I
A serious theme demands serious treatment. Let us, therefore, begin with
definitions. What is a poet? and what is a publisher? Popularly speaking,
a poet is a fool, and a publisher is a knave. At least, I am hardly wrong
in saying that such is the literal assumption of the Incorporated Society
of Authors, a body well acquainted with both. Indeed, that may be said to
be its working hypothesis, the very postulate of its existence.
Of course, there are other definitions of both. It is not so the maiden of
seventeen defines a poet, as she looks up to him with brimming eyes in the
summer sunset and calls him 'her Byron.' It is not so the embryo
Chatterton defines him, chained to an office stool in some sooty
provincial town, dreaming of Fleet Street as of a shining thoroughfare in
the New Jerusalem, where move authors and poets, angelic beings, in
'solemn troops and sweet societies.' For, indeed, was that not the dream
of all of us? For my part, I remember my first, most beautiful, delusion
was that poets belonged only to the golden prime of the world, and that,
like miracles, they had long ceased before the present age. And I very
well recall my curious bewilderment when, one day in a bookseller's, a
friendly schoolmaster took up a new volume of Mr. Swinburne's and told me
that it was by the new great poet. How wonderful that little incident made
the world for me! Real poets actually existing in this unromantic to-day!
If you had told me of a mermaid, or a wood-nymph, or of the philosopher's
stone as apprehensible wonders, I should not have marvelled more. While a
single poet existed in the land, who could say that the kingdom of Romance
was all let out in building lots, or that the steam whistle had quite
'frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns'?
Since then I have taken up the reviewing of minor verse as a part of my
livelihood, and where I once saw the New Jerusalem I see now the New
Journalism.
There are, doubtless, many who still cherish that boyish dream of the
poet. He still stalks through the popular imagination with his Spanish hat
and cloak, his amaranthine locks, his finely-frenzied eyes, and his
Alastor-like forgetfulness of his meals. But only, it is to be feared, for
a little time. For the latter-day poet is doing his best to dissipate that
venerable tradition. Bitten by the modern passion for uniformity, he has
French-cropped those locks, in which, as truly as with Samson, lay his
strength, he has discarded his sombrero for a Lincoln and Bennett, he
cultivates a silky moustache, a glossy boot, and has generally given
himself into the hands of the West-End tailor. Stung beyond endurance by
taunts of his unpracticality, he enters Parliament, edits papers, keeps
accounts, and is in every way a better business man than his publisher.
This is all very well for a little time. The contrast amuses by its
piquancy. To write of wild and whirling things in your books, but in
public life to be associated with nothing more wild and whirling than a
shirt-fronted eye-glassed hansom; to be at heart an Alastor, but in
appearance a bank-clerk, delights an age of paradox.
But, though it may pay for a while, it will, I am sure, prove a disastrous
policy in the long run. The poet unborn shall, I am certain, rue it. The
next generation of poets (or, indeed, writers generally) will reap a
sorrowful harvest from the gratuitous disillusionment with which the
present generation is so eager to indulge the curiosity, and flatter the
mediocrity, of the public. The public, like the big baby it is, is
continually crying 'to see the wheels go round,' and for a time the
exhibition of, so to say, the 'works' of poet and novelist is profitable.
But a time will come when, with its curiosity sated, the public will turn
upon the poet, and throw into his face, on his own authority, that he is
but as they are, that his airs of inspiration and divine right are humbug.
And in that day the poet will block his silk hat, will shave away the
silken moustache, will get him a bottle of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer,
and betake himself to the sombrero of his ancestors--but it will be all
too late. The cat will have been irrecoverably let out of the bag, the
mystery of the poet as exploded as the mysteries of Eleusis.
Tennyson knew better. To use the word in its mediævalsense, he respected
the 'mystery' of poetry. Instinctively, doubtless, but also, I should
imagine, deliberately, he all his life lived up to the traditional type of
the poet, and kept between him and his public a proper veil of Sinaitic
mist. You remember Browning's picture of the mysterious poet 'you saw go
up and down Valladolid,' and the awestruck rumours that were whispered
about him--how, for instance--
'If you tracked him to his home, down lanes
Beyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,
You found he ate his supper in a room
Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,
And twenty naked girls to change his plate!'
That is the kind of thing the public likes to hear of its poets. That is
something like a poet. Inquisitive the public always will be, but it is a
mistake to indulge rather than to pique its curiosity. Tennyson respected
the wishes of his public in this matter, and, not only in his dress and
his dramatic seclusion, but surely in his obstinate avoidance of
prose-work of any kind we have a subtler expression of his carefulness for
fame. It is a mistake for a poet to write prose, however good, for it is a
charming illusion of the public that, comparatively speaking, any one can
write prose. It is an earthly accomplishment, it is as walking is to
flying--is it not stigmatised 'pedestrian'? Now, your true Bird of
Paradise, which is the poet, must, metaphorically speaking, have no
legs--as Adrian Harley said was the case with the women in Richard
Feverel's poems. He must never be seen to walk in prose, for his part is,
'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' to hang aloft and warble the
unpremeditated lay, without erasure or blot. This is, I am sure, not
fanciful, for two or three modern instances, which I am far too
considerate to name, illustrate its truth. Unless you are a very great
person indeed, the surest way to lose a reputation as poet is to gain one
as critic. It is true that for a time one may help the other, and that if
you are very fecund, and let your poetical issues keep pace with your
critical, you may even avoid the catastrophe altogether; but it is an
unmistakable risk, and if in the end you are not catalogued as a great
critic, you will assuredly be set down as a minor poet: whereas if you had
stuck to your last, there is no telling what fame might not have been
yours. Limitation, not versatility, is the fashion to-day. The man with
the one talent, not the five, is the hero of the hour.
Besides, this sudden change of his spots on the part of the poet is unfair
to the publisher, who is thus apt to find himself surprised out of his
just gain. For, at the present moment, I would back almost any poet of my
acquaintance against any publisher in a matter of business. This is
unfair, for the publisher is a being slow to move, slow to take in changed
conditions, always two generations, at least, behind his authors.
Consequently, this sudden development of capacity on the part of the poet
is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who
can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce
apoplexy. Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every
evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an
instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially in manuscript, that
he has, after all, little to fear from the poet's new gifts.