The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 6

Art can never reach higher than that,--if we think of it as a factor in human evolution. What else you may say of Egyptian sculpture is of minor importance: as, that it was stiff, conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and eyes gazing into eternity. Ultimately we must regard Art in this Egyptian way: as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky. You may have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy, multiplying your skill to the power of n;--but you will still in reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the "peace which pa.s.seth understanding"--"the eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation."

If we turn to a.s.syria, we find much the same thing. This was a people far less spiritual than the Egyptians: a cruel, splendid, luxurious civilization deifying material power. But you cannot look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too, the motive was religious. There is an eternity and inexhaustible power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one end:--to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.--In the Babylonian sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or leopard-headed--the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might hide from the consciousness of a.s.syria and later Babylon the beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the _raison d'etre,_ of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty, and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.

Now then: that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries.

Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's

"Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more.";

to Dante's

"The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars";

to Talesin's

"My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars";

to Aeschylus's bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood;--and the next step you come to beyond (in the West)--the next expression of the Human Soul--marked with the same kind of feeling--the same spiritual and divine hauteur--is, for lack of literary remains, this Egyptian sculpture. The Grand Manner, the majestic note of Esotericism, the highest in art and literature, is a stream flowing down to us from the Sacred Mysteries of Antiquity.

It is curious that a crude primtivism in sculpture--and in architecture too--should have gone on side by side, in Greece, during the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., with the very finished art of the Lyricists from Sappho to Pindar; but apparently it did. (They had wooden temples, painted in bright reds and greens; I understand without pillared facades.) I imagine the explanation to be something like this: You are to think of an influx of the Human Spirit, proceeding downward from its own realms towards these, until it strikes some civilization --the Greek, in this case. Now poetry, because its medium is less material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of its descent much sooner. Perhaps music lies higher again; which is why music was the first of the arts to blossom at all in this nascent civilization of ours at Point Loma. Let me diverge a little, and take a glance round.--At any such time, the seeds of music may not be present in strength or in a form to be quickenable into a separately manifesting art; and this may be true of poetry too; yet where poetry is, you may say music has been; for every real poem is born out of a pre-existing music of its own, and is the _inverbation_ of it. The Greek Melic poets (the lyricists) were all musicians first, with an intricate musical science, on the forms of which they arranged their language; I do not know whether they wrote their music apart from the words. After the Greek, the Italian illumination was the greatest in western history; there the influx, beginning in the thirteenth century, produced first its chief poetic splendor in Dante before that century had pa.s.sed; not raising an equal greatness in painting and sculpture until the fifteenth. In England, the Breath that kindled Shakespeare never blew down so far as to light up a great moment in the plastic arts: there were some few figures of the second rank in painting presently; in sculpture, nothing at all (to speak of). Painting, you see, works in a little less material medium than sculpture does.

Dante's Italy had not quite plunged into that orgy of vice, characteristic of the great creative ages, which we find in the Italy of the Cinquecento. But England, even in Shakespeare's day, was admiring and tending to imitate Italian wickedness.

James I's reign was as corrupt as may be; and though the Puritan reaction followed, the creative force had already been largely wasted: notice had been served to the Spirit to keep off.

Puritanism raised itself as a barrier against the creative force both in its higher and lower aspects: against art, and against vice;--probably the best thing that could happen under the circ.u.mstances; and the reason why England recovered so much sooner than did Italy.--On the other hand, when the influx came to Holland, it would seem to have found, then, no opportunities for action in the non-material arts: to have skipped any grand manifestation in music or poetry: and at once to have hit the Dutchman 'where he lived' (as they say),--in his paintbox.--But to return:-

Sculpture, then, came later than poetry to Greece; and in some ways it was a more sudden and astounding birth. Unluckily nothing remains--I speak on tenterhooks--of its grandest moment. Progress in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus; some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed its likeness on carved stone. I once saw a picture--in a lantern lecture in London--of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating, I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C. She is advancing with upraised arm to protect--someone or something. The figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt it is the likeness of a G.o.ddess. She is not merely a very fine and dignified woman; she is a G.o.ddess, with something of Egyptian sublimity. The artist, if he had not attained perfect mastery of the human form--if his medium was not quite plastic to him--knew well what the Soul is like.--The Greek had no feeling, as the Egyptian had, for the _mystery_ of the G.o.ds; at his very best (once he had begun to be artistic) he personalized them; he tried to put into his representations of them, what the Egyptian had tried to put into his representations of men; and in that sense this Athene is, after all, only a woman;--but one in whom the Soul is quite manifest. I have never been able to trace this statue since; and my recollections are rather hazy. But it stands, for me, holding up a torch in the inner recesses of history. It was the time when Pythagoras was teaching; it was that momentous time when (as hardly since) the doors of the Spiritual were flung open, and the impulse of the six Great Teachers was let loose on the world. Hithertoo Greek carvers had been making images of the G.o.ds, symbolic indeed--with wings, thunderbolts and other appurtenances;--but trivially symbolic; mere imitation of the symbolism, without the dignity or religious feeling, of the Egyptians and Babylonians; as if their G.o.ds and wors.h.i.+p had been mere conventions, about which they had felt nothing deep;--now, upon this urge from the G.o.d-world, a sense of the grandeur of the within comes on them; they seek a means of expressing it: throw off the old conventions; will carve the G.o.ds as men; do so, their aspiration leading them on to perfect mastery: for a moment achieve Egyptian sublimity; but--have personalized the G.o.ds; and dear knows what that may lead to presently.

The came Pheidias, born about 496. Nothing of his work remains for us; the Elgin Marbles themselves, from the Parthenon, are pretty certainly only the work of his pupils. But there are two things that tell us something about his standing: (1) all antiquity bears witness to the prevailing quality of his conceptions; their sublimity. (2) He was thrown into prison on a charge of impiety, and died there, in 442.

Here you will note the progress downward. Aeschylus had been so charged, and tried--but acquitted. Pheidias, so charged, was imprisoned. Forty-three years later Socrates, so charged, was condemned to drink the hemlock. Of Aeschylus and Socrates we can speak with certainty: they were the Soul's elect men. Was Pheidias too? Athens certainly was turning away from the Soul; and his fate is a kind of half-way point between the fates of the others. He appears in good company. And that note of sublimity in his work bears witness somewhat.

We have the work of his pupils, and know that in their hands the marble--Pheidias himself worked mostly in gold and ivory--had become docile and obedient, to flow into whatever forms they designed for it. We know what strength, what beauty, what tremendous energy, are in those Elgin marbles. All the figures are real, but idealized: beautiful men and horses, in fullest most vigorous action, suddenly frozen into stone. The men are more beautiful than human; but they are human. They are splendid unspoiled human beings, reared for utmost bodily perfection; athletes whose whole training had been, you may say, to music: they are music expressed in terms of the human body.

Yes; but already the beauty of the body outshone the majesty of the Soul. It was the beauty of the body the artists aimed at expressing: a perfect body--and a sound mind in it: a perfectly healthy mind in it, no doubt (be cause you cannot have a really sound and beautiful body without a sound healthy mind)--was the ideal they sought and saw. Very well, so far; but, you see, Art has ceased to be sacred, and the handmaid of the Mysteries; it bothers itself no longer with the other side of the sky.

In Pheidias' own work we might have seen the influx at that moment when, s.h.i.+ning through the soul plane, its rays fell full on the physical, to impress and impregnate that with the splendor of the Soul. We might have seen that it was still the Soul that held his attention, although the body was known thoroughly and mastered: that it was the light he aimed to express, not the thing it illumined. In the work of his pupils, the preoccupation is with the latter; we see the physical grown beautiful under the illumination of the Soul; not the Soul that illumines it.

The men of the Egyptian sculptors had been G.o.ds. The G.o.ds of these Greek sculptors were men. Perfect, glorious, beautiful men --so far as externals were concerned. But men--to excite personal feeling, not to quell it into nothingness and awe. The perfection, even at that early stage and in the work of the disciples of Pheidias, was a quality of the personality.

It was indeed marvelously near the point of equilibrium: the moment when Spirit enters conquered matter, and stands there enthroned. In Pheidias himself I cannot but think we should have found that moment as we find it in Aeschylus. But you see, it is when that has occurred: when Spirit has entered matter, and made the form, the body, supremely beautiful; it is precisely then that the moment of peril comes--if there is not the wisdom present that knows how to avoid the peril. The next and threatening step downward is preoccupation with, then wors.h.i.+p of, the body.

The Age of Pericles came to wors.h.i.+p the body: that was the danger into which it fell; that was what brought about the ruin of Greece. That huge revelation of material beauty; and that absence of control from above; the lost adequacy of the Mysteries, and the failure of the Pythagorean Movement;--the impatience of spiritual criticism, heedlessness of spiritual warning;--well, we can see what a turning-point the time was in history. On the side of politics, selfishness and ambition were growing; on the side of personal life, vice. . . . It is a thing to be pondered on, that what has kept Greece sterile these last two thousand years or so is, I believe, the malaria; which is a thing that depends for its efficacy on mosquitos. Great men simply will not incarnate in malarial territory; because they would have no chance whatever of doing anything, with that oppression and enervation sapping them. Greece has been malarial; Rome, too, to some extent; the Roman Campagna terribly; as if the disease were (as no doubt it is) a Karma fallen on the sites of old-time tremendous cultural energies; where the energies were presently wrecked, drowned and sodden in vice. Here then is a pretty little problem in the workings of Karma: on what plane, through what superphysical links or channels, do the vices of an effete civilization transform themselves into that poor familiar singer in the night-time, the mosquito? Greece and Rome, in their heyday, were not malarial; if they had been, no genius and no power would have shone in them.

In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly translated itself into a great pestilence. Then we made advances and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said: Come now; we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out of commission.--And sure enough, the mere foulness of the battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had circ.u.mvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the physical links, and blocked the material channels through which wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.--Whereupon Nature, wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and inner planes; found new links and channels there; pa.s.sed through these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish Influenza;--and spread it over three continents, with greater scope and reach than had ever her old-fas.h.i.+oned stench-bred plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific.

Whereof the moral is: _He laughs loudest who laughs last;_ and just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma.

Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of manifested Time. When shall we stop imagining that any possible inventions or discoveries will enable us to circ.u.mvent the fundamental laws of Nature? Not the printing-press, nor steam, nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor _vril_ itself when we come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn themselves out by wrong-doing--or even that have come to old age and the natural time when they must die. But their pa.s.sings need not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they would learn decently to live.

But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the literature again:--

After Aeschylus, Sophocles. The former, a Messenger of the G.o.ds, come to cry their message of _Karma_ to the world; and in doing so, incidentally to create a supreme art-form;--the latter, a "good easy soul who lives and lets live, founds no anti-school, upsets no faith."--thus Browning sums him up. A "faultless"

artist enamored of his art; in which, thinks he (and most academic critics with him) he can improve something on old Aeschylus; a man bothered with no message; a beautiful youth; a genial companion, well-loved by his friends--and who is not his friend?--all through his long life; twenty times first-prize winner, and never once less than second.--Why, solely on the strength of his _Antigone,_ the Athenians appointed him a strategos in the expedition against Samos; with the thought that one so splendidly victorious in the field of drama, could not fail of victory in mere war. But don't lose hope!--upon an after-thought (perhaps) they appointed Pericles too; who suggested to his poet-colleague that though master of them all in his own line, he had better on the whole leave the sordid details of command to himself, Pericles, who had more experience of that sort. What more shall we say of Sophocles?--A charming brilliant fellow in his cups--of which, as of some other more questionable pleasures, report is he was too fond; a man wors.h.i.+ped during his life, and on his death made a hero with semi-divine honors;--does that sound like the story of a Messenger of the G.o.ds?

He was born at Colonos in Attica, in 496; of his hundred or so of dramas, seven come down to us. His age saw in him the very ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them. "Indeed," says Mahaffy, "it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more successful rival." Without trying to give you conclusions of my own, I shall read you a longish pa.s.sage from Gilbert Murray, who is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well, and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry.

Comparing the _Choephori_ of Aeschylus, the second play in the Oreseian Trilogy, with the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which deals with the same matter, he says:

"Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it. In the _Electra_ this element is practically ignored.

Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos!

Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles.

Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the _Choephori_--'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood?'--the _Electra_ closes with an expression of entire satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old b.l.o.o.d.y saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would...

Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences; they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos...

"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him--'I draw men as they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are'; 'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'--all imply the academic standpoint... Even his exquisite diction, which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist.

Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments.

But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them. It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus, who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke himself against the bars of life and poetry."

You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians.

The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless beauty, without regard to its spiritual import. What was to Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic--was to Sophocles the whole thing. Aeschylus was capable of wonderful psychological insight. Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way. But the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as

".... gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."

--divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic significance: because he has built like a t.i.tan, you do not at first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as someone has said. But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to see. His character-painting is exquisite: pathetic often; just and beautiful almost always. I put in the almost in view of that about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles" with her mother. The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on Aeschylus: but Sophocles' garb was the true fas.h.i.+onable Athenian chiton of his day. He was personal, where the other had been impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime; conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.

And then we come to third of the trio: Euripides, born in 480.

"He was," says Professor Murray, "essentially representative of his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of the stage--he won only four prizes in fifty years of production-- yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece." Athens hated, jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides. Where, in later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens of times. The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive, to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the G.o.ds, as Aeschylus had; his intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was. He questioned all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in comfortable fat acquiescence. He came to make men 'sit up and think.' He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung them at the head of the world. He must stir and probe things to the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the perfection of his poetry. Admetus is to die, unless someone will die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the worst of all possible happenings. Alcestis his wife will die for him; and he accepts her sacrifice. Now, that was the old saga; and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right. Woman was an inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that Alcestis should die for her lord.--Here let me make a point plain: you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into the past, the greater things you come to;--although in Egypt, too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization. In Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a state of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which, indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past. These great Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to the Greece of their time--of historic times; they were, I think, as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for memory. I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the Lodge--to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.--But to return to the story of Alcestis:--

You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I do not quite see how. Sophocles would have been aware of nothing wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course.

Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and rubbed it in for all he was worth. And he could not leave it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules at the end to win back Alcestis from death. So the play is great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:--leaves you just a little uncomfortable. Browning calls him, in _Balaustion's Adventure,_

".... Euripides The human, with his droppings of warms tears";

--it is a just verdict, perhaps. Without Aeschylus' Divine Wisdom, or Sophocles' worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the other.--I do not give you these sc.r.a.ps of criticism (which are not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of criticism; but for the sake of history;--understand them, and you have the story of the age illumined. You can read the inner Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age. When Euripides came, the light of the G.o.ds had gone. He was blindish; he would not accept the G.o.ds without question. Yet was he on the side of the G.o.ds whom he could not see or understand; we must count him on their side, and loved by them. He was not panoplied, like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and s.h.i.+ning armor; yet what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the h.e.l.lions'

batterings. Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon his own flesh. . . . Not even a total lack of humor, which I suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than a most sympathetic, an heroic figure. He was the child and fruitage and outcast of his age, belonging as much to an Athens declining and inwardly hopeless, as did Aeschylus (at first) to Athens in her early glory. He was not so much bothered (like Sophocles) with no message, as bothered with the fact that he had no clear and saving message. His realism--for compared with the other two, he was a sort of realist--was the child of his despair; and his despair, of the atmosphere of his age.

He was, or had been, in close touch with Socrates (you might expect it); lived a recluse somewhat, taking no part in affairs; married twice, unfortunately both times; and his family troubles were among the points on which gentlemanly Athens sneered at him.

A lovely lyricist, a restless thinker; tender-hearted; sublime in pity of all things weak and helpless and defeated:--women especially, and conquered nations. Prof. Murray says:

"In the last plays dying Athens is not mentioned, but her death- struggle and her sins are constantly haunting us; the Joy of battle is mostly gone; the horror of war is left. Well might old Aeschylus pray, 'G.o.d grant that I may sack no city!' if the reality of conquest is what it appears in the last plays of Euripides. The conquerors there are as miserable as the conquered; only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked."

He died the year before Aegospotami, at the court of Archelaus of Macedon. One is glad to think he found peace and honor at last.

Athens heard with a laugh that some courtier there had insulted him; and with astonishment that the good barbarous Archelaus had handed said courtier over to Euripides to be scourged for his freshness. I don't imagine that Euripides scourged him though-to amount to anything.

VI. SOCRATES AND PLATO

By this time you should have seen, rather than any picture of Greece and Athens in their heyday, an indication of certain universal historical laws. As thus (to go back a little): an influx of the Spirit is approaching, and a cycle of high activities is about to begin. A great war has cleared off what karmic weight has been hanging over Athens;--Xerxes, you will remember, burnt the town. Hence there is a clearness in the inner atmosphere; through which a great spiritual voice may, and does, speak a great spiritual message. But human activities proceed, ever increasing their momentum, until the atmosphere is no longer clear, but heavy with the effluvia of by no means righteous thought and action. The Spirit is no more visibly present, but must manifest if at all through a thicker medium; and who speaks now, speaks as artist only,--not as poet--or artist-prophet. Time goes on, and the inner air grows still thicker; till men live in a cloud, through which truths are hardly to be seen. Then those who search for the light are apt to cry out in despair; they become realists struggling to break the terrible molds of thought:--and if you can hear the Spiritual in them at all, it is not in a positive message they have for men, but in the greatness of their heart and compa.s.sion. They do not build; they seek only to destroy. There seems nothing else for them to do.

So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry; coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or less clearly through it his message from the G.o.ds. You hear a like radiant note of hope in Sh.e.l.ley; and something of it in Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from the Poet-Artist. Then you come to the ascendency of Tennyson, whose business in life was to be the latter. He tried the role of prophet; he lived up to the highest he could: strove towards the light much more gallantly than did Sophocles, his Athenian paradigm. But the atmosphere of his age made him something of a failure at it: no clear light was there for him to find, such as could manifest through poetry. Then you got men like Matthew Arnold with his cry of despair, and William Morris with his longing for escape; then the influence of Realism. So many poets recently have an element of Euripides in them; a will to do well, but a despair of the light; a tendency to question everything, but little power to find answers to their questions.