FATE
OF
PLEASURE
169
are dramatized by the English career of the most usual Latin word
for pleasure,
voluptas.
Although some Latin-English dictionaries,
especially those of the nineteenth century, say that
voluptas
means
"pleasure, enjoyment, or delight of body or mind in a good or a bad
sense," the word as it was used in antiquity seems to have been on the
whole morally neutral and not necessarily intense. But the English
words derived from
voluptas
are charged with moral judgment and
are rather excited. We understand that it is not really to the minds
of men that a voluptuous woman holds out the promise of pleasure,
enjoyment, or delight. We do not expect a voluptuary to see his
pleasures in domesticity, or in the Imagination or Melancholy, or in
smoking a pipe.
It is obvious that any badness or unfavorableness of meaning
that the word pleasure may have relates to the primitiveness of the
enjoyment that is being referred to. Scarcely any moralist will object
to pleasure as what we may call a secondary state of feeling, as a
charm or grace added to the solid business of life. What does arouse
strong adverse judgment is pleasure in its radical aspect, as it is
the object of an essential and definitive energy of man's nature.
It was because Bentham's moral theory asserted that pleasure was
indeed the object of an essential and definitive part of man's nature
that Carlyle called it the Pig-philosophy. He meant, of course, that
it impugned man's nature to associate it so immediately with pleasure.
Yet this is just how Wordsworth asks us to conceive man's nature
in the sentence I have spoken of-it is precisely pleasure in its
primitive or radical aspect that he has in mind. He speaks of "the
grand
elementary
principle of pleasure," which is to say, pleasure
not as a mere charm or amenity but as the object of an instinct,
of what Freud, whose complex exposition of the part that pleasure
plays
in life
is
of course much in point here, was later to call a
drive.
How little concerned was Wordsworth, at least in this one sentence,
with
pleasure in its mere secondary aspect is suggested by
his
speaking
of it as constituting the
dignity
of man, not having in mind such
dignity
as is conferred by society but that which is
native
and
naked.
When Carlyle denounced Bentham's assertion that pleasure is,
and must be, a first consideration of the human being,
it
was exactly
man's dignity that he was undertaking to defend. The traditional
morality to which Carlyle subscribed was certainly under no illusion
