‘The noble living and the noble dead’: community in The Prelude
On his way through Westmoreland in the 1650s, the Quaker George Fox had a vision:
Here the land opened unto me, and let me see a great people in white raiment by a river side, coming to the Lord; and the place that I saw them in was about Wensleydale and Sedbergh.1
Nothing so biblical appears either in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals (1800–3) or in her brother’s poems. But the habit of mind shown in Fox’s journal lived on in the conviction they shared with him, that epiphanies can take place by the roadside anywhere, and that they change a person’s life. The traffic of that idea among what Wordsworth called ‘the noble living and the noble dead’ (1805 x 969) across two centuries of English history introduces us to the community that matters most in reading The Prelude.
For although Wordsworth’s is a secular vision, this is a deeply Protestant poem. Its roots are embedded in the dissenting tradition of confessional autobiography practised by Fox and John Wesley in their Journals, by John Bunyan in Grace Abounding, as well as by numerous authors of Methodist and Quaker conversion-narratives published throughout the eighteenth century. There are a number of important things to grasp about these narratives. First, they were written in idiomatic prose (what Wordsworth called ‘the ordinary language of men’); often read aloud to a select audience, then later dictated or transcribed; sometimes published only after the author’s death, with a view to converting others. Second, they concerned the private nature of conscience, whose accountability to God wasn’t governed by the prescripts of the Church. And third, they really did originate from the people. In mid-eighteenth-century England they gave workers and criminals, women and dissenters, the poor, the oppressed and the homeless, a medium and a voice.2
According to these narratives, a religious life should be lived according to inner conviction, not theology; and often this implied rebellion against the sovereign and the law. Rebellion had its consequences. John Bunyan, who courageously declared that it was his ‘Christian Profession to be villified, slandered, reproached and reviled’ and that he could ‘rejoyce in reproaches for Christ’s sake’, had been ‘indicted for an Upholder and Maintainer of Unlawful Assemblies and Conventicles, and for not conforming to the National Worship of the Church of England’.3 He was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol for twelve years. Produced in this climate of persecution, conversion narratives charted the spiritual progress of ordinary people, offering a belief in human agency alongside a literal faith in divine intervention. The hero of Grace Abounding is ‘a lower-class itinerant whose major temptations occur when playing tipcat’;4 and many of the writers of spiritual autobiographies were either literally travellers, or portrayed on a pilgrimage, ‘occasionally befriended but ultimately alone’.5 One need only recall that Wordsworth, cast as a traveller in The Prelude, was the co-author of a radical volume of ballads many of which concern the homeless; that his poem ‘The Female Vagrant’ is a tale in the confessional mode; that in ‘Peter Bell’ he produced a Methodist conversion-narrative about a potter6 – to see the immediate relevance, political and stylistic, of these writings to his concerns. Their importance for The Prelude is in supplying a missing link between Wordsworth’s early radical vision and his later poetry of quietism.
As he finished the poem, Wordsworth claimed of The Prelude in a letter (1 May 1805) that it was ‘a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself’. But self is the staple subject of all conversion-narratives from Augustine onwards. Most readers in the 1790s would have been intimate with the conventions governing that form. They understood how the authorial self tries to justify actions, to account for a sense of election, and to seek forgiveness for human frailty; how the past comes to be read as a divinely ordained plot manifesting the grace of God; and how grace can be at once intensely personal and yet shared. They knew about the intimate relationship between a convert and the scriptures. (Bunyan, in Grace Abounding, describes his Bible as ‘so fresh, and with such comfort on my spirit that it was as if it talked with me.’)7 Above all, they grasped that spiritual autobiography is the record of a self that changes as it grows, for many of these narratives were written and revised over a period of many years.
The Prelude was no exception. Wordsworth began his poem in late 1798, during a short stay in Germany, but continued working on it throughout his life. Like many conversion-narratives, it remained private during that time, known by the poet and his family as ‘the poem to Coleridge’ – a label which neatly defined its joint functions of epistle, confession, and tribute. Only in 1850, when it was posthumously published, did ‘The Prelude’ appear on the title-page, at the behest of the poet’s widow and executors. The poem exists in a great many versions, because each time the poet revised it he produced a new work. Nonetheless, scholars have settled on three texts – the two-book version completed in 1799, the thirteen-book version of 1805, and the fourteen-book version published in 1850 – as marking the most crucial phases of composition. Recent critical orthodoxy has favoured the text completed in 1805, and read aloud to Coleridge when Wordsworth was at the height of his powers. It makes sense, though, to think of The Prelude’s compositional history as reflecting the organic self which is its subject matter, and the changing circumstances under which it evolved. A long autobiography such as this is a living entity, not at any time a monolithic power.
A contemporary reader approaching the first draft of The Prelude (the memory-fragment composed in late 1798 while Wordsworth was in Germany, known as MS JJ) would in the first instance have been a listener; for this text, like many of its predecessors, was read aloud long before it was published. How would he or she have understood the rhetorical question, ‘Was it for this?’, which is repeated insistently, like a mantra, through the first seventy or so lines?8 Surely as a signal that a confessional narrative is under way. The speaker, looking back on the progress of his life, sees it as leading to an end; and although he’s unsure of his destiny, he knows himself to be chosen. Recent Wordsworth scholars have supplied a context that glosses Wordsworth’s misgivings about his calling. Faced with the task of writing The Recluse, the great philosophical poem that Coleridge wanted him to write, would he be able to do so? What was the evidence he had the power?9 Coleridge, hearing these lines, must have felt the full force of the generic reference that links Wordsworth back into a tradition of conversion and spiritual vocation. This was a poet who took seriously the project envisioned in a mood of radical optimism by his friend.
The account of self given in this fragment is guilty and self-justifying. The speaker confesses childhood misdemeanours, but presents these as evidence of a providential pattern: ‘Though mean, / And though inglorious, were my views, the end / Was not ignoble’ (lines 57–8). He prays to ‘the beings of the hills’, the ‘voices of the clouds’ and ‘the familiars of the lakes and standing pools’, as guardians whose ministry made nature legible to him as a growing child. And he goes on to invoke ‘the eternal spirit – he that has / His life in unimaginable things’ (lines 124–5) as a ‘bounteous power’, who has watched over his growth towards love and joy. This is poetry of self-interrogation, but also of thanksgiving. There are enough religious references to make it uncertain how far Wordsworth has shed his Puritan heritage; and more than enough to suggest that he is defining, with the excitement and commitment of a convert, the unique form of pantheism which makes sense of his life.
This fragment of 150 lines was later expanded into the Two-Part Prelude of 1799. Its resemblance to spiritual autobiography became clarified in the process of shaping a more finished piece of writing. Wordsworth wrote the poem for Coleridge, with whom he shared his commitment to progress, freedom, and benevolence; and whose belief in God as an energizing principle, alive in all things, had recently communicated itself powerfully to him. He structured the narrative as an account of how nature’s ‘ministry’ led to his own calling as one of nature’s prophets, and so to the ‘self-same bourne’ as his friend (1799 ii 499). The poem declares openly his kinship with religious non-conformism. Wordsworth shared with Thomas Paine the rational inference that God could be perceived in the patterns of nature, and with Joseph Priestley the belief that there was a divine energy, activating the material world. Paine, a deist, was the author of two radical bestselling works, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. Priestley, a Unitarian scientist, is now best known for his discovery of oxygen; but his notoriety in the 1790s came from the publication of radical pamphlets, and a treatise on the relation between matter and spirit that challenged the central tenets of Anglicanism. Both these writers had suffered for their convictions: we should not forget that this was a decade that saw the government-organized persecution of dissenters. Many Unitarians (including Priestley himself) emigrated from Britain to the United States. Wordsworth and Coleridge, temporary emigres at the time The Prelude was begun, had allegedly been followed and watched by a spy in Somerset earlier that year; and when they returned to England they were looking for a safe retreat. In an atmosphere of continuing intolerance, when religious non-conformism and inflammatory politics were seen as going hand in hand, The Prelude might have re-awoken suspicion had it been published. Parts of it were read aloud at various stages in Wordsworth’s life, to those who shared his calling or could be trusted to sympathize. At later stages in the revision process, some of its unorthodox implications were toned down to accord with the doctrines of the Anglican church. Even so, the poem was regarded as shocking when it appeared in print: ‘It is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed socialist’, wrote Thomas Macaulay on 28 July 1850, ‘I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not choose to publish it in his lifetime.’
As Wordsworth expanded The Prelude from the two-part version of 1799 to the thirteen-book version completed in 1805, the poem became more philosophically exploratory. In this it resembled an older, meditative tradition of autobiography going back from Rousseau to St Augustine.10 It’s not certain that Wordsworth had read Rousseau’s posthumously published Confessions (1781), but he knew its content in the way most people know the great controversial books that are the talk of an era. There’s a similarity in the way he and Rousseau handle the guilty materials of their lives – suppressing the major transgressions (in Wordsworth’s case, the family he began and left in France) while bringing minor misdemeanours into the foreground.11 Wordsworth also shared with Rousseau a fascination with the temporality of human consciousness. He wanted to prove that memory was active, not passive, and so to discredit what Coleridge called the ‘sandy sophisms’ of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which had for a century dominated British philosophy. He used the interaction between past and present selves (a traditional feature of confessional narrative) to show how the mind shapes the materials it absorbs, working and re-working them. The verb ‘work’ is an important one in his vocabulary. Along with the nouns ‘effort’ and ‘motion’ it crops up a number of times in The Prelude to describe imaginative process. (See 1799 i 195–8; 120–2; 370–4.) These words declare the mind to be no lazy spectator but an active participant. Through the ‘work’ he was himself performing, the poet might count himself one of a community, like the Cumbrian shepherds and farmers whose lives he thought of as dignified and productive.
Wordsworth always regarded The Prelude as preparation for writing The Recluse; and in this sense it was a labour of love conceived for Coleridge, who had wished the idea of a philosophical poem upon him. Although the larger work was never completed, The Prelude came to occupy its place as the focus for Wordsworth’s abiding conviction that humankind was capable of progress. This faith had its foundations in the republican and communitarian politics of the 1790s, which he and Coleridge had shared. He refers to his friend as a collaborator in his vision, claiming that they both are ‘United helpers forward of a day / Of firmer trust’, ‘joint labourers in a work . . . / Of [man’s] redemption, surely yet to come’ (1805 xiii 438–41). This description acknowledges the hugely ambitious nature of Wordsworth’s project, undertaken in the spirit of enquiry and experimentalism that characterised dissenting culture. The poet made himself the subject of his own ‘experiment’, as Coleridge did when he took nitrous oxide to test its effects on the emotions.12 His aim was nothing less than to show how the foundations for a benevolent society might be laid, using ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ as his starting-point. Self, as he understood it, was best seen in terms of its responsibilities to community:
The outermost and all-embracing circle of benevolence has inward concentric circles which, like those of the spider’s web, are bound together by links, and rest upon each other; making one frame, and capable of one tremor; circles narrower and narrower, closer and closer, as they lie more near to the centre of self from which they proceeded, and which sustain the whole.13
Wordsworth wasn’t the systematic thinker that Coleridge was, but he read voraciously; and something of Coleridge’s effort to reconcile philosophy, poetry and religion can be felt in the difficult meditative texture of his verse, making the process of reading itself a kind of labour. There is, too, a powerful syncretist energy in The Prelude, which weaves together some of the eighteenth century’s major intellectual contributions. David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), a book Wordsworth had read in the early 1790s and never forgotten, gave him a scientific way of linking the theory of association with the idea of progress, by envisioning a steady improvement in man’s associative capacities.14 William Godwin’s Political Justice (1793), a work he came to see as pernicious (because of its atheism) showed him how freedom might be built on a purely rationalist basis, without the props of religion and the law. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759) helped him to understand the way the mind can be pleased or shocked into an awareness of the mysterious and the vast. And Rousseau’s Emile (1762) offered a developmental account of childhood on which to base his own reformist ideals.
The claim that mind is actively transformative is put to the proof by The Prelude’s handling of the intellectual materials it works upon. Influence is as much a process of revision as of absorption; and Wordsworth’s eclectic methodology brings into sharp focus the vigour of his own associative processes. The integration of Burke and Rousseau into the poem’s overarching design is an example. Burke had attempted to explain why terror could be pleasurable as part of aesthetic experience. He used a combination of psychological and philosophical analysis, but drew many of his examples from literature, and his essay anticipates Romanticism in its focus on imagination. Wordsworth wrote The Prelude under its sway, but added a spiritual-ethical dimension to the treatment of sublimity. In his poem, Burke’s feminine Beauty and masculine Terror become guardian spirits, in charge of imaginative life. He transformed Burke’s theory from a philosophical scheme which objectified aesthetic categories into a developmental model which intertwined the speaker’s subjective experience with his moral growth. The patterning of consciousness was presented as evidence of a shaping divinity.
This Burkean narrative was grafted onto Rousseau’s programme of education. Wordsworth was excited by Rousseau’s radical conviction that man is innately good, but that society corrupts him. (This was the cornerstone of a progressive argument that circumstances need only to be improved for humans themselves to become more virtuous.) He borrowed from Emile the idea that the best education is through nature, and that the growing child can be kept in touch with goodness by protection from societal prejudices. The ultimate aim, however – to produce an adult who is truly benevolent – depended on moving the child out of his innocent safety. A difficult transition which Rousseau had scarcely negotiated became for Wordsworth his central purpose in writing the thirteen-book Prelude: to prove (as the subtitle of Book 8 puts it) that ‘love of nature leads to love of mankind’. Under the guardianship of Terror and Beauty, implicitly likened to the watchful role of Emile’s tutor, the Wordsworthian child goes through a regime of moral enlightenment. The poem is concerned with how to avoid contamination from social evils, and how to ensure that goodness spreads:
O who is he that has his whole life long
Preserved, enlarged, this freedom in himself?
For this alone is genuine liberty.
(1805 xii 120–2)
Rousseau did not recommend literature in the upbringing of children. The only book Emile is allowed is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, valued not for its imaginative appeal as a gripping tale of adventure and survival, but because it is a conversion narrative in the dissenting tradition. By contrast Wordsworth placed books on a par with nature in the nourishment of imaginative life, and believed the mind could become accustomed to grandeur through what Milton in Areopagitica called ‘promiscuous’ reading. Again, he put this idea to the test through his own allusive style, which suggests how experience is mediated and enhanced by literature, so that it takes on a ‘texture midway betwixt life and books’ (1805 iii 614). The fabric of The Prelude is woven from many strands, and the voices speaking through it are multiple. On the prose side, as we’ve seen, are Bunyan, Paine, Burke, Godwin, Hartley, and Rousseau; among the poets, Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, Coleridge. This intertextual fluidity reflects the collaborative nature of Wordsworth’s interaction with the audiences – past, present, and future – he imagines and addresses. It makes of the poem a vast web of literary connections, expanding from the individual imagination towards an ‘outermost and all-embracing circle’ of precursors and readers.
Coleridge is sometimes invoked directly, as in the moving lines which conclude the poem in both 1799 and 1805.15 On other occasions Wordsworth ‘plants’ him in the narrative where he doesn’t chronologically belong, or speaks to him in a private language of allusion. The Prelude thus becomes the longest in a sequence of ‘Conversation Poems’ written by Coleridge and Wordsworth to each other. Like the earlier poems in that sequence (which had included ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’) it establishes a basis for benevolence in friendship, defining the ideal community as a nexus of ‘domestic affections’ that link family and friends into the world beyond. In this it parallels Edmund Burke’s eloquent declaration in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to country and to mankind.’16 But the poem is also a ‘conversation’ in a different sense. By juxtaposing different literary genres and influences, making them ‘move / In one society’ (1805 i 354–5), it creates discussion amongst voices past and present. The Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, has called this kind of writing ‘dialogic’. But the seventeenth-century concept of a ‘republic of letters’ offers a more appropriate label for the spirit of shared political and intellectual endeavour which the poem celebrates through allusion.
A key text for this communitarian poetics is Paradise Lost – a poem whose ending Wordsworth made the beginning of his own, as though both poets were bards in an oral culture, elaborating a traditional tale. At the opposite extreme from the ‘Conversation poem’ in its register, Milton’s epic provided Wordsworth with the connection between his life-story and the grand narrative of mankind’s fall from innocence into experience.17 It also bonded the particular moment in history at which Wordsworth wrote with an earlier moment in the story of the English nation. For Paradise Lost had been dictated after the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy. In it, Milton had reflected long and deeply on the nature of freedom. Wordsworth’s elective affinity with Milton came out of their shared experience of republican idealism and disillusionment. As he stood back from having witnessed the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution, Wordsworth too wondered how and where true liberty was to be found. The intricate network of allusions connecting The Prelude, with Paradise Lost shows Wordsworth looking for redemptive possibilities in the world itself, but also in the human imagination, which is ‘of substance and of fabric more divine’ than nature (1805 xiii 452).
Imagination is identified in The Prelude with ‘intellectual love’ (1805 xiii 186) and with ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ (1805 xiii 170) – an allusion to Milton’s ‘intuitive reason’, the highest human faculty (Paradise Lost v 467–8). Wordsworth saw it as almost synonymous with soul, and distinguished it sharply from the Godwinian reason he came to reject. In the ‘Crossing of the Alps’ passage in Book Six he associates imagination with spiritual hunger (‘Effort, and expectation and desire / And something evermore about to be’) and in the ‘Climbing of Snowdon’ he defines it as ‘the sense of God / Or whatsoe’er is dim or vast in [the mind’s] own being’ (1805 vi 541–2; xiii 72–3). These sublime moments in Wordsworth’s epic envisage for the mind a transcendent possibility: discovering what Milton had called a ‘paradise within’, they suggest that all human beings, not just poets, can make ‘communion with the invisible world’ (1805 xiii 105).
At the centre of the two-part version of The Prelude, and eventually providing the scaffolding for the thirteen-book version, are the ‘Spots of Time’. These moments of epiphany generate the child’s aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual growth. In Burkean terms, they afford him either a harmonizing and tranquillizing glimpse of beauty, or an encounter with terror, from which his own imagination emerges the stronger. But they also nourish his conscience; for in each of the darker ‘Spots’ there is an awareness that he himself has committed a crime (as in the woodcock-snaring, birdsnesting, and boatstealing episodes; 1799 i 30–129), or a more numinous sense that a spot is associated with guilt (as in the passages concerning the ‘Woman on the Hill’ or the ‘Waiting for Horses’; 1799 i 302–27; 335–74). These transgressions awaken in the child a sense of the grandeur within and beyond his own mind. They introduce him to the idea of death; but they also link him with the ‘Soul of things’, and make up the centre of his moral being.
The ‘Spots of Time’ are given as momentous a significance in The Prelude’s plot as are the climaxes in conversion-narratives. Their structure, and the dissenting religious sensibility they evince, are strongly reminiscent of Grace Abounding, a book which Wordsworth surely knew. In Bunyan’s story, life is understood as an internal dialogue between his conscience and the scriptures. He is accompanied everywhere by his Bible, which speaks to him directly, with the passion and urgency of a lover. The effect of each exchange upon his conscience is vividly remembered: the words ‘fell with a weight upon my spirit’ (p. 23); they sent ‘a sweet glance’(p. 38); they ‘returned upon me, as an eccho does a voice’ (p. 61); they ‘broke my heart, and filled me full of joy, and laid me as low as dust’ (p. 67). As he reaches the single epiphany which he looks back on as his conversion, the pace slows down, and he recalls how, even then, the moment led to a process of obsessional re-visiting:
Thorow the blessed Sentence the Lord led me over and over, first to this word, and then to that, and shewed me wonderful glory in every one of them. These words also have oft since this time been great refreshment to my Spirit. Blessed be God for having mercy on me. (p. 84)
The Prelude too is the journal of a spiritual renewal, in which natural forms are remembered speaking to the child and touching him with their power. In these moments of ‘ennobling interchange’ (Prel.1805 xii 306) the line between sensation and reflection becomes confused and consciousness deepens. Shelley caught this Wordsworthian process well in the phrase ‘wakening a sort of thought in sense’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’, line 312); and we can watch how a kind of arousal is achieved poetically. The river Derwent ‘sent a voice / That flowed among [his] dreams’ (Prel.1799 i 5–6); a scene of beauty ‘lay upon [his] mind / Even with the weight of pleasure’ (Prel.1799 ii 211–12); a ‘gentle shock of mild surprise / Has carried far into his heart the voice / Of mountain torrents’ (Prel.1805 v 407–9). Notice how those simple prepositions, ‘among’, ‘upon’, ‘into’, ascribe depth and dimension to perceptions, just as the physical verbs ‘flowed’, ‘lay’, ‘carried’ make abstract feelings palpable. Shelley might well have put it the other way round: Wordsworth’s poetry awakens a sort of sense in thought.
The Prelude shows a fascination with the way habitual impressions form identity, so that each person becomes ‘a memory to himself’ (Prel.1805 iii 189). Wordsworth understood how it is through sights, sounds and sensations (not through abstract ideas) that the deep patterning of consciousness is established. This feature of his sensibility belongs unmistakeably to the dissenting culture of his day. The integration of matter and spirit was a central tenet of Unitarianism, and Coleridge (like Priestley) believed in the ‘corporeality of thought’ (letter 11 December 1794). Repeated throughout childhood, Wordsworthian memories make up a private associative language whose significance is realized only in retrospect. The adult, in re-visiting them as Bunyan did the words of the Scriptures, finds them refreshing to his spirit: he ‘thence would drink / As at a fountain’ (Prel.1805 xi 383–4). Extraordinary experiences too are shown to have a formative power, partly because, occurring unexpectedly, they remove the ‘ballast of familiar life’ (Prel.1805 vii 603), revealing an essential solitude. When separated from the forms of nature, scenes of human distress or alienation are remembered striking the narrator’s conscience with the force of revelation, so that he felt ‘As if admonished from another world’ (Prel.1805 vii 622). Coming face to face with a beggar in London made his mind ‘turn round, / As with the might of waters’ (Prel.1805 vii 615–16); and the sight of a ‘hunger-bitten’ girl in France, accompanied by Beaupuy’s words, went on haunting him for years: ‘Tis against that / Which we are fighting’ (Prel.1805 ix 519–20). Wordsworth wanted to educate his readers away from gothic expectations, so the power of these moments does not derive from anything sensational. Even in the political spots of time, it’s not the ‘moving accidents’ themselves that are crucial.18 Wordsworth was in Paris in October 1792, a month after the uprising which had led to the ‘September Massacres’. The king’s deposition in August had caused the flight of the Royal family to the Tuileries. Four hundred republican citizens and eight hundred members of the Swiss guard had been slaughtered. The king’s imprisonment, and his execution in January 1793, were yet to follow. Wordsworth’s guilty complicity with the forces of revolution – later regicide – makes him retrospectively identify with Macbeth. Alone at night in a Paris hotel room, he seemed ‘to hear a voice that cried / To the whole city “Sleep no more!”’ (Prel.1805 x 76–7). The short interval that separated him from the bloody deeds then, and the longer interval that has since followed, have the effect for the reader of removing the immediate shock-value of the massacres themselves. But our sense of the narrator’s empathy and responsibility is intensified by this awareness of the passage of time, and the reflective distance it brings.
The Prelude declares its deepest affinities with the medium of Puritan autobiography in these ‘Spots’, whose poetic language is stripped of all but the essentials. In the episode concerning the ‘Woman on the Hill’, the figure on the skyline, balancing her pitcher on her head while forcing her way ‘with difficult steps’ against the wind, is drawn from daily working life in a rural community:
It was in truth
An ordinary sight, but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Did at that time invest the naked pool,
The beacon on the lonely eminence,
The woman and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind.
(Prel.1805 xi 308–16)
Her nearest literary analogue is the personification of ‘heavenly Truth’ in Coleridge’s early radical poem, ‘The Destiny of Nations’, described ‘With gradual steps, winning her difficult way’ from Bethabra northward (line 125). She also has features in common with the stylized classical figures stamped on Jacobin coins in the 1790s. But Wordsworth’s scrupulous avoidance of allegory and metaphor, his almost prosaic minimalism, keep the woman firmly this side of the symbolic.
Wordsworth shared with his dissenting predecessors Bunyan and Fox a belief that the spiritual is apprehended in and through the material. His secular commitment was to ‘the very world which is the world / Of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all’ (Prel.1805 x 725–7). Note how verse gives way to prose here, that middle line making little pretence to iambic pentameter. A resistance to the transcendent, the allegorical, and the sacramental was part and parcel of the realist project that linked Wordsworth with later writers like George Eliot, and thus with a Protestant community that outlived him. We can see this by comparing two passages: one in typical Wordsworth blank-verse, the other in a Victorian prose-style that owes much to the deep-structure of a Wordsworthian spot of time. The first, from Book Four of the 1805 text of The Prelude, describes a sunrise near his home in Cumbria, and the sense of dedication which this prospect gave him:
Magnificent
The morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious than I ever had beheld.
The sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn –
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And labourers going forth into the fields.
Ah, need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full? I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me: bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be – else sinning greatly –
A dedicated spirit. On I walked
In blessedness, which even yet remains.
(Prel.1805 iv 330–45)
The verse here, sliding from the grandiloquent and the epic to the humdrum and the quotidian, matches the eye’s movement from hazy distant prospect to the clearer human figures in the foreground. It takes in the full sweep of literary registers at work in The Prelude. A lofty, Miltonic diction, latinately polysyllabic – ‘grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light’ – gives way to the low-key, irregular, almost flatly prosaic line: ‘And labourers going forth into the fields.’ Then there’s a pause, as the poet works over the importance of this moment to the emerging pattern of his life, relishing the sense of blessedness (it’s a word that nearly, in this context, means grace) which has stayed with him.
The second passage occurs in the fictional life of Dorothea Brooke (even her name is Wordsworthian) in Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Dorothea is seen here emerging from the selfishness of grief into a full consciousness of how little her place is in the scheme of things:
She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.
Again the register is mixed, moving this time from low to high, in unison with the heroine’s mood. The moment of insight is led up to and framed – visually by the window, but narratorially by the slowness and deliberation of the actions. A gradual widening of perspective is accompanied by a slowing of tempo as the scene’s full significance is absorbed. The powerful Wordsworthian simplicity of the human group at the centre of this scene – each figure carrying a burden – is set against the heroine’s abstract ruminations, as she realizes that her own place in it is literally diminished, but spiritually enlarged.
‘A man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying a baby’; ‘The woman and her garments vexed and tossed / By the strong wind’. ‘Labourers going forth into the fields’; ‘the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance’. Ordinary human details in a Wordsworthian spot of time are momentous and telling, but resolutely spare, almost biblical. They accord a value to work, conscience, and the connection of self with community, which is at the heart of the English Puritan tradition. There’s not a trace in them of what Keats called the ‘egotistical sublime’;19 but their relation to sublimity – and specifically to the Miltonic sublime with which Wordsworth was most familiar – has a bearing on his peculiarly social and domestic version of the epic genre.
The Prelude, a vast multi-media collage as complex as Paradise Lost, links the writers of popular prose like Bunyan with those (like Milton) who chose the highest form in the hierarchy of genres. And it does so for the best of reasons. Wordsworth had come to mistrust the efficacy of revolution, and he looked elsewhere for compensatory evidence of human progress. A note of elegy can be heard in his rousing claim that ‘There is one great society alone on earth / The noble living and the noble dead’ (Prel.1805 x 968–9), with its implied admission that other forms of ‘society’ had failed. Nonetheless, he remained convinced that progress was possible – that there existed a pattern humanity could follow. He placed his faith in ‘a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead, the good, the brave and the wise of all ages’,20 and imagined in its midst a band of prophets, writers in both poetry and prose, who were charged with the task of reminding fallen humankind of its potential for benevolence. They formed a brotherhood, ‘each with each / Connected in the mighty scheme of truth’, (Prel.1805 xii 302–3) to which, as he worked on his spiritual autobiography throughout his life, Wordsworth consistently felt that he belonged. The Prelude is the record of his allegiance to that republic of letters.
NOTES
1 Quoted by Frank D. McConnell, The Confessional Imagination (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 85.
2 See Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 86.
3 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come, ed. with an introduction by Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 96, 97.
4 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 408.
5 The Autobiographical Subject, p. 96.
6 See Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’, 1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
7 Grace Abounding, p. 23.
8 See MS jj ‘Reading Text’, in Stephen Parrish, ed., The Prelude, 1798–1799 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 123–7.
9 The most extensive discussions of The Recluse can be found in Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) and Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
10 For Wordsworth’s debt to Rousseau and Augustine, see William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 73–91 and W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Influence, Autobiography and Literary History: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude’; ELH, 57 (1990), pp. 643–65.
11 In the 1805 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s relationship with Annette Vallon, and the child (Caroline) who was conceived during their affair, are ‘confessed’ only at second-hand, through the fictive device of Vaudracour and Julia’s romance, which is included in Book 9. In the 1850 version of the text, this section was removed altogether.
12 See Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
13 ‘The Convention of Cintra’; Prose i 340.
14 See H. W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (1962); Jonathan Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision.
15 See Prel.1799 ii 496–514; and Prel.1805 xiii 386–452. I have analysed Coleridge’s presence in The Prelude at length in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 165–94. For a more recent discussion, see Stephen Gill, The Prelude; Landmarks of World Literature Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 14–18.
16 James Chandler has discussed the Burkean strand in Wordsworth’s political thinking. See Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and the Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), esp. p. 43.
17 See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971); Jonathan Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision; and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
18 Used by Wordsworth to define his anti-sensational poetics in Lyrical Ballads: ‘The moving accident is not my trade, / To curl the blood I have no ready arts; / ’Tis my delight alone in summer shade, / To pipe a simple song to thinking hearts’ (‘Hart-leap Well’, lines 97–100).
19 Keats referred to ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing by itself and stands alone’ in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, on 27 October 1818. See Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 157.
20 The Convention of Cintra, Prose i 339.