A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET
A POET is one who endeavours to male I lie worst of both worlds. For he is thought seldom to make provision for himself in the next life, and 'tis odds if he gets any in this. The world will have nothing with his writinffs because thev are not of the v/orld: nor the religious, because they are not of religion. He is suspeft of the worldly, because of his unworldliness, and of the religious for the same reason. For there is a way of the world in religion, no less than in irreligion. Nay, though he should frankly cast in his lot with the profane, he is in no better case with them; for he alone of men, though he travel to the Pit, picks up no company by the way; but has a contrivance to evade Scripture, and find out a naiTow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument I know of his salvation; for 'tis inconceivable he should ever do as other m.en.
Mr Robert Louis Stevenson does not stick to affirm that the litterateur in general is but a poor devil of a fellow, who lives to please, and earns his bread by doing what he likes. Let this mere son of joy, says Mr Stevenson, sleek down his fine airs before men who are of some use in the world. Yet if rehgion be useful, so is poetry.
A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET For poetry is the teacher of beauty; and without beauty men would soon lose the conception of a God, and exchange God for the devil: as indeed happens at this day among many savages where the worships of ugliness and of the devil flourish together. Whence it was, doubtless, that poetry and reHgion w^re of old so united, as is seen in the prophetic books of the Bible. Where men are not kept in mind of beauty they become lower than the beasts; for a dog,' I will maintain, is a very tolerable judge of beauty, as appears from the faft that any liberally educated dog does, in a general way, prefer a woman to a man. The instinft of men is against this renegado of a Robert Louis. Though Butler justly observes that all men love and admire clothes, but scorn and despise him that made them, 'tis of tailors that he speaks. A modiste is held in as fair a reverence as any, tradesman; and 'tis evident that the ground of the difference is because a modiste has some connexion with art and beauty, but a tailor only with ughness and utihty. There is no utilitarian' but will class a soapmaker as a worthy and useful member of the community; yet is there no necessity why a man should use soap. Nay, if necessity be any criterion of usefulness (and surely that is useful which is necessary), the universal pra£lice of mankind will prove poetry to be more useful than soap; since there is no recorded age in which men did not use poetry, but for some odd thousand years the world got on very tolerably well without soap. Look closely into the matter, and there are no people really useful to a man, in the stri6l utilitarian sense, but butchers and bakers, for they feed man; builders, for they house a man; women, for they help him into the world; and doctors and soldiers, for they help him out of it.
Then, too, this rogue of an R. L. S., I doubt me (plague on him! I cannot get him out of my head), has found writing pretty utilitarian — to himself; and utility begins at home, I take it. Does he not eat and drink romances, and has he not dug up Heaven knows what riches (the adventurer!) in Treasure Island? And as for usefulness to other men, since we must have that or be ignoble, it seems — is there no utility in pleasure, pray you, when it makes a man's heart the better for it; as do, I am very certain, sun, and flowers, and Stevensons?
Did we give in to that sad dog of a Robert Louis, we must needs set down the poor useless poet as a son of joy. But the title were an irony more mordant than the title of the hapless ones to whom it likens him. Fillcs de joie? O rather Mies d'amertume! And if the pleasure they so mournfully purvey were lofty and purging as it is abysmal and corrupting, then would Stevenson's parallel be just; but then^ too, from ignoble viftims thev would become noble ministrants. 'Tis a difference which vitiates the whole comparison, O careless placer with the toys of the gods! whom we have taken, I warrant mc, more gravely tlian you take your whimsical self in this odd pleasantry!
Like his sad sisters, but with that transfiguring distinction, the poet sows in sorrow that men may reap in joy. He serves his pleasure, say you, R. L. S.? 'Tis a strange pleasure, if so it be. He loves his art? No, his art loves him; cleaves to him when she has become unwelcome, a very weariness of the flesh. He is the sorry sport of a mischievous convention. The traditions of his craft, fortified by the unreasonable and misguiding lessons of those sages who have ever instructed the poet in the things that make for his better misery, persuade him that he can be no true singer except he slight the world. Wordsworth has taught him a most unnecessary apprehension lest the world should be too much with him; which, to be sure, was very singular in Wordsworth, v/ho never had the w^orld with him till he was come near to going out of it. The poor fool, therefore, devotes assiduous pra6fice to acquiring an art which comes least natural to him of all men; and, after employing a world of pains to scorn the world, is strangely huffed that it should return the compliment in kind. There is left him no better remedy but, having spent his youth in alienating its opinion, to spend his manhood in learning to despise its opinion. And though it be a hard matter to contemn the world, 'tis a yet harder matter to contemn its contempt. I regard the villainous misleaders of poets who have preached up these dodlrines as all one for selfish cruelty with those who maintained the tradition of operatic eunuchs; and would have them equally suppressed by Christian sentiment. For they have procured the severance of the one from his kind to gratifv their understanding, as of the other to gratify their ear.
MOESTITIAE ENCOMIUM
MARSH, and night. There are sounds; no man shall say what sounds. There are shadows; no man shall say what shadows. There is light; were there not shadow, no man should call it light. The landscape is a sketch blotted in with smoke of Erebus, and grey from the cheek of death: those trees which threaten from the horizon — they are ranked apparitions, no boon of gracious God. The heaven is a blear copy of the land. Athwart the saturnine marsh, runs long, pitilessly straight, ghastly with an inward pallor (for no gleam dwells on it from the sky), the leprous, pined, infernal watercourse; a water for the Plutonian naiads — exhaling cold perturbation. It is a stream, a land, a heaven, pernicious to the heart of man; created onlv for
The abhorred estate Of empty shades, and disembodied elves.
Over this comes up of a sudden an unlawful moon. My very heart blanches. But a voice which is not the voice of reed, or sedge, or flag, or wind, yet is as the voice of each, says: ' Fear not; it is I, whom you know.' I know her, this power that has parted from the side of Terror; she is Sadness, and we are companions of old. Yet not here am I most familiar^ with her presence; far oftener have I found her lurking in the blocked-out, weighty shadows which fall from the tyrannous sun. We love the tyrannous sun, she and I.
1 know her, for I am of the age, and the age is hers. Alas for the nineteenth century, with so much pleasure, and so little joy; so much learning, and so little wisdom; so much effort, and so little fruition; so many philosophers, and such little philosophy; so many seers, and such little vision; so many prophets, and such little foresight; so many teachers, and such an infinite wild vortex of doubt! the one divine thing left to us is Sadness. Even our virtues take her stamp; the intimacy of our loves is born of despair; our very gentleness to our children is because we know how short their time. ' Eat,' we say, ' eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow ye are men.'
I know her; and praise, knowing. Foolishly we shun this shunless Sadness; fondly we deem of her as but huntress of men, who is tender and the bringer of tenderness to those she visits with her fearful favours. A world without joy were more tolerable than a world without sorrow. Without sadness where wxre brotherliness? For in joy is no brotherliness, but only a boon-companionship. She is the Spartan sauce which gives gusto to the remainder-viands of life, the broken meats of love. ' The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.' Her servitors rise in the hierarchy of being: to woman, in partioular, hardly comes the gracious gift of sweetness till her soul has been excavated by pain. Even a dog in sadness is nearer to the level and the heart of man. She has her dark accolade, her sombre patents of nobility; but the titles of that abhorred peerage are clemently and benignly imsuccessive. Our sweetest songs are from her, Shelley knew; but he needed not to have limited the benefa61:ion by song. She is not fair, poor Grief; yet in her gift is highest fairness. Love, says Plato, is unbeautiful: yet Love makes all things beautiful. And all things take on beauty which pass into the hueless flame of her aureole. It may chance to one, faring through a wet grey day-fall, that suddenly from behind him spurts the light of the sinking sun. Instantly, the far windows of unseen homesteads break into flash through the rain-smoke, the meads run over with yellow light, the scattered trees are splashed with saft'ron. Fie turns about towards the fountain of the splendorous surprise — sees but a weeping sundown of pallid and sickly gold. So, throughout humanity, my eyes discern a mourning loveliness; so I turn expedlant — ' What, pale Sorrow? Could all this have been indeed from you? And give you so much beauty that no dower of it remains for your own? ' Nay, but my vision was unversed when I disvalued her comeliness, and I looked not with the looking of her lovers.
Nay, but to our weak mortality the extremity of immitigate beauty is inapprehensible save through reflection and dilution. Sorrow is fair with an unmortal fairness, which we see not till
It is humanized in the sorrou-ful. The sweetest smiles I know, her rod draws forth from the rock of an abiding melancholy; the faces which haunt me from canvas attest that she prescribed to the painter's hand; of the most beautiful among the sons of men it is recorded that, though many had seen Him weep, no man had seen Him smile. Nor with beauty end her gifts to men. Solomon, who found in knowledge but increase of sorrow, might have found in sorrow increase of knowledge: it is less wisdom that reveals mourning, than mourning that reveals wisdom— as the Hindoo gathers secret things from gazing in the pool of ink. Power is the reward of sadness. It was after the Christ had wept over Jerusalem that He uttered some of His most august words; it was when His soul had been sorrowful even unto death that His enemies fell prostrate before His voice. Who suffers, conquers. The bruised is the breaker. By torture the Indians try their braves; by torture Life, too, tries the elected vi6fors of her untriumphal triumphs, and of cypress is the commemoration on their brows. Sadness the king-maker, morituri te saluiant!
Come, therefore, O Sadness, fair and froward and tender; dolorous coquette of the Abyss, who claspest them that shun thee, with fierce kisses that hiss against their tears; wraith of the mists of sighs; mermaid of the flood Cocytus, of the waves which arc salt with the weeping of the generations; most menacing scdudress, whose harp is stringed with lamentations, whose voice is fatal with disastrous prescience; draw me down, merge me, under thy waters of wail! Of thy undesired loveliness am I desirous, for I have looked long on thy countenance, and can forget it not, nor the footfalls of thy majesty which still shake the precindls of my heart: under the fringed awnings of the sunsets thou art throned, and thy face parts the enfolding pavilions of the Evens; thou art very dear to the heart of Night; thou art mistress of the things unmetable which are dreadful to meted life, mistress of the barren hearth and the barren soul of man, mistress of the weepings of death and of birth; the cry of the bride is thine and the pang of the first kiss, the pain which is mortise to delight, the flowers which trail between the ruined chaps of mortality, the over-foliaging death which chequers all human suns. Of thy beauty undesired am I desirous, for knowledge is with thee, and dom.inion, and piercing, and heahng; thou woundest with a thorn of light; thou sittest portress by the gates of hearts; and a cceptred quiet rests regal in thine eyes' sepulchral solitudes, in the tenebrous desolations of thine eyes.
' The over-foliaging death which chequers all human suns.' Even so. Not by Cocytus is delimited her deHmitless realm. For I have a vision; and the manner of the vision is this. I see the Angel of hfe. It (for it may be of either sex) is a mighty grey-winged Angel, with bowed and hidden face, looking into the river of Hfe. And somctimcj a waver of sunshine rests upon its grey wings and folded veil, so that I seem to sec its face, and to see it exceeding beautiful; and then again the sunlight fades, and I dare not attempt to penetrate that veil, for I imagine the countenance exceeding awful. And I see that v.ithin its sad drapery the Angel weeps, and its tears fall into the water of life: but whether they be tears of joy or sorrow, only its Creator knows, not I. I have tasted the water of hfe where the tears of the Angel fell; and the taste was bitter as brine.
Then, say you, they were tears of sorrow? The tears of joy are salt, as well as the tears of sorrow. And in that sentence are many meanings.