Bergson says in "Creative Evolution," that "an intelligence which reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over and above practically useful efforts." Does it not follow that when we make the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort of running to fires, we prevent him from enjoying the very advantage which made man a reflective being, to say nothing of a poet?
Perhaps we have never yet realized that this attitude of ours would turn poetic success into a question of the survival of that paradox, the commercially shrewd poet, or of the poet who by some happy accident of birth or marriage has been given an income, or of that prodigy of versatility who, in our present stage of civilization, besides being mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's calling, is also physically fit to bear the strain of doing two men's work; or, perhaps we had better say, three men's—for simply being a good poet is about as nerve-consuming an occupation as any two ordinary men could support in common—and the third would have to run to fires for the first two.
It is natural to the character of the American business man to declare that the professional poet has no reason for existence qua poet unless he can make his art support him. But let the business man bear in mind that if he had the power to enforce such a condition, he would be practically annihilating the art. For it is literally true that, if plays were excluded, it would take not even a five-foot shelf to contain all the first-rate poetry which was ever written by poets in a state of poetic self-support. "Could a man live by it," the author of "The Deserted Village" once wrote to Henry Goldsmith, "it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet." Alas, the fatal condition! For the art itself has almost never fed and clothed its devotee—at least until his best creative days are done and he has become a "grand old man." More often the poet has attained not even this reward. Wordsworth's lines on Chatterton have a wider application:
"What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow—
Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find
Whose footsteps mark the music of mankind!
'T was his to lend a life: 't was Man's to borrow:
'T was his to make, but not to share, the morrow."
Those who insist upon judging the art of poetry on the hard American "cash basis" ought to be prepared, for the sake of consistency, to apply the same criterion as well to colleges, public schools, symphony orchestras, institutions for scientific research, missions, settlements, libraries, and all other unlucrative educational enterprises. With inexorable logic they should be prepared to insist that people really do not desire or need knowledge or any sort of uplift because they are not prepared to pay its full cost. It is precisely this sort of logic which would treat the Son of Man if He should appear among us, to a bench in Bryant Park, and a place in the bread-line, and send the mounted police to ride down his socialistic meetings in Union Square. No! poetry and most other forms of higher education have always had to be subsidized—and probably always will. When wisely subsidized, however, this art is very likely to repay its support in princely fashion. In fact, I know of no other investment to-day that would bid fair to bring us in so many thousand per cent. of return as a small fresh-air fund for poets.
We Americans are rather apt to complain of the comparatively poor, unoriginal showing which our poets have as yet made among those of other civilized nations. We are quietly disgusted that only two of all our bards have ever made their work forcibly felt in Europe; and that neither Poe nor Whitman has ever profoundly influenced the great masses of his own people.
Despite our splendid inheritance, our richly mingled blood, our incomparably stimulating New World atmosphere, why has our poetry made such a meager showing among the nations? The chief reason is obvious. We have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were working for us. True, we have the reputation of being an open-handed, even an extravagantly generous folk. But thriftiness in small things often goes with an extravagant disposition, much as manifestations of piety often accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placed outside the edifice. We have spent millions on bronze and marble book-palaces which shall house the works of the poets. We have spent more millions on universities which shall teach these works. But as for making it possible for our few real poets to produce works, and completely fulfill their priceless functions, we have always satisfied ourselves by decreeing: "Let there be a sound cash basis."
So it came to pass that when the first exuberant, pioneer energy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormal type of city life, it became no longer possible for the poets to put as much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines, after they had toilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders. For often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer vitality. And how did we treat them from the first? In the old days we set Longfellow and Lowell at one of the most exhausting of professions—teaching. We made Emerson do one-night lecture-stands all winter long in the West—sometimes for five dollars a lecture and feed for his horse. We made Bryant ruin a gift as elemental as Wordsworth's, in journalism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours of the day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices and drink. We made Whitman drive nails, set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau in Washington, from which he was dismissed for writing the most original and the most poetic of American books. Later he was rescued from want only by the humiliation of a public European subscription. Lanier we allowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill himself so fast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing the flute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing "Sunrise" until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips. And this was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry of reproach:
"Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,
But cannot dream us bread?"
With Lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-up process began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland Sill we did away with in his early prime through journalism and teaching. We curbed and pinched and stunted the promising art of Richard Watson Gilder by piling upon him several men's editorial work. We created a poetic resemblance between Arthur Upson and the hero of "The Divine Fire" by employing him in a bookstore. We made William Vaughn Moody teach in a city environment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later set the hand that gave us "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" to the building of popular melodrama. These are only a tithe of the things that we have done to the hardiest of those benefactors of ours: