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<i., pp. 28-31. 
 
 ' Seth, English Philosophers, p. 17. 
 
 * See page 9. 
 
52 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Descartes and Spinoza, will prove the new system to be far from 
 independent of the naturalism of the seventeenth century philos- 
 ophers. 
 
 Francis Bacon, who determined the trend of metaphysics in the 
 fifty years after him, was not himself a metaphysician. His 
 concern was less with abstract conclusion than with concrete 
 fact. Reason, instead of starting from a general preconceived 
 idea and arguing deductively, should start from a hypothesis and 
 argue inductively, basing its conclusions on facts. Such a pro- 
 cedure was too concrete and homely to be scholastic; it is the 
 declaration of the independence of human thought from bondage 
 to mere speculation. At the same time it is neither idealistic 
 nor imaginative ; a philosophy with such a point of departure will 
 be as dependent on observation of nature as the previous school 
 had been upon authority. But dependence on so tolerant an 
 overlord must have seemed to the dogma-wearied thinkers of 
 Bacon's day a bondage both free and fascinating, as with ardor 
 they turned to the deification of nature. 
 
 The avowed philosophers, who followed Bacon's lead in making 
 from the new science a new philosophy, did not imitate him in 
 method. To Thomas Hobbes,^ who represents all that is deepest 
 and most penetrating in early seventeenth century English 
 thought, deduction from mathematical laws is the method for 
 solving the problems of the universe. But equally with Bacon 
 does Hobbes glorify the facts of physical science in his effort to 
 make them account for all mental phenomena. For him there is 
 no ideal or abstract reality; no concept or type exists apart from 
 embodiment in an individual. Philosophy is a reasoned knowledge 
 of effect from cause and of cause from effect, proceeding on lines 
 as inevitable as the propositions of Euclid; and the final cause to 
 which all events are reducible is motion. Even knowledge and 
 consciousness are merely the result of sensations which set up 
 motions in the brain. Such a mechanical interpretation of life 
 was necessarily far more materialistic than that of Descartes,* 
 contemporary with Bacon and Hobbes, who followed, like Hobbes, 
 the mathematical and deductive method, but who recognized the 
 
 * Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 255-262. 
 Seth, English Philosophers, pp. 56-78. 
 
 * Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 269-289. 
 rvoyce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, pp. 75-77. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 53 
 
 existence of abstract and universal intuitions, from which deductive 
 reasoning was to proceed and which he called innate ideas. The 
 axioms of mathematics are merely examples of these universal 
 concepts, of which the surest was the existence of self, proved in 
 the famous cogito, ergo sum. The truth of any idea could be 
 tested by its relative clearness in comparison with the self's 
 own existence. Thus the mechanical view of the world which 
 Descartes constructs to serve the purposes of science is based on 
 the assumption of the existence of mind in distinction from matter, 
 and leaves room, as Hobbes's does not, for ideas not embodied in 
 individual material form, even for the idea of God. 
 
 However original and constructive Bolingbroke desired to be in 
 organizing a new and free world-philosophy, he was the heir of his 
 predecessors in his reverential sense of the all-sufficiency of the 
 law of Nature, which the seventeenth century fastened upon 
 philosophical thought and which remained dominant until its 
 climax in Rousseau and the Physiocrats. "Obedience to the law 
 of Nature," wrote St. John,^ *'is our first duty and our greatest 
 interest." Christianity itself, in its sincere, not its traditional 
 form, he proved to be founded on the law of Nature.^ 
 
 Like master, hke pupil; allusions to "great Nature" sprinkle 
 the pages of the "Essay on Man." It is Nature who "wakes her 
 genial power "^ for man's happiness; who "errs from this gracious 
 end "' when earthquakes and tempests destroy him. It is Nature's 
 law which the scientist unfolds.^ Nature is the mother of the 
 ruling passion in man;^ her "vigor working at the root" produces 
 virtue from passion, giving 
 
 "The virtue nearest to our vice ally'd."* 
 
 » Works of Boliiigbroke, published by Bohn, 1844, Vol. IV, p. 251. 
 
 » lUd., Vol. Ill, p. 396. 
 
 Bolingbroke's distinction between genuine and traditional Christianity is 
 as follows: "Genuine Christianity is contained in the gospels; it is the word 
 of "God. . . . Traditional Christianity ... is derived from the writings of 
 fathers and doctors of the church, and from the decrees of councils. 
 It is therefore the word of men, and of men, for the most part, either very 
 weak, very mad, or very knavish." Vol. IV, p. ICM). 
 
 3 Ward's ed. of Pope's Works, Epistle I, 11. 133-144. 
 
 * Ibid., Epistle II, 1. 32. 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 137-14.5. 
 
 • Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 181-196. 
 
54 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 It is Nature who checks man's tyranny over the weak/ and who 
 
 works to weld 
 
 "the chain of love 
 Combining all below and all above."^ 
 
 "Cities were built" and "societies were made" at the mandate of 
 "great Nature."^ "Nature's light" is a truer guide than "wit's 
 false mirror."^ Nature is made coordinate with God in linking 
 the frame of the universe.^ And this implicit reverence for 
 Nature's laws, obedience to which the whole poem enjoins, reaches 
 its highest strain when Nature's laws are made synonymous with 
 God's— 
 
 "The state of Nature was the reign of God."^ 
 
 The "Nature," be it observed, about which Pope discoursed is 
 the abstract entity of his period and the preceding one. It is a 
 mere mechanical force, working itself out in cold and unchangeable 
 laws, not a vital life current making lovely the tree and the stream 
 and the flower. Pope was Hke his time in his worship of Nature's 
 laws; but he did not love her fair works as did earUer and later 
 poets, of the warmer EUzabethan and Revolutionary'- periods. 
 For him there were no "tongues in trees." The working of a 
 machine may be awe-inspiring and thought-provoking; but 
 neither the machine nor its product thrills the beholder with love. 
 And to Pope as to Bolingbroke, the universe was essentially a 
 machine, with Nature as its dynamic force. 
 
 For, however much in his "Essays on Human Knowledge" 
 Bolingbroke may decry the "gross absurdities" of Hobbes,' he 
 has not progressed beyond Hobbes in his idea of the universe as a 
 vast and perfect mechanism. "We ought," he wrote, "to consider 
 the world we inhabit no otherwise than as a little wheel in our 
 solar system, nor our solar system any otherwise than as a little 
 but larger wheel in the inmiense machine of the universe."* 
 This same idea is fundamental to the structure of the "Essay on 
 Man." Though Pope nowhere calls the universe a machine, 
 choosing rather the characteristically eighteenth century word 
 system, yet the view of creation presented in his four epistles is 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 49-52. " Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 317-318. 
 
 2 Ibid., Epistle III, U. 7-8. « Ibid., Epistle III, I. 148. 
 
 ' Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 199-202. ' Bolingbroke's Works, Vol. IV, p. 119. 
 * Ibid., Epistle rV, 1. 393. » Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 336. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 55 
 
 such a composite of wheels within wheels as to admit of no other 
 interpretation than the mechanical. The whole scheme of things 
 is a matter of "strong connections, nice dependencies, gradations 
 just,"^ held in agreement by the "vast chain of being," from which 
 no link may be broken without chaos.^ Every part of the eternal 
 order is made to fit into some other part, the parts being mutually 
 essential. In like manner, the passions of man, with every result- 
 ing virtue and vice, are analyzed in their relations to each other, 
 in their interdependence. Certain causes will inevitably give rise 
 to certain results. Self-love and Reason react upon each other ;^ 
 all good is ascribed to "their proper operation"; all evil, to their 
 improper operation. Though each individual seems to be seeking 
 "a sev'ral goal,"'* from the viewpoint of Heaven the whole, made 
 up of interacting individuals, is seen to be one in its working: 
 
 "The Universal Cause 
 Acts to one end, but acts by various laws."* 
 
 The principle of harmonious interaction which balances the 
 passions within a single individual is equally forceful in relating 
 to each other the units which make up society: 
 
 "From the first, eternal order ran, 
 And creature linked to creature, man to man."« 
 
 The identity of man's love to himself and to society is Ukened to 
 the twofold motion of the planets, which 
 
 " On their own axis . . . run, 
 Yet make at once their circle round the sun."^ 
 
 The truly happy man is he who 
 
 "Pursues that chain which links th' immense design, "» 
 
 and finds the "height of bliss but height of charity" in close 
 contact with the Divine love, the motive force of the whole great 
 mechanism. 
 
 1 Ward's ed. of Pope's Works, Epistle I, 11. 30-31. 
 
 2 Ibid., Epistle I, 11. 245-246. 
 
 3 Ibid., Epistle II, U. 53-60. 
 < Ibid., Epistle II, 1. 237. 
 
 5 Ibid., Epistle III, U. 1-2. 
 » Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 113-114. 
 ' Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 313-316. 
 « Ibid., Epistle IV, U. 327-340. 
 
56 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 It is in this inclusion of a God in the order of the universe that 
 Pope and Bohngbroke differ from the materialism of Hobbes, who 
 in his rejection of all universal concepts except geometrical axioms 
 leaves but doubtful place for the concept of God. Bolingbroke 
 and Pope, less agnostic and more akin in this respect to Descartes 
 and Spinoza, cannot conceive of a machine without a propelling 
 power, nor of a series of effects without a gi'eat first cause. But 
 Bolingbroke's God, who keeps the mechanism going, is not Hke 
 the God of Descartes, existent only as the projection of the thought 
 of the individual. He is a self-existent entity, like the God of 
 Spinoza; yet, like Spinoza's God, animating all nature, speaking 
 "in the harmony of the universe."^ Spinoza is alluded to by 
 Bolingbroke only to be dismissed as impious and absurd ;2 and 
 this earliest of the modern mystics is said to have been unfelt by 
 eighteenth century English thought. But there is no little 
 similarity between Bolingbroke's scheme for explaining the whole 
 world order and what Sir Frederick Pollock calls Spinoza's "mag- 
 nificent attempt at an impossible symmetry of the universe,"^ in 
 a system where God was the only free cause, and where all things 
 followed by necessity from the infinity of that power whose being 
 embraced the whole creation. As Pope, well tutored, puts it, 
 
 "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; 
 That, chang'd through all, and yet in all the same, 
 Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame, 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze. 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, 
 Lives through all life, extends through all extent."* 
 
 J Collins' Bolingbroke, p. 220. 
 ' Works of Bolingbroke, Vol. IV, pp. 415-416. 
 3 Pollock, Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy, p. 168. 
 « Ward's ed. of Pope, Epistle I, 11. 267-273. 
 
 It is not easy to escape noting the likeness between this passage, and the 
 famous lines in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey": 
 
 "Whose dwelling is the Ught of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the hving air. 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 This is one of the passages that estabhsh Wordsworth as a Platonist, an 
 idealist, a pantheist, none of which Pope was! 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 57 
 
 Such a passage is not too far removed from the idealistic pantheism 
 of Spinoza, though it lacks the passion and fire of the Jewish 
 mystic whose aim was not only to find but to love "a thing eternal 
 and infinite."* 
 
 In any case, whatever speculation may arise along the line of 
 the suggested query, there is no doubt that the immediate inspiration 
 for the idea of the "universal harmony" exemphfied in Pope's 
 "stupendous whole" was derived from Anthony Ashley Cooper, 
 third Earl of Shaftesbury, the most brilliant English representative 
 of the seventeenth century school of thought that found its God 
 in nature, and for which Natm-e was the body and God the soul 
 of the universe.- The parallehsm between the Unes just quoted 
 and such a passage as the following is too obvious to require 
 comment. Says Shaftesbury ,3 "All things in this world are united. 
 For, as the branch is united with the tree, so is the tree as immedi- 
 ately with the earth, air, and water, which feed it. As much as 
 the fertile mould is fitted to the tree, ... so much are the very 
 leaves, the seeds, and fruits of these trees fitted to the various 
 animals, these again to one another, and to the elements where 
 they live. . . . Thus, in contemplating all on earth, we must of 
 necessity view All in One, as holding to one common stock. Thus, 
 too, is the system of the bigger world. See there the mutual 
 dependency of things! — the relation of one to another; of the sun 
 to this inhabited earth, and of the earth and other planets to the 
 sun! — the order, union, and coherence of the Whole! . . . Now, 
 having recognized this uniform consistent fabric, and owned the 
 Universal System, we must of consequence acknowledge a Uni- 
 versal Mind." 
 
 Whether Pope's acquaintance with Shaftesbury came by way of 
 Bohngbroke or by direct contact, certainly many portions of the 
 "Essay" are mere versifications of Shaftesbury's principles. 
 For instance, we read that the "chain of love" combines "all 
 below and all above."* 
 
 ^ Works of Spinoza, Bohn's Library, Vol. II, p. 5. 
 ^ Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, p. 106. 
 
 Detailed discussion of Shaftesbury's philosophy is deferred to the section 
 which considers the deistic movement. 
 
 3 Shaftesbury, The Moralists, Part II, Sec. 4, p. 287. 
 * Ward's ed. of Pope, Epistle III, 11. 7-8, 21-26. 
 
58 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 "Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole; 
 One all-extending, all-preserving soul 
 Connects each being, ... 
 nothing stands alone." 
 
 That is Shaftesbury's doctrine of the whole, in which every part 
 contributes to the universal harmony. 
 
 " Who finds not Providence all good and wise, 
 Alike in what it gives, and what denies?"^ 
 
 That is Shaftesbury's doctrine of the essential Tightness of aU 
 existing things, because derived from a benevolent source. 
 
 "Even mean self-love becomes, by force divine. 
 The scale to measure others' wants by thine. "^ 
 
 That is Shaftesbury's theory of the derivation of social love from 
 self-love. 
 
 "Vast chain of being! which from God began, 
 Natures ethereal, human, angel, man. 
 Beast, bird, fish, insect" . . .^ 
 
 That is Shaftesbury's faith in a self-existent God in whom all 
 things five and move and have their being. 
 
 Shaftesbury's deism stands as the ultimate to which, in one 
 direction, the naturalism of the seventeenth century worked 
 itself out. But while the trend of his thought is divergent from 
 that of another school of philosophy against the background of 
 which the learning of the "Essay" must be viewed, the two 
 diverging lines of thought are not divorced. Though Shaftesbury 
 finds in nature an assurance to faith, while the strictly rationalistic 
 school finds in natural science a foundation only for scepticism 
 and materialism, yet both developing Unes of thought show the 
 motive force of the worship of reason. But Shaftesbury stood as 
 the farthest outpost to which his type of philosophy was at that 
 period in English thought to progress. In the soil of the early 
 eighteenth century the purely rationalistic type of thought 
 found a more fertile growth than did the philosophy of naturalism 
 which was to be brought back to life in England by the poets of 
 the Revolutionary period. 
 
 Rationalism had had its origin in the same educational move- 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle 1, 11. 205-206. 
 
 2 Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 291-292. 
 
 3 Ibid., Epistle I, 11. 237-239. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 59 
 
 ment as had naturalism. The growing interest in physical science 
 had worked hand in hand with Protestant revulsion against the 
 authority of dogma to stress the importance, in arriving at real 
 truth, of the individual, independent human intellect. For 
 however intolerant the revolting Protestant came to be, the original 
 motive of Protestantism was an effort to set free the individual 
 mind from outside authority in rehgious matters. Churchmen, 
 too much in the habit of following authority to know how to do 
 without it, substituted for an infallible church an infaUible 
 revelation through an inspired book; but the impetus given to 
 independent thought by the first Protestant revolt set real thinkers 
 free from all such trammels, and showed them the human intellect 
 as the sole guide and source of Ught in reaching a knowledge of 
 truth. A universe governed by natural laws, not managed by 
 an overruUng providence, must be grasped not by the imagination 
 which had been adequate to the reUgious symboUsm, but by the 
 reason, which alone could understand the working of cause and 
 effect.^ So metaphysics was made secular and brought into the 
 realm of pure reason, while religion was left in the realm of author- 
 ity and revelation. As experiment was the test of scientific 
 hypothesis, so experience, viewed in the light of reason, became 
 the test of truth. Thus, because reason set forth and explained 
 the laws of nature in their physical implications, a philosophy of 
 naturalism led inevitably to the rationalistic attitude toward the 
 universe which belonged to the latter half of the seventeenth 
 century, and which reached its culmination in the sceptical, 
 critical mood of the eighteenth century — "the hard, mid-morning 
 light of bare understanding. "^ 
 
 The "Essay on Man," however second-hand its doctrine may 
 be, has the distinction of being the epitome of both these phases 
 of the philosophy of its epoch. For Bolingbroke, too shallow a 
 thinker to realize that his attempt to reconstruct metaphysics on 
 a new basis was but an echo of the best thought of one hundred 
 years, proclaims the God immanent in nature characteristic of 
 the Shaftesbury school, and at the same tune claims not to admit 
 to his philosophy any ideas other than those for the proof of which 
 reason is sufficient. To him as to Shaftesbury, neither one a pure 
 
 ^ Lecky, Rise and Influence of Rationalism. 
 ^ Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 69. 
 
60 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 rationalist though both claimed to be such, proof of the existence 
 of God did not transcend the powers of intellect. Even the moral 
 attributes of God, of which he forms no concept, Bolingbroke 
 explains as merely "various apphcations of one eternal reason."* 
 A rational view of the universe is part of the divine intention, 
 for " God has given to his human creatures the materials of physical 
 and moral happiness. He has given them faculties and powers to 
 collect and apply these materials, and to carry on the work of 
 which Reason is the architect. "^ As for Pope, the use of reason 
 as a source of light is simply taken for granted from the outset of 
 the "Essay." "What can we reason but from what we know?"^ 
 he asks, with the implication that the rational is the only possible 
 method to pursue in a search for truth. Quite apart from the 
 fact that the poem itself is an example of an intricately reasoned 
 argument, its thesis is based upon the exaltation of reason into a 
 very deity — "the God within the mind."^ Reason is the restrain- 
 ing principle in human nature, counteracting the impelling force 
 of Self-love. 
 
 "Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; 
 Reason's comparing balance rules the whole."^ 
 
 Without Reason, man would "meteor-like, flame lawless through 
 the void."® The Passions, controlled and taught by Reason, 
 express themselves in virtuous action.^ It is Reason that observes 
 the laws of Nature and interprets them for man's instruction, 
 that he may use them as a basis for his social system.* Only 
 Reason can order the chaos of the good and ill in man's nature 
 with the great fiat that divides light from darkness.* At one point 
 only does Reason fail, for Pope will not attempt to run ahead of 
 his guide, who felt it unbecoming to analyze the attributes of 
 God,'° though for the proof of His existence Reason avails. Man's 
 
 ' Bolingbroke, Works, Vol. Ill, p. 286. 
 
 2 Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 429. 
 
 ' Ward's ed. of Pope, Epistle I, p. 18. 
 
 * /bid., Epistle II, p. 204. 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 59-60. 
 
 « Ibid., Epistle II, p. 65. 
 
 ' Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 93-122. 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 170-198. 
 
 9 Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 203-204. 
 
 i« Bolingbroke, Works, Vol. Ill, p. 286. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 61 
 
 erring intellect cannot pry into the secrets of the divine nature. 
 "Presume not God to scan,"^ says Pope to the presumptuous man 
 who essays to scale heav^en. 
 
 But a half centurj-^ before Bolingbroke and Pope expounded the 
 power of human reason, other and deeper thinkers had been led by 
 their enthusiasm for nature, by their rationalistic attitude to the 
 laws of nature, to an especial attention to human nature, man 
 being the most interesting of existing phenomena.^ "The proper 
 study of mankind" appeared to be himself. The topic was not 
 new. Two thousand years before "Nosce Teipsum" the advice 
 of Davies had been given by the wisest of the Greeks. But at the 
 end of a century the best thought of which had been devoted to 
 the laws of the physical universe, a certain newness attached to 
 the doctrine of that first of modern thinkers who defined the 
 problem of philosophy as an investigation of the nature and 
 extent of human knowledge.^ Until the power of man's mind 
 was known, how was it possible to take much stock in the conclu- 
 sions of that mind concerning the physical universe? John Locke, 
 heir to Bacon's method of observation and resulting induction,* 
 directed English thought to the problems,^ " How do we come by 
 knowledge?" and "Of what does our limited human reason permit 
 us to be sure?" Thus from 1690, when the "Essay on the Human 
 Understanding" appeared, the glorified Reason itself became the 
 subject of sceptical inquiry, with a view, in Locke's treatment of 
 the question, to destroying false pretensions of knowledge and to 
 declaring just how far real knowledge was possible and practical.* 
 The assumed innate ideas of Descartes were shown to have no 
 proved existence.'' All ideas, said Locke, were either by experience 
 and sensation, or by reflection upon experience and sensation.* 
 
 » Ward's ed. of Pope, Epistle II, II. 1-2. 
 ^ Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 32. 
 ' Fowler, John Locke, pp. 127-128. 
 Seth, English Philosophers, p. 94. 
 *Seth, pp. 3-4. 
 
 * Roj'ce, p. 70. 
 
 • Rogers, History of Philosophy, p. 339. 
 ^ Seth, English Philosophers, pp. 95-96. 
 Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 79. 
 » Seth, pp. 98-99. 
 
 Rogers, pp. 344-345. 
 
62 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 "These alone, so far as I can discover, are the windows by which 
 light is let into this dark room."^ 
 
 So much for the source of knowledge, which thus, in Locke's 
 view, "seems to be nothing but the perception of the connection 
 and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our 
 ideas."- This agreement or disagreement may be perceived 
 immediately; in that case knowledge is intuitive, such as the 
 knowledge of one's own existence. It may be perceived by a 
 gradual process of analysis and comparison; then knowledge is 
 demonstrative, as is the knowledge of the existence of God, which 
 may be proved by our intuitive knowledge of self and the necessity 
 of a first cause for the existence of self. Or it may be perceived 
 by sensation ; such is the knowledge of material things.' Without 
 pursuing further an outline of Locke's philosophy, even so cursory 
 a glance at it makes it evident that here is a new method in meta- 
 physics — a common sense method of drawing conclusions as to 
 the laws of mind by observation of the actual working of the 
 mind.^ The mind becomes its own object, and introspective 
 philosophy is born. The facts of experienced mental processes 
 are substituted, as a foundation for a system, for theories about 
 mental processes. It is the application to metaphysics of the 
 scientific inductive method. 
 
 Had Bolingbroke and Pope a place in their universal harmony 
 for a human reason removed from its godlike pinnacle and sub- 
 jected to a challenging analysis which tested its powers and 
 possibihties in the acid bath of common sense? Or were they 
 content, hke all English thinkers before Locke, to take reason for 
 granted as an infallible guide and solution of all life's problems? 
 Is the "Essay" to be classified only as a crowning hterary product 
 of the period of naturahstic, rationalistic thought; or does it 
 belong also to the dawning period of empirical, introspective 
 mental analysis initiated by the common sense of Locke? 
 
 The very title chosen by Bolingbroke is an echo of Locke. 
 And the "Essays on Human knowledge," written, as their 
 author says, as a task imposed upon him by Pope,^ begin with a 
 proof of the existence of God stated thus: "Since there must 
 
 ^ Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. II, Ch. xi, 17. 
 
 * Ibid., Bk. IV, Ch. i, 1, 2. 
 ' Rogers, p. 352. 
 
 * Fowler, John Locke, pp. 149-150, 196. 
 
 * Bolingbroke, Works, Vol. Ill, p. 40. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 63 
 
 have been something from eternity, because there is something 
 now, the eternal Being must be an intelligent being, because there 
 is intelligence now; and such a Being must exist necessarily, 
 whether tilings have always been as they are, or whether they 
 have been made in time, because it is no more possible to conceive 
 an infinite than a finite progression of events without a cause. "^ 
 But this is identical with Locke's proof of the existence of God: 
 "We know that something exists, since we are sure of our own 
 existence; and we know, also, that something must have existed 
 from eternity, since we are instinctively certain that bare nothing 
 cannot produce any real being. Since we possess powers, percep- 
 tion, knowledge, all these things must be present in the eternal 
 reality from which we spring; and we can know, therefore, that a 
 supremely powerful, knowing, and intelligent being exists."^ 
 
 Again, stating his own great question as "What is the precise 
 notion we are to entertain of the human mind?" Bolingbroke 
 confessedly proceeds "in Mr. Locke's method and with his assist- 
 ance"^ to analyze the sources of ideas as sensation and reflection 
 and to classify ideas into simple and complex. His emphasis, in 
 regard to the kinds of knowledge, is much more than is Locke's 
 upon the sensational type, leading him to the conclusion, quite in 
 accord with his position as heir of Shaftesbury and the naturalistic 
 school, that, since the facts of nature are incontrovertibly the 
 material for sensational knowledge, "there is no study, after that 
 of morahty, which deserves the application of the human mind, 
 so much as that of natural philosophy, and of the arts and sciences 
 which serve to promote it. The will of God, in the constitution 
 of our moral system, is the object of one. His infinite wisdom and 
 power, manifested in the natural system of the universe, are the 
 object of the other."'* 
 
 Though Bolingbroke's inquiry into the "nature, extent, and 
 reality" of human knowledge led him far afield into the region of 
 the attack on revealed and traditional religion which was the real 
 object of his writings, its starting point was certainly afforded hira 
 by Locke's "Essay"; and his constant and respectful citation of 
 that philosopher offers marked contrast to his attitude toward 
 
 1 IMd., Vol. Ill, p. 67. 
 
 ^ Essay on the Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. 10. 
 
 ' Bolingbroke, Works, Vol. Ill, p. 72 sq. 
 
 'Ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 101. 
 
64 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 other thinkers — toward Hobbes/ whom he quotes and disagrees 
 with; toward Descartes,^ whose doctrine he contests; toward 
 Berkeley,^ whose idealism he dismisses summarily as "incon- 
 ceivable"; toward Shaftesbury, whose atmosphere he breathes, 
 but whom he does not quote. 
 
 In view of this reverence of BoUngbroke for Locke it is the 
 more remarkable to find in the "Essay on Man" no trace of 
 imitation by the poet-disciple of the parts of the master's philo- 
 sophy which were borrowed from the "Essay on the Human 
 Understanding." So far as BoUngbroke echoes Shaftesbury, 
 Pope accompanies him; discord is "harmony not understood"; 
 "partial evil" is "universal good"; "true Self-love and Social 
 are the same"; through nature man "looks up to nature's God." 
 So far as BoUngbroke stresses attentive study of the facts of 
 nature, Pope exemplifies his principles, for his whole argument is 
 an inductive one based on those facts. So far as BoUngbroke 
 glorifies reason, Pope rhapsodizes in unison. But he offers no 
 proof of God, as does BoUngbroke; the great "Universal Cause" 
 is taken for granted, and on that assumed existence the argument 
 of the "Essay" is based. Why trouble to prove what it is not 
 necessary to doubt? Nor does Pope undertake to analyze the 
 human mind. His attitude to reason is that of worship rather 
 than chaUenge. The source of all Ught and leading is not a 
 subject for analysis by the mind utterly dependent upon its 
 illumination. So far as Pope's treatment of this phase of his 
 subject is concerned, Locke might never have written. 
 
 Three possible explanations suggest themselves for this difference 
 between the prose and the versified philosophies. Pope may 
 have been less ready than BoUngbroke, because of a native con- 
 servatism, to keep abreast of the most recent and radical develop- 
 ments in thought; or, his interest being didactic rather than 
 philosophic, he may have wished to include in a poem vindicating 
 the ways of God no suggestion of a doubt either of God or of the 
 abiUty of human reason to vindicate Him; or these parts of the 
 subject may have been destined for treatment in later cantos of a 
 work that in its conception was far more extended than the 
 present "Essay." At aU events, the deduction is safe that, just 
 as Davies' philosophy represented the philosophy previous to his 
 
 1 IMd., Vol. Ill, p. 66; Vol. IV, p. 119. => 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<yrks, Epistle I, 11. 24-27. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 67 
 
 No longer is man tlie center of the universe, as in the pre-Coperni- 
 can view of Davies. Such an assumption is ridiculed as an 
 absurdity. 
 
 "Man, who here seems principal alone, 
 Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, 
 Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal."* 
 
 Pope's view of the achievement and the limitation of Newton 
 is apparent in his summarj^ of the work of the seventeenth century 
 scientist : 
 
 "Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; 
 Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, 
 Correct old Time, and regulate the eun,"^ 
 
 and in his query whether the "mortal man" who could "unfold 
 all Nature's law" and bind with his rules the rapid comet could 
 "describe or fix one movement" of the human mind.^ The same 
 unawareness of Locke's analysis of the understanding that appears 
 in Pope's attitude to the sacredness of reason is implicit here; 
 what the great scientist cannot do Pope knows, but what the great 
 philosopher has done he does not know. 
 
 A great deal of general scientific information is evident in 
 allusions to the atomic theory — 
 
 "The single atomsyeach to other tend; 
 Attract, attracted to, the next in place 
 Formed and impell'd its neighbor to embrace." 
 
 to the relativity and indestructibility of matter: 
 
 " All forms that perish other forms supply, 
 Like bubbles on the sea of Matter borne. 
 They rise, they break, and to that sea return."* 
 
 and to the dual motion of the planets — 
 
 "On their own axis as the planets run. 
 Yet make at once their circle round the sun."* 
 
 Such nowadays self-evident physical truths seem as unnecessary 
 of mention as the facts about the five senses upon which Davies 
 spent so many lines. But the mention of them shows that to 
 Pope they were not yet too obvious to be marveled at and talked 
 about as of paramount interest. The fact that at the same time 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle I, 11. 57-59. * Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 10-2a. 
 
 ' Jhid., Epistle II, 11. 20-22. » Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 313-314. 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 35-36. 
 
68 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 he belittles rather than glorifies the work of Sir Isaac Newton is 
 evidence, however, that to him scientific achievement was but 
 incidental, as compared with the philosophical exploration on 
 which he was embarking with his guide, philosopher and friend. 
 Whether for criticism, for satire, or for analysis. Pope's "proper 
 study," when he followed his own bent, was human nature. 
 
 The scholarly-incUned man of the eighteenth century, if he 
 depended solely on the universities for inspiration, could learn 
 little but the classics. The Oxford and Cambridge of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries followed rather than led along 
 the trails of thought.^ Science was a subject of the curriculum 
 only in so far as mathematics was studied in appUcation to astron- 
 omy, mechanics, and physics. Chemistry was a mere experiment 
 in a private laboratory; biology and geology were unknown; 
 zoology was merely descriptive, often by hearsay, and botany was 
 hardly pursued apart from its relation to gardening. Geography 
 belonged only to the schools of navigation, while history as a 
 subject for study in the modern sense was reserved for nineteenth 
 century discovery. Individual scholars, in the university and 
 out of it, did pioneer work in all these lines. But Pope was not 
 a university man nor a scholar, nor had he the spirit of a pioneer. 
 His very knowledge of the classics was an unacademic one; and 
 in the allusions to subjects geographical, historical, zoological, 
 and botanical that are frequent in his pages he must be representa- 
 tive of the intelUgent and independent thinker of the period, who 
 by desultory reading and by the club and coffee-house type of 
 conversation amassed a large and fairly accurate stock of general 
 information. 
 
 Pope's knowledge of history, of plant and animal Ufe, even of 
 the habits of the famous "poor Indian" is such as he might have 
 picked up in casual readings of PHny, of the Elizabethan herbalists, 
 of Ray2 and Willoughby,^ and in hearing the talk of travellers 
 returning from far off lands. It is hearsay knowledge that speaks 
 in reference to the "headlong Honess,"^ hunting by ear rather than 
 by nostril, to the "half reas'ning elephant,"^ to the "stork, 
 
 ' Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. IX, p. 425 sq. 
 
 » John Ray, History of Plants, 1686-88. 
 
 » Francis Willoughby, Ornithology, 1676; History of Fishes, 1686. 
 
 * Ward's edition of Pope's Works, Epistle I, 1. 213. 
 
 s /6id., Epistle I, 1.221. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 69 
 
 Columbiis-likc," who explores "heav'ns not his own,"' and to the 
 "little nautilus" who can teach man 
 
 "to sail, 
 Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale."* 
 
 Such other facts from the world of living, growing nature as Pope 
 mentions could have come under his eye in his own prized garden 
 at Twickenham, where the grape and the rose renewed 
 
 "The juice nectareous and the balmy dew";> 
 
 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. 
 » /?«:<i., Epistle III, 1. 112. 
 
 « Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 113-150. 
 
74 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 In the same temple, the resounding wood, 
 
 All vocal beings hyuin'd their equal God; 
 
 The shrine with gore unstain'd, with gold undrest, 
 
 Unbrib'd, unbloody, stood the blameless priest."^ 
 
 Like the wise man of long ago, Nature pointed man to the ant as a 
 pattern. Man learned his first lessons in self-preservation by- 
 observation of the animal creation, and thence too derived a 
 pattern of a social union or contract. 
 
 "Learn each small people's genius, policies. 
 The ants' republic, and the realm of bees: 
 How those in common all their wealth bestow, 
 And anarchy without confusion know; 
 And these forever, though a monarch reign, 
 Their sep'rate cells and properties maintain."^ 
 
 Natural laws have been the foundation of civil laws, which yet 
 have never achieved the perfection of their model. 
 
 " In vain thy reason finer webs shall draw, 
 Entangle Justice in her net of law. 
 And right, too rigid, harden into wrong."* 
 
 Commercial relations followed poUtical ones; worship of the 
 "Father of all" grew from devotion to the head of the clan or 
 tribe, who became to them the pattern of their self-created God, 
 as they, 
 
 "looking up from sire to sire, explor'd 
 One great first Father, and that first ador'd."* 
 
 The picture of this ideal state of Nature is both unhistoric and 
 unscientific; historical method was unknown, and Darwin and 
 Spencer were unborn. Yet the account of the development of the 
 state and the church from the primitive family is quite like Locke's 
 view, who presents the family as the original unit of society, 
 acquiring and adapting its own customs, and joining with other 
 famiUes and tribes in a choice of a form of government, and in an 
 agreement with one another to obey and maintain that form.^ 
 However, tr}-- as he will to be truly philosophical, untheological, if 
 possible heretical. Pope cannot conceal his native orthodoxy and 
 his tendency to be influenced by tradition. Behind the verbiage 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 151-158. * Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 215-228. 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 171-190. « Fowler, John Locke, pp. 185-186. 
 
 ' Ibid., Epistle III, U. 191-194* 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 75 
 
 of a rationalistic philosoplier is recognizable the lingering belief in 
 a Garden of Eden and a Fall of Man. 
 
 So far Pope has run true to form in adherence to Locke, Shaftes- 
 bury, and the other believers in goodwill as the motive of the 
 social contract. But there is more to be said about the matter. 
 A philosopher writing a comprehensive poetical discussion of so 
 large a question must omit nothing that he has heard on the sub- 
 ject. So there follows a metrical summary of the egoistic philo- 
 sophy'- of Hobbes — that all exist for one, and that the individual 
 works for the whole only because thus he best helps himself. 
 
 "The same self-love, in all, becomes the cause 
 Of what restrains him, government and laws. 
 
 His safety must his liberty restrain : 
 All join to guard what each desires to gain. 
 Forc'd into virtue thus, by self-defence, 
 Ev'n kings learn'd justice and benevolence: 
 Self-love forsook the path it first pursu'd. 
 And found the private in the pubHc good."^ 
 
 Was such an inconsistency the result of befogged thinking or was 
 it deliberate? An effort to run a safe middle course between the 
 two extremes of thought is indicated by the last lines of the 
 Epistle: 
 
 " Thus God and Nature Unk'd the gen'ral frame, 
 And bade Self-love and Social be the same."" 
 
 Both motives, says our poet-philosopher, exist; both work to the 
 same end; therefore neither shall be preferred above the other as 
 an ultimate cause of action. This compromise conclusion is 
 identical with that of Shaftesbury, who argues that both self-love 
 and social love are virtuous and necessary, if maintained in proper 
 balance and proportion.^ Butler, too, in his "Sermons," and in his 
 "Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue,"* attempts the same 
 reconciliation of the two contradictory theories of human motive. 
 But both these writers analyze their subject at length, in such a 
 way as to make their conclusion seem, whether acceptable or not, 
 at least well-reasoned and consistent. Pope's hurried appending 
 
 » Ward's edition of Pope's Works, Epistle III, U. 271-282. 
 » Ward, Pope's Works, Epistle III, 11. 317-318. 
 
 * Characteristics, Book II, Part i, Sec. 3. 
 
 ♦ Seth. p. 200. 
 
76 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 of it after a full presentation of both the altruistic and the egoistic 
 doctrines makes it seem either his own ineffective attempt to 
 make an agreement between the conflicting systems which he 
 has outlined; or, what is more likely, an effort to summarize his 
 reading of Shaftesbury and Butler and thus to include in his 
 "Essay" all that any English philosopher had contributed to the 
 discussion. 
 
 Such a passage is excellent proof that Pope was not an inde- 
 pendent thinker. It takes straight thinking to copy inteUigently 
 another man's work, and phenomenally straight thinking to 
 patch together into a harmonious whole parts copied from several 
 men's work. The betrayal of one's own failure as a thinker 
 appears in any confusion with one another of the parts being 
 copied, or any failure of the parts to coalesce into a unity. An 
 echo is clear when it answers only a single voice; let voices multi- 
 ply, and the echo vanishes in complexity of sound. In philosophy 
 Pope's poem is an echo, sometimes clear, sometimes clouded. 
 
 Moreover, the independent thinker of the times, in the very 
 years when BoHngbroke and Pope were working out their second- 
 hand system, was thinking his way through to a very different 
 conclusion from the fallaciously optimistic one of the "Essay." 
 For Hume, a straight road led from Locke's challenge of the 
 human understanding to the sceptic's refusal to accept that 
 challenge. Such was the path of original reflection. In Pope's 
 willingness to accept as final the conclusions of philosophers before 
 him, discovering no implications or suggestions in those conclu- 
 sions, appears another proof that he was born to follow, not to 
 lead. The pioneer is never satisfied. 
 
 As Davies was typical of style in art at the end of a period of 
 developing artistic consciousness and experiment with art forms, 
 so Pope, too, was typical of the literature of his period. The 
 century of lyric and dramatic outpouring was over; no longer was 
 beauty the idol of writers and readers, but common sense was the 
 object of worship. Meaning and content, not form of expression, 
 were important in literature as in life. Writers wrote not to 
 amuse and please but to teach and criticize. Cleverness had 
 taken the place of grace; didacticism the place of emotion. An 
 art form convenient for the conveyance of thought had been 
 devised, and, content with the heroic couplet, the poet said what- 
 ever he had to say in that medium, without effort for variety or 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 77 
 
 innovation. It was the substance that mattered; why expend 
 energy in making new verse forms when so good a one was ready 
 at hand? Only let the couplets be as witty and polished as the 
 conversation of the clever men and women who comprised the 
 reading public. 
 
 In its presentation of philosophical learning, then, Pope's 
 "Essay" only follows, often afar off and uncertainly, the principles 
 evolved by the thinkers of his day. As an index of literary develop- 
 ment it shows the current indifference to art for art's sake, placidly 
 employing the vehicle of all poets of the day. And in relation to 
 other than philosophical learning, it is but a reflex of the writer's 
 time, showing all the Hmitations and patchinesses of the education 
 of contemporary leaders of thought. Pope is, indeed, less a 
 representative of the best learning of his time than is Davies; he 
 was less scholarly, less independent in following a line of thought 
 of his own, less awake to all phases of developing knowledge. 
 Above all, Pope was working under patronage and direction, as 
 Davies was not. Both poets, however, since neither is more than 
 abreast of his time, afford corroboration of the idea that the 
 philosopher in verse is an exponent of current learning rather 
 than a pioneer into new realms. 
 
 Before applying the same test to Tennyson, a survey of the 
 educational progress of the intervening centurj'^ must show how 
 full of change was this period, for thought and knowledge as well 
 as for politics and industry. The conventionality and formality 
 of the intellectual life of the cultured classes in the middle decades 
 of the eighteenth century, together with the rise to influence in 
 politics and society of the uncultured middle class, produced an 
 intellectual indifference and stagnation as clearlj^ apparent in the 
 devotion of literary men to the hack work that suppHed wealthy 
 tradesmen and manufacturers with the useful information that 
 they mistook for education,^ as it was in the classical deadness of 
 the life of the universities. RationaUsm had crushed the life out 
 of both theological and metaphysical thinking quite as effectually, 
 in spite of its proud casting off of traditional chains, as scholasti- 
 cism had done in the Middle Ages. The rebirth of thought and 
 knowledge came to England in the fifteenth century through the 
 study of classic hterature and through artistic effort. The channels 
 
 ' Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society, p. 147, aq. 
 
78 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 through which new hfe flowed into the reason-dulled mind of 
 England in the late eighteenth century were four: the philo- 
 sophical channel of German idealism; the scientific channel of 
 geological and biological investigation; the economic channel 
 leading from Hume's materiahstic scepticism, the impasse with 
 which metaphysics found itself confronted, into utilitarianism 
 and consequent interest in the problems of political economy and 
 social relationships, viewed not theoretically but in the light of 
 the newly kindled torch of history; and the literary channel, 
 whereby poetry became not didactic but aesthetic, not moral but 
 emotional, not pedantic but simple. 
 
 The name of Hume is noteworthy in this story of intellectual 
 change because with three of these tendencies his work was 
 connected. By a thorough-going empiricism he reached the 
 conclusion that any absolute knowledge, outside the range of 
 sense impressions, was impossible.^ The extreme scepticism in 
 which his philosophy terminated, and which was the end of the 
 chapter of English metaphysical speculation for almost a hundred 
 years, afforded a point of departure for Kant, in the effort to 
 refute it.- So, although modern idealism was not in its tran- 
 scendental form native to England, it was an English thinker who 
 set its processes in motion. Again, in his ethical contention that 
 the test of conduct is its effect in happiness,^ Hume was the 
 forerunner of the English utilitarians; and in his interest in 
 human nature, not analytically nor abstractly, but as seen in the 
 everyday activities of life,^ and in his treatment of morality not as 
 ethical but as social in its motives, he was the ancestor of the 
 early social scientists. Third, he was the first of English philos- 
 ophers to observe that man as an individual or in his social 
 relationships can be understood only in the light of his past; and 
 with a sense of the value of history to turn from the discouraging 
 sceptical philosophy which he had worked out and win fame for 
 himself as one of the three first modern English historians.^ 
 
 It is to repeat a platitude to say that the German idealists 
 
 1 Seth, English Philosophers, pp. 152-153. 
 
 ' Royce, Spirit of Modem Philosophy, pp. 126-127. 
 
 » Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, pp. 108-109. 
 
 Hume, Essays, Vol. II, p. 176. 
 
 * Patten, Development of English Thought, p. 214. 
 
 * Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society, p. 184. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 79 
 
 shaped the thought of England in the early nineteenth century; 
 and it is wellnigh an impertinence to sum up the essential features 
 of so well known a philosophy, as nevertheless must be done for 
 purposes of convenient comparison with the third of our poet- 
 philosophers. Four distinct tendencies are apparent in the 
 thought of the group of German thinkers who, between 1750 and 
 1850, transformed philosophy from a cold and rational system to 
 the living, pulsing, inspiring interpretation of hfe that the earlier 
 German Spinoza had conceived and that the later German Nietz- 
 sche, blinded by a less spiritual but more dazzling vision, aban- 
 doned. The first and best known of these is the movement 
 identified with the name of Emanuel Kant^ and called loosely and 
 variously transcendentahsm and subjective idealism. 
 
 For Kant there was no objective world; his world, nay, his 
 universe was self-created, the projection of his own individuality. 
 "All knowledge begins with experience,"^ and within the realms 
 of experience human reason is sufficient for knowledge. But 
 knowledge is not limited to experience, as Hume had said; and 
 for the transcendent realities, such as God, the soul, freedom, 
 immortahty, which lie outside the range of sense impressions, 
 the reason cannot avail as a solvent. Yet though God is unprov- 
 able. He is not unknowable. In order to a comprehension of the 
 world and one's self, a venture of faith, Uke a leap in the dark, 
 must postulate an ultimate unconditioned reality,^ hypothetically 
 the basis of all finite things — the reality which men call God. 
 Without such a postulate a world order is inconceivable; for 
 Kant's world order is based on the moral law; and, without a 
 source from which to emanate, a moral law is unthinkable. "Will 
 to act as if God were present and existent" is the command by 
 obedience to which man creates a moral order in the world and in 
 his own soul a belief in God. 
 
 Reduced to its lowest terms, the philosophy apparently so 
 abstruse and so involved becomes merely a kind of glorified 
 common sense. Since the world is self-created, why not create, 
 by our will to believe, those great realities which make possible 
 a sane and well-ordered life in our self-world? Beheve that God 
 
 » 1724-1804. Critique of Pure Reason, published 1781. 
 
 2 Immanuel KanCs Werke, Vol. Ill, p. 17, Kellermann edition. 
 
 ' Rogers, History o/ Philosophy, p. 440. 
 
80 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 exists, and for you He will exist. Vitalize your belief and His 
 existence by acting as if the belief were established truth. And 
 finally, since happiness and virtue cannot be attained in this life, 
 and such foreseen failure makes all effort futile, postulate an eternal 
 life^ in which all things shall be ours. "Truth comes to us," says 
 Kant, "because we make it."* 
 
 So there blows through the fogs and mists of the analytical 
 ponderings of the eighteenth century rationalists a breath of vital 
 air from the hills from whence strength cometh — an air the motive 
 current of which is the sense of the heroic power and value of 
 man's will. The reason, which has been deified as the most 
 godlike element in man, is dethroned, is itself laid bare to criticism. 
 In its place rules the human will, creating by its determined effort 
 of faith those transcendent realities by belief in which alone can 
 life be made anything but futile. 
 
 Fichte^ carried the idealism of Kant a step farther. In his 
 philosophy, all knowledge was dependent on action. The moral 
 will is the only true reality, and an exemplification of morality is 
 impossible apart from action. We know because we are compelled 
 by moral necessity to act, and thus the active self creates the 
 universe. The world is non-existent except as an object and a 
 sphere of duties* — "the stuff for our duty, made manifest to our 
 senses."^ In asserting itself in action the self exists, and at the 
 same time embodies the one true and infinite Reason, the will of 
 God, which can only work itself out, manifest itself, and so find 
 existence, through the wills of men.® Thus God, too, creates 
 Himself, and is at the same time man-created and subjective. 
 As Professor Royce puts it, "God is the pulse of the moral order, 
 the hfe of lives, the eternal spiritual self-creator, the live and 
 organic unity of all beings."'' 
 
 For the reader who is not a trained metaphysician, the essentials 
 of this idealistic philosophy reduce themselves, for all practical 
 purposes, to three colossal but simple tenets: The world of sense 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 448. 
 
 * Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 117. 
 » 1762-1814; first published work, 1792. 
 
 * Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 453-454. 
 ' Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 152. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 153. Cf . John XV. 
 » Ibid., p. 160. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 81 
 
 impressions is but a show world, a shadow of the inner life which 
 by its thinking creates the shadow picture; the real universe is 
 spiritual, with the moral law as its center; and man arri\es at 
 knowledge of these spiritual reaUties by a moral activity which 
 postulates the existence of a God from whom the moral impetus 
 emanates. 
 
 From the first of these tenets developed what, to quote Professor 
 Royce once more, has been called the "kaleidoscopic philosophy"^ 
 of the romantic period, the second tendency in the German thought 
 of the end of the eighteenth century. Out of our own personality 
 we create the world? Very well! Let us create it after the pattern 
 of our dream. Not by the sternness of a categorical imperative 
 shall we arrive at a belief in God, but by a sympathetic emotion 
 which feels rather than thinks a universe into being. God is the 
 great artist, the great dreamer, the great sympathizer. The man 
 whose dream is most godlike, whose emotion most shares the divine 
 sympathy, he it is who creates the best world.^ In SchlegeP the 
 philosophy is one of fickleness; "the truth best known to me," 
 he writes, "is that erelong my present truth will change."* To 
 know truth is to experience all moods, all emotions. In SchelUng* 
 it is a nature philosophy, partaking of a mystical pantheism not 
 unhke Spinoza's. God is the animating spirit of nature, the 
 motion and the spirit 
 
 "that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Throughout the world of nature the great spirit struggles onward 
 to his own highest manifestation, which is man.* 
 
 This is romanticism, not science. Yet it is not hard to trace 
 the kinship of the idea implicit here, that man is the highest 
 phase of a progressive development extending through all nature, 
 with the scientifically supported evolutionary philosophy that 
 appears as the third tendency in modern German thought, working 
 itself out first in relation to religion and second in relation to 
 history. Lessing, much earlier than this, had founded modern 
 religious philosophy in his discovery of the evolutional character 
 
 I Ibid., p. 173. * Royce, p. 176. 
 
 « Ibid., pp. 173-174. ' 1775-1854. 
 
 ' 1772-1829. • Royce, p. 185. 
 
82 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 of religion.* Throughout the ages God has been teaching man. 
 Any form of religion is but one stage in this process of divine 
 education. Religion is a progressive revelation of eternal truth; 
 in its progressiveness lies its vitality, and, indeed, its charm for 
 the man who wrote that, offered his choice between truth and a 
 search for truth, he would choose the search. 
 
 Lessing said religion must be studied historically. Schelling 
 extended the "growth" idea to the world of nature. HegeP 
 went further in his philosophical expression of the new historical 
 sense. Not only men and things but God Himself are illuminated 
 by the study of the gradual development of history.' Hegel did 
 not call this growth by the name evolution; but the evolutionary 
 idea implicit in his philosophy of history was appropriated from 
 the realm of science, where Laplace and Lamarck had lately 
 established it, and extended to the realm of spirit, so that at the 
 great idealist's hands it became "a constituent element in German 
 habits of thought."^ The subject of evolutionary theory in 
 England belongs more properly to the discussion of the progress 
 of science, for in spite of Spencer's claims to have anticipated 
 Darwin, it was as science and not as philosophy that the doctrine 
 came to England. It is mentioned here only as a necessary 
 background for the understanding of Hegel's contribution to 
 modern philosophy. According to his theory of development, 
 then, personality is a chain of selves, even as hfe is a chain of 
 experience, whether individual or social.^ No conclusions are to 
 be drawn by abstract reason, for reason is concrete, existing only 
 in the phenomena of experience, and making conclusions only on 
 the basis of experience. Nor is there any isolated phenomenon, 
 nor any individual hfe living out of relation to other hves. Man 
 exists only in relation to other men; "no man liveth to himself."^ 
 As history is the story of the struggle between the uncontrolled 
 natural will and the gradually victorious spiritual principle, so 
 the story of the individual life is a record of struggle, in which 
 alone lies personal existence. Virtue consists not in accomplish- 
 
 * Lindsay, Studies in European Philosophy, Chapter XIV. 
 2 1770-1831. 
 
 ' Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 470-479, 457-458. 
 
 * Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism, p. 50, sq. 
 ^ Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 206. 
 
 « Ibid., p. 208. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 83 
 
 ment but in the effort to be virtuous. It is through struggle that 
 the self is ennobled. "Conflict and active mastery continually 
 enlarge our finite selves."^ And the infinite self, called God, is 
 that whose existence is complete because it has made full conquest 
 of the contradictions of life.^ 
 
 So positive a philosophy as Hegel's was bound to arouse protest.^ 
 One was the protest of the intuitive mind, refusing to find the 
 solution for all mysteries in the experience of the world of sense. 
 One was the protest of the agnostic, asserting the insufficiency of 
 empirical knowledge to prove infinite realities, about the existence 
 of which, therefore, doubt must cling. The third was the protest 
 of the pessimist, whose revolt against Hegel marks the last phase 
 of German philosophy prior to 1850. Schopenhauer,* embittered, 
 gloomy, despairing, nevertheless bases his hopeless reading of life 
 on the wholesome and virile system of Kant.* His world, like 
 Kant's, is but a projection of the self; it lives only as an illusion. 
 The great reality is not, as for Hegel, to be found in experience. 
 It is a thing-in-itself, existing back of the shadow world which is 
 all man can know, except as in a thorough understanding of his 
 own nature he grasps reality. The essential quality in his own 
 nature he will find to be the will, the expression of which in action 
 is man's primary impulse. 
 
 So far Schopenhauer follows Kant. But in this will to believe 
 and to do Kant found joy and power. Schopenhauer sees the 
 will, individual or universal, to be a thing capricious, restless, 
 unsatisfied. The will to do springs from desire, and desire implies 
 lack or suffering. Unless we will we do not exist; and if we will 
 we suffer. The vision of joy in defeat, frustration, sacrifice, was 
 not for Schopenhauer. With such a conception of life, of what 
 good is existence? "The world," says Royce, "is an evil dream," 
 the only way to end which is to deny the will that dreams, and so, 
 in ceasing to exist by ceasing to will, to find peace.* It is this 
 tragic interpretation of life, spelling existence in letters of desire, 
 seeing no other motive for the exercise of the will than that of the 
 
 J Ibid., p. 214. 
 2 Ibid., p. 216. 
 ' Rogers, History of Philosophy, p. 483. 
 
 * 1788-1860. The World as Will and Idea, published 1819. 
 ' Rogers, p. 487. 
 
 ♦ Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 258. 
 
84 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 demand for something unattainable, that brings us to the mid- 
 century and the date of the completion of "In Memoriam." 
 
 Philosophy since Locke, even since Hume, has come a long 
 way. No longer does it measure and weigh and analyze and 
 syllogize. No longer is speculation a matter of nicely calculated 
 propositions with their proofs, or of mathematical problems with 
 their solutions. Cold logic underUes these later writings, to be 
 sure ; exposed to rational test, they would come through unscathed. 
 But the fabric woven upon the warp of barren metaphysics is 
 colorful, warm, pulsing with Ufe. There is joy in it, or pain; 
 aspiration, or despair; an enthusiastic groping after the stars, or 
 a descent into hell. The new philosopher is both man and artist, 
 in his intensity of feeling, in his vivid portrayal upon the canvas 
 of infinity of his own shadow-world. He is not hampered by 
 the Umitations of reason; his vision is of the unseen, the tran- 
 scendent, the eternal, surpassing reason. Whether the vision 
 appears to him as aflSrmation or as negation, the No or the Yes is 
 everlasting. 
 
 The poetic philosophy of Tennyson, put beside that of Pope, 
 shows the same difference in content and spirit as the contrast 
 between Shaftesbury, let us say, and Fichte, or between Locke and 
 Kant, or even between Hume and Schopenhauer. In Davies the 
 practical man of affairs speaks more loudly than the philosopher; 
 in Pope the would-be philosopher out-voices the man, though not 
 the artist; in Tennyson the poet is first man, then artist, and last 
 of all philosopher. Moreover, while Davies and Pope consciously 
 set to work to summarize existing systems of philosophy, "In 
 Memoriam" shows such existing systems only implicitly. Tenny- 
 son was not interested in recasting into verse the thoughts of 
 other men, nor was he writing a didactic essay. He was recording 
 in an inspirational poem his own emotions, his own reflections 
 springing from experience and emotion. If his self-expression 
 used the idiom of current philosophy, it was hardly with intention. 
 That philosophy was famiUar enough to him^ to have become a 
 natural part of his thought processes. 
 
 1 The Memoir tells us, Vol. I, pp. 43-44, that Tennyson was a member of 
 the "Apostles' Club" at Cambridge, who "read their Hobbes, Locke, Berke- 
 ley, Butler, Hume, Bentham, Descartes, and Kant," and discussed meta- 
 physical questions. This interest continued to a date later than 1850, when, 
 we are told, "he took to reading different systems of philosophy," and had in 
 his library "Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Schlegel, Fichte, Hegel." Vol. I, p. 308. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 85 
 
 It is a matter of but a moment to find in "In Memoriam" 
 traces of the philosophy in which reality transcends the powers of 
 reason. Such a transcendentalism is the keynote of the whole 
 poem, from its initiation with 
 
 " Believing where we cannot prove,"* 
 
 to its conclusion with the resolve to "trust, 
 
 "With faith that comes of self-control. 
 The truths that never can be proved."* 
 
 With the idealists Tennyson feels that "knowledge is of things we 
 see,"^ and that the unseen is beyond knowledge, though not 
 beyond perception. Knowledge 
 
 "is earthly of the mind, 
 But Wisdom heavenly of the soul."^ 
 
 For Tennyson as for the German philosophers, the road^to this 
 wisdom is the road of the moral will expressed in action. "Our 
 wills are ours, to make them thine "^ identifies existence with the 
 effort to attain to harmony with the infinite will which Hegel 
 called God. Man's best claim to immortality is that he is one 
 
 "Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, 
 Who battled for the True, the Just."« 
 
 The beauty of Hallam's life is once summarized as consisting in the 
 determined virtue of action by which he arrived at faith in_^the 
 unseen : 
 
 "Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
 At last he beat his music out."^ 
 
 Very existence lies in activity and exertion of the will to do : 
 
 "How much of act at human hands 
 The sense of human will demands 
 By which we dare to live or die."* 
 
 And if there were no other hint of Tennyson's belief in the philos- 
 
 * In Memoriam, Prelude, 1. 4. ' Ibid., Prelude, 1. 16. 
 « Ibid., Canto CXXXI. * IMd., Canto LVI. 
 
 ' Ibid., Prelude, 1. 22. ' lUd., Canto XCVI. 
 
 * Ibid., Canto CXIV. « Ibid., Canto LXXXV. 
 
86 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 ophy of the categorical imperative, it is unmistakably stated in 
 the thrilling last canto : 
 
 " O living will that shalt endure 
 
 When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
 Rise in the spiritual rock. 
 Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure."^ 
 
 In reading Pope, who presented what claimed to be a complete 
 and ordered philosophical system, one looked with justice for 
 consistency, and failed to find it, because Pope was copying the 
 work of other men. To seek for consistency in ''In Memoriam" 
 would be equally disappointing, but not equally just. All that is 
 said here is Tennyson's own; his reading has been assimilated to 
 his own thought, and, for human influence, it is through memory 
 and love alone that his "guide, philosopher and friend" inspires 
 him. But that of his own which he expresses is not a metaphysical 
 system; it is a succession of moods. Moods are not consistent; 
 unstable, variant, shifting, they show now sunlight, now shadow; 
 they reflect in one hour determination, in the next, vacillation. 
 So Tennyson on one page asserts firmly his Kantian faith in the 
 "living will" as the one enduring reahty, and on another page 
 veers to the romantic position, declaring with equal eloquence 
 that reality is to be found through feeUng. Such a passage is the 
 deeply emotional one- where, falling with his weight of cares 
 
 " Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
 That slope thro' darkness up to God," 
 
 he cries out, in a blind faith based on feeling, 
 
 " I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 To what I feel is Lord of all. 
 And faintly trust the larger hope." 
 
 Andfinfat least one famous canto' he has shown that the final 
 answer of intuitive faith to scepticism must be the answer of the 
 mystic, in terms of emotion : 
 
 " If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
 I heard a voice, 'believe no more,' 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 That tumbled in the Godless deep, 
 
 » Ilnd., Canto CXXXI. » /Wd., Canto CXXIV. 
 
 • Ibid., Canto LV. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 87 
 
 " A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 Stood up and answer'd, *I have felt.'" 
 
 In one respect Tennyson was caught at more than momentary 
 moods in the current of the romantic philosophy, especially in the 
 form characteristic of its leader Friedrich Schelling. Like the 
 poets of the Revolutionary period, he is filled with the conscious- 
 ness of the unity, the kinship, between man and nature, between 
 nature and God, between man and God, a unity so perfect that the 
 whole universe becomes, not the machine of the eighteenth century 
 physicist, but a great vital organism. Not in specific passages 
 does the feeling of Tennyson for nature appear so much as in the 
 spirit of the whole poem. It is the work of a man sympathetic 
 with the world out of doors, who finds a return of sympathy from 
 that world. Gazing at the gloom of the yew, symbol of the gloom 
 in his own soul, he seems to "grow incorporate" into the sullen 
 tree.^ The voice of Nature sounds but as a "hollow echo" of the 
 voice of Sorrow .2 A hushed autumn day, with chestnuts "patter- 
 ing to the ground" and "leaves that redden to the fall" brings 
 to him a transient calm, the calm of despair;* and when "the 
 winds begin to rise" and "the last red leaf is whirl'd away," the 
 tumult of the storm makes harmony with the "wild unrest" of 
 his soul.* It is "when sundown skirts the moor" that the spectres 
 of doubt arise.* The anniversary of Hallam's death rises dim, 
 howling, 
 
 "issuing out of night. 
 With blasts that blow the poplar white. 
 And lash with storm the streaming pane."* 
 
 When spring delays, he longs for its coming: 
 
 " Can trouble live with April days. 
 Or sadness in the summer moons? "^ 
 
 As the poem records the gradual allaying of grief, the passages 
 descriptive of nature grow less shadowed, less stormy. Beyond 
 the "gorgeous gloom of evening," from 
 
 "yonder orient star 
 A hundred spirits whisper 'peace.'"* 
 
 » Ihid., Canto II. • Itrid., Canto XLI. 
 
 » Ihid., Canto III. • Itrid., Canto LXXII. 
 
 » Ibid., Canto XI. ' Ibid., Canto LXXXIII. 
 
 * Ibid., Canto XV. » Ibid., Canto LXXXVI. 
 
88 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 The song of a wild bird, whose "passion clasps a secret joy" even 
 "in the midmost heart of grief," echoes the music of his own 
 harp, the strings of which pass beyond his control. When he 
 "would prelude woe, 
 
 " The glory of the sum of things 
 Will flash along the chord,"^ 
 
 and the vision of a wondrous universe, manifest in 
 
 " the songs, the stirring air, 
 The life re-orient out of dust" 
 
 in "sweet April" changes despair to regret and regret to hope. 
 The beauties of a fresh, green English spring 
 
 "Cry thro' the sense to hearten trust 
 In that which made the world so fair."^ 
 
 Finally, setting bond and seal upon the kinship between the poet 
 and the stuff of his poesy, comes the conviction that the friend so 
 mourned has become a part of the great world of nature, that his 
 life is absorbed into the life of the whole. 
 
 "Thy voice is on the rolling air; 
 
 I hear thee where the waters run ; 
 Thou standest in the rising sun, 
 And in the setting thou art fair. 
 
 "My love involves the love before; 
 My love is vaster passion now ; 
 Though mixed with God and Nature thou, 
 I seem to love thee more and more."^ 
 
 There are fewer traces of the Hegelian type of idealism in>"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. 
 
 <John Dalton, 1766-1844. Originated molecular theory. Founder of 
 modern organic chemistry. Published, 1810, A New System of Chemical 
 Philosophy. 
 
 ^ James Prescott Joule, 1818-1889. Discovered relation between heat and 
 energy, and law of conservation of energy. 
 
 8 James Hutton, Scotch geologist, 1726-97. Founder of dynamic geology. 
 
 'William Smith, 1769-1839. Published, 1815, First Geological Map of 
 England. 
 
 » Sir Charles Lyell, 1797-1875. Published, 1833, Principles of Geology. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 97 
 
 reflections ensuing upon the epoch-making voyage of the Beagle 
 were not formulated and published until nine years after "In 
 Memoriam" was finished. But the idea that present species 
 were descendants of preexisting simpler forms was in the air. 
 Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and St. Hilaire had almost simultaneous- 
 ly, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, announced such a 
 conclusion as their belief.^ In the first thirty years of the nine- 
 teenth century the French naturalist Lamarck was,^ as Darwin 
 himself said, "arousing attention to the probability of the change 
 in the organic, as well as in the inorganic, world being the result 
 of law, and not of miraculous interposition." Darwin's work 
 was only a cUmax and a convincing conclusion to much previous 
 speculation on a theme that before 1850 had become the subject 
 of discussion not only by scientists but by theologians, whose 
 tranquil confidence in the accepted "scheme of things entire" 
 was badly upset by so revolutionary a doctrine. In "In Memo- 
 riam" is reflected the uncertainty of the mind of the general 
 public, neither scientific nor theological — a mind inevitably 
 impelled in the direction of a new knowledge, and yet looking 
 back with longing and regret toward the peace of past certainties. 
 !S(Such a cUnging to past beliefs must underlie the passage where 
 Tennyson declares his belief in ultimate good for all, in spite of 
 the ruthless sacrifice of the individual on the road to "the greatest 
 good of the greatest number" — the cruel road that was later to 
 be called natural selection. "Somehow," the poet protests, 
 "somehow," in spite of the apparently ruthless working of natural 
 law, good 
 
 "Will be the final goal of Ul, 
 
 To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
 Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; 
 
 "That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
 That not one Ufe shall be destroy'd, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete; 
 
 1 Schurman, Ethical Impart of Darimnis7n, p. 52, sq. 
 
 Erasmus Darwin published, 1794, Zodnomia. Goethe published, 1790, 
 Metamorphoses of Plants. St. Hilaire, French naturalist, 1779-1853, devel- 
 oped, 1795, sq., theory of species as modifications of type. 
 
 ^ Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, 1744-1829. Philos- 
 ophie zoOloffique, 1809; Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertibres, 1815-22. 
 
98 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 "That not a worm is cloven in vain; 
 That not a moth with vain desire 
 Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, 
 Or but subserves another's gain."^ 
 
 The revelations of science seem an evil dream, dispelling the 
 vision of hope for a future Hfe. To Tennyson as to his contempo- 
 raries in the church, God and Nature appeared at strife, 
 
 " So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life."^ 
 
 It was the type that evolved through natural selection; it was 
 the law of the survival of the fittest that brought one seed out of 
 fifty to fruition. Longing to think, as in his childhood, that not 
 a sparrow fell unnoticed to the ground, he was forced against his 
 own longings to recognize the implacable working of natural law 
 in the organic as in the inorganic world. Belief in a God of love 
 must be maintained against the shriekings of a "Nature red in 
 tooth and claw with ravine."^ Nor had the findings of geology 
 escaped him; the voice of Nature cried "from scarped cliff and 
 quarried stone, "^ where the record of the rocks showed the dis- 
 appearance of a thousand tj'pes. The earth he knew to be not 
 only a "round of green," but the "orb of flame "^ which Hutton 
 had declared it. The nebular theory found eloquent, though 
 perhaps not convinced, expression in lines of vivid poetry : 
 
 "They say, 
 The solid earth whereon we tread 
 
 "In tracts of fluent heat began, 
 
 And grew to seeming-random forms, 
 The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
 Till at the last arose the man ; 
 
 "Who throve and branch'd from chme to clime, 
 The herald of a higher race."* 
 
 There is conversance with the evolutionary theories of Lamarck 
 in such lines as those, supplemented by the optimistic moral which 
 is the cheerful side of a belief in evolution, in the admonition to 
 
 "Move upward, working out the beast, 
 And let the ape and tiger die." 
 
 » In Memoriam, Canto LIV. * Ibid., Canto XXXIV. 
 
 » Ibid., Canto LV. « Ibid., Canto CXVIII. 
 
 * In Memoriam, Canto LVI. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 99 
 
 In the last part of the poem science reached its triumph over 
 tradition, as, by a mental process that might serve as index for 
 what every progressive mind in that period of readjustment had 
 to pass through, Tennyson arrived at a hopeful conception of the 
 doctrine of evolution. His own generation, according to the new 
 view of life, he saw to be merely a link between the lower manhood 
 of the past and the higher manhood of the future — 
 
 "the crowning race 
 
 "Of those that, eye to eye, shall look 
 
 On knowledge ; under whose command 
 Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand 
 Is Nature like an open book; 
 
 "No longer half -akin to brute, 
 
 For all we thought and loved and did. 
 And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed 
 Of what in them is flower and fruit/'^ 
 
 At first thought it may seem remarkable that Tennyson showed 
 such familiarity with the scientific side of the new learning of the 
 nineteenth century and not with its equally characteristic historical 
 and economic phases. But his ear found no music in the narratives 
 of wars and treaties, of the risings and downfalls of nations that 
 made up the tale of the centuries. There was neither thrill nor 
 color nor emotion in the pages of statistics and facts that made up 
 the early type of political economy. And poetry, for Tennyson, 
 must have in it music, color, emotion. A holy Roman empire 
 stirred him to no such flights of imagination as did the story of 
 earth's evolution : 
 
 "There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 
 O earth, what changes hast thou seen! 
 There where the long street roars hath been 
 The stillness of the central sea."' 
 
 A Malthusian theory of population or an Iron Law of Wages 
 touched no responsive chord in the soul of one who had seen a 
 vision of Science, reaching forth her arms 
 
 "To feel from world to world."' 
 
 It was in science that he recognized material for the play of his 
 
 * In Memoriam, Epilogue. ' Ibid., Canto XXI. 
 
 ' Ibid., Canto CXXIII. 
 
100 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 imagination, just as in the idealistic philosophy rather than the 
 utilitarian he found a system of thought with which his poetically 
 imaginative temperament could sympathize. 
 
 Is it safe to generalize from three instances? If such an assump- 
 tion may be ventured, the conclusion seems unavoidable that the 
 poet, however cultured, however famiUar with the learning of hifl 
 day, has no power to advance in thought independently of the 
 scholars and thinkers of his time. He is not the pioneer, opening 
 up the desert path; rather he comes after, by the beauty of his 
 poetic gift making the desert path to blossom as the rose. One 
 by-product of his work, because he himself is aware of the achieve- 
 ments of the study and the laboratory, is the suggestion of their 
 content to the lovers of literary art who follow his guidance. 
 Without the interweaving in the fabric of his poem of the most 
 mature thought and knowledge of his time, his work would be 
 flimsy, futile, and negligible. Yet his imagination and his gift 
 of music are his own; and though his thought is a reflection of the 
 thought of others, his interpretation of the thought gives it wings 
 to fly into the whole earth. 
 
With a little alteration, a familiar axiom can be made to read, 
 Things that reflect the same thing must be similar to each other. 
 If a poet reflects his period (as, so far in the discussion, these three 
 poet-philosophers seem to do) in its historical, social, educational 
 and philosophical conditions and qualities, then in spirit and style 
 he will not be unlike the other poets representative of that period. 
 Consequently, a proof that a writer is a mirror of his time requires 
 that he be compared with his contemporaries. The group of 
 poets under discussion have so far commanded attention as thinkers 
 rather than as artists. As thinkers they have been shown to be 
 followers, not leaders. But in a comparison of a poet-philosopher 
 with his literary contemporaries, he can no longer be viewed 
 exclusively as a philosopher. Here is the field where the style, 
 not the thought, is the man. It is his art, not his thought, that 
 demands primary attention in comparing him with other artists. 
 And though as philosopher he may be an echo, as artist he may 
 utter a music all his own. It is therefore necessary not only to 
 show the similarities of Davies, Pope, and Tennyson to other 
 poets, and thus to make evident that all alike express their age; 
 but also to point out the unlikenesses that grow out of the indi- 
 viduality of each as artist. 
 
 The position of the three poets under survey is alike in that 
 each was the voice of the end of a movement or phase of English 
 life. The epoch which was closing in the years when the work of 
 Davies began had two radically opposite sides, so far as England 
 was concerned. It was politically an age of an unexampled 
 national enthusiasm, marked by a forward-looking progressiveness 
 that counted no adventure too rash, no enterprise too daring, for 
 England and the queen. At the same time it was an age of not 
 yet outworn respect for the authority of the past — for classic 
 models and ideals in literature, for ancient and mediaeval philos- 
 ophies, and for the teachings of revealed and traditional religion. 
 Whether recognized or not, the iron hand of the church still 
 dominated the writer who, though in reality free to pursue his art 
 under no mandate but that of his own conscience, yet felt that 
 art for art's sake was pagan, and that his work must be merely 
 the means to an ethical or didactic end. It remained for the 
 nineteenth century to take pride in its aesthetic sense. The 
 
 101 
 
102 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 lighter songs and lyrics in the delicate grace and beauty of which 
 lies the charm of Elizabethan poetrj-- were for the most part free 
 of moral intention. But let a poet once conceive an extended and 
 serious poem, and at once his intent became not to entertain but 
 to edify, not to please but to preach. A sonnet sequence might 
 waste its sweetness on so light a thing as love; but the poem 
 which was really to figure as a magnum opus must have a purpose 
 worthy of the weight of learning that was to be exempUfied in it. 
 
 So the crowning glory of non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry 
 was a colorful, vivid, fantastic epic of art, rich in atmosphere, 
 varied in conception, yet dependent for its vitality on the poet's 
 intention to embody in his hero all the Platonic virtues. The 
 "Faery Queen" might easily have been, like the prose "Morte 
 d' Arthur," merely a narrative of the deeds of a national hero, 
 transformed by legend into a tale of magic and miracle. Instead, 
 the Red Cross Knight is a hero, not of England but of Christendom; 
 the lovely lady who rides beside him on her lowly ass is that 
 universal and unchanging truth for whose sake the noblest man- 
 hood of all ages strives; the false Duessa wears the ever-changing 
 guise that error is skilled in putting on; dwarf and enchanter, 
 Saracen and giant, all the magical beings of Spenser's faeryland 
 are symbolic of moral and ideal realities. Later poets, not gifted 
 with Spenser's imaginative wealth, but dowered with his Puritan 
 conscientiousness, clothed the morals which they were impelled 
 to utter, not in the gold and purple of fantastic narrative, but in 
 the sober gray of grave and serious verse. 
 
 So Daniel, favorite poet of the 1590's, writer of one of the 
 fashionable sequences of "sugared sonnets," and creator of 
 graceful lyrics, spent the largest proportion of his poetic years 
 upon a series of historical narratives known as "The Civile 
 Warres," in which the purpose to instruct his public as to one 
 phase of English history shared the poet's interest with the 
 intention to draw from that history the salutary moral lessons 
 for which it gave opportunity. So, too, he turned from his 
 historical project to a philosophical dialogue in defense of learning. 
 This poem, "Musophilus," because it approaches most nearly 
 in theme the work of Da vies, is the best for purposes of comparison 
 to show the ethical import in the work of both poets. "Muso- 
 philus,"^ then, purports to be a discussion between a lover of the 
 
 1 Daniel's Works, ed. by A. B. Grosart, Vol. I, p. 225, sq. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 103 
 
 world and a lover of learning, in which the former complains that 
 his disputant is spending 
 
 " In an ungainefuU Arte thy deerest dayes, 
 Tyring thy wits, and toyling to no end, 
 But to attaine that idle smoake of Praise." 
 
 Musophilus replies, with but few interruptions from the first 
 speaker, by a long dissertation in praise of his "sacred art." 
 Although the religious enthusiasm that breathes in every page of 
 Davies is wholly lacking here, and although Musophilus is evident- 
 ly one of those fruitlessly curious persons who, according to Davies, 
 
 "In bookes prophane seeke for knowledge hid," 
 
 nevertheless the spirit of gravity and earnestness with which 
 Daniel approaches his subject, and the detailed attention which 
 he devotes to its analysis makes it possible to regard the poem as 
 being in the same class with the much longer "Nosce Teipsum." 
 For instance, the declaration, 
 
 " I doe more in Soule esteeme, 
 Than all the gaine of dust the world doth crave," 
 
 is quite in the vein of Davies when he writes of "the heavenly 
 nature" of the mind, or of the soul's "power to know all things." 
 Davies questions the worth of general knowledge without the 
 self-knowledge for which he pleads: 
 
 "What is this knowledge but the sky-stolne fire. 
 For which the thief still chain'd in ice doth sit? 
 
 What can we know? or what can we discerne? 
 When Error chokes the windows of the minde, 
 The divers formes of things, how can we learne. 
 That have been ever from our birthday blind? "^ 
 
 Daniel sets a higher value on mere knowledge than does Davies, 
 for his contention is that life is valueless without knowledge; yet 
 the passage where this view is first stated is striking in its similarity 
 to the one just quoted: 
 
 "For what poore bounds have they, whom but th' earth bounds; 
 What is their end whereto their care attaines. 
 When the thing got relieves not, but confounds, 
 Having but travail to succeede their paines? 
 What joy hath he of Uving, that propounds 
 Affliction but his end, and Griefe his gaines? " 
 
 » Davies' Works, ed. by A. B. Grosart, Vol. I, pp. 17-18. 
 
104 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Yet Daniel is not urging the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of 
 knowledge; his aim is as practically ethical as that of Davies, who 
 pleads with men to know themselves so that they may use their 
 powers to the full. Of the art of letters, Daniel writes, with equal 
 emphasis on the virtue of act as well as thought, 
 
 "What good is like to this. 
 To do worthy the writing, and to write 
 Worthy the reading?" 
 
 Daniel's criticism of the world unguided by knowledge is remi- 
 niscent of Davies' indictment of the man of learning unguided 
 by self-knowledge: 
 
 "Strait, all that holy was, unhallow'd lies, 
 The scattred carcasses of ruin'd vowes: 
 Then Truth is false, and' now hath Blindnesse eyes, 
 Then Zeale trusts all, now scarcely what it knowes : 
 That evermore, to foolish or to wise. 
 It fatall is to be seduc'd with showes." 
 
 This knowledge which Daniel defends is, like Davies' self-knowl- 
 edge, to be based on experience : 
 
 "Should not grave and learn'd Experience 
 That lookes with the eyes of all the world beside, 
 
 And with all ages holdes intelligence. 
 Go safer than Deceit without a guide? 
 Which in the by-paths of her diffidence 
 Crossing the waies of Right, still runs more wide: 
 Who will not grant? and therefore this observe. 
 No state stands sure, but on the grounds of Right, 
 
 Of Vertue, Knowledge, Judgement to preserve." 
 
 Thus it is for the sake of virtue that Daniel enjoins knowledge. 
 And just as the contemplation of the powers of the human mind 
 leads Davies to an acclamation in praise of its Creator, so the 
 defense of learning inspires the less religious Daniel to an ascription 
 in honor of 
 
 "heavenly Eloquence, 
 That with the strong reine of commanding words. 
 Dost manage, guide, and master th' eminence 
 Of men's affections, more than all their swords: 
 Shall we not offer to thy Excellence, 
 The richest treasure that oiu* wit affords? 
 Thou that canst doe much more with one poore pen 
 Than all the powres of Princes can effect." 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 105 
 
 Such quotations, showing the similarity in spirit of two poems, 
 one as didactic as the other, might be multiplied. Equally easy, 
 though much too lengthy for the present discussion, would be a 
 proof by illustrations from the text that the intricate and detailed 
 analysis to which Daniel subjects his subject, human learning, is 
 exactly parallel to the meticulous care with which Davies dissects 
 the qualities of the human mind which make the theme of "Nosce 
 Teipsum." Neither poet trusts to implication for the smallest 
 link in his chain of argument. But whereas in the case of Davies 
 the result of this method is to give to the style a childhke sim- 
 plicity and directness that makes the argument daylight clear, 
 in the case of Daniel it is rather to befog the issue until the reader 
 is lost in a maze of words. 
 
 In some other respects than ethical purpose the two poems are 
 alike. Both show the preference of their period for an abstract 
 theme. But Davies treats his abstract theme in so concrete a 
 manner as to rob it of all pedantry; while in reading Daniel one is 
 tempted at times to sympathize with the utilitarian Philocosmos 
 in his distaste for 
 
 "A multitude of words to small effect." 
 
 In both poems a wealth of classical learning is obvious as a 
 background, as it was in the work of every writer, great or small, 
 of the Elizabethan age. In the matter of style, one great similarity 
 is in the use of the rhetorical simile, the legacy to hterature of 
 Lyly and Sidney. Davies' use of the simile has already been noted ; 
 like passages even more extended appear in "Musophilus," 
 where the "humorous world" is compared to the empty bed of a 
 creek which a fickle river has deserted for another channel, and 
 where the soul seeking mere fame is likened to a "wanton curte- 
 zan." In both Davies and Daniel, however, these similes make 
 use of more everyday, homely subjects for purposes of comparison 
 than do the highly ornamental and conventional figures of the 
 earlier Elizabethans. 
 
 In spite of this sharing by the two writers of the hterary habits 
 of their age, there are many ways in which the style of "Muso- 
 philus" lacks the compelling power of "Nosce Teipsum." It is 
 less direct, less vivid, less simple. It carries with it a sense of 
 greater effort, less spontaneity. Its long and involved sentences 
 
106 The Poet a.s Philosopher 
 
 make the thought difficult to follow. All in all, it is less truly 
 poetry than the work of Davies. For Davies was at his best, as 
 Daniel was not, in his philosophical writing. To compare "Muso- 
 philus" with some of the finest of the sonnets to DeUa — "Look, 
 Delia, how we esteem the half-blown rose," or "Let others sing of 
 knights and paladins," or with parts of the "Complaint of Rosa- 
 mond," or with one of the lyrics from "Tethys' Festival" — 
 
 " Pleasures are not, if they last, 
 In their passing is their best. 
 Glory is most bright and gay 
 In a flash and so away" — 
 
 is to realize that to write on a grave and philosophical subject 
 robbed Daniel of much of his poetic quaUty. Davies, on the other 
 hand, possessed of a temperament as much philosophical as 
 poetic, a thinker for whom grave and constructive thought was 
 no effort, was most poetic when he was most thoughtful. 
 
 The poet of the period who most thoroughly represented the 
 ethical interest in art and the didactic use of art was Fulke Greville. 
 Even the latter portion of his sonnet sequence "CaeUca" is made 
 weighty with moral reflections.^ And "Caelica" is his sole 
 departure from grave and reflective poetry, the character of which 
 is indicated by the fact that each long poem is called a "Treatise." 
 That upon " Monarchie " discusses and criticizes, often ironically, 
 all the institutions connected with the hfe of a state. ^ That upon 
 "Religion" shows the deep earnestness and sincerity of faith 
 that underlay Greville's life and work — as in the stanza, 
 
 "Then by affecting pow'r, we cannot know Him; 
 By knowing all things else, we know him less; 
 Nature contains Him not. Art cannot show Him; 
 Opinions, idols and not God express. 
 Without, in Pow'r, we see Him everywhere; 
 Within, we rest not, till we find Him there."^ 
 
 It is impossible not to see the Ukeness of the reUgious fervor of 
 such a passage to the underlying thought of Davies' poem, that 
 the chief function of the human mind is to know God; and the 
 
 I Greville's Works, ed. by A. B. Grosart, Vol. III. 
 * Ibid., Vol. I, p. 6. 
 ' Ibid., Vol. I, p. 241. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 107 
 
 lines quoted may be taken as representative of Greville's passion 
 for a non-ecclesiastical religion. 
 
 But Greville's religious position is much more modern than 
 that of Davies, which has been shown to be an inheritance from 
 scholastic theology. In Greville there is no reverence for tradition- 
 al authority. The church to him is invisible, made up of men who 
 
 "do in praying, and still pray in doing,"^ 
 
 with little stress laid upon ceremonial or creed. Creeds, in fact, 
 are likely to be harmful: 
 
 "Where man presumes on more than he obeys, 
 Then straight Religion to opinion strays."^ 
 
 Greville recognizes an authority, but it is not the authority of the 
 past for which Davies' reverence is evident in his echoing without 
 challenge its pronouncements. Greville's authority is the modern 
 Protestant one of individual interpretation of the Scriptures — 
 infallible book substituted for infalUble church. " If thou seek'st 
 more light," says Lord Brooke, "search His written Word."' 
 The whole thoughtful and dignified poem is permeated with a 
 temper much more modern than that of the young lawyer who 
 was willing to accept the religion of the Church of England as he 
 found it. The reUgion of "Nosce Teipsum" rests upon the 
 past; that of Greville's "Treatise" looks toward the future. 
 
 Another treatise deals with "Warres," and still another with 
 "Fame and Honour" — all subjects adapting themselves to serious 
 reflective treatment. But the poem most suitable for comparison 
 with "Nosce Teipsum" is "A Treatise of Human Learning," the 
 theme of which is almost identical with that of the first part of 
 Davies' poem."* A brief study will show not only how like this 
 poem is to "Nosce Teipsum," but how natural an outlet for 
 reflection, for the thinker of Davies' time, was the subject of the 
 nature and qualities of the human mind, chosen as theme by two 
 of the really memorable poets within a comparatively short 
 period. 
 
 I Ibid., Vol. I, p. 260. 
 « Ibid., Vol. I, p. 255. 
 » Ibid., Vol. I, p. 266. 
 « Ibid., Vol. II, p. 5. 
 
108 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Greville first discusses the deficiencies of knowledge, which is 
 infinite in its possibilities, 
 
 "yet satisfies no nainde 
 Till it that infinite of the God-head find." 
 
 Just as Davies recalls the fact that 
 
 "the desire to know first made men fools "^ 
 
 by causing them to taste of "that fruite forbid," so Greville 
 regards secular knowledge as 
 
 " the same forbidden tree, 
 Which man lusts after to be made his Maker." 
 
 The sources of knowledge are next analyzed, as in "Nosce 
 Teipsum" — sense, which is apt to deceive; imagination, which is 
 apt to exaggerate; memory, which may be "corrupted with 
 disguised intelligence"; understanding, which contains notions 
 "of general] truths," that however 
 
 "have such a staine 
 From our corruption, as all light they lose." 
 
 All these defects may be "supplyed by Sciences and Arts." With 
 this statement as introduction, the writer goes on to enumerate 
 and discuss the various branches of learning. In this portion of the 
 dissertation Greville, of course, differs from Davies, who spends a 
 much greater proportion of space on the faculties of the soul and 
 alludes to the branches of knowledge only incidentally — this, 
 because he is engaged in showing that self-knowledge is the only 
 kind worth while. Greville shows the same thing, by pointing 
 out the weaknesses of the forms of knowledge. "High-prais'd 
 Philosophic" is 
 
 "But bookes of poesie, in prose compiled, 
 Farre more delightful than they fruitfull be." 
 
 Music fails, in that it cannot teach 
 
 "how to show 
 No weeping voyce for losse of Fortune's goods." 
 
 ' Davies' Works, ed. by A. B. Grosart, Vol. I, p. 15. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 109 
 
 Geometry falls short, because it cannot instruct 
 
 "how to measure 
 What is enough for need, what fit for pleasure." 
 
 Greville's conclusion is the vanitas vanitatum with which Davies 
 began : 
 
 "What then are all these human arts and lights? 
 But seas of errors? in whose depths who sound 
 Of Truth find onely shadowes, and no ground. 
 
 "Then if our Arts want power to make us better, 
 What foole will thinke they can us wiser make?" 
 
 Man-made arts and philosophies can never arrive at the knowledge 
 of God which has been stated as the end of learning, for man's 
 mind itself is faulty and unable by its powers alone to grasp the 
 truth. The maturity of this thought, more mature even than 
 Bacon's belief that the "natural reason" was sufficient for the 
 comprehension of all knowledge,^ is an advance far beyond the 
 childUke idea of Davies, who, having described and eulogized the 
 power and glory of the human mind, concludes : 
 
 "Our Wit is given, Ahnighty God to know; 
 Our Will is given to love Him, being known; 
 But God could not be known to us below. 
 But by His workes which through the sense are shown."* 
 
 Davies merely takes for granted that since God has adorned man 
 "with so bright a mind," the quality of the mind must be adequate 
 for every use. The conclusion is the same at which Bacon arrived 
 by the road of inductive reasoning rather than a priori. Greville's 
 indictment of the powers of the mind is a challenge to both. 
 Possibly, however, the greater maturity of grasp evident in Lord 
 Brooke was due not only to his more mature years but to the fact 
 that he had for years been intimate with Bacon and knew his 
 ideas even before the publication of the " Advancement of Learn- 
 ing";^ while Davies, at the time when "Nosce Teipsum" was 
 written, probably did not know Sir Francis, and could not have 
 read a book which was not yet published. 
 
 » CroU, the Works of Fulke Greville. ' CroU, p. 23. 
 » Davies' Works, Vol. I, p. 80. 
 
110 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Greville continues his argument with a plea for the better 
 regulation of man's quest for knowledge, so that learning may be 
 adapted to the improvement of conduct. He is thoroughly 
 utilitarian in his view of study; its aim is "Ufe and actions," 
 since "God made all for use." In the succeeding definite sugges- 
 tions for the regulation of learning by the supervising power of 
 the state, Fulke Greville is far more practical than Davies. Re- 
 Hgion, law, physics, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, poetry, music, 
 mathematics, astronomy — all are to be reformed from subjects 
 of "idle contemplation" into subjects for "the practise of man's 
 wisedome." Where Davies was purely metaphysical in his 
 discussion, revelhng in philosophical analysis merely as such, 
 content to fill his readers with reverence for that wondrous thing, 
 the human soul, Greville never forgets for a moment what he 
 feels must be the practical issue of all knowledge: 
 
 "Onely that man understands indeed. 
 And well remembers, which he well can doe." 
 
 The mind, however marvellous, cannot say to hand or foot, "I 
 have no need of thee." Although Greville is much more the 
 mature philosopher in his mode of formulating, developing, and 
 presenting his thought, Davies is more truly interested in thought 
 for its own sake. 
 
 Yet the moral exhortation with which the poems close are not 
 unhke, albeit the vivid simplicity of the language of Davies makes 
 his the more compelling of the two. 
 
 "And thou my Soule," he writes, "which turn'st thy curious eye, 
 To view the beames of thine owne forme divine; 
 Know, that thou canst know nothing perfectly, 
 While thou art clouded with this flesh of mine. 
 
 "Take heed of over-weening, and compare 
 
 Thy peacock's feet with thy gay peacocke's traine; 
 Study the best, and highest things that are, 
 But of thy selfe an humble thought retaine. 
 
 " Cast downe thy selfe, and onely strive to raise 
 The glory of thy Maker's sacred Name."' 
 
 ' Davies' Works, Vol. I, p. 116. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 111 
 
 Greville's summary of the ethics of his treatise contains ahnost a 
 duplicate set of precepts: 
 
 " Man may well professe 
 To studie God, Whom he is borne to serve: 
 Nature, t' admire the greater in the lesse; 
 Time, but to learne; our selves we may observe, 
 To humble us: others, to exercise 
 Our love and patience, wherein duty lies." 
 
 Making due allowance for the difference touched upon, it is 
 most evident that two poems, the purpose of each of which is to 
 prove that all knowledge is vain except as it is moral and ethical 
 in its intention and result, are alike in theme and spirit. There is 
 in Fulke Greville, too, the same Hve interest as Davies shows in 
 the infant physical science. Allusions to right hnes, degrees of 
 latitude, and the loadstone, to the question whether the heavens 
 stand still or move, to the fact that the Caspian Sea has inlets 
 but no outlet and is therefore salt, to the atomic theory, and to the 
 relation of the sun to the planets — all these show a mind alert 
 to the new intelligence that was beginning to animate the studies 
 of the learned. The style of one poet, also, is as simple as the 
 other, for Greville's thought is not puzzling to trace. Yet, while, 
 in a way, the wholesome, virile sanity of his work inspires more 
 admiration and provokes more thought than the cheerful ingenu- 
 ousness of Davies', probably because it is more applicable to 
 practical life, there is lacking in Greville the humanly lovable 
 quahty that makes Davies a true Elizabethan and that endears 
 even to the modern reader his quaint, naive expression of outworn 
 ideas. The "Treatise on Human Learning" requires much more 
 thought for the following of its argument than does "Nosce 
 Teipsum," probably because, while its language is simple, its 
 style is more mature and dignified, more studied and thoughtful, 
 than that of Davies. Moreover, Greville is more the philosopher 
 and less the poet ; he thinks more than he sings. The independence 
 of his thought is therefore not a refutation, as it might otherwise 
 seem to be, of our proposition that the poet-philosopher does 
 little independent thinking. 
 
 Three so similar poems will suffice, for a tentative proof at 
 least, to show that the theme, the style, the spirit, and the ethical 
 intention of a poet philosophically inclined at the end of the 
 
112 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Elizabethan age were likely to resemble those of any other similarly 
 incUned poet, and that these respects in which they were ahke 
 were consequently results of the time that gave them birth. It is 
 in the things that express poetic individuality that these poets 
 differ. That which makes a man a poet is not reflected from his 
 time but lies within himself. It is only the philosopher half of the 
 poet-philosopher that is an echo. That Davies was essentially 
 a thinker, though not an independent or progressive thinker, is 
 apparent in the fact that he wrote neither allegory, like Spenser, 
 nor lyric, like Campion, nor sonnet sequence, like all the other 
 poets of his time, nor drama, in which most of the serious poets, 
 even Lord Brooke, tried to rival the stage playwrights, nor pastoral 
 or descriptive poetry, like Draj-ton, nor historical narrative, like 
 Daniel. His native form of expression was none of these. But 
 that he was essentiallj'^ a poet appears equally in the fact that his 
 grave reflections found outlet in vivid, musical, appealing verse, 
 poetic, not merely metrical, rather than in serious prose like that 
 of Hooker, a man not improbably possessed of much the type of 
 mind of Davies, or in the vivacious essay form adapted by Bacon 
 from Montaigne, or even in such worse than prosaic metrical 
 meanderings through endless pages of Mirums and Microcosms 
 as were perpetrated to the honor of God and the human soul by 
 Sir John's namesake, John Davies of Hereford. 
 
 The statement was made at the beginning of this section that 
 Davies was the voice of the end of a period. That this is so 
 appears best in his attitude to the past as compared with that of 
 other writers. While Bacon derided and Greville condemned as 
 pernicious the work of the Schoolmen, Davies based his philosophy 
 upon scholastic teaching. The sixteenth century was the closing 
 epoch of that phase of history where men's lives were determined 
 by their relations to the church and to religion. The normal, 
 average man of the time accepted unquestioningly the creed 
 ordained for him by the powers above him, whether of church or 
 state. So Davies did. His sole attempt is to prove the truth of 
 what he either beUeves intuitively or accepts with creduUty at 
 the hands of his church. In this respect he differs from Gre\dlle, 
 whose independence of reUgious authority belongs to the opening, 
 not the closing, era; and from Daniel, who neither advocates nor 
 speculates upon any religious matter, seeming totally uninter- 
 ested therein. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 113 
 
 To look at a succeeding group of poets, contemporaneous with 
 Davies but writing much later than he, is to see that he stood at 
 the end of one period and they at the beginning of another. His- 
 torical ballads and narratives free of morals, in the "Barons' 
 Wars" and "Agincourt"; idyllic description, written for sheer 
 love of the fair English country and of beautiful words, in the 
 "Polyolbion"; graceful, delicate fairy-tales and pastorals, guiltless 
 of allegorical intention, in "Dowsabel," "Nimphidia," and the 
 "Muses' Elizium" — these were Michael Drayton's contribution 
 to seventeenth century literature. He had learned in the school 
 of the Elizabethans, but he had gone ahead of his teachers, and 
 become the modern artist. In Drummond of Hawthornden, 
 indeed, the Elizabethan themes of love and religion survive in 
 lyrics of strength and beauty; but, for the most part, those things 
 of which Greene and Sidney, Southwell and Raleigh wrote with 
 the fresh charm of youth have lost their novelty, and either have 
 become conventional from much repetition, or are superseded 
 by ideas more sophisticated, more consciously artistic, more 
 suited to a worldly wise Stuart court. 
 
 Even John Donne, versatile, original, loving verbal and metrical 
 experiment as much as ever did the Elizabethans, direct and 
 outspoken as were any of them, was much more the conscious 
 artist than the singer who sang because he must. The EUzabethan 
 cared little whether the thing he said was new or old, since to him 
 it was new. But Donne cared greatly that, if the matter of his 
 verse were not as new as he desired to have it, at least his manner 
 of expressing it should be a new invention. Donne was a lyric, 
 not a philosophical poet ; but in his own vein he showed the fresh 
 independence of thought that did not mark the philosophy of 
 Davies. On the other hand, the spontaneity and freshness of 
 manner that make the platitudes of "Nosce Teipsum" delightful 
 reading were sacrificed by Donne at the altar of brilliant expression 
 — a brilliance often enough attained to repay the sacrifice, and 
 differentiating Donne from his predecessors. Outside the drama, 
 it is lyric poetry that gives opportunity for most universal appeal. 
 Donne the lyrist could do what Davies the reflective poet could 
 not. The strings of the harp of life still vibrate to the strains of 
 "I long to talk with some old lover's ghost," or "So let us melt 
 and make no noise," or "Since I am coming to that holy room." 
 There is in the modern reader's attitude to such poems as these 
 
114 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 none of the half-indulgent, half-curious sympathy with which the 
 antiquary approaches a monument of a past era. His gift of 
 condensation of a great thought into a few unusual word-combina- 
 tions separates him from a past of which one literary temptation 
 was prolixity. But about Davies clings unmistakably the atmos- 
 phere of his century. He was of the past ; Donne was of the future. 
 Standing thus at the end of an era, among the last of the typically 
 Elizabethan poets, Davies embodied in his verse the best qualities 
 developed in that age. The culture of which he was a product 
 could go no farther along the same lines; a new time, with a new 
 temper and new interests, must produce a new culture and a new 
 art. But the vital eagerness, the spontaneity of feeling, the direct 
 simplicity, the appreciation of beauty in word and line that were 
 the gift of the sixteenth century to English poetry, are all exempli- 
 fied in such a passage as that where Davies invokes divine aid 
 for his poetic adventure: 
 
 "0 Light which mak'st the light, which makes the day! 
 Which setst the eye without, and mind within; 
 Lighten my spirit with one cleare heavenly ray;"^ 
 
 or in his introduction to the description of the five senses: 
 
 " These are the windows through the which she views 
 The light of knowledge, which is life's loadstar : 
 And yet while she these spectacles doth use. 
 Oft worldly things seem greater than they are;"' 
 
 or in the lines which undoubtedly furnished the background for 
 two beautiful lines of Tennyson : 
 
 " that adamantine chaine. 
 Whose golden links, effects and causes be, 
 And which to God's owne chair doth fixt remaine,"^ 
 
 or in the beautiful Acclamation which forms the climax to the 
 whole fine poem : 
 
 "And when thou think'st of her eternitie, 
 
 Thinke not that Deathe against her nature is, 
 Thinke it a birth; and when thou goest to die, 
 Sing like a swan, as if thou went'st to blisse. 
 
 » Davies' Works, Vol. I, p. 16. ^ Ibid., Vol. I, p. 54. 
 
 2 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 65. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 115 
 
 "And if thou, like a child, didst feare before, 
 
 Being in the darke, where thou didst nothing see; 
 Now I have brought thee torch-hght, feare no more ; 
 Now when thou diest, thou canst not hud-winkt be."^ 
 
 With such confidence that his interpretation of the soul has 
 reached a sympathetic and beUeving public did Davies close his 
 venture into the world of the spirit. 
 
 As Davies stood at the end of a period of reverence for the 
 past, of an age so occupied with literary and artistic adventure 
 that speculative excursions did not attract thinkers away from 
 the traditional beliefs which they took for granted, so Pope stood 
 at the end of an age of rationalistic challenge to the past, an age 
 the breath of whose nostrils was speculative inquiry. Enough 
 has been said already to show the development of this temper 
 of the seventeenth century through the influence of growing 
 interest in natural science. The more men found they could 
 explain, by the effort of human reason, the more they 
 wanted to explain. If the old-time theories of the motion of the 
 sun and the shape of the earth were proved absurd, how was it 
 possible not to suspect of an equal absurdity the even more 
 ancient beHefs in heaven and hell? Such philosophies as those of 
 Hobbes and Descartes left little room for a creative, over-ruling 
 God. And when it was proved possible to formulate the laws by 
 which seen things were regulated, a proof of laws governing the 
 unseen seemed equally possible. So one type of mind dismissed 
 as irrational all the ancient faiths, being satisfied with a mathe- 
 matical axiom instead of a God; and another type of mind, 
 unwilling to destroy without building up, attempted to reason 
 out and prove the hitherto accepted tenets of religion, now for 
 the first time doubted and subjected to an interpretation which 
 would bring them into accord with physical science. On middle 
 ground between these two positions stood the deists, discarding 
 all the traditions of "revelation" and substituting for them a 
 philosophical religion, without creed and without authority, 
 looking "through Nature up to Nature's God." The attempt to 
 make religion and science agree, commonly associated with the 
 first half of the nineteenth century, found its first exponents in 
 the leaders of the so-called orthodox party in the deist controversy. 
 The " Essay on Man," standing at the end of the period of contest, 
 
 > 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 <m Man, Epistle IV, 11. 1 1 1-1 13. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 121 
 
 origins of government and of religion, he has a momentary flash 
 of clear, practical vision : 
 
 "For forms of government let fools contest; 
 Whate'er is best administered is best : 
 For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; 
 His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."^ 
 
 And, of course, in the portion of Epistle IV which proves that 
 happiness is virtue, it would have been difficult for the most 
 abstract writer to exemplify virtue except concretely. The value 
 of right conduct as the test of worth is here contrasted with 
 worldly wealth and position. The famous couplets, 
 
 "Honor and shame from no condition rise; 
 Act well your part: there all the honor lies,"* 
 
 and 
 
 "What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? 
 Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards,"^ 
 
 are certainly practical enough to deserve their frequent quotation. 
 But a significant contrast on the last page of the "Essay" 
 perhaps is typical of Pope's real standard of virtuous conduct. 
 In an eloquent passage on the development of self-love into 
 social love he expands the ageless theme, "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself," summing up an approximate perfection as a 
 condition where "height of bliss" is "height of charity." Then 
 with what, if one recalls the story of Bolingbroke, is a lamentable 
 anti-climax, but in language much less perfunctory than the 
 foregoing. Pope describes the man who for the time being was his 
 ideal of excellence, in words that show his actual ideal of virtuous 
 conduct. "Teach me," he cries, "like thee, 
 
 "To fall with dignity, with temper rise; 
 Form'd by thy converse, happily to steer 
 From grave to gay, from lively to severe: 
 Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease. 
 Intent to reason, or polite to please."* 
 
 Selfless love to one's neighbor — it is the highest, the still unattained 
 practical ideal of the ages. But versatility, correctness, easy 
 eloquence, politeness — these are superficial ideals, embodying 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 303-306. ^ 75^^,^ Epistle IV, II. 193-94. 
 
 2 Ibid., Epistle IV, 11. 215-16. * Ibid., Epistle IV, 11. 378-82. 
 
122 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 petty virtues of mind and manners, not great ideals of soul and 
 spirit. They were ideals attainable and attained by a Stuart or 
 a Georgian court, by a Bolingbroke, by a Chesterfield, by Pope 
 himself. By the distance between the two standards may be 
 measured the concrete practicaHty of Pope's ethics. 
 
 A by-product of this eighteenth century love for the abstract 
 was the failure of the poets of the period to illuminate their 
 abstract themes with concrete examples or similes. Their satire, 
 of course, was objective necessarily. But when they were not 
 writing satire they were analyzing the human soul or treating 
 some other topic of a generalized and ethical nature and they were 
 content to think abstractly. The homely illustrations and 
 similes which enhven the pages of Ehzabethans — childhke hearts, 
 in the midst of an objective world — are absent, or, if present, are 
 couched in such high-flown and stilted language as to lose the 
 homeliness which makes much of the charm of Davies. The 
 planets and their motions, the forbidden fruit of the tree, a few 
 famiUar and usually tame animals, a BibUcal or classical character 
 or two — these are reiterated to the verge of weariness in any 
 anthology of the period. More than his contemporaries Pope 
 made use of concrete figures, sketching here and there a vivid 
 word picture in illustration of his abstract theme. The im^e 
 of the lamb which 
 
 "crops the flow'ry food, 
 And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood "^ 
 
 has the pathos Pope is said to lack. The much misused poor 
 Indian is described with a sympathy astonishing in so untraveled 
 and unimaginative a person as Pope. Allusions to contemporary 
 personages must have made the poem interesting to current 
 readers. The results of whimsical observation of men and manners 
 are focused in such telling lines as, 
 
 "So, when small humors gather to a gout, 
 The doctor fancies he has driven them out."* 
 
 But, taken all in aU, the "Essay," Uke its contemporary serious 
 poems, betrays very little care on the part of its writer to please a 
 reading public, if any such existed, interested in facts rather than 
 ideas. In an age of reason, a clearly reasoned generalization 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle I, U. 3-84. * Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 160-161. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 123 
 
 would compel as much attention as the same work cheapened by 
 an attempt to popularize it with homely figures. 
 
 Nor is there in the "Essay" any trace of the emotional appeal 
 by virtue of which poetry usually wins the popular affection. 
 This absence of emotion might be ascribed to the nature of Pope's 
 subject, which gave little opportunity for the expression of feeling. 
 But he was not alone in producing verse innocent of passion. 
 An age in which life flowed gaily along on the surface, in the 
 pretense that, because the depths below were black and perilous 
 and unpleasant to contemplate, there were no depths there; 
 an age in which existence was rounded, not with a sleep, but with 
 a game of cards; an age in which a great passion was a thing to 
 be hidden as if indecent, or felt only to be suppressed; an age in 
 which love was dependent on dowry and poetry on patronage — 
 such an age was not likely to find utterance in emotional verse. 
 If the poet had an idea of more or less brilliance, if he had in his 
 ear the sound of rhyme and meter, if he had the gift of words 
 clearly and cleverly to express his thought, there was no need for 
 his heart to beat red. The spontaneous emotion that alone makes 
 poetry poetic, and which had sung itself so tunefully through 
 Elizabethan pages, waited to be rediscovered by Burns and Words- 
 worth. It would be difficult to find a line where Dryden was not 
 cool and dispassionate; Gay and Prior, amused but not incensed 
 at the follies they derided, hoped that the satirical criticism would 
 strike home, yet showed none of the reformer's ardor; the love- 
 poems of the time were as artificial as the beauty of the ladies 
 who presumably inspired them. The nearest approach to that 
 sincerity of expression in which one can feel the emotion dominating 
 the poet's interest in his verse form and often, consequently, 
 improving it, is to be found in the musical ballads of Gay, and, at 
 the other extreme, in the bitterly passionate satire of Swift. 
 But, however sincere, neither cheerful narrative nor sharp invective 
 can be said to represent a true poetic emotion. 
 
 Pope, then, is like his contemporaries in the lack of emotion 
 which is one of the explanations of his obvious lack of poetic 
 quality. But so far as mere style is concerned, he is raised far 
 above the other writers of his time by his gift of epigrammatic 
 expression. His epigrams do not make him the better poet, but 
 they do make him a writer of verse better remembered and more 
 often quoted than any other verse of its kind. It would be 
 
124 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 impertinence to cite the lines that live still on the tongues of 
 people who never heard of Alexander Pope. The eternally 
 springing Hope, the frightful monster Vice, the child 
 
 "Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw, "^ 
 
 the bubble joy which laughs in Folly's cup, the worldly rewards 
 by which 
 
 "at sixty are undone 
 The virtues of a saint at twenty-one, "^ 
 
 the honest man whom so many succeeding poets have honored 
 as the noblest work of God — familiar allusions like these, woven 
 into the fabric of our commonplace conversation, are the best 
 proof of the vital power, not poetic but epigrammatic, that 
 animated Pope's work. No one quotes Dry den; only the ballad- 
 singer and his audience remember black-eyed Susan; Lilliput, 
 indeed, remains one of the enchanted lands of childhood, but the 
 verses of its creator are forgotten. But it would be hard to find a 
 person of average intelligence who has not at some time, taught 
 by experience the truth of the epigram, echoed, humorously or 
 wistfully, the line, 
 
 "Man never is, but always to be, blest."^ 
 
 In all the literary qualities, then, in which a poet could be 
 controlled by the spirit and fashion of his time. Pope resembled 
 his earlier contemporaries. He and they ahke adhered to the 
 most formal and stilted of English verse measures; he and they 
 alike preached an abstract morality, presented abstractly; he 
 and they were guiltless of spontaneous emotion. But in those 
 elements that were the expression of individual genius, rising 
 transcendent above the dead level of the average Augustan poet, 
 the writer of the "Essay" was a bright particular star in a firma- 
 ment full of dull and dusty luminaries. The light of his star was, 
 perhaps, a metallic glitter rather than a warm and sympathetic 
 glow; the brilliance of polished couplet and clean-cut epigram 
 was dimmed by the flooding radiance of the poets of the Revolu- 
 tion; nevertheless the star still shines. 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle II, 1. 276. ^ j^id.^ Epistle I, 1. 96. 
 
 2 Ibid., Epistle IV, 11. 183-84. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 125 
 
 But Pope was above his contemporaries, rattier than ahead of 
 them. So essentially was he a product of his time that there was 
 in him none of the pointing forward to a later epoch than his own 
 that appears in other mid-eighteenth century poets. Young and 
 Thomson, Gray and Akenside were, in all the externals, writers 
 of the old school. The formal measure, the stilted poetic diction, 
 the love of abstractions all Unger in the "Night Thoughts" and 
 the "Seasons," the "Elegy" and the "Pleasures of the Imagina- 
 tion." But long before the period called revolutionary there was 
 stirring in the hearts of men gifted with the vision of the poet a 
 spirit of new Ufe, groping for the unseen realities that were to be 
 found, not by reason, but by contact with life. The world waken- 
 ed, as the age of Pope passed into the age of Johnson, to the idea 
 which revolutionized politics, social feehng, and art — the idea 
 that one individual is worth a thousand generalizations, and that 
 nature, human or otherwise, is to be known not by analyzing her 
 processes but by living in contact with her realities. And con- 
 temporary with the social and artistic awakening came the revival 
 of the religious consciousness, reacting against the wearisome 
 pros and cons of the threadbare deistic controversy, calling men 
 to a realization of their own emotional possibilities, and finding 
 expression either in enthusiasm for the new evangel of the Wesleys 
 or in renewed vigor within the ancient church from whose altars 
 "the pomp of method and of art" had driven the pioneers of 
 methodism. 
 
 Thus Young, who represented rather the reUgious than the 
 social change of impulse, and who sought to supply the gap left 
 by the absence of orthodox religion in the "Essay," turned the 
 didactic spirit of his predecessors into a weightily moral and 
 evangelically religious channel — so moral and so religious, that 
 more than a century later a worthy editor^ writes with unconscious 
 humor that "Night Thoughts" eloquently inculcates "those 
 great Christian doctrines which lie at the foundation of pure 
 morals and sound religion" — as truly Victorian a standard for 
 an art value as Young's own strictly orthodox code and creed. 
 A defense of deism might, according to Young's code, be illuminat- 
 ed by flashes of wit; but an apologetic for Christianity, as grave 
 as any of Wesley's sermons and less eloquent, must be character- 
 
 1 James Robert Boyd, 1854. 
 
126 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 ized only by decent gravity. "The new class of readers wanted 
 something more congenial to the teaching of their favorite min- 
 isters"^ than a system of abstract philosophy. Young's popularity 
 in his own time was an index of the interests and desires of his 
 audience, during years when disgust with the hypocrisy and 
 corruption of Walpole's England was arousing a passion for 
 spiritual realities. The equal popularity of Thomson showed the 
 other and more important element of a new life soon to quicken 
 in the mind of England. For with Thomson began the use in 
 modern English poetry of the description of natural beauty for 
 its own sake, and not for the pointing of a moral. Thomson's 
 appreciation of nature was the more remarkable as it preceded 
 by so long a time the work of the French Encyclopedists, and the 
 inspiration of the German romanticists. 
 
 Once the love of natural beauty found utterance, it was easy 
 for other poets to follow the way shown by the writer of "The 
 Seasons." That Pope did not so follow shows not only his own 
 artificial bent, but his faithful adherence to the literary tenets 
 which satisfied the first three decades of the eighteenth centmy. 
 He need not have been a pioneer in art to evince some interest 
 in the beauty of nature which Thomson had pointed out. But 
 his pages are as bare of allusions to concrete, external nature as 
 they are of the creed of which Young deplored the absence. In 
 the accepted conventional verbiage, Gray still wrote of the Muse 
 and the "rosy-bosom'd Hours" and the "Attic warbler" and 
 "reddening Phoebus" lifting "his golden fire"; but with the 
 formaUties of poetic diction alternated exquisite "showers of 
 violets," lovely allusions to "rugged elms" or the "old fantastic 
 roots" of the beech, and graphic hints of intimacy with "moping 
 owl" or twittering swallow, or droning beetle. Akenside still 
 referred to the sun as "the radiant ruler of the year" and called 
 upon his lyre to awake; but he could picture the green before a 
 threshold decked 
 
 "with cowslips pale, 
 Primrose and purple lychnis, . . . 
 . . . and . . . shelving walls 
 With honeysuckle covered."^ 
 
 ^ Stephen, English Literature and Society in the 18th Century, p. 153. 
 * From Fcrr a Grotto, Ward's British Poets, Vol. Ill, p. 350. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 127 
 
 Perhaps Pope never saw these things; presumably he did not 
 love them ; certainly he never wrote of them. Like Gray, Aken- 
 side could picture the humble home where the village-dame, 
 hearing the curfew, remembers as she watches her children at 
 play that 
 
 "At morn their father went abroad; 
 The moon is sunk, and deep the road; 
 She sighs, and wonders at his stay."^ 
 
 For Pope the village-dame, the ploughman, the "mute inglorious 
 Milton" did not exist; Twickenham was far away from Stoke 
 Pogis. The poetry of the future was the poetry of the beauty of 
 tree and stream and cloud; its philosophy was the message of 
 brotherhood, equality, the value of the individual, however 
 humble. Pope's poetry. Pope's philosophy were of the past. 
 
 The past of which Pope was both index and climax was a past 
 of patterned formality. The past which created Tennyson was a 
 past of revolt against all patterns. Into the stiff, outworn old 
 wineskins was poured the new wine from the vineyards of France. 
 A precedent became a chain. To conventionality of form suc- 
 ceeded infinite variety. A Scotch ploughman sang across his 
 fields, and the music of his verse echoed into the souls of lyric 
 poets till their words began to sing. No longer was the stanza 
 form a labored, metallic mould to imprison a conventional idea. 
 It was a tune fitly framed to carry grief or joy. As many as were 
 the complex emotions of rejoicing, suffering humanity, so many J 
 must be the lyric forms. Blank verse regained the grace and | 
 color, the sweep of rhythm and the aptness to express thought \. 
 with which Shakespeare and Milton had animated it, and of \. 
 which the users of the couplet had robbed it. The sonnet came 
 into its own, assuming under the touch of Wordsworth and 
 Shelley a flexibility and a dignity that not even the Elizabethan 
 sonnet had possessed. The elegance of poetic diction, high flown 
 and stilted, vanished; words suitable for poetry were found to be 
 no different from the words that made up "the real language of 
 men." For poetry, newly become the musical medium of emotion, 
 ceased to depend on form. 
 
 More important than the transformation of the form of poetry ,i 
 was the change in its spirit. The poet no longer sought to admon- 
 
 » From On the Winter Solstice, 1740, Ibid., p. 347. 
 
128 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 ish; rather he sought to inspire. The didactic spirit that looked 
 on poetry only as a vehicle for morality disappeared gradually 
 before the spirit of the artist whose art by its very beauty conveyed 
 a moral impulse. Much of the teacher clung about Wordsworth, 
 but his lessons of uplifting contact with nature and of sympathy 
 with humanity were couched not as precepts but as graphic 
 pictures or narratives, the contagious emotion of which aroused 
 the feelings he longed to awaken in his audience. The teacher as 
 prophet still lingered in Shelley; but with the work of Keats, 
 English poetry arrived at the goal of poetry for the sake of truth 
 and beauty. Verse that did not express or inspire a genuine 
 emotion was seen not to be poetry. The cold ethics of the Moral 
 Sense school gave place to religious fervor, as emotional in com- 
 parison with Swift's caustic morality or Pope's casuistic optimism 
 as were Burns 's love lyrics in contrast with those of Matthew 
 Prior. For it was emotion that lay at the heart of the new poetry, 
 an emotion stirred in one poet by a cuckoo's song or a tuft of 
 primrose, in another by a wind moaning ''grief too sad for song," 
 in another by the perfumed splendor of a summer night, numbing 
 his drowsy senses with its melody. 
 
 In subject matter, too, poetry was altered in the half century 
 that preceded Tennyson. Abstractions were no longer interesting 
 in a world where life was real. Why wander into the infinities 
 of space or seek to define the indefinable when there was at hand 
 a world full of concrete realities — of woods and mountains, of 
 lakes and streams, of summer rains and winter snows, of stars and 
 clouds and tempests, of loving, suffering men and women? So 
 Goldsmith wrote of the humble happiness of the Irish peasant 
 and Burns of the toil-worn cotter; Cowper, even before Words- 
 worth, found beauty in 
 
 "the meadows green, 
 Though faded; and the lands, where lately waved 
 The golden harvest, of a mellow brown;" 
 
 and Blake made exquisite poetry from the evening star, scattering 
 "silver dew on every flower," and from the sunflower, "weary of 
 time," counting "the steps of the sun." Jean and Lucy were the 
 inspiration of the new love lyrics, replacing the Daphnes and 
 Chioes of the old. "The simple annals of the poor" supplied 
 material for the poet of the commonplace who could find "a tale 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 129 
 
 in everything." The new poetry did not satirize the vices and 
 follies of the rich and groat ; instead, it held up to admiration the 
 sturdy virtues of the poor and humble, even while it implored 
 sympathy for their hardships. For poetry had become the 
 mouthpiece of the new democratic impulse, of the new social 
 sympathy. In Shelley, denunciation of present ills was as harsh 
 as the severest satires of the time of Pope; but Shelley's denuncia- 
 tion was direct, not veiled, and there was no wit nor laughter 
 in his "wail for the world's wrong." Yet the very abiUty by 
 which he sounded the deep places of despair, as Dry den and Swift, 
 Gaj^ and Prior, with minds upon more trivial evils, could not do, 
 gave him the capacity for glorious visions of the future which they 
 could not see. 
 
 At the end of such a time, a time when poetry had been set 
 free from the trammels of conventionality, when reason had been 
 superseded by emotion, when nature and humanity had triumphed 
 over abstractions as suitable material for the poet, when great 
 realities had replaced trivial superficialities as the dominant 
 interests in men's minds — at the end of such a time came Tennyson. 
 It must be remembered that this discussion concerns the earlier 
 Tennj^son, the poet of "In Memoriam," not the maturer poet of 
 the later "Idylls." Like Davies and Pope, this earlier Tennyson 
 shared with the poets preceding him the best of the quaUties 
 developed in the age of which he was the heir. 
 
 It was a period when, because of the contagion of German 
 philosophy, every poet was inclined to be philosophical. It is 
 difficult to compare the philosophy of Wordsworth with that of 
 Tennyson, because Wordsworth's reflections upon abstract 
 truths are presented by means of the concrete images of nature 
 poetry, rather than by direct analysis and introspective meditation, 
 as are Tennyson's. Wordsworth's philosophy is usually implicit; 
 he makes few direct metaphysical ventures, and none so ambitious 
 as Tennyson's proof of the immortality of the soul. It is in the 
 daintiest of spring lyrics^ that "Nature's holy plan" is revealed; 
 it is from the story of Lucy- that the power of the great teacher 
 "to kindle or restrain" is to be learned; it is through the simple 
 prattle of "a little cottage girl"^ that Wordsworth's feeling as to 
 
 * Li7ies Written in Early Spriiig, Globe ed. of Wordsworth, p. 83. 
 
 * The Education of Nature, Ibid., p. 115. 
 ' We are Seven, Ibid., p. 73. 
 
130 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 immortality is most convincingly expressed. Nevertheless, in all 
 the pages of ''In Memoriam" there is reached no surer faith than 
 Wordsworth's "faith that looks through death." For the inspired 
 "Ode" in which the older laureate declared the basis of his belief 
 there is no match in "In Memoriam"; the new interpretation of 
 Platonism sounded deep places where Tennyson's more deliberately 
 philosophical plummet does not reach. Tennyson's recollections 
 of early childhood provide him only with the unhappy belief 
 that, as the man 
 
 "forgets the days before 
 God shut the doorways of his head,"^ 
 
 so the happy dead will forget the life of earth. There is less real 
 insight, poetic or philosophic, in such a conclusion, than in the 
 vision which, 
 
 "In a season of calm weather. 
 Though inland far we be," 
 
 catches sight 
 
 "Of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither. "^ 
 
 Tennyson has left us record of the process by which he ceased 
 to believe in the persistence of personality. Early he wrote, 
 
 " That each, who seems a separate whole, 
 Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
 The skirts of self again, should fall 
 Remerging in the general Soul, 
 
 "Is faith as vague as all unsweet."^ 
 
 Later, the sense of his friend's presence in all the universe about 
 him came to him as a more comforting belief than that in an endur- 
 ing identity, and he concluded, 
 
 "Thy voice is on the rolling air; 
 
 I hear thee where the waters run; 
 Thou standest in the rising sun, 
 And in the setting thou art fair."^ 
 
 * In Memoriam, Canto XLIV. 
 
 * Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Globe ed. of Wordsworth, p. 360. 
 ' In Memoriam, Canto XLVII. 
 
 * Ibid., Canto CXXX. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 131 
 
 Perhaps Wordsworth passed through an equally slow and tortuous 
 process in the development of his similar belief. Eight simple 
 lines alone give us the result of any such thought development. 
 Their pure dignity and impressiveness speak of a mind discerning 
 and sincere in its philosophic quest. 
 
 "A slumber did my spirit seal; 
 I had no human fears: 
 She seem'd a thing that could not feel 
 The touch of earthly years. 
 
 "No motion has she now, no force; 
 She neither hears nor sees; 
 RoU'd round in earth's diurnal course 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees. "^ 
 
 The pages of Tennyson's great elegy contain nothing more com- 
 plete as a poetic rendering of a philosophic view. Nor is Tenny- 
 son's conclusion as to the nature of God an advance over Words- 
 worth's. The 
 
 " far-off divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves''^ 
 
 is only Wordsworth's 
 
 "spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things."^ 
 
 and it was hardly to be expected that in understanding of the God 
 
 "Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole,"* 
 
 Tennyson should advance beyond the truly philosophic dieamer 
 who did more than any other one man to make transcendentalism 
 a part of English thought. No passage of Tennyson reaches 
 deeper into the heart of things than Coleridge's 
 
 "Life is a vision shadowy of Truth ;"^ 
 
 or his longer explanation of the relation of sense to spirit: 
 
 ^ Globe ed. of Wordsworth, p. 115. 
 
 * In Memoriam, last stanza. 
 
 ' Liyies on Tintern Abbey, Globe ed. of \\ordsworth , p. 94. 
 
 * Coleridge, Religious Musings, 1. 131. 
 » Ibid., 1. .396. 
 
132 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 "For all that meets the bodily sense I deem 
 Symbolical, one mighty alphabet 
 For infant minds ; and we in this low world 
 Placed with our backs to bright Reality, 
 That we may learn with young unwounded ken 
 The substance from its shadow;"^ 
 
 or his supremely beautiful expression of the relation between 
 nature and God: 
 
 "And what if all of animated nature 
 Be but organic harps diversely framed. 
 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps 
 Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
 At once the Soul of each, and God of all?"- 
 
 Coleridge, too, summed up in a single line the element of Words- 
 worth's nature philosophy of which Tennyson failed to achieve 
 an understanding. 
 
 "In nature there is nothing melancholy,"* 
 
 wrote Coleridge. So Wordsworth thought, when he turned to 
 the daisy to "repair (his) heart with gladness"; so he thought 
 when, passing the hour of thoughtless youth, and hearing in the 
 universal harmony 
 
 "The still, sad music of humanity" 
 
 he found that melody 
 
 "Not harsh nor grating, though with ample power 
 To chasten or subdue";* 
 
 so he thought, even when he looked at the "sober coloring" of 
 the clouds that gathered "round the setting sun" and seemed to 
 hear echoing from the shadows the triumphant shout, 
 
 "Another race hath been, and other pahns are won."^ 
 
 For Tennyson there was in nature no remedy, no solace, no 
 uplift, except such as comes from the sharing of grief with a 
 listener, for nowhere in "In Memoriam" is there record that 
 
 1 Coleridge, The Destiny of Nations, II. 17-22. 
 
 2 Coleridge, The Eolian Harp, 11. 44-48. 
 ' Coleridge, The Nightingale, 1. 15. 
 
 * Tintern Abbey, Globe ed. of Wordsworth, p. 94. 
 ^ Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 11. 195-98. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 133 
 
 nature was to him anything but an echo of his own mood of "calm 
 despair" or "wild imrest."' 
 
 Nor did Tennj-son progress in philosophy beyond Shelley, the 
 prophet of revolt. More truly, he did not progress so far. "In 
 Memoriam" shows no spirit of revolt against the existing order, 
 none of that vicarious passion for freedom, none of that intense, 
 unresting devotion to truth, which in Shelley ever beat its wings 
 against the void. It is freedom that forms the keynote in all 
 Shelley's descriptions of his ideal world — a world where he^saw 
 
 "Religion's pomp made desolate by the scorn 
 Of Wisdom's faintest smile, and thrones uptorn. 
 And dwellings of mild people interspersed 
 With undivided fields of ripening corn. 
 And love made free,"- 
 
 Freedom and \'irtue are for him synonymous: 
 
 "All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil."^ 
 The triumph of Pi'ometheus is the triumph of truth and freedom : 
 
 "To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; 
 To forgive wrongs darker than death or night ; 
 To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; 
 To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates 
 From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; 
 Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; 
 This ... is to be 
 Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free."^ 
 
 The magnificent "Ode to Liberty" is a matchless paean of the 
 Rights of Man, thundering in deep organ tones the glories of 
 freedom. Similar utterances of other poets grow weak and pale 
 beside 
 
 " Like heaven's sun girt by the exhalation 
 Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise, 
 Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation 
 Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies 
 At dreaming midnight o'er the western wave."^ 
 
 ' bee above, pp. 87-88. 
 
 2 The Revolt of Islam, Canto VII, Stanza XXXV. 
 
 3 Prometheus Unbound, Act II, Scene 4. 
 « Ibid., Act IV, end. 
 
 ' Ode to Liberty, Stanza XI. 
 
134 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Tennyson was too thoroughly conservative to realize the need of 
 freedom; or else his personal problem crowded out of his mind, 
 as he wrote "In Memoriam," needs foreign to his own nature and 
 crisis. Unless such an explanation is accepted, it is hard to 
 conceive why, in a time when world events were making men of 
 sensitive soul aUve to the new spirit of freedom, there should be, 
 in a philosophical poem, no hint of the philosophy of liberty. 
 Yet Tennyson need not have been overconservative to fall behind 
 Shelley in this respect. Shelley's might be the voice of the twen- 
 tieth century radical, with an infusion of idealism. 
 
 Nowhere did Tennj^son more than approximate the depth, the 
 thoughtfulness, the discernment, the originaUty of interpretation 
 which can be found repeatedly in Shelley's attempts to read the 
 riddle of the universe. The life of earth is a dream, a shadow, a 
 symbol, a succession of "stormy visions," the awakening from 
 which is what men call death. Behind the phantoms is reality, 
 the reality to which Shelley would attain, though attainment came 
 by way of torment like that of his Titan. So struggUng for truth, 
 he reached a perception of the immanent soul of the world. 
 
 "How glorious art thou, Earth! And if thou be 
 The shadow of some spirit lovelier still, 
 Though evil stain its work, and it should be 
 Like its creation, weak yet beautiful, 
 I could fall down and worship that and thee."^ 
 
 There is a suggestion of such an interpretation of the universe in 
 Tennyson's Une, "They are but broken lights of Thee," which 
 amounts to his conclusion of the whole matter. But Tennyson 
 was finally content with the faith of the mystic, who, accepting 
 what he deems to be impossible of proof, rehes on intuition for 
 assurance. Through years he tried to reason out a standing- 
 ground for his faith ; failing, and knowing faith to be the necessity 
 of his soul, he made the mystic's leap in the dark. But there was 
 in Shelley none of the mystic. His restless soul could not be 
 satisfied with any faith for which his swift intellect gave him no 
 foundation. A philosophical position based on intuitive faith 
 would have seemed to him a wickedness and a hypocrisy. With 
 the intensity of the zealot he sought truth for its own sake; and 
 the solution of life at which he arrived was therefore more truly 
 
 ^ Prometheus Unbound, Act II, Scene 3. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 135 
 
 philosophical, even though in his passionate enthusiasms Shelley 
 seemed to display none of the balance of the philosopher's tempera- 
 ment. Tennyson's problem is not the relation of all the visible 
 life of the universe to the Unknowable behind it; his narrower 
 problem is the relation of one individual soul to that unseen 
 world. Consequently there is in Tennyson no such comprehension 
 of the relation between the seen and the unseen as in the Unes from 
 "Adonais": 
 
 "The One remains, the many change and pass; 
 Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; 
 Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 
 Until Death tramples it to fragments."^ 
 
 Tennyson was too much befogged, in his groping after a solution 
 for the problem of his own personal grief, to have the penetrating 
 world-vision necessary for so tremendous a summarj^ of the 
 universe. His opinions not only were intuitive but were expressed 
 in a manner wholly emotional; but Shelley, with all his passion 
 and wild inspiration, makes use of his emotional appeal only as 
 the garment of a well reasoned and formulated thought. The 
 passion of grief for a single beloved individual is hardly comparable, 
 as a source of vision and power, with the passion of a man who 
 carried the burden of a whole world's grief and oppression on his 
 tameless, rebellious heart. 
 
 It is the same generous, impersonal point of view that differ- 
 entiated Shelley's view of immortality from Tennyson's. The 
 poet of "In Memoriam" was bound by his own desire; how be 
 true to philosophy in the face of his own heart's longing for what 
 philosophy forbade? Shelley, possessed of the philosopher's 
 logic though not of the philosopher's temperament, and under no 
 pressure of a private grief, could write 
 
 " the pure spirit shall flow 
 Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 
 A portion of the Eternal."'^ 
 
 This is the only consistent philosophical creed of immortality; in so 
 far as Tennyson refused to accept it, by so much less was he the 
 philosopher than was Shelley. 
 
 I Adonais, Stanza LII. * Ibid., Stanza XXXVIII. 
 
136 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 The philosophy of "In Memoriam," then, points backward 
 rather than forward. It reflects of the thought of the period no 
 more than its predecessors reJQect. In the matter of the poetic 
 qualities which were the contribution to English verse of Keats 
 and Shelley particularly, the poem shows no more advance over 
 earlier writing than its thought does over earlier thought. Tenny- 
 son's deserved fame as a poet rests largely on the characteristics 
 of music, diction, beauty of sense impression, and the power of 
 word and line to express mood. But his music does not surpass 
 Shelley's; does not equal it, indeed, if to be master of many 
 instruments and many rhythms is a test of the musician. The 
 music of "In Memoriam" is that of the violin, now wailing, now 
 mellow with the memory of gladness, now soaring on a triumphant 
 overtone of joy conquering grief. The verse sings as it tells how 
 
 " round us aU the thicket rang 
 To many a flute of Arcady."^ 
 
 It sings as it re-echoes the Christmas bells, 
 
 "Each voice four changes on the wind, 
 That now dilate, and now decrease."^ 
 
 It sings in the picture of autumn calm — 
 
 " Cahn and deep peace on this high wold, 
 And on these dews that drench the furze, 
 And all the silvery gossamers 
 That twinkle into green and gold";' 
 
 and in the picture of the spring breeze at evening — 
 
 "Sweet after showers, ambrosial air. 
 That roUest from the gorgeous gloom 
 Of evening over brake and bloom 
 And meadow." ^ 
 
 But always the music is of the violin, and always the theme is one, 
 in a melody as reiterant as that of a Bach fugue, though less 
 formal in its cadences. In contrast, in the single poem " Adonais," 
 
 ^ In Memoriam, Canto XXIII. ' Ihid., Canto XI. 
 
 2 Ihid., Canto XXVII. * Ibid., Canto LXXXVI. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 137 
 
 the work of Shelley best comparable with "In Memoriam," 
 there sounds the plaintive cry of the violin : 
 
 "His head was bound with pansies overblown, 
 And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; 
 
 He came the last, neglected and apart ; 
 
 A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart;"^ 
 
 and the majestic note of the organ : 
 
 " The splendours of the firmament of time 
 May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; 
 Like stars to their appointed height they climb 
 And death is a low mist which cannot blot 
 The brightness it may veil;" * 
 
 and the Hquid sweetness of the harp: 
 
 "He is a portion of the loveliness 
 Which once he made more lovely." ^ 
 
 An elegy could not contain such a flute note as that of the "Sky- 
 lark"; the clarion call of the "West Wind" and the rapid sweep 
 of fingers over keys in the rhythm of the "Cloud" lack the appro- 
 priate quality of melancholy. But even in this single rhythm 
 the variety of musical tone shows that Shelley could "speak 
 sweet ... in many sorts of music." Tennyson, though his 
 melody far surpassed that of predecessors, contemporaries, and 
 most successors, had not learned what Shelley knew. With the 
 possible exception of Swinburne, no poet has learned it. 
 
 Again, one of the masterly characteristics of Tennyson is his 
 choice of vivid, expressive words to paint pictures and to convey 
 moods. Even here he was but carrying on the tradition created 
 by Keats and Shelley before him. Whatever the beauty of the 
 diction of "In Memoriam," it contains nothing to surpass the 
 description of Athens in the " Ode to Liberty" : 
 
 "Athens arose: a city such as vision 
 Builds from the purple crags and silver towers 
 Of battlemented cloud, as in derision 
 Of kingliest masonry : the ocean-floors 
 Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it; 
 
 Its portals are inhabited 
 
 By thunder-zoned winds, each head 
 Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlanded." 
 
 ' Stanza XXXIII. ' Stanza XLIII. 
 
 2 Stanza XLIV. 
 
138 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 In the lyrics of "Prometheus Unbound" there are combinations 
 of_^words unbelievably lovely: 
 
 "We wandered, underneath the young gray dawn, 
 And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds 
 Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains 
 Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind; 
 And the white dew on the new bladed grass, 
 Just piercing the dark earth, hung silently : 
 
 A wind arose among the pines ; it shook 
 The clinging music from their boughs, and then 
 Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts, 
 Were heard." ^ 
 
 Such passages as these show not only that if Tennyson was a 
 master of diction there had been masters preceding him, but also 
 that in the rendering into verse of sense impressions he was not 
 unrivalled. Similar citations can be made from Keats, whose 
 point of contact with Tennyson is the vivid sensuous beauty of 
 his^descriptions. At one moment, as his pages pass, 
 
 "From the darkening gloom a silver dove 
 Upsoars, and darts into the eastern light";* 
 
 at the next, 
 
 "Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight: 
 With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, 
 And taper fingers catching at all things, 
 To bind them all about with tiny rings;"' 
 
 "peaceful images" follow: 
 
 "the stirs 
 Of a swan's neck unseen among the rushes : 
 A linnet starting all about the bushes : 
 A butterfly, with golden wings broad parted, 
 Nestling a rose."* 
 
 In view of such comparison, it is doing no injustice to Tennyson 
 to say that in writing his musical verse with its liquid puritj- of 
 diction and its vivid use of sensuous images for reproduction of 
 scene or mood, he was doing no more than poets before him had 
 done. His work was not creating art of a new character; rather, 
 
 1 Act II, Scene 1. ' Ibid., p. 24. 
 
 2 Keats, Cabinet ed., p. 20. * Ibid., p. 39. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 139 
 
 in its power and poise, in the sustained quality of its rich beauty, 
 it made a fitting climax for the art of the closing epoch. 
 
 With all that he had in common with his predecessors, in which 
 both he and they were the product of a time of storm and stress, 
 there are in Tennyson, as in Da vies and in Pope, individual 
 elements not dependent on the character of his times but rising 
 from his own soul. Whether or not his verse reaches the poetic 
 level of Shelley's, his poetry is better loved than that of any of 
 the poets before him. Shelley is to be admired; Keats is to be 
 wondered at; Wordsworth is to be revered, and sometimes to be 
 borne with patiently; but Tennyson is loved. Perhaps it is the 
 love that one gives to the friend who has shared with one his grief. 
 Perhaps there is a certain popular appeal in Tennyson that the 
 other writers fail of. Shelley's gloom and despair are the index 
 of few actual moods, in a normal existence, for Shelley's tragedy 
 was almost unique. Wordsworth's adoration of nature becomes 
 tiresome with much repetition. There are moments when the 
 sensuous beauty of the images of Keats cloys like too much sweet. 
 But Tennyson expresses, in language lovely enough to satisfy 
 the aesthetic sense, simple enough to come within the ken of the 
 simple heart, a mood consequent upon an experience escaped by 
 no one. The great reason for his appeal is that he puts satisfyingly 
 into words the emotions which men and women who are not 
 poets feel, and long to express, and cannot. 
 
 There are other factors in the appeal of "In Memoriam" 
 which differentiate Tennyson from his predecessors. One such 
 factor is his use of similes from the everyday human life which he 
 saw around him — homely similes, endeared by their common- 
 placeness and familiarity. The maiden waiting for the lover 
 who would never arrive; the lover saddened by finding his sweet- 
 heart away from home ; the grief of a household for a dead master ; 
 the bride leaving her father's house; the village maid who loves 
 above her station; the self-made man; the wife whose husband 
 has outgrown her — all these are figures out of the tapestry of 
 everyday, woven between sunrise and sunset, and holding the 
 attraction of the familiar. Perhaps the strongest appeal of all is 
 the religious element in the poem. It is unsurpassed as an exquisite 
 expression of intuitive faith, as the triumphant answer of mystic 
 to sceptic. As such its appeal will never be outworn, for both 
 mystic and sceptic are immortal. 
 
140 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 If to all these excellences be added the poise and balance, 
 unhasting, unresting, with which Tennyson pursues his theme, 
 he may be recognized as the best poetic product of the years 
 before him. But he was a product of the past. As was the case 
 with Pope, there was in his message little of the prophetic. A 
 touch of future vision appears once or twice. The well-known 
 New Year song calls for the ringing in of the new social order, the 
 ringing out of "the feud of rich and poor" and of "the narrowing 
 lust of gold." The deep voice cries "across the storm, 
 
 "Proclaiming social truth shall spread, 
 And justice," ^ 
 
 and prophesying a social convulsion in which thrones shall topple — 
 a consummation, in Tennyson's view, devoutly to be feared. 
 For the most part, however, there is no forward-pointing outlook, 
 no vision of the new time heralded by Charles Kingsley and the 
 Brownings. The man who, in the days when the Revolution of 
 1830 was giving new courage to the hearts of liberty-lovers through- 
 out Europe, could speak of it as 
 
 "The red fool-fury of the Seine"; 
 
 the man who could say with contempt, in another poem, 
 
 "We are not cotton-spinners all"^ 
 
 was too conservative to feel the social sympathy that heard the 
 cry of the children, or conceived an "Aurora Leigh," or expressed 
 through the pen of a clergyman the heart of an Alton Locke, or 
 put into the mouth of a Pippa the philosophy needed by the rich 
 and great. 
 
 Moreover, there is no suggestion in the poem of the revived 
 spirit of virility that Browning infused into English verse, freeing 
 it from the sentimental emotionalness that Enghsh poets had 
 caught from the German romantic school. The "new poetry" 
 of mid- Victorian times was to be characterized by ruggedness 
 and force rather than by music, by eccentric independence rather 
 than by grace and beauty. Too much of "In Memoriam" makes 
 the reader sad in spite of himself, even in those youthful days 
 
 1 In Memoriam, Canto CXXVII. 
 
 * Tennyson's Works, Cambridge ed., p. 269. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 141 
 
 before death has touched him. It is an opiate; Browning is a 
 tonic. The wholesome and determined ring of a faith in the 
 essential, immediate goodness of life has in it more of inspiration 
 than the melancholy, far-off hope for final good — a hope so doubt- 
 fully expressed, when read in contrast with "Asolando," for 
 example, that it seems to ring its own knell. Tennyson's hope 
 is a hope seen through tears. There are no tears in the soul of 
 the man who 
 
 "Never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
 
 Never doubted clouds would break; 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 
 Sleep to wake."^ 
 
 Tennyson, Uke Davies and Pope, was the voice of the end of a 
 period — in each case a period distinctive, full of movement, 
 productive of change. Each poet sums up in himself the character- 
 istic literary qualities achieved by the writers preceding him or 
 contemporary with him; thus each is a reflex of the literary life 
 of the time. Yet each achieves his individual distinction as a 
 poet, not bj^ virtue of the q'uaUties he shares with or reflects from 
 others, but by those elements of his art which grew out of his own 
 individuaUty. The poet side of the poet-philosopher is less 
 wholly a mirror than the philosopher side. 
 
 * Epilogve to Asolando. 
 
VI 
 
 He who would write on a philosophical theme cannot avoid 
 religion. For philosophy is the eternally persistent, the eternally 
 foiled attempt to answer the "Why?" of the universe — that 
 riddle inseparably connected not only with the seen and concrete, 
 hke man and nature, but with the unseen and abstract, hke God 
 and the soul, immortahty and freedom, terms which, whether 
 looked upon as hypotheses or as facts, represent the great issues 
 of religion. The philosopher, who since the beginning of time 
 has thought that by searching he could find out God, if only to 
 disprove His existence, cannot, though he call himself positivist, 
 sceptic, or atheist, escape religion. 
 
 The poet-philosophers of this discussion, essentially conservative 
 in philosophy, and filled with an intense moral earnestness of 
 purpose, did not desire to escape it. Inextricably interwoven 
 with the fabric of each poet's philosophy, ser^dng as inspiration 
 to the most truly poetic portions of his poetry, appearing in one 
 as creed, in another as ethical dictum, in the third as faith, is 
 religion, A complete understanding of their relation to the thought 
 of their times necessitates a brief review of the religious thought 
 of each epoch, and of the poet's religious position in relation to 
 that thought. 
 
 The thought-forces that made the movement known as the 
 Reformation did not become a vital part of the mind of the 
 average non-ecclesiastical thinker until long after Protestantism 
 was an established fact. The influences that had made the loyal 
 Englishman an Anglican had worked out in practice long before 
 they had become conscious ideas. Such a man as Davies, with a 
 creed entirely orthodox from the point of view of the established 
 church, was swayed by thought currents set in motion a century 
 before him, but only in his time seeping into the soil of the average 
 individual consciousness. What were the elements that made the 
 background for the rehgion of Davies' time? 
 
 Free thought, a term too often confounded with agnosticism 
 and materialism, was not a nineteenth century product. The 
 first of its modern forms was the rebellion of independent thinkers 
 against the schoolmen. The flooding light of the Renaissance 
 showed too clearly the dust that had accumulated in the mediaeval 
 
 142 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 143 
 
 storehouse of church doctrine. A church so fearful of its authority 
 that it refused to face the truth presented by Copernicus and 
 GaHleo could not command the respect of honestly thinking men. 
 Scholars who, in the face of the discovery of an old world of learn- 
 ing, full of the treasures of art and thought, and of a new world 
 with still unexplored possibilities for adventure and for wealth, 
 could still dispute "with unabated enthusiasm about instants, 
 essences, and quiddities,'^ and who could still direct their students 
 to the study of the old Trivium and Quadrivium in wretched 
 mediaeval text-books or corrupt translations of the ancients, 
 could not compete with the fresh, humanistic influence of the 
 enthusiasts for the secular classics. Erasmus, the great humanist 
 of the church, who combined a rehgious purpose with a trained 
 intelligence, had a two-fold work to do, in bringing about the 
 breakdown of scholasticism that paved the way for the Refor- 
 mation. By his bitter ridicule of the corruption of monastic life 
 and of the bigotry and ignorance of theologians he fed the dis- 
 satisfaction with church practices that was leading to distrust of 
 church dogma. And by his apphcation of classical learning and 
 humanistic methods of scholarship to Biblical study and interpre- 
 tation he paved the way for that individual interpretation of 
 scripture which developed into the substitution of scriptural 
 authority for the authority of the Church of Rome. 
 
 Erasmus may be called the first of modern free thinkers. This 
 is not to miscall him the first of the reformers, for he was antedated 
 by Hus and Wiclif. But he was the first thorough scholar to 
 combine with the doctrinal and ethical viewpoint an intellectual 
 approach to religious problems; and the first to see that in the 
 application to religion of scholarly, not scholastic, habits and 
 progressive methods of thought lay the salvation of Christianity 
 from the condition of dry rot into which the bigotry of the ecclesi- 
 astic and the credulous ignorance of the layman had brought it. 
 Colet as well as Erasmus saw that an independent, vigorous, 
 intelligent interpretation of the Bible meant new life for the church; 
 but it was Erasmus who used his wealth of scholarship to make the 
 interpretation possible. It was Colet who called the schoohnen 
 dull and stupid fellows; it was Colet who said that Aquinas had 
 "contaminated the whole doctrine of Christ with his own profane 
 
 * Drummond, Erasmus, Vol. I, p. 67. 
 
144 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 philosophy;"^ it was Colet who, in his lectures on the Epistle of 
 St. Paul to the Romans, boldly threw off the chains of the scholastic 
 use of proof-texts and treated the Bible as a book like other 
 books, except that it contained more vital truth, and the apostle 
 as a man like other men.^ But it was Erasmus who not only 
 seared with his scathing satire in "The Praise of Folly" the 
 "superciHous and irritable" race of divines,^ who spent their 
 time in solving such profound mysteries of divinity as "whether 
 God could have taken upon him the form of a woman, of the 
 devil, of an ass, of a cucumber, or a flint-stone"; who not only 
 exposed relentlessly the corruption of the monastic life and the 
 un-Christlikeness of Christian teaching so-called;* but who also, 
 as the earliest of modern "higher critics," applied the methods of 
 secular learning to scriptural translation and interpretation, 
 removing the Bible from its position as a fetich, or as a storehouse 
 of proof-texts for upholding the doctrines of the schoolmen, to 
 that of a guide and standard of spiritual truth, from which, if 
 rightly understood, might be deduced the fundamentals of Chris- 
 tian doctrine. His restoration of the New Testament to its 
 original Greek was the work of a man who cared not only for the 
 purity of reUgion but for the purity of art; the Bible was to him 
 not only a sacred book but a great work of literature. That he 
 felt such a restoration to be the first step on the way toward 
 translation into the vernacular is evident from his own preface. 
 "I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to 
 himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum 
 them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile 
 with their stories the tedium of his journey."^ His edition of the 
 New Testament, moreover, contained daring criticisms of the 
 Vulgate, enraging the monks, who felt that the Holy Scriptures 
 were superior to the rules of grammar. It ventured upon textual 
 criticism, suggesting interpolations, doubts as to authorship, and 
 possible variant readings, quite in the manner of modern critical 
 scholarship, and treating the Bible as the humanists would have 
 
 ' Drummond, Erasmus, Vol. I, pp. 82-83. 
 
 ^ Meiklejohn, Erasmus, in The Reformers, p. 161. 
 
 ' Drummond, pp. 192-94. 
 
 * Enchiridion, or Christian Soldier's Dagger. 
 
 » Meiklejohn, p. 176. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 145 
 
 treated a piece of secular literature.^ For in the work of Erasmus 
 were combined the best elements of the humanistic learning and 
 of the new spirit of religious freedom which permeated the Europe 
 of the early sixteenth century. 
 
 Had the ideas of Erasmus borne legitimate fruit, there would 
 have been substituted for the papal assumption of the authority 
 of the church to enforce its dogmatic reading of scripture as the 
 only true one, a free and individual interpretation of the Bible, 
 made by each man for himself, each constructing for himself a 
 rehgious platform based on scriptural authority but shaped 
 according to his own thought. But the habit of submission to 
 authority was too strong in the minds of the mass of the people, 
 and the temptation to capitahze that habit was too powerful, 
 even though unconsciously so, in the minds of men with genius to 
 lead. Instead of dogmatic decrees of an infallible church, people 
 found themselves under bondage to dogmatic interpretation of an 
 infallibly authoritative book, an interpretation dictated by the 
 reformers, who, while repudiating the practices of the Church 
 of Rome, had learned all too well from its example how to control 
 the minds of the masses bj'' the fear of authority. It was the 
 external trappings of the church that the Reformation shook off. 
 Luther and Calvin and the Enghsh reformers, while insisting 
 on the rights of the individual conscience and asserting the possi- 
 biUty and necessity of man's individual approach to God, made 
 little divergence from the position of Augustine and Aquinas in 
 their use of scripture as a basis of doctrine. In the Thirty-nine 
 Articles of the Church of England appear the Trinity, the Incarna- 
 tion, the bodily Resurrection, the infallibility of the canon of 
 scripture, original sin, predestination, the vicarious atonement — 
 all doctrines of Rome. The divergence from Rome brought 
 about at the Reformation is noticeable in such articles as those 
 having to do with the definition of the church and the limitation 
 of its authority, with its inability to enforce belief, with purgatory, 
 pardons, and the worship of saints and relics, with the use of the 
 vernacular in church services, the number of the sacraments, and 
 the administration of the eucharist in both kinds, and with the 
 cehbacy of the clergy. This latter list concerns church usage, 
 not the beUef of the individual churchman. It is well known that 
 
 1 Drummond, pp. 310-320. 
 
146 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Luther's attack was upon the abuse of power by the church, upon 
 the corruption of its practices, and upon its interference between 
 the individual soul and God. Except for his emphasis upon 
 faith rather than works there was httle new in his theology. 
 
 Nor was there novelty in the theology of Calvin, which was in 
 many respects a replica of that of Augustine. Strenuous as 
 Calvin was in his combat with Roman teaching regarding penance, 
 the earning or purchasing of pardons, prayer for souls in purgatory, 
 and the other usages with which his cardinal doctrines of justifica- 
 tion by faith and salvation by grace were in opposition ; rigorous 
 as he was in establishing and enforcing the laws of his newly 
 conceived theocratic state; the points in his creed most inseparably 
 connected with his name — predestination and election, the fall 
 of man, and eternal salvation or reprobation — are all inheritances 
 from Augustine, to whose severe behef in these doctrines the 
 leaders of the mediaeval church had, by their emphasis on good 
 works, forced the reformers to return. ^ " Calvin invents nothing," 
 says a recent French biography; "he reviews, he analyzes, he 
 develops, and especially he affirms."^ The God of Augustine 
 was much like the God of Calvin — "unique and supreme, the 
 beginning and the end of all things, in whom all things exist."' 
 According to Augustine as to Calvin, the elect are predestined 
 to salvation, the reprobate abandoned to their fate. And in 
 proving from scripture his doctrine of election, Calvin proceeded 
 in a way similar to that of the schoolmen of Rome, "making 
 important the texts favorable to him, neglecting those contrary, 
 and not asking if his viewpoint accorded with the most ancient 
 testimony regarding the preaching of Jesus. "^ Yet, though 
 Calvin thought of the Bible not as a progressive literature but as a 
 mere storehouse of texts and doctrines from which to draw what- 
 ever he needed,^ none the less he saw in the Bible the only true 
 means of conamunication between God and man, no intermediary 
 priest being needed in the presence of so complete a revelation. 
 In this belief was embodied what was the greatest achievement 
 of the Reformation — the doing away with the work of the priest 
 as go-between. Efforts to win heaven by good works and by 
 
 ' Dyer, Calvin, p. 219. * Bossert, Calvin, p. 71. 
 
 » Bossert, Calvin, p. 66. * Ihid., p. 53. 
 
 » lUd., p. 68. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 147 
 
 penance were shown to be futile. Church organization was 
 transformed. The superstitious worship of relics and blind belief 
 in their healing efficacy were abandoned. Usages growing out of 
 the importation into the early church of heathen rites and cere- 
 monies, such as the apotheosis of Mary to the position of queen 
 of heaven and mother of God, were looked upon with horror. 
 But the fundamental tenets of the creed in its primitive form 
 were accepted with little question. Abstract theology in the 
 sixteenth century was scarcely changed from the theology of the 
 scholastic centuries. The most recent accepted and orthodox 
 P*rotestant teaching in the church of Davies' time was a combina- 
 tion of Roman doctrine as modified in the Thirty-nine Articles, 
 and of Roman doctrine as modified in Calvin's "Institutes of the 
 Christian Religion." 
 
 It was this theology, a direct inheritance from Augustine and 
 the rest of the fathers, that lay, in spite of its conservatism, at 
 the foundation of the sixteenth century religious movements of 
 extreme individualistic revolt. The reformers wished no improve- 
 ment in doctrine over that of Augustine; "in the authority 
 which they accorded to him, they placed him immediately after 
 the Holy Scriptures."^ The work of John Knox and the Scotch 
 Presbyterians, influenced by direct contact with Calvin in Geneva, 
 and the struggles of the Huguenots to establish Protestantism 
 in France were efforts not for a change of doctrine, but for a 
 removal of corruption of doctrine and for correction of abuses in 
 church practice and administration. English Puritans, returning 
 from Geneva at the accession of Elizabeth, planned to purify 
 the worship, the preaching, the church government from all 
 traces of paganism, "with their eyes fixed on Geneva."^ But 
 their revolt was directed toward freedom of usage, not toward 
 the introduction of a new belief. Questions of conformity to 
 stipulated ritual, of the use of a set form of worship, of submission 
 to the ecclesiastical hierarchy were the inspiration of such bitter 
 and tragic contests as the Martin Marprelate controversy, in 
 which the strongest religious individualism asserted itseK. The 
 error of such heretics as Udall, Cartwright, and Penry was not a 
 matter of unorthodox belief but of opposition to the tendency of 
 the established church to assert its administrative control over 
 the consciences of men. 
 
 > Bossert, Catvin, p. 218. ^ ji,i^^ p. 217. 
 
148 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Some independent religious thinkers there had been before the 
 time of Davies, who had attempted to introduce into theology 
 new ideas about God, life, the soul, nature, and immortality. 
 Their treatment at the hands of CathoUc and Protestant alike, 
 for their daring in promulgating new systems of belief, is sufficient 
 evidence that the doctrines of the Protestant churches of the late 
 sixteenth century had altered little from the cardinal doctrines 
 of Rome. Servetus, a Spanish physician, dared to teach a simple 
 gospel of a Christ "who demanded no act of adoration for himself, 
 who walked in the midst of men as one of them"; dared further to 
 assert that "the metaphysical Christ imagined by the theologians 
 was a deceitful mask that hid the real Christ."^ These heresies, 
 together with the refusal to accept in its absurd mediaeval inter- 
 pretation the doctrine of the Trinity taken over by Protestantism 
 from the Church of Rome, and together with his belief in a God 
 immanent in the whole universe, into whose being all creation 
 will finally be absorbed, represented a really progressive step in 
 theology. For his ideas he was burned at the stake in 1553 by 
 the Council of Geneva, with the reluctant concurrence of Calvin.* 
 Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, wandered from country to 
 country of Europe, spreading his message of the God indwelling, 
 of whose thought all nature is a reflection, the God who lives "in 
 the blade of grass, in the grain of sand, in the atom that floats in 
 the sunbeam, as well as in the boundless All."^ Applying the 
 Copernican theory to reUgion, he taught that the earth was but 
 one among many worlds, no more important in the universe 
 than any other planet. For a doctrine so subversive of the 
 mediaeval teaching of the plan of salvation, which Protestants 
 still held as an inheritance from Rome, and to maintain which 
 Rome closed its eyes upon all scientific learning, Bruno was hunted 
 from land to land, and finally burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 
 by the Inquisition.* The fate of these two forerunners of Spinoza 
 shows the conservatism of the theology of both branches of the 
 Christian Church, and proves that the progressive theologians 
 of Davies' time were not the Puritans but the pantheists. 
 
 » Ibid., p. 153. 
 
 2 Orr, Calvin, in The Reformers, pp. 274-82. 
 
 Draper, Religion and Science, p. 216. 
 
 ' Rogers, History of Philosophy, pp. 239-242. 
 
 * Draper, pp. 178-180. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 149 
 
 From Davies' relations to current philosophy, science, and 
 literature, conservatism in his religious position is to be expected. 
 Therefore it is not a disappointment that "Nosce Teipsum" 
 shows no sign of the influence of any freer, more progressive 
 thought than that of Calvin. At the very outset of the poem 
 occurs a discussion of the fall of man and its consequences which 
 is Calvinistic in the extreme.^ Man, says Davies, was made 
 perfect. 
 
 "God's hand had written in the hearts 
 Of the first parents, all the rules of good." 
 
 Not only his moral but his intellectual nature was in the image of 
 
 God. 
 
 " Their reason's eye was sharpe and cleere. 
 And (as an eagle can behold the sunne) 
 Could have approcht th' Eternall Light as neere, 
 As the intellectuall angels could have done." 
 
 To man in this perfect state the "Spirit of Lies" suggested the 
 desire to know evil, which they could only know by doing it. 
 
 "Ill they desir'd to know, and ill they did; 
 And to give Passion eyes, made Reason blind." 
 
 As passion awaked, and as experience became man's teacher, 
 reason died. 
 
 "But then grew Reason darke, that she no more, 
 Could the faire formes of Good and Truth discern; 
 Battes they became, that eagles were before : 
 And this they got by their desire to learne." 
 
 Of course the idea that "by one man sin entered into the world" 
 is as old as Paul, and was woven inextricably into the fabric of 
 mediaeval and modern religious thought in the forms given to it 
 by Augustine and Calvin. No priest or theologian, except such 
 heretics as the Traducians, sought for any origin of evil other 
 than the taste of that forbidden fruit which 
 
 "Brought death into the world and all our woe." 
 
 But the effect of the Fall on the intellect, of which Davies makes 
 so much, has been shown by Professor Sneath to be a characteristic 
 teaching of Calvin, based on his reading of Augustine, and "not 
 
 » Davies' Works, ed. by Grosart, Vol. I, pp. 15-16. 
 
150 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 -common in Christian theology."^ Before the disobedience of 
 Adam, as Calvin wrote, "Man excelled in these noble endowments 
 in his primitive condition, when reason, intelligence, prudence, 
 and judgment not only sufficed for the government of his earthly 
 life, but also enabled him to rise up to God and eternal happiness,"'^ 
 After the Fall, "soundness of mind and integrity of heart were 
 withdrawn. . . . For although there is still some residue of intelli- 
 gence and judgment, we cannot call a mind sound and entire 
 which is both weak and immersed in darkness. . . . Since reason 
 ... is partly weakened and partly corrupted, a shapeless ruin 
 is all that remains."^ 
 
 Closely connected with the doctrine of the Fall is that of original 
 sin. In a discussion of the question of the creation of the soul, 
 occurs a passage that answers the Traducians, who argued that 
 one soul must spring from another soul, 
 
 "As fire from fire, or light from Ught doth spring,"* 
 
 because otherwise, if God created each soul directly, He would be 
 "the author of her sinne." In this passage Davies gives elaborate 
 proof that, although God is the direct creator of every soul, the 
 origin of sin is in no way a divine responsibiUty. God is perfectly 
 able, reasons this lawyer turned theologian, to create the soul 
 without creating its sin. That the soul must be created by God 
 admits of several proofs.'^ No one but the Almighty could create 
 something from nothing, therefore the soul is created by God. 
 Further, the argument continues, 
 
 " If soules doe other soules beget, 
 
 'Tis by themselves, or by the bodie's power; 
 If by themselves, what doth their working let, 
 But they might soules engender every hour?" 
 
 That such engendering does not take place is a second proof that 
 soul does not spring from soul. Again, such a derivation of the 
 soul would involve change and motion of one into the other; but 
 
 » E. H. Sneath, Philosophy of Poetry, pp. 55-57. 
 
 " Ibid., quoted from Beveridge's translation of Calvin'a Institutes, Vol. I, 
 Bk. I, ch. 15, sec. 12. 
 
 * Ibid., quoted from the Institutes, Vol. I, Bk. II, ch, 2, sec. 12. 
 
 * Davies, ed. by Grosart, Vol. I, pp. 47-48. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. 49-52. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 151 
 
 "Change and motion still corruption beare; 
 How shall we then the soule immortall prove?" 
 
 By a succession of such proofs, of which the three given will 
 supply sufficient example, Davies substantiates his proposition. 
 The casuistic method of the argument is unmistakable; his logic 
 is the logic of the schoolmen. Elizabethan in his feeling for the 
 classics, in his naive directness, in his fresh and modern way of 
 presenting many an accepted truth, in his receptive attitude 
 toward such scientific discoveries as had come to his notice, he 
 saw no more than did the schoolm.en that the things of the spirit 
 transcended the bounds of logic. Perhaps a naturally legal mind 
 beUeved that such rules of logic as would do for law would serve 
 equally well for religion. Perhaps the natural product of a 
 credulous age was the supposition that because one beUeved a 
 thing one could inevitably prove it. An absence of doubt may 
 imply a conviction that if one takes the trouble one can prove the 
 proposition which, since it is not doubted, must be provable. 
 It is the agnostic age, Uke that of Tennyson, which brings its 
 doubters to embrace by faith the truths that never can be proved. 
 Having proved that God creates the soul directly, Davies 
 proceeds to show that nevertheless He is not the author of sin.^ 
 And here Calvin's influence is dominant again. God is the Maker 
 
 " Of all the Soules, in all the men that be : 
 Yet their corruption is no fault of His, 
 But the first man's that broke God's first decree." 
 
 Sin, which began with Adam, was transmitted from generation 
 to generation. In the person of Adam were included all his 
 descendants; he was the root and his posterity the branches, but 
 the root and the branch "are but one tree." The corruption 
 of the root means that the whole tree is corrupt. Therefore, as 
 soon as the soul, which God makes "good, rich, and fair," comes 
 into union with the body, which is the heir of Adam, the whole 
 man is depraved. 
 
 The germ of this doctrine, too, is as old as Paul; "by one man's 
 disobedience many were made sinners." But the form in which 
 Davies studied it was Calvin's — a form Hkely to have been as 
 surprising to the loving-hearted apostle to the Gentiles as it is 
 incredible to the modern Christian. " In regard to human nature," 
 
 » Ilnd., pp. 52-60. 
 
152 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 wrote Calvin, "Adam was not merely the progenitor, but, as it 
 were, a root, and by his corruption the whole human race was 
 deservedly vitiated."^ "Adam's ill desert," says Davies, is 
 "transferred unto his guilty race," Calvin, too, considered guilt 
 an inheritance. "Original sin may be defined as an hereditary 
 corruption and depravity of our nature. "^ 
 
 Moreover, Davies, like Calvin, defends the justice of God in 
 the apparently unjust decree of punishment for all men because 
 of one man's sin. Why did not "His high Providence" prevent 
 "The declination of the first man's will?" 
 
 In a few lines the amateur theologian, apparently unaware of the 
 magnitude of the task he is attempting so ingenuously, disposes 
 of the age-long inconsistency between the sovereignty of man and 
 the sovereignty of God. In his answer to the problem, Davies 
 allows more room for the operation of free will than did Calvin, 
 who was a thoroughgoing determinist. If God had prevented 
 Adam from sinning, 
 
 "It had bene one, as if His Word had said, 
 I will henceforth that Man no man shall bee, 
 
 "For what is Man without a mooving mind. 
 Which hath a judging wit, and chusing will? 
 Now, if God's power should her election bind. 
 Her motions then would cease and stand all still." 
 
 In other words, man was no man if his motives were not his own. 
 The reason for the existence of the soul in man was "that he should 
 his Maker know and love," But there is no merit in love if it 
 "be compeld and cannot chuse." Calvin's persecution of Jerome 
 Bolsec shows that he had little tolerance for a belief in free will.^ 
 It has been suggested that perhaps his uncompromising adherence 
 to the doctrine of predestination was due to an unwillingness to be 
 involved in the inconsistencies arising from the attempt to reconcile 
 two conflicting theories, Davies, who feels no such hesitancy, 
 seems here to show the influence of Aquinas, who held that free 
 will was indispensable as a basis for morality, since acts were not 
 virtuous if compulsory,* Aquinas made no satisfactory reconcilia- 
 
 * Sneath, p. 135, quoted from Calvin's Institutes, Vol. I, Bk, II, ch, 1, sec. 6. 
 ' Ibid., quoted from the Institutes, Vol, I, Bk, II, ch. 1, sec. 8. 
 
 3 Dyer, Calvin, pp. 224-237. 
 
 * Perrier, Scholasticism. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 153 
 
 tion of the two contradictory principles, any more than did 
 Davies. But in one way both Calvin and Davies have advanced 
 beyond the schoolmen. They are not satisfied with the conclu- 
 sions of their own logic. Writing of himself, Calvin said, "The 
 sum of his doctrine is, that God, in a wonderful manner, and by 
 methods unknown to us, governs all things to what end he pleases, 
 so that his eternal will is the first cause of everything. But why 
 God should will what appears to us by no means fit and proper 
 he acknowledges to be incomprehensible."^ So also Davies: 
 
 "Then let us praise that Power, which makes us be 
 Men as we are, and rest contented so; 
 And knowing Man's fall was curiositie, 
 Admire God's counsels, which we cannot know." 
 
 In many minor details Davies showed himself willing to accept 
 on credence the dictum of the church of his time. He had a 
 childlike faith in the legends of "the proud towre whose points 
 the clouds did hit,"^ of the creation of woman from the rib of 
 Adam,^ of the forming of man from the dust of the ground;* he 
 believed willingly in the virgin birth^ and the plan of salvation 
 by the death of Christ;^ he agreed with contemporary Presby- 
 terians that 
 
 "Our Wit is given, Ahnighty God to know; 
 Our Will is given to love Him, being known,"' 
 
 a declaration later to be paraphrased in the famous "Man's 
 chief end" of the Westminster Shorter Catechism; he concurred 
 absolutely in the worship of the Trinity, carrying his belief even 
 to the verge of superstition, when he likens sense, wit, and will, 
 the three powers of the soul, to 
 
 "A shadow of the blessed Trinitie;"* 
 
 he echoes Calvin again, as well as all previous orthodox theologians, 
 in his belief in predestination : 
 
 "First, God from infinite eternitie 
 
 Decreed, what hath been, is, or shall bee done; 
 And was resolv'd, that every man should bee. 
 And in his turne, his race of life should run."» 
 
 > Dyer, p. 222. « Ibid., pp. 28, 58. 
 
 2 Davies, ed. by Grosart, Vol. I, p. 28. ' Ibid., p. 80. 
 
 ^ Ibid., p. 51. 8/Wd., p. 81. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 45. » Ibid., p. 53. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 51, 
 
154 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 But most of all does he seem a product of an age just emerging 
 from the domination of scholasticism in his attempt at proof of 
 immortality. It is a brilliant example of proof defensive rather 
 than constructive; he beheves first, and afterwards produces 
 proof to support his belief, instead of proving first, and believing 
 only that for which proof gives ground. The second course is 
 logical, if Ukely to end in scepticism; but an effort to prove the 
 tenets of an intuitive faith is illogical because superfluous, and is 
 bound to end either in utter rout or in a loss of intellectual sincerity 
 — that is, unless the reasoner has the childhke mind of a Davies, 
 which will let him think he has proved his position whether he 
 has or not. 
 
 Although immortaUty is a fundamental Christian doctrine, it is, 
 of course, not peculiar to Christianity. Traces of other influences 
 than those of Calvin and the schoolmen may be found among the 
 reasons Davies alleges. Cicero and Aristotle are certainly to be 
 identified,^ and in the portions of the poem which do not seem 
 traceable to one of these three influences, it is hard to distinguish 
 just how much of the argument is Davies' own. At all events, 
 there is not an idea suggested that would have been too progressive 
 or too advanced for the schoolmen to have presented, if they had 
 thought of it. A brief outline of this portion of the poem^ will 
 allow its logic to speak for itself. 
 
 First, man has a passion for knowledge, but his life "so fast 
 away doth slide" that he has not time to attain it. Therefore, 
 if this desire for knowledge is not to be futile, 
 
 '' our knowledge, which is here begun. 
 Hereafter must bee perfected in heaven." 
 
 Second, the fact that the soul's aspiration is toward God shows 
 that the soul, like God, must be eternal. The argument is by 
 analogy : 
 
 " Water in conduit pipes can rise no higher 
 Than the wel-head from whence it first doth spring." 
 
 Again, if death were the end of all, not even a noble soul could so 
 far go against nature as to feel the contempt for death which 
 "the world's best spirits" feel, preferring honor to life, and daring 
 
 iSneath, pp. 19^211. 
 
 * Davies, ed. by Grosart, pp. 82-116. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 155 
 
 to undergo all sorts of perils. Nor, if death ended all, would the 
 wicked be so afraid of death. The universal desire of men for 
 immortality seems to Davies a convincing proof of it. Last of 
 all, the very fact that men are able to discuss an immortal thing 
 shows their capacity for immortaUty: 
 
 " If himself were but a mortall thing, 
 He could not judge immortall things at all." 
 
 Having proved his behef to his own satisfaction, Davies proceeds 
 to refute objections. If the soul does not grow old or become 
 corrupted, 
 
 "How comes it then that aged men do dote?" 
 and 
 
 "How can there idiots then by nature bee?" 
 
 Davies answers, in this case with true modern insight, that these 
 defects are due to imperfections in the physical structure which is 
 the instrument of the soul : 
 
 "We must not blame Apollo, but his lute. 
 If false accords from her false strings be sent." 
 
 A second objection arises. If the body dies, the soul has no 
 instrument through which to exert its powers, and is practically 
 dead itself. By analogy, Davies argues from the case of a man 
 who can play the lute well and is a good horseman. 
 
 "Though both his lute and horse he take away. 
 Doth he not keep his former learning still?" 
 
 To the query how the soul will be able to know or perceive anything 
 when it no longer has the medium of sense to bring it impressions, 
 the reply is that in another world there may be other means of 
 receiving impressions. The soul living in the body is compared 
 to the child before birth, nourished quite differently from the 
 way in which he is fed after birth. 
 
 "So, when the Soule is borne (for Death is nought 
 But the Soule's birth), 
 
 it will receive impressions in a different way from that of this 
 world. Again, asked why souls, if they are immortal, do not 
 
 return, 
 
 "to bring us newes 
 Of that strange world, where they such wonders see," 
 
156 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Davies replies that the soul which has taken up its new abode in 
 heaven has no more interest in the earth, which it scorns; while 
 the soul that is "detruded down to Hell" is tied and imprisoned, 
 unable to return if it would. The last objection of all is that the 
 whole belief in immortality is a lie, promulgated for a useful 
 purpose: 
 
 "Politike men have thought it not amisse. 
 To spread this lye, to make men virtuous so." 
 
 The answer, clever as repartee but not convincing, is that although 
 virtue is a good thing, a lie is a poor way to spread it, since 
 
 "Vertue and Truth do ever best agree." 
 
 Summing up, Davies is assured that the strongest reason of all 
 for believing in immortality is the universal acceptance Jof the 
 doctrine. 
 
 "For how can that be false, which every tongue 
 Of every mortal man affirmes for true? 
 Which truth hath in all ages been so strong, 
 As lodestone-hke, all hearts it ever drew. 
 
 "For, not the Christian, or the Jew alone. 
 
 The Persian, or the Turke, acknowledge this; 
 This mysterie to the wild Indian knowne. 
 And to the Canniball and Tartar is." 
 
 Another tenet in Davies' creed made necessary a behef in immor- 
 tality. Without such a belief, what was to become of the idea of a 
 wise and overruling providence? Davies still adhered to an idea 
 of man's importance which the scientific studies of the next two 
 centuries were to make untenable, and which Pope was to deride 
 in that passage of the "Essay on Man" that shows man to be 
 only a single link in the chain of the whole creation. A world 
 whose rank and file had not yet accepted Copernicus still looked 
 upon man as the center of creation. If the world was created 
 only for man's use, asks Davies, how is there any wisdom^or 
 justice in God apart from man's immortality? 
 
 "If man doe perish like a withered grasse. 
 How doth God's Wisedom order things below? 
 
 "If death do quench us quite, we have great wrong, 
 Sith for our service all things else were wrought; 
 That dawes, and trees, and rocks, should last so long, 
 When we must in an instant passe to nought." 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 157 
 
 Moreover, the life of the soul is incomplete without a life after 
 death. For the soul has three powers, the quickening power, 
 the power of sense, and the power of reason; and it must have a 
 life to correspond to each. The life of the unborn child in the 
 womb depends on the quickening power of the soul; life upon 
 earth exercises the power of sense; but the power of reason has no 
 chance to develop without a heavenly life. The desertion of the 
 body by the soul men call death; 
 
 "but were it knowne to all. 
 What life our soules do by this death receive, 
 Men would it birth or gaole delivery call. 
 
 "In this third life, Reason will be so bright. 
 
 As that her sparke will like the sun-beames shine; 
 And shall of God enjoy the reall sight." 
 
 This extended proof of immortality is interesting, not for its 
 argument, which is trite and often fallacious, but for its disclosure 
 of the writer, not as a metaphysician but as a practical philosopher 
 full of homelj^ common sense. The more Davies argues upon 
 abstractions the more clearly does he show that he was not a 
 metaphysician, but merely a keen observer of the everyday 
 things around him and a wise judge of human nature. Some of 
 the analogies, by which, rather than by fine-drawn syllogisms, he 
 makes his meaning clear, suggest that he and Franklin might 
 have been kindred spirits, and indicate a kinship with Montaigne 
 and Bacon that puts him in the van of the thinkers of his time. 
 When he wishes to show that the mind's power of knowledge was 
 not given for such imperfect use as this life permits, he writes 
 simply, saving pages of theorizing, 
 
 "God never gave a power to one whole kind. 
 But most part of that kind did use the same; 
 Most eyes have perfect sight, though some be blind; 
 Most legs can nimbly run, though some be lame."^ 
 
 To supply a reason why men may believe that souls live on, even 
 though they do not return from the hereafter, he argues, 
 
 "If we beleeve that men doe live 
 Under the Zenith of both frozen Poles, 
 Though none come thence advertisement to give; 
 Why beare we not the like faith of our soules?"^ 
 
 ' Ibid., p. 84. 
 » Ibid., p. 109. 
 
158 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 And to reassure the dismay caused by the apparent annihilation 
 of the soul at the death of the body, he replies with quaint 
 conviction, 
 
 "We have no cause the bodie's death to feai'e. 
 For when the shell is broke, out comes a chick. "^ 
 
 Similarly, that which commands attention in the religious 
 portions of "Nosce Teipsum" is not its well-worn theology, but 
 the fresh, eager spirit of enthusiasm that gives reahty to reiteration 
 of dogma and sincerity to assertion of creed. However conserva- 
 tive his religious theory may be, Davies' personal reflections and 
 comments on religious subjects have a modern ring. If a thinker 
 arrives at a real truth, indeed, ancient and modern are hardly 
 the terms to apply, since truth is not for an age but for all time. 
 Who first thought that "When the devil was sick the devil a 
 monk would be"? Whoever originated the aphorism, Davies 
 has his own terse rendering of it : 
 
 "Who ever sees these irreligious men. 
 
 With burthen of a sicknesse weake and faint; 
 But heares them talking of Religion then, 
 And vowing of their soules to every saint?"' 
 
 Equally condensed and equally thoughtful is his reflection upon 
 the food of the soul : 
 
 "Bodies are fed with things of mortall kind. 
 And so are subject to mortalitie; 
 But Truth which is eternall, feeds the mind ; 
 The Tree of Ufe, which will not let her die."^ 
 
 Most modern in thought of any religious statement in the poem 
 is the stanza which expresses Davies' theory of the incarnation: 
 
 "It exceeds man's thought, to thinke how hie 
 
 God hath raised Man, since God a man became."^ 
 
 Consciously or not, the old-time poet has hit upon a far-reaching 
 religious discovery — that incarnation means not only God in man 
 but man with the potentiahty of Godhood. 
 
 This rehgious Davies is not to be dismissed without a word of 
 the spirit of reverence, characteristic of his age, which inspires 
 some of the noblest lines of his poem. Dignity and strength and 
 
 » Ibid., p. 113. ' Ibid., p. 97. 
 
 » Ibid., p. 92. * Ibid., p. 82. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 169 
 
 music are all present in the passages where he most devoutly 
 pours out his sense of wonder at the ways of God with man. 
 One such passage will show Davies at his best — and an appreciation 
 of any man's work should always take leave of him at his best: 
 
 "Heaven waxeth old, and all the spheres above 
 Shall one day faint, and their swift motion stay ; 
 And Time it selfe in time shall cease to move; 
 Only the Soule survives, and lives for aye. 
 
 " Our Bodies, every footstep that they make, 
 March towards death, untill at last they die; 
 Whether we worke, or play, or sleepe, or wake. 
 Our life doth pass, and with Time's wings doth fiie; 
 
 "But to the Soule Time doth perfection give. 
 And ads fresh lustre to her beauty still ; 
 And makes her in eternall youth to live. 
 Like her which nectar to the gods doth fill."* 
 
 That Davies could be so direct, so concrete, and at the same 
 time so sincere and devout in his expression of religious feeling is 
 perhaps due to the fact that he was not a professional religionist. 
 The same fact undoubtedly accounts for his failure to make in his 
 philosophy of religion any advance step beyond the theologians 
 who preceded him. That advance step remained to be taken by 
 a poet and thinker, who, though a frivolous man of the world and 
 not a professional theologian, was as thoroughly theological in 
 his thoughtful moments as any divine of them all. Lord Herbert 
 of Cherbury set in motion the current of religious thought which, 
 in its final form, the "Essay on Man" sums up. 
 
 Between the time of Davies and the time of Herbert the ground 
 had been prepared for the growth of independent thought. The 
 application of the laws of reason to theology was first apparent in 
 the work of Davies' contemporary Hooker (1594), who based his 
 teachings, not on the writings of the fathers or the decrees of the 
 councils nor even on Scripture itself, but on what reason showed 
 of the use of those teachings for making better the life of individual 
 and society.- As religious questions came more and more under 
 the jurisdiction of reason, the spirit of toleration grew. "As 
 theology became more reasonable, it became less confident, and 
 
 » JUd., pp. 98-99. 
 
 * Buckle, History of Civilization , V 
 
 ol. I, pp. 246-49. 
 
160 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 therefore more merciful."^ The last martyrdom of a heretic 
 in England took place in 1611; and by the time of Chillingworth, 
 Sir Thomas Browne, and Lord Herbert, men were free to hold 
 what religious views they chose, subject to no persecution other 
 than that of an often virulent controversy with the orthodox. 
 Chillingworth, in his "Religion of Protestants," 1637, wholly cast 
 aside the claims of authority to interfere with the right of private 
 judgment. The whole fabric of religion was "made to rest upon 
 the way in which the unaided reason shall interpret the decrees 
 of an onmipotent God."^ 
 
 Against such a background of rationalism developed the move- 
 ment known as deism, the attempt to construct a theory of deity 
 that should be both rational and universal. The confusion of 
 sects, the conflict of varying doctrines, the concealment of the 
 body of truth beneath the multifold garments of dogma and 
 superstition, all made the obvious necessity of the hour, for the 
 mind that would arrive at a rational religious conclusion, the 
 determination of the fundamentals of all religion. The "De 
 Veritate" of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, published in 1624, con- 
 tained five such fundamentals — the existence of God, the necessity 
 to worship Him, the identity of worship with practical morality, 
 the obligation to repent and forsake sin, and the certainty of 
 divine recompense here and hereafter.^ These principles, said 
 Lord Herbert, were the nucleus of all religions, and among them 
 of primitive Christianity before it was corrupted by ecclesiasticism. 
 His statement came to be known as the "Five Articles" of deism.* 
 Throughout the ensuing century the development of this type of 
 theological rationalism continued, in conflict with more orthodox 
 thought, which was bent not on founding a rational religion, 
 but on showing the existence of a basis of reason for the accepted 
 religion of revelation, and thus founding a rational Christianity,^ 
 not inconsistent with the reverence of the age for reason, and in 
 line with the scientific achievements of the century. 
 
 Lord Herbert, indeed, appeared to have little veneration for 
 Christianity, or revealed religion. That, along with all other 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 249. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. 253-54. 
 
 ' Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 84. 
 
 * Schaff-Herzog, Article Deism. 
 
 * Leslie Stephen, p. 85. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 161 
 
 religious sj'^stems, he subjected to the test of reason, refusing to 
 accept any man's judgment in place of his own.^ Outside his 
 five principles, all dogma was "the work of priests, who have 
 endeavored to establish their own influence for their own advantage 
 by slirouding these five ideas in obscurely worded creeds."^ 
 Christianity he believed to be the best religion, because most 
 easily reducible to his five points. But he refused to see in it any 
 special revelation, and declared that virtue was the test of a man's 
 religion, whatever creed he chose to adopt.^ 
 
 The deists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote 
 much, but added little to the original statement of their position 
 by Lord Herbert. Very few of the writers who sought to follow 
 the "inward light" to which he pointed were as whollj'- intellectual 
 and as antagonistic to revealed religion as were he and his disciple 
 Charles Blount. Few of them were as able and as distinguished 
 as the men who appeared in the ranks of the Christian rationalists 
 — Locke, Berkeley, and Bentley, Clarke, Butler, and Warburton.* 
 Of these, Locke, the most purely philosophical, pubUshed in 1695 
 the "Reasonableness of Cliristianity," which comprised a 
 re-reading and a new, independent interpretation of the New 
 Testament, and which brought to light the purity and beauty of 
 Christianity as its founder intended it to be, swept clean of the 
 rubbish of the theologians. To Locke, Christianity is superior 
 to other creeds because it has been most practically useful in 
 making God known to men.^ Berkeley, primarily a metaphysician, 
 and Bentley, primarily a literary critic, engaged in the deistic 
 controversy only in the way of replies to the utterances of their 
 opponents. Samuel Clarke, philosopher and divine, clothing his 
 theology in mathematical language like that of Hobbes and 
 Descartes, delivered two series of Boyle lectures in 1704 and 1705, 
 intended to prove, by arguments similar to those of Descartes, 
 Leibnitz, and Spinoza, the existence and goodness of God.^ Using 
 the old ontological proof, he showed that all existence was con- 
 
 ' Sidney Lee, Introduction to the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cher' 
 bury, p. XXXV. 
 
 * Ibid., p. xli. 
 
 ' Ibid., pp. xliii-iv. 
 
 * Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 86. 
 ' Ibid., pp. 95-98. 
 
 « Ibid., pp. 120-129. 
 
162 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 ditioned upon a self-existent being, or great first cause. So far 
 his argument was at one with the deists. But he went on by a 
 similar chain of reasons to establish the truth of revealed religion, 
 basing his argument on the identity of the clear, changeless, and 
 universal law of nature with moral obligation, and showing that 
 Christianity was a complete revelation of truth, because by the 
 tests of reason it conformed to the law of nature. 
 
 Both Locke and Clarke used the deistic method applied to the 
 defense of a rather emasculated Christianity. Bishop Butler,' 
 opposing the ordinary deist position, and going farther in his 
 orthodoxy than the rationalists just referred to, took for granted 
 the existence of God. The aim of his argument was to show that 
 the God seen in nature was the same as the God seen in the Chris- 
 tian revelation. The laws of nature were the laws of God. And 
 the revelation of that God was not through an authoritative book 
 nor did it rest "on certain miracles wrought some centuries ago 
 in Palestine, but on that great standing miracle — the oracle 
 implanted in every man's breast." So says Leslie Stephen, 
 adding, "The God whom Butler worships is, in fact, the human 
 conscience deified." From the character of man's conscience 
 could be deduced the character of the God who spoke through it. 
 But Butler, who was no abstract, but only a moral and utilitarian 
 philosopher, evaded all the issues raised by the conflict of meta- 
 physical with religious problems. If he had faced those issues he 
 would have seen that he took for foundation of his position assump- 
 tions which had themselves to be proved before they could be used 
 as foundations. In his conviction that duty was the solution of all 
 problems, and that, whether one followed the voice of the God 
 of nature or that of the God of Christian revelation, the secret of 
 the universe was revealed only through morality, he reached the 
 same conclusion as was expressed in the third and fourth points 
 of the deist "Five Articles." But he differed from the deists in 
 recognizing that evil did exist in the world of nature. "No 
 religion can be powerful which does not give forcible expression to 
 men's conviction of the prevalence of natural and moral evil, and 
 of their intimate connection. The shallow optimism of the deists 
 blinked the obvious facts. Butler recognized them manfully. "^ 
 
 » Ibid., pp. 282, 287-88, 297, 306. 
 ' Ibid., p. 307. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 163 
 
 A long list of lesser names of churchmen, lawyers, and writers 
 fills up the ranks of the Christian rationalists who opposed the 
 deists. Of the deists — sceptics, free-thinkers, or atheists as 
 their time called them — there were fewer, only two of whom were 
 conspicuous figures in the social, political, and literary life of the 
 period. These two, perhaps because their rank and real scholar- 
 ship made them less polemic in temper than men who, with less 
 learning and less poHsh, had also less poise, were not so contro- 
 versial in their writing as the less gifted but more noisy deists. 
 John Toland, in "Christianity not Mysterious," the book which 
 in 1696 excited a storm among the orthodox, used the term Chris- 
 tianity to mean religion in its purest form. As such it contained 
 nothing mysterious: "There is nothing in the Gospels contrary 
 to reason, nor above it; and no Cliristian doctrine can properly 
 be called a mystery."^ The statements in the accepted creed 
 which were mysterious were therefore false doctrines superimposed 
 upon pure religion. Nothing in the Bible or in any system of 
 interpretation of it was to be believed without strict challenge by 
 the laws of reason.- Anthony Collins, in his "Discourse of 
 Freethinking," 1713, progressed farther along the same track. 
 Since all belief was to bear the test of reason, obviously every 
 independent thinker must be free to investigate the grounds of 
 his belief, untrammeled by the authority of church or creed. 
 And in Collins's view, everything supernatural was irrational.^ 
 In a later book^ he engaged in a critical dissection of the prophecies 
 of the Old Testament, on which, he claimed, Christianity was 
 based; and in showing their lack of reason seemed to display the 
 flimsy foundation of the accepted creed. The prophecies were all 
 very well, but they had nothing to do with the New Testament; 
 whereupon the belief in the Messiahship of Jesus broke down 
 for lack of prophetic support.^ The answer of the orthodox 
 party was that if there were no proof of Christianity from prophecy, 
 at least there was plenty from the New Testament miracles. 
 This supplied a theme for the maddest and most abusive of the 
 deists, Thomas Woolston, who in a series of what Leslie Stephen 
 
 ' Farrar, History of Free Thought, p. 127. 
 
 2 Stephen, pp. 105-107. 
 
 3 Ibid., pp. 205-206. 
 
 * Grounds of the Christian Religion, 1724. 
 ' Farrar, p. 135. 
 
164 The Poet as ' Philosopher 
 
 calls "wild rants" sought to prove that there was no truth in 
 the miracles except a mystic and allegorical one.^ His work was too 
 unbalanced, too vituperative, to add anything constructive to the 
 deist creed. 
 
 All these writers had been dealing with the validity of the 
 evidences of Christianity. Another group turned to the considera- 
 tion of the truth of its doctrines. In 1730, Matthew Tindal 
 published "Christianity as Old as the Creation," a book the 
 title of which is self-explanatory. True religion had existed as 
 long as the world had stood, in the form of a perfect moral and 
 natural law laid down by a perfect God. Christianity, in the 
 form given to it by its founder, was merely what Tindal called a 
 "republication" of this natural moral law, the extent of which, 
 amid the mass of accumulated dogma and superstition, could be 
 discovered by the human reason. The rest was priestcraft.^ 
 Morgan, the physician, and Chubb, the uneducated tallow- 
 chandler, carried on the controversy in the days of its decUne, 
 after 1730, but contributed nothing new to the thought of their 
 forerunners. 
 
 In the meantime, one of the really brilUant minds of the 
 period, having allied itself with the deist position, was approaching 
 the subject rather from the ethical than from the theological 
 angle. Natural law, which was the law of God, enjoined morality, 
 said Shaftesbury. Religion was a means to the end of morality. 
 Therefore such a religion as produced the best results in the form 
 of practical virtue was the religion that would best stand the test 
 of reason. Shaftesbury made no direct attack upon revealed 
 reUgion; but the influence of the deist controversy was tacitly 
 apparent in the contemptuous, sometimes mocking indifference 
 which he showed toward all accepted creeds, as he went about to 
 formulate the system of rational religion that became the platform 
 of the Moral Sense school. In a discussion Uke the present one, 
 leading to a comparison of Pope with the religious thought that 
 preceded him, the excuse for so detailed a study of deistic argument 
 as the foregoing is that it set in motion the thought currents on 
 the stream of which Shaftesbury and BoUngbroke, the guiding 
 influences in Pope's philosophical development, were carried to 
 the great sea of universal harmony at which their thought arrived. 
 
 » Ibid., pp. 136-37. ^ Stephen, pp. 136-44. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 165 
 
 For harmony was the keynote and the overtone of Shaftesbury's 
 system of ethics. 
 
 In brief outline, Shaftesbury's tenets were few and simple; 
 because he differed from the controversial deists in being con- 
 structive rather than destructive, they are easy to formulate. 
 There was a God, whose existence was proved by the order and 
 design in the universe. This universally benevolent God animated 
 all nature as the soul animated the body. That God must be all 
 good followed from the fact that He was universal, since evil 
 could only exist where one interest opposed another, and in a 
 universal being no such opposition was possible. Since God was 
 all good, everything in nature was for the best. What seemed 
 like evil was really good, when looked at not in isolation but in 
 its relation to the whole. And the whole included not only the 
 present but a futm'e life, where the inequalities of the present 
 would be adjusted. In man, the controlling principle was an 
 innate moral sense, by which he approved of right and disapproved 
 of wrong. Man was a naturally benevolent being; virtue in 
 action was the expression of this native benevolence and social 
 love.^ 
 
 Bolingbroke's philosophy has been seen to be a compendium 
 of the philosophical thought of the time preceding him. His 
 religious thought is no less a composite. Writing at a time when 
 the heats of controversy were cooling, and when free thought in 
 the form of deism had run its course, he comprised in his rehgious 
 system, if opinions so superficial and lacking in conviction as 
 Bolingbroke's can be dignified by the name of religion, both the 
 destructive argument of writers from Toland to Morgan, and the 
 constructive reasoning of Lord Shaftesbury. Like the deists, 
 he sought to substitute reason for revelation; like the deists, 
 he scoffed at the supernatural, the mysterious, the miraculous, 
 used to support the accepted creed; like the deists, he railed at 
 the substitution of a priest-made tradition for the religion of 
 nature. At the same time, like Shaftesbury he held to the belief 
 in a divine ruler of creation, a universal harmony, and a system 
 where all that was was right. He differed from Shaftesbury, 
 however, in the characteristic contention of his theological doctrine. 
 God might be all wise and all powerful, as could be proved from 
 the evident appearance of those attributes in creation. But 
 
 ' Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Part I, ch. 3 and 4. 
 
166 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 there was no proof of God's justice and goodness; too many 
 things in the world were unjust and unkind to believe in that. 
 Only men could be seen to be good and just. The inconsistency 
 of such a position, in a beUef that was supposed to maintain 
 universal harmony, is obvious. But Bolingbroke was little 
 troubled anywhere by a passion for consistency; his avoidance of 
 that bugbear of small minds might have proved him great, had 
 other pettinesses not interfered. 
 
 In relation to the religious thought preceding him, the position 
 of BoUngbroke, the last voice of the dying deist movement, is 
 the position of Pope. In theology, as in poetry. Pope speaks for 
 the end of an age. There is no need to examine the "Essay on 
 Man" for evidences of other religious influences than the deistic 
 controversy; that strife dominated the thought aUke of churchmen 
 and freethinkers throughout the fifty years that preceded the poem. 
 Ecclesiastics who were not engaged on that main issue were busy 
 with the color of vestments, the length of surplice sleeves, the 
 exactitude of genuflexions, and other such liturgical follies. 
 Assuming, then, that Pope in his creed reflected the deists, among 
 whose number his master was, the expectation would be reasonable 
 that he will be found to have learned his theological, as his philo- 
 sophical, lesson from BoHngbroke. Surprise comes with the 
 discovery that his creed is Shaftesbury's wholly — Bohngbroke's 
 only so far as Bolingbroke's coincided with Shaftesbury's. Second- 
 hand though his opinions may be, Pope's attitude to his subject 
 is constructive. His concern is not to attack church or creed, 
 but to build up a system so evidently reasonable as to supersede 
 them. A controversial attitude implies a certain degree of respect ; 
 such respect is Bolingbroke's when he pays revealed Christianity 
 the compliment of refuting its evidences. But Shaftesbury seems 
 in his discussions of God, the universe, immortality, and virtuo 
 to be unaware that there is any opposing system which he must 
 displace; it is as if he assumed that any rational thinker would 
 hold the same views with himself, and the irrational are no concern 
 of his. Such an assumption seems to underlie Pope's attitude. 
 When Pope wished to confute, he turned to satire; but there is 
 no satire in the "Essay." The futility of theological dispute 
 must have been present in his mind when he wrote in the dedication 
 to Lord Bolingbroke: "More good will accrue to mankind by 
 attending to the large, open, and perceptible parts, than by 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 167 
 
 studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the uses of which 
 will forever escape our observation. The disputes are all upon 
 these last, and they have less sharpened the wits than the hearts 
 of men against each other, and have diminished the practice more 
 than advanced the theory of morality." So Pope sets about an 
 attempt to steer "betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly 
 opposite," a moderate course animated by a spirit very similar 
 to the poised and temperate habit of Lord Shaftesbury, 
 
 Whatever is remembered or forgotten of the deists, Lord 
 Shaftesbury's summary of their shallow optimism will not be 
 forgotten. A belief that "Whatever is is right" must necessarily 
 lie back of an intention to "vindicate the ways of God to man," 
 since only ways of whose justice there is assurance can be 
 vindicated. 
 
 Pope presents several proofs that heaven's ways and plans are 
 good, in answer to hypothetical suggestions of fault-finding with 
 things as they are. First and most important, 
 
 ' 'Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call, 
 May, must be right, as relative to all."i 
 
 Man is not an isolated being; since he exists only as one link in 
 the chain, that which brings pain or evil upon him may serve 
 some useful purpose for the whole. Partial evil may be universal 
 good. Only God can see the whole, and therefore only God can- 
 conceive a proper plan which shall be best for all. 
 
 "Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal, 
 But Heav'n's great view is one, and that the whole. "^ 
 
 Just so Shaftesbury had defended the perfection of an apparently 
 imperfect universe: "Now, in this mighty Union, if there be 
 such relations of parts to one another as are not easily discovered, 
 if on this account the end and use of things does not everywhere 
 appear, there is no wonder. . . . For, in an infinity of things thus 
 relative, a mind which sees not infinitely can see nothing fully."' 
 Moreover, man should not complain of his partial knowledge. 
 His happiness depends upon it. If everyone knew what the 
 futiu^e held, life would be unendurable. 
 
 "The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
 Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? 
 
 ' Essay on Man, Epistle I, II. 51-52. ' Mcrralists, Part II, Sec. 4. 
 
 2 Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 237-38. 
 
168 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 Oh blindness to the future! kindly given, 
 
 That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n."^ 
 
 Again, it is no injustice on the part of heaven that limits man's 
 endowments, often to what he considers his detriment. The 
 hmitation is adapted "to what his nature and his state can bear." 
 His senses are all fitted to the particular use he has for them. 
 Only a fly needs a microscopic sense of sight. Keener touch, 
 smell, or hearing would cause exquisite torture, till a man would 
 "die of a rose in aromatic pain," or hsten to a hitherto unheard 
 thunder that "stunn'd him with the music of the spheres."^ 
 The reason why the plans of providence seem imperfect is twofold : 
 man thinks he sees everything, when as a matter of fact he sees 
 only the small part of the universe that comes within his own 
 experience; and he still cKngs to the antiquated and superstitious 
 belief that he is the center of the universe. Perishing hero and 
 falling sparrow are of equal importance in the sight of God. 
 But man, mistakenly, feels injustice if he "alone engross not 
 Heav'n's high care." For his use earth revolves and the heavenly 
 bodies shine. " ' For me,' " says Pride, 
 
 " 'kind Nature wakes her genial pow'r, 
 Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev'ry flow'r; 
 Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew 
 The juice nectareous and the balmy dew; 
 For me the mine a thousand treasures brings; 
 For me health gushes from a thousand springs; 
 Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; 
 My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.' "^ 
 
 To this claim that the great end of creation is human happiness, 
 Pope replies with a series of questions. 
 
 "Has God, thou fool! work'd solely for thy good. 
 Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food? 
 Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn. 
 For him as kindly spreads the flow'ry lawn; 
 Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings? 
 Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings. 
 Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat? 
 Loves of his own and raptures swell the note. 
 
 » Essay on Man, Epistle I, 11. 81-86. ^ /fti^^,^ Epistle 1, 11. 133-140. 
 
 2 lUd., Epistle I, II. 183-204. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 169 
 
 Know, Nature's children all divide her care; 
 The fur that warms a monarch warmed a bear. 
 While man exclaims, 'See all things for my use!' 
 'See man for mine!' replies a pampered goose."^ 
 
 But this deposition of man from his self-assumed dominance is 
 very like a passage where Shaftesbury answers a complaint as to 
 man's feebleness in contrast to the beasts. "You might as well 
 complain," he writes, "that man should be anything less than a 
 consummation of all advantages and privileges which Nature can 
 afford. Ask not merely, why man is naked, why unhoofed, why 
 slower-footed than the beasts? Ask why he has not wings also 
 for the air, fins for the water, and so on; that he might take 
 possession of each element, and reign in all. This would be to 
 rate him high indeed! As if he were, by nature. Lord of All: 
 which is more than I could wilhngly allow. "^ 
 
 Neither Pope nor Shaftesbury arrives at any satisfactory 
 explanation of the origin of and reason for evil. The so-called 
 proof that everything is done by the design of an all-wise and all- 
 good first cause is rather assertion than proof, and seeks by 
 constant reiteration to establish itself. "If we could see every- 
 thing, we would know that in its proper relations nothing is 
 evil"; that is one-half the proof. "If we did not know evil, we 
 could not know good"; that is the other half. 
 
 "Better for us, perhaps, it might appear. 
 Were there all harmony, all virtue here; 
 That never air or ocean felt the wind ; 
 That never passion discompos'd the mind. 
 But all subsists by elemental strife ; 
 And passions are the elements of life."^ 
 
 Shaftesbury, too, asserts the principle of contrast as essential to 
 consciousness, when he writes, "Much is alleged in answer, to 
 show why Nature errs. . . . But I deny she errs; and when she 
 seems most ignorant or perverse in her productions, I assert 
 her even then as wise and provident, as in her goodhest works. 
 For 'tis not then that men complain of the world's order, or abhor 
 the face of things, when they see various interests mixed and 
 interfering; natures subordinate, of different kinds, opposed to one 
 another, and in their different operations submitted, the higher 
 
 » Ibid., Epistle III, 11. 27-46. ' Essay on Man, Epistle I, 11. 165-70. 
 
 * Moralists, Part II, Sec. 4. 
 
170 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 to the lower, "Tis on the contrary, from this order of inferior 
 and superior things, that we admire the world's beauty, founded 
 thus on contrarieties: whilst from such various and disagreeing 
 principles, a universal concord is established."^ 
 
 The apparent imperfection of the present is with Pope as with 
 Shaftesbury a reason for holding to a beUef in a future Ufe. 
 
 "The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home, 
 Rests and expatiates in a life to come."* 
 
 So Shaftesbury: "The plain foundations of a distributive justice 
 and due order in this world, may lead us to conceive a further 
 building. We apprehend a larger scheme, and easily resolve 
 ourselves why things were not completed in this state, but their 
 accompUshment reserved rather to some further period."^ 
 The idea of the 
 
 "stupendous whole, 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul," 
 
 is Shaftesbury's; on the other hand, the identification of Nature 
 with God, which seems evident in such a Hne as 
 
 "The state of Nature was the reign of God," 
 
 is common property of the deists and of Bolingbroke, but does not 
 seems to occur in Shaftesbury's rather pantheistic philosophy. 
 For the deists, God was apart from his world, not immanent in 
 it. Pope, with his too great facility at making his own whatever 
 came to his hand, did not apparently see the inconsistency of 
 professing in one passage a deist's creed, and in another a panthe- 
 ist's. His method is accumulative rather than eclectic. And 
 one special phase of his argument was derived from Bolingbroke 
 rather than Shaftesbury; that is the account of the origin of 
 reUgion in its historical beginnings, until, from revering a patriarch, 
 man came to look beyond him to a Father-God.* For one of the 
 matters that most interested BoUngbroke, an interest in which 
 he showed himself ahead of his time, was the history and the 
 evolution of religion. 
 
 Even so brief a survey of the passages which reveal the religious 
 position of Pope shows, then, that belief in God, in the duty of 
 
 '■ Moralists, Part I, Sec. 3. 
 
 « Essay on Man, Epistle I, 11. 97-98. 
 
 • Moralists, Part II, Sec. 3. 
 
 * Essay on Man, Epistle III, U. 215-268. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 171 
 
 worshipping Him, in the necessity of virtue, in a future life com- 
 pleting the present imperfect one, all tenets of the deists' religion 
 of reason and nature, are maintained by Pope, largely from a 
 Shaftesburian angle. But religion is more dependent on emotion 
 than on reason. Creed is a product of the intellect; religion, 
 which, reduced to lowest terms, is action animated by feeling, 
 springs from the heart. And the influence of the deists on Pope's 
 religious position is most apparent in the absence of emotion in 
 the "Essay." His ideas about religion are unexceptionable; 
 but back of them throbs no heartbeat. To compare the detached 
 attitude of Pope toward the cold and unlovable deity created 
 by reason with the ingenuous and enthusiastic faith of Davies 
 in the God of his wonder and devotion, or with the intuitive 
 outreaching of Tennyson for "that God who ever lives and loves," 
 is to realize the deadening effect of deism on EngUsh religious 
 thought. Controversy kills enthusiasm even while it strengthens 
 opinion. That which has to be contentiously argued about loses 
 its charm. An over-reasoned religion is no exception to the 
 homely rule. The deists were so interested in defending their 
 idea of God that they had no attention left for God himself. And 
 it is hard to escape the impression that, while to Pope his friend 
 Bolingbroke was near and real enough to be both an ideal of 
 conduct and an object of worship, the Eternal Cause was very 
 remote, very abstract, very vague — a being one might worship, 
 but could never know intimately enough to love or to imitate. 
 
 Perhaps this very sense of remoteness accounts for the reverence 
 for the ways of God which is the most sincere element in Pope's 
 religion. In his reproof of man's presumption in replying against 
 God, he seems an eighteenth century Job. Presumptuous man 
 is adjured to hope humbly, to 
 
 "Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore."^ 
 Irony meets him who would weigh his opinion against Providence; 
 contempt is the due reward of the "vile worm" who would dare 
 suggest the breaking of the great universal order for a single 
 individual's pleasure.^ Contemplating man's pride in his own 
 achievements, Pope cries out, 
 
 "Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule — 
 Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!"' 
 
 ' Ibid., Epistle I, 11. 91-92. » Ibid., Epistle II, 11. 29-30. 
 
 > Ibi<i., Epi3tle I, 11. 257-58. 
 
172 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 This august being to whom man's whole soul is to submit has no 
 care for the individual; the laws of the great system cannot be 
 broken : 
 
 "When the loose mountain trembles from on high, 
 Shall gravitation cease if you go by?"^ 
 
 There was no room in this conception of God for the special 
 providences in which Davies believed so firmly. Pope's deity 
 was not the God of Romanist or Calvinist theology, the dispenser 
 of reward or punishment, of salvation or damnation. Nor was 
 He the sweet human God of Tennyson, making known His nature 
 through "loveliness of perfect deeds." This eighteenth century 
 God was synonymous with Nature, synonymous with the Force 
 that moves the universe; a God like that of the Westminster 
 divines, "infinite, eternal, unchangeable," but lacking in personal 
 nearness, and wholly unlovable. He was the Lord of the whirlwind 
 and the earthquake, rather than He of the stiU, small voice. 
 He was the source of eternal hope, to be trusted blindly, without 
 even so much question as an effort to understand His ways would 
 entail. Such advice sounds inconsistent enough in the midst of a 
 dissertation whose purpose is avowedly to explain and thus 
 vindicate the ways of God. The whole poem, the author of 
 which exempts himself from his own advice not to presume to 
 scan God, is an attempt to explain and justify a system which he 
 repeatedly urges needs no justification. The rationalist who 
 believes in no special providence exhorts man to trust providence, 
 and even while he counsels trust he reasons every step of the way 
 toward his conviction, with a dispassionate coolness of ^nethod 
 that keeps the conviction from being convincing. 
 
 Consistency, however, is no more a virtue of Pope's than of 
 Bolingbroke's. The man who sees in flashes and who speaks in 
 epigrams is rarely equipped for a sustained effort of logic. Pope 
 is not thinking his way through from a position of uncertainty to a 
 logical conclusion necessitated by the facts of nature or spirit. 
 He starts with a presupposition, and bases his chain of argument 
 on the very hypothesis which the argument aims to prove. Argu- 
 ment in a circle is not logical; but to ask Pope to be logical would 
 be like asking lightning to strike twice in the same place. In so 
 far as his rationalistic attitude toward his subject is concerned, 
 
 1 Ibid., Epistle IV, 11. 127-28. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 173 
 
 Pope is representative of the temper of his period; but in his own 
 failure as a rationalist to present his case consistently, he falls 
 short of reflecting the spirit of a time when every trained mind 
 prided itself on dawless logic, and when the best thinkers strove, 
 like Locke and Butler, to believe nothing beyond what reason 
 supplied proof for. The very quaUty of Pope's flashing and 
 erratic genius made adherence to logic an impossible task. He 
 would have reflected his century if he could; that he did not is 
 further proof of the inextinguishable element of personal quality 
 that raises the poet above the level of his fellows, and keeps him 
 from being no more than an echo. 
 
 The cold and impersonal creed of Pope represents the religious 
 temper of the cultured English mind at the end of the deist contro- 
 versy. The deists had striven by reason to undermine the founda- 
 tions of the accepted faith, in so far as that faith seemed to them 
 a tissue of romantic and superstitious self-deceit. The orthodox, 
 with equal zeal and equally bj' reason as an instrument, had 
 defended the basis of revelation and authority claimed by the 
 established creed. As a result of the strife, spiritual warmth and 
 beauty had disappeared. ''Two things," writes Leslie Stephen,^ 
 "were conspicuously absent from that form of religious doctrine — 
 faith and poetry. What remains when they are taken away? 
 Common sense and candour." Such a remainder might supply 
 the place of religion for the enlightened classes, to M'hom sound 
 common sense and a sincere search for truth might be sufficient 
 spiritual incentive. But for the unenlightened or half-enlightened 
 masses, for whom religion is always a matter of emotion and 
 enthusiasm, a rationalized creed meant nothing. The established 
 church, with its doctrine robbed of superstition and tradition, 
 offered the people at large little more than a mechanical and 
 unillumined ritual. If Pope expresses the attitude of the cultured 
 mind toward religion, perhaps George Eliot's Dolly Winthrop 
 may be thought of as expressing the religious intelligence of the 
 rank and file of the folk in the country parishes. "I can never 
 rightly know the meaning o' what I hear at church, but I know 
 it's good words, I do." 
 
 A religion so lacking in substance, color, and feeling could not 
 control the popular allegiance without an infusion of new life. 
 The failure of so purely intellectual a religion to come into vital 
 
 ' English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II, p. 335. 
 
174 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 touch with the needs and desires of the soul of the masses made the 
 contagion of such a movement as the Wesleyan inevitable. By 
 its adherence to and sympathy with old, popular religious traditions 
 and superstitions, Methodism met the crowd on its own intellectual 
 level. By its refusal to countenance the results of scientific 
 research it satisfied the orthodox and the conservative. By its 
 common sense teaching of morality it appealed to the man of 
 practical mind. In its hatred of Calvinism and enthusiastic 
 teaching of free will it was in line with the movement of the late 
 eighteenth century toward a reahzation of the value of the indi- 
 vidual. Predestination is as much a form of tyranny as is autoc- 
 racy. But most of all Methodism, by its understanding of crowd 
 psychology, by its emphasis on outward demonstration, by its 
 simple pleadings with men to come into personal relation with a 
 very concrete and personal God, afforded an emotional outlet 
 for the dammed-up streams of religious feehng which the orthodox 
 theologians of the Church of England were powerless to set free. 
 
 A revival of such a type was bound to produce varied results. 
 Besides the enthusiastic adoption of Methodism by the "hungry 
 sheep" who were no more fed by their ecclesiastical shepherds 
 than in Milton's time, there must be noted its rejection by the 
 Adam Bedes of every walk in life, for whom the long-tried, firmly 
 rooted habit of the estabhshed creed and ritual supplied adequate 
 spiritual nourishment. To minister to such devout or indifferent 
 souls, a new spirit awoke among church leaders. Just as the 
 revolt of Luther caused a purification of the Church of Rome, so 
 the schism of Wesley brought about an evangelical movement in 
 the Church of England and among dissenters other than Metho- 
 dists, advocating a return to what a religious popular song of our 
 own time has designated as "the old-time religion" of heaven and 
 hell, reward and punishment, vicarious atonement, conversion, 
 and all the paraphernalia which deism had caused to be discarded. 
 But a reaction of such sort in the du-ection of narrowness and 
 bigotry, was, of course, totally without influence on the mind of 
 the independent thinker. Revulsion against the utter irrationahty 
 of Methodists and Evangelicals developed the rationalistic church- 
 man of the eighteenth century into the Unitarian of the nineteenth. 
 Natural progress along the logically rational lines followed so 
 courageousl}'^ by Hume brought the deist to the sceptical position 
 occupied by Gibbon and Paine. And reason now had as her 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 175 
 
 handmaid the new historical sense, which at every step subjected 
 the validity of hitherto unquestioned scriptural assertions to the 
 test of the historical critical method. 
 
 Another element of confusion was added to the chaos into which 
 religious thought had been plunged before the end of the eighteenth 
 century by the culmination of the strife between rehgion and 
 science which had existed ever since Rome forced the recantation 
 of Galileo. Just as the Copernican theory had frightened mediae- 
 val theologians with its removal of the earth from the center of 
 the universe and therefore of man from his place of chief importance 
 in the divine scheme of things, so the discoveries of geologists 
 and biologists frightened Evangelical and churchman ahke. 
 Laplace presented the nebular theory; and what would become 
 of the old theory of the direct personal action of God upon the 
 universe? Linnaeus, Smith, and Lyell discovered fossils and 
 interpreted strata; and what was to become of the six days of 
 creation and of Noah's flood? Treviranus, Lamarck, Erasmus, 
 Darwin, and St. Hilaire developed the idea of evolution; and 
 what was to become of the Fall of Man, and with it of the whole 
 plan of salvation? Orthodox theologians and believers in the 
 truths of science were alike in their failure to see that the soundness 
 of Christianity was not endangered by the discarding of belief 
 in supernatural occurrences or special providences. If the events 
 of the Bible narrative did not happen in the miraculous, nay, 
 magical way in which the Bible said they did, then the whole 
 Christian revelation was false, for it must needs stand or fall by 
 the truth of the miracles. So the orthodox, ecclesiastic and 
 layman alike, began assiduously to prove that the scientific 
 conclusions were false, or, failing that, that they harmonized 
 point by point with scripture. The honest thinker, unable to 
 hoodwink himself into any distrust of scientific conclusions, began 
 to wonder if the beliefs in creation and flood and miracle and 
 special providence and anthropomorphic God did not, as they 
 fell in ruin, carry with them in one tremendous cataclysm all 
 belief in an unseen and eternal reahty. Honesty demanded the 
 disclaiming of possible knowledge; the agnostic was the man too 
 honest to believe in the supernatural, and not wise enough to 
 see of how little consequence the supernatural element was in a 
 Christianity rightly interpreted. 
 
 Less honest but more wise was the new type of clergyman 
 
f 
 
 176 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 produced by the controversy of orthodoxy with science. The 
 latitudinarian, attempting to broaden the creed of his church and 
 make it sufficiently elastic to stretch over the demands of the 
 hour, represented in religion the spirit of compromise that in the 
 sphere of poUtics animated the early Reform Bills. Firmness on 
 essentials, elasticity on non-essentials seem to have been the 
 principles of a group that might have been called Uberal conserva- 
 tives. They saw that to command the allegiance of thinking 
 men to the church it was necessary to leave room for individual 
 interpretation of scripture and of creed. Abstractly, the spirit 
 of compromise is despicable and cowardly; practically, it is by 
 compromise methods that reforms have always been effected. 
 The noblest type of character says with Luther, "Here I stand; 
 I cannot do otherwise." But such a declaration does not carry 
 its opponents with it. And there is no cowardice or insincerity 
 in such an adaptation of the cardinal principles of the creed as 
 that by which Arnold of Rugby or Robertson of Brighton made 
 the creed possible of acceptance by intelligent and earnest seekers 
 after truth. It was the broad churchmen of the Oriel school at 
 Oxford who first began to see that it was sin rather than heresy 
 that ailed the world, and who made their cardinal principle an 
 absence of dogma, and a generous "sjonpathy with what was 
 good and earnest in all religious parties."^ 
 
 The outstanding religious event during the years when "In 
 Memoriam" was growing was the Oxford Movement. Its initia- 
 tion was consequent upon the state of religious confusion suggested 
 by a mere enumeration of the names appUed to religious groups 
 of the time. Sectarians and Evangelicals; high, low, and broad 
 church parties; Whigs who beheved in an Erastian control of 
 church by state, in disestablishment, in Catholic emancipation, 
 and Tories who clung to the establishment; Athanasians, Unita- 
 rians, and agnostics — so diverse were the classifications necessary 
 to include the varying views and doctrines which somewhere 
 amidst the mists of argument and speculation concealed the 
 truth. Such a stormy sea of opinion offered no anchorage for 
 the orthodox mind. Such a bewildering choice of views implied 
 the absence of all authority. The Protestant Reformation, 
 three centuries before, had cut men loose from the comfortable 
 authority of the infallible Church of Rome. Now scientific 
 
 » Wilfred Ward's lAfe of Newman, Vol. I, p. 37. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 177 
 
 research, calling into question the validity and inspiration of the 
 supposedly infallible scriptures, once more removed the element 
 of authority and cut the church loose from its moorings. The 
 salvation of the establishment depended upon the substitution 
 of some other authority in religion for that of the creed and the 
 Bible, now being called into question and Hkely soon to be aban- 
 doned by all but the blindly orthodox. Such an incentive, as well 
 as the wish to revivify the dry bones of formal religion, animated 
 the leaders of the Tractarian party, which sought to establish 
 the antiquity and consequent authority of the Anglican Catholic 
 Church. But a movement aimed to make "relentless war against 
 the ' Liberalism ' in thought that was breaking up ancient institu- 
 tions in Church and State, and would not cease from its work 
 until it had destroyed religion,"^ as the Tractarians thought, 
 issued actually in causing an irreconcilable split between the 
 moderate Tractarians, like Pusey and Keble, the Romanistic 
 Tractarians Uke Newman, and the officials of the established 
 church. The sincere souls who set out to save religion in England 
 "by strengthening the English Church as the home of dogmatic 
 religion; by imparting intellectual depth to its traditional theology 
 and spiritual life to its institutions ; by strengthening and renewing 
 the almost broken links which bound the Church of England to 
 the Church Catholic of the great ages,"^ found themselves plunged, 
 not into a work of reform and purification, but into a passionate 
 controversy. 
 
 Religious confusion, then, growing out of an ardent religious 
 emotion, out of a sincere devotion to tradition and authority, 
 and out of an equally sincere passion for intellectual and spiritual 
 truth, was one of the characteristic elements of thought in the 
 age of Tennyson. The other dominant quality was something 
 newer than controversy, newer than dogma, newer even than 
 science, so far as its penetration into the Ufe of men was concerned; 
 yet as old as the God who is love. For love, not creed, was the 
 keynote of the new religion that gradually developed as the 
 nineteenth century matured. Called by a longer name, it was 
 the spirit of humanitarianism, of brotherhood and service, that 
 began in the work for social reform of the radical utilitarians, and 
 emerged into the Christian socialism of Maurice, Kingsley, and 
 Denison. Evangelicals joined with philosophical radicals and 
 
 >/&i<i., p. 4. » Ibid., p. 5. 
 
178 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 philanthropic hberals^ in reforms that had nothing whatever to do 
 with orthodoxy or heresy — aboUtion of slavery, prison reform, 
 modification of the barbarous penal code, legislation for the 
 protection of women and children in mines and factories. Just 
 as in the midst of primeval chaos the spirit of God "moved upon 
 the face of the waters," so the solvent for the chaos of creeds and 
 refusals of creeds was the spirit of practical love. 
 
 If Tennyson, Hke his fellow poet-philosophers, reflects the 
 religion of his time, he will reveal these two elements — a confusion 
 of thought, in which now one, now another current of opinion or 
 emotion will be dominant; and a breadth of sympathy akin to 
 the spirit that animated the philanthropists and social reformers. 
 Not seldom a writer's estimate of his own work is the fairest; 
 and Tennyson's final comment on his elegy, at the end of the 
 prologue — 
 
 "these wild and wandering cries, 
 Confusions of a wasted youth" — 
 
 prepares the way for an atmosphere of unrest and uncertainty 
 which all the early part of the poem verifies. As the categorical 
 imperative of Kant is reflected in "In Memoriam" not by echo 
 or paraphrase but implicitly, by application as a method to the 
 solving of problems; so the confusion of the mind of Tennyson's 
 age is implicitly reflected in the evident lack of assurance in 
 opinion of the writer as he struggles through from doubt to faith. 
 No one of the religious attitudes of the time is here maintained 
 consistently. In passages which bear upon the Biblical narrative 
 or upon accepted doctrine, there are apparent the results of 
 orthodox evangelical teaching, the influence surrounding the 
 poet's early years, and congenial to the native conservatism of 
 his mind. The God in whom foreknowledge dwells, with whom a 
 thousand years is as a day, is described in the reference to 
 
 "that eye which watches guilt 
 And goodness, and hath power to see 
 Within the green the moulder'd tree. 
 And towers fallen as soon as built."- 
 To this apparent belief in the foreknowledge of God is added a 
 hint of a Calvinistic adherence to predestination : 
 
 "I curse not Nature, no, nor Death; 
 For nothing is that errs from law."^ 
 
 ' Morley's Ldfe of Gladstone, Vol. I, pp. 156, 163. = Ibid., Canto LXXIII. 
 * In Memoriam, Canto XXVI. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 179 
 
 More than a hint of a lingering belief in special providences is 
 contained in the lines 
 
 "in Vienna's fatal walls 
 God's finger touched him, and he slept."' 
 
 No more beautiful interpretation of the heart of Christmas could 
 be given than Tennyson's greeting to the dawn of the first Yuletide 
 of the cycle: 
 
 "Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, 
 
 Draw forth the cheerful day from night: 
 O Father, touch the east, and light 
 
 The light that shone when Hope was born."^ 
 
 The two poems^ which record the story of the raising of Lazarus 
 and of Mary's grateful offering of devotion are redolent of the 
 faiths of childhood. What the EvangeUcals called "saving 
 faith" in Christ as the Way leading to life speaks in the end of the 
 imaginary picture of what Tennyson's life would have been had 
 Hallam lived — 
 
 "And He that died in Holy Land 
 Would reach us out the shining hand. 
 And take us as a single soul."^ 
 
 The sacred faiths of childhood weave themselves thus into the 
 fabric of thought. However far the progress of the mature 
 mind may proceed, outgrown habits of belief are inescapable. 
 Yet the same writer whose references to Holy Writ are as ingenuous 
 as might be those of the blue-eyed sister who told him doubt was 
 devil-born shows in other places an equal hatred of tradition 
 accepted merely because traditional. Use and Wont, 
 
 "Old sisters of a day gone by, 
 
 Gray nurses, loving nothing new,"* 
 
 are treated with tolerance only so long as in them remains alive 
 the spirit of a beloved past. When that memory dies, ceremony 
 becomes empty and futile, 
 
 "For who would keep an ancient form 
 Thro' which the spirit breathes no more?"^ 
 
 It is almost fanciful to suppose that in the implied attitude to 
 tradition in creed and in form lies any disclosure of Tennyson's 
 
 1 Ibid., Canto LXXXV. * Ibid., Canto LXXXIV. 
 
 2 Ibid., Canto XXX. » Ibid., Canto XXIX. 
 » Ibid., Cantos XXXI-XXXII. « Ibid., Canto CV. 
 
180 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 feeling toward the Oxford Movement, about which he must have 
 had an opinion. But except for the single line, 
 
 "To cleave a creed in sects and cries, "^ 
 
 there is no other hint of his view upon a subject which no religiously 
 minded person in the thirties and forties could avoid thinking 
 about. 
 
 In contrast with the orthodox habit of mind evident in such 
 allusions as those just quoted, are the passages which express the 
 latitudinarian viewpoint. To this Tennyson, creed is relatively 
 unimportant, as he thinks, shut in his sorrow, of 
 
 "The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot," 
 "Who keeps the keys of all the creeds, "^ 
 
 and realizes that death is the great leveller, not only of rich and 
 poor, but of Dissenter, Anglican, and Romanist. The toleration 
 which he asks from the man 
 
 "Whose faith has center everywhere" 
 
 for the sister who still clings to her early heaven, and to her 
 faith made real through form, impUes a greater sympathy with 
 the soul 
 
 "that after toil and storm 
 Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air."^ 
 
 It is this Tennyson who presents a view of a humanized Christ 
 far broader and more beautiful than that of the orthodox creed — 
 the man who made current coin of the truths of the spirit, who 
 wrought 
 
 "With human hands the creed of creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds. "^ 
 
 It is this Tennyson who dares, in a day when acceptance of the 
 deity of Jesus was a test question in religion, to run the risk of a 
 charge of infidelity by the declaration, 
 
 "Thou seemest human and divine, 
 
 The highest, holiest manhood, thou."^ 
 
 How like these expressions of breadth and tolerance are to the 
 elastic views of the broadest and most generous churchmen of the 
 
 ^ Ibid., Canto CXXVIII. ■• Ibid., Canto XXXVI. 
 
 2 Ibid., Canto XXIII. * Ibid., Prologue. 
 
 » Ibid., Canto XXXIII. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 181 
 
 period may be seen in a mere glance at the teaching of Frederick 
 Robertson. "Alas!" he wrote in 1852, "when I see Romanists 
 cursing the Church of England, Evangelicals shaking their heads 
 about the Christianity of Tractarians, Tractarians banning 
 Dissenters, Dissenters anathematizing Unitarians, and Unitarians 
 of the old school condemning the more spiritual ones of the new; 
 I am forced to hope that there is more inclusiveness in the Love 
 of God than in the bitter orthodoxy of sects and churches."^ 
 Later, establishing his argument for the divinity of Christ, he 
 proceeded in words that read like a commentary on Tennyson's 
 prologue: "Christ claims sonship in virtue of His Humanity. . . . 
 Begin with Him as God's character revealed under the limitations 
 of humanity. "2 
 
 As there was an evangelical Tennyson and a latitudinarian 
 Tennyson, so, temporarily, there was an agnostic Tennyson. 
 For him agnosticism grew out of the effort to prove the great 
 realities. He sought God, but 
 
 "found Him not in world or sun, 
 Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye, 
 Nor thro' the questions men may try. 
 The petty cobwebs we have spun."^ 
 
 He tried to prove immortality, but progressed no farther than the 
 persuasion that life must continue, since otherwise all life must be 
 futile.* His discussion of immortality concerns itself largely 
 with the attempt to determine what sort of life the continuing 
 life will be, seeking to provide proofs of all the hopes that his 
 love for his friend makes him desire assurance of. The life after 
 death is to be marked by a continuance of activity 
 
 "In those great offices that suit 
 The full-grown energies of heaven."^ 
 
 Earthly affection must continue: 
 
 "Love will last as pure and whole 
 
 As when he loved me here in Time."^ 
 
 Memory is to persist,' and personality,^ otherwise a belief in the 
 continuance of life is utterly without consolation. But all these 
 
 ' Stopford Brooke's Life o/ Robertson, p. 267. * Ibid., Canto XL. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 279. • Ibid., Canto XLIII. 
 
 3 In Memoriam, Canto CXXIV. ' Ibid., Cantos XLV-VI. 
 * Ihid., Cantos XXXIV, LVI. ^ ji^id,^ Canto XLVII. 
 
182 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 are assumptions, based on the "will to believe" ; nothing is proved. 
 Assurance of God came to Tennyson through the medium of 
 feeling: 
 
 "Then was I as a child that cries, 
 But, crying, knows his father near ; 
 
 And what I am beheld again 
 
 What is, and no man understands; 
 
 And out of darkness came the hands 
 That reach thro' nature, moulding men."^ 
 
 Assurance of immortaUty, too, came in a flash of intuition, in his 
 midnight vision on the lawn, when the contagion of Hallam's 
 own remembered faith and vigor came to touch him from the past, 
 
 "And all at once it seem'd at last 
 The living soul was flash'd on mine."^ 
 
 The spirit that cries out, 
 
 "Behold, we know not anything";' 
 
 the spirit that is like the "infant crying for the Ught"; the spirit 
 that can only falter on the stairs of God; the spirit which 
 recognized the faith in honest doubt — this is typically the spirit 
 of the agnostic. "Nothing worthy proving can be proven," says 
 the Ancient Sage. 
 
 But Tennj'^son did not remain agnostic. And the solution at 
 which he arrived in his attempt to prove the reaUties in which he 
 longed to beUeve, the solution of an intuitive conviction called 
 faith, was not characteristic of his time. His was the faith of the 
 mystic; and though he reached it bj-" the nineteenth century road 
 of doubt, the mystic's faith is not a nineteenth century growth. 
 The mystic in every age is he who grasps truth through intuition, 
 who has eyes to perceive the invisible. For him there is no 
 Unknowable. Such a spirit belongs to no century; it is a bond 
 that links together across the ages the young men who see visions 
 and the old men who dream dreams. The poet who waited for 
 the "beam in darkness," who Hstened for the vaster music, was 
 not so far removed in spiritual kinship from the mediaeval saint* 
 who wrote, "Blessed are the ears that gladly receive the pulses 
 of the Divine whisper . . . which Usten not after the voice which 
 
 I Ihid., Canto CXXIV. ' Ibid., Canto LIV. 
 
 « Ibid., Canto XCV. * Thomas k Kempis. 
 
The Poet as Philosopher 183 
 
 is sounding without, but for the Truth teaching within. Blessed 
 are the eyes which are shut to outward things, but intent on 
 things within." 
 
 Perhaps it was because his mind was so intent on things within 
 that Tennyson reflects so comparatively little of the human- 
 itarian movement of his time. There is a hint of awareness of it 
 in the complaint, 
 
 "So many worlds, so much to do, 
 So little done, such things to be";^ 
 
 there is a suggestion of consciousness of the social upheaval of 
 the years from 1830 to 1850 in the declaration that "social truth 
 shall spread," in spite of the "red fool-fury of the Seine," and in 
 spite of the toppling of king and beggar, the pillars that sustain 
 the two ends of the social system.^ But the only passage at all 
 typical of such dawning social sympathy as lay at the basis of 
 the work of Kingsley is the famous poem which rings out the old 
 year and with it old falsities and feuds, old political strifes, old 
 poverty and pride, old greed and coldness, old disease, darkness, 
 and war.3 Most of the time Tennyson's personal grief and 
 personal problems loomed too large to allow him to see the greater 
 griefs, the farther-reaching problems of humanity. 
 
 There is a similarity between the relation of each of these three 
 poet-philosophers to his age as an artist, and his relation as a 
 religionist. The preceding chapter reached the conclusion that, 
 while in the artistic qualities common to all poets of the period 
 each reflected the art development of his epoch, nevertheless in 
 his own peculiarly individual poetic qualities, each poet was 
 himself and no mere reflection. So in the present instance, as 
 far as religious opinion went, each was the echo of the theological 
 leaders of his time. But in personal reaction to religion, each 
 poet was essentially individual. Davies, in religion as in life 
 and art, combined the ingenuous temper of the child with the 
 judicial and logical mind of the lawyer. Pope, in religion as in 
 Hfe and art, was the brilliant and self-conscious rhetorician, 
 arguing without conviction of his own upon a theme of indifferent 
 interest to him, but which gave him opportunity for the exercise 
 
 » In Memariam, Canto LXXIII. ' Ibid., Canto CVI. 
 
 » Ibid., Canto CXXVII. 
 
184 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 of his gift of epigram. Tennyson, in religion as in life and art, 
 looked upon the universe with the eyes of the romanticist and the 
 mystic. He was much less the mirror of his time and much more 
 the individual than are the others, because while Davies and Pope, 
 turned philosophers for a time, were presenting systematized 
 philosophies of religion, Tennyson was merely giving expression 
 to the religious struggles and convictions of one who was at 
 moments a philosopher, but who was always a poet. In other 
 words, in so far as any expression becomes a revelation of person- 
 ality, it ceases to be only a mirror of its time. . 
 
VII 
 
 All that remains necessary to complete this discussion of the 
 poet-philosophers is a summary of the respects in which they 
 have been found to reflect their periods. With due allowance 
 made for the personal equation, by which the poet's own indi- 
 viduality, as man or as artist, surmounts the controlling influences 
 of his time, the conclusion seems fair that when the poet enters 
 the realm of metaphysics he becomes a mouthpiece of other 
 men's thought. His art is his own; his feeling is his own; his 
 interpretation and application of the system with which he deals 
 may be his own; but he is not, in the region of metaphysical 
 abstractions, an independent or original thinker. It is hardly 
 safe to generalize from three instances; but so far as Daviee, 
 Pope, and Tennyson are concerned, there seems no doubt as to 
 the generalization. 
 
 All three reflect the background of history and social condition 
 against which they appear. All three echo the philosophical 
 systems of the periods immediately preceding their own. All 
 three show themselves products of the educational development 
 that shaped their growth, Davies of humanism in particular, 
 Pope of naturalism, and Tennyson of modern scientific study. 
 Each stands at the close of a movement in art, and therefore 
 concentrates in himself the art qualities of the poets preceding 
 him. All three in their rehgious proclivities exempUfy with 
 paramount force the religious procUvities of their contemporaries, 
 If the discussion concerned Davies as a eulogist of Queen EHzabeth. 
 Pope as a social satirist, or Tennyson as a writer of idyllic narrative 
 or musical lyric, the verdict would be different, for in these fields 
 the poets breathed their own element and were essentially them- 
 selves, beholden for ideas to none. But as philosophers their 
 merit lies, not in originality or independence, but in the charm 
 or vigor of expression with which they present the thoughts that 
 they have not invented as new creations but have discovered as 
 already in existence. 
 
 Pondering upon these poet-philosophers who have interpreted 
 for the lover of literature the thought of their time; observing 
 how they become progressively less positive in thought, less 
 convinced, less dogmatic, one can but speculate on the influences 
 
 185 
 
186 The Poet as Philosopher 
 
 that will be reflected when the poet-philosopher arises to interpret 
 the twentieth century. His will be the voice of a world in chaos, 
 of an archaic social system tottering to its fall, of an industrial 
 strife which more and more robs hfe of all ideals except utility 
 and gain. It may be the voice of an international state, united 
 for ideals of peace; or of a persistent international rivalry issuing 
 in such warfare as shames the carnage of the jungle by its savage- 
 ness. His may be the voice of a generation, as yet hypothetical, 
 that understands the theory of relativity. He may, for the better 
 fortune of art, be spokesman for the end of an epoch of futurism 
 in music, painting, and poetry. He must, if religion is yet to 
 live, give expression to an ideal of human love and service as 
 the pathway to the apprehension of God. He may — who knows? 
 — arrive at such a contact with the unseen world as to prove that 
 immortality which all the thinkers in all the ages have sought to 
 prove. And then — 
 
 Will he have arrived at any truer comprehension of man's 
 relation to the infinite than did Davies in his prayer for inspiration? 
 
 "O Light that mak'st the light, which makes the day! 
 Which setst the eye without, and mind within; 
 'Lighten my spirit with one cleare heavenly ray." 
 
 Will he have reached any higher conception of the whole duty 
 of man than did Pope? 
 
 "Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, 
 But looks through nature up to nature's God; 
 Pursues that chain which links th' immense design. 
 Joins heav'n and earth, and mortal and divine; 
 Learns from this union of the rising whole, 
 The first, last purpose of the human soul; 
 
 "And knows where faith, law, morals, all began, 
 All end — in love of God and love of man." 
 
 And will he have attained any fuller knowledge of "the breadth, 
 and length, and depth, and height" than was Tennyson's? 
 
 ^Our Uttle systems have their day, 
 2.y \ They have their day and cease to be; 
 ^ t'^ A They are but broken Ughts of Thee, 
 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 
 
 For the discovery arrived at by every sincere thinker in every 
 age is one — the Uttleness of man in the infinite spaces of eternity. 
 
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