61 In addition to the general impression of Wordsworth and Dorothy being almost husband and wife when they lived in Alfoxden in 1797 and when they travelled to Germany in 1799, as described in Chapter Three, the observation of Crabb Robinson also attests to this impression. Crabb Robinson told Charles Lamb in 1816 that “he never saw a man so happy in three wives as Mr. Wordsworth is.”
The so-called “three wives” included Dorothy, Mary Hutchinson, and Mary’s sister, Sara Hutchinson (qtd. in Hagstrum 85).
62 Right after his marriage with Mary, Sir William Lowther cleared the debt Sir James Lowther owed to the Wordsworths, amounting to £10,388. 6s. 8d (Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life 207).
63 It was not until 1816, before the marriage of Caroline Wordsworth (daughter of Wordsworth and Vallon), that Mary Hutchinson and Annette Vallon finally met. To use the words of Stephen Gill, this event serves “to complete one movement in his [Wordsworth’s] life” (William Wordsworth: A Life 299).
A. Marriage of the Mind and the External World
The self-discipline of a healthy poet, as discussed in a previous part, was extended to include the nation in the poet’s mind. In the first part of Home at Grasmere, Wordsworth sees Grasmere as a beautiful place, a harmonious society:
A termination, and a last retreat,
A Centre, come from wheresoe’er you will, A Whole without dependence or defect, Made for itself, and happy itself,
Perfect Contentment, Unity entire. (Poems I, 147-151; my italics) The picture of a harmonious whole in his description of Grasmere belongs to the aesthetic catalog of the beautiful in Burke’s and Francis Hutchenson’s theories.
Though this society contains differences, these differences are closely related to produce the effect of identity: “One of a mighty multitude, whose way/ Is a perpetual harmony” (201-202). The perfect image of harmony projected on to Grasmere, however, is not without its problems when taking the real aspects of life into account.
Wordsworth confesses that, after second thoughts, Grasmere, or anyplace he goes, is never without encounters of hardship:
I came not dreaming of unruffled life, Untainted manners; born among the hills, Bred also there, I wanted not a scale
To regulate my hopes; pleased with the good, I shrink not from the evil with disgust, Or with immoderate pain. (347-352)
Bracing for difficulties, he determines to face the “evil” and the “pain” actually existing not only here in Grasmere but also in the world. Ironically, the gap between what is found in the world and what he pictures as a place of beauty calls for the
recognition “a scale.” Towards the end of the first part of Home at Grasmere, this
“scale” is understood as “a genuine frame” of divine contrivance, which is capable of erasing the distance between the ideal and the actual: “Society is here / A true
Community― a genuine frame / Of many into one incorporate. / That must be looked for here” (614-617, original italics). This “true Community” of concordia discord, under “paternal sway,” is “[o]ne household, under God, for high and low, / One family and one mansion” (617-619).
In the second part of Home at Grasmere, separated from the first part and used as a “Prospectus” for The Excursion when it was published in 1814, Wordsworth
promises to unite the actual with the ideal by transforming the material into a divinity of mind. Acting as a divine “genius poet,” Wordsworth’s ambition is to discover
“Beauty” in the “living Presence of the earth” (Poems II, 42):
the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these [Beauties]
A simple produce of the common day.
― I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation. (52-58)
The belief that “the individual Mind” and “the external World” is “exquisitely”
“fitted” (63-66) is Wordsworth’s philosophical argument not only for The Excursion but also for his poems as a whole. However, the mind, as discussed in Chapter 3, is for Wordsworth an immaterial existence isolated from the material body. The combining of the disparate entities is only possible when the material is subsumed into the realm of mind. Upon hearing Wordsworth’s argument in the “Prospectus,”
however, William Blake sneered at this fallacy: “Does not this Fit, & is it not Fitting
most Exquisitely too, but to what? ― not to Mind, but to the Vile Body only & to its Laws of Good & Evil & its Enmities against Mind” (qtd. in Bloom The Visionary Company 128). The natural world, instead of “fitting exquisitely” with the mind, is commensurate only with the body.
The seemingly impossible task of incorporating the material with the immaterial, body with mind, is soon practiced in the first book of The Excursion.64 The
Excursion contains two main characters: the poet and his senior old friend “the wanderer.” Once a peddler, the wanderer is portrayed as a noble savage, possessing the ability to see the inwardness of things through the education of Nature. A
father-image for the poet (“I learned / To weigh with care his words, and to rejoice / In the plain presence of his dignity” [Poems II, 74-76], the wanderer is at the same time Wordsworth’s imagined self, who is “endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine” (79-80). This vision is the ability to integrate mind with world, finding “Beauty” in “the common day.” In the argument claimed in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth is to show his reader a life of “flesh and blood,”
rather than “abstract ideas” (Prose I, 130).
The story of “flesh and blood” is described by the wanderer through a lady named Margaret when he and the poet stop at her disheveled house: “It was a plot / Of garden ground run wild” and “[t]he gooseberry trees that shot in long lank slips” “had tempted to o’erleap / The broken wall” (Poems II, 453-459). The house is ruined because the family members living here have all passed away: due to the scarce harvest from “[t]wo blighting seasons,” worsened by “affliction in the plague of war”
(537; 539), taking away the life of Margaret’s husband (Robert), her children, one by
64 The first Book contains two sections: Pedlar and The Ruined Cottage. Both of them are
self-sufficient poems, with their first version composed in 1798 and 1797 respectively. After several revisions, they were integrated into The Excursion with many changes, especially the interpretation of Margaret’s suffering at the end of Book the First.
one, and finally herself. Different from Salisbury Plain in 1793, these events which caused human suffering, national or domestic, are not directed as a charge against governmental policy. On the contrary, they are mysteriously rationalized in the wisdom of the wanderer. Before narrating Margaret’s tragedy, the wanderer tells the poet that:
I see around me here
Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend, Nor we alone, but that which each man loved And prized in his peculiar nook of earth Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon Even of the good is no memorial left. (469-474)
The cottage is ruined not just because the family no longer could take care of it: it has changed, “d [ying] with” the family. The wanderer’s philosophy that everything is doomed to die, man as well as nature, seeks no comfort or hope in the material.
Instead, he believes the power to “see” things through is the reason why he could narrate the story in a calm voice: “[s]ympathies there are / More tranquil, yet perhaps of kindred birth, / That steal upon the meditative mind, / And grow with thought”
(481-484). The wanderer’s “tranquil sympathy” is contrasted with the poet’s sorrow for the misfortune of Margaret’s family.65 After the story, the poet “turned aside in weakness,” and while he “stood, and leaning o’er the garden wall / Reviewed that Woman’s sufferings.” He then did the only thing he could do “with a brother’s love / I blessed her in the impotence of grief” (919-924). Upon seeing the poet’s grief, the wanderer dissuades the poet from suffering endless sorrow and leaves his comment on
65 It should be pointed out that in the original version of The Ruined Cottage (1797), the occupation of the Wanderer is peddling, a suspicious trade, being “the backbone of pilfered and stolen goods” and notorious for the propagation of “revolutionary sympathies” (Bailey 245-246). Paradoxically, in the revised form of The Excursion, the Wanderer is highlighted as a retired peddler, carrying a political undertone when Wordsworth’s early political inclination is taken into view.
Margaret’s story:
My Friend! enough to sorrow you have given, The purposes of wisdom ask no more:
Nor more would she have craved as due to One Who, in her worst distress, had ofttimes felt
The unbounded might of prayer; and learned, with soul Fixed on the Cross, that consolation springs,
From sources deeper far than deepest pain, For the meek Sufferer. (932-939)
With the image of Christ set forth, suffering in the world is consoled by faithful religious belief. The disparate tone in such stories of human suffering marks the change from the earlier Wordsworth when he dealt with a similar topic, if we compare the vehement charge against government at the end of Salisbury Plain (1793) with the revised Ruined Cottage discussed here. As James H. Averill notes, “after 1805, the center of his inquiry shifts to the metaphysical problem of evil, to suffering taken as a theological issue” (14). What Wordsworth preaches here is an other-worldly view of life: the “pain” inflicted on the body invites no political discourse to assert itself.
Instead, the pain of the body informs the story, the moral lesson of which is to
inculcate the steadfastness of the “meek Sufferer” when she faces difficulties in life.
This “meditative sympathy,” different from the corporeal pain felt by the viewer discussed in Chapter One, aims to erase any political implication related with the body and transcend it for a religious one, which in turn consoles the body in pain for the viewed as well as the viewer. In his “spousal verse” of intellectual mind and universe, Wordsworth downplays the meaning of pain for the material body, the “flesh and blood” that constitute the center of his story. This “marriage” of the material with the immaterial is to draw the body away from its historical contingency. What
the mind really does in its combination with the world is to disembody the material, and dub the body with belief in passive suffering. When Shelley and his future wife (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin then) read the first Book of The Excursion, both of them were “much disappointed.” The disappointment led to the following comment on Wordsworth: “He is a slave” (The Journals of Mary Shelley I, 25-26).
B. Imaging the Beautiful Nation
On the title page of The Excursion, Wordsworth inserted a poem to show his gratitude toward William Lonsdale, Earl of Lonsdale: “by thy care befriended, I appear / Before thee, LONSDALE, and this Work present, / A token (may it prove a monument!) / Of high respect and gratitude sincere” (Poems II, 5-8). In 1803, William Lonsdale cleared the debt his uncle owed to the Wordsworths. Since then, Wordsworth became close to this Tory nobleman. In February 1812, Wordsworth approached Lord Lonsdale to see about the chance of working as a civil servant.
Lord Lonsdale initially promised to provide £100 a year, but it was refused by Wordsworth. In autumn 1812 Lord Lonsdale sought help from Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister. In March 1813, the Distributor for Westmorland retired, and the vacancy was soon appointed to Wordsworth (Moorman 242-244). His position as a government official further consolidated Wordsworth’s role as a “poet-physician,”
curing the diseases of the country and preserving its health. In the first Book of The Excursion, as discussed in the previous section, Wordsworth’s strategy of finding beauty in the “common day” was to ignore embodied human suffering and produce harmony by relating the individual to the religious. In A Guide through the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth portrays a national picture of ideal harmony with the aestheticization of this historical-geographical landscape.
The outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 made the tour to the Continent a high risk, therefore the domestic tour substituted for the Grand Tour
(traveling to the Continent) as part of his liberal education. With the improvement of the roads and the construction of turn-pikes, tourists were able to visit places
discovered by travel writers such as Thomas Gray and William Gilpin, and, following in their steps, appreciated select views from certain stations. The domestic tour led the English travelers to unexplored places in Britain, such as the Lake District, Southern Scotland, Eastern Wales. Different from the domestic tours starting in the sixteenth century, the main purpose of travelers was no longer to satisfy their
antiquarian or geographical interest; instead, tourists went to the spots to make tangible the knowledge they acquired from literature, painting, and aesthetics. They appropriated Burkean phrases of the sublime and the beautiful, to which was later added the picturesque after Thomas West and William Gilpin popularized it, to describe the natural scenery.
Wordsworth’s A Guide through the District of the Lakes, when published in 1810, was only an anonymous essay attached to Joseph Wilkinson’s collection of paintings called Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire. It was not until 1823 that A Guide was published separately from Wilkinson’s painting, with a map added to it. In Wilkinson’s paintings, it is easy to detect the influence of the
Gilpinian picturesque style, with its three layers of background (sky), middle-ground (river or bridge), and foreground (a slanted tree). To follow the vogue of the picturesque travel, Wordsworth applies phrases from Burkean aesthetics (that is, the binary distinction of beauty and sublimity) and the Gilpinian picturesque in A Guide.
For instance, he defines the Lake District as an area full of the sublime and the beautiful: “I do not indeed know any tract of country in which, within so narrow a compass, may be found an equal variety in the influences of light and shadow upon the sublime or beautiful features of landscape” (Prose II, 174; my italics). Nor did the phrase “picturesque” escape Wordsworth’s appropriation: “Troutbeck,
distinguished by the mountains at its head--- by picturesque remains of cottage architecture; and, towards the lower part, by bold foregrounds formed by the steep and winding banks of the river (162; my italics). These popular aesthetic terms used in contemporary travel literature and travel tours were prevalent in Wordsworth’s A Guide. However, the appropriation of aesthetic terms in his description of the Lake District was not just to pinpoint the scenery of specific spots, as other travel literature did; it aimed to create the effect of multiplicity in unity in this area by seeing these spots as parts of a whole. To achieve this end, Wordsworth appealed to the readers’
“mind” when they appreciate these views:
In preparing this Manual, it was the Author’s principal wish to furnish a Guide or Companion for the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for Landscape, who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes with that degree of attention to which its beauty may fairly lay claim. (Prose II, 155; original italics)
The emphasis on the readers’ mind instead of their eyes has an ulterior meaning.66 Naked eyes could only discern the beauty of specific spots, but forming a whole picture of beauty demands mind, with its imaginative power to transcend the individual and material aspect of nature. This “marriage” of immaterial mind and material world as we discussed in the first Book of The Excursion puts on another face here. To help his readers with this general idea of beautiful harmony, Wordsworth adopts contemporary cartography to make abstract the Lake District.
In the eighteenth century, topographical paintings and maps were usually sponsored by landowners and aristocrats, and “[i]n these atlases, map-makers often rewarded sponsors by conspicuously representing their aristocratic arms, manor
66 As John R. Nabholtz points out, as a local resident Wordsworth wrote A Guide “in the hope that his work might serve in some way as a corrective to previous studies of local scenery” because “all previous accounts of Lake Country scenery had been directed to the eye of the reader” (288-289).
names or family pedigrees on a map’s face or in its margins” (Wiley 29). The first attempt to map out the whole of England was made in 1746 (under the reign of King George II), when General William Roy was commissioned to map Scotland’s
highlands after the Battle of Culloden. This military need for more accurate maps (based on one-inch measurements together with modern measurement tools [in 1791, the Board of Ordnance Survey purchased a huge new Ramsden theodolite]), was filled by England’s national Ordnance Survey. It was not until the England-France war in 1793 that England, under the threat of French invasion, became aware of the importance of the Ordnance Survey (France began its own OS earlier than England).
In 1798, Colonel William Mudge, was appointed Superintendent of the Ordnance Survey, and the same year (21 June), the Ordnance Survey Act was passed in parliament, listing boundaries to be shown and giving rights of access to private property by Ordnance surveyors. With the same will to imagined power, the
differences between the official map and private map not only affected the removal of cartouche and unnecessary decoration; with its political/economic intention (the mapping of Ireland from 1825 to 1838 aimed to assess land taxes accurately and reduce tensions caused by antiquated rate records), the focus of the official map was on the boundary between specific areas (shire/county) and the distribution of
landforms and vegetation, and populations.
The political/ economic function of the map was reapplied and transformed into an aesthetic one in Wordsworth’s A Guide. In the beginning of “Description of the Scenery of the Lakes,” Wordsworth describes the power of a French map to elicit the viewer’s imagination:
At Lucerne, in Switzerland, is shewn a Model of the Alpine country which encompasses the Lake of the four Cantons. The Spectator ascends a little platform, and sees mountains, lakes, glaciers, rivers, woods, waterfalls, and
vallies [sic], with their cottages, and every other object contained in them, lying at his feet…. It may be easily conceived that this exhibition affords an exquisite delight to the imagination, tempting it to wander at will from valley to valley, from mountain to mountain, through the deepest recesses of the Alps.
(Prose II, 170; my italics)
After the description of this French map, Wordsworth attempts to create the same effect by his map by asking his reader to freely imagine by way of his description of the Lake District:
let us suppose our station to be a cloud hanging midway between those two mountains [Great Gavel and Scawfell], at not more than half a mile’s distance from the summit of each, and not many yards above their highest elevation;
we shall then see stretched at our feet a number of vallies [sic], not fewer than eight, diverging from the point, on which we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a wheel. (Prose II, 171)
The landscape being termed as spokes of a wheel includes the vale of Langdale and the lake of Winandermere (south-east), the vale of Coniston (south), the vale of Duddon (the west), and so on. These spokes of a wheel appropriate William Mudge’s trigonometric triangulation of height and distance, with a specific location
The landscape being termed as spokes of a wheel includes the vale of Langdale and the lake of Winandermere (south-east), the vale of Coniston (south), the vale of Duddon (the west), and so on. These spokes of a wheel appropriate William Mudge’s trigonometric triangulation of height and distance, with a specific location