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No one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems.
The moralist, indeed, might have noted that a meaner kind of pride, the morbid fear of vulgarity, lent secret strength to the intellectual prejudice, which realised duty as the renunciation of all finite objects, the fastidious refusal to be or do any limited thing.
Naturally melancholy and thoughtful, feeding the sensibilities of his heart upon fiction, and though addicted to the cultivation of reason rather than fancy, having perhaps more of the deeper and acuter characteristics of the poet than those calm and half-callous properties of nature supposed to belong to the metaphysician and the calculating moralist, Mordaunt was above all men fondly addicted to solitude, and inclined to contemplations less useful than profound.
To think this tottering, old-woman-ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score!" But Mr. Wells intends something more than to explain the state of mind which led a distinguished politician and moralist, a married, middle-aged man, to victimise that is the "worldly" way of looking at it a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius.
However, for a moralist, I never set up, and never shall, while common sense abides with me. Such a man must be very wretched in this pure dearth of morality; like a fisherman where no fish be; and most of us have enough to do to attend to our own morals. Enough that I resolved to go; and as Lorna could not come with me, it was even worse than stopping.
And it is astonishing how penetrating is the knowledge that Seneca displays. His varied experience opened to him many avenues of observation closed to the majority. His very position, as at once a great statesman and a great moralist, naturally attracted men to him. And he used his opportunities with signal adroitness. But his ability was not the only reason of this peculiar insight.
We had known the terrible pathos of the story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless, freezing irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, and losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the mere observer, was a revelation that had come to that time of life in us when you think the tastes stiffen and one refuses new pleasures because they are new."
Every one knows the renovation of feeling often mistaken for a moral renewal when the worn dress of the day is exchanged for the fresh evening toilet. The expansiveness of prosperity has a like effect, though the moralist is always piping about the beneficent uses of adversity.
We oftentimes disputed: thy intention Was ever good; but thou were wont to play The moralist and preacher, and wouldst rail at me That I strove after things too high for me, Giving my faith to bold, unlawful dreams, And still extol to me the golden mean. Thy wisdom hath been proved a thriftless friend To thy own self.
It would have been a refreshing sight for a moralist to have witnessed this instance of man whose natural tendency is to try to look big thus voluntarily endeavouring to look as small as possible!
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