Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in In Memoriam:
Loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought,
and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's Letters of Life and Morning, in which she exhorts the young poet,
Learn to sing,
But first in all thy learning, learn to be.
The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, not poetry, holds his first allegiance.
He held his manly name
Far dearer than the muse,
[Footnote: J. G. Saxe, A Poet's Elegy.]
we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' talent and their respectability, averring,
They are like angels, but some angels fell.
[Footnote: Poets.]
Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes,
Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like these
The poet seems beside the man;
His life is now his noblest strain.
[Footnote: To Bryant on His Birthday.]