Wordsworth and Romanticism
William Wordsworth’s centrality to any review of English Romantic period writing continues fundamentally undisturbed. Critical fashions and methodologies change, but as regards English Romanticism they are tested against a canonical core of writers. Of those, Wordsworth almost always takes centre stage either as the best support of the new theories, or as the writer whose authority they must displace in order to show their innovative power and originality. One might risk saying that, for good or ill, Arnold has proved right in his predictions and Swinburne wrong: it is Wordsworth and Byron, not Coleridge and Shelley, who have remained the touchstones of canonical English poetry of the romantic age.1 In Wordsworth and Byron inhere the definitive contrasts of the period’s sensibility and style, the consistent Englishness of the former and the cosmopolitan inconsistency of the latter. But the recognition Wordsworth received in his own lifetime was not so straightforward.
Many major works routinely used in his critical evaluation now – the ‘Salisbury Plain’ poems, The Borderers, The Prelude in its several versions – remained unpublished while Wordswsorth was alive and largely unknown to his contemporaries. The depth of his immersion in republican thinking and radicalism generally during the Revolutionary period, the formative stress which must have been occasioned by his enforced abandonment of Annette Vallon and their daughter, Caroline (a connection itself politically fraught because of the mother’s staunchly Royalist persuasion), now seem crucial to the interpretation of his work. His writings successfully displace both these commitments, historical and personal, on to the distraits, indigent characters typical of his early poetry, and on the communitarianism he found exemplified by Lakeland society, charging his poetry with the same compensatory energies which the childhood fragmentation of his own family must have inspired. Yet such involvements appear to be what had to be overlooked by his critics or suppressed by him for his reputation to flourish. Yet it is because he is so implicated intellectually and humanly in his age that Wordsworth can articulate most comprehensively that passage through revolution to restoration which is commonly taken to identify the Romantic dilemma.
Official recognition of his literary pre-eminence, though, came in Victoria’s reign rather than in the heyday of Romanticism, and it is uncertain that by then a romantic poet was being honoured. Wordsworth was laden with doctorates from the University of Durham in 1838 and Oxford in 1839, awarded a pension from the Civil List in 1842, and created Poet Laureate in 1843 after Robert Southey’s death. Thomas De Quincey’s history of Wordsworth’s critical reception in his Recollections as if it might properly be couched in the language of a Church history is still plausible: ‘up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant’.2 And, one should add, from here the royal progress begins. After his death, the battles over his reputation were conducted in terms he might not himself have invited, especially in his writings up to 1814. As Stephen Gill records in Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998), protagonists as varied as John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Leslie Stephen, Edward Caird, William Hale White, and Thomas Hardy debated Wordsworth’s entitlement to cultural veneration in arguments which invoked a contradictory range of criteria – religious, moral, aesthetic, and political – clearly orientated towards mid and late-Victorian needs rather than towards those which had driven the poet himself at the time of writing the disputed works. No doubt this is quite proper, and Wordsworth’s translatability into a figure of contemporary debate is always going to be a sign of his enduring literary merit. But what gets left out, and what certainly became muted in Victorian discussion, was the sense that he might be located in a period rightly called romantic amongst writers sharing peculiarly romantic premises for writing and thinking. His home in the Lake District became not only a shrine for the faithful but an occasional salon for all sorts of thinkers, geologists, and mathematicians as well as critics and writers.3 Wordsworth produced Wordsworthians, intellectuals redeemed from the abstraction or dissociation incurred by scientific advance at the expense of religious belief, or by utilitarianism in public policy and private morality. Those not satisfied by the doctrinally unspecific religiosity of his poetry could be affected by the comprehensiveness of his ethical vision, in both cases enjoying an unprecedented expansion of sympathies too large to be housed within one church or a single practical social programme. To them, Wordsworth demonstrated that culture might be separated from action, and this contemplative ethos (which nevertheless produced action to safeguard it) sets the tone for a recognizably modern sequestration of the arts in society.4
Despite this Victorian cast to Wordsworthian success, M. H. Abrams, in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1987 commemorative volume, William Wordsworth and the Age of Romanticism, can celebrate him as ‘the central figure of English Romanticism [who] has exerted a revolutionary influence on all our lives’.5 He has little trouble in collecting earlier plaudits or testimonials deferring to Wordsworth as the greatest poet of the age from Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Blake, Keats, and Hazlitt. Wordsworth’s influence is also a palpable presence in the writings of his strongest detractors, an irony he himself noted in the case of Byron. Ignorance of Wordsworth on the continent did not stop him having an indirect influence on European Romanticism vicariously through the idioms he had bequeathed to the highly popular poetry of Sir Walter Scott and Byron, especially through Canto III of the latter’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.6 Revolutionary nationalism, the political output most characteristic of Romantic enthusiasm, was fostered throughout Europe by a poetic afflatus transcending the Tory and aristocratic feelings of its authors. Wordsworth’s distinctive patriotism, from the ‘Lucy’ poems to the final book of The Excursion, shared this radical impulse when transferred to countries like Italy and Greece labouring under foreign rule. Yet this openness to enthusiastic translation sounds difficult to reconcile with the uses to which Wordsworth’s writings were put by later Victorian conservatism; and of the Wordsworth constructed out of those needs Arnold could write in his Preface of 1879, ‘On the Continent he is almost unknown.’7 Wordsworth’s continuing romantic serviceableness, by contrast, is more easily accounted for as a strategic revision of his earlier republicanism, primarily associated with his explicitly anti-monarchical Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff of 1793 but also inherent in the democratic, pantheistic sympathies of that poetry of ‘the still sad music of humanity’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’.
Critical understanding now of the Romanticism to which Wordsworth was central is beset by historical diffidence. We are wary of subscribing unreservedly to an age’s image of itself, as if subscribing to an ideology. Equally, we are suspicious of the arrogance of retrospect: the prejudice of assuming that hindsight necessarily affords us a more accurate or objective view of an historical period, superior to that of its own culture. It is generally assumed that we can detect the Victorian view of Wordsworth and differentiate our own critical readings from it. However it is arguable that the complex Victorian view has persisted in obscuring Wordsworth’s pivotal role in expressing a Romantic difference from and development of what went before. ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ condenses the conflict of Enlightenment and Romantic ways of understanding within the calculatedly fictitious excerpt from an imaginary autobiography. When the poem first appeared, its extraordinary ambitions remained largely unrecognized. Subsequently, Victorian critics accepted that it was of a piece with Wordworth’s ‘philosophy’, and had to be reckoned as such, the philosophy ignored or championed. The poem did not, as its first readers mostly thought, fit unexceptionably into a tradition of eighteenth-century topographical poetry, contributing to a developing fashion of psychologizing sensibility whose most influential recent practitioners were probably James Beattie in The Minstrel (1771–4) and Mark Akenside, whose The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) had recently been republished (1772). With a slight tweaking of the meaning of ‘ballad’ to take in the French connotation of walking (faire une petite balade) the poem’s travelogue, literal and figurative, could also be thought in 1798 to assimilate peripatetic possibilities of the picturesque to the generic mixture ironically controlled by the other ballads in the collection (Lyrical Ballads) in which it first appeared. Irony was the master-trope of the brilliant group of German Romantics assembled in Jena in 1799. Also, it was the ironic treatment of character, evincing authorial superiority over rather than identification with the conventional boundaries of self, for which they commended Goethe. Coleridge famously likened Wordsworth and Goethe in their ‘feeling for, but never with their characters’.8
The Victorian reading of Wordsworth appeared to develop this initial reception, but then retreated from its confrontation with Wordsworth’s Romantic ambitions. The revealing debate between Wordsworth’s Victorian readers centred round the idea of his philosophy. Francis Jeffrey and William Hazlitt had attacked Wordsworth’s ‘system’ as perverse or politically obfuscating. For Jeffrey, Wordsworth used unsubstantiated allusions to a background in systematic thought to justify offending against generally accepted rules of poetic propriety. Hazlitt agreed, and further accused Wordsworth’s ‘levelling’ muse or Jacobinical ‘system’ of allowing him to incorporate lower-class, agrarian characters – the people – in his poetry, through a show of imaginative sympathy which exonerated him from taking any further action on their behalf in real life. Matthew Arnold praised this sublimating habit which so inflated Wordsworth’s range: ‘Where, then, is Wordsworth’s superiority? It is here: he deals with more of life . . . he deals with life, as a whole, more powerfully.’9 To translate Wordsworth’s universals back into the theories from which they came, and then to relate the poem’s value to the plausibility of the theories, is the mistake made by ‘Wordsworthians’. In the Preface to his 1879 edition of Wordsworth, Arnold takes one of those Wordsworthians to task:
the fervent Wordsworthian will add, as Mr Leslie Stephen does, that Wordsworth’s poetry is precious because his philosophy is sound . . . But we must be on our guard against the Wordsworthians, if we want to secure for Wordsworth his due rank as a poet . . . His poetry is the reality, his philosophy . . . is the illusion.10
In his lucid History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, though, Stephen gave a more sensible reply to the traditional disparagement of Wordsworth’s philosophical rhetoric when he claimed that, ‘doctrines which men ostensibly hold do not become operative upon their conduct until they have generated an imaginative symbolism’.11 Poetry like Wordsworth’s becomes the necessary conduit of philosophical ideas which would otherwise remain obscure or would entirely lack credibility. Stephen’s defence sounds stoutly empirical; but it also states a core notion of Romantic, post-Kantian philosophy. In art we grasp the otherwise inexpressible end-point of a philosophy ambitious to demonstrate our relation to a world that always exceeds our scientific differentiation of it because we belong to it in still more fundamental ways.
An auxiliar light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestow’d new splendor; the melodious birds,
The gentle breezes, fountains that ran on,
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obey’d
A like dominion; and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye.
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,
And hence my transport.
(Prel.1805 ii 387–95)
Clearly there is a doctrinal core to a passage like this, but its purpose seems rather to stress the importance of conveying some background theory by other means – in an experience by which mind is realized not in abstraction but in the intensity with which it renders back to us nature itself. ‘Obeisance’, ‘devotion’, ‘transport’ suggest commitments to felt experience which amply substitute for its theorization, but commitments whose full import is not understood unless the reader acknowledges their power of philosophical attorney. We can’t, in other words, extract the lyricism from the philosophical rhetoric without diminishing the poetry.
Stephen’s straightforward remark can be used to summon up Romantic philosophical presences usually thought to be obscure and unhelpful. Parts of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria appear to founder when loaded with material from the German philosopher Schelling. A twentieth-century critic as accessible as E. D. Hirsch, though, can write a persuasive book on Wordsworth and Schelling, locating Wordsworth’s poetry at the heart of the European philosophical avant-garde.12 Coleridge’s philosophical disappointment with Wordsworth as expressed in a famous letter to him of 1815 sounds clumsy and importunate in its expectations:
In short, Facts elevated into Theory – Theory into Laws – & Laws into living & intelligent Powers – true Idealism necessarily perfecting itself in Realism, & Realism refining itself into Idealism.13
Wordsworth had perhaps already got there more economically, wise to the fact that poetry might be able to show what philosophy could only postulate, and that the philosophical poem’s supreme importance lay in fulfilling that office. Coleridge, of course, had The Excursion in mind, not Wordsworth’s earlier work. ‘Tintern Abbey’ poses intepretative problems similarly liable to anachronism because the poem pre-dates whatever Coleridge might have told his friend and then collaborator of his German reading. It was in March 1801 that Coleridge announced to Thomas Poole that he had, single-handedly, broken with the British philosophical tradition, and the thought of David Hartley in particular, to take up a Germansounding one especially representative of continental romanticism.14 In fact, though, ‘Tintern Abbey’ again can be argued to pre-empt Coleridge. The poem’s subtle balance in which Hartleian elements, which look to the British empirical line of thought, are poised against a rhetoric of the sublime, seems already to know Coleridge’s later excursions into German aesthetic philosophy and therefore to represent his transition in advance.
It is not difficult to find general and particular anticipations of the plot of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in Hartley’s Observations on Man of 1749. Hartley contributes significantly to an English philosophical Enlightenment whose radical impulse parallels that of the philosophes in France. Although less charismatic than the tradition of Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, and Condillac, nevertheless the line of Hartley, Priestley, Darwin, and Godwin comparably used Lockean epistemology and theories of the association of ideas to further radical causes. Wordsworth’s narrative in ‘Tintern Abbey’ tells the story of a self constructed out of sensations which change through association from being the passive building blocks of memory into portentously energized players in transformative self-consciousness. Here is a self-sufficient materialism capable of generating spiritual categories on its own from below without any need of theological help from above. Hartley, like the Unitarian Priestley who edited him, was pious, and the Dissenting religiosity of their ‘active universe’ has sometimes veiled their affinities with contemporary French iconoclasts. But it is the derivation of a spiritual terminus from a base in sensations, a foundation by implication critical of other sources of the spiritual, ecclesiastical, or inspired, which allies Hartley and his followers with the Enlightenment. Equally, this comprehension of a final, qualitatively different transcendence attaches Enlightenment progressivism to romantic theories of sublimity. Hartley wrote that
we have a power of suiting our frame of mind to our circumstances, of correcting what is amiss, and improving what is right: that our ultimate happiness appears to be of a spiritual not a corporeal nature; and therefore that death, or the shaking off of the gross body, may not stop our progress, but rather render us more expedite in the pursuit of our true end: so that if one be happy, all must: and lastly, that the same association may also be shown to contribute to produce pure ultimate spiritual happiness.15
Read in the light of this passage, the collectivism of ‘Tintern Abbey’ becomes more comprehensible, its ‘still, sad music of humanity’ a source of happiness not misery for the narrator because its image of the convergence of individuals, the motor-force of the entire poem, predominates over its melancholy. The self’s preparation for this insight has been a progress across time through increasingly refined sensations incorporating rather than eschewing youthful, unrepresentable, animal affinities with nature, a progress itself moving towards a comparable extinction of consciousness signalling unconscious rapport:
that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
(lines 42–50)
The fact that Wordsworth then redescribes this insight as ‘a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’ indicates once more his Romantic view of how we retain a philosophical interest in areas philosophy points to but cannot itself articulate. The poem is an elegy for an absent cause. Just as much as does The Ruined Cottage, it celebrates a humanity paradoxically characterized by its inability to leave lasting memorials of its intensest feelings, experiential limits whose ultimate expressiveness is found, like Margaret’s life and cottage, in its dissolution into the larger natural elements from which it arose. Precipitated out of itself, Wordsworth’s self, early and late, discovers authenticity in a loss of individual consciousness, and his poetry expresses his difficult sense that he still remains a match for this new, even fatal expansion. For reductive historicism, sublimation rather than the sublime is what is really at issue here. Tintern Abbey in 1798 was swarming with beggars and the Wye valley echoed day and night to the sound of ironworks. A poetic vantage-point high enough to continue deaf and blind to this defining uproar is actually, it is argued, the view from nowhere. The poem’s plot, too, is allegedly evasive. Five years back should recall a time when, the father of an illegitimate French child, exiled from his new family by France’s war with his native country, he wrote a republican pamphlet too treasonable to publish and suffered a sense of alienation better summed up by the poem he wrote at the time, ‘Salisbury Plain’ (excerpts published in Lyrical Ballads as ‘The Female Vagrant’) than by any lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’:
‘Oh! dreadful price of being! to resign
All that is dear in being; better far
In Want’s most lonely cave till death to pine
Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star.’
(lines 306–10)
The poem that replaces this with ‘the hour / Of thoughtless youth’ and says it ‘cannot paint / What then I was’ is sublimating history for its own purposes, and discrediting these purposes as a result.
Few historicists are as reductive as this, but the temptation for the rest of us to see Wordsworth’s mind, in Jerome McGann’s words, as having ‘triumphed over its times’ in a pejorative sense and Wordsworth as having ‘lost the world merely to gain his own immortal soul’ is strong.16 The sublime can always be redrawn as sublimation, the view from nowhere as historical irresponsibility rather than the delegation of philosophical power to poetry. The difficulty about doing this where ‘Tintern Abbey’ is concerned is that such a reductio ignores the poem’s Enlightenment affiliations and overlooks the connected ways in which it shows material circumstances leading to a state of indeterminacy or unconsciousness in which we have to begin again, newly born into the wider franchise of humanity, with all to play for. The poem stutters twice, impressively, just after those two moments in which it has made the most demands on the reader struggling to follow its meditative journey. After trying to ‘see into the life of things’ the reader is brought up short with ‘If this / Be but a vain belief, yet . . .’: a dangerous relinquishment of consciousness, a laying asleep only undertaken on the absolute guarantee of revival, now appears to lose its underwriter and be obliged to canvass alternative means of support. Spiritual solvency is subsequently recovered, and ‘Tintern Abbey’ departs from an alarming near-miss with the ‘dreadful price of being’ described in ‘Tintern Abbey’, but only to fall into alarming arrears yet again. The Wordsworthian ‘lover’ of nature has no sooner succumbed to another transport, ‘A motion and a spirit’, than the possibility of its mistakenness is raised: ‘Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught, should I the more / Suffer my genial spirits to decay . . .’ (lines 112–14). The reassurance disturbs because the preceding, persuasive afflatus had seemed to rule out of court any other care, any thought of the need for some back-up. We are suddenly reminded that the sublime is free-floating, that it supervenes precisely when reference to the world fails but a sense of affinity persists, when the individual’s sense of a collective belonging continues beyond her power to distinguish her own identity. This unprecedented revolution, whose content informs the very structure of Wordsworth’s poem, destabilizes its certaintities and proclaims it a post-Revolutionary poem, one which patently could only be written by and about someone at the end of the Revolutionary decade. Its buoyancy, its power of self recovery or regeneration after sublime extinction, shows its progressive, Enlightened inheritance. Knowledge that its ‘unremembered acts’ are founded in sensation and that it is always to this empirical building-site of ideas and feelings to which it will be returned, charts the poem’s direction and keeps the reader afloat.
This sublime, unmodelled openness to life releases an experience which can look very like death. After all, The Excursion of 1814 extolls, in the Wanderer’s words ‘the sublime attractions of the grave’ (iv 238), and in his character it asks us to admire someone who ‘could afford [Wordsworth’s italics] to suffer / With those whom he saw suffer. Hence it came / That in our best experience he was rich . . .’ (i 370–3). These latter lines go back to The Pedlar drafts of 1803–4 (MS e 328–30; RC 410) and show a lasting aesthetic adventurousness and sympathetic brinkmanship co-existing with a growing emphasis on Christian consolation. The Wanderer’s rich expense of self suggests he might even be able to pay what Wordsworth’s Female Vagrant calls the ‘dreadful price of being’. His aptitude for sublimity makes him a match for ‘the awfulness of life’ (ii 555), something on which he can authoritatively urge the Pastor to pronounce ‘Authentic epitaphs’ which ‘Epitomize the life’ rather than gloss it with sententiae (v 650–1). But ‘Tintern Abbey’, with its two main climaxes and subsequent recoveries from a kind of sensational bankruptcy resulting from vast sympathetic outlay, exhibits the same trauma, though closer, perhaps, to its original historical source.
Historicist critics have made us realize that this kind of reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’ must be historically reflective to be valid. Equally, this kind of reading more than covers Wordworth from historicist attacks by showing his poem’s astonishingly articulate power to represent this historical moment in sensibility when Romanticism is born out of the Enlightenment’s confidence in generating human experience in all its spiritual varieties from the bottom up. It is hardly contentious to argue that the French Revolution, whatever else it did, however awful, also gave unusual expression to such a sublime mixture. Its Supreme Being, its religious festivals, its extraordinary rewriting of the human calendar into the natural cycle of the year, even its paper money or questionable assignats, all denote a secular spirituality which replaced received spirituality with one supposedly truer to its natural origins. Its opponents excoriated what they saw as the sublimation of unacceptable political violence. And Hazlitt attacked Wordsworth’s literary version of the French Revolution as ‘the poetry of paradox’, a breaking-down of literary hierarchies and proprieties in the interests of achieving an expression of universal humanity, a Rousseauistic realignment of poetic language with its natural circumstances or material occasions which, to Hazlitt’s literary sensibility, made the cataclysmic error of assuming there really was a parallel between politics and poetry.17
One cannot have it both ways. Wordsworth cannot be consistently condemned both for sublimating politics and for reflecting in his poetry the sublime clearing of the ground which made possible both the continuation of the French Revolution and, also, the regrouping of its opponents whose tyrannical politics of Restoration were shortly to follow – and, it might be added, the revolutions of 1820 and later ones which followed that! But failure to appreciate the historical commentary furnished by ‘Tintern Abbey’ comes from the belief that any history of ideas must involve sublimation or the transmutation of historical facts into something different. Correcting this view, Wordsworth makes it his poem’s subject to show that the Romantic sublime grows out of Enlightenment materialism and the spiritual indeterminacies lying at the far end of materialism’s comprehensive claims to generate all experience from sensuous grounds. In this he is a formative thinker of the emergent European Romanticism. He also shows in action the Romantic sublime’s role of handling those experiential extremities in a language capable of finally returning their universals to sensuous beginnings, his earlier self and the younger Dorothy, fictionalized ground-plans of the unformed love of nature from which he set out.18
If one reads the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, especially in the version of 1802, with a view to establishing Wordsworth’s status as a European Romantic, two things are immediately striking: his views on the cooperation of poetry and science, and his cosmopolitanism. His cosmopolitanism is usually regarded as a Romantic excess of sympathy:
[the poet] is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.
(Prose I 141; punctuation as 1802)
Natural eagerness to relate this passage to the subjects and writing of Lyrical Ballads can blind us to the wider intellectual transitions it records. Again, it requires us to think Enlightenment and Romanticism at the same time. The socializing impetus, with its egalitarian respect for but levelling of geographical and cultural difference, ambitiously lays hold of a universal spirit of the laws or notion of human rights recalling the great Enlightenment ideologues from Montesquieu to Kant. On the other hand, Wordsworth argues that such equalities can only be secured by imaginative, poetic sympathies which work outside anything you might find in a code of international law or political constitution, in order to identify our growth out of a common nature. To the poet thus empowered, later distinctions even between the sane and the insane or between the healthy and the abused are not between good and bad but amount to a diversity of ways of being human. But to avoid pejorative distinctions or invidious comparisons, the poet has to slip under systematic modes of understanding once again and approach an undifferentiated, sublime graveyard of the silent and destroyed. Enlightenment leads into Romanticism, and Wordsworth once more writes a passage exemplary of this transition.
The same passage from the Preface continues with a positioning of the poet in relation to the scientist. Wordsworth’s poet ‘will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science . . . carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself’. The effect seems to be the same as the one we saw Leslie Stephen think necessary for ‘doctrines’ to ‘become operative’: ‘an imaginative symbolism’ must be generated. This is true, but Wordsworth’s ambitions appear to go further and to be more in keeping with romantic notions of science as furnishing a kind of mythology itself and not only something whose communication might be assisted by poetic expression. For,
If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
(ibid.)
Wordsworth is often thought of as not being as interested in mythology to the degree that the second generation of British Romantics were. Or, as in the great sonnet which begins ‘The world is too much with us’ (1802–4), he toys with the idea of affronting a base, modern, commercial realism with the startling liveliness of mythic existence:
Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
But his other uses of mythology do not necessarily share this rebarbative idealism. Book 4 of The Excursion has the anthropological discussion of religion and myth which so influenced Keats. And in the passage quoted from the 1802 Preface he envisages a mythologized science figured as a poetic being, correspondingly attractive of our human sympathies. This intellectual move should be understood as at one with the beliefs of contemporary philosophers like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel that in science, above all, a new mythology was called for if scientific progress was to be achieved. The pantheism that looks back to ancient modes of belief, attacked by Heine as characteristically Romantic, has little place here where Wordsworth’s poet follows ‘the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist’ to have their discoveries advance towards us, transfigured, part of our ‘household’.19
Again, this seems to imply not just the popularization of science but the revelation of its human character, the point of the scope of investigation it has chosen. Scientists feature significantly in Wordsworth’s intellectual genealogy and friendships, from Joseph Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, his assistant Humphry Davy through, of course, to Coleridge. But like Coleridge’s increasingly esoteric interest in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, Schubert, Oersted, Oken, and other names which do not exactly leap to the tongue of Wordsworth’s readers, Wordsworth shares the fundamentally romantic idea, stemming from Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), that science only makes sense when holistically conceived of as binding knower and known together within ‘workings of one mind’, as The Prelude has it in one of its scientific epiphanies (vi 568). Such figurations are far from being naive pathetic fallacies. Nor are they only pantheistic alternatives to Christian orthodoxy. Wordsworth’s later more doctrinal revisions of the religious sentiments of his long poems never include substitutes for a Romantic scientific mind-set. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, and the compatibility of poetic afflatus with scientific enthusiasm is frequently apparent in the calculated atmospherics of set-pieces in The Prelude and The Excursion. Still more striking are those mineral visions of the vale of Gondo (vi 549–73) and the cave of Yordas (viii 711–41) in The Prelude where it is the petrific opposite of animation which actually provides the typology and symbolism for the sublime, outer reaches of the self – a kind of paradoxically inhuman, ‘unfathered’ access to the ultimate boundaries of the human situation. These are the testing points for the scientific marriage desired in ‘spousal verse’ at the end of Home at Grasmere in 1800, later to find its way into the Preface to The Excursion as the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, the theme ‘but little heard of among men’ of how ‘The external World is fitted to the Mind’. The theme no doubt offends that transcendentalist tradition identified most closely with mid-nineteenth-century America in the figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson and recorded persuasively recently by Wordsworth’s most influential twentieth-century American critics, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Unlike M. H. Abrams, Bloom and Hartman argue that Wordsworth falls short of fully expressing the natural homelessness of the human.20 But Wordsworth’s representative, Romantic scientism needs emphasis as well. Elsewhere, many of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ complement this ambition, but by revealing how uncanny and uneasy a meeting of mind and nature can be when scenes of apparently infinite materiality conjure up a human response characteristically sceptical of its own limits – sublime again. The ‘future restoration’ in which lodges the later comfort of the ‘spots of time’ also projects an outer boundary to which we are always aspiring – ‘something ever more about to be’ – an extension of ourselves whose fraughtness is often truer to the originally discomposing, uncomfortable, childhood experiences of the ‘spots of time’.
Wordsworth’s Romanticism can figure in those allegedly slighter moments for which he was often taken to task. The lyrics begun in 1802 look modest by comparison with the sonnets of the same year which are bold in their resumption of the past and confident in their treatment of current affairs. Poems to daisies, celandines, butterflies, and green linnets, not to mention daffodils, seemed provocative in 1807 when they were included in Poems, in Two Volumes as ‘Moods of My Own Mind’. ‘Caviare’, Walter Scott observed to Robert Southey, ‘not only to the multitude, but to all who judge of poetry by the established rules’.21 Jared Curtis, however, has alerted us to the ‘experiments with tradition’ which may in fact be taking place in these poems under the guise of simplicity. Wordsworth’s contemporary, Anna Seward, saw this as a possibility but an unfortunate one, complaining that Wordsworth had imposed ‘metaphysical importance upon trivial themes’.22 But when in the second poem ‘To a Butterfly’ Wordsworth compares the alighted creature with ‘not frozen seas / More motionless’, the effrontery of the conceit draws attention to Wordsworth’s study at that time of Elizabethan and metaphysical poetry. The imposition of meaning on the insect asks for the conceit to be read through those conventions. The immobility of the butterfly reminds one of so opposite a defining or elemental capacity for flight that it is appropriately described as a fluidity temporarily suspended. But the poem perhaps also anticipates a Tennysonian, microscopic attention to detail, a proto-Victorian relish for the potential ‘treasure-house of detail’ that is the butterfly, perhaps anticipated by the first ‘To a Butterfly’ poem of the same collection which ends with Emmeline’s nervousness of brushing ‘the dust from off its wings’.23 Here, the frozen seas of the wings suggest an attention which would notice the skein of their tissue as being like a fixed grid of waves (if immobility of pose rather than iciness of colour is at issue) on which its markings sit like islands. At any rate, a metaphysical resonance is surely coupled with an observational nicety which, like the later nineteenth-century movement in painting, pre-Raphaelitism, artfully updates a once naive simplicity. Writers of the period as varied as Schlegel and Stendhal proclaimed all poetry and literature to be romantic, and while romantic syncretism (stylistically epitomized by Goethe’s Faust) has been recognized in its larger gestures of medievalism, the cult of a pagan, classical south, or the revival of folklore, its smaller details are as important. And Wordsworth’s assimilation here of a scientific niceness to fit a poetic address or apostrophe, uncannily behind and ahead of itself in English literary history, is as distinctive as his bigger Romantic sketches of natural process, memory, and nationhood. The moods of Wordsworth’s own mind are only what Curtis calls an ‘apparent privateness’. In the MS version of another lyric on a redbreast chasing a butterfly the poet reproaches the pursuit as if it were cannibalistic. But what might have been a moment of extreme preciosity, inviting scepticism, in fact so conspicuously recalls the language of Wordsworth’s literary past as if to image a universal kinship to which, romantically, our self-consciousness ought always to aspire:
Playmates in the sunny weather?
Like thine own breast
His beautiful wings in crimson are drest,
As if he were bone of thy bone
(P2V 76–7)
Adam’s lament when he fears he will lose Eve in Book ix of Paradise Lost, ‘Bone of my bone thou art’ (ix 915) sits happily with Wordsworth’s Romantic scientific habit, curious about some level on which apparent disparates actually belong to a common nature. Wordsworth’s later version, published in 1807, stresses this meaning of kinship, substituting ‘A brother he seems of thine own’ for ‘As if he were bone of thy bone.’ The same point is made, more explicitly and less metaphysically no doubt, but both the dramatic contribution of the literary allusion to the meaning and the original biological curiosity are regrettably effaced as a result.
In conclusion, I have argued that to see Wordsworth’s Romanticism in the round one has to overcome a prejudice extending from first reviewers to late Victorian admirers and beyond: that what is philosophical in his poetry contributes nothing to its success. To contest this assumption one should return to the Enlightenment traditions in which Wordsworth’s intellect was formed and see the sublime structure of his poetry its apotheosis. The ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, perhaps his most controversial poem, repeats the pattern of recovering in sensation a responsive, self-enhancing world which had apprently been lost through the growth of self-consciousness. The poem, as he told Isabella Fenwick, is Platonic in its presiding metaphor, not Hartleian. Yet, like ‘Tintern Abbey’, it inscribes on the map of one life the larger movement of intellectual history in Wordsworth’s times. Read in this way, its beginning and its end are complementary by design. The spiritual sufficiency of unthinking, material experience, when ‘The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light’ is matched by that final lodging of our utmost expression in an object of ordinary sensation: ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’. Stanley Cavell thinks that the Ode tells of ‘an ordinariness which a new ordinariness must replace’.24 Cavell is our contemporary, but as a philosopher he feels compelled to trace a Romanticism in current philosophical sophistication back to a human ordinariness paradoxically achieved through scepticism of existing boundaries of the human. Or, as David Bromwich frames the conundrum, Wordsworth is, in the 1799 Prelude’s phrase, ‘Disowned by memory’ (ii 445). His most native experience becomes a poetically empowering mystery he cannot ‘pretend to know’, including his sublimely unmastered implication in the French Revolution.25
The young Schelling wrote of the human spirit carrying ‘within itself not only the ground but also the border of its being and its reality’.26 The limitations we suffer are necessary if we are to have a self to be conscious of, an identity; but to know these necessary restrictions for the limitations they are is immediately to transform them into borders, demarcations we inhabit on both sides. This difficult, uncanny thought permeates European romanticism, from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to Chateaubriand’s monumental autobiography, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1849–50). And in English, it is Wordsworth who gives it its most memorable expression.
1 Matthew Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (11 vols., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), ix, pp. 36–54. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Wordsworth and Byron’, Miscellanies (London, 1886), pp. 65–156. Stephen Gill sets the dispute in context in Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 219–20.
2 Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 116–17.
3 John Wyatt writes illuminatingly about Wordsworth’s scientific friendships in Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See Gill’s account of Wordsworth’s friendship with the brilliant young mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton in Wordsworth and the Victorians, pp. 71–2.
4 See Richard Bourke, Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the Intellectual and Cultural Critique (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1993).
5 Jonathan Wordsworth, Michael C. Jaye, Robert Woof, with the assistance of Peter Funnell, foreword by M. H. Abrams, William Wordsworth and the Age of Romanticism (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press and The Wordsworth Trust, 1987), p. 1.
6 Robert Rehder, in Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), points this out as well as a general continental ignorance of Wordsworth’s own work (The Prelude wasn’t translated into French until 1949, for instance) in the context of an argument for Wordsworth’s European centrality mirrored by my own chapter.
7 Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, p. 37.
8 On Wordsworth’s ironic use of Bürger and Sterne in Lyrical Ballads see Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads [1798] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). For the common source in Tristram Shandy of the German Romantic ironists and the Romantic use of irony in English, see Paul Hamilton, ‘Romantic Irony and English Literary History’, in Karsten Engelberg, ed., The Romantic Heritage (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 1983). Coleridge’s remark is from Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (2 vols.; London: Routledge, 1990), ii, p. 200.
9 Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, p. 48.
10 Ibid.
11 Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols.; London: Smith, Elder, 1876), ii, p. 329.
12 E. D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling: a Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).
13 STCL iv 575.
14 STCL ii 706.
15 Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind . . . , ed. Joseph Priestley (London, 1775), p. 28. See H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (London: Athlone Press, 1962).
16 J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 88.
17 William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, (21 vols.; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), v, pp. 82–3, 162; xi, pp. 86–7; xix, pp. 12–19. The best recent study of Wordsworth and Rousseau is James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
18 My view of the sublime here is unorthodox, although, I believe, salutary. The reader could usefully contrast it with Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
19 Heinrich Heine, Historische-Kritische-Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1979), Band 8/1, p. 118. A fine introduction to the culture of romantic scientists is Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
20 G. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964); H. Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 120–93.
21 Scott to Robert Southey, November 1807. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. C. Grierson (12 vols.; London: Constable and Co., 1932), i, p. 390.
22 Jared Curtis, Wordsworth’s Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 31–2.
23 I am utilizing Peter Conrad’s conceit of illustrating Victorian sensibility (The Victorian Treasure-House (London: Collins, 1973)) through Henry James’s description of Middlemarch as ‘a treasure house of detail, but . . . an indifferent whole’. The Romantics, though, were polemical in their insistence on the inherence of the whole in the detail or the infinite in the particular, hence the need for ‘metaphysical’ readings in both stylistic and philosophical senses.
24 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 71.
25 David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).
26 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, translated in S. R. Morgan, ‘Schelling and his Naturphilosophie’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).