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 S 6 
 
THE 
 
 INFLUENCE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 
 ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 THE 
 
 CHANCELLOR'S ESSAY 
 1906 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR H. SIDGWICK, B.A. 
 
 FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 
 LATE SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 AND 51, BROAD STREET 
 t Xonfcon 
 
 SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. 
 
 MDCCCCVI. 
 
THE 
 
 INFLUENCE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 
 ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 THE 
 
 CHANCELLOR'S ESSAY 
 1906 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR H. SIDGWICK, B.A. 
 
 FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 
 LATE SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 AND 51, BROAD STREET 
 
 Xon&on 
 
 SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. 
 
 MDCCCCVI. 
 
<f)pv/CTos Se <f)pvKTOv $evp' air ayydpov Trvpos 
 
 Aesch. Ag. 282-3. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 
 ON ENGLISH POETRY. 
 
 I. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 OF all the forces that may influence poetry that of a past 
 philosophy is the most difficult to estimate. The influence 
 of metrical tradition, of native or foreign literary forms, of 
 the great classics of the past, is comparatively easy to discern. 
 It is somewhat harder to trace the effects of that intangible 
 entity called "contemporary taste": but poetry is the creator 
 as well as the creature of taste, and a broad survey of a whole 
 period's literature will reveal the one in the other. But the 
 influence of philosophy is generically different ; it is a question, 
 so to say, for the metaphysics rather than the physics of poetry. 
 To estimate it adequately we have to regard poetry itself from 
 the philosophical standpoint : we have to consider it no longer 
 as a traditional form of artistic exercise, but rather as a means 
 by which man expresses his feelings towards the deeper 
 realities. Poetry, religion and philosophy all deal in part 
 with the supersensible or supernatural with something be- 
 yond the ordinary world as revealed to the first consciousness. 
 It is this element which makes a poetic description differ from 
 a literal reproduction, or a picture from a photograph. Hence, 
 to relate poetry to philosophy we have to regard both as 
 functions of that thought or spirit in man, which reaches 
 beyond the sensible and material world to a deeper reality 
 underlying it. 
 
 It is this which makes it difficult to estimate the influence 
 of the philosophy of one age and nation on the poetry of 
 another : for this thought or spirit in its manifestations eludes 
 local and temporal limitations ; indeed the categories of material 
 science are altogether inapplicable to it. Its history is not 
 like the history of science, a record of continuous growth by 
 aggregation, errors being cast away and forgotten, and truth 
 added to truth : error and truth are alike important to it, or 
 
 236789 
 
rather, the terms take on a new meaning. Thought is an 
 organic growth, continually absorbing alien elements and 
 making them part of itself, and containing in itself, so to speak, 
 its whole past. We cannot isolate Greek philosophy from the 
 body of modern thought, any more than we can isolate the 
 acorn from the oak. 
 
 It is thus clear at the outset that a full treatment of the 
 subject would carry us far beyond the assigned limits. In the 
 
 f first place, we should need a complete history of thought in 
 all its manifestations, embracing religion and philosophy as 
 well as poetry. Secondly, we should have to show in each 
 
 age how poetry was, in part at least, an expression of this 
 thought. Thirdly, we should have to trace throughout the 
 
 i ways in which the old movements of Greek thought were 
 repeated in aftertimes. To attempt this task at length is use- 
 less ; to attempt it in outline would be unjust to poetry ; we 
 should need, for example, to pass lightly over ages when song 
 flourished, to linger perhaps on a songless century of religious 
 or philosophic development. The most, that we can do is to 
 point occasionally in the history of English poetry to the 
 thought that lay behind it, to trace here and there the ele- 
 ments of Greek philosophy living again in it, and to avoid, 
 where possible, the dangers of facile generalization. 
 
 On the strictly metaphysical side, then, our problem can 
 only be briefly and inadequately treated. But in some other 
 ways it comes within the physics of poetry ; and here our task 
 is easier. Greek philosophy, in its form as an ancient classic, 
 
 exercised an influence in common with the other ancient clas- 
 sics. Hence we find in English poetry many reminiscences 
 
 , of the actual works of Greek philosophers, and of these we 
 , must take notice. We may roughly divide them into two 
 classes. In the first come the stray references to ancient 
 philosophy, such as the cosmological excerpts from Plato and 
 Aristotle, which have often formed part of the poet's stock-in - 
 **trade of literary ornament. The second class is more impor- 
 tant. At various times in English poetry actual doctrines or 
 
 - systems of the Greek philosophers have been taken over by 
 our poets and formed into a kind of semi-poetic philosophy, 
 more a literary cult than a spiritual creed. We may note 
 especially two doctrines of Plato : that of dro/u,n?<n? and the 
 prenatal existence of the soul, and the doctrine of Eros in the 
 Symposium and Phaedrus, which helped to form the curious 
 and interesting belief known as Italian Platonism. Of the 
 actual philosophy of poetry we need take little note. Aristotle's 
 Poetics undoubtedly formed the basis of all subsequent 
 aesthetic : but English poets, though often conversant with 
 
orthodox criticism, were, as a whole, little influenced by the 
 precepts and canons which wrought such havoc at times in 
 Continental literature. 
 
 Finally, we come to a point in English literature where 
 Greek philosophy has ceased to be an influence and has be- 
 come a study. In this, as in other spheres, the nineteenth 
 century began to win its freedom by perfect comprehension, 
 by the self-consciousness of thought. At this point too begins 
 what was impossible before the reinterpretation of Greek 
 life and philosophy in the light of the "historical imagination." 
 
 Such then, in outline, is our task. Dividing English poetry 
 for convenience into four periods, we shall endeavour to trace 
 in each both the primary influences of Greek philosophy as 
 manifested in the thought of the age as it appears in poetry, 
 and, also, the secondary influences, the systems based on the 
 Greek philosophers, the references to their works, the traces 
 of conscious aesthetic criticism. 
 
 To sum up briefly in anticipation, we may say that the 
 tangible influence of Greek philosophy on our poetry was, on 
 the whole, small, the intangible very great. 
 
 In the general history of thought it is impossible to over- 
 estimate the debt of the modern world to the Greeks. But 
 the secondary influences rarely penetrated beneath the surface 
 of English poetry. In that wonderful body of verse we may 
 well claim to find the epitome of our national life the contin- 
 uity which disdains external shocks, the vitality which again 
 and again arises from the ashes of decay, above all the spon- 
 taneity and freshness which are the well-spring of poetry. 
 Such a living body can hardly be said to be influenced from 
 without : rather it absorbs external elements and makes them 
 its own. And, where we find traces of such influence, we 
 may say that the mould is alien, but the clay is English, and 
 the fire. 
 
 II. 
 1500. 
 
 the purposes of this essay the earlier ages of English 
 poetry may be lightly passed over. Poetry must attain 
 mastery over its material conditions language, prosody, and 
 metre before it can rise above the accidental ; and the form- 
 ative process is of necessity long and arduous. Further, 
 philosophy, though curiously vigorous in these isles in the 
 
ninth and again in the thirteenth century, was at best the 
 precarious possession of a chosen few : and over philosophy 
 and poetry alike lay the shadow of the Churc^ A brief 
 review of mediaeval thought as it emerges from barbarism 
 may serve to show us how deep this shadow was. 
 
 The relation of Christianity to Greek philosophy forms a 
 good illustration of the organic character of thought and of 
 the failure of the scientific categories when applied to it. On 
 
 % * the one hand, nearly every element in Christian thought finds 
 a counterpart in Greek philosophy in the asceticism and 
 profound idealism of Plato, in the mystical ecstasy of Plotinus, 
 in the assertion by the Stoics of the absolute value of the 
 individual. At the same time, though the contrast may be 
 overdrawn, yet it is almost true to say that in the Middle 
 Ages the two systems seem directly antagonistic. Greek 
 philosophy in its prime had proclaimed the doctrine of self- 
 development : it had held up as its ideal the full activity of 
 the trained citizen. Although in its later phases the dualism, 
 inherent from the first, begins to become apparent, yet to the 
 
 *+ last we may say that the typical Greek doctrine is "live 
 according to nature." Now it is hardly too much to say that 
 the typical Christian doctrine of the Middle Ages is " live not 
 
 according to nature." Christianity had both a positive and a 
 negative side, but it was the latter which developed first : as 
 has been well said, the cutting edge of truth was negative. 
 Hence, at least in its extreme phases, the watchwords of 
 mediaeval thought were abstraction and opposition : spirit 
 was opposed to nature, faith to reason, this world to the next. 
 Now this abstract dualism was of course utterly opposed to 
 the concrete synthesis of poetry. The poet could find little 
 inspiration in a world from which all divinity had been ab- 
 stracted, in a human nature separated by a deep gulf from 
 human spirit. The only path which logical mediaeval thought 
 could allow to connect the two worlds was the " via negativa " 
 of asceticism ; only by the denial of nature could man rise to 
 the true spiritual existence. (The whole history of the Middle 
 , Ages is the history of the gradual mediation between these 
 ** pairs of opposites, the gradual admission of the natural and 
 human to a place beside the spiritual and divine. Of this 
 mediation as it appears in thought we must take some notice. 
 The philosophic systems of this age were the natural out- 
 come of its general mental attitude. The Platonic Realism 1 
 and the Aristotelian Nominalism are the natural twin products 
 of a time when man was regarded as an isolated unit, living 
 under a World Church, or even, in the heyday of the Holy 
 
 1 I indicate the technical sense of this word throughout by the capital. 
 
Roman Empire, a World State. Just because he was an 
 abstract particular he fell under abstract universals. But it 
 was of the nature of these systems that they could be nothing 
 more than temporary halting places in the history of thought. 
 Both, as they came to be developed, tended ultimately towards 
 mediation. And we may note that there were at the same 
 time movements in literature, which, if not exactly influenced 
 by the movements in thought, were yet in many ways their 
 
 \Realism' is of the two perhaps the creed most alien to the 
 spirit of our own day, and most intimately allied to that of 
 mediaevalism. We see this clearly if we look at what may 
 be called its literary counterpart the morality play, with its * 
 dramatis personae of abstract universals, Justice, Benevolence 
 and the Seven Deadly Sins. But both the philosophic system 
 and the literary form were in the end solvents of mediaevalism. 
 The reality of all abstract universals involved not only some 
 co-ordination or organisation of the universals themselves, but 
 also some adjustment of their relations to the universals of 
 Christianity , if not admission into the orthodox hierarchy. 
 The movement in literature was even more interesting : for 
 here the universals had to appear in visible form and enact a 
 story. Consequently, at once the bare figures of Mercy and 
 Faith begin to fill out and become concrete by the addition of 
 personal touches. Thus the spirit which animated Realism 
 and its literary counterpart, in both spheres moved away from 
 the abstraction in which it originated. 
 
 Nominalism, which had proved a failure in its earlier form, 
 was revived in the thirteenth century, and under the stimulus 
 of the actual study of Aristotle became a potent force in 
 thought. The Church first of all rejected it, but, finding it 
 too strong, threw open its gates, and seemed for the moment 
 to have gained a valuable ally. A formidable theology was 
 drawn up, based on the analytic logic which may be derived 
 from a superficial study of the Organon : study of the Meta- 
 physics was sternly forbidden, But the new Nominalism was 
 not to be bound by such limits. The spirit of enquiry was 
 already abroad ; the tide was lapping at the barriers of 
 mediaevalism. Already the abstract universal of Christendom 
 was giving place to the concrete universals of nationality : man 
 was becoming a concrete particular, and beginning to show an 
 interest in other concrete particulars. The broad impartial 
 study of phenomena as such which produced the pioneer work 
 of Roger Bacon in science, fell in exactly with the spirit, if 
 not the letter, of the new philosophy, and proved ultimately 
 the solvent of the tangled complex of tradition and authority. 
 
8 
 
 And without unduly straining the parallel, we may perhaps 
 say that it was the same impulse, the same emancipating and 
 and rationalizing force, which gave us the first great figure in 
 our poetry. 
 
 For surely spontaneity, freshness, interest in particular 
 things, are the great strength of Chaucer, and make him a fit- 
 ting poet to stand at the head of our literary history. Chaucer 
 was, of course, familiar with many of the ideas of Greek 
 philosophy through his study of Boethius, who may be con- 
 sidered in many ways one of the main channels between the 
 old world and the new. But for the most part these ideas 
 had little real influence on Chaucer's poetry : the Host, in 
 addressing the Clerk, is surely voicing the poet's own opinion 
 of philosophy : 
 
 " I trow ye study abouten some sophime : 
 Bat Solomon saith that everything hath time. 
 For Godde's sake as beth of better cheer : 
 It is no time for to studien here." 
 
 On the other hand, when we consider Chaucer's freedom 
 of thought and expressions, his boldness and naivete, we may 
 count him at least as a lay fighter in the army, whose com- 
 manders were Nominalists, and on whose banner was inscribed 
 the name of Aristotle. It was a true instinct which drove the 
 champions of intellectual and of aesthetic enlightenment to 
 the actual world, to actual men and women : for it is only by 
 the upward movement from below that the shackles of abstrac- 
 tion can be cast off. Of conscious idealization there is little in 
 in Chaucer : he seems, like Homer, able to convey an ideal 
 meaning through the most literal truth. Similarly, the rising 
 scientific interest, because it was scientific, seemed bound to 
 particular things as such : but, because it was an interest, it 
 gave an earnest of that spiritualizatioji of nature, which is the 
 glory of the Elizabethans. 
 
 Langland, the second great figure of this age, is in many 
 ways a counterpart to Chaucer. He has been called a mystic, 
 while Chaucer is a rationalist : he was certainly often a 
 Realist where Chaucer was a Nominalist. The spell of the 
 abstract universal still at times enchains him: Truth, Simony, 
 Civil Law, Hunger, take the place of the Knight and the 
 Nonne Priest. Even Chaucer did not always succeed in 
 individualising his types : Langland's types are hardly 
 individual at all. Piers Plowman is, in fact, the poetic 
 equivalent of the spirit of Realism, before it began to move 
 downward to meet the rising Nominalism. 
 
 This movement may be seen more clearly in the develop- 
 ment of the drama, which indeed shows throughout the process 
 
of thought. The first stage is the Miracle play, the embodi- 
 ment of Christian orthodoxy : then comes the Morality, in 
 which Realism takes its place beside the orthodox hierarchy, 
 and begins its descent towards actual life, and towards realism 
 in the popular sense of the word. And, we may add, the 
 cruder realism of the Interlude, the next stage, is the counter- 
 part of the nominalist movement. The development of the 
 Morality was a natural one : once the abstract personalities 
 were placed upon the stage, the people's inherent dramatic 
 instinct could be trusted to do the rest. What compelling 
 power and interest there may be in such plays, even when 
 cast definitely on allegorical lines, will be recognised by any- 
 one who saw the recent performances of Everyman one of 
 a large group of Moralities all closely akin, which arose 
 towards the end of this period. In such plays we feel that we 
 are drawing near to Shakespeare, and nearer still to those 
 mighty semi-personalised abstractions that bestride the world 
 of Marlowe. 
 
 ^Ct is sometimes accounted strange that after the great 
 period of mediaeval poetry a decline followed. It was really 
 inevitable. The first outburst came when the enfranchising 
 movement was just beginning, before the gravity of the issues 
 was grasped : as the struggle with authority deepened the 
 calmness and happiness of the earlier age vanished : as men 
 drew near for the gulf that separates modern from mediaeval 
 life they felt that there could be no more singing until they 
 stood upon the further side. But the work of Chaucer and 
 Langland and the nameless forefathers of our drama was not 
 lost : more particularly the influences which we have traced 
 above as linking them to Greek philosophy had yet a part to 
 play in English Literature. Realism and Nominalism, the 
 allegory and the story, were potent forces in the shaping of 
 later poetry : they represent indeed those two powers, the 
 ideal and the actual, which must ever rule jointly in the poetic 
 world. 
 
 III. 
 
 1500 1660. 
 
 ANY division of English poetry into chronological periods 
 must always be somewhat arbitrary. One phase of poetic 
 thought melts into the next by imperceptible gradations : it 
 is difficult, almost impossible, to say at any single point that 
 
IO 
 
 one age has ended, and another begun. It is better to pro- 
 ceed negatively : we can say with some definiteness, for 
 example, that the poetry of Surrey and Wyatt is far more 
 akin to Sidney than to Occleve and Lydgate ; we can thus 
 roughly fix the beginning of the great period in our poetry 
 generally known as the Renaissance period. In the same way 
 we can say that Milton and Spenser are of one age, while 
 Spenser and Dryden are not : here again w r e can roughly fix 
 a limit. Between then, the years 1500 and 1660 or so we may 
 put together, as forming one great and magnificent body, the 
 poetry of the Renaissance. 
 
 It was an age of creation so vigorous, so exuberant, so 
 spontaneous, that external forces seem at first sight to have 
 exercised on it little formal and less constitutive influence. 
 Still, we must remember that the Renaissance was, in part, 
 a classical Renaissance : in this country at least, one of its 
 occasions, if not its causes, was the revival of Greek learning, 
 and especially of Greek philosophy. Erasmus, still in the 
 twilight, recommends Plato and Aristotle, Theophrastus and 
 Plotinus for educational purposes : and it was the full text of 
 Aristotle, not the emasculated version of the Scholastics ; 
 Ascham knew the Republic so well as to quote it without 
 acknowledgment; Lady Jane Grey read the Phaedo "with 
 as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale 
 in Boccaccio." l 
 
 We may roughly distinguish three ways in which Greek 
 philosophy influenced poetry in this period. Firstly, as 
 always, it was latent as a whole in the thought of the age, 
 and therefore in its poetry. Secondly, certain particular and 
 definite phases of Greek thought, notably the Platonism of 
 the Symposium and the Phaedrus, exercise such an influence 
 on certain poets as almost to form a school. Thirdly, there 
 are what may be called by-products of Greek philosophy, 
 cosmological and metaphysical excerpts culled mostly from 
 Aristotle, and from the Hylozoists, which are used, especially 
 towards the end of the age, for purposes of poetical ornament. 
 
 The main currents of thought, as before, we can only 
 touch briefly. If we may sum up in one phrase the meaning 
 of the Renaissance, we may say that it was in general 
 a movement from abstract to concrete. Politically, the ab- 
 stract conception of a world-state finally vanishes in the 
 welter of conflict, and the more concrete idea of the nation 
 gains strength. Socially, the abstract distinction of the lord 
 and his feudal dependants breaks down, and the rise of the 
 middle class begins to relate the two terms to one another. 
 
 1 Ascham. 
 
II 
 
 Thus both within and without the nations begin to move 
 upwards from the mechanical to the organic stage. In the 
 domain of thought and religion the same forces are at work : 
 externally the abstract universality of Rome is challenged, 
 national churches begin to arise, and religion becomes a 
 function of nationality : internally, nature and spirit, the ideal 
 and the actual, are felt to be no longer reconcileable, and the 
 doom of mediaeval dualism is sounded. 
 
 It is this last manifestation of the Renaissance spirit which 
 both bears most nearly upon poetry, and is almost most akin 
 to Greek philosophy. The feature of the age which usually 
 impresses us most is the extension of the known world, the 
 "sinking back of the floors of heaven" so vividly described 
 by Froude. But this was not all. It was not only that the 
 bounds of the universe were widened : its whole character 
 was changed. It was no longer a lower world of nature, 
 opposed to a higher world of spirit : rather it was a world 
 already spiritual, in which deity was immanent. And, as in 
 nature without, so in the nature of man : his higher and lower 
 impulses were no longer -sharply divided as the servants of 
 God and the Devil : rather, he stood forth as a whole man, 
 whose whole nature might be brought into unity with God. 
 Thus the age restated the old Greek principle " Live accord- 
 ing to nature," although the negative movement which had 
 intervened had given a fuller and richer meaning to the phrase. 
 Once again, beside the mediaeval ideal of an ascetic life 
 dedicated to God, arose the ideal of life as a full and joyous 
 activity of all the human powers. 
 
 Possibly the above is, historically, somewhat of an antici- 
 pation ; few of the Renaissance poets could have formulated 
 their thought so precisely. As usual, the full meaning of the 
 age cannot be grasped until it has passed away, and the 
 creative impulse has given place to the reflective. But it is 
 indubitable that the source from which the Renaissance 
 poetry drew its inspiration was the spiritualisation of nature 
 within and without. It may have rested primarily on an 
 unconscious synthesis, a synthesis of feeling rather than 
 thought, but this is no more than to say it was a poetic age. 
 Like the Greeks, the Elizabethans idealised easily and almost 
 without effort ; like the Greeks, they created first, and then 
 reflected. 
 
 If unconscious idealisation is the main characteristic of 
 Elizabethan literature, it is surely seen nowhere more clearly 
 than in the age's most typical product, the drama. It is no 
 paradox to say that Shakespeare and his fellows were at once 
 the greatest of realists and the greatest of idealists ; this 
 
12 
 
 merely means that they were conscious of no distinction 
 between the ideal and the real. Just as the whole of language 
 formed their poetic vocabulary, so the whole of life formed 
 their poetic world. Hence it is of little use to seek in the 
 Elizabethan drama for traces of the patent influence of alien 
 philosophies, least of all Greek philosophy : the spontaneous 
 flood of creation disdained all influence from without. We 
 may, if we please, collect passages which show a knowledge 
 of certain portions of Greek philosophy : but we feel at once 
 that they are more dead shoots grafted on to a living stem, 
 receiving rather than giving life. Thus Marlowe knew a little 
 Aristotelian logic and cosmology, probably from Scholastic 
 sources. 1 Portia's speech on the quality of mercy shows 
 traces of Stoic philosophy, percolating through Seneca : the 
 super-sensible spheres and their music figure in at least one 
 most beautiful passage. 2 Pythagoras' metempsychosis is 
 known, and is even forced by Marlowe into a line, 3 and the 
 list might be extended through others, notably Ben Jonson 
 and Chapman. But when all are collected, they are seen to 
 be the merest chance reminiscences, as accidental to the main 
 purpose of the plays as King Cophetua and Childe Rowland. 
 Except, therefore, in so far as the whole thought of the 
 age was akin to Greek philosophy, we must pass over the 
 drama lightly. It is otherwise with lyric poetry. In the 
 drama, as we have seen, the idea of the spirituality of nature 
 was immanent, but not consciously expressed. In lyric 
 poetry, however, some steps were made towards the articula- 
 tion of the idea. The problem of which the poets were 
 vaguely conscious, and which was soon to be fully formulated 
 by the philosophers, was twofold. In the first place, the 
 material universe had to be exhibited as a spiritual whole, in 
 which the divine force was manifested throughout ; secondly, 
 man's nature had to be exhibited as a whole, with its capacity 
 of rising to the divine level. Rennaissance thought rested, as 
 we have seen, on the immediate and intuitive assertion of 
 their ultimate identity; its task was to justify this assertion 
 discursively. In this task, as we know now, it failed ; many 
 years were to elapse, the unconscious synthesis was to be 
 broken up in the long negative movement of science, before 
 even the real meaning of the problem could be grasped. But 
 in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, in the 
 temporary equilibrium of faith and reason, soon to renew 
 their ancient conflict, some attempts were made to solve the 
 problem of thought, which for our present purpose, both in 
 
 1 " Bid T J&j/'Kai fj.^ ov farewell." Faustus, Sc. i. 
 
 8 Merchant oj Venice, Act V. 3 Faustus: ad. fin. 
 
their philosophic and literary bearings, are most important. 
 Greek philosophy had faced the same problem, which indeed 
 in one form or another is the ultimate philosophic question of 
 all ages. Plato and Aristotle had both, in the end, given a 
 negative answer ; the final position of both in regard to sense 
 and reason, the worlds of theory and practice, was dualistic. 
 And on the heels of dualism trod, as always, scepticism and 
 mysticism. But there were certain phases in Greek thought, 
 and especially in Plato, which seemed for the moment to point 
 to a positive solution close at hand. It was on these phases 
 that Elizabethan thought fastened, and, by a curious blend of 
 Platonic and Aristotelian excerpts with the relics of mediaeval 
 chivalry, it created a metaphysic of man and the world which 
 seemed for the moment satisfactory. 
 
 This doctrine is generally called Italian Platonism, and 
 certainly its most clear relationship is to the Symposium and 
 Phaedrus. But there are traces of Aristotleianism in it, and 
 its later developments follow closely the movement of Greek 
 thought from the earlier dualism to the mysticism of Plotinus. 
 We may state the doctrine briefly as follows : the ultimate 
 force of the universe, alike in God, man, and the world, is 
 love, the Platonic epo><>. Love binds together the warring 
 atoms, love unites man to man, and to God; lastly God, as 
 love, is the sustaining power of the whole. In Aristotle's 
 words, He moves the universe J>s epw/xevov. Thus one 
 part of the problem the relation of the material world to 
 God is solved. The other part is more carefully articulated. 
 The highest function of man's nature is love of God, and since } 
 all love is in part divine, he can rise to this from common 
 human love. The " scala amoris" by which this is achieved, 
 is elaborately worked out in six stages, strongly recalling the 
 stages of knowledge as treated by Aristotle. 1 In the first 
 place, the distinction between sense and reason is strongly 
 drawn, in the true Platonic style; and, again Platonically, 
 beauty is made the middle term between the two worlds. 
 There are three stages in the love of material beauty, from 
 which we rise to three in the love of spiritual beauty. The 
 first stage in each is the birth of love for the beautiful 
 individual person or mind ; in the second stage, this is gen- 
 eralised, usually by absence from the loved object, into a love 
 for beauty in all beautiful persons or minds ; in the third 
 stage, the idea of beauty becomes a true universal, a one-in- 
 many and many-in-one. Thus the end of the first three stages 
 is a love for universal beauty as seen in the person of the 
 loved one ; the end of the second three is love for universal 
 1 Post. An. II. 19. 
 
14 
 
 ,, spiritual beauty, which is identical with religion, or love of 
 God. 
 
 Such was in outline the creed of Italian Platonism. To 
 us, no doubt, it seems a strange, almost alien movement in 
 human thought, and its spirit is very far from what we under- 
 stand by Platonism. But, exotic hybrid though it was, Italian 
 Platonism contained at least some doctrines which had a very 
 real meaning for the Elizabethan age. In the first place, the 
 idealization of beauty and the view of material as a lower and 
 \ preliminary stage to intelligible beauty, was characteristic of 
 the age; it was, in fact, one more point in which the Eliza- 
 bethans resembled the Greeks. Beauty was the easiest and 
 most tangible principle for a concrete synthesis of the natural 
 world ; and two terms, God and nature, could be more easily 
 reconciled, so to speak, on a metaesthetical than a metaphysical 
 basis, at least until the preliminary work of science was done. 
 And, secondly, the idealisation of love harmonised exactly 
 with the feelings of the age. It is true that the Platonic Love 
 soon became at best a fashionable amusement, at worst a 
 pretext for debauchery ; this was inevitable, since the whole 
 system rested on a sharp abstraction of the higher elements 
 in human passion from the lower. But for the moment, in 
 the happy equilibrium of forces which produced our great 
 love poetry, there was still enough ideality in love to make it 
 an elevating force, enough actuality to make it an inspiration. 
 C It is the sonneteers who owe most to Platonism ; and it is 
 natural that this should be so : for not only did the form and 
 the theme both come from Italy, but the two are exactly fitted 
 to one another. The true lyric form demands spontaneity 
 and freedom of thought and individuality of tone.> Epic and 
 drama, on the other hand, are moulds too great to be filled 
 with one passion only, and that in an abstracted form. The 
 sonnet exactly suits a cast of thought partly individual and 
 spontaneous, partly formal and stereotyped. Hence in the' 
 countless series of sonnets addressed to numberless heroines 
 which burst forth at this time, the influence of Platonism was 
 strong. Even in Sidney, who was avowedly a critic of the 
 Platonic as of other literary conventions, we can see at times 
 clear traces of the love philosophy. Thus the sonnet which 
 begins 
 
 " Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust, 
 
 And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things," 
 ends with the true ring of Platonism, 
 
 "Then farewell, world, thy uttermost I see: 
 
 Eternal love, maintain thy life in me." 
 
 He rises from the rejection of vulgar love, to the last step in 
 the "scala amovis" 
 
Love-philosophy finds its most notable expression in the v 
 sonnets of Shakespeare ; at least /the most successful answer 
 to the vexed question of their order is that which exhibits 
 them as a systematic exposition of Platonism the six as- 1 
 cending stages of ideal love, and the six descending stages of 
 vulgar love. 1 His was too great a soul to rest for long in the 
 ornamental garden of an alien formalism ; but it seems as if 
 for a moment he paused to catch the full spirit of the love 
 philosophy before passing on to the grander and subtler meta- 
 physic of his dramas. And perhaps we may be thankful that I 
 this was so ; for the external support of the system enabled ! 
 him to develop freely the sensuous side of poetry to a pitch' 
 hardly equalled in our literature. 
 
 It is different with Spenser. He was of all the Elizabethan 
 poets by far the most profound student of Greek philosophy, 
 studying it in the original, without the aid of Italian interpret- 
 ers; and he was beyond all question the most deeply influenced 
 by it. The debt of the Faery Queen to Plato and Aristotle is 
 obvious, especially in its external framework, with the list of 
 Aristotleian virtues. To show in what detail the scheme is 
 carried out we might note tire six trials of Guyon in the second 
 book ; the first three are directed against precisely what the 
 Greeks meant by Bvpos, the second three against eiri0v/ua, and 
 the whole forms an exposition of the Greek o-ox^poo-w^. But 
 perhaps the essential spirit of Spenser is to be found less in 
 the Faery Queen than in the pure and profound Platonism of 
 the Four Hymns. In the Hymn in Honour of Love the 
 Italian influence can be felt ; in all the others Spenser is 
 clearly going behind the formal tradition, and drawing his 
 inspiration from Plato himself. The Hymn in Honour of 
 Beautie is really a metaphysic of the Love-philosophy. Start- 
 ing from the conception, borrowed from Timaeus, of God ' 
 making the universe after a pattern, Spenser goes on to show 
 that all the beauty of the world is an expression of God's ' 
 beauty, and that a beautiful form or face only serves as a 
 guide to the beautiful spirit which animates it. After con- 
 trasting sensible and intelligible beauty in the true Platonic 
 style, he then gives the reason for the coincidence of the two 
 in the same person namely, that the beautiful soul makes j 
 the body it inhabits beautiful 
 
 " For soul is form, and doth the body make." 
 
 Love, then, is a " celestial harmony " : and, to use a later phrase, \ 
 a pre-established harmony; the two souls were made in heaven 
 out of one mould and descended to earth, where they recog- 
 nise their kinship, though in different bodies. 
 
 1 Simpson's Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets. 
 
i6 
 
 In the other two Hymns to Heavenly Love and Heavenly 
 Baauty Spenser attempts an even greater task, namely, to 
 reconcile the conception of God as absolute beauty, with the 
 Christian conceptions of him as father of Christ, and as the 
 judge of man. The influence of Platonism is still strong : for 
 example, he says that ,our pity and love for Christ must be 
 elevated from the sphere of sense to that of mind ; we must 
 rise from our pity at the sight of Him on the Cross, to what 
 is really the Platonic idea of pity. Or again, in the Hymn to 
 Heavenly Beauty Sapience (aro<j>ia) is reached by a dialectic 
 similar to that of the Symposium, but ethical rather than 
 aesthetic in character. Lastly, in the Mutability cantos Spen- i 
 ser, alone of English poets, has touched the core of Greek ' 
 philosophy the problem of change and permanence, of the 
 One and the Many, of form and matter; and he ends with 
 the ultimate form of Aristotle's doctrine of the eTSos gradually 
 realising itself through change. 
 
 Spenser, and Shakespeare in his sonnets, thus stand as 
 the chief representatives respectively of the true and Italian 
 Platonism. After them comes a decline ; there is no more 
 real study of Plato, and most of what is known comes through 
 the Spenserian medium. For the age, as for Shakespeare 
 individually, erotic metaphysic could at best be a mere tempo- 
 rary halting place. Further, the system itself was destined to 
 undergo the fate which awaits all doctrines based on abstrac- 
 tion. The higher human love, so sharply abstracted from 
 the lower, inevitably begins, as thought proceeds, to lose its 
 content, and the amoristic cult becomes on the one hand a 
 fashionable pursuit, on the other hand a mere name for religous 
 mysticism ; and neither form can give much inspiration to 
 poetry. The court gallant, who prated of Platonic love, 
 "fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism," and the 
 poet singing of a higher Love which can only be described 
 negatively, typify the two-fold end of all abstract systems. 
 
 The first stage in the decline may be seen in three poets, 
 all strongly under the Spenserian influence William Drum- 
 mond, and the brothers Giles and Phineas Fletcher. All are 
 orthodox Platonists, but we feel instinctively that in them 
 Platonism is less of a creed and more of a cult. The doctrine 
 of progress from sensual to intellectual love is common to all. 
 but throughout it is becoming more definitely Christian in 
 tone. Thus in Drummond's " Hymn to True Happiness," 
 where the " chiefest bliss " is the possession of God's beauty, 
 we feel that the essential element is Christianity, the acci- 
 dental Platonism. In the same way it might be said that the 
 Fletchers, and especially Giles, attempted to Platonise Christi- 
 
17 
 
 anity, while Spenser Christianised Platonism. They seize 
 rather on the negative than the positive Spenserian doctrines 
 the worthlessness of sensual pleasures, as opposed to in- 
 tellectual, 1 the necessity of regarding Christ mentally rather 
 than in bodily form. 5 * More significant still, the influence of 
 mysticism is already felt. Drummond takes from Plotinus 
 the doctrine of a super-sensible world ; Giles Fletcher speaks 
 of participation in the One. In all these poets, however, there 
 is still enough true Platonism left to give them a certain 
 warmth of colouring usually absent from religious poetry. 
 Love has not yet been entirely emptied of content by abstrac- 
 tion. The God of the Platonic Christians is still a God of 
 life and joy, contrasting both with the awful judge of Calvinists 
 and Puritans, and the metaphysical prius of Cartesians. 
 
 John Donne was a little earlier than the Fletchers, but his 
 place is logically posterior to theirs. In him we see the love 
 philosophy breaking up ; its latent abstraction is becoming con- 
 scious and is thrusting the higher love apart not merely from 
 the lower, but also frbm the realm of poetry. While Donne's 
 work as a whole is remarkable for its imaginative colouring, 
 in his philosophic poems we often feel the chill of a cold 
 intellectualism. His rough and almost jerky manner seems 
 to express the struggle of thought with itself. Thus in his 
 " Valediction forbidding Mourning " abstract love has triumphed 
 so completely over the lower life, as hardly to be living at all. 
 " Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
 
 Though I must go, endure not yet 
 A breach, but an expansion 
 
 Like gold to airy thinness beat." 
 
 How different is this calm, meditative coldness, from the 
 warmth and joy of Spenser's " Prothalamion." 
 
 Throughout Donne's work we feel that mysticism is near : 
 when woman is treated as the Idea of virtue, or the universal 
 soul, the end cannot be far off. The last stage of all dialectics 
 which move by the "via negativa" of abstraction, is reached 
 when the abstract term, emptied of content, can no longer be 
 described by positive predicates, but becomes the Unknown 
 or Unknowable. Donne reaches this stage in " Negative 
 Love" 
 
 " If that be simply perfectest 
 Which can by no way be expressed 
 Bnt negatives, my love is so." 
 
 The poem is full of reminiscences of Plotinus, and justly so : 
 far as Plotinus stands to Plato, so Donne' stands to Spenser. 
 
 1 Christ's Triumph after death. Stanza 34, 39 and 40. 
 
 2 Purple Island. VI., 75. 
 
i8 
 
 The English poetry of this period forms so complete a 
 whole that it is difficult to divide it at any one point. But 
 - there was a time about 1620 at which the tide of the Renais- 
 sance spirit began to turn, and a reaction set in towards the 
 still waters of the eighteenth century. Men became conscious 
 once more of a rift between the ideal and the actual ; the 
 drama soon began to oscillate between crudely realistic comedy, 
 from which the spiritual glow had vanished, and deliberately 
 heroic tragedy, buttressed by laboured bombast and the arti- 
 ficial support of the rhyming couplet. In lyric poetry the 
 i oscillation was more obvious still ; as we turn from Herrick's 
 I "Hesperides" to his "Noble Numbers," we do not rise from a 
 lower stage to a Higher : rather we leap from one world to 
 another. The opposing voices of Puritanism and Hedonism 
 grow louder and more discordant, and poetry suffers in con- 
 sequence both at its higher and at its lower level. The ideal 
 is less living, the actual is less inspiring ; religious poetry 
 becomes sterner and colder, secular poetry more frivolous and 
 worldy. The freshness of the earlier age is gone, and the 
 world gets ready for the coming of Classicism. 
 
 The poetic production of this age, however, was never 
 more wonderful than towards its close. The lyrical poets were 
 enabled to attain a balance of form and matter impossible to 
 the spontaneous exuberance of the Elizabethans. The old 
 contrast which the Greek critic loved to draw between con- 
 sistent perfection and fitful magnificence was exemplified once 
 more in the later and earlier lyric of this age. Bnt we cannot 
 dwell on Herrick, Suckling and their fellows. Greek philo- 
 sophy was little known to them, and would in any case have 
 been alien to their spirit. At most we find echoes of the 
 philosophic phraseology, as in the end of Herrick's address to 
 his winding-sheet 
 
 " And for a while lie here conceal'd 
 
 To be re veal 'd 
 
 Next at the great Platonick year 
 And then meet here." 
 
 In two places only can we look for the direct influence of 
 
 Greek philosophy, in Milton, and in the school of poets dubbed 
 
 by Johnson the " Metaphysicals." Johnson indicated by the 
 
 term primarily Donne, Cowley, Cleveland and a few more ; 
 
 but it is better, and truer historically, to omit Donne, and to 
 
 extend the term, with Mr. Saintsbury, to cover the religious 
 
 poets, Crawshaw, Vaughan, Herbert and Trahearne. The 
 
 , metaphysicals then form a group distinguished by a common 
 
 \ tone, brooding and contemplative, and a style suggestive 
 
 ' rather than descriptive, full of hidden meanings dimly adum- 
 
19 
 
 brated in brief, the style of mysticism, of ecstasy and im- 
 mediate intuition rather than discursive thought. As such 
 they were influenced by Greek philosophy in its more mystical 
 phases, and especially by the Platonic tradition of the Spen- 
 serians. Indeed it is more by their general attitude than by 
 any particular doctrine that we can distinguish the later from 
 the earlier Platonists. Many of the thoughts of Drummond 
 and the Fletchers reappear. Thus Vaughan revives the 
 theory of love as a pre-established harmony in his poem " To 
 Amoret " 
 
 " I am persuaded of that state 
 
 'Twixt thee and me 
 Of some predestined sympathy." 
 
 Crashaw, again in the " Glorious Epiphanie" follows the Hymn 
 to Heavenly Love in making Christ an intellectual object 
 
 " We vow to make brave way 
 Upwards, and press on for the pure intelligential prey." 
 
 Finally, in Henry More, the mysticism anticipated by Donne 
 finds its full expression. More is the most thorough-going 
 philosopher of the metaphysicals and also the most complete 
 Plotinian. The titles of his works Enneades, Psychathanasia 
 Antimonopsychia, Antipsychopannichia show the bent of his 
 mind. Plotinus' argument is transcribed at full length, and 
 the three ultimate hypostases the Good, Intellect, the Soul- 
 are carefully identified with the Christian Trinity. More's 
 work is laborious, and even exhaustive ; but his choice of 
 verse as a medium seems unnecessary. And the same is true 
 in part of the other poets of this group; it is often where they 
 Platonise that they prose. Their real inspiration was a genuine 
 religious feeling : Platonism was only a secondary aid, to be 
 tacked on to Christian doctrine -where convenient. If we re- 
 moved from their works all reminiscences of Greek philosophy 
 we should lose little poetry, except possibly Vaughan's " Re- 
 treat," which anticipates the recollection-theory of Words- 
 worth's ode. We should lose the whole of More, but the loss 
 would not be great. 
 
 We have left till last the great and solitary figure of Milton, 
 which defies all theories 'of groups and tendencies. He knew 
 Greek philosophy well, and when, as often, he is accused of 
 lacking humour, it should be remembered that he is the only 
 man whomever made Aristotle's logic amusing. The Vacation 
 Exercise with its presentation of father Ens, and his ten sons 
 the Predicaments, is no mean feat of academic satire. Milton 
 uses largely the by-products of Greek philosophy and especially 
 of the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies: the first-moving i 
 sphere, the daughters of necessity, the one first matter, the 
 
 B 2 
 
20 
 
 quintessence, occur frequently in the early poems and Para- 
 dise Lost, but are merely part of that endless store of classical 
 ornamentation he employed so lavishly. Whether the 
 essential spirit of his poetry was much influenced by Greek 
 philosophy is more open to question : in Paradise Lost, at 
 least, the spring of poetic force is Christianity. But in his 
 youth Milton came much under the influence of Plato : as he 
 says in the Apology for Smectymnuus, "Thus . . . riper years 
 led me to the shady spaces of philosophy, where, if I should 
 tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love . . . and how the 
 first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, 
 producing those happy twins of divine generation, knowledge 
 and virtue; with such abstracted sublimities as these, it might 
 be worth your listening, readers." It is clear that from this 
 conception of chastity as an "abstract sublimity" came the 
 inspiration of Comus. The opposition between sense and 
 reason is indeed the motif of the story, although Milton con- 
 trives to give it a preponderance of ethical character, whereas 
 in Plato the distinction is primarily epistetnological : but it 
 ,was natural that a phrase like that of the Phaedo " the soul 
 is dragged by the body into the region of the changeable "- 
 should be misinterpreted by an age that had not yet faced the 
 problem of knowledge. But in general we may say that the 
 Platonic antinomy of soul and body profoundly influenced 
 Milton's early thought. Comus indeed may in a sense be 
 called anti-Christian, since it involves the doctrine that the 
 soul can winjier own salvation, without an act of grace from 
 on high. [The sterner Puritanism of Milton's later years 
 weakened hfe~belief in this as in other doctrines derived from 
 Greek philosophy. Platonism was for Milton a thing_pf youth 
 and playtime : his mature life owned another master, j 
 
 find in this Milton's life was an epitome of his age. The 
 great period of poetic creation was passing away; the harmony 
 of the spiritual life from which it sprang was broken. The 
 faith and fervour of the Elizabethans was sufficient to hold 
 together a universe of beauty and love, and to see the ideal in 
 the real, but it could not stem the relentless tide of scientific 
 differentiation, definition, and classification, which was daily 
 extending the bounds of the world, thrusting God apart from 
 man, and ruthlessly analysing the unconscious synthesis of 
 the earlier idealism. Faith and reason were to be sundered 
 once more, and in the divorce were to become, the one mysti- 
 cism, the other rationalism. In such a world there was little 
 room for Greek "philosophy : it was a creed at once too wide 
 and too narrow too wide in its idealism for an age of science, 
 of materialism, of the study of man as the proper study of 
 
21 X*L!fcr 
 
 mankind, too narrow to cover the wide sweep of the scientific 
 consciousness in its new enfranchisement. The age of reason 
 was beginning: and its attidude to Greek philosophy might 
 be summed up in the words of Philodemus, 
 " KG! Trai^tiv ore Koupck, e7rat^a/x,ev 
 (f>povTL&o<s d^ 
 
 1660 1800. 
 
 IT is difficult to draw a chronological line between Dryden 
 and the metaphysicals : none the less it is true that he really 
 belongs to a later age than they, if only in this, that they 
 show a real interest in Greek philosophy which was not to 
 revive in English poetry for nearly a century. Many phrases 
 are used to describe this century the Age of Reason, the 
 age of prose, the " saeculmn rationalisticum " ; perhaps it is most 
 suitably called the age of criticism supervening upon creation. ' 
 In all regions of thought we feel the coming of a fuller self- 
 consciousness, which expresses itself first negatively, in the 
 condemnation of everything lying outstde its own domain. 
 The Middle Ages had to be pronounced Gothic, the Eliza- 
 bethan ignorantly exuberant, in order that the Age of Reason 
 might shine forth in relative brilliance. 
 
 Self-conscious, critical, analytical, sundering every whole 
 into its parts, and considering the parts before the whole 
 such was the general character of eighteenth century thought. 
 Religion, philosophy, and poetry each took its own domain, 
 and endeavoured to explain it by itself ; and in each in turn 
 the conflicting forces of the lower and higher tore the 
 whole asunder. Religion oscillated between pietism and 
 the vaguest deism ; philosophy between, scepticism and the 
 crudest idealism ; poetry between forced heroic and blank 
 prose. The favourite metrical form is characteristic : the 
 rhyming heroic makes each point, couplet by couplet, 
 independently of the rest. With all its wonderful art and 
 unequalled elaboration, Augustan poetry is still the poetry 
 of decline ; all Pope's skill cannot stay its lapse from the 
 organic to the mechanical. 
 
 Hence for our present purposes we cannot linger on the 
 saeculum rationalisticum. Greek philosophy was not only alien 
 to the spirit of the age, but was also branded with the stigma 
 
22 
 
 of antiquity. In any case it was excluded from the domain 
 of poetry. When poetry had to choose fitting subjects, and 
 clothe them in elegant and correct diction, with pleasing fancy 
 and temperate conceits, what need was there of Plato ? 
 
 References to the Greek philosophers in this age are of the 
 merest chance character, and usually show more acquaint- 
 ance with literary tradition than with the authors themselves. 
 Even to the philosophers of the age Plato and Aristotle are 
 merely the first and least reasonable a priori and a posteriori 
 dogmatists ; even to Kant, who stands between this age 
 and the next, Plato " left the world of sense, and ventured 
 beyond on the wings of his ideas into the empty space of 
 pure understanding." l 
 
 Greek philosophy has become more than ever an external 
 ornament, accidental to the main purpose of poetry. One 
 instance might be noted as showing some attempt at sym- 
 pathy with the benighted thinkers of old. Addison's Cato, 
 sitting alone with a drawn sword and the Phaedo, begins 
 
 " It must be so ! Plato, thou reason'st well," 
 
 and goes on to a defence of immortality not unsuitable to 
 a Stoic, though coloured by eighteenth century influence : 
 " Eternity ! thou pleasing, dreadful thought ! .... 
 .... If there's a power above us, 
 And that there is, all nature cries aloud 
 In all her works, he must delight in virtue," etc. 
 
 There was, however, one rather devious bypath by which 
 some influence from Greek philosophy could operate on 
 English poetry. In a self-conscious age, poetry and poetic 
 criticism can hardly be considered apart, and criticism was 
 very much influenced by French classicism. This again 
 contained many elements derived from the Greek philo- 
 sophers. -The fascinating and stimulating work on the 
 Sublime, half way between the physics and the metaphysics 
 of criticism, gained popularity through Boileau's translation. 
 Aristotle's Poetics, though long known in England, assumed 
 new power under the French influence. The doctrine of the 
 " unities " figures largely in Dryden's Essay on Dramatic 
 Poesy : he himself (Neander) is the only one of the four 
 interlocutors to question its authority. But had English 
 drama still been living, it is doubtful whether such disputa- 
 tions would have influenced it much ; as it was, it mattered 
 little what particular misinterpretation of the Poetics was 
 followed by Colley Gibber and Mrs. Centlivre. 
 
 It is needless, then, to linger on the eighteenth century, 
 the long and necessary slumber of the English muse previous 
 1 Introduction to the Critique. 
 
23 
 
 to her second great awakening. Science had to extend her 
 boundaries, new matter of thought had to be hammered out 
 by the iron sledge of classification and subdivision before the 
 reconstruction and reshaping could begin. It is commonly 
 said that the poets of the time saw nature through their 
 library windows ; we might add that only rarely on the 
 shelves of those libraries, uncut and covered with dust, lay 
 the works of Plato and Aristotle. 
 
 V. 
 
 1800 1900. 
 
 THE close relation between poetry and contemporary thought, 
 and the position of poetry as a function of that thought, 
 were never more clearly illustrated than in the great rebirth 
 which is usually dated from the publication of the Lyrical 
 Ballads. The five great English poets in whom poetry was 
 born again were all emphatically men of one age, drawing 
 their inspiration from a common source. Hence it is impos- 
 sible to understand or appreciate their work without glancing 
 at the movements in thought of which it was the expression. 
 The chief force which moved them all alike, and which 
 made it " bliss in that dawn to be alive," was undoubtedly 
 the negation of all external constraint, the challenge thrown 
 down to convention and constituted authority. The French 
 Revolution, the Introduction to the Lyrical Ballads, and the 
 Necessity of Atheism, are all different manifestations of this 
 same spirit. Natural man unimpeded by political authority, 
 natural language free from conventional poetic diction, the 
 world of nature unaffected by an external God these were 
 but three phases of a common ideal. In all departments of 
 life the principle was laid down that whatever is constituted 
 is bad. Such an attitude of mind may well be called revolu- 
 tionary ; yet it is interesting to note that just where thought 
 seemed to break away most decisively from its previous 
 course there was really the most complete continuity. Criti- 
 cism, analysis, individualism, and even atomism, in politics, 
 ethics, and religion all these had been the watchwords of 
 the Age of Reason. It was only carrying the process one 
 step further to deny the authority of State and Church, and 
 to question the validity of the religious abstraction in which 
 eighteenth century deism had vaguely acquiesced. When 
 
2 4 
 
 the moment came, the Age of Reason was helpless before the 
 offspring of its own logic ; once more Zeus dethroned Kronos, 
 and in the chaos of conflict which ensued it seemed for a 
 time as if the nineteenth century would have to repeat the 
 further cry : 
 
 Ati/os /ScuriAeuei, rov At' eeA?7 Act/coos. 
 
 But the danger was only momentary. Once again, though 
 the cutting edge of truth was negative, there were positive 
 elements already latent in its assertion. Beside the negative 
 idea of Liberty and the arithmetical idea of Equality was set 
 the far more fruitful conception of Fraternity. In the same 
 way the " return to nature " had always a goal as well as 
 a starting-point ; State, Church and Society were denounced 
 only to enhance the glorification of " nature " in its more 
 restricted sense ; and this soon led to the admission of man 
 in his simpler social relations to the realm of poetic ortho- 
 doxy. The extreme form of the negative doctrine the 
 abstract return upon the self quickly worked itself out to 
 its own contradiction in what was known as " Wertherism," 
 and a concrete doctrine of liberty soon began to take shape. 
 Many movements in the thought of this age bear a 
 resemblance to those of Greek philosophy. The similarity 
 of the Greek hedonism and the English utilitarianism is more 
 easily exaggerated than underestimated ; it is always well to 
 remember that Shelley explicitly declared himself a utili- 
 tarian. 1 Far more striking are the reminiscences of the other 
 and nobler individualistic creed of Stoicism. The peculiar 
 stoic traces in Kant's Theory of Knowledge do not concern 
 us here so much as two of the more general doctrines. One 
 of them is the conception of a rational principle in man 
 which lifts, him above the play of accident and circumstance : 
 this influence -took shape in the doctrine of Duty, which the 
 " Intuitionist " school opposed to the Utilitarians. The 
 other, even more important poetically, is the conception of 
 a soul or principle animating external nature. Of both these 
 doctrines we find many traces, and it is noteworthy that both 
 assisted the -positive movement in the "return to nature." 
 Philosophic or poetic thought of this age always tended to 
 lapse into an attitude, which might be summed up in Bishop 
 Heber's words, that " every prospect pleases, and only man 
 is vile." The first part of this statement receives a new and 
 richer meaning when nature is conceived as a great organic 
 system, inspired by a " soul " ; the second part is corrected, 
 when man is conceived, not as a creature of mere animal 
 desires, and with more than an animal's power of satisfying 
 1 Cf. Defence of Poetry. 
 
25 
 
 them, but as the organ of a rational principle, a being who at 
 once issues and obeys the categorical imperative of duty. 
 
 We can only touch briefly on the five great men who 
 renewed the youth of English poetry. Of these Coleridge 
 is both actually and logically the first. He definitely stands 
 between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with one 
 foot in either poetic world. Much of his work is redolent of 
 the Age of Reason ; much again is directly revolutionary : 
 most of the small portion which is really great is purely 
 romantic ; incidentally, he is a Kantian, a disciple of Goethe, 
 and a Christian pietist. Yet in the poetic medley which 
 sprang from this philosophic chaos we can see the germ of 
 nearly the whole of nineteenth century poetry ; and his 
 personal influence on literature is almost immeasurable. For 
 this reason it is to be traced in the works of others rather 
 than his own. In nearly all his philosophic moods Coleridge 
 owed something to Greek philosophy ; but direct reminis- 
 cences are few. Of these one deserves notice the passage 
 in the Sonnet on a Journey Homeward, 
 
 ' And some have said 
 We lived, ere yet this robe of flesh we wore." 
 
 which no doubt inspired Wordsworth's more famous utter- 
 ance of the same doctrine. In general, the Kantian influence 
 had led Coleridge at once too far and not far enough to be 
 consciously in sympathy with Greek philosophy ; on the one 
 hand, the simpler antitheses of sense and reason, ideal and 
 actual, could not satisfy one who had faced with Kant the 
 mightier antinomies of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, 
 the empirical and universal self ; on the other hand, Idealism 
 had not yet advanced far enough to catch the full meaning of 
 those half-hints that " all nature is akin," and that " all men 
 aim at one end, divining it to be somewhat." 
 
 Wordsworth's work seems by contrast strangely uniform 
 and equable in tone, if not in poetic quality. He was never 
 as deeply touched as Coleridge by the negative side of the 
 " return to nature " ; the change in his views supposed by 
 some to be represented in Browning's " Lost Leader," only 
 made him, instead of a mild revolutionary, a mild reactionary. 
 His real source of inspiration was always nature, and the 
 simpler social relations of man. But his quietism was no 
 inert or unreflecting acquiescence ; rather it was a creed as 
 thoroughly meditated and as fervently upheld as that of 
 the wildest revolutionary. Nature as a mechanical or even 
 organic system bound by law, man as a spirit who wins his 
 freedom by obedience to the same law in a higher form 
 these ideas, if not consciously expressed, are everywhere 
 
26 
 
 latent in Wordsworth's poetry. Hence come his many and 
 striking affinities with Greek philosophy. The old funda- 
 mental doctrine, " Live according to nature," is restated with 
 a yet deeper meaning. Even more striking are the reminis- 
 cences of Stoicism. It was doubtless some Kantian influence 
 permeating through Coleridge which helped to mould the 
 Ode to Duty ; even here the idea contained in the lines 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong." 
 
 goes far beyond Kant, who would at most admit the pheno- 
 menal world as a " type of the intelligible." But in his 
 interpretation of the " anima mundi " Wordsworth stands 
 quite alone ; no other poet meditated so profoundly, or 
 expressed so fully the 
 
 " sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." 
 
 The same doctrine is maintained, in a tone alternately more 
 fervid and more despairing, by Shelley. More than any poet 
 of the age he assails man as he is, governed by kings, directed 
 by priests, bowing the knee to convention ; more than any 
 other poet, he pictures with hopeful imagination what man 
 may become. But throughout all there is the fundamental 
 idea of a spirit or principle in the natural world, which finds 
 its highest manifestation in mankind. There are times 
 notably in "Prometheus Unbound" 1 when Shelley seems 
 almost a lineal descendant of the Italian Platonists, in pro- 
 claiming Love the ultimate principle of the Universe. Really, 
 however, he has given a new meaning to the term. Love is 
 no longer the abstraction of sensual passion, but rather the 
 desire for the Good, or the goal towards which all things strive. 
 Shelley at least would have subscribed to the opening sentence 
 of Aristotle's Ethics ; and this fundamental Greek doctrine has 
 never been more splendidly expressed than in the close of 
 Adonais : 
 
 " that sustaining Love 
 
 Which through the web of being blindly wove 
 By man and beast and earth and air and sea, 
 Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 
 The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me 
 Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality." 
 
 There are many reminiscences in Shelley of another Greek 
 doctrine that of the One and the Many. The famous simile 
 in " Adonais " is introduced by the lines 
 
 1 Esp., Act II., Sc. 4 ; and the Song of the Earth in Act IV. 
 
27 
 
 "The One remains, the Many change and pass ; 
 Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly." 
 
 while in " Hellas" a new form is given to it in the speech of 
 Ahasuerus who speaks of the One, beside which 
 
 "this Whole 
 
 Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers, 
 
 With all the silent and tempestuous workings 
 
 By which they have been, are, or cease to be, 
 
 Is but a vision." 
 
 On the two last poets of the group we need not linger. 
 Neither Keats nor Byron was deeply touched by the spirit of 
 Greek philosophy. Keats, of course, was cut off from direct 
 knowledge of the original ; fnrther he was less in sympathy 
 than the other poets of his time with those movements in 
 thought which were most akin to the Greek. In so far as he 
 may be said to have joined in the "return to nature,' it was 
 more by a direct and unreflecting intuition of the spirituality 
 of the natural world than by a conscious effort from convention 
 towards freedom; in this respect, at least, Keats was really 
 an Elizabethan. Byron, on the other hand, represented the 
 negative moment in its extreme form ; and in seeking a nega- 
 tive liberty he stumbled vainly after the will-o'-the-wisp 
 phantom of caprice. Endowed with an active and vigorous 
 imagination, he had little speculative insight ; romanticism 
 appealed to him more on its historical and legendary side. 
 Wherever, as in Cain, he touches the greater realities, we feel 
 that he is really playing with words ; his immensities and 
 sublimities seldom ring true. Hence, in his references to 
 Greek philosophy he never rises above the commonplace view, 
 as in his address to Plato and his "confounded sophistries," 1 
 and the description of 
 
 " Aristotle's rules, 
 
 The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, 
 Which makes so many poets, and some fools." 2 
 
 It is small consolation to find the same easy patronage ex- 
 tended to Bishop Berkeley. 3 In his treatment of philosophy 
 Byron, the Republican cosmopolite, proved himself at last an 
 English nobleman. 
 
 Keats and Byron are, in different ways, examples of a 
 movement in thought then only nascent, but in its later growth 
 of great importance. This was the conception of organic 
 development, since canonized under the title of Evolution, 
 which had already in Hegel's hands transformed the idealist 
 philosophy and shaped the lines of future speculation. It 
 gave a meaning and a purpose to the mediaevalism and passion 
 for the antique already prominent in the thought of the Revo- 
 
 1 Don Juan, I, 116. 2 ib. 201. 3 ib. XI., i. 
 
28 
 
 lution period ; for to it the past was no longer a dead thing. 
 Hence came the interest in history which was perhaps the 
 most abiding of Byron's fitful desires ; hence came too that 
 power of living again in the past, that "historical imagination" 
 of which " St. Agnes' Eve " and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" 
 are the first fruits. Most of all was this idea important as it 
 affected philosophy. More and more men came to regard 
 past systems not as definite solutions of particular questions, 
 to be accepted if right and rejected if wrong, but rather as 
 stages in the growth of a thought, which continually faces the 
 same problems with an ever deepening comprehension of their 
 meaning. 
 
 When, therefore, we come to estimate the debt of nine- 
 teenth century poets to Greek philosophy, we feel that it is of 
 quite a different kind to that of previous centuries. On the 
 one hand, Greek philosophy is more thoroughly studied and 
 understood than before. On the other hand, for this very 
 reason, it really has less influence ; it can be comprehended 
 just because it has passed away; it is no longer regarded as a 
 system, so to say, armed and militant in the arena of dialectics. 
 Thus to nineteenth century thought it is as a garment with 
 which the poet can clothe himself by an imaginative effort ; 
 he does not alternately hug it to him or cast it from him in 
 the oscillations of faith. There is nothing in the nineteenth 
 century resembling the Elizabethan Platonism ; rather, we 
 find presentations of Greek thought, sympathetic, imaginative, 
 full of the colour which comes of detached study, and the life 
 with which self-conscious thought can endow its past. 
 
 Examples of this modern treatment of Greek philosophy 
 may be found in any of the Victorian poets, but it will suffice 
 to note a few only, since they really fall outside the limits of 
 our subject. Perhaps the most elaborate attempt to reproduce 
 a phase of Greek thought is found in Matthew Arnold's 
 "Empedocles on Etna," a somewhat unequal dramatic medley, 
 redeemed by the splendour of certain passages, and by most 
 beautiful lyrics. It is characteristic of the Victorian spirit to 
 go behind the great age of Greek philosophy to that of the 
 Hylozoists, and to indicate the promise of what was to come. 
 Especially striking is the apostrophe to the stars, beginning 
 
 " No, no, ye stars, there is no death with you, 
 No languor, no decay " 
 
 which touches on the typical Greek conception of the heavens 
 as the realm of invariable law. 
 
 Tennyson, on the whole, found the mythology and poetry 
 of the ancients more congenial than their philosophy. Possibly 
 he was influenced to some extent by the spirit of Positivism, 
 
29 
 
 which regarded the metaphysical era as an unenlightened 
 predecessor of the scientific, and sought to reconcile the old 
 antinomy of nature and spirit by rechristening the terms 
 phenomenon and epiphenomenon. He seems to oscillate 
 between a mild materialist despair and a mild religious hope- 
 fulness. Greek philosophy appealed to him chiefly on its 
 imaginative side, or as refracted through the medium of ancient 
 poets. In the " Princess" he touches on the more poetical parts 
 of Plato, drawing the picture of 
 
 " Diotima, teaching him that died 
 
 Of hemlock." 
 
 Again in Lucretius we have a most beautiful presentation of 
 the old Greek atomism 
 
 " the flaring atom-streams 
 And torrents of her myriad universe 
 Ruining along the illimitable inane." 
 
 But we feel all through that the poet Lucretius stands between 
 Tennyson and Epicureanism, as in the passage about the gods 
 
 " who haunt 
 
 The lucid interspace of world and world 
 Where never creeps a cloud nor moves a wind .... 
 .... Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
 Their sacred everlasting calm." 
 
 To collect all the reminiscences of Greek philosophy in 
 Browning's works would be an endless task ; overt references 
 are common, and still commoner are turns of phrase and 
 suggestions subtly recalling the Greek original. In the first 
 act of Paracelsus alone we find a reference to the recollection 
 theory 
 
 11 That life was blotted out not so completely 
 But scattered wrecks enough of it remain " 
 to " the soul being darkened by sense "- 
 
 " Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in 
 
 This perfect, clear perception which is truth 
 and to the two world theory 
 
 " those who set themselves 
 To find the nature of the spirit they bore 
 Refused to fit them to its narrow sphere 
 But chose to figure forth another world." 
 
 On the other hand, Browning rarely makes philosophy or the 
 philosophic life his main theme. It might even be held that 
 he was naturally inclined to slight philosophy, not because it 
 might end in doubt and unrest, but because it might end in 
 static calm. Thus when he treats Epicureanism in Cleon the 
 end is no tranquil Ataraxia; on the contrary there is all 
 through the poem a growing note of sadness, rising to the 
 poignant cry of despair 
 
 " The horror quickening still from year to year, 
 The consummation coming past escape 
 When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy, 
 
30 
 
 When all my works wherein I prove my worth 
 Being present still to mock me in men's mouths .... 
 .... I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man, 
 The man who loved his life so overmuch, 
 Sleep in my urn." 
 
 It would be an attractive task to pursue further our search 
 for the many beautiful passages in which modern poets have re- 
 shaped Greek thought ; but such a task, as we have said above, 
 really lies outside our present purpose. The nineteenth century 
 spirit involves a loss as well as a gain ; the more fully we 
 grasp a phase of past thought the more definitely it becomes 
 a thing of the past, a thing outside us ; it can never again be 
 a present and living influence to us, as it was to the Eliza- 
 bethans. We can see now that the Greek thinkers were only 
 the first who dealt with the eternal problems ; the oppositions 
 which they faced have deepened, the content of philosophic 
 speculation has been enriched by the intervening ages, and it 
 is only by an imaginative effort that we can put ourselves in 
 their places, and feel again with them the wonder out of which 
 philosophy sprang. Least of all can poetry and the thought 
 on which it rests remain content with the partial and limited 
 solution, which was all that Greek philosophy could give us ; 
 rather, while regarding it as the seed from which modern 
 thought grew and watching the process of its gathering strength 
 and volume through history, poetry must still rest ultimately 
 on the primal impulse, which "reaches after the Good, divining 
 it to be something " which can see the ideal in the actual, and 
 invest the world of nature with a character more than natural. 
 
 All criticism and analysis of poetry must always end in a 
 certain sense of failure. When we have noted influences, and 
 causes, and movements, when we have tabulated our groups 
 and dated our periods, we must always remember that behind 
 all there lies, inscrutable and indefinable, the spirit of poetry 
 itself. The ultimate fact is not that thought and diction and 
 metre were in a certain state of development, but that these 
 things being so, poetry sprang to life. More especially must 
 English poetry, whose dominant note has always been vigour 
 and spontaneity, remain in essence a mystery, like the life of a 
 man or the even more intangible life of a nation. At most we 
 can say that at certain times some definitely formative influence 
 was exercised on it by the thinkers of old, while in the thought 
 which lies behind it was always contained the living seed of 
 Greek philosophy. For the rest, we must listen rather than 
 speak, and receive in humble reverence the greatest and most 
 splendid heritage of Englishmen, 
 
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