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.