UC-NBLF UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA THE POET AS PHILOSOPHER A STUDY OF THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS NOSCE TEIPSUM : THE ESSAY ON IVIAN : IN MEMORIAM BY MABEL DODGE HOLMES A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTL\L FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PHILADELPHIA, PA. 1921 <3V UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA THE POET AS PHILOSOPHER A STUDY OF THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS NOSCE TEIPSUM : THE ESSAY ON MAN : IN MEMORIAM BY MABEL DODGE HOLMES A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PHILADELPHIA. PA. 1921 ?fXCHA?^GE THE POET AS PHILOSOPHER I One of the passions of the human mind is the passion for defini- tion. Were it not so, the dictionary maker would not have found 60 large and so constantly growing a place in the sun. This, in spite of the fact that one of the discoveries of maturity is the futility of the effort to define. Like other passions mental and emotional, the definition is elusive. The mental concept, so clear while merely a concept, is a very butterfly in its power to evade the grasp. All too many words are required for the sufficient verbal analysis of an idea that, while it remains merely a visualized image, seems self-evident. The perception which flashes "upon the inward eye" becomes confused and dulled when the feeble reason attempts justly to reproduce it through the halting medium of language. Even the daily homely commonplaces refuse to be "cribb'd, cabined, or confined." The concrete fabric of wood or metal dissolves into thin air before our effort to imprison it in words. No better means exists of proving the objects of every- day life to be "such stuff as dreams are made of" than to seek to formulate their character in words. Since, then, anything made the object of definition becomes nebulous and refuses to crystallize, why not snatch at something recognizably elusive, and ask, "What is a poet?" What, then, is a poet? The answer must be in terms of what the poet makes himself. To-day he is a maker of pictures; and the charm of a dawning English Mayday, painted in vivid primary colors, lures us with Arcite out into woodland paths where the hawthorn breaks into blossom and the "busye larke" soars into the blue. To-morrow he is a singer of songs; and we dance with Ariel, or surfeit on the food of love to Feste's music ; with Hey wood we borrow the birds' not«s to give our love good-morrow, or with Greene and his Sephestia we weep for the coming grief of the child who smiles upon her knee. To-day he is the stem apostle of a religion of righteousness, preaching harsh judgment against the "blind mouths" that starve "the hungry sheep"; to-morrow he is the herald of the gentler creed of truth in beauty. Now he is the epicurean cynic, bidding us live for to-day alone, gathering rosebuds while we may; again he is the seer, with vision of that ■i52J 98 4 The Poet as Philosopher deathless something ''whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." To-day he is the voice of revolt against things as they are, wailing "for the world's wrong"; to-morrow he is the voice of an unforced optimism, singing that ''God's in His heaven." The poet is all these, and more than these, and none of these. Surely a definition which so refuses to be held within bounds leaves room for a poet who is a philosopher. Of philosophy there must be much, underlying and implicit, in all poetry as in all life. But of poets who have felt their art to be a medium for presenting a connected and well formulated philosophical system there have been few. Three such, because of a common element in their theme and in their attitude thereto, can be brought into collocation. That theme, the soul of man, its nature and its immortality, is the problem with which in all ages the thinker has wrestled, ever failing to solve it, ever return- ing, drawn by the fascination of the unsolvable. From Job and Socrates to Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a long road leads, marked as with milestones by man's attempts to find answers to the age-old questions, "What is man?" and "If a man die, shall he live again?" In England three at least of these mile- stones are the poetical philosophies, or philosophical poems, with which this discussion is concerned. He who set up the first of these. Sir John Davies, too little known as the creator of the earliest philosophical poem in modern English literature, closed Elizabeth's lyric and dramatic century with "Nosce Teipsum," a work, according to Nahum Tate, on the "origin, nature, and immortality of the soul." A century and a half later, Alexander Pope turned his gift of rhetoric and epigram to the task of versi- fying Bolingbroke's philosophy in "An Essay on Man." Again a century passed, and all the divers tones of Tennyson's clear harp were tuned to the theme of the deathlessness of man, in the most loved of English elegies, "In Memoriam." There is no doubt that these poets philosophized, or that in each of the works named a system of philosophy is presented. Does that make the poet a philosopher? The great leaders of metaphysical thought have been those who have built upon a structure already begun, a new elevation; or who have themselves laid the foundation for other men to build upon; or who, as pioneers, have blazed the trail into an unbroken wilderness of abstract reasoning. Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel — these are The Poet as Philosopher 5 creators. The poet, too, is a "maker"; but is his creative power adapted to the realm of metaphysical originality? Can a poet be an original philosopher? An answer may be arrived at by an investigation of the work of the poets who have turned their art to the use of metaphysics. From the measure of their success may be established a conclusion as to whether the poet can be as fittingly a leader in abstract thought as he is a maker of pictures, a teller of tales, a singer of songs, a voicer of emotions; or whether his philosophy is notable, not for its depth or originality, but for the grace and vividness of the image which the polished mirror of his mind reflects for us of the current thought of his time. II Were the poet not made of impressionable material he would be no poet. His appeal lies in his universality, in his voicing of the thoughts and emotions of all times and all classes. Were he not so sensitively keyed to the moods of men, to the temper of his time, to life around him, he would express in his verse only a personal and therefore a limited and subjective feeling or idea. It is the poet's power to focus within himself impressions from without, transmitting them through the lens of his own mind, that gives his work a claim on the world's attention. His theme, therefore, however old and however often treated, will show in his handling of it the influence not only of personal mood and tempera- ment, but also of personal circumstances and environment, and of the spirit of the age for which he is a spokesman. In a first casual reading of ''Nosce Teipsum," ''An Essay on Man," and "In Memoriam," it is easy to see that the writer's attitude to his subject was in each case colored by the exciting cause of the poem. Without falling into the fallacy that the artist's work always, and, to a large degree, only reflects the artist's life, we may yet grant that in the case of the reflective, the philosophic, or the emotional writer more than in that of the imaginative one, life and its circumstances disclose the springs of art. Could we trace the events of Shakespeare's life in the careers of Orlando, Troilus, and Hamlet, then "the less Shakespeare he"; but Goldsmith is not the less Goldsmith nor Burns the less Burns because the "Deserted Village" and "Sweet Afton" are auto- biographical. As for the three poems under consideration, they are all more easily understood and more fully appreciated in the light of the circumstances of their origin. In "Nosce Teipsum" is recorded the result of a piece of youthful extravagance on the part of the lately fledged barrister, not yet full grown into the grave statesman and lawyer so honored of King James the First. ^ During his years of law study, John Davies had counted as his "deerest friend," quoting the dedication of his poem "Orchestra,"^ one Richard Martin, elsewhere char- ^ Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. by Dr. A. B. Grosart, 1876, Vol. I, p. xxxiv. * Ibid., Vol. I, p. 159. 6 The Poet as Philosopher 7 acterized as "fast of tongue and ribald of wit."^ The intimacy suffered the fate that often attends extravagant youthful friend- ships. For reasons never known to the public, Davies took grave offense at Martin, and the quarrel which ensued not only changed the course of the poet's life, but was indirectly responsible for his greatest poem. The dramatic scene when Davies, cudgel in hand, entered the dining hall of the barristers in the Middle Temple, sought out Martin sitting at table, and beat him soundly over the head, displays a most unjudicial and unphilosophic fieriness of spirit, and was not unreasonably followed by the expulsion of Davies from the Temple and his dismissal from the bar. Humiliated, he retired to Oxford.- The year which followed seems to have been a turning-point in the young man's ; life for disgrace drove him to reflection, and unhappiness to introspection. We have his own word for it: '* If ought can teach us ought. Affliction's lookes, (Making us looke into ourselves so neere,) Teach us to know ourselves beyond all bookes, Or all the learned Schooles that ever were. " This mistresse lately pluckt me by the eare, And many a golden lesson hath me taught; Hath made my Senses quicke, and Reason cleare, Reform'd my Will and rectifide my Thought. "= At the end of a year, the golden lessons were embodied in "Nosce Teipsum," the earliest purely philosophical poem in English literature. It is obvious that a poem, the theme of which is the nature of the soul as revealed to the writer by the hard mistress Experience, with a view to guidance in his future conduct of life, must voice a subjective interpretation. It treats of the nature of the soul as Davies has found it out in experience, in observation, in reflection; particularly it is his own soul that is analyzed, for most of all he has learned to "know himself." The poem is a revelation of self, for the sake of those who by reading may arrive at a similar self- knowledge. Davies does not stand apart from his concept, man, and survey him with a detached and scientific scrutiny. He is a part of his own concept, and his treatment of the theme is cor- respondingly warm, intimate, and human. There is in "Nosce » Ibid., Vol. I, p. xxii. ^ Ilrid., Vol. I, p. xxiii. » Ilnd., Vol. I, p. 23. 8 The Poet as Philosopher Teipsum" no egotistically elaborate or self-conscious intention to produce a philosophy. It is a philosophy, to be sure, but a philosophy that overflows in childlike naivety from within the unhappy heart of its writer. It is hard to avoid the feeling that Davies wrote the poem to comfort himself in his humiUation by an act of self-expression; as if to him, as to Wordsworth, "A timely utterance gave that thought relief." Equally obvious is it that a poem the philosophy of which is essentially one of conduct must be primarily interested in the soul as it lives on earth, where conduct is its outer garment. More- over, it is not the soul of man in general that is so analyzed, but a single soul, real, animate, individual. Davies' conclusions were as empirical, as full of common sense, as thoroughly based on his own observations of the things that his own soul could and did do, as were Locke's, a century later. The problems of metaphysics are everywhere subordinated to the problems of conduct, and however far afield theoretical speculation may lead the writer, he always returns in time for his application of the theory to practice. For instance, in a carefully reasoned passage on free will, the strongest argument for freedom is that without it man could not do the things right standards of conduct demand of him — " If love be compeld and cannot chuse. How can it gratefuU or thankeworthy prove? "Love must free-hearted be, and voluntary. "» And a thorough analysis of the power, worth and beauty of the soul leads to the conclusion "that God did meane This worthy mind should worthy things imbrace; Blot not her beauties with thy thoughts unclean, Nor her dishonour with thy passions base."'^ Of such a practical and didactic nature was necessarily the meta- physics taught as "golden lessons" in the school of experience by the mistress Affliction, with a view to reforming and rectifying the will and thought of the learner. Quite different was the exciting cause of Pope's "Essay on Man." Here is no "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions" 1 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 59. » Ihid., Vol. 1, p. 115. The Poet as Philosopher 9 or even of tranquil reflection induced by regret for an act of folly. The poem grew, not out of Pope's life experience, but out of Bolingbroke's, and its initiation was due to the friendship between the statesman and the poet. Far from being "pluckt by the eare" by affliction, Pope was only too ready to give audience to the specious optimism which his St. John was so willing to impart. The source of the "Essay" is to be sought, then, rather in Boling- broke's story than in Pope's, except in so far as Pope's lack of philosophical knowledge, coupled with his worship for his noble patron, made him open to suggestion from the master of Dawley. The outstanding features of the first period of Bolingbroke's brilliant and unscrupulous career^ need here be only indicated rather than rehearsed — his rise to power under Anne; his fall and exile at the accession of George I ; his retirement into philosophical leisure in rural France; his declared intention, more than a little successful, to make himself the arbiter of European thought if he could not be of European politics; his return to Dawley and his subsequent gathering around him of the most illustrious wits and literary men of his time, while he pursued his double career, of philosopher at his country seat, of factious intriguer in London. The man of whom Chesterfield wrote that he joined "the most elegant politeness and good-breeding that ever any courtier and man of the world was graced with" to the "deepest erudition, "^ was easily able, by his grace and dignity of manner, by the charm of his conversation, and by his generous sympathy with men of genius,' to command the admiration of the "sickly, solitary,"* sensitive poet of Twickenham, whose passion for literature and literary men made him quickly susceptible to the condescension of the host of Voltaire, Swift, and Arbuthnot, and the patron of Gay.6 Bolingbroke's ambitious philosophical aim was no less than to demolish the existing systems of theological and philosophical dogma, and to reconstruct a new metaphysics along his own original lines, presenting an organic and harmonious view of the ^ See Bolingbroke: A Historical Study, by John Churton Collins. ' Chesterfield's Letters, ed. by Lord Mahon, 1847, Vol. I, p. 355. ' Collins' Bolingbroke, pp. 8-9. * Alexander Pope, by Leslie Stephen, p. 2. » Collins' Bolinghroke, pp. 186-188. 10 The Poet as Philosopher universe.^ But a merely academic hearing, by scholars and churchmen, did not offer to his propaganda suflScient range. A popular audience was his goal. At his hand he found a poet whose already established reputation would secure the popular audience. A philosophy however abstruse, if presented in Pope's admired couplets, would command the attention of the reading world. Together Bolingbroke and Pope sketched the plan for a great didactic poem, of which the cantos contained in our "Essay" were to be but a fraction.^ That portion of Bolingbroke's works which embodies this phase of his philosophy was couched in the form of "Letters to Mr. Pope." But these were not written until after the "Essay."' According to Doctor Warton, however. Lord Bathurst saw the whole scheme of Pope's poem drawn up in Bolingbroke's hand- writing, consisting of "a series of propositions, which the poet was ^Ibid., pp. 217-221. * Collins says: " It was he who sketched the plan of that magnificent work, of which the 'Essay on Man,' the 'Moral Essays,' and the fourth book of the 'Dunciad' are only fragments — a work which would in all probability, had the health and energy of Pope been equal to the task, have been the finest didactic poem in the world." P. 189. Stephen quotes Bolingbroke as saying to Swift in 1731, "Does Pope talk to you of the noble work which, at my instigation, he has begun?" P. 160. Bolingbroke writes to Pope in letter introductory to Essays on Human Knowledge: "Since you have begun, at my request, the work which I have wished long that you would undertake, it is but reasonable that I submit to the task you impose upon me." Works of Lord Bolingbroke, Bohn's edition, 1844, Vol. Ill, p. 40. ' Stephen's Pope, p. 165. Bolingbroke's letter to Pope, cited above, says: "You have begun your ethic epistles in a masterly manner. . . . While your muse is employed ... I shall throw upon paper, for your satisfaction and my own, some part at least of what I have thought and said formerly." Works, Vol. Ill, pp. 40-43. The Advertisement to the Fragments or Minutes of Essays says: "The foregoing essays and the Fragments or Minutes that follow, were thrown upon paper in Mr. Pope's lifetime and at his desire. They were all communicated to him in scraps, as they were occasionally written. . . . They are all noth- ing more than repetitions of conversations often interrupted, often renewed, and often carried on a httle confusedly." Works, Vol. IV, p. 111. These quotations make it evident that Pope's versification of Bolingbroke's philosophy was written before the formal arrangement of the prose essays. The Poet as Philosopher 11 to amplify, versify, and illustrate."' Poet and philosopher joined to construct a system of ethics which they determined should "descend to posterity clothed in more attractive form than those to be dug from ponderous folios. The sentiments, the design, the philosophy were to be Bolingbroke's; the poetry, the ornament, and the fame Pope's."* The "Essay on Man," then, represents a deliberate, conscious attempt to express in poetry the systematic analysis of the soul in its relation to life which is a part of Bolingbroke's philosophical system. Art is not here the medium through which the poet interprets the soul as life has revealed it to him; the poet himself is rather the tool of a propagandist. The motive is not, "Woe be unto me if I utter not the thought that burns my lips"; but rather, "Go to, now, let us build us a philosophical system that will reach unto heaven, and let us make of it a poem that shall command the popular ear." The impulse is wholty didactic, and the poetic form in which the teaching is couched has an artificiality not wholly due to the literary fashion of the time. "Nosce Teipsum," to be sure, is no less didactic; but its spon- taneous voicing of something valuable that the poet has found out and wants to pass on to others makes it real and sincere. Using one's art to interpret the truth of the soul as one has found it in experience is very different from entering into a literary partner- ship wherein a philosopher is to win audience for his system by means of a poet's pen, and a poet is to win fame by using an immortal theme as mere ready-made material for his art. The treatment of any subject under such circumstances must neces- sarily be abstract, coldly logical, and to a great extent objective. For the ideas are not evolved from Pope's consciousness; the garment which he cuts is from another man's cloth, and his interest is in shape rather than substance. He does not care greatly about the nature of the soul; his enthusiasm is for the cut and polished epigrams from whose facets are to glitter the truths he has been told about the soul. With the sources of inspiration of both Pope and Davies thus before us, it is not hard to trace the spiritual kinship of our third poet. If "Nosce Teipsum" bears witness to the sweetness of the ' Memoirs of Lord Bolingbroke, Vol. II, p. 100, footnote. Collins' Bolingbroke, p. 190. ' Memoirs of Lord Bolingbroke, pp. 100-101. 12 The Poet as Philosopher uses of adversity, even more does "In Memoriam" stand as monument to the triumph of the "faith that looks through death." Da vies wrote from the Valley of Humiliation; Tennyson, from the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And proportionate to the greater depth from which the cry came was the height to which the soul attained "Upon the world's great altar stairs That slope through darkness up to God." The story of the grief of Alfred Tennyson for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam is too familiar to need re-telling. Less trite, perhaps, is an allusion to the testimony of their contemporaries as to the beauty and power of the character of the subject of the "Elegies," as the separate poems were at first called. The man whose father could speak of his "almost faultless disposition"; whom Lord Houghton called "a most wise and influential coun- sellor," and Henry Alford a "gentle soul That ever moved among us in a veil Of heavenly lustre"; and of whom Gladstone wrote, long after, that had he lived he "would have built his own enduring monument,"^ was surely worthy of the seventeen-year-long poetic tribute that embodies the still dearer gift of unforgetting friendship. The very length of time over which the composition of "In Memoriam" extends is proof of the sincerity of its spirit. That it was begun immediately after Hallam's death is attested by a group of manuscript lines containing its germ and bearing date of the winter of 1833.2 " Where is the voice I loved? Ah where Is the dear hand that I would press? Lo! the broad heavens cold and bare, The stars that know not my distress! The vapor labors up the sky. Uncertain forms are darkly moved! Larger than human passes by The shadow of the man I loved, And clasps his hands, as one that prays!" » Wace's Tennyson, pp. 30-34. ^ Memoir, Vol. I, p. 107. The Poet as Philosopher 13 Moreover, in the manuscript book containing the earliest draft of "The Two Voices," pubUshed in 1833, appear five of the poems later to be a part of "In Memoriam."^ The date of pubhcation, 1850, would not alone be proof of the long process of development of the whole poem; but identification has been made of events and persons alluded to that did not enter the poet's life until dates as late as 1845.^ The last step in the progress of the work was the arrangement of the parts in the order in which thej' stand. Of the gradual evolution of the poem Tennyson himself wrote, "The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many." It is easy and superficial to say that the poem originated as an outlet for personal grief. Undoubtedly personal grief inspired inquiry into the great subjects of God, faith, and immortality, as likely to afford comfort.' Equally surely the poem is subjective in its initiation. Sorrow awakened the consciousness of the need to know by personal investigation what are the grounds for belief in the great tenets of faith. Tennyson, when Hallam died, was at the doubting age; his struggle with the doubts common to youth was merely precipitated by the loss of his friend. And because "In Memoriam" voices doubts that are common, it became, as its maker said of it, "a poem, not an actual biography." It partakes of a dramatic quality, by which, wrote Tennyson, 1 Memoir, p. 109. The poems are the following: Fair ship, that from the ItaUan shore, ix. With trembling fingers did we weave, xxx. When Lazarus left his chamel-cave. xxxi. This truth comes home with bier and pall. Ixxxv. It draweth near the birth of Christ, xxviii. * A. C. Bradley, in A Commentary on Tennyson's "In Memoriam,'" pp. 15-17, mentions Charles Tennyson's marriage tour in 1836 (xcviii) ; allu- sion in Ixxxv to Edmund Lushington, whom Tennyson did not become a friend of until 1840, and whose marriage to Cecilia Tennyson in 1842 is celebrated in the Epilogue; removal of the Tennysons from Somersby to Epping Forest in 1837 (c-cv); visits to Barmouth, 1839, and Gloucester- shire, 1844, where certain poems were said by Tennyson to have been written. Lushington wrote in 1845, "Tennyson showed me those poems of 'In Memoriam' which were finished," implying that more were to come. ' E. H. Sneath, The Mind of Tennyson, pp. 9-10. 14 The Poet as Philosopher "the different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given. . . . 'V is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him."* In another way than as an elegy "In Memoriam" was inspired by Arthur Henry Hallam. Much of the spirit of his few writings is apparent in Tennyson's philosophy. Hallam was much more a philosopher than was Tennyson in his youth, and in their walks at Cambridge, in their joumeyings in Europe, in their vacation days at Somersby, the friends must have talked much of the great topics that lie at the heart of all philosophy. It is not hard to detect a possible source of inspiration in the lines found by Hallam Tennyson among his father's treasured letters from Arthur.^ "I do but mock me with the questionings. Dark, dark, irrecoverably dark Is the soul's eye; yet how it strives and battles Through the impenetrable gloom to fix That master light, the secret truth of things, Which is the body of the Infinite God." Not only out of Hallam 's death, then, but equally out of Hallam 's life sprang the "wild and wandering cries" which grew through the years into an unexampled expression of the passion and the pain of the heart that "feels after God if haply we may find Him"; to discover at last triumphantly that "He is not far from evervone of us." If the circumstances in which the three poems originated are responsible for their quality, not less so are the temperaments and personalities of their writers. Sir John Davies was a lawyer, and from all we can learn of him an eminently practical person, whose legal acumen no less than his poetical achievement commended him to the shrewd King James the First. Nor was he without the social graces of a courtier, while at the same time displajdng the typically sturdy English temper of the parliamentarian who stood for right against privilege, even when privilege was a royal monopoly.^ His practical achievement found its best expression in his earnest, intelhgent, and untiring efforts for the right govern- ment of the ever troublesome Ireland.'* His mind was legal, his 1 Memoir, Vol. I, p. 305. ' Memoir, Vol. I, p. 104. ' Grosart's ed. of Davies, p. xxxiii. * Grosart's ed. of Davies, pp. xxxv-lxiv. The Poet as Philosopher 15 temper judicial, his habit of life active. In "Nosce Teipsum" the legal mind seeks to prove its belief; the judicial temper provides motive for such effort to prove, in the ethical application which is the raison d'etre of the poem; and the active practicaHty of the busy man of affairs presents the abstractions of metaphysics in the plain blunt language and with the simple faith characteristic of the writer's manly, straightforward attitude to life. It is a practical working philosophy that Davies embodies in his poem. And yet it is philosophy as such, not implicit in allegory or drama, lyric or heroic narrative, according to the fashions of his time. Davies was a thinker and a worker, not a singer; life to him was a problem of conduct, not the material of a stage-play. No less is the character of the "Essay" determined by the character of Alexander Pope, an exponent in his own person of the cynical temper of his day. Embittered by the ill-health and deformity which cut him off from the active life of men, and by the Catholic disabilities which barred him from a political career; little inclined to mingle in a wide and tolerant friendliness with men outside the circle of his chosen friends; prone, when irritated, to jealousy, suspicion, and petty quarreling; catering to popular wits and aristocratic Tory leaders, and priding himself on his position as ''authorized interpreter of the upper circle"; having the gift neither of sympathetic and kindly laughter nor of the tears that spring "from the depth of some divine despair" — thus poorly equipped for poesy, Pope can hardly be expected to handle with adequate sympathy or with spontaneity the great theme through the variations of which throbs the heartbeat of human longing. Problems of conduct were secondary to a man whose guide was expediency and whose pastime was intrigue. The great truths of religion brought no thrill to a man to whom his own religion had been only a limitation of opportunity and all other religion but a hostile environment. Pope's interest in God and immortality is primarily neither ethical nor theological, but speculative. An intricate and unimpassioned chain of logic, illuminated by Pope's rhetorical gift of brilliant epigram, leads to rationalistic and purely abstract conclusions, as cold as they are clever. To Davies the practical and Pope the rationalistic succeeds Tennyson the introspective. His passion is neither conduct nor speculation, but faith, the intuitive faith of the mystic. As truly 16 The Poet as Philosopher religious and moral as Davies, with the conventional religion and morality of the nineteenth century, he yet lives, unlike Davies, a life far removed from public affairs. As aristocratic and conserva- tive as Pope, he yet possesses, unlike him, a pulsing human sympathy and a love and knowledge of nature which are his heritage from the poets of the Revolution, Side by side with his gift of self-analj^sis is his capacity for experiencing to the full every human emotion — love, joy, grief, friendship, hope, despair. Where Davies based his treatment of the problems of the soul of man on the foundation, "I have inquired and learned to know"; where Pope proceeds from the starting-point, "I have reasoned and reached a conclusion"; Tennyson's heart "Stands up and answers, 'I have felt,'" and to his expression of feeling finds continuing echo in numberless other hearts. In spite of their single theme, then, our three poems are likely to be widely divergent in character — the first, an earnest, unaffect- ed expression of a soul enthusiastic, sturdy, sincere, seeking to impart to others salutary lessons learned by him in a hard school; the second, a studied, brilliant piece of artifice, issuing from a nature shallow, cold, vain, whose effort to convince men of eternal truths grew not of heart but of brain; the third, a record of struggle from darkness to light of a sensitive, introspective, intuitively religious soul, voicing with pulsing sympathy an experience common to every such soul and therefore universal in its appeal. And the divergence to be expected in view of these differences of circumstance and temperament is likely to appear still more inevitable when studied in the light of the times from which the poems emanated. Can our poet be an original philosopher? In so far as he reflects his time, he is but a mirror, not a creator. Before he can be estunated as either, he must be seen against a background Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian. Ill Of the Elizabethan age/ with its overflowing, superabundant vitaHty, the keynote is surely "More life and fuller." Not a century had passed since intellect, religion and national conscious- ness had had their new birth under the touch of Erasmus and More, Grocyn and Colet, Henry VII and Wolsey. From a negligible island, torn by civil strife and backward in civilization, England had been made by her great minister the arbiter of Europe; the often ridiculed economies of her first Tudor king had added to her international prestige the backing of a well-filled treasury ; stirred to emulation by Italian and Portuguese example, British voyagers had made their first timid attempts to try their "woven wings" upon the dread Atlantic; and all within less than a hundred years of the accession of Elizabeth. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance came late into England, having undergone transformation at the hands of the austere and ethical genius of northern Europe into a spirit whose dominant note was moral and religious.^ English scholars caught from Italy the zeal for classic philosophy and literature, the fascinated pursuit of ancient learning, the revolt against authority and the sense of the value of the individual, which in Italy had been accompanied by a purely pagan delight in beauty for its own sake. In the Oxford and Cambridge of Henry VII and VIII there was no paganism; the methods of classic study were applied with keenest zest to sacred writings, and among the treasures of antiquity it was the graver Hterature that commanded attention from the master minds of the time. The reviving intellect was the handmaid of religion; religious instruction and moral training were the ultimate goals of the study and teaching of the classics; and serious Hterature, not secular, supplied the material in shaping which the intellect was to achieve its mastery of the new tools of culture. The period of ' For facts implied in the historical and Hterary summary see the following: A. D. Innes, England Under the Tudors. E. P. Cheyney, England from the Defeat of the Artnada to the Death of . Elizabeth . F. A. Pollard, Political History of England from Accession of Edward VI to Death of Elizabeth. Cambridge History of English Literature, Vols. 3 and 4. 'Adams' Civilization During the Middle Ages, Ch. xv. 17 18 The Poet as Philosopher the humanists in England was a learning period, gravely intent, as a child upon a new lesson, upon its task of making practical and accessible the wisdom of the ancients. Before the opening of the Elizabethan period the intellect has found itself. The first ventures into new realms of thought and knowledge are complete. Knowing that it has wings, the spirit of Elizabethan England is ready for far flights. It is the age of youth, enthusiastic, exuberant, out-reaching, eager to try its newly realized intellectual strength as well in realms of art as in those of graver learning. So art seeks new channels, by experiment in the use of every medium — lyric, dramatic, fictional, metrical, linguistic. Travelled courtiers come home from France and Italy bringing new art forms, and England bursts into song. To find new modes of expression poets and pedants juggle with classic metres and euphuists strain rhetoric to the breaking point. Vogue follows vogue in kaleidoscopic succession of miscellany, allegory, pastoral, and sonnet. Religion refuses to be bound by the shackles of authority, either Roman or Anglican; and, as the method of the humanists applied to sacred documents produces the English Bible, the Puritan spirit comes to birth, itself a great adventure. National pride grows with Elizabeth's greatness, reflected in chronicle, historical play, and poetical history, where Camden and Harrison vie with Shakespeare and Daniel in celebrat- ing the glories of England. Across the western ocean the first of the empire builders sail out to meet the Spanish galleons home- coming under silken sails and laden with the treasures of the Indies. The flag of England follows the little ships of the merchant adventurers into the Orient. In the pages of Hakluyt magic casements are opened upon the foam of perilous seas. A new world lures to its exploration both poet and mariner. To seek, to strive, to fare forth upon the great adventure, whether armed with pen or with sword, is the temper of the time. Youth unspoiled is unsophisticated. The age of Elizabeth was an unsophisticated age. Its judgments were based on its own often mistaken, but always sincere sense of values. Its thinkers, with intellects newly set free from the trammels of ecclesiastical and scholastic methods, turned from the study of the classics to the study of life. They were for the most part unconscious philosophers, whose conscious interest was all in men and their affairs. Little abstract metaphysics emanates The Poet as Philosopher 19 from the age of Elizabeth. But a deep and simple understanding of Hfe and its problems is implicit in their writings; and is not that, after all, a working philosophy ?' Life was their study; all life, all manifestations of life, seemed to them new, vivid, full of wonder, a great adventure, luring to exploration as the far lands lured. A twentieth century which inherits the constructive thought of three hundred years can be startled into attention only by a radical innovation. But the thinkers of an age which inherited only crystallized tradition, and which had discarded that tradition as an outworn garment, found that the body of truth within the garment, hitherto by them unseen and unreahzed, had all the beauty of Venus to Praxiteles. They looked at the mere externals of this body of thought; they knew as little of the intricate possibilities of its inner recesses as contemporary physi- cists knew of the circulation of the blood. The simpler acts of life and of the universe, which a more complex age takes for granted, offered to them inexhaustible material for analysis. Simple emotions, rudimentary mental and spiritual processes, basic philosophical truths, are dissected with the garrulity, not of age, but of youth discovering something new. However much Plato or Zeno or Plotinus may have discovered it before, to the Ehzabeth- ans each fresh explanation of the meaning of life is naively a new discovery. It is a discovery which will out; it must find articulate expression. Thus the passion of love provides stuff for poetic meanderings through sonnet sequence after sonnet sequence, all voicing feelings which to our worldly wise generation are trite enough to be left implicit in something subtler, but which to them were full of the charm of things never before expressed. However often Greek or Latin or Italian poets might have said these things. Englishmen had not said them before. Nothing was too trivial, too obvious, to be put into words. As unsophisticated of spirit as his age, young John Davies took as his theme the explanation and proof of these great self- evident fundamentals, God, man, and immortality, which the ' Touchstone: Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd? Carin: No more but that I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends; that the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn . . . Touchstone: Such a one is a natural philosopher. —.4s You Like It. Act III, Sc. 2, 11. 21-33. 20 The Poet as Philosopher professional metaphysicians, ancient and modern, from Plato to Calvin, had already analyzed and formulated. The young adventurer into philosophy had nothing really new or profound to add to the body of their thought, but to himself his discoveries of truth were as new as if made for the first time. Since he had not known these things before, he took for granted they were equally new to others. It is probable, too, that to his contemporaries the philosophical discoveries of Davies had all the charm of novelty. It is to our print-satiated age that they seem trite. The men and women who read his work knew Plato and Aristotle, to be sure; but here were Plato and Aristotle popularized and made English. And these readers were not constructive thinkers, each in possession of a well-formulated system of metaphysics. Among the men of learning of his time, Davies was one of the few conscious philos- ophers. While he was no more really the philosopher than was Spenser, and while his work no more truly contains a knowledge of the deep things of the thought of the ages past than does the "Faerie Queen," nevertheless Spenser's philosophical reflections are so intermingled with the thread of his allegory and with vivid images of sensuous beauty that the philosopher seems all poet. For the writer of "Nosce Teipsum," on the contrary, poetry was merely the medium of expression of an abstract philosophical theme — the ship which carried the adventurer through the deeps of thought, into a country to him as undiscovered as was the Eldorado which lured Sir Walter Raleigh to his death. With the query, "Why did my parents send me to the Schooles?"^ Davies begins an introduction that laments the vanity of human knowledge. He reminds the reader that "the desire to know first made men fools," and goes on to describe the "fond fruitlesse curiositie" with which "in bookes prophane we seeke for knowledge hid." The seeking is to no purpose: "when all our lamps are burned, Our bodies wasted, and our spirits spent ; When we have all the learned Volumes turned, Which yeeld mens wits both help and ornament: What can we know? or what can we disceme?"* ' Grosart's ed. of Davies, Vol. I, pp. 15-17. * Ibid., p. 18. The Poet as Philosopher 21 The idea is not new; to search no further, it is at least as old as Koheleth. Davies, however, as the gentle cynic did not, finds a reason for this purposelessness which at the same time affords a hope for an ultimate knowledge that shall be of some avail : "For how may we to others' things attaine, When none of us his owne soule understands? "We that acquaint ourselves with every Zoane And passe both Tropikes and behold the Poles, When we come home, are to ourselves unknown, And unacquainted still with our owne Soules."^ If, then, the seeker after knowledge will but study his own soul first, he may hope to arrive at true wisdom. Had it not been for the poet's misfortunes, he tells us, he would have been as blind as others, having a mind wholly occupied with "the face of outward things, Pleasing and fau'e, agreeable and sweet."* But catastrophe has driven the young man back upon himself: "My selfe am center of my circling thought, Onely my selfe I studie, learne, and know."' With this preliminary statement of his theme and his reasons for choosing it, Davies proceeds to a detailed definition of the soul in terms both positive and negative. The theories of various "great clerks" are catalogued and dismissed with the verdict that "No craz'd braine could ever yet propound. Touching the Soule, so vaine and fond a thought, But some among these masters have been found, Which in their Schooles the self-same thing have taught."* Reaching the conclusion that the soul is "a spirit, and heavenly influence,"* the poem continues to give proof from nature and theology that this spirit was created by God, in contradiction to other theories of its origin.^ The explanation of the relation of the soul to the body, by means of physical senses and mental faculties, ends the first part of the poem.' The second part is devoted to a careful proof of the immortality of the soul, with a refutation of current objections to the doctrine.^ 1 Ibid., p. 19. * lUd., p. 27. ' Ihid., pp. 60-82. ' lUd., p. 22. » Ibid., p. 41. « lUd., pp. 82-116. 5 JUd., p. 24. « lUd., pp. 45-60. 22 The Poet as Philosopher Neither are these new ideas; they are as old as Socrates or as Job. But to Da vies they are new; and he approaches them with all the enthusiasm of that explorer into new realms who is the best type of the Elizabethan Englishman. He has no more hesitation in attacking an insoluble problem than has Gilbert in attempting a Northwest Passage or Drake in singeing the beard of the Spanish king. His daring spirit is undaunted; he will answer the question for which the centuries have found no adequate reply. He will define the indefinable; " unknowables " are left to the nineteenth century. Poets of his time have already blazed the trail of the love song, of the historical narrative, of the pastoral lyric, of the sonnet sequence; Davies will blaze the trail of the philosophical elegy. The twentieth century, far on the road to an understanding of all mysteries and all knowledge, may look with amused wonder at the length of the argument which Davies thinks is necessary' to prove that the soul can exist without the body, or that the soul has no need of food. Such propositions as he spends ingenuity and poetic power upon are of a sort to be either assumed or discarded, but no longer debated. In a time when every public school child may know if he will the uses of the five senses, a careful analj^sis of the subject by an adult for adults seems superfluous. Yet to feel a sence of redundancy or undue multiplication of words in Davies is to argue a lack of his- torical imagination; for in the naive simplicity which expresses what a more complex age would take for granted, the poet is only the exponent of the youthful outspokenness of his time. These things were to him worth talking about, worth writing his best verses about. Moreover, they were things about which the poetry reading public of his time thought and talked, and as to which Davies wished to persuade them to right views. They elicited from him many a brilliant stanza, many a fresh and vital interpretation of the meaning of life. That they did so merely shows him the child of his period, when to think was to put into words. Davies' problem was the problem of Job; it is the problem of Sir Oliver Lodge; it is ageless because unanswerable. But his approach to the problem, compact of philosophical conmionplaces though it may be, voices ideas that to his contemporaries were worth voicing, because to their simple, youthful enthusiasm 3verything was interesting, nothing trite. After all, with all the The Poet as Philosopher 23 sophistication of the moderns, it is hard to find a deeper, surer, more penetrating summing up of the whole nature of man than this: "I know I am one of Nature's Uttle kings. Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall — "*■ To gain wisdom has been to lose wonder; the twentieth century psychologist has reduced to a science the mental and spiritual processes, soul-stuff having become to him merely material for experiment, a substance as self-evident as oxygen to the chemist. It was the sixteenth century guesser at truth who cried out in reverent ardor, "O ignorant poor man! what dost thou beare Lockt up within the casket of thy brest? What jewels, and what riches hast thou there!"* But between our over-scientific age and the young enthusiasm of Sir John Davies and his contemporaries lie three centuries whose history is that of the swinging pendulum.^ The splendid figures of Elizabeth's court passed into silence; the great queen herself laid down her regal power; heroic adventure gave place to the petty intrigue of a Stuart court. Instead of the reverent wonder that took shape in lofty poetry appeared fanatic super- stition whose emotional outlet was witch-hunting. The consum- mate feminine tact was gone which, capitalizing the native English chivalry that made men loyal to a whimsical and arbitrary Glori- ana, had held a liberty-loving nation in happy subjection under an autocratic paternalism. In its stead reigned a shrewd, stubborn, antagonistic self-will, king by divine right, according to the fashion of continental monarchs. Administration by favorites, coupled with the failure of the royal pedant to comprehend the laws and Hberties of England, goaded the free-born Englishman into resentment and revolt. Enthusiasm found a new outlet; 1 Ibid., p. 24. » Ibid., p. 114-115. » For facts underlying the ensuing historical summary, see the following: Trevelyan — England under the Stuarts. Hassall — Balance of Power in Europe. Wakeman — Seventeenth Century Europe. Lecky — History of England in the 18th Century. Robertson — England under the Hanoverians. Innes — History of Englaiid and the British Empire, Vol. 3. 24 The Poet as Philosopher not Eldorado, not Virginia, not the treasures of the Indies lured the adventurous spirit, but an ideal of freedom from tyranny, of government by the consent of the governed. Play and poem gave place to political pamphlet; art became the handmaid of an austere religion, or fled in fear from the noisy confusion of a nation in civil strife. Great literature is not born of civil war, nor great art of religious bigotry. On the pendulum swung through the descending arc of regicide. Protectorate, and Restoration, to reach its lowest curve in the decadence of the Meriy Monarch's reign. Of the corruption of the public taste, permeated by the contagion of a corrupt court, no further evidence is needed than the total absence of ethical ideals in the Restoration drama. The reaction against Puritanism was displayed in two forms: the frivolous mind, resenting the trammels that had been placed upon conduct by the rigid morality of Presbyterians and Covenanters, burst all bounds in an orgy of dissipated pleasure; the thoughtful mind, flinging off the shackles of creed with which a Calvinistic establislmient had loaded it, either became indifferent to all religion, or inclined with cold curiosity to the rationalistic movement which was beginning to dominate thought under the influence of Hobbes and Descartes. In parliamentary circles reaction was the rule of the day, embodied in Poor Laws, a Penal Code, and acts of reUgious intolerance which made the great Toiy families supreme in state and church, and created an insurmountable cleavage between the upper class, Torj'^ and Anglican, and the middle and lower classes, democratic and Dissenting. National prestige, so high under Elizabeth, had fallen to the lowest figure perhaps ever reached by English stock — a figure indexed by the subsidy paid to Charles II by the king of France, and by the signatures of the Cabal to a sham treaty by which an ally was sold out. English military power was negligible, her strength sapped by the civil wars of two decades, and by the emigration of her sturdiest and most independent spirits to the free air of the New World. Men had changed "swords for ledgers," and forsaken "the student's bower for gold"; for one tremendously vital force in English life in the seventeenth century was the developing commercial life of the nation. Colonies were encour- aged as a source of new markets; navigation acts were made law as a means of controlling and monopolizing those markets; the The Poet as Philosopher 25 soon-to-be great aristocracy of trade was in its infancy. In these facts lay the germs of eighteenth century material prosperity; yet prosperity bought at the price of a commercialized national life is bought too dear, and the period when the commercializing process takes place may be not unfairly called a nation's lowest watermark. Still the pendulum swung, now through an ascending arc whose degrees are marked by the birth of the Whig party, the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights, and the conquests of England's first foreign wars of commerce. The colonial empire expands; growing commercial and sea power means growing prosperity, growing smugness, growing national self-satisfaction. England becomes to Europe the pattern of the constitutional monarchy, with a government really representative and a ministry really responsible. Dating from the Treaty of Utrecht, eighteenth century England represents the extreme opposite from the England of Elizabeth. A nation which has suffered from its unchecked enthusiasms — for freedom, in the stress of the Civil War; for religion, in Puritan bigotry; for pleasure, in the demoralized court of Charles II — turns with relief to a life bereft of enthusiasm. No more do the "woven wings" of the Uttle ships of England flit down the Channel on their way to wrest from the Spaniard the wealth of the Indies; rather her merchantmen ply the African slave trade in the infamous service of the Spanish crown. Bribery and place-hunting are the passions of an England made prosperous and peaceful by Walpole's statecraft. Formalism and artificiality are the natural outgrowth of revulsion against great genuineness of feeling, great sincerity of action. At all costs, whatever may be beneath the surface, let a seemliness of outward appearance be maintained. And since there are no great issues to be faced, with traditional insularity separating England from vital interest in European wars, with religious tolerance breeding religious indifference, with the love of system, of order, of a universe reduced to form and law becoming the sole meditation of the thoughtful — since there are no great issues there can be no great enthusiasms, and men's minds are left free for attention to the small, surface non-essentials. Thus the eighteenth century is as truly an age of artificiality as was the sixteenth an age of enthusiasm. Preservation of the balance of power is the keynote of international relations, as 26 The Poet as Philosopher preservation of the balance between classes is the goal of domestic statecraft. So dehcately adjusted a system, man-made and man-upheld, whose treaties, as Alberoni said of Utrecht, "pared and cut countries like Dutch cheeses," without regard for racial affinities or natural boundaries, must needs be both artificial and mechanical. The wars of the eighteenth century are not wars for principle, not wars of national pride, not wars for glory or for right; they are wars for boundary lines and for the right allotment of colonial possessions, so that no nation may have too much power. It is a time sordid, treacherous, unworthy, without touch of high adventure or of idealism. It is a time of unscrupu- lous invasions of Silesia, of ruthless partitionings of Poland, of secret treaties germinating the seeds of future wars. England, insular and isolated, pushes about her colonial pawns and knights upon the international chessboard; but her domestic life goes on apart from continental strifes. Apart, that is, except as the artificial spirit of the age finds outlet in an artificial social system, and except as her colonial conquests increase her command of world markets and consequent commercial prestige. Prosperity at home, on which the character of eighteenth century English life is based, grows out of conquest abroad. Under the nurture of the Mercantilist policy, a constant outward flow of English manufactures keeps a golden stream flowing inward far in excess of the cost of imported raw materials. Accessories of life which had in Elizabeth's day been the luxuries of the upper classes became the necessities of humbler folk. Artisan of the town and country squire desire to be comfortable as well as free and inde- pendent. The material conditions of life for the middle and lower classes improve; the upper classes increase, including in their charmed circle the newly born aristocracy of trade. The leisurely and luxurious life of the country estate is no longer the perquisite of the nobility. New types of amusement develop, of a sort to occupy the erstwhile bourgeois ladies and gentlemen whose center of social activity is the country house. Infinite leisure means infinite opportunity for elegant conversation at polite tea-drinkings among people of fashion. As formal as the "stiff, brocaded gown " of the eighteenth century lady, as artificial as the "patterned garden paths" of the primly laid out shrubberies and lawns where she walked, as superficial as the Chesterfieldian gallantry which cloaked an actual contempt for women — so The Poet as Philosopher 27 insincere and shallow was the conversation which skimmed the surface of the deep reahties of Hfe, mistaking itself for the language of true culture, while in fact its briUiancy was the veneer of elegance and taste rather than the substance of thought and knowledge. It is an age of political adventurers and reUgious sceptics; an age when men of letters write in bondage to the wealth of their patrons; an age when statecraft busies itself with intrigue and delicate finesse, uninspired by sweeping motives of patriotism or reform; an age without a grand passion. It is an age to produce a Frederick of Prussia, a Voltaire, a Swift, rather than a Gustavus Adolphus, a Montaigne, a Milton. Reason is enthroned, as must needs be in a time when everything, from the states of Europe to the Chinese vases in the lady's boudoir, is arranged according to a system. Even religion undergoes the same process; and the preacher systematizes his doctrine in accordance with the newly venerated laws of reason, and formalizes his ritual in harmony with the social conventionalities. It is an age when "Life in her creaking shoes Goes, and more formal grows, A round of calls and cues." Enthusiasm, moral passion, spontaneous emotion, lofty patriotism, — ^all these are dead. The pendulum has swung to its extreme of convention and formality. Of such an age Alexander Pope fittingly became the mouthpiece. Where Davies was unsophisticated and enthusiastic. Pope was worldly wise and world weary. Where Davies was natural and spontaneous, Pope was artificial and rhetorical. His poem (or "Essay," as he more suitably called it, for rhetoric is not poetry) has no concern with the nature of man and God in relation to conduct ; its concern is with the nature of man and God as material for brilliant epigram. He is like the conversationalist of his century, who cared not so much what he said as how he said it. God, man, and immortality are made the means to a glorification of the principle of that order which "is heaven's first law." Not the individual soul, not the relation of the individual soul to God and Ufe, not the destiny of the individual is here presented, but the system, the great machine, in which the individual is but a tiny cog. Davies wished to know himself in the concrete; Pope, as he himself tells us, wishes to consider "Man in the abstract," and, true to his century's love of syst«m, "what condition and 28 The Poet as Philosopher relation (he) is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of (his) being."' That the discussion is rationalistic, too, is evident at the outset. The writer who inquires "What can we reason but from what we know?"^ and sees in the negative answer a limit to his power of thought, has evidently no room in his philosophy for faith or intuition. The purpose of the dissertion is ambitiously stated as to "beat this ample field" of the "scene of man" which Pope beholds thoroughly systematized — "A mighty maze! but not without a plan."^ The whole of the first of the four "epistles," presumably addressed to Bolingbroke, is devoted to the proof of order in the universe, unrefuted by the evils and imperfections which offer an apparent contradiction to the belief in a benevolent Providence upholding this order — this chain which stretches "from infinite to thee, From thee to nothing."^ The universe is compact of system upon system. "And if each system in gradation roll Alike essential to the amazing Whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the Whole must fall." What a similarity to the arguments for maintaining in precarious equilibrium upon its apex the trembling pyramid of the balance of power in Europe! The succeeding parts of the poem study the nature of man with respect to himself, to society, and to happiness, thus echoing the topics which engaged the philosophers of the period onward from Hobbes. Reason is glorified as "the God within the mind" which negotiates between the good and evil passions that spring from self-love.^ It is Reason that has developed man from the State of Nature to the State of Art,' showing him that his best means of saving himself is by saving the social whole. Happiness, since no individual exists alone, but only as a part of the system, must consist in seeking the good of all; in other words, in the final conclusion, "Virtue only makes our bliss below."8 1 Ward's ed. of Pope's Works, pp. 192-3. '> Ibid., Epistle I, II. 247-250. » Ibid., Epistle I, 1. 18. « Ibid., Epistle II, 1. 204. 3 Ibid., Epistle I, 1. 6. ' Ibid., Epistle III, 1. 169. * Ibid., Epistle I, 11. 240-241. « Ibid., Epistle IV, 1. 397. The Poet as Philosopher 29 One need but contrast this unexceptionable conclusion with the known facts as to the virtues and the social love of Bolingbroke, the inspirer of the poem, to realize its utter artificiaht,y. Artificial, too, are the brilliant epigrams, often dragged into the argument by an obviously forced connection because, having flashed upon the witty mind of their maker, they are too good to be lost. The polished, sparkling hardness of the couplets is like the polish and sparkle of the literary circle that enjoj^ed its own wit at Dawley or Twickenham. The couplet was the convention of the day, so that its use alone could not convict Pope of formality. But the couplet as used by Pope has no similarity to the couplet as used by Goldsmith. Form in itself is not destructive to feeling. But the end-stopping not onl}' of lines but of thoughts becomes mere mechanism; and the sincerity that laments not only the vanishing of the substance of a boyhood memory but the ill fate of a land ''Where wealth accumulates and men decay" has no precursor in the specious argument that seeks to prove that "God sends not ill, if rightty understood, Or partial ill is universal good."^ Neither sincerity nor high ideals can be predicated of a man who in a poem on virtue proudly apostrophizes the vicious Bolingbroke as his "guide, philosopher and friend"; or who, vain, selfish, and deceitful in his private affairs, enjoins unselfishness, charity, and honest3^ This is not the counsel of the humble learner sharing his lesson for the good of all; it is the arrogant advice of the self-appointed teacher, who least of all had learned what he presumed to teach. Nor can spontaneous enthusiasm be dis- covered in a poem that runs its cycle between a not-too-modest statement of aim, to "vindicate the waj^s of God to man,"^ and a declaration that the great purpose has been accomplished to his own satisfaction.^ The enthusiasm was not for the theme, but for Bolingbroke its inspirer and for Pope's own treatment of it. Yet the merits of the eighteenth centurj' are Pope's. Its surface brilliancy is reflected in the scintillating couplets of his verse, readable, entertaining, thought-provoking. Its surface courtesies, which made life graceful and gracious, have their 1 Ibid., Epistle IV, 11. 113-114. 2 Ibid., Epistle I, 1. 16. ' Ibid., Epistle IV, 11. .391-398. 30 The Poet as Philosopher parallel in the facile grace of his phrasings. Its formal gardens, like his precisely turned epigrams, had a patterned beauty of their own. An age of reason is less stirring than an age of enthu- siasm, but less deadening than an age of bigotry and fanaticism. Order may not be heaven's first law, but chaos was dispelled by light, the first of created things. Pope, like his century, has the virtues of his defects. Convention is no more all bad than revolt is all good. The pendulum of poetry, as of life, must vibrate between the two, and Pope and his period represent the end of the swing toward the artificial and conventional. Extremes mean change. Once the extreme is reached, nothing remains but to turn back. When the extreme is revolt, the turn brings reaction. When the extreme is convention, the turn brings revolution. The record of the revolution that spans the century from Pope to Tennyson is too familiar to need rehearsal.^ The England that saw Tennyson at Cambridge was an England that had witnessed a struggle, hitherto unsuccessful except in the American colonies, for freedom from conservative Tory control; an England that had watched the First Republic and the First Empire rise and fall in France; an England whose Revolutionary poets had echoed Rousseau's ideals of human brotherhood and of the return to that nature where dwelt the ''motion and (the) spirit" which were God; an England where economic control had passed from the hands of the merchant and the agriculturist into the hands of the manufacturer, and where industry had moved from the home to the factory. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the period during which "In Memoriam" grew, there began to be worked out in this England, in terms of practical social and political action, the hitherto vague economic doctrines centering around the value of the individual human being, and the consequent necessity of human brotherhood in fact as well as in theory. In spite of the intervening Revolution, the first quarter of the nineteenth century shows lingering traces of the eighteenth century love of order and system. Now it is economic theory * For facts underlying the ensuing historical summary, see the following: Marriott — England Since Waterloo. Robertson — England Under the Hanoverians. Slater — Making of Modern England. Innes — History of England and the British Empire, Vols. 3 and 4. The Poet as Philosopher 31 that is reduced to a code. Adam Smith has bequeathed to his country the Laissez faire doctrine of the French physiocrats, by which all social ills are to be remedied. The laws which govern population and wages are formulated with scientific accuracy and rigidity by Malthus and Ricardo. If the order lauded by Pope and his deistic contemporaries is but left to work out its own perfect devices in "the best of all possible worlds," whatever is will soon be right. But alas for system! Left to itself the world grows worse. The so-beautiful theory does not materialize in fact, for childhood still grows up in hungry ignorance and weak old age is still "in corners thrown," Moreover, while a revolu- tionary bogie, as yet unseen in England, makes itself perceptible to Enghsh ears in the savage mutterings of rick-burners and of blanketeers at Peterloo, it is impossible for an aristocratic govern- ment to leave the world quite to itself, unhelped by repressive measures. So the failure of the laissez faire doctrine to accomplish practical results leads to an opposite movement in the direction of govern- ment control of economic forces, a movement slight and tentative at first, but steadily gaining impetus. At the same time the restlessness of an unhappy, poverty-stricken multitude under the oppression of laws forbidding free speech, free assembly, free association, makes it evident to eyes which can read the signs of the times that some panacea other than repression is needed to heal the economic sores of England. The self-interest of poUtician, landlord, and manufacturer, seeking to safeguard place and wealth, joins hands with the awakened conscience of the thinker and the philanthropist, striving to ameliorate the wretchedness of the masses. The humanitarian movement is bom and the period of experimental reform begins. Reform begins at the top. In 1832 an aristocratic parliament, with a side-glance across the water at a newly made Citizen Monarchy, remakes itself into a bourgeois but yet more nearly representative body. The reformed parliament enacts measures never sanctioned by its Tory predecessor. The long pleading of Wilberforce is Hstened to at last and slavery is abolished through- out the Empire. The first prison reform act rewards the efforts of John Howard and Ehzabeth Fry. A series of factory laws asserts the right of the government to regulate the hours and conditions of industry, especially as concerns children. A new 32 The Poet as Philosopher poor law seeks to reduce the pauperization of the laborer by- indiscriminate charity. For the first time public money is appro- priated for the maintenance of schools — a small sum, to be sure, less than that for the royal stables, and used only for primary education, the only sort necessary in a time when any child over nine years old is permitted by law to work. Agitation by the Anti-Corn Law League, helped by the Irish famine, puts an end at last to the infamous duties on imported wheat which for so long have taken bread from the mouths of the workers. The struggle begun by the ill-fated Huskisson culminates in free trade and the consequent possibihty of better living conditions for labor. These manifestations of the reforming spirit of the years immediately before and after Victoria's accession were all in the form of work done by the upper and middle classes for the lower classes. They were benevolent and philanthropic, not democratic. The poor were not expected or desired to seek to help themselves. Trade unions were permitted, but feared and hated. And the great ebullition of democracy among the masses, the Chartist movement, was shuddered at with the same horror that its descend- ant, Bolshevism, was one day to engender. None the less, the reforming tendency which directed EngUsh domestic policy in the years from 1830 to 1850 had for its motive the desire to help the individual citizen as a means of benefiting the social whole, and for its inspiration the sense of the value of that individual as such, and of human brotherhood as the basis of social organiza- tion. The passion for reform has underlying it much of a restless desire to change an existing order. Such a passion for change is apparent in others than the reformers of the period. Poets, essayists, novelists preached the gospel of social reform. Scien- tists and philosophers were opening new and startling, and, to their own age, dangerous-seeming paths of thought. Evolution had been discovered; a live utilitarianism had developed from rationalism. The nineteenth century strife between science and rehgion, so unnecessary and so inevitable, was beginning. Doubt and question were in the air. Every man who thought — and more men thought than formerly — wondered about life, about his own relation to life, about God, about his own relation to God. Abstract and introspective problems filled the minds not The Poet as Philosopher 33 only of the Teufelsdrockhs but of the Alton Lockes. The sense of the value of the individual reverted to its source; each self was of supreme importance to himself. Introspective thought oftenest means moral or religious thought. The term "Victorian" has achieved, because of the developing character of the Middle and Late portions of the period, an unenviable connotation which makes the morals indicated by it mere prudishness and the religion only religiosity. But Early Victorianism was free of both taints; what had become conven- tional in 1860 was fresh and spontaneous in 1840. A reUgious enthusiasm that later would find outlet only in the bigotry of the Bradshaws and Bulstrodes and the Sabbatarianism of the Mrs. Proudies was, in the third decade of the century, making channels for itself in two directions, both due to reaction against the deca- dent, lifeless condition of the Anglican Church. Tractarianism sought to elevate ideals and standards within the church by asserting its Catholic position; latitudinarianism sought to broaden the field of the church by making less rigid its insistence on dogma and ritual. Standards of judgment were religious and ethical; just as entrance to Oxford and degree-holding from Cambridge were tested by the applicant's religious afl51iation, so art, literature, and educational progress were estimated, not by their aesthetic or intellectual efifect, but by their probable bearing on belief and conduct. What matter that Shelley sang divinely, if he lived, according to his countrymen's ideals, dia- bolically? As Elizabeth gave her name to an age of enthusiasm whose passion was adventure; as Anne bequeathed hers to an artificial age whose passion was (paradoxically) system; so did the third great queen, Victoria, become sponsor for a humanitarian age whose passion was religion. And because religion, stronger than any human motive except the patriotism and the love to which it is akin, has power to inspire great emotion, great enthu- siasm, great poetry, Tennyson's religious outburst of emotion in the eloquent cantos of "In Memoriam" is a natural expression of the life of his century at its best. The introspective character of the time, when generaUzation was based on self-analysis and when consciousness of the unity and the needs of the social whole grew out of an enlightened self- consciousness, is reflected in the attitude of Tennyson to his subject. Davies, with didactic intent, analyzed the soul — any 34 The Poet as Philosopher soul — exhorting other men to similar study. Pope, rhetorical and systematic, established the soul — any soul — as a part of the eternal order of things. Tennyson, out of agony and struggle, let his own soul speak, in a self-revelation more convincing than analysis or logic. It is not the soul of man in the abstract with which he deals; rather he chooses to record, in words pregnant with personal emotion, the travail of his own soul on the journey from doubt to faith; and, in recording, to imply his philosophy of the soul, not formulated in a single short-lived exertion of reason, but growing through long years "from more to more." Never for a moment does the poet of "In Memoriam" forget the relation of the theme of immortahty to his own "grief for one removed." Therefore never for a moment, however he may generalize, does he cease to be introspective. Nor is the interpretation of the theme ever psychological and metaphysical, Hke Davies'; or rhetorical and rational, Uke Pope's. Always the religious chord is dominant, from its inception in thriUing harmony in the "We have but faith" of the prelude,* through the minor thirds and sevenths of "calm despair and wild unrest,"^ to the triumphant major diapason of confidence in "That God, which ever lives and loves."' Davies, true Elizabethan that he was, inscribed his work to his great queen; Pope called upon his St. John for inspiration; but Tennyson, as deeply religious as his contemporaries, will dedicate a poem of immortality to none but the " Strong Son of God, immortal Love,"* in whom, bereft of proof, he still believes. The struggle of faith with doubt so characteristic of the middle nineteenth century finds voice in many a familiar line of "In Memoriam." Now it is the honest agnostic who speaks, he who "after toil and storm (May) seem to have reached a purer air. Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form";* or he who can only "stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. And gather dust and chaff, and call To what (he feels) is Lord of all."' » Works oj Tennyson, Cambridge Edition, p. 163. * Ihid., p. 163. » Ibid., Canto XI. • Ibid., Canto XXXIII. • Jhid., p. 198. • Ihid., Canto LV. The Poet as Philosopher 35 Now it is the latitudinarian Christian, realizing the narrowness of the formal creed, but clinging to the heart of love behind it, who speaks his loyalty to that Word who wrought "With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds";* or who, in a sincere and spiritualized version of the false old platitude "Whatever is is right," trusts dimly " that good shall fall At last — far off — at last, to all."* Much of the spiritual struggle of Tennyson, as of his age, grew out of an awareness of the achievements of that science to which the Wilberforces and Gladstones obstinately closed their eyes. A dread of the materialism which he saw on every side surely inspired his view of Time as "a maniac scattering dust" and life as "a Fury slinging flame,"^ and was repudiated in the conviction that man, who loved, suffered, and battled for truth would not "Be blown about the desert dust."* Echoes of the evolutionary discoveries of the period are not absent, ringing with a conservative dislike of a "Nature red in tooth and claw;"* refusing to countenance the science which might prove men only "cunning casts in clay"; claiming a higher birth than to "shape His action like the greater ape."" Most of all, perhaps, is the humanitarianism of the period fragrant in the loveliest stanzas of the poem. True blessedness is theirs "whose lives are faithful prayers."' The man of pure deeds, however "perplext in faith," at last will "beat his music out."^ New Year's bells are to "ring out the feud of rich and poor," to ring in "the larger heart, the kindlier hand."' A deep voice sounds "across the storm Proclaiming social truth shall spread."'' » Ibid., Canto XXXVI. • Ibid., Canto CXX. » Ibid., Canto LIV. ' Ibid., Canto XXXIII. » Ibid., Canto L. » Ibid., Canto XCVI. * Ibid., Canto LVI. » Ibid., Canto CVI. » Ibid., Canto LVI. " Ibid., Canto CXXVII. 36 The Poet as Philosopher Honor for purity and kindliness of deed, reiterated and resung, might serve as keynote of an age when kindliness of deed was made the substance of acts of Parliament. How far afield is this love of sheer kindness from the selfish egotism that praised without conviction an academic virtue! As the three poems are unlike because of the variant characters of their makers, so equally are they unlike because of the characters of the times that produced the makers. Patriotic enthusiasm, artificial rationalism, reUgious humanitarianism — like fruits can- not grow of such soils any more than grapes can be gathered of thorns or figs of thistles. How can the poet help reflecting his time? His mind, by his very temperament, is not so much a mirror as a sensitized plate. And how, then, can he be original in his philosophy? Yet so summary a view of the poets in relation to their times is but superficial, and prone to the injustice of hasty generaUzation. A detailed study of the three poems in relation to certain phases of the thought of their periods, as seen in scholarship, in Uterature, and in theology, will either corroborate or disprove this incomplete view. IV The scholarship of the artist, unless his mind is of purely aca- demic growth, must fonn little more than the background for the play of his creative or interpretive imagination and of his artistic technique. Sound science may lie back of Shelley's "Cloud"; but too clear a perception of Shelley the scientist would mar the magic of the music and imagery of Shelley the poet. The artist's pioneer work is done in his own field, not in that of the scholar; so, however original he may be in thought or style, his scholarship is not likely to be in advance of the scholarship of his time and will be more or less dependent for its limits upon the condition of knowledge among his learned contemporaries. Is such a proposi- tion wholly true of the philosophical poet? Or is the very nature of his theme such as to call for independent progress in the realm of knowledge? Scholarship informs every line of "Nosce Teipsum." Is that scholarship determined by the advancement of the age in learning, and merely an index of that advancement? The question can be answered only by a survey of the educational conditions of which Sir John Davies was a product. Long before Davies began to write, the humanist movement had reached its triumph in all learned and cultured circles. Schol- asticism, as a controlling influence in the universities and among the learned, had had its day. Yet a method of thought dominant for six centuries was not to be cast aside and forgotten in fifty years. Humanism among the learned did not mean humanism among the people at large. And even among the learned, against their will, scholasticism lingered, cropping up to the surface with- out intention, often without recognition, so much a part was it of the scholar's mental make-up. An ingrained habit of thought, like an ingrained belief, is hardly to be outgrown in a generation. As the modern agnostic, set free from the orthodox creed in which he was reared, is humiliated to find himself in unguarded moments reverting to the orthodoxies of his childhood, so must the humanist of the sixteenth century not infrequently have rebuked himself for thinking scholastically. Nor was mediae valism dead. The popularity of Spenser's allegories attests its life. The creed of the early poet, that poetry 37 38 The Poet as Philosopher had a right to exist only as the servant of morals, was not an outworn creed, even though poets of wider vision were discovering that beauty and poetic significance in verse were their own excuse for being. The didactic spirit was as mediaeval then as it is Victo- rian now. And while mediaevalism lived, scholasticism was alive. Its influence was sure to be more evident in a philosophical poem than in any other art form; for though Renaissance art had superseded mediaeval art, and Renaissance learning had displaced mediaeval learning, there had as yet arisen no Hobbes and no Descartes to usher in a modern school of philosophy. The surprise is not to find Davies influenced by scholastic philosophy, but to find a man, by profession a lawyer, by avocation a poet, and only by accident a philosopher, whose system of thought is anything other than scholastic. A study of Davies' analysis of the soul, its nature, its origin, its relation to the body, its faculties, and its immortality, reveals immediately a close resemblance to the famous Aristotelian system of the Schoolmen. In a decade when Plato's philosophy, no less than Aristotle's ethics, had been brought to the attention of a poetry-loving public by the great poetic achievement of Spenser, appears a philosophic poem based wholly on the phil- osophy of Aristotle, and containing references to Plato's doctrines only for the purpose of refutation. This could hardly have been the case, had Davies not been willing to accept well-established and familiar philosophical opinions as he found them, devoting his efifort to putting them into the literary form that at that time would command most notice from a generation that loved verse. That a graduate of Oxford and a barrister of the Temple knew Aristotle in the original is no more to be doubted than that he knew Plato. But the Aristotle whom we find in his pages is the Aristotle of the Schoolmen, used by them as the provider of a method by which they could carry out their purpose of making faith and reason agree.^ And nowhere, not even in the portion of "Nosce Teipsum" which deals with immortality, the reahty of which Plato discussed in the "Phaedo" which Davies must have known, is there the least sign of any consultation of the Platonic philosophy .^ This adoption of Aristotle and indifference 1 Perrier, in Revival of Scholastic Philosophy, p. 17, quotes from Elie Blanc's " Dictionnaire de philosophie ancienne, moderne, et contemporaine." * Pneath, Philosophy in Poetry, p. 210. The Poet as Philosopher 39 to Plato suggests that Davies was content to follow in the path of Aquinas and Everard Digby rather than that of Erigena and William Temple.* His contribution to thought is literary rather than philosophical; he is not concerned with making a new system, but with presenting the old system in a form hitherto unused. If he knew the work of Giordano Bruno,^ who before this time had visited England, he shows no signs of being touched by his revolt against the scholastic system or by his message that humanity and nature alike were animated by a world-soul. The pantheistic idealism of Plato, brought to life again by Bruno,' has no place in Davies. To him, as to the Schoolmen, the universe was not an organic unity but a dualism* of God and the world, just as man was a dualism of soul and body. Besides the metaphysics of Aristotle's "De Anima," there are echoes in Davies' pages of the teachings of the church fathers, notably Origen and Nemesius;^ but the ancient Greek philos- ophers are quoted only as perpetrators of ideas which the poet wishes to refute. For example, in discussing the question what the soul is, Davies answers first negatively, by cataloguing various things which the soul is not, but which many "great clerks" have thought it to be.* Professor Sneath, by a comparison of this passage in "Nosce Teipsum" with similar passages in Aris- totle, Cicero, and Nemesius, who mention the philosophers responsible for the various opinions, has identified the author of each of the theories which in Davies' view show so "little wis- dome."^ Thus, it is Diogenes who "thinks the soul is aire"; Zeno and the Stoics called it fire; Critias explained it as "blood, 1 Cambridge History, Vol. IV, p. 315, sq. Everard Digby taught logic at Cambridge, 1573 sq. William Temple was his pupil and later also taught logic until 1582. About 1580 occurred a controversy between them regarding the old and the new logic, in which Digby defended the Aristotelian and Temple the Platonic method. ' 1548-1600. ' Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 239-242. * Lindsay, Stitdies in European Philosophy, p. 142. Rickaby, Scholasticism. Grosart's ed. of Davies, pp. 45, 52-60, where the poet explains the creation of the soul by God. Sneath, Philosophy in Poetry, p. 113, » Ilrid., pp. 38, 39-47, 115-129. • Grosart's ed. of Davies, pp. 26-27. ^ Sneath, pp. 65-79. 40 The Poet as Philosopher diffus'd about the heart"; Plato traced it to the conspiring of the elements; while Galen the physician, a materialist of ancient time, made it spring from "the bodie's humours, temp'red well," and the Sophists and Sceptics thought it "a fine perfection of the sense." As all these views of the soul were by the Schoolmen rejected in favor of Aristotle's, not because they were pagan, but because they were adapted but poorly to the process of upholding faith by reason; so they are rejected by Davies, who in a less academic and more practical way is attempting, like the School- men, to establish a faith which will serve as foundation for conduct. Indeed, one of the ways in which he most shows that his work is colored by their influence is the fact that he thought religious doctrine admitted of rational proof.^ There was little more of the mystic in Davies than there was in Thomas Aquinas, in spite of the prelude in which he ascribes all possible power to under- stand the mysteries of the soul to "the cleare lampe of Thy Oracle divine." Having declared his faith in revelation, he follows the path of reason. A close comparison of "Nosce Teipsum" with any outline of scholastic philosophy^ will serve to show how little Davies' meta- physics is in advance of that of his teachers. For instance, " The soule a substance, and a spirit is, to the body knit."^ In scholastic definition, the soul was a substantial form of the body,'* essentially simple and spiritual. In both cases, substance meant that which exists by itself, so that the soul's existence was assumed to be independent of the body. On this dualism both the Schoolmen and the poet based their proof of the soul's immor- tality. Davies devotes considerable space to the proposition that the soul is a separate entity, basing his argument on the things the soul can do without the body, and concluding, "Then her selfe-being nature shines in this, That she performs her noblest works alone."' But the soul, though independent, has no bodily form of its own. "Shee her selfe is bodilesse and free," says Davies, although » Lindsay, pp. 119, 129. * Eg., Lindsay, Perrier, Rickaby, Seth. ' Grosart's ed. of Davies, p. 29. * Perrier, p. 115. » Grosart's ed. of Davies, p. 35. The Poet as Philosopher 41 "she is confin'd" in the body.^ The substance of the soul, say the Schoolmen, is immaterial and incorporeal. ^ One of the famous theological controversies of the Middle Ages, between the creationist and the traducianist theories of the origin of the soul, is perpetuated by Davies.^ According to the first of these theories, "every individual soul is an absolute, immediate creation on the part of God." According to the second, all souls were created once for all in the beginning, and as each body has come to birth its particular soul has been detached from the mass and united to the individual })ody. This theory grew up as an attempt on the part of some of the church fathers to absolve God from the responsibility of having created man's sin along with man's soul. It was the creationist theory that triumphed among the Schoolmen, and it is the creationist theory that Davies defends, citing and refuting the objections of believers in pre-existence and in traducianism. Both were objections that must have been represented among the contemporary readers of "Nosce Teipsum." For we are told that the Lutherans favored traducianism,* and Shakespeare, in "The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night," supplies us with evidence of the popular interest in the doctrines of Pythagoras.* Having taken his stand with the Schoolmen on creationism, — "As God's handmaid, Nature, doth create Bodies in time distinct, and order due ; So God gives soules the like successive date, Which Himself e makes, in bodies formed new:" — » Davies is compelled to follow scholastic leadership on the subject of the harmony between divine sovereignty and human freedom. His interpretation of sin and the fall, a topic to be considered more fully in the discussion of the theology of the poem, is based on Aquinas's casuistic argument which seeks to establish pre- destination while avoiding determinism.' »/6id., p. 41. ' Lindsay, p. 140. * Sneath, p. 116 sq. *Ibid., p. 133. » Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Sc. 1, 11. 130-138. As You Like It, Act III, Sc. 2, 11. 186-188. Tu^elfth Night, Act IV, Sc. 2, 11. 54-65. * Grosart's ed. of Davies, p. 47. 7 Perrier, pp. 151-152. 42 The Poet as Philosopher Enough has been said to show the reality of Davies' debt to scholasticism. But had his work stopped with the mere versifica- tion of a moribund philosophical system, he would not be remem- bered as the earliest confessedly philosophical poet of England. For except as a system of Catholic theology, scholasticism was dying, or dead. In a strong affirmative Davies answers the ques- tion asked at every time of transition from an old system to a new, "Son of man, can these bones live?" It is not the philosophy of the poem that makes it alive, but the vivid thought and language that clothe the philosophy, and the fact that while in metaphysics it reflects mediaeval thought, in attitude to other branches of Elizabethan learning it is well abreast of its time. For instance, the very fact that Davies was so scholastic a metaphysician makes him all the more apparently an exemplar of the period when the dominant theological interest in art and literature was gradually yielding to the secular interest. Davies' motive was both didactic and theological; but evidences are abundant that he was the product of that humanistic age when the treasures of secular classical Uterature had been made accessi- ble not only to the scholar but to the popular reader. Like all the literary artists of his time, he found in "bookes prophane" the material for simile and metaphor with which to illuminate many an abstract statement. The myth of Eden, the forbidden fruit, and the Spirit of Lies stand cheek by jowl with allusions to the "sky-stolne fire" of Prometheus, the ''false payles" of the Danaides, and the ''firie coach" of Phaethon.^ lo, terrified at the watery image of "herselfe transformed she wist not how," is a figure of the fright of the soul at knowledge of itself.^ The soul travels skyward "without a Pegasus."^ The harmony of wit and will in which the heavenly choir praises God is "Amphion's lyre. Wherewith he did the Theban citie found."* Myths of Medea and Ulysses, side by side with stories of Mutius and Marius, are cited to prove the courage and wisdom of the soul. The immediate creation of the soul by God is likened to the springing of Minerva from the head of Jove.^ Martha, "busie — * Grosart'8 ed. of Daviea, p. 17. * Ibid., p. 35. * IHd., p. 21. » Ibid., pp. 45-46. * Ibid., p. 31. The Poet as Philosopher 43 the household things to doe," appears in the same stanza with a "Dryas, living in a tree."^ Memory, localized "in the braine behinde," is "like Janus' eye."^ The soul, transported to heaven, "doth . . , manna eat, and nectar drinke."^ Secular and sacred classical allusions are thus inextricably interwoven in the fabric of poetic art, as they were in the fabric of current thought. For the remarkable fact is that the casual use by Davies of these characters of classic lore, as a means of ensuring a better under- standing of his ideas, presupposes a general knowledge of the classics on the part of the reading public. The translators of the sixteenth century had made common property, possessed by churchman and layman alike, of Plutarch and Ovid, Euripides and Plautus, Homer and Vergil. The presence of mediaeval metaphysics in close intermixture with humanistic breadth in Davies' pages shows him the child of a century whose door swung at once back into the past of cold asceticism and forward into the future of radiantly human art. Standing at the end of a century whose paramount interest in the field of learning had been the development of literary art, Davies stood also at the beginning of the century whose educa- tional advance was to proceed along the line of a paramount interest in physical science. To the dawning light of that new sun of knowledge the poet was keenly awake, and in this pro- gressive awareness of the most recent of contemporary tendencies, he ran far ahead of his metaphysical masters. For one of the reasons for the breakdown of scholasticism was its opposition to progressive knowledge, and its refusal to accommodate its system to the newly developing physical science of the sixteenth cen- tury.* In the work of Davies, however didactic his intention may be, however theological his terminology in certain passages, it is patent that his wholesome interest in secular learning is that of the layman. For instance, the Schoolmen, wholly theological in motive, had not worked out with anything like completeness any system of psychology. Davies, interested in the soul from other viewpoints than the theological, realized that his analysis was not complete if it did not include a psychological treatment of the soul — though it is quite certain that he did not call it by that name. So, in the section of the poem which explains "How the I Ibid., p. 64. 5 Ibid., p. 90. » Ibid., p. 72. * Perrier, p. 153. 44 The Poet as Philosopher Soul doth exercise her Powers in the Body,"* he makes a crude and inconclusive but very real attempt at an exposition of the relations among the senses, the emotions, and the will. To his reading of Aristotle's classification of the senses and faculties he adds his own knowledge of the infant physics and physiology of his time. However unformed may be the scientific method which makes so sharp a cleavage as does Davies between soul and sense, in his presentation of the work of the physical senses as instruments of the mental powers can be discerned the germ of physiological psychology. "These," says he of the senses, "are the outward instruments of Sense, These are the guards which everything must passe Ere it approch the mind's intelligence, Or touch the Fantasie, Wit's looking-glasse."^ In the same passage where Davies analyzes the work of the senses may be seen indicated the chaotic state of science in the Elizabethan age, when actual observation of fact was only begin- ning to supplant traditions based on Pliny's "Natural History." Thus, a rudimentary understanding of the infant science of optics appears in a description of the eyes which seems to imply familiar- ity with the work of Kepler : "They no beames unto their objects send; But all the rays are from their objects sent, And in the eyes with pointed angles end: "If th' objects be farre off, the rayes doe meete In a sharpe point, and so things seeme but small ; If they be neere, their rayes doe spread and fleet. And make broad points, that things seeme great withall."3 But close after this fairly happy hit at the laws of perspective, follows a remarkable physiological discovery of the reason for the intricate construction of the ear: "That they (sounds) may not pierce too violently, They are delaied with turnes, and windings oft. "For should the voice directly strike the brain. It would astonish and confuse it much ; Therefore these plaits and folds the sound restraine, That it the organ may more gently touch. "< 1 Grosart's ed. of Davies, pp. 63-80. ^ Ibid., p. 66. » Ibid., p. 70. * Ibid^ P. 67. The Poet a3 Philosopher 45 Again, a fairly correct idea of the structure of the nervous system is implied: "For all those nerves, which spirits of Sence doe beare, And to those outward organs spreading goe; United are, as in a center there (in the forehead) And there this power those sundry formes doth know."' But almost immediately after, the heart, instead of being regarded as a merely bodily organ, is made literally the seat of the passions, as the brain is of the intellect : " Sith the braine doth lodge the powers of Sense, How makes it in the heart those passions spring?"* It may not be amiss to mention here the interesting by-products of Da vies' discussion of the senses. In the case of four out of the five he points out a special moral and a special aesthetic use of each sense. Thus, the highest use of the eyes is to be found "in another World,"' where "face to face they may their Maker see"; the chief use of the ears is to hear the speech "which God's heralds sound. When their tongs utter what His Spirit did pen";* while the sense of smell allows incense "To make men's spirits apt for thoughts divine."' As for the fine arts, the sense of sight is the source of the art of painting; the sense of hearing "gentle Musicke found";* taste has developed the art of cookery;^ and smell is "also mistresse of an Art, Which to soft people sweete perfumes doth sell."6 Such a passage as this on the senses shows the curious mixture of wisdom and simplicity which marked the passing of the old learning into the new. In his allusions to facts in the world of nature of which EUza- bethan science was beginning to take intelligent cognizance, Davies reflects another side of the widening learning of his time. His list of the things men seek to know recalls the work of geographers and map-makers, inspired by explorations into far-off lands, and »/&«i., p. 71. * Ibid., p. 68. • Ibid., p. 73. » Ibid., p. 69. • Ibid., p. 66. • Ibid., p. 67. ^ The Poet as Philosopher hints at the labors of the astronomers of Italy who were setting their misused science free from the chains of superstition. " We seeke to know the moving of each spheare, And the strange cause of th' ebbs and floods of Nile; " We . . . acquaint our selves with every Zoane And passe both Tropikes and behold the Poles."^ Da vies does not, however, accept the Copernican theory; to him the earth is still the center of the universe. " The lights of heav'n (which are the World's fair eyes) Looke downe into the World, the World to see; And as they turne, or wander in the skies, Survey all things that on this Center bee."^ A beginning has been made toward giving natural phenomena their correct explanation, for, Davies tells us, "Sense thinkes the planets, spheares not much asunder; What tells us then their distance is so farre? Sense thinks the lightning borne before the thunder; What tells us then they both together are?"' Observation of the actual facts of nature has not progressed far, for the discovery of that process as a means to gaining knowledge was to be Bacon's contribution to learning. But hints of a tendency of which Bacon was to be the first great exponent are found in such lines as: "As Spiders toucht, seek their webs inmost part; As bees in stormes unto their hives return."* And the physical laws that govern moisture and cloud, rain and river, are manifestly known in fair, correctness by the man who can write " Water in conduit pipes can rise no higher Than the wel-head, from whence it first doth spring:" and a little later, " As the moysture, which the thirstie earth Suckes from the sea, to fill her emptie veines, From out her wombe at last doth take a birth, And runs a Nymph along the grassie plaines: " Long doth she stay, as loth to leave the land, » Ibid., p. 20. » Ibid., p. 36. » Ibid., p. 24. * Ibid., p. 22. The Poet as Philosopher 47 "Yet Nature so her streames doth lead and carry, As that her course doth make no finall stay, Till she her selfe unto the Ocean marry, Within whose watry bosome first she lay."^ In the course of his discussion of immortality occurs a passage which especially shows Davies' illumination of spirit in advance of his time. At a far later date than his, men of enlightened mind still explained insanity or mental weakness on the ground of witchcraft or demon-possession; as so learned a physician as Sir Thomas Browne wrote in "Religio Medici, "^ "I hold that the devil doth really possess some men, the spirit of melancholy others, the spirit of delusion others." Mental disease was treated not as sickness but as sin — witness the pseudo-priest's visit to the pseudo-mad Malvolio.' In the midst of such ignorance and superstition, Davies had insight to see that mental disorders were physical, not spiritual : "Then these defects in Senses' organs bee, Not in the soule or in her working might."* Though Davies' work, even in such passages, can only vaguely point ahead, by the barest hints, to the era of scientific knowledge that is about to begin, he is, in mastery of his artistic medium, the best of proofs of the literary achievement of the Elizabethan age. His style has the sincerity and directness that grew out of the sincere and direct character of the times; his language has the force and vitality that filled the actions, as the words, of the builders of England's greatness. He has emerged from the mists of allegory and from the icebound cells of casuistic argument into the sunshine and warmth of a knowledge based on the realities of human life. For instance, as has been seen, his analysis of the nature of the soul is scholastic in origin; but his presentation of the idea is couched in individual and vivid language, in a passage proving the independent existence of the soul by the variety of things the soul can do independently.^ First, the soul can reason by analogy: 1 Ibid., pp. 8&-86. » Ed. by John Peace, 1844, Part I, Sec. xxx, p. 63. » Twelfth Night, Act IV, Sc. 2. * Grosart's ed. of Davies, p. 102. •/bid., pp. 30-31. 48 The Poet as Philosopher " She sorts things present with things past, And thereby things to come doth oft foresee." It can reason inductively: "She from sundry acts, one skill doth draw, Gathering from divers fights one art of warre, From many cases like, one rule of Law." It can reason deductively : " In th' effects she doth the causes know. And seeing the stream, thinks wher the stream doth rise; And seeing the branch, conceives the root below." The soul is possessed of both a reconstructive and a creative imagination: "She, without a Pegasus, doth flie Swifter than lightning's fire from East to West, About the Center and above the skie." "Without hands she doth thus castles build. Sees without eyes, and without feet doth runne." The soul has power to plan action in advance : "All her works she formeth first within, Proportions them, and sees their perfect end. Ere she in act does anie part begin." In these fresh, original stanzas is certainly exemplified the art of compressing into a few apt words an idea of magnitude, the vividness being the greater because of the fewness and the aptness. Again, when the poet answers the materialist who says that the soul originates in the humours of the body, his answer is the more convincing because of the direct simplicity which penetrates the subject like a well pointed arrow. "Why doth not beautie then refine the wit? And good complexion rectify the will? Why doth not health bring wisdom still with it? Why doth not sicknesse make men bruitish still? "^ Abstract ideas are made graspable by concrete images; as, in proving that the soul is immaterial, Davies says, "She is sent as soon to China as to Spaine, And thence returnes, as soone as shee is sent; She measures with one time, and with one paine, An ell of silke, and heaven's wide spreading tent."* 1 Ibid., p. 39. » Ibid., p. 45. The Poet as Philosopher 49 Even in connection with so academic and theological a subject as the question whether God created evil, we find a terse, modem, suggestive summing up of the whole problem in homely, everyday language: " Faine would we make Him Author of the wine, If for the dregs we could some other blame."' How much more compelling is such a common sense putting of the case than the ''unprofitable subtility" of argument of the Schoolmen who, as Bacon said, "their minds being shut up in a few authors, as their bodies were in the cells of their monasteries, . . . with infinite agitation of wit spun out of a small quantity of matter laborious webs of learning."^ There lies a century of developing literary power between Davies and his teachers of philosophy. Davies has profited, too, like all the writers of this last decade of the sixteenth century, by the work of rhetoricians and experi- menters with language such as Lyly and Sidney and their lesser imitators. He is far enough away from them to avoid their errors, and yet he finds ready to his hand a literary medium shaped and enriched by their labors. For instance, the wealth of similes in Davies is reminiscent of earlier as well as contem- porary writers. But his similes are always to the purpose. He does not use a figure for its own sake, nor for futile rhetorical decoration, but always in order to convey an idea difficult of apprehension. For example, the union of the soul with the body causes the poet some searching to find just the right comparison, but he finally lights upon a happy one : "Then dwels shee not therein as in a tent, Nor as a pilot in his ship doth sit ; Nor as the spider in his web is pent ; Nor as the waxe retaines the print in it ; " Nor as a vessell water doth contain ; Nor as one liquor in another shed ; Nor as the heat doth in the fire remain ; Nor as a voice throughout the ayre is spread : "But as the faire and cheerfull Morning light. Doth here and there her silver beames impart."' 1 Ibid., p. 48. * Bacon's Novum Organum, Bohn's Library, p. 45. * Grosart's ed. of Davies, pp. 61-62. 60 The Poet as Philosopher Again, the failure of the world to satisfy the longings of the soul elicits a poetic figure: "Then as a bee which among weeds doth fall, Which seeme sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay; She lights on that, and this, and tasteth all, But pleasd with none, doth rise, and soare away; "So, when the Soule finds here no true content. And, like Noah's dove, can no sure footing take; She doth returne from whence she first was sent. And flies to Him that first her wings did make."^ Da vies, however, is sparing in his use of figures; nowhere does he sacrifice thought to rhetoric. And in his original and unforced turns of phrase, when writing figuratively, he seems much more akin to the moderns than to his forerunners, the euphuists. With Daniel, Drayton, and Donne, he stands as exponent of the time when the experiments of the Areopagus Club, together with the success of Spenser in practice, had borne fruit in a well-tried knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of Enghsh verse. Through the work of his predecessors, most of them less happy than he in their literary output, the tool was ready to his hand. In his system of philosophy, then, in his classical knowledge, in his interest in scientific inquiry, in his gift of adapting to his own thought the rhetorical achievement of previous writers, Davies was representative of the best learning of his time. At the same time his treatment of his subject was limited by con- temporary learning, beyond which he hardly progressed. God, the soul, and immortality are viewed in the light of scholastic, not modern rational or ideahstic philosophy. The material of allusion at the poet's disposal is the classical material made accessible by the humanists. His attention to current scientific knowledge is alert, but his use of scientific fact is as childlike and rudimentary as was that of all the predecessors of Bacon, and his view is colored, like that of his contemporaries, by an orthodox religious and theological bias. His handling of the tools of his art is no more flexible, graceful, or effective than that of other poets who profited by the same wealth of experiment as he. The learning of Davies is the learning of his period. What of Pope? As the seventeenth century advanced, providing by its progress » Ibid., p. 87. The Poet as Philosopher 51 in learaing the background for Pope's knowledge, the achievement of the scholarly world was directed into two main channels, the philosophical and the scientific, closely interrelated and interde- pendent, and nearly akin in both spirit and method. The philo- sophical interest, now that dead scholasticism had given room for vitalized and independent opinion, superseded as a subject for the pioneer in thought the study of the humanities. For the time being there was no new cxperunent to be tried in the realm of the Latin and Greek classics; but metaphysics offered the " fresh fields and pastures new" which are ever the symbol of to-morrow. At the same time, enthusiasm for literary and artistic accomplish- ment gradually gave place to enthusiasm for scientific experiment and discoveiy. Men began to look, not into books, but into nature for their knowledge. The method of using experiment to test by induction an initial hypothesis, begun by Galileo^ and pursued with untiring zeal by Bacon, had no less influence upon philosophy than upon science. The universe was full of facts all conforming to exact law, and the chief end of the life of the man of science was to discover these laws. Nature came to be considered as a vast mechanism; and the philosopher, whose province was abstract conclusion rather than concrete experiment, turned his effort to explaining hmnan ideas and emotions, actions and reactions, as if man were a part of the mechanism. The laws of nature were made to stretch far enough to explain human nature, even to explain God himself.^ Thus the naturalistic philosophy of the seventeenth centur\'^ grew logically out of the inductive science of Bacon, both philosopher and scientist. "The task of philosophy in the seventeenth centuiy was to differentiate itself from theology, to assert the freedom of the scientific intellect from the bondage of authority."^ As has been said,* Bolingbroke's ambition was to conceive a wholly new explanation of the world order which should do exactly that — set philosophy free from the authority of revealed reUgion. An aim so stated would seem to discredit all the work in that direction of the centuiy preceding him. But a study of the "Essay on Man" in the light of the work of Bacon and Hobbes, ' Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, pp. 38-40. 2 76i Ilnd., Vol. Ill, pp. 71, 134. « Ibid., Vol. Ill, pp. 74, 95. The Poet as Philosopher 65 own time, so Bolingbroke's system is a mere compendium of the thought of his predecessors and early contemporaries, and the poem based on that compendium is a reflection of the same thought, cleverly combining in an artistic whole many of its more or less heterogeneous elements. But there were other sides of current learning beside the philo- sophical; and in his embodiment of these in his poetical epistles Pope may be looked at independently of his relation to BoHng- broke. St. John taught him his philosophy; but from many another source he may have imbibed the acquaintance with scientific progress, social and political science, and literary develop- ment which forms a background for the "Essay." As was said previously, the philosophical development of the seventeenth century, the trend of which has been indicated in outline, was an outgrowth of the awakening interest in the physical universe. This awakening was the cause of a movement destined to be of far more permanent value in the story of the progress of learning than either naturalism or deism. The inductive study of science laid the foundation for practical rather than metaphysical knowledge, and was the first step in a really modern system of education. If the Elizabethan theater is the great institution left as a legacy by the sixteenth century, no less an inheritance fell to English learning in the foundation of the Royal Society, the memorable contribution of the seventeenth century to the growth of science. But whereas the sixteenth century outburst of literary production was as manifold in its form as the versatility of the typical playwright who was also romancer, sonneteer, pamphleteer, and critic, the rule for the development of the new science seems to have been "One thing at a time." All that could be done with purely physical science was done before any intensive effort was made to pursue other lines. "Her balls" and "bes- tiaries" seemed to satisfy such botanical and zoological curiosity as the intelligent classes possessed; chemistry remained a matter of private experiment so obscure that Pope still confounds the chemist with the alchemist;^ while geology was not even thought of as a science, and a mid-eighteenth century collector who made a specialty of gathering fossils was laughed at by the wits as an absurdity.* Mathematics and astronomy, magnetism and the ' "The starving chemist in his golden views." Ep. II, 1. 269. * Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 170. 66 The Poet as Philosopher mechanical laws of physics held the attention of the scientists who founded the Royal Society and who sought to awaken the stagnant thought in the universities to a new and vital branch of knowledge. Just as new life came into literature a century before, not from the centers of learning but from popular play- wrights and court poets ; so now the movement to investigate the far recesses of the universe and find out the "why" of existing physical phenomena came, not from the dons of Oxford and Cambridge, who still mulled over their divinity, their classics, and their logic, but from the practical thinking men who desired a new knowledge sufficient to cope with new conditions of life. The great names, of course, are Gilbert and Napier, Newton and Halley; but the experiments and enthusiasm of many less promi- nent persons, experiments which worked themselves out in such instruments as the thermometer, the barometer, and the pendulum clock, helped to make physical science popular with commoner as with student — witness the patient Mrs. Pepys, learning the multiplication table for the pastime of her indefatigable husband.^ The great master of the period, Sir Isaac Newton, did his epoch-marking work upon the laws of motion as exemplified in the solar system. To him evei'ything in nature was rationally explainable by law. It is not surprising, with motion and law as the keywords of the dominant thought movement of the period, to find philosophers reducing all existence to motion or to mathe- matical formulas, and theologians referring dogma to the laws of reason. Not only Bolingbroke's conversation must have shown the influence of the work of inductive physical scientists, but the thought and the talk of all Pope's circle of wits must have been conversant with such topics. It was the scientific jargon of the day that crept into Pope's verbiage, with its recurrent figures of systems and chains and circles. And particularly the revelations of astronomy caught his poetic imagination, with the vision of "vast immensity" where "worlds on worlds compose one uni- verse," where "system into system runs." The poet runs ahead of the physicist, to speculate upon " What other planets circle other suns. What varied being peoples eveiy star."^ ' Schuster and Shipley, Heritage oj Science, p. 227. 2 Ward's edition of Pope's W where " the nice bee" extracted the "healing dew" from "pois'nous herbs" ;^ where he could watch "the wanton fawn," the lark, the linnet, the jay and the hawk; and where the spider designed his parallels "without rule or line."^ His historical allusions, too, are chiefly to facts and characters upon whom he chanced in his voluminous reading of the Greek and Latin authors, and familiar- ity with whom he presupposed in his readers. Borgia and Catiline, Alexander and Caesar, Nero and Titus, or even the more modern names of Turenne and Sidney, Charles XII and Pi'ince Eugene — such references imply no special interest in historical research, nor are they cited in any but the traditional light in which the eighteenth century regarded them. Pope's strength lay, not in his learning, but in his wit; his learning, superficial and made up of bits snatched here and there from a wide field, was but that of the average reader of his time, of whose general knowledge, we may venture to suppose, the "Essay" affords a fair example. In one direction, however. Pope showed himseK familiar with and deeply interested in what was a progressive step toward a new subject for study. From Hobbes onward, thinkers had been concerning themselves with the construction of a theory of the state. The rise of the great powers, making necessary a philosophy to explain their existence, produced, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the new type of political philosophy which was the direct ancestor of the modern science of poHtical economy. The angle from which the early seventeenth century writers approached the subject showed that economic questions were beginning to hold an important place as a subject of discussion, though as yet they did not comprise a separate branch of political 1 Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 103-106. * lUd., Epistle I, 11. 219-220. 2 Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 177-178. 'Ibid., Fpistle III, 11. 103-106. 3 Ibid., Epistle I, 11. 135-136. 70 The Poet as Philosopher philosophy.^ Thus Grotius, the Dutch contemporary of Hobbes,' treated of the relations of states to each other, of the laws governing property, and of the effects of commerce on international relations. Hobbes,^ more interested in internal politics, because of his desire to defend the divine right of the Stuarts, discussed the economic motives underlying the institution of society. Harring- ton drew in his "Oceana"* a picture of the ideal state, differing from the "Republic" and the "Utopia" in that its government and politics are based on economic power — a new idea in political philosophy. Mandeville,^ shocking the moralists of his day by the selfish egoism to which he reduced all human motives, attempt- ed a solution of the problems of demand and supply, necessity and luxury, labor and wage; and by arousing eager champions of an opposite opinion led the way to the foundation of an orthodox economic system.^ Locke, though more interested in ethics and metaphysics than in politics, none the less^ took time to develop a social philosophy in defense of his eager belief in democracy, and promulgated the new "doctrine of natural right," by which property rights grew out of labor expended. The central idea in all these early experiments at economic theory was the doctrine of the social contract on which society was founded. According to them all, the state began in a mutual agreement for the observance of certain laws as a basis of mutual welfare. The idea was not new in modern philosophy. "Epi- cureanism attributed the origin of the state to a deUberate conven- tion made for natural protection and security."* But later thinkers had followed Plato and Aristotle rather than Epicurus; so that the contract theory propounded by Grotius was the equiva- lent of an original contribution to thought. Two radically opposite interpretations of the social contract are represented by seventeenth century thinkers. Grotius inclined to the benevolent construction of human nature, claiming ' Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, pp. 84-5. * Laws of War and Peace, 1625. * De Cive, 1642; Leviathan, 1651. * Commonwealth of Oceana, 1658. » Fable of the Bees, 1714-23. * Seth, English Philosophers, p. 188. ^ Treatise on Civil Government, 1690. ' Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, p. 49. The Poet as Philosopher 71 that the agreement for mutual welfare grows out of man's natural love for ordered companionship.^ Rational beings by their inherent qualities follow the just way, and their innate regard for society is the source of all binding laws. The same position is held by Locke, in his declaration that government exists by compact, for the good of the governed, and that the compact grows out of obedience to the law of nature, which wills the peace and preservation of all raen.^ So much for the altruistic side in this early controversy. The egoistic current was set in motion by Hobbes, whose belief was in a contract founded on individual selfishness, the natural basic motive in all men. The first law of nature is self-preservation^ in the struggle for existence. In the state of nature selfishness rules unrestrained, giving rise to con- ditions so intolerable that sheer self-interest compels men to agree on some mutual scheme by which, in serving the interests of all, each individual will get the most possible for himself.* Men are "anti-social by nature, and social only by a happy invention of far-sighted selfishness."* The same egoistic inter- pretation of the contract is evident ip. Mandeville, whose bees serve themselves in serving the hive. In his solution of the labor and wage problem, everything that creates demand is good — extravagance, vice, and luxurj' as well as necessity give rise to industry and art. Therefore the more selfish and unbridled in desire a man is, the better is his service to the welfare of the whole.* Shaftesburv and his disciple Hutcheson, shocked at a doctrine so dangerous in its practical bearing on life, went to an extreme along the opposite line, in their declaration that man is naturally social and benevolent, that moral law is absolute and consistent with natural law, and that on this law society is based.'^ In that portion of the "Essay" where Pope discusses man in his relation to society, it is not hard to trace the influence of these schools of thought, echoes of whose combat reached him through the conversation of Bolingbroke if they did not do so through the ^ Ibid., p. 72. * Locke, Civil Governvient, Book II, Chap, ii, Sec. 4-14, 74-76, 124-131. » Bonar, pp. 78-79. * Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 258-259. * Bonar, p. 85. 8 Patten, Development of English Thought, pp. 204-212. ' Seth, English Philosophers, pp. 188-192. 72 The Poet as Philosopher pages of the philosophers themselves. It is distinctly the contract idea that has compelled his interest, to the exclusion of other economic problems. His omissions are perhaps as significant of the philosophical calibre of Pope's mind as are his inclusions. He does not touch upon or allude to the questions of trade, finance, property, taxation, increase of population, or popular education, topics which had engaged the attention of Hobbes and Harrington a century before him, in the period when "pohtical economy was growing up in England as an application of political philosophy."^ He suggests no rules for the machinery of government such as the "Oceana" outlines. He ignores Mandeville's theories regarding luxury as economically right though ethically wrong, and poverty and ignorance as necessary for the maintenance of a laboring, wage-earning class to do the work of the nation. It was the theoretic rather than the practical side of political philosophy that commanded the interest of Pope and his circle. Economic realities were very far removed from the experience of an aristo- cratic dilettante like Bohngbroke, of a shrewd and caustic analyst of the vices of court, church, and society like Swift, or even of a keenly observant but sheltered-living poet and critic like Pope himself. The fashions, the intrigues of court, the adventures of Belinda, the gossip of literary circles, a contest of wits with Lady Mary, the opening of a new vista among his garden walks; in his more scholarly moments the deeds of Hector or Achilles, and in his tenderer hours solicitude for his mother — these were Pope's reahties. This detached and academic acquaintance with political philos- ophy may account for the confusion which appears in Pope's explanation of the origin of social laws. He does not seem to have in mind a clear distinction between egoistic and altruistic doctrine. It is not compromise that makes him veer from one side to the other; for usually, once Pope knew his intended direction, he did not trim his sails to suit the wind. Here, however, he seems to have no firm conviction of what his position is. Perhaps in this portion of the work he was less directly under the tutelage of his "guide, philosopher, and friend"; and, according to Leshe Stephen, he was himself incapable of sustained reasoning or laborious and patient meditation, and could work well only on ^ Bonar, p. 85. The Poet as Philosopher 73 lines provided for him.* It is not unfair, however, to charge some of the confusion to Bolingbroke, who was himself but a superficial thinker and to whose pages can certainly be traced Pope's ideas on the state of Nature, and on the origins of poUtical and civil society, of government, and of religion.^ A study of Epistle III will show not only what were Pope's independent and second-hand views of the social contract, but also the confusion that is apparent in his presentation of them. For the most part his interpretation of the contract inclines to the benevolent view. The world of nature is proof sufficient that the chain "combining all below and all above" is a chain of love, "See plastic Nature working to this end: The single atoms each to other tend ; Attract, attracted to, the next in place Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace. See matter next with various life endu'd, Press to one centre still, the gen'ral good."^ The individual exists for the good of the whole: "short of reason he must fall. Who thinks all made for one, not one for all."* Such a statement is diametrically opposed to Hobbes, who thus, according to Pope, falls short of reason. No happiness is possible unless men live in social relation with each other, for God, in framing the whole, "On mutual wants built mutual happiness."' A picture of a Golden Age known as the "state of Nature" shows how instinctive is the social feeling, not only of human, but of animal kinds, beginning in the love of the mate and of the young.^ Universal benevolence reigned when man followed these natural social instincts. "Pride then was not; nor arts, that pride to aid; Man walk'd with beast joint-tenant of the shade; The same his table, and the same his bed; No murder cloth'd him, and no murder fed. * Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope, p. 162, * Churton Collins, Bolingbroke, p. 192, note. ' Ward's edition of Pope's Works, Epistle III, 11. 7-14. * Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 47-48. » /?«:"In Memoriam" than of the doctrines most characteristic of Kant and Schelhng. Perhaps the hackneyed "stepping-stones of their dead selves" may contain a suggestion of the chain of selves that Hegel says makes personality, of the continual struggle that^^he says makes life. Perhaps there is a hint in the last quatrain — "That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves, "^ — » Ibid., Canto LXXXVIII. » Ibid., Canto CXXV. * Ibid., Canto CXVI. * Ibid., Epilogue, last stanza. The Poet as Philosopher 89 of the infinite, all-conquering God of Hegel, as well as of the crown of a developing and unfolding creation that was Schelling's conception of deity. But the feeling for life as a progressive development, growing rather than static — a feeling which had in it the germ of an evolutionary philosophy — has in Tennyson much more the tone of the romanticists, already a familiar note in English poetry through the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, than it has of the less emotional viewpoint of Hegel's philosophy of history. It is far from improbable that Hegel, a writer later in time and later known in England than Kant or Schelling, had not been long enough familiar to Tennyson for his ideas to have become an integral part of the poet's philosophical equipment. For Tennyson was always a conservative, in art as in politics and morals. Had he not been so, he would have been as fully abreast of contemporary philosophy as was Carlyle. On the contrary, not only did he show Httle the influence of Hegel, but he definitely refused to be persuaded by the views of the most recent metaphysicians of his time. That he knew both Comte* and Schopenhauer, if not intensively, at least in the way in which the intelligent layman is always aware of the thought currents in his atmosphere, is evident from his repeated refutation of the ideas of the French positivist and the German pessimist. When the voice of Nature echoes the cry of materialism, "'I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more,'"^ Tennyson answers with a refusal to believe in such utter futility as an ending for a life of splendid purpose. "O life as futile, then, as frail"^ might be a quotation from Schopenhauer; the difference is that Schopenhauer would utter it as a conclusion, while with Tennyson it is a protest. It is the philosophy that abandoned the search for the infinite, to be content with the effort to under- stand and improve the finite, that is described in the passage which shows the inadequacy of knowledge "cut from love and faith." Such knowledge is hke "some wild Pallas from the brain » 1798-1857, Cours de Philosophie Positive, published 1839-42. * In Memoriam, Canto LVI. ' Ibid., Canto LVI. 90 The Poet as Philosopher "Of demons, fiery-hot to burst All barriers in her onward race For power. Let her know her place She is the second, not the first. " A higher hand must make her mild."^ Materialism would prove "human love and truth" to be but "dying Nature's earth and Ume"; but man's mission on earth is to prove "That Ufe is not an idle ore, " But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom "To shape and use."* Men are not "wholly brain, magnetic mockeries"; not merely "cunning casts in clay," even though the science of which Comte was the philosophical prophet may prove that they are so.^ Ck)mte and the EngUsh thinkers who followed him held their philosophy of materialism without being thereby plunged into pessimism, for the corollary of a view of life that ends with the finite was to them an activity for the betterment of finite con- ditions. A belief involving action can never be pessimistic; it is too busy. But had Tennyson been convinced by the positivists, the issue for him would probably have been like Schopenhauer's, for in his thought the only element that saves life as it is from futility is the faith in the ultimate reality "beyond the veil." Postulating, like Kant, that reahty, he is ready with his answer for the philosopher who called Ufe an evil dream. No poet, perhaps, has more adequately expressed despair: "From out waste places comes a cry, And murmurs from the dying Sun; "And all the phantom. Nature, stands — With all the music in her tone, A hollow echo of my own — A hollow form with empty hands."* » Ibid., Canto CXIV. » Ibid., Canto CXXI. « Ibid., Canto CXVIII. « Ibid., Canto III. The Poet as Philosopher 91 No poet has expressed more comprehensively the hopelessness that comes with disillusionment: " Be near me when the sensuous frame Is racked with pangs that conquer trust; And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame. "Be near me when my faith is dry, And men the flies of latter spring, That lay their eggs, and sting and sing And weave their petty cells and die."* But no poet has more satisfyingly replied to the voices of despair and disillusionment. Perhaps pessimism is a logical outcome of the philosophy of Kant and Fichte; but by virtue of the intuition that is mightier than logic, Tennyson trusts "that somehow good WiU be the final goal of ill." His is a very different optimism from the casuistry which proved to its own satisfaction that "Whatever is is right." The later and more thoughtful poet dared not assert so dogmatic and assured a knowledge. His antidote for pessimism is not proof, not knowl- edge, but faith : "Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last — far off — at last, to all."^ The way winds onward drearily enough; but patience in the pursuit of it comes from the purpose " to prove No lapse of moons can canker Love."' In that beUef lies the secret of Tennyson's avoidance of Schopen- hauer's gloom. For Tennyson's philosophy is a philosophy of the triumph of love over death, a triumph inevitable while human love is a part of the divine, the "immortal Love." It is the sentinel of Love, the "king and lord," who "whispers to the worlds of space. In the deep night, that all is well."* » Ibid., Canto L. « Ibid., Canto XXVI. « Ibid., Canto LIV. * Ibid., Canto CXXVI. 92 The Poet as Philosopher If we looked solely at the metaphysicians of the period, it might seem that at last has appeared a poet-philosopher independent in his thinking of the influences of current opinion. But, as will be seen later, the idea of love as a solution for life was the central principle of the new reHgion of the nineteenth century; and in this respect Tennyson was merely influenced more strongly by the religious than by the metaphysical thought of his time. Thinking of the poem as a whole, however, unmistakably the strongest philosophical bias therein manifest is the doctrine of Kant. Just as it is between the lines that the influence of the romantic school upon Tennyson's feeUng for nature is to be found, so Kant's postulates of reality are interwoven with the whole fabric of the argument by which the poet arrives at conviction. He longs to beheve in God, because without such a belief life is a futility. So he wills to believe, and postulates the God who alone makes life possible and endurable. He longs to believe in immor- tality, because, if Hallam is no longer alive, life for his friend is insupportable. So, like Kant, he wills to believe, and postulates the immortal life which alone can make the mortal life anything but vain. Here is something very like pragmatism, long before WilHam James; and yet it is only the application by a layman of Kant's categorical imperative to an agonizing personal problem. For, after all, the philosophy of "In Memoriam" remains a personal one. Tennyson in the writing of it was interested in philosophy, not for its own sake, but for what it could do for him in an acute personal crisis. Its claim to the universality that makes it art lies in the fact that every human soul has sooner or later to face a similar personal crisis. It is not to be forgotten that "In Memoriam" is far from being Tennyson's only philosophical poem. The fact that he was by inclination, throughout his life, a lover of "divine Philosophy" is evident from beginning to end of a volume of his collected works. He was by nature far more really a thinker on abstract questions than was either Davies or Pope. Davies had the legal mind and the executive temperament; his venture into philosophy was youthful and temporary. Pope was essentially a critic, whose metaphysical flights were on borrowed wings. Tennyson needed no tutor; the ideas to which he gave expression may have been other men's ideas, but he had lived with them until they had become a part of him, in no sense an echo or a parrot-like repetition. The Poet as Philosopher 93 Yet even Tennyson did not go ahead of his guides. Had he been an independent philosopher, he would have followed Kant's premises to their conclusion, and have arrived by his own road at pessimism, like Schopenhauer, or at agnosticism, like Huxley and Spencer; even as Da vies, if he had thought independently and progressively, would have taken the step ahead that waited for Hobbes; and as Pope, not content with past philosophies, would have reached the position of Hume. While German philosophers had been evolving and, little by little, sending to England doctrines pregnant with possibilities of a new and fuller life of the spirit, English philosophy had been progressing along a line no less new but much more practical. Utilitarianism was the contribution to philosophy of late eighteenth century English thought, as the science of political economy was its contribution to the material of education. The development of that side of eighteenth century thought which emphasized economic problems has already been traced. When metaphysical speculation reached the sceptical barrier which blocked Hume's further progress, English thought, instead of leaping the barrier like Kant, went around it, following its natural practical bent. Hume himself, while subordinating the economic to the political element in the life of a state, nevertheless based his really utilitarian ethics on economic considerations. The test of conduct is its effect upon the happiness of the whole community, and the greatest amount of happiness, and consequently the greatest opportunity for virtuous conduct, is possible under such conditions of peace and security as permit the flourishing of industry and art.^ Hume's point of view was ethical and his interest in the abstract; yet it is impossible to mistake the presence in his doctrine, as in that of his early contemporaries. Gay ,2 Tucker,^ and Paley,* of the germ of the practical utilitarian teaching popularized by Bentham^ and James Mill^ under the slogan, "The greatest good ' Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, pp. 108-112. * A Dissertation Concerning Virtue, by Rev. John Gay, published 1731. ' The Light of Nature Piirsued, by Abraham Tucker, published 1768-78. * Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, by WilHam Paley, published 1785. ' 1748-1832, Fragment on Government, 1776; Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789. * Politic/il Economy, 1821; Analysis of the Phenomena of the Humayi Mind, 1829. 94 The Poet as Philosopher of the greatest number." The details of the association of the visionary recluse and the practical psychologist, an association under the guidance of which a new party, the "philosophical radicals," initiated the movement that brought about the Reform Bill of 1832, need not be rehearsed here. There is in "In Memo- riam" no trace of interest in the abstract economic science devel- oped as a new subject of education by Bentham and Mill, nor in the more concrete type of pohtical economy which came into its own with the publication of the "Wealth of Nations," and was de- veloped by Malthus with his theory of population, by Ricardo with his theory of rent and wages, and by the ideaUsts of industry with the doctrine of laisser faire. If Ught were to be sought alone from this poem, the question whether Tennyson were a mercantihst or a physiocrat, a Benthamite or a Malthusian, must remain unan- swered. But hand in hand with the progress of economic science, which in its turn had grown out of the industrial and social changes of the Revolutionary period, went a deep and wide awakening of the popular conscience to industrial responsibility for "the greatest good of the greatest number," With such a movement, manifest in the social and humanitarian reforms great and small which marked the first half of the nineteenth century and which grew directly out of the educational work of the economists, Tennyson was by temperament deeply in sympathy, as he shows in other poems than this. This spirit of altruism finds reflection in "In Memoriam" in more than one passage of power and beauty, notably the famous New Year's Eve lyric. Again, in spite of the fact that Arthur Hallam's father was the greatest historian of Tennyson's period,^ the poem to Arthur's memory shows no trace of the revival of historical interest which marked the years immediately after the Napoleonic era. History in its modern form belongs to the nineteenth century, as the beginning of economic science belongs to the eighteenth. Annals and chronicles, diaries and apologetic biographies had kept records which later were to be invaluable as sources of historical material. Hume had conceived the idea of an impartial history ,2 but his work was superficial and far from scientific, and his interest in his material was that of the philosophical student of human nature, * Henry Hallam: Europe During the Middle Ages, 1818; Constitutional History of England, 1827; Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 1837-9. ^History of England, published 1754-61. The Poet as Philosopher 95 who, like Hegel, sought in the past an understanding of the ways of men. Gibbon,^ the first serious literary historian to look upon historical work as a primary interest, made his exhaustive and still authentic story of the fall of Rome an opportunity for a dialectic against ecclesiastical perversions of Christianity which unfortunately attracted an undue proportion of attention, and has tended to obscure the real value and historic impartiality of his work. It remained for a German scholar to become the accepted exponent of the true historical method. So enthusiastic was the interest of English students, during the very years when "In Memoriam" was in process of development, in the work of Niebuhr^ as translated into English and as imitated by such English scholars as Arnold of Rugby, Thirlwall, and Grote,^ that it seems impossible for Tennyson not to have realized the signifi- cance of this new step in the progress of learning, by which the critical method was applied to history and history became a science. Yet "In Memoriam" shows no trace of interest in the great new world of historical research henceforth open to the mind of the scholar. The third new element that entered the field of education with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a new type of scientific interest. Physical science had passed out of the realm of theory and had reached a concrete climax in its application to mechanics and to industry — witness the steam engine, the modern factory, and the beginning of transportation by machinery. The scientist of the study and the laboratory left the laws of motion to inventors and machinists and turned his attention to the laws which governed existence in a universe newly discovered to be a growing and organic unity. Evolution, as a solution of scientific problems and as a philosophy, was in the world long before Charles Darwin. Lessing and Hegel, as has been seen, conceived the present world and its life merely as a product of the past, as a growth, a progress, a development. Even before he made his famous categories, Kant had attempted to trace the evolution of the universe from primeval chaos to the present orderly system, ^ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published 1776. 2 Niebuhr's History of Rome, translated by Julius Hare and Connop Thirl- wall, 1828-32. ' Arnold, History of Rome, 1828-47. Histories of Greece by Thirlwall, 1844, and Grote, 184.5. 96 The Poet as Philosopher by one tremendous leap of the scientific imagination hypothesizing the nebular theory^ which Laplace and Herschel, a half century later, were to establish scientifically. The historical method, which Hegel appHed to the study of human nature and institutions, men of science began to apply to the study of all existent forms of organic life, with their origins and growth. So the varieties of scientific research that occupy the foreground of thought, in the years that supply the educational background for Tennyson, were geology, zoology, biology, and botany. The pubUc interest in these subjects may be estimated from the names of the numerous speciaHzed scientific societies founded between 1800 and 1830,^ and from the long fist of scientific magazines bearing on these topics.^ Natural scientists accompanied exploring expeditions, for the study of the flora and fauna of distant lands. While chemistry and physics were taking on their modern form under the leadership of Dalton* and Joule,^ geology, the origin of which was due to EngUsh scholarship, was coming into its own. As early as 1785, Hutton's® "Theory of the Earth" had opened up endless geological vistas reveahng down their length the hitherto unimagined age of the earth. Then with WilUam Smith's work on fossils^ came the beginning of histological geology, reaching its climax in the work of Lyell,* and a foundation was suppUed for research that would establish the vague hypotheses of the evolution of organic life. Not only existing but extinct species could now be studied. Tennyson, in the poem under consideration, could not have been under the influence of Charles Darwin, for the results of the ' Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism, p. 50, sq. 2 1803, Royal Horticultural Society; 1807, Geological Society of London; 1819, Cambridge Philosophical Society; 1826, Zo) logical Society of London; 1831, British Association for the Advancement of Science; 1839, Royal Botanic Society. 2 E. g., 1841, Annals and Magazine of Natural History. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 115-116. 116 The Poet as Philosopher and embodying the crystallized thought of the most prominent deists, may be taken as representative of the kind of speculation by which rationalists, whether religious or merely ethical, sought to establish a position at once religious and rational, spiritual and scientific. Deist theology and Pope's presentation of it may be left for later consideration. It is sufficient at this point merely to notice that Pope was as fully the spokesman for the end of a speculative age, expressing in his Hnes the conclusions to which its speculation had brought it, as Davies was the voice of a credulous age, express- ing the convictions which it had received by inheritance and accepted on intuition. In relation to truth itself, one writer is as conservative as the other, though Pope reasons where Davies believes. That Pope wrote a speculative poem was no proof of progressiveness on his part, in an age when everybody speculated. The fact that no other poet contemporary with Pope wrote a similarly speculative poem can be readily explained by recalling that Pope's native genius, like that of his age, was the genius of satire, and that his venture into philosophy was due to outside influence. No philosopher was at hand, in Dryden's circle of intimates, to turn the laureate's mind in a metaphysical direction ; and it might have been difficult even for the winning Lord Boling- broke to persuade the caustic Swift to engage in any form of writing to which he did not feel disposed. The "Essay on Man," indeed, has the distinction of being almost the only successful serious poem of any length, in this early eighteenth century, that is not imbued with the spirit of satire. In an age of wit, laughter is the rule. The eighteenth century writer who was compelled to be serious by what he saw and thought had even to be serious under the mask of a laugh — sometimes a bitter laugh, usually a scornful one. The gentler irony whose outward expression was an indulgent smile lived only in the sympathetic reflections of Sir Roger and the good-humored merriment of the worshiper of Belinda. From Dryden onward, until the spell was broken by Thomson, it was an ironic muse that inspired English verse. So, apart from his dramas, Dryden is best remembered for the sharp political satire "Absalom and Achitophel"; Matthew Prior's single memorable long poem is his dissertation on the relation between soul and body, a cheerfully humorous parody on the metaphysical wanderings of the philo- The Poet as Philosopher 117 sophic mind, bearing the title of "Alma, or the Progress of the Mind"; John Gay's most delightfully characteristic work, with the exceptions of the simple ballads and the "Beggar's Opera," is the humorous imitation of the conventional pastoral known as "The Shepherd's Week." Prose, too, was dominated by the spirit of satire. To think of the early eighteenth century is at once to remember the "Spectator" and the "Tale of a Tub." That Pope departed from the kind of writing in which his "Satires and Epistles" prove him such a master was due to the versatility which at another time made him wholly a student of the classics, as it made him now wholly a philosopher. So long as he chose to be a philosopher he could not be a satirist. No man could be both at the same time, for philosophy implies a mood of calm detachment, and satire a vehement espousal of, or antagonism to, some cause. With this single exception of its failm'e to reflect the satirical tendency of the period, the "Essay on Man" is an example of the finished product of that age of formality, convention, and polish that by 1740 was about to give place to a wholly new epoch in art and life. There is less apparent effort in the polish of Pope's style than in that of many another of his contemporaries who strove for formal perfection. The high-flown poetic diction that was fashionable seems less labored and more spontaneous on his lips; his facile pen handles the stiff couplet with more ease and grace. He is unswerving in his adherence to the poetic orthodoxies of his century, yet at the same time he lifts those orthodoxies to the highest plane on which forms so anaemic can breathe. A few examples will best show this superiority of Pope to his contemporaries in the handling of the popular verse form. For fairness, the examples are taken from poems of a nature equally serious with that of Pope, and represent a fair average of the author's work in each case. Listen first to Dryden, in "Religio Laici" : "Thus man by his own strength to Heaven would soar And would not be obliged to God for more. Vain, wretched creature, how art thou misled To think thy wit these god-like notions bred! These truths are not the product of thy mind. But dropped from Heaven, and of a nobler kind."^ ' Dryden, Religio Laici, 11. 62-67. 118 The Poet as Philosopher Pope, concluding the passage that reproves man for assuming over-much — a similar idea to that in the lines just quoted — is not even touched by a shadow of the commonplaceness that so often quite eclipsed Dryden's genius. *'Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore."^ How far such a couplet is removed from that in which Prior expresses the same thought : " In vain we lift up our presumptuous eyes To what our Maker to their ken denies."* A little farther on in the same passage Prior reaches a higher poetic level: "How narrow limits were to wisdom given! Earth she surveys; she thence would measure Heaven: Through mists obscure, now wings her tedious way: Now wanders dazzled with too bright a day; And from the summit of a pathless coast, Sees infinite, and in that sight is lost."^ But even this is surpassed in skill by the lines in which Pope describes man's imperfection of knowledge : "Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great : Alike in ignorance, his reason such. Whether he thinks too little or too much: Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!"' Other centuries than the eighteenth might have difficulty in producing a line more complete both in thought and expression than the last one. Perhaps the closing lines of Addison's famous description of Marlborough* come as near to real poetic power as any eighteenth 1 Essay on Man, Epistle I, 11. 91-92. » Prior, Poetical Works, Vol. II, pp. llS-119. • Essay on Man, Epistle II, 11. 3-18. * Ward's English Poets, Vol. Ill, p. 5. The Poet as Philosopher 119 century couplet — those lines where, rising above his usual rather mediocre verse, he sees a vision of an angel, who "pleas'd th' Almighty's orders to perform. Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm." But Pope has a couplet of similar dignity, more beautiful and more thought provoking: "On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but Passion is the gale; Nor God alone in the still calm we find, He mounts the storms, and walks upon the wind,"^ From a poet who was oftener rhetorical than poetic, such lines are doubly impressive. A more thorough comparative survey of verse written in the heroic couplet would serve to show that in the use of the poetic medium characteristic of his time Pope was approached by none of his contemporaries. Standing at the end of an epoch, he represented the best art of the style peculiar to that epoch. The didactic habit of mind that modern literature inherited from the middle ages had by no means worn itself out during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The mission of art was still to teach, as it was to continue to be, in the minds of many writers and readers, till a good two centuries after the time of Pope. The particular lesson which Dry den had to impart was, as became a laureate in those days of patronage, loyal adherence to whatever might be the powers that were. Historical poems, showing the power and glory of the ruling monarch and the good fortune of his subjects, and religious poems, defending the faith of whichever church Dryden adhered to at the time of writing, alike urged upon their readers the divine right of rulers. An age of satire of course was a didactic age; without a lesson to teach, satire would have no excuse for being. Even Gay's lively and laughable epistles, eclogues, and elegies carried with them the criticism that points out evils to correct them. Solomon's "Vanity," as transformed by Prior, is one long preachment, without the beauty of language and the originality of thought that Koheleth possessed. Death, immortality, sin, salvation, careless worldliness — these were the subjects that in the minor poets replaced the love songs of Sidney 1 Essay on Man, Epistle II, 11. 107-110. 120 The Poet as Philosopher and of Lovelace. Weighty gravity of exhortation reached its climax in the only important venture into verse made by Johnson ;i while Young- fairly revels in the gloom and grief, meditation upon which he thinks must be provocative of true morality. Consequently, if Pope had been, in such an undertaking as the "Essay," anything but didactic, he would have seemed as unnatural and artificial as a didactic poet would seem in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the product of an artificial school of literature is natural only when he is artificial. And the conventional morality of the poets of the eighteenth century was artificial enough, looked at beside their cheerful participation in the social life which they satirized, beside their eager pursuit of the vanities whose worship they deplored. They were abstract moralities that Pope and his contemporaries discoursed upon. As far as the "Essay" is concerned. Pope's preaching was only as regarded opinion. He was urgent that his readers should think properly; the kind of interest in their conduct that is manifest in such a sturdy, wholesome writer as Fulke Greville is quite absent. For example, the errors against which Pope warned his readers are entirely those of mind and soul, not of practice. Man is not to complain, blaming Heaven for his imperfection; he is to trust the absolute justice and wisdom of the "disposing Power" accord- ing to whose disposal "Whatever is is right." He must not allow in himself too lofty a pride, remembering that he is only one small part in a great whole. He is to believe that happiness lies only in virtue — but the virtue which Pope recommends remains a very abstract quality, quite different from the specific ones that Davies and Greville admired. Man is not to make the mistake of thinking that evil has its source in God, though as to its actual origin Pope suggests no satisfactory theory: "What makes all physical and moral ill? There deviates Nature, and here wanders Will. God sends not ill, if rightly understood."^ In a very few passages there is a hint that Pope realized conduct as the test of virtue of thought. After his discussion of the ^ Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749. 2 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, 1742-44. 3 Essay