TALBOYS. The poet has glorious apprehensions of human existence-visions of men -visions of men's actions-visions of men's destinies. He pitches his theory of the human world above reality-and that he shall, in due season or before it, learn to his great loss and to his great gain. In the meanwhile do not speak of the temper in him, as you would upbraid him with it. Do not lay to his charge the splendor of his powers and aspirations. Do not chide and rate him for his virtues. must be set right. "Conceptions of human. Conceptions of human | tor sowed there; and they may, if they dare life" are here meant to apply to expectations to believe in it, and know to call to it, bring of the honesty, gratitude, virtue of the persons it out with a burst. But belief is the main in general with whom you or I shall come ini ngredient of the spell, and hope is the mocontact in life. Good. The contemplation ther of belief. of human beings-men and women-ideally drawn by the Poet, lifts me too high-tinges hope in me with enthusiasm, and prepares disappointment. So it has been often said, and said truly. This is conception prospective and personal; and more philosophically termed Expectation. But then "conception of human life"-from the lip of a philosopher, should mean rather "intelligence of man's life." Now I repeat that only through the Poet have you true intelligence of man's life-either external or internal. In the Actual the Poet sees the Idea-just as a Painter does in respect of the visible man. In the man set before him He sees two men-the man that is, and the man of whom at his nativity was given the possibility to be. He reads cause and effect; and sees what has hindered the possible from being. Who, excepting the Poet, does this? And excepting this, what intelligence of man is an intelligence? SEWARD. There are two World-wisdoms. One, to know men, as for the most part they will show themselves, commonly called knowledge of the world; one, to know them as God made them. I forget what it is called. Possibly it has no name. NORTH. Observe, my dear Seward, the precise error of that expectation. It is to believe the good more prevalent than it is. It is no misunderstanding as to the constitution of the good. The good is; and the important point of all is to know it, when you meet it. To be cheated, by not apprehending the ill of a man, is a wound to your purse, and when you at last apprehend, to your heart. To be cheated by not apprehending the good of man is-death, which you bear in yourself, and know it not. SEWARD. What is desired? Is it that we should go into the world with hope not a whit wider and higher than the dimensions of the reality that we are to encounter? I trow not. NORTH. Your hope will elect your own destiny-will shape it will be it. There are possibilities given of the nobler happiness, as well as of the nobler services; and your hope, faithful to itself, will reach and grasp them. And only to such hope are they given. Moreover, in all men there is under the mask of evil which the world has shaped on them the power inextinct which the Crea SEWARD. "False conceptions!" a term essentially of depreciation and reproach. They are not false, they are true. For they are faithful to the vocation that lies upon the human beings; but they, the human beings, are false, and their lives are false; falling short of those true conceptions. NORTH. Well. He-the poet-comes to the encounter. It is the trial set for him by his stars as it is the trial set for all great spirits. He finds those who disappoint him, and those who do not. But, grant the disappointment, rather. What shall he do? That which all great spirits do-transfer the grandeur of his hopes, over which fate, fortune, and the winds of heaven ruled, to his own purposes of which he is master. TALBOYS. Why did not Mr. Stewart say simply that the Poet-and the young enthusiast of Poetry-thinks better of his fellows than they deserve, and brings a faith to them which they will take good care to disappoint? Why harp thus on the jarring string; torturing our ears, and putting our souls out of tune? NORTH. Who doubts-who does not know, and admire, and love Hope-in the ardent generous spirit-looking out from within the Eden of Youth into the world into which it shall, alas! fall? What is asked? That the spring-flowering of youth shall be prematurely blighted and blasted by winds frosty or fiery, which the set fruit may bear? Of course we hope beyond the reality, and it is God's gift that we do. TALBOYS. And why lay that imagination. which looks into Life with unmeasured ideas to the charge of the Poet alone? Herein every man is a Poet, more or less; and, most, every spirit of power-the hero, the saint, the minister of religion, the very Philosopher. Would we ask, sir, for a new law of nature? Upon the elements, fewer or more, which an | anticipated experience gathers, a spirit impelled by the yearnings inseparable from selfconscious power, and mighty to create, works unchecked and unruled. What shall it do but build glorious illusions? NORTH. "The culture of Imagination," understanding thereby, first, in the Great Poets themselves, the intercourse of their own minds with facts which imagination vivifies, and with ideas which it creates-of humanity; and secondly, in all others, as poets to be or not to be, the reading of the Great Poets, Mr. Stewart says-" does not diminish our interest in human life." Does not diminish! Quite the reverse. It extraordinarily deepens and heightens, increases and ennobles. For who are the painters, the authentic delineators and revealers of human life, outer and inner BULLER. Why, the Poets-the Poets to be sure the Poets beyond all doubt— NORTH. "Extremely apt to inspire the mind with false conceptions of it"-and so on. Why, the Faculty is there with a mission. It is its bounden office-its embassy from heaven-to exalt us above our earthly experience to lift us into the ideal possibility of things. Thereby it is an "Angel of Life," the white-winged good genius. The too sanguine hope is an adhering consequence, and the quelling of the hope is one of the penalties which we pay for Adam and Eve's coming through that Eastern Gate into this Lower World. TALBOYS. Of course, my dear sir, every power has its dangers-the greater, the profounder, the more penetrating and vital the power, the greater the danger. But is this the way that a Philosopher begins to treat of a power, with hesitation and distrust-inauspiciously auspicating his inquiry? The common, the better, the true order of treatment is by Use and Abuse-Use first. "Expectations above the level of our present existence!" Of course-that when the heaven on earth fails, we may have learnt " to expect above the level of our present existence," and go on doing so more and more, till Earth shall fade and Heaven open. SEWARD. "Frequently produces a youth of enthusiastic hope!" Is this proposed as a perversion and calamity, a " youth" to be deprecated? NORTH. I really don't know-it looks almost like it. SEWARD. Will you say Wo and Alas! for the City--Wo and Alas! for the Nation-in which princes, and nobles, and the gentle of blood--and the merchants, and the husbandmen, and the peasants, and the artisans, suffer under this endemic and feverous malady--a "youth of enthusiastic hope?" Methinks, sir, you would expect there to find an overflow of Pericles's, and Pindars, and Phidias's, and Shakespeares, and Chathams, and Wolfes BULLER. Stop, Seward-spare us the Catalogue. SEWARD. You would say-here is the People that is to lead the world in Arms and in Arts. Only let us use all our endeavors to see that the community produces reason enough in balance of the enthusiasm. BULLER. Let us procure Aristotles, and Socrates's, and Newtons, and TALBOYS. Why should a Philosopher do or say relatively to any particular power? He expounds an Economy of Nature. Therefore, he says, let us look how Nature deals with such or such a power. She gives it for such and such uses; and such is its fostering and such are its phenomena. But as every power unbalanced carries the subject in which it inheres ex orbite, let us look how nature provides to balance this power which we consider. NORTH. That, my dear Talboys, is a magnanimous and capacious way of inquiry. But how can any man write about a power who has not a full sympathy with it? I have no doubt that Davy when he wielded Galvanism to make wonderful and beautiful revelations of veiled things, deeply and largely sympathized with Galvanism. You would think it easier to smpathize with Imagination, and yet to Stewart it seems almost more difficult. Go on. TALBOYS. How has Nature dealt with her mighty and perilous power-Love. Look at it, where it is raised to its despotism— when a man loves a woman, and that woman that man. It is a power to unhinge a world. Lo! in proof" an old song"-the Iliad! "Trojanus ut opes et lamentabile regnum 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! | intellectual fop-gazing in the pocket lookingglass of self-conceit at his own perfectionsvain 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 dare say 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. 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 localizes-colonizes imparadizes-in his works. He has two lives; the life of his daily steps upon the hard and bare, or the green, and elastic, and sweetsmelling earth, and the life of his books, papers, and poetical, studious reveries-art-ceedingly disagreeable companion, rather intending, intellectual extacies. 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 to 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 handa 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 NORTH. Every soul conscious of power is in danger of estimating the power too highly; but I do not know why the Poet should be more so than another man. Then what is "overweening?" Is it overvaluing himself relatively to other men? Is it overmeasuring his power of achievement-whence disproportionate undertakings, that fail in their accomplishment? I can more easily suppose that all the Sons of Genius "overween" in this direction. They must needs shape enterprises of unattainable magnificence. But some one has said rightly that in attempting the Impossible we accomplish the Possible. But this is a higher and truer and more generous meaning, I fancy, than is intended by the choice of that slighting and scoffing dispraise of "overweening"-a word pointing to a social, or moral, defect that makes an ex than to any sublime error in the calculations TALBOYS. And why should those who are sanguine in hope be "too frequently indolent?" A hopeful temper engender indolence! A desponding temper engenders it; a hopeful one is the very spur of activity. The sanguine spirit of hope, taking possession of an active intellect, engenders the Projector -of all human beings the most restless and indefatigable-his undaunted and unconquerable trust in futurity creates for itself incessantly new shapes of exertion-till the curtain falls. SEWARD. There is, I suppose, a species of Castle-builder who hopes and does nothing; as if he believed that futurity had the special charge of bringing into existence the children of his wish. But his temper is not properly called sanguine-it is dreamy. Neither is his indolence a consequence of his dreams; but as much or more his dreams of his indolence. He sits and dreams. Say that nature has given to some one, as she will from time to time, an active fancy and an indolent humor-a disproportion in one faculty. 'Tis a misfortune and a reason why his friends should seek out, if possible, the means of stirring him into activity; but it has nothing to do with describing the Idea of the Poetical Character. TALBOYS. The Great Poets have not been indolent. They have been working men. The genius of the Poet calls him to his work. Shakspeare was a man of business. Spenser was a state-secretary BULLER. Read Milton's life. TALBOYS. See Cowper drowned in an invincible melancholy, and deliberately choosing a long-lasting and severe task of his Art, as a means of relieving, from hour to hour, the pressure of his intolerable burthen. If he had drooped under his hopeless disease into motionless stupor, you could not have wondered, much less could you have blamed. He fought, pen in hand, year after year, against the still-repelled and ultimately victorious enemy. BULLER. Think of Southey! upon and admiration of their own intellectual powers, while we rightly condemn it, we should remember that the Poet is gifted, and, in comparison with the most of those with whom he lives, is in certain directions far abler; and more delicate apprehensions he probably has than most or all of them-at least of such apprehensions as come under the Pleasures of Imagination. And when he begins to call auditors to his Harp-then, well-a-day!-then he lives and feeds upon the breath of praise—and upon the glow of sympathy--a flower that opens to the caress of zephyrs and sunbeams, and without them pines. Then comes envy and spiritual covetousness. Others obtain the praise and the sympathy-others who merit them less, or not at all. What a temptation to disparage all others--alive! And to the Poet, essentially plunged in the individualities of his own being, how easy! For each of his rivals has a different individuality from his own; and how easy to construe points of difference into points of inferiority! Easy to him whom pain wrings more than it does others—to whom disagreeable things are more disagreeable TALBOYS. Have done, sir, I beseech you, have done-talk not so of the Brotherhood. NORTH. I am thinking of some of the most majestic! 66 SEWARD. Alas! it is true. Com NORTH. Mr. Stewart more than insinuates, with a wavering and equivocating uncertainty of assertion he signifies, that the POET, or poetic mind, is not much endowed with common sense." Talboys, what say you! TALBOYS. I rather think it unusually wellendowed that way, and that it is the opposite NORTH. Yet the Poet is in danger of in-class of minds-those that cultivate abstract dolence. For in his younger years joy comes science that have, or seem to have, least unpurchased. To do, takes him out of his of it. dream. To do nothing, is to live in an en- SEWARD. The poetic mind, from its senchanted world; and with all tenderness be sibility, is peculiarly ready to sympathize it said, he hath, too, his specific temptation with the general mind, and it is that symto overmuch self-esteem. Because his speci-pathy that produces common sense. fic faculty and habit are to refer every thing that befalls constantly to himself as a contemplative spirit. Herein is the most luminous intuition alone. The perversion is to be quick and keen in referring to the ignoble Self-for as I or you said, and all men may know, the Poet assuredly has two souls. Personal estimation, personal prospects! A sensibility to injury, to fear, to harm, to misprision-a quick jealousy-suspicion-soreness! You do see them in Poets-and in Artists, who after their kind are Poets-for they are Men. As to excessive reflection mon sense is instinctive; and in its origin allied to that which, in the higher acts of the poet's mind, is called Inspiration. Therefore it is native to his mind. It is an inspiration of his mind as much as poetic imagination. BULLER. Has Seward said what you meant to say, Talboys? TALBOYS. He has why did not you? But observe, Buller, common sense is not solely employed upon a man's own conduct: it has all the world beside for its object. The common sense of a Poet in his own case may TALBOYS. Pretty good. BULLER. Common Life seems to be the school of it. It seems a practical faculty, or to respect practice. Obvious relations are its domain-obvious connections of cause and effect-means and end. A man of common sense effects a plain object quickly and cheaply, by ready and direct means. High reach of thought is distinguished from common sense on the same side, as downright folly is on the other. Yet the interest dealt with need not be, if they frequently are, low; only the relations obvious. Perhaps the phrase is oftener brought out by its violation than its maintenance. He who wants common sense employs means thwarting his end. I propose that Common Sense is a combination of common understanding and common experience. TALBOYS. I asked you, my dear Buller, for an Obs-one single Obs-you have given us a dozen-a Series. Let us take them one by one, and dissect the BULLER. Be hanged if we do! I am afraid that my notion of Common Sense is but a low one. I think that a blacksmith may acquire common sense about shoeing of horses, and a housewife about her kitchen and laundry. Sound sense applicable to high matters is another matter-une toute autre chose. TALBOYS. Be done, dear Buller. BULLER. In a moment. Moreover, I can imagine a strong, clear, sound sense confined to a special higher employment-a lawyer who would manage the most difficult and hazardous cause with admirable discretion, and make a mere fool of himself in marrying. TALBOYS. Be done-be done. BULLER. In a moment. I am not able to affirm that a Poet of high and sound faculties must have the talent for conducting himself with prudence in the common affairs of life and really that is what seems to me to be Common Sense. TALBOYS. Be done now-you cannot better it. VOL. XXI. NO. IV. BULLER. About the Poet what can I say that everybody does not know and say in all the weekly newspapers! Why, gentlemen, the Mission of the Poet is to fight the fight of the Spirit against the flesh, and to extend the reign of the Beautiful. Also, he is the Prophet of yvwo deaurov; and the finest of wordmongers. The words that he touches turn all to gold. He is the subtlest of thinkers. Our best discipline of thinking has been from the Poets. Compare Shakspeare and Euclid. TALBOYS. From you! ish me. Buller, you aston BULLER. Astonishment is sometimes proof of a weak mind. NORTH. There seem to be two Common Senses. Goldsmith appears to be viewed as an eminent case of wanting it, in conduct the practical-for his own use. But the theoretical-for judging others-imaginary cases— -characterizes that immortal work, The Vicar of Wakefield: and the theoretical, for judging other men real, existing, and known, his Retaliation. The criticism of Burke, for instance, is an exalted Common Sense «Who, born for the Universe, narrowed his mind, And to Party gave up what was meant for Man kind." That is the larger grasp at common Sense rising into high Sense. "And thought of convincing while they thought of dining," in its homelier scope. SEWARD. Common Sense is the low part of complete Good Sense. Shakspe a and Phidias must use Good Sense in governing their whole composition; which Common Sense could not reach; and a man might have good sense in composing a group in. marble, yet want it in governing his family.. But Phidias executing a Venus with a blunt notched chisel, would want Common Sense.. NORTH. Wordsworth the Great and Good has said that "the privilege and the duty of Poetry is to describe things not as they are, but as they seem to the senses and the passions;" and when in so saying he claimed further for the works of Poetry law and constancy, he spake heroically and thence well,-up to the mark of the fearless and clear truth. But when he condescended to speak of "one quality that is always favorable to good poetry, namely, good sense," he said that, without note of reserve, which should have been guarded. Good sense, if you please, but such good sense as 32 |