The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

98 chapter 4Wordsworth did so freely—Shakespeare’s sonnets or Housman’s lyrics, forinstance. Matthew Arnold begins “Dover Beach” (1851) with the cliffs ofEngland glimmering and vast, turns then to reflections about the Sea ofFaith, and ends with a battlefield, in pointed disruption of the tranquil bayand the sweet night air with which the poem begins. The traditions of thepastoral are disrupted for intellectual use.But Wordsworth’s nature in “Tintern Abbey,” I say, is not to be used at all.It is simply a thing to be loved, amandum, sheerly. Note the parallel withlove of God. “These waters . ../ With a soft inland murmur . ../ a wildsecluded scene” do not raise the poet’s blood pressure or bring into his mindthe turbid ebb and flow of human misery. They merely “impress / Thoughtsof more deep seclusion; and connect / The landscape with the quiet of thesky.” Nothing follows. It is pure appreciation-love, earthly agape.As the theologian David Klemm puts it, “material grace” is the experiencein the world that “restores me to my own being” by being the presence ofGod. 27 “I, so long / A worshipper of Nature, hither came / Unwearied in thatservice.” “Worshipper,” not “enjoyer” or “user” or “national-park customer.”Hartman writes, “This dialectic of love makes up his entire understanding. . . .Wordsworth’s understanding is characterized by the general absence of thewill to obtain relational knowledge.” 28 No wonder that early Wordsworth wasMill’s crutch when his Utilitarian life began to feel crippled. 29A modern Green Party member can give a utilitarian, consequential,instrumental, scientifically knowledgeable reply to an inquiry into why sheloves nature. She can claim, for example, that the snail darter has a use as,so to speak, a canary in the world’s coal mine, presaging a disaster that evena nonlover of nature would want to avoid. But had the snail darter noearthly use, the environmentalist would nonetheless go on loving it. Youmight as well ask why your mother loves you. She just does. Such love hasno outside use. It is a sacrifice, a making sacred.The archangel Raphael admonishes Adam in his love for Eve not to makeher his god. Milton combines the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean withAugustine’s and the neoplatonists’ doctrine of human love as that spark offa transcendent flint. Raphael speaks:In loving thou dost well, in passion not,Wherein true love consists not; love refinesThe thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat