THE CHILDREN OF APOLLO
'He is a _true_ poet,' or 'He is a _genuine_ artist,' are phrases which
irritate one day after day in modern criticism. One had thought that
'poet' and 'artist' were enough; but there must be a need, we
regretfully suppose, for these re-enforcing qualifications; and there
can be but the one, that the false in each kind do so exceedingly
abound, that none can be taken as genuine without such special
certificate. The widespread confusion with the poet of the rhetorician
and sentimentalist in verse, and again of the mere rhymer without even
rhetoric, not to refer to finer differentiation of error, is also a
fruitful source of bewilderment. The misuse of the word has parallels:
for instance, the spurious generic use of the word 'man' for 'male,'
the substitution of 'artist' for 'painter.' But here we have only to
deal with that one particular abuse. Some rules how to know a poet may
conceivably be of interest, though of no greater value.
Of course, the one first and last test is his work, but 'how to know
poetry' is another matter, which I do not propose treating of here; my
intention rather being to dot down a few personal characteristics--not
so much his 'works' as his 'ways.' I write as they come into my head;
and to any Reader about to cry out against digression, let me add: I
write thinking of Narcissus; for know all men, friend or Philistine, if
you have yet to learn it, my Narcissus is a poet!
First, as to the great question of 'garmenting.' The superstition that
the hat and the cloak 'does it' has gone out in mockery, but only that
the other superstition might reign in its stead--that the hat and cloak
cannot do it. Because one great poet dispensed with 'pontificals,' and
yet brought the fire from heaven, henceforward 'pontificals' are humbug,
and the wearer thereof but charlatan, despite--'the master yonder in
the isle.' Pegasus must pack in favour of a British hunter, and even the
poet at last wear the smug regimentals of mediocrity and mammon. Ye
younger choir especially have a care, for, though you sing with the
tongues of men and angels, and wear not a silk hat, it shall avail you
nothing. Neither Time, which is Mudie, nor Eternity, which is Fame, will
know you, and your verses remain till doom in an ironical _editio
princeps_, which not even the foolish bookman shall rescue from the
threepenny box. It is very unlikely that you will escape as did
Narcissus, for though, indeed,
'He swept a fine majestic sweep
Of toga Tennysonian,
Wore strange soft hat, that such as you
Would tremble to be known in,'
nevertheless, he somehow won happier fates, on which, perhaps, it would
be unbecoming in so close a friend to dilate.
The 'true' poet is, first of all, a gentleman, usually modest, never
arrogant, and only assertive when pushed. He does not by instinct take
himself seriously, as the 'poet-ape' doth, though if he meets with
recognition it becomes, of course, his duty to acknowledge his faculty,
and make good Scriptural use of it.
He is probably least confident, however, when praised; and never, except
in rare moments, especially of eclipse, has he a strong faith in the
truth that is in him. Therefore crush him, saith the Philistine, as we
crush the vine; strike him, as one strikes the lyre. When young, he
imagines the world to be filled with one ambition; later on, he finds
that so indeed it is--but the name thereof is not Poesy. Strange! sighs
he. And if, when he is seventeen, he writes a fluent song, and his
fellow-clerk admire it, why, it is nothing; surely the ledger-man hath
such scraps in his poke, or at least can roll off better. 'True bards
believe all able to achieve what they achieve,' said Naddo. But lo! that
ambition is a word that begins with pounds and ends with pence--like
life, quoth the ledger-man, who, after all, had but card-scores, a
tailor's account, and the bill for his wife's confinement in his pocket.
All through his life he loves his last-written most, and no honey of
Hybla is so sweet as a new rhyme. Let no maid hope to rival it with her
lips--she but interrupts: for the travail of a poet is even as that of
his wife--after the pain comes that dear joy of a new thing born into
the world, which doting sipping dream beware to break. Fifty repetitions
of the new sweetness, fifty deliberate rollings of it under the tongue,
is, I understand, the minimum duration of such, before the passion is
worked off, and the dream-child really breathing free of its
dream-parent. I have occasionally come upon Narcissus about the
twenty-fifth, I suppose, and wondered at my glum reception. 'Poetry gone
sour,' he once gave as the reason. Try it not, Reader, if, indeed, in
thy colony of beavers a poet really dwells.
He is a born palaeontologist: that is, he can build up an epic from a
hint. And, despite modern instances, the old rule obtains for him, he
need not be learned--that is, not deeply or abundantly, only at
points--superficially, the superficial would say. Well, yes, he has an
eye for knowing what surfaces mean, the secret of the divining rod.
Take it this way. We want an expression, say, of the work of Keats, want
to be told wherein lies his individuality. You take Mr. Buxton Forman's
four volumes, and 'work at' Keats! and, after thirty nights and days,
bring your essay. On the morning of the thirtieth the poet read again
the _Grecian Urn_, and at eventide wrote a sonnet; and on the morning of
the thirty-first, essay and sonnet are side by side. But, by the
evening, your essay is in limbo--or in type, all's one--while the sonnet
is singing in our heart, persistently haunting our brain. Some day the
poet, too, writes an essay, and thus plainly shows, says the essayist,
how little he really knew of the matter--he didn't actually know of the
so-and-so--and yet it was his ignorance that gave us that illuminating
line, after all.
I doubt if one would be on safe ground in saying: Take, now, the subject
of wine. We all know how abstemious is the poetical habit; and yet, to
read these songs, one would think 'twas Bacchus' self that wrote, or
that Clarence who lay down to die in a butt of Malmsey. Though the
inference is open to question,
'I often wonder if old Omar drank
One half the quantity he bragged in song.'
Doubtless he sat longest and drank least of all the topers of Naishapur,
and the bell for Saki rang not from his corner half often enough to
please mine host. Certainly the longevity of some modern poets can only
be accounted for by some such supposition in their case. The proposition
is certainly proved inversely in the case of Narcissus, for he has not
written one vinous line, and yet--well, and yet! Furthermore, it may
interest future biographers to know that in his cups he was wont to
recite Hamlet's advice to the players, throned upon a tram-car.
The 'true' poet makes his magic with the least possible ado; he and the
untrue are as the angler who is born to the angler who is made at the
tackle-shop. One encumbers the small of his back with nameless engines,
talks much of creels, hath a rod like a weaver's beam; he travels first
class to some distant show-lake among the hills, and he toils all day
as the fishermen of old toiled all night; while Tom, his gardener's son,
but a mile outside the town, with a willow wand and a bent pin, hath
caught the family supper. So is it with him who is proverbially born not
made. His friends say: 'O, you should go to such-and-such falls; you 'd
write poetry there, if you like. We all said so'; or, 'What are you
doing in here scribbling? Look through the window at the moonlight;
there's poetry for you. Go out into that if you want sonnets.' Of
course, he never takes his friends' advice; he has long known that they
know nothing whatever about it. He is probably quite ignorant of
metrical law, but one precept instinct taught him from the beginning,
and he finds it expressed one day in Wordsworth (with a blessed comfort
of assurance--like in this little, O, may be like, somehow, in the great
thing too!): 'Poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity.' The
wandlike moments, he remembers, always came to him in haunts all remote
indeed from poetry: a sudden touch at his heart, and the air grows
rhythmical, and seems a-ripple with dreams; and, albeit, in whatever
room of dust or must he be, the song will find him, will throw her arms
about him, so it seems, will close his eyes with her sweet breath, that
he may open them upon the hidden stars.
'Impromptus' are the quackery of the poetaster. One may take it for
granted, as a general rule, that anything written 'on the spot' is
worthless. A certain young poet, who could when he liked do good things,
printed some verses, which he declared in a sub-title were 'Written on
the top of Snowdon in a thunderstorm.' He asked an opinion, and one
replied: 'Written on the top of Snowdon in a thunderstorm.' The poet was
naturally angry--and yet, what need of further criticism?
The poet, when young, although as I said, he is not likely to fall into
the foolishness of conceit which belongs to the poetaster, is yet too
apt in his zeal of dedication to talk much of his 'art,' or, at least,
think much; also to disparage life, and to pronounce much gratuitous
absolution in the name of Poetry:--
Did Burns drink and wench?--yet he sang!
Did Coleridge opiate and neglect his family?--yet he sang!!
Did Shelley--well, whatever Shelley did of callous and foolish, the list
is long--yet he sang!!!
As years pass, however, he grows out of this stage, and, while regarding
his art in a spirit of dedication equally serious, and how much saner,
he comes to realise that, after all, art but forms one integral part,
however great, of a healthy life, and that for the greatest artist there
are still duties in life more imperative than any art can lay upon him.
It is a great hour when he rises up in his resolution first to be a man,
in faith that, if he be such, the artist in him will look after
itself--first a man, and surely all the greater artist for being that;
though if not, still a man. That is the duty that lies' next' to all of
us. Do that, and, as we are told, the other will be clearer for us. In
that hour that earlier form of absolution will reverse itself on his
lips into one of commination. Did they sing?--yet they sinned here and
here; and as a man soweth, so shall he reap, singer or sot. Lo! his
songs are stars in heaven, but his sins are snakes in hell: each shall
bless and torment him in turn.
Pitiable, indeed, will seem to him in that hour the cowardice that dares
to cloak its sinning with some fine-spun theory, that veils the
gratification of its desires in some shrill evangel, and wrecks a
woman's life in the names of--Liberty and Song! Art wants no such
followers: her bravest work is done by brave men, and not by sneaking
opium-eaters and libidinous 'reformers.' We all have sinned, and we all
will go on sinning, but for God's sake, let us be honest about it. There
are worse things than honest sin. If, God help you, you have ruined a
girl, do penance for it through your life; pay your share; but don't,
whatever you do, hope to make up for a bad heart by a good brain.
Foolish art-patterers may suffer the recompense to pass, for likely they
have all the one and none of the other; but good men will care nothing
about you or your work, so long as bad trees refuse to bring forth good
fruit, or figs to grow on thistles.
We have more to learn from Florentine artists than any 'craft mystery.'
If the capacity for using the blossom while missing the evil fruit, of
which Mr. Pater speaks in the case of Aurelius, were only confined to
those evil-bearing trees: alas! it is all blossom with us moderns, good
or bad alike, and purity or putrescence are all one to us, so that they
shine. I suppose few regard Giotto's circle as his greatest work: would
that more did. The lust of the eye, with Gautier as high-priest, is too
much with us.
The poet, too, who perhaps began with the simple ambition of becoming a
'literary man,' soon finds how radically incapable of ever being merely
that he is. Alas! how soon the nimbus fades from the sacred name of
'author.' At one time he had been ready to fall down and kiss the
garment's hem, say, of--of a 'Canterbury' editor (this, of course, when
very, very young), as of a being from another sphere; and a writer in
_The Fortnightly_ had swam into his ken, trailing visible clouds of
glory. But by and by he finds himself breathing with perfect composure
in that rarefied air, and in course of time the grey conviction settles
upon him that these fabled people are in no wise different from the
booksellers and business men he had found so sordid and dull--no more
individual or delightful as a race; and he speedily comes to the old
conclusion he had been at a loss to understand a year or two ago, that,
as a rule, the people who do not write books are infinitely to be
preferred to the people who do. When he finds exceptions, they occur as
they used to do in shop and office--the charm is all independent of the
calling; for just as surely as a man need not grow mean, and hard, and
dried up, however prosperous be his iron-foundry, so sure is it that a
man will not grow generous, rich-minded, loving, and all that is golden
by merely writing of such virtues at so much a column. The inherent
insincerity, more or less, of all literary work is a fact of which he
had not thought. I am speaking of the mere 'author,' the
writer-tradesman, the amateur's superstition; not of men of genius, who,
despite cackle, cannot disappoint. If they seem to do so, it must be
that we have not come close enough to know them. But the man of genius
is rarer, perhaps, in the ranks of authorship than anywhere: you are
far more likely to find him on the exchange. They are as scarce as
Caxtons: London possesses hardly half-a-dozen examples.
Narcissus enjoyed the delight of calling one of these his friend, 'a
certain aristocratic poet who loved all kinds of superiorities,' again
to borrow from Mr. Pater. He had once seen him afar off and worshipped,
as it is the blessedness of boys to be able to worship; but never could
he have dreamed in that day of the dear intimacy that was to come. 'If
he could but know me as I am,' he had sighed; but that was all. With the
almost childlike naturalness which is his greatest charm he confessed
this sigh long after, and won that poet's heart. Well I remember his
bursting into our London lodging late one afternoon, great-eyed and
almost in tears for joy of that first visit. He had pre-eminently the
capacity which most fine men have of falling in love with men--as one
may be sure of a subtle greatness in a woman whose eye singles out a
woman to follow on the stage at the theatre--and certainly, no other
phrase can express that state of shining, trembling exaltation, the
passion of the friendships of Narcissus. And although he was rich in
them--rich, that is, as one can be said to be rich in treasure so
rare--saving one only, they have never proved that fairy-gold which such
do often prove. Saving that one, golden fruit still hangs for every
white cluster of wonderful blossom.
'I thought you must care for me if you could but know me aright,'
Narcissus had said.
'Care for you! Why, you beautiful boy! you seem to have dropped from the
stars,' the poet had replied in the caressing fashion of an elder
brother.
He had frankly fallen in love, too: for Narcissus has told me that his
great charm is a boyish naturalness of heart, that ingenuous gusto in
living which is one of the sure witnesses to genius. This is all the
more piquant because no one would suspect it, as, I suppose, few do;
probably, indeed, a consensus would declare him the last man in London
of whom that is true. No one would seem to take more seriously the _beau
monde_ of modern paganism, with its hundred gospels of _La Nuance_; no
one, assuredly, were more _blasé_ than he, with his languors of pose,
and face of so wan a flame. The Oscar Wilde of modern legend were not
more as a dweller in Nirvana. But Narcissus maintained that all this was
but a disguise which the conditions of his life compelled him to wear,
and in wearing which he enjoyed much subtle subterranean merriment;
while underneath the real man lived, fresh as morning, vigorous as a
young sycamore, wild-hearted as an eagle, ever ready to flash out the
'password primeval' to such as alone could understand. How else had he
at once taken the stranger lad to his heart with such a sunlight of
welcome? As the maid every boy must have sighed for but so rarely found,
who makes not as if his love were a weariness which she endured, and the
kisses she suffered, cold as green buds, were charities, but frankly
glows to his avowal with 'I love you, too, dear Jack,' and kisses him
from the first with mouth like a June rose--so did that _blasé_ poet
cast away his conventional Fahrenheit, and call Narcissus friend in
their first hour. Men of genius alone know that fine _abandon_ of soul.
In such is the poet confessed as unmistakably as in his verse, for the
one law of his life is that he be an elemental, and the capacity for
great simple impressions is the spring of his power. Let him beware of
losing that.
I sometimes wonder as I come across the last frivolous gossip concerning
that poet in the paragraphs of the new journalism, or meet his name in
some distinguished bead-roll in _The Morning Post_, whether Narcissus
was not, after all, mistaken about him, and whether he could still,
season after season, go through the same stale round of reception,
private view, first night, and all the various drill of fashion and
folly, if that boy's heart were alive still. One must believe it once
throbbed in him: we have his poems for that, and a poem cannot lie; but
it is hard to think that it could still keep on its young beating
beneath such a choking pressure of convention, and in an air so 'sunken
from the healthy breath of morn.' But, on the other hand, I have almost
a superstitious reliance on Narcissus' intuition, a faculty in him which
not I alone have marked, but which I know was the main secret of his
appeal for women. They, as the natural possessors of the power, feel a
singular kinship with a man who also possesses it, a gift as rarely
found among his sex as that delicacy which largely depends on it, and
which is the other sure clue to a woman's love. She is so little used,
poor flower, to be understood, and to meet with other regard than the
gaze of satyrs.
However, be Narcissus' intuition at fault or not in the main, still it
was very sure that the boy's heart in that man of the world did wake
from its sleep for a while at the wandlike touch of his youth; and if,
after all, as may be, Narcissus was but a new sensation in his jaded
round, at least he was a healthy one. Nor did the callous ingratitude of
forgetfulness which follows so swiftly upon mere sensation ever add
another to the sorrows of my friend: for, during the last week before he
left us, came a letter of love and cheer in that poet's wonderful
handwriting--handwriting delicious with honeyed lines, each word a
flower, each letter rounded with the firm soft curves of hawthorn in
bud, or the delicate knobs of palm against the sky.