The general drift of the wonderfully pregnant verses is that man attains peace only by renouncing the things of sense and living in the realm of shades, that is, among eternal ideals. Here he is free--like the gods.
The Weavers of the Web--the Fates--but sway The matter and the things of clay; Safe from each change that Time to Matter gives, Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray With Gods a god, amidst the fields of Day, The FORM, the ARCHETYPE, serenely lives. Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing? Cast from thee Earth, the bitter and the real, High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring Into the Realm of the Ideal.[104]
Throughout the poem 'Beauty' is put for 'the Ideal'; and we get a reflex of the philosophic doctrine that only the aesthetic faculty can resolve the eternal conflict between the sensuous and the rational man. Life Is and must be struggle, that being its very essence; but by taking refuge in the Realm of the Ideal, man anticipates his apotheosis. There he escapes from the tyranny of the flesh and the bondage of nature's law. The misery of struggle and defeat no longer vexes him. The warring forces are reconciled and he sees their conflict under the aspect of eternal beauty. Thus, like the new-born god, Alcides, taking leave of the terrestrial battle-ground, he mounts into heaven, while the nightmare of the earthly life 'sinks and sinks and sinks'.
Behold him spring Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing, And the dull matter that confined before Sinks downward, downward, downward, as a dream! Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul, And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream, Fills for a God the bowl.[105]
All this may seem, at first blush, to attach excessive importance to the attainment of inward peace and harmony,--as if one's private comfort were the greatest thing in life. It _seems_ to recommend a quietistic, contemplative life; for how else shall one escape from the actual into the ideal? Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to read into the poem anything like a recommendation of quietism. The ultimate goal is described in terms which suggest now the mythology of Homer, now the Platonic realm of ideals, and again the Christian heaven; but however the blessed existence is imaged, it is always thought of as attainable only through a strenuous grapple with the realities of this life. Thus the essential spirit of the poem is the spirit of energetic, hopeful endeavor. Its doctrine is, to quote the words of Kuno Francke, that "only through work are we delivered from the slavery of the senses"; that "the very trials and sufferings of mankind bring out its divine nature and insure its ultimate transition to an existence of ideal harmony and beauty".[106]