Harmony and the poet: The creative ordering of reality [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9783111341842, 9789027930866

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD

Indiana University Series Maior, 4

Harmony and the Poet The Creative Ordering of Reality

Marie Antoinette Manca

Mouton Publishers The Hague • Paris • New York

ISBN 90 279 3086 4 © Copyright 1978 Mouton Publishers, The Hague No part of this issue may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers. Printed in Germany

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Thomas G. Bergin, Geoffrey Hartman, R.W.B. Lewis, Henri Peyre, and René Wellek for their advice, valuable comments, and corrections from which I have greatly benefited. I am especially indebted to R.W.B. Lewis for his unfailing encouragement and many helpful criticisms and suggestions. Any errors, needless to say, are my own. I wish to express my gratitude to John Temple Swing for his continued interest and encouragement during the revisionai stages of this work. My greatest debt is to Lina Manca who helped me at every stage and made this study possible. In its original form, this work was presented as a doctoral thesis at Yale University and subsequently revised for publication.

And you 0 my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, 0 my soul. Walt Whitman

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Remarks on Critical Method

1

Part One: I. Harmony: The Two Major Modes

11

Part Two: II. Justice, Piety, and the Dantean Quest III. The Endless Jar

31 71

Part Three: IV. Whitman's "Fang'd And Glittering One" V. The Disinherited Quest: Arthur Rimbaud VI. The Harmonious Vision of Song VII. Hart Crane: The Bridge

97 123 143 159

Selected Bibliography

181

Index

189

INTRODUCTION: REMARKS ON CRITICAL METHOD

1. In the following study we will be concerned with the role of, and forms assumed by, the two major modes of harmony in artistic creation. We will not engage in a specific exegesis of music and musical modes in their relation to literature. The study will focus, instead, on the philosophical and social implications of the modes of harmony as they are operative in literary creation. A concept of harmony may appear in the form of musical imagery or it may manifest itself in various other types of imagery, such as that found in different outlooks on the underlying relationships between spirit and matter, microcosm and macrocosm, man and society. It may be related to the ancient concept of the harmony of the spheres insofar as that concept is itself relevant to the cosmos, man, and society. The thesis of this study is that the ideal of harmony in its various forms and manifestations, plays an all-important role inhuman life and is a major inspirational element in artistic creation. In the course of the work, an attempt has been made to remain free from the restrictive bias of classificatory "labels", schools, and formal approach. If one should wish to isolate a basic guiding assumption in this study, one could possibly point to the implicit belief that despite the discontinuous and often contradictory aspect of human experience, there does exist an underlying unity of purpose in human striving and artistic creation. It is a unity, however, which may assume widely differing forms in accordance with the particular circumstances affecting the artist, and it may encompass incongruity as well as congruity, dissonance as well as consonance. I have called this unity of knowledge and of human striving "harmony". It can be and is often called by other "names" which in no way alter its basic meaning or the fundamental human experience it points to. 2. Before proceeding, so as to avoid confusion, some further remarks concerning approach and terminology are in order. Although the reader will encounter the phrase "idea of harmony" throughout this study, the basic assumptions underlying the discussion are emphatically divergent from those inspiring a history of ideas approach. The discipline known as "the history of ideas" derives its existence from Hegel and owes it major development to Lovejoy. It is beyond my purpose here to enter upon an extended discussion of Lovejoy's work. Some clarifications, however, might be of use.

2 Lovejoy's method involves the identification of the "unit-idea" ("a single specific proposition or principle"), which the historian of ideas then traces through time and setting . His method is comparative in that it seeks to trace the unit-idea through "all the provinces of history in which it figures in any important degree, whether those provinces are called philosophy, science, literature, art, religion, or politics". 1 The basic assumptions on which Lovejoy's work rests, however, are historicistic in nature. According to Lovejoy, it is impossible to understand an idea and its author without understanding the historical setting and times in which the idea originated. As he indicates in The Great Chain of Being: . . . it is, of course, in any case true that a historical understanding even of the few great writers of an age is impossible without an acquaintance with their general background in the intellectual life and common moral and aesthetic valuations of that age; and that the character of this background has to be ascertained by actual historical inquiry into the nature and interrelations of the ideas then generally prevalent. 2 To fully understand an idea and its author, Lovejoy affirms, one must trace it "connectedly through all the phases of man's reflective life in which those workings manifest themselves, or through as many of them as the historian's resources permit". 3 Thus, for instance, Lovejoy gives an analytical enumeration of the uses of the term "nature" as related to norms in antiquity in which he distinguishes sixty-six meanings of the word. 4 Critics of Lovejoy's method such as Leo Spitzer, René Wellek, or J. Hillis Miller, have strongly objected to the atomism and isolationistic tendency in his work. Leo Spitzer, who emphasizes the unifying connections between words and ideas rather than the distinctions in the form of isolated unit-ideas, was an especially vocal critic of Lovejoy's work, particularly in his two articles: "Geistesgeschichte vs. History of Ideas Applied to Hitlerism", in Journal of the History of Ideas V (1944), pp. 191-203, and "History of Ideas versus Reading of Poetry", in Southern Review VI (1941), pp. 584-609. Also René Wellek objects to Lovejoy's "excessive intellectualism" and to his approach which "imposes purely philosophical standards on works of the imagination". 5 Like Spitzer, he takes issue with the atomistic bent in Lovejoy's work. For example, as against Lovejoy's dissection of the word "Romanticism" into a plurality of different romanticisms 6 in which this term "has come to mean so many things, that, by itself, it means nothing", 7 Wellek rightly argues that "there is, on the contrary a profound coherence and mutual implication between romantic views of nature, imagination, and symbol". He goes on to point out that: Without such a view of nature we could not believe in the significance

3

of symbol and myth. Without symbol and myth the poet would lack the tools for the insight into reality which he claimed, and without such an epistemology, which believes in the creativity of the human mind, there would not be a living nature and a true symbolism.8 In agreement with this line of thought, J. Hillis Miller takes issue with the separation of a unit-idea from its "living context in the thought of a writer". Such a separation, according to Miller, jeopardizes both the cultural unity of a period and the unity of thought of the author: Lovejoy's attitude toward Western history was a bit like that of a positivistic anthropologist collecting the strange myths and beliefs of the aborigines. This detachment is apparent in his habit of separating the statement of a "unit-idea" from its living context in the thought of a writer and presenting it in cold isolation where it can be subjected to his merciless power of logical analysis. This analysis puts in question both the idea that there is a unity in the culture of a period and the idea that there is a unity in the thought of the individual man. 9 Miller sees in the work of Lovejoy "the negative energy present in a rigorous historicism". 10 The basic assumptions of this study on the role of harmony in artistic creation are very different from Lovejoy's. The historicistic stance of Lovejoy presumes a fundamental change in human thought and attitudes from one age and setting to another — hence the necessity for him to study ideas in their original period and setting. This study, on the contrary, is developed on the premise that there is a basic continuity in human thought and nature. The understanding of a writer or poet in this study, therefore, is not based on the analysis and comprehension of historical contingency, but rather on the comprehension of human psychology. The implicit Aristotelianism in his emphasis on the isolation of unit-ideas and on the classification of types and ideacomplexes (which is based on a phenomenological apperception of reality) is also divergent from the assumptions of this study. In other words, this study is based on an approach that maintains that to understand Dante's thought and work, for example, it is not essential to isolate, classify and go into all of the technical details of medieval scholastic doctrine, that such knowledge would be useful only to illuminate some minor aspects of his work as a poet. Such an approach also affirms that Dante's thought and creative inspiration may be fruitfully compared with that of artists who are both of periods other than his and whose artistic stature and production might be different from his. This study would agree in essence with that outlook which would view the poet as one who penetrates into the collective psyche of mankind and makes manifest his discoveries in artistic form. It would basically concur with

4 the statement that the poet's intuition takes him into "that matrix of life in which all men are embedded, which imparts common rhythm to all human existence, and allows the individual to communicate his feeling and his striving to mankind as a whole". 11 Finally, whereas Lovejoy aims at distinction and logical clarity in terms of the isolation of unit-ideas and the clarification of the "logical" relations between them, this study embraces the belief that excessive logical clarity is basically inimical to and incompatible with art. To a great extent, there is an inverse proportion between clarity and meaning as far as a work of art is concerned. The task of the Critic before Criticism can be compared to that of the "eternal and lucid Don Quixote" of whom René Char speaks in his prose on Rimbaud. The desire and duty of the critic is to explain the meaning of the artistic work, that is, to render explicit what has been appropriately defined by the same Char as: "le fascinant impossible, degré le plus haut du compréhensible". 12 As the clarity a critic achieves in analyzing the work of art increases, the meaning of the work decreases. The work of art disintegrates before the analysis of the logician. Logical clarification is necessary to the realms of philosophy and science, but not to that of art. The realm of art is that of a symbol. A symbol's significance depends on the multiplicity of meanings it encompasses and points to. In a paradoxical sense, the source of its meaning lies in an essential obscurity. Clarification, on the other hand, is necessarily limitation. To wish to clarify a symbol logically by identifying sixty-six possible meanings can result only in the loss of the fundamental symbolic character amidst a mass of details. For the symbolic meaning conveyed by the poet includes those sixty-six meanings and probably many more than the logician has perceived. Its essential meaning depends on the multiplicity of its significance within the unity of its form. It is the unrealized meanings and therefore the inexhaustible wealth of potentiality that makes a symbol, and therefore a work of art, great. The appeal of great poetry such as the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, or Goethe's Faust, lies precisely in their inexhaustible wealth of meaning, in their perpetually self-renewing signification, rather than in their one-time clarity. The critic must beware lest in seeking to eliminate ambiguity he also eliminate art. As Jacques Barzun has commented with regard to the critic with a "method": But as soon as the "method" turns criticism into a species of decoding, the man whose attachment to art is warm and direct must decline the game. He knows that the grand rule of life, Probability, also underlies art, and that such a rule can be applied only by intelligence, not by system. He knows how irrational and inspired Criticism has to be to keep up with art. He knows — and this makes him modest — that the critic's task, which is necessary, is also impossible . . . 1 3

5 3. Again with regard to approach, a few remarks might be in order concerning two works whose subject resembles my own. I am referring, on the one hand, to Leo Spitzer's work on harmony and particularly to the volume dedicated to this subject entitled Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 14 and, on the other hand, to John Hollander's book, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Since the subject matter these two critics treat is in some ways similar to mine, it might be well to stress at the outset that both my approach, and, in the case of Hollander, also the nature of my subject matter, differ from theirs. In this study I am concerned neither with conducting a lexicographical study of the term "harmony" nor with the type of historical semantics engaged in by Leo Spitzer. In Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Spitzer seeks to "reconstruct the many-layered occidental background for a German word: the concept of world harmony which underlies the word Stimmung" ("Introduction", p. 1). He traces the Platonic idea of the harmony of the spheres, the musica mundana, from antiquity through the Reformation and points to the breakdown of the old belief in world harmony (in his thought, the Platonic "harmony of the spheres") in the seventeenth century. John Hollander, instead, depicts the relevance of performed music and speculative musical "ideology" to English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He seeks to demonstrate the progressive disintegration of the old Platonic idea of the musica mundana. Hollander views this disintegration in terms of successive stages in the de-mythologizing of poetry's view of music, which proceeds "from the canonical Medieval Christian view that all actual human music bears a definite relation to the eternal, abstract (and inaudible) "music" of universal order, to the completely de-Christianized use of such notions in late seventeenth-century poetry as decorative metaphor and mere turns of wit . . ," 1 5 The progressive loss of faith in the notion of world harmony under the impact of the new scientific spirit he calls "The Untuning of the Sky". This study, unlike Spitzer's and Hollander's work, is not exclusively or even primarily concerned with the notion of harmony contained in the Platonic idea of the "harmony of the spheres". The notion of musica mundana, in this work, is but one aspect of the concept of Harmony — an aspect which we shall discuss in the next chapter. Moreover, since this is not a lexical analysis, the reader will not find a cataloguing or notation of all the specific uses of the term "harmony" by the poets in this study. Indeed, as will become increasingly apparent in the next chapter, since the concept of Harmony is integrally related to a vision of reality, it is not necessary for a poet to use the specific term "harmony" for the concept of Harmony to be present in and central to his work. An idea can be expressed by an ensemble of symbolic connotations as well as by a clear denotative sign (e.g. the term "harmony"). Substantive symbolic meaning does not necessarily require a specific "name".

6 The ensemble of connotations associated with the symbolic meaning of a concept may be present without the concept's specific name being mentioned. The superior poet is not bound by "names". On the contrary, his aim is usually to render the univalent word plurivalent in order to express or refer to that which lies beyond logical expression and the finitude of language. It is, therefore, often up to the perceptiveness of the critic to recognize the presence of a concept, when its denotative name is absent. The specific nature of the role of the idea of harmony in a work of art is based on the artist's perception of the order which for him underlies existence. The achievement of a vision or state of harmony involves the reconciliation, integration, or correlation of the multiplicity of human experience into a consistent and orderly whole. This whole, or conception of reality, may be conceived in terms of the transcendence of all discord. Such a formulation, which we encounter first comprehensively exposed in Western civilization in the work of Plato, is one of the major modes in which the concept of harmony may manifest itself in the work of an artist. On the other hand, the ordering of ultimate reality may be seen to encompass discord as an integral part of its essential nature. The "endless jars" of the opposing elements in nature are in this case accepted as a constituent part of ultimate reality. This formulation, which in Western civilization may be traced back to the thought of Heraclitus, is the second major mode in which the idea of harmony may appear. A concept of harmony, therefore, involves a vision of reality. It refers to the ordering of human experience into meaningful structure. The understanding and perception of harmony provides a sense of inner calm and tranquillity to man. This permits him to achieve that human fulfillment which comes with the full actualization of the potential proper to his nature. Such fulfillment is inseparable from his structure of values and meaning. This structure of values in turn is determined by his vision of harmony. The vision of and quest for the realization of this vision of Harmony, therefore, is central to human life in all of its dimensions. It is especially significant to artistic creation since the concept of harmony entertained by the artist informs and moulds the nature and structure of his work. In the essay that follows, I have decided to center my discussion on certain authors and poets in whom, to my mind, one can most clearly and forcefully perceive the concept of harmony at work as an essential operative element in their artistic creation. Many other poets could have been chosen besides the ones I have included, and, I must admit, the criterion for the selection is to a certain degree subjective. The number of poets to be discussed was limited to six because it was felt that a deeper examination of a few poets would be more fruitful and revealing than a necessarily more superficial "survey" approach that examines many different poets. On the other hand, poets from different centuries, countries, and backgrounds are discussed so as to provide

7 a broad spectrum and to show the perseverance of the idea of harmony and its importance in the thought and work of man throughout different nations and ages. We will first examine the meaning of "Harmony" and the formulations of the concept's two major modes as they initially appear in Western civilization in the thought of Plato and Heraclitus. Following this, we will establish the framework of our discussion by comparing these two formulations in the work of two of the major literary minds in the West: Dante and Shakespeare. We will then go on to examine the role of the two major modes of harmony in the work of four modern poets: Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, René Char, and Hart Crane. Because of the vastness of the canon of some of the poets treated, a certain fragmentation cannot be avoided in discussing their work. However, unless the unity of thought of an author is denied, there is always a central source of inspiration that informs his work. It is this central source of inspiration, which corresponds to a vision of reality and of man's relation to that reality, that I have sought to portray and illustrate, drawing support from various artistic creations within the whole of the poet's canon, creations which are almost always different artistic expressions stemming from the unitary source of inspiration running through all his works.

NOTES 1. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 15. 2. The Great Chain of Being, p. 20. 3. The Great Chain of Being, p. 15. 4. See: Appendix to A.O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935). See also: "Nature as Aesthetic Norm" and " 'Nature' as Norm in Tertullian" in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948). 5. René Wellek, "American Literary Scholarship", in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 306. 6. See: "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas", Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), pp. 257-78, and "On the Discriminations of Romanticisms", in Essays in the History of Ideas, pp. 228-53. 7. René Wellek, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History", in Concepts of Criticism, p. 128. For a comprehensive review of Lovejoy's Essay in the History of Ideas, see also: René Wellek, Germanic Review, 24 (1949), 306-10. 8. Ibid., p. 197. 9. J. Hillis Miller, "Literature and Religion", in Relations of Literary Study, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association, 1967), p. 119. 10. J. Hillis Miller, p. 118. 11. Carl Gustav Jung, "Psychology and Literature", in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Vol. 15 Collected Works, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966), p. 105. Also printed in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1933), p. 172.

8 12. Partage formel, XLVII, in: Poèmes et prose choisis (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 209. 13. Jacques Baizun, The Energies of Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 16-17. 14. The original version of Spitzer's work appeared in two articles in Traditio, II (1944), pp. 409-64, and Traditio, III (1945), pp. 307-64. 15. John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, p. 19.

PART ONE

I

HARMONY: THE TWO MAJOR MODES

What is the relationship between the creative process in art and the concept of Harmony? According to Suzanne K. Langer, "art is the objectivation of feeling and the subjectivation of nature". 1 If the prime function of art is to express the fundamental tensions in existence, if the aim of art is "to make felt the tensions of life from the diffused somatic tonus of vital sense to the highest intensities of mental and emotional experience . . then the creation of a work of art is the subjective expression of the fundamental opposites inherent in being and their objectivation or correlation in aesthetic form. What is the nature of these experiential tensions expressed in art and in what way are they related to Harmony? Harmony from one point of view may be looked upon as that Whole whose two poles are God and the World. Creativity, as Alfred North Whitehead indicates, achieves its supreme task of transforming multiplicity into unity through the dialectical tension between these two poles: God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality there are two concrescent poles of realization — 'enjoyment' and 'appetition', that is, the 'physical' and the 'conceptual'. For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles. 3 Moreover, art, in Whitehead's opinion, "at its highest exemplifies the metaphysical doctrine of the interweaving of absoluteness upon relativity". 4 According to him, "in the work of art the relativity becomes the harmony of the composition, and the absoluteness is the claim for separate individuality advanced by component factors". 5 Harmony is the basic driving principle of human creativity and hence of civilizational advance. As Whitehead points out, "in its broadest sense art is civilization. For civilization is nothing other than the unremitting aim at the major perfections of harmony". 6 The search for the understanding or creation of harmony in nature leads to creativity and discovery in the physical sciences; the quest for harmony in man and society

12 leads to creativity in the realm of the social sciences; and the search for harmony through aesthetic creation leads to art. In other words, art expresses the dialectical opposites which constitute the nature of the world and seeks to give some meaning to these tensions, either positive or negative. (Even the demonstration of negative meaning confers some meaning, for pure meaninglessness would be Non-Being). The artist through his art tries to impose an order on these tensions or to discover one in their interaction. 7 That is, out of the multiplicity of process (or becoming), the artist attempts to arrive at the meaningfulness of purpose of the One through the 'making' of a new 'order', an order of reality which is also that of the work of art. 8 The search for this new order is at the same time a search for Harmony. Such a search may express itself as a quest for a transcendental being - God, the absolute — or it may take the form of a quest for meaningfulness in and through life. In the first case, the artist tends to reject the opposites or to assign a diminished reality to them. The center of reality in this instance is generally seen to reside in an ideal world beyond the world of becoming; and the attainment of Harmony is seen to consist in a resolution of the opposites that characterize becoming. In the second case, instead, the artist tends to seek meaning and order within the context of the tensions in experiential being. The center of reality is placed in the dialectical flux and change of sense experience. The quest for Harmony occurs within the context of relativity. The realization and fulfillment of Harmony itself comes to depend on the individualistic resources of the artist. The harmony achieved in this case is a balance of unstable opposites, perpetually endangered and destroyed by the forces of becoming. Its existence depends on the continually renewed effort of the artist to guard and to reconstitute the dynamic balance once it is lost. The difference between these two conceptions of Harmony is substantial and leads to two basically different conceptions of art and of life. The belief in and search for the first kind of Harmony — absolute Harmony — leads to the type of sublimation found, for example, in Dante and in most mystical poetry where supreme reality is attained by leaving the world ultimately behind. It consists in a resolution of all tensions. If, for some reason, the pressure of the opposites inherent in the sense experience world of becoming makes it impossible for the artist to contemplate the attainment of such absolute Harmony, the harmony then envisaged is the relative "balance" of opposing tensions that we see, for example, in the work of Shakespeare and in that of most modern poets. The first view of Harmony admits the existence of eternal, absolute values, independent of the human mind. The work of art becomes an expression of those values and by association acquires some of the permanent and eternal aura of the ideal it portrays. In the second case, the Harmony depicted in the work of art is considered to be perpetually on the verge of dissolution and the work also is therefore endangered. "Une

13 poussière qui tombe sur la main occupée à tracer le poème, les foudroie, poème et main", 9 writes René Char. In this case both the Harmony portrayed and the work of art itself are seen to be dependent on human endeavour. No state of ultimate tranquillity is depicted because none can be reached in real life, or if it is depicted as a remote ideal, the impossibility of attaining it is also portrayed. "There is always a frustration in Discord", 10 Whitehead has observed, and any system which seeks to include Discord within a mode of Harmony is bound to reveal the instability and, hence, frustration inherent in such an association. This, however, is not to say that tranquillity is excluded from this second vision of reality. The tranquillity envisaged, however, is a relative one, a tranquillity subject to flux and contingency. The essence of Harmony is indeed a state of psychic tranquillity or Peace, whether of a relative or of an absolute kind. Peace is Harmony; it is also Beauty and Truth, as Whitehead indicates: The attainment of Truth belongs to the essence of Peace. By this it is meant that the intuition constituting the essence of Peace has as its objective that Harmony whose interconnections involve Truth. A defect in Truth is a limitation to Harmony. There can be no secure efficacy in the Beauty which hides within itself the dislocations of falsehood. 11 Peace, and hence Harmony, requires the "conformation of Appearance to Reality", whether one locates these categories in the world of sense or in the world of ideas or both. If such conformation cannot be reached in some degree, it is a signal of the decadence of civilization: The essential truth that Peace demands is the conformation of Appearance to Reality. There is the Reality from which the occasion of experience springs - a Reality of inescapable, stubborn fact; and there is the Appearance with which the occasion attains its final individuality — an appearance including its adjustment of the Universe by simplification, valuation, transmutation, anticipation. A feeling of dislocation of Appearance from Reality is the final destructive force, robbing life of its zest of adventure. It spells the decadence of civilization, by stripping from it the very reason for its existence. 12 The achievement of a conformation of Appearance to Reality is of course the attainment of Harmony. It involves the realization of the psychic tranquillity and balance which is both the substance and the result of such an attainment. The Harmony achieved, which is also a vision of reality, may be, as we indicated previously, of an absolute or of a relative nature. In its absolute form, Harmony corresponds to the vision of reality expounded in Plato and in neoPlatonic and idealistic modes of thought. In its relative form, Harmony corre-

14 sponds to the vision of reality first fully expressed in Western thought by Heraclitus. It is indeed in reaction to the notion of relativity advanced by Heraclitus and taken up by the Sophists that Socrates set out in search of absolute values, and Plato and Aristotle set up their systems of thought. 1 3 These two visions of reality correspond to the two major modes of Harmony. It is with the examination of the role of these two modes in the work of the poets of this study that we will be primarily interested. For ease of reference, I have called the one mode "Platonic" and the other "Heraclitean". None of the poets in this study adhere to one or the other mode completely. Dante is the poet who comes closest to a Platonic vision of Harmony. The other poets, although sometimes entertaining the possibility of Platonic Harmony as a distant ideal, are either torn between the two modes, or move in various ways toward a Heraclitean vision of Harmony. The thesis of this study is that the quest for Harmony, either in its Platonic or Heraclitean form, is a major inspiring source of artistic creativity, and, hence, of civilizational advance. Before going on to discuss our six poets, in this chapter we will first examine the meaning of these major modes of harmony since one or the other, or both, appear as central inspirational visions in these poets, and, it might be ventured, in most artistic creation. These two modes, it might be added, represent a basic division in the poetic imagination, and the adherence to one or the other is often a major source of disagreement among critics. _ In calling the two major modes of Harmony "Platonic" and "Heraclitean", I do not mean to imply that these modes of harmony did not exist before Plato and Heraclitus. Parallels to the modes of thought I identified in the two Greek philosophers can indeed be drawn back to ancient oriental civilizations. The Gilgamesh bard's vision of harmony or that of the anonymous writer of the Mesopotamian Dialogue of Pessimism are as much "Heraclitean" as certain ancient Hindu or Buddhistic mystical writings could anachronistically be called "Platonic". The two major modes of Harmony which for Western civilization I have identified as "Platonic" and "Heraclitean" are, as we indicated, two visions of reality. As such they may be found to reappear throughout the course of human time and artistic creation. However, since our Western heritage has its main foundations in Greek thought and writings, and since the average Western reader is most familiar with these writings, in seeking to define these modes of harmony, I thought it best to begin with their presence in Greek thought and philosophy. Though it is not my purpose here to write a history of the development of the term 'harmony', an excursion into the two major Greek expressions of the concept's meaning will be of use to help draw relationships with subsequent developments and will serve as a basic guideline in our discussion of the poets of this study. What is harmony? Is it a state of mind or a state of nature, or both? In Greek mythology, Harmonia is the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. Symboli-

15 cally, therefore, she is the offspring of strife and love, discord and union or communion. The Greek form of the word derives from the verb apfio^ew ("harmozein"), meaning "to fit together". In its original sense, apuovua did not refer to musical consonance, but was a carpenter's term denoting a "fitting together" or "joining" of parts into a unified whole. Joseph Shipley, in his Dictionary of Word Origins, points out that harmony is a central concept in Greek and Oriental thought. "Both the Greeks and Indians", he writes, "have a carpenter god; the Christian God is a mason, but his son was a carpenter . . . The fact that wood is the primary life-stuff, "of which all things are made", shows it no historical accident but a mythical necessity that the God be referred to as a carpenter",14 Ananda Coomaraswamy, referring to the origin of the word "harmony" as being a carpenter's term meaning "joinery", attributes the fact that in the Greek and Indian traditions the Father and the Son were carpenters to a doctrine of Neolithic or "Hylic" antiquity. 1 5 Harmony is thus a term which assumed cosmological relevance and was used to predicate the causal basis and relations in cosmic creation and phenomenal life. As such, it is a term of major significance in ancient thought. What is of interest at this point, however, is the fact that harmony did not originally refer to "consonance" but rather to a joining of things disparate to form a whole. This is the first and primary meaning of the term, the meaning that emerged from man's first direct confrontation with the element of strife and becoming present in the world of sense experience. The word according to this meaning embraces the totality of phenomenal experience and, at the same time, stands for the principle of cosmological unity, or order, if you will, but of an order which encompasses disorder. This is the sense in which Heraclitus uses api±ovLa( r)): People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as in the case of the bow and the lyre. (W 117; D 51; By 45) Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony. 1 6 (W 98; D 8; By 46) For, as Heraclitus affirms, "the hidden harmony is better than the obvious". 17 (W 116; D 54; By 47) It is important to recognize this meaning of "harmony", for when used in its primary sense, the word connotes a particular conception of reality and of life. It is the conception embodied in the mythological Harmonia, the

16 daughter of strife and love. In other words, this conception involves an outlook on Reality (both human and divine), which views strife and discord as fundamental elements of existence and affirms that these dissonant elements are essential to the life and cosmic processes, are an integral part of reality, and are therefore good. This is the reason why, according to Heraclitus, strife, which Anaximander had considered an "injustice", 1 8 a negative element of being, assumes the nature of a positive, integral aspect of being. Thus Heraclitus states that "It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife". (W 26; D 80; By 62) As far as the application of the Heraclitean formulation of harmony to the particular poets of this study is concerned, however, a qualification is needed here. Although most of these poets are Heraclitean insofar as the presence of strife and discord forms an integral part of their vision of reality and hence of their conception of the harmony that is to ensue, their orientation is more humanistic in one respect. In the fragments of Heraclitus' thought that have come down to us, the negative impact of his conception of reality on man and on the human condition seems to have been overlooked (although this does not exclude the possibility that Heraclitus treated this problem in some of his other non-extant writings). The poets of this study, instead, if and when they are Heraclitean, relate their cosmological vision to man and society. Where they would recognize the presence of strife and discord as constituting an integral part of any harmony that is to be attained, their more humanistic orientation would prompt them to add that it is the duty of men to attempt to keep the discordant elements in check so that harmony may be achieved. This, however, will become evident as we proceed in the discussion of the individual poets concerned. Alongside this primary meaning of harmony as a "fitting together" or "joining" of disparate elements, there subsequently emerged a secondary meaning of the term: harmony as denoting the principle of order and consonance in microcosm and macrocosm. According to this second meaning attributed to the term, Harmonia was seen to be the personification of symmetry and ratio, perfect balance and agreement. This is the Harmonia "with the golden hair" who, according to Euripides, was the mother of the Muses. 19 Plato, drawing on the one hand from the Pythagorean mathematical apperception of reality as consisting of ratio and number, and on the other hand from the Parmenidean vision of the Real as being beyond accident and becoming, came to adopt this second meaning of "harmony". In the Symposium, the physician Eryximachus expounds the Platonic point of view on harmony. He states that in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm you have a love which has not yet become double (187c). 2 0 To say, like Heraclitus, that harmony is composed of elements still in a state of discord is absurd, according to Eryximachus. "For Harmony", he asserts, "is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagree-

17 ments while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees" (187b). Harmony, for him, involves a reconciliation of opposites and as such he relates it to music. Musical harmony, he explains, is "composed of notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no harmony - clearly n o t " (187b). Heraclitus would probably counter — not "clearly", but intuitively yes. The reason for Eryximachus' contention that you cannot harmonize that which disagrees is to be found in Plato's conception of the Real. The main thrust of Plato's thought regards the Real or Ideal world of Forms as infinitely and eternally transcendent from the world of sense experience. Man, however, may grasp the essence of the Real through his rational faculties by means of intuitive mathematical abstraction and vision arrived at with the aid of dialectic. In Book VII of the Republic, there occurs a discussion of harmony and its sister science, astronomy, in relation to the Platonic conception of ultimate knowledge. A brief look at this discussion will help us to understand why harmony involves a resolution and not merely a union of opposites for Plato. This meaning of perfect "consonance" or "agreement" which Plato attributes to harmony is particularly important since, introduced into Christianity through the notion of redemption, it has come to stand for the primary meaning of the term, while the other "Heraclitean" meaning of harmony is often overlooked. In Book VII, we see that Socrates speaks of harmony, or rather harmonics (the science of harmony), in relation to astronomy. Harmonics and astronomy are sister sciences since they deal with two different aspects of motion. "As the eyes", Socrates says, "are designed to look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and these are sister sciences — as the Pythagoreans say . . ." (530d). Socrates, however, is here referring to essential relationships, those pertaining to the realm of the Real. In other words, he is speaking of absolute or ideal motion and hence of the absolute nature of harmony and astronomy. His remarks on astronomy and harmonics in this regard do not refer, therefore, to those sciences which we connect with the world of sense experience. He is, instead, pointing to those realms of knowledge perceived not with normal "sense experience" eyes and ears, but rather with the "mind's eye" and the "mind's ear". This becomes evident when Socrates sharply attacks those astronomers and Pythagoreans who merely observe the outward affects of things and do not inquire into their essential meaning. A scientist who merely "looks" at the heavens with his eyes and not with his mind will not attain to higher knowledge, Socrates asserts: . . . That knowledge only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul look upwards, and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would

18 deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is a matter of science; his soul is looking downwards, not upwards. . . (529b) This is because the "starry heaven" is wrought upon the visible grounds of deceptive and transitory sense experience and is therefore inferior to the absolute laws of motion, which are of necessity invisible and which can only be grasped by the mind 2 1 : The starry heaven which we behold is wrought upon a visible ground, and therefore, although the fairest and most perfect of visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to the true motions of absolute swiftness and absolute slowness, which are relative to each other, and carry with them that which is contained in them, in the true number and in every true figure. Now, these are to be apprehended by reason and intelligence, but not by sight (529c). Like the astronomers, also the Pythagoreans attacked by Socrates never attain to first causes. As he states, "they investigate the numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they never attain to problems — that is to say, they never reach the natural harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and others n o t " (531 c). In comparing sounds and consonances, the Pythagoreans who study harmonies should not place "their ears before their understanding". They should, according to Socrates, investigate the very essence of harmony, the reason why "some numbers are harmonious and others not", a thing, as Glaucon comments, of "more than mortal knowledge". In other words, it is the abstract principle of unity and perdurability behind the world of change, the unifying principle of knowledge which must be sought and not merely the observation of its outward, ephemeral experiential effects. 2 2 The value of the pursuit of the study of sciences lies in coming to understand their point of "intercommunion and connection with one another", (531c) their unity of meaning, despite the diversity of their particular form and attributes. For Plato, this unity, or resolution of finite opposites into the infinity of the One, forms the essential meaning of harmony, just as the search for this principle of order and consonance constitutes the object of the science of harmonics. The vision of supreme unity, order, and symmetry, as we mentioned earlier, is arrived at through abstraction. He who attains this vision in its most perfect form is the dialectician or philosopher. He is the one who arrives at "a conception of the essence of each thing" (534b). As Socrates indicates, only the person who is able to abstract through the process of dialectic, or, with the mind's eye and ear, will come to see the unitary knowledge of the Good: Until the person is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of the

19 good, and unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth, never faltering in any step of the argument — unless he can do all this, you would say that he knows neither the idea of good nor any other good; he apprehends only a shadow, if anything at all, which is given by opinion and not by science — dreaming and slumbering in this life, before he is well awake here, he arrives at the world below, and has his final quietus (534b-c). It should be noted, however, that the dialectician or philosopher is himself defined as a man with a "musical and loving nature" by Plato in the Phaedrus,23 In other words, the true dialectician, like the true artist or true lover, is the man whose soul is attuned to the harmony of the heavens and to the mathematical, absolute harmony that the heavenly spheres point to. 2 4 In sum, therefore, we can say that harmony has two principal meanings. On the one hand, as in the Heraclitean usage of the term, harmony denotes a "fitting together" of "joining" of opposite effects, an order encompassing disorder. On the other hand, the word can denote perfect order, consonance, and symmetry, a resolution of opposites, as in its Platonic, neo-Platonic and Christian usage. There are those, it should be noted, like F.M. Cornford who would see a fundamental similarity between the thoughts of Heraclitus and Parmenides (and hence Plato) because both philosophers insist on the unity of Being: "Heraclitus insists on the unity and continuity of the one real Being, just as emphatically as Parmenides; and, from this point of view, the histories of philosophy are misleading, when they set the two systems in polar antagonism" {FromReligion to Philosophy, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957, p. 186). Cornford here seems to dismiss the essential difference of outlook between Heraclitus and Parmenides with regard to the nature of real Being and the relationship between unity and diversity. Both philosophers, it is true, speak of the unity of real Being. But, on the one hand, Parmenides by "the unity of real Being" means a state of reconciliation of opposites, perfect unity and harmony, with change relegated to the realm of illusion or the unreal. Heraclitus, on the other hand, though he admits the transitory nature of becoming, does not relegate change to the realm of unreality but instead calls it the foundation of all Being. In other words, Parmenides equates becoming with non-Being and argues that real Being excludes non-Being. In writing of Being he states: One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once a continuous one . . . Nor will the force of truth suffer aught to arise besides itself from that which is not. Where-

20 fore, Justice doth not loose her fetters and let anything come into being or pass away, but holds it fast. . . How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. 2 5 These last words seem to be in direct contradiction to Heraclitus' statement that "This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be — an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures" (W 29; D 30; By 20). "Real" Being for Heraclitus includes non-Being, or rather, Being is at the same time non-Being, life is death ("The name of the bow is life, but its work is death") (W 115; D 48; By 66), "the way up and the way down are one and the same" (W 108; D 60; By 69). That is, while Parmenides and Plato envision Being triadically in terms of a substratum underlying or separate from changing phenomena, Heraclitus instead conceives of Being dyadically in terms of an alternation from opposite to opposite. Philip Wheelwright in his book Heraclitus offers an interesting exposition of the difference between the dyadic and triadic modes of thought, which throws light on the Heraclitean viewpoint and deserves to be quoted at length: In forming a conception of change we find ourselves constrained to think, as Aristotle has demonstrated, not dyadically in terms of two opposites alone, but triadically in terms of the pair of opposites and a substance or substratum or subject or thing in which the opposites are conceived successively to inhere. "It is hard to conceive", Aristotle remarks, "how density and rarity, for instance, each retaining its essential nature, could in any way act upon each other". Consequently, he concludes, "we must postulate the existence of a third something" that is logically distinct from the pair of opposite qualities which successively inhere in it. Sometimes the third something has a name denoting a set of recognizable qualities other than the opposites in question. Thus, when hot soup cools or when thin soup thickens — omitting all reference to physical theories about heat and evaporation . . . — we fall quite spontaneously into the triadic way of thinking, for meaning of "soup" is familiar to us through other properties, and we can easily think of hot and cold, thin and thick, as qualities that are distinct from the soup itself . . . Most persons are uneasy in contemplating change in so radical a manner as Heraclitus does; they require, as a conceptual prop, the idea of "something, I know not what" underlying the changing particulars. In this respect, although perhaps without knowing it, they are Aristotelian. Heraclitus, on the contrary, is not an Aristotelian: neither grammati-

21 cally nor conceptually does he share Aristotle's need for "a third something that endures" in any alteration from opposite to opposite. To him, every change is a knockdown battle between two ontological opposites, and there is no referee — neither a Platonic higher Form nor an Aristotelian "underlying substance" — that can be regarded as standing logically outside the process (pp. 33-34). Although the two basic modes of harmony as we have defined them - i.e., the Platonic and the Heraclitean — are almost never completely divorced in any age or man, and poetic intuition can usually pass from one usage to the other with little difficulty, it may generally be said that the appearance of harmony in its Heraclitean meaning most often occurs when phenomenal change is accepted as an integral and real factor in human experience. The Platonic meaning of harmony tends to predominate, instead, when the perceiving ego rejects the ultimate reality and value of the external world in favor of a more perdurable transcendental or mental reality. This mode of harmony is especially characteristic of mystical thought. These two modes of harmony are cosmological and religious in nature insofar as they are related to a vision of ultimate reality. Insofar as they are applied to man and to the human condition, they are social, ethical, and psychological in nature. The vision of harmony involved, in other words, points to a particular apperception of reality and of man's relation to that reality. On the human and social level, therefore, harmony is most closely associated with the concepts of piety and justice. Social piety and justice lead to harmony on the human plane, and form the basis of harmony on the divine plane, if such a plane is contemplated. If the Platonic vision of harmony prevails, piety and justice are envisioned in relation to an absolute and transcendent scale. Where the Heraclitean vision of harmony prevails, instead, piety and justice are most generally envisioned within the context of flux and change, and justice is often regarded as a mean between conflicting extremes. That is, in this latter case values are set against the background of a relative scale, either because the mode of thought expressed excludes an absolute transcendent order of things, or because the focus is on the existential, fluxridden aspect of human existence. The relevance of piety and justice to the concept of harmony, however, will be examined further in our discussion of the individual poets of this study. As we proceed in our discussion of the role of the idea of harmony in the thought of the six poets, the reader will observe that the precise meaning of the term changes according to the different outlooks of the poets treated. The change is not only attributable to the difference between the two major modes of vision that are expressed in the work of these poets - the Platonic absolute mode and the Heraclitean relativistic mode. It is also due to the different roads toward vision embarked upon by the poets. If in the Dante

22 chapter I speak of harmony largely in terms of piety and justice, it is because these two concepts reside at the foundation of both human and divine harmony for Dante. If in the Rimbaud chapter the word 'harmony' assumes the significance of redemption, it is because for Rimbaud the attainment of the goal of his poetic striving, which for him would have represented the attainment of harmony, is indeed the achievement of the psychic balance which is ultimately the meaning of redemption. This brings us to the question of the religious and mythical dimension of the term 'harmony'. In discussing the Platonic and Heraclitean modes of harmony, we briefly touched upon the mythical origins of these visions of reality. These origins point to the mythical-religious nature of the term, religious in the sense that it is expressive of a fundamental comprehensive outlook on human and divine reality. This outlook is formed by the externalization of certain psychic contents in the individual poets, contents which manifest themselves in the various instances of creative energy that find expression in their works of art. These creative works become, in effect, plastic representations of the Unknown and of man's relation to it. They are also testimonials of man's desperate effort to pierce the darkness of the Unknown and, thereby, to reach a state of inner and outer balance and meaningfulness. When I use the term 'religion' in regard to the concept of harmony, I would like to emphasize that I am not referring to an anthropomorphic conception of God or to any established code of sectarian beliefs. What I am instead speaking about is man's unending attempt to make sense of his own existence and that of the world about him, an attempt which, when it assumes the form of the total absorption of his creative energies and faculties, becomes religious in nature. The religious nature of the concept of harmony, in other words, stems from the artist's concern with total reality and with the drawing of the relationships between human consciousness and that total reality. Giovanni Gentile, the Italian philosopher, defines the sincere artist as a "religious spirit". It is according to the sense in which he views the artist's concern as being 'religious' that harmony, the object of the artist's quest, acquires its religious significance. As Gentile writes: The sincere artist, the artist who believes in art and takes it seriously, is essentially a religious spirit. Religious like the philosopher, who knows of no other reality, which is true reality, absolute reality, than that same one of the saint: total reality. Religious more than the philosopher, because that is his total reality; it is not mediated like that of the philosopher, not intellectualized, not dominated by him; instead it dominates him: volentem trahit, like a divine will. 26 It is to remembered that the word 'harmony' was itself a term originally used in carpentry, and that the original meaning of the term 'poet' was that of

23 'maker' and 'creator'. According to some accounts, carpenters and masons were the ones who built the original edifices enveloping human reality, giving that reality meaning through structure and relationship. 27 The poet as a 'maker', therefore, is also the creator of structure. He is a harmonizer, the seeker of a new synthesis and meaning. He is the Whitmanian "builder of bridges", the creator of psychic balance and peace, 2 8 who through his artistic endeavour seeks to point the way toward renewed human, cosmic, and divine wholeness and order — that is, toward Harmony. It is in this "cosmically religious" sense, to use Albert Einstein's terms, 2 9 that the word 'harmony' can assume religious connotations. It is also in this "cosmic" sense that Dante, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, René Char, and Hart Crane can be considered to be essentially religious poets, while Rimbaud may be seen to represent an instance of tragic conflict because of an inability to give affirmation and direction to his fundamentally religious creative feelings, feelings which led him on the search for a "new Christmas" on earth.

NOTES

1. Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 87. 2. Langer, p. 115. 3. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), p. 258. 4. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), p. 339. 5. Whitehead, p. 339. 6. Whitehead, p. 349. 7. See: Ivor Armstrong Richards: " F o r the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions of the artist an appraisal of existence. Matthew Arnold when he said that poetry is a criticism of life, was saying something so obvious that it is constantly overlooked. The artist is concerned with the record and perpetuation of the experiences which seem to him most worth having . . . he is also the man who is most likely to have experiences of value to record". Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1959), p. 61. 8. Although I would disagree with Gilson's extreme contention in The Arts of the Beautiful that art is not a kind of knowledge, I would concur with him in viewing the essence of artistic creativity to consist in the "making" of new " f o r m s " , or in the creation of a new order in substantial being. See: The Arts of the Beautiful (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), esp. pp. 9, 104. 9. René Char, Le risque et le pendule, in Poèmes et prose choisis (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 188. 10. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 339. 11. Whitehead, p. 337. 12. Whitehead, p. 337. 13. As G.T. Patrick has noted with regard to Heraclitus: " T o Heraclitus we trace the

24 notion of Relativity, the central point of the Sophists which, by withdrawing every absolute standard of truth, threatened to destroy all knowledge, all faith, and which sent Socrates searching for something permanent and fixed in the concepts of the human mind and so led to the finished products of Plato and Aristotle". The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus (Baltimore: N. Murray, 1899), p. 74. 14. Joseph T. Shipley, Dictionary of Word Origins (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1945), pp. 175-76. 15. "Our study of the history of architecture will make it clear that 'harmony' was first of all a carpenter's word meaning 'joinery', and that it was inevitable, equally in the Greek and Indian traditions, that the Father and the Son should have been 'carpenters', and show that this must have been a doctrine of Neolithic, or rather 'Hylic', antiquity". Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, formerly titled Why Exhibit Works of Art? (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 21. Also J.A. Philip in his book Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), writes: "Only in secondary and occasional instances does apflOVUL mean concord, the musical attunement which we observe as present in musical sounds. In origin and usually, it is a 'fitting together', primarily of things, that is imposed by a craftsman or maker. In the Iliad (5.60), Phereclus, the builder of the ships in which Paris carried off Helen, and a favourite of the artisans' patron Athene, is the son of Tekton (or carpenter-builder) who in his turn is the son of Harmon (or joiner). Odysseus (Od. 5.248) fits together his raft with dp/iovirjaw (joints) and dowels. Anything apparently that is fashioned with joints such that they make the original pieces part of a unified structure is a apuovia " (note 1, p. 128). 16. Unless otherwise indicated, I am following the translation of the fragments by Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). The first number in parentheses refers to the Wheelwright ordering of the fragments, the second to the Diels " B " list, and the third to the Bywater edition. 17. With regard to the rendition of the Greek apuovi17 in fragment W 116, I would agree with Wheelwright's argument for the use of the English word " h a r m o n y " as against other alternatives proposed by dissenting critics: . . . How should apuouirj be translated? Fairbanks, Freeman, and Lattimore translate it " h a r m o n y " , but Burnet prefers " a t t u n e m e n t " , since the Greek word does not imply harmony in the presentday sense - i.e., simultaneous sounds or chords. So much is true, but on the other hand two musicians whom I have consulted opposed the word " a t t u n e m e n t " because it suggests to them the preparatory tuning up of the instruments. Kirk argues (G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus, the Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge, Eng., 1952, p. 224) that apflOVll], which had come from ap;uofrtv ("to fit together"), probably did not yet have a musical significance in Heraclitus' day; accordingly he translates, "An unapparent connexion is stronger than an apparent". Nevertheless, it is clear that Heraclitus intends a cosmic, archetypal significance, and it appears to me that this is better suggested by our word " h a r m o n y " than by any English alternative. The same argument applies to Fr. 117 (p. 153). For a discussion on the musical significance of harmony in Heraclitus' time, see J.A. Philip, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism, particularly Chapter 8. Philip points out that in Heraclitus, the use of the term in a musical sense refers not to harmony in our modern sense of polyphony but in the sense of "an accord or fitting together of sounds in a melody, each note 'fitting' that which precedes it", and that in Empedocles the word is "personified and deified, as a fitting together or union" (note 1, p. 128). 18. As Theophrastos, quoting Anaximander's views on the primary substance of reality, writes: "And into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, 'as is

25 meet; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time', as he says in these somewhat poetical terms". Cited in John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 52. 19. Medea, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, translated by Edward P. Coleridge (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), p. 824. 20. Plato, The Symposium in: The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952). 21. It might be interesting to compare the similarity between the Platonic "rational" approach to a comprehension of ultimate reality and Einstein's statement on his own method in theoretical physics which led to the development of the theory of relativity. Referring to the problem of the relationship between the empirical and rational components of knowledge, a problem basic to all scientific inquiry, he writes: If, then, it is true that this axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented, can we ever hope to find the right way? Nay more, has this right way any existence outside our illusions? Can we hope to be guided in the right way by experience when there exist theories (such as classical mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to experience, without getting to the root of the matter? I answer without hesitation that there is in my opinion, a right way, and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceived mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed. ( T h e World As I See It, New York: Covici, Friede, 1934, pp. 36-37). 22. Plato, however, like Einstein, does not wholly condemn the contemplation of the natural world of sense experience through sight and hearing in the pursuit of knowledge. In his attack on the phenomenal universe, he is warning man not to trust himself completely to the deceptive and transitory world of the senses but to confide in the absolute perception of which mind and reason are capable. Only the truth arrived at through abstraction and reason is a perdurable one. The natural order of the universe, however, which man perceives through the senses, is instrumental in helping him create number and the power of inquiring abstractly about the nature of the universe and of ultimate being, according to Plato: . . . had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man . . . God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries. The same may be affirmed of speech and hearing . . . ('Timeus, 47).

26 23. See Socrates' classification of souls: "and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature . . ." (.Phaedrus, 248c-d). 24. The theory of the harmony of the spheres first appears in a complete form in Plato's Myth of Er (Republic, X, 616ff.). During his journey through the Beyond with other souls, Er is granted a vision of the order of the universe. In this vision he sees a model of the universe, the order of which is formed by eight hemispherical whorls attached to a spindle resting on the knees of Necessity. These eight whorls represent the sphere of the fixed stars, the sun, moon, and five planets (Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter). On each whorl there sits a siren who goes around with them in their revolutions, hymning a single note. The eight together form one harmony, according to Plato, which in its turn is accompanied by the harmony of the three Fates, Lachesis (who determines the length of the thread of life), Clotho (the spinner), and Atropos (who stops the spinning or turning). The Fates control the revolution of the whorls, and represent the element of time in the order of cosmic necessity, singing respectively of the past, present, and future: The spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals, there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon her throne: These are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then with the other. With regard to the source and development of the theory of the harmony of the spheres, which has been attributed to Pythagoras and his school, see J.A. Philip, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism, esp. Chapter 8; and John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Chapter 7, esp. pp. 306-07. See also Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963) for a discussion of the concept of world harmony in relation to an interpretation of the word Stimmung until its decline in the seventeenth century under the impact of the processes of secularization and scientific discovery. 25. In: John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 8, pp. 174-75. 26. Giovanni Gentile, Dante e Manzoni (Firenze: Vallechi Editore, 1923), p. 172. 27. The Greek word 'poet' (TTOITJTT^?)in its original sense meant 'creator' or 'maker'. With regard to the term 'maker' itself, it is interesting to note that the word comes from the Indo-European base mag, meaning 'to knead, mix; to make'. Ernest Klein, in A Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, points out that " t h e sense and development of the base mag-, from the original meaning 'to knead' into that of 'to make', may find its explanation in the fact that the first human buildings were houses of mud. " T o knead a mud house" meant almost the same as 'to make a mud house' " (New York: Elsevier Publishing Co., 1967), p. 925. 28. I am indebted to Professor R.W.B. Lewis for this phrase, who in conversation also pointed out to me that Walt Whitman uses carpentry language to describe a psyche at ease with itself in Song of Myself. 29. It is interesting to note that Albert Einstein sees the "cosmic religious feeling" as being central to scientific as well as to artistic endeavour. For Einstein, the attainment of a vision of harmony is also the end of the most significant scientific striving. He makes

27 this clear when, speaking in honor of the sixtieth birthday of Max Planck at the Physical Society of Berlin, he envisages the end of scientific endeavour as consisting in the achievement of a vision of the "pre-established harmony" of the universe (The World As I See It, p. 23). Actually, however, the inspirational source of this longing to attain a vision of harmony, or in Einstein's words, "to experience the universe as a single significant whole" (p. 264), stems from what he terms the "cosmic religious feeling". This feeling is based on the belief in a supra-personal meaning which reveals itself in nature and in the world of human thought. The cosmic religious feeling, according to Einstein, is the strongest incitement to scientific research (p. 266-67). Far from being antagonistic to religion, science, if considered in this light, is closely related to it in spirit. However, the religiousness of science, rather than being like the dogmatic formalism associated with the established churches, is a religious attitude more akin to the heretics or saints of every age. In this respect, Einstein indicates, "men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza" share a strong spiritual fellowship (p. 265). In Einstein's opinion, it is the most important function of both science and art to "awaken this (cosmic) feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it" (p. 265).

PART TWO

II JUSTICE, PIETY, AND THE DANTEAN QUEST

"All the arts are occupied with the search after truth; but to be drawn by study away from the active life is contrary to moral duty". Cicero 1 The genesis of the Divine Comedy, as has been often pointed out, may be traced to the events that most deeply affected Dante's life: his participation in Florentine and Italian politics, his profound experience of Italian disunity which he principally attributes to unchecked greed in both the temporal and spiritual realms, and the leaving of home, wife and children due to political misfortune and exile. Without the shattering experience of the disintegration of life that Dante underwent with his exile, we perhaps would not have the Divine Comedy as we know it today. It is through his feeling of revolt against the injustice perpetrated against him that Dante becomes "the preacher of justice", as he characterizes himself in his ninth Epistle. 2 This personal experience is accompanied by a profound prise de conscience with respect to what he saw to be the evils of his time. Dante did not seek the solution to these evils in the acceptance of the new values of individualism and relativity that were to find full expression in the Renaissance. He did not wish to accept the idea of an order which included discord and unresolved tensions. He would have agreed with Eryximachus in the Symposium that "harmony is a symphony and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees" (187b). Dante saw the restoration of meaning to his world to reside in the reassertion of the values of the past 3 — those values inherent in the idea of absolute harmony in the Platonic mode. The values Dante reverts to are the Platonic socio-political and metaphysical values, filtered through Aristotelian thought, and reinforced by Stoic ethical values 4 and the values of medieval Christian civilization in their Thomistic synthesis. For Dante, the attainment of absolute Harmony is the end of all human striving. At the same time, in order to attain it, there must exist harmony and concord on earth. If Paradise consists in Harmony (absolute concord and peace according to Dante), then

32 the way to Paradise is based on the constituent elements of Harmony. These for Dante are caritas, and especially justice and piety, its essential elements. Justice and piety are the offspring of caritas, Dante affirms in the Eighth Epistle. 5 It is the Platonic concept of absolute justice, reinforced by the Stoic concept of humanitas6 — which in his thought assumes the form of Christian pietas - that Dante elevates as an ideal against the political and moral chaos which he feels surround him. Throughout his works, from the Convivio to the De Monorchia and across the pages of the Comedy, Dante untiringly reiterates the idea of the need for harmony both in the temporal and spiritual realms for man to arrive at fulfillment and happiness. The essence of Harmony is Concord or Oneness for him. The resolution and perfect attunement of opposites in the unity of the One is the ultimate Good in Dante's opinion: . . . 'being' naturally precedes 'oneness' and 'oneness' naturally precedes 'good'; for that which is most existent is most one, and what is most one is most good. And the further anything is removed from the supremely existent the further is it removed from being one, and therefore from being good . . . Whence it comes about that 'being one' is seen to be the root of 'being good', and 'being many' the root of 'being bad'. 7 Evil, or sin, consists in division and disunity, in the discord that is inherent in unrestrained individualism and multiplicity. As Dante indicates, "Hence it may be seen that sinning is naught else than despising and departing from 'unity' and seeking multiplicity" {De Monorchia, I, 15). Sin for Dante, as we shall see in our discussion of the Comedy, is the forsaking of the values of justice and piety and the promotion of division and discord. Paradise, or the absolute good, is Harmony and Concord, the unity of the many divergent human wills and tendencies. This unity permits ultimate fulfillment and peace to be attained: All concord depends on unity in wills. The human race when best disposed is a concord. For as a single man when best disposed both as to mind and body is a concord, and so also a house, a city, and a kingdom, so likewise is the whole human race. Therefore the human race when best disposed depends upon a unity in wills. (De Monorchia, 1,15) On earth, the attainment of this unity depends on the agency of the universal monarch, according to Dante: (the unity of human wills on earth cannot be achieved) unless there is

33 one will dominating and ruling all the rest to oneness; inasmuch as the wills of mortals, because of the seductive delights of youth, have need of a directive principle, . . . Nor can that one will exist unless there be a single prince of all, whose will may be the mistress and ruler of all others. Now if the above deductions are sound, which they are, it is necessary for the best disposition of the human race that there should be a monarch in the world, and therefore for the well-being of the world that there should be a monarchy. (De Monorchia, 1,15) Since the universal monarch will possess and rule over everything, he will not be subject to the divisive forces of greed and lust for power. He will thus be able to devote all his energies toward the preservation of peace and harmony, which, according to Dante, is necessary for human and civilizational fulfillment: . . . the work proper to the human race, taken as a whole, is to keep the whole capacity of the potential intellect constantly actualised, primarily for speculation, and secondarily (by extension, and for the sake of the other) for action. And since it is with the whole as it is with the part, and it is the fact that in sedentary quietness the individual man is perfected in knowledge and in wisdom, it is evident that in the quiet or tranquillity of peace the human race is most freely and favourably disposed towards the work proper to it (which is almost divine . . . ) (DeMonorchia, 1,4) Dante envisioned Henry VII of Luxembourg as a possible guarantor of a new Holy Roman Empire and the restorer of peace to the temporal and spiritual realms. His hopes in Henry VII, however, were to remain unfulfilled due to the latter's death in 1313. Dante, nevertheless, rested his hopes in the deliverance of Italy on various persons during the course of his life, all of whom might be contained or symbolized in the image of the "Veltro", or "Greyhound", in the Comedy. In Virgil's words, the Veltro "will not feed on land or pelf, I but on wisdom, and love, and virtue; / and his nation shall be between Feltro and Feltro" 8 (Inf., 1,103-05). The resolution of differences in a unity of concordant wills is both the ideal to be sought on earth and the Ultimate Reality of Paradise. Dante makes particularly effective use of the imagery of music and song to indicate this in the Comedy. In the Inferno, we only see and hear individual and discordant laments. In the Purgatorio, we are instead met by the soothing notes of the song of Casella and the union of voices of the souls there in psalms of penitence. As Dante himself indicates in the Purgatorio :

34 Ahi quanto son diverse quelle foci dall'infernali! che quivi per canti s'entra, e la giii per lamenti feroci.

(Purg. XII, 112-14)

(Ah! how different are these openings from those in Hell! for here we enter through songs, and down there through fierce wailings.) And the choiring and circling heavens of the Paradiso are conceived in terms of song and dance or harmonious sound and motion, symbolic of the choral Godhead, or absolute Harmony. The notes of the harmony of the spheres9 are joined in concordant unity with those of the saved souls. Harmony is both the ultimate object of man's quest and, at the same time, the condition which makes the attainment of the quest possible. It is both the ultimate ideal and the element necessary for the realization of the ideal. The following tautology is affirmed throughout Dante's work: ". . . concord is a uniform motion of more wills than one. By which account it is seen that the unity of wills which is indicated by uniform motion is the root of concord or indeed is concord itself" (De Monorchia, I, 15). In our discussion of the role of the idea of Harmony in Dante, we will not center our attention on the more obvious aspects of harmony, e.g. the themes of music and song, the motion of the heavenly spheres, etc. We will, instead, attempt to deal with the inner reality which informs these outer symbols. That is, in our analysis we will examine the constitutive elements of harmony — justice and piety — and try to understand their role in the genesis and development of the Comedy and of Dante's thought. The criteria in approaching Dante's work will be selectivity and depth rather than the necessarily more superficial treatment inherent in a survey approach which seeks to cover the whole of the Comedy. The implicit assumption governing the development of this chapter, as I pointed out before, is that "it is with the whole as is with the part" (De Monorchia, 1,4) and vice versa. It is of course in the Paradiso that we find the enactment or expression of the full significance of harmony for Dante. However, it is often said that to fully understand what something is, one should first understand what it is not. To understand what the meaning of harmony is in the Paradiso, therefore, it might prove of value to examine its negative correlative in the Inferno. This approach to comprehension through what might be called a sort of "negative valuation" is, in addition, parallel to that of the Dantean way, which took the poet through the Inferno and Purgatorio, before leading him into the Paradiso. We will, hence, first examine the idea of harmony in Dante as it is operative in the Inferno, focusing our discussion specifically on two cantos: the twentieth and twenty-sixth. The Cantos chosen for discussion, moreover, also exemplify two quests, that of the diviners and of Ulysses,

35 which are at once similar to and dissimilar from the Dantean one, and, as we shall see, the relationship between these three quests will give greater relief to what the ultimate meaning of harmony is for Dante. Upon determining the nature of the basic elements of harmony in Dantean thought as they emerge negatively from our examination of the two Cantos of the Inferno, we will look at the positive exposition of the concept in the Paradiso, focusing our discussion in particular on the Cacciaguida Cantos and on the Eagle of Justice. Lastly, we will discuss the ultimate meaning of harmony for Dante and relate this to the two basic visions of harmony and of reality set forth in the preceding chapter. Our argument will be, in effect, that while the fundamental basis of vision for the poet was the Heraclitean experience of life, the Way toward vision and the vision ultimately achieved were eminently spiritual and transcendental, rather in the mode of Plato than that of Heraclitus. As the twentieth Canto of the Inferno opens, Dante finds himself looking toward a group of souls approaching along the tear — covered bottom of a new valley of the "submerged". At first his awareness is totally absorbed by the slowness, silence, and tears which envelop the condemned shadows: Io era già disposto tutto quanto a riguardar nello scoperto fondo, che si bagnava d'angoscioso pianto; e vidi gente per lo vallon tondo venir, tacendo e lagrimando, al passo che fanno le letane in questo mondo. 1 0 (Inf. XX, 4-9) (I now was all prepared to look into the depth discovered to me, which was bathed with tears of anguish; and through the circular valley I saw a people coming silent and weeping, at the pace which the Litanies make in this world.) Only subsequently does he note the reason for the slowness, silence, and tears: the twisted bodies and hence backward manner of walking of the souls: Come '1 viso mi scese in lor più basso, mirabilmente apparve esser travolto ciascun tra '1 mento e '1 principio del casso; chè dalle reni era tornato il volto, ed in dietro venir li convenía, perchè '1 veder dinanzi era lor tolto. (Inf. XX, 10-15) (When my sight descended lower on them, each seemed wondrously

36 distorted, between the chin and the commencement of the chest: for the face was turned towards the loins; and they had to come backward, for to look before them was denied.) These are the diviners and fortune tellers who, by having dedicated their lives to the unveiling of the future, only succeeded in submerging themselves all the faster into that frustration of ultimate vision which is Hell. In the image of the twisted bodies lies the essence of the tragedy that is prefigured in the silence, slowness, and tears with which the souls first reveal themselves to Dante. This tragedy is twofold in nature. In the cruelly twisted figures of these souls there is depicted both man's failure in his attempt to attain superhuman knowledge, and, at the same time, his failure in terms of human love and piety which tragically stems from that fruitless attempt — as we shall see below. At first glance, it would seem that the Canto of the diviners has little in common with that of Ulysses except in the similar nature of the sin condemned in both: willful misuse of the intellect or fraud, which, therefore, confines the sinners concerned to the Malebolge. The immediate earthly reason for the condemnation of both Ulysses and the diviners appears, on the outside, to be different, as is their respective punishment: whereas the former is punished within a burning flame, the latter receive castigation through the distortion of the members of their bodies. Yet, if we examine the two Cantos more closely, it soon becomes apparent that the sin of both Ulysses and the diviners is essentially the same. A close parallelism between the Cantos emerges as we come to see that where both Ulysses and the diviners may be innocent in regard to their concern with the mystery of human existence, both would in Dante's eyes deserve condemnation in view of their transgression against the basic human virtues or dispositions that renders that existence in any way bearable: love or social piety and justice. As we indicated, for Dante these virtues are essential to the attainment of human, social and, ultimately, of divine Harmony. Looking first at the twentieth Canto, one might begin by noting the dichotomy of perspective which announces itself at the very outset of the Canto. On the one hand, we see Dante's empathy with the condemned figures as it is expressed by his tears at the sight of the twisted bodies and by his address to the reader justifying those tears: Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto di tua lezione, or pensa per te stesso com'io potea tener lo viso asciutto, quando la nostra imagine di presso vidi si torta, che'l pianto delli occhi le natiche bagnava per lo fesso.

37 Certo io piangea, poggiato a un de'rocchi del duro scoglio . . . (Inf. XX, 19-26) (Reader, so God grant thee to take profit of thy reading, now think for thyself how I could keep my visage dry, when near at hand I saw our image so contorted, that the weeping of the eyes bathed the hinder parts at their division? Certainly I wept, leaning on one of the rocks of the hard cliff. . .) And, on the other hand, we find Virgil's trenchant questioning of his disciple's indiscriminate self-identification with the condemned figures through those tears of participation in their sorrow: Ancor se' tu delli altri sciocchi? Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta: chi è più scellerato che colui che al giudicio divin passion comporta? (Inf. XX, 27-30) (Art thou, too, like the other fools? Here pity lives when it is altogether dead. Who is more impious than he that sorrows at God's judgment?) Many have considered Virgil's words to constitute an emphatic condemnation of his disciple's tears. It would seem, however, that the divergence between master and disciple should not be seen as a failure on the part of Dante and a condemnation of that failure by Virgil. Such an interpretation would cast doubt on Dante's justification in weeping at the sight of the diviners — a justification which the poet himself so forcefully affirmed. The development of the whole Canto and its relationship to the Ulysses episode assumes, instead, greater significance if we see Dante's tears and Virgil's questioning words as two complementary reactions toward the basic problem of man's relation to the Unknown. Concern with the Unknown, as we pointed out earlier (p. 22), can be a basic factor in the question of the attainment of Harmony. In its total absorption of the energies of the persons involved, the concern with the Unknown assumes a religious dimension. However, in the case of Ulysses and the diviners, an overriding preoccupation with the Unknown leads to neglect of the fundamental constitutive elements of harmony — piety and justice. Within the structure of Dantean thought expressed in the Comedy, this concern therefore leads these figures to the damnation of the Inferno rather than to the beatitude of the Paradiso. The first reaction to the sight of the punishment allotted to the diviners — that of Dante the pilgrim — is less perfect though perhaps more human in

38 its concern with the individual suffering involved in man's confrontation with the mystery of existence. Dante, we see, not having as yet attained the higher Truth revealed in the Paradiso, is thoroughly shaken by the tragedy of frustrated human desire for superior knowledge which he observes in the twisted forms of the diviners. Virgil's reaction, instead, demonstrates a higher degree of knowledge and perfection in terms of the ultimate vision of the Comedy. For, "il savio duca" sees beyond the paralyzing despair in human foresight symbolized by the diviners' and Dante's tears — he perceives the social failure brought about by the diviners' too exclusive preoccupation with supernatural knowledge. Virgil, who, although falling short of the ultimate vision of the Paradiso, had in his Aeneid risen to a higher understanding of human purpose and direction in life, can admonish his disciple lest he follow on the humanly sterile path of the diviners: Drizza la testa, drizza, e vedi a cui s'aperse alli occhi de' Teban la terra; per ch'ei gridavan tutti: 'Dove rui, Anfiarao? perchè lasci la guerra?' E non restò di minare a valle fino a Minòs che ciascheduno afferra. Mira c'ha fatto petto delle spalle: perchè volle veder troppo davante, di retro guarda e fa retroso calle. (Inf. XX, 31-39) (Raise up thy head, raise up, and see him for whom the earth opened herself before the eyes of the Thebans, whereat they all cried, 'Whither rushest thou, Amphiaràus? Why leavest thou the war?' And he ceased not rushing headlong down to Minos, who lays hold on every sinner. Mark how he has made a breast of his shoulders: because he wished to see too far before him, he now looks behind and goes backward.) It is important to note here that Virgil is not condemning the diviners' attempt to gain superior knowledge in and for itself. He is, rather, exposing the fact that too great a concern with the supernatural led the diviners to transgress against the duties of leadership, love, and mutual social interdependence — virtues which might be resumed in the central virtue of 'piety'. It might be of use here to briefly go into the meaning of the term pietà and its significance in Dantean thought, particularly since, as we shall see in this chapter, the concept of pietà is basic to the idea of harmony in the Comedy. The meaning of pietà might emerge more clearly if we now examine in greater depth the verses quoted previously, directed by Virgil to Dante:

39 Ancor se' tu delli altri sciocchi? Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta: chi è più scellerato che colui che al giudicio divin passion comporta? (Inf. XX, 28-31) These verses, it would seem, should be interpreted to mean: "Are you yet one of the other fools? / Does pity live on here when piety is dead: / Who is more wretched (unhappy, ill-fated, and/or impious) than he / who would bring passion to bear on God's judgment?" There is, one might note, an interplay on the double meanings of the key words 'pietà', 'scellerato', and 'passion'. The two main meanings of the term pietà are, on the one hand, 'compassion' or 'pity' and, on the other, 'loyalty and devotion to parents, family; duty toward men and God'. 1 1 In its first meaning - that of 'compassion', the term piety denotes a charitable passion, a product of the appetites of sense. In its second meaning, piety refers to an intellectual or "absolute" virtue, a virtue that, like the virtue of Justice, resides at the basis of all other virtues. When we refer to piety in this chapter, we are referring to this second meaning of the term. This distinction on the meaning of the term 'piety' is one that Dante himself makes in the Convivio. Dante indicates that what he considers to be 'piety' should not be confused with a mere feeling of compassion and sorrow for the misfortunes affecting others, although this may constitute one limited aspect of the more general and embracing concept: piety is not that which the common people believe it to be, that is, to feel sorrow for the ills of others; indeed, this is merely one of its special effects which is called compassion and is a passion. 12 {Convivio, II, x, 6) For Dante the virtue of piety is not a product of the senses or passions. It is rather an intellectual or rational virtue: "but piety is not passion; it is instead a noble disposition of will, ready to receive love, compassion and other charitable passions" 13 (Convivio, II, x, 6). This is why Dante in the Vita Nuova can refer to God himself as "Pietà": "Sola Pietà nostra parte difende; / chè parla Dio che di madonna intende" (XIX). Piety, therefore, is central to all the other virtues and its presence in man leads one to expect the greatest nobility of character and action from a person, according to Dante: "most of all piety [makes one expect the maximum good from a person], which causes all other goodness to shine forth with its light. For this reason Virgil, speaking of Aeneas, in his highest praise calls him pious" 1 4 {Convivio, II, x, 6). Piety is, in other words, the Roman concept of humanitas, that virtue of nobility of character which represents the epitome of the civilized and civilizing in man. Piety in this broader context can be related to the Shakespearean concept of

40 'kindness', to the Rimbaudian concept of the 'redemptive' role of the poet, to the concept of revolt and of ephemeral, 'Sisyphian' redemption through the creative act which lies at the heart of modern poetry. Piety is the principle of human and social harmony and cohesion. It is the informing principle of human harmony, and through this, of divine harmony. Transgression against pietà, we shall see, is the major reason for the diviners' and Ulysses' damnation, just as adherence to and demonstration of pietà was the reason for Trajan's salvation. "Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta", may thus be interpreted to mean: "Does your pity live on here when the diviners' piety is dead?" The verses that follow, "chi à più scellerato che colui / che al giudicio divin passion comporta?", might refer either to Dante, to the diviners, or more generally, to all men. Their meaning depends on how one interprets the words 'scellerato' and 'passion'. 'Scellerato' can mean 'wretched' (ill-fated, unhappy) or 'impious', and 'passion' can signify 'compassion', 'passion' (strong feelings of revolt, etc.), or 'passivity'. 15 Accordingly, one may interpret the verses: "Who is more unhappy than he who would bring compassion to bear on God's judgment and thus torment himself by struggling against the irrevocability and impenetrability of that judgment", or, "Who can be so impious as to revolt against the law of God which commands love and piety?" Piety, I believe, in this case as well as in the verses beginning with "Qui vive la p i e t à . . . " , should be considered above all in the social context of duty and responsibility toward men rather than in the strictly religious sense of devotion to God, though the two are, naturally, interrelated. 16 As far as the third meaning mentioned for 'passion' is concerned, that is 'passivity', there are those critics, like Vandelli and Pagliaro, who would see the verses to mean that in this Bolgia there is no room for pity because none is more wicked than he who would bring his own will to bear on God's judgment, seeking thereby to render the divine will passive. 17 Sapegno, instead, remains undecided before the alternatives, 18 while, at the other extreme, E. Parodi sweepingly dismisses the exegetical problem involved. 19 Amidst the maze of critical dissent, in accordance with the thesis of this chapter, I would tend to view the sin of the diviners as consisting in a transgression against social piety for the sake of metaphysical knowledge. Seen in relation to this, the reactions of Dante and Virgil are no longer mystifyingly contradictory and the verses may be read as I suggested previously. Returning to the diviners, therefore, we see that in keeping with the larger, all-embracing nature of the concept of piety for Dante, the transgression of Amphiaraus, the first diviner mentioned by Virgil, may be looked upon as a violation of piety. One of the seven kings against Thebes, Amphiaraus, having foreseen his death in battle, fled from his duty as a king and leader in order to escape his destiny. Yet this flight was futile since his destiny was ultimately accomplished despite his foreknowledge. Tiresias, the second diviner men-

41 tioned by Virgil, more symbolically divided two serpents united in love whereby he changed from man to woman for seven years: Vedi Tiresia, che mutò sembiante quando di maschio in femmina divenne, cangiandosi le membra tutte quante; e prima, poi, ribatter li convenne li due serpenti avvolti, con la verga, che riavesse le maschili penne. (Inf. XX, 40-45) (Behold Tiresias who changed his aspect, when of male he was made woman, all his limbs transforming; and afterwards he had again to strike the two involved serpents with his rod, before he could resume his manly plumes.) Aruns, another diviner, abandoned normal human intercourse and isolated himself in his grotto so that, undisturbed, he might meditate upon the mysteries of existence hidden in the stars and the sea. And Manto, Tiresias' daughter, the fourth diviner to be mentioned by Virgil, fled the company of human society so as to be completely free to dedicate her life to her divinatory arts. Taking this occasion to dwell on the founding of his native city, Virgil makes a point of indicating that Manto made her home in the swampy region where Mantua was later to arise — an uncultivated place, barren of inhabitants: Quindi passando la vergine cruda vide terra, nel mezzo del pantano, sanza coltura e d'abitanti nuda. Li, per fuggire ogni consorzio umano, ristette con suoi servi a far sue arti, e visse, e vi lasciò suo corpo vano. (Inf. XX, 82-87) (The cruel virgin, passing that way, saw land amidst the fen, uncultivated and naked of inhabitants. There, to shun all human intercourse, she halted with her ministers to do her arts; and there she lived and left her vain body.) One might observe the negative quality attributed to Manto's virginity, "la vergine cruda", and the implicit condemnation of her abstention from fruitful and redeeming human intercourse, "corpo vano". After the "useless body" of Manto was buried, by a curious process of contrapasso on earth, people gath-

42 ered together on the previously barren ground where she had lived, and founded the city of Mantua. Thus, where there was once a place of human infertility and division caused by t o o exclusive an interest in attaining superior knowledge, there arises a human community, a place of creativity in all of its forms, the city which will give birth t o Virgil himself. The sterility of the swampy region is transformed into the fertile image of human communion, and, Virgil indicates, the city was called Mantua without further attention to divination or magic: Li uomini poi che 'ntorno erano sparti s'accolsero a quel luogo, ch'era forte per lo pantan ch'avea da tutte parti. Fer la città sovra quell'ossa morte; e per colei che '1 luogo prima elesse, Mantua l'appellar sanz'altra sorte. (Inf. XX, 88-93) (Afterwards the men, that were scattered round, gathered together on that spot which was strong by reason of the marsh it had on every side. They built the city over those dead bones; and for her who first chose the place, they called it Mantua without other augury.) Finally, we see that Virgil calls those women "wretched" who left their womanly and social functions (l'ago, la spuola, e'l fuso) so as to become diviners in black magic, or, "witches": Vedi le triste che lasciaron l'ago la spuola e'1 fuso, e fecersi 'ndivine; fecer malie con erbe e con imago. (Inf. XX, 121-23) (See the wretched women, who left the needle, the shuttle, and the spindle, and made themselves divineresses; they wrought witchcraft with herbs and images.) These are women who instead of engaging in socially useful activities have concerned themselves with knowledge and power beyond the normal human grasp, with interests that tend to create division rather than human union and mutual love. And the same may be said for the other figures mentioned in the Canto. An additional meaning may thus be read into the twisted bodies of all diviners: that of frustrated love and creativity. The heads of the diviners are twisted to the front, indicating their preoccupation with the future or with that which lies hidden to human view. The creative part of their bodies, how-

43 ever, is turned to the rear, pointing not only to the limitations of human vision, but also to a frustration of the creative and fruitful facet of human intercourse and communion. When Virgil thus questions his disciple's tears at the sight of the twisted figures of the diviners, he is therefore urging Dante to look beyond the despair and misery stemming from the frustration of Knowledge, which is exemplified in the hopeless tears of the diviners. He is pointing to a reason for living which can give meaning to human life and compensate man's despair before his finitude and metaphysical blindness. But, above all, Virgil is warning Dante to guard himself against the Faustian sin of isolation from human society in order to attain greater experience and wisdom. Harmony consists in communion, not in isolation. The "sage guide" is cautioning his disciple, the earthly seeker of wisdom, lest he sacrifice piety towards men to selfish pity on the finite nature of the human condition and to fruitless and divisive dedication to the extension of human knowledge and power beyond the barriers of destiny. While we have seen that the sin being condemned in the twentieth Canto is, then, transgression against social piety due to excessive concern with knowledge beyond the normal human reach, the reason for Dante's decided identification with the sorrow of the diviners might bear closer examination before we proceed to Canto XXVI. From the other Cantos of the Inferno we may observe that Dante is not deeply moved to sorrow merely by the sight of the punishment inflicted on the sinners, for, in that case, he would have wept in each Canto. We can note, instead, that Dante is most moved when there is a more highly universal element of common human sorrow exemplified in the condemned figures he contemplates; that is, when human striving in terms of individual human desire and happiness is frustrated by Fate, or, by the human condition — when that striving is channelled into the ultimate frustration and darkness of death. Thus is Dante moved to compassion and tears by the tragedy of Paolo and Francesca, to so great an identification with their sorrow that he loses consciousness: "e caddi come corpo morto cade". Thus does he manifest deep sorrow at the punishment inflicted on Pier delle Vigne ("ingiusto contro me giusto"), on Ciacco, on Brunetto Latini, on the promoters of schism, such as Bertran de Born, on Ulysses, Ugolino and on many others. Compassion is itself predicated by participation in sorrow or by a spiritual identification on the part of the perceiver with the object perceived which elicits his compassion. In other words, in order for compassion to occur, the perceiving subject must experience the identity of the perceived object and feel the object's sorrow — a sorrow that can be felt because of a common existential situation of human suffering which unites both. This common existential situation for Dante vis-à-vis the diviners, which he so strongly urges us to understand: "Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto / di tua lezione,

44 or pensa per te stesso . . ." emerges most forcefully in connection with the creation of the "poema sacro cui pose mano cielo e terra". 2 0 For, the product of Dante's life work, the Comedy, is in a sense the summation of a desperate and tortured attempt to understand and pierce the darkness of the future — of man's post-terrestrial and eternal future. At the same time, similar to the striving of the diviners, Dante's is an attempt to find a meaning whereby he might guide his life on earth to its ultimate and happiest possible fulfillment. His tears at the sight of the diviners are, then, the feeling-charged commentary of a poetic spirit on the wretchedness and misery which the need for knowledge of the eternal future causes in the souls experiencing the compulsion of that need. When he observes the diviners' plight, Dante unconsciously identifies their tears with his own poetic struggle before the Unknown in order to find meaning and direction in life. His impassioned outburst is thus understandable and deeply moving in itself. It is a testimony to the poetic and mystical folly to which all human souls, both Christian and nonChristian, who have struggled with the angel of God, can bear witness. Turning now to the twenty-sixth Canto of the Inferno, we find Dante confronted with the spectacle of flickering flames, which, like fireflies in a summer's night, illuminate the darkness of the valley below with their trembling light. So fascinated is he by the sight of the new sinners of the Eighth Bolgia that but for a rock he was holding on to, Dante tells us he would have fallen amidst the burning souls: Io stava sovra '1 ponte a veder surto, si che s'io non avessi un ronchion preso, caduto sarei giu sanz'esser urto. {Inf. XXVI, 43-45) (I stood upon the bridge, having risen so to look, that, if I had not held onto a rock, I should have fallen down without being pushed.) Punished within these flames are the evil counselors, foremost among whom is Ulysses, who is tormented in the same two-horned flame as Diomedes. And, as the former, addressed by Virgil, stops to recount the story of his disappearance and death, he gives us a prime example of fraudulent counsel. Seeking to convince his mariners to accompany him into the unknown regions of the Beyond in pursuit of experience, glory, and knowledge, Ulysses uses his oratorical powers to sway any hesitation they might have entertained: " 0 frati", dissi, "che per cento milia perigli siete giunti all'occidente, a questa tanto picciola vigilia de' nostri sensi ch'e del rimanente,

45 non vogliate negar 1'esperienza, di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente. Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza". {Inf. XXVI, 112-20) ("O brothers!" I said, "who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West, deny not, to this the brief vigil of your senses that remains, experience of the unpeopled world behind the Sun. Consider your origin: ye were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge".) The speech itself is conceived so as to attain the greatest possible persuasive effectiveness. Ulysses begins by lowering himself to the station of his followers, calling them "brothers" and emphasizing their comradeship through the common trials and dangers faced in their voyages together. He thereupon inserts an element of urgency in his statement by pointing to the little time left for them to arrive at self-fulfillment through knowledge of the Unknown. He then tempts their thirst for adventure and their concern with the mystery of the "world without people, beyond the sun". And he concludes his address by stressing the dignity and superior potential of man, who was not made to live as a brute but rather to follow virtue and knowledge: "ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza". A swift stroke of characterization is added by Dante, when Ulysses, with a touch of self-satisfaction at the effect of his oration upon his listeners, comments: Li miei compagni fec'io si aguti, con questa orazion picciola, al cammino, che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti. (Inf. XXVI, 121-23) (With this brief speech I made my companions so eager for the voyage, that I could hardly then have checked them.) The question that poses itself at this point is: "in what respect is the counsel given by Ulysses to his followers fraudulent?" A spirit of exploration and of concern with the Unknown would not seem in itself to be sinful. If we look at the very beginning of the episode and of Ulysses' narrative, however, a clue to the nature of his transgression may be perceived:

46 "Quando mi diparti' da Circe, che sottrasse me più d'un anno là presso a Gaeta, prima che sì Enea la nomasse, nè dolcezza di figlio, nè la pietà del vecchio padre, nè '1 debito amore lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta, vincer poter dentro da me l'ardore ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto, e delli vizi umani e del valore. (Inf. XXVI, 90-99) ("When I departed from Circe, who beyond a year detained me there near Gaeta, ere Aeneas thus had named it, neither fondness for my son, nor piety towards my aged father, nor the due love that should have made Penelope happy, could conquer in me the ardour that I had to gain experience of the world, and of human vice and worth;) Neither affection for his son nor reverence for his old father, nor the rightful love owed to Penelope, he tells us, could dissuade him from his ardent quest for knowledge of the world and of man. Like the diviners, Ulysses too in his own manner abandons social piety and frustrates familial happiness in order to attain superior knowledge. Moreover, through his rhetorical abilities he persuades others to do the same. The counsel to his followers which under other circumstances might have been justifiable, hence becomes a cause of extensive social disharmony and unhappiness, an aggravated transgression against piety and love. 21 His transgression is all the more serious because committed by a monarch, one who, according to Dante's thought, should be the guarantor of Justice and Harmony on earth, one in whose care is entrusted human happiness and fulfillment. One of the noteworthy aspects of the punishment given to Ulysses, which might be related to his transgression against piety and love, is the blindness that it inflicts on him. The flame, which encompasses him totally, does not permit the Greek hero to see beyond its narrow chastizing orbit. Just as Ulysses sought ultimate knowledge in the Unknown, in the non-human sphere of "il mondo sanza gente" and was blind to the fact that the ultimate truth for man lies in social piety and love, so now he is blinded and punished by the symbol of both human and divine love: Fire. Through the law of contrapasso, the supreme human Truth of love, which is also the ultimate Truth of divinity, here becomes the cosmic instrument of punishment to the person who has transgressed against it. This punishment is rendered more significant in that it

47 brings together in eternal suffering two promoters of division among men, who had not learned through suffering on earth the truth and happiness that can be found through social harmony. Paradoxically, the flame points to their failure and blindness, and, at the same time, indicates the ultimate knowledge that is to be seen in human unity and communion. A question which may come to mind in connection with this interpretation of the flame concerns the reason why the diviners are not punished by fire in the same Canto as Ulysses if they are guilty of a similar sin. To try to render completely coherent a poetic talent is always dangerous and can lead to distortion and misrepresentation. In this case, however, it would seem that the divergence in punishment might be related to the fact that the diviners chiefly harmed themselves rather than others through their divinatory arts. Between the diviners and Ulysses there is a difference in the degree and serious consequences of the misuse of the intellect and language for the purpose of persuading others toward a wrong end. The main emphasis in Canto XX falls on the diviners' own unhappiness and torture. Ulysses, instead, not only harms himself but creates human sorrow by abandoning his family, subjects, and country, and drags others to destruction with him through his rhetorical manipulation of language. The sin of Ulysses consists in an all-embracing transgression against piety and justice, both human and divine, and against language, the instrument of human communication and union. Thus the infernal Pentecost of fire that we saw in Cantos XIV and XVI merges with the symbol of human and divine love (the fire of the Holy Spirit) to give due punishment to the transgressor. There is, however, another important difference between the episode of the diviners and that of Ulysses. The diviners, we saw, were presented to us through the disapproving eyes of Virgil. But for the sympathetic and passionate outburst of Dante at the beginning of the Canto, this Virgilian presentation of the condemned figures would have cast a completely negative light on them. Ulysses, instead, is allowed to speak for himself and to tell his story directly to us. Through the moving narration of his last voyage, he emerges not merely as the Mephistophelian tempter of those who would follow him, nor as the Faustian seeker of Knowledge, portrayed in the diviners. The Dantean Ulysses, rather, assumes a truly Promethean stature. If seen through Virgil's eyes, Ulysses' social and religious sin consists in a transgression against social piety, compounded by the promotion of human division through false counsel, the Dantean Ulysses attains a measure of redemption, if not in a strictly theological Christian sense, at least redemption in a universally human perspective, through his Promethean thrust into the Unknown to steal the fire of the Gods — through his courage and willingness to face the impenetrability of the Beyond, to come to grips with its darkness in the hope of finding some distant ray of light. The voyage of Ulysses is itself in many respects parallel to the Dantean

48 voyage into the Beyond. That of Ulysses is also a trip into the other-world, into the cosmic Unknown beyond the limits of human potential indicated through the pillars of Hercules. As they set out on their last journey, Ulysses and his followers turn away from human society, from the eastern morning of life, and direct the prow of their ship to the west, toward the direction of sunset and darkness: e volta nostra poppa nel mattino, dei remi facemmo ali al folle volo, sempre acquistando dal lato mancino. (Inf. XXVI, 124-26) (and, turning the poop towards morning, we of our oars made wings for the foolish flight, always gaining on the left.) As against the voyage of Dante, however, theirs is a "foolish" or "mad" journey and the only progress they make is to the left, toward failure and damnation. 2 2 Significantly, having crossed the equator, the north star — the star which gives direction to mariners — no longer arises from below the horizon to guide their way: Tutte le stelle già dell'altro polo vedea la notte, e '1 nostro tanto basso, che non surgea fuor del marin suolo. (Inf. XXVI, 127-29) (Night already saw the other pole, with all its stars; and ours so low, that it rose not from the ocean floor.) There is no longer any light that can show them the way and give them comfort, for they are beyond the sun and out of sight of the north star of the human hemisphere. The only light mentioned is the illusory derivative light of the moon, which for five months successively sent forth illumination and then sank into darkness: Cinque volte racceso e tante casso lo lume era di sotto dalla luna, poi che 'ntrati eravam nell'alto passo. (Inf. XXVI, 130-32) (Five times the light beneath the Moon had been rekindled and quenched as oft, since we had entered on the arduous passage.)

49 But even here, the emphasis of the verse falls on the word "casso", "broken", which, with its cadenced harshness suggests impending total disappearance and darkness. The terms "alto passo", it might be noted, are the very words Dante used to describe his entrance into the darkness of the Inferno in the second Canto {Inf. II, 12). When in the distance a high mountain finally appears to them, it is shrouded in darkness due to its remoteness: . . . n'apparve una montagna, bruna per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto quanto veduta non avea alcuna. {Inf. XXVI, 133-35) ( . . . there appeared to us a mountain, dark with distance; and to me it seemed the highest I had ever seen.) Whether or not Dante intended this mountain to symbolize the mountain of Purgatory, as some commentators have thought, it evidently represents a possible goal of fulfillment for the mariners. Yet, the mountain is enveloped in the darkness of infinite and unsurpassable distance: it is a goal beyond the reach and the comprehension of Ulysses and his followers. Thus the first happiness of the mariners at the sight of the tall, dark mountain soon turns to sorrow as a whirlwind, spinning their ship around three times, sends it into the eternal darkness of the sea and death: Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto; chè della nova terra un turbo nacque, e percosse del legno il primo canto. Tre volte il fè girar con tutte l'acque: alla quarta levar la poppa in suso e la prora ire in giù, com'altrui piacque, infin che'l mar fu sopra noi richiuso. {Inf. XXVI, 136-42) (We joyed, and soon our joy was turned to grief: for a tempest rose from the new land, and struck the forepart of our ship. Three times it made her whirl round with all the waters; at the fourth, made the poop rise up and prow go down, as pleased Another, till the sea was closed above us.) The linear desire of the mariners that led them within sight of the mountain merges with the circular frustration of that desire in the whirlwind. There is infinite dignity, sorrow and resignation in Ulysses' concluding words as he ends the story of his lifelong quest. 2 3

50 In conclusion, we have seen, then, that in the case of both Ulysses and the diviners the search for superhuman knowledge and metaphysical certainty led to darkness and eternal sorrow. Yet, if their quest is similar to Dante's, why, one might ask, was not also the poet condemned for his voyage into the Beyond? What is the redeeming element which saves Dante and damns Ulysses and the diviners? The redeeming factor for Dante is perhaps to be found in the ultimately different natures of the quests concerned. Whereas Ulysses and the diviners flee from the hell of life and society and dedicate themselves exclusively to the pursuit of Knowledge, Dante, after his first attitude of fear and hesitation, with the help of Virgil finally pursues that Knowledge through its most bitter center within the bowels of the earth. While the quest of Ulysses and the diviners divides them from society and men, leading them away from the fulfillment of that quest, Dante seeks and finds the Truth by his experience of society in its fullest possible sense through his journey from the lower regions of the Inferno to the divine regions of the Paradiso. The diviners and Ulysses, by severing their ties with man because of excessive preoccupation with the Beyond, were shipwrecked in the frustration of the impenetrability of that Beyond. Dante, on the other hand, does not cut his ties with the human for the sake of the superhuman. If the diviners isolate themselves from human intercourse and communion and Ulysses ventures into the "world without people", Dante turns to that which is human in order to attain the divine. It is his human love for Beatrice that saves him, not intellectual knowledge devoid of its earthly substance. The voyage of Ulysses was a last voyage: Dante's is one that can and will recur, for its inspiring source and justification is man and his suffering, the happiness and harmony on earth forever lost, which must be forever regained. We see that throughout his journey, Dante continually stresses the fact that he will return to earth. It is not merely for the selfish reason of his own individual salvation that Dante has undertaken his journey into the Beyond, but, rather, in order to share with his fellow men the Truths he learns, and, which culminate in the vision of God or of ultimate Truth. His motivating desire is to alleviate through his revelation the suffering on earth caused by division and malice among men, so that all might perceive the intimate essence of God which he had mystically intuited. This essence consists in mutual concord and harmony, or, in other words, in Piety and Love. Thus, as he begs Marco Lombardo in the Purgatorio to explain the origins of evil to him so he may reveal it to man: Lo mondo e ben cosi tutto diserto d'ogni virtute, come tu mi sone, e di malizia gravido e coverto; ma priego che m'addite la cagione,

51 si ch'i' la veggia e ch'i' la mostri altrui. (Purg. XVI, 58-62) (The world is indeed so wholly desert of every virtue, even as thy words sound to me, and heavy and covered with sin; but I pray that thou point the cause out to me, so that I may see it, and that I may show it to others.) so does he ask all the other souls he encounters during his voyage to tell him the reason for their own or others sorrow or happiness so that he may illuminate human blindness on earth. Dante's concern with the divine, with the other world, never obscures or perverts the basic reason for that concern: man, his limitations and suffering. Dante's journey is not a journey of division, but, rather, is a search for God through man in order to help man. It is a journey of union and of communion, of creativity as against sterility. As Prospero finally resolves to abjure his Art and drown his book "deeper than did ever plummet sound", so Dante, after his mystical communion with God, will relinquish his union with divinity so as to return to society, to his fellow men. Ulysses and the diviners, despite the genuine and moving motivation of their quests, did not arrive at the ultimate and saving Truth of Love and Harmony, of human communion in sorrow which can lead to the only happiness and true knowledge possible to man. The truth that Dante arrives at through his journey into the Beyond is, therefore, the knowledge that the essence and meaning of ultimate reality is arrived at through piety, justice, and love. We saw that the sin of Ulysses and of the diviners, though varying in form and degree, was essentially the same: a transgression against social piety, justice, and love, or, against Harmony. Indeed, one can show that the guiding criterion for the assessment of punishment in the Inferno is the degree of transgression against social harmony, just as the criterion for the attainment of ultimate fulfillment and, hence, salvation, is the degree of adherence to and support of the principle of Harmony and communion in all spheres of life. That is why Paolo and Francesca, whose transgression, while causing disharmony, was animated by genuine love, are high toward the entrance of the Inferno-, why Ulysses, whose transgression afflicted family and kingdom, is placed lower in Malebolge than the diviners. That is why treachery, the sin punished in Cocytus, constitutes the ultimate evil in Dante's eyes. For the act of treachery destroys the very foundations on which human community is based: loyalty and mutual trust. 2 4 Thus, those who have committed acts of treachery against kin, native land, against the laws of hospitality, and, most serious, against masters and benefactors, are all confined to the four circles of this lowest infernal realm. At its center and in the lowest circle stands Satan, caught in the ice which he freezes with the movement of his own wings and punishing in his mouth the three perpetrators

52 of the greatest infamies for Dante: Brutus, Cassius and Judas. The former two are there because they betrayed Caesar, their lord and friend. He is the "primo principe sommo" (Convivio, IV, v, 12), who embodies in Dante's eyes the imperial power of the Holy Roman Empire and represents the period of relative peace in which the Christian saviour was born. The latter, Judas, is there because he betrayed Christ, his master, benefactor and friend, the representative figure of the reconciliation of the human and the divine, or, in other words, the embodiment of spiritual harmony. Since, as Dante indicates in his De Monarchia and asserts time and again in the Comedy, both social harmony and the spiritual accord represented in Christ are the two elements necessary for man to arrive at self-fulfillment, transgression against these two aspects of harmony deserves the ultimate in punishment and torture at the hands, or rather mouths, of the Anti-Christ, "Lo 'mperador del doloroso regno", the embodiment of supreme discord and alienation from Ultimate Reality. In Dante's portrayal of Lucifer, we are not led to envisage Milton's Prince of Hell with his glorious, even if fallen, stature. Rather, Dante in Cocytus depicts a wasteland of isolation and cold, broken only by the monotonous beating of the Anti-Christ's wings and his relentless punishment of the three sinners in his mouth. Somewhat reminiscent of the barren desolation around the diviner Manto, and (in contrast with the productivity of a populous, fertile city founded after her death), the wasteland portrayed here reflects, instead, the complete isolation and spiritual death of the sinners in this realm. If we turn now to the Paradiso, we see that our analysis of the essential elements of Harmony as they emerged through our discussion of the Inferno is confirmed in this third Cantica. For here, couched in cosmic music and dances, we find again the idea that pietà and its close correlatives, charity and justice, form the basis of both human and divine Harmony. The whole development of the Paradiso illustrates the enactment of the concept of pietà in its more universal "heavenly" sense of charity. All the souls Dante meets in the Paradiso are eager to help him in any way they can and to illuminate his ignorance through their more perfect vision so that he may come closer to his own self-fulfillment and to the enjoyment of their beatitude. As Piccarda tells Dante in the third Canto: La nostra carità non serra porte a giusta voglia, se non come quella che vuol simile a sè tutta sua corte. (Par., III, 43-45) (Our love doth no more bar the gate to a just wish, than doth that love which would have all its court like to itself.) In their happiness at being of service to Dante, the souls radiate light. Again

53 and again in the Paradiso, when a soul is about to answer Dante's questions, it shows its joy in a burst of light, as for example, Justinian: ond'ella fessi lucente più assai di quel ch'ell'era. Sì come il sol che si cela elli stessi per troppa luce, come '1 caldo ha rose le temperanze di vapori spessi; per più letizia sì mi si nascose dentro al suo raggio la figura santa. {Par., V, 131-37) (whereat it glowed far brighter than it did before. Like as the sun which hideth him by excess of light when the heat hath gnawed away the tempering of the thick vapours, so by access of joy the sacred figure hid him in his own rays.) Light, one might note here, expresses the essential nature of divinity and beatitude. It is symbolic of the all-pervasive principle of communion in unity and perfect accord which characterizes the state of the saved. Light, Beatrice points out to Dante in the fifth Canto, proceeds from perfect vision and communion with the divine. Light, therefore, is also an expression of perfect piety and charity. A foremost example of the Dantean concept of Harmony as being based on pietà occurs in the Cacciaguida cantos and in the cantos of the Eagle of Justice. In line with Dante's consistent attribution of meaning to number and place, the Cacciaguida cantos are not merely placed haphazardly at the center of the Paradiso. As Professor Bergin points out, "Cacciaguida is meant to be the central figure of the crowning cantica. What he has to say is important; what he subsumes, prefigures, and symbolizes more important still". 25 These cantos contain the central core of the Dantean idea of Harmony as based on pietà in its familial and social aspects. In his epistle to Can Grande, Dante wrote that the "end of the whole and of the part" of the Comedy "is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity". 26 Although Dante's faith that this felicity can ultimately be attained may be questioned in our contemporary society, the idea of "engagement poétique" expressed here is very close to that entertained by most modern poets, and especially by the poets discussed in this study. This fundamental commitment to man, to help "remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity", is the basic meaning of pietà for Dante. The way to that felicity is the way of pietà, the compassion of Christ who died on the cross

54 for his fellow men, the bond that ties a man to his family, to other men and to God; the Way of human self-fulfillment and of divine Harmony. In the Cacciaguida cantos, we find both the celebration of familial pietà and the indictment of a society which in Dante's time had lost all sense of "duty toward men and God". The affection, pride, and familial love with which Cacciaguida awaits Dante lead him to exclaim with joy when they meet: 0 fronda mia in che io compiacemmi pur aspettando, io fui la tua radice. {Par., XV, 88-89) (Oh leaf of mine, in whom I took delight, only expecting thee, I was thy taproot.) Cacciaguida then speaks about the "chaste and sober" times in which he was born, contrasting them with the corruption and lust for power that characterizes Dante's times. Referring to the women of the Florence of old he comments: Oh fortunate! ciascuna era certa della sua sepultura ed ancor nulla era per Francia nel letto diserta. L'una vegghiava a studio della culla, e, consolando, usava l'idioma che prima i padri e le madri trastulla; l'altra, traendo alla rocca la chioma, favoleggiava con la sua famiglia de' Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma. Saria tenuta allor tal maraviglia una Cianghella, un Lapo Salterello, qual or sana Cincinnato e Corniglia. A così riposato, a così bello viver di cittadini, a così fida cittadinanza, a così dolce ostello, Maria mi diè, chiamata in alte grida; e nell'antico vostro Batisteo insieme fui christiano e Cacciaguida. {Par., XV, 118-35) (Oh happy they, each one of them secure of her burial-place, and none yet deserted in her couch because of France. The one kept watch in minding of the cradle, and soothing spake that speech which first delighteth fathers and mothers;

55 another, as she drew its threads from the distaff, would tell her household about the Trojans, and Fiesole, and Rome. Then a Cianghella, or a Lapo Salterello, would have been as great a marvel as now would Cincinnatus or Cornelia. To so reposeful and so fair a life among the citizens, to so faithful cityhood, to so sweet abode, Mary — with deep wailings summoned — gave me; and, in your ancient Baptistery, at once a Christian I became and Cacciaguida.) Behind Cacciaguida it is Dante who is speaking here as one who had deeply experienced the meaning of the lack of the security of a "burial-place" and the loss of all his heritage. Cacciaguida thereupon touches on the main inspirational themes of the Comedy : the loss of social and political order and the necessity of its restoration if man is to attain to the fulfillment and happiness proper to him as a "social animal" and to arrive at a state of felicity. A just and peaceful community might still exist if there were harmony between the temporal and spiritual leadership, or as Cacciaguida puts it: Se la gente ch'ai mondo più traligna non fosse stata a Cesare noverca, ma come madre a suo figlio benigna. (Par.,XV\, 58-60) (Had the people, who goeth most degenerate on earth, not been to Caesar as a step-mother, but, as a mother to her son, benign.) The "people" Cacciaguida is referring to are the priests; the cause of discord he is condemning is Papal ambition. If the precepts of piety and justice were followed, order and happiness would ensue. However, the opposite has occurred in the Italy of Dante's time. The desire for power and the breaking of loyalties on the leadership level is mirrored by the breaking of loyalties, with subsequent disorders, on all levels of society. 27 Cacciaguida especially singles out and condemns the forsaking of marriage vows of Buondelmonte,2^ to which he attributes the end of peace and order in Florence : o Buondelmonte, quanto mal fuggisti le nozze sue per li altrui conforti! Molti sarebber lieti, che son tristi, se Dio t'avesse conceduto ad Ema la prima volta ch'a città venisti. Ma conveniesi a quella pietra scema che guarda '1 ponte che Fiorenza fesse

56 vittima nella sua pace postrema.

{Par., XVI, 140-47)

(Buondelmonte, how ill didst thou flee its nuptials at the prompting of another! Joyous had many been who now are sad, had God committed thee unto the Ema the first time that thou earnest to the city. But to that mutilated stone which guardeth the bridge 'twas meet that Florence should give a victim in her last time of peace.) It is this disorder and factionalism which will lead to Dante's own misfortune, and the concerned Cacciaguida forewarns his scion of his future exile in the following famous verses: Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta più caramente; e questo è quello strale che l'arco dello essilio pria saetta. Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle lo scendere e '1 salir per l'altrui scale. E quel che più ti graverà le spalle, sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempia con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle; che tutta ingrata, tutta matta e empia si farà contra te; ma, poco appresso, ella, non tu, n'avrà rossa la tempia. Di sua bestialità il suo processo farà la prova; sì ch'a te fia bello averti fatta parte per te stesso. {Par., XVII, 55-69) (Thou shalt abandon everything beloved most dearly; this is the arrow which the bow of exile shall first shoot. Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another's bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount upon another's stair. And that which most shall weigh thy shoulders down, shall be the vicious and ill company with which thou shalt fall down into this vale, for all ungrateful, all mad and impious shall they become against thee; but, soon after, their cheeks, and not thine, shall redden for it. Of their brutishness their progress shall make proof, so that it shall be for thy fair fame to have made a party for thyself.)

57 At the same time, however, he comforts Dante with the knowledge that his misfortunes will become an instrument of vision. This vision will be both a tool of justice and will give vital nourishment to mankind: Coscienza fusca o della propria o dell'altrui vergogna pur sentirà la tua parola brusca. Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna, tutta tua vision fa manifesta; e lascia pur grattar dov'è la rogna. Chè se la voce tua sarà molesta nel primo gusto, vital nutrimento lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta. Questo tuo grido farà come vento, che le più alte cime più percuote ; e ciò non fa d'onor poco argomento. (Par., XVII, 124-35) (Conscience darkened, or by its own or by another's shame, will in truth feel thy utterance grating. But none the less, every lie set aside, make thy entire vision manifest, and let them scratch wherever is the scab ; for if thy voice be grievous at first taste, yet vital nutriment shall it leave thereafter when digested. This cry of thine shall do as doth the wind, which smiteth most upon the loftiest summits; and this shall be no little argument of honour.) The vision which Cacciaguida urges Dante to make manifest is the truth which the earthly pilgrim has apprehended in his journey through the otherworld. This truth consists in his expanded knowledge or "vision" of how "man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice . . . becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice" (Epistle X, 8). It is an eminently social vision, one that focuses on the comprehension of those social and spiritual values necessary for man to arrive at self-fulfillment. This fulfillment, according to the vision, can be attained solely through piety and justice. It is his revelation of this vision which will, in Dante's eyes, lead men "from a state of misery to a state of felicity". Only in terms of the supreme place given by Dante to the values of piety and justice can we fully understand how it is that there are several "saved" pagans in the Comedy, and that we can appreciate the high place in Paradise given to Ripheus and Trajan among the just kings of the sky of Jupiter. Of Ripheus little is known except that he was a valiant defender of Troy against the Greeks mentioned by Virgil in Aeneid, Book II, and ajust and equitable

58 man: "Ripheus justissimus unus / Qui fuit in Teucris et servantissimus aequi" (Aeneid, II, 426-27). The example of Trajan, however, forcefully puts into relief Dante's concept of piety and justice as the basic means of attaining human and divine Harmony. For, in his version of what probably was a medieval legend about the emperor, Dante attributes Trajan's salvation to his sense of justice and pietà. Implored by a widow ("una vedovella . . . / di lacrime atteggiata e di dolore"), to execute justice on those who had killed her son, Trajan stops his army on the way to battle in order to grant her request out of a sense of kingly justice and pietà-, "giustizia vuole e pietà mi ritiene" (Purg., X, 93). Now, the Eagle of Justice informs Dante, Trajan is highest near its beak, a position earned by the emperor's just words of consolation to the grieving widow: colui che più al becco mi s'accosta, la vedovella consolò del figlio. (Par., XX, 44-45) (he who doth neighbor closest to the beak consoled the widow for her son.) Those critics who would impose a strict dogmatic Christian interpretation on Dante and argue that certain figures of the Comedy are damned or saved according to theological or sectarian reasons, are, it would seem to me, clearly contradicted here. The guiding valuational idea behind the Dantean classification of punishment and reward, it would appear, is not dogma but ethics. Universal pietà and justice, not the tenets of a particular dogma, are the determinant factors of damnation and redemption in the Comedy. In other words, Dante's valuational conception of the Comedy is inspired by the universal values embodied in the figure of Christ, not in the ecclesiastical codification and transformation of those values. Hence, does Dante have the Eagle of Justice explain: A questo regno non sali mai chi non credette 'n Cristo, vel pria vel poi ch'el si chiavasse al legno. Ma vedi: molti gridan 'Cristo, Cristo!', che saranno in giudicio assai men prope a lui, che tal che non conosce Cristo; e tai Cristiani dannerà l'Etiope, quando si partiranno i due collegi, l'uno in etterno ricco, e l'altro inope. (Par., XIX, 103-11)

59 (To this realm ne'er rose one who believed not in Christ, neither before nor after he was nailed unto the tree. But see, many cry, 'Christ, Christ', who at the judgment shall be far less near to him than he who knows not Christ; and such Christians the Ethiop shall condemn when the two colleges shall dispart, the one for ever rich, the other stripped.) It is the universal pietà of one who died on the cross to give his fellow men hope in redemption and who showed through his acts a way of life that could create peace and harmony on earth, which lies at the basis of Dante's vision. It is the Christian in spirit who is saved, whether he be Christian in name or not. Once again one is reminded that it is not the schemas composed of theological dogma that are important in the Comedy, but the essential message which lies beneath the schema and the letter — what Rabelais, referring to his own work, calls "la sustantificque mouelle". As Professor Fergusson has so well commented in his book on the Purgatorio : It is true that Dante used many maps and blueprints in building his great theatre for his journey. There is a geographical plan, and an astronomical scheme governing the significant and elaborately worked out chronology. There is a moral map, a Thomistic-Aristotelian classification of sins, with Pride at the bottom, nearest to Eden. The commentators have worked out most of these blueprints clearly, and their results are summarized in the excellent notes and appendices of the Temple Classics edition. But these abstract schemes have no more to do with what goes on in the poem than a road map has to do with hitch-hiking to Chicago. Dante did not believe that the varied modes of human life could be " k n o w n " abstractly; the knowledge he seeks to convey is so close to home that it may actually avail to free and nourish the spirit. That is why, instead of writing a psychology, he dramatizes the acquisition of insight, carefully distinguishing between what he knows as author of the poem and what it takes, and means, to get k n o w l e d g e . And so it is that the Eagle of Justice, formed of both pagan and Christian, affirms: Per esser giusto e pio son io qui essaltato a quella gloria che non si lascia vincere a disio; (Par., XIX, 13-15) (Because I was just and pious am I here exalted to this glory which suffereth not itself to be surpassed by longing.)

60 We have seen, therefore, that for Dante human and divine harmony is based on justice, and, above all, on pietà, the bond that ties man to man and man to God. What is, however, the ultimate meaning of the harmony that Dante envisages? Is the vision of reality and the final aim of human striving which he presents an effort to keep in balance opposing tensions always on the verge of dissolution, as in the Heraclitean outlook? Or does Dante move toward the more Platonic conception of harmony we discussed in our first chapter? That is, does Dante tend toward a conception of harmony as constituting a transcendence of the tensions in human reality? Is his an attempt to arrive at a state of resolution of all opposites? Although Dante is most painfully aware of the presence of strife in human life, this very awareness, caused by the political upheavals and crises which affected his own life, leads him to seek transcendence of these discordant elements in the human condition. His basic tendency is not to create a balance of opposing tensions, but rather to arrive at complete oneness and unity. What Dante searches for is the mystical reconciliation of all opposites both on earth and in heaven, the perfect attunement of the soul with itself, with its fellow men, and thereby with God. His is a journey in quest of a fulfilled peace. As Dante, offering his services to the Negligents violently slain, indicates: . . . ma s'a voi piace cosa ch'io possa, spiriti ben nati, voi dite, e io farò per quella pace che dietro a' piedi di sì fatta guida di mondo in mondo cercar mi si face. (Purg., V, 59-63) ( . . . but if aught I can do may please you, ye spirits born for bliss, speak ye; and I will do it for the sake of that peace, which following the steps of such a guide, makes me pursue it from world to world.) Dante's journey is a quest for that peace which resides in the resolution of all tensions and contradictions. This resolution and peace, or total harmony — the merging of the multiplicity of different wills into the unity of the One — is indeed the meaning of Paradise. As Piccarda explains to Dante: Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse tenersi dentro alla divina voglia, per ch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse; sì che, come noi sem di soglia in soglia per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace

61 com'allo re ch'a suo voler ne invoglia. E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace: eli'è quel mare al qual tutto si move ciò ch'ella cria e che natura face. {Par., Ili, 79-87) (Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves made one. So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the king, who draweth our wills to what he willeth; and his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that it createth and that nature maketh.) In this search for absolute wholeness, Virgil is the human guide who indicates the way to be followed on the human and social plane, Beatrice forms the link between the human and the divine wholeness, while St. Bernard leads the way to mystical unity and vision. Before concluding, let us briefly look at these last two guides, as this might give us greater insight into the Dantean concept of harmony. The end envisioned through Dante's journey into the beyond is the revelation to man of the road to salvation, a salvation to be understood in terms of redemption from the evil and discordant elements of life and the attainment of total self-fulfillment. This fulfillment comes with the ability of the perfectly attuned soul to experience absolute harmony. It is the redemption arrived at through the final resolution of all opposite tensions in the moment of ecstatic union with the Godhead. The way to attain this state of absolute harmony, as we have indicated, is for Dante the way of love and piety, the creative communion and correspondence between man and his fellow human beings, man and God. There is also, however, another dimension to this communion: the creative union between man and woman, which in its life-giving potential, may be said to constitute another basic element of vision. It is Beatrice who saves Dante, the symbolic principle of love-unity of the chtonian "realm of the Mothers" 3 0 transposed to the heavenly sphere of Christian salvation. As the "donna del ciel", the "heavenly woman", in her descent into the underworld instructs Virgil concerning the salvation of Dante : Ór movi, e con la tua parola ornata e con ciò c' ha mestieri al suo campare l'aiuta, sì ch'i' ne sia consolata. I' son Beatrice che ti faccio andare; vegno del loco ove tornar disio; amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare; (Inf., II, 67-72)

62 (Now go, and with thy ornate speech, and with what is necessary for his escape, help him so, that I may be consoled thereby. I am Beatrice who send thee; I come from a place where I desire to return; love moved me, that makes me speak.) Beatrice's descent into the depths of the Inferno — descent which is the necessary condition for the accomplishment of regeneration — is prompted by love: "Love moved me, that makes me speak". This love is the creative aspect of perfect union for Dante. The search for absolute wholeness can in human terms be expressed through the union of man and woman, the male and female principle, animus and anima, and in divine terms is contained in the unitary nature of the Trinity. Thus, in the Empyrean, Beatrice sits in the third circle from the highest rank, corresponding to that of the Holy Ghost, the symbol of the Divine love that unites the Father and the Son, man and God (see: Par. XXXI, 67). Through her, Dante finds himself transformed and redeemed, or as he says, "transhumanated" (Par. X, 63-72). And in the earthly Paradise she reflects the image of the Griffon - Christ in her eyes, both as God and as man (Purg. XXXI, 118-23). 31 Beatrice is the object that Dante will attempt to describe through his poetic vision: tentando a render te qual tu paresti là dove armonizzando il ciel t'adombra. (Purg. XXXI, 143-44) (trying to render you as you appeared there, where heaven in its eternal harmonizing mirrors you forth.) We see also that Beatrice in her heavenly seat next to the heart of the Godhead is crowned by and reflects the divine: " . . . , si facea corona / riflettendo da sè li etterni rai" (Par. XXXI, 71-72). And Dante in his final salutatory prayer to her states the redemptive nature of her role still more explicitly: Tu m' hai di servo tratto a libertate per tutte quelle vie, per tutt'i modi che di ciò fare avei la potestate. (Par. XXXI, 85-87) (Thou hast drawn me from a slave to liberty by all those paths, by all those methods by which you hadst the power to do so.) She resolves his doubts, helps him free himself from the contraries inherent in the phenomenal world, and guides him toward the supreme vision of absolute harmony, or God.

63 The nature of supreme Harmony is fully revealed, however, by Dante's choice o f his third and final guide to ultimate vision: St. Bernard. For while Beatrice, or the self-fulfilling anima principle, may be the inspiring source o f vision, that final vision must be apprehended through the intuitive transcendence o f mystical contemplation. St. Bernard, as Etienne Gilson has pointed out, was the perfect choice as the final guide to vision: Dante, who had almost infallible instinct in his choice of the personages required by his argument at every point, chose St. Bernard as the incarnation o f the highest form o f Christian life that it was possible for him to conceive. In fact, no choice could be better justified than St. Bernard as guide to the summits of spiritual life, for he is not only a mystic, he is the mystic pure and simple, without a trace of philosophy. His will to ecstasy involved the denial of everything beside and the successive suppression o f all aspects of nature and all manifestations o f life. What St. Bernard taught was not a system, not an elaborated doctrinal scheme, but simply an interior life and its formula; and because mysticism is much more a matter of doing than of speaking, it was natural that Dante should have chosen him as guide to the topmost heights. 3 2 It is only by turning wholly inward, by overcoming the discords and flux of phenomenal time, that one can attain to the absolute vision of divinity, and, beyond that, to the comprehension of the union of man and God in Christ, of the human and the divine which is the essence of Dante's final mystical illumination : 0 luce etterna che sola in te sidi, sola t'intendi, e da te intelleta e intendente te ami e arridi! Quella circulazion che sì concetta pareva in te come lume reflesso, dalli occhi miei alquanto circunspetta, dentro da sè, del suo colore stesso, mi parve pinta della nostra effige ; per che '1 mio viso in lei tutto era messo. Qual è '1 geomètra che tutto s'affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, pensando, quel principio ond'elli indige, tal era io a quella vista nova: veder volea come si convenne l'imago al cerchio e come vi s'indova; ma non eran di ciò le proprie penne:

64 se non che la mia mente fu percossa da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne. All'alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e '1 velie, sì come rota eh' igualmente è mossa, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. {Par. XXXIII, 124-45) (O Light eternal who only in thyself abidest, only thyself dost understand, and self-understood, self-understanding, turnest love on and smilest at thyself! That circling which appeared in thee to be conceived as a reflected light, by mine eyes scanned some little, in itself, of its own colour, seemed to be painted with our effigy, and thereat my sight was all committed to it. As the geometer who all sets himself to measure the circle and who findeth not, think as he may the principle he lacketh; such was I at this new seen spectacle; I would perceive how the image consorteth with the circle, and how it settleth there; but not for this were my proper wings, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its will came to it. To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled — even as a wheel that moveth equally — by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.) Such a vision can only be attained within the context of peace, which in its turn is created by earthly piety, justice, and love. The vision itself is inspired by a desire for unity and wholeness so comprehensive as to encompass all the creative unity fostering principles of life within its conception, while rejecting those principles in nature which are the forces of change and flux. The final conception of harmony arrived at in the Dantean vision, it is true, while springing from life, is basically alienated from human life as it exists on earth: the life composed of death, flux, injustice, impermanence. It is a conception which, in its desperate will to transcend the death inherent in life, looks to an a-temporal and eternal realm beyond human existence. While the experience of life was for the poet the basic Way to vision, the vision itself is a spiritual and transcendental one. It involves a fundamental will to comprehend transcendence, to understand the nature of Christ, the God-man, who passed from a human to a divine existence. This vision merges with and at the same time draws its inspiration from Beatrice, who, with her death, had become a spiritual ideal, capable of being regained only by transcending this life of the flesh, with its finiteness and limitations, and by arriving at the pure life of light and love within the realm of the spirit. The redeeming love that Aristo-

65 phanes in the Symposium

h u m o r o u s l y described as the "desire and pursuit

o f the w h o l e " ( 1 9 3 a ) , 3 3 f o r D a n t e b e c a m e t h e q u e s t o f a l i f e t i m e and the f u n d a m e n t a l subject o f vision, a vision o f a b s o l u t e s y n t h e s i s and u n i t y , o f a supreme H a r m o n y consisting in the total r e c o n c i l i a t i o n o f o p p o s i t e s . It is an a t t e m p t at reconciliation, u l t i m a t e l y , o f earthly life w i t h its discords and sorrows, w i t h a n o t h e r life, a spiritual o n e o f eternal p e a c e and happiness. This is the life o f happiness o f t h e r e d e e m e d soul, t h e soul at peace w i t h itself and w i t h all o f creation: E si c o m e c i a s c u n o a n o i venia, vedeasi l'ombra piena di letizia nel f u l g o r chiaro c h e da lei uscia. (Par. V , 1 0 6 - 0 8 ) ( A n d as e a c h o n e c a m e up t o us, the shade appeared filled w i t h j o y , b y the bright g l o w that issued f o r t h o f it.)

NOTES

This chapter includes a modified and revised version of an essay that appeared in the Italian Quarterly, XII: 47-48 (Winter-Spring 1969), pp. 161-83. 1. ". . . quae omnes artes in veri investigatione versantur; cuius studio a rebus gerendis abduci contra officium est. Virtutis enim laus omnis in actione consistit". Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, with an English translation by Walter Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), I, vi-vii, 19. 2. "Absit a viro predicante iustitiam ut perpessus iniurias, iniuriam inferentibus, velut benemerentibus, pecuniam suam volvat!" Espistle IX, 3. 3. See, for example, Natalino Sapegno: "As it may have happened to Erasmus or to Thomas More in the stands they took during the Reformation, so it befell Dante to be the representative of those attempting to sustain the values of past civilization. These are the values which deserve to be saved as a heritage, to which mankind will return after the moment of crisis, the moment of rupture that is necessarily a time of laceration and destruction. Certain values that are at the root of the inspiration of Dante's work - that quest for justice restored to its spiritual realm; that duty of rejection of divisive forces in the name of an idea transcending and regulating them; that necessity of a supreme arbitrator terminating the strife brought on by greed and reestablishing peace among men these are values to which even today's men can profitably return in their meditation" ("How the Commedia Was Born", in From Time to Eternity, ed. Thomas G. Bergin [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967] , 18). 4. For a discussion of the role of the idea of Roman justice and Stoic ethical thought in the work of Dante, see: Nancy Lenkeith, Dante and the Legend of Rome (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1952), for the Warburg Institute, University of London; for varying points of view see: Charles Till Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford:

66 Clarendon Press, 1957), Alessandro Passerin D'Entrèves, Dante as a Political Thinker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), and Allan H. Gilbert, Dante's Conception of Justice (New York: AMS Press, 1965). 5. "Cupiditatem unusquisque sibi duxit in uxorem, quemadmodum et vos, que numquam pietatis et equitatis, ut caritas, sed semper impietatis et iniquitatis est genitrix" (Epistle VIII, 7). 6. See Ernst Cassirer: "The ideal of humanitas was first formed in Rome; and it was especially the aristocratic circle of the younger Scipio that gave it its firm place in Roman culture. Humanitas was no vague concept. It had a definite meaning, and it became a formative power in private and public life in Rome. It meant not only a moral but also an esthetic ideal; it was the demand for a certain type of life that had to prove its influence in the whole of man's life, in his moral conduct as well as in his language, his literary style, and his taste. Through later writers such as Cicero and Seneca this ideal of humanitas became firmly established in Roman philosophy and Latin literature" The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 102. 7. De Monarchia, in: The Latin Works of Dante, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969; first published by J.M. Dent and Co., London, 1904), I, 15. 8. For an interesting interpretation of the riddle of the Dantean Veltro and of his origins "between feltro and feltro", see Leonardo Olschki, The Myth of the Felt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949). 9. Dante refers to the Platonic notion of the "harmony of the spheres" in Purg. XXX, 93ff., Par. I, 76ff., Par. VI, 126ff. 10. All subsequent quotations from the Divine Comedy refer to the Vandelli edition (Milano: Hoepli, 1965). The English translations of the Comedy are based on the Temple Classics Edition, 3 vols. (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1962-64; first published 18991901). Any modifications are my own. 11. See: Battisti and Alessio, Dizionario etimologico italiano (Firenze: Barbera, 1965); Tommaseo and Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana (Torino: Editrice Torinese, 1915), and the OED. 12. "E non è pietade quella che crede la volgar gente, cioè dolersi de l'altrui male, anzi à questo uno suo speziale effetto, che si chiama misericordia ed è passione". Il Convivio, with comment and notes by G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, with an introduction by Michele Barbi (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1964). 13. "ma pietade non è passione, anzi à una nobile disposizione d'animo, apparecchiata di ricevere amore, misericordia e altre caritative passioni". 14. "massimamente la pietade [fa de la persona bene sperare] , la quale fa risplendere ogni altra bontade col lume suo. Per che Virgilio, d'Enea parlando, in sua maggiore loda pietoso la chiama". Dante is probably referring to Aeneid I, 544: "Quo iustior alter / nec pietate fuit nec bello maior et armis". 15. See: Battisti and Tommaseo; also the OED. 16. See also A. Pagliaro in this regard: Ulisse, ricerche semantiche sulla Divina Commedia, 2 vols. (Firenze: D'Anna, 1967), p. 614, with whose semantic interpretation of the word I would agree, although I find myself in disagreement with his conclusions on the ultimate meaning of the verses. 17. In his note on the verses Vandelli writes: " 'In questa bolgia' - ecco quello che dice Virgilio - 'non c'è luogo a pietà, e ciò per la specie della colpa di cui i dannati in essa accolti furono rei. Chi infatti è più scellerato di chi tollera (comporta), ossia ammette possibile, per il giudizio di Dio, ch'è attività per essenza, a attività omnipotente, una condizione di passività?' Giacché non per altro si vuol prevedere il futuro nè si compiono malie se non per la presunzione di poter piegare artificiosamente, se così a noi giovi, il corso degli eventi futuri". Similarly, also Pagliaro comments: "La 'scelleratezza' non consiste, dunque, nella commozione suscitata in un cuore d'uomo dalla durezza della giusti-

67 zia divina ("qual maggiore empietà che portar compassione a un castigo voluto da Dio?" D'Ovidio), bensì è quella dell'indovino, il quale assume di poter rendere passivo, suscettibile di subire suggestioni umane, il volere divino, che è per sè stesso 'atto', 'attività', per eccellenza" (Ulisse, p. 615). 18. As Sapegno writes: "Vero è che entrambi le interpretazioni (Vandelli e D'Ovidio) lascian dubbioso e perplesso il lettore, perchè nessuna delle due riesce veramente a giustificare il tono violento ed enfatico del rimprovero di Virgilio (che resta eccessivo e suona rettorico, sia che noi vogliamo riferirlo alla pietà di Dante o all'empietà degli indovini) (Note to Inf. XX, 30, Divina Commedia, Ricciardi, 1957). 19. Referring to "Qui vive la pietà . . ." E. Parodi observes: "Quest'ultimo è un verso efficace e chiarissimo a udirlo; ma non bisogna poi ostinarsi ad esplorare troppo il fondo (. . .). Qui dice Virgilio, . . . "un animo informato alle pietà vera e sapiente deve riconoscere che non è il luogo da avere pietà" (Letture Dantesche, a cura di G. Getto, Firenze: Sansoni, 1955, p. 382). 20. I cannot agree with Sapegno who would see in Dante's sorrow before the sight of the diviners only an "intellectual" and "abstract" reaction to the punishment inflicted on the souls: "Si noti che la pietà di Dante, qui, sorge e si sviluppa nell'ambito di una situazione astratta, e la stessa insistenza ch'egli porta nell' intento di fornirle una giustificazione razionale riesce soltanto a metterne maggiormente in rilievo l'astratezza. Il suo pianto non nasce da partecipazione alla sorte di un individuo determinato, dalla considerazione di un caso umano specifico, sì solo dalla forma della pena assegnata a questa categoria di dannati, dal tormento, di natura tutta intellettuale, che egli prova nell' assistere a quell'indecoroso stravolgimento della nobile immagine dell'uomo" (note to Inf. XX, 25, op. cit., p. 230). If such were the case, Dante's anguished tears and Virgil's emphatic attitude would lose their force and profound meaning, not only in terms of Canto XX, but also in relation to the message of the Comedy as a whole. 21. With some reservations, I would tend to agree with A. Pézard, Dante sous la pluie de feu, Paris: Vrin, 1950, that the sin of Canto XV is primarily spiritual sodomy, a perversion of the use of language. 22. Left is the direction that leads Dante and Virgil to the bottom of the Inferno (except for Inf. IX, 132, and Inf. XVII, 31, where they go to the right). 23. For W.B. Stanford, on the other hand, Ulysses symbolizes man's sinful desire to attain forbidden knowledge, which leads to destruction: "Moralistically, Ulysses now becomes a symbol of sinful desire for forbidden knowledge. This gives Dante his ultimate reason for condemning him as a false counsellor, because by persuading his comrades to follow him in the quest for knowledge he led them to destruction" (The Ulysses Theme, Oxford: Blackwell, 1954, p. 181). Cf. Pagliaro's sharp negation of Stanford's position: "è da escludere che Ulisse sconti nella bolgia dei politici e condottieri fraudolenti anche il suo tentativo di forzare i limiti imposti da Dio alla conoscenza umana" (Ulisse, p. 396). For another distinguished scholar, M. Fubini, Ulysses represents pagan grandeur and thirst for Truth frustrated by the lack of divine grace, the grace of Christian theology: "Vi è nell'impresa di Ulisse il segno della grandezza e dell'insufficenza dell'umanità pagana, vale a dire dell'umanità tutta priva del soccorso della rivelazione . . . Nulla è di peccaminoso nell'operato di Ulisse, e ciononostante la catastrofe non può non esserne la conclusione" (Canto XXVI, Letture Dantesche, a cura di G. Getto, p. 507). Unable to see any sin in Ulysses' quest, Fubini, similarly to Parodi for Canto XX, goes to the extreme of negating the existence of a Ulyssean transgression: "Invano certi critici si sono tormentati intorno a un problema inesistente . . ." (p. 501) and further, "Non peccato nè ribellione è in Ulisse, poiché nulla ci fa riconoscere nelle colonne d'Ercole un divieto divino nè oltrepassando lo stretto l'eroe ha coscienza di volare una legge posta agli uomini dalla divinità. Non sono quelle colonne se non un avvertimento di un uomo ad altri uomini . . ." (p. 508). According to Fubini, neither because of his fraudulent acts nor for

68 any more serious sin which Dante might condemn does Ulysses become a figure of the Comedy, but, rather, as an example of " h u m a n magnaminity" (p. 502). Therefore, he concludes, "[Ulisse] resta, ricordiamolo, un esempio, il cui valore non è diminuito dall' esito necessariamente infelice dell'impresa, poiché il motivo che gliel'ha ispirata non è in se stesso rimproverevole, e perchè per altre vie il fine a cui egli ha mirato, sarà dato agli uomini raggiungere" (p. 511). Following on the steps of Fubini, also Pagliaro sees Ulysses as a symbol of "pure intelligence", of "love of knowledge" (Ulisse, p. 403), which is frustrated by the lack of divine grace: " E mancato a Ulisse il beneficio della grazia divina, e ciò ha reso vano il nobile suo sforzo di giungere alla beatitudine della piena libertà morale, conseguita mediante "virtute e canoscenza" (Ulisse, p. 422). The dark mountain for both critics stands for earthly Paradise, a symbol of the extreme point of knowledge which human nature, unaided by grace, can achieve: "Ulisse perciò ci appare il prototipo dell'umanità pagana che fidando nelle sue proprie forze à giunta tant'oltre da intravedere il monte del Paradiso terrestre, quasi simbolo del punto estremo a cui può spingersi per la sua intrinseca natura l'umanità" (Fubini, op. cit., p. 507). These views, by implication, contain a surprising conception of the Dantean idea of justice and seem to cast doubt on the presence, at least as far as Canto XXVI is concerned, of a controlling plan of progression of sins in the Inferno from less serious to more serious. If one negates, as Fubini and Pagliaro seem to, the existence of a reason for Dante's introduction of Ulysses in a particular Canto and at a particular point of his descent to the bottom of Hell, the conclusion must be that the Ulysses episode lies outside of the ethical division of the Inferno. Fubini hence observes: "il poeta si è studiato, come abbiamo veduto, di isolare [l'episodio di Ulisse] dalla commedia infernale . . ." (op. cit., p. 502). (In addition to the Ulysses episode, Fubini also excludes from the moral division of the Comedy the episodes of Paolo and Francesca, of Farinata, and of Brunetto Latini - which I cannot here discuss, although the line of thought that follows would apply also to these figures of the Inferno.) If one overthrows in this manner Dante's ethical division of the Comedy, one risks, it would seem, a return to the "episodic" ¡cading of the work and an oversight of the powerful unifying theme of Love which inspires and directs the poet's apocalyptic vision of life and death, of human suffering and happiness. In his interpretation, Fubini unites Ulysses' failure with his sin (i.e., the ethical reason for his presence in the Canto). But since he does not admit a Ulyssean transgression that would account for the hero's appearance in Canto XXVI, he is forced to negate the possibility of an ethical misdeed on the part of Ulysses and to attribute his failure to arbitrary Christian theological reasons, such as predestined divine grace: a grace given to Dante but not to Ulysses. According to this view, the only Truth would be that of Christian Revelation: since Ulysses was not a Christian, he was, therefore, necessarily condemned to failure. This conception of Dantean inspiration presents grave difficulties for the understanding of those pagans whom Dante saved in the Comedy. There is, it is true, a grace given to Dante and not to Ulysses. I would not, however, see the grace involved to be that divine illumination which distinguishes a Christian from a pagan or from a man of any other religious sect. (Also C. Singleton in his penetrating studies on the Divine Comedy seems to limit the Dantean wayfarer to a Christian "Whicheverman"; see: Dante Studies II: Journey to Beatrice, Cambridge: Harvard, 1958, p. 5ff.). The grace concerned, it seems to me, is not relativistic theological grace, but instead the illumination, universally accessible to the sensitive and poetic soul, which permitted Dante through his suffering to see and understand that the supreme Truth of life - of human life on earth - is Love and Harmony, human union as against division, whether this division be caused by avarice, pride, cupidity, lust, incontinence, violence, malice, or fraud. 24. As Francis Fergusson comments with regard to treachery: " T h e last three cantos of

69 the Inferno are devoted to Cocytus, the realm of treachery, which Dante (like Shakespeare) regarded as the deathly sin. Simple fraud "uccida / pur lo vinco d'amor che fa natura", "kills only the bond of love that nature makes", as Virgil says (Canto XI, line 55); but treachery, fraud of the worst kind, kills also the more intimate bond - which is trust - between members of one family, or city, or party; or between a protector or benefactor and the recipient of such kindness. For Dante, human "life consists in action", i.e. love, the movement of the spirit; and the spirit must have trust if it is to " m o v e " toward the persons or the things or the ideas that would fulfill and nourish it. Treachery does not destroy love, for love is inherent in the indestructible human soul; but it destroys trust, and so isolates the soul, turning its love from a vital to a deathly and futile aim. Dante (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 119. 25. See: Thomas Goddard Bergin, "Light from Mars", in: A Diversity of Dante (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969), p. 145. 26. "The end of the whole and of the part may be manifold, to wit, the proximate and the ultimate, but dropping all subtle investigation, we may say briefly that the end of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity" (270). Epistle X, to Can Grande. 27. Also Marco Lombardo remarks in Purg. XVI: Soleva Roma, ch'l buon mondo feo, due soli aver, che l'una e l'altra strada facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo. L'un l'altro ha spento; ed e giunta la spada col pasturale, e l'un con l'altro inseme per viva forza mal convien che vada; pero che, giunti, l'un l'altro non teme: se non mi credi, pon mente alia spiga, ch'ogn'erba si conosce per lo seme. (106-14) 28. Gualdrada Donati persuaded Buondelmonte Buondelmonti to forsake his promise to marry the daughter of Labertuccio Amidei and to marry her own daughter. Buondelmonte was killed at the feet of the statue of Mars, which was on the shore of the Arno, on Easter Sunday 1215. This killing signalled the beginning of endless internal discords and struggles for power in Florence. 29. Francis Fergusson, Dante's Drama of the Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 9. 30. For a discussion of the psychological significance of the Faustian "realm of the Mothers" see Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Vol. 5, Bollingen series of the collected works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 124ff. 31. See, for example, Fergusson: "The purpose of this very general survey of the chief parts of the morning in Eden is to show that the vision of Beatrice is the center of all its complementary appearances. This vision is implied in the timeless scene of the Golden Age with which the experience of Eden begins, and then made actual by means of the gradual coming, in human history, of Christ's Revelation. She is the betrayed way to God in Dante's own life; and then, after the personal Hell which her appearance brings him (echoing the Infernal vision of Cocytus), she reveals her beauty as Dante's way once more, and, thereby, the paradoxical Way Itself: Christ as both God and Man. She is thus the clue to the interpretation of man's tragic history from the coming of Christ to the present, in Dante's own Europe; and finally she gives Dante his hard instruction, both as a man and as the poet of the poem we are reading" (Dante's Drama of the Mind, p. 192).

70 32. A Gilson Reader, Anton C. Pegis ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 118-19. 33. Aristophanes concludes his analysis of the "human condition" as follows: "There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into the villages by the Lacedaemonians. And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies . . . I believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each one returning to his primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would be happy" (193a-c).

Ill THE ENDLESS JAR

In seeking to define the nature of the concept of harmony present in Shakespeare's work, we will not attempt to discuss all of his plays nor to go into sources, influences, or technical devices. Our goal is to try to reach a definition and understanding of Shakespeare's outlook on life and reality. This outlook, we shall see, finds its expression in a vision of harmony. We will not be concerned with the examination of the varied details of all of the plays. Rather, through a discussion of the major inspirational themes of some of Shakespeare's mature works, we will attempt to arrive at a comprehension of the basic mode of thought that informs the structure and content of the whole of his literary production. For, while plot and characters may vary, and the form and artistic expression may become more mature and complex, the basic inspirational values remain more or less constant throughout all of his works. In our discussion we will focus our attention primarily on the plays written after 1599, although the observations concerning these later works are also relevant to his earlier literary production. We will examine in greatest detail one of his last plays, The Tempest, which represents a culmination of Shakespeare's thought. Our analysis of this play will serve as an in-depth illustration of the forms and themes recurrent throughout his work. In dealing with the subject of harmony in Shakespeare's thought, one might be tempted at first to associate the idea of harmony present in the Shakespearean canon with the general notions of hierarchical order, comprised in the concept of 'the Great Chain of Being', that were diffused in Elisabethan times. That is, one might identify harmony in Shakespeare with what E.M. Tillyard has called the Elisabethan World Picture. It is true that there are many elements of this world picture present in Shakespeare's work. Yet, on closer analysis, it would seem that a Platonizing outlook like the one described by Tillyard as constituting the essential facet of the Elisabethan World Picture (and which he ascribes to Shakespeare) is not the major informing principle of the Shakespearean vision of harmony. Shakespeare's vision, it would seem, does not rest on the linear projection of transcendence which is present, for example, in the Dantean outlook. To think of Shakespeare solely or primarily in terms of the Elisabethan World Picture would mean to consider the idea of harmony in relation to notions of hierarchical

72 orders. As we saw in the first chapter, however, harmony may manifest itself in a hierarchical mode of vision, such as the Platonic, or it may appear in terms of a Heraclitean order: one composed of a balance of opposing tensions. This latter order is forever endangered by the centrifugal force of those tensions. It is this Heraclitean order, rather than that of the Great Chain of Being, which would seem to be the governing concept in Shakespearean thought. The notion of the Great Chain of Being, which Tillyard seems to see as central to Shakespeare and to the Elisabethan World Picture, is one diffused throughout the Western tradition. For the Greeks, the connective link of continuity in the chain was ontological in nature. In Greek philosophy, the great chain was indeed one of "being" rather than one of "order". Christian thought instead, came to view the chain of being as a chain of hierarchical orders. As Etienne Gilson points out, "no ontological link can possibly insure any kind of continuity between the being of a Creator and that of his creatures which his power has made to be from no antecedent matter, element, or entity of any kind". 1 The concept of the "orders" of being gained particular importance in medieval society where structure and relation became paramount considerations in both the spiritual and temporal realms. The concept of the 'great chain of being' or of the 'orders' of being was part of the heritage the Middle Ages transmitted to the Renaissance. At the same time, however, the tensions between faith and reason, spiritual and temporal authority, structure and its negation — tensions that were present also in the Middle Ages — erupted with new force in the intellectual climate of the Renaissance. These opposing tensions, breaking through the restrictive horizons of the past, undermined the belief in absolute hierarchical order and caused its dissolution. The influence of the new scientific modes of thought that culminated in Galileo and Copernicus, Humanism and the destruction of the old Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason, the systematic doubt of Montaigne and Descartes, the breakdown of the old feudal order and the rise of communes and signorie in Italy together with the consolidation of nation states elsewhere in Europe, the concomitant political and social upheavals, the corruption in the Church, religious dissent and religious wars, the political realism of Machiavelli — these are only some of the factors that contributed to a loss of faith in an absolute scale of world order. Shakespeare's universe reflects this breakdown and the new sensibility it gives rise to. Although he can at times embrace and pay homage to the views of Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Castiglione, Bembo - to name only a few - Shakespeare fundamentally mirrors the world of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Ariosto, Cervantes — the world of Heraclitean harmony. Dante envisioned a universe in which man could attain redemption through increasing knowledge and awareness of the good and the just. He portrays the possibility of achieving a state in which the opposing tensions inherent in human finitude may be

73

completely reconciled and attuned in the unity of the one Godhead. Shakespeare, instead, portrays something quite different. In the Shakespearean universe, the Dantean hierarchical orders of increasing beatitude and perfection give way to the depiction of the flux and strife present in human life on earth. It is the "star-crossed" aspect of that life on which he focuses his attention, not only in his tragedies, but also in his comedies and romances. The order he depicts is one ridden by disorder and flux. Any harmony envisaged must both emerge from and contain the opposing tensions that can cause its dissolution. The Shakespearean vision is closer to that of Sophocles and Heraclitus than to that of Plato. Although Shakespeare is a various man and introduces characters with different outlooks among whom are those who utter views that echo Plato, such as Lorenzo with his famous speech on music in The Merchant of Venice, the main thrust of his own vision is not Platonic but Heraclitean. The speech that is most often singled out as embodying the epitome of the Shakespearean vision of harmony in terms of hierarchy and order is the Ulysses commentary on the specialty of rule in Troilus and Cressida. Referring to the personal, political, and cosmological aspects of order, Ulysses affirms: O when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick! How could communities, Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores And make sop of all this solid globe. Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead. Force should be right; or rather right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice, too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey,

74 And last eat up himself. 2 (Act I, iii, 101-24) Yet the order of which Ulysses speaks, it should be noted, is not the state of complete resolution of opposing tensions advanced in the Platonic vision of harmony. Ulysses in effect describes what W.B. Yeats has called the 'Shakespearean vision of horror', the state of social and moral chaos that emerges when order breaks down. Beyond this state of horror, however, the nature of the ultimate order envisaged is Heraclitean rather than Platonic. It is the state of justice that emerges from the 'endless jar' of opposing tensions. Harmony consists in the precarious balance which, once destroyed, leads to the primeval state of chaos: "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows. Each thing melts / In mere oppugnancy". Or, as Othello observes referring to his love for Desdemona: "When I love thee not, / Chaos is come again". In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses' speech itself must be put into the proper perspective of the action of the play. This action reflects a state of broken trusts, inversion and confusion of values, inflated human appetite and vanity, and butchery. Cressida betrays Troilus after promising him everlasting faith. The great Greek hero Achilles, "his ear full of his airy fame" (I, ii), first "grows dainty of his worth", then out of wounded vanity proceeds to murder Hector in a rather unheroic and degrading way. Hector himself is first against the war because he feels that Helen is a worthless cause: " . . . She is not worth what she does cost / The holding". Yet Troilus is able to convince him to continue with the war by flattering his vanity through the mention of glories to be attained in battle: For, I presume, brave Hector would not lose So rich advantage of a promised glory As smiles upon the forehead of this action For the wide world's revenue. (Act II, ii, 203-06) In the play there is no hierarchical progression toward a state of resolved harmony. Ulysses' speech on order actually stands in marked contrast to the action of the drama and is no doubt meant to put into greater relief the nature of the reality depicted throughout the play. This reality mirrors the "confounding contraries" of which, for example, Timon of Athens speaks in the play that bears his name. It is the reality of human life when ". . . Piety and fear . . ." decline into confusion: . . . Piety, and fear, Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,

75 Domestic awe, night rest, and neighbourhood, Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades, Degrees, observances, customs, and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries, And let confusion live! Timon will to the woods; where he shall find The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind. (Act IV, i, 15-16) The order envisioned beyond these "confounding contraries" is that of a harmony which emerges from the attainment of a balance of these opposing forces. These contraries, nevertheless, always reside in the background of the harmony achieved. The main enforcing element for the preservation of this harmony is piety and human communion. Piety and justice for Shakespeare, as for Dante, are the basic elements for the creation of harmony in all spheres of existence. Dante, however, projects piety against the concept of absolute transcendent goals and thus relates it to the hierarchical Platonizing vision he expresses. Shakespeare, instead, focuses on the operation of piety and justice within the bounds of the Heraclitean reality of flux and change, the reality of earthly existence. Throughout Shakespeare, and particularly in the later works (Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, the romances, etc.) harmony is envisaged in terms of the attainment of a state of justice through social piety, human trust and communion. In these plays broken trusts and loyalties, or the suspicion of broken trusts, leads to tragedy, whereas harmony is restored through the recreation of broken bonds, leading to a new state of social piety and trust. Such a situation is most often expressed through the figure of marriage, or at any rate, of newly reconstituted family or social bonds. In Julius Caesar, for example, broken trust lies at the center of the tragedy. The tragic character of the situation is heightened by the fact that the betrayal was perpetrated by Caesar's closest associates and friends, particularly Brutus. Those elements of close relationship and trust, the violation of which, as Aristotle has pointed out, create the greatest tragic situation, are all present. Brutus was "Caesar's angel" and, as Mark Anthony indicates, the final blow of one whom Caesar loved and trusted was the "unkindest cut of all": Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd; And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away, Mark how the blood of Caesar follow'd it, As rushing out of doors, to be resolv'd If Brutus so unkindly knock'd or no;

76 For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel: Judge, 0 you gods, how dearly Caesar lov'd him. This was the most unkindest cut of all; For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms, Quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty h e a r t . . . (Act III, ii, 178-88) The concept of 'kindness' in Shakespeare embraces the wider meaning of 'piety', the quality that makes a man civilized, a basic element of social cohesion and happiness. Timon of Athens, upon experiencing the full meaning of human ingratitude, goes into the seclusion of the woods "Where he shall find / The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind". Lady Macbeth regrets the civilizing "milk of human kindness" which characterizes her husband. King Lear deeply feels the "sharp-toothed unkindness" of his daughters. The satisfaction that he found no man disloyal to himself is, ironically, Brutus' final consolation before dying: Countrymen, My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me. I shall have glory by this losing day More than Octavius and Mark Anthony By this vile conquest shall attain unto. So fare you well at once; for Brutus' tongue Hath almost ended his life's history: Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest, That have but labour'd to attain this hour. (Act V, v, 34-42) The act of unkindness, even if perpetrated altruistically and in good faith as in the case of Brutus, invariably leads to the breakdown of harmony and social order. As Mark Anthony prophesizes over Caesar's body: A curse shall light upon the limbs of men; Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war; All pity chok'd with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,

77 With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry 'havoc', and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (Act III, i, 262-75) In Julius Caesar, as in King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Richard III, the Henry K/th tetralogy, to name only a few, the act of unkindness not only affects the psychological order of the doer, but projects itself into the concommittant external disorder of the kingdom. Brutus' internal turmoil at the thought of conspiring against Caesar, Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar, I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. (Act II, i, 61-69) is mirrored by the "civil strife in heaven" alluded to by Casca, and is matched by the "fierce civil strife" on earth prophesized by Mark Anthony. Yet, in the Shakespearean correspondences between the human, social, and cosmic relationships, there is something more at work than a mere exposition of the Elisabethan World Picture. Through his use of human, social, and cosmological correspondences, Shakespeare seems to be attempting to illustrate, with the greatest possible force, a basic fact of life. This is the belief, recurrent throughout his work, that error, even if perpetrated in good faith, almost always leads not only to the downfall of the agent, but also of all who surround him. As Messala exclaims on perceiving Cassius' body: 0 hateful Error, Melancholy's child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? 0 error, soon conceiv'd, Thou never comest unto a happy birth, But kill'st the mother that engender'd thee. (Act V, iii, 67-71) Shakespeare seems to exploit the Elisabethan World Picture for poetic pur-

78 poses and to heighten dramatic effect. At the same time, however, he does not appear to really depend on it. His references to hierarchies and degrees of ascending orders are not the same as Dante's use of the Great Chain of Being cosmology. While, as we pointed out earlier, Dante's projection was linear and moved toward transcendence, Shakespeare's is human and is directed toward the realm of existential temporality. Edmund, in King Lear, laughs at the Elisabethan attribution of human events to the influence of celestial bodies: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Tut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (Act I, ii, 124-40) While he points to human excesses as being the main cause of our misfortunes, he at the same time implies that there is something more at work in the course of human life than mere human will and appetite: "I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing". This "something more" beyond the influence of sun, moon, and stars, beyond even the range of human excess, consists in an impenetrable Fate for Shakespeare. Although Cassius may tell Brutus that "men at some time are masters of their fates" (I, ii), Lafeu's statement in All's Well seems to be truer to Shakespeare's thought and feeling: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (Act II, üi, 1-6) This "unknown fear" is most fully expressed through the dark statements in King Lear : As flies to wanton boys, are we to th' Gods; They kill us for their sport. (Act IV, i, 36-37)

79 When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. (Act IV, vi, 184-85) If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offences, It will come, Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. (Act IV, ii, 46-50) Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. (Act V,ii, 9-11) While King Lear expresses the outlook on life of the mature Shakespeare and is, as Theodore Spencer has indicated, "the largest and the most profound of all his plays", 3 there is another dimension to Shakespearean thought which encompasses and goes beyond this outlook. This dimension is concerned with the possible reattainment of lost harmony. Shakespeare's work as a whole might be seen to deal with the problem of the loss of harmony, the several reasons for that loss, and the possibility of reestablishing a harmonious order. Even in King Lear, where the mature Shakespeare seems to envision life as a stoical test of existential endurance, the road toward the possible attainment of harmony is never quite lost sight of. It appears in the play through a vision of reintegrated familial communion and unity when a cured and wiser Lear dreams of a new future with Cordelia: Come, let's away to prison; We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take u p o n ' s the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th' moon. (Act V, iii, 8-19)

80 This vision of happiness is not destined to last, however, as an adverse Fate brings it to a tragic end. The contemplation of the way toward happiness and fulfillment through piety and human communion, nonetheless, forms the basic concern of the whole Shakespearean canon. This overriding preoccupation with the loss of harmony and the possibility of its reattainment, is especially apparent in the last romances, and particularly in The Tempest. The destruction and desperate effort to recreate balance and harmony is the subject of this play, the analysis of which will conclude our discussion. In attempting to explain the nature of the concept of Harmony which emerges in Shakespeare's The Tempest, we are faced with a task which approximates the difficulty of that assigned by Prospero to Ferdinand. The possibility of piling up "some thousands of . . . logs" before sunset seems to be indeed as dim as that of untangling and discussing the complex interplay of symbols in the play within the limits of a brief essay. Success in both cases would seem to be an illusion. Yet, like Ferdinand, one must seek to make that illusion become a reality, if not factually, then imaginatively. Ultimate success lies, perhaps, in seeking to harmonize the illusion - on this depends the outcome of Ferdinand's task, of Prospero's happiness, of Shakespeare, the artist's, play, and finally, of our own critical exegesis of that play. Since certain aspects of harmony can be related to music and music is such an important thematic element in Shakespeare's plays, it might prove fruitful to examine the concept of Harmony in The Tempest from a slightly different perspective; that is, as it is revealed through the poet's use of musical imagery and ideas. Facing our task squarely then, or I should say "musically", we might examine Shakespeare's use of musical imagery in relation to three main aspects of music which are present in the play. In the first place, one finds the concept of music as an eternal Idea of universal harmony, or rather, as the human analogy to that Idea. Secondly, there is the notion of the power of music in the realm of the finite and the temporal; that is, music is viewed as a potent means of achieving a given end. And, lastly, one notes the concept of music as "illusion". Paradoxically, the first two ideas — music as a paradigm and music as a means to an end — are ultimately comprised, negated, and fulfilled through the third concept: music as illusion. Looking at the first concept, music as a paradigm of universal harmony, one might relate Shakespeare's feeling toward this aspect of music to the "Pythagorean" notion of the harmony of the spheres and its Platonic elaboration. This idea would be the one normally associated with the Elisabethan World Picture outlook on reality. Music, as such, would represent an eternal principle of cosmic concord.4 Adherence to the precepts of this principle leads man to the vision of abundance, virtue, and happiness which in The Tempest are expressed through the songs and dances of the masque. Discord, or the violation of this eternal law of harmony, leads to cosmic condemnation such as that pronounced on Alonso by the voice of nature, a condemnation

81 described by the terrified King as being . . . monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass. (Act III, iii, 95-99) Ferdinand refers to the music he hears as "no sound / That the earth owes" (I, ii, 409-10). Such music is, to use Prospero's term, "heavenly", something of a transcendental nature which is made perceptible to human ears only through the agency of supernatural spirits acting under the compulsion of Prospero's Art. Heavenly music, moreover, as we see through the masque, is in complete correspondence with happiness. Such happiness is the ideal toward which all men strive. Yet, by the very fact of its perfection and ideality, the harmony of the spheres lies beyond the reach of imperfect human powers. It is visible only to the seer, the magician, the man endowed with superior power. Thus the various characters in the play follow the music they hear but never succeed in discerning its source. Prospero himself has command over the music of the spirits only through the supernatural power of his Art. When he abjures that Art, as we shall see, he also loses control over this heavenly music. In the play there is, hence, a marked dichotomy between the paradigm of heavenly music on the one hand, and natural human reality on the other. The opposition between the Ideal and the human seems to indicate that Ideal harmony is beyond the reach of ordinary human beings, unless these are aided by some supernatural power, such as magic. The fact that it is necessary to use Art to achieve that harmony points to the artificial quality of its nature. And, in addition, since the Art which is a means to arrive at that harmony is abjured, the implicit conclusion to be drawn is that for Shakespeare, the attainment of this "heavenly" harmony — which involves the reconciliation of all opposites — does not represent the correct context and end of human striving. It would seem that the Shakespearean outlook envisions a different conception of harmony. We will, however, examine the implications of this dichotomy further when we look into the idea of music as illusion. With respect to the second conception of music in The Tempest - music as a means to an end — we see that musical sound is treated as a powerful force which is of the essence in Prospero's attempt to reestablish harmony and happiness in his world. Music, in this instance, becomes the means of creating the finite image of harmony. Its power is qualified and stressed by the characters' reference to it as a force that "charms". Alluding to Alonso and his company, Prospero tells us that he has required music "To work mine

82 end upon their senses, that / This airy charm is for" (V, i, 54-54). And Ariel describes the effect of his music on Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban in terms of "charming". Using an appropriate animal metaphor, he states: "so I charm'd their ears, / That calf-like, they my lowing follow'd . . . " (IV, i, 178-79). The power of music as a means is further emphasized by Shakespeare in the Second Act of The Tempest, where a reference is made to the miraculous harp of Amphion, who, with its music, charmed the very stones so that they assembled out of their previous disorderly state and formed the walls of Thebes. This image of the power of music in respect to creation and order, moreover, is strengthened by its association with the idea of Gonzalo's creation of a new city by means of his "word". The two images, the one musical, the other having religious connotations, mutually gain greater relief and significance from their juxtaposition. As far as the end of music as a means is concerned, one might say that the immediate aim and result of music varies from situation to situation and character to character in the play. Music, thus, might lead to some form of punishment on both the literal and the symbolical levels, such as that inflicted on the drunken subplot trio, Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban, by the "Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns, / Which enter'd their frail shins": and by a bath in the "filthy-mantled pool . . ." (IV, i, 180-82). On the other hand, music might act as a means of curing symbolic mental disorders, as for example, the solemn music that restored the senses of Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, or the music that soothed the shipwrecked Ferdinand. In other words, it can have strong cathartic effects, leading the lost and distraught soul back to order and peace. Music may be associated, furthermore, with knowledge and revelation; i.e., the masque episode, the menacing harmony of nature which proclaimed the guilt of Alonso, or Ariel's song Five fathoms deep, through which he announces Alonso's symbolical death and regeneration to Ferdinand (who, however, understands the song on a literal level). Although the different immediate aims of music may vary, the overall guiding end of music as a means is the re-establishment of general harmony and happiness from the evil and suffering caused by discord. In the case of Prospero, the original discord was brought on by his retreat from the world, from social communion, and the temporal responsibility associated with his high office, which led to Antonio's seizure of power through ambition and greed. One might note, however, that in Shakespeare's work, discord appears as an integral part of human reality. The phenomenal world which he portrays for us in his plays consists in a constant, fluctuating tension between discord in all of its divers manifestations (lust, greed, passion, hatred, or any other sentiment that disrupts the balance of the human soul and its relation to the outer world), and harmony (the tendency of the human soul toward unity, balance, goodness, communion, and thence, toward happiness). Music with its

83 soothing, calming, cathartic effect is therefore most often seen to be in direct opposition to discord. Its role is perhaps best depicted in Lorenzo's words to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice: For do but note a wild and wanton herd Or race of youthful and unhandled colts Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud, Which is the hot condition of their blood, — If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, Or any air of music touch their ears, You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze, By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods, Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature, — The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted . . . (Act V, i, 71-88) Music as a means soothes the tormented psychic state of, or brings into balance the social relations between, various characters in Shakespeare's plays; it can allay the fury of the Tempest.5 The question that now poses itself is: "How successful was Prospero's use of music through the power of his Art in enabling him to reach his end: the re-establishment of harmony and order in his world, a harmony broken through his original rejection of his ties with that world?" Shakespeare seems to indicate that as long as music is controlled and directed through the use of supernatural powers (Prospero's Art), it can be partially successful at reestablishing harmony from the various levels of discord in the play, discord caused by the enmity of Alonso, the failure in social responsibility by Prospero, the ambition of Antonio and Sebastian, the lust and despite of Caliban, the tragi-comical ambition and greed of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban, the discord symbolized by the Tempest itself. The fact that Prospero's Art is only "partially" successful at re-establishing harmony, however, is highly significant and gives us a clue to Shakespeare's conception of the nature of harmony. On the one hand, we see that the conversion and perfect attunement with social order of either Antonio or Sebastian is, at best, dubious, and, with regard to Caliban, the possibility of complete moral reform is highly unlikely. Caliban,

84 it is true, does realize his mistake in placing his trust in Stephano and Trinculo: "What a thrice-double ass / Was I, to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool!" (V, i, 295-97) and he says that he will be wise hereafter and seek "grace" (besides the literal allusion to Prospero's pardon, various psychological and religious connotations can be associated with this word). Yet, one is led to feel that total conversion in the case of Caliban is incompatible with his evil nature, that he is still the "Abhorred slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill!" (I, ii, 353-55). Caliban is in a way a symbol of elemental discord or evil in the universe which cannot be reconciled to good or perfect attunement. In this sense Frank Kermode is right when he calls him the "ground of the play". 6 Caliban's new humility would seem to be due more to a momentary realization of the foolishness of his faith in Stephano and Trinculo rather than a conversion to social harmony. In terms of the trio, moreover, the harmony between its members, coordinated by Ariel's music and strengthened by the wine bottle, is destined to vanish. The fact that the music vanishes when they arrive at the "filthy-mantled pool", might be seen as a préfiguration of the disappearance of the false accord between the three, which is soon to occur. On the other hand, there is another factor which must be viewed in relation to Prospero's only "partial" success in the re-establishment of harmony one that is also connected to the vanishing of music indicated above. When Prospero abjures his Art at the end of the play, we mentioned earlier that he loses control over the "heavenly" music created by his Art, the ideal music that can reconcile the discordant and restore perfect harmony and oneness. Prospero must return to Milan on his own powers, without Art and without heavenly music. In the Fifth Act he tells us: But this rough magic I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd Some heavenly music, — which even now I do, — To work mine end upon their senses, that This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book. (Act V, i, 50-57) Heavenly music is here associated with and made dependent upon supernatural Art. The acquisition of that Art, moreover, was the direct cause of Prospero's misfortunes. As he indicates: those (Arts) being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother,

85 And to my state grew stranger, being transported And rapt in secret studies . . . (Act I, ii, 74-77) Prospero's rejection of Art is, therefore, symbolical of his rejection of the cause of division and disharmony as he is about to return to the world of Milan. The repudiation of that Art, though it does not necessarily indicate an averseness to all music, does imply a rejection of the Elisabethan World Picture concept of supernatural or "heavenly" music in favour of something else. We will see shortly what this "something else" is when we examine the Epilogue of the play. The limited nature of Prospero's success in re-establishing harmony and the varying nature of harmony itself leads us to the third main aspect of music: music as illusion. The idea of illusion is recurrent throughout Shakespeare. Next to The Tempest, the play that is most dependent on the interplay between deceptive appearance and reality is perhaps Twelfth Night, although the dichotomy between illusion and reality occurs in almost all of Shakespeare's works. Disguises and mistaken identities help create illusory realities. There are apparent deaths such as that of Hermione in The Winter's Tale; Imogen disguised as a page in Cymbeline; Portia as a doctor of laws in The Merchant of Venice-, Helena is mistaken for Diana by Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well, and so forth. To digress somewhat for a moment, it is interesting to note that the concept of illusion is not limited in application to the worlds of literature, psychology, or religion, but also extends itself into the field of scientific inquiry. For example, it might be fruitful to compare the implication in the Indian doctrine of Maya7 and the Platonic doctrine of the illusory nature of the world of sense experience, with the recent discoveries in modern physical science brought on by Einstein's development of the theory of relativity and De Broglie's theory of "matter waves", which led to the discovery of the theory of wave mechanics. These discoveries point to the dual nature of matter as "particles" or as "energy waves", and its changing appearance in accordance with varying circumstances and methods of observation. The OED defines the term "illusion" as the "fact or condition of being deceived or deluded by appearances, or an instance of this; a mental state involving the attribution of reality to what is unreal; a false conception or idea, a deception, delusion, fancy". The concept of illusion derives its importance in any metaphysical system from the fact that in one form or another, it refers to that which is unreal with respect to the true reality envisaged by the system of thought. In relation to the two fundamental visions of reality we discussed with regard to harmony, the Platonic and the Heraclitean, the illusion in both cases will be the opposite of what is meant by ultimate being or reality. If, on

86 the one hand, by the "real" we mean the eternal principle of non-differentiation underlying the flux and change of the phenomenal world, that is the principle of unity underlying diversity, then the illusion can be a term of reference pointing to that diversity, to the world of becoming and differentiation. For Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus and later neo-Platonic and Christian thought, the illusion is the world of sense experience, the world of flux as opposed to the eternal world of the Ideas or of God. In Plotinus' words, as against the harmonious world of the One, "life here, with the things of the earth, is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing". The life of here and now, "that of today . . . is but a shadow, a mimicry" (Enneads, IX, 10, p. 359). 8 It is, in other words, an illusion by contrast to the real world of the Supreme. 9 Christian thought has extended these views on the illusory nature of the world of sense experience while at the same time justifying and giving direction to man's passage through that world by means of the concepts of original sin, purification through suffering, and redemption. A second meaning of the term "illusion" emerges in relation to the Heraclitean meaning of harmony as a "fitting together", which we discussed earlier. If the real is seen to reside in the world of change and becoming, if, as Heraclitus says, "out of discord comes the fairest harmony", then the term illusion would refer to the ideal world of perfect concord, which, according to this view of reality, does not exist. In other words, if the real is seen to reside in the world of sense experience, in a balance of opposite tensions, then the world of the ideal, of the reconciliation of opposites, must be viewed as "illusory" or not real or true. This meaning of illusion appears whenever the Heraclitean vision of harmony appears. Returning to The Tempest, we see that the various characters in the play follow, or are enchanted by the "marvelous" sweet music they hear, but never succeed in perceiving its source, which in this case is supernatural and nonconcrete, as it has its origin in Prospero's Art. Music, in addition, is often connected with visions of happiness that generally do not have concrete foundations in reality. There is, for example, Caliban's allusion to the "sounds and sweet airs" of the island, "that give delight and hurt not". The music he associates with dream, and the dream with happiness: Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd, I cried to dream again. (Act III, ii, 135-41)

87 Even the brutish son of Sycorax has his visions, which however, in accordance with his nature, ultimately lead to the material reality of the pool. There is the illusory aspect of the masque, already referred to, which, while it envisages the ideal of absolute harmony and happiness, also points to the unreal nature of this ideal in human life by its disappearance under the impact of reality. What is the nature of the reality that destroys the vision of absolute harmony depicted in the masque? It is Prospero's sudden realization of the evil intentions and machinsations of the subplot trio. In other words, the existence of discord or evil as an enduring element in human reality renders ideal or perfect harmony illusory. Indeed, though his intent is to comfort the disturbed Ferdinand for the loss of the vision, in his words of consolation, Prospero extends the concept of illusion to include all of human life: You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort, As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd; Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled: Be not disturb'd with my infirmity. (Act IV, i, 146-80) He not only points out that the ideal harmony posited in the masque is unattainable and illusory, but indicates that even man and human achievement are in a certain sense vain and illusory, that change rather than duration is the essential determining factor of the human condition. 1 0 Prospero's awareness of the illusory nature of his Art culminates, as we have seen, in his decision to abandon "this rough magic" when he is about to return to Milan, and music is invoked here for the last time. His rejection of Art, and, consequently, of heavenly music, point to another aspect of the relationship between illusion and reality, music and discord in The Tempest. We saw that, on the one hand, there is a movement from reality to the ideal, from discord to music in the play. This movement involves those who are in a state of disharmony - Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian, Caliban, Ferdinand - and is directed by Prospero's Art. There is also, however, the opposite movement

88 from the ideal created by magic, which is also illusory, to reality, which climaxes in Prospero's abjuration of his Art. What is this reality? It is, one might say, the reality of Milan, of the human life into which Prospero must be reintegrated. In other words, it is the reality of a harmony which is not the ideal vision of perfectly reconciled tensions such as that advanced in the masque, but rather the harmony that involves a balance of opposites, of good and evil, order and discord, which are held in precarious equilibrium by conscious and sustained human effort. Are we, then, to say that Prospero's efforts to create harmony on his island were purely illusory? That music itself is but an illusion of harmony and that when the last strains of its concordant tones fade, only the stark reality of discord and the illusion remain? Is the play that evolved before our eyes totally illusory, the harmony we heard there totally false? These are some of the questions that are posed by the play, and particularly, by the Epilogue. The Epilogue contains an appeal by Prospero directed to the audience after his rejection of the artifices of his magic. This appeal proceeds essentially on two symbolic levels that are closely intertwined. In the first place, on the human level, one might advance that the Epilogue presents the man Prospero, once Duke of Milan, who is asking his fellow men to accept him and to reinstate him into the society he had forfeited for the sake of magical knowledge, or, in other words, for the illusion. He is praying for that mercy and forgiveness which Portia calls "an attribute to God himself" (The Merchant of Venice, IV, i), for a new harmony of voices to take the place of the old: Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint: now, 'tis true, I must be here confin'd by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from the bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be reliev'd by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

89 In the second place, the Epilogue contains a plea presented by the artist to his audience. The artist here is asking the spectators to accept the vision of reality he created in his work, to accept that work itself as a vital reality. Both the King and the artist are asking to be integrated into society; they are asking that the vision of truth arrived at in the play be accepted as real. What is the nature of this truth and of the desired harmony? The truth which Prospero the man and Shakespeare the artist advance is that harmony and happiness cannot be attained through a rejection of the social and phenomenal world for a higher "ideal" reality, one arrived at through magic or any other form of transcendental or superhuman knowledge. Although Prospero, in a Shakespearean version of the law of contrapasso, must use the very means which brought on his downfall — Art — to set the stage for a return to the world from which he had been banished, before a complete reintegration can take place, he will finally reject that Art, and appeal to the natural, harmonizing quality of human fellowship. If his attempt to achieve harmony is to be successful, Prospero must re-establish contact with the basic foundations of that harmony, his fellow men, those he had formerly repudiated in favour of superhuman Art. 1 1 The human fellowship and bonds of mutual responsibility broken by Prospero's original quest for superior knowledge must be reinstated. The vehicle for this reinstatement is mercy. It is the same quality that Dante calls "piety" or "compassion", the bond of forgiveness which unites men, admits the discordant back to concord and order, brings the disharmonious back to harmonious balance. The quality of mercy is the redeeming power which harmonizes the destructive forces of division and restores life and unity. It is the power exemplified by Posthumus toward Iachimo: Kneel not to me: The power that I have on you, is to spare you: The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live And deal with others better. {Cymbeline, V, v, 418-21) This is the quality sprung from a just love that Othello stifles with the dying pleas of Desdemona, the unifying bond basic to human fellowship and happiness which the future Richard III, that "undigested and deformed lump", totally lacks: I have no brother, I am like no brother; And this word "love", which greybeards call divine, Be resident in men like one another And not in me: I am myself alone. (KingHenry VI, 3, V, v, 80-83)

90 Prospero, however, is of a "better nature" than Richard, and it is precisely from the non-human and unnatural solitude into which his Art has led him that he wishes to free himself. He wishes to return to reside within the walls of a human city, Milan, to go back to the social existence, with its concomitant responsibilities, which he had forfeited. Otherwise, his ending is despair, the barren solitude of his island. And, in terms of the artist, it is the despair that stems from the meaninglessness of an art divorced from life, from the human beings who are its alpha and omega, its raison d'être. Is Prospero's attempt to re-establish the harmony he had broken destined to succeed? Will he be able to return to Milan, to reintegrate himself and those with him into the harmonious relationships of social existence, which for Shakespeare is the existence proper to man, the love and communion which is the opposite of Richard's wolf-like aloneness? Looking back over The Tempest, we see that some hope of success in harmonization seems to exist. Alonso does undergo a regeneration from evil into good; Ferdinand and Miranda represent hope in future unity and concord; Gonzalo insists that the good will finally emerge from evil, that though Carthage is Tunis, Alonso and Ferdinand did arrive at a fulfillment of their destiny which is ultimately good. Through him we hear that " . . . Milan [was] thrust from Milan, that his issue / Should become Kings of Naples, / " and that Prospero "his dukedom [found] / In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves / When no man was his own" (V, i, 205-13). Yet, as we indicated earlier, it is highly unlikely that the elemental forces of evil are permanently redeemed to good, that Antonio and Sebastian, or Caliban, undergo any significant change in nature. These evil forces, Shakespeare seems to imply, are destined to live side by side with the powers of order and love. To our query as to Prospero's ultimate success, Shakespeare, therefore, gives a conditional answer: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. (Epilogue) The form in which he gives the answer is prayer, the hope he holds out lies in Mercy, in goodness, in harmony, in man. But the alternative to success still remains: Despair. This is harmony's opposite, the synonym for total discord, that chaos which envelops Othello when he is not loving Desdemona: " . . . and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again" (III, iii, 91-92). The' tensions abide, the problem is unresolved, or rather, its resolution is left to the individual man, to the spectator. The end, as before, remains participation and human fellowship and compassion. What, then, is the nature of the concept of harmony that is present in Shakespeare's thought and work? Throughout Shakespeare's plays, we see

91 that harmony is achieved through the attunement of different tensions which are, however, never fully resolved in any permanent sense. In other words, Shakespeare points to the way toward order and happiness. This way and the harmony that it predicates are not divorced from the opposing tensions of phenomenal life and relegated to an absolute and ideal realm. They are, rather, deeply embedded in the contrasting and contradictory realities of that life. Discord and evil are elemental and active forces in the universe which must perforce form part of any harmony envisaged. These forces cannot be totally reconciled or redeemed. They can only be held in check or balance by opposing forces. A harmony that is relevant to man and to human life, Shakespeare seems to indicate, cannot be conceived of as residing in an abstract sphere of pure agreement such as that portrayed in the masque vision in The Tempest, which disintegrates under the impact of reality. It is not the agreement of "like" elements depicted by Eryximachus in the Symposium. Shakespearean harmony is, instead, a harmony that encompasses disorder and discord, that contains the seeds of its own dissolution: the forces of evil and death. It is the concept of harmony entertained by Heraclitus, the thought of one who would say that "The name of the bow is life, but its work is death" (W 115; D 48; By 66). Shakespeare's universe is one made up of Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Iago, Jack Cade, and Edmund, as well as of Desdemona, Cordelia, Edgar, Miranda, Pericles, Marina, and Portia, to name only a few. It is one in which the good can revert to evil because it can never be completely isolated from this integral part of its being, as in the case of Lear, Othello, Macbeth, or Hamlet. Just as through piety, repentance, and suffering, evil can revert to good, as in the case of Prospero, Cymbeline, Leontes and others. Harmony and order, for Shakespeare, are the end of all human striving. They are the necessary conditions for man to arrive at self-fulfillment and happiness. Because harmony is composed of a tension of elemental centrifugal forces, however, its duration is forever endangered. The only guard against the disintegration of harmony in the Shakespearean universe is the bond of human fellowship, mutual responsibility, social order. It is piety and mercy as against isolation and vengeance, humanity as against inhumanity, love as against hate, the forces of life as against those of destruction and death.

NOTES

1. Etienne Gilson, A Gilson Reader, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 147. 2. Citations from the works of Shakespeare are based on the Cambridge text, from The Works of William Shakespeare, 9 vols., ed. William Aldis Wright (London and New York:

92 Macmillan and Co., 1891). I have also extensively consulted the most recent Arden Editions of Shakespeare's works (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press). 3. Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945), p. 135. 4. For a discussion of the harmony of the spheres and related musical ideas in English literature from 1500 to 1700 see John Hollander's The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Though Hollander affords an interesting survey of the change in attitude toward the representation of musical ideas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I find I cannot agree with his conclusion that there occurs in this period a complete demythologizing of the concept of the harmony of the spheres which rendered this notion "as trivial as it rendered silent the singing spheres" (p. 422). The metaphysical nature of the concept of harmony is such that while the singing spheres may in certain periods and circumstances become untuned, they invariably never remain that way for very long. Soon the opposite tendency toward song and attunement prevails and the harmonies once more make themselves heard. With regard to the fortunes of the idea of the harmony of the spheres, I think it might be more accurate to say with Leo Spitzer that "the Pythagorean concept of world harmony was revived in modern civilization whenever Platonism was revived" (Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, p. 3). 5. See: G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), for an extensive treatment of the Tempest-Music opposition in Shakespeare's plays. 6. Introduction, The Tempest, Arden Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. xxv. 7. Our English term "illusion" comes from the Latin illusio, -onis, a "mocking" or "jeering", from the verb illudere, to mock, play with or on. The concepts predicated by the term are very ancient, however, and are of central importance in Oriental thought, particularly in the Indian doctrine of Maya. The concept of Maya, for example, is of central importance in Vedantic philosophy. Maya can derive from the Sanskrit root ma, meaning " t o measure, form", or from the Sanskrit man, " t o think". Its closest cognate in Greek is the word jurjTUr "wisdom, cunning, craft", and also the word jLtijuo? "imitator". (Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, New York: Scribner's, 1916, p. 503, subsequently referred to as HERE.) Originally signifying a "supernatural power", "cunning", or "mysterious willpower" in the Rigveda, Maya later assumed the meaning of "cosmic illusion". In the philosophy of Sankara (about A.D. 788) Maya means the illusion of change in the phenomenal world produced by the ignorance (avidya) in the perceiving human mind which hinders it from seeing that all is atman (the essential cosmic Self) and that atman is brahman (the ultimate reality and primal principle of the universe). Multiplicity and phenomenal change, according to Sankara, can be attributed to maya and avidya. Actually, there is only one unitary world spirit or atman (HERE, pp. 503-04). Sankara's thought, in some respects very similar to Plato's, looks upon phenomenal life as a state of dreaming which gives way to a state of awakening, emergence from the world of shadow, and fulfillment, when man arrives at a knowledge of the unitary nature of atman, or Supreme Reality. 8. The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952). 9. The idea of illusion is also closely related to the view of the world as a stage and of men acting out their parts as mere puppets - an "insubstantial pageant" on an insubstantial stage. One finds the idea set forth in Plato's Laws, where he writes: "Let us look at the matter thus: May we not conceive of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose - which of the two we cannot certainly k n o w ? " (I, 644d). This view is taken up by Plotinus (Enneads, III, ii, 15) and finds further elaboration during the period of the decline of the Roman Empire and in

93 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as E.R. Dodds and Ernst Robert Curtius have shown (See E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in An Age of Anxiety, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1965, esp. Ch. I; also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper and Row, 1963, esp. pp. 138-44). 10. The similarity between the Pirandellian and Shakespearean visions of reality is particularly evident in The Tempest, although the emphasis in focus differs between the two authors. Tillyard is quite right when he comments in passing that the masque episode is something we would associate more with Pirandello than with Elisabethan drama: "When we examine the masque, we find that, though its function may be simple, the means by which it is presented are complicated in a manner we associate rather with Pirandello than with the Elisabethan drama". See: Shakespeare's Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), p. 80. 11. As against this interpretation, Colin Still would see Prospero as an initiating priest or God: "he figures the prototypical Supreme Being, whom indeed, the pagan hierophant was deemed to represent" (Shakespeare's Mystery Play, London: Cecil Palmer, 1921, p. 202). In Still's view, The Tempest represents a mythical and ritual epic theme of the struggle of the human spirit, "individual or collective, out of the darkness of sin and error, into the light of wisdom and t r u t h " (p. 234). According to Still, Prospero is the one who leads fallen man to this wisdom. G. Wilson Knight, from the slightly different perspective of his Christian interpretation of Shakespeare's work, sees Prospero as a "god-man" or "god-in-man" who draws man toward vision. Prospero is, Knight indicates, "a logical conception, implicit in that textbook of contemporary idealism, Castiglione's II Cortegiano, wherein humanism grades by Platonic ascent into the divine" (The Crown of Life, London: Oxford University Press, 1947, p. 242). The problem with these Dantesque and Platonic conceptions of Prospero and of The Tempest is that they do not satisfactorily deal with the metaphysical structure of thought within which Shakespeare operates. The concept of harmony in Dante is not the same as that to be found in Shakespeare. Prospero is not a nineteenth century poete maudit as Wilson Knight would hold, the "eternal artist rejected by the society his art redeems" (p. 243). Redemption, as Shakespeare shows through the Epilogue, is a reciprocal rather than a unilateral matter. The reciprocity involved here does not concern a God-man relationship but rather a man to man interdependence. If Prospero actively "redeems" his fellow men, he must also be himself redeemed by the forgiveness of those he had trespassed against in his neglect of his social duties and obligations. In other words, redemption is not a function of a supernatural reality versus a natural one. It takes place in the context of natural existence, ultimately in the context of Milan and Naples rather than of the magic island. Far from being an endorsement of " t h e adventure of Renaissance discovery and the majesty of Renaissance intellect" (Knight, p. 243), Shakespeare makes Prospero an example of the limitations of the intellectual or supernatural worlds divorced from life, from society and man. In the last analysis, Prospero is quite the reverse of Pico della Mirandola. This is the basic reason for his rejection of Art. Although he possesses magical powers, Prospero is a man, not a god. He is a magician, a creator of Illusions, which he then leaves behind when he returns to social existence. Though in some ways Prospero may be similar to a Christ figure, as Knight seeks to show in his discussion, there is a significant difference between the two. While Christ attempts to reconcile spirit and matter, the transcendental with the phenomenal, Jahweh and man, Prospero's attention is directed toward that which is human. After having experienced the divisive and destructive effects of too exclusive a concern with the supernatural, he seeks to reconcile man with man, to restore the social harmony broken through his fault. For the Christian, the world of Milan would be the illusory and transitory state which man must pass through in order to atone for original sin and merit the

94 bliss of the afterlife. For Prospero, his island, the result of his Art, represents the illusory. The end of his striving is, instead, reintegration into the human world of Milan.

PART THREE

IV WHITMAN'S "FANG'D AND GLITTERING ONE"

The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me. Walt Whitman From an examination of the work of Dante and Shakespeare, who can be thought of as two colossi of world literature, we now move over time to a discussion of the first of the four "modern" poets included in this study. There could be those who on first thought might see a certain incommensurability between a comparison of Dante and Shakespeare with Whitman, Rimbaud, René Char, and Hart Crane. What is of interest to us, however, is not a comparison or analysis of poets with an equal breadth of production and power of expression. Our aim, instead, is to establish the existence of a certain continuity in thought — something which is not subject to the rule of commeftsurability in quantitative terms, but is rather a qualitative matter involving feeling and expression. The fact that the poets have been chosen from different periods and that a lapse of three centuries occurs between Shakespeare and Whitman should not be interpreted to mean that the idea of harmony was not present in poets and writers living in these centuries. Indeed, it can be seen as an operative element in the work of such diverse writers as Spenser, Ariosto, Milton, Racine, Voltaire, Goethe, Wordsworth, Foscolo, Leopardi, Emerson, to name only a few. However, as we indicated earlier, our purpose here is not to trace a history of the idea of Harmony, a pursuit which would demand a survey approach. It is instead to see the continuity and relevance of a mode of thought in artistic creation through a deeper analysis of the work of a few chosen poets — an analysis from which the reader can draw references and analogies of his own to expressions of the concept of Harmony in other minds and artistic productions. Dante and Shakespeare have given us the basic framework for our discussion, the former illustrating a substantially Platonic formulation of Harmony, the latter a fundamentally Heraclitean vision of Harmony. There is, to be sure, a certain discontinuity between these poets. For, whereas Dante and Shakespeare could draw on an all-embracing world picture — which, however, as we saw, was in the process of disintegrating even

98 in Shakespeare — our modern poets could not. With the possible exception of the basically self-confident Whitman (at least of the pre-1858 and post-1865 poet), theirs is a world of fragmentation and alienation where poetic vision, when or if attained, is always in danger of receding again beyond the poet's grasp. Yet a very important continuity of thought does exist between all these poets and our end is to establish its nature and relevance. Turning now to Walt Whitman, one might begin by noting that, as with most major poets, there has been considerable critical controversy and difference of opinion over the nature of the "real" Whitman and of his poetic production. There are those such as James E. Miller* who would view Whitman as a religious mystic, or those who would see him as the propounder of an essentially transcendental vision in the Emersonian mode.^ Leo Spitzer, in an essay on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", places Whitman within the Platonic tradition of world harmony. In his discussion, he contends that the "basic motifs in which the idea of world harmony has taken shape in Europe must be in our mind when we read Whitman's poem, which becomes greater to the degree that it can be shown as ranking with, and sometimes excelling, the great parallel poems of world literature". 3 Others have seen Whitman to be heavily indebted to the thought of philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, or Hegel because of his references to their work. As René Wellek points out, however, Whitman's acquaintance with German idealism was secondhand and superficial: "An examination of Whitman's knowledge of the German philosophers reveals. . . that he knew hardly more than a few secondhand accounts in a history of German literature, an anthology, and encyclopedias. He did not even go to the translations that were then available". According to Wellek, Whitman's enthusiasm is due in part, no doubt, to his desire for support by the prestige of philosophy; and at that time the St. Louis Hegelian movement had helped to transplant Hegel's fame to America when it was on the wane in Germany. On the other hand, it was also a genuine sense of kinship. Hegel advocates evolution, progress, freedom, a reconciliation of science and religion: he was an optimist and determinist. What more was needed for Whitman, who could not see and would not have cared for the differences? 4 Whitman, in Wellek's opinion, asserts "a suffused pantheism in which the Platonic ladder has been pulled down". 5 Assumptions of indebtedness to European philosophy, if not subjected to sufficient critical scrutiny, can lead to unfortunate conclusions, such as the one arrived at by Gay Wilson Allen when he wrote that "an exhaustive comparative study needs to be made of the relations of Whitman's thought to the Great Chain of Being". 6 Referring to this conclusion, Richard Chase encounters: "Poor old Walt, he had never

99 heard of the Great Chain of Being. His leading conceptions are the self, equality, and contradiction — appropriate preoccupations for the poet of American Democracy". 7 Whether or not Whitman had heard of the Great Chain of Being is in a certain sense immaterial. The important point Chase is making here is that the context and nature of Whitman's thought is different from that of the Great Chain of Being. There have been those critics who have presented the "real" Whitman as a prophetic poet. Others, such as Roy Harvey Pearce, have denied that the "real" Whitman is the "prophetic" poet. In discussing the prophetic element in Whitman, Pearce makes an excellent distinction between the prophetic and the visionary imagination. He relegates Whitman to the latter type and points to a decrease in the depth and quality of his poetic achievement, which accompanied the increase of the prophetic posture in his work: Whitman's genius was such as to render him incapable of the kind of discipline of the imagination which would make for the genuine sort of prophetic poetry we find in, say, Blake and Yeats: of whom we can say that they were poets as prophets; for whom we can observe that poetry is the vehicle for prophecy, not its tenor. Whitman is at best, at his best, visionary, and sees beyond his world to what it might be — thus failing to be, it is. Blake and Yeats are at their best, prophetic, and see through their world to what it really is — thus, what, pretending not to be, it might be. 8 The same Pearce would see the "real" Whitman as being an "archetypal" poet. In speaking of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which he considers the best, Pearce agrees with Schyberg, Asselineau, and Allen 9 that this edition is "quintessentially autobiographical". However, he thinks it is wrong to read the volume as a personal or private statement. According to Pearce, Whitman was not "trying to 'conceal' — much less 'mark' — his private personality but to transmute it into an archetypal personality". Pearce considers the 1860 edition to be not a personal but an 'archetypal' autobiography: Thus I should read the volume as not a personal but an archetypal autobiography: yet another version of that compulsively brought — forth nineteenth-century poem which dealt with the growth of the poet's mind. (Well instructed by our forebears, we now have a variety of names for the form — all demonstrating how deeply, and from what a variety of non-literary perspectives, we have had to deal with the issues which it raises for us: rite de passage, quest for identity, search for community, and the like.) Whitman's problem, the poet's problem, was to show that integral to the poet's vocation was his life cycle; that the poet, having discovered his gifts, might now use them to discover the relevance of

100 his life, his lived life, his Erlebnis, his career, to the lives of his fellows. Another reading of the "real" Whitman is that which sees his poetic development in terms of the trials of the Self in relation to its conception and experience of reality. Such a reading would consider his work as being both personal and archetypal — personal in that the protagonist in the drama of life and creativity is the specific "Me Myself", the concrete Walt Whitman of "flesh and bone", as Unamuno would put it — archetypal insofar as the trials that the Self participates in, are those of the collective matrix of human experience, what Carl Jung has called the "collective unconscious", which furnishes the basis for the psychic modes of eternal recurrence. Such a reading is the one adhered to by critics such as Richard Chase, who terms Whitman's real subject "the plight and destiny of the self", 1 1 and R.W.B. Lewis. In an excellent essay which traces Whitman's poetical evolution, "Walt Whitman: Always Going Out and Coming In", Lewis indicates: . . . the development of [Whitman's] consciousness and his craft, from moment to moment and year to year, is the very root of his poetic subject matter. It is what his best poems are mainly about, or what they reenact: the thrust and withdrawal, the heightening and declining, the flowing and ebbing of his psychic and creative energy. Whitman's poetry has to do with the drama of the psyche or "self" in its mobile and complex relation to itself, to the world of nature and human objects, and to the creative act. 1 2 This reading of Whitman is perhaps the most accurate and true to his poetic production. As Whitman himself wrote in his essay "Poetry Today — Shakespeare - The Future", the domain of poetry for him is interior: "Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior, but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man". 1 3 The poetry in Leaves of Grass, Whitman points out in "A Backward Glance", was mainly the "outcropping" of his own "emotional and other personal nature — an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America), freely, fully and truly on record". 1 4 Our discussion of the role of the idea of Harmony in Whitman rests on the assumption of this at once personal and archetypal nature of his poetic production. Walt Whitman is one of the foremost modern singers of Harmony. It seems to me, however, that the Harmony he sings is not, as Spitzer maintains, a Platonic transcendental Harmony like the one envisaged by Dante — that perfect concord which rejects and transcends all the discordant elements of existence. Whitman, instead, proclaims the Harmony which accepts Discord

101 as an integral and positive aspect of reality. Indeed, in the course of his spiritual evolution, he increasingly emphasizes the value of the discordant elements of existence (the greatest of which is Death) as the very source of human and poetic creativity. In this study, Whitman is perhaps the poet that most closely approximates what we have termed the "Heraclitean" vision of Harmony. Shakespeare, while accepting the existence of the "contraries" in life, gave them a negative meaning. Rimbaud, as we shall see, though he tried to give the tension between the opposites a positive meaning, was ultimately unable to accept this meaning. René Char and Hart Crane, each in his own way, give witness to the tension in the modern sensibility between the Platonic and the Heraclitean modes of thought. Unlike them, Whitman is not principally torn between these two major contrasting modes of reality. The tension in his thought basically springs from his vision of the "opposites" within the context of one mode of reality - the Heraclitean. Whitman, in this study, is the only poet to fully accept the implications of a Heraclitean vision of reality, to fully endorse evil as an integral - and because integral, therefore good — aspect of reality. By so doing, he was able to bypass the essentially linear nature of the Platonic-Christian concern with reality (the Ideas or God versus the World, or Matter) and, at the same time, to avoid what Mircea Eliade termed "the terror of history" (that is, the consciousness of being inevitably determined and limited by the finite temporality of history and the ensuing feeling of the futility of living). 15 Within the context of Whitman's cyclical vision of reality, history can hold no terror, for the soul is integrated in the rhythmic death and renewal processes of nature. There is, however, a moment of rupture with a consequent evolution — or perhaps prise de conscience is the better term — in Whitman's vision of reality and of poetic creation. This moment of realization occurs after the publication of the early 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass and is reflected in some of the best poems of the 1860 edition. In our discussion of Whitman, we will attempt to define the nature of his vision of Harmony and of artistic creation and to assess the change, if any, that occurred in that vision between 1856 and 1860. Before examining Whitman's vision of Harmony and reality, let us briefly glance at his conception of the role of the poet and of the nature and function of art. According to Whitman, the poet's role is not merely descriptive or aesthetic. "The land and sea, the animals fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forest mountains and rivers, are not small themes", he writes, "but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb and real o b j e c t s . . . they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls". 1 6 The function of indicating the path between reality and the soul is essentially an ethical one for Whitman, and indeed for most artists, as has been maintained throughout this study. In D.H. Lawrence's words,

102 The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake. Now Whitman was a great moralist. He was a great leader. He was a great changer of blood in the veins of men. 1 7 Whitman affirms the essentially ethical nature of art in his essay "Democratic Vistas". All works of art, he indicates, "are to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in, and radiation, in the highest sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles, and the eligibility to free, arouse, dilate". Quoting from a paper read by the Librarian of Congress before the Social Science Convention at New York in October 1869, Whitman agrees that "The true question to ask respecting a book, is, has it help'd any human soul?" And, he adds, "this is the hint, statement, not only of the great literatus, his book, but of every great artist". 1 8 Those who will be charged with delineating the path between reality and the soul, according to Whitman, will be a new class of bards of the future, the great Literatus, like himself, who will bring the negative elements of life into balance with the positive, who will reintegrate the negative as part of the universal process of nature "All is a procession, / The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion" ("Song of Myself", 6, p. 83). 1 9 Thus the negative elements will not rule and intimidate society as they did in the past and are still doing in the present: Surely this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has the past, and does the present. What the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some great coming literatus, especially p o e t . . In Whitman's view, the great Literatus will absorb all of the advances of science and the modern world and at the same time will spiritualize them. He will write the great poems of death, the poems of antithesis, and will thereby acknowledge death as being merely part of the process of creation. Seen in relation to the universal process death becomes something good and comprehensible, and the fear and tyranny of the thought of death that haunts man's imagination is overcome. Thus Whitman affirms: "In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be the poems of the purports of life,

103 not only in itself, but beyond i t s e l f " . 2 1 What America and the world need, in Whitman's opinion, is a class o f bards who will harmonize all aspects o f human experience: America needs, and the world needs, a class o f bards who will, now and ever, so link and tally the rational physical being o f man, with the ensembles o f time and space, and with this vast and multiform show, Nature, surrounding him, ever, tantalizing him, equally a part, and yet not a part o f him, as to essentially harmonize, satisfy, and put to rest. 2 2 What is the nature o f the Harmony the poet is to create? What is the nature of that harmonization itself? Harmony for Whitman, as for Heraclitus, does not involve perfect consonance and agreement, but rather consists in the joining of things disparate to form a whole. Whitman would agree with Heraclitus that "Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony" (W 9 8 ; D 8; By 4 6 ) . 2 3 Harmonization for Whitman consists in drawing the relationships between these disparate elements o f existence and creating a unity, a meaningful totality, out o f their interrelations. This unity is not the absolute unity of the Platonic transcendental vision, but the dynamic balance of opposites of the Heraclitean vision. The negative elements o f being are "translated" through the poetic act o f creation into a positive assessment of reality. This is one way in which the soul, confronted by the prospects o f non-being, can reintegrate that non-being into a viable system o f meaning. Non-being through the poetic act is translated from a negative into a positive entity — it is seen as part of the cosmic process. Just as Heraclitus set himself against all other previous thinkers who considered the existence o f opposites to be a breach o f the unity o f the One and affirmed that these very opposites constitute the unity of the One, so Whitman turned against the thinkers and poets o f his times and proclaimed that same truth. Those who look upon life in a linear vision see reality in terms of a beginning and an end: birth and death. But, Whitman asserts in "Song of Myself", there is no beginning and no end: there is only the ever-advancing interplay of equal opposites: I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk o f the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

104 Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. ("Song of Myself", 3, p. 26) Heraclitus had in mind a similar idea when he wrote: "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling and measures going out". Reality for Whitman consists in the All that is created by the perpetual tension, the rhythmic intercourse between these opposites, their eternal union and separation, which Whitman translates into the "procreant" imagery of sex. This perpetual dialectic of opposite tensions, with its neverending systole and diastole constitutes the essence of the All, which is Nature itself for Whitman: Lo! Nature (the only complete, actual poem), existing calmly in the divine scheme, containing all, content, careless of the criticisms of a day, or these endless and wordy chatterers. And lo! to the consciousness of the soul, the permanent identity, the thought, the something, before which the magnitude even of democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes partial, measurable — something that fully satisfies (which those do not). That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And again lo! the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever - the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things - wherefrom I feel and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning — and that nothing is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter. 24 It should be noted in passing for later reference that the text of the 1871 essay "Democratic Vistas" was based in part on Whitman's article "Democracy" published in the Galaxy IV, 919-33 (December 1867) and on his article "Personalism" which appeared in Galaxy V, 540-47 (May 1868). 25 "Democratic Vistas" was therefore written after Whitman's period of crisis and realization. Yet the ideas he expresses here are not very different from the ideas expressed in his early poetry, such as "Song of Myself". The conception of the unitary All pervades and inspires the whole of Whitman's poetic production. As we indicated, within the context of Whitman's cyclical vision of reality the traditional categories of good and evil are tran-

105 scended. The poet, therefore, is not only the singer of what is traditionally considered good, i.e., life. He is also the singer of evil - of those negative aspects of being that must be affirmed in order to be integrated. Thus Whitman asserts in "Song of Myself": I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux, I, extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each other's arms, I am he attesting sympathy, (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?) I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent, My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown. (22, p. 43) By being affirmed and seen as part of the cosmic process, evil, or what is traditionally considered as being evil, loses its negative aspects and becomes just as important as the good. In "Starting from Paumanok" Whitman writes: Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also, I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is — and I say there is in fact no evil, (Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land or to me, as any thing else.) (7, p. 16) Whitman therefore arrives at the conclusion that also death is good: Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

106 I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots. ("Song of Myself", 7, p. 30) Such an attitude brings him to the negation of death itself. As he comments in "Song of Myself": What do you think has become of young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. (6, p. 30) The harmonizing work of the poet consists in removing the veil of evil from things and revealing them to be good. He transfigures all of reality into a positive entity: Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured. I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from. ("Song of Myself", 24, p. 45) In creating or recreating the Harmony of reality in and through the poem, the poet himself must absorb all of the opposites in life. He is envisioned as the child who becomes all of the object it looks upon in "There Was a Child Went Forth", 2 6 or as the cosmic lover of life, as in "Song of Myself":

107 In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing, To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing, Absorbing all to myself and for this song. (13, p. 34) The poet, absorbing all of reality, becomes the arbiter of diversity. He balances the opposites, and forms new relations and inter-connections through his act of creation. The poet therefore, as Whitman affirms in his 1855 Preface, is the "equable" man. In words that foreshadow what Rimbaud was later to assert in his letter to Demeny, Whitman writes: Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land . . . he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking. If peace is the routine out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities, encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce — lighting the study of man, the soul, immortality . . . {Leaves of Grass, Inc. Ed., p. 492) In his role of harmonizer, Whitman equates the body to the soul. Both partake in and are divinity: I have said that the soul is not more than the body. And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is. ("Song of Myself", 48, p. 73) It is important to note that Whitman's conception of the soul involves a materialistic psychology similar to that of the Eleatic philosophers of Greece, and, in particular to that of Heraclitus. As Wilhelm Windelband has pointed out, the attention of the Eleatics was directed primarily toward the external universe. The mental activity of man — that of his mind or soul — was taken into consideration within the context of their concern with the outer world. The activity of the mind or soul for them reflected or was a part or product of the motion of the whole universe. Therefore, the mind or soul are considered scientifically, as Windelband indicates, "only in connection with the entire course of the universe, whose product they are as truly as all other

108 things". 27 The mind or soul is therefore looked upon principally as a moving force by the Eleatics. Moreover, it is considered almost exclusively in epistemological rather than psychological terms. That is, the attributes of "knowing" and "ideation" are emphasized rather than "feeling" and "volition". 2 8 Since the moving force of the entire universe is one for them, and since the knowing activity of the universe, a product of this force, is also one, the epistemological activity of the individual is also considered to be part of that world. The individual participates in the World Reason, the Xoyoq for Heraclitus, which is the same throughout the world. Since the World Reason is distributed throughout the universe as a moving force, knowing is common to all things, and the soul thereby embraces all things. This outlook resides at the basis of Whitman's all-inclusive idea of human fellowship, what he came to call "comradeship" between man and man, and man and the world. The "poet of the Body and of the Soul", in celebrating his own soul and in singing the Truth relative to his own soul, therefore sings the Truth relative to all souls, for all are part of the moving force or wisdom of the universe: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. ("Song of Myself", 1, p. 25) Whitman might have derived the fundamental Heraclitean basis of his thought from an acquaintance, even if "secondhand", as Wellek indicates, with Greek philosophy or via German idealism, particularly through the thought of Hegel. However, it is more probable that his mode of thought is a product of his own sensibility and experience. In the vision of Harmony which accepts the existence of the opposites in life as an integral part of ultimate reality, there always lurks the possibility that the balance of these opposites will at some time dissolve. Such a dissolution is generally accompanied by a profound questioning of meaning and values. Overpowered by a new awareness of the significance of discord, the psyche at first tends to lose confidence in itself, in its ability to control the opposites, and, losing momentum, it is engulfed by the negative aspects of the opposites, by non-being, if you will. A dissolution of this sort occurs in Whitman's life during the period between 1858 and 1859 and is reflected in the new poetic additions of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, notably in such poems as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life", and the "Calamus" poems. Critics have generally distinguished three phases in Whitman's spiritual biography and poetic production, and for our purpose it might be useful to briefly delineate these periods. The first period runs from 1855 to 1858. It comprises the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass and includes poems

109 such as "Song of Myself", "The Sleepers", "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", "To Think of Time". The second period is considered to be Whitman's "tragic" phase. It is roughly contained by the time span from 1859 to 1865 and centers around the 1860 edition of his work. The third period covers the rest of his poetic career. One of the best poems to emerge from this period is perhaps "Passage to India". In this third phase of his poetic career Whitman increasingly revised and reshuffled the order of his poems, tending more toward a cosmic and prophetic posture, the popular posture of the poet of Democratic America and of the union or merging of America with the rest of the world. The conventional view of Whitman's development as a poet, a view systematized by Floyd Stovall in 1932, 2 9 sees a progression in Whitman's thought, from what it considers the relatively immature phase of "Song of Myself" in Whitman's first period, through the increasingly mature stature of the "tragic" period, in which Whitman allegedly became more aware of human fellowship and destiny, to the mature last phase in which Whitman waxed more universal and spiritual, singing of universal love and unity. This conception of Whitman has been rejected by some of the best recent Whitman criticism. Richard Chase, for example, comments that "diffuseness, whether of love or anything else, was always Whitman's Waterloo as a poet. And far from being a step forward, Whitman's gradually slackening sense of the self and its relations to the not-self, a slackening which we begin to observe after the 1855 edition, was the beginning of the end of his greatness as a p o e t . . . for although Whitman wrote much fine verse in later life his period of best accomplishment was surely between 'Song of Myself' and 'When Lilacs Last' " . 3 0 Roy Harvey Pearce suggests that it is the Whitman of 1860 rather than the later poet, who must be recovered. 31 R.W.B. Lewis contends that during the last twenty-five years of his life (from 1867 onward), Whitman became self-concealing, and that he "asserted a persona radically other than that of the being which lay at the heart of his best poetry". In Lewis' opinion, this was the persona that became representative of a "shallowly and narrowly conceived democratic culture: the hearty voice at the center of a bustling and progressive republic, a voice that saluted the pioneers, echoed the sourtd of America singing, itself sang songs of joy that foretold the future union of the nation and the world and the cosmos, chanted the square deific, and wept over the country's captain lying cold and dead on the deck of the ship of state". 3 2 In other words, this is the bombastic and cosmic Whitman for Lewis, whereas in his view the real Whitman is the poet of the self, of the "real Me". The moment of dissolution, or the so-called "tragic period" of Whitman's life has also been variously interpreted by different critics and applied to his poetic output. It is beyond our purpose here to go into all of the various critical theories. Most critics attribute the sense of tragedy present in the 1860 edition to a homosexual love affair in Whitman's life. R.W.B. Lewis

110 traces the new sense of desolation in several of the poems of this edition to a hiatus in Whitman's life sometime in 1858 which ended with the publication of "A Child's Reminiscence", later called "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking". Psychologically speaking, perhaps the hypothesis advanced by Lewis comes closest to intuiting the complex interplay of factors behind Whitman's moment of self-doubt. Whitman's desolation, Lewis believes, is probably due to a combination of three factors: the homosexual love affair, which ended with a sense of profound loss and possibly of guilt; Whitman's passage through the crise de quarantaine; and, lastly, a temporary but fearful feeling of an exhaustion of talent after his early period of creative fertility. 33 In any case, as a result of any one of these factors or of a combination of all of them, Whitman experienced a deep feeling of loss of control over the opposing tensions in existence. Much has been made of Whitman's new sense of death in this period. Stephen E. Whicher has gone so far as to argue that the "whole character of Whitman's work was radically and permanently altered". 34 He contends that death simply "was not" in Whitman's early period, that his crisis led him to an awakening to death, and that his recovery afterwards was not merely a "recovery of serenity". Rather, he affirms that the knowledge his experience brought to Whitman, that "the stoic privilege it gave him of being one of those that know the truth, became the rock on which his mature equilibrium was founded". 35 I cannot help but feel that Whitman's "mature equilibrium" — if that is what it was — except for a difference in emphasis, was markedly similar to his earlier first phase equilibrium. It seems to me that Whitman's experience of death should be seen in a slightly different perspective. Since the poems of Whitman's period of crisis all spring from the same basic poetic impulse, we will draw on them as the discussion dictates, without following strict chronological order. In Whitman's poems of crisis, "A Hand Mirror", "Scented Herbage of My Breast", "As I Ebb'd", "Out of the Cradle", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and others, the loss in death is not only experienced, it is elevated and sublimated. Whitman arrives at Wallace Steven's realization that death is the mother of beauty. As he expresses in "Scented Herbage of My Breast": O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell in your own way of the heart that is under you, O I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves, you are not happiness, You are often more bitter than I can bear, you burn and sting me, Yet you are beautiful to me you faint-tinged roots, you make me think of death, Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)

Ill 0 I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death, For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers, Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer, (I am not sure but that the high soul of lovers welcomes death most), Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean. (p. 96) The "faint-tinged roots" belong to the Calamus plant, symbolic of manly love in Whitman. Earlier, when Whitman had intimated that death "was not", he did not mean that it was non-existent. What he meant was that in the context of the universal process, death, being part of that process, was not a terminal or allencompassing reality. Death led to life and life led to death, he indicated in "Song of Myself": And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) (49, p. 75) Life and death are two complementary aspects of One cosmic reality. They form a balance in which the alternation from opposite to opposite leads to new balance: "I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance" ("Song of Myself", 22, p. 43.) In his earlier vision, Whitman was fighting against the fear and tyranny of death, or, rather, of the idea of death. During his period of crisis, however, his former vision of the balance of life and death was upset, and one of the elements — death — became dominant and allencompassing. Whatever the origin of Whitman's crisis, his experience of loss served to precipitate a crisis that went far deeper than the one caused by the actual experience. It created a fundamental disjunction in his own soul; it brought that soul face to face with non-being. Momentarily, it led the soul to believe that it had lost control over the opposites in reality, that its integrative power had been forfeited, with the consequent result that one of the opposites — death — overwhelmed it. The original experience was analogous to that of the loss of faith. The feeling that ensued was not merely one of loss, it was one of corruption. The beauty of the body and all of its functions, which Whitman exalted in "Song of Myself', suddenly becomes the corrupt image looking back at him in "A Hand Mirror": Hold it up sternly — see this it sends back, (who is it? is it you?)

112 Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth, No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice or springly step, Now some slave's eye, voice, hands, step, A drunkard's breath, unwholesome eater's face, venerealee's flesh, Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous, Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination, Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams, Words babble, hearing and touch callous, No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex. (pp. 226-27) Love itself is now equated to death — not this time the limited death which exists in dialectical opposition to life, but rather an all-circumscribing entity. Death becomes the "real reality" of the One for Whitman: Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it, Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are, Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life, For now it is convey'd to me that you are the purports essential, That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons, and that they are mainly for you, That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality. ("Scented Herbage of My Breast", p. 96) Since the elevation of one category of existence to the status of the ultimate entity in life implies a one dimensional perspective on reality, rather than the dialectical dimension which was the essence of creative reality for Whitman, he arrives at the momentary conclusion that all in life is illusion and appearance. Referring to death in "Scented Herbage of My Breast", he writes: That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long, That you will one day perhaps take control of all, That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance,

113 That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not last so very long, But you will last very long. (p. 97) This is perhaps the point at which Whitman comes closest to a Platonic vision of reality, in which the real world is viewed as being mere "appearance". Whitman's feeling of disjunction, the sense of the self being overwhelmed by non-being, reaches a moment of deep crisis in "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life". The whole structure of reality appears in a disintegrated state here and the poet's psychic balance has disintegrated along with it. The poem evinces a profound sense of creative failure: 0 baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth, Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. 1 perceive that I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can, Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. (2, p. 215) The out-going, all-absorbing self of "Song of Myself" and "There Was A Child Went Forth", has become a lost, shipwrecked, and corrupt entity. Withman's feeling for death in these poems is not something totally new. He had recognized death in his earlier poetry and had even written in his poem "Assurances" that not Life but Death provides for all: I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all. (p. 374)

114 The question of his attitude toward death in the poetry of his "tragic" period is really one of variation in degree. What does change in this period is Whitman's realization of the meaning of loss and his recognition of the human suffering that it causes. Thus, in "Assurances", he could emphasize the fulfillment of the universal purpose through death without mentioning pain or suffering: I need no assurances, I am a man who is pre-occupied of his own soul; (Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Death, the purport of all Life, is not well provided for?) I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them, no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone down, are provided for, to the minutest points, I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any time, is provided for in the inherences of things. (pp. 373-74) But in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", composed in 1865, when Whitman in addition to his own suffering of the tragic period had experienced the suffering in war, the meaning of human suffering due to loss and death is acknowledged and portrayed: I saw the battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, But I saw they were not as was thought, They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not, The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd. And the armies that remain'd suffer'd. (15, p. 281) Whitman, however, was not one to stay crushed under the weight of despair for long. His deeply ingrained feeling for the opposites in existence soon asserted itself once again, together with the need to attain a new balance and meaning. The alienated self that we saw in some of the poems of the 1860 edition was to become newly reintegrated. The form this integration was to assume already appears in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", one of Whitman's best poems. In this poem, Whitman asserts the opposites once more. This time, however, they are not Life and Death. The source of creative

115 activity is now seen to reside in the tension between Love and Death — the desire for unity and the frustration of that desire, which leads to an everrenewed attempt. Frustration or Death thus becomes the source of creativity. In "Out of the Cradle", Whitman portrays a reminiscence by a man of forty of a childhood experience and the realization of the meaning of that experience as the source of poetic creativity. The development of the poem is summed up in the beginning section: A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. (p. 209) The poem opens in the darkness of a September evening, the "Ninth-month midnight", as a child "leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot" along the Paumanok seashore over "sterile" sands while a mockingbird sang his "musical shuttle". The darkness, the threat of sterility, the yellow halfmoon "late-risen and swollen as if with tears", the bird, the child, and the man of forty retrospectively looking back, are all present at the very outset. As the reminiscence begins the scene shifts to sunshine and daylight as the boy witnesses the happiness of two migrating mocking birds on the Paumanok shore, the he-bird singing of the joy and fulfillment of "two together" and the she-bird crouched on her nest "silent, with bright eyes". Nearby, the boy sat watching them, learning, "cautiously peering, absorbing, translating". The imagery of happiness is that of sunshine and warmth, of the opposites balanced in the unity of "two together", night and day, black and white, southwind and northwind: Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth, great sun! While we bask we have two together, Two together! Winds blow south, or winds blow north, Day come white, or night come black, Home, or rivers and mountains from home, Singing all the time, minding no time. While we two keep together. Reality is an integrated whole, time is transcended in the unity of the "two

116 together". One day, however, time and history break into the timeless state of the balanced unity of the "two together" and destroy both balance and fulfillment. The she-bird, we are told, possibly killed, does not return to her mate. All summer long he waits for her and calls her through his song. He still has not accepted the reality of time and history. He hopes she will return and restore the former balance and happiness. Although conscious of the threat of non-being and chaos which hovers over the reality of his former world, the he-bird fights that threat away through his song of desire and of questioning hope. The structure of the poem is one of alternating aria and recitative which has been likened to that of an opera. The arias of the distressed song of the he-bird, however, are not answered by the complementary arias of his mate, but by the recitative commentary of the absorbing and translating child-bard. At the loss of the she-bird, the imagery of sunshine and daylight gives way to the imagery of darkness that was present at the beginning of the poem. The balanced opposites that we saw in the daytime imagery of fulfillment have disappeared. The object of love, the separate and positive counterpart of the former balance — the she-bird — has become engulfed in a background that has stripped it of its identity and individual being. As the he-bird sorrowfully cries out: O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers? What is that little black thing I see there in the white? Loud! loud! loud! Loud I call to you, my love! High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, Surely you must know who is here, is here, You must know who lam, my love. Low-hanging moon! What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow? O it is the shape, the shape of my mate! O moon do not keep her from me any longer. It is no longer the opposites "day come white, or night come black" that are evoked here, but "that little black thing I see there in the white" and "the dusky spot" merged into the brown yellow of the moon. The balance is broken. The hope of the he-bird that his song will somehow bring back his mate and recreate the former balance and fulfilled unity slowly becomes more frantic and desperate; the darkness begins closing in on him:

117 Shake out carols! Solitary here, the night's carols! Carols of lonesome love! death's carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea! 0 reckless despairing carols. He finally reaches the realization that the former balance can never be recreated, that his songs of hope have been in vain, that the reality of time, of the here and now, is that of "We two together no more": O darkness! O in vain! 0 lam very sick and sorrowful. O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea! O troubled reflection in the sea! O throat! O throbbing heart! And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night. O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more. The sinking aria of the he-bird, however, provokes an ecstatic reaction in the child, who through the bird's sorrow and suffering, has intuited another meaning, a new possibility of recreating the lost Harmony and balance. Through his intuition, the child now becomes the "outsetting bard": On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling, The yellowhalf-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching, The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying, The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting, The aria's meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing, The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,

118 The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying, To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret hissing, To the outsetting bard. Out of his understanding of the sorrow of loss, the boy is transformed into a bard, this same understanding starting within him the "thousand warbling echoes" of his newly found vocation: Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die. Bird and poet become fused, the poet perpetuating the song of his alter ego: O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, 0 solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you, Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night, By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me. However, although we know that the source of the poetry of the bird-childbard is Death, for at the beginning of the poem we were told the reason for the disappearance of the she-bird: Till of a sudden, May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate, One forenoon the she-bird crouch'd not on the nest, Nor return'd that afternoon, nor the next, Nor ever appear'd again, the bird-child-bard has not as yet arrived at the full comprehension of ultimate truth and of the nature of the new universe of meaning he must create out of the disintegration of the old. For, death alone - the merging of all within its encompassing darkness — can also lead to chaos and meaninglessness. The opposites in their unbalanced state still retain the negative powers

119 of non-being and chaos. Unless death itself is reintegrated into significant meaning, despair and sterility rather than creativity can still be the outcome. We indicated earlier that, to become meaningful, to become a source of creativity as against sterility, death has to be affirmed positively. It is with this positive affirmation that the poem concludes. Realizing the hovering threat of chaos involved in loss and suffering, the poet asks for a final illumination: 0 give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,) O if I am to have so much, let me have more! The fear of chaos emerges much more clearly in the first version of these lines, a version Whitman changed only in 1867 when he was trying to make his poetry conform more to his later more positive cosmic conception of poetry: 0 0 O 0 0 O 0 0

give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere;) if I am to have so much, let me have more! a word! O what is my destination? (I fear it is henceforth chaos;) how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and all shapes, spring as from graves around me! phantoms! you cover all the land and all the sea! I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown upon me ; vapor, a look, a word! 0 well-beloved! you dear women's and men's phantoms!

The answer, the final word or "clew" the poet awaits, is appropriately given to him by the sea, the eternal symbol in the collective imagination of man of fertility and renewal. The word the sea gives forth is the truth of Death: Where to answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word of death, And again death, death, death, death, Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart, But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over Death, death, death, death, death. The sea affords the ritual baptism of renewal and fertility: "laving me softly all over". It is neither like the bird nor like the aroused heart of the child the

120 bird projected in his song, a song that centered on loss, on the "unknown want". The sea, instead, provides the clue and affirms the cause of that unknown want: Death. It affirms sorrow and discord or death, endorses them as the source of creativity, and encompasses them within its own flux and unity. We hence come to understand why the references to the sea are of a mixed nature. On the one hand, the sea contains the imagery of the demonic: "the hoarse surging", "the fierce old mother incessantly moaning", "the savage old mother incessantly crying". And, on the other hand, the sea appears in its soothing, all-reconciling aspect: Soothe! soothe! soothe! Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close. If the sea is the receptacle of savagery and fierceness, it is also the universal " m o t h e r " . Discord and harmony are brought together in the final image of the "old crone", symbolic of the passage of time, who yet "rocks the cradle" that soothes the child to sleep: Which I do not forget, But fuse the song of my husky demon and brother, That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray beach, With the thousand responsive songs at random, My own songs awaked from that hour, And with them the key, the word up from the waves, The word of the sweetest song and all songs, That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,) The sea whisper'd me. Because of the dualistic nature of the new reality revealed by the sea, the bird, which led the poet to that reality, also assumes a dual nature: that of a " d e m o n " and of a "brother". The he-bird on the one hand leads to a vision of the discord of hell, to the truth of loss. At the same time, however, he is referred to in terms of "brother", implying unity, a complementary part of the self. The bird is indeed the alter ego of the child-poet. The poem itself presents us with a dialogue between the two selves of the poet: the dark and demonic self representing the sorrow of discord due to loss, and the more positive "brotherly" self that succeeds in reintegrating loss within the context of a new cosmic reality. Both selves are finally balanced within the regenerative truth of the universal mother: the sea.

121 The truth that Whitman reaches here is not the truth of the resolution or of the transcendence of the opposites in existence. The opposites remain in their belligerent state within the "warlike One"; demon and brother are part of One reality. It is out of the tension between these opposites that poetry is seen to issue. It is true that in "Out of the Cradle" the imagery of darkness and night prevails. However, together with the newly found illumination, there is forecast also a new dawn: "(the sea) Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak . . ." As he emerged from his period of darkness, Whitman went back to sing of the unitary One. This time, however, it was not the "safe" One of his earlier poetry, but rather a "fang'd and glittering One", a One that causes the pain and suffering out of which poetry is created: And a song make I of the One form'd out of all, The fang'd and glittering One whose head is over all, Resolute warlike One including and over all. ("Starting From Paumanok", 6, p. 16) The One he sings is a Harmony which encompasses discord, whose very essence is discord, contradiction, and death — not a negative death but a positive "delicious" death, the source of change and renewal.

NOTES

1. See: James E. Miller, Jr., A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957). 2. See: Stephen E. Whicher, "Whitman's Awakening to Death", in: The Presence of Walt Whitman, ed. with a Foreword by R.W.B. Lewis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 3. Leo Spitzer, "Explication de Texte Applied to Walt Whitman's Poem 'Out of the Cradle' Endlessly Rocking", in: Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 21-22. 4. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 194. 5. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 4, p. 200. 6. See: Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago: Hendricks House Inc., 1946), quoted in Richard Chase, " 'Out of the Cradle' As a Romance", in: The Presence of Walt Whitman, p. 56. 7. Richard Chase, " 'Out of the Cradle' As a Romance", p. 56. 8. Roy Harvey Pearce, "Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860", in: Whitman, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 40. 9. See: Frederick Schyberg, Walt Whitman, trans. Evie Allison Allen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951): Roger Asselineau, L'Evolution de Walt Whitman (Paris: Gregory Lounz, 1954); Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (New York: The

122 Macmillan Company, 1955), also: Walt Whitman Handbook, op. cit. 10. Roy Harvey Pearce, "Whitman Justified", p. 46. 11. Richard Chase, " 'Out of the Cradle' As a Romance", p. 56. 12. R.W.B. Lewis, "Walt Whitman: Always Going Out and Coming In", in: Trials of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 4-5. 13. Walt Whitman, "Poetry To-day in America - Shakespeare - The Future", in: The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Prose Works 1892, Vol. II, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 485. 14. Walt Whitman, "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads", in: Leaves of Grass, Inclusive Edition, ed. Emory Halloway, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1926), p. 536. 15. See: Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), esp. pp. 141-62. 16. Walt Whitman, "Preface" to the 1855 edition, Leaves of Grass, p. 494. 17. D.H. Lawrence, "Whitman", in: Whitman, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 18. 18. Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas", in: The Collected Writings, II, p. 420. 19. All citations of Whitman's poetry refer to the Inclusive Edition of Leaves of Grass, ed. Emory Halloway (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1926). 20. "Democratic Vistas", p. 421. 21. "Democratic Vistas", p. 420. 22. "Democratic Vistas", p. 421. 23. Trans. Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). The first number in parenthesis refers to the Wheelwright ordering of the fragments, the second to the Diels " B " list, and the third to the Bywater edition. 24. "Democratic Vistas", p. 420. 25. See: Floyd Stovall, ed., The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, II, p. 361. 26. In "There Was A Child Went F o r t h " Whitman writes: There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. (p. 305) 27. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, I (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. 61. 28. Wilhelm Windelband, p. 62. 29. See: Floyd Stovall, "Main Drifts in Whitman's Poetry", American Literature, IV (1932-33), 3-21. 30. Richard Chase, " 'Out of the Cradle' As a Romance", p. 58. 31. Roy Harvey Pearce, "Whitman Justified", p. 39. 32. R.W.B. Lewis, "Walt Whitman: Always Going Out and Coming In", pp. 3-4. 33. R.W.B. Lewis, p. 23. 34. Stephen E. Whicher, "Whitman's Awakening to Death", p. 2. 35. Stephen E. Whicher, p. 18. 36. From 1863 to 1867 Whitman spent most of his free time ministering to the needs of the Civil War wounded in Army hospitals in Washington.

V THE DISINHERITED QUEST: ARTHUR RIMBAUD

While Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitman in their different ways sought and found a path toward harmonious vision, Dante focusing on the divine and the transcendent, Shakespeare on the human and immanent, Whitman on the unity of the material and the spiritual within the context of cosmic process, Rimbaud confronts us with a tragedy of Harmony desperately sought after and never found. The tragic character of Rimbaud's life and literary production can be attributed, perhaps, to his loss of faith in his own ability to find the harmonious synthesis of cosmic experience which he so deeply needed to attain. Failure for him did not consist in his inability to reconcile the ideal with the concrete reality of human existence and limitations — a frustration which haunts all artistic creation to a greater or lesser degree. Rather, the tragic nature of his life and art can be traced, it would seem, to two main reasons which are closely interrelated. On the one hand, one might point to Rimbaud's inability to compromise with success, to affirm the value of striving to attain the ideal "absolute" Harmony that lies beyond human reach once he realized the inaccessible nature of that ideal. On the other hand, Rimbaud was not able to rid himself of the transcendental projection of his Platonic-Christian heritage and accept that view of reality which was, nevertheless, an integral part of his subjective experience of life — the Heraclitean. In his search for absolute Harmony, or the ultimate unity of all experience, and in his total dedication to his objective, Rimbaud had the same strength of character of the mystic. Unlike the mystic, however, he was unable to abandon concrete nature for that which is purely spiritual, nor was he able to transform it into a spiritual synthesis of Body and Soul as Whitman had. It was in Nature, with all its contradictions, that Rimbaud felt the ultimate force of regeneration and renewal to lie. While symbolists like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry were able to affirm the superiority of " p u r e " form and of the "artificial" to the concrete world of flux and decay, Rimbaud's sensibility, in the last analysis, found itself at variance with any tendency to place ultimate truth in an absolute and " p u r e " Form. This dilemma, which Rimbaud was not able either to accept or resolve, haunted his poetic production and finally led him to reject poetry. While Dante and Shakespeare had tended toward one or the other mode of Harmony and Whitman had succeeded in

124 reconciling both within the breadth of his all-encompassing vision, Rimbaud found himself torn between the two primary modes of Harmony. Perhaps due to his extreme youth or to his temperament, he was not able to adapt these contrasting visions within a unitary positive vision. That of Rimbaud is essentially a pre-socratic experience of life and art which he was never able to reconcile with the linear projection of his Christian heritage. In his early enthusiasm, he envisions himself as a redeemer or "harmonizer" of finite nature through his poetic "Word". He eventually realized, however, that it was himself that had to be redeemed, and, not being able to accept the Christian solution, nor being able to fully adhere to the implications of the Heraclitean, he searched for another one for the rest of his life. In this chapter we will attempt to trace the evolution of Rimbaud's spiritual quest. This evolution may be seen most clearly, perhaps, through an examination and comparison of his outlook and faith in himself and art in an early letter to Paul Démeny and in certain of the Illuminations with the changed attitude and convictions expressed in Une Saison en enfer. In the first, we find Rimbaud's youthful affirmation of hope in his power to transform the world through art, whereas in Une Saison there occurs the violent rejection of this faith and the statement of a necessity for the search of other possibilities of affirmation, which, afterwards, was to take place during the restless wanderings of his later life. Turning to the affirmative statement contained in the letter to Paul Démeny written on May 15, 1871, often called la lettre du voyant, we see that, in the first place, Rimbaud, perhaps not wholly aware of the contradiction involved, advances the dialectical concept of poetic creation in which the poet appears at once as the passive, impersonal receiver of poetic knowledge and, at the same time, the active seeker of that knowledge both within himself and in nature. On the one hand, we see, the poet receives poetic knowledge from the universal Mind which "throws out its ideas naturally": "l'intelligence universelle a toujours jeté ses idées naturellement". 1 This conception of poetic creation leads Rimbaud to advance the idea, shared by most symbolists, of the impersonality of art. The origin of poetic creation is not seen to begin in the subjective Ego but is considered, instead, to be prompted by an external universal intelligence acting on and stimulating the poet. The poetic "I" is objectivized. No longer do we have Madame de Staël's "chantez votre âme"conception of poetic creation but rather, as Rimbaud writes to Izambard: "C'est faux de dire Je pense. On devrait dire: On me pense" (p. 268, 13 May, 1871). That is, to use Rimbaud's metaphor, if brass one day awakens to find itself in the form of a trumpet, or if man awakens to find himself a poet, it is not their fault: Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s'éveille clairon, il n'y a rien de sa faute. Cela m'est évident: j'assiste à l'éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je

125 l'écoute: je lance un coup d'archet: la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d'un bond sur la scène. (to Démeny, p. 270) (For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.) In other words, the primary poetic impulse does not come from within man but from without. The subjective Ego (small je) assists to the blossoming of the poetic thought which mysteriously comes to it. Rimbaud thus decries Critics and Romantics who identify the subjective je with artistic creation: Si les vieux imbéciles n'avaient pas trouvé du Moi que la signification fausse, nous n'aurions pas à balayer ces millions de squelettes qui, depuis un temps infini, ont accumulé les produits de leur intelligence borgnesse, en s'en clamant les auteurs. (to Démeny, p. 270) (If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming themselves to be the authors of them.) "Author, creator, poet", Rimbaud continues, "such a man never existed" (p. 270). For him, there is no such thing as a subjective creative "Moi", but only an objective "Moi" receptive to the truth revealed to it by the universal Mind. At the same time, however, Rimbaud sets forth the idea of an active poetic Ego which is both contradictory and complementary to his objective passive conception of the artistic Je. This idea of an active creative Ego must be seen in connection with the relation between macrocosm and microcosm. Man, the microcosm, being a reflection in miniature of the macrocosm, before he can comprehend the truth that resides in the macrocosm, must attain complete knowledge of himself: La première étude de l'homme qui veut être poète est sa propre connaissance, entière; il cherche son âme, il l'inspecte, il la tente, il l'apprend. Dès qu'il la sait, il doit la cultiver. Cela semble simple: en tout cerveau s'accomplit un développement naturel; tant d'égoistes se proclament auteurs; il en est bien d'autres qui s'attribuent leur progrès intellectuel! — Mais il s'agit de faire l'âme monstrueuse: à l'instar des com-

126 prachicos, quoi! Imaginez un homme s'implantant et se cultivant des verrues sur le visage. (to Démeny, p. 270) (The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, puts it to the test, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every brain a natural development takes place; so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! — But the soul has to be made monstrous, that's the point: after the fashion of the comprachicos, if you like! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.) In the Romantic tradition, Rimbaud affirms that the man who wishes to be a poet must make himself become a voyant, a seer. This is to be accomplished through total self-knowledge. How is this total self-knowledge to be attained? For Rimbaud, it is achieved through the actualization of all the latent potentialities in man. Since it is to be total, this process of cosmic experience must take place beyond the confines of any conventional limitations. Rimbaud indicates, hence, that a man becomes a poet or "seer" by means of an "immense and methodical derangement of all his senses": Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie. (to Démeny, p. 270) (I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness.) Having exhaustively experienced the multiplicity of human experience, the newly self-made poet will then arrive at the essence of experience; he will see the ultimate truth of the Unknown: [Le poète] cherche lui même, il épuise en lui tous les poisons pour n'en garder que les quintessences. Ineffable torture où il a besoin de toute la foi, de toute la force surhumaine, où il devient entre tous le grand malade, le grand criminel, le grand maudit, — et le suprême Savant! — Car il arrive à l'inconnu. Puisqu'il a cultivé son âme, déjà riche, plus qu'aucun! (to Démeny, p. 270) (The poet searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and

127 keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed — and the great learned one! — among men. — For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul — which was rich to begin with — more than any other man!) We have come full circle here. Ultimate Knowledge is no longer seen to reside exclusively out of man; the poetic Ego is no longer considered to be a passive receiving agent transmitting ultimate Truth monitored from universal Mind. Just as ultimate Truth exists in the macrocosm, it is also present in man, in the microcosm. And the poet, through willing abnegation, actively succeeds in perceiving the Truth within himself. 2 Through his discovery of divine Truth by means of selfless dedication to his objective, whatever the suffering involved, the poet becomes a truly Promethean figure. Rimbaud's theory is not built on an "art for art's sake" view of poetry. For him, poets are also citizens, "les poètes sont citoyens" (p. 272); they are charged with the recreation and transmission of Truth to all of humanity, to the world in general, and are even responsible for animals: Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu. Il est chargé de l'humanité, des animaux même; il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions; si ce qu'il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne de la forme; si c'est informe, il donne l'informe. (to Démeny, p. 271) (So, the poet really is the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he must see to it that his inventions can be smelt, felt, heard. If what he brings back from down there has form, he brings forth form; if it is formless, he brings back formlessness.) Once one postulates the possibility of attaining ultimate Truth, the next problem to be faced must be that of expression. Conventional language, limited by its normal associations and connotations, is no longer an adequate vehicle for the expression of the plurivalent universal Truth the poet has discovered. The limitations of the old word must be transcended through the creation of a new linguistic mode, capable of conveying multiple associations and meanings. The more or less univalent word must be made a vehicle for the expression of cosmic plurivalence. Only then can a universal language be achieved. Rimbaud, therefore, indicates the necessity of finding a new mode of expression, a new language: Trouver une langue; — Du reste, toute parole étant idée, le temps d'un

128 langage universel viendra! Il faut être académicien, — plus mort qu'un fossile, — pour parfaire un dictionnaire, de quelque langue que ce soit. Des faibles se mettraient à penser sur la première lettre de l'alphabet, qui pourraient vite ruer dans la folie! Cette langue sera de l'âme, pour l'âme, résumant tout, parfums), sons, couleurs, de la pensée accrochant la pensée et tirant. Le poète définirait la quantité d'inconnu s'éveillant en son temps dans l'âme universelle : il donnerait plus — que la formule de sa pensée, que l'annotation de sa marche au Progrès! Enormité devenant norme, absorbée par tous, il serait vraiment un multiplicateur de progrès! (to Démeny, pp. 271-72) (A language has to be found — for that matter, every word being an idea, the time of the universal language will come! One has to be an academician — deader than a fossil — to finish a dictionary of any language. Weak-minded people, beginning by thinking about the first letter of the alphabet, would soon rush into madness! This [new] language would be of the soul, for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colours; thought latching on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time: he would produce more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march towards Progress] An enormity which has become norm, absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplier of progress!) As he will have gone beyond the evolution of temporal and particular phenomena to the eternal presence of the absolute and the universal, the poet will be a "multiplier of progress" — "multiplier" in the sense of rendering progress, which is by nature evolutionary, manifold and simultaneous; that is, causing it to be fulfilled in the eternal present of poetic creation. Rimbaud's supreme faith in the poet's visionary artistic power leads him to proclaim the identity of word and idea, and hence to postulate the possibility of a universal language. His hope causes him to conceive of a poetic means of expression which would rise above the realm of human finiteness and exist in the realm of the eternal and infinite; or, if you wish, a poetic Word that, by uniting or harmonizing the finite with the infinite in the totality of its significance, would redeem the finite from the bonds of contingency. Yet, in his quest of a universal language, Rimbaud equates the human word, which is by nature mediate and thus subject to the limitations of particularity and concreteness, with something that transcends mediation: universal Truth. This attempted equation, which is to be found in all of the leading symbolists, largely accounts for the theme of frustration running through their poetic

129 production. In the case of Rimbaud, however, belief in the possibility of achieving a universal harmonizing poetic Word expressive of all and his final realization of the hopelessness of his quest may be seen as a decisive factor in his renunciation of poetry. By uniting the poetic Word and ultimate Truth in a binding relationship, once he lost his faith in the possibility of attaining that Truth, poetry also lost its value both as a means of arriving at the Unknown, which represents Harmony for him, and as the concrete embodiment of Harmony. In his letter to Démeny, Rimbaud still possessed faith in poetry and still felt Truth or Harmony to consist in a dialectical fusion of form and matter. "The future", he writes, "will be materialistic". And the poems of the future will embody the eternality and universality of Number and Harmony within their structure. At the same time, they will be concrete, partaking of that eternal future which will also reveal itself to be concrete. These poems, according to Rimbaud, will represent a recreation of the harmonious synthesis achieved in Greek poetry, but they will be beyond action, beyond the limitations of univalent form and matter. The Poetry of the future will be a universal art that exists "en avant", beyond the contingencies of particularity and flux: Cet avenir sera matérialiste, vous le voyez. — Toujours pleins de Nombre et de l'Harmonie, ces poèmes seront faits pour rester. — Au fond, ce serait encore un peu la Poésie grecque . . . La Poésie ne rythmera plus l'action; elle sera en avant. (to Démeny, p. 272) (This future will, as you see, be materialistic. Always filled with Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. Essentially, it will be Greek poetry again, in a way . . . Poetry will no longer take its rhythm from action; it will be ahead of it!) What Rimbaud is implicitly aiming for here is the transcendence of human imperfection associated with the ephemerality and temporality of material life, and the attainment of a state in which matter will be reconciled with spirit, death with life, human finiteness with divine infinity, expression with intuition. Absolute Harmony, the Harmony of Number is envisaged here. At the same time, however, an element which Rimbaud does not yet recognize as discordant is introduced: matter. "The future", he writes, "will be materialistic". The Truth of universal form and matter will be made visible to man through the work of the poet in the concrete work of art. In terms of Christian thought, the poet will thus arrive beyond human imperfection related to the idea of original sin. He will be free from his servitude to a finite material

130 world, tainted since the Fall, and will reveal new visions of perfection and Reality to man. The poet thereby becomes the redeemer of mankind, a Christ-like figure, who, through his suffering and striving toward the Ideal, brings new hope and regeneration to man. Though rebelling against his Christian heritage, Rimbaud here reveals himself to be very much under its influence. With inspired enthusiasm, Rimbaud looks to that future state beyond original sin when also woman, freed from her slavery to tainted matter, will discover new and mysterious truths of the Unknown: Ces poètes seront! Quand sera brisé l'infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par elle, l'homme —jusqu'ici abominable, — lui ayant donné son renvoi, elle sera poète, elle aussi! La femme trouvera de l'inconnu! Ses mondes d'idées différeront-ils des nôtres? — Elle trouvera des choses étranges, insondables, repoussantes, délicieuses; nous les prendrons, nous comprendrons. (to Démeny, p. 272) (Poets like this will exist! When the unending servitude of women is broken, when she lives by and for herself, when man — hitherto abominable — has given her her freedom, she too will be a poet! Woman will discover part of the unknown! Will her world of ideas be different from ours? — She will discover things strange and unfathomable, repulsive and delicious. We shall take them unto ourselves, we shall understand them.) The hope of attaining cosmic Harmony and Truth, and the charming naiveté of certain of his visions of future happiness through poetic creation are still present in some of the Illuminations. We will dwell, however, principally on Une Saison rather than on the Illuminations because the former present a more complete picture of Rimbaud's spiritual development insofar as art is concerned. Before going on to Une Saison en enfer a few observations on the Illuminations might nonetheless be in order. The Illuminations reveal a more positive view on poetry and on poetic possibilities which might be taken as an indication that they were mainly composed before Une Saison, although we will not here go into the critical controversy over the dating of the two works. Even though the realization of the failure inherent in poetic striving is present in the Illuminations, this realization is not felt deeply enough to lead to a rejection of poetic striving, something which instead occurs in Une Saison. In Conte Rimbaud alludes to the limitations inherent in poetic endeavour: the poet is also a man and the attainment of the knowledge of a superior ideal Harmony lies beyond his reach:

131 Un s o i r . . . un Génie apparut, d'une beauté ineffable, inavouable même. De sa physionomie et de son maintien ressortait la promesse d'un amour multiple et complexe! d'un bonheur indicible, insupportable même! Le Prince et le Génie s'anéantirent probablement dans la santé essentielle. Comment n'auraient-ils pas pu en mourir? Ensemble donc ils moururent. Mais ce Prince décéda, dans son palais, à un âge ordinaire. Le Prince était le Génie. Le Génie était le Prince. La musique savante manque à notre désir. {Conte, p. 179) (One evening . . . a Genie appeared, ineffably beautiful, with a beauty impossible even to acknowledge. From his face and bearing shone out the promise of a multiple and complex love! of an unutterable, even unendurable happiness! The Prince and the Genie annihilated each other probably in idiopathic health. How could they have helped dying of it? Together then they died. But the Prince died, in his palace, at a normal age. The Prince was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince. Great music falls short of our desire.) Yet, the assessment of the poet and his work is still basically positive here. In the Illuminations, the poet is seen as an inventor, a Harmonizer, as a musician who has found the key of love and redemption: Je suis un inventeur bien autrement méritant que tous ceux qui m'ont précédé; un musicien même qui ai trouvé quelque chose comme la clef de l'amour. (Vies II, p. 182) (I am an inventor more deserving by far than all who have gone before me; a musician, moreover, who has discovered something like the keysignature of love.) The possibilities for achieving a superior ideal Harmony, the reconciliation of all opposites in the moment of vision, are considered in a positive light: Un coup de ton doigt sur le tambour décharge tous les sons et commence la nouvelle harmonie. Un pas de toi, c'est la levée des nouveaux hommes et leur enmarche. Ta tête se détourne: le nouvel amour! Ta tête se retourne, — le nouvel amour! (A Une Raison, pp. 183-4) (A blow of your fìnger on the drum unleashes all sounds and begins the

132 new harmony. One step of yours is the arising of new men and their marching forward. Your head turns away: the new love! Your head turns back — 0 the new love!) Tu en es encore à la tentation d'Antoine. L'ébat du zèle écourté, les tics d'orgueil puéril, l'affaiblissement et l'effroi. Mais tu te mettras à ce travail: toutes les possibilités harmoniques et architecturales s'émouvront autour de ton siège. Des êtres parfaits, imprévus, s'offriront à tes expériences. Dans tes environs affluera rêveusement la curiosité d'anciennes foules et de luxes oisifs. Ta mémoire et tes sens ne seront que la nourriture de ton impulsion créatrice. Quant au monde, quand tu sortiras, que sera-t-il devenu? En tout cas, rien des apparences actuelles. (Jeunesse IV, p. 208) (You are still at the temptation of Anthony. The antics of docked zeal, the grimaces of puerile pride, collapse, and terror. But you will set yourself to this work: all harmonic and architectural possibilities will be in commotion at your feet. Perfect, unforeseen beings will offer themselves for your experiments. About you will gather dreamily the curiosity of old multitudes and of idle wealth. Your memory and your senses will be only the food of your creative impulse. As for the world, when you emerge, what will have become of it? In any case, nothing it seems now.) He still considers the poet to be the creator of structure and Harmony. Rimbaud envisages him surrounded by all the architectural and harmonic possibilities from which he will create a new order. His hopes and the positive outlook we find in the letter to Démeny and in the Illuminations are to give way, however, to the bitter realization of the impossibility of materializing his aspirations. It is this realization, accompanied by his renunciation of literature and his decision to search for other modes of knowledge and salvation that we find in Une Saison en enfer. The very opening of Une Saison presents a striking contrast to the unbounded enthusiasm for the poetic mission expressed in the letter to Démeny. No longer do we see a young poet speaking of his hopes and dreams, all afire with the thought of his mission. In Une Saison we find only the story of a broken dream as a disillusioned Rimbaud recounts the story of his progressive loss of faith in art and in himself: Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient. Un soir, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. — Et je l'ai trouvée amère.

133 — Et je l'ai injuriée. Je me suis armé contre la justice. Je me suis enfui. O sorcières, ô misère, ô haine, c'est à vous que mon trésor a été confié! Je parvins à faire s'évanouir dans mon esprit toute l'espérance humaine. {Une Saison en enfer, p. 219) (Once, if I remember correctly, my life was a feast at which all hearts opened and all wines flowed. One evening I sat Beauty on my knees — And I found her bitter — And I reviled her. I armed myself against justice. I fled. 0 witches, O misery, O hatred, it was to you that my treasure was entrusted! I managed to erase in my mind all human hope.) If, in the innocence of his youth, he had still believed in an ideal of perfect, eternal Beauty, one day he confronted this ideal with reality and thereby discovered discord and the enduring nature of contradiction and change. This discovery was accompanied by a rejection of the perfect, unitary ideal, now considered to be illusory, and a search for truth and harmony in discord, in brute materiality, in death: Sur toute joie pour l'etrangler j'ai fait le bond sourd de la bête féroce. J'ai appelé les bourreaux pour, en périssant, mordre la crosse de leurs fusils. J'ai appelé les fléaux, pour m'étouffer avec le sable, le sang. Le malheur a été mon dieu. Je me suis allongé dans la boue. Je me suis séché à l'air du crime. Et j'ai joué de bons tours à la folie. (Une Saison en enfer, p. 219) (Upon every joy, in order to strangle it, I made the muffled bound of the wild beast. I called up executioners in order to bite their gunbutts as I died. I called up plagues, in order to suffocate myself with sand and blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched myself out in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played some fine tricks on madness.) Yet spring, the time of birth and renewal, brought him only the bitter laugh of the idiot and consciousness of failure: "Et le printemps m'a apporté l'affreux rire de l'idiot". Having reached the point of total despair, as a last resort, he thinks of seeking the key to the ancient feast — which he sees to be the truth of the Christian banquet — so that he might gain new faith in life. He finds that key

134 to be charity, the mutual love that creates harmony between man and himself, and between man and God. But, again, as he confronts his discovery with the reality of human existence, this truth for him appears to be a dream: Or, tout dernièrement m'étant trouvé sur le point de faire le dernier couacl j'ai songé à rechercher le clef du festin ancien, où je reprendrais, peut-être, appétit. La charité est cette clef. — Cette inspiration prouve que j'ai rêvé! (p. 219) (But just lately, finding myself on the point of uttering the last croak, I thought of looking for the key to the old feast, where perhaps I might find my appetite again. Charity is this key — This inspiration proves that I have been dreaming!) At the very opening of Une Saison en enfer, we thus find the substance of the whole work: the loss of faith in a transcendent Ideal Harmony, the consciousness of the unbridgeable dichotomy between spirit and matter, between the harmonious ideal of Christianity to be found in charity and the reality of the discord and dissonance in human existence. This substance is reiterated throughout the rest of the work in different manners. In Mauvais sang we see that the Christian message of salvation is unsatisfying and useless to Rimbaud. Christ cannot give nobility and true liberty to his soul which he now feels is weighted down and degraded by matter: La sang païen revient. L'esprit est proche, pourquoi Christ ne m'aide-t-il pas, en donnant à mon âme noblesse et liberté. Hélas! l'Évangile a passé! l'Évangile! l'Évangile. (.Mauvais sang, p. 221) (Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is near. Why does Christ not help me by giving my soul nobility and freedom? Alas! the Gospel has passed by! the Gospel! the Gospel.) All he hears is the voice of contingency and fate urging him to act without restriction since ultimate knowledge is impossible and death reigns in life: Sur les routes, par des nuits d'hiver, sans gîte, sans habits, sans pain, une voix étreignait mon coeur gelé: "Faiblesse ou force: te voilà, c'est la force. Tu ne sais ni où tu vas, ni pourquoi tu vas, entre partout, réponds à tout. On ne te tuera pas plus que si tu étais cadavre". (Mauvais sang, p. 223)

135 (On the roads, on winter nights, without shelter, without clothing, without bread, a voice would clutch my frozen heart! "Weakness or strength: look at you, it's strength. You know neither where you are going nor why you are going: go everywhere, respond to everything. They won't kill you any more than if you were a corpse.) Occasionally, he swings back to his early "dérèglement de tous les sens" view of life in which he sees ultimate fulfillment to lie in and through matter. The mud of the cities suddenly takes on the form of a treasure in a forest: "Dans les villes la boue m'apparaissait soudainement rouge et noire, comme une glace quand la lampe circule dans la chambre voisine, comme un trésor dans la forêt!" {Mauvais sang, p. 223). Yet, his hope is only momentary. Matter again imposes its absurdity and ultimately condemned state upon him. Lost and alone, without the regenerative possibility of the companionship of a woman or of a real friend, Rimbaud imagines himself standing before an execution squad, in front of an exasperated crowd, crying for the sorrow which they had not been able to understand (contradiction, death, the human condition) and yet forgiving, like Joan of Arc: Mais l'orgie et la camaraderie des femmes m'etaient interdites. Pas même un compagnon. Je me voyais devant une foule exaspérée, en face du peloton d'exécution, pleurant du malheur qu'ils n'aient pu comprendre, et pardonnant! — Comme Jeanne d'Arc! (Mauvais sang, p. 223) (But orgy and the comradeship of women were forbidden me. Not even a companion. I could see myself in front of an angry crowd, facing the firing-squad, weeping with the unhappiness which they would not have been able to understand, and forgiving them! — Like Joan of Arc!) Through his strivings, Rimbaud asks, had he progressed in knowledge of nature or of himself? Had words led him to Truth, to a new world of resurrected humanity? "No more words", he cries. The word cannot resurrect; the dead, he concludes, must be assimilated back into life through life. Associating the idea of regenerative primitivism with that of the union of man with nature and life through the ecstatic rhythm of dance, he exclaims: Connais-je encore la nature? me connais-je? — Plus de mots. J'ensevelis les morts dans mon ventre. Cris, tambour, danse, danse, danse, danse! Je ne vois même pas l'heure où, les blancs débarquant, je tomberai au néant.

136 Faim, soif, cris, danse, danse, danse, danse! {Mauvais sang, pp. 223-24) (Do I know nature yet? do I know myself? — No more words. I bury the dead in my belly. Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance, dance! I cannot even see the time when the whites will land and I shall collapse into nothing. Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!) It is not through an artificial "dérèglement de tous les sens", but rather through life and nature, through the contraries, that one can arrive at the ultimate state of being "en avant". The unfathomable and unreachable mystery of trinitarian human and divine perfection will then give way to the fourfold unity of cosmic harmony, to the balance of those contraries, which constitute the fundamental basis of any human harmony or Truth. Debauch, Rimbaud now realizes, can only lead to decay: Sans doute la débauche est bête, le vice est bête; il faut jeter la pourriture à l'écart. Mais l'horloge ne sera pas arrivée à ne plus sonner que l'heure de la pure douleur. {Mauvais sang, p. 224) (Without a doubt, debauchery is stupid, vice is stupid, all rottenness must be thrown out. But the clock has not yet begun to strike only the hour of pure sorrow.) It is in nature that he now finds the perfection of divine love and harmony: "l'Amour divin seul octroie les clefs de la science. Je vois que la nature n'est qu'un spectacle de bonté. Adieu chimères, idéals, erreurs" {Mauvais sang, p. 224). He comes to the conclusion that the world is basically good, that he will bless life and love his brothers: La raison m'est née. Le monde est bon. Je bénirai la vie. J'aimerai mes frères. Ce ne sont plus des promesses d'enfance. Ni l'espoir d'échapper à la vieillesse et à la mort. Dieu fait ma force, et je loue Dieu. {Mauvais sang, p. 224) (Reason is born in me. The world is good. I will bless life. I will love my brothers. These are no longer childhood vows. Nor are they the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength, and I praise God.) We have here a comprehension of the context in which his Heraclitean experience of charity and harmony must operate, and the spiritual certitude of

137 having intuited the essence of God. However, it is not the God of Christian dogma whom Rimbaud envisages this time, but his own personal God of harmony and hope, the God that informs and balances the cosmic contraries. This is the God of Life he will search for in his African wanderings and during the rest of his life. Before a new affirmation can take place, however, the old affirmation must be fully rejected. In the succeeding poèmes en prose of Une Saison, we thus follow Rimbaud's description of his spiritual and physical descent into Hell and his realization of the failure of all of his old dreams. In Délires I: Vierge folle, l'époux infernal, he reveals his failure to arrive at Truth — the truth of perfect agreement or attunement propounded in Plato's Symposium — through his friendship with Verlaine. Even the one person with whom he had hoped to find absolute Truth and Harmony, Verlaine, was not able to enter his world and share his dreams. As he has "la Vierge Folle" admit: J'étais sure de ne jamais entrer dans son monde. A côté de son cher corps endormi, que d'heures des nuits j'ai veillé, cherchant pourquoi il voulait tant s'évader de la réalité . . . Il a peut-être des secrets pour changer la vie? Non, il ne fait qu'en chercher . . . J'ignore son idéal. Il m'a dit avoir des regrets, des espoirs: cela ne doit pas me regarder. Parle-t-il à Dieu? Peut-être devrais-je m'adresser à Dieu. Je suis au plus profond de l'abîme, et je ne sais plus prier. {Délires I, pp. 230-31) (I was sure I should never enter his world. Beside his dear sleeping body, how many hours I have sat up at night, trying to discover why he wished so hard to escape from reality . . . Perhaps he possesses secrets for transforming life? No, he is only looking for them. I don't know what his ideal is. He told me he had regrets, hopes: but they can't be about me. Does he speak to God? Perhaps I ought to appeal to God. I am at the bottom of the abyss, and I no longer know how to pray.) While the weakness of Verlaine is bitterly highlighted, Rimbaud at the same time sees his own failure and inability to give his friend the ultimate Truth that would save them both. Again, it is the "Vierge folle" who speaks: Par instants, j'oublie la pitié où je suis tombée: lui me rendra fort, nous voyagerons, nous chasserons dans les déserts, nous dormirons sur les pavés des villes inconnues, sans soins, sans peines. Ou je me réveillerai, et les lois et les moeurs auront changé, - grâce à son pouvoir magique, — le monde, en restant le même, me laissera à mes désirs, joies, nonchalances. Oh! la vie d'aventures qui existe dans les livres des

138 enfants, pour me récompenser, j'ai tant souffert, me la donneras-tu? D ne peut pas. {Délires I, p. 231) (Sometimes I forget the pitiful condition into which I have fallen: he will make me strong, we shall travel, we shall hunt in the deserts, we shall sleep on the stones of unknown towns, without cares, without troubles. Or I shall wake up, and laws and customs will have changed — thanks to his magic powers — the world, remaining the same, will leave me to my desires, my joys, and my carelessness. Oh! a life of adventures like they have in children's books, to make up for everything, I have suffered so much, will you give it to me? He cannot.) The last words of la Vierge folle, "he cannot", reveal all of Rimbaud's deep feeling of frustration before his inability to attain the truth of Ideal unity and oneness, of reconciled opposites. In Délires II: l'Alchimie du Verbe, Rimbaud goes on to express his consciousness of the failure of Art and language. His aim, he tells us (as in the letter to Démeny), was to create the plurivalent word in order to express the immediate unity of all things through the mediation of language: J'inventai la couleur des voyelles! - A noir, E blanc, / rouge, O bleu, U vert. — Je réglai la forme et le mouvement de chaque consonne, et, avec des rythmes instinctifs, je me flattai d'inventer un verbe poétique accessible, un jour ou l'autre, à tous les sens. Je réservais la traduction. (Délires II, p. 233) (I invented the colours of the vowels! — A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. — I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses. I reserved translation rights.) Yet a plurivalent word is ultimately inaccessible to man. It is, he finally realizes, untranslatable. Man's understanding, or spiritual being, is limited by his body, or material being. And the only way to reach the God of reconciled plurivalence, the Christian God, is by means of the spirit. As he concedes in l'Impossible-, "Par l'esprit on va à Dieu". But, he adds, "Déchirante infortune!" (p. 241). Plurivalent language thus reveals its insufficiency and limitations. After his tortured night in Hell, morning brings with it the realization that he can no more explain the ideal ineffable or even himself through language than the mendicant with his continuous Pa ter and Ave Maria. His own words sound just as hollow to him as those of the mendicant who seeks

139 sustenance from and for man through an appeal to a transcendent divine by means of language. Having reached this conclusion, Rimbaud is no longer able to believe in the magical power of the word; he is no longer able to speak: Moi, je ne puis pas plus m'expliquer que le mendiant avec ses continuels Pater et Ave Maria. Je ne sais plus parlerl (Matin, p. 242) (I can explain myself no better than the beggar with his incessant Our Father's and Hail Mary's. I don't know how to speak any more\) From the desert of life Rimbaud's tired eyes still continue to look toward the silver star, in alchemical imagery the symbol of fulfillment and regeneration. Yet, the alienated poetic Ego has lost hope and can no longer believe in the faith of the past: Du même désert, à la même nuit, toujours mes yeux las se réveillent à l'étoile d'argent, toujours, sans que s'émeuvent les Rois de la vie, les trois mages, le coeur, l'âme, l'esprit. (Matin, p. 242) (From the same desert, in the same night, always my weary eyes awaken to the silver star, always without disturbing the Kings of Life, the three magi, the heart, the soul, the mind.) The silver star remains distant 3 and a deeply disillusioned Rimbaud cries out for a new salvation, for the birth of a new Christmas on earth to appear: Quand irons-nous, par delà les grèves et les monts, saluer la naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la fuite des tyrans et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer — les premiers! — Noël sur la terre! Le chant des cieux, la marche des peuples! Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la vie. (Matin, p. 242) (When shall we journey, beyond the beaches and the mountains, to hail the birth of a new labour, the new wisdom, the rout of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition; to adore — as the first comers! — Christmas on earth! The song of the heavens, the march of nations! Slaves, let us not curse life.) The new affirmation voiced at the end of Matin is taken up in the last poème

140 en prose of Une Saison en enfer: Adieu. This last poème en prose sums up the development of the work as a whole and indicates what form the new affirmation is to assume for Rimbaud. Whether or not Rimbaud continued to write poetry after the Adieu is, in a certain sense, immaterial. What is important here is his total loss of faith in being able to attain salvation through Poetry and his inability to reaffirm the value of Poetry despite its inevitable limitations. Having become aware of the essential illusion present in any artistic endeavor, Rimbaud cannot accept this awareness and still believe in the value of his mission. For him, therefore, the past and its memories must be buried : — Quelquefois je vois au ciel des plages sans fin couvertes de blanches nations en joie. Un grand vaisseau d'or, au-dessus de moi, agite ses pavillons multicolores sous les brises du matin. J'ai créé toutes les fêtes, tous les triomphes, tous les drames. J'ai essayé d'inventer de nouvelles fleurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. J'ai cru acquérir de pouvoirs surnaturels. Eh bien! je dois enterrer mon imagination et mes souvenirs! Une belle gloire d'artiste et de conteur emportée! {Adieu, p. 243) (Sometimes I see in the sky beaches without end covered with white nations full of joy. A great golden vessel above me waves its manycoloured standards in the morning breezes. I have created all feasts, all triumphs, all dramas. I have tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I believed I had acquired supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories! A fine fame as an artist and story-teller swept away!) There is, he concludes, no transcendence of the human condition. Sublimation is impossible. The magician or poet must finally give way to the peasant, to the man who works the earth, immersed in the "wrinkled" reality of human existence: Moi! moi qui me suis dit mage ou ange, dispensé de toute morale, je suis rendu au sol, avec un devoir à chercher, et la réalité rugueuse à étreindre! Paysan! (Adieu, p. 243) (I! I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I am given back to the earth, with a task to pursue, and wrinkled reality to embrace! A peasant!)

141 The search for the old Eden must be abandoned. The vision of absolute Justice or Harmony, Rimbaud now believes, is God's alone. Therefore, he affirms, one must be absolutely modern: "Il faut être absolument moderne. Point de cantiques: tenir le pas gagné" (p. 244). Truth, he concludes, cannot be searched for in absolute transcendence of the human condition. All that is permitted to man is to possess his truth in the union of body and soul: "et il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps" (p. 244). With these words, Une Saison en enfer and Rimbaud's faith in poetry, come to a close. In conclusion, we have seen that Rimbaud at first tended to go in the direction of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry: toward the attainment of a Reality transcending human limitations by means of the poetic Word. However, his feeling for Nature — finally acknowledged to be the receptacle of human truth and reality — never permitted him to turn exclusively to pure transcendental Form (or Spirit) as the ultimate Ideal. After realizing the failure of his method of "dérèglement de tous les sens" in bringing him closer to ultimate Truth, he abandons art, the idealization of Nature, and gives himself totally to the concrete experience of life. For him, words, in the last analysis, remained only signs whose ultimate content is forever destined to reside in the domain of the unknown. Torn between, on the one hand, the linear and transcendental tendency of his Christian heritage and, on the other, his essentially Heraclitean sensibility, he was never able to sufficiently free himself from the former so as to be able to accept the full implications of the latter. Having seen the failure of the poetic Word to liberate itself from the limitations of human expression and understanding and to ascend to Ideal Truth and Harmony in this life, and not being able to accept the "contraries" in their unredeemed or unreconciled state, he comes to consider all artistic creation to involve an illusory search and to end in ultimate failure. Whereas the symbolists would consider the pure Ideal to embody ultimate Truth and Harmony, and though realizing its inaccessible nature, would nonetheless affirm the value of striving to achieve it, Rimbaud stands apart from them. He lacks the final "faith beyond faith" in a pure transcendent reality, which would enable him to reach such an affirmation. He thus rejects Poetry, the quest after the Ideal through the "Word", and turns to concrete life, to the search of Truth and Harmony "within a body and a soul".

NOTES

Amidst the maze of critical writings on Rimbaud, one of the most useful works is Enid Starkie's excellent biography of the poet: Arthur Rimbaud (New York: New Directions, 1961). René Etiemble's Mythe de Rimbaud, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), remains a

142 valuable source of information on critical adventures in Rimbaldian myth formation. The most significant indirect aid to interpretation, however, may be found in Carl Gustav Jung's illuminating studies on alchemy, particularly: The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy, in The Integration of the Personality, translated by Stanley M. Dell (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), and Mysterium Coniunctionis, Vol. 14, Bollingen series of Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 1. All citations of Rimbaud are from the Pléiade edition of his collected works: Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Rolland de Renéville and Jules Mouquet (Tours: Gallimard, 1963). The English rendition is based on Oliver Bernard's translation of Rimbaud's works, Rimbaud (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962). Any modifications are my own. 2. See Gwendolyn Bays, The Orphic Vision (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), pp. 181-85, for a treatment of the possible source in Sully Prudhomme of the subject-object opposition in Rimbaud and its philosophical background. 3. For a discussion of the alchemical nature and meaning of the symbolism here and elsewhere see Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, pp. 158-78. Good brief surveys of the main alchemical tenets and ideas can be found in Serge Hutin's A History of Alchemy, translated by Tamara Alferoff (New York: Walker Company, 1962), and Titus Burckhardt, l'Alchimie, Science et Sagesse, trans. Andrée Ossipovitch (Loos: Editions Planète, 1967).

VI THE HARMONIOUS VISION OF SONG

Je parle, homme sans faute originelle sur une terre présente. Je n'ai pas mille ans devant moi. Je ne m'exprime pas pour les hommes du lointain qui seront — comment n'en pas douter? — aussi malheureux que nous. J'en respecte la venue. 1 (I speak, a man without original sin on a present earth. I do not have a thousand years before me. I do not express myself for the men of far-off who — how can there be any doubt? — will be just as wretched as we. I respect their coming.) Tourterelle, ma tristesse A mon insu définie, Ton chant est mon chant de minuit, Ton aile bat ma forteresse! 2 (Turtle-dove, my sadness Without my knowledge defined, Your song is my song of midnight, Your wing beats my fortress.) Ensemble nous remettrons la Nuit sur ses rails; et nous irons, tour à tour détestant et nous aimant, jusqu'aux étoiles de l'aurore. 3 (Together we will put the Night back on its rails; and we will go in turn detesting and loving each other, up to the stars of dawn.) Turning now to an examination of the role of harmony in the work of the contemporary French poet, René Char, one might at the very outset point to the positive aspect of his outlook and faith in poetry and harmony despite the acknowledgement in his verse of those "contraries" that posed such an agonizing problem for Rimbaud. During the course of our examination of the idea of harmony in Char's work, we will seek to understand the nature of that affirmation and how the experience of the Heraclitean contraries can

144 on the one hand lead to defeat and destruction, and on the other, can result in positive self-fulfillment. In Char's work there often appears the image of song, the song of a bird, of a man, or of the universe itself, and one is led to wonder whether the idea of song might not be of central importance in his thought and artistic creation. What is the meaning and significance of this image and what relation does it have to the other dominant images in Char's poetry, images of dissonance and consonance, of darkness and light, of flux and permanence, of failure and revolt? Since meaning and relationship in poetry are generally of a multiple and highly varied nature, and particularly so in the case of Char, in the following pages we will only attempt to indicate the principal aspects under which the theme of song presents itself in his work. In the first place, as in the case of the preceding poets with regard to music and harmony, also in Char we find the idea of Song as an ideal of absolute agreement and attunement. It is the ideal of cosmic harmony and unity sought by the poet, the "pyramid of Song" which he tries to attain: Disposer en terrasses successives des valeurs poétiques tenables en rapports prémédités avec la pyramide du Chant à l'instant de se révéler, pour obtenir cet absolu inextinguible, ce rameau du premier soleil: le feu non-vu, indécomposable.4 (To dispose in successive terraces poetic values tenable in premeditated relations with the pyramid of Song at the moment of its revelation, to obtain that inextinguishable absolute, that palm of the first sun: the unseen fire, indecomposable.) Pyramid and Song, two distinct images which metamorphose themselves into one by their poetic identification through the definite article du. The respective meanings and values of the two images are united in the total image created by the poetic rapprochement. What are these values? One of the aspects of Song that is to be noted in Char's poetry, the one which interests us in this moment, is the ancient idea of Song understood in terms of the harmony of the spheres, embracing and resolving all human and divine multiplicity in its absolute, unitary attunement and meaning. The pyramid, on the other hand, may be looked upon as the three dimensional -triangle, a symbolic image of the absolute. At the same time, it represents one of man's most forceful affirmations of faith in his ability to attain that absolute. The pyramid is the place where human and phenomenal relativity and multiplicity are resolved in union with the One, with total and divine Harmony. Through the union of the two images, we thus witness a positive representation of absolute Reality and of the poet's hope of being able to attain that Reality by means of his poetic creation.

145 This affirmation, however, is not made without some reservations. At its center, at the center of the images chosen and of the poetic word itself, there is a negation, or, if you wish, a qualification of the affirmation. The "poetic values", we see, are "tenable", a word that suggests both success (from tenir, 'to hold') and at the same time opposition, effort, struggle (values tenable against something that endangers them), a word which draws its affirmative power from an inherent negation. The "poetic values" of which Char speaks are also disposed in "successive" terraces. "Successive" is an adjective which echoes on the one hand the idea of "success" but which at the same time contains a notion of two contradictory movements: the linear movement of ascension or of descent, and the circular movement of repetition. These contrasting movements or forces, however, result in a meaning which is affirmative on several levels. Continuing with this semantic analysis, we see that the "poetic values" must exist in "premeditated" relations with the pyramid of Song. "Premeditated" is again a word that embraces contrary meanings. On the one hand it can denote considered calculation and conscious design. Taken in its constitutive parts ("pre" - "meditated"), however, it can also suggest the absence of reflective reason; it can point to unconsciousness, to pure intuition. Char, moreover, speaks to us of a pyramid of Song with reference to a definite point in time: at the instant of its revelation. That is, in regard to the pyramid of Song, he is indicating a revelation that has no extended duration in time, one that is limited, abridged, confined by an instant, a revelation, which, if it occurs, is also destined to quickly disappear. If, nonetheless, it is limited in the time span of the instant, that revelation is also contained within the instant of poetic intuition; and it is known that the infinity of human time resides in the successive repetition of "instants". Even in the image of the "pyramid of Song" there is a contradiction. The pyramid is a visible, concrete, tangible thing, and because of this concreteness its terrestrial form is subject to the erosion of time. Song, on the contrary, is an invisible and intangible harmony which, therefore, can escape the destruction brought on by time. There is a sense, however, in which both the pyramid and Song are "eternal": through their symbolic connection with the absolute. There is, nevertheless, another sense in which both are condemned to continual finiteness and destruction: because of their inevitable base in the reality of phenomenal flux. The contradictions in the image thus converge into a harmony of meaning, only to immediately return once again to their contradictory state. These few observations on the semantic technique of condensation in Char's poetry already indicate that there are several symbolic dimensions in the image of Song. We will examine shortly some of the conclusions that can be drawn from the presence of the contradictions inherent in the poetic Word. However, there still remain some observations to be made concerning the

146 nature of Song as a symbol of absolute harmony. In the first place, one might ask, what is the nature of the divine or absolute harmony Char envisages? Char often mentions Heraclitus in his poemes en prose, and his extreme consciousness of the "contraries" inherent in human life and in poetry would seem to point to a Heraclitean vision of reality and of Harmony. In Partage formel Char writes in regard to Heraclitus: Heraclite met I'accent sur I'exaltante alliance des contraires. II voit en premier lieu en eux la condition parfaite et le moteur indispensable a produire I'harmonie.5 (.Heraclitus emphasizes the exhilarating alliance of the opposites. He sees firstly in them the perfect condition and the driving power indispensable for producing harmony.) This notion of "the exhilarating alliance of the opposites" would seem to contradict the concept of ideal Harmony as a transcendental "pyramid of Song" which we discussed earlier. If we look at Char's wording more closely, however, we note that the "exhilarating alliance of the opposites" is the "perfect condition" and the "indispensable motor" for the creation of harmony. Ideal Harmony, consequently, is not necessarily composed of a dynamic tension of contraries. These are, instead, Char seems to be saying, only the basis out of which harmony may emerge. This brings us to ask whether it is simply a balance of contraries that Char considers to be the end of poetic striving, a balance that would then constitute the essential nature of harmony, as is the case in Heraclitus; or, whether what Char actually desires is the resolution of those tensions. In other words, is Char's outlook truly Heraclitean, or under a Heraclitean exterior does it preserve an essentially Platonic transcendental tendency? A close examination of Char's poetry would seem to reveal that the ideal Harmony he envisages is to a large degree Platonic in its tendency toward the achievement of a reconciliation of opposites. In Char's view, the achievement of this reconciliation must be based on the poetic striving to connect the discordant phenomenal contraries with the transcendental ideal, and, thereby, to redeem them, as we shall see below. In this sense Char does not represent a complete break with the transcendentally directed aesthetic of the French symbolists. His work and thought, instead, may be looked upon as a continuation and extension of their poetic sensibility. This continuation is modified, however, by Char's profound experience of evil and suffering, or in other words, of discord and flux, during the Second World War in which he actively participated as a member of the French Resistance. The war experience heightened Char's awareness of the irreconcilable

147 contraries in human life and with all probability deepened his commitment to attempt to reconcile those contraries through social and poetic action. It is in this respect, however, that Char differs quite radically from Heraclitus and it is at this point that the nature of his striving and of the ideal Harmony he envisages may be understood. For Heraclitus, we saw, "war is the common condition, . . . strife is justice, and . . . all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife" (W 26, D 80, By 62). War of strife (i.e., the contraries) in Heraclitean thought is therefore something good, a part of the cosmic process of death and regeneration. Char, a member in his own way of the generation of the absurd, and partaking in that modern phenomenon of alienation which Mircea Eliade characterized as the "terror of history", 6 was not able to justify human suffering, disorder, and discord in life either in terms of the archaic idea of eternal recurrence or in terms of the Christian linear vision of redemption. Char sees the poet's mission, therefore, to consist in a perpetual revolt against those contraries which form the basis of human experience. The poetic creative act, as we shall see, resides in an unending attempt to harmonize the contraries by connecting them and bringing them into correspondence with the superior accord and meaning of the poetic ideal, the transcendental "pyramid of Song". This creative act involves not merely a connecting or a bringing together of opposite tensions into a unified and balanced whole. It involves instead a reconciliation and resolution of these tensions: "En poésie, devenir c'est réconcilier" 7 (in poetry, to become is to reconcile). This "pyramid of Song" is the poet's inspiring ideal; it represents his Poetry, the supreme object toward which his striving is directed. The desired object, however, remains unapproachable. The fascinating mirage of the ideal presents itself in front of the poet only to dissolve immediately into the darkness of the Unknown: . . . la vie de l'esprit, la vie unifilaire, contrairement à celle du coeur, n'est fascinée, dans la tentation de la poésie, que par un objet souverain inapprochable qui vole en éclats lorsque, distance franchie, nous sommes sur le point de le toucher. 8 (The life of the spirit, the unilinear life, as opposed to that of the heart, is only fascinated, in the temptation of poetry, by an unapproachable sovereign object which bursts into pieces when, the distance crossed, we are on the point of touching it.) If the ideal, which belongs to the life of the spirit, escapes the poet, to what extent is that ideal accessible to him? If he should insist in following the illusion of that ideal Song, is he not confronted with the risk of falling into the abyss of pure spirit, that is, of non-being or nothingness in terms of human powers? These questions lead us to consider the second principal

148 aspect of Song in Char's poetry: Song as a means of attaining the absolute, as a connective link with that absolute reality. From ancient times, Song has often been considered a trait d'union with the sacred, a magical way of acceding to the presence of the divine. Throughout all nations and ages one can observe the very significant role played by words such as Song, chant, cantatrice, enchant, charm, carmen, in appeals or relations to the absolute as one finds in magic or religion. Song, in many respects, stands at the limit of human comprehension of the absolute. In a musical composition one witnesses the transformation of a vibration that is imperceptible to human ears into a perceptible and intelligible harmony, full of meaning. The music created by man transforms the intangible into that which is tangible and places it into living communication with human sensibility. Song, in addition, employs a wholly human means to accomplish this transformation: the voice of man, or in the case of an animal, the voice of a living creature. If one considers ideal Song to consist in absolute harmony, objective and autonomous, then concrete Song can be looked upon as the means, the medium to communicate with the ideal, and the singer becomes the mediator between the human and the divine. Vis-à-vis the absolute harmony of Song, or his Poetry, the poet, like the singer, also assumes the aspect of a mediator and his Word, his "poetic note", becomes a means to arrive at or communicate with the divine. The commandment that Char gives the poet, therefore, is to sing of his thirst for the absolute: "Chante ta soif irisée" 9 (Sing your iridescent thirst). Song is the means by which he attempts to render "the diurnal possible", human reality, equal to "the forbidden possible", divine reality, or absolute Harmony. The task of poetic creation for Char thus consists first in recognizing two types of possible reality, the diurnal or phenomenal one, and the transcendental, forbidden divine one. The poet then must seek to render the first reality equal to the second through his creative act: he must place them on the "royal road of the fascinating impossible, the highest degree of the comprehensible"; that is, through his supreme act of poetic song the poet must connect the phenomenal with the divine, with absolute comprehensibility, and thereby seek to redeem or render meaningful the objects of the phenomenal world. As Char writes in Partage formel: Reconnaître deux sortes de possible: le possible diurne et le possible prohibé. Rendre, s'il se peut, le premier l'égal du second; les mettre sur la voie royale du fascinant impossible, degré le plus haut du compréhensible.10 (To recognize two sorts of possible: the diurnal possible and the forbidden possible. To render, if feasible, the first equal to the second; to put them on the royal road of the fascinating impossible, the highest degree of the comprehensible. )!1

149 The poet thus projects his energies toward that absolute vision which is at once darkness (or void) and light, and at the same time, in order to express this projection in a tangible and comprehensible form, he preserves the diurnal possible, the concrete, nature. As Char indicates: "The poet is the genesis of a being who projects and of a being who retains . . . " 1 2 But why must the poet retain the "diurnal possible", the concrete, one might ask? Why does Char feel such a pressing need to hold "desperately" to the cause of Nature, "the one who stops the mortal sands from spreading over the surface of our h e a r t . . ."? 1 3 One of the reasons for Char's emphasis on man's vital dependence on a relationship to Nature may be traced, paradoxically, to the poet's very desire to attain absolute reality. What the poet seeks to achieve is the pure reality which lies beyond the written words that point to it according to Char. As he affirms: "J'ai cherché dans mon encre ce qui ne pouvait être quêté: la tache pure au-delà de l'écriture souillée". 14 But that "pure spot beyond the soiled writing", the flower which in Mallarmé's terms is "l'absente de tous bouquets", for man and for the poet who despite his superhuman strivings is yet a man, as Char admits, is unattainable. If he does not wish to fall into the sterility of incomprehensibility, which is composed of the same substance as pure comprehensibility, the poet must go back on his tracks, curtail his extreme thrust toward the ideal and once more immerse himself in that which is humanly comprehensible, in the world of natural phenomena. Pure Song is not intelligible to man, and if the poet persists in his over-reaching desire to possess it, he risks losing himself in the void of total failure or in insanity. For pure Song, the absolute harmony barely intuited by the poet's soul, to be expressed at the level of human comprehension, in order that Poetry be accessible to man, the poet either needs the help of a miracle, or the mediation of nature, of the concrete poetic Word: En poésie, il est advenu qu'au moment de la fusion de ces contraires surgissait un impact sans origine définie dont l'action dissolvante et solitaire provoquait le glissement des abîmes qui portent de façon si antiphysique le poème. Il appartient au poète de couper court à ce danger en faisant intervenir soit un élément traditionnel à raison éprouvée, soit le feu d'une démiurgie si miraculeuse qu'elle annule le trajet de cause à effet. Le poète peut alors voir les contraires - ces mirages ponctuels et tumultueux - aboutir, leur lignée immanente se personnifier . . . 1 5 (In poetry it has come about that at the moment of the fusion of those opposites there arose an impact without a clearly defined origin, the dissolving and solitary action of which provoked the gliding of the abysses that bear the poem in such an anti-physical fashion. It rests with

150 the poet to thwart that danger by causing the intervention either of a traditional element that has undergone the test of reason, or the fire of a demiurgy so miraculous as to annul the path from cause to effect. The poet can then see the opposites - those punctual and tumultuous mirages - converge, their immanent progeny become personified . . .) If the "demiurgy" and the power of mediation of the poet consist in his intuition of those "punctual and tumultuous mirages" of absolute Harmony, in order to express that Harmony, the man must necessarily render it sensible so that he may understand and communicate it, or, at least, suggest it. As Char observes: La vitalité du poète n 'est pas une vitalité de l'au-delà mais un point diamanté actuel de présences transcendantes et d'orages pèlerins.16 (The vitality of the poet is nota vitality from the beyond, but a present point, set with diamonds, of transcendent presences and pilgrim storms.) The poet's task, therefore, becomes one of analogical paraphrase: it is the process of pure intuition that at the level of the human must manifest itself through the concrete poetic Word. If, however, that pure intuition of absolute reality must become concrete, must "personify" itself in order to be expressed in comprehensible terms, does its sensible translation preserve the ideal, which is pure? Is it possible to express absolute Harmony, as Char would say, at the "level of the nostrils", at the level of human perception? Doesn't the absolute disappear as soon as it becomes subject to the relativity of human time and understanding? We are here about to touch upon the third principal aspect of Song: the illusory reality which, like the contradictions at the center of the poetic Word, also arises from a negation. It is the result of the poet's tortured and eternally thwarted desire to attain ideal Song, to arrive at a vision of Poetry. Man's desire to move from "the heart of the tree to the ecstasy of the fruit" 1 7 is perhaps impossible to satisfy in the domain of the concrete. For Char, the beatific vision of the mystic remains, in the last analysis, incommunicable and incomprehensible to the human intellect. Char, it is true, envisages the poet as the "ferry-man" of a certain order or reality. It is an order, however, which has its foundations in the waters of flux, an order the constituent and limiting walls of which rest on the two shores that embrace those waters: the shore of the absolute and that of human finiteness. The order which the poet forms in passing from one shore to the other through his creative acts of connection and relationship does not have any stability, but is constantly "insurgent", "insurgé". The harmony of interrelationships that he creates becomes illusory in temporal reality:

151 Dans le tissu du poème doit se retrouver un nombre égal de tunnels dérobés, de chambres d'harmonie, en même temps que d'éléments futurs, de havres au soleil, de pistes captieuses et d'existants entr'appelant. Le poète est le passeur de tout cela qui forme un ordre. Et un ordre insurgé. 18 (In the tissue of the poem there must be found an equal number of secret tunnels, of chambers of harmony, together with future elements, harbors in the sun, captious trails, and existents calling each other. The poet is the ferryman of everything that forms an order. And an insurgent order.) If the end of the poem is "light", the pure harmony of the Absolute, that light also marks its "finitude". Why a pulverized poeml asks Char in La bibliothèque est en feu. The answer is: Parce qu 'au terme de son voyage vers le Pays, après l'obscurité prénatale et la dureté terrestre, la finitude du poème est lumière, apport de l'être à la vie.19 {Because at the end of its journey toward the Homeland, after the prenatal obscurity and the terrestrial harshness, the finitude of the poem is light, the contribution of being to life.) In order to arrive at ultimate reality, the poem must "pulverize itself", must destroy its organic and material unity so as to merge with the pure accord of Poetry. This pulverization, however, also implies its failure at the level of sensible human reality. If the poet aims for totality through his poem, if he tries to be the "preserver of the infinite faces of living", 20 his expressive act of conservation or eternalization of the "exhilarating alliance of opposites" at the level of the sensible is always menaced by the flux of that all-powerful Time which will give the final "sword's blow" to the "beloved Life". 2 1 Should the poet be able to perceive or create the Harmony of Song, that Harmony is nevertheless destined to give way to the mirage of its absence: Cette forteresse épanchant la liberté par toutes ses poternes, cette fourche de vapeur qui tient dans l'air un corps d'une envergure prométhéenne que la foudre illumine et évite, c'est le poème, aux caprices exorbitants, qui, dans l'instant, nous obtient puis s'efface,22 (That fortress pouring forth liberty from all its posterns, that fork of vapor which assumes in the air a body of promethean breadth which the thunderbolt illuminates and avoids, that is the poem, of exorbitant

152 caprices, which in the instant prevails upon us then effaces itself. ) The harmony achieved in the instant of poetic intuition and limited by that same instant, becomes illusory in the duration of human Time. According to Char, the fragility of the poetic creation is so great that even a speck of dust from temporal reality can destroy both the poem and the hand engaged in composing it: Une poussière qui tombe sur la main occupée à tracer le poème, les foudroie, poème et main. 2 3 (A speck of dust that falls on the hand engaged in sketching the poem, strikes them down, poem and hand.) It is this "lack of internal justice in the world", resulting from the dichotomy between the poetic aspiration toward the harmony of Song and the concrete reality of flux that destroys harmony, which creates the greatest source of suffering for the poet: Ce dont le poète souffre le plus dans ses rapports avec le monde, c'est du manque de justice interne. La vitre-cloaque de Caliban derrière laquelle les yeux tout-puissants et sensibles d'Ariel s'irritent,24 (That from which the poet suffers most in his relations with the world is lack of internal justice. The cesspool - window-pane of Caliban behind which the all-powerful and sensitive eyes of Ariel become irritated.) The diurnal reality of Caliban will always irritate the imaginative and spiritual eyes of Ariel that tend toward the harmony of Song, toward "the forbidden reality" of harmonious vision. Although the desire-appeal of the poet toward Poetry is direct and intuitive, his attempt to render the object of his striving comprehensible in the form of the concrete poem condemns it to the mediation of the concrete word, that is, to the limits of the temporal. Does the poetic creation, then, find itself inevitably reduced to a total failure before human contingency? If the poet must hold "desperately" to the cause of nature, of that which is humanly comprehensible, must he, nevertheless, "despair" as to the fulfillment of his aspirations? Is his poetic mission destined to total gratuity or to uselessness by his failure? If, finally, "the poet does not retain what he discovers; once transcribed, he loses it before long", 2 5 should he renounce his aspiration and abandon his attempt? For Char, the failure that inevitably awaits the poet at the end of his striving should not turn him away from his pursuit of Poetry or of Harmony.

153 If success is forbidden him, he must nonetheless preserve the possibility of revolt against that interdiction: Gardez-nous la révolte, l'éclair, l'accord illusoire, un rire pour le trophée glissé des mains, même l'entier et long fardeau qui succède, dont la difficulté nous mène à une révolte nouvelle. Gardez-nous la primevère et le destin. 26 (Preserve for us the revolt, the flash of lightning, the illusory concord, a laugh for the trophy that has slipped from one's hands, even the entire and long burden that follows, the difficulty of which leads us to a new revolt. Preserve for us the primrose and destiny.) If the accord of Song is illusory at the level of the phenomenal world, if only the empty mirage of a trophy that has slipped from one's hand remains, the poet must not passively resign himself to submit to that finitude which is an integral part of his human temporal condition. For Char, the weight itself of multiplicity and the impermanence of the temporal must lead the poet to a new revolt, must bring him to direct himself once more toward the pyramid of Song. Thus Madeleine, a figure representing the poetic object of the past and reflecting the memories of failure in that past, approaches the poet once again and urges him to reject his discouragement and to renew his revolt. Char steps back for an instant before his realization of the impossibility of the poetic task: Le souvenir de la quête des énigmes, au temps de ma découverte de la vie et de la poésie, me revient à l'esprit. Je le chasse, agacé. "Je ne suis pas tenté par l'impossible comme autrefois (je mens). J'ai trop vu souffrir . . . (quelle indécence!)". (The recollection of the quest of riddles, at the time of my discovery of life and of poetry, comes back to my mind. I drive it away, annoyed. "I am not tempted by the impossible as in the past (I lie). I have seen too much suffering . . . (what indecency!).) But Madeleine answers him: "Croire à nouveau ne fait pas qu'il y aura davantage de souffrance. Restez accueillant. Vous ne vous verrez pas mourir". Elle sourit. 27 ("To believe anew does not mean that there will be more suffering. Remain receptive. You will not see yourself die". She smiles.)

154 Even if there is nothing but illusion at the end of the accord or synthesis achieved by the poet, it is that illusion that he must renew, and make it become a new reality. One must perpetuate the revolt, and through the revolt, as Char indicates, "springtime and destiny". It is only by unending revolt, through the successive recreation of the poetic instants and a continual renewal of the illusory attunement, that one can attain liberty, that one is able to give some measure of eternity to that attunement, the only eternity possible for man. The road that the poet must travel is one of ceaseless struggle against the "contradictor" at the center of poetry, against the illusion or the dissolution of the ideal accord: Au centre de la poésie, un contradicteur t'attend. C'est ton souverain. Lutte loyalement contre lui. 2 8 (At the center of poetry, a contradictor awaits you. He is your sovereign. Fight loyally against him.) For Char, one must draw inspiration from the constructive pessimism of Heraclitus: Sa vue d'aigle solaire, sa sensibilité particulière l'avaient persuadé, une fois pour toutes, que la seule certitude que nous possédions de la réalité du lendemain, c'est le pessimisme, forme accomplie du secret où nous venons nous refraîchir, prendre garde et dormir. 2 9 (His vision like that of a solar eagle, his particular sensitivity had persuaded him, once and for all, that the only certitude that we possess of the reality of tomorrow, is pessimism, fulfilled form of the secret where we come to refresh ourselves, to take heed and sleep.) One must cling to the necessity for revolt in order to recreate the illusory accord and endow it with a dimension of truth. It is only then, Char advances, that the poet might be able to affirm: "poetry will rob me of my death". 3 0 The vital impulse toward the recreation of the illusory accord which we see in Char's poetry is not the product of an inspiration which limits itself to a purely aesthetic domain (if such a thing exists). It is a force which finds its raison d'être in a real, concrete object: man, at once the source of inspiration, destruction, and eternization of poetry: Il n'y a que mon semblable, la compagne ou le compagnon, qui puisse m'éveiller de ma torpeur, déclencher la poésie, me lancer contre les limites du vieux désert afin que j'en triomphe. Aucun autre. Ni deux, ni terre privilégiée, ni choses dont on tressaille. Torche, je ne valse qu 'avec lui.n

155 {There exists no one except my fellow-man, the comrade female or male, who can awaken me from my torpor, release the poetry, launch me against the limits of the old desert so that I may triumph over it. No one else. Neither skies, nor privileged earth, nor things that startle one. Torch, I only waltz with him.) Char's inspiration, in many ways similar to that of Camus, leads him to write poetry that is consciously engagée. Against evil, against the lack of agreement among men, against the "incompatibilities", against dogmas that sacrifice the reality of human suffering to an ideological god, Char erects the opposing ideal of harmony, balance, the order and justice that the poet will try to recreate : Certaines époques de la condition de l'homme subissent l'assaut glacé d'un mal qui prend appui sur les points les plus déshonorés de la nature humaine. Au centre de cet ouragan le poète complétera par le refus de soi le sens de son message, puis se joindra au parti de ceux qui, ayant ôté à la souffrance son masque de légitimité, assurent le retour éternel de l'entêté portefaix, passeur de justice.32 (Certain epochs of the condition of man undergo the chilling assault of an evil that takes its support on the most dishonored points of human nature. At the center of that hurricane the poet, by the refusal of himself, will complete the sense of his message, then will join with the party of those who, having taken away from suffering its mask of legitimacy, assure the eternal return of the persistent porter, the ferryman of justice.) Truth resides in the Harmony between the human and cosmic correspondences which inform Song and of which Poetry is composed, "poetry and truth, as we know, being synonymous". 3 3 It is a truth, however, which never becomes a dogma, which remains personal even in its universality. According to Char, "the damnation of the believer is for him to find his church, 3 4 and truth is something "personal, astonishing and personal". 35 There is no room for ideologies, either political or literary that might limit experience with their fixed intellectual categories. These can only lead to discord and party platforms, to the loss of communication among men. To paraphrase Char in a different context, ultimate meaning is only to be found through men, through participation in and revolt against their suffering, the "almost constant menace of annihilation which bears upon them . . ," 3 6 It is to be found through the sound of the poetic Song which rebels against the menace, an illusory and pathetic song, perhaps, yet one that is vitally real — a Song of suffering, and through suffering, of union and love.

156 The idea of Harmony, therefore, is a basic inspirational element in Char's poetry. In relation to the other poets of this study, we see that Char, like Dante, feels the powerful attraction of the transcendental. Unlike Dante, however, and like Shakespeare and Rimbaud, he cannot unequivocally adhere to a completely transcendental ideal, to the Platonic idea of Harmony as a resolution of opposites. In Char, as in Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Crane, the feeling for and the experience of the Heraclitean contraries in life is too strong. While a Platonic conception of harmony is posited as the ultimate ideal end of human striving in Char's poetry ("la pyramide du Chant", "la tache pure au delà de l'écriture souillée"), the poet is nonetheless always aware of overwhelming and fluctuating contraries which destroy the duration of this ideal in the phenomenal world. According to Char, the poet's task is to seek to build the "connections" between the human and the divine, between the phenomenal world and the eternal world of reconciled Reality. Char is acutely aware, however, that his efforts are destined to failure. As in Shakespeare the world of the masque and of Prospero's art was ultimately destined to vanish and to make way for the reality of social and contingent man, so in Char the world of absolute ideal Harmony is, in the last analysis, far removed from human reality. Yet, whereas Shakespeare turned away from the contemplation of what he considered to be the illusory world of the transcendent, René Char never really turns his back on that world. The "pyramid of Song" still remains an inspiring ideal which the poet unceasingly strives to attain through his poetic act of inter-connection and relation, of "ferrying" between the world of phenomena and the world of the absolute and ideal. Shakespeare sought to recreate harmony on a human level, in the world of Milan, rather than in the artificial world of Prospero's Art. Char, on the other hand, never abandons his striving toward the divine world of the "pyramid of Song". Rimbaud perhaps may more justly compare to Shakespeare in this respect than Char. Although Shakespeare and Rimbaud are in many ways different, they both share the belief that human harmony must ultimately be achieved in totally human terms and in a totally human and social context. For Shakespeare this was the context of Naples and Milan, of the human and social family. For Rimbaud it became the context of the normal human world of travel and adventure, of Africa and his coffee and gun trade. In the case of Rimbaud, however, this context was never fully defined and this was one of the causes of the basic restlessness and feeling of non-fulfillment which characterized his later life. Char's focus, instead, remains on the ideal. Working within a fundamentally Heraclitean framework of reality, Whitman accepted the opposites in life and pronounced them good and necessary to cosmic procession. Char, on the contrary, has a deep aversion to the opposites in human life, to the forces that for him cause discord and division. In his view the opposites are and remain negative entities, and Char insists on the necessity for man and the

157 poet t o engage in a perpetual revolt against them, to attempt to reconcile and thus redeem those forces through their continued efforts. While Rimbaud with his loss of faith in the success of the poetic mission also lost faith in poetry itself, Char instead drew his affirmation from the recognition of human and poetic failure. He does not wish to renounce Poetry and embrace solely the "wrinkled reality" o f human existence as Rimbaud, but still has faith in the poet's ability to s o m e h o w transform that reality through the plurivalent poetic Word. If failure attends the poet, Char points to the saving possibility o f unending revolt, and through revolt, to the perception of a new harmonious vision o f Song, a vision continuously lost and perpetually regained in the act o f poetic creation: A chaque

effondrement

des preuves

le poète

répond

par une

salve

d'avenir?1 (At each collapse

of proofs

the poet answers

with a salvo of

futurity.)

NOTES

The abbreviations for the collections of Char's works referred to are as follows: R.B.S. : Recherche de la base et du sommet (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). P.P.C. : Poèmes et prose choisis (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). T.C.A. : Trois coups sous les arbres (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). C.P. : Commune présence (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). The prose translations of Char's works are my own. 1. Chai, Impressions anciennes, in R.B.S., pp. 115-16. 2. Char, Fête des arbres et du chasseur, P.P.C., p. 115. 3. Char, A une sérénité crispée, R.B.S., p. 133. 4. Char, Partage formel, XII, P.P.C., p. 201. 5. Partage formel, XVII, P.P.C., p. 202. 6. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), esp. pp. 141-62, on which, however, I would have some reservations. 7. A une sérénité crispée, R.B.S., p. 133. 8. Lettre à Henri Peyre, R.B.S., pp. 39-40. 9. Feuillets d'Hypnos, P.P.C., p. 48 10. Partage formel, XLVII, P.P.C., p. 209. 11. The "royal road" envisioned by Char reminds one of Hart Crane's verses toward the end of The Bridge in which he celebrates a similar royal "path": Through the bound cable strands, the arching path Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings, -

158 Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate The whispered rush, telepathy of wires. Up the index of night, granite and steel Transparent meshes - fleckless the gleaming staves Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream As though a god were issue of the strings. . . The "arching path" is also another connective road to Char's "fascinating impossible" which, however, for Crane in The Bridge at least, is viewed as quite possible, the product of conscious poetic effort: So to thine Everpresence, beyond time, Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star That bleeds infinity - the orphie strings, Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge: - One Song, one Bridge of Fire! . . . . "Atlantis", The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966), pp. 114, 117. 12. "Le poète est la genèse d'un être qui projette et d'un être qui retient", Partage formel, XLV, P.P.C., p. 209. 13. Arthur Rimbaud, R.B.S., p. 102. 14. A une sérénité crispée, R.B.S., p. 133. 15. Partage formel, XVII, P.P.C., p. 202. 16. Partage formel, XXXVI, P.P.C., p. 207. 17. A la santé du serpent, XVIII, P.P.C., p. 82. 18. A une sérénité crispée, R.B.S., pp. 133-34. 19. La bibliothèque est en feu, P.P.C., p. 255. 20. Feuillets d'Hypnos, P.P.C., p. 39. 21. Heureuse la magie, R.B.S., p. 32. 22. Partage formel, LU, P.P.C., p. 210. 23. Le risque et le pendule, P.P.C., p. 188. 24. Partage formel, II, P.P.C., p. 199. 25. "Le poète ne retient pas ce qu'il découvre; l'ayant transcrit le perd bientôt", La bibliothèque est en feu, P.P.C., p. 255. 26. Prière rogue, R.B.S., p. 19. 27. Madeleine qui veillait, R.B.S., p. 42. 28. A une sérénité crispée, R.B.S., p. 127. 29. Héraclite d'Ephèse, R.B.S., p. 91. 30. La bibliothèque est en feu, P.P.C., p. 254. 31. La bibliothèque est en feu, P.P.C., p. 254. 32. Partage formel, LI, P.P.C., p. 210. 33. ". . . poésie et vérité, comme nous savons, étant synonymes", Partage formel, XVII, P.P.C., p. 202. 34. "La perte du croyant, c'est de rencontrer son église", A une sérénité crispée, R.B.S., p. 129. 35. Lettre à Henri Peyre, R.B.S., p. 40. 36. Trois coups sous les arbres, p. 214. 37. Partage formel, P.P.C., p. 210.

VII HART CRANE: THE

BRIDGE

The quest for Harmony is a major inspirational theme in Hart Crane's work. Crane's search leads him into the realm of myth and nature — a nature conceived of in terms of the regenerative and fulfilling principle of feminine creativity and fertility. This feminine principle for Crane is both the way toward vision and the embodiment of vision itself, whether it appear in the form of Helen, Pocahontas, or in the feminine presence evoked in "The Broken Tower". In relating the attainment of Harmony and vision to a feminine figure, Crane's thought presents many similarities to Dantean thought. Pocahontas in The Bridge, though once again a historical figure, like Beatrice becomes a spiritual trans-historical or "mythical" ideal. Like Beatrice, she renews the poet's life beyond time and contingency. At the same time, like Beatrice, she stands for the principle of death-in-life. For just as the Prince must die in order to find a new birth in Pocahontas, so Dante must symbolically die vis-à-vis his former finite self at the hands of Mathelda before he can join Beatrice on the other side of the Lethé and Eunoe. For Dante the impetus toward vision was given by the fragmentation brought into his own life through political upheavals and misfortunes. For Crane, the impetus was afforded by an analogous threat of fragmentation, caused this time by the spectre of alienation and spiritual meaninglessness created by technology. In the case of both poets, the search for wholeness and harmony was transferred to the fulfillment to be found through woman — both eternal creative mother and celestial bride. This search, however, and the fulfillment to be found at its resolution takes on a slightly different aspect for Crane. Dante was basically concerned with the possibility of surpassing human reality and attaining a state of complete reconciliation of opposites on a highly transcendental and mystical plane. Crane, instead, was not so much concerned with the problem of surpassing finite human reality as with the task of reintegrating a reality fragmented by technological and scientific advance into a context that would give it renewed spiritual meaning and validity. Pocahontas, therefore, does not recede into the distance of transcendental mystical vision and unity, like Beatrice, but remains in the strong and fertile earth of a past that was once whole and meaningful, a past that must

160 again be made present. In other words, although, as we shall see, the tendency toward transcendental projection is present in Crane's work, ultimately he is not concerned with surpassing or completely reconciling the contraries inherent in life, for this would freeze and kill life itself. His poetic energies are directed, rather, toward the reintegration of the fragmented and spiritually empty world of technology into the mythic and cyclical self-renewing world of nature. The task of the poet for Crane consists in the integration of experience: "The poet's concern must be, as always, self-discipline toward a formal integration of experience. For poetry is an architectural art, based not on Evolution or the idea of progress, but on the articulation of the contemporary human consciousness sub specie aeternitatis, and inclusive of all readjustments incident to science and other shifting factors related to that consciousness". 1 The contemporary function of poetry according to Crane is to absorb technological civilization and thereby transform it into material for meaningful vision: For unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function. This process does not infer any program of lyrical pandering to the taste of those obsessed by the importance of machinery . . . I mean to say that mere romantic speculation on the power and beauty of machinery keeps it at a continual remove; it cannot act creatively in our lives until, like the unconscious nervous responses of our bodies, its connotations emanate from within — forming as spontaneous a terminology ofpoeticreferenceas the bucolic world of pasture,plow and barn.2 Thus, a bridge that Crane himself points out, "as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism, and toothpicks", 3 through the act of poetic integration and connection, becomes a link to a past of vision. Thus also can a street car, with its "jerky window frame", carry Helen, the symbol of absolute beauty: And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall, — lost yet poised in traffic. Then I might find your eyes across an aisle, Still flickering with those préfigurations — Prodigal, yet uncontested now, Half-riant before the jerky window frame. 4 or an empty ash can in a lonely alley may be transformed into a "grail of laughter" as in "Chaplinesque":

161 but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.5 The quest for harmony — a harmony to be understood as consisting in a state of revitalized human consciousness through reintegration in mythical reality — is present in all of Crane's poetic endeavours. While in his earlier collection, White Buildings, it appears as a recurring theme, in Crane's major poetic creation, The Bridge, the quest for harmony is the central subject of the work and provides the structural scaffolding for the full expression of his thought on the "myth-seeking" task of the poet. In our discussion of the role of the concept of harmony in Crane's thought, we will focus our attention on this latter work. As Crane himself indicates in a letter to Otto Kahn (September 12,1927), with The Bridge he is really attempting to write "an epic of the modern consciousness".6 The Bridge itself is the symbol of connection of certain "chains of the past to certain chains and tendencies of the future". 7 In this epic Crane is seeking to portray the "Myth of America", 8 in which the experience of technological society is reassimilated into the mythical and regenerative experience and time of the past. The Bridge is thus carefully structured to lead the reader back to the experience of Pocahontas, the mythological nature principle who for Crane represents "the physical body of the continent, or the soil". 9 His aim is in one sense to mythologize the present, to give it new validity by making it relive within the context of the spiritual richness of the past: "What I am after is an assimilation of this experience, a more organic panorama, showing the continuous and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance of the present". 10 In another vaster sense, his poetic efforts of building relationships and the integration of experience point to an essentially religious element in his artistic creation. "Poetry", Crane wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson in 1926, " . . . may well give you the real connective experience, the very 'sign manifest' on which rests the assumption of a godhead". 11 This "real connective experience" is religious in the sense that it indicates the way to wholeness and unity which is the essence of godhead, something which all great art in some measure expresses. The Italian critic and political theorist Giovanni Gentile, for example, would argue that because it points to a "total reality" or to the connection of manifold experiences in the form of a unitary truth, all art is religious in nature. 12 Although denying any messianic predisposition, Crane himself acknowledges the religious motif in his work: " . . . I have never consciously approached any subject in a religious mood; it is only afterward that I, or someone else generally, have noticed a prevalent piety". 13 The Bridge, in its attempt to reintegrate a

162 spiritually debased and discontinuous reality into a meaningful spiritual continuum, evidences a quest, therefore, which is basically religious in nature. As Professor R.W.B. Lewis has indicated in his fine study on Hart Crane's poetry: The Bridge is, in short, a poem fully cognizant of the enormous cultural event known as the death of God; and it seeks with all its energy to discover and disclose the real nature of that death, finding it not simply in the waning power of Christianity but in the loss of the religious consciousness itself. But The Bridge is unique in being the only large-scale work of literature in its generation which, in the light of that event, is finally concerned not with the death of God but with the birth of God. 1 4 It might be of use here to digress briefly and look at the meaning of this concern with the "birth of God" as it relates to Crane's desire to recapture the mythic experience of reality. The nature of the mythic mentality and outlook sought by Crane is fundamentally that possessed by archaic and primitive man. In archaic or primitive societies, man looks upon his actions as being real or meaningful only insofar as they participate in the archetypal patterns of the superior reality of the divine seen to be diffused throughout creation. That is, human actions possess meaning to the extent that they are viewed as being patterned on the cosmic processes of death and renewal, existence within and ultimate reabsorption into the cosmic processes. 15 In the instance of such a mythical outlook, it is only when man ceases to see himself as an individual as against a collective being — that is, alienated from the superior reality of the cosmic process — that his actions cease to have meaning and purposefulness. To take ancient Mesopotamia as an example, such a process of alienation may be seen to occur in the epic Gilgamesh with the hero's forelorn realization of the meaning of historicity and his attempt to reintegrate himself into significant existence through another system of meaning — that afforded by the possession of the plant of eternal life. Gilgamesh is a man who, in the midst of cyclical collectivity and integration in the cosmos, discovers his historicity through a sudden realization of the historical meaning of death. His attempt to reintegrate himself into meaningful existence through his desperate search for earthly eternity presents one example of the need in man to conquer time by integration into some form of "timeless" or mythic existence. In Crane such integration occurs through the time-bridging power of poetic creation: The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves; A wind abides the ensign of your will. . . In alternating bells have you not heard All hours clapped dense into a single stride?

163 Forgive me for an echo of these things, And let us walk through time with equal pride. ("Recitative", pp. 25-26) Vision for the man who partakes of the mythic mentality is hence not contemplated in terms of transcendence of the concrete material world. Archaic or primitive man does not seek to see that which lies above and beyond earthly existence but rather to discover those vital life forces which lie hidden within the inner recesses of that existence. As H. and H.A. Frankfort have pointed out in one of their studies on mythopoeic thought: The mainspring of the acts, thoughts, and feelings of early man was the conviction that the divine was immanent in nature, and nature intimately connected with society . . . [The logic of mythopoeic thought], its peculiar structure, was seen to derive from an unceasing awareness of a live relationship between man and the phenomenal world. In the significant moments of his life, early man was confronted not by an inanimate, impersonal nature — not by an "It" — but by a "Thou" . . . Such a relationship involved not only man's intellect but the whole of his being — his feeling and his will, no less than his thought. 16 Archaic man is not concerned with attaining knowledge of a completely transcendent ideal, but rather with belief in a cosmic synthesis of which he is a part and on which his actions are modeled and obtain their meaning and superior significance. Vision here must be understood as entailing synthesis and comprehension within the cosmic cycle. Although it is perhaps impossible for a logically emancipated modern man to find total reintegration within the context of mythopoeic thought, we shall see that the attainment of some measure of reintegration constitutes the goal of Crane's quest. The Bridge is fundamentally concerned with developing the perception of archaic reality, one in which nature and all "objects" assume the aspect of a meaningful "Thou" rather than a mechanized "It". In examining The Bridge, we will concentrate in particular on a central moment of the work entitled "The Dance", in which the apocalyptic revelation and reintegration in a mythical nature reality occurs. In our discussion, we will not attempt to give a complete analysis of the complex symbolical structure and imagery at work in Crane's poetic creation. We will focus our attention, instead, on the basic inspirational element of his thought — his driving concern for the redemption of technological society through reintegration in a spiritually fulfilling mythic reality. The "Proem" of The Bridge entitled "To Brooklyn Bridge" reveals in essence the nature and scope of the poetic quest. It begins with a presentation of the possibility of vision alternating afterwards with the spiritually empty

164 images of technological society. The possibility of vision appears at dawn, the beginning of a new day, with the circling image of a seagull which dips and pivots through the morning air: How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty — ("To Brooklyn Bridge", p. 45) The spiritual freedom represented in the gull ranges toward new heights above the "chained", constrained technological life of the bay. The rings formed by the circling gulls metamorphose themselves into "White rings of tumult", expressing the new possibility of vision. The circle and its smallest part, the point, have long indicated divinity or cosmic eternalness. From the circle in ancient mandala symbolism to the spiritual circularity of the opening of the Gospel according to St. John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", the circle has always stood for totality and divinity. Dante in the Paradiso envisions the Trinity in terms of three circles: Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza dell'alto lume parvermi tre giri di tre colori e d'una contenenza; e l'un dall'altro come iri da iri parea riflesso, e '1 terzo parea foco che quinci e quindi igualmente si spin. (Par., XXXIII, 115-20) (In the profound and shining being of the deep light appeared to me three circles, of three colours and one magnitude; one by the second as Iris by Iris seemed reflected, and the third seemed a fire breathed equally from one and from the other.) The ancient hermetic saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus is recurrent throughout Western thought: "Deus est circulus cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia vero nusquam". 1 7 (God is a circle whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.) Emerson touches upon this symbol of divinity in his essay Circles, and Crane, we shall see, will express fulfilled unity with the divine in the ecstatic circular vision of "The Dance". 1 8 The vision alluded to in the circling motion of the gulls, however, soon disappears before the impact of the spiritually dehumanized technological world. The imagery of vision ("sails", "curves") gives way to the techno-

165 logical atmosphere of "pages of figures to be filed away", and of "elevators", symbolic of mechanized human activity: Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; — Till elevators drop us from our day . . . (p. 45) One is reminded of the same world of "stenographic smiles" and the stock market reality described in "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen": The mind has shown itself at times Too much the baked and labeled dough Divided by accepted multitudes. Across the stacked partitions of the day — Across the memoranda, baseball scores, The stenographic smiles and stock quotations Smutty wings flash out equivocations. (I, p. 27) Then high beyond the memoranda, baseball scores, or elevators, beyond the multitude that sees only the "flashing scenes" and panoramic deceptions created by a mechanized culture, there appears the symbol of the way toward vision — Brooklyn Bridge: And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced As though the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride, — Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! (p. 45) The Bridge here through the act of poetic transfiguration is presented as a "Thee" rather than an "It". It is both symbolic of the way toward mythical reintegration and at the same time stands as an example of the mythically integrated and humanized view of the world and all that is in it. Its relation to the poet is not that of a spiritually empty road to "shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism, and toothpicks", but it instead represents the spiritually rich world of humanized "presences", of Myth. In this stanza the bridge, its silver sheen reflecting the sun's rays, becomes identified through the act of poetic imagination with the rising sun, and, at the same time, is transformed into the new source of new energy: "As though the sun took step of thee, yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride".

166 As against the suicidal "bedlamite", who, emerging from the despairing depths of the mechanized world, does not recognize the life-renewing potential in a mythopoeic apprehension of reality and throws himself off the heights of the bridge, Crane presents a poetically and mythically transfigured view of reality. The bridge, instead of being the symbol of a technological road to death becomes the divinely reintegrated way to spiritual fulfillment and harmony: O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry, — Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path - condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. (p. 46) The imagery of music, religion, love, and unity ("harp and altar", "beading", "lover's cry", "unfractioned idiom") transform the steel cables of the bridge into "choiring strings" and the bridge itself into a means to "condense eternity", to lead man into the realm of myth where he will witness the rebirth of a new God: 0 Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God. (p. 46) This new God, however, will no longer be the Christian divinity, the creation of a linear and historical vision. Rather, it will be the pantheistic divinity of a cyclical and mythical apprehension of reality. The birth of a new God, or the attainment of a state of new poetically reintegrated spiritual reality and harmony occurs in the poem "The Dance", in the second section of The Bridge called "Powhatan's Daughter". Crane himself has described some of his intentions in this part of the work in a letter to Otto Kahn. He gives the following account of his thought and method of construction: Powhatan's daughter, or Pocahontas, is the mythological nature symbol chosen to represent the physical body of the continent, or the soil. She

167 here takes on much the same role as the traditional Hertha of ancient Teutonic mythology. The five subsections of Part II are mainly concerned with a gradual exploration of this "body" whose first possessor was the Indian. It seemed altogether ineffective from the poetic standpoint to approach this material from the purely chronological angle — beginning with, say, the landing of "The Mayflower", continuing with a résumé of the Revolution through the conquest of the West, etc. One can get that viewpoint in any history primer. What I am after is an assimilation of this experience . . . Consequently I jump from the monologue of Columbus in "Ave Maria" — right across the four intervening centuries — into the harbor of 20th-century Manhattan. And from that point in time and place I begin to work backward through the pioneer period, always in terms of the present - finally to the very core of the nature-world of the Indian. What I am really handling, you see, is the Myth of America.19 "Powhatan's Daughter" contains five poems — "The Harbor Dawn", "Van Winkle", "The River", 'The Dance", and "Indiana" — which, after the presentation of the spiritual quest for Cathay (a new reintegrated attitude of spirit) through the figure of Columbus in "Ave Maria" (Part I of The Bridge), take the reader back in time and space toward the "waking west" of the virgin earth. Across time with "Van Winkle" and space with the 20th Century Limited, the poet leads us down the river of the past toward a new spiritual revelation: The River lifts itself from its long bed, Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow Tortured with history, its one will — flow! — The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked and slow, Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below. (II, "The River", p. 69) The journey back in time is also a journey back toward a childlike apprehension of reality. This journey takes us to the purer perception of the three hobos in "The River", "hopping the slow freight/ — Memphis to Tallahassee". The hobos are immersed in the reality of the land across which they wander: Yet they touch something like a key perhaps. From pole to pole across the hills, the states — They know a body under the wide rain; Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates With racetrack jargon, — dotting immensity

168 They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west. — As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too. (II, P- 66) Like Columbus, also the hobos are stages closer toward a pristine reintegration into the mythic which Crane symbolizes through the figure of the Indian, "redskinned dynasties that fled the brain". These "redskinned dynasties" are represented in the figure of the Indian Prince, Maquokeeta, also symbolic of the poet, who, in "The Dance", attains apocalyptic union with Pocahontas. "The Dance" opens with the presentation of Pocahontas, mythical earth goddess, who in her cyclical and eternal changes embraces life and death: 2 0 The swift red flesh, a winter king — Who squired the glacier woman down the sky? She ran the neighing canyons all the spring; She spouted arms; she rose with maize — to die. And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands With mineral wariness found out the stone Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands? He holds the twilight's dim, perpetual throne. Mythical brows we saw retiring - loth, Disturbed and destined, into denser green. Greeting they sped us, on the arrow's oath: Now lie incorrigibly what years between . . . (II, "The Dance", p. 70) The integration of imagery here is designed to convey the integration of experience that informs a mythic apprehension of reality: "the swift red flesh" of the Indian, "a winter king"; the "glacier woman" — Pocahontas, the frozen land of winter that melts into the torrents running through canyons in the spring. In mythological symbolism, water is generally a symbol of fertility. This fertility is represented in the verses through the mythically animated terms of the melting winter ice "running" across "neighing canyons" — an image that conveys the energy and power of running horses metamorphosed into the regenerative power of nature in the spring. The fertilized earth thus "spouted arms", and "rose with maize — to die". Besides the factual allusion to the cyclical processes of nature, there is here, as throughout "The Dance", a reference to the contents of Indian mythology. Maize is the Indian corn — in Indian folklore a god or goddess that may be eaten and gives nourishment

169 and life (parallels may be drawn to the significance of the Eucharist in Christian symbolism). 21 Since in Indian thought maize may appear either as a female or as a male divinity, if considered in terms of a female goddess, it can be symbolical of the mysterious divine creative powers of Mother Earth (envisioned under the form of the beloved, Pocahontas). If looked upon as a male element, maize might in addition represent the Prince, who is thus at the very outset of the poem associated with Pocahontas in the mythical redemptive processes of death and renewal. And like his beloved mother-bride, he also must die in order for a new rebirth to occur. For the Indian Prince, Maquokeeta, the sacrificial groom, rebirth will take place through a vision and act of love — the creative love-union with Pocahontas: There was a bed of leaves, and broken play; There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride — 0 Princess whose brown lap was virgin May; And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride. (II, p. 70) In the next stanzas of the poem, Crane describes the final part of the Prince's journey toward the heart of vision, a vision in which both the Prince and the poet will reintegrate themselves into the nature world. These verses describing the world of Pocahontas are perhaps the most beautiful in the poem: 1 left the village for the dogwood. By the canoe Tugging below the mill-race, I could see Your hair's keen crescent running, and the blue First moth of evening take wing stealthily. What laughing chains the water wove and threw! I learned to catch the trout's moon whisper: I Drifted how many hours I never knew, But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die, — And one star, swinging, take its place, alone, Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass — Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn. I left my sleek boat nibbling margin grass.. . (II, pp. 70-72) The apocalypse itself is presented within the context of storm and dance. The verses evidence a great condensation and integration of imagery which reflects the spiritual integration and renewal that is taking place. All of the symbols

170 of regeneration are present — from death to the sacred oak grove, from the image of the circle (the dance with the sacred oak grove reflected in the sky) to the images of the snake and the eagle, the animals also of Zarathustra and symbolic of the eternal renewal of time and space. 22 The circles of the oak grove and of the dance represent the fulfillment of the imagery of vision that appeared in the form of the circling gulls of the "Proem" and of the tempestuous heavens ("This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring") revolving about Columbus in "Ave Maria": A distant cloud, a thunder-bud — it grew, That blanket of the skies: the padded foot Within, — I heard it; 'til its rhythm drew, — Siphoned the black pool from the heart's hot root! A cyclone threshes in the turbine crest, Swooping in eagle feathers down your back; Know, Maquokeeta, greeting; know death's best; — Fall, Sachem, strictly as the tamarack! A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly. The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves; The long moan of a dance is in the sky. Dance, Maquokeeta: Pocahontas g r i e v e s . . . And every tendon scurries toward the twangs Of lightning deltaed down your saber hair. Now snaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air . . . Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before, That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout, horn! Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore — Lie to us, — dance us back the tribal morn! (II, pp. 72-73) This is the paradigmatic revelation of a new vision, the reintegration of alienated consciousness into the totality of a new "tribal morn", or rather, a prayer that such a reintegration will take place. An intangible sense of impermanence and illusion, however, is introduced through Crane's use of the word "lie". A lie creates an illusion of reality, an illusion such as the one portrayed in the masque episode of The Tempest by Prospero. Yet there is more faith in that illusion in Crane than in Shakespeare. The dream-quest in Crane does not come to an abrupt end like the vision in The Tempest. There is,

171 perhaps, in The Bridge a greater will to believe in that illusion, to give it a chance to become reality. As against Shakespeare, who envisioned the problem of reintegration in more strictly social terms and placed its resolution within the sphere of the social responsibility of all men, Crane instead sees such reintegration to be the responsibility of the poet and his powers of mediation. Therefore, the poem does not end with the vision of reintegration but continues. The poet himself becomes identified with the sacrificial death of the Prince: Spears and assemblies: black drums thrusting on — 0 yelling battlements, — I, too, was liege To rainbows currying each pulsant bone: Surpassed the circumstance, danced out the siege! And buzzard-circleted, screamed from the stake; 1 could not pick the arrows from my side. Wrapped in that fire, I saw more escorts wake — Flickering, sprint up the hill groins like a tide. (II, P- 73) He becomes so immersed in the sacrificial love-death union of Maquokeeta with Pocahontas that he is able to feel the arrows in his side, and the buzzards (indicating the death phase of the sacrifice), circling overhead. Through this empathetic union with the Indian and nature world he also witnesses the metamorphosis of Maquokeeta — the metamorphosis of time into eternity: 0 like the lizard in the furious noon, That drops his legs and colors in the sun, — And laughs, pure serpent, Time itself, and moon Of his own fate, I saw thy change begun! And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny Like one white meteor, sacrosanct and blent At last with all that's consummate and free There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent. (II, P. 74) After the mythic sacrifice, the newly fertilized landscape gives rise to birth and renewal as Pocahontas' "speechless dream of snow" (recalling the snow that "submerges an iron year" in the "Proem", or the snow of the "glacier woman" at the beginning of "The Dance") thaws into the "torrent and the singing tree" of a new spring and of the new virgin earth:

172 Thewed of the levin, thunder shod and lean, Lo, through what infinite seasons dost thou gaze — Across what bivouacs of thine angered slain, And see'st thy bride immortal in the maize! Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid Though other calendars now stack the sky, Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince, and hid On paths thou knewest best to claim her by. High unto Labrador the sun strikes free Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again, She is the torrent and the singing tree; And she is the virgin to the last of men . . . (II, P- 74) The fulfillment attained in terms of the birth of new consciousness within the context of a new integrated wholeness of the self is expressed through the idea of the eternally renewed virginity of Pocahontas. As Carl Jung has observed with regard to the virgin conception: . . . psychologically it tells us that a content of the unconscious ("child") has come into existence without the natural help of a human father (i.e. consciousness) . . . It tells us, on the contrary, that some god has begotten the son and further that the son is identical with the father, which in psychological language means that a central archetype, the God-image, has renewed itself (been reborn) and become "incarnate" in a way perceptible to consciousness. The "mother" corresponds to the "virgin anima", who is not turned toward the outer world and is therefore not corrupted by it. She is turned rather towards the "inner sun", the archetype of transcendent wholeness - the self. 23 The new reintegrated wholeness of the alienated self of the poet is portrayed in the last stanza of "The Dance". Crane no longer speaks in terms of himself or of Maquokeeta individually ("I" or "Thou") but he speaks rather in the collective and integrative terms of "we": We danced, 0 Brave, we danced beyond their farms, In cobalt desert closures made our v o w s . . . Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms, The serpent with the eagle in the boughs. (II, p. 75)

173 The serpent of time and the eagle of space have become assimilated into the dance of mythic wholeness of the Indian nature world. The "cobalt desert closures" of modern civilization in the eyes of the poet have been absorbed into the mythic arms of eternal renewal and spiritual fulfillment. The opposites have been reunited in the cyclical creativity of Pocahontas. The former meaninglessness of a mechanized technological world has for the poet, at least, assumed new significance within the context of the creative virginity of the mythic past. Yet, the possibility that the vision attained will remain a "lie" still remains. Therefore, while the poet's quest up to now was the attainment of creative vision through mythical unity with a spiritually meaningful past, to fulfill the quest he must seek to relate that past to the technological present and attempt to strengthen the imaginative bridge between the two. This is, essentially, what Crane tries to do throughout the rest of The Bridge. The journey back toward the 20th century begins in the context of the pioneer world of "Indiana", continues on through "Cutty Sark", "Cape Hatteras", "Three Songs", "Quaker Hill", "The Tunnel", and terminates with "Atlantis". In the course of this journey back the poet emerges as the guarantor of the continuity of vision. Before going on to the conclusion of The Bridge, "Atlantis", we will briefly look at "Cape Hatteras" where the poet's mission is resumed and sublimated through the figure of Walt Whitman. In "Cape Hatteras", Crane reiterates the themes of technological hell and redemptive mythic and poetic vision. This time, however, these themes are vividly set against the background of the destructive potential of machinery seen in the death-without-renewal situation of modern warfare. Man, in his insensate drive for power, Crane indicates, has given himself totally over to the vertical and linear projection of the eagle, neglecting the circular ground of eternal renewal symbolized in the snake. He has sought to subjugate rather than to "conjugate" infinity. Yet the circle, that "blind crucible of endless space", can never be subjugated, and in his relentless lust for conquest man has brought on his own physical and spiritual destruction: But that star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sluiced by motion, — subjugated never. Adam and Adam's answer in the forest Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool. Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule Of wings imperious. . . Space, instantaneous, Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile: A flash over the horizon — shifting gears And we have laughter, or more sudden tears. Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact

174 From which we wake into the dream of act; Seeing himself an atom in a shroud — Man hears himself an engine in a cloud! (IV, "Cape Hatteras", p. 89) Man's unbalanced drive to subjugate eternity by the conquest of space at the expense of time, to reject the past for the present and the future, has led him to the presumption alluded to in the last Popean lines of the verses just quoted. The spiritually renewing sacrificial circles of the dance of Maquokeeta in "The Dance" here become the infernal and parodic "oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy" of the machine and the "marauding circles" of instruments of war, "bludgeon flail/ Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us/ Wounds that we wrap with theorems sharp as hail!" The result is the infernal dance of total death ending in the "mashed and shapeless debris" of a plane that has been shot down: But first, here at this height receive The benediction of the shell's deep, sure reprieve! Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink Now eagle-bright, now quarry-hid, twisting, sink with Enormous repercussive list-ings down Giddily spiralled gauntlets, upturned, unlooping In guerilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyring, dance the curdled depth down whizzing Zodiacs, dashed (now nearing fast the Cape!) down gravitation's vortex into crashed . . . dispersion . . . into mashed and shapeless d e b r i s . . . By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery! (IV, pp. 92-93) As against this destructive machine-oriented striving of man, Crane sets the vision-seeking figure of Walt Whitman. For Crane, Whitman is the paradigmatic figure of the poet whose life-giving song of poetic integration can build the bridge which forms the way toward the redemptive mythic reality portrayed in "The Dance":

175 Panis Angelicusl Eyes tranquil with the blaze Of love's own diametric gaze, of love's amaze! Not greatest, thou, — not first, nor last, — but near And onward yielding past my utmost year. Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel; And it was thou who on the boldest heel Stood up and flung the span on even wing Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing! Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice, New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt — Thou, Vedic Caesar, to the greensward knelt! (IV, pp. 94-95) Whitman aimed at the integration of human consciousness on every level of human reality. For Crane, he is the poet, the Vedic Caesar uniting East and West, or the totality of human reality through the medium of his bridgebuilding vision. His poetic vision transforms the infernal, death-bearing machines of technological civilization into "engines outward veering with seraphic grace", which can indeed become the vehicles "to course that span of consciousness thou'st named/ The Open Road". It is the Whitmanean poet who can lead man back to a redeemed civilization of the once happy Atlantis. In "Atlantis" Crane depicts the apocalyptic metamorphosis of history and of the technological society of the machine into the eternal vision of a reintegrated state beyond time: From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums, Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare — Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest Of deepest day — 0 Choir, translating time Into what multitudinous Verb the suns And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast in myriad syllables, - Psalm of Cathay! 0 Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm . . . ! (VIII, "Atlantis", p. 115) "Atlantis" is essentially a hymn to harmony attained. The image of the Bridge is metamorphosed into the image of a harp, Choir, and finally Song. A god of spiritual renewal is the product of its integrative music: Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

176 Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings, — Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate The whispered rush, telepathy of wires. Up the index of night, granite and steel — Transparent meshes — fleckless the gleaming staves — Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream As though a god were issue of the strings . . . (VIII, p. 114) Yet, despite the all-embracing and regenerative power of the Bridge and of the Poem itself, the "lie" alluded to in "The Dance" haunts the affirmation of the final verses, and ultimately leads to a question rather than to an affirmation: So to thine Everpresence, beyond time, Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star That bleeds infinity — the orphic strings, Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge: — One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay, Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring The serpent with the eagle in the leaves.. . ? Whispers antiphonal in azure swing. (VIII, p. 117) While a convergence of consciousness can occur through the mediational power of the poetic bridge, the durational reality of the reintegrated consciousness remains problematical. The union of the opposites represented by the serpent and the eagle leads to a question mark rather than to an affirmation. In what is perhaps his last poetic achievement, "The Broken Tower", Crane confesses the ultimately ephemeral and unpredictable durational reality of the poet's achievement. "The Broken Tower" is an appropriate poem with which to close this study as it dramatizes not only the "endless jar" of those eternally opposed Heraclitean centrifugal forces that inhere in the attainment of any earthly-based harmony and perpetually endanger its duration, but also reflects the tension between the Platonic and the Heraclitean modes of vision in Crane's thought. "The Broken Tower" presents the "opposites" with the full force of their shattering impact on the poet and on his quest for Harmony. It evidences a range of emotions, from the despair of the first stanzas to the more affirmative mood of the last verses. Yet, the intensity of the despair is greater in this work than in Crane's other creations and its effect overshadows the renewal of faith sought in the final stanzas. The poem begins with the mention of dawn, which, as we saw in the open-

177 ing of The Bridge, generally symbolizes for Crane the moment of new possibilities of vision: The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell Of a spent day — to wander the cathedral lawn From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell. (Ill, "The Broken Tower", p. 193) However, the integrational potential of the bell-rope that "gathers God at dawn" has become the vertical, earth-gravitating fall of poetic possibilities, equivalent to the sterile moment of a "spent day" and to the hell of defeat. The bells that, like the "choiring strings" of The Bridge, represent the means of communication with the divine, elude the concrete world of the earthly tower and swing beyond poetic grasp: The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower; And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score Of broken intervals. . . And I, their sexton slave! Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain! Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles outleaping 0 terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! . . . (Ill, p. 193) The soaring, skyward-reaching projection of the bells leads the poet only to "terraced echoes prostrate on the plain" and to canyons no longer fertile with the swollen spring torrents of Pocahontas but filled, instead, with the impasse of endless failures. The tenuous and desperate nature of the poetic quest is expressed in the next two stanzas: And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. My word I poured. But it was cognate, scored Of that tribunal monarch of the air Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word In wounds pledged once to hope — cleft to despair? (Ill, p. 193)

178 The "broken world" is, like the "broken tower", the demythologized, godless, and discontinuous world of technological society and culture. The poetic apprehension of the redeeming love-union with Pocahontas affirmed in The Bridge (which, however, even in "The Dance" was concluded with a question mark), now is seen in terms of "instants" of durationally ephemeral intuitions. Crane calls these instants of apprehension "desperate choices". The poet's word cannot transcend its finiteness. Despair, nonetheless, is not the final answer for Crane. For, if despair represents the negative facet of the human condition, its positive counterpart — hope — is also there. In the contradictory world of human perception there always exists the alternate possibility of life-giving love, i.e., of the feminine creative and redemptive principle recurrent in Crane's thought (from the Virgin Mary in "Ave Maria", to Pocahontas and woman generally): The steep encroachments of my blood left me No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower As flings the question true?) — or is it she Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power? — And builds, within, a tower that is not stone (Not stone can jacket heaven) — but slip Of pebbles, — visible wings of silence sown In azure circles, widening as they dip The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye That shrines the quiet lake and swells a t o w e r . . . The commodious, tall decorum of that sky Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower. (Ill, p. 194) Crane, perhaps, finally came to feel that also this "choice" was a "desperate" one, that the contraries in human life could never be harmonized in totally human terms. While Walt Whitman, in whose all-encompassing vision Crane sought inspiration, moved essentially within the integrated context of Heraclitean reality, the Platonic linear and transcendental projection in Crane's thought did not permit him to find total fulfillment or satisfaction in the Whitmanean outlook. Crane, like Rimbaud, was basically torn between the two major modes of vision — the Platonic linear transcendental mode and the Heraclitean cyclical pantheistic mode. He was never able to reconcile the two modes which were deeply embedded in his being, nor was he able to abandon one mode of vision for the other. Although at times seeming to fully accept the Whitmanean and Heraclitean vision of Harmony and of Reality, the opposite transcendental tendency remains latent in the background of his

179 t h o u g h t and s o o n e r or later reappears, as in "The B r o k e n T o w e r " . T h e feeling o f alienation t o w a r d t h e c o n c r e t e w o r l d o f t e c h n o l o g i c a l civilization, the sense o f t h e i m p o s s i b i l i t y o f f u l l y h a r m o n i z i n g t h e o p p o s i t e s in h u m a n existe n c e , a p o e t i c striving v i e w e d in terms o f "desperate c h o i c e s " were part o f Crane's vision o f reality, a part w h i c h h e s o u g h t t o reject or reintegrate b u t was never f u l l y able t o . R e t u r n i n g t o N e w Y o r k f r o m M e x i c o , o n April 2 7 , 1 9 3 2 , Crane s t e p p e d or fell o f f the b o w o f the ship Orizaba i n t o t h e w a r m waters o f the Caribbean. T h e sea had always b e e n a s y m b o l o f integration f o r Crane. If his leap i n t o the w a t e r s w a s i n t e n t i o n a l , it m i g h t b e that t h r o u g h this act h e m a d e his final "desperate c h o i c e " . Having tried all else, perhaps h e s o u g h t the answer w h i c h lies b e y o n d the "Barrier that n o n e e s c a p e s " — the answer a f f o r d e d b y direct reintegration i n t o t h e c o s m i c life and d e a t h c y c l e o f nature, i n t o t h e redemptive process o f eternal renewal.

NOTES

1. "Modern Poetry", p. 260. All citations from Crane's works and writings refer to: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1966). 2. "Modern Poetry", pp. 261-62. 3. Letter to Waldo Frank (June 20, 1926), p. 232. 4. " F o r the Marriage of Faustus and Helen", p. 28. 5. "Chaplinesque", p. 11. 6. Letter to Otto H. Kahn (September 1 2 , 1 9 2 7 ) , p. 252. 7. Letter to AUen Tate (July 13, 1930), p. 257. 8. Letter to Otto H. Kahn (September 12, 1927), p. 249. 9. Letter to Otto H. Kahn (September 12, 1927), p. 248. 10. Ibid. 11. Letter to Gorham Munson (March 17, 1926), p. 225. 12. In his essay Arte e Religione Gentile writes: "Non c'è arte che non sia religione. Non c'è arte che non leghi l'animo dell'uomo al proprio mondo con quello stesso vincolo onde l'animo umano à avvinto al divino; non c'è arte, se non in apparenza, indifferente al contenuto religioso dell'umana coscienza; e un'arte religiosa, che è come dire un'arte che nel suo atto non s'impadronisca di tutta la personalità dell'artista e non lo tenga come Dio tiene l'anima del santo, è un'arte appunto solo apparente, un artifizio, e veramente un peccato contro lo spirito sancto. L'artista sincero, l'artista che crede nell'arte e la prende sul serio, è uno spirito essenzialmente religioso. Religioso come il filosofo, che non conosce altra realtà, che sia vera realtà, realtà assoluta, che quella stessa del santo: la realtà totale. Religioso più che il filosofo, perchè quella è la sua realtà totale, non è mediata come la realtà del filosofo, non è pensata, non è dominata da lui, ma esso lo domina: volentem trahit, come un divino volere". In: Dante e Manzoni (Firenze: Vallechi Editore, 1923), p. 172. See also Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: "Let us tell [the public] the painful truth, that most of these works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society". Chris-

180 tian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 20. 13. Letter to Herbert Weinstock (April 22, 1930), p. 256. 14. R.W.B. Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 285. 15. See Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), esp. pp. 3-6. 16. H. and H.A. Frankfort, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 237-38. 17. Liber Hermetis, Liber Termigisti, Cod. Paris. 6319 (14th century); Cod. Vat. 3060 (1315), quoted in Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Vol. 11 of the Collected Works, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 155n. 18. On the significance of the circle and its symbolism see Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Pion, 1961). The Introduction of this work appears in English translation also in Dante, a collection of critical essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 151-77. 19. Letter to Otto H. Kahn, op. cit., pp. 248-49. 20. Crane relates his aims in "The Dance" as follows: "Here one is on the pure mythical and smoky soil at last! Not only do I describe the conflict between the two races in this dance - I also become identified with the Indian and his world before it is over, which is the only method possible of ever really possessing the Indian and his world as a cultural factor. I think I really succeeded in getting under the skin of this glorious and dying animal, in terms of expression, in symbols, which he himself would comprehend. Pocahontas (the continent) is the common basis of our meeting, she survives the extinction of the Indian, who finally, after being assumed into the elements of nature (as he understood them), persists only as a kind of "eye" in the sky, or as a star that hangs between day and night - "the twilight's dim perpetual throne". Letter to Otto H. Kahn, p. 251. 21. On the mythological significance of the Corn God, maize, in Indian thought, see Carl Jung, The Symbols of Transformation, Vol. 5 of the Collected Works, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press), esp. pp. 336-38. See also Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, III (London: St. Mark's Press, 1911) for a discussion of the meaning of the "dying god". 22. The serpent and the eagle for Crane represent respectively time and space. As he writes in "The River": But I knew her body there, Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark, And space, an eaglet's wing, laid on her hair. Together they signify the cycle of eternal return. As Zarathustra's animals, his spokesmen, say for him: "I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent - not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life: - I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things, Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomos Common (New York: Carleton House, n.d.), pp. 247-48. 23. Carl Jung, The Symbols of Transformation, p. 323.

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INDEX

Absolute, the 12,148, 151 - agreement 144 - beauty 160 - comprehensibility 148 - justice 141 - reality 144 Achilles 74 Aeneas 39 Aeneid 38,57 Alchemical imagery 139 Alienation 159, 179 All, the 104 Allen, Gay Wilson 98 ff., 121 America 109 Amphion 82 Anaximander 16, 24 note 18 Ancient feast 133 Animus and anima 62 Anti-Christ 52 Appearance 13 Apocalypse 169 Aphrodite 14 Ares 14 Ariosto 72,97 Aristophanes 64, 70 note 33 Aristotle 14, 20, 75 - Aristotelianism 3 - Aristotelian thought 31 Arnold, Matthew 23 note 7 Art 11 - failure of 138 - function of 101 - impersonality of 124 - religiousness of 161 - universal 129 Art (Magic) 51, 81 ff., 87 ff., 93 note 11, 156 Artist 1 9 , 2 2 , 8 9 Artistic endeavor 140 Asselineau 99

Astronomy 17 Atman 92 note 7 Avidya 92 note 7 Balance 83, 111, 117 ff., 155 Barzun, Jacques 4 Baudelaire 123, 141 Bays, Gwendolyn 142 Beauty 13 - eternal 133 - absolute 160 Becoming 12 Being 19 ff. - and non-being 103,111 Bembo 72 Bergin, Thomas Goddard 53, 69 note 25 Beyond 4 7 , 5 0 Blake 99 Body and Soul 107,123 Brahman 92 note 7 Caesar 52, 77 ff. Camus, Albert 155 Caritas, Charity 32, 52, 134 - and light 53 Cassirer, Ernst 66 note 6 Castiglione 72, 93 note 11 Cervantes, M. 72 Chaos 118 ff. Char, René 4, 7, 13, 23, 97, 101,143 ff. - A la santé du serpent 150 - A une sérénité crispée 143, 147, 149,151,154 - Fé te des arbres et du chasseur 143 - Feuillets d'Hypnos 151 - Héraclite d'Ephèse 154 - Impressions anciennes 143 - La bibliothèque est en feu 151 - Madeleine qui veillait 153

190 -

Partage formel 144,146,148,149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157 - Prière rogue 153 Chase, Richaid 98 ff., 109,121,122 Choir 175 Christ 52, 58 ff., 62, 93 note 11,130,134 Christian 19, 47, 59 ff., 67-68 note 23, 86, 93 note 11, 123 ff., 129 ff., 134, 147, 166 - banquet 133 - divinity 166 - thought 129 Christianity 17, 162 Christmas, new 139 Cicero 31 Circle 170,173 - and divinity 164 - sacrificial 174 - significance of 164, 180 note 18 Civilization, redeemed 175 Cocytus 51 ff., 68-69 note 24 Collective unconscious 100 Columbus 167 ff. Communion 82 Compassion 89 Comradeship 108 Consciousness - birth of new 172 - human 161 - integration of human 175 - reintegration of 170 Consonance 144 Contrapasso 4 1 , 4 6 , 8 9 Contraries 75, 137, 143, 146, 156, 160, 178 - cosmic 137 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 15 Copernicus 72 Cornford, F.M. 19 Corn God (maize) 168 - mythological significance of 180 note 21 Cosmic and human correspondence 155 - cycle 163 - life and death cycle 179 - lover of life 106 - plurivalence 127 - process 103, 162 - religious feeling 26-27 note 29 - synthesis 163 Crane, Hart 7, 23, 97, 101, 156,157 note 11, 159 ff.

-

"Atlantis" 158 note 1 1 , 1 7 3 , 1 7 5 "Ave Maria" 167,170,178 "Cape Hatteras" 173 "Chaplinesque" 160 "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" 109 "Cutty Sark" 173 "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" 165 - "Indiana" 167, 173 - Maquokeeta 168 ff. - "Powhatan's Daughter" 166 ff. - "Quaker Hill" 173 - The Bridge 157 note 11,159 ff. - "The Broken Tower" 159, 176 ff. - "The Dance" 164ff. - "The Harbor Dawn" 167 - "The River" 167 - "The Sleepers" 109 - "The Tunnel" 173 - "Three Songs" 173 - "To Brooklyn Bridge" 163 - "Van Winkle" 167 - White Buildings 161 Creativity 11 - cyclical 173 Critics 125 Curtius, Ernst Robert 92-93 note 9

Dante 3 , 7 , 1 4 , 23 ff., 31 ff., 75, 78, 89, 93 note 11, 97, 100, 123, 156, 159, 164 Characters: Amphiaràus 40 - Aruns 41 - Beatrice 5 0 , 5 3 , 6 1 ff., 69 note 31, 159 - Bertran de Born 43 - Brunetto Latini 43 - Brutus 52 - Buondelmonte 55 ff., 69 note 28 - Cacciaguida 35,53 ff. - Can Grande 53,69 note 26 - Casella 33 - Cassius 5 2 , 7 7 - Ciacco 43 - Diomedes 44 - Manto 41 ff., 52 - Marco Lombardo 50, 69 note 27 - Mathelda 159 - Paolo and Francesca 43, 51, 68 note 23

191 -

Piccaida 5 2 , 6 0 Pier delle Vigne 43 Ripheus 57 St. Bernard 61 ff. Tiresias 40 Trajan 4 0 , 5 8 Ugolino 43 Ulysses 34 ff., 40, 43 ff., 67 note 23, 73 ff. - Virgil 37 ff., 40 ff., 47, 50, 57, 61 Works: - Convivio 32, 39 ff., 52 - DeMonorchia 3 2 f f . , 5 2 - Divine Comedy 31 ff. - Vita Nuova 39 Death 64, 91, 101 ff., 105, 110, 134, 168 - in-life 159 - of God 162 - sacrificial 171 - total 174 DeBroglie 85 Demeny, Paul 124,132 ff. - letter to 107,124 Democritus 27 note 29 Descartes 72 Despair 90 Dialogue of Pessimism 14 Discord 13 ff., 16, 80 ff., 100, 120 ff., 133ff., 146,155 Disorder 115 Dissonance 134, 144 Diviners 34 ff. Dogma 155 Dream 134 - quest 170 Dyadic and triadic modes of thought 20 ff.

Elisabethan World Picture 71, 77 ff., 85 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 97, 164 - Circles 164 - Emersonian mode 98 Empyrean 62 Endless jar 6, 71 ff., 176 Eryximachus 1 6 , 3 1 , 9 1 Erlebnis 100 Eternal life 162 Eternity 171 - earthly 162 Etiemble, René 141 note Eucharist 169 Euripides 16 Evil 101, 104 Evolution 160 Experience, integration of 161 ff., 168

Eagle -

Galileo 72 Generation of the absurd 147 Gentile, Giovanni 22, 161, 179 note 12 German Idealism 9 8 , 1 0 8 Gilgamesh 14, 162 Gilson, Etienne 23 note 8, 63, 72, 91 note 1 Glaucon 18 ff. God 11 ff., 50 ff., 60, 62, 86, 101, 134, 137, 162, 166 ff. - birth of 162 ff. - carpenter God 15 - Christian 138 - death of 162

and serpent 176,180 note 22 of Justice 35, 53 ff. of space 173 significance of for Crane 180 note 22 Earthly Paradise 62 Eden 69 note 31 Ego, poetic 124 ff., 139 Einstein, Albert 23, 25 note 21, 25 note 22, 26 note 29, 85 Eleatic philosophers 107 ff. Eliade, Mircea 101, 122 note 15, 147, 157 note 6

Faith 139 Fall, the 130 Fate and Fates 26 note 24, 43, 80, 134 Faustian 43 Fear 74, 78, 102 Feeling 108 Feminine principle 159,178 Fergusson, Francis 59, 69 note 31 Fertility 168 Fichte, J.G. 98 Ficino, Marsilio 72 Finiteness 145 Fire, symbol of 46 Flux 63 Form 123 - world of Forms 17 Foscolo 97 Francis of Assisi, St. 27 note 29 Frankfort, H. and H.A. 163 French Resistance 146

192 - Godhead 161 - God-image 172 - of Life 137 - rebirth of 166 Goethe 97 Golden Age 69 note 31 Good, the 104 ff. Gospel according to St. John 164 Grace 67-68 note 23, 84 Great Chain of Being 71 ff., 78, 98 Great Literatus, the 102 Greed 82 Greek philosophy 72 Griffon 62 Happiness 80 Harmonia 14 ff. Harmonics 17 Harmony 50, 80, 120, 143 ff., 152, 161, 166 - absolute 12, 61, 62, 87, 123, 129 ff., 137,141,145, 149 ff. - absolute - ideal 156 - absolute good 32 - and aesthetic creation 12 - and civilization 11 - and discord 121 - and God 11,15 ff. - and music 1 , 1 7 , 8 0 - and nature 11 - anu society 11,51 ff. - and truth 130 - cosmic 130, 136, 144 - definition of 1, 6 , 1 9 - divine 5 2 - idea of 1, 5, 80,134 ff., 144, 152, 156 - ideal 131,134,146 - Heraclitean 81, 87, 97, 100, 121, 136,146 - of interrelationships 150 - of Song 151 ff. - origins of 14 ff. - Platonic 9 7 , 1 0 0 , 1 5 6 - quest for 159 - religious nature of 22 ff. - two major modes 14 ff., 21, 71, 101,123 - universal 80 Harmony of the spheres 1, 5, 26 note 24, 80,144 - in Shakespeare defined 83

- pythagorean notion of 80 Harmonizing work of the poet 106 - Shakespearean vision of 73 Hatred 82 Hector 74 Hegel 1 , 9 8 , 1 0 8 Helen 74, 160 Helena 85 Henry VII of Luxembourg 33 Heraclitean 14 ff., 74 ff., 97, 124, 136, 141,146 ff., 156, 178 - centrifugal forces 176 - contraries 143 - mode of vision/order 60, 72, 73, 97, 101, 103,107 ff., 176 - reality 74, 146, 178 Heraclitus 6, 14, 15 ff., 19 ff., 35, 73, 86,91, 103, 107 ff., 146 ff., 154 Hermes Trismegistus 164 Hertha 167 Historicity, meaning of 162 History of Ideas 1 - the unit-idea 2 ff. Hollander, John 5 ff., 92 note 4 - The Untuning of the Sky 5 Holy Roman Empire 33,52 Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost 47, 62 Hope and despair 178 Humanism 72 Humanitas 32, 39, 66 note 6 Human time 152

Ideal 123 - pure 141 Ideal accord 154 Ideas, world of 86, 101 Ideation 108 It Cortegiano 93 note 11 Iliad 24 note 15 Illusion 80, 85, 93 note 11, 140, 147, 154, 170 - and appearance 113 - defined 92 note 7 Il Veltro 33 Indian (American) 168 ff. - world 173 Inferno 33 ff., 37 Infinity - conjugate 173 - of human time 145 Injustice 64

193 Intuition, poetic 145 Izambard 124 Judas 52 Jung, Call Gustav 69 note 30, 100, 142, 172 Justice 21 ff., 32 ff., 36, 39, 46, 51 ff., 5 7 , 6 4 , 1 5 2 , 155 - Rimbaud 133 - Dantean idea of 67-68 note 23 - Eagle of 35, 53 ff. - Shakespeare 73 ff. Justinian 53 Kahn, Otto 161,166 Kant, Emmanuel 98 Kermode, Frank 84 Kindness, concept of 39-40, 76 Knight, G. Wilson 92 note 5, 93 note 11 Knowledge, knowing 42 ff., 47, 50, 82, 108 - ultimate 127 Langer, Suzanne K. 11 Language, universal 128 Lawrence, D.H. 101,122 note 17 Leopardi 97 Lewis, R.W.B. 26 note 28, 100,109,122 notes 12, 32, 33,162 Liberty 154 Life 111,113 Love 46, 50 ff., 61 ff., 64, 68,109, 111, 115, 132, 155,166,177 - and harmony 68 note 23 - death union 171 - divine 46, 136 Lovejoy,AO. I f f . - The Great Chain of Being 2 Lucretius 102 Lust 83 Machiavelli 72 Madame de Staél 124 Maize, symbol of 168 Malebolge 3 6 , 5 1 Mallarmé 123, 141, 149 Man 125 - archaic/primitive 162 ff. - modern 163 - tribal 170 Mandala symbolism 164 Mantua 41 ff.

Matter 101,129 ff. Maya 85, 92 note 7 Mercy 90 ff. Mesopotamia 162 Michelangelo 72 Microcosm and macrocosm 16, 100, 125 ff. Middle Ages 72 Milan 156 Miller, James E. 98, 121 note 1 Miller, J. Hfflis 2 ff. Milton, John 5 2 , 9 7 Mind - and soul 107 - universal 124ff. Monarch, universal 33 Montaigne 72 Mother, universal 120, 159 Mother Earth 169 Munson, Gorham 161 Muses 16 Music 5, 80 ff., 144,147,166 - as illusion 80, 85 ff. - as knowledge and revelation 82 - heavenly 81,84 - ideal 84 - integrative 175 Musica mundana 5 Mystic, mysticism 63,123 Myth 3 - mythicalidentity and reality 159 ff. - mythical reintegration 166 - mythic sacrifice 171 - mythic wholeness 173 - mythological nature symbol 168 - mythopoeic thought 163 ff. - Teutonic mythology 167 Myth of America 161,167 Myth of Er 26 note 24 Naples 156 Nature 102 ff., 1 2 3 , 1 4 1 , 1 4 9 , 1 5 2 - principle 163 - world of 161 Neo-Pla tonic 1 3 , 1 9 , 8 6 Non-Being 12, 20, 103, 108, 111, 116, 119 Number 129 ff. One, the 12, 18, 32, 60, 86, 103, 112, 121, 144

194 Opposites 12, 103 ff., 106 ff., I l l , 114, 118, 146, 151,156, 173, 176 - poet absorbs all 106 - reconciliation of 86, 131,160 Order 5, 15 ff., 71 ff., 83, 88, 89, 130, 155 Orders of Being 72 ff. Original sin 130 Pagliaro 40 Pantheistic divinity 166 Parmenides 19 ff., 86 - Parmenidean 16 Parodi, E. 40 Passion 82 Patrick, G. T. 23 note 13 Peace 1 3 , 3 3 , 5 9 , 8 2 Pearce, Roy Harvey 99 ff., 109,121 note 8, 122 notes 10, 31 Penelope 46 Pentecost of fire 47 Perception 167 Phereclus, Tekton, Harmon 24 note 15 Philosopher - Platonic 19 Philip, J. A. 24 note 15, 24 note 17 Pico della Mirandola 72, 93 note 11 Piety, pietas, pietà 21, 22, 36 ff., 50 ff., 54, 58,60, 75 ff., 161 - and light 39, 53, 64, 66 note 14 Pirandello 93 note 10 Plato 5,6,13,16, 25 note 2 2 , 3 5 , 7 3 , 8 6 , 92 notes 7, 9, 137 - Laws 92-93 notes 9, 11 - Phaedrus 19 - Symposium, The 16, 31, 65, 91, 137 - Timeus 25 note 22 Platonic mode of vision, thought 5, 14 ff., 60, 71, 74, 80, 98, 101,103, 113, 146, 156 ff., 176, 178 - Christian 101,123 - linear projection 178 Plotinus 86 - TheEnneads 86, 92 notes 8, 9 Pocahontas 159,161, 166 ff., 168 ff. Poet, the 105 ff., 119, 126,139, 147 - arbiter of diversity 107 - as guarantor of continuity of vision 173 - as magician 140 - harmonizer 131 - origin of word 26 note 27

Poetic -

redeemer 130 religious 22 ff. responsibility of 171 task of 101 ff., 160 ff. word of 178

bridge 176 creation 128, 144, 148 creative act 147 failure 157 ideal 146 quest 163,177 Word 124, 128, 138 ff., 145 ff., 149,157 Poetry 129, 140 ff., 148, 150 ff., 161 ff. Pre-socratic 124 Prince 159,169 Progress 160 Promethean 47 - figure 127 Pythagorean 16 ff., 80 Pyramid of Song 144 ff.

Rabelais 59 Racine 97 Real or Ideal, the 17 ff. Reality 13,115,156 - absolute 144 - archaic 163 - mythically transfigured 166 - phenomenal 148 - redemptive mythic 174 - temporal 152 - total 161 - ultimate 51,151 - vision of 85 Realm of the Mothers 61, 69 note 30 Rebirth 169 Redeemer-poet 124,130 Redemption 17, 22, 47, 58, 59, 93 note 11,130,147, 178 Regeneration, symbols of 169-170 Renaissance 72, 93 note 11 Renewal - and fertility 119 - eternal 170,173,179 - god of spiritual 175 Revelation 69 note 31, 82 - apocalyptic 163 Revolt 147, 153, 155 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 23 note 7 Rigveda 92 note 7

195 Rimbaud 4 , 7 , 2 2 f f . , 9 7 , 1 0 1 , 1 0 7 , 1 2 3 ff., 143,156 ff., 178 - Conte 130 - Delires I: Vierge Folle, l'époux infernal 137 ff. - Delires II: l'Alchimie du verbe 138 ff. - Illuminations 124,130 ff. - Matin 139 ff. - Mauvais Sang 134 ff. - Une Saison en Enfer 124, 130 ff. Rite de passage 99 Romanticism 2 Romantics 125 Romantic tradition 126 Salvation 134,139 St. Louis Hegelian movement 98 Sankara 92 note 7 Sapegno, N. 40,65 note 3 Satan, Lucifer 51 ff. Schyberg, F. 99,121 note 9 Sea 120 Seer 81,126 Self, the 100 ff. - new integrated wholeness of 172 Shakespeare 7, 23, 71 ff., 97, 101, 123, 156 ff., 171 - Harmony and discord in Shakespeare defined 82 Characters: - Alonso 81 ff., 87, 90 - Antonio 82 ff. - Ariel 82 ff., 152 - Bertram 85 - Brutus 75 ff. - Cade, Jack 91 - Caesar 75 ff. - Caliban 82 ff., 87, 90, 152 - Casca 77 ff. - Cassius 77 ff. - Cordelia 79,91 - Cressida 74 - Cymbeline 91 - Desdemona 74, 89 ff. - Diana 85 - Edgar 91 - Edmund 78,91 - Ferdinand 80, 82, 87, 90 - Gonzalo 82,90 - Hamlet 91 - Helena 85

-

Hermione 85 Iachimo 89 Iago 91 Imogen 85 Jessica 83 Lady Macbeth 76,91 Lafeu 78 Lear 76, 79,91 Leontes 91 Lorenzo 73, 83 Macbeth 91 Marina 91 Mark Anthony 75 ff. Miranda 90, 91 Octavius 76 Othello 74, 89 ff. Pericles 91 Portia 8 5 , 8 8 , 9 1 Prospero 51, 80 ff., 86 ff., 93 note 11, 156, 170 - Richard III 89,91 - Sebastian 8 3 , 8 7 , 9 0 - Stefano 82 ff. - Sycorax 87 - Timon of Athens 74 - Trinculo 82 ff. - Troilus 74 Works: - All's Well That Ends Well 78,85 - Anthony and Cleopatra 75 - Coriolanus 75 - Cymbeline 85, 89 - Hamlet 75 ff. - Henry VI tetralogy 77,89 - Julius Caesar 75 ff. - King Lear 75 ff. - King Richard III 77 - Macbeth 75 ff. - Measure for Measure 75 - The Merchant of Venice 7 3 , 8 3 , 8 5 , 88 - The Tempest 71 ff., 80 ff., 170 - Timon of Athens 75 ff. - Troilus and Cressida 73 ff. - Twelfth Night 85 - The Winter's Tale 85 Shipley, Joseph 15 Signorie 72 Silver star 139 ff. Sin, evil 32 Singleton, Charles 68 note 23 Sisyphian redemption 40

196 Social family 156 Social Harmony 47 ff., 51 Socrates 14, 17 Song 143 ff., 156,175 - ideal 147,150 - of poetic integration 174 pure 149 - Pyramid of 144 ff. Sophists 14, 24 note 13 Sophocles 73 Space 174 Spencer, Theodore 79,92 note 3 Spenser, Edmund 97 Spinoza 27 note 29 Spirit 141 - and matter 134 - spiritual fulfillment 166 Spitzer, Leo 2, 5, 92 note 4, 98, 100, 121 note 3 - Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony 5 Starkie, Enid 141 Stevens, Wallace 110 Still, Colin 93 note 11 Stimmung 5 Stoic 32 ff., 110 Stovall, Floyd 109,122 notes 25, 29 Strife and discord 16 Sublimation 140 Suffering 155 Sy corax 87 Symbol 2 , 4 Symbolists 123 ff., 141,146 Technology 159 - technological society 178 - redemption of 163 - technological civilization 179 Terror of history 101,147 Thebes 82 Theophrastos 24 note 18 Thomistic synthesis 31,72 "Thou" versus "It" 163 Tillyard, E.M. 71 Time 1 1 5 , 1 5 2 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 4 - serpent of 173 Transcendence 140,163 - transcendental Form 141 - transcendental projection 160 - transcendent ideal 163 Treachery 68 note 24 Trinity 62, 164

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trinitarian human and divine perfection 136 Troy 57 Truth 13, 38, 46, 50 ff., 108, 127, 137, 155 - ideal 141 - ultimate 118,126 ff., 137 "Two together" 115 ff. Unamuno, Miguel de 100 Union 155 Unitary truth 161 Unity 82, 109, 115 Universal language 128 Universal Mind 124 Universal mother 120 Unknown 22, 37 ff., 44 ff., 126,129 ff., 147 Valéry 123, 141 Vandelli 40 Vedantic philosophy 92 note 7 Vedic Caesar 175 Verlaine 137 ff. Virgin conception 172 Vision 57 ff., 62, 157, 159 ff., 170, 173 - bridge building 175 Volition 108 Voltaire 97 Water, symbol of fertility 168 Wellek, René 2, 98, 108, 121 notes 4, 5 Wheelwright, Philip 20, 24 note 17, 122 note 23 Whicher, Stephen 110, 121 note 2, 122 notes 34, 35 Whitehead, Alfred North 11 ff. Whitman, Walt 7, 23, 97 ff., 123, 156, 173, 174, 175,178 - "A Backward Glance" 100 - "A Child's Reminiscence" 110 - "A Hand Mirror" l l O f f . - "AsIEbb'd with the Ocean of Life" 108, 110,113 - "Calamus" poems 108 - "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" 109 - "Democratic Vistas" 102, 104 - Leaves of Grass 99 ff. - "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" 98, 108 ff., 114ff. - "Passage to India" 109

197 -

"Scented Herbage of My Breast" 110,112 - "The Sleepers" 109 - "Song of Myself" 103 ff., 109, 113 - "Starting from Paumanok" 105, 121 - "There Was a Child Went Forth" 106, 113 - "To Think of Time" 109 - "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" 110 ff., 114 Windelband, Wilhelm 107, 122 note 27

Wordsworth, William 97 World 1 1 , 1 0 1 - demythologized, godless 178 - phenomenal 153,156 - technological 173 World of ideas 13 World Reason 108 World War II 146 Yeats, W.B. 7 4 , 9 9 Zarathustra 170