The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once
carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do
before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he
is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and
go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to
a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern),
receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre
of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the
feeling, as it were, from far off.
Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and
can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that
will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and
Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves
subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as
choosing to be so; and therefore admit certain expressions and modes
of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.
Now so long as we see that the _feeling_ is true, we pardon, or are
even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we
are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley's above quoted,
not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully
describe sorrow.
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