[18] _Faust_, Part i, Act ii., _Anmutige Gegend_:
Du, Erde,... regst und rührst ein kraftiges Beschliessen
Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
[19] _Faust_, Part ii. Act iv., _Hochgebirg_:
Erstaunenswürdiges soll geraten,
Ich fühle Kraft zu kühnem Fleiss.
Herrschaft gewinn’ ich, Eigentum!
Die That ist alles, nichts der Ruhm.
Da wagt mein Geist, sich selbst zu überfliegen;
Hier möcht’ ich kämpfen, dies möcht’ ich besiegen.
[20] Ibid., Act v., _Grosser Vorhof des Palasts_:
Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen
Nicht in Aeonen untergehn.
[21] _Faust_, Part ii. Act iv., _Hochgebirg_:
Wer befehlen soll
Muss im Befehlen Seligkeit empfinden.
Ihm ist die Brust von hohem Willen voll,
Doch was er will, es darf’s kein Mensch ergründen.
[22] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Mitternacht_:
Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt:
Ein jed’ Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren,
Was nicht genügte, liess ich fahren,
Was mich entwischte, liess ich ziehn.
[23] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Grosser Vorhof des Palasts_:
Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
[24] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Himmel_:
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den konnen wir erlösen.
[25] Ibid.:
Wir wurden früh entfernt
Von Lebechören;
Doch dieser hat gelernt,
Er wird uns lehren.
[26] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Mitternacht_:
Noch hab’ ich mich ins Freie nicht gekämpft.
Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen,
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen,
Stünd’ ich, Natur, vor dir ein Mann allein.
Da wär’s der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.
[27] _Faust_, Part ii, Act v., _Himmel_:
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist es gethan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
[28] Cf. _Trilogie der Leidenschaft_, 1823:
Mich treibt umher ein unbezwinglich Sehnen;
Da bleibt kein Rat als grenzenlose Thränen....
Und so das Herz erleichtert merkt behende
Dass es noch lebt und schlägt und möchte schlagen,...
Da fühlte sich--o, dass es ewig bliebe!--
Das Doppelglück der Töne wie der Liebe.
[29] _Aus dem Nachlass, Abkündigung:_
Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht;
Es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende,
Allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.
V
CONCLUSION
It may be possible, after studying these three philosophical poets, to
establish some comparison between them. By a comparison is not meant a
discussion as to which of our poets is the best. Each is the best in his
way, and none is the best in every way. To express a preference is not
so much a criticism as a personal confession. If it were a question of
the relative pleasure a man might get from each poet in turn, this
pleasure would differ according to the man’s temperament, his period of
life, the language he knew best, and the doctrine that was most familiar
to him. By a comparison is meant a review of the analysis we have
already made of the type of imagination and philosophy embodied in each
of the poets, to see what they have in common, how they differ, or what
order they will fall into from different points of view. Thus we have
just seen that Goethe, in his _Faust_, presents experience in its
immediacy, variety, and apparent groundlessness; and that he presents it
as an episode, before and after which other episodes, differing from it
more and more as you recede, may be conceived to come. There is no
possible totality in this, for there is no known ground. Turn to
Lucretius, and the difference is striking. Lucretius is the poet of
substance. The ground is what he sees everywhere; and by seeing the
ground, he sees also the possible products of it. Experience appears in
Lucretius, not as each man comes upon it in his own person, but as the
scientific observer views it from without. Experience for him is a
natural, inevitable, monotonous round of feelings, involved in the
operations of nature. The ground and the limits of experience have
become evident together.
In Dante, on the other hand, we have a view of experience also in its
totality, also from above and, in a sense, from outside; but the
external point of reference is moral, not physical, and what interests
the poet is what experience is best, what processes lead to a supreme,
self-justifying, indestructible sort of existence. Goethe is the poet of
life; Lucretius the poet of nature; Dante the poet of salvation. Goethe
gives us what is most fundamental,--the turbid flux of sense, the cry of
the heart, the first tentative notions of art and science, which magic
or shrewdness might hit upon. Lucretius carries us one step farther. Our
wisdom ceases to be impressionistic and casual. It rests on
understanding of things, so that what happiness remains to us does not
deceive us, and we can possess it in dignity and peace. Knowledge of
what is possible is the beginning of happiness. Dante, however, carries
us much farther than that. He, too, has knowledge of what is possible
and impossible. He has collected the precepts of old philosophers and
saints, and the more recent examples patent in society around him, and
by their help has distinguished the ambitions that may be wisely
indulged in this life from those which it is madness to foster,--the
first being called virtue and piety and the second folly and sin. What
makes such knowledge precious is not only that it sketches in general
the scope and issue of life, but that it paints in the detail as
well,--the detail of what is possible no less than that (more familiar
to tragic poets) of what is impossible.
Lucretius’ notion, for instance, of what is positively worth while or
attainable is very meagre: freedom from superstition, with so much
natural science as may secure that freedom, friendship, and a few cheap
and healthful animal pleasures. No love, no patriotism, no enterprise,
no religion. So, too, in what is forbidden us, Lucretius sees only
generalities,--the folly of passion, the blight of superstition. Dante,
on the contrary, sees the various pitfalls of life with intense
distinctness; and seeing them clearly, and how fatal each is, he sees
also why men fall into them, the dream that leads men astray, and the
sweetness of those goods that are impossible. Feeling, even in what we
must ultimately call evil, the soul of good that attracts us to it, he
feels, in good all its loveliness and variety. Where, except in Dante,
can we find so many stars that differ from other stars in glory; so
many delightful habitations for excellences; so many distinct beauties
of form, accent, thought, and intention; so many delicacies and
heroisms? Dante is the master of those who know by experience what is
worth knowing by experience; he is the master of _distinction_.
Here, then, are our three poets and their messages: Goethe, with human
life in its immediacy, treated romantically; Lucretius, with a vision of
nature and of the limits of human life; Dante, with spiritual mastery of
that life, and a perfect knowledge of good and evil.
You may stop at what stage you will, according to your sense of what is
real and important; for what one man calls higher another man calls
unreal; and what one man feels to be strength smells rank to another. In
the end, we should not be satisfied with any one of our poets if we had
to drop the other two. It is true that taken formally, and in respect to
their type of philosophy and imagination, Dante is on a higher plane
than Lucretius, and Lucretius on a higher plane than Goethe. But the
plane on which a poet dwells is not everything; much depends on what he
brings up with him to that level. Now there is a great deal, a very
great deal, in Goethe that Lucretius does not know of. Not knowing of
it, Lucretius cannot carry this fund of experience up to the
intellectual and naturalistic level; he cannot transmute this abundant
substance of Goethe’s by his higher insight and clearer faith; he has
not woven so much into his poem. So that while to see nature, as
Lucretius sees it, is a greater feat than merely to live hard in a
romantic fashion, and produces a purer and more exalted poem than
Goethe’s magical medley, yet this medley is full of images, passions,
memories, and introspective wisdom that Lucretius could not have dreamed
of. The intellect of Lucretius rises, but rises comparatively empty; his
vision sees things as a whole, and in their right places, but sees very
little of them; he is quite deaf to their intricacy, to their birdlike
multiform little souls. These Goethe knows admirably; with these he
makes a natural concert, all the more natural for being sometimes
discordant, sometimes overloaded and dull. It is necessary to revert
from Lucretius to Goethe to get at the volume of life.
So, too, if we rise from Lucretius to Dante, there is much left behind
which we cannot afford to lose. Dante may seem at first sight to have a
view of nature not less complete and clear than that of Lucretius; a
view even more efficacious than materialism for fixing the limits of
human destiny and marking the path to happiness. But there is an
illusion here. Dante’s idea of nature is not genuine; it is not
sincerely put together out of reasoned observation. It is a view of
nature intercepted by myths and worked out by dialectic. Consequently,
he has no true idea either of the path to happiness or of its real
conditions. His notion of nature is an inverted image of the moral
world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon the sky. It is a mirage.
Now, while to know evil, and especially good, in all their forms and
inward implications is a far greater thing than to know the natural
conditions of good and evil, or their real distribution in space and
time, yet the higher philosophy is not safe if the lower philosophy is
wanting or is false. Of course it is not safe practically; but it is not
safe even poetically. There is an attenuated texture and imagery in the
_Divine Comedy_. The voice that sings it, from beginning to end, is a
thin boy-treble, all wonder and naïveté. This art does not smack of
life, but of somnambulism. The reason is that the intellect has been
hypnotized by a legendary and verbal philosophy. It has been unmanned,
curiously enough, by an excess of humanism; by the fond delusion that
man and his moral nature are at the centre of the universe. Dante is
always thinking of the divine order of history and of the spheres; he
believes in controlling and chastening the individual soul; so that he
seems to be a cosmic poet, and to have escaped the anthropocentric
conceit of romanticism. But he has not escaped it. For, as we have seen,
this golden cage in which his soul sings is artificial; it is
constructed on purpose to satisfy and glorify human distinctions and
human preferences. The bird is not in his native wilds; man is not in
the bosom of nature. He is, in a moral sense, still at the centre of the
universe; his ideal is the cause of everything. He is the appointed lord
of the earth, the darling of heaven; and history is a brief and
prearranged drama, with Judea and Rome for its chief theatre.
Some of these illusions are already abandoned; all are undermined.
Sometimes, in moments when we are unnerved and uninspired, we may
regret the ease with which Dante could reconcile himself to a world, so
imagined as to suit human fancy, and flatter human will. We may envy
Dante his ignorance of nature, which enabled him to suppose that he
dominated it, as an infinite and exuberant nature cannot be dominated
by any of its parts. In the end, however, knowledge is good for the
imagination. Dante himself thought so; and his work proved that he was
right, by infinitely excelling that of all ignorant contemporary poets.
The illusion of knowledge is better than ignorance for a poet; but the
reality of knowledge would be better than the illusion; it would
stretch the mind over a vaster and more stimulating scene; it would
concentrate the will upon a more attainable, distinct, and congenial
happiness. The growth of what is known increases the scope of what may
be imagined and hoped for. Throw open to the young poet the infinity of
nature; let him feel the precariousness of life, the variety of
purposes, civilizations, and religions even upon this little planet;
let him trace the triumphs and follies of art and philosophy, and their
perpetual resurrections--like that of the downcast Faust. If, under the
stimulus of such a scene, he does not some day compose a natural comedy
as much surpassing Dante’s divine comedy in sublimity and richness as
it will surpass it in truth, the fault will not lie with the subject,
which is inviting and magnificent, but with the halting genius that
cannot render that subject worthily.
Undoubtedly, the universe so displayed would not be without its dark
shadows and its perpetual tragedies. That is in the nature of things.
Dante’s cosmos, for all its mythical idealism, was not so false as not
to have a hell in it. Those rolling spheres, with all their lights and
music, circled for ever about hell. Perhaps in the real life of nature
evil may not prove to be so central as that. It would seem to be rather
a sort of inevitable but incidental friction, capable of being
diminished indefinitely, as the world is better known and the will is
better educated. In Dante’s spheres there could be no discord whatever;
but at the core of them was eternal woe. In the star-dust of our physics
discords are everywhere, and harmony is only tentative and approximate,
as it is in the best earthly life; but at the core there is nothing
sinister, only freedom, innocence, inexhaustible possibilities of all
sorts of happiness. These possibilities may tempt future poets to
describe them; but meantime, if we wish to have a vision of nature not
fundamentally false, we must revert from Dante to Lucretius.
Obviously, what would be desirable, what would constitute a truly
philosophical or comprehensive poet, would be the union of the insights
and gifts which our three poets have possessed. This union is not
impossible. The insights may be superposed one on the other. Experience
in all its extent, what Goethe represents, should be at the foundation.
But as the extent of experience is potentially infinite, as there are
all sorts of worlds possible and all sorts of senses and habits of
thought, the widest survey would still leave the poet, where Goethe
leaves us, with a sense of an infinity beyond. He would be at liberty to
summon from the limbo of potentiality any form that interested him;
poetry and art would recover their early freedom; there would be no
beauties forbidden and none prescribed. For it is a very liberating and
sublime thing to summon up, like Faust, the image of _all_ experience.
Unless that has been done, we leave the enemy in our rear; whatever
interpretations we offer for experience will become impertinent and
worthless if the experience we work upon is no longer at hand. Nor will
any construction, however broadly based, have an _absolute_ authority;
the indomitable freedom of life to be more, to be new, to be what it has
not entered into the heart of man as yet to conceive, must always remain
standing. With that freedom goes the modesty of reason, both in physics
and in morals, that can lay claim only to partial knowledge, and to the
ordering of a particular soul, or city, or civilization.
Poetry and philosophy, however, are civilized arts; they are proper to
some particular genius, which has succeeded in flowering at a particular
time and place. A poet who merely swam out into the sea of sensibility,
and tried to picture all possible things, real or unreal, human or
inhuman, would bring materials only to the workshop of art; he would not
be an artist. To the genius of Goethe he must add that of Lucretius and
Dante.
There are two directions in which it seems fitting that rational art
should proceed, on the basis which a limited experience can give it. Art
may come to buttress a particular form of life, or it may come to
express it. All that we call industry, science, business, morality,
buttresses our life; it informs us about our conditions and adjusts us
to them; it equips us for life; it lays out the ground for the game we
are to play. This preliminary labour, however, need not be servile. To
do it is also to exercise our faculties; and in that exercise our
faculties may grow free,--as the imagination of Lucretius, in tracing
the course of the atoms, dances and soars most congenially. One
extension of art, then, would be in the direction of doing artistically,
joyfully, sympathetically, whatever we have to do. Literature in
particular (which is involved in history, politics, science, affairs)
might be throughout a work of art. It would become so not by being
ornate, but by being appropriate; and the sense of a great precision and
justness would come over us as we read or wrote. It would delight us; it
would make us see how beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being
observant, economical, and sincere. The philosophical or comprehensive
poet, like Homer, like Shakespeare, would be a poet of business. He
would have a taste for the world in which he lived, and a clean view of
it.
There remains a second form of rational art, that of expressing the
ideal towards which we would move under these improved conditions. For
as we react we manifest an inward principle, expressed in that reaction.
We have a nature that selects its own direction, and the direction in
which practical arts shall transform the world. The outer life is for
the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and
conquest for the sake of self-possession. This inner life is wonderfully
redundant; there is, namely, very much more in it than a consciousness
of those acts by which the body adjusts itself to its surroundings. _Am
farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben_; each sense has its arbitrary
quality, each language its arbitrary euphony and prosody; every game has
its creative laws, every soul its own tender reverberations and secret
dreams. Life has a margin of play which might grow broader, if the
sustaining nucleus were more firmly established in the world. To the art
of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well. To
play with nature and make it decorative, to play with the overtones of
life and make them delightful, is a sort of art. It is the ultimate, the
most artistic sort of art, but it will never be practised successfully
so long as the other sort of art is in a backward state; for if we do
not know our environment, we shall mistake our dreams for a part of it,
and so spoil our science by making it fantastic, and our dreams by
making them obligatory. The art and the religion of the past, as we see
conspicuously in Dante, have fallen into this error. To correct it would
be to establish a new religion and a new art, based on moral liberty and
on moral courage.
Who shall be the poet of this double insight? He has never existed, but
he is needed nevertheless. It is time some genius should appear to
reconstitute the shattered picture of the world. He should live in the
continual presence of all experience, and respect it; he should at the
same time understand nature, the ground of that experience; and he
should also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own
passions, and for all the colours of his possible happiness. All that
can inspire a poet is contained in this task, and nothing less than this
task would exhaust a poet’s inspiration. We may hail this needed genius
from afar. Like the poets in Dante’s limbo, when Virgil returns among
them, we may salute him, saying: _Onorate l’altissimo poeta_. Honour the
most high poet, honour the highest possible poet. But this supreme poet
is in limbo still.