even while his importunate passions force him
into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a
yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take
an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the
_Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory,
as in the lines,

There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me,
I like the lassies--Gude forgie me.

But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his
artist's temperament. The muse tells him,

I saw thy pulses' maddening play,
Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way,
And yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven.

And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided
poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time.

Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height
about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor
over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_;
Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of Francois Villon_.] At the same time
Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey,
_Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis
Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared
to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this
time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving
cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded

What expiating agony
May for him damned to poesy
Shut in that little sentence be,--
What deep austerities of strife,--
He lived his life. He lived his life.
[Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.]

Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case
more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines,
puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as
the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their
charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to
temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper
course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but
to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a
disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge.
[Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease
is steadily increasing in these days of specialization,