)
"You think that's only my Cockney view?"
"I think it isn't Nature. It's your own idea."
"It isn't even my own idea; I bagged it from Coleridge. P'raps you'll
say he muddled himself with opium till he couldn't tell which was
Nature and which was Coleridge; but there was old Wordsworth, as sober
as a churchwarden, and he knew. What you call my Cockney view is the
view of the modern poets. They don't--they can't distinguish between
Nature and the human soul. Talk of getting near to Nature--we wouldn't
know Nature if we saw it now. Those everlasting poets have got so near
it that they've blocked the view for themselves and everybody else."
"Really, you talk as if they were a set of trippers."
"So they are! Wordsworth was nothing but a tripper, a glorified
tripper. Nature never looked the same since he ran his Excursion-train
through the Lake country--special service to Tintern and Yarrow."
"This is slightly profane."
"No--it only means that if you want Nature you musn't go to the poets
of Nature. They've humanized it. I wouldn't mind that, if they hadn't
womanized it, too."
"That only means that they loved it," she said softly.
"It means that they've demoralized it; and that now it demoralizes us.
Nature is the supreme sentimentalist. It's all their fault. They've
been flinging themselves on the bosom of Mother Earth, and sitting and
writing Stanzas in Dejection on it, and lying down like a tired child
on it, and weeping away their lives of care, that they have borne and
yet must bear on it, till they've saturated it with their beastly
pathos.
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