Classical and Romantic

7

 

The Natural and the Supernatural in Romanticism - Wordsworth's complex mysticism of Nature

 

To the Romantics the supernatural was a wide mystery with many recesses and revelatory aspects. The one thing it was not was some Aloofness excluding the natural. Its activity as Nature was - to revert to Whitehead's language - organic, but in the ultra-Whiteheadian sense that finds perhaps its most philosophical account in Wordsworth's poetry when he writes in the Ninth Book of his Excursion:

To every Form of being is assigned

An active Principle: - howe'er removed

From sense and observation, it subsists

In all things, in all natures; in the stars

Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,

In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone

That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,

The moving waters, and the invisible air.

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread

Beyond itself, communicating good,

A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;

Spirit that knows no insulated spot,

No chasm, no solitude; from link to link

It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.

This is the freedom of the universe.

Here we may add: "And this is Nature supernatural." For piquancy's sake we may note that by this natural supernatural-ism the Soul of all the worlds with whom we commune by seeking solitude is said by Wordsworth to be itself aware of no solitude, no "romantic chasm", since it is an omnipresence overflowing the divisions and parts that are its unnumbered visible forms, an Infinite in which all that looks confined

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partakes of an inviolable liberty without barriers of space or time. And it is because of this secret spiritual Whole, not only affecting the parts and thereby rendering them more than elements of a mechanical aggregate but also existing in its own . right as transcendent of them, that Nature is precious to Wordsworth: Nature he loves not for its beauty alone - he loves it basically for the liberation it promises beyond the mortal, the finite:

Whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,

Is with infinitude and only there.

Infinitude that is also Eternity - a release from barriers of time as well as space: this is what Nature supernatural holds out to Wordsworth, as he realised most vividly during his journey through the Simplon Pass when he "entered a narrow chasm" which carries to its deepest suggestion the Romanticism conjured up for us by Coleridge's "savage" and "holy" and "enchanted" gorge:

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,

The stationary blasts of waterfalls.

And in the narrow rent at every turn

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,

Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside

As if a voice were in them, the sick sight

And giddy prospect of the raving stream,

The unfettered clouds and regions of the Heavens,

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light -

Were all like workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

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The sense of both Eternity and Infinity through Nature is the core of the philosophy and religion of Romanticism. It makes it more than what is commonly understood as Pantheism or, rather, it makes it the true Pantheism as distin-guished from the false. In that travesty the defects of Nature are taken to characterise God since God and Nature are believed to be identical instead of the former exceeding the latter even though constitutive and pervasive of it. Words-worth himself was accused of identifying God with Nature, and we may be deluded into agreeing with his accusers on the evidence of a line like

... God and Nature's single sovereignty,

which occurs in the 1805 version of The Prelude and which he altered in the 1850 version to

... Presences of God's mysterious power

Made manifest in Nature's sovereignty.

E. H. de Selincourt holds that the poet was here trying "to cover up the traces of his early pantheism". It is true that the later Wordsworth inclined more towards orthodox Christia-nity and was eager not to be found tainted with what orthodox Christians took to be Pantheism. But in his own earlier Pantheism the "single sovereignty" he spoke of did not cabin God within Nature: it merely refused to make Nature extra-neous to God. In the 1805 version he clearly combined, as C. Clarke has stressed, the singleness of God and Nature with God's transcendence by writing of

... Nature's self, which is the breath of God

and repeating the metaphor from breathing in the lines:

Great God!

Who send'st thyself into this breathing world

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Through Nature and through every kind of life

And mak'st man what he is, Creature divine ...

The early Wordsworth once actually went out of his way to repudiate vehemently the charge of identifying God with Nature. In a letter to Mrs. Catherine Clarkson in 1814 about the misinterpretation by her friend of the religious views expressed in The Excursion, he wrote: "Where does she gather that the author of The Excursion looks upon Nature and God as the same? He does not indeed consider the supreme Being as bearing the same relation to the Universe as a watch-maker bears to a watch. In fact, there is nothing in the course of religious education adopted in this country, in the use made by us of the Holy Scriptures, that appears to me so injurious as the perpetually talking about making by God. Oh! that your correspondent had heard a conversation which I had in bed with my sweet little boy, four and a half years old, upon this subject the other morning. 'How did God make me? Where is God? How does He speak? He never spoke to me.' I told him that God was a spirit, that he was not like his flesh which he could touch, but more like his thoughts, in his mind, which he could not touch. The wind was tossing the fir trees and the sky and light were dancing about in their dark branches, as seen through the window. Noting these fluctuations, he exclaimed eagerly . 'There's a bit of him, I see it there!' This is not meant entirely for Father's prattle; but for Heaven's sake; in your religious talk with children say as little as possible about making."

Obviously Wordsworth's God is more than visible and tangible Nature, but He is not all outside Nature: He is not the maker of a world quite other than Himself: the world is His own emanation and it is what it is - good, bad, indifferent -through a difference of manifestation or non-manifestation by His substance in terms of space and time, of matter and life and mind. The later orthodox Wordsworth himself does not forget completely this emanation-sense of his early days. He can still refuse to make God stand over against Nature as a watchmaker

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facing a watch: he seeks a via media between orthodox Christianity and Nature-mysticism by conceiving Nature as a piece of art, an imaginative creation in which God's Self gets expressed with an inner warmth and intimate subjectivity as a poet's being gets expressed in a poem and as a watchmaker's soul does not get expressed in a time-piece. The young Wordsworth, of course, is entirely an emanationist. To him God, even when seeming absent, is yet concretely within Nature and keeps everywhere a possibility of revealing the infinite and the eternal of His true Self which is also the ultimate being of Nature. It is such a divinity that Wordsworth speaks of in his perhaps most-quoted lines:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains...

It is worth noting here that the Spirit who is God is in the mind of man who perceives and thinks no less than in the objects perceived and thought about by man. Being Spirit, He would be most intensely accessible in man's own conscious-ness, and the search of God within is Wordsworth's master-message provided we do not cleave it from his constant sense that the withinness is not restricted to humans but is the same vast Wonder everywhere, a depth of meadows and woods and mountains just as much as of ourselves, a depth which awakens in us most when we search for it as a Wideness one in all, a Depth that is at once Bliss and Strength and Illumination

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and Righteousness. Yes, Righteousness too, an "inner light" which guides and elevates and shows the highest "duty" not through mere dry precept framed by the outer mind but through a soul-intuition bringing "vital feelings of delight" and largening the individual conscience to the secret power of a controlling law felt operative from behind all appearances of Nature. That is why Wordsworth could say to "Duty" -

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh

and strong

- and that is why he is not striking a mere sentimental note when he writes -

One impulse from a vernal wood

Can teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can.

Wordsworth's is a morality of Nature-mysticism and not of Nature-sentimentalism. He is not blind to "Nature red in tooth and claw" any more than he is blind to the wickedness in man, but beyond both goes his poetic sight to the secret Godhead that is the truth of man's being and he strives for a life-suffusing Apocalypse full of "the joy of elevated thoughts".

Unfortunately it must be admitted that after an extra-ordinary decade of creative experience Wordsworth the moralist got the better of the mystic in him just as the intellectual in him got the better of the poet. But we are discussing him as the embodiment par excellence of the new Romanticism in England. And to complete our picture we must glance at two other sides of his natural supernaturalism. We have described his God as both immanent and transcendent. We may touch now on one implication of the transcendence which is not generally recognised: a double-shaded implication - what we,

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quoting a phrase of Wordsworth's own, may call "unknown modes of being" and what in addition we may call after Plato the prenatal bliss of the soul. Both the shades join with suggestions floating or flashing out from Coleridge's Kubla Khan. The woman wailing for her demon lover and haunting the romantic chasm is matched by the episode, recounted in The Prelude, of the boy Wordsworth pushing off the shore in a boat found tied to a willow tree within a rocky cove, the moonlight all about him, his view fixed

Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,

The horizon's utmost boundary; for above

Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.

We are told how, suddenly, as he rose upon the stroke and the boat went heaving through the water, from behind that steep crag which had appeared to be the sole limit of the scene,

a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,

And, growing still in stature, the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,

And through the silent water stole my way

Back to the covert of the willow tree.

Home the boy went through the meadows, in a grave mood -

but after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

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Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

Here, no less than in the lines where he recounts how, after stealing trapped woodcocks, he heard

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod,

we have the occult, as genuine as in any spectral perceptions of Coleridge's - or of Blake's, either, when he speaks of

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

or when, dazzled by the dreadful beauty he symbolises as "Tyger", he asks,

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

The occult is also as genuinely in Wordsworth as in any visionary sensation of Shelley's, though in a more formidable shape of vagueness than the Shelleyan

Dreams and adorations,

Winged persuasions and veiled Destinies,

Splendours and glooms and glimmering Incarnations

Of hopes and Fears, and twilight Phantasies.

The vague and the formidable, however, are not the sole features one may contact in the mysterious regions tran-scending our universe. There are also "the milk of paradise" and the unshadowed lovelinesses hinted by Blake -

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Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller's journey is done -

and the more magical felicities that haunted Shelley through-out his life as if he were an exile from them and that are poignantly evoked by him in the last lines of the lyric To Jane:

Though the sound overpowers,

Sing again,

With thy dear voice revealing

A tone

Of some world far from ours,

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one.

This far world figures in Wordsworth too in those lines of his Immortality Ode:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home.

It is this prenatal populating of Heaven by human souls that, according to Wordsworth, makes the child see Heaven all about it, the earthly "Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves" transmitting the light of their own archetypes, as it were, from the beatific Beyond.*

* Wordsworth once made a disclaimer that he never took the idea of prenatal existence seriously: he considered himself to have merely put it to an apt poetic use. But in the Ode it is inalienable part of the context of ideas sprung from his own childhood-experience of God clinging all about his soul. Whether he accepted it intellectually as an article of faith or no, it cannot be expelled from his experienced mysticism of Nature.

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Indeed a complex mysticism of Nature is Wordsworth's, hardly covered by a superficial use - complimentary or pejorative - of the term "Pantheism". But the term in its deepest and largest connotation is most apt, particularly because all that is on earth is enveloped by it with supreme significance. Wordsworth's eyes pierced to the paradisal and the eternal through the mundane and the temporal -

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears -

and death was robbed of the fearful visage it bears to the uninitiated, but there was no stress on a hope beyond the grave. Nature was tinged with God enough to create the "cheerful faith"

that all which we behold

Is full of blessing,

and the stress was on realising the "glory" and the "dream" here and now, amid the daily dust:

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in this very world, which is the world

Of all of us, - the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!

Perhaps Wordsworth uttered the last word on his complex mysticism - though in a style more epigrammatic than mys-tic - when he apostrophised the Skylark:

Type of the wise, who soar yet never roam,

True to the kindred points of heaven and home.

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