XXXVII
THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE
ORDINARY readers may deplore the habit of raking up the trivial and bad verse of good poets now long dead, but for living poets there is nothing more instructive in the world than these lapses, and in the absence of honest biography they alone are evidence for what would be naturally assumed, that these great poets in defiance of principle often tried to write in their dull moments just because they longed for the exquisite excitement of composition, and thought that the act of taking up a pen might induce the hypnotic state of which I have spoken. But afterwards they forgot to destroy what they produced, or kept it in the hope that it was some good after all.
XXXVIII
THE MORAL QUESTION
MODERN treatises on Poetry usually begin with definitions; ancient treatises with a heavy weight of classical authority and a number of grave reflections on the nature of the Poet, proving conclusively that he should be a man of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. Authority seems to count for nothing in these days, compared with the value set on it by Sir Philip Sidney in his “Apologie for Poetrie,” and the modern treatise would never ask its reader more than to admit a negative conclusion on the moral question, that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet turn out good work merely by applying themselves conscientiously and soberly in working hours, are likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feeling is that poets who modify the general ethical principles first taught them at home and at school, can only afford to purchase the right to do so at a great price of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton, lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always either a sign or a prophecy of ineffectual creative work.
Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the word to denote a standard of conduct which the mass demands of the individual and so poetry which makes a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to antagonize two readers out of three straight away, and there is little hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. Being therefore addressed to a limited section even of the smallish class who read poetry, such poetry will tend like most high-brow art to have more dexterity than robustness.
For a complete identification of successful art with morality I always remember with appreciation what an Irishman, a complete stranger, once said to my father on hearing that he was author of the song “Father O’Flynn”—“Ye behaved well, sir, when ye wrote that one.”
XXXIX
THE POET AS OUTSIDER
THE ethical problem is further complicated for poets by the tussle in their nature between the spontaneous and the critical biases. The principle of loyalty on which the present non-religious system of English manners depends is strained in them to breaking point by the tendency to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas for which mature consideration entirely alters the values, or with people who change by the same process from mere acquaintances to intimate friends and back in a flash. Which should explain many apparently discreditable passages in, for instance, the life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, and should justify Walt Whitman’s outspoken “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of ungenteel birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of their writing. To the polite society of their day—outsiders to a man.