He certainly resembled his father, who, by the way, wore out two women
without any satisfaction to himself, because they did not come up to his
supra-refined standard of the delicacy which is so perceptible in his
verses. That's your poet. He demands too much from others. The
inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself with that need for
embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion, the impulses the poet
puts into arrangements of verses, which are dearer to him than his own
self--and may make his own self appear sublime in the eyes of other
people, and even in his own eyes.
Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes? I should not like to
make that charge; though indeed there are other, less noble, ambitions at
which the world does not dare to smile. But I don't think so; I do not
even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence
in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so
often into impossible or equivocal situations. Looked at abstractedly
(the way in which truth is often seen in its real shape) his life had
been a life of solitude and silence--and desire.
Chance had thrown that girl in his way; and if we may smile at his
violent conquest of Flora de Barral we must admit also that this eager
appropriation was truly the act of a man of solitude and desire; a man
also, who, unless a complete imbecile, must have been a man of long and
ardent reveries wherein the faculty of sincere passion matures slowly in
the unexplored recesses of the heart. And I know also that a passion,
dominating or tyrannical, invading the whole man and subjugating all his
faculties to its own unique end, may conduct him whom it spurs and
drives, into all sorts of adventures, to the brink of unfathomable
dangers, to the limits of folly, and madness, and death.
To the man then of a silence made only more impressive by the
inarticulate thunders and mutters of the great seas, an utter stranger to
the clatter of tongues, there comes the muscular little Fyne, the most
marked representative of that mankind whose voice is so strange to him,
the husband of his sister, a personality standing out from the misty and
remote multitude. He comes and throws at him more talk than he had ever
heard boomed out in an hour, and certainly touching the deepest things
Anthony had ever discovered in himself, and flings words like "unfair"
whose very sound is abhorrent to him. Unfair! Undue advantage! He!
Unfair to that girl? Cruel to her!