It cannot surely be denied that art is full of indefinite and instinctive longing for the infinite.
Poetry is full of its pining voice. Chateaubriand says:
'When we are alone with nature, the feeling of the infinite forces itself irresistibly upon us. When the universe with its inexhaustible variety opens before us, when we contemplate the myriads of stars moving in ever-mystic harmony through the limitless immensity of space, when we gaze upon the ocean mingling with the sky in the boundless distance of the far horizon, when the earth and sea are rocked into profound calm, and creation itself seems wrapped in mystic contemplationan undefinable feeling of melancholy seizes upon us, unknown desires awaken in the soul, they seem to call us into other countries far beyond the limits of the knownmust it not then be the vague feeling after, the dim longing for, the infinite, which at such moments we feel strangely stirring in the calm depths of the divining soul?'
We find the same yearning breathing through the following beautiful poem of Mrs. Osgood's:
'As plains the home-sick ocean shell
Far from its own remembered sea,
Repeating, like a fairy spell,
Of love, the charmed melody
It learned within that whispering wave,
Whose wondrous and mysterious tone
Still wildly haunts its winding cave
Of pearl, with softest music-moan
'So asks my home-sick soul below,
For something loved, yet undefined;
So mourns to mingle with the flow
Of music from the Eternal Mind;
So murmurs, with its childlike sigh,
The melody it learned above,
To which no echo may reply
Save from thy voice, Eternal Love!'
It is to his fervent and fiery expression of this longing for the infinite, characterizing, whether pure or perverted, almost the whole of Byron's poetry, breaking out sometimes in imprecations and despair, and not to his immorality, that his great popularity is to be attributed. Even in the midst of the most unhappy scepticism, it was the haunting passion of his soul. Alas! that this longing for the food of heaven should have been fed on husks until the lower rungs of the heaven ladder became so covered with the corruption of matter and fiery sparks of evil, that it seemed rather meant for the foul feet of demons, than for the elastic tread of the redeemed human soul to God! We quote from him in proof:
'Blue rolls the water, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright;
Who ever gazed upon them shining
Nor turned to earth without repining,
Nor wished for wings to flee away,
And mix with their eternal ray?'
'Oh, thou beautiful
And unimaginable ether! and
Ye multiplying masses of increased
And still increasing lights! what are ye?
What
Is this blue wilderness of interminable
Air, wherein ye roll along as I have seen
The leaves along the limpid streams of
Eden?
Is your course measured for ye? or do ye
Sweep on in your unbounded revelry
Through an aerial universe of endless
Expansion, at which my soul aches to think
Intoxicated with eternity?'
'All heaven and earth are stillthough not in sleep,
And breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep;
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain coast,
All is concentred in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and Defence.
'Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone;
A truth, which through our being then doth melt,
And purify from self: it is a tone
The soul and source of music, which makes known
Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm,
Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,
Binding all things with beauty; 'twould disarm
The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.'
In some of the most forcible lines ever penned, Byron has given us the whole psychological analysis of the effects of human passion, when, in its insane perversion, and misdirected thirst for the infinite, it pours upon the dust that love and worship which is due to God alone. No one who has thus sinned, will refuse to acknowledge their force and truth. Fearful in their Medusa-like beauty, they fascinate the heart, only to turn its warm pulses into ice. They are actually withering in their despair. Poor Byron! did he never, never cry with the repentant but happy St. Augustin: 'Oh, eternal beauty! too late have I known thee!'
'Alas! our young affections run to waste,
Or water but the desert; whence arise
But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,
Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes,
Flowers whose wild odors breathe but agonies,
And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants
Which spring beneath her steps, as Passion flies
O'er the world's wilderness, and vainly pants
For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.
'O Love! no habitant of earth thou art
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee;
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquenched soulparchedweariedwrung and riven.
'Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation:where,
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?
In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreached Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er informs the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?
'Who loves, raves'tis youth's frenzybut the cure
Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,
Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prizewealthiest when most undone.
'We wither from our youth, we gasp away
Sicksick; unfound the boonunslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first
But all too late, so are we doubly cursed.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice'tis the same,
Each idleand all illand none the worst
For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
'Fewnonefind what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathiesbut to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dustthe dust we all have trod.
'Our life is a false nature'tis not in
The harmony of things,this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless Upas, this all blasting tree.
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew
Diseasedeathbondageall the woes we see
And worsethe woes we see notwhich throb through
The immedicable soul, with heartaches ever new.'
Again:
Again:
'What is the worst? Nay, do not ask
In pity from the search forbear:
Smile onnor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!'
Merciful God! how men suffer when they fly from Thee. When they refuse to listen to the sublime voice implanted within, which calls them to Thee, forever reminding them that they were made for things infinite, eternal! O ye men of pleasure, it is the very greatness of your nature which torments you: there is nothing save God capable of filling the immeasurable depths of your longing! How different the language of Klopstock, as already quoted: 'What recompense could I ask? I have tasted the cup of angels in singing of my Redeemer!'
One of the most dangerous, yet most brilliant among the novelists of the present day, says:
'Properly speaking, love is not a violent aspiration of every faculty toward a created being; it is rather a holy thirst of the most ethereal part of our being for the unknown. Tormented with intuitions of an eternal love, filled with torturing and insatiate desires for the infinite, we vainly seek their gratification in the dying forms which surround us, and obstinately adorn our perishable idols with that immaterial beauty which haunts our dreams. The emotions of the senses do not suffice us; in the treasure house of the simple joys of nature there is nothing sufficiently exquisite to fill our high demands; we would fain grasp heaven, and it is not within our reach. Then we seek it in a creature fallible as ourselves; we expend upon it all the high energies given us for far nobler ends. We refuse to worship God, and kneel before a worm like ourselves! But when the veil falls, when we see behind the clouds of incense and the halos woven by love, only a miserable and imperfect creaturewe blush for our delusion, overturn our idol in our despair, and trample it rudely under foot. But as we must love, and will not give our hearts to God, for whom they were created, we seek another idoland are again deceived! Through this bitter, bitter school we are purified and enlightened, until, abandoning all hope of finding perfection on earth, we are at last ready to offer God that pure, but now broken-hearted worship, which should never have been given save to Him alone.'George Sand.