's attributes. The muscular morality resulting
from training one's will develops in proportion to one's ability to
overthrow one's own unruly impulses. It is almost universally maintained
by poets, on the contrary, that their gift depends upon their yielding
themselves utterly to every fugitive impulse and emotion. Little modern
verse vaunts the poet's stern self-control. George Meredith may cry,

I take the hap
Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails
Propels, but I am helmsman.
[Footnote: _Modern Love_.]

Henley may thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole,
however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry
than is this one.

Hardly more popular than the superman theory is another argument for the
poet's virtue that appears sporadically in verse. It has occurred to a
few poets that their virtue is accounted for by the high subject-matter
of their work, which exercises an unconscious influence upon their
lives. Thus in the eighteenth century Young finds it natural that in
Addison, the author of _Cato_,

Virtues by departed heroes taught
Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame,
Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame.
[Footnote: _Lines to Mr. Addison_.]

Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same
view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live

With pureness in youth and religion in age.
[Footnote: _What Is a Poet_.]

since he conceives as the function of poetry

To raise and purify the grovelling soul,
* * * * *
And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill.
[Footnote: _Poetry_.]

This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a
Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of
the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming
his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more
efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps.

These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real
ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his
subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,--the
fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful.

There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility
with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves
his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: Se