Rice University

Wordsworth on the Sublime: The Quest for Interfusion

Author(s): James A. W. Heffernan
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 7, No. 4, Nineteenth Century
(Autumn, 1967), pp. 605-615
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/449528
Accessed: 07-04-2019 17:08 UTC

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 Wordsworth on the Sublime:
The Quest for Interfusion
JAMES AS A. W. HEFFERNAN

"THE UNIVERSE ITSELF," wrote Coleridge

in 1797, "-what but an immense heap of little things?-I can
contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little-! -My
mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great-
something one & indivisible-and it is only in the faith of this
that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the
sense of sublimity or majesty!"1 This profound yearning for
transcendent unity, this passion for the "one life" so char-
acteristic of Coleridge throughout his life, was likewise a
vital element in the poetry of William Wordsworth. In a
verse fragment from the Alfoxden Notebook, which he used
during the early months of 1798, Wordsworth speaks

Of unknown modes of being which on earth,

Or in the heavens, or in the heavens and earth
Exist by mighty combinations, bound
Together by a link, and with a soul
Which makes all one. (Poetical Works, V, 340-341)2
Similarly, in "Tintern Abbey," which he composed during
the same year, he described

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (Poetical Works, II, 262)
This preoccupation with "the one interior life / That lives

'Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs,

I (Oxford, 1956), 349.
'Citations designated Poetical Works in my text are from The Poetical
Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen
Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-1949); references to Poetical Works,
II are to the second edition of Volume II, rev. by Helen Darbishire
(Oxford, 1952). From this edition I quote The Excursion and the
major critical essays as well as the minor poems.
Citations of The Prelude are from The Prelude, ed. Ernest de
Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. by Helen Darbishire. Except where revisions
are significant, I cite the early (1805-1806) 'A" version of the poem
rather than the final text.
also its resemblance to Excursion IX, 12-15 (PW, V, 479).
later incorporated into Prelude A (I, 418-427); Miss Darbishire notes
It may be noted here that with some changes the passage above was

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 606 WORDSWORTH ON THE SUBLIME

in all things,"3 manifest as it is in the fragments and shorter

poems of the early Wordsworth,4 is equally evident in the
early books of The Prelude. Recalling his adolescence at one
point, Wordsworth writes that he was contented only when
he felt the "sentiment of Being" spread throughout the visible
universe, "for in all things now / [He] saw one life, and felt
that it was joy" (A II, 418-430). So too, during his college
days at Cambridge, he gave "a moral life" to every natural
form that he encountered; in his eyes

the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
Thus much for the one Presence, and the Life
Of the great whole. (A III, 120-131)
Wordsworth's references to the "one life" are generally
modified in the later version of The Prelude, reflecting a
movement away from the pantheistic tendencies of his youth
and toward the more orthodox, conservative Christianity of
his later years.5 But much of his early faith survived this
shift in perspective. The quest for interfusion remained a
vital habit, and persevered throughout his life. As a poet,
"carrying everywhere with him relationship and love" (PW,
II, 396), Wordsworth could never accept a universe of frag-
ments. In The Excursion, the Wanderer condemns the "pre-
sumptuous littleness of certain modern Philosophers" who
seek to view "all objects unremittingly / In disconnection
dead and spiritless."6 Likewise, in the later version of The
Prelude itself, Wordsworth retained his belief in "the unity
of all," which transcended petty "distinctions" and "puny
boundaries" (A II, 220-237). In Wordsworth's opinion, to

'See MS 2 of "Peter Bell" (1799-1800), quoted by de Selincourt in The

Prelude, p. 525.
'See also "The Old Cumberland Beggar," composed 1797; Wordsworth
speaks of "a spirit and a pulse of good, / A life and soul, to every
mode of being / Inseparably linked" (77-99 in Poetical Works, IV,
236).
5In Book II, for example, Wordsworth's tribute to the pervasiveness of
the "one life" (A II, 428-430) becomes in 1850 a joy in communing
"With every form of creature, as it looked / Towards the Uncreated
with a countenance / Of adoration" (II, 410-414); similarly, the final
version of Book III omits the original reference to the "one Presence,
and the Life / Of the great whole" (A III, 130-131).
'See the Argument of Book IV (Poetical Works, V, 109) and Excur-
sion IV, 957-968.

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 J A M ES A. W. H E F E R N A N 607

admit the absolute separation of natural elements, or to

countenance the disjunction of God and the universe, was to
destroy that sense of unity which was vital to the exercise
of imaginative power. As late as 1829, he expressed to W. R.
Hamilton a profound antipathy for all science which did not
have as its primary object the contemplation of God in His
works:

As for ... all science [Hamilton reports] which put

this end out of view, all science which was a bare col-
lection of facts for their own sake, or to be applied
merely to the material uses of life, he thought it de-
graded instead of raising the species. All science which
waged war with and wished to extinguish Imagination
in the mind of man, and to leave it nothing of any
kind but the naked knowledge of facts, was, he
thought, much worse than useless; and what is dis-
seminated in the present day under the title of "useful
knowledge," being disconnected, as he thought it, with
God and everything but itself, was of dangerous and
debasing tendency.7

Such a tendency would destroy the imagination by dissolv-

ing the sense of interfusion-the sine qua non in Words-
worth's conception of the universe. To describe this sense,
he frequently used the term "sublime"-characterizing not
merely the God-reflecting unity of natural objects, but also
the power and amplitude of mind required to embrace that
unity. When in "Tintern Abbey," for example, he apprehends
"a motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things," He
does so with "a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply
interfused" than the joy he gained from nature in his youth
(PW, II, 261-262). Likewise, by responding to the infinite life
and mystery which permeates "the least of things," the young
Wanderer develops a being that is "sublime and comprehen-
sive" (Excursion, I, 223-234). Wordsworth's use of these
adjectives is significant. For him, the "sources of sublimity"
lay not in nature, but rather deep within the "soul of Man";
experience of the sublime, he wrote, was impossible without
the exertion of power in the mind (Poetical Works, II, 427).8
Indeed, it was only by the exertion of such power that the
young Wordsworth, beholding a shepherd silhouetted against

'R. P. Graves, Life of William Rowan Hamilton, I (Dublin, 1882), 313.

8Cf. his reference to "individual Man" as "wise in passion, and sub-
lime in power" (Prelude A X, 668).

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 608 W O R D S W O R T H ON T H E S U B L IME

the distant sky, could see him as "a solitary object and sub-
lime"-seeming to unite and embody within himself the
"grace and honour, power and worthiness" of all human
nature (Prelude A VIII, 389-407). Similarly, in a city as
feverish and densely populated as London, it was this com-
prehensiveness of mind which brought to Wordsworth the
"sublime idea" of "the unity of man, / One spirit over igno-
rance and vice / Predominant, in good and evil hearts" (VIII,
665-673).
Wordsworth did not, of course, invent the term "sublime";
and in order to comprehend more precisely his special use
of it, we may consider first the extent to which he followed
the established meanings of the term. The concept of the
sublime, which originated with the "Longinian" treatise Peri
Hupsous9 and received extensive treatment at the hands of
Edmund Burke, had arisen in England long before the ap-
pearance of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublimnze and the Beautiful (1757) ;10 for, as
Samuel H. Monk has noted, both Dennis and Addison de-
scribed feelings of delightful horror at the sight of the Alps,
while Shaftesbury's "Theocles" (in The Moralists) contended
that mountains were a source of astonishment and awe."1
But since "sublimity" does not appear by name in the works
of these writers, it remained for Burke to provide a psycho-
logical explanation of the term itself, and to distinguish it
from the concept of beauty. As Burke conceives it, sublimity
is that quality in an object which appeals to man's instincts
of self-preservation by arousing in him a feeling of terror,
which is delightful because he has "an idea of pain and
danger, without being actually in such circumstances." By
contrast, beauty is that quality in an object which appeals to
man's social instincts by arousing in him the feelings of
love, affection, or tenderness. Sublime objects, according to
Burke, are vast, rugged, obscure, gloomy, and massive;

9Translated into English as On the Sublime, this work is generally

attributed to Longinus, but his authorship is uncertain. See George
Saintsbury, A History of Criticism (New York, 1961), I, 152-153.
0There is some question over the date of publication, which may be
1756. [See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical
Theories in XVIII-Century England, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, 1960), p.
10.] Burke's Enquiry is, of course, the locus classicus of eighteenth-
century views on the sublime.
"Monk, pp. 207-208.

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 J AM E S A. W . HE F E R N A N 609

beautiful objects are comparatively small, smoo

light, and delicate.'2
Wordsworth's familiarity with these categories cannot be
doubted.13 As early as 1790, he wrote to Dorothy of the "sub-
lime and beautiful objects" which he had encountered during
his European tour; and by way of illustration, he contrasted
the lovely tranquility of Italy's Lake Como with the terrible
majesty of the Swiss Alps, which had drawn his thoughts
to the power of the Creator.'4 The quality of response sug-
gested here, moreover, becomes pervasive in The Prelude.
"Fostered alike by beauty and by fear," Wordsworth knew
both the horror of a mountain, looming menacingly over him
as he attempted to steal a boat, and the sweetness of a sun-
rise, bathing sea and meadow with its glorious rays.1" What-
ever he found in nature "of Terror or of Love" affected him
sharply; he was equally struck by the setting sun and the
midnight storm, by the valley and the mountain, by tender-
ness and grandeur.16 Indeed, in summarizing his entire
development at the conclusion of The Prelude, Wordsworth
attributes the integrity of his character to

"A Philosophical Enquiry (London, 1798), pp. 57-58, 84-85, 237-238.

It is not always clear whether Burke regards "sublimity" as an
objective quality, for at one point he writes that whatever is terrible
is "a source of the sublime" (p. 58). Usually, however, he regards the
objects themselves as sublime-particularly when he defines their
attributes.
"Though there is no external evidence that Wordsworth had read the
Enquiry, it may be noted that he was an outspoken admirer of Burke.
See The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1786-
1846, ed. Tom Taylor (London, 1926), I, 210; Prelude VIII, 512-543;
Tom Moore's Diary, ed. J. B. Priestley (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 30-31;
and The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later
Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), II, 561-hereafter cited
as Later Years.
"Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1787-1805, ed.
Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), pp. 31-33-cited hereafter as
early Letters. See also A Guide Through the District of the Lakes,
ed. W. M. Merchant (Bloomington, 1952), where Wordsworth men-
tions the "sublime and beautiful region" of the Alps (p. 54) and
distinguishes between "sublimity," which is "the result of Nature's
first dealings with the earth," and "beauty," which arises from "a
multiplicity of symmetrical parts uniting in a consistent whole" (p.
69). In the Guide, Wordsworth twice refers to the sublimity of moun-
tains (pp. 135, 142), an attribution with a considerable tradition in
the eighteenth century. See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom
and Mountain Glory: The Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, 1925),
pp. 282, 354-355.
'See A I, 372-427, and A IV, 330-345.
'See A III, 132-133; A II, 387-395, A VI, 676; and VII, 619-620. See

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 610 WORDSWORTH ON THE SUBLIME

fear and love,

To love as first and chief ...
... to early intercourse,
In presence of sublime and lovely forms,
With the adverse principles of pain and joy.
(A XIII, 143-147)
With the change of "sublime and lovely" to "sublime or
beautiful" in the later version (XIV, 166), Wordsworth's
reference to the categories of Burke becomes unmistakably
explicit. The sublime and the beautiful are clearly linked
to their emotional correlates, pain and joy.
But Wordsworth was more than Burke's disciple. It is ob-
vious, first of all, that he lent a moral dimension to the here-
tofore aesthetic categories of sublime and beautiful. In the
boat-stealing episode, the avenging mountain disciplines the
character of the boy; and later, the lovely sunrise turns the
thoughts of a college student from revelry to high poetic
purpose, from vacation to vocation. More important than this
moral dimension, however, is Wordsworth's comprehensive-
ness of vision, by which Burke's categories were virtually
absorbed. Where Burke had enumerated special attributes
of the sublime and the beautiful, regarding each as an ob-
jective quality separated by "an eternal distinction,"'7 Words-
worth told Jacob Fletcher that "our business is not so much
with objects as with the law under which they are contem-
plated" (Later Years I, 184).18 Under this law, differences in
the features of natural objects could be at once perceived and
resolved, recognized for their individuality yet embraced
within the context of a larger whole.
To understand this concept, we must remember that Words-
worth saw in nature not a dead uniformity but a vital cur-
rent of relation, generated in and through an infinite variety.
As a schoolboy, he could observe "affinities / In objects
where no brotherhood exists / To common minds" (A II,
403-405) ;19 yet he was equally capable of perceiving "mani-

also references to "beauteous forms or grand" (A VI, 573), which

becomes in the later text "forms sublime or fair" (I, 546); and to
"lovely sights and sounds sublime" (III, 94).
l Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 238.
1The same object, he wrote, "may be both beautiful and sublime, but it
cannot be felt to be such at the same moment" (Later Years, I, 184).
"For this reason, every season "left a register / Of permanent relations,
else unknown" (A II, 311-312).

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 J A M E S A. W . HE F F E R N A 1N 611

fold distinctions, difference / . . . where to the common

No difference is" (A II, 318-320). Even during his days at
Cambridge, when he felt in nature "the one Presence, and the
Life / Of the great whole" (A III, 130-131), Wordsworth
had an eye
Which in [his] strongest workings, evermore
Was looking for the shades of difference
As they lie hid in all exterior forms,
Near or remote, minute or vast. (A III, 156-160)

The capacity to distinguish, therefore, was for Wordsworth

an indispensable part of the capacity to relate; for it was
only in terms of multiplicity that the pervasive unity of nature
emerged.20 It was on this basis, in the Essay of 1815, that
he sharply criticized the poetry of James Macpherson. "In
nature," Wordsworth wrote, 'everything is distinct, yet noth-
ing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Mac-
pherson's work, it is exactly the reverse; everything (that
is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated,
deadened,-yet nothing distinct" (Poetical Works, II, 423-
434). Unity here becomes a monotonous uniformity, a toneless
aggregation of discrete objects which cannot be distinguished
precisely because they have no relation. This was exactly the
kind of uniformity which the young Wordsworth encountered
in London, where he found a perpetual flow of trivial objects
"melted and reduced / To one identity, by differences / That
have no law, no meaning and no end" (A VIII, 701-704). Yet
Wordsworth himself was not vanquished by this barbaric
confusion; young as he was, he had brought to the city a
"capaciousness and amplitude of mind" (A VIII, 758) which
enabled him to discern the logos in this Heraclitan flux:

By nature an unmanageable sight,

It is not wholly so to him who looks
In steadiness, who hath among least things
An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.
(A VII, 708-715)

"?See also the MS. Y draft (composed 1804) of Prelude A VIII, 15

172, where Wordsworth writes that the growing child gradually per-
ceives his own power mirrored in nature "With difference that makes
the likeness clear" (The Prelude, p. 576). This kind of distinction
should not be confused with that made by the "false secondary power"
of Lockean epistemologists, who-in Wordsworth's opinion-sought to
reduce the mind to the sum of its parts (Prelude A II, 221-231). The

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 612 WORDSWORTH O N THE SUBL I ME

This comprehensive sense of a unity realized in and through

the perception of multiplicity is fundamental to Wordsworth's
use of the sublime. He could respect the categories of Burke
for what they were, but the movement of his mind was always
toward balance, relation, a "sense of the whole." This is why
he was grateful for the tender influence of Dorothy at a time
when he

too exclusively esteem'd that love

And sought that beauty, which, as Milton sings,
Hath terror in it. (A XIII, 224-226)
For Wordsworth, nature was neither reducible nor divisible;
it could only be embraced in its complexity, seen at once as
multiple and unified. So we find it in his poetry. When he
describes his journey through the Simplon Pass, in the Alps,
he writes not only of "winds thwarting winds, bewildered
and forlorn," and of "rocks that mutter'd close upon our
ears," but also of "the clear blue sky" and the "unfetter'd
clouds, and region of the Heavens." Nature is both distinctly
calm and distinctly violent, yet in such a way that its contrast-
ing elements become-in the eyes of the poet-members of a
larger whole:

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light

Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.
(A VI, 560-572)

In this wedding of darkness and light, of what in Burke's

aesthetic were the sharply divided categories of sublime and
beautiful, Wordsworth achieves a sublimity that is peculiarly
his own: the sense of a unity which transcends multiplicity
without destroying it, which embraces the variety of nature
in a single, comprehensive vision.21

"false secondary power" is reductive, distinguishing in order to divide

and thereby destroying the whole. The poet's power is constructive,
distinguishing in order to relate and thereby comprehending the whole
as a whole-a living union of parts.
'This interpretation may appear to conflict with Wordsworth's state-
ment to Fletcher, cited above and reiterated a few months later (LY,
I, 194), that "'the sublime and the beautiful cannot be felt in the
same instant of time.'" It is evident, however, that Wordsworth is

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 JAMES A. W. HEFFERNAN 613

But as the Mount Snowdon episode in the concluding book

of The Prelude contains the fullest expression of nature's
transforming power, so also it exemplifies perfectly that
unity of natural forces which can best be termed an inter-
fusion-the flowing of one object into another, the blending
of elements in such a way that each, while retaining its dis-
tinctive character, becomes part of a sublime and pervasive
whole. Wordsworth's revisions of crucial passages in this
book reveal, in fact, that he was seeking persistently to define
the precise character of this interfusion, to etch more sharply
the operation of that unifying power in nature which emblem-
ized-to his eyes-the imaginative power of higher minds.
In the earliest account of the Snowdon spectacle, he locates
"the Soul, the Imagination of the whole" in a chasm created
by a parting of the mist which surrounds the mountain. Thus
the "homeless voice of waters," rising through that "dark,
deep thoroughfare" from an unseen sea, is made to dominate
the entire scene; and when considered afterwards in medita-
tion, the sight effectively illustrates the manner in which
Nature

Doth make one object so impress itself

Upon all others, and pervade them so
That even grossest minds must see and hear
And cannot chuse but feel. (A JIII, 62-65; 81-84)

In a manuscript revision of this passage, however, Words-

worth begins to suggest that the unifying influence of nature
is not a reductive force, suppressing all diversity beneath a
single object, but rather a fluid current of relation; for in
this draft, Nature endows the outward face of things

With interchangeable supremacy

And makes one object... diffuse itself
Among all others and pervade and fill
Their frames with . .. commanding virtue.22

Though the "one object" remains, the introduction of "inter-

not experiencing both the sublime and the beautiful but rather a
higher state of sublimity (in his own sense) which includes both. (For
valuable suggestions on this and other passages which reveal Words-
worth's use of the sublime, I am greatly indebted to Mr. Joseph Dono-
hue, my former colleague in the graduate division of the Department
of English at Princeton University.)
22MS. A' Variant of A XIII, 79-83 in The Prelude, p. 484 app. crit.

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 614 WORDSWORTH ON THE SUBLIME

changeable supremacy" and "diffuse" clearly indicates that

Wordsworth was groping toward the concept of interaction,
interpenetration, and mutual modification. He is beginning
to realize that what he saw and heard from the summit of
Snowdon was not the domination of many objects by one,
but rather the interplay of elements, the "interchangeable"
operation of several forces upon each other.
The realization becomes complete in the final version,
which significantly drops the reference to the all-dominating
"Imagination of the whole." In this draft, Wordsworth has
come to recognize that the "homeless voice of waters" owes
not a little of its grandeur to the chasm in the mist through
which it rises; that the mist exalts that voice by making its
source invisible; that the reverberations of a palpable, though
unseen sea upon the ear are heightened by the simultaneous
effect of a seen, though impalpable sea upon the eye. The
homeless, mysterious roar of waters thus acts in partnership
with the evanescent, ethereal sea of mist; interpenetrating
and interoperating, the forces of nature here create that un-
forgettable scene of which Wordsworth writes at last:

One function, above all...

Had nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
'Mid circumstances awful and sublime,
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed
With interchangeable supremacy,
That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive,
And cannot choose but feel. (XIV, 78-86)

As the "domination"2 exerted by Nature in the early text

(A XIII, 77) here becomes "mutual domination," so the
concept of "interchangeable supremacy," first introduced in
a manuscript revision, now displaces entirely the belief that
one object at Snowdon had impressed itself upon all others.
Collectively considered, the various versions of this crucial
passage reveal the increasing clarity with which Wordsworth
perceived the difference between reductive control and diffu-
sive interaction. What he experienced at Snowdon, in the
final reckoning, was a sublime sense of interfusion, a unity
which pervaded multiplicity without suppressing it. And in
this spectacle of interfusion, wherein natural objects were
mutually modified by virtue of their interchangeable suprem-

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 J A MES A. W . HE F F E R N A N 615

acy, Wordsworth found a fitting emblem of the unifying

power of the imagination.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

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