Modern poet prophets; essays critical and interpretative

Front matter

A o.

N

„c cf*.

Table Of Contents

Introductory Essay.

page.

Ideal Womanhood in the Masterpieces of Dante, Goethe and

Contents

V. The Permanence of Art, or Art and Ontology, VI. Realistic Art on the Stage: Gerhardt Haupt-

MANN,

VII. Walt Whitman, the Camden Sage

Appendix

Note (1) A Section of the Rose of the Blessed,

Note (2) Wordsworth's Practical Philosophy,

Note (3) Shelley's Use of the Word "Annihilation,

Note (4) lone and Panthea,

Note (5) Coleridge's Theosophy,

Note (6) Shelley's Serpent Myth, .

Note (7) Byron as Chanter of Personality,

Note (8) A Hostile Critique on Whitman,

PAfiE.

Modern Poet Prophets.

ESSAYS CRITICAL AND INTERPRETATIVE.

IDEAL WOMANHOOD IN DANTE, GOETHE AND BROWNING.

The days for male egotism, blatant and bellowing, are fast drawing to a painful close. The signs of the times are not hard to discern. Dire and portentous, with snaky locks, they glare us, proud and hitherto undoubted sovereigns of nature, savagely in the face. We have harnessed steam, yoked the lightning, scaled Olympus and feasted in the golden houses of the gods. But it were futile to contend against Fate. And why is our doom sealed? The foe is within, holding the keys of our heart, wearing the crown of our glory !

Though the Germans and Celts may dispute with one another the honor of having first affirmed the equality of man and woman, was it not in any case in its completeness a doctrine of the Christ? If St. Paul be understood to have apprehended it imperfectly, does it alter the fact that it is Christ's? Is not the glorification of humility, gentleness, tenderness, patience, fortitude and faithfulness the glorification in very deed of mother, wife, sister and daughter? The Dark Ages, so called, the ages of much faith in Christ, but more sensual violence, greed, cruelty, craft and fatuous bigotry (always reducible to faith in self), what were the) 7 if not the period of gestation for the Christian ideal of womanhood, which has found its adequate expression (perverse enough, some will think) in the modern doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin, Queen of Heaven, daughter, bride and Mother of God? Few can be trusted to tell fitly the man) 7 myths of immaculate Mary — lovely flowers that sprang from holy soil — quivering rays of a miraculous Aurora — snatches of celestial song caught as the doors of Paradise opened and closed admitting earth's godly women. Of those myths it is not my purpose to speak. My object is more modest, to trace through Dante, Goethe and Browning the growth in definiteness of this ideal and its increasing ability to make for itself a home by the hearthstone of ordinary men, as expressed in its more and more substantial life-likeness of poetic incarnation.

I. BEATRICE AND MARY, QUEEN OF HEAVEN.

What a wonderful artistic intimation of that which it is not lawful for man to utter have we not in Dante's Rose of the blessed ! A cup of lunar crystal brimful of a sunny supernatural wine ; a vast sea lying breathless in contemplative ecstasy beneath the hovering heaven, interrogating reverently its height, and flashing back the vouchsafed answer in a trance of mirrored glory — the grateful worship of its quickened deep ; and after every figure has been exhausted do we not return to Dante's Rose? Tiers

BEATRICE AND MARY, QUEEN OF HEAVEN. \)

of holy souls — the petals ; the angels, like sunbeams — busy bees of God — ascending, descending, translucent to those below, of visible beauty to those above, bringing down pearly dew-drops of divine grace and love, carrying up the perfume of devout wishes and the honey of saintly praise ! Is not this wonderful Rose a thing for silent wonder, to brood over until the rapture of adoration closes the sense, and thought is transfigured, etherealized, to that hushed feeling we dare not seem to note lest it forsake us, which is wont to betoken the spiritual nearness of some one dearly loved, and long, long missed ?

But it is not in search of mystic lore and transport Ave shall now cast a glance athwart the holy Rose, but to ascertain the nature of Ideal Womanhood, and to analyze it if we may into irreducible constituents. Indeed, as it passed through the quivering atmosphere of Dante's vision the integral iridescent ray divides into its seven distinct hues of virtue, a society of symbolic women that ennesh them, arranged in a Godward scale. Let us hope we shall not be too fanciful in the interpretation of each particular hieroglyph ; but, at all events, we are sure that the purport of the inscription as a whole is too clear for any reasonable doubt or misconstruction.

We begin with the lowest round of this strange Jacob's ladder, in which the rounds are the very angels themselves, immovable forever, on which not they, but Dante, you and I, can ascend at will in the spirit to heaven.

First and simplest element of ideal womanhood is the courage of love to forsake the surroundiugs of childhood, to snap individual ties, to follow the fate and share the chance of those whom in the guise of dependence she upholds, strengthens, comforts : — Ruth.

As second element, we have the courage of love to defend her home and neighboring homes by the heroic performance of deeds such as their safety seems to require, but which are in themselves otherwise repugnant to her, and fraught with danger to what she knows to be the most precious of herself in the sight of men : — Judith.

As third element, we have the courage to forsake the loves and duties of girlhood, father and mother, brothers and sisters, for a husband far away; the known and tried and loved for the unknown, untried, yet not unloved; the trust that what she loves before she knows is altogether worthy of her devotion, or will become so : — Rebecca.

As fourth element, we have the courage to hold and impart her faith in Love. She has learned from Abraham, the Friend of God! and she teaches Isaac, "the child of promise :" — Sarah.

In her we have the crown of natural womanhood. The usual idealizing power of meu mounts no higher. More than wife to the friend of God, and mother of the faithful, woman surely can not be expected to become ! But such is not the view of Dante. Sarah, the crown of natural womanhood, is in turn the footstool only of a higher womanhood still — the spiritual. Not wife to " the friend of God," but " bride of God " himself; not " mother of the faithful" " servant of God," but Mother of the Faithful Son of God himself! Such is the burst of glory that man has beheld, and less than its luster and loveliness he dare not now on his soul's peril require.

BEATRICE AND MARY, QUEEN OF HEAVEN. 11

Let us begin our ascent once more with Sarah (courage to defend and transmit a traditional faith), and arrive at the fifth element (the second of the higher quaternary), the courage to forsake a traditional faith and its ease, in order to seek, and seeking to find, a personal revelation of the Divine, an assurance incommunicable direct^, but which so celestializes its receiver as to compel and captivate others till they too seek and find ; inner contemplation, oblivous, though nowise scornful, of religious externals : — Rachel; whence is derived an ever-increasing, immediate knowledge of that which gives all those externals what value they have, not merely blissful but blissgiving : — Beatrice.

As sixth element (third of the higher quaternary), we have the courage of her who has seen Paradise to bring forth such as may not ever see it, for aught she knows ; to suffer for, and lovingly to foster offspring that will rise and curse her when they sin, with coward soul attributing their own falls and foulness to her who gave them life, at cost not merely of her bodily substance, but also of that most precious leisure which would let her continue, in studious trance of faith, to realize with secret joy the Paradise of God within : — Eve, the mother of all living ! of all who truly live; children of a self-oblation to the cause of humanity ; children that need saving to be sure, but are called to that salvation in the everlasting purpose of the Holy One.

Again we have reached the crown, — the greater Sarah. And who is she?

White bride of God, sweet Mary maid, At Gabriel's greeting sore afraid

Did under thee thy white knees sink ? Did thy free hair fall down, a veil, Betwixt his glory and thine so pale ? Thine hands clasped tight, Thine eyes tear-bright, — What thought of wonder didst thou think?

" Fear not " there swelled a musical tone That wrought a mystic peace unknown ; Tingled the air, and thy gasped breath Drew in a fragrant cool delight, Lifting the soul with holy might Till thou didst rise With shamefast eyes : " Speak, the Lord's handmaid harkeneth."

What gracious greeting, Gabriel, As thine so sweetly terrible?

Yea,— like a lily dew-beladen Whom thrills and shakes the morning air To warble of birds, — on thy feet bare Fall happy showers— Thy tears and ours — White bride of God, sweet Mary maiden !

The angel gone, she mused and prayed, On bended knees, pure Mary maid:

Nor feared what hearts incredulous Would dare devise, for only she Disposed herself God's bride to be ; In meekest mind To all else blind But God's sweet grace all glorious.

Tell, tell us, sacred Lily of God, In what weird dream thy white feet trod, For days and nights with joy amazed ? As rests the smooth sea hyaline Whereon the vast blue heaven doth shine, O'ershadowed thee God's Mystery As on thine open heart he gazed ?

BEATRICE AND MARY, QUEEN OF HEAVEN. 13

Blessed, blessed blessed Rose, —

Whom Love, of all earth's purest, chose, —

Thy dreams be thine alone, lest we Should taint, for love of thee too great, Their tender beauty immaculate !

Simple girl bride, God magnified For thy very girl's simplicity !

Well, and what does all this signify ? As highest element, inclusive of all inferior elements if superseding them (so to speak, their supernatural consummation), we have the power of love to forsake humanity (its demands, its rewards) for the Divine, and become only and altogether receptive to It: no mere contemplation (Rachel) and knowledge of It (Beatrice); not the mere bringing into being of the adorers of It, that will, maybe, scorn her (Eve), but the power of love to be impregnated by the Divine itself, and bear fruit to It ; to help its spiritual fullness to a bodily reality ; to make effectual its sublime condescension of will to the carnal needs of men, who would not believe the manifestations of the Word within (their spiritual eyes fast glued) until they touched with the coarse animal sense for external fact, a shadow or image of It without ; and such essentially and symbolically is the blessed Virgin Queen of Heaven : — St. Mary*

Let us observe that these seven colors of virtue bear each to each in turn an indissoluble connection- There is a rhythm running through them of negative and positive, denial and assertion, forsaking and taking, progress and rest. The first and last are denials of self, forsakings of lower for higher love, progress at the cost

* For the convenience of the reader a diagram section of the Rose of the Blessed will be found in the Appendix.

of a sword-pierced heart. So we come to God by alternate failure and success, destruction and construction, and with St. Mary, we find " peace at the last," in letting God have and do and be our — nay — His all in all. It is also worth noting how she is protected — rather escorted for mere honor's sake — into the presence of her Sufficiency. At her left is Adam, the father of the natural savable race, assisted to higher things by Moses, the apostle of the Law. At her right is St. Peter, the father (by courtesy) of the race supernatural and saved, in his own words " partakers of the Divine nature," * seconded by St. John, the apostle of Charity, who speaks of the " unction " or Christhood, which we " have from the Holy One" Himself, f love of "Love," and therefore "very god of very God." +

% One can not help in passing the observation that by a quite heretical removal of Jesus from the Rose of redeemed humanity, and his transfer into the sheer Deity as a sort of floating platonic idea of Man, the ladder of manhood opposite that of womanhood is sadly imperfect, not to say unorthodox, if in these days the latter word can be considered a reproach ! John the Baptist, of whom Jesus said that he that was " little in the kingdom of God " is " greater than he " (Luke vii., 28), is made the highest crown of sainthood. "Repentance from dead works" has to do duty with men for the '■ blissful self-oblation " of St. Mary, " blessed among women !" Beneath him (a strange reflection, one would think, on their being even "little" in the kingdom of Heaven) sit St. Francis for Mysticism, St. Benedict for Asceticism, and St. Augustine for Theology. Below St. Augustine no one is worthy to be particularly mentioned as seated in his place. To the left of the Baptist is Lucia, presumably Greek philosophy and latter-day science, to his right is St. Anne, holy expectancy — the mother of the Virgin. No wonder, then, with such a conception of the Christ, mariolatry flourished and flourishes!

GRETCHEN OF EAUST. 15

II. GRETCHEN OF FAUST.

It is not easy to tear oneself away from the high imaginations of Dante. One may or may not regard his symbolic system as cumbersome and obsolete ; one may repudiate his theology with more of horror than can be accounted for merely by our transition from the idea of "justice" to that of "love" in eschatology, and our determination to be more reserved in definitions of life after death ; but nevertheless, the spell of that wonderful creation of Mediaeval thought is so compulsive ! In passing to Goethe's Faust from the Divina Commedia we have left a world of solutions to enter one of as yet insoluble riddles ; a world where one's place is already determined for better, for worse, or where one has at least the assurance of some clay finding it, to enter a world where one is tortured in Hell by the hope of its temporariness, and in Heaven by the doubt of its eternity.

The purpose of Goethe was the same as that of Dante ; to give a map of the river of human destiny — to explore if possible its source and tell us something of the "engulfing sea!" But Dante accepted for every problem substantially the answer of his civilization verified by his own intense, if limited experience. His bold apriorism could content itself with scholastic theology and philosophy slightly modified, or with Greek ethics, and Roman notions of law and government adapted to them. The tradition was so rich, he never had the time to count it out coin by coin and discover its insufficiency to cancel the human mind's irrepudiable debt to Mystery ; it never occurred to him that the coin might not pass current. If Goethe did not count out the pieces, with which he hoped to brihe away the hordes of devastating doubts from the happy plains of human heart-life, at all events he tested each coin ere he paid it into their hands. Goethe found no answer upon which his intelligent contemporaries were unanimously agreed; he did not even discover the various suggestions that found favor, to be harmonizable. His wary aposteriorism compelled him to procure a theory of life at the end of a personal experiment conducted with as little prejudice as possible, and therefore at great risk. Consequently Dante's work is dramatically solid throughout; the outline is decided, often harsh, "for he is able to use history (since expressive of the answer of his civilization), while Goethe's work, whenever it is of general import, becomes vapory, its outline wavering, history yielding only inadequate materials (as his theory was one that had not yet been consciously tested by mankind); even myths requiring so much reconstruction as to deprive them almost of the power of illusion arid appeal to faith, except where they become autobiographic — his life enlarged to the eye by mountain mists. Yet with all deductions duly made (faults inherent in the very prophetic character of the work), how marvelous and magical a poem ! How its audacious anticipations are coming one by one, into the field of vision — not all stars of the first magnitude — but such stars that one wonders they were not discerned before, so sharp and obstinate are their scintillations as they hang now in ascended Heaven.

And Gretchen is surely more near to us than Dante's Queen of Heaven. Gretchen (as one would

GRETCHEN OF FAUST. 17

expect of the Father of evolutionary theory) exhibits the power of womanhood, while its character is yet incomplete. In the Paradiso we have a finished symphony where in Faust we have a wonderful improvisation feeling its way to glory. Gretchen is becoming Mary — she will not surely be content to sit on any round below, and treat the gap between as not to be crossed without sacrilege; but though as yet so many, many rounds below, she has done the work of Beatrice, she has called her lover from out the " selva Qscara" and brought him to the Blessed Company.

In the glass (loathing the antics of the witch's apes) Faust catches a first rapturous glimpse of what can draw him — of what is worth pursuit. " In a glass " because our ideals are ghostly doubles, so to say, of our possible selves, phantasmal projections of what we fain would be, which (their origin in us, overlooked or forgotten) take seeming possession of some external thing or person, to saturate it for us with a weird alien beauty; and thus embodied, to all appearances, in their own right, they arrogantly demand of us (the future substance of which they are mere shadows) not devout reverence only, but for their sakes, if need be, an absolute self-sacrifice. What a blessed illusion is not this! How good that we separate our ideals from ourselves, to give ourselves to them and so to other selves ! How else could the chasm be bridged that islands us — and the old continental unity of which Arnold sings reassert itself in fact ?

Was it Helena or Gretchen that Faust saw? Enough if we know that it was " das Ewig-weibliche," in one of its incarnations, provided we remember that none persists in the world beyond, to meet and comfort him, but that concrete, frail, fallen, and risen creature of flesh and blood, whose angelic name is not revealed.

We all know the terrible story. Lust mingles with love, adoration becomes sacrilege — the sun is eclipsed; then it sets in blood and gloom. And what was her fault, poor, foolish girl ? Simply that her love was too confiding; that she mistook the idol for the God, and directed not through it, her worship, but to it! That she could not do enough for -him, who, (wrapt solely in self) would do nothing for her ! That her childish trust reinforced (not by vanity let us say, but) by the intense wish which transmutes for us the flimsiest improbabilities into a solid world of facts, leads her to suppose that the worship, she ought to know goes through her, is to her ! That no warning intuitions can be heeded because they wear the guise of doubt in his worth whom to doubt were sin, though they are in fact only a doubt of his self-comprehension, of his practical attainment of the self he shall become, and she prophetically endows him with already.

But it is now all over. She will not again antidate his perfection; assume in conduct as complete what is no more than rudimentary. She will not be saved from suffering, but through suffering. She has given herself now with the same utter abandonment to man's terrible caricature of God's justice with which she gave herself before to her lover. She has not ceased to love him, only she loves him for God's sake, not God for his. "She is judged," says the sneering double of Faust; "she is saved," is the word from Heaven.

GRETCHEN OF FAUST. 19

But Faust is a new man. He will not expiate his crime in the old craven fashion. He will atone for it by life, not death. Born of love, remorse and pity, a new idealizing energy seizes upon Faust. He must " strive on and upward to the highest pitch of existence" even if " the sun have set forever in his rear.'' Scope for his pent energies he must have, and, the opportunity presenting itself, power first tempts him. Power and wealth attained are discovered to be mere means. Their end is enjoyment; the object of enjoyment, Beauty. Art without living beauty is mere mimicry and mechanical tradition. Down to the world of mysteries, the unsunned depths of the soul of man ! Get Helena, for the Greeks knew beauty, and in. Helena they found a form fit to embody their ideal. But to see Helena is not merely to enjoy unmoved, altruistically. No sooner has one seen than a mad passion to possess is begotten. Only after painful journeys through the ideal world of dead men recreated in the modern mind (its form — the old, its substance — new — mere fancy)— the presence of each ghostly inhabitant conclusive proof of the potency of studious spells — only in such wise can Helena be possessed. But at the touch of sorrow all is gone, save the memory of a weird passion — a veil, a mantle — things that hid and protected her, now flowers whence the perfume soul has flitted, or fossil forests that shaded once luxuriantly a world of extinct life. And yet this mantle, this veil lifts one above all things mean and low.

Faust has learned in this long search the paradox that pleasure must not. be pursued, that perhaps it is therefore reasonable to suppose life is for mere life's sake, and pleasure not its end, being only the reward of them who seek it, lyy leaving it out of their reckonings. The spirit of beauty was not to be possessed by any galvanization of old art to apparent vitality. The ideal is a living power; it is felt if not seen. The greatest study for man is man. Surely Jules is right —

" Shall to produce from out of unshaped stuff

Be Art — and further to evoke a soul

From form be nothing " ? — (Pippa Passes.)

The greatest opportunity to-day for the idealizing faculty is the world of men. Therefore, he first saves social order in propping up the tottering throne, and then attempts to create social felicity — to free the individual from hampering circumstances, to obtain a seasonable springtime for the bursting of the blossom of humanity. In this his effort, he sins his last great sin : sheer reckless impatience in establishing an ideal, destroying what should be allowed (since in itself, harmless) to die a natural death. He felt sorrow, not remorse, for this act which he disowns; his fault being not the deed, but the impatient wish that wrought it. In this effort he overcomes all selfish considerations and has that sudden sense at length of what supreme bliss is.

We know how true is the paradox that rest is rust, and yet that work is for repose. Content with self is the death of the soul. Oblivion of self (which resembles content), in sympathetic consciousness of others and their joys, is the soul's most complete life. So Mephistopheles thinks he has won his nefarious bet. He has not. Angelic roses are sulphurous flames to the devils. " Saved is he who never ceases to strive,

GRETCHEN OF FAUST. 21

by unseen powers that wait to help ; and if some loving soul in the world beyond has felt with him and prayed for him, the whole host of the blessed meet him with a fervent welcome."

Then once more is it that we encounter Gretchen, but now as the purified soul that caused his welcome. Three Maries are close to the Holy Mary, not "five sweet symphonies " as in Rosetti's exquisite poem, virgins of mere untempted chastity, but penitent public sinners. They intercede for Gretchen. The Queen is to forgive and receive as maid of honor the loving, "the gentle soul that forgot her duty only once, nor ever dreamed that she was erring then." E~o sooner is Gretchen in favor than she sees the lover of her girlhood, and the prayer of her whole being is "grant me that I may instruct him, for he is yet blinded, unused to Heaven's new day." She asks to be allowed to "go" and "condescend." The answer, as firm as it is unexpected: "come" and "ascend!" Follow me "to higher spheres!" Inquire not whether he is nearing. Make the distance between him and thee still greater, and when he grows aware of thy presence, like far-off strains of music barely heard, then he will reach out after thee and follow !* We feel that, so admonished she mounts up — holy incense from the censer in which all memories of her bruised and broken life are fast consuming. And Faust admitted to the society of angels is quickened to new energetic effort bv the dawning recognition : — after all the power that drew T him and still draws him — known as

^Substantially Christ's answer to Peter's inquiry about John. Jno. xxi., 21.

passion, ambition, beauty, patriotism, philanthropy — was always one, same spirit affecting him in divers ways; it was the love of Gretchen pleading with his spirit and changing mask so often to avoid a premature discovery, lest he be tempted to worship and adore as God, his fellow-servant, his soul's own equal love, and fall thus into her sin.

Ah ! Gretchen has her lesson. The lily is the flower of purity, not merely for its almost unbearably radiant whiteness, for its penetrating perfume that floats upon the air and draws one panting, breathless to it ; but because it stands always erect, each cup opening heavenward first, then drooping for the entranced earth to behold its holy secrets, but its stalk never bending with the superincumbent load of glory except to snap in the violent wind, and fling it in the dust. Ah ! there was her mistake on earth. And was she not asking saintly Mary to permit her to sin the same unconscious sin afresh in heaven ? No, rise ! and he will rise. Stoop and he will be content to stay below — nay, intoxicated with thy condescending sweetness he will lose reason and self-mastery, and drag thee down to death !

Our ideal must be above us, not in station but in grace. Should it turn about inquiring if we follow ? Are we to be stirred out of our apparent lethargy, our ecstasy of aesthetic adoration and achieve some living likeness to what we love? Let it rise then out of sight, and we will surely soar after, borne upward by the quick wingbeats of desire. "All things perishable are but a parable ; here the impossible occurs and the unspeakable is done," for the ideal, ever living (to man in woman's guise) rises persistently, and rising " raises us up and on forever."

browning's pippa. 23

in. browning's pippa.

In Goethe's Faust we have the evolution of this ideal indicated from without, but only a fragment of its transcendental history suggested. We study it rather in its various disguises and their particular effects, than in its inherent self-accelerative cause-power. We do not see in Goethe's Faust how the ideal itself is benefited in its inner life, and fulfills its own individual purpose (without regard to what it elevates and develops), unless by the acquisition of a new motive for self-elevation and self-development, which, were such conceptions admissible, might just as well be applied directly to any Faust, as to any Margaret. It is in Browning that we find, first, the unconscious, necessary, God-caused unfolding of the Ideal itself, set forth in four stages, pictured as four independent, successive incarnations of the same divine womanhood :— Pippa, the unconsciously ministering angel, like flow 7 ers in a sick room, lovely and sweet, and therefore potent to save ; Pompilia, suffering, she knows not wiry, and saving, she know T s not how ; James Lee's Wife, known only by her torturer's name, suffering and aw^are of the injustice, rebellious first and then submissive, being perfected by such suffering, and willing to be God's instrument, even if he use her not for tasks of conscious mercy; and finally, the u Lyric Love" dweller in " realms of help," inspirer and blesser of the man she loves, willing to do her deeds thro' him now, which all men call his save he, and doubtless disclaiming them, to ascribe all the glory to Love, the one God, great and good, in both.