‘VIEW of the World’ is a clumsy phrase for an idea which itself has
for most of us an unattractive flavour of pedantry. This latter
impression is hardly removed by a knowledge of the part which, under
the neater and more expressive, term _Weltanschauung_, it has played
in German literary study. _Weltanschauung_ is the indispensable final
chapter without which no German biography, the confidential disclosure
without which no German friendship, is complete. A _Weltanschauung_ or
‘World-view,’ in its full scope, comprehends ideas about life of quite
distinct categories; it touches metaphysics and science, ethics and
æsthetics; it offers an answer to Faust’s question ‘what it is that at
bottom holds the world together,’ but also to the practical questions,
what is the end of action and how we ought to act.
Historically, we know, the answers to these questions occur, in great
part, as successive steps in continuous or closely-connected processes
of thought. But between these continuous processes yawn gulfs which no
argument can bridge. From Bacon through Hobbes to Locke we can trace
something like a connected development. But between Hobbes and his
contemporary Boehme there is a cleavage due not to bad reasoning on
either side, but to a radical difference in the kind of experience from
which the reasoning in the two cases set out. And the history of belief
indicates that there are at least two types of elemental experience
which thus generate ideas about the world, and to which two great
classes of World-view in essence correspond. These may be distinguished
as the _religious_ and the _philosophical_. In the first, thought is
dominated by the consciousness of a power or powers distinct from man,
controlling his fate, protecting his country or his tribe, determining
his moral code, his scheme of values, and his expectations after death.
From the crudest fetishism and animism to the loftiest theism, a living
relation to such a Power is the root fact from which the religious
World-view takes its origin and derives its character.
On the other hand, we find a vast and complex body of conceptions of
the world which do not originate in intercourse with a divine Power, or
in the fear or hope which such a power may inspire, but in the effort
to give a finally and universally valid account of experience.
Naturally, neither these nor any other type of World-view, if such
there be, are mutually exclusive in substance and content. Religion
may reach the conclusions of philosophy, and philosophy those of
religion, each by a path strictly its own. Historically, the two
attitudes to life have intimately interacted; and if the religious type
has on the whole shown less power of resistance to the penetration
of ideas of the opposed type, on the other hand modern philosophy,
in particular, has often built upon, and not seldom with, ideas
first begotten not by speculative curiosity, but by the rapture or
the agony of God-intoxicated or demon-haunted souls. The eternal war
of Ormuzd and Ahriman still echoes in the Hebraic intensity of our
distinction between good and evil; and the visionary ecstasies of the
mystics were of account in the evolution of philosophic pantheism.
And, similarly, the edifices of theology have borrowed fortifying
buttresses or indispensable pillars from ideas evolved by scientific
reason or a purely secular interpretation of good. Aristotle, applied
and interpreted by Aquinas, became one of the masters, not only of
those who know, but of those who believe. Nevertheless, the two types
have, on a comprehensive survey, stood distinctly apart; and their
ramifications appear to dominate between them the entire field of
belief and speculative thought.
Is it possible, nevertheless, to distinguish a third type of
‘World-view’ analogous to these? In other words, is there any
third kind of experience, distinct from that of either religion or
philosophy, yet involving an apprehension of reality comparable in
originality, and possibly in importance, with theirs? The present essay
is based upon the view that such an experience is given in and by
poetry.[30]
I
For the specific experience which comes to a poet through poetry,
however it may be interwoven with religious or philosophic ideas, has a
radically different psychological origin and character. It is equally
intense and absorbing, but it is not determined by conscious relation
to an outer power, and it seeks to express rather than to explain. It
is neither transfigured fear or hope, nor yet a logical process. In
the making of a poem there may be even a conscious detachment from
actuality, and the poet may float free in a dream world, apparently
without thought of the world which he inhabits. The poetic may well
be thought to differ from the religious or the philosophic types of
experience less in inducing any specific way of contemplating reality
than in liberating us from the necessity or desire to contemplate it at
all.
Yet it is certain that the poet’s detachment, even in his most ethereal
dream-flights, from reality, is only apparent. In all the spontaneous
and seemingly arbitrary movement of his mind among its crowding ideal
shapes, reality through his stored-up experience is at work, quietly
weaving a thousand subtle filiations between the poem and the life
of men at large. _Othello_ is much farther from ‘actuality’ than the
poor novel on which its story was based; but it is penetrated with the
vision of life, of which Cinthio’s tale caught so feeble and fugitive
a glimpse. What distinguishes poetic from religious or philosophic
apprehension is not that it turns away from reality, but that it lies
open to and in eager watch for reality at doors and windows which
with them are barred or blind. The poet’s soul resides, so to speak,
in his senses, in his emotions, in his imagination, as well as in
his conscious intelligence; and we may provisionally describe poetic
apprehension as an intense state of consciousness in which all these
are vitally concerned. In so far as a particular outlook upon the world
is founded upon a particular type of experience, a poet’s World-view
will be radically affected by his senses, emotions, imagination. The
flower which Wordsworth contemplated on the bank or by the lake, and
that other which Tennyson with his more curious scrutiny plucked from
the crannied wall, could stir these poets’ intellect and heart to the
depths; and their apprehension, as poets, of God and man, of Nature, of
Duty, would have been different without it.
But in any case, it will be said, even if we grant that poetic
experience tends to induce some way of regarding reality, it cannot
possibly induce any constant or definable way, if elements of mind so
infinitely diverse, so individual, as emotion and imagination, are
vitally concerned in the process. That energizing of mind released
from the control of actuality, which we call imagination, that free
following out of trains of suggestion called up by emotion, takes the
colour, at every step, of the individual make of the poet’s nature,
and the individual cast of his experience. In so far as a World-view
is strictly poetic in origin, the conclusion might seem hard to resist
that there may be as many poetic World-views as there are poets. And it
is true that the individual quality of the poet will always cleave to
whatever is strictly poetic in his thinking. But even so, it may be
possible to determine typical directions in which poetic apprehension
tends to engender or to sway belief, and to modify ideas imbibed in
education or accepted on authority.
Thus, it may be provisionally laid down that a view of the World
reached through poetic experience will tend to accentuate those
aspects of Man and Nature, and those ways of regarding them, which
offer most scope, analogy, or sanction, to this type of experience.
Where the senses play a vital part, and are yet vitally implicated
with passion and ideas, there will be little disposition to doctrines
which either brand the senses as evil or illusory, or erect them into a
sufficing faith. The logical intellect, its processes and conclusions,
will receive a respectful but distant salute, while the irrational
elements of life are accepted as its needful ingredients or even as
a supreme source of its worth. Love, which tramples on reason, and,
in the great words of à Kempis, warmly glows like a flame beyond all
measure, may be called in some sense the natural religion of the poet.
The mysterious love of man and woman, in particular, irrelevant to
most of the problems of philosophy, and regarded by religion chiefly
as a dangerous disturbing force, is one of the perennial springs of
poetry, and one of the shaping analogies of poetic thought. And the
same impassioned insight which gives significance to this love exalts
also all those other energies of the soul which carry men out of and
beyond themselves. Poetry is naturally heroic; it has presided over the
cult of the hero, as religion and philosophy over those of the saint
and the sage; it has rewarded him with enchanting secular Paradises,
Elysian fields, Isles of the Blest, and Temples of Fame. Poetry is
disposed to magnify human nature; the transition from Aeschylus, who
painted men greater than they were, to Euripides, who drew them after
life, is also a decline in the intrinsic temper of poetry, if in that
alone. And because of its bent to think greatly of man, it makes for
the assertion, in the great sense, of _freedom_--of man’s freedom to
be himself. Neither the shibboleths of political freedom nor those
of free thought have always, it is true, found response among poets.
Their part has rather been to keep alive in mankind the temper which
treats outward obstacles not as the soul’s constraints, but as its
opportunities; the faith that iron bars do not make a cage, and that
you may be bounded in a nutshell, and yet not only count yourself, but
be, a king of infinite space.
In the interpretation of Nature, poetic experience works creatively
or selectively on similar lines. To those wonderful deposits of the
imagination of the past, the myths of extinct faiths, from which
theology and philosophy have long withdrawn their sanction, or on which
they have laid their taboo, the poets have habitually been very tender.
And when they felt as poets, the image drawn from a myth has never had
merely decorative value, or served merely as a ‘poetic synonym’ for the
exact term. It expressed something in the poet’s vision not otherwise
to be put into words. If the glorious anthropomorphism of Olympus and
Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life everywhere pulsing
through Nature, and perpetually reborn in ‘Man and beast and earth and
air and sea,’ cries to the poet with a voice which will not be put by;
and the symbols by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they
read personality too definitely into the play of that elusive mystery,
yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned formulas of
science.
Hence many great philosophic ideas about the universe which, without
ascribing life or mind to it, might seem projected from our inner,
rather than gathered from our outer, experience, have powerfully
appealed to poets. The antithesis of the One and the Many, which
fascinated and fertilized every phase of Greek thought, had one of its
roots in the acute Greek feeling for continuity through change, which
is equally manifest in the Parthenon and in the Pindaric Ode, and to
a less degree in all art and poetry wherever the sense of rhythm is
present at all. ‘When we feel the poetic thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘is
it not that we find sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear?’ That
felicitously expresses the genius of Hellenic art in particular; but
it also marks off the specifically poetic apprehension of Oneness as a
‘something deeply interfused’ in and through the living multiplicity
of the world, alike from the mystic vision of a One whose splendour
dissolves the reality of things, and from the vision of Peter Bell, for
whom nothing but ‘things’ exists. Yet even this pregnant Oneness has
commonly gathered, in the poetic conception of the universe, the higher
and richer attribute of soul-life. It has become a living and working
Nature vitally implicated in every organ and filament, or Mind diffused
through every limb, or Love, or Beauty, or Power, woven through the
woof of it, or the splendour of God irradiating it through and through.
When we turn, as is proposed in what follows, from these general
considerations to watch the actual operation of poetic apprehension in
concrete examples, we naturally encounter some serious difficulties.
Poetic apprehension may be as distinct and definable as we will, but
it can rarely be caught acting _in vacuo_. Poets are men; they are
usually citizens; they are often penetrated with some form of religious
or philosophical faith. It is inevitable, in such cases, that their
strictly poetic experience should be coloured or even overridden by
ideas proper to their possibly more habitual or more deeply established
persuasions. In poets like Goethe and Shelley, deeply concerned with
the issues of life outside poetry, philosophic and poetic impulses and
data may well seem inextricably mingled. Even Blake and Whitman, who
perhaps come nearer than any other moderns to shaping out a poetic
World-view for themselves, evidently worked, as poets, under a deep
bias of revolutionary dogma, which made them unjust to some aspects
of poetry itself. And with poet-exponents of great theological or
philosophical systems, like Lucretius or Dante, it may well appear idle
to seek to catch the moment when the runnel of poetry carved out a
watercourse of its own, instead of falling into and moving along with
the great tide of Epicurean or Catholic thought. Yet we attach some
meaning to our words when we distinguish periods in which the poetic
element in a poet’s nature was more potent than at others. When we
say, for instance, that in Shelley the poetic apprehension after 1812
worked itself progressively free from an alien philosophy; or that in
Wordsworth, from about the same date, it became progressively overlaid
by a theology almost equally alien; or that in Dante’s _Convito_,
the poet of the _Vita Nuova_, who will finally recover dominance in
the _Commedia_, has yielded much ground to the scholastic thinker.
Distinctions so clearly felt and sharply drawn cannot be groundless.
What is here proposed is to examine whether any typical character or
direction can be discovered in the modifications which the data of
religious or philosophical beliefs and ideals have undergone in certain
commanding poet natures. In that case we might possess some of the
material for answering the question I have been bold enough to suggest
in the title of this paper.