The power of personality and the glory of love: these have emerged from
our discussion thus far as the things in life whose appeal to poetic
intelligence was most potent in modifying the substance or changing
the perspective of a World-view derived from religion. We have now to
examine, in a fashion unavoidably even more fragmentary and summary,
the reaction of another series of poetic minds upon the more complex
and abstruse World-views of _philosophy_.
It is necessary for the purpose to adopt a rough grouping of
philosophic systems, and I take the following division into three
fundamental types, based with qualifications upon one proposed by
Wilhelm Dilthey in the essay already referred to.
To the first belong the naturalistic schools, from Democritus to Hobbes
and the Encyclopedists, deriving their philosophical conceptions
directly or indirectly from an analysis of the physical world, and
commonly disdaining or ignoring phenomena not to be so explained. To
the second type of thinkers the objective world is still the absorbing
subject of contemplation; but it is approached not from the side
of physics, but from the side of self-conscious mind; it is felt,
not as material for causal investigation, but as responsive to the
human spirit, now as living Nature, now as immanent God, now as a
progressively evolving Absolute. Here, with various qualifications, we
may class Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel. In the third
type, the focus of interest and the determining source of philosophic
ideas is the self-conscious mind itself. It feels profoundly its own
energy and power of self-determination; and it regards the objective
world not as deeply at one with it, responsive to its feeling,
accessible to its thought, but rather as a threatening power against
which it must vindicate its spiritual freedom and build its secure
spiritual home. In the philosophies of this type, personality--which
the first type ignored and the second reduced to an organ of a world
process--became the fundamental condition of our experience, as with
Kant and Fichte, or a transcendent personal God shaping the universe to
his mind, as with the Plato of the _Timæus_.
If we now consider these three types in relation to our problem,
it seems evident that the second and the third are naturally more
congenial to poetry than the first. Yet we know that one of the
greatest of Roman poets made it the work of his life to expound the
atomic Naturalism of Epicurus to an unreceptive Roman world.
The naturalism of Democritus and Epicurus, though framed purely in the
interest of scientific explanation, and hostile both to poetry and
to religion as commonly understood, was potentially a great poetic
discovery, the disclosure of a Worldview wholly novel and of entrancing
appeal to the poetic apprehension. The sublime perspectives of an
illimitable universe, the permanent oneness underlying the changing
shows of sense: these were contributions of philosophy to a poetic
outlook of which no poet had yet dreamed, and which it was reserved for
the greatest of philosophic poets to make explicitly his own.
But the new way which Lucretius was the first to tread was not to be
pursued. He had for many ages no successors. His difficult conquest
of poetry from a mechanical system, designed to explain, not to
inspire, was only to be emulated by a poet of combined intellectual
and imaginative grasp comparable with his own. On the whole, the
science and the poetry of Lucretius, after that moment of intense
incandescence, fell apart. Vergil, who as a young man saw the rising
of this magnificent lonely star in the Roman firmament, and of all his
contemporaries perhaps alone understood its significance, honoured the
discoverer of the causes of things, but his own philosophy was of a
cast easier to harmonize with the idealisms of poetry. From the side of
science, Gassendi and the physicists of the seventeenth century valued
the Lucretian exposition of atomist theory as a welcome supplement to
the fragments of Democritus and Epicurus. But before the nineteenth
century scientific materialism was never again allied with great poetic
power. The eighteenth century saw an immense advance in the scientific
reconstruction of our beliefs about the world, but its nearest
approaches to the negations of Lucretius were conveyed only in the
prose of a D’Holbach or a Hume, while its most brilliant English poet,
far from wrestling, like his friend Berkeley, with the new spectre of
materialism raised by the triumphs of Newton, afforded himself and
his readers complete satisfaction by decorating the easy harmonics of
deism in the _Essay on Man_. The immense quickening of imaginative
power which marked the decades immediately before and after the close
of the century widened the chasm between poetry and any mechanical view
of the world. If at certain points (as in Shelley’s and Coleridge’s
early chemical ardour, and Goethe’s momentous biological researches)
poets make fruitful approaches to science, it was because they found
in science itself an apparent release from the mechanical point of
view, a clue to their ultimate faith (however differently expressed)
in a divine, benignant Nature. The recovery of imagination told, in
philosophy as in poetry, for the most part, is a wonderful idealization
of the universe, culminating in Hegel’s evolution of the Absolute and
in Wordsworth’s awe before the Mind of Man--conceptions which must be
discussed in a later section.
But in some very distinguished poetic minds the recovery of imaginative
power led to no idealization of the world. It rather enabled them
to present with a peculiar poignant intensity a world stripped bare
of ideal elements, in which goodness and hope are alike illusory,
and Nature is either a dead mechanism or a cruel, implacable and
irresistible alien Power. Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Leconte de Lisle, and
(on a lower plane) James Thomson, were the most conspicuous examples
in the nineteenth century of poetic genius (for Schopenhauer’s work
is a colossal poem of pessimism) absorbed in the contemplation of a
universe as denuded as that so passionately embraced by Lucretius, of
love or hope for man.
A situation analogous to that of Lucretius arises, therefore, in their
case. Their world offered no foothold to the optimist: was it equally
bare of support for the poet? Bacon’s assertion that poetry submits
the shows of things to man’s desires might imply that; but Bacon (who,
incidentally, thought slightly of Lucretius) ignores the poetry born of
a conviction that the shows of things are finally unalterable by man’s
desires, and it is Leopardi, even more than Lucretius, who has shown
us how sublime the poetry which rests on this lonely stoicism may be.
One might even, in certain moods, be tempted to attach a yet higher
value to the temper of this lonely heroism, which faces a blankly
hostile universe utterly without support, than to that which exults in
conscious Oneness with a universe pervaded by Love or Beauty, by benign
Nature or God. The loneliness of Prometheus is more moving as poetry
than his rapturous union with Asia. Why is this?
I take it that it is because the lonely Prometheus, the heroic striver
with a loveless world, makes us more vividly aware of the Spirit of
Man, and that what moves us most in the great poetry is the revelation
of the Spirit of Man even more than the revelation of the glory of
the universe. We have seen that these two are natural poles of poetic
faith, that is, conclusions upon which the thinking of any poet who
thinks as a poet, will tend to converge; and if he is thwarted in the
one aim he will fall back with the more energy upon the other.
Now this vivid consciousness of spirit, whether shown in heroism or in
love, is ultimately inconsistent with a creed which strips the universe
of all ideal elements; and where this is in possession, undermines and
disintegrates it. The ‘Everlasting No’ yields ground to the Everlasting
Yea; or negation itself is impregnated with divinity, as when Leconte
de Lisle glories in his _néant divin_. To imagine heroism intensely
is to be convinced that whatever else is illusory, heroism is not an
illusion, that the valour of man has a kinship and support somehow,
somewhere, in the nature of things. And if heroism is not an illusion,
human society is no illusion either. For the heroic struggler with
infinite odds is no longer alone; the army of saints and martyrs
are with him; and it was the poet for whom loneliness opened ways
into infinity beyond any companionship who cried to one such heroic
struggler, fallen in the fight--
Thou hast great allies.
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And Love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.
I propose to illustrate the working of the forces which thus qualified
a creed of negations, from the impressive case of Leopardi.
In Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) we have a poet in whom astonishing
power and wealth of mind were united to a complete rejection of the
theological and philosophical apparatus of consolation. The mental
revolution which left him in early manhood entirely denuded of the
beliefs in which he had been reared, was final, and left no trace of
reaction or regret, of hesitation or doubt. An absolute calm of secure
conviction marks the entire subsequent course of his short life. Few
men who have ‘found religion,’ once for all, have been brought by it
into an anchorage so secure from inner or outer assault as this man who
at twenty-two discovered that religion was a dream.
With supernatural belief fell from him also every form of secular faith
and hope for man. Religion was but one among the crowd of cherished
illusions which cheat men with the expectation of happiness. Human
happiness was always founded on illusion, and the pursuit of it was
therefore vain. Hence all the organized energies of civilization,
the activities of business or politics, of science or art, of the
professions, of state administration, counted in his eyes at best as
distractions which blinded those who engaged in them to the deadly
vision of truth. For himself these distractions and the relief they
brought were impossible, for he had seen the truth; and the remorseless
analysis which shattered the basis of illusion on which they rested,
sapped the impulse to share in them. Of the state, and the patriotisms
which bind its members together, he was as sceptical as Ibsen, without
sharing his idealizing homage to the man who stands alone. In the
_Storia del Genero Umano_ he makes Jove introduce the diversities of
peoples and tongues among men, seeds of emulation and discord, and send
forth among them the ‘phantoms’ known by the names of Justice, Virtue,
Glory, and Love of Country. ‘Humanity’ itself was an illusory bond, and
the ‘nations’ of the world were ultimately its individual men.
Yet Leopardi does not denounce crime. Man is for him more unhappy
than criminal; and his evil qualities are to be laid to the charge
of the Nature that made him. He is more sinned against than sinning,
and Leopardi’s profound pity, if often derisive and scornful, never
passes into invective. His passionate upbraidings of his countrymen in
the boyish canzone _Italy_, like his ardent aspiration after national
glory for his country and poetic fame for himself, disappear from the
melancholy calm of the _Bruto Minore_ and the _Ginestra_.
A great and potent spirit
Shows itself in enduring, nor will add
Fraternal hatred, worst of evils, to its griefs
By blaming Man for them, but lay the charge
On the true culprit,--Mother of mankind
By right of birth, and Stepmother in heart.
‘Nature,’ which planted us in this earth, exposed us from birth till
death to malign afflictions and lured us into constant pursuit of
illusive aims, is responsible for the wrongs which men inflict upon
one another in the vain chase; and Leopardi’s nearest approach to the
passion of humanity which inspired Shelley, a few years earlier, is
the cry of appeal to men which breaks from him, after uttering this
indictment of Nature, to band themselves together against her:
Her count the foe, and against Her,
Believing that man’s race, as is the truth,
Was foreordained to be in league,
Count all mankind as born confederates,
And embrace all with unfeigned love,
Rendering and expecting strong and ready succour
In the changing perils and the anguishes
Of the common warfare.[41]
Man in the grip of Nature is like the anthill crushed by a
chance-falling apple, and the lava field of Vesuvius, covering extinct
cities, where but the broom plant sheds a forlorn fragrance, aptly
symbolizes the desolate earth he is doomed to tread. While this earth
itself, a vanishing film of vapour in the universe, traverses by its
insignificance his dream of immortality. And his humorous irony sports,
in the prose dialogues, with this annihilating disparity between man’s
pretensions and the truth.[42]
Yet the effect of Leopardi’s work--and especially of his poetry--is
at many points subtly to rectify his desperate view of the world. He
cannot suppress the uprush of pity for those whose career in it is
prematurely cut short, however his reason may persuade him that they
are fortunate.[43] The noble pathos of the Attic grave monuments,
representing, for instance, a young girl in the act of taking leave
of her friends, overpowers the reflections of his philosophy, and he
wrestles in moving verses with the enigma:
Ah me! why at the end
Of paths so grievous, not ordain at least
A happy goal? But rather robe in gloom
And terror that for which through life
We long as the sole refuge from our woes,
And show us, yet more dread than the stormy sea,
The port we make for?
A portrait of a beautiful woman, carved also upon her tomb, overwhelms
him with the wonder of beauty and the paradox of its conversion into
dust:
Ah, human nature, how,
If utterly frail thou art and vile,
If dust thou art and ashes, is thy heart so great?
If thou art noble in part,
How are thy loftiest impulses and thoughts
By so ignoble causes kindled and put out?[44]
Not less acutely he feels the paradox of artistic creation. Like Abt
Vogler he contemplates the ‘palace of music’ reared by the performer’s
hand:
Desires infinite
And visions sublime
It begets in the kindled thought, ...
Where along a sea of delight the spirit of man
Ranges unseen, as some bold swimmer
For his diversion the deep....
But a single discord shatters this paradise in a moment. Abt Vogler’s
creation is not shattered; he has played to the end, and put the last
stone in its place. But it has vanished, and he calls in, to save it,
his high doctrine of the eternity of created beauty. Leopardi has no
such faith, and he puts the doctrine to a severer test by dissolving
the spell of beauty before it is complete. Yet he feels as acutely
as Browning the marvel of the musical creation, and that its abrupt
dissolution does not cancel the significance of its having been there
at all. He does not openly confess that significance, but it stirs in
him a tormenting sense of anomaly.
He comes nearer to such confession when he speaks of love. His
own experience of love was that of a virginal passion; the ideal
exaltations which make every lover something of a poet had their way
in this great poet unclouded by vulgar satiety. He knows well enough
that love arrays the woman, for the lover, in ideal charms not her own;
but instead of lamenting or deriding this illusion, as illogically
he should have done, he glories in it. Love, like music, ‘reveals
the mystery of unknown Elysiums,’[45] but these ‘lofty images’ are
accessible only to the man; woman cannot understand them; for such
conceptions there is no room in her narrow brow. The stern derider of
illusions has here no praise for the sex which sees things as they are:
the unconscious idealist in Leopardi takes the side of the ‘illusions.’
And his way of speaking about Love elsewhere is less that of the
pessimist philosopher than of the Platonist poet who sees in it a clue
to real vision. The pessimist in him does full justice to the havoc
wrought in the world in Love’s name; but after the gods had watched
the working of the lower love, their cynical gift, Jove sent down
another Love, ‘child of Venus Urania,’ in pity of the noble hearts who
were worthy of it, yet rarely permitting even to them the happiness it
brings as ‘surpassed in too small a measure by that of heaven.’[46]
Love above all else irradiates the waste of life, it is ‘the source of
good, of the highest joy found in the ocean of existence’; it alone
holds equal bliss for man with Death, which for ever allays his ills.
‘Love and Death’ are twin brothers, and the fairest things on the earth
or under the stars.[47] Even the memory of love can make ‘abhorred old
age’ endurable, and send a man willingly to the scourge or the wheel,
as the face of Beatrice could make her lover ‘happy in the flames.’[48]
Hence Love makes the heart ‘wise,’ for it inspires men with the
contempt of life:
‘For no other lord do men face peril
With such alacrity as for him.’
Where thou dost help, O Love, courage is born
Or wakens; and, against its wont, mankind
Grows wise in action, not lost in idle thought.[49]
This is not the language of pessimism; and this ‘wisdom’ inspired by
love, which reconciles men to courageous death, is something quite
other than the calculation that death is a release from life’s ills.
That is the suicide’s wisdom, not the hero’s. Leopardi’s conception of
Love has taken up nobler elements than his pessimism could supply; he
describes a Triumph of Love over Death, not a shrewd perception that
Death is the easiest way out, or even a blessed port after stormy seas.
Yet Love in its noblest form was given, he knows, but to few; and
he himself had known it only as a fleeting experience. He knew as a
continual possession, on the other hand, his own intellectual nature,
the sovran thought which stripped off the illusive shows of things and
disclosed to him the naked horror of reality undisguised, but filled
him none the less with the exultation of power, and the lofty joy which
belongs to discovery even of a tragic truth.
Such exaltation finds its most powerful expression in the great hymn
to ‘Thought the Master.’ His restless and piercing intellect was a
double-edged instrument. It was not the source of his pessimism, but
it furnished the remorseless analysis of the glories and shows of life
which gave its air of inevitable logic to his temperamental despair.
Yet the exercise of the instrument was itself a vivid joy, and, like
love, created for the wielder a lonely earthly paradise within the
vast waste of this earthly hell.[50] There he wanders, in an enchanted
light, which blots out his earthly state; thither he returns from
the dry and harsh converse with the world as from the naked crags of
the Apennines to a joyous garden smiling afar. Is this ‘terrible but
precious gift of heaven’ also an illusion? Perhaps; but it is one ‘by
nature divine,’ and capable of possessing us with the secure tenacity
of truth itself, as long as life endures.[51]
In any case it created for him definite and wonderful values in the
world which detracted dangerously from the consistency of his faith in
the world’s fundamental badness. ‘Thought’ was the only civilizer; by
thought mankind had actually risen out of their primeval barbarism;[52]
it was the sole agent in advancing the public welfare. His towering
disdain for the frivolity and utilitarianism of his own age sprang from
no mere excess of self-esteem; it was the scorn of one whom ‘thought’
had lifted to a standpoint of ideal excellence beside which all alien
impulses seemed intolerable.[53] It armed him with a magnanimity which
the sight of any cowardly or ignoble act stung to the quick, which
laughed at danger or at death,[54] which could endure with resolute
Stoicism and antique valour the passage through the miseries of
life.[55]
But thought had its peculiar joys also, less equivocal than these. It
fed on the sublimity even of the desolate world, on the loneliness of
nature, on the infinity of the starry depths. In the lines on ‘The
Infinite’ he describes a favourite haunt--a lonely hill, from which
the horizon is on all sides cut off. ‘There I sit and gaze, fashioning
in thought boundless distances, superhuman silences, and profoundest
rest.... In this immensity my thought is drowned, and shipwreck in that
ocean is a joy.’
And converse with thought gives him, too, the vision of ideal beauty--a
vision which quickens the ecstasy of his most rapturous moments. It
is no pallid dream; the fairest face he meets seems but a feigned
image of its countenance, a derivative streamlet from the one sole
source.[56] That ideal beauty is his lady, but he had never seen her
face, for nothing on the earth is like her, or were it like in feature,
or in voice, it would be less in beauty.[57] Leopardi is here very
near to Shelley. The visionary ideal of beauty and love was not less
vividly present to him; but the sterner temper of his pessimism was
less easily persuaded that it had projected itself into the being of
any earthly Emilia. The ‘Intellectual Beauty’ of Shelley’s hymn had
its seat and stronghold in a like glow of inner vision, but its ‘awful
loveliness’ was more abundantly hinted or disclosed in the world of
nature and of man, giving ‘grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream,’
and luring the sensitive poet on to the pursuit of a thousand fugitive
embodiments of its eternal essence. Leopardi’s language, marmoreally
clear-cut and austere, seems to bear the impress of a mind powerfully
self-contained, exempt from all seductions of the senses, even of
colour and melody, calm with the resolution of despair. Shelley’s
language, dissolving form and outline in an ethereal radiance, seems
the mirror of a self-diffusive genius which saw all things through
the veil of its own effulgence. Leopardi has been called ‘the most
classical of the romantics’; Shelley was in some sense the very soul of
romanticism. But as this very comparison implies, the romantic temper
glowed in both. In both, the long travail of existence was crossed
by the exultations of the visionary and the idealist. With Leopardi,
martyred in his prime by painful disease, the gloomy shades closed in
more and more impenetrably upon the world of man and nature, and death
was happy because it was the end of life. With Shelley the universe
grew more and more visibly transfigured by a spirit deeply responsive
to his own; all things worked and moved in beauty, and were woven
through and through with love. In Leopardi’s more tenacious intellect
the negations of a corroding criticism were less easily overcome.
But nature, which had armed his brain with that corroding criticism
flung across it also the rapturous delight in beauty, in love, in the
creative energy of thought itself, and there were moments when poetry
transported him beyond the iron limits of his creed, to the belief that
love and beauty and thought are neither illusory nor the sources of
illusion, but signs and symptoms of an ideal reality.