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." 8

8 Paradiso, Canto III.

Poetry and

14. There now remains the brief task of distinguishing the philosopher-poet from the philosoThe Difference pher himself. The philosopher-poet is between one who, having made the philosophical Philosophy. 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 coördinate conceptions, and finally to define in exact terms. The reanimation 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

66

Observations prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical

Ballads.

from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar?" 10

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."

10 A Defence of Poetry.

99 11

11 Quoted by Caird in his Literature and Philosophy, Vol. I,

p. 60