Not that praise must not always, of necessity, be
delightful to the artist, but that it may be redundant
to his content. Do you think so? or not?
It appears to me that poets who, like Keats, are highly
susceptible to criticism, must be jealous, in their
own persons, of the future honour of their works.
Because, if a work is worthy, honour must follow it,
though the worker should not live to see that following
overtaking. Now, is it not enough that the work
be honoured—enough I mean, for the worker?
And is it not enough to keep down a poet’s ordinary
wearing anxieties, to think, that if his work be worthy
it will have honour, and, if not, that ‘Sparta
must have nobler sons than he’? I am writing
nothing applicable, I see, to anything in question,
but when one falls into a favourite train of thought,
one indulges oneself in thinking on. I began
in thinking and wondering what sort of artistic constitution
you had, being determined, as you may observe (with
a sarcastic smile at the impertinence), to set about
knowing as much as possible of you immediately.
Then you spoke of your ‘gentle audience’
(
you began), and I, who know that you have
not one but many enthusiastic admirers—the
‘fit and few’ in the intense meaning—yet
not the
diffused fame which will come to you
presently, wrote on, down the margin of the subject,
till I parted from it altogether. But, after
all, we are on the proper matter of sympathy.
And after all, and after all that has been said and
mused upon the ‘natural ills,’ the anxiety,
and wearing out experienced by the true artist,—is
not the
good immeasurably greater than the
evil? Is it not great good, and great
joy? For my part, I wonder sometimes—I
surprise myself wondering—how without such
an object and purpose of life, people find it worth
while to live at all. And, for happiness—why,
my only idea of happiness, as far as my personal enjoyment
is concerned, (but I have been straightened in some
respects and in comparison with the majority of livers!)
lies deep in poetry and its associations. And
then, the escape from pangs of heart and bodily weakness—when
you throw off
yourself—what you
feel to be
yourself—into another
atmosphere and into other relations where your life
may spread its wings out new, and gather on every
separate plume a brightness from the sun of the sun!
Is it possible that imaginative writers should be so
fond of depreciating and lamenting over their own
destiny? Possible, certainly—but reasonable,
not at all—and grateful, less than anything!
My faults, my faults—Shall I help you?
Ah—you see them too well, I fear.
And do you know that I also have something of
your feeling about ‘being about to begin,’
or I should dare to praise you for having it.
But in you, it is different—it is, in you,
a virtue. When Prometheus had recounted a long
list of sorrows to be endured by Io, and declared
at last that he was [Greek: medepo en prooimiois],[1]
poor Io burst out crying. And when the author
of ‘Paracelsus’ and the ‘Bells and
Pomegranates’ says that he is only ‘going
to begin’ we may well (to take ‘the opposite
idea,’ as you write) rejoice and clap our hands.
Yet I believe that, whatever you may have done, you
will do what is greater. It is my faith
for you.