Generating a national sublime: Wordsworth's The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes.(William Wordsworth)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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GENERALLY CONSIDERED, 1820 IS WELL PAST THE ZENITH OF WORDSWORTH'S power as a poet. Both The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes, appearing together in 1820, are usually read in comparison with, and in terms of, work written very close to the century mark, as narratives of self and as celebrations of Wordsworth's blessed region. In Wordsworth's Poetry, Geoffrey Hartman writes that "the distance between 'After-thought' [the closing poem in The River Duddon] and 'Tintern Abbey' is not great." (1) For Hartman, "After-thought" displays that old apocalyptic fire which is generally quenched in the late work by a conventional religion that serves to quiet the process of self-questioning. Hartman is generous toward "After-thought," but the poem's worth is nevertheless defined by a "distance" to work two-decades old, effectively portraying much of the intervening time as a period of stagnation. James K. Chandler makes a similar appraisal when he opines that the ideas of "After-thought" are "essentially unchanged from those expressed in the lines added to The Ruined Cottage between January and March of 1798." (2) Chandler's interest lies in Wordsworth's "apostasy"; once the conversion has been made, Nature is Burkean, "wisdom without reflection." (3) Although the central concerns of both critics' work are different, Chandler's "reflection" is something very close to Hartman's, tied to the rupture of boundaries, not the guarding of them. How else could nature in The River Duddon fit Chandler's characterization, as "without reflection," when the work's central trope is the identification between poet, reader, and river? Daniel Robinson has recently summarized critical views of The River Duddon: "... critics still dismiss the sequence as a conventionally didactic loco-descriptive poem of Wordsworth's later years." (4)

There is something about Wordsworth's conservatism that invites one to take it on its own terms, as non-evolving and defensive. In September 1819, the month following Peterloo, Wordsworth chose to write a sentimental poem noteworthy only for its deliberate exclusion of recent events: "Yet will I temperately rejoice; / Wide is the range, and free the choice / Of undiscordant themes." (5) The late poetry is conventional in that it idealizes the past and argues against social change, and it is didactic in its moralizing tone. But Wordsworth's choice to stress continuity and harmony does not necessarily mean that the late work is unthinking, or that it is a watered-down repetition of earlier poetry. The effort to present an idealized Britain without discord is a reaction that Wordsworth developed in response to domestic and international conflict, and this surface harmony is, I will argue, ideologically and philosophically complex. Contrary to their critical reception, The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes are not simply celebrations of the local. As expressions of nationalism, their burden is to encompass the national through the local, and they achieve this aim through an aesthetic that is highly theoretical.

The River Duddon and The Guide have roots in times of Wordsworth's most sustained political activity, the Peninsular War and the Westmorland election of 1818, documented by three key prose works: Regarding the Convention of Cintra (1809), (6) and the Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland (1818). The Guide to the Lakes started from Wordsworth's introduction to Wilkinson's Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1810), but Theresa Kelley argues that Wordsworth began planning a guide to the Lake District much earlier, in 1806. (7) As for the Duddon sonnets, nineteen were written in 1818, the year of the Westmorland election. Two sonnets were recycled from an even earlier time and rewritten, including one previously entitled, "Composed While the Author Was Engaged in Writing a Tract Occasioned by the Convention of Cintra." The grouping of The River Duddon and The Guide was more than arbitrary, despite their myriad origins. Mary Wordsworth, in a letter to Sara Hutchinson, wrote that the Duddon sonnets "all together compose one poem," (8) and the fly title of the 1820 volume states that the Guide was republished because of "a consciousness of its having been written in the same spirit which dictated several of the poems, and from a belief that it will tend materially to illustrate them." (9)

Wordsworth put more effort into Cintra than into any other prose work. Stephen Gill proposes that Wordsworth's anxiety in composition was due to the fact that the tract demanded a level of political thinking to which Wordsworth was unaccustomed. (10) I propose instead that Cintra signaled a reawakening of political interest and a reorientation of position. Chandler, Heather Glen, David Simpson, (11) and a number of "new historicist" critics have characterized the work at the start of the nineteenth century as intensely lyrical and withdrawn from the political realm. Certainly, Lyrical Ballads of 1798, read through the 1794 letters to William Mathews, stands as a critique of governmental policy through its description of domestic rupture (fallen houses, dissolved families, degraded flocks). In responding to an external threat, Cintra reflects a different attitude towards state integrity and expresses a faith in existing relations that are described in Burkean terms, despite the fact that the domestic affections remain central.

At the same time that Wordsworth was forming a new political orientation, he was developing an aesthetics of the sublime. W. J. B. Owen argues that a recognizable vocabulary of the sublime enters Wordsworth's discourse in 1790, but finds most of the definitive examples in the different versions of the Guide and its related manuscripts. (12) Owen and Smyser date the most pertinent manuscript, "The Sublime and the Beautiful," between 1811 and the end of 1812 (2: 128), while Theresa Kelley argues that the manuscript is a collection of ideas formed much earlier, and traces Wordsworth's aesthetic theories to 1806 (208). If a negotiated range is accepted, Wordsworth's theorizing of the sublime is roughly concomitant to the formation of political ideas in reaction to the Peninsular War. Kelley calls "The Sublime and the Beautiful" the only "philosophical account of the mind's aesthetics Wordsworth attempted" (23). Owen believes that the manuscript was abandoned because Wordsworth lost his taste for systematic definition in favor of the descriptive mode of Select Views and The Guide to the Lakes. I will argue that a theory of the sublime, far from being abandoned, became central to Wordsworth's thinking, but was dissociated from a universal reason and instead tied to a national sensibility. Of particular importance is the formulation found in "The Sublime and the Beautiful": "... the body of this [sublime] sensation would be found to resolve itself into three component parts: a sense of individual form or forms; a sense of duration; and a sense of power (2: 351).

Concerning the Convention of Cintra

Cintra is an immense accomplishment not for its style nor for its contribution to political thought, but for its aesthetic unity: comprehensive in scope, it carries Wordsworth's earlier local concerns into the world of foreign affairs with a remarkable consistency. Because the tract comments negatively on the British government's policies during the American War and during the early days of the French Revolution, Stephen Gill describes the work as "a Tract for the Times with a distinctly radical orientation" (277). Gordon Kent Thomas, the author of the only full-length study of Cintra, approaches the text as "unquestionably a strong statement of democratic faith." (13)

Most, however, have approached Cintra as a conservative work, an example of Wordsworth's "apostasy" (Thomas 151-55). This judgment is due to the work's strong echoes of Burke's counterrevolutionary writings, fleshed-out not only by critics who regard Cintra as conservative, but by the tract's staunchest defenders, such as Thomas. Burke's influence on the tract is undeniable; but does this then automatically make the tract a conservative one? Thomas believes that Cintra has been received as conservative because of the tract's robust nationalism, and argues that critics have mistakenly projected the modern, negative connotations of nationalism on to a past when none existed. Nationalism and the belief in the universal right to national self-detemination are, of course, at odds, and the distinction is perhaps a great deal clearer to the modern reader. As Thomas notes, most of the opposition to the Convention used the latter as a rallying cry. But the widespread opposition to the Convention perhaps suggests that the former was at work as well: here, a chance to deal the competition a major blow was missed. Wordsworth passionately believed in Spanish independence, but this by no means exhausts the debate about his motivations. Felicia Hemans, who believed in an Englishness beyond British borders, found her poetic voice during the Peninsular War, and was able to say, with rather too much ease, "Be free, gallant Spaniards, or Die!" (14)

Wordsworth's tract shares in the strategic identification between personal and national independence. The latter is presented as the expression of the former, but national independence, as a political goal, takes precedence. The tie between the two exists in the "affections": "... the man, who in his age feels no regret for the ruined honour of other Nations, must be poor in sympathy for the honour of his own Country; and that, if he be wanting here towards that which circumstances the whole, he neither has--nor can have--a social regard for the lesser communities which Country includes." Where there is no love for national independence," writes Wordsworth, "a people are not a society, but a herd" (1: 327). Notice that what should be described as the lack of individual independence, a herd mentality, is tied to national independence. Indeed, when Wordsworth turns from national distinctions to class distinctions, he conflates the two independences, and the reader isn't sure to which he is referring. The laboring man "leans less upon others than any man in the community" (1: 326), and the "Peasant, and he who lives by the fair reward of manual labour, has ordinarily a larger sense of proportion of his gratifications dependent upon these thoughts--than, for the most part, men in other classes have"; the "poorest Peasant, in an unsubdued land, feels this pride" (1: 328). Just what exactly are these "thoughts," this "pride"? Because Wordsworth adds the modifier, "in an unsubdued land," these feelings are clearly meant to relate to the national affections as well as to the affections of the domestic circle. Wordsworth makes the connection even more directly in asserting that the "whole courage of his Country is in [the peasant's] breast" (1: 328).

Alone, the existence of the core principles "freedom" and "independence" does not make the tract liberal because Cintra valorizes the "common passions" instead of individual political rights. "Liberty" only extends to the individual through national liberty and national self-determination because Cintra lacks the necessary bit of abstraction: when Wordsworth discusses "the People," he is talking about the British People, or the Spanish People, or the French People. Nations have a character bound to past traditions, and a brotherhood of nations...

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