THE POET'S RELIGION
There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the
priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not
tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed
of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing
no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest
critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, assert
with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with
their interpretation of that word.
As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the
refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are
in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as
incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is
unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic
philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is,
as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the
poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The
poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society.
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 siècle_ 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 Benét,
_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
Ætna,_ 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 Brontë'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 preëminent 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.]