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exercising a selective and not a creative discretion; it is like nature subject to life and not master of it, a mental principle inherent in a natural process rather than a creative vision expressing itself through the matter of the organic world. For Nature attains beauty by reducing her sensuous chaos to its most perfect order. Her philosophy is limited to a conviction of the value of life, which leads her often into wanton exuberance. Of spiritual values she is oblivious. She is unmoral because she is beneath humanity, not because she is above it. But the truest poet, whether he goes to life for his matter or whether he creates an imaginative world the better to express his idea, is not content merely to accept the impressions of the senses. Instead he utilises these to image his vision of a purer existence, in which the infinite desire of man for spiritual perfection is interpreted through the finite conditions under which he is compelled to live here on earth.

It is such poetry alone which is in a true sense universal. For it comprehends not only this material life where opposing forces balance each other in space, but that far subtler world of mind where ideas blend together in an indescribable harmony, that city built to music, where no physical error encroaches, and no discord lingers to be resolved.

CHAPTER III

EARLY IDEALISM IN ENGLISH POETRY

Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves t' have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel plows air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is; there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.

He goes before them, and commands them all,
That to himself is a law rational.-CHAPMAN.

In extension the universe comprehends and engulfs me, in thought I comprehend it.-PASCAL.

I

IN the evolution of English poetry we can trace very clearly an advance from naturalism towards idealism. It is possible that the severity of their environment explains both the enlarged sense of the infinite to be found in all northern peoples and the profounder conviction of the need of moral effort. To survive at all man had to assert himself to death against the elements: to surrender to them, as was pleasant and inevitable beneath the smiling skies of the south, was very often with the northerner to perish. Our

earliest epic is in many ways more primitive than Homer; it has less of natural grace and heroic gesture. But its scenery is wilder, its tone more cosmic, and its morality more intense.

Between the thunder of the sea and the desolate mist-veiled moors and marshes, an animal people move like shadows, more often struggling against the brutal forces of nature, symbolised in a loathsome monster, than enjoying the benign influences of peace and fertility. Man is human only in his power to direct more effectively his animal energy so that his feats of athletic endurance may serve a conscious end. But the end is nature's. A great man is he who can ride the storm most stormily. On the other hand, we find that the necessity of rebellion against the natural forces has preserved the northerner from deifying them as the Greeks did. The whole distinction between modern poetry and ancient lies in this fact, that the northerner did not invariably bow to necessity as divine, nor worship it as Fate.

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He accepted the fact of nature's forces, and wrestled with them. Fate, the northern goddess Wyrd," was to him almost what it was named by later experience-character, and he saw as little mere pathos in man's defeat by necessity as he realised true sublimity in his triumph over it and melancholy grandeur in the struggle. Where, of course, his appetite coincided with nature's and could

be indulged without danger to himself, as a primitive man he indulged it, until in time his egotism did suffer, when he further refined upon his morality.

But against what he found to be evil to himself and possibly remediable he rebelled; he revolted against authority with all the energy of heroic egotism, when he found it grievous and cherished any hope of success. He championed free-will while admitting necessity, and the province of free-will he constantly enlarged. In short, unlike the Greeks, he imaged in the forces of life both a devil and a God, and he fought the one as fiercely as he reverenced the other. This spirit of individualism is well exemplified in the words of Brynhild in Morris's Sigurd.

Love thou the Gods-and withstand them, lest thy fame should fail in the end,

And thou be but their thrall and their bondsman, who wert born for their very friend.

This is the primary distinction, then, between the paganism of Beowulf and of Greece. In the latter there is more order, submissiveness and sunlight, in the former more of Titanic struggles and a brooding, mutinous melancholy.

By contrast how mild and genial is the world of Chaucer! The storm and darkness have given place to a mellow sunlight in which no extremes exist, and a universal charity, a kindly tolerance towards mortal weakness, presides. Chaucer's philosophy is that of uncritical humanity: he is critical

only in his observance as an artist. His religion may be that of accepted dogma, but it scarcely touches his view of life at a single point. His humour has the kindness of one who has understood the frailty of all mortal things, his jests the frivolity and the genial licence of Earth herself, his pathos is sentimental, never tragic, his joy is fresh with the dew of the morning.

But, lord Christ! when that it remembreth me
Upon my youth, and on my jollity,

It tickleth me about mine hearte-root,

Unto this day it doth mine hearte boot
That I have had my world as in my time!

When we have allowed for all the artifices and mannerisms which he took from foreign sources, this is the genius which remains, a genius which can reflect by observant sympathy every human type and embody the essential traits of each with an inspired accuracy. He records the manners of men, he does not seek to analyse their weakness or question their destiny. His is the voice of the normal good-tempered multitude who accept life for its momentary value as life, careless of its imperfections, contradictions and failures, reserving any higher conception of being to an unconsidered futurity of which religion gives us hope, but a rather vague and dreary definition, and which, therefore, they are content to leave to the theologians to quarrel over. For him:

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