"Hauntings from the infirmity of love": Wordsworth and the illusion of pastoral.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-04

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IN 1815 WORDSWORTH PUBLISHED A REVISED TEXT OF "ELEGIAC STANZAS Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm" in which he commemorated the "fond illusion" (29) of his youthful faith in the invulnerable calm that he had shared with the silent breathing life of the landscape. In the first version of the poem, published in 1807, he had described that faith more severely; it had been, he wrote, a "fond delusion." The distinction between illusion and delusion, invoked here by Wordsworth, is not always easy to clarify, since the two words so often overlap in meaning. It is, however, a distinction to which psychoanalysis has paid particular attention, and in The Future of an Illusion Freud offered some typically clear definitions that may serve as our starting-point. Both illusions and delusions, he wrote, are characterized by the prominence of wish-fulfilment in their motivation; it is this that distinguishes them from errors, although, he adds, an illusion is not necessarily an error. Otherwise, he concludes, the difference between a delusion and an illusion has to do with our point of view: when we call a belief a delusion we are considering it primarily in terms of its objective relation to reality, whilst when we call it an illusion we are considering it primarily in terms of its subjective elements of wish-fulfilment. (1)

A further difference between the two words lies in their different implications for mental health. If, as Freud says, a delusion is a mistaken belief motivated by wish-fulfilment and identified by reference to a shared world of knowledge and common sense, it is also a word which expresses an alienation from that world which may at times become madness. It was widely believed in the eighteenth century, for example, that delusive ideas were symptoms of insanity. Illusions, on the other hand, as Charles Rycroft reminds us, "are not pathological phenomena." (2) If sometimes they alienate us from the world, they may also connect us to it. Illusions belong to the normal history of our desires and affections as they mix themselves with the world, and we acknowledge this when we speak of the illusions rather than the delusions of childhood. If delusions are songs of experience, illusions are songs of innocence, from which we do not need to be cured, only awoken.

It was not always so. In Renaissance Britain, illusion was most commonly used to express the dangerous false seeing inspired by witches and other enemies of truth and patriarchal order. Prince Arthur in The Faerie Queene feared the power of"some magicall / Illusion, that did beguile his sense" (II: II.39.6); Hecate sought the "illusion" of "artifical sprites" to confound Macbeth (III.v.27-28). Even secular references to the "sweet illusions" of love retained something of this demonic sense of danger. But with the bourgeois pacification at the end of the seventeenth century illusion entered upon its modern meaning where anxieties are no longer theological but psychological, originating in the tensions between reason and the wish-fulfilments of fancy and imagination. In this new world, where delusion remained alien to reason and common sense, illusion enjoyed a richly ambiguous relationship with them. Mrs Radcliffe, for instance, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, condemned "the illusions of a distempered imagination" but celebrated "the magical illusions of twilight." (3) On the one hand, illusion was checked in the name of patriarchal reason; on the other, it was indulged as a source of value in its own right. In this second sense, it represented an exemption granted to fancy and desire by the taxing world of knowledge and common sense; and if that exemption was often marginalized, banished as it were to the twilight, it nevertheless indicates a bourgeois society more relaxed about its countercultural play than Renaissance Britain had been.

In the "Elegiac Stanzas" of 1807, fresh from the shock of his brother's death, Wordsworth had emphasized the error of his youthful faith: the dream in which he had been housed was a false belief, a delusion alienating him from his fellow-men, his "Kind" (54). By 1815, however, he had revised the poem in such a way as to lessen its concern with truth and falsehood. Its revision was the re-vision of a poet who, freed from the immediacy of bereavement, had come to see that what he had learned was not a matter of verifiable truth. It was with new experience, not new evidence, that Wordsworth wonderingly reviewed his earlier self and found it wanting. His former conception of the invulnerable tranquillity of the relationship between man and nature had failed him; he had been misled by his "capacity for generous error and noble illusion, which made life correspond to the heart's desire." (4) In speaking of illusion rather than delusion, Wordsworth insisted that what he had learned was not a new truth but a new vision; it was a new picture of the world, painted as it happened by Sir George Beaumont, that he had come to accept. The real subject of the poem was thus his imagination; and in dealing with imagination, Wordsworth was dealing with areas of life that go deeper than knowledge and truth. He was dealing with those symbolization processes that enable us to begin to live in the world at all. He was dealing with the history of his own desires and affections, with the Poetry that is the impassioned expression in the countenance of all Science. This small revision from a rationalist to an existential perspective in the "Elegiac Stanzas" recapitulated Wordsworth's own development as a poet in the 1790s; and this development in its turn, lying at the origins of the Romantic movement, anticipated, and in part enabled, a post-Freudian development in the psychoanalytic understanding of illusion which may now provide us with a contemporary way of approaching some of Wordsworth's most characteristic themes.

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Freud's most obvious aim in The Future of an Illusion was to dispel the illusions of religious belief. But this was an easy task which occupies only the surface of his book. Its deeper concern is with the alarming possibility that religious belief is only one manifestation of a much deeper problem originating in the repressed components active within all human wish-fulfilment. It is a problem familiar to scepticism: can we ever separate the objective truth of our beliefs from our wish to believe them? At the start of section VII, Freud confronted this challenge directly: was it possible that the major belief-systems of civilized peoples, not only in matters of religion but also of politics, sex and science, were all illusions? Freud's concern with this question seems more a matter of ontological insecurity than of intellectual skepticism, less a question of philosophical doubt than of doubt about himself, as he faced the profound fear that all his labors had been in vain and that his own "science" of psychoanalysis was no less illusory than religion itself. The book, in short, was driven by an anxiety familiar to Western rationalism, ever since Descartes had found himself haunted by that "malignant demon" which threatened that "the sky, the air, the earth, colours, figures, sounds, and all external things" were nothing more than "the illusions of dreams." (5) Rationalism, in evacuating the world of desire, desubstantiates it and thus becomes vulnerable to the pyrrhonism at its heart. Doubt is the fellow-contrary of reason, and it was Freud's confrontation with his deepest doubt that gave The Future of an Illusion both its inner dynamism and its literary shape.

Freud reserved his answer for the climactic last section of the book and, for the only time in his work, he used the literary form of the dialogue, first introduced in section IV to dramatize the pressure of his unruly thoughts and his temptation to push them aside. The alter ego with whom he argues speaks with all the patrician authority of contemporary conservatism. Like the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, and motivated partly perhaps by Freud's guilty fear that his faith in psychoanalysis was hubristic, he argues on the one hand for a position of universal skepticism and, on the other, for the retention of institutionalized religion in order to save society from the anarchy that would follow the spread of skepticism amongst the general populace. He speaks with the fellow-contrary voice to that of Freud the scientist and political liberal, with his faith in human rationality. In reply Freud is willing to admit that his belief in the final triumph of human rationality may prove illusory. He is prepared even to concede that his belief in science, including the "science" of psychoanalysis, is not without an element of wish-fulfilment. Hence the fine irony with which he celebrates the power of"our God, Aono" (reason) over the Christian Word. (6) But what he will not admit is that his science itself is an illusion. "No," he concludes, "our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere" (56).

The predominance of assertion over argument in Freud's concluding paragraphs suggests that the anxiety at the heart of his rationalism had not been allayed. He remained unwilling to trust himself to the full range of his desires as they sought to mix themselves with the stuff of the world. Indeed, the rhetorical structure of The Future of-an Illusion both engages and denies his anxiety; for in focusing on the opposition between science and religion, it deliberately ducks the more problematical challenges presented by wish-fulfilment in beliefs relating to sexual love, politics and, particularly, art. Freud himself sensed the disparity between the value of art and the kind of psychoanalytic interpretations that he could make of it; and it is a disparity in which the inadequacy of his world-view stands revealed. Art takes illusion with the utmost seriousness, we might say, and makes its work out of play. It was not until the language of illusion was revalued by analysts that a cultural space could be opened up within psychoanalysis which enabled scientific truth and subjective illusion, hitherto held stoically apart, profitably to interpenetrate. It was the work of the English analysts Marion Milner and Donald Winnicott in the 1940s and 1950s that rescued illusion from the rationalist limbo to which it had been condemned by Freud and his followers; and interestingly it was undertaken in a professional context which made the space of illusion especially desirable to them. They developed their ideas during the quarrels within the British psychoanalytic community between the supporters of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, whose rival claims on behalf of the "scientific" status of their beliefs made its seem worthwhile once more, as in the bourgeois society of late eighteenth-century Britain, to insist upon the countercultural value of illusion.

Milner's views celebrate experiences equally important to her as a painter and an analyst. They were developed in her book On Not Being Able to Paint (1950) and in her essay "The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation" (1955), and may be epitomized in her vision of what she called "the play of edges" between two jugs she unexpectedly saw one morning on her table: "how gaily they seemed almost to ripple now that they were freed from this grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place."(7) Her hostility was directed against the puritanism of classical psychoanalysis, particularly that of Freud and Jones, for its excessive dependence on denotative, or objective, thinking. Such thinking, she agreed, was necessary if we were to perceive the otherness of the created world in all its difference. But more important and primordial than this was what she called poetic, or oceanic, thinking, which permeated the otherness of the outside world with the sense of self and created an "illusion of oneness" (8) between them. This illusion originated in the infant's imagined unity with the breast that fed it, and recurred in the adult in such activities as the creation and enjoyment of art, the transferential and countertransferential exchanges of the analytic hour and, of course, in love and affection. Such moments of illusion were "the essential root of a high morale and vital enthusiasm for living," she thought (On Not Being Able to...

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