VII. Short Cuts
Petit Up to Thirty
From the inquisitive elder Disraeli, Petit the Poet learned that Lope de Vega was a poet from his cradle, and he learned it bitterly, for he was sixteen, and his poetic April lingered. There was great solace in Keats, who had begun to be a poet at an age which gave Petit still two years to falter in. But what of these cradle rhymes of the Spaniard? What of the numerous lispings of Pope to nurse and bottle? What of the spines of satire Bryant put out at three-and-ten, or the Blossomes Cowley bore midway his second decade? And Chatterton!
Never mind Pascal and his conic sections, precocious Pliny, or the well-stuffed Hermogenes—monsters, not poets! But to see the years slip by while his own virtues lay still under a cloud of youth was a trial which set Petit brooding full of anger, over the hours he had wasted in play before he had grown conscious of an imperative function. No honourable poet could weigh pleasure against the duty to be great. For all her tricky record, Fortune had never behaved so ill, Petit felt, as when she cheated him of his destiny by fifteen years’ stark ignorance of it. There was some comfort in the excuse which he made to himself, that these more forward poets had beaten him in the race toward the Muses merely because they had had an earlier summons. But this comfort faded when he wondered whether they had not beaten him because their summons had been more genuine than his. Nor could he be much heartened by the spectacle of those who had come later into self-knowledge. Wandering in the wilderness palled no less because of the tribes who shared it with him. The dying, Petit felt, might lie down comforted that patriarchs, kings, even the wise and good, were bedfellows; but the hot thrust of those who looked toward birth wanted none of the cool medicine which encourages death. Those who had to be about Father Apollo’s business had little time for beds.
And yet, strenuous as he was for the bright reward, he gave hours to becoming a specialist in the youth of poets. Like a man sick with some lingering disease, he ransacked annals for cases like his own, mad after a sign which would point to an end of his sullen malady of prose. He could tell you at a question when his poets had assumed the toga poetica, from Tennyson, covering his slate with blank verse at six or seven, up through Goldsmith, who scarcely touched pen to verse on the poetical side of thirty, to Cowper, who at fifty, a few cheerful bagatelles aside, had only just begun to be a poet. From this learning of his, more truly a scholar than he knew, Petit took examples, despair, and vindications. When he thought of poets he thought of a thin line marching fierily down through all the ages, endless, quenchless, and himself waiting unsuspected in a prairie village for the tongue of flame which should mark him of their company. When he thought how much he lacked their art and scope, Petit despaired; but whenever despair had a little numbed, he vindicated himself by instancing those who had slept late in the shell.
Thus, year by year, he pushed back the age at which he must come into his powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, Petit should have written some new Thanatopsis at seventeen, but he got only heartache from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, he learned that Bryant had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for Petit to endure. Poems by Two Brothers, Poe’s Tamerlane, The Blessed Damozel (unanswerable challenge), drove him ashamed and passionate to his rhyming. But once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s Ode on Solitude, written at twelve for lasting honour, was a prank of genius, why not The Blessed Damozel? And who would contend with ghosts? Yet he could not remember this assurance when, that year, he found Chatterton’s bitter, proud will, and thought of the career which had led so straight toward it.
Some years were kinder, or at least Petit’s ignorance saved him, for at nineteen and twenty he kept his courage well enough. But twenty-one threatened him to the very teeth. Drake’s Culprit Fay mocked him; Holmes’s Old Ironsides roared at him; Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope enticed him; Milton’s Nativity ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,” Petit cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I will be a minor poet and never strive with Milton.”
Later, by an odd reversal, Petit consoled himself with proofs that the great poet must come slowly to his heights, and he lived for cheerful months on the surpassing badness of Shelley’s work before Alastor, fruit of twenty-three.
But the years would not cease, nor would they bring Petit’s summons. At twenty-two he thought of Götz von Berlichingen and thrust his boundary back. Twenty-three taunted him with Paracelsus and Endymion and Milton’s wistful On his Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three. Petit passed twenty-four sickly conscious of The Defence of Guenevere and Tamburlaine and those cantos of Childe Harold which, already two years out of the pen, made Byron splendid in a night. Keats, by having died glorious at twenty-five, made Petit’s year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember The Ancient Mariner, Collins’s pure Odes, and the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable Arcadia. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could Petit’s numbness say to The Strayed Reveller, The Shepheardes’ Calender, and Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect? With twenty-eight, The Lyrical Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon saw his hopes begin a slow decline, which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardour, past Johnson’s London, Crabbe’s Village, Clough’s hospitable Bothie, into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And Petit was thirty.
Tall Alp after tall Alp behind him, Petit saw before him only a world of foothills. Yet his journey had been passionate. Now the work he had done was dead leaves, his energy all burned grass, his aspirations dust. And dry and bitter in his mouth was the reflection that the summons might have missed his ear while he had watched his fellows. Had zeal overreached him, some hidden jealousy undone him? What grief and rebellion to know himself cause, agent, and penalty of his own ruin! O black decades to come!
Still, Scott found himself at thirty-four.