Iv — Temperament
Temperament is a fate, oftentimes, from whose jurisdiction its victims hardly escape, but do its bidding herein, be it murder or martyrdom. Virtues and crimes are mixed in one’s cup of nativity, with the lesser or larger margin of choice. Unless of chaste extraction, his regeneration shall be wrought with difficulty through the struggling kingdom of evil into the peaceful realm of good. Blood is a destiny. One’s genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry, from fountains whence rose Adam the first and his Eve. The oldest and most persistent of forces, if once ennobled by virtue and refined by culture, it resists base mixtures long, preserving its purity and power for generations. All gifts descend in the torrent; all are mingled in the ecstasy, as purity or passion prevail; genius being the fruit of chaste conjunctions, brute force of adulterous—the virgin complexions or the mixed.M
“Our generation moulds our state,
Its virtues, vices, fix our fate;
Nor otherwise experience proves,
The unseen hands make all the moves,
If some are great, and some are small,
Some climb to good, some from good fortune fall,—
Not figures these of speech,—forefathers sway us all.
Me from the womb the midnight muse did take,
She clothed me, nourished, and mine head
With her own hands she fashioned;
She did a cov’nant with me make,
And circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake:
‘Thou of my church shalt be,
Hate and renounce (said she)
Wealth, honour, pleasure, all the world for me.
Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th’ exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar,
Content thyself with the small barren praise,
That neglected verse does raise.’
She spake, and all my years to come
Took their determined doom:
Their several ways of life, let others choose,
Their several pleasures let them use,
But I was born for love and for a muse.
With fate what boots it to contend?
Such I began, such am, and so shall end:
The star that did my being frame
Was but a lambent flame;
Some light indeed it did dispense,
But less of heat and influence.
No matter, poet, let proud fortune see
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee;
Why grieve thyself or blush to be
As all the inspired tuneful seers,
And all thy great forefathers were from Shakspeare to thy peers.”
Yet, biassed by temperament as we may be, whether for good or for evil, such measure of freedom is ours, nevertheless, as enables us to free ourselves from its tendencies and temptations. In the breast of each is a liberating angel, at whose touch, when we will it persistently, the doors of our dungeon fly open and loose their prisoner.
IV. The sanguine, being tempered of ether, and the least imprisoned, is cheerful, gentle, genial, versatile, naturally chaste, insinuating, searching into the secret of things natural and spiritual, and capable of divining the deepest mysteries. It loves the light, and aspires toward the sun. Its complexion is fair.”
IV
Metamorphoses
“Generation is not a creation of life, but a production of things to sense, and making them manifest. Neither is change death, but a hiding of that which was.”
—Hermes Trismegistus.
Metamorphoses
Notes
K “Spix, in his ‘Cephalogenesis,’ aids Oken’s theory of the spinal cranium in endowing the artist’s symbol of the cherub with all that it seemed to want before that discovery; namely: with a thorax, abdomen and pelvis, arms, legs, hands and feet.”—Owen.
L “Thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in a secret place, and there curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth: there thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect: and in thy Book were all my members written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them.”—Psalm cxxxix: 13, 15, 16.
M Boehme thus classifies and describes the temperaments:
“Lapsing out of her innocency, man’s soul enters into a strange inn or lodging, wherein he is held sometime captive as in a dungeon, wherein are four chambers or stories, in one of which she is fated to remain, though not without instincts of the upper wards (if her place be the lowest) and hope of finding the keys by which she may ascend into these also. These chambers are the elements of his constitution, and characterized as the four temperaments or complexions, namely:
I. The melancholic or earthy. II. The phlegmatic or aqueous. III. The choleric or fiery. IV. The sanguine or ethereal.
I. The splenetic or melancholic partakes of the properties of the earth, being cold, dark, and hungry for the light. It is timid, incredulous, empty, consuming itself in corrosive cares, anxieties and sorrows, being sad when the sun shines, and needs perpetual encouragement. Its color is dark.
II. The phlegmatic being nourished from the earth’s moisture, is inclined to heaviness; is gross, effeminate, dull of apprehension, careless, indifferent. It has but faint glimpses of the light, and needs much inculcation from without. Its color is brown.
III. The choleric is of the fiery temper, inclined to violence, wrath, obstinacy, irreverence, ambition. It is impulsive, contentious, aspires for power, and authority. It is greedy of the sun, and glories in its blazing beams. Its color is florid.