More Pages from a Journal Part 12

This was the experience, then, of 'distinct pre-eminence' in whose recollection his mind was 'nourished and invisibly repaired.' It is in such a moment that the soul's strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. Although he expands here and elsewhere he does not elaborate. He stops where the fact ends and shuns abstractions.

'So taught, so trained, we boldly face All accidents of time and place; Whatever props may fail, Trust in that sovereign law can spread New glory o'er the mountain's head, Fresh beauty through the vale.'

This is from The Wishing-Gate Destroyed, a late poem, not published till 1842, when Wordsworth was seventy-two years old. It is his Nicene and Apostles' Creed and Thirty-Nine Articles. Trust, with no credentials but its own existence, and yet they are indisputable.

'Is it that Man is soon deprest?

A thoughtless Thing! who, once unblest, Does little on his memory rest, Or on his reason.'

To the Daisy.

An example of Wordsworth's wisdom disclosing itself in his simplest pieces. For one sad conclusion to which the reason leads us, the uncontrolled, baseless procedure in the brain which we call thinking, but is really day-dreaming, leads us to a score. Reason on the whole is sanative.

'Blest Statesman He, whose Mind's unselfish will Leaves him at ease among grand thoughts: whose eye Sees that, apart from magnanimity, Wisdom exists not, nor the humbler skill Of Prudence, disentangling good and ill With patient care.'

Exist not. We are befooled by words. We conceive wisdom, prudence, and magnanimity as distinct ent.i.ties, without intercommunication.

If we could but see things as they are without the tyranny of definition!

Wordsworth has a singular power of expressing articulately that which would be mere mist without him, but is of vital importance.

G.o.dWIN AND WORDSWORTH

(Reprinted from The Pilot, 20th April 1901. With added postscript.)

Dr. Emile Legouis, in his singularly interesting book, La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth, well translated into English by Mr. T. W.

Matthews (Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on Wordsworth in his early years of G.o.dwin's Political Justice. On reading Political Justice now, it is difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. 'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31).

{205} 'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge' (i. 57). 'Justice . . . is coincident with utility' (i.

121). 'If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a ladder outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she was my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my exertions' (i. 83). 'But,' says an objector, 'your mother nourished you in the helplessness of infancy.' 'When she first subjected herself,' replies G.o.dwin, 'to the necessity of these cares, she was probably influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her future offspring. . . . It is the disposition of the mind . . .

that ent.i.tles to respect,' and consequently justice demands that I should rescue the most meritorious person first.' All moral science may be reduced to this one head, calculation of the future' (ii.

468), and consequently a promise is not an obligation. The statement that it is essential that we should be able to depend on engagements 'would be somewhat more accurate if we said "that it was essential to various circ.u.mstances of human intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quant.i.ties of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct"' (i. 156). The understanding is supreme in us, and 'depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment' (i.

174). Reason (the G.o.dwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even extinguish the strongest of all pa.s.sions. Marriage having been denounced as 'the most odious of all monopolies' (ii. 850), G.o.dwin is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman 'the same preference that I do.' 'This,' says he, 'will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.' It was impossible not to acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the welfare of mankind; but 'Calvin was unacquainted with the principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty of no man can exceed his capacity' (i. 102). As to G.o.dwin's necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite pa.s.sages in order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the question is to be settled by common logic. 'Volition is that state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced' (i. 297). 'A knife has a capacity of cutting.

In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity' (i.

308). 'A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as the iron candlestick differs from the bra.s.s one; he has one more way of being acted upon. This additional way in man is motive, in the candlestick is magnetism' (i. 309).

At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not quote the Borderers for a reason which will be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the Prelude, and the Excursion is decisive. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, "and read G.o.dwin on Necessity"' (Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a question, important historically, but more important to ourselves privately, whether Wordsworth's temporary subjugation by Political Justice was due to pure intellectual conviction. I think not. Coleridge noticed that Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria. He complains that during the Scotch tour in 1803 'Wordsworth's hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred.' He again says to Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has 'occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,' and that he has a 'hypochondriacal graft in his nature.' Wordsworth himself speaks of times when -

' . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came; Dim sadness--and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.'

He is haunted with

' . . . the fear that kills,'

and he thinks of Chatterton and his end.

During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria must have been greatly encouraged. His hopes in the Revolution had begun to fail, but the declaration of war against France made him wretched. He wandered about from place to place, unable to conjecture what his future would be. 'I have been doing nothing,'

he tells Matthews, 'and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not.' He proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease a.s.sumes. The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.

'So I fared, Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind, Suspiciously, to establish in plain day Her t.i.tles and her honours; now believing, Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground Of obligation, what the rule and whence The sanction; till, demanding formal PROOF, And seeking it in everything, I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair.

This was the crisis of that strong disease, This the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped, Deeming our blessed reason of least use Where wanted most: "The lordly attributes Of will and choice," I bitterly exclaimed, "What are they but a mockery of a Being Who hath in no concerns of his a test Of good and evil; knows not what to fear Or hope for, what to covet or to shun: And who, if those could be discerned, would yet Be little profited, would see, and ask, Where is the obligation to enforce?"'

In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of Raisley Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he immediately set to work on the Borderers, which I take to be the beginning of recovery. It was obviously written to exhibit the character of Oswald, the villain. He is one of a band of outlaws, and is jealous of the appointment of Marmaduke as chief. His revenge is a determination to make Marmaduke as guilty as himself.

Marmaduke is in love with Idonea, and Oswald, partly by inventing lies about her blind father, Herbert, and partly by dexterous sophistry derived from Political Justice, endeavours to persuade Marmaduke to kill him. Marmaduke hesitates, but is finally overpowered. Although he cannot himself murder Herbert, he draws him to a desolate moor and leaves him to perish. Oswald then recounts his own story. When he was on a voyage to Syria he had believed on false evidence, that some wrong had been done to him by his captain, and accordingly contrived that he should be left to die in agony on a barren island. Oswald discovered that he had been deceived, but he declares exultantly to Marmaduke that, after being somewhat stunned, he found himself emanc.i.p.ated:-

'Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way Cleared for a monarch's progress. Priests might spin Their veil, but not for me--'twas in fit place Among its kindred cobwebs.'

He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that the impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his death was -

'I would have made us equal once again.'

This is the commentary by Wordsworth on G.o.dwin's parable by which he ill.u.s.trates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul.

'When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck,' etc. etc. 'Exactly similar to this . . . are the actions of the human mind' (i. 306-7).

Lacy, one of the freebooters asks Wallace:-

'But for the motive?'

and Wallace replies:-

'Natures such as his Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!'

The Borderers is stuffed full with G.o.dwinism. 'Remorse,' exclaims Oswald,

'It cannot live with thought; think on, think on, And it will die. What! In this universe, Where the least things control the greatest, where The faintest breath that breathes can move a world; What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed, A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.'