“There’s a horrible unconsciousness about it,” he went on, pursuing as usual his own fancy.  “If you could get bare nature without spirit, it would look like that.”

“It doesn’t look quite real,” she admitted. (After that, there must be no more concessions.  They must separate.)

“It hasn’t any reality but what we give it.”

“Hasn’t it?”

(A statement so sweeping challenged contradiction.)

“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.  There isn’t a dry comfortable place left for anybody else.”

“Perhaps that’s just the way Nature inspires poets, by giving out the humanity it absorbs.”

“Perhaps.  I can’t say it inspires me.”

“Are you a poet?” she asked.  She was beginning to think it must be a case of mistaken identity; for this was not what she had expected of him.

He did not answer at first, neither did he look at her.  He looked at the beautiful face of Nature (the sentimentalist), and a wave of hot colour rushed again over his own.

“I don’t know whether I am or not.”

“Let us hope not, since you want to make a clean sweep of them.”

“I’d make a clean sweep of myself if I stood in my own light.  Anything for a good view.  But I’m afraid it’s too late.”  His tone dropped from the extreme of levity to an almost tragic earnest.  “We’ve done our work, and it can’t be undone.  We’ve given Nature a human voice, and now we shall never—­never hear anything else.”