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Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

by George Santayana · English · Gutenberg #35612 · 307,452 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

Author: George Santayana


        
Release date: March 18, 2011 [eBook #35612]
                Most recently updated: October 16, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS: LUCRETIUS, DANTE, AND GOETHE ***




THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS

LUCRETIUS, DANTE, AND GOETHE

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA


PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY


HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

VOLUME I


CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

1910




PREFACE


The present volume is composed, with a few additions, of six lectures
read at Columbia University in February, 1910, and repeated in April of
the same year, at the University of Wisconsin. These lectures, in turn,
were based on a regular course which I had been giving for some time at
Harvard College. Though produced under such learned auspices, my book
can make no great claims to learning. It contains the impressions of an
amateur, the appreciations of an ordinary reader, concerning three great
writers, two of whom at least might furnish matter enough for the
studies of a lifetime, and actually have academies, libraries, and
university chairs especially consecrated to their memory. I am no
specialist in the study of Lucretius; I am not a Dante scholar nor a
Goethe scholar. I can report no facts and propose no hypotheses about
these men which are not at hand in their familiar works, or in
well-known commentaries upon them. My excuse for writing about them,
notwithstanding, is merely the human excuse which every new poet has for
writing about the spring. They have attracted me; they have moved me to
reflection; they have revealed to me certain aspects of nature and of
philosophy which I am prompted by mere sincerity to express, if anybody
seems interested or willing to listen. What I can offer the benevolent
reader, therefore, is no learned investigation. It is only a piece of
literary criticism, together with a first broad lesson in the history of
philosophy--and, perhaps, in philosophy itself.

                                                     G.S.


_Harvard College_

_June, 1910_




CONTENTS


I

INTRODUCTION

_Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe sum up the chief phases of European
philosophy,--naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism--Ideal
relation between philosophy and poetry._

II

LUCRETIUS

_Development of Greek cosmology--Democritus--Epicurean moral
sentiment--Changes inspired by it in the system of
Democritus--Accidental alliance of materialism with
hedonism--Imaginative value of naturalism: The Lucretian Venus, or the
propitious movement in nature--The Lucretian Mars, or the destructive
movement--Preponderant melancholy, and the reason for it--Materiality
of the soul--The fear of death and the fear of life--Lucretius a true
poet of nature--Comparison with Shelley and Wordsworth--Things he might
have added consistently: Indefeasible worth of his insight and
sentiment._

III

DANTE

_Character of Platonism--Its cosmology a parable--Combination of this
with Hebraic philosophy of history--Theory of the Papacy and the Empire
adopted by Dante--His judgement on Florence--Dante as a lyric
poet--Beatrice the woman, the symbol, and the reality--Love, magic, and
symbolism constitutive principles of Dante’s universe--Idea of the
Divine Comedy--The scheme of virtues and vices--Retributive theory of
rewards and punishments--Esoteric view of this, which makes even
punishment intrinsic to the sins--Examples--Dantesque cosmography--The
genius of the poet--His universal scope--His triumphant execution of the
Comedy--His defects, in spite of which he remains the type of a supreme
poet._

IV

GOETHE’S FAUST _Page_

_The romantic spirit--The ideals of the Renaissance--Expression of both
in the legendary Faust--Marlowe’s version--Tendency to vindicate
Faust--Contrast with Calderon’s “Wonder-working Magician”--The original
Faust of Goethe,--universal ambition and eternal dissatisfaction
--Modifications--The series of experiments in living--The story of
Gretchen fitted in--Goethe’s naturalistic theory of life and
rejuvenation: Helen--The classic manner and the judgement on
classicism--Faust’s last ambition--The conflict over his soul and his
ascent to heaven symbolical--Moral of the whole._

V

CONCLUSION

_Comparison of the three poets--Their relative rank--Ideal of a
philosophic or comprehensive poet--Untried possibilities of art._




I


INTRODUCTION


The sole advantage in possessing great works of literature lies in what
they can help us to become. In themselves, as feats performed by their
authors, they would have forfeited none of their truth or greatness if
they had perished before our day. We can neither take away nor add to
their past value or inherent dignity. It is only they, in so far as they
are appropriate food and not poison for us, that can add to the present
value and dignity of our minds. Foreign classics have to be retranslated
and reinterpreted for each generation, to render their old naturalness
in a natural way, and keep their perennial humanity living and capable
of assimilation. Even native classics have to be reapprehended by every
reader. It is this continual digestion of the substance supplied by the
past that alone renders the insights of the past still potent in the
present and for the future. Living criticism, genuine appreciation, is
the interest we draw from year to year on the unrecoverable capital of
human genius.

Regarded from this point of view, as substances to be digested, the
poetic remains of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (though it is his _Faust_
only that I shall speak of) afford rather a varied feast. In their
doctrine and genius they may seem to be too much opposed to be at all
convergent or combinable in their wisdom. Some, who know and care for
one, perhaps, of these poets, may be disposed to doubt whether they have
anything vital to learn from the other two. Yet it is as a pupil--I hope
a discriminating pupil--of each in turn that I mean to speak; and I
venture to maintain that in what makes them great they are compatible;
that without any vagueness or doubleness in one’s criterion of taste one
may admire enthusiastically the poetry of each in turn; and that one may
accept the essential philosophy, the positive intuition, of each,
without lack of definition or system in one’s own thinking.

Indeed, the diversity of these three poets passes, if I may use the
Hegelian dialect, into a unity of a higher kind. Each is typical of an
age. Taken together they sum up all European philosophy. Lucretius
adopts the most radical and the most correct of those cosmological
systems which the genius of early Greece had devised. He sees the world
to be one great edifice, one great machine, all its parts reacting upon
one another, and growing out of one another in obedience to a general
pervasive process or life. His poem describes the nature, that is, the
birth and composition, of all things. It shows how they are compounded
out of elements, and how these elements, which he thinks are atoms in
perpetual motion, are being constantly redistributed, so that old
things perish and new things arise. Into this view of the world he fits
a view of human life as it ought to be led under such conditions. His
materialism is completed by an aspiration towards freedom and quietness
of spirit. Allowed to look once upon the wonderful spectacle, which is
to repeat itself in the world for ever, we should look and admire, for
to-morrow we die; we should eat, drink, and be merry, but moderately and
with much art, lest we die miserably, and die to-day.

This is one complete system of philosophy,--materialism in natural
science, humanism in ethics. Such was the gist of all Greek philosophy
before Socrates, of that philosophy which was truly Hellenic and
corresponded with the movement which produced Greek manners, Greek
government, and Greek art--a movement towards simplicity, autonomy, and
reasonableness in everything, from dress to religion. Such is the gist
also of what may be called the philosophy of the Renaissance, the
reassertion of science and liberty in the modern world, by Bacon, by
Spinoza, by the whole contemporary school that looks to science for its
view of the facts, and to the happiness of men on earth for its ideal.
This system is called naturalism; and of this Lucretius is the
unrivalled poet.

Skip a thousand years and more, and a contrasting spectacle is before
us. All minds, all institutions, are dominated by a religion that
represents the soul as a pilgrim upon earth; the world is fallen and
subject to the devil; pain and poverty are considered normal, happiness
impossible here and to be hoped for only in a future life, provided the
snares and pleasures of the present life have not entrapped us. Meantime
a sort of Jacob’s ladder stretches from the stone on which the wayfarer
lays his head into the heaven he hopes for; and the angels he sees
ascending and descending upon it are beautiful stories, wonderful
theories, and comforting rites. Through these he partakes, even on
earth, of what will be his heavenly existence. He partly understands his
destiny; his own history and that of the world are transfigured before
him and, without ceasing to be sad, become beautiful. The raptures of a
perfect conformity with the will of God, and of union with Him, overtake
him in his prayers. This is supernaturalism, a system represented in
Christendom chiefly by the Catholic Church, but adopted also by the
later pagans, and widespread in Asia from remote antiquity down to the
present time. Little as the momentary temper of Europe and America may
now incline to such a view, it is always possible for the individual, or
for the race, to return to it. Its sources are in the solitude of the
spirit and in the disparity, or the opposition, between what the spirit
feels it is fitted to do, and what, in this world, it is condemned to
waste itself upon. The unmatched poet of this supernaturalism is Dante.

Skip again some five hundred years, and there is another change of
scene. The Teutonic races that had previously conquered Europe have
begun to dominate and understand themselves. They have become
Protestants, or protesters against the Roman world. An infinite fountain
of life seems to be unlocked within their bosom. They turn successively
to the Bible, to learning, to patriotism, to industry, for new objects
to love and fresh worlds to conquer; but they have too much vitality, or
too little maturity, to rest in any of these things. A demon drives them
on; and this demon, divine and immortal in its apparent waywardness, is
their inmost self. It is their insatiable will, their radical courage.
Nay, though this be a hard saying to the uninitiated, their will is the
creator of all those objects by which it is sometimes amused, and
sometimes baffled, but never tamed. Their will summons all opportunities
and dangers out of nothing to feed its appetite for action; and in that
ideal function lies their sole reality. Once attained, things are
transcended. Like the episodes of a spent dream, they are to be smiled
at and forgotten; the spirit that feigned and discarded them remains
always strong and undefiled; it aches for new conquests over new
fictions. This is romanticism. It is an attitude often found in English
poetry, and characteristic of German philosophy. It was adopted by
Emerson and ought to be sympathetic to Americans; for it expresses the
self-trust of world-building youth, and mystical faith in will and
action. The greatest monument to this romanticism is Goethe’s _Faust._

Can it be an accident that the most adequate and probably the most
lasting exposition of these three schools of philosophy should have been
made by poets? Are poets, at heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is
philosophy, in the end, nothing but poetry? Let us consider the
situation.

If we think of philosophy as an investigation into truth, or as
reasoning upon truths supposed to be discovered, there is nothing in
philosophy akin to poetry. There is nothing poetic about the works of
Epicurus, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or Kant; they are leafless forests. In
Lucretius and in Dante themselves we find passages where nothing is
poetical except the metre, or some incidental ornament. In such passages
the form of poetry is thrown over the substance of prose, as Lucretius
himself confesses where he says: “As when physicians would contrive to
administer loathsome wormwood to little boys they first moisten the rim
of the cup round about with sweet and golden honey, that the children’s,
unsuspecting youth may be beguiled--to the lips, but no further--while
they drink down the bitter potion, by deception not betrayed, but
rather by that stratagem made whole and restored;... so I have willed to
set forth our doctrine before thee in sweet-sounding Pierian song, and
to smear it, as it were, with the Muses’ honey.”[1]

But poetry cannot be spread upon things like butter; it must play upon
them like light, and be the medium through which we see them. Lucretius
does himself an injustice. If his philosophy had been wormwood to him,
he could not have said, as he does just before this passage: “Like a
sharp blow of the thyrsus, a great hope of praise vibrates through my
heart and fills my breast with tender love of the Muses, whereby now,
instinct with flowering fancy, I traverse pathless haunts of the
Pierides, by no man’s foot trodden before. It is joy to reach undefiled
fountains and quaff; it is joy to gather fresh flowers and weave a
matchless crown for my head of those bays with which never yet the Muses
veiled the brow of any man; first, in that I teach sublime truths and
come to free the soul from the strangling knots of superstition; then,
in that on so dark a theme I pour forth so clear a song, suffusing all
with poetic beauty,... if haply by such means I might keep thy mind
intent upon my verses, until thine eye fathoms the whole structure of
nature, and the fixed form that makes it beautiful.”[2]

Here, I think, we have the solution to our doubt. The reasonings and
investigations of philosophy are arduous, and if poetry is to be linked
with them, it can be artificially only, and with a bad grace. But the
vision of philosophy is sublime. The order it reveals in the world is
something beautiful, tragic, sympathetic to the mind, and just what
every poet, on a small or on a large scale, is always trying to catch.

In philosophy itself investigation and reasoning are only preparatory
and servile parts, means to an end. They terminate in insight, or what
in the noblest sense of the word may be called _theory, θεωρία_,--a
steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth. Such
contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach it who has not enlarged
his mind and tamed his heart. A philosopher who attains it is, for the
moment, a poet; and a poet who turns his practised and passionate
imagination on the order of all things, or on anything in the light of
the whole, is for that moment a philosopher.

Nevertheless, even if we grant that the philosopher, in his best
moments, is a poet, we may suspect that the poet has his worst moments
when he tries to be a philosopher, or rather, when he succeeds in being
one. Philosophy is something reasoned and heavy; poetry something
winged, flashing, inspired. Take almost any longish poem, and the parts
of it are better than the whole. A poet is able to put together a few
words, a cadence or two, a single interesting image. He renders in that
way some moment of comparatively high tension, of comparatively keen
sentiment. But at the next moment the tension is relaxed, the sentiment
has faded, and what succeeds is usually incongruous with what went
before, or at least inferior. The thought drifts away from what it had
started to be. It is lost in the sands of versification. As man is now
constituted, to be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Shall we say, then,--and I now broach an idea by which I set some
store,--that poetry is essentially short-winded, that what is poetic is
necessarily intermittent in the writings of poets, that only the
fleeting moment, the mood, the episode, can be rapturously felt, or
rapturously rendered, while life as a whole, history, character, and
destiny are objects unfit for imagination to dwell on, and repellent to
poetic art? I cannot think so. If it be a fact, as it often is, that we
find little things pleasing and great things arid and formless, and if
we are better poets in a line than in an epic, that is simply due to
lack of faculty on our part, lack of imagination and memory, and above
all to lack of discipline.

This might be shown, I think, by psychological analysis, if we cared to
rely on something so abstract and so debatable. For in what does the
short-winded poet himself excel the common unimaginative person who
talks or who stares? Is it that he thinks even less? Rather, I suppose,
in that he feels more; in that his moment of intuition, though fleeting,
has a vision, a scope, a symbolic something about it that renders it
deep and expressive. Intensity, even momentary intensity, if it can be
expressed at all, comports fullness and suggestion compressed into that
intense moment. Yes, everything that comes to us at all must come to us
at some time or other. It is always the fleeting moment in which we
live. To this fleeting moment the philosopher, as well as the poet, is
actually confined. Each must enrich it with his endless vistas, vistas
necessarily focused, if they are to be disclosed at all, in the eye of
the observer, here and now. What makes the difference between a moment
of poetic insight and a vulgar moment is that the passions of the poetic
moment have more perspective. Even the short-winded poet selects his
words so that they have a magic momentum in them which carries us, we
know not how, to mountain-tops of intuition. Is not the poetic quality
of phrases and images due to their concentrating and liberating the
confused promptings left in us by a long experience? When we feel the
poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in
the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a
jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

If a short passage is poetical because it is pregnant with suggestion of
a few things, which stretches our attention and makes us rapt and
serious, how much more poetical ought a vision to be which was pregnant
with all we care for? Focus a little experience, give some scope and
depth to your feeling, and it grows imaginative; give it more scope and
more depth, focus all experience within it, make it a philosopher’s
vision of the world, and it will grow imaginative in a superlative
degree, and be supremely poetical. The difficulty, after having the
experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to hold
and suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such
verbal expression that others maybe able to decipher it, and to be
stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of
their memories.

Poetry, then, is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental, but,
on the contrary, for being comprehensive and having range. If too much
matter renders it heavy, that is the fault of the poet’s weak intellect,
not of the outstretched world. A quicker eye, a more synthetic
imagination, might grasp a larger subject with the same ease. The
picture that would render this larger subject would not be flatter and
feebler for its extent, but, on the contrary, deeper and stronger, since
it would possess as much unity as the little one with greater volume. As
in a supreme dramatic crisis all our life seems to be focused in the
present, and used in colouring our consciousness and shaping our
decisions, so for each philosophic poet the whole world of man is
gathered together; and he is never so much a poet as when, in a single
cry, he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe, and
salutes his ultimate destiny. It is the acme of life to understand life.
The height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.

But enough of psychological analysis and of reasoning in the void.
Three historical illustrations will prove my point more clearly and more
conclusively.


       *       *       *       *       *

[1] Lucretius, I. 936-47:

       Veluti pueris absinthia tetra medentes
     Cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circura
     Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore,
     Ut puerorum aetas improvida ludificetur
     Labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum
     Absinthi laticem, deceptaque non capiatur,
     Sed potius tali pacto recreata valescat:
     Sic ego nunc ... volui tibi suaviloquenti
     Carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram,
     Et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle.


[2] Lucretius, i. 922-34, 948-50:

                                              Acri
     Percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor
     Et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem
     Musarum, quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti
     Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
     Trita solo: iuvat integros accedere fontes,
     Atque haurire; iuvatque novos decerpere flores,
     Insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam,
     Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae.
     Primum, quod magnis doceo de rebus, et artis
     Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo:
     Deinde, quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
     Carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore....
     Si tibi forte animum tali ratione tenere
     Versibus in nostris possem, dum perspicis omnem
     Naturam rerum, qua constet compta figura.





II


LUCRETIUS



There is perhaps no important poem the antecedents of which can be
traced so exhaustively as can those of the work of Lucretius, _De Rerum
Natura_. These antecedents, however, do not lie in the poet himself. If
they did, we should not be able to trace them, since we know nothing, or
next to nothing, about Lucretius the man. In a chronicon, compiled by
St. Jerome largely out of Suetonius, in which miscellaneous events are
noted which occurred in each successive year, we read for the year 94
B.C.: “Titus Lucretius, poet, is born. After a love-philtre had turned
him mad, and he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, several
books which Cicero revised, he killed himself by his own hand in the
forty-fourth year of his age.”

The love-philtre in this report sounds apocryphal; and the story of the
madness and suicide attributes too edifying an end to an atheist and
Epicurean not to be suspected. If anything lends colour to the story it
is a certain consonance which we may feel between its tragic incidents
and the genius of the poet as revealed in his work, where we find a
strange scorn of love, a strange vehemence, and a high melancholy. It is
by no means incredible that the author of such a poem should have been
at some time the slave of a pathological passion, that his vehemence
and inspiration should have passed into mania, and that he should have
taken his own life. But the untrustworthy authority of St. Jerome cannot
assure us whether what he repeats is a tradition founded on fact or an
ingenious fiction.

Our ignorance of the life of Lucretius is not, I think, much to be
regretted. His work preserves that part of him which he himself would
have wished to preserve. Perfect conviction ignores itself, proclaiming
the public truth. To reach this no doubt requires a peculiar genius
which is called intelligence; for intelligence is quickness in seeing
things as they are. But where intelligence is attained, the rest of a
man, like the scaffolding to a finished building, becomes irrelevant. We
do not wish it to intercept our view of the solid structure, which alone
was intended by the artist--if he was building for others, and was not a
coxcomb. It is his intellectual vision that the naturalist in particular
wishes to hand down to posterity, not the shabby incidents that preceded
that vision in his own person. These incidents, even if they were by
chance interesting, could not be repeated in us; but the vision into
which the thinker poured his faculties, and to which he devoted his
vigils, is communicable to us also, and may become a part of ourselves.

Since Lucretius is thus identical for us with his poem, and is lost in
his philosophy, the antecedents of Lucretius are simply the stages by
which his conception of nature first shaped itself in the human mind. To
retrace these stages is easy; some of them are only too familiar; yet
the very triteness of the subject may blind us to the grandeur and
audacity of the intellectual feat involved. A naturalistic conception of
things is a great work of imagination,--greater, I think, than any
dramatic or moral mythology: it is a conception fit to inspire great
poetry, and in the end, perhaps, it will prove the only conception able
to inspire it.

We are told of the old Xenophanes that he looked up into the round
heaven and cried, “The All is One.” What is logically a truism may often
be, imaginatively, a great discovery, because no one before may have
thought of the obvious analogy which the truism registers. So, in this
case, the unity of all things is logically an evident, if barren, truth;
for the most disparate and unrelated worlds would still be a multitude,
and so an aggregate, and so, in some sense, a unity. Yet it was a great
imaginative feat to cast the eye deliberately round the entire horizon,
and to draw mentally the sum of all reality, discovering that reality
makes such a sum, and may be called one; as any stone or animal, though
composed of many parts, is yet called one in common parlance. It was
doubtless some prehistoric man of genius, long before Xenophanes, who
first applied in this way to all things together that notion of unity
and wholeness which everybody had gained by observation of things
singly, and who first ventured to speak of “the world.” To do so is to
set the problem for all natural philosophy, and in a certain measure to
anticipate the solution of that problem; for it is to ask how things
hang together, and to assume that they do hang together in one way or
another.

To cry “The All is One,” and to perceive that all things are in one
landscape and form a system by their juxtaposition, is the rude
beginning of wisdom in natural philosophy. But it is easy to go farther,
and to see that things form a unity in a far deeper and more mysterious
way. One of the first things, for instance, that impresses the poet, the
man of feeling and reflection, is that these objects that people the
world all pass away, and that the place there-of knows them no more.
Yet, when they vanish, nothingness does not succeed; other things arise
in their stead. Nature remains always young and whole in spite of death
at work everywhere; and what takes the place of what continually
disappears is often remarkably like it in character. Universal
instability is not incompatible with a great monotony in things; so that
while Heraclitus lamented that everything was in flux, Ecclesiastes, who
was also entirely convinced of that truth, could lament that there was
nothing new under the sun.

This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once
sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought,
perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon, and which
was the chief inspiration of Lucretius. It is that all we observe about
us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent
substance. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in
inward quality, is constantly redistributed; in its redistribution it
forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find
constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things are dust, and to
dust they return; a dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to
fall perpetually into new, and doubtless beautiful, forms. This notion
of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world; it
persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common
ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.

The spectacle of inexorable change, the triumph of time, or whatever we
may call it, has always been a favourite theme for lyric and tragic
poetry, and for religious meditation. To perceive universal mutation, to
feel the vanity of life, has always been the beginning of seriousness.
It is the condition for any beautiful, measured, or tender philosophy.
Prior to that, everything is barbarous, both in morals and in poetry;
for until then mankind has not learned to renounce anything, has not
outgrown the instinctive egotism and optimism of the young animal, and
has not removed the centre of its being, or of its faith, from the will
to the imagination.

To discover substance, then, is a great step in the life of reason, even
if substance be conceived quite negatively as a term that serves merely
to mark, by contrast, the unsubstantiality, the vanity, of all
particular moments and things. That is the way in which Indian poetry
and philosophy conceived substance. But the step taken by Greek physics,
and by the poetry of Lucretius, passes beyond. Lucretius and the Greeks,
in observing universal mutation and the vanity of life, conceived behind
appearance a great intelligible process, an evolution in nature. The
reality became interesting, as well as the illusion. Physics became
scientific, which had previously been merely spectacular.

Here was a much richer theme for the poet and philosopher, who was
launched upon the discovery of the ground and secret causes of this gay
or melancholy flux. The understanding that enabled him to discover these
causes did for the European what no Indian mystic, what no despiser of
understanding anywhere, suffers himself to do; namely, to dominate,
foretell, and transform this changing show with a virile, practical
intelligence. The man who discovers the secret springs of appearances
opens to contemplation a second positive world, the workshop and busy
depths of nature, where a prodigious mechanism is continually supporting
our life, and making ready for it from afar by the most exquisite
adjustments. The march of this mechanism, while it produces life and
often fosters it, yet as often makes it difficult and condemns it to
extinction. This truth, which the conception of natural substance first
makes intelligible, justifies the elegies which the poets of illusion
and disillusion have always written upon human things. It is a truth
with a melancholy side; but being a truth, it satisfies and exalts the
rational mind, that craves truth as truth, whether it be sad or
comforting, and wishes to pursue a possible, not an impossible,
happiness.

So far, Greek science had made out that the world was one, that there
was a substance, that this was a physical substance, distributed and
moving in space. It was matter. The question remained, What is the
precise nature of matter, and how does it produce the appearances we
observe? The only answer that concerns us here is that given by
Lucretius; an answer he accepted from Epicurus, his master in
everything, who in turn had accepted it from Democritus. Now Democritus
had made a notable advance over the systems that selected one obvious
substance, like water, or collected all the obvious substances, as
Anaxagoras had done, and tried to make the world out of them.
Democritus thought that the substance of everything ought not to have
any of the qualities present in some things and absent in others; it
ought to have only the qualities present in all things. It should be
_merely_ matter. Materiality, according to him, consisted of extension,
figure, and solidity; in the thinnest ether, if we looked sharp enough,
we should find nothing but particles possessing these properties. All
other qualities of things were apparent only, and imputed to them by a
convention of the mind. The mind was a born mythologist, and projected
its feelings into their causes. Light, colour, taste, warmth, beauty,
excellence, were such imputed and conventional qualities; only space and
matter were real. But empty space was no less real than matter.
Consequently, although the atoms of matter never changed their form,
real changes could take place in nature, because their position might
change in a real space.

Unlike the useless substance of the Indians, the substance of Democritus
could offer a calculable ground for the flux of appearances; for this
substance was distributed unequally in the void, and was constantly
moving. Every appearance, however fleeting, corresponded to a precise
configuration of substance; it arose with that configuration and
perished with it. This substance, accordingly, was physical, not
metaphysical. It was no dialectical term, but a scientific anticipation,
a prophecy as to what an observer who should be properly equipped would
discover in the interior of bodies. Materialism is not a system of
metaphysics; it is a speculation in chemistry and physiology, to the
effect that, if analysis could go deep enough, it would find that all
substance was homogeneous, and that all motion was regular.

Though matter was homogeneous, the forms of the ultimate particles,
according to Democritus, were various; and sundry combinations of them
constituted the sundry objects in nature. Motion was not, as the vulgar
(and Aristotle) supposed, unnatural, and produced magically by some
moral cause; it had been eternal and was native to the atoms. On
striking, they rebounded; and the mechanical currents or vortices which
these contacts occasioned formed a multitude of stellar systems, called
worlds, with which infinite space was studded.

Mechanism as to motion, atomism as to structure, materialism as to
substance, that is the whole system of Democritus. It is as wonderful in
its insight, in its sense for the ideal demands of method and
understanding, as it is strange and audacious in its simplicity. Only
the most convinced rationalist, the boldest prophet, could embrace it
dogmatically; yet time has largely given it the proof. If Democritus
could look down upon the present state of science, he would laugh, as he
was in the habit of doing, partly at the confirmation we can furnish to
portions of his philosophy, and partly at our stupidity that cannot
guess the rest.

There are two maxims in Lucretius that suffice, even to this day, to
distinguish a thinker who is a naturalist from one who is not.
“Nothing,” he says, “arises in the body in order that we may use it, but
what arises brings forth its use.”[1] This is that discarding of final
causes on which all progress in science depends. The other maxim runs:
“One thing will grow plain when compared with another: and blind night
shall not obliterate the path for thee, before thou hast thoroughly
scanned the ultimate things of nature; so much will things throw light
on things.”[2] Nature is her own standard; and if she seems to us
unnatural, there is no hope for our minds.

The ethics of Democritus, in so far as we may judge from scanty
evidence, were merely descriptive or satirical. He was an aristocratic
observer, a scorner of fools. Nature was laughing at us all; the wise
man considered his fate and, by knowing it, raised himself in a measure
above it. All living things pursued the greatest happiness they could
see their way to; but they were marvellously short-sighted; and the
business of the philosopher was to foresee and pursue the greatest
happiness that was really possible. This, in so rough a world, was to be
found chiefly in abstention and retrenchment. If you asked for little,
it was more probable that the event would not disappoint you. It was
important not to be a fool, but it was very hard.

The system of Democritus was adopted by Epicurus, but not because
Epicurus had any keenness of scientific vision. On the contrary,
Epicurus, the Herbert Spencer of antiquity, was in his natural
philosophy an encyclopaedia of second-hand knowledge. Prolix and minute,
vague and inconsistent, he gathered his scientific miscellany with an
eye fixed not on nature, but on the exigencies of an inward faith,--a
faith accepted on moral grounds, deemed necessary to salvation, and
defended at all costs, with any available weapon. It is instructive that
materialism should have been adopted at that juncture on the same
irrelevant moral grounds on which it has usually been rejected.

Epicurus, strange as it may sound to those who have heard, with horror
or envy, of wallowing in his sty, Epicurus was a saint. The ways of the
world filled him with dismay. The Athens of his time, which some of us
would give our eyes to see, retained all its splendour amid its
political decay; but nothing there interested or pleased Epicurus.
Theatres, porches, gymnasiums, and above all the agora, reeked, to his
sense, with vanity and folly. Retired in his private garden, with a few
friends and disciples, he sought the ways of peace; he lived
abstemiously; he spoke gently; he gave alms to the poor; he preached
against wealth, against ambition, against passion. He defended free-will
because he wished to exercise it in withdrawing from the world, and in
not swimming with the current. He denied the supernatural, since belief
in it would have a disquieting influence on the mind, and render too
many things compulsory and momentous. There was no future life: the art
of living wisely must not be distorted by such wild imaginings.

All things happened in due course of nature; the gods were too remote
and too happy, secluded like good Epicureans, to meddle with earthly
things. Nothing ruffled what Wordsworth calls their “voluptuous
unconcern.” Nevertheless, it was pleasant to frequent their temples.
There, as in the spaces where they dwelt between the worlds, the gods
were silent and beautiful, and wore the human form. Their statues, when
an unhappy man gazed at them, reminded him of happiness; he was
refreshed and weaned for a moment from the senseless tumult of human
affairs. From those groves and hallowed sanctuaries the philosopher
returned to his garden strengthened in his wisdom, happier in his
isolation, more friendly and more indifferent to all the world. Thus the
life of Epicurus, as St. Jerome bears witness, was “full of herbs,
fruits, and abstinences.” There was a hush in it, as of bereavement. His
was a philosophy of the decadence, a philosophy of negation, and of
flight from the world.

Although science for its own sake could not interest so monkish a
nature, yet science might be useful in buttressing the faith, or in
removing objections to it. Epicurus therefore departed from the reserve
of Socrates, and looked for a natural philosophy that might support his
ethics. Of all the systems extant--and they were legion--he found that
of Democritus the most helpful and edifying. Better than any other it
would persuade men to renounce the madness that must be renounced and to
enjoy the pleasures that may be enjoyed. But, since it was adopted on
these external and pragmatic grounds, the system of Democritus did not
need to be adopted entire. In fact, one change at least was imperative.
The motion of the atoms must not be wholly regular and mechanical.
Chance must be admitted, that Fate might be removed. Fate was a
terrifying notion. It was spoken of by the people with superstitious
unction. Chance was something humbler, more congenial to the man in the
street. If only the atoms were allowed to deflect a little now and then
from their courses, the future might remain unpredictable, and free-will
might be saved. Therefore, Epicurus decreed that the atoms deflected,
and fantastic arguments were added to show that this intrusion of chance
would aid in the organization of nature; for the declension of the
atoms, as it is called, would explain how the original parallel downpour
of them might have yielded to vortices, and so to organized bodies. Let
us pass on.

Materialism, like any system of natural philosophy, carries with it no
commandments and no advice. It merely describes the world, including the
aspirations and consciences of mortals, and refers all to a material
ground. The materialist, being a man, will not fail to have preferences,
and even a conscience, of his own; but his precepts and policy will
express, not the logical implications of his science, but his human
instincts, as inheritance and experience may have shaped them. Any
system of ethics might accordingly coexist with materialism; for if
materialism declares certain things (like immortality) to be impossible,
it cannot declare them to be undesirable. Nevertheless, it is not likely
that a man so constituted as to embrace materialism will be so
constituted as to pursue things which he considers unattainable. There
is therefore a psychological, though no logical, bond between
materialism and a homely morality.

The materialist is primarily an observer; and he will probably be such
in ethics also; that is, he will have no ethics, except the emotion
produced upon him by the march of the world. If he is an _esprit fort_
and really disinterested, he will love life; as we all love perfect
vitality, or what strikes us as such, in gulls and porpoises. This, I
think, is the ethical sentiment psychologically consonant with a
vigorous materialism: sympathy with the movement of things, interest in
the rising wave, delight at the foam it bursts into, before it sinks
again. Nature does not distinguish the better from the worse, but the
lover of nature does. He calls better what, being analogous to his own
life, enhances his vitality and probably possesses some vitality of its
own. This is the ethical feeling of Spinoza, the greatest of modern
naturalists in philosophy; and we shall see how Lucretius, in spite of
his fidelity to the ascetic Epicurus, is carried by his poetic ecstasy
in the same direction.

But mark the crux of this union: the materialist will love the life of
nature when he loves his own life; but if he should hate his own life,
how should the life of nature please him? Now Epicurus, for the most
part, hated life. His moral system, called hedonism, recommends that
sort of pleasure which has no excitement and no risk about it. This
ideal is modest, and even chaste, but it is not vital. Epicurus was
remarkable for his mercy, his friendliness, his utter horror of war, of
sacrifice, of suffering. These are not sentiments that a genuine
naturalist would be apt to share. Pity and repentance, Spinoza said,
were vain and evil; what increased a man’s power and his joy increased
his goodness also. The naturalist will believe in a certain hardness, as
Nietzsche did; he will incline to a certain scorn, as the laughter of
Democritus was scornful. He will not count too scrupulously the cost of
what he achieves; he will be an imperialist, rapt in the joy of
achieving something. In a word, the moral hue of materialism in a
formative age, or in an aggressive mind, would be aristocratic and
imaginative; but in a decadent age, or in a soul that is renouncing
everything, it would be, as in Epicurus, humanitarian and timidly
sensual.

We have now before us the antecedents and components of Lucretius’ poem
on nature. There remains the genius of the poet himself. The greatest
thing about this genius is its power of losing itself in its object, its
impersonality. We seem to be reading not the poetry of a poet about
things, but the poetry of things themselves. That things have their
poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of
their own movement and life, is what Lucretius proves once for all to
mankind.

Of course, the poetry we see in nature is due to the emotion the
spectacle produces in us; the life of nature might be as romantic and
sublime as it chose, it would be dust and ashes to us if there were
nothing sublime and romantic in ourselves to be stirred by it to
sympathy. But our emotion may be ingenuous; it may be concerned with
what nature really is and does, has been and will do for ever. It need
not arise from a selfish preoccupation with what these immense realities
involve for our own persons or may be used to suggest to our
self-indulgent fancy. No, the poetry of nature may be discerned merely
by the power of intuition which it awakens and the understanding which
it employs. These faculties, more, I should say, than our moodiness or
stuffy dreams, draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full
vitality and music. Naturalism is a philosophy of observation, and of an
imagination that extends the observable; all the sights and sounds of
nature enter into it, and lend it their directness, pungency, and
coercive stress. At the same time, naturalism is an intellectual
philosophy; it divines substance behind appearance, continuity behind
change, law behind fortune. It therefore attaches all those sights and
sounds to a hidden background that connects and explains them. So
understood, nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as
well as sensuous variety. Before the sublimity of this insight, all
forms of the pathetic fallacy seem cheap and artificial. Mythology, that
to a childish mind is the only possible poetry, sounds like bad rhetoric
in comparison. The naturalistic poet abandons fairy land, because he has
discovered nature, history, the actual passions of man. His imagination
has reached maturity; its pleasure is to dominate, not to play.

Poetic dominion over things as they are is seen best in Shakespeare for
the ways of men, and in Lucretius for the ways of nature. Unapproachably
vivid, relentless, direct in detail, he is unflinchingly grand and
serious in his grouping of the facts. It is the truth that absorbs him
and carries him along. He wishes us to be convinced and sobered by the
fact, by the overwhelming evidence of thing after thing, raining down
upon us, all bearing witness with one voice to the nature of the world.

Suppose, however,--and it is a tenable supposition,--that Lucretius is
quite wrong in his science, and that there is no space, no substance,
and no nature. His poem would then lose its pertinence to our lives and
personal convictions; it would not lose its imaginative grandeur. We
could still conceive a world composed as he describes. Fancy what
emotions those who lived in such a world would have felt on the day when
a Democritus or a Lucretius revealed to them their actual situation. How
great the blindness or the madness dissipated, and how wonderful the
vision gained! How clear the future, how intelligible the past, how
marvellous the swarming atoms, in their unintentional, perpetual
fertility! What the sky is to our eyes on a starry night, that every
nook and cranny of nature would resemble, with here and there the
tentative smile of life playing about those constellations. Surely that
universe, for those who lived in it, would have had its poetry. It would
have been the poetry of naturalism. Lucretius, thinking he lived in such
a world, heard the music of it, and wrote it down.

And yet, when he set himself to make his poem out of the system of
Epicurus, the greatness of that task seems to have overwhelmed him. He
was to unfold for the first time, in sonorous but unwieldy Latin, the
birth and nature of all things, as Greek subtlety had discerned them. He
was to dispel superstition, to refute antagonists, to lay the sure
foundations of science and of wisdom, to summon mankind compellingly
from its cruel passions and follies to a life of simplicity and peace.
He was himself combative and distracted enough--as it is often our
troubles, more than our attainments, that determine our ideals. Yet in
heralding the advent of human happiness, and in painting that of the
gods, he was to attain his own, soaring upon the strong wings of his
hexameters into an ecstasy of contemplation and enthusiasm. When it is
so great an emotion to read these verses, what must it have been to
compose them? Yet could he succeed? Could such great things fall to his
lot? Yes, they might, if only the creative forces of nature, always
infinite and always at hand, could pass into his brain and into his
spirit; if only the seeds of corruption and madness, which were always
coursing through the air, could be blown back for a moment; and if the
din of civil conflicts could be suspended while he thought and wrote. To
a fortunate conjunction of atoms, a child owes his first being. To a
propitious season and atmosphere, a poet owes his inspiration and his
success. Conscious that his undertaking hangs upon these chance
conjunctions, Lucretius begins by invoking the powers he is about to
describe, that they may give him breath and genius enough to describe
them. And at once these powers send him a happy inspiration, perhaps a
happy reminiscence of Empedocles. There are two great perspectives which
the moralist may distinguish in the universal drift of atoms,—a creative
movement, producing what the moralist values, and a destructive
movement, abolishing the same. Lucretius knows very well that this
distinction is moral only, or as people now say, subjective. No one else
has pointed out so often and so clearly as he that nothing arises in
this world not helped to life by the death of some other thing;[3] so
that the destructive movement creates and the creative movement
destroys. Yet from the point of view of any particular life or interest,
the distinction between a creative force and a destructive force is real
and all-important. To make it is not to deny the mechanical structure of
nature, but only to show how this mechanical structure is fruitful
morally, how the outlying parts of it are friendly or hostile to me or
to you, its local and living products.

This double colouring of things is supremely interesting to the
philosopher; so much so that before his physical science has reached the
mechanical stage, he will doubtless regard the double aspect which
things present to him as a dual principle in these things themselves. So
Empedocles had spoken of Love and Strife as two forces which
respectively gathered and disrupted the elements, so as to carry on
between them the Penelope’s labour of the world, the one perpetually
weaving fresh forms of life, and the other perpetually undoing them.[4]

It needed but a slight concession to traditional rhetoric in order to
exchange these names, Love and Strife, which designated divine powers
in Empedocles, into the names of Venus and Mars, which designated the
same influences in Roman mythology. The Mars and Venus of Lucretius are
not moral forces, incompatible with the mechanism of atoms; they are
this mechanism itself, in so far as it now produces and now destroys
life, or any precious enterprise, like this of Lucretius in composing
his saving poem. Mars and Venus, linked in each other’s arms, rule the
universe together; nothing arises save by the death of some other thing.
Yet when what arises is happier in itself, or more congenial to us, than
what is destroyed, the poet says that Venus prevails, that she woos her
captive lover to suspend his unprofitable raging. At such times it is
spring on earth; the storms recede (I paraphrase the opening
passage),[5] the fields are covered with flowers, the sunshine floods
the serene sky, and all the tribes of animals feel the mighty impulse of
Venus in their hearts.

The corn ripens in the plains, and even the sea bears in safety the
fleets that traverse it.

Not least, however, of these works of Venus is the Roman people. Never
was the formative power of nature better illustrated than in the
vitality of this race, which conquered so many other races, or than in
its assimilative power, which civilized and pacified them. Legend had
made Venus the mother of Aeneas, and Aeneas the progenitor of the
Romans. Lucretius seizes on this happy accident and identifies the Venus
of fable with the true Venus, the propitious power in all nature, of
which Rome was indeed a crowning work. But the poet’s work, also, if it
is to be accomplished worthily, must look to the same propitious
movement for its happy issue and for its power to persuade. Venus must
be the patron of his art and philosophy. She must keep Memmius from the
wars, that he may read, and be weaned from frivolous ambitions; and she
must stop the tumult of constant sedition, that Lucretius may lend his
undivided mind to the precepts of Epicurus, and his whole heart to a
sublime friendship, which prompts him to devote to intense study all the
watches of the starry night, plotting the course of each invisible atom,
and mounting almost to the seat of the gods.[6]

This impersonation in the figure of Venus of whatever makes for life
would not be legitimate--it would really contradict a mechanical view of
nature--if it were not balanced by a figure representing the opposite
tendency, the no less universal tendency towards death.

The Mars of the opening passage, subdued for a moment by the
blandishments of love, is raging in all the rest of the poem in his
irrepressible fury. These are the two sides of every transmutation, that
in creating, one thing destroys another; and this transmutation being
perpetual,--nothing being durable except the void, the atoms, and their
motion,--it follows that the tendency towards death is, for any
particular thing, the final and victorious tendency. The names of Venus
and Mars, not being essential to the poet’s thought, are allowed to drop
out, and the actual processes they stand for are described nakedly; yet,
if the poem had ever been finished, and Lucretius had wished to make the
end chime with the beginning, and represent, as it were, one great
cycle of the world, it is conceivable that he might have placed at the
close a mythical passage to match that at the beginning; and we might
have seen Mars aroused from his luxurious lethargy, reasserting his
immortal nature, and rushing, firebrand in hand, from the palace of love
to spread destruction throughout the universe, till all things should
burn fiercely, and be consumed together. Yet not quite all; for the
goddess herself would remain, more divine and desirable than ever in her
averted beauty. Instinctively into her bosom the God of War would sink
again, when weary and drunk with slaughter; and a new world would arise
from the scattered atoms of the old.

These endless revolutions, taken in themselves, exactly balance; and I
am not sure that, impartially considered, it is any sadder that new
worlds should arise than that this world should always continue.
Besides, nature cannot take from us more than she has given, and it
would be captious and thankless in us to think of her as destructive
only, or destructive essentially, after the unspeculative fashion of
modern pessimists. She destroys to create, and creates to destroy, her
interest (if we may express it so) being not in particular things, nor
in their continuance, but solely in the movement that underlies them, in
the flux of substance beneath. Life, however, belongs to form, and not
to matter; or in the language of Lucretius, life is an _eventum_, a
redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, involved in the
equilibration of matter; as the throw of sixes is an _eventum,_ a
redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, occasionally involved in
shaking a dice-box. Yet, as this throw makes the acme and best possible
issue of a game of dice, so life is the acme and best possible issue of
the dance of atoms; and it is from the point of view of this _eventum_
that the whole process is viewed by us, and is judged. Not until that
happy chance has taken place, do we exist morally, or can we reflect or
judge at all. The philosopher is at the top of the wave, he is the foam
in the rolling tempest; and as the wave must have risen before he bursts
into being, all that he lives to witness is the fall of the wave. The
decadence of all he lives by is the only prospect before him; his whole
philosophy must be a prophecy of death. Of the life that may come after,
when the atoms come together again, he can imagine nothing; the life he
knows and shares, all that is life to him, is waning and almost spent.

Therefore Lucretius, who is nothing if not honest, is possessed by a
profound melancholy. Vigorous and throbbing as are his pictures of
spring, of love, of ambition, of budding culture, of intellectual
victory, they pale before the vivid strokes with which he paints the
approach of death--fatigue of the will, lassitude in pleasure,
corruption and disintegration in society, the soil exhausted, the wild
animals tamed or exterminated, poverty, pestilence, and famine at hand;
and for the individual, almost at once, the final dissipation of the
atoms of his soul, escaping from a relaxed body, to mingle and lose
themselves in the universal flow. Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing
falls back into nothing, if we consider substance; but everything comes
from nothing and falls back into nothing if we consider things--the
objects of love and of experience. Time can make no impression on the
void or on the atoms; nay, time is itself an _eventum_ created by the
motion of atoms in the void; but the triumph of time is absolute over
persons, and nations, and worlds.[7]

In treating of the soul and of immortality Lucretius is an imperfect
psychologist and an arbitrary moralist. His zeal to prove that the soul
is mortal is inspired by the wish to dispel all fear of future
punishments, and so to liberate the mind for the calm and tepid
enjoyment of this world. There is something to be gained in this
direction, undoubtedly, especially if tales about divine vengeance to
come are used to sanction irrational practices, and to prevent poor
people from improving their lot. At the same time, it is hardly fair to
assume that hell is the only prospect which immortality could possibly
open to any of us; and it is also unfair not to observe that the
punishments which religious fables threaten the dead with are, for the
most part, symbols for the actual degradation which evil-doing brings
upon the living; so that the fear of hell is not more deterrent or
repressive than experience of life would be if it were clearly brought
before the mind.

There is another element in this polemic against immortality which,
while highly interesting and characteristic of a decadent age, betrays a
very one-sided and, at bottom, untenable ideal. This element is the fear
of life. Epicurus had been a pure and tender moralist, but
pusillanimous. He was so afraid of hurting and of being hurt, so afraid
of running risks or tempting fortune, that he wished to prove that human
life was a brief business, not subject to any great transformations, nor
capable of any great achievements. He taught accordingly that the atoms
had produced already all the animals they could produce, for though
infinite in number the atoms were of few kinds. Consequently the
possible sorts of being were finite and soon exhausted; this world,
though on the eve of destruction, was of recent date. The worlds around
it, or to be produced in future, could not afford anything essentially
different. All the suns were much alike, and there was nothing new under
them. We need not, then, fear the world; it is an explored and domestic
scene,--a home, a little garden, six feet of earth for a man to stretch
in. If people rage and make a great noise, it is not because there is
much to win, or much to fear, but because people are mad. Let me not be
mad, thought Epicurus; let me be reasonable, cultivating sentiments
appropriate to a mortal who inhabits a world morally comfortable and
small, and physically poor in its infinite monotony. The well-known
lines of Fitzgerald echo this sentiment perfectly:

     _A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,_
     _A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou_
         _Beside me singing in the Wilderness--_
     _Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!_

But what if the shadow of incalculable possibilities should fall across
this sunny retreat? What if after death we should awake in a world to
which the atomic philosophy might not in the least apply? Observe that
this suggestion is not in the least opposed to any of the arguments by
which science might prove the atomic theory to be correct. All that
Epicurus taught about the universe now before us might be perfectly true
of it; but what if to-morrow a new universe should have taken its
place? The suggestion is doubtless gratuitous, and no busy man will be
much troubled by it; yet when the heart is empty it fills itself with
such attenuated dreams. The muffled pleasures of the wise man, as
Epicurus conceived him, were really a provocation to supernaturalism.
They left a great void; and before long supernaturalism--we shall see it
in Dante--actually rushed in to quicken the pulses of life with fresh
hopes and illusions, or at least (what may seem better than nothing)
with terrors and fanatical zeal. With such tendencies already afoot as
the myths and dogmas of Plato had betrayed, it was imperative for
Epicurus to banish anxiously all thought of what might follow death. To
this end are all his arguments about the material nature of the soul and
her incapacity to survive the body.

To say that the soul is material has a strange and barbarous sound to
modern ears. We live after Descartes, who taught the world that the
essence of the soul was consciousness; and to call consciousness
material would be to talk of the blackness of white. But ancient usage
gave the word soul a rather different meaning. The essence of the soul
was not so much to be conscious as to govern the formation of the body,
to warm, move, and guide it. And if we think of the soul exclusively in
this light, it will not seem a paradox, it may even seem a truism, to
say that the soul must be material. For how are we to conceive that
preexisting consciousness should govern the formation of the body, move,
warm, or guide it? A spirit capable of such a miracle would in any case
not be human, but altogether divine. The soul that Lucretius calls
material should not, then, be identified with consciousness, but with
the ground of consciousness, which is at the same time the cause of life
in the body. This he conceives to be a swarm of very small and volatile
atoms, a sort of ether, resident in all living seeds, breathed in
abundantly during life and breathed out at death.

Even if this theory were accepted, however, it would not prove the point
which Lucretius has chiefly at heart, namely, that an after-life is
impossible. The atoms of the soul are indestructible, like all atoms;
and if consciousness were attached to the fortunes of a small group of
them, or of one only (as Leibniz afterwards taught), consciousness would
continue to exist after these atoms had escaped from the body and were
shooting through new fields of space. Indeed, they might be the more
aroused by that adventure, as a bee might find the sky or the garden
more exciting than the hive. All that Lucretius urges about the
divisibility of the soul, its diffused bodily seat, and the perils it
would meet outside fails to remove the ominous possibility that troubles
him.

To convince us that we perish at death he has to rely on vulgar
experience and inherent probability: what changes is not indestructible;
what begins, ends; mental growth, health, sanity, accompany the fortunes
of the body as a whole (not demonstrably those of the soul-atoms); the
passions are relevant to bodily life and to an earthly situation; we
should not be ourselves under a different mask or in a new setting; we
remember no previous existence if we had one, and so, in a future
existence, we should not remember this. These reflections are
impressive, and they are enforced by Lucretius with his usual vividness
and smack of reality. Nothing is proved scientifically by such a
deliverance, yet it is good philosophy and good poetry; it brings much
experience together and passes a lofty judgment upon it. The artist has
his eye on the model; he is painting death to the life.

If these considerations succeed in banishing the dread of an after-life,
there remains the distress which many feel at the idea of extinction;
and if we have ceased to fear death, like Hamlet, for the dreams that
may come after it, we may still fear death instinctively, like a stuck
pig. Against this instinctive horror of dying Lucretius has many brave
arguments. Fools, he says to us, why do you fear what never can touch
you? While you still live, death is absent; and when you are dead, you
are so dead that you cannot know you are dead, nor regret it. You will
be as much at ease as before you were born. Or is what troubles you the
childish fear of being cold in the earth, or feeling its weight stifling
you? But you will not be there; the atoms of your soul--themselves
unconscious--will be dancing in some sunbeam far away, and you yourself
will be nowhere; you will absolutely not exist. Death is by definition a
state that excludes experience. If you fear it, you fear a word.

To all this, perhaps, Memmius, or some other recalcitrant reader, might
retort that what he shrank from was not the metaphysical state of being
dead, but the very real agony of dying. Dying is something ghastly, as
being born is something ridiculous; and, even if no pain were involved
in quitting or entering this world, we might still say what Dante’s
Francesca says of it: _Il modo ancor m’offende_,--“I shudder at the way
of it.” Lucretius, for his part, makes no attempt to show that
everything is as it should be; and if our way of coming into this life
is ignoble, and our way of leaving it pitiful, that is no fault of his
nor of his philosophy. If the fear of death were merely the fear of
dying, it would be better dealt with by medicine than by argument. There
is, or there might be, an art of dying well, of dying painlessly,
willingly, and in season,--as in those noble partings which Attic
gravestones depict,--especially if we were allowed, as Lucretius would
allow us, to choose our own time.

But the radical fear of death, I venture to think, is something quite
different. It is the love of life. Epicurus, who feared life, seems to
have missed here the primordial and colossal force he was fighting
against. Had he perceived that force, he would have been obliged to meet
it in a more radical way, by an enveloping movement, as it were, and an
attack from the rear. The love of life is not something rational, or
founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and
spontaneous. It is that Venus Genetrix which covers the earth with its
flora and fauna. It teaches every animal to seek its food and its mate,
and to protect its offspring; as also to resist or fly from all injury
to the body, and most of all from threatened death. It is the original
impulse by which good is discriminated from evil, and hope from fear.

Nothing could be more futile, therefore, than to marshal arguments
against that fear of death which is merely another name for the energy
of life, or the tendency to self-preservation. Arguments involve
premises, and these premises, in the given case, express some particular
form of the love of life; whence it is impossible to conclude that death
is in no degree evil and not at all to be feared. For what is most
dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility
that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is
dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its
various undertakings. Such a present will cannot be argued away, but it
may be weakened by contradictions arising within it, by the irony of
experience, or by ascetic discipline. To introduce ascetic discipline,
to bring out the irony of experience, to expose the self-contradictions
of the will, would be the true means of mitigating the love of life; and
if the love of life were extinguished, the fear of death, like smoke
rising from that fire, would have vanished also.

Indeed, the force of the great passage against the fear of death, at the
end of the third book of Lucretius, comes chiefly from the picture it
draws of the madness of life. His philosophy deprecates covetousness,
ambition, love, and religion; it takes a long step towards the surrender
of life, by surrendering all in life that is ardent, on the ground that
it is painful in the end and ignominious. To escape from it all is a
great deliverance. And since genius must be ardent about something,
Lucretius pours out his enthusiasm on Epicurus, who brought this
deliverance and was the saviour of mankind. Yet this was only a
beginning of salvation, and the same principles carried further would
have delivered us from the Epicurean life and what it retained that was
Greek and naturalistic: science, friendship, and the healthy pleasures
of the body. Had it renounced these things also, Epicureanism would have
become altogether ascetic, a thorough system of mortification, or the
pursuit of death. To those who sincerely pursue death, death is no evil,
but the highest good. No need in that case of elaborate arguments to
prove that death should not be feared, because it is nothing; for in
spite of being nothing--or rather because it is nothing--death can be
loved by a fatigued and disillusioned spirit, just as in spite of being
nothing--or rather because it is nothing--it must be hated and feared by
every vigorous animal.

One more point, and I have done with this subject. Ancient culture was
rhetorical. It abounded in ideas that are verbally plausible, and pass
muster in a public speech, but that, if we stop to criticize them, prove
at once to be inexcusably false. One of these rhetorical fallacies is
the maxim that men cannot live for what they cannot witness. What does
it matter to you, we may say in debate, what happened before you were
born, or what may go on after you are buried? And the orator who puts
such a challenge may carry the audience with him, and raise a laugh at
the expense of human sincerity. Yet the very men who applaud are proud
of their ancestors, care for the future of their children, and are very
much interested in securing legally the execution of their last will and
testament. What may go on after their death concerns them deeply, not
because they expect to watch the event from hell or heaven, but because
they are interested ideally in what that event shall be, although they
are never to witness it. Lucretius himself, in his sympathy with nature,
in his zeal for human enlightenment, in his tears for Iphigenia, long
since dead, is not moved by the hope of observing, or the memory of
having observed, what excites his emotion. He forgets himself. He sees
the whole universe spread out in its true movement and proportions; he
sees mankind freed from the incubus of superstition, and from the havoc
of passion. The vision kindles his enthusiasm, exalts his imagination,
and swells his verse into unmistakable earnestness.

If we follow Lucretius, therefore, in narrowing the sum of our personal
fortunes to one brief and partial glimpse of earth, we must not suppose
that we need narrow at all the sphere of our moral interests. On the
contrary, just in proportion as we despise superstitious terrors and
sentimental hopes, and as our imagination becomes self-forgetful, we
shall strengthen the direct and primitive concern which we feel in the
world and in what may go on there, before us, after us, or beyond our
ken. If, like Lucretius and every philosophical poet, we range over all
time and all existence, we shall forget our own persons, as he did, and
even wish them to be forgotten, if only the things we care for may
subsist or arise. He who truly loves God, says Spinoza, cannot wish that
God should love him in return. One who lives the life of the universe
cannot be much concerned for his own. After all, the life of the
universe is but the locus and extension of ours. The atoms that have
once served to produce life remain fit to reproduce it; and although the
body they might animate later would be a new one, and would have a
somewhat different career, it would not, according to Lucretius, be of a
totally new species; perhaps not more unlike ourselves than we are
unlike one another, or than each of us is unlike himself at the various
stages of his life.

The soul of nature, in the elements of it, is then, according to
Lucretius, actually immortal; only the human individuality, the chance
composition of those elements, is transitory; so that, if a man could
care for what happens to other men, for what befell him when young or
what may overtake him when old, he might perfectly well care, on the
same imaginative principle, for what may go on in the world for ever.
The finitude and injustice of his personal life would be broken down;
the illusion of selfishness would be dissipated; and he might say to
himself, I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

       *       *       *       *       *

The word nature has many senses; but if we preserve the one which
etymology justifies, and which is the most philosophical as well, nature
should mean the principle of birth or genesis, the universal mother, the
great cause, or system of causes, that brings phenomena to light. If we
take the word nature in this sense, it may be said that Lucretius, more
than any other man, is the poet of nature. Of course, being an ancient,
he is not particularly a poet of landscape. He runs deeper than that; he
is a poet of the source of landscape, a poet of matter. A poet of
landscape might try to suggest, by well-chosen words, the sensations of
light, movement, and form which nature arouses in us; but in this
attempt he would encounter the insuperable difficulty which Lessing long
ago pointed out, and warned poets of: I mean the unfitness of language
to render what is spatial and material; its fitness to render only what,
like language itself, is bodiless and flowing,--action, feeling, and
thought.

It is noticeable, accordingly, that poets who are fascinated by pure
sense and seek to write poems about it are called not impressionists,
but symbolists; for in trying to render some absolute sensation they
render rather the field of association in which that sensation lies, or
the emotions and half-thoughts that shoot and play about it in their
fancy. They become--against their will, perhaps--psychological poets,
ringers of mental chimes, and listeners for the chance overtones of
consciousness. Hence we call them symbolists, mixing perhaps some shade
of disparagement in the term, as if they were symbolists of an empty,
super-subtle, or fatuous sort. For they play with things luxuriously,
making them symbols for their thoughts, instead of mending their
thoughts intelligently, to render them symbols for things.

A poet might be a symbolist in another sense,--if he broke up nature,
the object suggested by landscape to the mind, and reverted to the
elements of landscape, not in order to associate these sensations lazily
together, but in order to build out of them in fancy a different nature,
a better world, than that which they reveal to reason. The elements of
landscape, chosen, emphasized, and recombined for this purpose, would
then be symbols for the ideal world they were made to suggest, and for
the ideal life that might be led in that paradise. Shelley is a symbolic
landscape poet in this sense. To Shelley, as Francis Thompson has said,
nature was a toy-shop; his fancy took the materials of the landscape and
wove them into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for
new-born irresponsible spirits. Shelley was the musician of landscape;
he traced out its unrealized suggestions; transformed the things he saw
into the things he would fain have seen. In this idealization it was
spirit that guided him, the bent of his wild and exquisite imagination,
and he fancied sometimes that the grosser landscapes of earth were
likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, of some restlessly
dreaming power. In this sense, earthly landscape seemed to him the
symbol of the earth spirit, as the starlit crystal landscapes of his
verse, with their pensive flowers, were symbols in which his own fevered
spirit was expressed, images in which his passion rested.

Another sort of landscape poetry is to be found in Wordsworth, for whom
the title of poet of nature might perhaps be claimed. To him the
landscape is an influence. What he renders, beyond such pictorial
touches as language is capable of, is the moral inspiration which the
scene brings to him. This moral inspiration is not drawn at all from the
real processes of nature which every landscape manifests in some aspect
and for one moment. Such would have been the method of Lucretius; he
would have passed imaginatively from the landscape to the sources of the
landscape; he would have disclosed the poetry of matter, not of spirit.
Wordsworth, on the contrary, dwells on adventitious human matters. He is
no poet of genesis, evolution, and natural force in its myriad
manifestations. Only a part of the cosmic process engages his interest,
or touches his soul--the strengthening or chastening of human purposes
by the influences of landscape. These influences are very real; for as
food or wine keeps the animal heart beating, or quickens it, so large
spaces of calm sky, or mountains, or dells, or solitary stretches of
water, expand the breast, disperse the obsessions that cramp a man’s
daily existence, and even if he be less contemplative and less virtuous
than Wordsworth, make him, for the moment, a friend to all things, and a
friend to himself.

Yet these influences are vague and for the most part fleeting.
Wordsworth would hardly have felt them so distinctly and so constantly
had he not found a further link to bind landscape to moral sentiment.
Such a link exists. The landscape is the scene of human life. Every
spot, every season, is associated with the sort of existence which falls
to men in that environment. Landscape for Wordsworth’s age and in his
country was seldom without figures. At least, some visible trace of man
guided the poet and set the key for his moral meditation. Country life
was no less dear to Wordsworth than landscape was; it fitted into every
picture; and while the march of things, as Lucretius conceived it, was
not present to Wordsworth’s imagination, the revolutions of society--the
French Revolution, for instance--were constantly in his thoughts. In so
far as he was a poet of human life, Wordsworth was truly a poet of
nature. In so far, however, as he was a poet of landscape, he was still
fundamentally a poet of human life, or merely of his personal
experience. When he talked of nature he was generally moralizing, and
altogether subject to the pathetic fallacy; but when he talked of man,
or of himself, he was unfolding a part of nature, the upright human
heart, and studying it in its truth.

Lucretius, a poet of universal nature, studied everything in its truth.
Even moral life, though he felt it much more narrowly and coldly than
Wordsworth did, was better understood and better sung by him for being
seen in its natural setting. It is a fault of idealists to misrepresent
idealism, because they do not view it as a part of the world. Idealism
_is_ a part of the world, a small and dependent part of it. It is a
small and dependent part even in the life of men. This fact is nothing
against idealism taken as a moral energy, as a faculty of idealization
and a habit of living in the familiar presence of an image of what
would, in everything, be best. But it is the ruin of idealism taken as a
view of the central and universal power in the world. For this reason
Lucretius, who sees human life and human idealism in their natural
setting, has a saner and maturer view of both than has Wordsworth, for
all his greater refinement. Nature, for the Latin poet, is really
nature. He loves and fears her, as she deserves to be loved and feared
by her creatures. Whether it be a wind blowing, a torrent rushing, a
lamb bleating, the magic of love, genius achieving its purpose, or a
war, or a pestilence, Lucretius sees everything in its causes, and in
its total career. One breath of lavish creation, one iron law of change,
runs through the whole, making all things kin in their inmost elements
and in their last end. Here is the touch of nature indeed, her largeness
and eternity. Here is the true echo of the life of matter.

Any comprehensive picture of nature and destiny, if the picture be
credited, must arouse emotion, and in a reflective and vivid mind must
inspire poetry--for what is poetry but emotion, fixing and colouring the
objects from which it springs? The sublime poem of Lucretius, expounding
the least poetical of philosophies, proves this point beyond a doubt.
Yet Lucretius was far from exhausting the inspiration which a poet might
draw from materialism. In the philosophy of Epicurus, even, which had
but a sickly hold on materialism, there were two strains which Lucretius
did not take up, and which are naturally rich in poetry, the strain of
piety and the strain of friendship. It is usual and, in one sense,
legitimate to speak of the Epicureans as atheists, since they denied
providence and any government of God in the world. Yet they admitted the
existence of gods, living in the quiet spaces between those celestial
whirlpools which form the various worlds. To these gods they attributed
the human form, and the serene life to which Epicurus aspired. Epicurus
himself was so sincere in this belief, and so much affected by it, that
he used to frequent the temples, keep the feasts of the gods, and often
spend hours before their images in contemplation and prayer.

In this, as in much else, Epicurus was carrying out to its logical
conclusion the rational and reforming essence of Hellenism. In Greek
religion, as in all other religions, there was a background of vulgar
superstition. Survivals and revivals of totem-worship, taboo, magic,
ritual barter, and objectified rhetoric are to be found in it to the
very end; yet if we consider in Greek religion its characteristic
tendency, and what rendered it distinctively Greek, we see that it was
its unprecedented ideality, disinterestedness, and aestheticism. To the
Greek, in so far as he was a Greek, religion was an aspiration to grow
like the gods by invoking their companionship, rehearsing their story,
feeling vicariously the glow of their splendid prerogatives, and placing
them, in the form of beautiful and very human statues, constantly before
his eyes. This sympathetic interest in the immortals took the place, in
the typical Greek mind, of any vivid hope of human immortality; perhaps
it made such a hope seem superfluous and inappropriate. Mortality
belonged to man, as immortality to the gods; and the one was the
complement of the other. Imagine a poet who, to the freedom and
simplicity of Homer, should have added the more reverent idealism of a
later age; and what an inexhaustible fund of poetry might he not have
found in this conception of the immortals leading a human life, without
its sordid contrarieties and limitations, eternally young, and frank,
and different!

Hints of such poetry are to be found in Plato, myths that present the
ideal suggestions of human life in pictures. These he sometimes leaves
general and pale, calling them ideas; but at other times he embodies
them in deities, or in detailed imaginary constructions, like that of
his _Republic_. This Platonic habit of mind might have been carried
further by some franker and less reactionary poet than Plato was, or
tended to become, as the years turned his wine into vinegar. But the
whole world was then getting sour. Imagination flagged, or was diverted
from the Greek into the Hebrew channel. Nevertheless, the hymns of
modern poets to the ancient gods, and the irrepressible echoes of
classic mythology in our literature, show how easy it would have been
for the later ancients themselves, had they chosen, to make immortal
poetry out of their dying superstitions. The denials of Epicurus do not
exclude this ideal use of religion; on the contrary, by excluding all
the other uses of it--the commercial, the mock-scientific, and the
selfish--they leave the moral interpretative aspect of religion standing
alone, ready to the poet’s hand, if any poet could be found pure and
fertile enough to catch and to render it. Rationalized paganism might
have had its Dante, a Dante who should have been the pupil not of Virgil
and Aquinas, but of Homer and Plato. Lucretius was too literal,
positivistic, and insistent for such a delicate task. He was a Roman.
Moral mythology and ideal piety, though his philosophy had room for
them, formed no part of his poetry.

What the other neglected theme, friendship, might have supplied, we may
see in the tone of another Epicurean, the poet Horace. Friendship was
highly honoured in all ancient states; and the Epicurean philosophy, in
banishing so many traditional forms of sentiment, could only intensify
the emphasis on friendship. It taught men that they were an accident in
the universe, comrades afloat on the same raft together with no fate not
common to them all, and no possible helpers but one another. Lucretius
does speak, in a passage to which I have already referred,[8] about the
hope of sweet friendship that supports him in his labours; and
elsewhere[9] he repeats the Epicurean idyl about picnicking together on
the green grass by a flowing brook; but the little word “together” is
all he vouchsafes us to mark what must be the chief ingredient in such
rural happiness.

Horace, usually so much slighter than Lucretius, is less cursory here.
Not only does he strike much oftener the note of friendship, but his
whole mind and temper breathe of friendliness and expected agreement.
There is, in the very charm and artifice of his lines, a sort of
confidential joy in tasting with the kindred few the sweet or pungent
savour of human things. To be brief and gently ironical is to assume
mutual intelligence; and to assume mutual intelligence is to believe in
friendship. In Lucretius, on the other hand, zeal is mightier than
sympathy, and scorn mightier than humour. Perhaps it would be asking too
much of his uncompromising fervour that he should have unbent now and
then and shown us in some detail what those pleasures of life may be
which are without care and fear. Yet, if it was impossible for him not
to be always serious and austere, he might at least have noted the
melancholy of friendship--for friendship, where nature has made minds
isolated and bodies mortal, is rich also in melancholy. This again we
may find in Horace, where once or twice he lets the “something bitter”
bubble up from the heart even of this flower, when he feels a vague need
that survives satiety, and yearns perversely for the impossible.[10]
Poor Epicureans, when they could not learn, like their master, to be
saints!

So far the decadent materialism of Epicurus might have carried a poet;
but a materialist in our days might find many other poetic themes to
weave into his system. To the picture which Lucretius sketches of
primitive civilization, we might add the whole history of mankind. To a
consistent and vigorous materialism all personal and national dramas,
with the beauties of all the arts, are no less natural and interesting
than are flowers or animal bodies. The moral pageantry of this world,
surveyed scientifically, is calculated wonderfully to strengthen and
refine the philosophy of abstention suggested to Epicurus by the flux of
material things and by the illusions of vulgar passion. Lucretius
studies superstition, but only as an enemy; and the naturalistic poet
should be the enemy of nothing. His animus blinds him to half the
object, to its more beautiful half, and makes us distrust his version of
the meaner half he is aware of. Seen in its totality, and surrounded by
all the other products of human imagination, superstition is not only
moving in itself, a capital subject for tragedy and for comedy, but it
reinforces the materialistic way of thinking, and shows that it may be
extended to the most complex and emotional spheres of existence. At the
same time, a naturalism extended impartially over moral facts brings
home a lesson of tolerance, scepticism, and independence which, without
contradicting Epicurean principles, would very much enlarge and
transform Epicurean sentiment. History would have opened to the
Epicurean poet a new dimension of nature and a more varied spectacle of
folly. His imagination would have been enriched and his maxims
fortified.

The emotions which Lucretius associated with his atoms and void, with
his religious denials and his abstentions from action, are emotions
necessarily involved in life. They will exist in any case, though not
necessarily associated with the doctrines by which this poet sought to
clarify them. They will remain standing, whatever mechanism we put in
the place of that which he believed in,--that is, if we are serious, and
not trying to escape from the facts rather than to explain them. If the
ideas embodied in a philosophy represent a comprehensive survey of the
facts, and a mature sentiment in the presence of them, any new ideas
adopted instead will have to acquire the same values, and nothing will
be changed morally except the language or euphony of the mind.

Of course one theory of the world must be true and the rest false, at
least if the categories of any theory are applicable to reality; but the
true theory like the false resides in imagination, and the truth of it
which the poet grasps is its truth to life. If there are no atoms, at
least there must be habits of nature, or laws of evolution, or
dialectics of progress, or decrees of providence, or intrusions of
chance; and before these equally external and groundless powers we must
bow, as Lucretius bowed to his atoms. It will always be important and
inevitable to recognize _something_ external, something that generates
or surrounds us; and perhaps the only difference between materialism and
other systems in this respect is that materialism has studied more
scrupulously the detail and method of our dependence.

Similarly, even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is
nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions. Our
lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled
Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as
if we are to face only one. The gradual losing of what we have been and
are, Emerson says:

     _This losing is true dying;_
     _This is lordly maris down-lying,_
     _This his slow but sure reclining,_
     _Star by star his world resigning._

The maxim of Lucretius, that nothing arises save by the death of
something else, meets us still in our crawling immortality. And his art
of accepting and enjoying what the conditions of our being afford also
has a perennial application. Dante, the poet of faith, will tell us that
we must find our peace in the will that gives us our limited portion.
Goethe, the poet of romantic experience, will tell us that we must
renounce, renounce perpetually. Thus wisdom clothes the same moral
truths in many cosmic parables. The doctrines of philosophers disagree
where they are literal and arbitrary,--mere guesses about the unknown;
but they agree or complete one another where they are expressive or
symbolic, thoughts wrung by experience from the hearts of poets. Then
all philosophies alike are ways of meeting and recording the same flux
of images, the same vicissitudes of good and evil, which will visit all
generations, while man is man.


       *       *       *       *       *

[1] Lucretius, iv. 834, 835:

     Nil ... natumst in corpore, ut uti
     Possemus, sed quod natumst id procreat usum.


[2] Ibid., I. 1115-18:

         Alid ex alio clarescet, nec tibi caeca
     Nox iter eripiet, quin ultima naturai
     Pervideas: ita res accendent lumina rebus.


[3] Lucretius, i. 264, 265:

       Alid ex alio reficit natura, nec ullam
     Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adiuta aliena.


[4] An excellent expression of this view is put by Plato into the mouth
of the physician Eryximachus in the _Symposium_, pp. 186-88.


[5] Lucretius, i. 1-13:

     Æneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
     Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
     Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
     Concelebras; per te quoniam genus omne animantum
     Concipitur, visitque exortum lumina solis:
     Te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli,
     Adventumque tuum: tibi suaves daedala tellus
     Submittit flores; tibi rident aequora ponti,
     Placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.
     Nam simul ac species patefactast verna diei,
     Et reserata viget genitabilis aura favoni;
     Aëriae primum volucres te, diva, tuumque
     Significant initum, perculsae corda tua vi.


[6] Lucretius, i. 24, 28-30, 41-43, 140-44:

     Te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse....
     Quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem:
     Effice, ut interea fera moenera militiai
     Per maria ac terras omnes sopita quiescant....
     Nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo
     Possumus aequo animo, nec Memmi clara propago
     Talibus in rebus communi desse saluti....
     Sed tua me virtus tamen, et sperata voluptas
     Suavis amicitiae, quemvis sufferre laborem
     Suadet, et inducit noctes vigilare serenas,
     Quaerentem, dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
     Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti.


[7] Lucretius, ii. 1139-41, 1148-49, 1164-74:

     Omnia debet enim cibus integrare novando,
     Et fulcire cibus, cibus omnia sustentare.
     Nequidquam,...
     Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi
     Expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas....
     Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
     Crebrius incassum manuum cecidisse laborem:
     Et cum tempora temporibus praesentia confert
     Praeteritis, laudat fortunas saepe parentis,...
     Nec tenet, omnia paulatim tabescere et ire
     Ad capulum, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto.


[8] Cf. pages 41, 49.

[9] Lucretius, ii. 29-33:

         Inter se prostrati in gramine molli
     Propter aquae rivum, sub ramis arboris altae,
     Non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant:
     Praesertim cum tempestas arridet, et anni
     Tempa conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas.


[10] Horace, _Odes_, iv. 1:

     Iam nec spes animi credula mutui...
       Sed cur, heu! Ligurine, cur
     Manat rara meas lacrima per genas?





III


DANTE


In the _Phaedo_ of Plato there is an incidental passage of supreme
interest to the historian. It foreshadows, and accurately defines, the
whole transition from antiquity to the middle age, from naturalism to
supernaturalism, from Lucretius to Dante. Socrates, in his prison, is
addressing his disciples for the last time. The general subject is
immortality; but in a pause in the argument Socrates says: “In my youth
... I heard some one reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras,
that Reason was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at
this notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: ‘If
Reason is the disposer, Reason will dispose all for the best, and put
each particular in the best place;’ and I argued that if any desired to
find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of
anything, he must find out what ... was best for that thing.... And I
rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes
of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me
first whether the earth is flat or round; and whichever was true, he
would proceed ... to show the nature of the best, and show that this was
best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre [of the universe],
he would further explain that this position was the best, and I should
be satisfied with the explanation given, and not want any other sort of
cause.... For I could not imagine that when he spoke of Reason as the
disposer of things, he would give any other account of their being,
except that this was best.... These hopes I would not have sold for a
large sum of money, and I seized the books and read them as fast as I
could, in my eagerness to know the better and the worse.

“What expectations I had formed and how grievously was I disappointed!
As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking Reason or
any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and
water, and other eccentricities.... Thus one man makes a vortex all
round, and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a
support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which
in arranging them as they are arranges them for the best never enters
into their minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it,
they rather expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is
stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good; of the
obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet
this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach
me.”[1]

Here we have the programme of a new philosophy. Things are to be
understood by their uses or purposes, not by their elements or
antecedents; as the fact that Socrates sits in his prison, when he might
have escaped to Euboea, is to be understood by his allegiance to his
notion of what is best, of his duty to himself and to his country, and
not by the composition of his bones and muscles. Such reasons as we give
for our actions, such grounds as might move the public assembly to
decree this or that, are to be given in explanation of the order of
nature. The world is a work of reason. It must be interpreted, as we
interpret the actions of a man, by its motives. And these motives we
must guess, not by a fanciful dramatic mythology, such as the poets of
old had invented, but by a conscientious study of the better and the
worse in the conduct of our own lives. For instance, the highest
occupation, according to Plato, is the study of philosophy; but this
would not be possible for man if he had to be continually feeding, like
a grazing animal, with its nose to the ground. Now, to obviate the
necessity of eating all the time, long intestines are useful; therefore
the cause of long intestines is the study of philosophy. Again, the
eyes, nose, and mouth are in the front of the head, because (says Plato)
the front is the nobler side,--as if the back would not have been the
nobler side (and the front side) had the eyes, nose, and mouth been
there! This method is what Molière ridicules in _Le Malade Imaginaire_,
when the chorus sings that opium puts people to sleep because it has a
dormitive virtue, the nature of which is to make the senses slumber.

All this is ridiculous physics enough; but Plato knew--though he forgot
sometimes--that his physics were playful. What it is important for us
now to remember is rather that, under this childish or metaphorical
physics, there is a serious morality. After all, the _use_ of opium is
that it is a narcotic; no matter why, physically, it is one. The _use_
of the body _is_ the mind, whatever the origin of the body may be. And
it seems to dignify and vindicate these uses to say that they are the
“causes” of the organs that make them possible. What is true of
particular organs or substances is true of the whole frame of nature.
Its _use_ is to serve the good--to make life, happiness, and virtue
possible. Therefore, speaking in parables, Plato says with his whole
school: Discover the right principle of action, and you will have
discovered the ruling force in the universe. Evoke in your rapt
aspiration the essence of a supreme good, and you will have understood
why the spheres revolve, why the earth is fertile, and why mankind
suffers and exists. Observation must yield to dialectic; political art
must yield to aspiration.

It took many hundred years for the revolution to work itself out; Plato
had a prophetic genius, and looked away from what he was (for he was a
Greek) to what mankind was to become in the next cycle of civilization.
In Dante the revolution is complete, not merely intellectually (for it
had been completed intellectually long before, in the Neoplatonists and
the Fathers of the Church), but complete morally and poetically, in that
all the habits of the mind and all the sanctions of public life had been
assimilated to it. There had been time to reinterpret everything,
obliterating the natural lines of cleavage in the world, and
substituting moral lines of cleavage for them. Nature was a compound of
ideal purposes and inert matter. Life was a conflict between sin and
grace. The environment was a battle-ground between a host of angels and
a legion of demons. The better and the worse had actually become, as
Socrates desired, the sole principles of understanding.

Having become Socratic, the thinking part of mankind devoted all its
energies henceforward to defining good and evil in all their grades, and
in their ultimate essence; a task which Dante brings to a perfect
conclusion. So earnestly and exclusively did they speculate about moral
distinctions that they saw them in almost visible shapes, as Plato had
seen his ideas. They materialized the terms of their moral philosophy
into existing objects and powers. The highest good--in Plato still
chiefly a political ideal, the aim of policy and art--became God, the
creator of the world. The various stages or elements of perfection
became persons in the Godhead, or angelic intelligences, or aerial
demons, or lower types of the animal soul. Evil was identified with
matter. The various stages of imperfection were ascribed to the
grossness of various bodies, which weighted and smothered the spark of
divinity that animated them. This spark, however, might be released;
then it would fly up again to its parent fire and a soul would be saved.

This philosophy was not a serious description of nature or evolution;
but it was a serious judgement upon them. The good, the better, the
best, had been discerned; and a mythical bevy of powers, symbolizing
these degrees of excellence, had been first talked of and then believed
in. Myth, when another man has invented it, can pass for history; and
when this man is a Plato, and has lived long ago, it can pass for
revelation. In this way moral values came to be regarded as forces
working in nature. But if they worked in nature, which was a compound of
evil matter and perfect form, they must exist outside: for the ideal of
excellence beckons from afar; it is what we pine for and are not. The
forces that worked in nature were accordingly supernatural virtues,
dominations, and powers; each natural thing had its supernatural
incubus, a guardian angel, or a devil that possessed it. The
supernatural--that is, something moral or ideal regarded as a power and
an existence--was all about us. Everything in the world was an effect of
something beyond the world; everything in life was a step to something
beyond life.

Into this system Christianity fitted easily. It enriched it by adding
miraculous history to symbolic cosmology. The Platonists had conceived a
cosmos in which there were higher and lower beings, marshalled in
concentric circles, around this vile but pivotal lump of earth. The
Christians supplied a dramatic action for which that stage seemed
admirably fitted, a story in which the whole human race, or the single
soul, passed successively through these higher and lower stages. There
had been a fall, and there might be a salvation. In a sense, even this
conception of descent from the good, and ascent towards it again, was
Platonic. According to the Platonists, the good eternally shed its vital
influence, like light, and received (though unawares and without
increase of excellence to itself) reflected rays that, in the form of
love and thought, reverted to it from the ends of the universe. But
according to the Platonist this radiation of life and focusing of
aspiration were both perpetual. The double movement was eternal. The
history of the world was monotonous; or rather the world had no
significant history, but only a movement like that of a fountain playing
for ever, or like the circulation of water that is always falling from
the clouds in rain and always rising again in vapour. This fall, or
emanation of the world from the deity, was the origin of evil for the
Platonists; evil consisted merely infinitude, materiality, or otherness
from God. If anything besides God was to exist, it had to be imperfect;
instability and conflict were essential to finitude and to existence.
Salvation, on the other hand, was the return current of aspiration on
the part of the creature to revert to its source; an aspiration which
was expressed in various types of being, fixed in the eternal,--types
which led up, like the steps of a temple, to the ineffable good at the
top.

In the Christian system this cosmic circulation became only a figure or
symbol expressing the true creation, the true fall, and the true
salvation; all three being really episodes in a historical drama,
occurring only once. The material world was only a scene, a
stage-setting, designed expressly to be appropriate for the play; and
this play was the history of mankind, especially of Israel and of the
Church. The persons and events of this history had a philosophic import;
each played some part in a providential plan. Each illustrated creation,
sin, and salvation in some degree, and on some particular level.

The Jews had never felt uncomfortable at being material; even in the
other world they hoped to remain so, and their immortality was a
resurrection of the flesh. It did not seem plausible to them that this
excellent frame of things should be nothing but a faint, troubled, and
unintended echo of the good. On the contrary, they thought this world so
good, intrinsically, that they were sure God must have made it
expressly, and not by an unconscious effluence of his virtue, as the
Platonists had believed. Their wonder at the power and ingenuity of the
deity reached its maximum when they thought of him as the cunning
contriver of nature, and of themselves. Nevertheless the work seemed to
show some imperfections; indeed, its moral excellence was potential
rather than actual, a suggestion of what might be, rather than an
accomplished fact. And so, to explain the unexpected flaws in a creation
which they thought essentially good, they put back at the beginning of
things an experience they had daily in the present, namely, that trouble
springs from bad conduct.

The Jews were intent watchers of fortune and of its vicissitudes. The
careers of men were their meditation by day and by night; and it takes
little attention to perceive that frivolity, indifference, knavery, and
debauchery do not make for well-being in this world. And like other
hard-pressed peoples, the ancient Jews had a pathetic admiration for
safety and plenty. How little they must have known these things, to
think of them so rapturously and so poetically! Not merely their
personal prudence, but their corporate and religious zeal made them
abhor that bad conduct which defeated prosperity. It was not mere folly,
but wickedness and the abomination of desolation. With the lessons of
conduct continually in mind, they framed the theory that all suffering,
and even death, were the wages of sin. Finally they went so far as to
attribute evil in all creation to the casual sin of a first man, and to
the taint of it transmitted to his descendants; thus passing over the
suffering and death of all creatures that are not human with an
indifference that would have astonished the Hindoos.

The imperfection of things, in the Hebraic view, was due to accidents in
their operation; not, as in the Platonic view, to their essential
separation from their source and their end. It is in harmony with this
that salvation too should come by virtue of some special act, like the
incarnation or death of Christ. Just so, the Jews had conceived
salvation as a revival of their national existence and greatness, to be
brought about by the patience and fidelity of the elect, with tremendous
miracles supervening to reward these virtues.

Thus their conception of the fall and of the redemption was historical.
And this was a great advantage to a man of imagination inheriting their
system; for the personages and the miracles that figured in their
sacred histories afforded a rich subject for fancy to work upon, and for
the arts to depict. The patriarchs from Adam down, the kings and
prophets, the creation, Eden, the deluge, the deliverance out of Egypt,
the thunders and the law of Sinai, the temple, the exile--all this and
much more that fills the Bible was a rich fund, a familiar tradition
living in the Church, on which Dante could draw, as he drew at the same
time from the parallel classic tradition which he also inherited. To
lend all these Biblical persons and incidents a philosophical dignity he
had only to fit them, as the Fathers of the Church had done, into the
Neoplatonic cosmology, or, as the doctors of his own time were doing,
into the Aristotelian ethics.

So interpreted, sacred history acquired for the philosopher a new
importance besides that which it had seemed to have to Israel in exile,
or to the Christian soul conscious of sin. Every episode became the
symbol for some moral state or some moral principle. Every preacher in
Christendom, as he repeated his homily on the gospel of the day, was
invited to rear a structure of spiritual interpretations upon the
literal sense of the narrative, which nevertheless he was always to hold
and preserve as a foundation for the others.[2] In a world made by God
for the illustration of his glory, things and events, though real, must
be also symbolical; for there is intention and propriety behind them.
The creation, the deluge, the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection
of Christ, the coming of the Holy Ghost with flames of fire and the gift
of tongues, were all historical facts. The Church was heir to the chosen
people; it was an historic and political institution, with a destiny in
this world, in which all her children should share, and for which they
should fight. At the same time all those facts, were mysteries and
sacraments for the private soul; they were channels for the same moral
graces that were embodied in the order of the heavenly spheres, and in
the types of moral life on earth. Thus the Hebrew tradition brought to
Dante’s mind the consciousness of a providential history, a great
earthly task,--to be transmitted from generation to generation,--and a
great hope. The Greek tradition brought him natural and moral
philosophy. These contributions, joined together, had made Christian
theology.

Although this theology was the guide to Dante’s imagination, and his
general theme, yet it was not his only interest; or rather he put into
the framework of orthodox theology theories and visions of his own,
fusing all into one moral unity and one poetical enthusiasm. The fusion
was perfect between the personal and the traditional elements. He threw
politics and love into the melting-pot, and they, too, lost their
impurities and were refined into a philosophic religion. Theology
became, to his mind, the guardian of patriotism, and, in a strangely
literal sense, the angel of love.

The political theory of Dante is a sublime and largely original one. It
suffers only from its extreme ideality, which makes it inapplicable, and
has caused it to be studied less than it deserves.

A man’s country, in the modern sense, is something that arose yesterday,
that is constantly changing its limits and its ideals; it is something
that cannot last for ever. It is the product of geographical and
historical accidents. The diversities between our different nations are
irrational; each of them has the same right, or want of right, to its
peculiarities. A man who is just and reasonable must nowadays, so far as
his imagination permits, share the patriotism of the rivals and enemies
of his country,--a patriotism as inevitable and pathetic as his own.
Nationality being an irrational accident, like sex or complexion, a
man’s allegiance to his country must be conditional, at least if he is a
philosopher. His patriotism has to be subordinated to rational
allegiance to such things as justice and humanity.

Very different was the situation in Dante’s case. For him the love of
country could be something absolute, and at the same time something
reasonable, deliberate, and moral. What he found claiming his allegiance
was a political body quite ideal, providential, and universal. This
political body had two heads, like the heraldic eagle,--the pope and the
emperor. Both were, by right, universal potentates; both should have
their seat in Rome; and both should direct their government to the same
end, although by different means and in different spheres. The pope
should watch over the faith and discipline of the Church. He should bear
witness, in all lands and ages, to the fact that life on earth was
merely a preliminary to existence in the other world, and should be a
preparation for that. The emperor, on the other hand, should guard peace
and justice everywhere, leaving to free cities or princes the regulation
of local affairs. These two powers had been established by God through
special miracles and commissions. An evident providential design,
culminating in them, ran through all history.

To betray or resist these divine rights, or to confound them, was
accordingly a sin of the first magnitude. The evils from which society
suffered were the consequence of such transgressions. The pope had
acquired temporal power, which was alien to his purely spiritual office;
besides, he had become a tool of the French king, who was (what no king
should be) at war with the emperor, and rebellious against the supreme
imperial authority; indeed, the pope had actually been seen to abandon
Rome for Avignon,--an act which was a sort of satanic sacrament, the
outward sign of an inward disgrace. The emperor, in his turn, had
forgotten that he was King of the Romans and Caesar, and was fond of
loitering in his native Germany, among its forests and princelings, as
if the whole world were not by right his country, and the object of his
solicitude.

And here the larger, theoretical patriotism of Dante, as a Catholic and
a Roman, passed into his narrower and actual patriotism as a Florentine.
Had Florence been true to its duties and worthy of its privileges, under
the double authority of the Church and the Empire? Florence was a Roman
colony. Had it maintained the purity of its Roman stock, and a Roman
simplicity and austerity in its laws? Alas, Etruscan immigrants had
contaminated its blood, and this taint was responsible, Dante thought,
for the prevalent corruption of manners. All that has made Florence
great in the history of the world was then only just beginning,--its
industry, refinements, arts, and literature. But to Dante that budding
age seemed one of decadence and moral ruin. He makes his ancestor, the
crusader Cacciaguida, praise the time when the narrow circuit of the
walls held only one-fifth of its later inhabitants. “Then the city
abided in peace, sober and chaste.”[3] The women plied the distaff, or
rocked the cradle, and prattled to their children of the heroic legends
of Troy, Fiesole, and Rome. A woman could turn from her glass with her
face unpainted; she wore no girdle far more deserving of admiration than
her own person. The birth of a daughter did not frighten a good burgher;
her dowry would not have to be excessive, nor her marriage premature. No
houses were empty, their masters being in exile; none were disgraced by
unmentionable orgies.[4] This was not all; for if luxury was a great
curse to Florence, faction was a greater. Florence, an imperial city,
far from assisting in the restitution of the emperors to their universal
rights, had fought against them traitorously, in alliance with the
French invader and the usurping pontiff. It had thus undermined the only
possible foundation of its own peace and dignity.

These were the theoretical sorrows that loomed behind the personal
sorrows of Dante in his poverty and exile. They helped him to pour forth
the intense bitterness of his heart with the breath of prophetic
invective. They made his hatred of the actual popes and of the actual
Florence so much fervid zeal for what the popes and Florence ought to
have been. His political passions and political hopes were fused with a
sublime political ideal; that fusion sublimated them, and made it
possible for the expression of them to rise into poetry.

Here is one iron string on which Dante played, and which gave a tragic
strength to his music. He recorded the villainies of priests, princes,
and peoples. He upbraided them for their infidelity to the tasks
assigned to them by God,--tasks which Dante conceived with a Biblical
definiteness and simplicity. He lamented the consequences of this
iniquity, wasted provinces, corrupted cities, and the bodies of heroes
rolling unburied down polluted streams. These vigorous details were
exalted by the immense significance that Dante infused into them. His
ever-present definite ideal quickened his eye for the ebb and flow of
things, rendered the experience of them singly more poignant, and the
vision of them together more sustained and cumulative. Dante read
contemporary Italy as the Hebrew prophets read the signs of their times;
and whatever allowance our critical judgement may make for generous
illusions on the part of either, there can be no doubt that their
wholeness of soul, and the prophetic absoluteness of their judgements,
made their hold on particular facts very strong, and their sense for
impending weal or woe quite over-powering.

Nor does it seem that at bottom Dante’s political philosophy, any more
than that of the Hebrew prophets, missed the great causes and the great
aims of human progress. Behind mythical and narrow conceptions of
history, he had a true sense for the moral principles that really
condition our well-being. A better science need subtract nothing from
the insight he had into the difference between political good and evil.
What in his day seemed a dream--that mankind should be one great
commonwealth--is now obvious to the idealist, the socialist, the
merchant. Science and trade are giving, in a very different form, to be
sure, a practical realization to that idea. And the other half of his
theory, that of the Catholic Church, is maintained literally by that
church itself to this day; and the outsider might see in that ideal of a
universal spiritual society a symbol or premonition of the right of the
mind to freedom from legal compulsions, or of the common allegiance of
honest minds to science, and to their common spiritual heritage and
destiny.

On the other hand, the sting of Dante’s private wrongs, like the
enthusiasm of his private loves, lent a wonderful warmth and clearness
to the great objects of his imagination. We are too often kept from
feeling great things greatly for want of power to assimilate them to the
little things which we feel keenly and sincerely. Dante had, in this
respect, the art of a Platonic lover: he could enlarge the object of his
passion, and keep the warmth and ardour of it undiminished. He had been
banished unjustly--_Florentinus exul immeritus_, he liked to call
himself. That injustice rankled, but it did not fester, in his heart;
for his indignation spread to all wrong, and thundered against Florence,
Europe, and mankind, in that they were corrupt and perfidious. Dante had
loved. The memory of that passion remained also, but it did not
degenerate into sentimentality; for his adoration passed to a larger
object and one less accidental. His love had been a spark of that “love
which moves the sun and the other stars.”[5] He had known, in that
revelation, the secret of the universe. The spheres, the angels, the
sciences, were henceforth full of sweetness, comfort, and light.

Of this Platonic expansion of emotion, till it suffuses all that
deserves to kindle it, we have a wonderful version in Dante’s _Vita
Nuova_. This book, on the surface, is an account of Dante’s meeting, at
the age of nine, with Beatrice, a child even a little younger; of
another meeting with her at the age of eighteen; of an overwhelming
mystic passion which the lover wished to keep secret, so much so that he
feigned another attachment as a blind; of a consequent estrangement; and
of the death of Beatrice, whereupon the poet resolved not to speak
publicly of her again, until he could praise her in such wise as no
woman had ever been praised before.

This story is interspersed with poems of the most exquisite delicacy,
both in sentiment and in versification. They are dreamlike, allegorical,
musical meditations, ambiguous in their veiled meanings, but absolutely
clear and perfect in their artful structure, like a work of tracery and
stained glass, geometrical, mystical, and tender. A singular limpidity
of accent and image, a singular naïveté, is strangely combined in these
pieces with scholastic distinctions and a delight in hiding and hinting,
as in a charade.

The learned will dispute for ever on the exact basis and meaning of
these confessions of Dante. The learned are perhaps not those best
fitted to solve the problem. It is a matter for literary tact and
sympathetic imagination. It must be left to the delicate intelligence
of the reader, if he has it; and if he has not, Dante does not wish to
open his heart to him. His enigmatical manner is his protection against
the intrusion of uncongenial minds.

Without passing beyond the sphere of learned criticism, I think we may
say this: the various interpretations, in this matter, are not mutually
exclusive. Symbolism and literalness, in Dante’s time, and in his
practice, are simultaneous. For instance, in any history of mediaeval
philosophy you may read that a great subject of dispute in those days
was the question whether universal terms or natures, such as man, or
humanity, existed before the particulars, in the particulars, or after
the particulars, by abstraction of what was common to them all. Now,
this matter was undoubtedly much disputed about; but there is one
comprehensive and orthodox solution, which represents the true mind of
the age, above the peculiar hobbies or heresies of individuals. This
solution is that universal terms or natures exist before the
particulars, _and_ in the particulars, _and_ after the particulars: for
God, before he made the world, knew how he intended to make it, and had
eternally in his mind the notions of a perfect man, horse, etc., after
which the particulars were to be modelled, or to which, in case of
accident, they were to be restored, either by the healing and
recuperative force of nature, or by the ministrations of grace. But
universal terms or natures existed also _in_ the particulars, since the
particulars illustrated them, shared in them, and were what they were by
virtue of that participation. Nevertheless, the universals existed also
after the particulars: for the discursive mind of man, surveying the
variety of natural things, could not help noticing and abstracting the
common types that often recur in them; and this _ex postfacto_ idea, in
the human mind, is a universal term also. To deny any of the three
theories, and not to see their consistency, is to miss the mediaeval
point of view, which, in every sense of the word, was Catholic.

Just such a solution seems to me natural in the case of Beatrice. We
have it on independent documentary evidence that in Dante’s time there
actually lived in Florence a certain Bice Portinari; and there are many
incidents in the _Vita Nuova_ and in the _Commedia_ which hardly admit
of an allegorical interpretation; such as the death of Beatrice, and
especially that of her father, on which occasion Dante writes a
sympathetic poem.[6] can see no reason why this lady, as easily as any
other person, should not have called forth the dreamful passion of our
poet. That he had loved some one is certain. Most people have; and why
should Dante, in particular, have found the language of love a natural
veil for his philosophy, if the passion and the language of love had not
been his mother-tongue? The language of love is no doubt usual in the
allegories of mystics, and was current in the conventional poetry of
Dante’s time; but mystics themselves are commonly crossed or potential
lovers; and the troubadours harped on the string of love simply because
it was the most responsive string in their own natures, and that which
could most easily be made to vibrate in their hearers. Dante was not
less sensitive than the average man of his generation; and if he
followed the fashion of minstrels and mystics, it was because he shared
their disposition. The beautiful, the unapproachable, the divine, had
passed before him in some visible form; it matters nothing whether this
vision came once only, and in the shape of the actual Beatrice, or
continuously, and in every shape through which a divine influence may
seem to come to a poet. No one would deserve this name of poet--and who
deserves it more than Dante?--if real sights and sounds never impressed
him; and he would hardly deserve it either, if they impressed him only
physically, and for what they are in themselves. His sensibility creates
his ideal.

If to deny the existence of an historical Beatrice seems violent and
gratuitous, it would be a much worse misunderstanding not to perceive
that Beatrice is _also_ a symbol. On one occasion, as we read in the
_Vita Nuova_,[7] Dante found himself, in a church, in the presence of
Beatrice. His eyes were inevitably fixed upon her; but as he wished to
conceal his profound passion from the gossiping crowd, he chose another
lady, who happened to stand in the direct line of vision between him and
Beatrice, and pretended to be gazing at her, in reality looking beyond
her to Beatrice. This intervening lady, _la donna gentile_, became the
screen to his true love.[8] But his attentions to her were so assiduous
that they were misinterpreted. Beatrice herself observed them, and
thinking he was going too far and not with an honourable purpose, showed
her displeasure by refusing to greet him as he passed. This sounds real
and earthly enough: but what is our surprise when we read expressly, in
the _Convito_, that the _donna gentile,_ the screen to Dante’s true
love, is philosophy.[9] If the _donna gentile_ is philosophy, the
_donna gentilissima,_ Beatrice, must be something of the same sort, only
nobler. She must be theology, and theology Beatrice undoubtedly is. Her
very name is played upon, if not selected, to mean that she is what
renders blessed, what shows the path of salvation.

Now the scene in the church becomes an allegory throughout. The young
Dante, we are given to understand, was at heart a religious and devout
soul, looking for the highest wisdom. But intervening between his human
reason and revealed truth (which he really was in love with, and wished
to win and to understand) he found philosophy or, as we should say,
science. To science he gave his preliminary attention; so much so that
the mysteries of theology were momentarily obscured in his mind; and his
faith, to his great sorrow, refused to salute him as he passed. He had
fallen into materialistic errors; he had interpreted the spots on the
moon as if they could be due to physical, not to Socratic, causes; and
his religious philosophy had lost its warmth, even if his religious
faith had not actually been endangered. It is certain, then, that
Beatrice, besides being a woman, was also a symbol.

But this is not the end. If Beatrice is a symbol for theology, theology
itself is not-final. It, too, is an avenue, an interpretation. The eyes
of Beatrice reflect a supernal light. It is the ineffable vision of
God, the beatific vision, that alone can make us happy and be the reason
and the end of our loves and our pilgrimages.

A supreme ideal of peace and perfection which moves the lover, and which
moves the sky, is more easily named than understood. In the last canto
of the _Paradiso_, where Dante is attempting to describe the beatific
vision, he says many times over that our notion of this ideal must be
vague and inadequate. The value of the notion to a poet or a philosopher
does not lie in what it contains positively, but in the attitude which
it causes him to assume towards real experience. Or perhaps it would be
better to say that to have an ideal does not mean so much to have any
image in the fancy, any Utopia more or less articulate, but rather to
take a consistent moral attitude towards all the things of this world,
to judge and coordinate our interests, to establish a hierarchy of goods
and evils, and to value events and persons, not by a casual personal
impression or instinct, but according to their real nature and tendency.
So understood, an ultimate ideal is no mere vision of the philosophical
dreamer, but a powerful and passionate force in the poet and the orator.
It is the voice of his love or hate, of his hope or sorrow, idealizing,
challenging, or condemning the world.

It is here that the feverish sensibility of the young Dante stood him in
good stead; it gave an unprecedented vigour and clearness to his moral
vision; it made him the classic poet of hell and of heaven. At the same
time, it helped to make him an upright judge, a terrible accuser, of the
earth. Everything and everybody in his day and generation became to him,
on account of his intense loyalty to his inward vision, an instance of
divine graciousness or of devilish perversity. Doubtless this keenness
of soul was not wholly due to the gift of loving, or to the discipline
of love; it was due in part also to pride, to resentment, to theoretical
prejudices. But figures like that of Francesca di Rimini and Manfred,
and the light and rapture vibrating through the whole _Paradiso,_ could
hardly have been evoked by a merely irritated genius. The background and
the starting-point of everything in Dante is the _intelletto d’amore_,
the genius of love.

Everybody has heard that God is love and that love makes the world go
round; and those who have traced this latter notion back to its source
in Aristotle may have some notion of what it means. It means, as we saw
in the beginning, that we should not try to explain motion and life by
their natural antecedents, for these run back _in infinitum_. We should
explain motion and life rather by their purpose or end, by that
unrealized ideal which moving and living things seem to aspire to, and
may be said to love. What justifies itself is not any fact or law; for
why should these not have been different? What justifies itself is what
is good, what is as it ought to be. But things in motion, Aristotle
conceived, declare, as it were, that they are not satisfied, and ought
to be in some different condition. They look to a fulfilment which is as
yet ideal. This fulfilment, if it included motion and life, could
include them inwardly only; it would consist in a sustained activity,
never lapsing nor suffering change. Such an activity is the unchanging
goal towards which life advances and by which its different stages are
measured: But since the purpose of things, and not their natural
causes, is that which explains them, we may call this eventual activity
their reason for being. It will be their unmoved mover.

But how, we may ask,--how can the unchanging, the ideal, the eventual,
initiate anything or determine the disposition and tendency of what
actually lives and moves? The answer, or rather the impossibility of
giving an answer, may be expressed in a single word: magic. It is magic
when a good or interesting result, because it would prove good or
interesting, is credited with marshalling the conditions and evoking the
beings that are to realize it. It is natural that I should be hungry,
and natural that there should be things suitable for me to eat--for
otherwise I should not be hungry long; but if my hunger, in case it is
sharp enough, should be able of itself to produce the food it calls
for, that would be magic. Nature would be evoked by the incantations of
the will.

I do not forget that Aristotle, with Dante after him, asserts that the
goal of life is a separate being already existing, namely, the mind of
God, eternally realizing what the world aspires to. The influence of
this mind, however, upon the world is no less magical than would be that
of a non-existent ideal. For its operation is admittedly not transitive
or physical. It itself does not change in working. No virtue leaves it;
it does not, according to Aristotle and Plotinus, even know that it
works. Indeed, it works only because other things are disposed to pursue
it as their ideal; let things keep this disposition, and they will
pursue and frame their ideal no less if it nowhere has an actual
existence, than if by chance it exists elsewhere in its own person. It
works only in its capacity of ideal; therefore, even if it exists, it
works only by magic. The matter beneath feels the spell of its presence,
and catches something of its image, as the waves of the sea might
receive and reflect tremblingly the light shed by the moon. The world
accordingly is moved and vivified in every fibre by magic, by the magic
of the goal to which it aspires.

But this magic, on earth, bore the name of love. The life of the world
was a love, produced by the magic attraction of a good it has never
possessed and, so long as it remains a world, is incapable of
possessing. Actual things were only suggestions of what the elements in
that ulterior existence ought to be: they were mere symbols. The acorn
was a mere prophecy--an existing symbol--for the ideal oak; because when
the acorn falls into good ground it will be corrupted, but the idea of
the oak will arise and be manifested in its place. The acorn was a sort
of reliquary in which the miraculous power of the idea was somehow
enshrined. In the vulgar attribution of causes we, like Anaxagoras,
resemble a superstitious relic-worshipper who should forget that the
intercession and merits of the saint really work the miracle, and should
attribute it instead to the saint’s bones and garments in their material
capacity. Similarly, we should attribute the power which things exerted
over us, not to the rarer or denser substance, but to the eternal ideas
that they existed by expressing, and existed to express. Things merely
localized--like the saint’s relics--the influences which flowed to us
from above. In the world of values they were mere symbols, accidental
channels for divine energy; and since divine energy, by its magic
assimilation of matter, had created these things, in order to express
itself, they were symbols altogether not merely in their use, but in
their origin and nature.

A mind persuaded that it lives among things that, like words, are
essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic
attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind
poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and
philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become
poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence. When Plato
and Aristotle, following the momentous precept of Socrates, decreed that
observation of nature should stop and a moral interpretation of nature
should begin, they launched into the world a new mythology, to take the
place of the Homeric one which was losing its authority. The power the
poets had lost of producing illusion was possessed by these philosophers
in a high degree; and no one was ever more thoroughly under their spell
than Dante. He became to Platonism and Christianity what Homer had been
to Paganism; and if Platonism and Christianity, like Paganism, should
ever cease to be defended scientifically, Dante will keep the poetry and
wisdom of them alive; and it is safe to say that later generations will
envy more than they will despise his philosophy. When the absurd
controversies and factious passions that in some measure obscure the
nature of this system have completely passed away, no one will think of
reproaching Dante with his bad science, and bad history, and minute
theology. These will not seem blemishes in his poetry, but integral
parts of it.

A thousand years after Homer, Alexandrian critics were expounding his
charming myths as if they were a revealed treatise of physics and
morals. A thousand years after Dante we may hope that his conscientious
vision of the universe, where all is love, magic, and symbolism, may
charm mankind exclusively as poetry. So conceived, the _Divine Comedy_
marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato’s dialogues mark
the beginning: a pause of two thousand years in the work of political
reason, during which the moral imagination spun out of itself an
allegorical philosophy, as a boy, kept at home during a rainy day with
books too hard and literal for his years, might spin his own romance out
of his father’s histories, and might define, with infantile precision,
his ideal lady-love, battles, and kingdoms. The middle age saw the good
in a vision. It is for the new age to translate those delightful symbols
into the purposes of manhood.

       *       *       *       *       *

In a letter which tradition assigns to Dante, addressed to his
protector, Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona and Vicenza, are these
words about the _Divine Comedy_: “The subject of the whole work, taken
merely in its literal sense, is the state of souls after death,
considered simply as a fact. But if the work is understood in its
allegorical intention, the subject of it is man, according as, by his
deserts and demerits in the use of his free-will, he is justly open to
rewards and punishments.” This by no means exhausts, however, the
significations which we may look for in a work of Dante’s. How many
these may be is pointed out to us in the same letter, and illustrated by
the beginning of the one hundred and fourteenth Psalm: “When Israel went
out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language;
Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” Here, Dante tells us,
“if we look to the _letter_ only, what is conveyed to us is the
deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt in the time of Moses;
if we look to the _allegory_ of it, what is signified is our redemption
accomplished through Christ; if we consider the _moral sense_, what is
signified is the conversion of the soul from her present grief and
wretchedness to a state of grace; and if we consider the _anagogical
sense_ [that is, the revelation contained concerning our highest
destiny], what is signified is the passing of the sanctified soul from
the bondage of earthly corruption to the freedom of everlasting glory.”

When people brooded so much over a simple text as to find all these
meanings in it, we may expect that their own works, when meant to be
profound, should have stage above stage of allegorical application. So
in the first canto of the _Inferno_ we find a lion that keeps Dante from
approaching a delectable mountain; and this lion, besides what he is in
the landscape of the poem, is a symbol for pride or power in general,
for the king of France in particular, and for whatever political
ambitions in Dante’s personal life may have robbed him of happiness or
distracted him from faith and from piety. Thus, throughout the _Divine
Comedy_, meaning and meaning lurk beneath the luminous pictures; and the
poem, besides being a description of the other world, and of the rewards
and punishment meted out to souls, is a dramatic view of human passions
in this life; a history of Italy and of the world; a theory of Church
and State; the autobiography of an exile; and the confessions of a
Christian, and of a lover, conscious of his sins and of the miracle of
divine grace that intervenes to save him.

The subject-matter of the _Divine Comedy_ is accordingly the moral
universe in all its levels,--romantic, political, religious. To present
these moral facts in a graphic way, the poet performed a double work of
imagination. First he chose some historical personage that might
plausibly illustrate each condition of the soul. Then he pictured this
person in some characteristic and symbolic attitude of mind and of body,
and in an appropriate, symbolic environment. To give material embodiment
to moral ideas by such a method would nowadays be very artificial, and
perhaps impossible; but in Dante’s time everything was favourable to the
attempt. We are accustomed to think of goods and evils as functions of
a natural life, sparks struck out in the chance shock of men with things
or with one another. For Dante, it was a matter of course that moral
distinctions might be discerned, not merely as they arise incidentally
in human experience, but also, and more genuinely, as they are displayed
in the order of creation. The Creator himself was a poet producing
allegories. The material world was a parable which he had built out in
space, and ordered to be enacted. History was a great charade. The
symbols of earthly poets are words or images; the symbols of the divine
poet were natural things and the fortunes of men. They had been devised
for a purpose; and this purpose, as the Koran, too, declares, had been
precisely to show forth the great difference there is in God’s sight
between good and evil.

In Platonic cosmology, the concentric spheres were bodies formed and
animated by intelligences of various orders. The nobler an intelligence,
the more swift and outward, or higher, was the sphere it moved; whence
the identification of “higher” with better, which survives, absurdly, to
this day. And while Dante could not attribute literal truth to his
fancies about hell, purgatory, and heaven, he believed that an actual
heaven, purgatory, and hell had been fashioned by God on purpose to
receive souls of varying deserts and complexion; so that while the
poet’s imagination, unless it reechoed divine revelation, was only
human and not prophetic, yet it was a genuine and plausible imagination,
moving on the lines of nature, and anticipating such things as
experience might very well realize. Dante’s objectification of morality,
his art of giving visible forms and local habitations to ideal virtues
and vices, was for him a thoroughly serious and philosophical exercise.
God had created nature and life on that very principle. The poet’s
method repeated the magic of Genesis. His symbolical imagination
mirrored this symbolical world; it was a sincere anticipation of fact,
no mere laboured and wilful allegory.

This situation has a curious consequence. Probably for the first and
last time in the history of the world a classification worked out by a
systematic moralist guided the vision of a great poet. Aristotle had
distinguished, named, and classified the various virtues, with their
opposites. But observe: if the other world was made on purpose--as it
was--to express and render palpable those moral distinctions which were
eternal, and to express and render them palpable in great detail, with
all their possible tints and varieties; and if Aristotle had correctly
classified moral qualities, as he had--then it follows that Aristotle
(without knowing it) must have supplied the ground-plan, as it were, of
hell and of heaven. Such was Dante’s thought. With Aristotle’s _Ethics_
open before him, with a supplementary hint, here and there, drawn from
the catechism, and with an ingrained preference (pious and almost
philosophic) for the number three and its multiples, he needed not to
voyage without a chart. The most visionary of subjects, life after
death, could be treated with scientific soberness and deep sincerity.
This vision was to be no wanton dream. It was to be a sober meditation,
a philosophical prophecy, a probable drama,--the most poignant,
terrible, and consoling of all possible truths.

The good--this was the fundamental thought of Aristotle and of all Greek
ethics,--the good is the end at which nature aims. The demands of life
cannot be radically perverse, since they are the judges of every
excellence. No man, as Dante says, could hate his own soul; he could not
at once be, and contradict, the voice of his instincts and emotions. Nor
could a man hate God; for if that man knew himself, he would see that
God was, by definition, his natural good, the ultimate goal of his
actual aspirations.[10] Since it was impossible, according to his
insight, that our faculties should be intrinsically evil, all evil had
to arise from the disorder into which these faculties fall, their too
great weakness or strength in relation to one another. If the animal
part of man was too strong for his reason, he fell into
incontinence,--that is, into lust, gluttony, avarice, wrath, or pride.
Incontinence came from an excessive or ill-timed pursuit of something
good, of a part of what nature aims at; for food, children, property,
and character are natural goods. These sins are accordingly the most
excusable and the least odious. Dante puts those who have sinned through
love in the first circle of hell, nearest to the sunlight, or in the
topmost round of purgatory, nearest to the earthly paradise. Below the
lovers, in each case, are the gluttons,--where a northern poet would
have been obliged to place his drunkards. Beneath these again are the
misers,--worse because less open to the excuse of a merely childish lack
of self-control.

The disorder of the faculties may arise, however, in another way. The
combative or spirited element, rather than the senses, may get out of
hand, and lead to crimes of violence. Violence, like incontinence, is
spontaneous enough in its personal origin, and would not be odious if it
did not inflict, and intend to inflict, harm on others; so that besides
incontinence, there is malice in it. Ill-will to others may arise from
pride, because one loves to be superior to them, or from envy, because
one abhors that they should seem superior to oneself; or through desire
for vengeance, because one smarts under some injury. Sins of these kinds
are more serious than those of foolish incontinence; they complicate the
moral world more; they introduce endless opposition of interests, and
perpetual, self-propagating crimes. They are hateful. Dante feels less
pity for those who suffer by them: he remembers the sufferings these
malefactors have themselves caused, and he feels a sort of joy in
joining the divine justice, and would gladly lash them himself.

Worse still than violence, however, is guile: the sin of those who in
the service of their intemperance or their malice have abused the gift
of reason. _Corruptio optimi pessima_; and to turn reason, the faculty
that establishes order, into a means of organizing disorder, is a
perversity truly satanic: it turns evil into an art. But even this
perversity has stages; and Dante distinguishes ten sorts of dishonesty
or simple fraud, as well as three sorts of treachery.

Besides these positive transgressions there is a possibility of general
moral sluggishness and indifference. This Dante, with his fervid nature,
particularly hates. He puts the Laodiceans in the fringe of his hell;
within the gate, that they may be without hope, but outside of limbo,
that they may have torments to endure, and be stung by wasps and
hornets into a belated activity.[11]

To these vices, known to Aristotle, the Catholic moralist was obliged to
add two others: original sin, of which spontaneous disbelief is one
consequence, and heresy, or misbelief, after a revelation has been given
and accepted. Original sin, and the paganism that goes with it, if they
lead to nothing worse, are a mere privation of excellence and involve,
in eternity merely a privation of joy: they are punished in limbo. There
sighs are heard, but no lamentation, and the only sorrow is to live in
desire without hope. This fate is most appropriately imputed to the
noble and clear-sighted in the hereafter, since it is so often their
experience here. Dante was never juster than in this stroke.[12] Heresy,
on the other hand, is a kind of passion when honest, or a kind of fraud
when politic; and it is punished as pride in fiery tombs,[13] or as
faction by perpetual gaping wounds and horrible mutilations.[14]

So far, with these slight additions, Dante is following Aristotle; but
here a great divergence sets in. If a pagan poet had conceived the idea
of illustrating the catalogue of vices and virtues in poetic scenes, he
would have chosen suitable episodes in human life, and painted the
typical characters that figured in them in their earthly environment;
for pagan morality is a plant of earth. Not so with Dante. His poem
describes this world merely in retrospect; the foreground is occupied by
the eternal consequences of what time had brought forth. These
consequences are new facts, not merely, as for the rationalist, the old
facts conceived in their truth; they often reverse, in their emotional
quality, the events they represent. Such a reversal is made possible by
the theory that justice is partly retributive; that virtue is not its
own sufficient reward, nor vice its own sufficient punishment. According
to this theory, this life contains a part of our experience only, yet
determines the rest. The other life is a second experience, yet it does
not contain any novel adventures. It is determined altogether by what we
have done on earth; as the tree falleth so it lieth, and souls after
death have no further initiative.

The theory Dante adopts mediates between two earlier views; in so far as
it is Greek, it conceives immortality ideally, as something timeless;
but in so far as it is Hebraic, it conceives of a new existence and a
second, different taste of life. Dante thinks of a second experience,
but of one that is wholly retrospective and changeless. It is an
epilogue which sums up the play, and is the last episode in it. The
purpose of this epilogue is not to carry on the play indefinitely: such
a romantic notion of immortality never entered Dante’s mind. The purpose
of the epilogue is merely to vindicate (in a more unmistakable fashion
than the play, being ill acted, itself could do) the excellence of
goodness and the misery of vice. Were this life all, he thinks the
wicked might laugh. If not wholly happy, at least they might boast that
their lot was no worse than that of many good men. Nothing would make an
overwhelming difference. Moral distinctions would be largely impertinent
and remarkably jumbled. If I am a simple lover of goodness, I may
perhaps put up with this situation. I may say of the excellences I prize
what Wordsworth says of his Lucy: there may be none to praise and few to
love them, but they make all the difference to me.

Dante, however, was not merely a simple lover of excellence: he was also
a keen hater of wickedness, one that took the moral world tragically
and wished to heighten the distinctions he felt into something absolute
and infinite. Now any man who is _enragé_ in his preferences will
probably say, with Mohammed, Tertullian, and Calvin, that good is
dishonoured if those who contemn it can go scot-free, and never repent
of their negligence; that the more horrible the consequences of
evil-doing, the more tolerable the presence of evil-doing is in the
world; and that the everlasting shrieks and contortions of the damned
alone will make it possible for the saints to sit quiet, and be
convinced that there is perfect harmony in the universe. On this
principle, in the famous inscription which Dante places over the gate of
hell, we read that primal love, as well as justice and power,
established that torture-house; primal love, that is, of that good
which, by the extreme punishment of those who scorn it, is honoured,
vindicated, and made to shine like the sun. The damned are damned for
the glory of God.

This doctrine, I cannot help thinking, is a great disgrace to human
nature. It shows how desperate, at heart, is the folly of an egotistic
or anthropocentric philosophy. This philosophy begins by assuring us
that everything is obviously created to serve our needs; it then
maintains that everything serves our ideals; and in the end, it reveals
that everything serves our blind hatreds and superstitious qualms.
Because my instinct taboos something, the whole universe, with insane
intensity, shall taboo it for ever. This infatuation was inherited by
Dante, and it was not uncongenial to his bitter and intemperate spleen.
Nevertheless, he saw beyond it at times. Like many other Christian
seers, he betrays here and there an esoteric view of rewards and
punishments, which makes them simply symbols for the intrinsic quality
of good and evil ways. The punishment, he then seems to say, is nothing
added; it is what the passion itself pursues; it is a fulfilment,
horrifying the soul that desired it.

For instance, spirits newly arrived in hell require no devil with his
prong to drive them to their punishment. They flit towards it eagerly,
of their own accord.[15] Similarly, the souls in purgatory are kept by
their own will at the penance they are doing. No external force retains
them, but until they are quite purged they are not able, because they
are not willing, to absolve themselves.[16] The whole mountain, we are
told, trembles and bursts into psalmody when any one frees himself and
reaches heaven. Is it too much of a gloss to say that these souls change
their prison when they change their ideal, and that an inferior state of
soul is its own purgatory, and determines its own duration? In one
place, at any rate, Dante proclaims the intrinsic nature of punishment
in express terms. Among the blasphemers is a certain king of Thebes, who
defied the thunderbolts of Jupiter. He shows himself indifferent to his
punishment and says: “Such as I was alive, such I am dead.” Whereupon
Virgil exclaims, with a force Dante had never found in his voice before:
“In that thy pride is not mortified, thou art punished the more. No
torture, other than thy own rage, would be woe enough to match thy
fury.”[17] And indeed, Dante’s imagination cannot outdo, it cannot even
equal, the horrors which men have brought upon themselves in this world.
If we were to choose the most fearful of the scenes in the _Inferno_, we
should have to choose the story of Ugolino, but this is only a pale
recital of what Pisa had actually witnessed.

A more subtle and interesting instance, if a less obvious one, may be
found in the punishment of Paolo and Francesca di Rimini. What makes
these lovers so wretched in the Inferno? They are still together. Can an
eternity of floating on the wind, in each other’s arms, be a punishment
for lovers? That is just what their passion, if left to speak for
itself, would have chosen. It is what passion stops at, and would gladly
prolong for ever. Divine judgement has only taken it at its word. This
fate is precisely what Aucassin, in the well-known tale, wishes for
himself and his sweetheart Nicolette,--not a heaven to be won by
renunciation, but the possession, even if it be in hell, of what he
loves and fancies. And a great romantic poet, Alfred de Musset, actually
upbraids Dante for not seeing that such an eternal destiny as he has
assigned to Paolo and Francesca would be not the ruin of their love,[18]
but the perfect fulfilment of it. This last seems to be very true; but
did Dante overlook the truth of it? If so, what instinct guided him to
choose just the fate for these lovers that they would have chosen for
themselves?

There is a great difference between the apprentices in life, and the
masters,--Aucassin and Alfred de Musset were among the apprentices;
Dante was one of the masters. He could feel the fresh promptings of life
as keenly as any youngster, or any romanticist; but he had lived these
things through, he knew the possible and the impossible issue of them;
he saw their relation to the rest of human nature, and to the ideal of
an ultimate happiness and peace. He had discovered the necessity of
saying continually to oneself: Thou shalt renounce. And for this reason
he needed no other furniture for hell than the literal ideals and
fulfilments of our absolute little passions. The soul that is possessed
by any one of these passions nevertheless has other hopes in abeyance.
Love itself dreams of more than mere possession; to conceive happiness,
it must conceive a life to be shared in a varied world, full of events
and activities, which shall be new and ideal bonds between the lovers.
But unlawful love cannot pass out into this public fulfilment. It is
condemned to be mere possession--possession in the dark, without an
environment, without a future. It is love among the ruins. And it is
precisely this that is the torment of Paolo and Francesca--love among
the ruins of themselves and of all else they might have had to give to
one another. Abandon yourself, Dante would say to us,--abandon yourself
altogether to a love that is nothing but love, and you are in hell
already. Only an inspired poet could be so subtle a moralist. Only a
sound moralist could be so tragic a poet.

The same tact and fine feeling that appear in these little moral dramas
appear also in the sympathetic landscape in which each episode is set.
The poet actually accomplishes the feat which he attributes to the
Creator; he evokes a material world to be the fit theatre for moral
attitudes. Popular imagination and the precedents of Homer and Virgil
had indeed carried him halfway in this symbolic labour, as tradition
almost always carries a poet who is successful. Mankind, from remotest
antiquity, had conceived a dark subterranean hell, inhabited by unhappy
ghosts. In Christian times, these shades had become lost souls,
tormented by hideous demons. But Dante, with the Aristotelian chart of
the vices before him, turned those vague windy caverns into a
symmetrical labyrinth. Seven concentric terraces descended, step by
step, towards the waters of the Styx, which in turn encircled the brazen
walls of the City of Dis, or Pluto. Within these walls, two more
terraces led down to the edge of a prodigious precipice--perhaps a
thousand miles deep--which formed the pit of hell. At the bottom of
this, still sinking gently towards the centre, were ten concentric
furrows or ditches, to hold ten sorts of rogues; and finally a last
sheer precipice fell to the frozen lake of Cocytus, at the very centre
of the earth, in the midst of which Lucifer was congealed amongst lesser
traitors.

Precision and horror, graphic and moral truth, were never so wonderfully
combined as in the description of this hell. Yet the conception of
purgatory is more original, and perhaps more poetical. The very approach
to the place is enchanting. We hear of it first in the fatal adventure
ascribed to Ulysses by Dante. Restless at Ithaca after his return from
Troy, the hero had summoned his surviving companions for a last voyage
of discovery. He had sailed with them past the Pillars of Hercules,
skirting the African shore; until after three months of open sea, he saw
a colossal mountain, a great truncated cone, looming before him. This
was the island and hill of purgatory, at the very antipodes of
Jerusalem. Yet before Ulysses could land there, a squall overtook him;
and his galley sank, prow foremost, in that untraversed sea, within
sight of a new world. So must the heathen fail of salvation, though some
oracular impulse bring them near the goal.

How easy is success, on the other hand, to the ministers of grace! From
the mouth of the Tiber, where the souls of Christians congregate after
death, a light skiff, piloted by an angel, and propelled only by his
white wings, skims the sea swiftly towards the mountain of purgatory,
there deposits the spirits it carries, and is back at the mouth of the
Tiber again on the same day. So much for the approach to purgatory. When
a spirit lands it finds the skirts of the mountain broad and spreading,
but the slope soon becomes hard and precipitous. When he has passed the
narrow gate of repentance, he must stay upon each of the ledges that
encircle the mountain at various heights, until one of his sins is
purged, and then upon the next ledge above, if he has been guilty also
of the sin that is atoned for there. The mountain is so high as to lift
its head into the sphere of the moon, above the reach of terrestrial
tempests. The top, which is a broad circular plain, contains the Garden
of Eden, watered by the rivers Lethe and Eunoe, one to heal all painful
memories, and the other to bring all good thoughts to clearness. From
this place, which literally touches the lowest heaven, the upward flight
is easy from sphere to sphere.

The astronomy of Dante’s day fell in beautifully with his poetic task.
It described and measured a firmament that would still be identified
with the posthumous heaven of the saints. The whirling invisible spheres
of that astronomy had the earth for their centre. The sublime
complexities of this Ptolemaic system were day and night before Dante’s
mind. He loves to tell us in what constellation the sun is rising or
setting, and what portion of the sky is then over the antipodes; he
carries in his mind an orrery that shows him, at any given moment, the
position of every star.

Such a constant dragging in of astronomical lore may seem to us puerile
or pedantic; but for Dante the astronomical situation had the charm of a
landscape, literally full of the most wonderful lights and shadows; and
it also had the charm of a hard-won discovery that unveiled the secrets
of nature. To think straight, to see things as they are, or as they
might naturally be, interested him more than to fancy things impossible;
and in this he shows, not want of imagination, but true imaginative
power and imaginative maturity. It is those of us who are too feeble to
conceive and master the real world, or too cowardly to face it, that run
away from it to those cheap fictions that alone seem to us fine enough
for poetry or for religion. In Dante the fancy is not empty or
arbitrary; it is serious, fed on the study of real things. It adopts
their tendency and divines their true destiny. His art is, in the
original Greek sense, an imitation or rehearsal of nature, an
anticipation of fate. For this reason curious details of science or
theology enter as a matter of course into his verse. With the
straightforward faith and simplicity of his age he devours these
interesting images, which help him to clarify the mysteries of this
world.

There is a kind of sensualism or aestheticism that has decreed in our
day that theory is not poetical; as if all the images and emotions that
enter a cultivated mind were not saturated with theory. The prevalence
of such a sensualism or aestheticism would alone suffice to explain the
impotence of the arts. The life of theory is not less human or less
emotional than the life of sense; it is more typically human and more
keenly emotional. Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than
common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is
something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the
rumble of cities. For this reason philosophy, when a poet is not
mindless, enters inevitably into his poetry, since it has entered into
his life; or rather, the detail of things and the detail of ideas pass
equally into his verse, when both alike lie in the path that has led him
to his ideal. To object to theory in poetry would be like objecting to
words there; for words, too, are symbols without the sensuous character
of the things they stand for; and yet it is only by the net of new
connections which words throw over things, in recalling them, that
poetry arises at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of
crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s
length.

Never before or since has a poet lived in so large a landscape as Dante;
for our infinite times and distances are of little poetic value while we
have no graphic image of what may fill them. Dante’s spaces were
filled; they enlarged to the limits of human imagination, the
habitations and destinies of mankind. Although the saints did not
literally inhabit the spheres, but the empyrean beyond, yet each spirit
could be manifested in that sphere the genius of which was most akin to
his own. In Dante’s vision spirits appear as points of light, from which
voices also flow sometimes, as well as radiance. Further than reporting
their words (which are usually about the things of earth) Dante tells us
little about them. He has indeed, at the end, a vision of a celestial
rose; tier upon tier of saints are seated as in an amphitheatre, and the
Deity overarches them in the form of a triple rainbow, with a semblance
of man in the midst. But this is avowedly a mere symbol, a somewhat
conventional picture to which Dante has recourse unwillingly, for want
of a better image to render his mystical intention. What may perhaps
help us to divine this intention is the fact, just mentioned, that
according to him the celestial spheres are not the real seat of any
human soul; that the pure rise through them with increasing ease and
velocity, the nearer they come to God; and that the eyes of
Beatrice--the revelation of God to man--are only mirrors, shedding
merely reflected beauty and light.

These hints suggest the doctrine that the goal of life is the very
bosom of God; not any finite form of existence, however excellent, but a
complete absorption and disappearance in the Godhead. So the
Neoplatonists had thought, from whom all this heavenly landscape is
borrowed; and the reservations that Christian orthodoxy requires have
not always remained present to the minds of Christian mystics and poets.
Dante broaches this very point in the memorable interview he has with
the spirit of Piccarda, in the third canto of the _Paradiso_. She is in
the lowest sphere of heaven, that of the inconstant moon, because after
she had been stolen from her convent and forcibly married, she felt no
prompting to renew her earlier vows. Dante asks her if she never longs
for a higher station in paradise, one nearer to God, the natural goal of
all aspiration. She answers that to share the will of God, who has
established many different mansions in his house, is to be truly one
with him. The wish to be nearer God would actually carry the soul
farther away, since it would oppose the order he has established.[19]

Even in heaven, therefore, the Christian saint was to keep his essential
fidelity, separation, and lowliness. He was to feel still helpless and
lost in himself, like Tobias, and happy only in that the angel of the
Lord was holding him by the hand. For Piccarda to say that she accepts
the will of God means not that she shares it, but that she submits to
it. She would fain go higher, for her moral nature demands it, as
Dante--incorrigible Platonist--perfectly perceived; but she dare not
mention it, for she knows that God, whose thoughts are not her thoughts,
has forbidden it. The inconstant sphere of the moon does not afford her
a perfect happiness; but, chastened as she is, she says it brings her
happiness enough; all that a broken and a contrite heart has the courage
to hope for.

Such are the conflicting inspirations beneath the lovely harmonies of
the _Paradiso_. It was not the poet’s soul that was in conflict here; it
was only his traditions. The conflicts of his own spirit had been left
behind in other regions; on that threshing-floor of earth which, from
the height of heaven, he looked back upon with wonder,[20] surprised
that men should take so passionately this trouble of ants, which he
judges best, says Dante, who thinks least of it.

In this saying the poet is perhaps conscious of a personal fault; for
Dante was far from perfect, even as a poet. He was too much a man of his
own time, and often wrote with a passion not clarified into judgement.
So much does the purely personal and dramatic interest dominate us as we
read of a Boniface or an Ugolino that we forget that these historical
figures are supposed to have been transmuted into the eternal, and to
have become bits in the mosaic of Platonic essences. Dante himself
almost forgets it. The modern reader, accustomed to insignificant,
wayward fictions, and expecting to be entertained by images without
thoughts, may not notice this lack of perspective, or may rejoice in it.
But, if he is judicious, he will not rejoice in it long. The Bonifaces
and the Ugolinos are not the truly deep, the truly lovely figures of the
_Divine Comedy_. They are, in a relative sense, the vulgarities in it.
We feel too much, in these cases, the heat of the poet’s prejudice or
indignation. He is not just, as he usually is; he does not stop to
think, as he almost always does. He forgets that he is in the eternal
world, and dips for the moment into a brawl in some Italian
market-place, or into the council-chamber of some factious
_condottiere_. The passages--such as those about Boniface and
Ugolino--which Dante writes in this mood are powerful and vehement, but
they are not beautiful. They brand the object of their invective more
than they reveal it; they shock more than they move the reader.

This lower kind of success--for it is still a success in rhetoric--falls
to the poet because he has abandoned the Platonic half of his
inspiration and has become for the moment wholly historical, wholly
Hebraic or Roman. He would have been a far inferior mind if he had
always moved on this level. With the Platonic spheres and the
Aristotelian ethics taken out, his _Comedy_ would not have been divine.
Persons and incidents, to be truly memorable, have to be rendered
significant; they have to be seen in their place in the moral world;
they have to be judged, and judged rightly, in their dignity and value.
A casual personal sentiment towards them, however passionate, cannot
take the place of the sympathetic insight that comprehends and the wide
experience that judges.

Again (what is fundamental with Dante) love, as he feels and renders it,
is not normal or healthy love. It was doubtless real enough, but too
much restrained and expressed too much in fancy; so that when it is
extended Platonically and identified so easily with the grace of God and
with revealed wisdom, we feel the suspicion that if the love in question
had been natural and manly, it would have offered more resistance to so
mystical a transformation. The poet who wishes to pass convincingly from
love to philosophy (and that seems a natural progress for a poet) should
accordingly be a hearty and complete lover--a lover like Goethe and his
Faust--rather than like Plato and Dante. Faust, too, passes from
Gretchen to Helen, and partly back again; and Goethe made even more
passages. Had any of them led to something which not only was loved, but
deserved to be loved, which not only could inspire a whole life, but
which ought to inspire it--then we should have had a genuine progress.

In the next place, Dante talks too much about himself. There is a sense
in which this egotism is a merit, or at least a ground of interest for
us moderns; for egotism is the distinctive attitude of modern philosophy
and of romantic sentiment. In being egotistical Dante was ahead of his
time. His philosophy would have lost an element of depth, and his poetry
an element of pathos, had he not placed himself in the centre of the
stage, and described everything as his experience, or as a revelation
made to himself and made for the sake of his personal salvation. But
Dante’s egotism goes rather further than was requisite, so that the
transcendental insight might not fail in his philosophy. It extended so
far that he cast the shadow of his person not only over the terraces of
purgatory (as he is careful to tell us repeatedly), but over the whole
of Italy and of Europe, which he saw and judged under the evident
influence of private passions and resentments.

Moreover, the personality thrust forward so obtrusively is not in every
respect worthy of contemplation. Dante is very proud and very bitter; at
the same time, he is curiously timid; and one may tire sometimes of his
perpetual tremblings and tears, of his fainting fits and his intricate
doubts. A man who knows he is under the special protection of God, and
of three celestial ladies, and who has such a sage and magician as
Virgil for a guide, might have looked even upon hell with a little more
confidence. How far is this shivering and swooning philosopher from the
laughing courage of Faust, who sees his poodle swell into a monster,
then into a cloud, and finally change into Mephistopheles, and says at
once: _Das also war des Pudels Kern_! Doubtless Dante was mediaeval, and
contrition, humility, and fear of the devil were great virtues in those
days; but the conclusion we must come to is precisely that the virtues
of those days were not the best virtues, and that a poet who represents
that time cannot be a fair nor an ultimate spokesman for humanity.

Perhaps we have now reviewed the chief objects that peopled Dante’s
imagination, the chief objects into the midst of which his poetry
transports us; and if a poet’s genius avails to transport us into his
enchanted world, the character of that world will determine the quality
and dignity of his poetry. Dante transports us, with unmistakable power,
first into the atmosphere of a visionary love; then into the history of
his conversion, affected by this love, or by the divine grace identified
with it. The supreme ideal to which his conversion brought him back is
expressed for him by universal nature, and is embodied among men in the
double institution of a revealed religion and a providential empire. To
trace the fortunes of these institutions, we are transported next into
the panorama of history, in its great crises and its great men; and
particularly into the panorama of Italy in the poet’s time, where we
survey the crimes, the virtues, and the sorrows of those prominent in
furthering or thwarting the ideal of Christendom. These numerous persons
are set before us with the sympathy and brevity of a dramatist; yet it
is no mere carnival, no _danse macabre_: for throughout, above the
confused strife of parties and passions, we hear the steady voice, the
implacable sentence, of the prophet that judges them.

Thus Dante, gifted with the tenderest sense of colour, and the firmest
art of design, has put his whole world into his canvas. Seen there, that
world becomes complete, clear, beautiful, and tragic. It is vivid and
truthful in its detail, sublime in its march and in its harmony. This is
not poetry where the parts are better than the whole. Here, as in some
great symphony, everything is cumulative: the movements conspire, the
tension grows, the volume redoubles, the keen melody soars higher and
higher; and it all ends, not with a bang, not with some casual incident,
but in sustained reflection, in the sense that it has not ended, but
remains by us in its totality, a revelation and a resource for ever. It
has taught us to love and to renounce, to judge and to worship. What
more could a poet do? Dante poetized all life and nature as he found
them. His imagination dominated and focused the whole world. He thereby
touched the ultimate goal to which a poet can aspire; he set the
standard for all possible performance, and became the type of a supreme
poet. This is not to say that he is the “greatest” of poets. The
relative merit of poets is a barren thing to wrangle about. The question
can always be opened anew, when a critic appears with a fresh
temperament or a new criterion. Even less need we say that no greater
poet can ever arise; we may be confident of the opposite. But Dante
gives a successful example of the _highest species_ of poetry. His
poetry covers the whole field from which poetry may be fetched, and to
which poetry may be applied, from the inmost recesses of the heart to
the uttermost bounds of nature and of destiny. If to give imaginative
value to something is the minimum task of a poet, to give imaginative
value to all things, and to the system which things compose, is
evidently his greatest task.

Dante fulfilled this task, of course under special conditions and
limitations, personal and social; but he fulfilled it, and he thereby
fulfilled the conditions of supreme poetry. Even Homer, as we are
beginning to perceive nowadays, suffered from a certain conventionality
and one-sidedness. There was much in the life and religion of his time
that his art ignored. It was a flattering, a euphemistic art; it had a
sort of pervasive blandness, like that which we now associate with a
fashionable sermon. It was poetry addressed to the ruling caste in the
state, to the conquerors; and it spread an intentional glamour over
their past brutalities and present self-deceptions. No such partiality
in Dante; he paints what he hates as frankly as what he loves, and in
all things he is complete and sincere. If any similar adequacy is
attained again by any poet, it will not be, presumably, by a poet of the
supernatural. Henceforth, for any wide and honest imagination, the
supernatural must figure as an idea in the human mind,--a part of the
natural. To conceive it otherwise would be to fall short of the insight
of this age, not to express or to complete it. Dante, however, for this
very reason, may be expected to remain the supreme poet of the
supernatural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato, of that phase of
thought and feeling in which the supernatural seems to be the key to
nature and to happiness. This is the hypothesis on which, as yet, moral
unity has been best attained in this world. Here, then, we have the most
complete idealization and comprehension of things achieved by mankind
hitherto. Dante is the type of a consummate poet.


       *       *       *       *       *

[1] Plato, _Phaedo_,97B-99C, Jowett’s translation. I have changed the
rendering of _νοῡς_ from “mind” to “reason.”

[2] “Est pro fundamento tenenda veritas historiae et desuper spirituales
expositiones fabricandae.” Thomas Aquinas, _Summa Theologiae_, i.
quaest. 102, conclusio.

[3] _Paradiso_, xv. 97, 99:

     Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica...
       Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.


[4] Ibid., 100-26:

     Non avea catenella, non corona,
       Non donne contigiate, non cintura
       Che fosse a veder pin che la persona.
     Non faceva nascendo ancor paura
       La figlia al padre, chè il tempo e la dote
       Non fuggan quinci e quindi la misura.
     Non avea case di famiglia vote;
       Non v’era giunto ancor Sardanapalo
       A mostrar ciò che in camera si puote....
     O fortunate! Ciascuna era certa
       Delia sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla
       Era per Francia nel letto deserta.
     L’ una vegghiava a studio della culla,
       E consolando usava l’ idioma
       Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla;
     L’ altra traendo alia rocca la chioma,
       Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
       De’ Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.


[5] _Paradiso_, xxxiii. 143-45:

           Volgeva il mio disiro e il _velle,_
       Si come rota ch’ egualmente è mossa,
     L’ amor che move il sole e l’ altre stelle.


[6] _Vita Nuova_, § 22: Secondo l’ usanza della sopradetta cittade,
donne con donne, e uomini con uomini si adunino a cotale tristizia;
molte donne s’ adunaro colà, ove questa Beatrice piangea pietosamente,
&c.

Also, _Purgatorio_, xxxi. 50, 51:

                Le belle membra in ch’ io
     Rinchiusa fui, e sono in terra sparte.


[7] _Vita Nuova_,§ v.

[8] _Schermo della veritade_,--natural philosophy.

[9] _Convito_, II. cap. 16: _Faccia che gli occhi d’ esta Donna miri_;
gli occhi di questa Donna sono le sue _dimostrazioni_, le quali dritte
negli occhi dello intelletto inhamorano l’ anima, libera nelle
condizioni. Oh dolcissimi ed ineffabili sembianti, e rubatori subitani
della mente umana, che nelle dimostrazioni negli occhi della Filosofia
apparite, quando essa alli suoi drudi ragiona! Veramente in voi è la
salute, per la quale si fa beato chi vi guarda, e salvo dalla morte
della ignoranza e delli vizi.... E cosi, in fine di questo secondo
Trattato, dico e affermo che la Donna, di cui io innamorai appresso lo
primo amore, fu la bellissima e onestissima figlia dello Imperadore
dell’ universo, alla quale Pittagora pose nome _Filosofia_.

[10] _Purgatorio_, xvii. 106-11:

     Or perchè mai non può dalla salute
       Amor del suo suggetto volger viso,
       Dall’ odio proprio son le cose tute:
     E perchè intender non si può diviso,
       E per sè stante, alcuno esser dal primo,
       Da quello odiare ogni affetto è deciso.


[11] _Inferno_, iii. 64-66:

     Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi,
       Erano ignudi e stimolati molto
       Da mosconi e da vespe ch’ erano ivi.


[12] _Ibid._, iv. 41, 42:

     Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi
     Che senza speme vivemo in disio.

Cf. _Purgatorio_, iii. 37-45, where Virgil says:

     “State contenti, umana gente, al _quia_;
       Chè se potuto aveste veder tutto,
       Mestier non era partorir Maria;
     E disiar vedeste senza frutto
       Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato,
       Ch’eternalmente è dato lor per lutto.
     Io dico d’Aristotele e di Plato,
       E di molti altri.” E qui chinò la fronte;
       E più non disse, e rimase turbato.


[13] _Inferno_, ix. 106-33, and x.

[14] _Ibid_., xxviii.

[15] _Inferno_, iii. 124-26:

     E pronti sono a trapassar lo rio,
       Chè la divina giustizia gli sprona
       Si che la tema si volge in disio.


[16] _Purgatorio_, xxi. 61-69:

     Della mondizia sol voler fa prova,
       Che, tutta libera a mutar convento,
       L’alma sorprende, e di voler le giova....
     Ed io che son giaciuto a questa doglia
       Cinquecento anni e più, pur mo sentii
       Libera volontà di miglior soglia.


[17] _Inferno_, xiv. 63-66:

       “O Capaneo, in ciò che non s’ammorza
     La tua superbia, se’ tu più punito:
       Nullo martirio, fuor che la tua rabbia,
       Sarebbe al tuo furor dolor compito.”


[18] Alfred de Musset, _Poésies Nouvelles, Souvenir_:

     Dante, pourquoi dis-tu qu’il n’est pire misère
     Qu’un souvenir heureux dans les jours de douleur?
     Quel chagrin t’a dicté cette parole amère,
            Cette offense au malheur?

      ... Ce blasphème vanté ne vient pas de ton cœur.
     Un souvenir heureux est peut-être sur terre
            Plus vrai que le bonheur....

     Et c’est à ta Françoise, à ton ange de gloire,
     Que tu pouvais donner ces mots à prononcer,
     Elle qui s’interrompt, pour conter son histoire,
            D’un éternel baiser!


[19] _Paradiso_, iii. 73-90:

     “Se disiassimo esser più superne,
       Foran discordi li nostri disiri
       Dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne,...
     E la sua volontate è nostra pace;
       Ella è quel mare al qual tutto si move
       Ciò ch’ella crea, e che natura face.”
     Chiaro mi fu allor com’ ogni dove
       In cielo è Paradiso, e sì la grazia
       Del sommo ben d’un modo non vi piove.


[20] _Paradiso_, xxii. 133-39:

     Col viso ritornai per tutte e quante
     Le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
     Tal, ch’io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante;
     E quel consiglio per migliore approbo
     Che l’ha per meno; e chi ad altro pensa
     Chiamar si puote veramente probo.





IV.


GOETHE’S FAUST



In approaching the third of our philosophical poets, there is a scruple
that may cross the mind. Lucretius was undoubtedly a philosophical poet;
his whole poem is devoted to expounding and defending a system of
philosophy. In Dante the case is almost as plain. The _Divine Comedy_ is
a moral and personal fable; yet not only are many passages explicitly
philosophical, but the whole is inspired and controlled by the most
definite of religious systems and of moral codes. Dante, too, is
unmistakably a philosophical poet. But was Goethe a philosopher? And is
_Faust_ a philosophical poem?

If we say so, it must be by giving a certain latitude to our terms.
Goethe was the wisest of mankind; too wise, perhaps, to be a philosopher
in the technical sense, or to try to harness this wild world in a
brain-spun terminology. It is true that he was all his life a follower
of Spinoza, and that he may be termed, without hesitation, a naturalist
in philosophy and a pantheist. His adherence to the general attitude of
Spinoza, however, did not exclude a great plasticity and freedom in his
own views, even on the most fundamental points. Thus Goethe did not
admit the mechanical interpretation of nature advocated by Spinoza. He
also assigned, at least to privileged souls, like his own, a more
personal sort of immortality than Spinoza allowed. Moreover, he
harboured a generous sympathy with the dramatic explanations of nature
and history current in the Germany of his day. Yet such transcendental
idealism, making the world the expression of a spiritual endeavour, was
a total reversal of that conviction, so profound in Spinoza, that all
moral energies are resident in particular creatures, themselves sparks
in an absolutely infinite and purposeless world. In a word, Goethe was
not a systematic philosopher. His feeling for the march of things and
for the significance of great personages and great ideas was indeed
philosophical, although more romantic than scientific. His thoughts upon
life were fresh and miscellaneous. They voiced the genius and learning
of his age. They did not express a firm personal attitude, radical and
unified, and transmissible to other times and persons. For philosophers,
after all, have this advantage over men of letters, that their minds,
being more organic, can more easily propagate themselves. They scatter
less influence, but more seeds.

If from Goethe we turn to _Faust_--and it is as the author of _Faust_
only that we shall consider him--the situation is not less ambiguous. In
the play, as the young Goethe first wrote it, philosophy appeared in the
first line,--_Hab nun ach die Philosophey_; but it appeared there, and
throughout the piece, merely as a human experience, a passion or an
illusion, a fund of images or an ambitious art. Later, it is true, under
the spell of fashion and of Schiller, Goethe surrounded his original
scenes with others, like the prologue in heaven, or the apotheosis of
Faust, in which a philosophy of life was indicated; namely, that he who
strives strays, yet in that straying finds his salvation. This idea left
standing all that satirical and Mephistophelian wisdom with which the
whole poem abounds, the later parts no less than the earlier. Frankly,
it was a moral that adorned the tale, without having been the seed of
it, and without even expressing fairly the spirit which it breathes.
_Faust_ remained an essentially romantic poem, written to give vent to a
pregnant and vivid genius, to touch the heart, to bewilder the mind with
a carnival of images, to amuse, to thrill, to humanize; and, if we must
speak of philosophy, there were many express maxims in the poem, and
many insights, half betrayed, that exceeded in philosophic value the
belated and official moral which the author affixed to it, and which he
himself warned us not to take too seriously.[1]

_Faust_ is, then, no philosophical poem, after an open or deliberate
fashion; and yet it offers a solution to the moral problem of existence
as truly as do the poems of Lucretius and Dante. Heard philosophies are
sweet, but those unheard may be sweeter. They may be more unmixed and
more profound for being adopted unconsciously, for being lived rather
than taught. This is not merely to say what might be said of every work
of art and of every natural object, that it could be made the
starting-point for a chain of inferences that should reveal the whole
universe, like the flower in the crannied wall. It is to say, rather,
that the vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it
dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the
best-chosen words.

Now _Faust_ is the foam on the top of two great waves of human
aspiration, merging and heaping themselves up together,--the wave of
romanticism rising from the depths of northern traditions and genius,
and the wave of a new paganism coming from Greece over Italy. These are
not philosophies to be read into _Faust_ by the critic; they are
passions seething in the drama. It is the drama of a philosophical
adventure; a rebellion against convention; a flight to nature, to
tenderness, to beauty; and then a return to convention again, with a
feeling that nature, tenderness, and beauty, unless found there, will
not be found at all. Goethe never depicts, as Dante does, the object his
hero is pursuing; he is satisfied with depicting the pursuit. Like
Lessing, in his famous apologue, he prefers the pursuit of the ideal to
the ideal itself; perhaps, as in the case of Lessing, because the hope
of realizing the ideal, and the interest in realizing it, were beginning
to forsake him.

The case is somewhat as that of Dante would have been if, instead of
recognizing and loving Beatrice at first sight and rising into a vision
of the eternal world, ready-made and perfectly ordered, Dante had passed
from love to love, from _donna gentile_ to _donna gentile_, always
longing for the eyes of Beatrice without ever meeting them. The _Divine
Comedy_ would then have been only human, yet it might have suggested and
required the very consummation that the _Divine Comedy_ depicts; and
without expressing this consummation, our human comedy might have
furnished materials and momentum for it, such that, if ever that
consummation came to be expressed, it would be more deeply felt and more
adequately understood. Dante gives us a philosophical goal, and we have
to recall and retrace the journey; Goethe gives us a philosophic
journey, and we have to divine the goal.

Goethe is a romantic poet; he is a novelist in verse. He is a
philosopher of experience as it comes to the individual; the philosopher
of life, as action, memory, or soliloquy may put life before each of us
in turn. Now the zest of romanticism consists in taking what you know
is an independent and ancient world as if it were material for your
private emotions. The savage or the animal, who should not be aware of
nature or history at all, could not be romantic about them, nor about
himself. He would be blandly idiotic, and take everything quite
unsuspectingly for what it was in him. The romanticist, then, should be
a civilized man, so that his primitiveness and egotism may have
something paradoxical and conscious about them; and so that his life may
contain a rich experience, and his reflection may play with all
varieties of sentiment and thought. At the same time, in his inmost
genius, he should be a barbarian, a child, a transcendentalist, so that
his life may seem to him absolutely fresh, self-determined, unforeseen,
and unforeseeable. It is part of his inspiration to believe that he
creates a new heaven and a new earth with each revolution in his moods
or in his purposes. He ignores, or seeks to ignore, all the conditions
of life, until perhaps by living he personally discovers them.[2] Like
Faust, he flouts science, and is minded to make trial of magic, which
renders a man’s will master of the universe in which he seems to live.
He disowns all authority, save that mysteriously exercised over him by
his deep faith in himself. He is always honest and brave; but he is
always different, and absolves himself from his past as soon as he has
outgrown or forgotten it. He is inclined to be wayward and foolhardy,
justifying himself on the ground that all experience is interesting,
that the springs of it are inexhaustible and always pure, and that the
future of his soul is infinite. In the romantic hero the civilized man
and the barbarian must be combined; he should be the heir to all
civilization, and, nevertheless, he should take life arrogantly and
egotistically, as if it were an absolute personal experiment.

This singular combination was strikingly exemplified in Doctor Johannes
Faustus, a figure half historical, half legendary, familiar to Goethe in
his boyhood in puppet-shows and chapbooks. An adventurer in the romantic
as well as in the vulgar sense of the word, somewhat like Paracelsus or
Giordano Bruno, Doctor Faustus had felt the mystery of nature, had
scorned authority, had credited magic, had lived by imposture, and had
fled from the police. His blasphemous boasts and rascally conduct,
together with his magic arts, had made him even in his lifetime a
scandalous and interesting personage. He was scarcely dead when legends
gathered about his name. It was published abroad that he had sold his
soul to the devil, in exchange for twenty-four years of wild pleasures
upon earth.

This legend purported to offer a terrible and edifying example, a
warning to all Christians to avoid the snares of science, of pleasure,
and of ambition. These things had sent Doctor Faustus into hell-fire;
his corpse, found face downward, could not be turned over upon its back.
Nevertheless, we may suspect that even at the beginning people
recognized in Doctor Faustus a braver brother, a somewhat enviable
reprobate who had dared to relish the good things of this life above the
sad joys vaguely promised for the other. All that the Renaissance valued
was here represented as in the devil’s gift; and the man in the street
might well doubt whether it was religion or worldly life that was
thereby made the more unlovely. Doubtless the Lutheran authors of the
first chapbook felt, and felt rightly, that those fine things which
tempted Faustus were unevangelical, pagan, and popish; yet they could
not cease altogether to admire and even to covet them, especially when
the first ardours of the Old-Christian revival had had time to cool.

Marlowe, who wrote only a few years later, made a beginning in the
rehabilitation of the hero. His Faustus is still damned, but he is
transformed into the sort of personage that Aristotle approves of for
the hero of tragedy, essentially human and noble, but led astray by some
excusable vice or error. Marlowe’s public would see in Doctor Faustus a
man and a Christian like themselves, carried a bit too far by ambition
and the love of pleasure. He is no radical unbeliever, no natural mate
for the devil, conscienceless and heathen, like the typical villain of
the Renaissance. On the contrary, he has become a good Protestant, and
holds manfully to all those parts of the creed which express his
spontaneous affections. A good angel is often overheard whispering in
his ear; and if the bad angel finally prevails, it is in spite of
continual remorse and hesitation on the Doctor’s part. This excellent
Faustus is damned by accident or by predestination; he is brow-beaten by
the devil and forbidden to repent when he has really repented. The
terror of the conclusion is thereby heightened; we see an essentially
good man, because in a moment of infatuation he had signed away his
soul, driven against his will to despair and damnation. The alternative
of a happy solution lies almost at hand; and it is only a lingering
taste for the lurid and the horrible, ingrained in this sort of
melodrama, that sends him shrieking to hell.

What makes Marlowe’s conclusion the more violent and the more
unphilosophical is the fact that, to any one not dominated by
convention, the good angel, in the dialogue, seems to have so much the
worse of the argument. All he has to offer is sour admonition and
external warnings:

     _O Faustus, lay that damned book aside,_
     _And gaze not on it lest it tempt thy soul,_
     _And heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head._
     _Read, read, the Scriptures; that is blasphemy...._
     _Sweet Faustus, think of heaven, and heavenly things._

To which the evil angel replies:

     _No, Faustus, think of honour and of wealth._

And in another place:

     _Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art,_
     _Wherein all nature’s treasure is contained._
     _Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,_
     _Lord and commander of these elements._

There can be no doubt that the devil here represents the natural ideal
of Faustus, or of any child of the Renaissance; he appeals to the vague
but healthy ambitions of a young soul, that would make trial of the
world. In other words, this devil represents the true good, and it is no
wonder if the honest Faustus cannot resist his suggestions. We like him
for his love of life, for his trust in nature, for his enthusiasm for
beauty. He speaks for us all when he cries:

     _Was this the face that launched a thousand ships_
     _And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?_

Even his irreverent pranks, being directed against the pope, endear him
the more to an anti-clerical public; and he appeals to courtiers and
cavaliers by his lofty poetical scorn for such crabbed professions as
the law, medicine, or theology. In a word, Marlowe’s Faustus is a martyr
to everything that the Renaissance prized,--power, curious knowledge,
enterprise, wealth, and beauty.

How thoroughly Marlowe and Goethe are on the way towards reversing the
Christian philosophy of life may be seen if we compare _Faust_ for a
moment (as, in other respects, has often been done) with _The
Wonder-working Magician_ of Calderon. This earlier hero, St. Cyprian of
Antioch, is like Faust in being a scholar, signing away his soul to the
devil, practising magic, embracing the ghost of beauty, and being
ultimately saved. Here the analogy ends. Cyprian, far from being
disgusted with all theory, and particularly with theology, is a pagan
philosopher eagerly seeking God, and working his way, with full faith in
his method, toward Christian orthodoxy. He floors the devil in
scholastic argument about the unity of God, his power, wisdom, and
goodness. He falls in love, and sells his soul merely in the hope of
satisfying his passion. He studies magic chiefly for the same reason;
but magic cannot overrule the free-will of the Christian lady he loves
(a modern and very Spanish one, though supposed to adorn ancient
Antioch). The devil can supply only a false phantasm of her person, and
as Cyprian approaches her and lifts her veil, he finds a hideous
death’s-head beneath; for God can work miracles to cap those of any
magician, and can beat the devil at his own game. Thunderstruck at this
portent, Cyprian becomes a Christian. Half-naked, ecstatic, taken for a
madman, he bears witness loudly and persistently to the power, wisdom,
and goodness of the one true God; and, since the persecution of Decius
is then going on, he is hurried away to martyrdom. His lady, sentenced
also for the same cause, encourages him by her heroic attitude and
words. Their earthly passion is dead; but their souls are united in
death

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