PERSISTENCY OF POETRY Though the Muse be gone away, -Matthew Arnold Who walks with Beauty has no need of fear, CONCERNING FAME When Chatterton was a boy (if that uncanny little elf ever really was a boy), a china maker offered to decorate a cup especially for him. "Paint me," the child said, "paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet to trumpet my name over all the world." The anecdote provides a complete symbolism for our thought about the kind of fame that poets most desire. It must not be merely the acclaim of the vulgar; it must not be merely bellowed by radio; it must not be limited by time and space. If a poet desires fame in any proud way, he desires that sort which can make of one blood all nations on the earth and give them one pulse in the beating of his heart. It must be lofty, coming from the great to the great; illustrious, proclaimed in trumpet tones as battle and triumph are; timeless and spacious, passing from soul to soul and from age to endless age. Blake went even further and, in one of his letters, claimed to have no care about terrestrial immortality because his work, he said, was "famed in Heaven" and "the delight of archangels." As a religious visionary he doubtless found it easy to believe that, if angels could rejoice in repentant sinners, they might also find delight in an exuberant poet. Before we can be sure that he was wrong we shall have to extend our acquaintance with angels. But we do not need to extend our acquaintance with poets in order to know that whenever they believe in angels, they probably believe in them as beings who ought to be interested in their poems. Blake was exceptional only in two ways he had more faith in angels than most of us and his work was more deserving of their attention. What poet has not dreamed dreams somewhat like that of Jacob's about the sun and moon and stars? And, after all, why should anybody be content with fame on one poor little oblate spheroid if he believes that he is chanting before a solar system? "It is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by a wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature,” said Ben Jonson, and all who have known the sensitivity and hauteur of the masters have felt this aspect of the truth. The large audience of the little people can confer a popularity that is eloquent enough in its own way, wrought out of their blood and sweat and tears; out of their raucous hilarity and familiar affections. Yet fame is not in their gift unless they are joined in acclamation by the little audience of the great who can add insight to eloquence. Keats seems to have felt this keenly. He says: I have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the public, or to anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of Great Men. And again, I feel every confidence that, if I choose, I may be a popular writer. That I will never be. . . . I equally dislike the favor of the public with the love of woman.. I shall now consider them (the people) as debtors to me for verses, not myself to them for admiration, which I can do without. Just so much as I am humbled by the genius above my grasp, am I exalted and look with hate and contempt upon the literary world. To be sure, wholesome citizens may often be right in their estimates of poetry when contemporray critics, hoodwinked by their own intellectual and emotional sophistication, are wrong. But wholesome citizens wabble on their æsthetic legs and fumble with their æsthetic fingers because they do not know the reasons for their sound estimates of contemporary work. They accept leadership all too readily and choose their poets with a dumb, good-natured, uncomprehending docility just as they choose tooth paste or cereals for breakfast, believing that what is widely advertised must be good. Instead of making their own opinions on the basis of sincere likes and dislikes they tend to revert to memories of what they learned about poetry in Public School Number Three. The beauty that differs from that of the past and comes to them hot and glistening like metal from a crucible is anathema to them. They will have none of it until it has cooled in its mould. The opinions of the contemporary literary world are also unreliable for trite and obvious reasons. It is always difficult for a critic to be judicial and relate the labors of his superlative friends and positive enemies to great works of the past by which they might be tested. It is certain, also, that if two women produced work of equal value in any period of the world's history, the more charming would get the better reviews in a world of men, not because men are unfair, but because the work of the more charming woman would be better understood through the medium of her personality. Quite as certainly, in any |