In looking back upon such a life as Clare's, so prominent are the
human interests which confront us, that those of poetry, as one of
the fine arts, are not unlikely to sink for a time completely out of
sight. The long and painful strain upon our sympathy to which we are
subject as we read the story is such perhaps as the life of no other
English poet puts upon us. The spell of the great moral problems by
which the lives of so many of our poets seem to have been more or
less surrounded makes itself felt in every step of Clare's career. We
are tempted to speak in almost fatalistic language of the disastrous
gift of the poetic faculty, and to find in that the source of all
Clare's woe. The well-known lines--
We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness--
ring in our ears, and we remember that these are the words of a poet
endowed with a well-balanced mind, and who knew far less than Clare
the experience of
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills.
In Clare's case we are tempted to say that the Genius of Poetry laid
her fearful hand upon a nature too weak to bear her gifts and at the
same time to master the untoward circumstances in which his lot was
cast. But too well does poor Clare's history illustrate that
interpretation of the myth which pictures Great Pan secretly busy
among the reeds and fashioning, with sinister thought, the fatal pipe
which shall "make a poet out of a man." And yet it may be doubted
whether, on the whole, Clare's lot in life, and that of the wife and
family who were dependent upon him, was aggravated by the poetic
genius which we are thus trying to make the scapegoat for his
misfortunes. It may be that the publicity acquired by the
Northamptonshire Peasant Poet simply brings to the surface the
average life of the English agricultural labourer in the person of
one who was more than usually sensitive to suffering. Unhappily there
is too good reason to believe that the privations to which Clare and
his household were subject cannot be looked upon as exceptional in
the class of society to which both husband and wife belonged,
although they naturally acquire a deeper shade from the prospect of
competency and comfort which Clare's gifts seemed to promise. In this
light, while the miseries of the poet are none the less real and
claim none the less of our sympathy, the moral problem of Clare's
woes belongs rather to humanity at large than to poets in particular.
We are at liberty to hope, then, that the world is all the richer,
and that Clare's lot was none the harder, by reason of that
dispensation of Providence which has given to English literature such
a volume as "The Rural Muse." How many are there who not only fail,
as Clare failed, to rise above their circumstances, but who, in
addition, leave nothing behind them to enrich posterity! We are
indeed the richer for Clare, but with what travail of soul to himself
only true poets can know.