time to read Spinoza--an author with whom he would have found himself
largely in sympathy--he might have learned that nothing is evil in
itself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in
creation, nor to groundless malice in man. Evil is an inevitable
aspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve
themselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter
enough for them to prosper equally side by side. Under these
circumstances the partial success of any creature--say, the
cancer-microbe--is an evil from the point of view of those other
creatures--say, men--to whom that success is a defeat. Shelley
sometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy. So he says of the
fair lady in the _Sensitive Plant_:
"All killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof--
In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent."
Now it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and
go feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves do not object; oak-leaves
might be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot
listen to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless
they are quickly and utterly exterminated. And fundamentally men are
subject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason
unless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that,
being animals, they should be reasonable exclusively. Imagination is
indeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing
themselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children,
perhaps, or for their religion. But they are not more capable of
sacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the
cancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.
When Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his
ignorance of the world. The illusion he suffers from is
constitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly
subject to in their way: what he is marvelling at is really that
anything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral
disposition. Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and
bids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature: so
that all is not vanity in his illusion, nor night in his blindness.
The poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion
in the expression of his own soul. His political utopias, his belief
in the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way
of judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his
lyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy. If he had understood universal
nature, he would not have so glorified in his own. And his own nature
was worth glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest,
richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse. I have not
read in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated
instincts of the mind. The world of Shelley is that which the vital
monad within many of us--I will not say within all, for who shall set
bounds to the variations of human nature?--the world which the vital
monad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have
its way.
Matthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he
was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external
perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his
lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even
an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul
just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous,
and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest
playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from
observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity
appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men
would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons,
like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole
inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of
real things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree
bent by too prevalent a wind. Half the fertility of such a soul is
lost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy
deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing
object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate
in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an
ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate
possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the
desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.
His obtuseness to things dynamic--to the material order--leaves his
whole mind free to develop things æsthetic after their own kind; his
abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative
freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.
We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of
us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or
stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no
less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or
flowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of
producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,
like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances
may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they
cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed. What
Shelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like
what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food--a mass of
mere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley
constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed
organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and
muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human
happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may
be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they
can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which
they hide.
When the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the
world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that
_freedom_ should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not
been the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for
himself. "I never could discern in him," says his friend Hogg, "any
more than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love
of liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...
and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution." We all fancy nowadays
that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we
approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make
them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions
would be if we retained them. Liberty of the press and liberty to vote
do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I
suppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of
a poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is
forbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with
the people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling
of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test
of freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the
beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.
To be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to
be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those
of us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to
declare frankly that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility
of freedom.
"I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select,
Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion; though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding that grows bright
Gazing on many truths.... Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity!"
The difficulties in reducing this charming theory of love to practice
are well exemplified in Shelley's own life. He ran away with his first
wife not because she inspired any uncontrollable passion, but because
she declared she was a victim of domestic oppression and threw herself
upon him for protection. Nevertheless, when he discovered that his
best friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love
principles, he was very seriously annoyed. When he presently abandoned
her, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned
herself in the Serpentine: and his second wife needed all her natural
sweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the
waves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept
the too sensitive heart of her husband. Free love would not, then,
secure freedom from complications; it would not remove the present
occasion for jealousy, reproaches, tragedies, and the dragging of a
lengthening chain. Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom
of action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements,
but you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism
and not, like love, a plastic dream. Wisdom is very old and therefore
often ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who
would live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world:
and that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a snare for
poets. Let them endure to love freely, hopelessly, and infinitely,
after the manner of Plato and Dante, and even of Goethe, when Goethe
really loved: that exquisite sacrifice will improve their verse, and
it will not kill them. Let them follow in the traces of Shelley when
he wrote in his youth: "I have been most of the night pacing a
church-yard. I must now engage in scenes of strong interest.... I
expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry.... I
slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not
die," Happy man if he had been able to add, "And did not marry!"
Last among the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his
atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his
biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a
pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox
conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a
judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any
sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred
the _Paradiso_ of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to
the popular _Inferno_ itself, could evidently be attracted by
Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as
expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A
pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this
whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any
conscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of
the whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a
panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the
individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral
ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the
essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the
chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He
maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused
among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful
and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose
it.
"To suffer ...
To forgive ...
To defy Power ...
To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This ... is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free."
Shelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly
speculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All
metaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good
poetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance:
"The pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
"He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.
"He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.
"The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
... the dead live there."
Atheism or pantheism of this stamp cannot be taxed with being gross or
materialistic; the trouble is rather that it is too hazy in its
sublimity. The poet has not perceived the natural relation between
facts and ideals so clearly or correctly as he has felt the moral
relation between them. But his allegiance to the intuition which
defies, for the sake of felt excellence, every form of idolatry or
cowardice wearing the mask of religion--this allegiance is itself the
purest religion; and it is capable of inspiring the sweetest and most
absolute poetry. In daring to lay bare the truths of fate, the poet
creates for himself the subtlest and most heroic harmonies; and he is
comforted for the illusions he has lost by being made incapable of
desiring them.
We have seen that Shelley, being unteachable, could never put together
any just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions,
and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does
not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of
nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic;
it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never
were on earth, and never will be. If you are seriously interested only
in what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in
Shelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism
of life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no
solidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances
of life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those
circumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the
circumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it
stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the
formal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.
By so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a
parallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the
analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances
of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life
can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and
air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as
persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he
was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the
interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are
probably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which
Matthew Arnold said we should read in order to know the best that has
been thought and said in the world. The future, too, even among men,
may contain, as Shelley puts it, many "arts, though unimagined, yet to
be." The divination of poets cannot, of course, be expected to reveal
any of these hidden regions as they actually exist or will exist; but
what would be the advantage of revealing them? It could only be what
the advantage of criticising human life would be also, to improve
subsequent life indirectly by turning it towards attainable goods, and
is it not as important a thing to improve life directly and in the
present, if one has the gift, by enriching rather than criticising it?
Besides, there is need of fixing the ideal by which criticism is to be
guided. If you have no image of happiness or beauty or perfect
goodness before you, how are you to judge what portions of life are
important, and what rendering of them is appropriate?
Being a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal
goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a
discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of
life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life
is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in
expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove
useful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon
them. This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is
diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that
are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other
names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material
processes. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some
favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these
visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day
be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the
possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is
precisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,
that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific
probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the
landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that
the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual
truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)
than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre
and aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by
sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul
touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may
people the infinite.
For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired
poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most
appealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the
world they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.
They do not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I
think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it
"Must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
Which frowns above the idle foam of time."
"Frowns," says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something
timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could
threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous
error! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those
who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to
reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal
possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of
other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite
unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal
essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian
calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome
to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. Whether
any one has the will depends on his material constitution, and whether
he has the power depends on the firm texture of that constitution and
on circumstances happening to be favourable to its operation.
Otherwise what the rebel or the visionary hails as his ideal will be
no picture of his destiny or of that of the world. It will be, and
will always remain, merely a picture of his heart. This picture,
indestructible in its ideal essence, will mirror also the hearts of
those who may share, or may have shared, the nature of the poet who
drew it. So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of
Shelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted
friend wrote upon his tomb: _cor cordium_, the heart of hearts.
VI
THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
_Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of
California, August_ 25, 1911.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The privilege of addressing you to-day
is very welcome to me, not merely for the honour of it, which is
great, nor for the pleasures of travel, which are many, when it is
California that one is visiting for the first time, but also because
there is something I have long wanted to say which this occasion seems
particularly favourable for saying. America is still a young country,
and this part of it is especially so; and it would have been nothing
extraordinary if, in this young country, material preoccupations had
altogether absorbed people's minds, and they had been too much
engrossed in living to reflect upon life, or to have any philosophy.
The opposite, however, is the case. Not only have you already found
time to philosophise in California, as your society proves, but the
eastern colonists from the very beginning were a sophisticated race.
As much as in clearing the land and fighting the Indians they were
occupied, as they expressed it, in wrestling with the Lord. The
country was new, but the race was tried, chastened, and full of solemn
memories. It was an old wine in new bottles; and America did not have
to wait for its present universities, with their departments of
academic philosophy, in order to possess a living philosophy--to have
a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human
destiny.