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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
For Wordsworth imagination is the link between the visible and the invisible world. Esthetic enjoyment of things visible seems at times to bring the very life of the invisible before us. The more freely we plunge into the beauty of Nature, the more palpable becomes the Spirit of Nature. The grounds for such a belief are mystical and sheerly intuitive: we may not hope to reproduce them in argument. We can trace, however, the ways by which Wordsworth tried to describe such experience and to make it communicable. Throughout, he seems certain that in the apprehension of beauty, the human soul is never isolated, but is in contact with a spiritual urgency, which is the origin of beauty. On the other hand, the agony of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, his utter loneliness of spirit, is in diametric opposition to any love or enjoyment of Nature. Here the mind is closed to any communion or inspiration. It is also without imaginative enjoyment. The Mariner's release from such isolation depends upon the reawakening of his esthetic sensitiveness. In this essay, we shall consider the relation which seems to pertain in Wordsworth's thought between imagination and our awareness of Nature as a mind or spirit. We shall find that for Wordsworth, the boundaries of the finite soul are not final but seem to expand or almost to disappear in the perception of beauty.
1 This article is supplementary to “Wordsworth and Philosophy.” PMLA, xliv, 1116–43.
2 See the author's “The Moral of the Ancient Mariner,” PMLA, xlvii, 559–569.
3 The Prelude, A, xiii (1850, xiv).
4 Ibid., A, xiii, 78 ff.; also W, 66–89, where Wordsworth mentions “imaginative power” that seems to be in Nature.
5 Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926), pp. 120–122—This passage has been commented upon by Melvin M. Rader in his Presiding Ideas in Wordsworth's Poetry, Univ. of Wash. Pub. in Lang. & Lit., v, 8, No. 2, pp. 121–216 (Seattle, 1931), pp. 164 ff.
6 The Prelude (1850), I, 464 ff. (A, 490 ff.).
7 See de Selincourt's apparatus criticus on The Prelude A, xiii, 66 ff. (1850, xiv, 63 ff.) and his notes to same section.
8 The Prelude (1850), xiv, 81.
9 Ibid., W, xiii, 82.
10 Ibid., A2, xiii, 81.
11 Ibid. (1850), xiv, 84.
12 Ibid., A, xiii, 84; (1850), xiv, 86.
13 Ibid.
14 Table Talk, June 23, 1834, also Biographia Literaria, end of Chapter xiii. See Rader, op. cit., p. 166.—Compare Professor Mather's statement: “If (the artist) puts nature first, he will look at his own position as ambassadorial; he has the proud function of representing and extolling her. If he puts himself first, his duty is solely that of self-expression with such aid or hindrance as inferior nature may provide. In the former case, while he thinks he is imitating nature, he will instinctively so transform the appearance that he will find a style that is his own; in the latter case, he will consciously exploit his own idiosyncracies, and the result will be not style but mannerism.” (Concerning Beauty [Princeton, 1935], pp. 204–205.)
15 “. . . abrupt and unhabitual influence,” ThePrelude, A, xiii, 80.
16 Bosanquet, History of Æsthctic (London, 1904), p. 261.
17 Essay ii, chapter 6, section 6.
18 S. G. Dunn, “A Note on Wordsworth's Metaphysical System,” Essays and Studies (1932).
19 The Excursion, ix, 20 and 40.
20 Joseph W. Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1936).
21 The Prelude, A, II, 381.
22 Eternal and Immutable Morality, Vol. in of Cudworth's Intellectual System (London, 1845), p. 600. See also The Prelude, A, ii, 431.
23 Again the ethics involved in the conclusion of The Prelude and so intimately connected with the theory of imagination is not at all similar to that of the Cambridge Platonists. Cudworth and More believed that the standards of morals are to be interpreted as Platonic Ideas, apprehended as we are said to apprehend the axioms of arithmetic and geometry. This is the eternal and immutable morality of Cudworth. In The Prelude Wordsworth is searching for a less formalist doctrine, being eager to derive the criterion of moral right and wrong from the union of imaginative understanding and desire, rather than from a direct apprehension of eternal duty. Thus his views have some Spinozian notions worked into them (see Wordsworth and Philosophy, 1127–34) whereas this moral theory is far
removed from Cambridge Platonism. If we are to look for English sources of this ethic, we might turn to Shaftesbury, but certainly not to Cudworth or More. But I have not come upon any verbal echoes from Shaftesbury. The reader must remember that this attempt to minimize the importance of the Cambridge Platonists applies only to the synthesis of doctrine presented at the close of The Prelude. They cannot, as Professor Beach has shown, be excluded entirely.
No more, incidentally, can the ancient Neo-Platonists be ignored. In fact, Wordsworth's statement of the interpenetration of objects offered in the eighth book of The Prelude seems to be a verbal echo of a passage from Coleridge's beloved Plotinus. Compare
The pulse of Being everywhere was felt,
When all the several frames of things, like stars
Through every magnitude distinguishable,
Were half confounded in each other's blaze,
One galaxy of life and joy. (A, viii, 626 ff.)
with Plotinus'
… for all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing impenetrable; every being is lucid to every other, light manifest to light. And each of them contains all within itself and sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and each is all, and infinite the glory! Each of them is great: the small is great; the sun There is all the stars; and every star, again, is all the stars and sun; each is mirrored in every other. (Enneads v, viii, 4)
Wordsworth continues
Then rose
Man, inwardly contemplated, and present
In my own being, to a loftier height;
As of all visible creatures crown .. .
. . . . . . . . . . .
As, more than anything we know instinct
With Godhead . ..
Compare this with Plotinus' comments which follow the passage already quoted. The lover of beauty is rendered truly divine.
Thus a man filled with a God holds his vision of the Divine Being within himself if he but have the strength. Anyone possessed by God has but to bring that Divine-within before his consciousness and at once he sees an image of himself lifted to a better beauty—(v, viii, 10–11).
There seems little ground for doubting that Wordsworth has caught a verbal echo of Plotinus from Coleridge's inspired conversation. But Wordsworth's thought is not strictly Neo-Platonic. The Neo-Platonic beautiful world where such interpenetration is maintained is not as with Wordsworth the concrete world in which we live and move. This beautiful world, like the Platonic Ideas, is a transcendent realm which only the God-like man may enter. Wordsworth's thought is at this point tangent to Plotinus' philosophy but not coincident with it. On the other hand, Wordsworth's apprehension of the substantial and indivisible unity of the concrete world fits easily enough into a Spinozian world-scheme.
24 See The Prelude, A, xiii, 45 (1850), xiv, 43.—While completing this study of Wordsworth's theory of “objective metaphor,” I have been fascinated by Professor Frank Jewett Mather's theory of correspondences of rhythm which he has presented in his recent volume,
Concerning Beauty (Princeton, 1935). His contribution must be studied as a whole. But let me quote these striking sentences: “Everything [the artist] experiences tends to organize itself by analogy and correspondence into groups, and these groups generally develop unexpected interrelations. He lives in constant expectation of the extensions of such correlations in a world that, being always open and flexible, is progressively becoming of a wider and richer orderliness” (p. 187).
25 Ibid., W. See de Selincourt's notes, p. 602; also A, ii, 347–348.
26 Ibid., A, xiii, 71.
27 “ Ibid. (1850), xiv, 72.
28 Ibid., A, i, 104; (1850), 96.
29 Ibid. (1850), xiv, 76.
30 Expostulation and Reply, and The Tables Turned.
31 For the opposite view see Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: his doctrine and art in their historical relations (Madison, 1922), p. 115. Professor Beatty's interpretation leaves no room for the mystical utterances of Wordsworth. See my Wordsworth and Philosophy, p. 1120. See also for an examination of Beatty's arguments concerning the influence of sensationalist writers upon Wordsworth, Rader, “The Transcendentalism of William Wordsworth,” MP, xxvi (1928), 169–190.
32 The Prelude, A, viii, 513.
33 Ibid., A, xiii, 71. See Rader, Presiding Ideas, p. 168.
34 Ibid., Y. See de Selincourt's notes, p. 556.
35 Compare the following from a fragment of Goethe's. See the Goethe-Jahrbuch, xii (1891), 1–12: Wir haben oben gesagt, daß alle lebendig existirende Dinge ihr Verhältniß in sich haben, den Eindruck also den sie so wohl einzeln als in Verbindung mit andern auf uns machen, wen er nur aus ihrem volständigen Daseyn entspringt, nennen wir wahr und wen dieses Daseyn theils auf eine solche Weise beschränckt ist daß wir es leicht faßen können und in einem solchen Verhältniß zu unssrer Natur stehet daß wir es gern ergreifen mögen, nennen wir den Gegenstand schön. Ein gleiches geschieht wen sich Menschen
nach ihrer Fähigkeit ein Ganzes, es sey so reich oder arm als es wolle, von dem Zusammenhange der Dinge gebildet und nunmehr den Kreiß zugeschloßen haben. Sie werden dasjenige was sie am bequemsten dencken, worin sie einen Genuß finden können, für das gewißeste und sicherste halten, ja man wird meistentheils bemercken daß sie andere welche sich nicht so leicht beruhigen und mehr Verhältniße götlicher und menschlicher Dinge aufzusuchen und zu erkennen streben, mit einem zufriedenen Mitleid ansehen und bey jeder Gelegenheit bescheiden trotzig mercken laßen daß sie im Wahren eine Sicherheit gefunden welche über allen Beweiß und Verstand erhaben sey. Sie können nicht genug ihre inere beneidenswerthe Ruhe und Freude rühmen und diese Glückseeligkeit einem jeden als das letzte Ziel andeuten. Da sie aber weder klar zu entdecken imstande sind auf welchem Weg sie zu dieserUeberzeugung gelangen,noch was eigendlich der Grund derselbigen sey, sondern bloß von Gewissheit als Gewissheit sprechen, so bleibt auch dem lehrbegierigen wenig Trost bey ihnen indem er immer hören muß, das Gemüht müße immer einfältiger und einfältiger werden, sich nur auf einem Punckt hinrichten, sich aller manigfaltigen Verwirrenden Verhältniße entschlagen und nur alsdenn könne man aber auch um desto sicherer in einem Zustande sein Glück finden der ein freywilliges Geschenck und eine besondere Gabe Gottes sey. Nun mögten wir zwar nach unßrer Art zu dencken diese Beschränckung keine Gabe nennen weil ein Mangel nicht als eine Gnade der Natur ansehen daß sie, da der Mensch nur meist zu unvolständigen Begriffen zu gelangen imstande ist, sie ihn doch mit einer solchen Zufriedenheit in seiner Enge versorgt hat.
36 The Prelude, A, ii, 266.—For the theory of the “higher minds” see further my essay “The Doctrine of Coleridge's Dejection and its relation to Wordsworth's Philosophy,” PMLA, xlix, 196–207.
37 Ibid., A, iii, 194; (1850) iii, 196.
38 Ibid., A, xiii, 108–109; (1850), xiv, 115.
39 Ibid., A, xiii, 185 ff.; (1850), xiv, 206 ff.
40 Ethics, ii, 40, note 2.
41 Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
42 The Prelude, A, vi, 135 ff.
43 See the author's “Wordsworth and Philosophy,” 1121–22, for mention of some outstanding literature on this topic.
44 Archive de lettres françaises, No. 26 (1927), pp. 202–203, quoted from Hallett, Aeternitas (Oxford, 1930), p. xi.