Like sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude, the same inconsistency that lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Plato, the poet sees this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,—and yet it is to him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it as from a prison house. One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all-a woman Sappho, suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine his spirit. Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in poems even of such bulk as the Prelude one does not find a complete analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In Aurora Leigh one might speculate similarly about the spiritual æstheticism of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of qualities derived from more remote ancestors. The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, since it typifies the union in the poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness. There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of the woman who was "no churl" as A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes, In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. A little 1 See Thalassius. 3 Alfred Noyes, Tales of the Mermaid Inn. See Beattie, The Minstrel; Wordsworth, The Prelude; Cowper, Lines_on_his_Mother's Picture; Swinburne, Ode to his Mother; J. G. Holland, Kathrina; William Vaughan Moody, The Daguerreotype; Anna Hempstead Branch, Her Words. poem by Sara Teasdale, The Mother of a Poet, gives a poetical explanation of this type of woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's adversities,1 is not found in verse. One might almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness.2 The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted upon by poets,3 though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said to the little Viola, 1 See H. E. Rives, The Castaway (1904); J. D. Bacon, A Family Affair (1900). 'A Ballad in Blank Verse, by John Davidson, is a rare exception. See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, Her Words. If angels have hereditary wings, If not by Salic law is handed down The poet's laurel crown, To thee, born in the purple of the throne, But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in which they grow. cance. What have poets to say on the larger question of their social inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without signifiThe renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than to create, beauty,— that he is the connoisseur rather than the genius,— seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage. Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows |