Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 420, October 1850

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!

'Trojanas ut opes et lamentabile regnum

Eruerint Danai!'

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

Every soul conscious of power is in danger of estimating the power too highly; but I do not know why the Poet should be so more than another man. Then, what is "overweening?" Is it overvaluing himself relatively to other men? Is it over-measuring 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 exceedingly disagreeable companion, rather than to any sublime error in the calculations of genius. And I come back upon the small sinner in rhyme, who has been cockered by his friends and cuddled by himself into conceit, till he thinks the world not good enough for him – takes no trouble to satisfy Its reasonable expectations, and finds that It will take none to satisfy his unreasonable ones —there is a source of "numberless misfortunes" – a seedy surtout, a faded vest, and very threadbare inexpressibles.

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 humour – 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!

NORTH

Yet the Poet is in danger of indolence. For in his younger years joy comes to him unpurchased. To do, takes him out of his dream. To do nothing, is to live in an enchanted world; and with all tenderness be it said, he hath, too, his specific temptation to overmuch self-esteem. Because his specific 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 ignobler 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 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 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!

SEWARD

Alas! it is true.

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 well-endowed that way, and that it is the opposite class of minds – those that cultivate abstract science – that have, or seem to have, least of it.

SEWARD

The poetic mind, from its sensibility, is peculiarly ready to sympathise with the general mind, and it is that sympathy that produces common sense. Common 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 besides for its object. The common sense of a Poet in his own case may be disturbed by his sensibilities, which are greater than common; while yet, in all other cases, it may be truer than the magnet.

BULLER

Good.

TALBOYS

I will trouble you, if you please, for an Obs.

BULLER

I have long desired a definition of Common Sense. It seems to me rather a commonplace thing. I suppose it is called Common Sense, as being common to men, so that you may expect it in 9 out of 10, or 99 out of 100.