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THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 VII 
 
 6 IB there a Poetic Yiew of the 
 
 World?' 
 
 By 
 
 C. H. Herford, Litt.D. 
 
 [From the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. VH~\ 
 
 London 
 
 Published for the British Academy 
 
 By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 
 
 Amen Corner, E.G. 
 
 Price Two Shillings net 
 
WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 VII 
 
 IS THEEE A POETIC VIEW OF THE 
 WORLD ? 
 
 BY C. H. HERFORD, Lnr.D. 
 Read November 24, 1916 
 
 * VIEW of the World ' is a clumsy phrase for an idea which itself has 
 for most of us an unattractive flavour of pedantry. This latter im- 
 pression is hardly removed by a knowledge of the part which, under 
 the neater and more expressive term Weltanschauung, it has played in 
 German literary study. Weltanschauung is the indispensable final 
 chapter without which no German biography, the confidential dis- 
 closure without which no German friendship, is complete. A Weltan- 
 schauung or ' World-view ', in its full scope, comprehends ideas about 
 life of quite distinct categories ; it touches metaphysics and science, 
 ethics and aesthetics ; it offers an answer to Faust's question ' what it 
 is that at bottom holds the world together ', but also to the practical 
 questions, what is the end of action and how we ought to act. 
 
 Historically, we know, the answers to these questions occur, in great 
 part, as successive steps in continuous or closely-connected processes 
 of thought. But between these continuous processes yawn gulfs which 
 no argument can bridge. From Bacon through Hobbes to Locke we 
 can trace something like a connected development. But between 
 Hobbes and his contemporary Boehme there is a cleavage due not to 
 bad reasoning on either side, but to a radical difference in the kind of 
 experience from which the reasoning in the two cases set out. And 
 the history of belief indicates that there are at least two types of 
 elemental experience which thus generate ideas about the world, and 
 to which two great classes of World-view in essence correspond. These 
 may be distinguished as the religious and the philosophical. In the 
 first, thought is dominated by the consciousness of a power or powers 
 distinct from man, controlling his fate, protecting his country or his 
 tribe, determining his moral code, his scheme of values, and his expecta- 
 tions after death. From the crudest fetishism and animism to the loftiest 
 
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2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 theism, a living relation to such a Power is the root fact from which 
 the religious World-view takes its origin and derives its character. 
 
 On the other hand, we find a vast and complex body of conceptions 
 of the world which do not originate in intercourse with a divine 
 Power, or in the fear or hope which such a power may inspire, but in 
 the effort to give a finally and universally valid account of experience. 
 
 Naturally, neither these nor any other type of World-view, if such 
 there be, are mutually exclusive in substance and content. Religion 
 may reach the conclusions of philosophy, and philosophy those of 
 religion, each by a path strictly its own. Historically, the two attitudes 
 to life have intimately interacted ; and if the religious type has on the 
 whole shown less power of resistance to the penetration of ideas of the 
 opposed type, on the other hand modern philosophy, in particular, 
 has often built upon, and not seldom with, ideas first begotten not 
 by speculative curiosity, but by the rapture or the agony of God- 
 intoxicated or demon-haunted souls. The eternal war of Ormuzd 
 and Ahriman still echoes in the Hebraic intensity of our distinction 
 between good and evil ; and the visionary ecstasies of the mystics 
 were of account in the evolution of philosophic pantheism. And, 
 similarly, the edifices of theology have borrowed fortifying buttresses 
 or indispensable pillars from ideas evolved by scientific reason or 
 a purely secular interpretation of good. Aristotle, applied and inter- 
 preted by Aquinas, became one of the masters, not only of those who 
 know, but of those who believe. Nevertheless, the two types have, on 
 a comprehensive survey, stood distinctly apart; and their ramifica- 
 tions appear to dominate between them the entire field of belief and 
 speculative thought. 
 
 Is it possible, nevertheless, to distinguish a third type of ' World - 
 view ' analogous to these ? In other words, is there any third kind of 
 experience, distinct from that of either religion or philosophy, yet 
 involving an apprehension of reality comparable in originality, and 
 possibly in importance, with theirs ? The present essay is based upon 
 the view that such an experience is given in and by poetry. 1 
 
 I 
 
 For the specific experience which comes to a poet through poetry, 
 however it may be interwoven with religious or philosophic ideas, has- 
 a radically different psychological origin and character. It is equally 
 intense and absorbing, but it is not determined by conscious relation 
 
 1 The distinction of a religious, philosophic, and poetic World-view is based upon 
 W. Dilthey : Das Wesen der PMlosophie : Weltanschauungslehre (Hinneberg, 
 Kultur der Gegenwart, I. vi). 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 3 
 
 to an outer power, and it seeks to express rather than to explain. It 
 is neither transfigured fear or hope, nor yet a logical process. In the 
 making of a poem there may be even a conscious detachment from 
 actuality, and the poet may float free in a dream world, apparently 
 without thought of the world which he inhabits. The poetic may 
 well be thought to differ from the religious or the philosophic types 
 of experience less in inducing any specific way of contemplating reality 
 than in liberating us from the necessity or desire to contemplate 
 it at all. 
 
 Yet it is certain that the poet's detachment, even in his most 
 ethereal dream-flights, from reality, is only apparent. In all the 
 spontaneous and seemingly arbitrary movement of his mind among its 
 crowding ideal shapes, reality through his stored-up experience is at 
 work, quietly weaving a thousand subtle filiations between the poem 
 and the life of men at large. Othello is much farther from ' actuality ' 
 than the poor novel on which its story was based ; but it is penetrated 
 with the vision of life, of which Cinthio's tale caught so feeble and 
 fugitive a glimpse. What distinguishes poetic from religious or 
 philosophic apprehension is not that it turns away from reality, but 
 that it lies open to and in eager watch for reality at doors and 
 windows which with them are barred or blind. The poet's soul 
 resides, so to speak, in his senses, in his emotions, in his imagination, 
 as well as in his conscious intelligence ; and we may provisionally 
 describe poetic apprehension as an intense state of consciousness in 
 which all these are vitally concerned. In so far as a particular out- 
 look upon the world is founded upon a particular type of experience, 
 a poet's World-view will be radically affected by his senses, emotions, 
 imagination. The flower which Wordsworth contemplated on the 
 bank or by the lake, and that other which Tennyson with his more 
 curious scrutiny plucked from the crannied wall, could stir these poets' 
 intellect and heart to the depths ; and their apprehension, as poets, 
 of God and man, of Nature, of Duty, would have been different 
 without it. 
 
 But in any case, it will be said, even if we grant that poetic ex- 
 perience tends to induce some way of regarding reality, it cannot 
 possibly induce any constant or definable way, if elements of mind so 
 infinitely diverse, so individual, as emotion and imagination, are 
 vitally concerned in the process. That energizing of mind released 
 from the control of actuality, which we call imagination, that free 
 following out of trains of suggestion called up by emotion, takes the 
 colour, at every step, of the individual make of the poet's nature, and 
 the individual cast of his experience. In so far as a World- view is 
 
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4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 strictly poetic in origin, the conclusion might seem hard to resist that 
 there may be as many poetic World-views as there are poets. And it 
 is true that the individual quality of the poet will always cleave to 
 whatever is strictly poetic in his thinking. But even so, it may be 
 possible to determine typical directions in which poetic apprehension 
 tends to engender or to sway belief, and to modify ideas imbibed in 
 education or accepted on authority. 
 
 Thus, it may be provisionally laid down that a view of the 
 World reached through poetic experience will tend to accentuate 
 those aspects of Man and Nature, and those ways of regarding 
 them, which offer most scope, analogy, or sanction, to this type 
 of experience. Where the senses play a vital part, and are yet 
 vitally implicated with passion and ideas, there will be little dis- 
 position to doctrines which either brand the senses as evil or illusory, 
 or erect them into a sufficing faith. The logical intellect, its pro- 
 cesses and conclusions, will receive a respectful but distant salute, 
 while the irrational elements of life are accepted as its needful in- 
 gredients or even as a supreme source of its worth. Love, which 
 tramples on reason, and, in the great words of a Kempis, warmly 
 glows like a flame beyond all measure, may be called in some sense the 
 natural religion of the poet. The mysterious love of man and woman, 
 in particular, irrelevant to most of the problems of philosophy, and 
 regarded by religion chiefly as a dangerous disturbing force, is one of 
 the perennial springs of poetry, and one of the shaping analogies 
 of poetic thought. And the same impassioned insight which gives 
 significance to this love exalts also all those other energies of the 
 soul which carry men out of and beyond themselves. Poetry is 
 naturally heroic ; it has presided over the cult of the hero, as religion 
 and philosophy over those of the saint and the sage ; it has rewarded 
 him with enchanting secular Paradises, Elysian fields, Isles of the 
 Blest, and Temples of Fame. Poetry is disposed to magnify human 
 nature ; the transition from Aeschylus, who painted men greater than 
 they were, to Euripides, who drew them after life, is also a decline 
 in the intrinsic temper of poetry, if in that alone. And because of its 
 bent to think greatly of man, it makes for the assertion, in the great 
 sense, of freedom of man's freedom to be himself. Neither the 
 shibboleths of political freedom nor those of free thought have always, 
 it is true, found response among poets. Their part has rather been to 
 keep alive in mankind the temper which treats outward obstacles not 
 as the soul's constraints, but as its opportunities ; the faith that iron 
 bars do not make a cage, and that you may be bounded in a nutshell, 
 and yet not only count yourself, but be, a king of infinite space. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 5 
 
 In the interpretation of Nature, poetic experience works creatively 
 or selectively on similar lines. To those wonderful deposits of the 
 imagination of the past, the myths of extinct faiths, from which 
 theology and philosophy have long withdrawn their sanction, or on 
 which they have laid their taboo, the poets have habitually been very 
 tender. And when they felt as poets, the image drawn from a myth 
 has never had merely decorative value, or served merely as a ' poetic 
 synonym ' for the exact term. It expressed something in the poet's 
 vision not otherwise to be put into words. If the glorious anthropo- 
 morphism of Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of 
 life everywhere pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn in 
 * Man and beast and earth and air and sea ', cries to the poet with 
 a voice which will not be put by ; and the symbols by which he seeks 
 to convey his sense of it, if they read personality too definitely into 
 the play of that elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which 
 escapes the reasoned formulas of science. 
 
 Hence many great philosophic ideas about the universe which, with- 
 out ascribing life or mind to it, might seem projected from our inner, 
 rather than gathered from our outer, experience, have powerfully 
 appealed to poets. The antithesis of the One and the Many, which 
 fascinated and fertilized every phase of Greek thought, had one of its 
 roots in the acute Greek feeling for continuity through change, which 
 is equally manifest in the Parthenon and in the Pindaric Ode, and to 
 a less degree in all art and poetry wherever the sense of rhythm is 
 present at all. ' When we feel the poetic thrill,' says Santayana, * is it 
 not that we find sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear ? ' That 
 felicitously expresses the genius of Hellenic art in particular; but it 
 also marks off the specifically poetic apprehension of Oneness as 
 a 'something deeply interfused' in and through the living multi- 
 plicity of the world, alike from the mystic vision of a One whose 
 splendour dissolves the reality of things, and from the vision of Peter 
 Bell, for whom nothing but ' things ' exists. Yet even this pregnant 
 Oneness has commonly gathered, in the poetic conception of the 
 universe, the higher and richer attribute of soul-life. It has become 
 a living and working Nature vitally implicated in every organ and 
 filament, or Mind diffused through every limb, or Love, or Beauty, or 
 Power, woven through the woof of it, or the splendour of God 
 irradiating it through and through. 
 
 When we turn, as is proposed in what follows, from these general 
 considerations to watch the actual operation of poetic apprehension in 
 concrete examples, we naturally encounter some serious difficulties. 
 
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Poetic apprehension may be as distinct and definable as we will, but 
 it can rarely be caught acting in vacuo. Poets are men ; they are 
 usually citizens ; they are often penetrated with some form of religious 
 or philosophical faith. It is inevitable, in such cases, that their 
 strictly poetic experience should be coloured or even overridden by 
 ideas proper to their possibly more habitual or more deeply established 
 persuasions. In poets like Goethe and Shelley, deeply concerned with 
 the issues of life outside poetry, philosophic and poetic impulses and 
 data may well seem inextricably mingled. Even Blake and Whitman, 
 who perhaps come nearer than any other moderns to shaping out 
 a poetic World-view for themselves, evidently worked, as poets, under 
 a deep bias of revolutionary dogma, which made them unjust to some 
 aspects of poetry itself. And with poet-exponents of great theological 
 or philosophical systems, like Lucretius or Dante, it may well appear 
 idle to seek to catch the moment when the runnel of poetry carved 
 out a watercourse of its own, instead of falling into and moving along 
 with the great tide of Epicurean or Catholic thought. Yet we 
 attach some meaning to our words when we distinguish periods in 
 which the poetic element in a poet's nature was more potent than at 
 others. When we say, for instance, that in Shelley the poetic appre- 
 hension after 1812 worked itself progressively free from an alien 
 philosophy ; or that in Wordsworth, from about the same date, it 
 became progressively overlaid by a theology almost equally alien ; or 
 that in Dante's Convito, the poet of the Vita Nuova, who will finally 
 recover dominance in the Commedia, has yielded much ground to the 
 scholastic thinker. Distinctions so clearly felt and sharply drawn 
 cannot be groundless. What is here proposed is to examine whether 
 any typical character or direction can be discovered in the modifications 
 which the data of religious or philosophical beliefs and ideals have 
 undergone in certain commanding poet natures. ^In that case we 
 might possess some of the material for answering the question I have 
 been bold enough to suggest in the title of this paper. 
 
 II 
 
 I begin with examples in which these data are derived from 
 religion ; and, in the first place, from religion still untouched by philo- 
 sophic reflection. Without rashly assuming the solution of unsolved 
 or insoluble problems, one may venture to assert that the Homeric 
 epics owe their present form neither to purely religious awe nor 
 merely to conscious and deliberate artistry, but to a poetic appre- 
 hension of the world operating upon the data of the savage cults and 
 rituals, the animism, totemism, and magic, which anthropology is 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 7 
 
 gradually deciphering under the palimpsest of their obliterating 
 splendour. With some aspects of the process we are not here 
 concerned. If 'Homer', as many modern scholars suppose, disliked 
 human sacrifice and similar barbarities, and tempered or effaced the 
 record of them, he reflects the growing efficacy of civilized, but not 
 necessarily of poetic, ideas. It is otherwise with the transformation, 
 whatever its precise nature and history, which put the defined 
 character and rich personal accent of the Homeric Olympus in place 
 of the psychological fluidity and incoherence of primitive religion. 
 For the childhood of poetry the change possibly involved a loss. 
 A world where there are no barriers, or none which magic cannot 
 dissolve, where gods and men and beasts pass over into one another 
 without resistance or demur, where everything can be done and had if 
 the right formula be pronounced and the due charm applied such 
 a world is the home and habitat of the fairy tale ; but its facile in- 
 stability must be overcome before a mature poetry, no less certainly 
 than before a mature science, can arise. The Homeric outlook upon 
 the world had as a religion grave flaws, which merited the strictures 
 of later moralists ; but it had also, as a religion, magnificent qualities 
 to which they rarely did justice. His deathless figures permanently 
 raised the status of man and the ideals of human achievement ; and 
 every line of the poetry is instinct with an assurance of the glory of 
 the world and the goodness of life, and the nobility of heroic emprise, 
 and of reverence and of pity, which justly made his book the Bible of 
 later Greece. 
 
 Yet it is plain that even Homer reflects or finds reflection in but 
 a limited tract of the Greek mind ; that there were many deeper, as 
 well as darker, currents in the Greek way of apprehending the world, 
 of which that radiant mirror shows no trace. Humanity had triumphed 
 over the superhuman as well as over the subhuman, clarity over 
 mystery as well as over confusion. The Ionian thinkers of the sixth 
 century swept away the fables of Olympus, fastened on the problem of 
 substance, and proclaimed the sublime discovery that the All is One. 
 The Orphic cults and the Thracian orgies of Dionysus betrayed by 
 the widespread and intimate hold which they won in Greek life, 
 refined and humanized as they doubtless were, that religion in Greece 
 too included the riot of intoxicated rapture as well as clear-eyed piety ; 
 the Bacchic frenzy, which carries men beyond themselves, as well as 
 temperate self-reverence and self-control. Both these new elements 
 enriched and uplifted, if at some points they also impoverished and 
 degraded, Greek mentality and the Greek apprehension of the world, 
 religious, philosophic, and poetic alike. The philosophic apprehension 
 
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 of unity reacted on religion, and the two strains coalesced in the sub- 
 lime theism of Cleanthes' hymn. The Dionysiac rapture reacted on 
 philosophy without it should we have had the great doctrine pro- 
 claimed in the Phaedrus, of the divine vision won through madness 
 and love ? And both reacted upon poetry above all on tragedy, with 
 its stringent ideal of unity, maintained and manifested through all 
 the phases and moods of conflict, and the alliance, disclosed in its 
 very structure, of Apolline clarity and order with the lyric exaltation 
 of Dionysus. But the matter of tragedy shows yet more evidently 
 the larger and deeper Wo rid- view which poetry has now won. In 
 passing from Homer to Aeschylus we enter an atmosphere in which 
 the gods are hardly ever visible, but which is laden and tense with the 
 sense of divine things. His persons, it was said, are more than human ; 
 certainly his gods are sometimes like the Zeus of the Prometheus 
 less than divine. But the Aeschylean universe has outgrown Olympus 
 without having dispossessed it. A soul of immense reach and depth, 
 apprehending life from many sides, but always with a sense of vast 
 issues and inexhaustible import, here interprets the old stories of 
 man's relations with the gods, and leaves us with a new vision of the 
 possibilities and responsibility of man. His tragic conflicts call in- 
 commensurate forces into play, and their apparent solution leaves yet 
 larger problems unsolved. The story of Prometheus ended with his 
 reconciliation to Zeus; and this doubtless expressed the poet's de- 
 liberate intention and design. The modern world has remembered 
 Prometheus, not for his final surrender or appeasement, but as the 
 assertor and embodiment of something in man which stands over 
 against the gods he recognizes, and not only endures unflinchingly all 
 that their utmost anger can inflict, but arraigns them himself before 
 a law of Justice higher than their own. Aeschylus, we know, was 
 a devoutly religious man, and never dreamed of surrendering his 
 reverence for the divine because of the crimes of the gods. Possibly, 
 as Wilamowitz has suggested, he believed that divinity itself had 
 passed through a youth ' full of foolish noise ' to become with ripening 
 years a righteous God and Father, worthy at length of universal 
 reverence. Reverence for such an erring divinity is hardly distinguish- 
 able from forgiveness; in any case it foreshadows, if it does not 
 announce, the clear recognition of human responsibility. And that 
 recognition is already dominant in the mature work of Aeschylus. 
 The traditional superstitions which still entangled the Greek mind 
 the doctrine of an irresistible fate, or of a divine jealousy attending 
 human greatness dissolve under the scrutiny of his terrible insight. 
 Man is free even in his crimes, and the greater because he is free. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 9 
 
 Clytaemnestra chooses and wills as freely as Lady Macbeth ; she is as 
 little the helpless victim of the curse of Atreus as the other of the 
 Witches 1 spell. It needed a great poet thus to embrace in his vision 
 of life things incompatible to common sense. * Whether Aeschylus is 
 greater', declares the penetrating interpreter to whom I have referred, 
 ' when he uplifts our hearts by the full tones of surrender to the 
 divine, or when he thrills us with the terrible acts and sufferings of 
 human freewill, every one must decide for himself from his own 
 experience ; but let no one say that he understands the poet until he 
 has known them both. 1 1 The poetfs eye, * glancing from heaven to 
 earth, from earth to heaven ', overcomes the antinomies of theological 
 dogma ; and herein lies one of the most signal services which poetic 
 apprehension has rendered to thought, and not least to religion. 
 
 To pass from Aeschylus to Dante is to watch operations of poetic 
 intelligence in which only the environment, the material, and the 
 instruments of expression are profoundly changed. The words just 
 quoted of the Greek might apply without the alteration of a syllable 
 to the Florentine ; and if ever poet saw earth and heaven at once it 
 was he. But the theological World-view which he found was more 
 authoritatively established, more intellectual in its philosophical 
 substance, and more rich and beautiful in its human appeal. The 
 fresh fountain of religious feeling, still abundantly flowing, was for- 
 tified and entrenched within a vast structure of elaborated dogma, 
 for which councils and saints had supplied the architects and the 
 masons, and ancient philosophy the stones. Within this imposing 
 edifice, nevertheless, Dante, with complete conviction, found and made 
 his home. No one now questions the absoluteness of Dante^ Catholic 
 faith, and we should seek in vain for any rebellious upsurging of the 
 poet in him against the starkest of scholastic abstractions. On the 
 contrary, his wonderful gift of style continually finds the material for 
 poetry in the most seemingly arid regions. Sometimes the result is 
 merely an astonishing tour deforce ; but often we become aware that 
 Dante has not only invented but discovered, and that many a dogma 
 which has the air of being the mere husk of religion is m reality the 
 imperfect, stammering utterance through which religious passion 
 sought to make itself articulate. Dante, in short, makes us feel in 
 these constructions of the intellect the language of the soul. 
 
 To do this needed something more than devout belief. It 
 needed the imaginative intuition of a poet. The poetry of Dante was 
 distinguished from that of his older contemporaries above all by being 
 
 1 Wilamowitz, Oresteia, p. 47* 
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10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 just this intense soul-vision put into words. 'I simply write down 
 what Love within dictates.' T Psychological veracity never fails him. 
 Allegory, in so many hands a tissue of personified abstractions, be- 
 comes, in his, a living image of humanity. Symbolic meanings and 
 applications interweave and encircle it, but the core is real. His 
 vision is only on the surface a description necessarily speculative 
 of the fortunes of souls after death ; its substance, as he tells us, is 
 ' man of his freewill choosing good or evil here '. The human denizens 
 of his hell and purgatory and paradise have undergone no inner 
 change ; they are the men he had known, in their spiritual habits as 
 they lived ; and their fate, when Dante is thinking most as a poet and 
 least as a theologian, is a continuation of their crucial actions. That 
 Paolo and Francesca are immersed in unquenchable flames satisfies 
 the theological idea of retribution ; Dante inflicts on them the more 
 searching penalty of being for ever locked in the embrace of their 
 illicit love. And how often, when he thinks he is devoutly following 
 out to the last consequence the Church's dogma of eternal punishment, 
 he is unconsciously testifying to the poet's sublime faith in the soul of 
 man as stronger than death and hell. 'Who is he', asks Dante, 
 looking upon Capaneo (Inf. xiv. 46), 'who seems not to heed the 
 flame, but lies fiercely unsubdued by the fiery vein ? ' Or the yet 
 greater picture of Farinata (Inf. x. 35), defiantly erect where the rest 
 grovel in agony, 'as if he held hell in great disdain '. Even the 
 criminals whom the poet most abhors, and thrusts into the very 
 depths of the abyss, even the traitors guilty of the death of Caesar or 
 of Christ, he allows still to show greatness of soul ; Brutus, champed 
 to a bloody foam in the jaws of Lucifer, is still the Stoic philosopher, 
 and though he writhes in agony, utters not a word (Inf. xxxiv. 66). 
 And how wonderfully in the great Ulysses scene (Inf. xxvi) the poet 
 takes the pen out of the hand of the theologian, and, forgetting the 
 ' fraud ' for which the captor of Troy is doing penance in hell, com- 
 pels us to listen entranced to his tale of that last voyage, beyond the 
 sunset, of the old wanderer, still insatiable of experience, who had 
 kindled his shrinking comrades by bidding them ' Consider of what 
 seed ye are sprung ; ye were not made to live like the brute beasts, but 
 to follow after virtue and knowledge'. Strange words to issue from 
 the quenchless flames of hell ! But Dante goes beyond this. For the 
 sake of the heroism of Cato, he flatly violates the theological 
 categories which condemned him to hell, and makes him the guardian 
 of Purgatory. 2 As for the rest of the ' virtuous heathen', he cannot 
 
 1 Purg. xxiv. 52. 4. 
 
 9 The case of Trajan, who for his justice was said to have been saved by the 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 11 
 
 indeed transfer them from the hell to which the Church has assigned 
 them a hell much more ferocious than any of which they had 
 dreamed to Elysium. But he does what he may, and he provides 
 for them within the precincts of hell an Elysium of green lawns and 
 running streams, * the one place in the Inferno where there is light and 
 air' (Inf. iii). The theological ethic of sin is thus unconsciously 
 crossed, again and again, by the poetic ethic for which ' good ' means 
 greatness of soul. 
 
 Moreover, with a depth of spiritual insight strangely in contrast 
 with the vulgar notion of punishment which dictated the theological 
 hell, Dante has asserted, even in this realm of iron necessity, the 
 freedom of man. The inmates of hell are not convicts condemned and 
 punished for sins long since repented of: they are there of their own 
 motion and by their own will ; and if there is no hope there, it is not 
 because God has no mercy, but because they cannot repent. The souls 
 in Purgatory are held there by no compulsion ; they desire nothing but 
 to be purified of their sins, and the moment they desire to mount to 
 Paradise, that moment they are free. 
 
 It would be strange, then, had Dante, with all his sense of supreme 
 cosmic forces, not stood for the faith that man is yet the * captain of 
 his soul '. There he is at one with Aeschylus and Milton, and the other 
 great theological poets of the West. Man's ' freedom ' is a root idea 
 of the Comedy ; and not merely because its purpose was to show him 
 ' in the exercise of freewill ', determining his fate hereafter. Dante went 
 much farther than this. A devoted Catholic and citizen, and eager to 
 welcome the authority both of Church and State, he was driven by the 
 corruption of the one and the anarchy of the other to seek ' another 
 way ' the way of spiritual self-help with the aid of philosophy and 
 theology, along which he is led by Vergil and Beatrice. The great 
 farewell words with which Vergil leaves him in the Earthly Paradise, 
 ' I crown and mitre thee king and bishop over thyself, express with 
 thrilling power the individualist nay, the revolutionary side of his 
 thought. He would not have been the great poet he was if it had 
 been the only side. Dante's reverence for Vergil and for Beatrice is 
 of the very substance of his self-assertion ; he has crowned and mitred 
 himself by taking them for his guides, and the result is the great 
 poetic cosmos eloquent beyond all the other masterpieces of the 
 world of devout discipleship, and yet instinct in every line with 
 
 prayers of Gregory, is not quite parallel, since there was here a theological 
 tradition in his favour. But at least Dante seizes on and emphasizes the 
 tradition, and not merely 'saves' Trajan, but makes him the comrade of the 
 glorious just kings in Jupiter (Par. xx. 44 f.). 
 
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12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 the ardour of a soul 'voyaging through strange seas of thought 
 alone \ 
 
 But the name of Beatrice points to another aspect of Dante's work 
 on which the impress of the poet in him is yet more unmistakably 
 set. Measured by the range and compass of thought, and by the 
 richness and delicacy of feeling, which the term in his usage conveys, 
 Dante is the first, as he is the greatest, of the poets of Love. His 
 poetry recovers and renews, or at the least suggests and recalls, all the 
 varieties of intellectual and emotional experience for which philosophy, 
 religion, and romance had, before his time, found in < Love ' the final 
 expression, or the speaking symbol. The cosmic love ((f>i\ia) by 
 which Empedocles had first interpreted the universal phenomena 
 which we still, hardly less anthropomorphically, know as ' attraction ' ; 
 the passion for another human being (epco?) in which the author of 
 the Phaedrus and the Symposium discovered one of the sources of the 
 divine exaltation which emancipates men from their human limits, 
 and endows them with the vision of reality ; the love of God for man, 
 and of man for God (ayairri\ proclaimed as the very core of Christi- 
 anity in the Fourth Gospel these three types of love, all denoted for 
 Dante by Amor, amore, 1 were conjoined in his experience with a fourth, 
 distinct from all, though nearly allied to the second : the romantic 
 love of woman which had been the chief inspiration of the poetry of 
 Provence, and which, however sublimated and spiritualized, is en- 
 shrined in the Vita Nuova. To say that Dante's mind, equally 
 powerful in analysis and in synthesis, confounds these distinctions 
 would be unjust ; but it would be equally untrue to assert that their 
 associations are never blended. Christian philosophy had itself ab- 
 sorbed the first; cosmic attraction then reappeared in a sublime 
 apotheosis, as the love which draws all the universe towards God, and 
 by which God, as its source, 'moves the sun and the other stars'. 
 And if Dante, in his treatise on poetry, 2 distinguishes himself from 
 the poets of ' love ' as a poet of ' morals ', or ' righteousness ', he also, 
 as we saw, ascribes his whole power as a poet to his writing what love 
 dictated in his heart. Man in virtue of his freedom has power to 
 misuse Love, and Dante everywhere scornfully contrasts the higher 
 and the baser love. Nay, all sin which can be ' purged away ' he regards 
 
 1 The second type I take to be represented, with ohvious differences, for 
 Dante hy the ( philosophical ' love of Guido Guiuicelli, the ' father of love poets 
 and my own ' (Purg. xxvi. 97) ; there is no evidence that he knew anything of 
 this part of Plato ; in any case, of course, this love is for him excited only by 
 woman. The amore of Empedocles is mentioned in Inf. xii. 42 ; Empedocles 
 himself, as well as Plato, is in Limbo (Inf. iv. 138). 
 
 2 De Vulg. Eloq. ii. 2. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 13 
 
 as due to ' love ' wrongly used ; the whole population of Purgatory is 
 there because it loved unwisely, or loved indifferent things too well, 
 or right things too little. But the harm here, for Dante, arises not 
 from love, but from the application to it of the evil material in man's 
 nature ' as a foul impress may be set upon the most precious wax.' l 
 
 Something of the idealizing atmosphere which Christianity and 
 Plato had thrown about love thus always colours it in Dante's mind. 
 But it is also subtly touched with that other idealizing force which 
 not Christianity but the poets had recognized, which Christian ethics 
 had contemptuously tolerated or scornfully tabooed. Dante had 
 known the love of woman in many forms. Longing for the absent 
 wife and child had consumed his flesh and his bones in exile ; 2 and 
 his virginal adoration of Beatrice sprang from no coldness of the 
 blood. The power of womanhood to lift men to supreme heights of 
 vision and fortitude, which he had divined through Beatrice and 
 sung in the great canzone of the Vita Nuova, 3 no more passed out of 
 his faith than did her image from his memory. If the Comedy is 
 a great scheme of salvation, it is also a great song of womanhood such 
 as, he said, no man ever sang before ; and if we say that Beatrice is 
 there a symbol for Theology, that is doubtless true : but a thousand 
 phrases remind us how much she symbolizes besides ; and the look ' in 
 the eyes of Beatrice ', which draws Dante upward through the circling 
 spheres of Paradise to the beatific vision, attests also his faith in the 
 power of the lover's adoration to lift a man out of his humanity 
 (trasumanar), and make him 'joyful even in the flames'. 
 
 Thus Dante, though he counted himself not among the poets of 
 love, but among the poets of * righteousness ', is one of the inspiring 
 sources of the modern poetry which invests the love of man and 
 woman with the ideal attributes which philosophy and religion had 
 proclaimed in other forms of love, but had ignored or repudiated in 
 this. In Spenser Platonist, Christian, and lover at once the fusion 
 of the three strains is complete ; his great hymns to Love, who 
 
 is lord of all the world by right, 
 And ruleth all things by his powerful saw, 
 
 prelude his even greater hymn of marriage. Even Chaucer perhaps 
 learnt from Dante that amazed awe with which, in the opening lines 
 of one of his earliest Italianate poems, he contemplates the ' wonderful 
 working' of love. 4 The Petrarchists and Sonneteers went far to 
 reduce the expression of this love to hollow phrase-making. But with 
 
 1 Purg. xviii. 36. * Cans:, xix. 
 
 8 Canz. i. * Parkment of Fowles, I f. 
 
14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Romanticism it found fresh and original utterance, and its status in 
 the world has never been more loftily affirmed than by Celtic Romanti- 
 cizing poets of to-day. ' I say that Eros is a being ! ' declares one of 
 the finest spirits among them. ' It is more than a power of the soul, 
 though it is that also. It has a universal life of its own.' l 
 
 III 
 
 The power of personality and the glory of love : these have emerged 
 from our discussion thus far as the things in life whose appeal to 
 poetic intelligence was most potent in modifying the substance or 
 changing the perspective of a World-view derived from religion. We 
 have now to examine, in a fashion unavoidably even more fragmentary 
 and summary, the reaction of another series of poetic minds upon the 
 more complex and abstruse World- views of philosophy. 
 
 It is necessary for the purpose to adopt a rough grouping of philo- 
 sophic systems, and I take the following division into three funda- 
 mental types, based with qualifications upon one proposed by Wilhelm 
 Dilthey in the essay already referred to. 
 
 To the first belong the naturalistic schools, from Democritus to 
 Hobbes and the Encyclopedists, deriving their philosophical concep- 
 tions directly or indirectly from an analysis of the physical world, and 
 commonly disdaining or ignoring phenomena not to be so explained. 
 To the second type of thinkers the objective world is still the absorb- 
 ing subject of contemplation ; but it is approached not from the side 
 of physics, but from the side of self-conscious mind ; it is felt, not as 
 material for causal investigation, but as responsive to the human 
 spirit, now as living Nature, now as immanent God, now as a pro- 
 gressively evolving Absolute. Here, with various qualifications, we 
 may class Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel. In the 
 third type, the focus of interest and the determining source of philo- 
 sophic ideas is the self-conscious mind itself. It feels profoundly its 
 own energy and power of self-determination ; and it regards the 
 objective world not as deeply at one with it, responsive to its feeling, 
 accessible to its thought, but rather as a threatening power against 
 which it must vindicate its spiritual freedom and build its secure 
 spiritual home. In the philosophies of this type, personality which 
 the first type ignored and the second reduced to an organ of a world 
 process became the fundamental condition of our experience, as with 
 Kant and Fichte, or a transcendent personal God shaping the universe 
 to his mind, as with the Plato of the Timaeus. 
 
 1 A. E., Imaginations and Reveries, p. 151. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD ? 15 
 
 If we now consider these three types in relation to our problem, it 
 seems evident that the second and the third are naturally more con- 
 genial to poetry than the first. Yet we know that one of the greatest 
 of Roman poets made it the work of his life to expound the atomic 
 Naturalism of Epicurus to an unreceptive Roman world. The De 
 Rerum Natura was not, like the Essay on Man, the attempt of a con- 
 summate writer to clothe in elegant dress philosophic ideas which he 
 only half understood and which he abandoned in alarm when they 
 threatened to be dangerous. Lucretius was the poet but also the 
 prophet of Epicureanism, and it is among the prophets of the faiths 
 by which men live and die that we must seek a parallel to the 
 passionate earnestness with which he proclaims to Memmius the 
 saving gospel of Epicurus to that same Memmius who a few years 
 later showed his piety to Epicurus's memory by destroying his house. 
 But Lucretius felt and thought also as a poet, and in the temper of 
 poetry. He was not ' lending his pen ' to a good cause, nor turning 
 Greek science into Latin hexameters in order that it might be more 
 vividly grasped or more readily remembered. He was conquering 
 a new way in poetry, as his master (according to his pious faith) had 
 done in thought ; striking out a virgin path which no foot before his 
 had trod, as Epicurus had soared beyond the flaming walls of the 
 world in the lonely and victorious quest for truth. And he calls on 
 the Muses for aid with as devout a faith in his poetic mission as 
 Milton had when he summoned Urania or some greater Muse to be 
 his guide while he essayed ' things unattempted yet in prose or 
 rhyme \ 
 
 The atomic system of Democritus, which Epicurus adopted as his 
 account of the world, was a magnificent contribution to physical 
 science, and the fertility of its essential idea is still unexhausted. 
 The problems of mind and life, of ethic and religion and art, it 
 touched only in so far as it resolved mind and all its activities into 
 functions of matter and motion, death into disintegration of elements, 
 and divine agency into an idle dream. But these negations were 
 precisely what commended the doctrine to Epicurus. A saintly 
 recluse, bent only upon showing mankind how to live a life of serene 
 and cheerful virtue, he took over the doctrine of the great physicist 
 of Abdera, as that which promised most effectual relief from dis- 
 turbing superstitions. He might have gone to the great Athenian 
 idealists of the previous century, the immortal masters not only of 
 those who know, but of those who think and labour and create, 
 whether in science or in poetry or in citizenship ; but his aim was 
 precisely to liberate from these distracting energies, and allure a weary 
 
16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 generation from the forum and the workshop, even the studio of 
 letters or of art, the strenuous laboratories of science, and the 
 temples of the gods, into the choice seclusion of his garden, the garden 
 of a secular monasticism, secure from fear, and fragrant with innocent 
 and beautiful things. Such a secular monasticism has charms for the 
 modern spirit, in some of its phases, too ; and M. Anatole France has 
 described a latter-day Epicurean garden even more securely barred 
 than the old from the fever and the fret of thought. What Epicurus 
 added of his own to Democritus's theory was an accommodation not 
 to truth but to convenience ; and the measure of his scientific ardour 
 is given by his easy toleration of conflicting explanations of the same 
 phenomenon, provided they did not call in the intervention of the 
 gods : while the measure of his attachment to poetry is given by his 
 counsel to his disciples to go past it with stopped ears, as by the 
 Sirens' deadly song. 
 
 It was of this enemy of disturbing emotion, this quietist of paganism, 
 this timid and debonair humanitarian, that his Roman disciple drew 
 the magnificent and astonishing portrait which opens the De Rerum 
 Natura. The Lucretian Epicurus is another Prometheus 'the 
 Greek who, when mankind lay prostrate before the horrible apparition 
 of Religion, first of mortals dared to face and withstand her. No 
 legendary terror quelled him, nor thunder, nor the menacing roar of 
 heaven ; they did but kindle the more the eager courage of his soul, 
 to be the first to break the bars of Nature's gates. So the living might 
 of his genius prevailed ; and he passed beyond the far-flaming walls 
 of the world, and traversed in mind and spirit the immeasurable 
 universe, returning thence in triumph to tell us what can, and what 
 cannot, come into being ; . . . having trampled under foot Religion 
 who once crushed mankind, and lifted mankind in turn by his victory 
 up to the height of heaven.' l 
 
 One might well surmise that a philosophy which a poet could thus 
 ardently proclaim was itself, after all, not without some of the seeds 
 or springs of poetry ; and that Lucretius, in choosing to expound it 
 in verse, was not staking everything on his power of making good, by 
 brilliant surface decoration or eloquent digressions, radical defects of 
 substance. No doubt there are passages enough in his poem where 
 poetic substance and decorative surface seem equally wanting. But 
 perhaps we yield too implicitly to the spell of Homer and of Aristotle, 
 or, it may be, to that of Lessing or Mommsen, if with the last-named 
 we declare Lucretius's choice of subject *a blunder'. 2 Rather, we can 
 
 1 De Rer. Nat. i. 63-79. 
 
 9 Rom. Gesch. V. xii. 595. Goethe, to speak only of German critics, was of 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 17 
 
 discern under much scholastic obstruction and irrelevance the out- 
 lines of a colossal epic of the universe, of which the protagonist is 
 Man, and wanting neither in the heroic exultations nor in the tragic 
 dooms, neither in the melancholy over what passes nor in the triumph 
 over what endures, which go to the making of the greatest epic. And 
 these qualities had one of their roots in the atomic theory of Demo- 
 critus itself, at first sight so unpromising for poetry. 
 
 For his theory was, in effect, and probably in intention, a jdevice 
 for overcoming that dilemma on the horns of which early Greek 
 thought found itself so desperately impaled, the antithesis of the One 
 and the Many. The Eleatics had declared that pure Being was alone 
 real, denying Change and Motion ; Heraclitus declared that nothing 
 was real but Change, and the only perpetuity 'flux'. His rival 
 Democritus showed that it was possible to hold change and per- 
 manence to be equally real by supposing the world of the senses, 
 where all things die and are born, to be composed of uncreated and 
 indestructible elements. Underlying the ceaseless fluctuations of 
 Nature and life as we see them, lay a continuity of eternal substance, 
 of which they were the passing modes one of the greatest of philo- 
 sophical conceptions, as Santayana has called it, 1 but also one 
 appealing profoundly to the specifically poetic intuition which I have 
 described. Whether the permanent, apprehended through the flux of 
 sense, be a spiritual substance like Plato's ideas, or Shelley's ' white 
 radiance of eternity ', or whether it be the constant Form and Function 
 of the flowing river, as in Wordsworth's last Duddon sonnet, or whether, 
 as here, it be a background of material particles perpetually combining 
 and resolved, we have the kind of intuition which gives the thrill of 
 poetry; we discover 'sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear'; 
 infinite perspectives open out in the moment and in the point, and, how- 
 ever remote as yet the temper and the conclusions of Spinozan mysticism 
 may be, we yet in some sort see things ' in the light of eternity '. 
 
 In Lucretius this conception found a mind capable of being ravished 
 by its imaginative grandeur, as well as of pursuing it indefatigably 
 
 another opinion. His own choice of subject in poemg like the Metamorphose der 
 Pflanzen was closely analogous, and he recognized with high appreciation Lucre- 
 tius's extraordinary gifts cognate with his own of intuition (Anschauung) and 
 imagination, enabling him to ' describe with power ' and to ' explore beyond the 
 reach of the senses the mysterious recesses of Nature ' ; in other words, gifts 
 which found peculiar scope in dealing with the subject which Lucretius actually 
 chose. Cf. Goethe's letter to v. Kriebel, the first German translator of the De 
 Rer. Nat., Feb. 14, 1821, Werke, ed. Hempel, xxix. 537. 
 
 1 Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, to which this essay owes several 
 suggestions. 
 
18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 through the thorniest mazes of mechanical proof. The contagious 
 fervour which breathes through his poem is not the mere ardour of 
 the disciple bent on winning a convert, nor the joy of the literary 
 craftsman as his hexameters leap forth glowing on the anvil : it is the 
 sacred passion of one who has had a sublime vision of life and nature, 
 and who bears about the radiance of it into all the work to which he 
 has set his hand. It is not because of anything that Lucretius adds 
 to Epicurus in explicit doctrine he really adds nothing at all that 
 the impression produced by his poem differs so greatly from that of 
 all we know in fragments and at second-hand, it is true of Epicurus's 
 own writings. The ultimate principles are the same, but the accent 
 is laid at different points. The parochial timidities of Epicurus have 
 left their traces on the Roman's page ; but they appear as hardly more 
 than rudimentary survivals among the native inspirations of a man of 
 heroic mettle and valour and Roman tenacity and force of will. 
 He is not able quite to break free even from speculative foibles 
 which show the Master's shallow opportunism at its worst ; he repeats 
 the dictum that the sun is about as large as it looks, a lamp hung 
 a little above the earth, and daily lighted and put out ; but he becomes 
 himself when he lets his imagination soar into the infinities of Time 
 and Space which his faith opens out or leaves room for. It is a 
 triumph of poetry as well as of common sense when he scoffs at the 
 Stoic dogma of a Space which abruptly comes to an end ; when he 
 stations an archer at the supposed terminus and ironically bids him 
 shoot his arrow into the hypothetical nothingness beyond. Or in more 
 sombre mood, how grave an intensity he puts into a common thought 
 like that of the end of life by the sublimely terrible epithet immortal 
 which he applies to death : 
 
 Mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit (iii. 869), 
 or into a mere reminder that birth and death are always with us, by 
 making us hear the continuous succession, through the ages, of funeral 
 laments and wailings of the newly-born (iii. 578). He accepts with- 
 out question the swerving of the atoms, devised by Epicurus child 
 and man of genius at once to refute the Stoic dogma of necessity ; 
 but what possesses his mind and imagination is not these intrusions 
 of caprice, but the great continuities and uniformities of existence, 
 which follow from the perpetual dissolution and re-making of life : 
 
 ' Rains die, when father ether has tumbled them into the lap of 
 mother earth ; but then goodly crops spring up and trees laden with 
 fruit ; and by them we and the beasts are fed, and glad towns teem 
 with children and the woods ring with the song of young birds' 
 (i. 250 f.). 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 19 
 
 Only, as such passages show, Lucretius grasps these uniformities 
 and continuities not as theoretic abstractions, but as underlying con- 
 ditions of the teeming multiplicity and joyous profusion of living 
 Nature. His senses, imagination, and philosophic intellect, all phe- 
 nomenally acute and alert, wrought intimately together ; and he 
 enters into and exposes the life of the individual thing with an inten- 
 sity of insight and a realistic precision and power which burn 
 its image upon our brain, without ever relaxing our consciousness 
 that it is yet part of an endless process and the incidental expression 
 of law. 
 
 None the less, his conception of the nature of the process itself does 
 insensibly undergo a change. The hidden flaw in his system could 
 not but, with an exponent so richly endowed and so transparently 
 sincere, at some point disturb its imposing coherence. Atomism could 
 not explain life, and life poured with too abounding a tide through 
 the heart and brain of Lucretius not to undermine in some degree the 
 authority of his mechanical calculus, and to lend a surreptitious per- 
 suasiveness to analogies derived from the animated soul. Without 
 ostensibly disturbing the integrity of his Epicurean creed, such 
 analogies have, in two ways, infused an alien colour into his poetry 
 and alien implications into his thought. In the first place, he feels, 
 as abounding natures will, that life ' the mere living ' is somehow 
 very good, in spite of all the evils it brings in its train, and death 
 pathetic, in spite of the evils from which it sets us free. When he is 
 demonstrating that the world cannot have been made by gods, he sets 
 forth its grave flaws of structure and arrangement with merciless 
 trenchancy 'tanta stat praedita culpa' (v. 199); and, like Lear, he 
 makes the new-born child wail because he is come into a world where 
 so many griefs await him. And no one ever urged with more 
 passionate eloquence that it is unreasonable to fear to die. None the 
 less, phrases charged with a different feeling about life continually 
 escape him. To begin to live is ' to rise up into the divine borders 
 of light ' (i. 20). And secondly, despite his philosophical assurance, 
 incessantly repeated, that birth and death are merely different aspects 
 of the same continuous mechanical process, and that nothing receives 
 life except by the death of something else, 1 he cannot suppress the 
 suggestion that the creative energy of the world is akin to that which, 
 with conscious will and desire, brings forth the successive generations 
 of man. And so, in the astonishing and magnificent opening address 
 
 1 Alid ex alio reficit natura, nee ullam 
 
 rem gigni patitur. nisi morte adiuta alieua. 
 
 i. 263, &c. 
 
20 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 to Venus (i. 1 f.), the poet who was about to demonstrate that the 
 gods lived eternally remote from the life of men calls upon the 
 legendary mother of his own race, as the divine power ever at work 
 in this teeming universe, the giver of increase, bringing all things to 
 birth, from the simplest corn-blade to the might and glory of the 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 So grave and impressive an appeal cannot be treated as mere 
 rhetorical ornament. If we call it figure, it is figure of the kind 
 which is not a ' poetical ' substitute for exact description, but conveys 
 something for which no other terms are adequate. The great symbol 
 of Venus rendered his vehement apprehension of the life of Nature 
 with more veracity than that calculus of atomic movements which he 
 was about to expound, and by which his logical intellect with perfect 
 sincerity believed it to be explained. 
 
 Far less astonishing than his bold rehabilitation of the goddess of 
 Love is his fetishistic feeling for the Earth, the legendary Mother 
 of men. For him, too, as for primaeval myth, she is the ' universal 
 mother', 1 who in her fresh youth brought forth flower and tree, and 
 bird and beast ; from whose body sprang at length the race of man 
 itself; nay, he tells us how the infants crept forth 'from wombs 
 rooted in the soil', and how, wherever this happened, earth yielded 
 naturally through her pores a liquor most like to milk, 'even as 
 nowadays every woman when she has borne is filled with sweet milk, 
 because all that current of nutriment streams toward the breast '. 
 
 But if Lucretius in such passages goes even beyond the most 
 implicit modern attribution of personality to Nature, his feeling is at 
 another point sharply marked off from that of Wordsworth, for 
 instance, or Meredith. His Earth is veritably mother, but she is not 
 benign ; she has brought forth the teeming life which possesses her, 
 but she does not love her children, nor mould their forms by silent 
 sympathy, nor nourish their manhood from her ' well of strength '. 
 
 For the Earth is not only our Mother ; she is our tomb (ii. 1 148 f.). 
 And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal 
 energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to 
 it. The Earth, so prolific in her joyous youth, is now like a woman 
 who has ceased to bear, ' worn out by length of days '. In the whole 
 universe birth and death absolutely balance, the equation of mechanical 
 value is never infringed ; the universe has no history, only a continuous 
 substitution of terms. But each living thing has a history ; it knows 
 the exultation of onset and the melancholy of decline ; nor is its fear 
 
 1 v. 788 f . His ' scientific ' mind about Earth is expressed in ii. 652 f. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 21 
 
 of death cancelled by the knowledge that in that very moment, and 
 in consequence of that fact, some other living thing will be born. 
 And Lucretius, feeling for our earth as a living thing, and one very 
 near to us and deeply involved in all the issues of our existence, does 
 not suggest that some other Earth elsewhere is now on the threshold 
 of being. She has for him a history, and the joy and pathos of 
 history, and he forgets that she is a mechanical term. To say that 
 he puts the ' Nevermore ' of romantic sentimentality in the place of 
 the dispassionate ' give and take ' of mechanics would do wrong to the 
 immense virility which animates every line of this athlete among poets. 
 Of the cheap melancholy of discontent he knows as little as of the 
 cheap satisfaction of complacency, or of that literary melancholy 
 where the sigh of Horace, or Ronsard, or Herrick, over the passing of 
 roses and all other beautiful things covers a sly diplomatic appeal 
 to the human rosebud to be gathered while still there is time. No, 
 the melancholy of Lucretius is like that of Diirer's Melancholia, the 
 sadness of strong intellect and far-reaching vision as it contemplates 
 the setting of the sun of time and the ebbing of the tides of mortality ; 
 or like Wordsworth's mournful music of dissolution, only to be heard 
 by an ear emancipated from vulgar joys and fears ; or like the melan- 
 choly of Keats the veiled goddess who hath her shrine in the very 
 temple of delight, the amari aliquid, in Lucretius's own yet more 
 pregnant words, which lurks in the very sweetness of the flower. 
 
 IV 
 
 The naturalism of Democritus and Epicurus, then, though framed 
 purely in the interest of scientific explanation, and hostile both to 
 poetry and to religion as commonly understood, was in essence a great 
 poetic discovery, the disclosure of a World-view wholly novel and of 
 entrancing appeal to the poetic apprehension. The sublime perspec- 
 tives of an illimitable universe, the permanent oneness underlying the 
 changing shows of sense : these were contributions of philosophy to 
 a poetic outlook of which no poet had yet dreamed, and which it was 
 reserved for the greatest of philosophic poets to make explicitly 
 his own. 
 
 But the system was not thus responsive to poetry at all points ; and 
 we have seen Lucretius the poet involuntarily creating an atmosphere 
 of passion and pathos, attachment, regret not dreamt of in his 
 philosophy. And there are signs enough that had that philosophy 
 admitted, what it fiercely denied, those ideas of a living and personal 
 or even divine Nature, or of a universe pervaded by God, which 
 
22 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 respond to poetic apprehension at the point where the Epicurean 
 naturalism left it, as it were in the lurch, he would have eagerly 
 embraced them. 
 
 Now it was precisely those ideas of life and personality present in 
 Nature, or even pervading the universe, which prevailed among philo- 
 sophic thinkers of the second type, who inquired (to put it in the 
 roughest way) not how the world might have come about, but what 
 it meant. For the answer, infinitely varied in its terms, uniformly 
 postulated that the idealism of man reflected something answering to 
 it in the very nature of reality. Two profound suggestions towards 
 an ideal conception of the world, thrown out by the genius of Greece, 
 could still intoxicate the intellect of early nineteenth-century Germany : 
 the Heraclitean idea of the harmony of opposites, and the Platonic 
 and Stoic doctrine of the soul of the world. Of the first I say nothing 
 more here; for Heraclitus, pregnant as his dark sayings are with 
 poetry, has never had his Lucretius. 1 The doctrine of a world-soul, 
 on the other hand, has again and again helped poetry to articulate her 
 rapturous apprehension of the glory of the world. For European 
 speculation, at least, the conception had its origin in the Timaeus^ 
 where the last perfecting touch of the divinely-appointed artificer 
 who constructs the world is to give it a 'soul 1 and make it 'a 
 blessed god\ 
 
 In the pantheism of the Stoics, the idea of a divine world-soul set 
 forth in this grandiose myth became a radical dogma, one of the 
 chief sources of their significance as an intellectual and moral force. 
 At Rome the Stoic pantheism softened the rigour of national and 
 social distinctions. The humanity of the Roman law lies in the 
 direct line of its influence. In the mind of the most sensitive and 
 tender of Roman poets, on the other hand, the Stoic idea fell upon 
 a soil rich in qualities uncongenial, if not unknown, to its native 
 habitat. Stoic thought in Vergil, no less than Epicurean in Lucretius, 
 has taken the colour of that richer soil. The sublime verses which he 
 puts in the mouth of Anchises have riveted this solution, if such it be, 
 of the world-riddle upon the mind of posterity ; but the real contribu- 
 tion of Vergil is less in any expressive phrase or image than in the 
 diffused magic of a temperament in which all subtle and delicate 
 attachments wonderfully throve ; where, more than in any other Roman 
 mind, the ' threefold reverence ' of Goethe, the reverence for what is 
 
 1 His famous illustration, quoted by Plato, is the harmony of the lyre brought 
 about by the balance of opposite forces in the strings. Plut. Is. et Osir. (quot. 
 Hitter and Preller, p. 17), Plat. Symp., p. 187. ' 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 23 
 
 above us, for what is below us, and for our fellow-men, found its 
 congenial home. 
 
 And it is not hard to see how sheer poetic instinct drew him this 
 way. His two great masters in poetry, Homer and Lucretius, had 
 inspired and helped to mould a genius fundamentally unlike either. 
 The majestic pageant of the Olympians was not at bottom more con- 
 sonant to his poetry than the scorn which tramples on all fear of 
 divinity and puts the roar of Acheron under its feet. The Jupiter 
 and Venus and Juno and Pallas who so efficiently order the changing 
 fortunes of Aeneas are but a splendid decoration, like the Olympian 
 figures in Raphael's frescoes at the Farnesina. And well as he under- 
 stands the bliss of the triumphant intellect, of Man become the 
 master of things, he is himself content with the humbler joys of one 
 who has acquaintance with Pan and the Nymphs, with the gods of the 
 woodland and the fountain-spring. These were real for him, not it 
 may be with the matter-of-fact reality of the senses, but as speaking 
 symbols of something more deeply interfused, less articulate than man, 
 but more articulate to man's spirit than the fountains or the flowers. 
 
 The great pantheistic phrases of Vergil have echoed, we know, 
 throughout the after-history of poetry. We might even be tempted 
 to say that pantheism, in some sense, must be the substance of any 
 ' poetic view of the world'. But if so, it must be a pantheism which 
 owes at least as much to the entranced intuition of the poets as to the 
 abstract thinking of philosophy. Their ecstasy of the senses, their 
 feasting joy in the moment, and in the spot, have enabled them not 
 merely to express the creed of pantheism with greater freshness and 
 sincerity, but to give it interpretations and applications of which 
 theoretic speculation never dreamed. We should not prize the great 
 lines of Tintern Abbey so far above the eloquent platitudes of the 
 Essay on Man if we did not feel that Pope was merely putting 
 philosophy at second-hand into brilliant verse, while Wordsworth had 
 not only reached his thought through his own impassioned contempla- 
 tion, but actually given it a new compass and profundity not attain- 
 able by any logical process. He found his * something more deeply 
 interfused' as he looked with emotion too deep for tears upon the 
 humble flower and the simple village child, or remembered the ex- 
 periences of his own wonderful boyhood ; and these were for him not 
 merely portions of a body of which God was the soul, but themselves 
 luminous points, or running springs, of spiritual light and life. So 
 that if his poetry touches doctrinal pantheism (which he never names) 
 at one pole, at the other it is nearer to the spiritual fetishism of 
 St. Francis's hymns to Brother Sun and Brother Rain. 
 
24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 It is easier to distinguish definite philosophic ideas at work in the 
 poetic apprehension of Shelley. We know in any case that they 
 played an immensely greater part in his intellectual growth. Plato 
 and Dante have helped him to those wonderful phrases in which he 
 seeks to make articulate his rapturous cosmic vision of 
 
 That light, whose smile kindles the universe, 
 That Beauty in which all things work and move, 
 
 that sustaining love 
 
 Which thro' the web of Being blindly wove, 
 In man and beast and earth and air and sea, 
 Burns bright or dim as each are mirrors of 
 The fire for which all thirst. 
 
 That is his rendering, translated out of theological terms, of the 
 sublime opening lines of the Paradiso : 
 
 6 The glory of Him who moves the whole, penetrates through the 
 universe and is reflected in one part more and in another less.' 
 
 But, even so, Shelley is feeling through these great words Light, 
 Love, Beauty towards something which none of them can completely 
 convey. And in this Shelleyan 'love' itself, the subtle distinctions 
 carried out, as we saw, by Dante disappear even more completely 
 than the dramatic play of thought in the Symposium disappears in 
 the suffused splendour of Spenser's Hymns. In logical power Shelley 
 was as little to be compared with Dante as Spenser with Plato. Yet 
 some distinctions seem to assert themselves even in that ecstatic love- 
 interwoven universe of his. His poet's intense consciousness of 
 personality sounds clear through the pantheistic harmonies. When 
 he is trying to utter as he sees it the sublime paradox of the dead but 
 deathless poet, he falls successively, heedless of inconsistency, upon 
 symbols drawn from the dogmas of antagonistic schools of thought. 
 Pantheism, individual immortality, heaven, Elysium he draws upon 
 them all, but none suffices. The dead poet is made one with Nature, 
 becomes a part of the loveliness which once he made more lovely ; his 
 voice is heard in the nightingale's song. But he is also an individual 
 soul, who has passed at death to the abode where the Immortals are, 
 and is welcomed there by Chatterton and Sidney and Lucan and the 
 rest. A cognate depth and reach of apprehension has perplexed the 
 discoverers of contradiction in In Memoriam. ' For the poets ', aptly 
 comments Mr. Bradley, though he is thinking chiefly of Shelley and 
 Tennyson, ' the soul of the dead in being mingled with nature does not 
 lose its personality ; in living in God it remains human and itself.' * 
 
 1 A Commentary on In Memoriam, Introd. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD? 25 
 
 In comparison with the magnificent audacities of pantheism and 
 cosmic love, the philosophic conception of 'Nature' has enjoyed the 
 position of a great authoritative commonplace, by invoking which the 
 most mediocre poet could dignify and quicken his verse. It belonged 
 to science as much as to poetry, and to the poetry of clarified good 
 sense by as good right as to that of childlike intuition. It could stand 
 for the ideal of just expression which Pope counselled the poet ' first 
 to follow ', as legitimately as, a century later, it was to stand for the 
 living presence of Beauty, of whose ' wedding ' with the soul Words- 
 worth chanted the spousal verse, or as the teeming creative energy 
 whose infinity Faust sought vainly to clasp. But even that Augustan 
 ' Nature ' gathered something from the quality of the minds which 
 pursued literar^ discipline by its light, and no one doubts that in 
 Wordsworth or in Goethe the ^i/cny or natura of strictly philosophic 
 speculation was but the fecund germ of a poetic creation, which, 
 whether it answered to a cosmic reality or not, answered to deep- 
 seated and ineffaceable instincts and needs of man. Only, if great 
 and original genius has set its hall-mark upon this noble metal, the 
 crowd of small poets have mixed it with their feeble alloys. There is 
 a Nature which responds to the greatest and sublimest aspirations of 
 man, and one which answers to his self-indulgent dreams ; a Nature 
 which is wedded to his soul, and one which is but the casual mistress 
 of his light desires. If the term ' poetical ' has a slightly derisive air, 
 it is because a cheap glamour, which disguises truth, so often replaces 
 the profound symbol which touches its core. A truly * poetic ' World- 
 view has at any rate nothing to do with this second-rate romance. 
 
 Among the poetic w^ays of regarding Nature, there are two types, 
 the distinction between which concerns us. It is shadowed forth in 
 the two images I borrowed just now from Wordsworth and from 
 Faust. We may feel Nature as intimately united to us, deep calling 
 to deep. Or we may feel it as something which eludes our clasp, but 
 holds us by the very appeal of its infinity to that which is infinite in 
 ourselves. The first type is too familiar to be further discussed here. 
 But the second, or Goethean type, needs a few words. 
 
 For it was with Goethe that a new and powerful philosophic 
 influence tardily entered modern poetry the influence of Spinoza. 
 A quarter of a century before Wordsworth and Coleridge were over- 
 heard talking of him at Nether Stowey, Spinoza had found deep 
 springs of sympathy in the young Goethe. A vivid passage in 
 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Book XIV) tells us that what especially 
 fascinated him was 'the boundless unselfishness that glowed in every 
 sentence ', and notably that ' strange sentence ' which later suggested 
 
26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 a famous retort of his Philine * He who loves God must not expect 
 that God shall love him in return V Spinoza's God meant, roughly, 
 the infinity of Nature, and to love God meant to see all things in the 
 light of that infinity. Such a dictum therefore cut at the root of the 
 whole body of poetry which asserted an answering spirit in Nature, 
 from the self-indulgent dreams of romantic sentiment to the love- 
 interwoven universe of Dante or Shelley. The grandeur of Spinoza's 
 conception is apparent enough even in his geometrical formulas, but 
 Goethe's intense intuition translated it into human experiences which 
 stir us to the depths. The Erdgeist's retort to Faust ' Du gleichst 
 dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir ' is one of the most thrilling 
 in all poetry, not because it indulges all our wishes, nor yet because 
 it baffles them, but because the barrier it opposes to the intellect is 
 a gate to the imagination, and we step out into a poetic apprehension 
 of the infinity which our formulas seek to capture in vain. 
 
 It is by a like suggestion of infinities beyond our reach and un- 
 touched by our emotions that he moves us in poems like Das Gottliche 
 or Die Grenzen der Menschheit, or the opening scene of the Second 
 Part of Faust, which insist with so lofty a calm on our limitations. 
 From these infinities, if we wish to live and act, we must turn away, 
 and that is what, as a wise physician, Goethe bids us do. The 
 intolerable glory of the sun is broken up for us in the many-hued 
 rainbow, and this refracted light must be the guide of our life. But 
 no one could see life there who had not himself gazed on the glory 
 of the sun, and while we read Goethe's words we evade the very 
 limitations he imposes, just as Shelley (in the great kindred passage), 
 by the very image which condemns life as a dome of many-coloured 
 glass, lifts us into the ' white radiance ' beyond. 'A little ring bounds 
 our life,' he says elsewhere, ' and many generations succeed one another 
 on the endless chain of their being.' A little ring on an endless 
 chain a 'little life rounded with a sleep', that way lies a poetry as 
 great as that which comes to the visionary Celt who sees * waving 
 round every leaf and tree the fiery tresses of that hidden sun which 
 is the soul of the earth V 
 
 But that way, also, lies a poetry of Man, a poetry which has its 
 sustaining centre not in the cosmos, but in the soul. To refuse the 
 easy assumption of Nature's comradeship in our sorrow, to resign the 
 cheap consolations of the 'pathetic fallacy', may be the way not 
 merely to resignation, or Stoicism, but to an apprehension of the 
 
 1 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, iv. 9. 
 8 A. E., The Renewal of Youth. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD ? 27 
 
 heights and depths of the soul thrown back upon itself, and fetching 
 strength not from any outer power, but from undreamed-of inner 
 resources of its own. When Wordsworth, in the grasp of a great 
 sorrow, puts aside the glamour of the poet's dream, in order to bear 
 with fortitude ' what is to be borne ', he has taken a step towards that 
 poetry. When he finds in suffering 'the nature of infinity', with 
 gracious avenues opening out of it to wondrous regions of soul life, 
 he has entered it. 1 
 
 We have thus watched the modification, first of the naturalistic 
 atomism, then of the cosmic conceptions of ' pantheism ' and * Nature ', 
 by the immediate intuition, the eager senses, and the vivid soul- 
 consciousness which characterize the poetic apprehension. It remains 
 to glance, finally, at the relations of poetry with that third type of 
 philosophic system, in which soul-consciousness itself has played the 
 guiding and master part. 
 
 It was with the assertion of the soul's predominance that European 
 philosophy, in the full sense of the word, began. When Socrates turned 
 from the cosmic speculations of the lonians to found his ' thinking- 
 shop ' at Athens, and chaffed Anaxagoras for having put mind at the 
 head of things and then given it nothing to do, he was preparing the 
 way, we know, for the magnificent soul-sovereignty established by 
 the master of all idealists. Plato set up a trenchant dualism between 
 soul and sense, and thrust the sense-world into a limbo of disparage- 
 ment from which, where his spell prevailed, it never emerged. The 
 body was the soul's prison ; the senses Reheated it with illusion and 
 dragged it down with base desires. 
 
 The Transcendentalists of modern Germany established a soul- 
 autocracy differently conceived, and founded upon other postulates, 
 but not less absolute. Kant shattered the claims of Verstand, but 
 only to enthrone Vernunft ; Fichte found nothing real and nothing 
 good that was not rooted in heroic will ; Schopenhauer built up a 
 philosophy of self-effacement and world-flight on the doctrine that the 
 will to live which tortures us is also the malign indwelling energy of 
 the world. And none of them surpassed in calm audacity the claims 
 made for individual reason by Fichte's English contemporary, Godwin. 
 
 Speculation of this type was already allied to poetry by the bold- 
 ness of its 'subjective idealism', and it might be expected that its 
 
 1 The lines from The Borderers are iii fact, of course, earlier than those from 
 Peele Castle. 
 
28 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 points of fruitful contact with poetry would be correspondingly 
 numerous. Yet this is hardly, on the whole, the case. If Plato's 
 influence on poetry is hard to measure, if Kant brought something 
 vital to Schiller, and Schopenhauer to Wagner, * subjective ' philo- 
 sophers and poets in the main pursued their common preoccupation 
 with soul along paths which rarely crossed. Each brought to the 
 exploration of that marvellous mine a lamp of extraordinary power ; 
 but they carried it into different regions, surveyed them on different 
 methods, and returned with different results. Poets without any 
 scientific psychology have, in virtue of imaginative insight into the 
 ways of character, created a mass of psychological material with which 
 scientific psychology has only begun to cope. It is only among poetic 
 portrayers of the second rank, such as Jonson and the allegorists, that 
 theoretic categories of. character have had any determining weight. 
 The supreme characters of literature are true creations, creations that 
 are at the same time discoveries pieces of humanity which exceed 
 Nature's ' reach ', perhaps, but not her ' grasp '. Prometheus, Hamlet, 
 Satan, Faust, permanently enlarged the status of the human soul in 
 our common valuation of life. That ' discovery of Man ' which intoxi- 
 cated the Renascence was pre-eminently a discovery of the stature of 
 man's soul * how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, ... in 
 action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god ! ' but 
 philosophic ideas hardly touched the surface of either Shakespeare or 
 Marlowe, and they furnished but one strand in the woof of the mind 
 of Milton. 
 
 In the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth there is more 
 affinity to philosophic ideas, but their actual influence is apt to be 
 strongest just where the poetry itself is least intense. In a very 
 luminous lecture Mr. Bradley has traced the relation between the two 
 movements. 1 An exalted faith in soul possessed and inspired both, 
 Kut each was in the main unconscious of the other. In the poetry of 
 his own countryman, Schiller, Kant's austere ideas reappear trans- 
 formed in the crucible of the poet's livelier emotions or quicker sense 
 of beauty. Coleridge drank as deeply of Kantian and cognate ideas, 
 but only when the brief chapter of his own poetry was all but closed ; 
 while the magnificent prose-poem in which Carlyle conveyed the 
 philosophy of Fichte-Jean Paul-Teufelsdrockh stands alone. What 
 Wordsworth may have drawn through Coleridge's talk is not clearly 
 distinguishable |rom the original bent of his own mind. The two 
 streams ran courses largely parallel, but in distinct though adjacent 
 
 1 English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth (Manchester 
 University Press). 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD ? 29 
 
 valleys. With Godwin's ideas, on the other hand, both Wordsworth, 
 Blake, and Shelley had stood in close intellectual relations. And 
 these were precisely the men whose poetry set the deepest impress 
 upon their view of life. 
 
 Is it possible by the help of either the parallel or the derivative 
 relationship to lay down any common features in the process ? 
 
 In the first place, the stress on the exaltation of spirit is shifted by 
 the poets, and with great emphasis, from ' reason ', the instrument of 
 philosophy, to imagination. Reason is constantly not merely ignored 
 but openly slighted. It is not what they mean when they exalt 
 ' mind '. When Wordsworth tells us, in the great Recluse passage, of 
 the awe, beyond Empyrean or Erebus, with which he contemplated 
 ' the mind of man ' ; when he sees the heroic devotion of the fallen 
 Toussaint perpetuated in 'man's inconquerable mind'; when he 
 encourages those who doubted Spanish heroism with the sublime 
 assurance that ' the true sorrow of humanity consists in this : not that 
 the mind of man fails, but that the course and demands of life so 
 rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires ' ; 
 by this *mind' he means imagination, passion, heroic will, but not 
 discourse of reason. Wordsworth, apprehending soul with his poet's 
 intuition, apprehends it as he knew it in himself. He saw it, there- 
 fore, as an energy operating not through ' meddling intellect ' but 
 through vision and vision-illuminated will, with open eye and ear for 
 its indispensable associates, and love as its core. The ' soul ' whereby 
 alone the nations shall be great and free was something in which the 
 humblest peasant and the simplest child had part, and in which the 
 meanest flower struck answering chords. It is not accident that the 
 soul-animated England of Wordsworth's ideal is so widely unlike 
 Hegel's Prussian state. 
 
 In William Blake soul-autocracy became aggressive and revolu- 
 tionary, and the breach with reason, philosophic or other, widened to 
 a yawning gulf. Whether he is declaring 'the world of imagination 
 to be the world of eternity', scoffing at the nature-lover who sees 
 ' with ' not * through ' the eye, or affirming that 4 to generalize is to 
 be an idiot' (a stupendous example of the procedure he derides) 
 he stands for a poetry stripped bare of all that allies it either to philo- 
 sophy or to common sense. His prophetic books adumbrate a grandiose 
 poetic metaphysic, a world-system framed to the postulates of this 
 denuded poetry. And Shelley's Apology enthrones imagination as the 
 creator and upholder of all civilization. 
 
 Secondly, the poetic shifting of the stress, within the domain of the 
 autocratic soul, from reason to imagination and feeling, told power- 
 
30 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 fully upon the ethical ideals proclaimed by this group of poets. It 
 added fresh impetus to that disposition to override or transcend 
 external standards of morality which is inherent in all vivid inner 
 consciousness. Moral distinctions fade in the inner illumination of the 
 mystic. We have seen hints of such a ' transvaluation of ethical 
 values ' disarranging the iron categories of Dante's Hell. Applied to 
 Hamlet or Othello, the traditional categories of good and evil 
 break in our hands. Milton's heroic devil, and the lovers whom 
 Browning scorns for being saved by their sloth from crime, still 
 perplex the moralist. But the poets of the Revolution are openly 
 sceptical of morality. Of Shelley I need not speak. Even Wordsworth 
 makes a hero of a murderer. And Blake first proclaimed explicitly, 
 a century before Nietzsche, a good 'beyond good and evil', and 
 figured the inauguration of this transcendent ethic in the colossal 
 symbolism of his Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 
 
 In all these writers, it is true, their attitude to morality was in part 
 derived from the bias towards emancipation then current in all depart- 
 ments of ethical, social, and political life, and had no relation to 
 specifically poetic apprehension. * Freedom ' was an ideal for Godwin 
 and for Robespierre, as well as for Shelley and for Kant, and was 
 pursued by them with equal devotion in their several fashions. But 
 they all, also, understood it in the light of their several preoccupations. 
 With Godwin, as with Robespierre, it is mainly negative ; with Shelley, 
 as with Kant, it acquires positive substance and content. And this is 
 because both philosopher and poet see it as the means to some perfec- 
 tion of the soul. The soul-autocracy of the age, extravagant as it 
 might be, is seen at its noblest in the Kantian freedom won through 
 duty, and in the Shelleyan freedom won through Love. The Kantian 
 ideal of freedom interpreted in that last conclusion of Goethe's 
 wisdom 'He alone is free who daily wins his freedom anew' has 
 passed into the very substance of the strenuous German mind. The 
 Shelleyan ideal is of a rarer but also of a more perilous stuff, and has 
 touched no such chords in the English character as his music has 
 stirred in the English ear. But something of the genius of both ideals 
 was gathered up and concentrated in Wordsworth's great affirmation, 
 so recklessly impugned, so magnificently borne out to-day, of the mean- 
 ing of national freedom. 
 
 Wordsworth's sense of law corrects what is anarchic in Shelley, as 
 Shelley's flame-like ardour corrects what is prosaic and common in 
 Wordsworth. Together they present more purely than any of their 
 contemporaries the noble substance of a poetic ethic. In that poetic 
 ethic the greatest word, rightly understood, is still the Shelleyan Love. 
 
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD ? 31 
 
 And it may be that if there is any ideal which, springing from 
 poetic apprehension, is yet fit, rightly interpreted, for the common 
 . needs of men, it is that 'love of love' on which Tennyson, so far 
 always from the revolutionary temper either in love or poetry, set his 
 finger in his early prime, as the sovereign endowment of the poet. 
 Only it must be love wide enough to include every kind of spiritual 
 energy by which the soul, transcending itself, fulfils itself, and exerts, 
 whether upon men or nations, its liberating and uplifting power : the 
 love which creates, and the love which endures ; the love which makes 
 the hero or the artist, and that which spends itself inexhaustibly on 
 a thankless cause ; the impersonal ardour of the mind, which Spinoza 
 called the ' intellectual love of God \ and the impassioned union of 
 souls, which to some has seemed a clue to the vision of reality, and to 
 others the surest pledge of a future life ; the love of country which 
 distinguishes the true service of humanity from a shallow cosmo- 
 politanism ; and the love of our fellow men, which distinguishes true 
 patriotism from national greed. To have had no mean share in sus- 
 taining this large ideal of the ' soul ' which makes us free is an enduring 
 glory of the poets. 
 
 Nor is this strange if, as I trust this partial survey may have served 
 to suggest, the spiritual energy transcending itself, for which Love is 
 the most adequate name, be the core of the World- view towards which, 
 from their various religious or philosophic vantage-grounds, a number 
 of poetic master-spirits have made an approach. Whether they have 
 found it as a light kindling the universe, like Dante and Shelley ; or as 
 a creative power shadowed forth in the eternal new birth of all things, 
 like Lucretius ; or as the will and passion of the human soul, heroically 
 shaping its fate, and divining its infinity most clearly when most aware 
 of its limitations, like Goethe ; in some form the faith that spiritual 
 energy is the heart of reality was the centre towards which they 
 knowingly or obscurely strove. Such a faith, I suggest, will be found 
 to be a vital constituent of every view of the world reached by a poet 
 through his poetic experience, and the main contribution of that 
 rich, profound, and intense form of experience to man's ultimate 
 interpretation of life. 
 
SUMMARY 
 
 View of the World, or World- view ', defined. Distinction of 
 religious and philosophical World-views. The present essay attempts 
 to define and describe a poetic World-view. I. Character of poetic 
 experience. Types of belief about Man and Nature to which it pre- 
 disposes. Though rarely detached from religious or philosophical 
 presumptions, it habitually modifies them, and the method here pro- 
 posed is to study, in some salient examples, the character and direc- 
 tion of these modifications (p. 2). II. (i) Modifications of religious 
 World-views by the poetic inspirations of Personality and Love. 
 HOMEB. AESCHYLUS. DANTE (p. 6). III. (ii) Modifications of 
 philosophical World-views : (a) Materialistic schools. Epicureanism 
 and LUCRETIUS (p. 14). IV. (b) ' Objective idealisms '. Stoic pan- 
 theism and VERGIL. WORDSWORTH. SHELLEY. Philosophic doctrine 
 of ' Nature ' in WORDSWORTH, and in GOETHE. SPINOZA and GOETHE 
 (p. 21). V. (c) ' Subjective idealisms \ * Mind ' in the philosophers 
 and in the poets of the age of WORDSWORTH. The poets subordinate 
 (1) the rational to the emotional and imaginative factors of soul : 
 WORDSWORTH, BLAKE, SHELLEY, and (2) moral categories to a good 
 ' beyond good and evil '. Of this poetic ethic the most vital con- 
 stituent is Love ; and Love, comprehensively understood, will be an 
 intrinsic element of every World- view won through poetic experience 
 (p. 27). 
 
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