IV

A great and potent spiritShows itself in enduring, nor will addFraternal hatred, worst of evils, to its griefsBy blaming Man for them, but lay the chargeOn the true culprit,—Mother of mankindBy right of birth, and Stepmother in heart.

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 succourIn the changing perils and the anguishesOf the common warfare.[41]

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 endOf paths so grievous, not ordain at leastA happy goal? But rather robe in gloomAnd terror that for which through lifeWe long as the sole refuge from our woes,And show us, yet more dread than the stormy sea,The port we make for?

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 wonderof 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 thoughtsBy so ignoble causes kindled and put out?[44]

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 infiniteAnd visions sublimeIt begets in the kindled thought, ...Where along a sea of delight the spirit of manRanges unseen, as some bold swimmerFor his diversion the deep....

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 wasthat 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 perilWith such alacrity as for him.’Where thou dost help, O Love, courage is bornOr wakens; and, against its wont, mankindGrows wise in action, not lost in idle thought.[49]

‘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 sternertemper 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 corrodingcriticism 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.

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 thesecond type, who inquired (to putit 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 theTimæus, 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 andtender 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, notit 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 ofTintern Abbeyso far above the eloquent platitudes of theEssay on Manif 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. Sothat 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 loveWhich 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 ofThe fire for which all thirst.

That light, whose smile kindles the universe,That Beauty in which all things work and move,

That light, whose smile kindles the universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,

· · · · ·

that sustaining loveWhich 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 ofThe fire for which all thirst.

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 theParadiso:

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 theSymposiumdisappears in the suffused splendour of Spenser’sHymns. In logical power Shelley was as little to be comparedwith 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 inIn 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 ornaturaof 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 regardingNature, 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 fromFaust. We may feel Nature as intimatelyunited 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 inDichtung 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 allour 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 likeDas GöttlicheorDie Grenzen der Menschheit, or the opening scene of the Second Part ofFaust, 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]

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 Anaxagorasfor 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 ofVerstand, but only to enthroneVernunft; 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 explorationof 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 exaltedfaith 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 greatReclusepassage, 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 heroismwith 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’sApologyenthrones 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. Onlyit 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 ofreality was the centre towards which they knowingly or obscurely strove. Such a faith, I suggest, will be found to be a vital constituent of every view of the world reached by a poet through his poetic experience, and the main contribution of that rich, profound, and intense form of experience to man’s ultimate interpretation of life.

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[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, theLoves 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.

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