m. 
 
 GIFT or 
 
 MICHAEL REE^E 
 
INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY 
 AND RELIGION 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE SENSE OF BEAUTY: Being the 
 Outlines of ytsthetic Theory . . $1.50 
 
INTERPRETATIONS 
 
 or 
 
 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE SANTAYANA 
 
 i 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1900 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 VfAcdC 
 
 Nnrfaootf 53«g3 
 
 J, 8. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
 Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following volume is composed of a number 
 of papers written at various times and already par- 
 tially printed ; they are now revised and gathered 
 together in the hope that they may lead, the reader, 
 from somewhat different points of approach, to a 
 single idea. This idea is that reli gion and poet ry 
 are identical in essence, and differ merely in the 
 way in~which they are attached to practical affairs. 
 Poetr y is called religion when it intervenes in life ^ 
 a nd religion, when it merely supervenes upon life,. 
 is seenJo_beji£LlMngJbutj2oe^^ 
 ^ It would naturally follow from this conception 
 that religious doctrines would do well to withdraw 
 their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. 
 That pretension is not only the source of the con- 
 flicts of religion with science and of the vain and 
 bitter controversies of sects ; it is also the cause of 
 the impurity and incoherence of religion in the 
 soulj, when it seeks its_sanciljQns-m^the"&phere off 
 reality, and forgets that its proper concern is toj 
 express the ideal. For the dignityjof religion, l ike 
 that of poetry a nd of every moral ideal, lies pre- 
 cisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of 
 
J 
 
 n PREFACE 
 
 the meanings and values of life, in its anticipation 
 of perfection ; so that the excellence of religion is 
 due to an idealization of experience which, while 
 making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes 
 it necessarily false if treated as science. Its func- 
 tion is rather to draw from reality materials for an 
 image of that ideal to which reality ought to con- 
 form, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in 
 the world we crave. 
 
 It also follows from our general conception that 
 poetry has a universal and a moral function. Its 
 fudijoientary essays in the region of fancy and 
 pleasant sound, as well as its idealization of epi- 
 sodes in human existence, are only partial exercises 
 in an art that has all time and all experience for 
 its natural subject-matter and all the possibilities 
 of being for its ultimate theme. As religion is 
 deflected from its course when it is confused with 
 a record of facts or of natural laws, so poetry is 
 arrested in its development if it remains an un- 
 meaning plaj_of fancy without relevance to the 
 ideals and purposes of life. In that^relevance lies 
 its highest power. As its elementary pleasantness 
 comes from its response to the demands of the ear, 
 so its deepest beauty comes from its response to 
 the ultimate demands of the soul. 
 
 This theory can hardly hope for much commen- 
 dation either from the apologists of theology or 
 from its critics. The mass of mankind is divided 
 
\ 
 
 PREFACE Vll 
 
 into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a 
 sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quix- 
 otes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expe- 
 dient of recognizing facts as facts and accepting 
 ideals as ideals, — and this is all we propose, — 
 although apparently simple enough, seems to elude 
 the normal human power of discrimination. If, 
 therefore, the champion of any orthodoxy should 
 be offended at our conception, which would reduce 
 his artful cosmos to an allegory, all that could be 
 said to mitigate his displeasure would be that our 
 view is even less favourable to his opponents than 
 to himself. 
 
 The liberal school that attempts to fortify re- 
 ligion by minimizing its expression, both theoretic 
 and devotional, seems from this point of view 
 to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and 
 vulgarizing religious aims ; it subtracts from faith! 
 that imagination by v/hich faith becomes an in-] 
 terpretation and idealization of human life, and 
 retains only a stark and superfluous principle of 
 superstition. For meagre and abstract as may be 
 the content of such a religion, it contains all the 
 venom of absolute pretensions ; it is no less cursed 
 than the more developed systems with a contro- 
 versial unrest and with a consequent undertone of 
 constraint and suspicion. It tortures itself with 
 the same circular proofs in its mistaketi ambition 
 to enter the plane of vulgar reality and escape its 
 
Vm PREFACE 
 
 native element of ideas. It casts a greater blight 
 than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous 
 freedom of thought. For the respect exacted by 
 an establishment is limited and external, and not 
 greater than its traditional forms probably deserve, 
 as normal expressions of human feeling and apt 
 symbols of moral truth. A reasonable deference 
 once shown to authority, the mind remains, under 
 such an establishment, inwardly and happily free ; 
 the conscience is not intimidated, the imagination 
 is not tied up. But the preoccupations of a hun- 
 gry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nomi- 
 nally allowed, bias all vision, and turn philosophy 
 itself, which should be the purest of delights and 
 consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the 
 soul. In such a spectral form religious illusion 
 does not cease to be illusion. Mythology cannot 
 become science by being reduced in bulk, but it 
 may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having. 
 
 On the other hand, the positivistic school of 
 criticism would sennij if our theory is right, to 
 have overlooked in its programme the highest 
 functions of human nature. The environing world 
 y,n ^an justify itself to the mind only by the free life 
 \ * which it fosters there. All observation is observa- 
 ■Xtion of brute fact, all discipline is mere repression, 
 until these facts digested and this discipline em- 
 _Jaodied in humane impulses become the starting- 
 point for a creative movement of the imagination, ) 
 
PREFACE IX 
 
 the firm basis for ideal constructions in society, 
 religion, and art. Only as conditions of these 
 human activities can the facts of nature and his- 
 tory become morally intelligible or practically im- 
 portant. In themselves they are trivial incidents, 
 gossip of the Fates, cacklings of their inexhaust- 
 ible garrulity. To regard the function of man as 
 accomplished when these chance happenings have 
 been recorded by him or contributed to by his 
 impulsive action, is to ignore his reason, his privi- 
 lege, — shared for the rest with every living crea- 
 ture, — of using Nature as food and substance for 
 his own life. This human life is not merely 
 animal and passionate. The best and keenest 
 part of it consists in that very gift of creation and 
 government which, together with all the transcen- 
 dental functions of his own mind, man has signifi- 
 cantly attributed to God as to his highest ideal. 
 Not to see in this rational activity the purpose and 
 standard of all life is to have left human nature, 
 half unread. It is to look to the removal of cer- 
 tain incidental obstacles in the work of reason as 
 to the solution of its positive tasks. In compariso»«^ 
 with such apathetic naturalism, all the errors and 
 follies of religion are worthy of indulgent sympathy, 
 since they represent an effort, however misguided, 
 to interpret and to use the materials of experience 
 for moral ends, and to measure the value ^f reality 
 by its relation to the ideal. 
 
 } 
 
X PKEFACE 
 
 The moral function of the imagination and the 
 poetic nature of religion form, then, the theme of 
 the following pages. It may not be amiss to 
 announce it here, as the rather miscellaneous sub- 
 jects of these essays might at first sight obscure 
 the common import of them all. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 yj. Understanding, Imagination, AND Mysticism 1 
 
 II. The Hombeic Hymns 24 
 
 III. The Dissolution of Paganism . . . 49 
 
 IV. The Poetry of Christian Dogma . . 76 
 !/ V. Platonic Love in Some Italian Poets 118 
 
 VI. The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare 147 
 
 VII. The Poetry of Barbarism .... 166 
 
 VIII. Emerson . .217 
 
 ^IX. A Religion op Disillusion .... 234 
 
 •, X. The Elements and Function of Poetry . 251 
 
 sd 
 
UNDEESTANDING, IMAGINATION, AND 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 When we consider the situation of the human 
 mind in Nature, its limited plasticity and few- 
 channels of communication with the outer world, 
 we need not wonder that we grope for light, or 
 that we find incoherence and instability in human 
 systems of ideas. The wonder rather is that we 
 have done so well, that in the chaos of sensations 
 and passions that fills the mind, we have found 
 any leisure for self-concentration and reflection, 
 and have succeeded in gathering even a light 
 harvest of experience from our distracted labours. 
 Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our 
 occasional sanity. Eelapses into dreams are to 
 be expected in a being whose brief existence is 
 so like a dream; but who could have been sure 
 of this sturdy and indomitable perseverance in 
 the work of reason in spite of all checks and 
 discouragements ? 
 
 The resources of the mind are not commensurate 
 with its ambition. Of the five senses, three are of 
 
 B 1 
 
2 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 little use in the formation of permanent notions: 
 a fourth, sight, is indeed vivid and luminous, but 
 furnishes transcripts of things so highly coloured 
 and deeply modified by the medium of sense, that 
 a long labour of analysis and correction is needed 
 before satisfactory conceptions can be extracted 
 from it. For this labour, however, we are en- 
 dowed with the requisite instrument. We have 
 memory and we have certain powers of synthesis, 
 abstraction, reproduction, invention, — in a word, 
 we have understanding. But this faculty of un- 
 derstanding has hardly begun its work of decipher- 
 ing the hieroglyphics of sense and framing an 
 idea of reality, when it is crossed by another 
 faculty — the imagination. Perceptions do not re- 
 main in the mind, as would be suggested by the 
 trite simile of the seal and the wax, passive and 
 changeless, until time wear off their sharp edges 
 and make them fade. No, perceptions fall into 
 the brain rather as seeds into a furrowed field or 
 even as sparks into a keg of powder. Each image 
 breeds a hundred more, sometimes slowly and sub- 
 terraneously, sometimes (when a passionate train 
 is started) with a sudden burst of fancy. The 
 •mind, exercised by its own fertility and flooded by 
 its inner lights, has infinite trouble to keep a true 
 reckoning of its outward perceptions. It turns 
 from the frigid problems of observation to its own 
 visions J it forgets to watch the courses of what 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 3 
 
 sh-ould be its "pilot stars." Indeed, were it not 
 for tlie power of convention in which, by a sort of 
 mutual cancellation of errors, the more practical 
 and normal conceptions are enshrined, the imagina- 
 tion would carry men wholly away, — the best men 
 first and the vulgar after them. Even as it is, 
 individuals and ages of fervid imagination usually 
 waste themselves in dreams, and must disappear 
 before the race, saddened and dazed, perhaps, 6y 
 the memory of those visions, can return to its 
 plodding thoughts. 
 "{ Five senses, then, to gather a small part of the 
 infinite influences that vibrate in Nature, a mod- 
 erate power of understanding to interpret those 
 senses, and an irregular, passionate fancy to over- 
 lay that interpretation — such is the endowment 
 of the human mind. And what is its ambition? 
 Nothing less than to construct a picture of all 
 reality, to comprehend its own origin and that of 
 the universe, to discover the laws of both and 
 prophesy their destiny. Is not the disproportion 
 enormous ? Are not confusions and profound con- 
 tradictions to be looked for in an attempt to build 
 so much out of so little? 
 
 Yet the metaphysical ambition we speak of can- 
 not be abandoned, because whatever picture of 
 things we may carry about in our heads we are 
 bound to regard as a map of reality ; although we 
 may mark certain tracts of it "unexplored coun- 
 
4 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 try," the very existence of such regions is vouched 
 for only by our representation, and is necessarily 
 believed to correspond to our idea. All we can do 
 is, without abandoning the aspiration to knowledge 
 which is the inalienable birthright of reason,. to 
 control as best we may the formation of our con- 
 ceptions ; to arrange them according to their deri- 
 vation and measure them by their applicability in 
 life, so prudently watching over their growth that 
 we may be spared the deepest of sorrows — to sur- 
 vive the offspring of our own thought. 
 
 V The inadequacy of each of our faculties is what 
 occasions the intrusion of some other faculty into 
 its field. The defect of sense calls in imagination, 
 the defect of imagination calls in reasoning, the 
 defect of reasoning divination. If our senses were 
 
 J clairvoyant and able to observe all that is going on 
 in the world, if our instincts were steady, prompt- 
 ing us to adequate reactions upon these observar 
 tions, the fancy might remain free. We should 
 not need to call upon it to piece out the imperfec- 
 tions of sense and reflection, but we should employ 
 it only in avowed poetry, only in building dream- 
 worlds alongside of the real, not interfering with 
 the latter or confusing it, but repeating its pat- 
 tern with as many variations as the fertility of 
 our minds could supply. As it is, the imagination 
 is brought into the service of sense and instinct, 
 and made to do the work of intelligence. This 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION b 
 
 substitution is the more readily effected, in that 
 imagination and intelligence do not differ in their 
 origin, but only in their validity. Understanding 
 is an applicable fiction,!'^ kind of wit with a prac- 
 tical use. Common sense and science live in a 
 world of expurgated mythology, such as Plato 
 wished his poets to compose, a world where the 
 objects are imaginative in their origin and essence, 
 but useful, abstract, and beneficent in their sugges- 
 tions. The sphere of common sense and science is 
 concentric with the sphere of fancy ; both move in 
 virtue of the same imaginative impulses. The even- 
 tual distinction between intelligence and imagina- 
 tion is ideal ; it arises when we discriminate various 
 functions in a life that is dynamically one. Those 
 conceptions which, after they have spontaneously 
 arisen, prove serviceable in practice, and capable 
 of verification in sense, we call ideas of the under- 
 standing. The others remain ideas of the imagina- 
 tion. The shortness of life, the distractions of 
 passion, and the misrepresentation to which all 
 transmitted knowledge is subject, have made the 
 testing of ideas by practice extremely slow in the 
 history of mankind. Hence the impurity of our j 
 knowledge, its confusion with fancy, and its pain-/ 
 f ul inadequacy to interpret the whole world of ' 
 human interests. These shortcomings are so many 
 invitations to foreign powers to intervene, so many 
 occasions for new waves of imagination to sweep 
 
b POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 away the landmarks of our old labour, and flood 
 the whole mind with impetuous dreams. 
 
 It is accordingly the profounder minds that com- 
 monly yield to the imagination, because it is these 
 minds that are capable of feeling the greatness of 
 the problems of life and the inadequacy of the 
 understanding, with its present resources, to solve 
 them. The same minds are, moreover, often swayed 
 by emotion, by the ever-present desire to find a 
 noble solution to all questions, perhaps a solution 
 already hallowed by authority and intertwined inex- 
 tricably, for those who have always accepted it) 
 with the sanctions of spiritual life. Such a coveted 
 conclusion may easily be one which the understand- 
 ing, with its basis in sense and its demand for veri- 
 fication, may not be able to reach. \Therefore the 
 impassioned soul must pass beyond the understand- 
 ing, or else go unsatisfied ; and unless it be as dis- 
 ciplined as it is impassioned it will not tolerate 
 dissatisfaction. From what quarter, then, will it 
 ^,/draw the wider views, the deeper harmonies, which 
 it craves ? Only from the imagination. There is 
 no other faculty left to invoke. The imagination, 
 therefore, must furnish to religion and to meta- 
 physics those large i<i^s tinctured with passion, 
 those supersensible forms Shrouded in awe, in which 
 alone a mind of great sweepr and vitality can find 
 its congenial objects. Thus the stone which the 
 builder, understanding, rejected, becomes the chief 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 7 
 
 stone of the corner; the intuitions which science 
 could not use remain the inspiration of poetry and 
 religion. 
 
 The imaginajtion, when thus employed to antici- ^ 
 pate or correct the conclusions of the understand- 
 ing, is of course not called imagination by those 
 who appeal to it. The religious . teasksr^^call it 
 prophecy or revelatiop, the philosophers call, it a 
 higher reason. But these names are merely eulo- 
 gistic synonyms for imagination, implying (what is 
 perfectly possible) that the imagination has not 
 misled us. They imply on the contrary that in the 
 given instances the imagination has hit upon an 
 ultimate truth. A prophet, unless he be the merely 
 mechanical vehicle of truths he does not under- 
 stand, cannot be conceived as anything but a man 
 of imagination, whose visions miraciilously mirror 
 the truth. A metaphysician who transcends the 
 intellect by his reason can be conceived only as 
 using his imagination to such good purpose as to 
 divine by it the ideal laws of reality or the ultimate 
 goals of moral effort. His reason is an imagination 
 that succeeds, an intuition that guesses the principle 
 of experience. But if this intuition were of such a"^ 
 nature that experience could verify it, then that 
 higher reason or imagination would be brought 
 down to the level of the understanding ; for under- 
 standing, as we have defined it, is itself a kind of 
 imagination, an imagination prophetic of experience, 
 
» POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 / a spontaneity of thought by which the science of 
 *^ perception is turned into the art of life. The same 
 absence of verification distinguishes revelation from 
 science; for when the prophecies of faith are veri- 
 fied, the function of faith is gone. Faith and the 
 higher reason of the metaphysicians are therefore 
 forms of imagination believed to be avenues to 
 truth, as dreams or oracles may sometimes be truth- 
 ful, not because their necessary correspondence to 
 truth can be demonstrated, for then they would be 
 portions of science, but because a man dwelling on 
 those intuitions is conscious of a certain moral 
 transformation, of a certain warmth and energy 
 of life. This emotion, heightening his ideas and 
 giving them power over his will, he calls faith or 
 high philosophy, and under its dominion he is able 
 to face his destiny with enthusiasm, or at least with 
 composure. 
 
 J The imagination, even when its premonitions are 
 not wholly justified by subsequent experience, has 
 \ thus a noble role to play in the life of man. With- 
 out it his thoughts would be not only far too narrow 
 to represent, although it were symbolically, the 
 greatness of the universe, but far too narrow even 
 to render the scope of his own life and the condi- 
 tions of his practical welfare. Without poetry 
 and religion the history of mankind would have 
 been darker than it is. \,Niit_only would emotional 
 
 ,_^ life have been poorer, but the public conscience, 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 9 
 
 the national and family spirit, so useful for moral 
 organization and discipline, would hardly have be- 
 come articulate. By what a complex and unin- 
 spired argumentation would the pure moralist have 
 to insist upon those duties which the imagination 
 enforces so powerfully in oaths sworn before the 
 gods, in commandments written by the finger of 
 God upon stone tablets, in visions of hell and 
 ^heaven, in chivalrous love and loyalty, and in the 
 sense of family dignity and honouj^? What intri- 
 cate, what unavailing appeals to positive interests 
 would have to be made before those quick reactions 
 could be secured in large bodies of people which 
 can be produced by the sight of a flag or the sound 
 of a name? The imagination is the great unifiei;/ 
 0^ humanity. Men's perceptions may be various,' 
 their powers of understanding very unequal; but^t 
 the imagination is, as it were, the self-conscious- 
 ness of instinct, the contribution which the inner 
 capacity and demand of the mind makes to ex- 
 perience. To indulge the imagination is to express 
 the universal self, the common and contagious ele- 
 ment in all individuals, that rudimentary potency 
 which they all share. To stimulate the imagina- * 
 tion is to produce the deepest, the most pertina- 
 cious emotions. To repress it is to chill the soul, 
 so that even the clearest perception of the truth 
 remains without the joy and impetuosity of convic- 
 tion. 
 
10 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 The part played by imagination is thus indis- 
 pensable ; but obviously the necessity and benefi- 
 cence of this contribution makes the dangers of 
 it correspondingly great. Wielding a great power, 
 exercising an omnipresent function, the imagina- 
 tion may abuse a great force. While its inspira- 
 tions coincide with what would be the dictates 
 of reason, were reason audible in the world, all 
 is well, and the progress of man is accelerated hji 
 his visions ; but being a principle a priori the im- 
 agination is an irresponsible principle ; its right- 
 ness is an inward rightness, and everything in the 
 real world may turn out to be disposed otherwise 
 than as it would wish. Our imaginative precon- 
 ceptions are then obstacles to the perception of 
 fact and of rational duty; the faith that stiimi- 
 lated our efforts and increased our momentum, 
 multiplies our wanderings. The too hasty organi- 
 zation of our thoughts becomes the cause of their 
 more prolonged disorganization, for to the natural 
 obscurity of things and the difficulty of making 
 them fit together among themselves, we add the 
 cross lights of our prejudices and the impossibility 
 of fitting reality into the frame we have made for 
 it in our ignorance of its constitution and extent. 
 And as we love our hopes, and detest the experi- 
 ence that seems to contradict them, we add fanati- 
 cism to our confusion. CXlie habits of the imagina- 
 tion, in conflict with the facts of sense, thus come 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION ll 
 
 to cloud science with, passion, with Action , with 
 sentimental prejudice.' Nor is this the end of 
 our troubles. For Imagination herself suffers vio- 
 lence in this struggle ; she seeks to reduce herself 
 to conformity with existence, in the hope of vindi- 
 cating her nominal authority at the price of some 
 concessions. She begins to feign that she de- 
 manded nothing but what she finds. Thus she 
 loses her honesty and freedom, becomes a flatterer 
 of things instead of the principle of their ideal 
 correction, and in the attempt to prove herself 
 prophetic and literally valid (as in a moment of 
 infatuation she had fancied herself to be) she for- 
 feits that symbolic truth, that inner propriety, 
 which gave her a moral value. Thus the false 
 steps of the imagination lead to a contorted science 
 and to a servile ideal. 
 
 These complications not unnaturally inspire dis- 
 couragement and a sense of the hopeless relativity 
 of human thought. Indeed, if there be any special 
 endowment of mind and body called human nature, 
 as there seems to be, it is obvious that all human 
 experience must be relative to that. But the truth, 
 the absolute reality, surrounds and precedes these 
 operations of finite faculty. What value, then, we 
 may say, have these various ideals or perceptions, 
 or the conflicts between them ? Are not our senses 
 as human, as " subjective " as our wills ? Is not 
 the understanding as visionary as the fancy ? Does 
 
12 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 it not transform the Unknowable into as remote a 
 symbol as does the vainest dream ? 
 — • The answer which a rational philosophy would 
 make to these questions would be a double one. 
 It is true that every idea is equally relative to 
 human nature and that nothing can be represented 
 in the human mind except by the operation of 
 human faculties. But it is not true that all these 
 products of human ideation are of equal value, 
 since they are not equally conducive to human 
 purposes or satisfactory to human demands. 
 
 The impulse that would throw over as equally 
 worthless every product of human art, because it 
 is not indistinguishable from some alleged external 
 reality, does not perceive the serious self-contra- 
 dictions under which it labours. In the first place 
 , the notion of an external reality is a human no- 
 
 ' "^tion; our reason makes that hypothesis, and its 
 verification in our experience is one of the ideals 
 of science, as its validity is one of the assumptions 
 of daily life. In throwing over all human ideas, 
 
 "vT because they are infected with humanity, all human 
 ideas are being sacrificed to one of them — the idea 
 \of an absolute reality. If this idea, being human, 
 deserved that such sacrifices should be made for 
 it, have the other notions of the mind no rights ? 
 Furthermore, even if we granted for the sake of 
 argument a reality which our thoughts were es- 
 sentially helpless to represent, whence comes the 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 13 
 
 duty of our thoughts to represent it? Whence 
 comes the value of this unattainable truth ? From 
 an ideal of human reason. We covet truth. So 
 that the attempt to surrender all human science 
 as relative and all human ideals as trivial is 
 founded on a blind belief in one human idea and 
 an absolute surrender to one human passion. 
 
 In spite of these contradictions, which only a 
 dispassionate logic could thoroughly unravel, the 
 enthusiast is apt to rush on. The vision of abso- 
 lute truth and absolute reality intoxicates him, and 
 as he is too subtle a thinker, too inward a man, to 
 accept the content of his senses or the conventions 
 of his intelligence for unqualified verities, he for- 
 tifies himself against them with the consciousness 
 of their relativity, and seeks to rise above them 
 in his meditations. But to rise to what ? To some 
 more elaborate idea ? To some object, like a scien- 
 tific cosmos or a religious creed, put together by\ 
 longer and more indirect processes than those of \ 
 common perception? Surely not. If I renounce J 
 my senses and vulgar intellect because they are 
 infected with finitude and smell of humanity, how 
 shall I accept a work of art, a product of reason- 
 ing, or an idol made originally with hands and 
 now encrusted all over, like the statue of Glaucus, 
 with traditional accretions ? Poetry, science, and 
 religion, in their positive constructions, are more • 
 human, more conditioned, than are the senses and V 
 
 % 
 
14 POETEY AND RELIGION 
 
 the common understanding themselves. The lover 
 of inviolate reality must not look to them. If the 
 data of human knowledge must be rejected as sub- 
 jective, how much more should we reject the in- 
 ferences made from those data by human thought. 
 The vKay of true wisdom, therefore, if true wisdom 
 is to deal with the Absolute, can only lie in absten- 
 tion: neither the senses nor the common under- 
 standing, and much less the superstructure raised 
 upon these by imagination, logic, or tradition, must 
 delude us : we must keep our thoughts fixed upon 
 the inanity of all this in comparison with the un- 
 thinkable truth, with the undivided and unimagi- 
 nable reality. Everything, says the mystic, is 
 nothing, in comparison with the One. 
 
 This confusion, the logical contradiction of which 
 we have just seen, may, for lack of a more specific 
 word, be called mysticism. It consists in the sur- 
 render of a category of thought on account of the 
 discovery of its relativity. If I saw or reasoned 
 or judged by such a category, I should be seeing, 
 reasoning, or judging in a specific manner, in a 
 manner conditioned by my finite nature. But the 
 specific and the finite, I feel, are odious; let me 
 therefore aspire to see, reason and judge in no spe- 
 cific or finite manner — that is, not to see, reason or 
 judge at all. So I shall be like the Infinite, nay 
 I shall become one with the Infinite and (marvel- 
 lous thought !) one with the One. 
 
 :t- 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 15 
 
 / 
 The ideal of mysticism is accordingly exactly 
 
 contrary to the ideal of reason ; instead of perfect- 
 ing human nature it seeks to abolish it ; instead 
 of building a better world, it would undermine 
 the foundations even of the world we have built 
 already ; instead of developing our mind to greater 
 scope and precision, it would return to the condi- 
 tion of protoplasm — to the blessed consciousness 
 of an Unutterable Eeality. In the primary stages, 
 of course, mysticism does not venture to abolish 
 all our ideas, or to renounce all our categories of 
 thought. Thus many Christian mystics have still 
 clung, out of respect for authority, to traditional 
 theology, and many philosophical mystics have 
 made some room for life and science in the post- 
 scripts which they, like Parmenides, have appended 
 to the blank monism of their systems. But such 
 concessions or hesitations are inconsistent with the 
 mystical spirit which will never be satisfied, ifl 
 fully developed and fearless, with anything short] 
 of Absolute Nothing. ' 
 
 For the very reason, however, that mysticism 
 is a tendency to obliterate distinctions, a partial 
 mysticism often serves to bring out with wonder- - 
 ful- intensity those underlying strata of experienced^ 
 which it has not yet decomposed. The razing of 
 the edifice of reason may sometimes discover its 
 foundations. Or the disappearance of one depart- 
 ment of activity may throw the mind with greater 
 
16 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 energy into another. So Spinoza, who combined 
 mysticism in morals with rationalism in science, 
 can bring out the unqualified naturalism of his 
 system with a purity and impressiveness impossi- 
 ble to men who still retain an ideal world, and 
 seek to direct endeavour as well as to describe it. 
 Having renounced all ideal categories, Spinoza has 
 only the material categories left with which to 
 cover the ground. He thus acquires all the con- 
 centrated intensity, all the splendid narrowness, 
 which had belonged to Lucretius, while his mysti- 
 cal treatment of the spheres which Lucretius sim- 
 ply ignored, gives him the appearance of a greater 
 profundity. So an ordinary Christian who is mys- 
 tical, let us say, about time and space, may use 
 his transcendentalism in that sphere to intensify 
 his positivism in theolog}^, and to emphasize his 
 whole-souled surrender to a devout life. 
 
 What is impossible is to be a transcendentalist 
 " all 'round." In that case there would be nothing 
 left to transcend ; the civil war of the mind would 
 have ended in the extermination of all parties. The 
 art of mysticism is to be mystical in spots and to aim 
 the heavy guns of your transcendental philosophy 
 against those realities or those ideas which you 
 find particularly galling, Planted on your dearest 
 dogma, on your most precious postulate, you may 
 then transcend everything else to your heart's con- 
 tent. You may say with an air of enlightened 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 17 
 
 profundity that nothing is " really " right or wrong, 
 because in Nature all things are regular and neces- 
 sary, and God cannot act for purposes as if his 
 will were not already accomplished; your mys- 
 ticism in religion and morals is kept standing, as 
 it were, by the stiff backing which is furnished by 
 your materialistic cosmology. Or you may say 
 with a tone of devout rapture that all sights and 
 sounds are direct messages from Divine Providence 
 to the soul, without any objects "really" existing 
 in space; your mysticism about the world of per- 
 ception and scientific inference is sustained by the 
 naive theological dogmas which you substitute for 
 the conceptions of common sense. Yet among 
 these partialities and blind denials a man's positive 
 insight seems to thrive, and he fortifies and con- 
 centrates himself on his chosen ground by his arbi- 
 trary exclusions. The patient art of rationalizing 
 the various sides of life, the observational as well 
 as the moral, without confusing them, is an art 
 apparently seldom given to the haste and pugnacity 
 of philosophers. 
 
 ^Thus mysticism, although a principle of disso- 
 lution, carries with it the safeguard that it can 
 never be consistently applied. We__reach_i^only 
 in exceptional moments of intuition, from which 
 we descend to our pots and pans with habits and 
 instincts virtually unimpaired, Life goes on ; vir- 
 tues and affections endure, none the worse, the 
 
18 . POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 mystic feels, for that slight film of unreality which 
 envelops them in a mind not unacquainted with 
 ecstasy. And although mysticism, left free to 
 express itself, can have no other goal than Nir- 
 vana, yet moderately indulged in and duly inhib- 
 ited by a residuum of conventional sanity, it 
 serves to give a touch of strangeness and eleva- 
 tion to the character and to suggest superhuman 
 gifts. It is not, however, in the least super- 
 human. It is hardly even abnormal, being only 
 / An exaggeration of a rational interest in the high- 
 est abstractions. The divine, the universal, the 
 absolute, even the One, are legitimate conceptions. 
 They are terms of human thought having as such 
 a meaning in language and a place in speculation. 
 Those who live in the mind, whose passions are 
 only audible in the keen overtones of dialectic, 
 are no doubt exalted and privileged natures, choos- 
 ing a better part which should not be taken from 
 them. So the poet and the mathematician have 
 their spheres of abstract and delicate labour, in 
 which a liberal legislator would not disturb them. 
 Trouble only arises when the dialectician represents 
 his rational dreams as knowledge of existences, and 
 the mystic his excusable raptures as the only way 
 of life. Poets and mathematicians do not imagine 
 that their pursuits raise them above human limi- 
 tations and are no part of human life, but rather 
 its only goal and justification. Such a pretension 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 19 
 
 would be regarded as madness in the mathemati- 
 cian or the poet; and^ls not the mjrstic_.a,s.^lll.isfir- 
 ably a man ? Is he not embodying, at his best, the 
 analytic power of a logician, or the imagination 
 of an enthusiast, and, at his worst, the lowest and 
 most obscure passions of human nature ? 
 
 Yes, in spite of himself, the mystic remains 
 human. Nothing is more normal than abstraction. 
 A contemplative mind drops easily its practical 
 preoccupations, rises easily into an ideal sympathy 
 with impersonal things. The wheels of the uni- 
 verse have a wonderful magnetism for the human 
 will. Our consciousness likes to lose itself in the 
 music of the spheres, a music that finer ears are 
 sometimes privileged to catch. The better side of 
 mysticism is an aesthetic interest in large unities 
 and cosmic laws. The aesthetic attitude is not the* 
 moral, but it is not for that reason illegitimate. It 
 gives us refreshment and a foretaste of that per- 
 fect adaptation of things to our faculties and of 
 our faculties to things which, could it extend to 
 every part of experience, would constitute the ideal 
 life. Such happiness is denied us in the concrete j 
 but a hint and example of it may be gathered by 
 an abstracted element of our nature as it travels 
 through an abstracted world. Such an indulgence 
 adds to the value of reality only such value as it 
 may itself have in momentary experience; it may 
 have a doubtful moral effect on the happy dreamer 
 
 4. 
 
20 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 /S himself. But it serves to keep alive the convic- 
 
 f 
 
 tion, which a confused experience might obscure, 
 that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds 
 us, like music, that there are worlds far removed 
 from the actual which are yet living and very near 
 to the heart. Such is the fruit of abstraction when 
 
 \^/abstraction bears any fruit. If the imagination 
 merely alienates us from reality, without giving 
 us either a model for its correction or a glimpse 
 into its structure, it becomes the refuge of poetical 
 selfishness. Such selfishness is barren, and the 
 fancy, feeding only on itself, grows leaner every 
 day. Mysticism is usually an incurable disease. 
 Facts cannot arouse it, since it never denied them. 
 Eeason cannot convince it, for reason is a human 
 faculty, assuming a validity which it cannot prove. 
 The only thing that can kill mysticism is its own 
 uninterrupted progress, by which it gradually de- 
 — vours every function of the soul and at last, by 
 destroying its own natural basis, immolates itself 
 to its inexorable ideal. 
 
 Need we ask, after all these reflections, where 
 we should look for that expansion and elevation of 
 the mind which the mystic seeks so passionately 
 and so unintelligently ? We can find that expan- 
 
 /sion, in the first place, in the imagination itself. 
 That is the true realm of man's infinity, where 
 novelty may exist without falsity and perpetual 
 diversity without contradiction. But such exercise 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 21 
 
 of imagination leaves the world of knowledge un- 
 touched. Is there no escape from the prison, as 
 the mystic thinks it, of science and history which 
 shall yet not carry us beyond reality ? Is there 
 no truth beyond conventional truth, no life behind 
 human existence ? 
 
 Certainly. Behind the discovered there is the )r^ 
 discoverable, beyond the actual, the possible. Sci- 
 ence and history are not exhausted. In their deter- 
 minate directions they are as infinite as fancy in its 
 indetermination.. The spectacle which science and 
 history now spread before us is as far beyond the 
 experience of an ephemeral insect as any Absolute 
 can be beyond our own ; yet we have put that 
 spectacle together out of just such sensations as 
 the insect may have — out of this sunlight and this / 
 buzz and these momentary throbs of existence. 
 The understanding has indeed supervened, but it 
 has supervened not to deny the validity of those 
 sensations, but to combine their messages. We 
 may still continue in the same path, by the indefi- 
 nite extension of science over a world of experience 
 and of intelligible truth. Is that prospect insuf- 
 ficient for our ambition ? With a world so full \ 
 of stuff before him, I can hardly conceive what / ' 
 morbid instinct can tempt a man to look else- V 
 where for wider vistas, unless it be unwilling- \ 
 ness to endure the sadness and the^disdgline oi ^) 
 the truth. 
 
-<' 
 
 22 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 But can our situation be made better by refusing 
 to understand it? If we renounced mysticism 
 altogether and kept imagination in its place, should 
 we not live in a clearer and safer world, as well as 
 in a truer ? Nay, are we sure that this gradually 
 unfolding, intelligible, and real world would not turn 
 out to be more congenial and beautiful than any 
 wilful fiction, since it would be the product of a 
 universal human labour and the scene of the ac- 
 cumulated sufferings and triumphs of mankind? 
 When we compare the temple which we call Nature, 
 built of sights and sounds by memory and under- 
 standing, with all the wonderful worlds evocable 
 by the magician's wand, may we not prefer the 
 humbler and more lasting edifice, not only as a 
 dwelling, but even as a house of prayer ? It is not 
 always the loftiest architecture that expresses the 
 deepest soul; the inmost religion of the Pagan 
 haunted his hearth as that of the Christian his 
 catacombs or his hermitage. So philosophy is 
 more spiritual in her humility and abstinence than 
 in her short-lived audacities, and she would do well 
 to inscribe over her gates what, in an ancient 
 Spanish church, may be seen written near the steep 
 entrance to a little subterraneous crypt : — 
 
 " Wouldst thou pass this lowly door ? 
 Go, and angels greet thee there; 
 For by this their sacred stair 
 To descend is still to soar. 
 
UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION 23 
 
 Bid a measured silence keep 
 What thy thoughts be telling o'er ; 
 Sink, to rise with wider sweep 
 To the heaven of thy rest, 
 For he climbs the heavens best 
 Who would touch the deepest deep." 
 
^ 
 
 II 
 
 THE HOMEKIC HYMNS 
 
 We of this generation look back upon a variety 
 of religious conceptions and forms of worship, and 
 a certain unsatisfied hunger in our own souls 
 attaches our attention to the spectacle. We ob- 
 serve how literally fables and mysteries were once 
 accepted which can have for us now only a thin 
 and symbolical meaning. Judging other minds 
 and other ages by our own, we are tempted to ask 
 if there ever was any fundamental difference be- 
 tween religion and poetry. Both seem to consist 
 in what the imagination adds to science, to history, 
 and to morals. Men looked attentively on the face 
 of Nature : their close struggle with her compelled 
 them to do so : but before making statistics of her 
 movements they made dramatizations of her life. 
 The imagination enveloped the material world, as 
 yet imperfectly studied, and produced the cosmos 
 of mythology. " ^ 
 
 Thus the religion of the Greeks was, we might 
 say, nothing but poetry: nothing but what ijnagi- 
 nation added to thfi^mdiniejits. of science, to the 
 24 """"' ' 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 25 
 
 first impressions of a mind that pored upon 
 natural phenomena and responded to them with 
 a quick sense of kinship and comprehension. 
 The religion of the Hebrews might be called 
 poetry WTEE~"as""*gbod reasonT^^ Their "sense for 
 con9!u3t" and their vivid interest in their na- 
 tional destiny' carried thehT'past any prosaic record 
 of events or cautious theory of moral and social 
 laws. They rose at once into a bold dramatic 
 conception of their race's covenant with Heaven : 
 just such a conception as the playwright would 
 seek out in order to portray with awful accel- 
 eration the ways of passion and fate. Finally, we 
 have apparently a third kind of poetry in what 
 has been the "natural religion of the detached 
 philosophers of all ages. In them the iniagina- 
 tioii touches the precepts of morals and the ideal^ 
 of reason, attributing to them a larger scope and 
 more perfect fulfilment^ than experience can show 
 them to have. Philosophers ever tend to clothe 
 the harmonies of their personal thought with 
 universal validity and to assign to their ideals 
 a latent omnipotence and an ultimate victory over 
 the forces of unreason. This which is obviously 
 a kind of poetry is at the same time the spontane- 
 ous religion of conscience and thought. 
 
 Yet re ligion i n all these cases differs from a 
 mere play of the imagination in one important 
 respect; it reacts directly upon life ; it is a factor 
 
V, 
 
 26 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 in conduct. Our religion is the poetry in which 
 we_ believe. M ere poet ry is an ineffectual shadow 
 of life ; ^reii^g^ is, if you will, a phantom also, but 
 a phantom guidi&.- While it tends to its own ex- 
 pansion, like any growth in the imagination, it 
 tends als o to i ts application in practice. Such 
 an aim is foreign to poetry. The inspirations of 
 religi6n"demand fidelity and courageous response 
 on our part. Faith brings us not only peace, not 
 only the contemplation of ideal harmonies, but 
 labour and the sword. ' These two tendencies — to 
 imaginative growth and to practical embodiment 
 -^coexist in every living religion, but they "arl 
 not always equally conspicuous. In the formative 
 ages of Christianity, for instance, while its legends 
 were being gathered and its dogma fixed, the im- 
 aginative expansion absorbed men's interest ; later, 
 when the luxuriant branches of the Church began 
 to shake off their foliage, and there came a time 
 of year 
 
 " When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold," 
 
 the energy of religious thought, released from the 
 enlargement of doctrine, spent itself upon a more 
 rigid and watchful application of the residuum of 
 faith. 
 
 In the Pagan religion the element of applica- 
 bility might seem at first sight to be lacking, so 
 
.^w 
 
 THE HOMERIC HYMNS 27 
 
 that nothing would subsist but a poetic fable. An 
 unbiassed study of antiquity, however, will soon 
 dispel that idea. Besides the gods whom we may 
 plausibly regard as impersonations of natural forces, 
 there existed others; the spirits of ancestors, the 
 gods of the hearth, and the ideal patrons of war 
 and the arts. Even the gods of Nature inspired 
 reverence and secured a cultus only as they in- 
 fluenced the well-being of man. The worship of 
 |;hem had a practical import. The conception of Q 
 their nature and presence became a sanction and n 
 an inspiration in the conduct of life. When the "^ 
 figments of the fancy are wholly divorced from 
 reality they can have no clearness or consistency ; 
 they can have no permanence when they are wholly 
 devoid of utility. The vividness and persistence 
 of the figures of many of the gods came from the 
 fact that they were associated with institutions 
 and practices which controlled the conception of 
 them and kept it young. The fictions of a poet, 
 whatever his genius, do not produce illusion be- 
 cause they do not attach themselves to realities 
 in the world of action. They have character with- 
 out power and names without local habitations. 
 The gods in the beginning had both. Their image, 
 their haunts, the reports of their apparitions and 
 miracles, gave a nucleus of empirical reality to 
 the accretions of legend. The poet who came to 
 sing their praise, to enlarge upon their exploits. 
 
28 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 •and to explain their cultus, gave less to the gods 
 in honour than he received from them in inspira- 
 tion. All his invention was guided by the genius 
 of the deity, as represented by the traditions of 
 his shrine. This poetry, then, even in its most 
 playful mood, is not mere poetry, but religion. It 
 
 "^ is a poetry in which men believe; it is a poetry 
 that beautifies and justifies to their minds the 
 positive facts of their a ncestral wo rship, ^eir 
 social unity, and their personal conscience. 
 '""Hiese general reflections may help us to approach 
 the hymns of Homer in a becoming spirit. For in 
 
 . them we find the extreme pf „f ancy, the approach^ 
 . to a divorce between the imagination and the faith 
 
 * ofl;he worshipper. Consequently there is danger 
 that we may allow ourselves to read these lives of 
 the gods as the composition of a profane poet. If 
 we did so we should fail to understand not only 
 their spirit as a whole but many of their parts, in 
 which notes are struck now of devotion and affec- 
 tionate pride, now of gratitude and entreaty. These 
 may be addressed, it is true, to a being that has 
 just been described as guilty of some signal vice 
 or treachery, and the contradiction may well stag- 
 ger a Puritan critic. But the lusts of life were 
 once for all in the blood of the Pagan gods, who 
 were the articulate voices of Nature and of passion. 
 The half-meant exaggeration of a well-known trait 
 in the divinity would not render the poets that 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 29 
 
 indulged in it unwelcome to the god ; he could feel 
 the sure faith and affection of his worshippers even 
 in their good-humoured laughter at his imaginary- 
 plights and naughtiness. The clown was not ex- 
 cluded from these rites. His wit also counted as 
 a service. 
 
 The Homeric Hymns, if we may trust the impres- 
 sion if hey produced a modern, are not hymns and 
 are not Homer's. They are fragments of narrative 
 Tn luniC'Eexameter recited during the feasts and 
 fairs at various Greek shrines. They are not melo- 
 dies^o he chanted with a common voice by the 
 assemblage during a sacrifice ; they are tales deliv- 
 ered by the minstrel to the listening audience of 
 citizens and strangers. They usually have a local 
 "reference. Thus we find under the title ,of a hymn 
 to Apollo a song of Delos and one of Delphi. 
 Delos is a barren rock ; its wealth was due to the 
 temple that attracted to the place pilgrimages and 
 embassies, not without rich offerings, from many 
 Greek cities. Accordingly we hear how Leto or 
 Latona, when about to become the mother of Apollo,* 
 wandered about the cities and mountains of Greece 
 and Asia, seeking a birthplace for her son. None 
 would receive her, but all the islands trembled at 
 the awful honour of such a nativity, profitable as 
 the honour might eventually prove, — 
 
 "Until at length 
 The lovely goddess came to Delos' side 
 
30 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 And, making question, spake these wing6d words : 
 
 ' Delos, were it thy will to be the seat 
 
 Of my young son Apollo, brightest god. 
 
 And build him a rich fane, no other power 
 
 Should ever touch thee or work ill upon thee. 
 
 I tell thee not thou shalt be rich in kine 
 
 Or in fair flocks, much fruit, or myriad flowers ; 
 
 But when Apollo of the far-felt dart 
 
 Hath here his shrine, all men will gather here 
 
 Bringing thee hecatombs. . . . And though thy soil be poor, 
 
 The gods shall make thee strong against thy foes.' " 
 
 The spirit of the island is naturally not averse 
 to so favourable a proposition but, like some too 
 humble maiden wooed by a great prince, has some 
 misgivings lest this promise of unexpected good 
 fortune should veil the approach of some worse 
 calamity. " When the god is born into the light 
 of day," she says, "will he not despise me, seeing 
 how barren I am, and sink me in the sea 
 
 "That ever will 
 Oppress my heart with many a watery hill ? 
 And therefore let him choose some other land. 
 Where he shall please, to build at his command 
 Temple and grove set thick with many a tree. 
 For wretched polypuses breed in me. 
 Retiring chambers, and black sea-calves den 
 In my poor soil, for penury of men." ^ 
 
 Leto reassures the island, however, and swears 
 to build a great temple there which her son will 
 haunt perpetually, preferring it to all his other 
 
 1 Chapman's version. 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 31 
 
 shrines. Delos consents, and Apollo is born amid 
 the ministrations of all the goddesses except Hera, 
 who sits indignant and revengeful in the solitudes 
 of Olympus. The child is bathed in the stream 
 and delicately swaddled ; but after tasting the nec- 
 tar and ambrosia which one of the nymphs is quick 
 to offer him, he bursts his bands, calls for his 
 bow and his lyre, and flies upward into the sky 
 announcing that he will henceforth declare the will 
 of Zeus to mortals. Thereupon — 
 
 " All the immortals stood 
 In deep amaze. . . . 
 All Delos, looking on him, all with gold 
 Was loaded straight, and joy'd to be extoll'd. 
 . . . For so she flourished, as a hill that stood 
 Crown'd with the flower of an abundant wood." i 
 
 This legend, with all that accompanies it con- 
 cerning the glories of Delos and its gods, and the 
 pilgrimages and games that enlivened the island, 
 was well-conceived to give form and justification to 
 the cultus of the temple, and to delight the vota- 
 ries whom custom or vague instincts of piety had 
 gathered there. The sacred poet, in another part 
 of this hymn, does the same service to the even 
 greater sanctuary of Delphi. He tells us how 
 Apollo wandered over many lands and waters, and 
 he stops lovingly to recall the names of the various 
 spots that claimed the honour of having at some 
 
 1 Chapman's version. 
 
32 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 time been visited by the god. The minstrels, wan^ 
 derers themselves, loved to celebrate in this way 
 the shores they had seen or heard of, and to fill 
 at the same time their listener's minds with the 
 spell of sonorous names, the sense of space and 
 the thrill of mystery. In his journeys Apollo, 
 the hymn tells us, finally came to the dell and 
 fountain of Delphusa on the skirts of Parnassus. 
 The nymph of the spot, fearing the encroachments 
 of so much more powerful a deity, deceived him 
 and persuaded him to plant his temple on another 
 site, where Parnassus fronts the west, and the 
 overhanging rocks form a cavern. There Apollo 
 established his temple for the succour and enlight- 
 enment of mankind, while Trophonius and Aga- 
 medes, sons of Erginus, men dear to the immortal 
 gods, built the approaches of stone. 
 
 Thus the divine origin of the temple is vindi- 
 cated, the structure described, and the human ar- 
 chitects honoured, whose descendants, very likely, 
 were present to hear their ancestors' praise. But 
 here a puzzling fact challenges the attention and 
 stimulates the fancy of the poet: Apollo was a 
 Dorian deity, yet his chief shrine was here upon 
 Phocian ground. Perhaps some traditions re- 
 mained to suggest an explanation of the anomaly ; 
 at any rate the poet is not at a loss for an account 
 of the matter. The temple being established, 
 Apollo bethought himself what race of priests he 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 83 
 
 should make its ministers: at least, such is the 
 naive account in the poem, which expects us to 
 forget that temples do not arise in the absence of 
 predetermined servants and worshippers. While 
 pondering this question, however, Apollo cast his 
 eyes on the sea where it chanced that a swift 
 ship, manned by many and excellent Cretans, was 
 merrily sailing: whereupon the god, taking the 
 form of a huge dolphin, leapt into the ship, to the 
 infinite surprise and bewilderment of those worthy 
 merchants, who, as innocent as the fishers of the 
 Galilsean Lake of the religious destiny that awaited 
 them, were thinking only of the pecuniary profits 
 of their voyage. The presence of the god be- 
 numbed their movements, and they stood silent 
 while the ship sailed before the wind. And the 
 blast, veering at this place with the changed con- 
 figuration of the coast, blew them irresistibly to 
 the very foot of Parnassus, to the little haven of 
 Crissa. There Apollo appeared to them once 
 more, this time running down to the beach to 
 meet them in the form of 
 
 " A stout and lusty fellow, 
 His mighty shoulders covered with his mane ; 
 Who sped these words upon the wings of sound : 
 • Strangers, who are ye ? and whence sail ye hither 
 The watery ways ? Come ye to traffic justly 
 Or recklessly like pirates of the deep 
 Rove ye, adventuring your souls, to bring 
 Evil on strangers ? Why thus sit ye grieving, 
 
34 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 Nor leap on land, nor strike the mast and lay it 
 In your black ship ? For so should traders do 
 When, sated with the labour of the sea, 
 They quit their painted galley for the shore, 
 And presently the thought of needful food 
 Comes gladsomely upon them.' So he spake, 
 Putting new courage in their breasts. To whom 
 The Cretan captain in his turn replied : 
 ' Since thou art nothing like to things of earth 
 In form or stature, but most like the gods 
 That ever live, Hail, and thrice hail, Stranger, 
 And may the gods pour blessings on thy head. 
 Now tell me truly, for I need to know. 
 What land is this, what people, from what race 
 Descended ? As for us, over the deep 
 Broad sea, we sought another haven, Pylos, 
 Sailing from Crete, for thence we boast to spring ; 
 But now our ship is cast upon this shore. 
 For some god steered our course against our will.' 
 Then the far-darter spoke and answered them. 
 * Friends, in well-wooded Cnossus hitherto 
 Ye have had homes, but ye shall not again 
 Return to your good native town, to find 
 Each his fair house and well-belov6d wife. 
 But here shall ye possess my temple, rich 
 And greatly honoured by the tribes of men. 
 For I am son to Zeus. Apollo is 
 My sacred name. 'Twas I that led you hither 
 Over the mighty bosom of the deep, 
 Intending you no ill ; for ye shall here 
 Possess a temple sacred to me, rich. 
 And greatly honoured of all mortal men. 
 The counsels of the deathless gods shall be 
 Revealed to you, and by their will your days 
 Shall pass in honour and in peace for ever. 
 Come then and, as I bid, make haste to do. 
 . . . Build by the sea an altar ; kindle flame ; 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 85 
 
 Sprinkle white barley grains thereon, and pray, 
 
 Standing about the altar. And as first 
 
 Ye saw me leap into your swift black bark 
 
 In likeness of a dolphin, so henceforth 
 
 Worship me by the name Delphinius, 
 
 And Delphian ever be my far-seen shrine.' " 
 
 Thus the establishment of the Dorian god in 
 Phocis is explained, and the wealth and dignity 
 of his temple are justified by prophecy and by 
 divine intention. For Apollo is not satisfied with 
 repeatedly describing the future temple, by an in- 
 cidental epithet, as opulent; that hint would not 
 have been enough for the simplicity of those mer- 
 chant sailors, new as they were to the mysteries of 
 priestcraft. It was necessary for Apollo to allay 
 their fears of poverty by a more explicit assurance 
 that it will be easy for them to live by the altar. 
 And what is more, Hermes and all the thieves he 
 inspires will respect the shrine ; its treasures, 
 although unprotected by walls, shall be safe for- 
 ever. 
 
 • These were truly, as we see, the hyrQng pf, tj^ 
 loyitical ^patriotism. With Homeric breadth and 
 candour they dilated on the miracles, privileges, 
 and immunities of the sacred places and their ser- 
 vitors, and they thus kept alive in successive gen- 
 erations an awe mingled with familiar interest 
 toward divine persons and things which is char- 
 acteristic of that more primitive age. Gods and 
 
86 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 men were then nearer together, and both yielded 
 more frankly to the tendency, inherent in their 
 nature, to resemble one another. "" *"*** 
 
 The same quality is found in another fragment, 
 the most beautiful and the most familiar of all. 
 This is the hymn to Demeter in which two stories 
 are woven together, one telling of the rape of Per- 
 sephone, and the other of the reception of Demeter, 
 disguised in her sorrow, into the household of 
 Celeus, where she becomes the nurse of his infant 
 son Demophoon. Both stories belong to the relig- 
 ion of Eleusis, where this version of them seems 
 intended to be sung. The place was sacred to 
 Demeter and Persephone and its mysteries dealt 
 particularly with the passage of souls to the nether 
 world and with their habitation there. The pa- 
 thetic beauty of the first fable — in which we can 
 hardly abstain from seeing some symbolical mean- 
 ing — expresses for us something of the mystic 
 exaltation of the local rites; while the other tale 
 of Celeus, his wife, his daughters, and his son, 
 whom his nurse, the disguised goddess, almost sue-* 
 ceeds in endowing with immortality, celebrates the 
 ancient divine affinities of the chiefs of the Eleu- 
 sinian state. 
 
 The first story is too familiar to need recount- 
 ing; who has not heard of the gentle Persephone 
 gathering flowers in the meadow and suddenly 
 swallowed by the yawning earth and carried away 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 37 
 
 to Hades, the god of the nether world, to share 
 his sombre but sublime dominion over the shades ? 
 — a dignity of which she is not insensible, much 
 as she grieves at the separation from her beloved 
 mother ; and how Demeter in turn is disconsolate 
 and (in her wrath and despair at the indiffer- 
 ence of the gods) conceals her divinity, refuses 
 the fruits of the earth, and wanders about in the 
 guise of an old woman, nursing her grief, until 
 at last Zeus sends his messenger to Hades to 
 effect a compromise ; and Persephone, after eating 
 the grain of pomegranate that obliges her to return 
 yearly to her husband, is allowed to come back to 
 the upper world to dwell for two-thirds of the year 
 in her mother's company. 
 
 The underlying allegory is here very interesting. 
 We observe how the genius of the Greek religion, 
 while too anthropomorphic to retain any clear 
 consciousness of the cosmic processes that wer^' 
 symbolized by its deities and their adventures, was 
 anthropomorphic also in a moral way, and tended 
 to turn the personages which it ceased to regard 
 as symbols of natural forces into types of human 
 experience. So the parable of the seed that must 
 die if it is to rise again and live an immortal, if 
 interrupted, life in successive generations, gives 
 way in the tale of Demeter and Persephone, to 
 a prototype of human affection. The devotee, no 
 longer reminded by his religion of any cosmic laws, 
 
38 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 was not reduced to a mere superstition, — to a 
 fable and a belief in the efficacy of external rites, 
 — he was encouraged to regard the mystery as the 
 divine counterpart of his own experience. His 
 religion in forgetting to be natural had succeeded 
 in becoming moral; the_ggds_ were now models of 
 human endurance and success ; their histories 
 offered sublime consolations to mortal destiny. 
 Fancy had turned the aspects of Nature into per- 
 sons ; but devotion, directed upon these imaginary 
 persons, turned them into human ideals and into 
 patron saints, thereby relating them again to life 
 and saving them from insignificance. 
 
 A further illustration of the latter transforma- 
 tion may be found in the second story contained in 
 our hymn. 'Demeter, weary of her wanderings and 
 sick at heart, has come to sit down beside a well, 
 near the house of Celeus. His four young daugh- 
 ters, dancing and laughing, come to fetch water in 
 their golden jars, — 
 
 " As hinds or heifers gambol in the fields 
 When Spring is young." 
 
 They speak kindly to the goddess, who asks them 
 for employment. " And for me," she says, — 
 
 "And for me, damsels, harbour pitiful 
 And favouring thoughts, dear children, that I come 
 To some good man's or woman's house, to ply 
 My task in willing service of such sort 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 39 
 
 As ag6d women use. A tender child 
 
 I could nurse well and safely In my arms, 
 
 And tend the house, and spread the master's couch 
 
 Recessed in the fair chamber, or could teach 
 
 The maids their handicraft." 
 
 The offer is gladly accepted, for Celeus himself 
 has an infant son, Demophoon, the hope of his race. 
 The aged woman enters the dwelling, making in her 
 long-robed grief a wonderful contrast to the four 
 sportive girls : — 
 
 " Who lifting up their ample kirtle-folds 
 Sped down the waggon-furrowed way, and shook 
 Their curls about their shoulders — yellow gold 
 Like crocuses in bloom." 
 
 Once within the house, which she awes with her 
 uncomprehended presence, the goddess sits ab- 
 sorbed in grief, until she is compelled to smile for 
 a moment at the jests of the quick-witted maid 
 lambe, and consents to take in lieu of the wine that 
 is offered her, a beverage of beaten barley, water, 
 and herbs. These details are of course introduced 
 to justify the ritual of Eleusis, in which the clown 
 and the barley-water played a traditional part. 
 
 Thus Demeter becomes nurse to Demophoon, but 
 she has ideas of her duties differing from the com- 
 mon, and worthy of her unusual qualifications. She 
 neither suckles nor feeds the infant but anoints him 
 with ambrosia and lays him at night to sleep on the 
 embers of the hearth. This his watchful mother 
 
40 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 discovers with not unnatural alarm ; when the god- 
 dess reveals herself and departs, foiled in her desire 
 to make her nursling immortal. 
 
 The spirit that animates this fable is not that 
 poetic frivolity which we are accustomed to asso- 
 ciate with Paganism. Here we find an immortal 
 in profoundest grief and mortals entertaining an 
 angel unawares ; we are told of supernatural food, 
 and of a burning fire that might make this mortal 
 put on immortality did not the generous but igno- 
 rant impulses of the natural man break in upon that 
 providential purpose and prevent its consummation. 
 Eleusis was the natural home for such a myth, and 
 we may well believe that those initiated into the 
 mysteries there were taught to dwell on its higher 
 interpretation. 
 
 But there are other hymns in a lighter vein in 
 which the play of fancy is not guided by any moral 
 intuition. The hymn to Hermes is one perpetual 
 ebullition of irresponsible humour. 
 
 Hermes is the child of Maia, a nymph of Cyllene 
 whose cave Zeus has surreptitiously visited while 
 the white-armed Juno — for, unsympathetic prude 
 as this goddess may be, she must still be beautiful 
 — slept soundly in Olympus. The child is hardly 
 born when he catches a tortoise, kills it, scoops out 
 the shell, and makes a lute of it, upon which he 
 begins to play delicious music. Not satisfied with 
 that feat, however, he escapes from his cradle, and 
 
 I 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 41 
 
 drives from their pasture the kine that Apollo has 
 left feeding there. Accused afterward of this mis- 
 chief, he defends himself after the following fash- 
 ion, while he lies in his crib, holding his new-made 
 lyre lightly in his hand under the bedclothes. I 
 quote Shelley's version : — 
 
 " ' An ox-stealer should be both tall and strong 
 
 And I am but a little new-born thing 
 "Who yet, at least, can think of nothing wrong. 
 
 My business is to suck, and sleep, and fling 
 The cradle-clothes about me all day long. 
 
 Or, half-asleep, hear my sweet mother sing . 
 And to be washed in water clean and warm 
 And hushed and kissed and kept secure from harm.' '* 
 
 " Sudden he changed his plan, and with strange skill 
 Subdued the strong Latonian, by the might 
 
 Of winning music, to his mightier will. 
 
 His left hand held the lyre, and in his right 
 
 The plectrum struck the chords : unconquerable 
 Up from beneath his hand in circling flight 
 
 The gathering music rose — and sweet as Love 
 
 The penetrating notes did live and move 
 
 " "Within the heart of great Apollo. He 
 
 Listened with all his soul, and laughed for pleasure. 
 Close to his side stood harping fearlessly 
 
 The unabashed boy, and to the measure 
 Of the sweet lyre there followed loud and free 
 
 His joyous voice : for he unlocked the treasure 
 Of his deep song, illustrating the birth 
 Of the bright Gods, and the dark desert Earth ; 
 
 " And how to the Immortals every one 
 A portion was assigned of all that is. 
 
42 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 But chief Mnemosyne did Maia's son 
 Clotiie in the light of his loud melodies. 
 
 And, as each god was born or had begun, 
 He in their order due and fit degrees 
 
 Sung of his birth and being — and did move 
 
 Apollo to unutterable love." 
 
 In fact, after the most enthusiastic encomiums 
 on the young god's art, and on the power of music 
 in general, Apollo offers the child his protection 
 and friendship : — 
 
 "Now, since thou hast, although so very small, 
 Science of arts so glorious, thus I swear, — 
 
 And let this cornel javelin, keen and tall, 
 Witness between us what I promise here, — 
 
 That I will lead thee to the Olympian hall, 
 Honoured and mighty, with thy mother dear, 
 
 And many glorious gifts in joy will give thee 
 
 And even at the end will ne'er deceive thee." 
 
 Hermes is not insensible to this offer and its ad- 
 vantages ; he accepts it with good grace and many 
 compliments, nor does he wish to remain behind 
 in the exchange of courtesies and benefits : he ad- 
 dresses Apollo thus : — 
 
 " Thou canst seek out and compass all that wit 
 
 Can find or teach. Yet, since thou wilt, come, take 
 
 The lyre — be mine the glory giving it — 
 
 Strike the sweet chords, and sing aloud, and wake 
 
 The joyous pleasure out of many a fit 
 Of tranced sound — and with fleet fingers make 
 
 Thy liquid-voiced comrade speak with thee, — 
 
 It can talk measured music eloquently. 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 43 
 
 " Then bear it boldly to the revel loud, 
 
 Love-wakening dance, or feast of solemn state, 
 
 A joy by night or day : for those endowed 
 With art and wisdom who interrogate 
 
 It teaches, babbling in delightful mood 
 All things which make the spirit most elate. 
 
 Soothing the mind with sweet familiar play, 
 
 Chasing the heavy shadows of dismay. 
 
 " To those that are unskilled in its sweet tongue, 
 Though they should question most impetuously 
 
 Its hidden soul, it gossips something wrong — 
 Some senseless and impertinent reply. 
 
 But thou, who art as wise as thou art strong. 
 Canst compass all that thou desirest. I 
 
 Present thee with this music-flowing shell, 
 
 Knowing thou canst interrogate it well. ..." 
 
 Apollo is not slow to learn the new art with 
 which he is ever after to delight both gods and 
 men; but he is not at first quite at ease in his 
 mind, fearing that Hermes will not only recapture 
 the lyre but steal his friend's bow and arrows into 
 the bargain. Hermes, however, swears by all that 
 is holy never to do so, and the friendship of the 
 two artful gods is sealed for ever. The minstrel 
 does not forget, at this point, to remind his hearers, 
 among whom we may imagine not a few profes- 
 sional followers of Hermes to have been mixed, 
 that the robber's honour is pledged by his divine 
 patron to respect the treasures of Apollo's shrines. 
 Let not the votary think, he adds, that Apollo's 
 oracles are equally useful to good and to bad men; 
 
44 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 these mysteries are truly efficacious only for the 
 pious and orthodox who follow the established 
 traditions of the temple and honour its servants. 
 Apollo says : — 
 
 " He who comes consigned 
 By voice and wings of perfect augury 
 To my great shrine shall find avail in me : 
 
 " Him I will not deceive, but will assist. 
 
 But he who comes relying on such birds 
 As chatter vainly, who would strain and twist 
 
 The purpose of the gods with idle words, 
 And deems their knowledge light, he shall have missed 
 
 His road — whilst I among my other hoards 
 His gifts deposit. ..." 
 
 The wildest fairy-story thus leads easily to a 
 little drama not without its human charm and moral 
 inspiration; while the legend is attached to the 
 cultus, and the cultus is intertwined with the prac- 
 tice and sanctions of daily life. Even here, in its 
 most playful mood, therefore, this mythological 
 poetry retains the spirit and function of religion. 
 Even here sacerdotal interests are not forgotten. 
 Delphi shall be safe ; the lyre is Apollo's by right 
 although it be Hermes' by invention. A certain 
 amiable harmony is after all drawn from the riot 
 of foolishness. All is sweet and unmalicious and 
 lovable enough, and the patronage of both the 
 friendly gods, the enthusiast and the wag, may be 
 invoked with confidence and benefit. 
 
 Not less remarkable, although for other reasons, 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 46 
 
 is the hymn to Aphrodite. Here we find a more 
 human fable and a more serious tone: while the 
 poem, if we choose to consider it in its allegorical 
 meaning, touches one of the deepest convictions 
 of the Greek conscience. All the gods save three 
 — Athena, Artemis, and Hestia, — are subject to 
 the power of Aphrodite, Zeus at least as much 
 as the rest. In revenge for this subjection, Zeus 
 determines to make Aphrodite feel the passion 
 which she boasts to be able to inspire in others. 
 The fair shepherd Anchises feeds his flocks upon 
 Mount Ida, and with him Aphrodite is made to 
 fall in love. She presents herself to him in a 
 human disguise, and meets his advances with a 
 long account of her birth and parentage, and begs 
 him to take her back to her parents, and having 
 asked for her hand and fulfilled all customary 
 formalities, to lead her away as his lawful wife. 
 The passion which at the same time, however, she 
 is careful to breathe into him cannot brook so long 
 a delay : and she yields to his impatience. When 
 about to leave him she awakes him from his sleep, 
 turns upon him the full glance of her divinity, and 
 reveals her name and his destiny. She will bear 
 him a son, ^neas, who will be one of the greatest 
 princes and heroes of Troy; but he himself will 
 be stricken with feebleness and a premature old 
 age, in punishment for the involuntary sacrilege 
 which he has committed. 
 
46 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 The description of the disguised goddess, with 
 its Homeric pomp and elaborate propriety, is a 
 noble and masterly one, underlined, as it were, 
 with a certain satirical or dramatic intention; we 
 have the directness of a Nausicaa, with a more 
 luxurious and passionate beauty. The revelation 
 of the goddess is wonderfully made, with that 
 parallel movement of natural causes and divine 
 workings which is so often to be admired in 
 Homer. The divinity of the visitant appears only 
 at the moment of her flight, when she becomes a 
 consecration and an unattainable memory. The 
 sight of deity leaves the eyes dull, like those of 
 the Platonic prisoners returning from the sunlight 
 of truth into the den of appearance. Nay more, 
 a communion with the divinity, closer than is 
 consonant with human frailty, leaves the seer im- 
 potent and a burden upon the world; but this 
 personal tragedy is not without its noble fruits to 
 posterity. Anchises suffers, but his son ^neas, 
 the issue of that divine though punishable union, 
 lives to bear, not only the aged Anchises himself, 
 but the gods of Ilium, out of the ruins of Troy. 
 
 Such analogies carry us, no doubt, far beyond 
 the intention of the hymn or of the exoteric re- 
 ligion to which it ministers. The story-teller's 
 delight in his story is the obvious motive of such 
 compositions, even when they reflect indirectly 
 the awe in which the divine impersonations of 
 
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 47 
 
 natural forces were held by the popular religion. 
 All that we may fairly imagine to have been in 
 the mind of the pious singer is the sense that 
 something divine comes down among us in the 
 crises of our existence, and that this visitation is 
 fraught with immense although vague possibilities 
 of both good and evil. The gods sometimes ap- 
 pear, and when they do they bring us a foretaste 
 of that sublime victory of mind over matter which 
 we may never gain in experience but which may 
 constantly be gained in thought. When natural 
 phenomena are conceived as the manifestation of 
 divine life, human life itself, by sympathy with 
 that ideal projection of itself, enlarges its custom- 
 ary bounds, until it seems capable of becoming the 
 life of the universe. A god is a conceived victory 
 of mind over Nature. A visible god is the con- 
 sciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. 
 The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence 
 is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile 
 forces ; but the momentary illusion of that realized 
 good has left us with the perenniaj knowledge of^ 
 good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the • 
 function of religion.. 
 
 That such a function was fulfilled by this 
 Homeric legend, with all its love of myth aijd 
 tust of visible beauty, is witnessed by another short 
 hymn, which we may quote almost entire by way 
 of conclusion. It is addressed to Castor and Poly- 
 
48 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 deuces, patrons of sailors no less than of horsemen 
 and boxers. It is impossible to read it without 
 feeling that the poet, however entangled he may 
 have been in superstition and fable, grasped that 
 high essence of religion which makes religion 
 rational. He felt the power of contemplation 
 to master the contradictions of life and to over- 
 spread experience, sublime but impalpable, like a 
 rainbow over retreating storms : — 
 
 ' Ye wild-eyed Muses, sing the Twins of Jove 
 . . . Mild Pollux, void of blame. 
 And steed-subduing Castor, heirs of fame. 
 These are the powers who earth-born mortals save 
 And ships, whose flight is swift along the wave. 
 When wintry tempests o'er the savage sea 
 Are raging, and the sailors tremblingly 
 Call on the Twins of Jove with prayer and vow, 
 Gathered in fear upon the lofty prow. 
 And sacrifice with snow-white lambs — the wind 
 And the huge billow bursting close behind 
 Even then beneath the weltering waters bear * 
 The staggering ship, — they suddenly appear. 
 On yellow wings rushing athwart the sky, 
 And lull the blasts in mute tranquillity 
 And strew the waves on the white ocean's bed, 
 ' Fair omen of the voyage ; from toil and dread 
 The sailors rest, rejoicing in the sight, 
 And plough the quiet sea in safe delight." ^ 
 
 1 Shelley's translation. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 
 
 Greek religion seems to have contained three 
 factors of unequal prominence, but ultimately of 
 about equal importance and longevity. Most obvi- 
 ous, especially if we begin our study with Homer, 
 is the mythology which presents us with a multi- 
 tude of gods, male and female, often related by 
 blood, and having social and even hostile relations 
 
 with one another. If_^e examine their characters, 
 
 attributes, and fables, we readily perceive that most 
 of' them are impersonations of natural forces. 
 Some, however, figure prominently as patrons of 
 special arts or special places, as Apollo of prophecy 
 and music, of Delos and Delphi; and yet others 
 seem to be wholly personifications of human powers, 
 as Athena of prudence and of martial and indus- 
 trial arts. 
 
 Underlying this mythology is another element, 
 probably more ancient, the worship of ancestors, 
 local divinities, and domestic gods. With these 
 were naturally connected various ritual observ- 
 ances, and especially the noblest and most impor- 
 £ 49 
 
50 POETRY AND KELIGIOK 
 
 tant of rites, the sacrifice. Such practices may be 
 supposed to have belonged originally to the tribal 
 religion, and to have passed by analogy to the great 
 natural gods, when these had been once created by 
 the poet and perhaps identified with the older 
 genius of that spot where their efficacy was first 
 signally manifested. 
 
 Finally, as a third element, we find the religion 
 of the priests, soothsayers, and magicians, as well as 
 the rites of Orpheus, Bacchus, and the Great 
 Goddesses at Eleusis. These forms of worship 
 showed Oriental affinities and partook of a kiiid of 
 nocturnal horror and mystical enthusiasm. They 
 were the Greek representatives of the religion of 
 revelation and of sacraments, and bore much the 
 same relation to the supernaturalistic elements in 
 Christianity as does the idea of a shade in Hades 
 to the idea of a soul in heaven. The fundamental 
 intuitions were the same, but in Pagan times they 
 remained vague, doubtful, and incoherent. 
 
 These three forms of religion lay together in 
 men's minds and habits throughout the formative 
 period of Greek literature. There was an occa- 
 sional rivalry among them, but the tolerance char- 
 acteristic of Paganism could reconcile their claims 
 without much difficulty, and admit them all to 
 a share of honour. The history of the three 
 elements, however, differs essentially, as might be 
 expected after a consideration of their respective 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 51 
 
 natures. The antique family religion lived by 
 inertia; it was obeyed without being justified 
 theoretically, and remained strong by its very 
 obscurity. Many customs which a man may have 
 occasion to conform to only once or twice in his 
 life endure for ages and survive the ebb and flow 
 of intellectual and political systems. Nursery tales, 
 trivial superstitions, customs connected with wed- 
 dings or funerals, or with certain days of the year, 
 have a strange and irrational persistence ; they 
 surprise us by emerging into prominence after 
 centuries of a sort of subterraneous existence. 
 Thus the deification of Roman emperors was not 
 the sacrilegious innovation which it might appear 
 to be, but on the contrary a restoration of the spirit 
 of the most ancient faith, a revival called to the 
 aid of a new polity by the mingled statecraft and 
 superstition of the times. Thus, too, the Christian 
 care in the burial of the dead (contrary as it is to 
 the theoretical spiritualism of Christianity), the 
 feast of All Souls, and the prayers for the departed 
 are evidences of the same latent human religion 
 underlying the cosmic flights and public contro- 
 versies of theology. 
 
 The myster ies, on the other hand, had essentially 
 a spirit of self-consciousness and propaganda. They 
 came as revelations or as reforms ; they pretended 
 to disclose secrets handed down from remote 
 antiquity, from the primeval revelation of God to 
 
52 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 man, or truths recovered by the inspiration of 
 later prophets supernaturally illumined. The 
 history of these movements is, accordingly, the 
 history of sects. They never constituted the nor- 
 mal and common religion of the people, and never 
 impressed their spirit on the national literature, 
 -^schylus or Plato may have borrowed something 
 from them ; but they did so most when they 
 assumed an attitude of open opposition to the 
 exoteric religion of their country. Thus when 
 Plato makes his Socrates propound a Pythagorean 
 or Orphic doctrine of transmigration, he represents 
 the very members of the Socratic circle as surprised, 
 or as incredulous; and when they are finally 
 silenced by the proofs advanced, it is only because 
 they are overawed by the dogmatic unction of a 
 dying sage, who stimulates their imagination with 
 poetic myths, and confuses their intellect with 
 verbal equivocations. When the mist of the argu- 
 ment has cleared away, like incense after the 
 sacrifice, there remains indeed a profound emotion, 
 a catharsis produced by the sublimity and pathos, 
 so artfully mingled, of both scene and argument ; 
 but the bare doctrine enunciated, true and profound 
 as it is in its deeper meaning, is quite incapable of 
 appealing to an undisciplined mind, and could not 
 pass for a religious dogma except for the priestly 
 robes in which it is dressed. Thus the function of 
 the mysteries of which Plato's Phaedo may be 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 53 
 
 regarded as a philosophic echo, was to be the 
 vehicle of revolutionary tendencies, tendencies 
 which a philosopher might privately shape in one 
 way and a superstitious man in another. Both 
 could find in the spell of an occult ceremonial and 
 in the prophecies of an oracular creed an escape 
 from the limitations of the official religion. Mysti- 
 cism and the claim to illumination found in these 
 mysteries their natural expression. The many 
 fundamental questions left unanswered and unasked 
 by Paganism, the many potentialities of religious 
 emotion left unexercised by it, were thus allowed 
 to appear. 
 
 Independently of these two comparatively silent 
 streams of religious life, we may trace the current of 
 polytheistic theology, — a current which naturally 
 left a plainer trace in literature, since it contained 
 all there might be in Greece of speculation and 
 controversy in religious matters. The moral sanc- 
 tions of religion were embodied in the domestic 
 and civic worship ; the pious imagination remained 
 thereby all the freer to follow the analogies of 
 physical objects in its mythology. Apollo was the 
 father of Asclepius and the leader of the Muses; 
 his ideal dignity and beneficence were vouched for 
 by those attributes. He could well afford, there- 
 fore, as the Sun-god, to decimate the Greek army 
 with the same fatal shafts with which he slew the 
 Python. The moral function of the god was cer- 
 
54 POETRY AND KELIGION 
 
 tain on other grounds, being enshrined in the local 
 religions of the people. The poet might follow 
 without scruple the suggestions of experience ; he 
 might attribute to the god the various activities, 
 beneficent and maleficent, observable in the ele- 
 ment over which he presided. This is a liberty- 
 taken even in the most moralistic religions. (^ In the 
 Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the king- 
 dom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from 
 observation of this world rather than from an ideal 
 conception of justice-, as when we hear that to him 
 that hath shall be given and from him that hath 
 not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 
 Such characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. 
 They remind us that the God we are seeking is 
 present and active, that he is the living God; they 
 are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion 
 from passing into a mere idealism and God into 
 the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour. 
 For we naturally seek to express his awful actu- 
 ality, his unchallengeable power, no less than his 
 holiness and beauty. This sense of the real exist- 
 ence of religious objects can only be maintained by 
 identifying them with objects of actual experience, 
 with the forces of Nature, or the passions or con- 
 science of man, or (if it must come to that) with 
 written laws or visible images. 
 
 An instinctive recognition of this necessity kept 
 Greek mythology ever ready to return to Nature to 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 55 
 
 gather its materials afresh from a docile, if poetical, 
 observation of reality. The character of the god 
 must be studied in the manifestations of his chosen-* 
 element ; otherwise men might forget that, althoughy 
 the form of the god was poetical, his essence wasV 
 a positive reality of the most practical kind. Zeus 
 must still toss his ambrosial locks with a certain 
 irritation, in order that we may recognize him in 
 the rumblings of the sky ; he must still be capable 
 of wrath and deliberate malice, that his awful hand 
 may be thought to have hurled the thunderbolt. 
 Cronos must not be forbidden to devour his chil- 
 dren, else we should no longer reverence in him the 
 inexorable might of time. Mythology was quite, 
 right in not shrinking from such poetic audaci- 
 ties. They were its chief title to legitimacy, the 
 proof, amid the embroideries of fancy which over- 
 lay the divine idea, that the god was not an inven- 
 tion, but a fact. He had been found, he was known. 
 His character, like all character, was merely a prin- 
 ciple which reflection discovered in his observed 
 conduct. The reality, then, of the mythological 
 gods was initially unquestionable ; and the more 
 faithful the study of Nature by which the poet was 
 inspired, the more authority did his prophetic vision 
 retain. 
 
 But the intense imaginative vitality that must 
 have preceded Homer and Hesiod, the prodigious 
 gift of sympathetic observation to which we owe 
 
56 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 Zeus and Pan and all their endless retinue, was too 
 glorious to last. No later interpreter could find so 
 much meaning in his text. Mythology was accord- 
 ingly placed in a sad dilemma, with either horn 
 fataFto'rEs life ; it must either be impoverished to 
 remain sincere, or become artificial to remain ade- 
 quate. The history of Greek religion, on its specu- 
 lative side, is nothing but the story of this double 
 decadence. Reflection upon the process of Nature ^ 
 and desire for philosophic truth led inevitably to 
 a blank pantheism and to the reduction of positive 
 traditions to moral allegories. This was the direc- 
 tion taken by the Stoic theology. On the other 
 hand, adherence to the traditional gods, with no 
 further vivifying reference to their natural func- 
 tions in the world, could lead only to arbitrary 
 fictions, which, having no foothold or justification 
 in reality, were incapable of withstanding the first 
 sceptical attack. What an age of imagination had 
 intuited as truth, an age of reflection could preserve 
 only as fable ; and as fable, accordingly, the religion 
 of the ancients survived throughout the Christian 
 ages. It remains still the mother-tongue of the 
 imagination and, in spite of all revolutions and 
 admixtures, is the classic language of art and 
 poetry, which no other means of expression has 
 superseded. 
 
 Beginning, however, with that zealous Protestant, 
 the old Xenophanes, the austerer minds, moralists. 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 57 
 
 naturalists, and wits, united in decrying the fanci- 
 ful polytheism of the poets. This criticism was in 
 one sense unjust; it did not. . considei^tlie.jDriginal 
 J justification of mythology in human nature and in 
 the external facts. It was, like all heresy or partial 
 scepticism, in a sense superficial and unphilosophi- 
 cal. It was far from conceiving that its own tenets 
 and assumptions were as groundless, without being 
 as natural or adequate, as the system it attacked. 
 To a person sufficiently removed by time or by 
 philosophy from the controversies of sects, ortho- 
 doxy must always appear right and heresy wrong ; 
 for he sees in orthodoxy the product of the creative 
 mind, of faith and constructive logic, but in heresy 
 only the rebellion of some partial interest or partial 
 insight against the corollaries of a formative prin- 
 ciple imperfectly grasped and obeyed with hesita- 
 tion. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates 
 any great product of art or mind must always appear 
 short-sighted and unamiable. Socrates, invoking 
 the local deities of brooks and meadows, or paying 
 the debt of a cock to Asclepius (in thanksgiving, 
 it is said, for a happy death), is more reasonable 
 and noble to our mind than are the hard denials of 
 Xenophanes or Theodorus. But in their day the 
 revolt of the sceptics had its relative justification. 
 The imagination had dried up, and what had once 
 been a natural interpretation of facts now seemed an 
 artificial addition to them. An elaborate and irrel- 
 
58 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 evant world of fiction seemed to have been im- 
 posed on human credulity. Mythology was, in 
 fact, already largely irrelevant; the experience 
 poetized by it had been forgotten and the symbol, 
 in its insignificance, could not be honestly or use- 
 fully retained. 
 
 The Greek philosophers, as a rule, proceeded 
 cautiously in these matters. They passed myth- 
 ology by with a conventional reverence and looked 
 elsewhere for the true object of their personal 
 religion. But the old mythological impulse was 
 not yet spent; it showed itself still active in all 
 the early philosophers who gave the godhead new 
 incarnations congruous with the character of their 
 respective physical systems. ( ^ To t he Socratic 
 School the natural world was no longer the sphere 
 in which divinity was to be found. They looked 
 for the divine rather in moral and intelligible 
 ideas J But not only did they carry the mytho- 
 logical instinct with them into that new field, they 
 also retained it in the field of Nature, whenever 
 they still regarded Nature as real. Thus Aristotle, 
 while he rejected the anthropomorphism of the 
 popular faith, attributing it to political exigencies, 
 turned the forty-nine spheres, of which he con- 
 jectured that the heaven might be composed, into 
 a pantheon of forty-nine divinities. Every pri- 
 mary movement, he argued, must be the expression 
 of an eternal essence by which the movement is 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 59 
 
 justified, as the movement of the mind in thinking 
 or loving is justified by the truth or excellence of 
 the object of thought or of love. Without such a 
 worthy object, these spiritual activities would be 
 irrational; and no less irrational would be the 
 motion of the spheres, were each not obedient to 
 the influence of some sacred and immutable prin- 
 ciple. Forty-nine gods accordingly exist; but no 
 more. For, since the essence of each is to be the 
 governing ideal of a motion, the number of motions 
 in the sky determines the number of divine first 
 principles. The gods, we see, are still the souls 
 of Nature; a soul without a body would be a 
 principle without an application ; there can be 
 no gods, then, without a phenomenal function, 
 no gods that do not appear in the operations of 
 Nature. This astronomic mythology was surely 
 not less poetical than that of Homer, even if, by 
 virtue of a certain cold and abstract purity, not 
 unworthy of the stars of which it spoke, it was 
 more difficult and sublime. We may observe in 
 it a last application of the ancient mythological 
 •method by which the phenomena of Nature became 
 evidence of the existence and character of the 
 gods. 
 
 But the celestial deities of Aristotle, and the 
 minor creative gods of Plato that correspond to 
 them, retained too much poetic individuality for the 
 still poorer imagination of later tinles. The most 
 
60 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 religious of sects during the classical decadence was 
 that of the Stoics ; in them the spirit of conformity, 
 which is a chief part even of the religions of hope, 
 constituted by its exclusive cultivation a religion 
 of despair. The name of Zeus, and an equally 
 equivocal use of the word "reason" to designate 
 the regularity of Nature, served to disguise the 
 alien brutality of the power or law to which all 
 the gods had been reduced. Against the back- 
 ground of a materialistic pantheism, in which Stoic 
 speculation culminated, two positive interests stood 
 out: one, the resolute and truly human courage 
 with which the Stoic faced the reality as he con- 
 ceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience 
 pure although heaven might fall ; the other, the 
 efforts he made, in his need for religion, to re- 
 juvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms. The 
 fables he turned into ethical allegories, the oracles, 
 auspices, and other superstitious rites, he trans- 
 formed into quasi-scientific ways of reading the 
 book of Nature and forecasting events. 
 
 This possibility of prophecy constituted the Stcfic 
 '' providence " which the sentimentality of modernj* 
 apologists has been glad to confuse with the benevo- 
 lent Providence of Christian dogma, a Providence 
 making for the salvation of men. GQie Stoie_prQYi- 
 dence excluded that essential element of benevo- 
 lence; it was merely the fact that Nature was 
 prophetic of her own future, that her parts, both 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 61 
 
 in space and in time, were magically composed into 
 one living system. Mythology thus ended with 
 the conception of a single god whose body was the 
 whole physical universe, whose fable was all his- 
 tory, and whose character was the principle of the 
 universal natural order. No attempt was made by 
 the ancient Stoics to make this divinity better or 
 more amiable than the evidence of experience 
 showed it to be ; the self-centred, self-sufficient 
 Stoic morality, the recourse to suicide, and the 
 equality in happiness and dignity between the wise 
 man and Zeus, all prove quite conclusively that 
 nothing more was asked or expected of Nature 
 than what she chose to give ; to be virtuous was in 
 man's power, and nothing else was a good to man. 
 The universe could neither benefit nor injure him ; 
 and thus we see that, despite a reverential tone and 
 an occasional reminiscence of the thunderbolts of 
 Zeus, the Stoic's conscience knew how to scorn the 
 moral nothingness of that blank deity to which his 
 metaphysics had reduced the genial company of the 
 gods. 
 
 Thus the reality which the naturalistic gods had 
 borrowed from the elements proved to be a danger- 
 ous prerogative ; being real and manifest, these gods 
 had to be conceived according to "our experience of 
 tjieir operation, so that with every advance in sci- 
 entific observation theology had to be revised, and 
 something had to be subtracted from the person- 
 
62 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ality and benevolence of the gods. The moral 
 character originally attributed to them necessarily 
 receded before the clearer definition of natural 
 forces and the accumulated experience of national 
 disasters. Finally, little remained of the gods 
 except their names, reduced to rhetorical synonyms 
 for the various departments of Nature; Phoebus 
 was nothing but a bombastic way of saying the 
 sun ; Hephaestus became nothing but fire, Eros or 
 Aphrodite nothing but love, Zeus nothing but the 
 general force and law of Nature. Thus the gods 
 remained real, but were no longer gods. If belief 
 in their reality was to be kept up, they could not 
 retain too many attributes that had no empirical 
 manifestation. They must be reduced, as it were, 
 to their fighting weight. All that the imagination 
 had added to them by way of personal character, 
 sanctity, and life must be rejected as anthropomor- 
 phism and fable. 
 
 Such is the necessary logic of natural religion. 
 If Nature manifests the existence of a god, she 
 must to that extent manifest his character ; if she 
 does not manifest his character, she cannot involve 
 his existence. We observe to-day a process exactly 
 analogous to that by which the natural divinities 
 of Greece were reduced again to the physical or 
 social forces from which poetry had originally 
 evoked their forms. Many minds are grown too 
 timid to build their religious faith unblushingly on 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 63 
 
 revelation, or on that moral imagination or inward 
 demand which revelation comes to express and to 
 satisfy^ They seek, therefore, to naturalize the 
 Deity and to identify it with some principle of 
 history, of Nature, or of logic. But this identifica- 
 tion cannot be made without great concessions on 
 both sides. The accommodations which ensue in- 
 evitably involve many equivocations, and some 
 misrepresentations of the heterogeneous principles, 
 now natural, now moral, which it is sought to 
 unify. Confused and agonized by these contra- 
 dictions, the natural theologian, if he keep his 
 honesty, can only rest in the end in a chastened 
 recognition of the facts of experience, toward 
 which he will, no doubt, exercise his acquired 
 habits of acquiescence and euphemism. But these 
 habits, the survival of which gives his philosophy 
 some air of being still a religion, will not be in- 
 herited by his disciples and successors; a pious 
 manner may survive religious faith, but will not 
 survive it long. The society to whom the reformer 
 teaches a reticent and embarrassed naturalism will 
 discard the reticence and avow the naturalism 
 with pride. The masses of men will see no reason 
 why they should not live out their native impulses 
 or acquired passions without fear of that environ- 
 ing power of which they are, after all, the highest 
 embodiment; while a few thinkers, devout and 
 rational by temperament, will know how to main- 
 
64 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 tain their dignity of spirit in the face of a universe 
 of which they ask no favour save the revelation of 
 its laws. (T^^ irreligion for the many and Stoicism 
 for the few is the end of natural religion in the 
 modern world as it was in the ancient. 
 \r But natural religion (that is, the turning of the 
 j facts and laws of Nature or of experience into an 
 L object of worship) is by no means a primitive nor an 
 ^ ultimate form of religion; it is rather of all the 
 forms of religion the most unnatural and the least 
 capable of existing without a historical and emo- 
 tional setting, independent of its own essence and 
 inconsistent with its principle. £q. nation has ever 
 had a merely natural religion. What is called by 
 that name has been the appanage of a few philoso- 
 phers in ages of religious disintegration, when the 
 habit of worship, surviving the belief in any proper 
 object of worship, has been transferred with effort 
 and uncertainty to the natural order which alone 
 remained before the mind, — to the cosmos, the 
 self, the state, or humanity. Mythology, of which 
 natural religion is the last and most abstract phase, 
 was originally religious only in so far as it was 
 l!!supernatural ; in so far,- 1 mean, as the analogies of 
 outer Nature led the poet to conceive some moral 
 ideal, some glorious being full of youth and serenity, 
 of passion and wisdoniTj Only when thus trans- 
 figured into the human could the natural seem 
 diviner] The Greeks were never idolaters, and no 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 65 
 
 more worshipped the sun or moon or the whole of 
 Nature than they did statues of bronze or marble ; 
 they worshipped only the god who had a temporal 
 image in the temple as he had an eternal image in 
 the sun or in the universe. 
 
 It happened, therefore, that in the decay of 
 mythology the gods could still survive as moral 
 ideals. The more they were cut off from their 
 accidental foothold in the world of fact, the more 
 clearly could they manifest their essence as expres- 
 sions of the world of values. We have mentioned 
 the fact that the greater gods of Greece were almost 
 wholly detached from the cosmographical hints 
 which had originally suggested their character and 
 fable. Thus emancipated, these nobler gods could 
 survive in the consciousness of the devout, fixed 
 there by their purely moral significance and poetic 
 truth. Apollo or Athena showed little or nothing 
 of a naturalistic origin ; they were patrons of life, 
 embodiments of the ideal, objects of contemplation 
 for souls that by prayer would rise to the sem- 
 blance of the god to whom they prayed. This 
 transformation into the moral had been going on 
 from the beginning in the religious mind of Greece. 
 It was really the legitimate fulfilment of that 
 translation into the human to which mythology 
 itself was due. JBut mythj^logyJiaiL -merelv turn ed 
 the physical into the personal and impassioned; 
 religion was now to turn the psychical into the 
 
66 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 good. This tendency came to a vivid and rational 
 expression in Plato. The gods, he declared, should 
 De represented only as they were, i.e. as moral 
 ideals. The scandal of their fables should be 
 removed and they should be regarded as authors 
 only of the good, in their own lives as in ours. To 
 refer all things to the efficacy of the gods should 
 be accounted impiety. They, like the supreme and 
 abstract principle of all excellence which they em- 
 bodied, could be the authors only of what is good. 
 
 Had this remarkable doctrine been carried out 
 fully it would have led to important results. We 
 should have had goodness as the criterion of divin- 
 ity, to the exclusion of power. God would have 
 become avowedly an ideal, a pattern to which the 
 world might or might not conform. Such potential 
 conformity would have remained dependent on 
 causes, natural or free, with which God, not being 
 a power, could have nothing to do. Plato and 
 Aristotle did, in fact, construct a theology on these 
 lines, but they obscured its purity in their well- 
 meant attempts to connect (more or less mythically 
 or magically) their own Socratic principle of ex- 
 cellence with the cosmic principles of the earlier 
 philosophers. The elements of confusion and pan- 
 theism which were thus introduced into the Socratic 
 philosophy made it more acceptable, perhaps, to 
 the theologians of later times, in whose religion a 
 pantheistic tendency was also latent. In the hands 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 67 
 
 of Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan commenta- 
 tors the mythical and magical part of the Greek 
 conceptions was naturally emphasized and the 
 rational part reinterpreted and obscured. Plato 
 had spoken, in one of his myths, of a Demiurgos, 
 a personification of the Idea of the Good, who 
 directly or indirectly made the world in his own 
 image, rendering it as perfect as the indeterminate 
 Chaos he worked on would allow. Aristotle had 
 spoken of an intelligence, happy and self-contem- 
 plative, who was the principle of movement in the 
 heavens, and through the heavens in the rest of 
 Nature. Such expressions had a sound far too 
 congruous with Mosaic doctrine not to be seized 
 upon with joy by the apologists of the new faiths, 
 who were glad to invoke the authority of classic 
 poets and philosophers in favour of doctrines that 
 in their Hebrew expression might so easily seem 
 crude and irrational to the Gentiles. This assimila- 
 tion gave to the casual myths of Plato and to the 
 meagre though bold argumentation of Aristotle a 
 turn and a significance which they hardly had to 
 their authors. If we approach these philosophers 
 as we should from the point of view of Greek 
 literature and life, and prepare ourselves to see in 
 them the disciples of Socrates rather than (what 
 Plato was once actually declared to be) the dis- 
 ciples of Moses, we shall see that they were simply 
 mythologists of the Ideal; they refined the gods 
 
68 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 of tradition into patrons of civic discipline and 
 art, the gods of natural philosophy into principles 
 of intelligibility and beauty. 
 
 The creation described in the Timaeus is a trans- 
 parent parable. Elements which ethical reflection 
 distinguishes in the field of experience are turned 
 in that dialogue, with undisguised freedom of 
 fancy, into so many half-personified primitive 
 powers ; the Ideas, the Demiurgos, Chaos, the In- 
 determinate, and the "gods of gods." Plato has 
 not forgotten the lessons of Socrates and Parmen- 
 ides. He distrusts as much as they any natural 
 or genetic philosophy of existence. He virtually 
 tells us that, if we must have a history of creation, 
 we can hardly do better than to take ideal or 
 moral principles, combine them as we might so 
 many material elements, and see how the intelligi- 
 ble part of existence may thus receive a quasi- 
 explanation. God remains the creator of the good 
 only, because what he is mythically said to create 
 is merely that in Nature which spontaneously re- 
 sembles him or conforms to his idea ; only this 
 element in Nature is intelligible or good, and 
 therefore the principle of goodness may be said 
 to be its cause. Thus, for example, if we chose 
 to write an Anatomy of Melancholy, we might 
 • attribute to the Demon of Spleen or to the Blue 
 Devils only the sombre elements of that soulful 
 compound, which, however, the evil imps would 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 69 
 
 eternally tend to make as absolutely dyspeptic 
 and like unto themselves as its primordial texture 
 would allow. In exactly such a way P lato^ in his 
 allegorical manner, constructed a universe with a 
 poetical machinery of moral forces, personified and 
 treated as agents. When the thin veil of allegory 
 is drawn aside, there remains nothing but a splen- 
 did illustration of the Socratic philosophy ; we are 
 taught that the only science is moral science, and 
 that, if we wish to understand the world, we must 
 bend our minds to the definition of its qualities 
 and values, which are all that is intelligible in it. 
 Essences and values alone are knowable and fixed 
 and amenable to science. If we insist on history 
 and cosmogony, we must be satisfied with hav- 
 ing them presented to us in allegorical form, and 
 made to follow ethics as the Timaeus follows the 
 Kepublic. Natural philosophy can be nothing 
 but a sort of analytic retrospect by which we trace 
 the first glimmerings and the progressive manifesta- 
 tion in Nature of those ideas which have authority 
 over our own minds. 
 
 Phenomena had for Plato existence without" 
 reality, that is, without intelligibility or value. 
 They were a mere appearance. We need not be 
 surprised, then, that he refused altogether to con- 
 struct a theology by the poetic interpretation of 
 phenomena and preferred to construct one allegori- 
 cally out of his moral conceptions, the good and the 
 
70 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ideal. Aristotle, too, while adhering incidentally, 
 as we have seen, to a purified astronomical the- 
 ology, capped this with a purified moral theology 
 of his own. The Platonic picture-gallery of ideas, 
 with the abstract principle of excellence that 
 unified them, gave place in his philosophy to an 
 Ideal realized in the concrete and existing as an 
 individual. We may venture to say that among 
 the thinkers of all nations Aristotle was the first 
 to reach the conception of what may fitly be called 
 God. Neither the national deity of the Hebrews, 
 as then conceived, nor the natural deities of the 
 Gentiles, nor the half-physical, half-logical abstrac- 
 tions of the earlier Greek philosophers really 
 corresponded to the notion of a being spiritual,, 
 personal, and perfect, immutable without being ' 
 abstract, and omnipotent without effort and with- 
 out degradation. Aristotle first constructed this 
 ideal, not out of his fancy, but by building on the 
 solid ground of human nature and following to 
 their point of union the lines which moral aspira- 
 tion and effort actually follow. Nay, the ideal 
 he pointed to was to be the goal not of human life 
 only but of natural life inall its forms. The 
 analytic study of Nature (a study which at the 
 same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) 
 could guide us to the conception of her inner 
 needs and tendencies and of what their proper 
 fulfilment would be. We could then see that this 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 71 
 
 fulfilment would lie in intelligence and thought. 
 Growth is for the sake of the fruition of life, and 
 the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and 
 attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong 
 to the pursuit, the intellectual to the attainment. 
 Knowledge is the ft^rl of gjl AnrlPfuz-onr^ thQ. J nstifi- 
 ^ation aQ j] fnlfilr'ent nf nU ffiP'n'tji Intelligence 
 is the clarification of love. 
 
 A being, then, whose life should be a life of 
 pure and complete knowledge, would embody the 
 goal toward which all Nature strives. When we 
 ponder duly the short phrases in which Aristotle 
 propounds his conception of God we find that he 
 has called up before us the noblest possible object 
 of human thought, the presentiment of that 
 thought's perfect fulfilment. There is no alloy 
 of naturalism in this conception, and at the same 
 time no suspicion of irrelevancy. This God is not 
 a mere title of honour for the psycho-physical 
 universe, confusedly conceived and lumped to- 
 gether; he is an ultra-mundane ideal, to be an 
 inviolate standard and goal for all moving reality. 
 Yet he is not irrelevant to the facts and forces of 
 the world, not the dream of an abstracted poet. 
 He is an idea which reality everywhere evokes in 
 evoking its own deepest craving and need. Noth- 
 ing is so pertinent and momentous in life as the 
 object we are trying to attain by thought or 
 action, since that object is the source of our in- 
 
72 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 spiration and the standard of our success. Thus 
 Aristotle's God is not superfluous, not invented. 
 This theology is a true idealism, I mean an ideal- 
 ; ism itself purely ideal, which establishes the 
 • authority of human demands, ethical, and logical, 
 without impugning the existence or efficacy of that 
 material universe which it endows with a meaning 
 and a standard. 
 
 Yet this rational conception, the natural out- 
 growth of the Socratic philosophy, establishes a 
 dualism between the actual and the ideal against 
 which the human mind easily rebels. Aristotle 
 himself was hardly faithful to it. He tried to 
 prove the existence of his God, and existence is 
 something quite irrelevant to an ideal. This con- 
 fusion is very excusable, especially in an age 
 when the strictly mechanical view of Nature still 
 seemed hopelessly inadequate. Aristotle conse- 
 quently tried to understand the natural world by 
 viewing it systematically from the point of view 
 of moral science, as Plato had done less coherently 
 in his myths; and hence came what we must re- 
 gard as the great error of Aristotle's philosophy, 
 the belief in the efficacy of final causes and in the 
 preexistence of entelechies. But, apart from this 
 unhappy question of existence, which is, as we 
 have said, irrelevant to an ideal, Aristotle's concep- 
 tion of God remains, perhaps, the most philosophi- 
 cal that has yet been constructed. Without any 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 73 
 
 concessions to sentiment or superstition, it presents 
 us with a sublime vision of the essentially human, 
 of a nature as free from an unworthy anthropo- 
 morphism as from an inhuman abstractness. It is 
 made both human and superhuman by the same 
 principle of idealization. It is the final cause of 
 Nature and man, the realization of their imminent 
 upward effort, the essence that would contain all 
 their values and escape all their imperfections. 
 
 We may well doubt, however, whether men in 
 general will ever be ready to accept so austere a 
 theology in guise of a religion ; they were certainly 
 not ready to do so at the end of the classical 
 period. The inheritance of Paganism fell instead 
 to Christianity, in which ethical and naturalistic 
 elements were again united, although united in a 
 new way. For, while the scheme of Paganism, 
 and of all the philosophies that sought to rational- 
 ize Paganism, was cosmic and static, the scheme 
 of Christianity was historical. They spoke of the 
 dynamic relations of heaven and earth, or of the 
 immutable hierarchy of ideas and essences; even 
 Aristotle's God was somehow in spatial relations 
 to the Universe which he set in motion. The re- 
 ligion of the Hebrews, on the other hand, had been 
 essentially historical and civic : it had been con- 
 cerned with the moral destinies of Israel and the 
 dealings of Jehovah with his people. Christianity 
 inherited this historical character; its mysteries 
 
74 POETBY AND RELIGION 
 
 occurred in time. Not only the redemption of the 
 world but the vocation and sanctification of the in- 
 dividual were progressive, and when the habits and 
 problems of Christian theology were carried over 
 by the German idealists into the region of pure 
 metaphysics, the systems they conceived were still 
 systems of evolution. God was to be manifest in 
 the development of things. For Christianity in its 
 own way had spoken from the beginning of a grad- 
 ual and yet to be completed descent of the divine 
 into the natural by the agency of prophecy, law, 
 and sacramental institutions; it had represented 
 the relations of God to man in a vast historic 
 drama, of which creation constituted the opening, 
 the fall and redemption the nexus, and the last 
 judgment the unravelling. 
 
 Thus appeared a new scheme for the unification 
 of the natural and the moral. The harmony which 
 the old religion had failed to establish in space and 
 in Nature, the new sought to establish in history 
 and in time. It was hoped that life and experi- 
 ence, sin and redemption, might manifest that 
 divinity which had fled out of the sea and sky, and 
 which it seemed sacrilege to identify any longer 
 with the animal vitality of the universe. Whether 
 the same criticism that disintegrated mythology 
 and isolated its elements of science and of poetry 
 would not be fatal to the new combination of the 
 moral and the factual in the history of man, is 
 
THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM 75 
 
 hardly a question for us here. SufiB.ce it to point 
 out the problem and to register the solution which 
 was found in the ancient world to the analogous 
 problem that presented itself there. The first im- 
 pulse of the imagination is always to combine in 
 the object all the elements which lie together in 
 the mind, to project them indiscriminately into a 
 single conception of reality, enriched with as many 
 qualities as there are phases and values in our 
 experience. But these phases and values have 
 diverse origins and do not permanently hang to- 
 gether. It becomes after a while impossible to 
 keep them attached to a single image; they have 
 to be distributed according to their true order and 
 connections, some objectified into a physical uni- 
 verse of mechanism and law, others built into a 
 system of rational objects, into a hierarchy of logi- 
 cal and moral ideas. So the lovely pantheon of the f 
 Greeks yielded in time to analysis and was dis- 
 solved into abstract science and conscious fable. 
 So, too, the body and soul of later religions may 
 come to be divided, when they render back to earth 
 what they contain of positive history and to the 
 heaven of man's indomitable idealism what they 
 contain of aspiration and hope. 
 
IV 
 
 THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 
 
 The deathbed of Paganism was surrounded by 
 doctors. Some, the Stoics, advised a conversion 
 into pantheism (with an allegorical interpretation 
 of mythology to serve the purposes of edification) ; 
 others, the Neo-Platonists, prescribed instead a 
 supernatural philosophy, where the efficacy of all 
 traditional rites would be justified by incorporation 
 into a system of universal magic, and the gods 
 would find their place among the legions of spirits 
 and demons that were to people the concentric 
 spheres. But these doctors had no knowledge of 
 the patient's natural constitution ; their medicines, 
 prescribed with the best intentions, were in truth 
 poisons and only hastened the inevitable end. 
 Nor had the unfortunate doctors the consolation 
 of being heirs. Parasites that they were, they per- 
 ished with the patron on whose substance th^y had 
 fed, and Christianity, their despised rival, came 
 into sole possession. 
 
 Yet Neo-Platonism, for all we can see, responded 
 as well as Christianity to the needs of the time, 
 76 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 77 
 
 and had besides great external advantages in its 
 alliance with tradition, with civil power, and with 
 philosophy. If the demands of the age were for 
 a revealed religion and an ascetic morality, Neo- 
 Platonism could satisfy them to the full. Why, 
 then, should the Hellenic world have broken with 
 the creations of its own genius, so plastic, elo- 
 quent, and full of resource, to run after foreign 
 gods and new doctrines that must naturally have 
 been stumbling-blocks to its prejudices, and fool- 
 ishness to its intelligence ? Shall we say that the 
 triumph of Christianity was a miracle ? Is it not 
 a doubtful encomium on a religion to say that only 
 by miracle could it come to be believed? Per- 
 haps the forces of human reason and emotion suf- 
 fice to explain this faith. We prefer to think so ; 
 otherwise, however complete and final the triumph 
 of Christianity might be, it would not be justified 
 or beneficent. 
 
 Neo-Platonism arose in the midst of the same 
 con4i_tions as Christianity. There was weariness 
 and disgust with the life of nature, decay of polit- 
 icaP virtue, desire for some personal and super- 
 natural good. It was hardly necessary to preach 
 the doctrine of original sin to that society ; the vis- 
 ible blight that had fallen on classic civilization 
 was proof enough of that. What it was necessary 
 to preach was redemption. It was necessary to 
 point to some sphere of refuge and of healthful 
 
78 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 resort, where the ignominies and the frivolities of 
 this world might be forgotten, and where the hun- 
 ger of a heart left empty by its corroding passions 
 might be finally satisfied. . But where find such a 
 supernatural world ? By what revelation learn its 
 nature and be assured of its existence ? 
 
 Neo-Platonism opened vistas into the supernat- 
 ural, but the avenues of approach which it had 
 chosen and the principle which had given form to 
 its system foredoomed it to failure as a religion. 
 This avenue was dialectic, and this principle the 
 hypostasis of abstractions. Plato had pointed out 
 this path in his genial allegories. He had, by a 
 poetical figure, turned the ideas of reason into the 
 component forces of creation. This was, with him, 
 a method of expression, but being the only method 
 he was inclined to employ, it naturally entangled 
 and occasionally, perhaps, deceived his intelligence ; 
 for a poet easily mistakes his inspired tropes for 
 the physiology of Nature. Yet Platonic dogma, 
 even when meant as such, retained the transparency 
 and significance of a myth ; philosophy was still a 
 language for the expressioji of experience, and dia- 
 lectic a method and not a creed. But the master's 
 counters, current during six centuries of intellect- 
 ual decadence, had become his disciples' money. 
 Each of his abstractions seemed to them a dis- 
 covery, each of his metaphors a revelation. The 
 myths of the great dialogues, and, above all, the 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 79 
 
 fanciful machinery of the Tim sens, interpreted with 
 an incredible literalness and naive earnestness, such 
 as only Biblical exegesis can rival, formed the 
 starting point of the new revelation. The method 
 and insight thus obtained were then employed in 
 filling the lacimce of the system and spreading its 
 wings wider and wider, until a prodigious hier- 
 archy of supernatural existences had been invented, 
 from which the natural world was made to depend 
 as a last link and lowest emanation. 
 
 The baselessness and elaboration of this theology 
 were, of course, far from being obstacles to its suc- 
 cess in such an age. On the contrary, the less evi- 
 dence could be found in common experience for 
 what a man appeared to know, the more deeply, 
 people inferred, must he be versed in supernatural 
 lore, and the greater, accordingly, was his author- 
 ity. Nor was the spell of personal genius and even 
 holiness wanting in the leaders of the new philoso- 
 phy to lend it colour and persuasiveness with the 
 many, to whom metaphysical conceptions are less 
 impressive than is an eloquent personality, or a 
 reputation for miraculous powers. Plotj-iius, to 
 speak only of the greatest of the sect, had, in fact, 
 a notable success in his day. His lectures at Eome, 
 we are told, were attended by all the fashion and 
 intellect of the capital; and his large and system- 
 atic thought, his subtlety and precision, his com- 
 paratively sober eloquence, and his assurance, if we 
 
80 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 may say so, in treading the clouds, have made him 
 at all times a great authority with those persons 
 who look in philosophy rather for impressive results 
 than for solid foundations. His contemporaries 
 were eminently persons of that type. A hungry 
 man, when you bring him bread, does not stop to 
 make scrupulous inquiries about the mill or the 
 oven from which you bring it. 
 
 But the trouble w^as that the bread of Plotinus 
 was a stone. The heart cannot feed on thin and 
 elaborate abstractions, ' irrelevant to its needs and 
 divorced from the natural objects of its interest. 
 Men will often accept the baldest fictions as 
 truths; but it is impossible for them to give a 
 human meaning to vacuous conceptions, or to grow 
 to love the categories of logic, interweaving their 
 image with the actions and emotions of daily life. 
 Religion must spring from the people; it must 
 draw its form from tradition and its substance 
 from the national imagination and conscience. 
 Neo-Platonism drew both form and substance from 
 a System of abstract thought. Its gods were still- 
 born, being generated by logical dichotomy. Only 
 in the lower purlieus of the system, filled in by 
 accepting current superstitions, was there any 
 contact with something like vital religious forces. 
 But those minor elements — hopes and fears about 
 another world, fasts and penances, ecstasies and 
 marvels — had no necessary relation to that meta- 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRlSTtAN DOGMA 81 
 
 physical system. Such practices could be found 
 in every religion, in every philosophical sect of the 
 time. The Alexandrian dialectic of the super- 
 natural accordingly remained a mere schema or 
 skeleton, to be filled in with the materials of 
 some real religion, if such a religion should arise. 
 As such a schema the Neo-Platonic system actually 
 passed over to Christian theology, furnishing the 
 latter with its categories, its language, and its specu- 
 lative method. But that dialectic served in Christi- 
 anity to give form to a religious substance furnished 
 by Hebrew and apostolic tradition, a religious 
 substance such as, after the Pagan religion was 
 discredited, Neo-Platonism necessarily lacked and 
 was powerless to generate. 
 
 We have mentioned apostolic tradition. It is 
 fortunately not requisite for our purpose to discuss 
 the origin of this tradition, much less to decide 
 how much of what the Christian Church eventually 
 taught might be traced to its Founder. That is a 
 point which even the. most* thorough scholars seem 
 still to decide mainly by their prejudices, perhaps 
 because other material is lacking on which to base 
 a decision. For our present object we 'may admit 
 the most extreme hypotheses as equally possible. 
 The whole body of Catholic doctrine may have been 
 contained in the oral teaching of Christ; or, on 
 the other hand, a historical Jesus may not have 
 existed at all, or may have been one among many 
 
82 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 obscure Jewish revolutionists, the one who, by 
 accident, came afterward to be regarded as the 
 initiator of a movement to which all sorts of forces 
 contributed, and with which he had really had 
 nothing to do. In either case the fact remains 
 which alone interests us here ; that after three or 
 four centuries of confused struggles, an institution 
 emerged which called itself the Catholic Church. 
 This church, possessed of a recognized hierarchy 
 and a recognized dogma, triumphed, both over the 
 ancient religion, which it called Paganism, and 
 over its many collateral rivals, which it called 
 heresies. Why^did it triumph? What was there 
 in its novel dogma and practice that enchained the 
 minds that Paganism could retain no longer, and 
 that would not be content with Neo-Platonism, 
 native, philosophical, and pliable as that system 
 was? 
 
 The answer, to be adequate, would have to be 
 
 long; but perhaps we may indicate the spirit in 
 
 /^which it ought to be conceived. Paganism was 
 
 ] a religion, but was discarded because it was not 
 
 < supernatural: Neo-Platonism could not be main- 
 
 / tained because it was not a religion. Christianity 
 
 / was both. It had its roots in a national faith, l 
 
 I moulded by the trials and passions of a singularly n 
 
 Vreligious people; that connection with Judaism 
 
 gave Christianity a foothold in history, a definite 
 
 dogmatic nucleus, which it was a true instinct in 
 
THE POETEY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 83 
 
 the Church never to abandon, much as certain 
 speculative heresies might cry out against the 
 unnatural union of a theory of redemption with 
 one of creation, and of a world-denying ascetic 
 idealism, which Christianity was essentially, with 
 the national laws, the crude deism, and the strenu- 
 ous worldliness of the ancient Jews. However, 
 had the Gnostic or Manichsean heresies been vic- 
 torious, Christianity would have been reduced to 
 a floating speculation: its hard kernel of positive 
 dogma, of Scripture, and of hieratic tradition would 
 have been dissolved. It would have ceased to rep- 
 resent antiquity or to hand down an ancestral 
 piety: in fine, by its eagerness to express itself 
 as a perfect philosophy, it would have ceased 
 to be a religion. How essential an element its 
 Hebraism was, we can see now by the study of 
 Protestantism, a group of heresies in which the 
 practical instincts and sentimental needs of the 
 Teutonic race found expression, by throwing over 
 more or less completely the Catholic dogma and 
 ritual. Yet in this revolution the Protestants 
 maintained, or rather increased, the intensity of 
 their religious consciousness, chie^y by absorbing 
 the elements of Hebrew law and prophecy which 
 they could find in the Bible and casting into that, 
 traditional form their personal conscience or their, 
 national ideals. 
 
 How inadequate, on the other hand, this Hebraic 
 
84 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 element would have been to constitute tlie super- 
 natural religion that was now needed, appears very 
 clearly from the case of Philo Judseus. Here was 
 a man, heir to all the piety and fervour of his race, 
 who at the same time was a Neo-Platonist three 
 hundred years before Plotinus and, as it were, the 
 first Father of the Church. But his religion, be- 
 ing national, was not communicable and, being 
 positivistic, was at fundamental odds with the 
 spirit of his philosophy. It remained, therefore, 
 as a merely personal treasure and heirloom, the 
 possession of his private life : his disciples, had 
 he had any, must either have been Jews them- 
 selves or else must have been the followers merely 
 of his philosophy. His religion could not have 
 passed to them; they would have regarded it, as 
 we might regard the Christianity of Kant or the 
 wife-worship of Corate, as a private circumstance, 
 a detached trait, less damaging, perhaps, to his 
 philosophy than favourable to his loyal heart. 
 
 Philo, in his commentaries on the Bible, sought 
 to envelop and transform every detail in the 
 light of Platonic metaphysics. His interpreta- 
 tions are often violent, but the ingenuous artifice 
 of them would have delighted his contemporaries 
 as much as himself, and was adopted afterward by 
 all the Fathers and theologians of the Church. 
 Philo's theology was thus a success, even a model ; 
 yet he failed, because of the inadequacy of his 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 85 
 
 religion. What interest, what relevance, could it 
 have for any Gentile to hear about the deliverance 
 of Israel out of Egypt or oat of Babylon, or about 
 circumcision and prescribed meats, or about the 
 sacrifices in the Temple? What charm or credi- 
 bility could he find in further promises of glorious 
 kingdoms, flowing with milk and honey? Such 
 images might later appeal to the imagination of 
 New England Puritans and make a religion for 
 them: but what meaning could they have to the 
 weary Pagan? No doubt the Jews carried with 
 them an ideal of righteousness and prosperity; 
 but the Gentile was sick of heroes and high priests 
 and founders of cities. Stoic virtues were as vain 
 in his eyes as Sybaritic joys. He did not wish 
 his passions to be flattered, not even his pride or 
 the passion for a social Utopia. He wished his 
 passions to be mortified and his soul to be re- 
 deemed. He would not look for a Messiah, unless 
 he could find him on a cross. 
 
 That is the essence of the matter. What over- 
 came the world, because it was what the world \ 
 desired, was not a moral reform, — for tha|; was 
 preached by every sect ; not an ascetic regimen — 
 for that was practised by heathen gymnosophists 
 and Pagan philosophers ; not brotherly love within 
 the Church — for the Jews had and have that at 
 least in equal measure; but what overcame the 
 world was what Saint Paul said he would alyrays 
 
y 
 
 86 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 preach : Christ and him crucified. Therein was a 
 new poetry, a new ideal, a new God. Therein was 
 the transcript of the real experience of humanity, 
 as men found it in their inmost souls and as they 
 were dimly aware of it in universal history. The 
 moving power was a fable — for who stopped to 
 question whether its elements were historical; if 
 only its meaning were profound and its inspiratioa, 
 jcontagious ? This fable had points of attachment 
 to real life in a visible brotherhood and in an extant 
 worship, as well as in the religious past of a whole 
 people. At the same time it carried the imagina- 
 tion into a new sphere ; it sanctified the poverty 
 and sorrow at which Paganism had shuddered; it 
 awakened tenderer emotions, revealed more humaji 
 objects of adoration, and furnished subtler instru- 
 ments of grace. It was a whole world of poetr y., 
 descended^ among men, like tlie^'angels at the 
 Nativity, doubling, as it were, their habitation, so 
 that they might move through supernatural realms 
 in the spirit while they walked the earth in the 
 flesh. The consciousness of new loves, new duties, 
 fresh consolations, and luminous unutterable hopes 
 accompanied them wherever they went. They 
 stopped willingly in the midst of their business for 
 recollection, like men in love ; they sought to 
 stimulate their imaginations, to focus, as it were, 
 the long vistas of an invisible landscape. 
 If the importunity of affairs or of ill-subdued pas- 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 87 
 
 sions disturbed that dream, they could still return 
 to it at leisure in the solitude of some shrine or 
 under the spell of some canticle or of some sacra- 
 mental image ; and meantime they could keep their 
 faith in reserve as their secret and their resource. 
 The longer the vision lasted and the steadier it be- 
 came, the more closely, of course, was it intertwined 
 with daily acts and common affections ; and as real 
 life gradually enriched that vision with its sugges- 
 tions, so religion in turn gradually coloured common 
 life with its unearthly light. In the saint, in the 
 soul that had become already the perpetual citizen of 
 that higher sphere, nothing in this world remained 
 without reference to the other, nor was anything 
 done save for a supernatural end. Thus the re- 
 demption was actually accomplished and the soul 
 was lifted above the conditions of this life, so that 
 death itself could bring but a slight and unessential 
 change of environment. 
 
 Morbid as this species of faith may seem, vision- 
 ary as it certainly was, it is not to be confused 
 with an arbitrary madness or with personal illu- 
 sions. Two circumstances raised this ima ginativ e 
 piety to a high dignity and made it compatible with 
 greaE accomplishments, both in thought and in action. 
 In the first place the religious world constituted a 
 system complete and consistent within itself. There 
 was occasion within it for the exercise of reason, 
 for the awakening and discipline of emotion, for 
 
88 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 the exertion of effort. As music, for all that it 
 contains nothing of a material or practical nature, 
 offers a field for the development of human faculty 
 and presents laws and conditions which, within its 
 sphere, must be obeyed and which reward obedi- 
 ence with the keenest and purest pleasures ; so a 
 supernatural religion, when it is traditional and 
 systematic like Christianity, offers another world, 
 almost as vast and solid as the real one, in which 
 the soul may develop. In entering it we d^ not 
 enter a sphere of arbitrary dreams, but a sphere of 
 law where learning, experience, and happiness may 
 be gained. There is more method, more reason, in 
 such madness* than in the sanity of most people. 
 The world of the Christian imagination was emi- 
 nently a field for moral experience; moral ideas 
 were there objectified into supernaturar forces, 
 and instead of being obscured as in the real world 
 by irrational accidents formed an intelligible_cos- 
 mos, vast, massive, and steadfast. For this reason 
 the believer in any adequate and mature super- 
 natural religion clings to it with such strange 
 tenacity and regards it as his highest heritage, 
 while the outsider, whose imagination speaks 
 another language or is dumb altogether, wonders 
 how so wild a fiction can take root in a reasonable 
 mind. 
 
 The other circumstance that ennobled the Chris- 
 tian system was that all its parts had some sig- 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 89 
 
 ^nificari ce an d poetic truth, although they contained, 
 oF^needed to contain, nothing empirically real. 
 The system was a great poem which, besides being 
 well constructed in itself, was allegorical of actual 
 experience, and contained, as in a hieroglyph, a 
 very deep knowledge of the world and of the 
 human mind. For what was the object that un- 
 folded itself before the Christian imagination, the 
 vision that converted and regenerated the world ? 
 It was a picture of human destiny. It was an e pic,. 
 containing, as it were, the moral autobiography of 
 man. The object of Pagan religion and philosophy 
 had been a picture of the material cosmos, con- 
 ceived as a vast animal and inhabited by a multi- 
 tude of individual spirits. Even the Neo-Platonists 
 thought of nothing else, much as they might multi- 
 ply abstract names for its principles and fancifully 
 confuse them with the . spheres./ It was always a" 
 vast, living, physical engine, a cosmos of life in 
 which man had a determinate province. His 
 spirit, losing its personality, might be absorbed 
 into the ethereal element from which it came ; but 
 this emanation and absorption was itself an tin- 
 changing process^ the systole and diastole of the 
 universal heart. Practical religion consisted in 
 honouring the nearest gods and accepting from 
 them man's apportioned goods, not without look- 
 ing, perhaps, with a reverence that needed no 
 ritual, to the enveloping whole that prescribed to 
 
90 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 gods and men their respective functions. Thus 
 even Neo-Platonisra represented man as a minor 
 incident in the universe, supernatural though that 
 universe might be. The spiritual spheres were 
 only the invisible repetitions of the visible, as the 
 Platonic ideas from the beginning had been only 
 a dialectic reduplication of the objects in this 
 world. It was against this allotment that the 
 soul was rebelling. It was looking for a deliver- 
 ance that should be not so much the conscious- 
 ness of something higher as the hope of some- 
 thing better. 
 
 Now, the great characteristic of Christianity, 
 inherited from Judaism, was that its scheme was 
 historical] Not existences but events were the 
 subject of its primary interest. It presented a 
 story, not a cosmology. It was an Q^ic in which 
 there was, of course, superhuman machinery, but 
 of which the subject was man, and, notable cir- 
 cumstance, the Hero was a man as well. Like 
 Buddhism, it gave the highest lion our to a man 
 who could lead his fellow-men to perfection. What 
 had previously been the divine reality — the engine 
 of Nature — now became a temporary stage, built 
 for the exigencies of a human drama. What had 
 been before a detail of the edifice — the _ life of 
 man — now became the argument and purpbsB 
 of the whole creation. Notable transformation, on 
 which the philosopher cannot meditate too much. 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 91 
 
 Was Christianity right in saying that the world 
 was made for man ? Was the account it adopted 
 of the method and causes of Creation conceivably 
 correct? Was the garden of Eden a historical 
 reality, and were the Hebrew prophecies announce- 
 ments of the advent of Jesus Christ? Did the 
 deluge come because of man's wickedness, and will 
 the last day coincide with the dramatic denouement 
 of the Church's history ?LIn other words, is the 
 spiritual experience of man the explanation of the 
 universe? Certainly not, if we are thinking of a 
 scientific, not of a poetical explan ation. As a matter 
 of fact, man is a product of laws which must also 
 destroy him, and which, as Spinoza would say, 
 infinitely exceed him in their scope and power. 
 His welfare is indifferent to the stars, but de- 
 pendent on them. And yet that counter-Coper- 
 nican revolution accomplished by Christianity — 
 a revolution which Kant should hardly have 
 attributed to himself — which put man in the 
 centre of the universe and made the stars circle 
 about him, must have some kind of justification. 
 And indeed its justification (if we may be so brief 
 on so great a subject) is that what is false in 
 the science of facts may be true in the science of 
 values. While the existence of things must be 
 understood by referring them to their causesy^^ 
 which are mechanical, their functions can only 
 be explained by what is interesting in their results, \ 
 
92 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 in other words, by their relation to human natura 
 and to human happiness. 
 
 The Christian drama was a magnificent poetic 
 rendering of this side of the matter, a side which 
 Socrates had envisaged by his admirable method, 
 but which now flooded the consciousness of man- 
 kind with torrential emotions. Christianity was 
 born under an eclipse, when the light of Kature 
 was obscured; but the star that intercepted that 
 light was itself luminous, and shed on succeed- 
 ing ages a moonlike radiance, paler and sadder 
 than the other, but no less divine, and meriting 
 no less to be eternal. Man now studied his own 
 destiny, as he had before studied the sky, and 
 the woods, and the sunny depths of water; and 
 as the earlier study produced in his soul — anima 
 naturaliter poeta — the images of Zeus, Pan, and 
 Nereus, so the later study produced the images of 
 Jesus and of Mary, of Heaven and Hell, of miracles 
 and sacraments. The observation was no less exact, 
 the translation into poetic images no less wonderful 
 here than there. To trace the endless transfigura- 
 tion, with all its unconscious ingenuity and har- 
 mony, might be the theme of a fascinating science. 
 Let not the reader fancy that in Christianity every- 
 thing was settled by records and traditions. The 
 idea of Christ himself had to be constructed by the 
 imagination in response to moral demands, tra- 
 dition giving only the barest external points of 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 93 
 
 attachment. ', The facts were nothing until they 
 became symbols ; and nothing could turn them into 
 synrboTs'^xcept' an" eager imagination on the watch 
 for all that might embody its- dreams. 
 ^ The crucifixion, for example, would remain a 
 tragic incident without further significance, if we 
 regard it merely as a historical fact ; to make it 
 a religious mystery, an idea capable of converting 
 the world, the moral imagination must transform 
 it into something that happens for the sake of 
 the soul, so that each believer may say to him- 
 self that Christ so suffered for the love of him. 
 And such a thought is surely the objectifica- 
 tion of an inner impulse; the idea of Christ be- 
 comes something spiritual, something poetical. 
 What literal meaning could there be in saying 
 that one man or one God died for the sake 
 of each and every other individual ? By what 
 effective causal principle could their salvation be 
 thought to necessitate his death, or his death to 
 make possible their salvation ? By an varepov irpo- 
 repov natural to the imagination; for in truth the 
 matter is reversed. Christ's death is a symbol of 
 human life. Men could ^' believe in '' his death, 
 because it was a figure and premonition of the 
 burden of their experience. That is why, when 
 some Apostle told them the story, they could say 
 to him : " Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet : 
 thou hast told me all things whatsoever I have 
 
94 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ielt" Thus the central fact of all Christ's history, 
 narrated by every Evangelist, could still be nothing 
 but a painful incident, as unessential to the Chris- 
 tian religion as the death of Socrates to the Socratic 
 philosophy, were it not transformed by the imagina- 
 tion of the believer into the counterpart of his own 
 
 \ moral need. Then, by ceasing to be viewed as a 
 historical fact, the death of Christ becomes a re- 
 ligious inspiration. The whole of Christian doc- 
 trine is thus religious and efficacious only when it 
 becomes poetry, because only then is it the felt 
 counterpart of personal experience and a genuine 
 expansion of human life. ^ 
 
 '^ake, as another example, the doctrine of eter- 
 nal rewards and punishments. Many perplexed 
 Christians of our day try to reconcile this spirited 
 fable with their modern horror of physical suffering 
 and their detestation of cruelty; and it must be 
 admitted that the image of men suffering unending 
 tortures in retribution for a few ignorant and 
 sufficiently wretched sins is, even as poetry, some- 
 what repellent. The idea of torments and ven- 
 geance is happily becoming alien to our society 
 and is therefore not a natural vehicle for our relig- 
 
 ^ ion. Some accordingly reject altogether the Chris- 
 tian doctrine on this point, which is too strong for 
 their nerves. Their objection, of course, is not 
 simply that there is no evidence of its truth. If 
 they asked for evidence, would they believe any- 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 95 
 
 thing? Proofs are the last thing looked for by 
 a truly religious mind which feels the imaginative 
 fitness of its faith and knows instinctively that, in 
 such a matter, imaginative fitness is all that can be 
 required. The reason men reject the doctrine of 
 eternal punishment is that they find it distasteful 
 or unmeaning. They show, by the nature of their 
 objections, that they acknowledge poetic propriety 
 or moral truth to be the sole criterion of religious 
 credibility. 
 
 But, passing over the change of sentiment which 
 gives rise to this change of doctrine, let us inquire 
 of what reality Christian eschatology was the imagi- 
 native rendering. What was it in the actual life 
 of men that made them think of themselves as 
 hanging between eternal bliss and eternal perdi- 
 tion ? Was it not the diversity, the momentousness, 
 and the finality of their experience here? No 
 doubt the desire to make the reversal of the injus- 
 tices of this world as melodramatic and picturesque 
 as possible contributed to the adoption of this idea ; 
 the ideal values of life were thus contrasted with 
 its apparent values in the most absolute and graphic 
 manner. But we may say that beneath this motive, 
 based on the exigences of exposition and edification, 
 there was a deeper intuition. There was the genu- 
 ine moralist's sympathy with a philosophic and 
 logical view of immortality rather than with a 
 superstitious and sentimental one. / Another life 
 
96 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 exists and is infinitely more important than this 
 life J but it is reached by the intuition of ideals, 
 not by the multiplication of phenomena; it is 
 an eternal state not an indefinite succession of 
 changes. Transitory life ends for the Christian 
 when the balance-sheet of his individual merits 
 and demerits is made up, and the eternity that 
 ensues is the eternal reality of those values. 
 
 For the Oriental, who believed in transmigrar 
 tion, the individual dissolved into an infinity of 
 phases; he went on actually and perpetually, as 
 Nature does ; his immortality was a long Purga- 
 tory behind which a shadowy Hell and Heaven 
 scarcely appeared in the form of annihilation or 
 absorption. This happened because the Oriental 
 mind has no middle; it oscillates between ex- 
 tremes and passes directly from sense to mysti- 
 cism, and back again ; it lacks virile understanding 
 and intelligence creative of form. But Christianity, 
 following in this the Socratic philosophy, rose to 
 the conception of eternal essences, forms suspended 
 above the flux of natural things and expressing 
 the ideal suggestions and rational goals of expe- 
 rience. Each man, for Christianity, has an immor- 
 tal soul ; each life has the potentiality of an eternal 
 meaning, and as this potentiality is or is not actu- 
 alized, as this meaning is or is not expressed in 
 the phenomena of this life, the soul is eternally 
 saved or lost. As the tree falleth, so it lieth. 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 97 
 
 The finality of this brief and personal experiment, 
 the consequent awful solemnity of the hour of death 
 when all trial is over and when the eternal sentence 
 is passed, has always been duly felt by the Chris- 
 tian. The Church, indeed, in answer to the demand 
 for a more refined and discriminating presentation 
 of its dogma, introduced the temporary discipline 
 of Purgatory, in which the virtues already stamped 
 on the soul might be brought to greater clearness 
 and rid of the alloy of imperfection; but this 
 purification allowed no essential development, no 
 change of character or fate ; the soul in Purgatory 
 was already saved, already holy. 
 
 The harshness of the doctrine of eternal judg- 
 ment is therefore a consequence of its symbolic 
 truth. The Church might have been less absolute 
 in the matter had she yielded more, as she did in 
 the doctrine of Purgatory, to the desire for merely 
 imaginary extensions of human experience. But 
 her better instincts kept her, after all, to the moral 
 interpretation of reality ; and the facts to be ren- 
 dered were uncompromising enough. Art is long, 
 life brief. To have told men they would have infi- 
 nite opportunities to reform and to advance would 
 have been to feed them on gratuitous fictions with- 
 out raising them, as it was the function of Chris- 
 tianity to do, to a consciousness of the spiritual 
 meaning and upshot of existence. To have specu- 
 lated about the infinite extent of experience and its 
 
98 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 endless transformations, after the manner of the 
 barbarous religions, and never to have conceived 
 its moral essence, -^Ivould have been to encourage a 
 dream which may bj chance be prophetic, but 
 which is as devoid of ideal meaning as of empirical 
 probability. Christian fictions were at least signifi- 
 cant; they beguiled the intellect, no doubt, and 
 were mistaken for accounts of external fact; but 
 they enlightened the imagination ; they made man 
 understand, as never before or since, the pathos and 
 nobility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the 
 possibility of sanctity, the transcendence and the hu- 
 manity of the divine. For the divine was reached 
 by the idealization of the human. The supernatu- 
 ral was an allegory of the natural, and rendered 
 the values of transitory things under the image of 
 eternal existences. Thus the finality of our activity 
 in this world, together with the eternity of its ideal 
 meanings, was admirably rendered by the Christian 
 dogma of a final judgment. 
 
 But there was another moral truth which was 
 impressed upon the believer by that doctrine and 
 which could not be enforced in any other way with- 
 out presupposing in him an unusual philosophic 
 acumen and elevation of mind. That is the truth 
 that moral distinctions are absolute. A cool phi- 
 losophy sufi&ces to show us that moral distinctions 
 exist, since men prefer some experiences to others 
 and can by their action bring these good and evil 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 99 
 
 experiences upon themselves and upon their fellows. 
 But a survey of Nature may at the same time im- 
 press us with the fact that these goods and evils 
 are singularly mixed, that there is hardly an ad- 
 vantage gained which is not bought by some loss, 
 or any loss which is not an opportunity for the 
 attainment of some advantage. While it would be 
 chimerical to pretend that such compensation was 
 always adequate, and that, in consequence, no one 
 condition was ever really preferable to any other, 
 yet the perplexities into which moral aspiration is 
 thrown by these contradictory vistas is often pro- 
 ductive of the desire to reach some other point of 
 view, to escape into what is irrationally thought to 
 be a higher category than the moral. The serious 
 consideration of those things which are right accord- 
 ing to human reason and interest may then yield 
 to a fanatical reliance on some facile general notion. 
 It may be thought, for instance, that what is 
 regular or necessary or universal is therefore right 
 and good ; thus a dazed contemplation of the actual 
 may take the place o:^ the determination of the 
 ideal. Mysticism in regard to the better and the 
 worse, by which good and bad are woven into a 
 seamless garment of sorry magnificence in which 
 the whole universe is wrapped up, is like mysti- 
 cism on other subjects ; it consists in the theoretic 
 renunciation of a natural attitude, in this case of 
 the natural attitude of welcome and repulsion in 
 
100 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 the presence of various things. But this category- 
 is the most fundamental of all those that the 
 human mind employs, and it cannot be surren- 
 dered so long as life endures. It is indeed the 
 conscious echo of those vital instincts by whose 
 operation we exist. Levity and mysticism may do 
 all they can — and they can do much — to make 
 men think moral distinctions unauthoritative, be- 
 cause moral distinctions may be either ignored or 
 transcended. Yet the essential assertion that one 
 thing is really better than another remains involved 
 in every act of every living being. It is involved 
 even in the operation of abstract thinking, where 
 a cogent conclusion, being still coveted, is assumed 
 to be a good, or in that aesthetic and theoretic en- 
 thusiasm before cosmic laws, which is the human 
 foundation of this mysticism itself. 
 
 It is accordingly a moral truth which no subter- 
 fuge can elude, that some things are really better 
 than others. In the daily course of affairs we are 
 constantly in the presence of events which by turn- 
 ing out one way or the other produce a real, an 
 irrevocable, increase of good or evil in the world. 
 The complexities of life, struggling as it does 
 amidst irrational forces, may make the attainment 
 of one good the cause of the unattainableness of 
 another ; they cannot destroy the essential desira- 
 bility of both. The niggardliness of Nature can- 
 not sterilize the ideal; the odious circumstances 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 101 
 
 which make the attainment of many goods condi- 
 tional on the perpetration of some evil, and which 
 punish every virtue by some incapacity or some 
 abuse, — these odious circumstances cannot rob any 
 good of its natural sweetness, nor all goods to- 
 gether of their conceptual harmony. To the heart 
 that has felt it and that is the true judge, every 
 loss is irretrievable and every joy indestructible. 
 Eventual compensations may obliterate the memory 
 of these values but cannot destroy their reality. 
 The future can only furnish further applications 
 of the principle by which they arose and were 
 justified. 
 
 Now, how utter this moral truth imaginatively, 
 how clothe it in an image that might render its 
 absoluteness and its force ? Could any method be 
 better than to say : Your eternal destiny is hang- 
 ing in the balance: the grace of God, the influ- 
 ences of others, and your own will reacting upon 
 both are shaping at every moment issues of abso- 
 lute importance. What happens here and now 
 decides not merely incidental pains and pleasures 
 — which perhaps a brave and careless spirit might 
 alike despise — but helps to determine your eternal 
 destiny of joy or anguish,, and the eternal destiny 
 of your neighbour. In place of the confused vistas 
 of the empirical world, in which the threads of 
 benefit and injury might seem to be mingled and 
 lost, the imagination substituted the clear vision 
 
10*2 poeteV and religion 
 
 of Hell and Heaven; while the determination of 
 our destiny was made to depend upon obedience 
 to recognized duties. 
 
 Now these duties may often have been far from 
 corresponding to those which reason would impose ; 
 but the intention and the principle at least were 
 sound. It was felt that the actions and passions of 
 this world breed momentous values, values which 
 being ideal are as infinite as values can be in the 
 estimation of reason — the values of truth, of love, 
 of rationality, of perfection — although both the 
 length of the experience in which they arise and 
 the number of persons who share ttiat experience 
 may be extremely limited. But the mechanical 
 measure of experience in length, intensity, or mul- 
 tiplication has nothing to do with its moral signifi- 
 cance in realizing truth or virtue. Therefore the 
 difference in dignity between the satisfactions of 
 reason and the satisfactions of sense is fittingly 
 rendered by the infinite disproportion between 
 heavenly and earthly joys. In our imaginative 
 translation we are justified in saying that the 
 alternative between infinite happiness and infinite 
 misery is yawning before us, because the alterna- 
 tive between rational failure or success is actually 
 present. The decisions we make from moment to 
 moment, on which the ideal value of our life and 
 character depends, actually constitute in a few 
 years a decision which is irrevocable. 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 103 
 
 The Christian doctrine of rewards and punish- 
 ments is thus in harmony with moral truths which 
 a different doctrine might have obscured. The 
 good souls that wish to fancy that everybody will 
 be ultimately saved, subject a fable to standards 
 appropriate to matters of fact, and thereby deprive 
 the fable of that moral significance which is its 
 excuse for being. If every one is ultimately saved, 
 there is nothing truly momentous about alternative 
 events : all paths lead more or less circuitously to 
 the same end. The only ground which then re- 
 mains for discriminating the better from the worse 
 is the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the path 
 to salvation. All moral meanings inhere, then, in 
 this life, and the other life is without significance. 
 Heaven comes to replace life empirically without 
 fulfilling it ideally. We are reduced for our moral 
 standards to phenomenal values, to the worth of 
 life in transitory feeling. These values are quite 
 real, but they are not those which poetry and re- 
 ligion have for their object. They are values pres- 
 ent to sense, not to reason and imagination. 
 
 The ideal of a supervening general bliss presents 
 indeed an abstract desideratum, but not the ideal 
 involved in the actual forces of life; that end 
 would have no rational relation to its primary 
 factors; it would not be built on our instinctive 
 preferences but would abolish them by a miracu- 
 lous dream, following alike upon every species of 
 
104 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 activity. Moral differences would have existed 
 merely to be forgotten; for if we say they were 
 remembered, but transcended and put to rest, we 
 plunge into an even worse contradiction to the 
 conscience and the will. For if we say that the 
 universal bliss consists in the assurance, mysti- 
 cally received, that while individual experiences 
 may differ in value they all equally conduce to 
 the perfection of the universe, we deny not merely 
 the momentousness but even the elementary valid- 
 ity of moral distinctions. We assert that the 
 best idea of God is that least like the ideal of 
 man, and that the nearer we come to the vision 
 of truth the farther we are from the feeling of 
 preference. In our attempt to extend the good 
 we thus abolish its essence. Our religion consists 
 in denying the authority of the ideal, which is its 
 only rational foundation; and thus that religion, 
 while gaining nothing in empirical reality, comes 
 to express a moral falsehood instead of a moral 
 truth. 
 
 If we looked in religion for an account of facts, 
 as most people do, we should have to pass a very 
 different judgment on these several views. The 
 mechanical world is a connected system and Nature 
 seems to be dynamically one; the intuitions on 
 which mysticism feeds are therefore true intuitions. 
 The expectation of a millennium is on the other 
 hand quite visionary, because the evidence of 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 105 
 
 history, while it shows undeniable progress in 
 many directions, shows that this progress is essen- 
 tially relative, partial, and transitory. As for the 
 Christian doctrine of the judgment, it is something 
 wholly out of relation to empirical facts, it assumes 
 the existence of a supernatural sphere, and is be- 
 yond the reach of scientific evidence of any kind. 
 But if we look on religion as on a kind of poetry, 
 as we have decided here to do, — as on a kind of 
 poetry that expresses moral values and reacts benef- 
 icently upon life, — we shall see that the Christian 
 doctrine is alone justified. For mysticism is not an 
 imaginative construction at all but a , renunciation 
 or confusion of our faculties ; here a surrender of 
 the human ideal in the presence of a mechanical 
 force that is felt, and correctly felt, to tend to 
 vaguer results or rather to tend to nothing in 
 particular. Mysticism is not a religion but a 
 religious disease. The idea of universal salvation, 
 on the other hand, is the expression of a feeble 
 sentimentality, a pleasant reverie without structure 
 or significance.^ But the doctrine of eternal re- 
 wards and punishments is, as we have tried to 
 show, an expression of moral truth, a poetic ren- 
 dering of the fact that rational values are ideal, 
 momentous, and irreversible. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply examples and to 
 exhibit the various parts of Christianity as so many 
 interpretations of human life in its ideal aspects. 
 
106 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 But we are not attempting to narrate facts so much 
 as to advance an idea, and the illustrations given 
 will perhaps suffice to make our conception intelli- 
 gible. There is, however, a possible misunderstand- 
 ing which we should be careful to avoid in this 
 dangerous field of philosophic interpretation. In 
 saying that a given religion was the poetic trans- 
 formation of an experience, we must not imagine 
 that it was thought to be such — for it is evident 
 that every sincere Christian believed in the literal 
 and empirical reality of all that the Christian epic 
 contained. Nor should we imagine that philo- 
 sophic ideas, or general reflections on life, were the 
 origin of religion, and that afterward certain useful 
 myths, known to be such by their authors, were 
 mistaken for history and for literal prophecy. 
 That sometimes happens, when historians, poets, or 
 philosophers are turned by the unintelligent venera- 
 tion of posterity into religious proj)hets. Such was 
 the fate of Plato, for instance, or of the writer of 
 the " Song of Solomon " ; but no great and living 
 religion was ever founded in that way. 
 
 Had Christianity or any other religion had its 
 basis in literary or philosophical allegories, , it 
 would never have become a religion, because the 
 poetry of it would never have been interwoven 
 with the figures and events of real life. No tomb, 
 no relic, no material miracle, no personal deriva- 
 tion of authority, would have existed to serve 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 107 
 
 as the nucleus of devotion and the point of 
 junction between this world and the other. The 
 origin of Christian dogma lay in historic facts 
 and in doctrines literally meant by their authors! 
 It is one of the greatest possible illusions in these" 
 matters to fancy that the meaning which we see in 
 parables and mysteries was the meaning they had 
 in the beginning, but which later misinterpretation 
 had obscured. On the contrary — as a glance at 
 any incipient religious movement now going on 
 will show us — the authors of doctrines, however 
 obvious it may be to every one else that these 
 dSctrines have only a figurative validity, are the 
 first dupes to their own intuitions. This is no less 
 true of metaphysical theories than of spontaneous 
 superstitions : did their promulgator understand the 
 character of their justification he would give him- 
 self out for a simple poet, appeal only to cultivated 
 minds, and never turn his energies to stimulating 
 private delusions, not to speak of public fanaticisms. 
 The best philosophers seldom perceive the poetic 
 merit of their systems. 
 
 So among the ancients it was not an abstract 
 observation of Nature, with conscious allegory su- 
 pervening, that was the origin of mythology, but 
 the interpretation was spontaneous, the illusion 
 was radical, a consciousness of the god's presence 
 was the first impression produced by the phenom- 
 enon. Else, in this case too, poetry would never 
 
108 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 have become superstition; what made it supersti- 
 tion was the initial incapacity in people to dis- 
 criminate the objects of imagination from those of 
 the understanding. The fancy thus attached its 
 images, without distinguishing their ideal locus, 
 to the visible world, and men became supersti- 
 tious not because they had too much imagination, 
 but because they were not aware that they had 
 any. 
 
 In what sense, then, are we justified in saying 
 that religion expresses moral ideals ? In the sense 
 that moral significance, while not the source of 
 religions, is the criterion of their value and the 
 reason why they may deserve to endure. Far as 
 the conception of an allegory may be from the 
 minds of prophets, yet the prophecy can only take 
 root in the popular imagination if it recommends 
 itself to some human interest. There must be some 
 correspondence between the doctrine announced or 
 the hopes set forth, and the natural demands of 
 the human spirit. Otherwise, although the new 
 faith might be preached, it would not be accepted. 
 The significance of religious doctrines has there- 
 fore been the condition of their spread, their main- 
 tenance, and their development, although not the 
 condition of their origin. In Darwinian language, 
 moral significance has been a spontaneous variation 
 of superstition, and this variation has insured its 
 survival as a religion. For religion differs from 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 109 
 
 superstition not psychologically but morally, not 
 in its origin but in its worth. This worth, when 
 actually felt and appreciated, becomes of course a 
 dynamic factor and contributes like other psycho- 
 logical elements to the evolution of events; but 
 being a logical harmony, a rational beauty, this 
 worth is only appreciable by a few minds, and 
 those the least primitive and the least capable of 
 guiding popular movements. Reaso n is pow erless 
 tq^found religions, although it is alone competent 
 to^udge them. Good religions are therefore the 
 product of unconscious rationality, of imaginative 
 impulses fortunately moral. 
 
 Particularly does this appear in the early his- 
 tory of Christianity. Every shade of heresy, every 
 kind of mixture of Christian and other elements 
 was tried and found advocates ; but after a greater 
 or less success they all disappeared, leaving only 
 the Church standing. For the Church had known 
 how to combine those dogmas and practices in 
 which the imagination of the time, and to a great 
 extent of all times, might find fitting expression, 
 ^•^aginative significance was the touchstone of 
 orthodoxy; tradition itself was tested by this 
 standard. By this standard the canon of Scripture 
 was fixed, so as neither to exclude the Old Testa- 
 ment, which the pure metaphysicians would have 
 rejected, nor to accept every gospel that circulated 
 under the name of an apostle, and which might 
 
110 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 please a wonder-loving and detail-loving piety. 
 By the same criterion the ritual was composed, 
 the dogma developed, the nature of Christ defined, 
 the sacraments and discipline of the Church regu- 
 lated. The result was a comprehensive system 
 where, under the shadow of a great epic, which 
 expanded and interpreted the history of mankind 
 from the Creation to the Day of Doom, a place 
 was found for as many religious instincts and as 
 many religious traditions as possible ; while at the 
 same time the dialectic proficiency of an age that 
 inherited the discipline of Greek philosophy, intro- 
 duced into the system a great consistency and a 
 great metaphysical subtlety. Time mellowed and 
 expanded these dogmas, bringing them into rela- 
 tion with the needs of a multiform piety ; a justi- 
 fication was found both for asceticism and for a 
 virtuous naturalism, both for contemplation and 
 for action; and thus it became possible for the 
 Church to insinuate her sanctions and her spirit 
 into the motives of men, and to embody the religion 
 of many nations during many ages. 
 
 The Church's successes, however, were not all 
 legitimate; they were not everywhere due to a 
 real correspondence between her forms and the 
 ideal life of men. It was only the inhabitants of 
 the Graeco-Eoman world that were quite prepared 
 to understand her. When the sword, or the author- 
 ity of a higher worldly civilization, carried her 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 111 
 
 influence beyond the borders of the Roman Empire 
 we may observe that her authority seldom proved 
 stable. She was felt, by those peoples whose im- 
 aginative traditions and whose moral experience 
 she did not express, to be something alien and 
 artificial. The Teutonic races finally threw off 
 what they felt to be her yoke. If they recon- 
 structed their religion out of elements which she 
 had furnished, that was only because religion is 
 bound to be traditional, and they had been Chris- 
 tians for many hundred years. A wholly new 
 philosophy or poetry could not have taken im- 
 mediate root in their minds ; even the philosophy 
 which Germany has since produced, when the na- 
 tional spirit was reaching, so to speak, its majority, 
 hardly seems able to constitute an independent 
 religion, but takes shelter under some form of 
 Christianity, however much the spirit of that re- 
 ligion may be transformed. 
 
 At first, indeed, the new movement took the 
 Bible for its starting-point. So heterogeneous a 
 book, which was already habitually interpreted 
 in so many fanciful ways, was indeed an admi- 
 rable basis for the imagination to build upon. 
 The self-reliant and dreamy Teuton could spin 
 out of the Biblical chronicles and rhapsodies con- 
 victions after his own heart ; while his fixed per- 
 suasion that the Bible was the word of God, was 
 strengthened (not illegitimately) by his ability to 
 
112 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 make it express his own moral ideals. The in- 
 tensity of his religion was proportionate to the 
 degree in which he had made it the imaginative 
 rendering of his own character. 
 
 Protestantism in its vital elements was thus a 
 perfectly new, a perfectly spontaneous religion. 
 The illusion that it was a return to primitive 
 Christianity was useful for controversial purposes 
 and helped to justify the iconoclastic passions of 
 the time ; but this illusion did not touch the true 
 essence of Protestantism, nor the secret of its legiti- 
 macy and power as a religion. This was its new 
 embodiment of human ideals in imaginative forms, 
 whereby those ideals became explicit and found a 
 remarkable expression in action. These ideals 
 were quite Teutonic and looked to inner sponta- 
 neity and outward prosperity ; they were more 
 allied to those of the Hebrews than to those of 
 the early Christians, whose religion was all mira- 
 cles, asceticism, and withdrawal from the world. 
 Indeed we may say that the typical Protestant 
 was himself his own church and made the selec- 
 tion and interpretation of tradition according to 
 the demands of his personal spirit. What the 
 Fathers did for the Church in the fourth century, 
 the Keformers did for themselves in the sixteenth, 
 and have continued to do on the occasion of their 
 various appearances. 
 
 If we judge this interpretation by poetic stand- 
 
THE POETRY OP CHRISTIAN DOGMA 118 
 
 ards, we cannot resist the conclusion that the old 
 version was infinitely superior. The Protestant, 
 with his personal resources, was reduced to making 
 grotesquely and partially that translation of moral 
 life which the Fathers had made comprehensively 
 and beautifully, inspired as they were by all the 
 experience of antiquity and all the hopes of youth- 
 ful Christendom. Nevertheless, Protestantism has 
 the unmistakable character of a genuine religion, 
 a character which tradition passively accepted and 
 dogma, regarded as so much external truth, may 
 easily lose ; it is in correspondence with the actual 
 ideals and instincts of the believer; it is the self- 
 assertion of a living soul. Its meagreness and 
 eccentricity are simply evidences of its personal 
 basis. It is in full harmony with the practical 
 impulses it comes to sanction, and accordingly it 
 gains in efficiency all that it loses in dignity and 
 truth. 
 
 The principle by which the Christian system had 
 developed, although reapplied by the Protestants to 
 their own inner life, was not understood by them in 
 its historical applications. They had little sym- 
 pathy with the spiritual needs and habits of that 
 Pagan society in which Christianity had grown up. 
 That society had found in Christianity a sort of 
 last love, a rejuvenating supersensible hope, and 
 had bequeathed to the Gospel of Eedemption, for 
 its better embodiment and ornament, all its own 
 I 
 
114 POETRY AND EELIGIOK 
 
 wealth of art, philosophy, and devotion. This 
 embodiment of Christianity represented a civi- 
 lization through which the Teutonic races had 
 not passed and which they never could have pro- 
 duced; it appealed to a kind of imagination and 
 sentiment which was foreign to them. This em- 
 bodiment, accordingly, was the object of their first 
 and -fiercest attack, really because it was unsympar 
 thetic to their own temperament but ostensibly 
 because they could not find its basis in those 
 Hebraic elements of Christianity which make up 
 the greater bulk of the Bible. They did not value 
 the sublime aspiration of Christianity to be not 
 something Hebraic or Teutonic but something 
 Catholic and human ; and they blamed everything 
 which went beyond the accidental limits of their 
 own sympathies and the narrow scope of their own 
 experience. 
 
 Yet it was only by virtue of this complement 
 inherited from Paganism, or at least supplied by 
 the instincts and traditions on which Paganism 
 had reposed, that Christianity could claim to 
 approach a humane universality or to achieve an 
 imaginative adequacy. The problem was to com- 
 pose, in the form of a cosmic epic, with meta- 
 physical justifications and effectual starting-points 
 for moral action, the spiritual autobiography of 
 man. The central idea of this composition was 
 to be the idea of a Redemption. Around this were 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 115 
 
 to be gathered and moulded together elements 
 drawn from Hebrew tradition and scripture, others 
 furnished by Paganism, together with all that the 
 living imagination of the time could create. Nor 
 was it right or fitting to make a merely theoretical 
 or ethical synthesis. Doctrine must find its sen- 
 sible echo in worship, in art, in the feasts and fasts 
 of the year. Only when thus permeating life and 
 expressing itself to every sense and faculty can a 
 religion be said to have reached completion ; only 
 then has the imagination exhausted its means of 
 utterance. 
 
 The great success which Christianity achieved in 
 this immense undertaking makes it, after classic 
 antiquity, the most important phase in the history 
 of mankind.. It is clear, however, that this success 
 was not complete. That fallacy from which the 
 Pagan religion alone has been free, that Trpdrov ij/ev- 
 Sos of all fanaticism, the natural but hopeless mis- 
 understanding of imagining that poetry in order to , 
 be religion, in order to be the inspiration of life,> 
 must first deny that it is poetry and deceive us\ 
 about the facts with which we have to deal — this \ 
 misunderstanding has marred the work of the/ 
 Christian imagination and condemned it, if we 
 may trust appearances, to be transitory. For 
 by this misunderstanding Christian doctrine was 
 brought into conflict with reality, of which it 
 pretends to prejudge the character, and also into 
 
116 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 conflict with what might have been its own ele- 
 ments, with all excluded religious instincts and 
 imaginative ideals. Human life is always essen- 
 tially the same, and therefore a religion which, like 
 Christianity, seizes the essence of that life, ought 
 to be an eternal religion. But it may forfeit that 
 privilege by entangling itself with a particular 
 account of matters of fact, matters irrelevant to its 
 ideal significance, and further by intrenching Itself, 
 by virtue of that entanglement, in an inadequate 
 regimen or a too narrow imaginative development, 
 thus putting its ideal authority in jeopardy by 
 opposing it to other intuitions and practices no 
 less religious than its own. 
 
 Can Christianity escape these perils ? Can it 
 reform its claims, or can it overwhelm all op- 
 position and take the human heart once more by 
 storm ? The future alone can decide. The great- 
 est calamity, however, would be that which seems, 
 alas ! not unlikely to befall our immediate pos- 
 terity, namely, that while Christianity should be 
 discredited, no other religion, more disillusioned 
 and not less inspired, should come to take its 
 place. Until the imagination should have time to 
 recover and to reassert its legitimate and kindly 
 power, the European races would then be re- 
 duced to confessing that while they had mastered 
 the mechanical forces of Nature, both by science 
 and by the arts, they had become incapable of 
 
THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA 117 
 
 mastering or understanding themselves, and that, 
 bewildered like the beasts by the revolutions of the 
 heavens and by their own irrational passions, they 
 could find no way of uttering the ideal meaning of 
 their life. 
 
PLATONIC LOVE IN SOME ITALIAN 
 POETS 
 
 When the fruits of philosopliic reflection, con- 
 densed into some phrase, pass into the common 
 language of men, there does not and there cannot 
 accompany them any just appreciation of their 
 meaning or of the long experience and travail of 
 soul from which they have arisen. Few doctrines 
 have suffered more by popularization than the in- 
 tuitions of Plato. The public sees in Platonic 
 sayings little more than phrases employed by un- 
 practical minds to cloak the emptiness of their 
 yearnings. Finding these fragments of an obso- 
 lete speech put to bad uses, we are apt to ignore 
 and despise them, much as a modern peasant might 
 despise the fragment of a frieze or a metope which 
 he found built into his cottage wall. It is not 
 only the works of plastic art that moulder and 
 disintegrate to furnish materials for the barbarous 
 masons of a later age : the great edifices of reason 
 also crumble, their plan is lost, and their frag- 
 ments, picked where they happen to lie, become 
 118 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 119 
 
 the materials of a feebler thought. In common 
 speech we find such bits of ancient wisdom em- 
 bedded; they prove the intelligence of some an- 
 cestor of ours, but are no evidence of our own. 
 When used in ignorance ci their meaning, they 
 become misplaced flourishes, lapses into mystery 
 in the businesslike plainness of our thought. 
 ■ Yet there is one man, the archaeologist, to whom 
 nothing is so interesting as just these stones which 
 a practical builder would have rejected. He for- 
 gives the ignorance and barbarism that placed 
 them wh^re they are; he is absorbed in studying 
 their sriulptured surface and delighted if his fancy 
 can p'ass from them to the idea of the majestic 
 whole to which they once belonged. So in the 
 pr'^sence of a much-abused philosophic phrase, 
 w;e may be interested in reconstructing the ex- 
 .perience which once gave it meaning and form. 
 ^Words are at least the tombs of ideas, and the 
 most conventional formulas of poets or theolo- 
 gians are still good subjects for the archaeologist 
 of passion. He may find a treasure there; or at 
 any rate he may hope to be rewarded for his 
 labour by the ideal restoration of some once beau- 
 tiful temple of Athena. 
 
 Something of this kind is what we may now 
 attempt to do with regard to pjoe^Qr two Platonic 
 ideas, ideas which under the often ironical title 
 of Platonic love, are constantly referred to and 
 
120 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 seldom understood. These ideas may be defined 
 as the transformation of the appreciation of beau- 
 tiful things into the worship of an ideal beauty 
 and the transformation of the love of particular 
 persons into the love of God. These mystical 
 phrases may acquire a new and more human 
 meaning if we understand, at least in part, how 
 they first came to be spoken. We shall then not 
 think of them merely as the reported sayings of 
 Plato or Plotinus, Porphyry or Proclus ; we shall 
 not learn them by rote, as the unhappy student 
 learns the enigmas, which, in the histories of 
 philosophy, represent all that survives of t'^he doc- 
 trine of a Thales or a Pythagoras. We shall 
 have some notion of the ideas that once proLQpted 
 such speech. 
 
 And we shall be the better able to reconstriiict 
 those conceptions inasmuch as the reflection bj 
 which they are bred has recurred often in the' 
 world — has recurred, very likely, in our own ex- 
 perience. ■^JVe.are often Platonists without know- 
 ing it. In some form or other Platonic ideas occur 
 in all poetry of passion when it is seasoned with 
 reflection. They are particularly characteristic of 
 some Italian poets, scattered from the thirteenth 
 to the sixteenth centuries. These poets had souls 
 naturally Platonic; even when they had heard 
 something of Plato they borrowed nothing from 
 him. They repeated his phrases, when they did 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 121 
 
 SO, merely to throw the authority of an ancient 
 philosopher over the spontaneous suggestions of 
 their own minds. Their Platonism was all their 
 own : it was Christian, mediaeval, and chivalrous, 
 both in origin and expression. But it was all the 
 more genuine for being a reincarnation rather 
 than an imitation of the old wisdom. 
 
 Nothing, for example, could be a better object- 
 lesson in Platonism than the well-known senti- 
 mental history of Dante. There is no essential 
 importance in the question whether Dante could 
 have read anything of Plato or come indirectly 
 under his influence. The Platonism of Dante, is, 
 in any case, quite his own. It is the expression of 
 his inner experience moulded by the chivalry and 
 theology of his time. He tells us the story him- 
 self very quaintly in the "Vita Nuova." 
 
 At the age of nine he saw, at a wedding-feast in 
 Florence, Beatrice, then a child of seven, who be- 
 came, forthwith, the mistress of his thoughts. This 
 precocious passion ruled his imagination for life, so 
 that, when he brings to an end the account of the 
 emotions she aroused in him by her life and death, 
 he tells us that he determined to speak no more 
 about her until he should be able to do so more 
 worthily, and to say of her what had never been said 
 of any woman. In the "Divine Comedy," accord- 
 ingly,- where he fulfils this promise, she appears 
 transfigured into a heavenly protectress and guide, 
 
/ 
 
 122 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 whose gentle womanhood fades into an imper- 
 sonation of theological wisdom. (But this life- 
 long devotion of Dante to Beatrice was something 
 purely mental and poetical; he never ventured to 
 woo ; he never once descended or sought to descend 
 from the sphere of silent and distant adoration; 
 his tenderness remained always tearful and dreamy, 
 like that of a supersensitive child."^ 
 
 Yet, while his love of Beatrice was thus constant 
 and religious, it was by no means exclusive. Dante 
 took a wife as Beatrice herself had taken a husband ; 
 the temptations of youth, as well as the affection of 
 married life, seem to have existed beneath this ideal 
 love, not unrebuked by it, indeed, but certainly not 
 disturbing it. Should we be surprised at this 
 species of infidelity ? Should we regard it as proof 
 of the artificiality and hollowness of that so tran- 
 scendental passion, and smile, as people have done 
 in the case of Plato himseK, at the thin disguise of 
 philosophy that covers the most vulgar frailties of 
 human nature? Or, should we say, with others, 
 that Beatrice is a merely allegorical figure, and the 
 love she is said to inspire nothing but a symbol for 
 attachment to wisdom and virtue ? These are old 
 questions, and insoluble by any positive method, 
 since they cannot be answered by the facts but only 
 by our interpretation of them. Our solution can 
 have little historical value, but it will serve to test 
 our understanding of the metaphysics of feeling. 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 123 
 
 To guide us in this delicate business we may 
 appeal to a friend of Dante, his fellow-poet Guido 
 Cavalcanti, who will furnish us with another ex- 
 ample of this same sort of idealization, and this 
 same sort of inconstancy, expressed in a manner 
 that will repay analysis. Guido Cavalcanti had a 
 Beatrice of his own — something of the kind was 
 then expected of every gentle knight and poet — 
 and Guido's Beatrice was called Giovanna. Dante 
 seems to acknowledge the parity of his friend's 
 passion with his own by coupling the names of the 
 two ladies, Monna Vanna and Monna Bice, in one 
 or two of the sonnets he addresses to Guido. Now 
 it came to pass that Guido, in the fervour of his 
 devotion, at once chivalrous and religious, bethought 
 him of making a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint 
 James the Apostle, at Compostela in Spain. Upon 
 this journey — a journey beguiled, no doubt, by 
 thoughts of the beautiful Giovanna he had left in 
 Florence — he halted in the city of Toulouse. But 
 at Toulouse, as chance would have it, there lived 
 a lovely lady by the name of Mandetta, with whom 
 it was impossible for the chivalrous pilgrim not to 
 fall in love ; for chivalry is nothing but a fine em- 
 blazoning of the original manly impulse to fighy 
 every man and love every woman. Now in an 
 interesting sonnet Guido describes the conflict of 
 these two affections, or perhaps we should rather 
 say, their union. 
 
124 POETEY AND RELIGION 
 
 ** There is a lady in Toulouse so fair, 
 
 So young, so gentle, and so chastely gay, 
 She doth a true and living likeness bear 
 In her sweet eyes to Love, whom I obey." 
 
 The word I have, to avoid confusion, here ren- 
 dered by " Love " is in the original " la Donna mia," 
 " my Lady '' ; so that we have onr poet falling in 
 love with Mandetta on account of her striking re- 
 semblance to Giovanna. Is this inconstancy or 
 only a more delicate and indirect homage? We 
 shall see ; for Guido goes on to represent his soul, 
 according to his custom, as a being that dwells and 
 moves about in the chambers of his heart; and 
 speaking still of Mandetta, the lady of Toulouse, 
 he continues : — 
 
 •' Within my heart my soul, when she appeared, 
 Was filled with longing and was fain to flee 
 
 Out of my heart to her, yet was afeared 
 To tell the lady who my Love might be. 
 
 She looked upon me with her quiet eyes, 
 And under their sweet ray my bosom burned, 
 
 Cheered by Love's image, that within them lies.'* 
 
 So far we have still the familiar visible in the 
 new and making its power; Mandetta is still 
 nothing but a stimulus to reawaken the memory 
 of Giovanna. But before the end there is trouble. 
 The sting of the present attraction is felt in contrast 
 to the eternal ideal. There is a necessity of sac- 
 rifice, and he cries^ as the lady turns away her 
 eyes : — 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 125 
 
 *' Alas ! they shot an arrow as she turned, 
 And with a death-wound from the piercing dart 
 My soul came sighing back into my heart." 
 
 Perhaps this merely means that the lady was 
 disdainful ; had she been otherwise the poet might 
 never have written sonnets about her, and surely 
 not sonnets in which her charms were reduced to 
 a Platonic reminiscence of a fairer ideal. But it is 
 this turning away of the face of love, this ephemeral 
 quality of its embodiments, that usually stimulates 
 the imagination to the construction of a super- 
 sensible ideal in which all those evaporated im- 
 pulses may meet again and rest in an adequate and 
 permanent object. So that while Guido's " death- 
 wound" was perhaps in reality nothing but the 
 rebuff offered him by a prospective mistress, yet 
 the sting of it, in a mind of Platonic habit, served 
 at once to enforce the distinction between the 
 ideal beauty, so full of sweetness and heavenly 
 charm, which had tempted the soul out of his 
 heart on its brief adventure, and the particular 
 and real object against which the soul was dashed, 
 and from which it returned bruised and troubled to 
 its inward solitude. 
 
 So the meditative Guido represents his experi- 
 ence: a new planet swam into his ken radiant 
 with every grace and virtue; yet all the magic 
 of that lady lay in her resemblance to the mysteri- 
 ous Giovanna, the double of Beatrice, the ideal 
 
'j 
 
 126 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 of the poet's imagination. The soul, at first, went 
 out eagerly to the new love as to an image and 
 embodiment of the old, but was afraid, and justly, 
 to mention the ideal in the presence of the reality. 
 There is always danger in doing that; it breaks 
 the spell and reduces us again to the old and 
 patient loyalty to the unseen. The present thing 
 being so like the ideal we unhesitatingly pursue it : 
 but we are quickly disappointed, and the soul re- 
 turns sighing and mortally wounded, as the new 
 object of passion fades away. 
 
 We may now understand somewhat better that 
 strange combination of loyalty and disloyalty which 
 we find in Dante. While the object of love is any 
 particular thing, it excludes all others ; but it in- 
 cludes all others as soon as it becomes a general 
 ideal. All beauties attract by suggesting the ideal 
 and then fail to satisfy by not fulfilling it. While 
 Giovanna remained a woman, Guido, as his after 
 life plainly showed, had no difficulty in forgetting 
 her and in loving many others with a frank heart ; 
 but when Giovanna had become a name for the ab- 
 solute ideal, that sovereign mistress could never be 
 forgotten, and the thought of her subordinated every 
 particular attachment and called the soul away from 
 it. Compared with the ideal, every human perfec- 
 tion becomes a shadow and a deceit ; every mortal 
 passion leaves, as Keats has told us, 
 
 " A heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, 
 A burning forehead and a parching tongue." 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 127 
 
 Such is the nature of idealization. Like the 
 Venus 'of Apelles, in which all known beauties 
 were combined, the ideal is the union of all we 
 prize in all creatures ; and the mind that has once 
 felt the irresistible compulsion to create this ideal, 
 and to believe in it has become incapable of unre- 
 served love of anything else. The absolute is a 
 jealous god ; it is a consuming fire that blasts the 
 affections upon which it feeds. For this reason 
 the soul of Guido, in his sonnet, is mortally 
 wounded by the shaft of that beauty which has 
 awakened a vehement longing for perfection with- 
 out being able to satisfy it. All things become to 
 the worshipper of the ideal so many signs and 
 symbols of what he seeks; like the votary who, 
 kneeling now before one image and now before 
 another, lets his incense float by all with a certain 
 abstracted impartiality, because his aspiration 
 mounts through them equally to the invisible God 
 they alike represent. 
 
 Another aspect of the same process is well de- 
 scribed by Shakespeare, in whom Italian influences 
 count for much, when he says to the person he has 
 chosen as the object of his idealization : — 
 
 " Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts 
 
 Which I, by lacking, have supposed dead, 
 
 And there reigns love and all love's loving parts 
 And all those friends which I thought buried. 
 
 How many a holy and obsequious tear 
 Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye 
 
128 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 As interest for the dead, which now appear 
 But things removed, which hidden in thee lie. 
 
 Thou art the grave where buried love doth live 
 Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, 
 
 Who all their parts of me to thee did give : 
 That due of many now is thine alone. 
 
 Their images I loved I view in thee, 
 
 And thou, all they, hast all the all of me." 
 
 We need not, then, waste erudition in trying to 
 prove whether Dante's Beatrice or Guido's Gio- 
 vanna or any one else who has been the subject 
 of the greater poetry of love, was a symbol or a 
 reality. To poets and philosophers real things 
 are themselves symbols. The child of seven 
 whom Dante saw at the Florentine feast was, if 
 you will, a reality. As such she is profoundly 
 unimportant. To say that Dante loved her then 
 and ever after is another way of saying that she 
 was a symbol to him. That is the way with child- 
 ish loves. Neither the conscious spell of the 
 senses nor the affinities of taste and character 
 can then be powerful, but the sense of loneliness 
 and the vague need of loving may easily conspire 
 with the innocence of the eyes to fix upon a 
 single image and to make it the imaginary goal 
 of all those instincts which as yet do not know 
 themselves. 
 
 When with time these instincts become explicit 
 and select their respective objects, if the inmost 
 heart still remains unsatisfied, as it must in all 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 129 
 
 profound or imaginative natures, the name and 
 memory of that vague early love may well sub- 
 sist as a symbol for the perfect good yet unat- 
 tained. It is intelligible that as time goes on 
 that image, grown thus consciously symbolic, 
 should become interchangeable with the abstract 
 method of pursuing perfection — that Beatrice, 
 that is, should become the same as sacred the- 
 ology. Having recognized that she was to his 
 childish fancy what the ideals of religion were to 
 his mature imagination, Dante intentionally fused 
 the two, as every poet intentionally fuses the 
 general and the particular, the universal and the 
 personal. Beatrice thenceforth appeared, as Plato 
 wished that our loves should, as a manifestation 
 of absolute beauty and as an avenue of divine 
 grace. Dante merely added his Christian humil- 
 ity and tenderness to the insight of the Pagan 
 philosopher. 
 
 / The tendency to impersonality, we see, is essen- 
 tial to the ideal. It tSDuld not fulfil its functions 
 if it retained too many of the traits of any in- 
 dividual. A blind love, an unreasoning passion, 
 is therefore inconsistent with the Platonic spirit, 
 which is favourable rather to abstraction from per- 
 sons and to q/lTrrvpaj^f^^ f)f ^nalif^PQ Thcsc may, 
 of course, b^'mund in many individuals. Too 
 much subjection to another personality makes the 
 expression of our own impossible, and the ideal 
 
130 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 is nothing but a projection of the demands of 
 our imagination. If the imagination is over- 
 powered by too strong a fascination, by the abso- 
 lute dominion of an alien influence, we form no 
 ideal at all. We must master a passion before 
 we can see its meaning. 
 
 For this reason, among others, we find so little 
 Platonism in that poet in whom we might have 
 expected to find most — I mean in Petrarch. Pe- 
 trarch is musical, ingenious, learned, and passion- 
 ate, but he is weak. His art is greater than his 
 thought. In the quality of his mind there is 
 nothing truly distinguished. The discipline of 
 his long and hopeless love brings him little wis- 
 dom, little consolation. He is lachrymose and 
 sentimental at the end as at the beginning, and 
 his best dream of heaven, expressed, it is true, in 
 entrancing verse, is only to hold his lady's hand 
 and hear her voice. Sometimes, indeed, he re- 
 peats what he must have read and heard so often, 
 and gives us his version of Plato in half a son- 
 net. Thus, for instance, speaking of his love for 
 Laura, he says in one place : — 
 
 Hence comes the understanding of love's scope 
 That seeking her to perfect good aspires, 
 Accounting little what all flesh desires ; 
 And hence the spirit's happy pinions ope 
 In flight impetuous to the heaven's choirs, 
 Wherefore I walk already proud in hope." 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 131 
 
 If we are looking, however, for more direct 
 expressions of the idealism of feeling, of love, 
 and the sense of beauty passing into religion, we 
 shall do well to turn to another Italian, not so 
 great a poet as Petrarch by any means, but a far 
 greater man — to Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo 
 justly regarded himself as essentially a sculptor, 
 and said even of painting that it was not his art ; 
 his verses are therefore both laboured and rough. 
 Yet they have been too much neglected, for they 
 breathe the same pathos of .strength, the same 
 agony in hope, as his Titanic designs. 
 
 Like every Italian of culture in those days, 
 Michael Angelo was in the habit of addressing 
 little pieces to his friends, and of casting his 
 thoughts or his prayers into the mould of a son- 
 net or a madrigal. Verse has a greater natural- 
 ness and a wider range among the Latin peoples 
 than among the English; poetry and prose are 
 less differentiated. In French, Italian, and Span- 
 ish, as in Latin itself, elegance and neatness of 
 expression sufiB.ce for verse. The reader passes 
 without any sense of incongruity or anti-climax 
 from passion to reflection, from sentiment to satire, 
 from flights of fancy to homely details : the whole 
 has a certain human sincerity and intelligibility 
 which weld it together. As the Latin languages 
 are not composed of two diverse elements, as 
 English is of Latin and German, so the Latin 
 
132 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 mind does not have two spheres of sentiment, one 
 vulgar and the other sublime. All changes are 
 variations on a single key, which is the key of 
 intelligence. We must not be surprised, therefore, 
 to find now a message to a friend, now an artistic 
 maxim, now a bit of dialectic, and now a confes- 
 sion of sin, taking the form of verse and filling out 
 the fourteen lines of a sonnet. On the contrary, 
 we must look to these familiar compositions for 
 the most genuine evidence of a man's daily 
 thoughts. 
 
 We find in Michael Angelo's poems a few recur- 
 ring ideas, or rather the varied expression of a 
 single half aesthetic, half religious creed. The 
 soul, he tells us in effect, is by nature made for 
 God and for the enjoyment of divine beauty. All 
 true beauty leads to the idea of perfection; the 
 effort toward perfection is the burden of all art, 
 which labours, therefore, with a superhuman and 
 insoluble problem. CAllJLax^e, also, that does not lead 
 to the love of God and merge into that love, is a 
 long and hopeless tormenT^) while the light of love 
 is already the light of^Ti^ven, the fire of love is 
 already the fire of hell. These are the thoughts 
 that perpetually recur, varied now with a pathetic 
 reference to the poet's weariness and old age, now 
 with an almost despairing appeal for divine mercy, 
 often with a powerful and rugged description of 
 the pangs of love, and with a pious acceptance of 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 133 
 
 its discipline. The whole is intense, exalted, and 
 tragic, haunted by something of that profound 
 terror, of that magnificent strength, which we 
 admire in the figures of the Sixtine Chapel, those 
 noble agonies of beings greater than any we find 
 in this world. 
 
 What, we may ask, is all this tragedy about? 
 What great sorrow, what great love, had Michael 
 Angelo or his giants that they writhe so supernat- 
 urally ? As those decorative youths are sprinkled 
 over the Sixtine vault, filled, we know not why, 
 with we know not what emotion, so these scraps 
 of verse, these sibylline leaves of Michael Angelo's, 
 give us no reason for their passion. They tell no 
 story ; there seems to have been no story to tell. 
 There is something impersonal and elusive about 
 the subject and occasion of these poems. Attempts 
 have been made to attribute them to discreditable 
 passions, as also to a sentimental love for Vittoria 
 Colonna. But the friendship with Vittoria Colonna 
 was an incident of Michael Angelo's mature years ; 
 some of the sonnets and madrigals are addressed 
 to her, but we cannot attribute to her influence 
 the passion and sorrow that seem to permeate 
 them all. 
 
 Perhaps there is less mystery in this than the 
 curious would have us see in it. Perhaps the love 
 and beauty, however base their primal incarnation, 
 are really, as they think themselves, aspirations 
 
184 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 toward the Most High. In the long studies and 
 weary journeys of the artist, in his mighty inspira- 
 tion, in his intense love of the structural beauty of 
 the human body, in his vicissitudes of fortune and 
 his artistic disappointments, in his exalted piety, 
 we may see quite enough explanation for the burden 
 of his soul. It is not necessary to find vulgar 
 causes for the extraordinary feelings of an extraor- 
 dinary man. It suffices that life wore this aspect 
 to him; that the great demands of his spirit so 
 expressed themselves in the presence of his world. 
 Here is a madrigal in which the Platonic theory 
 of beauty is clearly stated : — 
 
 " For faithful guide unto my labouring heart 
 Beauty was given me at birth, 
 To be my glass and lamp in either art. 
 Who thinketh otherwise inisknows her worth, 
 For highest beauty only gives me light 
 To carve and paint aright. 
 Rash is the thought and vain 
 That maketh beauty from the senses grow. 
 She lifts to heaven hearts that truly know, 
 But eyes grown dim with pain 
 From mortal to immortal cannot go 
 Nor without grace of God look up again." 
 
 And here is a sonnet, called by Mr. Symonds 
 " the heavenly birth of love and beauty." I bor- 
 row in part from his translation : — 
 
 '* My love's life comes not from this heart of mine. 
 The love wherewith I love thee hath no heart, 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 136 
 
 Turned thither whither no fell thoughts incline 
 And erring human passion leaves no smart. 
 yLoye, from God's bosom when our souls did part, 
 Made me pure eye to see, thee light to shine, 
 And I must needs, half mortal though thou art, 
 In spite of sorrow know thee all divine. 
 As heat in fire, so must eternity 
 In beauty dwell ;/ through thee my soul's endeavour 
 Mounts to the pattern and the source of thee ;. 
 And having found all heaven in thine eyes, 
 Beneath thy brows my burning spirit flies 
 There where I loved thee first to dwell for ever." 
 
 Sometliing of this kind, may also be found in 
 the verses of Lorenzo de' Medici, who, like Michael 
 Angelo, was a poet only incidentally, and even 
 thought it necessary to apologize in a preface for 
 having written about love. Many of his composi- 
 tions are, indeed, trival enough, but his pipings 
 will not seem vain to the severest philosopher 
 when he finds them leading to strains like the 
 following, where the thought rises to the purest 
 sphere of tragedy and of religion : — 
 
 " As a lamp, burning through the waning night, 
 When the oil begins to fail that fed its fire 
 Flares up, and in its dying waxes bright 
 And mounts and spreads, the better to expire ; 
 So in this pilgrimage and earthly flight 
 The ancient hope is spent that fed desire. 
 And if there burn within a greater light 
 ' Tis that the vigil's end approacheth nigher. 
 Hence thy last insult. Fortune, cannot move, 
 Nor death's inverted torches give alarm ; 
 
136 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 I see the end of wrath and bitter moan. 
 My fair Medusa into sculptured stone 
 Turns me no more, my Siren cannot charm. 
 Heaven draws me up to its supernal love." 
 
 From sucli spontaneous meditation Lorenzo could 
 even pass to verses ofl&cially religious ; but in them 
 too, beneath the threadbare metaphors of the pious 
 muse and her mystical paradoxes, we may still 
 feel the austerity and firmness of reason. The 
 following stanzas, for instance, taken from his 
 " Laudi Spirituali," assume a sublime meaning if we 
 remember that the essence to which they are ad- 
 dressed, before being a celestial Monarch into 
 whose visible presence any accident might usher 
 us, was a general idea of what is good and an in- 
 transitive rational energy, indistinguishable from 
 the truth of things. 
 
 " let this wretched life within me die 
 
 That I may live in thee, my life indeed ; 
 In thee alone, where dwells eternity, 
 
 While hungry multitudes death's hunger feed. 
 I list within, and hark I Death's stealthy tread I 
 I look to thee, and nothing then is dead. 
 
 " Then eyes may see a light invisible 
 
 And ears may hear a voice without a sound, — 
 
 A voice and light not harsh, but tempered well, 
 Which the mind wakens when the sense is drowned, 
 
 Till, wrapped within herself, the soul have flown 
 
 To that last good which is her inmost own. 
 
 *' When, sweet and beauteous Master, on that day. 
 Reviewing all my loves with aching heart, 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 137 
 
 I take from each its bitter self away, 
 The remnant shall be thou, their better part. 
 This perfect sweetness be his single store 
 Who seeks the good ; this f aileth nevermore. 
 
 " A thirst unquenchable is not beguiled 
 
 By draught on draught of any running river 
 Whose fiery waters feed our pangs for ever, 
 
 But by a living fountain undetiled. 
 O sacred well, I seek thee and were fain 
 To drink ; so should I never thirst again." 
 
 Having before us these characteristic expressions 
 of Platonic feeling, as it arose again in a Christian 
 age, divorced from the accidental setting which 
 Greek manners had given it, we may be better able 
 to understand its essence. It is nothing else thanf 
 the application to passion of that pursuit of somei 
 thing permanent in a world of change, of something! 
 absolute in a world of relativity, which was thel 
 essence of the Platonic philosophy. If we may 
 give rein to the imagination in a matter which 
 without imagination could not be understood at all, 
 we may fancy Plato trying to comprehend the 
 power which beauty exerted over his senses by 
 applying to the objects of love that profound met- 
 aphysical distinction which he had learned to make 
 in his dialectical studies — the distinction between 
 the appearance to sense and the reality envisaged 
 by the intellect, between the phenomenon and the 
 ideal. The whole natural world had come to seem 
 to him like a world of dreams. In dreams images 
 
138 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 succeed one another without other meaning than 
 that which they derive from our strange power of 
 recognition — a power which enables us somehow, 
 among the most incongruous transformations and 
 surroundings, to find again the objects of our wak- 
 ing life, and to name those absurd and unmannerly 
 visions by the name of father or mother or by any 
 other familiar name. As these resemblances to 
 real things make up all the truth of our dream, and 
 these recognitions all its meaning, so Plato thought 
 that all the truth and meaning of earthly things 
 was the reference they contained to a heavenly , 
 original. This heavenly original we remember andx 
 recognize even among the distortions, disappear- 
 ances, and multiplications of its earthly copies. 
 
 This thought is easily applicable to the affec- 
 tions ; indeed, it is not impossible that it was the 
 natural transcendence of any deep glance into 
 beauty, and the lessons in disillusion and idealism 
 given by that natural metaphysician we call love, 
 that first gave Plato the key to his general system. 
 There is, at any rate, no sphere in which the super- 
 sensible is approached with so warm a feeling of 
 its reality, in which the phenomenon is so trans- 
 parent and so indifferent a symbol of something 
 perfect and divine beyond. In love and beauty, if 
 anywhere, even the common man thinks he has 
 visitations from a better world, approaches to a 
 lost happiness ; a happiness never tasted by us in 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 139 
 
 this world, and yet so natural, so expected, that 
 we look for it at every turn of a corner, in every 
 new face ; we look for it with so much confidence, 
 with so much depth of expectation, that we never 
 quite overcome our disappointment that it is not 
 found. 
 
 And it is not found, — no, never, — in spite of 
 what we may think when we are first in love. 
 Plato knew this well from his experience. He 
 had had successful loves, or what the world calls 
 such, but he could not fancy that these successes 
 were more than provocations, more than hints of 
 what the true good is. To have mistaken them for 
 real happiness would have been to continue to 
 dream. It would have shown as little compre- 
 hension of the hearths experience as the idiot shows 
 of the experience of the senses when he is unable 
 to put together impressions of his eyes and hands 
 and to say, "Here is a table; here is a stool." It 
 is by a parallel use of the understanding that we 
 put together the impressions of the heart and the 
 imagination and are able to say, "Here is abso- 
 lute beauty : here is God." The impressions them- 
 selves have no permanence, no intelligible essence. 
 As Plato said, they are never anything fixed but 
 are always either becoming or ceasing to be what 
 we think them. There must be, he tells us, an 
 eternal and clearly definable object of which the 
 visible appearances to us are the manifold sem- 
 
140 POETRY AND RELIGION d 
 
 blance; now by^*ane trait now by another *the 
 phantom before us lights up that vague and haunt- 
 ing idea, and makes us utter its name with a mo- 
 mentary sense of certitude and attainment, y 
 
 Just so the individual beauties that charm^our" 
 attention and enchain the soul have only a transi- 
 tive existence; they are mom«!rt;ary visions, irre- 
 coverable moods. Their object i^nstable; we never, 
 can say what it is, it changes so quickly befor§ our 
 eyes. What is it that a mother loves in her child ? 
 Perhaps the babe nqt..yet born, or the babe that 
 grew long ago by her suffering and unrecognized' 
 care ; perhaps the man to be or the youth thalf has I 
 been. What does a man love in a woman ? The \ 
 girl that is yet, ^rhaps, to be his, or the wife >. 
 that once chose to give him her whole existeftCe. . 
 Where, among all these glimpses, is the true objedl^ ^ 
 of love? It flies before us, it tempts us on, only 
 to escape and turn to mock us from a new quarter. 
 And yet nothing can concern us more or be more 
 real to us than this mysterious good, since the 
 pursuit of it gives our lives whatever they have 
 of true earnestness and meaning, and the approach 
 to it whatever they have of joy. 
 
 So far is this ideal, Plato would say, from being 
 an illusion, that it is the source of the world, the 
 power that keeps us in existence. But for it, we 
 should be dead. A profound indifference, an ini- 
 tial torpor, would have kept us from ever opening 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 141 
 
 our eyes, and we should have no world of business 
 or pleasure, politics or science, to think about at 
 all. We, and the whole universe, exist only by 
 the passionate attempt to return to our perfection, 
 by the radical need of losing ourselves again in 
 God. That ineffable good is our natural posses- 
 sion ; all we honour in this life is but the partial 
 recovery of our birthright ; every delightful thing 
 is like a rift in the clouds through which we catch 
 a glimpse of our native heaven. If that heaven 
 seems so far away and the idea of it so dim and 
 unreal, it is because we are so far from perfect, so 
 much immersed in what is alien and destructive to 
 the soul. 
 
 Thus the history of our loves is the record of 
 our divine conversations, of our intercourse with 
 heaven. It matters very little whether this his- 
 tory seems to us tragic or not. In one sense, all 
 mortal loves are tragic because never is the crea- 
 ture we think we possess the true and final object 
 of our love ; this love must ultimately pass beyond 
 that particular apparition, which is itself continu- 
 ally passing away and shifting all its lines and 
 colours. As Heraclitus could never bathe twice in 
 the same river, because its water had flowed away, 
 so Plato could never look twice at the same face, 
 for it had become another. But on the other hand 
 the most unsuccessful passion cannot be a vain 
 thing. More, perhaps, than if it had found an 
 
142 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 apparent satisfaction, it will reveal to us an ob- 
 ject of infinite worth, and the flight of the soul, 
 detached by it from the illusions of common life, 
 will be more straight and steady toward the ulti- 
 mate good. 
 
 Such, if we are not mistaken, is the lesson of 
 Plato's experience and also of that of the Italian 
 poets whom we have quoted. Is this experience 
 something normal? Is it the rational outcome of 
 our own lives ? That is a question which each 
 man must answer for himself. Our immediate 
 object will have been attained if we have made 
 more intelligible a tendency which is certainly 
 very common among men, and not among the men 
 least worthy of honour. It is the tendency to 
 make our experience of love rational, as scientific 
 thinking is a tendency to make rational our experi- 
 ence of the outer world. The theories of natural 
 science are creations of human reason ; they change 
 with the growth of reason, and express the intel- 
 lectual impulses of each nation and age. Theories 
 about the highest good do the same; only being 
 less applicable in practice, less controllable by ex- 
 periment, they seldom attain the same distinctness 
 and articulation. But there is nothing authorita- 
 tive in those constructions, of the intellect, nothing 
 coercive except in so far as our own experience and 
 reflection force us to accept them. Natural science 
 is persuasive because it embodies the momentum 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 143 
 
 of common sense and of the practical arts; it 
 carries on their spontaneous processes by more 
 refined but essentially similar methods. Moral 
 science is persuasive under the same conditions, 
 but these conditions are not so generally found 
 in the minds of men. Their conscience is often 
 superstitious and perfunctory; their imagination 
 is usually either disordered or dull. There is little 
 momentum in their lives which the moralist can 
 rely upon to carry them onward toward rational 
 ideals. Deprived of this support his theories fall 
 to the ground; they must seem, to every man 
 whose nature cannot elicit them from his own ex- 
 perience, empty verbiage and irrelevant dreams. 
 
 Nothing in the world of fact obliges us to agree 
 with Michael Angelo when he says that eternity 
 can no more be separated from beauty than heat 
 from fire. Beauty is a thing we experience, a 
 value we feel ; but eternity is something problem- 
 atical. It might well happen that beauty should 
 exist for a while in our contemplation and that 
 eternity should have nothing to do with it or with 
 us. It might well happen that our affections, be- 
 ing the natural expression of our instincts in the 
 family and in the state, should bind us for a while 
 to the beings with whom life has associated us 
 — a father, a lover, a child — and that these affec- 
 tions should gradually fade with the decay of our 
 vitality, declining in the evening of life, and pass- 
 
144 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ing away when we surrenderfwr breath, without 
 leading us to any single and sitpteme good, to any 
 eternal love. If, there!£ore, the thoughts and con- 
 solations we have been rehearsing have sounded 
 to us extravagant or unnatural, we cannot justify 
 them by attempting to prove the actual existence 
 of their objects, by producing the absolute beauty 
 or by showing where and how we may come face to 
 face with God. We may well feel that beauty and 
 love are clear and good enough without any such 
 additional embodiments. We may take the world 
 as it is, without feigning another, and study actual 
 experience without postulating any that is hypo- 
 thetical. We can Welcome beauty for the pleasure 
 it affords and love for the happiness it brings, 
 without asking that? these things should receive 
 supernatural extensions?) 
 
 But we should have studied Plato and his 
 kindred poets to little purpose if we thought that 
 by admitting all this we were rejecting more than 
 the mythical element that was sometimes mixed 
 with their ideal philosophy. Its essence is not 
 touched by any acknowledgment of what seems 
 true or probable in the realm of actual existence. 
 Nothing is more characteristic of the Platonic 
 mind than a complete indifference to tRe continu- 
 ance of experience and an exclusive interest in its 
 comprehension. If we wish to understand this 
 classic attitude of reason, all we need do is to let 
 
PLATONIC LOVE 145 
 
 reason herself instruct us. We do not need more 
 data, but more mind. If we take the sights and 
 the loves that our mortal limitations have allowed 
 of, and surrender ourselves unreservedly to their 
 natural eloquence ; if we say to the spirit that stirs 
 within them, " Be thou me, impetuous one " ; if we 
 become, as Michael Angelo says he was, all eyes 
 to see or all heart to feel, then the force of our 
 spiritual vitality, the momentum of our imagina- 
 tion, will carry us beyond ourselves, beyond an 
 interest in our personal existence or eventual emo- 
 tions, into the presence of a divine beauty and 
 an eternal truth — things impossible to realize in 
 experience, although necessarily envisaged by 
 thought. 
 
 As the senses that perceive, in the act of per- 
 ceiving assert an absolute reality in their object, 
 as the mind that looks before and after believes 
 in the existence of a past and a future which' 
 cannot now be experienced, so the imagination 
 and the heart behold, when they are left free 
 to expand and express themselves, an absolute 
 beauty and a perfect love. Intense contemplation 
 disentangles the ideal from the idol of sense, and a 
 purified will rests in it as in the true object of 
 worship. These are the oracles of reason, the 
 prophecies of those profounder spirits who in the 
 world of Nature are obedient unto death because 
 they belong intrinsically to a world where death is 
 
146 POETRY AND flELIGION 
 
 impossible, and who can rise continually, by ab- 
 straction from personal sensibility, into identity 
 with the eternal objects of rational life. 
 
 Such a religion must elude popular app^ehe^sion 
 until it is translated into myths and cosmological 
 dogmas. It is easier for men to fill out the life of 
 the spirit by supplementing the facts of experience 
 by other facts for which there is no evidence than 
 it is for them to master the given facts and turn 
 them to spiritual uses. Many can fight for a 
 doubtful fact when they cannot perform a difficult 
 idealization. They trust, as all men must, to what 
 they can see ; they believe in thijigs as their facul- 
 ties represent things to them. By the same right, 
 however, the rationalizer of experience believes in 
 his visions ; he rests, like the meanest of us, in the 
 present object of his thought. So long as we live 
 at all we must trust in something, at least in the 
 coherence and pernianence of the visible world and 
 in the value of the objects of our own desires. And 
 if we live nobly, we are under the same necessity of 
 believing in noble things. However unreal, there- 
 fore, these Platonic intuitions may seem to those of 
 us whose interests lie in other quarters, we may 
 rest assured that these very thoughts would domi- 
 nate our minds and these eternal companionships 
 would cheer our desolation, if we had wrestled as 
 manfully with the same passions and passed through 
 the transmuting fire of as great a love. 
 
VI 
 
 THE ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKE- 
 SPEARE 
 
 We are accustomed to think of the universality 
 of Shakespeare as not the least of his glories. No 
 other poet has given so many-sided an expression 
 to human nature, or rendered so many passions and 
 moods with such an appropriate variety of style, 
 sentiment, and accent. If, therefore, we were asked 
 to select one monument of human civilization that 
 should survive to some future age, or be trans- 
 ported to 9,nother planet to bear witness to the 
 inhabitants there of what we have been upon earth, 
 we should probably choose the works of Shake- 
 speare. In them we recognize the truest portrait 
 and best memorial of man. Yet the archaeologists 
 of that future age, or the cosmographers of that 
 other part of the heavens, after conscientious study 
 of our Shakespearian autobiography, would miscon- 
 ceive our life in one important respect. They 
 would hardly understand that man had had a 
 religion. 
 
 There are, indeed, numerous exclamations and in- 
 147 
 
148 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ( 
 
 vocations in Shakespeare which we, who have other 
 means of information, know to be evidences of cur- 
 rent religious ideas. Shakespeare adopts these, as 
 he adopts the rest of his vocabulary, from the soci- 
 ety about him. But he seldom or never gives them 
 their original value. When lago says " 's^Zood," a 
 commentator might add explanations which should 
 involve the whole philosophy of Christian devo- 
 tion ; but this Christian sentiment is not in lago's 
 mind, nor in Shakespeare's, any more than the vir- 
 tues of Heracles and his twelve labours are in the 
 mind of every slave and pander that cries "/iercwZe" 
 in the pages of Plautus and Terence. Oaths are 
 the fossils of piety. The geologist recognizes in 
 them the relics of a once active devotion, but they 
 are now only counters and pebbles tossed about in 
 the unconscious play of expression. The lighter 
 and more constant their use, the less their mean- 
 ing. 
 
 Only one degree more inward than this survival 
 of a religious vocabulary in profane speech is the 
 reference we often find in Shakespeare to religious 
 institutions and traditions. There are monks, 
 bishops, and cardinals; there is even mention of 
 saints, although none is ever presented to us in 
 person. The clergy, if they have any wisdom, 
 have an earthly one. Friar Lawrence culls his 
 herbs like a more benevolent Medea ; and Cardinal 
 Wolgey flings away ambition with a profoundly 
 
\ RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 149 
 
 Pagan despair ; his robe and his integrity to heaven 
 are cold comfort to him. Juliet goes to shrift to 
 ' arrange her love affairs, and Ophelia should go to 
 a nunnery to forget hers. Even the chastity of 
 Isabella has little in it that would have been out 
 of place in Iphigenia. The metaphysical Hamlet 
 himself sees a " true ghost," but so far reverts to 
 the positivism that underlies Shakespeare's think- 
 ing as to speak soon after of that "undiscovered 
 country from whose bourn no traveller returns." 
 
 There are only two or three short passages in the 
 plays, and one sonnet, in which true religious feel- 
 ing seems to break forth. The most beautiful of 
 these passages is that in " Kichard II," which com- 
 memorates the death of Mowbray, Duke of Nor- 
 folk : — 
 
 "Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought 
 For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, 
 Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross 
 Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens ; 
 And, toiled with works of war, retired himself 
 To Italy ; and there, at Venice, gave 
 His body to that pleasant country's earth, 
 And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, 
 Under whose colours he had fought so long." 
 
 This is tender and noble, and full of an indescrib- 
 able chivalry and pathos, yet even here we find the 
 spirit of war rather than that of religion, and a 
 deeper sense of Italy than of heaven. More un- 
 
150 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 mixed is the piety of Henry V after the battle of 
 Agincourt : — 
 
 *' O God, thy arm was here; 
 And not to us, but to thy arm alone, 
 Ascribe we all ! — When, without stratagem, 
 But in plain shock and even play of battle, 
 Was ever known so great and little loss, 
 On one part and on the other ? — Take it, God, 
 For it is none but thine. . . . 
 Come, go we in procession to the village. 
 And be it death proclaimed through our host. 
 To boast of this, or take that praise from God, 
 Which is his only. . . . 
 
 Do we all holy rites ; 
 Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum.''^ 
 
 This passage is certainly a true expression of 
 religious feeling, and just the kind that we might 
 expect from a dramatist. Keligion appears here 
 I as a manifestation of human nature and as an 
 expression of human passion. The passion, how- 
 ever, is not due to Shakespeare's imagination, but 
 is essentially historical: the poet has simply not 
 rejected, as he usually does, the religious element 
 in the situation he reproduces.^ 
 
 1 " And so aboute foure of the clocke in the afternoone, the 
 Kynge when he saw no apparaunce of enemies, caused the 
 retreite to be blowen, and gathering his army togither, gave 
 thankes to almightie god for so happy a victory, causing his 
 prelates and chapleines to sing this psalm. In exitu Israeli 
 de Egipto, and commandyng every man to kneels downe 
 on the grounde at this verse ; Non nobis, domine, non nobis, 
 sed nomini tuo da gloriam. Which done, he caused Te Deum, 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 151 
 
 With this dramatic representation of piety we 
 may couple another, of a more intimate kind, from 
 the Sonnets : — 
 
 " Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 Fooled by these rebel powers that thee array, 
 Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, 
 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay ? 
 Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ? 
 Shall worms, inheritors of this excess. 
 Eat up thy charge ? Is this thy body's end ? 
 Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, 
 And let that pine to aggravate thy store ; 
 Buy terms divine by selling hours of dross, 
 Within be fed, without be rich no more : 
 Then shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men. 
 And death once dead, there's no more dying then." 
 
 This sonnet contains more than a natural reli- 
 gious emotion inspired by a single event. It con- 
 tains reflection, and expresses a feeling not merely 
 dramatically proper but rationally just. A mind 
 that habitually ran into such thoughts would be 
 philosophically pious ; it would be spiritual. The 
 Sonnets, as a whole, are spiritual ; their passion is 
 transmuted into discipline. Their love, which, 
 whatever its nominal object, is hardly anything but 
 love of beauty and youth in general, is made to 
 triumph over time by a metaphysical transforma- 
 
 with certain anthems, to be song, giving laud & praise to god, 
 and not boasting of his owne force or any humaine power." 
 
 HOLINSHKD. 
 
152 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 tion of the object into something eternal. At first 
 this is the beauty of the race renewing itself by 
 generation, then it is the description of beauty in 
 the poet's verse, and finally it is the immortal soul 
 enriched by the contemplation of that beauty. This 
 noble theme is the more impressively rendered by 
 being contrasted with another, with a vulgar love 
 that by its nature refuses to be so transformed and 
 transmuted. " Two loves," cries the poet, in a line 
 that gives us the essence of the whole, " Two loves 
 I have, — of comfort, and despair." 
 
 In all this depth of experience, however, there is 
 still wanting any religious image. The Sonnets are 
 spiritual, but, with the doubtful exception of the 
 one quoted above, they are not Christian. And, of 
 course, a poet of Shakespeare's time could not have 
 found any other mould than Christianity for his 
 religion. In our day, with our wide and conscien- 
 tious historical sympathies, it may be possible for 
 us to find in other rites and doctrines than those 
 of our ancestors an expression of some ultimate 
 truth. But for Shakespeare, in the matter of reli- 
 gion, the choice lay between Christianity and noth- 
 ing. He chose nothing; he chose to leave his 
 heroes and himself in the presence of life and of 
 death with no other philosophy than that which 
 the profane world can suggest and understand. 
 
 This [positivism, we need hardly say, was not due 
 to any grossness or sluggishness in his imagination. 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 153 
 
 Shakespeare could be ideg-Jistic when he dreamed, 
 as he could be spiritual when he reflected. The 
 spectacle of life did not pass before his eyes as a 
 mere phantasmagoria. He seized upon its princi- 
 ples; he became wise. Nothing can exceed the 
 ripeness of his seasoned judgment, or the occa- 
 sional breadth, sadness, and terseness of his reflec- 
 tion. The author of " Hamlet " could not be without 
 metaphysical aptitude ; " Macbeth " could not have 
 been written without a sort of sibylline inspiration, 
 or the Sonnets without something of the Platonic 
 mind. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, 
 that we should have to search through all the 
 works of Shakespeare to find half a dozen passages 
 that have so much as a religious sound, and that 
 even these passages, upon examination, should prove 
 not to be the expression of any deep religious con- 
 ception. If Shakespeare had been without meta- 
 physical capacity, or without moral maturity, we 
 could have explained his strange insensibility to 
 religion ; but as it is, we must marvel at his indif- 
 ference and ask ourselves what can be the causes 
 of it. For, even if we should not regard the ab- 
 sence of religion as an imperfection in his own 
 thought, we must admit it to be an incompleteness 
 in his portrayal of the thought of others. Positiv- 
 ism may be a virtue in a philosopher, but it is a 
 vice in a dramatist, who has to render those hu- 
 man passions to which the religious imagination 
 
154 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 has always given a larger meaning and a richer 
 depth. 
 
 Those greatest poets by whose side we are accus- 
 tomed to put • Shakespeare did not forego this ad- 
 J vantage. They gave us man with his piety and 
 the world with its gods. H ^mer is the chief reposi- 
 tory of the Greek religion, and Dante the faithful 
 interpreter of the Catholic. iTature would have 
 been inconceivable to them without the super- 
 natural, or man without the influence and com- 
 panionship of the gods. These poets live in a 
 cosmos. In their minds, as in the mind of their 
 age, the fragments of experience have fallen to- 
 gether into a perfect picture, like the bits of glass in 
 a kaleidoscope. Their universe is a total. Reason 
 and imagination have mastered it completely and 
 peopled it. No chaos remains beyond, or, if it 
 does, it is thought of with an involuntary shudder 
 that soon passes into a healthy indifference. The^ 
 have a theory of human life ; they see man in his 
 relations, surrounded by a kindred universe in 
 which he fills his allotted place. He knows the 
 meaning and issue of his life, and does not voyage 
 without a chart. 
 
 Shakespeare's world, on the contrary, is only the 
 world of human society. The cosmos eludes him ; 
 he does not seem to feel the need of framing that 
 idea. He depicts human life in all its richness 
 and variety, but leaves that life without a setting. 
 
BELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 155 
 
 and consequently without a meaning. If we asked 
 him to tell us what is the significance of the 
 passion and beauty he had so vividly displayed, 
 and what is the outcome of it all, he could hardly 
 answer in any other words than those he puts into 
 the mouth of Macbeth : — 
 
 " To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
 To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle 1 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
 And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing." 
 
 How differently would Homer or Dante have 
 answered that question ! Their tragedy would 
 have been illumined by a sense of the divinity of 
 life and beauty, or by a sense of the sanctity of 
 suffering and death. Their faith had enveloped 
 the world of experience in a world of imagination, 
 in which the ideals of the reason, of the fancy, and 
 of the heart had a natural expression. They had 
 caught in the reality the hint of a lovelier fable, — 
 a fable in which that reality was completed and 
 idealized, and made at once vaster in its extent 
 and more intelligible in its principle. They had, 
 as it were, dramatized the universe, and endowed 
 it with the tragic unities. In contrast with such a 
 
156 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 luminous philosophy and so well-digested an expe- 
 rience, the silence of Shakespeare and his philo- 
 sophical incoherence have something in them that 
 is still heathen ; something that makes us wonder 
 whether the northern mind, even in him, did not 
 remain morose and .barbarous at its inmost core. 
 
 But. before we allow ourselves such hasty and 
 general inferences, we may well stop to consider 
 whether there is not some simpler answer to our 
 question. An epic poet, we might say, naturally 
 deals with cosmic themes. He needs- supernatural 
 machinery because he depicts the movement of 
 human affairs in their generality, as typified in the 
 figures of heroes whose function it is to embody or 
 to overcome elemental forces. Such a poet's world 
 is fabulous, because his inspiration is impersonal. 
 But the dramatist renders the concrete reality of 
 li fe. H e has no need of a superhuman setting for 
 "*Xis pictures. Such a setting would destroy the 
 vitality of his creations. His plots should involve 
 only bfflnaii^tors and humgiii^motives : the deus 
 ex machina has always been regarded as an inter- 
 loper on his stage. The passions of man are his 
 all-sufiicient material; he should weave his whole 
 fabric out of them. 
 
 To admit the truth of all this would not, how- 
 ever, solve our problem. The dramatist cannot 
 be expected to put cosmogonies on the boards. 
 Miracle-plays become dramatic only when they be- 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 157 
 
 come human. But the supernatural world, which 
 the playwright does not bring before the foot- 
 lights, may exist nevertheless in the minds of his 
 characters and of his audience. He may refer to 
 it, appeal to it, and imply it, in the actions and 
 in the sentiments he attributes to his heroes. 
 And if the comparison of Shakespeare with 
 Homer or Dante on the score of religious in- 
 spiration is invalidated by the fact that he is a 
 d rama tist while they are epic ^oets, a comparison 
 may yet be instituted between Shakespeare and 
 other dramatists, from which his singular insensi- 
 bility to religion will as readily appear. 
 
 Greek tragedy, as we know, is dominated by the 
 idea of fate. Even when the gods do not appear 
 in person, or where the service or neglect of them 
 is not the moving cause of the whole play, — as 
 it is in the "Bacchse'' and the ^^ Hippoly tus " of 
 Euripides, — still the deep conviction of the limits 
 and conditions of human happiness underlies the 
 fable. The will of man fulfils the decrees of 
 Heaven. The hero manifests a higher force than 
 his own, both in success and in failure. The 
 fates guide the willing and drag the unwilling. 
 There is no such fragmentary view of life as we 
 have in our romantic drama, where accidents make 
 the meaningless .happiness or unhappiness of a 
 supersensitive adventurer. Life is seen whole, 
 although in miniature. Its boundaries and its 
 
158 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 principles are studied more than its incidents. 
 The human, therefore, everywhere merges with 
 the divine. Our mortality, being sharply defined 
 and much insisted upon, draws the attention all 
 the more to that eternity of Nature and of law 
 in which it is embosomed. Nor is the fact of 
 superhuman control left for our reflection to dis- 
 cover ; it is emphatically asserted in those oracles 
 on which so much of the action commonly turns. 
 
 When the Greek religion was eclipsed by the 
 Christian, the ancient way of conceiving the ultra- 
 human relations of human life became obsolete. 
 It was no longer possible to speak with sincerity 
 of the oracles and gods, of Nemesis and v/?pis. 
 Yet for a long time it was not possible to speak 
 in any other terms. The new ideas were without 
 artistic definition, and literature was paralyzed. 
 But in the course of ages, when the imagination 
 had had time and opportunity to develop a Chris- 
 tian art and a Christian philosophy, the dramatic 
 poets were ready to deal with the new themes. 
 Only their readiness in this respect surpassed 
 their ability, at least their ability to please those 
 who had any memory of the ancient perfection 
 of the arts. 
 
 The miracle-plays were the beginning. Their 
 crudity was extreme and their levity of the frank- 
 est ; but they had still, like the Greek plays, a re- 
 ligious excuse and a religious background. They 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 159 
 
 were not without dramatic power, but their offences 
 against taste and their demands upon faith were 
 too great for them to survive the Renaissance. 
 Such plays as the "Polyeucte" of Corneille and 
 the " Devocion de la Cruz " of Calderon, with other 
 Spanish plays that might be mentioned, are ex- 
 amples of Christian dramas by poets of culture; 
 but as a whole we must say that Christianity, 
 while it succeeded in expressing itself in painting 
 and in architecture, failed to express itself in any 
 adequate drama. Where Clmatiani ty was stro ng, 
 the drama either disagpearedjor became secular ; 
 and it has never again dealt with cosmic themes 
 successfully, except in such hands as those of 
 Goethe and Wagner, men who either neglected 
 Christianity altogether or used it only as an in- 
 cidental ornament, having, as they say, transcended 
 it in their philosophy. 
 
 The fact is, that art and reflection have never 
 been able to unite perfectly the two elements of 
 a civilization like ours, that draws its culture fronj^ 
 one source and its religion from another. Modern 
 taste has ever been, and still is, largel^r exotic, 
 largely a revolution in favour of something ancient 
 or foreign. The more cultivated a period has been, 
 the more wholly it has reverted to antiquity for 
 its inspiration. The existence of that completer 
 world has haunted all minds struggling for self- 
 expression, and interfered, perhaps, with the 
 
160 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 natural development of tlieir genius. The old art 
 which they could not disregard distracted them 
 from the new ideal, and prevented them from em- 
 bodying this ideal outwardly; while the same 
 ideal, retaining their inward allegiance, made their 
 revivals of ancient forms artificial and incomplete. 
 The strange idea could thus gain admittance that 
 art was not called to deal with everything; that 
 its sphere was the world of polite conventions. 
 The serious and the sacred things of life were to 
 be left unexpressed and inarticulate; while the 
 arts masqueraded in the forms of a Pagan antiq- 
 uity, to which a triviality was at the same time 
 attributed which in fact it had not possessed. 
 This unfortunate separation of experience and its 
 artistic expression betrayed itself in the inade- 
 quacy of what was beautiful and the barbarism 
 of what was sincere. 
 
 When such are the usual conditions of artistic 
 creation, we need not wonder that Shakespeare, a 
 poet of the Renaissance, should have confined his 
 representation of life to its secular aspects, and 
 that his readers after him should rather have 
 marvelled at the variety of the things of which 
 he showed an understanding than have taken note 
 of the one thing he overlooked. To omit religion 
 was after all to omit what was not felt to be con- 
 genial to a poet's mind. The poet was to trace 
 for us the passionate and romantic embroideries 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 161 
 
 of life; he was to be artful and humane, and 
 above all he was to be delightful. The beauty and 
 charm of things had nothing any longer to do 
 with those painful mysteries and cont^ations 
 which made the temper of the__pioiis^o acrid and 
 sad. In Shakespeare's time and country, to be 
 religious already began to mean to be_Puritanical ; 
 and in the divorce between the fulness of life 
 on the one hand and the depth and unity of faith 
 on the other, there could be no doubt to which 
 side a man of imaginative instincts would attach 
 himself. A world of passion and beauty without 
 a meaning must seem to him more interesting and 
 worthy than a world of empty principle and 
 dogma, meagre, fanatical, and false. It was be- 
 yond the power of synthesis possessed by that age 
 and nation to find a principle of all passion and a 
 religion of all life. 
 
 This power of synthesis is indeed so difiicult and 
 rare that the attempt to gain it is sometimes con- 
 demned as too philosophical, and as tending to 
 embarrass the critical eye and creative imagination 
 with futile theories. We might say, for instance, 
 that the absence of religion in Shakespeare was a 
 sign of his good sense ; that a healthy instinct kept 
 his attention within the sublunary world ; and that 
 he was in that respect superior to Homer and to 
 Dante. For, while they allowed their wisdom to 
 clothe itself in fanciful forms, he gave us his in its 
 
162 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 immediate truth, so that he embodied what they 
 signified. The supernatural machinery of their 
 poems was, we might say, an accidental incum- 
 brance, a traditional means of expression, which 
 they only half understood, and which made their 
 representation of life indirect and partly unreal. 
 Shakespeare, on the other hand, had reached his 
 poetical majority and independence. He rendered 
 human experience no longer through symbols, but 
 by direct imaginative representation. What I have 
 treated as a limitation in him would, then, appear 
 as the maturity of his strength. 
 
 There is always a class of minds in whom the^ 
 spectacle of history produces a certain apathy of 
 reason. They flatter themselves that they can 
 escape defeat by not attempting the highest tasks. 
 We need not here stop to discuss what value as 
 truth a philosophical synthesis may hope to attain, 
 nor have we to protest against the aesthetic prefer- 
 ence for the sketch and the episode over a reasoned 
 and unified rendering of life. Suffice it to say that 
 the human race hitherto, whenever it has reached a 
 phase of comparatively high development and free- 
 dom, has formed a conception of its place in Nature, 
 no less than of the contents of its life; and that 
 this conception has been* the occasion of religious 
 sentiments and practices ; and further, that every 
 art, whether literary or plastic, has drawn its 
 favourite themes from this religious sphere. The 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 163 
 
 poetic imagination has not commonly stopped short 
 of the philosophical in representing a superhuman 
 environment of man. 
 
 Shakespeare, however, is remarkable among the 
 greater poets for being without a philosophy and 
 without a religion. In his drama there is no 
 fixed conception of any forces, natural or moral, 
 dominating and transcending our mortal energies. 
 Whether this characteristic be regarded as a merit 
 or as a defect, its presence cannot be denied. 
 Those who think it wise or possible to refrain 
 from searching for general prmciples, and are 
 satisfied with the successive empirical appearance 
 of things, without any faith in their rational con- 
 tinuity or completeness, may well see in Shake- 
 speare their natural prophet. For he, too, has been 
 satisfied with the successive description of various 
 passions and events. His world, like the earth be- 
 fore Columbus, extends in an indefinite plane which 
 he is not tempted to explore. 
 
 Those of us, however, who believe in circum- 
 navigation, and who think that both human reason 
 and human imagination require a certain totality in 
 our views, and who feel that the most important 
 thing in life is the lesson of it, and its relation to 
 its own ideal, — we can hardly find in Shakespeare 
 all that the highest poet could give. Fulness is not 
 necessarily wholeness, and the most profuse wealth 
 of characterization seems still inadequate as a 
 
164 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 picture of experience, if this picture is not some- 
 how seen from above and reduced to a dramatic 
 unity, — to that unity of meaning that can suffuse 
 its endless details with something of dignity, sim- 
 plicity, and peace. This is the imaginative power 
 found in several poets we have mentioned, — the 
 power that gives certain passages in Lucretius also 
 their sublimity, as it gives sublimity to many 
 passages in the Bible. 
 
 For what is required for theoretic wholeness is 
 not this or that system but some system. Its value 
 is not the value of truth, but that of victorious 
 imagination. Unity of conception is an aesthetic 
 merit no less than a logical demand. A fine 
 sense of the dignity and pathos of life cannot be 
 attained unless we conceive somehow its outcome 
 and its relations. Without such a conception our 
 emotions cannot be steadfast and enlightened. 
 Without it the imagination cannot fulfil its essen- 
 tial function or achieve its supreme success. 
 Shakespeare himself, had it not been for the time 
 and place in which he lived, when religion and 
 imagination blocked rather than helped each other, 
 would perhaps have allowed more of a cosmic back- 
 ground to appear behind his crowded scenes. If 
 the Christian in him was not the real man, at least 
 the Pagan would have spoken frankly. The ma- 
 terial forces of Nature, or their vague embodiment 
 in some northern pantheon, would then have stood 
 
RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 165 
 
 behind his heroes. The various movements of 
 events would have appeared as incidents in a larger 
 drama to which they had at least some symbolic 
 relation. We should have been awed as well as 
 saddened, and purified as well as pleased, by being 
 made to feel the dependence of human accidents 
 upon cosmic forces and their fated evolution. Then 
 we should not have been able to say that Shake- 
 speare was without a religion. Qlor the effort of 
 religion, says Goethe, is to adjust us to the inevit- 
 able ; each religion in its way strives to bring about 
 this consummation; 
 
VII 
 THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 
 
 It is an observation at first sight melancholy 
 but in the end, perhaps, enlightening, that the eatc 
 lie ^t poets a re the most ideal, and that primitive 
 ages furnish the jjQQst heroic characters and have 
 the clea rest vi si on of a pe r fect li fe. The Homeric 
 times^must have been full of ignorance and suffer- 
 ing. In those little barbaric towns, in those camps 
 and farms, in those shipyards, there must have 
 been much insecurity and superstition. That age 
 was singularly poor in all that concerns the con- 
 venience of life and the entertainment of the mind 
 with arts and sciences. Yet it had a sense for 
 civilization. That machinery of life which men 
 were beginning to devise appealed to them as 
 poetical; they knew its ultimate justification and 
 studied its incipient processes with delight. The 
 poetry of that simple and ignorant age was, ac- 
 cordingly, the sweetest and sanest that the world 
 has known; the most faultless in taste, and the 
 most even and lofty in inspiration. Without lack- 
 166 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM It) 7 
 
 ing variety and homeliness, it bathed all things 
 human in the golden light of morning ; it clothed 
 sorrow in a kind of majesty, instinct with both 
 self-control and heroic frankness. Nowhere else 
 can we find so noble a rendering of human nature, 
 so spontaneous a delight in life, so uncompromising 
 a dedication to beauty, and such a gift of seeing 
 beauty in everything. Homer, the first of poets, 
 was also the best and the most poetical. 
 
 From this beginning, if we look down the history 
 of Occidental literature, we see the power of ideali- 
 zation steadily decline. For while it finds here 
 and there, as in Dante, a more spiritual theme and 
 a subtler and riper intellect, it pays for that advan- 
 tage by a more than equivalent loss in breadth, 
 sanity, and happy vigour. And if ever imagina- 
 tion bursts out with a greater potency, as in Shake- 
 speare (who excels the patriarch of poetry in depth 
 of passion and vividness of characterization, and in 
 those exquisite bubblings of poetry and humour in 
 which English genius is at its best), yet Shake- 
 speare also pays the price by a notable loss in taste, 
 in sustained inspiration, in consecration, and in 
 rationality. There is more or less rubbish in his 
 greatest works. When we come down to our own 
 day we find poets of hardly less natural endow- 
 ment (for in endowment all ages are perhaps alike) 
 and with vastly richer sources of inspiration; for 
 they have many arts and literatures behind them, 
 
168 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 with the spectacle of a varied and agitated society, 
 a world which is the living microcosm of its own 
 history and presents in one picture many races, 
 arts, and religions. Our poets have more wonder- 
 ful tragedies of the imagination to depict than had 
 Homer, whose world was innocent of any essential 
 defeat, or Dante, who believed in the world's defin- 
 itive redemption. Or, if perhaps their inspiration 
 is comic, they have the pageant of mediseval man- 
 ners, with its picturesque artifices and passionate 
 fancies, and the long comedy of modern social rev- 
 olutions, so illusory in their aims and so productive 
 in their aimlessness. They have, moreover, the 
 new and marvellous conception which natural sci- 
 ence has given us of the world and of the condi- 
 tions of human progress. 
 ^ With all these lessons of experience behind 
 \ them, however, we find our contemporary poets 
 < incapable of any high wisdom, incapable of any 
 / imaginative rendering of human life and its mean- 
 ^ ing. Our poets are things of shreds and patches ; 
 they give us episodes and studies, a sketch of 
 this curiosity, a glimpse of that romance; they 
 / h ave no tot aLrision, no grasp of the whole..reality, 
 and consequentl.y ^,oj?apacit;yifor^^_sana^Jid--sJifiady 
 , ^idealization^ The comparatively barbarous ages 
 had a poetry of the ideal; they had visions of 
 y beauty, order, and perfection. This age of material 
 elaboration has no sense for those things. Its 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 169 
 
 fancy is retrospective, whimsical, and flickering; 
 its ideals, when it has any, are negative and par- 
 tial ; its moral strength is a blind and miscella- 
 neous vehemence. Its peetry^ in a word,, is* the 
 poetry of barbarism. ^^ 
 
 T5is poetry should be viewed in relation to the ] 
 general moral crisis and imaginative disintegration 
 of which it gives a verbal echo ; then we shall avoid 
 the injustice of passing it over as insignificant, 
 no less than the imbecility of hailing it as essen- 
 tially glorious and successful. We must remember 
 that the imagination of our race has been subject 
 to a double discipline. It has been formed partly -^ 
 in the school of classic literature and polity, and 
 partly in the school of Christian piety. This duality 
 of inspiration, this contradiction between the two 
 accepted methods of rationalizing the world, has 
 been a chief source of that incoherence, that roman- 
 tic indistinctness and imperfection, which largely 
 characterize the products of the modern arts. A 
 man cannot serve two masters ; yet the conditions 
 have not been such as to allow him wholly to 
 despise the one or wholly to obey the other. To 
 be wholly Pagan is impossible after the dissolution 
 of that civilization which had seemed universal, 
 and that empire which had believed itself eternal. 
 To be wholly Christian is impossible for a similar 
 reason, now that the illusion and cohesion of Chris- 
 tian ages is lost, and for the further reason that 
 
 ^ 
 
170 POETRY AND KELIGION 
 
 Christianity was itself fundamentally eclectic. Be- 
 fore it could succeed and dominate men even for a 
 time, it was obliged to adjust itself to reality, to 
 incorporate many elements of Pagan wisdom, and to 
 accommodate itself to many habits and passions at 
 ^ variance with its own ideal. 
 
 O In these latter times, with the prodigious growth 
 i ^ of material life in elaboration and of mental life in 
 / diffusion, there has supervened upon this old dual- 
 / ism a new faith in man's absolute power, a kind 
 of return to the inexperience and self-assurance 
 of youth. This new inspiration has made many 
 minds indifferent to the two traditional disci- 
 plines ; ^either is seriously nccpptpfl V>y fliP^]T^^^T' 
 the reason , excellent from their own point of view, 
 tl iat no dis cipline whatever is needed. The mem- 
 ory of ancient aisillusions nas faded with time. 
 Ignorance of the past has bred contempt for the 
 lessons which the past might teach. Men prefer 
 to repeat the old experiment without knowing that 
 x^they repeat it. 
 
 I say advisedly ignorance of the past, in spite of 
 the unprecedented historical erudition of our time ; 
 for life is an ^artj[iot_to_be learned by obser vatio n, 
 and the most minute and comprehensive studies do 
 not teach us what the spirit of man should have 
 learned by its long living. We study the past as a 
 dead object, as a ruin, not as an authority and as 
 an experiment. One reason why history was less 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 171 
 
 interesting to former ages was that they were less 
 conscious of separation from the past. The per- 
 spective of time was less clear because the synthe- 
 sis of experience was more complete. The mind 
 does not easily discriminate the successive phases 
 of an action in which it is still engaged; it does 
 not arrange in a temporal series the elements of a 
 single perception, but posits them all together as 
 constituting a permanent and real object. Human 
 nature and the life of the world were real and 
 stable objects to the apprehension of our fore- 
 fathers ; the actors changed, but not the characters 
 or the play. Men were then less studious of 
 derivations because they were more conscious of 
 identities. They thought of all reality as in a 
 sense contemporary, and in considering the maxims 
 of a philosopher or the style of a poet, they were 
 not primarily concerned with settling his date and 
 describing his environment. The standard by which \ 
 they judged was eternal ; the environment in which 
 man found himself did not seem to them subject of 
 any essential change. 
 
 To us the picturesque element in history is 
 more striking because we feel ourselves the chil- 
 dren of our own age only, an age which being 
 itself singular and revolutionary, tends to read 
 its own character into the past, and to regard all 
 other periods as no less fragmentary and effer- 
 vescent than itself. The changing and the per- 
 
\ 
 
 172 POETRY AND EELIGION 
 
 manent elements are, indeed, everywhere present, 
 and the bias of the observer may emphasize the 
 one or the other as it will: the only question is 
 whether we find the significance of things in their 
 variations or in their similarities. 
 
 Now the habit of regarding the past as effete 
 and as merely a stepping-stone to something pres- 
 ent or future, is unfavourable to any true appre- 
 hension of that element in the past which was 
 vital and which remains eternal. It is a habit of 
 thought that destroys the sense of the moral iden- 
 tity of all ages, by virtue of its very insistence on 
 the mechanical derivation of one age from another. 
 Existences that cause one another exclude one an- 
 other; each is alien to the rest inasmuch as it 
 is the product of new and different conditions. 
 Ideas that cause nothing unite all things by giv- 
 ing them a common point of reference and a single 
 standard of value. 
 
 The classic and th e Ohr^^^in °yiSt^Ti^° were both 
 systems of ideas, attempts to seize the eternal 
 morphology of reality and describe its unchang- 
 ing constitution. The imagination was summoned 
 thereby to contemplate the highesi^bjei^ts, and the 
 essence of thin gs being thus described, their in- 
 signiticant variations could retain little irapor- 
 ftance and the study of these variations might well 
 seem superficial. Mechanical^cience, the scieiice of 
 causes, was accordingly neglected, while the science 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 173 
 
 of values, with the arts that express these values, . 
 was exclusively pursued. The reverse has now 
 occurred and the spirit of life, innocent of any 
 rationalizing discipline and deprived of an au- 
 thoritative and adequate method of expression, has 
 relapsed into miscellaneous and shallow exuber- 
 ance. Religion and art have become short-winded. 
 I They have forgotten the old maxim that we should 
 » copy in order to be copied and remember in order 
 ^ to be remembered. It is true that the multiplicity 
 of these incompetent efforts seems to many a com- 
 pensation for their ill success, or even a ground 
 for asserting their absolute superiority. Incompe- 
 tence, when it flatters the passions, can always 
 find a greater incompetence to approve of it. In- 
 deed, some people would have regarded the Tower 
 of Babel as the best academy of eloquence on 
 account of the variety of oratorical methods pre- 
 vailing there. 
 
 It is thus that the imagination of our time has 
 relapsed into barbarism. But discipline of the 
 heart and fancy is always so rare a thing that 
 the neglect of it need not be supposed to involve 
 any very terrible or obvious loss. The triumphs 
 of reason have been few and partial at any time, 
 and perfect works of art are almost unknown. 
 The failure of art and reason, because their prin- 
 ciple is ignored, is therefore hardly more conspicu- 
 ous than it was when their principle, although 
 
/ 
 
 174 POETRY AND EELIGION 
 
 perhaps acknowledged, was misunderstood or dis- 
 y obeyed. Indeed, to one who fixes his eye on the 
 ideal goal, the greatest art often seems the great- 
 est failure, because it alone reminds him of what 
 it should have been. Trivial stimulations coming 
 from vulgar objects, on the contrary, by making us 
 forget altogether the possibility of a deep satisfac- 
 tion, often succeed in interesting and in winning 
 applause. The pleasure they give us is so brief 
 and superficial that the wave of essential disap- 
 pointment which would ultimately drown it has 
 not time to rise from the heart. 
 \ The poetry of barbarism is not without its charm. 
 It can play with sense and passion the more readily 
 4 and freely in that it does not aspire to subordinate 
 them to a clear thought or a tenable attitude of the 
 will. It can impart the transitive emotions which 
 it expresses ; it can find many partial harmonies of 
 mood and fancy; it can, by virtue of its red-hot 
 irrationality, utter wilder cries, surrender itself and 
 us to more absolute passion, and heap up a more in- '^ ^ 
 X .^ discriminate wealth of images than belong to poets 
 • of seasoned experience or of heavenly inspiration. 
 Irrational stimulation may tire u^ in the end, but 
 it excites us in the beginning ; and how many con- 
 ventional poets, tender and prolix, have there not 
 . been, who tire us now without ever having excited 
 N anybody ? ^The power to stimulate is the begin- » 
 ning of ^reatn^s, and when the barbarous poet^^ 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 175 
 
 has genius, as he well may have, he stimulates all 
 the more powerfully on accoiint^f_the crudity of 
 his met hods and the recklessness of his emotions. 
 The defects of such art — lack of distinction, ab- 
 sence of beauty, confusion of ide£Ps, incapacity 
 permanently to please — will hardly be felt by the 
 contemporary public, if once, its attention is ar- 
 rested; for no poet is so undisciplined that he 
 will not find many readers, if he finds readers at 
 all, less disciplined than himself^ 
 
 These considerations may perhaps be best en- 
 forced by applying them to two writers of great 
 influence over the present generation who seem to 
 illustrate them on different planes — Robert Brown- 
 ing and Walt Whitman. They are both analytic 
 poets — poets who seek to reveal and express the ( 
 elemental as opposed to the conventional ; but the 
 dissolution has progressed much farther in Whitman / 
 than in Browning, doubtless because Whitman be- 
 gan at a much lower stage of moral and intellec- 
 tual organization; for the good will to be radical 
 was present in both. The elements to which 
 Browning reduces experience are still passions, 
 characters, persons; Whitman carries the disinte- 
 gration further and knows nothing but moods and 
 particular images. , The world of Browning is a 
 world of history with civilization for its setting 
 and with the conventional passions for its motive 
 forces. The._jyor1 d jQL,.lYhitmaii is. innocent of 
 
176 POETRY AND KELIGION 
 
 these things and contains_only far simpler and 
 more chaotic elements. In him the barbarism is 
 much more pronounced ; it is, indeed, avowed, and 
 the "barbaric yawp" is sent "over the roofs of 
 the world " in full consciousness of its inarticulate 
 character ; but in Browning the barbarism is no 
 less real though disguised by a literary and scien- 
 tific language, since the passions of civilized life 
 with which he deals are treated as so many " bar- 
 baric yawps," complex indeed in their conditions, 
 puf&ngs of an intricate engine, but aimless in their 
 vehemence and mere ebullitions of lustiness in ad- 
 venturous and profoundly ungoverned souls. 
 * Irrationality on this level is viewed by Browning 
 with the same satisfaction with which, on a lower 
 level, it is viewed by Whitman ; "and the admirers 
 of each hail it as the secret of, a new poetry which 
 pierces to the quick and awakens the imagination 
 to a new and genuine vitality. It is in the re- 
 bellion against discipline, in the abandonment of 
 the i( ^als of ^assic and Ch ristian tradition, tRat 
 this rejuvenation is found!^~Both poets represent, 
 therefore, ahJ are admired for representing, what 
 may be called the poetry of barbarism in the most 
 accurate and descriptive sense of this word. For 
 the barbari^ is the man who^regards his passions 
 as their own^ excuse for bmng; whoaoes~not 3.0- 
 mesticate them either by understanding their cause 
 or by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 177 
 
 who does not know his derivations nor perceive, 
 his tendencies, but who merely feels and acts, valu- 
 ing in his life its force and its filling, but being 
 careless of its purpose and its form. His delight 
 is in abundance and vehemence ; his art, like his 
 life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and 
 splendour of materials. His scorn for what is 
 poorer and weaker than himself is only surpassed 
 by his ignorance of what is higher. 
 
 II 
 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 The works of Walt Whitman offer an extreme 
 illustration of this phase of genius, both by their 
 form and by their substance. It was the singu- 
 larity of his literary form — the challenge it threw 
 to the conventions of verse and of language -^ that 
 first gave Whitman notoriety : but this notoriety has 
 become fame, because those incapacities and sole- 
 cisms which glare at us from his pages are only 
 the obverse of a profound inspiration and of a 
 genuine courage. Even the idiosyncrasies of his 
 style have a side which is not mere peversity or 
 affectation ; the order of his words, the processioi\^ 
 of his images, reproduce the method of a rich, spon-V 
 taneous, absolutely lazy ' fancy. In most poets ) 
 such a natural order is modified by various gov- 
 erning motives — the thought, the metrical form, 
 
 N 
 
178 POETEY AND BELIGION 
 
 the echo of other poems in the memory. By Walt 
 Whitman these conventional influences are reso- 
 lutely banished. We find the swarms of men and 
 objects rendered as they might strike the retina in 
 a sort of waking dream. It is the most sincere 
 V . possible confession of the lowest — I mean the 
 most primitive — type of perception. All ancient 
 poets are sophisticated in comparison and give 
 proof of longer intellectual and moral training. 
 Walt Whitman has gone back to the innocent 
 style of Adam, when the animals filed before him 
 one by one and he called each of them by its name. 
 In fact, the influences to which Walt Whitman 
 was subject were as favourable as possible to the 
 imaginary experiment of beginning the world over 
 y > again. Liberalism and transcendentalism both 
 \j harboured some illusions on that score; and they 
 were in the air which our poet breathed. Moreover 
 he breathed this air in America, where the newness 
 of the material environment made it easier to 
 ignore the fatal antiquity of human nature. When 
 he afterward became aware that there was or had 
 been a world with a history, he studied that world 
 with curiosity and spoke of it not without a certain 
 shrewdness. But he still regarded it as a foreign 
 world and imagined, as not a few Americans have 
 done, that his own world was a fresh creation, 
 not amenable to the same laws as the old. The 
 difference in the conditions blinded him, in his 
 
THE POETKY OF BARBARISM 179 
 
 merely sensuous apprehension, to the identity of 
 the principles. 
 
 His parents were farmers in central Long Island 
 and his early years were spent in that district. 
 The family seems to have been not too prosperous 
 and somewhat nomadic ; Whitman himself drifted 
 through boyhood without much guidance. We 
 find him now at school, now helping the labourers 
 at the farms, now wandering along the beaches of 
 Long Island, finally at Brooklyn working in an 
 apparently desultory way as a printer and some- 
 times as a writer for a local newspaper. He must 
 have read or heard something, at this early period, 
 of the English classics ; his style often betrays the 
 deep effect made upon him by the grandiloquence 
 of the Bible, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. But 
 his chief interest, if we may trust his account, was 
 already in his own sensations. The aspects of 
 Nature, the forms and habits of animals, the sights 
 of cities, the movement and talk of common people, 
 were his constant delight. His mind was flooded 
 with these images, keenly felt and afterward to be^ 
 vividly rendered with bold strokes of realism and 
 imgiginatipn. 
 
 Many poets have had this faculty to seizQ the 
 elementary aspects of thi ngs, but none has had 
 it so exclusively; with Whitman the surface is^ 
 absolutely all and the underlying structure, i^ 
 without interest and almost without existence. 
 
180 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 He had had no education and his natural de- 
 light in imbibing sensations had not been trained 
 to the uses of practical or theoretical intelligence. 
 He basked in the sunshine of perception and 
 wallowed in the stream of his own sensibility, as 
 later at Camden in the shallows of his favourite 
 brook. Even during the civil war, when he heard 
 the drum-taps so clearly, he could only gaze at the 
 picturesque and terrible aspects of the struggle, 
 and linger among the wounded day after day with 
 a canine devotion ; he could not be aroused either 
 to clear thought or to positive action. So also in 
 his poems ; a multiplicity of images pass before him 
 and he yields himself to each in turn with absolute 
 passivity. ' The world has no inside ; it is a phan- 
 tasmagoria of continuous visions, vivid, impressive, 
 but monotonous and hard to distinguish in memory, 
 like the waves of the sea or the decorations of some 
 barbarous temple, sublime only by the infinite ag- 
 y \ gregation of parts. 
 
 This abundance of detail without organ izatio n, 
 this wealth of perceptionjwithout intelligence and 
 of JmagiBation jadthoaiL-taste, makes the singular- 
 ity of Whitman's genius. Full of sympathy and 
 receptivity, with a wonderful gift of graphic 
 characterization and an occasional rare grandeur 
 of diction, he fills us with a sense of the individu- 
 ality and the universality of what he describes — 
 it is a drop in itself yet a drop in the ocean. 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 181 
 
 The abs ence of ajix . p rinc i pl e of selection or of 
 a sus tained style enables him to render aspects 
 of*tEiiigs and of emotion which would have eluded 
 a trained writer. He is, therefore, interesting even 
 where he is grotesque or perverse. He has accom- 
 plished, by the sacrifice of almost every other good 
 quality, something never so ;well done before. 
 He has approached common life without bring- 
 ing in his mind any higher standard by which to 
 criticise it; he has seen it, not in contrast with 
 an ideal, but as the expression of forces more 
 indeterminate and elementary than itself; and the 
 vulgar, in this cosmic setting, has appeared to him 
 sublime. 
 
 There is clearly some analogy between a mass of 
 images without structure and the notion of an 
 absolute democracy. Whitman, inclined by his 
 genius and habits to see life without relief or organ- 
 ization, believed that his inclination in this respect 
 corresponded with the spirit of his age and coun- 
 try, and that Nature and society, at least in the 
 United States, were constituted after the fashion 
 of his own mind. Being the poet of the average 
 man, he wished all men to be specimens of that 
 average, and being the poet of a fluid Nature, he 
 believed that Nature was or should be a formless 
 flux. This personal bias of Whitman's was further 
 encouraged by the actual absence of distinction in 
 his immediate environment. Surrounded by ugly 
 
182 POETKY AND RELIGION 
 
 things and common people, he felt himself happy, 
 ecstatic, overflowing with a kind of patriarchal 
 love. He accordingly came to think that there was 
 a spirit of the New World which he embodied, and 
 which was in complete opposition to that of the 
 Old, and that a literature upon novel principles was 
 needed to express and strengthen this American 
 spirit. 
 
 Democracy was not to be merely a constitu- 
 tional device for the better government of given 
 nations, not merely a movement for the material 
 improvement of the lot of the poorer classes. It 
 was to be a social and a moral democracy and to 
 j involve an actual equality among all men. What- 
 ever kept them apart and made it impossible for 
 them to be messmates together was to be discarded. \ 
 . The literature of democracy was to ignore all ex- 
 \ traordinary gifts of genius or virtue, all distinction 
 drawn even from great passions or romantic adven- 
 tures. In Whitman's works, in which this new 
 literature is foreshadowed, there is accordingly not ,1 
 V a single character nor a single story. His only 
 Nhero is Myself, the "single separate person," en- 
 dowed with the primary impulses, with health, and 
 with sensitiveness to the elementary aspects of 
 Nature. The perfect man of the future, the pro- 
 lific begetter of other perfect men, is to work with 
 his hands, chanting the poems of some future Walt, 
 some ideally democratic bard. Women are to have 
 
 r 
 
 i 
 
THE POETJilY OF BARBARISM 183 
 
 as nearly as possible the same character as men: 
 the emphasis is to pass from family life and local 
 ties to the friendship of comrades'and the general 
 brotherhood of man. Men are to be vigorous, com- 
 fortable, sentimental, and irresponsible. 
 
 This dream is, of course, unrealized and unreal- 
 izable, in America as elsewhere. Undeniably there 
 are in America many suggestions of such a societj^ 
 and such a national character. But the growing 
 complexity _aiid fixity_jaf-. institutions .necessarily 
 tends to obscure these traits of ^ primitive and 
 crude deniocfacy. What Whitman seized upon as 
 the promise of the future was in reality the sur- 
 vival of the past. He sings the song of pioneers, 
 but it is in the nature of the pioneer that the 
 greater his success the quicker must be his trans- 
 formation into something different. When Whit- 
 man made the initial and amorphous phase of 
 society his ideal, he became the prophet of a lost 
 cause. That cause was lost, not merely when 
 wealth and intelligence began to take shape in the 
 American Commonwealth, but it was lost at the 
 very foundation of the world, when those laws of 
 evolution were established which Whitman, like 
 Bousseau, failed to understand. If we may trust 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer, these laws involve a passage 
 from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and* 
 a constant progress at once in differentiation and ., - ' 
 in organization — all, in a word, that Whitman sys- ^ 
 
184 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 tematically deprecated or ignored. He is surely 
 not tlie spokesman of the tendencies of his country, 
 although he describes some aspects of its past and 
 present condition : nor does he appeal to those whom 
 he describes, but rather to the dilettanti he despises. 
 He is regarded as representative chiefly by foreign- 
 ers, who look for some gi'otesque expression of the 
 genius of so young and prodigious a people. 
 
 Whitman, it is toie^ loved. jind.. comprehended 
 men; but this love and comprehension had the 
 same limits as his love and comprehension of 
 Nature. He observed truly and responded to his 
 observation with genuine and pervasive emotion. 
 A great gregariousness, an innocent tolerance of 
 moral weakness, a genuine admiration for bodily 
 health and strength, made him bubble over with 
 affection for the generic human creature. Inca- 
 pable of an ideal passion, he was full of the niilk of 
 human kindness. Yet, for all his acquaintance 
 with the ways and thoughts of the common man 
 of his choice, he did not truly understand him. 
 For to understand people is to go much deeper 
 than they go themselves ; to penetrate to their 
 characters and disentangle their inmost ideals. 
 Whitman's insight into man did not go beyond a 
 sensuous sympathy; it consisted in a vicarious 
 satisfaction in their pleasures, and an instinctive 
 love of their persons. It never approached a 
 scientific or imaginative knowledge of their hearts. 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 185 
 
 Therefore Whitman failed radically in his 
 dearest ambition: he 3_n_ne.Yex_be_a. poet of the 
 pe ople. YoT the people, like the early races whose 
 poetry was ideal, are natural believers in perfection. 
 They have no doubts about the absolute desirability 
 of wealth and learning and power, none about the 
 worth of pure goodness and pure love. Their 
 chosen poets, if they have any, will be always those 
 who have known how to paint th£s©4deals in lively 
 even if in gaudy colours. Nothing is farther froni~T 
 the common people than the corrupt desire to be / 
 primitive. They instinctively look toward a more 
 exalted life, which they imagine to be full of dis- 
 tinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter 
 existence fills them with hope or with envy or with 
 humble admiration. • 
 
 If the people are ever won over to hostility 
 to such ideals, it is only because they are cheated 
 by demagogues who tell them that if all the 
 flowers of civilization were destroyed its fruits 
 would become more abundant. A greater share 
 of happiness, people think, would fall to their 
 lot could they destroy everything beyond their 
 own possible possessions. But they are made 
 thus envious and ignoble only by a deception: 
 what they really desire is an ideal good for them- 
 selves which they are told they may secure by de- 
 priving others of their preeminence. Their hope 
 is always to enjoy perfect satisfaction themselves ; 
 
186 POETRY AND RELIGIOK 
 
 and therefore a poet who loves the picturesque 
 aspects of labour and vagrancy will hardly be 
 the poet of the poor. He may have described their 
 figure and occupation, in neither of which they are 
 much interested ; he will not have read their souls. 
 They will prefer to him any sentimental story-teller, 
 any sensational dramatist, any moralizing poet ; for 
 they are hero-worshippers by temperament, and are 
 too wise or too unfortunate to be much enamoured 
 of themselves or of the conditions of their existence. 
 Fortunately, the political theory that makes 
 Whitman's principle of literary prophecy and 
 criticism does not always inspire his chants, nor 
 is it presented, even in his prose works, quite 
 bare and unadorned. In " Democratic Vistas " we 
 find it clothed with something of the same poetic 
 passion and lighted up with the same flashes of 
 intuition which we admire in the poems. Even 
 there the temperament is finer than the ideas and 
 the poet wiser than the thinker. His ultimate 
 appeal is really to something more primitive and 
 general than any social aspirations, to something 
 more elementary than an ideal of any kind. He 
 speaks to those minds and to those moods in which 
 sensuality is touched with mysticism. When the 
 intellect is in abeyance, when we would " turn and 
 live with the animals, they are so placid and self- 
 contained," when we are weary of conscience and 
 of ambition, and would yield ourselves for a while 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 187 
 
 to the dream of sense, Walt Whitman is a wel- 
 come companion. The images he arouses in us, 
 fresh, full of light and health and of a kind of 
 frankness and beauty, are prized all the more at 
 such a time because they are not choice, but drawn 
 perhaps from a hideous and sordid environment. 
 For this circumstance makes theiji^aJbetter^ieans 
 of escape_foom_convention and from that fatigue 
 and despair which lurk not far^fiii^ath the sur- 
 f ac^ of _i^n ventional life. In casting off with 
 self-assurance and a sense of fresh vitality the 
 distinctions of tradition and reason a man may 
 feel, as he sinks back comfortably to a lower level 
 6f sense and instinct, that he is returning to 
 Nature or escaping into the infinite. Mysticism 
 makes us proud and happy to renounce the work 
 of intelligence, both in thought and in life, and 
 persuades us that we become divine by remaining 
 imperfectly human. Walt Whitman gives a new 
 expression to this ancient and multiform tendency. 
 He feels his own cosmic justification and he would 
 lend the sanction of his inspiration t© all loafers 
 and holiday-makers. He would be the congenial 
 patron of farmers and factoi-y hands in their crude 
 pleasures and pie'ties, as Pan was the patron of 
 the shepherds of Arcadia: for he is sure that in 
 spite of his hairiness and animality, the gods will 
 acknowledge him as one of themselves and smile 
 upon him from the serenity of Olympus. 
 
 V 
 
188 POETliY AND KELIGION 
 
 III 
 
 BOBERT BROWNING 
 
 If we would do justice to Browning's work as a 
 human document, and at the same time perceive its 
 relation to the rational ideals of the imagination 
 and to that poetry which passes into religion, we 
 must keep, as in the case of Whitman, two things 
 in mind. One is the genuineness of the achieve- 
 ment, the sterling quality of the vision and inspira- 
 tion; these are their own justification when we 
 approach them from below and regard them as 
 manifesting a more direct or impassioned grasp 
 of experience than is given to mildly blatant, 
 convention-ridden minds. The other thing to re- 
 member is the short distance to which this compre- 
 hension is carried, its failure to approach any 
 finality, or to achieve a recognition even of the 
 traditional ideals of poetry and religion. 
 r~ In the case of Walt Whitman such a failure will 
 \ be generally felt ; it is obvious that both his music 
 ( and his philosophy are those of a barbarian, nay, 
 / almost of a savage. Accordingly there is need of 
 dwelling rather on the veracity and simple dignity 
 of his thought and art, on their expression of an 
 order of ideas latent in all better experience. But 
 in the case of Browning it is the success that is 
 obvious to most people. Apart from a certain 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM .189 
 
 superficial grotesqueness_ to which we are soon 
 accustomed, he easily _arouses_ and engages the 
 reader by the pithiness of his phrase , the volume — 
 of his passion, t he vigour of his moral judgmen t, 
 the liveliness of his ^historical fanc y. It is obvious 
 that we are in the presence of a great writer, of 
 a great imaginative force, of a master in the ex- 
 pression of emotion. What is perhaps not so obvi- -^^j 
 ous, but no less true, is that we are in the presence 
 of a barbaric geniu s, of a tr u ncatedj magination^ of 
 a thought and an art inchoate and ill-digested, o f a 
 
 volcanic eruption that tosse s itself quite blindly 
 and ineffect ually into the sky. _ 
 
 The points of comparison by which this becomes 
 clear are perhaps not in every one's mind, although 
 they are merely the elements of traditional culture, 
 aesthetic and moral. Yet even without reference to 
 ultimate ideals, one may notice in Browning many 
 superficial signs of that deepest of all failures, the ; 
 failure in rationality and the indifference tgjer- 
 f gction.^^ Such a sign is the turgid style, weight}^ 
 without nobility, pointed without naturalness or 
 precision. Another sign is the "realism" of the- 
 personages, who, quite like men and women in\ 
 actual life, are always displaying traits of char- 
 acter and never attaining charactei^^as a^ whole. 
 Other hints might be found in the structure of 
 the poems, where the dramatic substance does not 
 achieve a dramatic form ; in the metaphysical dis- 
 
190 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 cussion, with its confused prolixity and absence 
 of result; in the moral ideal, where all energies 
 figure without their ultimate purposes j in the 
 religion, which breaks off the expression of this 
 life in the middle, and finds in that suspense an 
 argument for immortality. In all this, and much 
 more that might be recalled, a person coming to 
 • Browning with the habits of a cultivated mind 
 might see evidence of some profound incapacity in 
 the poet ; but more careful reflection is necessary 
 to understand the nature of this incapacity, its 
 cause, and the peculiar accent which its presence 
 gives to those ideas and impulses which Browning 
 stimulates in us. 
 
 There is the more reason for developing this 
 criticism (which might seem needlessly hostile and 
 which time and posterity will doubtless make in 
 their own quiet and decisive fashion) in that 
 Browning did not keep within the sphere of 
 drama and analysis, where he was strong, but 
 allowed his own temperament and opinions to 
 vitiate his representation of life, so that he some- 
 times ^turned the expression of a violent passion 
 intothe_lastwor d of what he thought a religi oji^ 
 He had a didactic vei n, a habifcofjudging^tiie 
 spectacle he evoked and of .loading the passions he 
 "S^pictedTwith his visible syjnpathy or scorn. 
 
 Now a chief support of Browning's popularity is 
 that he is, for many, an initiator into the deeper 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 191 
 
 mysteries of passion, a means of escaping from the 
 moral poverty of their own lives and of feeling the 
 rhythm and compulsion of the general striving. 
 He figures, therefore, distinctly as a prophet, as a 
 bearer of glad tidings, and it is easy for those who 
 hail him as such to imagine that, knowing the 
 labour of life so well, he must know something 
 also of its fruits, and that in giving us the feeling 
 of existence, he is also giving us its meaning. 
 There is serious danger that a mind gathering 
 from his pages the raw materials of truth, the un- 
 threshed harvest of reality, may take him for a 
 philosopher, for a rationalizer of what he describes. 
 Awakening may be mista ken for enlightenment, 
 and the galv anizing^ _of___torpT^ fipnfia.ti(>ri«^ a.Tifl \m. 
 pulses for wisdo m. 
 
 Against such fatuity reason should raise her 
 voice. The vital and historic forces that produce 
 illusions of this sort in large groups of men are 
 indeed beyond the -control of criticism. The ideas 
 of passion are more vivid than those of memory, 
 until they become memories in turn. They must 
 be allowed to fight out their desperate battle 
 against the laws of Nature and reason. But it 
 is worth while in the meantime, for the sake of the 
 truth and of a just philosophy, to meet the varying 
 though perpetual charlatanism of the world with a 
 steady protest. As soon as Browning is proposed 
 to us as a leader, as soon as we are asked to be 
 
192 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 not the occasional patrons of his art, but the pupils 
 of his philosophy, we have a right to express the 
 radical dissatisfaction which we must feel, if we 
 are rational, with his whole attitude and temper 
 of mind. 
 
 The great dramatists have seldom dealt with 
 perfectly virtuous characters. The great poets 
 have seldom represented mythologies that would 
 bear scientific criticism. But by an instinct which 
 constituted their greatness they have cast these 
 mixed materials furnished by life into forms con- 
 genial to the specific principles of their art, and 
 by this transformation they have made acceptable 
 in the aesthetic sphere things that in the sphere 
 of reality were evil or imperfect: in a word, 
 their works have been beautiful as works of art. 
 Or, if their genius exceeded that of the technical 
 poet and rose to prophetic intuition, they have 
 known how to create ideal characters, not pos- 
 sessed, perhaps, of every virtue accidentally needed 
 in this world, but possessed of what is ideally 
 better, of internal greatness and perfection. They 
 have also known how to select and reconstruct 
 their mythology so as to make it a true interpreta- 
 tion of moral life. When we read the maxims of 
 lago, FalstafF, or Hamlet, we are delighted if the 
 thought strikes us as true, but we are not less de- 
 lighted if it strikes us as false. These characters 
 are not presented to us in order to enlarge our 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 193 
 
 capacities of passion nor in order to justify them- 
 selves as processes of redemption; they are there, 
 clothed in poetry and imbedded in plot, to entertain 
 us with their imaginable feelings and their interest- 
 ing errors. The poet, without being especially a 
 philosopher, stands by virtue of his superlative 
 genius on the plane of universal reason, far above 
 the passionate experience which he overlooks and 
 on which he reflects; and he raises us for the 
 moment to his own level, to send us back again, if 
 not better endowed for practical life, at least not 
 unacquainted with speculation. 
 
 With Browning the case is essentially different. 
 When his heroes are blinded by passion and warped 
 by circumstance, as they almost always are, he 
 do es no t d escribe the jac t from the vantage-groun d 
 of the intellect and invite us to look at it from that 
 
 point of view. On the contrary, his art is all self-_ 
 exp ression or satire^ For the most part his her o, 
 like Whitman^s , is himsel f; not appearing, as in 
 the case of the American bard, in puris naturalibuSj 
 but masked in all sorts of historical and romantic 
 finery. Sometimes, however, the personage, like 
 Guido in " The Eing and the Book" or the " frus- 
 trate ghosts " of other poems, is merely a Marsyas, 
 shown flayed and quivering to the greater glory 
 of the poet's ideal Apollo. The impulsive utter- 
 ances and the crudities of most of the speakers 
 are passionately adopted by the poet as his own. 
 
194 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 He th u s peryertsjwhat^might jiave been a trium ph 
 jQf iDia gination jnto.A-faiIu re of reas on. 
 
 This circumstance has much to do with the fact 
 that Browning, in spite of his extraordinary gift 
 for expressing emotion, has hardly produced works 
 purely and unconditionally delightful. _They_not 
 only portraypassio n, which is interesting , but t hey 
 betray it, which is odious. Hi s art was still in th g^ 
 
 servic e^f the will. _ He had ^t^attained, in study- 
 ing the beauty of things, that detachment of the 
 phenomenon, that love of the form for its own sake, 
 which is the secret of contemplative satisfaction. 
 Therefore, the lamentable accidents of his person- 
 ality and opinions, in themselves no worse than 
 those of other mortals, passed into his art. He 
 did not seek to elude them : he had no free specu- 
 lative faculty to dominate them by. Or, to put 
 the same thing differently, he was too much in 
 earnest in his^ctiong^ he_threw himself toqjmrje^ 
 servedly i nto hi s creations^ His imagination, like 
 the imagination we have in dreams, was merely a 
 vent for personal preoccupations. His art was in- 
 spired by purposes Jesssimple and uni versal than 
 the ends of imagination itseTf"~Jiis_play of mind 
 con sequentl Y couldnot be free or pure^,^ The cre- 
 ative impulse could not reach its goal or manifest 
 in any notable degree its own organic ideal. 
 \ We may illustrate these assertions by consider- 
 ing Browning's treatment of the passion of love, 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 195 
 
 a passion to which he gives great prominence and 
 in which he finds the highest significance. 
 
 Love is depicted by Browning with truth, with 
 vehemence, and with the constant conviction that 
 it is the supreme thing in life. The great variety 
 of occasions in which it appears in his pages and 
 the different degrees of elaboration it receives, 
 leave it always of the same quality — th e^ quality 
 of passion. It never sinks into sensuality; in 
 spite of its frequent extreme crudeness, it is al- 
 ways, in Browning's hands, a passion of the im - 
 agination, ib is always love. On the other hand 
 it never rises into contemplation : mingled as it 
 may be with friendship, with religion, or with 
 various forms of natural tenderness, it always 
 remains_a_passion ; it always remains a personal 
 impulse, a hypnotization^ with another person for 
 its object or its cause. Kept within these limits 
 it is represented, in a series of powerful sketches, 
 which are for most readers the gems of the Brown- 
 ing gallery, as the last word of experience, the 
 highest phase of human life. 
 
 " The woman yonder, there's no use in life 
 But just to obtain her ! Heap earth's woes in one 
 And bear them — make a pile of all earth's joys 
 And spurn them, as they help or help not this ; 
 Only, obtain her ! " 
 
 " When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, 
 Either hand 
 
196 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace 
 
 Of my face, 
 Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech 
 
 Each on each. . . . 
 O heart, blood that freezes, blood that burns 1 
 
 Earth's returns 
 For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin — 
 
 Shut them in — 
 With their triumphs and their follies and the rest. 
 
 Love is best." 
 
 In the piece called " In a Gondola " the lady says 
 to her lover: — 
 
 " Heart to heart 
 And lips to lips ! Yet once more, ere we part. 
 Clasp me and make me thine, as mine thou art." 
 
 And he, after being surprised and stabbed in her 
 arms, replies : — 
 
 " It was ordained to be so, sweet ! — and best 
 Comes now, beneath thine eyes, upon thy breast : 
 Still kiss me ! Care not for the cowards ; care 
 Only to put aside thy beauteous hair 
 My blood will hurt ! The Threo I do not scorn 
 To death, because they never lived, but I 
 Have lived indeed, and so — (yet one more kiss) — 
 can die." 
 
 We are not allowed to regard these expressions 
 as the cries of souls blinded by the agony of pas- 
 sion and lust. Browning unmistakably adopts them 
 as expressing his own highest intuitions. He so 
 much admires the strength of this weakness that 
 he does not admit that it is a weakness at all. It 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 197 
 
 is with the stmt of self-satisfaction, with the sen- 
 sation, almost, of muscular Christianity, that he 
 boasts of it through the mouth of one of his heroes, 
 who is explaining to his mistress the motive of his 
 faithful services as a minister of the queen : — 
 
 " She thinks there was more cause 
 In love of power, high fame, pure loyalty ? 
 Perhaps she fancies men wear out their lives 
 Chasing such shades. . . . 
 I worked because I want you with my soul." 
 
 Readers of the fifth chapter of this volume 
 need not be reminded here of the contrast which 
 this method of understanding love offers to that 
 adopted by the real masters of passion and imagi- 
 nation. .T hey began with that crude emotion with 
 which Brow ning ends ; they lived it down^ they 
 exalted it by thought, they extracted the pure gold 
 of it in a long purgation of discipline and suffering. 
 The fierce paroxysm which for him is heaven, was 
 for them the proof that heaven cannot be found on 
 earth, that the value of experience is not in expe- 
 rience itself but in the ideals which it reveals. The 
 
 intense, volumino us emotion , the sudden , over: 
 whelming self -surrender_ Jn which he rests , was for 
 them the starting-point of a life of rational wor- 
 ship, of an austere and impersonal religion, *by 
 which the fire of love, kindled for a moment by the 
 sight of some creature, was put, as it were, into a 
 censer, to burn incense before every image of the 
 
198 POETRY AND BELIGION 
 
 Highest Good. Thus love ceased to be a passion 
 and became the energy of contemplation: it dif- 
 fused over the universe, natural and ideal, that 
 light of tenderness and that faculty of worship 
 which the passion of love often is first to quicken 
 in a man's breast. 
 
 Of this art, recommended by Plato and practised 
 in the Christian Church by all adepts of the spirit- 
 ual life. Browning knew absolutely nothing. About 
 the object of love he had no misgivings. What 
 could the object be except somebody or other ? The ^ 
 importajitt hing was to love intense ly and to love 
 often. .. ^Jleremained in t he phenomenal sphere: 
 he was a lover o f experiencej the ideal did no^ 
 exist for him. No conception could be farther 
 from his thought than the essential conception of 
 any rational philosophy, namely, that feeling is to 
 be treated as raw material for thought, and that 
 the destiny of emotion is to pass into objects which 
 shall contain all its value while losing all its form- 
 lessness. This transfor mation of sense and emo- 
 ti on into objects agreeable t o the intellect , into 
 cle ar ideas and beautiful thin gs, is the natural work 
 ^of^easoa.; when it has been accomplished very im- 
 perfectly, or not at all, we have a^ba£ba£Ous__mind, 
 a mind full of chaotic sensation s, objectless passions, 
 and undigested_ideas. Such a^ aind-J^owning's 
 was, to a degree remar kable in one _withL-aQ-jdch_a^ 
 ^ieritage ©rclvilization. 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 199 
 
 The nineteenth century, as we have already said, <• 
 has nourished the hope of abolishing the past as a 
 force while it studies it as an object; and Brown- 
 ing, with his fondness for a historical stage setting 
 and for the gossip of history, rebelled equally » 
 against the Pagan and the Christian discipline. 
 The " Soul " which he trusted in was the barbarous 
 soul, the " Spontaneous Me " of his half-brother 
 Whitman. It was a restless personal impulse, con- / 
 scions of obscure depths within itself which it fan- ] 
 cied to be infinite, and of a certain vague sympathy 
 with wind and cloud and with the universal muta- I 
 tion. It was the soul that might have animated 
 Attila and Alaric when they came down into Italy, 
 a soul not incurious of the tawdriness and corrup- 
 tion of the strange civilization it beheld, but inca- 
 pable of understanding its original spirit; a soul 
 maintaining in the presence of that noble, unappre- 
 ciated ruin all its own lordliness and energy, and 
 all its native vulgarity. 
 
 Browning, who had not had the education tra- 1 
 ditional in his own country, used to say that Italy ( 
 had been his university. But it was a school for 
 which he was ill prepared, and he did not sit 
 under its best teachers. For the superficial fer- 
 ment, the worldly passions, and the crimes of the 
 Italian Eenaissance he had a keen interest and 
 intelligence. But Italy has been always a civil- 
 ized country, and beneath the trappings and 
 
200 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 suits of civilization which at that particular time 
 it flaunted so gayly^t preserved a civilized hear t 
 to which Browning's insight could never penetrate. 
 There subsisted m the best minds a trained imag- 
 ination and a cogent ideal of virtue. Italy had a 
 religion, and that religion permeated all its life, 
 and was the background without which even its 
 secular art and secular passions would not be truly 
 intelligible. The most commanding and represen- 
 tative, the deepest and most appealing of Italian 
 natures are permeated with this religious inspira- 
 tion. A Saint Francis, a Dante, a Michael Angelo, 
 breathe hardly anything else. Yet for Browning 
 these men and what they represented may be said 
 not to have existed. He saw, he studied, and he 
 painted a decapitated Italy. His vision could not 
 mount so high as her head. 
 
 One of the elements of that higher tradition 
 which Browning was not prepared to imbibe was/ 
 the idealization of love. The passion he repreV 
 sents is lava hot from the crater, in no way mouldedl 
 smelted, or refined. He had no thought of subju4 
 gating impulses into the harmony of reason. He ^ 
 didn ot master life , butwas^mastered by it. Accord:, 
 ingl y the love he describes has no wings; it issues 
 innothing,. His lovers "extinguish sight and 
 speech, each on each " ; sense, as he says elsewhere, 
 drowning soul. The man in the gondola may well 
 boast that he can die ; it is the only thing he can 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 201 
 
 properly do. Death is the only solution of a love. 
 that is tied to its in dividual object and inseparable 
 l^mTEeHloy of passion and illusion within itself. J 
 Brovvning'^sTiero7""Because he has loved intensely, 
 says that he has lived; he would be right, if the 
 significance of life were to be measured by the inten- 
 sity of the feeling it contained, and if intelligence 
 were not the highest form of vitality. But had 
 that hero known how to love better and had he 
 had enough spirit to dominate his love, he might 
 perhaps have been able to carry away the better 
 part of it and to say that lie could not die ; for one 
 half of himself and of his love would have been 
 dead already and the other half would have been 
 eternal, having fed — 
 
 " On death, that feeds on men ; 
 And death once dead, there's no more dying then." 
 
 The irrationality of the passions which Browning 
 glorifies, making them the crown of life , is so ^ross 
 that at times he cannot help perceiving it. 
 
 " How perplexed 
 Grows belief ! Well, this cold clay clod 
 
 Was man's heart : 
 Crumble it, and what comes next ? Is it God? " 
 
 Yes, he will tell us. These passions and follies, 
 however desperate in themselves and however vain 
 for the individual, are excellent as parts of the 
 dispensation of Providence : — 
 
202 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 *'Be hate that fruit or love that fruit, 
 
 It forwards the general deed of man, 
 
 And each of the many helps to recruit 
 
 The life of the race by a general plan, 
 
 Each living his own to boot." 
 
 M 
 
 If we doubt, then, the value of our own expe- 
 rience, even perhaps of our experience of love, we 
 may appeal to the interdependence of goods and 
 evils in the world to assure ourselves that, in 
 view of its consequences elsewhere, this experience 
 was great and important after all. We need not 
 stop to consider this supposed solution, which 
 bristles with contradictions; it would not satisfy 
 Browning himself, if he did not back it up with 
 something more to his purpose ^somethin gnearer 
 to warm an d transitive feeling . The compensation 
 for our defeats, the answer to our doubts, is not 
 to be found merely in a proof of the essential 
 necessity and perfection of the universe; that 
 would be cold comfort, especially to so uncontem- 
 plative a mind. No : that answer, and compensa- 
 tion are to come very soon and very vividly to 
 every private bosom. There is another life, a 
 series of other lives, for this to happen in. Death 
 will come, and — 
 
 "I shall thereupon 
 
 Take rest, ere I be gone 
 Once more on my adventure brave and new, 
 
 Fearless and unperplexed, 
 
 When I wage battle next, 
 What weapons to select, what armour to endue." 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 203 
 
 "For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 
 
 The black minute's at end, 
 And the element's rage, the fiend-voices that rave 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again 
 
 And with God be the rest ! " 
 
 Into this conception of continued life Browning 
 has put, as a collection of further passages might 
 easily show, all the items furnished by fancy or tra- 
 dition which at the moment satisfied his imagination 
 — new adventures, reunion with friends, and even, 
 after a severe strain and for a short while, a little 
 peace and quiet. The gist of the matter is that we 
 are to live indefinitely, that all our faults can be 
 turned to good, all our unfinished business settled, 
 and that therefore there is time for anything we 
 like in this world and for all we need in the other. 
 It is in spirit the direct opposite of the philosophic 
 maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave 
 a finished life and a perfect character behind us. 
 It is the opposite, also, of the religious memento mori, 
 of the warning that the time is short before we go 
 to our account. According to Browning, there is no 
 account: .we have an infinite credit. With an , 
 unconscious and characterist ic mixtura qj hp.ufhp.n 
 instinctwith Christian d octrine, he thinks of the 
 other world as heaven, but of the life to be led 
 there as of the life of Nature. 
 
204 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 Aristotle observes that we do not think the busi- 
 ness of life worthy of the gods, to whom we can 
 only attribute contemplation ; if Browning had had 
 the idea of perfecting and rationalizing this life 
 rather than of continuing it indefinitely, he would 
 have followed Aristotle and the Church in this 
 matter. But he had no idea of anything eternal ; 
 and so he gave, as he would probably have said, 
 a filling to the empty Christian immortality by 
 making e very man busy in it about many thin gs. 
 
 "^ And to t he irrational man, to the boy, it is no 
 unpleasant idea to have an infinite number of days 
 
 ^ to live through, an infinite fi umber of dinners to 
 eat, with an infinity of fresh fights and new love- 
 affairs, andno en d of last rides togeth er. 
 
 But it is a mere euphemism to call jbhis perpet- 
 ^^na1 _va.gra.r> py ^a development of the soul. A devel- 
 opment means the unfolding of a definite nature, 
 the gradual manifestation of a known idea. A 
 series of phases, like the successive leaps of a 
 water-fall, is no development. And Browning has 
 no idea of an intelligible good which the phases of' 
 life might approach and with reference to which 
 they might constitute a progress. His jiotion jg_ 
 simjBJj that the_^;ame__ofJif% th^^x^^ 
 action, is inexhaustible. You may set up your 
 tenpins again after you have bowled them over, 
 and you may keep up the sport for ever. The 
 point is to bring them down as often as pos- 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 205 
 
 sible with a master-stroke and a big bang. That 
 will tend to invigorate in you that s elf-confidence 
 w hich i n this system passe s for faith. But it is 
 unmeaning to call such'aii exercise heaven, or to 
 talk of being " with God " in such a life, in any 
 sense in which we are not with God already and 
 under all circumstances. Our destiny would rather 
 be, as Browning himself expresses it in a phrase 
 which Attila or Alaric might have composed, 
 " bound dizzily to the wheel of change to slake the 
 thirst of God." 
 
 Such an optimism and such a doctrine of immor- 
 tality can give no justification to experience which 
 it does not already have in its detached parts. In- 
 deed, those dogmas arejo ot the basis ^of Browning ^s 
 attitude, not conditions of^ his s atisfaction _ in 
 living, but rather overflo wings o f th at satisf action. 
 The present life is presumably a fair average of the 
 whole series of " adventures brave and new " which 
 fall to each man's share; were it not found de- 
 lightful in itself, there would be no motive for 
 imagining and asserting that it is reproduced in 
 infinitum. So too if we did not think that the evil 
 in experience is actually utilized and visibly swal- 
 lowed up in its good effects, we should hardly 
 venture to think that God could have regarded as 
 a good something which has evil for its condition 
 and which is for that reason profoundly sad and 
 equivocal. But Browning's philosophy of life and 
 
206 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 habit of imagination d o nq t^ require the support_pf 
 ^any^etaphj^kaJjbh^ His temperamentisper- 
 
 fectr^^^elf-sufficient and primary; what doctrines 
 he has are suggestedn5ylt~and^"are too loose to give 
 it more than a hesitant expression ; they are quite 
 powerless to give it any justification which it 
 might lack on its face. 
 
 IW s the te mperament) then, that speaks ; we 
 may brush aside as unsubstantial, and even as dis- 
 torting, the web of arguments and theories which 
 it has spun out of itself. And what does the 
 ^ temperament say? That life is an adventure , not 
 a discipline ; jthat the exercise of energy is the 
 ^ absolute good, irr espective of motives or of conse- 
 quence s^ These are the maxims of a frank bar- 
 barism; nothing could express better the lust of 
 life, the dogged u nwilling ness to learn from experi- 
 
 ence, the contempt for rationality, the carelessness 
 
 \ abou t perfectio n, the admiration for mere force, in 
 
 whi ch barbarism always betrays itself. Thejvague 
 
 religion which seeks to justify this attitude is really 
 
 only another outburst of the same i rrational im pulse^ 
 
 In Browning this religion takes the name of 
 
 Christianity, and identifies itself with one or two 
 
 Christian ideas arbitrarily selected ; but at heart it 
 
 has far more affinity to the worship of Thor or of 
 
 Odin than to the religion of the Cross. The zest^ 
 
 y of life_ becom es a co smic emotion; we lump the 
 
 N whole together and cry, " Hurrah for the Uni- 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 207 
 
 verse!" A faith which is thus a pure matter of 
 lustiness and inebriation rises and falls, attracts or 
 
 repels, with the eBh and flow of the mood from 
 which it springs. It is invincible because unseiz- 
 able ; it is as safe from refutation as it is rebellious 
 to embodiment. But it cannot enlighten or correct 
 the passions on which it feeds. Like a servile 
 priest, it flatters them in the name of Heaven. It 
 cloaks irrationality in sanctimony; a nd its admi - 
 ration^jor e very blu ff folly, ^J)emg_Jhu^_J3istified_ 
 by a theory,Jbecomes a posit ive fanaticism ^ eager 
 to defend^ any^way ward impulse. 
 
 Such barbarism of temper and thought could 
 hardly, in a man of Browning's independence and 
 spontaneity, be without its counterpart in his art. 
 When a man's personal religion is passive, as 
 Shakespeare's seems to have been, and is adopted 
 without question or particular interest from the 
 society around him, we may not observe any an- 
 alogy between it and the free creations of that 
 man's mind. Not so when the religion is cre- 
 ated afresh by the private imagination ; it is then 
 merely one among many personal works of art, 
 and will naturally bear a family likeness to the 
 others. The same individual temperament, with 
 its limitations and its bias, will appear in the art 
 which has appeared in the religion. And such 
 is the case with Browning. His limitations as a 
 poet are the counterpart of his limitations as a 
 
208 POETKY AND llELIGION 
 
 moralist and theologian; only in the poet they 
 
 are not so regrettable. Philosophy and religion 
 
 are nothing if not ultimate; it is their business 
 
 to deal with general principles and final aims. 
 
 ' Now it is in the conception of _things junjamental 
 
 ^ and ultimate that Bro wning is weak; he is strong 
 
 J,n t]ie conception_of things i mmediate . The pulse 
 
 of the emotion, the bobbing up of the thought, the 
 
 streaming of the reverie — these he can note down 
 
 with picturesque force or imagine with admirable 
 
 fecundity. 
 
 Yet the limits of such excellence are narrow, 
 for no man can safely go far without the guidance 
 of reason. His long poems have no structure 
 — for that name cannot be given to the singu- 
 lar mechanical division of " The Eing and the 
 Book.'' Even his short poems have no complet e- 
 ness, no limpidity. They are little torsos made 
 broken so as to stimulate the reader to the resto- 
 ration of their missing legs and arms. What is 
 admirable in them is__pregnancy_of_phra^ yiv^ 
 ne ss of passi on_and sentiment, jieaped-up scraps 
 _of__xibgeryationj^ qccasionulja^hes _of_^^ occar 
 sional beauties ^f _ver sification , — all like 
 
 *' the quick sharp scratch 
 And blue spurt of a lighted match." 
 
 There is never anything largely composed in the 
 spirit of pure beauty, nothing devotedly fiiiished, 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 209 
 
 no thJDg simple and truly just. The poet's min d > 
 cannot r each equilibrium; at best he oscil lates 
 between oppose d extravagan ces ; his ^final "g ord 
 is still a boutade, still an explosion. He has no 
 sustaine d nobility of_style. He affects with the 
 reader a contLdentiaT and vulgar ^nanner^so as to 
 be more sincere and to feel more at home. Even *^ 
 in the poems where the effort at impersonality is ^ 
 most successful, the dramatic disguise is usually 
 thrown off in a preface, epilogue or parenthesis. 
 The author likes to remind us of himself by some 
 confidential wink or genial poke in the ribs, by 
 some little interlarded sneer. We get in these 
 tricks of manner a taste of that essential vul- 
 garity, that indigerence to purity and distincti on, 
 which is latent but pervasive in all the products 
 of this mind. Th^^^^^me ^ disdain of perfection 
 which appears in his ethics appears here in his 
 verse, and impairs its beauty by allowing it to 
 remain too often obscure, affected, and grotesque. 
 Such a correspondence is natural: for the same 
 powers of conception and expression are needed 
 in fiction, which, if turned to reflection, would 
 produce a good philosophy. Jleas pn is necessary 
 to the perception of high beauty. Discipline is 
 indispensable to art. Work from which these -^ 
 qualities are absent must be barbaric ; it can have 
 no ideal form and must appeal to us only through 
 the sensuousness and profusion of its materials. 
 
^ 
 
 210 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 We are invited by it to lapse into a miscellane- 
 ous appreciativeness, into a subservience to every 
 detached impression. And yet, if we would only 
 reflect even on these disordered beauties, we should 
 see that the principle by which they delight us 
 is a principle by which an ideal, an image of per- 
 fection, is inevitably evoked. We can have no 
 pleasure or pain, nor any preference whatsoever, 
 without implicitly -setting up a standard of excel- 
 lence, an ideal of what would satisfy us there. To 
 make these implicit ideals explicit, to catch their 
 hint, to work out their theme, and express clearly 
 to ourselves and to the world what they are de- 
 manding in the place of the actual — that is the 
 labour of reason and the task of genius. The two 
 cannot be divided. ^^Clarification of_ ideas and dis- 
 entanglement of values arenas essential tojesthetic 
 activity as Jp^inteH^i^ence. A failure of r eason is 
 a failure ofa,rt^nd_tastej. 
 
 The limits of Browning^s art, like the limits of 
 Whitman's, can therefore be understood by consid- 
 ering his mental habit. Both poets had powerful 
 imaginations, but the ty^e of their imaginations 
 was loTS^. In Whitman imagination was limited to 
 marshalling sensations in single file ; the embroid- 
 eries he made around that central line were simple 
 and insignificant, ^^is energy was concentrated 
 on that somewhat animal form of contemplation, 
 of which, for the rest, he was a great, perhaps an 
 
6l 
 
 THE POETEY OF BAEBARISM 211 
 
 unequalled master^ Browning rose above that 
 level; with him sensation is usually in the back- 
 ground ; he is not particularly a poet of the senses 
 or of ocular vision. C-Sis favourite subject-matter *» 
 is rather the stream of thought and feeling in ^ ■ — - 
 t he mind ; he is the poet of soliloquy. Nature ,/r^i 
 and life as they really are, rather than as they 
 may appear to the ignorant and passionate partici- 
 pant in them, lie beyond his range. Even in his 
 best dramas, like "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" or 
 " Colombe's Birthday,'' the interest remains in the 
 experience of the several persons as they explain 
 it to us. The same is the case in "The Bing and 
 the Book," the conception of which, in twelve 
 monstrous soliloquies, is a striking evidence of the 
 poet's predilection for this form. 
 
 The method is, to penetrate by sympathy rather ^ 
 than to portray by intelligence . The most authori- 
 tative insight is not the poet's or the spectator's, 
 aroused and enlightened by the spectacle, but the 
 various heroes' own, in their moment of intensest 
 passion. We therefore _miss the tragic relief and 
 exaltation, and come away instead with the uncom- 
 fortable feeling that an obsti nate folly is appar- 
 ently the_mo st glori ous_ and choice w o rthy thing i ii__ 
 jtheworld^ This is evidently the poet's own illusion, 
 and those who do not happen to share it must feel 
 that if life were really as irrational as he thinks 
 it, it would be not only profoundly discouraging, 
 
212 POETRY AKD RELIGION 
 
 which it often is, but profoundly disgusting, which 
 it surely is not; for at least it reveals the ideal 
 which it fails to attain. 
 
 "^ This ideal Browning never disentangles. For 
 ^ him the crude experience is t h e only _ end^ the 
 endless str u^glejthe only ideal, and the perturbed 
 "Soul" the only organon of truth. The arrest 
 of his intelligence at this point, before it has 
 envisaged any rational object, explains the arrest 
 of his dramatic art at soliloquy. His immersion 
 / in the forms of self -consciousness prevents him 
 i from dramatizing the real relations of men and 
 / their thinkings to one another, to Nature, and to 
 destiny. For in order to do so he would have 
 had to view his characters from above (as Cer- 
 vantes did, for instance), and to see them not 
 merely as they appeared to themselves, but as 
 they appear to reason. This higher attitude, how- 
 ever, was not only beyond Browning's scope, it was 
 positively_jiQ6traTy_jto_h^ Had he 
 
 reached it, he would no longer have seen the uni- 
 verse through the "Soul," but through the intel- 
 lect, and he would not have been able to cry, " How 
 the world is made for each one of us ! " On the 
 contrary, the "Soul" would have figured only in 
 its true conditions, in all its ignorance and depend- 
 ence, and also in its essential teachableness, a point 
 against which Browning's barbaric wilfulness par- 
 ticularly rebelled. Rooted in his persuasion that 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 218 
 
 the soul is essentially omnipotent and that to live ^g^ 
 hard can never be to l i ve wrongs he remained fas- 
 cinated by the march and method of self -conscious- 
 ness, and never allowed himself to be weaned from 
 that romantic fatuity by the energy of rational 
 imagination, which prompts us not to regard our 
 ideas as mere filling of a dream, but rather to build 
 on them the conception of permanent objects and 
 overruling principles, such as Nature, society, and 
 the other ideals of reason. A full-grown imagina- 
 tion deals with these things, which do not obey the 
 laws of psychological progression, and cannot be 
 described by the methods of soliloquy. 
 
 We thus see that Browning's sphere, though 
 more subtle and complex than Whitman's, was 
 still elementary. It lay far below the spheres 
 of social and historical reality in which Shake- 
 speare moved; far below the comprehensive and 
 cosmic sphere of every great epic poet. Bro wning 
 did not even reach the intellectual plane of such 
 conte mporary poets as Tennyson and Matthew Ar ^,, 
 nold, who, whatever may be thought of their \ 
 powers ^ did not study consciousness for itself, but 
 for the sake of its meaning and of th e objects 
 jw^h itr evealed. The best things that come 
 into a man's consciousness are the things that take 
 him out of it — the rational things that are independ- 
 ent of his personal perception and of his personal 
 existence. These he approaches with his reason, and 
 
214 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 they, in the same measure, endow him with their 
 immortality. But precisely these things — the 
 /objects of science and of the constructive imagina- 
 ' tion — Browning always saw askance, in the out- 
 skirts of his field of vision, for his eye was fixed 
 J and riveted on the soliloc^uizing Soul. And this 
 Soul being, to his apprehension, irrational, did not 
 give itself over to those permanent objects which 
 might otherwise have occupied it, but ruminated 
 on its own accidental emotions, on its love-affairs, 
 and on its hopes of going on so ruminating for 
 ever. 
 
 The pathology of the human mind — for the 
 normal, too, is pathological when it is not referred 
 to the ideal — the pathology of the human mind 
 is a very interesting subject, demanding great gifts 
 and great ingenuity in its treatment. Browning 
 ministers to this interest, and possesses this in- 
 genuity and these gifts. More than any others 
 poet he keeps a kind of speculation alive in the 
 now large body of sentimental, eager-minded peo- 
 ple, who no longer can find in a definite religion a 
 form and language for their imaginative lif e.( That 
 this service is greatly appreciated speaks well for 
 the ineradicable tendency in man to study himself 
 and his destiny. We do not deny the achievement 
 when we point out its nature and limitations. It 
 does not cease to be something because it is taken 
 to be more than it is. 
 
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM 215 
 
 In every imaginative sphere the nineteenth cen- 
 tury has been an era of chaos, as it has been an era 
 of order and growing organization in the spheres 
 of science and of industry. An ancient doctrine of 
 the philosophers asserts that to chaos the world 
 must ultimately return. And what is perhaps true 
 of the cycles of cosmic change is certainly true of 
 the revolutions of culture. Nothing lasts for ever : 
 languages, arts, and religions disintegrate with time. 
 Yet th e perfecting o f such forms is the only cri- | 
 terion of progress; the destruction of them the ' 
 chief evidence of decay. Perhaps fate intends 
 that we should have, in our imaginative decadence, 
 the consolation of fancying that we are still pro- 
 gressing, and that the disintegration of religion 
 and the arts is bringing us nearer to the proto- 
 plasm of sensation and passion. If energy an d *^ 
 actual ity are all that we care for, chaos is as good 
 as order, and^ barbarism as good as discipline — > 
 bet ter, perhaps, since impulse is not jtheiiJfi&trained. 
 within^^nybou nds of reason or beauty. But if the 
 powers of the human mind are at any time ade- 
 quate to the task of digesting experience, clearness 
 andorder^jnevitably sup ervene. The moulds of 
 thought are imposed uponT^ature, and the convic- 
 tion of a definite truth arises together with the 
 vision of a supreme perfection. It is only at such 
 periods that the human animal vindicates his title 
 of rational. If such an epoch should return, people 
 
216 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 will no doubt retrace our present gropings with 
 interest and see in them gradual approaches to 
 their own achievement. Whitman and Browning 
 might well figure then as representatives of our 
 time. For the merit of being representative can- 
 not be denied them. The min d of our ^ jge^ like^ 
 theirs, is choked with material s, emotional, _an^ 
 inconclusive. They merely_aggravate o ur charac- 
 teristics, and their success with us is ,diia_partly^ 
 
 their own absolute strength an d partly to our 
 common weakness. If once, however, this imagi- 
 native^^weakness could be overcome, and a form 
 found for the crude matter of experience, men 
 might look back from the height of a new religion 
 and a new poetry upon the present troubles of the 
 spirit; and perhaps even these things might then 
 be pleasant to remember. 
 
VIII 
 
 EMEESON 
 
 Those who knew Emerson, or who stood so near 
 to his time and to his circle that they caught some 
 echo of his personal influence, did not judge him 
 merely as a poet or philosopher, nor identify his 
 efficacy with that of his writings. His friends and 
 neighbours, the congregations he preached to in his 
 younger days, the audiences that afterward lis- 
 tened to his lectures, all agreed in a veneration 
 for his person which had nothing to do with their 
 understanding or acceptance of his opinions. They 
 flocked to him and listened to his word, not so 
 much for the sake of its absolute meaning as for 
 the atmosphere of candour, purity, and serenity 
 that hung about it, as about a sort of sacred music. 
 They felt themselves in the presence of a rare and 
 beautiful spirit, who was in communion with a 
 higher world. More than the truth his teaching 
 might express, they valued the sense it gave them 
 of a truth that was inexpressible. They became 
 aware, if we may say so, of the ultrarviolet rays of 
 his spectrum, of the inaudible highest notes of his 
 gamut, too pure and thin for common ears. 
 217 
 
218 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 This effect was by no means due to the possession 
 on the part of Emerson of the secret of the uni- 
 verse, or even of a definite conception of ultimate 
 truth. He was not a prophet who had once for all 
 climbed his Sinai or his Tabor, and having there 
 beheld the transfigured reality, descended again to 
 make authoritative report of it to the world. Far 
 from it. At bottoni he had no doctrine at all.. 
 The deeper he went and the more he tried to 
 grapple with fundamental conceptions, the vaguer 
 and more elusive they became in his hands. Did 
 he know what he meant by Spirit or the "Over- 
 Soul " ? Could he say what he understood by the 
 terms, so constantly on his lips, Nature, Law, God, 
 Benefit, or Beauty? He could not, and the con- 
 sciousness of that incapacity was so lively within 
 him that he never attempted to give articulation to 
 his philosophy. His finer instinct kept him from 
 doing that violence to his inspiration. 
 
 The source of his power lay not in his doctrine, 
 but in his temperament, and the rare quality of his 
 wisdom was due less to his reason than to his imag- 
 ination. Reality eluded him ; he had neither dili- 
 gence nor constancy enough to master and possess 
 it ; but his mind was open to all philosophic influ- 
 ences, from whatever quarter they might blow; the 
 lessons of science and the hints of poetry worked 
 themselves out in him to a free and personal reli- 
 ^**^gion. He differed from the plodding many, not in 
 
EMERSON 219 
 
 knowing things better, but in having more ways of 
 knowing them. His grasp was not particularly 
 firm, he was far from being, like a Plato or an 
 Aristotle, past master in the art and the science 
 of life. But his mind was endowed with unusual 
 plasticity, with unusual spontaneity and liberty of 
 movement — it was a fairyland of thoughts and 
 fancies. He was like a young god making experi- 
 ments in creation : he blotched the work, and 
 always began again on a new and better plan. 
 Every day he said, " Let there be light," and every 
 day the light was new. His sun, like that of 
 Heraclitus, was different every morning. 
 
 What seemed, then, to the more earnest and less 
 critical of his hearers a revelation from above was in 
 truth rather an insurrection from beneath, a shak- 
 ing loose from convention, a disintegration of the 
 normal categories of reason in favour of various im- 
 aginative principles, on which the world might have 
 been built, if it had been built difterently. This gift 
 of revolutionary thinking allowed new aspects, hints 
 of wider laws, premonitions of unthought-of funda- 
 mental unities to spring constantly into view. But 
 such visions were necessarily fleeting, because the 
 human mind had long before settled its grammar, 
 and discovered, after much groping and many 
 defeats, the general forms in which experience will 
 allow itself to be stated. These general forms 
 are the principles of common sense and positive 
 
220 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 science, no less imaginative in their origin than 
 those notions which we now call transcendental, 
 but grown prosaic, like the metaphors of common 
 speech, by dint of repetition. 
 
 Yet authority, even of this rational kind, sat 
 lightly upon Emerson. To reject tradition and 
 think as one might have thought if no man had 
 ever existed before was indeed the aspiration of the 
 Transcendentalists, and although Emerson hardly 
 regarded himself as a member of that school, he 
 largely shared its tendency and passed for its 
 spokesman. Without protesting against tradition, 
 he smilingly eluded it in his thoughts, untamable 
 in their quiet irresponsibility. He fled to his 
 woods or to his ^^ pleached garden," to be the cre- 
 ator of his own worlds in solitude and freedom. 
 No wonder that he brought thence to the tightly 
 conventional minds of his contemporaries a breath 
 as if from paradise. His simplicity in novelty, his 
 profundity, his ingenuous ardour must have seemed 
 to them something heavenly, and they may be ex- 
 cused if they thought they detected inspiration 
 even in his occasional thin paradoxes and guile- 
 less whims. They were stifled with conscience and 
 he brought them a breath of Nature; they were 
 surfeited with shallow controversies and he gave 
 them poetic truth. 
 
 -^Imagination, indeed, is his single theme. As a 
 preacher might under every text enforce the same 
 
EMEESON 221 
 
 lessons of the gospel, so Emerson traces in every 
 sphere the same spiritual laws of experience — 
 compensation, continuity, the self-expression of the 
 Soul in the forms of Nature and of society, until she 
 finally recognizes herself in her own work and sees 
 its beneficence and beauty. His constant refrain 
 is the omnipotence of imaginative thought; its 
 power first to make the world, then to understand 
 it, and finally to rise above it. All Nature is an 
 embodiment of our native fancy, all history a drama 
 in which the innate possibilities of the spirit are 
 enacted and realized. While the conflict of life ] 
 and the shocks of experience seem to bring us face /^ 
 to face with an alien and overwhelming power, re- X 
 flection can humanize and rationalize that power 
 by conceiving its laws; and with this recognition^ 
 of the rationality of all things comes the sense of ) 
 their beauty and order. The destruction which ^ 
 Nature seems to prepare for our special hopes is 
 thus seen to be the victory of our impersonal inter- 
 ests. To awaken in us this spiritual insight, an 
 elevation of mind which is at once an act of com- 
 prehension and of worship, to substitute it for " 
 lower passions and more servile forms of intelli-. 
 gence — that is Emerson's constant effort. All 
 his resources of illustration, observation, and rheto- 
 ric are used to deepen and clarify this sort of 
 wisdom. 
 Such thought is essentially the same that is 
 
222 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 found in the German romantic or idealistic phi- 
 losophers, with whom Emerson's affinity is remark- 
 able, all the more as he seems to have borrowed 
 little or nothing from their works. The critics of 
 human nature, in the eighteenth century, had 
 shown how much men's ideas depend on their pre- 
 dispositions, on the character of their senses and 
 the habits of their intelligence. Seizing upon this 
 thought and exaggerating it, the romantic philoso- 
 phers attributed to the spirit of man the omnipo- 
 tence which had belonged to God, and felt that in 
 this way they were reasserting the supremacy of 
 mind over matter and establishing it upon a safe 
 and rational basis. 
 
 The Germans were great system-makers, and 
 Emerson cannot rival them in the sustained effort 
 of thought by which they sought to reinterpret 
 every sphere of being according to their chosen 
 principles. (^But_he surpassed them in an iustinc- 
 tive sense of what he was deSg;::^ He never rep- 
 resented his poetry as science, nor countenanced 
 the formation of a new sect that should nurse the 
 sense of a private and mysterious illumination, and 
 relight the fagots of passion and prejudice. He 
 never tried to seek out and defend the universal 
 implications of his ideas, and never wrote the book 
 he had once planned on the law of compensation, 
 foreseeing, we may well believe, the sophistries in 
 which he would have been directly involved. He 
 
EMERSON 223 
 
 fortunately preferred a fresh statement on a fresh 
 subject. A suggestion once given, the spirit once 
 aroused to speculation, a glimpse once gained of 
 some ideal harmony, he chose to descend again to 
 common sense and to touch the earth for a moment 
 before another flight. The faculty of idealization 
 was itself what he valued. Philosophy for him 
 was rather a moral energy flowering into sprightli- 
 ness of thought than a body of serious and defen- 
 sible doctrines. In practising transcendental spec- 
 ulation only in this poetic and sporadic fashion, 
 Emerson retained its true value and avoided its 
 greatest danger. He secured the freedom and fer- 
 tility of his thought and did not allow one concep- 
 tion of law or one hint of harmony to sterilize the 
 mind and prevent the subsequent birth within it 
 of other ideas, no less just and imposing than their 
 predecessors. For we are not dealing at all in such 
 a philosophy with matters of fact or with such 
 verifiable truths as exclude their opposites. We 
 are dealing only with imagination, with the art of 
 conception, and with the various forms in which 
 reflection, like a poet, may compose and recompose 
 human experience. 
 
 A certain disquiet mingled, however, in the minds 
 of Emerson's contemporaries with the admiration 
 they felt for his purity and genius. They saw that he 
 had forsaken the doctrines of the Church; and they 
 were not sure whether he held quite unequivocally 
 
224 POETEY AND RELIGION 
 
 any doctrine whatever. We may not all of us share 
 the concern for orthodoxy which usually caused 
 this puzzled alarm : we may understand that it was 
 not Emerson's vocation to be definite and dogmatic 
 in religion any more than in philosophy. Yet that 
 disquiet will not, even for us, wholly disappear. 
 It is produced by a defect which naturally accom- 
 panies imagination in all but the greatest minds. 
 I mean disorganization, v^naerson not only con- 
 ceived things in new ways, but he seemed to think 
 the new ways might cancel and supersede the old) 
 His imagination was to invalidate the understand- 
 ing. That inspiration which should come to fulfil 
 seemed too often to come to destroy. If he was able 
 so constantly to stimulate us to fresh thoughts, was 
 it not because he demolished the labour of long 
 ages of reflection ? Was not the startling effect of 
 much of his writing due to its contradiction to tra- 
 dition and to common sense ? 
 
 So long as he is a poet and in the enjoyment of 
 his poetic license, we can blame this play of mind 
 only by a misunderstanding. It is possible to 
 think otherwise than as common sense thinks; 
 there are other categories beside those of science. 
 When we employ them we enlarge our lives. We 
 add to the world of fact any number of worlds of 
 the imagination in which human nature and the 
 eternal relations of ideas may be nobly expressed. 
 So far our imaginative fertility is only a benefit : 
 
EMERSON 225 
 
 it surrounds us with the congenial and necessary- 
 radiation of art and religion. It manifests our 
 moral vitality in the bosom of Nature. 
 
 But sometimes imagination invades the sphere of 
 understanding and seems to discredit its indispensa- 
 ble work. Common sense, we are allowed to infer, 
 is a shallow affair: true insight changes all that. 
 When so applied, poetic activity is not an unmixed 
 good. It loosens our hold on fact and confuses our^ 
 intelligence, so that we forget that intelligence has 
 itself every prerogative of imagination, and has 
 besides the sanction of practical validity. We" 
 are made to believe that since the understanding 
 is something human and conditioned, something 
 which might have been different, as the senses 
 might have been different, and which we may yet, 
 so to speak, get behind — therefore the understand- 
 ing ought to be abandoned. We long for higher 
 faculties, neglecting those we have, we yearn for 
 intuition, closing our eyes upon experience. We 
 become mystical. 
 
 Mysticism, as we have said, is the surrender of a 
 category of thought because we divine its relativity. 
 As every new category, however, must share this 
 reproach, the mystic is obliged in the end to give 
 them all up, the poetic and moral categories no 
 less than the physical, so that the end of his 
 purification is the atrophy of his whole nature, 
 the emptying of his whole heart and mind to make 
 Q 
 
226 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 room, as he thinks, for God. By attacking the 
 authority of the understanding as the organon of 
 knowledge, by substituting itself for it as the 
 herald of a deeper truth, the imagination thus 
 prepares its own destruction. For if the under- 
 standing is rejected because it cannot grasp the 
 absolute, the imagination and all its works — art, 
 dogma, worship — must presently be rejected for 
 the same reason. Common sense and poetry must 
 both go by the board, and conscience must follow 
 after : for all these are human and relative. Mys- 
 ticism will be satisfied only with the absolute, and 
 as the absolute, by its very definition, is not repre- 
 sen table by any specific faculty, it must be ap- 
 proached through the abandonment of all. The 
 lights of life must be extinguished that the light of 
 the absolute may shine, and the possession of every- 
 thing in general must be secured by the surrender 
 of everything in particular. 
 
 The same diffidence, however, the same constant 
 renewal of sincerity which kept Emerson's flights 
 of imagination near to experience, kept his mys- 
 ticism also within bounds. A certain mystical 
 tendency is pervasive with him, but there are only 
 one or two subjects on which he dwells with enough 
 constancy and energy of attention to make his mys- 
 tical treatment of them pronounced. One of these 
 is the question of the unity of all minds in the 
 single soul of the universe, which is the same in all 
 
EMERSON 227 
 
 creatures ; another is the question of evil and of its 
 evaporation in the universal harmony of things. 
 Both these ideas suggest themselves at certain 
 turns in every man's experience, and might receive 
 a rational formulation. But they are intricate sub- 
 jects, obscured by many emotional prejudices, so 
 that the labour, impartiality, and precision which 
 would be needed to elucidate them are to be looked 
 for in scholastic rather than in inspired thinkers, 
 and in Emerson least of all. Before these prob- 
 lems he is alternately ingenuous and rhapsodical, 
 and in both moods equally helpless. Individuals 
 no doubt exist, he says to himself. But, ah ! Na- 
 poleon is in every schoolboy. In every squatter 
 in the western prairies we shall find an owner — 
 
 " Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, 
 Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain." 
 
 But how? we may ask. Potentially? Is it be- 
 cause any mind, were it given the right body and 
 the right experience, were it made over, in a word, 
 into another mind, would resemble that other mind 
 to the point of identity ? Or is it that our souls 
 are already so largely similar that we are subject 
 to many kindred promptings and share many ideals 
 unrealizable in our particular circumstances ? But 
 then we should simply be saying that if what 
 makes men different were removed, men would be 
 indistinguishable, or that, in so far as they are now 
 
228 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 alike, they can understand one another by summon- 
 ing up their respective experiences in the fancy. 
 There would be no mysticism in that, but at the 
 same time, alas, no eloquence, no paradox, and, if 
 we must say the word, no nonsense. 
 
 On the question of evil, Emerson's position is of 
 J^e same kind. There is evil, of course, he tells us. 
 Experience is sad. There is a crack in everything 
 that God has made. But, ah! the laws of the 
 universe are sacred and beneficent. Without them 
 nothing good could arise. All things, then, are in 
 their right places and the universe is perfect above 
 our querulous tears. Perfect ? we may ask. But 
 perfect from what point of view, in reference to 
 what ideal ? To its own ? To that of a man who 
 renouncing himself and all naturally dear to him, 
 ignoring the injustice, suffering, and impotence in 
 the world, allows his will and his conscience to be 
 hypnotized by the spectacle of a necessary evolu- 
 tion, and lulled into cruelty by the pomp and music 
 of a tragic show? In that case the evil is not 
 explained, it is forgotten ; it is not cured, but con- 
 doned. We have surrendered the category of the 
 better and the worse, the deepest foundation of 
 life and reason ; we have become mystics on the 
 one subject on which, above all others, we ought to 
 be men. 
 
 Two forces may be said to have carried Emerson 
 in this mystical direction; one, that freedom of 
 
EMERSON 229 
 
 his imagination whicli we have already noted, and 
 which kept him from the fear of self-contradiction ; 
 the other the habit of worship inherited from his 
 clerical ancestors and enforced by his religious edu- 
 cation. The spirit of conformity, the unction, the 
 loyalty even unto death inspired by the religion of 
 Jehovah, were dispositions acquired by too long a 
 discipline and rooted in too many forms of speech, 
 of thought, and of worship for a man like Emerson, 
 who had felt their full force, ever to be able to lose 
 them. The evolutions of his abstract opinions left 
 that habit unchanged. Unless we keep this cir- 
 cumstance in mind, we shall not be able to under- 
 stand the kind of elation and sacred joy, so charac- 
 teristic of his eloquence, with which he propounds 
 laws of Nature and aspects of experience which, 
 viewed in themselves, afford but an equivocal 
 support to moral enthusiasm. An optimism so 
 persistent and unclouded as his will seem at vari- 
 ance with the description he himself gives of human 
 life, a description coloured by a poetic idealism, 
 but hardly by an optimistic bias. 
 
 We must remember, therefore, that this opti- 
 mism is a pious tradition, originally justified by 
 the belief in a personal God and in a providential 
 government of affairs for the ultimate and positive 
 good of the elect, and that the habit of worship 
 survived in Emerson as an instinct after those posi- 
 tive beliefs had faded into a recognition of " spirit- 
 
280 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ual laws." We must remember that Calvinism had 
 known how to combine an awestruck devotion to 
 the Supreme Being with no very roseate picture 
 of the destinies of mankind, and for more than 
 two hundred years had been breeding in the stock 
 from which Emerson came a willingness to be, as 
 the phrase is, " damned for the glory of God." 
 
 What wonder, then, that when, for the former in- 
 exorable dispensation of Providence, Emerson sub- 
 stituted his general spiritual and natural laws, he 
 should not have felt the spirit of worship fail within 
 him ? On the contrary, his thought moved in the 
 presence of moral harmonies which seemed to him 
 truer, more beautiful, and more beneficent than 
 those of the old theology. An independent philos- 
 opher would not have seen in those harmonies an 
 object of worship or a sufRcient basis for optimism. 
 But he was not an independent philosopher, in spite 
 of his belief in independence. He inherited the 
 problems and the preoccupations of the theology 
 from which he started, being in this respect like 
 the German idealists, who, with all their pretence of 
 absolute metaphysics, were in reality only giving 
 elusive and abstract forms to traditional theology. 
 Emerson, too, was not primarily a philosopher, 
 but a Puritan mystic with a poetic fancy and a 
 gift for observation and epigram, and he saw in the 
 laws of IS'ature, idealized by his imagination, only 
 a more intelligible form of the divinity he had 
 
EMERSON 281 
 
 always recognized and adored. His was not a" 
 philosophy passing into a religion, but a religion 
 expressing itself as a philosophy and veiled, as at 
 its setting it descended the heavens, in various tints 
 of poetry and science. 
 
 If we ask ourselves what was Emerson's relation 
 to the scientific and religious movements of his 
 time, and what place he may claim in the history 
 of opinion, we must answer that he belonged very 
 little to the past, very little to the present, and 
 almost wholly to that abstract sphere into which 
 mystical or philosophic aspiration has carried a 
 few men in all ages. The religious tradition in 
 which he was reared was that of Puritanism, but 
 of a Puritanism which, retaining its moral intensity 
 and metaphysical abstraction, had minimized its 
 doctrinal expression and become Unitarian. Emer- 
 son was indeed the Psyche of Puritanism, "the 
 latest-born and fairest vision far" of all that 
 "faded hierarchy." A Puritan whose reli^^oji 
 wag^jJLlpoetry, a^et whose only "pleasure._j8s:as 
 thought, he showed in his life and personality the 
 meagreness, the constraint, the frigid and conscious 
 consecration which belonged to his clerical ances- 
 tors, while his inmost impersonal spirit ranged 
 abroad over the fields of history and Nature, 
 gathering what ideas it might, and singing its little 
 snatches of inspired song. 
 
 The traditional element was thus rather an ex- 
 
232 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ternal and unessential contribution to Emerson's 
 mind ; lie had tlie professional tinge, the decorum, 
 the distinction of an old-fashioned divine ; he had 
 also the habit of writing sermons, and he had the 
 national pride and hope of a religious people that 
 felt itself providentially chosen to establish a free 
 and godly commonwealth in a new world. For 
 the rest, he separated himself from the ancient 
 creed of the community with a sense rather of 
 relief than of regret. A literal belief in Christian 
 doctrines repelled him as unspiritual, as manifest- 
 ing no understanding of the meaning which, as 
 allegories, those doctrines might have to a philo- 
 sophic and poetical spirit. Although as a clergy- 
 man he was at first in the habit of referring to 
 the Bible and its lessons as to a supreme authority, 
 he had no instinctive sympathy with the inspira- 
 tion of either the Old or the New Testament; in 
 Hafiz or Plutarch, in Plato or Shakespeare, he 
 found more congenial stuff. 
 
 While he thus preferred to withdraw, without 
 rancour and without contempt, from the ancient 
 fellowship of the church, he assumed an attitude 
 hardly less cool and deprecatory toward the en- 
 thusiasms of the new era. The national ideal of 
 democracy and freedom had his entire sympathy ; 
 he allowed himself to be drawn into the movement 
 against slavery; he took a curious and smiling 
 interest in the discoveries of natural science and 
 
EMERSON 233 
 
 in the material progress of the age. But he could 
 go no farther. His contemplative nature, his reli- 
 gious training, his dispersed reading, made him 
 stand aside from the life of the world, even while 
 he studied it with benevolent attention. His heart 
 was fixed on eternal things, and he was in no 
 sense a prophet /for his age or country. He be- 
 longed by nat;are to that mystical company of 
 devout souls that recognize no particular home 
 and are dispersed throughout history, although 
 not without intercommunication. He felt his 
 affinity to the Hindoos and the Persians, to the 
 Platonists and the Stoics. Like them he re- 
 mains " a friend and aider of those who would 
 live in the spirit." If not a star of the first 
 magnitude, he is certainly a fixed star in the 
 firmament of philosophy. Alone as yet among 
 Americans, he may be said to have won a place 
 there, if not by the originality of his thought, at 
 least by the originality and beauty of the expres- 
 sion he gave to thoughts that are old and imperish- 
 able. 
 
IX 
 
 A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION 
 
 Man has henceforth this cause of pride : that he has he- 
 thought himself of justice in a universe without justice^ and 
 has put justice there. — Jean Lahor. 
 
 The break-up of traditional systems and the 
 disappearance of a recognized authority from the 
 religious world have naturally led to many at- 
 tempts at philosophic reconstruction. Most of 
 these are timid compromises, which leave first 
 principles untouched and contain in a veiled form 
 all the old contradictions. Others are advertise- 
 ments of some personal notion, some fresh discov- 
 ery, proposed as a panacea and as an equivalent 
 for all the heritage of human wisdom. A few 
 thinkers, however, inspired by more comprehen- 
 sive sympathies, and at the same time free from 
 preconceptions, have come nearer to the funda- 
 mental elements of the problem and have given 
 out suggestions which, even if not satisfactory in 
 their actual form, are helpful and interesting in 
 their tendency. Such a thinker is the contempo- 
 rary French poet, Jean Lahor, who, in a volume 
 234 
 
A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION 235 
 
 of thoughts entitled " La gloire du ndant," has gath- 
 ered together three philosophical points of view, 
 we might almost say three religions, and combined 
 their issues in a way which may now seem again 
 new, but which in reality is as old as wisdom. 
 
 The form is literary and the outcome in a sense 
 negative; there is no attempt to put new wine 
 into old bottles, no apologetic tone, no unction. 
 Experience is consulted afresh, withoiit preoccu- 
 pation as to the results of reflection ; and if these 
 results are religious, it is because any reasoned 
 appreciation of life is bound to be a religion, even 
 if no conventionally religious elements are im- 
 ported into the problem. In fact, those prophets 
 who have said that the Sabbath was made for man 
 and who have given moral functions to historical 
 religion, as well as those philosophers who have 
 best understood its nature, have seemed irreligious 
 to their contemporaries, because they have looked 
 upon religion as an interpretation of reality, not 
 as a quasi-real ity existing by itself and vouched 
 for merely by tradition and miracle. Eeligion is 
 axi imaginative echo of things natural and moral : 
 and if this echo is to be well attuned, our ear 
 must first be attentive to the natural sounds of 
 which, in religion, we are to develop the har- 
 mony. 
 
 It is, therefore, not an objection to Jean Labor's 
 competence to gather for us the elements of a 
 
236 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 religion that lie is a poet rather than a theologian 
 and an observer rather than a philosopher, or that 
 he presents his intuitions without technical ap- 
 paratus in a series of highly coloured epigrams 
 and little pictures. On the contrary, such sim- 
 plicity and directness are an advantage when, as 
 in this case, the guiding inspiration is religious. 
 It is religious because, on the one hand, it is im- 
 aginative; we are asking ourselves everywhere 
 what Nature says to us and what we are to say 
 in reply; and on the other hand, because it is 
 rational, and these messages and reactions are to be 
 unified into a single science and a single morality. 
 The logical scheme of the system is not made ex- 
 plicit : there is no argumentation and no answers are 
 offered to the objections that might naturally sug- 
 gest themselves. But the sayings are so arranged 
 and made so to progress in tone and subject that 
 a system of philosophy is clearly implied in them ; 
 and the essence of this system is at times briefly 
 expressed. 
 
 All, as it behooves a poet, is the transcript 
 of personal experience. We must not look for 
 the inclusion of elements, however important in 
 themselves, which the author has not found in 
 his own life. The omissions are in this case 
 as characteristic as the inclusions. We look 
 in vain, for instance, for any appreciation of 
 Christianity or of all that side of human nature 
 
A EELiaiON OF DISILLUSION 237 
 
 and experience on which faith in Christianity 
 rests; we hear nothing of love and its ideal sug- 
 gestions, nothing of the aspiration to immortal- 
 ity, nothing of the whole transcendental attitude 
 toward experience. These are grave omissions. 
 They may seem to condemn Jean Lahor, if not as 
 a general philosopher, at least as a representative 
 of an age in which religious thought has so largely 
 centred about these very questions. But our cen- 
 tury has been an age of confusion; and a man 
 who at its end wishes to attain some coherence of 
 life and mind, must begin by letting drop much 
 that the age has held in solution. It is by not 
 being an average that a man may become a guide. 
 Only by manifesting the direction of change and 
 embodying that change in his own person can he 
 be a sign of progress. It remains for time to 
 show whether what survives in a given man has 
 fortune on its side and contains the inward ele- 
 ments of vitality. The presumption in this case, 
 when we abstract from our personal prejudices, 
 will seem to be wholly in favour of our author. 
 
 The three influences to which he has yielded 
 and which have moulded his mind are the pan- 
 theism of the Hindoos, our contemporary natural 
 science, and the ideal of Greek civilization. These "^ 
 three elements might at first sight seem incongru- 
 ous, and the principle of selection by which they are 
 preferred above all others might seem as hard to 
 
 V 
 
238 POETBY AND RELIGION 
 
 find as the principle of union by which they are to 
 be welded into one philosophy. But a little study 
 of these maxims and of the autobiographical sketch 
 which precedes them will, I think, enable us to 
 discover both the principles we miss. The selec- 
 tion of the three influences in question is due to the 
 poetical temperament and scientific tastes of the 
 author, to an individual disposition and to studies 
 which drew him successively to these different 
 sources of instruction. The principle of synthesis, 
 or rather, we should perhaps say, of subordination, 
 by which these various habits of thought are com- 
 bined in one philosophy, is a moral principle. It 
 is a native power to conceive the ideal and a native 
 loyalty to the ideal when once conceived. This 
 moral enthusiasm is in no sense vapid or sentimen- 
 tal; it hardly comes to the surface in any direct 
 or enthusiastic expression ; but it is betrayed and 
 proved to be sincere, now by a passionate pessi- 
 mism about the natural world, now in detailed and 
 practical demands for a better state of society. A 
 genial individuality and a well-reasoned form of 
 pessimism are, then, the two factors in the devel- 
 opment of this interesting thinker, the two keys 
 to the apparently contradictory affinities of his 
 mind. 
 
 Our author, as we have said, is a poet, and even 
 if his verses seem at times a little thin and rhetori- 
 cal, they prove abundantly what is evident also in 
 
A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION 239 
 
 his prose, namely, that he has keen sensations, that 
 images impress themselves upon him with force, 
 and that any scene whose elements are gorgeous 
 and picturesque or which is weighted with tragic 
 emotion, holds his attention and awakens in him 
 the impulse to literary expression. But this plastic 
 impulse is not powerful, or finds in the environ- 
 ment insufficient support. Great art and great 
 creative achievements are rare in the world, and 
 come for the most part only in those moments and 
 in those places where an unusual concentration of 
 mental energy and the friction of many kindred 
 minds allow the scattered sparks of inspiration to 
 merge and to leap into flame. We need not 
 wonder, therefore, that the aesthetic sensibility of 
 our author is greater than his artistic success. Of 
 which of our contemporaries might we not say the 
 same thing? Jean Lahor's attention is analytic;, 
 he is absorbed by his model, he does not absorb it 
 and master it by his art. He has not enough vigour 
 and determination of thought to create eternal 
 forms out of the swift hints of perception. He 
 watches rather passively the flight of his ideas, 
 conscious of their vivacity, of their beauty, but 
 most of all, alas ! of their flight. His last word as 
 an observer, his laessage as a poet is that aH 
 things are illusion. They fade, they pass into one 
 another, the place thereof knows them no more. 
 Nothing of them remains, absolutely nothing, save 
 
240 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 the universal indeterminate force that breeds and 
 devours them perpetually. 
 
 A mind thus gifted and thus limited would natu- 
 rally feel its affinity to Oriental pantheism as soon 
 as that phase of thought and feeling came within 
 the radius of its vision. Jean Lahor seems early 
 to have felt an attraction toward the speculation 
 of the East, and his prolonged study of that litera- 
 ture could of course only intensify the natural bent 
 of his mind, and give his thought a more pro- 
 nounced pantheistic colouring. Had he been wholly 
 absorbed, however, in such mystical contemplation, 
 we should have had little to study in him that was 
 new ; only one more case of sensibility and fancy 
 overpowering a timid intellect, one more gifted 
 nature arrested at the stage of bewilderment. 
 
 But as Jean Lahor is only a pseudonym for the 
 man, so the sympathy with India which that name 
 indicates is only one phase of the thinker. Our 
 poet pursued the study of medicine ; he realized in 
 the concrete the orderly complexities of natural law 
 and the sordid realities of human life. The vague, 
 sensuous enthusiasm with which he had followed 
 the flux of images in his fancy was now sobered by 
 an accurate knowledge of the miseries, the defeats, 
 the shames that lie beneath. His poetic sense of 
 illusion was deepened into a moral sense of wrong. 
 The same keenness of perception, the same power of 
 graphic expression, which had made him dwell on 
 
A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION 241 
 
 the luxuriance of Nature now made liim paint the 
 irony and brutality of life. There is here and there 
 a touch of bitterness and exaggeration in the satire, 
 as if the man of science felt a personal resentment 
 against a world that had so cheated the poet. 
 
 Yet the two descriptions are far from inconsist- 
 ent; we have merely learned to understand as a 
 process and to conceive as an inner experience what 
 before we had admired as a spectacle. A scien- 
 tific view has come to give definition and coherence 
 to phenomena which a poetical pantheism merely 
 saluted as they passed and disappeared into the 
 primordial darkness, or, if you like, into the pri- 
 mordial light. The two systems differ in tone and 
 in method, but not in result. Natural science, like 
 pantheism, presents ns with a universal flux, in 
 which something, we known not what, moves, we 
 know not why, we know not whither. The method 
 of this transformation may be more or less accu- 
 rately described, the general sense of continuity 
 and necessity may find a more or less specific ex- 
 pression in the various fields of experience ; yet the 
 outcome is still the same whirligig. We find our- 
 selves in either case confronted by the same gloire 
 du n4ant, by a nothing that lives and that is beauti- 
 ful in its nothingness. 
 y^These two elements in Jean Labor's philosophy, 
 V the Oriental and the scientific, would thus tend alike 
 ( to represent man with his intelligence as the pro- 
 
242 t»OETRy AND RELIGION 
 
 duct and the captive of an irrational engine called 
 the universe. Many a man accepts this solution 
 and reconciles himself as best he can to the truth 
 as it appears to him. What is there, he may say, 
 so dreadful in mutability ? What so intolerable in 
 ultimate ignorance? We know what we need to 
 know, and things last, perhaps, as long as they 
 deserve to last. So, once convinced that his 
 naturalistic philosophy is final, a man will silence 
 the demands of his own reason and call them chi- 
 merical. There is nothing to which men, while they 
 have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. 
 They will put up with present suffering, with the 
 certainty of death, with solitude, with shame, with 
 wrong, with the expectation of eternal damnation. 
 In the face of such things, they can not only be 
 happy for the moment, but solemnly thank God 
 for having brought them into existence. Habit 
 is stronger than reason, and the respect for fact 
 stronger than the respect for the ideal ; nor would 
 the ideal and reason ever prevail did they not make 
 up in persistence what they lack in momentary 
 energy. 
 
 It would have been easy, therefore, for Jean 
 Labor, as for the rest of us, to remain in the 
 naturalistic world, had he had only poetical intui- 
 tion, or only scientific training, or only both. But 
 there was also in him a third and a moral element, 
 an impulse toward ideal creation, a spark of Prome- 
 
( nNTVEHSTTT / 
 A RELIGION OF DISILLITSION 243 
 
 thean fire. He felt a genuine admiration for that 
 humane courage which made the Greeks, for all 
 their clear consciousness of fate, hopeful without 
 illusions and independent without rebellion. In 
 the bosom of the intractable infinite he still dis- 
 tinguished the work of human reason — the cosmos 
 of society, character, and art — like a Noah's ark 
 floating in the Deluge. His imagination had suc- 
 cumbed to the dream of sense; his art had not 
 attempted the task of imposing a meaning or an 
 immortal form upon Nature: but his conscience 
 and his political instinct had held out against the 
 fascinations of Maya. The Greek asserted himself 
 here against the barbarian, the moralist against the 
 naturalist. Nor was this a merely accidental addi- 
 tion or an inconsistency. It was the explicit ex- 
 pression of that creative reason which had all along 
 chafed under the dominion of brute fact and of 
 perpetual illusion. The same moral energy which 
 had made him a pessimist in the presence of Nature 
 made him an idealist at the threshold of life. 
 
 For why should the natural world ever come to 
 be called a world of illusion? To call the vivid 
 objects of sense illusory is to compare them to 
 their disadvantage with something else which we 
 conceive as more worthy of the title of reality. 
 This deeper reality must be something ideal, some- 
 thing permanent, something conceived by the in- 
 tellect, and which only a man having faith in the 
 
244 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 intellect could prefer to the objects of sense or 
 fancy. The Hindoos that our author thinks so 
 much akin to himself would hardly understand 
 this rational bias of his thought, this foregone 
 dissatisfaction with a world of infinite change and 
 indefinite structure. They would accept as a natu- 
 ral fact that perpetual flux which he emphasizes 
 as a paradox and laments as a calamity. In spite 
 of his studied immersion in sensuous illusion, he 
 is still a native of the sphere of intelligible things, 
 and it is only the difficulty of finding the perma- 
 nent beings which he is inclined to look for and 
 in the presence of which he could alone rest, that 
 makes him linger with tragic self-consciousness 
 in the region of fleeting shadows. Accordingly we 
 need not be surprised by the somewhat forced and 
 pessimistic note of a pantheism which is really 
 exotic, and we may be prepared to find the plastic 
 mind asserting itself ultimately against that sys- 
 tem. So Jean Labor, after the groups of thoughts 
 which he puts under the title of "L'orient" and 
 " Le ciel du Nord," adds another group under the 
 title of " Cosmos." 
 
 It would require a philosophical treatise of 
 greater pretentions than the little book before 
 us to explain fully how this cosmos can arise out 
 of the chaos of mechanical forces, and how the 
 life and the work of reason can be superposed 
 upon the life of sense and imagination. Our 
 
A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION 245 
 
 author's vision, fixed as it is on concrete images 
 and expressed in detached epigrams, does not 
 always extend to the philosophical relations of 
 his thoughts. Yet he offers, perhaps uncon- 
 sciously, an admirable variation of that revolu- 
 tion of thought which is associated with the name 
 of Kant. He proposes to us as the work of human 
 intelligence what is commonly believed to be the 
 work of God. The universe, apart from us, is a 
 chaos, but it may be made a cosmos by our efforts 
 and in our own minds. The laws of events, apart 
 from us, are inhuman and irrational, but in the 
 sphere of human activity they may be dominated 
 by reason. We are a part of the blind energy 
 behind Nature, but by virtue of that energy we im- 
 pose our purposes on the part of Nature which we 
 constitute or control. We can turn from the 
 stupefying contemplation of an alien universe to 
 the building of our own house, knowing that, alien 
 as it is, that universe has chanced to blow its 
 energy also into our will and to allow itself to 
 be partially dominated by our intelligence. Our 
 mere existence and the modicum of success we 
 have attained in society, science, and art are the 
 living proofs of this human power. The exercise 
 of this power is the task appointed for us by the 
 indomitable promptings of our own spirit, a task 
 in which we need not labour without hope. 
 
 For as the various plants and animals have 
 
246 POETKY AND RELIGION 
 
 found foothold and room to grow, maintaining for 
 long periods the life congenial to them, so the 
 human race may be able to achieve something like 
 its perfection and its ideal, maintaining for an 
 indefinite time all that it values, not by virtue of 
 an alleged intentional protection of Providence, 
 but by its own watchful art and exceptional good 
 fortune. The ideal is itself a function of the 
 reality and cannot therefore be altogether out of 
 harmony with the conditions of its own birth 
 and persistence. Civilization is precarious, but 
 it need not be short-lived. Its inception is already 
 a proof that there exists an equilibrium of forces 
 which is favourable to its existence; and there 
 is no reason to suppose this equilibrium to be less 
 stable than that which keeps the planets revolving 
 in their orbits. There is no impossibility, there- 
 fore, in the hope that the human will may have 
 time to understand itself, and, having understood 
 itself, to realize the objects of its rational desire. 
 
 We see that the " Cosmos '^ here invoked is 
 not inconsistent with the "Nothingness'' before 
 described. It is a triumph amid illusions, an order 
 within c];iaos, la gloire du n4ant. This hint of a 
 reconciliation between the practical optimism nat- 
 ural to an active being, and the speculative pes- 
 simism inevitable to an intelligent one, is happier 
 than the muddled solutions of the same problem 
 with which current philosophies have made us fa- 
 
A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION 247 
 
 miliar. The philosophy suggested by Jean Lahor') 
 is that of Spinoza, if we subtract from the lattery 
 its mystical optimism, and add a broad appreciarN 
 tion of human culture. Man cannot attain his 
 happiness by conforming to that which is hostile 
 to himself; he can thus attain only his dissolu- 
 tion. But by using what is hostile to himself for 
 his own ends, as far as his energy extends, he can 
 make an oasis for himself in Nature, and being at 
 peace with himself, be at peace also with her. 
 
 Such a view has some relation to the real condi- 
 tions of human life and progress. What is called 
 the higher optimism, on the contrary, commonly 
 consists in recounting all the evils of existence 
 with a radiant countenance, and telling us that 
 they are all divine ministers of some glorious con- 
 summation ; but what this consummation is never 
 appears, and we are reduced in practice to a mere 
 glorification of impulse. We are simply invited 
 to accept the conditions of life as they are, and 
 to find in incidental successes a compensation for 
 incidental or — as we should say if we were sin- 
 cere — for essential failures. Such an optimism 
 impairs by a kind of philosophic Nature-worship 
 that moral loyalty which consists in giving the 
 highest honour to the highest, not to the strongest, 
 things. It substitutes, as pantheism must, the 
 study of tendencies for the study of ends, and the 
 dignity of success for the dignity of justice. 
 
248 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 This moral confusion our author avoids by his 
 greater sincerity. He has understood how funda- 
 mentally that man is a dupe who does not begin by 
 settling his accounts with Despair. There is no 
 safety in lies ; there is no safety even in " postu- 
 lates." Let the worst of the truth appear, and 
 when it has once seen the light, let it not be im- 
 mediately wrapped up again in the swaddling 
 clothes of an equivocal rhetoric. In such a dis- 
 ingenuous course there is both temerity and cow- 
 ardice : temerity in throwing away the opportunity, 
 always afforded by the recognition of fact, of culti- 
 vating the real faculties of human nature ; coward- 
 ice in not being willing to face with patience and 
 dignity the situation in which fate appears to have 
 put us. That Nature is immense, that her laws 
 are mechanical, that the existence and well-being 
 of man upon earth are, from the point of view of 
 the universe, an indifferent incident, — all this is 
 in the first place to be clearly recognized. It is 
 the lesson which both poetic contemplation and 
 practical science had taught Jean Labor. 
 
 Had he stopped to subject his opinion to meta- 
 physical criticism, he would not, I think, have found 
 reason to change it. To subjectify the universe is 
 not to improve it, much less to dissolve it. The 
 space I call my idea has all the properties of the 
 space I called my environment; it has the same inev- 
 itable presence and the same fundamental validity. 
 
A RELIGION OP DISILLUSION 249 
 
 Because it is a law of our intelligence that two and 
 two make four, and the implications of that law 
 may be traced by abstract thought, the world 
 which is subject to that arithmetical principle is 
 not made more amenable to our higher demands 
 than if it had been arithmetical of its own sweet 
 will. It is not made docile by being called our 
 creature. Indeed, what is less docile to us than 
 ourselves ? what less subject to our correction than 
 the foundations of our own being? So when the 
 Kantian philosophy teaches us to look upon the 
 enveloping universe as a figment of the under- 
 standing and on its laws as results of mental 
 synthesis and inference, we are still pursued by 
 the inevitable presence of that figment and con- 
 fronted involuntarily by that result. Nay, the 
 conditions of our thought, like the predispositions 
 of our characters, are the most fatal and inexorable 
 of our limitations. 
 
 Why the world is as it is, whether of itself 
 or by refraction in the medium of our intellect, 
 is not a question that affects the practical mor- 
 alist. What concerns him is that the laws of 
 the world, whatever their origin, are fixed and 
 unchangeable conditions of our happiness. We ) 
 cannot change the world, even if we boast to have \ 
 made it ; we must in any case learn to live with it, 
 whether it be our parent or our child. To veil it3V 
 character with euphemisms or to supply its defects' 
 
260 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 with superstitious assumptions is a course unworthy 
 of a brave man and abhorrent to a prudent one. 
 What we should do is to make a modest inven- 
 tory of our possessions and a just estimate of our 
 powers in order to apply both, wdth what strength 
 we have, to the realization of our ideals in society, 
 in art, and in science. These will constitute our 
 Cosmos. In building it — for there is none other 
 that builds it for us — we shall be carrying on the 
 work of the only race that has yet seriously at- 
 tempted to live rationally, the race to which we 
 owe the name and the idea of a Cosmos, as well as 
 the beginnings of its realization. We shall then 
 be making that rare advance in wisdom which con- 
 sists in abandoning our illusions the better to attain 
 our ideals. 
 
 -^ 
 
THE ELEMENTS AND FUNCTION OF 
 POETRY 
 
 If a critic, in despair of giving a serious delB- 
 nition of poetry, should be satisfied with saying 
 that poetry is metrical discourse, he would no 
 doubt be giving an inadequate account of the 
 matter, yet not one of which he need be ashamed 
 or which he should regard as superficial. Although 
 a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon 
 the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical 
 synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the 
 most significant equivalent for beauty, for good- 
 ness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and 
 profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, 
 saw the essence of all things in number, and it 
 was by weight, measure, and number, as we read 
 in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature 
 out of the void. Every human architect must do 
 likewise with his edifice ; he must mould his bricks 
 or hew his stones into symmetrical solids and lay 
 them over one another in regular strata, like a 
 poet's lines. 
 
 261 
 
252 POETRY AND EELIGION 
 
 Measure is a condition of perfection, for per- 
 fection requires that order should be pervasive, 
 that not only the whole before us should have 
 a form, but that every part in turn should have a 
 form of its own, and that those parts should be 
 coordinated among themselves as the whole is 
 coordinated with the other parts of some greater 
 cosmos. Leibnitz lighted in his speculations upon 
 a conception of organic nature which may be false 
 as a fact, but which is excellent as an ideal; he 
 tells us that the difference between living and dead 
 matter, between animals and machines, is that the 
 former are composed of parts that are themselves 
 organic, every portion of the body being itself a 
 machine, and every portion of that machine still 
 a machine, and so ad infiyiitum; whereas, in arti- 
 ficial bodies the organization is not in this manner 
 infinitely deep. Fine Art, in this as in all things, . 
 imitates the method of Nature and makes its most 
 beautiful works out of materials that are them- - 
 selves beautiful. So that even if the difference be- . 
 tween verse and prose consisted only in measure, . 
 that difference would already be analogous to that 
 between jewels and clay. 
 
 The stuff of language is words, and the sensuous 
 material of words is sound ; if language therefore 
 is to be made perfect, its materials must be made 
 beautiful by being themselvessubiected to a meas- 
 1iS85|!~an3~~'BTnitT#ed"with^'a It^rs^^true that 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 253 
 
 language is a symbol for intelligence rather than 
 a stimulus to sense, and accordingly the beauties 
 of discourse which commonly attract attention are 
 merely the beauties of the objects and ideas signi- 
 fied; yet the symbols have a sensible reality of 
 their own, a euphony which appeals to our senses 
 if we keep them open. The tongue will choose 
 those forms of utterance which have a natural 
 grace as mere sound and sensation; the mem- 
 ory will retain these catches, and they will pass 
 and repass through the mind until they become 
 types of instinctive speech and standards of pleas- 
 ing expression. 
 
 The highest form of such euphony is song; the 
 singing voice gives to the sounds it utters the thrill 
 of tonality, — a thrill itself dependent, as we know, 
 on the numerical proportions of the vibrations that 
 it includes. But this kind of euphony and sensu- 
 ous beauty, the deepest that sounds can have, we 
 have almost wholly surrendered in our speech. Our 
 intelligence has become complex, and language, to 
 express our thoughts, must commonly be more 
 rapid, copious, and abstract than is compatible with 
 singing. Music at the same time has become com- 
 plex also, and when united with words, at one time 
 disfigures them in the elaboration of its melody, 
 and at another overpowers them in the volume of 
 its sound. So that the art of singing is now in the 
 same plight as that of sculpture, — an abstract and 
 
 
254 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 conventional thing surviving by force of tradition 
 and of an innate but now impotent impulse, which 
 under simpler conditions would work itself out into 
 the proper forms of those arts. The truest kind of 
 euphony is thus denied to our poetry. If any 
 verses are still set to music, they are commonly the 
 worst only, chosen for the purpose by musicians of 
 specialized sensibility and inferior intelligence, who 
 seem to be attracted only by tawdry effects of 
 •^jhetoric and sentiment. 
 
 When song is given up, there still remains in 
 speech a certain sensuous quality, due to the nature 
 and order of the vowels and consonants that com- 
 pose the sounds. This kind of euphony is not 
 neglected by the more dulcet poets, and is now so 
 studied in some quarters that I have heard it main- 
 tained by a critic of relative authority that the 
 beauty of poetry consists entirely in the frequent 
 utterance of the sound of " j " and " sli," and the 
 consequent copious flow of saliva in the mouth. 
 But even if saliva is not the whole essence of 
 poetry, there is an unmistakable and fundamental 
 diversity of effect in the various vocalization of 
 different poets, which becomes all the more evident 
 when we compare those who use different languages. 
 One man's speech, or one nation's, is compact, 
 crowded with consonants, rugged, broken with 
 emphatic beats ; another man's, or nation's, is open, 
 tripping, rapid, and even. So Byron, mingling in 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 255 
 
 his boyish fashion burlesque with exquisite senti- 
 ment, contrasts English with Italian speech : — 
 
 *' I love the language, that soft bastard Latin 
 Which melts like kisses from a female mouth 
 And sounds as if it should be writ on satin 
 With syllables which breathe of the sweet South, 
 And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in 
 That not a single accent seems uncouth, 
 Like our harsh Northern whistling, grunting guttural/ 
 Which we're obliged to hiss and spit and sputter all." 
 
 And. yet these contrasts, strong when we com- 
 pare extreme cases, fade from our consciousness in 
 the actual use of a mother-tongue. The function 
 makes us unconscious of the instrument, all the 
 more as it is an indispensable and almost invaria- 
 ble one. The sense of euphony accordingly attaches 
 itself rather to another and more ^ariable quality ; 
 the tune, or measure, or rhythm 'of speech. The 
 elementary sounds are prescribed ^y the language 
 we use, and the selection we may mak^ among those 
 sounds is limited ; but the arrangement of words is 
 still undetermined, and by casting our speech into 
 the moulds of metre and rhyme we can give it a 
 heightened power, apart from its significance. A 
 tolerable definition of poatry, on its formal side, 
 might be found in this /that poetry is speech in 
 which the instrument coimts as well as the mean- 
 ing — poetry^ speech for its own sake and for its 
 own sweetness.! As common windows are intended 
 
256 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 only to admit the light, but painted windows also 
 to dye it, and to be an object of attention in them- 
 selves as well as a cause of visibility in other things, 
 so, (while the purest prose is a mere vehicle of 
 /^thought, verse, likestan ied sla,ss, arrests a ttention 
 ( in its own intricacieSj Conf uaes it, in its oam l^j^Tf^fis^ 
 and is even at times allowed to darken and puzzle 
 in the hope of casting over us a supernatural spell. 
 Long passages in Shelley's "Kevolt of Islam" 
 and Keats' " Endymion " are poetical in this sense ; 
 the reader gathers, probably, no definite meaning, 
 but is conscious of a poetic medium, of speech 
 euphonious and measured, and redolent of a kind 
 of objectless passion which is little more than the 
 sensation of the movement and sensuous richness 
 of the lines. Such poetry is not great ; it has, in 
 fact, a tedious vacuity, and is unworthy of a mature 
 mind; but it is poetical, and could be produced 
 only by a legitimate child of the Muse. It belongs 
 to an apprenticeship, but in this case the appren- 
 ticeship of genius. It bears that relation to great 
 poems which scales and aimless warblings bear to 
 great singing — they test the essential endowment 
 and fineness of the organ which is to be employed 
 in the art. Without this sensuous background and 
 ingrained predisposition to beauty, no art can reach 
 the deepest and most exquisite effects; and even 
 without an intelligible superstructure these sensu- 
 ous qualities suffice to give that thrill of exaltation, 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 257 
 
 that suggestion of an ideal world, which we feel in 
 the presence of any true beauty. 
 
 The sensuous beauty of words and their utter- 
 ance in measure suffice, therefore, for poetry of one 
 sort — where these are there is something unmis- 
 takably poetical, although the whole of poetry, or 
 the best of poetry, be not yet there. Indeed, in 
 such works as " The Kevolt of Islam '' or ^^ Endym- 
 ion" there is already more than mere metre and 
 sound ; there is the colour and choice of words, the 
 fanciful, rich, or exquisite juxtaposition of phrases. 
 The vocabulary and the texture of the style are 
 precious ; affected, perhaps, but at any rate refined. 
 
 This quality, which is that almost exclusively 
 exploited by the Symbolist, we may call euphu- 
 ism — the choice of coloured words and rare and 
 elliptical phrases. If great poets are like archi- 
 tects and sculptors, the euphuists are like gold- 
 smiths and jewellers; their work is filigree in 
 precious metals, encrusted with glowing stones. 
 Now euphuism contributes not a little to the poetic 
 effect of the tirades of Keats and Shelley; if we 
 wish to see the power of versification without eu- 
 phuism we may turn to the tirades of Pope, where 
 metre and euphony are displayed alone, and we 
 have the outline or skeleton of poetry without the 
 filling. 
 
 " In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 
 One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right." 
 
 8 
 
>^ 258 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 / We should hesitate to say that such writing was 
 / truly poetical ; so that some euphuism would seem 
 :' to be necessary as well as metre, to the formal 
 essence of poetry. 
 
 An example of this sort, however, takes us out 
 of the merely verbal into the imaginative region; 
 the reason that Pope is hardly poetical to us is not 
 that he is inharmonious, — not a defect of euphony, 
 — but that he is too intellectual and has an excess 
 of mentality. It is easier for words to be poetical 
 
 without any thought, when they are felt merely as 
 
 sensuous and musical, than for them to, remain so 
 
 I when they convey an abstract notion, — especially 
 
 j if that notion be a tart and fri^d sophism, like 
 
 i that of the couplet just quoted. The pyrotechnics 
 
 of the intellect then take the place of the glow of 
 
 sense, and the artifice of thought chills the pleasure 
 
 we might have taken in the grace of expression. 
 
 If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophi- 
 cal than history, because it presents the memorable 
 types of men and things apart from unmeaning cir- 
 cumstances, so in its primary substance and texture 
 poetry is more philosophical than prose because it 
 is nearer to our immediate experience. Poetry , 
 breaks up the trite conceptions designated by cur- "i 
 rent words into the sensuous qualities out of which 
 those conceptions were originally put together. 
 We name what we conceive and believe in, not 
 what we see ; things, not images j souls, not voices 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 259 
 
 and silhouettes. This naming, with the whole edu- 
 cation of the senses which it accompanies, sub- 
 serves the uses of life ; in order to thread our way 
 through the labyrinth of objects which assault us, 
 we must make a great selection in our sensuous ex- 
 perience; half of what we see and hear we must 
 pass over as insignificant, while we piece out the 
 other half with such an ideal complement as is 
 necessary to turn it into a fixed and well-ordered 
 world. This labour of perception and understand- 
 ing, this spelling of the material meaning of expe- 
 rience is enshrined in our work-a-day language and 
 ideas ; ideas which are literally poetic in the sense 
 that they are ^^ made '' (for every conception in an 
 adult mind is a fiction), but which are at the same 
 time prosaic because they are made economically, 
 by abstraction, and for use. 
 
 When the child of poetic genius, who has learned 
 this intellectual and utilitarian language in the cra- 
 dle, goes afield and gathers for himself the aspects 
 of Nature, he begins to encumber his mind with 
 the many living impressions which the intellect 
 rejected, and which the language of the intellect 
 can hardly convey; he labours with his nameless 
 burden of perception, and wastes himself in aim- 
 less impulses of emotion and revery, until finally 
 the method of some art offers a vent to his inspira- 
 tion, or to such part of it as can survive the test of 
 time and the discipline of expression. 
 
/I 
 
 260 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 The poet retains by nature the innocence of the 
 eye, or recovers it easily; he disintegrates the fic- 
 tions of common perception into their sensuous 
 elements, gathers these together again into chance 
 groups as the accidents of his environment or the 
 affinities of his temperament may conjoin them; 
 and this wealth of sensation and this freedom of 
 fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his 
 ignorant heart, presently bubble over into some 
 kind of utterance. 
 
 The fulness and sensuousnese of such effusions 
 bring them nearer to our actual perceptions than 
 common discourse could come ; yet they may easily 
 seem remote, overloaded, and obscure to those accus- 
 tomed to think entirely in symbols, and never to be 
 interrupted in the algebraic rapidity of their think- 
 ing by a moment's pause and examination of heart, 
 nor ever to plunge for a moment into that torrent 
 of sensation and imagery over which the bridge of 
 prosaic associations habitually carries us safe and 
 dry to some conventional act. How slight that 
 bridge commonly is, how much an affair of trestles 
 and wire, we can hardly conceive until we have 
 trained ourselves to an extreme sharpness of intro- 
 spection. But psychologists have discovered, what 
 laymen generally will confess, that we hurry by 
 the procession of our mental images as we do by 
 the traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly 
 forgetting the noise and movement of the scene. 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 261 
 
 and looking only for the corner we would turn or 
 the door we would enter. Yet in our alertest 
 moment the depths of the soul are still dreaming^ 
 the real world stands drawn in bare outline against 
 a background of chaos and unrest. Our logical 
 thoughts dominate experience only as the paral- 
 lels and meridians make a checker-board of the 
 sea. They guide our voyage without controlling 
 the waves, which toss for ever in spite of our ability 
 to ride over them to our chosen ends. Sanity is aj 
 madness put to good uses ; waking life is a dreaml 
 controlled. 
 
 Out of the neglected riches of this dream the 
 poet fetches his wares. He dips into the chaos 
 that underlies the rational shell of the world and 
 brings up some superfluous image, some emotion 
 dropped by the way, and reattaches it to the 
 present object ; he reinstates things unnecessary, 
 he emphasizes things ignored, he paints in again 
 into the landscape the tints which the intellect has 
 allowed to fade from it. If he seems sometimes 
 to obscure a fact, it is only because he is restoring 
 an experience. We may observe this process in 
 the simplest cases. When Ossian, mentioning the 
 sun, says it is round as the shield of his fathers, 
 the expression is poetical. Why ? (^ecause he 
 has added to the word sun, in itself sufficient and 
 unequivocal, other words, unnecessary for practical 
 clearness, but serving to restore the individuality 
 
262 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 of his perception and its associations in Ms mind.) 
 There is no square sun with which the sun he is 
 speaking of could be confused ; to stop and call it 
 round is a luxury, a halting in the sensation for 
 the love of its form. And to go on to tell us, what 
 is wholly impertinent, that the shield of his fathers 
 was round also, is to invite us to follow the chance 
 wanderings of his fancy, to give us a little glimpse 
 of the stuffing of his own brain, or, we might 
 almost say, to turn over the pattern of his em- 
 broidery and show us the loose threads hanging 
 out on the wrong side. Such an escapade disturbs 
 and interrupts the true vision of the object, and 
 a great poet, rising to a perfect conception of the 
 sun and forgetting himself, would have disdained 
 to make it ; but it has a romantic and pathological 
 interest, it restores an experience, and is in that 
 measure poetical. We have been made to halt at 
 the sensation, and to penetrate for a moment into 
 its background of dream. 
 
 But it is not only thoughts or images that the 
 poet draws in this way from the store of his ex- 
 perience, to clothe the bare form of conventional 
 objects: he often adds to these objects a more 
 subtle ornament, drawn from the same source. 
 For the first element which the intellect rejects 
 in forming its ideas of things is the emotion 
 which accompanies the perception; and this emo- 
 tion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY ^ 263 
 
 at the image, because he stops to enjoy. He 
 wanders into the by-paths of association because the 
 by-paths are delightful. The love of beauty which 
 made him give measure and cadence to his words, 
 the love of harmony which made him rhyme them, 
 reappear in his imagination and make him select 
 there also the material that is itself beautiful, or 
 capable of assuming beautiful forms. The link 
 that binds together the ideas, sometimes so wide 
 apart, which his wit assimilates, is most* often the 
 link of emotion; they have in common some ele- 
 ment of beauty or of horror. 
 
 ' The poet's art is to a great extent the art of inten- 
 sifying emotions by assembling the scattered objects 
 that naturally arouse them. He sees the affinities 
 of things by seeing their common affinities with pas- 
 sion. As the guiding principle of practical think- 
 ing is some interest, so that only what is pertinent 
 to that interest is selected by the attention; as 
 the guiding principle of scientific thinking is some 
 connection of things in time or space, or some 
 identity of law ; so in poetic thinking the guiding 
 principle is often a mood or a quality of senti- 
 ment. By this union of disparate things having 
 a common overtone of feeling, the feeling is itself 
 evoked in all its strength ; nay, it is often created 
 for the first time, much as by a new mixture of 
 old pigments Perugino could produce the unprece- 
 dented limpidity of his colour, or Titian the un- 
 
264 POETEY AND RELIGION 
 
 r 
 
 precedented glow of his. [ Poet s can thus arouse 
 sentiments finer than any which they have known, 
 and in the act of composition become discoverers 
 of new realms of delightfulness and ^rief. j Ex- 
 pression is a misleading term which suggests that 
 something previously known is rendered or imi- 
 tated ; whereas the expression is itself an original 
 fact, the values of which are then referred to the 
 thing expressed, much as the honours of a Chinese 
 mandarin -are attributed retroactively to his par- 
 ents. So the charm which a poet, by his art of 
 combining images and shades of emotion, casts over 
 a scene or an action, is attached to the principal 
 actor in it, who gets the benefit of the setting 
 furnished him by a well-stocked mind. 
 
 The poet is himself subject to this illusion, and 
 a great part of what is called poetry, although by 
 no means the best part of it, consists in this sort 
 of idealization by proxy. We dye the world of 
 our own colour ; by a pathetic fallacy, by a false 
 projection of sentiment, we soak Nature with our 
 own feeling, and then celebrate her tender sym- 
 pathy with our moral being. This aberration, as 
 we see in the case of Wordsworth, is not incon- 
 sistent with a high development of both the facul- 
 ties which it confuses, — I mean vision and feeling. 
 On the contrary, vision and feeling, when most 
 abundant and original, most easily present them- 
 selves in this undivided form. There would be 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 265 
 
 need of a force of intellect which poets rarely 
 possess to rationalize their inspiration without di- 
 minishing its volume : and if, as is commonly the 
 case, the energy of the dream and the passion in 
 them is greater than that of the reason, and they 
 cannot attain true propriety and supreme beauty 
 in their works, they can, nevertheless, fill them with 
 lovely images and a fine moral spirit. 
 
 The pouring forth of both perceptive and emo- 
 tional elements in their mixed and indiscriminate 
 form gives to this kind of imagination the direct- 
 ness and truth which sensuous poetry possesses 
 on a lower level. The outer world bathed in 
 the hues of human feeling, the inner world ex- 
 pressed in the forms of things, — that is the 
 primitive condition of both before intelligence 
 and the prosaic classification of objects have ab- 
 stracted them and assigned them to their respec- 
 tive spheres. Such identifications, on which a 
 certain kind of metaphysics prides itself also, 
 are not discoveries of profound genius; they are 
 exactly like the observation of Ossian that the 
 sun is round and that the shield of his fathers 
 was round too; they are disintegrations of con- 
 ventional objects, so that the original associates / 
 of our perceptions reappear ; then the thing and*/ 
 the emotion which chanced to be simultaneous 
 are said to be one, and we return, unless a better 
 principle of organization is substituted for the 
 
266 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 principle abandoned, to the chaos of a passive 
 animal consciousness, where all is mixed together, 
 projected together, and felt as an unutterable 
 whole. 
 , The pathetic fallacy is a return to that early 
 habit of thought by which our ancestors peopled 
 the world with benevolent and malevolent spirits ; 
 what they felt in the presence of objects they 
 took to be a part of the objects themselves. In 
 Returning to this natural confusion, poetry does 
 / us a service in that she recalls and consecrates 
 N those phases of our experience which, as useless 
 ^ \ to the understanding of material reality, we are 
 in danger of forgetting altogether. Therein is 
 her vitality, for she pierces to the quick and 
 shakes us out of our servile speech and imagina- 
 tive poverty ; she reminds us of all we have felt, 
 she invites us even to dream a little, to nurse the 
 wonderful spontaneous creations which at every 
 waking moment we are snuffing out in our brain. 
 And the indulgence is no mere momentary pleas- 
 ure; much of its exuberance clings afterward to 
 our ideas; we see the more and feel the more 
 for that exercise ; we are capable of finding greater 
 entertainment in the common aspects of Nature 
 and life. When the veil of convention is once 
 removed from our eyes by the poet, we are better 
 able to dominate any particular experience and, as 
 it were, to change its scale, now losing ourselves 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 267 
 
 in its infinitesimal texture, now in its infinite 
 ramifications. 
 
 * If the function of poetry, however, did not go 
 beyond this recovery of sensuous and imaginative 
 freedom, at the expense of disrupting our useful 
 habits of thought, we might be grateful to it for 
 occasionally relieving our numbness, but we should 
 have to admit that it was nothing but a relaxation ; 
 that spiritual discipline was not to be gained from 
 it in any degree, but must be sought wholly in 
 that intellectual system that builds the science 
 of Nature with the categories of prose. So con- 
 ceived, poetry would deserve the judgment passed 
 by Plato on all the arts of flattery and entertain- 
 ment ; it might be crowned as delightful, but must 
 be either banished altogether as meretricious or 
 at least confined to a few forms and occasions 
 where it might do little harm. The judgment of 
 Plato has been generally condemned by philoso- 
 phers, although it is eminently rational, and justi- 
 fied by the simplest principles of morals. It has 
 been adopted instead, although unwittingly, by 
 the practical and secular part of mankind, who 
 look upon artists and poets as inefiicient and brain- 
 sick people under whose spell it would be a serious 
 calamity to fall, although they may be called in on 
 feast days as an ornament and luxury together 
 with the cooks, hairdressers, and florists. 
 
 Several circumstances, however, might suggest 
 

 268 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 to US the possibility that the greatest-function of 
 poetry may be still to find. Plato, while condemn- 
 ing Homer, was a kind of poet himself ; his quarrel 
 with the followers of the Muse was not a quarrel 
 with the goddess ; and the good people of Philistia, 
 distrustful as they may be of profane art, pay 
 undoubting honour to religion, which is a kind of 
 poetry as much removed from their sphere as the 
 midnight revels upon Mount Citheron, which, to 
 be sure, were also religious in their inspiration. 
 Why, we may ask, these apparent inconsistencies ? 
 Why do our practical men make room for religion 
 in the background of their world? Why did 
 Plato, after banishing the poets, poetize the uni- 
 erse in his prose? Because the abstraction by 
 which the world of science and of practice is 
 drawn out of our experience, is too violent to 
 satisfy even the thoughtless and vulgar; the 
 ideality of the machine we call Nature, the con- 
 ventionality of the drama we call the world, are too 
 glaring not to be somehow perceived by all. Each 
 must sometimes fall back upon the soul ; he must 
 challenge this apparition with the thought of death ; 
 he must ask himself for the mainspring and value 
 of his life. He will then remember his stifled 
 loves; he will feel that only his illusions have 
 ever given him a sense of reality, only his passions 
 the hope and the vision of peace. He will read 
 himself through and almost gather a meaning from 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 269 
 
 his experience ; at least he will half believe that 
 all he has been dealing with was a dream and a 
 symbol, and raise his eyes toward the truth be- 
 yond. <r— — 
 
 This plastic moment of the mind, when we be- 
 come aware of the artificiality and inadequacy of 
 what common sense perceives, is the true moment 
 of poetic opportunity, — an opportunity, we may 
 hasten to confess, which is generally missed. The 
 strain of attention, the concentration and focussing 
 of thought on the unfamiliar immediacy of things, 
 usually brings about nothing but confusion. We 
 are dazed, we are filled with a sense of unutterable 
 things, luminous yet indistinguishable, many yet 
 one. Instead of rising to imagination, we sink into 1 — ' 
 mysticism. 
 
 To accomplish a mystical disintegration is not 
 the function of any art ; if any art seems to accom- 
 plish it, the effect is only incidental, being involved, 
 perhaps, in the process of constructing the proper 
 object of that art, as we might cut down trees and 
 dig them up by the roots to lay the foundations of 
 a temple. For every art looks to the building up 
 of something. And just because the world built up 
 by common sense and natural science is an inad- 
 equate world (a skeleton which needs the filling of 
 sensation before it can live), therefore the moment 
 when we realize its inadequacy is the moment when 
 the higher arts find their opportunity. When the 
 
270 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 world is shattered to bits they can come and " build 
 it nearer to the heart's desire." 
 
 The great function of poetry, which we have not 
 yet directly mentioned, is precisely this : t o repa ir 
 t o the mate rial of e xperience, seizi ngjiold of the 
 re ality of sensatio n and fancy beneath th e surface 
 ofconventio nal ideas, and then o ut of that living 
 bu t indefinite mat e rial to build _ new siructures, 
 richer, finer, fitter to the prim ary tendencies of our 
 
 nature, tv-nM^^Jtr^^J^f. nltimntp pnssibilif.iPa of the 
 
 soul . Our descent into the elements of our being 
 is then justified by our subsequent freer ascent 
 toward its goal; we revert to sense only to find 
 food for reason ; we destroy conventions only to 
 construct ideals. 
 
 Such analysis for the sake of creation is the 
 
 essence of all great poetry. Science and com- 
 
 \ mon sense are themselves in their way poets 
 
 of no mean order, since they take the material 
 
 j ) of experience and make out of it a clear, sym- 
 
 1 / metrical, and beautiful world ; the very propriety 
 
 I ( of this art, however, has made it common. Its 
 
 figures have become mere rhetoric and its meta- 
 
 I phors prose. Yet, even as it is, a scientific and 
 
 mathematical vision has a higher beauty than the 
 
 irrational poetry of sensation and impulse, which 
 
 merely tickles the brain, like liquor, and plays upon 
 
 our random, imaginative lusts. The imagination of 
 
 \^ great poet, on the contrary, is as orderly as that 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 271 
 
 of an astronomer, and as large; he has the natu- 
 ralist's patience, the naturalist^s love of detail and 
 eye trained to see fine gradations and essential 
 lines ; he knows no hurry 5 he has no pose, no sense 
 of originality; he finds his effects in his subject, 
 and his subject in his inevitable world. Resem- 
 bling the naturalist in all this, he differs from him 
 in the balance of his interests; the poet has the 
 concreter mind; his visible world wears all its 
 colours and retains its indwelling passion and life. 
 Instead of studying in experience its calculable 
 elements, he studies its moral values, its beauty, 
 the openings it offers to the soul : and the cosmos 
 he constructs is accordingly an ideal theatre for the 
 spirit in which its noblest potential drama is 
 enacted and its destiny resolved. 
 
 This supreme function of poetry is only the con- 
 summation of the method by which words and 
 imagery are transformed into verse. As verse 
 breaks up the prosaic order of syllables and sub- 
 jects them to a recognizable and pleasing measure, 
 so poetry breaks up the whole prosaic picture of 
 experience to introduce into it a rhythm more con- 
 genial and intelligible to the mind. And in both 
 these cases the operation is essentially the same as 
 that by which, in an intermediate sphere, the 
 images rejected by practical thought, and the emo- 
 tions ignored by it, are so marshalled as to fill the 
 mind with a truer and intenser consciousness of its 
 
272 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 memorable experience. The poetry of fancy, of 
 observation, and of passion moves on this inter- 
 mediate level ; the poetry of mere sound and virtu- 
 osity is confined to the lower sphere; and the 
 highest is reserved for the poetry of the creative 
 reason. But one principle is present throughout, — 
 the principle of Beauty, — the art of assimilating 
 phenomena, whether words, images, emotions, or 
 systems of ideas, to the deeper innate cravings of 
 the mind. 
 
 Let us now dwell a little on this higher function 
 of poetry and try to distinguish some of its 
 phases. 
 
 The creation of characters is what many of us 
 might at first be tempted to regard as the supreme 
 triumph of the imagination. If we abstract, how- 
 ever, from our personal tastes and look at the 
 matter in its human and logical relations, we shall 
 see, I think, that the construction of characters is 
 not the ultimate task of poetic fiction. A character 
 can never be exhaustive of our materials: for it 
 exists by its idiosyncrasy, by its contrast with 
 other natures, by its development of one side, and 
 one side only, of our native capacities. It is, there- 
 fore, not by characterization as such that the ulti- 
 mate message can be rendered. The poet can put 
 only a part of himself into any of his heroes, but 
 he must put the whole into his noblest work. A 
 character is accordingly only a fragmentary unity ; 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 273 
 
 fragmentary in respect to its origin, — since it is 
 conceived by enlargement, so to speak, of a part of 
 our own being to the exclusion of the rest, — and 
 fragmentary in respect to the object it presents, 
 since a character must live in an environment and 
 be appreciated by contrast and by the sense of 
 
 derivation. Not the character, but its effects and 
 
 —— — — — — -^— — " 
 
 causes, is the truly interesting thing. Thus in 
 master poets, like Homer and Dante, the char- 
 acters, although well drawn, are subordinate to 
 the total movement and meaning of the scene. 
 There is indeed something pitiful, something comic, 
 in any comprehended soul ; souls, like other things, 
 are only definable by their limitations. We feel in- 
 stinctively that it would be insulting to speak of 
 any man to his face as we should speak of him in 
 his absence, even if what we say is in the way 
 of praise : for absent he is a character understood, 
 but present he is a force respected. 
 
 In the construction of ideal characters, then, the 
 imagination is busy with material, — particular 
 actions and thoughts, — which suggest their uni- 
 fication in persons ; but the characters thus con- 
 ceived can hardly be adequate to the profusion of 
 our observations, nor exhaustive, when all person- 
 alities are taken together, of the interest of c*ir 
 lives. Characters are initially imbedded in life, 
 as the gods themselves are originally imbedded 
 in Nature. Poetry must, therefore, to render all 
 
/ 
 
 274 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 reality, render also the background of its figures, 
 and the events that condition their acts. We 
 must place them in that indispensable environ- 
 ment which the landscape furnishes to the eye and 
 the social medium to the emotions. 
 
 The visible landscape is not a proper object for 
 poetry. Its elements, and especially the emotional 
 stimulation which it gives, may be suggested or ex- 
 pressed in verse ; but landscape is not thereby rep- 
 resented in its proper form ; it appears only as an 
 element and associate of moral unities. Painting, 
 architecture, and gardening, with the art of stage 
 setting, have the visible landscape for their object, 
 and to those arts we may leave it. But there is a 
 sort of landscape larger than the visible, which es- 
 capes the synthesis of the eye ; it is present to that 
 topographical sense by which we always live in the 
 consciousness that there is a sea, that there are 
 mountains, that the sky is above us, even when we 
 do not see it, and that the tribes of men, with their 
 different degrees of blamelessness, are scattered 
 over the broad-backed earth. This cosmic land- 
 scape poetry alone can render, and it is no small 
 part of the art to awaken the sense of it at the 
 right moment, so that the object that occupies 
 tlie centre of vision may be seen in its true lights, 
 coloured by its wider associations, and dignified by 
 its felt affinities to things permanent and great. 
 As the Italian masters were wont not to paint their 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 275 
 
 groups of saints about the Virgin without enlarging 
 the canvas, so as to render a broad piece of sky, 
 some mountains and rivers, and nearer, perhaps, 
 some decorative pile; so the poet of larger mind 
 envelops his characters in the atmosphere of Nature 
 and history, and keeps us constantly aware of the 
 world in which they move. 
 
 The distinction of a poet — the dignity and 
 humanity of his thought — can be measured by 
 nothing, perhaps, so well as by the diameter of the 
 world in which he lives; if he is supreme, his 
 vision, like Dante's, always stretches to the stars. 
 And Virgil, a supreme poet sometimes unjustly 
 belittled, shows us the same thing in another form ; 
 his landscape is the Eoman universe, his theme the 
 sacred springs of Eoman greatness in piety, con- 
 stancy, and law. He has not written a line in f or- 
 getf ulness that he was a Eoman ; he loves country 
 life and its labours because he sees in it the origin 
 and bulwark of civic greatness ; he honours tradition 
 because it gives perspective and momentum to the 
 history that ensues ; he invokes the gods, because 
 they are symbols of the physical and moral forces 
 by which Eome struggled to dominion. 
 
 Almost every classic poet has the topographical 
 sense ; he swarms with proper names and allusions 
 to history and fable ; if an epithet is to be thrown 
 in anywhere to fill up the measure of a line, he 
 chooses instinctively an appellation of place or 
 
276 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ^ family ; his wine is not red, but Samian ; his gorges 
 \ are not deep, but are the gorges of Haemus ; his 
 songs are not sweet, but Pierian. We may deride 
 their practice as conventional, but they could far 
 more justly deride ours as insignificant. Conven- 
 tions do not arise without some reason, and genius 
 will know how to rise above them by a fresh ap- 
 preciation of their Tightness, and will feel no 
 temptation to overturn them in favour of per- 
 sonal whimsies. The ancients found poetry not 
 so much in sensible accidents as in essential forms 
 and noble associations ; and this fact marks very 
 clearly their superior education. They dominated 
 the world as we no longer dominate it, and lived, as 
 we are too distracted to live, in the presence of the 
 rational and the important. 
 
 A physical and historical background, however, 
 is of little moment to the poet in comparison with 
 that other environment of his characters, — the 
 dramatic situations in which they are involved. 
 The substance of po etry is, aft er_all^jmot.iQji; and 
 if the intellectual emotion of comprehension and 
 the mimetic one of impersonation are massive, 
 they are not so intense as the appetites and other 
 transitive emotions of life; the passions are the 
 chief basis of all interests, even the most ideal, 
 and the passions are seldom brought into play 
 except by the contact of man with man. The 
 various forms of love and hate are only possible 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 277 
 
 in society, and to imagine occasions in which, these 
 feelings may manifest all their inward vitality is 
 the poet's function, — one in which he follows the 
 fancy of every child, who puffs himself out in his 
 day-dreams into an endless variety of heroes and 
 lovers. The thrilling adventures which he craves 
 demand an appropriate theatre; the glorious emo- 
 tions with which he bubbles over must at all haz- 
 ards find or feign their correlative objects. 
 
 But the passions are naturally blind, and the 
 poverty of the imagination, when left alone, is 
 absolute. The passions may ferment as they will, 
 they never can breed an idea out of their own 
 energy. This idea must be furnished by the 
 senses, by outward experience, else the hunger 
 of the soul will gnaw its own emptiness for ever. 
 Where the seed of sensation has once fallen, how- 
 ever, the growth, variations, and exuberance of 
 fancy may be unlimited. Only we still observe 
 (as in the child, in dreams, and in the poetry of 
 ignorant or mystical poets) that the intensity of 
 inwardly generated visions does not involve any 
 real increase in their scope or dignity. The inex- 
 perienced mind remains a thin mind, no matter 
 how much its vapours may be heated and blown 
 about by natural passion. It was a capital error 
 in Fichte and Schopenhauer to assign essential 
 fertility to the will in the creation of ideas. They 
 mistook, as human nature will do, even when at 
 
278 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 times it professes pessimism, an ideal for a real- 
 ity: and because they saw how much the will 
 clings to its objects, how it selects and magnifies 
 them, they imagined that it could breed them out 
 of itself. A man who thinks clearly will see that 
 such self-determination of a will is inconceivable, 
 since what has no external relation and no diver- 
 sity of structure cannot of itself acquire diversity 
 of functions. Such inconceivability, of course, need 
 not seem a great objection to a man of impassioned 
 inspiration; he may even claim a certain consist- 
 ency in positing, on the strength of his preference, 
 the inconceivable to be a truth. 
 
 The alleged fertility of the will is, however, dis- 
 proved by experience, from which metaphysics must 
 in the end draw its analogies and plausibility. 
 The passions discover, they do not create, their 
 occasions; a fact which is patent when we observe 
 how they seize upon what objects they find, and 
 how reversible, contingent, and transferable the 
 emotions are in respect to their objects. A doll 
 will be loved instead of a child, a child instead of 
 a lover, God instead of everything. The differen- 
 tiation of the passions, as far as consciousness is 
 concerned, depends on the variety of the objects 
 of experience, — that is, on the differentiation of 
 the senses and of the environment which stimu- 
 lates them. 
 
 When the "infinite" spirit enters the human 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 279 
 
 body, it is determined to certain limited forms 
 of life by the organs which it wears; and its 
 blank potentiality becomes actual in thought and 
 deed, according to the fortunes and relations of 
 its organism. The ripeness of the passions may 
 thus precede the information of the mind and 
 lead to groping in by-paths without issue ; a phe- 
 nomenon which appears not only in the obscure 
 individual whose abnormalities the world ignores, 
 but also in the starved, half-educated genius that 
 pours the whole fire of his soul into trivial arts 
 or grotesque superstitions. The hysterical forms 
 of music and religion are the refuge of an ideal- 
 ism that has lost its way ; the waste and failures 
 of life flow largely in those channels. The carnal 
 temptations of youth are incidents of the same 
 maladaptation, when passions assert themselves 
 before the conventional order of society can allow 
 them physical satisfaction, and long before philos- 
 ophy or religion can hope to transform them into 
 fuel for its own sacrificial flames. 
 
 Hence flows the greatest opportunity of fiction. 
 We have, in a sense, an infinite will ; but we have 
 a limited experience, an experience sadly inadequate 
 to exercise that will either in its purity or its \ 
 strength. To give form to our capacities nothing ' 
 is required but the appropriate occasion; this the 
 poet, studying the world, will construct for us out 
 of the materials of his observations. He will in- 
 
280 POETKY AND KELIGION 
 
 volve us in scenes which lie beyond the narrow 
 lane of our daily ploddings; he will place us in 
 the presence of important events, that we may feel 
 our spirit rise momentarily to the height of his 
 great argument. The possibilities of love or glory, 
 of intrigue and perplexity, will be opened up be- 
 fore us ; if he gives us a good plot, we can readily 
 furnish the characters, because each of them will be 
 the realization of some stunted potential self of 
 our own. It is by the plot, then, that the char- 
 acters will be vivified, because it is by the plot that 
 our own character will be expanded into its latent 
 possibilities. 
 
 The description of an alien character can serve 
 this purpose only very imperfectly ; but the presen- 
 tation of the circumstances in which that character 
 manifests itself will make description unneces- 
 sary, since our instinct will supply all that is requi- 
 site for the impersonation. Thus it seems that 
 Aristotle was justified in making the plot the chief 
 element in fiction: for it is by virtue of the plot 
 that the characters live, or, rather, that we live in 
 them, and by virtue of the plot accordingly that 
 our soul rises to that imaginative activity by which 
 we tend at once to escape from the personal life 
 and to realize its ideal. This idealization is, of 
 course, partial and merely relative to the particular 
 adventure in which we imagine ourselves engaged. 
 But in some single direction our will finds self- 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 281 
 
 expression, and understands itself; runs through 
 the career which it ignorantly coveted, and gathers 
 the fruits and the lesson of that enterprise. 
 
 This is the essence of tragedy : the sense of the / 
 finished life, of the will fulfilled and enlightened : ? 
 that purging of the mind so much debated upon, 
 which relieves us of pent-up energies, transfers our 
 feelings to a greater object, and thus justifies and 
 entertains our dumb passions, detaching them at 
 the same time for a moment from their accidental 
 occasions in our earthly life. An episode, however 
 lurid, is not a tragedy in this nobler sense, because 
 it does not work itself out to the end ; it pleases 
 without satisfying, or shocks without enlightening. 
 This enlightenment, I need hardly say, is not a 
 matter of theory or of moral maxims ; the enlight- 
 enment by which tragedy is made sublime is a 
 glimpse into the ultimate destinies of our will. 
 This discovery need not be an ethical gain — Mac- 
 beth and Othello attain it as much as Brutus and 
 Hamlet — it may serve to accentuate despair, or 
 cruelty, or indifference, or merely to fill the imagi- 
 nation for a moment without much affecting the 
 permanent tone of the mind. But without such a 
 glimpse of the goal of a passion the passion has not 
 been adequately read, and the fiction has served to 
 amuse us without really enlarging the frontiers of 
 our ideal experience. Memory and emotion have 
 been played upon, but imagination has not brought 
 anything new to the light. 
 
282 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 The dramatic situation, however, gives us the 
 environment of a single passion, of life in one of 
 its particular phases ; and although a passion, like 
 Eomeo's love, may seem to devour the whole soul, 
 and its fortunes may seem to be identical with those 
 of the man, yet much of the man, and the best part 
 of him, goes by the board in such a simplification. 
 If Leonardo da Vinci, for example, had met in 
 his youth with Romeo's fate, his end would have 
 been no more ideally tragic than if he had died at 
 eighteen of a fever ; we should be touched rather 
 by the pathos of what he had missed, than by the 
 sublimity of what he had experienced. A passion 
 like Romeo's, compared with the ideal scope of 
 human thought and emotion, is a thin dream, a 
 pathological crisis. 
 
 Accordingly Aristophanes, remembering the orig- 
 inal religious and political functions of tragedy, 
 blushes to see upon the boards a woman in love. 
 And we should readily agree with him, but for two 
 reasons, — one, that we abstract too much, in our 
 demands upon art, from nobility of mind, and from 
 the thought of totality and proportion; the other, 
 that we have learned to look for a symbolic meaning 
 in detached episodes, and to accept the incidental 
 emotions they cause, because of their violence and 
 our absorption in them, as in some sense sacra- 
 mental and representative of the whole. Thus the 
 picture of an unmeaning passion, of a crime with- 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 283 
 
 out an issue, does not appear to our romantic appre- 
 liension as the sorry farce it is, but rather as a true 
 tragedy. Some have lost even the capacity to con- 
 ceive of a true tragedy, because they have no idea 
 of a cosmic order, of general laws of life, or of an 
 impersonal religion. They measure the profundity 
 of feeling by its intensity, not by its justifying 
 relations ; and in the radical disintegration of their 
 spirit, the more they are devoured the more they 
 fancy themselves fed. But the majority of us 
 retain some sense of a meaning in our joys and 
 sorrows, and even if we cannot pierce to their ulti- 
 mate object, we feel that what absorbs us here and 
 now has a merely borrowed or deputed power ; that 
 it is a symbol and foretaste of all reality speaking 
 to the whole soul. At the same time our intelli- 
 gence is too confused to give us any picture of 
 that reality, and our will too feeble to marshal our 
 disorganized loves into a religion consistent with 
 itself and harmonious with the comprehended uni- 
 verse. A rational ideal eludes us, and we are the 
 more inclined to plunge into mysticism. 
 j Nevertheless, the function of poetry, like that of 
 Jicience, can only be fulfilled by the conception of 
 ^harmonies that become clearer as they grow richer. 
 As the chance note that comes to be supported by 
 a melody becomes in that melody determinate and 
 necessary, and as the melody, when woven into a 
 harmony, is explicated in that harmony and fixed 
 
284 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 beyond recall ; so the single emotion, the fortuitous 
 dream, launched by the poet into the world of 
 recognizable and immortal forms, looks in that 
 world for its ideal supports and affinities. It 
 must find them or else be blown back among the 
 ghosts. The highest ideality is the comprehension 
 of the reaL-, Poetry is not at its best when it 
 depicts a further possible experience, but when 
 it initiates us, by feigning something which as an 
 experience is impossible, into the meaning of the 
 experience which we have actually had. 
 
 The highest example of this kind of poetry is 
 religion ; and although disfigured and misunderstood 
 by the simplicity of men who believe in it without 
 being capable of that imaginative interpretation 
 of life in which its truth consists, yet this religion 
 is even then often beneficent, because it colours life 
 harmoniously with the ideal. Religion may falsely' 
 represent the ideal as a reality, but we must re- 
 member that the ideal, if not so represented, would 
 be despised by the majority of men, who cannot 
 understand that the value of things is moral, and 
 who therefore attribute to what is moral a natural 
 existence, thinking thus to vindicate its importance 
 and value. But value lies in meaning, not in subt 
 stance ; in the ideal which things approach, not in 
 the energy which they embody. 
 ^Mi^IC he highest poetr y, then, is not that of the 
 versifiers, but that of the proph ets, or of such poets 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 285 
 
 as. interpret verbally the visions which the prophets 
 have rendered_in„.action and sentiment rather than 
 in adequate words. That the intuitions of religion 
 are poetical, and that in such intuitions poetry- 
 has its ultimate function, are truths of which both 
 religion and'poetry become more conscious the more 
 they advance in refinement and profundity. A 
 crude and superficial theology may confuse God 
 with the thunder, the mountains, the heavenly 
 bodies, or the whole universe ; but when we pass 
 from these easy identifications to a religion that 
 has taken root in history and in the hearts of men, 
 and has come to flower, we find its objects and its 
 dogmas purely ideal, transparent expressions of 
 moral experience and perfect counterparts of 
 human needs. The evidence of history or of the 
 senses is left far behind and never thought of; 
 the evidence of the heart, the value of the idea, 
 are alone regarded. 
 
 Take, for instance, the doctrine of transubstantia- 
 tion. A metaphor here is the basis of a dogma, 
 because the dogma rises to the same subtle region 
 as the metaphor, and gathers its sap from the same 
 soil of emotion. Keligion has here rediscovered its 
 affinity with poetry, and in insisting on the truth 
 of its mystery it unconsciously vindicates the ideal- 
 ity of its truth. Under the accidents of bread and 
 wine lies, says the dogma, the substance of Christ's 
 body, blood, and divinity. What is that but to 
 
286 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 treat facts as an appearance, and their ideal import 
 as a reality ? And to do this is the very essence"" 
 of poetry, for which everything visible is aTsacra;:^ 
 ment — an outward sign of that inward grace for 
 which the soul is thirsting. 
 
 In this same manner, where poetry rises from its 
 elementary and detached expressions in rhythm, 
 euphuism, characterization, and story-telling, and 
 comes to the consciousness of its h i ghest fur^ ^ g - 
 tion^_ that of portraying the ideals of experience 
 and destiny, then the poet becomes a^are that 
 he is essentially a prophet, and either devotes 
 himself, like Homer or Dante, to the loving ex- 
 pression of the religion that exists, or like Lucre- 
 tius or Wordsworth, to the heralding of one which 
 he believes to be possible. Such poets are aware 
 of their highest mission ; others, whatever the 
 energy of their genius, have not conceived their 
 ultimate function as poets. They have been will- 
 ing to leave their world ugly as a whole, after stuf- 
 fing it with a sufficient profusion of beauties. Their 
 contemporaries, their fellow-countrymen for many . 
 generations, may not perceive this defect, because 
 they are naturally even less able than the poet 
 himself to understand the necessity of so large a 
 harmony. If he is short-sighted, they are blind, 
 and his poetic world may seem to them sublime in 
 its significance, because it may suggest some par- 
 tial lifting of their daily burdens and some partial 
 idealization of their incoherent thoughts. 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 287 
 
 Such insensibility to the highest poetry is no more 
 extraordinary than the corresponding indifference to 
 the highest religion; nobility and excellence, how- 
 ever, are not dependent on the suffrage of half-baked 
 men, but on the original disposition of the clay and 
 the potter ; I mean on the conditions of the art and 
 the ideal capacities of human nature. Just as a 
 note is better than a noise because, its beats being 
 regular, the ear and brain can react with pleasure 
 on that regularity, so all the stages of harmony are 
 better than the confusion out of which they come, 
 because the soul that perceives that harmony wel- 
 comes it as the fufilment of her natural ends. The 
 Pythagoreans were therefore right when they made 
 number the essence of the knowable world, and 
 Plato was right when he said harmony was the 
 first condition of the highest good. The good man 
 is a poet whose syllables are deeds and make a 
 harmony in Nature. The poet is a rebuilder of 
 the imagination, to make a harmony in that. And 
 he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination 
 is not attuned and his whole experience composed 
 into a single symphony. 
 
 For his complete equipment, then, it is necessary, 
 in the first place, that he sing; that his voice be 
 pure and well pitched, and that his numbers flow ; 
 then, at a higher stage, his images must fit with 
 one another ; he must be euphuistic, colouring his 
 thoughts with many reflected lights of memory and 
 
288 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 suggestion, so that their harmony may be rich and 
 profound; again, at a higher stage, he must be 
 sensuous and free, that is, he must build up his 
 world with the primary elements of experience, not 
 with the conventions of common sense or intelli- 
 gence ; he must draw the whole soul into his har- 
 monies, even if in doing so he disintegrates the 
 partial systematizations of experience made by ab- 
 stract science in the categories of prose. But finally, 
 this disintegration must not leave the poet weltering 
 in a chaos of sense and passion ; it must be merely 
 the ploughing of the ground before a new harvest, 
 the kneading of the clay before the modelling of 
 a more perfect form. The expression of emotion 
 should be rationalized by derivation from char- 
 acter and by reference to the real objects that 
 arouse it — to Nature, to history, and to the uni- 
 verse of truth ; the experience imagined should be 
 conceived as a destiny, governed by principles, and 
 issuing in the discipline and enlightenment of the 
 will. In this way alone can poetry become an 
 interpretation of life and not merely an irrelevant 
 excursion into the realm of fancy, multiplying our 
 
 J images without purpose, and distracting us from 
 
 lour business without spiritual gain. 
 
 ' If we may then define poetry, not in the formal 
 sense of giving the minimum of what may be called 
 by that name, but in the ideal sense of determining 
 the goal which it approaches and the achievement 
 
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 289 
 
 in which all its principles would be fulfilled, we 
 may say that poetry is metrical and euphuistic dis- 
 course, expressing thought which is both sensuous 
 and ideal. 
 
 Siich is poetry as a literary form ; but if we drop 
 the limitation to verbal expression, and think of 
 poetry as that subtle fire and inward light which 
 seems at times to shine through the world and 
 to touch the images in our minds with ineffable 
 beauty, then poetry is a momentary harmony in 
 the soul amid stagnation or conflict, — a glimpse 
 ol ..the divine and an incitation to a religious 
 life^ 
 
 Religion is poetry become the guide of life, 
 poetry substituted for science or supervening upon 
 it as an approach to the highest reality. Poetry 
 is religion allowed to drift, left without points of 
 application in conduct and without an expression 
 in worship and dogma; it is religion without prac- 
 tical ef&cacy and without metaphysical illusion. 
 The ground of this abstractness of poetry, how- 
 ever, is usually only its narrow scope ; a poet who 
 plays with an idea for half an hour, or constructs 
 a character to which he gives no profound moral 
 significance, forgets his own thought, or remembers 
 it only as a fiction of his leisure, because he has 
 not dug his well deep enough to tap the subterra- 
 neous springs of his own life. But when the poet 
 enlarges his theatre and puts into his rhapsodies 
 
290 POETRY AND RELIGION 
 
 the true visions of his people and of his soul, his 
 poetry is the n^ILS^C^SiaitittH nf 3hr ^ft^pp^t convic- 
 tions, and contains the whole truth of his religion. 
 What the religion of the vulgar adds to the poet's 
 is simply the inertia of their limited apprehension, 
 which takes literally what he meant ideally, and 
 degrades into a false extension of this world on its 
 own level wJiat in his mind was a true interpre- 
 tation of it upon a moral plane. 
 
 This higher plane is the sphere of significant 
 imagination, of relevant fiction, of idealism become 
 
 , the interpretation of the reality it leaves behind. 
 Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical 
 
 ! with religion grasped in its inmost truth ; at their 
 
 I point of union both reach their utmost purity and 
 Ibeneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and 
 
 I ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its 
 
 i illusions and ceases to deceive. 
 
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