Keats finds in love a stimulus to “all-feelings”—a stimulus of the same kind as external nature, but more eminent in degree. Nature is good; but in love
there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading by degrees
To the chief intensity.
Love, for Keats, is the quintessence of the not-self; and yet, by a seeming paradox,
when we combine therewith,
Life’s self is nourished by its proper pith,
And we are nurtured like a pelican brood.
The not-self is the very core and marrow of our beings.
Of the other stimuli to “all-feelings” and a consciousness of the not-self, Keats does not speak in this passage from “Endymion.” Intellectual, ethical, mystical, even sensual, they exist and are, according to circumstances and the temperament of those on whom they act, more or less efficacious, more or less completely satisfying. This is not, however, the place to discuss them.
Grands bois, vous m’effrayez comme des cathédrales,
Vous hurlez comme l’orgue, et dans nos coeurs maudits,
Chambres d’éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles,
Répondent les échos de vos De Profundis.
Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds et tes tumultes,
Mon esprit les retrouve en lui! Ce rire amer
De l’homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d’insultes,
Je l’entends dans le rire énorme de la mer.
Comme tu me plairais, ô Nuit! sans ces étoiles
Dont la lumière parle un langage connu!
Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!
Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles
Ou vivent, jaillissant de mon œil par milliers,
Des êtres disparus, aux regards familiers!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
The essential horror of Baudelaire’s existence was that he could never, for all the intensity of his longing, break out from the prison of self into the happy freedom of the not-self. He wanted to have the “all-feeling,” to “share the immortal lot” of the spirit of things, to establish a “fellowship with essence.” But he always remained narrowly, hopelessly, mortally himself. Instead of becoming “portion of that around him,” he assimilated external nature to himself. To Byron, high mountains were a feeling—an “all-feeling”; to Baudelaire, they and the woods, the sea, the night, were as much a torture as the hum of human cities. Everything spoke un langage connu. The world was part of his tortured spirit and his sick body; never, even for a moment, could they become a part of the impersonal world.
The Individual
Descend, O Lamb of God, and take away the imputation of Sin
By the creation of States and the deliverance of individuals evermore, Amen.
Thus wept they in Beulah over the four regions of Albion:
But many doubted and despaired and imputed Sin and righteousness,
To Individuals and not to States, and these slept in Ulro.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
Affections, Instincts, Principles and Powers,
Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control—
So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,
Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.
Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,
Spring the foundations of the shadowy throne
Where Man’s one nature, queen-like, sits alone,
Centred in a majestic unity;
And rays her powers, like sister islands, seen
Linking their coral arms under the sea;
Or clustered peaks, with plunging gulfs between
Spanned by aerial arches, all of gold,
Where’er the chariot wheels of life are rolled
In cloudy circles, to eternity.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
For the homme moyen sensuel, Blake’s doctrine of states is one of the most alluring ever propounded. Accepted, it frees us at one stroke from all moral responsibility whatsoever.
According to Blake’s theory, the individual is no longer accountable for his actions. Responsibility can be attached only to states and not to the person (if such a being any longer exists) who passes through the states. The individual self is reduced to a mere locality in space—the region where states occur; nothing more. There is no need for any of us to sleep in Ulro—to suffer, that is to say, the pains of hell, whether posthumously or in the form of present remorse. What a comfort!
But a question arises. How far does the doctrine square with observable facts? To what extent, if we happen to be intellectually honest can we accept it?
Certain facts are clearly unamenable to interpretation in terms of Blake’s theory. To start with, we have bodies—bodies which retain through gradual change an unmistakable individual identity. In the second place, the “bitter taste of me” is something with which each one of us is only too familiar. But “self is an illusion.” Possibly; it is an illusion, however, which lasts a lifetime and is shared by all human beings. My mind has never been subtle enough to see much difference between such illusions and reality. I am a fact of my own immediate experience. But the illusion, or the reality of self is not quite unbroken. It has holes in it, so to speak, rifts and flaws. I am a fact of my own experience; but so, occasionally, is not-I. For the bitter taste of self is not continuously on our palate. There are times when we forget it; times when some other savour seems for a moment to take its place; times when we are conscious of being something other than our ordinary selves—better, worse, inhumanly vaster or inhumanly more limited. Of the possible significance of certain of these abnormal experiences I have allowed the poets to speak in other sections of this book. What concerns us here is the fact that we do really have them, that we sometimes actually feel and taste ourselves to be other than we ordinarily are. Even the law recognizes the existence of these abnormal states. By admitting, as in most countries it does, a distinction between crimes of passion and crimes of calculation, it admits that men are sometimes not themselves—it “imputes sin and righteousness to states” and so preserves the offending individual from sleeping in Ulro, to say nothing of swinging from the gallows.
Blake’s doctrine, then, would seem to be partially true. Our successive states are islands—but, for the most part, “sister islands linking their coral arms under the sea”; islands of the same archipelago, having the same geology, the same fauna and flora, the same climate and civilization. But here and there, in midocean, rises some isolated peak; uninhabited, or peopled by races of strange men and unknown animals; an island where life is unrecognizably different from that which we lead on the familiar atolls of our home waters. Between these and the oceanic islands, there exists, no doubt, some obscure, submarine connection. If in no other way, they are at least united in this: that they rise from the crust of the same globe. But the connection is invisible; we have no direct knowledge of it, can only infer its existence. For practical purposes—as mystics and lawyers unexpectedly agree—it is not there.
In describing these islands, the psychological geographer may lay his chief emphasis either on the sea that sunders them, or on the linked coral arms under the sea. It is less a matter of scientific accuracy (for, as we have seen, man is simultaneously a diversity of states and an individual unity) than of taste and expediency. Individual responsibility is the essence of all existing systems of ethics; therefore moralists have always insisted on the submarine connections. The imputation of sin and righteousness to states is subversive, not only of morality, but of all organized society. If a man is nothing but a succession of states, then contracts, property, social position are without justification or even meaning. Suppose, for example, my state A makes an agreement with your state X. A week later state B has succeeded to state A and state Y to state X. If there are no coral arms under the sea, if we impute sin and righteousness only to states—then, clearly, there is no reason why the old agreement should be binding on the new states. We may try to wriggle out from under the burden of sin and righteousness; but simple expediency demands that we should impute business arrangements to individuals rather than to states.
Over against the moralist and the business man, stand the immoralist and the psychological analyst—geographers, who emphasize the sea as opposed to the coral. Immoralists may be of the transcendental kind—men beyond good and evil, like certain mystics, Blake among them—or else quite ordinary misbehavers anxious to evade responsibility for their offences. The transcendental immoralists provide the crowd of untranscendental average sensual men with a justifying doctrine. Hence the popularity of Blake at the present time. The religious bases of the traditional morality were long ago destroyed; and now after hanging for some time miraculously suspended in air, the morality itself has begun to crumble. Blake seems to offer a justifying explanation for behaviour that would otherwise be merely lawless and animal.
The psychological analyst is inevitably, whatever his intentions happen to be, on the side of the immoralists. Analysis is an insistence on separation. The analyst perceives divisions in what had seemed continuous, fissures
