The poetry of negations strives instinctively towards fuller
affirmation: that is the purport of our survey hitherto. We have seen
in a previous essay how Lucretius the poet saw this mechanical universe
through a transfiguring atmosphere of passion and pathos, attachment,
regret, not dreamt of in his philosophy.[58] And there are signs enough
that had that philosophy admitted, what it fiercely denied, those
ideas of a living and personal or even divine Nature, or of a universe
pervaded by God, which respond to poetic apprehension at the point
where the Epicurean naturalism left it, as it were in the lurch, he
would have eagerly embraced them.
Now it was precisely those ideas of life and personality present
in Nature, or even pervading the universe, which prevailed among
philosophic thinkers of the _second type_, who inquired (to put it in
the roughest way) not how the world might have come about, but what
it meant. For the answer, infinitely varied in its terms, uniformly
postulated that the idealism of man reflected something answering to
it in the very nature of reality. Two profound suggestions towards an
ideal conception of the world, thrown out by the genius of Greece,
could still intoxicate the intellect of early nineteenth-century
Germany:--the Heracleitean idea of the harmony of opposites, and the
Platonic and Stoic doctrine of the soul of the world. Of the first I
say nothing more here; for Heracleitus, pregnant as his dark sayings
are with poetry, has never had his Lucretius.[59] The doctrine of a
world-soul, on the other hand, has again and again helped poetry to
articulate her rapturous apprehension of the glory of the world. For
European speculation, at least, the conception had its origin in the
_Timæus_, where the last perfecting touch of the divinely-appointed
artificer who constructs the world is to give it a ‘soul’ and make it
‘a blessed god.’
In the pantheism of the Stoics, the idea of a divine world-soul set
forth in this grandiose myth became a radical dogma, one of the chief
sources of their significance as an intellectual and moral force. At
Rome the Stoic pantheism softened the rigour of national and social
distinctions. The humanity of the Roman law lies in the direct line
of its influence. In the mind of the most sensitive and tender of
Roman poets, on the other hand, the Stoic idea fell upon a soil rich
in qualities uncongenial, if not unknown, to its native habitat. Stoic
thought in Vergil, no less than Epicurean in Lucretius, has taken the
colour of that richer soil. The sublime verses which he puts in the
mouth of Anchises have riveted this solution, if such it be, of the
world-riddle upon the mind of posterity; but the real contribution of
Vergil is less in any expressive phrase or image than in the diffused
magic of a temperament in which all subtle and delicate attachments
wonderfully throve; where, more than in any other Roman mind, the
‘threefold reverence’ of Goethe, the reverence for what is above us,
for what is below us, and for our fellow-men, found its congenial home.
And it is not hard to see how sheer poetic instinct drew him this way.
His two great masters in poetry, Homer and Lucretius, had inspired and
helped to mould a genius fundamentally unlike either. The majestic
pageant of the Olympians was not at bottom more consonant to his poetry
than the scorn which tramples on all fear of divinity and puts the roar
of Acheron under its feet. The Jupiter and Venus and Juno and Pallas
who so efficiently order the changing fortunes of Æneas are but a
splendid decoration, like the Olympian figures in Raphael’s frescoes at
the Farnesina. And well as he understands the bliss of the triumphant
intellect, of Man become the master of things, he is himself content
with the humbler joys of one who has acquaintance with Pan and the
Nymphs, with the gods of the woodland and the fountain-spring. These
were real for him, not it may be with the matter-of-fact reality
of the senses, but as speaking symbols of something more deeply
interfused, less articulate than man, but more articulate to man’s
spirit than the fountains or the flowers.
The great pantheistic phrases of Vergil have echoed, we know,
throughout the after-history of poetry. We might even be tempted
to say that pantheism, in some sense, must be the substance of any
‘poetic view of the world.’ But if so, it must be a pantheism which
owes at least as much to the entranced intuition of the poets as to
the abstract thinking of philosophy. Their ecstasy of the senses,
their feasting joy in the moment, and in the spot, have enabled them
not merely to express the creed of pantheism with greater freshness
and sincerity, but to give it interpretations and applications of
which theoretic speculation never dreamed. We should not prize the
great lines of _Tintern Abbey_ so far above the eloquent platitudes
of the _Essay on Man_ if we did not feel that Pope was merely putting
philosophy at second-hand into brilliant verse, while Wordsworth had
not only reached his thought through his own impassioned contemplation,
but actually given it a new compass and profundity not attainable by
any logical process. He found his ‘something more deeply interfused’
as he looked with emotion too deep for tears upon the humble flower
and the simple village child, or remembered the experiences of his own
wonderful boyhood; and these were for him not merely portions of a body
of which God was the soul, but themselves luminous points, or running
springs, of spiritual light and life. So that if his poetry touches
doctrinal pantheism (which he never names) at one pole, at the other it
is nearer to the spiritual fetishism of St. Francis’s hymns to Brother
Sun and Brother Rain.
It is easier to distinguish definite philosophic ideas at work in the
poetic apprehension of Shelley. We know in any case that they played
an immensely greater part in his intellectual growth. Plato and Dante
have helped him to those wonderful phrases in which he seeks to make
articulate his rapturous cosmic vision of
That light, whose smile kindles the universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
....
that sustaining love
Which thro’ the web of Being blindly wove,
In man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.
That is his rendering, translated out of theological terms, of the
sublime opening lines of the _Paradiso_:
The glory of Him who moves the whole, penetrates through the universe
and is reflected in one part more and in another less.
But, even so, Shelley is feeling through these great words--Light,
Love, Beauty--towards something which none of them can completely
convey. And in this Shelleyan ‘love’ itself, the subtle distinctions
carried out, as we saw, by Dante disappear even more completely than
the dramatic play of thought in the _Symposium_ disappears in the
suffused splendour of Spenser’s _Hymns_. In logical power Shelley
was as little to be compared with Dante as Spenser with Plato. Yet
some distinctions seem to assert themselves even in that ecstatic
love-interwoven universe of his. His poet’s intense consciousness of
personality sounds clear through the pantheistic harmonies. When he
is trying to utter as he sees it the sublime paradox of the dead but
deathless poet, he falls successively, heedless of inconsistency, upon
symbols drawn from the dogmas of antagonistic schools of thought.
Pantheism, individual immortality, heaven, Elysium--he draws upon them
all, but none suffices. The dead poet is made one with Nature, becomes
a part of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; his voice is
heard in the nightingale’s song. But he is also an individual soul,
who has passed at death to the abode where the Immortals are, and is
welcomed there by Chatterton and Sidney and Lucan and the rest. A
cognate depth and reach of apprehension has perplexed the discoverers
of contradiction in _In Memoriam_. ‘For the poets,’ aptly comments
Mr. Bradley, though he is thinking chiefly of Shelley and Tennyson,
‘the soul of the dead in being mingled with nature does not lose its
personality; in living in God it remains human and itself.’[60]
In comparison with the magnificent audacities of pantheism and cosmic
love, the philosophic conception of ‘Nature’ has enjoyed the position
of a great authoritative commonplace, by invoking which the most
mediocre poet could dignify and quicken his verse. It belonged to
science as much as to poetry, and to the poetry of clarified good sense
by as good right as to that of childlike intuition. It could stand for
the ideal of just expression which Pope counselled the poet ‘first to
follow,’ as legitimately as, a century later, it was to stand for the
living presence of Beauty, of whose ‘wedding’ with the soul Wordsworth
chanted the spousal verse, or as the teeming creative energy whose
infinity Faust sought vainly to clasp. But even that Augustan ‘Nature’
gathered something from the quality of the minds which pursued literary
discipline by its light, and no one doubts that in Wordsworth or in
Goethe the φύσις or _natura_ of strictly philosophic speculation was
but the fecund germ of a poetic creation, which, whether it answered
to a cosmic reality or not, answered to deep-seated and ineffaceable
instincts and needs of man. Only, if great and original genius has set
its hall-mark upon this noble metal, the crowd of small poets have
mixed it with their feeble alloys. There is a Nature which responds to
the greatest and sublimest aspirations of man, and one which answers to
his self-indulgent dreams; a Nature which is wedded to his soul, and
one which is but the casual mistress of his light desires. If the term
‘poetical’ has a slightly derisive air, it is because a cheap glamour,
which disguises truth, so often replaces the profound symbol which
touches its core. A truly ‘poetic’ World-view has at any rate nothing
to do with this second-rate romance.
Among the poetic ways of regarding _Nature_, there are two types, the
distinction between which concerns us. It is shadowed forth in the two
images I borrowed just now from Wordsworth and from _Faust_. We may
feel Nature as intimately united to us, deep calling to deep. Or we
may feel it as something which eludes our clasp, but holds us by the
very appeal of its affinity to that which is infinite in ourselves.
The first type is too familiar to be further discussed here. But the
second, or Goethean type, needs a few words.
For it was with Goethe that a new and powerful philosophic influence
tardily entered modern poetry--the influence of Spinoza. A quarter of
a century before Wordsworth and Coleridge were overheard talking of
him at Nether Stowey, Spinoza had found deep springs of sympathy in
the young Goethe. A vivid passage in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ (Book
XIV) tells us that what especially fascinated him was ‘the boundless
unselfishness that glowed in every sentence,’ and notably that ‘strange
sentence’ which later suggested a famous retort of his Philine--‘He
who loves God must not expect that God shall love him in return.’[61]
Spinoza’s God meant, roughly, the infinity of Nature, and to love God
meant to see all things in the light of that infinity. Such a dictum
therefore cut at the root of the whole body of poetry which asserted
an answering spirit in Nature, from the self-indulgent dreams of
romantic sentiment to the love-interwoven universe of Dante or Shelley.
The grandeur of Spinoza’s conception is apparent enough even in his
geometrical formulas, but Goethe’s intense intuition translated it into
human experiences which stir us to the depths. The Erdgeist’s retort
to Faust--‘Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir’--is one
of the most thrilling in all poetry, not because it indulges all our
wishes, nor yet because it baffles them, but because the barrier it
opposes to the intellect is a gate to the imagination, and we step out
into a poetic apprehension of the infinity which our formulas seek to
capture in vain.
It is by a like suggestion of infinities beyond our reach and untouched
by our emotions that he moves us in poems like _Das Göttliche_ or _Die
Grenzen der Menschheit_, or the opening scene of the Second Part of
_Faust_, which insist with so lofty a calm on our limitations. From
these infinities, if we wish to live and act, we must turn away, and
that is what, as a wise physician, Goethe bids us do. The intolerable
glory of the sun is broken up for us in the many-hued rainbow, and
this refracted light must be the guide of our life. But no one could
see life there who had not himself gazed on the glory of the sun, and
while we read Goethe’s words we evade the very limitations he imposes,
just as Shelley (in the great kindred passage), by the very image
which condemns life as a dome of many-coloured glass, lifts us into
the ‘white radiance’ beyond. ‘A little ring bounds our life,’ he says
elsewhere, ‘and many generations succeed one another on the endless
chain of their being.’ A little ring on an endless chain--a ‘little
life rounded with a sleep,’--that way lies a poetry as great as that
which comes to the visionary Celt who sees ‘waving round every leaf
and tree the fiery tresses of that hidden sun which is the soul of the
earth.’[62]
But that way, also, lies a poetry of Man, a poetry which has its
sustaining centre not in the cosmos, but in the soul. To refuse the
easy assumption of Nature’s comradeship in our sorrow, to resign the
cheap consolations of the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ may be the way not merely
to resignation, or Stoicism, but to an apprehension of the heights and
depths of the soul thrown back upon itself, and fetching strength not
from any outer power, but from undreamed-of inner resources of its
own. When Wordsworth, in the grasp of a great sorrow, puts aside the
glamour of the poet’s dream, in order to bear with fortitude ‘what is
to be borne,’ he has taken a step towards that poetry. When he finds in
suffering ‘the nature of infinity,’ with gracious avenues opening out
of it to wondrous regions of soul life, he has entered it.[63]
V
We have thus watched the modification of naturalistic atomism, of
pessimistic materialism, and of the cosmic conceptions of ‘pantheism’
and ‘Nature,’ by the immediate intuition, the eager senses, and the
vivid soul-consciousness which characterize the poetic apprehension. It
remains to glance, finally, at the relations of poetry with that third
type of philosophic system, in which soul-consciousness itself has
played the guiding and master part.
It was with the assertion of the soul’s predominance that European
philosophy, in the full sense of the word, began. When Socrates
turned from the cosmic speculations of the Ionians to found his
‘thinking-shop’ at Athens, and chaffed Anaxagoras for having put mind
at the head of things and then given it nothing to do, he was preparing
the way, we know, for the magnificent soul-sovereignty established
by the master of all idealists. Plato set up a trenchant dualism
between soul and sense, and thrust the sense-world into a limbo of
disparagement from which, where his spell prevailed, it never emerged.
The body was the soul’s prison; the sense cheated it with illusion and
dragged it down with base desires.
The Transcendentalists of modern Germany established a soul-autocracy
differently conceived, and founded upon other postulates, but not
less absolute. Kant shattered the claims of _Verstand_, but only to
enthrone _Vernunft_; Fichte found nothing real and nothing good that
was not rooted in heroic will; Schopenhauer built up a philosophy of
self-effacement and world-flight on the doctrine that the will to
live which tortures us is also the malign indwelling energy of the
world. And none of them surpassed in calm audacity the claims made for
individual reason by Fichte’s English contemporary, Godwin.
Speculation of this type was already allied to poetry by the boldness
of its ‘subjective idealism,’ and it might be expected that its points
of fruitful contact with poetry would be correspondingly numerous. Yet
this is hardly, on the whole, the case. If Plato’s influence on poetry
is hard to measure, if Kant taught something vital to Schiller, and
Schopenhauer to Wagner, ‘subjective’ philosophers and poets in the
main pursued their common preoccupation with soul along paths which
rarely crossed. Each brought to the exploration of that marvellous
mine a lamp of extraordinary power; but they carried it into different
regions, surveyed them on different methods, and returned with
different results. Poets without any scientific psychology have, in
virtue of imaginative insight into the ways of character, created a
mass of psychological material with which scientific psychology has
only begun to cope. It is only among poetic portrayers of the second
rank, such as Jonson and the allegorists, that theoretic categories
of character have had any determining weight. The supreme characters
of literature are true creations, creations that are at the same time
discoveries--pieces of humanity which exceed Nature’s ‘reach,’ perhaps,
but not her ‘grasp.’ Prometheus, Hamlet, Satan, Faust, permanently
enlarged the status of the human soul in our common valuation of
life. That ‘discovery of Man’ which intoxicated the Renascence was
preeminently a discovery of the stature of man’s soul--‘how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty, ... in action how like an angel, in
apprehension how like a god!’ but philosophic ideas hardly touched the
surface of either Shakespeare or Marlowe, and they furnished but one
strand in the woof of the mind of Milton.
In the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth there is more
affinity to philosophic ideas, but their actual influence is apt to
be strongest just where the poetry itself is least intense. In a very
luminous lecture Mr. Bradley has traced the relation between the two
movements.[64] An exalted faith in soul possessed and inspired both,
but each was in the main unconscious of the other. In the poetry of his
own countryman, Schiller, Kant’s austere ideas reappear transformed
in the crucible of the poet’s livelier emotions or quicker sense
of beauty. Coleridge drank as deeply of Kantian and cognate ideas,
but only when the brief chapter of his creative poetry was all but
closed; while the magnificent prose-poem in which Carlyle conveyed
the philosophy of Fichte-Jean-Paul-Teufelsdröckh stands alone. What
Wordsworth may have drawn through Coleridge’s talk is not clearly
distinguishable from the original bent of his own mind. The two streams
ran courses largely parallel, but in distinct though adjacent valleys.
With Godwin’s ideas, on the other hand, both Wordsworth, Blake, and
Shelley had stood in close intellectual relations. And these were
precisely the men whose poetry set the deepest impress upon their view
of life.
Is it possible by the help of either the parallel or the derivative
relationship to lay down any common features in the process?
In the first place, the stress on the exaltation of spirit is shifted
by the poets, and with great emphasis, from ‘reason,’ the instrument of
philosophy, to imagination. Reason is constantly not merely ignored but
openly slighted. It is not what they mean when they exalt ‘mind.’ When
Wordsworth tells us, in the great _Recluse_ passage, of the awe, beyond
Empyrean or Erebus, with which he contemplated ‘the mind of man’;
when he sees the heroic devotion of the fallen Toussaint perpetuated
in ‘man’s inconquerable mind’; when he encourages those who doubted
Spanish heroism with the sublime assurance that ‘the true sorrow of
humanity consists in this: not that the mind of man fails, but that
the course and demands of life so rarely correspond with the dignity
and intensity of human desires’;--by this ‘mind’ he means imagination,
passion, heroic will, but not discourse of reason. Wordsworth,
apprehending soul with his poet’s intuition, apprehends it as he knew
it in himself. He saw it, therefore, as an energy operating not through
‘meddling intellect’ but through vision and vision-illuminated will,
with open eye and ear for its indispensable associates, and love as
its core. The ‘soul’ whereby alone the nations shall be great and free
was something in which the humblest peasant and the simplest child had
part, and in which the meanest flower struck answering chords. It is
not accident that the soul-animated England of Wordsworth’s ideal is so
utterly unlike Hegel’s Prussian state.
In William Blake soul-autocracy became aggressive and revolutionary,
and the breach with reason, philosophic or other, widened to a yawning
gulf. Whether he is declaring ‘the world of imagination to be the
world of eternity,’ scoffing at the nature-lover who sees ‘with’
not ‘through’ the eye, or affirming that ‘to generalize is to be an
idiot’--(a stupendous example of the procedure he derides)--he stands
for a poetry stripped bare of all that allies it either to philosophy
or to common sense. His prophetic books adumbrate a grandiose poetic
metaphysic, a world-system framed to the postulates of this denuded
poetry. And Shelley’s _Apology_ enthrones imagination as the creator
and upholder of all civilization.
Secondly, the poetic shifting of the stress, within the domain of
the autocratic soul, from reason to imagination and feeling, told
powerfully upon the ethical ideals proclaimed by this group of poets.
It added fresh impetus to that disposition to override or transcend
external standards of morality which is inherent in all vivid inner
consciousness. Moral distinctions fade in the inner illumination of
the mystic. We have seen hints of such a ‘transvaluation of ethical
values’ disarranging the iron categories of Dante’s Hell. Applied to
Hamlet or Othello, the traditional categories of good and evil break in
our hands. Milton’s heroic devil, and the lovers whom Browning scorns
for being saved by their sloth from crime, still perplex the moralist.
But the poets of the Revolution are openly sceptical of morality. Of
Shelley I need not speak. Even Wordsworth makes a hero of a murderer.
And Blake first proclaimed explicitly, a century before Nietzsche,
a good ‘beyond good and evil,’ and figured the inauguration of this
transcendent ethic in the colossal symbolism of his Marriage of Heaven
and Hell.
In all these writers, it is true, their attitude to morality was in
part derived from the bias towards emancipation then current in all
departments of ethical, social, and political life, and had no relation
to specifically poetic apprehension. ‘Freedom’ was an ideal for Godwin
and for Robespierre, as well as for Shelley and for Kant, and was
pursued by them with equal devotion in their several fashions. But they
all, also, understood it in the light of their several preoccupations.
With Godwin, as with Robespierre, it is mainly negative; with Shelley,
as with Kant, it acquires positive substance and content. And this
is because both philosopher and poet see it as the means to some
perfection of the soul. The soul-autocracy of the age, extravagant as
it might be, is seen at its noblest in the Kantian freedom won through
duty, and in the Shelleyan freedom won through Love. The Kantian ideal
of freedom interpreted in that last conclusion of Goethe’s wisdom--‘He
alone is free who daily wins his freedom anew’--has passed into the
very substance of the strenuous German mind. The Shelleyan ideal is
of a rarer but also of a more perilous stuff, and has touched no
such chords in the English character as his music has stirred in the
English ear. But something of the genius of both ideals was gathered up
and concentrated in Wordsworth’s great affirmation of the meaning of
national freedom.
Wordsworth’s sense of law corrects what is anarchic in Shelley, as
Shelley’s flame-like ardour corrects what is prosaic and common in
Wordsworth. Together they present more purely than any of their
contemporaries the noble substance of a poetic ethic. In that poetic
ethic the greatest word, rightly understood, is still the Shelleyan
Love.
And it may be that if there is any ideal which, springing from poetic
apprehension, is yet fit, rightly interpreted, for the common needs of
men, it is that ‘love of love’ on which Tennyson, so far always from
the revolutionary temper either in love or poetry, set his finger in
his early prime, as the sovereign endowment of the poet. Only it must
be love wide enough to include every kind of spiritual energy by which
the soul, transcending itself, fulfils itself, and exerts, whether upon
men or nations, its liberating and uplifting power: the love which
creates, and the love which endures; the love which makes the hero or
the artist, and that which spends itself inexhaustibly on a thankless
cause; the impersonal ardour of the mind, which Spinoza called the
‘intellectual love of God,’ and the impassioned union of souls, which
to some has seemed a clue to the vision of reality, and to others the
surest pledge of a future life; the love of country which distinguishes
the true service of humanity from a shallow cosmopolitanism; and the
love of our fellow men, which distinguishes true patriotism from
national greed. To have had no mean share in sustaining this large
ideal of the ‘soul’ which makes us free is an enduring glory of the
poets.
Nor is this strange if, as I trust this partial survey may have served
to suggest, the spiritual energy transcending itself, for which Love is
the most adequate name, be the core of the World-view towards which,
from their various religious or philosophic vantage-grounds, a number
of poetic master-spirits have made an approach. Whether they have
found it as a light kindling the universe, like Dante and Shelley; or
as a creative power shadowed forth in the eternal new birth of all
things, like Lucretius; or as the will and passion of the human soul,
heroically shaping its fate, and divining its infinity most clearly
when most aware of its limitations, like Goethe; in some form the faith
that spiritual energy is the heart of reality was the centre towards
which they knowingly or obscurely strove. Such a faith, I suggest, will
be found to be a vital constituent of every view of the world reached
by a poet through his poetic experience, and the main contribution of
that rich, profound, and intense form of experience to man’s ultimate
interpretation of life.
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