Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE PRELUDE” by William Wordsworth (first written between 1798 and 1805; amended and revised many times by the poet; final version first published posthumously in 1850)
So at last, over a sunny summer week this year, I got around to it.
Before I begin grinding out my opinions of it, let me set out the nature of the beast. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) began writing what we call The Prelude in 1798 when he was 28. He finished the first version of it in 1799, then expanded it by 1805. But he did not have it published. For many years he tinkered with it and revised sections of it. It was not published until three months after his death in 1850. Wordsworth never gave this opus a title. Because the book often addresses Coleridge directly, Wordsworth himself had only ever referred to it as his “poem to Coleridge”. It was his widow Mary who gave it the title The Prelude or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. You can now find scholarly editions that offer you the choice of the 1799, 1805 and 1850 versions.
As The Prelude now exists (in its 1850 version), it consists of fourteen Books. Summarised briefly, Books 1 and 2 concern Wordsworth’s childhood years and school days in the Lake District. Books 3, 4, 5 and 6 cover his days as a student at Cambridge, including a vacation in France, the books he studied and a holiday in the alps. Book 7 deals with the time he spent in London (which he did not like). Book 8 is largely devoted to his general ideas on ethics and morality and is called “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man”. Then come Books 9, 10 and 11 on his longer stay in France, focusing on his changing perspectives on the French Revolution. The concluding three Books 12, 13 and 14, are “Taste – How Impaired and Restored”, being Wordsworth’s version of how he regained his equilibrium and moral sense, and then his very general Conclusion.
Because this is a long and very discursive work, it is not all of a piece, so I will begin with the three major things that I personally find attractive and nourishing in it.
First, we certainly learn much about Wordsworth’s development as a poet. In Book Six, where Wordsworth is studying at Cambridge, he first meets Coleridge and he accuses himself of idleness. He also notes that he had not yet learnt how to write in the common language saying: “In general terms, / I was a better judge of thoughts than words” and “overprized / [the] dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice”. (Book 6, ll.123-134) Writing in language that is commonly understood was one of the main ideas put forward in Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, so he hadn’t yet embraced that concept when he was a student.
A further attraction is the vividness of his verse when he is describing physical action, as opposed to propounding aesthetic and philosophical theory. He is at his liveliest when he is recording childhood events or when he is venturing outside the Lake District and encountering, with fresh eyes, new lands and cultures. Book 1 has clear accounts of snaring birds by starlight and the famous episode – one of the sections of The Prelude that has often been anthologised – of the young boy Wordsworth taking a boat in the darkness and being unnerved by the daunting black shape of a mountain (Book 1, ll.357- 400). This was the time of his life when Wordsworth would “stray about / Voluptuously through fields and rural walks / And ask no record of the hours given up…” (Book 1, ll.254-258). In Book 2, covering his adolescence up to the age of 17, he presents himself and his friends running and rambling happily and rowing about Lake Windermere and having carefree adventures. Again he conveys the immediacy of these experiences without pontificating upon them. The same note is struck when he records walking in the hills with his dog and feeling he had a companion to inspire his verse (Book 4, ll.101-108) and in the closing books where there is his account of climbing Mt Snowdon with all its wind and hail. Where something physical is happening, The Prelude reads well.
Another positive aspect of The Prelude is what it reveals of this English observer’s changing attitudes to the French Revolution. This is of great historical interest and sometimes inspires the poet’s livelier passages. As the revolution begins, Wordsworth remarks “ ’twas a time when Europe was rejoiced, / France standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again”. (Book 6, ll.350-352). There is a common assumption that Wordsworth was at first an unconditional enthusiast for the revolution, then abruptly turned into a critic of it. This assumption is not supported by the text. Idealist or not, the fact is that Wordsworth felt misgivings even before his long residence in France. Despite admiring what the earlier French revolutionaries were attempting, he always had mixed feeling about the enterprise.
As he records in Book 6, he holidayed briefly in France when he was still a student at Cambridge. He landed in Calais “on the great federal day” and enjoyed seeing a crowd rejoicing at their new liberties BUT it gave him great pause to then see a mob preparing to ransack a monastery (or convent). Even while propounding his own idiosyncratic system of values, he always respected religion. When he settled for months in France, as recounted in Books 9, 10 and 11, his responses to revolution were always changing. In Paris he finds “In both her clamorous Halls, / The National Synod and the Jacobins, / I saw the Revolutionary Power / Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms.” There were “hissing Factionists with ardent eyes,” suggesting incipient fanaticism. And when he picks up a stone from the demolished Bastille he admits that he was not as inspired by it as he claimed to be: “in honest truth, / I looked for something that I could not find, / Affecting more emotion than I felt…” (Book 9, ll.42-73). Furthermore “The land all swarmed with passion, like a plain / Devoured by locusts…” (Book 9, ll.174-175). He is deeply distressed when revolutionaries attack or destroy churches (Book 9, ll.466-480). He praises “the bravest youth in France” for fighting against the invading armies who wished to impose a counter-revolution. When the King of France is overthrown, Wordsworth rejoices in the new republic; but he soon observes the severity of the new regime. He contrasts the earlier idealistic plans of Robespierre with his later role in Terror (Book 10, ll.498-514). He rejoices when Robespierre is overthrown and wonders if there can now be the time for the perfect republic to emerge. In the opening lines of Book 11 he is glad the Terror is over and thinks the new regime – the Directory – will be more benign. He still has the watery idealism which tells him that “Nature” will sort everything out and that younger people are nearer to Nature than their elders are. He is appalled that England now wars with France; but he is then even more appalled when the French themselves become warlike conquerors of other countries: “But now, become oppressors in their turn, / Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence / For one of conquest, losing sight of all / Which they had struggled for: up mounted now, / Openly in the eye of earth and heaven, / The scale of liberty”. (Book 11, ll.208-214) He admits to losing his early idealism and sometimes suggests that “liberty” for the individual can lead to anarchy. His reflections on France bring him up to the time he finished his first draft of The Prelude in 1805, when he declares his contempt for Napoleon and the pope who crowned him, as expressed in Book l1, ll.359-372. There is a constant interplay between his enthusiasm for the revolution and his uncertainty about it.
It should be remembered that the two most-quoted lines in The Prelude were written by Wordsworth in full awareness of their youthful naivete: “O pleasant exercise of hope and joy! / For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood / Upon our side, us who were strong in love! / Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven! O times, / In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways / Of custom, law, and statute, took at once / The attraction of a country in romance! / When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights / When most intent on making of herself / A prime enchantress…. / The inert / Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! / …Were called upon to exercise their skill, / Not in Utopia,—subterranean fields,— / Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! / But in the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!” (Book 11, ll.106-145) An earthly paradise was about to be built. But one has to note that Wordsworth’s callow sense of “bliss” and “very heaven” were as much inspired by his love for the Frenchwoman Annette Vallon, who bore his daughter, as they were inspired by the ongoing revolution. (To me, it is rather worrisome that he never specifically mentions Annette in The Prelude, making only vague allusions here and there to somebody who was important to him.)
However much his views had been modified and re-modified while the revolution was in progress, Wordsworth ended up disillusioned: “What then I learned, or think I learned, of truth, / And the errors into which I fell, betrayed / By present objects, and by reasonings false / From their beginnings, inasmuch as drawn / Out of a heart that had been turned aside / From Nature’s way by outward accidents, / And which was thus confounded, more and more / Misguided, and misguiding.” (See whole long passage of his disillusion at Book 11, ll.288-322). There is a note close to despair in one of his direct addresses to Coleridge: “But indignation works where hope is not, / And thou, O Friend! wilt be refreshed. There is / One great society alone on earth: / The noble Living and the noble Dead.” (Book 11, ll.395-398)
By the time he wrote this, Wordsworth was beginning on the path that would ultimately turn him into a conservative old gentleman and a staunch supporter of the Church of England.
What is vivid in Wordsworth’s verse, what tells us about his development as a poet, and what he reports on the major historical event of his era are the things that make (parts of) The Prelude readable. But now, alas, we come to the matter of Wordsworth’s nebulous philosophy, and the laborious way in which it is expressed.
Whole weighty theses and critiques have been written about Wordsworth and Nature, and I am not going to delve at length into his “Natural” philosophy any more than I would step into the badlands of trying to find a coherent narrative in Shakespeare’s collected sonnets.
To sum things up in brutal brevity, Wordsworth believed that Nature itself teaches us ethical and moral lessons, and that we are exulted and ennobled by immersing ourselves in Nature… but by “Nature” he seems more than anything to be referring to the pastoral scene, to places far from cities and throngs. Thus “if in this time / Of dereliction and dismay, I yet / Despair not of our nature; but retain / A more than Roman confidence, a faith / That fails not, in all sorrow my support, / The blessing of my life, the gift is yours, / Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed / My lofty speculations; and in thee, / For this uneasy heart of ours I find / A never-failing principle of joy, / And purest passion”. (Book 2, ll.449-472). Further, in farm labourers and those close to the land he sees “simplicity, / And beauty, and inevitable grace”. (Book 8, ll.98-110). He understands himself as privileged to have grown up, far from city life, in a remote part of the country: “But doubly fortunate my lot; not here / Alone, that something of a better life / Perhaps was round me than it is the privilege / Of most to move in, but that first I looked / At Man through objects that were great or fair; / First communed with him by their help. And thus / Was founded a sure safeguard and defence / Against the weight of meanness, selfish cares, / Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in / On all sides from the ordinary world / In which we traffic.” (Book 8, ll.313-323)
Though sometimes his ethical system comes close to pantheism [where all things are God], he still takes the classical approach that humanity is unique and is subject to a Higher Power: “In the midst stood Man, / Outwardly, inwardly contemplated, / As, of all visible natures, crown, though born / Of dust, and kindred to the worm; a Being, / Both in perception and discernment, first / In every capability of rapture, / Through the divine effect of power and love; / As, more than anything we know, instinct / With godhead, and, by reason and by will, / Acknowledging dependency sublime.” (Book 8, ll.479-496) There is a clearly expressed Deism in the closing words of Book 12, even if “Nature” is the ground on which our thoughts and impulses are forged: “Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low / To God, Who thus corrected my desires; / And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain, / And all the business of the elements, / The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music from that old stone wall, / The noise of wood and water, and the mist / That on the line of each of those two roads / Advanced in such indisputable shapes; / All these were kindred spectacles and sounds / To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink, / As at a fountain; and on winter nights, / Down to this very time, when storm and rain / Beat on my roof, or, haply, at noon-day, / While in a grove I walk, whose lofty trees, / Laden with summer’s thickest foliage, rock / In a strong wind, some working of the spirit, / Some inward agitations thence are brought, / Whate’er their office, whether to beguile / Thoughts over busy in the course they took, / Or animate an hour of vacant ease”. (Book 12, ll.316-336)
But he also notes, in the opening words of Book 13:“From Nature doth emotion come, and moods / Of calmness equally are Nature’s gift: / This is her glory; these two attributes / Are sister horns that constitute her strength. / Hence Genius, born to thrive by interchange / Of peace and excitation, finds in her / His best and purest friend; from her receives / That energy by which he seeks the truth, / From her that happy stillness of the mind / Which fits him to receive it when unsought. / Such benefit the humblest intellects…” (Book 13, ll.1-11)
By this stage I have beaten you into submission by quoting Wordsworth at length, as I wanted to assure you that I am representing the poet’s “Nature” philosophy accurately. But here comes the negative side of it, and my views do not derive from Aldous Huxley’s witty but rather glib riposte to the poet in his essay Wordsworth in the Tropics, wherein Huxley argued that Wordsworth worshipped nature only because he did not live in one of the Earth’s harsher terrains. Rather, I see Wordsworth as ineptly inflating his personal and particular experience into a universal moral code. It is clear for example, that on the whole he hated urban life. This is made plain especially in Book 7, where he gives his account of his time in London. I will not quote at length, but look up Book 7, ll. 415-431, where he is scandalised by whores openly at work and the filth of the city and “distress of mind ensued”; or Book 7, ll.722-771, where city dwellers are permanently caught in a whirl of “trivial things” which are “self-destroying” and “transient”. Of course I know that he wrote a famous sonnet “Upon Westminster Bridge” in which he presented an admiring and positive view of London – but remember it was depicting London in the early morning when nobody was around. Put simply, Wordsworth saw Nature as a great escape from modernity and people – and a moral code which derives from ignoring the mass of humanity is not much of a moral code. Of course we have all felt uplifted and relieved when we discover a remote and beautiful beach or walk the Heaphy track or the Tongariro Crossing or even the Waitakeres. It’s so delightful to be far from the madding crowd. But this is in the nature of a holiday – not a solid guide to how we should live our lives.
Worse, when he speaks of Nature, his lengthy attempts at generalised thought are cloudy and tiresomely didactic. They are very hard to read, because their points of reference are undefined and they speak in the abstract. Poor Wordsworth! I am sure that in his time, much of his work would have seemed radical, innovative, and seeking a new way to understand people. He ends up telling us at length of the healing power of Nature; of the divinity of nature; of the moral code it implicitly gives us. But this is such a vague and nebulous commentary that it gives little real moral guidance. In the end, his retreat into Nature is a withdrawal from human affairs after he has been disillusioned by politics and failed attempts to better the world. On and on he goes, preaching to us like a forgetful priest, oblivious to the fact that his congregation has had enough and is getting restless.
What I have just said might strike some readers as being very disrespectful, given that Wordsworth is one of those essential canonical poets we are taught to admire. But I am in good company in my nay-saying. In a largely laudatory article in the old Pelican Guide to English Literature, the critic B.O.C.Winkler notes Wordsworth’s “deficiency of concreteness”. He judges Wordsworth as being at his best when he is conveying physical experiences, but “when such experience is not available, assertion is apt to become the staple of his verse and it then sometimes declines into the declamatory or even strident, as though to make up by emphasis what is lacking in evidence.” In other words, he goes vague and abstract on us. Keats criticised Wordsworth for being too ready to teach lessons and be didactic; and Wordsworth’s sometime collaborator and dedicatee Coleridge spent the last chapter of his Biographia Literaria pointing out Wordsworth’s defects as a poet. Coleridge calls out “a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects and their positions as they appeared to the poet” and later says that much of Wordsworth’s poetry “belongs to the moral philosopher, and would be pursued not only more appropriately, but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral essays than in an elevated poem”. In short, Wordsworth can be prose-y and preachy, and for me this element kills the greater part of The Prelude stone dead.
I cannot remember which sage it was who said there is no such thing as a long poem – only short poems stitched together. I’m not sure that this is a general truth, but it is certainly true of The Prelude, where brilliant moments are overshadowed by long, dull passages of vague, abstract moral theorising – passages that invite sleep. Now that I’ve read the whole thing, I conclude that it is one of those productions that is better enjoyed in anthologised selections. I don’t think I will ever again read The Prelude in its entirety, but I will dip into those lively selections that permit Wordsworth to be regarded as a great poet.
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