justification. Lucretius is a pathological study, and seems to me more fit for an essay in the Lancet than for a poem. A psychological study, in the hands of such a writer as Tennyson, might make a fine poem; and even morbid psychology would not lie beyond the range of possible successful treatment. But the study of the action of a brain poison upon body and mind is pure pathology, and pathology is outside the region of poetry. When, in Maud, the lover goes mad, it is within the province of the poem to depict his madness, because the madness is the direct fruit of the mental and moral experiences dealt with in the poem, and these experiences give its whole cast to the madness itself; the madman is Maud's lover still. But when to Lucretius is given a dose of poison which subverts his whole nature, and gives to that which was weakest in him-not him at all, in fact-a factitious and temporary power, so that thoughts and images foreign to his whole life take possession of his mind, and, howsoever mingled with broken glances of his own proper thoughts and dominant tendencies, invert and falsify the whole putting of his naturethis is a case for the doctor, not the poet. If he who had lived Lucretius, through the ignorant impatience or selfishness of a woman, taking form in a poison-cup, died so, let us, if necessary, record the fact, but let us not make a poem of it. So, at least, the matter presents itself to my mind; and so it is that, finding much fine poetry in Lucretius, I do not like the poem. Despair is, if I may coin the word, a spirituopathologic study. Lucretius groaned under the effects of a brain poison; this poor man under the effects of a spirit poison. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son "-that was the health he had lost, and the poisons that worked in him were, first, Calvinism, and then, to which the other helped to drive him, Atheism. For the poor man had a human heart, and his faithful love for a faithful wife, and hers for him, made Calvinism and Atheism not theories, but living terrors. Terrors, not fears merely ; but terrors creating the vision of a universe without justice, without love. The infused lies made his In other words, the poor man's trouble was not legitimate. disease. It is not like the sorrow of the widow in Rizpah. Than it nothing could be bitterer; but there was reason for it, in fact. For this poor man's sorrow there was cause, but no reason. It was a disease. The healing of it would have made a lovely art subject; the analysis of it, no-as I think. The part of the poem that justifies itself as art is the touch of health still left-the touch of tender human love and trust. "And she laid her hand in my own-she was always loyal and sweet Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our feet. "We turned to each other, we kissed, we embraced, she and I. "Dear Love, for ever and ever, for ever and ever farewell.' I think that Tennyson in some of these later poems speaks, and suffers his characters to speak, in a very superficial way about the doctrine of future punishment. To print "hell" with a capital H, as in this poem, involves a sort of special pleading. If, which I do not think, a satisfactory discussion of the subject were possible, it would have to rest not only upon thoughts of the heart of God, but also upon conceptions of the nature of character and of the human soul. I, who write, suffered enough in my early years from the horrors of Calvinistic teaching. But to talk with inevitable ignorance and rashness on the other side will not help matters. The words of the New Testament, if we refer to them, are at once solemn and vague. Our wisdom is, perhaps, to take the solemnity to heart, and to rest content with the vagueness. may well be that with our present powers of understanding and realising, greater seeming precision would be simply misleading. It Our poet, who loved men, desired that they should believe in the infinite love of the Infinite and Incomprehensible God. To this end, I doubt not, he wrote Despair, and such passages as I have just referred to. But a more excellent way was open to him, even the way of the devout and holiness-loving artist which he was. In the other way, not even a theologian can do much. But he who has seen the beauty of God must needs believe in His love. Divine beauty in all its grades is the great sphere of the poet's teaching, and in this sphere our poet could better have sought the end at which he aimed. By a natural transition we pass to the consideration of the Later Philosophical Poems. CHAPTER XVI LATER PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS THE series of Later Philosophical Poems opens well with the brave little poem Wages, teaching that virtue is the basis of the hope of immortality, that the hope of immortality is the life-blood of virtue, and that the immortality which virtue desires is not an immortality of reward as distinct from virtue, but an immortality of virtue. The Voice and the Peak finds in man a peak higher, a voice deeper, and a being other than belongs to external nature. So far we have familiar truths; the putting makes the poem in each. The next are more speculative, concerning themselves with the relation of the seen to the unseen in the universe at large. "Flower in the crannied wall," in asserting that to understand through and through any part of nature would involve the understanding of all nature, and of Him who is nature's source and life, implies the organic unity of the universe and its vital relation to God. The Higher Pantheism goes further, and asserts that in some mystic manner God and the universe are one, as body and soul are one man, essential reality and vital manifestation. But the pantheism, if pantheism it be, is a higher pantheism, for there is no obscuring of the two fundamentals of religion, the Divine Personality, and the seeming paradox therewith, the true personality of man. The Ancient Sage combines the attitudes of the two former groups. It bears a considerable resemblance to The Two Voices. Like it, it consists of counter-puttings; and like it, it takes its stand outside, that is, in thought prior to (in this case in time prior to) the Christian revelation. The counter-puttings are between two who plead, the one for the seen alone, and the other for the unseen, the one for sense, and the other for faith, the one for the outer world, and the other for the inner consciousness. One of the speakers is a young man, a kind of saddened Alcibiades, whose words are in the discordant keys of sorrow and voluptuousness. He urges, "The visible is all that we know, there is nothing, or nothing that reveals itself, behind, and in man himself age and death unmake what life and youth have made. So the present, though it is contemptible, is all that we have, and should be sadly and scornfully lived for. "Yet wine and laughter friends! and set The lamps alight, and call For golden music, and forget The darkness of the pall.' To him the Sage answers that the Nameless is revealed within; that in his own being man learns the unseen, and that in obedience to the inner voice is the path of wisdom. |