candal and the cry:
Proclaim the faults he would not show,
Break lock and seal; betray the trust;
Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but just
The many-headed beast should know.

In protesting against the right of the public to judge their conduct,
true poets refuse to bring themselves to a level with their accusers by
making the easiest retort, that they are made of exactly the same clay
as is the _hoi polloi_ that assails them. This sort of recrimination is
characteristic of a certain blustering type of claimant for the title of
poet, such as Joaquin Miller, a rather disorderly American of the last
generation, who dismissed attacks upon the singer with the words,

Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealed
That he was more than man or less?
[Footnote: _Burns_ and _Byron_.]

The attitude is also characteristic of another anomalous type which
flourished in America fifty years ago, whose verse represents an
attempted fusion of emasculated poetry and philistine piety. A writer of
this type moralizes impartially over the erring bard and his accusers,

Sin met thy brother everywhere,
And is thy brother blamed?
From passion, danger, doubt and care
He no exemption claimed.
[Footnote: Ebenezer Eliot, _Burns_.]

But genuine poets refuse to compromise themselves by admitting that they
are no better than other men.

They are not averse, however, to pointing out the unfitness of the
public to cast the first stone. So unimpeachable a citizen as Longfellow
finds even in the notoriously spotted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, an
advantage over his maligners because

He is not
That despicable thing, a hypocrite.
[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.]

Most of the faults charged to them, poets aver, exist solely in the evil
minds of their critics. Coleridge goes so far as to expurgate the poetry
of William Blake, "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from
the too probable want of it in the readers." [Footnote: Letter to Charles
Augustus Tulk, Highgate, Thursday Evening, 1818, p. 684, Vol. II,
_Letters_, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge.]

The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the
more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak
of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for
autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in
which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says
of Burns, "We can see horribly cle