dom from financial cares at all, but
premature age, instead, that made his goddess of poesy fickle after
the advent of the pitifully belated fortune. Mr. Stedman spoke a far
truer word on this subject. "Poets," he said, "in spite of the
proverb, sing best when fed by wage or inheritance." "'Tis the
convinced belief of mankind," wrote Francis Thompson with a sardonic
smile, "that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if the
Almighty had constructed him like certain rudimentarily vocal dolls."
"No artist," declares Arnold Bennett, "was ever assisted in his career
by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by economic
inferiority." And Bliss Carman speaks out loud and bold: "The best
poets who have come to maturity have always had some means of
livelihood at their command. The idea that any sort of artist or
workman is all the better for being doomed to a life of penurious
worry, is such a silly old fallacy, one wonders it could have
persisted so long." The wolf may be splendid at suckling journalism
and various other less inspired sorts of writing, but she is a
ferocious old stepmother to poetry.

There are some who snatch eagerly at any argument in support of the
existing order, and who triumphantly point out the number of good
poems that have been written under "seemingly" adverse conditions. But
they do not stop to consider how much better these poems might have
been made under "seemingly" favorable conditions. Percy Mackaye is
right in declaring that the few singers left to English poetry after
our "wholesale driving-out and killing-out of poets ... are of two
sorts: those with incomes and those without. Among the former are
found most of the excellent names in English poetry, a fact which is
hardly a compliment to our civilization."

Would that one of those excellent philanthropists who has grown so
accustomed to giving a million to libraries and universities that the
act has become slightly mechanical--might realize that he has, with
all his generosity, made no provision as yet for helping one of the
most indispensable of all educational institutions--the poet. Would
that he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive
from the universities--places whose conservative formalism is even
dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with
all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is
distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow,