Platonism in English Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

This essay was presented as a dissertation for the doctorate in Columbia University. It attempts to explain the nature of the influence of Platonism upon English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exclusive of the drama. Its method is purely critical. It has not attempted to treat the subject from the standpoint of the individual poet, but has tried to interpret the whole body of English poetry of the period under survey as an integral output of the spiritual thought and life of the time.

In its interpretation of this body of poetry the essay has aimed to see Platonism in its true historical perspective, as it must have been understood by the poets, either as a system of philosophic thought held consciously in the mind, or as a more intimate possession of the spirit in its outlook upon life. The idea of Platonism which these poets had was that which Ficino had made known to Italy of the viii fifteenth century, and from Italy to the rest of Europe. Ficino saw Plato through two more or less refracting media. To him Plato was the “divine Plato,” the importance of whose work lay in its subtle affinity for the forms of Christian thought. He thus Christianized Plato’s philosophy. But this body of thought was that peculiar product resulting from the study of Plato’s “Dialogues” in the light of what latter-day criticism has named Neo-platonism, or that new form of Platonic philosophy which is expounded in the “Enneads” of Plotinus. But more than this. Ficino endeavored to reform the practice of love by the application of the Platonic doctrine of love and beauty to the lover’s passion. From his “Commentarium in Convivium,” which he translated into Italian, originate the various discussions of love and beauty from the Platonic standpoint which were carried on in dialogues and manuals of court etiquette throughout the sixteenth century. In this essay, consequently, reference has been made to Ficino’s “Commentarium” on the points involved in the theory of love and beauty. The translations have been made directly from the Latin version of the commentary. On the more metaphysical side of Platonism the “Enneads” of Plotinus have ix been accepted as representative. The translation on page 77 is taken from Mr. Bigg’s “Neo-Platonism,” and those on pages 153 , 154 , 155 are from Thomas Taylor’s translation noted in the bibliography. In interpreting the “Enneads” I have accepted the explanation of his system by Mr. Whittaker in “The Neo-Platonists.” All the quotations from Plato’s “Dialogues” are from Jowett’s translation. In quoting from the poets the texts of the editions noted in the bibliography have been followed in details of spelling, punctuation, and the like.

In the preparation of the work hardly anything of a critical nature was found serviceable. In the notes to the works of the individual poets several detached references are to be gratefully mentioned, but no general appreciation of the part Platonism played in the work of the English poets was at hand. Mr. Fletcher’s article on the “Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,” in the second number of the “Journal of Comparative Literature,” appeared after this essay had gone to the printer.

I should like to acknowledge my thanks to Mr. W. H. Heck for his service of transcription in the British Museum Library and to Miss M. P. Conant for a similar kindness in research work in the Harvard College Library. x To Professor George Edward Woodberry I am most deeply grateful for innumerable suggestions and invaluable advice. The work was undertaken at his suggestion, and throughout the past two years has progressed under his kindly criticism. But the help and inspiration which I have received from him antedate the inception of the essay, extending back to the earlier days of undergraduate life. The work is thus inseparably connected with the training in the study of literature which he has given, and his help in its completion is only an episode in a long series of kindnesses which he has been ever willing to show.

I. HOLINESS

The fundamental doctrine of Platonism as it was understood throughout the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the reality of a heavenly beauty known in and by the soul, as contrasted with an earthly beauty known only to the sense. In this the Christian philosophic mind found the basis for its conception of holiness. Christian discipline and Platonic idealism blended in the “Faerie Queene” in the legend of the Red Cross Knight.

The underlying idea taught by Spenser in the first book is that holiness is a state of the soul in which wisdom or truth can be seen and loved in and for its beauty. In the allegorical scheme of his work Una stands for the Platonic 2 wisdom, σοφία, or ἀρετή, and a sight of her in her native beauty constitutes the happy ending of the many struggles and perplexities that the Red Cross Knight experiences in his pursuit of holiness. The identification of Una with the Platonic idea of truth or wisdom is not merely a matter of inference left for the reader to draw; for Spenser himself is careful to inform us of the true nature of the part she plays in his allegory. Una is presented as teaching the satyrs truth and “trew sacred lore.” (I. vi. 19; I. vi. 30.) When the lion, amazed at her sight, forgets his fierceness, Spenser comments:

When Una summons Arthur to the rescue of the Red Cross Knight from the Giant and the Dragon, Spenser opens his canto with a reflection on the guiding power of grace and truth amid the many perils of human life:

Here Arthur is meant by grace and Una by truth. In accordance with the same conception of Una’s nature Satyrane is made to wonder

Furthermore, she is represented as guiding the Red Cross Knight to Fidelia’s school, where he is to taste her “heavenly learning,” to hear the wisdom of her divine words, and to learn “celestiall discipline.” (I. x. 18.) In making these comments and in thus directing the course of the action of his poem Spenser presents in Una the personification of truth or wisdom.

But he does more than this; he presents her not only as wisdom, but as true beauty. Spenser is so thoroughly convinced of the truth of that fundamental idea of Platonic ethics, that truth and beauty are identical, that he shows their union in the character of Una, 4 in whom, as her name signifies, they are one. Plato had taught that the highest beauty which the soul can know is wisdom, which, though invisible to sight, would inflame the hearts of men in an unwonted degree could there be a visible image of her. In his “Phædrus” he had stated that “sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her.” (250.) Convinced, as Spenser was, of the spiritual nature of the beauty of wisdom, he carefully avoids dwelling upon any detail of Una’s physical beauty. The poetic form of allegory, through which his ideas were to be conveyed, required the personification of truth, and the romantic character of chivalry demanded that his Knight should have a lady to protect. The progress of the action of the poem, moreover, made necessary some reference to the details of Una’s form and feature. (Cf. I. iii. 4–6; vi. 9.) But in no instance where the physical form of Una is brought to notice is there any trace of the poet’s desire to concentrate attention upon her physical charms. In this respect Una 5 stands distinctly apart from all his other heroines, and especially Belphœbe. And yet Spenser has taken the greatest care to show that the source of Una’s influence over those that come into her presence lies in the power exerted by her beauty; but this is the beauty of her whole nature, a penetrating radiance of light revealing the soul that is truly wise. Indeed, when Spenser has the best of opportunities to describe Una, after she has laid aside the black stole that hides her features, he contents himself with a few lines, testifying only to their radiant brilliancy:

In other instances he directs our attention to the power which the mere sight of her has upon the beholder. Her beauty can tame the raging lion and turn a ravenous beast into a strong body-guard who finds his duty in the light of her fair eyes:

The wild-wood gods stand astonished at her beauty, and in their wonder pity her desolate condition. (I. vi. 9–12.) Old Sylvanus is smitten by a sight of her. In her presence he doubts the purity of his own Dryope’s fairness; sometimes he thinks her Venus, but then on further reflection he recalls that Venus never had so sober mood; her image calls to mind—

To behold her lovely face the wood nymphs flock about and when they have seen it, they flee away in envious fear, lest the contrast of 7 its beauty may disgrace their own. (I. vi. 18.)

By these dramatic touches Spenser very skilfully suggests to his reader the high nature of Una’s beauty. It has a power to win its way upon the brute creation, and it has a severity and radiance that set it off from the beauty of physical form possessed by the wood nymphs and even by the great goddess of love, Venus.

The most important consideration that bears upon the question of Una’s beauty is found in the method which Spenser has used to indicate how the Red Cross Knight attains to a knowledge of it. One reason why the people of the wood, the nymphs, the fauns, and the satyrs, were permitted to see the celestial beauty of Una unveiled lay in the fact that through their experiences a means was provided by the poet to quicken the imagination into a sense of its pure nature. But the Knight, though he had journeyed with her throughout a great portion of her “wearie journey,” had never been able to see her face in its native splendor, hidden, as it had always been, from his sight by the black veil which Una wore. The deep conceit which Spenser here uses points in the direction of Platonism; for there it 8 was taught that wisdom could be seen only by the soul. This is a fundamental truth, present everywhere in Plato, in the vision of beauty that rises before the mind at the end of the dialectic of the “Symposium,” in the species of divine fury that accompanies the recollection of the ideal world in the presence of a beautiful object, as analyzed in the “Phædrus,” and in the “Hymn of the Dialectic” in the “Republic” by which the soul rises to a sight of the good. (VII. 532.) In the “Phædo” the function of philosophy is explained to lie in the exercise by the soul of this power of spiritual contemplation of true existence. (82, 83.) In Spenser this conception is further illustrated by the part which the schooling, received by the Red Cross Knight on the Mount of Contemplation, played in the perfection of his mental vision. Up to the time when the Knight comes to the Mount he is, as the aged sire says, a “man of earth,” and his spirit needs to be purified of all the grossness of sense. (I. x. 52.) When this has been accomplished, the Knight is prepared to

9 While on this Mount he is initiated into a knowledge of the glories of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and through this experience he is made aware of the relative insignificance of that beauty which he had thought the greatest to be known on earth. He thus says to the aged man, Heavenly Contemplation, who has revealed this vision to him:

With his soul filled with the radiance of this vision of beauty, his eyes dazed—

the Red Cross Knight descends from the Mount; and when after the completion of his labors he sees Una on the day of her betrothal, he wonders 10 at a beauty in her which he has never before seen. Una has now laid aside her black veil, and shines upon him in the native undimmed splendor of truth.

The contribution of Platonism to the formation of the ideal of holiness can now be easily recognized. The discipline of the Red Cross Knight in the House of Holiness is twofold. In the practice of the Christian graces—faith, hope, and charity—the Knight is perfected in the way of the righteous life. He is a penitent seeking to cleanse his soul of the infection of sin. On the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation he exercises his soul in the contemplative vision of the eternal world. But the emphasis laid by Platonism upon the loveliness of that wisdom which is the object of contemplation results in quickening the imagination 11 and in stirring the soul to realize the principle in love. This is the exact nature of the experience of the Red Cross Knight at the end of his journey. On the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation he has a desire to remain in the peaceful contemplation of heaven:

But the aged sire, Heavenly Contemplation, reminds him of his duty to free Una’s parents from the dragon. (I. x. 63.) Obedient but still purposing to return to the contemplative life (I. x. 64.), the Knight descends; and in the performance of his duty he gains the reward that the contemplative life brings. “But he,” says Plato, “whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike face or any bodily form which is the expression of divine beauty.” (“Phædrus,” 251.) Thus it is that the Red Cross Knight

12 With that sight comes the one joy of his life after the many struggles experienced in the perfection of his soul in holiness.

II. TEMPERANCE

The spiritual welfare of the soul was the prime object of importance to the Christian. Through the power of its doctrine of heavenly beauty Platonism had entered into the conception of this life considered in its heavenward aspect. It remained to show how it could explain the right manner of conduct for the soul in the presence of those strong passions which were felt as the disturbing elements of its inner welfare. In the Platonic system of morality there was a conception of temperance, σωφροσύνη, based upon an analysis of the soul sufficiently comprehensive to cover the entire scope of its activities; in fact, temperance was there conceived as the necessary condition for the presence of any virtue in the soul. The vitality of this teaching in English poetry is found in the second book of Spenser’s 13 “Faerie Queene,” celebrating the exploits of the knight Guyon,

The adventures of Guyon, through the discipline of which he perfects himself in temperance, fall into two distinct groups. Up to the sixth book the conflicts in which he is concerned are those calculated to try his mastery of the angry impulses of his nature. After the sixth book his struggles record his proficiency in governing the sensual desires of appetite. This division is made in accordance with the analysis of the soul on which Plato bases his doctrine of temperance. Within the soul are three distinct principles,—one rational and two irrational. The irrational principles are, first, the irascible impulse of spirit (θυμός) with which a man is angry and, second, the appetitive instinct the workings of which are manifested in all the sensual gratifications of the body, and in the love of wealth. The rational principle is that of reason by which a man learns truth. (“Republic,” IX. 580, 581.) Against this one rational principle the two irrational impulses are constantly insurgent, and temperance is that harmony 14 or order resulting in the soul when the rational principle rules and the two irrational principles are obedient to its sovereignty. “And would you not say,” asks Socrates, “that he is temperate who has these same elements in friendly harmony, in whom the one ruling principle of reason, and the two subject ones of spirit and desire are equally agreed that reason ought to rule, and do not rebel?” (“Republic,” IV. 442.)

The rule of right reason in Guyon over his angry impulses is recorded in three instances; in each case the anger is aroused under varying conditions. The opening episode of the book presents Guyon checking the impetuous fury of his wrath when he learns that it has been aroused by a false presentation of the facts. Archimago, the deceitful enemy of truth, related to Guyon how the Red Cross Knight had violated the purity of a maiden; and the pretended maiden herself became a party to the lie. (II. i. 10, 11, 17.) When Guyon heard of this outrage he hastened to avenge the wrong.

15 And yet he wondered how the Red Cross Knight could have done such a deed. He knew that he was a knight of honor and had won glory in his defence of Una. (II. i. 19.) He was quick, then, to restrain himself when about to charge upon the accused Knight, for on his shield he recognized the cross of his Lord. When he was on the point of clashing with his enemy, he

After an apology and an exchange of knightly courtesies with the Red Cross Knight he was able to

The second encounter of Guyon with the forces of wrath is the struggle with Furor and his mother Occasion. (II. iv. 3–36.) He has now to try his strength in conquering wrath when it has an occasion to be aroused. The power with which he strives is described as a fury of great might, but so ill-governed by 16 reason that in its blind passion its force is spent to no purpose.

Guyon struggles with this madman and finally, after he has quieted the reviling tongue of Occasion, who urges her son, Furor, on to the conflict, he binds him with iron chains.

The third trial of Guyon’s reason is by a species of wrath so wilfully furious that it 17 runs to seek an occasion for a quarrel, and finds no rest until it has succeeded. This type of irascible impulse is portrayed in Pyrochles. He delights in deeds of daring might, and in blood and spoil. (II. iv. 42.) His squire, Atin by name, acts as his forerunner to seek an occasion for his lord’s furious delight. (II. iv. 43.) But Guyon masters himself both in his refusal to fight for no good reason, and in his behavior when forced against his wishes to a conflict with Pyrochles. Guyon bids Atin tell his master that he, Guyon, has bound Occasion, and the Palmer, who is the rational element of Guyon personified, lectures the squire on the folly of wilful anger.

Even when Guyon is compelled by Pyrochles to the fight, the Knight does not give way to unrestrained wrath, but ever tempers his passion 18 with reason. In the conflict Pyrochles thundered blows:

When at last Guyon has his foe at his feet, he spares his life, so firmly he holds his passion in check.

Thus far Guyon’s life has exemplified the rule of reason over the irrational element of wrath; the remaining episodes of his life centre about the struggle of the irrational element of appetite. In this his soul is tried in three various forms of sensual desire. In Phædria the first form is typified. She represents the light gaieties of frivolous mirth and wantonness which the courteous nature of Guyon may suffer to play until they pass the bounds of modesty. (II. vi. 21.) When, however, she tried to win his heart from warlike enterprise into dissolute delights of sense, Guyon

The second trial of Guyon’s temperance comes in the House of Mammon, where he triumphs over sensual desire in the form of covetousness. Mammon offers him mountains of gold, if he will but serve him (II. vii. 9.); he tries to induce him to accept by saying that money is the one necessity to supply all the wants of man. (II. vii. 11.) But Guyon answers:

When Mammon urges him to seat himself on the silver stool in the Garden of Proserpina, to rest awhile and eat of the golden fruit of the trees,—

The culminating trial of the Knight’s temperance is made in Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss. Acrasia typifies that form of beauty that allures the senses with pleasure, but ruins the soul with its poisonous delight. (II. i. 52, 53.) The only fear that she and the inmates of her bower have is

During the passage to this place of delight, and while he was within its precincts, Guyon was able to withstand every assault of sensual desire upon his soul. When the Palmer, speaking as reason dictated, told him that the piteous cry of a woman in distress was only a deceitful ruse to win him to harm—

Again, when Guyon’s senses are “softly tickled” by the rare melody of the mermaids, as it mingled 21 with the strange harmony of the rolling sea, he bids the boatman row easily.

Even when Guyon began to lessen his pace at the sight of the fair maidens sporting in the lake, which kindled signs of lust in his countenance, his reason was able to resist.

He has now become so strong that he can perform the great object of his adventures, the destruction of the Bower of Bliss and the capture of the enchantress, Acrasia. (II. xii. 83, 84.)

So powerful is the hold on Spenser’s mind of this Platonic conception of the nature of the struggle in the soul striving to be temperate that it colors even the Aristotelean doctrine of the mean which is worked out in the episode of Medina’s castle. (II. ii. 13 et seq. ) According to Aristotle temperance is a mean between 22 the excess and defect of pleasure. (“Nich. Ethics,” III, 10.) In Spenser, Medina is the mean; her two sisters, Elissa and Perissa, are the defect and excess respectively. (II. ii. 35, 36.) Yet Spenser has colored the character of each in accordance with the Platonic division of the soul. The three sisters are daughters of one sire by three different mothers; that is, they are the three principles of the soul (the sire); namely, right reason (Medina), wrath or spirit (Elissa), and sensual desire (Perissa). Thus Spenser describes Elissa:

So, too, in the description of the lovers of each, the presence of the two irrational principles is felt. In Hudibras, the devoted Knight of Elissa—

the angry impulse of the soul is reflected; while in Sans Loy, the lover of Perissa, who had attempted to violate the purity of Una,—

it is apparent that the appetitive element of the soul is figured. Temperance, then, according to Spenser, is not the golden mean between the excess and defect of pleasure, but between two disturbing passions.

This struggle between the rational principle and the irrational elements in the soul does not, however, constitute temperance. That virtue, or rather that condition of all virtue, is the harmony and order resulting in the soul after reason has quieted the disturbing passions, and is conceived by Plato as its very health or 24 beauty. “‘Healthy,’ as I conceive,” says Socrates, “is the name which is given to the regular order of the body, whence comes health and every other bodily excellence.... And ‘lawful’ and ‘law’ are the names which are given to the regular order and action of the soul, and these make men lawful and orderly:—and so we have temperance and justice.” (“Gorgias,” 504.) The fruition of this idea in Spenser’s mind is noticeable in his manner of speaking about temperance throughout his poem. Amavia had been able to win her husband back to the ways of purity through wise handling and “faire governaunce.” (II. i. 54.) The Red Cross Knight mentions the “goodly governaunce” of Guyon’s life. (II. i. 29.) Spenser comments in an introductory stanza on the Knight’s demeanor in pleasures and pains:

The Knight and the Palmer move on in their path of progress “in this faire wize,” that is, in the ways of temperance. (II. i. 34.) When Archimago meets Guyon, he meets

The feeling of order is conveyed through the movements of Guyon’s charger. The Palmer

The clearest explanation, however, of Spenser’s conception of temperance as the condition of the soul’s excellence in the body is given in his reflection at the opening of the eleventh book of the second canto, which records the repulse of the bodily senses from the dwelling-place of Alma, or the soul. No war is so fierce as that of the passions with the soul.

After this examination of Spenser’s ideals of holiness and temperance, it is clear why Platonism as a system of ethics is absent in the remaining books of the “Faerie Queene.” Spenser’s avowed aim in his poem was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” Since he conceives of life as a constant warfare with inward and outward foes, his method of presenting his thought is to send each virtue on a journey during which it is to perfect itself by overcoming the vices to whose assaults it is especially liable. This plan is carefully followed in the first two books. The allegorical scheme is unbroken; the personages encountered by the Knights are objectified states of their own spiritual consciousness. In the remaining books, however, the allegorical scheme has well-nigh broken down; and the poetic method is that of the romantic epic of adventure in the manner of Ariosto. This change was due very largely to the fact that after Spenser had completed his first two books he had exhausted the ethical teachings of 27 Plato; and when he went on to his remaining books, he passed out of the sphere of virtue as taught by Plato into an essentially different realm of thought in which the graces of courtly accomplishment were dignified as virtues. He tried to treat these later virtues of chastity, friendship, justice, courtesy, and constancy as if they were coördinate with the virtues of holiness and temperance. But they fall into a distinct class by themselves. They are the ideals of conduct to be followed when man is acting in his purely social capacity as a member of society. They may be dignified as virtues, but can never be coördinate with the Platonic conception of virtue, which conceives of it not as an outward act, but as the very health of the soul when realizing, unhampered by any disturbing influences, its native impulses toward the good.

The difference between these two conceptions is strikingly illustrated by a comparison of Spenser’s idea of justice with the Platonic notion. According to the English poet, justice is purely retributive, a dispensing of reward and punishment. The education of the Knight of Justice, Arthegal, by Astræa, is thus described:

In Plato, on the other hand, justice is the same thing as temperance, an inward state of the soul and the condition of any virtue. “But,” says Socrates, “in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others,—he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him ... and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act ... always thinking and calling that which preserves and cöoperates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any 29 time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.” (“Republic,” IV. 443.) Spenser did not attempt to incorporate this idea into his notion of justice; he had already exhausted it in his second book, in his explanation of temperance. Nothing was left for him to do but to shift his mind from a conception of virtue as one, to an inferior notion of virtue as a manifold of personal graces. But in thus changing his idea, he destroyed the unity of his work. In his first two books he had explained how the soul could perfect itself in the full scope of its powers; and in doing this he had taught the Platonic doctrines of a heavenly beauty and of temperance as the condition of virtue in the soul. Here lay the basic idea of his conception of a gentleman.

This idea, however, is not felt as the informing spirit of his books on courtesy and on friendship, but appears only in scattered reflections. In the later books the inferior conception of 30 virtue is the controlling idea, and Spenser has failed to harmonize it with his earlier and finer one.

III. CHASTITY

Although Platonism as a system of ethical philosophy determined the structural unity of the first two books of the “Faerie Queene” and as a system ceases to be felt in the construction of the later books, the purity of its ethical teaching is present throughout the entire work. The truths of Platonism were a strong influence in moulding an ideal of noble love. The cardinal doctrine of this ethical philosophy was that true beauty is to be found by the soul only in moral ideas. This conviction, which was so powerful in ennobling the Christian conception of holiness, was carried over into the realm of man’s social relations, and through the genius of Spenser made to dignify the conception of human love, and to inform with a profound spiritual truth the idea of chastity in its broadest signification as the purity of the soul.

The influence of the ethical conception of beauty upon the subject of romantic love is 31 found in the work of Spenser. Although Spenser’s mind had a strong bent toward philosophy, so that it could interpret the very spirit of Plato’s conception of wisdom and temperance, it was still a mind in which the genius of the poet was always uppermost. It thus resulted that in him the teaching of the beauty of moral ideas came to fruition in ennobling the conception of human life by an appreciation of the true beauty of woman’s inner nature, her womanhood, and by a conception of love that placed its source in the reverent adoration of this spiritual beauty.

The exposition of the true inward beauty of woman is found in the “Epithalamion” and in a minor episode of the “Faerie Queene.” In the account of the dialectic, by which the lover gains a sight of absolute beauty, Plato has stated that at one stage the lover will see that beauty of mind surpasses beauty of outward form. Plato says, “In the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of outward form.” (“Symposium,” 210.) This idea lies at the basis of Spenser’s praise of beauty in the “Epithalamion.” In his marriage hymn he 32 dwells in exuberant Renaissance fashion upon the physical perfections of the bride, each detail an object of delight to the senses. The sight of such beauty amazes the beholders. But after this is done, Spenser draws attention to the truth that, although these perfections that are visible to the eye may daze the mind, there is a higher beauty of soul which no eye can see. His admiration for the bride’s beauty is then caught up into a more lofty pitch and blended with his love of her moral qualities.

In the “Faerie Queene” there is a less elaborate example of this same appreciation of the inward, unseen beauty of the soul. The contrast is set up between the lively portrait of the Faerie Queene on Guyon’s shield and the actual beauty of her person, and then extended to a comparison of this with the beauty of her mind. Arthur has asked Guyon who is the original of the portrait he bears on his shield and has chanced to notice its great liveliness. Guyon 34 does not answer directly, but breaks out into praise of the Queen’s beauty. If a mere likeness appeals so strongly to Arthur, what must he think when he beholds the glorious original; and though this is fair, the beauty of her mind, if he but knew it, would arouse great wonder and pour infinite desire into his soul.

In the vision of this inward world of beauty in woman’s mind, so Spenser teaches, begins the passion of love. In the “Phædrus” Plato has analyzed it as a divine fury, and in his account he emphasizes the feeling of reverence with which the lover gazes upon the beauty of the beloved, seeing in it the idea of pure beauty which his soul has beheld in its prenatal existence. “But he,” says Plato, “whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator 35 of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike face or any bodily form which is the expression of divine beauty; and at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him; then looking upon the face of his beloved as of a god he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god.” (“Phædrus,” 251.) The habit of contemplating the beauty of the beloved in reverent fear is characteristic of the love which Arthegal feels for Britomart. So intimately acquainted was Spenser with Plato that he caught the spirit of his worship of beauty. Disguised as Britomart, the virgin Knight of Chastity, was, in her panoply of armor, her beauty was not the object of constant sight. On three different occasions, however, when by the removal of some portion of it her features shine forth, the impression made by her beauty is that of reverent adoration. When Arthegal chances thus to behold her, the sight is so awful that he hesitates to press his suit for her love, and only after some time does he venture to win her affections.

36 One occasion on which the spectators catch a glimpse of Britomart’s beauty occurs when she unlaces her helmet. The sight of her golden locks strikes all with amazement; and though there is a mingled feeling of surprise and curiosity, due to the preconceived notion of her sex, the feeling of amazement and adoration of her beauty is expressly stated as consequent upon this revelation.

37 A second time when her beauty is revealed in greater fulness, the feeling of terror and amazement inspired is especially emphasized. The spectators are described as standing in mute astonishment, in worship of her divine beauty.

In the fight between Britomart and Arthegal the sword of the latter cuts away a part of her ventayle, discovering to his view her beautiful face. As he is about to raise his arm for a second blow, he is benumbed with fear, and, falling on his knee, he gazes upon her beauty with a true religious feeling of wonder.

With this vision of the resplendent beauty of chastity begins Arthegal’s love for Britomart. It has been pointed out by critics that the love episode between Britomart and Arthegal was a suggestion—so far as plot goes—which Spenser found in Ariosto’s account of the love of Ruggiero and Bradamante in the “Orlando Furioso.” ^[1] But the great difference in the 39 poets appears in the contrast of the passionate love of beauty revealed in Spenser’s poem with the superficial delights of love as explained in Ariosto. As has already been seen, Platonism as a system of ethics disappears from the “Faerie Queene” after the second book; but so deeply had Spenser been impressed with the worship of beauty characteristic of Plato’s manner, that when he came to recount the history of the passion of love, in his Knight of Justice, for his heroine, Chastity, he centred attention upon the feeling of awe and reverence inspired by the beauty of chastity, and intimated the sobering effect of this vision upon the behavior of the lover. He found nothing like this in the “Orlando Furioso.” The love episode in Ariosto is thus briefly described:

Here is only the note of delight. In Spenser, however, the dread awe aroused by Britomart’s beauty restrains the passionate utterance of the lover, and only after some time has elapsed, during which the two have rested from the fatigues of their combat, does Arthegal dare to make suit to Britomart’s affections,—

The training afforded by the philosophy of Plato in the realization of the true moral value of beauty has a somewhat different result in the work of Milton. Owing to his preconceived notion of the moral inferiority of woman, Milton does not permit his mind to dwell upon the vision of beauty to be seen in her, as Spenser’s chivalric impulses have led him to do; but in Milton the flowering of Platonic thought is found in a certain conception of chastity, which teaches that love begins and ends only in the soul. And yet the deep sense of beauty which 41 he has, asserts itself at times even in spite of his prejudices; consequently in his work there is a wavering of mind between the conviction that woman’s beauty cannot be the expression of the beauty of a moral order, since she is the moral inferior of man, and the more chivalric notion that in her beauty lies the inspiration of the soul to know goodness.

In Milton the love of beauty is the conscious activity of a contemplative mind rather than the pouring out of the soul’s passion in reverent adoration. About Spenser beauty lies as a golden splendour streaming from the hidden world of the moral nature; whenever it shines upon the lover’s sight, it at once moves him to silent adoration. In Milton, on the other hand, beauty is an idea to be known in the soul by him who seeks for it among the beautiful objects of the world of sense; its pursuit is an intellectual quest of a philosophic mind. Writing to his friend, Charles Diodati, he says: “What besides God has resolved concerning me I know not, but this at least: He has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour as the fables have it, is Ceres said to have sought her 42 daughter Proserpine, as I am wont day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful (hanc τοῦ καλοῦ ἰδέaν) through all the forms and faces of things ( for many are the shapes of things divine ), and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces.” ^[2]

The expression of this love of beauty is found in Milton’s Satan. Abiding beneath the wreck of his moral character, in spite of the perversion of a malicious will, there remain in Satan a deep sense of beauty and a contemplative love of it for its moral quality. In a speech addressed to Christ in “Paradise Regained” Satan himself confesses this one conviction of his soul. The contemplative love of the beauty of goodness and virtue is the very condition of his soul’s existence. Thus he says:

The honesty of this confession is not impugned by Christ, although he exposes the hollow insincerity 43 of the rest of Satan’s speech in which these lines occur.

And Satan lives up to his confession. The power of moral goodness to hold his mind’s thought by its beauty is seen in his behavior in the Garden of Eden. He had reached this place in pursuit of his revenge to ruin the happy pair. As he gazes upon the beauties of the garden,

On these he stands gazing until evening, and at last breaks out into an expression of the love which this vision of their beauty has aroused in him:

At another time Satan is occupied in contemplating beauty, but it is the beauty he sees in Eve alone. Milton’s treatment of the episode is characteristic of that wavering of his mind between the two impulses—one to worship beauty, and the other to teach that woman is the inferior of man. The later conviction is expressed in Adam’s words to Raphael:

Thus Eve confesses that in Adam’s beauty, and not in the image of her own soft feminine grace, does she

45 Yet in the presence of Eve’s beauty Satan stands lost in contemplation, made for one moment good.

Even here the idea of the inferiority of Eve’s beauty enters into the description; but a few lines below it makes itself even more strongly felt. Because her beauty is without its power to inspire awe and terror, Satan reasons that she is the proper one to tempt.

In this contemplative love of beauty there is present as a noticeable element the consciousness in the poet’s mind of the moral significance of beauty. In Spenser’s description of the first meeting of Calidore with Pastorella, however, the contemplative love of beauty so absorbs the power of the soul that the lover and the poet are oblivious to every other thought and silently gaze upon the beauty of form present to their eyes. Calidore sees Pastorella on a little hillock surrounded by maidens, she lovelier than all.

So Satan stands before the happy pair in Paradise. His will toward them is far otherwise than Calidore’s toward Pastorella; but his contemplative love of their beauty is one in spirit with the youthful lover’s.

47 The most characteristic side of Milton’s idealism, however, is revealed in his teaching of the doctrine of chastity as the purity of the soul. In the defence of his own life which he made in “An Apology for Smectymnuus,” he acknowledges an important debt in his education to the teaching of Platonic philosophy. “Thus, from the laureat fraternity of poets,” he says, “riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading led me to the shady spaces of philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon: where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy ... and how the first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, producing those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtue: with such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listening, readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding.” ^[3] Milton was the only poet of his time who was able to conceive of chastity as an “abstracted sublimity,” 48 known in and by the soul. In his treatment of this theme, there are two phases: one in which the enthusiasm of Milton asserts itself in a positive way, and the other a conviction of maturer experience, in which sin is explained negatively in its relation to the soul’s purity.

The fundamental idea of Plato on which Milton built his doctrine of chastity is the one taught in the “Phædo,” that every experience of the soul gained through the medium of the senses tends to degrade the soul’s pure essence into the grosser, corporeal form of the body. “And were we not saying long ago,” says Socrates, “that the soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?” (“Phædo,” 79.) This appears in the “Comus” in a modified form, 49 and constitutes the basis for Milton’s conception of sin in “Paradise Lost.” In the masque the idea is plainly stated by the Elder Brother in his explanation of the doctrine of chastity; and its workings are seen in the effect of the magic potion of Comus upon all who drink it.

This idea, thus stated, is represented symbolically in the disfigurement which the magic 50 liquor of Comus works in the divine character of the soul visible in the countenance.

The opposition indicated in the Platonic doctrine between the senses and the soul is carried over by Milton in his description of the trial undergone by the spirit of him who strives to be chaste. In Plato the fundamental idea is somewhat different from Milton’s; for Plato is concerned with the problem of the attainment by the soul of pure knowledge, and he means by sense knowledge not sensuality in the restricted moral signification of that word, but in the broader signification of all experience gained through all the senses. Milton, however, places a narrow interpretation upon the doctrine of Plato. This is evident in his description of 51 the attempt made by Comus to allure The Lady to sensual indulgence.

Comus endeavors twice to overpower The Lady. He tries to tempt her to impurity of conduct, and also seeks to blind her judgment through the power of sense illusion. In this second trial there may be seen the influence of the Platonic notion of sense knowledge destroying the soul’s purity; the first trial contains the more narrow application of the idea of unchastity. Milton himself calls attention to the greater similarity of Comus to his mother, Circe, the enchantress of men’s minds, than to Bacchus, the god of wine. He is

In keeping with his character he tries to entice The Lady to drink his magic potion. He reminds her that about him are all the pleasures that fancy can beget; he praises the marvellous efficacy of his elixir in stirring joy within; and pleads with her not to be cruel to the dainty limbs that were given for gentle usage.

To this argument The Lady replies simply that no real pleasure can result from mere physical gratification, but only from the enjoyment of the moral quality of goodness. Thus she says to Comus:

53 But when Comus reveals the more subtle trait of his nature, the response which The Lady makes rises to the height of the threatening danger. The Circean strain in his character is his power of deceiving the soul through sense illusion, and his insidious desire to win his way into the hearts of men by courteous words and gay rhetoric. Thus, when he first is conscious of the approach of The Lady, he says:

The effect of this sense witchery is seen in the forebodings of The Lady’s fancy and in the hallucinations that haunt her mind as she comes within the range of its spells. She says:

When Comus, then, begins to practise the more dangerous art of this witchery, acting in accordance with his confession of his manner,—

she responds to the attack with an account of the great power of chastity. Only because she sees that he is trying to deceive her judgment does she deign to answer him.

She then intimates the power which the doctrine of chastity has to overcome Comus, and states that, should she attempt to unfold it, the enthusiasm of her soul would be such as to overwhelm him and his magic structures.

55 This vehemence of moral enthusiasm in Milton is due to the conception of chastity as an “abstracted sublimity.” He learned it, he says, in his study of Platonic philosophy; but the teaching of it as a positive doctrine applied to human conduct is his own contribution, and strikes the characteristic note of his idealism. In Plato he found only the suggestion of this teaching. It lay in that idea of the “Phædo,” already explained, of the destruction of the soul’s purity through sense knowledge. Milton’s imagination, working upon this idea, transformed it in a way peculiar to himself alone. The pure soul, according to his belief, has power in itself to change the body to its own pure essence. The conversion of body to soul, however, is not a tenet of Platonic philosophy in any phase. It was the working in Milton of that tendency, visible throughout the poetry of the seventeenth century, to assert the primacy of the soul in life—an attempt which was made by the metaphysical poets especially in their treatment of love.

The statement of this theory of chastity is explained in “Comus,” and its quickening influence is felt in the very manner in which Milton 56 refers to it. Before the Elder Brother recounts the effect of lust upon the soul he explains the hidden power of chastity.

This is the “abstracted sublimity” which The Lady refers to when she addresses Comus. It is a notion, a mystery, which he, standing for the purely sensual instincts of man, cannot apprehend. She tells him:

So powerfully, indeed, has the vision of beauty described in the “Phædrus” and the “Symposium” 57 affected Milton’s own imagination that he visualizes chastity much as Plato does an idea; it is an idea not only known to the mind, but thrilling the imagination with its beauty. When The Lady is at first conscious of the power of Comus’s magic to disturb her mind with foreboding fancies, she invokes faith, hope, and chastity. The first two are seen as personages, but chastity only as a pure, unblemished form.

The directness of this vision is like that of the soul in the “Phædrus” when it sees the flashing beauty of the beloved, “which,” says Plato, “when the charioteer [the soul] sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty, whom he beholds in company with Modesty like an image placed upon a holy pedestal.” (“Phædrus,” 254.)

It is in the vision of this holy beauty as a lost possession of the soul that the deadly pang of sin lies. In Milton’s later work there is no reference to the power of the chaste soul to 58 change the body to its own pure essence; but his mind still holds to the power of sin to dim the soul’s lustre. This is strikingly exemplified in the character of Satan’s reflection on his faded glory. The one keen regret that he feels, in spite of his indomitable will, is occasioned by the thought that by reason of sinning his form has lost the beauty of its original goodness. Throughout “Paradise Lost” there is repeated emphasis upon the faded lustre of Satan’s form. The very first words that fall from Satan’s lips, in his speech to Beelzebub, as the two lay rolling in the fiery gulf, draw our attention to the great change in their outward forms.

In his address to the Sun Satan expresses his hatred of that bright light because it brings to remembrance the more glorious state from which he fell.

When the moral significance of this change in his form flashes through his mind, Satan then suffers the deepest regret that could come to him. The episode in which he learns the true effect of his sin is his encounter with the angels, Ithuriel and Zephon. These two have found him “squat like a toad” at the ear of Eve, trying to work upon her mind while she sleeps. At the touch of Ithuriel’s spear Satan springs up in his real form. Ithuriel then asks which of the rebel angels he may be. The lofty pride of Satan is touched to the quick.

Zephon, however, points out that Satan should not think that he may still be known, as he was in heaven, by the brightness of his form; for his glory departed when he rebelled, and now resembles his sin and place of doom.

At this thought Satan stands abashed. Lover of the beautiful as he is, he now experiences the pang of its loss in his own life.

61 In Milton, then, whether his mind dwells on chastity or on the consciousness of sin’s effect on the soul, it is to the vision of a world of moral beauty that at last it mounts.

The relation of these ideals of holiness, temperance, and chastity to the Christian doctrine of grace, which finds a place in the works of these English poets, can now be clearly seen. The ideals of conduct are essentially moral ideals, and in the attainment of them the soul lives its fullest life. “The being who possesses good always, everywhere, and in all things,” says Socrates in the “Philebus” (60), “has the most perfect sufficiency.” According to Plato the soul may realize perfect sufficiency of itself, it is self-sufficient; but Christian theology taught the necessity of a heavenly grace for man to work out his own salvation. The two ideals are thus distinct; and though the English poets incorporate both in their work, the line of cleavage is distinctly visible, and the doctrine of grace plays no more than a formal part in their exposition of the soul’s growth. In the “Faerie Queene” and in “Comus” Platonic idealism triumphs over Christian theology.

In Spenser the adventures of Arthur, in 62 whom heavenly grace is commonly recognized, have no moral significance in the progress of the Knight aided by him toward the realization of virtue. Arthur frees the Red Cross Knight from Orgoglio and Duessa, but the Red Cross Knight is, morally speaking, the same man after he is freed as before; the adventure of Arthur answers to no change significant in the moral order of his life as this is revealed in holiness. The realization of holiness as an intimate experience of the soul is achieved only after the Knight’s training on the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation, which follows all his preceding discipline in the Christian graces; for this has left him a “man of earth.” In the legend of temperance the efficacy of grace is no more vital, and what is more, it is an intrusion upon the moral order; it makes the soul untrue to itself and all that we know of her. The logic of Guyon’s inner life did not require that Arthur should come to his rescue after he had shown his ability to remain temperate under strong emotion and in the presence of wantonness and covetousness. His swoon at the end of the seventh canto has no more meaning than mere bodily fatigue after toil; morally, Guyon should 63 have been only the stronger for his past victories over his passions. Arthur’s entrance at the eighth canto, consequently, is not required: Spenser is only paralleling in his second book Arthur’s advent in the eighth canto of his first.

Similarly in “Comus.” When the younger brother inquires what that power which The Lady possesses to keep herself unspotted in the presence of lust may be, if it is not the strength of heaven, his elder companion replies:

So The Lady herself witnesses, when in the great crisis of her life she appeals to faith, hope, and chastity; if need were , she is confident that heaven would send an angel to her defence.

64 And the Guardian Spirit, in whose parting words is found the moral of the poem, explains the same idea of the self-sufficiency of the virtuous soul.

The theological doctrine of grace, although maintained as a part of an intellectual scheme of thought, did not enter into the inward life of Spenser’s and Milton’s work. So sensitive were they to the power of beauty that nothing could come between it and the soul. To Milton beauty wore an invincible grace, before which all must give way. Satan recognized this when he was confronted by the angel, Zephon.

Nothing was more natural, then, than that such a mind feeding upon Plato’s thought and learning its great lesson of wisdom, that it alone 65 is truly fair, should conceive virtue panoplied in all the might of beauty. He thus could teach in his “Comus” “the sun-clad power of chastity”:

In Spenser beauty is not thus militant. When the Red Cross Knight, eager to enter the Cave of Error (I. i. 12), says to Una, confident in his power,

Una cautions him to stay his step while there yet is time. (I. i. 13.) But it is just as true in Spenser as in Milton, that beauty is an unerring guide in life. Spenser responded to it because he felt most deeply the power of the soul’s affinity for it. Throughout his work the influence of beauty upon man is constantly present. Even though at times he seems to be drawn to it by the subtlety of its appeal to the 66 sense alone, he makes it very evident that true beauty can be found in the soul only in its habits of virtuous life. Thus the witch Duessa, when stripped of her alluring beauty, is revolting in her hideousness (I. ii. 40; II. i. 22), and Acrasia’s beauty only poisons the souls of her lovers. (II. i. 54.) Beauty that is nothing but a mere witchery of the sense disappears into thin air when confronted by virtue in her beauty. This is the lesson taught in the vanishing of the false Florimell when the true is placed beside her. (V. iii. 25.) The power of this affinity of the soul for beauty, mysterious as it is real, which Spenser’s work reveals, is conveyed in a question from Sidney’s “Arcadia,” where the spirit of the “Phædrus” is all present. “Did ever mans eye looke thorough love upon the majesty of vertue, shining through beauty, but that he became (as it well became him) a captive?” ^[5]

I. HEAVENLY LOVE

Heavenly love, as conceived in the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, refers to two distinct experiences. By this term the poets meant either the love known in the soul for the realities of the unseen world or the love which God had shown to man in his creation and preservation, and which man could experience through the indwelling of God’s spirit within him. In the explanation of the nature of these two experiences the teaching of Platonism played a very important part, directing the course of that love of man for heavenly things, and accounting for the presence of love in the Godhead.

To the discussion of the latter of these subjects Platonism was able to offer two conceptions, in which a rational explanation of God’s love as revealed in the creation could be found; 68 one presenting the highest reality as beauty, the other as the good. The first conception was present in its theory of love. In the “Symposium” Plato had taught that love was a desire of birth in beauty, and that the highest love was a desire of birth in beauty absolute, the ultimate principle of all beauty. (“Symposium,” 206, 211–212.) Christianity, on the other hand, had taught that God is love. By identifying the absolute beauty of Plato with God, and by applying the Platonic conception of the birth of love to this Christian conception of God as love, God Himself was understood as enjoying his own beauty, thus begetting beings like to it in fairness. In Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Love,” this idea forms the first division of the poem which treats of the love of God. (ll. 25–122.) At first God is conceived as living in Himself in love.

The second conception of the highest reality as the good is used in a more general way to 70 explain the reason of creation. In the “Timæus” the Maker of the universe is conceived as creating the world in goodness. “Let me tell you,” says Timæus, “why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be.” (“Timæus,” 29.) In Henry More the idea is expressed in the closing canto of his “Psychathanasia,” where he is accounting for the creation. (III. 4.) He has words of bitter denunciation for those who teach that God created the world merely as a manifestation of His power, His will. (III. iv. 22.) He maintains the Platonic teaching.

So closely allied in the English poets are the teachings of Platonism with the devotional 71 spirit of Christian love that in the same man and even in the same experience the thought can pass most naturally from a conception of Christ’s love for God, as absolute beauty, to a subjective treatment of it as a personal experience. Thus in George Herbert’s lyric, “Love,” the invocation is to the love of Christ for God springing from His imperishable beauty; but in the second division of the poem this love has become a refining fire that can burn all lusts within the soul and enable it to see Him.

72 The earlier conception of heavenly love, as related to absolute beauty, is not, however, the more important of the two themes of this poetry. From the very nature of the love itself, although it could be described in accordance with certain Platonic conceptions, it could not be the subject of a personal treatment; it gave no sufficient outlet for the passion of love. This was afforded only by that heavenly love which is the love of man for the unseen realities of the spiritual world. The full treatment which this latter subject receives in English poetry testifies to the strong hold which the teachings of Platonism had upon religious experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Platonism afforded not only the philosophic basis for the object of this passion, but it also acted as a corrective tendency in checking the influence of an alien idea, erotic mysticism.

Heavenly love, understood as a love known in the soul for a spiritual, or as it was then called, heavenly beauty, sprang out of the treatment to which Plato had subjected love in the “Symposium.” In English it appears in two separate forms, although in both it consists 73 in gaining a correct idea of the relation of the beauty known to the senses as compared with that known by the soul. The only difference in the two expressions is that the object of the passion is variously described.

In Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Beautie” occurs the first form of this love. The heavenly beauty celebrated in this “Hymne” is the Platonic wisdom, Sapience, as Spenser calls it, the same high reality with which he had identified Una. (l. 186.) The subject of the love in the “Hymne” is formally presented as God, who is described as

Yet the real subject is the praise of Sapience, to which somewhat more than one-third of the “Hymne” is devoted. A description of her transcendent beauty and her power to fill the soul of the beholder with true insight into the relative beauty of this world of sense and that of spirit is the climax of the poem. Among all the attributes of God mentioned, His truth, 74 His love, His grace, His mercy, His might, His judgment (ll. 113–115), the greatest is Sapience, who is described as sitting in the very bosom of the Almighty. (l. 187.) The fairness of her face, he says, none can tell; no painter or poet can adequately describe her; his own powers are so weak that he can only admire, not presuming to picture her. (ll. 207–241.) So completely, however, does she occupy the field of spiritual vision in the happy mortals that behold her, that

According to Spenser, then, heavenly love is the love felt in the soul when the sight of wisdom in her beauty dawns upon the inner vision. It is a love gained through speculation; and though the object is conceived of as yonder in heaven, it is still the beauty which is seen here in the mind. (l. 17.) Instead of the poetical device of the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation used in the “Faerie Queene” to signify the refinement of the spiritual vision necessary to the sight of this heavenly wisdom, Spenser has been able to explain in detail the way along which the soul must travel to gain its goal. It is the dialectic of the “Symposium” (211), the progress through ever ascending gradations of beauty up to the first absolute beauty changed only in the externals as required by the Christian conception of the heavenly hierarchy. But throughout the long series of upward stages through which his mind passes, one may feel the quickening of his spirit at the thought of the highest beauty, in which 76 lies the unity of the poem. In the contemplation of this heavenly beauty the poem begins and ends.

The second form which the doctrine of heavenly love assumed in English is found in William Drummond’s “Song II—It autumn was, and on our hemisphere.” The conception of heavenly beauty is not the ethical notion of Spenser’s “Hymne,” but a less stimulating idea of the beauty of an intelligible world of which this world is but a copy. The attraction in this idea lay in its appeal to Drummond’s 77 peculiar imagination, delighting, as it did, in the sight of vastness. The poem is an exhortation to the lover, who is Drummond himself, to cease his mourning for his dead love, and to raise his mind to a love of heaven and of the beauty of God there to be seen. The two ideas which Platonism contributed are the notion of an intelligible world above this world of sense, and of an absolute beauty of which all beauty on earth is but a shadow.

The conception of a world above this world was suggested by Plato in his “Phædo” and explained by Plotinus in his Enneads (VI. vii. 12) as a pure intelligible world. “For since,” says Plotinus, “we say that this All [the universe] is framed after the Yonder, as after a pattern, the All must first exist yonder as a living entity, an animal; and since its idea is complete, everything must exist yonder. Heaven, therefore, must exist there as an animal, not without what here we call its stars, and this is the idea of heaven. Yonder, too, of course, must be the Earth, not bare, but far more richly furnished with life; in it are all creatures that move on dry land and plants rooted in life. Sea, too, is yonder, and all water ebbing 78 and flowing in abiding life; and all creatures that inhabit the water, and all the tribes of the air are part of the all yonder, and all aerial beings, for the same reason as Air itself.” In the “Phædo” (110–111), Plato lends color to his account by calling attention to the fairness of the place and to the pleasantness of life there. Drummond has seized upon this idea of an immaterial world where all is fair and happy, and interprets it as the heaven whither the young woman who has died is urging him to direct his love. Thus in her addresses to Drummond she speaks of the character of the world where she lives.

It is to this world that she urges him to raise his mind, for all that earth has to offer is a vain shadow.

At this point the poem naturally passes on to develop the second suggestion found in Platonism, that the beauty of earth is but a shadow or reflexion of the absolute beauty. As was common in that time, this absolute beauty is identified with God. Accordingly, the young woman appeals to Drummond to trust in God’s beauty, which alone can fill the soul with bliss. If the power of earthly beauty—the glance of an eye—can make him leave all else, what, she asks, must be the love kindled by the “only Fair”; for though the 80 wonders of earth, of sea, and heaven are beautiful, they are but shadows of Him.

81 This “Song,” then, though drawing on a different phase of Platonism—its more philosophic and fanciful side, ^[6] not its deep ethical truth—follows the same order of thought as Spenser’s “Hymne,” and like that presents heavenly love as a love known in the soul and growing out of a correct notion of the relative values of the visible beauty of the senses and the invisible beauty of mind.

In Drummond heavenly love is a progression out of the romantic love of woman. It is not explicitly so stated in the “Song,” but in a sonnet, the subject of which refers to the young woman of the longer poem, he writes:

This is a note heard in other poets where heavenly love is described as naturally growing out of earthly love when the right idea of the nature of the object of that lower passion has been learned. Thus in Milton it is taught that the love of woman must not be passion, but must be a scale by which the mind may mount to the heavenly world. The passion which Adam feels for the loveliness that hedges the presence of Eve—

83 is described by Raphael “with contracted brow” as merely transported touch, in reality the same feeling shared by the beasts of the field. (VIII. 582.) Raphael, accordingly, directs Adam to love only the rational in Eve’s nature, for true love has his seat in the reason.

In Phineas Fletcher’s sixth “Piscatorie Eclogue,” where there is a long discussion on the nature of love, human love is shown to be a love merely of the passing charms of woman: of her form, which will decay; of her voice, which is but empty wind; and of her color, which can move only the sense. (Stz. 20–22.) No attempt is made to describe the nature of the higher love, but a simple exhortation to raise this love of woman to a love of the “God of fishers” closes the account.

Heavenly love, then, whether springing from the desire within the soul to see wisdom in her beauty, or from a desire to raise the mind from a love of earth to the intelligible world, or from the desire to find a worthy object in the love of the rational in woman, when freed from all the grossness of physical passion, is a contemplative love of a less perishing beauty than can be found on earth. And just as the transition was easy from the love which God himself knows to the soul’s love of God, so was the change from the love of soul for a higher reality than earthly beauty to the immortal love of God for the soul. Thus in Sidney’s sonnet the subtle change is effected.

The appeal which Platonism made to the English poets in its doctrine of a heavenly love was through its power to stir the minds with a deep sense of that beauty which God was understood to possess. The application of the principle of beauty to God resulted in a note of joy and in an exaltation of soul in the religious mind, which, after forsaking the beauty of this world of sense, could enjoy the great principle of beauty in the beatific vision of God. Such a strain of joy may be heard in Drummond, in John Norris, and even in the quiet lyrics of George Herbert.

The sight of God in His absolute beauty is considered by these poets as the end of the 86 soul’s endeavor. According to John Norris God is the divine excellence,

According to Drummond, the one “choicest bliss” of life is the possession of God’s beauty as a burning passion within the soul. In “An Hymn of True Happiness” he teaches that supreme felicity does not consist in the enjoyment of earth’s treasures, of sensuous beauty, or of other sensual delights, and not even in knowledge and fame.

The essential nature of this beatific vision is described either as a sense of eternal rest or of eternal joy. In Norris’s “Prospect,” the soul is preparing for the great change that will come when it is free from the body; and its greatest change is described as a sight of “the only Fair.”

In Drummond’s “Teares on the Death of Mœliades” the joy of the departed soul is repeatedly emphasized as a rest in the enjoyment 88 of God’s beauty. Thus, in closing, the dead is addressed:

The note of joy in the beatific vision is heard in Drummond and Norris. In Drummond earthly love is a care, a war within our nature; but love

In Norris’s “Seraphick Love” a more violent strain is detected. He has forsaken the beauty of earth because he has seen a fairer beauty in contemplation, and to this source of all good and beauty he thus addresses the close of his poem.

The violence of passion in these poets is absent in George Herbert, and even the presence of the beatific vision, as a conscious experience of the soul known after the long travail of its search for beauty, is not in the least discernible. Still, the conviction that there is a higher beauty than that seen on earth, and that in truth lies this beauty, is 90 felt beneath the mildness of Herbert’s devotion. In two sonnets, which he sent to his mother in 1608, he laments the decay of any true love for God among the poets, and contrasts the beauty of God with the beauties of the amorists. To him the beauty of God lies in the discovery.

So intimately has this notion of the spiritual nature of true beauty blended with the simple experience of his devotional life that he can ask

Platonism, then, came as a direct appeal to the religious mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which was so constituted that the element of philosophic revery was blended most naturally with a strain of pure devotional love. Although the ultimate postulates of that philosophy were intellectual principles, they were such as could be grasped by the soul only in its deep passion of love for spiritual 92 beauty. The condemnation which Baxter passes upon other philosophies could not be brought with truth against Platonism. “In short,” he says, “I am an enemy of their philosophy that vilify sense.... The Scripture that saith of God that He is life and light, saith also that He is love, and love is complacence, and complacence is joy; and to say God is infinite, essential love and joy is a better notion than with Cartesians and Cocceians to say that God and angels and spirits are but a thought or an idea. What is Heaven to us if there be no love and joy?” ^[8] This desire of life and love, along its upper levels of thought, was satisfied by Platonism; it enabled the poets to forecast the life of the soul in heaven, and of its anticipation on earth as a love of beauty.

There was a strong tendency, however, throughout this period of religious poetry, toward a phase of devotional love which may be called erotic mysticism, or that love for Christ which is characterized less by admiration and more by tenderness and mere delight in the pure sensuous experience of love. Contemplation 93 of Christ’s divine nature as essential beauty is totally absent from this passion. Christ as the object of this love is conceived only as the perfection of physical beauty; and the response within the soul of the lover is that of mere sensuous delight either in the sight of his personal beauties or in the realization of the union with him. This strain of religious devotion is heard in Herbert, in Vaughan, and Crashaw. In Herbert, who confessed that he entered the service of the church in order to be like Christ, “by making humility lovely,”—a confession which breathes pure emotion,—there was joined so sensuous a strain that “he seems to rejoice in the thoughts of that word Jesus, and say, that the adding these words, my Master, to it, and often repetition of them, seemed to perfume his mind, and leave an oriental fragrancy in his very breath.” ^[9] The spectacle of the crucified Saviour of man was especially influential in keeping this strain of mystical devotion alive; and the minds of these poets are continually dwelling upon the beauty of his mangled hands and feet. In a nature so eminently intellectual as John 94 Donne’s, this strain of feeling is still present, and in his explanation of the grounds for such a love is found an excellent account of its varying phases. In one of his sermons he says:

“I love my Saviour, as he is the Lord , he that studies my salvation: and as Christ , made a person able to work my salvation; but when I see him in the third notion, Jesus , accomplishing my salvation, by an actual death, I see those hands stretched out, that stretched out the heavens, and those feet racked, to which they that racked them are footstools: I hear him, from whom his nearest friends fled, pray for his enemies, and him, whom his Father forsook, not forsake his brethren: I see him that clothes this body with his creatures, or else it would wither, and clothes this soul with his righteousness, or else it would perish, hang naked upon the cross; ... when I conceit, when I contemplate my Saviour thus, I love the Lord , and there is reverent adoration in that love, I love Christ , and there is a mysterious adoration in that love, but I love Jesus , and there is a tender compassion in that love....” (Works, II. 181.)

95 Whenever Platonism enters into this tender passion it always elevates the emotion into a higher region, where the more intellectual or spiritual nature of Christ or God is the object of contemplation; and it does this by affording the poets a conception of the object of the soul’s highest love, as a philosophical principle, whether of beauty, of good, or of true being.

The first way by which this elevation of a purely sensuous passion into a higher region was effected was through the Platonic conception of the “idea.” Plato had taught that in love the mind should pass from a sight of the objects of beauty through ever widening circles of abstraction to the contemplation of absolute beauty in its idea. This can be known only by the soul, and is the only real beauty. Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Love” is the best example of the application of this idea to the love of Christ. In this poem he sings the praise of Christ as the God of Love. He finds the chief manifestation of Christ’s love in his sacrifice. At first he treats this as a spectacle to move the eye. He dwells upon the mangling of Christ’s body (ll. 241–247), and exhorts the beholder to

But later, instead of calling upon the beholder to lift up his “heavie clouded eye” to behold such a manifestation of mercy (ll. 226–227), he directs him to lift up his mind and meditate upon the author of his salvation (l. 258). Christ’s love then will burn all earthly desire away by the power of

whose glory dazes the eye but illumines the spirit. And then, when this final stage of refinement is past, the ravished soul of the beholder shall have a sight not of

97 The “Hymne,” which celebrates the life of Christ on earth as a man among men, closes, as it had begun, with the mind in the presence of heavenly beauty.

In Phineas Fletcher the term “idea” is not used, but the habit of thought is identical with that of Spenser’s. Christ is to be seen by the soul, not in his bodily form, but in his “first beautie” and “true majestie.” In the passage where these expressions occur Fletcher is showing the manner of the love we should bestow upon Christ for that which he has shown to us. He says that the only adequate return is to give back to Christ the love he has given to us. He then prays that Christ will inflame man with his glorious ray in order that he may rise above a love of earthly things into heaven.

In Crashaw’s “In the Glorious Epiphanie of Our Lord God,” the elevation of the subject from 98 a sensuous image into an object of pure contemplation is effected by conceiving Christ’s nature as that of true being according to the Platonic notion. The first image brought before the mind is that of the Christ child’s face.

Soon, however, under this image of the face appears the hidden conception of Christ as true being unchanging and everywhere present. For Christ is addressed as

The poem, then, which had begun with a recognition of the beauty of the Babe’s eyes in whose beauty the East had come to seek itself, ends in a desire not to know what may be seen with 99 the eyes, but to press on, upward to a purely intellectual object,—Christ in heaven.

In those passages in Henry More, where the mystic union of the soul with Christ or God is symbolized as a sensuous experience, the elevating power of Platonism is noticeable in the progression of the poet’s mind out of this lower plane into a higher region of pure thought. Thus in “Psychathanasia” the advance is made from a treatment of the communion, which the blest have with Christ in their partaking His body and blood, to a contemplation of the beauty of God. In this union, which is shared by those

In Giles Fletcher’s “Christ’s Triumph after Death” the most elaborate attempt is made to convey the idea of the blessedness of the union of the soul with God through the pleasure of mere sense and at the same time to show how the object with which the soul is joined is in every respect a super-sensible entity. At first the blessedness of the soul’s life in heaven is presented both as a pleasurable enjoyment of 101 the sense of sight, of hearing, and even that of smell, and as a more spiritual pleasure in the exercise of the faculties of understanding and will. Speaking of the joy of those souls that ever hold

Here the progression in the scale of pleasures is from those of the senses to those of the mind.

But Fletcher presents this union as even a more intimate experience of the soul. His is the most elaborate attempt in English poetry to describe the nature of the participation of the soul in the beauty of the ultimate reality, according to the Platonic notion of the participation of an object in its idea. After three stanzas descriptive of the state of absolute 102 freedom from cares of life which reigns in heaven (stz. 35–37), Fletcher passes on to a description of God—the “Idea Beatificall,” as he names Him—in accordance with the Platonic notion of the highest principle, The One:

He then goes on to explain what the Idea is not. It is nothing that can be known by sense. It is no flaming lustre, no harmony of sounds, no ambrosial feast for the appetite, no odor, no soft embrace, nor any sensual pleasure. And yet within the soul of the beholder it is known 103 as an inward feast, a harmony, a light, a sound, a sweet perfume, and entire embrace. Thus he writes:

Such was the powerful hold of the doctrines of Platonism upon the minds of these religious poets. Strong as were the forces leading them into a degenerate form of Christian love, these were overcome by the one fundamental conception of Platonism that the highest love the soul can know is the love of a purely intellectual principle of beauty and goodness; and that this love is one in which passion and reason are wedded into the one supreme 104 desire of the seeker after wisdom and beauty. Such a conception saved a large body of English poetry from degenerating into that form of erotic mysticism which Crashaw’s later poems reveal; and in which there is no elevation of the mind away from the lower range of sense enjoyment, but only an introversion of the physical life into the intimacies of spiritual experience.

II. EARTHLY LOVE

The influence of Platonism upon the love poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England is felt in two distinct forms. In the first place, the teachings of that philosophy were used to explain and dignify the conception of love as a passion having its source in a desire for the enjoyment of beauty; and in the second place, the emphasis laid by Platonism upon the function of the soul as opposed to the senses resulted in a tendency to treat love as a purely spiritual passion devoid of all sensuous pleasure. In the first phase the teachings of Platonic theory were made to render service according to the conventional love theory known as Petrarchism; and in its second 105 phase Platonism contributed its share in keeping alive the so-called metaphysical mood of the seventeenth-century lyric.

According to the conventional method of Petrarchism, the object of the poet’s love was always a lady of great beauty and spotless virtue, and of a correspondingly great cruelty. Hence the subjects of the Petrarchian love poem were either the praise of the mistress’s beauty or an account of the torment of soul caused by her heartless indifference. By applying the doctrines of Platonism to this conventional manner, a way was found to explain upon a seemingly philosophic basis the power of the lover’s passion and of beauty as its exciting cause. The best example in English of this application of Platonic theory is Spenser’s two hymns,—“An Hymne in Honour of Love” and “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie.”

The professed aim of Spenser in these hymns differs in no wise from the purpose of the Petrarchian lover. Both are written to ease the torments of an unrequited passion. In the “Hymne in Honour of Love” he addresses love in his invocation:

In his closing stanzas he expresses the wish of coming at last to the object of his desire. (ll. 298–300.) In the “Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” he openly confesses a desire that through his hymn

The only respect in which these hymns differ from the mass of love poetry of their time is in the method by which Spenser treated the common subject of the poetical amorists of the Renaissance. In singing the praises of love and beauty he drew upon the doctrines of Italian Platonism, and by the power of his own genius blended the purely expository and lyrical strains so that at times it is difficult to separate them. The presence of Platonic doctrine, 107 however, is felt in the dignified treatment of the passion of love and of beauty.

In the “Hymne in Honour of Love” love is described as no merely cruel passion inflicted by the tyrannical Cupid of the amorist, but as the manifestation in man of the great informing power which brought the universe out of chaos and which now maintains it in order and concord. According to Ficino, the greatest representative of Italian Platonism during the Renaissance, one truth established by the speech of Eryximachus in the “Symposium” is that love is the creator and preserver of all things. “Through this,” Ficino says in his “Commentarium in Convivium,” “fire moves air by sharing its heat; the air moves the water, the water moves the earth; and vice versa the earth draws the water to itself; water, the air; and the air, the fire. Plants and trees also beget their like because of a desire of propagating their seed. Animals, brutes, and men are allured by the same desire to beget offspring.” (III. 2.) And in summing up his discussion he says, “Therefore all parts of the universe, since they are the work of one artificer and are members of the same mechanism like to one another both in 108 being and in life, are linked together by a certain mutual love, so that love may be rightly declared the perpetual bond of the universe and the unmoving support of its parts and the firm basis of the whole mechanism.” (III. 3.) Holding to this conception of love Spenser comes to a praise of the

with an explanation of His power as the creating and sustaining spirit of the universe. Before the world was created love moved over the warring elements of chaos and arranged them in the order they now obey.

The second subject which was treated in the light of Platonism was that of beauty. In the “Hymne in Honour of Beautie” the topic is treated from three points of view. First, the “Hymne” outlines a general theory of æsthetics to account for the presence of beauty in the universe lying without us (ll. 32–87); second, it explains the ground of reason for the beauty to be found in the human body (ll. 88–164); and third, it accounts for the exaggerated notion which the lover has of his beloved’s physical perfections. (ll. 214–270.)

Spenser’s general theory of æsthetics is a blending of two suggestions he found in his study of Platonism. According to Ficino, beauty is a spiritual thing, the splendor of God’s light shining in all things. (II. 5; V. 4.) This conception is based upon the idea that the universe is an emanation of God’s spirit, and that beauty is the lively grace of the divine light of God shining in matter. (V. 6.) 110 But according to another view, the universe is conceived as the objective work of an artificer, working according to a pattern. “The work of the creator,” says Plato in the “Timæus” (28, 29), “whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and the nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect.... If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal ... for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes.” By blending these ideas Spenser was able to conceive of God as creating the world after a pattern of ideal beauty, which, by virtue of its infusion into matter, is the source of that lively grace which the objects called beautiful possess. At first he presents the view of creation which is more in accordance with the Mosaic account,

Spenser now passes on to the theory of the infusion of beauty in matter, by which its grossness is refined and quickened, as it were, into life.

At this point of his “Hymne” Spenser pauses to refute the idea that beauty is

112 His pausing to overthrow such an idea of beauty is quite in the manner of the scientific expositor in the Italian treatises and dialogues written throughout the Renaissance. Ficino, for instance, combats the idea, which he says some hold, that beauty is nothing but the proportion of the various parts of an object with a certain sweetness of color. (V. 3.) In like manner Spenser says it is the idle wit that identifies beauty with proportion and color, both of which pass away.

Spenser overthrows this contention by doubting the power of mere color and superficial proportion to stir the soul of man. (ll. 74–87.) He has proved the power of beauty only too well to maintain such a theory. He thus seeks for the source of its power in the soul.

The Platonic theory of beauty teaches that the beauty of the body is a result of the 113 formative energy of the soul. According to Ficino, the soul has descended from heaven and has framed a body in which to dwell. Before its descent it conceives a certain plan for the forming of a body; and if on earth it finds material favorable for its work and sufficiently plastic, its earthly body is very similar to its celestial one, hence it is beautiful. (VI. 6.) In Spenser this conception underlies his account of the descent of the soul from God to earth.

The obvious objection which one might make to this theory, that it does not cover the whole ground inasmuch as it could never account for the fact of the existence of a good soul in any but a beautiful form, was answered by the further explanation that when the matter of which the soul makes its body is unyielding, the soul must content itself with a less beautiful form. (Ficino, VI. 6.) Thus Spenser adds:

After an exhortation to the “faire Dames” to keep their souls unspotted (ll. 165–200), Spenser outlines the true manner of love and in the course of his poem he accounts for that manifestation of power which the beloved’s beauty 115 has over the mind of the lover. According to Ficino, true lovers are those whose souls have departed from heaven under the same astral influences and who, accordingly, are informed with the same idea in imitation of which they frame their earthly bodies. (VI. 6.) Thus Spenser writes that love is not a matter of chance, but a union of souls ordained by heaven.

He then explains the Platonist’s views of love as a passion. Ficino had stated that the lover is not satisfied with the mere visual image of the beloved, but refashions it in accordance 116 with the idea of the beloved which he has; for the two souls departing from heaven at the same time were informed with the same idea. The lover, then, when he beholds the person of the beloved, sees a form which has been made more in conformity with the idea than his own body has; consequently he loves it, and by refining the visual image of the beloved from all the grossness of sense, he beholds in it the idea of his own soul and that of the beloved; and in the light of this idea he praises the beloved’s beauty. (VI. 6.) So Spenser:

Here there is no distinction of lover and beloved; but soon Spenser passes on to consider the subject from the lover’s standpoint:

With a description of the many beauties the lover sees in the beloved—the thousands of graces that make delight on her forehead—the poem ends. (ll. 235–270.)

The feature in this theory of Platonism which appealed to Spenser was the high nature of the beauty seen in comeliness of form, as explained by its doctrine of æsthetics. A sense of beauty as a spiritual quality spreading its divine radiance over the objects of the outward world envelops the poem in a golden haze of softened feeling characteristic of Spenser’s poetic manner. The scientific terms of the Platonic theorist melt away into the gentle flow of his verse. The soul being informed with its idea, as Ficino had put it, has become in his “Hymne in 118 Honour of Beautie” that “faire lampe” which has “resemblence of that heavenly light” of beauty (ll. 102, 124); or the idea of beauty in the soul is spoken of as

In accordance with the same sense of beauty Spenser in the “Hymne in Honour of Love” stops to explain away the cruelty which love seems to show in afflicting him, an innocent sufferer, by calling attention to the fact that such suffering is necessary to try the lover’s sincerity in his worship of so high a thing as the beauty of his beloved. Love is not physical desire, but a soaring of the mind to a sight of that high beauty,

And even though the lover may not win the good graces of his lady, he is happy in the sight of her beauty.

Because of this love of beauty, Spenser was able to find more material in the Renaissance criticism of Platonic æsthetics for his “Hymne in Honour of Beautie” than in the corresponding hymn on love. Besides the conception of the creative power of love, his “Hymne in Honour of Love” draws upon a few suggestions which could dignify the power of the passion. The saying of Diotima to Socrates in the “Symposium,”—“Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake 120 of immortality” (208)—is made to do service in differentiating the passion of love in men from that in beasts. By satisfying physical desire beasts

Further, to add a sense of mystery to the nativity of the god of love, Spenser refers to the myth of Penia and Poros, and also in the manner of the Platonist tries to reconcile two contrary assertions about the mysterious nature of love’s birth. In Diotima’s account of “the lesser mysteries of love,” she says that love is the offspring of the god Poros or Plenty, and of Penia or Poverty. (“Symposium,” 203.) In Phædrus’s oration on love he began by affirming that “Love is a mighty god, and wonderful among gods and men, but especially wonderful in his birth. For he is the eldest of the gods.” (“Symposium,” 178.) Agathon, however, differs from his friend Phædrus in saying that love 121 is the youngest of the gods. (“Symposium,” 195.) This disagreement was a source of perplexity to the Platonist of the Renaissance; thus Ficino gives a division of his commentary to a reconciliation of these statements. (V. 10.) He solves the difficulty by stating that when the Creator conceived the order of angels, with whom Ficino identifies the gods of ancient mythology, the love guiding God was before the angels, hence is the most ancient of the gods; but when the created angelic intelligences turned in their love to the Creator, the impelling love was the youngest, coming after the creation of the angels. According to these notions of the nativity of the god of love, Spenser opens his “Hymne.”

Spenser’s “Hymnes” are the most comprehensive exposition of love in the light of Platonic theory in English. The attempt, however, which he made to place love upon a basis of philosophic fact is imitated in a much less prominent way in other poets. Spenser himself refers to the subject in “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.” In that poem Colin unfolds to Cuddy the high nature of love’s perfection. At the court, he says, love is the all-engrossing topic (ll. 778–786); but it is love so shamefully licentious that its “mightie mysteries” are profaned. (l. 790.) Love, however, is a religious thing and should be so conceived. To support this statement Colin explains the creative power of love manifest throughout the wide range of nature (ll. 843–868) and points out that in man it is a love of beauty. (ll. 869–880).

In a few of Jonson’s masques there are slight attempts to dignify the subject of love in the manner of Spenser’s “Hymnes.” In “The Masque of Beauty” love is described as the 123 creator of the universe, and beauty is mentioned as that for which the world was created. In one of the hymns occurs this stanza:

In “Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis” the same ideas appear. In this masque, after the band of sensual lovers has been driven from the suburbs of the City of Beauty (Callipolis), 124 and a lustration of the place has followed, Euclia, or “a fair glory, appears in the heavens, singing an applausive Song, or Pæan of the whole.”

In the same masque love is defined in accordance with the myth of Penia and Poros:

In “Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly” the sustaining power of love in keeping the 125 parts of the universe in concord is used to combat the accusation that love is mere cruelty. Love, who is represented as a captive of the Sphynx, thus replies to the charge:

In “The Barriers” where Truth and Opinion—a division of the state of knowing according to its degree of certainty common in Plato as knowledge and opinion (“Republic,” V. 476–478)—hold a discussion on marriage, an angel declares that

In Drayton’s seventh eclogue Batte replies to a charge of cruelty against love which is made by his fellow-shepherd, Borril, with the

A more common appropriation of the teachings of Platonism was made in the love lyrics—chiefly the sonnet—written in the Petrarchian manner. Petrarchism was as much a manner of writing sonnets as it was a method of making love. On its stylistic side it was characterized by the use of antitheses, puns, and especially of conceits. In the Platonic theory of love and beauty a certain amount of 127 material was offered which could be reworked into a form suited for the compact brevity of the sonnet. Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare are the three chief sonnet writers of the last decade of the sixteenth century in whose work this phase of Platonism is to be found; but its presence, though faint, can be felt in others.

One way in which this theory was applied is found in the manner in which these poets speak of the beauty of their beloved. Plato has stated that wisdom is the most lovely of all ideas, and that, were there a visible image of her, she would be transporting. (“Phædrus,” 250.) Sidney seizes upon this suggestion, and by identifying his Stella with wisdom he can frame a sonnet ending in a couplet that shall have the required epigrammatic point. He writes:

Shakespeare is able to praise the beauty of the subject of his sonnets by identifying him with the absolute beauty of the Platonic philosophy, and by describing him in accordance with this notion. Thus he confesses that his argument is simply the fair, kind, and true, back of which statement may be inferred the theory upheld by Platonism that the good, the beautiful, and the true are but different phases of one reality. His love, he says, cannot be called idolatry because his songs are directed to this theme, for only in his friend are these three themes united into one.

In another sonnet one phase of this argument is given a detailed treatment, and the poet’s object is to praise the beauty of his friend by describing its contrast with the beauty of earth, just as if he were speaking of absolute beauty. In this sonnet he uses the Platonic phraseology of the substance and the shadow, by which he means first, the reality that makes a thing what it is, the substance, not the matter or stuff of which it is made; and second, the reflection of that reality in the objective world, the shadow of the substance, not the obscuration of light. ^[10] He thus writes of his friend’s beauty as if it were the substance of beauty, beauty absolute, of which all other beauty is but a reflection.

Spenser, too, praises his beloved by conceiving her as absolute beauty, of which all other objects are but shadows. In the light of her beauty all the glory of the world appears but a vain show.

131 In George Daniel the idea of the substance and shadow again occurs. He says that it is enough for him if he may behold his mistress’s face, although others may boast of her favors; for in contemplating her glories he sees how all other forms are but empty shadows of her perfection.

A second tenet of Platonism which was reworked into English love poetry was its conception 132 of love. As Spenser had explained in his “Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” true love has its source in the life of two souls in heaven. (ll. 200–213.) Drummond uses the idea to explain the purity of his love.

In Vaughan the same theory of love is again referred to as a proof of the poet’s lofty passion. In “To Amoret. Walking in a Starry Evening,” he says that even were her face a distant star shining upon him, he would be sure of a sympathy between it and himself, because their minds were united in love by no accident or chance of sight, but were designed for one another.

In a second lyric, “A Song to Amoret,” he describes his love as superior to that which a “mighty amorist” could give, because it is a love that was born with his soul in heaven.

134 Thus far the tenets of Platonic theory have been used in a more or less direct way; but in several instances the Platonic idea is present only in the writer’s mind, and the reader is left to unravel it by his own ingenuity. Thus Shakespeare urges his friend to marry because in his death truth and beauty will both end—a possible inference being that his friend is ideal beauty.

In another sonnet Shakespeare plays with words in an attempt to excuse his truant muse for not praising his friend’s beauty. His muse may say that since his friend is true beauty he needs no praise.

But so closely identified is the praise of his friend’s beauty with the immortality conferred by poetry that Shakespeare cannot justly excuse the silence of his muse

Again, Shakespeare describes how, when absent from his friend, he is able to play with the flowers as shadows of his friend’s beauty.

In Spenser the lover is able to make an appeal for pity by reference to the Platonic conception of the idea of the beloved which the lover is supposed to behold in his soul.

The end which this conception of making love after the manner of the Platonist served was thought to be found in a purification of love. By praising the beauty of the beloved in such lofty terms the poet was able to set off the purity of his love from any connection with mere sensual desire. Thus Spenser testifies to the ennobling power of the beauty of his beloved’s eyes.

In Sidney there is a direct reference to the power of Plato’s thought to lead the mind from the desire with which he is struggling.

The application of the tenets of Platonic theory to the writing of love lyrics in the Petrarchian manner, however, was never anything more than a courtly way of making love through exaggerated conceit and fine writing. Fulke Greville saw clearly the relation between the love of woman and the love of the idea of her beauty. In the tenth sonnet of his “Cælica” 138 he asks what can love find in a mind where all is passion; rather he says go back to

The love of the idea of beauty, however, in its absolute nature is nowhere present in the mass of love lyrics written between 1590 and 1600. The term is used to give title to Drayton’s “Idea,” and to denominate the object of twelve sonnets addressed by Craig to “Idea”; and anagrams on the French word for the term L’Idée, Diella and Delia, are used to name two series of poems by Linche and Samuel Daniel, respectively. Crashaw’s “Wishes” is addressed to “his (supposed) mistresse,” as an idea. No better commentary on the whole movement can be made than these words of Spenser in which it is easily seen how the method conduced only to feeding the lower desires of the soul in love. Writing in 1596, in the midst of the period 139 when sonnet writing was most popular in England, he says, speaking of his two “Hymnes”:

“Having in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved ... to call in the same. But being unable so to doe, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad, I resolved at least to amend, and by way of retraction to reforme them, making in stead of those two Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly and celestiall.”

The great representative of Platonism in English poetry thus condemns the less vital phase of Platonic thought. The great weakness of the theory lay in the fact that it had no moral significance; and just here lay the great strength of Plato’s ethics. Although preaching that beauty was a spiritual thing, this phase of Platonic æsthetics never blended with the conception of the beauty of moral 140 goodness. And it failed to do this because it is a theory not of Plato but of Plotinus, who throughout the period of the Renaissance was understood to expound the true meaning of Plato’s thought. But Plato left no system of æsthetics; Plotinus, however, constructed a theory to account for beauty in its strictest sense. Now Ficino in his propaganda of Platonic theory throughout the Renaissance interpreted Plato’s “Symposium” in the light of Plotinus and thus in his commentary, the source of all Renaissance theorizing on love, is found the theory reflected in the English poets. This fusion of Plato’s ethics with the æsthetics of Plotinus was not perfect; and to the deep moral genius of Spenser’s mind the disparity soon became evident.

The Platonic theory of love had enabled the English poets to write about their passion as a desire of enjoying the spiritual quality of beauty in their beloved. In those poets in whom the Petrarchistic manner is evident, it is the object of love on which the attention centres; only in a slight way did they treat of the nature of love as a passion. The result of the discussion of love, as opened by Platonism, ended, however, 141 in an attempt to place love upon a purely spiritual basis and to write about it as if it were a psychological fact that was to be known by analysis. A consideration of beauty, as the object of love, is absent; attention is directed to the quality of the passion as one felt in the soul rather than by the sense; and when the attraction of woman is present in this love it is carefully differentiated from the attraction of sex. In the body of love lyrics written in the seventeenth century the distinctive traits of this passion are clearly explained.

The chief trait of this kind of love is that it concerns only the soul. The union of the lover and the beloved is simply a union of their souls which because of the high nature of the soul can triumph over time and space. The character of this union is described in Donne’s “Ecstacy.” The two lovers are described as sitting in silence, watching one another. While thus engaged their souls are so mysteriously mingled that they are mixed into one greater soul which is not subject to change. Even when the passion descends from this height to the plane of human affections there is no essential change in the purity of the love.

In a like strain Randolph in “A Platonic Elegy” praises his love as that founded on reason, not on sense. The true union in love, he says, is the meeting of essence with essence.

The great value which this purely spiritual love was supposed to possess was that it was unaffected either by time or distance. The union, not being one known to sense, could exist as well in the absence of the lovers as in the presence of both. This thought is a great comfort and is emphasized as the peculiarity in the lovers’ passion that sets it apart from the 144 vulgar kind. Thus Donne in the song, “Soul’s Joy,” consoles his beloved with the assurance that their souls may meet though their bodies be absent.

145 In his “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” Donne again recurs to the subject of separation and explains by the figure of the compass how their souls will be one. The love in which the mind is bent on the objects of sense cannot admit of absence; but the love shared by Donne and his mistress is so refined that their souls suffer only an expansion and not separation in absence.

Even in death this love will still live. Thus Lord Herbert explains that his love has passed over into that of the soul, and it will be as immortal as the soul.

The second characteristic of this love is that it is purely contemplative, informing the mind with knowledge rather than satisfying the 147 senses with pleasure. Habington has left a poem entitled “To the World. The Perfection of Love,” in which he contrasts this love in which the soul is engaged with thoughts with the love of sense.

By virtue of this contemplation in love the passion was freed from any disturbing element due to absence, just as the restriction of love to the soul had been thought to do. Vaughan boasts to Amoret that he can dispense with a sight of her face or with a kiss because when absent from her he can court the mind.

149 In the examples thus far given, the character of the passion as shared by lover and beloved has been merely described. There was an attempt made in some of this poetry to define love as if it were a something to be analyzed—a product, as it were, of psychological elaboration. Vaughan has indicated the two traits in the love lyrist of the seventeenth century, when he gives the following title to a lyric,—“To Amoret, of the Difference ’Twixt Him and Other Lovers, and What True Love Is.” In defining “What True Love Is,” the poets show that it cannot be desire, but is rather an essence pure in itself, and in one instance it is described as something unknowable either to sense or to mind.

Donne has left a letter in verse “To the Countess of Huntingdon,” in which he carefully explains how love cannot be desire. Sighing and moaning may be love, but it is love made in a weak way; love should never cast one down, but should elevate.

At first love was mere desire, ignorant of its object; but now love is a matter of the soul, and it is profane to call rages of passion love.

151 The reason for this lies in the fact that love begins in the soul, and not in the sight.

In Jonson’s “Epode” in “The Forest,” the same differentiation of love from passion is present, and an attempt is made to define love as an essence. The love of the present is nothing but raging passion.

In Donne in his “Love’s Growth,” there is an expression of doubt whether his love can be as 152 pure as he thought it was, because it seems to suffer an increase in the spring, and is not a thing without component elements. But if love is no quintessence, he says, it must be mixed with alien passions and thus not be pure. He silences his doubts, however, by explaining after the analogy of concentric rings of waves of water about the centre of disturbance how his love is one and unelemented.

153 Again, in “The Dream,” he fears the strength of his beloved’s affection if it is mingled with a sense of fear, or shame, or honor.

This refinement of the subject of love is carried to an even greater excess. Love is such a passion that it can be defined only by negatives. It is above apprehension, because sense and soul both can know the object of their love. In the poem of Donne’s “Negative Love,” in which this idea is expressed, it is probable that the poet has in mind the description of The One which Plotinus outlines in the “Enneads.” Summing up his discussion of The One, or The Good, in which he has pointed out how it is above intellect, Plotinus says: “If, however, anything is present with the good , it is present with it in a way transcending knowledge and intelligence and a cosensation of itself, since it has not anything different from itself.... On this account says Plato [in the “Parmenides,” speaking of the one ] that neither language can describe, nor sense nor science apprehend 154 it, because nothing can be predicated of it as present with it.” (“Enneads,” VI. vii. 41.) Transferring this idea of the transcendency of The One to his love, Donne had the form of thought for his lyric.

This reference to the knowledge of self also occurs in Plotinus in the preceding sentence to the passage already extracted. “For the mandate,” he says, “‘know thyself,’ was delivered to those, who, on account of the multitude 155 which they possess , find it requisite to enumerate themselves, and in order that by knowing the number and quality of the things contained in their essence, they may perceive that they have not a knowledge of all things, or, indeed, of anything [which they ought to know], and who are ignorant over what they ought to rule, and what is the characteristic of their nature.” (VI. vii. 41.)

This highly metaphysical conception of love, the character of which has been shown in a few selected examples, became in the course of time known as “Platonic Love.” Scattered throughout the lyric poetry of the seventeenth century may be found certain poems labelled “Platonic Love.” Their presence among the author’s work is no testimony whatsoever that it is colored by any strain of Platonism, but merely signifies that at one time in his career the poet wrote love lyrics according to the prevailing manner of the time. For about 1634 Platonic love was a court fad. Howell, writing under date of June 3, 1634, says: “The Court affords little News at present, but that there is a Love call’d Platonick Love which much sways there of late: it is a Love abstracted 156 from all corporeal gross Impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and Ideas of the Mind, not in any carnal Fruition. This Love sets the Wits of the Town on work; and they say there will be a Mask shortly of it, whereof Her Majesty and her Maids of Honour will be part.” ^[12]

The masque referred to is D’Avenant’s “The Temple of Love” (1634). In Thomas Heywood’s “Love’s Mistress or the Queen’s Masque” (1640) the myth of Cupid and Psyche is interpreted in accordance with the notion of Platonic love; and in D’Avenant’s “Platonick Lovers” (1636) the subject of Platonic love is ridiculed. It is probable that the rise of this custom at the court was due to the presence of Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I. Margaret of Valois had made Platonic love known in France; and had shown how licentiousness of conduct was compatible with its practice. “She had a high harmonious soul,” writes Howell, ^[13] “much addicted to music and the sweets of love, and oftentimes in a Platonic way; She would have this Motto often in her mouth; Voulez vous 157 cesser d’aymer? possedez la chose aymée. ... She had strains of humors and transcendencies beyond the vulgar, and delighted to be call’d Venus Urania .” It is probable that the young queen wished to follow such an example and made known to the English court this new way of love gallantry. The practice of making love in the Platonic way grew so popular at any rate as to become a question of serious discussion. John Norris says, “ Platonic Love is a thing in every Bodies Mouth,” and after comparing it with the love described by Plato in the “Symposium,” he concludes, “But why this should be call’d by the name of Platonic Love, the best reason that I know of, is because People will have it so.” ^[14] Algernon Sidney has left an account of love as a desire of enjoying beauty. He concludes that since man is midway between angels and beasts, his love will share in the peculiarities of both the celestial and the sensual passion. ^[15] Walter Charleton ridicules the subject and unmasks its immorality, although his purpose is not in any way to 158 purify the morals of his readers. ^[16] Robert Boyle wrote, but did not publish, a series of letters, “wherein [among other subjects] Platonic love was explicated, celebrated, and wherein the cure of love was proposed and prosecuted.” ^[17]

The ideas expressed in these poems on Platonic love are not essentially different from those in the lyrics which have been already discussed. At times, as in Stanley’s “Love’s Innocence,” the Platonic manner is understood as one devoid of all danger. It was in this way that Vaughan looked upon his love for Amoret. “You have here,” he says, “a flame, bright only in its own innocence, that kindles nothing but a generous thought, which though it may warm the blood, the fire at highest is but Platonic; and the commotion, within these limits, excludes danger.” ^[18] On the other hand, Carew’s “Song to a Lady, not yet Enjoyed by her Husband,” shows how the stock ideas was used to cloak the immorality of the poet’s thought. George Daniel has left a series 159 of poems revealing the several phases of this love ranging between the two extremes. He writes one “To Cinthia, coying it,” in which its innocence is preached. “To Cinthia Converted” describes the union of the two souls. “To the Platonicke Pretender” warns the ladies from listening to this love when taught by a libertine. “Pure Platonicke” explains the spiritual nature of the passion by contrast with sensual love. “Court-Platonicke” shows how at court it was used merely as a means to an improper end. “Anti-Platonicke” recites the feelings of the sensual lover. ^[19] In Lord Herbert are found two other phases of this love. The first and second of his poems named “Platonick Love” are complimentary poems addressed to a lady; the first, telling her how the love inspired by her refines his soul, and the second celebrating Platonic love in general application.

160 In the third “Platonicke Love” the lover is represented as wavering between despair and hope with a slight balance in favor of the latter. He is disconsolate because he finds no hope

Platonic love, as such an example proves, was but synonymous with hopeless love.

Platonic love, then, meant either a love devoid of all sensual desire, an innocent or hopeless 161 passion, or it was a form of gallantry used to cloak immorality. Its one characteristic notion was that true love consisted in a union of soul with soul, mind with mind, or essence with essence. This idea of restricting love to the experience of soul as opposed to the enjoyment of sense is the one notion which runs beneath many of the love lyrics written in the seventeenth century; and it is the point attacked by opponents. In John Cleveland, “To Cloris, a Rapture,” and in Campion’s “Song” ^[20] the poets exhort their beloved to enjoy this high union of soul. In Carew’s “To My Mistress in Absence,” in Lovelace’s “To Lucasta. Going beyond the Seas,” and in Cowley’s “Friendship in Absence,” the triumph of love over time and space is explained by the mingling of souls in true love. In Sedley’s “The Platonick” and in Ayres’s “Platonic Love” are found examples of the hopelessness of the passion. In Aytoun’s “Platonic Love” which was taken by Suckling to form a poem—the “Song,” beginning, “If you refuse me once”—the lover modestly confesses that he cannot rise to the heights of such a pure passion, and 162 requests a more easy way. In Cleveland’s “The Anti-Platonick” and “Platonick Love,” in Brome’s “Epithalamy,” in Cowley’s “Platonick Love” and “Answer to the Platonicks,” and in Cartwright’s “No Platonique Love,” the claims of the opponents are expressed in all the grossness of Restoration immorality.

The atmosphere in which the metaphysical treatment of love flourished was intensely intellectual. The poets in whom the strain is clearest were trying to accomplish two thing: they wished to oppose the idea of passion in love, and they endeavored to account for the attraction of sex in the love which they themselves experienced. However much these poets wished to exclude the notion of sex, their minds were constantly busied in trying to solve the source of its power. In Donne, the greatest representative of the metaphysical manner, this purpose is very evident. He wrote his longest poem, “An Anatomy of the World,” to show how, by reason of the death of a certain young woman, “the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented.” In reply to Jonson’s criticism, that this poem was “full of blasphemies,” Donne remarked that “he described 163 the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was.” ^[21] Here lies the secret of Donne’s treatment of woman; he was interested in her, not as a personality, but as an idea. In solving the nature of this idea he recurred to certain Platonic conceptions by which he thought to explain the source of her power.

These Platonic conceptions are two. Woman is identified with virtue; she is the source of all virtue in the world, others being virtuous only by participating in her virtue. Thus in a letter “To the Countess of Huntingdon” he shows how virtue has been raised from her fallen state on earth by appearing in woman. She was once scattered among men, but now summed up in one woman.

Beneath this torture of conceits may be seen the idea that woman is that very virtue of which Plato has spoken in his “Phædrus.” Sidney has used the idea to compliment Stella; but Donne’s purpose is to show how woman, as woman, is to be identified with it, and that the differentiation in the concept resulting from the fact that she may be a wife or a mother is due to the necessity that this virtue become visible on earth.

The second Platonic conception through which Donne conveys his idea of woman’s nature is the universal soul. In his lyric, “A Fever,” he says, speaking of the object of his love:

And in “An Anatomy of the World” this idea of the death of the world in the death of a woman is explained at length.

Holding thus to this idea of woman, and striving to differentiate love from passion, Donne was able to confine his notion of love to the soul; and through the metaphysical manner of his poetic art he was able to express this notion in the most perplexing intricacies of thought. As Dryden has said, “he affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign: and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with the speculations of philosophy, where he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love.” ^[22] By imitating his style the other lyric poets of the seventeenth century produced the species of love poems which have 166 already been analyzed. His skill and his sincerity of aim are lacking in their verse; and the result was either a weak dilution of his thought or a striving for his manner in praising a lower conception of love.

I. NATURE OF GOD

Platonism affected Christian theology as it appears in English poetry in a twofold way. It provided a body of intellectual principles which were identified with the persons of the Christian Trinity and it also trained the minds of the poets in conceiving God rather as the object of the mind’s speculative quest than as the dread judge of the sinful soul. Platonism in this form is no longer the body of ethical principles appearing in the Platonic dialogues; but is that metaphysical after-growth of Platonism that has its source in the philosophy of Plotinus. According to this form of speculative mysticism there were three ultimate principles, or hypostases,—The Good, Intellect (υοῦς), and Soul. Owing to the affinity of Platonism for Christian forms of thought, these three 168 hypostases were conceived as the philosophic basis underlying the Christian teaching of the three Persons of the Trinity. Such an interpretation is seen plainly in the work of Henry More and William Drummond; and the speculative attitude of conceiving God and Christ in the light of the hypostases of Plotinus is also discernible in Spenser and Milton.

The boldest attempt to identify the three Plotinian principles with the Christian Trinity is made in Henry More’s “Psychozoia,” the first poem of his “Psychodia Platonica.” This poetical treatise reveals the aim of More’s spiritual life as it was formulated on the basis of Platonic philosophy blended with the teaching of the “Theologia Germanica.” The strain of self-abnegation which More learned in “that Golden little Book ,” ^[23] as he names the German treatise, may be easily separated from the Platonism, being confined to the last two books of his poem; it may thus be dismissed. In the first book, however, the current of thought is almost purely Platonic. There, under the figure of the marriage rite, the first principle of Plotinus, the Good, is represented 169 as joining his two children—Intellect and Soul—in holy union; and under the poetic device of a veil with several films or tissues, More describes Soul in minute detail.

In keeping with the teachings of Platonism More defines each person of the Trinity in the terms used by Plotinus. According to this philosopher the highest reality is The One or The Good which is infinite and above all comprehension, not because it is impossible to measure or count it (since it has no magnitude and no multitude), but simply because it is impossible to conceive its power. (“Enneads,” VI. ix. 6.) In the beatific vision, in which The Good is known in the Soul, it is invisible, hidden in its own rays of light. (“Enneads,” VI. vii. 35.) More thus speaks of God, naming him Hattove:

The Son is identified with the second hypostasis,—universal intellect. In this all realities are present not as created things in time or space, but embraced as essential forms with no spatial or temporal relation. This character of universal intellect is thus named αἰών, or eternity. (“Enneads,” III. vii. 4.) More thus writes of Christ—

Psyche, or Uranore, as she is named at times, is the third person of the Trinity. She is the soul of the universe, present in every “atom ball,” in the creatures of earth, sea, air, the 171 divine stars in heaven. (“Enneads,” V. i. 2.) In her true essence she is invisible; but More pictures her as enveloped in a fourfold garment. The outer garment is called Physis, in which all natural objects appear as spots which grow each according to its idea. This robe is stirred with every impulse of life from the central power of God.

The second and third folds of Psyche’s vest are very closely identified. They are called Arachnea and Haphe, by which the life of 172 sensation is meant. Haphe, or touch, sits in the finely spun web of Arachnea, and is aware of every manifestation of life resulting from the soul’s contact with the outward world. In this life of sensation Psyche sees as in a mirror all the stirring life within the universe. (I. 48, 49, 50.)

The fourth fold of Psyche’s garment is called Semele, by which imagination is meant. This is the loosest of the four veils, having the fullest play in its movements. It is universal imagination, and from it arises the inspiration of the poet and the prophet. (I. 57.) The individual powers of imagination are conceived as daughters of the one great Semele.

These three persons—Ahad, another name given by More to God (I. 34), Æon, and Psyche—form, 173 says More, “the famous Platonicall Triad; which though they that slight the Christian Trinity do take for a figment; yet I think it is no contemptible argument, that the Platonists, the best and divinest of Philosophers, and the Christians, the best of all that do professe religion, do both concur that there is a Trinity. In what they differ, I leave to be found out, according to the safe direction of that infallible Rule of Faith, the holy Word.” ^[24] To signify the union of these persons More represents Ahad joining Æon, his son, in marriage to Psyche, and by holding their hands in his, maintaining a perpetual unity.

In this way More has expressed his conception of the Christian Trinity. Inasmuch as his purpose in the “Psychozoia” is to relate the experiences of the human soul from the time of its departure from God to its return thither, he has laid especial emphasis upon the third hypostasis of Plotinus,—Soul.

In William Drummond’s “An Hymn of the Fairest Fair” attention is centred upon the first person of the Trinity. Drummond is more of a poet and less of a philosopher than More; but the philosophic conceptions which are woven into his poetical description of the nature, attributes, and works of God are drawn from the same system of metaphysics. In Drummond’s “Hymn” there is a mingling of two conceptions of God. He is described, according to the Hebraic idea, as a mighty king, the creator of the universe, dwelling in heaven, 175 and possessing such attributes of personality as justice, mercy, might. Running in and out of this description is a strain of Platonic speculation, in which the conception of God as an essence is very prominent. Thus by means of a poetic device picturing youth standing before God and pouring immortal nectar into His cup, Drummond expresses the Platonic idea of absolute oneness. And this idea is the attribute of God first set forth.

After a description of God’s might, Drummond passes on to consider His truth, conceived as the Platonists conceived intellect, embracing all reality as essential form. This 176 attribute is pictured as a mirror in which God beholds all things.

Platonic metaphysics are also present in Drummond’s account of the essential unity persisting throughout the triplicity of Persons. Plotinus had held that The One caused the mind or intellect, and that in turn caused universal soul. The order, however, is not one of time sequence, but merely a logical order of causation. In this series of causation there is no idea of a production as an act going out of itself and forming another; each producing cause remains in its own centre; throughout the series runs one cause or manifestation of life. His favorite figures by which he explains this idea are, first, that of an overflowing spring which gives rise to a second and this to a third; 177 and, second, that of a sun with a central source of light with its spreading rays. (“Enneads,” V. ii. 1, 2.) Thus intellect is an irradiation of The One and soul is an irradiation of intellect. (“Enneads,” V. i. 6.) Drummond, holding to the idea of the self-sufficiency of God as expressed in Plotinus, a state in which God is alone by Himself and not in want of the things that proceed from Him (“Enneads,” VI. vii. 40), is thus able to unfold the mystery of the One in Three:

From this point on to the close, the “Hymn” celebrates the glory of God in his works. Drummond possessed an imagination that delighted as Milton’s did in the contemplation of the universe as a vast mechanical scheme of sun and planets. (ll. 180–232.) His philosophic mind, however, led him to conceive of nature in the manner of the Platonists. God, or true 179 being, according to Plotinus is a unity, everywhere present (“Enneads,” VI. v. 4); and matter, the other extreme of his philosophy, is an empty show, a shadow in a mirror. (“Enneads,” III. vi. 7.) In closing the account of the works of God, Drummond thus writes:

Drummond’s “Hymn” is the work of a mind in which poetical sensuousness and philosophic abstraction are well-nigh equally balanced. In More the philosopher had outweighed the poet. In Milton the poet asserts his full power. To him the Plotinian scheme of the hypostases is valuable only as they enable his love of beauty to be satisfied in conformity with his intellectual apprehension of the relation between God and the Son in the Trinal Godhead. Plotinus 180 had outlined the relation between The Good and Intellect as that of a principle of beauty by which the intellect is invested and possesses beauty and light. (“Enneads,” VI. vii. 31.) The Good itself is the principle of beauty, hidden in its own rays of light. In Milton the conception of God as hidden in inaccessible light, and of the Son as the express image of the invisible beauty of God, is explained in conformity with the Platonic scheme, and also with those Scriptural texts, one of which mentions God as a King of kings, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto (1 Tim. vi. 16); and the other proclaims that in Christ “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. ii. 9). Thus in heaven the angels hymn their praises:

This relation of Christ to God which in the Scripture was indicated only as in an outline sketch has been filled in with the substance of the Plotinian æsthetics, in which The One and The Good is beauty itself (καλλονή) and intellect is the beautiful (τὸ καλόν). (“Enneads,” I. vi. 6.)

The attraction which this philosophical explanation had for those whose work reveals its presence is twofold. To the religious mind in which the metaphysical cast of thought was prominent, the idea of the transcendent immanence of God in all things as their life, yet apart from all things as objects in time and space 182 came home with its wealth of suggestion of the nearness of God to man. In Henry More this feeling is uppermost in his “Psychozoia.” In the midst of his description of Psyche’s robe he breaks out into a passage on the constant care which God shows toward the world. In Psyche’s mirror of Arachnea and Haphe God is aware of all on earth that falls under sense. The roaring of the hungry lion, the burning thirst of the weary traveller and every movement of the little sparrow are all known to him.

In his second canto, where he repeats the idea of the universal life of Psyche, he dwells on the fact of God’s immanence in the world. He is the inmost centre of creation, from whom as rays from the sun the individual souls are born.

In those minds less metaphysical in nature, the high speculations of Platonic philosophy opened a way by which they could conceive God as a principle grasped by the mind rather than as a personal judge and punisher of sin. In Drummond this contrast in the two conceptions of God—one feeding itself on philosophy, and the other on the imagery of the Scripture—is strikingly brought out by a comparison of the opening and the ending of “An Hymn of the Fairest Fair” with those of “A Prayer for Mankind.” The “Hymn” begins with a confession of the elevating power of his subject:

“A Prayer for Mankind,” however, opens with the note of humble adoration and a sense of sin.

In Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Beautie” in the first portion of which he sings the ascent of the mind through ever rising stages of perfection to

the mingling of these two ways of approach to God is very apparent. Spenser is first a Platonist and then a Christian. How, he asks, if God’s glory is such that the sun is dimmed by comparison, can we behold Him?

Then comes in the sense of sin, and he approaches God in a different spirit. He continues:

II. NATURE OF THE SOUL

The nature of the soul from the standpoint of Plotinian metaphysics was treated by Henry More in his two poetical treatises, “Pyschathanasia” and “Anti-psychopannychia.” In the former he follows the course of the argument 187 set forth in the seventh book of the fourth “Ennead” of Plotinus. In the Plotinian defence two propositions are established; namely, that the soul is not body, and that it is not a function of body. By demonstrating these, it followed that the soul is an immaterial thing, a real being, and consequently eternal. This is the drift of More’s argument in “Psychathanasia.” The first and second books are devoted to the establishment of the definition of the soul as an incorporeal substance, and the proof of its incorporeality is deduced from considerations of its functions.

The soul, More holds, is an incorporeal thing because it is a self-moving substance present in all forms of life. Plotinus had taught that soul was everywhere. “First, then,” he says, “let every soul consider this: how by breathing life into them soul made all animals, the creatures of earth, sea, air, the divine stars in heaven; made the sun, made the great firmament above us, and not only made but ordered it, so that it swings round in due course. Yet is this soul a different nature from what it orders, and moves, and vivifies. It must needs then be more precious than its creations. For 188 they are born, and when the soul which ministers their life abandons them, they die; but the soul ever is because it never abandons itself.” (“Enneads,” V. i. 2.) More finds this soul present in the growth of all forms of vegetation, the sphere spermatic (I. ii. 30), in the life of animals, sensation, and self-directed motion; and in the intellectual life of man. (I. ii. 17–22.)

He next demonstrates that this soul is a self-moving substance. It is self-moving in plants, as the quickening power of the sun on vegetation shows. Through the heat of the sun the hidden centre, or soul, is called into the life of blossoming and growth.

In animals the self-moving soul is manifested in motion and the life of sensation.

In man the self-motion of the soul is present in the activity of reason, whether as the presiding power in all of the operations of the image-making faculty, or as the contemplative and speculative power. (I. ii. 41–44.)

After this account of the nature of the soul as a self-moving substance, More addresses himself to the task of showing that all life is immortal. In a time of despondency a Nymph once came and declared to him,

According to the theory unfolded by the Nymph there is an ever present unity in all things which is the true source of their life. This is God. From Him are six descending degrees of existence, called intellectual, psychical, imaginative, sensitive, plantal, or spermatic. (I. iii. 23.) Below all of these is matter, which is nothing but mere potentiality, 190 or the possibility of all created things. (I. iv. 9.) Though these various degrees of life are distinct, they are manifestations of the one pervading unity. (I. iii. 25.) Matter thus cannot be the prop and stay of life. (I. iii. 26.)

The second proof of the incorporeal nature of the soul is found in the character of its functions. After a hasty attack on the doctrine of materialism in the form of a reductio ad absurdum (II. ii. 13–25; cf. Plotinus, IV. vii. 3), More shows, first, that the faculty within us by which we are aware of the outward world of sense is one and individual, yet everywhere present in the body. (II. ii. 32.) This faculty, called “the common sense” (II. ii. 26), sits as judge over all the data of sense knowledge (cf. Plotinus, IV. vii. 6); it decides in case of disagreement between two senses, and distinguishes clearly between the objects present to each sense. (II. ii. 28.) The common sense must be one, else, being divided, it would breed confusion in consciousness (II. ii. 31); and it must be everywhere present in the body because it shows no partiality to any sense, but has intelligence of all equally. (II. ii. 32.)

191 The rational powers of the soul are a further proof of the soul’s incorporeal nature. The first consideration draws attention to the vast scope of man’s will and soul. In the virtuous the soul can be so universalized and begotten into the life of God that the will embraces all with a tender love and is ever striving to seek God as the good. (II. iii. 6.) If this is so, More asks whether the soul thus universalized can ever die. (II. iii. 7.) Man’s understanding, too, can become so broadened that it can apprehend God’s true being, not knowing it, to be sure, in its true essence, but having such a true insight that it can reject all narrow conceptions of His nature and welcome other more comprehensive ideas as closer approximations to the truth. The understanding is in a state that More calls parturient; God under certain conditions can be born within the soul. (II. iii. 9–12.) For the reason, then, of the vastness of the power of will and understanding More holds that the soul cannot be a body. (II. iii. 4.)

The next argument in regard to the rational powers of the soul centres about her power of pure abstraction. (Cf. “Enneads,” IV. vii. 8.) In herself the soul divests matter of all time 192 and place relations and views the naked, simple essence of things. (II. iii. 18.) She thus frames within herself an idea, which is indivisible and unextended; and by this she judges outward objects. (II. iii. 18–20; cf. “Enneads,” IV. vii. 12.) This property is not a property of body. (II. iii. 26.)

At this point More closes the first division of his argument. By establishing the definition of the soul as a self-moving substance, and by an account of the nature of its functions, he has defended his first proposition, that the soul is an incorporeal thing. He then passes on to the second part of his argument, that the soul is an incorporeal thing because it is independent of the body.

This portion of his defence falls into four main divisions. In the first he explains the nature of the body’s dependence upon the soul. Through the power that the soul has by virtue of its lowest centre of life, called the plantal, the soul frames the body in order to exercise through it the functions of life. (III. i. 17.) The more perfect this body is the more awake the soul is. (III. i. 17.) But after the work of framing the body is finished, the soul dismisses 193 it as an old thought and begins its life of contemplation. (III. i. 16.) The main desire is to see God. (III. ii. 11.) Next More shows how the soul can direct her own thoughts within herself without in any way considering the body. Her intellectual part dives within her nature in its quest for self-knowledge and her will affects herself after this knowledge has been gained. All this is accomplished free from any bodily assistance. (III. ii. 25, 26.) The third division shows how the soul is so independent of the body that she can resist its desires. Often the sensual impulse of our nature would lead us to be content with mere satisfaction of our bodily desires; but the soul desirous of truth and gifted with an insight into God’s true nature enables us to resist all such impulses. (III. ii. 38, 39.) The fourth division contrasts the vitality of the soul with that of sense, fancy, and memory. These three faculties are weakened by age and by disease, and also by excessive stimulation; but the soul never fades, but grows stronger with each contemplative act. (III. ii. 48, 49, 56.)

The attraction which the philosophy of Plotinus had for More’s mind lay in its scheme 194 of speculative mysticism. The metaphysical system of Plotinus had taught that The One, which is the truly existing being, is everywhere present and yet nowhere wholly present. (“Enneads,” VI. iv.) It had explained also that the only way in which the individual soul could apprehend this truly existing being was by a mystical union with it, in which state the soul did not know in the sense of energizing intellectually, but was one with The One. (“Enneads,” VI. ix. 10.) These two ideas lie at the basis of More’s theosophic mysticism. Their presence can be felt throughout his “Psychathanasia” as its controlling idea and also in his two less important treatises, “Anti-psychopannychia” and “Anti-monopsychia.”

The argument of the “Anti-psychopannychia” and of the “Anti-monopsychia” centres about the doctrine of the mystic union with God. The argument in the “Psychathanasia” is a critique of materialism rather than a positive plea for the existence of the soul after death. It was the purpose of More in his two pendants to his longer poem to treat of the state of the soul after death. That it is not enveloped in eternal night he proves in his 195 “Anti-psychopannychia.” His argument is briefly this: Since God is a unity everywhere present, he is infinite freedom. (II. 2.) Since the soul’s activities of will and intellect are free from dependence upon the body, death will be but the ushering of the soul into the life of God’s large liberty.

In this life of union the soul will realize the deep fecundity of her own nature; for in her are innate ideas. To establish this theory of innate ideas into which Plato’s theory of reminiscence has been transformed in Plotinus (cf. “Enneads,” IV. iii. 25), More educes four considerations. They must exist because (1) like is known only by like (II. 31); (2) no object or number of objects can give the soul a universal concept (II. 36); (3) the apprehension of 196 incorporeal things cannot be made by sense, therefore the soul must have the measure of such within her own nature (II. 38, 39); and (4) the process of learning shows that it is education, or the drawing out of the mind what was in it potentially (II. 42). Inasmuch, then, as innate ideas exist within the mind, called out by experience in life, how much more will they be evoked in that high union with God!

But this union of the soul with The One may be thought to obliterate self-identity after death and teach only a universal absorption of all souls into The One. To combat this idea More contends in his “Anti-monopsychia” that by virtue of the “Deiformity” of the soul, by which he means its ability to be joined with God, the soul in death is so

In the “Psychathanasia” the Plotinian doctrines of the immanent unity of The One and of the mystical union of the soul with it are not so much present as positive arguments incorporated in the sequence of thought, but are felt as controlling ideas in the mind of the writer. The reason for this lies in the fact that in the argument of Plotinus (IV. vii) these two truths of his philosophy are not specifically elaborated. To More, however, as indeed to all students of Plotinian metaphysics, these are the significant ideas of his system. More thus brings them in at opportune times throughout his argument in “Psychathanasia.”

The conception of the ever present unity of 198 The One in all things is the fundamental idea in the first division of his thought. The tenacity with which he clings to this doctrine is remarkable. His argument had brought him to the point where he had shown that all life—of plants and animals, as well as of men—was immortal. What, then, is the state of the plantal and animal soul after death? (I. ii. 49–53.) More does not answer directly, but replies that although men cannot know this, it is not permitted to reason it down.

Consequently when he comes to consider man’s immortality, he says that all the preceding argument—the general reflection on the “self-motion and centrall stabilitie” of the soul—may be dismissed as needless.

199 It is because of the firm conviction with which he holds to the conception of the pervading unity of The One that he expands the idea at length in the third and fourth cantos of the first book.

The second idea, that of the mystical union of the individual soul with The One, is an incentive to More’s thought and feelings throughout the course of his entire argument. From the fact that the soul can dive as deep as matter, and rise to the height of a blissful union with God, he derives the necessary inspiration for his “mighty task.”

When in the course of his argument he arrives at a discussion of the rational power of the soul, he launches out into a treatment of the vast scope of man’s will and mind which

Again, when his argument brings him to the point at which the independence of soul from body is to be proved, he breaks out with an exclamation of the bliss of that union of soul with God, when

Finally in the last canto of his third book he testifies to the vanity of that knowledge of the reasons for the soul’s immortality, even as he had given them (III. ii. 11), and confesses that the only sure stay in the storm of life is a faith in “the first Good.”

As in his “Psychozoia” it was noted how the omnipresence of Psyche appealed to More’s religious sense of the nearness of God to His children, so in his other treatises, especially his “Psychathanasia,” the mystical union of the soul with The One is for More another name for the love of God as known in the soul of the Christian. The Christian religion had taught 202 that God is love, a conception far removed from Platonism, whether of the dialogues or of the “Enneads” of Plotinus. But the tendency to find in Platonism a rational sanction for religious truth was so strong in the theology of the Cambridge school, to which More belonged, that this conception of God as love—which, indeed, is held by the Christian not as an idea but as a fact of his inmost religious experience—was interpreted in the light of the speculative mysticism of Plotinus; and thus the formless One, the ultra-metaphysical principle above all being, became the Christian God of love.

III. ETERNITY OF THE SOUL AND OF MATTER

In the work of Vaughan and Spenser two distinct phases of another form of Platonic idealism are presented: one in which the poet looks back upon eternity as a fact of the soul’s past experience, and the other in which he directs a forward glance to the future when the soul shall find its eternal rest.

In the expression of his sense of eternity, Vaughan recurs to the doctrine of the preëxistence 203 of the soul as it is expounded in Plato. In Vaughan this idea is felt as an influence either affording the substance of his thought or determining the nature of his imagery. The idea which Vaughan carries over into his own poetry is found in Plato’s account in the “Phædrus” of the preëxistence of the soul in a world of pure ideas before its descent into the body. “There was a time,” says Plato, “when with the rest of the happy band they [ i.e. the human souls] saw beauty shining in brightness: we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we held shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell.” (“Phædrus,” 250.)

This idea occurs in two forms in Vaughan. In “The Retreat” the reminiscence of a past 204 is described as a fact of Vaughan’s religious experience. He longs to travel back to the time when, in his purity, he was nearer to God than he is now in his sinful state.

The second form of this idea appears in Vaughan’s poem called “Corruption.” Man is represented as enjoying the happiness of innocence in the garden of Eden, where he was in close touch with the beauties of heaven. Here he had a glimpse of his heavenly birth; but when, by reason of sin, he was forced to leave that place, he found earth and heaven no longer friendly.

In this poem, although there is no such parallelism with the account of a preëxistent state as it is given in Plato, the fundamental idea is the same as that of “The Retreat.” Vaughan describes man’s life in Eden as one of closer intimacy with his celestial home than his lot on earth affords him, just as he had described the experience of his own “angel-infancy” and its contrast to his earthly life. In both poems is present the conviction that the human soul once lived in a state of pure innocence; and in both is heard the note of regret at the loss of this through sin.

In Vaughan’s poem, “The World,” the influence of Plato’s account of the preëxistent life of the soul is felt only in affording the character of the imagery which Vaughan has used to express his idea. In the “Phædrus” Plato describes the progress of the soul in its sight of the eternal ideas in the heaven of heavens. Each soul, represented as a charioteer 207 guiding a pair of winged horses, is carried about by the revolution of the spheres, and during the progress it beholds the ideas. The souls of the gods have no difficulty in seeing these realities; “but of the other souls,” says Plato, “that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while another only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world, and they all follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed, or have their wings broken, through the ill-driving of the charioteers.” (“Phædrus,” 248.)

In this account of the revolution of the soul about the eternal realities of true being, Vaughan found the suggestion for his poem, “The World.” Instead of the revolution of the soul about true being, he describes the revolution of time about 208 eternity. The figure of the charioteer is absent, too, but it is by the use of the “wing” that those who make the revolution about eternity mount up into the circle, just as in Plato. Time in the poem also is represented as being “driven about by the spheres.” Such coincidences of imagery show that Vaughan found in Plato’s fanciful account of the soul’s preëxistent life in heaven the medium through which he expressed his view of the relation of the life of the present day world to that of eternity. At first he pictures the revolution of the world about the great ring of light which he calls eternity:

He then describes the lover busied in his trifles,—his lute, his fancies, and his delights. Next moves the statesman, pursued by the shouts of multitudes. The next to follow are the miser and the epicure.

210 At this point Vaughan ends his catalogue of human types and comments upon the unwillingness of the many to soar up into the ring by the aid of the wing.

Spenser finds his suggestion of the eternal in life, not in a consciousness of a past existence, but in a conception of the world of matter built up in accordance with the Platonic doctrine of stability of the substance amid the flux of changing forms. This conception of the world is explained by him in his description of the “Garden of Adonis” in the “Faerie Queene” and in his “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie.”

The conception of matter which Spenser teaches is the doctrine of Plotinus expressed in accordance with the account of flux and stability of natural phenomena explained by Plato 211 in the “Timæus.” According to Plotinus matter is an indestructible “subject” of forms which endures through all the various changes which it is constantly undergoing, and this unchanging something is never destroyed. (“Enneads,” II. iv. 6.) In the “Timæus” Plato had outlined a theory of flux with which this doctrine of the indestructibility of matter could be easily harmonized. In his discussion of the world of natural phenomena he distinguishes three natures, as he calls them, and likens them to a father, a child, and a mother. “For the present,” he says in the “Timæus” (50), “we have only to conceive of three natures: first, that which is in process of generation; secondly, that in which the generation takes place; and thirdly, that of which the thing generated is a resemblance. And we may liken the receiving principle to a mother, and the source or spring to a father, and the intermediate nature to a child.” According to this piece of poetic imagery he describes the various manifestations of matter in the outward world. The elements are constantly changing in and out of one another and have in them nothing permanent. They cannot be called “this” or “that,” but 212 only “such.” Only the receiving principle, the universal nature, “that must be always called the same; for while receiving all things, she never departs at all from her own nature, and never in any way or at any time assumes a form like that of any of the things which enter into her; she is the natural recipient of all impressions, and is stirred and informed by them, and appears different from time to time by reason of them.” (“Timæus,” 50.)

The explanation of the myriad changes of matter of the outward world of sense after the manner of this account by Plato is found in Spenser’s description of the “Garden of Adonis.” The term “garden of Adonis” is found in Plato’s “Phædrus” (276), where is meant an earthen vessel in which plants are nourished to quick growth only to decay as rapidly. On this term Spenser’s imagination built its superstructure of fancy by which the garden of Adonis became symbolic of the world of natural phenomena described after the manner of Plato in the “Timæus” and Plotinus in the “Enneads.” The garden is described at first as a seminary of all living things, conceived first as flowers:

Spenser’s imagination now changes, and he conceives of the objects in this garden as naked babes, in accordance with the suggestion of the intermediate nature which Plato conceived as a child. Genius as the porter of the place is thus described:

Again there is a change, and the objects issuing from this garden are forms which borrow their substance from the matter of chaos.

When these forms are sent forth from the garden they take for their substance the matter found in chaos which is ever eternal.

Spenser now stops the play of fancy and becomes the philosopher, explaining the doctrine of matter as taught by Plotinus. The substance of things is eternal and abides in potency of further change.

Finally, Spenser closes his account of the garden with a mingling of fancy and philosophy. He adopts the suggestion of Plato that the source of the many changes in natural phenomena is a father, and blends the conception with the myth of Venus and Adonis. In the garden Venus is represented as enjoying the pleasure of the presence of Adonis perpetually, for he is described as the father of 216 the various forms who abides eternal in all change.

The attraction which this doctrine of the indestructibility of matter had for Spenser lay in the comforting assurance which it brought him of an eternity when things should be at rest. Throughout Spenser is heard a note of world weariness.

217 These words placed in the mouth of Arthur (I. ix. 11) are essentially characteristic of Spenser’s outlook on the things of this world: they are his lacrimæ rerum . The “Cantos of Mutabilitie” is the best instance in point. These two cantos celebrate the overthrow of Mutability by Nature. To the claim of preëminence among the gods which Mutability lays before Nature, and which she bases upon the fact that everything in the wide universe is subject to constant change, Dame Nature replies that though they be subject to change, they change only their outward state, each change working their perfection; and she further remarks that the time will come when there shall be no more change. At the end of Mutability’s plea Dame Nature thus answers the charge:

On this decision of Nature Spenser bases his assurance of a time when the soul shall have its final rest. With a prayer to the great God of Sabaoth that he may see the time when all things shall rest in Him, Spenser closes his work on his great unfinished poem—the “Faerie Queene.”

In the theory of the preëxistence of the soul and in the conception of the indestructibility of matter Vaughan and Spenser were able to find teachings which were akin to the most intimate 219 experiences of their lives. Although the phase of Platonic idealism which taught in these two distinct ways the eternity of human life and of the world about us did not have so vital an influence upon English poetry as did the opening of a world of moral beauty, its presence is nevertheless indicative of the strong hold which Platonism had upon some of the finest poetic minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. Even when these poets were writing from the fulness of their own personal experience, it was in the moulds of Platonic philosophy that their thought was cast.

The elements of Platonism, then, that enter into the English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have their source in the dialogues of Plato and the “Enneads” of Plotinus. The body of this teaching—its æsthetics, its metaphysics, and its ethics—was seen by the poets in its relation to Christian doctrine and to the passion of romantic love. The more permanent results for good are found in the fusion of Platonism with the ideals of Christian living and with its longing for perfection. If one passage in Plato may adequately sum up the teaching of Platonism most influential in 220 English poetry, it is the passage in “Phædrus” in which the beauty of wisdom is taught (“Phædrus,” 250).

But beauty in its stricter import is a thing known to the sense, and is carried over into the moral world only to indicate the value of moral ideas. Plato recognized this; and in this connection it is significant that in the part of “Phædrus,” where he speaks of the loveliness of wisdom, he is aware of the power of pure beauty. “But of beauty,” he says, “I repeat again that we saw her there [in the ideal world] shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense. For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible counterparts, would be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight” (250).

Spenser was the poet who caught the spirit of this teaching. Pastorella’s beauty is presented not as Una’s, the beauty of wisdom, nor 221 as Britomart’s, the beauty of the inward purity of womanhood; but it is a beauty of pure form.

And yet as she stands on the little hillock she is encompassed with a cloud of glory.

They saw in the object before their eyes the idea of beauty in earthly form. The miracle is no more and no less than this; it is “the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight.”

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6 . Besides paraphrasing “Phædo,” 110–111 in ll. 111–136, Drummond repeats the argument given in that dialogue to prove the probable existence of such a world. Cf. ll. 141–170 with “Phædo,” 109.—“But we who live in these hollows [of earth] are deceived into the notion that we are dwelling on the surface of the earth; which is just as if a creature who was at the bottom of the sea were to fancy that he was on the surface of the water and that the sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars, he having never come to the surface by reason of his feebleness and sluggishness, and having never lifted up his head and seen, nor ever heard from one who had seen, how much purer and fairer the world above is than his own.... [But] if any man could arrive at the exterior limit [of the atmosphere], or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then like a fish who puts his head out of water and sees this world, he would see a world beyond.”

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CHAPTER I
	PAGE
Ideals of Christian Virtues	1
I. Holiness	1
II. Temperance	12
III. Chastity	30

CHAPTER II
Theory of Love	67
I. Heavenly Love	67
II. Earthly Love	104

CHAPTER III
God and the Soul	167
I. Nature of God	167
II. Nature of the Soul	186
III. Eternity of the Soul and of Matter	202

Bibliography	223

Index	229

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

PLATONISM IN ENGLISH POETRY

OF THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

PREFACE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
Ideals of Christian Virtues

I. HOLINESS

II. TEMPERANCE

III. CHASTITY

CHAPTER II
Theory of Love

I. HEAVENLY LOVE

II. EARTHLY LOVE

CHAPTER III
God and the Soul

I. NATURE OF GOD

II. NATURE OF THE SOUL

III. ETERNITY OF THE SOUL AND OF MATTER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

PLATONISM IN ENGLISH POETRY OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

PREFACE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I Ideals of Christian Virtues

I. HOLINESS

II. TEMPERANCE

III. CHASTITY

CHAPTER II Theory of Love

I. HEAVENLY LOVE

II. EARTHLY LOVE

CHAPTER III God and the Soul

I. NATURE OF GOD

II. NATURE OF THE SOUL

III. ETERNITY OF THE SOUL AND OF MATTER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PLATONISM IN ENGLISH POETRY

OF THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

CHAPTER I
Ideals of Christian Virtues

CHAPTER II
Theory of Love

CHAPTER III
God and the Soul