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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 their heyday;
Every day should be a play-day.

Yet mankind will work and worry,
Over trifles fuss and flurry,
Getting hot as Indian curry.