At least these great artists of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries are agreed upon one thing, that the public, even in its most gracious mood, makes an ill task-master for the man of letters.It is worth the pains to ask why, and to attempt to show how much of an author's literary quality is involved in his attitude towards his audience.Such an inquiry will take us, it is true, into bad company, and exhibit the vicious, the fatuous, and the frivolous posturing to an admiring crowd.But style is a property of all written and printed matter, so that to track it to its causes and origins is a task wherein literary criticism may profit by the humbler aid of anthropological research.
Least of all authors is the poet subject to the tyranny of his audience."Poetry and eloquence," says John Stuart Mill, "are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling.But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener." Poetry, according to this discerning criticism, is an inspired soliloquy; the thoughts rise unforced and unchecked, taking musical form in obedience only to the law of their being, giving pleasure to an audience only as the mountain spring may chance to assuage the thirst of a passing traveller.In lyric poetry, language, from being a utensil, or a medium of traffic and barter, passes back to its place among natural sounds; its affinity is with the wind among the trees and the stream among the rocks; it is the cry of the heart, as simple as the breath we draw, and as little ordered with a view to applause.Yet speech grew up in society, and even in the most ecstatic of its uses may flag for lack of understanding and response.It were rash to say that the poets need no audience; the loneliest have promised themselves a tardy recognition, and some among the greatest came to their maturity in the warm atmosphere of a congenial society.Indeed the ratification set upon merit by a living audience, fit though few, is necessary for the development of the most humane and sympathetic genius; and the memorable ages of literature, in Greece or Rome, in France or England, have been the ages of a literary society.The nursery of our greatest dramatists must be looked for, not, it is true, in the transfigured bear-gardens of the Bankside, but in those enchanted taverns, islanded and bastioned by the protective decree -IDIOTA, INSULSUS, TRISTIS, TURPIS, ABESTO.
The poet seems to be soliloquising because he is addressing himself, with the most entire confidence, to a small company of his friends, who may even, in unhappy seasons, prove to be the creatures of his imagination.Real or imaginary, they are taken by him for his equals; he expects from them a quick intelligence and a perfect sympathy, which may enable him to despise all concealment.
He never preaches to them, nor scolds, nor enforces the obvious.
Content that what he has spoken he has spoken, he places a magnificent trust on a single expression.He neither explains, nor falters, nor repents; he introduces his work with no preface, and cumbers it with no notes.He will not lower nor raise his voice for the sake of the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his entertainment.His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his achievement.Sometimes they come late.
