ART, TRA 0 IT ION, AND TRUT H
II
without
real
scope are exceedingly rare. The few that remain are de–
-scribed
splendidly,
if
quite unintentionally, by Heller's strictures of
Rilke: "Rilke, however is the poet of a world, the philosopher of
which is Nietzsche. Its formations evade all traditional systems of car–
tography. Doubt has dislodged all certainties. The unnameable is
christened and the unsayable uttered. It is a world in which the
order of correspondences is violently disturbed. We can no longer
be
sure that we love the lovable and abhor the detestable. Good
does no good and evil no harm."
This might as well have been written about Shakespeare, whose
art it is to win our hearts for men from whom our judgment would
recoil. Coriolanus may seem an extreme example. But what of Lear?
Macbeth? Or even Hamlet? Does Hamlet's callous attitude after he
has dispatched Polonius warrant the affection which almost every
reader feels for him? Or is his calculated and unmerciful destruction
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern so lovable? Or his behavior toward
Ophelia? Or anything at all he does? Or is it not a fact that
in
Shakespeare's plays our emotions do
nQt
"respond to the interpreted
world" but instead "do the interpreting and then respond to their
own interpretation"?
No other English poet even approximates the scope of Shake–
speare. But Milton and Blake who have at least tried to create worlds
of their own are certainly no less open to Heller's objections than
Rilke. "We can no longer be sure that we love the lovable and abhor
the detestable." Is not this the very heart of
Paradise Lost?
Or
The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell?
Or Goethe's
Faust?
Or Dostoevsky'S
work?
The piety of the poet consists in a reverence not for tradition
but for experience. The great poet is not a mellifluous liar but a
man too honest to be able to accept what is stabilized and fixed. Im–
pressed with the lack of correspondence between his own experience
and the customary interpretations, he refuses to sacrifice
his
perception
to the stereotyped idols of society. He is, like the great philosopher, a
revolutionary. In Nietzsche's words: the creator breaks the old tab–
lets. What Heller considers an objection is really nothing less than
a criterion of great poetry: "the unnameable is christened and the
unsayable uttered."
To be sure, there are differences of degree;
also
of emphasis.
