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People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front." "So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that group are too unmanageable. If he were a Parnell! But he lacks just the qualities that matter the reticence, the power of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard self-concentration." Aldous raised his shoulders.
Such self-concentration and hugging of the facts has no power to improve them; it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and rather tends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions a mind that has lost faith in reason and that deliberately ignores the difference in scope and dignity which exists among various pursuits.
Doubtless they had been expecting something of the sort from the beginning. He seemed quite himself but for a marked self-concentration as he walked through the town. Dunwoodie, emerging from the Maverick bar, hailed him as he passed. He did not hear or he was not immediately conscious of hearing. But half a dozen steps farther on he checked himself. Some one had spoken to him. He turned around.
And in it, above it, around it for what are the dimensions of nothingness? there reigned the incomprehensible Unity of the Primal One, in calm and pitiless self-concentration, beyond the Real, nay even beyond the Conceivable for conception implies plurality the Supreme One of the Neo-Platonists to whose school she belonged.
A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose; which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon: he must have "self-concentration" selfishness perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.
He paused, looking backward and forward between the picture and me. "Which of them shall I kill first?" he said to himself. "The man who was my trusted friend? Or the woman whom I believed to be an angel on earth?" He stopped once more, in a state of fierce self-concentration, debating what he should do. "The woman," he decided. "Wretch! Fiend! Harlot! How I loved her!!!"
It is to this intense self-concentration that we must attribute the strange deficiency of humour which the poet shared with the Puritans generally, and which here and there breaks the sublimity of the poem with strange slips into the grotesque. But it is above all to this Puritan deficiency in human sympathy that we must attribute Milton's wonderful want of dramatic genius.
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its silence and self-concentration.
What shall I do if it fails? He could give heed to nothing but himself, all the world seemed blotted out, and he suffered the pain of excessive self-concentration. Rose, on the other hand, had lost sight of herself, and existed almost unconsciously in the soul of another being.
And so immortality, in a second ideal sense, touches the mind. The transitive phases of consciousness, however, have themselves a reference to eternal things. They yield a generous enthusiasm and love of good which is richer in consolation than either Epicurean self-concentration or mathematical ecstasy.
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