to the poet because he has abandoned the Platonic half of his
inspiration and has become for the moment wholly historical, wholly
Hebraic or Roman. He would have been a far inferior mind if he had
always moved on this level. With the Platonic spheres and the
Aristotelian ethics taken out, his _Comedy_ would not have been divine.
Persons and incidents, to be truly memorable, have to be rendered
significant; they have to be seen in their place in the moral world;
they have to be judged, and judged rightly, in their dignity and value.
A casual personal sentiment towards them, however passionate, cannot
take the place of the sympathetic insight that comprehends and the wide
experience that judges.
Again (what is fundamental with Dante) love, as he feels and renders it,
is not normal or healthy love. It was doubtless real enough, but too
much restrained and expressed too much in fancy; so that when it is
extended Platonically and identified so easily with the grace of God and
with revealed wisdom, we feel the suspicion that if the love in question
had been natural and manly, it would have offered more resistance to so
mystical a transformation. The poet who wishes to pass convincingly from
love to philosophy (and that seems a natural progress for a poet) should
accordingly be a hearty and complete lover--a lover like Goethe and his
Faust--rather than like Plato and Dante. Faust, too, passes from
Gretchen to Helen, and partly back again; and Goethe made even more
passages. Had any of them led to something which not only was loved, but
deserved to be loved, which not only could inspire a whole life, but
which ought to inspire it--then we should have had a genuine progress.
In the next place, Dante talks too much about himself. There is a sense
in which this egotism is a merit, or at least a ground of interest for
us moderns; for egotism is the distinctive attitude of modern philosophy
and of romantic sentiment. In being egotistical Dante was ahead of his
time. His philosophy would have lost an element of depth, and his poetry
an element of pathos, had he not placed himself in the centre of the
stage, and described everything as his experience, or as a revelation
made to himself and made for the sake of his personal salvation. But
Dante’s egotism goes rather further than was requisite, so that the
transcendental insight might not fail in his philosophy. It extended so
far that he cast the shadow of his person not only over the terraces of
purgatory (as he is careful to tell us repeatedly), but over the whole
of Italy and of Europe, which he saw and judged under the evident
influence of private passions and resentments.
Moreover, the personality thrust forward so obtrusively is not in every
respect worthy of contemplation. Dante is very proud and very bitter; at
the same time, he is curiously timid; and one may tire sometimes of his
perpetual tremblings and tears, of his fainting fits and his intricate
doubts. A man who knows he is under the special protection of God, and
of three celestial ladies, and who has such a sage and magician as
Virgil for a guide, might have looked even upon hell with a little more
confidence. How far is this shivering and swooning philosopher from the
laughing courage of Faust, who sees his poodle swell into a monster,
then into a cloud, and finally change into Mephistopheles, and says at
once: _Das also war des Pudels Kern_! Doubtless Dante was mediaeval, and
contrition, humility, and fear of the devil were great virtues in those
days; but the conclusion we must come to is precisely that the virtues
of those days were not the best virtues, and that a poet who represents
that time cannot be a fair nor an ultimate spokesman for humanity.
Perhaps we have now reviewed the chief objects that peopled Dante’s
imagination, the chief objects into the midst of which his poetry
transports us; and if a poet’s genius avails to transport us into his
enchanted world, the character of that world will determine the quality
and dignity of his poetry. Dante transports us, with unmistakable power,
first into the atmosphere of a visionary love; then into the history of
his conversion, affected by this love, or by the divine grace identified
with it. The supreme ideal to which his conversion brought him back is
expressed for him by universal nature, and is embodied among men in the
double institution of a revealed religion and a providential empire. To
trace the fortunes of these institutions, we are transported next into
the panorama of history, in its great crises and its great men; and
particularly into the panorama of Italy in the poet’s time, where we
survey the crimes, the virtues, and the sorrows of those prominent in
furthering or thwarting the ideal of Christendom. These numerous persons
are set before us with the sympathy and brevity of a dramatist; yet it
is no mere carnival, no _danse macabre_: for throughout, above the
confused strife of parties and passions, we hear the steady voice, the
implacable sentence, of the prophet that judges them.
Thus Dante, gifted with the tenderest sense of colour, and the firmest
art of design, has put his whole world into his canvas. Seen there, that
world becomes complete, clear, beautiful, and tragic. It is vivid and
truthful in its detail, sublime in its march and in its harmony. This is
not poetry where the parts are better than the whole. Here, as in some
great symphony, everything is cumulative: the movements conspire, the
tension grows, the volume redoubles, the keen melody soars higher and
higher; and it all ends, not with a bang, not with some casual incident,
but in sustained reflection, in the sense that it has not ended, but
remains by us in its totality, a revelation and a resource for ever. It
has taught us to love and to renounce, to judge and to worship. What
more could a poet do? Dante poetized all life and nature as he found
them. His imagination dominated and focused the whole world. He thereby
touched the ultimate goal to which a poet can aspire; he set the
standard for all possible performance, and became the type of a supreme
poet. This is not to say that he is the “greatest” of poets. The
relative merit of poets is a barren thing to wrangle about. The question
can always be opened anew, when a critic appears with a fresh
temperament or a new criterion. Even less need we say that no greater
poet can ever arise; we may be confident of the opposite. But Dante
gives a successful example of the _highest species_ of poetry. His
poetry covers the whole field from which poetry may be fetched, and to
which poetry may be applied, from the inmost recesses of the heart to
the uttermost bounds of nature and of destiny. If to give imaginative
value to something is the minimum task of a poet, to give imaginative
value to all things, and to the system which things compose, is
evidently his greatest task.
Dante fulfilled this task, of course under special conditions and
limitations, personal and social; but he fulfilled it, and he thereby
fulfilled the conditions of supreme poetry. Even Homer, as we are
beginning to perceive nowadays, suffered from a certain conventionality
and one-sidedness. There was much in the life and religion of his time
that his art ignored. It was a flattering, a euphemistic art; it had a
sort of pervasive blandness, like that which we now associate with a
fashionable sermon. It was poetry addressed to the ruling caste in the
state, to the conquerors; and it spread an intentional glamour over
their past brutalities and present self-deceptions. No such partiality
in Dante; he paints what he hates as frankly as what he loves, and in
all things he is complete and sincere. If any similar adequacy is
attained again by any poet, it will not be, presumably, by a poet of the
supernatural. Henceforth, for any wide and honest imagination, the
supernatural must figure as an idea in the human mind,--a part of the
natural. To conceive it otherwise would be to fall short of the insight
of this age, not to express or to complete it. Dante, however, for this
very reason, may be expected to remain the supreme poet of the
supernatural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato, of that phase of
thought and feeling in which the supernatural seems to be the key to
nature and to happiness. This is the hypothesis on which, as yet, moral
unity has been best attained in this world. Here, then, we have the most
complete idealization and comprehension of things achieved by mankind
hitherto. Dante is the type of a consummate poet.
* * * * *
[1] Plato, _Phaedo_,97B-99C, Jowett’s translation. I have changed the
rendering of _νοῡς_ from “mind” to “reason.”
[2] “Est pro fundamento tenenda veritas historiae et desuper spirituales
expositiones fabricandae.” Thomas Aquinas, _Summa Theologiae_, i.
quaest. 102, conclusio.
[3] _Paradiso_, xv. 97, 99:
Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica...
Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.
[4] Ibid., 100-26:
Non avea catenella, non corona,
Non donne contigiate, non cintura
Che fosse a veder pin che la persona.
Non faceva nascendo ancor paura
La figlia al padre, chè il tempo e la dote
Non fuggan quinci e quindi la misura.
Non avea case di famiglia vote;
Non v’era giunto ancor Sardanapalo
A mostrar ciò che in camera si puote....
O fortunate! Ciascuna era certa
Delia sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla
Era per Francia nel letto deserta.
L’ una vegghiava a studio della culla,
E consolando usava l’ idioma
Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla;
L’ altra traendo alia rocca la chioma,
Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
De’ Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.
[5] _Paradiso_, xxxiii. 143-45:
Volgeva il mio disiro e il _velle,_
Si come rota ch’ egualmente è mossa,
L’ amor che move il sole e l’ altre stelle.
[6] _Vita Nuova_, § 22: Secondo l’ usanza della sopradetta cittade,
donne con donne, e uomini con uomini si adunino a cotale tristizia;
molte donne s’ adunaro colà, ove questa Beatrice piangea pietosamente,
&c.
Also, _Purgatorio_, xxxi. 50, 51:
Le belle membra in ch’ io
Rinchiusa fui, e sono in terra sparte.
[7] _Vita Nuova_,§ v.
[8] _Schermo della veritade_,--natural philosophy.
[9] _Convito_, II. cap. 16: _Faccia che gli occhi d’ esta Donna miri_;
gli occhi di questa Donna sono le sue _dimostrazioni_, le quali dritte
negli occhi dello intelletto inhamorano l’ anima, libera nelle
condizioni. Oh dolcissimi ed ineffabili sembianti, e rubatori subitani
della mente umana, che nelle dimostrazioni negli occhi della Filosofia
apparite, quando essa alli suoi drudi ragiona! Veramente in voi è la
salute, per la quale si fa beato chi vi guarda, e salvo dalla morte
della ignoranza e delli vizi.... E cosi, in fine di questo secondo
Trattato, dico e affermo che la Donna, di cui io innamorai appresso lo
primo amore, fu la bellissima e onestissima figlia dello Imperadore
dell’ universo, alla quale Pittagora pose nome _Filosofia_.
[10] _Purgatorio_, xvii. 106-11:
Or perchè mai non può dalla salute
Amor del suo suggetto volger viso,
Dall’ odio proprio son le cose tute:
E perchè intender non si può diviso,
E per sè stante, alcuno esser dal primo,
Da quello odiare ogni affetto è deciso.
[11] _Inferno_, iii. 64-66:
Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi,
Erano ignudi e stimolati molto
Da mosconi e da vespe ch’ erano ivi.
[12] _Ibid._, iv. 41, 42:
Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi
Che senza speme vivemo in disio.
Cf. _Purgatorio_, iii. 37-45, where Virgil says:
“State contenti, umana gente, al _quia_;
Chè se potuto aveste veder tutto,
Mestier non era partorir Maria;
E disiar vedeste senza frutto
Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato,
Ch’eternalmente è dato lor per lutto.
Io dico d’Aristotele e di Plato,
E di molti altri.” E qui chinò la fronte;
E più non disse, e rimase turbato.
[13] _Inferno_, ix. 106-33, and x.
[14] _Ibid_., xxviii.
[15] _Inferno_, iii. 124-26:
E pronti sono a trapassar lo rio,
Chè la divina giustizia gli sprona
Si che la tema si volge in disio.
[16] _Purgatorio_, xxi. 61-69:
Della mondizia sol voler fa prova,
Che, tutta libera a mutar convento,
L’alma sorprende, e di voler le giova....
Ed io che son giaciuto a questa doglia
Cinquecento anni e più, pur mo sentii
Libera volontà di miglior soglia.
[17] _Inferno_, xiv. 63-66:
“O Capaneo, in ciò che non s’ammorza
La tua superbia, se’ tu più punito:
Nullo martirio, fuor che la tua rabbia,
Sarebbe al tuo furor dolor compito.”
[18] Alfred de Musset, _Poésies Nouvelles, Souvenir_:
Dante, pourquoi dis-tu qu’il n’est pire misère
Qu’un souvenir heureux dans les jours de douleur?
Quel chagrin t’a dicté cette parole amère,
Cette offense au malheur?
... Ce blasphème vanté ne vient pas de ton cœur.
Un souvenir heureux est peut-être sur terre
Plus vrai que le bonheur....
Et c’est à ta Françoise, à ton ange de gloire,
Que tu pouvais donner ces mots à prononcer,
Elle qui s’interrompt, pour conter son histoire,
D’un éternel baiser!
[19] _Paradiso_, iii. 73-90:
“Se disiassimo esser più superne,
Foran discordi li nostri disiri
Dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne,...
E la sua volontate è nostra pace;
Ella è quel mare al qual tutto si move
Ciò ch’ella crea, e che natura face.”
Chiaro mi fu allor com’ ogni dove
In cielo è Paradiso, e sì la grazia
Del sommo ben d’un modo non vi piove.
[20] _Paradiso_, xxii. 133-39:
Col viso ritornai per tutte e quante
Le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
Tal, ch’io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante;
E quel consiglio per migliore approbo
Che l’ha per meno; e chi ad altro pensa
Chiamar si puote veramente probo.
IV.
GOETHE’S FAUST
In approaching the third of our philosophical poets, there is a scruple
that may cross the mind. Lucretius was undoubtedly a philosophical poet;
his whole poem is devoted to expounding and defending a system of
philosophy. In Dante the case is almost as plain. The _Divine Comedy_ is
a moral and personal fable; yet not only are many passages explicitly
philosophical, but the whole is inspired and controlled by the most
definite of religious systems and of moral codes. Dante, too, is
unmistakably a philosophical poet. But was Goethe a philosopher? And is
_Faust_ a philosophical poem?
If we say so, it must be by giving a certain latitude to our terms.
Goethe was the wisest of mankind; too wise, perhaps, to be a philosopher
in the technical sense, or to try to harness this wild world in a
brain-spun terminology. It is true that he was all his life a follower
of Spinoza, and that he may be termed, without hesitation, a naturalist
in philosophy and a pantheist. His adherence to the general attitude of
Spinoza, however, did not exclude a great plasticity and freedom in his
own views, even on the most fundamental points. Thus Goethe did not
admit the mechanical interpretation of nature advocated by Spinoza. He
also assigned, at least to privileged souls, like his own, a more
personal sort of immortality than Spinoza allowed. Moreover, he
harboured a generous sympathy with the dramatic explanations of nature
and history current in the Germany of his day. Yet such transcendental
idealism, making the world the expression of a spiritual endeavour, was
a total reversal of that conviction, so profound in Spinoza, that all
moral energies are resident in particular creatures, themselves sparks
in an absolutely infinite and purposeless world. In a word, Goethe was
not a systematic philosopher. His feeling for the march of things and
for the significance of great personages and great ideas was indeed
philosophical, although more romantic than scientific. His thoughts upon
life were fresh and miscellaneous. They voiced the genius and learning
of his age. They did not express a firm personal attitude, radical and
unified, and transmissible to other times and persons. For philosophers,
after all, have this advantage over men of letters, that their minds,
being more organic, can more easily propagate themselves. They scatter
less influence, but more seeds.
If from Goethe we turn to _Faust_--and it is as the author of _Faust_
only that we shall consider him--the situation is not less ambiguous. In
the play, as the young Goethe first wrote it, philosophy appeared in the
first line,--_Hab nun ach die Philosophey_; but it appeared there, and
throughout the piece, merely as a human experience, a passion or an
illusion, a fund of images or an ambitious art. Later, it is true, under
the spell of fashion and of Schiller, Goethe surrounded his original
scenes with others, like the prologue in heaven, or the apotheosis of
Faust, in which a philosophy of life was indicated; namely, that he who
strives strays, yet in that straying finds his salvation. This idea left
standing all that satirical and Mephistophelian wisdom with which the
whole poem abounds, the later parts no less than the earlier. Frankly,
it was a moral that adorned the tale, without having been the seed of
it, and without even expressing fairly the spirit which it breathes.
_Faust_ remained an essentially romantic poem, written to give vent to a
pregnant and vivid genius, to touch the heart, to bewilder the mind with
a carnival of images, to amuse, to thrill, to humanize; and, if we must
speak of philosophy, there were many express maxims in the poem, and
many insights, half betrayed, that exceeded in philosophic value the
belated and official moral which the author affixed to it, and which he
himself warned us not to take too seriously.[1]
_Faust_ is, then, no philosophical poem, after an open or deliberate
fashion; and yet it offers a solution to the moral problem of existence
as truly as do the poems of Lucretius and Dante. Heard philosophies are
sweet, but those unheard may be sweeter. They may be more unmixed and
more profound for being adopted unconsciously, for being lived rather
than taught. This is not merely to say what might be said of every work
of art and of every natural object, that it could be made the
starting-point for a chain of inferences that should reveal the whole
universe, like the flower in the crannied wall. It is to say, rather,
that the vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it
dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the
best-chosen words.
Now _Faust_ is the foam on the top of two great waves of human
aspiration, merging and heaping themselves up together,--the wave of
romanticism rising from the depths of northern traditions and genius,
and the wave of a new paganism coming from Greece over Italy. These are
not philosophies to be read into _Faust_ by the critic; they are
passions seething in the drama. It is the drama of a philosophical
adventure; a rebellion against convention; a flight to nature, to
tenderness, to beauty; and then a return to convention again, with a
feeling that nature, tenderness, and beauty, unless found there, will
not be found at all. Goethe never depicts, as Dante does, the object his
hero is pursuing; he is satisfied with depicting the pursuit. Like
Lessing, in his famous apologue, he prefers the pursuit of the ideal to
the ideal itself; perhaps, as in the case of Lessing, because the hope
of realizing the ideal, and the interest in realizing it, were beginning
to forsake him.
The case is somewhat as that of Dante would have been if, instead of
recognizing and loving Beatrice at first sight and rising into a vision
of the eternal world, ready-made and perfectly ordered, Dante had passed
from love to love, from _donna gentile_ to _donna gentile_, always
longing for the eyes of Beatrice without ever meeting them. The _Divine
Comedy_ would then have been only human, yet it might have suggested and
required the very consummation that the _Divine Comedy_ depicts; and
without expressing this consummation, our human comedy might have
furnished materials and momentum for it, such that, if ever that
consummation came to be expressed, it would be more deeply felt and more
adequately understood. Dante gives us a philosophical goal, and we have
to recall and retrace the journey; Goethe gives us a philosophic
journey, and we have to divine the goal.
Goethe is a romantic poet; he is a novelist in verse. He is a
philosopher of experience as it comes to the individual; the philosopher
of life, as action, memory, or soliloquy may put life before each of us
in turn. Now the zest of romanticism consists in taking what you know
is an independent and ancient world as if it were material for your
private emotions. The savage or the animal, who should not be aware of
nature or history at all, could not be romantic about them, nor about
himself. He would be blandly idiotic, and take everything quite
unsuspectingly for what it was in him. The romanticist, then, should be
a civilized man, so that his primitiveness and egotism may have
something paradoxical and conscious about them; and so that his life may
contain a rich experience, and his reflection may play with all
varieties of sentiment and thought. At the same time, in his inmost
genius, he should be a barbarian, a child, a transcendentalist, so that
his life may seem to him absolutely fresh, self-determined, unforeseen,
and unforeseeable. It is part of his inspiration to believe that he
creates a new heaven and a new earth with each revolution in his moods
or in his purposes. He ignores, or seeks to ignore, all the conditions
of life, until perhaps by living he personally discovers them.[2] Like
Faust, he flouts science, and is minded to make trial of magic, which
renders a man’s will master of the universe in which he seems to live.
He disowns all authority, save that mysteriously exercised over him by
his deep faith in himself. He is always honest and brave; but he is
always different, and absolves himself from his past as soon as he has
outgrown or forgotten it. He is inclined to be wayward and foolhardy,
justifying himself on the ground that all experience is interesting,
that the springs of it are inexhaustible and always pure, and that the
future of his soul is infinite. In the romantic hero the civilized man
and the barbarian must be combined; he should be the heir to all
civilization, and, nevertheless, he should take life arrogantly and
egotistically, as if it were an absolute personal experiment.
This singular combination was strikingly exemplified in Doctor Johannes
Faustus, a figure half historical, half legendary, familiar to Goethe in
his boyhood in puppet-shows and chapbooks. An adventurer in the romantic
as well as in the vulgar sense of the word, somewhat like Paracelsus or
Giordano Bruno, Doctor Faustus had felt the mystery of nature, had
scorned authority, had credited magic, had lived by imposture, and had
fled from the police. His blasphemous boasts and rascally conduct,
together with his magic arts, had made him even in his lifetime a
scandalous and interesting personage. He was scarcely dead when legends
gathered about his name. It was published abroad that he had sold his
soul to the devil, in exchange for twenty-four years of wild pleasures
upon earth.
This legend purported to offer a terrible and edifying example, a
warning to all Christians to avoid the snares of science, of pleasure,
and of ambition. These things had sent Doctor Faustus into hell-fire;
his corpse, found face downward, could not be turned over upon its back.
Nevertheless, we may suspect that even at the beginning people
recognized in Doctor Faustus a braver brother, a somewhat enviable
reprobate who had dared to relish the good things of this life above the
sad joys vaguely promised for the other. All that the Renaissance valued
was here represented as in the devil’s gift; and the man in the street
might well doubt whether it was religion or worldly life that was
thereby made the more unlovely. Doubtless the Lutheran authors of the
first chapbook felt, and felt rightly, that those fine things which
tempted Faustus were unevangelical, pagan, and popish; yet they could
not cease altogether to admire and even to covet them, especially when
the first ardours of the Old-Christian revival had had time to cool.