Three Philosophical Poets

THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS
LONDON : GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
THREE
PHILOSOPHICAL POETS
LUCRETIUS, DANTE, AND GOETHE
BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA
CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1947
COPYRIGHT, 1810, BT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
COPYRIGHT RENEWED, 1938, BY GEORGE SANTAYANA
EIGHTH IMPRESSION
PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRINTING OFFICE

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A.
PREFACE
T H E 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. I t contains the impressions of an ama-
teur, the appreciations of an ordinary reader, con-
cerning 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 Lucre-
tius ; 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 fa-
miliar works, or in well-known commentaries upon
them. My excuse for writing about them, notwith-
standing, 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
vi PREFACE
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
ι
INTRODUCTION Page 3
Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe sum up the chief phases of European
philosophy,—naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism : Ideal re-
lation between philosophy and poetry.
II
LUCRETIUS Page 19
Development of Greek cosmology : Democritus : Epicurean moral senti-
ment : 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 Lu-
cretian 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.
Ill
DANTE Pag» 73
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 cosmo-
graphy : 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.
Vili CONTENTS
IV
GOETHE'S FAUST Page 130
The romantic spirit : The ideals of the Renaissance : Expression of
both in the legendary Faust : Marlowe's version : Tendency to vindicate
Faust : Contrast with Calderón's " Wonder-working Magician" : The
original Faust of Goethe, — universal ambition atid eternal dissatisfac-
tion : 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 sym-
bolical : Moral of the whole.
V
CONCLUSION Page 203
Comparison of the three poets : Their relative rank : Ideal of a philo-
sophx: or comprehensive poet : Untried possibilities of art.
INTRODUCTION
I
INTRODUCTION
T H E 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. W e can neither take away nor add to their past
value or inherent dignity. I t 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 peren-
nial humanity living and capable of assimilation.
Even native classics have to be reapprehended by
every reader. I t 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 appre-
ciation, 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
4 THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS
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 discrimi-
nating 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 vague-
ness 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 defi-
nition 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 to-
gether they sum up all European philosophy. Lu-
cretius adopts the most radical and the most correct
of those cosmological systems which the genius of
early Greece had devised. H e sees the world to be
one great edifice, one great machine, all its parts re-
acting 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. I t shows how
they are compounded out of elements, and how
these elements, which he thinks are atoms in per-
petual motion, are being constantly redistributed,
INTRODUCTION 5
so that old things perish and new things arise. In-
to 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 ad-
mire, 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,—ma-
terialism in natural science, humanism in ethics.
Such was the gist of all Greek philosophy before So-
crates, of that philosophy which was truly Hellenic
and corresponded with the movement which pro-
duced 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 phi-
losophy of the Renaissance, the reassertion of science
and liberty in the modern world, by Bacon, by Spi-
noza, by the whole contemporary school that looks
to science for its view of the facts, and to the happi-
ness of men on earth for its ideal. This system is
called naturalism ; and of this Lucretius is the un-
rivalled poet.
Skip a thousand years and more, and a contrast-
ing 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 sub-
ject 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 as-
cending 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 des-
tiny; his own history and that of the world are trans-
figured before him and, without ceasing to be sad,
become beautiful. The raptures of a perfect confor-
mity with the will of God, and of union with Him,
overtake him in his prayers. This is supernatural-
ism, a system represented in Christendom chiefly by
the Catholic Church, but adopted also by the later
pagans, and widespread in Asia from remote anti-
quity down to the present time. Little as the mo-
mentary 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 con-
INTRODUCTION 7
demned 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 be-
come Protestants, or protesters against the Roman
world. An infinite fountain of life seems to be un-
locked within their bosom. They turn successively
to the Bible, to learning, to patriotism, to industry,
for new objects to love and fresh worlds to con-
quer ; 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 immor-
tal in its apparent waywardness, is their inmost self.
I t 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 for-
gotten; the spirit that feigned and discarded them
remains always strong and undefiled; it aches for
new conquests over new fictions. This is romanti-
cism. I t 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 them-
selves we find passages where nothing is poetical ex-
cept the metre, or some incidental ornament. In such
passages the form of poetry is thrown over the sub-
stance of prose, as Lucretius himself confesses where
he says: "As when physicians would contrive to ad-
minister loathsome wormwood to little boys they
first moisten the rim of the cup round about with
sweet and golden honey, that the children's unsus-
pecting youth may be beguiled—to the lips, but no
further—while they drink down the bitter potion,
INTRODUCTION 9
by deception not betrayed, but rather by that strat-
agem made whole and restored ; . . . so I have willed
to set forth our doctrine before thee in sweet-sound-
ing 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 unde-
filed 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
1 Lucretius, I. 936-47 :
Veluti pueris absinthia tetra medentes
Cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore.
Ut puerorum aetas impróvida 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 nostrani,
Et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle.
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
b e a u t y , . . . 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." 1
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, sym-
pathetic 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
1 Lucretius, i. 9-22-34, 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 Íntegros 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.
INTRODUCTION 11
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 prac-
tised 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 philoso-
pher, 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 in-
teresting image. H e renders in that way some mo-
ment of comparatively high tension, of comparatively
keen sentiment. But at the next moment the ten-
sion is relaxed, the sentiment has faded, and what
succeeds is usually incongruous with what went be-
fore, or at least inferior. The thought drifts away
from what it had started to be. I t 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 in-
termittent in the writings of poets, that only the
fleeting moment, the mood, the episode, can be rap-
turously 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 per-
son 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 mo-
mentary intensity, if it can be expressed at all, com-
ports 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. I t is
always the fleeting moment in which we live. To
INTRODUCTION 13
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. W h a t 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 expe-
rience? 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 preg-
nant 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 phi-
losopher's vision of the world, and it will grow ima-
ginative 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
may be 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-wind-
ed or incidental, but, on the contrary, for being com-
prehensive 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, deep-
er 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 rea-
INTRODUCTION 15
soning in the void. Three historical illustrations will
prove my point more clearly and more conclusively.
LUCRETIUS
II
LUCRETIUS
THERE is perhaps no important poem the
antecedents of which can be traced so exhaus-
tively 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 oc-
curred 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 re-
vealed 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 in-
spiration should have passed into mania, and that he
should have taken his own life. But the untrust-
worthy 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, proclaim-
ing the public truth. To reach this no doubt requires
a peculiar genius which is called intelligence; for in-
telligence 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 pos-
terity, not the shabby incidents that preceded that
vision in his own person. These incidents, even if
they were by chance interesting, could not be re-
peated 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 ourseives.
Since Lucretius is thus identical for us with his
LUCRETIUS 21
poem, and is lost in his philosophy, the antecedents
of Lucretius are simply the stages by which his con-
ception 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 con-
ception of things is a great work of imagination,—
greater, I think, than any dramatic or moral mytho-
logy: it is a conception fit to inspire great poetry,
and in the end, perhaps, it will prove the only con-
ception able to inspire it.
W e 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 be-
fore 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, discov-
ering 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.
I t 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 obser-
vation of things singly, and who first ventured to
speak of "the world." To do so is to set the pro-
blem 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 feel-
ing 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 re-
markably 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 con-
LUCRETIUS 23
vinced of that truth, could lament that there was
nothing new under the sun.
This double experience of mutation and recur-
rence, an experience at once sentimental and scien-
tific, soon brought with it a very great thought, per-
haps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit
upon, and which was the chief inspiration of Lu-
cretius. I t is that all we observe about us, and our-
selves also, may be so many passing forms of a per-
manent substance. This substance, while remaining
the same in quantity and in inward quality, is con-
stantly 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, how-
ever, eternally fertile, and destined to fall perpetu-
ally 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 muta-
tion, to feel the vanity of life, has always been the
beginning of seriousness. I t 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 par-
ticular 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 mel-
ancholy 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 domi-
LUCRETIUS 25
nate, foretell, and transform this changing show with
a virile, practical intelligence. The man who discov-
ers the secret springs of appearances opens to con-
templation a second positive world, the workshop
and busy depths of nature, where a prodigious mech-
anism is continually supporting our life, and making
ready for it from afar by the most exquisite adjust-
ments. The march of this mechanism, while it pro-
duces 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 hu-
man things. I t 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.
I t 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 an-
swer he accepted from Epicurus, his master in every-
thing, 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 appar-
ent 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 con-
stantly moving. Every appearance, however fleeting,
corresponded to a precise configuration of substance ;
LUCRETIUS 27
it arose with that configuration and perished with
it. This substance, accordingly, was physical, not,
metaphysical. It was no dialectical term, but a sci-
entific anticipation, a prophecy as to what an obser-
ver 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 con-
stituted the sundry objects in nature. Motion was
not, as the vulgar (and Aristotle) supposed, unna-
tural, and produced magically by some moral cause ;
it had been eternal and was native to the atoms. On
striking, they rebounded; and the mechanical cur-
rents 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 sys-
tem 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 dis-
carding offinalcauses 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
1 Lucretius, iv. 834, 833 :
Nil. . . natumst in corpore, ut uti
Possemus, sed quod natumst id procréât usum.
»Ibid., ι. 1115-18:
Alid ex alio clarescet, nec tibi caeca
Nox iter eripiet, quin ultima naturai
Pervideas : ita res accendent lumina rebus.
LUCRETIUS 29
considered his fate and, by knowing it, raised him-
self 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 pur-
sue 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 dis-
appoint you. It was important not to be a fool, but
it was very hard.
The system of Democritus was adopted by Epi-
curus, but not because Epicurus had any keenness of
scientific vision. On the contrary, Epicurus, the Her-
bert Spencer of antiquity, was in his natural philo-
sophy an encyclopaedia of second-hand knowledge.
Prolix and minute, vague and inconsistent, he ga-
thered 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 neces-
sary 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 usu-
ally 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, re-
tained 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. Re-
tired in his private garden, with a few friends and
disciples, he sought the ways of peace; he lived ab-
stemiously; he spoke gently; he gave alms to the
poor; he preached against wealth, against ambition,
against passion. H e 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 dis-
quieting 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 dis-
torted 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" volup-
tuous 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 S t a t -
ues, when an unhappy man gazed at them, reminded
him of happiness ; he was refreshed and weaned for a
LUCRETIUS 31
moment from the senseless tumult of human affairs.
From those groves and hallowed sanctuaries the phi-
losopher 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 in-
terest so monkish a nature, yet science might be use-
ful in buttressing the faith, or in removing objec-
tions to it. Epicurus therefore departed from the
reserve of Socrates, and looked for a natural phi-
losophy that might support his ethics. Of all the sys-
tems extant—and they were legion—he found that
of Democritus the most helpful and edifying. Bet-
ter than any other it would persuade men to re-
nounce 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 ad-
mitted, that Fate might be removed. Fate was a ter-
rifying notion. It was spoken of by the people with
superstitious unction. Chance was something hum-
bler, 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 re-
main unpredictable, and free-will might be saved.
Therefore, Epicurus decreed that the atoms de-
flected, and fantastic arguments were added to show
that this intrusion of chance would aid in the or-
ganization 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 philo-
sophy, carries with it no commandments and no ad-
vice. 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 con-
science, of his own ; but his precepts and policy will
express, not the logical implications of his science,
but his human instincts, as inheritance and experi-
ence may have shaped them. Any system of ethics
might accordingly coexist with materialism; for if
materialism declares certain things (like immbrtality)
to be impossible, it cannot declare them to be un-
desirable. 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
LUCRETIUS 33
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 he-
donism, 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 natural-
ist 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 some-
thing. 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 com-
ponents 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. W e 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.
LUCRETIUS 35
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 phi-
losophy 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. I t therefore attaches all
those sights and sounds to a hidden background
that connects and explains them. So understood, na-
ture 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 aban-
dons 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 supposi-
tion,—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. W e could still conceive a
world composed as he describes. Fancy what emo-
tions those who lived in such a world would have felt
on the day when a Democritus or a Lucretius re-
vealed to them their actual situation. How great the
LUCRETIUS 37
blindness or the madness dissipated, and how won-
derful 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 play-
ing about those constellations. Surely that universe,
for those who lived in it, would have had its poetry.
I t would have been the poetry of naturalism. Lucre-
tius, 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. H e 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 su-
perstition, 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. H e was him-
self combative and distracted enough—as it is often
our troubles, more than our attainments, that deter-
mine our ideals. Yet in heralding the advent of hu-
man 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 com-
pose 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 atmos-
phere, 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 inspira-
tion, 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 distinc-
tion 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
LUCRETIUS 39
1
life by the death of some other thing; so that the de-
structive movement creates and the creative move-
ment 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 me-
chanical 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 in-
teresting 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.2
It needed but a slight concession to traditional
rhetoric in order to exchange these names, Love and
1
Lucretius, x. 264, 265 :
Alid ex alio reficit natura, nec ullam
Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adiuta aliena.
* An excellent expression of this view is put by Plato into the mouth of the
physician Eryximachus in the Symposium, pp. 186-88.
Strife, which designated divine powers in Empedo-
cles, into the names of Venus and Mars, which desig-
nated 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 unprofit-
able raging. At such times it is spring on earth ; the
storms recede (I paraphrase the opening passage),1
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.
1
Lucretius, ι. 1-13 :
jEneadum 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 tuura : tibi suaves daedala tellus
Submittit flores ; tibi rident aequora ponti,
Placatumque nitet diffuso Iumine 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.
LUCRETIUS 41
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 Ro-
mans. 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. 1
1 Lucretius, i. 24, 28-30, 41-43, 140-44:
Te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse. . . .
Quo majris aeternura da dictis, diva, leporem :
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 repre-
senting 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 dur-
able 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
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 tarnen, 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.
LUCRETIUS 43
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, reassert-
ing 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. In-
stinctively into her bosom the God of W a r 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 mod-
ern 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 pro-
duct or incidental aspect, involved in the equilibra-
tion of matter; as the throw of sixes is an eventum,
a redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, occa-
sionally 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 hon-
est, is possessed by a profound melancholy. Vigorous
and throbbing as are his pictures of spring, of love,
of ambition, of budding culture, of intellectual vic-
tory, they pale before the vivid strokes with which
he paints the approach of death—fatigue of the will,
lassitude in pleasure, corruption and disintegration
LUCRETIUS 45
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 flaw. Nothing comes out of nothing, no-
thing falls back into nothing, if we consider sub-
stance ; 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 impres-
sion 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 per-
sons, and nations, and worlds.1
In treating of the soul and of immortality Lucre-
tius 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 pun-
ishments, and so to liberate the mind for the calm
and tepid enjoyment of this world. There is sorae-
» Lucretius, π. 1139-4.1, 1148-49, 1164-74:
Omnia debet enira 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.
thing to be gained in this direction, undoubtedly,
especially if tales about divine vengeance to come
are used to sanction irrational practices, and to pre-
vent poor people from improving their lot. A t 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 ob-
serve that the punishments which religious fables
threaten the dead with are, for the most part, sym-
bols 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 cha-
racteristic 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. H e 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. H e 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,
LUCRETIUS 47
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. W e 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 senti-
ments 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 Booh 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 possibili-

ties should fall across this sunny retreat ? W h a t if
after death we should awake in a world to which the
atomic philosophy might not in the least apply ? Ob-
serve 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 Epi-
curus 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 sugges-
tion 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 muf-
fled pleasures of the wise man, as Epicurus conceived
him, were really a provocation to supernaturalism.
They left a great void; and before long supernatu-
ralism— 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. W i t h such
tendencies already afoot as the myths and dogmas
of Plato had betrayed, it was imperative for Epi-
curus 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. W e live after Des-
cartes, 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 dif-
ferent 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
LUCRETIUS 49
that the soul must be material. For how are we to
conceive that preexisting consciousness should gov-
ern 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, resi-
dent in all living seeds, breathed in abundantly dur-
ing 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 im-
possible. 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 Lucre-
tius urges about the divisibility of the soul, its dif-
fused bodily seat, and the perils it would meet out-
side 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 experi-
ence 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 in-
stinctive 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
LUCRETIUS 51
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 no-
where; 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 re-
calcitrant 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 some-
thing 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 ra-
tional, or founded on experience of life. It is some-
thing antecedent and spontaneous. I t is that Venus
Genetrix which covers the earth with its flora and
fauna. I t 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. I t 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, ex-
press some particular form of the love of life; whence
it is impossible to conclude that death is in no de-
gree evil and not at all to be feared. For what is
most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the
LUCRETIUS 53
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 Ufe and its
various undertakings. Such a present will cannot be
argued away, but it may be weakened by contra-
dictions arising within it, by the irony of experience,
or by ascetic discipline. To introduce ascetic disci-
pline, 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 Lucre-
tius, comes chiefly from the picture it draws of the
madness of life. His philosophy deprecates covetous-
ness, 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 enthusi-
asm on Epicurus, who brought this deliverance and
was the saviour of mankind. Yet this was only a be-
ginning of salvation, and the same principles carried
further would have delivered us from the Epicurean
life and what it retained that was Greek and natural-
istic: science, friendship, and the healthy pleasures
of the body. Had it renounced these things also, Epi-
cureanism 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 sub-
ject. Ancient culture was rhetorical. I t 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 can-
not live for what they cannot witness. What does it
matter to you, we may say in debate, what hap-
pened 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
LUCRETIUS 55
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. H e forgets himself. H e
sees the whole universe spread out in its true move-
ment 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 inter-
ests. On the contrary, just in proportion as we de-
spise 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 Lucre-
tius and every philosophical poet, we range over all
time and all existence, we shall forget our own per-
sons, as he did, and even wish them to be forgotten,
if only the things we care for may subsist or arise.
H e 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 Lucre-
tius, 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 pre-

LUCRETIUS 57
serve the one which etymology justifies, and which is
the most philosophical as well, nature should mean
the principle of birth or genesis, the universal mo-
ther, 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, be-
ing an ancient, he is not particularly a poet of land-
scape. H e 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 lan-
guage itself, is bodiless and flowing,—action, feeling,
and thought.
I t is noticeable, accordingly, that poets who are
fascinated by pure sense and seek to write poems
about it are called not impressionists, but symbol-
ists; 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 dis-
paragement 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 land-
scape 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 land-
scape, 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 sym-
bolic 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 un-
realized 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 fan-
LUCRETIUS 59
cied 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 in-
spiration 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 im-
aginatively 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 en-
gages his interest, or touches his soul—-the strength-
ening or chastening of human purposes by the influ-
ences 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 moun-
tains, 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. A t 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 so-
ciety—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 na-
ture. In so far, however, as he was a poet of land-
scape, he was still fundamentally a poet of human
life, or merely of his personal experience. When he
LUCRETIUS 61
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 study-
ing it in its truth.
Lucretius, a poet of universal nature, studied every-
thing 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 liv-
ing 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. Na-
ture, 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 large-
ness 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 phi-
losophies, 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
LUCRETIUS 63
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.
I n 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 su-
perstition. 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 con-
sider 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, rehears-
ing their story, feeling vicariously the glow of their
splendid prerogatives, and placing them, in the form
of beautiful and very human statues, constantly be-
fore his eyes. This sympathetic interest in the im-
mortals took the place, in the typical Greek mind,
of any vivid hope of human immortality; perhaps
it made such a hope seem superfluous and inap-
propriate. 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 in-
exhaustible 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 dif-
ferent !
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 Pla-
tonic 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. Never-
theless, the hymns of modern poets to the ancient
gods, and the irrepressible echoes of classic mytho-
logy 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 ex-
clude 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,
LUCRETIUS 65
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 an-
other Epicurean, the poet Horace. Friendship was
highly honoured in all ancient states; and the Epi-
curean philosophy, in banishing so many traditional
forms of sentiment, could only intensify the em-
phasis 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. Lucre-
tius does speak, in a passage to which I have already
referred,1 about the hope of sweet friendship that
supports him in his labours; and elsewhere2 he re-
peats the Epicurean idyl about picnicking together
1
Cf. pages 41, 42.
8
Lucretius, n. 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
Temra coponspergunt viridantis floribus herbas.
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 intelli-
gence 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 im-
possible for him not to be always serious and
austere, he might at least have noted the melan-
choly 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
LUCRETIUS 67
1
yearns perversely for the impossible. Poor Epicu-
reans, 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 ma-
1
Horace, Odes, iv. 1 :
lam nec spes animi credula mutui . . .
Sed cur, heu ! Ligurine, cur
Manat rara meas lacrima per genas ?
terialistic 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 Epi-
curean 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 a,ny 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
LUCRETIUS 69
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 gener-
ates or surrounds us; and perhaps the only difference
between materialism and other systems in this re-
spect is that materialism has studied more scrupu-
lously 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 recon-
ciled 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 hsing 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 re-
nounce, 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 un-
known; but they agree or complete one another where
they are expressive or symbolic, thoughts wrung by
experience from the hearts of poets. Then all philo-
sophies 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.
DANTE
III
DANTE
I N the Phaedo of Plato there is an incidental pas-

sage of supreme interest to the historian. It fore-
shadows, and accurately defines, the whole transition
from antiquity to the middle age, from naturalism
to supernaturalism, from Lucretius to Dante. So-
crates, 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: " I n 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 dis-
pose 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 ex-
istence of anything, he must find out what . . . was
best for that t h i n g . . . . 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 ex-
plain 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 im-
agine 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.
" W h a t expectations I had formed and how griev-
ously 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
1
Plato, Phaedo, 9TB-99C, Jowett's translation. I have changed the render-
ing of pois from " mind " t o " reason."
DANTE 75
Here we have the programme of a new philoso-
phy. 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. I t must be inter-
preted, 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, accord-
ing to Plato, is the study of philosophy; but this
would not be possible for man if he had to be con-
tinually feeding, like a grazing animal, with its nose
to the ground. Now, to obviate the necessity of eat-
ing all the time, long intestines are useful ; therefore
the cause of long intestines is the study of philo-
sophy. 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 phy-
sics 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 isthat 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 or-
gans 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: Dis-
cover 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 dialec-
tic; political art must yield to aspiration.
It took many hundred years for the revolution to
DANTE 77
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 de-
sired, the sole principles of understanding.
Having become Socratic, the thinking part of
mankind devoted all its energies henceforward to de-
fining 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 per-
fection became persons in the Godhead, or angelic
intelligences, or aerial demons, or lower types of the
animal soul. Evil was identified with matter. The va-
rious 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, symboliz-
ing 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. I n 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
DANTE 79
that possessed it. The supernatural—that is, some-
thing moral or ideal regarded as a power and an ex-
istence—was all about us. Everything in the world
was an effect of something beyond the world ; every-
thing in life was a step to something beyond life.
Into this system Christianity fitted easily. I t en-
riched it by adding miraculous history to symbolic
cosmology. The Platonists had conceived a cosmos
in which there were higher and lower beings, mar-
shalled in concentric circles, around this vile but
pivotal lump of earth. The Christians supplied a
dramatic action for which that stage seemed admi-
rably 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 con-
ception 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 ra-
diation 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 move-
ment 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 con-
sisted merely in finitude, materiality, or otherness
from God. If anything besides God was to exist, it
had to be imperfect ; instability and conflict were es-
sential 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, oc-
curring only once. The material world was only a
scene, a stage-setting, designed expressly to be ap-
propriate 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 philo-
sophic import ; each played some part in a provi-
dential plan. Each illustrated creation, sin, and sal-
vation 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 re-
DANTE 81
main 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, in-
trinsically, 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 won-
der at the power and ingenuity of the deity reached
its maximum when they thought of him as the cun-
ning contriver of nature, and of themselves. Never-
theless 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 medi-
tation by day and by night; and it takes little atten-
tion to perceive that frivolity, indifference, knavery,
and debauchery do not make for well-being in this
world. And like other hard-pressed peoples, the an-
cient 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 poet-
ically ! 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 trans-
mitted to his descendants ; thus passing over the suf-
fering and death of all creatures that are not hu-
man 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 revi-
val of their national existence and greatness, to be
brought about by the patience and fidelity of the
elect, with tremendous miracles supervening to re-
ward these virtues.
Thus their conception of the fall and of the re-
demption was historical. And this was a great ad-
vantage to a man of imagination inheriting their
system; for the personages and the miracles that
DANTE 83
figured in their sacred histories afforded a rich sub-
ject for fancy to work upon, and for the arts to de-
pict. 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 phi-
losopher 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 be-
came the symbol for some moral state or some moral
principle. Every preacher in Christendom, as he re-
peated his homily on the gospel of the day, was in-
vited to rear a structure of spiritual interpretations
upon the literal sense of the narrative, which never-
theless he was always to hold and preserve as a
foundation for the others. 1 In a world made by God
1
" Est pro fundamento tenenda Veritas historiae et desuper spirituales ex-
positiones fabricandae." Thomas Aquinas, Summa Thtologiae, i. quaest. 102,
conclusio.
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 resur-
rection 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 chil-
dren 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 pro-
vidential history, a great earthly task,—to be trans-
mitted from generation to generation,—and a great
hope. The Greek tradition brought him natural and
moral philosophy. These contributions, joined to-
gether, 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 frame-
work 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
DANTE 85
politics and love into the melting-pot, and they, too,
lost their impurities and were refined into a philo-
sophic 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. I t 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 some-
thing that arose yesterday, that is constantly chan-
ging its limits and its ideals; it is something that
cannot last for ever. I t is the product of geographi-
cal and historical accidents. The diversities between
our different nations are irrational; each of them
has the same right, or want of right, to its peculiar-
ities. A man who is just and reasonable must nowa-
days, so far as his imagination permits, share the
patriotism of the rivals and enemies of his coun-
try,—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 phi-
losopher. His patriotism has to be subordinated to
rational allegiance to such things as justice and hu-
manity.
Very different was the situation in Dante's case.
For him the love of country could be something ab-
solute, and at the same time something reasonable,
deliberate, and moral. W h a t he found claiming his
allegiance was a political body quite ideal, provi-
dential, 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, al-
though by different means and in different spheres.
The pope should watch over the faith and disci-
pline of the Church. H e 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 regu-
lation of local affairs. These two powers had been
established by God through special miracles and
commissions. An evident providential design, culmi-
nating in them, ran through all history.
To betray or resist these divine rights, or to con-
found them, was accordingly a sin of the first mag-
nitude. 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
DANTE 87
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 indus-
try, refinements, arts, and literature. But to Dante
that budding age seemed one of decadence and
moral ruin. H e makes his ancestor, the crusader
Cacciaguida, praise the time when the narrow cir-
cuit of the walls held only one-fifth of its later in-
habitants. "Then the city abided in peace, sober
and chaste."1 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 ex-
cessive, nor her marriage premature. No houses were
empty, their masters being in exile; none were dis-
graced by unmentionable orgies.2 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,
1
Paradiso, xv. 97, 99 :
Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica . . .
Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.
« Ibid., 100-26 :
Non avea catenella, non corona,
Non donne contigiate, non cintura
Che fosse a veder più che la persona.
Non faceva nascendo ancor paura
La figlia al padre, chè il tempo e la dote
Non fuggian 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
Della sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla
Era per Francia nel letto deserta.
L' una vegghiava a studio della culla,
E consolando usava Γ idioma
Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla ;
L' altra traendo alla rocca la chioma,
Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
De' Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.
DANTE 89
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 con-
ceived 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 vig-
orous details were exalted by the immense signifi-
cance 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 pro-
phets, missed the great causes and the great aims of
human progress. Behind mythical and narrow con-
ceptions 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 compul-
sions, or of the common allegiance of honest minds to
DANTE 91
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 ob-
jects of his imagination. W e 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 un-
diminished. H e had been banished unjustly — Flo-
rentinus 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." 1 H e had known, in that re-
velation, the secret of the universe. The spheres, the
angels, the sciences, were henceforth full of sweet-
ness, comfort, and light.
1
Paradiso, xxxiii. 143-45 :
Volgeva il mio disiro e il velie,
SI come rota eh' egualmente è mossa,
L* amor che move il sole e 1* altre stelle.
Of this Platonic expansion of emotion, till it suf-
fuses all that deserves to kindle it, we have a won-
derful 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 conse-
quent 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 versifica-
tion. They are dreamlike, allegorical, musical medi-
tations, 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 de-
light 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 sym-
pathetic imagination. It must be left to the delicate
DANTE 93
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 inter-
pretations, 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 ab-
straction of what was common to them all. Now,
this matter was undoubtedly much disputed about;
but there is one comprehensive and orthodox solu-
tion, 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 recupera-
tive 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 universale
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 docu-
mentary 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 in-
terpretation ; such as the death of Beatrice, and es-
pecially that of her father, on which occasion Dante
writes a sympathetic poem.11 can see no reason why
this lady, as easily as any other person, should not
have called forth the dreamful passion of our poet.
1
Vita Nuova, § 22 : Secondo Γ 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. SO, SI :
Le belle membra in eh' io
Rinchiusa fui, e sono in terra sparte.
DANTE 95
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 re-
sponsive 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 con-
tinuously, 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 im-
pressed 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 Bea-
trice is also a symbol. On one occasion, as we read
in the Vita Nuova,1 Dante found himself, in a
church, in the presence of Beatrice. His eyes were
inevitably fixed upon her ; but as he wished to con-
ceal 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 be-
yond her to Beatrice. This intervening lady, la donna
gentile, became the screen to his true love.2 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 refus-
ing 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.3 If the
1
Vita Nuova, § v.
8
Schermo della veritade, — natural philosophy.
s
Convito, il. 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 innamorano 1' 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 in-
namorai appresso lo primo amore, fu la bellissima e onestissima figlia dello
Imperadore dell' universo, alla quale Pittagora pose nome Filosofia.
DANTE 97
donna gentile is philosophy, the donna gentilissima,
Beatrice, must be something of the same sort, only-
nobler. She must be theology, and theology Bea-
trice 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 un-
derstand, was at heart a religious and devout soul,
looking for the highest wisdom. But intervening be-
tween 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 at-
tention ; 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. H e 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 re-
flect 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 inade-
quate. The value of the notion to a poet or a philoso-
pher 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 at-
titude 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 un-
derstood, 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, chal-
lenging, or condemning the world.
It is here that the feverish sensibility of the young
Dante stood him in good stead ; it gave an unpre-
DANTE 99
cedented 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 devil-
ish perversity. Doubtless this keenness of soul was
not wholly due to the gift of loving, or to the disci-
pline of love; it was due in part also to pride, to re-
sentment, to theoretical prejudices. But figures like
that of Francesca di Rimini and Manfred, and the
light and rapture vibrating through the whole Para-
diso, could hardly have been evoked by a merely irri-
tated 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 Aris-
totle 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 ante-
cedents, for these run back in infinitum. W e should
explain motion and life rather by their purpose or
end, by that unrealized ideal which moving and liv-
ing 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? W h a t 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 un-
changing 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 even-
tual 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 deter-
mine the disposition and tendency of what actually
lives and moves? The answer, or rather the impossi-
bility of giving an answer, may be expressed in a sin-
gle word : magic. It is magic when a good or interest-
ing result, because it would prove good or interesting,
is credited with marshalling the conditions and evok-
ing 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
DANTE 101
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 magi-
cal 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 re-
flect 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 interces-
sion 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. I n the world of values they were mere sym-
bols, 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
DANTE 103
they signify is the magic attraction, called love, which
draws all things after it, is a mind poetic in its in-
tuition, 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. W h e n Plato and
Aristotle, following the momentous precept of Soc-
rates, 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. H e 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. W h e n the ab-
surd controversies and factious passions that in some
measure obscure the nature of this system have com-
pletely passed away, no one will think of reproach-
ing 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 thou-
sand years after Dante we may hope that his con-
scientious vision of the universe, where all is love,
magic, and symbolism, may charm mankind exclu-
sively 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, dur-
ing 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. I t is for
the new age to translate those delightful symbols in-
to the purposes of manhood.
In a letter which tradition assigns to Dante, ad-

dressed 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
DANTE 105
to rewards and punishments." This by no means ex-
hausts, 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 illus-
trated 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 lan-
guage ; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his do-
minion." 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 signi-
fied is the conversion of the soul from her present
grief and wretchedness to a state of grace ; and if we
consider the anagogicaI sense [that is, the revela-
tion 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 applica-
tion. 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 be-
neath 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 his-
tory 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 ac-
cordingly the moral universe in all its levels,—ro-
mantic, 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 condi-
tion 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. W e are accustomed
DANTE 107
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 vari-
ous 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 whileDante
could not attribute literal truth to his fancies about
hell, purgatory, and heaven, he believed that an ac-
tual heaven, purgatory, and hell had been fashioned
by God on purpose to receive souls of varying de-
serts and complexion; so that while the poet's im-
agination, unless it reëchoed 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. Prob-
ably 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 ex-
press 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 Aris-
totle (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
DANTE 109
before him, with a supplementary hint, here and
there, drawn from the catechism, and with an in-
grained preference (pious and almost philosophic) for
the number three and its multiples, he needed not to
voyage without a chart. The most visionary of sub-
jects, life after death, could be treated with scien-
tific 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 can-
not 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.1
Since it was impossible, according to this insight,
that our faculties should be intrinsically evil, all evil
1
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.
had to arise from the disorder into which these facul-
ties fall, their too great weakness or strength in rela-
tion 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 in-
flict. 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
DANTE 111
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 incon-
tinence ; they complicate the moral world more; they
introduce endless opposition of interests, and per-
petual, 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 join-
ing 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. Cor-
ruptio optimipessima ; 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 pos-
sibility of general moral sluggishness and indiffer-
ence. This Dante, with his fervid nature, particu-
larly hates. He puts the Laodiceans in the fringe of
his hell; within the gate, that they may be with-
out hope, but outside of limbo, that they may have
torments to endure, and be stung by wasps and
hornets into a belated activity.1
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 eter-
nity 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.2 Heresy, on the other hand, is a kind of
1
Inferno, in. 64^66 :
Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi,
Erano ignudi e stimolati molto
Da mosconi e da vespe eh' erano ivi.
2 Ibid., IV. 41, 42:
Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi
Che senza speme vivemo in disio.
Cf. Purgatorio, in. 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.
DANTE 113
passion when honest, or a kind of fraud when politic ;
and it is punished as pride in fiery tombs, 1 or as fac-
tion by perpetual gaping wounds and horrible muti-
lations.2
So far, with these slight additions, Dante is follow-
ing 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 mo-
rality 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 repre-
sent. 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 con-
tains 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. I t is deter-
mined altogether by what we have done on earth ;
1
Inferno, ix. 106-33, a n d x.
8
Ibid., XXVIII.
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 re-
trospective and changeless. I t 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 epi-
logue is merely to vindicate (in a more unmistak-
able 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 good-
ness, 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,
DANTE 115
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 Moham-
med, 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 in-
scription 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. I t shows how desperate,
at heart, is the folly of an egotistic or anthropocen-
tric 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 pun-
ishment. They flit towards it eagerly, of their own
accord.1 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 will-
ing, to absolve themselves. 2 The whole mountain, we
1
Inferno, m. 124-26 :
E pronti sono a trapassar lo rio,
Chè la divina giustizia gli sprona
Sì che la tema si volge in disio.
8
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.
DANTE 117
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 in-
ferior state of soul is its own purgatory, and deter-
mines 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 Ju-
piter. 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 tor-
ture, other than thy own rage, would be woe enough
to match thy fury."1 And indeed, Dante's imagina-
tion 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
1
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."
Paolo and Francesca di Rimini. W h a t makes these
lovers so wretched in the Inferno ? They are still to-
gether. 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,1 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
1
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 coeur.

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 eternel baiser !
DANTE 119
him to choose just the fate for these lovers that they
would have chosen for themselves?
There is a great difference between the appren-
tices in life, and the masters,—Aucassin and Alfred
de Musset were among the apprentices ; Dante was
one of the masters. H e could feel the fresh prompt-
ings of life as keenly as any youngster, or any ro-
manticist; 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.
H e had discovered the necessity of saying continu-
ally 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 abey-
ance. Love itself dreams of more than mere posses-
sion; 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 be-
tween 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 them-
selves 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 sympa-
thetic landscape in which each episode is set. The
poet actually accomplishes the feat which he attri-
butes to the Creator ; he evokes a material world to
be the fit theatre for moral attitudes. Popular ima-
gination 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 de-
scended, 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 ter-
races led down to the edge of a prodigious precipice
—perhaps a thousand miles deep—which formed the
pit of hell. A t the bottom of this, still sinking gently
towards the centre, were ten concentric furrows
DANTE 121
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 de-
scription of this hell. Yet the conception of purga-
tory is more original, and perhaps more poetical. The
very approach to the place is enchanting. W e 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 com-
panions 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 un-
traversed 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 pur-
gatory. 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 in-
visible spheres of that astronomy had the earth for
their centre. The sublime complexities of this Pto-
lemaic 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
DANTE 123
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 land-
scape, 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. I t 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.
W i t h 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 culti-
vated 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 emo-
tional 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 howl-
ing of storms or the rumble of cities. For this reason
philosophy, when a poet is not mindless, enters in-
evitably 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 sen-
suous 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 dis-
tances are of little poetic value while we have no
DANTE 125
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 man-
kind. 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.
H e has indeed, at the end, a vision of a celestial rose ;
tier upon tier of saints are seated as in an amphi-
theatre, 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 some-
what conventional picture to which Dante has re-
course unwillingly, for want of a better image to
render his mystical intention. W h a t may perhaps
help us to divine this intention is the fact, just men-
tioned, 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 absorp-
tion and disappearance in the Godhead. So the Neo-
platonists had thought, from whom all this heavenly
landscape is borrowed; and the reservations that
Christian orthodoxy requires have not always re-
mained present to the minds of Christian mystics
and poets. Dante broaches this very point in the me-
morable interview he has with the spirit of Piccarda,
in the third canto of the Paradiso. She is in the low-
est 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.1
» Paradiso, m . 73-90 :
" S e 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 eh' 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.
DANTE 127
Even in heaven, therefore, the Christian saint was
to keep his essential fidelity, separation, and lowli-
ness. H e 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 per-
ceived; 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, 1 surprised that men should
1 Paradiso, xxii. 133-39 :
Col viso ritornai per tutte e quante
Le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
Tal, eh' io sorrisi del suo vii sembiante ;
E quel consiglio per migliore approbo
Che Γ ha per meno ; e chi ad altro pensa
Chiamar si puote veramente probo.
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 Boni-
face or an Ugolino that we forget that these histori-
cal 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 insig-
nificant, waywardfictions,and expecting to be enter-
tained 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 lovelyfiguresof 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 pre-
judice 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
DANTE 129
this mood are powerful and vehement, but they are
not beautiful. They brand the object of their invec-
tive 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 aban-
doned the Platonic half of his inspiration and has
become for the moment wholly historical, wholly
Hebraic or Roman. H e would have been a far in-
ferior mind if he had always moved on this level.
W i t h 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. I t 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 wis-
dom, we feel the suspicion that if the love in ques-
tion had b^en natural and manly, it would have
offered more resistance to so mystical a transforma-
tion. The poet who wishes to pass convincingly from
love to philosophy (and that seems a natural pro-
gress 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 phi-
losophy and of romantic sentiment. In being egotis-
tical 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 re-
quisite, 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),
DANTE 131
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 ob-
trusively is not in every respect worthy of contem-
plation. 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 con-
clusion 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 de-
termine 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 fur-
thering or thwarting the ideal of Christendom. These
numerous persons are set before us with the sym-
pathy 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 pro-
phet 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. I t is
vivid and truthful in its detail, sublime in its march
and in its harmony. This is not poetry where the
DANTE 133
parts are better than the whole. Here, as in some
great symphony, everything is cumulative:the move-
ments conspire, the tension grows, the volume re-
doubles, 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 do-
minated and focused the whole world. He thereby
touched the ultimate goal to which a poet can as-
pire; 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 op-
posite. 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 re-
cesses of the heart to the uttermost bounds of nature
and of destiny. If to give imaginative value to some-
thing is the minimum task of a poet, to give imagina-
tive 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 conven-
tionality 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 perva-
sive 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 brutal-
ities 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 sin-
cere. 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 hon-
est 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 super-
natural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato, of that
phase of thought and feeling in which the super-
DANTE 135
natura] seems to be the key to nature and to happi-
ness. 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 com-
prehension of things achieved by mankind hitherto.
Dante is the type of a consummate poet.
GOETHE'S FAUST
IV
GOETHE'S FAUST
I N 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 £Hvine Comedy is a moral and personal
fable; yet not only are many passages explicitly
philosophical, but the whole is inspired and con-
trolled by the most definite of religious systems and
of moral codes. Dante, too, is unmistakably a philo-
sophical poet. But was Goethe a philosopher? And is
Faust a philosophical poem ?
If we say so, it must be by giving a certain lati-
tude to our terms. Goethe was the wisest of man-
kind ; 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 philoso-
phy 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 ad-
mit the mechanical interpretation of nature advo-
cated by Spinoza. He also assigned, at least to privi-
leged 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 ideal-
ism, 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 resi-
dent in particular creatures, themselves sparks in an
absolutely infinite and purposeless world. In a word,
Goethe was nota systematic philosopher. His feeling
for the march of things and for the significance of
great personages and great ideas was indeed philo-
sophical, 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 Phibsophey ; but
it appeared there, and throughout the piece, merely
GOETHE'S FAUST 141
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 sur-
rounded his original scenes with others, like the pro-
logue 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, with-
out having been the seed of it, and without even ex-
pressing fairly the spirit which it breathes. Faust re-
mained 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 max-
ims 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 solu-
tion to the moral problem of existence as truly as
1
Eckermann, Conversation of May 6, 1827 : "Das ist zwar ein wirksamer,
manches erklärender, guter Gedanke, aber es ist keine Idee die dem Gan-
zen . . . zugrunde liege."
do the poems of Lucretius and Dante. Heard philo-
sophies 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 pas-
sions seething in the drama. It is the drama of a
philosophical adventure; a rebellion against conven-
tion; a flight to nature, to tenderness, to beauty;
and then a return to convention again, with a feel-
ing 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
GOETHE'S FAUST 143
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 for-
sake him.
The case is somewhat as that of Dante would
have been if, instead of recognizing and loving Bea-
trice at first sight and rising into a vision of the eter-
nal 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 consum-
mation that the Ovvine 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 philosophi-
cal goal, and we have to recall and retrace the jour-
ney; 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 emo-
tions. The savage or the animal, who should not be
aware of nature or history at all, could not be ro-
mantic about them, nor about himself. He would be
blandly idiotic, and take everything quite unsuspect-
ingly 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 con-
tain 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 in-
spiration 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.1 Like Faust, he flouts sci-
ence, and is minded to make trial of magic, which
1 Faust, Part π. Act v. 375-82:
Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt ;
Ein jed' Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren,
Was nicht genügte, liess ich fahren,
Was mir entwischte, liess ich ziehn.
Ich habe nur begehrt und nur vollbracht
Und abermals gewünscht und so mit Macht
Mein Leben durchgestürmt ; erst gross und mächtig,
Nun aber geht es weise, geht bedächtig.
GOETHE'S FAUST 145
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 interest-
ing, 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 barba-
rian 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 exem-
plified in Doctor Johannes Faustus, a figure half
historical, half legendary, familiar to Goethe in his
boyhood in puppet-shows and chapbooks. An ad-
venturer in the romantic as well as in the vulgar
sense of the word, somewhat like Paracelsus or Gior-
dano Bruno, Doctor Faustus had felt the mystery
of nature, had scorned authority, had credited magic,
had lived by imposture, and had fled from the po-
lice. 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 edi-
fying 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 envi-
able reprobate who had dared to relish the good
things of this life above the sad joys vaguely pro-
mised 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 unevan-
gelical, pagan, and popish ; yet they could not cease
altogether to admire and even to covet them, es-
pecially 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
GOETHE'S FAUST 147
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 whis-
pering in his ear ; and if the bad angel finally pre-
vails, it is in spite of continual remorse and hesita-
tion 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 con-
clusion 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 linger-
ing 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 vio-
lent 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 cm 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. W e 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 pub-
GOETHE'S FAUST 149
lie ; 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 Renais-
sance 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 Calderón. This ear-
lier 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 philoso-
pher 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 phan-
tasm of her person, and as Cyprian approaches her
and lifts her veil, he finds a hideous death's-head be-
neath ; 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 at-
titude and words. Their earthly passion is dead ; but
their souls are united in death and in immortality.
In this drama we see magic checkmated by mira-
cles, doubt yielding to faith, purity resisting temp-
tation, passion transformed into zeal, and all the
glories of the world collapsing before disillusion and
asceticism. These glories are nothing, the poet tells
us, but dust, ashes, smoke, and air.
The contrast with Goethe's Faust could not be
more complete. Both poets take the greatest liber-
ties with their chronology, yet the spirit of their
dramas is remarkably true to the respective ages in
which they are supposed to occur. Calderón glorifies
the movement from paganism to Christianity. The
philosophy in which that movement culminated—
Catholic orthodoxy—still dominates the poet's mind,
not in a perfunctory way, but so as to kindle his
imagination, and render his personages sublime and
GOETHE'S FAUST 151
his verses rapturous. Goethe's Faust, on the con-
trary, glorifies the return from Christianity to pagan-
ism. It shows the spirit of the Renaissance liberat-
ing the soul, and bursting the bonds of traditional
faith and traditional morals. This spirit, after mani-
festing itself brilliantly at the time of the historical
Faust, had seemed to be smothered in the great
world during the seventeenth century. Men's char-
acters and laws had reaffirmed their old allegiance to
Christianity, and the Renaissance survived only ab-
stractly, in scholarship or the fine arts, to which it
continued to lend a certain classic or pseudo-classic
elegance. In Goethe's time, however, a second Re-
naissance was taking place in the souls of men. The
love of life, primal and adventurous, was gathering
head in many an individual. In the romantic move-
ment and in the French Revolution, this love of life
freed itself from the politic compromises and con-
ventions that had been stifling it for two hundred
years. Goethe's hero embodies this second, romantic
emancipation of the mind, too long an unwilling
pupil of Christian tradition. He cries for air, for na-
ture, for all experience. Cyprian, on the other hand,
an unwilling pupil of paganism, had yearned for truth,
for solitude, and for heaven.
Such was the legend that, to the great good for-
tune of mankind, fascinated the young Goethe, and
took root in his fancy. Around it gathered the ex-
periences and insights of sixty well-filled years: Faust
became the poetical autobiography and the philoso-
phic testament of Goethe. He stuffed it with every
enthusiasm that diversified his own life, from the
great alternative of romantic or classical art, down
to the controversy between Neptunism and Vulcan-
ism in geology, and to his fatherly admiration for
Lord Byron. Yet in spite of the liberties he took with
the legend, and the personal turn he gave it, nothing
in its historical associations escaped him. His life
in Frankfort and in Strassburg had made the me-
diaeval scene familiar to his fancy; Herder had com-
municated to him an imaginative cult for all that
was national and characteristic in art and manners;
the spell of Gothic architecture had fallen on him;
and he had learned to feel in Shakespeare the infinite
strength of suggestion in details, in multitudinous
glimpses, in lifelike medleys of sadness and mirth, in
a humble realism in externals, amid lyric and meta-
physical outpourings of the passions. The sense for
classic beauty which had inspired Marlowe with im-
mortal lines, and was later to inspire his own Helena,
was as yet dormant ; but instead he had caught the
humanitarian craze, then prevalent, for defending and
idealizing the victims of law and society, among
others, the poor girl who, to escape disgrace, did away
with her new-born child. Such a victim of a selfish
seducer and a Pharisaical public was to add a de-
GOETHE'S FAUST 153
sirable touch of femininity and pathos to the story of
Faust: Gretchen was to take the place, at least for
the nonce, of the coveted Helen.
This Gretchen was to be no common creature, but
one endowed with all the innocence, sweetness, in-
telligence, fire, and fortitude which Goethe was find-
ing, or thought he was finding, in his own Gretchens,
Kätchens, and Frederickes. For the young Goethe,
though very learned, was no mere student of books ;
to his human competence and power to succeed,
he joined the gusts of feeling, the irresponsible rap-
tures, the sudden sorrows, of a genuine poet. He was
a true lover, and a wayward one. He could delve
into magic with awe, in a Faust-like spirit of ad-
venture; he could burn offerings in his attic to the
rising sun ; he could plunge into Christian mysticism ;
and there could well up, on occasion, from the deep
store of his unconscious mind, floods of words, of
images, and of tears. He was a genius, if ever there
was one; and this genius, in all its freshness, was
poured into the composition of Faust,—the most
kindred of themes, the most picturesque and magi-
cal of romances.
In Goethe's first version of the poem, before the
story of Gretchen, we find the studious Faust, as in
Marlowe, soliloquizing on the vanity of the sciences.
They grasp nothing of the genuine truth; they are
verbal shams. They have not even brought Faust
fame or riches. Perhaps magic might do better. The
air was full of spirits ; could they be summoned to
our aid, possibly the secrets of nature might be un-
locked. W e might reach true science, and through
it undreamt-of power over the material world. For
Nature, according to Goethe, really has secrets. She
is not all open to eventual inspection; she is no mere
mechanism of minute parts and statable laws. Our
last view of her, like our first glimpse, must be inter-
preted ; from the sum of her manifestations we must
divine her soul. Therefore only a poetic and rhetori-
cal art, like magic, has any chance of unveiling her,
and of bringing us face to face with the truth.
In this invocation of spirits, as Goethe's Faust
makes it, there is no question of selling, or even of
risking, the soul. This Faust, unlike Marlowe's, has
no faith and no fear. From the point of view of the
church he is damned already as an unbeliever; but,
as an unbeliever, he is looking for salvation in an-
other quarter. Like the bolder spirits of the Renais-
sance, he is hoping to find in universal nature,
infinite, placid, non-censorious, an escape from the
prison-house of Christian doctrine and Christian law.
His magic arts are the sacrament that will initiate
him into his new religion, the religion of nature. He
turns to nature also in another sense, more charac-
teristic of the age of Goethe than of that of Faust.
He longs for grandiose solitudes. He feels that moon-
GOETHE'S FAUST 155
light, caves, mountains, driving clouds, would be his
best medicine and his best counsellors. The souls of
Rousseau, Byron, and Shelley are pre-incarnate in
this Faust, the epitome of all romantic rebellions.
They coexist there with the souls of Paracelsus and
Giordano Bruno. The wild aspects of nature, he
thinks, will melt and renew his heart, while magic
reveals the mysteries of cosmic law and helps him
to exploit them.
Full of these hopes, Faust opens his book of magic
at the sign of the Macrocosm : it shows him the me-
chanism of the world, all forces and events playing
into one another and forming an infinite chain. The
spectacle entrances him; he seems to have attained
one of his dearest ambitions. But here he comes at
once upon the other half, or, as Hegel would call it,
the other moment, of the romantic life. Every ro-
mantic ideal, once realized, disenchants. No matter
what we attain, our dissatisfaction must be perpetual.
Thus the vision of the universe, which Faust now
has before him, is, he remembers, only a vision ; it is
a theory or conception.1 It is not a rendering of the
inner life of the world as Shakespeare, for instance,
feels and renders it. Experience, as it comes to him
who lives and works, is not given by that theoretical
1
Faust, Part i., Studierzimmer, ι. :
Welch Schauspiel ! aber, ach ! ein Schauspiel nor !
Wo fass' ich dich, unendliche Natur ?
Euch, Brüste, wo?
vision; in science experience is turned into so many
reviewed events, the passage of so much substance
through so many forms. But Faust does not want an
image or description of reality ; he yearns to enact
and to become the reality itself.
In this new search, he fixes his eye on the sign of
the Earth-Spirit, which seems more propitious to his
present wish. This sign is the key to all experience.
All experience tempts Faust; he shrinks from no-
thing that any mortal may have endured ; he is ready
to undertake everything that any mortal may have
done. In all men he would live; and with the last man
he will be content to die.1 So mighty is his yearn-
ing for experience that the Earth-Spirit is softened
and appears at his bidding. In a red flame he sees its
monstrous visage, and his enthusiasm is turned to
horror. Outspread before him is the furious, indis-
criminate cataract of life, the merciless flux, the in-
finite variety, the absolute inconstancy of it. This
general life is not for any individual to rehearse; it
bursts all bounds of personality. Each man may as-
similate that part only which falls within his under-
standing, only that aspect which things wear from his
1
Faust, Part i., Studierzimmer:
Du, Geist der Erde, bist mir näher ;
Schon fühl' ich meine Kräfte höher,
Schon glüh' ich wie von neuem Wein ;
Ich fühle Mut, mich in die Welt zu wagen,
Der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen, . . .
Mit Stürmen mich herumzuschlagen
Und in des Schiffbruchs Knirschen nicht zu zagen.
GOETHE'S FAUST 157
particular angle, and to his particular interests. Du
gleichst, the Earth-Spirit cries to him,—du gleichst
dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir.
This saying—that the life possible and good for
man is the life of reason, not the life of nature—is
a hard one to the romantic, unintellectual, insatiable
Faust. He thinks, like many another philosopher of
feeling, that since his is a part of the sum of expe-
rience, the whole of experience should be akin to
his. But in fact the opposite is far nearer the truth.
Man is constituted by his limitations, by his station
contrasted with all other stations, and his purposes
chosen from amongst all other purposes. Any great
scope he can attain must be due to his powers of
representation. His understanding may render him
universal ; his life never can. Faust, as he hears this
sentence from the departing Earth-Spirit, collapses
under it. He feels impotent to gainsay what the tu-
mult of the world is thundering at him, but he will
not accept on authority so unwelcome and chasten-
ing a truth. All his long experience to come will
scarcely suffice to convince him of it.
These are the chief philosophical ideas that appear
in the two earlier versions of Goethe's Faust,—the
Urfaust and the Fragment. What Mephistopheles
says to the young student is only a clever expansion
of what Faust had said in his first monologue about
the vanity of science and of the learned professions.
Mephistopheles, too, finds theory ashen, and the tree
of life green and full of golden fruit; only, having
more experience than Faust of the second disen-
chanting moment in the romantic dialectic, he fore-
sees that this golden fruit also will turn to ashes in
the mouth, as it did in the garden of Eden. Science
is folly, but life is no better; for after all is not science
a part of life ?
When we turn to the first part in its final shape,
or to the entire drama, we find many changes and
additions that seem to transform the romantic pic-
ture of the opening scene, and to offer us a rounded
philosophy. The changes, however, are more in ex-
pression than in ultimate substance, and the addi-
tions are chiefly new illustrations of the ancient
theme. Critics who study the Entstehungsgeschichte
of works of art help us to analyze them more intel-
ligently and reproduce more accurately what, at va-
rious times, may have been the intention of their au-
thors. Yet these bits of information would be dearly
bought if we were distracted by them from what
gives poetic value and individual character to the re-
sult— its total idiosyncrasy, its place in the moral
world. The place in the moral world of Goethe's
Faust as a whole is just the place which the opening
scene gave it in the beginning. It fills more space, it
touches more historical and poetic matters; but its
centre is the old centre, and its result the old re-
GOETHE'S FAUST 159
suit. It remains romantic in its pictures and in its
philosophy.
The first addition that promises to throw new
light on the idea of the drama is the Prologue in
Heaven. In imitation of The Book of Job, we find
the morning stars—the three archangels—singing
together; and then follows a very agreeable and hu-
morous conversation between the Lord and Me-
phistopheles. The scene is in the style of mediaeval
religious plays, and this circumstance might lead us
to suppose that the point at issue was the salvation
of Faust's soul. But that, in the literal sense, is far
from being the case. As in Job, the question is what
sentiments the tempted mortal will maintain dur-
ing this life, not what fate will afterwards overtake
his disembodied spirit. Dead men, Mephistopheles
observes, do not interest him. He is not a devil from
a subterranean hell, concerned, out of pique or am-
bition, to increase the population of tortured shades
in that fabulous region. He dwells in the atmosphere
of earth ; he knows nothing of the suns or the worlds,
—the life of man is his element.1 He remains—what
1
Faust, Prolog im Himmel :
Mit den Toten
Hab' ich mich niemals gern befangen.
A m meisten lieb' ich mir die vollen, frischen Wangen.
Für einen Leichnam bin ich nicht zu Haus ;
Mir geht es, wie der Katze mit der Maus. . . .
Von Sonn' und Welten weiss ich nichts zu sagen,
Ich sehe nur, wie sich die Menschen plagen.
he was in the first versions of the play—a part of
the Earth-Spirit, one of its embodiments. His parti-
cular office, as we shall see presently, is to precipitate
that continual destruction which is involved in the
continual renewal of life. He finds it very foolish of
Faust to demand everything and be satisfied with
nothing; and his wager is that Faust may be brought
to demand nothing and be satisfied with what chance
throws in his way, that he shall lick the dust, and
lick it with pleasure,1 that he shall renounce the
dignity of willing what is not and cannot be, and
crawl about, like the serpent, basking in the comforts
of the moment.
Against this, the Lord pronounces Faust to be
his servant,—the servant, that is, of an ideal,—and
declares that whoever strives after an ideal must
needs go astray ; yet in his necessary errors, the good
man never misses the right road.2 In other words,
to have an ideal to strive for, and, like Faust, never
to be satisfied, is itself the salvation of man. Faust
does not yet know this. He half believes there is
some concrete and ultimate good beyond, and so is
bitter and violent in his dissatisfaction; but in due
1
Faust, Prolog im Himmel:
Staub soll er fressen, und mit Lust.
^ Ibid. :
Es irrt der Mensch, so lang' er strebt.
Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.
GOETHE'S FAUST 161
season he will come to clearness on this subject, and
understand that only he deserves freedom and life
who must daily win them afresh.1 Mephistopheles
himself, with his mockeries and seductions, helps to
keep the world moving and men wide awake.2 Im-
perfection is all that is possible in the world of ac-
tion ; but the angels may gather up and fix in thought
the perfect forms approached or suggested by exis-
tence.3
In the two earlier versions of Faust, Mephisto-
pheles appears without introduction ; we find him
amusing himself by giving ambiguous advice to an
innocent scholar, and accompanying Faust in his
wanderings. His mocking tone and miraculous pow-
ers mark him at once as the devil of the legend ; but
several passages prove that he is a deputy of the
Earth-Spirit evoked by Faust in the beginning. That
he should be both devil and world-demon ought not
1
Faust, Part n. Act v. :
Ja ! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben,
Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss :
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muss.
' Ibid., Part i., Prolog im Himmel:
Des Menschen Thätigkeit kann allzu leicht erschlaffen,
Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh ;
Drum geb' ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu.
Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen.
3 Ibid.:
Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken !
to surprise the learned. 1 The devils of popular medi-
aeval religion were not cut out of whole cloth: they
were simply the Neoplatonic demons of the air, toge-
ther with the gods of Olympus and the more ancient
chthonic deities, blackened by sectarian zeal, and de-
graded by a coarse and timid imagination. Many of
these pagan sprites, indeed, had been originally imp-
ish and mischievous, since not all the aspects of na-
ture are lovely or propitious, nor all the dreams of
men. But as a whole they were without malice in
their irresponsible, elemental life,—winged powers
darting through space between the earth and the
moon. They were not dwellers in a subterranean
hell; they were not tormentors nor tormented.
Often they swarmed and sang blithely, as they do
in Faust and even in the Wonder-working Magi-
cian; and if at other times they croaked or hooted,
it was like frogs and owls, less lovely creatures than
humming-birds, but not less natural.
One of these less amiable spirits of the atmo-
1
Faust, Part i., Wald und Höhle:
Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet. . . .
O, dass dem Menschen nichts Vollkommnes wird,
Empfind' ich nun. Du gabst zu dieser Wonne,
Die mich den Göttern nah und näher bringt,
Mir den Gefährten, &c.
Also, ibid.. Trüber Tag: Grosser herrlicher Geist, der du mir zu erscheinen
würdigtest, der du mein Herz kennest und meine Seele, warum an den
Schandgesellen mich schmieden, der sich am Schaden weidet und am Ver-
derben sich letzt?
GOETHE'S FAUST 163
sphere, especially of its ambient fire, is the Mephis-
topheles of Goethe. Why he delighted in evil rather
than in good he himself explains in a profound and
ingenious fashion. Darkness or nothingness, he says,
existed alone before the birth of light. Nothingness
or darkness still remains the fundamental and, to
his mind, the better part of that mixture of being
and privation which we call existence. Nothing that
exists can be preserved, nor does it deserve to be;
therefore it would have been better if nothing had
ever existed.1 To deny the value of whatever is, and
to wish to destroy it, according to him, is the only
rational ambition; he is the spirit that denies con-
tinually, he is the everlasting No. This spirit —
which we might compare with the Mars of Lucre-
tius—has great power in the world; every change,
in one of its aspects, expresses it, since in one of its
aspects, every change is the destruction of some-
thing. This spirit is always willing evil, for it wills
1
Faust, Part i., Studierzimmer, π.:
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint !
Und das mit Recht ; denn alles, was entsteht,
Ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht ;
Drum besser wär's, dass nichts entstünde. . . .
Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war,
Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar. . . .
Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wusste nicht ihr beizukommen. . . .
Wie viele hab' ich schon begraben !
Und immer cirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut.
So geht es fort, man möchte rasend werden !
death, with all the folly, crime, and despair that
minister to death. But in willing evil, it is always ac-
complishing good; for these evils make for nothing-
ness, and nothingness is the true good. The famous
couplet—
Ein Teil von jener Kraft
Oie stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft—
is far from expressing the Hegelian commonplace
with which it is usually identified. It does not mean
that destruction serves a good purpose after all
because it clears the way for "something higher."
Mephistopheles is not one of those philosophers
who think change and evolution a good in them-
selves. He does not admit that his activity, while
aiming at evil, contributes unintentionally to the
good. It contributes to the good intentionally, be-
cause the evil it does is, in his opinion, less than the
evil it cures. He is the cruel surgeon to the disease
of life.
If he admitted the other interpretation, he would
be ipso facto converted to the view of the Lord in
the Prologue. His naughtiness would become, in his
own eyes, a needful service in the cause of life,—a
condition of life being really vital and worth living.
He might then continue his sly operations and bit-
ing witticisms, without one drop more of kindness,
and yet be sanctioned in everything by the Absolute,
and adopt the smile and halo of the optimist. He
GOETHE'S FAUST 165
would have perceived that he was the spice of life,
the yeast and red pepper of the world, necessary to
the perfect savour of the providential concoction.
As it is, Mephistopheles is far more modest. He
says that he wills evil, because what he wills is con-
trary to what his victims will; he is the great contra-
dictor, the blaster of young hopes. Yet he does good,
because these young hopes, if let alone, would lead
to misery and absurdity. His contradiction nips the
folly of living in the bud. To be sure, as he goes on
to acknowledge, the destructive power never wins a
decisive victory. While everything falls successively
beneath his sickle, the seeds of life are being scat-
tered perpetually behind his back. The Lucretian
Venus has her innings, as well as the Lucretian Mars.
The eternal see-saw, the ancient flux, continues with-
out end and without abatement.
Thus Mephistopheles has a philosophy, and is
justified and consistent in his own eyes; yet in the
course of the drama he wears various masks and has
various moods. All he says and does cannot be made
altogether compatible with the essence of his mind,
as Goethefinallyconceived it. The dramatic figure of
Mephistopheles had been fixed long before in its
graphic characteristics. Mephistopheles, for instance,
is extremely old ; he feels older than the universe.
There is nothing new for him ; he has no illusions.
His feeling for anyone he sees is choked, as happens
to old people, by his feelings for the infinite number
of persons he remembers. He is heartless, because he
is impersonal and universal. He is altogether inhu-
man ; he has not the shames nor the tastes of man.
He often assumes the form of a dog,—it is his fa-
vourite mask in this earthly carnival. He is not
averse to the witches' kitchen, with its senseless din
and obscenity. He puts up good-naturedly with the
grotesque etiquette of the spirit-world, observes all
the rules about signing contracts in blood, knocking
thrice, and respecting pentagrams. Why should he
not ? Dogs and demons of the air are forms of the
Earth-Spirit as much as man; man has no special
dignity that Mephistopheles should respect. Man's
morality is one of the moralities, his conventions are
not less absurd than the conventions of other mon-
keys. Mephistopheles has no prejudice against the
snake; he understands and he despises his cousin,
the snake, also. He understands and he despises him-
self; he has had time to know himself thoroughly.
His understanding, however, is not impartial, be-
cause he is the advocate of death ; he cannot sympa-
thize with the other half of the Earth-Spirit, which
he does not represent,—the creative, propulsive,
enamoured side, the side that worships the ideal, the
love that makes the world go round. What enchants
an ingenuous soul can only amuse Mephistopheles;
what torments it gives him a sardonic satisfaction.
GOETHE'S FAUST 167
Thus he comes to be in fact a sour and mocking
devil. At other times, when he opposes the silliness
and romanticism of Faust, he seems to be the spokes-
man of all experience and reason; as when he warns
Faust that to be at all you must be something in
particular. Yet even this he says by way of check-
ing and denying Faust's passion for the infinite. The
soberest truth, when unwelcome, may seem to the
sentimental as diabolical as the most cynical lie ; so
that in spite of the very unequal justness of his
various sentiments, Mephistopheles retains his dra-
matic unity. We recognize his tone and, under what-
ever mask, we think him a villain and find him de-
lightful.
Such is the spirit, and such are the conditions, in
which Faust undertakes his adventures. He thirsts
for all experience, including all experience of evil ;
he fears no hell; and he hopes for no happiness. He
trusts in magic ; that is, he believes, or is willing to
make believe, that apart from any settled conditions
laid down by nature or God, personal will can evoke
the experience it covets by its sheer force and as-
surance. His bond with Mephistopheles is an ex-
pression of this romantic faith. It is no bargain to
buy pleasures on earth at the cost of torments here-
after ; for neither Goethe, nor Faust, nor Mephis-
topheles believes that such pleasures are worth hav-
ing, or such torments possible.
The first taste Faust gets of the world is in
Auerbach's cellar, and he finds it at once unpala-
table. His mature and disdainful mind cannot be
amused by the sodden merriment he sees there. He
is without that simplicity and heartiness which
might find even drunken gaiety attractive; to put
up with such follies, one must know nothing, like
Brander, or everything, like Mephistopheles. Faust
still feels the "pathos of distance ;" he is acutely con-
scious of something incomparably noble just out of
reach. In the witches' kitchen, which he next vis-
its, pleasure is still more ugly and shallow ; here the
din is even more nonsensical, and the fancy more
obscene. Yet Faust comes forth with two points
gained in his romantic rehabilitation ; he has taken
the elixir of youth and he has seen the image of
Helen in a mirror. He is henceforth in love with
ideal beauty, and being young again, he is able to
find ideal beauty in the first woman he sees.
The great episode of Gretchen follows ; and when
he leaves her (after the duel with her brother) to
view the wild revels of the Walpurgisnacht, his
youth for a moment catches the contagion of that
orgy. His love of ideal beauty, which remains un-
satisfied, saves him, however, from any lasting illu-
sion. He sees a little red mouse running out of the
mouth of a nymph he is pursuing, and his momen-
tary inclination turns to aversion. When he goes
GOETHE'S FAUST 169
back to Gretchen in her prison, it is too late for
him to do more than recognize the ruin he has
brought about,—Gretchen dishonoured, her mother
poisoned, her brother killed, her child drowned by
her in a pond, and she herself about to be executed.
Gretchen, who is the only true Christian in this
poem, refuses to be rescued, because she wishes to
offer her voluntary death in propitiation for her
grave, though almost involuntary, offences.
This is the end of Faust's career through the world
of private interests,—the little world,—and we may
well ask what has been the fruit of his experiments
so far. What strength or experience has he amassed
for his further adventures ? The answer is to be found
in the first scene of the second part, where Goethe
reaches his highest potency as a poet and as a phi-
losopher. W e are transported to a remote, magni-
ficent, virgin country. It is evening, and Faust is
lying, weary but restless, on a flowering hillside.
Kindly spirits of nature are hovering above his head.
Ariel, their leader, bids them bring solace to the
troubled hero. It is enough he was unfortunate—
they make no question whether he was a saint or a
sinner.1 The spirits in chorus then sing four lovely
1
Faust, Part n. Act i., Anmutige Gegend:
Kleiner Elfen Geistergrösse
Eilet, wo sie helfen kann ;
Ob er heilig, ob er böse,
Jammert sie der Unglücksmann.
stanzas, one for each watch of the night. The first
invokes peace, forgetfulness, surrender to the healing
influence of sleep. Pity and remorse, they seem to
say, in the words of Spinoza, are evil and vain ; fail-
ure is incidental ; error is innocent. Nature has no
memory ; forgive yourself, and you are forgiven. The
song of the second watch merges the unhappy soul
again in the infinite incorruptible substance of na-
ture. The stars, great or little, twinkling or pure, fill
the sky with their ordered peace, and the sea with
their trembling reflection. In this universal circula-
tion there is no private will, no permanent division.
In the next watch we find the plastic stress of
nature beginning to reassert itself ; seeds swell, sap
mounts up the thawing branches, buds grow full;
everything recovers a fresh individuality and a ten-
der, untried will. Finally, the song of the fourth watch
bids the flowers open their petals and Faust his eyes.
Forces renewed in repose should tempt a new career.
Nature is open to the brave, to the intelligent ; all
may be noble, who dare to be so.1
Soothed by these ministrations, Faust awakes full
of new strength and ambition. He watches with rap-
ture the sunlight touch the mountain-tops and creep
down gradually into the valleys. When it reaches
1
Alles kann der Edle leisten,
Der versteht und rasch ergreift.
The whole scene will repay study.
GOETHE'S FAUST 171
him, he turns to look directly at the sun ; but he is
dazzled. He seems to remember the Earth-Spirit that
had once allured and then rejected him. W e wish, he
says, to kindle our torch of life, and we produce a
conflagration, a monstrous medley of joy and sorrow,
love and hate. Let us turn our backs upon the sun,
upon infinite force and infinite existence. Fitter for
our eyes the waterfall over against it, the torrent of
human affairs, broken into a myriad rills. Upon the
mists that rise from it the sunlight paints a rainbow,
always vanishing, but always restored. This is the
true image of rational human achievement. W e have
our life in the iridescence of the world.1 Or, as Shelley
has said it for us,—
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments.
This death, however, is itself unstable. The Lucre-
tian Venus, by reshaping our senses and instincts,
builds that coloured dome once more. The rainbow
is renewed, as the mists rise again or the wind dies
down, and creation is glorious as on the first day.
1
Des Lebens Fackel wollten wir entzünden,
Ein Feuermeer umschlingt uns, welch ein Feuer ! . . .
So bleibe denn die Sonne mir im Rücken !
Der Wassersturz, das Felsenriff durchbrausend,
Ihn schau' ich an mit wachsendem Entzücken. . . .
Allein wie herrlich, diesem Sturm erspriessend,
Wölbt sich des bunten Bogens Wechseldauer, . . .
Der spiegelt ab das menschliche Bestreben. . . .
Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.
This is Goethe's theory of rejuvenation and im-
mortality. It is thoroughly naturalistic. There is a
life after death, but only for such souls as have enough
scope to identify themselves with those forms which
nature, in her uncertain oscillations, always tends to
reproduce. A deep mind has deep roots in nature,—
it will bloom many times over. But what a deep mind
carries over into its next incarnation—perhaps in
some remote sphere—is not its conventional merits
and demerits, its load of remorse, or its sordid memo-
ries. These are washed away in its new baptism. What
remains is only what was deep in that deep mind,
so deep that new situations may again imply and
admit it.
When, after the scene with the Earth-Spirit, Faust
thought of suicide, he regarded it as a means to
escape from oppressive conditions and to begin a
fresh life under conditions wholly different and un-
known. It was as if a man in middle life, disgusted
with his profession, should abandon it to take up
another. Such a resolution is serious. It expresses a
great dissatisfaction with things as they stand, but
it also expresses a great hope. Death, for Faust, is
an adventure, like any other ; and if, contrary to his
presumption, this adventure should prove the last,
that, too, is a risk he is willing to run. Accordingly,
as he lifted the poison to his lips, he drank to the
dawn, to a new springtime of existence. It was by
GOETHE'S FAUST 173
no means the saddest nor the weakest moment of
his life.1
Although the sound of an Easter hymn checked
him, bringing sentimental memories of a religion in
which he no longer believed, the transformation scene
he looked for was only postponed. There is not much
difference between dying as he had thought to die
and living as he was about to live. Venomous es-
sences, artificially brewed, were hardly necessary to
bring him to a new life ; the adventures he was en-
tering upon were suicidal enough, for he was to strive
without hope of attainment, and to proceed by pas-
sionate wilfulness or magic, without accepting the
discipline of art or reason. Now, at the close of the
first part, he has drained this poisoned life to the
dregs, and the fever into which he falls carries him
of itself into a new existence. He is not grown bet-
ter or more reasonable ; he is simply starting afresh,
like a new day or a new person. He retains, how-
ever, the fundamental part of his character; his will
remains wayward, but indomitable, and his achieve-
ments remain fruitless. Only he will henceforth be
romantic on a broader stage, that of history and civi-
1
Faust, Part i., Studierzimmer:
Ins hohe Meer werd' ich hinausgewiesen, . . .
Zu neuen Sphären reiner Thätigkeit. . . .
Hier ist es Zeit, durch Thaten zu beweisen,
Dass Manneswiirde nicht der Götterhöhe weicht, . . .
Zu diesem Schritt sich heiter zu entschliessen
Und war' es mit Gefahr, ins Nichts dahin zu fliessen.
lization; and his magic will summon before him illu-
sions somewhat more intellectual, counterfeits of
beauty and of power. His old loves have blown over,
like the storms of a bygone year; and with only a
dreamlike memory of his past errors, he goes forth
to meet a new day.
Among the allurements which, in the old legend,

prompted Faust to sell his soul to the devil, one
was the beauty of woman. The poor recluse, grown
gray among his parchments, had never noticed real
women, or had not found them beautiful. Pedantic
child that he was, when he thought of the beauty
of woman, he thought only of Helen of Troy. And
Helen, to the Faust of the legend, was simply
what Venus might be to Tannhäuser,—a woman
more ravishing than other ravishing women. She was
the supreme instance of a vulgar thing. The young
Goethe, however, who was a poet and a true Ger-
man, and loved with his soul, was not attracted by
this ideal. H e gave his Faust a tenderer love,—a
love of the heart as well as of the senses. Later, also,
when Goethe took up the old legend again in a more
antiquarian spirit, and restored Helen to her place in
it, he transformed her from a symbol of feminine
beauty alone into a symbol for all beauty, and es-
pecially for the highest beauty, that of Hellas. The
second love of Faust is the passion for classicism.
GOETHE'S FAUST 175
This passion in a romantic age is not so paradoxi-
cal as it may sound. Winckelmann and the philo-
logians were restoring something ancient. It was the
romantic passion for all experience—for the faded ex-
perience of the ancients also—that made, for them,
the poetry and the charm of antiquity. How dignified
everything was in those heroic days ! How noble, se-
rene, and abstracted! How pure the blind eyes of
statues, how chaste the white folds of the marble
drapery! Greece was a remote, fascinating vision, the
most romantic thing in the history of mankind. The
sad, delicious emotion one felt before a ruined temple
was as sentimental as anything one could feel before
a ruined castle, but more elegant and more choice.
It was sentimentality in marble. The heroes of the
Iliad were idealized in the same way as the savages
of Rousseau were idealized, or as the robbers of
Schiller.
The romantic classicism of the Napoleonic era lies
between the polite classicism of the French seven-
teenth century and the archaeological classicism of
our present Grecians. French classicism had been
quite indifferent to the picturesque aspects of ancient
life ; it could tolerate on the stage an Achilles in a
periwig and laces. What the French tragedians had
adopted from the ancients was something inward, a
standard of character and motive, or a criterion of
taste. They studied harmony and restraint, not be-
cause these had been Greek qualities, but because
they were qualities essentially reasonable and beauti-
ful, naturally belonging, even in modern times, to a
cultivated society and a cultivated poet. Again, the
admiration for Greece which is common in our
time among people of judgement differs from that of
Goethe and his age; for if we admire the artistic
expression of ancient life in poetry or sculpture, we
know that these manifestations were made possible
by a long political and moral discipline, and that, in
spite of that discipline, ancient art remained very
mixed, and often grotesque and impure.
For Goethe, however, as for Byron, Greece was
less a past civilization, to be studied scientifically,
than a living idea, a summons to new forms of art
and of sentiment. Goethe was never so romantic as
when he was classical. His distichs are like theatrical
gestures ; he feels the sweep of his toga as he rounds
them off. His Iphigenia is a sentimental dream—
verflucht human, as he himself came to feel ; and his
Helena is an evocation of magic, magical not merely
by accident and in the story, but essentially so, in
her ghostly semi-consciousness and glassy beauty.
The apparent incongruities of the scenes in which
she appears, surrounded by German knights in the
court of a feudal castle, are not real incongruities.
For this Helen is not a thing of the past; she is the
present dream and affectation of things classical in
GOETHE'S FAUST 177
a romantic era. Faust and his vassals offer Helen the
most chivalrous and exaggerated homage; they in-
troduce her, as a play queen, into their society.
Faust retires with her to Arcadia,—the land of
intentional and mid-summer idleness. Here a son,
Euphorion, is born to them, a young genius, classic
in aspect, but wildly romantic and ungovernable in
temper. He scales the highest peaks, pursues by
preference the nymphs that flee from him, loves
violence and unreason, and finally, thinking to fly,
falls headlong, like Icarus, and perishes. His last
words call his mother after him, and she follows,
leaving her veil and mantle behind, as Euphorion
had left his lyre. On the mantle of Helen, which
swells into a cloud, Faust is borne back again to
his native Germany; its virtue, as he learns, is to
lift him above all commonness.
This long allegory is charming enough, as a series
of pictures and melodies, to leave the reader content
not to interpret it; yet the intention of the poet is
clear, if we care to disentangle it. By going down
into the bowels of nature, where the earth goddesses
dwell, who are the first mothers of all life and of
all civilizations alike, we may gather intelligence to
comprehend even the most alien existence. Greece,
after such a reversion to the elemental, will appear
to us in her unmatched simplicity and beauty. The
vision will be granted us, although the object we see
belongs to a distant past; and if our enthusiasm, like
that of Faust, is passionate and indomitable, we may
actually persuade the Queen of the Dead to yield up
Helen that we may wed her. Our scholarship and
philosophy, our faithful imitation of Greek art and
literature, may actually render the Greek scene fa-
miliar to us. Yet the setting of this recovered genius
will still be modern ; it will become half modern itself ;
we shall have to teach Helen to rhyme. The product
of this hybrid inspiration will be a romantic soul in
the garb of classicism, a lovely wild thing, fated to
die young. When this enthusiasm has dashed itself
against the hard conditions of life, the beauty of
Greece, that was its mother, will also pale before
our eyes. W e shall be, perforce, content to let it re-
turn to the realm of irrevocable past things. Only its
garment, the monuments of its art and thought, will
remain to raise us, if we have loved them, above all
vulgarity in taste and in moral allegiance.
It is an evidence of Goethe's great wisdom that he
felt that romantic classicism must be subordinated or
abandoned; that Helen must evaporate,while Faust
returned to Germany and to the feeling that after all
Gretchen was his true love.1 A t the same time the
issue of this wonderful episode is a little disappoint-
ing. A t the beginning, the vision of Helen in a mir-
ror had inspired Faust with renewed enthusiasm. The
1 Fautt, Part n. Act iv., Hochgebirg: The first monologue.
GOETHE'S FAUST 179
sight of her again, in the magic play, had altogether
enraptured and overwhelmed him ; and this inspira-
tion had come just when, after the death of Gretchen,
he had resolved to pursue not all experience, as at
first, but rather the best experience, 1 —a hint that
the transformations of Faust's will were expected
somehow to constitute a real progress. There was,
indeed, among mortals such an infinite need of this
incomparable and symbolic Helen, that it could
move the very guardians of the dead to mercy and
to tears. W h e n we remember all this, we have some
reason to expect that a great and permanent im-
provement in the life and heart of our hero should
follow on his obtaining so rare a boon. But to live
within Arcadia Helen was not needed ; any Phyllis
would have served.
Helen, to be sure, leaves some relics behind, by
which we may understand that the influence of
Greek history, literature, and sculpture may still avail
to cultivate the mind and give it an air of distinc-
tion. Perhaps in the commonwealth he is about to
found, Faust would wish to establish not only dykes
and freedom, but also professorships of Greek and
archaeological museums. And the lyre of Euphorion,
which is also left us, may signify that poems like
1
Faust, Part i. Act 11., Anmutige Gegend:
Du, Erde, . . . regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschliessen
Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
Byron's Isles of Greece, Keats's Grecian Urn, Die
Götter Griechenlands of Schiller, and Goethe's own
classical pieces will continue to enrich European lit-
erature. This is something, but not enough to lift
Faust's immense enthusiasm for Helen above a
crass illusion. That dream of a perfect beauty to be
achieved, of a perfect life to be lived according to
nature and reason, would have ended in a little
scholarship and a little pedantry. Faust would have
won Helen in order to hand her over to Wagner.
Helen was queen of Sparta ; and although of course
the Doric Sparta of Lycurgus was something much
later, and had nothing to do with the Sparta of
Homer, yet taken symbolically it is the happiest
accident that Helen, the type of Greek perfection in
beauty, should have been queen of Sparta, the type
of Greek perfection in discipline. A Faust that had
truly deserved and understood Helen would have
built her an Hellenic city; he would have become
himself an άναξ ανδρών, a master of men, one of
those poets in things, those shapers of well-bred
generations and wise laws, of which Plato speaks,
contrasting them with Homer and other poets in
words only. For the beauty of mind and body that
fascinates the romantic classicist, and which inspired
the ancient poets themselves, was not a product of
idleness and sentimentality, nor of material and
forced activity ; it was a product of orderly war, re-
GOETHE'S FAUST 181
ligion, gymnastics, and deliberate self-government.
The next turn in Faust's fortunes actually finds
him a trader, a statesman, an empire-builder ; and
if such a rolling stone could gather any moss, we
should expect to see here, if anywhere, the fruits of
that "aesthetic education of mankind "which Helen
represented. We should expect Faust, who had lain
in the lap of absolute beauty, to understand its na-
ture. We should expect him, in eager search after
perfection, to establish his state on the distinction be-
tween the better and the worse,—a distinction never
to be abolished or obscured for one who has loved
beauty. In other words, he might have established a
moral society, founding it on great renunciations and
on enlightened heroisms, so that the highest beauty
might really come down and dwell within that city.
But we find nothing of the sort. Faust founds his
kingdom because he must do something; and his
only ideal of what he hopes to secure for his subjects
is that they shall always have something to do. Thus
the will to live, in Faust, is not in the least educated
by his experience. It changes its objects because it
must ; the passions of youth yield to those of age;
and among all the illusions of his life the most fatu-
ous is the illusion of progress.
It is characteristic of the absolute romantic spirit
that when it has finished with something it must in-
vent a new interest. It beats the bush forfreshgame;
it is always on the verge of being utterly bored. So
now that Helen is flown, Mephistopheles must come
to the rescue, like an amiable nurse, and propose
all sorts of pastimes. Frankfort, Leipzig, Paris, Ver-
sailles, are described, with the entertainments that
life there might afford ; but Faust, who was always
d i f f i c i l e , has been rendered more so by his recent
splendid adventures. However, a new impulse sud-
denly arises in his breast. From the mountain-top to
which Helen's mantle has borne him, he can see the
German Ocean, with its tides daily covering great
stretches of the flat shore, and rendering them brack-
ish and uninhabitable. It would be a fine thing to re-
claim those wastes, to plant there a prosperous pop-
ulation. After Greece, Faust has a vision of Holland.
This last ambition of Faust's is as romantic as the
others. He feels the prompting towards political art,
as he had felt the prompting towards love or beauty.1
The notion of transforming things by his will, of
leaving for ages his mark upon nature and upon
human society, fascinates him;2 but this passion for
1 Faust, Part n. Act iv., Hochgebirg:
Erstaunenswürdiges soll geraten.
Ich fühle Kraft zu kühnem Fleiss.
Herrschaft gewinn' ich, Eigentum !
Die That ist alles, nichts der Ruhm.
Da wagt mein Geist, sich selbst zu überfliegen ;
Hier möcht' ich kämpfen, dies möcht' ich besiegen.
8 Ibid., Act v., Grosser Vorhof des Palasts:
Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen
Nicht in Aeonen Untergehn.
GOETHE'S FAUST 183
activity and power, which some simple-minded com-
mentators dignify with the name of altruism and of
living for others, has no steady purpose or standard
about it.1 Goethe is especially lavish in details to
prove this point. Magic, the exercise of an unteach-
able will, is still Faust's instrument. Mephistopheles,
by various arts of illusion, secures the triumph of the
emperor in a desperate war which he is carrying on
against a justifiable insurrection. As a reward for the
aid rendered, Faust receives the shore marches in fief.
The necessary dykes and canals are built by magic ;
the spirits that Mephistopheles commands dig and
build them with strange incantations. The commerce
that springs up is also illegitimate: piracy is involved
in it.
Nor is this all. On some sand-dunes that diversified
the original beach, an old man and his wife, Phile-
mon and Baucis, lived before the advent of Faust
and his improvements. On the hillock, besides their
cottage, there stood a small chapel, with a bell which
disturbed Faust in his newly built palace, partly by
its importunate sound, partly by its Christian sugges-
tions, and partly by reminding him that he was not
master of the country altogether, and that something
1
Faust, Part n. Act iv., Hochgebirg :
Wer befehlen soll
Muss im Befehlen Seligkeit empfinden.
Ihm ist die Brust von hohem Willen voll,
Doch was er will, es darf's kein Mensch ergründen.
existed in it not the product of his magical will. The
old people would not sell out; and in a fit of impa-
tience Faust orders that they should be evicted by
force, and transferred to a better dwelling elsewhere.
Mephistopheles and his minions execute these orders
somewhat roughly : the cottage and chapel are set on
fire, and Philemon and Baucis are consumed in the
flames, or buried in the ruins.
Faust regrets this accident; but it is one of those
inevitable developments of action which a brave man
must face, and forget as soon as possible. He had re-
gretted in the same way the unhappinessof Gretchen,
and, presumably, the death of Euphorion; but such
is romantic life. His will, though shaken, is not ex-
tinguished by such misadventures. He would con-
tinue, if life could last, doing things that, in some
respect, he would be obliged to regret : but he would
banish that regret easily, in the pursuit of some new
interest, and, on the whole, he would not regret hav-
ing been obliged to regret them. Otherwise, he would
not have shared the whole experience of mankind,
but missed the important experience of self-accusa-
tion and of self-recovery.
It is impossible to suppose that the citizens he is
establishing behind leaky dykes, so that they may
always have something to keep them busy, would
have given him unmixed satisfaction if he could
really have foreseen their career in its concrete de-
GOETHE'S FAUST 185
tails. Holland is an interesting country, but hardly
a spectacle which would long entrance an idealist like
Faust, so exacting that he has found the arts and
sciences wholly vain, domesticity impossible, and
kitchens and beer-cellars beneath consideration. The
career of Faust himself had been far more free and
active than that of his industrious burghers could
ever hope to be. His interest in establishing them is
a masterful, irresponsible interest. It is one more ar-
bitrary passion, one more selfish illusion. As he had
no conscience in his love, and sought and secured no-
body's happiness, so he has no conscience in his am-
bition and in his political architecture ; but if only his
will is done, he does not ask whether, judged by its
fruits, it will be worth doing. As his immense dejec-
tion at the beginning, when he was a doctor in his
laboratory, was not founded on any real misfortune,
but on restlessness and a vague infinite ambition, so
his ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded
on any good done, but on a passionate wilfulness. He
calls the thing he wants for others good, because he
now wants to bestow it on them, not because they
naturally want it for themselves. Incapable of sym-
pathy, he has a momentary pleasure in policy;
and in the last and "highest" expression of his will,
in his statesmanship and supposed public spirit, he
remains romantic and, if need be, aggressive and
criminal.
Meantime, his end is approaching. The smoke from
that poor little conflagration turns into shadowy
shapes of want, guilt, care, and death, which come
and hover about him. W a n t is kept off by his wealth,
and guilt is transcended by his romantic courage.
But care slips through the keyhole, breathes upon
him, and blinds him; while death, though he does
not see it, follows close upon his heels. Nevertheless,
the old man—Faust is in his hundredth year—is
undaunted, and all his thoughts are intent on the
future, on the work to which he has set his hand.
H e orders the digging to proceed on the canals he is
building ; but the spirits that seem to obey him are
getting out of hand, and dig his grave instead.
W h e n he feels death upon him, Faust has one
of his most splendid moments of self-assertion. H e
has stormed through the world, he says, taking with
equal thanks the buffets and rewards of fortune and
the last word of wisdom he has learned is that no
man deserves life or freedom who does not daily win
them anew. H e will leave the dykes he has thrown
up against the sea to protect the nation he has estab-
lished ; a symbol that their health and freedom must
consist in perpetual striving against an indomitable
1
Fautt, Part n. Act v., Mitternacht:
Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt :
Ein jed' Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren,
Was nicht genügte, liess ich fahren,
Was mich entwischte, liess ich ziehn.
GOETHE'S FAUST 187
foe. The thought of many generations living in that
wholesome danger and labour fills him with satis-
faction ; he could almost say to this moment, in which
that prospect opens before his mind's eye, "Stay,
thou art so fair." 1 And with these words—a last
challenge and mock surrender to Mephistopheles—
he sinks into the grave open at his feet.
Who has won the wager ? Faust has almost, though
not quite, pronounced the words which were to give
Mephistopheles the victory ; but the sense of them
is new, and Mephistopheles has not succeeded in
making Faust surrender his will to will, his indefinite
idealism. Since what satisfies Faust is merely the
consciousness that this will to will is to be main-
tained, and that neither he, nor the colonists he has
brought into being, will ever lick the dust, and take
comfort, without any further aspiration, in the chance
pleasures of the moment. Faust has maintained his
enthusiasm for a stormy, difficult, and endless life.
He has been true to his romantic philosophy.
He is therefore saved, in the sense in which salva-
tion is defined in the Prologue in Heaven, and pre-
sently again in the song of the angels that receive his
soul when they say : " Whosoever is unflagging in his
1
Faust, Part 11. Act v., Grosser Vorhof des Palasts:
Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
Zum Augenblicke dürft' ich sagen :
Verweile doch, du bist so schön !
striving for ever, him we can redeem."1 This salva-
tion does not hang on any improvement in Faust's
character,—he was sinful to the end, and had been
God's unwitting servant from the very beginning,—
nor does it lie in any revolution in his fortunes, as if
in heaven he were to be differently employed than on
earth. He is going to teach life to the souls of young
boys, who have died too soon to have had in their own
persons any experience of Rathskellers, Gretchens,
Helens, and Walpurgisnachts.2 Teaching (though not
exactly in these subjects) had been Doctor Faustus'
original profession ; and the weariness of it was what
had driven him to magic and almost to suicide, until
he had escaped into the great world of adventure
outside. Certainly, with his new pupils he will not be
more content; his romantic restlessness will not for-
sake him in heaven. Some fine day he will throw his
celestial school-books out of the window, and with
his pupils after him, go forth to taste life in some
windier region of the clouds.
No, Faust is not saved in the sense of being sanc-
tified or brought to a final, eternal state of bliss. The
only improvement in his nature has been that he has
1
Faint, Part n. Act v., Himmel:
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.
2 Ibid. :
Wir wurden früh entfernt
Von Lebechören ;
Doch dieser hat gelernt,
Er wird uns lehren.
GOETHE'S FAUST 189
passed, at the beginning of the second part, from
private to public activities. If, at the end of this part,
he expresses a wish to abandon magic and to live like
a man among men, in the bosom of real nature, that
wish remains merely Platonic.1 It is a thought that
visited Goethe often during his long career, that it
is the part of wisdom to accept life under natural
conditions rather than to pretend to evoke the con-
ditions of life out of the will to live. This thought,
were it held steadfastly, would constitute an ad-
vance from transcendentalism to naturalism. But
the spirit of nature is itself romantic. It lives spon-
taneously, bravely, without premeditation, and for
the sake of living rather than of enjoying or attain-
ing anything final. And under natural conditions,
the vicissitudes of an endless life would be many;
and there could be no question of an ultimate goal,
nor even of an endless progress in any particular di-
rection. The veering of life is part of its vitality,—it
is essential to romantic irony and to romantic pluck.
The secret of what is serious in the moral of Faust
is to be looked for in Spinoza, —the source of what
is serious in the philosophy of Goethe. Spinoza has
an admirable doctrine, or rather insight, which he
1
Faust, Part n. Act v., Mitternacht:
Noch hab' ich mich ins Freie nicht gekämpft.
Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen,
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen,
Stiind' ich, Natur, vor dir ein Mann allein,
D a wär's der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.
calls seeing things under the form of eternity. This
faculty is fundamental in the human mind ; ordinary
perception and memory are cases of it. Therefore,
when we use it to deal with ultimate issues, we are
not alienated from experience, but, on the contrary,
endowed with experience and with its fruits. A thing
is seen under the form of eternity when all its parts or
stages are conceived in their true relations, and there-
by conceived together. The complete biography of
Caesar is Caesar seen under the form of eternity. Now
the complete biography of Faust, Faust seen under
the form of eternity, shows forth his salvation. God
and Faust himself, in his last moment of insight, see
that to have led such a life, in such a spirit, was to
be saved ; it was to be the sort of man a man should
be. The blots on that life were helpful and necessary
blots ; the passions of it were necessary and creative
passions. To have felt such perpetual dissatisfaction
is truly satisfactory ; such desire for universal experi-
ence is the right experience. You are saved in that
you lived well; saved not after you have stopped liv-
ing well, but during the whole process. Your destiny
has been to be the servant of God. That God and
your own conscience should pronounce this sentence
is your true salvation. Your worthiness is thereby
established under the form of eternity.
The play, in its philosophic development, ends
here; but Goethe added several more details and
GOETHE'S FAUST 191
scenes, with that abundance, that love, of symbolic
pictures and poetic epigrams which characterizes the
whole second part. As Faust expires, or rather be-
fore he does so, Mephistopheles posts one of his little
demons at each aperture of the hero's body, lest the
soul should slip out without being caught. A t the
same time a bevy of angels descends, scattering the
red roses of love and singing its praises. These roses,
if they touch Mephistopheles and his demons, turn
to balls of fire; and although fire is their familiar
element, they are scorched and scared away. The
angels are thus enabled to catch the soul of Faust
at their leisure, and bear it away triumphantly.
It goes without saying that this fight of little boys
over a fluttering butterfly cannot be what really de-
termines the issue of the wager and the salvation of
Faust; but Goethe, in his conversations with Ecker-
mann, justifies this intervention of a sort of me-
chanical accident, by the analogy of Christian doc-
trine. Grace is needed, besides virtue; and the inter-
cession of Gretchen and the Virgin Mary, like that
of the Virgin Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice, in Dante's
case, and the stratagem of the balls of fire, all stand
for this external condition of salvation.
This intervention of grace is, at bottom, only a
new symbol for the essential justification, under the
form of eternity, of what is imperfect and insufficient
in time. The chequered and wilful life of Faust is
not righteous in any of its parts ; yet righteousness
is imputed to it as a whole ; divine love accepts it as
sufficient ; speculative reason declares that to be the
best possible life which, to humdrum understanding,
seems a series of faults and of failures. If the foretaste
of his new Holland fills, from a distance, the dying
Faust with satisfaction, how much more must the
wonderful career of Faust himself deserve to be ac-
cepted and envied, and proclaimed to be its own
excuse for being! The faults of Faust in time are
not counted against him in eternity. His crimes and
follies were blessings in disguise. Did they not ren-
der his life interesting and fit to make a poem of?
W a s it not by falling into them, and rising out of
them, that Faust was Faust at all? This insight is
the higher reason, the divine love, supervening to
save him. What ought to be imperfect in time is,
because of its very imperfection there, perfect when
viewed under the form of eternity. To live, to live
just as we do, that—if we could only realize it—is the
purpose and the crown of living. W e must seek im-
provement ; we must be dissatisfied with ourselves ;
that is the appointed attitude, the histrionic pose, that
is to keep the ball rolling. But while we feel this dis-
satisfaction we are perfectly satisfactory, and while
we play our game and constantly lose it, we are win-
ning the game for God.
Even this scene, however, did not satisfy the pro-
GOETHE'S FAUST 193
lific fancy of the poet, and he added a final one,

—the apotheosis or Himmelfahrt of Faust. In the
Campo Santo at Pisa Goethe had seen a fresco re-
presenting various anchorites dwelling on the flanks
of some sacred mountain,—Sinai, Carmel, or Athos,
—each in his little cave or hermitage; and above
them, in the large space of sky, flights of angels were
seen rising towards the Madonna. Through such a
landscape the poet now shows us the soul of Faust
carried slowly upwards.
This scene has been regarded as inspired by Cath-
olic ideas, whereas the Prologue in Heaven was Bib-
lical and Protestant ; and Goethe himself says that
his "poetic intention" could best be rendered by im-
ages borrowed from the tradition of the mediaeval
church. But in truth there is nothing Catholic about
the scene, except the names or titles of the person-
ages. What they say is all sentimental landscape-
painting or vague mysticism, such as might go with
any somewhat nebulous piety ; and much is actually
borrowed from Swedenborg. What is Swedenbor-
gian, however,—such as the notion of heavenly in-
struction, passage from sphere to sphere, and looking
through other people's eyes,—is in turn a mere form
of expression. The "poetic intention "of the author is,
as we have seen, altogether Spinozitic. Undoubtedly
he conceives that the soul of Faust is to pass, in an-
other world, through some new series of experiences.
But that destiny is not his salvation ; it is the con-
tinuance of his trial. The famous chorus at the very
end repeats, with an interesting variation, the same
contrast we have seen before between the point of
view of time and that of eternity. Everything tran-
sitory, says the mystic chorus,1 is only an image;
here (that is, under the form of eternity) the insuf-
ficient is turned into something actual and complete ;
and what seemed in experience an endless pursuit
becomes to speculation a perfect fulfilment. The ideal
of something infinitely attractive and essentially in-
exhaustible—the eternal feminine, as Goethe calls
it — draws life on from stage to stage.
Gretchen and Helen had been symbols of this
ideal; Goethe's green old age had felt, to the very
last, the charm of woman, the sweetness and the
sorrow of loving what he could not hope to possess,
and what, in its ideal perfection, necessarily eludes
possession. He had reconciled himself, not without
tears, to this desire without hope, and, like Piccarda
in the Paradiso, he had blessed the hand that gave the
1 Faust, Part 11. Act v., Himmel:
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis ;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird's Ereignis ;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist es gethan ;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
GOETHE'S FAUST 195
passion and denied the happiness.1 Thus, in dreaming

of one satisfaction and renouncing it, he had found
a satisfaction of another kind. Faust ends on the
same philosophical level on which it began,—the
level of romanticism. The worth of life lies in pur-
suit, not in attainment; therefore, everything is worth
pursuing, and nothing brings satisfaction—save this
endless destiny itself.
Such is the official moral of Faust, and what we
may call its general philosophy. But, as we saw just
now, this moral is only an afterthought, and is far
from exhausting the philosophic ideas which the
poem contains. Here is a scheme for experience ; but
experience, in filling it out, opens up many vistas ;
and some of these reveal deeper and higher things
than experience itself. The path of the pilgrim and
the inns he stops at are neither the whole landscape
he sees as he travels, nor the true shrine he is mak-
ing for. And the incidental philosophy or philoso-
phies of Goethe's Faust are, to my mind, often bet-
ter than its ultimate philosophy. The first scene of
the second part, for instance, is better, poetically
and philosophically, than the last. It shows a deeper
1
Cf. Trilogie der Leidenschaft, 1823 :
Mich treibt umher ein unbezwinglich Sehnen ;
Da bleibt kein Rat als grenzenlose Thränen. . . .
Und so das Herz erleichtert merkt behende
Dass es noch lebt und schlägt und möchte schlagen, . . .
Da fühlte sich—o, dass es ewig bliebe! —
Das Doppelglück der Töne wie der Liebe.
sense for the realities of nature and of the soul, and
it is more sincere. Goethe there is interpreting na-
ture with Spinoza ; he is not dreaming with Sweden-
borg, nor talking equivocal paradoxes with Hegel.
In fact, the great merit of the romantic attitude
in poetry, and of the transcendental method in
philosophy, is that they put us back at the begin-
ning of our experience. They disintegrate conven-
tion, which is often cumbrous and confused, and
restore us to ourselves, to immediate perception and
primordial will. That, as it would seem, is the true
and inevitable starting-point. Had we not been born,
had we not peeped into thig world, each out of his
personal eggshell, this world might indeed have ex-
isted without us, as a thousand undiscoverable worlds
may now exist ; but for us it would not have existed.
This obvious truth would not need to be insisted on
but for two reasons: one that conventional know-
ledge, such as our notions of science and morality
afford, is often top-heavy; asserts and imposes on
us much more than our experience warrants,—our
experience, which is our only approach to reality.
The other reason is the reverse or counterpart of
this; for conventional knowledge often ignores and
seems to suppress parts of experience no less actual
and important for us as those parts on which the
conventional knowledge itself is reared. The public
world is too narrow for the soul, as well as too
GOETHE'S FAUST 197
mythical and fabulous. Hence the double critical
labour and reawakening which romantic reflection
is good for,—to cut off the dead branches and feed
the starving shoots. This philosophy, as Kant said,
is a cathartic: it is purgative and liberating; it is in-
tended to make us start afresh and start right.
I t follows that one who has no sympathy with such
a philosophy is a comparatively conventional per-
son. H e has a second-hand mind. Faust has a first-
hand mind, a truly free, sincere, courageous soul. It
follows also, however, that one who has no philo-
sophy but this has no wisdom; he can say nothing
that is worth carrying away; everything in him is
attitude and nothing is achievement. Faust, and es-
pecially Mephistopheles, do have other philosophies
on top of their transcendentalism ; for this is only a
method, to be used in reaching conclusions that shall
be critically safeguarded and empirically grounded.
Such outlooks, such vistas into nature, are scattered
liberally through the pages of Faust. Words of wis-
dom diversify this career of folly, as exquisite scenes
fill this tortuous and overloaded drama. The mind
has become free and sincere, but it has remained
bewildered.
The literary merits of Goethe s Faust correspond
accurately with its philosophical excellences. In the
prologue in the theatre Goethe himself has described
them ; much scenery, much wisdom, some folly, great
wealth of incident and characterization ; and behind,
the soul of a poet singing with all sincerity and fer-
vour the visions of his life. Here is profundity, in-
wardness, honesty, waywardness; here are the most
touching accents of nature, and the most varied as-
sortment of curious lore and grotesque fancies. This
work, says Goethe (in a quatrain intended as an
epilogue, but not ultimately inserted in the play),—
this work is like human life: it has a beginning, it
has an end ; but it has no totality, it is not one whole.1
How, indeed, should we draw the sum of an infinite
experience that is without conditions to determine
it, and without goals in which it terminates? Evi-
dently all a poet of pure experience can do is to re-
present some snatches of it, more or less prolonged ;
and the more prolonged the experience represented
is the more it will be a collection of snatches, and the
less the last part of it will have to do with the be-
ginning. Any character which we may attribute to
the whole of what we have surveyed would fail to
dominate it, if that whole had been larger, and if we
had had memory or foresight enough to include other
parts of experience differing altogether in kind from
the episodes we happen to have lived through. To
be miscellaneous, to be indefinite, to be unfinished,
1
Aus dem Nachlass, Abkiindigung:
Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht ;
Es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende,
Allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.
GOETHE'S FAUST 199
is essential to the romantic life. May we not say that
it is essential to all life, in its immediacy; and that
only in reference to what is not life—to objects,
ideals, and unanimities that cannot be experienced
but may only be conceived—can life become rational
and truly progressive ? Herein we may see the radi-
cal and inalienable excellence of romanticism; its
sincerity, freedom,richness,and infinity. Herein, too,
we may see its limitations, in that it cannot fix or
trust any of its ideals, and blindly believes the uni-
verse to be as wayward as itself, so that nature and
art are always slipping through its fingers. It is ob-
stinately empirical, and will never learn anything
from experience.
CONCLUSION
ν
CONCLUSION
I T may be possible, after studying these three phi-

losophical poets, to establish some comparison
between them. By a comparison is not meant a
discussion as to which of our poets is the best. Each
is the best in his way, and none is the best in every
way. To express a preference is not so much a crit-
icism as a personal confession. If it were a question
of the relative pleasure a man might get from each
poet in turn, this pleasure would differ according to
the man's temperament, his period of life, the lan-
guage he knew best, and the doctrine that was most
familiar to him. By a comparison is meant a review
of the analysis we have already made of the type of
imagination and philosophy embodied in each of the
poets, to see what they have in common, how they
differ, or what order they will fall into from different
points of view. Thus we have just seen that Goethe,
in his Faust, presents experience in its immediacy,
variety, and apparent groundlessness; and that he
presents it as an episode, before and after which other
episodes, differing from it more and more as you re-
cede, may be conceived to come. There is no pos-
sible totality in this, for there is no known ground.
Turn to Lucretius, and the difference is striking. Lu-
cretius is the poet of substance. The ground is what
he sees everywhere; and by seeing the ground, he
sees also the possible products of it. Experience ap-
pears in Lucretius, not as each man comes upon it
in his own person, but as the scientific observer views
it from without. Experience for him is a natural, in-
evitable, monotonous round of feelings, involved in
the operations of nature. The ground and the limits
of experience have become evident together.
In Dante, on the other hand, we have a view of
experience also in its totality, also from above and,
in a sense, from outside ; but the external point of
reference is moral, not physical, and what interests
the poet is what experience is best, what processes
lead to a supreme, self-justifying, indestructible sort
of existence. Goethe is the poet of life; Lucretius
the poet of nature; Dante the poet of salvation.
Goethe gives us what is most fundamental,—the
turbid flux of sense, the cry of the heart, the first
tentative notions of art and science, which magic or
shrewdness might hit upon. Lucretius carries us one
step farther. Our wisdom ceases to be impressionistic
and casual. I t rests on understanding of things, so
that what happiness remains to us does not deceive
us, and we can possess it in dignity and peace. Know-
ledge of what is possible is the beginning of happi-
ness. Dante, however, carries us much farther than
that. He, too, has knowledge of what is possible and
impossible. H e has collected the precepts of old
CONCLUSION 205
philosophers and saints, and the more recent ex-
amples patent in society around him, and by their
help has distinguished the ambitions that may be
wisely indulged in this life from those which it is
madness to foster,—the first being called virtue and
piety and the second folly and sin. W h a t makes such
knowledge precious is not only that it sketches in
general the scope and issue of life, but that it paints
in the detail as well,—the detail of what is possible
no less than that (more familiar to tragic poets) of
what is impossible.
Lucretius' notion, for instance, of what is posi-
tively worth while or attainable is very meagre : free-
dom from superstition, with so much natural science
as may secure that freedom, friendship, and a few
cheap and healthful animal pleasures. No love, no
patriotism, no enterprise, no religion. So, too, in what
is forbidden us, Lucretius sees only generalities,—the
folly of passion, the blight of superstition. Dante, on
the contrary, sees the various pitfalls of life with in-
tense distinctness; and seeing them clearly, and how
fatal each is, he sees also why men fall into them,
the dream that leads men astray, and the sweetness
of those goods that are impossible. Feeling, even in
what we must ultimately call evil, the soul of good
that attracts us to it, he feels in good all its loveliness
and variety. Where, except in Dante, can we find
so many stars that differ from other stars in glory;
206 T H R E E PHILOSOPHICAL POETS
so many delightful habitations for excellences; so
many distinct beauties of form, accent, thought, and
intention; so many delicacies and heroisms? D a n t e
is the master of those who know by experience what
is worth knowing by experience; he is the master of
distinction.
Here, then, are our three poets and their messages :
Goethe, with human life in its immediacy, treated
romantically ; Lucretius, with a vision of nature and
of the limits of human life ; Dante, with spiritual mas-
tery of that life, and a perfect knowledge of good
and evil.
You may stop at what stage you will, according
to your sense of what is real and important; for what
one man calls higher another man calls unreal; and
what one man feels to be strength smells rank to
another. In the end, we should not be satisfied with
any one of our poets if we had to drop the other
two. I t is true that taken formally, and in respect to
their type of philosophy and imagination, Dante is on
a higher plane than Lucretius, and Lucretius on a
higher plane than Goethe. B u t the plane on which
a poet dwells is not everything; much depends on
what he brings up with him to that level. Now there
is a great deal, a very great deal, in Goethe that
Lucretius does not know of. Not knowing of it, L u -
cretius cannot carry this fund of experience up to the
intellectual and naturalistic level; he cannot trans-
CONCLUSION 207
mute this abundant substance of Goethe's by his
higher insight and clearer faith ; he has not woven so
much into his poem. So that while to see nature, as
Lucretius sees it, is a greater feat than merely to live
hard in a romantic fashion, and produces a purer and
more exalted poem than Goethe's magical medley,
yet this medley is full of images, passions, memories,
and introspective wisdom that Lucretius could not
have dreamed of. The intellect of Lucretius rises,
but rises comparatively empty ; his vision sees things
as a whole, and in their right places, but sees very
little of them ; he is quite deaf to their intricacy, to
their birdlike multiform little souls. These Goethe
knows admirably; with these he makes a natural
concert, all the more natural for being sometimes
discordant, sometimes overloaded and dull. It is
necessary to revert from Lucretius to Goethe to get
at the volume of life.
So, too, if we rise from Lucretius to Dante, there
is much left behind which we cannot afford to lose.
Dante may seem at first sight to have a view of na-
ture not less complete and clear than that of Lucre-
tius; a view even more efficacious than materialism
for fixing the limits of human destiny and marking
the path to happiness. But there is an illusion here.
Dante's idea of nature is not genuine ; it is not sin-
cerely put together out of reasoned observation. It
is a view of nature intercepted by myths and worked
out by dialectic. Consequently, he has no true idea
either of the path to happiness or of its real condi-
tions. His notion of nature is an inverted image of
the moral world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon
the sky. It is a mirage.
Now, while to know evil, and especially good, in
all their forms and inward implications is a fargreater
thing than to know the natural conditions of good
and evil, or their real distribution in space and time,
yet the higher philosophy is not safe if the lower
philosophy is wanting or is false. Of course it is not
safe practically; but it is not safe even poetically.
There is an attenuated texture and imagery in the
Divine Comedy. The voice that sings it, from begin-
ning to end, is a thin boy-treble, all wonder and
naïveté. This art does not smack of life, but of som-
nambulism. The reason is that the intellect has been
hypnotized by a legendary and verbal philosophy. It
has been unmanned, curiously enough, by an excess
of humanism; by the fond delusion that man and
his moral nature are at the centre of the universe.
Dante is always thinking of the divine order of his-
tory and of the spheres; he believes in controlling
and chastening the individual soul; so that he seems
to be a cosmic poet, and to have escaped the an-
thropocentric conceit of romanticism. But he has not
escaped it. For, as we have seen, this golden cage in
which his soul sings is artificial ; it is constructed on
CONCLUSION 209
purpose to satisfy and glorify human distinctions
and human preferences. The bird is not in his native
wilds ; man is not in the bosom of nature. H e is, in
a moral sense, still at the centre of the universe ; his
ideal is the cause of everything. H e is the appointed
lord of the earth, the darling of heaven; and history
is a brief and prearranged drama, with Judea and
Rome for its chief theatre.
Some of these illusions are already abandoned ; all
are undermined. Sometimes, in moments when we
are unnerved and uninspired, we may regret the
ease with which Dante could reconcile himself to a
world, so imagined as to suit human fancy, and flat-
ter human will. W e may envy Dante his ignorance
of nature, which enabled him to suppose that he
dominated it, as an infinite and exuberant nature
cannot be dominated by any of its parts. In the end,
however, knowledge is good for the imagination.
Dante himself thought so ; and his work proved that
he was right, by infinitely excelling that of all ig-
norant contemporary poets. The illusion of know-
ledge is better than ignorance for a poet; but the
reality of knowledge would be better than the illu-
sion; it would stretch the mind over a vaster and
more stimulating scene ; it would concentrate the
will upon a more attainable, distinct, and congenial
happiness. The growth of what is known increases
the scope of what may be imagined and hoped for.
Throw open to the young poet the infinity of nature ;
let him feel the precariousness of life, the variety of
purposes, civilizations, and religions even upon this
little planet; let him trace the triumphs and follies
of art and philosophy, and their perpetual resurrec-
tions —like that of the downcast Faust. If, under the
stimulus of such a scene, he does not some day com-
pose a natural comedy as much surpassing Dante's
divine comedy in sublimity and richness as it will
surpass it in truth, the fault will not lie with the
subject, which is inviting and magnificent, but with
the halting genius that cannot render that subject
worthily.
Undoubtedly, the universe so displayed would not
be without its dark shadows and its perpetual trage-
dies. That is in the nature of things. Dante's cosmos,
for all its mythical idealism, was not so false as not
to have a hell in it. Those rolling spheres, with all
their lights and music, circled for ever about hell.
Perhaps in the real life of nature evil may not prove
to be so central as that. I t would seem to be rather
a sort of inevitable but incidental friction, capable of
being diminished indefinitely, as the world is better
known and the will is better educated. In Dante's
spheres there could be no discord whatever; but at
the core of them was eternal woe. In the star-dust
of our physics discords are everywhere, and harmony
is only tentative and approximate, as it is in the best
CONCLUSION 211
earthly life ; but at the core there is nothing sinister,
only freedom, innocence, inexhaustible possibilities
of all sorts of happiness. These possibilities may
tempt future poets to describe them ; but meantime,
if we wish to have a vision of nature not funda-
mentally false, we must revert from Dante to Lu-
cretius.
Obviously, what would be desirable, what would
constitute a truly philosophical or comprehensive
poet, would be the union of the insights and gifts
which our three poets have possessed. This union is
not impossible. The insights may be superposed one
on the other. Experience in all its extent, what
Goethe represents, should be at the foundation. But
as the extent of experience is potentially infinite, as
there are all sorts of worlds possible and all sorts of
senses and habits of thought, the widest survey
would still leave the poet, where Goethe leaves us,
with a sense of an infinity beyond. H e would be at
liberty to summon from the limbo of potentiality
any form that interested him ; poetry and art would
recover their early freedom ; there would be no beau-
ties forbidden and none prescribed. For it is a very
liberating and sublime thing to summon up, like
Faust, the image of all experience. Unless that has
been done, we leave the enemy in our rear ; whatever
interpretations we offer for experience will become
impertinent and worthless if the experience we work
upon is no longer at hand. Nor will any construction,
however broadly based, have an absolute authority;
the indomitable freedom of life to be more, to be new,
to be what it has not entered into the heart of man
as yet to conceive, must always remain standing.
W i t h that freedom goes the modesty of reason, both
in physics and in morals, that can lay claim only to
partial knowledge, and to the ordering of a particu-
lar soul, or city, or civilization.
Poetry and philosophy, however, are civilized arts ;
they are proper to some particular genius, which
has succeeded in flowering at a particular time and
place. A poet who merely swam out into the sea of
sensibility, and tried to picture all possible things,
real or unreal, human or inhuman, would bring ma-
terials only to the workshop of art; he would not
be an artist. To the genius of Goethe he must add
that of Lucretius and Dante.
There are two directions in which it seems fitting
that rational art should proceed, on the basis which
a limited experience can give it. A r t may come to
buttress a particular form of life, or it may come to
express it. All that we call industry, science, busi-
ness, morality, buttresses our life ; it informs us about
our conditions and adjusts us to them ; it equips us
for life ; it lays out the ground for the game we are
to play. This preliminary labour, however, need not
be servile. To do it is also to exercise our faculties;
CONCLUSION 213
and in that exercise our faculties may grow free,—
as the imagination of Lucretius, in tracing the course
of the atoms, dances and soars most congenially.
One extension of art, then, would be in the direc-
tion of doing artistically, joyfully, sympathetically,
whatever we have to do. Literature in particular
(which is involved in history, politics, science, affairs)
might be throughout a work of art. It would be-
come so not by being ornate, but by being appro-
priate; and the sense of a great precision and justness
would come over us as we read or wrote. It would
delight us ; it would make us see how beautiful, how
satisfying, is the art of being observant, economi-
cal, and sincere. The philosophical or comprehensive
poet, like Homer, like Shakespeare, would be a poet
of business. He would have a taste for the world in
which he lived, and a clean view of it.
There remains a second form of rational art, that
of expressing the ideal towards which we would move
under these improved conditions. For as we react we
manifest an inward principle, expressed in that re-
action. W e have a nature that selects its own direc-
tion, and the direction in which practical arts shall
transform the world. The outer life is for the sake of
the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and
conquest for the sake of self-possession. This inner
life is wonderfully redundant ; there is, namely, very
much more in it than a consciousness of those acts
by which the body adjusts itself to its surroundings.
Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben; each
sense has its arbitrary quality, each language its ar-
bitrary euphony and prosody; every game has its
creative laws, every soul its own tender reverbera-
tions and secret dreams. Life has a margin of play
which might grow broader, if the sustaining nucleus
were more firmly established in the world. To the
art of working well a civilized race would add the
art of playing well. To play with nature and make
it decorative, to play with the overtones of life and
make them delightful, is a sort of art. It is the ulti-
mate, the most artistic sort of art, but it will never
be practised successfully so long as the other sort of
art is in a backward state ; for if we do not know our
environment, we shall mistake our dreams for a part
of it, and so spoil our science by making it fantas-
tic, and our dreams by making them obligatory. The
a,rt and the religion of the past, as we see conspicu-
ously in Dante, have fallen into this error. To correct
it would be to establish a new religion and a new
art, based on moral liberty and on moral courage.
Who shall be the poet of this double insight? He
has never existed, but he is needed nevertheless. It
is time some genius should appear to reconstitute
the shattered picture of the world. He should live
in the continual presence of all experience, and re-
spect it ; he should at the same time understand na-
CONCLUSION 215
ture, the ground of that experience; and he should
also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his
own passions, and for all the colours of his possible
happiness. All that can inspire a poet is contained
in this task, and nothing less than this task would
exhaust a poet's inspiration. W e may hail this needed
genius from afar. Like the poets in Dante's limbo,
when Virgil returns among them, we may salute
him, saying: Onorate ΐaltissimo poeta. Honour the
most high poet, honour the highest possible poet.
But this supreme poet is in limbo still.

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THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS

LONDON : GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRINTING OFFICE

T H E present volume is composed, with a few

1 Lucretius, i. 9-22-34, 948-50 :

Effice, ut interea fera moenera militiai

But what if the shadow of incalculable possibili-

The word nature has many senses ; but if we pre-

The maxim of Lucretius, that nothing arises save

I N the Phaedo of Plato there is an incidental pas-

science, and to their common spiritual heritage and

In a letter which tradition assigns to Dante, ad-

. . . Ce blasphème vanté ne vient pas de ton coeur.

Et c'est à ta Françoise, à ton ange de gloire,

To which the evil angel replies :

And in another place:

There can be no doubt that the devil here represents

Even his irreverent pranks, being directed against the

lie ; and he appeals to courtiers and cavaliers by his

Among the allurements which, in the old legend,

lific fancy of the poet, and he added a final one,

passion and denied the happiness.1 Thus, in dreaming

I T may be possible, after studying these three phi-

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