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diff --git a/old/69468-0.txt b/old/69468-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9c88699..0000000 --- a/old/69468-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5356 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Shakespeare's treatment of love and -marriage and other essays, by Charles Harold Herford - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Shakespeare's treatment of love and marriage and other essays - -Author: Charles Harold Herford - -Release Date: December 4, 2022 [eBook #69468] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Tim Lindell, Turgut Dincer, Eleni Christofaki and the - Online Distributed Proofreading Team at - https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images - generously made available by The Internet Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE'S TREATMENT OF -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 - - - - -THE MERMAID SERIES - -THE BEST PLAYS OF THE OLD DRAMATISTS. _Literal Reproductions of the Old -Text_ - -WITH PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE - -Boards, =3/6= net; Cloth, =5/-= net each - -THOMAS DEKKER, JOHN DRYDEN, BEN JONSON, THOMAS OTWAY, Etc. - -_Send for a copy of the Prospectus of the Mermaid Series_ - - -T. FISHER UNWIN LTD. LONDON - - - - - 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. - - - _Printed in Great Britain by_ - UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED - WOKING AND LONDON - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] The characteristics of this norm are well set forth by Wetz, -_Shakespeare_, ch. v. - -[2] The conflict of friendship with love was in general treated in -England with a livelier sense of the power of love than in Italy. -Boccaccio’s Palemone and Arcita, rivals for the hand of Emilia, -courteously debate their claims (_Teseide_, V, 36, 39 f.); Chaucer -makes them fight in grim earnest. Spenser in the spirit of the -Renascence makes friendship an ideal virtue, but exposes it to more -legitimate trials, as where the Squire of low degree repels the -proffered favours of his friend’s bride. (_Faerie Queen_, iv. 9, 2.) - -[3] ‘Perjured, murderous, ... savage, extreme ... rude, cruel, not to -trust.’ - -[4] Goethe probably never heard of a less fortunate adventure in that -kind by his English contemporary, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the _Loves of -the Plants_, which had then been famous in England for ten years; a -poem which suffices to show that it is possible to exploit in the -description of natural processes all the figures and personifications -of poetry, and yet to go egregiously wrong. - -[5] To Knebel, 14 February 1821. - -[6] I. 140 f. - -[7] I. 922, 1. - -[8] This and subsequent passages are freely compressed here and there. - -[9] IV. 575. - -[10] II. 29. - -[11] 18 July 1818. - -[12] 13 July 1818, to Tom Keats. - -[13] April 1818, to Taylor. - -[14] Cf. his amusing outburst at Teignmouth, in the previous March, at -the effeminacy he ascribed to the men of Devon. ‘Had England been a -large Devonshire, we should not have won the battle of Waterloo. There -are knotted oaks, there are lusty rivulets, there are meadows such as -are not elsewhere--there are valleys of feminine climate--but there are -no thews and sinews,’ etc. March 13th, to Bailey. - -[15] Lord Houghton, quoted by Buxton Forman, _Letters_, LXI. - -[16] It is not irrelevant, however, in this context, to recall that -Dante’s account of his Dream-journey has been thought to give evidence -of actual climbing experience. The Purgatory mountain was provided with -a good path; but the Inferno, with its precipitous walls, was less -easily negotiated. He had, however, the services of a most competent -Guide! Cf. H. F. Tozer, _Mod. Quart._, April 1899. - -[17] Cf. ‘vaulted with fire,’ _Paradise Lost_, i. 298, with ‘the -vaulted rocks,’ _Hyperion_, ii. 348. - -[18] Cf. the sonnet written at the top. - -[19] Referred to also by Professor de Sélincourt (note _ad loc._), -though he ascribes it (somewhat sternly) to the ‘vulgarity of Hunt.’ - -[20] Much of this paragraph is repeated in substance from an article, -by the writer, on ‘The Higher Mind of Italy,’ in the _Manchester -Guardian_, 15 March 1920. - -[21] _Manchester Guardian_, 12 September 1918. - -[22] Dedication of _Il Poema Paradisiaco_ (1892). - -[23] _Laus Vitæ_, 232 f. - -[24] Gargiulo, _Gabriele d’Annunzio_ (1912), to whose account of the -poet’s _sovrumanità_ the present essay is much indebted. - -[25] _Beatitudine._ - -[26] _Il Fanciullo._ - -[27] _Elettra: Città del Silenzio._ - -[28] _Elettra: A uno dei Mille._ - -[29] _Fast._ iv. 291 f. - -[30] The distinction of a religious, philosophic, and poetic -World-view is based upon W. Dilthey: _Das Wesen der Philosophie: -Weltanschauungalehre_ (Hinneberg, _Kultur der Gegenwart_, I. vi). - -[31] Wilamowitz, _Oresteia_, p. 47. - -[32] _Purg._ xxiv. 52. 4. - -[33] The case of Trajan, who for his justice was said to have been -saved by the prayers of Gregory, is not quite parallel, since there was -here a theological tradition in his favour. But at least Dante seizes -on and emphasizes the tradition, and not merely ‘saves’ Trajan, but -makes him the comrade of the glorious just kings in Jupiter (_Par._ xx. -44 f.). - -[34] The second type I take to be represented, with obvious -differences, for Dante by the ‘philosophical’ love of Guido Guinicelli, -the ‘father of love poets and my own’ (_Purg._ xxvi. 97); there is no -evidence that he knew anything of this part of Plato; in any case, of -course, this love is for him excited only by woman. The _amore_ of -Empedocles is mentioned in _Inf._ xii. 42; Empedocles himself, as well -as Plato, is in Limbo (_Inf._ iv. 138). - -[35] _De Vulg. Eloq._ ii. 2. - -[36] _Purg._ xviii. 36. - -[37] _Canz._ xix. - -[38] _Canz._ i. - -[39] _Parlement of Fowles_, 1 f. - -[40] A. E., _Imaginations and Reveries_, p. 151. - -[41] _Ginestra_, p. 120. - -[42] _Il Copernico._ - -[43] _Sopra un basso relievo_, etc. - -[44] _Sopra un ritratto di una bella donna_, etc. - -[45] _Aspasia._ - -[46] _Storia dell genere umano._ - -[47] _Amore e Morte._ - -[48] _Consalvo._ - -[49] _Amore e Morte._ - -[50] ‘Che paradiso è quello,’ etc. - -[51] - ‘Ma di natura ... - Divina sei,’ etc. - -[52] _Ginestra._ - -[53] _Il Pensiero Dom._: ‘Quasi intender non posso,’ etc. - -[54] _Il Pensiero Dom._: ‘Giammai d’allor,’ etc. - -[55] _Bruto Minore._ - -[56] _Pens. Dom._ ‘Quanto più torno,’ etc. - -[57] _Alla sua Donna._ - -[58] The essay on _The Poetry of Lucretius_ in the present volume -supplements the argument of the present essay at this point, and he is -merely referred to here. - -[59] His famous illustration, quoted by Plato, is the harmony of the -lyre brought about by the balance of opposite forces in the strings. -Plut. _Is. et Osir._ (quot. Ritter and Preller, p. 17), Plat. _Symp._, -p. 187. - -[60] _A Commentary on In Memoriam_, Introd. - -[61] _Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre_, iv. 9. - -[62] A. E., _The Renewal of Youth_. - -[63] The lines from _The Borderers_ are in fact, of course, earlier -than those from _Peele Castle_. - -[64] _English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth_ -(Manchester University Press). - - - - -Corrections - -The first line indicates the original, the second the correction: - -p. 28 - - A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love as extravagant - magnanimity - A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love is extravagant - magnanimity - -p. 57 - - He was not, like Pope in the _Essay of Man_, - He was not, like Pope in the _Essay on Man_, - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE'S TREATMENT OF LOVE -AND MARRIAGE AND OTHER ESSAYS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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