Title: Shakespeare's treatment of love and marriage and other essays
Author: Herford, C. H. (Charles Harold)
Language: English
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LOVE AND MARRIAGE AND OTHER ESSAYS ***



Transcriber’s note

Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuation
inconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list of the corrections
made can be found at the end of the book. Formatting and special
characters are indicated as follows:

_italic_



SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE AND OTHER ESSAYS



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                             SHAKESPEARE’S
                             TREATMENT OF
                            LOVE & MARRIAGE
                           AND OTHER ESSAYS

                          _By_ C. H. HERFORD

               HONORARY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
                    IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER


                          T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
                        LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE



_First published in 1921_

(_All rights reserved_)



                                  TO
                             MY STUDENTS,
                           PAST AND PRESENT,
                    IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
                               1901-1921



PREFACE


THE following essays, mainly concerned with famous and familiar names,
are less heterogeneous, and it is hoped less hackneyed, than some of
the titles may suggest. They are all occupied ultimately with some
aspect of a single problem in what I would call the psychology of
poetic experience, did not the phrase imply a scientific rigour of
method hardly as yet achieved, in this region, by psychological science
itself, and in any case beyond the reach of the present writer. How is
the gift of imaginative creation affected by the presence in the same
mind of one or other of the spiritual energies which have a different,
even an alien, perhaps incompatible, aim or goal; or simply by a bias
of ingrained ethical habitudes or ideals? What terms does poetry
make with philosophy, or religion, or patriotism, or politics, or
love, when one of these is urgent, also, in the mind of a poet? I say
‘terms’ advisedly, for nothing is more certain than that the outcome
is determined by a process of give and take. Every complex experience
involves a certain compromise among its disparate or contending
factors; a compromise in great part, indeed, involuntary, resulting
from the fact that, even in the least integrated personalities, the
field of consciousness is a continuous unity, into which no fresh
element enters without modifying, and being itself modified by, the
rest. In the class of cases with which we are here concerned the
modification may be loss or gain, or both together. We think of Dante
or Lucretius as great philosophical poets, and many people assume,
because there are _longueurs_ in the _Paradiso_, and tough blocks of
versified mechanics in the _De Rerum Natura_, that these great poets
would have produced better poems had they pursued poetry ‘for its
own sake.’ What is certain is that, without the passion for truth,
without the passionate desire to understand the universe, without,
too, the missionary passion to save souls by communicating their own
uplifting and fortifying faith, each would have been less occasionally
tedious, doubtless, but also would have missed some of those heights
in poetry which they in fact achieved. A chorus of critics denounce
the ‘didactic poem,’ and clearly the impulse to instruct is more
likely to act as slag than as fuel upon the flame of poetic creation.
But the prophet is only the schoolmaster writ large, and _vates_ is
one of the oldest names of the poet. Matthew Arnold made fun of the
educational theorizing in _The Excursion_, but no one better understood
the grandeur of Wordsworth the prophet, and he and Goethe are doubtless
chiefly accountable for the Arnoldian definition of poetry as
‘criticism of life.’

Analogous problems are touched in the essays on Keats and on
d’Annunzio. These two very dissimilar poets, both recently invested
with topical interest by the hazards of a centenary and of a political
adventure, have this in common, that into the life of both came, at
a certain moment, an experience of grandeur, which told decisively,
though in utterly different ways, upon the scale and contents of their
imaginative vision. Keats in 1818 for the first time looked upon ‘grand
mountains’ (his own phrase); d’Annunzio, in the early nineties, was
captivated by the Nietzschean revelation of the Superman. Upon Keats,
the effect, complicated as we know, with other influences, was wholly
astringent and bracing; it concurred with the strenuous art of Milton
to wean him from the ‘luxury’ of his earlier song and inspire the
colossal imaginings of _Hyperion_. Upon d’Annunzio the effect was less
entirely happy. The fiery declamations of the Destroyer (as his Italian
disciple called Nietzsche), who aspired to rear an ideally potent
and perfect race upon the ruins of present-day humanity, enlarged
his intellectual horizons and quickened his patriotic ambition, but
also tinged his thinking and his action, whether as a poet or as a
publicist, henceforth, with a megalomania hazardous for him in both
capacities.

Shakespeare may seem to offer little foothold for this kind of study,
or at least to illustrate aspects of it too familiar to be discussed.
No one now imagines him a passionless artist, holding up the mirror
to a world in which he had no further concern. He was in any case a
devoted lover of his country, and patriotism contributed vitally to
the making of one, not the least splendid or memorable, division of
his drama. National pride has occasionally impaired the poetry of the
English Histories, though the vulgar Joan of Arc scenes in 1 _Henry
VI_ be no misdeed of his; it has again and again caught the poet up
to towering heights. But in some other, perhaps less obvious, ways
Shakespeare’s mentality, as we divine it, seems to stand in a like
double relation to his poetry; here tributory and creative, there, if
not impairing its quality, limiting its scope. With all his apparent
spontaneity, and the thousand unblotted lines which astonished
his editors and offended Ben, he was hardly pure poet, hardly ‘of
imagination all compact’; the man of ‘sovran alchemy’ had his share of
the still untransmuted stuff. His poetry, compared with Spenser’s or
Shelley’s, is in intimate touch with fact, far richer and deeper than
theirs, but also nearer to the temper which is the negation of poetry.
His glorious humanity is not without preferences and exclusions; and
these are largely of a kind which he shares with the respectable
citizen rather than with the finer and rarer spirits. He has not
Browning’s taste for eccentric or exceptional types, his interest is
not on the dangerous edge of things; and if each of his great creations
is in some sense unique, they are rich beyond all others in traits
which make them seem our kin. He unmistakably prefers order to turmoil;
‘degree, priority and place’ to the romance and heroics of revolution;
observance of custom, other things being the same, to the breach of it;
the normal to the irregular. His temperament was thus of a type which
has affinities with some great and with some less estimable things:
it is allied on the one side to the noble harmonies and symmetries of
classical art, on the other to unreflecting habit and dull routine.
It is the aim of the opening essay to trace the effects of what I may
then call Shakespeare’s bias for _normality_ in a single sphere of his
art--his treatment of Love and Marriage. His ideal of love is a state
in which passion and sense and intellect are united in happy balance,
and we owe to it a series of creations of incomparable loveliness,
from Rosalind and Portia to Imogen and Perdita. But it is plain
that Shakespeare has sounded only a few notes of the gamut of love
poetry. He gives us a few exquisite simple melodies; he rarely hints
its complex music, the difficult harmonies extorted from dissonance
and conflict. He rather conspicuously avoids, save for special
dramatic purposes, irregular, illicit, or criminal passion. It is not
merely accident or stage fashion that has prevented our having from
Shakespeare more than occasional approximations to a Vittoria Corombona
or a Francesca da Rimini, a Gretchen or a Rebekka West.

The fifth essay, finally, asks a question which may appear futile,
or academic, but at least arises very naturally for the student in
this field. Does the creative activity of poetry, so readily fed and
fanned, or obstructed and impaired, by philosophical or religious
preoccupation, itself react upon the poet’s beliefs, his outlook upon
the world, in any definable way? We may be inclined to reply, with the
young Tennyson, that the poet stands apart from beliefs, ‘holding no
form of creed, but contemplating all’; or to object, on the contrary,
that poets are the most sensitive of men, apt to be rather less than
others exempt from subjection to the idols of their place and time.
Certainly there is no ‘poet’s creed.’ But there may be a common
bent or bias which poetic creation tends to impress upon creeds and
convictions otherwise derived; and a survey of the modifications
actually undergone by philosophies and theologies in the crucible of
poetry suggests that this bent will be towards the faith which, in
one guise or another, exalts the place and function of spirit in the
universe, and in the last resort finds in spiritual energy the heart of
reality.

       *       *       *       *       *

I desire to express my acknowledgments to the Council of the British
Academy, for permission to reprint the fifth Essay; to the Keats’
Memorial Committee, for permission to reprint the third; to the Council
of the Rylands Library, for permission to reprint the second and
fourth; and to the proprietors of _Edda_ (Christiania) for permission
to reprint the first. Most of them have been extensively revised and in
part re-written for the present volume. I am indebted to my colleagues,
Prof. E. Gardner and Signor A. Valgimigli, for kindly reading the
fourth essay. Neither is in any way responsible for the opinions
expressed. The translations throughout the volume, unless the contrary
is stated, are original.



CONTENTS


                                                 PAGE

  PREFACE                                          7

  I. SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE 17

  II. THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS                     47

  III. MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS                  83

  IV. GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO                        101

  V. IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?        147



I SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE



I SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE


THE Shakesperean world is impressed, as a whole, with an unmistakable
joy in healthy living. This tells habitually as a pervading spirit, a
contagious temper, not as a creed put forward, or an example set up.
It is as clear in the presentment of Falstaff or Iago, as of Horatio
or Imogen. And nowhere is it clearer than in his handling of the
relations between men and women. For here Shakespeare’s preferences and
repugnances are unusually transparent; what pleased him in the ways of
lovers and wedded folks he drew again and again, and what repelled him
he rarely and only for special reasons drew at all. Criminal love, of
any kind, holds a quite subordinate place in his art; and, on the other
hand, if ideal figures are to be found there, it is among his devoted,
passionate, but arch and joyous women.

It is thus possible to lay down a Shakesperean _norm_ or ideal type
of love-relations. It is most distinct in the mature Comedies, where
he is shaping his image of life with serene freedom; but also in the
Tragedies, where a Portia or a Desdemona innocently perishes in the
web of death. Even in the Histories it occasionally asserts itself
(as in Richard II’s devoted queen, historically a mere child) against
the stress of recorded fact. In the earlier Comedies it is approached
through various stages of erratic or imperfect forms. And both in
Comedy and Tragedy he makes use, though not largely, of other than the
‘normal’ love for definitely comic or tragic ends.

The present study will follow the plan thus indicated. The first
section defines the ‘norm.’ The second describes the kinds of appeal
and effect, in Comedy and Tragedy, to which the drama of ‘normal’ love
lent itself. The third traces the gradual approach to the norm in the
early Comedies. The fourth and fifth sections, finally, discuss the
treatment, in Comedy and Tragedy, of Love-types other than the norm.


I

The Shakesperean norm of love,[1] thus understood, may be described
somewhat as follows. Love is a passion, kindling heart, brain,
and senses alike in natural and happy proportions; ardent but not
sensual, tender but not sentimental, pure but not ascetic, moral but
not puritanic, joyous but not frivolous, mirthful and witty but not
cynical. His lovers look forward to marriage as a matter of course, and
they neither anticipate its rights nor turn their affections elsewhere.
They commonly love at first sight and once for all. Love-relations
which do not contemplate marriage occur rarely and in subordination
to other dramatic purposes. Tragedy like that of Gretchen does not
attract him. Romeo’s amour with Rosalind is a mere foil to his greater
passion, Cassio’s with Bianca merely a mesh in the network of Iago’s
intrigue; Claudio’s with Juliet is the indispensable condition of the
plot. The course of love rarely runs smooth; but rival suitors proposed
by parents are quietly resisted or merrily abused, never, even by the
gentlest, accepted. Crude young girls like Hermia, delicate-minded
women like Desdemona and Imogen, the rapturous Juliet and the homely
Anne Page, the discreet Silvia and the naïve Miranda, are all at one
on this point. And they all carry the day. The dramatically powerful
situations which arise from forced marriage--as when Ford’s Penthea
(_The Broken Heart_) or Corneille’s Chimène (_Le Cid_) is torn by
the conflict between love and honour--lie, like this conflict in
general, outside Shakespeare’s chosen field. And with this security
of possession his loving women combine a capacity for mirth and jest
not usual in the dramatic representation of passion. Rosalind is more
intimately Shakesperean than Juliet.

Married life, as Shakespeare habitually represents it, is the
counterpart, _mutatis mutandis_, of his representation of unmarried
lovers. His husbands and wives have less of youthful abandon; they
rarely speak of love, and still more rarely with lyric ardour, or
coruscations of poetic wit. But they are no less true. The immense
field of dramatic motives based upon infringements of marriage, so
fertile in the hands of his successors, and in most other schools of
drama, did not attract Shakespeare, and he touched it only occasionally
and for particular purposes. Heroines like Fletcher’s Evadne (_A
Maid’s Tragedy_), who marries a nominal husband to screen her guilty
relations with the King, or Webster’s Vittoria Corombona (_The White
Devil_), who conspires with her lover to murder her husband, or
Chapman’s Tamyra (_Bussy d’Ambois_), whose husband kills her lover in
her chamber; even Heywood’s erring wife, whom her husband elects to
‘kill with kindness,’ are definitely un-Shakesperean.


II

The norm of love lent itself both to comic and to tragic situation, but
only within somewhat narrow limits. The richness, depth and constancy
of the passion precluded a whole world of comic effects. It precluded
the comedy of the coquette and the prude, of the affected gallant
and the cynical roué, of the calf-lover and the doting husband; the
comedy of the fantastic tricks played by love under the obsession of
pride, self-interest, meticulous scruple, or superstition. Into this
field Shakespeare made brilliant incursions, but it hardly engaged his
rarest powers, and to large parts of it his ‘universal’ genius remained
strange. We have only to recall, among a crowd of other examples,
Moreto’s Diana (_El Desden con el Desden_), Molière’s Alceste and
Célimène, Congreve’s Millamant, in Shakespeare’s century; or, in the
modern novel, a long line of figures from Jane Austen to _The Egoist_
and Ibsen’s _Love’s Comedy_--to recognize that Shakespeare, with all
the beauty, wit and charm of his work, touched only the fringes of the
Comedy of love.

The normal love, not being itself ridiculous, could thus yield material
for the comic spirit only through some fact or situation external to
it. It may be brought before us only in ludicrous parody. We laugh
at the ‘true love’ of Pyramus and Thisbe in the ‘tedious brief’ play
of the Athenian artisans, or at that of Phœbe and Silvius, because
Shakespeare is chaffing the literary pastoral of his day. Hamlet’s
love, itself moving, even tragic, becomes a source of comedy in the
solemn analysis of Polonius. Or again, the source of fun lies in the
wit and humour of the lovers themselves. Some of them, like Rosalind
and Beatrice, virtually create and sustain the wit-fraught atmosphere
of the play single-handed. But Shakespeare habitually heightens this
source of fun by some piquancy of situation--almost always one arising
from delusion, particularly through confusion of identity. It is a
mark of the easy-going habits of his art in comedy that he never threw
aside this rather elementary device, though subjecting it, no doubt, to
successive refinements which become palpable enough when we pass from
the _Two Gentlemen_ to _Cymbeline_. But his genius made perennially
delightful even the crude forms of confusion which create grotesque
infatuations like those of Titania, Malvolio, Phœbe, Olivia. More
refined, and yet more delightful, are the confusions which bring true
and destined lovers together, like the arch make-believe courtship
with which Rosalind’s wit amuses and consoles her womanhood, and that
other which liberates the natural congeniality of Beatrice and Benedict
from their ‘merry war.’ In cases like these, Shakespeare’s humour has
the richer and finer effluence which derives from a hidden ground of
passion or tears. Rosalind’s wit is that of a woman many fathoms deep
in love; Beatrice’s ears tingle with remorse at the tale of Benedick’s
secret attachment; Viola’s gallant bravado to Olivia conceals her own
unspoken maiden love. And Portia crowns her home-coming to her husband
and her splendid service to his friend with the madcap jest of the
rings. Such jesting is in Shakespeare a part of the language of love;
and like its serious or lyrical speech, is addressed with predilection
to love’s object.

Again, the normal love offered in itself equally little promise of
tragedy. No deformed or morbid passion, but the healthy and natural
self-fulfilment of man and woman, calling heart and wit and senses
alike into vigorous play, it provided equally little hold for the
criminal erotics in which most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries sought
the tragic thrill, and for the bitter disenchantment and emotional
decay which generate the subtle tragedy of _Anna Karénina_ or _Modern
Love_. Tragic these healthy lovers of themselves will never become;
they have to be led into the realm of pity and fear, as into that of
laughter and mirth, by the incitement or the onthrust of alien forces.
Here, too, Shakespeare’s habitual instrument is delusion; only now it
is not the delusion which deftly entangles and pleasantly infatuates,
but that which horribly perplexes and rends apart. The blindness,
of Claudio, of Othello, of Posthumus, of Leontes, is provoked by
circumstances of very various cogency, but in each case it wrecks a
love relation in which we are allowed to see no flaw. The situation
of innocent, slandered, heart-stricken womanhood clearly appealed
strongly to him, and against his wont he repeated it again and again.
Even after leaving the stage, he was allured by the likeness of the
story of Henry VIII’s slandered queen to his Hermione, to reopen the
magic ‘book’ he had ‘drowned.’ He was no sentimentalist; his pathos is
never morbid; but it is in imagining souls of texture fine and pure
enough to be wrought upon to the most piteous extreme by slander from
the man they love, that Shakespeare found most of his loveliest and
most authentically Shakesperean characters of women. Hermione and Hero,
Desdemona and Imogen, are to his graver art what Rosalind and Beatrice
and Portia are to his comedy.

But while the tragic issue is directly provoked by the alien
intervention, it is clear that almost all its tragic quality springs,
not from the operations of Iachimo or Iago, but from the wonderful
presentment of the love they wreck. Shakespeare’s supreme command of
pity springs from his exalted faith in love. The poet of the Sonnets is
implicit in the poet of _Othello_. And the dramas themselves abound in
lyric outbursts, often hardly called for by the situation, in which his
ideal of wedded love is uttered with the poignant insight of one who
was probably far from having achieved or observed it himself. One need
but think of France’s reply to Burgundy (_King Lear_, I, i. 241):

                          Love’s not love
    When it is mingled with regards that stand
    Aloof from the entire point.

Or of Imogen, blind to all but the path of light and air that divides
her from Milford Haven:

    I see before me, man; nor here, nor here,
    Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them,
    That I cannot look through.

Even Adriana, in the _Comedy of Errors_, expresses the unity of married
love with an intensity which we expect neither from this bustling
_bourgeoise_ nor in this early play:

    For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
    A drop of water in the breaking gulf
    And take unmingled thence that drop again
    Without addition or diminishing,
    As take from me thyself and not me too; (II, ii. 127.)

an utterance which in its simple pathos anticipates the agonized cry of
Othello--the most thrilling expression in Shakespeare of the meaning of
wedded unity:

  But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
  Where either I must live, or bear no life,
  The fountain from the which my current runs,
  Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!

The husband in these cases, it is true, neither forgives nor condones,
and Shakespeare (unlike Heywood) gives no hint that he would have
dissented from the traditional ethics on which Othello and Posthumus
and Leontes acted, had their wives in fact been guilty. The wives, on
the other hand, encounter the husband’s unjust suspicions, or brutal
slanders, without a thought of revenge or reprisal. Desdemona, Imogen,
Hermione, alike beautifully fulfil the ideal of love presented in the
great sonnet:

                          Love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove.

In one drama only did he represent ideal love brought to a tragic
doom without a hint of inner severance. The wedded unity of Romeo and
Juliet is absolute from their first meeting to their last embrace; it
encounters only the blind onset of outer and irrelevant events; nothing
touches their rapturous faith in one another. This earliest of the
authentic tragedies thus represents, in comparison with its successors,
only an elementary order of tragic experience; set beside _Othello_,
it appears to be not a tragedy of love, but love’s triumphal hymn. Yet
it is only in this sense immature. If Shakespeare had not yet fathomed
the depths of human misery, he understood completely the exaltation of
passion, and _Romeo and Juliet_, though it gives few glimpses beyond
the horizons of his early world, remains the consummate flower of his
poetry of ideal love.


III

The beauty and insight of Shakespeare’s finest portrayals of the comedy
and the tragedy of love were not reached at once. His conception of
love itself was still, at the opening of his career, relatively slight
and superficial; his mastery of technique was equally incomplete. The
early plays accordingly abound with scenes and situations where from
either cause or both the dramatic treatment of love is not yet in the
full sense Shakesperean. It will suffice in this sketch to specify two
types of each.

The young Shakespeare, as is well known, showed a marked leaning to two
apparently incongruous kinds of dramatic device--paradox and symmetry.
In the riotous consciousness of power he loved to take up the challenge
of outrageous situations, to set himself dramaturgical problems, which
he solves by compelling us to admit that the impossible might have
happened in the way he shows. A shrew to be ‘tamed’ into a model wife.
A widow following her murdered father’s coffin, to be wooed, there and
then, and won, by his murderer. A girl of humble birth, in love with
a young noble who scorns her, to set herself, notwithstanding, to win
him, and to succeed. Paradoxical feats like these were foreign to the
profound normality--under whatever romantic disguise--of Shakespeare’s
mature art. Richard and Petruchio and Helen carry into the problems
of love-making the enterprising audacity of the young Shakespeare
in the problems of art. But the audacity of the young Shakespeare
showed itself in another way. His so-called taste for ‘symmetry’ had
nothing in common with the classical canons of balance and order. It
was nearer akin to the boyish humour of mimicry. If he found a pair
of indistinguishable twins producing amusing confusion in a Roman
play, he capped them with a second pair, to produce confusion worse
confounded in the English _Comedy of Errors_. And so with love. Navarre
(in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_) and his three lords, like the four horses
of an antique quadriga, go through the same adventure side by side.
All four have forsworn the sight of women; all four fall in love, not
promiscuously but in order of rank, with the French princess and her
ladies, whose numbers, by good fortune, precisely go round.

But love itself is not, as yet, drawn with any power. Berowne’s
magnificent account of its attributes and effects (IV, iii., mainly
re-written in 1597) is not borne out by any representation of it
in the play. The ‘taffeta phrases’ and ‘silken terms precise,’ the
pointed sallies and punning repartees, full of a hard crackling gaiety,
neither express passion nor suggest, like the joyous quips of the later
Rosalind, that passion is lurking behind. We are spectators of a rather
protracted flirtation, a ‘way of love’ which was to occupy a minimal
place in his later drama. Armado’s dramatically unimportant seduction
of Jaquenetta is likewise a symptom of his ‘apprentice’ phase.

Equally immature is the representation of fickle love in the _Two
Gentlemen_. Proteus is Shakespeare’s only essay in the Don Juan type,
but it falls far short in psychological and dramatic force of his
portrait of the faithful Julia. Proteus’s speeches are often rhetorical
analyses of his situation rather than dramatic expressions of it.
His threat to outrage Sylvia (V, iv. 58) is, as he naively declares,
‘’gainst the nature of love,’ and it clashed no less violently with
Shakespeare’s rendering of the passion elsewhere. Even the apparent
fickleness produced by delusion flourishes only in the magical world
of the young Shakespeare’s Midsummer Dream. The inconstancy of the
Athenian lovers attests only the potency of the faery juice. No doubt
Shakespeare’s denouements, even in some of the maturest comedies, show
his lovers accepting with a singular facility a fate in love other than
that they had chosen. Olivia accepts Sebastian in default of Viola,
and the Duke Viola when Olivia is out of the question. Still less
defensible artistically is Isabel’s renunciation of the convent to
marry the Duke. But these acquiescences, even if they were not touched
with the frequent perfunctoriness of Shakespeare’s finales, are not to
be classed with deliberate inconstancy.

A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love is extravagant
magnanimity. This, like other kinds of unnatural virtue, was a part
of the heritage from mediæval romance, fortified with Roman legend.
The antique exaltation of friendship concurred with the Germanic
absoluteness of faithful devotion, and for the mediæval mind the most
convincing way of attesting this was by the surrender of a mistress.
In the tenth book of the _Decamerone_ Boccaccio collects the most
admired examples of ‘things done generously and magnificently,’ chiefly
in matters of love; one of them is the tale of Tito and Gisippo
(_Decamerone_, X, 8), where, Tito having fallen in love with his
friend’s bride, Gisippo ‘generously’ resigns to him all but the name of
husband. The story, quoted in Sir T. Elyot’s _Governour_ (1531), was
well known in Elizabethan England, and fell in with the fantastical
world of Fletcher’s Romanticism. But the humanity and veracity of the
mature Shakespeare rejected these extravagances as the cognate genius
of the mature Chaucer had done before him. Chaucer lived to mock at the
legendary magnanimity of Griselda, so devoutly related in the _Clerkes
Tale_; and it was only the young Shakespeare who could have made
Valentine’s astounding offer, in the _Two Gentlemen_, to resign ‘all
his rights’ in his bride to the ‘friend’ from whose offer of violence
he has only a moment before rescued her (V, vi. 83).[2]

A second variety of extravagant magnanimity was the recurring situation
of the girl, who, deserted by her lover, follows him in disguise,
takes service as his page, and in that capacity is employed by him
to further his suit to a new mistress. This motive was of the purest
romantic lineage; having first won vogue in Europe through Montemayor’s
_Diana_ (1558, trans. 1588), and in England by Sidney’s _Arcadia_
(1581, publ. 1590). On the London stage it profited by the special
piquancy attaching to the rôles of girls in masculine disguise when
the actors were boys, and its blend of audacious adventure and devoted
self-sacrifice gave the Elizabethan auditor precisely the kind of
composite thrill he loved.

For some forms of sex-confusion Shakespeare throughout his career
retained an unmistakable liking. But the finer instincts of his
ripening art gradually restricted its scope. Viola, in the original
story (Bandello, II, 36) follows a faithless lover; in _Twelfth
Night_, wrecked on the Illyrian coast, she disguises herself merely
for safety, takes service with the Duke as a complete stranger, and
only subsequently falls in love with him. The change indicates with
precision Shakespeare’s attitude at this date (_c._ 1600) to this type
of situation. He was still quite ready to exploit the rather elementary
comedy arising out of sex-confusion--to paint with gusto Viola’s
embarrassments as the object of Olivia’s passion and Sir Andrew’s
challenge, or the brilliant pranks of Rosalind in a like position. But
he would not now approach these situations by the romantic avenue of a
love-sick woman’s pursuit. In his latest plays he shows disrelish even
for the delightful fun evolved from sex-confusion in _Twelfth Night_
and _As you like it_. The adventures of Imogen in disguise are purely
pathetic. Pisanio indeed proposes, and Imogen agrees, to follow her
husband to Italy in disguise; but this opening is significantly not
followed up. (_Cymbeline_, III, iv. 150 f.)

But in the _Two Gentlemen_, the entire motive without curtailment
or qualification is presented in the adventures of Julia. Abandoned
by Proteus, she follows him in disguise, takes service as his page,
and is employed as go-between in his new courtship of Silvia. To the
young Shakespeare the situation was still wholly congenial, and he
availed himself of its opportunities of pathos without reserve, though
with incomplete power. His riper technique, fortified probably by a
closer acquaintance with the spirited and high-bred womanhood of the
Portias and Rosalinds of his time, withdrew his interest, perhaps
his belief, from the risky psychology of Julia’s self-assertion and
self-abnegation. Like other strained situations suggested by ‘golden
tongued romance,’ it fell away before the consolidated experience, the
genial worldliness, the poetized normality, of his riper art.

The case of another devoted pursuer of an unwilling man is more
complicated, and calls for closer examination. _All’s Well That
Ends Well_ has already been referred to as an example of the
paradox-plotting congenial to the young Shakespeare. But Helena’s
passion and her sacrifices for the man whose love she seeks ally her
also with the Julia type. Yet internal evidence leaves no doubt that
this play, though originally written, and therefore planned, in the
early nineties, was revised by Shakespeare at a date not far remote
from that of Hamlet. If the paradox-subject was the apprentice’s eager
choice, the artist at the height of his power did not reject its
challenge. In the original story (_Decamerone_, III, 9) the flavour of
paradox was even more pronounced. Like the other tales of the Third
Day, it describes one who _alcuna cosa molto da lui desiderata con
industria acquistasse_. Giletta of Narbonne succeeds in effect by sheer
audacity and enterprise; and Boccaccio’s readers doubtless enjoyed
this inversion of the usual rôles, where a masterful girl captures a
reluctant man. Shakespeare’s earlier version was probably the lost
_Love’s Labour’s Won_ mentioned by Meres, and the title emphasizes the
element of resolute and unhesitating pursuit which marks the original,
and was probably more pronounced in the earlier than in the revised
play.

For it is plain that precisely the resolute pursuit of a resisting
man was uncongenial to Shakespeare’s riper art, because unnatural
in the type of high-bred and refined womanhood whose ways in love
reflected his ideal of healthy love-making. Helena, as the heroine and
predominant figure of the play, had to be of the sisterhood of Portia
and Rosalind and Beatrice and Viola. But if the plot forbad this?
And clearly, the most hazardous incident of all (the substitution of
Helen for Diana) could not be eliminated without breaking up the plot
altogether. Why then take up the old play at all? Plainly there must
have been in the fundamental theme something which Shakespeare was
unwilling to lose as well as something that he would have wished away.
This something that attracted him was evidently Helen’s clear-sighted
resolution in itself; in this she is, in fact, a true sister of
Portia and Rosalind, though her seriousness is not, like theirs,
irradiated with laughter. Could she be visibly endowed with this grace
of clear sight and will, yet at the same time be rather drawn on by
circumstances to the final conquest of Bertram than herself the active
agent in it? Somewhat thus must the problem have presented itself to
Shakespeare. Did he completely solve it? I think not. But we can to
some extent follow his procedure.

Strength and delicacy are from the first blended in Helen. Her famous
lines (I, i. 231):

    Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
    Which we ascribe to heaven.

strike the keynote of her resolute temper. Yet her love, a maiden’s
idolatry, is content without possession; with her, ‘Dian’ is ‘both
herself and love’ (I, iii. 218). If she forms plans for showing her
merit and thus commending herself in Bertram’s eyes, she takes no step
herself; it is the Countess who, having discovered her love, welcomes
her prospective daughter-in-law and sends her with all proper convoy to
court to ‘cure the king.’ Her choosing of Bertram (II, iii. 109) is an
offer of life-long service, not the appropriation of a well-won prize.
And when Bertram bluntly declares that he ‘cannot love her nor will
strive to do it,’ she proposes, turning to the king, to withdraw her
whole claim:

    That you are well restored, my lord, I’m glad;
    Let the rest go.

The crucial situation, however, for her (and for Shakespeare) begins
only with Bertram’s definite departure, and scornful intimation of the
conditions on which he will be her husband. Giletta, on receiving the
corresponding message, had made up her mind at once what to do; had
arranged her affairs and set out on the _soi-disant_ pilgrimage to
Florence, where Beltramo she knows will be found. Helena’s procedure
is less clear. Two distinct courses were open to her. She might, like
Giletta, make direct for Bertram at Florence, under the pretext of
going on a pilgrimage. Or she might finally surrender the pursuit of
a husband who had decisively shown he did not love her, as she had
already proposed to do when he had only declared that he did not. The
second was unquestionably more in keeping with Helen’s character. But
the first was more in keeping with the plot. It might well be that
Shakespeare’s Helen would hesitate between the two. But it is in any
case probable that Shakespeare hesitated, and that the marks of his
hesitation have not been effaced from the text.

On reading Bertram’s letter she is, like Imogen when she reads
Posthumus’s, for the moment overwhelmed. ‘This is a dreadful sentence.’
She hardly speaks, and gives no hint to the Countess of her thoughts.
But when she is alone she breaks out in the great passionate monologue
of renunciation (III, ii. 102 f.)....

            No, come thou home, Rousillon,
    Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
    As oft it loses all: I will be gone;
    My being here it is that holds thee hence:
    Shall I stay here to do’t? no, no, although
    The air of paradise did fan the house,
    And angels office’d all: I will be gone....

This can only imply, since she is alone, that she sincerely proposes to
give up all claim to her nominal husband.

Nevertheless, in Scene iv., the Countess is seen reading a letter from
Helen which declares that she has gone as a pilgrim to Saint Jaques,
in Florence. She begs the Countess, it is true, to summon Bertram home
to live there in peace while she in the far land does penance for her
‘ambitious love.’ Was this a subterfuge, like Giletta’s, or was it her
sincere intention as we should infer from the previous monologue? If it
is the first, Helena comes nearer to the crafty duplicity of Giletta
than anywhere else in the play, and this towards the Countess who
has just indignantly renounced her stubborn son, and taken Helena to
her heart as her sole child (III, ii. 71). But if it is the second,
we cannot but ask why then, if Helena means _bona fide_ to avoid
Bertram and leave him free, she chooses for her pilgrimage precisely
the one place in the world in which she knows he will be found? And
this awkward question remains un-answered, notwithstanding the evident
effort to allow us to believe in Helena’s innocent good faith. Giletta,
on arriving at Florence, takes up her abode at an inn, ‘eager to hear
news of her lord.’ Helena arrives, apparently concerned only to learn
the way to St. Jacques, and where the pilgrims bound thither found
lodging. Then Bertram is mentioned; she learns that he is known, and
has made advances to Diana; presently he passes by, and now at length
Helen deliberately and unhesitatingly takes measures to fulfil his
‘impossible’ conditions.

Helena’s conduct appears, then, to fluctuate, without clear
explanation, between resolute pursuit and dignified renunciation.

There can be no doubt that the former type of procedure represents the
earlier, the latter the riper, mind of Shakespeare, in the treatment
of love. The letter to the Countess, of III, iv., is, like all his
verse-letters, early work; the great preceding monologue is in the
richly imaginative phrase and daringly yet harmoniously moulded verse
of the Hamlet period. He set out to fit a character based upon a nobler
type of love into a plot based upon a grosser; and even he could not
effect this without some straining of the stuff, and here and there a
palpable rent.


IV

What I have called the norm of love must thus rank high among the
determining forces of his mature drama. Obscured and disguised at
the outset by crude conceptions and immature technique, it gradually
grew clear, and provided the background of passion, faith, and truth
out of which, aided by misunderstandings, pleasant or grave, his most
delightful comedy and his most poignant tragedy were evolved. And other
types of love--whether they made for comedy or for tragedy, held a
relatively slight place in his work. In particular he concerns himself
only in a quite exceptional or incidental way either with the high
comedy of love or with guilty passion.

His comedy of love outside the norm for the most part resembles
burlesque. In other words, the ‘ways of love’ which he treats as
comic material are not plausible or subtle approximations to romantic
passion, but ludicrously absurd counterfeits of it. The fun is
brilliant, but it does not strike deep; it provokes the loud laugh
rather than the ‘slim feasting smile.’ It commonly springs from some
grotesque infatuation; as when, in Bottom and Titania, human grossness
and fairy fantasticality are brought together for the eternal joy
of gods and men. Ridicule of such infatuations was soon to find its
peculiar home in the Humour comedy of the later nineties, in the
prosaic satirical air of which the romantic or normal love had no
place at all. It is hardly an accident that the plays in which this
Shakesperean comedy of grotesque infatuation in love runs riot were
produced when the Humour comedy was at the height of its vogue, or that
they bear clear traces of its influence. _Twelfth Night_ is far from
being as a whole a Comedy of Humours. Viola’s maiden passion is touched
with a charm wholly alien to it. The Duke, with his opal and taffeta
mind, a self-pleasing artist in emotion, who feeds his languid passion
on music, and does his wooing by proxy, is perhaps Shakespeare’s only
serious study of love as a humour. Of still more laughable futility
is the love-making of Malvolio, with his smiles and yellow stockings,
and Sir Andrew, who gets no further than learning an assortment of
fine words for an interview that never comes off--a comic counterpart
to Iago’s miserable dupe, Roderigo. _The Merry Wives_ also shows the
influence of the Humour comedy. Slender is a true ‘country-gull,’
nowhere more obviously than in his wooing, or preparations to woo,
sweet Anne Page. The adventures of Falstaff in pursuit of Mrs. Ford and
Mrs. Page are brilliantly executed examples of a kind of comic effect
which Shakespeare’s riper art elsewhere disdained. Officially required
to represent ‘Falstaff in love,’ he turned the laugh against the lover
by representing his ill-luck in pursuing the only ‘way of love’ he knew.


V

Finally, as Shakespeare recognized for purposes of comedy certain
types of love-making alien to the ideal norm, so too, more rarely,
for the purposes of tragedy. Ideal love, as has been seen, occurs
constantly in the tragedies even where it does not directly affect or
participate in the tragic issues; as with France and Cordelia, Brutus
and Portia, Richard II and his queen, Coriolanus and Virgilia. But the
more penetrating sense of evil which becomes apparent in his tragic
period contributed to draw more prominently into the sphere of his art
the disastrous aspects of the relations between men and women. That he
refrained from exploiting in drama the more sinister forms of passion,
we have seen. But in some of his ripest and greatest work he drew love
with implications and under conditions, which sharply mark it off from
the ‘marriage of true minds.’ It is unstable, or lawless, or grounded
on illusion; and thus not merely succumbs easily to assault from
without, but directly breeds and fosters tragic ruin within. Even the
union of Othello and Desdemona, in every other respect a ‘marriage of
true minds’ which reaches for a moment (ii. 1) incomparable intensity
and beauty, is rendered fatally precarious by their ignorance of each
other.

Love, like everything else which grows in Hamlet’s Denmark, is touched
with insidious disease. Ophelia is wonderfully imagined in keeping with
the tragic atmosphere, an exquisite but fragile flower of the unweeded
garden where evil things run to seed and good things wither. And her
love, wholly un-Shakesperean as it is, and therefore irritating to
many readers, bears within it the seed of tragedy both for Hamlet and
herself. It is ‘a power girt round with weakness.’ She never falters
in faithful devotion to him; but the ‘sweet bells,’ her father has
told her, are ‘jangled,’ and she consents both to be the instrument
of the king and Polonius’s ‘lawful espial’ (which may, please heaven,
restore him), and to deny his access and return his gifts. She stands
alone among Shakesperean heroines in renouncing her love at a father’s
bidding. We seem to approach for once the heroic renunciations of love
in the name of principle or country which impress us in Corneille
and Racine--in _Polyeucte_ or _Bérénice_. But no halo of sublime
self-sacrifice surrounds Ophelia’s renunciation, for her or for us.
It is merely a piteous surrender, which breaks her heart, overthrows
her delicately poised reason, and removes one of the last supports of
Hamlet’s trust in goodness.

On the other hand, Shakespeare occasionally found his tragic love in
violent and lawless passion. We need not dwell on episodic incidents
like the rivalry in the love of Edmund which crowns and closes
the criminal careers of Goneril and Regan. In this case there was
little scope for the undoing of soul which is the habitual theme of
Shakesperean tragedy. But in _Measure for Measure_ an inrush of sensual
passion instantly shatters the imposing but loosely built edifice of
Angelo’s morality, and though the play was meant for comedy, and the
tragic point is thus (rather clumsily) blunted or broken off, the
spiritual undoing of him is discernible enough. Without a thought of
resistance he proceeds to act out the whole merciless catalogue of
vices which the poet of sonnet cxxix saw attending upon lust.[3] At the
same time it is clear that Isabel, with her cold austerity, is an even
greater anomaly among Shakespeare’s women. Their purity is not that of
a negative abstinence, but of whole-hearted devotion to the man they
love.

In Cressida he drew a kind of tragic love as lawless as Angelo’s and
as sensual, but insidious and seductive instead of violent. Compared
with the profligate women of Restoration Comedy she has a certain
girlish air of grace and innocence. If she betrays Troilus for Diomede
it is with a sigh and a half wistful glance back at the deserted
lover: ‘Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee’ (V, ii. 107).
Though classed by the Folio editors--hesitatingly it would seem--with
the Tragedies, this play seems to set at nought the whole scheme of
Shakesperean tragedy. Neither Troilus nor Cressida has the grandeur
without which ruin is not sublime; and their love has not the heroic
intensity of those (like Heine’s _Asra_) _welche sterben wenn sie
lieben_. The only imposing figures are those of the great captains of
the Greek and Trojan camps, who are but slightly concerned with their
love. Nevertheless, the whole effect of the play is tragic, or falls
short of tragedy only because the gloom is more unrelieved. There
are no colossal disasters, plots, crimes, or suffering, nor yet the
stormy splendour which agony beats out of the souls of Othello, Hamlet,
Antony, or Lear, and which leaves us at the close rather exultant
than depressed. This tragedy is purely depressing because it strikes
less deep; the harms do not rend and shatter, but secretly undermine
and insidiously frustrate. Cressida is a symbol of the love which may
kindle valour for a moment, but in the end saps heroism and romance at
once, and which strikes the magnificent champions of Homeric story
themselves with a futility more tragic than death, the futility hinted
savagely in the Horatian _Troiani cunnus teterrima belli Causa_, and
superbly in Faustus’s great apologue to ‘the face that launched the
thousand ships.’

In _Antony and Cleopatra_, on the other hand, a type of love not in
its origin loftier or purer than that of Troilus and Cressida is
seen dominating two souls of magnificent compass and daemonic force.
Antony is held by his serpent of old Nile in the grip of a passion
which insolently tramples on moral and institutional bonds, private
and public alike; which brings the lovers to ruin and to death; and
which yet invests their fall with a splendour beside which the triumph
of their conqueror appears cold and mean. There is no conflict, no
weighing of love and empire, as great alternatives, against each other,
in the manner of Corneille; nor does Shakespeare take sides with
either; he neither reprobates Antony, like Plutarch, for sacrificing
duty to love, nor glorifies him, like the author of the Restoration
drama, _All for Love, or the World Well Lost_; still less does he seek
to strike a balance between these views. He is no ethical theorist
trying exactly to measure right or wrong, but a great poet whose
comprehensive soul had room, together, for many kinds of excellence
incompatible in the experience of ordinary men. That Antony’s passion
for Cleopatra not only ruins his colossal power in the state but
saps his mental and moral strength is made as mercilessly clear in
Shakespeare as in Plutarch. He is ‘the noble ruin of her magic.’ But it
is equally clear that this passion enlarges and enriches his emotional
life; in a sense other than that intended by the sober Enobarbus,

    A diminution in our captain’s brain
    Restores his heart; (III, xiii, 198)

and enlarged feeling opens up new regions of imagination and lifts him
to unapproached heights of poetry, as in the unarming-scene with Eros
(IV, xiv.) and the farewell speeches to Cleopatra (‘I am dying, Egypt,
dying,’ IV, xv.). And Cleopatra too, in the ‘infinite variety’ of her
moods, has momentary flickerings of genuine devotion of which she was
before incapable. Momentary only, it is true; the egoist, the actress,
the coquette, are only fitfully overcome; in her dying speech itself
the accent of them all is heard. The ‘baser elements’ are not expelled,
but the nobler ‘fire and air’ to which she dreams that she is resolved,
gleam for a fitful instant in her cry ‘Husband, I come,’ to yield a
moment later to jealous alarm lest Lear should have Antony’s kiss, and
vindictive satisfaction at having outwitted Cæsar.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shakespeare’s poetry takes account of so vast a number of other things,
of so many other ways of living and aspects of life, that we hardly
think even of the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ as in any special
sense the poet of Love. Nor is he, if we mean by this that he thinks
or speaks of Love in the transcendent way of Dante, or Lucretius, or
Spenser, or Shelley. Love with them is part of the vital frame of the
universe. Lucretius (in spite of his atomist creed) saw it pervading
‘all that moves below the gliding stars, the sea and its ships, the
earth and its flocks and flowers.’ Dante saw it as the force which
not only draws men and women together, but ‘moves the Sun and the
other stars.’ Spenser saw it as ‘the Lord of all the world by right,
that rules all creatures by his powerful saw.’ Shelley saw it as the
sustaining force blindly woven through the web of Being. For such
heights of poetic metaphysic we do not look in Shakespeare. He is one
of the greatest of poets, and his poetry has less almost than any
other the semblance of myth and dream; its staple is the humanity we
know, its basis the ground we tread; what we call the prose world,
far from being excluded, is genially taken in. And precisely where
he is greatest, in the sublime ruin of the tragedies, love between
the sexes has on the whole a subordinate place, and is there most
often fraught, as we have seen, with disaster and frustration. So it
seemed to Keats when he turned from ‘golden-tongued Romance’ to ‘burn
through’ the strife of ‘damnation with impassioned clay’ in _King
Lear_. Shakespeare certainly did not, so far as we can judge, regard
sexual love (like some moderns) as either the clue to human life or as
in any way related to the structure of the universe. But if, instead
of these abstract questions, we ask whether any poet has united in a
like degree veracious appreciation of love in its existing conditions
with apprehension of all its ideal possibilities, we shall not dispute
Shakespeare’s place among the foremost of the poets of love.



II THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS



II THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS

 ‘Lucretius stands alone in the controversial force and energy with
 which the genius of negation inspires him, and transforms into sublime
 reasons for firm act, so long as living breath is ours, the thought
 that the life of a man is no more than the dream of a shadow.’--LORD
 MORLEY’S _Recollections_.


I

THERE was a time when the title of this essay would have been received
as a paradox, if not as a contradiction in terms. Lessing, as is well
known, declared roundly that Lucretius was ‘a versifier, not a poet,’
and Lessing is one of the greatest of European critics. It is easy,
indeed, to explain in part his trenchant condemnation. It reflects his
implicit acceptance of Aristotle’s _Poetics_--which he said was for him
as absolutely valid as Euclid, and therefore of Aristotle’s doctrine
that poetry is imitation of human action. Lessing’s insistence on
this doctrine was extraordinarily salutary in his day, and definitely
lowered the status of the dubious kinds known as descriptive,
allegorical, satirical, and didactic poetry, in a century too much
given to them all. That phrase of his about the imitation of human
action marked out a correct, well-defined, and safe channel for the
stream of poetry to pursue, and some of the slender poetic rills of
his generation improved their chance of survival by falling into it
and flowing between its banks. But Lessing did not reckon with the
power of poetic genius to force its own way to the sea through no
matter how tangled and tortuous a river-bed,--nay, to capture from
the very obstructions it overcomes new splendours of foam and rainbow
unknown perhaps to the well-regulated stream. In plain language, he
did not reckon with the fact that a _prima facie_ inferior form, such
as satire or didactic, may not only have its inferiority outweighed by
compensating beauties, but may actually elicit and provoke beauties not
otherwise to be had, and thus become not an obstacle, but an instrument
of poetry. Nor did he foresee that such a recovery of poetic genius,
such an effacement of the old boundaries, such a withdrawal of the
old taboos, was to come with the following century, nay, was actually
impending when he wrote. Goethe, who read the _Laokoon_ entranced, as
a young student at Leipzig, honoured its teaching very much on this
side of idolatry when he came to maturity. As a devoted investigator
of Nature, who divined the inner continuity of the flower and the leaf
with the same penetrating intuition which read the continuity of a
man, or of a historic city, in all the phases of their growth, Goethe
was not likely to confine poetry within the bounds either of humanity
or of the drums and tramplings, the violence, passion, and sudden
death, for which human action in poetic criticism has too commonly
stood. He himself wrote a poem of noble beauty on the _Metamorphosis of
Plants_ (1797)--a poem which suffices to show that it is possible to be
poetically right while merely unfolding the inner truth of things in
perfectly adequate speech.[4] We cannot wonder, then, that Lucretius
and the poem _On the Nature of Things_ excited in the greatest of
German poets the liveliest interest and admiration. On the score of
subject alone he eagerly welcomed the great example of Lucretius. But
he saw that Lucretius had supreme gifts as a poet, which would have
given distinction to whatever he wrote, and which, far from being
balked by the subject of his choice, found in it peculiarly large
scope and play. ‘What sets out Lucretius so high,’ he wrote (1821) to
his friend v. Knebel, author of the first German translation, ‘what
sets him so high and assures him eternal renown, is a lofty faculty
of sensuous intuition, which enables him to describe with power; in
addition, he disposes of a powerful imagination, which enables him to
pursue what he has seen beyond the reach of sense into the invisible
depths of Nature and her most mysterious recesses.’[5] But while Goethe
thus led the way in endorsing without reserve the Lucretian conception
of what the field of poetry might legitimately include, he contributed
to the discussion nothing, so far as I know, so illuminating or so
profound as the great saying of Wordsworth: ‘poetry is the impassioned
expression which is in the countenance of all science.’ For Wordsworth
here sweeps peremptorily away the boundary marks set up, for better or
worse, by ancient criticism--he knows nothing of a poetry purely of man
or purely of action: he finds the _differentia_ of poetry not in any
particular choice of subject out of the field of real things, but in
the _impassioned_ handling of them whencesoever drawn, and therefore
including the impassioned handling of reality as such, or, in the
Lucretian phrase, of _the nature of things_.

What did he mean by _impassioned?_ Something more, certainly, than the
enthusiasm of a writer possessed with his theme, or even of one eager,
as Lucretius was, to effect by its means a glorious purgation in the
clotted soul of a friend. We come nearer when we recall the profound
emotion stirred in Wordsworth by ‘earth’s tears and mirth, her humblest
mirth and tears,’ or the thought, ‘too deep for tears,’ given him by
the lowliest flower of the field. Such passion as this is not easily
analysed, but it implies something that we may call participation on
the one side and response on the other. The poet finds himself in
Nature, finds there something that answers to spiritual needs of his
own. The measure of the poet’s mind will be the measure of the value
of the response he receives. A small poet will people Nature with
fantastic shapes which reflect nothing but his capricious fancy or his
self-centred desires. That is not finding a response in Nature, but
putting one into her mouth; a procedure like that of the bustling
conversationalist who, instead of listening to your explanation, cuts
it short with a ‘You mean to say’--whatever it suits him to suppose.
But the poet of finer genius will neither seek nor be satisfied with
such hollow response as this. If he finds himself in Nature, it will
not be his shallow fancies or passing regrets that he finds, but his
furthest reach, and loftiest appetency of soul. He will not properly
be said to ‘subdue things to the mind,’ as Bacon declared it to be
the characteristic aim of poetry to do, instead of, like philosophy,
subduing the mind to things. But he will feel after analogies to mind
in the universe of things which mind contemplates and interprets.

Such an analogy, for instance, is the sense of _continuity_
underlying the changing show of the material world, corresponding to
the continuity of our own self-consciousness through the perpetual
variations of our soul states. The doctrine of a permanent substance
persisting through the multiplicity of Nature, and giving birth to all
its passing modes, belongs as much to poetry as to philosophy, and owes
as much to impassioned intuition as to a priori thought. Under the
name of the _One and the Many_ the problem of Change and Permanence
perplexed and fascinated every department of Greek thought: it provoked
the opposite extravagances of Heracleitos, who declared change to
be the only form of existence, and of the Eleatics, who denied that
it existed at all; but it also inspired the ordered and symmetrical
beauty of the Parthenon and the Pindaric ode. ‘When we feel the poetic
thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘it is when we find fulness in the concise,
and depth in the clear; and that seems to express with felicitous
precision the genius of Hellenic art.’

A second such analogy is the discovery of _infinity_. Common sense
observes measure and rule, complies with custom, and takes its ease
when its day’s work is done; but we recognize a higher quality in the
love that knows no measure, in the spiritual hunger and thirst which
are never stilled. Therefore, at the height of our humanity, we find
ourselves in the universe in proportion as it sustains and gives scope
for an endlessly ranging and endlessly penetrating thought. The Stoics
looked on the universe as a globe pervaded by what Munro unkindly
calls _a rotund and rotatory god_; at the circumference of which all
existence, including that of space, simply stopped; common sense
revolts, but imagination is even more rudely balked, and we glory in
the defiant description of Epicurus passing beyond the flaming walls
of the world. Yet we are stirred with a far more potent intellectual
sympathy when the idea is suggested, say by Spinoza, that space and
time themselves are but particular modes of a universe which exists
also in an infinite number of other ways; or when, in the final cantos
of Dante’s _Paradiso_, after passing up from Earth, the centre,
through the successive ever-widening spheres that circle round it,
till we reach the Empyrean, the whole perspective and structure of the
universe are suddenly inverted, and we see the real centre, God, as
a single point of dazzling intensity, irradiating existence ‘through
and through.’ Then we realize that the space we have been laboriously
traversing is only the illusive medium of our sense-existence, and
without meaning for the Eternity and Infinity of divine reality.

This example has led us to the verge of another class of poetic ideas,
those in which poetry discovers in the world not merely analogies
of mind, but mind itself. This is the commonest, and in some of its
phases the cheapest and poorest, intellectually, of all poetic ideas.
It touches at one pole the naive personation which peoples earth and
air for primitive man with spirits whom he seeks by ritual and magic
to propitiate or to circumvent. The brilliant and beautiful woof of
myth is, if we will, poetry as well as religion; the primitive and
rudimentary poetry of a primitive and rudimentary religion. Yet it
points, however crudely, to the subtler kinds of response which a
riper poetic insight may discover. If the glorious anthropomorphism of
Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life, everywhere
pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn ‘in man and beast and
earth and air and sea,’ cries to the poet in every moment of his
experience with a voice which will not be put by, and the symbols
from soul-life by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they
often read human personality too definitely into the play of that
elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned
formulas of science, and justify the claim of poetic experience to be
the source of an outlook upon the world, of a vision of life, with
which, no less than with those reached through philosophy and religion,
civilization has to reckon.

The poetic consciousness of soul has thus left a deep impress upon the
medium of ideas through which we currently regard both Nature and Man.
It has imbued with a richer significance and a livelier appeal those
analogies in Nature of which I spoke; turning the sublime but bare
conceptions of continuity and substance into Wordsworth’s _something
more deeply interfused_, or Shelley’s _Love ... through the web of
Being blindly wove;_ turning the abstraction of infinity into limitless
aspiration, or into that ‘infinite passion’ which Browning felt across
‘the pain of finite hearts that yearn.’

On the other hand, in its interpretation of Man, the poetic
soul-consciousness, so extraordinarily intense on the emotional and
imaginative side, has lifted these aspects of soul into prominence;
illuminating and sustaining everywhere the impassioned insight which
carries men outside and beyond themselves, in heroism, in prophecy, in
creation, in love; which makes the past alive for them, and the future
urgent; which lifts them to a vision of good and evil beyond that of
moral codes; to the perception that danger is the true safety, and
death, as Rupert Brooke said, ‘safest of all’; which in a word gives
wing and scope and power to that in man which endures, as the stream
endures though its water is ever gliding on, and makes us ‘feel that we
are greater than we know.’

I have tried to sketch out some of the ways in which a scientific
poetry is possible without disparagement to either element in the
description. Let me now proceed to apply some of these ideas to the
great poet of science who is our immediate subject.


II

In this assembly it is unnecessary to recall the little that is told,
on dubious authority, of the life which began a little less than a
hundred years before the Christian era, and ended when he was not much
over forty, when Virgil was a very young man. All that is told of his
life is the story that he went mad after receiving a love-philtre,
composed the books of his great poem, _On the Nature of Things_ in his
lucid intervals, and finally died by his own hand. It is this tradition
which Tennyson with great art has worked up into his noble poem. We
need not here discuss the truth either of the tradition of madness or
of that of suicide. What is certain is that no poem in the world bears
a more powerful impress of coherent and continuous thought. While
the poets of his own time and of the next generation, though deeply
interested in his poetry and in his ideas, know nothing of the tragic
story which first emerges in a testimony four centuries later.

Lucretius called his poem by the bald title _On the Nature of Things_.
But no single term or phrase can describe the aims which, distinct
but continually playing into and through one another, compose the
intense animating purpose of the book. We may say that it is at once
a scientific treatise, a gospel of salvation, and an epic of nature
and man; yet we are rarely conscious of any one of these aims to the
exclusion of the rest. In none of these three aims was Lucretius
wholly original. In each of them he had a great precursor among the
speculative thinkers and poets of Greece. His science roughly speaking
was the creation of Democritus; his gospel of salvation was the work of
Epicurus; and the greatest example of a poem on the nature of things,
before his, had been given by Empedocles, the poet-philosopher of
Agrigentum whom Matthew Arnold made the mouthpiece of his grave and
lofty hymn of nineteenth-century pessimism. In his own country his only
predecessor in any sense was Ennius, the old national poet who had
first cast the hexameter in the stubborn mould of Latin speech, to whom
he pays characteristically generous homage.

The atomic system of Democritus, which explained all things in the
universe as combinations of different kinds of material particles,
was a magnificent contribution to physical science, and the fertility
of its essential idea is still unexhausted. It touched the problems
of mind and life, of ethics and art, only indirectly, in so far as
it resolved mind and all its activities into functions of matter and
motion. Epicurus, on the other hand, a saintly recluse, bent only
upon showing the way to a life of serene and cheerful virtue, took
over the doctrine of the great physicist of Abdêra, without any touch
of dispassionate speculative interest, as that which promised most
effectual relief from disturbing interests and cares, and especially
from the disturbance generated by fear of the gods and of a life
after death. He might have gone to the great Athenian idealists of
the fourth century, the immortal masters not only of those who know,
but of those who think and create, whether in science or in poetry
or in citizenship. But his aim was precisely to liberate from these
distracting energies, and allure a weary generation from the forum and
the workshop, even the studio of letters or of art, and the temples of
the gods, into the choice seclusion of his garden--the garden of a soul
at peace, fragrant with innocent and beautiful things. What Epicurus
added of his own to Democritus’ theory was an accommodation not to
truth but to convenience; and the measure of his scientific ardour is
given by his easy toleration of conflicting explanations of the same
phenomenon, provided they dispense with the intervention of the gods.
While the measure of his attachment to poetry is given by his counsel
to his disciples to go past it with stopped ears, as by the siren’s
deadly song.

It was this scientific doctrine, adopted by Epicurus in the interest
not of science but of his gospel of deliverance from the cares
of superstition, that Lucretius took over with the fervour of
discipleship. He was not, like Pope in the _Essay on Man_, providing
an elegant dress for philosophic ideas which he only half understood
and abandoned in alarm when they threatened to be dangerous. He was the
prophet of Epicureanism, and it is among the prophets of the faiths by
which men live and die that we must seek a parallel to the passionate
earnestness with which he proclaims to Memmius the saving gospel of
Epicurus--to that same Memmius who a few years later showed his piety
to Epicurus’ memory by destroying his house. It was the hope of pouring
the light and joy of saving truth upon the mind of this rather obtuse
Roman, his beloved friend, that Lucretius laboured, he tells us,
through the silent watches of the night, seeking phrase and measure
which might make deep and hidden things clear.[6] But Lucretius felt
and thought also as a poet and in the temper of poetry. He was not
‘lending his pen’ to a good cause, nor turning Greek science into Latin
hexameters in order that they might be more vividly grasped or more
readily remembered. He was conquering a new way in poetry; striking
out a virgin path which no foot before his had trod. For Empedocles
had had far narrower aims. And he calls on the Muses for aid with as
devout a faith in his poetic mission in the great adventure as Milton
had when he summoned Urania or some greater Muse to be his guide while
he attempted ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.’ What we admire
unreservedly in him, declares a great French poet who died only the
other day, Sully-Prudhomme, is the breath of independence which sweeps
through the entire work of this most robust and precise of poets.

We see the temper of the poet at the outset, in the wonderful
transfiguration which the gentle recluse Epicurus undergoes in
the ardent brain of his Roman disciple. For it was of this enemy
of disturbing emotion, this quietist of paganism, this timid and
debonnaire humanitarian, that Lucretius drew the magnificent and
astonishing portrait which immediately follows the prologue of the _De
Rerum Natura_. The Lucretian Epicurus is a Prometheus--the heroic Greek
who first of mortals dared to defy and withstand the monstrous tyrant
Religion to her face. No fabled terror could appal him, no crashing
thunder, nor the anger of heaven; these only kindled the more the eager
courage of his soul, to be the first to break the bars of Nature’s
gates. So the living might of his soul prevailed; and he passed beyond
the flaming walls of the world and traversed in mind and spirit the
immeasurable universe; returning thence in triumph to tell us what can,
and what cannot, come into being; having trampled under foot Religion
who once crushed mankind, and lifted mankind in turn by his victory up
to the height of heaven.

One might well surmise that a philosophy which a poet could thus
ardently proclaim was itself, after all, not without the seeds and
springs of poetry; and that Lucretius in choosing to expound it in
verse was not staking everything on his power of making good radical
defects of substance by effective surface decoration or brilliant
digressions. He recognized, no doubt, a difference in popular appeal
between his substance and his form, and in a famous and delightful
passage compares himself to the physician who touches the edge of the
bitter cup with honey, ensnaring credulous childhood to its own good.
So, he tells Memmius, he is spreading the honey of the Muses over his
difficult matter, that he may hold him by the charm of verse until
the nature of things have grown clear to his sight. But Lucretius is
here putting himself at the point of view of the indifferent layman,
and especially of the rather obtuse layman whose interest he was with
almost pathetic eagerness seeking to capture. One guesses that Memmius,
like the boy, was by no means reconciled to the wormwood because it was
prefaced with honey; and modern critics who, like Mommsen, condemn his
choice of subject as a blunder, come near to adopting the resentful
boy’s point of view. But in the splendid lines which immediately
precede, though they form part of the same apology to Memmius, the
poet involuntarily betrays his own very different conception of the
matter. The hope of glory, he says, has kindled in his breast the
love of the Muses, ‘whereby inspired I am exploring a virgin soil of
poetry hitherto untrodden by any foot. O the joy of approaching the
unsullied springs, and quaffing them, O the joy of culling flowers
unknown, whence may be woven a splendid wreath for my head, such as the
Muses have arrayed no man’s brows withal before; first because I am
reporting on a great theme, and undoing the tight knot of superstition
from the minds of men; and then because I convey dark matters in such
transparent verse, touching everything with the Muses’ charm.’[7]

Here, in spite of the last words, Lucretius clearly feels that his
matter is something more than the wormwood which he overlays with
honey; it is a vast region of implicit poetry which he, first of poets,
is going to discover and annex; and he rests his claim to the poetic
wreath he expects to win, in the first place upon this greatness of
the subject matter itself, and secondly, not as the wormwood and
honey theory would suggest, on the ingenious fancy which decorates or
disguises it, but on the lucid style which allows it to shine in, as
through a window, upon the ignorant mind.


III

Let us then consider from this point of view the subject of Lucretius.
This subject, as he conceives it, has two aspects. On the one side
it is negative;--an annihilating criticism of all the crude religion
founded upon fear--fear of the gods, fear of death and of something
after death; criticism delivered with remorseless power and culminating
in the sinewy intensity of the terrible line

    Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,

which transfixes once for all the consecrated principle of _tabu_
everywhere dominant in the primitive faiths, the product of man’s
cowardice, as magic is the product of his pride.

The other aspect is constructive; the building up of the intellectual
and moral framework of a worthy human life, by setting forth the true
nature of the universe, the history of life, and the development of
man; in other words, the story of his struggle through the ages, with
the obstacles opposed to him by the power of untamed nature, by wild
beasts, storms, inundations, by the rivalry and antagonism of other
men, and by the wild unreason in his own breast. Lucretius saw as
clearly as any modern thinker that man’s conduct of his life, whether
in the narrow circle of domestic happiness and personal duty, or in the
larger sphere of civic polity, must be based upon a comprehension of
the external world and of the past through which we have grown to what
we are; and making allowance for his more limited resources and his
more confined point of view, he carried it out with magnificent power.
So that if his poem remains in nominal intention a didactic treatise,
in its inner substance and purport it might better be described as a
colossal epic of the universe, with man for its protagonist and the
spectres of the gods for its vanquished foes; and wanting neither the
heroic exultations nor the tragic dooms, neither the melancholy over
what passes nor the triumph in what endures, which go to the making of
the greatest poetry.

These two aspects--criticism and construction--are thus most intimately
bound together in the poem, but can yet be considered apart. And to
each belongs its own peculiar and distinct vein of poetry. On the
whole it is the former, at first sight so much less favourable to
poetic purposes, which has most enthralled posterity. For the voice of
Lucretius is here a distinctive, almost a solitary voice. The poets for
the most part have been the weavers of the veil of dreams and visions
in whose glamour the races of mankind have walked: but here came a
poet, and one of the greatest, who rent the veil asunder and bade men
gaze upon the nature of things naked and unadorned. And his austere
chaunt of triumph as he pierces illusion and scatters superstition,
has in it something more poignant and thrilling than many a song of
voluptuous ecstacy or enchanted reverie. For, after all, the passing
of an old order of things and the coming of a new has always at least
the interest of colossal drama, and cannot leave us unmoved, however
baneful we may hold the old order to have been, however we may exult
in the deliverance effected by the new. So Milton’s celebration of the
birth of Christ only reaches the heights of poetry when he is telling
of the passing of the old pagan divinities:

          The lonely mountains o’er
          And the resounding shore,
    A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
          From haunted spring and dale,
          Edged with poplar pale,
    The parting genius is with sighing sent;
      With flower-inwoven tresses torn
    The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn.

Through the Christian’s exultation there sounds, less consciously
perhaps, but more clear, the Humanist scholar’s sense of tragedy
and pathos. In this sense Milton’s Ode has affinity with poems like
Schiller’s _Gods of Greece_, where grief for the passing of the pagan
faith is untouched by Christian sentiment; but precisely its more
complex and subtle emotion raises Milton’s poem higher. In _Hyperion_,
even more, we are made to feel the pathos of the passing of the fallen
divinity of Saturn and his host; and Hyperion himself, the sun-god of
the old order of physical light, is more magnificently presented than
Apollo, the sun-god of the new order of radiant intelligence and song.
Lucretius, as we shall see, brings back the old divinity in a sublime
way of his own; but he feels the beneficence of the new order of
scientific vision and inviolable law too profoundly to have any sense
of pathos at the passing of the reign of superstition and caprice.
He is rather possessed with flaming wrath as he recalls the towering
evils of which that old regime had been guilty: the wrath of a prophet,
more truly divine in spirit than the divinities he assailed, as
Prometheus is more divine than Zeus. Again and again we are reminded,
as we read his great invectives, not of the sceptics mocking all gods
indiscriminately in the name of enlightened good sense, but of a Hebrew
prophet, chastising those who sacrifice to the gods of the Gentiles, in
the name of the God of righteousness who refuses to be worshipped with
offerings of blood. There is surely a spirit not far remote from this
in the indignant pity with which he tells, in a famous and splendid
passage, the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the divine bidding, as the price
of the liberation of the Grecian fleet on its way to Troy:

 How often has fear of the gods begotten impious and criminal acts!
 What else was it that led the chieftains of Greece, foremost of men,
 foully to stain the altar of Artemis with the blood of the maiden
 Iphigenia? Soon as the victim’s band was bound about her virgin locks,
 and she saw her father grief-stricken before the altar, and at his
 side the priests concealing the knife, and the onlookers shedding
 tears at the sight, dumb with fear she sank on her knees to the
 ground. And it availed her nothing at that hour that she had been the
 first to call the king by the name of father; for she was caught up by
 the hands of men, and borne trembling to the altar; not to have a glad
 wedding hymn sung before her when these sacred rites were over, but
 to be piteously struck down, a victim, stained with her own stainless
 blood, by the hand of a father in the very flower of her bridal years;
 and all in order to procure that a happy deliverance might be granted
 to the captive fleet. So huge a mass of evils has fear of the gods
 brought forth! (I. 84-101.)[8]

Thus the crucial proof of the badness of the old religions is derived
from the hideous violence done in their name to the natural and
beautiful pieties of the family.

Yet, with all his fierce aversion for this baneful fear, Lucretius
feels profoundly how natural it is. His intense imagination enters
into the inmost recesses of the human heart, and runs counter, as it
were, to the argument of his powerful reason; riveting upon our senses
with almost intolerable force the beliefs which he is himself seeking
to dispel; so that though there is no trace of doubt or obscurity in
his own mind, his words need only to be set in a different context to
become a plea for that which he is using them to refute. Thus his very
derision of the Stoic doctrine of an all-pervading God is conveyed in
language of what one is again prompted to call Hebraic magnificence.
‘What power can rule the immeasurable All, or hold the reins of the
great deep? who can revolve the heavens and warm the earth with
ethereal fires? who can be everywhere present, making dark the sky and
thrilling it with clashing sound...?’ (V. 1234 f.) Do we not seem to
listen to an echo of the ironical questions of the Jahveh of the Book
of Job?

There he feels only scorn for the believer, in spite of his involuntary
imaginative hold upon the belief. But in another passage we see the
poet himself shudder with the fear that his logic is in the act of
plucking up by the roots:

 When we gaze upward at the great vault of heaven, and the empyrean
 fixed above the shining stars, and consider the paths of sun and
 moon, then the dread will start into life within us lest haply we
 should find it to be the immeasurable might of the gods which moves
 the blazing stars along their diverse ways. For dearth of argument
 tempts us to wonder whether the world was ever begotten, and whether
 it be destined to perish when its ceaseless movements have worn it
 out, or endowed with immortal life glide on perpetually, defying all
 the might of time. And then what man is there whose heart does not
 shrink with terror of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with fear,
 when the parched earth trembles at the lightning stroke, and the roar
 of thunder rolls through the sky! Do not the peoples shudder, and
 haughty kings quake with fear, lest for some foul deed or arrogant
 speech a dire penalty has been incurred and the hour be come when it
 must be paid? For when the might of the hurricane sweeps the commander
 of a fleet before it along the seas, with all his force of legions and
 elephants, does he not approach the gods with prayers for their favour
 and helping winds; and all in vain, for often enough none the less
 he is caught in the whirlpool and flung into the jaws of death? So
 utterly is some hidden power seen to consume the works of man, and to
 trample and deride all the symbols of his glory and his wrath (V. 1204
 f.).

But beyond the fear of what the gods may do to us on earth, lay another
more insidious and ineluctable fear--the dread of what may befall us
after death. It was a main part of Lucretius’s purpose to meet this by
showing that death meant dissolution, and dissolution unconsciousness;
but men continued to dread, and this is the reasoning, equally
inconclusive and brilliant, with which he confronts them:

 Therefore since death annihilates, and bars out from being altogether
 him whom evils might befall, it is plain that in death there is
 nothing for us to fear, and that a man cannot be unhappy who does not
 exist at all, and that it matters not a jot whether a man has been
 born, when death the deathless has swallowed up life that dies.

 Therefore, when you see a man bewail himself that after death his body
 will rot, or perish in flames or in the jaws of beasts, his profession
 clearly does not ring true, and there lurks a secret sting in his
 heart, for all his denial that he believes there is any feeling in
 the dead. For, I take it, he does not fulfil his promise, nor follow
 out his principle, and sever himself out and out from life, but
 unconsciously makes something of himself survive. For when as a living
 man he imagines his future fate, and sees himself devoured by birds
 and beasts, he pities himself; for he does not distinguish between
 himself and the other, nor sever himself from the imagined body, but
 imagines himself to be it, and impregnates it with his own feeling.
 Hence he is indignant that he has been created mortal, nor sees that
 there will not in reality be after death another self, to grieve as a
 living being that he is dead, and feel pangs as he stands by, that he
 himself is lying there being mangled or consumed.

Then he supposes the dying man’s friends to condole with him:

 Now no more thy glad home shall welcome thee, nor a beloved wife, nor
 sweet children run to snatch kisses, touching thy heart with secret
 delight. No more wilt thou be prosperous in thy doings, no more be a
 shelter to thy dear ones. A single, cruel day has taken from thee,
 hapless man, all the need of life. So they tell you, but they forget
 to add that neither for any one of these things wilt thou any longer
 feel desire (III. 863).


IV

So much then for the first aspect of Lucretius’s poem--the criticism of
the old religions. Most of the recognized and famous ‘poetry’ of the
book is connected, like the passages I have quoted, with this negative
side of his creed. But I am more concerned to show that a different
and not less noble vein of poetry was rooted in the rich positive
appetencies of his nature; in his acute and exquisite senses; in the
vast and sublime ideas which underlay his doctrine of the world; in
his intense apprehension of the zest of life; and, on the other hand,
penetrating, like an invisible but potent spirit, the texture of his
reasoned unconcern, his profound, unconfessed sense of the pathos
of death, his melancholy in the presence of the doom of universal
dissolution which he foresaw for the world and for mankind.

Let us look first at the main constructive idea; the atomic theory
of Leucippus and Democritus, taken over by Epicurus and expounded by
Lucretius.

For this theory was in effect, and probably in intention, a device
for overcoming that antithesis of the One and the Many, of Permanence
and Change, of which I have spoken. The Eleatics had declared that
pure Being was alone real, and denied Change and Motion; Heracleitus
declared that nothing was real but Change, and the only perpetuity
‘flux.’ The founder of atomism, Leucippus, showed that it was possible
to hold, in the phrase of Browning’s philosophic Don Juan, that there
is in ‘all things change, and permanence as well,’ by supposing that
shifting and unstable world of the senses, where all things die and
are born, to be composed of uncreated and indestructible elements.
Underlying the ceaseless fluctuations of Nature, and life as we see
them, lay a continuity of eternal substance, of which they were the
passing modes;--one of the greatest of philosophical conceptions,
Mr. Santayana has called it, but one also appealing profoundly to
the specifically poetic intuition which I have described. Whether
the permanent apprehended through the flux of sense be a spiritual
substance like Plato’s ideas, or Shelley’s ‘white radiance of
eternity,’ or whether it be the constant form and function of the
flowing river, as in Wordsworth’s Duddon sonnet; or whether, as here,
it be a background of material particles perpetually combining and
resolved, we have the kind of intuition which gives the thrill of
poetry; we discover ‘sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear,’
infinite perspectives open out in the moment and in the point, and
however remote the temper of Spinozan mysticism may be, we yet in some
sort see things ‘in the light of eternity.’

In Lucretius this conception found a mind capable of being ravished
by its imaginative grandeur, as well as of pursuing it indefatigably
through the thorniest mazes of mechanical proof. The contagious fervour
which breathes through his poem is no mere ardour of the disciple
bent on winning converts, or the joy of the literary craftsman as
his hexameters leap forth glowing on the anvil; it is the sacred
passion of one who has had a sublime vision of life and nature,
and who bears about the radiance of it into all the work to which
he has set his hand. It is not because of anything that Lucretius
adds to Epicurus--in theory he really adds nothing at all--that the
impression produced by his poem differs so greatly from that of all
we know--in fragments and at second hand, it is true--of Epicurus’s
own writings. The ultimate principles are the same, but the accent is
laid at a different point. The parochial timidities of Epicurus have
left their traces on the Roman’s page, but they appear as hardly more
than rudimentary survivals among the native inspirations of a man of
heroic mettle and valour, Roman tenacity, and native sweep of mind.
He cannot quite break free from some speculative foibles which show
the Master’s shallow opportunism at its worst--such as the dictum that
the sun is about as large as it looks, a lamp hung a little above the
earth, and daily lighted and put out; but he becomes himself when he
lets his imagination soar into the infinities of time and space which
his faith opens out or leaves room for. It is a triumph of poetry as
well as of common sense when he scoffs at the Stoic dogma of a Space
which abruptly comes to an end; when he stations an archer at the
barrier and ironically bids him shoot his arrow into the nothingness
beyond. Or in more sombre mood, how grave an intensity he puts into a
common thought, like that of the end of life, by the sublimely terrible
epithet _immortal_ which he applies to death:

    Mortalem vitam Mors cum inmortalis ademit (III. 869).

or into a mere reminder that birth and death are always with us, by
making us feel the endless concomitant succession through the ages
of funeral wailings, and the cry of the new-born child (II. 578).
He accepts without question the swerving of the atoms, devised by
Epicurus--child and man of genius at once--to refute the Stoic dogma
of necessity; but what possesses his mind and imagination is not these
intrusions of caprice, but the great continuities and uniformities of
existence, which follow from the perpetual dissolution and remaking
of life. ‘Rains die, when father ether has tumbled them into the lap
of mother earth; but then goodly crops spring up and trees laden with
fruit; and by them we and the beasts are fed, and joyous cities teem
with children and the woods ring with the song of young birds’ (I. 250
f.).

Only, as such passages show, Lucretius grasps these uniformities
and continuities not as theoretic abstractions, but as underlying
conditions of the teeming multiplicity and joyous profusion of
living Nature. His senses, imagination, and philosophic intellect,
all phenomenally acute and alert, wrought intimately together; and
he enters into and exposes the life of the individual thing with
an intensity of insight and a realistic precision and power which
quicken us with its warm pulse, and burn its image upon our brain,
without ever relaxing our consciousness that it is part of an endless
process, and the incidental expression of an unalterable law. For
him, indeed, as for Dante, individuality is an intrinsic part of law,
and law of individuality. Every being has its place and function, its
‘deep fixed boundaries’ (_terminus alte haerens_). The very stone, for
Dante, cleaves to the spot where it lies. And the Roman as well as
the philosopher in Lucretius scornfully contrasts with this Nature of
minute and ubiquitous law the fluid and chaotic world of myth, where
anything might become anything (cf. V. 126 f.).


V

None the less, his conception of the nature of the process itself does
insensibly undergo a change. In the mind of an exponent so richly
endowed and so transparently sincere, the hidden flaw in his system
could not but at some point disturb its imposing coherence. Atomism
could not at bottom explain life, and life poured with too abounding a
tide through the heart and brain of Lucretius not to sap in some degree
the authority of his mechanical calculus, and to lend a surreptitious
persuasiveness to inconsistent analogies derived from the animated
soul. Without ostensibly disturbing the integrity of his Epicurean
creed, such analogies have, in two ways, infused an alien colour into
his poetry and alien implications into his thought. In the first
place, he feels, as such abounding natures will, that life--‘the mere
living’--is somehow very good, in spite of all the evils it brings in
its train, and death pathetic in spite of all the evils from which
it sets us free. When he is demonstrating that the world cannot have
been made by gods, he set forth its grave inherent flaws of structure
and arrangement with merciless trenchancy--_tantâ stat praedita culpâ_
(V. 199); and like Lear, he makes the new-born child wail because he
is come into a world where so many griefs await him. And no one ever
urged with more passionate eloquence that it is unreasonable to fear to
die. None the less, phrases charged with a different feeling about life
continually escape him. He speaks of the _praeclara mundi natura_ (V.
157). To begin to live is to ‘rise up into the divine borders of light’
(I. 20). And secondly, despite his philosophical assurance, incessantly
repeated, that birth and death are merely different aspects of the same
continuous mechanical process, and that nothing receives life except by
the death of something else, ‘Alid ex alio reficit natura, nec ullam
Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adiuta aliena’ (I. 264, etc.), he cannot
suppress suggestions that the creative energy of the world is akin to
that which with conscious desire and will brings forth the successive
generations of Man. And so, in the astonishing and magnificent opening
address, the poet who was about to demonstrate that the gods lived
eternally remote from the life of men, calls upon Venus, the legendary
mother of his own race, as the divine power ever at work in this
teeming universe, the giver of increase, bringing all things to birth,
from the simplest corn blade to the might and glory of the Roman Empire:

 Mother of the Roman race, delight of gods and men, benign Venus, who
 under the gliding constellations of heaven fillest with thy presence
 the sea with its ships and the earth with its fruits, seeing that by
 thy power all the races of living things are conceived and come to
 being in the light of day; before thee, O goddess, the winds take
 flight, and the clouds of heaven at thy coming; at thy feet the brown
 earth sheds her flowers of a thousand hues, before thee the sea breaks
 into rippling laughter, and the sky rejoicing glows with radiant light
 (I. 1 f.).

So grave and impassioned an appeal cannot be treated as mere rhetorical
ornament. If we call it figure, it is figure of the kind which is not
a ‘poetical’ substitute for prose, but conveys something for which
no other terms are adequate. Lucretius, the exponent of Epicurus,
doubtless intended no heresy against the Epicurean theology; but
Lucretius, the poet, was carried by his vehement imagination to an
apprehension of the creative energies of the world so intense and acute
that the great symbol of Venus rendered it with more veracity than all
that calculus of atomic movements which he was about to expound, and by
which his logical intellect with perfect sincerity believed it to be
adequately explained.

Far less astonishing than his bold rehabilitation of the goddess of
Love is his fetishistic feeling for the Earth, the legendary mother of
men. For him too, as for primeval myth, she is the ‘universal mother,’
who in her fresh youth brought forth flower and tree, and bird and
beast; from whose body sprang finally the race of man itself; nay,
he tells us how the infants crept forth, ‘from wombs rooted in the
soil,’ and how, wherever this happened, earth yielded naturally through
her pores a liquor most like to milk, ‘even as nowadays every woman
when she has given birth is filled with sweet milk, because all that
current of nutriment streams towards the breast’ (V. 788 f.).

It is true that elsewhere Lucretius speaks with rationalistic
condescension of the usage which calls the Earth a mother and divine,
as a phrase like Bacchus for wine or Ceres for corn, permissible so
long as no superstitious fear is annexed to it (II. 652 f.). But
it is plain that the Earth’s motherhood had a grip upon his poet’s
imagination quite other than could be exerted by any such tag of poetic
diction. Doubtless the fervour with which he insists on it--‘Therefore
again and again Earth is rightly called Mother, seeing that she brought
forth the race of men and every beast and bird in its due season’--is
not wholly due to poetic motives. He is eager to refute the Stoic
doctrine that men were sprung from heaven. But the poet in him is, all
the same, entranced by the sublimity of the conception he is urging,
and he describes it with an afflatus which dwarfs that Stoic doctrine,
and makes the splendid legend of Cybele the Earth Mother, elaborated by
the Greek poets, seem puerile with all its beauty. ‘In the beginning
Earth hath in herself the elements whence watersprings pouring forth
their coolness perpetually renew the boundless Sea, and whence fires
arise, making the ground in many places hot, and belching forth the
surpassing flames of Ætna. Then she bears shining corn and glad
woodlands for the support of men, and rivers and leaves and shining
pastures for the beasts that haunt the hills. Wherefore she is called
the mother of the gods and mother of beasts and men’ (II. 589 f.).

This all-creating Earth is far enough no doubt from the benign Nature
of Wordsworth, who moulds her children by silent sympathy. But it is
not so remote from the Earth of Meredith, the Mother who brings Man
‘her great venture’ forth, bears him on her breast and nourishes him
there, but ‘more than that embrace, that nourishment, she cannot give.’

    He may entreat, aspire,
    He may despair, and she has never heed.
    She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,
            Not his desire.

Meredith too sees man, in dread of her, clutching at invisible powers,
as Lucretius’s sea-captain in the storm makes vows to the gods. And
Meredith’s thought that man rises by ‘spelling at’ her laws is no less
Lucretian. But Meredith’s story of Earth is full of hope, like his
story of man. It is perpetual advance. With Lucretius it is otherwise.

For the Earth is not only our Mother; she is our tomb (II. 1148 f.).
And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal
energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to
it. The Earth, so prolific in her joyous youth, is now like a woman
who has ceased to bear, ‘worn out by length of days’ (V. 820 f.). In
the whole universe birth and death absolutely balance, the equation
of mechanical values is never infringed; the universe has no history,
only a continuous substitution of terms. But each living thing has
a history, it knows the exultation of onset and the melancholy of
decline; and its fear of death is not cancelled by the knowledge that
in that very moment, and in consequence of that very fact, some other
living thing will be born. And thus Lucretius, feeling for our Earth
as a being very near to us, and with which the issues of our existence
are involved, applies the doctrine to her without shrinking indeed, but
not without a human shudder. The Earth had a beginning, and ineluctable
reason forces us to conclude that she will have an end, and this not
by a gradual evanescence or dispersion, but by a sudden, terrific
catastrophe, as in a great earthquake, or world conflagration (V. 95
f.).

And he feels this abrupt extinction of the Earth and its inhabitants to
be tragic, notwithstanding that extinction is, by his doctrine, only
the condition of creation, and that at the very moment of her ruin,
some other earth will be celebrating its glorious birth. Earth has for
him a life-history, a biography, and he forgets that she is strictly
but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms thickened for a time
to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus we see how this mechanical
system, ardently embraced by a poet, working freely upon him, and
itself coloured and transformed by his mind, stirred in him two
seemingly opposed kinds of poetic emotion at once: the sublime sense of
eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden doom and inexorable
passing away.

Hence the _melancholy_ that in Lucretius goes along with an enormous
sense of life. To say that he puts the ‘Nevermore’ of romantic
sentimentality in the place of that dispassionate ‘give and take’ of
mechanics would do wrong to the immense virility which animates every
line of this athlete among poets. Of the cheap melancholy of discontent
he knows as little as of the cheap satisfaction of complacency, or
of that literary melancholy, where the sigh of Horace, or Ronsard,
or Herrick, over the passing of roses and all other beautiful things
covers a sly diplomatic appeal to the human rosebud to be gathered
while still there is time. No, the melancholy of Lucretius is like
that of Dürer’s ‘Melancholia,’ the sadness of strong intellect and
far-reaching vision as it contemplates the setting of the sun of time
and the ebbing of the tides of mortality; or like Wordsworth’s mournful
music of dissolution, only to be heard by an ear emancipated from
vulgar joys and fears; or like the melancholy of Keats--the veiled
goddess who hath her shrine in the very temple of delight--the _amari
aliquid_, in Lucretius’s own yet more pregnant words, which lurks in
the very sweetness of the flower.

Thus our ‘scientific poet’ appears in an extraordinary if not unique
way to have united the functions and temper and achievement of science
and poetry. He ‘knew the causes of things,’ and could set them forth
with marvellous precision and resource; and the knowledge filled him
with lofty joy as of one standing secure above the welter of doubt
and fear in which the mass of men pass their lives. To have reached
this serene pinnacle of intellectual security seemed to his greatest
follower Virgil a happiness beyond the reach of his own more tender and
devout genius, and he commemorated it in splendid verses which Matthew
Arnold in our own day applied to Goethe:

    And he was happy, if to know
    Causes of things, and far below
    His feet to see the lurid flow
    Of terror and insane distress
    And headlong fate, be happiness.

There is, it may be, something that repels us, something slightly
inhuman, in this kind of lonely happiness, and Lucretius does little
to counteract that impression when he himself compares it, in another
famous passage, to the satisfaction of one who watches the struggle
of a storm-tost ship from the safe vantage-ground of the shore. Yet
Lucretius is far from being the lonely egoist that such a passage
might suggest; his poem itself was meant as a helping hand to lift
mankind to his own security: he knew what devoted friendship was,
and we have pleasant glimpses of him wandering with companions among
the mountains,[9] or sharing a rustic meal stretched at ease on the
grass by a running brook.[10] Lucretius like his master had no social
philosophy, and it is his greatest deficiency as a thinker; but he was
not poor in social feeling. His heart went out to men, as a physician,
not coldly diagnosing their disease, but eager to cure them.

And so his feeling for Nature, for the universe of things, though
rooted in his scientific apprehension, is not bounded by it. He seizes
upon the sublime conceptions which his science brought to his view--the
permanent substance amid perennial change, the infinity of space and
time--and his vivid mind turns these abstractions into the radiant
vision of a universe to which the heaven of heavens, as the old poets
had conceived it, ‘was but a veil.’ But he went further, and shadowed
forth, if half-consciously and in spite of himself, the yet greater
poetic thought, of a living power pervading the whole, drawing the
elements of being together by the might of an all-permeating Love. And
thus Lucretius, the culminating expression of the scientific thinking
of Democritus and of the gospel of Epicurus, foreshadows Virgil, whom
he so deeply influenced, and prophesies faintly but perceptibly of
Dante and of Shelley; as his annihilating exposure of the religions
founded upon fear insensibly prepared the way for the religions of hope
and love.



III MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS



III MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS


THE ‘love of mountains’ which plays so large a part in the poetry of
the age of Wordsworth, and has so few close analogies in that of any
other country or any earlier time, offers matter of still unexhausted
interest to the student of poetic psychology. This is not the place
to consider how it happened that any mass of boldly crumpled strata,
on a certain scale, became in the course of the eighteenth century
charged with a kind of spiritual electricity which set up powerful
answering excitements in the sensitive beholder. Gray already in 1739
expressed the potential reach and compass of these excitements in our
psychical life when he called the scenery of the Grande Chartreuse
‘pregnant with religion and poetry’--a thought which Wordsworth’s
sublime verses on the Simplon, sixty years later, only made explicit.
Not all the mountain-excitement of the time was of this quality; and
we can distinguish easily enough between the ‘picturesque,’ ‘romantic’
mountain sentiment of Scott, to whom the Trossachs and Ben Venue spoke
most eloquently when they sounded to the pad of a horseman’s gallop,
and the ‘natural religion’ of Wordsworth, to whom the same pass wore
the air of a ‘Confessional’ apt for autumnal meditation on the brevity
of life. In the younger poets of the age mountain sentiment is less
original and profound than in Wordsworth, less breezily elemental than
in Scott. The mountain poetry of Wordsworth concurred, as an explicit
stimulus to mountain sentiment, with the inarticulate spell of the
mountains themselves, transforming in some degree the native feeling
and experience of almost all mountain-lovers of the next twenty years,
even when they were of the calibre of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley.
Yet even where the Wordsworthian colour is most perceptible, as in _The
Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni_, in _Alastor_, _Mont Blanc_, and in the
Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, the younger poet has seen his mountains
with his own eyes and through the glamour of his own passions,
impregnated them with his own genius and temperament. Shelley’s
mountains are no longer the quiet brotherhood of Grasmere, with a
listening star atop, but peaks of flamelike aspiration, or embodied
protests against men’s code of crime and fraud; Byron’s are warriors
calling joyously to one another over the lit lake across the storm. For
all these poets--even for Scott when he _was_ a poet--mountain scenery
was not so much new matter to be described as a new instrument of
expression, a speaking symbol for their own spiritual appetencies and
ideal dreams. Of its importance for the poetry of any one of them there
cannot be a moment’s doubt. There remains, however, another poet, the
youngest, the shortest-lived, but in some respects the most gifted
of the whole group. On a general view Keats appears to be sharply
distinguished, in regard to the characteristic here in question, from
all the rest. Mountains and mountain sentiment seem to have a quite
negligible place in his poetry. It may be worth while to consider how
far this is really the case.


I

If we look to the sources of his experience, Keats was more nearly
secluded from the stimulus of mountain scenery than any of his
compeers. By the outward circumstances, of his birth and breeding
he was in reality the ‘cockney poet’ of later derisive criticism.
During the whole formative period of youth he hardly encountered even
‘wild’ scenery; what lay about him in his infancy was at best the
semi-suburban meadow and woodland landscape of Edmonton, or the ‘little
hill’ (of Hampstead) on which he ‘stood tiptoe’ to command a wider
view. Before the summer of 1818 there is no sign that either ‘mountain
power’ or ‘mountain mystery’ had any meaning for him. He deeply admired
Wordsworth, and regarded _The Excursion_ as one of the three things
to rejoice at in that age; but it was Wordsworth as an interpreter of
human life, the poet who ‘thought into the human heart’ (to Reynolds,
May 1818), rather than the mountain lover. There is no clear trace as
yet in his earlier poetry of Cumberland fells; there is none whatever
of the great mountain mythology of Wordsworth. No menacing peak had
ever towered up between him and the stars, no far-distant hills had
sent an alien sound of melancholy to his ear. Not that he owes nothing
as a poet to the mythic rendering of mountains. On the contrary, up to
this date, all his imagining of mountains, in the stricter sense, is
derived from, or at least touched with, myth. Only it is the myth of
classic legend, not of modern ‘natural religion.’ Had not the ‘lively
Grecians’ inhabited a ‘land of hills,’ these would hardly have entered
even as largely as they do into the enchanted scenery of _Endymion_;
and on the whole it is a scenery of woods and waters, flowery glades
and ocean caverns, not of Olympian heights. But if Keats’s experience
of nature is still limited, it is used to the full. _Endymion_, at
first sight a tissue of exquisite dreams, is full of the evidence
of his no less exquisite perception of the living nature within his
reach. From the very outset we are aware that the ‘things of beauty’
he loved best and knew most intimately in the natural world were woods
and flowers and streams. There is no mention, in that opening survey,
of hills, and when they come perforce into the story they are arrayed
as far as may be in the semblance of these beloved things. ‘A mighty
forest’ is ‘outspread upon the sides of Latmus’ (i. 62); in the summons
to the Shepherds, the highland homes are touched vaguely and without
interest (‘whether descended from beneath the rocks that overtop your
mountains’), while he lingers with evident delight upon the ‘swelling
downs’

                          ... where sweet air stirs
    Blue hare-bells lightly and where prickly furze
    Buds lavish gold. (i. 201.)

as later, no less daintily, upon the

            ... hill-flowers running wild
    In pink and purple chequer. (ii. 286.)

The ideal dwelling for Endymion and his ‘swan of Ganges’ will be under
the brow of a steep hill, but they will be embowered in ivy and yew,
and the hill itself, like their bridal couch, will be ‘mossy’--the
haunting character of the Keatsian woodland and its ‘winding ways’ (iv.
670).

On the other hand, some of the hills in _Endymion_, like ‘fountain’d
Helicon,’ are purely legendary, and the higher and bolder ones derive
their characters from the tales of Olympus or Cyllene. Between nature
and classic myth there was for Keats no trace of the disparity which
so deeply offended Wordsworth; his imagination passed without thought
of discord from one to the other, or blended them together; it was
probably the Nature poet yet more than the Christian in Wordsworth
who responded so coldly (‘A pretty piece of paganism’) when the young
poet brought his train of Bacchanals ‘over the light-blue hills.’
It is of Arcadian boar-hunts that we have to think when Endymion on
the mountain-heights will ‘once more make his horn parley from their
foreheads hoar’ (i. 478), or sees the thunderbolt hurled from his
threshold (ii. 203); it is an Arcadian shepherd whose ‘pipe comes clear
from aery steep’ (iii. 359). And it is at least no English mountain
of whose ‘icy pinnacles’ we have a momentary and here quite isolated
glimpse.


II

But while the mountain-drawing in _Endymion_ is on the whole vague and
derivative, there are hints that Keats was already becoming alive to
the imaginative spell of great mountains, to their power in poetry, and
for his poetry. When he imagines the moonlit earth, he sees it partly
in delicate miniature like the image of the nested wren, who takes
glimpses of the moon from beneath a sheltering ivy-leaf, but this is
coupled with a picture of Miltonic grandeur and tumult:

    Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,
    Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes. (iii. 59.)

He was already on the way to that clear recognition of his need of
great mountains which speaks from his famous explanation of the motives
of the northern tour which he undertook, with Brown, in the summer of
1818--the crucial event of his history from our present point of view.
‘I should not have consented to myself,’ he wrote to Bailey, ‘these
four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought that it
would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more
hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and
strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among
books, even though I should read Homer.’[11] The passage has great
psychological value, for it shows how closely involved his nascent
apprehension of mountains was with the other spiritual appetencies
urgent within him in these months. To be ‘loaded with grander
mountains’ he thought of as an integral part of an inner process of
much wider scope, of which the common note was to be the bracing and
hardening of a mind which had not yet won complete control of its
supreme gift of exquisite sensation. The ‘grander mountains’ were to
be only one of the bracing forces, but it is clear that he felt this
new force, under whose sway he was for a while about to live, akin to
others which his letters show to have been alluring him during these
months. The bare rugged forms of the mountains he was now to explore
accorded subtly for him with the hardihood and endurance of the
climber, and not less with the severity of the epic poet, who, like
Milton, preferred ‘the ardours to the pleasures of song,’ or who, like
Homer, allowed us fugitive but sublime glimpses of the mountains which
looked down upon the scene of his Tale. When Keats and Brown came down
upon the town of Ayr, they had before them ‘a grand Sea view terminated
by the black Mountains of the isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them
so nearly I said to myself: How is it they did not beckon Burns to
some grand attempt at Epic?’[12] Keats perhaps thought of the Isle of
Tenedos, which similarly dominates the plain of Troy across a reach of
sea; ‘You would lift your eyes from Homer only to see close before you
the real Isle of Tenedos,’ he was writing to Reynolds in a different
context on the same day. That one peaked Isle should stand out in
Keats’s mind from all the other imagery of Homer, and that he should
wonder at the failure of another to beget new Iliads in the unhomeric
Burns, shows with much precision how his literary passion for the
Homeric poetry was now quickened and actualized by the visible presence
of grand mountains.

It is needless (though not irrelevant) to dwell here upon other
kindred features of the expanding horizons which came into view for
Keats in this momentous year: the resolve to renounce his ‘luxurious’
art for philosophy and knowledge;[13] and the disdain for women, for
effeminate characters, for the pleasures of domesticity. In each
case the urgency of this passion for what he felt more bracing, more
intellectually fortifying, more masculine, found vent, for a time, in
language too peremptory and exclusive to be true to the needs of his
rich and complex nature.[14] Philosophy would, had he lived, assuredly
have ministered more abundantly to his poetry, but _Lamia_ shows how
far she was from becoming its master, or its substitute; the Miltonic
ardours of _Hyperion_ were to be qualified in the renewed but chastened
and ennobled ‘luxury’ of _St. Agnes’ Eve_ and the _Odes_. The man who
wrote: ‘the roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the
windowpane are my children,’ would yet have found a place for noble
womanhood within his ‘masculine’ ideal, had not a tragical influence
intervened. And, similarly, the traces of his mountain experience fade
after 1818, a new order of symbols, more congenial at bottom to the
ways of his imagination, asserts or reasserts itself in his poetry; and
it is hardly an accident that in the revised _Hyperion_ of a year later
we approach the granite precipices and everlasting cataracts of the
original poem by way of a garden, a temple, and a shrine.


III

For, evidently, it is in _Hyperion_, if anywhere, that we have to seek
the afterglow of that experience of ‘grander mountains’ which, in
June, he had set out to encounter. We must not indeed look in poetry
of this quality for those detailed reproductions of what he had seen
which Wordsworth condemned as ‘inventories’ in Scott, but which are
not strange either to the lower levels of his own verse. Even in the
letters written for the entertainment of a sick brother Keats rarely
describes; and constantly, to others, he breaks off impatiently when
he has begun. ‘My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about scenery and
visitings.’ His impressions come from him in brief, sudden, unsought
phrases; he left it to the methodic Brown to give the enchanting and
‘picturesque’ detail of mountains and valleys ‘in the manner of the
Laputan printing-press.’ ‘I have been among wilds and mountains too
much to break out much about their grandeur,’ he writes a little later
to Bailey. But there is no doubt of the impression. He had hoped that
his experience would ‘load’ him with grander mountains; and, in fact,
as he goes on to tell, ‘The first mountains I saw, though not so large
as some I have since seen, _weighed_ very solemnly upon me.’ And Brown
tells us that when Windermere first burst upon their view, ‘he stopped
as if stupefied with beauty.’[15]

Their actual experiences of mountain-climbing were few. Weather checked
them at Helvellyn, and expense at Ben Lomond; but in the ‘bleak air
atop’ of Skiddaw, as Lamb had called it, ‘I felt as if I were going to
a Tournament.’ What he felt about the Arran mountains we have seen.
Ailsa Craig--the seafowl-haunted ‘craggy ocean pyramid,’ evoked ‘the
only sonnet of any worth I have of late written.’ They found the north
end of Loch Lomond ‘grand to excess,’ and Keats made a rude pen-and-ink
sketch of ‘that blue place among the mountains.’ But their greatest
experience was doubtless the climb on Ben Nevis, on 2 August. The
chasms below the summit of Nevis seemed to him ‘the most tremendous
places I have ever seen,’ ‘the finest wonder of the whole--they appear
great rents in the very heart of the mountain, ... other huge crags
rising round ... give the appearance to Nevis of a shattered heart or
core in itself.’

The plan of a poem on the war of the gods and Titans was already
shaped or shaping in his mind when Keats set out for the north. As
early as September 1817 he had had in view ‘a new romance’ for the
following summer; in keeping with the new aspirations which that
summer brought, the ‘romance’ was now to be an epic. The most potent
influence governing the execution, that of Milton, is familiar, and
does not directly concern us here. Still less can we consider the
possible effect of companionship with those three little volumes of
Cary’s _Dante_, the single book taken with him on this tour.[16] But
while the spell of _Paradise Lost_ is apparent in the cast of the plot,
above all in the debate of the Titans, and in the style, an influence
to which Milton’s is wholly alien asserts itself in the delineation of
the Titanic ‘den’ itself. Clearly based upon the idea of an Inferno,
this ‘sad place’ where ‘bruised Titans’ are ‘chained in torture,’ is
yet full of traits which recall neither Milton nor Dante, but rather
one of those amazing chasms on Nevis, which seemed to be the very
‘core’ of the great mountain. He had, even, as he looked down into that
vaporous gulf, actually thought of the image of Hell. Milton’s Hell
is a plain of burning earth vaulted with fire and verging on a sea of
flame[17]; if there is a hill (i. 670) it is a volcano, belching fire,
or coated with a sulphurous scurf. The Keatsian Inferno is genuinely,
what he calls it, a ‘den,’ a yawning mountain dungeon overarched with
jutting crags, floored with hard flint and slaty ridge, and encompassed
by a deafening roar of waterfalls and torrents. A shattered rib of
rock, with his iron mace beside it, attests the spent fury of Creus.
Enceladus lies uneasily upon a craggy shelf. To render the spectacle
of the ruined and almost lifeless bodies lying ‘vast and edgeways,’ he
calls in a definite reminiscence, the ‘dismal cirque’ of Druid stones
near Keswick. He has felt too the silence of the mountains in the
pauses of the winter wind, though he speaks of it only to contrast it
with the organ voice of Saturn preceding the expectant murmur of his
audience of fallen divinities (ii. 123).[18] The darkness, too, in
which they languish is not eternal and ordained like that of Milton’s
Hell; the coming of the Sun-god will invade it with a splendour like
the morn and

        ... all the beetling gloomy steeps,
    All the sad spaces of oblivion,
    And every gulf, and every chasm old,
    And every height, and every sullen depth,
    Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams,
    And all the everlasting cataracts,
    And all the headlong torrents, far and near,
    Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, (ii. 358)

will stand revealed in that terrible splendour.

It is clear that in this great passage Keats has deliberately invoked
the image of a sunrise among precipitous mountains; and these lines
assure him a lasting place amongst our poet interpreters of mountain
glory. We must beware, as we have seen, of overstressing the element
of realism in the poem. Keats was not _describing_ mountain scenery,
English, Scotch, or any other, but using certain aspects of it, which
had been vividly brought home to him as he climbed or trudged, to
render poetic inspirations of far richer compass and wider scope. Much
of the detail of this Titan prison belongs as little to his British
mountain experience as do the Titans themselves. Iapetus grasps a
strangled serpent; Asia, dreaming of palm-shaded temples and sacred
isles, leans upon an elephant tusk. We are conscious of no discord,
so pervading is the impress of a single potent imagination, whatever
the material it employs. But it is not immaterial to note that, as
Professor de Sélincourt has pointed out, Keats did alter the original
draft of Hyperion’s coming in such a way as to give it a close
resemblance to a sunrise among the mountains, omitting two lines which
preceded the last but one quoted above:

    And all the Caverns soft with moss and weed,
    Or dazzling with bright and barren gems.

The former of these lines may be described as a momentary reversion
to the tender ‘mossy’ luxuriance of the _Endymion_ scenery, like the
‘nest of pain’ (ii. 90), which, however, he allowed to stand.[19] Its
excision, in the final version, marks Keats’s sense of the incongruity
of that earlier symbolism with the sterner matter in hand, as does the
transformation of the dreamy, pastoral Oceanus of the earlier poem
into the master of Stoic wisdom, able ‘to bear all naked truths, and
to envisage circumstance, all calm,’ who offers his bitter balm to the
despairing Titans, in the later.

_Hyperion_, we know, was left a fragment, and with deliberate purpose.
The mighty shade of Milton, he came to feel, deflected him from his
proper purpose in poetry. It is less important, but not less true, that
his passing vision of grand mountains was not in complete consonance
with his genius, and that his brief anthem of mountain poetry had in it
something of the nature of a _tour de force_. The mountains were for
him neither strongholds of faith nor sources of sublime consolation.
Even in the letters written in their presence he could speak somewhat
impatiently, as we have seen, of ‘scenery’ compared with life and men.
And if he places his ruined Titans in this wild den among the crags and
torrents, it is because there was something in him, deeper than his
reverence for Wordsworth or for mountain grandeur, which felt the very
savagery of the scene, its naked aloofness from everything human, to be
in accord with the primeval rudeness of an outdone and superseded race.
It is not for nothing that, when the scene changes from the old order
to the new, we are transported from Hyperion’s sun-smitten precipices
to the sea-haunted lawns and woodlands of Delos, where the young Apollo
is seen wandering forth in the morning twilight

    Beside the osiers of a rivulet,
    Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.

Do we not hear in this the home-coming accents, as of one who has
escaped from barbarous Thynia and Bithynia, and tastes the joy that is
born

    ‘cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
    labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum’?

Keats had, in effect, come home.

Yet the deflection, if it strained, also braced; and if in the
following months his imagination, when he is most inspired, moves once
more habitually among mossy woodland ways and by enchanted waters, the
immense advance in robustness of artistic and intellectual sinew which
distinguishes the poet of the _Nightingale_ and _Autumn_ from the poet
of _Endymion_ was gained chiefly in that summer of enlarged ideals and
experience, of which the mountain vision was a small but a significant
and symbolical part.



IV GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO



IV GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO


MAZZINI, the most prophetic figure of the nineteenth century,
declared in a famous passage his confidence in the European mission
of his country. ‘The Third Italy,’ destined to be born of the long
agony of the struggle with Austria without and the papacy within,
was not merely to be a nation, restored to unity and independence;
it was to intervene as an original voice in the complex harmony of
the European nationalities, contributing of its own inborn genius
something distinctive and unique. ‘We believe devoutly that Italy has
not exhausted her life in the world. She is called to introduce yet
new elements in the progressive development of humanity, and to live
with a third life. It is for us to begin it.’ Were Mazzini to return
to life to-day, how far would he regard his prophecy as fulfilled?
Beyond question his lofty idealism would find much to disapprove and
to regret. He would find a Third Italy, which has committed grave
excesses in the name of her recovered nationhood. But he would also
find a nation whose present rulers have shown more capacity for
Mazzinean internationalism than any other European government. And he
would find, also, in the Third Italy, a real renascence, a genuine
rebirth of genius and power, and this in ways so individual as to
justify in a rare degree the anticipation that Italy would give
something vitally her own to the new Europe. Open any serious Italian
book to-day, and you will note a kind of intellectual concentration,
a girding up of the loins of speech and thought, in striking contrast
with the loose-tongued volubility of most Italian writing, in verse
or prose, of the mid-nineteenth century. You note also a new tone of
critical mastery and conscious equality. Italy in the last century was
still the ‘woman-people,’ the pathetic beauty, languid still after
the gentle torpor of two centuries, and whose intellectual life, with
some brilliant isolated exceptions, faintly reflected that of the
more masculine nations north of the Alps. To-day she has not only
critically mastered all that Europe has to give, she sits in judgment
upon us, and the judgment she pronounces has again and again been of
that fruitful kind which disposes of old difficulties by revealing a
larger law. Benedetto Croce, who in his review, the _Critica_, brings
the literature of Europe, weighed and measured, to his reader’s doors,
has in his original philosophic work subjected her philosophic systems
to a searching revision, and has succeeded in some measure to their
authority.[20] A thinker less known, even to cultivated Italians,
Aliotta, has surveyed in a book of singular penetration and philosophic
power, the ‘idealistic reaction against science’ in the nineteenth
century. And when we look to creative literature, we find in this Third
Italy, together with a profusion of those fungoid growths of which the
modern age has in the West been everywhere prolific, a group of poets,
of powerful temperament and dazzling gifts, to whom no predecessor,
in Italy or elsewhere, offers more than a distant resemblance. One
of these, after pouring forth poems, dramas, novels, in prodigal
abundance for thirty years, became the most vociferous, and possibly
the most potent, of the forces that drove Italy into the war, and was
until lately the idol of the whole Italian race. Even to-day, after
the sorry collapse of his adventure, the man in whom Europe, irritated
and impatient, sees only a sort of Harlequin-Garibaldi, impudent
where his predecessor was sublime, and florid where he was laconic,
is still, for multitudes of his countrymen, the hero-poet who took
the banner of _Italianità_ from the failing or treacherous hands of
diplomats and statesmen, and defended it against the enemy without
and the enemy within, with the tenacity of maturity and the ardour of
youth. Certainly, one who is beyond all rivalry the most adored poet,
in any country, of our time, who has fought for Italy with tongue
and pen and risked his life in her service, and whose personality
might be called a brilliant impressionist sketch of the talents and
failings of the Italian character, reproducing some in heightened but
veracious illumination, others in glaring caricature or paradoxical
distortion--such a man, as a national no less than as a literary
force, claims and deserves close study.

Before entering, however, upon the detail of his life and work, let
me assist our imagination of Gabriele d’Annunzio by quoting from the
vivid description given by Mr. James Bone of a meeting with him at
Venice in the summer of 1918. The poet, fifty-six years old, was then
at the height of his renown; Fiume was still unthought of. His great
exploit of flying over Vienna and dropping leaflets inviting her in
aureate imagery to make peace was on every tongue. The gondoliers
took off their hats as they passed his house on the Grand Canal, and
he had to register all his letters to prevent their being abstracted
as souvenirs. Mr. Bone was talking with the airmen at an aerodrome on
one of the islands in the lagoons; when ‘Conversation died instantly
as an airman, very different from the others, came hurrying towards
us a rather small, very quick, clean-cut figure, wearing large smoked
glasses and white gloves with the wrists turned down.... The nose was
rather prominent, complexion not dark but marked a little, the whole
profile very clear, making one think not of a Renaissance Italian but
of a type more antique, an impression accentuated by his rather large,
beautifully shaped ear, very close to the head. The body denied the age
that was told in the face, for all its firmness. One’s first impression
was of a personality of extraordinary swiftness and spirit still at
full pressure, remorselessly pursuing its course “in hours of insight
willed.”... The whole surface of d’Annunzio’s personality suggested
a rich, hard fineness, like those unpolished marbles in old Italian
churches that gleam delicately near the base where the worshippers have
touched them, but above rise cold and white as from the matrix....
There was something of the man of fashion in the way he wore his
gloves, and in his gestures, but nothing one could see of the national
idol aware of itself.’[21]


I

The soldier-poet-man-of-fashion, who wore his fifty-six years thus
lightly, was born, in 1862, at Pescara, the chief--almost only--town
of the Abruzzi, then one of the wildest and rudest provinces of Italy.
Its valleys, descending from the eastern heights of the Apennines to
the Adriatic, were inhabited by an almost purely peasant population--a
hardy, vigorous race, tenacious of their primitive customs, and
little accessible to cultural influences. The Church enjoyed their
fanatical devotion, but only at the price of tacitly accepting many
immemorial pagan usages disguised by an unusually transparent veil
of Catholic ritual; while the Law occasionally found it expedient
to leave a convicted murderer (as in the _Figlia di Iorio_) to be
executed by an angry multitude according to the savage methods their
tradition prescribed. The little haven of Pescara--one of the few
on Italy’s featureless Adriatic coast--was the centre of a coasting
traffic with the yet wilder Dalmatian seaboard, a traffic which like
all ancient sea-faring, pursued its economic aims in an atmosphere of
superstitious observance, mystical, picturesque, and sometimes cruel.
In the poetic autobiography (‘The Soul’s Journey’) which occupies the
first _Laude_ (1903), d’Annunzio sketches vividly his boyhood’s home in
this Abruzzan country overlooking the sea. Of the persons who composed
this home, of family affections, we have only momentary retrospective
glimpses. We hear of the father, long dead when he wrote, from whom
he derived his iron-tempered muscles; and of the mother, who gave him
his insatiable ardour of will and desire. The three sisters seem to
have been like him; the face of the second sister resembled his own
‘mirrored in a clear fountain at dawn.’ All that stood between them,
he says, was their innocence and his passion. There was, too, an
old nurse, to whom in her serene old age, when she had retired to a
mountain hamlet, the poet addressed some tenderly beautiful stanzas,
contrasting his own stormy career with her idyllic peace as she ‘spins
the wool of her own flocks while the oil holds out.’[22]

But of household drama, such as dominates the experience of most
children, little seems to have existed for this child. Certainly it
vanishes completely, in the retrospect of the man of forty, beside
the drama enacted with prodigious intensity of colour, animation, and
passion, by his imperious senses. The contrast is here acute between
d’Annunzio and his co-heir of the Carduccian tradition, Pascoli, whose
poignant memories of childhood, instead of being effaced by the energy
of his sense-life, permeate it through and through, giving a ‘deep
autumnal tone’ to almost every line he wrote. He spoke in later life
of his ‘profound sensuality’ as a gift which had brought him poetic
discoveries denied to colder men, and this is no doubt true if by
‘sensuality’ we understand, as we ought, that d’Annunzio is prodigally
endowed with all the senses, that eye and ear feast on the glory and
the music of the world and live in its teeming life, that his lithe
body thrills with the zest of motion, that imagery is the material
of his thinking and the stuff of his speech; and that the passion of
sex, so acutely and perilously developed in him, is just one element
in this prodigal endowment of his entire sense-organism, itself a main
source of the artistic splendour of his work. In the early pages of the
_Viaggio_ we see the young boy drinking in with a kind of intoxication
the simple sights and sounds of the farm--the rhythmic fall of the
flails on the threshing-floor, the pouring of the whey from the churn,
the whirr of the spool in the loom, the scampering of wild ponies with
streaming manes over the hillside; or again, out at sea, the gorgeous
scarlet or gold sails scudding before the wind, each with its symbolic
sign. Even the inanimate world became for his transfiguring senses
alive; ‘it was a lying voice,’ he cries, ‘that declared that Pan is
dead.’ The mere contrasts of things, the individual self-assertion
shown by a tree, for instance, in not being a rock, produced in him
an excitement analogous to that which made Rupert Brooke, in his
own words, ‘a lover’ of all kinds of common things for being just
definitely and unmistakably what they were. So that a conception
apparently so thin and abstract as ‘difference’ can assume for him the
shape and potency of an alluring divinity: ‘Diversity,’ he cries, ‘the
siren of the world! I am he who love thee!’

And then, with adolescence, came the passion of sex; for d’Annunzio no
shy and gradual discovery, but a veritable explosion, before which all
obstacles, moral and material, vanished into air. He tells it with the
frankness of a child of the South, and the self-conscious importance
of an egoist for whom the events of his own physical history could
only be fitly described in terms of epic poetry, with its contending
nationalities and ruined or triumphant kings. ‘O flesh!’ he cries,
‘I gave myself up to thee, as a young beardless king gives himself
up to the warrior maid who advances in arms, terrible and beautiful.
She advances victorious, and the people receive her with rejoicing.
Astonishment strikes the gentle king, and his hope laughs at his
fear.’[23] And from the first this new passion allies itself with the
rest of his sense-organism, irradiating eye and ear and imagination,
‘giving to every power a double power,’ as Biron says in _Love’s
Labour’s Lost_. ‘Thou wast sometimes as the grape pressed by fiery
feet, O flesh, sometimes as snow printed with bleeding traces; I seemed
to feel in thee the twisting of trodden roots, and to hear the far-off
grinding of the axe upon the whetstone.’ The young erotic was already
growing towards that observant psychologist of eroticism who pervades
so many gorgeous but repulsive pages of his novels.

He was also growing, more slowly and as yet invisibly, to other and
more notable things. In the first published poems of the boy of
eighteen, and the second, _Canto Novo_, two years later, there is not
much more than the reflexion of this intense and pervading ‘sensuality’
(in the large meaning above indicated), in a speech moulded upon
the diction and rhythms of Carducci. The great master, then at the
height of his fame, had still to do much of his most splendid work.
D’Annunzio, who never ceased to revere him, was to become his principal
inheritor; but the heir added so much of his own to the bequest that
he can only at the outset be regarded as his disciple. The elder
poet’s influence was in any case entirely salutary. The classical
severity and nobility of style which distinguish the _Rime Nove_ and
the _Odi Barbare_ from the florid and facile romantic verse of the
day, contributed to temper the dangerous luxuriance of d’Annunzio,
and to evoke the powers of self-discipline and tenacious will which
lay within; while Carducci’s exultation in radiance and clarity, his
noonday view of life, his symbolic sun-worship and his hatred of all
twilight obscurantism and moonlight nebulosity, equally enforced the
more virile strain in d’Annunzio, the ‘stalk of carle’s hemp’ which,
far more truly than in Burns, underlay the voluptuous senses.

This background of harder and tougher nature was already manifested
when d’Annunzio, a few years later, turned to tell in prose some
stories of his native province. There is little in the _Novelle della
Pescara_ of love, less of luxury or refinement; we see the Abruzzan
village folk at feud, fanatical and ferocious, the women inciting the
men, the Church in its most ceremonial robes blandly but helplessly
looking on. _The Idolators_ tells how the men of a certain village
plan to set the bronze statue of their saint upon the church altar of
another neighbouring village. They assemble at night and march through
the darkness with the image on a cart. In the other village the men
await them in force, and a savage battle takes place in the church,
ending in the rout of the assailants with much slaughter, and the
ignominious mutilation of the image of their patron saint. And all
this grim matter is told in a style admirably strong and terse, bold
and sharp in outline, direct and impersonal in statement, untouched
by either delicate feeling or weak sentimentality. D’Annunzio’s
sensuality asserts itself still, as always; but it appears here as a
Rubens-like joy in intense impressions; now a copper-coloured storm
sky, now a splash of blood, betrays his passion for the crude effects
of flame and scarlet, most often where they signify death or ruin. He
imagines voluptuously as always, but his voluptuousness here feeds not
in the lust of the flesh, but in the lust of wounds and death. When
he describes the fighting in the church, he spares you as little as
Homer; you are not told merely that a man was stabbed, you are made to
see the blade shear away the flesh from the bone. His men are drawn
with the same hard, pungent stroke, and a visible relish for scars,
gnarled features, frayed dress, and all the maimings and deformities,
which tell not of weakness or decay, but of battles recent or long
ago, the blows and buffets received in the tug with fortune. There is
little trace of sybarite effeminacy in the painting of old Giacobbe,
for instance, the leader of the insurgents, a tall, bony man, with bald
crown and long red hairs on nape and temples, two front teeth wanting,
which gave him a look of senile ferocity, a pointed chin covered with
bristles, and so forth.

D’Annunzio was intrinsically of the Abruzzan race; the tough hardy
fibre of the peasant folk was his; and it was the deep inborn
attachment to his blood and kin which produced, twenty years later, his
greatest work, as a like attachment lifted Mr. Shaw, almost at the same
moment, to the rare heights of _John Bull’s Other Island_. But much had
to happen to the young provincial before he could thus discover to the
full the poetry of his province.


II

In the early eighties d’Annunzio had come to Rome. The little circle
of young Carduccians in the capital welcomed the poet’s brilliant
disciple, who was soon to outdistance them all in sheer splendour
of literary gift. More important, however, than any literary or
personal influence--for his hard encasing shell of egoism made him
extraordinarily immune to the intrusion either of alien genius or
of friendship or love--was the deep impression made upon the young
Abruzzan by the splendour, the art glories, and above all the historic
import of Rome. ‘The Abruzzi gave d’Annunzio the sense of _race_‘,
says an excellent critic, ‘Rome gave him the sense of _history_.’ The
magical effect of Rome had hitherto been rendered most vividly in the
poetry of other peoples, to whom it was a revelation, or a fulfilment
of long aspiration, of the ‘city of their soul,’ in Goethe’s _Roman
Elegies_, _Childe Harold_, or _Adonais_. How overwhelming to an
imaginative Italian the sight and living presence of Rome could be may
be judged from the magnificent _Ode_ of Carducci. The Englishman who is
thrilled as he stands in the Forum, or by the mossy bastions of our own
Roman wall, may faintly apprehend the temper of a citizen of the ‘Third
Italy’ who felt his capital, newly won from the Popes, to be once more
in living continuity with the city of Cæsar. Both the nobility and
the extravagance of Italian national feeling have their root in this
sense of continuity with antique Rome, and this is to be remembered in
estimating the perfervid _Italianità_ of d’Annunzio, the most striking
example both of the sublime idealism and of the childish extravagance
which it is able to inspire.

The work of the next years abounded in evidence of the spell which Rome
had laid upon his sensuous imagination. He poured forth novels and
poems, both charged with an oppressive opulence of epicurean and erotic
detail, but saved for art by the clear-cut beauty of the prose, and by
frequent strokes of bold and splendid imagination.

Andrea Sperelli in _Il Piacere_ (1889) and Tullio Hermil in
_L’Innocente_ (1892), are virtuosos in æsthetic as well as in erotic
luxury, and the two allied varieties of hedonism reflect and enforce
one another. Sperelli is artist and connoisseur, of unlimited resources
and opportunities, and neither he nor his mistress could think love
tolerable in chambers not hung with precious tapestry and adorned with
sculptured gold and silver vessels, the gift of queens or cardinals of
the splendour-loving Renascence. No doubt there is irony in the picture
too; the native stamina in d’Annunzio resists complete assimilation to
the corrupt aspects of the luxury he describes, and he feels keenly the
contrast between the riotous profusion of the ‘new rich’ of the new
Rome and the heroism and hardships of the men of the _Risorgimento_ who
had won it.

The poetry of this period is less repellent because its substance,
though not definitely larger or deeper, is sustained and penetrated
by the magic of a wonderfully winged and musical speech. His _Elegie
Romane_ (1892)--a rare case of his emulating another poet--are inferior
in intellectual force to Goethe’s, which yet have as lyrics an almost
pedestrian air in comparison with the exquisite dance of the Italian
rhythms. Here is one of d’Annunzio’s, in some approach to the original
elegiacs. He has listened to a service in St. Peter’s:

    Thro’ the vaulted nave, that for ages has gathered so vast a
      Human host, and of incense harboured so vast a cloud,
    Wanders the chorus grave from lips invisible. Thunders
      Break from the organ at times out of its hidden grove.
    Down thro’ the tombs the roar reverberates deep in the darkness;
      The enormous pillars seem to throb to the hymn.
    High enthroned the pontifical priests watch, blessing the people.
      At the iron gates angels and lions keep guard.
    How majestic the chant! From its large, long undulations
      Rises one clear voice with a melodious cry.
    The voice mourns, alone; in his cold vault does he not hear it,
      Palestrina? Alone the voice mourns, to the world
    Uttering a sorrow divine. Does the buried singer not hear it?
      Does not his soul leap up, bright on the heights of heaven?
    Even as a dove makes wing aloft unto golden turrets?
      The voice mourns, alone; mourns, in the silence, alone.

The sonnets of the _Isottèo_ and _Chimera_ (1885-8) show a
concentration rare in the later history of the Italian sonnet. And
any reader who thinks d’Annunzio incapable of writing of love without
offence may be invited to try the charming idyll of Isaotta Guttadàuro.
Scenery and circumstances, to be sure, are sumptuous and opulent as
usual. The simple life and homely persons traditional in idyll are
remote; but poetry did not absolutely fly from Tennyson’s touch when
he turned from his Miller’s and Gardener’s daughters to put Maud in a
Hall; and neither does she retire from d’Annunzio’s Isaotta, in her
noble mansion. The lover stands at sunrise in the ‘high hall garden’
under her window and summons her in a joyous morning song to come
forth. It is late autumn, the house is silent, but the peacocks perched
on the orange trees hail the morning in their raucous tones. The
situation is that of Herrick’s May morning song to Corinna; but though
Herrick loved jewels and fine dresses not a little, the contrast is
piquant between the country simplicity of his Devonshire maids and men,
and the aristocratic luxury of Isaotta. ‘Come, my Corinna, come! Wash,
dress, be brief in praying’--bids Herrick; but no such summary toilette
will serve the Italian. Isaotta will rise from her brocaded bed,
and her white limbs will gleam in a marble bath, as her maid pours
amber-scented water on them, while the woven figures of the story of
Omphale look on from the walls. At length Isaotta comes out on to her
vine-wreathed balcony and playfully greets _messèr cantore_ below. She
is secretly ready, we see, to surrender, but makes a show of standing
out for terms. They will wander through the autumnal vineyards, and if
they find a single cluster still hanging on the poles, ‘I will yield
to your desire, and you shall be my lord.’ So they set out in the
November morning. The vineyards, lately so loud with vintage merriment
and song, are now deserted and still. Not a cluster is to be seen. She
archly mocks him: ‘What, has subtle Love no power to give you eyes?’
They meet peasant women going to their work, and one of them asks him,
‘What seekest thou, fair sir?’ And he replies: ‘I seek a treasure.’ A
flight of birds rises suddenly across their path with joyous cries;
they take it as a sign, and gaze at each other, pale and silent. Then
unexpectedly he sees before him a vineyard flaming in full array of
purple and gold, and a flock of birds making a chorus in its midst. “‘O
lady Isaotta, here is life!’ I cried to her with rapt soul; and the
chorus of songsters cried over our heads. I drew her to the spot, and
she came as swift as I, for I held her firmly by the hand. Rosy was the
face she turned away from me, but fair as Blanchemain’s when she took
the kiss of Lancelot, her sovran lover, in the forest. ‘O Lady, I keep
my pact; for you I pluck the fatal untouched cluster.’ Then she gave me
the kiss divine”.


III

The last word of the Isaotta idyll--_sovrumano_--rendered above
‘divine,’ was an early symptom of a development of formidable
significance in the prose and poetry of d’Annunzio during the next
twenty years. The ‘Superman’ had not yet been discovered when he was a
boy, but the spirit to which _sovrumanità_ appeals had from the first
run in his blood. His passion for sensation, for strong effects, for
energy, even for ferocity and cruelty, was the concomitant of a genius
that strove to shatter obstacles, to bend others to its will, and
reshape its experience, as the opposite genius of Pascoli submissively
accepted experience, hearing in all its vicissitudes reverberations of
the mournful memories in which his soul was steeped. When d’Annunzio
accordingly, in the early nineties, discovered the work of Nietzsche,
he experienced that liberation which comes to every man who meets with
a coherent exposition of the meaning of his own blind impulses, and a
great new word for his confused and inarticulate aims. In Nietzsche he
found a mind more congenial to him perhaps than any other he had known,
more even than that of his master Carducci, but, unlike his, congenial
mainly to what was most perilous and ill-omened in himself. He loftily
admitted the German his equal, a great concession, and when Nietzsche
died, in 1900, wrote a noble dirge ‘to the memory of a destroyer,’--of
the _Barbaro enorme_ ‘who lifted up again the serene gods of Hellas on
to the vast gates of the Future.’

When d’Annunzio wrote these words the Hellenic enthusiasms, nourished
by his acute sense of beauty in a nature utterly wanting in the
Hellenic poise, had won, partly through Nietzsche’s influence, an
ascendancy over his imagination which made it natural for him to render
the Superman in Hellenic terms. The serene gods of Hellas symbolized
for him the calmness of absolute mastery, of complete conquest, all
enemies trampled under foot or flung to the eternal torments of Erebus.
This mood detached him wholly from Shelley, and Byron, and the young
Goethe. They had gloried in Prometheus, the spirit of man struggling
against supreme deity on its Olympian heights, and finally overthrowing
it; whereas d’Annunzio, like the riper Goethe, adores the secure
serenity of Olympus. ‘O Zeus, Father of Serene Day, how much fairer
than the chained and howling Iapetid seemed in thy eyes the silent
mountain and its vast buttresses fresh with invisible springs.’ And
besides Prometheus, Zeus has another enemy, Christ--the foe of beauty,
and lord of the herd of slaves with their slave-morality of pity and
submission. ‘O Zeus, he cries, I invoke thee, awaken and bring on the
Morrow! Make the fire of heaven thy ploughshare to plough the Night!
Thou only canst purify Earth from its piled-up filth.’

We are not to look in all this for even so much of definite ethical or
philosophic content as we find in Nietzsche. If Nietzsche was a poet
imagining in philosophic terms rather than a philosopher, d’Annunzio
was hardly capable of abstract thought at all. On the other hand,
Nietzsche could still less rival d’Annunzio in creative faculty, and
the series of d’Annunzian characters inspired or touched by the spirit
of Nietzschean _sovrumanità_ may be set against the richer intellectual
and spiritual substance of _Zarathustra_. No doubt this influence was
in the main disastrous for him; Nietzsche’s heady draught intoxicated
his brain with visions of colossal and ruthless power, begetting images
of supermen and superwomen magnificent in stature and equipment, in
the glory of their flame-like hair, and the crystalline beauty of
their speech, but wholly unreal and impossible. Nevertheless, there
were fortunate moments when the vision of power was constrained by a
human and moving story to work within the limits of humanity. And these
moments, though few, atoned for much splendid futility.

Moreover, his vision of power came to include, at moments, the bridling
of his own infirmities. There was always the making of a soldier in
the Abruzzan before he became one. He was capable of an asceticism
amazing to those who know only the hothouse atmosphere of his novels.
Some of his most sumptuous prose and verse was poured forth in the
naked seclusion of monastic cells, or in wild peasant houses far from
civilization; and only the most iron industry could have achieved the
enormous bulk of his work.[24] Hence he can put into the mouth of
Claudio Cantelmo, in the _Vergini_, these evidently autobiographic
words: ‘After subduing the tumults of youth, I examined whether
perchance ... my will could, by choice and exclusion, extract a new
and seemly work of its own from the elements which life had stored up
within me.’ There is a glimpse here of a finer psychological and a
deeper ethical insight than we often find in d’Annunzio, and it might
have led a man of richer spiritual capacity to a loftier poetry than he
was ever to produce.

But on the whole the clue thus hinted was not followed up, and the
tough nerve which might have nourished the powerful controlling will
of a supreme artist, often served only to sustain those enormities of
the ferocious and the grandiose which make dramas like _Gloria_ and _La
Nave_ mere examples of the pathology of genius.

We touch here the crucial point. For these extravagances were not mere
momentary aberrations. They were but the more pronounced manifestations
of fundamental deficiencies in the man, which in their turn impoverish
and dwarf the poet. D’Annunzio, in one word, is wanting in humanity;
and because of his shallow and fragmentary apprehension of the human
soul, his vision of power and beauty discharges itself in barren
spectacles of brute energy and material splendour, for which he cannot
find psychological equivalents in grandeur or loveliness of character.
Shakespeare’s huge personalities--Othello, Lear, Antony--are human in
every trait, however much they transcend our actual experience of men.
D’Annunzio tries to make violent actions and abnormal passions produce
the illusion of greatness of soul, and disguises his psychological
poverty by the sustained coruscations of his lyric speech.

In the meantime novels and poems and dramas poured forth. The prolific
later nineties saw the famous novel _Fuoco_ (1900), a picture of
Venetian splendour as gorgeous as that of Rome in _Piacère_, but
touched with the new joy in power; and the dramas _Sogno d’un Mattino
di Primavera_ (1897), _Gioconda_, and _Città Morta_ (1898). In the
last named d’Annunzio’s vision of power assumes an audacious and
original form. It is here the power of the vanished past to stretch
an invisible hand across the centuries and strike down youth and
life. The result is a tragedy that reproduces as nearly as a modern
dramatist may the horror excited in ancient spectators by the doom
of the House of Atreus. Nothing indeed could be less Greek than the
structure and persons of the play. Leonardo, a young archæologist,
is excavating in the ruins of Mycenæ. With him are his sister, Beata
Maria, and their friends Alessandro and Anna his wife, a cluster of
human flowers, full of living charm and sap, transplanted into the
‘dead city.’ But the dead city is not merely dead; it is mysteriously
fraught with the power of the vanished past to control the present and
the future. Its mouldering ruins are the arena of a struggle between
Death and Life, in which death triumphs and life receives the mortal
blow. Leonardo, obsessed with the _Oresteia_, is haunted at night by
visions of terrific blood-stained figures, and has no thoughts by day
but of penetrating the secrets of their tombs. Alessandro, full of the
joy of life, seeks to detach him from these preoccupations. ‘I hoped
he would have come with me and gathered flowers with those fingers
of his which know nothing but stones and dust,’ and he is drawn to
Beata Maria, herself the very genius of glowing youth, ‘the one live
thing, says her friend Anna, in this place, where all is dead and burnt
... it is incredible what force of life is in her ... if she were
not, none of us could live here, we should all die of thirst.’ ‘When
Beata Maria speaks, he who hears forgets his pain, and believes that
life can still be sweet.’ She herself is devoted to the brother whose
passion seems to estrange him so far from what she loves. She shares
his Hellenic ardour, and innocently recites Cassandra’s prophecy in the
_Agamemnon_, with Cassandra’s wreath on her golden locks, of ‘an evil,
intolerable to the nearest kin, and irreparable, preparing in this
house.’ Anna, struck with mysterious fear, stops her; but the ominous
words have been spoken, and foreshadow a real doom. Beata Maria, the
unconscious Cassandra, will suffer Cassandra’s fate. The indestructible
virus of the dead city will poison the glory of youth. The incestuous
passion which desolated the House of Atreus is not extinguished in the
crumbling dust of their tombs. A horrible infection seizes Leonardo. He
struggles vainly with an impure passion for his sister. In only one way
can his love be purified, a way grievous for him, and yet more grievous
for her. She must die; and he slays her among the tombs of the ‘dead
city’ which has thus again laid upon the living its mortal hand.

The conclusion outrages our feelings, and betrays d’Annunzio’s glaring
deficiency in sympathetic power. Whatever pity we feel for Leonardo
in his miserable plight is dispelled by his cynical purchase of the
purity of his own emotions at the price of his innocent sister’s death.
Here, as in other cases, d’Annunzio’s fundamental want of passion,
and the strain of hard egoism which pervaded the movements of his
brilliant mind, gravely injured his attempts in tragic poetry. Death
was doubtless the only solution; but it must be another death--one that
would have saved the ‘purity’ of Leonardo’s emotions by ending them
altogether. Leonardo, however, has the ruthless energy of the Superman,
and the innocent life must be crushed that he may rise.


IV

Yet d’Annunzio’s vision of power, his appetency of enormous and
abnormal things, was now to assume a new form. The grandiose dream of
the Superman expands into the dream of the Super-nation. The discovery
of Rome had taught him something of the pride of citizenship, and more
than the nascent pride of nationality. But in the last year of the
century he underwent an experience which turned this nascent emotion
into a passion, and the poet himself into a prophet and preacher in
its service, an ‘announcer’ as he was fond of saying, of the cause and
creed of _Italianità_.

He had as yet seen nothing of Europe beyond the Alps. In 1900 he made
an extensive tour, but in no tourist spirit. An Italian had no need
to go abroad for beauty of nature or of art, and d’Annunzio’s keen
eyes were turned in quite other directions--to the great Transalpine
nations with their vast resources and their high ambitions; and he
measured their several capacities for success in the conflict which
he, among the first, saw to be impending. He was impressed by the
threatening growth of Germany, and by ‘the extraordinary development
of race-energy’ in England. Everywhere the force of nationality was
more vehement than ever before. ‘All the world is stretched like a bow,
and never was the saying of Heracleitos more significant: “The bow is
called Bios (life), and its work is death.”’

But where was Italy in this universal tension of the national spirit?
Where was _her_ strung bow? How was _she_ preparing to hold her own
with the great progressive nations of the North? D’Annunzio flung down
these challenging questions in his eloquent pamphlet, _Della coscienza
nazionale_ (1900). To the foreign observer the trouble with Italy did
not seem to be defective ambition. She had rather appeared to take
her new rôle as a great Power too seriously, blundering into rash
adventures abroad when she ought to have been spreading the elements of
civilization at home. But d’Annunzio had seen the race for empire in
the North, and his call to Italy was the call of an imperialist; a call
for unity of purpose, for concentration of national wealth and strength
in the interest of a greater Italy, mistress of the Adriatic, if not of
the Mediterranean. It was the beginning of a new phase of d’Annunzio’s
career. He was henceforth a public man, whose voice, the most resonant
and eloquent then to be heard in Italy, counted, as poetic voices so
rarely do, in the direction of public affairs. He entered Parliament, a
proclaimed disciple in policy of Crispi, the Italian Bismarck.

How did these enlarged ideals affect d’Annunzio’s work in poetry?
In part, as has been hinted, disastrously. The enlarged ideals lent
themselves with perverse ease, in a mind already obsessed with
_sovrumanità_, to a mere megalomania, a rage for bigness, only more
mischievous in practice, and nowise better as literature, because it
was conveyed in terms of navies and transmarine dominions. He had
already in his fine series of _Odi Navali_ (1893) fanned to some
purpose the naval ambitions of his country. He now sounded a loftier
note, suited to the vaster horizons of an Italian Mediterranean. These,
for instance, are some stanzas from the opening hymn or prayer prefixed
to his colossal naval tragedy, _La Nave_ (1908):

    O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
    The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
    It is this living People by Thy grace
        Who on the Sea
    Shall magnify Thy name, who on the Sea
    Shall glorify Thy name, who on the Sea
    With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
        At the altar-prow.
    Of all Earth’s oceans make Our Sea, O Thou!
        Amen!

The fourth book of the _Laudi_ is a lyric celebration in this spirit,
of the Tripoli adventure ‘beyond the sea.’ But megalomania was happily
not the whole result. The older and deeper instincts planted or
quickened in d’Annunzio by his earlier experience--the feeling for
race and for historic continuity--coalesced with the new and vehement
passion of nationality, communicating to it, in moments of vision,
something of their human intimacy, and undergoing in their turn an
answering enlargement of range and scope. If his _Italianità_ was
something more significant than a resonant cry for more ships and
territory, it was because it drew warmth and insight from the home
sentiment for his Abruzzan province deep-rooted in the poet’s heart;
while the Abruzzan province, in its turn, was seen in the larger and
grander setting of the Italian people and the Roman race, but without
the distorting nimbus of megalomaniac dreams. This fortunate harmony
found expression chiefly in certain poems of the years shortly before
and after the beginning of the new century, the golden period of
d’Annunzio’s production. To these years belong his two most notable
attempts to give to Italy a tragic poetry built upon Italian history.

In the material for tragic poetry no country was richer, but it had
been left to the genius of foreign dramatists to give world-wide fame
to the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice Cenci, and Torquato Tasso.
Alfieri, the greatest of Italian tragic poets, had devoted his austere
art almost solely to classical subjects; and his _Don Garzia_ and
_Congiura de’ Pazzi_, with Niccolini’s _Arnaldo da Brescia_, Monti’s
_Galeotto Manfredi_, and Manzoni’s _Conte di Carmagnola_ and _Adelchi_
stood almost alone, as remarkable Italian tragedies on Italian themes.
In the story of Francesca of Rimini, d’Annunzio found to his hand a
native tragic subject of the first order, not yet touched by a tragic
poet of genius, Italian or other. That it had been made his own by
the supreme poet of Italy hardly disturbed d’Annunzio, deeply as he
revered the poet whose words, in the fine phrase of his Dante Ode,
clothed Italy like the splendour of day. He was not going to challenge
comparison with Dante’s marmoreal brevity. And the poet of Pescara had
some title to regard this story of the adjacent Adriatic sea-board
of Rimini and Ravenna, as his by right. But the story itself has
also exerted its moderating control upon the natural prodigiosity of
his invention, so that in his Francescan tragedy it is possible to
recognize a general conformity to traditional technique.

It is even possible that Shakespeare’s handling of his Italian tragedy
may have afforded a hint. The ruin of Romeo and Juliet results from the
feud of the rival houses. The ruin of d’Annunzio’s Francesca and Paolo
is similarly rooted ultimately in the feud of Guelf and Ghibelline. Her
father, a great Guelf captain, has sold her to the lord of Ravenna, as
the price of support against the Ghibellines. But when her hand is thus
plighted, she has already seen his brother Paolo, with his feminine
beauty and luxuriant locks, pass under her window, and the seed of
their passion is sown. Francesca has grown up ‘a flower in an iron
soil,’ and love throughout is set in a frame of war. But she would be
no d’Annunzian heroine if she did not respond to the call of life and
light. When about to leave Rimini on her marriage she replies to the
pleading of her devoted young sister who cannot live without her, ‘I am
going, sweet life, where thou canst not come, to a deep and solitary
place, where a great fire burns without fuel.’ Fire is d’Annunzio’s
haunting symbol for terrible and splendid things, a symbol, too, for
the strange union of cruelty and beauty in his own mind and art, and
it does not here forecast only the Inferno flames in which she will
move with Paolo so lightly before the wind. In the palace at Ravenna
we see her among her ladies, chafing at her dull seclusion, while the
Ghibelline siege rages without. A Florentine merchant displays his
gorgeous wares before them, a feast of scarlet and gold. Presently
Francesca has climbed to the tower where her husband’s brothers are
on guard. Bolts and arrows crash against the walls or through the
loophole. A cauldron of Greek fire stands ready for use. Francesca, to
the horror of the soldiers, fires it, and breaks into wild ecstasy at
the ‘deadly beauty’ of this ‘swift and terrible life.’ A moment later a
bolt pierces the curls of Paolo. She thinks he is wounded, and clasps
his head. In that embrace he stammers the first word of love. ‘They
have not hit me, but your hands have touched me, and have undone the
soul within my heart!...’ _Francesca_: ‘Lost! Thou art lost!’ Thus,
again, Francesca’s fate, like Juliet’s, is provoked by the irrelevant
feud of parties without. But presently the same irrelevant feud thrusts
the lovers apart. Paolo is sent as General of the Guelf forces to
Florence. Francesca in his absence reads the Lancelot romance with her
ladies. But Paolo, unable to endure his exile, posts back to Ravenna,
and rushes to her chamber. The romance of Lancelot lies open on the
lectern. The place where the reading stopped is marked; it is where
Galeotto is urging Lancelot’s suit upon Ginevra. They bend over the
book together. The following dialogue replaces Dante’s single pregnant
line:

  _Pa._ Let us read a page, Francesca!

  _Fr._ Look at that swarm of swallows, making a shadow
        On the bright water!

  _Pa._         Let us read, Francesca.

  _Fr._ And that sail that is glowing like fire!

  _Pa._ (_reading_).     ‘Assuredly,
        Lady,’ says Galeotto, ‘he does not dare,
        Nor will he ask ye anything of love,
        Being afraid, but I ask in his name, and if
        I did not ask, you ought to seek it, seeing
        You could in no wise win a richer treasure.’
        And she says--
        (_drawing Francesca gently by the hand_)
                  Now do you read what she says,
        Be you Ginevra.

  _Fr._ (_reading_). And she says: ‘Well I know it, and I will do
        What you command. And Galeotto said:
        Grammercy, lady; I beg that you will give him
        Your love....’
            (_she stops._)

  _Pa._           Read further!

  _Fr._               No, I cannot see
        The words.

  _Pa._           Read: ‘Certainly ...

  _Fr._                Certainly,’ she says,
        ‘I give it him, but so that he be mine
        And I utterly his, and all ill things
        Made good’ ... Paolo, enough.

  _Pa._ (_reading with a hoarse and tremulous voice_).
        ‘Lady, he says, much thanks; now in my presence
        Kiss him, for earnest of true love’--You, you!
        What says she now? What now?
          (_Their pale faces bend over the book, so that their cheeks
           almost touch._)

  _Fr._ (_reading_).  She says: ‘Why should
        He beg it of me? I desire it more
        Than you....’

  _Pa._ (_continuing with stifled voice_). ‘They draw apart.
              And the Queen sees
        The Knight dare go no further. Then she clasps him
        About the chin, and with a long kiss kisses
        His mouth....’
          (_He kisses her in the same way. When their mouths separate
            Francesca reels, and falls back on the cushions._)
                      Francesca!

  _Fr._ (_with hardly audible voice_).
                      No, Paolo!

The sequel is too long drawn out, and is marred by the duplicity of
all the persons concerned. Malatestino’s sleuth-hound cunning brings
about the husband’s vengeance, but his strategy is animated only by
ferocious hatred of the lovers, not by any care for justice. By his
contrivance the rough soldier, who has never suspected his own wrongs,
returns prematurely from the march, and thunders at the lovers’ chamber
door: ‘Open, Francesca!’ The wretched Paolo tries to escape through
a trapdoor, but is dragged up by the hair to be slain. But Francesca
rushes to clasp him, and the husband’s sword pierces her. _Francesca da
Rimini_, though a brilliant drama, with innumerable beauties of detail,
misses, like the _Dead City_, the quality of great tragedy. Of the
principal characters Francesca alone excites a fitful sympathy, while
Paolo’s effeminacy provokes a contempt which diminishes our compassion
for the woman whose love he has won. These coward ‘heroes’ who leave
their mistresses in mortal peril, or slay their sisters, or see their
brides borne to execution in their place, seem to haunt the egoist
imagination of the poet, to the grievous hurt of his work. Yet when all
is said, _Francesca_ is one of the most arresting, though dramatically
by no means one of the best, plays produced in Europe during the first
decade of the century.

If the _Francesca_ owed much to the stimulus and the control of a
great historic and literary tradition, the rarer beauty of _La Figlia
di Iorio_ (1904) was nourished on the old intimate passion for his
Abruzzan race and home. In language the more moving, because in
d’Annunzio so seldom heard, he dedicated ‘To the land of Abruzzi, to
my Mother, to my Sisters, to my Brother in exile, to my Father in his
grave, to all my Dead, to all my People between the Mountains and the
Sea, this song of the ancient blood.’ It betokened, indeed, no mere
recurrence to the scenes and memories of his childhood, but a recovery,
through them, of the more primitive sensibilities and sympathies which
the complexities of an ultra modern culture had obscured or submerged.
The shepherds and peasants of this ‘pastoral tragedy’ live and move in
an atmosphere fanatically tense with the customs and beliefs of their
catholicized paganism; but no believing poet ever drew the ritual of
rustic unreason with more delicate sympathy, or rendered its wild
prayers and incantations in more expressive and beautiful song. For
the poetry is not exotic or imposed; like the songs of peasants in
opera, it is found and elicited. The young shepherd, Aligi, is drawn
into a kind of mystic relationship to Mila di Codra, a witch-maiden
dreaded and abhorred over the whole countryside. But a bride has been
chosen for him by his family, and the scene opens on the morning after
their nominal bridal. Aligi’s three sisters are seen kneeling before
the old carved oak chest, choosing her bridal robes, and vying with
each other in joyous morning carols. A band of scarlet wool is drawn
across the open door, a crook and a distaff lean against it, and by
the doorpost hangs a waxen cross as a charm against evil spells. Aligi
looks on in dreamy distraction, his thoughts far away. The women of
the neighbouring farms come in procession bearing gifts of corn
in baskets on their heads. An unknown girl follows in their train.
Presently angry cries are heard in the distance. The reapers are in
pursuit of Mila, whose spells have spoilt their harvest; they have
seen her enter the house, and now they clamour at the door for her
surrender. The frightened women tremble, but Mila has crouched down
on the sacred hearth, whence it would be sacrilege to remove her, and
Ornella, the youngest of the sisters, who alone secretly pities Mila,
draws the bolts. The storm of menace grows louder, till Aligi, roused
from his dreamy absorption by the taunts of the women, raises his hand
to strike the suppliant on the hearth. Immediately the horror of his
sacrilege seizes him, he implores her pardon on his knees, and thrusts
his guilty hand into the flame. Then he hangs the cross above the door
and releases the bolts. The reapers rush in, but seeing the cross, draw
back in dismay, baring their heads. Aligi has saved his ‘sister in
Christ;’ but his guilt is not effaced.

In the second Act, Aligi and Mila are living together, as brother and
sister, in a mountain cavern. He would fain go with his flocks to Rome
to seek dissolution of his marriage; but she knows that happiness is
not for her, and she will not hurt him with her passionate love. But
in his home they know only that the witch-maiden has decoyed the son
away from his mother and his virgin bride; Ornella, the compassionate
sister, is thrust out of doors, and now the father, who had returned
home only after the reapers had gone, arrives at the mountain cavern
in Aligi’s absence, and peremptorily summons Mila. She holds him
defiantly at bay. He is about to seize her, when Aligi appears on the
threshold. In the great scene which follows the Roman authority of the
Abruzzan father over the son overpowers for the moment even the lover’s
devotion. Not softened by Aligi’s humble submission, Làzaro binds him,
flogs him savagely, and turns upon Mila, now wholly in his power.
At the moment when he has seized her Aligi breaks free, rushes upon
his father, and kills him. The third act opens with the mourning for
Làzaro, in long-drawn lyric dirges. Then harsher and fiercer notes are
heard, and Aligi, deeply penitent, appears black-robed and bound, borne
by the angry mob to bid farewell to his mother before being led to the
parricide’s death. ‘To call you mother is no more permitted me, for my
mouth is of hell, the mouth that sucked your milk, and learnt from you
holy prayers in the fear of God. Why have I harmed you so sorely? I
would fain say, but I will be silent. O most helpless of all women who
have suckled a son, who have sung him to sleep in the cradle and at the
breast, O do not lift this black veil to see the face of the trembling
sinner....’ The crowd tries to comfort her in its rough way, and the
mother gives her son the bowl of drugged wine. Suddenly, confused
cries are heard in the rear, and Mila breaks her way impetuously
through the throng. ‘Mother, sisters, bride of Aligi, just people,
justice of God, I am Mila di Codra. I am guilty. Give me hearing!’
They call for silence, and Mila declares that Aligi is innocent, and
she the murderer. Aligi protests: ‘Before God thou liest.’ But the
crowd eagerly turns its fury upon the dreaded sorceress who owns her
guilt, and the cry goes up: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Aligi
protests again, but with growing faintness, as the deadening potion
masters and confuses his brain; till at length, when the bonds have
been transferred from his limbs to Mila’s, he lifts up his hands
to curse her. At this felon stroke her spirit breaks down. With a
piercing shriek she cries: ‘Aligi, Aligi, not thou, thou canst not,
thou must not!’ She is hurried away to the stake, only Ornella crying
aloud: ‘Mila, Mila, Sister in Jesus, Paradise is for thee,’ while Mila
herself, now full of the d’Annunzian exultation in glorious ruin, goes
to her death crying: ‘Beautiful Flame, Beautiful Flame!’

A brief résumé such as this inevitably brings into undue emphasis
the melodramatic elements of the plot. Yet it is the most human and
natural, as it is the most beautiful, of d’Annunzio’s dramas. For the
strangest things that happen in it are no mere projections of the
poet’s inspired ferocity or eroticism, as so often elsewhere, but are
grounded in the real psychology of a primitive countryside. We see its
fear, love, hatred, now mysteriously mastered by superstitious awe, now
breaking rebelliously from its control, now wrought by its mystic power
to else inexplicable excesses.


V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So, O Rome, our Rome, in its time

           *       *       *       *       *

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

           *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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



V

IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?



SUMMARY

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



V

IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?


‘VIEW of the World’ is a clumsy phrase for an idea which itself has
for most of us an unattractive flavour of pedantry. This latter
impression is hardly removed by a knowledge of the part which, under
the neater and more expressive, term _Weltanschauung_, it has played
in German literary study. _Weltanschauung_ is the indispensable final
chapter without which no German biography, the confidential disclosure
without which no German friendship, is complete. A _Weltanschauung_ or
‘World-view,’ in its full scope, comprehends ideas about life of quite
distinct categories; it touches metaphysics and science, ethics and
æsthetics; it offers an answer to Faust’s question ‘what it is that at
bottom holds the world together,’ but also to the practical questions,
what is the end of action and how we ought to act.

Historically, we know, the answers to these questions occur, in great
part, as successive steps in continuous or closely-connected processes
of thought. But between these continuous processes yawn gulfs which no
argument can bridge. From Bacon through Hobbes to Locke we can trace
something like a connected development. But between Hobbes and his
contemporary Boehme there is a cleavage due not to bad reasoning on
either side, but to a radical difference in the kind of experience from
which the reasoning in the two cases set out. And the history of belief
indicates that there are at least two types of elemental experience
which thus generate ideas about the world, and to which two great
classes of World-view in essence correspond. These may be distinguished
as the _religious_ and the _philosophical_. In the first, thought is
dominated by the consciousness of a power or powers distinct from man,
controlling his fate, protecting his country or his tribe, determining
his moral code, his scheme of values, and his expectations after death.
From the crudest fetishism and animism to the loftiest theism, a living
relation to such a Power is the root fact from which the religious
World-view takes its origin and derives its character.

On the other hand, we find a vast and complex body of conceptions of
the world which do not originate in intercourse with a divine Power, or
in the fear or hope which such a power may inspire, but in the effort
to give a finally and universally valid account of experience.

Naturally, neither these nor any other type of World-view, if such
there be, are mutually exclusive in substance and content. Religion
may reach the conclusions of philosophy, and philosophy those of
religion, each by a path strictly its own. Historically, the two
attitudes to life have intimately interacted; and if the religious type
has on the whole shown less power of resistance to the penetration
of ideas of the opposed type, on the other hand modern philosophy,
in particular, has often built upon, and not seldom with, ideas
first begotten not by speculative curiosity, but by the rapture or
the agony of God-intoxicated or demon-haunted souls. The eternal war
of Ormuzd and Ahriman still echoes in the Hebraic intensity of our
distinction between good and evil; and the visionary ecstasies of the
mystics were of account in the evolution of philosophic pantheism.
And, similarly, the edifices of theology have borrowed fortifying
buttresses or indispensable pillars from ideas evolved by scientific
reason or a purely secular interpretation of good. Aristotle, applied
and interpreted by Aquinas, became one of the masters, not only of
those who know, but of those who believe. Nevertheless, the two types
have, on a comprehensive survey, stood distinctly apart; and their
ramifications appear to dominate between them the entire field of
belief and speculative thought.

Is it possible, nevertheless, to distinguish a third type of
‘World-view’ analogous to these? In other words, is there any
third kind of experience, distinct from that of either religion or
philosophy, yet involving an apprehension of reality comparable in
originality, and possibly in importance, with theirs? The present essay
is based upon the view that such an experience is given in and by
poetry.[30]


I

For the specific experience which comes to a poet through poetry,
however it may be interwoven with religious or philosophic ideas, has a
radically different psychological origin and character. It is equally
intense and absorbing, but it is not determined by conscious relation
to an outer power, and it seeks to express rather than to explain. It
is neither transfigured fear or hope, nor yet a logical process. In
the making of a poem there may be even a conscious detachment from
actuality, and the poet may float free in a dream world, apparently
without thought of the world which he inhabits. The poetic may well
be thought to differ from the religious or the philosophic types of
experience less in inducing any specific way of contemplating reality
than in liberating us from the necessity or desire to contemplate it at
all.

Yet it is certain that the poet’s detachment, even in his most ethereal
dream-flights, from reality, is only apparent. In all the spontaneous
and seemingly arbitrary movement of his mind among its crowding ideal
shapes, reality through his stored-up experience is at work, quietly
weaving a thousand subtle filiations between the poem and the life
of men at large. _Othello_ is much farther from ‘actuality’ than the
poor novel on which its story was based; but it is penetrated with the
vision of life, of which Cinthio’s tale caught so feeble and fugitive
a glimpse. What distinguishes poetic from religious or philosophic
apprehension is not that it turns away from reality, but that it lies
open to and in eager watch for reality at doors and windows which
with them are barred or blind. The poet’s soul resides, so to speak,
in his senses, in his emotions, in his imagination, as well as in
his conscious intelligence; and we may provisionally describe poetic
apprehension as an intense state of consciousness in which all these
are vitally concerned. In so far as a particular outlook upon the world
is founded upon a particular type of experience, a poet’s World-view
will be radically affected by his senses, emotions, imagination. The
flower which Wordsworth contemplated on the bank or by the lake, and
that other which Tennyson with his more curious scrutiny plucked from
the crannied wall, could stir these poets’ intellect and heart to the
depths; and their apprehension, as poets, of God and man, of Nature, of
Duty, would have been different without it.

But in any case, it will be said, even if we grant that poetic
experience tends to induce some way of regarding reality, it cannot
possibly induce any constant or definable way, if elements of mind so
infinitely diverse, so individual, as emotion and imagination, are
vitally concerned in the process. That energizing of mind released
from the control of actuality, which we call imagination, that free
following out of trains of suggestion called up by emotion, takes the
colour, at every step, of the individual make of the poet’s nature,
and the individual cast of his experience. In so far as a World-view
is strictly poetic in origin, the conclusion might seem hard to resist
that there may be as many poetic World-views as there are poets. And it
is true that the individual quality of the poet will always cleave to
whatever is strictly poetic in his thinking. But even so, it may be
possible to determine typical directions in which poetic apprehension
tends to engender or to sway belief, and to modify ideas imbibed in
education or accepted on authority.

Thus, it may be provisionally laid down that a view of the World
reached through poetic experience will tend to accentuate those
aspects of Man and Nature, and those ways of regarding them, which
offer most scope, analogy, or sanction, to this type of experience.
Where the senses play a vital part, and are yet vitally implicated
with passion and ideas, there will be little disposition to doctrines
which either brand the senses as evil or illusory, or erect them into a
sufficing faith. The logical intellect, its processes and conclusions,
will receive a respectful but distant salute, while the irrational
elements of life are accepted as its needful ingredients or even as
a supreme source of its worth. Love, which tramples on reason, and,
in the great words of à Kempis, warmly glows like a flame beyond all
measure, may be called in some sense the natural religion of the poet.
The mysterious love of man and woman, in particular, irrelevant to
most of the problems of philosophy, and regarded by religion chiefly
as a dangerous disturbing force, is one of the perennial springs of
poetry, and one of the shaping analogies of poetic thought. And the
same impassioned insight which gives significance to this love exalts
also all those other energies of the soul which carry men out of and
beyond themselves. Poetry is naturally heroic; it has presided over the
cult of the hero, as religion and philosophy over those of the saint
and the sage; it has rewarded him with enchanting secular Paradises,
Elysian fields, Isles of the Blest, and Temples of Fame. Poetry is
disposed to magnify human nature; the transition from Aeschylus, who
painted men greater than they were, to Euripides, who drew them after
life, is also a decline in the intrinsic temper of poetry, if in that
alone. And because of its bent to think greatly of man, it makes for
the assertion, in the great sense, of _freedom_--of man’s freedom to
be himself. Neither the shibboleths of political freedom nor those
of free thought have always, it is true, found response among poets.
Their part has rather been to keep alive in mankind the temper which
treats outward obstacles not as the soul’s constraints, but as its
opportunities; the faith that iron bars do not make a cage, and that
you may be bounded in a nutshell, and yet not only count yourself, but
be, a king of infinite space.

In the interpretation of Nature, poetic experience works creatively
or selectively on similar lines. To those wonderful deposits of the
imagination of the past, the myths of extinct faiths, from which
theology and philosophy have long withdrawn their sanction, or on which
they have laid their taboo, the poets have habitually been very tender.
And when they felt as poets, the image drawn from a myth has never had
merely decorative value, or served merely as a ‘poetic synonym’ for the
exact term. It expressed something in the poet’s vision not otherwise
to be put into words. If the glorious anthropomorphism of Olympus and
Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life everywhere pulsing
through Nature, and perpetually reborn in ‘Man and beast and earth and
air and sea,’ cries to the poet with a voice which will not be put by;
and the symbols by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they
read personality too definitely into the play of that elusive mystery,
yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned formulas of
science.

Hence many great philosophic ideas about the universe which, without
ascribing life or mind to it, might seem projected from our inner,
rather than gathered from our outer, experience, have powerfully
appealed to poets. The antithesis of the One and the Many, which
fascinated and fertilized every phase of Greek thought, had one of its
roots in the acute Greek feeling for continuity through change, which
is equally manifest in the Parthenon and in the Pindaric Ode, and to
a less degree in all art and poetry wherever the sense of rhythm is
present at all. ‘When we feel the poetic thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘is
it not that we find sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear?’ That
felicitously expresses the genius of Hellenic art in particular; but
it also marks off the specifically poetic apprehension of Oneness as a
‘something deeply interfused’ in and through the living multiplicity
of the world, alike from the mystic vision of a One whose splendour
dissolves the reality of things, and from the vision of Peter Bell, for
whom nothing but ‘things’ exists. Yet even this pregnant Oneness has
commonly gathered, in the poetic conception of the universe, the higher
and richer attribute of soul-life. It has become a living and working
Nature vitally implicated in every organ and filament, or Mind diffused
through every limb, or Love, or Beauty, or Power, woven through the
woof of it, or the splendour of God irradiating it through and through.


When we turn, as is proposed in what follows, from these general
considerations to watch the actual operation of poetic apprehension in
concrete examples, we naturally encounter some serious difficulties.
Poetic apprehension may be as distinct and definable as we will, but
it can rarely be caught acting _in vacuo_. Poets are men; they are
usually citizens; they are often penetrated with some form of religious
or philosophical faith. It is inevitable, in such cases, that their
strictly poetic experience should be coloured or even overridden by
ideas proper to their possibly more habitual or more deeply established
persuasions. In poets like Goethe and Shelley, deeply concerned with
the issues of life outside poetry, philosophic and poetic impulses and
data may well seem inextricably mingled. Even Blake and Whitman, who
perhaps come nearer than any other moderns to shaping out a poetic
World-view for themselves, evidently worked, as poets, under a deep
bias of revolutionary dogma, which made them unjust to some aspects
of poetry itself. And with poet-exponents of great theological or
philosophical systems, like Lucretius or Dante, it may well appear idle
to seek to catch the moment when the runnel of poetry carved out a
watercourse of its own, instead of falling into and moving along with
the great tide of Epicurean or Catholic thought. Yet we attach some
meaning to our words when we distinguish periods in which the poetic
element in a poet’s nature was more potent than at others. When we
say, for instance, that in Shelley the poetic apprehension after 1812
worked itself progressively free from an alien philosophy; or that in
Wordsworth, from about the same date, it became progressively overlaid
by a theology almost equally alien; or that in Dante’s _Convito_,
the poet of the _Vita Nuova_, who will finally recover dominance in
the _Commedia_, has yielded much ground to the scholastic thinker.
Distinctions so clearly felt and sharply drawn cannot be groundless.
What is here proposed is to examine whether any typical character or
direction can be discovered in the modifications which the data of
religious or philosophical beliefs and ideals have undergone in certain
commanding poet natures. In that case we might possess some of the
material for answering the question I have been bold enough to suggest
in the title of this paper.


II

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


III

The power of personality and the glory of love: these have emerged from
our discussion thus far as the things in life whose appeal to poetic
intelligence was most potent in modifying the substance or changing
the perspective of a World-view derived from religion. We have now to
examine, in a fashion unavoidably even more fragmentary and summary,
the reaction of another series of poetic minds upon the more complex
and abstruse World-views of _philosophy_.

It is necessary for the purpose to adopt a rough grouping of
philosophic systems, and I take the following division into three
fundamental types, based with qualifications upon one proposed by
Wilhelm Dilthey in the essay already referred to.

To the first belong the naturalistic schools, from Democritus to Hobbes
and the Encyclopedists, deriving their philosophical conceptions
directly or indirectly from an analysis of the physical world, and
commonly disdaining or ignoring phenomena not to be so explained. To
the second type of thinkers the objective world is still the absorbing
subject of contemplation; but it is approached not from the side
of physics, but from the side of self-conscious mind; it is felt,
not as material for causal investigation, but as responsive to the
human spirit, now as living Nature, now as immanent God, now as a
progressively evolving Absolute. Here, with various qualifications, we
may class Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel. In the third
type, the focus of interest and the determining source of philosophic
ideas is the self-conscious mind itself. It feels profoundly its own
energy and power of self-determination; and it regards the objective
world not as deeply at one with it, responsive to its feeling,
accessible to its thought, but rather as a threatening power against
which it must vindicate its spiritual freedom and build its secure
spiritual home. In the philosophies of this type, personality--which
the first type ignored and the second reduced to an organ of a world
process--became the fundamental condition of our experience, as with
Kant and Fichte, or a transcendent personal God shaping the universe to
his mind, as with the Plato of the _Timæus_.

If we now consider these three types in relation to our problem,
it seems evident that the second and the third are naturally more
congenial to poetry than the first. Yet we know that one of the
greatest of Roman poets made it the work of his life to expound the
atomic Naturalism of Epicurus to an unreceptive Roman world.

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.


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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_,



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