Wednesday
I have been reading the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, considered by many to be the greatest 19th century English philosopher, in which he discusses how Wordsworth came to his aid at a dark hour. It sounds as if he was caught in the grip of pure intellect and that Wordsworth showed him how to reconnect with his emotions.
I remember once using literature in a similar reconnection process, although my case was not as dire.
A proponent of utilitarianism, a very philosophical approach to social policy which advocates judging acts by their utility—how can one attain the greatest good for the greatest number?—Mill was raised by a philosopher father. As a result, he was immersed in what he calls “intellectual culture.” At a certain point, this proved to be not enough and he was plunged into depression:
During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit…. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later period of the same mental malady:
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.
Mill turned to poetry in a search for answers. His first choice proved to be no help:
In the worst period of my depression, I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet’s state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras.
Wordsworth was a different matter:
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth’s poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
Wordsworth’s nature descriptions in themselves were not what Mill needed, however. As he notes, Sir Walter Scott does a better job describing nature. Wordsworth, however, links nature to the emotions:
What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure…. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.
It’s important that Mill could see in Wordsworth someone going through his own struggles. Consider the opening of Intimations of Immortality:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
In the course of the poem, however, Wordsworth manages to work his way back to joy. I suspect it is this which gives Mill hope in his own case:
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s immortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I promised my own story so here it is. Having been raised, like Mill, by a father who was both intensely intellectual and emotionally reserved, I tried to be rational in my every endeavor. I felt thoroughly comfortable with the fiction of Jane Austen but shied away from more emotional authors. My research field, after all, was the British 18th century, about which Esther in Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar says, “I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.”
I don’t know about the smug but I put a high premium on reason. As Mill discovered, however, life can seem awfully arid under such an onslaught.
Feeling that something was missing, I spent my first sabbatical year exploring how I could make teaching literature more meaningful, both to my students and to myself. As I was in Ljubljana on a Fulbright at the time, I took advantage of the English Department’s excellent collection and started reading authors who plunge one into the emotional life of their characters. I remember especially immersing myself in English novelist Margaret Drabble’s melodramas, reading one work after another as though my life depended on it. They were enough like the reserved Jane Austen to make me feel comfortable but different enough to explore the emotions displayed.
Mill is careful to note that he “never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement.” In other words, he remained true to his utilitarian vision, just as I never ceased to value the intellect. But he learned, as I did, that it must be “joined” with emotions. As he puts it,
The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.
He found the answer in poetry. As have I.
