To most of his contemporaries, Wordsworth was a great poet of the religious and moral life, but with the modernist devaluation of both religion and morality, whether supernatural or humanist, he became esteemed only as a poet, and later hardly as that. Today with faith once more on the agenda of the enlightened, Lionel Trilling again evokes the spirit of the poet who celebrated the mute but speaking reality of “rocks and stones and trees,” and the closeness to the roots of being of simple, unlettered people who live next to nature—and finds in Wordsworth’s thought a quality that he finds also in the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism. This essay grows out of a lecture originally given at Princeton in April 1950 for the centenary of Wordsworth’s death and published subsequently, under the title “Wordsworth and the Iron Time,” in Kenyon Review for Summer 1950 and, together with other addresses on Wordsworth, in a volume published by Princeton University Press in 1951. Mr. Trilling revised the essay for inclusion in his forthcoming book The Opposing Self, and we present it here, somewhat abridged, in that revised form.

In our culture it is not the common habit to read the books of a century ago. Very likely all that we can mean when we say that a writer of the past is “alive” in people’s minds is that, to those who once read him as a college assignment or who have formed an image of him from what they have heard about him, he exists as an attractive idea. And if we think of the three poets whom Matthew Arnold celebrated in his “Memorial Verses,” we know that Byron is still attractive and possible, and so is Goethe. But Wordsworth is not attractive and not an intellectual possibility. He was once the great, the speaking poet for all who read English. He spoke both to the ordinary reader and to the literary man. But now the literary man outside the university will scarcely think of referring to Wordsworth as one of the important events of modern literature; and to the ordinary reader he is likely to exist as the very type of the poet whom life has passed by, presumably for the good reason that he passed life by.

If we ask why Wordsworth is no longer the loved poet he once was, why, indeed, he is often thought to be rather absurd and even a little despicable, one answer that suggests itself is that for modern taste he is too Christian a poet. He is certainly not to be wholly characterized by the Christian element of his poetry. Yet at the present time, the doctrinal tendency of the world at large being what it is, that which is Christian in Wordsworth may well seem to be more prominent than it ever was before, and more decisive. I have in mind his concern for the life of humbleness and quiet, his search for peace, his sense of the burdens of this life, those which are inherent in the flesh and spirit of man. Then there is his belief that the bonds of society ought to be inner and habitual, not merely external and formal, and that the strengthening of these bonds by the acts and attitudes of charity is a great and charming duty. Christian too seem his responsiveness to the idea that there is virtue in the discharge of duties which are of the great world and therefore dangerous to simple peace and his impulse to submit to the conditions of life under a guidance that is at once certain and mysterious—his sense of the possibility and actuality of enlightenment is one of the characteristic things about him. It was not he who said that the world was a vale of soul-making, but Keats could not have made this striking paraphrase of the Christian sentiment had not Wordsworth made it possible for him to do so. Above all, there is his consciousness of the neighbor, his impulse to bring into the circle of significant life those of the neighbors who are simple and outside the circle of social pride, and also those who in the judgment of the world are queer and strange and useless: faith and hope were to him very great virtues, but he conceived that they rested upon the still greater virtue, charity.

Certainly what I have called Christian in Wordsworth scarcely approaches, let alone makes up, the sum of Christianity. But then no personal document or canon can do that; when we speak of a poet as being of a particular religion, we do not imply in him completeness or orthodoxy, or even explicitness of doctrine, but only that his secular utterance has the decisive mark of the religion upon it. And if a religion is manifold in its aspects and extensive in time, the marks that are to be found on the poets who are in a relation to it will be various in kind. It seems to me that the marks of Christianity on Wordsworth are clear and indelible. It is therefore worth trying the hypothesis that the world today does not like him because it does not like the Christian quality and virtues.

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But the question at once arises whether this hypothesis is wholly permissible. Professor Hoxie Neal Fairchild says that it is not. In the chapter on Wordsworth in the third volume of his Religious Trends in English Poetry, he tells us that Wordsworth was not a Christian poet and goes on to express his doubt that Wordsworth was ever properly to be called a Christian person even when he became a communicant of the Church and its defender. And Professor Fair-child goes so far as to tell us that as a poet Wordsworth is actually dangerous to the Christian faith. He is dangerous in the degree that he may be called religious at all, for his religion is said to be mere religiosity, the religion of nothing more than the religious emotion, beginning and ending in the mere sense of transcendence. Naked of dogma, bare of precise predication of God and the nature of man, this religiosity of Wordsworth’s is to be understood as a pretentious and seductive rival of Christianity, the more dangerous because it gives license to man’s pretensions.

We can surely admit the cogency of Professor Fairchild’s argument within the terms of its intention. The 19th century was in many respects a very Christian century, but in the aspect of it which bulks largest in our minds it developed chiefly the ethical and social aspects of Christian belief, no doubt at the cost of the dogmatic aspect. And it is probably true that when the dogmatic principle in religion is slighted, religion goes along for a while on generalized emotion and ethical intention and then loses the force of its impulse, even the essence of its being. In this sort of attenuation of religion Wordsworth did indeed play a part by making the sense of transcendence and immanence so real and so attractive. During the most interesting and important period of his career, Wordsworth seems to have been scarcely aware of the doctrines of the Church in which he had been reared. He spoke of faith, hope, and charity without reference to the specifically Christian source and end of these virtues. His sense of the need for salvation did not take the least account of the Christian means of salvation. Of evil in the Christian sense of the word, of sin as an element of the nature of man, he also took no account.

And yet, all this being true, as we look at Wordsworth in the context of his own time and in the context of our time, what may properly be called the Christian element of his poetry can be made to speak to us, as it spoke to so many Christians in the 19th century, as it spoke to so many who were not Christians and made them in one degree or another accessible to Christianity. He certainly did not in his great period accept as adequate what the Church taught about the nature of man. But he was one of the few poets who really discovered something about the nature of man. What he discovered can perhaps be shown to be at variance with the teachings of Christianity. Yet I think it can also be shown that Wordsworth discovered much that a strong Christianity must take account of, and be easy with, and make use of. It can be shown too, I believe, that the Church has found advantage in what Wordsworth has told us of the nature of man. And so, although I do indeed recognize the force of Professor Fairchild’s opinion to the contrary, I cannot help feeling that there is an important element of Christianity with which Wordsworth has a significant affinity, even though this element is not at the present time of chief importance to Christian intellectuals.

I do not, however, wish to appear to be forcing even a great poet into a faith whose members do not want him there. And I am not, in any case, so much concerned to prove that Wordsworth is a Christian poet as to account for a certain quality in him which makes him unacceptable to the modern world. Without repudiating my first hypothesis, I shall therefore abandon it for this fresh one: that the quality in Wordsworth that now makes him unacceptable is a Judaic quality.

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My knowledge of the Jewish tradition is, I fear, all too slight to permit me to hope that I can develop this new hypothesis, as to the Judaic quality in Wordsworth, in any very enlightening way. Yet there is one Jewish work of traditional importance which I happen to know with some intimacy, and it lends a certain color of accuracy to my notion. This is the work called Pirke Aboth, that is, the Sayings, the sententiae, of the Fathers. It was edited in the 2nd century of the present era by the scholar and teacher who bore the magnificent name of Judah the Prince and who is traditionally referred to by the even more magnificent name of Rabbi—that is to say, the rabbi, the master teacher, the greatest of all. In its first intention Pirke Aboth, under the name Aboth, “Fathers,” was one of the tractates of the Mishnah, which is the traditional Jewish doctrine represented chiefly by rabbinical decisions. But Aboth itself, the last of the tractates, does not deal with decisions; nor is it what a common English rendering of the longer title, “Ethics of the Fathers,” would seem to imply, for it is not a system of ethics at all but simply a collection of maxims and Pensées, some of them very fine and some of them very dull, which praise the life of study and give advice on how to live it.

My intimacy with Pirke Aboth comes from my having read it many times in boyhood. It is not the kind of book a boy is easily drawn to read, and I did not read it out of piety. On the contrary; for when I was supposed to be reading my prayers—very long, and in the Hebrew language, which I never mastered—I spent the required time and made it seem that I was doing my duty by reading the English translation of the Pirke Aboth, which, although it is not a devotional work, had long ago been thought of as an aid to devotion and included in the prayer book. It was more attractive to me than psalms, meditations, and supplications; it seemed more humane, and the Fathers had a curious substantiality. Just where they lived I did not know, nor just when, and certainly the rule of life they recommended had a very quaint difference from the life I knew or wanted to know. Yet they were real, their way of life had the charm of coherence. And when I went back to them, using R. Travers Herford’s scholarly edition and translation of their sayings,¹ I could entertain the notion that my early illicit intimacy with them had had its part in preparing the way for my responsiveness to Wordsworth, that between the Rabbis and Wordsworth an affinity existed.

But I must at once admit that a large difficulty stands in the way of the affinity I suggest. The Aboth is a collection of the sayings of masters of the written word. The ethical life it recommends has study as both its means and its end, the study of Torah, of the Law, which alone can give blessedness. So that from the start I am at the disadvantage of trying to make a conjunction between scholars living for the perpetual interpretation of a text and a poet for whom the natural world was at the heart of his doctrine and for whom books were barren leaves. The Rabbis expressed a suspiciousness of the natural world which was as extreme as Wordsworth’s suspiciousness of study. That the warning was given at all seems to hint that it was possible for the Rabbis to experience the natural world as a charm and a temptation—still, the Aboth does warn us that whoever interrupts his study to observe the beauty of a fine tree or a fine meadow is guilty of sin. Yet I think it can be said without more extravagance than marks my whole comparison that it is precisely here, where they seem most to differ, that the Rabbis and Wordsworth are most at one. For between the Law as the Rabbis understood it and Nature as Wordsworth understood that, there is a pregnant similarity.

The Rabbis of the Aboth were Pharisees and here is Mr. Herford’s statement of the defining principle of Pharisaism: “The central conception of Pharisaism is Torah, the divine Teaching, the full and inexhaustible revelation which God had made. The knowledge of what was revealed was to be sought, and would be found, in the first instance in the written text of the Pentateuch; but the revelation, the real Torah, was the meaning of what was there written, the meaning as interpreted by all the recognized and accepted methods of the schools. . . . The written text of the Pentateuch might be compared to the mouth of a well; the Torah was the water which was drawn from it. He who wished to draw the water must needs go to the well, but there was no limit to the water which was there for him to draw. . . . The study of Torah . . . means therefore much more than the study of the Pentateuch, or even of the whole Scripture, regarded as mere literature, written documents. It means the study of the revelation made through those documents, the divine teaching therein imparted, the divine thought therein disclosed.” And Mr. Herford goes on to say that it might be observed of the Aboth that it makes very few direct references to God. “This is true,” he says, “but it is beside the mark. Wherever Torah is mentioned, there God is implied. He is behind the Torah, the Revealer of what is Revealed.”

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What I am trying to suggest is that, different as the immediately present objects were in each case, Torah for the Rabbis, Nature for Wordsworth, there existed for the Rabbis and for Wordsworth a great object, which is from God and might be said to represent him as a sort of surrogate, a divine object to which one can be in an intimate passionate relationship, which one can, as it were, handle, and in a sense create, drawing from it inexhaustible meaning by desire, intuition, and attention.

And when we turn to the particulars of the Aboth we see that the affinity continues. In Jewish tradition the great Hillel has a peculiarly Wordsworthian personality, being the type of gentleness and peace, and having about him a kind of joy which has always been found wonderfully attractive; and Hillel said—was, indeed, in the habit of saying: he “used to say”—“If I am not for myself, who, then, is for me? And if I am for myself, what then am I?” Mr. Herford implies that this is a difficult utterance. But it is not difficult for the reader of Wordsworth, who finds the Wordsworthian moral essence here, the interplay between individualism and the sense of community, between an awareness of the self that must be saved and developed, and an awareness that the self is yet fulfilled only in community.

Then there is this saying of Akiba’s: “All is foreseen, and yet free will is given; and the world is judged by grace, and yet all is according to the work.” With how handsome a boldness it handles the problem of fate and free will, or “grace” and “works,” handles the problem by stating it as an antinomy, escaping the woeful claustral preoccupation with the alternatives, but not their grandeur. This refusal to be fixed either in fate or in free will, either in grace or in works, and the recognition of both, are characteristic of Wordsworth.

There are other parallels to be drawn. For example, one finds in the Aboth certain remarks which have a notable wit and daring because they go against the whole tendency of the work in telling us that the multiplication of words is an occasion for sin, and the chief thing is not study but action. One finds the injunction to the scholar to divide his time between study and a trade, presumably in the interest of humility. And the scholar is warned that the world must not be too much with him, that, getting and spending, he lays waste his powers. There is the concern, so typical of Wordsworth, with the “ages of man,” with the right time in the individual’s development for each of life’s activities. But it is needless to multiply the details of the affinity, which in any case must not be insisted on too far. All that I want to suggest is the community of ideal and sensibility between the Aboth and the canon of Wordsworth’s work—the passionate contemplation and experience of the great object which is proximate to Deity; then the plain living that goes with the high thinking; the desire for the humble life and the discharge of duty; and last, but not least important, a certain insouciant acquiescence in the anomalies of the moral order of the universe, a respectful indifference to, or graceful surrender before, the mysteries of the moral relation of God to man.

This last element, as it is expressed in the pensée of Akiba which I have quoted, has its connection with something in the Aboth which for me is definitive of its quality. Actually it is something not in the Aboth but left out—we find in the tractate no implication of moral struggle. We find the energy of assiduity but not the energy of resistance. We hear about sin, but we do not hear of the sinful nature of man. Man in the Aboth guards against sin but he does not struggle against it, and of evil we hear nothing at all.

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When we have observed this, it is natural to observe next that there is no mention in the Aboth of courage or heroism. In our culture we connect the notion of courage or heroism with the religious life. We conceive of the perpetual enemy within and the perpetual enemy without, which must be “withstood,” “overcome,” “conquered”—the language of religion and the language of fighting are in our culture assimilated to each other. Not so in the Aboth. The enemy within seems not to be conceived of at all. The enemy without is never mentioned, although the Aboth was compiled after the Dispersion, after the Temple and the nation had been destroyed—with what heroism in the face of suffering we know from Josephus. Of the men whose words are cited in the Aboth, many met martyrdom for their religion, and the martyrology records their calm and fortitude in torture and death; of Akiba it records his heroic joy. And yet in their maxims they never speak of courage. There is not a word to suggest that the life of virtue and religious devotion requires the heroic quality.

As much as anything else in my boyhood experience of the Aboth it was this that fascinated me. It also repelled me. It had this double effect because it went so clearly against the militancy of spirit which in our culture is normally assumed. And even now, as I consider this indifference to heroism of the Aboth, I have the old ambiguous response to it, so that I think I can understand the feelings that readers have when they encounter something similar in Wordsworth in whose vision of life the element of quietude approaches passivity, whose exemplars of heroism endure because they are what they are, whose Happy Warrior derives his courage not from militancy of spirit but from his calm submission to the law of things. Where the scholars and Wordsworth are at one is in their quietism which is not in the least a negation of life but, on the contrary, an affirmation of life so complete that it needed no saying. To the Rabbis, as I read them, there life was, unquestionable because committed to a divine object, not needing to be affirmed by force or assertion, real because the object of its regard was unquestioned and because the object was unquestionably more important than the individual person who regarded it and lived by it. And Wordsworth, who loved to affirm the dizzy raptures of ear and eye and mind, also loved to move down the scale of being, to say that when the sentient spirit was sealed by slumber, when it was without motion and force, when it was like a rock or a stone or a tree, passive in the cosmic motion—that even then, perhaps especially then, existence was blessed. Wordsworth liked nothing better than to recite examples of courage, but it is the courage of mute, insensate things, and it is often associated with such things, with “rocks, and stones, and trees,” or with stars—Michael on his hilltop, whose character is defined by the light of his cottage, which was called “The Evening Star,” and by the stones of his sheepfold; or the Leech Gatherer, who is like some old, great rock; or Margaret, who, like a tree, endured as long as she might after she was blasted.

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This non-militancy of spirit which I conceive Wordsworth and the Rabbis to have in common goes against the tendency of our Western culture, which is committed to an ideal of motion and force. With us the basis of spiritual prestige is some form of aggressive action directed outward upon the world, or inward upon ourselves. During the last century and a half this ideal has been especially strong in literature. If the religious personality of preceding times took to itself certain of the marks of military prestige, the literary personality now takes to itself certain of the marks of religious prestige, in particular the capacity for militant suffering.

A peculiarly relevant example of this lies to hand in T. S. Eliot’s explanation of the decline of Wordsworth’s genius from its greatness to what Mr. Eliot calls the “still sad music of infirmity.” Mr. Eliot’s theory of the decline suggests the depth of our belief in the value of militancy, of militant suffering, for Mr. Eliot tells us that the trouble with Wordsworth was that he didn’t have an eagle: it is that eagle which André Gide’s Prometheus said was necessary for success in the spiritual or poetic life—“Il faut avoir un aigle.” As an explanation of Wordsworth’s poetic career this is, we perceive, merely a change rung on the weary idea that Wordsworth destroyed his poetic genius by reversing his position on the French Revolution or by terminating his connection with Annette Vallon. Wordsworth had no need of an eagle for his greatness, and its presence or absence had nothing to do with the decline of his genius. His pain, when he suffered, was not of the kind that eagles inflict, and his power did not have its source in his pain. But we are disturbed by the absence of the validating, the poetically respectable bird, that aigle obligatoire. We like the fiercer animals. Nothing is better established in our literary life than the knowledge that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction. We know that we ought to prefer the bulls in the ring to the horses, and when we choose between the two kinds of horses of Plato’s chariot we all know that Plato was wrong, that it is the blacks, not the whites, which are to be preferred. We do not, to be sure, live in the fashion of the beasts we admire in our literary lives, but we cherish them as representing something that we all seek. They are the emblems of the charisma—to borrow from the sociologists a word they have borrowed from the theologians—which is the hot, direct relationship with Godhead, or with the sources of life, upon which depend our notions of what I have called spiritual prestige.

The predilection for the powerful, the fierce, the assertive, the personally militant, is very strong in our culture. We find it in the liberal-bourgeois admiration of the novels of Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser. On a lower intellectual level we find it in the long popularity of that curious underground work The Fountainhead. On a higher intellectual level we find it in certain aspects of the work of Yeats and Lawrence. We find it too, if not in our religion itself, then at least in one of our dominant conceptions of religion—to many intellectuals the violence of Dostoevsky represents the natural form of the religious life, to many gentle spirits the ferocity of Léon Bloy seems quite appropriate to the way of faith; and although some years ago Mr. Eliot reprobated D. H. Lawrence, in the name of religion, for his addiction to this characteristic violence, yet for Mr. Eliot the equally violent Baudelaire is preeminently a Christian poet.

Now obviously I am not speaking against a sense of urgency or immediacy, or against power or passion. Nor would I be taken to mean that the Wordsworthian quietism I have described is the whole desideratum of the emotional life. It obviously wasn’t that for Wordsworth himself—he may be said to be the first poet who praised movement and speed for their own sakes, and dizziness and danger; he is the poet of rapture. No one can read Book Five of The Prelude and remain unaware of Wordsworth’s conception of literature as urgency and immediacy, as power and passion. Book Five, which is about literature and the place of reading in our spiritual development, opens with an impressive eschatological vision, a vision of final events—Wordsworth shared in his own way our present sense of the possible end of man and of all the works of man’s spirit. It is in this book that Wordsworth defends the violence and fearfulness of literature from the “progressive” ideas of his day; it is here that he speaks of the poet as “crazed/By love and feeling, and internal thought/Protracted among endless solitude,” and of the “reason” that lies couched “in the blind and awful lair” of the poet’s madness; and it is here that he defends the “maniac’s” dedication at the cost of the domestic affections:

Enow there are on earth to take in charge
Their wives, their children, and their virgin
    loves,
Or whatsoever else the heart holds dear;
Enow to stir for these. . . .

As we speak of Wordsworth’s quietism the opposite element in his poetry must of course be borne in mind.

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And yet the fact remains that there is in Wordsworth a quality that is very close to the Stoic apatheia, to not-feeling—which makes it the more significant to remember what great particular thing he is said to have accomplished. Matthew Arnold said that in a wintry clime, in an iron time, Wordsworth taught us to feel . This statement, extreme as it is, will be seen to be not inaccurate if we bring to mind the many instances of spiritual and psychological crisis in the 19th century in which affectlessness, the loss of the power to feel, played an important part. Ennui, noia—how often we meet with them in 19th-century biography; and the acedia which was once a disorder of the specifically religious life became now a commonplace of secular spirituality. And yet, although Arnold’s statement is accurate so far as it goes, and is supported by Wordsworth’s own sense of the overarching intention of his poetic enterprise, it does not go far enough. Wordsworth did, or tried to do, more than make us feel: he undertook to teach us how to be.

In The Prelude, in Book Two, Wordsworth speaks of a particular emotion which he calls “the sentiment of Being.” The “sentiment” has been described in this way: “There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity—yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts.” This, of course, is not Wordsworth, it is Walt Whitman, but I quote Whitman’s statement in exposition of Wordsworth’s “sentiment of Being” because it is in some respects rather more boldly explicit, although not necessarily better, than anything that Wordsworth himself wrote about the sentiment, and because Whitman goes on to speak of his “hardest basic fact” as a political fact, as the basis, and the criterion, of democracy.

Through all his poetic life Wordsworth was preoccupied by the idea, by the sentiment, by the problem, of being. All experience, all emotions lead to it. He was haunted by the mysterious fact that he existed. He could discover in himself different intensities and qualities of being—“Tintern Abbey” is the attempt to distinguish these intensities and qualities. Being is sometimes animal; sometimes it is an “appetite and a passion”; sometimes it is almost a suspension of the movement of the breath and blood. The Lyrical Ballads have many intentions, but one of the chief of them is the investigation of the problems of being. “We Are Seven,” which is always under the imputation of bathos, is established in its true nature when we read it as an ontological poem; its subject is the question, What does it mean when we say a person is? “The Idiot Boy,” which I believe to be a great and not a foolish poem, is a kind of comic assertion of the actuality—and, indeed, the peculiar intensity—of being in a person who is outside the range of anything but our merely mechanical understanding. Wordsworth has an almost obsessive concern to put being to the test in situations where its presence may perhaps most easily be questioned—in very old people. We are all of us aware from our own experience what a strain very old people put upon our powers of attributing to them personal being, “identity.” Wordsworth’s usual way is to represent the old man as being below the human condition, apparently scarcely able to communicate, and then suddenly, startlingly, in what we have learned to call an “epiphany,” to show forth the intensity of his human existence.

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The social and political implication of Wordsworth’s preoccupation with ontology is obvious enough. It is not, however, quite what Wordsworth sometimes says it is. The explicit political lesson that the poet draws from the Old Cumberland Beggar is interesting, but it is beside his real, his essential, point. “Deem not this man useless,” the poet says in his apostrophe to the political theorists who have it in mind to put the Beggar into a workhouse, and he represents the usefulness of the Beggar as consisting in his serving as the object of a habitual charity and thus as a kind of communal institution, a communal bond. But this demonstrated utility of the Beggar is really secondary to the fact that he is. He is a person, he takes a pleasure, even though a minimal one, in his being. Therefore he may not in conscience be dealt with as a mere social unit. So with all the dramatis personae of the Lyrical Ballads—the intention of the poet is to require us to acknowledge their being and thus to bring them within the range of conscience, and of something more immediate than conscience, natural sympathy. It is an attractive thing about Wordsworth, and it should be a reassuring thing, that his acute sense of the being of others derives from, and serves to affirm and heighten, his acute sense of his own being.

I realize that I am speaking of Wordsworth’s preoccupation with being as if it were unique and as if it accounted for, or led to what accounts for, the contemporary alienation from his work and his personality. And indeed in some ways his preoccupation is unique, and certain aspects of it do lead to the present alienation from him. Yet from what I have said about him, it must be clear that between Wordsworth and the great figures of our literature there is a very close affinity, if only in this one regard of the preoccupation with being. There is scarcely a great writer of our own day who has not addressed himself to the ontological crisis, who has not conceived of life as a struggle to be—not to live, but to be. To be sure, the writers of our epoch operate under a necessity rather different from Wordsworth’s. They feel the necessity to affirm the personal qualities that are associated with a former time, presumably a freer and more personally privileged time—they wish, as a character in one of Yeats’s plays says, “to bring back the old disturbed exalted life, the old splendor.” Their image of freedom and personal privilege is often associated with violence, sometimes of a kind that does not always command the ready assent we are habituated to give to violence when it appears in moral or spiritual contexts. A tenant’s sliced-off ear, which is an object of at least momentary pleasure to Yeats, a kick given by an employer to his employee, which wins the approval of Lawrence—these are all too accurately representative of the nature of the political and social fantasies that Yeats and Lawrence could build upon their perception of the loss of freedom and privilege, the loss of the sense of being. Yet we know that this violence stands against an extreme fate of which we are all conscious. We really know in our time what the death of the word can be—for that knowledge we have only to read an account of contemporary Russian literature. We really know what the death of the spirit means—we have seen it overtake whole peoples. Nor do we need to go beyond our own daily lives to become aware, if we dare to, of how we have conspired, in our very virtues, to bring about the devaluation of whatever is bold and assertive and free, replacing it by the bland, the covert, the manipulative. If we wish to understand the violence of so much of our literature, we have only to consider that We must endure not only the threat to being which comes from without but also the seduction to non-being which establishes itself within. We need, in Coleridge’s words, something to “startle this dull pain, and make it move and live.” Violence is a means of self-definition; the bad conscience, Nietzsche says, assures us of our existence.

Wordsworth, then, is not separated from us by his preoccupation with being, for it is our preoccupation. Yet he is separated from us. His conception of being seems different from ours.

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In book Five of The Prelude Wordsworth gives us a satiric picture of the boy educated according to the “progressive” ideas of his day, and on the whole we follow him readily enough in the objections he makes to these ideas—when he speaks of the presumptuousness of pedagogical theorists, denouncing them as, in effect, engineers of the spirit, he flatters at least one element of our ambivalence toward the psychological expert. We are responsive to his notion of what a boy should be: “not . . . too good,” “not unresentful where self-justified.” Possibly we are not in perfect agreement with him on all points—perhaps we will feel that he has dealt rather too harshly with the alert political and social consciousness of the progressive child, or that he goes too far in thinking that a child’s imagination should be fed on fanciful books; perhaps, too, the qualities of the boys he really admires would not be precisely the qualities we would specify—“Fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy.” But on the whole, whatever our reservations about details, his discussion of pedagogics appeals to the enlightened muddled concern with “adjustment” and “aggression” which occupies the PTA segment of our minds. Where, I think, we cease to follow him is when, in the course of his argument, he rises to one of his great poetical moments. This is the passage “There was a Boy. . . .” which follows the description of the model child. The Boy is described as having had a trick of imitating the hooting of owls, and at night he would call across Windermere, trying to get the owls to answer; and often they did answer, but sometimes they did not, and then the silence would be strange and significant.

. . . In that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, re-
   ceived
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

We may be ready enough to acknowledge the “beauty” of the passage, but the chances are that we will be rather baffled by its intention. We perceive that the Boy is obviously intended to represent something very good and right, meant to be an example of very full being. But what baffles us, what makes us wonder what the poem has to do with education and the development of personality, is that the Boy exercises no will, or at least, when his playful will is frustrated, is at once content with the pleasures that follow upon the suspended will. And as likely as not we will be impelled to refer the poem to that “mysticism” which is supposed to be an element of Wordsworth’s mind.

Now Wordsworth’s mind does have an element of mysticism—it is that “normal mysticism” which, according to a recent writer on the Rabbis, marked the rabbinical mind.² Wordsworth’s mysticism, if we wish to call it that, consists of two elements, his conception of the world as being semantic, and his capacity for intense pleasure. When we speak of him as a mystic in any other sense, we are pretty sure to be expressing our incomprehension of the intensity with which he experienced his own being, and our incomprehension of the relation which his sentiment of being bore to his will.

Thus, we have no trouble understanding him when, in Book Six of The Prelude, in the remarkable episode of the crossing of the Alps, he speaks of the glory of the will:

. . . Whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

The note on which the will is affirmed is high, Miltonic—it echoes the accents of Satan’s speech in the Council of Hell; and the passage resumes its movement with a line the martial tenor of which we happily respond to: “Under such banners militant, the soul . . .” But we are checked by what ensues:

Under such banners militant, the soul
Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils
That may attest her prowess, blest in
    thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in herself and in beatitude. . . .

The soul’s energy is directed to the delight of the soul in itself.

Wordsworth is describing the action of what, at a later time, a man of very different mind, Hegel, was to call a new human faculty, the faculty of Gemüt. The word, I gather, is not entirely susceptible of translation—“heart,” with the implication of responsiveness, and of high-heartedness and large-heartedness, is an approximation. Hegel defines his faculty of Gemüt as expressing itself as a desire, a will, which has “no particular aims, such as riches, honors, and the like; in fact, it does not concern itself with any worldly condition of wealth, prestige, etc., but with the entire condition of the soul—a general sense of enjoyment.” Much that I have said about the tendency of our culture would seem to deny the truth of Hegel’s statement that Gemüt is one of the characteristics of our time, and much more evidence might be adduced to confirm the impression that nothing could be less characteristic of our time than the faculty of Gemüt, that we scarcely conceive of it, let alone exercise it. Yet at the same time I think it is true to say that it plays in our culture a covert but very important part.

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Of our negative response to Gemüt, to the “sentiment of Being,” Mr. Eliot provides an instance—again, for it is Mr. Eliot’s high gift to be as pertinent when we think him wrong as when we think him right. In The Cocktail Party there is a description of two virtuous ways of life, that of “the common routine” and that of the spiritual heroism of the saint and martyr. The two ways, Mr. Eliot tells us, are of equal value; the way of the saint is not better than that of the householder. Yet when it comes to describing the life of the common routine, Mr. Eliot says of those who elect it that they

Learn to avoid excessive expectation,
Become tolerant of themselves and others,
Giving and taking in the usual actions
What there is to give and take. They do not
    repine;
And are contented with the morning that
    separates
And with the evening that brings together
For casual talk before the fire
Two people who know that they do not
    understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not
    understand
And who will never understand them.

Well, few of us will want to say much for the life of the common routine, and no doubt, under the aspect of modern life with its terrible fatigues, and in the consciousness of its gross threats, the sort of thing that Mr. Eliot says here will be pretty nearly all that any of us will want to say. Yet if we think of the description of the common routine as being not merely the expression of one possible mood among many—and it is not merely that: it is what it says it is, the description of a “way”—we must find it very strange. There is in it no reference to the pain which is an essential and not an accidental part of the life of the common routine. There is no reference to the principles, the ethical discipline, by which the ordinary life is governed—all is habit. There is no reference to the possibility of either joy or glory—I use the Wordsworthian words by intention. The possibility of Gemüt does not appear. Mr. Eliot does not say that his couples are in Limbo, which would of course be a true thing to say of many householding couples: he is describing the virtuous way of life that is alternative to the way of the saint.

This failure to conceive the actuality of the life of common routine is typical of modern literature since, say, Tolstoy. I do not say this in order to suggest that domestic life, the common routine, in itself makes an especially appropriate subject for literature—I don’t think it does—but in order to suggest a limitation of our conception of the spiritual life. Mr. Eliot’s representation of the two “ways” exemplifies how we are drawn to the violence of extremity. We imagine, with nothing in between, the dull not-being of life, the intense not-being of death; but we do not imagine being—we do not imagine that it can be a joy. We are in love, at least in our literature, with the fantasy of death. Death and suffering, when we read, are our only means of conceiving the actuality of life.

Perhaps this is not new and we are merely making more intense what is indigenous in our culture. Perhaps this is in the nature of life as Western culture has long been fated to see it. Perhaps it is inescapable for us that the word “tragic” should be used as an ultimate recommendation of a sense of life. Yet we, when we use the word, do not really mean it in its old, complex, mysterious sense—we mean something like “violent” or “conclusive”: we mean death. And just here lies a paradox and our point. For it is precisely what Wordsworth implies by his passionate insistence on being, even at a very low level of consciousness, pride, and assertiveness, as well as at the highest level of quasi-mystic intensity, that validates a conception of tragedy, and a conception of heroism. The saintly martyrdom which Mr. Eliot represents in his play is of course not intended to be taken as tragic: the idea of martyrdom precludes the idea of tragedy. But if we ask why the martyrdom seems as factitious as it does, must we not answer that this is because it is presented in a system of feeling which sets very little store by—which, indeed, denies the possibility of—the “beatitude” which Wordsworth thought was the birthright of every human soul? And this seems to be borne out by the emphasis which Mr. Eliot puts on the peculiar horror of the mode of the martyr’s death, as if only by an extremity of pain could we be made to realize that a being was actually involved, that a life has been sacrificed—or, indeed, has been lived.

Wordsworth’s incapacity for tragedy has often been remarked on, and accurately enough. Yet we cannot conclude that Wordsworth’s relation to tragedy is wholly negative. The possibility of tragic art depends primarily upon the worth we ascribe not to dying but to living, and to living in “the common routine.” The power of the Homeric tragedy, for example, derives from the pathos, which the poet is at pains to bring before us repeatedly, of young men dying, of not seeing ever again the trees of their native farmsteads, of their parents never again admiring and indulging them, of the cessation of their being in the common routine. And I think it can be shown that every tragic literature owes its power to the high esteem in which it holds the common routine, and the sentiment of being which arises from it, the elemental given of biology. And that is what Wordsworth had in mind when, in the “Preface” of 1800, defending the idea that poetry should give “immediate pleasure,” he said that this idea was “a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.”

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Yet if we are aware of the tendency of our literature I have exemplified by the passage from Mr. Eliot’s play, we must at the same time be aware of the equally strong counter-tendency. In speaking of our alienation from Wordsworth, it has not been my intention to make a separation between Wordsworth and the literature of our time. The separation cannot be made. Wordsworth and the great writers of our time stand, as I have said, on the common ground of the concern with being and its problems—Wordsworth, indeed, may be said to have discovered and first explored the ground upon which our literature has established itself. Our preference for the apocalyptic subject and the charismatic style do indeed constitute a taste which alienates many readers from Wordsworth, and no doubt the more if we believe, as some do, that it is a taste wholly appropriate to the actualities of our historical situation. Yet we can without too much difficulty become aware of how much of the Wordsworthian “mildness,” which so readily irritates us, and how much of the Wordsworthian quietism (as I have called it), which dismays us, are in the grain of our literature, expressed through the very intensities which seem to deny them.

Thus, to bring Wordsworth and James Joyce into conjunction might at first seem a joke or a paradox, or an excess of historicism, at best a mere device of criticism. We will at once be conscious of the calculated hauteur of Joyce’s implied personality, the elaborations of his irony, the uncompromising challenge of his style and his manner, and by the association of contrast we will remember that horrendous moment in The Prelude when Wordsworth says, “My drift I fear/Is scarcely obvious.” How can we fail to think only of the abysses of personality, theory, and culture that separate the two men? And yet when we have become acclimated to Joyce, do we not find that we are involved in a conception of life that reiterates, in however different a tonality, the Wordsworthian vision? One of the striking things about Ulysses (to speak only of that work) is that the idea of evil plays so small a part in it. One hears a good deal about the essential Christian orthodoxy of Joyce, and perhaps this is an accurate opinion, but his orthodoxy, if he has it, takes no account of the evil which is so commonly affirmed by the literary expressions of orthodoxy; the conception of sin has but a tangential relevance to the book. The element of sexuality which plays so large a part in the story does not raise considerations of sin and evil; it is dealt with in the way of poetic naturalism. The character of Leopold Bloom, who figures in the life of Joyce’s Poet much as the old men in Wordsworth figure in his life—met by chance and giving help of some transcendent yet essentially human kind—is conceived in Wordsworthian terms: in terms, that is, of his humbleness of spirit. If we speak of Wordsworth in reference to the Rabbis and their non-militancy, their indifference to the idea of evil, their acceptance of cosmic contradiction, are we not to say that Bloom is a Rabbinical character? It is exactly his non-militancy that makes him the object of general contempt and, on one occasion, of rage. It is just this that has captivated his author, as the contrast with the armed pride, the jealousy and desire for prestige, the bitter militancy of Stephen Dedalus. Leopold Bloom is deprived of every shred of dignity except the dignity of that innocence which for Joyce, as for Wordsworth, goes with the “sentiment of Being.”

Again and again in our literature, at its most apocalyptic and intense, we find the impulse to create figures who are intended to suggest that life is justified in its elemental biological simplicity, and, in the manner of Wordsworth, these figures are conceived of as being of humble status and humble heart: Lawrence’s simpler people or primitive people whose pride is only that of plants or animals; Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt and Mrs. Griffiths, who stand as oases in the wide waste of their creator’s dull representation of energy; Hemingway’s waiters with their curious silent dignity; Faulkner’s Negroes, of whom it is said, as so often it is said in effect of Wordsworth’s people, they endured; and Faulkner’s idiot boys, of whom it is to be said, they are—the list could be extended to suggest how great is the affinity of our literature with Wordsworth. And these figures express an intention which is to be discerned through all our literature—the intention to imagine, and to reach, a condition of the soul in which the will is freed from “particular aims,” in which it is “strong in itself and in beatitude.” At least as early as Balzac our literature has shown the will seeking its own negation—or, rather, seeking its own affirmation by its rejection of the aims which the world sets before it and by turning its energies upon itself in self-realization. Of this particular affirmation of the will Wordsworth is the proponent and the poet.

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¹ Pirke Aboth, edited with introduction, translation, and commentary, 3rd edition (New York, 1945).

² Max Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (New York, 1951). This impressive work of scholarship has received far less general notice than it deserves. I read it after I had written this essay—read it not only with admiration for its intellectual achievement but also with a peculiar personal pleasure, because its author, in his seminary days, had been one of the long-suffering men who tried to teach me Hebrew, with what success I have indicated; yet he did teach me—it was no small thing for a boy of twelve to be in relation with a serious scholar. Dr. Kadushin has been kind enough to tell me that what 1 have said about the Rabbis is not wrong. In revising my essay I have not tried to amend my primitive account by what is to be learned from Dr. Kadushin’s presentation of the Rabbis in all their great complexity of thought. But the phrase “normal mysticism” seemed too apt not to quote.

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