From “Conversations on the Poets.”
(“John” speaks)
PERHAPS actual want may be inconsistent with that serenity of I mind which is needful to the highest and noblest exercise of the creative power; but I am not ready to allow that poverty is so. Few can dignify it like our so admirable prose poet, whose tales are an honor even to the illustrious language they are written in; few can draw such rich revenues of wise humbleness from it as our beloved R. C.; few can win a smile from it by his Lambish humor, and that generous courtesy which transmutes his fourpence into a bank note in the beggar’s eyes, like S.; but there is none for whom it has not some kind lesson. Poverty is a rare mistress for the poet. She alone can teach him what a cheap thing delight is; to be had of every man, woman, and child he meets; to be gathered from every tree, shrub, and flower; nay, to be bought of the surly northwestern wind himself, by the easily paid installments of a cheerful, unhaggling spirit. Who knows the true taste of buns, but the boy who receives the annual godsend of one with election day? Whoever really went to the theatre, but Kit Nubbles? Who feels what a fireside is, but the little desolate barefooted Ruths, who glean the broken laths and waste splinters after the carpenters have had a full harvest? Who believes that his cup is overflowing, but he who has rarely seen anything but the dry bottom of it? Poverty is the only seasoner of felicity. Except she be the cook, the bread is sour and heavy, and the joint tough or overdone. As brisk exercise is the cheapest and warmest overcoat for the body, so is poverty for the heart. But it must be independent, and not of Panurge’s mind,—that to owe is a heroic virtue. Debt is like an ingenious mechanical executioner I have read of somewhere, which presented the image of a fair woman standing upon a pedestal of three steps. When the victim mounted the first, she opened her arms; at the second, she began to close them slowly around him; and at the third, she locked him in her iron embrace forever.
On the other hand, however, poverty has its bad side. Poverty in one hour’s time shall transport a man from the warm and fruitful climate of sworn brotherhood with the world into the bare, bleak, desert, and polar ice field of distant country cousinship; and the world’s whole duty of man towards him becomes on a sudden the necessity of staving off asking him to dinner. Then, for the first time, he gets an insight into the efficacy of buttons, and discovers, to his great surprise, that the world has one at each pocket. This gives him an excellent hint for a sonnet to a button, comparing it to the dragon of the Hesperides, in which he gets no further than the end of the second quatrain, finding it impossible to think of anybody or anything analogous to Hercules in his victory over the monster. Besides, he now learns that there are no golden apples to be guarded, the world assuring him on its honor that it has enormous sums to pay and not a cent to meet them with. In a fit of inspired despair he writes an elegy, for the first two stanzas of which (having learned economy) he uses up the two quatrains already adjusted for his sonnet. By employing the extremely simple process of deduction invented by the modern expounders of old myths, he finds that Hercules and Οὔτις are identical, and that the same word in the Syro-Phœnician language imports a dragon and a button. The rest of the elegy is made easy by merely assuming the other steps of the proposition, as every expounder of old myths has a clear right to do, by a rule of logic founded on the usage of the best writers in that department. He therefore considers the heart in the poetical light of a pocket or garden of Hesperides, buttoned up tight against all intruders. As Scripture is always popular, he ends by comparing it also to that box which Jehoiada set at the gate of the Temple, which had a hole in the top ample enough to admit the largest coins, though you might shake till you were tired without getting the smallest one out of it. Having now commenced author, we may as well leave him; for, at that lowest ebb of fortune, the bare, muddy flats of poverty lie exposed, and the tide must soon turn again.
That poverty may be of use to the poet, as you have said, may be granted, without allowing that it must come to the actual pinch and gripe of want with him. The man of genius surely needs it not as a spur, for his calling haunts him from childhood up. He knows that he has that to say that will make the great heart of the universe beat with a more joyous peacefulness and an evener motion. As he grows to man’s estate, the sense of a duty imposed on him by nature, and of a necessary obedience to heavenly messengers, which the world neither sees nor acknowledges, grows stronger and stronger. The exceeding brightness of his countenance weaves a crown around his head out of the thick air of earth; but earthlings cannot see it. He tells his errand, and the world turns its hard face upon him and says, “Thou art a drone in my busy hive; why doest thou not something?” Alas! when the winter season comes, the world will find that he had been storing honey for it from heavenly flowers, for the famishing heart to feed upon. He must elbow through the dust and throng of the market, when he should be listening to the still, small voice of God; he must blaspheme his high nature, and harden his heart to a touchstone to ring gold upon, when it is bursting with the unutterable agony of a heavenly errand neglected,—that bitterest feeling of having “once had wings.” The world has at last acknowledged his sovereignty, and crowned him with a crown of thorns. Thomson, in one of his letters, says:—
| “The great fat doctor of Bath told me that poets should be kept poor, the more to animate their genius. This is like the cruel custom of putting a bird’s eyes out, that it may sing the sweeter.” |
Milton tells us that:—
| “Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise | |
| To scorn delights and live laborious days”; |
