Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic LiteratureM. H. ABRAMS
New York London
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU
Copyright © 1971 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
First published in the Norton Library 1973
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Books That Live The Norton imprint on a book means that in the publisher's estimation it is a book not for a single season but for the years. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Abrams, Meyer Howard. Natural supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in romantic literature.
( Norton library) Indudes bibliographical references. 1. Romanticism. I. Title.
[PN603.A3 1973]
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For Jane and
Contents PREFACE 11
O N E / "This Is Our High Argument" 17 1. Wordsworth's Program for Poetry 21
2. The Design of Biblical History 32
3. The Shape of Things to Come: The Apocalyptic Marriage 37
4. Christian History and Christian Psycho-Biography 46
5. Alternative Ways to the Millennium: Progress and Revolution 56
6. Natural Supernaturalism 65
T W O / Wordsworth's Prelude and the Crisis-Autobiography 71 1. The Idea of The Prelude 74
2. Proust's Gothic Church 80
3. The Art of Augustine's Confessions 83
4. The Transactions of Mind and Nature 88
5. The Theodicy of the Private Life 95
6. The Theodicy of the Landscape 97
7. The Redemptive Imagination 117
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9. Wordsworth as Evangelist 134
T H R E E / The Circuitous Journey: Pilgrims and Prodigals 141
1. The Great Circle: Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism 146
2. Divided and Reunited Man: The Esoteric Tradition 154
3. The Prodigal's Return 164
4. Forms of Romantic Imagination 169
F O U R / The Circuitous Journey: Through Alienation to Reintegration 197
1. The Paradox of the Fortunate Division: Schiller and Universal History 201
2. Romantic Philosophy and the High Romantic Argument 217
3. Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit: Metaphysical Structure and Narrative Plot 225
4. Some Other Educational Travelers: Hölderlin's Hyperion, Goethe's Faust, the Romances of Novalis 237
F I V E / The Circuitous Journey: From Blake to D. H. Lawrence 253
1. Unity Lost and Integrity Earned: Blake and Coleridge 256
2. Wordsworth: The Long Journey Home 278
3. Romantic Love 292
5. Carlyle and His Contemporaries 307
6. Four Versions of the Circuitous Return: Marx, Nietzsche, Eliot, Lawrence 313
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s I X / Revelation, Revolution, Imagination, and Cognition 325 1. Apocalypse by Revolution 329
2. Apocalypse by Imagination 335
3. Apocalypse by Cognition 348
4. The Politics of Vision: Mastery, Servitude, and Freedom 356
S E V E N / The Poet's Vision: The New Earth and the Old 373 1. Freshness of Sensation 377
2. Moments 385
3. Transvaluations 390
4. Hamann and Wordsworth: Some Parallels in Spiritual Discovery 399
E I G H T / The Poet's Vision: Romantic and Post-Romantic 409
1. Freshness of Sensation and the Disordering of the Senses 412
2. Varieties of the Modern Moment 418
3. The Romantic Positives 427
4. The World's Song of Life and Joy 431
5. The Romantic Reverdie 437
6. Hope and Dejection 442
7. The Eagle and the Abyss 448
A P P E N D I X / Wordsworth's Prospectus for The Recluse 463 1. In the Preface to The Excursion 465
2. The Manuscripts of the Prospectus 470
NOTES 481
INDEX 533
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Preface "THE literature of England," Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry, "has arisen as it were from a new birth." "We live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty," and these men have in common "the spirit of the age." In a letter to Charles Ollier of October 1819, he further remarked that the great poets derive "from the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have exposed to view, a similar tone of sentiment, imagery, and expression," and that such similarity in the "best writers" of an age attests to "the spirit of that age acting on all." Some of Shelley's contemporaries, as we shall see, made similar assertions. Suppose that we abstract the factual claims in Shelley's pronouncements and restate them as follows: A number of major poets, who differed markedly from their eighteenth-century predecessors, had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; the writings of these poets were part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as in poetry; this tendency was causally related to the drastic political and social changes of the age. It seems to me that the claims, so stated, are valid; and I would add that they are valid not only for English but also for German literature and philosophy during the lifetime of Shelley.
My aim in this book is to substantiate these claims by specifying some of the striking parallels, in authorial stance and persona, subject matter, ideas, values, imagery, forms of thought and imagination, and design of plot or structure, which are evident in a number of the prominent poets, post-Kantian philosophers,
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writers of romances, authors of partly fictional autobiography, and exponents of the related form the Germans called Universalgeschichte—a philosophical scheme of the human past, present, and predictable future—in both England and Germany during that remarkable period of creativity, the three or four decades following the outbreak of the French Revolution. Within the great variety of literary, philosophical, and historical forms that fall within this purview, each has its own premises and principles of organization, while each major writer has his distinctive preoccupations and voice; in dealing with a particular work or a particular writer, I have tried to do justice to such differences in formal intention and individual utterance. Nevertheless, these writers shared a concern with certain human problems, and an identifiable way of considering and moving toward the resolution of these problems, which justify Shelley and his contemporaries in distinguishing what they called "the spirit of the age," and what I, for economy of discussion, have chosen to call by the conventional though ambiguous term "Romantic."
The title Natural Supernaturalism indicates that my recurrent, but far from exclusive, concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking. In England and Germany, two great Protestant nations with a history of theological and political radicalism, the Biblical culture fostered collateral developments of response to what Shelley called "the great events of the age," by which he meant above all the French Revolution, its unbounded promise and its failure, and the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary shock waves it had set up in that era of the turbulent emergence of the modern political, social, and industrial world. Philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, imaginative writers from Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and the young Carlyle in England, and Hölderlin and Novalis in Germany, as well as others who, like Schiller and Coleridge, were equally metaphysicians and bards, conceived themselves as elected spokesmen for the Western tradition at a time of profound cultural crisis. They represented themselves in the traditional persona of the philosopher-seer or the poet-prophet (in England, the chief model was Milton, the great "bard" of what Shelley called "the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty"), and they set out, in various yet recognizably parallel ways, to reconstitute the grounds of hope and to announce the certainty, or at least the possibility, of a rebirth in which a renewed mankind will inhabit a renovated earth where he will find himself thoroughly at home.
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It is a historical commonplace that the course of Western thought since the Renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place. Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process—outside the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas, as constitutive elements in a world view founded on secular premises. Much of what distinguishes writers I call "Romantic" derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature. Despite their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however, the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history survived, as the implicit distinctions and categories through which even radically secular writers saw themselves and their world, and as the presuppositions and forms of their thinking about the condition, the milieu, the essential values and aspirations, and the history and destiny of the individual and of mankind.
This book does not undertake to be an inclusive survey of thought and literature in the early nineteenth century. Even in the writers who are my primary concern, I deal largely with selected works written in the prime of their powers, while some major writers of the age are marginal to my focus. Keats, for example, figures mainly insofar as he represented in some of his poems a central Romantic subject: the growth and discipline of the poet's mind, conceived as a theodicy of the individual life (what Keats called "a system of Salvation") which begins and ends in our experience in this world. Byron I omit altogether; not because I think him a lesser poet than the others but because in his greatest work he speaks with an ironic counter-voice and deliberately opens a satirical perspective on the vatic stance of his Romantic contemporaries. The book is organized as a sequence of movements out of and back to various passages in the programmatic statement, first written at the turn of the century, which Wordsworth put forward in his Preface to The Excursion as "a kind of Prospectus of the design
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and scope" of his intended masterpiece, The Recluse, and of the entire corpus of his lesser poems. My rationale is that Wordsworth (as his English contemporaries acknowledged, with whatever qualifications) was the great and exemplary poet of the age, and his Prospectus stands as the manifesto of a central Romantic enterprise against which we can conveniently measure the consonance and divergences in the writings of his contemporaries. In each section I also look before and after—back to the Bible, to Christian exegetic, devotional, and confessional literature, and to relevant aspects of both exoteric and esoteric philosophy, and ahead as far as some prominent writers in our own time. I do so in order to show that Romantic thought and literature represented a decisive turn in Western culture. The writers of that age, in reinterpreting their cultural inheritance, developed new modes of organizing experience, new ways of seeing the outer world, and a new set of relations of the individual to himself, to nature, to history, and to his fellow men. This fact has been obvious to most of the important writers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present time, and many of these writers have defined their own literary enterprise by either a positive or a negative reference to the forms and inherent ethos of the Romantic achievement. These topics and materials, I realize, are extremely diverse; at times, in the refractory work of putting them together, I have ruefully remembered Coleridge's comment as to why he took so long over his projected Magnum Opus—that it dealt de omne scibile quibusdamque aliis.
An early version of this book was delivered as the Addison L. Roache Lectures at the University of Indiana in April and May of 1963, and a revised version as the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in May of the following year. I take this occasion to express my thanks for the many kindnesses extended to me at both these universities, and to pay tribute to the late Professor A. S. P. Woodhouse, whose scholarly concerns touched in many ways on the matter of this work and who was closely associated with the Alexander Lectures from their inauguration in 1929 until his retirement at the end of the term in which I had the honor to participate in this distinguished series. I have expanded the text for this book, to the extent that four lectures have burgeoned into eight chapters. The topics and general argument, however, remain those of the Alexander Lectures. The additions are mainly a more comprehensive treatment of the post-Kantian philosophers and cultural historians in Germany, and a large increase in the citations
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of illustrative passages. My justification for the latter procedure is the principle that in such matters authors, so far as feasible, should be allowed to speak for themselves; I take comfort in the thought that a reader, unlike a captive audience, has the liberty to linger or leap over, as his interests dictate.
While this work was evolving, I was aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship in the spring of 1960, by a research grant and term's leave of absence from Cornell University in 1965, and by a very pleasant year, 1967-8, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California. At the Center I profited especially from conversations with Professors Morton Bloomfield, Donald MacRae, Gregory Vlastos, and Maurice Mandelbaum; the last, by a happy chance, turned out to be writing a book, related to my own subject, on the philosophy of history and of the social sciences in the nineteenth century. It was also my good fortune to have Professor Harold Bloom, once my student, for a colleague this year as a distinguished Fellow from Yale at the Cornell Society for the Humanities; he read through the manuscript, and the text has at numerous points been improved by his remarkable command of the Romantic and post-Romantic literary tradition. Several undergraduate and graduate research assistants, especially Ira Nadel and Arthur Gross, Jr., and Mrs. Berniece Roske and the secretarial staff of the Cornell Department of English, helped greatly in the onerous task of preparing the manuscript for publication. And my wife, as always, performed cheerful and yeomanly service, with no more than a stimulating modicum of complaint that this book, so long in the making, got in the way of other scholarly and domestic plans.
In the third book of The Prelude, describing his residence at Cambridge, Wordsworth projected his vision of an ideal university —as A. C. Bradley remarked, instead of working at his studies, he imagined a university in which he would have worked. Suppose one were now to imagine an ideal place for writing a work on Romantic literature. He might envision a study in a commodious old university building surrounded by the studies of scholars, generous of their learning, whose provinces include both ancient and modern literatures and philosophy; a minute's stroll distant there would be a major research library with a notable collection in the age of Wordsworth, reached by a path commanding a Wordsworthian prospect of hill, wood, lake, and sky. This was in fact my situation in 171 Goldwin Smith Hall, where this book was planned, worked
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out in lectures and discussions, and largely written. My debt to some of my colleagues and former students I have occasion to acknowledge in the notes; let me express here my obligation to all the others.
M. H. ABRAMS
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ONE "This Is Our High Argument"
Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt.
— G. W. F. Hegel, Preface, Phenomenology of the Spirit
A picture held us captive, and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably....
We are not contributing curiosities, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
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ONE On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude ...
WITH these words Wordsworth announced the genesis of The Recluse, the work to which he planned "to devote the Prime of my life and the chief force of my mind" 1 and on which he staked his claim to be ranked with the greatest poets. This project was perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly one of the most grandiose, ever undertaken by a major writer. As Wordsworth described his plan in 1814, The Prelude, itself an autobiography of epic dimension, was to serve merely as "preparatory poem" to a trilogy in which each part, to judge by The Excursion (which may itself be incomplete), was intended to be a good deal longer than the standard epic. 2 In spite of persistent and anguished effort Wordsworth accomplished, in addition to The Prelude, only Book I of Part I ( Home at Grasmere), Part II ( The Excursion), and none of Part III; so that, as Helen Darbishire has remarked, all we have of The Recluse is "a Prelude to the main theme and an Excursion from it." These writings were finished by 1814. From then almost until his death in 1850 Wordsworth suffered from the proddings of his well-meaning family and friends, as well as from his own sense that he had fallen short in a mission for which, he claimed, he had been granted the vision of a seer. 3
In his Preface to The Excursion Wordsworth declined "formally to announce a system" for The Recluse, declaring that from the completed poem "the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself." As an interim statement, however, he appended a verse passage of 107 lines to serve "as a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole
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Poem." This passage is our indispensable guide to understanding the design informing Wordsworth's poetry—including not only the completed parts of The Recluse but The Prelude and the shorter poems of the great period between 1798 and 1814 as well.
The first existing version of Wordsworth's poetic statement was probably written at some time between 1800 and 1806. 4 This manuscript was expanded to serve as the announcement, at the end of Home at Grasmere, of the "theme" of the new poetry Wordsworth felt it was his special mission to sing. A decade or so later, in the Preface to The Excursion ( 1814), Wordsworth still chose to reprint this radical statement of his poetic intentions, with only slight adjustment to more orthodox views, as a "Prospectus" to the whole of The Recluse. In that Preface he also likened the design implicit in all his writings to the structural plan of "a gothic church," in which the "preparatory poem" we now call The Prelude is "the ante-chapel," the tripartite Recluse is "the body," and all his "minor Pieces," when "properly arranged," are equivalent to "little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices." 5 In the following year, moreover, he invited the readers of his Poems of 1815 to regard the separate pieces "under a two-fold view; as composing an entire work within themselves, and as adjuncts to the philosophical Poem, ' The Recluse.' " 6 Wordsworth could not have been more precise or insistent: he envisaged all his…