Rudd Fleming
CULTURAL ANXIETY AND THE
ROMANTIC AUDIENCE
"We later civilizations now know that we are mortal," said
Paul Valery in 1919. The idea itself was not, of course, new at the
time of Valery's essay
(La Crise de
f
Esprit),
but Valery set it to a
new feeling-tone which has since become pervasive:
"An
extraor–
dinary shiver ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in all her
centers of thought a failure of self-recognition, of self-resemblance, as
if she were about to lose consciousness." ( ...
a senti, par tous ses
noyaux pensants
. . .
qu'elle allait perdre conscience .)
The ((
frisson
extraordinaire,"
the unaccountable shudder of anxiety, which informs
Valery's words, is entirely absent from the somewhat similar observa–
tion of Wordsworth in his famous Preface (1800): " ... a multitude
of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined
force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting
it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage
torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events
which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of
men in cities."
Wordsworth is trying to make an objective judgment of social
conditions, but that he himself was not free from the threatening
torpor of these conditions is evident in his personal life and in his
poems ( ... the dreary intercourse of daily life ... the fretful stir
unprofitable, and the fever of the world, have hung upon the beatings
of my heart). He counterpoises against this subjective anxiety a
philosophy of harmony between man and nature and of the funda–
mental value of pleasure: "The Poet," according to Wordsworth,
"considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other." The
Poet considers "man and the objects that surround him as acting
and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity
