The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (22 page)

The central unity of George’s work is, then, the establishment of a new religion founded on the power of poetry, where it is the
form
that takes precedence over the content of any specific poem or body of poems: it is the form of poetry that
intensifies
sensation. This is to be viewed in the German tradition of
Bildung
, the process of self-cultivation and refinement in which
Dichtung
, the practice and experience of poetry, was seen as a highly valued critical corrective to the progressive domination of intellectual life by scientific research and dispassionate scholarship (
Wissenschaft
). Poetry, on this reading, is superior to the rational idioms of science “because it is imbued with the power of synthesis.”
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(Remember that Freud had been applauded for
his
synthesis.)

All this comes together, for George, in the centrality of the idea of praise. Praise, for him, is the foremost aspect of worship; praise establishes a relationship between the great man and his followers, between in effect a deity and his worshippers. People need both axes, George is saying, in order to be fulfilled. They need a vertical axis, someone to look
up to and learn from, and a horizontal axis, where members of the worshipping community live together according to shared ideals obtained by worship. The notion that “poetry is praise” was adopted by George for his later work. In 1928, Max Kommerell would publish
The Poet as Leader in the Age of German Classicism
.

LIVING WITH DISAPPOINTMENT

Paul Valéry, the French poet and man of letters, was born, he said, in one of the places where he would have wished to be born—Sète, in the South of France, “where my first impressions came from the sea and the activities of a seaport.” Sensitive and highly intelligent, Valéry grew up constantly anxious about making mistakes in his schoolwork and about competition (though there were only four pupils in his class). This may well have colored his attitudes in later life. Always self-disciplined (Nietzsche’s works formed his bedside reading early on), he began to write poetry in his teens, before he did his military service. In 1890, at age nineteen, he met the poet Pierre Louÿs at a festival to celebrate the sixth centenary of the University of Montpellier, Louÿs being a student delegate from Paris. A friendship blossomed, and the Parisian, who mixed in the circle centering on Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and André Gide, offered to show them some of Valéry’s work. These early friendships no doubt helped propel Valéry’s talent.

That talent included a lifelong interest in mathematics, and from that stemmed an interest in
order
, which in turn fueled an interest in music and architecture, major concerns of Mallarmé’s. For Valéry, music and architecture were the greatest art forms, for they were “pure intention.” It was this interest in order that shaped at least part of his philosophy: he thought our main concern should be the attempt to go beyond our organic/biological nature. For him, the processes of organic nature were no guide to the desirable issues of human evolution—as he pointed out, morbidity is as natural as healthiness.
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What separated humans from other animals was our ability to break free from our biological inheritance, and he insisted that “the various things that we are” may be best understood as discontin
uous from one another, casting doubt on the idea of the
moi pur
because we have many successive selves, some of which exist simultaneously.

Evolutionary fitness was for him a sort of red herring. He thought that our highest destiny is to be other than—outside—our biological urges; that “the soul’s reward is outside evolution, evolution and art [being] totally different,” the former achieving its results by imperceptible increments over long time spans, art achieving its effects, usually, by one magnificent urge, or surge. Valéry believed that the imperceptible pace of evolution led us to mistake continuity for finality, one consequence of this being that “there is no wholeness in the universe,” so that partiality is as real as totality—which is where the poet or artist comes in, creating “small worlds of order.” A successful work of art inspires “the force of faith without exacting belief.” A successful poem, for him, produces moments (moments, note) “of infinite consequence,” a separate reality from the biological world, spiritual but not theological. There is an overlap here with the views of Santayana.

Valéry was particularly concerned to show that there is a “mutual irrelevance” of biological and spiritual values—for him that was the
point
of being human, that we had broken free of our biology. Biological life, as he characterized it, was “ordinary,” but though the soul was a partner to the body, our most precious psychological experiences are those—such as delight in knowledge, or disinterested love—“which envisage an end radically distinct from our involvement in life.” He thought that the Romantics’ yearning after the unattainable stopped them—and many of us—from coming to terms with the fact that all stages in our quest for discovery “are ineluctably provisional.”
30
Rather, he thought that man, “a stranger on Earth,” could not bend the world as it is to any purpose: we cannot modify the constitution of things, but we can modify their relation to one another.

Valéry felt that disappointment “inevitably” arose in all earthly experiences because “they are never quite adequate to what the self might hope to derive from them.” He applied this to works of art also: however significant the landmarks, they are never really definitive (this was summed up in his famous remark that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned at a certain stage). A poet should be easy to impress and impossi
ble to convince; the spontaneous movements of the mind, especially our “strange preoccupation” with immortality, must be verified and examined by a stricter second self.

“A work of art is always to some extent a disappointment to its author, but because it announces something less than the
intended
discovery
, not because it is unequal to, or betrays, something already fully experienced and inadequately expressed. The perfection, to which the work is inadequate, lies beyond the work, not behind it; we are concerned with the falling short of a perfection whose complete conception—quite apart from concrete realizations—would itself be emergent, not with the imperfect expression of an ineffable but already known ‘profundity’ [italics added].” And this argument applies equally to the self: the essential self, “like the poetic reality which is one of its aspects,” is something to be discovered by emergence which, even as it emerges, is never the end point. And “[t]he product of any . . . single act is to be regarded as contributing to the discovery, not as the imperfect announcement of a thing discovered in a more favored state of consciousness. . . . The discovery itself is a purpose.”

This is why, for Valéry, order, or form (the sonnet in poetry, for example), is not a limitation: the form is objective, not limited to an immediate occasion, and determines relationships recognized by author and beholder alike, both of whom can assess the success or otherwise of the realization, each having a more or less agreed idea of the form and how it affects expression. A work of art shows us what we are capable of and points to a perfection that will never exist except in the mind of either the artist or the beholder, or both. The perfection, however big or small, always remains ideal; we must accept our disappointment as we savor the ideal notion that the work of art has set before us.
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For Valéry as for Stefan George, poetry, the poetic use of language, even its artificiality—especially its artificiality—were spiritual, at least in intent: “
L’esprit est un souffle, la pensée un poids.
”
32
Our most intimate, our most profound thoughts, he said, come from the naïveté and confusion of our ancestors, and no poetry worth the name can allow such thoughts to remain inexact—in that sense poetry has embodied progress, as a form of clarification (Thomas Nagel’s definition of philosophy). The intellect is the real angel in our heads, it is the intellect that determines that the soul is
an arbitrary construct, that art is the real spiritual construct, that spiritual life, seen in this way, is a proper part of nature. We are on the verge of the psychological age, he wrote.

Poetry was “an absolute place,” a voyage through “the Netherlands of in-between existence,” a way of thinking unlike any other, a way for thought and words to emerge, one result of Schopenhauer’s “will,” which Valéry thought of as “an urge without a goal,” perhaps the most meaningless thing in the cosmos. A poem is not just a way of reli[e]ving an internal pressure in the poet, or of producing “passive delight” in the reader or beholder, but also an indispensable means of arriving at a unique state of aesthetic consciousness. It is not so much something divine, as Mallarmé had said, as “the temporary depository of our intimations of divinity . . . the poem is, for the poet, at once an invitation to the reader, a stage in the realization of his own destiny, and no more than provisional in either of these functions.” In creating a poem, the poet becomes more than himself, a fuller form of himself; “the real destiny of the universe is to be expressed by poets.” The self is inexhaustible.
33

The very point of poetry, Valéry is saying, is for the human mind to approach asymptotically the experience, which is as far from the materially real as it can be, and yet still means something: that is what spirituality
is
. Many have said that religions draw much of their lasting force in the world from the continued existence of suffering. Valéry saw that people are capable of far more than they will actually achieve in their lifetimes, and that this knowledge—derived from reading and sharing poetry—should strengthen them and help them prepare for, and respond to, suffering. In other words, we are bigger than traditional religions allow us to be.

It is this
ambition
that unites the figures in this chapter.

EVANESCENT ORDER

W. B. Yeats described himself as “enthralled” by Nietzsche. In 1902, he wrote to his friend the American collector John Quinn, “I have not read anything with so much excitement,” and elsewhere he said that he found Nietzsche a “joy.”
34
Otto Bohlmann finds many correspondences between
the work of Nietzsche and that of Yeats, the latter distinguishing between a “harsh” and a “gentle” Nietzsche, and being drawn to the philosopher’s “darker” instincts and his ideas about man’s “frightful” inner nature. Yeats liked the fact that Nietzsche looked out on the world “with unmoistened eyes,” that he thought the “total character” of the world was “chaos,” and that the fact that the world was “rich in contradictions” was “fruitful.” He was sympathetic to Nietzsche’s opinion that love was “a brief forgiveness between opponents.”
35

For Yeats as for Nietzsche, personality “is a constantly renewed choice,” invariably giving life the qualities of a (Darwinian?) battle, which is nonetheless to be “embraced as a joy.” Once we acknowledge life as a tragedy, and understand our limitations, he said, we open ourselves to the fact that “even the shortest moments might contain something sacred, which outweigh [for that brief time] struggle and suffering.”

For Yeats, that’s what the aim of poetry was: the creation of brief moments of “ecstatic affirmation.” The world, as the phenomenologists say, is illogical, and reason, logic, poetic analogies and license allow us to “treat as equal what are merely similar,” thereby creating order; and even evanescent order is better than none.

Like his fellow Irishman George Bernard Shaw, Yeats both was and was not religious. He thought that “ultimate unity” can be achieved only beyond the physical world, but he also thought that subjectivity and objectivity need each other “if wholeness is to be achieved”; and that is what poetry is, subjectivity and objectivity wrapped up into order. For him, “all art is passion, the praise of life,” and he shared with Shaw, too, the view that there is “no final happy state except insofar as men may gradually grow better.” Great art—and great art always has tragic overtones—takes us “beyond self-consciousness” into “self-forgetfulness”: this is what salvation
is
.

He, too, was influenced by Mallarmé and the Symbolists. When he read Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s occult drama
Axel
, he said, “I could without much effort imagine that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for.” He was drawn to the Symbolist technique of terse and open-ended communication “that defies analytic attempts at exterior deciphering or decoding of ambiguities of meaning.” He liked the subtleties of poetry “that have a new
meaning every day.” For him this was “the meaning of meaning in poetry.”

Nor was Yeats averse to regarding art as having a sacred function—the poet as secular priest. “The arts in brooding on their own intensity have become religious and are seeking . . . to create a sacred book.” In “The Autumn of the Body” he writes: “The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests.” And, elsewhere: “How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their words upon men’s heartstrings again without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.”

His achievement in amalgamating metaphor and (Celtic) myth in noble, grandiose sweeps endowed poetry and poetry reading with a ritual, almost a ceremonial quality, and that, too, suggests it was a secular replacement form of liturgy.

In many of his works the protagonists combat chance elements of an indifferent cosmos. However, unlike Mallarmé, Yeats never abandoned the possibility of spiritual transcendence, which is why his broader significance lies elsewhere. He was as much a child of his time as he was of his father. John Butler Yeats was a confirmed religious skeptic. A lawyer who abandoned the bar in Dublin to study painting in London, he was later described as a man “who had an opinion about everything and information and eloquence to support it, and was always witty and intelligent even when inaccurate. Edward Dowden, G. K. Chesterton, Van Wyck Brooks, and others have testified to his personal charm.” Trained in law, J. B. liked dichotomies, the social versus the individual, the intellect versus the emotions—in particular “poetry is the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the sociable-minded.”
36
For him, Shakespeare’s age was the ideal age, for then, “everybody was happy.” Unhappiness came in with the French Revolution, “which brought realism along with it.” And there were two kinds of belief, he maintained, the poetical and the religious, poetry expressing an absolute freedom, and religion embodying the denial of liberty.