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.