Without Prejudice

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,

adiness, patience; and of all kinds of writing, poetry demands the steadiest pen. Complex metres and curious rhyme-schemes are not to be achieved without pain and patience. Prose is a path, but poetry is a tight-rope, and to walk on it demands the nicest dexterity. You may scribble off prose in the fieriest frenzy-who so fiery and frenzied as your journalist with the printer's devil at his elbow?-but if you would aspire to Parnassus, you must go slow and steady. Fancy inditing a sonnet with the composito

ting comes from

siest who have l

run in the original manu

on: Handwri

aisins; yet Shelley's last manuscripts are full of lacunae and erasures,

h the … as

hadows of

next, H

ocodile

Here is another one, which begins as beautifully a

rface of the

d image of

unquiet, a

but it neve

o th

ged, will find

o "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 bro

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 repres

ng,

ned outside;

and of aust

l 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

sun this lo

e should have

should be

d will wor

les fuss

ot as Ind

in such

sonable i

sunshine't i

for Gladston

Radicals

ocks, pipes

se of all th

d emotions

er let's g

lks and swim

emon-squas

at eterna

d luring you off into all sorts of false tracks. Moreover, it affords no help whatever in polishing. After lunch I set to work with renewed zeal, licking the lines in

d by the side of the irresp

thought that it was already Friday, and that he was about to sing in a new house, whose hostess he did not even know, had already dismayed the superstitious singer. But when he saw the number on the door was 13, no power on earth and no amount of argument could ind

this heedlessness for the morrow, this inclination to look for the day's tobacco and the quarter's rent from loans and debts rather than from honest work, this witty contempt for current morality." But this is scarcely the teaching of the ever delightful book, which catches the spirit of youth and gaiety and irresponsibility wedded to artistic ardour as no other book has done before or since, and for which one might put in the plea that Charles Lamb made for the dramatists of the Restoration. Its world is only a pleasing fiction, and the ordinary rules of morality do not carry over into it. It is the East of Suez of literature, "where there ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man may raise a thirst." The real Bohemia, as Jules Valdes showed in "Réfractaires," is a world of misery and discontent. Still more sordid is the English Bohe

n a city

, indeed,

a week, al

inly all

w I found it

may find i

re just fiv

try, hope,

titude's rath

ngitude al

pity who kno

iful City

of respectability above or the world of shame below. "Qu'on est bien à vingt ans!" will always be a cry to fill the breast of p

eyes the litt

outh, I weathe

tress, a staunc

art still brea

of life and

glory of m

lted up four

days when I w

rposes only. She is the great matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds. And so the

is, and "hic jacet" may be written over t

e! When I s

the rue

when thy fo

"We meet

ot in that

est ima

eft to Mem

ow and

eeable than Joseph or Tom Jones than Blifil, even when Joseph or Blifil is as proper as he pretends. And if Tom or Charles is a poet to boot, what can we not forgive him? The poet must have his experiences-be sure that nine tenths of them are purely of the imagination. For the other tenth-well, if Burns had been strictly temperate, "the world had wanted many an idle song," and we should not have celebrated his centenary so enthusiastically. The poet expresses the joy and sorrow of the race whose silent emotions become vocal in him, and it is necessary that he should have a full and varied life, from which "nihil humanum" is a

, oh, many a

right goo

ey all? So p

nd wanders

gloats over his sins-is musically remorseful or swingingly defiant; he hints or exaggerates or invents. That is where the poet's imagination comes in-to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. The poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life; the "poet's licence" is rightly understood to be limited to his language. To have written

suppose, Verlaine will rank with Villon as an impossible person. He may have been all that is said, all that is hinted, even in Mr. George Moore's famous description of him.

anything very lurid and diabolique: life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the "French master," the poor, despised, "frog-eating Mounseer Jacques" of boys' stories, the butt of all their facetio

hilosoph

enon

ible

aire e

. It was rather late at night before, having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the narrow, poverty-stricken rue in which Verlaine was living a year or so ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminab

s and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He greeted me with simple cordiality; and, ugly and coarse though his face was, it was lit up throughout by a pleasant smile. His notorious leg was bandaged, but not repulsively. No, "homely" is the only impression I shall ever

poem he had just written in celebration of his own fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a "crystal goblet." "Ce verre-là!" he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also an allusion to a "blue-bird," a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The "plumage bleutê de l'orgueil" figures in one of his very

terity may appraise Verlaine's work as a whole, he has left three or four lyrics which can die only if the French language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoe

t dans

pleut d

ich it renders the endless drip, drip of melanc

nglots

vi

'aut

nt mon

e la

oto

"soul," the haunting, elusive magic of wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the "finer light in light," that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spi

was a time I

hts, and from l

chord to reach

nvenuto Cellini, who murdered his ene