Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this our contention?

It seems a reasonable contention, at least, the more so since poets are practically unanimous in describing inspiration as lifting them out of themselves, into self-forgetful ecstasy. Even that archegoist, Byron, concedes this point. "To withdraw myself from myself-oh, that accursed selfishness," he writes, "has ever been my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all." 1 Surely we may complain that it is rather hard on us if the poet can escape from himself only by throwing himself at the reader's head.

It would seem natural to conclude from the selflessness of inspiration that the more frequently inspired the poet is, the less will he himself be an interesting subject for verse. Again we must quote Keats to confute his more self-centered brothers. "A poet," Keats says, "is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the stars, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity." 2 The same conviction is differently phrased by Landor. The poet is a luminous body, whose function is to reveal other objects, not Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, November 26, 1813. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.

himself, to us. Therefore Landor considers our scanty knowledge of Shakespeare as compared with lesser poets a natural consequence of the self-obliterating splendor of his genius:

In poetry there is but one supreme,

Though there are many angels round his throne,
Mighty and beauteous, while his face is hid.1

But though an occasional poet lends his voice in support of our censure, the average poet would brush aside our complaints with impatience. What right have we to accuse him of swerving from the subject matter proper to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure obscure our view?

Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in this world.

Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the opposing views, 1 On Shakespeare.

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like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have no competitors to dispute his place as chief character.

At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the Phædrus, "This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" Now, whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, one must

1 § 251.

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admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge:

In our life alone does nature live,

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.1

The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was; his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us,

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.

Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet called The Love of Narcissus:

Like him who met his own eyes in the river,
The poet trembles at his own long gaze

'Ode to Dejection.

That meets him through the changing nights and days.
From out great Nature; all her waters quiver
With his fair image facing him forever:
The music that he listens to betrays

His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways
His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor.
His dreams are far among the silent hills;
His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain;
With winds at night vague recognition thrills
His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
He knows again his mirth in mountain rills,
His weary tears that touch him in the rain.

Possibly we may concede that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist gives. We cannot but sympathize with Sidney Lanier's complaint against "your cold jellyfish poets that wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let us see it through their substance, as if that were a great feat."

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In answer, champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse may point to the Canterbury Tales, and show us Chaucer ambling along with the

'Poem Outlines.