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always protesting. Wordsworth was one of the first to make the
protest when he discarded the Godwinian view of the mind, ad·
vanced a psychology of his own and from it derived a politics. No
doubt his politics was, in the end, reactionary enough; but it
became reactionary for this reason as much as any other: that it
was in protest against the view of man shared alike by Liberal
manufacturing Whig and radical philosopher, the view that man
was very simple and individually of small worth in the cosmic or
political scheme. It was because of this view that Wordsworth
deserted the Revolution; and it was to supply what the Revolution
lacked or, in some part, denied, that he wrote his best poetry.
What the philosophy of the Revolution lacked or denied it is
difficult to find a name for. Sometimes it gets called mysticism,
but it is not mysticism and Wordsworth is not a mystic. Sometimes,
as if by a kind of compromise, it gets called "mystery," but that,
though perhaps closer, is certainly not close enough. What is meant
negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what
is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of
surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth. These are
things whose more or less abstract expressions we recognize in
the arts; in our inability to admit them in social matters lies a
great significance. Our inability to give this quality a name, our
embarrassment, even, when we speak of it, marks a failure in our
thought. But Wordsworth was able to speak of this quality and he
involved it integrally with morality and all the qualities of mind
which morality suggests. Eventually he made morality absolute
and admittedly he engaged it with all sorts of unsound and even
dangerous notions. But, as he conceived the quality, it was a pro·
tection against the belief that ma,n could be made into a means and
it was an affirmation that every man was an end.
It is a tragic irony that the diminution of the moral possi·
bility, with all that the moral possibility implies of free will and
individual value, should spring, as it does, from the notion of the
perfectibility of man.* The
ultimate man
has become the end for
which all temporal men are the means. Such a notion is part of the
notion of progress in general, a belief shared by the bourgeois and
• I leave it to some novelist to explore the more subtle results of the confused denial
of the moral possibility as it appears in the personal lives of radical intellectuals.
They have used the denial, of course, to explain the conduct of men less equipped
than themselves for thought; they have declared that the mass of me• are not to
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