How else had he
at once taken the stranger lad to his heart with such a sunlight of
welcome? As the maid every boy must have sighed for but so rarely found,
who makes not as if his love were a weariness which she endured, and the
kisses she suffered, cold as green buds, were charities, but frankly
glows to his avowal with 'I love you, too, dear Jack,' and kisses him
from the first with mouth like a June rose--so did that _blase_ poet
cast away his conventional Fahrenheit, and call Narcissus friend in
their first hour. Men of genius alone know that fine _abandon_ of soul.
In such is the poet confessed as unmistakably as in his verse, for the
one law of his life is that he be an elemental, and the capacity for
great simple impressions is the spring of his power. Let him beware of
losing that.
I sometimes wonder as I come across the last frivolous gossip concerning
that poet in the paragraphs of the new journalism, or meet his name in
some distinguished bead-roll in _The Morning Post_, whether Narcissus
was not, after all, mistaken about him, and whether he could still,
season after season, go through the same stale round of reception,
private view, first night, and all the various drill of fashion and
folly, if that boy's heart were alive still. One must believe it once
throbbed in him: we have his poems for that, and a poem cannot lie; but
it is hard to think that it could still keep on its young beating
beneath such a choking pressure of convention, and in an air so 'sunken
from the healthy breath of morn.
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