Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/218

192 THE YELLOW PATCH its dignity more damage than the palsying superstition that it is something excessively sublime. The reader picks out his prose-men, he is familiar with philoso- phers ; but the moment he mentions verse he remembers the proprieties : up go his eyes and down droops his voice ; and, from what is no doubt just a nice, natural desire to do nothing offensive to refinement, he invari- ably speaks of the specially simple, jolly, frank, and friendly souls who make it as though they were a race of wilted priests. Whereas, in reality, of course, they are, of all writers, exactly the men whom it is most needful to see as human beings : for, of all forms of writing, theirs is the most personal, intimate, instinctive — poetry being, after all, simply essence of utterance — speech with the artifice left out. Doubly wrong, therefore, this mock-reverence ; bad for readers and writers, breeding an unfamiliarity which is the worst sort of contempt ; and one of our first tasks ought to be its destruction. Let us preach a gay impiety — insist that songs are meant for singing — declare that the only certain sacrilege is awe. And perhaps one of the soundest ways of doing that would be to show the men among their books, make a series of birds'-eye-views of verse that shall be so many scenes of human effort, with living figures, very mortal, very practical and muddy, engrossed in the grubby, glorious work of growing flowers. And, as it happens, if but the right Chronicler were here, such an effort might now be made with special justness — for right in the foreground, flashing superbly, easily the top-note of the scene, gleams a patch that not only plucks the reader's sight instantly, and is not only specially quick with human drama, but that is also an absolutely unequalled demonstration of the impertinence of piety, of the irreverence of awe, of the treachery of treating Poetry too devoutly. The