Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays

by C. H. Herford

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]