FATE OF PLEASURE
177
"His whole frame appeared to himself to be enlarged, and all nature
which surrounded him diminished to atoms."2
In connection with the art of the eighteenth century I used the
disagreeable modern word
consumer,
meaning thus to suggest the
affinity that art was thought to have with luxury, its status as a
commodity which is implied by the solicitude
it
felt for the pleasure
and the comfort of the person who was to own and experience
it.
Certainly Wordsworth was preeminent in the movement to change
this state of affairs,s yet Wordsworth locates the value of metrical
language as lying in its ability to protect the reader from the dis–
comfort of certain situations that poetry may wish to represent and
he compares the effect of such situations in novels with their effect in
Shakespeare, his point being that in novels they are "distressful" but
in Shakespeare they are not.
4
It was, we know, an explanation which
2. All writers on the Sublime say in effect what Bouchardon says-that, al–
though the sublime subject induces an overpowering emotion, even fear or
terror, it does so in a way that permits us to rise superior to it and thus
give us occasion to have a good opinion of our power of intellect and of
ourselves generally. The Sublime has this direct relation to comfort and
luxury, that it induces us "to regard as small those things of which we are
wont to be solicitous" (Kant,
Critique of A esthetic Judgment).
A more
ambitious treatment of my subject would require a much fuller exposition of
the theory of the Sublime. Of this theory, which so much occupied the
writers on art of the eighteenth century, it can be said that it has much more
bearing upon our own literature than modern critics have recognized.
The classic study in English is Samuel H. Monk's
Th e Sublime,
first
published in 1935, now available as an Ann Arbor Paperback.
3. "... Men ... who talk of Poetry as a matter of amusement and idle pleasure;
who will converse with us as gravely about a
taste
for Poetry, as they express
it, as if
it
were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac,
or Sherry."
4. The strength of Wordsworth's impulse to suppress the "distressful" is
suggested by the famous passage in
The Prelude
in which the poet explains
how his childhood reading served to inure him to the terrors of actuality.
He recounts the incident, which occurred when he was nine years old; of
his seeing a drowned man brought up from the bottom of Esthwaite Lake.
He was, he says, not overcome by fear of the "ghastly face," because his
"inner eye" had seen such sights before in fairy tales and romances. And
then he feels it necessary to go further, to go beyond the bounds of our
ready credence, for he tells us that from his reading came "a spirit" which
hallowed the awful sight
With decoration and ideal grace
A dignity, a smoothness, like the works
Of Grecian Art, and pwrest poesy.
