SOURCE: “Out of the Veil of Ignorance: Agency and the Mirror of Disillusionment,” in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 1-21.

[In the following essay, Dunn examines Alastor as “a study in moral agency.”]

Following Shelley's lead in his preface to the poem, I propose to read Alastor as a study in moral agency. This may sound surprising since the poem is often criticized for its solipsism or, worse, for displaying the symptoms of pathological narcissism. However, the apparent pathology of Alastor's narrator and of the visionary poet he describes stems from a moral dilemma which Shelley inherits from moral philosophers like his mentor Godwin and from the poetry of Wordsworth. As the poem illustrates, the dilemma is precipitated by the way in which both empiricist and rationalist systems of morality fail to mediate the particularity of individual desire, by their inability to universalize the subject and thus to fulfill the Enlightenment dream which gave them birth. Alastor documents this failure. It also suggests that for the self-conscious subject the resulting disillusionment is a constitutive and not an accidental feature of moral agency. While Shelley's preface holds open the possibility that some individuals may find moral community through a natural (and implicitly unreflective) sympathy, the real choice seems to be between disillusionment and moral death. To be “deluded by … generous error,” to be “duped by … illustrious superstition,” is the price of moral life in Shelley's world of philosophical skepticism.¹ For the Poet Visionary who is the subject of the poem, this disappointment is intolerable, but for the poet of the preface, it becomes the pre-condition of moral action. Such disillusionment is the double awareness that neither the foundations nor the goals of moral agency can be deduced naturally according to the Enlightenment plan. Rather, morality entails an act of self-reflection in which the self and the self reflected can never match, can never be completely subsumed in a moral universe. Before I proceed to my reading of Alastor, I will more fully describe the dilemma to which the poem responds.

The secularization of moral theory during the Enlightenment redefines the moral mission of poetry. Poets, like moral philosophers, are charged with the responsibility of demonstrating that moral principles may be deduced “naturally” from the essential principles of human psyche and society, whether these be empirically or rationally given. Wordsworth, for instance, promises a poetry which will reveal “the primary laws of our nature”² and thus show how these laws form even the most common of human actions. From these laws, specifically from the “grand elementary principle of pleasure,” he deduces the moral sympathy which binds the “vast empire of human society.”³ By tracing the primary principle of human behavior in everyday events, he provides his readers with a mirror of mutual self-recognition in which they can recognize a moral community as the natural extension of their private intellect and interest. The poet then must provide Enlightenment moral theory with its praxis, staging in concrete terms the scene of mutual recognition which the philosophers treat more abstractly, the scene in which the apparent chaos of individual desires is revealed to be in harmony with the moral universal. “We have,” Shelley says, “more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice.” We need poetry, he insists, so that we can “imagine that which we know” and “act that which we imagine.”⁴

For the poets of British Romanticism, of course, the primary model for imagining moral community is the nascent utilitarianism of Hartley and Godwin in which the medium of reflection, the substance of human identity, is sensation itself as it is ordered by self-refining differentials of pleasure and pain. These utilitarian systems, derived from the empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, and (for Godwin) Hume, propose a moral bond forged from empirical necessity. They describe moral progress as a perpetually expanding sphere of mutual identification in which individuals recognize that their pleasures are inseparable from the pleasures of others in the community, since all are mutually dependent on a shared network of causes and effects.

For both Hartley and Godwin morality is a progressively inclusive process of universalization. Improvements in the quality of happiness necessarily reflect an increase in the scope and quantity of perceptual experience. Thus, moral pleasure surpasses merely selfish individual pleasures because it is more capacious; it includes the happiness of others. Godwin and Hartley deny that there can be any essential conflict between reason and sensuality since sensuality is a combination of impressions, and wisdom or reason is merely a more inclusive combination of these same sensations as they are stored in memory and combined by the “faculty of association.”⁵ Hartley formalizes this version of moral progress in a series of seven progressive stages. Human consciousness begins with simple sensations which combine to produce imagination. Sensation and imagination combine to produce self-interest, and this process of combination into increasingly complex faculties continues like a mathematical progression until theopathy and moral sense complete the development of the individual. Because moral sense contains all the combinations of pleasure and pain sensation, it is both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to any purely sensual interest in its particularity:

This Moral Sense therefore carries its own Authority with it, inasmuch as it is the Sum total of all the rest, and the ultimate Result from them; and employs the Force and Authority of the whole Nature of Man against any particular Part of it, that rebels against the Determinations and Commands of the Conscience or moral Judgment.⁶

Both philosophers emphasize that morality as the mental sum of experience adds nothing to the particular impressions of which it is comprised. In order to argue for the unbroken continuity between sensation and thought, they deny reflection or ratiocination any autonomous power. Against Locke, Hartley asserts that “the most complex Ideas arise from Sensation … Reflection is not a distinct Source.”⁷ This means that mental events are merely extensions of physical events and governed by the same laws. Understanding and assent follow naturally and necessarily from sensation; experiencing the truth and believing the truth are in fact indistinguishable parts of the same process.⁸ It is impossible then, according to the deterministic logic both philosophers employ, that those who are continually exposed to truth (and this includes everybody since truth is empirical reality itself) should not in time understand and believe it. It is likewise impossible that the truth, once believed, should not determine their conduct.

Such a doctrine assures necessary moral progress, what Hartley calls the “final Happiness of all Mankind,”⁹ but it also reduces all human agency to the passivity of perception. Godwin makes this clear in his treatment of both sensual and moral desire. The infant, he argues rather sophistically, can desire nothing without knowing or understanding what it is he or she desires. Desire therefore proceeds from perception, and the infant's apparent self-love is “only the faculty of perception under another name.”¹⁰ Similarly, Godwin argues that the desire for virtue must proceed from the understanding (which after all is only a totality of sensation) “that desire only can be eminently virtuous, which flows from a distinct perception of the value, and consequently of the nature, of the thing desired.”¹¹ Virtue requires a “grand view” of the causes of happiness, a “collective idea of the human species.”¹² Vice is no more than a mistake resulting from the particularity of a narrow viewpoint. It is inevitably corrected as the natural consequence of observation, which rescues it from particularity to moral universality.

In this deterministic view of morality's inevitable progress, the individual and the community are not only inseparable but finally indistinguishable. All isolated particularity including that of agency must be subsumed in an inclusive totality. The supreme pleasure for both Hartley and Godwin is the obliteration of any particular identity. Godwin describes it as an identification with general happiness, with the happiness of others, which is so complete that it prompts the individual to forget that he or she has interests which are merely personal: “No man so truly promotes his own interest, as he that forgets it.”¹³ With more flamboyant phrasing, Hartley describes the goal of morality as “Self-annihilation.”¹⁴ In perfect self-annihilation all isolated particularity is banished and the individual thinks the totality of experience (which Hartley identifies as God). Moral progress, he argues, is “the Method of destroying Self, by perpetually substituting a less and purer Self-interest for a larger and grosser.” This method, he observes, corresponds to mathematical methods of obtaining quantities “by leaving a less and less Error sine limite.”¹⁵

The paradox of such moral self-annihilation is precisely the unbridgeable distance between the imagined totality “sine limite” of the moral universal and the finitude of particular experience. This unbridgeable distance is the gap between the theorist as observer, as the embodiment of the totality he describes, and the causal web of human connections which he observes. The observer's totalizing perspective is immune from the moment of desire and decision, since it situates such moments in the retrospective totality of a third-person narrative. The utilitarian agent must view his or her own actions from an external position which merely denies the dilemma of choice. This explains the reverence which Hartley and Godwin (and Wordsworth) show for necessity and clarifies the apparent inconsistency of their notions of free will. Both philosophers admit free will and intention as localized, subjective phenomena such as are manifest in the voluntary movement of the body, but both deny that such subjective phenomena have any bearing on virtue.¹⁶ Virtue, as Godwin says, must be considered as a tendency to ultimate ends rather than as “modifying any particular beings.”¹⁷ Since truth is in essence material necessity, observation allows the agent to escape the vicissitudes of particular personality and to assume the identity of fate. The individual can see her self reflected in this fateful totality, however, only by maintaining the complete transparency of observation. If self-annihilation should be revealed to be less than complete, if it is tainted by the partial or particular, in short if it reflects the particularity of an individual choice or desire, then the authority of the moral observer's position is compromised. As will become clear in the case of Wordsworth, the observer sympathizes with the specificity of human suffering from the distance of a universal understanding.¹⁸ It is impossible that he should experience that sorrow in its particularity by making it his own.

For the British Romantics, of course, the primary difficulty with the utilitarian model of moral self-reflection is its inability to account for the experience of moral or creative freedom or, more specifically, its failure to account for the self-conscious, self-reflective im-mediacy that seems to characterize both moral and creative acts. In this area, utilitarianism's failure is idealism's success. In opposition to the empiricist scheme of integrative contiguity, idealist morality dramatizes the inevitability of a break between sensible and supersensible interest. The retrospective and inclusive order of utilitarianism is replaced by an immediate self-consciousness which asserts its independence from all contingent (causal) particularity. Thus, the integrity of the moral agent in the idealist scheme is based on the exclusion of the very particulars which the utilitarian transcends by inclusion. This expulsion of the particular sensual or self-interested self initiates moral agency by splitting the subject or agent. However, the split engendered by this initial act of self-opposition is recompensed by a free self-affirmation which is immanent in the will and independent of historical determination.

This economy of limitation and freedom is illustrated in Kant's ethics wherein duty is first experienced as humiliation and then as (self) affirmation. “The moral law,” Kant writes, “inevitably humbles every man when he compares the sensuous propensity of his nature with the law.”¹⁹ Such humiliation, however, makes it possible for the agent to reject the sensuality of his nature and by conforming his will to the imperatives of duty to identify his supersensible self with the absolute self-consistency of law and reason. Each particular act of duty reflects the universal principles of the categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxim of your action by your will were to become a Universal Law of Nature.”²⁰ Here the act of imitation which lies at the heart of Kantian morality is made explicit. In contrast to the essentially narrative pattern of empiricist morality, idealist morality is metaphoric. The agent is to act as if each individual act had the self-determining force of a universal law. Thus Kantian morality recovers free will and intention in a single stroke. It is through “good will” alone that the individual reflects universal good. Kant insists that “Good will is good not because of what it causes or accomplishes.”²¹ It must be both its own cause and effect, devoid of any ulterior motive of interest, and without contingent goals. In this complete isolation from the causal conntinuum, the agent can be what Fichte calls both “determinate and determinant.”²² Rather than self-annihilation, idealist agency produces a heightened sense of self, what Kant calls “personality, i.e., the freedom and independence from the mechanism of nature regarded as a capacity of a being which is subject to special laws.”²³ Conformity to this special moral law reflects the “sublimity of our own supersensuous existence,” for in such conformity the individual most perfectly approximates the pure self-determination of a divine being.²⁴

For Kant, however, the resemblance between human and divine virtue must remain only approximate. For any perfect being, Kant claims, will and law are in natural, irrefragable agreement so that the principles of law exist not as duty but as holiness, as the essence of divinity itself.²⁵ For “a finite rational being,” however, moral law must remain an objective and extrinsic duty, an ideal like the categorical imperative.²⁶ It can never be natural; it can never be, as Kant says, identical with “our very nature.”²⁷ Human virtue must be distinguished from divine holiness as possibility is distinguished from essence. The human attempt to naturalize or to internalize the categorical imperative results in what he calls the “self-conceit” of “fanaticism,” a usurpation of divine prerogative.²⁸ In fanaticism the agent attempts to turn every act into an act of self-affirmation and thus to eliminate the tension between sensible and supersensible identity. The fanatic would turn the “as if” of the categorical imperative into a literal “is” and deny the distance or difference between the individual and the universal. For Kant, fanaticism is especially pernicious because it stems from an overweening pride which hypocritically masks selfish inclination as universal law. However, Kant's vehement opposition to fanaticism reveals idealism's vulnerability to narcissistic collapse. That is, the fanatic's deluded notion that he lives the absolute freedom of universal law as part of his very nature raises the question of whether any attempt to dignify self-reflexivity as a supersensible freedom might be similarly deluded. The stability of the idealist scheme depends on its ability to distinguish the finite act from the yet unimaginable and unrealized ideal of a pure reason. If the ideal of reason is discredited, then the self-reflexive act that was supposed to imitate divine self-determination turns out to be merely a narcissistic self-reflection.

Because the post-Kantian idealists attempt to imagine the supersensible freedom which Kant insisted was unimaginable, they have a more difficult time distinguishing the finite from the infinite act of self-reflection, and their systems are thus more vulnerable to narcissistic collapse. Fichte, for instance, deduces the properties of the infinite I, its absolute self-reflection (“I am absolutely, because I am”), from the aspirations of the finite I.²⁹ In the course of this deduction in The Science of Knowledge, it is frequently difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish finite and infinite self-reflection. Despite Fichte's protest that the two are distinct and that he does not intend to transcendentalize the finite subject, his system was (and is) frequently assailed as solipsistic individualism. Starting with the tautology of Cartesian self-consciousness which he formulates A = A,³⁰ he attempts to deduce difference, both the difference of the finite subject from itself in the process of self-objectification and the difference between the finite and infinite self-reflection. This self-produced difference, however, is always suspect as the specular medium of merely narcissistic contemplation. It is understandable, therefore, that other idealist philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel (and the later Fichte) should take greater care to ground the dialectic of self-discovery in such external media as nature, history, and, of course, a refurbished dialectical Christianity in which God himself becomes the instrument of progressive human self-revelation. Idealism arrives in England with a distinct theological emphasis. It is Christianity that allows the Coleridge of the Biographia to distinguish so confidently the finite “I am” from the infinite “I AM.”³¹

In more practical terms, the link between members of a community in idealist morality is grounded in the same act of imaginative anticipation that allows the individual to see finite duty as a reflection of an infinite or pure self-determination. That is, in the idealist version of community each individual must respect others as the embodiment of a rational freedom with the result, according to Kant, that a human be treated as “an end in itself,” never “merely as a means.”³² Unlike the mutual identification in utilitarianism which is based on shared interest or happiness, the bond here is mutuality generated by the shared potential of a disinterested freedom. The agent must imagine other people's possible self-sufficiency rather than observe the needs which bind them to the world of causality. Because another person's freedom is unknowable, it must be an imaginative projection of the agent's own aspirations for self-determination, just as community must be an imaginative projection of a shared immunity from identity which is not the product of self-determination. This creates the same gap in social experience that the individual experiences in self-reflection. That is, the appearance of a mechanistic determinism must be opposed to the possibility of free self-determination. Individuals often appear needy, helpless, or self-interested, but they must be imagined as willing themselves freely. As Kant puts it, (individual) “Man is certainly unholy enough,” but “humanity in his person” (as shared freedom) “must be holy.”³³

The complementary weaknesses of the utilitarian and idealist moral systems constitute the dilemma which Shelley inherits from Godwin and the earlier Romantics. The utilitarian perspective entails the continual deferral of desire to the inclusive narrative totality represented by a transparent observer. From this perspective all human desire appears merely particular, fragmentary, and pathetic. Accordingly, the morality of shared happiness turns out to be the morality of pathos, for satiety and satisfaction are invisible in such a system. Godwin is disgusted by material excess and indifferent to successful subsistence.³⁴ His concern is with the needs of the less fortunate, with their material needs, but ultimately with their need for an enlightened (universal) perspective. However worthy an endeavor this is, as the phrasing implies, it necessarily involves a condescending sympathy; the transparency of the observer assures a covert superiority. In his position of superiority he is likely to be tempted into a hypocritical denial of his own interests and a Benthamite blindness to the stubborn particularity and complexity of other people's desires.

Unlike utilitarianism whose omniscient narrator renders all human history in the past tense of causal necessity, idealism proposes a moment of freedom which reflects a necessarily opaque future, a future yet to be imagined or realized. This opacity allows the agent to value the moment of free self-determination as anticipation of an indeterminate greatness, as the possibility of a complete freedom. The danger, of course, is that the future onto which self-consciousness projects itself may be an illusion, that even with systems of monstrous alterity such as Hegel's history, self-determination may be only empty self-reflection, a formal unity imposed on an impassive world. The same danger obtains in social relationships where the freedom of others is necessarily an imaginative projection, charged with an unknown quantity of personal and perhaps narcissistic desire.

By now it should be clear to those who know the poem that the utilitarian and idealist alternatives described above reflect the predicaments of Alastor's two poets, the predicaments of the Narrator and the Visionary respectively.³⁵ As Wasserman points out in the most complete and perceptive reading of the poem, although these two poets are in many ways reflections of one another, they represent distinct metaphysical perspectives.³⁶ The Narrator, Shelley's critical redaction of the Wordsworthian poet, seeks inspiration through a wise passiveness, confident of the spiritual value immanent in the natural world. In his invocation the Narrator describes himself as a “long-forgotten lyre” (l. 42) awaiting the winds of natural inspiration, a child awaiting the ministrations of the “great Mother” (l. 2).³⁷ Like many of Wordsworth's narrators, the Narrator in Alastor tells the tale of a good soul who is destroyed by adhering to a hopelessly single-minded desire, a desire with which he sympathizes from his broader perspective, but a desire which nonetheless is not his own. Shelley's treatment of the Alastor Narrator echoes many of his other criticisms of Wordsworth such as those in “Peter Bell the Third” where Wordsworth/Peter is described as trapped within a single inclusive perspective which abolishes all difference, trapped in an egotism which the poet mistakes for totality:

All things that Peter saw and felt
          Had a peculiar aspect to him;
And when they came within the belt
Of his own nature, seemed to melt,
          Like cloud to cloud, into him.

(ll. 273-77)³⁸

His mind is both “circumference and centre,” an all-absorbing consciousness from which “Nothing went ever out,” but “Something did ever enter,” a mind forever unable to “Fancy another situation / … Than that wherein he stood” (ll. 294 and following).

The Visionary, by contrast, represents Shelley's own fascination with a world of ideal difference, a world which harbors love's unobtainable goal, that ideal self commemorated in the often-quoted passage from “On Love”:

We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed; a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap.³⁹

Such self-contemplation courts disappointment in the form of narcissistic collapse, leaving the visionary poet as the “beautiful and ineffectual angel” of Matthew Arnold's caricature, “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”⁴⁰

As Wasserman describes Alastor, the parallel quests of Narrator and Visionary culminate in a mutual disappointment which attests to Shelley's skepticism about the possibility of ever knowing ultimate truth. The Narrator discovers the dead emptiness of the natural world and is thus condemned to live a life in death, bound to nature's meaningless cycles. The Visionary's disillusionment is more dramatic. Unwilling to tolerate a world which will not sustain or reflect his vision, “he descends to an untimely grave” (p. 959). Passivity painfully endures; desire consumes itself. Although neither poet triumphs, the Visionary through his passion and death purchases an identity which the faceless Narrator must remain without. In his epigraph Shelley seems to vindicate the Visionary's self-destructive passion against the Narrator's Wordsworthian survival:

“The good die first,
And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust,
Burn to the socket!”

(p. 960)

Wasserman describes Shelley as “ambivalently setting his Wordsworthian Narrator against the pure Visionary”⁴¹ to demonstrate the impossibility of certain knowledge, but I will argue that the differences between Narrator and Visionary have as much to do with conflicting versions of moral self-representation as they do with opposing notions of metaphysical truth. Beyond the issues of the metaphysical debate, Alastor explores the way in which desire informs observation, both self-observation and the observation of others. It is a poem built of reflections, a poem in which the poet is continually multiplied. From the poet maiden to the poet Visionary who imagines her, to the poet Narrator who tells her story, to the poet of the preface who interprets it, all are fascinated by their likenesses and the limitations of their likenesses.

Furthermore, while I agree with Wasserman that the poem is a critique of both Wordsworthian empiricism and visionary idealism, I think that the solitude, the self-centered seclusion which Alastor punishes, is linked most conspicuously with Wordsworthian empiricism and that the Visionary's tragedy is due in large part to the fact that he will not relinquish the Wordsworthian perspective which he shares with the Narrator. The seclusion which the vision of human love avenges and which Shelley by implication criticizes is based on the assumption that there is a superhuman basis of value which obviates the need for actual human community and which frees the enlightened individual from the contingencies of merely human relationships. Both the supersensible reason of idealism and the beneficent nature of empiricism claim to be such a foundation for value and so both are vulnerable to Shelley's attack. It is the empiricist claim, the appeal to natural authority, which receives the closest scrutiny in this poem, however, since the claims of idealism are explored and one might say subsumed within a Wordsworthian vision of nature.

As Shelley's epigraph hints, the specific target of Alastor's polemic seems to be “The Wanderer,” the first book of Wordsworth's Excursion. Shelley evidently read “The Wanderer” shortly before composing Alastor, and parallels between the two poems indicate that Shelley is imitating Wordsworth in order to criticize him.⁴² The epigraph points to the most obvious parallel: both Margaret and the Visionary are “the good” who die young, and both are illustrations of the Wordsworthian pathos to which I have already alluded. Margaret is condemned to waste herself in a futile vigil, waiting for her husband to return. She is the victim of “one torturing hope” which is “fast rooted at her heart” (ll. 913-14). As with many of Wordsworth's other rustics (Michael, for example), her abject fixation on a single object of desire prevents her from achieving the more capacious perspective of the Wordsworthian narrator, of the Wanderer who tells her story, and she thus illustrates the empiricist view of the idealist delusion. Her single-minded hope dooms her to death by disappointment, while the Wanderer's inclusive sympathy allows him to live on, aware that particular sorrow conduces to universal good. Margaret's passion and pathos find their counterpart in the Visionary's all-consuming desire and his subsequent demise. He too is focused on a particular love object which prevents him from finding solace in the empiricist's identification with the totality of nature. The persistent particularity of his passion contrasts with the (Alastor) Narrator's yearning for a self-annihilating identification with nature in the same way that the fierce singularity of Margaret's desire contrasts with the diffuse and inclusive sympathies of the Wanderer.

Wasserman observes that the similarities between the Visionary and Margaret, the Narrator and the Wanderer, establish a polemical relationship between the two poems. According to him, Alastor voices Shelley's conviction that Wordsworth had “not set his sights high enough,” that he had “defined man's spirit too mundanely, too humanly.” This means, Wasserman continues, that Shelley is objecting to Margaret's earthbound love as a model of virtue, that Alastor is arguing “the truly good who are soonest taken out of life are not those with unwavering and devoted hope for, and faith in, an absent human love, but those who aspire to a vision that is absent because it can have no existence on earth.”⁴³ This interpretation assumes that the resemblance between Margaret and the Visionary is purely critical and that the Visionary is superior to Margaret because he rejects actual human love in favor of a supersensuous ideal. I think that the similarities between Margaret and the Visionary imply quite the opposite. Alastor describes the revenge of the “spirit of sweet human love” (l. 203) against the seclusion of a Wordsworthian solitary. Human love, Shelley is arguing, inevitably includes an idealized self-reflective specificity. He is defending Margaret's fixation on the human particular against the empiricist detachment of the poets who tell her story. The Visionary experiences human love as a curse, a punishment, because he, like the Narrator and Wordsworth's Wanderer, is committed to the moral delusion that solitary nature is superior to human society. The Visionary ends his life like Margaret, but he begins his life in the bosom of nature like the Wanderer. In this convergence of identities, the convergence of lover and solitary, Shelley's critical message is made clear.

That the Wanderer is the primary model for Shelley's Visionary is confirmed by a second set of parallels between Alastor and “The Wanderer,” parallels which Wasserman seems to overlook. Each poem presents not two but three main characters. “The Wanderer” is actually narrated by a character whom Wordsworth identifies as the “Author,” and it is this Author who corresponds most closely to Shelley's Narrator. Author, Wanderer, and Margaret occupy the same respective places in the structure of Wordsworth's narrative as Narrator, Visionary, and dream maiden occupy in the dramatic structure of Shelley's poem. Both Author and Narrator begin their tales with accounts of their poet-subjects' Wordsworthian childhoods, and the Narrator's account seems to echo the Author's. From these accounts we learn that both the Wanderer and the Visionary are natural poets whose purity of heart has made them especially receptive to natural wisdom. According to the empiricist model, in each case this wisdom is imparted through the immediacy of sensation without the necessity of human intervention. Chaste, aloof, and obedient to higher impulses, both Wanderer and Visionary leave their families to begin their solitary wandering. In describing the Visionary's travels, Shelley frequently uses the verb “wander” perhaps in allusion to the Visionary's Wordsworthian counterpart. In both poems the childhood history establishes a natural brotherhood between the poet narrator and his poet subject. All four characters receive their poetic inspiration from nature and have quit human society to pursue their callings. The bond of brotherhood they share is distinctly different from either the Wanderer's pity for Margaret or the Visionary's passion for the dream maiden. Both Wanderer and Visionary act as alter egos for the poets who narrate their stories; they mediate (although unsuccessfully in the case of the Visionary) between the worlds of masculine totality and feminine particularity.

The Wanderer, who tells Margaret's story to the Author, takes pains to construct a moral justification for such a lugubrious tale. He warns his listener that the tale should not turn their attention from “natural wisdom” (l. 601) or make them insensitive to the “natural comfort” (l. 602) which surrounds them.⁴⁴ It would be “wantonness,” he admits, if they were to “hold vain dalliance with the misery / Even of the dead”; they would be culpable if they drew from Margaret's unhappiness only “A momentary pleasure, never marked / By reason, barren of all future good” (ll. 626-31). His motive, he protests, is not to satisfy the voyeurism of idle curiosity or to indulge a merely personal sorrow but to awaken the “power to virtue friendly” which is found in “mournful thought” (ll. 633-34). This power to virtue is the antithesis of “vain dalliance” or “momentary pleasure.” Margaret's tale has this power because it is marked by reason and reveals a universal truth, not a momentary or particular passion. The tale is so common, so ubiquitous, the Wanderer argues, that it hardly has the particularity of a “bodily form”:

… 'Tis a common tale,
An ordinary sorrow of man's life,
A tale of silent suffering, hardly clothed
In bodily form. …

(ll. 636-39)

When the story concludes and the Author grieves, tracing the “secret spirit of humanity” which somehow survives amid the “calm oblivious tendencies / Of nature,” the Wanderer assures him that he has sorrowed enough since the “purposes of wisdom ask no more” (ll. 927-29, 933). He admonishes the Author to remember his Christian faith, and they continue their journey “in happiness” (l. 956).

The Narrator in Alastor, however, cannot continue in happiness when his tale is done. Appalled by death (the Visionary's and his own), he laments that “God, / Profuse of poisons” will not “concede the chalice” that gave the Wandering Jew eternal life (ll. 675-76). Overwhelmed by the “oblivious tendencies / Of nature,” he announces that the world which once seemed a “Great Parent” (l. 45) is now revealed to be a vast indifference. The Narrator despairs because he sees the Visionary's story not as a common tale or a moral parable but as a reflection of himself, his aspirations, his destiny. He cannot regain the detachment of the empiricist perspective because he is personally implicated in the Visionary's demise. In Alastor, Shelley is determined to make a Wordsworthian narrator see himself in the pathos and particularity of the common life whose story he tells.

The tale of the Visionary begins as an account of Wordsworthian poetic election but ends as a story of Wordsworthian pathos. It is as if the poet of the early Prelude should grow up to be not Wordsworth but Margaret. Poetic election is confirmed for Wordsworth by the retrospective discovery of the inherent unity of the poet's apparently chaotic experience. Each episode of the Prelude, for instance, is given coherence and value as it is shown to contribute to the inclusive totality of the poet's vision. The locus of self or identity is continually displaced from the fragmentary moment to the historical whole. The lack of the poet's inclusive perspective condemns rustics like Margaret and Michael to their obsessions. These obsessions feed not on a coherent past but on an illusory future. For those trapped in single-minded desires, this future brings death rather than satisfaction, a death as private and particular as their hope and frustration. Alastor subverts the Wordsworthian paradigm by locating poetic identity in hope rather than recollection, in the exclusive totality of an ideal image rather than the inclusive totality of a narrative which redeems history. As a reflection of poetry and the poet, the dream maiden is radically particular, a sexually charged encounter in an instant of time. She is accessible not through recollection but through hope; if Margaret's hope of human love is futile, Shelley seems to be saying, then the hope of poetry (which in Alastor is the same hope) can be no less so.

The Narrator shares the Visionary's despair not just because they resemble one another but because this resemblance is informed by the Narrator's desire. Unlike Wordsworth's Author, his rapport with nature is less than complete. Although he has lived in brotherhood with the elements, imbued with Wordsworth's own “natural piety” (l. 3), nature herself has not “unveiled” her “inmost sanctuary” (l. 38). Specifically, she has not answered his “obstinate questionings” (l. 26) about death. What assurance he has found has “shone within” him in the form of “dream,” “phantasms,” and “noon-day thought” (ll. 39-41). In this state of unanswered need he awaits nature's quickening breath. The Visionary, then, appears to be the realization of the Narrator's desire. No “moveless” lyre, the Visionary finds his passive devotion answered by nature's kind attention. According to the associationist model he is first tutored by sensation: “Every sight / And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, / Sent to his heart its choicest impulses” (ll. 68-70). “Divine philosophy” he “felt / And knew” (ll. 71-4, 75). At an early age he leaves his alienated home in order to follow nature's “secret steps” (l. 81), and in solitude he discovers majesty “inaccessible / To avarice or pride” (ll. 89-90). His education is completed by memorials of the ancient past. Like the works of nature, this historical panorama educates him without the mediation of human presence. He studies “mute thoughts on the mute walls” until “speechless shapes” flash “meaning” on his “vacant mind,” revealing the “thrilling secrets of the birth of time” (ll. 120-27). For him knowledge has a pure sensuous immediacy.

Yet, despite all this, the Visionary's world is speechless, static, and retrospective. He may see the “thrilling secrets of the birth of time,” the ruins of the past, but he has no future. He wanders, obedient to nature's promptings, but without goals or destination. Although he is constantly referred to as “the Poet,” he performs no creative acts. Even his relationship with the Arab maiden who brings him food is silent. Ironically, it is the equilibrium of this rather sterile innocence which the Narrator as nature's lyre seems to desire and celebrate.

Also ironic is the fact that by achieving this state of harmony, this passive contentment, the Visionary becomes vulnerable to the dream which will destroy his life. Nature ceases to suffice because he is satisfied. Unlike the Narrator, he is driven by no need, troubled by no “obstinate questionings.” There is no gap in his communion with nature. According to Shelley's definition in “On Love,” love is what perpetually transcends itself in its quest for an object that is by definition unobtainable. It is, therefore, the person who has found natural satisfaction who will be troubled with a supernatural desire. In this way Shelley's love is the absolute antithesis of the need or limitation inscribed in empiricist (Wordsworthian) pathos. It is a supererogatory desire which defies the causal determinations of history, a freedom which traces its origin to plenitude rather than deprivation. The Visionary's dream of the poet maiden, then, has no cause, certainly no cause in nature or the past. After the vision fades, we are told that it has been sent by the “spirit of sweet human love” (l. 203), but as we have seen, the essence of this love for Shelley is a self-transcending freedom, a freedom which according to the idealist model takes itself as its own object. The cause of such love is the future, not the past.

As a result of this break in the continuum of natural time, everything in the Visionary's life is transformed. His passive satisfaction becomes active desire; meaning which had flashed upon his “vacant mind” from times past is now to be found only in the future. His wandering turns, at least momentarily, to quest, his filial dependence to unsatisfied sexuality. Most importantly, the maiden's poetry shatters the silence of nature's speechless forms. In her poetry she reveals herself as both the medium and the object of the Visionary poet's desire. Her theme is “Knowledge and truth and virtue” and “lofty hopes of divine liberty, / Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy” (ll. 158-60). She represents the perpetual hope of a “divine liberty” which is always yet to be achieved, for this for Shelley is the essence of both love and poetry. She embodies love as it is described in Shelley's second epigraph, the epigraph from Augustine's Confessions (here in translation): “Not yet did I love, and I loved to love. I sought what I should love, loving to love” (p. 960). This is the love that loves itself loving, that prizes its own activity more than the attainment of the finite object.

For the Visionary, however, the freedom discovered in this self-reflecting moment of poetry is a mixed blessing since it introduces a perpetual imbalance, a perpetual lack of adequation between the imaginative mind and the surrounding world of Wordsworthian nature. At the heart of this imbalance and of the discontent which it causes is the sudden eruption of sexuality and language. These are the forces which disrupt the integrative contiguity of the natural world by exciting a desire which knows no final or natural object. Love is excess, the perpetual difference between the obtainable and the unobtainable object: upon hearing the maiden's song, the poet is “sickened with excess / Of love” (ll. 181-82).

This excess of love remains even after the maiden vanishes, and in the world of Wordsworthian nature it produces an extremely painful double perspective, splitting the Visionary's consciousness into active and passive components. In the waking world the dream is described in both positive and negative terms; the Visionary both pursues and is pursued by his vision. He recovers his former “mute” passivity only to succumb to passion when nature's objects disappear in darkness:

                                                                                While day-light held
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul. At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness. …

(ll. 222-27)

The Visionary's perspective is split by a double disillusionment. After the vision the dream maiden appears as a “fair fiend” (l. 297), but nature itself appears no less treacherous. The Visionary's discovery that the ideal which the dream maiden represents is only a human projection (with no basis in the natural world) entails his corresponding and seemingly more traumatic realization that the beneficence of nature is no less an illusion, no less a projection of human desires. Through the Visionary's plight Shelley emphasizes that benevolent nature, the “great Mother” of the Narrator's invocation, is no more a source of natural piety than the dream maiden. To be sure, the empiricist notion of a natural virtue, a virtue imparted in the immediacy of sensation itself, effectively disguises human agency as a passive dependence on a greater power, while the idealist vision of virtue boasts a non-natural supersensuous origin which, as I have mentioned, is only too easily exposed as mere human desire. For the Visionary, however, the disillusionment of vision is simultaneous with the demystification of nature. He awakes to find the maiden gone and earth stripped of its “mystery” and “majesty” (l. 199). When the Visionary realizes that the faithlessness of nature is indistinguishable from the treachery of vision, he resigns himself to death.

He comes to this realization on the Chorasmian shore where he has wandered, tortured by the vacillations of passion and passivity. Here he addresses a swan, an animal which before his vision would have been part of his natural brotherhood, in some ways his double, but which now appears inexorably alien. Whether the Visionary's apostrophe to the swan is actually verbalized or merely thought is impossible to tell, since as he himself observes it makes no difference. The words are the first directly attributed to the Visionary, and they mark a self-awareness which banishes his intuitive sympathy with nature. Seeing and feeling are no longer equivalent to knowing; meaning is no longer immanent in sensation. The Visionary's language instantiates and records the unbridgeable gap between the human and natural realms. He speaks first to note his difference from the swan, lamenting the fact that unlike the bird he has no home or mate. He then questions his identity in light of this difference:

“And what am I that I should linger here,
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts?”

(ll. 285-90)

The Visionary's self-consciousness (his “I”) emerges in opposition to the natural brotherhood with which he once identified. To know his own sweet voice, his frame “attuned / To beauty” is to become aware of “deaf air” and “blind earth,” to feel nature as it denies the particularity of his identity. As soon as he has reflected on his own “surpassing powers,” he is “startled by his own thoughts,” and looks around to find “no fair fiend near him, not a sight / Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind” (ll. 296-98). Aware that he is the source of vision's beauty and Nature's awesomeness, he is urged by a “restless impulse” to meet “lone Death” at sea (ll. 304-05).

The desire awakened by the self-reflective vision leads the Visionary to an awareness of the lack of reciprocity between mind and nature, but this lack of reciprocity exposes in its turn the merely human source of vision. Here the empiricist and idealist perspectives compromise each other in the poem's central irony. After the demystification of both nature and the ideal, death appears as the only source of possible value external to the Visionary's “own deep mind,” the only way to confirm a nonhuman ground of authority. Ironically, the quest for such a superhuman authority becomes a romance with death. Caught as he is between idealist passion and empiricist passivity, the Visionary sees death as a resolution of his conflict. His death is both a resignation to nature and an attempt to get beyond the natural world, a way of restoring sensuous immediacy while aspiring to the supersensuous.

Wasserman argues Alastor requires the reader to acknowledge the possibility that death does in fact lead the Visionary to a supersensible satisfaction. The language which portrays death as a savage indifference, he avers, reflects not Shelley's attitude but the attitude of the Wordsworthian Narrator who has become disillusioned with his own natural perspective.⁴⁵ It is hard to know what would characterize a distinctly Wordsworthian disillusionment, since the entire Wordsworthian project is a defense against such an eventuality. In his outrage and despair, however, the Narrator clearly shares the Visionary's unWordsworthian regard for the self-reflective identity which nature denies. The Narrator's laments echo the Visionary's own complaints that nature will not reflect his “surpassing” visionary powers. There is no indication that Shelley sees the Visionary's embrace of death as anything other than a bitter irony. Death is described in Alastor as a raging tyrant, a figure of vicious, arbitrary masculine authority whose rule is disguised by nature's mild, mothering façade. This is the language of Shelley's disapprobation, not the language of a disillusioned Wordsworth.

The description of the Visionary's journey to death emphasizes his passive acquiescence to the natural elements, not his defiance of nature or his confidence in a supersensuous destiny. This is especially true in the account of his death where Shelley's description parodies Wordsworth's retrospective sympathy with nature. First, the Visionary resigns himself “To images of the majestic past” which pause “within his passive being” (ll. 629-30). Freed now from the hope and despair of his future-oriented vision, he lies in repose, “the influxes of sense, / … calmly fed / The stream of thought” (ll. 641-44). The Visionary's blood, “That ever beat in mystic sympathy / With nature's ebb and flow,” flows more and more feebly as the moon slowly sets until in utter darkness he expires (ll. 652-53). At his death the Visionary becomes once again the passive receptacle of natural inspiration which the Narrator had earlier sought to emulate. With macabre humor his corpse is described as a “fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings / The breath of heaven did wander” (ll. 667-68).

The “mystic sympathy” which weds the Visionary to Nature as death is the same sympathy which united him with the benevolent nature of his youth, just as his journey to death is an ironic recapitulation of his earlier wandering in the bosom of nature. It is imperative to note that the Visionary remains committed to Wordsworthian solitude throughout Alastor. Only his (and our) perspective on this solitude changes, and this change in perspective is the essence of the Visionary's punishment. He is forced to relive his earlier self-centered seclusion with the burden of knowledge contained in his vision of human love. This human knowledge transforms the solace of solitude into a torture by revealing that his seclusion really is solitude and not the brotherhood that he had once imagined. The self-consciousness introduced by human love alerts the Visionary to the grim and literal fact behind the metaphorical self-annihilation of the Wordsworthian project.

Yet, the Visionary is condemned to remain in solitary nature. His Wordsworthian perspective gives him no access to the human world; he is unable to embrace or even to imagine the human love that might give body to his self-reflective ideal. To look for the dream maiden (or simply to desire her) from within the confines of Wordsworthian nature is to look for her and the freedom she represents in death; it is to look for her in those false reflections which are nothing more than the naked projections of human desire onto the blank indifference of nature. This, and not the projection of one's desires onto another human being, is for Shelley the most abject form of narcissism. The elaborate descriptions of the Visionary's death journey are full of false reflections, reflections which project the eyes of the dream maiden onto the deathly face of nature. According to Alastor's rigorous logic, it is because nature does not reflect human particularity that it must necessarily reflect death; to fall in love with one's own face as it is reflected in nature's empty pool is to fall in love with one's own annihilation. Shelley expresses this idea in a brilliantly compressed double metaphor:

                                                                                His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there.

(ll. 469-74)

Shelley's imagery further connects this romance of death with psycho-sexual regression. In refinding “Nature's dearest haunt,” “her cradle” and the cradle in which he was raised, the Visionary discovers “his sepulchre” (ll. 429-30). To attempt to re-establish a filial dependency on the “great Mother” after loving the dream maiden is to regress, to quell the troubling echoes of self-consciousness by seeking to return to the oblivion of childhood. The vision identifies freedom, self-reflection (including poetry as the language of self-expression), and sexuality as the unnatural core of human identity which cannot be dispersed through metaphoric self-annihilation. Sexual love cannot be universalized: its objects necessarily remain personal and specific; it cannot be transferred from maiden back to mother without destructive consequences. It demands a reciprocity which distinguishes it from pity or dependence; it requires a self-awareness which is not innocent of self-regard.

The Visionary, like his Wordsworthian counterparts, seems unable to face this knowledge. He loves fate as if it were a woman, as if it embodied human freedom. The Wanderer, by contrast, loves a woman (Margaret) as if she were fate, as if she had no freedom. In the world of the Excursion, human passion is departicularized by death, which is by implication the totality from which the poet views the world. Alastor reverses this scheme. It, too, views the world from the perspective of death, but from the perspective of death as the particularity of desire. Shelley implies that such a reversal of perspectives (and the self-consciousness such a reversal entails) is inevitable and the precondition of any honest moral agency. He does not imply that the particularity discovered in such self-reflection need have the destructive consequences that it does for the Visionary. Nor does he imply that such particularity even need destroy the possibility of Wordsworthian sympathy. Shelley does suggest that both types of moral self-identification are partial and partially self-interested. In a world without metaphysical absolutes, however, this need not exclude their claims to moral authority.

Notes

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Preface” to Alastor, in English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967), p. 960.

2. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800),” in English Romantic Writers, p. 321.

3. Wordsworth, “Preface,” pp. 325, 326.

4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” in English Romantic Writers, pp. 1083-84.

5. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, edited by F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1946), Volume I, p. 94.

6. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, And His Expectations (1749) (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), Volume I, p. 497.

7. Hartley, Volume I, p. 360.

8. See, for instance, Hartley, Volume I, pp. 324-35.

9. Hartley, Volume II, p. 419.

10. Godwin, Volume I, p. 34.

11. Godwin, Volume I, p. 317.

12. Godwin, Volume I, p. 317.

13. Godwin, Volume I, p. 447.

14. Hartley, Volume I, p. 510.

15. Hartley, Volume II, p. 282.

16. Godwin, Volume I, pp. 56-9, 361 and following; Hartley, Volume I, p. 257.

17. Godwin, Volume I, p. 386.

18. This distance is preserved by solitude. Paradoxically, both Wordsworth and Godwin imply that universal sympathy is the product of distance, literal and metaphoric, from the compromising specificity of social relationships. Both tend to distrust consensus.

19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Indiana: Library of Liberal Arts, Inc., 1956), p. 77.

20. Immanuel Kant, The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, translated by Otto Manthey-Zorn (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1938), p. 38.

21. Kant, Fundamental Principles, p. 9.

22. J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge with the First and Second Introductions, edited and translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 272.

23. Kant, Critique, p. 89.

24. Kant, Critique, p. 91.

25. Kant, Critique, p. 84.

26. Kant, Critique, p. 85.

27. Kant, Critique, p. 84.

28. Kant, Critique, p. 87.

29. Fichte, pp. 99, 224 and following.

30. Fichte, p. 94.

31. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), Volume I, p. 304.

32. Kant, Critique, p. 90.

33. Kant, Critique, p. 90.

34. Godwin, Volume II, Chapter 2, pp. 489 and following.

35. I follow Wasserman in referring to Alastor's two poets in this way, although it is important to remember the Visionary is referred to in the poem as “the Poet.”

36. Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 11 and following.

37. Shelley, “Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude,” in English Romantic Writers, pp. 959-968. All quotations from the poem are hereafter cited in the text by line or page numbers in parentheses.

38. Shelley, “Peter Bell the Third,” in Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 353. All quotations from the poem are hereafter cited in the text by line numbers in parentheses.

39. Shelley, “On Love,” in English Romantic Writers, p. 1071.

40. Matthew Arnold, “Shelley,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), p. 380.

41. Wasserman, pp. 20-21.

42. Wasserman, p. 20.

43. Wasserman, p. 20.

44. Wordsworth, “Book First. The Wanderer,” from “The Excursion,” in English Romantic Writers, pp. 303-312. All quotations from the poem are hereafter cited in the text by line numbers in parentheses.

45. Wasserman, pp. 33-4.