10
The mind of Romanticism and the Victorian sequel - The spiritual note in the older poetry, Classical or Romantic, and in the second Romanticism
We may hazard the guess that the promise given by modern English Romanticism will be fulfilled most perfectly if certain recent glowings of the mystical in English poetry blend with influences of a spiritually resurgent India to seize most intimately on the soul of that Movement and carry it beyond the Spirit's dawn-flush known to it in the old days. The mind at work in it rose suddenly from a submerged racial being which, whatever developments in its own line may be attained by it in a later England or even Europe, seems to have little chance to arrive at utter completion within the context of psychological race-factors dominant at present in the West.
This mind, revolting against the superficiality of the eighteenth century's pseudo-Classicism, was not a direct continuation of the intellectuality developed by Milton after the Metaphysicals had partly freed themselves from the Elizabethan Life-force though without quite passing beyond its quivering nerves and therefore without acquiring properly the typical qualities of the creative Intelligence. In the field of the true intellectuality brought forth by Milton, "a new larger endeavour in the same field might have been expected which would have set before it the aim," says Sri Aurobindo,1 "of a richer, deeper, wider, more curious intellectual humanism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. To that eventually, following the main stream of European thought and culture, English poetry turned for a time in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century; that too was more indistinctly the half-conscious drift of the slow transitional movement which intervenes between Pope and Wordsworth."
Among the Romantics themselves there is a pointer to it in
Page 159
the work of Keats. Sri Aurobindo has some interesting remarks on it. He considers Keats and Shelley as "perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, -not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era .... Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession of a perfect or almost perfected instrument of his native temperament and genius, but he had not yet found the thing he had to say, not yet seen what he was striving to see. All the other high things that interested his great equals, had for him no interest; one godhead only he worshipped, the image of divine Beauty, and through this alone he wished to see Truth and by her to achieve spiritual delight and not so much freedom as completeness. And he saw her in three of her four forms, sensuous beauty, imaginative beauty, intellectual and ideal beauty. But it is the first only which he had entirely expressed when his thread was cut short in its beginning; the second he had carried far, but it was not yet full-orbed; towards the third and highest he was only striving, 'to philosophise he dared not yet', but it was from the first the real sense and goal of his genius."2 Not in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, not even in the great Odes does Sri Aurobindo see the real soul of Keats: this "inner genius... lay in that attempt which, first failing in Endymion, was again resumed in Hyperion. It was the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty which by its breath of delight has created the universe, supports it and moves towards a greater perfection, inspires the harmonies of inward sight and outward form, yearns and strives towards the fullness of its own self-discovery by love and delight."3 By "the intimation of it in his work, his growing endeavour to find it and the unfulfilled promise of its discovery and unique fullness of expression" Keats belongs in spirit to the "prophetic, but half-foiled singers of the dawn"4 of mysticism that was the English Romantic Movement. Yet he prepares another epoch than that of mystical Romanticism.
Page 160
Not having had time before his too early death to find his way into the deepest sanctuary of the secret temple of ideal Beauty entered by him, what stood out as most effectively and cumulatively Keatsian was "a rich, artistic and sensuous poetical speech" .5 It is as if the spiritual seeking of the age stopped abruptly short and prepared to fall down a multicoloured incline to "a subsequent poetry which turns from it to seek poetic Truth or pleasure through the senses and an artistic or curiously observing or finely psychologising intellectual-ism"6 - the poetry of the Victorians.
The work of these poets is sometimes considered a continuation of Romanticism and indeed it is "opened up to some mountain-top prospects, struck across by some moments of prophecy"7 which recall the achievements of their predecessors. But, on the whole, Romanticism is felt only in the form of this work, not in its spirit; or else the spirit keeps the shadow of Romanticism, not the substance. And the sheer poetic inspiration is also much less. Sri Aurobindo8 writes: "The descent from the uncertain but high elevations of the first romantic, half spiritual outbreak is very marked, baffling and sudden. This is not in the nature of a revolt, an energetic audacity of some new thing, - except for a moment in Swinburne, - but a change of levels, a transition to other more varied but less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by the careful opulent cultivated picturesqueness of Tennyson, the concentrated personal force of Byron by the many-sided intellectual robustness and energy of Browning, the intense Nature poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by the too intellectually conscious eye on Nature and the cultured moralising of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by Swinburne's turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and languourous fields of dream of Rossetti and Morris."
The Victorians, however, are much closer to the soul of the
Page 161
new Romanticism than are those who preceded it. The intellectual endeavour in the immediate predecessors was "paltry, narrow and elegantly null" ,9 the poetic sight a power of making abstractions pointed by rhetorical means. One of the best passages in Pope is - interestingly enough - on a kind of Pantheism:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
'That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns,
As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.
The lines are undeniably effective and are poetic by just managing to bring in some element of rhythmic emotion and vision, but there is a preponderance of thought and sentiment over the really imaginative "feeling intellect", save in the phrases about Nature and God and about the "rapt Seraph" and in the third and the terminal couplet. Also, the rhetoric by its too sweeping tone falsifies somewhat the truth expressed. We have only to hark back to the passage from Wordsworth already quoted as his most philosophical statement on Pantheism, to appreciate the change the Romantic vision introduced into the poetry: he is talking of "an active principle" assigned to "every Form of being":
howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
Page 162
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.
Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds,
This is the freedom of the universe.
Portions of this are still not the imagination freely on the wing, the mind of prose drags at it here and there; yet the poetic breath blows authentically in every line and, like the soul of whom Wordsworth speaks, joins all together and uplifts even the heaviest phrase into a whole of true vision charged with a "feel" of Pantheism and not merely an idea of it: depths in us are stirred and an inner sight is opened. In passages where Wordsworth is most Wordsworthian the impact both poetic and pantheistic is more intensely unlike anything an eighteenth-century thinker in verse could couplet out; for Wordsworth has not only a finer poetic gift but lives more genuinely in the heart of what he poetises. Pantheism is to him an entry by his own subjective self into the Universal Spirit whose body is Nature:
many an hour in caves forlorn,
And mid the hollow depths of naked crags
He sate, and even in their fixed lineaments,
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,
Or by creative feeling overborne,
Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying!
Page 163
Again, he has touched the Universal Spirit by exceeding the body-sense not only outwards but also inwards, plunging towards the profundities of the Self of selves. That is why he has written, uttering what to the ordinary religious mind of his time must have struck as a blasphemy:
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep - and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength - all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form -
Jehovah - with his thunder and his choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones -
I pass them unalarmed. Not chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man -
My haunt, and the main region of my song.
The poetic tone, though not the idea and feeling, is here akin to Milton's and indeed Wordsworth wrote the passage after remembering Milton's invocation to Urania, one of the grandest by that Puritan poet:
... Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. Up led by thee
Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,
Thy tempering. With like safety guided down,
Return me to my native element;
Lest, from this flying steed unreined (as once
Bellorophen, though from a lower clime)
Dismounted on the Aleian field I fall,
Page 164
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible Diurnal Sphere.
Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
All the Romantics of Wordsworth's time, and not he only, were admirers of Milton and reflected something of his manner the moment they ceased to be directly lyrical. But, while Milton at his best is superb, his mind is more external than theirs. Even Byron who is the most external-minded among them has at times a speech with a keener edge of bright inner perception about it than Milton, though in sheer poetic quality he is on the whole nowhere near him. Thus the hail of Milton's Satan to the infernal regions to which he is condemned is from
Immortal vigour, though oppressed and fallen
and from
one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time
and who holds that
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
But Byron presents the dreadful greatness of the fallen Archangel in one swift forcible concentrated phrase:
Page 165
his eye
Glared forth the immortality of Hell.
Again, Milton is unsurpassably powerful in conveying the terribleness of Satan's fall and punishment:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
Yet we should hope in vain from him for the fearful preternatural imaginativeness of the lines where Byron shadows out his Manfred's unspeakable guilt:
a tyrant spell
Which had its birthplace in a star condemned,
The burning wreck of a demolished world,
A wandering hell in the eternal space.
The mind of the later Romantics is freer from the limits of a Classicism of the inspired reason looking outwards: a subtler sweep is in it not only of rhythm but also of vision and aspiration. Con those words of the Lord of Pandemonium:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield ...
In their own context the words are a monstrous defiance of Heaven, but let us for the moment put aside their use by Satan and concentrate only on the essence of power in them, by which the apparently defeated transcends defeat. There is yet something in the psychological movement which, despite the
Page 166
motive of defeat-transcendence, is narrow in imagination and rigid in emotion, as compared with Wordsworth's profoundly stirring visionary assurance to the Negro liberator of Haiti, Toussaint L'Ouverture, in the day of his downfall:
Thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
The same can be said in comparison with Shelley's passionately noble conclusion to his drama about Prometheus in revolt against all autocracy of the Magnified Ego whether by a human king or a priest-conceived God of wrath and terror:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
Almost everywhere in the best Romanticism of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries we can. trace the pulsing of pinions more subtle than any that Classicism could unfold in its habitual soars. The pulsing has diverse moods behind it, but there goes with it the same rarefied puissance. We have this puissance in Coleridge's excitement:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free,
We were the first who ever burst
Into that silent sea -
in Shelley's pensiveness:
Page 167
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought -
in Keats's wonder:
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific - and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien -
in Blake's ambiguity:
O Earth, O earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.
Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The wat'ry shore,
Is giv'n thee till the break of day -
in Wordsworth's delicacy:
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face -
even in Byron's sentimentalism:
Page 168
So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
On the Continent the Romantic imagination is both less ethereal and less audacious. The typical French mind, even while revolting from Classicism, retained something of the Classical manner. Edmund Wilson10 has an acute comment here: "It is enlightening to compare Shelley's lyric which begins 'O World! O Life! O Time!' with the poem of Alfred de Musset's which begins 'J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie'. These two lyrics are in some ways curiously similar: each is the breath of a Romantic sigh over the passing of the pride of youth. Yet the French poet, even in his wistfulness, makes epigrammatic points: his language is always logical and precise; whereas the English poet is vague and gives us images unrelated by logic. And it will not be till the advent of the Symbolists that French poetry will really become capable of the fantasy and fluidity of English."
German Romanticism, on the other hand, is vague enough, but there is not much luminosity in its cloudiness and whatever thrill of ecstasy it has is more morbid, more nihilistic. Bowra quotes Novalis's letter to Caroline Schlegel in this connection: "I know that imagination is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." Bowra's comment11 is: "This was not what the English Romantics thought. They believed that the imagination stands in some essential relation to truth and reality, and they were at pains to make their poetry pay attention to them." For the rest, the German Romantics made unsatisfied longing
Page 169
an end in itself and gave a large part in their minds to belief in hallucinations and magic - things which the English Romantics put in a secondary place and mostly absorbed into a higher motive.
But even on the Continent a stir of rarefied puissance is occasionally at work and its presence is felt in moments of wistful fancy from Heine:
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Lm Norden auf kahler Hoh.
Ihn schlafert; mit weiber Decke
Umhiillen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.
On a bare northern hillside
A lonely fir-tree grows,
Nodding in its white mantle
Of ice and driven snows.
And of a palm its dream is
That sorrows, mute, alone,
In some far land of morning
On hills of burning stone. (Lucas)
It brushes past us when love in Hugo defies time:
Votre aile en le heurtant ne fera rien repandre
Du vase ou je m'abreuve et que j'ai bien rempli.
Mon ame a plus de feu que vous n' avez de cendre;
Mon coeur a plus d'amour que vous n'avez d'oubli.
Your flying wings may smite, but never can they dash
The cup which I have brimmed and where my lips I wet.
My heart has far more fire than you can dim with ash,
My soul more love than you can make my soul forget.
(K.D.S.)
Page 170
A breath of it is on us when Hugo's Gastibelza ends that song of pathos and ardour about Dona Sabine:
... la nuit gagne
Le Mont Falou -
Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou!
... over Mount Falou
Night hangs her sway -
The wind that comes across the mountain will blow
My wits away! (K.D.S.)
It is the indefinite atmosphere of the scene in Musset,
Ou la mer vient mourir sur une plage endormie.
Where the sea comes to die on a shore asleep.
Anything like this - and much more what English Romanticism gives us - is enough to show up the grosser body of the Miltonic flight. And where the intense subtlety becomes an explicit or suggestive spirituality the bounded nature of that flight is painfully obvious, no matter if the organic artistry of it be unimpeachable. Follow sensitively the beat of that celebrated apostrophe in Paradise Lost
Hail, holy light, offspring of Heaven first-born!...
Bright essence of bright effluence increate!
and now trace the motion of mind and language in Wordsworth's line:
The light that never was on sea or land,
or his
Page 171
a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
or else Shelley's
The Light whose smile kindles the universe,
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity...
There is a mystical quickening which makes the intellect of these Romantics a medium of inspiration quite dissimilar to that of the Classical poets. Even a mystical mood in Milton -
thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight -
has too external a tone, too thought-out a formulation. Wordsworth, in a far shorter phrase, can suggest most illu-minatively the mystical mood by speaking not even of supra-mundane things but of mere daffodils remembered:
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
The same intellectual externality, though never superficiality, may be contrasted in the verse where Milton faintly mixed the "pantheistic" with the "neoplatonic" -
Thou Sun, of this great World both eye and soul -
Page 172
to Shelley's still intellectual yet profoundly pregnant phrase put into the mouth of the Sun-Spirit:
I am the Eye with which the universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine.
Milton's religious intellectuality as differentiated from the intellectuality living in a mystical atmosphere is too patent in his exhortation to all natural powers to declare God's greatness: when he comes to the Winds and Pines he says:
His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud, and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of worship wave.
But how intensely inward with a transcendent atmosphere without even breathing of God's name is Wordsworth's response to outward Nature one early May morning:
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
Not that Milton is utterly devoid of the true spiritual inspiration: a touch of it enters the rhythm of the summons to every creature to extol
Him first, Him last, Him midst, and without end-
a line which Wordsworth as good as lifted for the close to his reading of the natural sights in the Simplon Pass as the symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end -
and in one phrase Milton catches the topmost spiritual height:
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
Page 173
but the height seems in its own context not quite conscious of the empyrean it inhabits, while Wordsworth without referring to Eternity can give us in his picture of the mind of the scientist Newton a concrete "feel" of unknown spiritual widenesses:
a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
And there is a dissimilarity in the way the spiritual substance and rhythm come in: what is somewhat absent in the Miltonic reception of the supra-intellectual is an intimate thrill of it which the later Romantics sometimes have, despite their mental expression where intimacy and thrilling of any kind are less natural than to vital speech. The Classical Milton, passing from the religious to the mystical, gets on rare occasions the thought-mind magnificently uplifted, but there is not the play of the illuminative intuition in the very grain of the substance and the very texture of the rhythm. The visionary "feel", though arising out of the Creative Intelligence rather than from the creative Life-force as in Shakespeare, yet recovers and holds "as its central secret something akin to the older poet, a greater straight impact and natural body of intuitive intensity"12 that Milton can command
We may here quote some passages by Sri Aurobindo on the nature of poetry and on Shakespeare and this recovery at times by the later Romantics of the main power of his peculiar poetic penetrativeness. All genuine poetry, according to Sri Aurobindo,13 has its origin in a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a region of "supermind" where things are seen in "their innermost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and with a lustrous effulgency and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre." It is the inrush of this supramental glory into brain and heart and nerve that creates the psychological phenomenon noted from of old as poetic inspiration. But rarely does the supreme significant word come direct and
Page 174
unaltered: ordinarily there is, as it were, a cloud of formless light from which we have to disengage or reshape substance and speech with the help of our own faculties while they are excited by the influx from above. The influx plunges first into "an intuitive self in the depth of each of our parts of being, hid in sense, life, heart, mind".14 This self is the transmitting agent, a subliminal secrecy, through which the inspiration emerges into one or another part of our composite psychology that happens to be habitually dominant in us. The more these parts are near and awake to the subliminal soul-mind, the more intuitive the utterance within our subtle-physical or our vital or our intellectual consciousness. And the more the secrecy that is the transmitting agent breaks open outward, the greater the body of the supramental sight and rhythm in our utterance.
The transmitted sight and rhythm may be overtly mystical or no: the sheer poetic quality is not affected, for this quality is determined not by overt mysticism but by the intuitiveness of expressive turn. And it is by being thus intuitive in superabundance that Shakespeare is well-nigh the most remarkable poet the world has seen: the secret of his pre-eminence is the intuitive seizing again and again of the word from the very heart of the thing seen. English poetry after him, by getting intellectualised, lost much of this power, though in Milton it gained a more dynamic amplitude of imaginative thought as distinguished from imaginative sensation and emotion. The later Romantics have often a clear, strong, large and luminous manner, but by functioning from the more deliberative mental rather than the more spontaneous vital plane they too.lack comparatively in "the searching audacities of the intuition". Still, now and then, there emerges, as Sri Aurobindo15 puts it, "a certain effort to recapture the Shakespearian potency and intensity accompanied by a new and higher element in the workings of the poetic inspiration. When we try to put a name on it... we can see that this is an attempt to return to the fullness and the awakening turn of the direct intuitive expression on a subtler and more ethereal level." Sri Aurobindo cites as successes in this effort some lines of Keats:
Page 175
The journey homeward to habitual self!
and
... solitary thinkings, such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven...
"These lines of Keats," he16 observes, "are Shakespearian in their quality, they have recovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and inner truth other than Shakespeare's; by the passage through the detaching intellect and beyond it they have got to the borders of the realm of another and greater self than the life-self, though there we include and take up life into the deeper self-vision."
The new intensity has a thrill of imaginative sight and sound unlike that of even whatever mystical suggestion may occur accidentally in Shakespeare. Not only is the thrill different from the more obvious kind of suggestion like the lines with a hint analogous to the second Keats-quotation's - the question asked by Hamlet to his father's ghost about his appearing as he does,
So horribly to shake our dispositions
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.
The thrill differs also from mystical-seeming suggestions at their keenest, either through an impetuosity of human love -
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven -
or through an imaginative sensation's indefinite depth as of "strange seas" -
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
Page 176
Here, as everywhere else in the old Romanticism, "the vision is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression": the later Romantics, whether in their simplicities or in their richnesses, make their revelations through the intellec-tualised consciousness which, "observing life from above is in itself a higher thing than the vital and emotional mind which responds more immediately and powerfully to life, but is caught in its bonds",17 and out of a sublimation or intensification of this consciousness, neighbour of mightier and profounder realities, "there comes in some absolute moments a native voice of the spirit".18
In European poetry of the time the spiritual note is also heard here and there. The greatest figure of Italian Romanticism, Leopardi, was a kind of paradox, for he made a cult of classicism and hated the word "Romantic", understanding by it Mediaeval trappings such as his father had immured him amongst during his boyhood. But there was in him not only a queer blend of the emotional Byronic despair and the Stoic defiance of a Vigny: there was also the belief in the bursting of great truths with startling suddenness and ecstatic vividness over which the mind has little control and there was the desire to feel (sentito),as well as know (conosceva) the truth. However, where the English Romantics felt a positive divinity everywhere, Leopardi had the living sense of an Infinite Nothing which he embraced with an unflinching gusto. This Nothing makes for him all life endless filth and frustration; but a hint is found in a few places in his work that that is because the human ego is imprisoned in its desires. If the ego could stand bare and free, the Nothing might be what, watching once a solitary hill and a far hedge screening the horizon, he seemed to apprehend - space beyond space and "supernal silence and un-fathomed peace" measured, as it were, by the wind's murmur among the leaves nearby. Time present and time past are caught up into timelessness:
... Cosi tra questa
Immensita s'annega il pensier mio:
Page 177
E il naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.
... So
In this immensity my thought is drowned
And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea.
(Bickersteth)
A still greater figure on the Continent, Goethe, with all his urge towards Classicism in the years of his maturity, cannot escape the Romantic drive towards "things not easily expressible" and one of his best-known passages not only suggests the inexpressible but counts name-giving to be unimportant, even reprehensible. It is the pantheistic reply of Faust when asked if he believes in God. It ends:
Und drangt nicht alles
Nach Haupt und Herzen dir,
Und webt in ewigem Geheimnis
Unsichtbar sichtbar neben dir?
Erfull davon dein Herz, so grob es ist,
Und wenn du ganz in dem Gefuhle selig bist,
Nenn es dann, wie du willst,
Nenns GlUck! Herz! Liebe! Gott!
Ich habe keinen Namen
DafUr!Gefuhl ist alles;
Name ist Schall und Rauch,
Umnebelte Himmelsglut.
Does not the whole world press
Into your heart and brain,
And the eternal secret float
Round you, hidden and plain?
Fill to the brim your soul
From that full blessedness,
Then name it as you will,
Love, Rapture, God!
I have no name for it, none,
Page 178
The heart is all, and the name
Nothing but clamour and smoke
Clouding the glow of the sky.
(Helen Stawell and G. Lowes-Dickinson) .
Spoken by a lover, the passage is more Shelleyan than Wordsworthian, but it compasses too the essence of Wordsworth's feeling, in a more excited voice than his - his feeling, for instance, in those lines that close the description of "the growing Youth" watching from the naked top of a bold headland the sun rise and bathe the world in light:
... Far and wide the clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces could be read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the powers T
hat made him; it was blessedness and love!
Another passage worth quoting from Goethe is the often-cited conclusion of Faust - words at once weighty and winged, in which several Romantic elements reach a fine spiritualisation through the idealistic in_tellect:
Alles Vergangliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulangliche,
Page 179
Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist's gethan, D
as Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
All things that pass
Are symbols alone;
Here into Fullness
Each failure is grown;
Here the Untellable
Crowns all endeavour,
The Eternal Feminine
Leads onward for ever. (K.D.S.)
And it was Goethe who stated perhaps most clearly the non-exclusiveness of the Romantic Pantheism, the complexity of it which did not set it over against other "isms" about God. He wrote to Jacobi: "I cannot be satisfied with only one way of thinking. As a poet and artist I am a polytheist, as a scientific investigator a pantheist, and one just as much as the other. If I need a God for my life as a moral person, there is provision for this also. Things in Heaven and earth form a kingdom so wide that only all the organs of all beings could grasp it." There is a small inaccuracy here, for Goethe as a poet was a pantheist as well as a polytheist, and most pronouncedly so; but his mention of polytheism is enlightening, casting into relief the experience of all poetic imagination, since that imagination perceives feeling entities everywhere: Wordsworth with his "Presences of Nature" and "Souls of lonely places" was polytheistic no less than pantheistic.
Goethe as the greatest poetic intellect of the age was most aware of the conceptual implications of the spiritual bent in him. But the spiritual cannot be said to lie at his very core and lead at times to a direct visionary intimation of godhead; neither, for all his lavish use of nouns like "Infinity" and "Eternity" and "Divinity", can it said to be the most Hugo-
Page 180
esque part of Hugo, much less to verge him on concrete mysticism. The reverse is the case with some of the English Romantics. They may fall often into thinness or bareness because of an insufficient development in them of a supporting body to their unusual inspiration, but the spiritual note not only emerges in its true rhythm in some of their utterances but also seems the ultimate centre of their being and the echo of a genuine mystical intuition. If we are asked to name the most Shelleyan lines of Shelley we cannot help quoting:
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The longing for something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow,
and the fragment which he wrote a few months before his death and which is uniquely intense with an aspiration touched by the Ineffable:
I loved - oh, no, I mean not one of ye,
Or any earthly soul, though ye are dear
As human heart to human heart may be,
I loved I know not what; but this lone sphere
And all that it contains, contains not thee,
Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.
Perhaps the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's lines are that quatrain,
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
and the fragment retrieved by Hugh de Selincourt, not suggesting poignantly like Shelley's a perfect Beyond which is at once here and not here, but magnificently emphasising a single-selfed omnipotent Within:
Page 181
One interior life
In which all beings live with God, themselves
Are God, existing in the mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as the cloudless east
At noon is from the cloudless west, when all
The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
References
1.The Future Poetry, p. 91.
2.Ibid., pp. 129-30.
3.Ibid., pp. 130-31.
4.Ibid., p. 131.
5.Ibid., p. 116.
6.Ibid, p. 94.
7.Ibid, p. 132.
8.Ibid., pp. 132-33.
9.Ibid., p. 91.
10.E. Wilson, op. cit.
11.C. M. Bowra, op. cit., p. 5.
12.The Future Poetry, p. 278.
13.Ibid., p. 279.
14.Ibid.
15.Ibid., p. 172.
16.Ibid., p. 173.
17.Ibid., p. 172.
18.Ibid., p. 116.
Page 182
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.