magic," as we say, in the picture called up, or the natural sentiment aroused, which fills us with wondering surmiseof what, we know not. This "magic" may be illustrated perhaps most instructively from lyric poetry, and there, from the lightest variety of the kind, from the simple love song. The pictures and sentiments suggested in the love song, regarded in themselves, belong to an experience which seems to be, more than any other, realised fully in the present, without intrusion of past or future to overcast its blue day with shadow. But look at these natural pictures and sentiments not directly, but as reflected in the magic mirror of Poetry! They are still radiant in the light of their Present -for let us think now only of the happy love song, not of the love song which is an elegy-they are still in their happy Present; but they are not of it-they have become something 'rich and strange." No words can describe the change which they have suffered; it is only to be felt as in such lines as these: Das Mädchen. Ich hab' ihn gesehen! Der Jüngling. Hier muss ich sie finden! Dann trat sie verlegen Ist 's Hoffnung, sind 's Träume ? Ihr Felsen, ihr Bäume, Entdeckt mir die Liebste, Entdeckt mir mein Glück! The magic of such lines as these is due, I cannot doubt, to the immediate presence of some great mass of feeling which they rouse, and, at the same time, hold in check, behind our mere understanding of their literal meaning. The pictures and sentiments conjured up, simple and familiar though they are, have yet that about them which I can only compare with the mysterious quality of those indifferent things which are so carefully noticed, and those trifling thoughts which are seriously dwelt upon, in an hour of great trouble. But the Transcendental Feeling which, being pent up behind our understanding of their literal meaning, makes the magic of such lines, may burst through the iridescent film which contains it. We have an example of this in the transfiguration of the Earthly into the Heavenly Beatrice. The Transcendental Feeling latent behind our understanding of the praise of Beatrice in the earlier sonnets and canzoni of the Vita Nuova emerges as a distinct experience when we assist at her praise in the Paradiso. Contrast the eleventh sonnet of the Vita Nuova with the twenty-fifth, which, with its commentary, is a prelude to the Paradiso. The eleventh sonnet of the Vita Nuova ends : Aiutatemi, donne, a farle onore. Quel ch' ella par quand' un poco sorride, Here it is the magic of the lines which is all in all. Now let us turn to the twenty-fifth, the last, sonnet of the Vita Nuova, and to the words after it ending the book with the promise of more worthy praise-more worthy, because offered with a deeper sense of the encompassing presence of "That which was, and is, and ever shall be ". : Oltre la spera, che più larga gira, Passa il sospiro ch' esce del mio core: Io non lo intendo, si parla sottile Sicch' io lo intendo ben, donne mie care. "Straightway after this sonnet was writ, there appeared unto me a marvellous vision, wherein I beheld things which made me determine not to say more concerning this Blessed One until I should be able to speak of her more worthily. To this end I studied with all diligence, as she knoweth well. Wherefore, if it shall be the pleasure of Him through Whom all things live that my life endure for some years, I hope to say of her that which never before hath been said of woman. And then may it please Him Who is Lord of Courtesy that my Soul may go to behold the glory of her Lady, to wit, of that Blessed Beatrice, who in glory doth gaze upon the face of Him Who is blessed for evermore." 4. TRANSCENDENTAL FEELING, THE EXPERIENCE TO WHICH THE PLATONIC MYTH AND ALL OTHER FORMS OF POETRY APPEAL, EXPLAINED GENETICALLY. Transcendental Feeling I would explain genetically (as every mood, whatever its present value may be, that is another matter, ought to be explained) as an effect produced within consciousness (and, in the form in which Poetry is chiefly concerned with Transcendental Feeling, within the dream-consciousness) by the persistence in us of that primeval condition from which we are sprung, when Life was still as sound asleep as Death, and there was no Time yet. That we should fall for a while, now and then, from our waking, time-, marking life, into the timeless slumber of this primeval life is easy to understand; for the principle solely operative in that primeval life is indeed the fundamental principle of our nature, being that "Vegetative Part of the Soul" which made from the first, and still silently makes, the assumption X on which our whole rational life of conduct and science rests -the assumption that Life is worth living. No arguments which Reason can bring for, or against, this ultimate truth 20 are relevant; for Reason cannot stir without assuming the very thing which these arguments seek to prove or to disprove. "Live thy life" is the Categorical Imperative addressed by Nature to each one of her creatures according to its kind. At the bottom of the scale of Life the Imperative is obeyed silently, in timeless sleep, as by the trees of the tropical forest : The fair and stately things, Impassive as departed kings, All still in the wood's stillness stood, And dumb. The rooted multitude Nodded and brooded, bloomed and dreamed, No other art, no hope, they knew, Than clutch the earth and seek the blue. * * My eyes were touched with sight. I saw the wood for what it was: Green conquerors from overhead When to the "Vegetative" the "Sensitive" Soul is first added, the Imperative is obeyed by creatures which, experiencing only isolated feelings, and retaining no traces of them in memory, still live a timeless life, without sense of past or future, and consequently without sense of selfhood. Then, with Memory, there comes, in the higher animals, some dim sense of a Self dating back and prospecting forward. Time begins to be. But the sense of its passage brings no melancholy; for its end in death is not yet anticipated by reflective thought. Man's anticipation of death would oppress his life with 1 Songs of Travel, R. L. Stevenson: "The Woodman.”› insupportable melancholy, were it not that current employments, especially those which are spoken of as duties, are so engrossing-that is, I would explain, were it not that his conscious life feels down with its roots into that "Part of the Soul" which, without sense of past or future or self, silently holds on to Life, in the implicit faith that it is worth living —that there is a Cosmos in which it is good to be. As it is, there is still room enough for melancholy in his hours of ease and leisure. If comfort comes to him in such hours, it is not from his thinking out some solution of his melancholy, but from his putting by thought, and sinking, alone, or led by some μυσταγωγὸς τοῦ βίου, for a while into the sleep of that fundamental "Part of the Soul." When he wakes into daily life again, it is with the elementary faith of this Part of his Soul newly confirmed in his heart; and he is ready, in the strength of it, to defy all that seems to give it the lie in the world of the senses and scientific understanding. Sometimes the very melancholy, which overclouds him at the thought of death, is transfigured, in the glow of this faith, into an exultant resignation-" I shall pass, but He abideth for ever." Sometimes, and more often, the faith does not merely transfigure, but dispels, the melancholy, and fills his heart with sweet hope, which fancy renders into dreams of personal immortality. To sum up in effect what I have said about Transcendental Feeling it is feeling which indeed appears in our ordinary object-distinguishing, time-marking consciousness, but does not originate in it. It is to be traced to the influence on consciousness of the presence in us of that "Part of the Soul" which holds on, in timeless sleep, to Life as worth living. Hence Transcendental Feeling is at once the solemn sense of Timeless Being-of "That which was, and is, and ever shall be" overshadowing us-and the conviction that Life is good. In the first-mentioned phase Transcendental Feeling appears as an abnormal experience of our conscious life, as a well-marked ecstatic state; in its other phase-as conviction that Life is good-Transcendental Feeling may be said to be a normal experience of our conscious life: it is not 1 1 See Paradiso, xxxiii. 82-96, quoted supra, p. 23, and Vita Nuova, Sonnet IIV., quoted supra, p. 38. |