64 Poetry for Students
styles did not disturb Motley; what disturbed him
was any intrusion of the Actual. “Artistic feeling”
required the avoidance of Actuality; here Motley
did not trust Holmes. In his letter he wrote: “To the
morallypure & noble, there is no need of my ex-
horting you—To that you are always instinctively
and unerringly true—To the intellectually beautiful &
sublime you are equally loyal—It is only to the artis-
tic feeling that you are sometimes false, and so far,
false to your own nature... .”
In the section now called “The Statesman’s Se-
cret,” with its unheroic and unpoetical subject,
Daniel Webster, Motley found two passages that
he evidently regarded as notably “false” to “artis-
tic feeling.”
The cheated turncoat shakes his broken chain,
The baffled spoilsman howls, “In vain! In vain!”
The whitening bones of trampled martyrs strew
The slippery path his sliding feet pursue.
Go, great Deluded! Go and take thy place
With thy sad brethren of the bovine race, frenzied
The herd of would-be quadriennial kings
The white-house gad-fly crazes when he stings!
Motley wanted both deleted, explaining why in a
marginal note to the first:
a presidential election is in its details so vulgar & un-
poetical, that you must soar as high as possible into
the generalempyrean of poetical ambition—This you
have done very skilfully, & if you will omit as above
suggested, the picture is grand & solemn—it ought
in no sense to be comic
Deleting the first passage, Holmes revised the
second:
Shake from thy sense the wild delusive dream!
Without the purple, art thou not supreme?
And soothed by love unbought, thy heart shall own
A nation’s homage nobler than its throne!
Avoiding the democratic Actual, Holmes could
reach for the Ideal only by resorting to an inap-
propriately royal diction.
Bankers, like politicians, similarly tempted the
poet toward the vulgar Actual, and the embezzler’s
dinner-party displeased Motley in proportion as it
evoked Holmes’s sense of the comic. The critic did
what he could with the offending subject. The Host-
ess who thinks of her “vexed cuisine” is “too bour-
geois”; there are “too many” extra dinner guests; the
amount of drinking is “too strong for a ladies’ din-
ner party.” The “Blairish” objection to the “mean”
shows in protests against such words as “sweating,”
“slink,” “lugs out,” “slow-coach,” “slap on,” and
“jolly,” offenses that Holmes amended or deleted.
A far safer subject was that of “The Lover’s
Secret.” From Motley’s standpoint a love-sickancient Roman was Ideal in his condition, his time,
and his place. Although Motley found a few inel-
egant words, he considered the “whole episode...
classic, original, & brilliant,” and marked the first
eighteen lines with the parallels:
What ailed young Lucius? Art had vainly tried
To guess his ill, and found herself defied.
The Augur plied his legendary skill,
Useless; the fair young Roman languished still.
His chariot took him every cloudless day
Across the Pincian Hill or Appian Way;
They rubbed his wasted limbs with sulphurous oil
Oozed from the far-off Orient’s heated soil;
They led him tottering down the steamy path
Where bubbling fountains filled the thermal bath;
Borne in a litter to Egeria’s cave,
They washed him, shivering, in her icy wave.
They sought all curious herbs and costly stones,
They scraped the moss that grew on dead men’s
bones
They tried all cures the votive tablets taught,
Scoured every place whence healing drugs were
bought,
O’er Thracian hills his breathless couriers ran,
His slaves waylaid the Syrian caravan.
Thirty-one additional lines received Motley’s ap-
proving parallels. He asked for the omission of one
couplet, pointed out the redundancy in “hired sicar-
ius,” and objected to “The maid of lion step,” be-
cause “lion is too masculine,” suggesting “panther”
as a substitute. The maid is she who “bade black
Crassus ‘touch her if he dare!’” Motley protested
in the margin: “I don’t like ‘touch her if he dare!’—
too prosaic and the passage is very poetical & ro-
mantic.” The whole, however, pleased Motley
because he saw in it the ideal qualities of “classic
elegance” and “tenderness & truth.”
In “Ideality,” however, it could not match “The
Mother’s Secret.” In that section, Motley was able
to mark nearly half the poem with the parallels; and
here he saw little to complain of. Combining reli-
gion and domestic affection, “The Mother’s Secret”
nowhere tempted Holmes toward the gross actual-
ities Motley wanted him to avoid. Motley saw not
only Fra Angelico; he found in the description of
the elders in the Temple “a vivid picture in 2 Rem-
brandt strokes”:
They found him seated with the ancient men,—
The grim old swordsmen of the tongue and pen,—
Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near,
Their grey beards slanting as they turned to hear,
Lost in half envious wonder and surprise
That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
Consistent in his major criticisms and in cer-
tain minor ones not here noted, Motley holds to the
standard of the opposed Ideal and Actual as if byThe Chambered Nautilus