The Poet's Poet Part 27

One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose atheistic creed makes up the whole substance of _The City of Dreadful Night_. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, with the words,

And now at last authentic word I bring Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no G.o.d; no fiend with name divine Made us and tortures us; if we must pine It is to satiate no Being's gall.

But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be a.s.serted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart.

Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful envy,

He came to the desert of London town, Mirk miles broad; He wandered up and he wandered down, Ever alone with G.o.d.

[Footnote: _William Blake._]

Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the "aesthetic repose."

Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning,

Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine.

[Footnote: _Poets._]

Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benet, _The Falconer of G.o.d._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his birds are

Summer-saulting for G.o.d's sake.

Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought "thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the flower itself. He muses,

Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;-- I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all and all in all, I should know what G.o.d and man is.

By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one.

A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by

The foolishest fond folly of a heart Divided, neither here nor there at rest, That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth.

[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.]

On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint.

Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him.

Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Sh.e.l.ley devoted a large part of _Prometheus Unbound_ and the conclusion of _Adonais_ to his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the sense world which was yet spiritual,

The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, [Footnote: _Hart Leap Well._]

and was led to the conclusion,

It is my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.

[Footnote: _Lines Written in Early Spring._]

Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings.

Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in _Empedocles on aetna,_ in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's pantheistic faith. Swinburne's _Hertha_ is one of the most thorough going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit.

One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne's _Natural Religion,_ wherein he explains the grounds of his faith,

Up through the mystic deeps of sunny air I cried to G.o.d, "Oh Father, art thou there?"

Sudden the answer like a flute I heard; It was an angel, though it seemed a bird.

On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe with him.

The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship.

Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated "without love of human nature and reverence for G.o.d," [Footnote: Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence from this power of revelation.

But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit characteristic of religious reverence.

It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings.

There is no G.o.d, O son!

If thou be none, [Footnote: _On the Downs._]

Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any G.o.d, any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Sh.e.l.ley) but a.s.suredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, _Swinburne_, p. 309.]

Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create G.o.d in his own image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet G.o.d." [Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.]

Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of the poet's instinctive att.i.tude, because he is most courageous in carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion.

In the _Prophetic Books_, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it.

Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the puritan himself feels the power of Emily Bronte's _Last Lines,_ in which she cries with proud and triumphant faith,

Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void; Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him.

In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this att.i.tude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement.

So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch as Byron's _A Vision of Judgment,_ with its irresistible satire on Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet.

The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring conceptions of G.o.d. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I _do_ believe,"

said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but the Church of England," was the att.i.tude by which Byron shocked the orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] _Cain,_ however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians.

Sh.e.l.ley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional religion. In _Julian and Maddalo_, he causes Byron to say of him,

You were ever still Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel.

Sh.e.l.ley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was persecuted by the church. In _Rosalind and Helen_, the hero was hated by the clergy,

For he made verses wild and queer Of the strange creeds priests hold so dear,

and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in Lionel's death, for

The ministers of misrule sent Seized on Lionel and bore His chained limbs to a dreary tower, For he, they said, from his mind had bent Against their G.o.ds keen blasphemy.

The most notable ill.u.s.tration of this phase of Sh.e.l.ley's thought is _The Revolt of Islam,_ wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies.

Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets have gloried in his att.i.tude.