Poetry | Page 2

his great Crystal Eye is always cast?Up to the Moon, and on her fixèd fast;?And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere,?So daunceth he about the centre here._
This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the world solemnly in a footnote, "Modern astronomy has exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres...." (The Professor wrote "singular" when he meant "curious."--The notion was never "singular.") "These 'spheres,'" he adds, "have disappeared, and their music with them, except in poetry." Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and one of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is not a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained harmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things of obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his noble Ode,
_Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,?And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong._
Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this macrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, the microcosm. All "transcendental" philosophy,--all discussions of the "Absolute," of mind and matter, of "subjective" and "objective" knowledge, of "ideas" and "phenomena," "flux" and "permanence"--all "systems" and "schools," down from the earliest to be found in "Ritter and Preller," through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas, to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism and Nominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yet again on to James and Bergson--all inevitably work out to this, that the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as he apprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to some corresponding harmony within himself. Lacking him, the harmony (so far as he knows) would utterly lack the compliment of an audience: by his own faulty instrument he must seek to interpret it, if it is to be interpreted at all: and so, like the man at the piano, he goes on "doing his best."

"God created Man in His image," says the Scripture: "and," adds Heine, "Man made haste to return the compliment." It sounds wicked, but is one of the truest things ever said. After all, and without vanity, it is the best compliment Man can pay, poor fellow!--and he goes on striving to pay it, though often enough rebuked for his zeal. "Canst thou," demands the divine Interlocutor in the Book of Job--
_"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?"_
To this, fallen and arraigned man, using his best jargon, responds that "the answer is in the negative. I never pretended to do these things, only to guess, in my small way, how they are done."
Nor is there any real irreverence in answering thus: for of course it is not the Almighty who puts the questions, but someone audaciously personating Him. And some of us find this pretension irritating; as Douglas Jerrold meeting a pompous stranger on the pavement was moved to accost him with, "I beg your pardon, Sir, but would you mind informing me--Are you anybody in particular?"
Again, in the sixth chapter of the Second Book of Esdras, someone usurping the voice of the Almighty and using (be it said to his credit) excellent prose, declares:
_"In the beginning, when the earth was made, before the waters of the world stood, or ever the wind blew,
Before it thundered or lightened, or ever the foundations of paradise were laid,
Before the fair flowers were seen, or ever_ _the moveable powers were established; before the innumerable multitude of angels were gathered together,
Or ever the heights of the air were lifted up, before the measures of the firmament were named, or ever the chimneys of Zion were hot._
Then _did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me alone, and through none other: by Me also they shall be ended, and by none other."_
It is all very beautiful: but (for aught that appears) no one was denying it. It has been shrewdly objected against the arguments of the "affable Archangel" in the later books of Paradise Lost that argument by its nature admits of being answered: and the fatal fallacy of putting human speech into a divine mouth, as in the above passage, is that it invites retort.
A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades: but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universal harmony in which he and they bear a part, if