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Read books online » Fiction » Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana (free children's ebooks pdf TXT) 📖

Book online «Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana (free children's ebooks pdf TXT) 📖». Author George Santayana



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world. He thereby touched the ultimate goal to which a poet can aspire; he set the standard for all possible performance, and became the type of a supreme poet. This is not to say that he is the "greatest" of poets. The relative merit of poets is a barren thing to wrangle about. The question can always be opened anew, when a critic appears with a fresh temperament or a new criterion. Even less need we say that no greater poet can ever arise; we may be confident of the opposite. But Dante gives a successful example of the highest species of poetry. His poetry covers the whole field from which poetry may be fetched, and to which poetry may be applied, from the inmost recesses of the heart to the uttermost bounds of nature and of destiny. If to give imaginative value to something is the minimum task of a poet, to give imaginative value to all things, and to the system which things compose, is evidently his greatest task.

Dante fulfilled this task, of course under special conditions and limitations, personal and social; but he fulfilled it, and he thereby fulfilled the conditions of supreme poetry. Even Homer, as we are beginning to perceive nowadays, suffered from a certain conventionality and one-sidedness. There was much in the life and religion of his time that his art ignored. It was a flattering, a euphemistic art; it had a sort of pervasive blandness, like that which we now associate with a fashionable sermon. It was poetry addressed to the ruling caste in the state, to the conquerors; and it spread an intentional glamour over their past brutalities and present self-deceptions. No such partiality in Dante; he paints what he hates as frankly as what he loves, and in all things he is complete and sincere. If any similar adequacy is attained again by any poet, it will not be, presumably, by a poet of the supernatural. Henceforth, for any wide and honest imagination, the supernatural must figure as an idea in the human mind,—a part of the natural. To conceive it otherwise would be to fall short of the insight of this age, not to express or to complete it. Dante, however, for this very reason, may be expected to remain the supreme poet of the supernatural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato, of that phase of thought and feeling in which the supernatural seems to be the key to nature and to happiness. This is the hypothesis on which, as yet, moral unity has been best attained in this world. Here, then, we have the most complete idealization and comprehension of things achieved by mankind hitherto. Dante is the type of a consummate poet.

[1] Plato, Phaedo,97B-99C, Jowett's translation. I have changed the rendering of νοῡς from "mind" to "reason."

[2] "Est pro fundamento tenenda veritas historiae et desuper spirituales expositiones fabricandae." Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, i. quaest. 102, conclusio.

[3] Paradiso, xv. 97, 99:

Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica...
Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.

[4] Ibid., 100-26:

Non avea catenella, non corona,
Non donne contigiate, non cintura
Che fosse a veder pin che la persona.
Non faceva nascendo ancor paura
La figlia al padre, chè il tempo e la dote
Non fuggan quinci e quindi la misura.
Non avea case di famiglia vote;
Non v'era giunto ancor Sardanapalo
A mostrar ciò che in camera si puote....
O fortunate! Ciascuna era certa
Delia sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla
Era per Francia nel letto deserta.
L' una vegghiava a studio della culla,
E consolando usava l' idioma
Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla;
L' altra traendo alia rocca la chioma,
Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
De' Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.

[5] Paradiso, xxxiii. 143-45:

Volgeva il mio disiro e il velle,
Si come rota ch' egualmente è mossa,
L' amor che move il sole e l' altre stelle.

[6] Vita Nuova, § 22: Secondo l' usanza della sopradetta cittade, donne con donne, e uomini con uomini si adunino a cotale tristizia; molte donne s' adunaro colà, ove questa Beatrice piangea pietosamente, &c.

Also, Purgatorio, xxxi. 50, 51:

Le belle membra in ch' io
Rinchiusa fui, e sono in terra sparte.

[7] Vita Nuova, § v.

[8] Schermo della veritade,—natural philosophy.

[9] Convito, II. cap. 16: Faccia che gli occhi d' esta Donna miri; gli occhi di questa Donna sono le sue dimostrazioni, le quali dritte negli occhi dello intelletto inhamorano l' anima, libera nelle condizioni. Oh dolcissimi ed ineffabili sembianti, e rubatori subitani della mente umana, che nelle dimostrazioni negli occhi della Filosofia apparite, quando essa alli suoi drudi ragiona! Veramente in voi è la salute, per la quale si fa beato chi vi guarda, e salvo dalla morte della ignoranza e delli vizi.... E cosi, in fine di questo secondo Trattato, dico e affermo che la Donna, di cui io innamorai appresso lo primo amore, fu la bellissima e onestissima figlia dello Imperadore dell' universo, alla quale Pittagora pose nome Filosofia.

[10] Purgatorio, xvii. 106-11:

Or perchè mai non può dalla salute
Amor del suo suggetto volger viso,
Dall' odio proprio son le cose tute:
E perchè intender non si può diviso,
E per sè stante, alcuno esser dal primo,
Da quello odiare ogni affetto è deciso.

[11] Inferno, iii. 64-66:

Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi,
Erano ignudi e stimolati molto
Da mosconi e da vespe ch' erano ivi.

[12] Ibid., iv. 41, 42:

Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi
Che senza speme vivemo in disio.

Cf. Purgatorio, iii. 37-45, where Virgil says:

"State contenti, umana gente, al quia;
Chè se potuto aveste veder tutto,
Mestier non era partorir Maria;
E disiar vedeste senza frutto
Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato,
Ch' eternalmente è dato lor per lutto.
Io dico d' Aristotele e di Plato,
E di molti altri." E qui chinò la fronte;
E più non disse, e rimase turbato.

[13] Inferno, ix. 106-33, and x.

[14] Ibid., xxviii.

[15] Inferno, iii. 124-26:

E pronti sono a trapassar lo rio,
Chè la divina giustizia gli sprona
Si che la tema si volge in disio.

[16] Purgatorio, xxi. 61-69:

Della mondizia sol voler fa prova,
Che, tutta libera a mutar convento,
L' alma sorprende, e di voler le giova....
Ed io che son giaciuto a questa doglia
Cinquecento anni e più, pur mo sentii
Libera volontà di miglior soglia.

[17] Inferno, xiv. 63-66:

"O Capaneo, in ciò che non s' ammorza
La tua superbia, se' tu più punito:
Nullo martirio, fuor che la tua rabbia,
Sarebbe al tuo furor dolor compito."

[18] Alfred de Musset, Poésies Nouvelles, Souvenir:

Dante, pourquoi dis-tu qu'il n'est pire misère
Qu'un souvenir heureux dans les jours de douleur?
Quel chagrin t'a dicte cette parole amère,
Cette offense au malheur?

... Ce blasphème vanté ne vient pas de ton cœur.
Un souvenir heureux est peut-être sur terre
Plus vrai que le bonheur....

Et c'est à ta Françoise, à ton ange de gloire,
Que tu pouvais donner ces mots à prononcer,
Elle qui s'interrompt, pour conter son histoire,
D'un éternel baiser!

[19] Paradiso, iii. 73-90:

"Se disiassimo esser più superne,
Foran discordi li nostri disiri
Dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne,...
E la sua volontate è nostra pace;
Ella è quel mare al qual tutto si move
Ciò ch' ella crea, e che natura face."
Chiaro mi fu allor com' ogni dove
In cielo è Paradiso, e sì la grazia
Del sommo ben d' un modo non vi piove.

[20] Paradiso, xxii. 133-39:

Col viso ritornai per tutte e quante
Le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
Tal, ch' io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante;
E quel consiglio per migliore approbo
Che l' ha per meno; e chi ad altro pensa
Chiamar si puote veramente probo.

IV. GOETHE'S FAUST

In approaching the third of our philosophical poets, there is a scruple that may cross the mind. Lucretius was undoubtedly a philosophical poet; his whole poem is devoted to expounding and defending a system of philosophy. In Dante the case is almost as plain. The Divine Comedy is a moral and personal fable; yet not only are many passages explicitly philosophical, but the whole is inspired and controlled by the most definite of religious systems and of moral codes. Dante, too, is unmistakably a philosophical poet. But was Goethe a philosopher? And is Faust a philosophical poem?

If we say so, it must be by giving a certain latitude to our terms. Goethe was the wisest of mankind; too wise, perhaps, to be a philosopher in the technical sense, or to try to harness this wild world in a brain-spun terminology. It is true that he was all his life a follower of Spinoza, and that he may be termed, without hesitation, a naturalist in philosophy and a pantheist. His adherence to the general attitude of Spinoza, however, did not exclude a great plasticity and freedom in his own views, even on the most fundamental points. Thus Goethe did not admit the mechanical interpretation of nature advocated by Spinoza. He also assigned, at least to privileged souls, like his own, a more personal sort of immortality than Spinoza allowed. Moreover, he harboured a generous sympathy with the dramatic explanations of nature and history current in the Germany of his day. Yet such transcendental idealism, making the world the expression of a spiritual endeavour, was a total reversal of that conviction, so profound in Spinoza, that all moral energies are resident in particular creatures, themselves sparks in an absolutely infinite and purposeless world. In a word, Goethe was not a systematic philosopher. His feeling for the march of things and for the significance of great personages and great ideas was indeed philosophical, although more romantic than scientific. His thoughts upon life were fresh and miscellaneous. They voiced the genius and learning of his age. They did not express a firm personal attitude, radical and unified, and transmissible to other times and persons. For philosophers, after all, have this advantage over men of letters, that their minds, being more organic, can more easily propagate themselves. They scatter less influence, but more seeds.

If from Goethe we turn to Faust—and it is as the author of Faust only that we shall consider him—the situation is not less ambiguous. In the play, as the young Goethe first wrote it, philosophy appeared in the first line,—Hab nun ach die Philosophey; but it appeared there, and throughout the piece, merely as a human experience, a passion or an illusion, a fund of images or an ambitious art. Later, it is true, under the spell of fashion and of Schiller, Goethe surrounded his original scenes with others, like the prologue in heaven, or the apotheosis of Faust, in which a philosophy of life was indicated; namely, that he who strives strays, yet in that straying finds his salvation. This idea left standing all that satirical and Mephistophelian wisdom with which the whole poem abounds, the later parts no less than the earlier. Frankly, it was a moral that adorned the tale, without having been the seed of it, and without even expressing fairly the spirit which it breathes. Faust remained an essentially romantic poem, written to give vent to a pregnant and vivid genius, to touch the heart, to bewilder the mind with a carnival of images, to amuse, to thrill, to humanize; and, if we must

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