BOOKS
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tic writers must be set
in
reaction: the latter see man characteristically
as self-divided, yearning for the innocence and primal simplicity of
nature and yet aware that nature is will-less, blind, incapable of moral
satisfactions. The contradictory romantic perception is perfectly drama–
tized by Wordsworth, with his sense of the beauty and the terror, the
resuscitating calm and the awful barrenness, of the natural landscape;
it is exemplified by the movement of Schiller's thought when he writes:
"It happens with us, at least
in
certain moral dispositions, to curse our
prerogative, this free will, which exposes us to so many combats with
ourselves, to so many anxieties and errors, and to wish to exchange it
for the condition of beings destitute of reason, for that fatal existence
that no longer admits of any choice, but which is so calm in its uni–
formity....
"1
My point is that one may discern in romantic literature, as a corre–
lative to its sense of the primacy of the imagination, a conviction that
man has cut himself off from nature
simply by being man,
that certain
unnatural difficulties attend the cultivation of the human spirit even in
its mo"St vital and most generous forms. Although subsequent thought
has moved away from the romantic ideal, it has done so only at the
promptings of the romantic experience itself. That nature yields no bene–
fits to man except as he successfully resists her, that man must distort
nature cruelly in order to make his psychic energies available for the
purposes of civilization-this testimony may be read throughout the
nineteenth century, in the works of Spencer and the social Darwinians,
in the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in the post-romantic
doctrines of aestheticism and symbolism, which see the artist sacrificed on
the altar of his art, creating impersonal beauty by a process that entails
his becoming ugly, grotesque, an aberration.
If
we are to grasp the
spiritual import of this literature, we must recognize that the word
"spiritual" can apply to more than religious intentions, that it has refer–
ence to certain moral and aesthetic conditions whose satisfaction dis–
tinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom. It was with
this larger sense of the word in mind that Hegel argued for an
ideal state in which the wounds of the spirit would heal without leaving
scars; and it is the conveyed experience of what we have termed vision–
ary dissent that in actuality the wounds of the spirit are everlasting, that
even worthiest goals of civilization require irredeemable suffering as a
precondition of their accomplishment. (A classic instance is provided
by the fate of Dostoyevsky's characters, whose salvation depends upon
1.
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.
