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.