Romantic Ecology (Routledge Revivals)

Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition

Jonathan Bate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135089467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1991, Romantic Ecology reassesses the poetry of William Wordsworth in the context of the abiding pastoral tradition in English Literature. Jonathan Bate explores the politics of poetry and argues that contrary to critics who suggest that the Wordsworth was a reactionary who failed to represent the harsh economic reality of his native Lake District, the poet's politics were fundamentally 'green'. As our first truly ecological poet, Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature which exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements and is of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today. Challenging the orthodoxies of new historicist criticism, Jonathan Bate sets a new agenda for the study of Romanticism in the 1990s.

1 A LANGUAGE THAT IS EVER GREEN

DOI: 10.4324/9780203798843-1

During his highly productive residence at Racedown in Dorset and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, Wordsworth worked on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, a poem which Coleridge took to be one of the most beautiful in the language. Over the last twenty years this poem has come to look absolutely central to Wordsworth’s achievement and its narrative is now highly familiar to students: owing to failed harvests and high prices, Margaret’s husband enlists as a paid recruit; he does not return, Margaret and her family decline and die, nature re-encroaches upon her cottage plot until all that is left is an overgrown ruin. For the poet and the character – originally called the Pedlar, later the Wanderer-who narrates Margaret’s tragedy, the ruined cottage provides an image of consolation. Wordsworth tells of how he

traced with milder interest

That secret spirit of humanity

Which, ’mid the calm oblivious tendencies

Of nature, ’mid her plants, her weeds, and flowers,

And silent over growings, still survived.¹

The Pedlar responds by saying that he too has gained consolation and a sense of tranquillity, an inner peace that leads to an acceptance of suffering, from the weeds:

The purposes of wisdom ask no more;

Be wise and chearful, and no longer read

The forms of things with an unworthy eye.

She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.

I well remember that those very plumes,

Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,

By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o’er,

As once I passed did to my heart convey

So still an image of tranquillity,

So calm and still, and looked so beautiful

Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,

That what we feel of sorrow and despair

From ruin and from change, and all the grief

The passing shews of being leave behind,

Appeared an idle dream that could not live

Where meditation was. I turned away

And walked along my road in happiness.

(‘The Ruined Cottage’, 509–25)

Wordsworth has always provoked widely differing responses. With this passage in mind, I want to consider two contrasting reactions in the Victorian era. First, here is Thomas De Quincey, in his essay on Wordsworth’s poetry, originally published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1845:

It might be allowable to ask the philosophic wanderer who washes the case of Margaret with so many coats of metaphysical varnish, but ends with finding all unavailing, ‘Pray, amongst your other experiments, did you ever try the effect of a guinea?’ Supposing this, however, to be a remedy beyond his fortitude, at least he might have offered a little rational advice, which costs no more than civility. Let us look steadily at the case. The particular calamity under which Margaret groaned was the loss of her husband, who had enlisted – not into the horse marines, too unsettled in their head-quarters, but into our British army… . Here it is that we must tax the wandering philosopher with treason to his obvious duty. He found so luxurious a pleasure in contemplating a pathetic phthisis of heart in the abandoned wife, that the one obvious word of counsel in her particular distress, which dotage could not have overlooked, he suppresses. And yet this one word, in the revolution of a week would have brought her effectual relief. Surely the regiment into which her husband had enlisted bore some number: it was the king’s ‘dirty half-hundred’, or the rifle brigade, or some corps known to men and the Horse Guards. Instead, therefore, of suffering poor Margaret to loiter at a gate, looking for answers to her questions from vagrant horsemen … the Wanderer should at once have inquired for the station of that particular detachment which had enlisted him. This must have been in the neighbourhood. Here, he would have obtained all the particulars. That same night he might have written to the War-Office; and in a very few days, an official answer, bearing the indorsement, On H. M.’s Service, would have placed Margaret in communication with her truant. To have overlooked a point of policy so broadly apparent as this, vitiates and nullifies the very basis of the story. Even for a romance it will not do, far less for a philosophic poem, dealing with intense realities.²

And, by way of contrast, here is John Stuart Mill, in his Autobiography of 1873, recollecting how in 1828, twenty-two years old and in the depths of depression, he read Wordsworth for the first time. Granted, he has been reading the short poems, not The Excursion into which ‘The Ruined Cottage’ was incorporated, but the poet’s and the Wanderer’s reflections are among the best examples of that aspect of Wordsworth which Mill emphasizes:

In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression… . But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings … I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings… . The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.³

These passages are the products of two different kinds of reading. De Quincey’s is materialistic and realistic, sceptical and interrogative, ultimately political. Mill’s is spiritual and emotive, sympathetic and engaged, ultimately medicinal. In one, the reader tells the poet what he should have done; in the other, the reader allows the poet to do something to him. Neatly reversing our expectations, De Quincey has produced a Utilitarian reading, Mill a Romantic one.

The most influential recent readings of Wordsworth are in the tradition of De Quincey’s, though they are, alas, nowhere near so comic as his. They seem to demand of poetry that it should attempt to solve political and social problems; they forget Chekhov’s advice that it is the business of art to pose questions in interesting ways, not to provide answers.⁴ Jerome McGann is annoyed with Wordsworth for finding consolation in nature when he ought to be attending to economic conditions. He is also annoyed with Keats for attending to swallows instead of Corn Laws in ‘To Autumn’, just as Marjorie Levinson is annoyed that Wordsworth doesn’t talk about coal-barges on the river Wye and vagrants in the ruins of Tintern Abbey.⁵ In an essay in which George Crabbe is praised for looking rural poverty squarely in the face, McGann argues that the relationship with nature in poems such as ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is a matter of ‘compensatory justice’, ‘Romantic displacement’, and ‘the “fond illusion” of Wordsworth’s heart that some uncertain hope presides over all disastered things’.⁶ ‘Displacement’ is the key term here: comfort in nature is read as an escape from, or even an active suppression of, socio-political reality.

Wordsworth’s Nature ‘upholds and cherishes’ suffering humanity ‘first and last and midst and without end’. Ecological nature is Wordsworth’s fundamental sign and symbol of his transcendent Nature because the objective natural world – the field of chemistry, physics, biology – contains for human beings, whose immediate lives are lived in social and historical fields, the images of permanence which they need. Like Coleridge, however, Wordsworth translates those ecological forms into theological realities: nature as Nature, the Active Universe and manifest form of the One Life.⁷

So it is that Alan Liu feels a need to do away with this transcendent Nature: ‘there is no nature except as it is constituted by acts of political definition made possible by particular forms of government’.⁸ Since the work of John Barrell, critics of Romantic representations of rural nature have become increasingly interested in questions of landowner-ship.⁹ David Simpson looks at parish records and agricultural histories in order to establish the real state of sublunary nature in the Vale of Grasmere during the early nineteenth century and to consider how true or false Wordsworth’s representation of it is in his poetry.¹⁰ In a book aimed at the student market, Roger Sales advances an angry reading of ‘Michael’ which accuses the poem of ignoring where economic change comes from. Towards the end of the poem we learn of Michael’s cottage that ‘the ploughshare has been through the ground / On which it stood’; according to Sales, Wordsworth’s phrasing effects a cunning evasion of the identity of the driver of the plough – rural change is made to seem like an inevitable process of nature, not a depredation brought about by the aristocracy. Wordsworth suppresses the role of the large landowners in the decline of the smallholders, the ‘statesmen’ whom he so admired; already in ‘Michael’ he is implicitly toeing the line of the local grandees, the powerful Lowther family to whom he will later openly toady in his 1818 by-election addresses.¹¹ Critics in this mould like to point out that a majority of statesmen did not really own their land, but held it under a system of ‘customary tenure’ which allowed it to revert to the lord of the manor if certain payments (‘feudal obligations’, Sales calls them¹² ) were not made. One looks in vain in such books as Sales’s for reference to the process of enfranchisement which enabled many statesmen to become genuine freeholders.

There is a constant implication in all this work that Wordsworth ought to have written about real economic conditions; hence the analogy with De Quincey’s comments on what the Wanderer ought to have done about Margaret’s unfortunate position. But where De Quincey was playful, others are in deadly earnest. In a recent study of Pastoral and Ideology, Annabel Patterson says of a chapter on ‘Michael’ by a critic of an older generation that it is ‘an attractive but overly generous reading’.¹³ The critic’s superiority to the poet is proclaimed by that ‘overly generous’. We know about ideology and economic reality, therefore to read ‘Michael’ with Wordsworth’s own emphasis on the shepherd’s bond with nature, rather than his bondage to the aristocracy, is to read over-generously. What, one wonders, does Annabel Patterson make of John Stuart Mill’s reading of Wordsworth? Is it ‘overly generous’ to read a poet in such a way that he pulls you through a nervous breakdown?

De Quincey’s witty dismantling of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ was in fact an aberration in his criticism. In his more characteristic mode he juxtaposed Wordsworth and Crabbe in the way that McGann does, but came down firmly on the side of Wordsworth. Responding to a comparison in a letter by John Clare,

The Opium-Eater wondered that [Clare] should think of comparing Wordsworth and Crabbe together, who had not one thing in common in their writings. Wordsworth sought to hallow and ennoble every subject on which he touched, while Crabbe was anything but a poet. His pretensions to poetry were not nothing, merely, but if they were represented algebraically, the negative sign must be prefixed. All his labours and endeavours were unpoetical. Instead of raising and elevating his subjects, he did all he could to make them flat and commonplace, to disrobe them of the garb in which imagination would clothe them, and to bring them down as low as, or even to deb...