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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
I. Argument
... and though the length of his walk be sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls.
--Dorothy Wordsworth describing her brother's habits of composition. (1)
WE ARE NEVER ALONE WITH WORDSWORTH; THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE there: a stranger. Wordsworth s poetry disturbs us with a presence--anxious, moving about in words not always realized. On occasion, we may catch a glimpse, such as in the second book of The Prelude, where Wordsworth says that "sometimes" "I seem/Two consciousnesses--conscious of myself,/And of some other being" (Book 2.32-33). More often, though, the double is an implicit presence that shifts subliminally behind the lines, apprehensive of apprehension. Whether one thinks initially of the "second self" to whom the poem Michael is addressed (line 39), the "Doubling and doubling" with which Wordsworth begins the late sonnet "Rest and Be Thankful," or more muted inferences of subjective duplication that can unnerve a given passage (such as obtain in the following fragment, "Redundancy"), the double is a crucial if elusive specter cast throughout Wordsworth's poetry: Not the more Failed I to lengthen out my watch. I stood Within the area of the frozen vale, Mine eye subdued and quiet as the ear Of one that listens, for even yet the scene, Its fluctuating hues and surfaces, And the decaying vestiges of forms, Did to the dispossessing power of night Impart a feeble visionary sense Of movement and creation doubly felt. Amidst the duplication of "I" and "I" and "eye" in the passage's opening lines, the reader cannot help registering too the movement of creation "doubly felt." The tropes of the double and of doubling in Wordsworth's writing do not only obtain local power either; they are significant to the whole structure, for instance, of The Prelude, which traces a journey from "a house of bondage," "a prison where [he] hath been long immured," described in the opening lines of Book 1, to a sublime confrontation with a mysterious secondary self whose existence has impressionistically materialized over the course of the entire work--a "Resemblance," it is said, near the end of the final book,
in the fullness of its strength Made visible--a genuine counterpart And brother--of the glorious faculty Which higher minds bear with them as their own. This is the very spirit in which they deal With all the objects of the universe: They from their native selves can send abroad Like transformation, for themselves create A like existence, and, whene'er it is Created for them, catch it by an instinct. Them the enduring and the transient both
Serve to exalt. (The Prelude, 1805, 13.87-98) But what exactly (or who) is this "genuine counterpart," this "like existence," this uncanny secondary "consciousness"--frequently present but nowhere formally presented? Does it exist as part of the tacit richness of the poetry, part of the imaginative scaffolding which is meant to be taken down once a poem stands? (2) This essay investigates how the trope of incarcerated consciousness on the one hand, and of multiple subjectivity on the other, are connected in Wordsworth's poetry, and how together they are invested with unexpected philosophical authority when seen in the light of an astonishing concept introduced by an eccentric philosopher with whom Wordsworth was personally associated in Paris during the early storms of the French Revolution. That individual was John "Walking" Stewart. (3)
"Walking" Stewart (1747-1822) is one of those forgotten cultural lenses through which the anxieties of an entire age are brought into unexpected focus. His unusual appellation derives from his reputation for having travelled on foot over a greater portion of the known world than anyone before him had ever attempted. Between 1765 and the 1798 Stewart is believed to have walked from Madras (where he was stationed as a young writer for the East India Company) through the divided principalities of India, across Turkey and Persia, through the deserts of Arabia, Abyssinia and Africa and into every European country as far east as Russia, before sailing to North America where he travelled throughout the new United States and into the upper reaches of Canada. (4) As he progressed from place to place, from tradition to tradition, by the early 1790s Stewart emerged as the tireless exponent of a unique form of cross-cultural materialism--a kind of "instinctive Spinozism," (5) as it has been described by Thomas McFarland--that he endeavored to refine over the course of his travels. Stewart's philosophy is at once congruent with, and distinct from, the prevailing current of contemporary materialist theory found in the writings of such better-known influences on Romantic thinking as Joseph Priestley and David Hartley, and is concerned, in particular, with the endless flux of material nature--a phenomenon that Stewart believed provided a profound synecdoche for the ceaseless transmutation of human identity.
Wordsworth met "Walking" Stewart in Paris in late October, or possibly early November 1792, when Wordsworth's own identity was in a dramatic state of flux. Stewart's and Wordsworth's relationship in France occurred during that intriguingly ill-documented six-week interlude between the time when the young poet bid his lover Annette Vallon (then eight-months pregnant with their daughter) farewell in Orleans, and his eventual return to England in early December. What little we know of Wordsworth's and Stewart's association comes from two essays by Thomas De Quincey, contributed to the London Magazine and Traits Magazine in 1822, which appeared shortly following Stewart's death. De Quincey, who was an intimate friend of both men, regarded Stewart as "a sublime visionary" and "by far the most interesting person" he had ever met. De Quincey tells us, furthermore, that Wordsworth recalled being similarly impressed by Stewart--especially his "eloquence" "on the subject of nature." Indeed both men agreed that "Walking" Stewart was, "by instinct," "a true philosopher." By the time that Wordsworth made his acquaintance in late 1792, Stewart had begun aggressively promoting what he called his "new system of Nature and sense," which he had endeavored to delineate in a series of works published in London through the radical bookseller James Ridgway (who was at the same time preparing Thomas Paine's controversial Rights of Man for publication). In the concluding section of a long verse treatise entitled The Revelation of Nature, Stewart offers an analogy with which he aims to crystallize not only the argument of his poem, but his philosophy in general, illustrating the essence of man's relationship with Nature. The external world, Stewart contends, is most perspicuously understood as an "Asylum of Nature," a "vast hall" that "forms" one general focus of the mind, Whose powers increasing, brings increase of good. Till the infant mind nursed with three hundred sells, Would gain three hundred's force, and these again, Would give a force no calculate can reach;
Till the collected sense of all mankind, Would form a reason manhood might adore; Exalt the man, to manhood's zenith point,
Where wisdom wills, and power executes. The human species here becomes a pledge, The mind to strengthen and the will to aid; All bound in bonds of liberty and light. (6) (35) The primary mode of force exerted by the vast disciplinary institution of Nature on its "inmate man" is the transmutation of matter or constant flux between subjective Self and objective Other. The endless interiorization of the exterior and its reverse, perforce constitute a total transparency of energy in the universe, both moral and physical, that rolls through all things: Hear nature's voice, the universe I am,
One whole of matter indistructible: All mode's of being my constituent parts; In time, space, cause, coequal fractions all, Whole sum collective forms the integer; Matter, motion, being, whole of nature,
Collected links on matter[']s circled chain, Exchanging modes, by death renewing life; The zenith atom now a system's soul (3-4) So conceived, Stewart's "circled chain," or "asylum of nature," is ironically therefore an emancipatory institution ("All bound in bonds of liberty and light") which rises to replace, or emerges as an antidote for, the failed social institutions that man has endeavored to create to discipline himself throughout history (and for which the then recently razed Bastille was the piece de resistance). Among the most remarkable consequences of Stewart's asylum, and implications of his extreme form of materialism generally, is the wraithlike mutation--whether understood as endless production or endless dissolution--of Self into Other that Nature's power constantly generates. Identity, as constituting the integrity of a static entity or "self," is, it would seem, a deceptive chimera: Identity is nought but motion mechaniz'd To give it centre, radii, and a sphere, Like river flowing whose identic self Nor here nor there exists but all is chang'd While circling eddies hold resembling form; So mind or conscience like the eddy moves And vibrates sense to navel matter's flux, Self is not sameness but a central point Whose conscience moves to join effect and cause [...] (9-10) Given the eddy-like motion of "mind or conscience" into, through, and back again from Nature, Stewart, throughout The Revelation, and elsewhere in his writings, comments on what he sees as man's propensity for dual, and indeed multiple, subjectivity--on how the prince becomes...
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