POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

Sec. As the ultimate criticism of all human interests, philosophy may be approached by avenues as various as these interests. Only when philosophy is discovered as the implication of well-recognized special interests, is the significance of its function fully appreciated. For the sake of such a further understanding of philosophy, those who find either inspiration or entertainment in poetry are invited in the present chapter to consider certain of the relations between poetry and philosophy.

We must at the very outset decline to accept unqualifiedly the poet’s opinion in the matter, for he would not think it presumptuous to incorporate philosophy in poetry. “No man,” said Coleridge, “was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a great philosopher.” This would seem to mean that a great poet is a great philosopher, and more too. We shall do better to begin with the prosaic and matter of fact minimum of truth: some poetry is philosophical. This will enable us to search for the portion of philosophy that is in some poetry, without finally defining their respective boundaries. It may be that all true poetry is philosophical, as it may be that all true philosophy is poetical; but it is much more certain that much actual poetry is far from philosophical, and that most actual philosophy was not conceived or written by a poet. The mere poet and the mere philosopher must be tolerated, if it be only for the purpose of shedding light upon the philosopher-poet and the poet-philosopher. And it is to the philosopher-poet that we turn, in the hope that under the genial spell of poetry we may be brought with understanding to the more forbidding land of philosophy.

Sec. Poetry is well characterized, though not defined, as an interpretation of life. The term “life” here signifies the human purposive consciousness, and active pursuit of ends. An interpretation of life is, then, a selection and account of such values in human experience as are actually sought or are worth the seeking. For the poet all things are good or bad, and never only matters of fact. He is neither an annalist nor a statistician, and is even an observer only for the sake of a higher design. He is one who appreciates, and expresses his appreciation so fittingly that it becomes a kind of truth, and a permanently communicable object. That “unbodied joy,” the skylark’s song and flight, is through the genius of Shelley so faithfully embodied, that it may enter as a definite joy into the lives of countless human beings. The sensuous or suggestive values of nature are caught by the poet’s quick feeling for beauty, and fixed by his creative activity. Or with his ready sympathy he may perceive the value of some human ideal or mastering passion, and make it a reality for our common feeling. Where the poet has to do with the base and hateful, his attitude is still appreciative. The evil is apprehended as part of a dramatic whole having positive moral or aesthetic value. Moral ideas may appear in both poetry and life as the inspiration and justification of struggle. Where there is no conception of its moral significance, the repulsive possesses for the poet’s consciousness the aesthetic value of diversity and contrast. Even where the evil and ugly is isolated, as in certain of Browning’s dramatic monologues, it forms, both for the poet and the reader, but a part of some larger perception of life or character, which is sublime or beautiful or good. Poetry involves, then, the discovery and presentation of human experiences that are satisfying and appealing. It is a language for human pleasures and ideals. Poetry is without doubt a great deal more than this, and only after a careful analysis of its peculiar language could one distinguish it from kindred arts; but it will suffice for our purposes to characterize and not differentiate. Starting from this most general truth respecting poetry, we may now look for that aspect of it whereby it may be a witness of philosophical truth.

Sec. For the answer to our question, we must turn to an examination of the intellectual elements of poetry. In the first place, the common demand that the poet shall be accurate in his representations is suggestive of an indispensable intellectual factor in his genius. As we have seen, he is not to reproduce nature, but the human appreciative experience of nature. Nevertheless, he must even here be true to his object. His art involves his ability to express genuinely and sincerely what he himself experiences in the presence of nature, or what he can catch of the inner lives of others by virtue of his intelligent sympathy. No amount of emotion or even of imagination will profit a poet, unless he can render a true account of them. To be sure, he need not define, or even explain; for it is his function to transfer the immediate qualities of experience: but he must be able to speak the truth, and, in order to speak it, he must have known it. In all this, however, we have made no demand that the poet should see more than one thing at a time. Sincerity of expression does not require what is distinctly another mode of intelligence, comprehensiveness of view. It is easier, and accordingly more usual, to render an account of the moments and casual units of experience, than of its totality. There are poets, little and great, who possess the intellectual virtue of sincerity, without the intellectual power of synthesis and reconciliation. This distinction will enable us to separate the intelligence exhibited in all poetry, from that distinct form of intelligence exhibited in such poetry as is properly to be called philosophical.

The “barbarian” in poetry has recently been defined as “the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal." One will readily appreciate the application of this definition to Walt Whitman. What little unity there is in this poet’s world, is the composition of a purely sensuous experience,

“The earth expending right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where
it is not wanted.”

In many passages Whitman manifests a marvellous ability to discover and communicate a fresh gladness about the commonest experiences. We cannot but rejoice with him in all sights and sounds. But though we cannot deny him truth, his truth is honesty and not understanding. The experiences in which he discovers so much worth, are random and capricious, and do not constitute a universe. To the solution of ultimate questions he contributes a sense of mystery, and the conviction

“That you are here that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

His world is justly described by the writer just quoted as “a phantasmagoria 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 aggregation of parts."

As is Walt Whitman, so are many poets greater and less. Some who have seen the world-view, exhibit the same particularism in their lyric moods; although, generally speaking, a poet who once has comprehended the world, will see the parts of it in the light of that wisdom. But Walt Whitman is peculiarly representative of the poetry that can be true, without being wise in the manner that we shall come shortly to understand as the manner of philosophy. He is as desultory in his poet raptures as is the common man when he lives in his immediate experiences. The truth won by each is the clear vision of one thing, or of a limited collection of things, and not the broad inclusive vision of all things.

Sec. The transition from Whitman to Shakespeare may seem somewhat abrupt, but the very differences between these poets serve to mark out an interesting affinity. Neither has put any unitary construction upon human life and its environment. Neither, as poet, is the witness of any world-view; which will mean for us that neither is a philosopher-poet. As respects Shakespeare, this is a hard saying. We are accustomed to the critical judgment that finds in the Shakespearian dramas an apprehension of the universal in human life. But though this judgment is true, it is by no means conclusive as respects Shakespeare’s relation to the philosophical type of thought. For there can be universality without philosophy. Thus, to know the groups and the marks of the vertebrates is to know a truth which possesses generality, in contradistinction to the particularism of Whitman’s poetic consciousness. Even so to know well the groups and marks of human character, vertebrate and invertebrate, is to know that of which the average man, in his hand to hand struggle with life, is ignorant. Such a wisdom Shakespeare possessed to a unique degree, and it enabled him to reconstruct human life. He did not merely perceive human states and motives, but he understood human nature so well that he could create consistent men and women. Moreover, Shakespeare’s knowledge was not only thus universal in being a knowledge of general groups and laws, but also in respect of its extensity. His understanding was as rich as it was acute. It is true, then, that Shakespeare read human life as an open book, knowing certainly the manner of human thinking and feeling, and the power and interplay of human motives. But it is equally true, on the other hand, that he possessed no unitary conception of the meaning and larger relations of human life. Such a conception might have been expressed either by means of the outlook of some dominating and persistent type of personality, or by a pervading suggestion of some constant world-setting for the variable enterprise of mankind. It could appear only provided the poet’s appreciation of life in detail were determined by an interpretation of the meaning of life as a whole. Shakespeare apparently possessed no such interpretation. Even when Hamlet is groping after some larger truth that may bear upon the definite problems of life, he represents but one, and that a strange and unusual, type of human nature. And Hamlet’s reflections, it should be noted, have no outcome. There is no Shakespearian answer to the riddles that Hamlet propounds. The poet’s genius is not less amazing for this fact; indeed, his peculiar distinction can only be comprehended upon this basis. Shakespeare put no construction upon life, and by virtue of this very reserve accomplished an art of surpassing fidelity and vividness. The absence of philosophy in Shakespeare, and the presence of the most characteristic quality of his genius, may both be imputed by the one affirmation, that there is no Shakespearian point of view.

This truth signifies both gain and loss. The philosophical criticism of life may vary from the ideal objectivity of absolute truth, to the subjectivity of a personal religion. Philosophy aims to correct the partiality of particular points of view by means of a point of view that shall comprehend their relations, and effect such reconciliations or transformations as shall enable them to constitute a universe. Philosophy always assumes the hypothetical view of omniscience. The necessity of such a final criticism is implicit in every scientific item of knowledge, and in every judgment that is passed upon life. Philosophy makes a distinct and peculiar contribution to human knowledge by its heroic effort to measure all knowledges and all ideals by the standard of totality. Nevertheless it is significant that no human individual can possibly possess the range of omniscience. The most adequate knowledge of which any generation of men is capable, will always be that which is conceived by the most synthetic and vigorously metaphysical minds; but every individual philosophy will nevertheless be a premature synthesis. The effort to complete knowledge is the indispensable test of the adequacy of prevailing conceptions, but the completed knowledge of any individual mind will shortly become an historical monument. It will belong primarily to the personal life of its creator, as the articulation of his personal covenant with the universe. There is a sound justification for such a conclusion of things in the case of the individual, for the conditions of human life make it inevitable; but it will always possess a felt unity, and many distinct features, that are private and subjective. Now such a projection of personality, with its coloring and its selection, Shakespeare has avoided; and very largely as a consequence, his dramas are a storehouse of genuine human nature. Ambition, mercy, hate, madness, guilelessness, conventionality, mirth, bravery, deceit, purity these, and all human states and attributes save piety, are upon his pages as real, and as mysterious withal, as they are in the great historical society. For an ordinary reader, these states and attributes are more real in Hamlet or Lear than in his own direct experience, because in Hamlet and Lear he can see them with the eye and intelligence of genius. But Shakespeare is the world all over again, and there is loss as well as gain in such realism. Here is human life, no doubt, and a brilliant pageantry it is; but human life as varied and as problematic as it is in the living. Shakespeare’s fundamental intellectual resource is the historical and psychological knowledge of such principles as govern the construction of human natures. The goods for which men undertake, and live or die, are any goods, justified only by the actual human striving for them. The virtues are the old winning virtues of the secular life, and the heroisms of the common conscience. Beyond its empirical generality, his knowledge is universal only in the sense that space and time are universal. His consciousness contains its representative creations, and expresses them unspoiled by any transforming thought. His poetic consciousness is like the very stage to which he likens all the world: men and women meet there, and things happen there. The stage itself creates no unity save the occasion and the place. Shakespeare’s consciousness is universal because it is a fair field with no favors. But even so it is particular, because, though each may enter and depart in peace, when all enter together there is anarchy and a babel of voices. All Shakespeare is like all the world seen through the eyes of each of its inhabitants. Human experience in Shakespeare is human experience as everyone feels it, as comprehensive as the aggregate of innumerable lives. But human experience in philosophy is the experience of all as thought by a synthetic mind. Hence the wealth of life depicted by Shakespeare serves only to point out the philosopher’s problem, and to challenge his powers. Here he will find material, and not results; much to philosophize about, but no philosophy.

Sec. The discussion up to this point has attributed to poetry very definite intellectual factors that nevertheless do not constitute philosophy. Walt Whitman speaks his feeling with truth, but in general manifests no comprehensive insight. Shakespeare has not only sincerity of expression but an understanding mind. He has a knowledge not only of particular experiences, but of human nature; and a consciousness full and varied like society itself. But there is a kind of knowledge possessed by neither, the knowledge sought by coordinating all aspects of human experience, both particular and general. Not even Shakespeare is wise as one who, having seen the whole, can fundamentally interpret a part. But though the philosopher-poet may not yet be found, we cannot longer be ignorant of his nature. He will be, like all poets, one who appreciates experiences or finds things good, and he will faithfully reproduce the values which he discovers. But he must justify himself in view of the fundamental nature of the universe. The values which he apprehends must be harmonious, and so far above the plurality of goods as to transcend and unify them. The philosopher-poet will find reality as a whole to be something that accredits the order of values in his inner life. He will not only find certain things to be most worthy objects of action or contemplation, but he will see why they are worthy, because he will have construed the judgment of the universe in their favor.

In this general sense, Omar Khayyam is a philosopher-poet. To be sure his universe is quite the opposite of that which most poets conceive, and is perhaps profoundly antagonistic to the very spirit of poetry; but it is none the less true that the joys to which Omar invites us are such as his universe prescribes for human life.

“Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum.”

Herein is both poetry and philosophy, albeit but a poor brand of each. We are invited to occupy ourselves only with spiritual cash, because the universe is spiritually insolvent. The immediately gratifying feelings are the only feelings that the world can guarantee. Omar Khayyam is a philosopher-poet, because his immediate delight in “youth’s sweet-scented manuscript” is part of a consciousness that vaguely sees, though it cannot grasp, “this sorry scheme of things entire.”

“Drink for you know not whence you come, nor why;
Drink for you know not why you go, nor where.”

Sec. But the poet in his world-view ordinarily sees other than darkness. The same innate spiritual enterprise that sustains religious faith leads the poet more often to find the universe positively congenial to his ideals, and to ideals in general. He interprets human experience in the light of the spirituality of all the world. It is to Wordsworth that we of the present age are chiefly indebted for such imagery, and it will profit us to consider somewhat carefully the philosophical quality of his poetry.

Walter Pater, in introducing his appreciation of Wordsworth, writes that “an intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry.” We recognize at once the truth of this characterization as applied to Wordsworth. But there is something more distinguished about this poet’s sensibility even than its extreme fineness and delicacy; a quality that is suggested, though not made explicit, by Shelley’s allusion to Wordsworth’s experience as “a sort of thought in sense.” Nature possessed for him not merely enjoyable and describable characters of great variety and minuteness, but an immediately apprehended unity and meaning. It would be a great mistake to construe this meaning in sense as analogous to the crude symbolism of the educator Froebel, to whom, as he said, “the world of crystals proclaimed, in distinct and univocal terms, the laws of human life.” Wordsworth did not attach ideas to sense, but regarded sense itself as a communication of truth. We readily call to mind his unique capacity for apprehending the characteristic flavor of a certain place in a certain moment of time, the individuality of a situation. Now in such moments he felt that he was receiving intelligences, none the less direct and significant for their inarticulate form. Like the boy on Windermere, whom he himself describes,

“while he hung
Loitering, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.”

For our purpose it is essential that we should recognize in this appreciation of nature, expressed in almost every poem that Wordsworth wrote, a consciousness respecting the fundamental nature of the world. Conversation, as we know, denotes an interchange of commensurable meanings. Whatever the code may be, whether words or the most subtle form of suggestion, communication is impossible without community of nature. Hence, in believing himself to be holding converse with the so-called physical world, Wordsworth conceives that world as fundamentally like himself. He finds the most profound thing in all the world to be the universal spiritual life. In nature this life manifests itself most directly, clothed in its own proper dignity and peace. But it may be discovered in the humanity that is most close to nature, in the avocations of plain and simple people, and the unsophisticated delights of children; and, with the perspective of contemplation, even “among the multitudes of that huge city.”

So Wordsworth is rendering a true account of his own experience of reality when, as in “The Prelude,” he says unequivocally:

“A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides,
And in the heart of man; invisibly
It comes to works of unreproved delight,
And tendency benign; directing those
Who care not, know not, think not, what they do.”

Wordsworth is not a philosopher-poet because by searching his pages we can find an explicit philosophical creed such as this, but because all the joys of which his poet-soul compels him to sing have their peculiar note, and compose their peculiar harmony, by virtue of such an indwelling consciousness. Here is one who is a philosopher in and through his poetry. He is a philosopher in so far as the detail of his appreciation finds fundamental justification in a world-view. From the immanence of “the universal heart” there follows, not through any mediate reasoning, but by the immediate experience of its propriety, a conception of that which is of supreme worth in life. The highest and best of which life is capable is contemplation, or the consciousness of the universal indwelling of God. Of those who fail to live thus fittingly in the midst of the divine life, Walter Pater speaks for Wordsworth as follows:

“To higher or lower ends they move too often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety to bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world at its very sources."

The quiet and worshipful spirit, won by the cultivation of the emotions appropriate to the presence of nature and society, is the mark of the completest life and the most acceptable service. Thus for Wordsworth the meaning of life is inseparable from the meaning of the universe. In apprehending that which is good and beautiful in human experience, he was attended by a vision of the totality of things. Herein he has had to do, if not with the form, at any rate with the very substance of philosophy.

Sec. Unquestionably the supreme philosopher-poet is Dante. He is not only philosophical in the temper of his mind, but his greatest poem is the incarnation of a definite system of philosophy, the most definite that the world has seen. That conception of the world which in the thirteenth century found argumentative and orderly expression in the “Summa Theologiae” of Thomas of Aquino, and constituted the faith of the church, is visualized by Dante, and made the basis of an interpretation of life.

The “Divina Commedia” deals with all the heavens to the Empyrean itself, and with all spiritual life to the very presence of God. It derives its imagery from the cosmology of the day, its dramatic motive from the Christian and Greek conceptions of God and his dealings with the world. Sin is punished because of the justice of God; knowledge, virtue, and faith lead, through God’s grace and mercy manifested in Christ, to a perpetual union with Him. Hell, purgatory, and paradise give place and setting to the events of the drama. But the deeper meaning of the poem is allegorical. In a letter quoted by Lowell, Dante writes:

“The literal subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after death, simply considered. But if the work be taken allegorically the subject is man, as by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of justice."

In other words, the inner and essential meaning of the poem has to do not with external retribution, but with character, and the laws which determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punishments described in the “Inferno” are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and evil, or moral insight, as the guide of man through this life of struggle and progress. The earthly paradise, at the close of the “Purgatorio,” represents the highest state to which human character can attain when choice is determined by ordinary experience, intelligence, and understanding. Here man stands alone, endowed with an enlightened conscience. Here are uttered the last words of Virgil to Dante, the explorer of the spiritual country:

“Expect no more or word or sign from me. Free, upright, and sane is thine own free will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its pleasure; wherefore thee over thyself I crown and mitre."

But moral self-reliance is not the last word. As Beatrice, the image of tenderness and holiness, comes to Dante in the earthly paradise, and leads him from the summit of purgatory into the heaven of heavens, and even to the eternal light; so there is added to the mere human, intellectual, and moral resources of the soul, the sustaining power of the divine grace, the illuminating power of divine truth, and the transforming power of divine love. Through the aid of this higher wisdom, the journey of life becomes the way to God. Thus the allegorical truth of the “Divina Commedia” is not merely an analysis of the moral nature of man, but the revelation of a universal spiritual order, manifesting itself in the moral evolution of the individual, and above all in his ultimate community with the eternal goodness.

“Thou shouldst not, if I deem aright, wonder more at thy ascent, than at a stream if from a high mountain it descends to the base. A marvel it would be in thee, if, deprived of hindrance, thou hadst sat below, even as quiet by living fire in earth would be."

Such, in brief, is Dante’s world-view, so suggestive of the freer idealistic conceptions of later thought as to justify a recent characterization of him as one who, “accepting without a shadow of a doubt or hesitation all the constitutive ideas of mediaeval thought and life, grasped them so firmly and gave them such luminous expression that the spirit in them broke away from the form."

But it must be added, as in the case of Wordsworth, that Dante is a philosopher-poet not because St. Thomas Aquinas appears and speaks with authority in the Thirteenth Canto of the “Paradiso,” nor even because a philosophical doctrine can be consistently formulated from his writings, but because his consciousness of life is informed with a sense of its universal bearings. There is a famous passage in the Twenty-second Canto of the “Paradiso,” in which Dante describes himself as looking down upon the earth from the starry heaven.

“‘Thou art so near the ultimate salvation,’ began Beatrice, ’that thou oughtest to have thine eyes clear and sharp. And therefore ere thou further enterest it, look back downward, and see how great a world I have already set beneath thy feet, in order that thy heart, so far as it is able, may present itself joyous to the triumphant crowd which comes glad through this round ether.’ With my sight I returned through each and all the seven spheres, and saw this globe such that I smiled at its mean semblance; and that counsel I approve as the best which holds it of least account; and he who thinks of other things maybe called truly worthy.”

Dante’s scale of values is that which appears from the starry heaven. His austere piety, his invincible courage, and his uncompromising hatred of wrong, are neither accidents of temperament nor blind reactions, but compose the proper character of one who has both seen the world from God, and returned to see God from the world. He was, as Lowell has said, “a man of genius who could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his task”; and his power was not obstinacy, but a vision of the ways of God. He knew a truth that justified him in his sacrifices, and made a great glory of his defeat and exile. Even so his poetry or appreciation of life is the expression of an inward contemplation of the world in its unity or essence. It is but an elaboration of the piety which he attributes to the lesser saints of paradise, when he has them say:

“Nay, it is essential to this blessed existence to hold ourselves within the divine will, whereby our very wills are made one. So that as we are from stage to stage throughout this realm, to all the realm is pleasing, as to the King who inwills us with His will. And His will is our peace; it is that sea whereunto is moving all that which It creates and which nature makes."

Sec. There now remains the brief task of distinguishing the philosopher-poet from the philosopher himself. The philosopher-poet is one who, having made the philosophical point of view his own, expresses himself in the form of poetry. The philosophical point of view is that from which the universe is comprehended in its totality. The wisdom of the philosopher is the knowledge of each through the knowledge of all. Wherein, then, does the poet, when possessed of such wisdom, differ from the philosopher proper? To this question one can give readily enough the general answer, that the difference lies in the mode of utterance. Furthermore, we have already given some account of the peculiar manner of the poet. He invites us to experience with him the beautiful and moving in nature and life. That which the poet has to express, and that which he aims to arouse in others, is an appreciative experience. He requires what Wordsworth calls “an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.” Therefore if he is to be philosophical in intelligence, and yet essentially a poet, he must find his universal truth in immediate experience. He must be one who, in seeing the many, sees the one. The philosopher-poet is he who visualizes a fundamental interpretation of the world. “A poem,” says one poet, “is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”

The philosopher proper, on the other hand, has the sterner and less inviting task of rendering such an interpretation articulate to thought. That which the poet sees, the philosopher must define. That which the poet divines, the philosopher must calculate. The philosopher must dig for that which the poet sees shining through. As the poet transcends thought for the sake of experience, the philosopher must transcend experience for the sake of thought. As the poet sees all, and all in each, so the philosopher, knowing each, must think all consistently together, and then know each again. It is the part of philosophy to collect and criticise evidence, to formulate and coordinate conceptions, and finally to define in exact terms. The réanimation of the structure of thought is accomplished primarily in religion, which is a general conception of the world made the basis of daily living.

For religion there is no subjective correlative less than life itself. Poetry is another and more circumscribed means of restoring thought to life. By the poet’s imagination, and through the art of his expression, thought may be sensuously perceived. “If the time should ever come,” says Wordsworth, “when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh, and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man." As respects truth, philosophy has an indubitable priority. The very sternness of the philosopher’s task is due to his supreme dedication to truth. But if validity be the merit of philosophy, it can well be supplemented by immediacy, which is the merit of poetry. Presuppose in the poet conviction of a sound philosophy, and we may say with Shelley, of his handiwork, that “it is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.” “Indeed,” as he adds, “what were our consolations on this side of the grave and our aspirations beyond it if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar?"

The unity in outlook, attended by differences of method and form, which may exist between poet and philosopher, is signally illustrated by the relation between Goethe and Spinoza. What Goethe saw and felt, Spinoza proved and defined. The universal and eternal substance was to Spinoza, as philosopher, a theorem, and to Goethe, as poet, a perception and an emotion. Goethe writes to Jacobi that when philosophy “lays itself out for division,” he cannot get on with it, but when it “confirms our original feeling as though we were one with nature,” it is welcome to him. In the same letter Goethe expresses his appreciation of Spinoza as the complement of his own nature:

“His all-reconciling peace contrasted with my all-agitating endeavor; his intellectual method was the opposite counterpart of my poetic way of feeling and expressing myself; and even the inflexible regularity of his logical procedure, which might be considered ill-adapted to moral subjects, made me his most passionate scholar and his devoted adherent. Mind and heart, understanding and sense, were drawn together with an inevitable elective affinity, and this at the same time produced an intimate union between individuals of the most different types."

It appears, then, that some poets share with all philosophers that point of view from which the horizon line is the boundary of all the world. Poetry is not always or essentially philosophical, but may be so; and when the poetic imagination restores philosophy to immediacy, human experience reaches its most exalted state, excepting only religion itself, wherein God is both seen and also served. Nor is the part of philosophy in poetry and religion either ignoble or presumptuous, for, humanly speaking, “the owl-winged faculty of calculation” is the only safe and sure means of access to that place on high,

“Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But a divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.”