Chapter IV: Gabriele D’annunzio (3)

The naturalism of Democritus and Epicurus, though framed purely in the interest of scientific explanation, and hostile both to poetry and to religion as commonly understood, was potentially a great poetic discovery, the disclosure of a Worldview wholly novel and of entrancing appeal to the poetic apprehension. The sublime perspectives of an illimitable universe, the permanent oneness underlying the changing shows of sense: these were contributions of philosophy to a poetic outlook of which no poet had yet dreamed, and which it was reserved for the greatest of philosophic poets to make explicitly his own.

But the new way which Lucretius was the first to tread was not to be pursued. He had for many ages no successors. His difficult conquest of poetry from a mechanical system, designed to explain, not to inspire, was only to be emulated by a poet of combined intellectual and imaginative grasp comparable with his own. On the whole, the science and the poetry of Lucretius, after that moment of intense incandescence, fell apart. Vergil, who as a young man saw the rising of this magnificent lonely star in the Roman firmament, and of all his contemporaries perhaps alone understood its significance, honoured the discoverer of the causes of things, but his own philosophy was of a cast easier to harmonize with the idealisms of poetry. From the side of science, Gassendi and the physicists of the seventeenth century valued the Lucretian exposition of atomist theory as a welcome supplement to the fragments of Democritus and Epicurus. But before the nineteenth century scientific materialism was never again allied with great poetic power. The eighteenth century saw an immense advance in the scientific reconstruction of our beliefs about the world, but its nearest approaches to the negations of Lucretius were conveyed only in the prose of a D’Holbach or a Hume, while its most brilliant English poet, far from wrestling, like his friend Berkeley, with the new spectre of materialism raised by the triumphs of Newton, afforded himself and his readers complete satisfaction by decorating the easy harmonics of deism in the _Essay on Man_. The immense quickening of imaginative power which marked the decades immediately before and after the close of the century widened the chasm between poetry and any mechanical view of the world. If at certain points (as in Shelley’s and Coleridge’s early chemical ardour, and Goethe’s momentous biological researches) poets make fruitful approaches to science, it was because they found in science itself an apparent release from the mechanical point of view, a clue to their ultimate faith (however differently expressed) in a divine, benignant Nature. The recovery of imagination told, in philosophy as in poetry, for the most part, is a wonderful idealization of the universe, culminating in Hegel’s evolution of the Absolute and in Wordsworth’s awe before the Mind of Man--conceptions which must be discussed in a later section.

But in some very distinguished poetic minds the recovery of imaginative power led to no idealization of the world. It rather enabled them to present with a peculiar poignant intensity a world stripped bare of ideal elements, in which goodness and hope are alike illusory, and Nature is either a dead mechanism or a cruel, implacable and irresistible alien Power. Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Leconte de Lisle, and (on a lower plane) James Thomson, were the most conspicuous examples in the nineteenth century of poetic genius (for Schopenhauer’s work is a colossal poem of pessimism) absorbed in the contemplation of a universe as denuded as that so passionately embraced by Lucretius, of love or hope for man.

A situation analogous to that of Lucretius arises, therefore, in their case. Their world offered no foothold to the optimist: was it equally bare of support for the poet? Bacon’s assertion that poetry submits the shows of things to man’s desires might imply that; but Bacon (who, incidentally, thought slightly of Lucretius) ignores the poetry born of a conviction that the shows of things are finally unalterable by man’s desires, and it is Leopardi, even more than Lucretius, who has shown us how sublime the poetry which rests on this lonely stoicism may be. One might even, in certain moods, be tempted to attach a yet higher value to the temper of this lonely heroism, which faces a blankly hostile universe utterly without support, than to that which exults in conscious Oneness with a universe pervaded by Love or Beauty, by benign Nature or God. The loneliness of Prometheus is more moving as poetry than his rapturous union with Asia. Why is this?

I take it that it is because the lonely Prometheus, the heroic striver with a loveless world, makes us more vividly aware of the Spirit of Man, and that what moves us most in the great poetry is the revelation of the Spirit of Man even more than the revelation of the glory of the universe. We have seen that these two are natural poles of poetic faith, that is, conclusions upon which the thinking of any poet who thinks as a poet, will tend to converge; and if he is thwarted in the one aim he will fall back with the more energy upon the other.

Now this vivid consciousness of spirit, whether shown in heroism or in love, is ultimately inconsistent with a creed which strips the universe of all ideal elements; and where this is in possession, undermines and disintegrates it. The ‘Everlasting No’ yields ground to the Everlasting Yea; or negation itself is impregnated with divinity, as when Leconte de Lisle glories in his _néant divin_. To imagine heroism intensely is to be convinced that whatever else is illusory, heroism is not an illusion, that the valour of man has a kinship and support somehow, somewhere, in the nature of things. And if heroism is not an illusion, human society is no illusion either. For the heroic struggler with infinite odds is no longer alone; the army of saints and martyrs are with him; and it was the poet for whom loneliness opened ways into infinity beyond any companionship who cried to one such heroic struggler, fallen in the fight--

Thou hast great allies.
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And Love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.

I propose to illustrate the working of the forces which thus qualified a creed of negations, from the impressive case of Leopardi.

In Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) we have a poet in whom astonishing power and wealth of mind were united to a complete rejection of the theological and philosophical apparatus of consolation. The mental revolution which left him in early manhood entirely denuded of the beliefs in which he had been reared, was final, and left no trace of reaction or regret, of hesitation or doubt. An absolute calm of secure conviction marks the entire subsequent course of his short life. Few men who have ‘found religion,’ once for all, have been brought by it into an anchorage so secure from inner or outer assault as this man who at twenty-two discovered that religion was a dream.

With supernatural belief fell from him also every form of secular faith and hope for man. Religion was but one among the crowd of cherished illusions which cheat men with the expectation of happiness. Human happiness was always founded on illusion, and the pursuit of it was therefore vain. Hence all the organized energies of civilization, the activities of business or politics, of science or art, of the professions, of state administration, counted in his eyes at best as distractions which blinded those who engaged in them to the deadly vision of truth. For himself these distractions and the relief they brought were impossible, for he had seen the truth; and the remorseless analysis which shattered the basis of illusion on which they rested, sapped the impulse to share in them. Of the state, and the patriotisms which bind its members together, he was as sceptical as Ibsen, without sharing his idealizing homage to the man who stands alone. In the _Storia del Genero Umano_ he makes Jove introduce the diversities of peoples and tongues among men, seeds of emulation and discord, and send forth among them the ‘phantoms’ known by the names of Justice, Virtue, Glory, and Love of Country. ‘Humanity’ itself was an illusory bond, and the ‘nations’ of the world were ultimately its individual men.

Yet Leopardi does not denounce crime. Man is for him more unhappy than criminal; and his evil qualities are to be laid to the charge of the Nature that made him. He is more sinned against than sinning, and Leopardi’s profound pity, if often derisive and scornful, never passes into invective. His passionate upbraidings of his countrymen in the boyish canzone _Italy_, like his ardent aspiration after national glory for his country and poetic fame for himself, disappear from the melancholy calm of the _Bruto Minore_ and the _Ginestra_.

A great and potent spirit
Shows itself in enduring, nor will add
Fraternal hatred, worst of evils, to its griefs
By blaming Man for them, but lay the charge
On the true culprit,--Mother of mankind
By right of birth, and Stepmother in heart.

‘Nature,’ which planted us in this earth, exposed us from birth till death to malign afflictions and lured us into constant pursuit of illusive aims, is responsible for the wrongs which men inflict upon one another in the vain chase; and Leopardi’s nearest approach to the passion of humanity which inspired Shelley, a few years earlier, is the cry of appeal to men which breaks from him, after uttering this indictment of Nature, to band themselves together against her:

Her count the foe, and against Her,
Believing that man’s race, as is the truth,
Was foreordained to be in league,
Count all mankind as born confederates,
And embrace all with unfeigned love,
Rendering and expecting strong and ready succour
In the changing perils and the anguishes
Of the common warfare.[41]

Man in the grip of Nature is like the anthill crushed by a chance-falling apple, and the lava field of Vesuvius, covering extinct cities, where but the broom plant sheds a forlorn fragrance, aptly symbolizes the desolate earth he is doomed to tread. While this earth itself, a vanishing film of vapour in the universe, traverses by its insignificance his dream of immortality. And his humorous irony sports, in the prose dialogues, with this annihilating disparity between man’s pretensions and the truth.[42]

Yet the effect of Leopardi’s work--and especially of his poetry--is at many points subtly to rectify his desperate view of the world. He cannot suppress the uprush of pity for those whose career in it is prematurely cut short, however his reason may persuade him that they are fortunate.[43] The noble pathos of the Attic grave monuments, representing, for instance, a young girl in the act of taking leave of her friends, overpowers the reflections of his philosophy, and he wrestles in moving verses with the enigma:

Ah me! why at the end
Of paths so grievous, not ordain at least
A happy goal? But rather robe in gloom
And terror that for which through life
We long as the sole refuge from our woes,
And show us, yet more dread than the stormy sea,
The port we make for?

A portrait of a beautiful woman, carved also upon her tomb, overwhelms him with the wonder of beauty and the paradox of its conversion into dust:

Ah, human nature, how,
If utterly frail thou art and vile,
If dust thou art and ashes, is thy heart so great?
If thou art noble in part,
How are thy loftiest impulses and thoughts
By so ignoble causes kindled and put out?[44]

Not less acutely he feels the paradox of artistic creation. Like Abt Vogler he contemplates the ‘palace of music’ reared by the performer’s hand:

Desires infinite
And visions sublime
It begets in the kindled thought, ...
Where along a sea of delight the spirit of man
Ranges unseen, as some bold swimmer
For his diversion the deep....

But a single discord shatters this paradise in a moment. Abt Vogler’s creation is not shattered; he has played to the end, and put the last stone in its place. But it has vanished, and he calls in, to save it, his high doctrine of the eternity of created beauty. Leopardi has no such faith, and he puts the doctrine to a severer test by dissolving the spell of beauty before it is complete. Yet he feels as acutely as Browning the marvel of the musical creation, and that its abrupt dissolution does not cancel the significance of its having been there at all. He does not openly confess that significance, but it stirs in him a tormenting sense of anomaly.

He comes nearer to such confession when he speaks of love. His own experience of love was that of a virginal passion; the ideal exaltations which make every lover something of a poet had their way in this great poet unclouded by vulgar satiety. He knows well enough that love arrays the woman, for the lover, in ideal charms not her own; but instead of lamenting or deriding this illusion, as illogically he should have done, he glories in it. Love, like music, ‘reveals the mystery of unknown Elysiums,’[45] but these ‘lofty images’ are accessible only to the man; woman cannot understand them; for such conceptions there is no room in her narrow brow. The stern derider of illusions has here no praise for the sex which sees things as they are: the unconscious idealist in Leopardi takes the side of the ‘illusions.’

And his way of speaking about Love elsewhere is less that of the pessimist philosopher than of the Platonist poet who sees in it a clue to real vision. The pessimist in him does full justice to the havoc wrought in the world in Love’s name; but after the gods had watched the working of the lower love, their cynical gift, Jove sent down another Love, ‘child of Venus Urania,’ in pity of the noble hearts who were worthy of it, yet rarely permitting even to them the happiness it brings as ‘surpassed in too small a measure by that of heaven.’[46] Love above all else irradiates the waste of life, it is ‘the source of good, of the highest joy found in the ocean of existence’; it alone holds equal bliss for man with Death, which for ever allays his ills. ‘Love and Death’ are twin brothers, and the fairest things on the earth or under the stars.[47] Even the memory of love can make ‘abhorred old age’ endurable, and send a man willingly to the scourge or the wheel, as the face of Beatrice could make her lover ‘happy in the flames.’[48] Hence Love makes the heart ‘wise,’ for it inspires men with the contempt of life:

‘For no other lord do men face peril
With such alacrity as for him.’
Where thou dost help, O Love, courage is born
Or wakens; and, against its wont, mankind
Grows wise in action, not lost in idle thought.[49]

This is not the language of pessimism; and this ‘wisdom’ inspired by love, which reconciles men to courageous death, is something quite other than the calculation that death is a release from life’s ills. That is the suicide’s wisdom, not the hero’s. Leopardi’s conception of Love has taken up nobler elements than his pessimism could supply; he describes a Triumph of Love over Death, not a shrewd perception that Death is the easiest way out, or even a blessed port after stormy seas.

Yet Love in its noblest form was given, he knows, but to few; and he himself had known it only as a fleeting experience. He knew as a continual possession, on the other hand, his own intellectual nature, the sovran thought which stripped off the illusive shows of things and disclosed to him the naked horror of reality undisguised, but filled him none the less with the exultation of power, and the lofty joy which belongs to discovery even of a tragic truth.

Such exaltation finds its most powerful expression in the great hymn to ‘Thought the Master.’ His restless and piercing intellect was a double-edged instrument. It was not the source of his pessimism, but it furnished the remorseless analysis of the glories and shows of life which gave its air of inevitable logic to his temperamental despair. Yet the exercise of the instrument was itself a vivid joy, and, like love, created for the wielder a lonely earthly paradise within the vast waste of this earthly hell.[50] There he wanders, in an enchanted light, which blots out his earthly state; thither he returns from the dry and harsh converse with the world as from the naked crags of the Apennines to a joyous garden smiling afar. Is this ‘terrible but precious gift of heaven’ also an illusion? Perhaps; but it is one ‘by nature divine,’ and capable of possessing us with the secure tenacity of truth itself, as long as life endures.[51]

In any case it created for him definite and wonderful values in the world which detracted dangerously from the consistency of his faith in the world’s fundamental badness. ‘Thought’ was the only civilizer; by thought mankind had actually risen out of their primeval barbarism;[52] it was the sole agent in advancing the public welfare. His towering disdain for the frivolity and utilitarianism of his own age sprang from no mere excess of self-esteem; it was the scorn of one whom ‘thought’ had lifted to a standpoint of ideal excellence beside which all alien impulses seemed intolerable.[53] It armed him with a magnanimity which the sight of any cowardly or ignoble act stung to the quick, which laughed at danger or at death,[54] which could endure with resolute Stoicism and antique valour the passage through the miseries of life.[55]

But thought had its peculiar joys also, less equivocal than these. It fed on the sublimity even of the desolate world, on the loneliness of nature, on the infinity of the starry depths. In the lines on ‘The Infinite’ he describes a favourite haunt--a lonely hill, from which the horizon is on all sides cut off. ‘There I sit and gaze, fashioning in thought boundless distances, superhuman silences, and profoundest rest.... In this immensity my thought is drowned, and shipwreck in that ocean is a joy.’

And converse with thought gives him, too, the vision of ideal beauty--a vision which quickens the ecstasy of his most rapturous moments. It is no pallid dream; the fairest face he meets seems but a feigned image of its countenance, a derivative streamlet from the one sole source.[56] That ideal beauty is his lady, but he had never seen her face, for nothing on the earth is like her, or were it like in feature, or in voice, it would be less in beauty.[57] Leopardi is here very near to Shelley. The visionary ideal of beauty and love was not less vividly present to him; but the sterner temper of his pessimism was less easily persuaded that it had projected itself into the being of any earthly Emilia. The ‘Intellectual Beauty’ of Shelley’s hymn had its seat and stronghold in a like glow of inner vision, but its ‘awful loveliness’ was more abundantly hinted or disclosed in the world of nature and of man, giving ‘grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream,’ and luring the sensitive poet on to the pursuit of a thousand fugitive embodiments of its eternal essence. Leopardi’s language, marmoreally clear-cut and austere, seems to bear the impress of a mind powerfully self-contained, exempt from all seductions of the senses, even of colour and melody, calm with the resolution of despair. Shelley’s language, dissolving form and outline in an ethereal radiance, seems the mirror of a self-diffusive genius which saw all things through the veil of its own effulgence. Leopardi has been called ‘the most classical of the romantics’; Shelley was in some sense the very soul of romanticism. But as this very comparison implies, the romantic temper glowed in both. In both, the long travail of existence was crossed by the exultations of the visionary and the idealist. With Leopardi, martyred in his prime by painful disease, the gloomy shades closed in more and more impenetrably upon the world of man and nature, and death was happy because it was the end of life. With Shelley the universe grew more and more visibly transfigured by a spirit deeply responsive to his own; all things worked and moved in beauty, and were woven through and through with love. In Leopardi’s more tenacious intellect the negations of a corroding criticism were less easily overcome. But nature, which had armed his brain with that corroding criticism flung across it also the rapturous delight in beauty, in love, in the creative energy of thought itself, and there were moments when poetry transported him beyond the iron limits of his creed, to the belief that love and beauty and thought are neither illusory nor the sources of illusion, but signs and symptoms of an ideal reality.

IV

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.

_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
WOKING AND LONDON

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The characteristics of this norm are well set forth by Wetz, _Shakespeare_, ch. v.

[2] The conflict of friendship with love was in general treated in England with a livelier sense of the power of love than in Italy. Boccaccio’s Palemone and Arcita, rivals for the hand of Emilia, courteously debate their claims (_Teseide_, V, 36, 39 f.); Chaucer makes them fight in grim earnest. Spenser in the spirit of the Renascence makes friendship an ideal virtue, but exposes it to more legitimate trials, as where the Squire of low degree repels the proffered favours of his friend’s bride. (_Faerie Queen_, iv. 9, 2.)

[3] ‘Perjured, murderous, ... savage, extreme ... rude, cruel, not to trust.’

[4] Goethe probably never heard of a less fortunate adventure in that kind by his English contemporary, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the _Loves of the Plants_, which had then been famous in England for ten years; a poem which suffices to show that it is possible to exploit in the description of natural processes all the figures and personifications of poetry, and yet to go egregiously wrong.

[5] To Knebel, 14 February 1821.

[6] I. 140 f.

[7] I. 922, 1.

[8] This and subsequent passages are freely compressed here and there.

[9] IV. 575.

[10] II. 29.

[11] 18 July 1818.

[12] 13 July 1818, to Tom Keats.

[13] April 1818, to Taylor.

[14] Cf. his amusing outburst at Teignmouth, in the previous March, at the effeminacy he ascribed to the men of Devon. ‘Had England been a large Devonshire, we should not have won the battle of Waterloo. There are knotted oaks, there are lusty rivulets, there are meadows such as are not elsewhere--there are valleys of feminine climate--but there are no thews and sinews,’ etc. March 13th, to Bailey.

[15] Lord Houghton, quoted by Buxton Forman, _Letters_, LXI.

[16] It is not irrelevant, however, in this context, to recall that Dante’s account of his Dream-journey has been thought to give evidence of actual climbing experience. The Purgatory mountain was provided with a good path; but the Inferno, with its precipitous walls, was less easily negotiated. He had, however, the services of a most competent Guide! Cf. H. F. Tozer, _Mod. Quart._, April 1899.

[17] Cf. ‘vaulted with fire,’ _Paradise Lost_, i. 298, with ‘the vaulted rocks,’ _Hyperion_, ii. 348.

[18] Cf. the sonnet written at the top.

[19] Referred to also by Professor de Sélincourt (note _ad loc._), though he ascribes it (somewhat sternly) to the ‘vulgarity of Hunt.’

[20] Much of this paragraph is repeated in substance from an article, by the writer, on ‘The Higher Mind of Italy,’ in the _Manchester Guardian_, 15 March 1920.

[21] _Manchester Guardian_, 12 September 1918.

[22] Dedication of _Il Poema Paradisiaco_ (1892).

[23] _Laus Vitæ_, 232 f.

[24] Gargiulo, _Gabriele d’Annunzio_ (1912), to whose account of the poet’s _sovrumanità_ the present essay is much indebted.

[25] _Beatitudine._

[26] _Il Fanciullo._

[27] _Elettra: Città del Silenzio._

[28] _Elettra: A uno dei Mille._

[29] _Fast._ iv. 291 f.

[30] The distinction of a religious, philosophic, and poetic World-view is based upon W. Dilthey: _Das Wesen der Philosophie: Weltanschauungalehre_ (Hinneberg, _Kultur der Gegenwart_, I. vi).

[31] Wilamowitz, _Oresteia_, p. 47.

[32] _Purg._ xxiv. 52. 4.

[33] The case of Trajan, who for his justice was said to have been saved by the prayers of Gregory, is not quite parallel, since there was here a theological tradition in his favour. But at least Dante seizes on and emphasizes the tradition, and not merely ‘saves’ Trajan, but makes him the comrade of the glorious just kings in Jupiter (_Par._ xx. 44 f.).

[34] The second type I take to be represented, with obvious differences, for Dante by the ‘philosophical’ love of Guido Guinicelli, the ‘father of love poets and my own’ (_Purg._ xxvi. 97); there is no evidence that he knew anything of this part of Plato; in any case, of course, this love is for him excited only by woman. The _amore_ of Empedocles is mentioned in _Inf._ xii. 42; Empedocles himself, as well as Plato, is in Limbo (_Inf._ iv. 138).

[35] _De Vulg. Eloq._ ii. 2.

[36] _Purg._ xviii. 36.

[37] _Canz._ xix.

[38] _Canz._ i.

[39] _Parlement of Fowles_, 1 f.

[40] A. E., _Imaginations and Reveries_, p. 151.

[41] _Ginestra_, p. 120.

[42] _Il Copernico._

[43] _Sopra un basso relievo_, etc.

[44] _Sopra un ritratto di una bella donna_, etc.

[45] _Aspasia._

[46] _Storia dell genere umano._

[47] _Amore e Morte._

[48] _Consalvo._

[49] _Amore e Morte._

[50] ‘Che paradiso è quello,’ etc.

[51]
‘Ma di natura ...
Divina sei,’ etc.

[52] _Ginestra._

[53] _Il Pensiero Dom._: ‘Quasi intender non posso,’ etc.

[54] _Il Pensiero Dom._: ‘Giammai d’allor,’ etc.

[55] _Bruto Minore._

[56] _Pens. Dom._ ‘Quanto più torno,’ etc.

[57] _Alla sua Donna._

[58] The essay on _The Poetry of Lucretius_ in the present volume supplements the argument of the present essay at this point, and he is merely referred to here.

[59] His famous illustration, quoted by Plato, is the harmony of the lyre brought about by the balance of opposite forces in the strings. Plut. _Is. et Osir._ (quot. Ritter and Preller, p. 17), Plat. _Symp._, p. 187.

[60] _A Commentary on In Memoriam_, Introd.

[61] _Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre_, iv. 9.

[62] A. E., _The Renewal of Youth_.

[63] The lines from _The Borderers_ are in fact, of course, earlier than those from _Peele Castle_.

[64] _English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth_ (Manchester University Press).

Corrections

The first line indicates the original, the second the correction:

p. 28

A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love as extravagant
magnanimity
A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love is extravagant
magnanimity

p. 57

He was not, like Pope in the _Essay of Man_,
He was not, like Pope in the _Essay on Man_,