C. H. Herford

“ To imagine heroism intensely is to be convinced that whatever else is illusory, heroism is not an illusion, that the valour of man has a kinship and support somehow, somewhere, in the nature of things. And if heroism is not an illusion, human society is no illusion either. For the heroic struggler with infinite odds is no longer alone; the army of saints and martyrs are with him; and it was the poet for whom loneliness opened ways into infinity beyond any companionship who cried to one such heroic struggler, fallen in the fight ”

“ The ‘Intellectual Beauty’ of Shelley’s hymn had its seat and stronghold in a like glow of inner vision, but its ‘awful loveliness’ was more abundantly hinted or disclosed in the world of nature and of man, giving ‘grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream,’ and luring the sensitive poet on to the pursuit of a thousand fugitive embodiments of its eternal essence. Leopardi’s language, marmoreally clear-cut and austere, seems to bear the impress of a mind powerfully self-contained, exempt from all seductions of the senses, even of colour and melody, calm with the resolution of despair. ”

“ Wordsworth, apprehending soul with his poet’s intuition, apprehends it as he knew it in himself. He saw it, therefore, as an energy operating not through ‘meddling intellect’ but through vision and vision-illuminated will, with open eye and ear for its indispensable associates, and love as its core. The ‘soul’ whereby alone the nations shall be great and free was something in which the humblest peasant and the simplest child had part, and in which the meanest flower struck answering chords. ”

“ Earth has for him a life-history, a biography, and he forgets that she is strictly but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms thickened for a time to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus we see how this mechanical system, ardently embraced by a poet, working freely upon him, and itself coloured and transformed by his mind, stirred in him two seemingly opposed kinds of poetic emotion at once: the sublime sense of eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden doom and inexorable passing away.
Hence the melancholy that in Lucretius goes along with an enormous sense of life. ”

“ Man in the grip of Nature is like the anthill crushed by a chance-falling apple, and the lava field of Vesuvius, covering extinct cities, where but the broom plant sheds a forlorn fragrance, aptly symbolizes the desolate earth he is doomed to tread. While this earth itself, a vanishing film of vapour in the universe, traverses by its insignificance his dream of immortality. And his humorous irony sports, in the prose dialogues, with this annihilating disparity between man’s pretensions and the truth. ”

“ For the voice of Lucretius is here a distinctive, almost a solitary voice. The poets for the most part have been the weavers of the veil of dreams and visions in whose glamour the races of mankind have walked: but here came a poet, and one of the greatest, who rent the veil asunder and bade men gaze upon the nature of things naked and unadorned. And his austere chaunt of triumph as he pierces illusion and scatters superstition, has in it something more poignant and thrilling than many a song of voluptuous ecstacy or enchanted reverie. ”

“ Love above all else irradiates the waste of life, it is ‘the source of good, of the highest joy found in the ocean of existence’; it alone holds equal bliss for man with Death, which for ever allays his ills. ‘Love and Death’ are twin brothers, and the fairest things on the earth or under the stars. [47] [180] Even the memory of love can make ‘abhorred old age’ endurable, and send a man willingly to the scourge or the wheel, as the face of Beatrice could make her lover ‘happy in the flames.’ [48] Hence Love makes the heart ‘wise,’ for it inspires men with the contempt of life ”

“ Yet d’Annunzio’s vision of power, his appetency of enormous and abnormal things, was now to assume a new form. The grandiose dream of the Superman expands into the dream of the Super-nation. The discovery of Rome had taught him something of the pride of citizenship, and more than the nascent pride of nationality. But in the last year of the century he underwent an experience which turned this nascent emotion into a passion, and the poet himself into a prophet and preacher in its service, an ‘announcer’ as he was fond of saying, of the cause and creed of Italianità. ”

“ We are apt to think that the tide of humanity has ebbed decisively away from the city of the seven hills, and that wherever its sundered streams may be destined finally to flow together in unison, the Roman Forum, where the roads of all the world once met, will not be that spot. Yet a city which can generate magnificent, even if illusory, dreams is assured of a real potency in human affairs not to be challenged in its kind by far greater and wealthier cities which the Londoner, or the New Yorker, or even the Parisian, would never think of addressing in these lyrical terms. ”

“ So that a conception apparently so thin and abstract as ‘difference’ can assume for him the shape and potency of an alluring divinity: ‘Diversity,’ he cries, ‘the siren of the world! I am he who love thee!’
And then, with adolescence, came the passion of sex; for d’Annunzio no shy and gradual discovery, but a veritable explosion, before which all obstacles, moral and material, vanished into air. ”

“ We might even be tempted to say that pantheism, in some sense, must be the substance of any ‘poetic view of the world.’ But if so, it must be a pantheism which owes at least as much to the entranced intuition of the poets as to the abstract thinking of philosophy. Their ecstasy of the senses, their feasting joy in the moment, and in the spot, have enabled them not merely to express the creed of pantheism with greater freshness and sincerity, but to give it interpretations and applications of which theoretic speculation never dreamed. ”

“ GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
MAZZINI, the most prophetic figure of the nineteenth century, declared in a famous passage his confidence in the European mission of his country. ‘The Third Italy,’ destined to be born of the long agony of the struggle with Austria without and the papacy within, was not merely to be a nation, restored to unity and independence; it was to intervene as an original voice in the complex harmony of the European nationalities, contributing of its own inborn genius something distinctive and unique. ‘We believe devoutly that Italy has not exhausted her life in the world. ”

“ In Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, a type of love not in its origin loftier or purer than that of Troilus and Cressida is seen dominating two souls of magnificent compass and daemonic force. Antony is held by his serpent of old Nile in the grip of a passion which insolently tramples on moral and institutional bonds, private and public alike; which brings the lovers to ruin and to death; and which yet invests their fall with a splendour beside which the triumph of their conqueror appears cold and mean. ”

“ Shakespeare’s poetry takes account of so vast a number of other things, of so many other ways of living and aspects of life, that we hardly think even of the author of Romeo and Juliet as in any special sense the poet of Love. Nor is he, if we mean by this that he thinks or speaks of Love in the transcendent way of Dante, or Lucretius, or Spenser, or Shelley. Love with them is part of the vital frame of the universe. ”

“ And because of its bent to think greatly of man, it makes for the assertion, in the great sense, of freedom—of man’s freedom to be himself. Neither the shibboleths of political freedom nor those of free thought have always, it is true, found response among poets. Their part has rather been to keep alive in mankind the temper which treats outward obstacles not as the soul’s constraints, but as its opportunities; the faith that iron bars do not make a cage, and that you may be bounded in a nutshell, and yet not only count yourself, but be, a king of infinite space. ”

“ With Leopardi, martyred in his prime by painful disease, the gloomy shades closed in more and more impenetrably upon the world of man and nature, and death was happy because it was the end of life. With Shelley the universe grew more and more visibly transfigured by a spirit deeply responsive to his own; all things worked and moved in beauty, and were woven through and through with love. ”

“ We see the temper of the poet at the outset, in the wonderful transfiguration which the gentle recluse Epicurus undergoes in the ardent brain of his Roman disciple. For it was of this enemy of disturbing emotion, this quietist of paganism, this timid and debonnaire humanitarian, that Lucretius drew the magnificent and astonishing portrait which immediately follows the prologue of the De Rerum Natura. The Lucretian Epicurus is a Prometheus—the heroic Greek who first of mortals dared to defy and withstand the monstrous tyrant Religion to her face. ”

“ D’Annunzio, in one word, is wanting in humanity; and because of his shallow and fragmentary apprehension of the human soul, his vision of power and beauty discharges itself in barren spectacles of brute energy and material splendour, for which he cannot find psychological equivalents in grandeur or loveliness of character. Shakespeare’s huge personalities—Othello, Lear, Antony—are human in every trait, however much they transcend our actual experience of men. ”

“ He cannot quite break free from some speculative foibles which show the Master’s shallow opportunism at its worst—such as the dictum that the sun is about as large as it looks, a lamp hung a little above the earth, and daily lighted and put out; but he becomes himself when he lets his imagination soar into the infinities of time and space which his faith opens out or leaves room for. It is a triumph of poetry as well as of common sense when he scoffs at the Stoic dogma of a Space which abruptly comes to an end ”

“ On the contrary, his wonderful gift of style continually finds the material for poetry in the most seemingly arid regions. Sometimes the result is merely an astonishing tour de force; but often we become aware that Dante has not only invented but discovered, and that many a dogma which has the air of being the mere husk of religion is in reality the imperfect, stammering utterance through which religious passion sought to make itself articulate. Dante, in short, makes us feel in these constructions of the intellect the language of the soul. ”

“ Even the union of Othello and Desdemona, in every other respect a ‘marriage of true minds’ which reaches for a moment (ii. 1) incomparable intensity and beauty, is rendered fatally precarious by their ignorance of each other.
Love, like everything else which grows in Hamlet’s Denmark, is touched with insidious disease. Ophelia is wonderfully imagined in keeping with the tragic atmosphere, an exquisite but fragile flower of the unweeded garden where evil things run to seed and good things wither. ”

“ Meredith too sees man, in dread of her, clutching at invisible powers, as Lucretius’s sea-captain in the storm makes vows to the gods. And Meredith’s thought that man rises by ‘spelling at’ her laws is no less Lucretian. But Meredith’s story of Earth is full of hope, like his story of man. It is perpetual advance. With Lucretius it is otherwise.
For the Earth is not only our Mother; she is our tomb (II. 1148 f.) . And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to it. ”

“ The grandeur of Spinoza’s conception is apparent enough even in his geometrical formulas, but Goethe’s intense intuition translated it into human experiences which stir us to the depths. The Erdgeist’s retort to Faust—‘Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir’—is one of the most thrilling in all poetry, not because it indulges all [192] our wishes, nor yet because it baffles them, but because the barrier it opposes to the intellect is a gate to the imagination, and we step out into a poetic apprehension of the infinity which our formulas seek to capture in vain. ”

“ In Lucretius this conception found a mind capable of being ravished by its imaginative grandeur, [69] as well as of pursuing it indefatigably through the thorniest mazes of mechanical proof. The contagious fervour which breathes through his poem is no mere ardour of the disciple bent on winning converts, or the joy of the literary craftsman as his hexameters leap forth glowing on the anvil; it is the sacred passion of one who has had a sublime vision of life and nature, and who bears about the radiance of it into all the work to which he has set his hand. ”

“ A second such analogy is the discovery of infinity. Common sense observes measure and rule, complies with custom, and takes its ease when its day’s work is done; but we recognize a higher quality in the love that knows no measure, in the spiritual hunger and thirst which are never stilled. Therefore, at the height of our humanity, we find ourselves in the universe in proportion as it sustains and gives scope for an endlessly ranging and endlessly penetrating thought. The Stoics looked on the universe as a globe pervaded by what Munro unkindly calls a rotund and rotatory god ”