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man," that
it
is the principle by which man "knows, and feels, and
lives, and moves."
This is a statement which has great intrinsic interest, because,
if
we recognize that it is bold at all, we must also perceive that it
is
bold to the point of being shocking, for it echoes and it controverts
St. Paul's sentence which tells us that "we live, and move, and have
our being" in God.
(Acts,
XVII, 28.) And in addition to its intrinsic
interest, it has great historical interest, not only because
it
sums up
a characteristic tendency of eighteenth-century thought but also
because it bears significantly upon a characteristic tendency of our
contemporary culture. Its relation to our contemporary culture
is
chiefly a negative one- our present sense of life does not accommodate
the idea of pleasure as something which constitutes the "naked and
native dignity of man."
The word
pleasure
occurs fl equently in the Preface. Like earlier
writers on the subject, when Wordsworth undertakes to explain why
we do, or should, value poetry, he bases his explanation upon the
pleasure which poetry gives. Generally he uses the word in much
the same sense that was intended by his predecessors. The pleasure
which used commonly to be associated with poetry was morally
unexceptionable and not very intense-it was generally understood
that poetry might indeed sometimes excite the mind but only as a
step toward composing it. But the word has, we know, two separate
moral ambiences and two very different degrees of intensity. The
pleasures of domestic life are virtuous; the pleasures of Imagination or
Melancholy propose the idea of a cultivated delicacy of mind in those
who experience them; the name of an English pipe-tobacco, "Parson's
Pleasure," suggests how readily the word consorts with ideas of
mildness. None of these propose what Byron had in mind when he
wrote, "0
pleasure! you're indeed a pleasant thing,/Although one
must be damn'd for you no doubt."
The
Oxford English Dictionary
takes due note of what it calls an "unfavorable" sense of the word:
"Sensuous enjoyment as a chief object of life, or end, in itself" and
informs us that in this pejorative sense
it
is "sometimes personified
as a female deity." The Oxford lexicographers do not stop there but
go on to recognize what they call a "strictly physical" sense, which
is even lower in the moral scale: "the indulgence of the appetites,
sensual gratification." The "unfavorable" significations of the word
