Part 12

In fact, the great merit of the romantic attitude in poetry, and of the transcendental method in philosophy, is that they put us back at the beginning of our experience. They disintegrate convention, which is often cumbrous and confused, and restore us to ourselves, to immediate perception and primordial will. That, as it would seem, is the true and inevitable starting-point. Had we not been born, had we not peeped into this world, each out of his personal eggshell, this world might indeed have existed without us, as a thousand undiscoverable worlds may now exist; but for us it would not have existed. This obvious truth would not need to be insisted on but for two reasons: one that conventional knowledge, such as our notions of science and morality afford, is often top-heavy; asserts and imposes on us much more than our experience warrants,--our experience, which is our only approach to reality. The other reason is the reverse or counterpart of this; for conventional knowledge often ignores and seems to suppress parts of experience no less actual and important for us as those parts on which the conventional knowledge itself is reared. The public world is too narrow for the soul, as well as too mythical and fabulous. Hence the double critical labour and reawakening which romantic reflection is good for,--to cut off the dead branches and feed the starving shoots. This philosophy, as Kant said, is a cathartic: it is purgative and liberating; it is intended to make us start afresh and start right.

It follows that one who has no sympathy with such a philosophy is a comparatively conventional person. He has a second-hand mind. Faust has a first-hand mind, a truly free, sincere, courageous soul. It follows also, however, that one who has no philosophy but this has no wisdom; he can say nothing that is worth carrying away; everything in him is attitude and nothing is achievement. Faust, and especially Mephistopheles, do have other philosophies on top of their transcendentalism; for this is only a method, to be used in reaching conclusions that shall be critically safeguarded and empirically grounded. Such outlooks, such vistas into nature, are scattered liberally through the pages of _Faust_. Words of wisdom diversify this career of folly, as exquisite scenes fill this tortuous and overloaded drama. The mind has become free and sincere, but it has remained bewildered.

The literary merits of Goethe’s _Faust_ correspond accurately with its philosophical excellences. In the prologue in the theatre Goethe himself has described them; much scenery, much wisdom, some folly, great wealth of incident and characterization; and behind, the soul of a poet singing with all sincerity and fervour the visions of his life. Here is profundity, inwardness, honesty, waywardness; here are the most touching accents of nature, and the most varied assortment of curious lore and grotesque fancies. This work, says Goethe (in a quatrain intended as an epilogue, but not ultimately inserted in the play),--this work is like human life: it has a beginning, it has an end; but it has no totality, it is not one whole.[29] How, indeed, should we draw the sum of an infinite experience that is without conditions to determine it, and without goals in which it terminates? Evidently all a poet of pure experience can do is to represent some snatches of it, more or less prolonged; and the more prolonged the experience represented is the more it will be a collection of snatches, and the less the last part of it will have to do with the beginning. Any character which we may attribute to the whole of what we have surveyed would fail to dominate it, if that whole had been larger, and if we had had memory or foresight enough to include other parts of experience differing altogether in kind from the episodes we happen to have lived through. To be miscellaneous, to be indefinite, to be unfinished, is essential to the romantic life. May we not say that it is essential to all life, in its immediacy; and that only in reference to what is not life--to objects, ideals, and unanimities that cannot be experienced but may only be conceived--can life become rational and truly progressive? Herein we may see the radical and inalienable excellence of romanticism; its sincerity, freedom, richness, and infinity. Herein, too, we may see its limitations, in that it cannot fix or trust any of its ideals, and blindly believes the universe to be as wayward as itself, so that nature and art are always slipping through its fingers. It is obstinately empirical, and will never learn anything from experience.

* * * * *

[1] Eckermann, Conversation of May 6, 1827: “Das ist zwar ein wirksamer, manches erklärender, guter Gedanke, aber es ist keine Idee die dem Ganzen ... zugrunde liege.”

[2] _Faust_, Part it-i. Act v. 375-82:

Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt; Ein jed’ Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren, Was nicht genügte, liess ich fahren, Was mir entwischte, liess ich ziehn. Ich habe nur begehrt und nur vollbracht Und abermals gewünscht und so mit Macht Mein Leben durchgestürmt; erst gross und mächtig, Nun aber geht es weise, geht bedächtig.

[3] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_, i.:

Welch Schauspiel! aber, ach! ein Schauspiel nur! Wo fass’ ich dich, unendliche Natur? Euch, Brüste, wo?

[4] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_:

Du, Geist der Erde, bist mir näher; Schon fühl’ ich meine Kräfte höher, Schon glüh’ ich wie von neuem Wein; Ich fühle Mut, mich in die Welt zu wagen, Der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen,... Mit Stürmen mich herumzuschlagen Und in des Schiffbruchs Knirschen nicht zu zagen.

[5] _Faust, Prolog im Himmel_:

Mit den Toten Hab’ ich mich niemals gern befangen. Am meisten lieb’ ich mir die vollen, frischen Wangen. Für einen Leichnam bin ich nicht zu Haus; Mir geht es, wie der Katze mit der Maus.... Von Sonn’ und Welten weiss ich nichts zu sagen, Ich sehe nur, wie sich die Menschen plagen.

[6] _Faust, Prolog im Himmel_:

Staub soll er fressen, und mit Lust.

[7] Ibid.:

Es irrt der Mensch, so lang’ er strebt. Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.

[8] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v.:

Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben. Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der täglich sie erobern muss.

[9] Ibid., Part i., _Prolog im Himmel_:

Des Menschen Thätigkeit kann allzu leicht erschlaffen, Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; Drum geb’ ich gem ihm den Gesellen zu, Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen.

[10] Ibid.:

Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, Umfass’ euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt, Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken!

[11] _Faust_, Part i., _Wald und Höhle_:

Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles, Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.... O, dass dem Menschen nichts Vollkommnes wird, Empfind’ ich nun. Du gabst zu dieser Wonne, Die mich den Göttern nah und näher bringt, Mir den Gefährten, &c.

Also, ibid., _Trüber Tag_: Grosser herrlicher Geist, der du mir zu erscheinen würdigtest, der du mein Herz kennest und meine Seele, warum an den Schandgesellen mich Schmieden, der sich am Schaden weidet und am Verderben sich letzt?

[12] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_, ii.:

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, Ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht;, Drum besser wär’s, dass nichts entstünde.... Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war, Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar.... Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt, Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt, So viel als ich schon unternommen, Ich wusste nicht ihr beizukommen.... Wie viele hab’ ich schon begraben! Und immer cirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut. So geht es fort, man möchte rasend werden!

[13] _Faust_, Part ii. Act i., _Anmutige Gegend_:

Kleiner Elfen Geistergrösse Eilet, we sie helfen kann; Ob er heilig, ob er böse, Jammert sie der Unglücksmann.

[14] _Faust_, Part ii. Act i., _Anmutige Gegend_:

Alles kann der Edle leisten, Der versteht und rasch ergreift.

The whole scene will repay study.

[15] _Faust_, Part ii. Act i., _Anmutige Gegend_:

Des Lebens Fackel wollten wir entzünden, Ein Feuermeer umschlingt uns, welch ein Feuer!... So bleibe denn die Sonne mir im Rücken! Der Wassersturz, das Felsenriff durchbrausend, Ihn schau’ ich an mit wachsendem Entzücken.... Allein wie herrlich, diesem Sturm erspriessend, Wolbt sich des bunten Bogens Wechseldauer,... Der spiegelt ab das menschliche Bestreben.... Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.

[16] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_:

Ins hohe Meer werd’ ich hinausgewiesen,... Zu neuen Sphären reiner Thätigkeit.... Hier ist es Zeit, durch Thaten zu beweisen, Dass Manneswürde nicht der Götterhöhe weicht,... Zu diesem Schritt sich heiter zu entschliessen Und war’ es mit Gefahr, ins Nichts dahin zu fliessen.

[17] _Faust_, Part ii. Act iv., _Hochgebirg_: The first monologue.

[18] _Faust_, Part i, Act ii., _Anmutige Gegend_:

Du, Erde,... regst und rührst ein kraftiges Beschliessen Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.

[19] _Faust_, Part ii. Act iv., _Hochgebirg_:

Erstaunenswürdiges soll geraten, Ich fühle Kraft zu kühnem Fleiss. Herrschaft gewinn’ ich, Eigentum! Die That ist alles, nichts der Ruhm. Da wagt mein Geist, sich selbst zu überfliegen; Hier möcht’ ich kämpfen, dies möcht’ ich besiegen.

[20] Ibid., Act v., _Grosser Vorhof des Palasts_:

Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen Nicht in Aeonen untergehn.

[21] _Faust_, Part ii. Act iv., _Hochgebirg_:

Wer befehlen soll Muss im Befehlen Seligkeit empfinden. Ihm ist die Brust von hohem Willen voll, Doch was er will, es darf’s kein Mensch ergründen.

[22] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Mitternacht_:

Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt: Ein jed’ Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren, Was nicht genügte, liess ich fahren, Was mich entwischte, liess ich ziehn.

[23] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Grosser Vorhof des Palasts_:

Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn. Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen: Verweile doch, du bist so schön!

[24] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Himmel_:

Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den konnen wir erlösen.

[25] Ibid.:

Wir wurden früh entfernt Von Lebechören; Doch dieser hat gelernt, Er wird uns lehren.

[26] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v., _Mitternacht_:

Noch hab’ ich mich ins Freie nicht gekämpft. Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen, Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen, Stünd’ ich, Natur, vor dir ein Mann allein. Da wär’s der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.

[27] _Faust_, Part ii, Act v., _Himmel_:

Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis; Das Unzulängliche, Hier wird’s Ereignis; Das Unbeschreibliche, Hier ist es gethan; Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan.

[28] Cf. _Trilogie der Leidenschaft_, 1823:

Mich treibt umher ein unbezwinglich Sehnen; Da bleibt kein Rat als grenzenlose Thränen.... Und so das Herz erleichtert merkt behende Dass es noch lebt und schlägt und möchte schlagen,... Da fühlte sich--o, dass es ewig bliebe!-- Das Doppelglück der Töne wie der Liebe.

[29] _Aus dem Nachlass, Abkündigung:_

Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht; Es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende, Allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.

V

CONCLUSION

It may be possible, after studying these three philosophical poets, to establish some comparison between them. By a comparison is not meant a discussion as to which of our poets is the best. Each is the best in his way, and none is the best in every way. To express a preference is not so much a criticism as a personal confession. If it were a question of the relative pleasure a man might get from each poet in turn, this pleasure would differ according to the man’s temperament, his period of life, the language he knew best, and the doctrine that was most familiar to him. By a comparison is meant a review of the analysis we have already made of the type of imagination and philosophy embodied in each of the poets, to see what they have in common, how they differ, or what order they will fall into from different points of view. Thus we have just seen that Goethe, in his _Faust_, presents experience in its immediacy, variety, and apparent groundlessness; and that he presents it as an episode, before and after which other episodes, differing from it more and more as you recede, may be conceived to come. There is no possible totality in this, for there is no known ground. Turn to Lucretius, and the difference is striking. Lucretius is the poet of substance. The ground is what he sees everywhere; and by seeing the ground, he sees also the possible products of it. Experience appears in Lucretius, not as each man comes upon it in his own person, but as the scientific observer views it from without. Experience for him is a natural, inevitable, monotonous round of feelings, involved in the operations of nature. The ground and the limits of experience have become evident together.

In Dante, on the other hand, we have a view of experience also in its totality, also from above and, in a sense, from outside; but the external point of reference is moral, not physical, and what interests the poet is what experience is best, what processes lead to a supreme, self-justifying, indestructible sort of existence. Goethe is the poet of life; Lucretius the poet of nature; Dante the poet of salvation. Goethe gives us what is most fundamental,--the turbid flux of sense, the cry of the heart, the first tentative notions of art and science, which magic or shrewdness might hit upon. Lucretius carries us one step farther. Our wisdom ceases to be impressionistic and casual. It rests on understanding of things, so that what happiness remains to us does not deceive us, and we can possess it in dignity and peace. Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. Dante, however, carries us much farther than that. He, too, has knowledge of what is possible and impossible. He has collected the precepts of old philosophers and saints, and the more recent examples patent in society around him, and by their help has distinguished the ambitions that may be wisely indulged in this life from those which it is madness to foster,--the first being called virtue and piety and the second folly and sin. What makes such knowledge precious is not only that it sketches in general the scope and issue of life, but that it paints in the detail as well,--the detail of what is possible no less than that (more familiar to tragic poets) of what is impossible.

Lucretius’ notion, for instance, of what is positively worth while or attainable is very meagre: freedom from superstition, with so much natural science as may secure that freedom, friendship, and a few cheap and healthful animal pleasures. No love, no patriotism, no enterprise, no religion. So, too, in what is forbidden us, Lucretius sees only generalities,--the folly of passion, the blight of superstition. Dante, on the contrary, sees the various pitfalls of life with intense distinctness; and seeing them clearly, and how fatal each is, he sees also why men fall into them, the dream that leads men astray, and the sweetness of those goods that are impossible. Feeling, even in what we must ultimately call evil, the soul of good that attracts us to it, he feels, in good all its loveliness and variety. Where, except in Dante, can we find so many stars that differ from other stars in glory; so many delightful habitations for excellences; so many distinct beauties of form, accent, thought, and intention; so many delicacies and heroisms? Dante is the master of those who know by experience what is worth knowing by experience; he is the master of _distinction_.

Here, then, are our three poets and their messages: Goethe, with human life in its immediacy, treated romantically; Lucretius, with a vision of nature and of the limits of human life; Dante, with spiritual mastery of that life, and a perfect knowledge of good and evil.

You may stop at what stage you will, according to your sense of what is real and important; for what one man calls higher another man calls unreal; and what one man feels to be strength smells rank to another. In the end, we should not be satisfied with any one of our poets if we had to drop the other two. It is true that taken formally, and in respect to their type of philosophy and imagination, Dante is on a higher plane than Lucretius, and Lucretius on a higher plane than Goethe. But the plane on which a poet dwells is not everything; much depends on what he brings up with him to that level. Now there is a great deal, a very great deal, in Goethe that Lucretius does not know of. Not knowing of it, Lucretius cannot carry this fund of experience up to the intellectual and naturalistic level; he cannot transmute this abundant substance of Goethe’s by his higher insight and clearer faith; he has not woven so much into his poem. So that while to see nature, as Lucretius sees it, is a greater feat than merely to live hard in a romantic fashion, and produces a purer and more exalted poem than Goethe’s magical medley, yet this medley is full of images, passions, memories, and introspective wisdom that Lucretius could not have dreamed of. The intellect of Lucretius rises, but rises comparatively empty; his vision sees things as a whole, and in their right places, but sees very little of them; he is quite deaf to their intricacy, to their birdlike multiform little souls. These Goethe knows admirably; with these he makes a natural concert, all the more natural for being sometimes discordant, sometimes overloaded and dull. It is necessary to revert from Lucretius to Goethe to get at the volume of life.

So, too, if we rise from Lucretius to Dante, there is much left behind which we cannot afford to lose. Dante may seem at first sight to have a view of nature not less complete and clear than that of Lucretius; a view even more efficacious than materialism for fixing the limits of human destiny and marking the path to happiness. But there is an illusion here. Dante’s idea of nature is not genuine; it is not sincerely put together out of reasoned observation. It is a view of nature intercepted by myths and worked out by dialectic. Consequently, he has no true idea either of the path to happiness or of its real conditions. His notion of nature is an inverted image of the moral world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon the sky. It is a mirage.

Now, while to know evil, and especially good, in all their forms and inward implications is a far greater thing than to know the natural conditions of good and evil, or their real distribution in space and time, yet the higher philosophy is not safe if the lower philosophy is wanting or is false. Of course it is not safe practically; but it is not safe even poetically. There is an attenuated texture and imagery in the _Divine Comedy_. The voice that sings it, from beginning to end, is a thin boy-treble, all wonder and naïveté. This art does not smack of life, but of somnambulism. The reason is that the intellect has been hypnotized by a legendary and verbal philosophy. It has been unmanned, curiously enough, by an excess of humanism; by the fond delusion that man and his moral nature are at the centre of the universe. Dante is always thinking of the divine order of history and of the spheres; he believes in controlling and chastening the individual soul; so that he seems to be a cosmic poet, and to have escaped the anthropocentric conceit of romanticism. But he has not escaped it. For, as we have seen, this golden cage in which his soul sings is artificial; it is constructed on purpose to satisfy and glorify human distinctions and human preferences. The bird is not in his native wilds; man is not in the bosom of nature. He is, in a moral sense, still at the centre of the universe; his ideal is the cause of everything. He is the appointed lord of the earth, the darling of heaven; and history is a brief and prearranged drama, with Judea and Rome for its chief theatre.

Some of these illusions are already abandoned; all are undermined. Sometimes, in moments when we are unnerved and uninspired, we may regret the ease with which Dante could reconcile himself to a world, so imagined as to suit human fancy, and flatter human will. We may envy Dante his ignorance of nature, which enabled him to suppose that he dominated it, as an infinite and exuberant nature cannot be dominated by any of its parts. In the end, however, knowledge is good for the imagination. Dante himself thought so; and his work proved that he was right, by infinitely excelling that of all ignorant contemporary poets. The illusion of knowledge is better than ignorance for a poet; but the reality of knowledge would be better than the illusion; it would stretch the mind over a vaster and more stimulating scene; it would concentrate the will upon a more attainable, distinct, and congenial happiness. The growth of what is known increases the scope of what may be imagined and hoped for. Throw open to the young poet the infinity of nature; let him feel the precariousness of life, the variety of purposes, civilizations, and religions even upon this little planet; let him trace the triumphs and follies of art and philosophy, and their perpetual resurrections--like that of the downcast Faust. If, under the stimulus of such a scene, he does not some day compose a natural comedy as much surpassing Dante’s divine comedy in sublimity and richness as it will surpass it in truth, the fault will not lie with the subject, which is inviting and magnificent, but with the halting genius that cannot render that subject worthily.

Undoubtedly, the universe so displayed would not be without its dark shadows and its perpetual tragedies. That is in the nature of things. Dante’s cosmos, for all its mythical idealism, was not so false as not to have a hell in it. Those rolling spheres, with all their lights and music, circled for ever about hell. Perhaps in the real life of nature evil may not prove to be so central as that. It would seem to be rather a sort of inevitable but incidental friction, capable of being diminished indefinitely, as the world is better known and the will is better educated. In Dante’s spheres there could be no discord whatever; but at the core of them was eternal woe. In the star-dust of our physics discords are everywhere, and harmony is only tentative and approximate, as it is in the best earthly life; but at the core there is nothing sinister, only freedom, innocence, inexhaustible possibilities of all sorts of happiness. These possibilities may tempt future poets to describe them; but meantime, if we wish to have a vision of nature not fundamentally false, we must revert from Dante to Lucretius.