Hist. You ought to have been a teacher of heraldry to decayed noblemen's sons in a medieval university. I do not want to startle you when I say that the Renaissance came four hundred years ago and brought in the reign of positive knowledge. Since that time the very artists have given up symbolism except as a game. Listen to a contemporary critic upon Michel Angelo: "Darkness and imperfection are infinite, indeterminate, confused, unknown, and can never be understood; light and perfection are finite, determinate, distinct, easily known and seized upon by the intelligence of man." In your anxiety to avoid the clearness of the perfect you would plunge back into a morass of superstition and mysticism; you care for no picture but a hieroglyph, and value a bunch of spring flowers only as a lexicon whence you may compose your vague messages of sentimental inanity. Queen Anne, they say, is dead. Everything in due time, I have the happiness to inform you that she was born.
Poet. Your choice of queens betrays you. The eighteenth century is gone, and has taken its historians and encyclopaedists along with it. It has left a few poets—William Blake for one, who questioned not his corporeal eye any more than he would have questioned a window concerning a sight. He looked through it and not with it. It is this looking through the eye that constitutes metaphor. But it does not draw vagueness in its train. The same Blake remarks that only an idiot has a general knowledge, the knowledge of wise men is of particulars—and so perfectly definite.
Hist. It is late; and I must lose the ten tribes by next week. My publisher will not wait. The moonbeams are playing on your head—which statement I reach by inference, not by vision. Next time we meet let us talk about something we can agree upon.
Poet.
