THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

264 The Harmony of Virtueplaced; the imagination of the man is centred in himself, and therealm and people whose destinies are in his hands, seem to himto be created only to minister to his ingenious or soaring fanciesand his dramatic, epic or idealistic sense of what should be; hisintellect lives in a poetic world of its own and thinks in tropesand figures instead of grappling with the concrete facts of theworld; hence he is unfitted for action and once absolute poweris out of his hands, once he is no longer able to arrange menand events to his liking as if he were a dramatist manoeuvringthe creatures of his brain but is called upon to measure his willand ability against others, he fails and his failure leads to tragicissues; for he persists in attempting to weave his own imaginationsinto life; he will not see facts; he will not recognize theinexorable logic of events. Hence, though not necessarily a coward,though often a man of real courage and even ability, he playsthe part of an incompetent or a weakling or both. Moreover, hetends to become a tyrant, to lose moral perspective and often allsense of proportion and sanity; for he regards himself as the centreof a great drama, and to all who will not play the part he assignsthem or satisfy his emotional needs and impulses, to all who getin the way of his imaginative egotism he becomes savage andcruel; his rage when a word of this life-drama is mispronouncedor a part ill-studied or a conception not complied with is a magnifiedreflection of the vexation felt by a dramatist at a similarcontretemps in the performance of his darling piece; and unfortunatelyunlike the playwright he has the power to vent his indignationon the luckless offenders in a fashion only too effective.The last end of the poet-king is almost always tragic, themad-house, the prison, suicide, exile or the dagger of the assassin.It must be admitted that this dramatic picture largely reflectsthe facts of history. We know some instances of poet-kings inhistory, Nero and Ludwig of Bavaria were extreme instances;but we have a far more interesting because typical series in thehistory of the British Isles. The Stuarts were a race of born poetswhom the irony of their fate insisted upon placing one afterthe other upon a throne, with the single exception of CharlesII (James VI was a pedant, which for practical purposes is asbad as a poet) they were all men of an imaginative temper,