Wordsworth and the meaning of taste
The various essays that constitute Wordsworth’s prose oeuvre bear a strange relationship to the literary marketplace. They are the work of a writer frequently interested in current issues and events (when he writes about the Convention of Cintra, for example, or the Kendal and Windermere Railway, or copyright). Yet even these, the most topical of Wordsworth’s essays, also manifest his consciousness of being at some remove from those events. It was a detachment, in part, simply circumstantial. Think, for instance, of Wordsworth’s political analysis of the Convention of Cintra, which concluded Napoleon’s efforts to bring Portugal into the ‘Continental System’, his Europe-wide closure of ports to British trade, and to oust the British. Wordsworth wrote the essay on the Convention of Cintra in the Lake District, relying on British newspapers from the middle of September 1808 for news of the Convention and the complex political manoeuvring that Napoleon engaged in with the Spanish and Portuguese, and was continually adjusting his understanding of his audience. He initially planned to express his views at a County Meeting, but later sought publication for the essay as a series of entries in Daniel Stuart’s daily newspaper The Courier, and then commissioned De Quincey to shepherd the pamphlet through publication by Longman’s at the end of May 1809. Delays overtook the project. The essay that had begun as a contribution to current political debates lost most of its audience before it ever reached them. Sales were minimal, and Wordsworth’s earlier plan to bring out a second edition of Cintra dissolved in the face of scant demand for the first.1
Other prose works had less ignominious publishing histories, because Wordsworth did not publish them at all. (The Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff , the Essay on Morals and two of the three Essays upon Epitaphs, for instance, never saw publication during Wordsworth’s lifetime.) Only the prose associated with Lyrical Ballads could be said to have successfully created the kind of audience that Wordsworth thought that poetry – and, by extension, art of any kind – ought to be able to create for itself. It is, thus, easy enough to see Wordsworth’s prose as evidence of his inability to compete very effectively in the world of reviews and reviewers that called upon the aggressive talents of a Byron.2
Yet Wordsworth’s prose, taken as the whole that has been given to us by the fine edition that W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser published in 1974, enables us to make a case that Wordsworth uses his prose writings for more than elaboration on the issues better raised in his poetry. Rather, he continually tests the relationship between prose and poetry, trying, as one can see from his discussion in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of poetry’s need to be at least as well written as prose when prose is well written, to identify both the characteristic excellences of the two modes and also the impact that each has upon the other (Prose I 131–7). Part of what Wordsworth recognized in his sense that well-written prose was superior to most poetry was that the rising importance and influence of prose in British letters had contributed substantially to the rise of a poetic diction that never questioned its value because it treated itself as inevitably superior to prose.
What becomes apparent from considering the full course of development of Wordsworth’s prose writings is that he moved from self-consciousness and anxiety about his skills as a writer of prose to a consciousness of the value of prose in his time. If he could write in June of 1794 that he had ‘not been much used to composition of any kind particularly in prose’, and that his ‘style therefore [might] frequently want fluency and sometimes perhaps perspicuity’, his confidence that ‘these defects [would] gradually wear off’ soon justified itself.3 His prose remained complex, but it came, increasingly, to function not simply as an alternative to the poetry in which he was fluent but as a mode of expression that was interchangeable with it. Wordsworth began frequently to move directly between prose and poetry, as in his essay on the Kendal and Windermere Railway, where he drew from his own MS poem of The Prelude for his description of the Simplon Pass and from the sonnet Steamboats and Railways that he had published in 1837 (Prose III 354–5). Moreover, Wordsworth didn’t simply alternate between poetry and prose in the same piece of writing. He also compared his poetry to novels, and suggested that their aims were similar.
From our twenty-first century vantage, Wordsworth’s assimilation of poetry to prose may look like an effort to make modest adaptations in an obsolescent technology to try to gain the advantages of the technology that was replacing it. That would certainly be one way to understand what it must have felt like to be a poet experiencing the extraordinary successes of Scott’s novels and the effects of the attacks of the Edinburgh Review on, for instance, the Poems of 1815.4 Wordsworth would, on that account, be a rational actor trying to use his recognition of the rewards allocations of the literary field to win advantages for himself and his kind of work. And it is certainly easy enough to credit De Quincey’s observation that Wordsworth betrayed feelings of injured merit, and to believe Owen and Smyser’s suggestion that Wordsworth was at least disingenuous when he said that he never read the Edinburgh Review. Yet the limitation of that account is that it exaggerates the clarity of the competition for public attention. Daily events, in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth, were, in and of themselves, as important in diminishing the public for particular works as hostile reviews were. Think, for instance, of the case of Jeremy Bentham. Though he went on to develop a reputation for considerable laziness in seeing his writings through publication, Bentham had just published his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation when the French Revolution broke out. As Elie Halevy puts it, ‘in the universal upheaval the book passed unnoticed’.5 Bentham’s volume was, that is, directly engaging the questions that were animating public politics and still failed to find an immediate audience. The remarkable fact is that during much of the period in which Wordsworth was writing, one could be like Bentham, one of the most avowedly practical writers ever to hold a pen and still not achieve an audience. One could be addressing burning questions about the proper understanding of government and law, and could even be devising projects for workhouses and prisons, such as Bentham’s proposed high-security prison, the Panopticon, only to feel that practical applications of one’s ideas were rendered merely theoretical by neglect.
To read through all of Wordsworth’s prose as a body of work, however, is to see how the various prose forms had come to exercise their influence not merely as competitors to poetry but as direct influences on it. For two distinct but related impulses had become most explicit in the novel and in the periodical literature of the eighteenth century. The novel, particularly in the line that begins in Defoe and Richardson, had made itself pre-eminently the literary form that insisted upon taking the lives of individuals as its province. The novel, in its interest in evaluating human action, was in no way unprecedented, since a great deal of writing in the epic and dramatic modes had made the recognition of the tragic or the reprehensible part of its process of judgement. Yet it placed a distinctive stress on the notions, first, that each individual has one and only one life to live and, second, that the emotional interest of the novel comes from its providing occasions for seeing motives and ends, when, as Wordsworth puts it in his Preface to The Borderers, ‘in real life we rarely see either the one or the other; and, when the distress comes, it prevents us from attending to the cause’ (Prose I 80). Moreover, the novel’s insistence upon the examined life related itself most naturally and directly to the examination of the larger political circumstances of that life. Fictitious though the novel might be, it lent real impetus to the expressions of opinion – the reviews of literary works and the commentaries on political events – that circulated in the periodical press. Individuals, from a novelistic perspective, needed to cultivate their opinions about their private lives and their political views.
What the novel and the periodical’s expressions of opinion brought to Wordsworth’s understanding of poetry was a renewed commitment to the notion of the genuineness of appearances. Thus, he could write, in the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface of 1815 (Prose III 63) that
The appropriate business of poetry, (which, nevertheless, if genuine is as permanent as pure science), her appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions.
The concern for appearances, that is, might involve a truth somewhat at odds with available facts. Owen and Smyser for their part, and Simon Bainbridge, for his, usefully point out that Wordsworth in his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff might have found his claim that the French people universally supported the Revolution embarrassed by the facts and that his accounts of Napoleon in The Convention of Cintra were inaccurate.6 Yet, even in those situations in which Wordsworth was misinformed or blinded by the strength of his views, his commitment is to attend to the truth of private judgements of both private and public matters – that is, to psychology and to public opinion. His recurrent interest in what he calls the laws of human nature involves rejecting any notion that truth inevitably loses as opinion gains ground, or that opinion can never be ‘mere opinion’ because there is no such thing as truth and opinion is all there is.
Wordsworth’s particular combination of views on aesthetic and political judgements has come to look politically retrograde to many modern commentators, as it did to the second generation of Romantic poets. Yet his positions share with many of his time a conviction in the importance of the acts of individual judgement that draw their claim to legitimacy from the simple fact of their existence. Although we have no record of his particularly endorsing specific portions of Paine’s Rights of Man, it is easy to imagine that Paine’s claim that the rights ‘of thinking, of speaking, of forming and expressing opinions’ are rights ‘in which the power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself’.7 It was this general line of thought that linked them both with Rousseau and Godwin, each of whom imagined that the inalienability of individual emotions and aesthetic judgements meant that there were inevitable limitations on state power, and with a figure like Robespierre, who conducted his revolutionary politics while carrying at his breast a copy of Rousseau’s Confessions – and not the First or Second Discourses with their explicitly political focus.8 What looks to contemporary scholars like conservatism is a position that relinquishes the claim that a government needs to achieve full equality among individuals in favour of the insistence that men may be unalterably unequal to one another in the mental and physical powers that are ineradicably their individual identities but that this inequality is tolerable because they are, in Elie Halevy’s words, ‘nearly equal when all the events of their lives are considered as so many incidents in a great moral drama, equal in their obligations and in their destiny’ (137).
Wordsworth’s early and incompletely preserved Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff was written in 1793 but not published. (Owen and Smyser speculate that Wordsworth may have felt ‘misgivings’ about publishing the essay in the wake of the Proclamation against seditious writing of May 1792, and that Joseph Johnson, as the publisher for Wordsworth as well as for Priestley, Horne Tooke, Godwin, and other radicals, may have endorsed his more cautious stance, Prose I 24–5.) Yet though it doesn’t have the endorsement of publication, it provides substantial evidence of Wordsworth’s interest in thinking about the relationship between morality and politics. What is, perhaps, most remarkable is the distinctness with which Wordsworth’s position separates itself from those of Burke and Bentham. Both of these had sought to replace morality as an individual project – Burke by establishing the standard of social authority so strongly in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that all individual opinion came to look like fanaticism, Bentham by attempting to create positive law of such perspicuousness that individuals would merely need to implement their happiness and the general happiness of society. For both, then, individual judgement was a rogue faculty, one that was said to blind individuals to their own best interests and those of society more generally.
Wordsworth, by contrast, opens his essay by stressing the importance of ‘reputation’ in such a way as to indicate how fragile he takes reputation to be. And its fragility, in his view, is not external – as it would be if it were being assaulted from without (and could come to be treated under libel laws). Wordsworth, opening with the sentence ‘Reputation may not improperly be termed the moral life of man’, makes ‘reputation’ do the work of the notion of character, in its modern emphasis on internality. Burke had found himself defending the strongest possible account of the importance of external reputation when he appealed to the importance of traditional authority on the grounds that it was traditional authority and to the importance of aristocracy and monarchy on the grounds that the external forms rendered the personal characteristics of their bearers irrelevant; and Bentham was articulating legal and bureaucratic programmes that would enable individuals to see themselves as simply parts of a unified social field. The one might be conservative, and the other progressive, but both strongly restricted the claims of individual judgement. Wordsworth, by contrast, imagines reputation as if it were almost a private affair, in which individuals could only be betrayed by themselves. In his view, Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, had earned his authority by ‘continuing [his] Way for a long time, unseduced and undismayed’ by the attacks on his political positions: ‘The names of levelling prelate, bishop of the dissenters, which were intended as a dishonour to your character were looked upon by your friends, perhaps by yourself, as an acknowledgment of your possessing an enlarged and philosophical mind’ (Prose I 31). It would, he thinks, have been possible for Watson, ‘like the generals in a neighbouring country, if it had been equally becoming to your profession’ to adopt ‘as an honourable title, a denomination intended as a stigma’ (Prose I 31).
As Watson recommends ‘a servile adoption of the British constitution’ to the world in preferring monarchy to a republic on the grounds that a republic pretends to offer liberty but in fact merely enables individuals to be tyrannized ‘by their equals’ (Prose I 35), Wordsworth replies by carving out a common ground for them by imagining Watson’s views. He insists that they must agree that ‘the great evils which desolate states proceed from the governors’ having an interest distinct from that of the governed (Prose I 36–7), and proceeds to make the balance of the essay revolve around the question of what the best means are for eliminating the differences between the interests of the governed and those of the governors. He defends republicanism, arguing that it involves less violence to our understanding of what people are and can be than monarchy does: ‘The office of king is a trial to which human virtue is not equal’, because an individual is asked to become and remain as enlightened as if he could personally sustain the responsibility for representing the interests of the governed (Prose I 41). Thus, while Watson argues that the office can make the man, Wordsworth responds that no amount of reverence for office can enable a man to override ‘the eternal nature of man’ (Prose I 41). Instead, he insists that government itself involves inequality, that the ‘end of government cannot be attained without authorizing some members of the society to command, and, of course, without imposing on the rest the necessity of obedience’ (Prose I 42). The best governments are those that restrict the length of time in which that inequality attaches to particular individuals and that give the governors a stake in the justice of the laws they enact by returning them to the position of the citizen, so that they see themselves less as governors than as persons who are about to become the governed. In adopting that view, Wordsworth rests his argument on the question of respect and self-respect that he introduced at the essay’s opening. There should be limitations on the terms of the governors, just as there should be limitations on hereditary authority, because it compromises the self-respect of the governed – and, ultimately, the self-respect of the governors – to proceed in any other fashion.
In the Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff , Wordsworth produces arguments that take the general lines of arguments to be found in Rousseau, Paine, and Godwin. Without trying to establish the degree and the importance of the originality of Wordsworth’s views, we should note that it represents important evidence of Wordsworth’s contribution to a republican rhetoric that characterizes the principal aim of government as the achievement of selfrespect for all its citizens and that introduces a strongly generationalized view of the importance of the contemporaneity of governmental legitimacy. He sees government as most legitimate when it needs to exercise the least force to compel obedience to its laws; and argues that such government draws its strength from seeing fathers as in the position of republican governors – ‘only enfranchised’, and not guaranteed permanent authority by virtue of the authority they had exercised (Prose I 34).
The utilitarian conviction that happiness provided the only true measure of the value of actions was one that Wordsworth shared with a host of writers from Adam Smith through Bentham and Malthus and Godwin. The chief differences of opinion revolved around whether there was a natural identity of interests among individuals (as Smith and Godwin thought) or whether one needed to have a government that would actively function to enable persons to recognize their own interests accurately (as Bentham and Malthus thought). Those who favoured more active roles for government – through bureaucratic structures or education or both – were essentially claiming that morality and government could become interchangeable – that individuals would do things that were good and happiness-promoting if they knew enough to see that they were happiness-promoting things. And it was in the context of such views that essays like Wordsworth’s Preface to his tragedy The Borderers (1797) or his fragmentary essay on morals (1798) have their particular force. In the Preface Wordsworth considers at length the potential for evil of great intellectual powers not grounded in ‘any solid principles of benevolence’. As Wordsworth describes Rivers (called Oswald in the version of the play finally published in 1842) going into the world and being ‘betrayed into a great crime’, his discussion centres on the kind of threat that efforts to translate happiness and good action into a rational language encounter from the possibility of self-deception. It becomes difficult to return ‘bad men to virtue’ because, he says, good actions speak more softly than evil ones and also because actions lose their uniform appearance outside of artificially constructed moral and legal schemata. Such uniformity is the first illusion: ‘we insensibly suppose that a criminal action assumes the same form to the agent as to ourselves’, and ‘we forget that his feelings and his reason are equally busy in contracting its dimensions and pleading for its necessity’ (Prose I 77, 80). In the Preface, Wordsworth even goes so far as to treat moral self-deception as ‘superstition’, as if to endorse the basic view that goodness and rationality are ultimately identical, but in both the Preface and the fragment on morals he casts doubt upon the efficacy of resolving the problem of self-deception with positive law, saying, ‘I think publications in which we formally and systematically lay down rules for the actions of Men cannot be too long delayed’ (Prose I 103–4).
One can see in these early writings the basis for Wordsworth’s efforts to make a poetry that both committed itself to the production of happiness by imparting ‘that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure . . . which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Prose I 118) and also recognized the kinds of self-deception and superstition that made it difficult for pleasure simply to make its way directly and uncomplicatedly in the world. Indeed, his account of ‘habit’ in relation to poetry is a particularly important element of this project. Given, as he says in the fragment on morals that ‘we do not argue in defence of our good actions . . . [but rather] feel internally their beneficent effect’, happiness is incompletely external in its manifestations. It assumes the forms of habit rather than that of more conspicuous rules and arguments. Moreover, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads suggests that ‘Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing’ because it does not stand ‘upon external testimony’ but rather gives external form to the habitual, ‘truth which is its own testimony’, the language of the ‘fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature (Prose I 139; i 126).
Wordsworth thus insists upon poetry as a moral enterprise, and describes his friends as seeing his poetry as part of ‘a class of Poetry . . . not unimportant in the multiplicity and in the quality of its moral relations’ (Prose I 120). Yet the peculiarity of Wordsworth’s position is that he scarcely concerns himself with describing these moral relations in terms of the subject matter of the poems or recommendations of specific moral actions. Rather, the morality of poetry develops, in his view, from the promulgation of sympathy by pleasure, for which metrical language is a crucial element. Meter does not simply adorn thought but makes it possible to think about – and even dwell upon – distressful things, since metrical language (with its power to generate pleasure in the perception of similitude in dissimilitude) produces ‘excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure’ (Prose I 146). Wordsworth, insisting upon ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure’, argues that all understanding is ‘propagated by pleasure’ and that every occasion in which we sympathize with pain ‘is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure’ (Prose I 140). Moreover, the importance of pleasure holds even for apparently dry or distasteful varieties of knowledge – that of the ‘Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician,’ and the ‘Anatomist’ (Prose I 140). It is, however, the poet’s distinctive mission to supplement the scientific knowledge that is ‘a personal and individual acquisition’ that does not ‘connect us with our fellow-beings’ with the knowledge of ‘a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance’ of emotional and moral understanding (Prose I 141). Scientific knowledge may be universalizable, but it is remarkably dependent upon individuals. Poetic knowledge, by contrast, involves us in recognizing the commonality of the inalienability of individual emotion – the way in which the ‘primary laws of our nature’ express themselves in emotional connections (Prose I 122).
Two particularly important themes converge in Wordsworth’s discussion in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The first involves the statement of an essentially liberal position, in the form of a view that there is no possibility of finding one all-encompassing language or representational scheme in which to evaluate all of human experience. The persistence of poetry and science thus comes to be a version of the persistence of various different religious views. The differences between the two do not resolve themselves into doctrinal disputes in the way that religious differences do; and they therefore do not open the same lines of argument that developed in conjunction with religious toleration. No one feels obliged to contend that it is only practical to argue for toleration because the costs of war are too high, because poetry and science do not prompt wars with anything more than metaphorical casualties. Yet Wordsworth essentially adopts the liberal position that fundamental differences in the basic views of the various persons in his society can never be completely resolved. Neither poetry nor science will ever be able to replace the other, because the pleasures that each affords are not comparable. Moreover, his anticipation of C. P. Snow’s mid-twentieth-century identification of the ‘two cultures’ of poetry and science starts to mark out some of the crucial questions of modern political culture, in which the theoretically universalizable (the scientific) is, in practice, the world of experts and individualized knowledge while the theoretically private (the poetic, the emotional) is, in practice, the arena of common experience. Indeed, the very strengths of each mode are precisely what call the other mode into being: the advances that scientific progress achieves becoming available to a smaller and smaller portion of the population, the commonality of experience that obtains for poetic and psychological life tending toward homogenization and uniformity.
The second issue that develops particular force – as a direct consequence of the inevitable persistence of different intellectual modes – is that of taste. From Wordsworth’s earliest pronouncements on taste in the materials surrounding Lyrical Ballads through the Preface to the edition of 1815 and the Essay Supplementary to the Preface, he outlined a position that would seem at least in part self-contradictory. Individuals should, on the one hand, be receptive to the appeal of new kinds of writing (of the kind that Wordsworth announced himself to be presenting in Lyrical Ballads), but this receptivity to new objects did not, in his view, really amount to an abandonment of one’s earlier taste. Indeed, he thought it entirely right that ‘all men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them: we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased’ (Prose I 156). Yet the claim that he held out for the individual faculty of taste was that it represented what we might think of as the liberal capacity in its essence: it represented appreciation without exclusivity. Just as his poem ‘Anecdote for Fathers: How the Art of Lying Might be Taught’ dramatized the mistakenness of asking a child to compare his pleasures – to choose between Kilve and Liswyn, so his claim for taste imagined in the first place that part of what was important about taste was that it did not establish the same kind of competition between choices that many other kinds of experience did. By contrast, many utilitarian social systems (such as the classrooms that Bell, Lancaster, and Bentham devised) were committed to establishing comparability – in different students’ performances in spelling or maths – that would make it possible to choose and choose until one had arrived at a recognition of ‘the best’ in a particular category.9 Wordsworth’s approach was distinctly different, in that he treated taste as a fundamentally emotional faculty that, also and importantly, saw the emotions as their own justification and saw them as open to different kinds of uncompared objects (parents and siblings, brothers and sisters, children and spouses). In affectionate attachments and objects of taste, he might have said, one doesn’t love one’s mother or father for being the best mother or father; one takes them to be the best mother or father because one loves them. One doesn’t select the best family member, but loves a mother or a brother without treating them as comparable.
To put it in this way may seem, however, to countenance the view that the affections involve their own kind of ineluctable fatality – that, as Stephen Guest would put it in The Mill on the Floss (1860) or Emma Bovary would put it in Madame Bovary (1857), one’s love is one’s destiny. Morality would, on this account, be as irrelevant as in any description of the ancients that emphasized their fatedness. So the puzzle that we are left to resolve is why Wordsworth thinks that there is any need to account for tastes, and it is perfectly clear that he takes the project of accounting for tastes to be central and necessary. We may begin to develop an answer by noting how feelings, in his view, are not circumstantial, as he emphasizes in talking about how the poems of Lyrical Ballads differ from ‘the popular poetry of the day’ in that ‘the feeling . . . developed [in them] gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling’ (Prose I 128). If feelings could be derived or inferred from circumstances, they would be completely determined and would, thus, never call on any capacity for judgement at all. Because there would be no alternatives among feelings dictated by circumstances, there would never be any possibility that circumstances would produce a variety of feelings. There would be nothing to choose.
Yet Wordsworth, in claiming that his poems may place his ‘Reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them’ (Prose I 128) is already stressing the importance of the moral judgement and the aesthetic judgement. These are capacities that neither eliminate choice nor suggest the irrelevance of what one chooses. And it is this combination of claims about judgement that fuels his remarkable survey of the vagaries of literary taste in the Preface to the Poems of 1815 and the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface and that continues his earlier discussion of taste in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. From the moment that Wordsworth produces an account of what the poet ought to be doing in his discussion ‘What is a Poet?’ in the Preface (Prose I 138–43), he announces an understanding of poetic duty – or, more modestly – a job description. The immediate consequence of ascertaining what is involved in a poet’s duty is to exert pressure on any account of poetic history that is purely historical – based, that is, on a chronological and precedential order. A chronological order need not meet with any questions, because it merely reports on two largely unrelated things – that certain poems were written in a particular time and that those poems met with a particular kind of reception. The notion of a mistake has no place in an historical account. What Wordsworth provides in his account of poetic duty and in his elaboration in the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface of 1815 is, by contrast, a standard by which to judge poetry that does not rest simply on the available examples. The fact that a poem was the best poem there was would, in this view, be insufficient justification of it and of poetry. Whether current popular taste or past popular taste ratifies it or not, Wordsworth asserts that ‘the only infallible sign’ of genius in the fine arts is ‘the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honour, and benefit of human nature (Prose III 82).
Wordsworth’s examples of the poets who have widened human sensibility are now uncontroversial: Shakespeare and Milton are chief among them. Yet what Wordsworth stresses in his description of their reception is the discrepancy between the nineteenth-century estimation of them and the reception of their contemporaries. Shakespeare, he claims, ‘stooped to accommodate himself to the People’, but never made enough ‘impression upon the ruling Intellects of the time’ to have been alluded to by Lord Bacon; and he says that Dryden reports of his era that Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were twice as likely to be acted as Shakespeare’s (Prose III 68). He asserts that Milton provides another example of the divergence of a poet’s contemporaries and his subsequent readers. Milton’s poems ‘are now much read, and loudly praised; yet were they little heard of till more than 150 years after their publication’, and cites Boswell testifying to Dr Johnson’s repeated expressions of contempt for them (Prose III 70). The principle that Wordsworth enunciates is not, however, that poets are always without proper honour in their own time. He argues, rather, that poetry creates the taste by which it is to be appreciated in its own time and that that taste has cumulative effect. Poetry like Shakespeare’s that speaks with the logic of the emotions proves its worth by producing a taste that will enable it to become progenitive. While Wordsworth does not exactly argue that the justice of critical judgements of poetry will emerge with time, he does produce an account of critical justice that closely approaches T. S. Eliot’s position in Tradition and the Individual Talent in arguing that the most significant poetry gets its due eventually by virtue of subtly but inexorably transforming the critical understanding of the entire literary tradition. The interplay between a larger tradition of influence and individual poems and poets finally means that taste is not at all an individual or merely personal matter. People may take themselves to love Ossian and to have nothing but scorn for Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and it may seem as if one must trust their reports since individuals would seem to be the best informants about their preferences. Yet Wordsworth thinks that the fact of their being mistaken in these impressions will emerge as the ballads that Percy catalogued make their influence felt while Ossian’s poetry turns out to have been a mule, work of no generative power.
Wordsworth’s description of taste foregrounds a preference for poetry of psychological depth (of the kind that Shakespeare so abundantly produced) but also suggests that poetry is itself a testimony to the psychological depth of individuals and societies, to the ways in which people respond differently and more deeply than they themselves are always conscious of. It is easy to see why Wordsworth thinks that poetry’s ‘obligation’ to present things ‘as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions’ prepares ‘a world of delusion . . . for the inexperienced’, because only experience can balance an appropriate confidence in one’s appreciative responses with an appropriate mistrust of one’s own capacity for self-delusion (Prose III 63).
Clearly, experience is a help in predicting ‘the destiny of a new work’, as Wordsworth puts it in the Essay, Supplementary . . . , in talking about how the most dependable critics are those who have continued to comprehend poetry as a study (Prose III 63). Yet it is worth noticing that he does not go so far as to argue that the most experienced students of poetry always have the best taste. (Indeed, he produces a catalogue of possible ways in which a critic might confuse his judgement of a work’s merit with a judgement of the excellence of its particular ideas and words, and particularly instances the ‘misconceptions and mistakes peculiar to themselves’ that ‘men who read from religious or moral inclinations’ may make.) Wordsworth’s consciousness of the difficulties of judgement does not simply resolve itself into a claim that greater experience will automatically produce better judgement – that all mature judgements will automatically be more accurate than those of younger people. For ‘the mind grows serious from the weight of life’, and ‘the range of its passions is contracted accordingly; and its sympathies become so exclusive, that many species of high excellence wholly escape’ (Prose III 64).
With this last remark, which suggests the limitations of the experience that had earlier made taste look reliable, Wordsworth might seem to have arrived at what he elsewhere calls ‘unmanly despair’ on the subject of taste. Developing the knowledge that makes taste informed and informative also carries with it a kind of constriction. Yet this apparent inadequacy turns out to be the aspect of taste that most clearly indicates the distinctive nature of its contribution. For taste parallels a crucial understanding of the liberal tradition as Rousseau and Kant had been developing it – that the general will both acknowledges the legitimacy of virtually all positions and also has a humbling effect on its individual representatives. In so far as they have views, they are to be respected and taken into consideration; in so far as they claim to represent the general will themselves, they will reveal themselves as pretenders. For the key issue at stake in the notion of the general will is that it requires individuals to imagine an ideal that includes differences from their own particular situations and that recognizes the limitations of even their own strengths.
Wordsworth had in his early Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff applied this logic to the situation of the monarch who is pitiable because he is forced into impersonating an unavailable ideal, but he works out the force of its logic most clearly in his classification of his poems and his elaboration on it in the Preface of 1815. Wordsworth’s classification is indeed complicated. He begins by enumerating the ‘powers requisite for the production of poetry’ (Observation and Description, Sensibility, Reflection, Imagination and Fancy, Invention, and Judgement), and then proceeds to a list of poetic forms (Prose III 27–8). As if these lists were insufficient, however, Wordsworth proceeds to explain that he has arranged his ‘apparently miscellaneous’ poems ‘either with reference to the powers of mind predominant in the production of them’ or to form, or to subject; and he complicates even this remark about the various classificatory arrangements by saying that he has arranged them ‘as far as it was possible, according to an order of time, commencing with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality’ (Prose III 28). Wordsworth’s taxonomizing impulses seem to have run away with him, and led him to produce classes of poetic faculties, genres, and reception before having talked about the question of the stages of human life. Yet this last classification – according to the stages of life – is particularly revelatory, in that it enables Wordsworth to describe the faculties and subject matters that ‘predominate’ in the various different poems while implicitly arguing how distinct and distinctive these faculties and concerns will be. In other words, his classification establishes the same kind of categorization of experience that he elaborates on in his remarks on taste in the Essay, Supplementary . . . Individual poems thus enter their claims to attention under certain obvious implicit restrictions, and no poem is asked to play the role of monarch to the rest. Each poem gains value from its association with the whole collection, but each poem is also allowed a kind of specialization. The faculties and characteristic intensities also appear as constrictions and restrictions in the passions of poet, the dramatic characters in the poems, and the reader. Wordsworth’s classification of his poems thus participates in a liberal understanding of the role of poetry: rather than involving a sympathetic identification between any reader and any poetic emotion as expressed in a poem or by a poetic character, the classification asks readers to accept and respect emotions and perspectives that they themselves do not share, to see children or elderly people – without imagining that they can be those persons.
The three Essays upon Epitaphs constitute something like an epitome of the logic of argument that I have been tracing. (Only the first of them appeared during Wordsworth’s lifetime, after having been used to fill some space in the 22 February 1810 number of Coleridge’s journal The Friend, when Coleridge was in low spirits and ‘utterly unprovided’ with material.) Although the other two were held in reserve for possible later publication in The Friend, Coleridge ceased publishing his journal before they could appear; Wordsworth revised the first essay and reprinted it (in revised form as a note to The Excursion in 1814) without ever bringing the other two to the light of day. In their parts and as a whole, the Essays upon Epitaphs represent a remarkable statement of Wordsworth’s poetic faith. Indeed, they have an eerie affinity with the Profession of Faith of Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar, in that they attempt to determine what an individual finds it necessary to believe even if – and especially because – he has distanced himself from the doctrines on offer.10
Various social influences and historical developments had caused funeral monuments and memorials to become increasingly important artifacts. The importance that Protestantism placed on an individual sense of an eternal account of one’s actions, the particular emphasis that certain dissenting sects placed on the body and its handling in preparation for eventual reunion with the soul contributed to their prominence – as did the rise of modern armies that led soldiers to die in another country in the service of one’s own. In that sense, funeral monuments and epitaphs would seem to have begun to come into their own – before reaching intense popularity in Queen Victoria’s widowhood. Yet Wordsworth’s attention to epitaphs is peculiarly keen. He treats the epitaph as the poetic genre in which one must seek the causes of poetry, an answer to the question ‘Why write poetry?’ that had perennially occupied him from the time of his early work on the Prelude. In the Prelude, the question seems to have an answer from affection – the commitment that the poet has to his family and close friends and, finally, to a larger and more abstract sense of humanity. In the Essays upon Epitaphs, however, he selects a poetic form that is, of all forms, the one most commonly prompted by affectionate grief and argues, improbably enough, for the insufficiency of affection as an explanation of the form:
And, verily, without the consciousness of a principle of immortality in the human soul, Man could never have awakened in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows: mere love, of the yearning of kind towards kind could not have produced it.
(Prose II 50)
A conviction of human immortality emerges, that is, from no framework of religious doctrine but rather as a necessary hypothesis underlying the fact that people do write epitaphs. For Wordsworth’s central assertion is that the affections could never unfold themselves ‘in a creature endowed with the faculties of foresight and reason’ if he took death at face value. ‘The individual dying could not have had a desire to survive in the remembrance of his fellows, nor on their side could they have felt a wish to preserve for future times’ tokens of the departed unless a belief in the immortality of the human soul operated as a practical belief (Prose II 52).
Even if individual humans never spoke of either God or immortality, then, the belief in immortality is carried by the epitaphs that they utter. Moreover, Wordsworth’s insistence upon the epitaph’s credence in an immortality has at least three important consequences for poetry and the proper understanding of it. First, it establishes a transcendental perspective – albeit, a negative one – that evaluates lives in the light of immortality, past the perspective of any one individual. In that, it provides reasons for criticizing not just specific epitaphs and remarks of Pope and Johnson but their basic presuppositions and procedures. Wordsworth criticizes their interest in discrimination – their cultivation of observation and the appreciation of characters distinctive enough to call observation forth. In his view, the difficulty of the epitaph is not due, as Dr Johnson remarked, to ‘the scantiness of the objects of human praise’ or ‘the want of variety in the characters of men’. It lies, rather, in minimizing the importance of the fact that epitaphs are ‘records placed in the bosom of the all-uniting and equalising receptacle of the dead’ (Prose II 57).
Thus, Wordsworth asserts that ‘the affections are their own justification’, that the writers of epitaphs do not need to provide any credentials for the persons whom they mourn, because the very fact that they are moved to write an epitaph is the only relevant justification (Prose II 57). Yet the second consequence of Wordsworth’s insistence upon the epitaph’s involvement with a transcendental perspective is that the affections may always justify an epitaph without making all epitaphs equal. One may judge them and criticize them – not for falling short in minute observation but rather for emphasizing what is personal in grief. Although the affections of particular persons for the person they lament may motivate the epitaph, the epitaph should not fall into the circumstantial. Even if it were proper for us to analyse those we love, it would none the less mean nothing to the reader to have a detailed picture of the exact nature of the relationships between mourned and mourners.
The third consequence of Wordsworth’s treatment of the epitaph is that it becomes the emblem of a poetry that aspires to counteract the increasing segmentation of the literary marketplace. Against the factionalism of the reviews, with their commitment to deriving identity for themselves from their opposition to others, Wordsworth presents the epitaph as the very obverse to ‘proud writing’. The epitaph, he says, is not ‘shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all – to the wise and the most ignorant; . . . the stooping old man cons the engraven record like a second horn-book; – the child is proud that he can read it; . . . it is concerning all, and for all . . .’ (Prose II 59). Wordsworth had, we saw in his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff , raised the question of authority and its generational reach, and had argued for a limitation on paternal authority much like the limitation he proposed for political representatives. Yet in his discussions of the epitaph, he prizes it as the literary form that most completely escapes the partiality of political and literary party and the more abstract but real partiality of poetic genre and subject (exemplified in the appeal of religious subjects to elderly readers of poetry that Wordsworth had mentioned in his Essay Supplementary to the Preface).
What draws Wordsworth to the epitaph as he describes it is that it epitomizes the urgency of questions of autonomy to his understanding of the poetic mission. For the epitaph identifies death as one of the few experiences that all humans face, and attempts to accommodate that universality to a series of individual perspectives that can retain their autonomous value and accord it to other perspectives. (The stooping old man and the child ‘proud that he can read it’ are not trying to debate with one another over who has the superior interpretation or evaluation.) With Wordsworth’s emphasis on the epitaph’s importance, his commitment to an essentiallly liberal version of what poetry can do is complete. The disagreement between the views of the child and the stooping old man cannot be remedied by discussion, because their views are importantly part of who they are. Yet the epitaph registers an insistence that human attachment – to friends, family, and country – continues in the absence of agreement.
NOTES
1 See Owen and Smyser’s discussion, Prose I 193–220. For a sustained analysis, see Margaret Russet, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2 Wordsworth’s only commercially successful prose was his A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, which appeared in various editions from 1810 through 1835 during his lifetime. Although this essay scants A Guide, its basic argument – that Wordsworth evolves a strong claim for the importance of judgement rather than reliance on the existence of objects – could be extended to A Guide. Wordsworth’s distinctive treatment of the guidebook involves treating it as an occasion for explaining how one should see particular views rather than for an inventory of the important sites of the Lake District.
3 WL i 123–9.
4 See Prose III 23–4. See also Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
5 Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), p. 153.
6 Prose I 24; and Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 95–133.
7 Paine, Rights of Man (1791–2), cited Halevy, Philosophical Radicalism, p. 187.
8 Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9 Andrew Bell’s school in Madras and Joseph Lancaster’s in London were prototypes of a new systematized classroom that developed around 1800; Jeremy Bentham elaborated on their schemes in his Chrestomathia of 1817. These schools harnessed mutual instruction – which involved scrutiny and competition among students – so as to make mass education financially practicable.
10 The Savoyard Vicar makes his profession of faith in Rousseau’s prose discourse on education, Emile (1762). It caused outrage because it is a negative defence of religion, which replaces claims that the existence of the world is evidence of the existence of God with the argument that individual conscience and moral capacity provide a model for the possibility of a divine being. Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790 pursues a similar line of argument.