diss ,j-\ scrs d CopighlN" /7( )/ COPYUKiHT DEPOSIT. POEMS OF PERSONALITY SECOND SERIES REGINALD C. ROBBINS " to speak beyond the hook " CAMBRIDGE lIDrinteu at tEPtie Htoersftoe l^xt^^ 1909 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY REGINALD CHAUNCEY ROBBINS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I WlAY 29 '^'^^^ ERRATA POEMS OF PERSONALITY [FIRST SERIES) ist, 2nd, and 3rd editions — Page ^2, line 12 \ and >- for Gi^eh read Ga:(^a. Page ^^, line 3 ) ist and 2nd editions only — Page 1 16, line 8 — for the read zw. ist edition only — Page 80, line i — for relea read release. CONTENTS CONFUCIUS 3 HERACLITUS 9 .CSCHYLUS 18 PARMENIDES 24 PHIDIAS 29 EURIPIDES . 38 SOCRATES 45 SOPHOCLES 54 PLATO 62 ARISTOTLE 73 ASOKA 86 PAUL 91 PETER 100 CONSTANTINE 104 ATHANASIUS no AUGUSTINE 117 iii CONTENTS AVERROES 123 AQUINAS 131 LUTHER 143 LOYOLA 149 XAVIER 155 PALESTRINA 162 AKBAR 168 SHAKESPEAR 174 DESCARTES 180 SPINOZA 188 KANT 197 MRS. BROWNING 213 CARLYLE 215 IV POEMS OF PERSONALITY SECOND SERIES CONFUCIUS Alack ! down from the Golden Years of Kings Perfect in every enterprise of life And Sages calm in benison of Shang-te, Unto the turmoil of these latter days, This modern-made forgetfulness of earth, What lapse, degeneration ! And the fall Continues with the passing of the days ; And Princes lift the sword against their kind, And none are Kings. And no superior man Is counsellor ; nor folk obedient Anywhere bear in mind the Rule of Shun, Nor guide their ways by the Proprieties, Nor sacrifice by ceremonial Exact, nor regulate by music-mood Nor holy ode, conduct and character. But all, both high and low, demand new modes Of turmoil, new disorder ; whilst this sun Rises and sets, and stars upon their course Move nightly, marking our disease and death. I have made study of the Golden Years, Their lore of order and their ways of worth Perfect, plain-fashion 'd ; whence am well aware 3 POEMS OF PERSONALITY How, might but men return unto those laws Of firm obedience in both home and State, Of wise command, submission questionless. By king or husband, subject, yea, or wife. Then might the rebel or the concubine Garrulous, lustful, be unknown among us ; And government be peaceful, taxes just, And many sons be born to reverence Both parents equally. Hence would I teach This Middle Kingdom, centre of the skies, With sure authority the method of them Celestial, absolute ; that so might men Re-live the ancient dignity of life, And stand re-born as on the pristine earth And be of Golden Years, or slaves or kings. I am so fain to teach, yet nowhere find Right opportunity ; but fear my faith Will fade unheard when death o'ertaketh me (My creed, of destiny too like mine own !) And none after myself be bless'd to know — For what disciple can preserve a truth Without example in my private life Which some successful government alone Under my counsel could afford to him ? — 4 CONFUCIUS None bless'd to know the truth establish 'd by The fair performance of the Golden Kings. 'Sooth, in these days of turbid insolence When nought is order'd in authority, But hearts are bruised and broken with despair Of learning each some novelty to suit The strain and stress of untoward circumstance, Stands this my novelty and my despair That nowhere men may heed the precept wise, The proof irrefutable which I tell them Glean'd of the wisdom of the greater age Before all things grew old and tottering. And I myself grow old and tottering To leave no high example of success, Who feel my very faith a failure here Where few believe ; and I, alone of all Wise in the sanction of authority, Wield no authority — though yet, by grace Of circumstance, set for the space of moons Over this province-government to try The fresh enforcement of the earlier ways. Nor will this folk obey, nor will he heed Whose counsellor by compact I became. 5 POEMS OF PERSONALITY But all goes on from bad to worse by want Of that antique respect and reverence Which record of the wisdom-ways of Kings Abundantly reveals, but is not now. How shall I bear to go into my grave A savior still unseen in public power, A wealth of wisdom, doom'd as ignorance To die and nevermore be known of men By fair performance as of Golden Kings ? Ah ! who could quench the fervor of our crime ? Could Shun himself, fallen on latter days, Have transform'd earth to heaven, made mankind, Shang-te ? Though every man perchance be good at heart. Born good ; yet more than all the Sages' selves Were needed to make perfect man born, both, And bred to lust and greed by age mature. As I believed and labor'd, so might Shun ; And as I fail'd, so haply would Shun fail, Whose faith, pride, wisdom were scarce more than mine ! Scarce more than mine ! And as Shun stands to-day Criterion of perfection, so may I To future ages, if no fault 's confess'd, 6 CONFUCIUS Stand model and exemplar, teaching men The way of me, Kung-fu-tze, as of them The earlier Sages — ay, and serve mankind I For where is opportunity to help. There pride is justified ; and unto pride With claim of self-success cleaves reverence ; And where is reverence there all is saved ; And saviorhood proves the superior man ! — Yet from this pitiful experience Of practical failure I perforce resign. Throw down the staff of office and retire To some sole hermitage to meditate The better fortune of the Golden Days When wisdom was, a better fortune proven By mine experience of modern life So purposeless without authority. So warp'd and thwarted of accomplishment For want of any ancient self-restraint And plain obedience to command of Kings. For where there is not any self-restraint There nought is regulated ; and where nought Is regulated there no government Exists worth preservation ; and where earth Is nowise govern'd no superior man 7 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Can safely intervene to found the State. I shall abandon service publicly And give myself to setting forth in script The evils annall'd of their Springs, their Autumns, Which are not years of singleness and truth. By my book be I judged ; but be forgot As conservator crazed who cried reform Yet could not quench the fervor of our crime, Could not bring back the Golden Years of Kings ! - Was it not fault of mine, to strive beyond All possibility of world-success ? Was not crime mine that I defied our fate, Sought to turn backward on earth's destiny Which goeth ever onward though we fall ? Which if we thwart we must deserve to fall ; Which if we foster yields our life's success. And thereby proves itself desirable, More perfect than the Ceremonials Of Shun, more sweet than old Proprieties ? — Yet, be mine Annals as mine eloquence Confident still of favor with the skies ! HERACLITUS Behold the world as man perceiveth it (O world ! thou source of every thought of truth !) Call'd fire, or water, earth or any name For somewhat static, moveless, even though man Himself be judge of it that flux be all ! Behold the world, as though perception might be Some passive permanence, some plethora Of recognition mutually inane. Devoid of meaning, imperceptible Because all-unimpressive ! Yet mine arm Before mine eyes passeth from point to point Athwart yon landscape (ay, o'er Ephesos, Artemis' precinct !) ; and by motion proveth A relativity dynamic 'twixt My sight and world as, still within them both, Its sweep impresseth alterance on the face Of the world ; and by its passage o'er the world Becomes unlike itself, mine arm no more As erst, but arm and world at once made new And by their novelty impressing on me Flux, flux, and flux unto the end of time. Why then denominate or world or water 9 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Or fire or earth or arm with any name Intended to denote a permanence, Implying some perception unimpress'd And hence impossible ? Truth were not so. And therefore fire and earth as men conceive them Are not. But flux are all things that we know ; And * world ' or * life ' names but the flux as whole. The wonder is not, therefore, of the way Life floweth and is absolved within itself With every fresh desire — for how impress Perception save by impact ; and how else Might motion be, save by the alterance Unending, irremediable of time ? The wonder is not of the way we pass, Are born and are forgotten with the dead. Rather were alterance, the flux of change World's axiom, and physics every way (The Upward and the Downward Burning both) Built in our understanding how we move And breathe and face the morrow as we must. Necessity, for flux. And what we know For necessary ne'er bemarvelleth. The wonder, rather, that we seem to stay ; 10 HERACLITUS Are here, one moment ; there, at other while ; 'Stablish'd and resting as we somehow seem. The wonder, so, that any element — Or very fire, or water, or dull earth — Remaineth very fire, water, earth. And not another ; how each element Seems untransmutive, hath identity Whether it be or not-be, though each thing Can neither be nor not-be, but (becoming !) In some sort must amalgamate with each And every other, as the law of all Requires, whose fundament is alterance ! From this dilemma there were no appeal To proof of gods. The gods (if gods there be !) Either abiding still beyond space, time, And sharing not in motion ; or else wise Being but motions of the myriad world Call'd archetypal, alterance none the less ! And either way were they beyond appeal — For, being unmotion'd, were they nought to point This paradox of stillness seemingly ; Or, being (as needs were, were they anywise !) Themselves but movements of the world at large, Were they but type and formula indeed II POEMS OF PERSONALITY Of this my proposition, not themselves Solutions of the mighty mystery ! For how were Zeus, a motion, seeming Zeus Through countless ages ; Artemis herself. The symbol of life-lapse by local creed, Continuously Artemis, nought else ? Gods, elements or men, beasts, trees, or all Alike, true chaos of unceasing flux. Yet paradoxically Zeus, earth, fire, Artemis, air, oak, Herakleitos, each ! Lo ! were it, by some possibility, A bare necessity beyond escape That somewhat, still unchanging, lurks within The maelstrom of the fluxion ; gives a name To each momentum ; that beyond the breath Of birth-in-death affords identity To recognition ? Were it, that I take An hidden axiom and reluctantly Accept a fundament occult till now ? Urge I not every hour that what we see For bare necessity were understood Beyond necessity to understand ? And prove I not both terms of axiom — 12 HERACLITUS The status, as the fluxion — equally Prime datum of the world wherein we move ? The movement and the mover ! — Yet wherein Were paradox precluded, that we say : I move, Zeus moveth ; earth is earth ; and water Water ; as fire, fire though it melt And pass in every flickering ? How might Zeus Be to his motion, I unto mine arm's Translation show related, when * itself * Must be, as by hypothesis, without Share in self-passage nor defined by change Of relativity to all things else — Though of itself nought if it may not move ? And what of alterance then when passage-fact Precludes intrinsic inference of aught Moveless, unpassing ? If relation lie In truth 'twixt state and state, and such we call Motion ; yet what, within such mystic stream, The very self-distinctiveness of flux From each self-state as state, which cannot be As state determinate of passingness Which could demark it but impermanently (Save passingness be endless emptiness !) And so transform it into flux anew ? 13 POEMS OF PERSONALITY If, as indeed I take the novel truth, There be unceasingness within our flow (Ha ! were it that very flow's unceasingness Which by non-termination yields to each Moment and aspect an enduringness Inherent only for the fluxion's self Its universalness of reference, And cheats us with supposed identity Of many moments joint-establishing ! ) Whereby such fluxion shows distinctively For alterance (requiring permanence For standard and criterion !) — what, within Such duplex datum of our universe. Can thus, with appeal to any sanity, Be said of such relationship as lies 'Twixt alterance and change-nonentity. Whether itself were fluxional or no ? And if itself 's shown static — what were then Its own relationship, as status, toward The primal fluxion — secondary crux Interminably self-repetitive In logic-regress beyond man's conceit ? I pause before such paradox, whose terms Now first confront me among sons of men, 14 HERACLITUS Now first demand solution. Future years Shall haply see solution ; haply find The task impossible, to rectify Such rift within Necessity, the One ! — t Yet not the same task, not such paradox Precise as now appalls me among men The first and therefore last, as all truths flow : Necessity, but passingness writ large, Like world without or pause or permanency (So reason tells, interpreter of sense In just perception of duplexity) Save as we name it so, we know not wherefore. And seize the simulacrum to explain The shown reality — and call it Same, ^ Though unto every thought respectively A different necessity-of- truth ! To none my same dilemma, though the name Of Herakleitos' fluxion aye endure ! Some task made different by the lapse of time, By newer information, newer needs Of understanding truth-necessity, ^ Yet seeming-same within their universe Of logic-wrought procedure : whereunto 15 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Shall many minds attain, for whom my fame Means nought than early rumor, who shall stand Confronting, seemingly as I confront This paradox. And many shall attempt Evasion, or delude with trickery. For some shall say : The paradox disproves AH possibility of movement made — For how can somewhat pass and yet be same ? — Forgetful how this motion of my hand, Though at each instant status in itself (As we imagine instance cognizable !) Yet passes, point to point, perceptibly, And proves unto perception, truth's best judge, This wonder-universe of earth, of water, Fire and Ephesos within my sight. Known thus for motion all though each bear name — Known for perceivers each (not plethoras Of blank passivity !) beyond all doubt Even as I (ha ! might the changeless I Resolve all paradox, itself that knows Continuously through the change of each Perception, feeling on interminably Beyond and through each moment, who can say .?), Yea, even as I — and proving thus my life i6 HERACLITUS Impression'd of a world. — And some shall cheat Themselves, to doubt perception-reasoning And base truth in denial ! Yet, O world, Can any, sane, deny truth were of thee ? 17 ^SCHYLUS They murmur, then, that I (as they demur) Unmask the Mysteries, declare to men Matters beyond the scope of tragedy, From speech taboo'd, perchance precluded from Mere human understanding ? Let them rail ! What garland could be grander on the brows Of victory than this protestation ? Who Might flatter to the clouds this poetry. As he who calls my name, forsooth, accursed For blasphemy, revealing sacred things ? So much for them, the mob, who only praise When most denouncing. Them I thank with scorn. Them, too, I thank that they have subtlier still Suggested to imagination much Toward some yet greater work than they deplore ! Some vision of a gnarl'd protagonist (As some bolt-stricken oak in Tempe's vale) Prometheus-like, snatching from Zeus for men The swift fire-secret, and for punishment (Even as the oak by disembowelling) Suffering vast maltreatment, though at soul i8 >ESCHYLUS But more confirmed in mighty righteousness By each injustice. Only let the mob Threat but my life on Areopagos, Torment me round with clamor — that my heart Be wrath-inflamed to rigor — and I Ml make The master-piece : the Master-Hero Bound Defiant and triumphant : Gods and all Belittled by the unswerved suffering Man — The suffering Man unswerved, the soul at last Of tragedy and heart of holiest song Triumphant by distress over all Gods ! The master-music : though the veil be rent ; And high Olympos, mere earth-mount at last, Cast down Zeus' throne before the feet of men, Doff every vestige of eternal snow — And flower with thyme and honey ; to the taste Of every soul a liberation, though Come sorrow with responsibility, Come suffering with the fresh awakening : The pain of parting from the father-care Of God Olympian, seen at last in truth A tyranny and nobly cast aside ! Such my Prometheus. — Let them rail at that (Come Dionysia-season) an they will I 19 POEMS OF PERSONALITY For me an inspiration ; and for them Boar-baiting, bull-bewildering as with goads ; Prometheus shall be : man exposing all (The sacredest, most holily taboo'd, The most mysterious) to the sight of man And men's instruction ; that an holier truth (That secret of the breast Promethean, The doom of Zeus for all his tyranny !) Rise from the ashes and establish us In sacredness if not in mystery. In consecration and an open heart. And yet — might any Order be not Zeus, He of the Law ? Is there a law beyond Law's full impersonation ? And if such There seem (those Moirai, dread Eumenides Of myth), swells not the name and thought call'd Zeus To fill the perfected requirement ? Might I, save for some Areopagos Protective from the momentary spite Of mobs impulsive, with impunity Assail the old-time myth-authorities ; Save, as I say, for force conservative. The middle-source of justice, tyrant still 20 >ESCHYLUS Over the reckless demos-novelty ? Shall I be wrath demotic tearing down All institution, when but Institute Alone gives warrant of free thought and speech ? Prometheus hath taken indeed a shape Such as my wrathful mood against the mob Of archaists impell'd, such as my right To mouth deep-searching and wild-winged words Demanded in assertion ; but shall mine Half-misconception bide as Titan bound, Binding mine art, cramping mine utterance still To mere defiance and self-petulance Protestive, when to act constructively, Upbuilding and establishing, were best ; And best were to abide with justice yet Staunch partisan of Zeus, who, though he grow A greater Zeus, were Areopagite Still, an establish'd custom from the first ? It is because I did accept the myth Erroneously indicating Zeus For interloper that I failed to feel Futurity for his ; but now I see The Zeus-succession but the Chronos-rule From first, the Zeus-anticipation in 21 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The old pre-Titan forcefulness. And thus Be there some reconciliation found At last, some yielding of rigidity (Even as the oak, shear 'd of the lightning-blast, May skyward rear anew some crown of green And the blue shine down and be but heaven the more!) ; Some Zeus-approximation of the man Roused to a wider-eyed austerity Of ripe world-insight recognizing doom For just and pardon in humility ; Some earth-approximation of the God, Humaner by the conquest ! That my tongue Shall sing the man's unbinding and his end In stalwart service 'neath authority As interceder for the human race : The Fire-Bearer, Master-Foresight Freed — Whose cult obtains throughout our Attika. And thus shall this my trilogy enhance The potence of that wise authority Over Athenai exercised by them On whose defence I must at last rely For privilege to speak whilst speak I must ! Thus shall the Gods not unassisted sway 22 iCSCHYLUS Athenai's destinies, but by my song Of songs renew authority outworn Over the demos ; and these archaists, Wholly unjustified of blasphemy, Yet win by will of mine and with me stand Leaders conservative to teach themselves How truest reverence springs in freest thought, In freest speech anent the truths of earth ; The clear conviction (not the skeptic rant) Found in most-revelation — trusting Zeus To test of any searching, any proof ; Nor veird in jugglery of dark taboo. — *T is thus that I reveal the Mysteries, Unmasking with my mask the sacred things ! 23 PARMENIDES Although mine Elea be a little town Unlike Athenai, yet the wide world all Is nowise larger than her atomy — Not even Athenai, like although unlike : This strange vast city whereto mine old-age Hath come to wonder at her ways of men. For, were aught other than another thing (Or seas or men or cities equally), Were then nonentity between their bounds *Soe'er approximate though they might be. And therefore in no rational intent Can there be here Athenai, there afar Elea, though the journey 1 have made — Ah I dogma blessed to the wanderer For whom an Elea, though a little town. Is birthplace; home-beloved, being an hearth ! In sooth, Athenai is but still a town, Yet of herself, so far as she hath truth Of any being, is she as the world : And I yet in that Elea, though I came O'er leagues of purple ocean to be here, 24 PARMENIDES And there no longer. Thus indeed I fail Defeat the law of reason. In my heart All is as Elea though I dwell not there, Though if in space and time I seem at least Here present. Elea was a little town ; Yet in herself teacheth the truth of things ! How then explain the semblance that I came Even from Elea to arrive at last After such leagues of laboring overseas In strange Athenai ? How indoctrinate This contrast, to the clarity of truth ? How reconcile this lorn nostalgia Of him the old man wandering, lonelily (I laughed at it in new-come colonists !), Lost from his Elea toward yon agora ; If that the Elea straining at his heart Be proof that neither time nor space hath truth. But all is still but Elea and the years Of youth and wisdom and the praise of men ? Perchance, indeed, that unity I preach Were this of yearning, unforgetfulness. Presence in very absence, if by pain And loss in separation very real ? 25 POEMS OF PERSONALITY And how acknowledge, how construct anew, Such scheme of unity noetical In face of opposition and defeat ? For here what waits me ? That shrewd Sokrates Whom no man can withstand, whose ruthless test (So I have heard from friends who urge me to it) Is soul-examination (as I now Examine self perforce !) — he waits for me Even in that agora to try my truth By his new method (so unlike mine own Before this hour), to examine me (Himself a young man ; beautiful, no doubt, As every god-like intellect implies), Alas — and find nostalgia writ large Upon my spirit contradicting clean The world's illusiveness to men of reason, Elea's unity with all things here ! — How have I erst been wont to reason with Some skeptical disciple ; how, denounce The counter-dogma of the Ephesian sage ? Let me rehearse, and reassure myself Therewith, the folly of the counter-creed Which Herakleitos foisted on the world. The craze of contradiction ! — How become 26 PARMENIDES (How not- be in the moment that we seem ?) When truth is, and is-not 's nonentity ? — Ay, so oft-time the formula hath served Whilst all was at the acme and the world Was yet in fact but Elea unto me ; And nought was known, save as by vague report, Of league-on-league of weltering, or the sense Of oceans intervening, or the sight Of strangers cold-contain'd and arrogant. Indifferent to Elea as to aught Beyond their agora : themselves at home As I in Elea ; their unity With me, worst mockery ! Did Ephesos Vomit her sage, a corpse, upon these streets To gibber of death-throes and the charnel-house (Dread proofs of scarce-illusive alterance !), I were not more unnerved, shaken at soul, To meet with Sokrates and speak with him. I should have wiped away the universe Consistently with qualities of sense, To wean me of this Elea inwardly. Before I undertook to cross the seas ! And is not Elea quality of sense ? 27 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Yet how maintain the doctrine, when at heart By this new method, self-examining, Which omen-like forewarneth me of him — Gnaweth a contradiction worse than death Which will not as a ghost be laid away, But as a Fury feasts upon my frame ! How can illusion warrant me these throes Of yearning homewardly, whilst nevermore Perchance shall any save the inward eye Behold that Elea, town where I was born : Which is not as Athenai ? — Ah, here comes (With Zenon, my disciple, urging on) A lout so ugly that I laugh at him — Not Sokrates, surely ! I had never dream'd A visitant so ludicrous. — Ah, well ! If there be any truth of Unity, No Reason can be in a shape so crude, So unlike Zenon or Parmenides, So utterly unlike the wisdom-form Of gracious balance, proud benignity ! None in mine Elea are so dull as this one. Doubtless. Our Elea shall have victory ! 28 PHIDIAS The Gods are working with me as I work ; I, Pheidias, sculptor ; helpmate of the man Perikles : maker of the homes of Gods, These temples ; sponsor to the homes of men, This town Athenai and Akropolis. The Gods are working with me here on high In air above Athenai, where the fane Of Parthenon already rears around The Form chryselephantine. Round the Form Athena : virgin matron, patroness Of the City-State, preceptress of the mind Of man: concentres all the orb of earth, From Babylon to Aithiopia, Cold Chersonesos or the Hesperides. And very near around me and this Form (Hid from my workshop only by these walls Of Parthenon, and unto memory clear) Lie glittering Ilissos, Lykabettos Where Phoibos riseth in this summer-time, And broad Hymettos with its dusky green. And, closer yet (though whither wearying sun Sinks to his rest), springs Areopagos 29 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Where weighty words still sway the destinies Of life and death in matters of our State. And yonder (through these walls I picture them Sun-sparkling) lie Phaleron and the port Peiraieus; and, though further westwardly, The way Eleusis-ward (mysterious site, Emblem of piety) along the plain Between the hills and 'mid the almond-groves. The world of human power or sacred hope Alike concentres with me and this Form. Mine art embodies in the name of earth (Material, practical, political : As reverent) all that wisdom which, without Athena for demonstrance, were as breath Too subtle for the senses, unlike earth And therefore nought for men material. Void as a chaos for our politic. — There are who doubt them even of the Gods, Holding the final truth mere fire or air. Some few the hypercritical deny Athena ; and deserve the poison-cup For State-corruption and seditioning. And yet no poison-cup would still them quite, No punishment which breeds a sympathy 30 PHIDIAS Eradicate the sacrilegious rant ; Only the clear conviction of mine art As fundamental pedagogic fact Embodying Godhood, giving unto men Proof positive (practical, political : As reverent) of a true divinity Beyond all myth and legend. Let the myth Elude belief — no piety need fear To fall with that ! 1 turn and men shall turn Unto Athena sculptured by my hand Here in her temple on Akropolis — And must believe. I work with my mere hand As the man Perikles commanded me To help to rear Athenai, fit abode For Gods or men. But, whilst my chisel plies And flakes of ivory plate leap in the light, I know the Gods are Gods by virtue of This beauty of chryselephantine Form. — The Gods are working with me as I work. — Completed ! — Truth perfected ; no stroke more To make ? — Hand wearies and the chisel falls In a moment cold and dull'd. And all were as The Gods were not; Athena were a doubt; 31 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Athenai some ephemera ; and myself, 'Spoird of my body's power, suddenly Widely awaked in mind, as skeptic too ! I, for the nonce as the young Sokrates ; Strangely akin in new bewilderment To Anaxagoras who makes of thought The Gods' thin effigy in place of stone ; Parmenides and their unholy rout Who work no beauty, but disturb our faith With pleading, counter-pleading of the case Man had no right to enter against Gods — Even though brought on Areopagos ! — Against the Gods who only ask of men Belief and piety and workfulness Unto the archetypal truth of Form Which cannot be of fire or thought or air ! Alas ! I suddenly, as Sokrates, As any Eleatic anciently (All alike, whatsoe'er the teaching, false To any illustration outwardly Of presence and proportion, ay, to art) Question the clear conviction ; from my hand Let fall with the cold tool my piety, My loyalty to him, that Perikles ; 32 PHIDIAS My serviceableness to City-State ! — Serve I the State so truly then who carve The solid semblance to persuade the world Unto belief I fear may be but myth, Myth only, and no universal truth ? The chisel falls from the fingers ; cold and dull'd It lies in the silvery flakes ; and with it lies My spirit, vacant of divinity. The Form still stands a form material, Material only, meaningless anent Truth archetypal. I have rear'd above Athenai but some domicile of power To tyrannize upon the souls of men ; Some image born of force, projected of Mine overweening blind credulity — Ignorant of the nature of myself — And Perikles' persuasion. Tyrants must Conserve the Gods unto their own support ; Delude the demos to mistake mere form. The physical body, for what lies beyond Physics : the fiction of the judging mind (The mind, which ne'er were perfect nor complete, But hath its being by some form-of-growth And therefore cannot finish and lose faith 33 POEMS OF PERSONALITY As now I fail of heart in finishing !), Which weighs my sculpture unto aimlessness. Denies it purpose and excuse to be Save as it serve at worst some archetype Of purpose formative not in the Form. And any purpose, if the Gods but fall, Condemns my huge Athena either way. — I doubt me if there be in truth a God ! It is in truth as one or two have said, Endanger'd for their wise temerity ! 'T is true the mind is verily a form Quite unlike matter (leaving matter nought But inchoate formlessness — as now I sense This Anaxagoras!) ; and the over-mind. The formal mind of all, hath in it nought Of frame material, but breath alone. Fire or feeling, as the doctrine goes ! What then am I with this Athena's frame ? A child, a plaything of this Perikles, A prostitute to plans political, A maker of impostures ! If as men Our bodies be but clogs upon the soul. But prisons of the spirit, as rumor saith, Is there an art at all still worthy of 34 PHIDIAS A man's endeavor ; when his every hope Should be to rid his aspiration from The deadweight of the tenement of clay ? (The Eleusinians give some hint of this.) The poets may be mightier than I With all the crimes of their impieties ; And but because they sing earth incomplete, Life tragic and imperfect : Aischylos Or Sophokles alike leaving a world Which, beautiful but in-the-making, stands Fit to be ever new, though Godlessly. Philosophers may soon be born of men Who, surer than the surest yet of them, Shall yield irrefragable logic-form To doctrines of their immaterial Formative verity — and leave me here, Me and my works with wreck of all the Gods, An outgrown childhood, plaything thrown aside Even with Athenai and Akropolis While the world centres in some other sphere. — The Gods are perfect, fmish'd — with my work! The Gods with me are weary, as I lie ! Ah ! but the Form chryselephantine — see, 35 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Yon line unbeautiful : not modell'd quite Unto the archetype I feel in me (Unfinishable, imperfectible !), The searching wisdom of the frame divine, Itself at growth within me as I breathe And move and have my being of its power, Demanding imitation in the clay Interminably to its modelling : Which thus alone is anywise transfused. One hour's brief laboring will set that right (As near as man may e'er achieve an end Which groweth in itself unendingly) Eternally as no man than myself (Not Polykleitos, he the strong and new). Labor he ne'er so many, many days, Might ever hope to render it correct ! — What were the barren breath-mentality. The truth of air or fire, were not we men Of frame material and with our hands Laborers to embody the divine, If only point by point interminably, In archetypal and enduring fact ? We are the children of the Gods indeed ; Our works are playthings of divinity ; 36 PHIDIAS Perikles, sponsor to Olympos here ; And I by inspiration fitted toward This rectification of humanity. The beauty of the body : it is man's truth, Whereunto each high thought, though thin as air, Nurtureth and approximates the frame Of every man of men in some degree. What though the beauty grow elusivewise Beyond our labor, even with each high thought That stimulates the sense to self-defeat ? We can still labor, winning truth in work So long as work is to us. — Whence I feel I have won beauty by this victory now Over impiety ; can grasp this tool Anew to more assured dexterity Toward absolute proportion and design. The work were finish 'd never, though we fail And cease. The hope eternal is through all : Wisdom, the maid Athena, matron o'er The glittering city on Akropolis. The Gods leap with me to my feet afresh, Stoop as I stoop, and grasp the keen-edged tool ! 37 EURIPIDES We are but human, and the human fume Of crime and passion reeks within the brain Pathetic, tragic, beautiful by proof Indeed of incompleteness and the need Of ' Gods ' and * Law ' to make intelligent The stultification. We indeed are men ; But by our partial manhood must imply An over-humanhood, a * God ' o'er all. And therefore doth the Godhood through our griefs Gleam forth and render radiant the scene Of daily anguish and the agony Of incompletion to these minds and hearts That feel a oneness deeper than the dreams Of love, a wider heritage than hate. Yet spend by doom our force in lust and wrath. But therefore are our passions and our shames Sources of noble wonder, of dismay, May be, but of an high tranquillity, Of speculation through infinitude. On, therefore ! be the tragedy infused With present limitation, let the theme Lift itself not beyond the ways and words 38 EURIPIDES Of poor humanity, that through those ways Be teaching subtler, surer than the mode Of dream archaic, than the dignity Of great discourse without the throb of blood, Yea, than this Sophokles' serenity (His, who 'd ascribe unto unmoral Gods The fiat that absolves mere man from blame!), Scornful of sin, ignorant of remorse : Remorse, self-blight of insufficiency ! — Medeia ! be thou mad amongst thine own, Slayer of thy self-seed in blind despair To spite world's huge injustice : that all men May shrink and shudder, take the truth to soul. And so learn of themselves, achieve the law Of self-distrust and be, beyond all Gods (The Gods, but men impractical, inane !), Efficient by the moderation ; through The rule of self-restraint, all-powerful ! Another (in this hesitation now), Another than myself (this Sophokles ?) Had fallen on recantation, writ the Fates Large over this Medeian manuscript ; And lost the tragic conscience out of all. 39 POEMS OF PERSONALITY He had implied some vast ship-enginery Whereof my murderess was but some beam, Some wavering mast, at most some straining cord Unwitting of the wallow and the gale That drave her, her the blameless ministrant Of powers beyond the ken of human soul ; And thus had saved her through self-ignorance And allegation of a truth-unknown : Strange contradiction ! Stranger paradox Yet, that I, by admission of her guilt Self-known and self-compell'd, have given to man Self-mastery by failure self-imposed ; Omniscience by denial of a law Beyond ourselves : as we are source of law In high internal conflict ; in ourselves Peace-recompensed by loss of our peace all ! — It is a truth new-earn'd : as this my soul Is new and earns (as all this Age must earn !) A fresh-form'd understanding. Here we stand, Athenai fronted by the worst of wars. Which unto any man sane and aware Must spell in the end disaster : haply then The ruin of our great god-founded State. And what shall then remain unless the soul 40 EURIPIDES Be its own theatre, and the choral ode Of deep endurance *neath the ruin'd rule Of a world undone rise as the paean now Sounds in the stillness of an Attic sky Above the breathing of the hearkening throng ? For I foresee the ruin of this world Of Perikles and proud Aspasia At hands of Lakedaimons, Dorian clods Who only by their heritage of tune (Longtime transferr'd unto our choristers) Are better than the brutes or have in them The sweet self-gratulation of an art. But therefore stand we all confronted now With opportunity : to base our hope, Not in the unknown God-imaginings Which with Athenai ruin finally But, in the self-known ruin wherethrough we too, Though slaughtering these children of our brain And heart and soul, though casting unto dogs These gems of tragic purport, yet shall offer Ourselves unto the world forever proven Of purport tragic though the Gods are nought. And thus I face the future cataclysm With my Medeia warning all mankind — 41 POEMS OF PERSONALITY These people of Athenai who must wake To find the Fates within us and our theme Of beauty born anew with every man Or high or low who knows within himself The ordered conflict conscientiously. This we must know who soon must slay with hands Our offspring : else shall we be, Spartan-like, Lost to ourselves forever, with the fall Of Gods and heroes as the Long Walls fall. 1 prophesy ; and seek to leave with life Example of the strength within the soul. Which, though it yield to savage hate, inspires The truth with self-nobility, and lives ! — Enough for life, though it inflict a death Ennobling in itself the shame and sin ; Enough for this Athenai which with throes Shall fall and fling to ruin Tragedy : Athenai, beautiful if only fill'd With passion of self-knowledge whilst it slays. What, too, of death, if Attika must die Even as Alkestis, yielding all herself : That world, the wider if less worthy State, 42 EURIPIDES May linger past the life or death of these ? What was Alkestis when I wrote of her ? A something new unto the sight of man ? A fond return to life forevermore By virtue of the death vicarious ? And shall some wrestling with the spirit of death, Some soul-of-perishing that saves all things, Renew for all-time this Athenai too, If perishing but with the conscious wish That world shall pass to some more-worthiness Over, beyond anything She hath known ? I pause before the threshold of the thought — I, herald of new eras unto men Of pure self-knowledge though Medeia slay And death ensue unto the very soul ; Of knowledge purified and endless life By virtue of Alkestis, the new thought Of self-devotion unto death achieving. Not by some Fate but ever beyond Fate, — Identifying wisdom with the selfhood Of all things known though these be not of self — A victory o'er death and endless life. Euripides hath enter'd on the stage, 43 POEMS OF PERSONALITY And, though he pass, shall leave the tragic world Not as before, but human holily ; More faith-felt by avoidance of all creed ; And thus involving Godliness through all. 44 SOCRATES Whether it be the voice oracular, Possession demoniacal ; or no ? Whether the prompting force infallible Be inspiration ? — Let me meet myself Abroad as in some spirit-agora, Stand face to face with me, greet me and pause Self-disputatious ; holding dialogue Silent, alone within the mind of me To clear the question of equivocacy ; Determining, defining mine own terms The trulier to understand the point, This question of divinity in me. The source of insight and intelligence Where reason fails. Ay, let me reason of it As with those casual acquaintances Or pupils, forcing freely from my soul Her premises, her preassumptive truths Wherewith, by interplay of stimuli In logic dialectical, to prove Some ultimate position tenable 45 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Anent the deity within the man : Whether mine ignorance be sibylline ! The power of reason and its limit in me ? Man holds opinion, goes abroad to meet His fellow, finds within the counter-man Counter-opinion ; sets to reason with him (As I with me myself in singleness) Each against each ; and reaches at the last Some third opinion, fruit of all that toil. Grant me, the third opinion is the best, Compounded of the two now both disproved (Light born of darkness, truth of two untruths — Small satisfaction !), and that at the last Both disputants maintain it, each in sort, Though haply with no final sympathy. Part then these two, and go their different ways Out through our agora. Each meets anew Some disputant and sets to reason with him. Then from the three fresh-provable untruths Arise two truths, not in themselves alike, Being compounded of three lies distinct In various combination, which go forth Into the world, forever losing truth 46 SOCRATES By fresh compounding, never to the end Wholly alike (nay, unlike more and more ?), Yet each true to the soul that sweareth it. And all (as many as there may be men ? ) Of equal-seeming self-authority ! So to our reasoning is never rest ; So to our truth come echoes of untruth, Reverberations from the primal theme As many as we meet and teach of men. And therefore in the soul as many dreams Of half-truth as there may be voices in us Of man or god testing, protesting, doubting. Questioning, reasoning of our premisings ; Ev'n as I test in skeptic singleness The virtue of our reason-faculty. Thus test the premise of our power to reason - Conceivable but as the power of speech Within to bandy half-truth with the tongue Of men or gods. Can such an instrument Of untruth and of inconclusiveness Determine in my soul's-own dialogue The postulate of man or god within me (Whose voice hath seem'd so demoniacal) To supplement the range of this same reason 47 POEMS OF PERSONALITY And yield authority where reason hath none ? A clear conception of the difficulty (Won in the bandying of words within Self-antinomial, interpreting Each to itself by alteration through The contact self-conceptual), the problem — The reasoner to say within his soul : By right of reason (bandyings of untruth Through thousand half-truths !) I pronounce him true Or false (him god or man) who speaks beyond All logic and all insight reasonable ! Yet are we men ; or true or false, half-gods In truth-assurance ! And as man-god I find Mine ignorance self-sibylline, self-taught ; With, in a sort, some sure authority Where reason fails. Some tongue divine there is (Apollon, Zeus, Athena, what care I ?) That leadeth in this dialogue, outweighs The skeptic inference of nescience And asks reconstitution from the first Of logic-method and false-premising. For of the reason reason's way hath proved Equivocacy — by what analogue, 48 SOCRATES What test demonstrable, unequivocal (Apart from reason !), were the reason all ? And thus, at first thought, must the reason-way Be self-annihilating, worse than void Because delusively aspiring to Authoritatively deny itself — Bewilderment, to reason contrary ! But the god-man in us will never yield The right to question and determine for us Immediate false-and-true, even if beyond Each tentative decision opens wide New vista of truth-possibility Which relegates as unbelieved untruth The narrower first conclusion. Still the process Of searching constitutes authority ; The purpose must assume to guide the mind With motive final, though each stage by stage Within the dialectic alter yet All minute definition of our aim With shift of standpoint — as my pacing feet Here in my courtyard change the shifting sight Through door and portico of shuffling crowds ; Yet ever bear me back and forth within The parallels of some soul-perfecting 49 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Itself as felt self-fix'd, unalterable, And lending logic to the swarming scene Else without purport, aimless soullessly. Therefore a new conception of the soul Springs of itself : a self-authority Within the reason, self-condemnatory Indeed (if those old premises, proved false, Were still maintain'd as standpoint of debate), But by the inward dialogue self-proved Final, demonic, in best sense divine. For see, friend (may I call my scholar-self. That leads me whilst he seems to follow still, Friend whilst the talk flows on and knowledge comes With personal sympathy in this self-soul ?), For see how every man within himself Stands — not a mere untried equivocal Opinion isolate from aught of truth. Else in the flux of a void of skepticism ; But — each within himself as dialogue, Protagonist and chorus of the truth. Himself the truth, himself the tragedy That fmds full definition but in death Of one, in sympathetic passing o'er To new scenes through the theatre of the world — 50 SOCRATES New selfhood — of the many to spread truth Fresh-learn 'd by witness of lost falsity : The tragic meaning ! See how every growth Proves but self-definition (in itself, The continuity each concept lacks Beyond the moment's premising), soe'er Corrected, still identical as no Twice-held opinion ! Therefore growth itself, By virtue of conclusive questioning, Proved the all-saving truth ! T is thus I learn Self-taught to solve the dim antinomy As never in mere dialogue with men Might the truth give and take to true effect. For see how closer to the truth I stand Who talk within me, who in hearkening And counter-talk take instant sympathy (That exercise of very voice divine) Which no man with his neighbor feeleth so Whole and all-grasping as when soul with self Commune and mutually win the way Of comprehension ! Thus by this communing I feel the demon for the truth's own fact ; My inward sight (conclusive of the views 51 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Of both inquirers, by hypothesis), The perfect sanction and authority — And need none other : proving reason nought Of mere opinion solely, but itself The process of opinion-alterance. The growth intelligent within the soul (True in degree as sympathy inheres Instead of isolation, comprehension In place of demarcation — as in me now !), That meets and talks with men and meets their views With counterview born of the gendering Of soul in soul, the insight sibylline. — Why forth into the agora, when truth Comes final and insistive thus within ? Why forth to processes of reasoning Imperfect, self-destructive ; when the way Of reason, method, logic I have learn 'd Alone within my house apart from men ? But might I not in converse yet explain them The loftier definition and so serve The cause of clear conception in the mind By leading men each to commune alone With self and so experience in self 52 SOCRATES (Not then ascribable to other minds Nor any mere opinion here or there) The truth-assurance, hear the voice divine ? For thus were I conclusive of mankind, The continuity of other men, Their growth, their self-persuasion, guarantee And warrant of authority as truth ; Outward, as inwardly, that very voice ! 53 SOPHOCLES NOTHING too much ! — My prosperous old-age Were proof sufficient of the paradigm. Nothing too much : gnomic of my career ! — Aischylos* wrath, Euripides' unrest (Each rival, he the loftier, earlier one Or he the versatile of nowadays). At odds with fortune ; ay, whilst I work on, At harmony with all things, heartily. Happily moulding beauty of this breath Of times antique, to-day's, to-morrow's truth Alike, in terms and tones accepted yet Of the old, old stories, tales heroical Dear to the Attic heart as to mine own. Aischylos knew the old nobility Indeed, and worthily did mouth of it A scene high-sounding ; but himself was moved Too deeply as by horror, felt of truth Some secret shame and somewhat blamed in men Their subtlest reverence, best piety Of faith, their fair assumption that the gods Are from reproach immune ; himself thereby — Through effort clearly to establish Zeus 54 SOPHOCLES Above mere blame, habilitate the truth — Betray'd into impiety perchance By strange portrayal of a Zeus impure Self -justified in tyranny. Howbeit, Was Aischylos at odds with Attic taste, Safest criterion of sanity ; Taste which demandeth no self-justifier For Zeus Olympian, but sees in him Embodiment of sanction ; all his deeds Themselves criterial of justice. So Was Aischylos at odds with earth and found Too much of meaning in the mighty myth For man to master and make art of it. And thus, forsooth, he fail'd. Euripides Is of another mould, but no less fails. For him, the too-much lieth in a zeal To reconstruct, make something new of truth, Plainly half-impious in denying much Men must believe, be there but gods at all ; A zeal too much to substitute for myth The lore of merely men, to feel and speak Men as they are, though unheroical And far too homely for our tragedy. His ways betray their failure, that they feel 55 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Scarce horror, scarce a shame, but sympathy For failure. E'en, his plays would seem to teach Not reverence for godhood nor for men Moderate and potent, but for men (unlike, Far too unlike mine own prosperity And harmony of competence !) themselves Similar in their unprosperity To him who made them not as heroes are. *T is thus with Aischylos, Euripides, And all who yield too much unto themselves. Unmoved I make men as they ought to be — Men failing alone by Fate, if fail they must (Crush 'd nor as by tyranny divine nor lost Of any seed of weakness in themselves) ; Heroic, high : and in myself reflect Lustre of ancient mythus all my days. Such as the marble works of Perikles Or perfect Pheidias is mine old-age. Serene, unmoved, at harmony with all Of good or ill, one with our Attic taste. Calm in Kolonos though the Long Walls fall, Which fate forefend unto our piety ! — Nothing too much. — And am I calm at heart 56 . SOPHOCLES Whilst tottereth Athenai, and the men Who made her glorious die day by day Before me, and the years of them are o'er Who should have been eternal ; when the times (Even in this interval of Spartan peace) Not as by Fate, but as by human fault, Fall from their leading and forget their name Who bless'd and still should bless with memory The place that once possess'd them ? Am I calm ? Might I write, all unmoved, of such as them ? Of gods-made-men, of men heroical Who labor'd and achieved, yet, by some flaw Of the human in them, suffer'd and are lost ? Were not the tragedy I might produce If moved by sympathy with former friends Something superior to the perfect piece ; Something which Aischylos, Euripides, Each may have sought if blindly, may have said Somewhat though I have miss'd ? This Aischylos, Portray 'd he not Zeus reconciled with men By understanding face to face, by speech, More potent even than a Fate unnamed ? This fervent, multiple Euripides, Sings he not somewhat as of man who works 57 POEMS OF PERSONALITY And partially prevails ? Did Perikles Perfect yon Propylaia, yet and fell (Ah ! like these human of Euripides !) Grief-stricken for a pestilence, dismay'd — Not as by Fate, but for our human fault — At the times* prospect ? Did not Pheidias (If not for tyranny, yet as for godhood, Ah ! Zeus-apologist of Aischylos !) Suffer dishonor from Athena's folk ? I have seen Perikles dismay'd in death And Pheidias dishonored : but myself (Nay, note the irony : myself the Fate !) Have never known a failure, not till now ! Scarce or in soul or skena have I fail'd — Till now by sympathy ? Though all men else, The princely Perikles or Pheidias My perfect peer alike (ah, irony !), Attempt some way too much, are broken by it I nowise ! Were my way indeed the best ? Or faileth not the gnoma where I fail By sympathy unwonted, proving so much Of meaning to our life that none should be Of golden mediocrity who live ? Was not I dead until this moment's mood 58 SOPHOCLES Of sympathy too much revivifying For calm of artistry within my soul The over-zeal, the over-weakness, yet The peerless manhood of my manhood's friends, Perikles, Pheidias (e'en Euripides?), Worthy of loftiest poetry and pose Upon our skena as I know to-day ? Combine the Zeus-defensive with the man Weltering in self-felt weakness : and conceive The archetype of more-than-tragedy. The ultimatum of our Attic taste ! — My way achieved the most : so men must say — And self-peace with the accomplishment, 't was true — Behold my three-score tragedies, supreme In men's opinion over all plays else. Perchance ? But at this moment all are nought, All, to begin anew still unbegun. And I first competent by this too-much Which now hath hold on me and shakes my soul With wrath and unrest for the failure of Perfection, for the perfecting by death (Or failure's self ?) of work still useless else, For all its mere achievement. To my soul Or unto Attika, alone hath worth 59 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The wonder of men's suffering, the gods* Self-justification through a tyranny None the less hateful that it richeth life To beauty by the very pity of it ! T is this my pity for that Perikles, Mine agony for Athenai, that is more Than any self-success : 't is that alone Which makes of tragedy the art of truth And nature above nature (life of mine, By feeling as by insight life of theirs ! ) ; Which makes me great as Aischylos was great And this Euripides beyond us both : Me great, if only great by Oidipous The Sufferer who serveth Attika By suffering still our hospitality ! Me, moved in Kolonos by mine Oidipous, Who by too much of failure proves at end A best possession of our Attika, A blessing and beneficence of Zeus Through all our days, maugre the curse and sin Of human ignorance and gods' despite ! — Ah ! if through failure hitherto by too-much Of artistry, too-little poethood 60 SOPHOCLES In me (too-much perfecting ; not enough Creation !), yet some day my sweet Kolonos May feel bless'd in possession of my bones And honor me with sacrifice perchance For honoring in rhyme this Oidipous Most pitiably human of all men Though unheroical ; may honor me For the true poethood, for tragedy Above, beyond the golden media, Teeming with sympathies as now my soul (Not as by Fate,, but for her human fault — As I, being I, must know no Fate for mine !) Appropriates failure and in her old-age Becomes (as Aischylos', Euripides') Herself of tragic meaning, hence of man : Achieving more than some prosperity Of senile competence : me, Sophokles, Somewhat as Oidipous, a truth at last. Some gnoma in my person and a force To guide, make grow, not pander Attic taste ; Me, moved in Kolonos by the pity of it ! 6i PLATO The blue sky overarcheth with a sense Of space illimitable, self-sustain 'd. — The blue waves fling awide in the breeze ; sea-birds Wheel, hover, dart in the foam with plunge and scream Unfetter 'd ; and the wings of this swift ship Aiginaward from Syrakousai press Before this west wind as with inward will And purpose : every sight and sound informed With life-insistence. Yet of me my mind Alone is free, this body but a slave By tyranny's command ; and in a slave Must my mind evermore be buried as In some self-sheol ; taking blow by blow The temper of obedience, the tone Of sequence and subservience ; to be As shadow only of the mind of man, c As tyrant's sycophant ! How far opposed Unto my present temper and that tone Of proud reliance and a high disdain Which brought my downfall : even thus my mind Sold into slavery as some prisoner By power of circumstance ; that circumstance 62 PLATO Its bondage to the body ! For all things Are sycophant, subservient sequently To matter's tyranny, the base command Of physical passivity ; and seem Free but by mind's illusion, active but By figure of the fancy. Lo ! these masts Are bended of a blast inanimate And would not, haply, though indeed they must Aiginaward bear on ; and so the sea Bursts beneath burden of this bustling breeze ; The birds by hard desire of food or lust To procreate their kind are driven fro And yon pursuing and pursued, not one All self-impulsive, but directed all Toward outward circumstance ; the sacred sky Doubtless were but some element ; as these Compell'd — to silence and a stagnancy ? Shall I, the slave of Dionysios' sneer, Decay to silence and a stagnancy ? The mind hath seem'd creator of all things. Divine by emanation of all truth Therefrom — impress'd not as from truth-without Nowise subservient (witness Sokrates 63 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Sublime in dying!). Yet this slightest change Of the body's state from freeman unto slave, This incident of Dionysios' frown, Shall this corrupt the essence of Idea ? (Was Sokrates to such a death compell'd ? ) How slight an alteration ; when from birth Hath body, like the billows or these birds. Been driven — whether as by outer force Or inward want, what heed ? — through all its days A creature of necessity compell'd : And therewith even the Reason housed therein. How slight a change, how insignificant, From free to slave, if body aye be slave ! Have I, one hour, been freeman and not slave ? Is any man then free ? Freeman or slave, Can slavery alter then one whit the state Of Reason (bar that truth of Sokrates The Savior)? For if man is never free. Then slavery, being best knowledge of himself. But aids toward freedom. And, if not slave-born In virtue of our body-prisonment. Then Reason lifts beyond all circumstance Compulsive, whether sold a slave or no. (And either way is Sokrates proved free 64 PLATO As he devoted body unto death ! And either way is custody of body — 'Soe'er custodian of soul — no curse ! ) — I have been somewhat free beyond most men, Somewhat more reasoning and therefore moved Of high philosophy to seek abroad The springs of wisdom in the ways of men. By Neilos, in Kyrene have I sought ; Elea ; and schools of the Pythagoreans ; Completing the best circuit of men's dreams To blend in them I had at Megara With keen Eukleides since Athenai-time. Might I return, within as outwardwise A bondman ? Or shall this last voyaging Aiginaward achieve what I have sought : An insight and a system of the truth ? Behold ! from those sweet lips of Sokrates I first received the love of lofty thought — Him, who in all mine earnest dialogues Enacts protagonist 'mid many men ; Him, symbol of all rationality ! To him be mine obeisance ! Though the soul Seek sight original, his sight leads on ! 65 POEMS OF PERSONALITY For from his doctrine thus much I imbibed : The primacy of Reason ; how no truth Is truth but by the mind's conception of it, By definition common to its class And therefore self-sufficed, immutable, Free and eternal, not as one of these. His the new gnoma : * Learn of soul, not world * Despite the physicists. From him the faith : Of freedom in the realm of pure Idea. And yet, these elder Eleatic schools Who look for freedom in some Unity And find in Wholeness physical their Law ! Or they who, Herakleitos-like, have found Sanction and satisfaction in the theme Of flux and passing on the face of things ! Found they not somewhat meet unto the mind. Somewhat of permanence, self-equity. In outward world despite the paradox ? Methinks Pythagoras might yield a term, Some golden mean between the face of things That passeth and the 'stablishment of Law ? Number hath multiplicity and still Permanence, unity of character, A certain continence of identity, 66 PLATO Through all mutation. With that thought to guide, Might not a way be found to reconcile The freedom and the slavery of man ? For in the man, as in the number-scheme, Are integrality (the freedom of him. Well-named the mind — the pride of Sokrates Unswervable) and multiplicity, This sequent reference to other things (That hemlock offer'd to the lips to drink !). In man are sameness, then, and otherness Strangely united — as, eclectical, 1 seek thus to unite Parmenides With him of Ephesos through terms of speech Best writ in the book I bought (but now have lost) Of Philolaos. Can the problem be So simple of solution : that some Soul Inheres between the heavens and the earth, 'Twixt mind and body reconciling them, Partaking of them both, yet nowise they ; Whose omnipresence and omnipotence Is mathematic. Number's very self ? A mighty bolt to unbar heaven and earth. Forsooth ; a business now beyond my brain 67 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Perturb'd by sense of slavehood's impotency, But mightily alluring should some chance Exchange this serfdom for the nobler life Of citizen and teacher in some court Or garden near to Akademos' grove. Ah, might I hope some outlook to return Homeward redeem 'd by bounty of a friend ! More like, to execution am I haled (A parody of Sokrates indeed ! ) Among the Aiginetans hostile to me By reason of their quarrel with our State ! Ah, me ! And yet some insight have I gain'd Haply of moment equal unto all That learning of the Schools : this sense that man Is still both slave and free, and that in world (The type of serfdom) as in very mind (Our type of freedom) equally inheres The dualism and blendeth with them both : The mind, by reason of its bodiment, Imbued with strange compulsion ; and the world, By reason of the primacy of mind. Passive beneath some freedom-of-its-own Inseparable, nowise not of it. And thus is Soul the very problem's self, 68 PLATO The mean and common term contain'd of both (Though both have nought in common, nought be- tween ! ) Matter and spirit, containing equally Both horns of world's dilemma : and thus a term Not separable nor abstracted from The conflict which defines it (Sokrates Involved in birth-and-dying ; life and death Explain'd through Sokrates !). — And thus were they Right, the old physiographers, to test The world all ways, that it might yield its truth E'en though material ; for in the earth Its constitution see we mirror- wise The problem of the heavens, the elements Which are contain'd of mind inversely shown (Flux, change for self ; peace for the space of things) To mind's interpretation. As was he Right, the great Sokrates, to prove of mind The truth direct : the peace of inward self. The roil but own'd of otherness perceived By sense without. Wherefore am I not wrong To seek in soul of the world some scheme that shall (As air is intermediate, proportion'd Harmonic 'twixt the heavens and the earth) 69 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Explain the contrast ; show how man is free (How Sokrates both lived and died, one Man) Though slave, how serfdom never may express The psychic habitancy of the spheres As my soul soars and is at peace with them Through all this turmoil's sad expectancy ! For, lo ! how were a freedom to be found In isolation, void of other men To meet in equal intercourse of mind With mind, each mind thus entering in and owning As self-like every fresh mentality Not as identical conceived, but known As other, mutually known, defined ? The way of loneliness were ever silence And stagnancy, not self-sufficiency To any purpose : serfdom, but world's type Inverted of such isolation ; I Fitly enslaved for seeking such a scheme Of vacant chaos as were mere Idea Hypostatized but not phenomenal. Identical but wholly undefined — Interminable ! How were World-Ideas 70 PLATO Aught wonderful or worthy, were not each Defined, scarce by some common character In concept (quite precluded to the lone Idea!) but, best, beyond identity. By contrast self-implied through all the world ? For otherwise were they but number merely ; As world, indifferently were one or nought; Subject to duplication, hence unreal, Because still undefined, positionless : But now are Number reconciling all Perplexity by implication each Of unity in multiplicity, Of integrality in otherness ; And world is not without, but is of mind. — Yon blue waves beat and burst because they must ; These masts bend, driven, to the piping gale And part the waters with a roar and rush Of proud prow-impulse ; and the white sea-birds Pursue and are pursued. But all because Yon blue sky soars not self-illimitable (Is not some element apart from these): Serene indeed, but standing upon earth Or ocean's wide-encircled founding-flood A thing of breath and air, of motion, spirit — 71 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Itself a spirit as all space is spirit Containing and contain'd ; not calculable, But valued as of truth : and is as they. I am a slave and enter into freedom By bondage — a slave — and have achieved a Soul ! 72 ARISTOTLE How can he teach who faileth to explain The method of our learning, how we come To know the unknown : an we truly learn ? How can he teach who cannot of himself Find organon, who groping for the Mind Loseth all grasp of soul's experience ? How can he yield experience to men ? Not recollection nor forgetfulness Might solve this paradox of Known-Unknown, This presence of an universal truth In truth not universal, of the God In self, the certainty in sensuous things As felt despite their doubt and falsity : This difficulty of the Master's creed Which he might name but never might remove By myth — metempsychosis and the dream Of anamnesis, fable which assumes Original possession, someway lost, Of truth whose gradual acquirement, Of godship whose contingent genesis (Alone the problem as the paradox !) 73 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Alone might be demonstrable. For what proof (E'en were the proof to problem pertinent!) Were plausible ? Where might the man begin His immemoriality save as (God being alone possess'd of truth as whole) The very Godhead ? And, if very God, Then must each consequent remove by birth (Each strange escape of warrant ultimate From out the actual which alone Is !) Be some degeneration, without cause Or logic possible, compatible ; A flaw in the fibre of the Essence' Self, A foul decomposition as of death (A name, this death, perchance, for all this coil ?) Inherent, not to any mortal thing But, to the causal Origin of Life ! And thus of one hand must the Godhead prove Self-contradiction, incompatible With absolute establishment ; whilst yet Of the other hand the life of every man, Increasing hourly by experience In knowledge and in wisdom, contradicts The tendence of the Godhead (thus defined As stultification), and moreover thwarts 74 ARISTOTLE By mere inevitable cumulance Of certainty and insight through the years The natural teleology of things ; Runs counter to the soul's supremest goal ^Of perfect godship as the crown of life (For so this Platon's doctrine needs were crown 'd) Such godship (that of self-degenerance Inherent) shown beneath the dignity Of idiocy, a godship self-deceived And worse than worthless if deceiving Man ! The Master endeth in a Mystery : An universe at odds within itself ; A primal Cause of self-deintegrance — And he, by preassumed self-ignorance, shown Unfit to teach who knoweth not to learn ! — I well know otherwise ; I feel in me A worth of wisdom in experience, The value of this sense-accumulation. The dignity of life as it is learning And not forgetfulness, the insight gather'd Aspiring as to God ; and know the God A goal of aspiration ; if unmoved (Still unattainable), yet not at last Devolving and destroying, save as death 75 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Be parcel of developmental life, Wherethrough the individual achieves An impulse for the race and class of each Onward and Godward ! —How shall these truths be ? A motion and a Cause ; the creature moved And the Creator — if the phrase be so. An immanence of universalness Conative, self-recognizant in act, A system of accumulance impress'd As in a mould ; a force defining self Substantialwise ; a matter and a form. These, the essentials ; and the rest obtains. I touch and test the world of men and things, Finding one substance to the touch and test, An opposition, self -negation of All impulse, a passivity excluding (Particularity of judgment-mode) Its own mere part-displacement under stress, A space-impassive none the less compel I'd : For creature-moment ; and I call the thing Matter, as meaning elemental rest. The moved and dead-created, uncreate. Immobile in itself — nay, that which hath 76 ARISTOTLE As 't were no selfhood, is not in itself. I touch and test the world of self within, Finding a test, but not a substance here To touch : an action of appropriance (The generality of truth-adjudged), Hardly of opposition though containing All self-distinction, part within the part. This that I find I call the mind of me (Experiential ; never as in dream Disjunct from world, self-segregate from things ; But registrant and nowise self-innate) ; Made universal as the world of mind. The self-impressive, that which makes the test As register'd and testing registrates ; Which is creator of distinctiveness As though internal through the vague extern Of segregative substance, binding it To self-relationship and unity ; And thus is mould, or still more subtly Form, The final motive. Thus the riddle reads. Now, to the theme of world-development (Consonant with the growth of me by thought Or act-participation in affairs From day to day) must a new proof adhere 17 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Of tendency, self-teleology In mutualization of the duplex stuffs (Abstractly so defined as I 've defined them Each aspect severally); for these must still Constitute interplay ; and otherwise Were no duplexity but separate worlds Unthinkable, preposterous to proof. Therefore must be for further postulate The innate yearning of the primal vague Toward truth-distinctiveness as in a sort Appropriate thereto, a property (Degenerative of degenerance' self, Preclusive of inertia in the inert !) Even of passivity as actualized ; And on the counter hand the zeal of mind To transcend and sublate with proof of form (And thus achieve itself !) material fact : The term of mind actualized so and taken For mutual-matter's goal-finality. Likewise the inward latency of things Toward declaration — not as though some void Were gradual fill'd of substance less or more Compact-diffuse ; but as though form and substance Were self-processive, were by nature nought 78 ARISTOTLE Than mutuality, whose proof and sign Is Time, the passing of the days and years. Nor might a logic of analysis (Such as were practical to be put forth, On basis of the Platonism here, To counteract the Master's mere mistakes Of extra-worldliness, and yet to be Readily understanded of the schools), A classification of our genera And species, an epistemology Of type as perfect object (as I fear My doctrine will adumbrate, implicate As men will half-mistake it ! ) quite attain A method-organon of such a scheme Of cumulance and temporality. In mutualizing of each element By definition through all substance else. Substance unmutual were stuff of space, 'Tis true, demarcable and alterable Partitive-wise, abstract each part from part And strictly self-contain'd in every part Without a reference to aught extern — Such stuff were well demonstrable by rule Of contradiction and a common term 79 POEMS OF PERSONALITY For consubstantiation ; and indeed Were such a logic-system Platon's surely, Conformable to and explicable of The pure Idea. But such should not be my Doctrine of knowledge ; for my creed should be More adequate to a knowledge entering in As mind-term of the world-hypothesis Developmental, cumulant — whereof, Despite all ignorance, might no term be Itself unknown in present actualness ; Such membership in knowledge rightly achieved, Not by community with outer fact (Mergence impossible) but, by reference To somewhat (selfhood with the object of it) Both gone before and coming after ; each term Itself present in time but nowise one With what it cannot be, the yesterday Nor the to-morrow ; but each day of days Defining and referring in itself To all-time ; thus eternal ; thus self-known By self-distinctiveness ; thus generalized. Self-absolute as every Truth must be ! And thus alone were knowledge possible As universal in the temporal scheme ; 80 ARISTOTLE And thus alone were logic actual Because contain 'd of cumulative life Processive, self-achieving as toward God ! 'T were plausible! And note how opens out The field of travail to philosophy : No longer blind to every fact of earth With faith but focuss'd on the farthest stars, But finding in the daily strife o' the world The dear domain of absolute idea, Of form the truth-constructor, not beyond World wholly (for, were form beyond the world, Were form but shown inane and actionless In isolation of a pseudo-truth Call'd mathematic, number) but, itself The mind, self-comprehension of things all. So, to the field of travail ! that this earth Be catalogued ; and categorical Analysis — not sheerly part from part. But mutualwise with generality Specifical in contrast self -contain 'd Of each itself — declare of each the frame And genesis, its coming unto truth. — Granted that all shall pass and grow anew 8i POEMS OF PERSONALITY To stricter frame, more self-disposed to achieve Economy of action purposeful ; Granted that teleology propose Invention now undream'd : and therefore these Now extant modern instances of truth Wax obsolete : shall that deter one whit The wonder of the instant truth-survey, The sure investigation here and now Whereof each item of real genesis (Nowise explaining away the now-complex !) Shall postulate and indicate to men The doctrine of the vital latency, The potency of matter and the zeal Energic of the world-updrawing mind Godward developing through all her days ? The cause efficient as the genesis : And then beyond, beneath and still within, The God-cause final, the perfected Form So far as may be meant of mortal mind Working within these days and in these ways That man may work in as the world is young. And, young or old, some knowledge step by step Sure in the doctrine and the world-idea, The formative pure process and the proof 82 ARISTOTLE By teleology, the yearning-toward Inherent and insistent ! — At the worst 'Twere plausible, though still the rift remain And riddle of an universe at odds ! Though still the self-dilemma needs inhere : Of Learning in the stead of Ready-Known, Of genesis in place of plethora ! Though all be problem still, 't were plausible I Why trouble, then, further with the riddle of it. When at the worst my world is onwardly A self -correction, not a chaos-come ? My logic stands sufficient to the times. Their need to dis-god Platon and design An organon of high acquirement By truth transmissible, so teachable, Not block'd by body's bad forgetful ness, But plain appreciable as here and now Complete, didactically fmitive : Wanting but souls to seize it ! Oh, for some King-born disciple, one who might, by strength Of this world-knowledge, as he conquer'd earth, Rule well, self-cognizant of law and rule Within him as within the world he ruled ; Some pliant prince, receptive to the mould 83 POEMS OF PERSONALITY (Philippos* child, the Makedonian's, My father's patron's grandson, should be he ?) Of this my masterful impressive mind As matter to the Form — I unto him Master and God -cause final ; he to me The latency, the striving. That my labor Be not lost, but my name be known in him (No name of race nor class nor kind, but my name !), An universe of practice, though my theme Be theoretic and my deeds be nought. — The Master of these Akademos-groves Hath miss'd the meaning, is as one apart, For all his vast discipleship here shown. He is a truth, but weak within the world Because of isolation, disregard Of the body of the world, its genuine zeal Toward self-salvation and accumulance Of truth experiential in the form Impressible by men 'mongst other men. By mind 'mongst other minds projectible Each upon others pedagogically — And by such only. For were truth apart, A theme but of these Akademic groves. Then were no knowledge possible, unless 84 ARISTOTLE We dream 'd and have forgotten and at best May bitterly remember as we die The old lost Godhood self-deintegrant. But I, I grow by inward genesis Of truth in every instant ; and start forth A Teacher ; and shall teach unto some man (Whether or no Demosthenes denounce !) The secret of the governance of earth : And, unto ages, truth grown of my truth ! 85 ASOKA Behold these my decrees, on steles set Plain, in the portions of mine empire Triune, in North and East and West alike Proclaiming dominance of my true creed, The cult of Him the Buddha, Blessed One ! - How hold my diverse empire in hand As wholly mine and mighty, save by such Dominance of some spiritual truth Potent to seize upon men's many minds And so subdue them to subservience. Leaving my mind lifted on high alone Above their poor desires and feebler will ; My will and my desire alone of strength To overcome sedition, stamp all sign Of treason from beneath me, and be sure : Asoka, I, supreme, imperial ? Asoka, I, supreme, imperial. Founding my power on the Buddha's word ! What creed so clearly might consolidate Imperial power, as this of quietism. Some somnolent non-assertion of men's wills 86 ASOKA Against mine in the world, their hope at last For innermost non-essence, slow attained Through many lives of meekness more and more ? Through many lives of weakness : I alone Strong, unencumber'd of the creed imposed ! These priests of Brahma (whom I nowise hurt Now they are harmless !) had made sorry slaves With their pretensions to authority And spiritual power over men By ceremonial observances And sacrifices to propitiate A pandemonium of deities Conceived above all power imperial ! How had I wasted life in truckling to them. Cajoling, flattering ; and been weaken'd by it In every hour of my governing! How had I been their puppet, just a show Of kinghood : but for these few cataclysms Happily now performed upon their heads Which rid me of their menace. Whereupon In gratitude to Gautama, behold These steles of an universal peace Proclaiming quietism ; to all men Self-abnegation, and at last reward POEMS OF PERSONALITY (Scarcely by grace of any deity), For non-resistance, in a nothingness : Myself alone remaining as some god ; Asoka, I, supreme, imperial ! May I, the king, attain no Buddhahood ! What worthy system were there of a world Without some dominant superior To order and devise, plan and proclaim, Determining the Path, making the Law Unto the diverse disagreements of The dull and wrangling peoples ? What were well Were it not for the wisdom of some man Eminent, understanding, capable Even to compel obedience overtly And with authority overawe the heart And mind unto subservient content ? These priests of Brahma were a wiser folk Than any mendicant ; and e'en within This Order of the Law (in monastery As through novitiate), the Law prevails As Gautama devised it, and the Law Needs, both, and finds preceptors wise enough (Though by their vow not menacing to me !) 88 ASOKA To discipline, chastise, enforce, and seem Authoritative to the time and place. How doth this plain necessity for power And for obedience run through all our ways Of earth and men, preventing quietism Absolute, abrogating emptinesses Of will and purpose, proving each of us Incapable of nothingness, each man Imperial in a sort, someway supreme In the mere life-assertion every day Of breath and being. And the greatest man Is the most dominant ; the happiest He who proclaims and can enforce decrees On the recalcitrant. These Brahmin priests Were greater than their fellows ; that they fell Because a greater was among them, I — I, though low-born of caste, by strength of heart Brahmin indeed of Brahmins, greatest of them, Asoka, king, supreme, imperial ! Ah, but a greater was upon the earth : Gautama, the Enlightened, Blessed One, He whom I reverence, who without decree Or force of cataclysm, nor by aid 89 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Of any power material could compel All men to yield unto His purposes And be subservient unendingly ! Even Asoka, in defying Him Whocounsell'd uttermost humility, Hath bow'd unto His power and become His slave, Asoka who establisheth Himself supreme, imperial but by strength Of Buddha's Law within the kingly mind : Imperial disciple ! Would that I Knew but the secret of His prevalence, To rule without decree, command by strength Of prescience inborn ; and be, as He, Buddha ; in mine own person, as a creed ! go PAUL A MURMUR is of many men around Unfriendly (as at Thessalonica and Philippi) — God be unto me a shield And strength ; for I shall need Him when 1 stand High there on Areopagus. The Jews Hate, when they dare indulge their hearts to hate, Even with the hate of hounds and wolves (I, once, A Grecian Jew : twice venomized !) ; the Greeks Shriek shriller than the Jews, but at the worst Hate Jew worse than this Jesus of my word. (Perchance their hatred of myself as Jew Will melt in mockery when I come to speak Of truths un-Jewish and a novelty ? ) That thus will God help, guard, if not by peace And goodwill among men, at least by strife Of Greek 'gainst Hebrew, shielding Christ and me— A Roman citizen as they may know — Beyond the fear of harm. I less should fear Were mine affliction not upon mine eyes : That so I see not clearly, but as darkling Perceive these scowling faces in the throng So close about. But I will swell my thought 91 POEMS OF PERSONALITY With inward vision and beyond their frowns Draw wisdom with courage from the Source of both, Dispelling hesitancy. — I will mount Mars' Hill and speak unto the Stoics thence, The Epicureans and idolaters. Athens below me as I dimly climb, All Greece, a different nation, other minds Than Antioch, than Salamis, despite That Hellenism of the Syrian shores — For was not I a Jew though Hellenist ; Although Cilician, mystic at the heart ? These are not mystics at the heart (for all That altar to the Unknown God I spell'd Below in Agora !), but men of sense (For so, in the moment's need, their viewpoint seems More rational than formerly — than mine ? ) Desirous of an understanding mind. As I in private converse have discern 'd. Beyond mere superstition. — How to meet Need of the moment by the word of God ? How render unto Pericles (for much Of Athens' history I late have learn 'd. Her rulers and philosophers) in speech 92 PAUL The things of Pericles, when my truths be The things of God ? — And yet I feel that God Is logical — as Greece is logos-wise ; Is practical — as I am practical : Apostle laboring, accomplishing By argument unto the moment's need — I something of the demagogue at soul, Half-Alcibiades, Demosthenes, If also Plato at the core of me ! And therefore is no blasphemy at worst, But verily the best mere man may do (Whilst combating their soulless Aristotle, To waive that worth of Plato they would scorn) If God be made a purpose practical (The things of Pericles made God's thereby!) Unto the reason, practised argument And sophistry that fills this people here. No doubt a later age may find in him. The Stagirite, much inference of a Mind Somewhat omnipotent, creative, which Folk shall confuse with Him I 'd now proclaim. Doubtless the peaceful Platonism in me Of reservation beyond earthly strife. Of resurrection, what-not after death, 93 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Shall color as with a jargon of the schools My dogma of the God who, also Man, Concludeth all, yet scarce is very world : Himself a part of it whilst still the whole. Yet now I feel me toward the Stagirite Hostile who teacheth isolation, mind From mind, without a resolution through Any divinity inherent in us As we are men material here and now, Any communion as of charity Which maketh universals, each in each, By insight and by sympathy, not by Analysis of common characters As in the scheme abstractive taught of him. Plato were more my creed, in truth, save he, too. Suffer interpretation misconceived (As now these men of Athens would construe Amiss the mystery !) of God but name For generality abstract and lost In ether of the spheres, as are their gods — Leaving poor man alone and earth alone Disintegrant as in their Stoicism. Thus, in default of either of their wisest (Opposing Aristotle's soullessness 94 PAUL Of earth, and God beyond real earth or man ; Avoiding Plato's generality Of world-salvation through the archetype Beyond real reason ; though aifirming through Christ the creed's universal applicance), So must I make God very practical, Complaisant to the motive of their mind, Its pseudo-wisdom and its old despair ! What was their utmost wisdom ? * Know thyself ' ! And what the outcome of much earnest search Unguided of the Christ ? Just this at last : * The self is atom, item each alone, * Indifferently to the wider world ' Of other selves sustaining each its fate — * Body or spirit, Stoic either way ; * Epicurean severally, though soul — * Imposed by all-soul of the universe ' As from without. The names we give the gods * Are but a man's emotions clothed with false * Impersonation in the void of things.' There the scheme ends and fails; the gnosticism, The boasted system of these men of sense. Turns to the nature of that God Unknown 95 POEMS OF PERSONALITY (The atom, else the generality ; Zero or void — who can determine which ? — Alike intended of Democritus, Zeno, Parmenides, or Socrates ! ) — The Known, the Self; because, though miscall'd spirit. Regarded as the body (earth, as truth All-unregenerate by the syllogism Which proves earth false, impossible to proof Unless divine in essence !), mere mine or thine ; A Christ's that might have died to rise no more ; The unity assumed : nothing of God ; And thus God-nature, nothing ! — Can a man, With such as these to hear and be made convert (Keen disputants imbued of paradox. Glorying in contradiction if but clean-cut), Howe'er he truly scorn their paradox Of thee and me ununion'd of a God, Talk mystic doctrine ; or hath mystery Been long ago to logic-chopping tongues Emptied of any than a barren fame ? Were that a service unto God, to speak Mere esoteric unity-through-Christ (As through some All, failing the truth of Self !) — Vicarious, for all our faith in it* — 96 PAUL As I have elsewhere taught it, when to them T would seem so stale an outcome, just a myth At best of Delphi or Eleusis there ? Ah, rather, take Christ as the type of each Successful in the knowledge of Himself And only therefore centrally of God And, as God, savior to the race of men ! God is the unity their wisdom lacks, 'T is true (acceptance of the Self in all It knows or feels or hath its being in : Self, therefore world-sustainer, Christ or each ! ) — 'T is true ; nought truer, than God's inmost truth. Yet what were God or Christ, were Christ or God Not yet of self, nothing of self's own world. Unknown as were the fabled Pythian ? — It is an instance, then, to lay aside All mystery and thus to serve best God By making very self-like Him we seek — Method of Socrates ; though not, as that one By isolative world-analysis And negative demarcation, proving self Or God alike but that which truth is not ! For fact at last is still the truth we seek. Still subject of salvation, I or thou 97 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Saved but by proof that each is yet his world And therefore universal and the God. It is an instance, then, of * Know Thyself \ The God Thou art, not as a myth outworn Of hyperhumans, powers impossible At war and lust within the world (still less Without the world, by Platonism ! ) — but just Knowledge, the world as faith self-makes it, shown Contain'd within the life of each of men So far as wisdom is the life of him And holds the world concluded of his strength. With this, the truth I see within, I mount Fearless and foeless to the speaking-place (Their frowns, as not when Socrates stood here. Melted to semblance of some courtesy), My speech determined in unwonted guise To meet this moment : not the Unknown God Their superstition and idolatry (For so I see their sense, by loftier sense Of understanding contravening theirs !), 'Wilder'd by logic of the Stagirite Or dream of Plato, hath reduced to nought ; Such as I preach'd, through Christ's authority 98 PAUL And mystical identity, before At Antioch or Salamis ; and such As, if without unreasoning faith in Christ, Mere negative analysis must rest in, If Christ be vicar and not type of each Self-savior universalized : but now (For 't is my second calling, first to faith In blindness, now to wisdom inwardly — Mine eyes' affliction serving in good stead!) Without least blasphemy, most practical ; (Demagogue I, most suited to the time And place, so thus most serviceable) : the God Of Knowledge, universal world of each — Prosper'd, made godly most, by knowledge of it ! They question me, asking to hear my truth. — ** Ye men of Athens, hear me while I speak **The God ye ignorantly worship : God ! " 99 PETER Now is the hour of failure of my life, The sinking of the star within my soul Which hitherto hath led me and sustain'd Through divers tribulations since that night Accursed when I did deny Him thrice. Since that dark hour of Jesus' earthly death Hath Christ in me, the risen Spirit of God, Upheld and temper'd with a living strength Of infinite salvation : a commission, By overflood beyond my need alone. To be Apostle, Christ's evangelist Unto the saving of the souls of men. Till now, hath Christ been power in me ; but now I fail, am swoon 'd in spirit, am as though Christ had not risen from the dead, but lay Still in the tomb as I so fear to lie. I am grown old so very suddenly ; My limbs half-palsied with the stricken heart In panic at the last. The last is come ; And I, with what of palsied, frenzied speed Remains, am fleeing like a thief in the night From Rome, from Nero and a martyr's crown. ICX) PETER I am unworthy of a martyr's crown. I flee from glory : utterly unfit. The congregation hath for many days (Such Sheep as Cesar's savagery hath spared) In secret meeting-places pray'd of me To make departure, in the name of Christ (As Christ permitted to our fmitude) Preserving from the persecution this Enfeebled body, sorrow-stricken head, For new apostlehood in fairer fields And less distressful days. I did resist. Knowing the cowardice their words awoke Within me, feeling that escape was worse Than any bodily death. But now I yield me Unto temptation irresistible, Stampeded by my fear ; and mask that fear In resignation to the call of God Afar, who dwells no longer in myself As erst ! — Could Christ Himself, might He appear. Condemn my soul more utterly than I ? My limbs swing quavering onward ; but my soul. Abject before the judgment-bar of Christ, Resists itself ; would turn upon this path lOI POEMS OF PERSONALITY Back to Gehenna were it yawning for me — Save that my soul, not yet so shameless-lost, Acknowledges no right to martyrdom. And therefore must shamefacedly away. Yet, were it not some subtler torment still Of terror, self-disguised, which I detect In this self-condemnation barring me From best nobility ? The bodily fear, Welcomes it not the abnegation, but Because the self-distrust is easier, The abrogation of all heavenly hope Evades the calling to the cruel cross ? Deem'd Christ not (knowing every thought of man) Me worthy, as poor sinful men are found Faltering and repenting every hour, To be His conservator upon earth. Holder of mystic keys to ope the door Of earth to heaven ; and call'd me by the name Cephas, the rock-foundation of the faith ? Foresaw He not these dregs of sin in me. This fainting of the body ? Yet said He not : The soul is willing though the flesh be weak — And therefore not unworthy though it sleep 102 PETER As slept it there in His Gethsemane ? I know so surely what Christ's self would do. He would be hasting from the ends of earth (Could but one soul be saved for God thereby) Toward crucifixion here the second time ! Perchance Christ hasteth now to save my soul Out of the dismal slumber of this night ! — Awake, my soul ! Methinks there doth appear, Like to quick gleams of dawn athwart the way (The hour of dawn is come and cocks do crow As once in far-off sad Jerusalem !), The spirit of Jesus ! Those, His hands ; and that, His white-robed person as from that first tomb It rose with angels o'er the sepulchre — I saw it not, but feel it was as now ! And, there, that burst of morning-shine upon The mist of this low country, beams His face : Beloved features seen as long ago. Though never latterly. And these His feet Are stirring in the radiant risen dust ! It is the morning and the night is past. The day hath purpose of evangel still. — Master ! I turn. I know Thou wilt forgive. 103 CONSTANTINE A CREDIBLE wonder ! * In the sign of the cross, * Lo ! thou Shalt conquer ! ' — And destroy I did Mine enemy. And all that appertain'd Unto his power hath fallen mine appanage. And I am Imperator unopposed. I am inclined unto the way of Christ Without such intervention, knowing well The fruit of victory were best a peace, The source of peace best found within the soul, And the soul best at peace within her world When loving most (love, but a sympathy Of world-control — as I, being unopposed, Am fain to love !) beyond the body's bounds. Therefore 1 would not be myself the God And worshipp'd of the nations as were needs The cult did 1 declare for idol-Rome Her priests and deities ; for so myself. Being above humanity, were then Incapable of sympathy, perverse In every action and impolitic, Blind to the signs of the times (this cross, the chief !), 104 CONSTANTINE Regardless of all rights or righteousnesses Beyond my person proven in itself Alone invaluable ; and my soul Were thus confined to dwell within my breast, Nor could expand with zeal beneficent. Nor do the reascftis of best politic Longer allow a God Imperial Where now so clear majority of men Decline the worship, are recalcitrant Even in face of Diocletian's beasts ; And plain rebellious where 't were folly quite Wantonly to provoke with such demand. Nor would I be the Stoic, shut within The circuit of his breast, whose idleness Of dull indifference vainly would deny All vital interest in men's affairs. How be as old Aurelius meditating Conduct of life as though the life of the world Were wholly alien (whilst under his hand Men shook and suffer 'd !), when unto mine hand Are peoples teeming, and the power of well Or ill within the hollow of my palm, And daily everything to judge and do Pertaining to the conduct of the world 105 POEMS OF PERSONALITY As 't were my life, as I must feel for it And judge for it and wield it as 't were mine ? Or how indulge in dream Philonian — Platonic, Hermetic, Saccan, who may care ? — Of ason-emanation and exile (In mystification-subtlety) of God From world and world from life, sith all within The soul is held but as some gnosis-scheme Of Logos-wrought construction, nothing like (Nor did Plotinus scare the ghost away, For all his intermediacy of worlds !) A life where all is opportunity And all is opportune unto the soul (That takes the trick of opportunity !) To see and feel the life of thousand souls As one, by sympathy to move and sway All purposes and passions to mine own ; And thus, by playing the god within the world Whilst still man, learn the truth of God-within, Not God-beyond, the system of earth-things — For thus, I deem, doth Hosius seem to teach, Seeking to turn me to the ways of Christ — Of Christ, Himself the system, that He be In guise a man, unworshipp'd, spat upon io6 CONSTANTINE And crucified even because His soul Was great beyond the body, and therethrough (As may mine in my plenitude of power I) Did feel and sympathize with life of men ! Such, God should be — a God beyond myself (Would I be Christ, to suffer as the God, When power with sympathy pertains to kings ?) And yet within the working of the world : And thus within myself that I shall wield Power by fostering, not by opposing, ('Ware yet to him who sole opposed my mood !) The prevalent purposes of many men Made thereby loyal subjects.-— What care I For heresy, for this new Arius' creed (One hears fresh-rumor'd through the scandall'd West Out of the East of thousand fantasies !) Concerning Godhood's man-embodiment, Its unity or difference in God — When plain I see the purpose through all creeds Toward world-religion fit for private life Since seated in the soul of all alike Who find God in the sympathy with all Honest opinion ! —Whence 1 shall announce — 107 POEMS OF PERSONALITY When the due time come, and Licinius, This Eastern half-Augustus who remains 'Twixt me and absolute power, shall in turn Be ruin'd, and I have leisure then to love In way of Christ as Hosius would approve it ! — Conversion of the State as of myself Unto the Christian teaching : scarce to crush The Stoic or the Mystic — let them dream Along their ways of life, which shall be safe (Save if by men's insistent loud demand Their persecution should prove politic ? ) Within my bounds of empire ; for they lack The worldhood as the Godhood ; and shall pass Without mine intervention. And within The Christian covenant shall every soul — So long as he be quiet citizen — Enjoy respect unto his private creed : Save only, should majority demand, (Surely, for reasons of a quiet State) I well might silence him call'd Arius, Else him who may oppose him — who may care ? Then let the plausible miracle have sway Sufficient to enforce within my heart 1 08 CONSTANTINE Soul's natural propensity, give excuse For politic conversion to the creed Which seems to bode prosperity and peace With power by insight of the hearts of men. Unfold the Labarum above the host ! * In this sign shalt thou conquer ' — credibly ! 109 ATHANASIUS Myself against the world ! — that here I stand (Though courteous, Caesar's chill magnificence) Exiled, alone among the Treviri ! Nay, worse, Nicasa's declaration quite Betray'd of men ; that I of all alone Uphold the truth ; and every man beside Of all who dare lift voice and make belief Effective, felt within the ways of life, Cleave to that Arian error, how our Christ Were demi-god, not God essentially ! Christ, and is this the working of Thy Word That Thou shouldst be betray'd a second time ? Christ, and, alas ! this momentary doubt Of my poor self against the whole wide world : The doubt of my clear vision ! Would Thy care E'er have committed truth to me alone ? Is it the loneliness, whilst sick at heart I mourn in this cold boreal clime our sun And sweetness of the Alexandrian air. That all-congeals the passion of my soul no ATHANASIUS To mist and dimness and the ice of doubt, Deadening faith ? Or doth Thy spirit at last Desert Thine instrument of Providence, Leaving me naked, inspirationless, Defeated and acknowledged desolate. Myself in error ; and mine enemies (I fancied Thine) but mine triumphantly Because within Thy will inscrutable Chosen truth-messengers mysteriously ? All were as dark, O Christ, if truth were so. For me, I could not see, being in wrong ; I could not understand this being in wrong Because mine error's fault would blind the soul. But either way must I have faith in Thee For utter Godhead, being by Thy will Born as I am to this belief in Thee. And, right or wrong, must speak Thy gospel still. Whether by plenitude of inward light Thy servant, or by plenitude of sin Thine anti-Christ self-blinded of the void ! Man scarce may know whether the will be free Or fated of Thy Providence ; but this Too bitterly I know, that, right or wrong, Man is but blind unless by grace of Thee III POEMS OF PERSONALITY His blindness proveth wisdom. But Thy grace Extendeth not to me. And lost am I. Am not I lost because I never knew The grace of moderation, realizing Not this dilemma of the blinded flesh ? That I but stand more fervently confirm'd (By self-deceit, so be it by Thy will ?) In hatred of that half-god humanhood Their creeds would foist upon Thee (being assured By creature-blindness in this human soul — Christ save the contradiction ! — Thou couldst ne'er Be any compound of humanity As such with God ; but that Thy manhood were The Godhead through and through and so self- known !) — That I may never waver in belief (To fall, if fall I must, in self-despite), Preventeth not this keen soul-scrutiny Which showeth other minds as self-deceived Doubtless, at best as wholly self-unknown. Dependent on Thy grace for right belief, As I ; and therefore worth, none less than I, The pity and charity wherewith Thy mind 112 ATHANASIUS Must ever regard this mole-like mind of man. To what end Thou might'st misinform Thy seed (Nay, rather, permit man's own perversity Some want of Thy correction) scarce were theme For any mind of man e'er to admit Unto his ignorance. Though this at least Is sure, that now in ignorance self-known Mine ignorance uprears regenerate ; Now for the first truly acclaiming Thee ! Now for the first truly a man of God, A man God-like as Thou art God made Man. Thine, Christ, the Gnosis ; ours, the Ignorance : Alike in self-acceptance. And, since man Hath thereby knowledge of his ignorance. Are we, as Thou in Arius' half-creed, Each demi-god ; and Arius were right If but with our humanity concern 'd ; Each man, some incarnation of Thy truth, Divine because self-seen in ignorance ; Yet human sheerly. And myself were wrong. Who fancied Thy Christ-incarnation other Than thuswise human wholly in that Thou Wast cognizant of being still divine ! — What further subtlety were plausible 113 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Beyond such understanding, by Thy grace, As this vouchsafed ? How longer make dispute Concerning Thy humanity's degree Of Godhood or of humanhood, where both Alike are property incorporate Of every man ? 'T were but that we, being flesh, Achieve this Godhood of self-cognizance, Acknowledgment unto ourselves (by grace Of Thee) of this our ignorance inborn ; Whereas Thy Godhood, for the sins of the world In ignorance conceived, didst take upon Thee The partiality of innocence ; That, by the spectacle of innocence Godly in perfect self-acknowledgment, Might men discover in themselves the seed Of Thy divinity — as I to-day. What further subtlety were possible ? Yet, Christ, perchance, in these cool boreal lands — Who knows ? — where passion warps not, but the sight Within were at the acme, and the man. Imbued with confidence of innocence, In natural exaltation might assume World-comprehension quite without Thy grace — 114 ATHANASIUS A comprehension wantonly supposed Of wisdom, not of selfish ignorance — To such a man might not this doctrine seem, To-day which I inherit and achieve. Some warrant to degrade in parity Thy manhood to my manhood, thus to mock Thee with assumption of a full divine For man, as Thou assumedst humanity ? Pardon the wanton word ! Yon Arius Degradeth Thee not as would such a man (And till this hour had I but been as he In crass self-confidence — though spared his folly!) By such apotheosis of his kind ! For within such an arrogance might no law (For no humility would look for it !) Of logic countervene still to maintain Distinction intervening as reveal'd Between Thee and Thy people ne'ertheless. Therefore, O Lord, unto Thy revelation I still appeal against this Arian world. Not unto logic ratiocinant Nor unto grace of comprehension ; but 115 POEMS OF PERSONALITY To faith in revelation ! That alone (Ay, plain I feel it in this moment's need) Can save our ignorance from claim at last To perfect parity with truth of Thee And with Thy wisdom, Godhood. — Thus, O Christ, Alone in Treviri my soul appeals Not more to argument which leads too far For safety of poor human ignorance (Scarce to a Caesar, seem he ne'er so kind !) But, to transfiguration : Christ reveal'd — Thy revelation, against Arius ! ii6 AUGUSTINE It is not that I too well knew the sweets Of the old false way (he my natural son Adeodatus was some proof of them !); But rather that this tumult at the walls, This thunder of the Vandal horde's attack, Hath meaning and prejudgment of a new Wise order founded in the way of Christ As over against the way of heathen gods Which we, though followers and folk of Christ, Must represent and still uphold in the breach Against God's Genseric ! I little heed (Though in itself his error kill the soul I) That he profess — for thus the rumor runs — Fiercely that heresy of Arius The anomoean — as I still less heed That I, the staunch supporter of the truth, Held mysteries Manich^an in those days Of youth-perversity and carnal lust. For none less I stand representative Of Rome imperial, the Christless State, 117 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The City not of God though Christ's in name. And he no less, though nominally none Of Christian principle, denying Christ's Incarnate Godhood by declaring Him Created if divine — he, Genseric, But battles in the cause of order new. Destroying that the Lord may build again On a clean field when we unworthy both, And all unworthy that are men with us Alive, lie swept from out the path of God ; And God's own City may itself arise Perchance on earth even as now on high. Thus much were my conviction which the mind Must cling to for some comfort : I must fall And with me all mine African great Church For Christ's sake and in Christ's name, over- whelm'd 'Neath armed heresy that burns and slays By mercy Providential, knowing none. Such the sole comfort : that God's wisdom rules In worst disaster ! — And this human heart Is sore and sorrowing and self-ashamed, Saying unto the God who calleth me Soon to His presence as this weak frame yields ii8 AUGUSTINE Worn-out with years — saying to God : * I heed * Indeed the lesson ; but mine heart is sore.' — O thou great City of Christ in Africa For whose establishment mine earnest years With voice and hand and screed devotedly Have struggled and attempted in the name Of God's Word and the Will of Him who died ! O thou, God's grace upon the face of earth, Earth's inspiration faith-fill'd, leading on Each member of the body politic. Each person of the City of Earth, in God From grossness of the carnal lust and strife Toward peace of heavenly perfectedness — Thou Church ! — to see thee perish utterly Even as I faint and am not swift to save ; Even as I pass and never may return To be thy builder and renew thy strength ! Verily, verily the heart is sore (O Lord, forgive the old man full of days !). Ah ! to see all the faithful stricken down. Blinded and scourged, robb'd, ravish'd, and enslaved, The bishop and the presbyter, the flock Shepherded of them, one and all betray'd 119 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Unto the ravening of the Vandal wolves ! And to desert my people at the last, Myself to steal away unto my God Whilst they my people suffer at the maw Of Genseric, I leaving them alone ; Evading as a traitor from the world : Entering lone into felicity ! And to reflect that, most of all, our woes Have come of too keen controversial Dispute, dividing peoples patriot else (Nay, placing dogma and our discipline Above all civil duty), and thereby Denuding provinces of self-defence ; In name of such and such a pettiest point Of doctrine persecuting ruthlessly. When all by some complacent compromise, Haply as close to truth as either creed (I being in error acknowledged, many times !), Had saved strength for the struggle to sustain Life of the Church against this Vandal death ! And I have been chief controversialist Through all my days — O Lord, the heart is sore ! Forgiveness, Christ ! Did not Thyself, as now 120 AUGUSTINE Thy Church, but perish that this world might live ? Did not Thy death ensure to all mankind The freedom of God's City (by Thy Grace Against our all-demerit) ? And shall now Thy Church, so wholly Thine, perish in vain ? What are the failures of the private man, Mine errors multifold upon me proved, But fair successes in the Plan of God, Points in procedure of His Providence ? Surely, of human sin original Accumulated through the thousand years Of Rome and Godlessness, am I but God's Exemplar, and the Church that was my work But instance of the worthlessness of man Who builds for earth without full faith that God Will alter earth after His own behest Nor heed our disappointment ! Let mine heart Be sore, that in its bitterness be proved The impotence of dreams Pelagian (Asserting man's too-independent power Of self- regeneration by good- will !) Which I opposed, but in opposing made. By my too-sure assertion of the truth. Mine own ! Ay, Lord ! let then mine heart be sore ! — 121 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Let then mine heart be sore ; that Genseric May blindly represent Thee, wreak Thy will On Rome's inherited philosophies, Her dogmas and denials, sophisms all, Pagan or Christian — and myself have been Chief churchman of their sophists ! In the world Is all Thy will. As now unto Thy will And to the City of God on earth, the Church Of faith beyond denial, I resign My Bishophood. — For I have known the sweets Of the old false way : and the heart is sore. 122 AVERROES WHAT though the Caliph and the questioners Condemn ? Shall that affect philosophy ? Shall the religion of the common mind Reprove mine Aristotle ? He, be it sure, Were scarce fit food for zealot-ignorance ! The culture of the highest were no cure For crude fanaticism ! At their complaint Thus much I may admit. —But none the less Is the religion of the Prophet nought Considerable to the cultured mind ; Nowise respectable to reasoning ! Let their Mohammed in his purblind zeal Control and guide them, fervently enough If quite inconsequently, in a way Of rectitude sufficient to their wants. But let them not presume to teach me creeds Contrary to my reason, when the mind Under that guidance of the Stagirite Hath earnestly achieved, beyond their ken, A knowledge of the universal law Whereto the Prophet is as nothingness.— Mohammed, for the ignorant who need 123 POEMS OF PERSONALITY A sign and symbol ; but the Stagirite, In perspicacity of intellect Preceptor to the cultured : such the way Of compromise ! I never meant to teach The universe of lore impersonal Unto their passionate vulgarity ; And do regret vulgarity was taught Truths beyond comprehension of the crowd, Hence to their blindness false. But, for myself. Never will I retract ; and I defy Caliph and questioners to do their worst In name of ignorance. Philosophy Shall still sustain me even unto death ! Never will I retract ; but fain would seek Still further insight of the ways of truth Absolute and unquestionable ! Yet, How strange the schism, how lone this intellect (Supposed an universal ope ranee Of truth alike in every man of men !) In segregation from the fond belief Of thousands of our people ! Them I 've judged For right and wrong, doom'd them to weal or woe On plain assumption of some common ground 124 AVERROES Self-evident and cognizable alike By clown or Cadi, of a moral law Applicable, with grade but of degree, To child or Caliph — yet at length I find me An old man isolate, assail'd by all, If so be, that my cognizance transcends In kind as in degree their ignorance. And leaves me with my Stagirite alone. Gnostic of God's eternal scheme of things Whereof not one of thousands round me here, These citizens and priests of Cordova (Themselves components one and all alike As soul-partakers in God's intellect), Hath any inkling ; every intellect. Save mine, all-unenlighten'd of the truth Which constitutes them and they constitute ! And thus must I resort to doctrine scarce Compatible with any universe Of law-wrought intellect, but in itself Too like their crude religion : how the mind Of them who with my reason disagree May scarce at all partake of final truth. But rightly rests whence none may hope to lift Unto the light ; I, in mine arrogance, 125 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Missing that fair solution which might teach Salvation to the ignorant and still (Not, as their error, by Mohammed's creed) Achieve truth-satisfaction ! Compromise Or no, must my philosophy provide Religion in the very terms of truth, Knowledge in passionate belief ; else fail For me, for them alike. For life is so, Passionate in and through the Gnosis, still Cognizant though the blood with faith be mad ! Wherein have I then by philosophy Miss'd the religion ; wherein doth their creed Show possibility of competence Unto the standard of a tested truth ? For, were their ignorant zeal some adumbration But of a system they would fain believe ; And were my consciousness of cosmic law But applicable to each actual fact Of personal experience (not as now Too subtly academfc), how might we But reach some fair agreement, none the worse Of logic or devotion, for the new World-reconciliation ? And without Such reamalgamation might the world 126 AVERROES Well be regarded as no universe Substance of law nor subject of a faith ! What, then, the requisite ; that faith like theirs Might truly mean an Aristotle's lore Adequate to an universe whose God Can scarce be but as Caliph overruling The human populace by Cadi's voice (Mohammed, but some Cadi speaking under A Caliph, not of Cordova, Bagdad, Forsooth, yet governing from aether-throne) ? What truth, perchance within the reach of all, Might yield unto the world eternity In place of some creation ; to the soul Universality in place of death And judgment-doom imagined of their creed ? And, of my part, what liberality Of emphasis within the scheme of truth Learn'd of the Stagirite might bring my law To daily application and infuse Enthusiasm of a moral creed Within the serious teaching ? — Ay, what more true Than just this yearning of mine intellect To search and reach unto a loftier plane 127 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Than any yet achieved, that therein may My loneliness have solace and my lore Illumine their religion that it prove Consonant with philosophy ? What fact Of faith more patent than their striving toward Personal satisfaction in some sight Of system, order, though their order be Too much anthropomorphic ? Were the truth Even as the faith a fair development Out of the mind-indifferent physic-fact Toward ever yet more universalness Of implication, whilst, within the growth. Grows and keeps pace the person — that our passion And faith-enthusiasm shall nowise fade Into mere law-sublation, more than shall law Resolve itself to ignorant caprice : Were such the reconciliation 'twixt Their faith, my knowledge : then philosophy Were some religion, and the crudest creed Incident to truth-involution ! Such An universe of growth (here speaks again The exhaustless Aristotle !) would incite A truth of passion and a faith of law In the perpetual striving whereof each, 128 AVERROES As each is in degree sane and aware, Intendeth truth, believeth in a law, Impassionate and saving, none the less Provable universal and in God, By dint of yearning, ever satisfied Without creation by a cause beyond Nor ultimate absorption in the Goal ; But as from first eternal endlessly ! Thus were such world (of them and me at odds) Nevertheless one single systeming (Whereby my system were for them not false But merely as more-than-true beyond their souls) Of truth according to the Stagirite. For in the physic-fact original Lay bedded a conatus which within Almansor or myself, Ibn Roshd, alike By satisfaction-seeking is the truth, The law, the unity of intellect (Self's implication of the souls of all) And Godship to the humblest : all alike By yearning God ward, thus themselves the God Operant through the stuff primordial Of individuation ! Though I need Myself no God beyond such operance 129 POEMS OF PERSONALITY (Still less, the mere moon-motive put between Heaven and earth, the Godhead and the Man !), May he, the Caliph or the questioner, Require Mohammed and some asther-throne Without belying Godhood in himself, Without disjunction from philosophy. And therefore may their crude religious cult (Achieving ample rectitude for them) Be humanly considerable within My teaching learn 'd now of the Stagirite ! — Never will I retract. But yet my truth Comporteth with a fair acknowledgment (In this so late- won world-enthusiasm) Even of a truth which by interpretance I predicate as sure achievement of Their seeming ignorance. And I may well (Should persecution finally compel it ! ) Avow their Prophet, and be saved thereby From shameful death, but sully not my soul ! Haply, and teach afresh this more-than-truth Unto their want-of -truth ; and lead them on, By means of mere religion, Godwardly ! 130 AQUINAS The flesh indeed is weary, though command Of Pope unto the Council calleth me. This bulk indeed is weary ; yet the spirit Must acquiesce though death itself ensue Of the arduous journey. Whence, expecting death (Though fearing not the least, and only sad That God through Pope and Council doth demand Cessation of my labors ere the Sum Of all Theology be tabulate), May I one last redaction make in mind Of my vast effort in the name of Faith Which Reason warrants, this my ponderous work Which open lies before me. For the spirit Hath strength still and desire to speak the truth Best, perfected, ere all my speech be done. — Of God, of Man, and of the God-in-Man, The Summa Theologice, the whole Of human wisdom or the best of it. Quintessence, at the worst, of every truth ! The Summa Theologies, man's Reason At service of the Faith, man's Faith directing 131 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The operation of a logic-law. For, as the God is other than His world Whilst yet its Cause Efficient ; whilst the world Is otherwise than God, yet work of Him And God-appetitive : so yet our Reason Hath appetite of Faith ; and Faith is cause Of all our proof's discourse. No skill can prove To Reason-satisfaction aught of truth Without Faith ; nought of Faith can be conceived Save as by process of the intellect : Even as, within the province of our thought Are universals individuated By fact-material within the form Specific-spiritual ; the genera. Although to human mind unthinkable Save individuate, none less py law Of spiritual entity believed To be angelic, emanate of God, And from within dominant of our dreams Of personal independence, by control Of the mere body; our spiritual part — Without all person as we know of person Within the world — by grace nevertheless Of God's predestinance (misunderstood 132 AQUINAS And not intelligible save to Faith) Destined to individuance supreme Whilst death destroys our individual. Even thus doth Reason (by our intellect) Prove of its own known insufficiency The final perfecting achieved by Faith In high theology. And here the Sum Of all Theology would stand portray'd With scheme of God and Man and, for the last And best (to reconcile the miracle), The God-in-Man, the Christ upon our earth, God's intermediary and the world's. Angel within the body, guardian Of the truths unthinkable preserved for men Till death release and open eyes of Faith To comprehend as now we dimly feel : Christ, the true demiurge, the compromise And come-between, required of our mind For comprehension of the worldliness Of God or Godliness within the world : Our intellect's salvation. Reasoning Faith ! Yet (might a mere man dare transgress the bounds Of Reason's fmitude, and, trespassing 133 POEMS OF PERSONALITY On Faith, without Faith dare envisage truth As Christ may, and pronounce of right or wrong By logical insistence on the ways Of premise and conclusion !) how might he (Such heretic blasphemer !) dream a scheme Unlike the true scheme of our Reason-Faith Yet sprung of Faith-in-Reason, making world Some God-in-Man, as even now is Christ Best explanation of the world He saves ? I tremble at the subtlety, ashamed At such temptation. Yet some power within Impels me and allures to try with test Of intellect alone the things of Faith In shame-faced half-apology to God (As Jesus Christ without apology In terms of intellect might prove the Faith Some merely natural Reason of Himself!) Prying into the mysteries conceal'd — For all that Revelation we conceive ! — Of spiritual being. Will not God Forgive, nor Aristotle disapprove One who but keenly as the Stagirite (With Reason sanctified in Christ, for Faith !) Searcheth the Revelation, as the Greek 134 AQUINAS Search'd but the natural knowledge of the soul ? Will God forgive a Stagirite in Christ Whose Reason, waiving Faith, is more than Faith ? And must not any search conclude at last In Christ ; and need the Christian be afraid ? But, ha ! were not the Reason's stumbling-block And Faith-compulsion just this fact of Christ Supposed the mediary demiurge Partaking of both natures, God and Man ? Himself the intercessionary aid In that dilemma of the infinite At touch with finite : God, cause of a world ? Yet, with the goal of logic-in-the-Faith So clear before me, let me logically Without recourse to Faith prove both of God And Man that sans Christ's intermediacy Were neither God nor Man as God and Man Must be conceived unto our intellect If they be verily truth-known at all For finite-infinite as Christ is known. Though yet, what revolution in the ways Of premise and conclusion, of our proof Itself, if so be Christ be provable Unto our Reason, as without a Faith, 135 POEMS OF PERSONALITY For actual truth of body, both, and soul ! What alteration of the scheme of truths Divine or human, as the human soul Might comprehend the intercession new ! But shows not Christ supremely thinkable (Example of the perfect natural life Of Man in the world at unison with God — If sinful none, yet humanly as finite !) Without resort to Faith in any kind : Himself that very form-material, That spiritual-body, genus-fact Of individual specific still Because divine, personal yet and owning A world relational of membership Whereof the Christ-identity in flesh Were finite member, but which as a world Were nought than Christ's inferr'd pragmatical Being, as Christ is conscious of the whole Within His sympathy, and died therefor ? What ultimate Reason, shorn indeed of Faith Yet needing none ; solving antinomy Of finite-infinite (scarce by pantheism. But by pan-Christhood !), of God and the world Which otherwise were noway reconciled ; 136 AQUINAS Solving the mystery not as I deem'd Through mediation merely — which would yield But duplication of the paradox Of infinite from finite still demark'd Within Christ's person and none less within Relation of the God or world to Him — Not merely by intrusion as between Two partialities, but by conclusion Of both, sublate, in Christhood ; so, by proving Christ-intermediary but a name For God or world rightfully understood, Self-comprehended by the all-seeing soul Of Faith-transcendent logic : how no world Might be, save if in every membership Infinitely completed and inferr'd Interminably through all membership From each self-focus personal of truth ; And therefore in each membership divine, Howe'er by postulate's hypothesis Also all-human and a work-created Indeed ! How no God (spare the blasphemy !) Might be, save personal and therefore part Of His own handiwork, explaining it As He is self-explain 'd in terms of truth 137 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Worldwise, and known in every truth as Christ ! Thus far, for Reason working without Faith Unto expression of an hyper- Faith By logic : no mere exclusion, yea and nay. Which by the choice 'twixt two coordinates (Truth and untruth !) by severating them Selectionwise obliterates to nought Even the supposed distinction ; but a proof Conclusive of each part as also whole By differential inference, by oneness In virtue of an incoordination Final, nowise selective inter se To indetermination, but distinctly This and all others, positive-negative United, infinite and finite both ; Christ only ! — world and God alike but name For truth's two aspects ; intermediation In propria persona, God-and-Man : Who neither, save in Christ, were Man or God, World or Creator ; but in Christ are so ! Lo ! by the Faithless logic stands approved The very mystery which Faith alone Can but propound, which Reason led by Faith 138 AQUINAS Can but pronounce by miracle achieved And best accepted without questioning ; Yet which the Reason, freed of fear for Faith, Proudly elaborates to perfect proof And solvent-satisfaction ! How might I Justify then the angelologism Of demiurge interpolate between A God and world, a sheer Faith and a Reason, A genus and an individual ; When in fair truth are God and Man alike, World or the World-Creator, person or Species, incomprehensible save as Themselves the demiurge, the God-in-Man, The genus-individual, the person Yet comprehensive of a fact without Which scarce were fact save as we reason of it, Which scarce were truth save for the soul that sees ? How justify the Christ call'd mystery (All being but Christ in that we reason of Him, And thereby in persona mediate Ourselves 'twixt any God or world whate'er — Which were not severally God nor world*!) Save on assumption of a God, a world Separate and irreconcilable 139 POEMS OF PERSONALITY By any Christhood — as my proof hath shown ? — Alas ! for this my Theologice Summa ! I may not work upon it more Until the Faith return in which I wrought Blindly perchance, but reverently far Beyond this mood of Reason-frowardness Wherein this hour hath moved me to blaspheme ! Alas ! for this mine undertaking ! Christ, Canst Thou allow that any truth of Thee Shall come to nought, that any labor'd love Of God, felt humbly as the child might feel God's inspiration, shall in blasphemy End and be self-destroy'd ? Perchance mankind May take the labor and the law of Faith, The love-humility, and let it lie For proof of inspiration — nor perceive The rational induction as from Christ His comprehension and example shown Self-cogitant beyond all mystery (Impertinence unfit for merely man !) ; The logic-inference of Faith-less lore. This hour hath shown me ? There the Summa lies Unfmish'd, never from my hand and heart To receive sentence more ; for fear my fall 140 AQUINAS May self-betray upon the patient page The intellect's rebellion unawares ! There the work lies. And I must undertake My journey to the Council to defend Our Christianity ; though heresy Gnaw at mine heart, and fain would I be dead Liefer than bear dispute where soul herself Hath died down unto embers with the weak'ning Of my vast body strangely sick to death. Rather a death upon the arduous road, Though sick at soul beside and self-despairing Of any absolution, than blaspheme In folly of dispute where no belief Gives basis to the assertion. Fondly, Lord ! I pray Thee, bless this journey with release By death ; that, ere the Council, shall mine eyes Of Faith re-open, and my blasphemy End with some resurrection ! E'en though flame Of Hell receive my spirit, yet, O Lord ! Compel not to the public sacrilege Of double-tongued dispute ! My Summa lies A monument at least of piety, An edification to the centuries. Grant, in the name of this, release by death ! 141 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Grant for the sake of labor wrought in love That no exposure ruin that I writ In humble service of Thy mystery, But which in weakness of my body now To blasphemy have secretly betray'd ! 142 LUTHER A MIGHTY stronghold is our Lord of Hosts, A refuge and a very present help In time of trouble. — Were this Wartburg sure Without God's guardance and my trust in Him ? God guardeth best those that have trust in Him. God's guardianship by this my trust in Him ! These move the world anew, these shake the towers Of thousand Wartburgs that have not my faith. The fabrics of the works of many men Burst unto dust but by my living faith. Saint Thomas and the Schools, bishop and Pope Blind to the beauty of sweet Augustine, Awake at the word of one poor recreant priest Teutonic, ay, titanic by a faith. ' I can no more. God help me.' — And in that Word's intimate reliance came the light, The truth's assurance. And I turn'd and stepp'd A little from them into God's sunshine And Germany's free country ; and am free, Free of the spirit limitless in God, Though of my body and my body's works 143 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Incarcerated by a patron^s care Lest harm befall. I cheerfully allow The imprisonment that so the soul stay free ; Concealment, that the world through me may know God's wonderworking by faith's grace alone ! Doubtless the way of man is daily work. God's grace vouchsafeth not where gluttony, The battening of lone convented folk Burdens the laboring brethren of the field Or sweating city or the mining-pit To the support of idle sluts and drones. Doubtless the way is work, as I shall show By fair example set in God's good time, Laboring, wedding, fathering stalwart sons And daughters to be ministers of God In the world and vessels of His faith and grace. Surely the way is work, mistake me not, Ye future freely working humankind, For any apostle of an idleness ! Yet are the works of man but vanity By sin original, the ways of man A mockery against the ways of God, 144 LUTHER Save faith transcend the paltry falling-short, Trust in the universal rule of truth (Truth, valent but by belief the all-powerful !) Absolve the error, and our penitence Be perfect triumph, not by merit earn'd Of scourge and penance, but by assurance, through Christ's intercession and the heart of God (That intercession and that heart within me) Compassionate of His lost handiwork. Assurance of salvation unto those Who wholly love and suffer — and are glad. For thus is penance privately entail'd, A contriteness of spirit, a pact between The soul and God, man's proper stand of soul In the presence compassionate though awful yet Of Him his maker : not a rule imposed Extrinsic of interpretance by phrase Of Peter or the Pope's usurping screed. The Bull of Pope's-indulgence were as nought ; The strict monastic discipline no source Of purification, save the church- within, The cloister of confession in the heart, Impose the ordinance, to show all men The power in grace that trust hath o'er the soul. 145 POEMS OF PERSONALITY God's guardianship is but my trust in Him, The power in grace that faith hath o'er the soul ! Nay, do I hear detractors who exclaim : * A thousand churches for a thousand men * This Martin fain would build : no Church at all ' Compelling, overruling, yielding peace * By questionless authority — a man, * This Luther, who would substitute for God * On earth in the Church the passion-rule of self, * Discord and chaos come again.' How now ? I answer : * Where the way of each is right * In personal cognizance of the voice of God * Can come but concord, an accord of each * In his mere time and place with timeless, whole * Ordinance and establishment beyond ' The petty understanding of the mind ! ' (Ah ! dared I say : * Yet human none the less, * Yet temporal in mine eternal soul ' !) — Thus will a Church arise, not consecrate To scarce-disguised idolatries, not back'd By fiction, legends of a spirit-world Man scarce hath seen, and lived ; but ordered in Community of purpose to oppose 146 LUTHER Presumption, blasphemous assumption of God*s office on the part of any man Over his fellows, each of whom by grace Of faith is godly (and no God beside In the world save operant as healing faith) — Community of protest to be free And worship, each communicant, by joy Of the inward light, howe'er it come to him, Perfervid, wholesome, stalwart, practical Through the world of God which is the world of men And women, vessels of His faith and grace. O bountiful earth-nature ! Field and sky, Clouds and the forest-clouds upon the face Of the field as heaven ! O toilers in my sight, Women and men providing, from the field And forest, sustenance to rear your young. Sinews of faith and grace ! O, hear ye me ! — This Wartburg falleth as the works of men Must ever fall. Yet, firm by providence Of Him who made me, by zeal of him who put me A prisoner here assured for safer times — Nay, through my faith ! — this Wartburg still shall stand 147 POEMS OF PERSONALITY When all save God and soul are pass'd away : A stronghold by the guardance of our God — By faith of the spirit — symbol on earth of God Stronghold ; high Refuge ; very Present Help ! 148 LOYOLA Ay, ad major em Dei gloriam, His splendor in the world as evidenced In Peter's power through the See of Rome, And in preferment of this Company, Mine Order and myself creator of it ! Unto that end all means are profitable And righteous whatsoever, if the end But best be served : a logic practical, An ethic Macchiavellian (Christ save Its pagan perpetrator!), sane, self -proved. And to that end is much self-evident Of ways and method organizing men : All to be builded of obedience. Blind substitution of command for cause, Discipline overruling reason ; yea. Conscience obliterate in servitude ? — Amen ! Were any conscience other than Acknowledged servitude to rules of right ? Might any rules of right stand more confirm 'd. Establish 'd beyond perad venture, than Decretals of the very Vicar of Christ (Christ but the Vicar of God), and thus through him 149 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Orders, commands of each superior From General down to novitiate — Straight substitute for God where otherwise Were little leading and no feeblest light— As evidence Hussites and Lutherans ? Thus I establish it : obedience In furth'rance of the greater glory of God On earth, obedience without any let Nor hindrance of conviction personal Beyond conviction that to serve is right. Thus I establish it to high and low Of the Company — yet what of mine own self ? What of the least of them, stood he as I Commanding, without book to bind behest, Freely, dependent upon God alone Who speaks not plainly, leads by little light And suffers interpretance equivocal ? Am I obedient, or were such an one, Below me, but obedient who stood Suddenly faced of some fresh circumstance Not fair foreseen, not pre-provided for? Can conscience (and originality Be requisite I) be,. after all, the source 150 LOYOLA Of truth and best for service even of God ? For, lo ! if every means be justified That leadeth to God's end, what surety Save conscience can convince (my case at least) Of purity of purpose, 'propriateness Of circumstance and accident unto The goal and substance — what but reasoning faith (Not blind obedience !) can assure the soul Of justification unto any end, Of true fulfilment of the perfect plan Itself : major em Dei gloriam ? — Lay I not sick in anguish many days, A warrior not yet dedicate to God, But fiH'd of the fume of the camp, and ignorant In every line of learning ; when upon me There came a call of conscience, not of man, And bade me unto vigils and the oath Of Mary : that chastity and poverty Which hath been in my case sufficient to The saintly life — beyond obedience ? Have I not many years by diligent zeal As student late in life amass'd in mind The myriad lore of universities. Making myself as teacher unto men, 151 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Inditing with a wisdom sorely earn'd The spirit-regimen that makes of man (By vigil, apparition, visual trance) Best devotee, most valued proselyte Of the Order, Fellow of my Company ? And hath this life-career been otherwise Than instigate of conscience thoroughly Without obedience to any man. But rather in face of all authorities Compelling even Pope and Holy See To slow acceptance of the proffer'd help, Reluctant permit to be serviceable ? Thus have I wrought, without obedience, Better than had I been obedient To any call my conscience disapproved : Conscience, that sense of universal right, Of God, within the individual soul ! And am I otherwise than other men ? With that interrogation stands or falls The Company of Jesus. It must stand ! — I, then, am otherwise than other men, Not subject to the law I needs impose On other men unto the glory of God. 152 LOYOLA Unique am I ; to other men, as God To me ; as soul to body (no Pope himself — Elective, not soul-chosen — were as I Christ's representative!); and men must be Obedient to my precepts to serve Christ And me who serve best Christ by ruling them. All were as Hussites and as Lutherans Alike who lack'd this special light of law Which, emanate from God within my soul, Is conscience within me, but unto them Command imperative. The vow shall stand A sign unto the ages ; servitude Made glorious : questionless obedience Even unto death and sin — the sin absolved By my transcendence who pronounce all sin Committed by command but righteousness. Upbuilding this our Company, upholding The See of Rome to greater glory of God. So let the justification be by works. Corroborative of the theorem. Let results speak and prove what-means-soe'er Appropriate to the end approved of God Toward making men wholly God's puppetry. And (as mine Order shall absorb mankind) 153 POEMS. OF PERSONALITY Myself shall be (in humblest reverence, I dare to trust) the last and greatest Man, Creator of the sainthood militant : Myself, prime Saint without inheritor. 154 XAVIER The Goans and the Cochinese have been And poor pearl-seekers of the Fishing Coast Chiefly my field of labor under God Since first from Lisbon on these sapphire seas I voyaged, obedient to my General Loyola, loyal to the call of Christ. Here of these glistening Indies hath my work Prosper'd and brought prosperity of soul Unto these simple folk, dark-skinn'd, soft-voiced, Who needed only Christ and Christian faith. The tongue of truth and leading unto God To be so easily heart-taught and saved — So easily that some must e'en misconstrue My modest ministry for miracle ! By hundreds or by thousands may I count The sheep of this new pasture : not enough Where millions, daily cowering, wail before Dark idols in sick-smelling champak wreaths And withering jasmines ; not enough where bells Harsh-jangled and the fume of bitter blood From burnt flesh-offering, faugh ! human and beast Offend God's nostril and annoy His ear. 155 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The Goans and the Cochinese in part Or poor pearl-seekers of the Fishing Coast I count among Christ's children. What of those Whom only want of opportunity, The chance prevention of enlightenment (For chance it seems, howe'er ordain'd of God !), Benights and dooms at death as here on earth Unto some Hell of dusk idolatry ? There are who do entreat the dark-of-skin As by necessity the dark-of-soul, Forgetful of that ^Ethiopian Whom Philip did baptize ; and of this proof. If proof were needed, now of Malabar. Not so doth God who sendeth me to save Through grace of Christ the sinners dark of skin Proven less dark of soul than many a man Cradled beneath the bounty of the Babe ! And yet the grave perplexity remains Of ignorance and wickedness foredoom 'd In these God's folk-potential save for my Fortuitous advent, insufficient zeal Which scarce sufiiceth for one millionth part Of men's salvation, in these Indies now 156 XAVIER Alive, and toucheth nothing of those, dead Since Christ, yet unforewarn'd of pains of Hell ! Doth God, though leading through Ignatius' word And my obedience, suffer yet His sheep To wait the chance of men's infirmity (My constancy at proof ; my health, perchance. Subject to every tropical unease) For soul-salvation or eternal death ? Doth God set man, myself, a task without Limit or possibility wherethrough Alone by infinite accomplishment, Executance instantaneous, might I Acquit me worthily, achieve in God Aught adequate to human righteousness ? The mystery seems irresolvable : I, honestly devoted, doom'd at best To infinite dishonor and defeat For want of some omnipotence ; these men Of Indies doom'd, save only two or three From many, to some Hell by my default ! I voyage onward to extend God's name And Christ's high purpose unto lands remote And men of hues uncouth (Moluccans ; else The yellow Mongol race ? ) — to spread the seed X57 POEMS OF PERSONALITY No doubt ! But what of very voyaging ? What of this gradual inadequacy, This perishing of millions whilst I earn The infinite saviorhood for one or two, And for myself — so moderate must be men's Criterion ! — some crown of saintliness ? The problem spreads, inclusive of all ways Of God with man, of man within his soul : The pitiable mean accomplishment — Self-shamed ; there lurks the crux of this dismay ! For lack of infinite power ; and therethrough The doom of innocence on every hand ; Doom of those unconverted and myself ; Doom likewise in degree of every man. The problem is in brief : Man, with a soul God-like responsible, yet is not God ; How then be worthy of our God, yet Man ? Behold, as in this faith-extremity I cast myself upon this wavering plank Prone upon knees to pray — and all the air Is full of inspiration (and yon men. The ship's swarth company, retire apart Leaving me space for privileged communion), 158 XAVIER And under me I feel the heave of the sea hiterminable, and above my head The blue interminable and the clouds Ceaselessly travelling athwart the face Of heaven — and all is kind unto my thought To foster, strengthen, and protect in faith By influence beneficent and peace In element-performance under God — So under God upsurges in my soul A clarity, a fair infinitude Of aspect and of outlook. Though I be Inly foredoomed, yet God Himself did take Finitude thus upon Him, and in Christ Did touch of men some score in Galilee (And they were fisher-folk as these of Ind!) And in Jerusalem, but not in Rome Nor yet in Goa nor Negapatam. I voyage on, my very little space Beyond the Christ, as Christ His little space Travell'd and touch 'd upon the surging throng But here and there : for all the infinite need ! I have learn 'd God : how God's mere infinite Were emptiness, and nothing were perform 'd Were all complete (as some sage Singhalese 159 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Themselves asserted, following the creed Of Prince Asoka from some antique time !) ; How fmitude entails accomplishment ; And God the infinite Accomplisher Became of inmost self-necessity (Nay, was from first, as Athanasius saith) Essential Finitude, the Man of men ! The mystery were thus resolvable : That, God being also finitude, so man, In virtue of each least accomplishment By will and purpose, effort to perform Insistent, conscienced, were as God Himself Christlike establisher of heaven-on-earth, Cause of infinity. And, in degree As each feels failure, is infinitude In him establish'd, and through him in all Who hearken to his tale of Man the Christ. And, for the rest, shall Christ not yet suffice In some long purgatory by His grace Not unbeneficently to redeem The dark-of-soul, whatever outward hue Their ignorance hath worn under the sun ? — Some ignorant might well enough maintain The fantasy that even without Christ, i6o XAVIER Through their sad Gautama or Krishna fierce, Each swarth idolater doth save himself By faith in idol-gods upon the earth (Their faith, as mine, the test of saving truth !) And effort to live manfully by them ? But I, I value God reveal'd, not dream'd : Not I ; I voyage in the name of Christ ! i6i PALESTRINA The mandate of Pope Pius, the decree Of Council, finally the Cardinals, Those eight commission'd, Borromeo most And Vitellozzi, pressing with appeal That music in the Church — surely a clear High contrapuntal canon of command ! — That music in the Church shall be reformed And I reform it — by formality Fresh-liberated, free of the Flemish mode Of intricate conceit, yet quite by rule Of law newly-devised with dignity In place of decoration ; consecution Appropriate to expression of the creed Or service, offertory, praise, or prayer, Rather than some profane inanity Of madrigal translated, out of point, To vulgarize the heavenly acclaim. A fair reform ! Yet surely I have heard Of one who, barbarous German renegade. Hath undertaken to reform far more Than merely music ; hath denied both Pope 162 PALESTRINA And Council and the holy Cardinals ; Denied authority of men o'er men As intermediate authorities 'Twixt man and God (an overt blasphemy Decrying God-establish 'd hierarchies Essential to religion and the Church — Fault damnable), and so hath reft the Church In twain with his reforms ; and music too : Reduced to lawless maundering, as they say. — A situation strange : authority Demanding of mine art that at the word Of Pope or Council or of Cardinal (With threat of abolition should she fail !) Music shall yield, and yield the world a law; Mine art, obedient to authority, Become authority as God to man ! At first acceptance (God forbid the fault Of heresy !) yet find I in my soul Somewhat of Luther : keen to push reform ; Whilst as creator, artist in mine heart, Indignant at the connoisseur-command — At the word of ignorance (placed ne'er so high) Demanding this or that accomplishment 163 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Out of the spirit that should yield to God Alone (not man !) the satisfaction of Its innermost devotion. I adore Man Borromeo, were he ne'er so saint, In manner to award him prayer and praise Out of the fulness of a reverent soul ? Doth any proud position in the Church Give artist-insight such that at the word Shall spring forth paean from the barren brass ? Almost would I too tear the Church in twain Than make my music at a churchman's nod ! I fancy, too, those tunes of Martin's make Are not so bad as Cardinals would claim. I deem there must be something said therein Straightforward, suited to solemnity. Appropriate to a service meant for God : Perceiving how the man who speaks in them Speaks as the artist-soul original. All-independent of the fear of man And making music in the name of God ! Somehow the case is not so wholly clear Despite that counter-canon of command : Whether it were not best to scorn command And serve but God, well as my will may do, 164 PALESTRINA All-independent of the fear of man ? Music were made, at worst, for music's best (And therefore best for prayer and praise of God), Were I to make by impulse as I must (Regardless of the Church, her proud demand) An earnest, genuine, heart-yearning song Soaring to God's own throne, not lost athwart Their aisles and transepts of the Lateran. An earnest, genuine song, made beautiful In all the beauties of the sanctuary — The Church her proud demand, even as mine ! Mine ! for am I the man, or mine the mode To be as Martin and his homely psalm ? Am not I, working at my music's best And quite regardless of the fear of man, Yet, as spontaneous creator, still Source of an hierarchy, in myself Church, Council, Cardinal, and Pope ; my song A counter-canon of authority Given, regiven, verberant abroad In firm reecho from the primal theme (The primal God) reiterant and still Reiterant down through God's servitors 165 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The highest, Pope and Cardinals, and then The lowlier dignitaries to the least : So aggrandizing ever the glory of God By imitation to the outermost Boundaries of His realm illimitable ? Is not the method of the Church mine own, And am not I the man who in myself Sum up, express, pour forth (as Cardinal Or Pope or Council never may pour forth) The spirit of Peter, the transmission of The splendor apostolic, consecrate In laying on of hands, crown upon crown Blessing the consecution of command ? Such the best freedom, such the late-found law Reforming every old formality By fresh insistence on the power of God In Holy Church her wondrous formulae Of intervention, man and man between Each man and God — even the Pope supreme Only as God, the Last, is over him : God, the God-given motive in my mind ! — No more of Martin's music — good, no doubt, For him ; but not for me the master-hand i66 PALESTRINA Of music apostolic, laying on My manumission of high prayer and praise. This Borromeo, Vitellozzi, Pope And Council, what is it they crave of me ? A Mass, to be exemplar to the age Of meaning, music made appropriate To Holy Church, her use and services ? I am the man and mine the mode ; I make Them three — a trinity, for Cardinals And Pope and Council : representing God ! 167 AKBAR There is no God but God ; and I, El Akbar, Am representative of God on earth As in the heavens the Sun. Whence to the Sun, Celestial Emperor, lord paramount Of skies and potentate of God's decrees As written nightly in the further stars — Whence to the nearest Word of all God's words Interpretable of the astrologers I daily make prostration : morn and noon, Evening and at the midnight when ends both And re-begins the cycle of the skies : Four times (a number perfect, as 't is form'd Of a self-birth in symmetry of cause All ways) I, Akbar, Emperor of earth, Worshipping heavenward as the realm of earth Shall worship me ; that through both Emperors, The heavenly as the earthly, shall the power Of God be heralded and manifest, Proclaim'd devotionally by the act And faith of every servant of His name. i68 AKBAR There is no God but God ; and I, El Akbar, Am God on earth as in the heavens the Sun. — 'T is not enough that God should be on earth As any merely mild well-temper'd man, Or any struggler by the savage sword (As Jesus or Muhammad), not enough That He appear in vision, some mere dream Of power in contradiction to a fact Of impotence and failure as of him The Nazarene, else to some pettiness Of desert carnage and the sack of towns. (My father, thus, the pitiful Humayun, My grandsire, bold Babar, conqueror, Had rather been the deity to worship. Than I, consolidator, self-supreme !) 'T is not enough that God should be on earth Despised, rejected, else held fearfully In hate enforced because of spear and sword Wielded insatiate. But God must be On earth in majesty and reverence, In power that is so beyond dispute (Mine obvious right, not any ancestor's !) That, being all-unopposed, 't is infinite. i69 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The wisdom and the clemency are mine, Made admirable but by the power within To scourge earth ; power, in mightier self-restraint ! Not as Muhammad who but smote and slew ; Not as this Jesus of the Prankish monks Himself but smitten and spat upon and slain (Not as bold Babar nor the meek Humayun !) : But as the God, confirming the divine In mine own person, I may smite but will not Because I am beyond the sword of man ! Enough for Jesus or that Arab chief ; Clods, of no Persian culture. Indie wealth ; No Jew despised, no lesser-Tamerlane Of wrath and unrestraint can be as God Divine on earth. I, Akbar, am divine. So much for creeds of earth. Shall those of heaven, These strange idolatries of Hindu slaves. Allure me with their multitude of gods. Unless some God be worthier than the rest. Some symbol of their all-being provide (Mix'd with the meaning of the Magian cult) A practical performance and a prayer Meet for this teeming people, them whose toil 170 AKBAR Is of the field and forest, of the rain And shine, all sky-dependent ? From the creed Of that Muhammad and the Nazarene Accept the old Hebraic unity Of power, though not in terms of them I scorn As humanly inadequate to be God-like, but in some nature-sign to show These Hindu vassals that divinity Which I and those selected of my court Must seek and find nowhere than in myself ? Let the sun serve, sith it is known to them By long-continued custom as a god (Creator doubtless by some means occult Of clouds and rains as of the parched dust) Whereto their reverence doth naturally Direct their prayer : that I may build upon Their superstition and credulity A further confirmation of the truth I gradually have evolved in mind : My Godship in my kingship absolute. — The Zarathushtrians have given excuse For this, the Parsis, fire-worshippers Whose tongue is Persian and whose heart is pure, Whose priests are persons of a liberal mind 171 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Fit to be functionaries of a cult That finds its patron in the Great Mogul ! — And lo ! into fire (let it but be believed) Our souls shall alter at the last decease And wander in spirit as a purity Through all things, quickening the life of each. A future fitter than a paradise, A merit meeter than that judgment-bar Imagined of those occidental creeds Which cramp divinity with more and less Of wrath or love and leave the soul a slave ! So, let the fire be for an holy sign ; And let the arch-priest, the sage and sweet Vizir, Bring forth the focus-glass that fire may fall From heaven upon the fuel here prepared As sacred hearth and shrine of empire. And let the courtiers and the people pay Respect to each and every lamp at night In courtyard or in palace, and receive Sun with obeisance ; as example shown Of my prostration publicly commands. — Behold ! in mosque or church or fane alike Is God but Akbar as He dwells on earth. 172 AKBAR And of this Akbar is the Sun in heaven High representative, a Power, a Fire, Focus and unity of every flame, Emperor, Potentate, all-absolute. — There is no God but God ; and I, El Akbar, Am God on earth as in the heavens the Sun. Allahu y^^^^r — meaning: God is Great, Akbar is God — doubly declaring both ! 173 SHAKESPEAR Ah me ! mine own success I cannot reap ! The groundlings flatter ; and I set me straight To write them just another such a piece As pleased — yet no jot can my stint repeat. So through these weary seasons hath it been (Belike I jest, yet in mine own despite !) — No respite from a fond progression. Though to deaf Heaven I bootless cry to keep My mind unmoved, still must I undo All flattery, all praise obliterate With some new strange experiment to win The general — which, when their ear is won, E'en with its own slow-earned half-success Turns all attention, swerves all fair revenue From earlier sore-snatch'd popularity. Say it be won, the top of admiration : Othello hath no peer. Yet, seek as hard As wit may work to trick their wits again With any story of Boccaccio, With any old-wife's winter's evening's tale, The manner alters and the labor 's lost ; Until the groundlings (fickle as the gods, 174 SHAKESPEAR Yet favorable !) laud me the novelty — And then Othello's occupation *s gone, And all is unwell though it endeth well ! To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow (Some humor find I in this high-flown strain Stealing the thunder-cloud of mine own bombast To vent this spleen with, mocking so myself !), To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, Each day begins the business all anew ; And of the yesterdays no whit remains To arm me against seas of troubles new-stirr'd Betwixt me and the starvelings of the pit With every offering of a new- writ play. Ah ! could I twice re-write, re-vamp the old — T were to be playwright then, if not to be Poet : the question — is the play the thing ? Would I might borrow and lend e'en of myself As of this Ariosto. Fain would I lose The loan itself (if not these friends therewith !), Sailing on flood of tide in mine affairs Rough-hew them though I should. The humor takes me, The thing's conceit. And yet 't would never do. I am no playwright ; though the pit cry out On top of flattery, still I write beyond 175 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Their moment's gust, still unto heaven's gates Send larks ascending, still reap contumely At every first-night — till the twelfth night shines ! And now am I turned punster, with ado O'er nothing yearning (ay, beshrew my soul For arrant knavery !) toward those comedies In error, which ne'er I may make again. Which paid so handsomely for house and field ! Haply these chronicles of British kings (I have my share in), writ indifferent ill With help of friends, may bring in some revenue (So full of sounding words and stirring deeds !) And keep the wife's pot boiling as the stew On witches' heath ? But by my forthright art, Ah me ! I cannot reap mine own success — But mouth and mow anent some mad old Lear, Some whoreson Cleopatra in her cups ; Jesting at mine own impotence to be Up doing at my business of the stage — A passable actor, marry ; but a fool Not fit to know a failure at first-hand ! But now more honorably with mine art — Belike a way '11 be found in fair excuse, 176 SHAKESPEAR Some proof of method in this maddening shift From profitable comedy or some Tragic impressive popularity To, ever subtlier and involved more, A high romancing o'er the general — This caviare I offer them for meat ? Mayhap I have my reason though my play Hath none ? There may be something in this soul Of honest Will the rhymester, as of Jaques In Arden, though his greenwood 's London town, That groweth all regardless of the want For reimbursement ; else, of beggary ? To London came I and was one of them. These players and purveyors of bad verse — Or worse ; to London ; and have been from first A peer if no small potentate among them. Adapting to the method of the time (Each time serves for the matter born in it !) My daily converse or my nightly song In wassail with the rest — as natural. Perchance I am two persons out of tune ; And this that lifts to speak before the bar Of wise examining within me now The nobler of the jangling ill-match 'd twain ? 177 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Then let it speak and soothe to harmony (By overmastering of the discord harsh) The music that is melody indeed, Sweet reasoning and understanding sane ! A man that hath not music — in himself Is beggary though he breathe the wooing air Of kingly palaces and crowds acclaim His pettiest perfections ! — So, to Lear ! On with the petulant, pitiful old man So unlike idols of our England's stage, So lost a king, yet so inevitable Unto the shaping insight as I labor. On, to that infinite variety (Eternity still in her lips and eyes) Which custom hath not staled nor withered, My Serpent of Old Nile, bred o' the sun And slime, not of the town ! For I obey Necessity, must tell Othello's tale (This truculence of rhythm in my heart). Though he the Moor be set at naught thereby. Nothing must I extenuate nor warp In malice — trusting that such stuff as dreams Are made on must as dreams be builded up Out of the cloud-capt high imaginings 178 SHAKESPEAR Of multitudinous truths extemporized Of fantasy looking before and after — The hues of resolution richlier blown With every cast of thought. That thus no whit Ought I my stint of scripture to repeat As playwright flattering the groundlings* whim, To make the angels weep ; but I, proud man, Now manumitted of the fear of the pit, Dress'd in the poet's quick authority Eternalize my tongue ! Not monuments Of princes shall outlive mine impotent rhyme That, dying with the utterance, lifts again To grandeur witless of a withering ! — The King hath e'en commanded us to play That prurient trick'd-up stew of Troilus Another time. I will not play it for him. I *ve earn'd enough for competence without More ribaldry. — On with this doomed Lear ! 179 DESCARTES Cogito, ergo sum! — Gassendi hath And Hobbes, sour exile, none too courteously, Question'd the ultimatum ; and the rest Murmur of God. Mine answers have I sent (All that I care or dare say publicly !) In satisfaction to the crude complaints. And yet myself I cannot satisfy, Stirr'd by objection to subject my creed To keener criticism, a scrutiny More penetrating than the best of theirs. Mine axiom stands invulnerable. Now Let me best be my critic, through my faith In that self-certainty, allowing nought Contrary to that primal postulate To mar the logic-harmony ; but all *Soe'er of God or world, let it remain Only if consonant with final truth. Cogito, ergo sum! — Upon that rock I rear me, though the very heavens fall. Cogito, ergo sum ! — The vortices Of motion borne upon the stream of time i8o DESCARTES Contain no such criterion of truth Immediate, conclusive. Nay, nor God (Despite His putative eternity) Himself affords such certainty as this. That I have weakly yielded to the whim Of flattering outworn divinity. Allowing * truthfulness of will in God ' To supplement the self-won principle For guarantee of certainty, but brings Shame to my soul, confusion to my creed In contrast to the plain nobility Of that enunciation clear, distinct, Which springs in introspection. * Cogito * ■ Therefore all truths 'soever of my soul Hold valid by inference of the human fact Of self-identity immediate. And God, so far as any need inheres Of guarantee against an ultimate doubt, Were supererogatory to my soul. Mere source of ultimate confusedness. Within mine intimate discovery Of doubt-transcending entity no flaw Demands God-resolution. This my soul Is absolute ; and, if somewise of God i8i POEMS OF PERSONALITY (As even I were scarce prepared as yet To contradict), hath no dependency By any virtue of residual doubt ; But is itself final criterion Of clearness and distinctness. All without The soul must seem indeed a source confused Of indirection and analogy, Fit object of the sweeping skepticism To which I aye subject it. If within Is certainty, without 's but theory Interpretative of sensations scarce Distinguishable, scarce beyond the beasts' Referable to reason. And, for this, Were God no supererogation, but Basic necessity, an warranty Be wanted, an the passions of the sense May anywise be clarified, subdued, And brought to order and a systeming. God may be Mind or no. His may be mine Absolute insight of self-being, yet (As His — as supplemental to the proof Within — beyond first incidence of mine) Not needed, nowise indispensable To mine assurance. But without the self 182 DESCARTES Were chaos, save some ordering God-will Creates, haply sustains, and orders all things Contrary to deception and impels The animal-spirits correctly to report Unto the soul in brain-stuff situate The manner of world-motions ; which, save only Mediance of the gland pineal, might Nowhere enact on thought an alterance Nor offer any information through Machineries of sense. But by God's will (And only by God's will miraculous) Doth motion indicate upon the soul Its indirections, its analogies Unto interpretation, skepticism And theory approximating toward. But never realizing, certainty Beyond some dubitation. Save for God, Might the man-mind in vain essay an insight Of worldly things, sans God beyond all reach Of any knowledge ; as the motion-world Of space-rmpulsion and of vortices Might wilder chaoswise, and none to heed Cosmic fatuity, for all the care With which upon the pulses of our brain 183 POEMS OF PERSONALITY The emanations and the corpuscles Might beat in vanity. — The vortices Contain no certainty like this of self. But God by act miraculous of will Orders the spirits-animal intervening To cause infection of the conscious soul And yield a knowledge where no knowledge is By any power of the human will. And thus were soul in this its certainty Confined unto volition which alone Is independent of the world-machine And of the intervened divinity. Thus were my will alone cause-of-itself And independent of a God beyond Who may or may not be formaliter Himself my will without affecting it Nor causing derogation from the truth Of certainty immediate. But thought, In so far as affected by the things Of motion and emotions of the sense, Essentially dependeth on the act Of God, and must upon His truthfulness Implicit place reliance ; that, sans God, Were all my doctrines of the vortices — 184 / DESCARTES Their propagance of motion self-conserved — Of mechanism and geometry (Which seem so pseudo-clear, so false-distinct At least to cogitation) nothing more Than postulates, coordinates in God Of a proof, of a curvature nowise Intrinsically provable. And world Remains enigma, save our confidence In God be perfect beyond skepticism ! And can the soul that once hath known itself In thought's immediate certainty rest thus In confidence upon a God unfelt Whose plausible coincidence of will Even with mine own might never operate Otherwise than my certainty of self Permits unto the will of God-in-me ? Were not the soul, that thus can rise beyond Dependence and attain indifference toward The infinite will (such autovital self) , Superior to any confidence Wherein the right of self-reliance were Lost and assurance credulously placed Upon the fiat of an emptiness 185 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Which no heart-introspection verifies ? Rather, the true report of skepticism Be for a credo ; firm denial of God For faith : acceptance of uncertainty Be certain, clear, distinct assurance won : How nought in the world stands proven as we sense it ; But all, if any world beyond the soul Exist, may be deception ! Then at last, However pitiful and valueless. Ironical, a mockery might be The proven data of a motion-world Conceived as heterousian to thought, Yet in such world's rejection by our thought Lurks nothing that may make the soul ashamed. Nothing wherefrom our certainty may shrink For fear of lie divine, contingency For guarantee ; but all is open then To confidence, reliance in a will That wipes into a nescience inane * The fabled world of fiat ! That a world / (For some world must be to our questioning) Based in the inward certainty (for no World hath survived from self estranged) may rise i86 DESCARTES Germane unto the mind that makes of it Interpretations of the things of sense Which are of thought's own substance ; and be seen By warranty of faith immediate In world-construction (to our questioning A fair response) for soul-experience Of soul, in virtue of the will-of-self Self-differential ! Then my Cogito Shall bear a meaning of a world-in-me ; Mine Ergo sum involve creation (as A God) of endless multitudes of souls, Past and to-come unto the end of time, Holding in each soul, as within my soul, By godship, each, all-time's criterion All-independent of eternity. Cogito, ergo sum ! — (Gassendi hath His answer, and I mine) — The vortices Shall stare amazed upon the Vortex-Soul ! 187 SPINOZA How marvellous that I, the mind minute, Of personage obscure and humble place, Benedict, outcast (how that Benedict Implies the wonder !) at my daily task Of grinding glasses unto optic aid, Should share in God and, to my least degree, In finite represent His attributes Infinite, grounds of my modality. Extension both and Thought ; in that I taste Both bodily and with the spirit-sight (As body and thought are one within my soul) Somewhat of His intention absolute — For order, system, law are God in us — Gazing athwart these lowlands toward the sea And sensing God the boundless in their breadth. Ay, every man and every beast (therein Descartes was blind and brutal that he placed Dumb brutes beyond the pale of soul !), in sort Each herb of the field, if not each smallest grain Of the sea's shifting sand, yields sight in least Of that which God is. For in fact and thought Is He each man, each beast, each herb of the field, i88 SPINOZA And every grain of the sea's shifting sand — The sea unseen, whose murmur, like God's voice Within the heart, comes on the distant air Unto my window as I work and muse Of His infinity, the Far yet Here, Thought ev'n as Existence. For the great Descartes Was fair in this : that certainty of self (And with it, as I hold, of every fact In anywise resemblant of a self) Felt in the postulate immediate (As by analogy applied to all) Of thought, can rest but in the truth of God His being as His knowing. But beyond Descartes was this ; the proof that, an God be (As God were absolute primal axiom!), Must all soe'er in somewise be of Him Parcel and aspect, sharing as of God In thought and being, spirit-truth or space. For otherwise were God's infinitude Hamper'd, determined, and confined (so made Nought infinite) by merest being of each (For, e'en though finite, yet must entity Be relatively theirs in virtue of Possess 'd extension, attribute of being : 189 POEMS OF PERSONALITY No mere illusion to our thought that else Were but deceived by God whose law is truth !) Were God confined by very being of each The least herb of the field, sand of the sea, Or ear to hear the murmuring far voice From ocean drifting with the westerwind Unto my window over the wide lea. Rene was right. But on him must I build The explanation of our dualism, God's prime assumption of the attributes Wherein, as substantives by God create Opposed, Descartes divided yet the world Nor reunited them, as needs should be, (Save partially, if God and mind be one ?) In ultimate essence of the Substance-God. For God conceived he (as a man might see Some ocean over beyond a managed land) For stuff-of-thought somewise intractable. Incapable of reclamation still ; Maugre our dunes or dikes of argument Not germane to the fact of fact-in-space But sheerly non-extensive ; that there stood. Over against the solid land of men, Their goings and their comings practicable 190 SPINOZA (Which only as in the brain's pineal gland Had touch of God or unity with Him !), The theory of God within the mind : Final assurance somewise (as the sea Might seem to bound and be for firmament Around our continent) of me and mine, This man and that man and their means and ways ; But not, save solely for that postulate Of being through thought's certainty of self. Accountable for truth's duality In either instance. For the mind of God (With Rene, substantive not attribute ; Opposed to matter and not reconciled By relative ascription), why should it think (By indirection through the mind of man Dreaming the dreams of space unwarrantable !) The thoughts call'd mind of man ; and why should man Think thoughts of space-extension, dream of things Unwarranted by spacelessness of God, And hence, if anywise themselves a truth. Of independent fundament ? Whence God By postulates Cartesian well might seem A somewhat merely over-against all We know of land and sea and air alike ; 191 POEMS OF PERSONALITY And therefore (lo ! a God remote and lorn As ocean !) inly over-against us too, Whose stuff-of- thought (explained as God none less !) Is land and sea and air, herb of the field. Beast of the pasture, and that distant sound Which comes like voice out of the infinite In sooth, whilst but some emanation from The pulse-beat of the surge upon the sand — Nought other : though it stir my senses here And with them all my soul (my soul, but sense Of world in order of eternity And therefore God in sort) to speak of God ! Thus take I great Descartes. Were he right wholly (And then would he be Nature, God not Man !) Were God yet very near nonentity ; And nought were referable unto Him Nor explicable by infinity, Where His infinity, so false-conceived As mental substance sans space-attribute, Were bounded by the substance of our space, Our world and everything we think therein So far as built upon the facts of sense ! Nor can Geulincx, with all his fear of God, Effect a reconciling, where his God 192 SPINOZA Must operate on substances opposed, Mind both and body as occasion calls, To harmonize ; though neither is of Him For attribute, and therefore both alike Determine God as in Jehovah's guise ; And Descartes' fault is doubled. Nor can they Of Britain, Bacon, Hobbes, or latest Locke, By reference of every truth to sense And thus at last to motion, more than mean That of a God, an One, they know nor care. But of the dear dilemma doth a truth Evolve, how God, if Godlily He be. Must owe both fundamental attributes. Not mind alone, far less this world of space Solely, but both alike, extension and Thought, if inverse of aspect both yet God's, Attributes wherein rests modality. — That further problem of the attributes. Their prime interrelation, how they be Wholly obverse and yet of God the same, Without relation and yet correlate, That problem leave I to futurity Building upon me as upon Descartes I build. My stint of sight goes not so far, 193 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Though sure unto the limit of my reason : Reason, sufficient by my sharing in The truth of God, as He is infinite And finite I, but otherwise one truth. Nay, and that further contrast ultimate Of my half-finite, His infinity (This difficulty of our modalism) Seemeth itself but marvel, not to be Wholly explain'd by me the quasi-finite Who realize, appropriate in mind But may not sanely solve the mystery None less for marvel actual assured ! For in the dual attribution springs The form of truth that yields me share in God ; And therefore is the marvel possible That I the bigots' scapegoat, late thrust out From synagogue and service of my race And in this humble village set to earn A meagre livelihood by craft obscure, May ne'ertheless feel of the infinite My share for solace and be stuff of God Both as I sit and see the widespread leas Of this Low Country and, though fleshly-born, Am parcel of His plenitude of space, 194 SPINOZA And as the murmur of the distant sea So faintly touching on the ear of sense Speaks to the spirit and resolves my thought To ratiocinate of God the Mind, Thought-universal : that my meagre thoughts Are also God's : God thereby through me proven, In virtue even of my fmitude. Nowise determined of my fmitude, But postulating and approving it In both those ways diverse which great Descartes Fail'd of ascribing equally to Him. And thus the ultimate axiom of God, The substance self-appearing modalwise As self-diverse, gleams through my daily task Of grinding glasses unto optic aid (Fit symbol of a mission unto men !) Daily discern'd, daily to comfort me In this affliction, thrust beyond the pale Of race and old religion. And I plan, As adequately as my share in Him May prompt me and permit, to set me forth The ethical system of the Modal God, The substance and the attributes portray'd, The truths of reason and the truths of sense, 195 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Insight of ordering eternity To govern, regulate our daily ways Of passion and affection — all portray 'd By method of the sure geometer From postulate and axiom, premised in The truth of this reflection : whilst the sea Pours to my ear attuned, attentive now The distant, small yet full sonority Of mightiness at working : that my work, Though emanate but from this mind minute. May with the breadth and fulness of the sea Have power, and speak to many among men Of mightiness at working. Great Descartes Rifted the world in twain — I, Benedict The poor world-outcast, heal the rift — in God. 196 KANT From our dogmatic slumbers surely we Awake, and critically comprehend The compromise between opposing creeds. From our dogmatic slumbers we awake ! God, freedom, immortality abide, An heritage of grace inviolable In virtue of the comprehension, saved Unto our personal practice, though at best Lost from phenomenal sufficiency Or any knowledge. But the faith remains Clear'd of confusion with the things of sense, Space-intuition or the synthesis Sprung a posteriori. Prior to All understanding, underlying all Of sensuous reason, gleam intuitive To pure-imagination (an the term Mean though t-beyond-conception ?) postulates Proved innerly ideal, quite beyond Concatenation with experiable Truth-presentation. Undiscursively Sub specie ceternitatis spring The truths beyond space, time, or very judgment 197 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Self -given, transcendental : God, the soul ; And, of the two conjoin'd, freedom of deed Within will-conscience categorical. Thus much is sure : no mere analysis Of inborn intellection e'er might yield Experience ; no experience by sense, Save apperceptual, might formulate Truth-relativity and functioning. Nor, if our knowledge be, as thus approved, Wholly experiential, earn'd of sense For necessary substance apperceived Within the formal functions space and time. Might duty, conscience, immortality Be saved unto the soul, nor God and soul Experience themselves, unless at last Over beyond experience remain The final postulates self-warranted. Axiomatic, whereof (noumenal To faith if to our very reason blind) Are guidance, valuation yielded to All acts of man, man moralist alone In virtue of a Duty, absolute. Unquestionable. We indeed awake From our dogmatic slumbers ; and are sure 198 KANT By warrant of the sane evaluation, Evaluation applicable alike To aught sensational or rational, Hypostatized or formal, save alone Those postulates exempt, themselves beyond Concept of form or substance. Save at least For such exemption, seems the last truth known, The problem solved. —Might any man do more ? And in the conscious-won achievement now I, soul-mature, resign the teaching, take Leave of my post for leisure whilst I live To recapitulate to mine own mind What I have learn'd and taught before all men. And the truth seems as I above declare. Displacing dogmatisms hitherto True seemingly and heretofore believed. Though, were it not but dogmatism disguised To rest in any doctrine that would seem Final truth-satisfaction ? May not truth (Attainable perchance by criticism, Yet, as attain'd, formative-critical !) Itself be process, truth-belief at best In alterance ever (I would fain believe 199 POEMS OF PERSONALITY No man in error where belief is frank As in this Gottlieb ! I would fain believe My wisdom unendanger'd by success Of counter-systems !) that the old give place To new : as I in leadership must now Yield to the young-advancing spirit, he Whom I befriended, yet before the world Who openly decries my creed, would fain Substitute for this credence noumenal Some sense of selfness felt intuitively, To solve the riddle of antinomies As I proposed them, relegating form- And-substance (hitherto my fundament Of cosmic explanation) to mere phase Of self-deliverance, self-utterance Of the absolute inherence, egohood ? My craft were criticism, judgment o'er The crabbed dogmatisms of thought and sense — And so far fairly ! Yet are those dogmatisms In my critique, as sadly I confess, Alike regarded as unreconciled For terms of explanation ultimate Unless in some third function nowhere found Save in a faith, pragmatic postulate 2CXD KANT Necessitated lest reason and sense Alike be vacuous and all truth be lost ; Faith call'd in compromise to substitute For non-phenomena unknowable, For spaceless, timeless soul-nonentity, For chaos come again, wanting a form. That I 've derived God, immortality. The human soul from such sheer tour deforce Of unctio in extremis to my creed Scarce may discredit this the fresh attempt Of him who, postulating inwardness, Egohood for the pure nooumenon (Though how such universal be defined Unless as I and thou as each is man, 1 know not nor might readily conceive !), Assumes the derivation of a world By spontaneity, as it would seem, Although by opposition absolute From out such selfness. Shall I pale before The young-ascending star without at worst Some criticism, comprehensively Some effort urgent of mine egohood (Of Egohood within the will of me Even as a god, and yet God by no means ! — 201 POEMS OF PERSONALITY So Johann Gottlieb teacheth me to mouth) Unspent as yet although eyesight be dim And hand's strength failing for the record here ? Shall I in dogmatism make descent Who flourish'd in a dogmatism's fall, Or use my last of critical acumen, Of estimate and apperception, toward Some reconstruction of the falling scheme, Some alteration of the creed, to crave Attention from the centuries to-come Even beyond this Fichte's ? For I feel. In my sad sense of failure before him Who would reclaim to our experience Innerly what my teaching hath but proved No presentation — in my failure feel I A principle of regenerance, a seed Perchance of proof will relegate his own (Which seems indeed strangely to lack some real Accountability for me and thee As we are facts of mine experience !) To obsolescence. Centuries, may be. Shall heed some fresh tongue that shall plainly speak What I 'd adumbrate with my senile sense And failing faculties which yet yield not 202 KANT Without revolt to triumph such as his Who was my pupil ; for the old demurs At the new prophet and would none of him, Save to refute him out of his own mouth, By full agreement fain outstripping him To win the laurel in the lists of truth ! — So be it ; for this my criticism now Of mine own creed and system, radical And fundamental in simplicity : The egohood of Fichte (which would seem Wanting in characteristic ?), with mine own Appreciant return upon the truth Within the truth and constituting it ; Solving perchance the problem of a God-world Noumenal, self-sustaining as I feel it In process of world-truth, yet none the less Experiable and phenomenal, Formal and characteristic even in each As each, yet infinite in every soul. For is not this my soul some infinite (Not as a world-force surely — but as myself!) Grasping the truth of Gottlieb, as before The truths of predecessors, by return Upon itself ever elaborating 203 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Unlimited criteria within (But not beyond ; for nought might be beyond !) The postulated process ? Therefore, on To criticism unused, whose verity Even as some function of my being pfoves Capacity within my creed to close With views unwonted, satisfactory Unto an intellect that knows itself In the very process-critical, itself Highest example of the problem now To solve by power of the problem's self. For, on this hint of Fichte, I absolve Intellect from those limitations (deem'd Proven as limitations) space and time — Its own formality. And now declare Essential formalism (such even as space And time the universals) for no proof Of limitation nor of truth beyond Our powers of apprehension rationally, Which by their own exhaustion but exhaust Truth proven concluded of their formalism And formalist essentially as them. Though all be given in phenomena 204 KANT As an experience interminable, Yet just such mutualism essential yields Key to the secret of experience, Yields resolution to the antinomy Of such a criticism as mine old creed Pronouncing its own impotence of proof ! For, lo ! howe'er our sense be constituted Of universe external, if we be (As thou or I in estimating truth) Ourselves the judge of such experience, Experiencing but in virtue of This faculty of judgment critical (As mine old creed fairly establishes), Then is our truth a figment in itself (Not representative but original. Not tentatively but definitive Unto the soul elaborating it !) Of its own mastery creative, true As by processiveness recomplicant Of the creator-judgment, thine or mine, Inly assumptive ; and (unless we be Utterly all-illusive !) infinite Because interminably determinative Of its intrinsic mutuality 205 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Of item unto item constituting My personality or thine alike Creative of the world-experience Nowise identical, yet identically Appreciant, apperceptive, absolute For all world's sensuous relativity And imposition of the counter-self — Posited counter, scarce by force imposed Of general conatus not one's own But, by the identical totality Of selfness equally inherent to Mine object-inverse as mine egohood. And to such self-world scheme were space the form Of counter-self supposed indifferent To alteration ; and the form of change Time, as my consciousness alone hath motion Cumulant, irretractable, and hence Essentially processive (whether through Objective- world or subject), over space An alterant eternity in each Moment of implication endlessly. Where were the need, to such evaluing, Of any cosmic essence putatively 206 KANT (That bugbear thing-itself beyond all ken ! ) A non-objective independently Of formalism in this my space and time ? Where were the need of any egohood (Call it a soul, God, immortality : My theory or Fichte's, who may care ?) All undiscursive of an universe ? What were the want of some imperative Of conscience nowise presentational. Bearing no reference to a world of selves Of equal counter-obligation ? How Conceive some ultimate antinomy Of finite-infinite, when, to this new Presupposition of totality At self-determination, finitude Or absolute infinity alike Were utterly fallacious ; and the truth, The essence-structure of the system's self. Were some infinitizing of each fact By comprehension of the whole in each, Were some determinism finite-wise, But none less inferential endlessly Of the universal, of the unifaction Of rational appreciation ? Such 207 POEMS OF PERSONALITY A faculty of judgment doubtless may Excuse its operation from the law Of abstract concept categorical Or crass modalities of logic-scheme ; Where every judgment is alike of form Inceptual, mutualizing (by no mean Of class-subsumption, no identifying Of entities distinct but misdefmed By the inclusion indiscriminant), Mutualizing items whose whole worth (Whose worth as whole and finally defined) Lies in their implication each of each Obversely, by polarity of like To unlike (by appropriance subjectwise In contrast to the world-rejectiveness Of object), reconciled but ne'er confused In the judgment-deed, the effective alterance Of self through world, the conscious ethicism Positing both which otherwise were nought. Such an inherence of the world in self, Self in the world establishing its truth By absolute experience, were perforce A moralism, an insight of the deed Determinant interminably through 208 KANT All deeds else of a world's infinity, And hence a conscience and a duty, far Beyond all law-imposed imperative, Establishing for law what well may seem Rule universal — * Act so that thy deed 'Should be the deed of all.' For thus thy deed (By my fresh insight of the world-permeation) Determines universally through all A novel form and substance unto truth. Each deed itself creative of a truth Valid by absolute conformity Unto the nature of the cosmic scheme, A scheme created by the comprehension, The evaluation ultimate express'd In each world-conscienced act-experience Of teleology interminable (For all the empiricism of our sense) Through space-in-time, of every hour and place Wherein we move and have our being. For thus Are space and time no mere restrictive forms In limitation of the thing-itself. But, space for world, time for the subject-soul. Our essence-being and the truth of things Noumenal as perceptual, sensuous 209 POEMS OF PERSONALITY As intellectual ; and nought were beside Of any meaning to an universe Of individuation, personal As this of thine and mine ! — There, Fichte, thou ! Condemn me out of mine own mouth, if thou Wouldst to the centuries be more than 1 1 But, ah ! what standard anywhere of truth Remains, if out of every mouth may mouth Condemn the truth, as I this Fichte's, he Mine, as myself erstwhile have disapproved The dogmatisms heretofore believed ? Where were the settlement of truth-dispute Fit for the fond old-age of such as me, To comfort and console for many a doubt With sense of some real goal to all our search And standard ultimate for test and proof ? If to the centuries thou wouldst be more Than I, or I than thou, must there be more For truth-criterion than this strange-made Self (Whate'er its restless heart-conatus toward Unceasing criticism cumulative ! ) Which thou hast conjured and my thought hath won 2IO KANT Unto pale-gibbering ghostliness, myself As that false seer whose disembodied earth Shimmer'd arcanawise within his dreams ! Ah, Gottlieb ! what hast thou not wrought of harm To sane and serious thinking ; what have I Not in this hour brought home to mine own creed Of accusation in enormity ? Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, none did this ; Locke, Berkeley, nay — save as a Hume was in them ; And we, as now ! But we are many Humes, Powerful as our disproofs are powerful Beyond the shallower skepticism to slay. Slay and leave nought but orphanage to earth ! Cringe we not both convicted, who forsook The safe assumption of a Deity Himself accountable not unto us Even for the mystery, the antinomy Of me or thee striving to comprehend An universe ? Struck not my first fond blow The shackles from our dogmatisms, to lead Inevitably to the loss at last Of all God guaranteed ? My criticism. My feeling for the soul's formality And earth's phenomenality, alas ! 211 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Lifted they not the veil, that thou and I Have enter'd into the temple and are there Godless, deserted, desolate of hope, The great destroyers of the Word-Reveal'd, Thought-stultified and soul-ashamed ? What faith Without pretence of logic can abide The very skepticism that left it there A mockery unto mine own insight When stirr'd to quick acumen by thy crude Snatch at the thunder, by thy gross conceit Of innermost omniscience ? Mine old-age Hath left earth somewhat desolate ; thy youth Hath sow'd but dragon-teeth of discontent At hard-won orphanage ! For surely we From our safe dogmatisms are wide-awaked : And the new chaos welters, who knows where ? 212 MRS. BROWNING No, not one word of death ! Though here I die, These songs I leave thee. And they are my life ! — Love, who hast given me hope and health and voice, Making me poet in mine own despite ! Lurk'd there a song of my lips till thy love bid me Onward and up to lift my heart to thine — There that thou stoodest sole yet and sublimely Where no soul's song save mine may dwell with thee ? Surely a world of song is wholly thine : Thine isolate sublimity, no lack Of a universe to love and call thine own. Yet, thou wast wont to stoop, to lift it, so ! Till, suddenly, one lift more, and 't is I Startling my spirit to its fresh-found depths With peal and psean who can stand with thee ! *T is the right woman's-work. Where thou art — well. Not seraph-spotless as in vaster theme (Though how this love of mine at least did mend Thy music to that song of Any Spouse 213 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Whose spotlessness belies me where I lie !), Where thou wert passionate yet conscienced still Of man and woman as a man must be — There swells the wife-heart ; and the Word is sung ! Shall I accomplish thus Aurora's life In mine own person, complementing man With woman's utter passion-purity ? What though Aurora fail as poet-piece ? It manifests a mission — made complete In its own failure by these Sonnet-things. These, then, my song ; my voice wrung-out by thee, For thee and through thee unto all mankind — The love that springs forth naked, unashamed ! Love, how these songs live at the "heart of thee! 214 CARLYLE I GRIEVE for old bereavement ; long alone I seek to salve my sore with some new sight, Mine own gone stale ; I seek to see the world With eyes of others : as in all those years Of her companionship I fail'd to find Hers or to dwell at large within that soul. Thus much hath been of loss irrevocable, Wholly inexorable, fix'd withal — Thus much of her. Let me not quit the world Without some insight of the younger eyes To bear upon my grief ; I yet preserving What wisdom hath been to me beyond theirs : Not losing God, perhaps gaining the world In some way yet unguess'd. Let me allow This loneliest unrest to expatiate Out of the fulness of some central truth Ev'n to truth's utmost confines — how, I care not ; But yield my thought to the flux, all unafraid. — In darkness or in wisdom struggling, each, Centre and focus of immensity. The confluence each of two eternities : 215 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Each soul some sign of the infinite, of God ! Thus have I spoken ; and shall stand by that ; Against their cant of atheism, secure : The fulness of the central truth withal ! And what though this be pantheism : if true ? What though I risk mine individual self (And with that self all hope of after-death !) — As their taunt goes — if God alone in truth Be the truth, and there be no self beside ? And more : how lose a self if in some sense (No matter how, so long as truth it be) That self be infinite and find in God A loftier truth that yet is self the same ? I have decried this truth when logic-woven Of empty metaphysic subtlety Without firm faith-foundation ; I have mock'd The misty opium-dreamer ; scoff'd at him My first disciple from beyond the sea — While ever haughtily refusing help Proffered of physic-fact's stolidity. But now am come, fronting the physic-fact. Fearless to grapple with it, reconstruct That slough utilitarian to truth, If may be, builded of mine Emerson 216 CARLYLE His unforgotten Godhood of the soul ! I have examined soul and find it so ; Seem to myself assured of self-in-God. A thought to stand-by, utterly sincere. But why asseverate, asseverate. If nought be to gainsay within the soul ? If all the conscious cant, hypocrisy Be wholly theirs, be none at all of mine, Why vehement, why objurgatory so Through all these years of mine accomplishment, With irritation of internal fret And mental pain, as though some lurking rift *Twixt fact and faith tortured the frenzied brain ? Why is it that the question hath recurr'd To the same condemnation hour by hour — Ever the same — if there be not a doubt ; If detail of the faith (ay, whether worth Faith, fit to be believed !) never demands A re-adjudication, if to stay Still genuinely, vitally sincere ? The detail of my faith hath varied much — Half Calvin I, half Fichte ! — still sincere ? Am I alone * infallible ' of men 217 POEMS OF PERSONALITY (Incapable, that, of falsity to self). Whilst doomed within me to deny as 'twere Myself, denying what I yet feel fact-like : Ignoring this their * evidence of fact ' Which so gets hold of me, for all my cry ; Which holding me compels me that I cry ? How may there be that everlasting Yea I prate of, an there be no Nay as real As in mine adolescence I too knew ? Were not my Yea of the soul just Fichte's Self, My Calvinism alway so bemock'd. Save something of denial by a world Be the world and give God a meaning still ? What if the evidence of fact hath truth And earth, as earth, be godless as they claim it ? Shall that destroy me ? Shall idealism Die vehement deploring phantoms lost ? Stay, put this case, that earth lies as they say Barren, and God a gas, and heaven a void. And soul some tubercle ! Shall I have fear That God and soul cannot by ev'n these false-truths Triumph and turn them but to truth the more ? 'T were worst hypocrisy, self-sham and cant Longer to laugh their evidence to scorn 218 CARLYLE As hitherto. At least their full belief (Mistaken, certainly ?) is yet some fact For me to face. A world, of many men Half-one with God, believes there is no God : Within God's scheme there proves a place for such. Within my rede (as I am phase of God) Must prove the same place, proved as it shall please God to give value. — May earth be as godless ; And God yet of me and my faith be His ? A search for truth then, utterly sincere ! — And why so long postponed I to old-age This search for truth, if utterly truth-single At soul in my life's labor as I deem'd Of prophet, truth-seeker ? May it not be Perchance some love toward what most apeth truth (But is not save the self be very God And very worldless as by Berkeley's scheme), Zeal for conviction, worst unconscious-cant, Sincere-hypocrisy (subtlest demerit Of Satan's panoply !) that hath subdued me ? I doubt, then, that I truly have loved truth Despite much protestation. I have loved Sincerity, pre-requisite soul of truth 219 POEMS OF PERSONALITY But not truth's body, forgetful that men's faith Is measured also by the emblem of it (The Not-Self of that Fichte, and the *form * Of pure perception ' in the slang of Kant, Determinate-momenta of that Hegel, As the babble goes !) — sole warrant of the mind Contra mistake, crass insufficiency. Error against the laws of world-in-God. Granted God doth allow of varying merit, The less or more of truthful worth attain 'd, The achievement characteristic and unique, The stint of sight — each heart may be sincere In force of sheer belief and yet unworthy. (How self may be so — that is for research Of some far future soul, the final problem Of all soul's exercise in search of truth — The logic-law of error — I may not seek it !) What, thus, were the honest fool but fool-sincere, A fact of nature scantly valuable In furtherance of truth ? And I have praised him Through mine intemperance of outcry 'gainst Mere sham. I doubt me if a man may well (Even myself despite this hour's first fear !) Unto himself (the last appeal ?) be sham ; 220 CARLYLE But deem him mainly earnestness at heart In genuine effort to delude the world At worst, at best not to delude himself ; Even I at worst, ah, to myself sincere ! I had been thus far sham-like, fool-sincere. Incapable of answering with truth Unto their false-truth wherewith they deny God, immortality, that I approved Nigh any ignorance if but confident (Mine own admitted ignorance this day Of immortality, the lesson of it Illustrative as of some Fichtean scheme. Some Hegel's subtlety beyond mere dreams Of Emerson, of Coleridge and his crew. Found in the facts these modern men mistake — These Darwins, Huxleys, Spencers, and the rest For counterproof, and I till now ignored !), Nigh any brutal, raw effrontery — Of Friedrich, almost of Danton, Marat — Of mind or manners if with courage of Its brutishness ; and could not by my test Of practical conquest over force opposed (The right of might, due to might's truculence : The might of right not being competitive !) 221 POEMS OF PERSONALITY Have logically long discountenanced The physic-cohort. (It was but my Ruskin That warranted the counterclaim of * power * By virtue of more complex understanding ' And spiritual conclusion.) I felt free With arrogance of Calvinistic zeal, While yet confessing doctrines of God's ways With men which made men each some Absolute, To spurn contemptuous a fund of fact Rich to interpret continuity Within each individual self as source Of both eternities, rich to prove soul By metabolic impetus of will Ever evolving, rich for detail'd proof Of the ways of God-in-man which are the Hero And are my heart's religion. I thus forgetful How truth is half a doubt, half a dismay At that which truth's new being oversets (The God ex macUna of Calvin in me !), The truth and thing outworn : because the o'er- setting Destroys still truth and is that brutal fact Which very truth is not. Whence must a love For truth be sadness half, half-insincere 222 CARLYLE And saved thereby from being tyranny ! God is not ' in His heaven ' (yon Browning sings it For all his tragic musings !) save the soul Of man, regretful of Elysium lost, Be heaven — and how be heaven save as this earth Is freedom and omniscience, absolute power Unto each man whose insight of men all Yieldeth accommodation, compromise In practice, as by infinite interplay Of conscience — Fichte given body and hands By this despised (and rightly despicable In its own sordid dust-analysis) Material hypothesis — reborn As inward force, infinity of power In self-conatus — dream'd by mere Lamarck ! Whence must belief in immortality By soul's new proof derived out of the earth (Earth's continuity of constant change Precluding alteration beyond felt Identity of self within self's span) Be half a sadness for the faith outworn Of personal persistence after death — This personal infinity, once proven, Of each least conscious spirit in so far 223 POEMS OF PERSONALITY As conscientious of the facts of soul About him — coextensive with his truth — Debarring any aftermath of death ; And leaving sad, regretful this belief In earth-borne godhood for the loss at best Of heaven-and-hell and God's machinery Of retribution or unending bliss. The retribution, bliss without an end, Are heroism as I feel it in me. The comprehensive rule of faith in self Avowing rights of self within all else As source of mutual duties. Truth is such. I clearly have inveigh'd (beyond best wont Of world's great truth-seekers) against untruth. And have been thus untrue unto myself In the sole way man may be thus untrue : Incapable of assimilating much Which dreary atheism (saved, re-born In the Teuton's mystery) now turns to mean. Could I but greatly retransform in me The false which yet in other minds or times Is as the truth (these doctrines, let us say. Of transmutation, teaching the loftier scheme 224 CARLYLE Of continuity as self-defining The conscious soul coterminous with all, Hence infinite ! ) I less had been sincere-like, May be, (well might I wax wiser by that !) But truthful more unto the universe Of men within me each of whom speaks truth And acts it as is in him : truthful most Unto divinity that each man is — Each comprehensive of the selves of all. Thus had I truliest been historian. As poet, not fantastic chronicler, By artistry (as one may some day tell My history !), each puppet speaking forth Reflective estimate of his own acts In terms of my best insight of acts all. Rather than act (as writ) a narrative Held up to censure by my private creed — He unenlighten'd in his own estate. (I ponder that and find that it is so.) Then had I seen that action least is finite. Most focus of the eternal by most conscience. Most gradual wisdom, than by that brute-born haste Of swift decision bred of ignorance 225 POEMS OF PERSONALITY As was the crass way of the cross 'd of old, As is the way now of the tyrannous, The self-assertive, not the self-contain'd ! Then had I offer 'd less a wail of protest, More the benign construction Goethe knew As god unto his spiritual realm ; More worshipping the truth intrinsically (And therefore worshipful as no mere hero), However overthrown and crush 'd by force Of crude sincerity ; and therefore more As great men are, fostering not deriding The weaker cause : myself a power among them. Chief optimist, upbuilder, constituter In spite of great, wise grief over things lost Which each fresh proof destroys. I have seen truth Destroyed and new truth ever self-destroy'd ; Have felt and made men feel the tragedy ; But ever as by that prevalence of might Irrational, for right no substitute Save by some stultification, by some juggle Of phrase to take the fact for proof of law (Withal mistaking the real moral-fact) ; Thus ever as dull protester (irony, 226 CARLYLE The tongue of impotent discontent !) perceiving Not that best protest comes by best constructing Advanceward of the times, not turning back. It may be that the meaning of the times Brings a belief in just this way achieved now (Despite the lawless Law of Darwin's creed) Of individual initiative (Not tyrannous dominance by force sincere ; Not purpose of some mob beyond the man !) Proven by comprehension, soul-conclusion Ensuant on the shown necessity ' Of each in every mutual influence. It may be that the petty point-by-point Of all their science (those benumbing norms — False metaphor for Mill's, for Spencer's dreams Of metaphysic systems self-disguised And therefore feebler, foolisher than most — Belittling man's best effort, every sweep And lift of an heart their theory denies) Opens, as now 1 find, a splendor-proof Of hyper-heroism, divinity, In this world-constitution, within each Its definition, miscall'd consequence. I '11 not inveigh against pettiest proofs 227 POEMS OF PERSONALITY (I catch me in contempt nevertheless, Maugre this hour's avow'd Catholicism ! ) Of utilization in the general scheme (I leave those sand-wastes to the Bentham-brood); But show the standard of utility (Synthetic source of value by insight Through sympathy, not competition with Desires and satisfactions of all men) Mainly this personal perception of Evaluation within every man — Not within all alike, but within each In sort by terms yet individualwise Distinctive, not less infinite thereby, Because, respective in their private kind And grade, conclusive. Something of this at heart I spake of several in whose half -success I found some warrant of divinity (Mahomet, Dante, Luther, and of him Misjudged by name of Cromwell) — them I loved And felt at one, contributors to use Upbuilt within my soul as theirs in furtherance Of ' God's will ' : rather, of that sympathy Which clothes increasingly our passion-frame With moderation as a garment, pity 228 CARLYLE And acquiescence unto other wills, By knowledge of their faith soul-absolute Conforming self unto its world of selves ; Each in its lonely sort a world by insight ! Then to the recognition, reconstruction ; To find it very helpful at the last Unto the old man ruthlessly bereaved : Their crazed material hypothesis — Toward God-in-the-world (not merely by example Through history, but) by continuity, By self-necessitation of world-knowledge Truth-cumulative in the temporal stream Enveloping, involving * to the end ' : By worldhood-needed such a knowledge shown Focus of both eternities ; some sign Of life immortal in and of itself As each is self — though all the world shall pass. Ah me ! but the bereavement : I alone ! 229 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A