About the Work
Three Philosophical Poets is a short book of literary criticism and philosophical appreciation by George Santayana, based on six lectures he delivered at Columbia University in February 1910 and repeated that April at the University of Wisconsin. The lectures grew out of a regular course he had long taught at Harvard College, and the book was signed from Harvard College in June 1910. Santayana opens with a disarming disclaimer: he is no specialist on Lucretius, not a Dante scholar nor a Goethe scholar, and he reports no facts and proposes no hypotheses that are not already available in the familiar works or well-known commentaries. What he offers, he says, is an amateur’s impressions and an ordinary reader’s appreciations of three great writers, two of whom could occupy a lifetime of study and have academies, libraries, and university chairs consecrated to them. His excuse is the human excuse every new poet has for writing about spring: these writers attracted him, moved him to reflection, and revealed aspects of nature and philosophy that he is prompted by sincerity to express. The result is not a learned investigation but a piece of literary criticism together with a first broad lesson in the history of philosophy—and perhaps in philosophy itself.
“The good is the end at which nature aims.”
The book’s contents are listed as five sections: an Introduction; a study of Lucretius; a study of Dante; a study of Goethe’s Faust; and a Conclusion. The Introduction announces the governing thesis—that Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe sum up the chief phases of European philosophy, namely naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism—and treats the ideal relation between philosophy and poetry. The Lucretius section traces the development of Greek cosmology, Democritus, the Epicurean moral sentiment and its modifications of the Democritean system, the accidental alliance of materialism with hedonism, the imaginative value of naturalism, the poet’s preponderant melancholy, his account of the materiality of the soul, his treatment of the fear of death and the fear of life, his standing as the true poet of nature, his comparison with Shelley and Wordsworth, and the indefeasible worth of his insight and sentiment. The Dante section moves from the character of Platonism and its cosmology as parable, through its combination with the Hebraic philosophy of history, to Dante’s theory of the Papacy and the Empire, his judgement on Florence, his lyric gift, Beatrice as woman, symbol, and reality, the constitutive principles of love, magic, and symbolism in his universe, the idea of the Divine Comedy, its scheme of virtues and vices, the retributive theory of rewards and punishments and the esoteric view that makes punishment intrinsic to the sins, Dantesque cosmography, the poet’s genius and universal scope, the triumphant execution of the Comedy, and his defects—despite which he remains the type of a supreme poet. The section on Goethe’s Faust covers the romantic spirit and the ideals of the Renaissance as both are expressed in the Faust legend, Marlowe’s version, the tendency to vindicate Faust, the contrast with Calderón’s Wonder-working Magician, Goethe’s original Faust with his universal ambition and eternal dissatisfaction, the modifications the figure underwent, the series of experiments in living, the story of Gretchen fitted into the whole, Goethe’s naturalistic theory of life and rejuvenation through Helen, the classic manner and the judgement on classicism, Faust’s last ambition, the conflict over his soul and his ascent to heaven as symbolical, and the moral of the whole. The Conclusion compares the three poets, their relative rank, the ideal of a philosophic or comprehensive poet, and the untried possibilities of art.
Context
The book belongs to a moment when the history of ideas was being written with unusual confidence about large patterns, and Santayana’s framework is frankly dialectical: the diversity of the three poets passes, in Hegelian fashion, into a unity of a higher kind. Each poet is taken as typical of an age, and together they are said to sum up all European philosophy. Lucretius adopts what Santayana considers the most radical and most correct of the cosmological systems devised by early Greece; Dante completes the revolution by which a moral interpretation of nature replaced the observation of nature; Goethe’s Faust is the foam atop two merging waves, the romanticism of northern traditions and a new paganism flowing from Greece over Italy.
Santayana’s own position is deliberately unprofessional. He insists that the sole advantage of possessing great works of literature lies in what they can help us to become. In themselves, as feats of their authors, they would have forfeited no truth or greatness had they perished before our day; we can neither take away nor add to their past value or inherent dignity. Only insofar as they are appropriate food and not poison for us can they add to the present value and dignity of our minds. Foreign classics must be retranslated and reinterpreted for each generation, to render their old naturalness naturally and keep their perennial humanity living and capable of assimilation; even native classics must be reapprehended by every reader. This continual digestion of the past’s substance alone renders past insights potent in the present and future, and living criticism—genuine appreciation—is the interest we draw yearly on the unrecoverable capital of human genius.
The book thus stands at a distance from the scholarly apparatus that had grown up around its subjects. Santayana notes that no important poem’s antecedents can be traced so exhaustively as those of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, yet these antecedents do not lie in the poet himself, since we know nothing or next to nothing about Lucretius the man. The one surviving notice, a chronicle compiled by St. Jerome largely from Suetonius, records that Titus Lucretius was born in 94 B.C., that a love-philtre turned him mad, that he wrote several books in the intervals of his insanity which Cicero revised, and that he killed himself in his forty-fourth year. Santayana calls the love-philtre apocryphal and the madness and suicide too edifying an end for an atheist and Epicurean not to be suspected. He grants a consonance between the story’s tragic incidents and the poet’s genius—the strange scorn of love, the strange vehemence, the high melancholy—so that it is not incredible the author was once slave to a pathological passion, that the vehemence passed into mania, and that he took his own life; but the untrustworthy authority cannot assure us whether this is tradition founded on fact or ingenious fiction. Santayana does not much regret the ignorance: the work preserves what the poet wished preserved. Perfect conviction ignores itself, proclaiming public truth, and reaching this requires a peculiar genius called intelligence—quickness in seeing things as they are. Where intelligence is attained, the rest of a man, like scaffolding to a finished building, becomes irrelevant. It is the intellectual vision the naturalist wishes to hand down, not the shabby incidents preceding it; those incidents could not be repeated in us, but the vision is communicable and may become part of ourselves.
Structure of the Book
The book unfolds as a sequence of five movements, each with its own centre of gravity, and the argument is cumulative rather than merely additive. The Introduction sets out the relation between philosophy and poetry and the claim that the three poets are compatible in what makes them great. It argues that poetry is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental but for being comprehensive and having range; if too much matter makes a poem heavy, that is the fault of the poet’s weak intellect, not of the outstretched world. A quicker eye and a more synthetic imagination could grasp a larger subject with the same ease, and the resulting picture would be deeper and stronger, possessing as much unity as a smaller one with greater volume. As in a supreme dramatic crisis all life seems focused in the present, so for each philosophic poet the whole world of man is gathered together; he is never so much a poet as when in a single cry he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe and salutes his ultimate destiny. The acme of life is to understand life; the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods. Three historical illustrations are then promised, and the Introduction closes with two Latin quotations from Lucretius—the first comparing the poet’s sweet honeyed verse to doctors touching cups with honey so that children may drink bitter wormwood and be healed, the second describing the hope of praise striking the poet’s heart as with a thyrsus, filling him with love of the Muses, so that he roams pathless Pierian places, drinks from untouched fountains, gathers new flowers, and seeks a crown, teaching great things and striving to free the mind from the knots of religion, writing lucid verses on obscure matters, hoping to hold the reader’s mind while he surveys all nature.
The Lucretius section then reconstructs the stages by which a naturalistic conception of things first shaped itself in the human mind. Xenophanes looked up into the round heaven and cried, “The All is One.” What is logically a truism may be imaginatively a great discovery, because no one before may have thought of the obvious analogy the truism registers. The unity of all things is logically evident but barren, since even the most disparate worlds would still be a multitude, an aggregate, and so in some sense a unity; yet it was a great imaginative feat to cast the eye deliberately round the entire horizon and draw mentally the sum of all reality, discovering that reality makes such a sum and may be called one. Doubtless some prehistoric man of genius, long before Xenophanes, first applied to all things together the notion of unity and wholeness everybody had gained from observing things singly, and first ventured to speak of “the world.” To do so sets the problem for all natural philosophy and in some measure anticipates its solution, for it asks how things hang together and assumes they do hang together in one way or another. From this beginning the section moves through Democritus and Epicurus to the poem itself, and then to the poet’s genius, whose greatest trait is losing itself in its object—impersonality. We read not poetry about things but the poetry of things themselves. That things have poetry because of their own movement and life, Lucretius proves once for all.
The Dante section opens with an incidental passage in Plato’s Phaedo that foreshadows and defines the transition from antiquity to the middle age, from naturalism to supernaturalism, from Lucretius to Dante. Socrates, in prison, recounts hearing someone read from a book of Anaxagoras that Reason was the disposer and cause of all. He was delighted, reasoning that if Reason disposes all, it disposes each thing for the best and places it in the best position; to find the cause of anything’s generation, destruction, or existence, one must find what is best for it. He seized the books and read eagerly—and was grievously disappointed, finding the philosopher forsaking Reason and having recourse to air, ether, water, and other eccentricities. One man makes a vortex and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives air as a support to the earth, a sort of broad trough. No power arranging things for the best enters their minds; they expect another Atlas stronger and more everlasting than the good. Santayana calls this the programme of a new philosophy: things are to be understood by their uses or purposes, not by elements or antecedents—as Socrates sitting in prison rather than escaping to Euboea is understood by his allegiance to what is best, not by the composition of his bones and muscles. Such reasons as we give for our actions are to explain the order of nature. The world is a work of reason, interpreted by its motives, guessed not by fanciful dramatic mythology but by conscientious study of better and worse in our own lives. This is ridiculous physics, but Plato knew his physics were playful; what matters is that under this metaphorical physics there is a serious morality. The use of opium is that it is a narcotic; the use of the body is the mind. It dignifies these uses to call them the “causes” of the organs. What is true of particular organs is true of the whole frame of nature: its use is to serve the good—to make life, happiness, and virtue possible. Therefore Plato says with his whole school: discover the right principle of action, and you will have discovered the ruling force in the universe. Evoke the essence of a supreme good, and you will understand why the spheres revolve, why the earth is fertile, and why mankind suffers and exists. Observation must yield to dialectic; political art must yield to aspiration. It took many hundred years for the revolution to work itself out. Plato had prophetic genius and looked away from what he was—a Greek—to what mankind was to become. In Dante the revolution is complete, not merely intellectually (completed long before in the Neoplatonists and the Fathers of the Church), but complete morally and poetically, in that all habits of mind and sanctions of public life had been assimilated to it. Everything was reinterpreted, obliterating natural lines of cleavage and substituting moral lines. Nature was a compound of ideal purposes and inert matter. Life was a conflict between sin and grace. The environment was a battle-ground between angels and demons. The better and the worse had become the sole principles of understanding.
The Goethe section presents Faust as no deliberately philosophical poem, yet as offering a solution to the moral problem of existence comparable to those of Lucretius and Dante. In the young Goethe’s first version, philosophy appeared in the opening line, Hab nun ach die Philosophey, but only as human experience, passion, illusion, or ambitious art. Later, under fashion and Schiller’s influence, Goethe added scenes like the prologue in heaven and Faust’s apotheosis, indicating a philosophy of life: he who strives strays, yet in straying finds salvation. This moral adorned the tale without seeding it and without fairly expressing its spirit. Faust remained essentially romantic—written to vent a vivid genius, touch the heart, bewilder the mind with images, amuse, thrill, humanize. Its express maxims and half-betrayed insights exceeded the belated official moral Goethe himself warned against taking too seriously. Faust is thus no openly philosophical poem, yet offers a solution to existence’s moral problem as truly as Lucretius and Dante. Unheard philosophies may be sweeter, more unmixed and profound for being lived rather than taught. The vital straining toward a latent ideal, dominating a whole life, may express that ideal better than words. Faust is the foam atop two merging waves: romanticism from northern traditions and a new paganism from Greece over Italy. These are passions seething in the drama, not philosophies read in by critics. It is a philosophical adventure, rebellion against convention, flight to nature, tenderness, beauty, then return to convention.
The Conclusion then compares the three poets, their relative rank, the ideal of a philosophic or comprehensive poet, and the untried possibilities of art—closing the arc that the Introduction opened.
Inside the Book
Preface and Occasion
The book, Santayana explains, grew out of six lectures delivered at Columbia University in February 1910 and repeated that April at the University of Wisconsin, themselves drawn from a course he had long taught at Harvard. He disclaims scholarship outright: these are an amateur’s impressions and an ordinary reader’s appreciations of three writers, two of whom could occupy a lifetime and have whole academies and university chairs consecrated to them. He is no specialist on Lucretius, no Dante scholar, no Goethe scholar, and reports no fact or hypothesis unavailable in familiar works and commentaries. His excuse is the human one every new poet has for writing about spring: these poets attracted him, moved him to reflection, and revealed aspects of nature and philosophy he is prompted by sincerity to express. What he offers is literary criticism plus a first broad lesson in the history of philosophy—and perhaps in philosophy itself.
The Contents announce five sections: an Introduction; Lucretius; Dante; Goethe’s Faust; and a Conclusion. The Introduction will argue that the three poets sum up the chief phases of European philosophy—naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism—and will treat the ideal relation between philosophy and poetry. The Lucretius section will trace Greek cosmology from Democritus through the Epicurean moral sentiment, the accidental alliance of materialism with hedonism, the imaginative value of naturalism with its Venus and Mars, the poet’s melancholy, his materiality of the soul, his fear of death and of life, his standing beside Shelley and Wordsworth, and the indefeasible worth of his insight. The Dante section will cover Platonism as parable, its marriage with the Hebraic philosophy of history, the theory of Papacy and Empire, the judgement on Florence, Dante as lyric poet, Beatrice as woman, symbol, and reality, love and magic and symbolism as constitutive principles, the idea of the Comedy, its scheme of virtues and vices, its retributive and esoteric theories of punishment, its cosmography, the poet’s genius and universal scope, his triumphant execution, and his defects—despite which he remains the type of a supreme poet. The Faust section will treat the romantic spirit and Renaissance ideals embodied in the legend, Marlowe’s version, the tendency to vindicate Faust, the contrast with Calderón, Goethe’s restless hero, his experiments in living, the story of Gretchen, the naturalistic theory of rejuvenation through Helen, the judgement on classicism, Faust’s last ambition, the conflict over his soul, and his ascent to heaven as symbol. The Conclusion will compare the three poets, their relative rank, the ideal of a comprehensive philosophic poet, and the untried possibilities of art.
The Advantage of Great Literature
The sole advantage of possessing great works of literature, Santayana begins, lies in what they can help us to become. In themselves, as feats of their authors, they would have forfeited no truth or greatness had they perished before our day; we can neither take away nor add to their past value. Only insofar as they are appropriate food and not poison for us can they add to the present value and dignity of our minds. Foreign classics must be retranslated and reinterpreted for each generation, to render their old naturalness naturally and keep their perennial humanity capable of assimilation; even native classics must be reapprehended by every reader. This continual digestion of the past’s substance alone renders past insights potent in the present and future. Living criticism, genuine appreciation, is the interest we draw yearly on the unrecoverable capital of human genius.
Regarded as substances to be digested, the poetic remains of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe afford a varied feast. In doctrine and genius they may seem too opposed to be convergent or combinable in wisdom, and some who know and care for one may doubt whether they have anything vital to learn from the other two. Yet Santayana speaks as a pupil—hopefully discriminating—of each in turn, and ventures that in what makes them great they are compatible: without vagueness or doubleness of taste one may enthusiastically admire each poet’s poetry and accept each one’s essential philosophy, positive intuition, without lack of definition in one’s own thinking.
The diversity of the three poets passes, in Hegelian dialect, into a unity of a higher kind. Each is typical of an age; together they sum up all European philosophy. Lucretius adopts the most radical and most correct of the cosmological systems devised by early Greece. He sees the world as one great edifice, one great machine, all parts reacting upon and growing out of one another in obedience to a general pervasive process or life. His poem describes the nature of all things, showing how they are compounded of elements—atoms in perpetual motion, constantly redistributed so that old things perish and new arise. Into this view he fits a conception of human life as it ought to be led under such conditions. His materialism is completed by an aspiration toward freedom and quietness of spirit.
Poetry as Comprehensive Vision
Santayana argues that poetry is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental but for being comprehensive and having range. If too much matter makes a poem heavy, that is the fault of the poet’s weak intellect, not of the outstretched world. A quicker eye and more synthetic imagination could grasp a larger subject with the same ease; the resulting picture would be deeper and stronger, possessing as much unity as a smaller one with greater volume. As in a supreme dramatic crisis all life seems focused in the present, so for each philosophic poet the whole world of man is gathered together; he is never so much a poet as when in a single cry he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe and salutes his ultimate destiny. The acme of life is to understand life; the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods. Three historical illustrations will prove the point.
Two Latin quotations from Lucretius follow: the first compares the poet’s sweet honeyed verse to doctors touching cups with honey so children may drink bitter wormwood and be healed; the second describes the hope of praise striking the poet’s heart as with a thyrsus, filling him with love of the Muses, so that he roams pathless Pierian places, drinks from untouched fountains, gathers new flowers, and seeks a crown—teaching great things, striving to free the mind from the knots of religion, writing lucid verses on obscure matters, hoping to hold the reader’s mind while he surveys all nature.
The Man Lucretius and His Antecedents
No important poem’s antecedents can be traced so exhaustively as those of the De Rerum Natura, yet these antecedents do not lie in the poet himself, since we know next to nothing about Lucretius the man. A chronicle compiled by St. Jerome largely from Suetonius records for 94 B.C. that Titus Lucretius the poet was born, that after a love-philtre had turned him mad he wrote several books in the intervals of his insanity which Cicero revised, and that he killed himself in his forty-fourth year. Santayana calls the love-philtre apocryphal and the madness and suicide too edifying an end for an atheist and Epicurean not to be suspected. He notes a consonance between its tragic incidents and the poet’s genius—strange scorn of love, strange vehemence, high melancholy—making it not incredible that the author was once slave to a pathological passion, that vehemence passed into mania, and that he took his own life; but St. Jerome’s untrustworthy authority cannot assure whether this is tradition founded on fact or ingenious fiction.
Santayana does not much regret our ignorance of the life: the work preserves what the poet wished preserved. Perfect conviction ignores itself, proclaiming public truth; reaching this requires a peculiar genius called intelligence—quickness in seeing things as they are. Where intelligence is attained, the rest of a man, like scaffolding to a finished building, becomes irrelevant; we do not wish it to intercept our view of the solid structure. It is the intellectual vision the naturalist wishes to hand down, not the shabby incidents preceding it; those incidents could not be repeated in us, but the vision is communicable and may become part of ourselves.
Since Lucretius is identical for us with his poem and lost in his philosophy, the antecedents of Lucretius are simply the stages by which his conception of nature first shaped itself in the human mind. To retrace these is easy; some are only too familiar, yet the triteness may blind us to the grandeur and audacity of the intellectual feat. A naturalistic conception of things is a great work of imagination—greater than any dramatic or moral mythology; it is fit to inspire great poetry and may prove the only conception able to inspire it.
Xenophanes looked up into the round heaven and cried, “The All is One.” What is logically a truism may be imaginatively a great discovery, because no one before may have thought of the obvious analogy the truism registers. The unity of all things is logically evident but barren, since even the most disparate worlds would still be a multitude, an aggregate, and so in some sense a unity; yet it was a great imaginative feat to cast the eye deliberately round the entire horizon and draw mentally the sum of all reality, discovering that reality makes such a sum and may be called one, as any stone or animal, though composed of many parts, is called one in common parlance. Doubtless some prehistoric man of genius, long before Xenophanes, first applied to all things together the notion of unity and wholeness everybody had gained from observing things singly, and first ventured to speak of “the world.” To do so sets the problem for all natural philosophy and in some measure anticipates its solution, for it asks how things hang together and assumes they do hang together in one way or another.
To cry “The All is One” and perceive all things in one landscape forming a system by juxtaposition is the rude beginning of wisdom in natural philosophy. But it is easy to go farther and see things form a unity in a far deeper, more mysterious way. One of the first things impressing the poet, the man of feeling and reflection, is that these objects peopling the world all pass away, and the place thereof knows them no more. Yet when they vanish, nothingness does not succeed; other things arise in their stead. Nature remains always young and whole despite death at work everywhere.
The Epicurean Gods and the Ethics of Materialism
The gods of Epicurus were remote, happy, and secluded from earthly affairs; nothing disturbed their voluptuous unconcern. Yet visiting their temples was pleasant: there the gods were silent, beautiful, and wore human form. Their statues reminded unhappy men of happiness, refreshing them and weaning them momentarily from human affairs. From groves and sanctuaries the philosopher returned to his garden strengthened in wisdom, happier in isolation, more friendly and indifferent to the world. St. Jerome is cited as witnessing that Epicurus’s life was full of herbs, fruits, and abstinences. A hush, as of bereavement, pervaded it; his was a philosophy of decadence, negation, and flight from the world.
Science for its own sake could not interest so monkish a nature, but it might buttress faith or remove objections. Epicurus therefore departed from Socrates’s reserve and sought a natural philosophy supporting his ethics.
The Symbolist Landscape and the Poet of Nature
The passage distinguishes two further kinds of landscape poetry. A poet might be a symbolist in a second sense: breaking up nature, the object landscape suggests to the mind, and reverting to landscape’s elements—not to associate sensations lazily, but to build in fancy a different and better nature than the one they reveal to reason. Elements chosen, emphasized, and recombined would become symbols for the ideal world and ideal life they suggest. Shelley is a symbolic landscape poet in this sense. Per Francis Thompson, nature was to Shelley a toy-shop; his fancy wove landscape’s materials into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for new-born irresponsible spirits. Shelley was the musician of landscape: he traced its unrealized suggestions, transforming what he saw into what he would fain have seen. Spirit guided this idealization—the bent of his wild, exquisite imagination—and he fancied earthly landscapes were likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, some restlessly dreaming power. Earthly landscape seemed to him the symbol of the earth spirit, as his verse’s starlit crystal landscapes, with pensive flowers, expressed his own fevered spirit, images in which his passion rested.
Another sort of landscape poetry is in Wordsworth, for whom the title poet of nature might perhaps be claimed. To him landscape is an influence: what he renders is the moral inspiration the scene brings. This inspiration is not drawn from nature’s real processes; that would be Lucretius’s method—passing imaginatively from landscape to its sources, disclosing the poetry of matter, not spirit. Wordsworth dwells on adventitious human matters; he is no poet of genesis, evolution, and natural force. Only part of the cosmic process interests him—the strengthening or chastening of human purposes by landscape’s influences. These influences are real: as food or wine quickens the animal heart, so calm sky, mountains, dells, or solitary waters expand the breast and disperse obsessions, making even a less contemplative, less virtuous man, for the moment, a friend to all things and to himself.
Yet these influences are vague and mostly fleeting. Wordsworth would hardly have felt them so distinctly had he not found a further link binding landscape to moral sentiment: landscape is the scene of human life. Every spot and season is associated with the existence falling to men there. Landscape in Wordsworth’s age and country was seldom without figures; some visible trace of man guided the poet and set the key for moral meditation. Country life was no less dear to him than landscape; while Lucretius’s march of things was absent from his imagination, society’s revolutions—the French Revolution, for instance—were constantly in his thoughts. Insofar as he was a poet of human life, Wordsworth was truly a poet of nature; insofar as he was a poet of landscape, he was still fundamentally a poet of human life or merely of personal experience. When he talked of nature he was generally moralizing, subject to the pathetic fallacy; when of man or himself, he unfolded part of nature—the upright human heart—studying it in its truth.
Lucretius, poet of universal nature, studied everything in its truth. Even moral life, though felt more narrowly and coldly than Wordsworth did, was better understood and sung by him for being seen in its natural setting. It is a fault of idealists to misrepresent idealism because they do not view it as part of the world. Idealism is a part of the world, a small and dependent part—even in men’s lives. This is nothing against idealism taken as moral energy, a faculty of idealization, a habit of living in the familiar presence of an image of what would be best; but it ruins idealism taken as a view of the central and universal power in the world. Thus Lucretius, seeing human life and idealism in their natural setting, has a saner, maturer view of both than Wordsworth, for all Wordsworth’s greater refinement. Nature, for the Latin poet, is really nature; he loves and fears her as she deserves. Whether a wind blowing, a torrent rushing, a lamb bleating, love’s magic, genius achieving its purpose, a war, or a pestilence, Lucretius sees everything in its causes and total career. One breath of lavish creation, one iron law of change, runs through the whole, making all things kin in their inmost elements and last end. Here is nature’s touch, her largeness and eternity; the true echo of the life of matter.
Any comprehensive picture of nature and destiny, if credited, must arouse emotion and inspire poetry in a reflective, vivid mind—poetry being emotion fixing and colouring the objects from which it springs. Lucretius’s sublime poem, expounding the least poetical of philosophies, proves this. Yet he did not exhaust materialism’s poetic inspiration. In Epicurus’s philosophy, even with its sickly hold on materialism, were two strains Lucretius did not take up, naturally rich in poetry: piety and friendship. It is usual and, in one sense, legitimate to call the Epicureans atheists, since they denied providence and any government of God in the world. Yet they admitted gods living in quiet spaces between the celestial whirlpools forming the various worlds, attributing to them human form and the serene life Epicurus aspired to. Epicurus himself was so sincere in this belief, and so affected by it, that he frequented the temples, kept the gods’ feasts, and often spent hours before their images in contemplation and prayer. In this, as in much else, Epicurus carried to its logical conclusion the rational and reforming essence of Hellenism.
Latin Verse and the Turn Toward Dante
A passage of Latin verse describes how food must integrate, support, and sustain all things through renewal; it speaks of the walls of the great world being stormed and falling into crumbling ruin; a weary plowman, shaking his head, sighs that the labor of his hands has often come to nothing; comparing present times with past, he praises the fortunes of his father; he does not grasp that all things gradually waste away and go to the grave, worn out by the long span of age. Editorial footnotes cross-reference earlier pages and cite Lucretius on men lying together on soft grass beside a stream, pleasantly refreshing their bodies at no great cost when the weather smiles and the season sprinkles the green grass with flowers, and Horace on the rare tear that flows down the cheek of Ligurinus.
The Socratic Revolution and the Programme of a New Philosophy
The transition from antiquity to the middle age, from naturalism to supernaturalism, from Lucretius to Dante, is foreshadowed in an incidental passage of Plato’s Phaedo. Socrates, in prison, addresses his disciples for the last time on immortality. In a pause, he recounts hearing someone read from a book of Anaxagoras that Reason was the disposer and cause of all. Socrates was delighted, reasoning that if Reason disposes all, it disposes each thing for the best and places it in the best position. He argued that to find the cause of anything’s generation, destruction, or existence, one must find what is best for it. He rejoiced at finding in Anaxagoras a teacher of causes, expecting him to explain whether the earth is flat or round and to show the nature of the best. He seized the books and read eagerly.
Socrates was grievously disappointed: he found the philosopher forsaking Reason and having recourse to air, ether, water, and other eccentricities. One man makes a vortex and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives air as a support to the earth, a sort of broad trough. No power arranging things for the best enters their minds; they expect another Atlas stronger and more everlasting than the good. Socrates would fain learn this principle if anyone would teach him.
This is the programme of a new philosophy: things are to be understood by their uses or purposes, not by elements or antecedents—as Socrates sitting in prison rather than escaping to Euboea is understood by his allegiance to what is best, not by the composition of his bones and muscles. Such reasons as we give for our actions are to explain the order of nature. The world is a work of reason, interpreted by its motives, guessed not by fanciful dramatic mythology but by conscientious study of better and worse in our own lives. For instance, Plato says the highest occupation is philosophy, but this would be impossible if man had to feed continually like a grazing animal; therefore long intestines are useful, so the cause of long intestines is the study of philosophy. Again, eyes, nose, and mouth are in the front of the head because the front is the nobler side—as if the back would not have been nobler had those features been there. Molière ridicules this method in Le Malade Imaginaire, where the chorus sings that opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormitive virtue.
This is ridiculous physics, but Plato knew his physics were playful. What matters is that under this metaphorical physics there is a serious morality. The use of opium is that it is a narcotic; the use of the body is the mind. It dignifies these uses to call them the “causes” of the organs. What is true of particular organs is true of the whole frame of nature: its use is to serve the good—to make life, happiness, and virtue possible. Therefore Plato says with his whole school: discover the right principle of action, and you will have discovered the ruling force in the universe. Evoke the essence of a supreme good, and you will understand why the spheres revolve, why the earth is fertile, and why mankind suffers and exists. Observation must yield to dialectic; political art must yield to aspiration.
It took many hundred years for the revolution to work itself out. Plato had prophetic genius and looked away from what he was (a Greek) to what mankind was to become. In Dante the revolution is complete—not merely intellectually (completed long before in the Neoplatonists and the Fathers of the Church), but complete morally and poetically, in that all habits of mind and sanctions of public life had been assimilated to it. Everything was reinterpreted, obliterating natural lines of cleavage and substituting moral lines. Nature was a compound of ideal purposes and inert matter. Life was a conflict between sin and grace. The environment was a battle-ground between angels and demons. The better and the worse had become the sole principles of understanding.
Having become Socratic, the thinking part of mankind devoted its energies to defining good and evil in all their grades and ultimate essence—a task Dante brings to perfect conclusion. They speculated about moral distinctions so earnestly that they saw them in almost visible shapes, as Plato had seen his ideas. They materialized the terms of their moral philosophy into existing objects and powers. The highest good—in Plato chiefly a political ideal—became God, the creator of the world.
Dante’s Political Ideal and Its Betrayal
For Dante, love of country could be absolute, reasonable, deliberate, and moral. He saw a political body that was ideal, providential, and universal. This body had two heads, like the heraldic eagle: the pope and the emperor. Both were by right universal potentates, both should have their seat in Rome, and both should direct government to the same end by different means and in different spheres.
Dante’s Theory of Immortality and the Justice of Hell
Dante’s conception of immortality occupies a middle ground between two older visions: the Greek ideal of a timeless, impersonal permanence and the Hebraic expectation of a second, different life. Dante fuses them into a single retrospective epilogue—a changeless summing-up that completes the drama rather than extending it indefinitely. Its purpose is to vindicate, more unmistakably than the flawed play of earthly life could, the excellence of goodness and the misery of vice. Were this life all, Dante fears the wicked might boast that their lot was no worse than many good men’s, and moral distinctions would collapse into confusion. A simple lover of goodness might accept that, prizing excellence for its own sake regardless of reward. But Dante was not merely a lover of excellence; he was a keen hater of wickedness, taking the moral world tragically and wishing to heighten its distinctions into something absolute and infinite.
Such a temperament insists that good is dishonoured if those who scorn it go unpunished, and that the more horrible the consequences of evil, the more tolerable evil’s presence becomes. Hence the famous inscription over hell’s gate: primal love, no less than justice and power, established that torture-house—love of the good that is honoured and vindicated by the extreme punishment of those who scorn it. The damned are damned for the glory of God. Santayana calls this doctrine a great disgrace to human nature, the desperate folly of an egotistic philosophy that begins by assuring us everything serves our needs, then our ideals, and ends by revealing that everything serves our blind hatreds and superstitious qualms. Yet Dante saw beyond it at times, betraying an esoteric view of reward and punishment as symbols for the intrinsic quality of good and evil ways: punishment is nothing added; it is what the passion itself pursues, a fulfilment that horrifies the soul that desired it.
Spirits newly arrived in hell need no devil with his prong to drive them; they flit eagerly of their own accord. Souls in purgatory are held by their own will at their penance, unable to absolve themselves until they are willing. The whole mountain trembles and bursts into psalmody when anyone frees himself. Santayana asks whether it is too much of a gloss to say these souls change their prison when they change their ideal, and that an inferior state of soul is its own purgatory, determining its own duration. Dante proclaims this intrinsic nature of punishment expressly: among the blasphemers, a king of Thebes defies Jupiter’s thunderbolts and says, “Such as I was alive, such I am dead.” Virgil then exclaims with a force Dante had never found in his voice before: because thy pride is not mortified, thou art punished the more; no torture other than thy own rage would match thy fury. Dante’s imagination cannot outdo the horrors men bring on themselves; the most fearful scene in the Inferno, the story of Ugolino, is only a pale recital of what Pisa actually witnessed.
A subtler instance is the punishment of Paolo and Francesca. What makes these lovers wretched in hell? They are still together. An eternity of floating on the wind in each other’s arms is precisely what their passion would have chosen and gladly prolonged forever. Divine judgement has merely taken passion at its word. This is exactly the fate Aucassin wishes for himself and Nicolette—not a heaven won by renunciation, but possession, even in hell, of what he loves. Alfred de Musset upbraids Dante for not seeing that such an eternal destiny would be the perfect fulfilment of their love rather than its ruin. This seems true; but did Dante overlook it? If so, what instinct guided him to choose for these lovers the very fate they would have chosen? There is a great difference between apprentices in life and masters. Aucassin and Musset were apprentices; Dante was a master. He could feel life’s fresh promptings as keenly as any romanticist, but he had lived these things through, knew their possible and impossible issue, and saw their relation to the ideal of ultimate happiness and peace. He had discovered the necessity of saying continually to oneself: Thou shalt renounce. For this reason he needed no other furniture for hell than the literal ideals and fulfilments of the heart’s own desires.
The Flaws of Dante’s Greatness
Santayana argues that Dante, though a supreme poet, was flawed—too much a man of his own time, often writing with a passion not clarified into judgement. This personal and dramatic interest dominates when reading of a Boniface or an Ugolino, making readers forget these figures were meant to be transmuted into eternal, Platonic essences. Dante himself almost forgets this. The modern reader, accustomed to insignificant fictions, may not notice the lack of perspective, but the judicious reader will not rejoice in it long. The Bonifaces and Ugolinos are not the truly deep or lovely figures of the Divine Comedy; they are, relatively, its vulgarities. In these cases we feel too much the heat of the poet’s prejudice or indignation. He is not just, as he usually is; he does not stop to think, as he almost always does. He forgets he is in the eternal world and dips into a brawl in some Italian market-place or a factious condottiere’s council-chamber. Such passages are powerful and vehement but not beautiful; they brand the object of invective more than reveal it, and shock more than move the reader.
This lower success in rhetoric falls to the poet because he has abandoned the Platonic half of his inspiration and become wholly historical, wholly Hebraic or Roman. With the Platonic spheres and Aristotelian ethics taken out, his Comedy would not have been divine. Persons and incidents, to be truly memorable, must be rendered significant, seen in their place in the moral world, judged rightly in their dignity and value. A casual personal sentiment, however passionate, cannot replace the sympathetic insight that comprehends and the wide experience that judges.
Again, Dante’s love, as he feels and renders it, is not normal or healthy love. It was doubtless real enough but too much restrained and expressed too much in fancy. When extended Platonically and identified so easily with the grace of God and revealed wisdom, we suspect that had the love been natural and manly, it would have offered more resistance to so mystical a transformation. The poet who wishes to pass convincingly from love to philosophy should be a hearty and complete lover—like Goethe and his Faust—rather than like Plato and Dante. Faust passes from Gretchen to Helen, and partly back again; had any passage led to something which not only was loved but deserved to be loved, which not only could inspire a whole life but ought to inspire it, then we should have had a genuine progress.
Dante talks too much about himself. This egotism is a merit, or at least a ground of interest for moderns; egotism is the distinctive attitude of modern philosophy and romantic sentiment. In being egotistical, Dante was ahead of his time. His philosophy would have lost depth, and his poetry pathos, had he not placed himself in the centre of the stage, describing everything as his experience or as a revelation made for his personal salvation. But Dante’s egotism goes further than requisite, so that transcendental insight might not fail in his philosophy. It extended so far that he cast the shadow of his person not only over the terraces of purgatory but over the whole of Italy and Europe, which he saw and judged under the evident influence of private passions and resentments.
Moreover, the personality thrust forward so obtrusively is not in every respect worthy of contemplation. Dante is very proud and very bitter; at the same time, he is curiously timid; one may tire of his perpetual tremblings and tears, his fainting fits and intricate doubts. A man who knows he is under the special protection of God, of three celestial ladies, and who has such a sage and magician as Virgil for a guide, might have looked even upon hell with more confidence. How far is this shivering and swooning philosopher from the laughing courage of Faust, who sees his poodle swell into a monster, then into a cloud, and finally change into Mephistopheles, and says at once: Das also war des Pudels Kern! Doubtless Dante was mediaeval, and contrition, humility, and fear of the devil were great virtues in those days; but the conclusion is precisely that the virtues of those days were not the best virtues, and that a poet who represents that time cannot be a fair nor an ultimate spokesman for humanity.
Perhaps we have now reviewed the chief objects that peopled Dante’s imagination, the chief objects into the midst of which his poetry transports us; and if a poet’s genius avails to transport us into his enchanted world, the character of that world will determine the quality and dignity of his poetry. Dante transports us, with unmistakable power, first into the atmosphere of a visionary love; then into the history of his conversion, affected by this love, or by the divine grace identified with it. The supreme ideal to which his conversion brought him back is expressed for him by universal nature, and is embodied among men in the double institution of a revealed religion and a providential empire. To trace the fortunes of these institutions, we are transported next into the panorama of history, in its great crises and great men; and particularly into the panorama of Italy in the poet’s time, where we survey the crimes, virtues, and sorrows of those prominent in furthering or thwarting the ideal of Christendom. These numerous persons are set before us with the sympathy and brevity of a master.
Goethe’s Faust and the Romantic Spirit
Santayana turns to Goethe’s Faust, noting that in the young Goethe’s first version, philosophy appeared in the opening line, Hab nun ach die Philosophey, but only as human experience, passion, illusion, or ambitious art. Later, under fashion and Schiller’s influence, Goethe added scenes like the prologue in heaven and Faust’s apotheosis, indicating a philosophy of life: he who strives strays, yet in straying finds salvation. This moral adorned the tale without seeding it and without fairly expressing its spirit. Faust remained essentially romantic—written to vent a vivid genius, touch the heart, bewilder the mind with images, amuse, thrill, humanize. Its express maxims and half-betrayed insights exceeded the belated official moral Goethe himself warned against taking too seriously.
Faust is thus no openly philosophical poem, yet offers a solution to existence’s moral problem as truly as Lucretius and Dante. Unheard philosophies may be sweeter, more unmixed and profound for being lived rather than taught. The vital straining toward a latent ideal, dominating a whole life, may express that ideal better than words. Faust is the foam atop two merging waves: romanticism from northern traditions and a new paganism from Greece over Italy. These are passions seething in the drama, not philosophies read in by critics. It is a philosophical adventure, rebellion against convention, flight to nature, tenderness, beauty, then return to convention. Goethe never depicts the object his hero pursues, only the pursuit—like Lessing preferring pursuit of the ideal to the ideal itself.
The Rejuvenation in the First Scene of Part Two
At the close of Faust’s career through the “little world” of private interests, the question arises what fruit his experiments have yielded. The answer lies in the opening scene of Part Two, where Goethe reaches his highest potency as poet and philosopher. In a remote, magnificent, virgin country at evening, Faust lies weary but restless on a flowering hillside while kindly spirits of nature hover above him. Ariel, their leader, bids them bring solace to the troubled hero—it suffices that he was unfortunate; they do not ask whether he was saint or sinner. The spirits sing four stanzas, one for each watch of the night. The first invokes peace, forgetfulness, and surrender to healing sleep, suggesting that pity and remorse are vain, failure incidental, error innocent, and nature without memory—forgive yourself and you are forgiven. The second merges the unhappy soul into the infinite, incorruptible substance of nature, where stars fill sky and sea with ordered peace and no private will or permanent division remains. The third shows nature’s plastic stress reasserting itself: seeds swell, sap mounts thawing branches, buds grow full, and everything recovers fresh individuality and a tender, untried will. The fourth bids flowers open their petals and Faust his eyes, for forces renewed in repose should tempt a new career; nature is open to the brave and intelligent, and all may be noble who dare to be so.
Soothed, Faust awakes full of new strength and ambition. He watches sunlight touch mountain-tops and creep into valleys; when it reaches him he turns to look directly at the sun but is dazzled. He seems to remember the Earth-Spirit that once allured and then rejected him, and says we wish to kindle our torch of life and produce a conflagration, a monstrous medley of joy and sorrow, love and hate. Let us turn our backs on the sun, on infinite force and existence; fitter for our eyes is the waterfall over against it, the torrent of human affairs broken into myriad rills, on whose rising mists sunlight paints a rainbow, always vanishing, always restored—the true image of rational human achievement. We have our life in the iridescence of the world. Shelley is quoted: life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity until death tramples it to fragments. This death is itself unstable; the Lucretian Venus, reshaping our senses and instincts, builds the coloured dome once more, and creation is glorious as on the first day.
This is Goethe’s theory of rejuvenation and immortality—thoroughly naturalistic. There is a life after death, but only for souls with enough scope to identify themselves with forms nature, in her uncertain oscillations, always tends to reproduce. A deep mind has deep roots in nature and will bloom many times over. What a deep mind carries into its next incarnation—perhaps in some remote sphere—is not its conventional merits and demerits, remorse, or sordid memories; these are washed away in its new baptism. What remains is only what was deep in that deep mind.
When, after the Earth-Spirit scene, Faust thought of suicide, he regarded it as a means to escape oppressive conditions and begin a fresh life under wholly different, unknown conditions—as if a man in middle life, disgusted with his profession, abandoned it for another. Such a resolution is serious, expressing both great dissatisfaction and great hope. Death, for Faust, is an adventure like any other; if it should prove the last, that too is a risk he will run. Lifting the poison to his lips, he drank to the dawn, to a new springtime of existence—by no means the saddest or weakest moment of his life. Although an Easter hymn checked him, bringing sentimental memories of a religion he no longer believed, the transformation scene was only postponed. There is little difference between dying as he had thought to die and living as he was about to live; venomous essences were hardly necessary, since the adventures he was entering upon were suicidal enough—he was to strive without hope of attainment, proceeding by passionate wilfulness or magic, without accepting the discipline of art or reason. Now, at the close of Part One, he has drained this poisoned life to the dregs, and the fever into which he falls carries him into a new existence. He is not grown better or more reasonable; he simply starts afresh, like a new day or a new person, retaining the fundamental part of his character: his will remains wayward but indomitable, his achievements fruitless. Henceforth he will be romantic on a broader stage—history and civilization—and his magic will summon illusions somewhat more intellectual, counterfeits of beauty and power. His old loves have blown over like storms of a bygone year; with only a dreamlike memory of past errors, he goes forth to meet a new day.
Among the allurements prompting Faust to sell his soul, one was the beauty of woman. The poor recluse, grown gray among parchments, had never noticed real women or found them beautiful; pedantic child that he was, he thought only of Helen of Troy—to the legendary Faust simply what Venus might be to Tannhäuser, a woman more ravishing than other ravishing women, the supreme instance of a vulgar thing. The young Goethe, a poet and true German who loved with his soul, was not attracted by this ideal; he gave his Faust a tenderer love, of the heart as well as the senses.
Philemon and Baucis, and the Approach of Death
On sand-dunes by the original beach, an old man and his wife, Philemon and Baucis, lived before Faust’s improvements. Beside their cottage stood a small chapel with a bell that disturbed Faust in his newly built palace—by its importunate sound, its Christian suggestions, and by reminding him he was not master of the whole country and that something existed not produced by his magical will. The old people refused to sell out; in impatience Faust orders their forcible eviction and transfer to a better dwelling elsewhere. Mephistopheles and his minions execute these orders roughly: the cottage and chapel are set on fire, and Philemon and Baucis are consumed in the flames or buried in the ruins.
Faust regrets this accident, but treats it as an inevitable development a brave man must face and forget. He had similarly regretted Gretchen’s unhappiness and presumably Euphorion’s death. His will, though shaken, is not extinguished; he would continue doing things he would have to regret, banishing regret in pursuit of new interest—otherwise he would have missed the experience of self-accusation and self-recovery.
The citizens Faust establishes behind leaky dykes, always kept busy, would not have given him unmixed satisfaction had he foreseen their concrete career. Holland is interesting but hardly a spectacle to entrance an idealist so exacting that arts and sciences seem vain, domesticity impossible, and kitchens and beer-cellars beneath consideration. Faust’s own career was freer and more active than his burghers’ could be. His interest in establishing them is masterful, irresponsible—one more arbitrary passion, one more selfish illusion. Having had no conscience in love, he has none in ambition or political architecture; if his will is done, he does not ask whether it is worth doing. His initial dejection as a doctor in his laboratory rested on no real misfortune but on restlessness and vague infinite ambition; his ultimate satisfaction rests not on good done but on passionate wilfulness. He calls what he wants for others good because he now wants to bestow it, not because they naturally want it. Incapable of sympathy, he takes momentary pleasure in policy; in his statesmanship and supposed public spirit he remains romantic and, if need be, aggressive and criminal.
His end approaches. Smoke from the conflagration turns into shadowy shapes of want, guilt, care, and death hovering about him. Want is kept off by wealth; guilt is transcended by romantic courage; but care slips through the keyhole, breathes upon him, and blinds him, while death follows close, unseen. Faust, in his hundredth year, is undaunted, his thoughts intent on the future and his work. He orders digging to proceed on the canals he is building, but the spirits that seem to obey him get out of hand and dig his grave instead.
Feeling death upon him, Faust has a splendid moment of self-assertion: he has stormed through the world, taking with equal thanks fortune’s buffets and rewards; the last word of wisdom is that no man deserves life or freedom who does not daily win them anew. He will leave his dykes against the sea to protect the nation he established—a symbol that health and freedom consist in perpetual striving against an indomitable foe. The thought of many generations living in wholesome danger and labour fills him with satisfaction; he could almost say to the moment, “Stay, thou art so fair.” With these words—a last challenge and mock surrender to Mephistopheles—he sinks into the grave open at his feet.
Who has won the wager? Faust has almost, though not quite, pronounced the words that would give Mephistopheles victory; but their sense is new, and Mephistopheles has not made Faust surrender his will to will, his indefinite idealism. What satisfies Faust is merely the consciousness that this will to will is to be maintained, and that neither he nor his colonists will ever lick the dust and take comfort without further aspiration in chance pleasures. Faust has maintained enthusiasm for a stormy, difficult, endless life; he has been true to his romantic philosophy.
He is therefore saved in the sense defined in the Prologue in Heaven and in the angels’ song receiving his soul: “Whosoever is unflagging in his striving for ever, him we can redeem.” This salvation hangs on no improvement in character—he was sinful to the end and God’s unwitting servant from the beginning—nor on any revolution in fortunes. He will teach life to souls of young boys who died too soon to experience Rathskellers, Gretchens, Helens, and Walpurgisnachts. Teaching had been Doctor Faustus’ original profession; its weariness drove him to magic and almost to suicide until he escaped into the great world of adventure. With his new pupils he will not be more content; his romantic restlessness will not forsake him in heaven. Some day he will throw his celestial school-books out the window and, with his pupils after him, go forth to taste life in some windier region of the clouds.
Faust is not saved in the sense of being sanctified or brought to a final, eternal state of bliss. The only improvement is his passage, at the beginning of the second part, from private to public activities. If at the end he wishes to abandon magic and live like a man among men in the bosom of real nature, that wish remains merely Platonic. It was a thought that visited Goethe often: that wisdom accepts life under natural conditions rather than pretending to evoke the conditions of life out of the will to live.
The Merits and Limits of Romanticism
The literary merits of Goethe’s Faust correspond accurately with its philosophical excellences.
Main Arguments
The book’s central claim is that the three poets, taken together, sum up the chief phases of European philosophy, and that in what makes them great they are compatible. Santayana speaks as a pupil—hopefully discriminating—of each in turn, and ventures that without vagueness or doubleness of taste one may enthusiastically admire each poet’s poetry and accept each one’s essential philosophy, each one’s positive intuition, without lack of definition or system in one’s own thinking. The diversity of the three passes, in Hegelian dialect, into a unity of a higher kind. Lucretius sees the world as one great edifice, one great machine, all parts reacting upon and growing out of one another in obedience to a general pervasive process or life; his poem describes the nature—birth and composition—of all things, showing how they are compounded of elements, which he thinks are atoms in perpetual motion, constantly redistributed so that old things perish and new arise. Into this view he fits a view of human life as it ought to be led under such conditions. His materialism is completed by an aspiration toward freedom and quietness of spirit.
A second argument concerns the nature of poetry itself. Poetry is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental but for being comprehensive and having range. If too much matter makes a poem heavy, that is the fault of the poet’s weak intellect, not of the outstretched world. A quicker eye and a more synthetic imagination could grasp a larger subject with the same ease; the resulting picture would be deeper and stronger, possessing as much unity as a smaller one with greater volume. As in a supreme dramatic crisis all life seems focused in the present, so for each philosophic poet the whole world of man is gathered together; he is never so much a poet as when in a single cry he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe and salutes his ultimate destiny. The acme of life is to understand life; the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.
A third argument concerns the relation between materialism and ethics. Materialism carries no commandments or advice; it describes the world, including mortal aspirations and consciences, referring all to a material ground. The materialist, being a man, has preferences and a conscience, but his precepts express human instincts, not logical implications of science. Any ethics might coexist with materialism; if materialism declares things like immortality impossible, it cannot declare them undesirable. Still, a psychological, not logical, bond links materialism to a homely morality. The materialist is primarily an observer, probably so in ethics—having no ethics except emotion produced by the world’s march. If an esprit fort and truly disinterested, he will love life, as we love vitality in gulls and porpoises. This is the ethical sentiment consonant with vigorous materialism: sympathy with the movement of things, delight in the rising wave and its foam before it sinks. Nature does not distinguish better from worse, but the lover of nature does, calling better what enhances his vitality. This is Spinoza’s ethical feeling; Lucretius, despite fidelity to the ascetic Epicurus, is carried by poetic ecstasy in the same direction. But the crux: the materialist loves nature’s life when he loves his own; if he hated his own life, how could nature’s please him? Epicurus mostly hated life. His hedonism recommends pleasure without excitement or risk—modest, chaste, not vital. He was remarkable for mercy, friendliness, horror of war, sacrifice, suffering—sentiments no genuine naturalist would share. Spinoza called pity and repentance vain and evil; what increased power and joy increased goodness. The naturalist believes in hardness, as Nietzsche did, inclines to scorn, as Democritus’s laughter was scornful, and is an imperialist rapt in achievement. Thus materialism’s moral hue is aristocratic and imaginative in a formative age or aggressive mind, but humanitarian and timidly sensual in a decadent age or a soul renouncing everything.
A fourth argument concerns the soul and immortality. To say the soul is material sounds strange and barbarous to modern ears. We live after Descartes, who taught that the soul’s essence was consciousness; calling consciousness material would be talking of the blackness of white. But ancient usage gave “soul” a different meaning: its essence was not so much to be conscious as to govern the body’s formation, to warm, move, and guide it. Thinking of the soul exclusively in this light, saying it must be material seems not a paradox but a truism. For how could preexisting consciousness govern the body’s formation, move, warm, or guide it? A spirit capable of such a miracle would not be human but altogether divine. The soul Lucretius calls material should not be identified with consciousness but with the ground of consciousness, which is also the cause of life in the body. He conceives it as a swarm of very small, volatile atoms, a sort of ether, resident in all living seeds, breathed in abundantly during life and breathed out at death. Even if accepted, this theory would not prove Lucretius’s chief point—that an after-life is impossible. The soul’s atoms are indestructible, like all atoms; if consciousness were attached to a small group of them, or one only, as Leibniz afterwards taught, consciousness would continue after these atoms escaped the body and shot through new fields of space. Indeed they might be more aroused by that adventure, as a bee might find sky or garden more exciting than the hive. All Lucretius urges about the soul’s divisibility, its diffused bodily seat, and perils outside fails to remove the ominous possibility troubling him. To convince us we perish at death he must rely on vulgar experience and inherent probability: what changes is not indestructible; what begins, ends; mental growth, health, sanity accompany the body’s fortunes as a whole; the passions are relevant to bodily life and earthly situation; we should not be ourselves under a different mask or new setting; we remember no previous existence.
A fifth argument concerns Dante’s theory of immortality, which mediates between two earlier views: the Greek conception of immortality as ideal and timeless, and the Hebraic conception of a new existence and a second, different taste of life. Dante combines these: he imagines a second experience, but one wholly retrospective and changeless—an epilogue that sums up the play and is its last episode. Its purpose is not to carry the play on indefinitely, a romantic notion Dante never entertained, but to vindicate more unmistakably than the ill-acted play itself could the excellence of goodness and the misery of vice. Were this life all, Dante thinks the wicked might laugh, or at least boast their lot was no worse than many good men’s; moral distinctions would be largely impertinent and remarkably jumbled. A simple lover of goodness might tolerate this, saying of the excellences he prizes what Wordsworth says of his Lucy: none may praise or love them, but they make all the difference to him. Dante, however, was not merely a simple lover of excellence but a keen hater of wickedness, taking the moral world tragically and wishing to heighten its distinctions into something absolute and infinite. Such a man, enragé in his preferences, will say with Mohammed, Tertullian, and Calvin that good is dishonoured if those who contemn it go scot-free and never repent; that the more horrible the consequences of evil-doing, the more tolerable evil’s presence; and that the everlasting shrieks and contortions of the damned alone let the saints sit quiet, convinced of perfect harmony in the universe. Hence Dante’s famous inscription over hell’s gate: primal love, as well as justice and power, established that torture-house—primal love of that good which, by the extreme punishment of those who scorn it, is honoured, vindicated, and made to shine like the sun. The damned are damned for the glory of God. Santayana calls this doctrine a great disgrace to human nature, showing how desperate at heart is the folly of egotistic or anthropocentric philosophy: it begins by assuring us everything is created to serve our needs, then maintains everything serves our ideals, and in the end reveals everything serves our blind hatreds and superstitious qualms. Because an instinct taboos something, the whole universe shall taboo it forever. This infatuation was inherited by Dante and was not uncongenial to his bitter, intemperate spleen. Nevertheless he saw beyond it at times, betraying an esoteric view of rewards and punishments as simply symbols for the intrinsic quality of good and evil ways: punishment is nothing added; it is what the passion itself pursues, a fulfilment horrifying the soul that desired it.
Key Concepts
Several named ideas organize the book. The first is the triad of naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism, the three phases of European philosophy that the three poets are said to sum up. The second is the distinction between the poetry of nature and the poetry of landscape. Lucretius is the true poet of nature; Shelley is the musician of landscape, the symbolic landscape poet who breaks up nature and reverts to its elements to build in fancy a different and better nature than the one they reveal to reason. Per Francis Thompson, nature was to Shelley a toy-shop; his fancy wove landscape’s materials into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for new-born irresponsible spirits. He traced landscape’s unrealized suggestions, transforming what he saw into what he would fain have seen. Spirit guided this idealization—the bent of his wild, exquisite imagination—and he fancied earthly landscapes were likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, some restlessly dreaming power. Earthly landscape seemed to him the symbol of the earth spirit, as his verse’s starlit crystal landscapes, with pensive flowers, expressed his own fevered spirit, images in which his passion rested. Wordsworth, by contrast, is the poet for whom landscape is an influence: what he renders is the moral inspiration the scene brings. This inspiration is not drawn from nature’s real processes; that would be Lucretius’s method—passing imaginatively from landscape to its sources, disclosing the poetry of matter, not spirit. Wordsworth dwells on adventitious human matters; he is no poet of genesis, evolution, and natural force. Only part of the cosmic process interests him—the strengthening or chastening of human purposes by landscape’s influences. These influences are real: as food or wine quickens the animal heart, so calm sky, mountains, dells, or solitary waters expand the breast and disperse obsessions, making even a less contemplative, less virtuous man, for the moment, a friend to all things and to himself. Yet these influences are vague and mostly fleeting. Wordsworth would hardly have felt them so distinctly had he not found a further link binding landscape to moral sentiment: landscape is the scene of human life. Every spot and season is associated with the existence falling to men there. Landscape in Wordsworth’s age and country was seldom without figures; some visible trace of man guided the poet and set the key for moral meditation. Country life was no less dear to him than landscape; while Lucretius’s march of things was absent from his imagination, society’s revolutions—the French Revolution, for instance—were constantly in his thoughts. Insofar as he was a poet of human life, Wordsworth was truly a poet of nature; insofar as he was a poet of landscape, he was still fundamentally a poet of human life or merely of personal experience.
