Alps on Alps Arise

FROM the inquisitive elder Disraeli I learned that Lope de Vega was a poet from his cradle, and I learned it bitterly, for I was sixteen, and my poetic April lingered. There was great solace in Keats, who had begun to be a poet at an age which gave me 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 wellstuffed Hermogenes — monsters, not poets! But to see the years slip by and real virtues hidden still under a cloud of youth, was a trial which set me brooding, full of anger, over the hours I had wasted in play before I had grown conscious of an imperative function. No honorable poet could weigh pleasure against the duty to be great. For all her tricky record, Fortune had never behaved so ill as when she cheated me of my destiny by fifteen years’ stark ignorance of it. In the thought that most forward poets had been early at their calling, lay a dim consolation which darkened when I feared that their greener majority may have meant a more genuine summons.

Nor could I be much heartened by the spectacle of those who had come late into self-knowledge. Wandering in the wilderness palled no less because of the tribes who shared it with me. The dying, I 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. We who had to be about Father Apollo’s business had little time for beds.

And yet, strenuous as I was for the bright reward, I gave hours to becoming a specialist in the youth of poets. Like a man sick with some lingering disease, I ransacked annals for cases like my own, mad after a sign which would point to an end for my sullen malady of prose. I could tell you at a question when my 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 mine, more truly a scholar than I knew, I took examples, despair, and vindications. When I thought of poets I thought of a thin line marching fierily down through all the ages, endless, quenchless, and myself waiting unsuspected in a prairie village for the tongue of flame which should mark me of their company. When I thought how much I lacked their art and scope, I despaired; but whenever despair had a little numbed, I vindicated myself against the precocious poets by instancing those who had slept late in the shell.

Thus, year by year, I pushed back the age at which I must come into my powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, I should have written some new Thanatopsis at seventeen, but I had only heartache from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, I learned that he had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for me to endure. Poems by Two Brothers, Poe’s Tamerlane, The Blessed Damosel (unanswerable challenge), drove me ashamed and passionate to my rhyming. But once again I found out a defense. If Pope’s Ode on Solitude, written at twelve for lasting honor, was a prank of genius, why not The Blessed Damosel? And who would contend with ghosts? Yet I could not remember this assurance when, that year, I 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 my ignorance saved me, for at nineteen and twenty I kept my courage well. But twenty-one threatened me to the very teeth. Drake’s Culprit Fay mocked me; Holmes’s Old Ironsides roared at me; Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope enticed me; Milton’s Nativity ode submerged and cowed me. ‘No, no,’ I cried, as I read again these resonant strophes, ‘ I will be a minor poet and never strive with Milton.’

Later, by a strange reversal, I consoled myself with proofs that the great poet must come slowly to his height, and I 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 my summons. At twenty-two I thought of Götz von Berlichingen and thrust my boundary back. Twenty-three taunted me with Paracelsus and Endymion and Milton’s wistful On his Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three. I passed twentyfour 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, dying glorious at twenty-five, made my year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember The Ancient Mariner, Collins’s pure Odes, and youth’s dreamland, the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable Arcadia. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could my 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 my hopes begin a slow decline, which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardor, past Johnson’s London, Crabbe’s Village, Clough’s hospitable Bothie, into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And I am thirty.

Tall Alp after tall Alp behind me, I see before me only a world of foothills. Yet my journey was passionate. Now the work I have done is dead leaves, my energy all burned grass, my aspirations dust. And dry and bitter in my mouth is the reflection that the summons may have missed my ear while I watched my fellows. Did zeal overreach me, some hidden jealousy undo me? What grief and rebellion to know one’s self cause, agent, and penalty of one’s own ruin! O black decades to come!

Scott found himself at thirty-four.