personality, it is inevitable that his followers should have their
attention caught by the different coloring which their own natures throw
upon it. The more acute their sense of observation, the more they will
be interested in the phenomenon. "Of course you are self-conscious,"
Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning. "How could you be a poet
otherwise?" [Footnote: February 27, 1845.]

This modern individualizing trend appears equally in all the arts, of
course. Yet the poet's self-consciousness appears in his work more
plainly than does that of painters and sculptors and musicians. One
wonders if this may not be a consequence of the peculiar nature of his
inspiration. While all art is doubtless essentially alike in mode of
creation, it may not be fanciful to conceive that the poet's inspiration
is surrounded by deeper mystery than that of other geniuses, and that
this accounts for the greater prominence of conscious self-analysis in
his work. That such a difference exists, seems obvious. In spite of the
lengths to which program music has been carried, we have, so far as I
know, practically no music, outside of opera, that claims to have the
musician, or the artist in general, for its theme. So sweeping an
assertion cannot be made regarding painting and sculpture, to be sure.
Near the beginning of the history of sculpture we are met by the legend
of Phidias placing his own image among the gods. At the other extreme,
chronologically, we are familiar with Daniel Chester French's group,
Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor. Painters not infrequently
portray themselves and their artist friends. Yet it is improbable that
the mass of material concerned with the poet's view of the artist can be
paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to
ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all
other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is
mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to