6 - “Consecrated fancy”: Byron and Keats

Summary

ORPHAN OF THE HEART: CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

In the previous two chapters, I have been arguing that the national tale finds a common ground with Wordsworth's poetry because of their shared commitments to secular institutions as a vital support of local distinction. In the national tale, the nation becomes apprehensible as a nation within a realm of extra-national relations; in Wordsworth's poetry, the Solitary – as model for, rather than an exception to, communal membership – gains distinction as a Solitary precisely because of his inclusion and recognition within the reach of the church establishment. These strategies are indeed truly different. The national tale arrives at a way of treating belief that departs in substantial ways from Wordsworth's ever-present religious establishment that presides over his poetry just as it presides over the nation, while Edgeworth consigns religion to near invisibility. But these strategies comment on each other even while they differ. For if Wordsworth sees religion as a kind of secular government, Edgeworth sees the mutually supporting mechanisms of the economy and secular institutions as a kind of religion: or, at least, as a source of vitality and security that recovers the functions of religion's most ancient forms.

To emphasize the complementarity of these two views is to emphasize what Bentham had understood as the ultimate goal of the secular organs of state, which would not merely oppose themselves to religion but in fact recover what he considered to be religion's most basic function as the all-encompassing source of social organization.