W. J. B. Owen

Understanding The Prelude

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Understanding The Prelude

W. J. B. Owen

Humanities Ebooks

W J B Owen receiving an honorary degree, 19??

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Understanding The Prelude 12 2. The Sublime and the Beautiful 31 3. Literary Echoes in The Prelude 57 4. Wordsworth’s Aesthetics of Landscape 74 5. ‘A Shock of Mild Surprise’ 91 6. Two Wordsworthian Ambivalences 112 7. Wordsworth’s Imaginations 131 8. ‘The Charm More Superficial’ 155 9. The Object the Eye and the Imagination 174 10. ‘The Ascent of the Mind’ 188 11. ‘The Poetry of Nature’ 215 12. ‘The Most Despotic of our Senses’ 237 13. ‘Such Structures as the Mind builds’ 258 14. ‘The Perfect Image of a mighty Mind’ 274 15. The descent from Snowdon 292 16. ‘A Sense of the Infinite’ 313 17. ‘Prose’ 333

They probe deeply into questions that most readers of Wordsworth would never have formulated, or recognized as problematic. What is meant by ‘the poetry of nature’? How exactly does the symbolism of the Snowdon episode work? What does Wordsworth mean by ‘Imagination’, and what reflections led him to place one poem under ‘Poems of Imagination’ while another, equally imaginative, appears under ‘Poems dealing with the Affections’? Do the processes involved in writing or experiencing ‘A Night-Piece’ deserve the term Imagination as defined by either Wordsworth or Coleridge? Exactly how does the great English poet of the natural

7

Preface

With one exception, the essays in this volume have appeared hitherto only in the pages of The Wordsworth Circle, Professor Owen having been little given to self-promotion. They are collected here as a service to students and to scholarship. W. J. B. Owen was a scholar to his fingertips, and his quiet assurance in any matter to do with Wordsworth’s texts could be relied upon implicitly. Like many habitués of the Wordsworth Summer Conference, founded in 1970 by Richard Wordsworth, I have long felt that they deserved a wider audience, and re-reading them in the process of formatting raw scans into finished text, I came across numerous reminders of why I did so. On the surface they share little with the critical procedures dominant in the 70s and 80s of the last century, and they are mercifully free of theoretical jargon, yet their refusal to submit passively to the poet’s claims, is a strength Professor Owen’s work shares with such sceptical methodologies as deconstruction or new historicism.

The essays dwell on a limited range of themes, mostly to do with matters of aesthetic definition, or of psychological exactitude in pinning down just what it is that given Wordsworth passages—usually the absolutely central passages—are about. They frequently return, ruminatively—as do the essays of many other critics—to the same teasing problems. Their style is quiet, unflamboyant, methodical, and flavoured with a dry humour which is sometimes barely detectable, and is most evident, perhaps, in the opening essay of this collection—a starting point nominated by Professor Owen himself when considering such a collection. Yet their substance bears, very often, upon the most debated aspects of Wordsworth’s mind and art.

8

s own practice in The Prelude, as opposed to the lyric experiments of 1798–180

hat curious issue, into its disquisition into what it means to rea

ncerns itself me

ly text, rath

Sublime relate to Edmund Burke, the most quoted theorist of the Sublime? Are the terms Fancy and Imagination discriminations of relative value? What weight should we attach to each of the words in ‘a shock of mild surprise’ and how does this experience relate to other Wordsworthian intensities? How, in practice, does the dispute between Coleridge and Wordsworth vis-à-vis the language of prose bear upon hi

0? As the editor of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, The Prose

Works of William Wordsworth, and the Cornell edition of The Fourteen-Book Prelude, and as the author of Wordsworth as Literary Critic, Jack Owen had unequalled resources for finding the apt illustration of any question one might ask. A debate was once held at the Wordsworth Summer Conference concerning the relative merits of the 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude. Five learned persons were divided by the question whether the appearance in Book 3 of the 1850 text of the poetical expression ‘an arrow’s flight’ as a measure of distance was, or was not, proof of the artificiality of the later text. It required Professor Owen to point out quietly that the only reason that the phrase did not appear at the same point in the 1805 text was that it was, at that date, still reserved for use in the Book 4 account of the Discharged Soldier, having been part of that narrative since 1798. Only someone who knew both texts through and through (not merely his personal favourite) could make that point. And the opening essay in this collection takes off from a witty exploration of precisely t

lly read The Prelude. T. S. Eliot once said that the most valuable contribution a critic can make to

literary appreciation is to draw one’s attention to a fact, and literary contracts often require authors (somewhat optimistically, perhaps) to attest that any statement in their work ‘purporting to report a fact is true’. Critical inquiry which co

thodically with establishing what is the case deserves to be relished. In its quiet way, also, Professor Owen’s book offers an alternative view of

editorial process from that which is current. As a participant in the editorial work of the Cornell Wordsworth—he edited the Fourteen-Book Prelude—Professor Owen was, of course, engaged in some sense in restoring the earliest possible text, or at least the earliest version of a late text. But in this case, as he points out, his task was to restore the poet’s text of the so-called 1850 Prelude, as opposed to the fami

er than to advance a text based on the critic’s claim to superior judgment.

9

of discovery, the

ime leverage of t at image and directs one’s visualizing imagination back to the natural sublime. Perhaps Wordsworth came to see the justice of Professor Owen’s view

Richard Gravil

I do not propose to summarise the essays in this volume. But I will call attention to a personal favourite. The essay entitled ‘The Descent from Snowdon’ takes the characteristic (and subversive) position that a passage is not necessarily profound and valuable, or even lucid, merely because the poet chose to give it some prominence. One may enjoy the essay simply for its quiet irreverence in that respect. But the argument that in 1805 Wordsworth was adopting values that had little to do with the way his poetry had been created, and advancing these as if they were unproblematic values, is an important one, and wittily expressed. It is ironic, Professor Owen argues, that ‘the vision from Snowdon … should be the starting-pointing for a tedious and obscure argument which will tell you that the very power which conceived that vision is not enough; is, in a sense, undesirable, is in need of taming, is in need of supplementing and balancing by characteristics which are often those of a minor poet.’ Moreover, ‘a man “in mental repose” will no longer discover the types and symbols of eternity in an Alpine pass, or the perfect image of a mighty mind in a Welsh cloudscape, or the sublimity of the Cumbrian mountains echoed in the man-made sublimity of a great city—he will not discover these, for being complete he no longer needs to discover anything, and the excitement

sense of what Wordsworth often calls “admiration,” will no longer emerge in poetry.’ It is a challenging point for one peroration to level at another.

A sub-theme of this argument is that Wordsworth has been persuaded by his post-revolutionary recuperation to value sublimity less and beauty more than a great poet ought. One could, of course, disagree with that point of view on several grounds. But did Wordsworth? My own reading of some of the revisions to The Prelude in subsequent years suggests otherwise. At key moments in the poem his afterthoughts accentuate grandeur and add quietly to sublime effects. In the skating ‘spot of time’, for instance, a propos of mountain echoes, Wordsworth changes the phrase ‘with the din, meanwhile’ to ‘with the din smitten’, substituting a word of power for a peculiarly lame expression. In the boating ‘spot’, merely by changing ‘with trembling hands’ to ‘with trembling oars’ he quadruples the subl

h.

10

Acknowledgements

The essays in this volume were first published in The Wordsworth Circle, ed. Marilyn Gaull, between 1972 and 1997 and are reproduced in this format by kind permission of Professor Gaull.

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Abbreviations

BL S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson

Bate (1983), Enquiry Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas

on the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (1958). EY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Early Years* Journal The Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E de Selincourt, Ernest de

Selincourt (London, 1941). LY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Later Years* MY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Middle Years* Prelude The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford:

The Clarendon Press, 1959), usually in the text of 1805. Prose Prose Works, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1974). PW Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and

Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940–49) S&B ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, in Prose Works * Wordsworth’s letters are cited from the edition of Ernest de Selincourt, and where possible from the

revised volumes by Chester L. Shaver, Mary Moorman, and Alan G. Hill (1967–)

Chapter 1

Understanding The Prelude1

In Book IV of The Prelude the adolescent Wordsworth encounters the Discharged Soldier. He is walking back to Hawkshead from somewhere near the west side of the Windermere ferry by moonlight (after a regatta celebration, the text of 1850 says), when he comes upon the soldier resting against a milestone and making depressing noises. The scene is near a village, probably Far Sawrey:

In a Glen Hard by, a Village stood, whose roofs and doors Were visible among the scatter'd trees, Scarce distant from the spot an arrow's flight. (IV.425–8)

In this narrative of rather precise detail, we might expect a more precise measurement than "Scarce ... an arrow's flight." How far is an arrow's flight? If you lacked an appropriate reference book, you could find answers, rather various answers, from other passages in The Prelude, provided you had access to various manuscripts of the poem and were prepared to undertake a little arithmetic. In the climbing of Snowdon in the last book, MS W records that the dark blue gulf which is a prominent feature of the scene was "Not … more … than half a mile" from the observers; MS A says that it was "not the third part of a mile"; revised MS A, "Not twice the measure of an arrow's flight"; MS D, "Not thrice the measure of an arrow's flight," which is revised in MS D to the final straightforward version, "Not distant from the shore." If we conflate these sources and base our arithmetic on MS W, we find that two or three times an arrow's flight is half a mile; if on MS A, that two or three times an arrow's flight is a third of a mile; hence an arrow's flight is about 400 or 300 yards (MS W), or 300 or 200 yards (MS A). Or again, we can note that the student who fascinated Wordsworth as he entered Cambridge for the first time was observed, according to MSS ABC, "Till he was left a hundred yards behind" (III.9); 1 A paper read at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, August 1990. The two texts of

Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination are denoted by “1744” and “1757.”

Understanding The Prelude 13

but according to MSS DE, "Till he was left an arrow's flight behind." If we bypass all these complications and consult Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v.

"Archery," we learn more quickly that the maximum range of a conventional longbow is 300 yards. If we arrive at this information by this briefer route and if we reject the figure of 400 yards as a gross exaggeration, we learn that Wordsworth met the soldier, at most, 300 yards from the village: it is therefore credible that he could see the "roofs and doors" (426), and, further on, that he could see that "the fires [were] all out; / And every silent window to the Moon / Shone with a yellow glitter" (451–3). If we take the longer route to the information, we shall reach the same conclusion, with the variation that the distance may have been 100 or 200 yards; and we shall also learn that Wordsworth knew, or thought he knew, something about the fire-power of the English longbow. Whether this last information casts light on him or on other poems I have not discovered, except that "Yew-trees" mentions the "sounding bows" of the English at Agincourt and earlier battles in France; as if Wordsworth might have both seen and heard the longbow in use.

A more interesting speculation might be why he chose this method of defining distance, in both the early passage about the soldier (1798), and in the later passages (?1817 and ?1832) in MS D about the student in Cambridge and the scene from Snowdon. If we had only the later passages, we might be tempted to regard the expression as a piece of poeticizing such as occurs from time to time in the later text; in fact, the expression survives in Book IV from the earliest manuscript to MS C, where it is deleted; MS D, having introduced it once and used it twice, gets rid of it quite smartly from the final book, but retains it in Book HI. So why was it used at all? Perhaps (we might guess) because it is more "poetical" to say "an arrow's flight" than "a hundred yards" or "two hundred yards" or "three hundred yards" (all metrically equivalent, incidentally, to "an arrow's flight"). This consideration did not deter Wordsworth from using "half a mile" or "the third part of a mile," which seem almost as prosaically precise as "two hundred yards," or "a hundred yards" in Cambridge, where the range of the longbow seems to have been drastically reduced.

A final consideration is that, at various moments in the growth of The Prelude, Wordsworth must have supposed his audience sufficiently knowledgeable about archery not to stumble over the sense of "an arrow's flight"; he did not expect a reader to pause, as I have paused, to ask, "And how far might that be?" In this supposition he may, of course, have been deceived, as he has been, eventually, deceived with regard to twentieth-century readers. My point is that most twentieth-century readers do not recognize their own ignorance about longbows in this

Understanding The Prelude 14

passage; at least so I should judge from the absence of any comment on archery in any commentary with which I am familiar. My more general point is that the reader who does not recognize his ignorance in this instance, and in others, is not reading Wordsworth's poem; he is reading only a fraction of it, and the remaining fraction is passing through his head as, literally, non-sense—words without meaning.

In this sense I have to confess that I have never been able to read the whole of The Prelude, and I suspect that I never will so read it. I am led to this conclusion both by my experience of reading the poem and by a good many years of attempting to teach graduate students to read it; and from this experience I conclude that there are problems of interpretation that can be solved; problems that cannot be, or, so far, have not been solved; and there are intermediate cases where the commentator gropes towards a solution and sees that it can be no better than tentative. It follows that no commentary known to me solves, or indeed recognizes, all the difficulties.

Nearly twenty years ago I raised this matter in a paper read to a well-regarded editorial conference which is held annually at the University of Toronto.1 At the time I was concerned more with Wordsworth's prose than with The Prelude or other verse; but the paper contained a few references to The Prelude which seem to have found their, way into the literature of the poem such as the Norton edition. Since that time I have edited the later version of the poem—The Fourteen-Book Prelude (1985). My main object in that book was to present what seemed to me Wordsworth's, not his family's text; but various reviewers seem to have found the commentary to the Cornell volume useful, and I have continued to expand it since the book appeared. What follows draws on that expanded commentary. I will generally avoid passages with which I have dealt in the Cornell commentary; and I repeat from my Toronto paper a useful passage from Wordsworth himself on the duties of an editor which he wrote in 1805 in a letter to Scott:

A correct text is the first object of an editor: then such notes as explain difficult or unintelligible passages or throw light on them; and lastly, … notes pointing out passages or authors to which the Poet has been indebted, not in the piddling way of [a] phrase here and phrase there (which is detestable as a general practice) but where the Poet has really had essential obligations either as to matter or manner. (EY, p. 642)

I am not much concerned here with the concept of a correct text, which these days tends to be arrived at by a rationale unknown in Wordsworth's time; but I shall try to illustrate what he calls "difficult or unintelligible passages," and his borrowings. And

1 "Annotating Wordsworth," in Editing Texts of the Romantic Period, ed. John D. Baird (1972).

Understanding The Prelude 15

in discussing these I shall hope that in at least some instances I shall awaken in some of you a recognition of your ignorance of Wordsworth's meaning, as I often recognize my own, and stir you to an effort to overcome it.

The simplest sort of problem, or at any rate the smallest in scope, arises from the interpretation of a single word or short phrase. No doubt because of the small scope, such problems tend to be passed over without recognition of difficulty: the context carries the reader over into a half-understanding, instead of halting him with the question: "What does that mean? What is an arrow's flight?" or whatever. Some of these cases can be solved, readily enough, if the commentator turns, as he does too infrequently, to OED. For instance: in III.549–59 Wordsworth observes that Cambridge served him as a "midway residence" between his more or less sheltered experience, as a Cumbrian schoolboy, and "mortal business," commonplace dealings with the real world. This, he says, was "Far better, than to have been bolted forth, / Thrust out abruptly into Fortune's way / Among the conflict of substantial life" (III.557–9). The alert reader will pause to ask: "What does 'bolted forth' mean?" The Norton editors in this instance were indeed alert, and glossed the phrase as: "Forced ... as an animal is forced to bolt from cover." They should, in my view, have been more alert to mere grammar; for, since the phrase "to have been bolted forth" is in the passive voice, the verb "bolt" must be transitive, whereas "to bolt from cover" uses it intransitively. If we look at OED, vb.2, sense 4, we find the meaning: "To let off or discharge like a bolt; to shoot; ... to expel," as the missile of a crossbow (the bolt) is shot forth. Here is a suitable transitive sense, quite parallel to the following phrase "Thrust our abruptly"; OED actually uses this passage to illustrate this sense.

A little further on, Wordsworth compares the aged academics of Cambridge with the shepherds of Cumbria:

Here on my view, confronting me as it were Those Shepherd Swains whom I had lately left, Did flash a different image of old age … A Book of rudiments … which with sedulous care Nature holds up before the eye of Youth In her great School; with further view, perhaps, To enter early on her tender scheme Of teaching comprehension with delight. (III.579–89)

I am concerned with the word "view," which occurs twice in these dozen lines: first, a different image flashed "on my view," that is, came within the scope of

Understanding The Prelude 16

Wordsworth's observation. The second occurrence, "with further view … / To enter early on her tender scheme / Of teaching comprehension with delight," obviously means something different: "further" means "in addition to holding up the book of rudiments," and "view," as often in Wordsworth, means "intention" (OED, sense 12), a usage which survives in twentieth-century English (I suspect) only in the phrase "with a view to," meaning "intending to." The expression disappears from the text of 1850, but the sense of "intention" is retained in the auxiliary verb "would": "Nature's book of rudiments— / That book upheld as with maternal care / When she would enter on her tender scheme / Of teaching comprehension with delight" (1850 [557–60]).

My examples thus far are of problems which can be solved readily enough by a mere reference to OED, always supposing that the commentator is sufficiently alert to recognize that a problem exists. Here are some instances where, with or without the aid of the dictionary, the evidence is ambiguous, and the reader will have to use his judgment, assisted by his feel for Wordsworthian idiom, at best; or, at worst, he must merely guess.

At IX.294, Wordsworth's French hero Beaupuy is described as "of other mold" than the royalist officers with whom he associated early in his stay in France. And at XII.255–60 he contrasts "men adroit / In speech and for communion with the world / Accomplished" with another group, presumably decent honest Cumbrian rustics, "Men … of other mold than these." The Norton edition glosses "mold" as "The earth from which the human body was regarded as having been formed" (note to XII.260, referring also to IX.295). This is a credible sense: OED, sb.1, sense 4: "Earth regarded as the material of the human body"; a sense called obsolete or poetical, and not cited later than Milton's Nativity Ode. I should propose, rather, OED, sb.3, sense 4: "Said of things serving as a matrix or model; esp. in phr. to be cast in a (certain) mould; to have a certain form or character." I am moved to this alternative for two reasons: first, that the quotations under sb.1, apart from their dates, do not seem to distinguish various grades or qualities of mould from which the human body might be made; secondly, because the usage under sb.3 is thoroughly common in Wordsworth: "Anecdote for Fathers," 3: "His limbs are cast in beauty's mould"; the sonnet "A Poet 12–13: "the grandeur of the Forest-tree / Comes not by casting in a formal mould"; "The Church at San Salvador," 28: "A Hero cast in Nature's mould"; "The Brownie," 11: "in the mould of mercy all is cast"; or a passage from the Guide to the Lakes {Prose 11.181): "the secondary agents of nature, ever at work to supply the deficiencies of the mould in which things were originally cast." There are, of

Understanding The Prelude 17

course, many instances of "mould" meaning "earth" in Wordsworth, but not many, I believe, in the sense of material for the human body.

At XIII.226 ff., the passage about Dorothy's softening influence on him, Wordsworth says:

But for thee, sweet Friend,

My soul, too reckless of mild grace, had been Far longer what by Nature it was framed,

namely, the stern "rock with torrents roaring" which Dorothy beautified into a rock garden. The problem here is the sense of "Nature," always a troublesome word in Wordsworth. R. D. Havens, the most voluminous commentator on the poem, insisted in The Mind of a Poet (1941) that Nature "must mean 'the congenital or inborn qualities or talents of a person …' [he is quoting Arthur Lovejoy], and not mountains, trees, and the like" (p. 627). This is a possible sense, especially when we look at the late text [XIV.249], which has "My soul … had stood in her original self too confident, / Retained too long a countenance severe," where "original self might seem to confirm Havens' interpretation. But just below in 1805 (237): "Nature, destined to remain so long / Foremost in my affections, had fallen back / Into a second place" (sc. love of nature leading to love of man), "Nature" must mean "mountains, trees, and the like." And if we look back to Book 1.362 ff., we find entirely parallel phrasing: "Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame / A favor'd Being, from his earliest dawn / Of infancy doth open out the clouds." The collocation "Nature" and "frame" confirms that "Nature" means the same in both passages, and the personification of "Nature" as the power of the natural environment is plain in the passage in Book I.

In these last two instances, I arrive at my interpretation of "mould" and "Nature" by the time-honoured method of drawing on parallel expressions of which the sense is not in doubt.

Another sort of difficulty arises from the use of a common word in a Wordsworthian context to which the word seems quite alien, and therefore (Wordsworth's word) unintelligible. In IV.268 ff. Wordsworth rebukes himself for indulging in trivial social pleasures, "feast, and dance, and public revelry, / And sports and games," at the expense of "feeding pleasures … that eager zeal, / Those yearnings which had every day been mine," when he had been

A wild unworldly-minded Youth, given up

Understanding The Prelude 18

To Nature and to Books, or, at the most, From time to time, by inclination shipp'd, One among many, in societies, That were, or seem'd, as simple as myself.

The drift is clear enough: the trivial social pursuits of this summer had replaced two aspects of his schoolboy way of life, solitary attention to nature and books, "or, at the most, / From time to time," participation in "societies, / That were, or seem'd, as simple as myself—such as the athletic activities of his schooldays in the company of his fellows, described in Books I and II. The problem occurs in the phrase "by inclination shipp'd." "Shipped" in British usage means "transported by ship"; in North American usage it can mean "transported by rail or other means of conveyance" (OED), a use which Wordsworth could not have known. Havens (p. 362) was so puzzled by the word that he proposed to amend it to "slipp'd," which would be more convincing if the preposition following had been "into societies" rather than "in societies." I have no remedy; it may be that Wordsworth thought the passage as unintelligible as do his editors, since he deleted it from MSS A and B.

Likewise at IV.392: as Wordsworth walked towards the encounter with the soldier, "beauteous pictures"

… rose

As from some distant region of my soul And came along like dreams; yet such as left Obscurely mingled with their passing forms A consciousness of animal delight, A self-possession felt in every pause And every gentle movement of my frame.

The general sense is: even though the "beauteous pictures" seemed a product of the mind, they involved some degree of physical pleasure. The usual sense of "self-possession" ("self-command, composure") does not seem appropriate; we need something like "self-awareness," echoing "consciousness" in the preceding line; that is, awareness of physical well-being ("animal delight") diffused through the body and its activity. This passage survives into MS D, and is there revised towards the 1850 text, where the troublesome usage does not recur.

The beautiful little boy whom Wordsworth saw in unseemly company in a theatre lobby in London is thus described:

Understanding The Prelude 19

… the Boy had been The pride and pleasure of all lookers-on In whatsoever place; but seem'd in this A sort of Alien scatter'd from the clouds. (VII.374–7)

To scatter something is to distribute it in discrete particles: "To distribute to various positions; to place here and there at irregular intervals"; "To throw or send forth so that the particles are distributed or spread about" (OED, senses 4, 5); and all senses in OED carry the notion of dispersion of parts or particles. Unless Wordsworth supposed that the boy was one of many aliens descended from the clouds, it is obvious that he means merely "dropped."

A variant of this sort of problem occurs when a common word demands an unusual emphasis, or assumes a quite unusual, but nevertheless documented, function. At XII.97 ff. Wordsworth describes his discovery of the worth of the common man; he had

… an anxious wish

To ascertain how much of real worth Did at this day exist in those who liv'd By bodily labour.

This looks innocent enough: he is investigating the worth of manual labourers. But the passage gains weight, and has more bearing on Wordsworth's situation in Grasmere at the time of writing (1804), if we pay attention to the verb "liv'd." I believe he is referring to those whose "bodily labour" produces directly (and not by financial exchange) the means of survival. He knew such people, or at least he knew that they had existed: Michael's family was one such, where the housewife spun flax and wool which Michael and Luke carded; they ate

… a mess of pottage and skimmed milk, Sat round the basket piled with oaten cakes, And their plain home made cheese. (78–109)

In the Guide to the Lakes he describes the state of affairs in Cumbria "till within the last sixty years" (sc. till the 1770s; the figure is updated in successive editions of the Guide): "Towards the head of these Dales was found a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists, among whom the plough of each man was confined to

Understanding The Prelude 20

the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation of his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and cheese" (Prose, 11.204). The race was disappearing, as Wordsworth knew, but he could still admire it in fact or in retrospect for what it achieved in its way of living. This admiration is brought out by the emphasis on "liv'd" which I am suggesting.

In some such instances the word which needs the commentator's attention seems utterly common and insignificant, but the correct interpretation enlightens the whole context. At XII.286 ff. Wordsworth is still discussing the valuable common man:

… I felt that the array

Of outward circumstance and visible form Is to the pleasure of the human mind What passion makes it, that meanwhile the forms Of Nature have a passion in themselves That intermingles with those works of man To which she summons him.

This passage needs explication of the sense of "passion" which I will omit here since I wish rather to gloss the curious word "meanwhile," which in its normal sense (a period intervening between two defined points of time) seems to have no meaning here. But if we look further in OED we find the sense (actually s.v. "Meantime"): "Used ... in adversative or concessive sense: While this is true; still, nevertheless": or, approximately," "on the other hand, complementarily." The contrast established by this reading is between human passion and the passion inherent in the forms of nature; and the sentence acquires a neatly balanced structure which it lacks until the force of "meanwhile" is recognized.

Again: after the death of Robespierre which is recorded in a well-known passage in Book X, Wordsworth was, he says, optimistic about the success of the Revolution (X.568 ff.): he supposed that its high ideals would be sustained or renewed. In this, he eventually admits, he was mistaken: he confesses that "juvenile errors are my theme" (638), and that he "was led to take an eager part / In arguments of civil polity / Abruptly, and indeed before my time" (660–2). But before he achieved this sobering, he had confidence in "youth" and "Nature" (meaning, probably, "human nature"):

Youth maintains, I knew …

Communion more direct and intimate With Nature, and the inner strength she has,

Understanding The Prelude 21

And hence, oft-times, no less, with Reason too, Than Age or Manhood, even. To Nature then, Power had reverted: habit, custom, law, Had left an interregnum's open space For her to stir about in, uncontrol'd. (X.605–13)

The force of this passage depends ultimately on our interpretation of "then" in "To Nature then, / Power had reverted." The obvious sense is, "at that time," i.e. after the death of Robespierre. But since it will emerge that Wordsworth's trust in youth and nature was misplaced, this cannot be the sense, for it will appear that France did not change her imperialistic course. We need a particular sense of "then" given in OED (sense 5) as "that being the case … therefore, consequently, as may be inferred"; or, more simply here, "so I thought": "To nature, so I supposed, Power had reverted." In this supposition, he confesses shortly in the passages quoted earlier, he was deceived. In order to make it clear that supposition, not historical fact, is involved, we must read "then" as I have indicated, and not as marking a point in historical time.

There are passages in the poem where the reader is faced with what might be called an overwhelming gush of abstractions, undefined and yet seeming to have a meaning. Here is one such from Book I, well known and frequently quoted, yet glossed inadequately or not at all by the commentators:

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou Soul that art the Eternity of Thought! That giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion! (1.428–31)

Havens attempted a paraphrase of this which does little more than repeat and juggle the list of abstractions: "Spirit of Wisdom! Thou that art the soul of the universe and the embodiment of what the human mind grasps as eternity! Thou that givest life and constant movement [or, everlasting existence] to the ideas and forms which thou conceivest!" (p. 301). This has to be dismissed forthwith, if only because it is impossible to believe that Wordsworth intended "Soul" to be interpreted as the "embodiment" of anything. Havens' general comment is better: "This is one of Wordsworth's many attempts to express his conception of the Eternal Spirit; he avoids 'God' because of anthropomorphic and ecclesiastical connotations and because he is thinking less of a personality than of a vast creative and guiding intelligence of which he can form no definite conception." I cannot do much better

Understanding The Prelude 22

than this, but here are a few thoughts which may "cast light" (Wordsworth's phrase in his letter to Scott) on the unintelligible, without pretending to "explain" it. "Wisdom" is perhaps a seemingly benevolent principle in external nature which appears to act for the benefit of humanity (or of the universe, animate or inanimate, in general). "Spirit" and "Soul" appear to have the common sense of "vital principle," that by virtue of which the universe is alive rather than dead. What is addressed is the vital principle of what 11.266 calls an "active universe," rather than (and here I come close to Havens' general comment) what The Excursion, IV. 14–15, calls "a Being / Of infinite benevolence and power," which is distinct from the universe and which, fairly clearly, is what most people call "God." The concept in our passage seems to lie between that of The Excursion and that of the Prelude of 1799, which at the corresponding point addresses "ye Beings of the hills! / And ye that walk the woods and open heaths / By moon or star-light" (Prelude 1799, p. 46). These are equally unidentified, but at least they have a quasi-concreteness that brings them nearer to a possible credibility than the abstractions of the major texts.

With "Thou Soul that art the Eternity of Thought," after rejecting Havens, I can do little except to suggest that it may be the "eternal mind" by which the child in the Immortality Ode (114) is said to be haunted; but as that phrase is equally difficult, we are no wiser. Overall, I succumb to Havens' judgment, that Wordsworth is dealing with something "of which he can form no definite conception": the language and the interpretation are correspondingly indefinite.

I should place this sort of writing under "Fading Abstractions," a heading invented by J. P. Ward in Wordsworth's Language of Men (1984), though Ward does not use this passage to illustrate his classification. It will be obvious from my approach that I find such passages a challenge, that I am frustrated when they do not yield to the usual methods of the commentator, and that I might be tempted (am so tempted, in some instances) to dismiss them as merely bad writing.1 Ward, whose views some might wish to share, thinks better of them: of some similar lines in "Tintern Abbey," and others, he says that "these passages can be felt by most readers to be both elusive and compelling at the same time … the very fact of the imprecise

1 Consider, in the often quoted passage V.619–29, the use of undefined abstractions: "Visionary

Power," "darkness," "shadowy things," "transparent veil"; the obscurity of the figure involved in "mansion" as (apparently) an appropriate place for making changes; and, especially, the vagueness of reference of the demonstratives (words that function by necessarily referring to other elements in the context): "there" (twice, 622, 623, perhaps having the same referent, perhaps not) and "that" (626). There are obvious parallels in 11.327–32, but that passage, evidently dealing with the experience of the natural sublime, is only less obscure than that in Book V.

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nature of the language used is thus itself the more powerful, because it seems to be conceding and in fact urging this very inadequacy … these blurred abstractions … recognize our basic earthbound condition, and they do not aspire to an exactitude which is impossible" (pp. 87, 88, 90). This sounds like praising such passages for the very obscurity of which I am complaining; yet it is the best, and probably the only, critical language if you wish to praise; it may reflect the way in which most readers accept such passages—in which I must accept them, if at all, when I have given them up as unintelligible; but I shall usually continue to strive to find intelligibility in them, on the assumption that the poet meant them to be intelligible when he wrote them.

I turn to the last of Wordsworth's desiderata for a commentary, the noting of sources, borrowings, or allusions (as the current jargon has it). Some of these are sources of ideas; some add what I call in chapter 3 "a bonus of significance" ; some add no more than the sense of tradition, of the use of the language of English, or even European, poetry; a few, again, demonstrate a surprising lack of judgment on Wordsworth's part.1

A source neglected by commentators is Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination. I will defer to a footnote some minor borrowings of word and phrase,2 with one exception by way of specimen. In one of the generally admired revisions of the 1850 text, VI. [12], the phrase "the mild magnificence / Of calmer lakes" probably comes from the 1757 text of Akenside (I. 415–16): "yon flowery bank / Clothed in the soft magnificence of Spring," especially when we notice "Clothed in the sunshine of their withering fern" in Wordsworth's preceding line.

More important than such borrowings of word and phrase are those of philosophical or psychological idea. In Book XI there is a difficult passage dealing with the domination of the sense of sight; I discuss it in "The Most Despotic of our Senses" (Chapter 12). A particularly obscure element in the argument is the deferring to "another Song," no doubt The Recluse, a statement of 1 For instance, the borrowing from The Faerie Queene (III.xi.28) in III.590–6, where Wordsworth

seems to be more intent on cramming in as many Spenserian details as possible than on showing how the image of the arras illuminates "artificial life / And manners" in Cambridge.

2 Prelude, V.377: "The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties"; cf. 1744, 1.22: "The guide, the guardian of their lovely sports" 108 (also "Tintern Abbey," 110: "The guide, the guardian of my heart"); Prelude, IX. 198 ff.: the arguments of the royalist officers were "Maim'd, spiritless, and in their weakness strong / I triumph'd" (IX.265–6): cf. 1744, II.582–3 (an allegorical hero is urged to stand up to his tormentor): "Brave in thy fears, and in thy weakness strong, / This hour he triumphs"; Prelude, XII.57: "the intellectual eye"; cf. 1744, III.29: "Fancy cheats the intellectual eye."

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… the means

Which Nature studiously employs to thwart This tyranny, summons all the senses each To counteract the other, and themselves. (XI. 178–81)

I do not know how a sense can counteract itself, but the earlier phrases might be illuminated by a passage in Akenside which proposes, not the thwarting, but the supplementing, of one sense by another:

So while we taste the fragrance of the rose, Glows not her blush the fairer? While we view

... a limpid rill Gush through the trickling herbage, to the thirst Of summer, yielding the delicious draught Of cool refreshment; o'er the massy brink Shines not the surface clearer, and the waves With sweeter music murmur as they flow? (1744, 11.76–85)

Smell and thirst (akin to taste) are here supplemented by the visual of the blush of the rose and the gleam of the water, and the auditory of "sweeter music." The supplementing of smell and taste, by extending the appeal of the object concerned to sight and hearing, and thereby (as it were) diffusing and diluting it, might be thought to be an instance where "all the senses each" are summoned "To counteract the other."

In X.710 ff. Wordsworth distinguishes two sorts of mind and their reactions to French affairs. The first sort is the mind which thinks in terms of the sublime:

They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,

… who had made All powers of swiftness, subtlety, and strength Their ministers, used to stir in lordly wise Among the grandest objects of the sense …

The second sort is the mind which thinks in terms of the beautiful:

… they too, who, of gentle mood Had watch'd all gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild …

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Akenside also knew these two minds:

Different minds Incline to different objects, one pursues The vast alone, the wonderful, the wild, Another sighs for harmony, and grace And gentlest beauty. (1744, III.546–50)

And in a prose note (to III.22) he claims:

Some men ... by the original frame of their minds, are more delighted with the vast and magnificent, others on the contrary with the elegant and gentle aspects of nature. And it is very remarkable, that the disposition of the moral powers is always similar to this of the imagination … [the first class] are … most inclined to applaud examples of fortitude and heroic virtue in the moral [world]. While [the second class] never fail ... to yield the preference to the softer scenes of virtue and the sympathies of domestic life.

The sublime and the beautiful are eighteenth-century commonplaces (though Akenside predates Burke's Enquiry); but I have not seen the psychology involved—the definition of minds in terms which will become those of Burke's aesthetics—used elsewhere.

In "The Ascent of the Mind" (chapter 10), I discuss an unused passage in MS Y of The Prelude connected with Book VIII. The drift of the early part of this passage is to trace the progress of the ordinary mind from childhood to an ordinary maturity; the progress is made by a series of steps in which one interest is found to be unexciting, and is replaced by another. I quote my paper: "Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then increasing indifference, and the developing mind requires more potent stimulus if it is to retain its admiration for the environment". In that paper I postulated that Wordsworth's argument was derived from introspection and, in its account of the very young, from his observation of his children, especially his son John. When I turn to The Pleasures of Imagination, I am less sure of this postulate: Akenside at least anticipated Wordsworth's argument:

Witness the sprightly joy when aught unknown Strikes the quick sense, and wakes each active power To brisker measures: witness the neglect Of all familiar prospects, though beheld With transport once; the fond attentive gaze Of young astonishment; the sober zeal