POETS AND PUBLISHERS

I


A serious theme demands serious treatment. Let us, therefore, begin with
definitions. What is a poet? and what is a publisher? Popularly speaking,
a poet is a fool, and a publisher is a knave. At least, I am hardly wrong
in saying that such is the literal assumption of the Incorporated Society
of Authors, a body well acquainted with both. Indeed, that may be said to
be its working hypothesis, the very postulate of its existence.

Of course, there are other definitions of both. It is not so the maiden of
seventeen defines a poet, as she looks up to him with brimming eyes in the
summer sunset and calls him 'her Byron.' It is not so the embryo
Chatterton defines him, chained to an office stool in some sooty
provincial town, dreaming of Fleet Street as of a shining thoroughfare in
the New Jerusalem, where move authors and poets, angelic beings, in
'solemn troops and sweet societies.' For, indeed, was that not the dream
of all of us? For my part, I remember my first, most beautiful, delusion
was that poets belonged only to the golden prime of the world, and that,
like miracles, they had long ceased before the present age. And I very
well recall my curious bewilderment when, one day in a bookseller's, a
friendly schoolmaster took up a new volume of Mr. Swinburne's and told me
that it was by the new great poet. How wonderful that little incident made
the world for me! Real poets actually existing in this unromantic to-day!
If you had told me of a mermaid, or a wood-nymph, or of the philosopher's
stone as apprehensible wonders, I should not have marvelled more. While a
single poet existed in the land, who could say that the kingdom of Romance