Has Nature feared, therefore, to use it? She builds the world with it. And look how she proceeds. To these two—the Lovers as they are called—the Universe is in these two—to each in the other. The rest of the Universe is shut out from their view, or more wonderfully comprehended in their view—seen to each through and relatively to the other—seen transformed in the magical mirror of their love. Can you expect anything less than that they should go by different doors, or by the same door, into Bedlam? Lo! they have become a Father and a Mother! They have returned into the real world—into a world yet dearer than Dreamland! The world in which their children shall grow up into men and women. Sedate, vigilant, circumspect, sedulous, industrious, wise, just—Pater-familias and Mater-familias. So Nature lets down from an Unreal which she has chosen, and knows how to use.
NORTH.
The ground of the Poet, my dear Talboys, is an extraordinary dotation of sensibility—of course, ten thousand dangers. Life is exuberant in him—and if the world lies at all wide about him, the joy of the great and the beautiful. The dearest of all interests to every rational soul is her own coming destiny. The Poet, quick and keen above all men in self-reference, must, among his contemplations and creations, be full of contemplating and creating his own future, and must pour over it all his power of joy, rosy and golden hopes. And that vision, framed with all his power of the Ideal, must needs be something exceedingly different from that which this bare, and blank, and hard earth of reality has to bestow. What follows? A severe, and perhaps an unprepared trial. The self-protection demanded of him is a morally-guarded heart and life. The protection provided for him is—his Art. The visions—the Ideal—the Great and the Fair, which he cannot incorporate in his own straitened existence—the ambitions, at large, of his imagination he localises—colonises—imparadises—in his works. He has two lives; the life of his daily steps upon the hard and bare, or the green, and elastic, and sweet-smelling earth, and the life of his books, papers, and poetical, studious reveries—art-intending, intellectual ecstasies.
BULLER.
What say you, sir, to the charge of "overweening self-conceit and indolence?"
NORTH.
What say you, my Buller?
BULLER.
That I do not quite understand the proposition. Is it, that generally the "sanguine" temperament is apt to make these accompaniments for itself? Or that in the Poet the three elements are often found together? If the former, I see no truth in it. The sanguine temper should naturally inspire activity—and I do not quite know what is here an "overweening conceit." That a sanguine-minded man is apt to have great self-reliance in any project he has in hand—a confidence in his own present views that is not a little refractory to good argument of cooler observers, I understand. But that sort of self-conceit which makes of a man an intellectual fop—gazing in the pocket looking-glass of self-conceit at his own perfections—vain self-contemplation and self-adulation—the sanguine temper is far more likely to carry a man out of himself, to occupy his time, his pleasure, and his passion in works, and withdraw them from himself. I suppose, therefore, that we must look to the Poet alone. I daresay that small poets have a great conceit of themselves. They have a talent that is flattered and admired far beyond its worth. They readily fancy themselves members of the Immortal Family. But a true Poet has a thousand sources of humility. Does he not reverence all greatness, moral and intellectual? Does he not reverence, above all, the mighty masters of song? He understands their greatness—he can measure distances—which your small Poet cannot.
NORTH.