made his cell the artistic centre of London, but I doubt if he got through much work; and more recently, when Jokai was in gaol, he was compelled to insist on two hours' privacy and confinement per day. To be a 'first-class misdemeanant' seems to me the height of happiness for a literary man.
Unfortunately there are few honest opportunities for going to gaol. The most honest way of all would be to write the truth about men and things; but this editors will not print. So one has to live at one's own expense. Nevertheless, the Hotel of the Black Maria remains an ideal.
IV. BOHEMIA AND VERLAINE
It is one of the pleasures of my life that I never saw Tennyson. Hence I am still able to think of him as a poet, for even his photograph is not disillusionising, and he dressed for the part almost as well as Beerbohm Tree would have done. Why one's idea of a poet is a fine frenzied being, I do not quite know. One seems to pick it up in the very nursery, and even the London
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
Probably these very lines run in the original manuscript somewhat as follows:
[Illustration]
Shelley is the ideal of a poet, a soul of white fire, fed by bread and raisins; yet Shelley's last manuscripts are full of lacunae and erasures, some of which have had to be reproduced perforce in the printed editions.
Clothed with the...as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like...next, Hypocrisy,
On a crocodile rode by.
It reads like a puzzle set by a Competition Editor. Here is another one, which begins as beautifully as Hedda Gabler could desire, and ends in blankness.
Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but it never fades away;
Go to the [ ]
You, being changed, will find it then as now.
The fact is, of course, that inspiration is no guarantee of perfection. The limitations of inspiration vary with the limitations of the writer-a proposition that may be commended to the theologians. Genius can no more safeguard a man against his own ignorance than it can find a rhyme to 'silver.' Inspiration could not save Keats from his Cockney rhymes nor Mrs. Browning from her rhymeless rhymes. I met a poet in a London suburb-it seemed odd to see one out of Fleet Street-but after a few bewildered instants I recognised him. There was on his brow the burden of a brooding sorrow. I sought delicately to probe the cause of his grief, and he confessed at last that in a much- praised poem just published he had made a monosyllable dissyllabic. He had never got over a youthful mispronunciation, and in an unguarded moment of inspiration it had slipped in.
This prosaic view of poetry is distasteful to many, who like to think that 'Paradise Lost' came out in a jet. But all these grandiose conceptions belong to the obscurantist view of human life, which is popular with all who hate, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, 'to think clear and see straight.' People fancy that the dignity of human life demands that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime. The finest art-be it literature, music, or painting-is, after all that inspiration can do has been done, a matter of painful pegging away; and the finest artists will be found quietly occupying themselves with their art without pose or fuss. That side of the business is largely monopolised by the little men. But even the big men sometimes fall victims to the popular conception, as when a Byron stagily takes the centre of the universe, and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. We do not need biographical scandal-mongers to tell us what 'the real Lord Byron' was like. He was like 'Don Juan,' his own poem; shrewd, cynical, worldly, with flashes of exquisite feeling. The poem which is cut out of young ladies' editions of Byron is the one that represents him most truly in his blend of sensualism and idealism, whereas the Brocken figure is but Byron as he appeared to himself in his stormiest and gloomiest moments, and even that phantasm artistically draped and limelit by a poet's imagination. If people realised how much Byron wrote in his pitiable span of thirty-six years, how much hard labour went to make those cleverly-rhymed stanzas of 'Childe Harold' or 'Don Juan,' despite Swinburne's accusation of botchery, they would see that he really had very little time to be wicked. They would understand that art-even the most decadent- is based on strenuous labour.
Young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
Even in poetically declaring himself a decadent, the artist must take as many pains as fall to the prosiest bourgeois. This is the paradox of the position. Just as the pyrrhonist in maintaining that there is no truth asserts one, so the literary pessimist partly contradicts his contention of the futility of existence by his anxiety to express himself elegantly. Leopardi's Italian and Schopenhauer's German are far superior to those of the optimistic philosophers; and one of the most polished poems of our day is poor Thomson's 'City of Dreadful Night.' So, too, the poet who declares himself an idler and a vagabond gives the lie to his pretensions by the labour he takes to clothe them in unimpeachable verse. The other morning I looked out of my study window after breakfast and discovered that the weather was heavenly. I had lingered over the meal, reading the beautiful political speeches, from which I gathered there was a Crisis at hand. I knew that Crisis. I had heard about it ever since I learnt to hear. Nevertheless, the newspapers were still devoting as much space to it as if it were brand-new, and beguiling me to take interest in it. I felt quite annoyed when I looked at the blue sky after breakfast and took deep breaths of ambrosial air, and thought how I had wasted my time. Thrilled by the sunshine, a cosmic rapture seized me, and I wondered that men should fritter away their time in politics and other serious occupations. The inspiration grew and grew, and I felt that my lips had been touched by the sacred fire, and that I had been called to preach a great moral lesson to mankind. So I took up my pen and wrote:
Bright the sun this lovely May-day;
Youth and love should have thair heyday;
Every day should be a play-day.
Yet mankind will work and worry,
Over trifles fuss and flurry,
Getting hot as Indian curry.
Orators, in such a season,
How unreasonable is reason!
'Gainst the sunshine't is a treason.
What care I for Gladstone's glories?
