Wayne Booth is quite right [see excerpt above]: for all my interest in the methods of literary criticism, I say nothing about method in my two historical books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism. The reason for my silence on this issue is simple: these books were not written with any method in mind. Instead they were conceived, researched, worked out, put together, pulled apart, and put back together, not according to a theory of valid procedures in such under-takings, but by intuition. I relied, that is, on my sense of rightness and wrongness, of doubt and assurance, of deficiencies and superfluities, of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. (p. 176)

I confess that I was taken aback to discover, in Booth's just analysis, what a strange book Natural Supernaturalism is, and how extraordinary are the claims it presumes to make on its readers. It involves, explicitly or implicitly, a wide range of propositional truth-claims, of which only a fraction assert literal causation. Other propositions are assertions about an epoch. "Romanticism," and its special importance to us, and about the validity of the contention of some Romantic writers that they are "prophets" or "seers"; others assert not only facts, but values—the great values in the poems of certain Romantic authors, especially Wordsworth, and the high moral values that constitute the general Romantic "ethos"; still other implicit propositions even undertake to offer justifiable, if partial, answers to such questions as who we now are, where we are, where we came from, and what all this means. The basic mode of "proof" employed for this mixed bag of assertions is their incorporation into a story—more specifically, into a story made up of many stories, in which we can distinguish, within the overarching narrative, a number of middle-sized "novellas" and a great many "short stories"; and the book as a whole requires that the reader enter into its "narrative world" and be convinced that "all of this happened—this story is true," as a necessary condition for being persuaded of the soundness of the truth-claims and value-claims that the narrative implicates.

And what a very odd thing this story itself turns out to be! Its chief elements, or protagonists, are neither integral literary documents nor Lovejoy's unit ideas, but a fusion of ideas, structural shapes, and values. The connections asserted among these elements range from temporal and causal relations, through analogical relations (sometimes stated in terms that suggest a Platonic belief in timeless forms in which particulars "participate"), to a great diversity of other connectives which are left out of account in standard inventories of rational relationships. And as Booth points out, the temporal order is again and again "scrambled," for the diverse narratives move bewilderingly back and forth in time between the Romantic present, its ancestral past, and its portended future up to the time in which the book was written. In candor I must add to Booth's list another oddity, which some reviewers have in part noted but which Booth, perhaps out of kindness, chose to leave out of his account: the book as a whole has a structure that is deliberately iconic of the spiral form which many Romantic thinkers considered the necessary shape of all intellection, and in which many Romantic writers ordered their philosophies, their histories, and their fictional writings in verse and prose. That is, each of the component sections of Natural Supernaturalism constitutes a circle of exposition and narrative out of and back to a passage in Wordsworth's Prospectus to The Recluse; while the book as a whole ends where it began, with the opening passage of the Prospectus, but on a level of understanding which, the author presumes, will incorporate the results of the narrative exposition that has intervened.

About this strange performance Booth has raised a number of searching questions, which play variations on one central question: how to justify the claim that this complex story and its inherent propositional claims are not only convincing, but ought to be convincing, and on rational grounds, rather than merely by their rhetorical, emotional, and imaginative appeal? He also, and insistently, poses to the author a second-order question: if I believe this history of what happened in the Romantic era to be, by and large, true, how can I justify my pluralist claim that alternative and conflicting histories of the same era may also be true? (pp. 178-79)

One source of confusion about what I tried to do lies in my use of that pesky word "Romantic" (and "Romanticism"), which is one of those terms which historians can neither do with, nor make do without. I am not on this issue, as Booth suggests …, a "Platonist," but am instead, like R. S. Crane and A. O. Lovejoy, a "nominalist." That is, I don't believe that there exists an abstract entity, named "Romanticism," whose essential features are definable; or to put it in another way, that we can set the necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of the term, "Romanticism." Instead, I use the word as an expository convenience to specify, as I say on the opening pages, "some of the striking parallels, in authorial stance and persona, subject matter, ideas, values, imagery, forms of thought and imagination, and design of plot or structure" which are manifested in a great many important English and German writers, in a great variety of literary, philosophical, and historical forms, during those three or four decades after the outbreak of the French Revolution which, following common historical usage, I call the Romantic era…. (pp. 179-80)

But having stipulated my nominalist choice for the reference of the term "Romantic," I go on in the course of the book to refer to such things as "the Romantic Bildungsgeschichte," "the Romantic spiral pattern," "the Romantic ethos," without reiterating each time the warning that I mean the term "Romantic" to apply only to my stipulated set of writers and documents. As a result, some reviewers have been misled into claiming that I undertook a complete "typology of Romanticism," or a "grand synthesis of Romanticism," or a "definitive" study of Romanticism; and some have happily announced that I had once and for all demolished Lovejoy's claim that there is no single entity called Romanticism. But the same misunderstanding of what I set out to do opened to other reviewers the opportunity to assert that my conspectus of Romanticism is radically omissive, or else that it distorts the true nature of the Romantic achievement. In either case, the discussion has shifted from questions of the sort: "Did the distinctive complex of literary and cultural phenomena I chose to discuss really take place in the period conventionally called Romantic? Was it central enough to be worth such extended treatment? Is the analysis of this complex and its interrelations accurate and adequate?" to another type of question: "What is the proper, or correct, or central, or primary meaning of the term 'Romanticism'?" That is, "Romanticism" has shifted over from being a nominal convenience for the literary and cultural historian, who stipulates what he uses it to denote, to a status in which, like "justice," "democracy," and "a Christian life," it is what W. B. Gallie calls an "essentially contested concept." I don't know, short of the use of intolerable circumlocutions, how to avoid such slippage, to which all of us are extremely vulnerable; for if we go against the grain of usage and substitute a different term for "Romanticism," it will soon be reified in its turn, and so re-inaugurate the old debates about its proper meaning. (pp. 180-81)

[An] initial but only partial answer to Booth's question about historical pluralism is to say that diverse historians have the right to focus their attention on different areas of historical concern. I claim no more than that the interrelated topics which I have elected to treat, and the writings in which these topics are instantiated, were very important in their own time and continue to be of great interest to us today; that to tell this chosen story with any adequacy is quite enough for one book to try to do; and that if I have done my job properly, both the historical importance and continuing human interest of these selected topics are confirmed and expanded in the course of their historical exposition. (p. 181)

[Booth] fails to specify one recurrent tactic in Natural Supernaturalism: it consists not only of generalizations, explanations, and stories-within-a-story, but includes a number of what we may call "vignettes," in which the history pauses to render an account of a particular text in its subject matter, structure, organizing principle, and formal artistry. I introduced these explications in instances in which the importance and literary value of a document seemed to warrant consideration of its distinctive particularities, as confirming a historical generalization, while serving at the same time as a useful reminder of how diverse may be the particular embodiments of the general feature…. [Among such vignettes is the treatment of Wordsworth's Prelude.] My discussions of The Prelude add up to a length greater than many published critiques of that poem; and I judge that they constitute a fairly full treatment of The Prelude in its poetic integrity. What obscures this fact is that the treatment is not consecutive, but is scattered through various parts of the book. Not only, then, is the temporal order of my history "scrambled," but also a number of the poems it comments on are fragmented; so that it can be charged that the book frequently presents disjecta membra poetae. I can only reply that the complexity of the overall story I undertook to tell required a number of sub-stories, and I simply lacked the wit that would enable me to tell these stories without scrambling the temporal order of events and without dissevering for separate consideration various components or aspects of the major documents that these multiple stories were about. (pp. 185-86)

Booth makes it plain that what he found most novel in Natural Supernaturalism—and also most surprising, because it violated his critical presuppositions—is that it functions as what he calls "epideictic history, a history designed to show forth the greatness of the phenomena it explains."… What surprised him is that, although an investigation of the sources and influence of Romantic poems can discover only facts which are "extrinsic" to the poems, these discoveries somehow served in the book to "demonstrate" the high literary values in the poems themselves, and especially the high literary values in the poems of Wordsworth.

I must admit that when I decided to use Wordsworth's Prospectus as a recurrent point of departure in my exposition, I had no intention of making Wordsworth the hero of my story, nor of writing a kind of work that would prove "a poem's greatness by discovering what kind of historical account you can give of it—both of what went into it and of what came out."… I simply took Wordsworth's greatness as a poet for granted, and chose his Prospectus as a persistent reference mainly because it—together with The Prelude …—so strikingly and tersely embodied the Romantic motives and concepts and manner of proceeding that I wanted to deal with. My conspectus of Wordsworth's contemporaries was designed less to prove how "representative" Wordsworth was than to show the many important features which were shared by a great diversity of major Romantic writings. And I chose an exegesis that was historical (that is, retrospective and prospective as well as conspective) because I believed that the only way to understand the particulars of my humanistic investigation—the only way fully to realize what they are—involves knowing where they came from, what changes were made in them, and what those changes portended for what they were to become. I suppose that what Booth has in mind when he says of the resulting book that it "in a sense provides a conspectus on the whole of Western civilization" … is not only that it ranges in time from the Bible to Allen Ginsberg, but also that the Romantic motives it elucidates turn out to be altered versions of the persistent forms of imagination by which our great religious visionaries and philosophers had tried to make sense of themselves, their past and anticipated future, and their place in the world, and in which they had found a sanction for their values and moral norms. As the most clear-sighted of the Romantic writers saw, these forms of imagination, or "myths," constitute the fabric of Western civilization, and they believed that, despite their own drastically altered circumstances, these myths must not be rejected, but reconstructed on new conceptual foundations, if that cultural fabric was to endure.

Even though I set out to deepen understanding rather than to demonstrate literary values, I nonetheless found as I went along, just as Booth did, that the values of certain Romantic poems were enhanced as my awareness of the complex tradition that they embodied continued to grow. That an increase in knowledge alters our experience of poetic values is a matter of common experience; it seems mysterious to us only because we are taken in by our own critical metaphors. It is useful, for some analytic purposes, to distinguish extrinsic from intrinsic, external from internal criticism, and to regard historical knowledge as something external to a poem. But the inside of a poem is not like the inside of a house where, except for a zone of dubiety at the threshold, the boundary between what is inside and what is outside is sharp and stable. The full significance of a poem depends on what we bring to our interpretation of its determinable meanings, and as our knowledge of the importance of a tradition enlarges, so does the significance of a poem which represents that tradition. We don't think first of the poem and then of the tradition outside the poem. Instead, we experience its traditionality as a dimension of the poem's meaning, as a resonance within the poem itself. And when we recognize in a poem a powerful but altered restatement of a great theme in our Western culture, uttered with an art and in a voice that endures comparison with the greatest art and voices of its ancestral past, that attribute becomes a measure of the poem's greatness. If our aesthetic theory disqualifies such a measure as extrinsic, hence irrelevant to poetic value, our experience in reading the poem discredits the theory and not the value. This is apparently what T. S. Eliot had in mind when he said that whether something is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards, but its greatness as literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards.

We come finally to my discussion of "the Romantic ethos" and of "the Romantic positives."… I decided to end Natural Supernaturalism by identifying, in my chosen authors, those Romantic positives which deliberately reaffirmed the elementary values of the Western past, and to present these values in a way directly addressed to our own age of anxiety and of incipient despair of our inherited civilization. I was well aware that this section set itself against the prevailing way of reading the Romantics, and—moved perhaps by a touch of perversity—opened it by listing their chief positives as baldly and challengingly as possible: "life, love, liberty, hope, and joy."… After this provocative beginning, however, I tried to show, by extensive analysis and quotation, that these traditional positives were radically reinterpreted, interrelated, and managed with great subtlety of discrimination; and that in their literary contexts, they are powerfully and convincingly stated. I tried also to show that the right to make these affirmations was fairly earned, by authors profoundly aware of the negative conclusions that seemed pressed upon them by human history and their own experience; and that the reason for their insistence is that they saw their era as we see our own—as a crisis of civilization and consciousness. (pp. 190-92)

My claim was that, in the face of life's clamorous counter-evidence, the Romantic writers, in those works in which they assumed the traditional persona of the poet-prophet—to put it in another way, in which they undertook to speak with an authoritative public voice—deliberately adopted their affirmative stance…. I was not greatly surprised, though a bit chagrined nonetheless, to find that, despite all the skill I could muster to communicate the nuance and shadow in the great passages of Romantic affirmation, [the section of Natural Supernaturalism in which I quote Shelley's secular version of the traditional theodicy] was described by some critics as a product of the author's own optimism, which found a matching optimism in the Romantic poets only by selecting the evidence and ignoring the dark undertones in the passages selected.

The failure to achieve a general meeting of minds on this issue leads me to a final observation on method: a cultural history requires from the historian something no less important than a sound method of demonstration, and that is, an effort of the sympathetic imagination. In a famous statement Mill said that Bentham looked at ancient or received opinions from the view-point of his own convictions and asked "Is it true?" Coleridge on the other hand asked "What is the meaning of it?" and to answer this question, he "looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it was at first suggested, and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered continually credible." This way of looking at the past is a Romantic discovery, and it seems to me to be a necessary condition for any full understanding of the past. In Natural Supernaturalism I tried, by an effort of imagination, to understand a great Romantic enterprise by looking at it from within. In the process of coming to understand this segment of our past I also discovered, and tried at the end to communicate the discovery, that to know who and what and where we were then helps us to understand who and what and where we are now. I tried in addition to communicate my sense that this Romantic past is a usable past, in that it presents a stance toward ourselves and the world which affirms human dignity and the grounds for a qualified hope, and thus shows us what was possible for men who were no less sagacious and unillusioned than we are now.

Wayne Booth says that he was convinced and moved by what I found moving and convincing in the history I tried to tell. But Booth also says, and I entirely agree, that his response of being persuaded "is an experience that many sincere and competent readers will for various reasons not discover."… A humanistic demonstration, unlike a scientific demonstration, is rarely such as to enforce the consent of all qualified observers. For it to carry the reader through its exposition to its conclusions requires some grounds for imaginative consent, some comparative ordering of values, some readiness of emotional response to the matters shown forth, which the reader must share with the author even before he begins to read; and these common grounds are no doubt in part temperamental, hence variable from reader to reader. If this assertion constitutes relativism, then we simply have to live with the relativism it asserts, for it is an aspect of the human predicament which the languages and complex strategies of proof in humanistic inquiries are designed to cope with, but can never entirely overcome. (pp. 193-94)