SEWARD.
These were not my very words, sir —
NORTH.
Ay, Seward, you say well. From how many indeed! First among the prime, that peculiar aptitude and faculty, which may be called – a Taste and Genius for – Words.
BULLER.
I rather failed there in the Schools.
NORTH.
Yet you were in the First Class. There is implied in it, Seward, a readiness of logical discrimination in the Understanding, which apprehends the propriety of Words.
BULLER.
I got up my Logic passably and a little more.
NORTH.
For, Seward, the Thoughts, the Notions themselves – must be distinctly dissevered in the mind, which shall exactly apply to each Thought – Notion – its appropriate sign, its own Word.
BULLER.
You might as well have said "Buller" – for I beat Seward in my Logic.
NORTH.
But even to this task, Seward, of rightly distinguishing the meaning of Words, more than a mere precision of thinking – more than a clearness and strictness of the intellectual action is requisite.
BULLER.
And in Classics we were equal.
NORTH.
You will be convinced of this, Buller, if you recollect what Words express. The mind itself. For all its affections and sensibilities, Talboys, furnish a whole host of meanings, which must have names in Language. For mankind do not rest from enriching and refining their languages, until they have made them capable of giving the representation of their whole Spirit.
TALBOYS.
The pupil of language, therefore, sir – pardon my presumption – before he can recognise the appropriation of the Sign, must recognise the Thing signified?
NORTH.
And if the Thing signified, Talboys, by the Word, be some profound, solemn, and moral affection – or if it be some wild, fanciful impression – or if it be some delicate shade or tinge of a tender sensibility – can anything be more evident than that the Scholar must have experienced in himself the solemn, or the wild, or the tenderly delicate feeling before he is in the condition of affixing the right and true sense to the Word that expresses it?
TALBOYS.
I should think so, sir.
SEWARD.
The Words of Man paint the spirit of Man. The Words of a People depicture the Spirit of a People.
NORTH.
Well said, Seward. And, therefore, the Understanding that is to possess the Words of a language, in the Spirit in which they were or are spoken and written, must, by self-experience and sympathy, be able to converse, and have conversed, with the Spirit of the People, now and of old.
BULLER.
And yet what coarse fellows hold up their dunderheads as Scholars, forsooth, in these our days!
NORTH.
Hence it is an impossibility that a low and hard moral nature should furnish a high and fine Scholar. The intellectual endowments must be supported and made available by the concurrence of the sensitive nature – of the moral and the imaginative sensibilities.
BULLER.
What moral and imaginative sensibilities have they – the blear-eyed – the purblind – the pompous and the pedantic! But we have some true scholars – for example —
NORTH.
No names, Buller. Yes, Seward, the knowledge of Words is the Gate of Scholarship. Therefore I lay down upon the threshold of the Scholar's Studies this first condition of his high and worthy success, that he will not pluck the loftiest palm by means of acute, quick, clear, penetrating, sagacious, intellectual faculties alone – let him not hope it: that he requires to the highest renown also a capacious, profound, and tender soul.
SEWARD.
Ay, sir, and I say so in all humility, this at the gateway, and upon the threshold. How much more when he reads.
NORTH.
Ay, Seward, you laid the emphasis well there – reads.
SEWARD.
When the written Volumes of Mind from different and distant ages of the world, from its different and distant climates, are successively unrolled before his insatiable sight and his insatiable soul!
BULLER.
Take all things in moderation.
NORTH.
No – not the sacred hunger and thirst of the soul.
BULLER.
Greed – give – give.
NORTH.
From what unknown recesses, from what unlocked fountains in the depth of his own being, shall he bring into the light of day the thoughts by means of which he shall understand Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Demosthenes, Plato, Aristotle – DISCOURSING! Shall understand them, as the younger did the elder – the contemporaries did the contemporaries – as each sublime spirit understood – himself?
BULLER.
Did each sublime spirit always understand himself?
TALBOYS.
Urge that, Mr Buller.
NORTH.
So – and so only – to read, is to be a Scholar.
BULLER.
Then I am none.
NORTH.
I did not say you were.
BULLER.
Thank you. What do you think of that, Mr Talboys? Address Seward, sir.
NORTH.
I address you all three. Is the student smitten with the sacred love of Song? Is he sensible to the profound allurement of philosophic truth? Does he yearn to acquaint himself with the fates and fortunes of his kind? All these several desires are so many several inducements of learned study.
BULLER.
I understand that.
TALBOYS.
Ditto.
NORTH.
And another inducement to such study is – an ear sensible to the Beauty of the Music of Words – and the metaphysical faculty of unravelling the causal process which the human mind followed in imparting to a Word, originally the sign of one Thought only, the power to signify a cognate second Thought, which shall displace the first possessor and exponent, usurp the throne, and rule for ever over an extended empire in the minds, or the hearts, or the souls of men.
BULLER.
Let him have his swing, Mr Talboys.
TALBOYS.
He has it in that chair.
NORTH.
A Taste and a Genius for Words! An ear for the beautiful music of Words! A happy justness in the perception of their strict proprieties! A fine skill in apprehending the secret relations of Thought with Thought – relations along which the mind moves with creative power, to find out for its own use, and for the use of all minds to come, some hitherto uncreated expression of an idea – an image – a sentiment – a passion! These dispositions, and these faculties of the Scholar in another Mind falling in with other faculties of genius, produce a student of a different name – The Poet.
BULLER.
Oh! my dear dear sir, of Poetry we surely had enough – I don't say more than enough – a few days ago, sir.
NORTH.
Who is the Poet?
BULLER.
I