A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion, and the slave
Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light;
A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.
I am a man set to overhear
The inner harmony, the very tune
Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time: to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour
And make them known.
Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"—
A fearless, ruthless, wanton band,
Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe
Of last year's log a smouldering brand,
To light at Yule the fire of faith.
He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and is not uninclined to envy the old days
When Heaven and Hell were nigh.
It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says Ninian:—
Sometimes, when I forget myself, I talk
As though I were persuaded of the truth
Of some received or unreceived belief;
But always afterwards I am ashamed
At such lewd lapses into bigotry.
And though another immediately ejaculates
Intolerantly tolerant!