The poet who has not learned how to be rude has not learned his
first duty to himself. By "poet" I mean, of course, any imaginative
creator--novelist, mathematician, editor, or a man like Herbert
Hoover. And by "rude" I mean the strict and definite limitation
which, sooner or later, he must impose upon his sociable instincts.
He must refuse to fritter away priceless time and energy in the
random genialities of the world. Friendly, well-meaning, and
fumbling hands will stretch out to bind the poet's heart in the
maddening pack-thread of Lilliput. It will always be so. Life, for
most, is so empty of consecrated purpose, so full of palaver, that
they cannot understand the trouble of one who carries a flame in his
heart, and whose salvation depends on his strength to nourish that
flame unsuffocated by crowding and scrutiny.
The poet lives in an alien world. That is not his pride; it is his
humility. It is often his joy, but often also his misery: he must
dree his weird. His necessary solitude of spirit is not luxury, nor
the gesture of a churl: it is his sacrifice, it is the condition on
which he lives. He must be content to seem boorish to the general in
order to be tender to his duty. He has invisible guests at the table
of his heart: those places are reserved against all comers. He must
be their host first of all, or he is damned. He serves the world by
cutting it when they meet inopportunely. There are times (as Keats
said and Christ implied) when the wind and the stars are his wife
and children.
There will be a thousand pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy
of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant
folderol. He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy. He has
his own heart-burn to consider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in
this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters
to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that
he consorts first of all with his own imagination.
As the poet sees the world, and studies, the more he realizes that
men are sharply cut in two classes: those who understand, those who
do not. With the latter he speaks a foreign language and with
effort, trying shamefacedly to conceal his strangeness. With these,
perhaps, every moment spent is for ever lost. With the others he can
never commune enough, seeking clumsily to share and impart those
moments of rare intuition when truth came near. There is rarely any
doubt as to this human division: the heart knows its kin.
The world, as he sees it around him, is almost unconscious of its
unspeakable loveliness and mystery; and it is largely regimented and
organized for absurdity. The greater part of the movement he sees is
(by his standard) not merely stupid (which is pardonable and
appealing), but meaningless altogether. He views it between anger
and tenderness. Where there might have been the exquisite and
delicious simplicity of a Japanese print, he sees the flicker and
cruel garishness of a speeding film. And so, for refreshment, he
crosses through the invisible doorway into his own dear land of
lucidity. He cons over that passport of his unsociability, words of
J.B. Yeats which should be unforgotten in every poet's mind:
Poetry is the voice of the solitary man. The poet is always a
solitary; and yet he speaks to others--he would win their
attention. Thus it follows that every poem is a social act done
by a solitary man. And being an alien from the strange land of
the solitary, he cannot be expected to admonish or to
sermonize, or uplift, as it is called; and so take part in the
cabals and intrigues in other lands of which he knows nothing,
being himself a stranger from a strange land, the land of the
solitary. People listen to him as they would to any other
traveller come from distant countries, and all he asks for is
courtesy even as he himself is courteous.
Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity--and, indeed,
their only chance of being permitted to live--and to make
friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they
would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and
preachers. And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly
they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech
perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the
most precious, because he comes from a land--the poet's
solitude--which no other feet have trodden and which no other
feet will tread.
So, briefly and awkwardly, he justifies himself, being given (as
Mrs. Quickly apologized) to "allicholy and musing." Oh, it is not
easy! As Gilbert Chesterton said, in a noble poem:
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.
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