Virtues by departed heroes taught
Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame,
Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame.
[Footnote: Lines to Mr. Addison.]
Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live
With pureness in youth and religion in age.
[Footnote: What Is a Poet.]
since he conceives as the function of poetry
To raise and purify the grovelling soul,
* * * * *
And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill.
[Footnote: Poetry.]
This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps.
These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,—the fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful.
There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: See the Republic, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher.
Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England, where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian æsthetics, he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to make of his own life a true poem.
"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry,