The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue philosophers.

Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of philosophy to which he objected, as follows:

To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, under general notions, and with—yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms—a botanic or physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: Plato and Platonism.]

But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, "The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other the image." [Footnote: The Romantic Movement, p. 129.] That is, to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual.

Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Shelley is the classic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, in Queen Mab. But Shelley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who declared, "After I had read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart." [Footnote: James Gillman, Life of Coleridge, p. 23.]

A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the fin de siecle school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, already drooping.

It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, To Science.] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. "I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about which most men merely prate,—the vanity of the human or temporal life." [Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.]

It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank paper.

One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of The City of Dreadful Night. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, with the words,

And now at last authentic word I bring Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God; no fiend with name divine Made us and tortures us; if we must pine It is to satiate no Being's gall.

But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful envy,

He came to the desert of London town, Mirk miles broad; He wandered up and he wandered down, Ever alone with God. [Footnote: William Blake.]

Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the "aesthetic repose."

Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning,

Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine. [Footnote: Poets.]

Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, John Masefield, Prayer, and The Seekers; and William Rose Benet, The Falconer of God.] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his birds are

Summer-saulting for God's sake.

Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought "thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the flower itself. He muses,

Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;— I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one.

A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by

The foolishest fond folly of a heart Divided, neither here nor there at rest, That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth. [Footnote: Later Life, Sonnet 24.]

On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him.

Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Shelley devoted a large part of Prometheus Unbound and the conclusion of Adonais to his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the sense world which was yet spiritual,

The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, [Footnote: Hart Leap Well.]

and was led to the conclusion,

It is my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. [Footnote: Lines Written in Early Spring.]

Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in Empedocles on AEtna, in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's pantheistic faith. Swinburne's Hertha is one of the most thorough going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit. One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne's Natural Religion, wherein he explains the grounds of his faith,

Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air I cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?" Sudden the answer like a flute I heard; It was an angel, though it seemed a bird.

On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe with him.

The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated "without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence from this power of revelation.

But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit characteristic of religious reverence.

It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings.

There is no God, O son! If thou be none, [Footnote: On the Downs.]

Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, Swinburne, p. 309.]

Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet God." [Footnote: A Vision of Poets.]

Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. In the Prophetic Books, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it.

Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the puritan himself feels the power of Emily Bronte's Last Lines, in which she cries with proud and triumphant faith,

Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void; Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him.

In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch as Byron's A Vision of Judgment, with its irresistible satire on Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet.

The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I do believe," said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] Cain, however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians.

Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional religion. In Julian and Maddalo, he causes Byron to say of him,

You were ever still Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel.

Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was persecuted by the church. In Rosalind and Helen, the hero was hated by the clergy,

For he made verses wild and queer Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear,

and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in Lionel's death, for

The ministers of misrule sent Seized on Lionel and bore His chained limbs to a dreary tower, For he, they said, from his mind had bent Against their gods keen blasphemy.

The most notable illustration of this phase of Shelley's thought is The Revolt of Islam, wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies.

Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets have gloried in his attitude.

Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he

Smote the God of base men's choice At God's own gate. [Footnote: Burns.]

Young poets have not yet lost their taste for religious persecution. It is a great disappointment to them to find it difficult to strike fire from the faithful in these days. Swinburne in his early poetry denounced the orthodox God with such vigor that he roused a momentary flutter of horror in the church, but nowadays the young poet who craves to manifest his spiritual daring is far more likely to find himself in the position of Rupert Brooke, of whom someone has said, "He imagines the poet as going on a magnificent quest to curse God on his throne of fire, and finding—nothing."

The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See Christmas Eve and Easter Day.] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See In Memoriam.] of Arnold, [Footnote: See Dover Beach.] of Clough. [Footnote: See The New Sinai, Qui Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium.] So, too, James Thomson muses with regret,

How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray With all the others whom we love so well! All disbelief and doubt might pass away, And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell. Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast. [Footnote: The Reclusant.]

In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his contemporaries,

There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and love." [Footnote: Preface to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards proved spurious).]

The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold.

Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry,

Ah, but there should be one! There should be one. And there's the bitterness Of this unending torture-place for men, For the proud soul that craves a perfectness That might outwear the rotting of all things Rooted in earth. [Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, Marlowe.]

The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious satisfaction. Thus the hero of Pauline comes to no triumphant issue, though he maintains,

I have always had one lode-star; now As I look back, I see that I have halted Or hastened as I looked towards that star, A need, a trust, a yearning after God.

The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses,

Of a power above you still, Which, utterly incomprehensible, Is out of rivalry, which thus you can Love, though unloving all conceived by man— What need! And of—none the minutest duct To that out-nature, naught that would instruct And so let rivalry begin to live— But of a Power its representative Who, being for authority the same, Communication different, should claim A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed, This human clear, as that Divine concealed— What utter need!

There is, after all, small need that the public should charge the poet with deliberate failure to gain a satisfactory view of the deity. The quest of a God who satisfies the poet's demand that He shall include all life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in

The too-bold dying song of her whose soul Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died. [Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, Haworth Churchyard.]

A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him,

Who dropped his plummet down the broad Deep universe, and said, "No God," Finding no bottom. [Footnote: A Vision of Poets.]

If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel with Tennyson,

Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they, [Footnote: In Memoriam.]

yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to

Let lore of all theology Be to thy soul what it can be. [Footnote: Soothsay.]

Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the part of the church.

In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, A Life in Song, and The Real and the Ideal, to begin by being poets, and end by becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's Bitter Sweet is a thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In Kathrina, though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the tradition of the poet-revivalist.

Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean Ingelow, in Letters of Life and Morning, offers most conventional religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the eighteenth century could afford.

The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived, perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute. There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June 28, 1918, Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters, ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline Kilmer, April 21, 1918, Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters, ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors.

Perhaps a history of art would not square with the repugnance one feels toward such censorship. Conformance to the religious beliefs of his time certainly does not seem to have handicapped Homer or Dante, to say nothing of the preeminent men in other fields of art, Phidias, Michael Angelo, Raphael, etc. Yet in the modern consciousness, the theory of art for art's sake has become so far established that we feel that any compromise of the purely aesthetic standard is a loss to the artist. The deity of the artist and the churchman may be in some measure the same, since absolute beauty and absolute goodness are regarded both by poets and theologians as identical, but there is reason to believe that the poet may not go so far astray if he cleaves to his own immediate apprehension of absolute beauty as he will if he fashions his beliefs upon another man's stereotyped conception of the absolute good.

Then, too, it is not unlikely that part of the poet's reluctance to embrace the creed of his contemporaries arises from the fact that he, in his secret heart, still hankers for his old title of priest. He knows that it is the imaginative faculty of the poet that has been largely instrumental in building up every religious system. The system that holds sway in society is apt to be the one that he himself has just outgrown; he has, accordingly, an artist's impatience for its immaturity. There is much truth to the poet's nature in verses entitled The Idol Maker Prays:

Grant thou, that when my art hath made thee known And others bow, I shall not worship thee, But as I pray thee now, then let me pray Some greater god,—like thee to be conceived Within my soul. [Footnote: By Arthur Guiterman.]



CHAPTER VII

THE PRAGMATIC ISSUE

No matter how strong our affection for the ingratiating ne'er-do-well, there are certain charges against the poet which we cannot ignore. It is a serious thing to have an alleged madman, inebriate, and experimenter in crime running loose in society. But there comes a time when our patience with his indefatigable accusers is exhausted. Is not society going a step too far if, after the poet's positive faults have been exhausted, it institutes a trial for his sins of omission? Yet so it is. If the poet succeeds in proving to the satisfaction of the jury that his influence is innocuous, he must yet hear the gruff decision, "Perhaps, as you say, you are doing no real harm. But of what possible use are you? Either become an efficient member of society, or cease to exist." Must we tamely look on, while the "light, winged, and holy creature," as Plato called the poet, is harnessed to a truck wagon, and made to deliver the world's bread and butter? Would that it were more common for poets openly to defy society's demands for efficiency, as certain children and malaperts of the poetic world have done! It is pleasant to hear the naughty advice which that especially impractical poet, Emily Dickinson, gave to a child: "Be sure to live in vain, dear. I wish I had." [Footnote: Gamaliel Bradford, Portraits of American Women, p. 248 (Mrs. Bianchi, p. 37).] And one is hardly less pleased to hear the irrepressible Ezra Pound instruct his songs,

But above all, go to practical people, go, jangle their door-bells. Say that you do no work, and that you will live forever. [Footnote: Salutation the Second.]

Surely no one else has had so bad a time with efficiency experts as has the poet, even though everyone whose occupation does not bring out sweat on the brow is likely to fall under their displeasure. The scholar, for instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him?

The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James Thomson, The Castle of Indolence (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, The Poet and the Fisher, and Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship; Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply; Emerson, Apology; Whitman, Song of Myself; Helen Hunt Jackson, The Poet's Forge; P. H. Hayne, An Idle Poet Dreaming; Henry Timrod, They Dub Thee Idler; Washington Allston, Sylphs of the Seasons; C. W. Stoddard, Utopia; Alan Seeger, Oneata; J. G. Neihardt, The Poet's Town.] Sometimes he gives them the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet.

When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, A Life in Song, and The Real and the Ideal.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few scattered figures,—Lucan, [Footnote: See Nero, Robert Bridges.] Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, Giovanna of Naples, and Andrea of Hungary.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, Dante.] Boccaccio, Walter Map, [Footnote: See A Becket, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See Milton, Bulwer Lytton; Milton, George Meredith.]—and these, he must admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet-politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. [Footnote: See William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, a drama, Richard Garnett.]

If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer,

When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's work, You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk, And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his hand. It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong, And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song. [Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, The Proud Poet.]

It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet as a warrior see Thomas Moore, The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, Dear Harp of My Country; Praed, The Eve of Battle; Whitman, Song of the Banner at Daybreak; E. C. Stedman, Jean Prouvaire's Song at the Barricade, Byron; G. L. Raymond, Dante, A Song of Life; S. K. Wiley, Dante and Beatrice; Oscar Wilde, Ravenna; Richard Realf, Vates, Written on the Night of His Suicide; Cale Young Rice, David, Aeschylus; Swinburne, The Sisters; G. E. Woodberry, Requiem; Rupert Brooke, 1914; Joyce Kilmer, In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud Poet; Alan Seeger, I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, Liebestod; John Bunker, On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the Wars; Jessie Rittenhouse, To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle; Rossiter Johnson, A Soldier Poet; Herbert Kaufman, Hell Gate of Soissons; Herbert Asquith, The Volunteer; Julian Grenfil, Into Battle; Grace Hazard Conkling, Francis Ledwidge; Richard Mansfield, 2d, Song of the Artists; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge; Donald F. Goold Johnson, Rupert Brooke.] A recent writer has said, "The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might have done Byron's,

When the true lightning of his soul was bared, Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch. [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, Emily Bronte.]

But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet? Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his title as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at fault when he excused his occupation:

I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse, And wrote verse. [Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.]

How can the poet satisfy the philistine world that his songs are worth while? Need we ask? Business men will vouch for their utility, if he will but conform to business men's ideas of art. Here is a typical expression of their views, couched in verse for the singer's better comprehension:

The days of long-haired poets now are o'er, The short-haired poet seems to have the floor; For now the world no more attends to rhymes That do not catch the spirit of the times. The short-haired poet has no muse or chief, He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef. [Footnote: "The Short-haired Poet," in Common-Sense, by E. F. Ware.]

But the poet utterly repudiates such a view of himself as this, for he cannot draw his breath in the commercial world. [Footnote: Several poems lately have voiced the poet's horror of materialism. See Josephine Preston Peabody, The Singing Man; Richard Le Gallienne, To R. W. Emerson, Richard Watson Gilder; Mary Robinson, Art and Life.] In vain he assures his would-be friends that the intangibilities with which he deals have a value of their own. Emerson says,

One harvest from thy field Homeward brought the oxen strong; A second crop thine acres yield Which I gather in a song. [Footnote: Apology]

But for this second crop the practical man says he can find absolutely no market; hence overtures of friendliness between him and the poet end with sneers and contempt on both sides. Doubtless the best way for the poet to deal with the perennial complaints of the practical-minded, is simply to state brazenly, as did Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite useless." [Footnote: Preface to Dorian Gray.]

Is the poet justified, then, in stopping his ears to all censure, and living unto himself? Not so; when the hub-bub of his sordid accusers dies away, he is conscious of another summons, before a tribunal which he cannot despise or ignore. For once more the poet's equivocal position exposes him to attacks from all quarters. He stands midway between the spiritual and the physical worlds, he reveals the ideal in the sensual. Therefore, while the practical man complains that the poet does not handle the solid objects of the physical world, but transmutes them to airy nothings, the philosopher, on the contrary, condemns the poet because he does not wholly sever connections with this same physical world, but is continually hovering about it, like a homesick ghost.

Like the plain man, the philosopher gives the poet a chance to vindicate his usefulness. Plato's challenge is not so age-worn that we may not requote it. He makes Socrates say, in the Republic,

Let us assure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered state, we shall be delighted to receive her.... We are very conscious of her charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth.... Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to states and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. [Footnote: Republic, Book X, 607.]

* * * * *

One wonders why the lovers of Poetry have been so much more solicitous for her cause than Poetry herself has appeared to be. Aristotle, and after him many others,—in the field of English literature, Sidney, Shelley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,—have made most eloquent defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but here are some things I might say for myself, if I wished."

Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy. But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the philosopher assures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body.

Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and one by the poet. [Footnote: See the Republic X, 596 B ff.] Now the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the room:

"I know what is and what has been; Not anything to me comes strange, Who in so many years have seen And lived through every kind of change. I know when men are bad or good, When well or ill," he slowly said, "When sad or glad, when sane or mad And when they sleep alive or dead." [Footnote: In the Room]

Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport." [Footnote: Republic X, 599 A.]

It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude:

Painting and sculpture are but images; Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, As something in itself, and not an image, A something that is not, surpasses them As substance shadow. [Footnote: Michael Angelo.]

Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak of commonness in the speaker's nature,—of a disposition to value the clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, "I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect. It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A. E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing,

He who might have wrought in flame Only traced upon the foam. [Footnote: Epilogue]

In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet who died a soldier:

A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, Are greater than a poet's art, And greater than a poet's fame A little grave that has no name. [Footnote: Soliloquy.]

Is not our idealization of poets who died in war a confession that we ourselves believe that they chose the better part,—that they did well to discard imitation of life for life itself?

It is not fair to force an answer to such a question till we have more thoroughly canvassed poets' convictions on this matter. Do they all admit the justice of Plato's characterization of poetry as a sport, comparable to golf or tennis? In a few specific instances, poets have taken this attitude toward their own verse, of course. There was the "art for art's sake" cry, which at the end of the last century surely degenerated into such a conception of poetry. There have been a number of poets like Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang, who have frankly regarded their verse as a pastime to while away an idle hour. There was Swinburne, who characterized many of his poems as being idle and light as white butterflies. [Footnote: See the Dedication to Christina Rossetti, and Envoi.] But when we turn away from these prestidigitators of rhymes and rhythms, we find that no view of poetry is less acceptable than this one to poets in general. They are far more likely to earn the world's ridicule by the deadly seriousness with which they take verse writing. If the object of his pursuit is a sport, the average poet is as little aware of it as is the athlete who suffers a nervous collapse before the big game of the season.

But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an imitation of life? It depends, of course, upon how broadly we interpret the phrase, "imitation of life." In one sense almost every poet would say that Plato was right in characterizing poetry thus. The usual account of inspiration points to passive mirroring of life. Someone has said of the poet,

As a lake Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, Shall he reflect our great humanity. [Footnote: Alexander Smith, A Life Drama.]

And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's function, but they leave us leeway to quarrel over the nature of the reflection mentioned, just as we quarrel over the exact connotations of Plato's and Aristotle's word, imitation. Even if we hold to the narrower meaning of imitation, there are a few poets who intimate that imitation alone is their aim in writing poetry. Denying that life has an ideal element, they take pains to mirror it, line for line, and blemish for blemish. How can they meet Plato's question as to their usefulness? If life is a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war poetry. [Footnote: See Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.] Perhaps his defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication contained in his two lines,

If there's good in war and crime, There may be in my bits of rhyme. [Footnote: See Ibid.]

Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's City of Dreadful Night. Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from its realism, but from the idealism of the writer.

We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is.

And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, [Footnote: Sleep and Poetry.]

said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose inevitably calls up William Morris:

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale, not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day. [Footnote: Prologue to the Earthly Paradise.]

Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, Preludes.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of man." [Footnote: Sleep and Poetry.]

We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says,

'Tis the privilege of art Thus to play its cheerful part Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate. [Footnote: Art.]

It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, and is its essence.

Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning says,

Paint a body well, You paint a soul by implication. [Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]

This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye and save the soul beside," [Footnote: The Ring and the Book.] as Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers,

If you get simple beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing God invents. [Footnote: Fra, Lippo Lippi.]

Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. Cook, June 28, 1918.]

Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, harmony—what you will—leading him to see life as a unity.

The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as

A many-sided mirror, Which could distort to many a shape of error This true, fair world of things. [Footnote: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound.]

It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described the poet's achievement:

With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes. [Footnote: Ode.]

"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the artist's imitation of life, inquiring,

What is art But life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres It pushes toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the infinite. [Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]

The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things than are the things themselves. Thus Shelley describes the poet's work:

He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality. [Footnote: Prometheus Unbound.]

Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; [Footnote: Aurora Leigh.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; [Footnote: The Function of the Poet.] Emerson calls him "the only teller of news." [Footnote: Poetry and Imagination. The following are some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: Blake, Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard; Montgomery, A Theme for a Poet; Bowles, The Visionary Boy; Wordsworth, Personal Talk; Coleridge, To Wm. Wordsworth; Arnold, The Austerity of Poetry; Rossetti, Sonnet, Shelley; Bulwer Lytton, The Dispute of the Poets; Mrs. Browning, Pan is Dead; Landor, To Wordsworth; Jean Ingelow, The Star's Monument; Tupper, Wordsworth; Tennyson, The Poet; Swinburne, The Death of Browning (Sonnet V), A New Year's Ode; Edmund Gosse, Epilogue; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment; Bayard Taylor, For the Bryant Festival; Emerson, Saadi; M. Clemmer, To Emerson; Warren Holden, Poetry; P. H. Hayne, To Emerson; Edward Dowden, Emerson; Lucy Larcom, R. W. Emerson; R. C. Robbins, Emerson; Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy; G. E. Woodberry, Ode at the Emerson Centenary; Bliss Carman, In a Copy of Browning; John Drinkwater, The Loom of the Poets; Richard Middleton, To an Idle Poet; Shaemas O'Sheel, The Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One.]

Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to the most deeply Platonic poets of our period—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,—one may inquire, Does not your description of the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, The Garden of Boccaccio; Kirke White, Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets; Bulwer Lytton, Milton; George E. Woodberry, Agathon.] Surely if the quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows trivial, but let us see how the case stands.

From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being

Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes. [Footnote: To William Wordsworth.]

Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts,

Think you, mid all this mighty sum Of things forever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, We must be ever seeking? [Footnote: Expostulation and Reply.]

But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, "Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: A Defense of Poetry.]

To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends,

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: What is Art?]

Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has pronounced the philosopher's attitude of mind wholly antagonistic to poetry.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, [Footnote: Lamia.]

Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: A Poet's Epitaph.]

Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers,

We are they who dream no dreams, Singers of a rising day, Who undaunted, Where the sword of reason gleams, Follow hard, to hew away The woods enchanted. [Footnote: E. Flecker, Donde Estan.]

One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He declares,

Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek for shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? [Footnote: To Science.]

If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed,

Most true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely,

and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." [Footnote: Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying.] If poets complain that all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy, [Footnote: Lamia.]

are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars?

In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things.

What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this subject are Shelley, A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty; Mrs. Browning, Pan Is Dead; Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy; Madison Cawein, Prototypes.] If Poe's rejection of

The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,

in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a somber tapestry.

It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, "fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See The Minstrel.] and Bowles [Footnote: See The Visionary Boy.] both warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry. Even Landor reflected,

A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, And showing but the broken sky Too surely is the sweetest lay That wins the ear and wastes the day Where youthful Fancy pouts alone And lets not wisdom touch her zone. [Footnote: See To Wordsworth.]

But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such distinctions.

If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of things—their number, solidarity, edibleness—instead of beauty, for his test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works.

The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: Poem Outlines.] says Sidney Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's." [Footnote: The Prelude.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream—he awoke and found it truth." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.]

If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are not." [Footnote: A Defense of Poetry.] In our period, verse dealing with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, The Bard; Scott, The Lady of the Lake, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Thomas the Rhymer; Campbell, Lochiel's Warning.] But we have many poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy. [Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to Songs of Experience, Hear the Voice of the Bard; Crabbe, The Candidate; Landor, Dante; Barry Cornwall, The Prophet; Alexander Smith, A Life Drama; Coventry Patmore, Prophets Who Cannot Sing; J. R. Lowell, Massaccio, Sonnet XVIII; Owen Meredith, The Prophet; W. H. Burleigh, Shelley; O. W. Holmes, Shakespeare; T. H. Olivers, The Poet, Dante; Alfred Austin, The Poet's Corner; Swinburne, The Statue of Victor Hugo; Herbert Trench, Stanzas on Poetry.] Holmes' view is typical:

We call those poets who are first to mark Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,— Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark While others only note that day is gone; For them the Lord of light the curtain rent That veils the firmament. [Footnote: Shakespeare.]

Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Shelley does; as a more recent poet has phrased it:

Strange hints Of things past, present and to come there lie Sealed in the magic pages of that music, Which, laying hold on universal laws, Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh. [Footnote: Alfred Noyes, Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]

The poet's defense is not finished when he establishes the truth of his vision. How shall the world be served, he is challenged, even though it be true that the poet's dreams are of reality? Plato demanded of his philosophers that they return to the cave of sense, after they had seen the heavenly vision, and free the slaves there. Is the poet willing to do this? It has been charged that he is not. Browning muses,

Ah, but to find A certain mood enervate such a mind, Counsel it slumber in the solitude Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good Its nature just, as life and time accord. —Too narrow an arena to reward Emprize—the world's occasion worthless since Not absolutely fitted to evince Its mastery! [Footnote: Sordello.]

But one is inclined to question the justice of Browning's charge, at least so far as it applies peculiarly to the poet. Logically, he should devote himself to sense-blinded humanity, not reluctantly, like the philosopher descending to a gloomy cave which is not his natural habitat, but eagerly, since the poet is dependent upon sense as well as spirit for his vision. "This is the privilege of beauty," says Plato, "that, being the loveliest of the ideas, she is also the most palpable to sight." [Footnote: Phaedrus.] Accordingly the poet has no horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an enthusiasm to make the world of sense a more transparent medium of beauty. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet's humanitarian aspect, see Bowles, The Visionary Boy, On the Death of the Rev. Benwell; Wordsworth, The Poet and the Caged Turtle Dove; Arnold, Heine's Grave; George Eliot, O May I Join the Choir Invisible; Lewis Morris, Food Of Song; George Meredith, Milton; Bulwer Lytton, Milton; James Thomson, B. V., Shelley; Swinburne, Centenary of Landor, Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo in 1877, Ben Jonson, Thomas Decker; Whittier, To J. P., and The Tent on the Beach; J. R. Lowell, To The Memory of Hood; O. W. Holmes, At a Meeting of the Burns Club; Emerson, Solution; R. Realf, Of Liberty and Charity; W. H. Burleigh, Shelley; T. L. Harris, Lyrics of the Golden Age; Eugene Field, Poet and King; C. W. Hubner, The Poet; J. H. West, O Story Teller Poet; Gerald Massey, To Hood Who Sang the Song of the Shirt; Bayard Taylor, A Friend's Greeting to Whittier; Sidney Lanier, Wagner, Clover; C. A. Pierce, The Poet's Ideal; E. Markham, The Bard, A Comrade Calling Back, An April Greeting; G. L. Raymond, A Life in Song; Richard Gilder, The City, The Dead Poet; E. L. Cox, The Master, Overture; R. C. Robbins, Wordsworth; Carl McDonald, A Poet's Epitaph.] It is inevitable that every poet's feeling for the world should be that of Shelley, who says to the spirit of beauty,

Never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery. [Footnote: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.] For, unlike the philosopher, the poet has never departed from the world of sense, and it is hallowed to him as the incarnation of beauty. Therefore he is eager to make other men ever more and more transparent embodiments of their true selves, in order that, gazing upon them, the poet may have ever deeper inspiration. This is the central allegory in Enydmion, that the poet must learn to help humanity before the mystery of poetship shall be unlocked to him. Browning comments to this effect upon Bordello's unwillingness to meet the world:

But all is changed the moment you descry Mankind as half yourself.

Matthew Arnold is the sternest of modern poets, perhaps, in pointing out the poet's responsibility to humanity:

The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man. Though he move mountains, though his day Be passed on the proud heights of sway, Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, Though he hath borne immortal pains, Action and suffering though he know, He hath not lived, if he lives so. [Footnote: Resignation.]

It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. If beauty is the heart of the universe (and it must be, the poet argues, since it abides in sense as well as spirit), there is no place for the corrupt will. If men are free, they are expressing their real natures; they are beautiful.

Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of tyranny." [Footnote: Republic.] Few enemies of poets nowadays would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas Peacock, who locked horns with Shelley on the question of poetry, asserted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's potentates. [Footnote: See The Four Ages of Poetry.] Once, it must be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim,

If thou hast ever done amiss It was, O Southey, but in this, That, to redeem the lost estate Of the poor Muse, a man so great Abased his laurels where some Georges stood Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood. Was ever genius but thyself Friend or befriended of a Guelf?

But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization of the modern poet as liberty-lover.

Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of poet-laureate.

The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue." Gray, in The Progress of Poesy, draws the same conclusion as Shelley:

Her track, where'er the goddess roves, Glory pursue, and generous shame, The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame.

Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. [Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, _Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_; Shelley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, _Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, _To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, _The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Shore_, _For You_, _O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of Liberty and Charity_; Henry van Dyke, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming,

Where's the poet? Show him, show him, Muses mine, that I may know him! 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king Or poorest of the beggar clan. [Footnote: The Poet.]

Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be false to poetry, and he answers his detractors,

Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise, That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope Of his pure song.

In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom:

Poets (hear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats. Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high, But loyal to the low, and cognizant Of the less scrutable majesties. [Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]

Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote: See The Poet.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See Mater Triumphilis, Prelude, Epilogue, Litany of Nations, and Hertha.] till our new group of singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident.

It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs. Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his truest self.

If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" [Footnote: See Sordello.] of the world, here amending a law, here building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the poet. Mrs. Browning, in Aurora Leigh, makes much of the issue, and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world

Forgets To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down To the empty grave of Christ ... ... Who has time, An hour's time—think!—to sit upon a bank And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands. [Footnote: Aurora Leigh. See also the letter to Robert Browning, February 17, 1845.]

The poet has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization in reform the gauge of a poet's merit. Where, in that case, would Keats be beside Hood? In our day, where would Sara Teasdale be beside Edwin Markham? Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See Aurora Leigh.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely unsettling society,—for what end? He himself will soon have forgotten—will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the beauty of holiness. Let reformers beware how they assert the poet's uselessness, our singers say, for it is an indication that they themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be leading men. The work of the reformer inevitably degenerates into the mere strenuosity of the campaign,

Unless the artist keep up open roads Betwixt the seen and unseen, bursting through The best of our conventions with his best, The speakable, imaginable best God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond Both speech and imagination. [Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]

Thus speaks Mrs. Browning.

The reforms that make a stir in the world, being merely external, mean little or nothing apart from the impulse that started them, and the poet alone is powerful to stir the impulse of reform in humanity. "To be persuaded rests usually with ourselves," said Longinus, "but genius brings force sovereign and irresistible to bear upon every hearer." [Footnote: On the Sublime.] The poet, in ideal mood, is as innocent of specific designs upon current morality as was Pippa, when she wandered about the streets of Asolo, but the power of his songs is ever as insuperable as was that of hers. It is for this reason that Emerson advises the poet to leave hospital building and statute revision for men of duller sight than he:

Oft shall war end and peace return And cities rise where cities burn Ere one man my hill shall climb Who can turn the golden rhyme. Let them manage how they may, Heed thou only Saadi's lay. [Footnote: Saadi.]

Here the philosopher may demur. If the poet were truly an idealist,—if he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's failing that he gives men no vision of abstract beauty. He represents his visions in the contemporary dress of his times. Thus he idealizes the past and the present, showing beauty shining through the dullness and error of human history. Is he not, then, the enemy of progress, since he will lead his readers to imagine that things are ideal as they are?

Rather, men will be filled with reverence for the idealized portrait of themselves that the poet has drawn, and the intervention of the reformer will be unnecessary, since they will voluntarily tear off the shackles that disfigure them. The poet, said Shelley, "redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." Emerson said of Wordsworth, "He more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." Mrs. Browning said (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet—by analyzing humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through which beauty does not shine.

Therefore, the poet repeats, he is the true author of reform. Tennyson says of freedom,

No sword Of wrath her right arm whirled, But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word She shook the world. [Footnote: The Poet.]

This brings us back to our war poets who have so recently died. Did they indeed disparage the Muse whom they deserted? Did they not rather die to fulfill a poet's prophesy of freedom? A poet who did not carry in his heart the courage of his song—what could be more discreditable to poetry than that? The soldier-poets were like a general who rushes into the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the engagement, that saved the day.

If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says,

The gods talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the long reach of the old seashore With dialogue divine. And the poet who overhears Some random word they say Is the fated man of men Whom the nations must obey. [Footnote: Fragment on The Poet.]

What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his vision is true he shall join

The choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues. [Footnote: George Eliot, The Choir Invisible.]