Chapter IV: Gabriele D’annunzio (2)

But even the finest dramatic work of d’Annunzio makes clear that his genius is fundamentally lyrical. The greatest moments of _La Figlia di Iorio_ and _Francesca_ are uttered in a vein which thrills and sings; while, on the other hand, these moments are often reached by summary short cuts, not by the logical evolution of great drama. And it is fortunate that while he continued to be allured by drama--giving in particular a very individual rendering of the tragedy of Phædra (1909)--d’Annunzio’s most serious and ambitious poetry took the form of a festival of sustained song, the _Laudi_ (1903 onwards). We have already quoted from the picture of his childhood drawn retrospectively, in the opening book, by the poet of forty. But these passages, though not at all merely episodic, hardly disclose the deeper sources of inspiration in this series of lyric cycles. ‘Praises,’ he calls them, ‘Praises of the Sky, of the Sea, of the Earth, of its Heroes.’ The glory of earth, and sea, and sky had drawn more majestic praise from the poet of the 123rd Psalm, though in his naïve Hebrew way he ‘praised’ only their Maker, not these ‘wonderful works’ themselves. D’Annunzio’s ‘praise’ expresses simply the ravishment of acute sensibilities in the presence of the loveliness and sublimity of Nature and the heroism of man, an emotion Greek rather than Hebraic. Our poet is perhaps the least Hebraic of all modern poets of genius; and if his barbaric violence alienates him almost as completely from the Hellenic temper, he is yet akin to it by his inexhaustible joy in beauty. And in these years of the _Laudi_ Hellas had become more than ever the determining focus about which his artistic dreams revolved, the magnet to whose lure even the barbarian in him succumbs. The first book, called _Maia_, after the mother of Hermes, describes the poet’s spiritual journey to the shrine of that god of energy and enterprise, whose Praxitelean image, the most magnificent expression of radiant virility ever fashioned by the chisel, had not long before been unearthed at Olympia. It is a journey of discovery, and d’Annunzio invokes for it the symbolism of the last voyage of the Dantesque Ulysses to seek the experience that lay ‘beyond the sunset.’ D’Annunzio turns his prow east, not west, but he, too, is daring peril in the quest of the unknown. A splendid Proem in _terza rima_, ‘To the Pleiads and the Fates,’ takes us to a rocky promontory by the Atlantic shore, where, on a flaming pyre, the helm of the wrecked ship of Ulysses is being consumed--the fiery consummation which crowns most of d’Annunzio’s heroic careers. The modern venturer, too, must disdain safety, not like Galileo turning back into the secure haven, but fronting the pathless sea of fate with no anchor but his own valour. The sequel does not, it is true, accord completely with this Ulyssean vision. Symbolic imagery is interwoven, in this ‘spiritual journey,’ to the ruin of poetic coherence, with scenes from an actual voyage to Greece, leaves from a tourist’s notebook, incidents of steamer-life, games and talk on board, sketches of fellow-passengers, the squalor and vice of Patras. Presently the ship reaches Elis, and then, as we enter the ruins of Olympia, the great past, human and divine, rises up before us. Pericles, Alcibiades, Themistocles obliterate the tourist memories, and the poet holds high colloquy with Zeus, and offers up a prayer, nine hundred lines long, to Hermes--a lurid picture of the future of humanity, as d’Annunzio imagined it, wrought by the genius of Energy and Enterprise, Invention and Will; a future dominated by men of rocky jaw, who chew care like a laurel leaf, precipitate themselves on life, and impregnate it relentlessly with their purposes,--a significant image, for the d’Annunzian Hermes is fused with Eros (v. 2904). Eros was, indeed, indispensable, it might well be thought, to a quite satisfying d’Annunzian divinity. Yet in the fine colloquy with Zeus, which precedes, he touches a deeper note, rare with him, of desperate and baffled struggle with his own ‘vast sensuality.’ He begs Zeus for a sign. ‘I am at war with many monsters, but the direst are those, ah me! which rise within me from the depths of my lusts.’ ‘Thou wilt conquer them,’ replies Zeus, ‘only if thou canst transform them into divine children.’

The monsters, nevertheless, continued to haunt his later art. But happier moods were interposed, when he found relief from their urgency in poetic communing with the passionless calm of Nature and of the dead things that cannot die.

Such moods in the second and third books of the _Laudi_, _Elettra_ and _Alcione_, both mainly written before the _Maia_. The _Alcione_, in particular, is the record of a true ‘halcyon’ season--of hours or moments--in the poet’s stormy course. It opens, indeed, with a savage denunciation--in perfectly handled _terza rima_--of the demons, within and without, that he has striven with. But now for a while he calls a truce:

Washed clean from human foulness in cool springs,
I need but, for my festival, the ring
Of the ultimate horizons of the earth.
The breezes and the radiant air shall weave
My new robe, and this body, purged from sin,
Shall dance, light-hearted and alert, within!

Air and light and water do indeed play a large and significant part in this benign experience, and in the poetry which renders it. Water, we know, had peculiar allurements for his imagination; but now the obsession of fleets and arsenals is overcome, and he looks out over the wide levels of the Arno mouth, where fishing boats with their hanging nets are seen, transfigured in the effulgence of the west, like cups or lilies of flame upon the water; or ‘on a June evening after rain,’ when ‘the gracious sky, tenderly gazing at her image in the earth she has refreshed, laughs out from a thousand mirrors.’ The solidity of the material world seems to remain only in its most delicate and attenuated forms--the crescent moon ‘slender as the eyebrow of a girl,’ the lean boughs and tapering leaves of the olive, the seashore sand, not ‘ribbed’ as Wordsworth put it, but delicately traced like the palate or the finger-tip. The poet is visibly striving through these frail and delicate things to escape his obsession into a realm of spirit he divines, but cannot reach:

A slender wreath suffices, with few leaves,
Lest it with weight or any shadow burden
The gracious thoughts of dawn!

This is the language of no sensualist, but of a mystic. And d’Annunzio in these poems again and again approaches the poetic mysticism of Wordsworth, and of Shelley and Dante. As he watches the dewy loveliness of evening, the earth seems to dissolve in the ‘infinite smile,’ which for Shelley ‘kindled the universe’;[25] and for the Italian it is the smile of Beatrice. In the child, who hardly exists for him before, the poet of pitiless virility now sees not only ‘the father of the man,’ but the soul implicitly aware of the Truth we only guess at:

The immense plenitude of life
Is tremulous in the light murmur
Of thy virginal breathing,
And Man with his fervours and griefs.

* * * * *

Thou art ignorant of all, and discernest
All the Truths that the Shadow hides.
If thou questionest Earth, Heaven answers,
If thou speak’st with the waters, the flowers hear.[26]

There are hints, perhaps reminiscences, of Wordsworth here; but d’Annunzio’s more obvious affinity is doubtless with Shelley, whose Roman grave he saluted in an ode of lofty eulogy and sculptured grace.

The lyric eloquence of _Alcione_ undoubtedly recalls the rush of Shelley’s music and the æthereal liquidity of his style. Yet they touch across a gulf of profound disparity. D’Annunzio, for all his preoccupation with air and light and water, never, either as man or as artist, escapes the earth. The hard stuff of his egoism is never really transmuted in the flame of love; nor does the clear and delicate precision of his style ever really dissolve in radiant suffusion. D’Annunzio’s nature-world, like Shelley’s, is peopled with imagined shapes, in which the myths of old Greece are created anew. But here too their divergence asserts itself. Shelley’s Prometheus is not really earth-born, and his Asia is the hardly embodied symbol of the ideal passion of his own soul. While d’Annunzio’s Triton and Dryad are recognizably akin to the sea or woodland life they spring from, hued like the salt deep, and full of the sap of earth. D’Annunzio is the greater artist, Shelley the finer and the rarer soul.

But these gracious idylls were, as has been hinted, an episode. Nature could not replace man; beyond ‘earth’ and ‘sea’ and ‘sky,’ the ‘heroes,’ and especially the heroes and heroic memories of Italy, called for his ‘praise.’ Here, he felt, was the home of his spirit. The gracious valley of Arno might be

A cradle of flowers and dreams and peace;
But the cradle of my soul
Is the crashing chariot’s furrow
In the stone of the Appian Way.

The _Elettra_, the second book of the _Laudi_, is mainly devoted to the memories of these vanished glories. The resonant herald of the Third Italy wanders, for instance, among the ‘Cities of Silence’--decayed, half grass-grown capitals of vanished dukes and extinct republics--Ferrara, Pisa, Pistoja; oldest and grandest of all, Ravenna, the ‘deep ship’s hull, heavy with the iron weight of empire, driven by shipwreck on the utmost bounds of the world.’[27] Of the sequence of lyrics on the great enterprise of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand,’ _La Notte di Caprera_, it is enough to say that it is worthy of being put beside Carducci’s Ode. After a quarter of a century Garibaldi’s glory was no whit dimmed. On the contrary, Italians who knew how many gross blots defiled the Italy he had helped to win, saw Garibaldi as a figure of ideal splendour and purity on the further side of a foul morass. The bitter disillusion of such minds is powerfully painted in the moving piece: ‘To One of the Thousand.’ An old Garibaldian sailor brings his broken anchor-cable to the ship cordwainer to be mended. He looks on, sombre, dejected, silent, but thinking what he does not say; and his thoughts are like this:

The anchor-sheet is broken: let it be.
No hope of mending. Give it up, go home!
Turn into scourges, cordsman, and halter-nooses
Thy bitter twine.
Vilely supine lies the Third Italy,
A harlot-people put to basest uses,
And in her holy oak-grove’s shadow, Rome
Pastures her swine.[28]

But Rome, the eternal City, could only obscure her destiny, not efface it; disillusion founded on her moments of self-oblivion was itself the vainest of illusions. That is the faith of the new Italian Renascence, and d’Annunzio, the fiercest chastiser of her oblivious fatuities, attains his loftiest note of ‘praise’ in the Ode which prophetically arrays Rome in glory as the future centre of the embodied Power of Man.

It is based on the legend, told by Ovid,[29] of the ship of the Great Mother, stranded in the Tiber mud, and drawn to shore by the Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta. The opening stanzas tell the story--the dearth in the city, the Sibylline oracle’s counsel to bring the image of the Mater Magna, the arrival of her ship in the river, the stranding in the mud, the vain efforts of the entire city to extricate it, until a Vestal Virgin, without an effort, draws it to bank. Then the poet interprets the symbolic legend:

So, O Rome, our Rome, in its time

* * * * *

Shall come from far-off seas,
Shall come from the deep, the Power
Wherein alone thou hast hope.
So, O Rome, our Rome, in its hour,
A heroic Maid of thy race
Shall draw Her within thy walls.
Not a vessel immovably stuck
In the slimy bed, not an image
Once worshipped in foreign fanes,
Shall her pure hand draw to the shore;
But the Power of Man, but the holy
Spirit born in the heart
Of the Peoples in peace and in war,
But the glory of Earth in the glow
Divine of the human Will
That manifests her, and transfigures,
By works and deeds beyond number,
Of light, and darkness, of love
And hatred, of life and death;
But the beauty of human fate,
The fate of Man who seeks
His divinity in his Creature.
Since in thee, as in an imperishable
Imprint shall the Power of Man
Take form and image ordained
In the market-place and the Senate
To curb the dishonour of Men.

* * * * *

O Rome, O Rome, in thee only,
In the circle of thy seven hills,
The myriad human discords
Shall find their vast and sublime
Unity. Thou the new Bread
Shalt give, and speak the new Word.

All that men have thought,
Dreamed and endured, achieved
And enjoyed, in the Earth’s vast bound,
So many thoughts, and dreams,
So many labours and pangs,
And raptures, and every right won
And every secret laid bare,
And every book set open
In the boundless circuit of Earth....
Shall become the vesture of thee,
Thee only, O Rome, O Rome!
Thou, goddess, Thou only shalt break
The new Bread, and speak the new Word!

On this note, the climax of his boundless national faith, we will leave d’Annunzio. We are apt to think that the tide of humanity has ebbed decisively away from the city of the seven hills, and that wherever its sundered streams may be destined finally to flow together in unison, the Roman Forum, where the roads of all the world once met, will not be that spot. Yet a city which can generate magnificent, even if illusory, dreams is assured of a real potency in human affairs not to be challenged in its kind by far greater and wealthier cities which the Londoner, or the New Yorker, or even the Parisian, would never think of addressing in these lyrical terms.

Few men so splendidly endowed as d’Annunzio have given the world so much occasion for resentment and for ridicule. His greatest gifts lend themselves with fatal ease to abuse; his ‘vast sensuality’ and his iron nerve sometimes co-operate and enforce one another in abortions of erotics and ferocity. But the same gifts, in other phases, become the creative and controlling elements of his sumptuous style. His boundless wealth of sensuous images provides the gorgeous texture of its ever changing woof. But its luxury is controlled by tenacious purpose; the sentences, however richly arrayed, move with complete lucidity of aim to their goal; the surface is pictorial, but the structure is marble. Thus this Faun of genius, as he seems under one aspect, compounded with the Quixotic adventurer, as he seems under another, meet in one of the supreme literary artists of the Latin race; a creator of beauty which, however Latin in origin and cast, has the quality that strikes home across the boundaries of race, and has already gone far to make its author not merely the protagonist of the Latin renascence, but a European classic.

V

IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?

SUMMARY

View of the World, or ‘World-view,’ defined. Distinction of
_religious_ and _philosophical_ World-views. The present essay
attempts to define and describe a _poetic_ World-view.--I.
Character of poetic experience. Types of belief about Man and
Nature to which it predisposes. Though rarely detached from
religious or philosophical presumptions, it habitually modifies
them, and the method here proposed is to study, in some salient
examples, the character and direction of these modifications (p.
150).--II. (i) Modifications of _religious_ World-views by the
poetic inspirations of Personality and Love. HOMER. ÆSCHYLUS.
DANTE (p. 156).--III. (ii) Modifications of _philosophical_
World-views: (_a_) Materialistic schools. Epicureanism and
LUCRETIUS. Poets of Pessimism: LEOPARDI (p. 169).--IV. (_b_)
‘Objective idealisms.’ Stoic pantheism and VERGIL. WORDSWORTH.
SHELLEY. Philosophic doctrine of ‘Nature’ in WORDSWORTH, and
in GOETHE. SPINOZA and GOETHE (p. 184).--V. (_c_) ‘Subjective
idealisms.’ ‘Mind’ in the philosophers and in the poets of
the age of WORDSWORTH. The poets subordinate (1) the rational
to the emotional and imaginative factors of soul: WORDSWORTH,
BLAKE, SHELLEY, and (2) moral categories to a good ‘beyond good
and evil.’ Of this poetic ethic the most vital constituent is
Love; and Love, comprehensively understood, will be an intrinsic
element of every World-view won through poetic experience (p.
198).

V

IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?

‘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.

II

I begin with examples in which these data are derived from _religion_; and, in the first place, from religion still untouched by philosophic reflection. Without rashly assuming the solution of unsolved or insoluble problems, one may venture to assert that the Homeric epics owe their present form neither to purely religious awe nor merely to conscious and deliberate artistry, but to a poetic apprehension of the world operating upon the data of the savage cults and rituals, the animism, totemism, and magic, which anthropology is gradually deciphering under the palimpsest of their obliterating splendour. With some aspects of the process we are not here concerned. If ‘Homer,’ as many modern scholars suppose, disliked human sacrifice and similar barbarities, and tempered or effaced the record of them, he reflects the growing efficacy of civilized, but not necessarily of poetic, ideas. It is otherwise with the transformation, whatever its precise nature and history, which put the defined character and rich personal accent of the Homeric Olympus in place of the psychological fluidity and incoherence of primitive religion. For the childhood of poetry the change possibly involved a loss. A world where there are no barriers, or none which magic cannot dissolve, where gods and men and beasts pass over into one another without resistance or demur, where everything can be done and had if the right formula be pronounced and the due charm applied--such a world is the home and habitat of the fairy tale; but its facile instability must be overcome before a mature poetry, no less certainly than before a mature science, can arise. The Homeric outlook upon the world had as a religion grave flaws, which merited the strictures of later moralists; but it had also, as a religion, magnificent qualities to which they rarely did justice. His deathless figures permanently raised the status of man and the ideals of human achievement; and every line of the poetry is instinct with an assurance of the glory of the world and the goodness of life, and the nobility of heroic emprise, and of reverence and of pity, which justly made his book the Bible of later Greece.

Yet it is plain that even Homer reflects or finds reflection in but a limited tract of the Greek mind; that there were many deeper, as well as darker, currents in the Greek way of apprehending the world, of which that radiant mirror shows no trace. Humanity had triumphed over the superhuman as well as over the subhuman, clarity over mystery as well as over confusion. The Ionian thinkers of the sixth century swept away the fables of Olympus, fastened on the problem of substance, and proclaimed the sublime discovery that the All is One. The Orphic cults and the Thracian orgies of Dionysus betrayed by the widespread and intimate hold which they won in Greek life, refined and humanized as they doubtless were, that religion in Greece too included the riot of intoxicated rapture as well as clear-eyed piety; the Bacchic frenzy, which carries men beyond themselves, as well as temperate self-reverence and self-control. Both these new elements enriched and uplifted, if at some points they also impoverished and degraded, Greek mentality and the Greek apprehension of the world, religious, philosophic, and poetic alike. The philosophic apprehension of unity reacted on religion, and the two strains coalesced in the sublime theism of Cleanthes’ hymn. The Dionysiac rapture reacted on philosophy--without it should we have had the great doctrine proclaimed in the _Phædrus_, of the divine vision won through madness and love? And both reacted upon poetry--above all on tragedy, with its stringent ideal of unity, maintained and manifested through all the phases and moods of conflict, and the alliance, disclosed in its very structure, of Apolline clarity and order with the lyric exaltation of Dionysus. But the matter of tragedy shows yet more evidently the larger and deeper World-view which poetry has now won. In passing from Homer to Aeschylus we enter an atmosphere in which the gods are hardly ever visible, but which is laden and tense with the sense of divine things. His persons, it was said, are more than human; certainly his gods are sometimes--like the Zeus of the _Prometheus_--less than divine. But the Aeschylean universe has outgrown Olympus without having dispossessed it. A soul of immense reach and depth, apprehending life from many sides, but always with a sense of vast issues and inexhaustible import, here interprets the old stories of man’s relations with the gods, and leaves us with a new vision of the possibilities and responsibility of man. His tragic conflicts call incommensurate forces into play, and their apparent solution leaves yet larger problems unsolved. The story of Prometheus ended with his reconciliation to Zeus; and this doubtless expressed the poet’s deliberate intention and design. The modern world has remembered Prometheus, not for his final surrender or appeasement, but as the assertor and embodiment of something in man which stands over against the gods he recognizes, and not only endures unflinchingly all that their utmost anger can inflict, but arraigns them himself before a law of Justice higher than their own. Æschylus, we know, was a devoutly religious man, and never dreamed of surrendering his reverence for the divine because of the crimes of the gods. Possibly, as Wilamowitz has suggested, he believed that divinity itself had passed through a youth ‘full of foolish noise’ to become with ripening years a righteous God and Father, worthy at length of universal reverence. Reverence for such an erring divinity is hardly distinguishable from forgiveness; in any case it foreshadows, if it does not announce, the clear recognition of human responsibility. And that recognition is already dominant in the mature work of Æschylus. The traditional superstitions which still entangled the Greek mind--the doctrine of an irresistible fate, or of a divine jealousy attending human greatness--dissolve under the scrutiny of his terrible insight. Man is free even in his crimes, and the greater because he is free. Clytaemnestra chooses and wills as freely as Lady Macbeth; she is as little the helpless victim of the curse of Atreus as the other of the Witches’ spell. It needed a great poet thus to embrace in his vision of life things incompatible to common sense. ‘Whether Æschylus is greater,’ declares the penetrating interpreter to whom I have referred, ‘when he uplifts our hearts by the full tones of surrender to the divine, or when he thrills us with the terrible acts and sufferings of human freewill, every one must decide for himself from his own experience; but let no one say that he understands the poet until he has known them both.’[31] The poet’s eye, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ overcomes the antinomies of theological dogma; and herein lies one of the most signal services which poetic apprehension has rendered to thought, and not least to religion.

To pass from Æschylus to Dante is to watch operations of poetic intelligence in which only the environment, the material, and the instruments of expression are profoundly changed. The words just quoted of the Greek might apply without the alteration of a syllable to the Florentine; and if ever poet saw earth and heaven at once it was he. But the theological World-view which he found was more authoritatively established, more intellectual in its philosophical substance, and more rich and beautiful in its human appeal. The fresh fountain of religious feeling, still abundantly flowing, was fortified and entrenched within a vast structure of elaborated dogma, for which councils and saints had supplied the architects and the masons, and ancient philosophy the stones. Within this imposing edifice, nevertheless, Dante, with complete conviction, found and made his home. No one now questions the absoluteness of Dante’s Catholic faith, and we should seek in vain for any rebellious upsurging of the poet in him against the starkest of scholastic abstractions. On the contrary, his wonderful gift of style continually finds the material for poetry in the most seemingly arid regions. Sometimes the result is merely an astonishing _tour de force_; but often we become aware that Dante has not only invented but discovered, and that many a dogma which has the air of being the mere husk of religion is in reality the imperfect, stammering utterance through which religious passion sought to make itself articulate. Dante, in short, makes us feel in these constructions of the intellect the language of the soul.

To do this needed something more than devout belief. It needed the imaginative intuition of a poet. The poetry of Dante was distinguished from that of his older contemporaries above all by being just this intense soul-vision put into words. ‘I simply write down what Love within dictates.’[32] Psychological veracity never fails him. Allegory, in so many hands a tissue of personified abstractions, becomes, in his, a living image of humanity. Symbolic meanings and applications interweave and encircle it, but the core is real. His vision is only on the surface a description--necessarily speculative--of the fortunes of souls after death; its substance, as he tells us, is ‘man of his freewill choosing good or evil here.’ The human denizens of his hell and purgatory and paradise have undergone no inner change; they are the men he had known, in their spiritual habits as they lived; and their fate, when Dante is thinking most as a poet and least as a theologian, is a continuation of their crucial actions. That Paolo and Francesca are immersed in unquenchable flames satisfies the theological idea of retribution; Dante inflicts on them the more searching penalty of being for ever locked in the embrace of their illicit love. And how often, when he thinks he is devoutly following out to the last consequence the Church’s dogma of eternal punishment, he is unconsciously testifying to the poet’s sublime faith in the soul of man as stronger than death and hell. ‘Who is he,’ asks Dante, looking upon Capaneo (_Inf._ xiv. 46), ‘who seems not to heed the flame, but lies fiercely unsubdued by the fiery vein?’ Or the yet greater picture of Farinata (_Inf._ x. 85), defiantly erect where the rest grovel in agony, ‘as if he held hell in great disdain.’ Even the criminals whom the poet most abhors, and thrusts into the very depths of the abyss, even the traitors guilty of the death of Cæsar or of Christ, he allows still to show greatness of soul; Brutus, champed to a bloody foam in the jaws of Lucifer, is still the Stoic philosopher, and though he writhes in agony, utters not a word (_Inf._ xxxiv. 66). And how wonderfully in the great Ulysses scene (_Inf._ xxvi) the poet takes the pen out of the hand of the theologian, and, forgetting the ‘fraud’ for which the captor of Troy is doing penance in hell, compels us to listen entranced to his tale of that last voyage, beyond the sunset, of the old wanderer, still insatiable of experience, who had kindled his shrinking comrades by bidding them ‘Consider of what seed ye are sprung; ye were not made to live like the brute beasts, but to follow after virtue and knowledge.’ Strange words to issue from the quenchless flames of hell! But Dante goes beyond this. For the sake of the heroism of Cato, he flatly violates the theological categories which condemned him to hell, and makes him the guardian of Purgatory.[33] As for the rest of the ‘virtuous heathen,’ he cannot indeed transfer them from the hell to which the Church has assigned them--a hell much more ferocious than any of which they had dreamed--to Elysium. But he does what he may, and he provides for them within the precincts of hell an Elysium of green lawns and running streams, ‘the one place in the Inferno where there is light and air’ (_Inf._ iii). The theological ethic of sin is thus unconsciously crossed, again and again, by the poetic ethic for which ‘good’ means greatness of soul.

Moreover, with a depth of spiritual insight strangely in contrast with the vulgar notion of punishment which dictated the theological hell, Dante has asserted, even in this realm of iron necessity, the freedom of man. The inmates of hell are not convicts condemned and punished for sins long since repented of: they are there of their own motion and by their own will; and if there is no hope there, it is not because God has no mercy, but because they cannot repent. The souls in Purgatory are held there by no compulsion; they desire nothing but to be purified of their sins, and the moment they desire to mount to Paradise, that moment they are free.

It would be strange, then, had Dante, with all his sense of supreme cosmic forces, not stood for the faith that man is yet the ‘captain of his soul.’ There he is at one with Æschylus and Milton, and the other great theological poets of the West. Man’s ‘freedom’ is a root idea of the Comedy; and not merely because its purpose was to show him ‘in the exercise of freewill,’ determining his fate hereafter. Dante went much farther than this. A devoted Catholic and citizen, and eager to welcome the authority both of Church and State, he was driven by the corruption of the one and the anarchy of the other to seek ‘another way’--the way of spiritual self-help with the aid of philosophy and theology, along which he is led by Vergil and Beatrice. The great farewell words with which Vergil leaves him in the Earthly Paradise, ‘I crown and mitre thee king and bishop over thyself,’ express with thrilling power the individualist--nay, the revolutionary--side of his thought. He would not have been the great poet he was if it had been the only side. Dante’s reverence for Vergil and for Beatrice is of the very substance of his self-assertion; he has crowned and mitred himself by taking them for his guides, and the result is the great poetic cosmos eloquent beyond all the other masterpieces of the world of devout discipleship, and yet instinct in every line with the ardour of a soul ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.’

But the name of Beatrice points to another aspect of Dante’s work on which the impress of the poet in him is yet more unmistakably set. Measured by the range and compass of thought, and by the richness and delicacy of feeling, which the term in his usage conveys, Dante is the first, as he is the greatest, of the poets of Love. His poetry recovers and renews, or at the least suggests and recalls, all the varieties of intellectual and emotional experience for which philosophy, religion, and romance had, before his time, found in ‘Love’ the final expression, or the speaking symbol. The cosmic love (φιλία) by which Empedocles had first interpreted the universal phenomena which we still, hardly less anthropomorphically, know as ‘attraction’; the passion for another human being (ἔρως) in which the author of the _Phædrus_ and the _Symposium_ discovered one of the sources of the divine exaltation which emancipates men from their human limits, and endows them with the vision of reality; the love of God for man, and of man for God (ἀγάπη), proclaimed as the very core of Christianity in the Fourth Gospel--these three types of love, all denoted for Dante by _Amor_, _amore_,[34] were conjoined in his experience with a fourth, distinct from all, though nearly allied to the second: the romantic love of woman which had been the chief inspiration of the poetry of Provence, and which, however sublimated and spiritualized, is enshrined in the _Vita Nuova_. To say that Dante’s mind, equally powerful in analysis and in synthesis, confounds these distinctions would be unjust; but it would be equally untrue to assert that their associations are never blended. Christian philosophy had itself absorbed the first; cosmic attraction then reappeared in a sublime apotheosis, as the love which draws all the universe towards God, and by which God, as its source, ‘moves the sun and the other stars.’ And if Dante, in his treatise on poetry,[35] distinguishes himself from the poets of ‘love’ as a poet of ‘morals,’ or ‘righteousness,’ he also, as we saw, ascribes his whole power as a poet to his writing what love dictated in his heart. Man in virtue of his freedom has power to misuse Love, and Dante everywhere scornfully contrasts the higher and the baser love. Nay, all sin which can be ‘purged away’ he regards as due to ‘love’ wrongly used; the whole population of Purgatory is there because it loved unwisely, or loved indifferent things too well, or right things too little. But the harm here, for Dante, arises not from love, but from the application to it of the evil material in man’s nature--‘as a foul impress may be set upon the most precious wax.’[36]

Something of the idealizing atmosphere which Christianity and Plato had thrown about love thus always colours it in Dante’s mind. But it is also subtly touched with that other idealizing force which not Christianity but the poets had recognized, which Christian ethics had contemptuously tolerated or scornfully tabooed. Dante had known the love of woman in many forms. Longing for the absent wife and child had consumed his flesh and his bones in exile;[37] and his virginal adoration of Beatrice sprang from no coldness of the blood. The power of womanhood to lift men to supreme heights of vision and fortitude, which he had divined through Beatrice and sung in the great canzone of the _Vita Nuova_,[38] no more passed out of his faith than did her image from his memory. Nor was it for nothing that his master Vergil had forgotten the political and imperial purpose of his poem in making Dido the most moving heroine of antiquity. If the Comedy is a great scheme of salvation, it is also a great song of womanhood such as, he said, no man ever sang before; and if we say that Beatrice is there a symbol for Theology, that is doubtless true: but a thousand phrases remind us how much she symbolizes besides; and the look ‘in the eyes of Beatrice,’ which draws Dante upward through the circling spheres of Paradise to the beatific vision, attests also his faith in the power of the lover’s adoration to lift a man out of his humanity (_trasumanar_), and make him ‘joyful even in the flames.’

Thus Dante, though he counted himself not among the poets of love, but among the poets of ‘righteousness,’ is one of the inspiring sources of the modern poetry which invests the love of man and woman with the ideal attributes which philosophy and religion had proclaimed in other forms of love, but had ignored or repudiated in this. In Spenser--Platonist, Christian, and lover at once--the fusion of the three strains is complete; his great hymns to Love, who

is lord of all the world by right,
And ruleth all things by his powerful saw,

prelude his even greater hymn of marriage. Even Chaucer perhaps learnt from Dante that amazed awe with which, in the opening lines of one of his earliest Italianate poems, he contemplates the ‘wonderful working’ of love.[39] The Petrarchists and Sonneteers went far to reduce the expression of this love to hollow phrase-making. But with Romanticism it found fresh and original utterance, and its status in the world has never been more loftily affirmed than by Celtic Romanticizing poets of to-day. ‘I say that Eros is a being!’ declares one of the finest spirits among them. ‘It is more than a power of the soul, though it is that also. It has a universal life of its own.’[40]

III

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.