"
There is to me a heartrending pathos in these confessions. It is easy to
stand aloof, of course, like a schoolmaster with his chastising rod, and
lash the frailties of poor human nature. It is easy to declare with
virtuous indignation that the man who covets his neighbor's wife is a
transgressor who has no claim upon our sympathy. And yet who can help
pitying this great, noble poet, who fought so bravely against his
"barbaric, Titanic self with its hairy arms"? His passionate intensity
of soul was, indeed, part of his poetic equipment; and he would not have
been the poet he was if he had been cool, callous, and self-restrained.
The slag in him was so intimately moulded with the precious metal that
their separation would have been the extinction of the individuality
itself. The fiery furnace of affliction through which he passed warped
and scorched and cracked this mighty compound, but without destroying
it. A glimpse of this experience which transformed the powerful, joyous,
bright-visaged singer into a bitter, darkly brooding pessimist, fleeing
from the sinister shadow which threatened to overtake him, is afforded
us in the poem "Hypochondria[40]":
"I stood upon the altitude of life,
Where mingled waters part and downward go
With rush and foam in opposite directions.
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