e past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all
scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth
century this mode of passing judgment was most naively manifest in
verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal
lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded,
without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In
the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to
prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same
simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral
reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart,
Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective
attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.]

It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that
considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The
highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though
poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his
critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his
protege, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's,
Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been
represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of
their poetical wares.

Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead
one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain
quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate
connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously
moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that
the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing
the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, in _In Memoriam_:

Loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought,

and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the
tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow's _Letters of Life and Morning_, in
which she exhorts the young poet,

Learn to sing,
But first in all thy learning, learn to be.

The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the
conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue,
not poetry, holds his first allegiance.

He held his manly name
Far dearer than the muse,
[Footnote: J. G. Saxe, _A Poet's Elegy_.]

we a