THE POETIC GIFT.
[TO THZ EDITOR OF TILE " SPECTATOR.")
Sin,—In your interesting article, "Gifts of Money," in the Spectator of August 13th, you say, "The necessity to earn a livelihood by ordinary means kills the poetic gift." Do facts bear out this statement ? "Poetic gifts," say Schopenhauer, in his essay on "The Metaphysics of the Beautiful," "belong to the holidays, not to the work- ing-days of life : Hence, even if they should be felt to be somewhat oppressed and limited by an occupation which the poet carries on at the same time, they may still prosper along with it indeed, poetic gifts are condensed by the ordinary work of life just as they are diluted by too much leisure, and by being carried on ex professo." We know that Wordsworth dreaded the too ample freedom of the purely poetic life. The misery of Keats was in a great measure the misery of a man who felt himself divorced from the ordinary occupations of life. Browning would gladly have entered the diplomatic service. Who can doubt that much of the unhappy waywardness of Byron's life arose from the fact that he had nothing in this wide world to do but drag his menagerie and his lame leg from one Italian city to another ? Scott, on the other hand, was reared to the labours of the desk. His imaginative work was healthily enriched by his practical occupations. "If you wish to be a poet," says a wise old French writer, "do some- thing else six hours a day." It was not till this century that the idea somehow became fixed that the poet was a sort of -vessel that must be kept in cotton wool to prevent its volatile genius from evaporation. For my part, I cannot see that the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" suffers from the fact that Chaucer earned his livelihood by ordinary means as ." Controller of the Petty Customs in the Port of London ; " or is Shakespeare less universal for being at the same time 4' an absolute Johannes Factotum " Is the war in heaven less energetic than it would have been if Milton had never flung himself into political strife, or maintained his lofty 'independence by turning his Latin to practical account? Surely the poet, whatever else he may be, is also a man of this world, not a sort of sensitive sea-anemone, waving its f utile arms in periodical low water.—I am, Sir, &c., G. M.
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