“‘New Loves for Old!’ the pedler went his way—
Night fell, then in my window the bright spark
Of my old love gave out its constant ray,
‘How burn the new loves that they bought to-day?’
But all the other windows remained dark.”
“Do you mean it? Is it true?” asked the Sphinx when I had finished.
“Those are nice questions for a philosopher to ask!” I laughed. “Of course, it is true for some people, true of some lives, and for those I mean it.”
“But what is your own personal feeling in the matter?”
“I hardly know if I have any personal feeling about it.”
“But you wrote the poem. Why did you write it then?”
“One doesn’t write poems for oneself. One writes them for others. Poetry is addressed, like certain legal proclamations, to all whom it concerns. Do you remember those lines of Straton’s in the Greek Anthology:
“‘Love-songs I write for him and her,
Now this, now that, as Love dictates;
One birthday gift alone the Fates
Gave me, to be Love’s Scrivener.’
“Of course, this is not the whole truth about the artist, but it is a good deal of it. In a sense the artist is the most unselfish of human beings, for his whole life is living for, and feeling for, others. The more lives and the more various he can live, the greater the number and the diversity of his feelings, the greater his art. This many-mooded nature leads those who misunderstand his function frequently to cry out that he is insincere; the fact being that he is so sincere in so many different ways that to hasty observers his imaginative sympathy has the look of inconsistency.”
“But come now, you needn’t pretend to be so superior to our common human nature as all that! If you yourself had to choose between one of your dimmed old loves that last, and one of the peddler’s brilliant novelties, which would you choose?”