READING, AND BELIEVING IN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

READING, AND BELIEVING IN, AUTOBIOGRAPHYAuthor(s): BROOKE HOPKINSSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 93-111Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178175 .

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READING, AND BELIEVING IN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BROOKE HOPKINS

the tenth book of his confessions, Augustine asks a question of himself the importance of which can hardly

be overestimated for the theory and practice of the genre he did so much to establish: autobiography. It concerns his audience, those he imagines to be the "witnesses" of his act,1 "a race," as he describes them, "curious to know of other men's lives, but slothful to correct their own" (212), willing to hear others confess their sins to God, but unwilling to do the same. "And when," he asks, "they hear me confessing of myself, how do they know that I speak the truth, since [quoting Paul, 1 Cor. 2: 1 1] no man knows the things of a man but the spirit that is in him" (212)? On what grounds, in other words, will his "witnesses" believe what he tells them? How will he be able to convince them that his story is true?

Here, for the first time, the central paradox of autobiography is addressed (a paradox embodied in the very word itself- auto-biography, self-biography - the first part implying solitude, inwardness, even inaccessibility; the second, the public or communal nature of the task): to try to make the private experience of the writer available to others, or, in Thoreau's words, "to send some such account [of his life] to his kindred from a distant land."2 How has an attempt been made to resolve that paradox

Brooke Hopkins took his doctorate from Harvard and taught there for five years before moving to the University of Utah, where he is currently Associate Professor of English. Two essays on themes related to this article will appear shortly: "Pear-Stealing and Other Faults," in the South Atlantic Quarterly, and "The Mystical Dimension of Wordsworth's Poetry," in Studia Mystica. He is currently at work on a study of Wordsworth and the French Revolution.

93



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on the part of three major autobiographers, Augustine himself, and two later authors writing in the tradition (whether con- sciously or not) of confession and self-scrutiny he established: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth? It will be the purpose of this paper to answer that question, and in doing so, to shed at least some light on the nature of autobiography in general, as well as on some of the changes it has undergone as a genre since its inception.

In what has become by now a fairly well-known essay, Walter Ong has argued that writers always "fictionalize" the audience to whom they write, "casting them in a made-up role and calling on them to play the role assigned."3 That role varies enormously, of course, between one genre and another, and even within specific genres themselves. The novelist, the historian, and the scientist each make different demands upon their readers, forcing them to conceive of themselves in different ways, ways appropriate to the projects at hand - as readers of fiction, of history, or of science, with all the vast differences in expectation those roles involve. The same is true of the autobiographer. Generally speaking, the autobiographer writing in the Augustinian tradition (regardless of its secularization since the Renaissance) re- quires an audience of believers, sympathetic readers willing to approach the story before them with some measure of openness, with some sense that the life they are or will be reading is in fundamental ways similar to their own.

Conditions have changed, however: "truth" itself and its criteria have become, over the centuries, far more subjective phenomena than once they were. For all the radical new privacy of the story told in his Confessions, Augustine could at least be assured that his audience shared with him a common belief in God as the source of all wisdom and the repository of all truth- belief, in other words, in an objective and transcendent standard of truth beyond the confines of individual conscience. For Rousseau and his audience, on the other hand, such a shared belief was no longer possible. The truth of his story would have to be judged by the conscience of the individual reader and the individual reader alone, there being no other, more objective standard available. Finally, and in line with the revolution in aesthetic theory that took place during the last half of the eighteenth century, Wordsworth was far less concerned to persuade his reader to believe in the truth of what was contained in



READING, AND BELIEVING IN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY 95

the Prelude, than he was to persuade the reader to respond to it on the basis of his own personal experience, each of us, in his words, being "a memory to himself."4 "Sympathy" was even more important to him than it had been to Rousseau, a kind of direct response to the story possible only through the expressive (as opposed to mimetic) medium of poetry, in which form and content, "truth" and "beauty" were inseparable. It is with what one might call the rhetoric of confessional autobiography, then, that this essay is concerned, and with some of the ways in which that rhetoric has changed over time.

*****

Augustine's purpose in composing the Confessions is quite clearly stated at the opening of the tenth book, shortly before the lines already quoted. "Let me know Thee who knowest me; let me know Thee even as I am known' (21 1).5 On the private level, then, the ultimate aim of confession is, through self-knowledge, to attain that knowledge of God, that recovery ("recollection," in neo- Platonic terms) of the truth, of the "Unity" (23) from which Augustine believed he had fallen over the course of the first part of his life. Yet the Confessions was composed not merely for the benefit of its author, as "an act," as Peter Brown puts it, "of therapy, "(i but for the benefit of his fellows as well, to help bring them closer to God. "I, O Lord, confess to You that men may hear" (212); "... in my heart before Thee, in my writing before many witnesses" (211), witnesses, it was his hope, who would recognize analogies between their stories and his (as he had once recognized analogies between his and those he had been told at the time of his conversion), and either discover how to overcome their weaknesses in the process or learn to be even more firm in their strengths. The psychology could not be more simply put:

When the confession of my past sins . . . are read and heard, they stir up the heart. It no longer lies in the lethargy of despair and says "I cannot/' but keeps wakeful in the love of Your mercy and the loveliness of Your grace . . . As for the good, it rejoices them to hear of sins committed in the past by men now free from them: not because these things are sins, but because they were and no longer are. (212)

It had become one of Augustine's firmest convictions, then, that only through confession could persons begin to undo the dam- age they had done to themselves over the course of their lives as a



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result of their abandonment of God. His book was composed as an act of self-liberation, which would, he hoped, contribute to the liberation of others and to their eventual salvation.

In order for his task to be accomplished, however, it would be absolutely necessary in Augustine's opinion for his "witnessess" to believe in the truth of what they heard from him about his past life and present condition. And here is precisely where the problem, the paradox arises. How could the abyss which sepa- rated him from his fellows and his fellows from one another be bridged, given the fact that, as he writes, "they have not their ear at my heart, where I am what I am . . . where they cannot pierce with eye or ear or mind" (213)? How could he ever hope to bring his "witnesses" to a true understanding of what he had written, and hence a truer understanding of themselves? "No man," Paul had written, "knows the things of a man but the spirit of a man that is in him." Upon that assurance Augustine had composed his book - the assurance that, to the degree that he allowed the "spirit" to work within him, his confession could not fail to be true, "for," as Paul had written in the same passage (in the King James version), "the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God" (1 Cor. 2: 10). To be filled with the "spirit," then, was to be filled with the truth. And, although Augustine believed himself to be far from filled, as the confession of his present weaknesses in sections xxvi-xliii of Book Ten so amply demonstrates, he did feel that enough of the "spirit" had entered him to justify his book and to permit him to believe that what he had written and would write was worthy of his reader's belief.

But what of his "witnesses"? How could they be assured of the same thing? Once again, it is 1 Corinthians that forms the basis of Augustine's answer. For it had been there, especially in the second chapter, that Paul had made the distinction, so crucial to his own and later Christian thought, between two forms of knowledge, that of the head and that of the heart - the knowledge of the philosophers, which depends upon subtle reasoning and effective rhetoric, and a higher, deeper knowledge, informed by the "spirit," by love: a knowledge made available, as he believed, by the coming of Christ. Paul says that he comes to the Corinthians not to impart the first kind of knowledge, which in his opinion is mere vanity, but to make the second possible, the requirement being that in order to understand him, in order




to believe what he says, one must be at least to some degree filled with the "spirit" as well. "We speak," he declares,

not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 1 5 But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. (1 Cor. 2:13-15)

The issue, then, is judgment, comprehension. And in Paul's view, only those who have allowed the "spirit" to enter them will be able to hear (with the inner ear) the truth of what he speaks. To all others, the "natural man," what he has to say will seem like liiere nonsense, "a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal" (1 Cor. 13: 1). As Shakespeare's Bottom puts it, paraphrasing Paul: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."7 One must, at least in part, have "dreamed" it oneself.

The numerous allusions to 1 Corinthians dit the opening of Book Ten make it quite clear that Augustine perceived his position in relation to those he imagined to be the "witnesses" of his confession in much the same manner as Paul had perceived his in relation to those he had addressed in his epistle. Because he had written and would continue to write not merely with his intellect, "the wisdom of the world," but with the aid of the "spirit" within him, those who heard him would have to respond in kind, with the aid of the "spirit" within them-^ specifically, with the aid of the greatest of all the "gifts" the "spirit" had bestowed: with "love." Without love, in Augustine's view, belief is impossible; with it, everything is possible. "Because charity believes all things," he quotes Paul once again (this time from 1 Cor. 13),

that is, all things spoken by those whom it binds to itself and makes one - I, O Lord, confess to You that men may hear, for though I cannot prove to them that my confession is true, yet those will believe me whose ears charity has opened to me. (212)

Following Paul, then, Augustine makes a distinction here between two kinds of truth, two kinds of knowledge: intellectual truth and spiritual truth, the former arrived at by proof or demonstration, the latter, by trust or belief. It is clearly the latter kind of truth that he believes he has made available to his



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"witnesses" through his Confessions: a truth, like that of the Word itself (although, of course, not of the same magnitude), which can only be understood by those who are in some measure ready and willing to accept it, that is, by those who have been made "one" by love themselves, or, as Augustine puts it, "whose ears charity has opened to me." To hear something truthfully, in other words, depends as much upon the condition of the hearer as upon what it is which is heard.

Such, then, are the conditions under which Augustine was certain that his Confessions would be believed. The "spirit" within him told him that what he was writing was true. The "spirit" within his "witnesses" would have to tell them the same. Those "whose ears charity [had] opened" would believe; those "whose ears" it had not would remain in doubt. Proof, "demonstrare,"* was impossible. Only a deeper kind of knowledge would do, heart knowledge, a knowledge only possible through love, which softens the boundaries between the self and the other and renders them fluid. "They desire to know and are prepared to believe, but will they know?" (213) Augustine repeats his question several paragraphs later and answers it in the same terms as before: "The charity by which they are good tells them that in my confession I do not lie about myself, and this charity in them believes me" (213). The Latin is obviously more precise: "et ipsa in eis credit mihi"9 - and that charity in them trusts me. Trust. The idea was central to what Augustine was attempting to accomplish through his Confessions - to establish a kind of living trust between himself and his "witnesses," a community held together by reciprocal awareness on the part of each of its members of the "spirit" within all persons, generating a capacity to love. Augus- tine envisions that community at the conclusion of the discussion we have been following:

This then is the fruit of my confession ... in that I confess not only before You, with inward exultation yet trembling, with inward sorrow yet with hope as well; but also in the ears of the believing sons of men, companions of my joy and sharers of my mortality, my fellow citizens, fellow pilgrims: those who have gone before, and those who are to come after, and those who walk the way of life with me. (214)

The key phrase here, then, is "the believing sons of men." For in Augustine's view, it was their willingness to believe what he told about himself (or, in Coleridge's terms, their willingness to




suspend their "disbelief'10) that was responsible, in part, for its "truth."

îfc Hî * * *

The self-exculpatory motives behind Rousseau's Confessions are well-known. He had both been, and imagined himself to be, accused of much (most consistently, misanthropy), and he wrote in part to clear his name, to prove to his public as well as to his accusers (although he knew they would never believe him, so corrupted had the) become) that he was basically good at heart, the victim, if anything, of circumstances beyond his control. For what, after all (the argument of much of the First Part of the Confessions goes), could the Lockean "white Paper, void of all characters, without any Ideas,"11 upon which his conception of personality was based, possibly have done to ward off the evil influences of education and society? From the outset, however, Rousseau had had as well a public purpose in giving an account of his life: to teach his fellows more about their own. As far back as the late 1 750s in fact, even before he had decided to compose the "history of [his] soul" (as opposed to a study of his "character"12), Rousseau had written to himself of the aim of such a book:

I approach the end of my life and I have not done anything worthwhile here on earth. I have good intentions, but it is not always easy to fulfill them. I conceive a new kind of service to render to men: this is to offer to them a faithful image of one of their kind in order that they might learn to know themselves.13

The operative word here, of course, is "faithful," true. Like Augustine, Rousseau was convinced that he knew, or at least could know, himself better than could anyone else, and on essentially the same Pauline grounds ("no man knows the things of a man but the spirit of a man that is in him"). In addition, Rousseau had been born and brought up in Calvinist Geneva. He was, he was convinced, one of the "elect," and it was his "heart" that told him so. As with Augustine, however, the trick was to get others to believe him, and consequently be saved as well, if not in some other life, at least in this one.

Far and away Rousseau's most elaborate exploration of the "truth" of his book and what would be required of his readers to believe it is to be found in the original, or Neuchatel, preface to the Confessions, which he probably composed in November 1764,



100 SOUNDINGS

just a few months before beginning his story proper. Later set aside in favor of a much more concise introduction, consisting of the book's opening three paragraphs,14 the preface nevertheless remains of central importance for an understanding of Rous- seau's conception of his project and what he describes there as the "spirit ... in which it ought to be read."15 Opening with a statement of his purpose in giving an account of his life (namely, to offer to his readers a "standard of comparison" (1149) by which to judge their own and thus begin to overcome the "double illusion of amour-propre" (1 148) that made both self- knowledge and the knowledge of others so difficult), Rousseau then goes on to describe what he believed would make his "confession" so useful for the purpose: its concern would be with theformation of his character and (to defend his special qualifica- tions for the task) the fact that through the long course of his life he had been able to remain in touch with himself and hence with the spirit of humanity in general. For our purposes, however, the crucial paragraph comes near the end, where Rousseau affirms, in no uncertain terms, the sincerity of his work and instructs his readers on why it is to be believed. "Few men have done worse things than have I," that declaration begins:

and never has a man said of himself that which I have to say of myself. There is no vice of character the confession of which is less easy to make than that of a low or black deed, and you can be sure that one who dares to confess such actions will confess everything. I will be true, I will be true without reserve. I will tell all, the good, the bad, everything. I will rigorously fulfill my title, and never did the most timorous woman of piety make a more thorough examination of her conscience than the one I am preparing to make, never unfold more scrupulously to her confessor all the secret recesses of her soul than will I in revealing mine to the public. You have only to begin by reading me on my word: you will not get far without seeing that I intend to keep it. (1153)

The final sentence is the most crucial, and subtle, of the paragraph, and suggests the degree to which Rousseau, like Augus- tine, was convinced that an understanding of the truth of his book would have to be preceded by some sort of belief, some sort of openness on the part of his readers to at least the possibility that what he wrote would be true: you have only to begin by taking my word for it. "Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis," as Augus- tine had written, "unless you believe, you will not understand."1" Mere intellectual apprehension would not do. To read him, his




readers would have to open their hearts to him as he had opened his to them, in an act of mutual understanding.

As Jean Starobinski has pointed out in his essay "Le sense de la critique," however, unlike Augustine, the "truth" of whose Con- fessions was in some sense guaranteed both to himself and to his "witnesses" (those, at any rate, "whose ears charity [had] opened" to him) by the fact that it was addressed to God, before "whose eyes the deepest depths of man's conscience lies bare" (211), neither Rousseau nor his readers could rely on any such "objective" standard for determining the veracity of what his book contained.17 The traditional God of Christianity had all but disappeared, at least as Someone to whom one could address one's Confessions, and Rousseau mentions Him only once, in the bizarre third paragraph of his book. As a consequence, both he and his (in contrast to Augustine again18), for the most part anonymous, readers would have to rely upon a far more subjective and relative set of standards for judging the truth of what he wrote - in his case, those of his own conscience, as he composed; in the case of his readers, what they felt within theirs as they read, the spontaneous recognition on their parts that what they were reading gave a direct impression of the state of his soul at the very moment of composition itself, that he had written exactly what he felt. Hence, the tremendous importance Rousseau, following Montaigne and looking forward to Proust, places in his preface upon the style of his book, the only medium, in his opinion, through which his true character could be grasped by its readers. "It will be necessary for what I have to say," he writes, following the declaration of his sincerity,

to invent a language as new as my project: for what tone, what style to adopt in order to unravel that immense chaos of feelings, feelings so diverse, so contradictory, often so vile, and sometimes so sublime which agitate me without end? ... I go to work, so to speak, in a camera obscura. There must be no other art than to follow exactly the traces as I see them marked. I am thus going to take the same stand on style as I do on objects. I will not endeavor to render it uniform, I will always keep that which comes to me, I will modify it according to my humor and without scruple; I will say each thing as I see it, as I feel it, without refinement, without constraint, without embarrassing myself as to its freakishness. In giving myself up at the same time to the memory of the impression received and to the present feeling, I shall paint doubly the state of my soul, that is to say, at the moment the event occurred and the moment I described it; my irregular and



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natural style, sometimes hasty, sometimes diffuse, sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, sometimes serious and sometimes gay, my style itself will be a part of my history. ( 1 153-4)

There is something strikingly "modern" about this passage - not only in the way it looks forward, in theory at least, to certain notions of "free writing" that have developed since Freud (in which the objective "truth" of what is written no longer matters, only what and the way it is said), but in the manner in which Rousseau suggests that his book will be as much "about" itself and its own composition as about the "history" it describes, about both at once, about what he had/<?// at the very moment of the recollection itself- a "double portrait" of the condition of his soul. Read in that light, Rousseau suggests, its readers could not fail to be convinced of its "truth," the truth of his feelings at the time that he wrote it. Everything depended upon their reading properly, however, in the spirit in which his confession would be written, that is to say , with the feelings as well as with the intellect .

Such, then, were the conditions under which Rousseau was certain that his Confessions would be believed. Le sentiment intér- ieur, la conscience told him that what he would write would be true (as long as he allowed himself to "tell all"). The conscience within his readers would have to tell them the same. Those who took him on his "word," who gave him the benefit of the doubt, would believe. Those who could not find it in their hearts to do so would never accept the truth of his story. Acceptance, however, would be an entirely subjective affair, something that could be decided only within the reader's own conscience, in the act of reading itself, in a direct confrontation with the word. "I should like to make my soul to a certain extent transparent to the reader,"19 Rousseau wrote at the end of the fourth book, in a passage that has been made famous by Starobinski.20 "Trans- parency," as Rousseau well knew, however, was a two-way street, and depended as much upon the capacity of readers to open their hearts as upon writers to open theirs. That, in fact, is the assumption that lies behind Rousseau's notorious challenge to his fellows at the end of the third paragraph of the Confessions, his insistence that, having read his book, they try to make themselves as transparent as he had, and declare, if they dared, "I was better than that man there."21 Like his predecessor, it was a reciprocal relationship with his readers that Rousseau was after, one that would involve the acknowledgement of their




common humanity and hence the possibility of a new and more authentic kind of community.

*****

When Wordsworth "began" the Prelude in Germany, during the winter of 1798-99, he had no other purpose in mind beyond the reawakening of his own imaginative powers through the recreation of certain extremely intense experiences he had had as a boy, what he would later call his "spots of time" (xi, 258). Bewildered and depressed by his inability to begin work on The Recluse, he found himself, largely out of "self-defense,"22 return- ing to the events of his early life to try to recover some of the joyful enthusiasm he had experienced then. It was only during .the following summer, in fact, that his poem (if it could be described as such at that stage in its composition) found an audience, albeit for the moment at least, an audience of one, Wordsworth's "friend," Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is addressed as such throughout. And although a few others outside Wordsworth's own immediate circle were given the privilege of reading his story during his lifetime, the fact that he withheld publication of the poem until after his death (in 1850) indicates just how unsure he was of the way in which it would be read by a larger audience, of the extent to which they would be able to understand what he had written. To a degree almost unprece- dented by earlier autobiography, then, the Prelude illustrates the paradox with which we have been concerned, that involved in its author's attempt to translate his own essentially private experience into words that would, on some level at least, be understood by others, and his effort, through his book, to lead them to a deeper knowledge of themselves.

Unlike the earlier autobiographers, however, Wordsworth was not so much concerned with questions of belief and truth as he was with his reader's capacity to respond to what he had written and his own ability, through what he would call "the sad incompetence of human speech,"23 to elicit that response. He was, after all, a poet, not a theologian or a philosopher. And the poet's aim is not so much to convince his readers that what he has written is true as to make it possible for them to experience it themselves, to prove the truth, in Keats' words, on their "pulses."24 That is why Coleridge was such an ideal audience for



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Wordsworth to address in his poem, because he was a poet as well and could be trusted to respond not, as Wordsworth wrote at the end of the first book, with "harsh judgments" (i, 658), but with "sympathy" (i, 646) to what he had written, specifically, to the memories of his childhood. The traditional Pauline dichotomy between two forms of knowledge is present in Wordsworth's terminology: that of the head and that of the heart, the one informed merely by the intellect, the other, by love, a capacity to enter into the feelings of others and so to ap- prehend what they write from within, on a deeper, more organic level. Such a capacity, Wordsworth believed, his "friend" possessed, making him for the time being, in Milton's phrase, "fit audience" for his poem, "though few" {PL vii, 31).

Wordsworth's boldest and most provocative statement of the paradoxical nature of his endeavor to relate the story of his own poetic development and the basis upon which it could be understood, however, is to be found about a quarter of the way through Book Three. The passage cannot be precisely dated,25 but it represents a clear stopping-place for the poet, a place where, as he so often does in the Prelude, Wordsworth pauses in the midst of his task (or, as the poem so often describes itself, in mid-stream) to take stock of what he has written and, in this case, to try to assess the sense it will make to others, the meaning it might have for their lives. By contrast to the earlier works in the tradition of English poetry of which he believed his poem (as a part of The Recluse) would form a part, "my theme," he declares,

has been What pass'd within me. Not of outward things Done visibly for other minds, words, signs, Symbols or actions; but of my own heart Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind, (iii, 174-77)

Wordsworth could never have known it, of course, but he was here echoing a statement that Rousseau had made in his preface- his declaration that it was his intention in the Confes- sions to pay less attention to the outward "events" of his life than to describe what he called the "state of my soul as they took place," the way it felt within him to be himself (1 150). In contrast to Rousseau, however, who seems to have believed with a good deal of Enlightenment optimism that he could remember everything about that "history" if he tried, and more in agreement with Augustine, in fact, for whom the inner life or "memory"




had remained an ultimately mysterious phenomenon, Wordsworth goes on, after declaring the heroic nature of his "theme," to admit his essential speechlessness before it:

This is, in truth, heroic argument And genuine prowess; which I wish'd to touch With hand however weak; but in the main It lies far hidden from the reach of words, (iii, 182-85)

The final clause is essential for an understanding of Wordsworth's basic humility before his subject so far, the "aw- ful . . . might of Souls" (iii, 178) when they are young: the ultimate powerlessness of "words," of consciousness, to "reach" it and to convey it to others. "/// the main" he writes, "it lies/or hidden from the reach of words," buried within the depths of what will later be named the "unconscious." "Who," as Augus- tine had asked rhetorically fourteen centuries before, "can reach its uttermost depth?" (220) Not even, the implication is, "the spirit of a man that is in him."

The crux of the paradox, however, as well as at least the possibility of its resolution is to be found in the nine lines that follow. And here, as it is occasionally possible to do when reading the Prelude, we are able to trace the movement of its author's thoughts as he wrote it; in this case, from his acknowledgment of the basic solitude of every individual and his acceptance of the fact that he will only be able to "hint"2" through words of the strength that lies within, through his recognition of the fact that, despite their essential singleness, the faculty of memory is shared by every person, to the faith that since others will have experienced roughly what he has as a youth, they will, on some level, be able to respond to what he has written and thus be brought more deeply in touch with themselves. The passage reads:

Points have we all of us within our souls, Where all stand single; this I feel, and make Breathings for incommunicable powers. Yet each man is a memory to himself, And, therefore, now that I must quit this theme, I am not heartless; for there's not a man That lives who hath not had his godlike hours, And knows not what majestic sway we have, As natural beings in the strength of nature, (iii, 186-94)

The implication is, of course, that in order to be able to read his



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poem properly, that is, to respond to it with the heart as well as with the head, its readers would, to a certain degree at least, have to "recollect" themselves as they read, to recognize the analogies between his experience and theirs and thus their common humanity: the creative powers with which every human being is born. Once again, the "truth" of his story would depend as much upon how it was read as upon how it had been written, the degree of "sympathy" its readers could bring to it, their willingness to understand themselves as they read. But now that understanding was contained entirely within the "memory" of the reader, available only through the essentially creative act of reading itself.

That Wordsworth remained convinced of this can be seen quite clearly in a passage which appears toward the end of the Preludes final book. Still addressing his "friend," Wordsworth asks him to recall "the mood in which this Poem was begun" (xiii, 371), the "intense desire" (xiii, 374) he had felt at the time to accomplish something worthy of his talents and his need to lake stock of his life before he did so. "And I rose," he describes its composition itself,

As if on wings, and saw beneath me stretch'd Vast prospect of the world which I had been And was; and hence this Song, which like a lark I have protracted, in the unwearied Heavens Singing, and often with more plaintive voice Attemper'd to the sorrows of the earth; Yet centring all in love, and in the end All gratulant if rightly understood, (xiii, 377-95)

The important word here, I believe, is "rightly," meaning, in this context, "in the proper spirit," with sympathy and love. Only when read in that spirit, Wordsworth believed, would his poem be "understood" for what it was, a prayer of thanksgiving to "Nature" for teaching him how to love, thus making it possible for him to become a teacher of others, one of her "chosen" sons (iii, 82). That at least one person has responded to it in the proper spirit is clear from Coleridge's poem "To William Wordsworth: composed on the night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind," which concludes,

And when- O Friend! my comforter and guide! Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength! - Thy long sustained Song finally closed,




And thy deep voice had ceased - yet thou thyself Wert still before my eyes, and round us both That happy vision of beloved faces - Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound - And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.27

No autobiography could have asked for a more fitting reader, nor for a more sympathetic response.

Eight years or so after Coleridge composed his poem, "To William Wordsworth," Wordsworth himself wrote, in the "Es- say, Supplementär) to the Preface," paraphrasing an observa- tion made by his "philosophical Friend"28 a number of years before, "that every author as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task oí creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed" (80). He went on to assert, however, that "without the exertion of a co-operating power in the mind of the Reader" such enjoyment will never take place: "he [the reader] is invigo- rated and inspired by his leader, in order that he may exert himself, for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he cannot be carried like a dead weight" (82, italics mine). He must respond to the energy of his leader's language with a "corresponding energy" (82) of his own, must, in other words, help to give life to the poem he is reading, much as the poet himself gives life to his subject by approaching it imaginatively. The Prelude as a whole is distin- guished from its predecessors by the degree to which its composition involved a continuation ofthat "growth of a poet's mind" it itself describes, namely, a continuous and continuing act of self-creation on the part of its author. Recollecting his "emo- tion ... in tranquility,"2i) Wordsworth (as in the Simplón Pass episode, for instance) was constantly led over the course of the poem's composition, and in the very act of recollection itself, to new and deeper insights concerning the meaning of his own personal experience and of human experience in general, until, as he wrote in the final book, summing up the outcome ofthat process -

lastly, from its progress have we drawn The feeling of life endless, the great thought By which we live, Infinity and God. (xiii, 182-84 italics mine)

- the achieved vision of the whole, represented by the ascent of



108 SOUNDINGS

Mt. Snowdon and the meditation that follows. The Prelude, therefore, embodies what Paul Sheats has (with reference to "Tintern Abbey") described as a "meditative ascent:"30 the achievement on Wordsworth's part, through the act of creative recollection itself, of a "faith that looks through death,"31 an awareness of the essentially "godlike" or creative nature of the human soul far deeper than the one he had possessed when he started. To "believe" in the Prelude, then, its readers must, in some measure at least, be willing to make that ascent as well, something that can only be accomplished in the act of reading itself, in tlitit creative interchange between "the object seen, and eye that sees" (xii, 378) that Wordsworth felt to be the essence of both poetry and life.

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"To read well," Thoreau wrote in his chapter on "Reading" in Waiden, "that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem."32 Thoreau, of course, was not himself unacquainted with the paradox we have been concerned with here, the difficulty of getting others to share one's singleness, and the distinction between ways of knowing which helps to resolve it. As we have seen, the distinction takes its origin in Pauline theology, in Paul's separation between "man's wisdom," which demands concrete proof, and wisdom of the "spirit," which "believeth all things spoken in its name" - a distinction Augustine applied directly to his "witnesses" in his acknowledgment that those would "believe [him] whose ears charity has opened." And as we have seen further, that distinction remained operative for both Rousseau and Wordsworth, if in somewhat different terms, both from one another and from their predecessor: in the case of the former, his conviction that if only his readers would have faith in him, that faith would be justified in the act of reading his book; in that of the latter, his hope that his poem would find readers endowed with as much "sympathy" as the one to whom he wrote it, so that they would be able to understand it "rightly," as "centering all in love." The basic differences between the three are contained in the words most operative for each in this context: "spirit," "conscience," and "memory." For Augustine, of course, the "Spirit" was the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost residing in the heart




of each of us by which we are able to love both our fellows and ourselves. By Rousseau's day, however, that "spirit" had been redefined as the "conscience" shared by each individual, "the divine spark within us ... the very essence of our nature as moral beings,"33 psychologized, in other words, to fit Rousseau's new image of men and women as creatures basicall) good at heart but corrupted by forces beyond their control. Finally, Wordsworth has internalized the concept of the "spirit" still further, in the "power" to recollect these "godlike hours" of childhood we all share, the "mystery of man . . . On which [his] greatness stands" (xi, 329-32): a notion of "memory" as an essentially creative, and therefore spiritual, faculty. For no less than his predecessors (although in different terms, of course), it was Wordsworth's aim in the Prelude to "instruct" his readers

how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this Frame of things (Which, 'mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of substance and of fabric more divine, (xiii, 446-52) To reach these heights, however, his readers would have to be

willing to be instructed, for, as Thoreau so clearly saw, and as a sensitivity to the history of autobiography reveals, the reading of "true books in a true spirit" is genuinely an exercise, "a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem."

NOIES

1. The Confessions of Saint Angustiile, trans. F. J. Sheed (New York, 1959), p. 211, hereafter cited by page in the text.

2. Henry David Thoreau, Waiden; or, Life in the Woods (New York, 1948), pp. 1-2.

3. Walter ' J. Ong, "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction y" PMLA, (90), I, p. 17.

'

4. William Wordsworth, I he Prelude, or Growth oj a Poet s Mind, ed. truest de Selincourt, ed. rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959), 1805 version, Book iii, 1. 189. Hereafter cited by book and line in the text.

5. I he reference is to / Corinthians 13:12. 6. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, 1969), p. 165. 7. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans et al. (Boston, 1974), A Midsummer

Night's Dream, act iv, scene i, 11. 210-15. 8. St. Augustine's Confessions (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), Vol. II, p. 78. 9. Confessions, Vol. II, p. 80.



110 SOUNDINGS

10. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York, 1965), p. 169. 1 1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), p.

104. 12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Tome I, ed. Bernard Gagnebin

and Marcel Raymond (Paris, 1959), p. 21, from a letter of the 26th of October, to Malesherbes.

13. Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Tome I, p. 1121, from "Mon Portrait." My translation.

14. Written, Gagnebin and Raymond suggest, sometime in 1768, during the hiatus between the First and Second Parts. Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Tome!, p. 1231.

15. Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Tornei, p. 1 154. References lo the preface will be cited hereafter by page in the text. Translation is mine throughout.

16. Roy W. Battenhouse, A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine (Oxford, 1955), pp. 287-8.

17. Jean Starobinski, La relation critique- essai (Paris, 1970), pp. 89-96. 18. As Peter Brown makes clear, Augustine was assured of an audience whom

he could trust to read his book with sympathy, an audience made up of men and women like himself, who had undergone similar conversion experiences to his. Paulinus of Noia was one of them, in fact , and there were many others who shared the same convictions. Rousseau's position in his culture was, needless to say, a very different one, and audiences tended to be both more remote and less sympathetic, "readers' instead of listeners. Wordsworth's problem was, if anything, more acute. And he solved it , as we shall see, by preselecting his audience in order to be assured of a sympathetic reading, if only from one person.

19. Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Tome I, p. 174. Mv translation. 20. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence ct I obstacle (Paris,

1959). 21. Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Tornei, p. 5. See the note on pp. 1232-33 fora

brief history of the statement. Cf. Sigmund Freud's statement at the end oí the second chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, after the confession of his "specimen dream," defending his "reticence" in not analyzing it further - "If anyone should feel tempted to express a hasty condemnation of mv reticence, I would advise him to make the experiment of being franker than I am." trans. James Strachey (New York, 1965), p. 154.

22. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 17X7-1X05, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, ed. rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), p. 236.

23. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book vi, 1. 593. 24. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1 972), Vol.

I, p. 279, May 3, 1818 letter to J. H. Reynolds. 25. See Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: Chronology of the Middle Years, 1X00-1X15

(Cambridge, Mass., 1975), Appendix V, pp. 633-7. 26. R. D. Havens, The Mind of a Poet, Vol. II, The Prelude,' a commentary

(Baltimore, 1941), p. 346. 27. S. I. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1969), p. 408. 28. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eel. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Sniyser

(Oxford, 1974), Vol. Ill, p. 80. Hereafter cited by page in the text. 29. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser

(Oxford, 1973), Vol. I, p. 148. 30. Paul D. Sheats,7'Ä* Making of Wordsworth's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1973),

p. 235.



READING, AND BELIEVING IN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1 1 1

3 1 . The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1940-49), Vol. IV, o. 284, 1. 186.

32. Thoreau, Waiden, p. 82. 33. Ronald Grimslev, Rousseau and the Religious Quest (Oxford, 1968), p. 61,

paraphrasing Rousseau's Profession de foi.



READING, AND BELIEVING IN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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