V IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?

SUMMARY

View of the World, or ‘World-view,’ defined. Distinction of religious and philosophical World-views. The present essay attempts to define and describe a poetic World-view.—I. Character of poetic experience. Types of belief about Man and Nature to which it predisposes. Though rarely detached from religious or philosophical presumptions, it habitually modifies them, and the method here proposed is to study, in some salient examples, the character and direction of these modifications (p. 150).—II. (i) Modifications of religious World-views by the poetic inspirations of Personality and Love. Homer. Æschylus. Dante (p. 156).—III. (ii) Modifications of philosophical World-views: (a) Materialistic schools. Epicureanism and Lucretius. Poets of Pessimism: Leopardi (p. 169).—IV. (b) ‘Objective idealisms.’ Stoic pantheism and Vergil. Wordsworth. Shelley. Philosophic doctrine of ‘Nature’ in Wordsworth, and in Goethe. Spinoza and Goethe (p. 184).—V. (c) ‘Subjective idealisms.’ ‘Mind’ in the philosophers and in the poets of the age of Wordsworth. The poets subordinate (1) the rational to the emotional and imaginative factors of soul: Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, and (2) moral categories to a good ‘beyond good and evil.’ Of this poetic ethic the most vital constituent is Love; and Love, comprehensively understood, will be an intrinsic element of every World-view won through poetic experience (p. 198).

V

IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?

‘VIEW of the World’ is a clumsy phrase for an idea which itself has for most of us an unattractive flavour of pedantry. This latter impression is hardly removed by a knowledge of the part which, under the neater and more expressive, term Weltanschauung, it has played in German literary study. Weltanschauung is the indispensable final chapter without which no German biography, the confidential disclosure without which no German friendship, is complete. A Weltanschauung or ‘World-view,’ in its full scope, comprehends ideas about life of quite distinct categories; it touches metaphysics and science, ethics and æsthetics; it offers an answer to Faust’s question ‘what it is that at bottom holds the world together,’ but also to the practical questions, what is the end of action and how we ought to act.

Historically, we know, the answers to these questions occur, in great part, as successive steps in continuous or closely-connected processes of thought. But between these continuous processes yawn gulfs which no argument can bridge. From Bacon through Hobbes to Locke we can trace something like a connected development. But between Hobbes and his contemporary Boehme there is a cleavage due not to bad reasoning on either side, but to a radical difference in the kind of experience from which the reasoning in the two cases set out. And the history of belief indicates that there are at least two types of elemental experience which thus generate ideas about the world, and to which two great classes of World-view in essence correspond. These may be distinguished as the religious and the philosophical. In the first, thought is dominated by the consciousness of a power or powers distinct from man, controlling his fate, protecting his country or his tribe, determining his moral code, his scheme of values, and his expectations after death. From the crudest fetishism and animism to the loftiest theism, a living relation to such a Power is the root fact from which the religious World-view takes its origin and derives its character.

On the other hand, we find a vast and complex body of conceptions of the world which do not originate in intercourse with a divine Power, or in the fear or hope which such a power may inspire, but in the effort to give a finally and universally valid account of experience.

Naturally, neither these nor any other type of World-view, if such there be, are mutually exclusive in substance and content. Religion may reach the conclusions of philosophy, and philosophy those of religion, each by a path strictly its own. Historically, the two attitudes to life have intimately interacted; and if the religious type has on the whole shown less power of resistance to the penetration of ideas of the opposed type, on the other hand modern philosophy, in particular, has often built upon, and not seldom with, ideas first begotten not by speculative curiosity, but by the rapture or the agony of God-intoxicated or demon-haunted souls. The eternal war of Ormuzd and Ahriman still echoes in the Hebraic intensity of our distinction between good and evil; and the visionary ecstasies of the mystics were of account in the evolution of philosophic pantheism. And, similarly, the edifices of theology have borrowed fortifying buttresses or indispensable pillars from ideas evolved by scientific reason or a purely secular interpretation of good. Aristotle, applied and interpreted by Aquinas, became one of the masters, not only of those who know, but of those who believe. Nevertheless, the two types have, on a comprehensive survey, stood distinctly apart; and their ramifications appear to dominate between them the entire field of belief and speculative thought.

Is it possible, nevertheless, to distinguish a third type of ‘World-view’ analogous to these? In other words, is there any third kind of experience, distinct from that of either religion or philosophy, yet involving an apprehension of reality comparable in originality, and possibly in importance, with theirs? The present essay is based upon the view that such an experience is given in and by poetry.[30]

I

For the specific experience which comes to a poet through poetry, however it may be interwoven with religious or philosophic ideas, has a radically different psychological origin and character. It is equally intense and absorbing, but it is not determined by conscious relation to an outer power, and it seeks to express rather than to explain. It is neither transfigured fear or hope, nor yet a logical process. In the making of a poem there may be even a conscious detachment from actuality, and the poet may float free in a dream world, apparently without thought of the world which he inhabits. The poetic may well be thought to differ from the religious or the philosophic types of experience less in inducing any specific way of contemplating reality than in liberating us from the necessity or desire to contemplate it at all.

Yet it is certain that the poet’s detachment, even in his most ethereal dream-flights, from reality, is only apparent. In all the spontaneous and seemingly arbitrary movement of his mind among its crowding ideal shapes, reality through his stored-up experience is at work, quietly weaving a thousand subtle filiations between the poem and the life of men at large. Othello is much farther from ‘actuality’ than the poor novel on which its story was based; but it is penetrated with the vision of life, of which Cinthio’s tale caught so feeble and fugitive a glimpse. What distinguishes poetic from religious or philosophic apprehension is not that it turns away from reality, but that it lies open to and in eager watch for reality at doors and windows which with them are barred or blind. The poet’s soul resides, so to speak, in his senses, in his emotions, in his imagination, as well as in his conscious intelligence; and we may provisionally describe poetic apprehension as an intense state of consciousness in which all these are vitally concerned. In so far as a particular outlook upon the world is founded upon a particular type of experience, a poet’s World-view will be radically affected by his senses, emotions, imagination. The flower which Wordsworth contemplated on the bank or by the lake, and that other which Tennyson with his more curious scrutiny plucked from the crannied wall, could stir these poets’ intellect and heart to the depths; and their apprehension, as poets, of God and man, of Nature, of Duty, would have been different without it.

But in any case, it will be said, even if we grant that poetic experience tends to induce some way of regarding reality, it cannot possibly induce any constant or definable way, if elements of mind so infinitely diverse, so individual, as emotion and imagination, are vitally concerned in the process. That energizing of mind released from the control of actuality, which we call imagination, that free following out of trains of suggestion called up by emotion, takes the colour, at every step, of the individual make of the poet’s nature, and the individual cast of his experience. In so far as a World-view is strictly poetic in origin, the conclusion might seem hard to resist that there may be as many poetic World-views as there are poets. And it is true that the individual quality of the poet will always cleave to whatever is strictly poetic in his thinking. But even so, it may be possible to determine typical directions in which poetic apprehension tends to engender or to sway belief, and to modify ideas imbibed in education or accepted on authority.

Thus, it may be provisionally laid down that a view of the World reached through poetic experience will tend to accentuate those aspects of Man and Nature, and those ways of regarding them, which offer most scope, analogy, or sanction, to this type of experience. Where the senses play a vital part, and are yet vitally implicated with passion and ideas, there will be little disposition to doctrines which either brand the senses as evil or illusory, or erect them into a sufficing faith. The logical intellect, its processes and conclusions, will receive a respectful but distant salute, while the irrational elements of life are accepted as its needful ingredients or even as a supreme source of its worth. Love, which tramples on reason, and, in the great words of à Kempis, warmly glows like a flame beyond all measure, may be called in some sense the natural religion of the poet. The mysterious love of man and woman, in particular, irrelevant to most of the problems of philosophy, and regarded by religion chiefly as a dangerous disturbing force, is one of the perennial springs of poetry, and one of the shaping analogies of poetic thought. And the same impassioned insight which gives significance to this love exalts also all those other energies of the soul which carry men out of and beyond themselves. Poetry is naturally heroic; it has presided over the cult of the hero, as religion and philosophy over those of the saint and the sage; it has rewarded him with enchanting secular Paradises, Elysian fields, Isles of the Blest, and Temples of Fame. Poetry is disposed to magnify human nature; the transition from Aeschylus, who painted men greater than they were, to Euripides, who drew them after life, is also a decline in the intrinsic temper of poetry, if in that alone. And because of its bent to think greatly of man, it makes for the assertion, in the great sense, of freedom—of man’s freedom to be himself. Neither the shibboleths of political freedom nor those of free thought have always, it is true, found response among poets. Their part has rather been to keep alive in mankind the temper which treats outward obstacles not as the soul’s constraints, but as its opportunities; the faith that iron bars do not make a cage, and that you may be bounded in a nutshell, and yet not only count yourself, but be, a king of infinite space.

In the interpretation of Nature, poetic experience works creatively or selectively on similar lines. To those wonderful deposits of the imagination of the past, the myths of extinct faiths, from which theology and philosophy have long withdrawn their sanction, or on which they have laid their taboo, the poets have habitually been very tender. And when they felt as poets, the image drawn from a myth has never had merely decorative value, or served merely as a ‘poetic synonym’ for the exact term. It expressed something in the poet’s vision not otherwise to be put into words. If the glorious anthropomorphism of Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life everywhere pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn in ‘Man and beast and earth and air and sea,’ cries to the poet with a voice which will not be put by; and the symbols by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they read personality too definitely into the play of that elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned formulas of science.

Hence many great philosophic ideas about the universe which, without ascribing life or mind to it, might seem projected from our inner, rather than gathered from our outer, experience, have powerfully appealed to poets. The antithesis of the One and the Many, which fascinated and fertilized every phase of Greek thought, had one of its roots in the acute Greek feeling for continuity through change, which is equally manifest in the Parthenon and in the Pindaric Ode, and to a less degree in all art and poetry wherever the sense of rhythm is present at all. ‘When we feel the poetic thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘is it not that we find sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear?’ That felicitously expresses the genius of Hellenic art in particular; but it also marks off the specifically poetic apprehension of Oneness as a ‘something deeply interfused’ in and through the living multiplicity of the world, alike from the mystic vision of a One whose splendour dissolves the reality of things, and from the vision of Peter Bell, for whom nothing but ‘things’ exists. Yet even this pregnant Oneness has commonly gathered, in the poetic conception of the universe, the higher and richer attribute of soul-life. It has become a living and working Nature vitally implicated in every organ and filament, or Mind diffused through every limb, or Love, or Beauty, or Power, woven through the woof of it, or the splendour of God irradiating it through and through.

When we turn, as is proposed in what follows, from these general considerations to watch the actual operation of poetic apprehension in concrete examples, we naturally encounter some serious difficulties. Poetic apprehension may be as distinct and definable as we will, but it can rarely be caught acting in vacuo. Poets are men; they are usually citizens; they are often penetrated with some form of religious or philosophical faith. It is inevitable, in such cases, that their strictly poetic experience should be coloured or even overridden by ideas proper to their possibly more habitual or more deeply established persuasions. In poets like Goethe and Shelley, deeply concerned with the issues of life outside poetry, philosophic and poetic impulses and data may well seem inextricably mingled. Even Blake and Whitman, who perhaps come nearer than any other moderns to shaping out a poetic World-view for themselves, evidently worked, as poets, under a deep bias of revolutionary dogma, which made them unjust to some aspects of poetry itself. And with poet-exponents of great theological or philosophical systems, like Lucretius or Dante, it may well appear idle to seek to catch the moment when the runnel of poetry carved out a watercourse of its own, instead of falling into and moving along with the great tide of Epicurean or Catholic thought. Yet we attach some meaning to our words when we distinguish periods in which the poetic element in a poet’s nature was more potent than at others. When we say, for instance, that in Shelley the poetic apprehension after 1812 worked itself progressively free from an alien philosophy; or that in Wordsworth, from about the same date, it became progressively overlaid by a theology almost equally alien; or that in Dante’s Convito, the poet of the Vita Nuova, who will finally recover dominance in the Commedia, has yielded much ground to the scholastic thinker. Distinctions so clearly felt and sharply drawn cannot be groundless. What is here proposed is to examine whether any typical character or direction can be discovered in the modifications which the data of religious or philosophical beliefs and ideals have undergone in certain commanding poet natures. In that case we might possess some of the material for answering the question I have been bold enough to suggest in the title of this paper.

II

I begin with examples in which these data are derived from religion; and, in the first place, from religion still untouched by philosophic reflection. Without rashly assuming the solution of unsolved or insoluble problems, one may venture to assert that the Homeric epics owe their present form neither to purely religious awe nor merely to conscious and deliberate artistry, but to a poetic apprehension of the world operating upon the data of the savage cults and rituals, the animism, totemism, and magic, which anthropology is gradually deciphering under the palimpsest of their obliterating splendour. With some aspects of the process we are not here concerned. If ‘Homer,’ as many modern scholars suppose, disliked human sacrifice and similar barbarities, and tempered or effaced the record of them, he reflects the growing efficacy of civilized, but not necessarily of poetic, ideas. It is otherwise with the transformation, whatever its precise nature and history, which put the defined character and rich personal accent of the Homeric Olympus in place of the psychological fluidity and incoherence of primitive religion. For the childhood of poetry the change possibly involved a loss. A world where there are no barriers, or none which magic cannot dissolve, where gods and men and beasts pass over into one another without resistance or demur, where everything can be done and had if the right formula be pronounced and the due charm applied—such a world is the home and habitat of the fairy tale; but its facile instability must be overcome before a mature poetry, no less certainly than before a mature science, can arise. The Homeric outlook upon the world had as a religion grave flaws, which merited the strictures of later moralists; but it had also, as a religion, magnificent qualities to which they rarely did justice. His deathless figures permanently raised the status of man and the ideals of human achievement; and every line of the poetry is instinct with an assurance of the glory of the world and the goodness of life, and the nobility of heroic emprise, and of reverence and of pity, which justly made his book the Bible of later Greece.

Yet it is plain that even Homer reflects or finds reflection in but a limited tract of the Greek mind; that there were many deeper, as well as darker, currents in the Greek way of apprehending the world, of which that radiant mirror shows no trace. Humanity had triumphed over the superhuman as well as over the subhuman, clarity over mystery as well as over confusion. The Ionian thinkers of the sixth century swept away the fables of Olympus, fastened on the problem of substance, and proclaimed the sublime discovery that the All is One. The Orphic cults and the Thracian orgies of Dionysus betrayed by the widespread and intimate hold which they won in Greek life, refined and humanized as they doubtless were, that religion in Greece too included the riot of intoxicated rapture as well as clear-eyed piety; the Bacchic frenzy, which carries men beyond themselves, as well as temperate self-reverence and self-control. Both these new elements enriched and uplifted, if at some points they also impoverished and degraded, Greek mentality and the Greek apprehension of the world, religious, philosophic, and poetic alike. The philosophic apprehension of unity reacted on religion, and the two strains coalesced in the sublime theism of Cleanthes’ hymn. The Dionysiac rapture reacted on philosophy—without it should we have had the great doctrine proclaimed in the Phædrus, of the divine vision won through madness and love? And both reacted upon poetry—above all on tragedy, with its stringent ideal of unity, maintained and manifested through all the phases and moods of conflict, and the alliance, disclosed in its very structure, of Apolline clarity and order with the lyric exaltation of Dionysus. But the matter of tragedy shows yet more evidently the larger and deeper World-view which poetry has now won. In passing from Homer to Aeschylus we enter an atmosphere in which the gods are hardly ever visible, but which is laden and tense with the sense of divine things. His persons, it was said, are more than human; certainly his gods are sometimes—like the Zeus of the Prometheus—less than divine. But the Aeschylean universe has outgrown Olympus without having dispossessed it. A soul of immense reach and depth, apprehending life from many sides, but always with a sense of vast issues and inexhaustible import, here interprets the old stories of man’s relations with the gods, and leaves us with a new vision of the possibilities and responsibility of man. His tragic conflicts call incommensurate forces into play, and their apparent solution leaves yet larger problems unsolved. The story of Prometheus ended with his reconciliation to Zeus; and this doubtless expressed the poet’s deliberate intention and design. The modern world has remembered Prometheus, not for his final surrender or appeasement, but as the assertor and embodiment of something in man which stands over against the gods he recognizes, and not only endures unflinchingly all that their utmost anger can inflict, but arraigns them himself before a law of Justice higher than their own. Æschylus, we know, was a devoutly religious man, and never dreamed of surrendering his reverence for the divine because of the crimes of the gods. Possibly, as Wilamowitz has suggested, he believed that divinity itself had passed through a youth ‘full of foolish noise’ to become with ripening years a righteous God and Father, worthy at length of universal reverence. Reverence for such an erring divinity is hardly distinguishable from forgiveness; in any case it foreshadows, if it does not announce, the clear recognition of human responsibility. And that recognition is already dominant in the mature work of Æschylus. The traditional superstitions which still entangled the Greek mind—the doctrine of an irresistible fate, or of a divine jealousy attending human greatness—dissolve under the scrutiny of his terrible insight. Man is free even in his crimes, and the greater because he is free. Clytaemnestra chooses and wills as freely as Lady Macbeth; she is as little the helpless victim of the curse of Atreus as the other of the Witches’ spell. It needed a great poet thus to embrace in his vision of life things incompatible to common sense. ‘Whether Æschylus is greater,’ declares the penetrating interpreter to whom I have referred, ‘when he uplifts our hearts by the full tones of surrender to the divine, or when he thrills us with the terrible acts and sufferings of human freewill, every one must decide for himself from his own experience; but let no one say that he understands the poet until he has known them both.’[31] The poet’s eye, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ overcomes the antinomies of theological dogma; and herein lies one of the most signal services which poetic apprehension has rendered to thought, and not least to religion.

To pass from Æschylus to Dante is to watch operations of poetic intelligence in which only the environment, the material, and the instruments of expression are profoundly changed. The words just quoted of the Greek might apply without the alteration of a syllable to the Florentine; and if ever poet saw earth and heaven at once it was he. But the theological World-view which he found was more authoritatively established, more intellectual in its philosophical substance, and more rich and beautiful in its human appeal. The fresh fountain of religious feeling, still abundantly flowing, was fortified and entrenched within a vast structure of elaborated dogma, for which councils and saints had supplied the architects and the masons, and ancient philosophy the stones. Within this imposing edifice, nevertheless, Dante, with complete conviction, found and made his home. No one now questions the absoluteness of Dante’s Catholic faith, and we should seek in vain for any rebellious upsurging of the poet in him against the starkest of scholastic abstractions. On the contrary, his wonderful gift of style continually finds the material for poetry in the most seemingly arid regions. Sometimes the result is merely an astonishing tour de force; but often we become aware that Dante has not only invented but discovered, and that many a dogma which has the air of being the mere husk of religion is in reality the imperfect, stammering utterance through which religious passion sought to make itself articulate. Dante, in short, makes us feel in these constructions of the intellect the language of the soul.

To do this needed something more than devout belief. It needed the imaginative intuition of a poet. The poetry of Dante was distinguished from that of his older contemporaries above all by being just this intense soul-vision put into words. ‘I simply write down what Love within dictates.’[32] Psychological veracity never fails him. Allegory, in so many hands a tissue of personified abstractions, becomes, in his, a living image of humanity. Symbolic meanings and applications interweave and encircle it, but the core is real. His vision is only on the surface a description—necessarily speculative—of the fortunes of souls after death; its substance, as he tells us, is ‘man of his freewill choosing good or evil here.’ The human denizens of his hell and purgatory and paradise have undergone no inner change; they are the men he had known, in their spiritual habits as they lived; and their fate, when Dante is thinking most as a poet and least as a theologian, is a continuation of their crucial actions. That Paolo and Francesca are immersed in unquenchable flames satisfies the theological idea of retribution; Dante inflicts on them the more searching penalty of being for ever locked in the embrace of their illicit love. And how often, when he thinks he is devoutly following out to the last consequence the Church’s dogma of eternal punishment, he is unconsciously testifying to the poet’s sublime faith in the soul of man as stronger than death and hell. ‘Who is he,’ asks Dante, looking upon Capaneo (Inf. xiv. 46), ‘who seems not to heed the flame, but lies fiercely unsubdued by the fiery vein?’ Or the yet greater picture of Farinata (Inf. x. 85), defiantly erect where the rest grovel in agony, ‘as if he held hell in great disdain.’ Even the criminals whom the poet most abhors, and thrusts into the very depths of the abyss, even the traitors guilty of the death of Cæsar or of Christ, he allows still to show greatness of soul; Brutus, champed to a bloody foam in the jaws of Lucifer, is still the Stoic philosopher, and though he writhes in agony, utters not a word (Inf. xxxiv. 66). And how wonderfully in the great Ulysses scene (Inf. xxvi) the poet takes the pen out of the hand of the theologian, and, forgetting the ‘fraud’ for which the captor of Troy is doing penance in hell, compels us to listen entranced to his tale of that last voyage, beyond the sunset, of the old wanderer, still insatiable of experience, who had kindled his shrinking comrades by bidding them ‘Consider of what seed ye are sprung; ye were not made to live like the brute beasts, but to follow after virtue and knowledge.’ Strange words to issue from the quenchless flames of hell! But Dante goes beyond this. For the sake of the heroism of Cato, he flatly violates the theological categories which condemned him to hell, and makes him the guardian of Purgatory.[33] As for the rest of the ‘virtuous heathen,’ he cannot indeed transfer them from the hell to which the Church has assigned them—a hell much more ferocious than any of which they had dreamed—to Elysium. But he does what he may, and he provides for them within the precincts of hell an Elysium of green lawns and running streams, ‘the one place in the Inferno where there is light and air’ (Inf. iii). The theological ethic of sin is thus unconsciously crossed, again and again, by the poetic ethic for which ‘good’ means greatness of soul.

Moreover, with a depth of spiritual insight strangely in contrast with the vulgar notion of punishment which dictated the theological hell, Dante has asserted, even in this realm of iron necessity, the freedom of man. The inmates of hell are not convicts condemned and punished for sins long since repented of: they are there of their own motion and by their own will; and if there is no hope there, it is not because God has no mercy, but because they cannot repent. The souls in Purgatory are held there by no compulsion; they desire nothing but to be purified of their sins, and the moment they desire to mount to Paradise, that moment they are free.

It would be strange, then, had Dante, with all his sense of supreme cosmic forces, not stood for the faith that man is yet the ‘captain of his soul.’ There he is at one with Æschylus and Milton, and the other great theological poets of the West. Man’s ‘freedom’ is a root idea of the Comedy; and not merely because its purpose was to show him ‘in the exercise of freewill,’ determining his fate hereafter. Dante went much farther than this. A devoted Catholic and citizen, and eager to welcome the authority both of Church and State, he was driven by the corruption of the one and the anarchy of the other to seek ‘another way’—the way of spiritual self-help with the aid of philosophy and theology, along which he is led by Vergil and Beatrice. The great farewell words with which Vergil leaves him in the Earthly Paradise, ‘I crown and mitre thee king and bishop over thyself,’ express with thrilling power the individualist—nay, the revolutionary—side of his thought. He would not have been the great poet he was if it had been the only side. Dante’s reverence for Vergil and for Beatrice is of the very substance of his self-assertion; he has crowned and mitred himself by taking them for his guides, and the result is the great poetic cosmos eloquent beyond all the other masterpieces of the world of devout discipleship, and yet instinct in every line with the ardour of a soul ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.’

But the name of Beatrice points to another aspect of Dante’s work on which the impress of the poet in him is yet more unmistakably set. Measured by the range and compass of thought, and by the richness and delicacy of feeling, which the term in his usage conveys, Dante is the first, as he is the greatest, of the poets of Love. His poetry recovers and renews, or at the least suggests and recalls, all the varieties of intellectual and emotional experience for which philosophy, religion, and romance had, before his time, found in ‘Love’ the final expression, or the speaking symbol. The cosmic love (φιλία) by which Empedocles had first interpreted the universal phenomena which we still, hardly less anthropomorphically, know as ‘attraction’; the passion for another human being (ἔρως) in which the author of the Phædrus and the Symposium discovered one of the sources of the divine exaltation which emancipates men from their human limits, and endows them with the vision of reality; the love of God for man, and of man for God (ἀγάπη), proclaimed as the very core of Christianity in the Fourth Gospel—these three types of love, all denoted for Dante by Amor, amore,[34] were conjoined in his experience with a fourth, distinct from all, though nearly allied to the second: the romantic love of woman which had been the chief inspiration of the poetry of Provence, and which, however sublimated and spiritualized, is enshrined in the Vita Nuova. To say that Dante’s mind, equally powerful in analysis and in synthesis, confounds these distinctions would be unjust; but it would be equally untrue to assert that their associations are never blended. Christian philosophy had itself absorbed the first; cosmic attraction then reappeared in a sublime apotheosis, as the love which draws all the universe towards God, and by which God, as its source, ‘moves the sun and the other stars.’ And if Dante, in his treatise on poetry,[35] distinguishes himself from the poets of ‘love’ as a poet of ‘morals,’ or ‘righteousness,’ he also, as we saw, ascribes his whole power as a poet to his writing what love dictated in his heart. Man in virtue of his freedom has power to misuse Love, and Dante everywhere scornfully contrasts the higher and the baser love. Nay, all sin which can be ‘purged away’ he regards as due to ‘love’ wrongly used; the whole population of Purgatory is there because it loved unwisely, or loved indifferent things too well, or right things too little. But the harm here, for Dante, arises not from love, but from the application to it of the evil material in man’s nature—‘as a foul impress may be set upon the most precious wax.’[36]

Something of the idealizing atmosphere which Christianity and Plato had thrown about love thus always colours it in Dante’s mind. But it is also subtly touched with that other idealizing force which not Christianity but the poets had recognized, which Christian ethics had contemptuously tolerated or scornfully tabooed. Dante had known the love of woman in many forms. Longing for the absent wife and child had consumed his flesh and his bones in exile;[37] and his virginal adoration of Beatrice sprang from no coldness of the blood. The power of womanhood to lift men to supreme heights of vision and fortitude, which he had divined through Beatrice and sung in the great canzone of the Vita Nuova,[38] no more passed out of his faith than did her image from his memory. Nor was it for nothing that his master Vergil had forgotten the political and imperial purpose of his poem in making Dido the most moving heroine of antiquity. If the Comedy is a great scheme of salvation, it is also a great song of womanhood such as, he said, no man ever sang before; and if we say that Beatrice is there a symbol for Theology, that is doubtless true: but a thousand phrases remind us how much she symbolizes besides; and the look ‘in the eyes of Beatrice,’ which draws Dante upward through the circling spheres of Paradise to the beatific vision, attests also his faith in the power of the lover’s adoration to lift a man out of his humanity (trasumanar), and make him ‘joyful even in the flames.’

Thus Dante, though he counted himself not among the poets of love, but among the poets of ‘righteousness,’ is one of the inspiring sources of the modern poetry which invests the love of man and woman with the ideal attributes which philosophy and religion had proclaimed in other forms of love, but had ignored or repudiated in this. In Spenser—Platonist, Christian, and lover at once—the fusion of the three strains is complete; his great hymns to Love, who

prelude his even greater hymn of marriage. Even Chaucer perhaps learnt from Dante that amazed awe with which, in the opening lines of one of his earliest Italianate poems, he contemplates the ‘wonderful working’ of love.[39] The Petrarchists and Sonneteers went far to reduce the expression of this love to hollow phrase-making. But with Romanticism it found fresh and original utterance, and its status in the world has never been more loftily affirmed than by Celtic Romanticizing poets of to-day. ‘I say that Eros is a being!’ declares one of the finest spirits among them. ‘It is more than a power of the soul, though it is that also. It has a universal life of its own.’[40]

III

The power of personality and the glory of love: these have emerged from our discussion thus far as the things in life whose appeal to poetic intelligence was most potent in modifying the substance or changing the perspective of a World-view derived from religion. We have now to examine, in a fashion unavoidably even more fragmentary and summary, the reaction of another series of poetic minds upon the more complex and abstruse World-views of philosophy.

It is necessary for the purpose to adopt a rough grouping of philosophic systems, and I take the following division into three fundamental types, based with qualifications upon one proposed by Wilhelm Dilthey in the essay already referred to.

To the first belong the naturalistic schools, from Democritus to Hobbes and the Encyclopedists, deriving their philosophical conceptions directly or indirectly from an analysis of the physical world, and commonly disdaining or ignoring phenomena not to be so explained. To the second type of thinkers the objective world is still the absorbing subject of contemplation; but it is approached not from the side of physics, but from the side of self-conscious mind; it is felt, not as material for causal investigation, but as responsive to the human spirit, now as living Nature, now as immanent God, now as a progressively evolving Absolute. Here, with various qualifications, we may class Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel. In the third type, the focus of interest and the determining source of philosophic ideas is the self-conscious mind itself. It feels profoundly its own energy and power of self-determination; and it regards the objective world not as deeply at one with it, responsive to its feeling, accessible to its thought, but rather as a threatening power against which it must vindicate its spiritual freedom and build its secure spiritual home. In the philosophies of this type, personality—which the first type ignored and the second reduced to an organ of a world process—became the fundamental condition of our experience, as with Kant and Fichte, or a transcendent personal God shaping the universe to his mind, as with the Plato of the Timæus.

If we now consider these three types in relation to our problem, it seems evident that the second and the third are naturally more congenial to poetry than the first. Yet we know that one of the greatest of Roman poets made it the work of his life to expound the atomic Naturalism of Epicurus to an unreceptive Roman world.

The naturalism of Democritus and Epicurus, though framed purely in the interest of scientific explanation, and hostile both to poetry and to religion as commonly understood, was potentially a great poetic discovery, the disclosure of a Worldview wholly novel and of entrancing appeal to the poetic apprehension. The sublime perspectives of an illimitable universe, the permanent oneness underlying the changing shows of sense: these were contributions of philosophy to a poetic outlook of which no poet had yet dreamed, and which it was reserved for the greatest of philosophic poets to make explicitly his own.

But the new way which Lucretius was the first to tread was not to be pursued. He had for many ages no successors. His difficult conquest of poetry from a mechanical system, designed to explain, not to inspire, was only to be emulated by a poet of combined intellectual and imaginative grasp comparable with his own. On the whole, the science and the poetry of Lucretius, after that moment of intense incandescence, fell apart. Vergil, who as a young man saw the rising of this magnificent lonely star in the Roman firmament, and of all his contemporaries perhaps alone understood its significance, honoured the discoverer of the causes of things, but his own philosophy was of a cast easier to harmonize with the idealisms of poetry. From the side of science, Gassendi and the physicists of the seventeenth century valued the Lucretian exposition of atomist theory as a welcome supplement to the fragments of Democritus and Epicurus. But before the nineteenth century scientific materialism was never again allied with great poetic power. The eighteenth century saw an immense advance in the scientific reconstruction of our beliefs about the world, but its nearest approaches to the negations of Lucretius were conveyed only in the prose of a D’Holbach or a Hume, while its most brilliant English poet, far from wrestling, like his friend Berkeley, with the new spectre of materialism raised by the triumphs of Newton, afforded himself and his readers complete satisfaction by decorating the easy harmonics of deism in the Essay on Man. The immense quickening of imaginative power which marked the decades immediately before and after the close of the century widened the chasm between poetry and any mechanical view of the world. If at certain points (as in Shelley’s and Coleridge’s early chemical ardour, and Goethe’s momentous biological researches) poets make fruitful approaches to science, it was because they found in science itself an apparent release from the mechanical point of view, a clue to their ultimate faith (however differently expressed) in a divine, benignant Nature. The recovery of imagination told, in philosophy as in poetry, for the most part, is a wonderful idealization of the universe, culminating in Hegel’s evolution of the Absolute and in Wordsworth’s awe before the Mind of Man—conceptions which must be discussed in a later section.

But in some very distinguished poetic minds the recovery of imaginative power led to no idealization of the world. It rather enabled them to present with a peculiar poignant intensity a world stripped bare of ideal elements, in which goodness and hope are alike illusory, and Nature is either a dead mechanism or a cruel, implacable and irresistible alien Power. Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Leconte de Lisle, and (on a lower plane) James Thomson, were the most conspicuous examples in the nineteenth century of poetic genius (for Schopenhauer’s work is a colossal poem of pessimism) absorbed in the contemplation of a universe as denuded as that so passionately embraced by Lucretius, of love or hope for man.

A situation analogous to that of Lucretius arises, therefore, in their case. Their world offered no foothold to the optimist: was it equally bare of support for the poet? Bacon’s assertion that poetry submits the shows of things to man’s desires might imply that; but Bacon (who, incidentally, thought slightly of Lucretius) ignores the poetry born of a conviction that the shows of things are finally unalterable by man’s desires, and it is Leopardi, even more than Lucretius, who has shown us how sublime the poetry which rests on this lonely stoicism may be. One might even, in certain moods, be tempted to attach a yet higher value to the temper of this lonely heroism, which faces a blankly hostile universe utterly without support, than to that which exults in conscious Oneness with a universe pervaded by Love or Beauty, by benign Nature or God. The loneliness of Prometheus is more moving as poetry than his rapturous union with Asia. Why is this?

I take it that it is because the lonely Prometheus, the heroic striver with a loveless world, makes us more vividly aware of the Spirit of Man, and that what moves us most in the great poetry is the revelation of the Spirit of Man even more than the revelation of the glory of the universe. We have seen that these two are natural poles of poetic faith, that is, conclusions upon which the thinking of any poet who thinks as a poet, will tend to converge; and if he is thwarted in the one aim he will fall back with the more energy upon the other.

Now this vivid consciousness of spirit, whether shown in heroism or in love, is ultimately inconsistent with a creed which strips the universe of all ideal elements; and where this is in possession, undermines and disintegrates it. The ‘Everlasting No’ yields ground to the Everlasting Yea; or negation itself is impregnated with divinity, as when Leconte de Lisle glories in his néant divin. To imagine heroism intensely is to be convinced that whatever else is illusory, heroism is not an illusion, that the valour of man has a kinship and support somehow, somewhere, in the nature of things. And if heroism is not an illusion, human society is no illusion either. For the heroic struggler with infinite odds is no longer alone; the army of saints and martyrs are with him; and it was the poet for whom loneliness opened ways into infinity beyond any companionship who cried to one such heroic struggler, fallen in the fight—

I propose to illustrate the working of the forces which thus qualified a creed of negations, from the impressive case of Leopardi.

In Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) we have a poet in whom astonishing power and wealth of mind were united to a complete rejection of the theological and philosophical apparatus of consolation. The mental revolution which left him in early manhood entirely denuded of the beliefs in which he had been reared, was final, and left no trace of reaction or regret, of hesitation or doubt. An absolute calm of secure conviction marks the entire subsequent course of his short life. Few men who have ‘found religion,’ once for all, have been brought by it into an anchorage so secure from inner or outer assault as this man who at twenty-two discovered that religion was a dream.

With supernatural belief fell from him also every form of secular faith and hope for man. Religion was but one among the crowd of cherished illusions which cheat men with the expectation of happiness. Human happiness was always founded on illusion, and the pursuit of it was therefore vain. Hence all the organized energies of civilization, the activities of business or politics, of science or art, of the professions, of state administration, counted in his eyes at best as distractions which blinded those who engaged in them to the deadly vision of truth. For himself these distractions and the relief they brought were impossible, for he had seen the truth; and the remorseless analysis which shattered the basis of illusion on which they rested, sapped the impulse to share in them. Of the state, and the patriotisms which bind its members together, he was as sceptical as Ibsen, without sharing his idealizing homage to the man who stands alone. In the Storia del Genero Umano he makes Jove introduce the diversities of peoples and tongues among men, seeds of emulation and discord, and send forth among them the ‘phantoms’ known by the names of Justice, Virtue, Glory, and Love of Country. ‘Humanity’ itself was an illusory bond, and the ‘nations’ of the world were ultimately its individual men.

Yet Leopardi does not denounce crime. Man is for him more unhappy than criminal; and his evil qualities are to be laid to the charge of the Nature that made him. He is more sinned against than sinning, and Leopardi’s profound pity, if often derisive and scornful, never passes into invective. His passionate upbraidings of his countrymen in the boyish canzone Italy, like his ardent aspiration after national glory for his country and poetic fame for himself, disappear from the melancholy calm of the Bruto Minore and the Ginestra.

‘Nature,’ which planted us in this earth, exposed us from birth till death to malign afflictions and lured us into constant pursuit of illusive aims, is responsible for the wrongs which men inflict upon one another in the vain chase; and Leopardi’s nearest approach to the passion of humanity which inspired Shelley, a few years earlier, is the cry of appeal to men which breaks from him, after uttering this indictment of Nature, to band themselves together against her:

Man in the grip of Nature is like the anthill crushed by a chance-falling apple, and the lava field of Vesuvius, covering extinct cities, where but the broom plant sheds a forlorn fragrance, aptly symbolizes the desolate earth he is doomed to tread. While this earth itself, a vanishing film of vapour in the universe, traverses by its insignificance his dream of immortality. And his humorous irony sports, in the prose dialogues, with this annihilating disparity between man’s pretensions and the truth.[42]

Yet the effect of Leopardi’s work—and especially of his poetry—is at many points subtly to rectify his desperate view of the world. He cannot suppress the uprush of pity for those whose career in it is prematurely cut short, however his reason may persuade him that they are fortunate.[43] The noble pathos of the Attic grave monuments, representing, for instance, a young girl in the act of taking leave of her friends, overpowers the reflections of his philosophy, and he wrestles in moving verses with the enigma:

A portrait of a beautiful woman, carved also upon her tomb, overwhelms him with the wonder of beauty and the paradox of its conversion into dust:

Not less acutely he feels the paradox of artistic creation. Like Abt Vogler he contemplates the ‘palace of music’ reared by the performer’s hand:

But a single discord shatters this paradise in a moment. Abt Vogler’s creation is not shattered; he has played to the end, and put the last stone in its place. But it has vanished, and he calls in, to save it, his high doctrine of the eternity of created beauty. Leopardi has no such faith, and he puts the doctrine to a severer test by dissolving the spell of beauty before it is complete. Yet he feels as acutely as Browning the marvel of the musical creation, and that its abrupt dissolution does not cancel the significance of its having been there at all. He does not openly confess that significance, but it stirs in him a tormenting sense of anomaly.

He comes nearer to such confession when he speaks of love. His own experience of love was that of a virginal passion; the ideal exaltations which make every lover something of a poet had their way in this great poet unclouded by vulgar satiety. He knows well enough that love arrays the woman, for the lover, in ideal charms not her own; but instead of lamenting or deriding this illusion, as illogically he should have done, he glories in it. Love, like music, ‘reveals the mystery of unknown Elysiums,’[45] but these ‘lofty images’ are accessible only to the man; woman cannot understand them; for such conceptions there is no room in her narrow brow. The stern derider of illusions has here no praise for the sex which sees things as they are: the unconscious idealist in Leopardi takes the side of the ‘illusions.’

And his way of speaking about Love elsewhere is less that of the pessimist philosopher than of the Platonist poet who sees in it a clue to real vision. The pessimist in him does full justice to the havoc wrought in the world in Love’s name; but after the gods had watched the working of the lower love, their cynical gift, Jove sent down another Love, ‘child of Venus Urania,’ in pity of the noble hearts who were worthy of it, yet rarely permitting even to them the happiness it brings as ‘surpassed in too small a measure by that of heaven.’[46] Love above all else irradiates the waste of life, it is ‘the source of good, of the highest joy found in the ocean of existence’; it alone holds equal bliss for man with Death, which for ever allays his ills. ‘Love and Death’ are twin brothers, and the fairest things on the earth or under the stars.[47] Even the memory of love can make ‘abhorred old age’ endurable, and send a man willingly to the scourge or the wheel, as the face of Beatrice could make her lover ‘happy in the flames.’[48] Hence Love makes the heart ‘wise,’ for it inspires men with the contempt of life:

This is not the language of pessimism; and this ‘wisdom’ inspired by love, which reconciles men to courageous death, is something quite other than the calculation that death is a release from life’s ills. That is the suicide’s wisdom, not the hero’s. Leopardi’s conception of Love has taken up nobler elements than his pessimism could supply; he describes a Triumph of Love over Death, not a shrewd perception that Death is the easiest way out, or even a blessed port after stormy seas.

Yet Love in its noblest form was given, he knows, but to few; and he himself had known it only as a fleeting experience. He knew as a continual possession, on the other hand, his own intellectual nature, the sovran thought which stripped off the illusive shows of things and disclosed to him the naked horror of reality undisguised, but filled him none the less with the exultation of power, and the lofty joy which belongs to discovery even of a tragic truth.

Such exaltation finds its most powerful expression in the great hymn to ‘Thought the Master.’ His restless and piercing intellect was a double-edged instrument. It was not the source of his pessimism, but it furnished the remorseless analysis of the glories and shows of life which gave its air of inevitable logic to his temperamental despair. Yet the exercise of the instrument was itself a vivid joy, and, like love, created for the wielder a lonely earthly paradise within the vast waste of this earthly hell.[50] There he wanders, in an enchanted light, which blots out his earthly state; thither he returns from the dry and harsh converse with the world as from the naked crags of the Apennines to a joyous garden smiling afar. Is this ‘terrible but precious gift of heaven’ also an illusion? Perhaps; but it is one ‘by nature divine,’ and capable of possessing us with the secure tenacity of truth itself, as long as life endures.[51]

In any case it created for him definite and wonderful values in the world which detracted dangerously from the consistency of his faith in the world’s fundamental badness. ‘Thought’ was the only civilizer; by thought mankind had actually risen out of their primeval barbarism;[52] it was the sole agent in advancing the public welfare. His towering disdain for the frivolity and utilitarianism of his own age sprang from no mere excess of self-esteem; it was the scorn of one whom ‘thought’ had lifted to a standpoint of ideal excellence beside which all alien impulses seemed intolerable.[53] It armed him with a magnanimity which the sight of any cowardly or ignoble act stung to the quick, which laughed at danger or at death,[54] which could endure with resolute Stoicism and antique valour the passage through the miseries of life.[55]

But thought had its peculiar joys also, less equivocal than these. It fed on the sublimity even of the desolate world, on the loneliness of nature, on the infinity of the starry depths. In the lines on ‘The Infinite’ he describes a favourite haunt—a lonely hill, from which the horizon is on all sides cut off. ‘There I sit and gaze, fashioning in thought boundless distances, superhuman silences, and profoundest rest.... In this immensity my thought is drowned, and shipwreck in that ocean is a joy.’

And converse with thought gives him, too, the vision of ideal beauty—a vision which quickens the ecstasy of his most rapturous moments. It is no pallid dream; the fairest face he meets seems but a feigned image of its countenance, a derivative streamlet from the one sole source.[56] That ideal beauty is his lady, but he had never seen her face, for nothing on the earth is like her, or were it like in feature, or in voice, it would be less in beauty.[57] Leopardi is here very near to Shelley. The visionary ideal of beauty and love was not less vividly present to him; but the sterner temper of his pessimism was less easily persuaded that it had projected itself into the being of any earthly Emilia. The ‘Intellectual Beauty’ of Shelley’s hymn had its seat and stronghold in a like glow of inner vision, but its ‘awful loveliness’ was more abundantly hinted or disclosed in the world of nature and of man, giving ‘grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream,’ and luring the sensitive poet on to the pursuit of a thousand fugitive embodiments of its eternal essence. Leopardi’s language, marmoreally clear-cut and austere, seems to bear the impress of a mind powerfully self-contained, exempt from all seductions of the senses, even of colour and melody, calm with the resolution of despair. Shelley’s language, dissolving form and outline in an ethereal radiance, seems the mirror of a self-diffusive genius which saw all things through the veil of its own effulgence. Leopardi has been called ‘the most classical of the romantics’; Shelley was in some sense the very soul of romanticism. But as this very comparison implies, the romantic temper glowed in both. In both, the long travail of existence was crossed by the exultations of the visionary and the idealist. With Leopardi, martyred in his prime by painful disease, the gloomy shades closed in more and more impenetrably upon the world of man and nature, and death was happy because it was the end of life. With Shelley the universe grew more and more visibly transfigured by a spirit deeply responsive to his own; all things worked and moved in beauty, and were woven through and through with love. In Leopardi’s more tenacious intellect the negations of a corroding criticism were less easily overcome. But nature, which had armed his brain with that corroding criticism flung across it also the rapturous delight in beauty, in love, in the creative energy of thought itself, and there were moments when poetry transported him beyond the iron limits of his creed, to the belief that love and beauty and thought are neither illusory nor the sources of illusion, but signs and symptoms of an ideal reality.

IV

The poetry of negations strives instinctively towards fuller affirmation: that is the purport of our survey hitherto. We have seen in a previous essay how Lucretius the poet saw this mechanical universe through a transfiguring atmosphere of passion and pathos, attachment, regret, not dreamt of in his philosophy.[58] And there are signs enough that had that philosophy admitted, what it fiercely denied, those ideas of a living and personal or even divine Nature, or of a universe pervaded by God, which respond to poetic apprehension at the point where the Epicurean naturalism left it, as it were in the lurch, he would have eagerly embraced them.

Now it was precisely those ideas of life and personality present in Nature, or even pervading the universe, which prevailed among philosophic thinkers of the second type, who inquired (to put it in the roughest way) not how the world might have come about, but what it meant. For the answer, infinitely varied in its terms, uniformly postulated that the idealism of man reflected something answering to it in the very nature of reality. Two profound suggestions towards an ideal conception of the world, thrown out by the genius of Greece, could still intoxicate the intellect of early nineteenth-century Germany:—the Heracleitean idea of the harmony of opposites, and the Platonic and Stoic doctrine of the soul of the world. Of the first I say nothing more here; for Heracleitus, pregnant as his dark sayings are with poetry, has never had his Lucretius.[59] The doctrine of a world-soul, on the other hand, has again and again helped poetry to articulate her rapturous apprehension of the glory of the world. For European speculation, at least, the conception had its origin in the Timæus, where the last perfecting touch of the divinely-appointed artificer who constructs the world is to give it a ‘soul’ and make it ‘a blessed god.’

In the pantheism of the Stoics, the idea of a divine world-soul set forth in this grandiose myth became a radical dogma, one of the chief sources of their significance as an intellectual and moral force. At Rome the Stoic pantheism softened the rigour of national and social distinctions. The humanity of the Roman law lies in the direct line of its influence. In the mind of the most sensitive and tender of Roman poets, on the other hand, the Stoic idea fell upon a soil rich in qualities uncongenial, if not unknown, to its native habitat. Stoic thought in Vergil, no less than Epicurean in Lucretius, has taken the colour of that richer soil. The sublime verses which he puts in the mouth of Anchises have riveted this solution, if such it be, of the world-riddle upon the mind of posterity; but the real contribution of Vergil is less in any expressive phrase or image than in the diffused magic of a temperament in which all subtle and delicate attachments wonderfully throve; where, more than in any other Roman mind, the ‘threefold reverence’ of Goethe, the reverence for what is above us, for what is below us, and for our fellow-men, found its congenial home.

And it is not hard to see how sheer poetic instinct drew him this way. His two great masters in poetry, Homer and Lucretius, had inspired and helped to mould a genius fundamentally unlike either. The majestic pageant of the Olympians was not at bottom more consonant to his poetry than the scorn which tramples on all fear of divinity and puts the roar of Acheron under its feet. The Jupiter and Venus and Juno and Pallas who so efficiently order the changing fortunes of Æneas are but a splendid decoration, like the Olympian figures in Raphael’s frescoes at the Farnesina. And well as he understands the bliss of the triumphant intellect, of Man become the master of things, he is himself content with the humbler joys of one who has acquaintance with Pan and the Nymphs, with the gods of the woodland and the fountain-spring. These were real for him, not it may be with the matter-of-fact reality of the senses, but as speaking symbols of something more deeply interfused, less articulate than man, but more articulate to man’s spirit than the fountains or the flowers.

The great pantheistic phrases of Vergil have echoed, we know, throughout the after-history of poetry. We might even be tempted to say that pantheism, in some sense, must be the substance of any ‘poetic view of the world.’ But if so, it must be a pantheism which owes at least as much to the entranced intuition of the poets as to the abstract thinking of philosophy. Their ecstasy of the senses, their feasting joy in the moment, and in the spot, have enabled them not merely to express the creed of pantheism with greater freshness and sincerity, but to give it interpretations and applications of which theoretic speculation never dreamed. We should not prize the great lines of Tintern Abbey so far above the eloquent platitudes of the Essay on Man if we did not feel that Pope was merely putting philosophy at second-hand into brilliant verse, while Wordsworth had not only reached his thought through his own impassioned contemplation, but actually given it a new compass and profundity not attainable by any logical process. He found his ‘something more deeply interfused’ as he looked with emotion too deep for tears upon the humble flower and the simple village child, or remembered the experiences of his own wonderful boyhood; and these were for him not merely portions of a body of which God was the soul, but themselves luminous points, or running springs, of spiritual light and life. So that if his poetry touches doctrinal pantheism (which he never names) at one pole, at the other it is nearer to the spiritual fetishism of St. Francis’s hymns to Brother Sun and Brother Rain.

It is easier to distinguish definite philosophic ideas at work in the poetic apprehension of Shelley. We know in any case that they played an immensely greater part in his intellectual growth. Plato and Dante have helped him to those wonderful phrases in which he seeks to make articulate his rapturous cosmic vision of

That is his rendering, translated out of theological terms, of the sublime opening lines of the Paradiso:

The glory of Him who moves the whole, penetrates through the universe and is reflected in one part more and in another less.

But, even so, Shelley is feeling through these great words—Light, Love, Beauty—towards something which none of them can completely convey. And in this Shelleyan ‘love’ itself, the subtle distinctions carried out, as we saw, by Dante disappear even more completely than the dramatic play of thought in the Symposium disappears in the suffused splendour of Spenser’s Hymns. In logical power Shelley was as little to be compared with Dante as Spenser with Plato. Yet some distinctions seem to assert themselves even in that ecstatic love-interwoven universe of his. His poet’s intense consciousness of personality sounds clear through the pantheistic harmonies. When he is trying to utter as he sees it the sublime paradox of the dead but deathless poet, he falls successively, heedless of inconsistency, upon symbols drawn from the dogmas of antagonistic schools of thought. Pantheism, individual immortality, heaven, Elysium—he draws upon them all, but none suffices. The dead poet is made one with Nature, becomes a part of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; his voice is heard in the nightingale’s song. But he is also an individual soul, who has passed at death to the abode where the Immortals are, and is welcomed there by Chatterton and Sidney and Lucan and the rest. A cognate depth and reach of apprehension has perplexed the discoverers of contradiction in In Memoriam. ‘For the poets,’ aptly comments Mr. Bradley, though he is thinking chiefly of Shelley and Tennyson, ‘the soul of the dead in being mingled with nature does not lose its personality; in living in God it remains human and itself.’[60]

In comparison with the magnificent audacities of pantheism and cosmic love, the philosophic conception of ‘Nature’ has enjoyed the position of a great authoritative commonplace, by invoking which the most mediocre poet could dignify and quicken his verse. It belonged to science as much as to poetry, and to the poetry of clarified good sense by as good right as to that of childlike intuition. It could stand for the ideal of just expression which Pope counselled the poet ‘first to follow,’ as legitimately as, a century later, it was to stand for the living presence of Beauty, of whose ‘wedding’ with the soul Wordsworth chanted the spousal verse, or as the teeming creative energy whose infinity Faust sought vainly to clasp. But even that Augustan ‘Nature’ gathered something from the quality of the minds which pursued literary discipline by its light, and no one doubts that in Wordsworth or in Goethe the φύσις or natura of strictly philosophic speculation was but the fecund germ of a poetic creation, which, whether it answered to a cosmic reality or not, answered to deep-seated and ineffaceable instincts and needs of man. Only, if great and original genius has set its hall-mark upon this noble metal, the crowd of small poets have mixed it with their feeble alloys. There is a Nature which responds to the greatest and sublimest aspirations of man, and one which answers to his self-indulgent dreams; a Nature which is wedded to his soul, and one which is but the casual mistress of his light desires. If the term ‘poetical’ has a slightly derisive air, it is because a cheap glamour, which disguises truth, so often replaces the profound symbol which touches its core. A truly ‘poetic’ World-view has at any rate nothing to do with this second-rate romance.

Among the poetic ways of regarding Nature, there are two types, the distinction between which concerns us. It is shadowed forth in the two images I borrowed just now from Wordsworth and from Faust. We may feel Nature as intimately united to us, deep calling to deep. Or we may feel it as something which eludes our clasp, but holds us by the very appeal of its affinity to that which is infinite in ourselves. The first type is too familiar to be further discussed here. But the second, or Goethean type, needs a few words.

For it was with Goethe that a new and powerful philosophic influence tardily entered modern poetry—the influence of Spinoza. A quarter of a century before Wordsworth and Coleridge were overheard talking of him at Nether Stowey, Spinoza had found deep springs of sympathy in the young Goethe. A vivid passage in Dichtung und Wahrheit (Book XIV) tells us that what especially fascinated him was ‘the boundless unselfishness that glowed in every sentence,’ and notably that ‘strange sentence’ which later suggested a famous retort of his Philine—‘He who loves God must not expect that God shall love him in return.’[61] Spinoza’s God meant, roughly, the infinity of Nature, and to love God meant to see all things in the light of that infinity. Such a dictum therefore cut at the root of the whole body of poetry which asserted an answering spirit in Nature, from the self-indulgent dreams of romantic sentiment to the love-interwoven universe of Dante or Shelley. The grandeur of Spinoza’s conception is apparent enough even in his geometrical formulas, but Goethe’s intense intuition translated it into human experiences which stir us to the depths. The Erdgeist’s retort to Faust—‘Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir’—is one of the most thrilling in all poetry, not because it indulges all our wishes, nor yet because it baffles them, but because the barrier it opposes to the intellect is a gate to the imagination, and we step out into a poetic apprehension of the infinity which our formulas seek to capture in vain.

It is by a like suggestion of infinities beyond our reach and untouched by our emotions that he moves us in poems like Das Göttliche or Die Grenzen der Menschheit, or the opening scene of the Second Part of Faust, which insist with so lofty a calm on our limitations. From these infinities, if we wish to live and act, we must turn away, and that is what, as a wise physician, Goethe bids us do. The intolerable glory of the sun is broken up for us in the many-hued rainbow, and this refracted light must be the guide of our life. But no one could see life there who had not himself gazed on the glory of the sun, and while we read Goethe’s words we evade the very limitations he imposes, just as Shelley (in the great kindred passage), by the very image which condemns life as a dome of many-coloured glass, lifts us into the ‘white radiance’ beyond. ‘A little ring bounds our life,’ he says elsewhere, ‘and many generations succeed one another on the endless chain of their being.’ A little ring on an endless chain—a ‘little life rounded with a sleep,’—that way lies a poetry as great as that which comes to the visionary Celt who sees ‘waving round every leaf and tree the fiery tresses of that hidden sun which is the soul of the earth.’[62]

But that way, also, lies a poetry of Man, a poetry which has its sustaining centre not in the cosmos, but in the soul. To refuse the easy assumption of Nature’s comradeship in our sorrow, to resign the cheap consolations of the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ may be the way not merely to resignation, or Stoicism, but to an apprehension of the heights and depths of the soul thrown back upon itself, and fetching strength not from any outer power, but from undreamed-of inner resources of its own. When Wordsworth, in the grasp of a great sorrow, puts aside the glamour of the poet’s dream, in order to bear with fortitude ‘what is to be borne,’ he has taken a step towards that poetry. When he finds in suffering ‘the nature of infinity,’ with gracious avenues opening out of it to wondrous regions of soul life, he has entered it.[63]

V

We have thus watched the modification of naturalistic atomism, of pessimistic materialism, and of the cosmic conceptions of ‘pantheism’ and ‘Nature,’ by the immediate intuition, the eager senses, and the vivid soul-consciousness which characterize the poetic apprehension. It remains to glance, finally, at the relations of poetry with that third type of philosophic system, in which soul-consciousness itself has played the guiding and master part.

It was with the assertion of the soul’s predominance that European philosophy, in the full sense of the word, began. When Socrates turned from the cosmic speculations of the Ionians to found his ‘thinking-shop’ at Athens, and chaffed Anaxagoras for having put mind at the head of things and then given it nothing to do, he was preparing the way, we know, for the magnificent soul-sovereignty established by the master of all idealists. Plato set up a trenchant dualism between soul and sense, and thrust the sense-world into a limbo of disparagement from which, where his spell prevailed, it never emerged. The body was the soul’s prison; the sense cheated it with illusion and dragged it down with base desires.

The Transcendentalists of modern Germany established a soul-autocracy differently conceived, and founded upon other postulates, but not less absolute. Kant shattered the claims of Verstand, but only to enthrone Vernunft; Fichte found nothing real and nothing good that was not rooted in heroic will; Schopenhauer built up a philosophy of self-effacement and world-flight on the doctrine that the will to live which tortures us is also the malign indwelling energy of the world. And none of them surpassed in calm audacity the claims made for individual reason by Fichte’s English contemporary, Godwin.

Speculation of this type was already allied to poetry by the boldness of its ‘subjective idealism,’ and it might be expected that its points of fruitful contact with poetry would be correspondingly numerous. Yet this is hardly, on the whole, the case. If Plato’s influence on poetry is hard to measure, if Kant taught something vital to Schiller, and Schopenhauer to Wagner, ‘subjective’ philosophers and poets in the main pursued their common preoccupation with soul along paths which rarely crossed. Each brought to the exploration of that marvellous mine a lamp of extraordinary power; but they carried it into different regions, surveyed them on different methods, and returned with different results. Poets without any scientific psychology have, in virtue of imaginative insight into the ways of character, created a mass of psychological material with which scientific psychology has only begun to cope. It is only among poetic portrayers of the second rank, such as Jonson and the allegorists, that theoretic categories of character have had any determining weight. The supreme characters of literature are true creations, creations that are at the same time discoveries—pieces of humanity which exceed Nature’s ‘reach,’ perhaps, but not her ‘grasp.’ Prometheus, Hamlet, Satan, Faust, permanently enlarged the status of the human soul in our common valuation of life. That ‘discovery of Man’ which intoxicated the Renascence was preeminently a discovery of the stature of man’s soul—‘how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, ... in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!’ but philosophic ideas hardly touched the surface of either Shakespeare or Marlowe, and they furnished but one strand in the woof of the mind of Milton.

In the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth there is more affinity to philosophic ideas, but their actual influence is apt to be strongest just where the poetry itself is least intense. In a very luminous lecture Mr. Bradley has traced the relation between the two movements.[64] An exalted faith in soul possessed and inspired both, but each was in the main unconscious of the other. In the poetry of his own countryman, Schiller, Kant’s austere ideas reappear transformed in the crucible of the poet’s livelier emotions or quicker sense of beauty. Coleridge drank as deeply of Kantian and cognate ideas, but only when the brief chapter of his creative poetry was all but closed; while the magnificent prose-poem in which Carlyle conveyed the philosophy of Fichte-Jean-Paul-Teufelsdröckh stands alone. What Wordsworth may have drawn through Coleridge’s talk is not clearly distinguishable from the original bent of his own mind. The two streams ran courses largely parallel, but in distinct though adjacent valleys. With Godwin’s ideas, on the other hand, both Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley had stood in close intellectual relations. And these were precisely the men whose poetry set the deepest impress upon their view of life.

Is it possible by the help of either the parallel or the derivative relationship to lay down any common features in the process?

In the first place, the stress on the exaltation of spirit is shifted by the poets, and with great emphasis, from ‘reason,’ the instrument of philosophy, to imagination. Reason is constantly not merely ignored but openly slighted. It is not what they mean when they exalt ‘mind.’ When Wordsworth tells us, in the great Recluse passage, of the awe, beyond Empyrean or Erebus, with which he contemplated ‘the mind of man’; when he sees the heroic devotion of the fallen Toussaint perpetuated in ‘man’s inconquerable mind’; when he encourages those who doubted Spanish heroism with the sublime assurance that ‘the true sorrow of humanity consists in this: not that the mind of man fails, but that the course and demands of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires’;—by this ‘mind’ he means imagination, passion, heroic will, but not discourse of reason. Wordsworth, apprehending soul with his poet’s intuition, apprehends it as he knew it in himself. He saw it, therefore, as an energy operating not through ‘meddling intellect’ but through vision and vision-illuminated will, with open eye and ear for its indispensable associates, and love as its core. The ‘soul’ whereby alone the nations shall be great and free was something in which the humblest peasant and the simplest child had part, and in which the meanest flower struck answering chords. It is not accident that the soul-animated England of Wordsworth’s ideal is so utterly unlike Hegel’s Prussian state.

In William Blake soul-autocracy became aggressive and revolutionary, and the breach with reason, philosophic or other, widened to a yawning gulf. Whether he is declaring ‘the world of imagination to be the world of eternity,’ scoffing at the nature-lover who sees ‘with’ not ‘through’ the eye, or affirming that ‘to generalize is to be an idiot’—(a stupendous example of the procedure he derides)—he stands for a poetry stripped bare of all that allies it either to philosophy or to common sense. His prophetic books adumbrate a grandiose poetic metaphysic, a world-system framed to the postulates of this denuded poetry. And Shelley’s Apology enthrones imagination as the creator and upholder of all civilization.

Secondly, the poetic shifting of the stress, within the domain of the autocratic soul, from reason to imagination and feeling, told powerfully upon the ethical ideals proclaimed by this group of poets. It added fresh impetus to that disposition to override or transcend external standards of morality which is inherent in all vivid inner consciousness. Moral distinctions fade in the inner illumination of the mystic. We have seen hints of such a ‘transvaluation of ethical values’ disarranging the iron categories of Dante’s Hell. Applied to Hamlet or Othello, the traditional categories of good and evil break in our hands. Milton’s heroic devil, and the lovers whom Browning scorns for being saved by their sloth from crime, still perplex the moralist. But the poets of the Revolution are openly sceptical of morality. Of Shelley I need not speak. Even Wordsworth makes a hero of a murderer. And Blake first proclaimed explicitly, a century before Nietzsche, a good ‘beyond good and evil,’ and figured the inauguration of this transcendent ethic in the colossal symbolism of his Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In all these writers, it is true, their attitude to morality was in part derived from the bias towards emancipation then current in all departments of ethical, social, and political life, and had no relation to specifically poetic apprehension. ‘Freedom’ was an ideal for Godwin and for Robespierre, as well as for Shelley and for Kant, and was pursued by them with equal devotion in their several fashions. But they all, also, understood it in the light of their several preoccupations. With Godwin, as with Robespierre, it is mainly negative; with Shelley, as with Kant, it acquires positive substance and content. And this is because both philosopher and poet see it as the means to some perfection of the soul. The soul-autocracy of the age, extravagant as it might be, is seen at its noblest in the Kantian freedom won through duty, and in the Shelleyan freedom won through Love. The Kantian ideal of freedom interpreted in that last conclusion of Goethe’s wisdom—‘He alone is free who daily wins his freedom anew’—has passed into the very substance of the strenuous German mind. The Shelleyan ideal is of a rarer but also of a more perilous stuff, and has touched no such chords in the English character as his music has stirred in the English ear. But something of the genius of both ideals was gathered up and concentrated in Wordsworth’s great affirmation of the meaning of national freedom.

Wordsworth’s sense of law corrects what is anarchic in Shelley, as Shelley’s flame-like ardour corrects what is prosaic and common in Wordsworth. Together they present more purely than any of their contemporaries the noble substance of a poetic ethic. In that poetic ethic the greatest word, rightly understood, is still the Shelleyan Love.

And it may be that if there is any ideal which, springing from poetic apprehension, is yet fit, rightly interpreted, for the common needs of men, it is that ‘love of love’ on which Tennyson, so far always from the revolutionary temper either in love or poetry, set his finger in his early prime, as the sovereign endowment of the poet. Only it must be love wide enough to include every kind of spiritual energy by which the soul, transcending itself, fulfils itself, and exerts, whether upon men or nations, its liberating and uplifting power: the love which creates, and the love which endures; the love which makes the hero or the artist, and that which spends itself inexhaustibly on a thankless cause; the impersonal ardour of the mind, which Spinoza called the ‘intellectual love of God,’ and the impassioned union of souls, which to some has seemed a clue to the vision of reality, and to others the surest pledge of a future life; the love of country which distinguishes the true service of humanity from a shallow cosmopolitanism; and the love of our fellow men, which distinguishes true patriotism from national greed. To have had no mean share in sustaining this large ideal of the ‘soul’ which makes us free is an enduring glory of the poets.

Nor is this strange if, as I trust this partial survey may have served to suggest, the spiritual energy transcending itself, for which Love is the most adequate name, be the core of the World-view towards which, from their various religious or philosophic vantage-grounds, a number of poetic master-spirits have made an approach. Whether they have found it as a light kindling the universe, like Dante and Shelley; or as a creative power shadowed forth in the eternal new birth of all things, like Lucretius; or as the will and passion of the human soul, heroically shaping its fate, and divining its infinity most clearly when most aware of its limitations, like Goethe; in some form the faith that spiritual energy is the heart of reality was the centre towards which they knowingly or obscurely strove. Such a faith, I suggest, will be found to be a vital constituent of every view of the world reached by a poet through his poetic experience, and the main contribution of that rich, profound, and intense form of experience to man’s ultimate interpretation of life.

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