Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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Herder, in point of fact, was before a larger tribunal than that of poetry, and in his plea for communal verse he was joining the great democratic movement which ran through European thought at large, no less active because less conspicuous in science, art, letters, religion, than in affairs of state. A passion for democracy had gone from literature into politics and again from politics into literature, begetting this notion of creative power in the people as a whole; about the time that philosophers discovered the people in politics, Hamann and Herder discovered the folk in verse. The earlier eighteenth century, like all the preceding Christian centuries from the time of St. Augustine,^[274] when saint or prophet or king was the embodiment of progress, still turned history into biography, and human development into a series of individual inventions; any movement in social life, whether of war or of peace, was due to the great man,—general, king, orator, poet,—who began or led the movement. Pascal’s pleasantry about Cleopatra and her nose became a serious system of history and philosophy. Even as late as Turgot,^[275] for example, one pinned one’s faith to great men, to genius, for the advancement of mankind. The seventeenth century had asked for raison; the eighteenth sought esprit.^[276] Genius was already a watchword when the democratic movement began, and it was not discarded by the new school; the Rousseaus and Herders clung to genius, but with a new interpretation of the word, and added that larger idea of “nature.” Critics are apt to forget that the return to nature was preceded by a return to genius. The next step was to substitute natural genius for the great man, to separate genius from the individual; and here the democratic movement found help at hand in the progress and gains of science. Science was now clear of the church, and began to work into the domain of law, causes, force; it sought the impersonal both in natural and in supernatural things. Cold and analytic in the earlier decades, science in the later eighteenth century grew emotional, synthetic, romantic, and full of zeal for what the Germans call “combination.” What a change from the earlier mood, represented, one might say, in Shaftesbury’s letter on enthusiasm! “Good humour,” he writes in 1707,^[277] “is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion.” Even as late as 1766, when the spirit of enthusiasm was again abroad, aristocratic Horace Walpole sounds the old note against the new communalism in his account of a sermon which he heard Wesley preach at Bath; the preacher “exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm.” Enthusiasm, however, was now rife in science itself; still blocked on the theological side, it turned to nature and what lay undiscovered in her domain. No talk as yet of a struggle for existence, no distinct lapse of faith in humanity as main object of cosmic solicitudes; but a disposition to find in the sweep and conflict of natural forces sufficiently good answer to any question about the history of man, and a tendency to force upon individual men a transfer of values to the race. Not the individual, but the mass, and behind this mass the currents of life at large, were to interpret history. The great man disappeared, or else served simply as mouthpiece for the national and popular genius; and it was at this point that Herder appeared with his Thoughts for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind,—thoughts that here and there foreshadow the doctrine of evolution. Down to the extreme theories of Buckle, this point of view was taken by historians and philosophers. True, much is said of the individual; Rousseau, Goethe in his Werther, Herder, even, and Hamann, all glorified the free, individual man; it is not individual man in the old sense, however, but rather man himself as type of the human brotherhood, as one of a throng, the “citizen” whether high or low. More than this, it was a glorification of primitive man himself without the differencing and individualizing work of culture; the eighteenth century, and not merely in Rousseau’s sentimental fashion, discovered the savage on one side, and, on the other side, unspoiled men of the prime. In literature there was an outbreak of gentle savages and a very mob of Robinson Crusoes; while for philosophy and science, the alchemy of human perfectibility, a desire to reconstruct society by the elixir of primitive life and a study of man as he ought to be, preceded the chemistry of modern anthropological and sociological researches, which aim at an analysis of earliest social conditions and the science of man both as he was and as he is.