The impulse that would throw over as equally worthless every

INTERPRETATIONS

OF

POETRY AND RELIGION

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1900

PREFACE

The following volume is composed of a number of papers written at

various times and already partially printed; they are now revised and

gathered together in the hope that they may lead the reader, from

somewhat different points of approach, to a single idea. This idea is

that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely

in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry

is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it

merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry.

It would naturally follow from this conception that religious doctrines

would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters

of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of

religion with science and of the vain and bitter controversies of

sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion

in the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the sphere of reality,

and forgets that its proper concern is to express the ideal. For the

dignity of religion, like that of poetry and of every moral ideal, lies

precisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of the meanings

and values of life, in its anticipation of perfection; so that the

excellence of religion is due to an idealization of experience which,

while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily

false if treated as science. Its function is rather to draw from

reality materials for an image of that ideal to which reality ought

to conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world we

crave.

It also follows from our general conception that poetry has a universal

and a moral function. Its rudimentary essays in the region of fancy

and pleasant sound, as well as its idealization of episodes in human

existence, are only partial exercises in an art that has all time and

all experience for its natural subject-matter and all the possibilities

of being for its ultimate theme. As religion is deflected from its

course when it is confused with a record of facts or of natural laws,

so poetry is arrested in its development if it remains an unmeaning

play of fancy without relevance to the ideals and purposes of life. In

that relevance lies its highest power. As its elementary pleasantness

comes from its response to the demands of the ear, so its deepest

beauty comes from its response to the ultimate demands of the soul.

This theory can hardly hope for much commendation either from the

apologists of theology or from its critics. The mass of mankind is

divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for

reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals,

but mad. The expedient of recognizing facts as facts and accepting

ideals as ideals,--and this is all we propose,--although apparently

simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.

If, therefore, the champion of any orthodoxy should be offended at our

conception, which would reduce his artful cosmos to an allegory, all

that could be said to mitigate his displeasure would be that our view

is even less favourable to his opponents than to himself.

The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by minimizing

its expression, both theoretic and devotional, seems from this point

of view to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizing

religious aims; it subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith

becomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retains

only a stark and superfluous principle of superstition. For meagre and

abstract as may be the content of such a religion, it contains all

the venom of absolute pretensions; it is no less cursed than the more

developed systems with a controversial unrest and with a consequent

undertone of constraint and suspicion. It tortures itself with the

same circular proofs in its mistaken ambition to enter the plane of

vulgar reality and escape its native element of ideas. It casts a

greater blight than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous freedom

of thought. For the respect exacted by an establishment is limited and

external, and not greater than its traditional forms probably deserve,

as normal expressions of human feeling and apt symbols of moral truth.

A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind remains, under

such an establishment, inwardly and happily free; the conscience is not

intimidated, the imagination is not tied up. But the preoccupations of

a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nominally allowed,

bias all vision, and turn philosophy itself, which should be the purest

of delights and consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the

soul. In such a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be

illusion. Mythology cannot become science by being reduced in bulk, but

it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having.

On the other hand, the positivistic school of criticism would seem, if

our theory is right, to have overlooked in its programme the highest

functions of human nature. The environing world can justify itself to

the mind only by the free life which it fosters there. All observation

is observation of brute fact, all discipline is mere repression, until

these facts digested and this discipline embodied in humane impulses

become the starting-point for a creative movement of the imagination,

the firm basis for ideal constructions in society, religion, and art.

Only as conditions of these human activities can the facts of nature

and history become morally intelligible or practically important. In

themselves they are trivial incidents, gossip of the Fates, cacklings

of their inexhaustible garrulity. To regard the function of man as

accomplished when these chance happenings have been recorded by him or

contributed to by his impulsive action, is to ignore his reason, his

privilege,--shared for the rest with every living creature,--of using

Nature as food and substance for his own life. This human life is not

merely animal and passionate. The best and keenest part of it consists

in that very gift of creation and government which, together with all

the transcendental functions of his own mind, man has significantly

attributed to God as to his highest ideal. Not to see in this rational

activity the purpose and standard of all life is to have left human

nature half unread. It is to look to the removal of certain incidental

obstacles in the work of reason as to the solution of its positive

tasks. In comparison with such apathetic naturalism, all the errors

and follies of religion are worthy of indulgent sympathy, since they

represent an effort, however misguided, to interpret and to use the

materials of experience for moral ends, and to measure the value of

reality by its relation to the ideal.

The moral function of the imagination and the poetic nature of religion

form, then, the theme of the following pages. It may not be amiss to

announce it here, as the rather miscellaneous subjects of these essays

might at first sight obscure the common import of them all.

CONTENTS

I. UNDERSTANDING, IMAGINATION, AND MYSTICISM

II. THE HOMERIC HYMNS

III. THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM

IV. THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA

V. PLATONIC LOVE IN SOME ITALIAN POETS

VI. THE ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE

VII. THE POETRY OF BARBARISM

VIII. EMERSON

IX. A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION

X. THE ELEMENTS AND FUNCTION OF POETRY

I

UNDERSTANDING, IMAGINATION, AND MYSTICISM

When we consider the situation of the human mind in Nature, its limited

plasticity and few channels of communication with the outer world, we

need not wonder that we grope for light, or that we find incoherence

and instability in human systems of ideas. The wonder rather is that we

have done so well, that in the chaos of sensations and passions that

fills the mind, we have found any leisure for self-concentration and

reflection, and have succeeded in gathering even a light harvest of

experience from our distracted labours. Our occasional madness is less

wonderful than our occasional sanity. Relapses into dreams are to be

expected in a being whose brief existence is so like a dream; but who

could have been sure of this sturdy and indomitable perseverance in the

work of reason in spite of all checks and discouragements?

The resources of the mind are not commensurate with its ambition. Of

the five senses, three are of little use in the formation of permanent

notions: a fourth, sight, is indeed vivid and luminous, but furnishes

transcripts of things so highly coloured and deeply modified by the

medium of sense, that a long labour of analysis and correction is

needed before satisfactory conceptions can be extracted from it. For

this labour, however, we are endowed with the requisite instrument.

We have memory and we have certain powers of synthesis, abstraction,

reproduction, invention,--in a word, we have understanding. But this

faculty of understanding has hardly begun its work of deciphering the

hieroglyphics of sense and framing an idea of reality, when it is

crossed by another faculty--the imagination. Perceptions do not remain

in the mind, as would be suggested by the trite simile of the seal

and the wax, passive and changeless, until time wear off their sharp

edges and make them fade. No, perceptions fall into the brain rather

as seeds into a furrowed field or even as sparks into a keg of powder.

Each image breeds a hundred more, sometimes slowly and subterraneously,

sometimes (when a passionate train is started) with a sudden burst of

fancy. The mind, exercised by its own fertility and flooded by its

inner lights, has infinite trouble to keep a true reckoning of its

outward perceptions. It turns from the frigid problems of observation

to its own visions; it forgets to watch the courses of what should be

its "pilot stars." Indeed, were it not for the power of convention in

which, by a sort of mutual cancellation of errors, the more practical

and normal conceptions are enshrined, the imagination would carry men

wholly away,--the best men first and the vulgar after them. Even as it

is, individuals and ages of fervid imagination usually waste themselves

in dreams, and must disappear before the race, saddened and dazed,

perhaps, by the memory of those visions, can return to its plodding

thoughts.

Five senses, then, to gather a small part of the infinite influences

that vibrate in Nature, a moderate power of understanding to interpret

those senses, and an irregular, passionate fancy to overlay that

interpretation--such is the endowment of the human mind. And what is

its ambition? Nothing less than to construct a picture of all reality,

to comprehend its own origin and that of the universe, to discover

the laws of both and prophesy their destiny. Is not the disproportion

enormous? Are not confusions and profound contradictions to be looked

for in an attempt to build so much out of so little?

Yet the metaphysical ambition we speak of cannot be abandoned, because

whatever picture of things we may carry about in our heads we are bound

to regard as a map of reality; although we may mark certain tracts

of it "unexplored country," the very existence of such regions is

vouched for only by our representation, and is necessarily believed

to correspond to our idea. All we can do is, without abandoning

the aspiration to knowledge which is the inalienable birthright of

reason, to control as best we may the formation of our conceptions; to

arrange them according to their derivation and measure them by their

applicability in life, so prudently watching over their growth that we

may be spared the deepest of sorrows--to survive the offspring of our

own thought.

The inadequacy of each of our faculties is what occasions the intrusion

of some other faculty into its field. The defect of sense calls in

imagination, the defect of imagination calls in reasoning, the defect

of reasoning divination. If our senses were clairvoyant and able to

observe all that is going on in the world, if our instincts were

steady, prompting us to adequate reactions upon these observations, the

fancy might remain free. We should not need to call upon it to piece

out the imperfections of sense and reflection, but we should employ it

only in avowed poetry, only in building dream-worlds alongside of the

real, not interfering with the latter or confusing it, but repeating

its pattern with as many variations as the fertility of our minds

could supply. As it is, the imagination is brought into the service

of sense and instinct, and made to do the work of intelligence. This

substitution is the more readily effected, in that imagination and

intelligence do not differ in their origin, but only in their validity.

Understanding is an applicable fiction, a kind of wit with a practical

use. Common sense and science live in a world of expurgated mythology,

such as Plato wished his poets to compose, a world where the objects

are imaginative in their origin and essence, but useful, abstract, and

beneficent in their suggestions. The sphere of common sense and science

is concentric with the sphere of fancy; both move in virtue of the same

imaginative impulses. The eventual distinction between intelligence and

imagination is ideal; it arises when we discriminate various functions

in a life that is dynamically one. Those conceptions which, after

they have spontaneously arisen, prove serviceable in practice, and

capable of verification in sense, we call ideas of the understanding.

The others remain ideas of the imagination. The shortness of life,

the distractions of passion, and the misrepresentation to which all

transmitted knowledge is subject, have made the testing of ideas by

practice extremely slow in the history of mankind. Hence the impurity

of our knowledge, its confusion with fancy, and its painful inadequacy

to interpret the whole world of human interests. These shortcomings are

so many invitations to foreign powers to intervene, so many occasions

for new waves of imagination to sweep away the landmarks of our old

labour, and flood the whole mind with impetuous dreams.

It is accordingly the profounder minds that commonly yield to the

imagination, because it is these minds that are capable of feeling

the greatness of the problems of life and the inadequacy of the

understanding, with its present resources, to solve them. The same

minds are, moreover, often swayed by emotion, by the ever-present

desire to find a noble solution to all questions, perhaps a solution

already hallowed by authority and intertwined inextricably, for those

who have always accepted it, with the sanctions of spiritual life.

Such a coveted conclusion may easily be one which the understanding,

with its basis in sense and its demand for verification, may not be

able to reach. Therefore the impassioned soul must pass beyond the

understanding, or else go unsatisfied; and unless it be as disciplined

as it is impassioned it will not tolerate dissatisfaction. From what

quarter, then, will it draw the wider views, the deeper harmonies,

which it craves? Only from the imagination. There is no other faculty

left to invoke. The imagination, therefore, must furnish to religion

and to metaphysics those large ideas tinctured with passion, those

supersensible forms shrouded in awe, in which alone a mind of great

sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects. Thus the stone

which the builder, understanding, rejected, becomes the chief stone

of the corner; the intuitions which science could not use remain the

inspiration of poetry and religion.

The imagination, when thus employed to anticipate or correct the

conclusions of the understanding, is of course not called imagination

by those, who appeal to it. The religious teachers call it prophecy or

revelation, the philosophers call it a higher reason. But these names

are merely eulogistic synonyms for imagination, implying (what is

perfectly possible) that the imagination has not misled us. They imply

on the contrary that in the given instances the imagination has hit

upon an ultimate truth. A prophet, unless he be the merely mechanical

vehicle of truths he does not understand, cannot be conceived as

anything but a man of imagination, whose visions miraculously mirror

the truth. A metaphysician who transcends the intellect by his reason

can be conceived only as using his imagination to such good purpose

as to divine by it the ideal laws of reality or the ultimate goals of

moral effort. His reason is an imagination that succeeds, an intuition

that guesses the principle of experience. But if this intuition were of

such a nature that experience could verify it, then that higher reason

or imagination would be brought down to the level of the understanding;

for understanding, as we have defined it, is itself a kind of

imagination, an imagination prophetic of experience, a spontaneity of

thought by which the science of perception is turned into the art of

life. The same absence of verification distinguishes revelation from

science; for when the prophecies of faith are verified, the function

of faith is gone. Faith and the higher reason of the metaphysicians

are therefore forms of imagination believed to be avenues to truth,

as dreams or oracles may sometimes be truthful, not because their

necessary correspondence to truth can be demonstrated, for then they

would be portions of science, but because a man dwelling on those

intuitions is conscious of a certain moral transformation, of a certain

warmth and energy of life. This emotion, heightening his ideas and

giving them power over his will, he calls faith or high philosophy, and

under its dominion he is able to face his destiny with enthusiasm, or

at least with composure.

The imagination, even when its premonitions are not wholly justified

by subsequent experience, has thus a noble role to play in the life

of man. Without it his thoughts would be not only far too narrow

to represent, although it were symbolically, the greatness of the

universe, but far too narrow even to render the scope of his own

life and the conditions of his practical welfare. Without poetry and

religion the history of mankind would have been darker than it is. Not

only would emotional life have been poorer, but the public conscience,

the national and family spirit, so useful for moral organization and

discipline, would hardly have become articulate. By what a complex

and uninspired argumentation would the pure moralist have to insist

upon those duties which the imagination enforces so powerfully in

oaths sworn before the gods, in commandments written by the finger of

God upon stone tablets, in visions of hell and heaven, in chivalrous

love and loyalty, and in the sense of family dignity and honour? What

intricate, what unavailing appeals to positive interests would have to

be made before those quick reactions could be secured in large bodies

of people which can be produced by the sight of a flag or the sound

of a name? The imagination is the great unifier of humanity. Men's

perceptions may be various, their powers of understanding very unequal;

but the imagination is, as it were, the self-consciousness of instinct,

the contribution which the inner capacity and demand of the mind makes

to experience. To indulge the imagination is to express the universal

self, the common and contagious element in all individuals, that

rudimentary potency which they all share. To stimulate the imagination

is to produce the deepest, the most pertinacious emotions. To repress

it is to chill the soul, so that even the clearest perception of the

truth remains without the joy and impetuosity of conviction. The

part played by imagination is thus indispensable; but obviously the

necessity and beneficence of this contribution makes the dangers

of it correspondingly great. Wielding a great power, exercising an

omnipresent function, the imagination may abuse a great force. While

its inspirations coincide with what would be the dictates of reason,

were reason audible in the world, all is well, and the progress of man

is accelerated by his visions; but being a principle _a priori_ the

imagination is an irresponsible principle; its rightness is an inward

rightness, and everything in the real world may turn out to be disposed

otherwise than as it would wish. Our imaginative preconceptions

are then obstacles to the perception of fact and of rational duty;

the faith that stimulated our efforts and increased our momentum,

multiplies our wanderings. The too hasty organization of our thoughts

becomes the cause of their more prolonged disorganization, for to the

natural obscurity of things and the difficulty of making them fit

together among themselves, we add the cross lights of our prejudices

and the impossibility of fitting reality into the frame we have made

for it in our ignorance of its constitution and extent. And as we love

our hopes, and detest the experience that seems to contradict them,

we add fanaticism to our confusion. The habits of the imagination, in

conflict with the facts of sense, thus come to cloud science with

passion, with fiction, with sentimental prejudice. Nor is this the

end of our troubles. For Imagination herself suffers violence in this

struggle; she seeks to reduce herself to conformity with existence,

in the hope of vindicating her nominal authority at the price of some

concessions. She begins to feign that she demanded nothing but what

she finds. Thus she loses her honesty and freedom, becomes a flatterer

of things instead of the principle of their ideal correction, and in

the attempt to prove herself prophetic and literally valid (as in a

moment of infatuation she had fancied herself to be) she forfeits that

symbolic truth, that inner propriety, which gave her a moral value.

Thus the false steps of the imagination lead to a contorted science and

to a servile ideal.

These complications not unnaturally inspire discouragement and a sense

of the hopeless relativity of human thought. Indeed, if there be any

special endowment of mind and body called human nature, as there seems

to be, it is obvious that all human experience must be relative to

that. But the truth, the absolute reality, surrounds and precedes

these operations of finite faculty. What value, then, we may say, have

these various ideals or perceptions, or the conflicts between them?

Are not our senses as human, as "subjective" as our wills? Is not the

understanding as visionary as the fancy? Does it not transform the

Unknowable into as remote a symbol as does the vainest dream?

The answer which a rational philosophy would make to these questions

would be a double one. It is true that every idea is equally relative

to human nature and that nothing can be represented in the human mind

except by the operation of human faculties. But it is not true that all

these products of human ideation are of equal value, since they are not

equally conducive to human purposes or satisfactory to human demands.

The impulse that would throw over as equally worthless every product

of human art, because it is not indistinguishable from some alleged

external reality, does not perceive the serious self-contradictions

under which it labours. In the first place the notion of an external

reality is a human notion; our reason makes that hypothesis, and its

verification in our experience is one of the ideals of science, as its

validity is one of the assumptions of daily life. In throwing over all

human ideas, because they are infected with humanity, all human ideas

are being sacrificed to one of them--the idea of an absolute reality.

If this idea, being human, deserved that such sacrifices should be made

for it, have the other notions of the mind no rights? Furthermore, even

if we granted for the sake of argument a reality which our thoughts

were essentially helpless to represent, whence comes the duty of our

thoughts to represent it? Whence comes the value of this unattainable

truth? From an ideal of human reason. We covet truth. So that the

attempt to surrender all human science as relative and all human ideals

as trivial is founded on a blind belief in one human idea and an

absolute surrender to one human passion.

In spite of these contradictions, which only a dispassionate logic

could thoroughly unravel, the enthusiast is apt to rush on. The vision

of absolute truth and absolute reality intoxicates him, and as he

is too subtle a thinker, too inward a man, to accept the content of

his senses or the conventions of his intelligence for unqualified

verities, he fortifies himself against them with the consciousness of

their relativity, and seeks to rise above them in his meditations.

But to rise to what? To some more elaborate idea? To some object,

like a scientific cosmos or a religious creed, put together by longer

and more indirect processes than those of common perception? Surely

not. If I renounce my senses and vulgar intellect because they are

infected with finitude and smell of humanity, how shall I accept

a work of art, a product of reasoning, or an idol made originally

with hands and now encrusted all over, like the statue of Glaucus,

with traditional accretions? Poetry, science, and religion, in their

positive constructions, are more human, more conditioned, than are the

senses and the common understanding themselves. The lover of inviolate

reality must not look to them. If the data of human knowledge must be

rejected as subjective, how much more should we reject the inferences

made from those data by human thought. The way of true wisdom,

therefore, if true wisdom is to deal with the Absolute, can only lie

in abstention: neither the senses nor the common understanding, and

much less the superstructure raised upon these by imagination, logic,

or tradition, must delude us: we must keep our thoughts fixed upon the

inanity of all this in comparison with the unthinkable truth, with the

undivided and unimaginable reality. Everything, says the mystic, is

nothing, in comparison with the One.

This confusion, the logical contradiction of which we have just seen,

may, for lack of a more specific word, be called mysticism. It consists

in the surrender of a category of thought on account of the discovery

of its relativity. If I saw or reasoned or judged by such a category,

I should be seeing, reasoning, or judging in a specific manner, in

a manner conditioned by my finite nature. But the specific and the

finite, I feel, are odious; let me therefore aspire to see, reason and

judge in no specific or finite manner--that is, not to see, reason or

judge at all. So I shall be like the Infinite, nay I shall become one

with the Infinite and (marvellous thought!) one with the One.

The ideal of mysticism is accordingly exactly contrary to the ideal

of reason; instead of perfecting human nature it seeks to abolish it;

instead of building a better world, it would undermine the foundations

even of the world we have built already; instead of developing our mind

to greater scope and precision, it would return to the condition of

protoplasm--to the blessed consciousness of an Unutterable Reality. In

the primary stages, of course, mysticism does not venture to abolish

all our ideas, or to renounce all our categories of thought. Thus many

Christian mystics have still clung, out of respect for authority,

to traditional theology, and many philosophical mystics have made

some room for life and science in the post-scripts which they, like

Parmenides, have appended to the blank monism of their systems. But

such concessions or hesitations are inconsistent with the mystical

spirit which will never be satisfied, if fully developed and fearless,

with anything short of Absolute Nothing.

For the very reason, however, that mysticism is a tendency to

obliterate distinctions, a partial mysticism often serves to bring

out with wonderful intensity those underlying strata of experience

which it has not yet decomposed. The razing of the edifice of reason

may sometimes discover its foundations. Or the disappearance of one

department of activity may throw the mind with greater energy into

another. So Spinoza, who combined mysticism in morals with rationalism

in science, can bring out the unqualified naturalism of his system

with a purity and impressiveness impossible to men who still retain an

ideal world, and seek to direct endeavour as well as to describe it.

Having renounced all ideal categories, Spinoza has only the material

categories left with which to cover the ground. He thus acquires all

the concentrated intensity, all the splendid narrowness, which had

belonged to Lucretius, while his mystical treatment of the spheres

which Lucretius simply ignored, gives him the appearance of a greater

profundity. So an ordinary Christian who is mystical, let us say,

about time and space, may use his transcendentalism in that sphere to

intensify his positivism in theology, and to emphasize his whole-souled

surrender to a devout life.

What is impossible is to be a transcendentalist "all 'round." In that

case there would be nothing left to transcend; the civil war of the

mind would have ended in the extermination of all parties. The art of

mysticism is to be mystical in spots and to aim the heavy guns of your

transcendental philosophy against those realities or those ideas which

you find particularly galling. Planted on your dearest dogma, on your

most precious postulate, you may then transcend everything else to your

heart's content. You may say with an air of enlightened profundity

that nothing is "really" right or wrong, because in Nature all things

are regular and necessary, and God cannot act for purposes as if

his will were not already accomplished; your mysticism in religion

and morals is kept standing, as it were, by the stiff backing which

is furnished by your materialistic cosmology. Or you may say with a

tone of devout rapture that all sights and sounds are direct messages

from Divine Providence to the soul, without any objects "really"

existing in space; your mysticism about the world of perception and

scientific inference is sustained by the naive theological dogmas

which you substitute for the conceptions of common sense. Yet among

these partialities and blind denials a man's positive insight seems to

thrive, and he fortifies and concentrates himself on his chosen ground

by his arbitrary exclusions. The patient art of rationalizing the

various sides of life, the observational as well as the moral, without

confusing them, is an art apparently seldom given to the haste and

pugnacity of philosophers.

Thus mysticism, although a principle of dissolution, carries with it

the safeguard that it can never be consistently applied. We reach it

only in exceptional moments of intuition, from which we descend to our

pots and pans with habits and instincts virtually unimpaired. Life goes

on; virtues and affections endure, none the worse, the mystic feels,

for that slight film of unreality which envelops them in a mind not

unacquainted with ecstasy. And although mysticism, left free to express

itself, can have no other goal than Nirvana, yet moderately indulged

in and duly inhibited by a residuum of conventional sanity, it serves

to give a touch of strangeness and elevation to the character and to

suggest superhuman gifts. It is not, however, in the least superhuman.

It is hardly even abnormal, being only an exaggeration of a rational

interest in the highest abstractions. The divine, the universal, the

absolute, even the One, are legitimate conceptions. They are terms

of human thought having as such a meaning in language and a place

in speculation. Those who live in the mind, whose passions are only

audible in the keen overtones of dialectic, are no doubt exalted and

privileged natures, choosing a better part which should not be taken

from them. So the poet and the mathematician have their spheres of

abstract and delicate labour, in which a liberal legislator would not

disturb them. Trouble only arises when the dialectician represents

his rational dreams as knowledge of existences, and the mystic his

excusable raptures as the only way of life. Poets and mathematicians do

not imagine that their pursuits raise them above human limitations and

are no part of human life, but rather its only goal and justification.

Such a pretension would be regarded as madness in the mathematician

or the poet; and is not the mystic as miserably a man? Is he not

embodying, at his best, the analytic power of a logician, or the

imagination of an enthusiast, and, at his worst, the lowest and most

obscure passions of human nature?

Yes, in spite of himself, the mystic remains human. Nothing is

more normal than abstraction. A contemplative mind drops easily

its practical preoccupations, rises easily into an ideal sympathy

with impersonal things. The wheels of the universe have a wonderful

magnetism for the human will. Our consciousness likes to lose itself

in the music of the spheres, a music that finer ears are sometimes

privileged to catch. The better side of mysticism is an æsthetic

interest in large unities and cosmic laws. The æsthetic attitude is

not the moral, but it is not for that reason illegitimate. It gives us

refreshment and a foretaste of that perfect adaptation of things to

our faculties and of our faculties to things which, could it extend

to every part of experience, would constitute the ideal life. Such

happiness is denied us in the concrete; but a hint and example of it

may be gathered by an abstracted element of our nature as it travels

through an abstracted world. Such an indulgence adds to the value of

reality only such value as it may itself have in momentary experience;

it may have a doubtful moral effect on the happy dreamer himself. But

it serves to keep alive the conviction, which a confused experience

might obscure, that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds

us, like music, that there are worlds far removed from the actual

which are yet living and very near to the heart. Such is the fruit

of abstraction when abstraction bears any fruit. If the imagination

merely alienates us from reality, without giving us either a model for

its correction or a glimpse into its structure, it becomes the refuge

of poetical selfishness. Such selfishness is barren, and the fancy,

feeding only on itself, grows leaner every day. Mysticism is usually an

incurable disease. Facts cannot arouse it, since it never denied them.

Reason cannot convince it, for reason is a human faculty, assuming a

validity which it cannot prove. The only thing that can kill mysticism

is its own uninterrupted progress, by which it gradually devours every

function of the soul and at last, by destroying its own natural basis,

immolates itself to its inexorable ideal.

Need we ask, after all these reflections, where we should look for

that expansion and elevation of the mind which the mystic seeks so

passionately and so unintelligently? We can find that expansion, in

the first place, in the imagination itself. That is the true realm of

man's infinity, where novelty may exist without falsity and perpetual

diversity without contradiction. But such exercise of imagination

leaves the world of knowledge untouched. Is there no escape from the

prison, as the mystic thinks it, of science and history which shall

yet not carry us beyond reality? Is there no truth beyond conventional

truth, no life behind human existence?

Certainly. Behind the discovered there is the discoverable, beyond

the actual, the possible. Science and history are not exhausted. In

their determinate directions they are as infinite as fancy in its

indetermination. The spectacle which science and history now spread

before us is as far beyond the experience of an ephemeral insect as any

Absolute can be beyond our own; yet we have put that spectacle together

out of just such sensations as the insect may have--out of this

sunlight and this buzz and these momentary throbs of existence. The

understanding has indeed supervened, but it has supervened not to deny

the validity of those sensations, but to combine their messages. We may

still continue in the same path, by the indefinite extension of science

over a world of experience and of intelligible truth. Is that prospect

insufficient for our ambition? With a world so full of stuff before

him, I can hardly conceive what morbid instinct can tempt a man to look

elsewhere for wider vistas, unless it be unwillingness to endure the

sadness and the discipline of the truth.

But can our situation be made better by refusing to understand it? If

we renounced mysticism altogether and kept imagination in its place,

should we not live in a clearer and safer world, as well as in a

truer? Nay, are we sure that this gradually unfolding, intelligible,

and real world would not turn out to be more congenial and beautiful

than any wilful fiction, since it would be the product of a universal

human labour and the scene of the accumulated sufferings and triumphs

of mankind? When we compare the temple which we call Nature, built of

sights and sounds by memory and understanding, with all the wonderful

worlds evocable by the magician's wand, may we not prefer the humbler

and more lasting edifice, not only as a dwelling, but even as a house

of prayer? It is not always the loftiest architecture that expresses

the deepest soul; the inmost religion of the Pagan haunted his

hearth as that of the Christian his catacombs or his hermitage. So

philosophy is more spiritual in her humility and abstinence than in

her short-lived audacities, and she would do well to inscribe over her

gates what, in an ancient Spanish church, may be seen written near the

steep entrance to a little subterraneous crypt:--

"Wouldst thou pass this lowly door?

Go, and angels greet thee there;

For by this their sacred stair

To descend is still to soar.

Bid a measured silence keep

What thy thoughts be telling o'er;

Sink, to rise with wider sweep

To the heaven of thy rest,

For he climbs the heavens best

Who would touch the deepest deep."

II

THE HOMERIC HYMNS

We of this generation look back upon a variety of religious conceptions

and forms of worship, and a certain unsatisfied hunger in our own souls

attaches our attention to the spectacle. We observe how literally

fables and mysteries were once accepted which can have for us now only

a thin and symbolical meaning. Judging other minds and other ages

by our own, we are tempted to ask if there ever was any fundamental

difference between religion and poetry. Both seem to consist in what

the imagination adds to science, to history, and to morals. Men looked

attentively on the face of Nature: their close struggle with her

compelled them to do so: but before making statistics of her movements

they made dramatizations of her life. The imagination enveloped the

material world, as yet imperfectly studied, and produced the cosmos of

mythology.

Thus the religion of the Greeks was, we might say, nothing but poetry:

nothing but what imagination added to the rudiments of science, to

the first impressions of a mind that pored upon natural phenomena and

responded to them with a quick sense of kinship and comprehension.

The religion of the Hebrews might be called poetry with as good

reason. Their "sense for conduct" and their vivid interest in their

national destiny carried them past any prosaic record of events or

cautious theory of moral and social laws. They rose at once into a

bold dramatic conception of their race's covenant with Heaven: just

such a conception as the playwright would seek out in order to portray

with awful acceleration the ways of passion and fate. Finally, we have

apparently a third kind of poetry in what has been the natural religion

of the detached philosophers of all ages. In them the imagination

touches the precepts of morals and the ideals of reason, attributing

to them a larger scope and more perfect fulfilment than experience can

show them to have. Philosophers ever tend to clothe the harmonies of

their personal thought with universal validity and to assign to their

ideals a latent omnipotence and an ultimate victory over the forces of

unreason. This which is obviously a kind of poetry is at the same time

the spontaneous religion of conscience and thought.

Yet religion in all these cases differs from a mere play of the

imagination in one important respect; it reacts directly upon life;

it is a factor in conduct. Our religion is the poetry in which we

believe. Mere poetry is an ineffectual shadow of life; religion is,

if you will, a phantom also, but a phantom guide. While it tends to

its own expansion, like any growth in the imagination, it tends also

to its application in practice. Such an aim is foreign to poetry. The

inspirations of religion demand fidelity and courageous response on

our part. Faith brings us not only peace, not only the contemplation

of ideal harmonies, but labour and the sword. These two tendencies--to

imaginative growth and to practical embodiment--coexist in every

living religion, but they are not always equally conspicuous. In the

formative ages of Christianity, for instance, while its legends were

being gathered and its dogma fixed, the imaginative expansion absorbed

men's interest; later, when the luxuriant branches of the Church began

to shake off their foliage, and there came a time of year

"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,"

the energy of religious thought, released from the enlargement of

doctrine, spent itself upon a more rigid and watchful application of

the residuum of faith.

In the Pagan religion the element of applicability might seem at first

sight to be lacking, so that nothing would subsist but a poetic fable.

An unbiassed study of antiquity, however, will soon dispel that idea.

Besides the gods whom we may plausibly regard as impersonations of

natural forces, there existed others; the spirits of ancestors, the

gods of the hearth, and the ideal patrons of war and the arts. Even the

gods of Nature inspired reverence and secured a cultus only as they

influenced the well-being of man. The worship of them had a practical

import. The conception of their nature and presence became a sanction

and an inspiration in the conduct of life. When the figments of the

fancy are wholly divorced from reality they can have no clearness or

consistency; they can have no permanence when they are wholly devoid of

utility. The vividness and persistence of the figures of many of the

gods came from the fact that they were associated with institutions and

practices which controlled the conception of them and kept it young.

The fictions of a poet, whatever his genius, do not produce illusion

because they do not attach themselves to realities in the world of

action. They have character without power and names without local

habitations. The gods in the beginning had both. Their image, their

haunts, the reports of their apparitions and miracles, gave a nucleus

of empirical reality to the accretions of legend. The poet who came

to sing their praise, to enlarge upon their exploits, and to explain

their cultus, gave less to the gods in honour than he received from

them in inspiration. All his invention was guided by the genius of the

deity, as represented by the traditions of his shrine. This poetry,

then, even in its most playful mood, is not mere poetry, but religion.

It is a poetry in which men believe; it is a poetry that beautifies and

justifies to their minds the positive facts of their ancestral worship,

their social unity, and their personal conscience.

These general reflections may help us to approach the hymns of Homer

in a becoming spirit. For in them we find the extreme of fancy, the

approach to a divorce between the imagination and the faith of the

worshipper. Consequently there is danger that we may allow ourselves

to read these lives of the gods as the composition of a profane poet.

If we did so we should fail to understand not only their spirit as

a whole but many of their parts, in which notes are struck now of

devotion and affectionate pride, now of gratitude and entreaty. These

may be addressed, it is true, to a being that has just been described

as guilty of some signal vice or treachery, and the contradiction may

well stagger a Puritan critic. But the lusts of life were once for

all in the blood of the Pagan gods, who were the articulate voices of

Nature and of passion. The half-meant exaggeration of a well-known

trait in the divinity would not render the poets that indulged in it

unwelcome to the god; he could feel the sure faith and affection of

his worshippers even in their good-humoured laughter at his imaginary

plights and naughtiness. The clown was not excluded from these rites.

His wit also counted as a service.

The Homeric Hymns, if we may trust the impression they produce on

a modern, are not hymns and are not Homer's. They are fragments of

narrative in Ionic hexameter recited during the feasts and fairs at

various Greek shrines. They are not melodies to be chanted with a

common voice by the assemblage during a sacrifice; they are tales

delivered by the minstrel to the listening audience of citizens and

strangers. They usually have a local reference. Thus we find under the

title of a hymn to Apollo a song of Delos and one of Delphi. Delos is

a barren rock; its wealth was due to the temple that attracted to the

place pilgrimages and embassies, not without rich offerings, from many

Greek cities. Accordingly we hear how Leto or Latona, when about to

become the mother of Apollo, wandered about the cities and mountains

of Greece and Asia, seeking a birthplace for her son. None would

receive her, but all the islands trembled at the awful honour of such a

nativity, profitable as the honour might eventually prove,--

"Until at length

The lovely goddess came to Delos' side

And, making question, spake these wingèd words:

'Delos, were it thy will to be the seat

Of my young son Apollo, brightest god,

And build him a rich fane, no other power

Should ever touch thee or work ill upon thee.

I tell thee not thou shalt be rich in kine

Or in fair flocks, much fruit, or myriad flowers;

But when Apollo of the far-felt dart

Hath here his shrine, all men will gather here

Bringing thee hecatombs.... And though thy soil be poor,

The gods shall make thee strong against thy foes.'"

The spirit of the island is naturally not averse to so favourable a

proposition but, like some too humble maiden wooed by a great prince,

has some misgivings lest this promise of unexpected good fortune should

veil the approach of some worse calamity. "When the god is born into

the light of day," she says, "will he not despise me, seeing how barren

I am, and sink me in the sea

"That ever will

Oppress my heart with many a watery hill?

And therefore let him choose some other land,

Where he shall please, to build at his command

Temple and grove set thick with many a tree.

For wretched polypuses breed in me,

Retiring chambers, and black sea-calves den

In my poor soil, for penury of men."[1]

Leto reassures the island, however, and swears to build a great

temple there which her son will haunt perpetually, preferring it to

all his other shrines. Delos consents, and Apollo is born amid the

ministrations of all the goddesses except Hera, who sits indignant

and revengeful in the solitudes of Olympus. The child is bathed in

the stream and delicately swaddled; but after tasting the nectar and

ambrosia which one of the nymphs is quick to offer him, he bursts his

bands, calls for his bow and his lyre, and flies upward into the sky

announcing that he will henceforth declare the will of Zeus to mortals.

Thereupon--

"All the immortals stood

In deep amaze....

All Delos, looking on him, all with gold

Was loaded straight, and joy'd to be extoll'd.

For so she flourished, as a hill that stood

Crown'd with the flower of an abundant wood."[2]