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]