And
similarly in the natural religion of Wordsworth we may discern the
modified outcome of other human impulses hardly less universal--of
those instincts which led our forefathers to people earth and air
with deities, or to vivify the whole universe with a single soul. In
this view the achievement of Wordsworth was of a kind which most of
the moral leaders of the race have in some way or other performed.
It was that he turned a theology back again into a religion: that he
revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of
reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into
speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of
beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,--
of rites which had become unmeaning,--he substituted an admiration
for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a
sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable worship. Such
worship, I repeat, is not what we commonly imply either by paganism
or by pantheism. For in pagan countries, though the gods may have
originally represented natural forces, yet the conception of them
soon becomes anthropomorphic, and they are reverenced as
transcendent _men_; and, on the other hand, pantheism is generally
characterized by an indifference to things in the concrete, to
Nature in detail; so that the Whole, or Universe, with which the
Stoics (for instance) sought to be in harmony, was approached not by
contemplating external objects, but rather by ignoring them.
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