IMAGINATION AND FAITH.
JN an interesting little volume, carefully illustrated as a gift-book, which Messrs. Isbister and Co. have published, called " In the Footsteps of the Poets,"—of which some part, at any rate, has appeared formerly in Good Words,—Pro- fessor Masson and Others hate attempted to make the lives of nine great English poets (Milton, George Herbert, Cowper, Thomson, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, the two Brownings, and Tennyson) more distinctly visible to the English people. Of these, six at least would be usually called "religious poets," though we are not sure that the term applies properly to the very greatest of them all, Milton, in spite of the fact that "Paradise Lost" and "Samson .A.gonistes " were his greatest works ; while neither Sir Walter Scott, nor the poet of the "Seasons," could properly be termed "religious poets" at all, for their imaginations,—great as Scott's at all events was,— turned more naturally and more eagerly to the visions of this world's beauty than to the vision of eternal hopes. The pre- sent writer would say the same of Milton. His greater themes, indeed, were taken from the history of the people of Israel, and his mind was essentially majestic in its attitudes, but it was not essentially spiritual. On the contrary, we should call it essentially sensuous. Satan is the really great figure of "Paradise Lost," and "Samson Agonistes," like Satan, is rendered great by his pride and grandeur, notby his vision of God. Milton's imagination loved to deal with the most Titanic forms of human purpose and resolve. He made a great study of the most lofty and tragically impressive forms of man's volition, and he knew how to clothe them in all the magnificence of a rich and sensuous fancy. But of spirituality in the sense in which George Herbert was spiritual, or in the sense in which Cowper (in his hymns, at least) was spiritual, still more in the sense in which both the Browning, especially Robert Browning, Tennyson, and most of all Wordsworth, was spiritual, there is no trace at all, we think, in Milton. His was a lofty, bold, rashly just, and militant, but essentially sensuous and sell-willed, nature. No poet of spiritual essence could possibly have taken his line on the subject of divorce, and no poet of spiritual essence could possibly have been so masterful and arbitrary. We should say of Milton that though he dealt gladly with religious themes, the cast of his imagination led him to these themes far more from fascina- tion for their sublimity than from sympathy with that child- like spirit which is of the very core of religious faith. , His natural attraction was rather to the towering shapes of ./Eschylean genius than to the spiritual peace and untroubled love of Christ. We hold that Milton's imagination, though it led him into a world of the most sublime visions, led him rather away from the most characteristic graces of Christian faith. That could not be said of Herbert, or Cowper, or the Brownings, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson. In all their minds the imagination busied itself especially with the justification of faith, and in all but Cowper's, which was at least as playful and fanciful as it was spiritual, it led them habitually into a world of which the spiritual affections were the very heart.
Some great writers have said that poetry is essentially spiritual. For example, Matthew Arnold in a famous passage has contended that "the strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry." He regards all poetry as something better even than religion, as religion freed from illusion. "There is not a creed," he says, "which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is fail- ing it. But for poetry the idea is everything ; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion." But is not "the idea" itself often a world of illusion, of illusion that is not divine, that is often far from divine -Did not Shelley's imagination, for instance, habitually wander in a world of the airiest ideas not by any means divine P Did not the imagination of Keats wander habitually in a world of illusion,—beautiful illusion, but with a beauty short of divine ? Did not Byron's imagination wander habitually in a world of illusion which was not only not divine, but not seldom hardly even human, more or less penetrated by the sirocco of an infernal cynicism P Even Sir Walter Scott's mighty and magnificent imagination, though it was never tainted with evil, was by no means essentially spiritual. It was like Shakespeare's,—chiefly human, chiefly potent in that sphere in which it witnesses to the realities of this world, without piercing the world of the unseen. If we go to Chaucer, to the Elizabethan poets, to Dryden and Pope and Burns, or even Goldsmith, we shall see that the imagination has much oftener taken us into a world of pure illusion, than it has into one of pure truth. Doubtless without imagination the "witnesses of the unseen" would have had no wings for their greatest upward flights. But it is only in modern times, only since Wordsworth and Coleridge and Browning and Tennyson have turned the ima- gination inwards, that it has become so much of a handmaid to spiritual faith. In the general field of English literature, we should say that the imagination had worked far more power- fully in the direction of filling the mind and heart with the pageantry and passions of this world, than in the direction of witnessing to the unseen. George Herbert, Keble, Words- worth, Browning, Tennyson, are after all the exceptions to the rule that English poetry is much more deeply penetrated by the seeming glories of this world, than by the spiritual affec- tions which find their full satisfaction only beyond the veil.
Even the greater idealists have quite as often used their imagination, as Shelley did, to uproot faith, and replace it by something that dazzles the fancy, as for the purpose of strengthening and deepening it. We should not say that Matthew Arnold himself is one of these, because, though his dogmatic purpose was destructive, the passion of tender regret with which he always painted the faith he had lost, tends much more, we think, towards its renovation than towards its eradi- cation. But it is not only knowledge which " puffeth up," it is fancy and imagination, too, which frequently have that effect. The idealist is very apt to pride himself on the purity of the rarified air in which be lives, though it does not in the least follow that all that is thin and rare is pure also. Tennyson in one of his noblest poems,—" The Palace of Art,"—has shown this in the most impressive manner. The natural language of the imagination is, as Tennyson puts it, "I sit as God, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all,"—not "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed," but "Blessed are they who have even seen and yet have not believed." That is the language which flows most naturally from many of the most modern of the poets of the day,— especially the French poets,—the language not indeed of reason, but of the sceptical judgment contemplating the many illusions of life, and erroneously reckoning amongst those illusions many of its most trustworthy lights. Even Shakespeare evidently held that the possession of the highest imaginative faculty was no guarantee at all for the steadfast- ness and soundness of a man's convictions. Hamlet, who is his greatest study of a musing imagination,—which is the most perfect type of pure imagination,—is only bewildered by it as to the reliance he should place either on his senses or on his instincts. He sees so completely round every question that he is credulous and incredulous by turns, and never clearly determines for himself whether credulity or incredulity is the safer attitude. Goethe and Victor Hugo seem both of them to have had the same bewildering power of imagining every- thing, and therefore resting in nothing. The imagination is evidently a perfectly neutral faculty which is as active in the suggestion of suspicions as in the confirmation of convictions. The stability of a great mind depends not upon its imagina- tive powers, but on its deeper instincts and higher affections. A spiritual nature will use a great imagination to fix its gaze on the spiritual world, as did Wordsworth and Browning and Tennyson and Herbert and Keble. An unspiritual nature like Byron's will use a great imagination to fasten the gaze on all the hot passions, cynical misgivings, and dis- turbing forces which shake men's faith in the powers of good. And an eager, impulsive mind like Shelley's will use a great imagination to multiply indefinitely the kaleidoscopic panes of "many-coloured glass" through which it gazes at the 'white radiance of eternity." The poetic imagination is no security for either belief or unbelief, but it can increase indefinitely that intrinsic bias towards either, which the balance of its more active instincts and affections would separately produce. One great idealist will find that he is too proud of the range of his own unfettered imagination to tolerate the subjection of faith, while another will use his imagination to humiliate his own self-confidence, to "refrain his soul and keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from his mother." A proud nature like Lord Herbert's of Cherbury will use the imagination to multiply the obstacles in the way of any satisfying faith ; while a meek nature like his brother's, George Herbert's, will use the imagination for the overcoming of all those obstacles which the sceptical thinker had so vastly magnified. There are quite as many oases of idealist scepticism as of materialist scepticism,' though sceptics of the latter kind are usually more or less deficient in imagination, and sceptics of the former kind more or less rich in it.
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