very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's
autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don
Juan_--as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably
in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's
_Villanelle of the Poet's Road_ is a typical expression of the
mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines,

Wine and women and song,
Three things garnish our way:
Yet is day overlong.
Three things render us strong,
Vine-leaves, kisses and bay.
Yet is day overlong.
Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills,
rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices
is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an
inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover
it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic
feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness.
This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian
period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to
it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the
most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the
_Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and
Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these
youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so
innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance
for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of
Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but
inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss
Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that
everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly
by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846;
May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and
Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which
would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor,
cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into
their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose."
[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.]

Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as
yearning for holiness,