Recent Developments in European Thought Part 4

In poetry the French Parna.s.sians created the most brilliant poetry that has, since Milton, been built upon erudition and impeccable art. Their leader, Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his _Poemes antiques_ (1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent, and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron's stormy egoism. Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the shade of Alfred de Musset--the Oscar Wilde of the later Romantics[6]--who had never known the stress of thought, and had filled his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; the new poets were to be no such gay triflers, but workers at a forge, beating the glowing metal into shape, and singing as they toiled.[7] Carducci, too, derisively contrasts the 'moonlight' of Romanticism--cold and infructuous beams, proper for Gothic ruins and graveyards--with the benignant and fertilizing sunshine he sought to restore; for him, too, the poet is no indolent caroller, and no gardener to grow fragrant flowers for ladies, but a forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning calls Byron a 'flat fish', and Arnold sees the poet of _Prometheus_ appropriately pinnacled in the 'intense inane', they are expressing a kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in clear-cut form.

If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the temper of a scientific time. Thus the supreme gift of all the greater poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty--_pace_ Hogarth--there is no science. But their view of beauty was partly limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry.

Thus:

(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to be the impa.s.sioned expression which is in the face of science; for Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora.

When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a pa.s.sionate explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity.

The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar's heart and Angentyr's sword, of Cain's doom, and Erinnyes never, like those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's _Orientales_ or Moore's _Lalla Rookh_ is merely a veneer; the poet of _Qain_ has heard the wild a.s.ses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.

In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning becomes no less evidently poetry's honoured and indispensable ally.

Tennyson studies nature like a naturalist, not like a mystic, and finds felicities of phrase poised, as it were, upon delicate observation. Man, too, in Browning, loses the vague aureole of Sh.e.l.leyan humanity, and becomes the Italian of the Renascence or the Arab doctor or the German musician, all alive but in their habits as they lived, and fashioned in a brain fed, like no other, on the Book of the histories of Souls.

Matthew Arnold more distinctively than either, and both for better and for worse, was the scholar-poet; among other things he was, with Heredia and Carducci, a master of the poetry of critical portraiture, which focusses in a few lines (_Sophocles_, _Rahel_, _Heine_, _Obermann Once More_) the meaning of a great career or of a complex age.

(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable artistry. 'A great poet', he said, 'and a flawless artist are convertible terms.' The Parna.s.sian precision rested on the postulate that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can be adequately expressed, the a.n.a.logue of the contemporary scientific conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained. The pursuit of an objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal emotion, of the _cri du coeur_, of individual originality, involved the surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands a.s.sume this grandeur without effort. The power of sheer style to enn.o.ble is better seen in Sully Prudhomme's _tours de force_ of philosophic poetry--when he unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like pieces on 'Memory', 'Habit', 'Forms', and similar unpromising abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr.

William Watson. But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia--monuments of a moment, as sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does, to invisible horizons, and to the before and after--the old wooden guardian-G.o.d recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying ships of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra's eyes.

In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, a.s.serted itself even in the naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in my work are resolved by the triple formula: in politics Italy before all, in aesthetics cla.s.sical poetry before all, in practice, frankness and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, ant.i.thetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the cla.s.sicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parna.s.sian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.

(3) Finally, the Parna.s.sian poetry, like most contemporary science, was in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe. Leconte de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of 'a heart seven-times steeped in the divine nothingness',[9] or calls him to 'that city of silence, the sepulchre of the vanished G.o.ds, the human heart, seat of dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory universe'.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had antic.i.p.ated him.

In the ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for theological illusions pa.s.ses into the fierce derision of the Ode to Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the _Hymn to Man_. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own G.o.ds beside a fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation pa.s.sed into the unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_. In all these poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the pa.s.sing of the G.o.ds, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.

Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard--Victor Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a poetry such as the Parna.s.sian sought--objective, reticent, impersonal, technically consummate--was at least one of the strings of his many-chorded lyre. Three magnificent works--the very crown and flower of Hugo's production--belong to this decade, 1850-60,--the _Chatiments_, _Contemplations_, and _Legende des Siecles_. I said advisedly, one string in his lyre. Objective reticence is certainly not the virtue of the terrible indictment of 'Napoleon the Little'. On the other hand, the greatest qualities of Parna.s.sian poetry were exemplified in many splendid pieces of the other two works, together with a large benignity which their austere Stoicism rarely permits, and I shall take as ill.u.s.tration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first phase the closing stanzas of his famous _Boaz Endormi_ in the _Legende_, whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable is subst.i.tuted for the Alexandrine.[11]

'While thus he slumbered, Ruth, a Moabite, Lay at the feet of Boaz, her breast bare, Waiting, she knew not when, she knew not where, The sudden mystery of wakening light.

Boaz knew not that there a woman lay, Nor Ruth what G.o.d desired of her could tell; Fresh rose the perfume of the asphodel, And tender breathed the dusk on Galgala.

Nuptial, august, and solemn was the night, Angels no doubt were pa.s.sing on the wing, For now and then there floated glimmering As it might be an azure plume in flight.

The low breathing of Boaz mingled there With the soft murmur of the mossy rills.

It was the month when earth is debonnaire; The lilies were in flower upon the hills.

Night compa.s.sed Boaz' slumber and Ruth's dreams, The sheep-bells vaguely tinkled far and near; Infinite love breathed from the starry sphere; 'Twas the still hour when lions seek the streams.

Ur and Jerimedeth were all at rest; The stars enamelled the blue vault of sky; Amid those flowers of darkness in the west The crescent shone; and with half open eye

Ruth wondered, moveless, in her veils concealed, What heavenly reaper, when the day was done And harvest gathered in, had idly thrown That golden sickle on the starry field.'

II. DREAM AND SYMBOL

The rise of French symbolism towards the end of the 'seventies was a symptom of a changed temper of thought and feeling traceable in some degree throughout civilized Europe. Roughly, it marked the pa.s.sing of the confident and rather superficial security of the 'fifties into a vague unrest, a kind of troubled awe. As if existence altogether was a bigger, more mysterious, and intractable thing than was a.s.sumed, not so easily to be captured in the formulas of triumphant science, or mirrored and a.n.a.lysed by the most consummate literary art.

Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.

In the secluded workshops of Thought, subtler changes were silently going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led poetry itself to emulate the marble impa.s.sivity of the scientific temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective, their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the history of _Materialism_ in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the 'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige and importance from the outlying circ.u.mference of the sciences to their very centre and core.

But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is utterly beyond its power to discover.

Of this changed outlook the growth of Symbolism is the most significant literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the fiery iconoclast pa.s.sed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth reflected the idealistic reactions against it, and Villiers de l'Ile Adam, its founder, came forward proclaiming that 'Science was bankrupt'.

And so it might well seem to him, the visionary mystic inhabiting, as he did, a world of strange beauty and invisible mystery which science could not unlock. The symbolists had not all an explicit philosophy; but they were all aware of potencies in the world or in themselves which language cannot articulately express, and which are yet more vitally real than the 'facts' which we can grasp and handle, and the 'respectable' people whom we can measure and reckon with. Sometimes these potencies are vaguely mysterious, an impalpable spirit speaking only by hints and tokens; sometimes they are felt as the pulsations of an intoxicating beauty, breaking forth in every flower, but which can only be possessed, not described; sometimes they are moods of the soul, beyond a.n.a.lysis, and yet full of wonder and beauty, visions half created, half perceived. Experiences like these might have been described, as far as description would go, by brilliant artificers like the Parna.s.sians. Verlaine and Mallarme did not discover, but they applied with new daring, the fact that an experience may be communicated by words which, instead of representing it, suggest it by their colour, their cadences, their rhythm, their verbal echoes and inchoate phrases.

All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as both inadequate and insincere. 'Take eloquence and wring her neck!

Nothing but music and the nuance--all the rest is "Literature", mere writing--futile verbosity!' that was the famous watchword of Verlaine's creed.[12]

The strength of symbolism lay in this demand for a complete sincerity of utterance. Its revolt against science was at the same time a vindication of truth, an effort to get nearer to reality both by shedding off the incrustations of habitual phrase and by calling into play the obscure affinities by which it can be magically evoked. In the subtleties of suggestion latent in sensations the symbolists were real discoverers.

But the way had already been pointed in famous verses by Baudelaire:

'Earth is a Temple, from whose pillared mazes Murmurs confused of living utterance rise; Therein Man thro' a forest of symbols paces, That contemplate him with familiar eyes.

As prolonged echoes, wandering on and on, At last in one far tenebrous depth unite, Impalpable as darkness, and as light, Scents, sounds, and colours meet in unison.'

There Baudelaire had touched a chord that was to sound loud and long; for what else than this thought of all the senses meeting in union inspired the music drama of Wagner?--only one of his points of kinship, as we shall see, with symbolism.

Thus the symbolists, in quest of reality, touched it only through the inner life. There they are, in their fashion, realists. 'A landscape', said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false, but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres; or in the language of Samain's sonnet

'Feel flowing through them, like a pouring wave, The music-tide of universal Soul; Hear in their heart the beating pulse of heaven.'[13]

In the earlier poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck, the inner life imposes a more jealous sway. The poet sits not before a transforming mirror, where the outer world is disguised, but in a closed chamber, where it is only dreamed of, and it fades into the incoherence and the irrelevance of a dream. But the chamber is of rare beauty, and in its hushed and perfumed twilight, dramas of the spirit are being silently and almost imperceptibly enacted, more tragic than the loud pa.s.sion and violence of the stage. He has written an essay on Silence,--silence that, like humility, holds for him a 'treasure' beyond the reach of eloquence or of pride; for it is the dwelling of our true self, the spiritual core of us, 'more profound and more boundless than the self of the pa.s.sions or of pure reason.' And so there is less matter for drama in 'a captain who conquers in battle or a husband who avenges his honour than in an old man, seated in his arm-chair waiting patiently with his lamp beside him, giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting without comprehending, the silence of door and window, and the quivering voice of the light; submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny.'

It is on this side that symbolism discloses its kinship with the Russian novel,--with the mystic quietism of Tolstoy and the religion of self-sacrifice in Dostoievsky; and its sharp antagonism to the Nietzschean gospel of daemonic will and ruthless self-a.s.sertion, just then being preached in Germany. The two faiths were both alive and both responded to deep though diverse needs of the time; but the immediate future, as we shall see, belonged to the second. They had their first resounding encounter when Nietzsche held up his once venerated master Wagner to scorn as the chief of 'decadents' because he had turned from the superhuman heroism of Siegfried and the boundless pa.s.sion of Tristram to glorify the mystic Catholicism of the Grail and the loveliness of the 'pure fool' Parzifal.

Outside France symbolism found eager response among young poets, but rather as a literary than as an ethical doctrine. In Germany Dehmel, the most powerful personality among her recent poets, began as a disciple of Verlaine; in Italy, D'Annunzio wove esoteric symbols into the texture of the more than Nietzschean supermanliness of his supermen and superwomen.

More significant than these, however, was the symbolism of what we call the Celtic school of poets in Ireland. For here both their artistic impressionism and their mystic spirituality found a congenial soil. The princ.i.p.al mediating force was Mr. Arthur Symons, friend of Verlaine and of Yeats, and himself the most penetrating interpreter of Symbolism, both as critic and as poet.[14] And to the French influence was added that of Blake, a poet too great to be included in any school, but allied to symbolism by his scorn for 'intellect' and for rhetoric, and by his audacities of figured speech. But Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.', the leaders of the 'Celtic' group, are in no sense derivation voices. They had the great advantage over the French of a living native folklore and faery lore. Hence their symbolism, no less subtle, and no less steeped in poetic imagining, has not the same air of literary artifice, of studio fabrication, of cultured Bohemianism; it breathes of the old Irish hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it, is the pa.s.sion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope can touch:

'Out-worn heart in a time out-worn Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight; Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young, Dew ever shining and twilight grey; Tho' hope fall from you and love decay Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill; For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will.'

For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-cla.s.sicism.

The pa.s.sion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary phase to which I now turn.

III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'

1. _Philosophic a.n.a.logies_

Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or hostile. The Parna.s.sians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And the a.n.a.logies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become peculiarly striking. Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these a.n.a.logies and of the common bent from which they spring. All three--whether with brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both--use their thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making _Aesthetics_, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in _Critica_, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important particulars--the individual living thing--slip through the meshes; whereas intuition--the eye fixed on the object--penetrates to the very heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply imbued with the a.n.a.logies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form, contains the secret of the world.'[15] And Bergson's _Creative Evolution_ embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time. For he restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely suited to the temper of the age just dawning. The will to live became a formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical 'struggle for existence'.

The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato. It was one of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of Sch.e.l.ling. And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in his _Birth of Tragedy_ (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly development', wrote the great h.e.l.lenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic reason. But it affirmed energetically the pa.s.sion of his own time for immediate and first-hand experience.

And it did more. Beside and above Apollo, Nietzsche put Dionysus; beside vision and above it, _rage_. Of the union of these two Tragedy was born.

And Nietzsche's glorification of this elemental creative force also responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German. His Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and the beginning of Schopenhauer's fame, about 1850, coincides with a general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of Wundt and Munsterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing is is determined by what it _can_; that value is in fact the measure, and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power which created the German empire and launched her on the career of industrial greatness. Nietzsche's Superman is, above all, a being of colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer moved the world. The moment at which the prestige of will began definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has pointed out, by the appearance of James's _Will to Believe_, just when agnosticism seemed triumphant.

Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was not the least symptomatic pa.s.sage of his great book. And both concurred, however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as creation, creation in which we take part--a conception which again, in the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the type of faith announced in that last--the Jamesian--'Variety' of religious experience, which represents us as indispensable fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving G.o.d.

2. _The New Freedom_