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LIONEL TRILLING
about the crude force of man's impulse to self-gratification, but it
did not associate man's dignity with this force---on the contrary,
dignity, so far as it was personal and moral, was thought to derive
from the resistance which man offers to the impulse to pleasure.
For Wordsworth, however, pleasure was the defining attribute of
life itself and of nature itself-pleasure is the
«impulse from the
vernal wood"
which teaches us more of man and his moral being
«than all the sages can."
And the fallen condition of humanity–
«what man has made of man"-is
comprised by the circumstance
that man alone of natural beings does not experience the pleasure
which, Wordsworth believes, moves the living world.
It
is of course a
commonplace of Wordsworth criticism that, although the poet set
the highest store by the idea of pleasure, the actual pleasures he
represents are of a quite limited kind. Certainly he ruled out pleasures
that are "strictly physical," those which derive from "the indulgence of
the appetites" and "sensual gratification," more particularly erotic
gratification. His living world of springtime is far removed from that
of Lucretius: nothing in it is driven by the irresistible power of
alma
Venus.
This is not to say that there is no erotic aspect to Wordsworth's
mind; but the eroticism is very highly sublimated-Wordsworth's
pleasure always tended toward
joy,
a purer and more nearly trans–
cendant state. And yet our awareness of this significant limitation
does not permit us to underrate the boldness of his statement in the
Preface about the primacy of pleasure and the dignity which derives
from the principle of pleasure, nor to ignore its intimate connection
with certain radical aspects of the moral theory of the French
Revolution.
For an understanding of the era of the Revolution, there is, I
think, much to be gained from one of the works of the German
economic historian, Werner Sombart, whose chief preoccupation was
the origins of capitalism. In his extensive monograph,
Luxury and
Capitalism,
Sombart develops the thesis that the first great accumula–
tions of capital were achieved by the luxury trades in consequence
of that ever-increasing demand for the pleasures of the world, for
comfort, sumptuousness, and elegance, which is to be observed in
Western Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the end
of the eighteenth century.
As
a comprehensive explanation of the
rise
of capitalism, this theory, I gather, has been largely discredited.
