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COPYRIGHT 1996 University of Illinois Press
When we speak of a poet as being of a particular religion, we do not imply in him completeness or orthodoxy, or even explicitness of doctrine, but only that his secular utterance has the decisive mark of the religion upon it. --Lionel Trilling(1)
The problem Wordsworth poses for modern readers, Lionel Trilling argued in 1951, lies in the manifestly Christian aspects of his poetry. Some forty years after "Wordsworth and the Iron Time," Wordsworth's finest readers concur in finding Christianity manifestly irrelevant to the poet's finest work. This reversal followed from the virtual reinvention of Romanticism accomplished by Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, M. H. Abrams, and others in the years following 1961--a reinvention which rescued Romantic poetry from its New Critical banishment by presenting it as a mythopoeic humanism.(2) I by no means deny the explanatory power of criticism such as Hartman's account of "the difficult humanizing of imagination" in Wordsworth (Hartman, p. xi). Nor, after the impact of poststructuralism, am I prepared to argue for a Christian poetics of presence in Wordsworth. But I do contend that recent criticism has unfairly dismissed the Christianity in the poetry of Wordsworth's early maturity. The poems of that period unquestionably displace the Christian perspective they incorporate; often they sketch the Christian affinities of ideas dependent principally on other frames of reference. Neither unreligious nor radically unorthodox in orientation, those poems nonetheless retain Christianity as an essential part of their philosophical outlook. Trilling balanced contending claims quite adroitly, then, in speaking of the "decisive" Christian sympathies of Wordsworth's "secular utterance."
My argument on behalf of the Christian Wordsworth of 1798-1800 will concentrate on two illustrative issues: the notion of the One Life in Wordsworth's depiction of the Pedlar, and the notion of natural supernaturalism in the Prospectus to The Recluse.(3) These texts seek not merely to preserve traditional religious emotions for secular truths, as is often declared Wordsworth's great aim, but to preserve traditional religious truths by accommodating them to the poet's own prophetic intimations. Here Wordsworth's revisionary engagement with Christianity resituates conventional Christian values without subverting them: the Pedlar materials and the Prospectus to The Recluse, for example, clearly incorporate a recognizably Christian belief in God. By stressing the important role accorded Christianity in these texts, my argument questions a critical tradition which unduly privileges the secular character of the poet's imagination. In passing, my argument also questions certain assumptions about poetic development and the nature of faith that have governed much Wordsworth criticism. Writing of Coleridge, Thomas McFarland rightly observes that "We too often think of `development' as a kind of progress up a series of steps, the improvement of one's position by the abandonment of a previous position. Actually the word implies an unwrapping of something already there.... The textbooks exult in the proliferation of developmental stages; but such stages do not allow us to see clearly the unfolding of a single, constant orientation to life."(4) To recognize that Wordsworth's poetic progress testifies to just such a "constant orientation to life" we need merely concede the struggles and uncertainties inherent in the lived experience of faith. Wordsworth's spiritual restlessness was real and occasionally urgent. But since he never misunderstood faith as a finality in which the human mind comes serenely to rest, he never viewed such restlessness as a basis for skepticism. The poet who concluded the 1805 Prelude with a "final Christian affirmation," in Jonathan Wordsworth's phrase, reached that conclusion through an unbroken investment in Christianity.(5)
WORDSWORTH, CHRISTIANITY, AND THE ONE LIFE
One of the more influential accounts of Wordsworth's intellectual development credits him with a brief but formative phase of pantheism. A fanciful "literary" pantheism was wholly conventional in late eighteenth-century landscape verse. But Wordsworth's pantheism involves no mere heightening of an available descriptive idiom. The One Life, critics contend, was a discrete, highly particularized philosophical position that remains recognizable as a core doctrine despite all the ambiguities of its articulation. "For a brief period," Jonathan Wordsworth writes, the poet "not only believed that `There [was] an active principle alive / In all things'. . . but went on from this quite ordinary position to assert a universe of blessedness and love, based on the assumption that the individual could perceive as well as share `the life of things'" (Jonathan Wordsworth, "Wordsworth's Borderers," p. 176). All aspects of the natural world, the One Life doctrine stipulated, exist as modulations of a single vital energy. When this materialist doctrine was imported from France into England, it was spiritualized and Christianized by Hartley and Priestley. The Unitarian Coleridge understood the universal energy as God investing nature in the form of an omnipresent consciousness. To Coleridge's displeasure, Wordsworth appropriated this Christian pantheism in a personalized way which divested it of its residual orthodoxy--the argument goes--and used it to frame his own intuitions of natural and spiritual unity.
In short, critics view the One Life as a belief which replaced Wordsworth's conventional religious faith, or which was adopted only because his faith had already lapsed. Butler enlists the prestige of the Cornell Wordsworth Series for this position in remarking that during late 1797 "Wordsworth seems to have absorbed a philosophic system, if not necessarily its theological underpinnings, into which he could by early 1798 fit his own feelings about natural harmony."(6) In an impressive recent article, Richard E. Matlack argues similarly for Wordsworth's pantheist rejection of conventional Christianity. "Wordsworth paid due respect to the Bible," Matlack allows," but considered "Christianity a falsehood, albeit a harmless one that inspires some good."(7) Indicating the work of Richard E. Brantley and Paul D. Sheats, Matlack states further that "there have been attempts to tame Wordsworth's religious radicalism by aligning it with mainstream Christian ferment . . . or by finding it to be not in conflict with Wordsworth's orthodox, Trinitarian upbringing." Matlack then declares that "both of these arguments would have surprised Coleridge"--a conclusion he supports with brief references to two important Coleridge documents, one accusing Wordsworth of being "at least a Semi-atheist," the other an account of a heated religious dispute involving Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt.(8) All told, Matlack credits Wordsworth with a "natural supernaturalism" construed as the individualized religious vision of a non-Christian prophet.
Jonathan Wordsworth presses the case against Wordsworth's Christianity even further. He first presents the argument that "Coleridge believed in [the One Life], and passed it on to Wordsworth, as a form of Christianity; but Wordsworth took it over without its doctrinal implications" (Jonathan Wordsworth, "Two-Part Prelude," p. 575). The Pedlar's experience of the One Life therefore "lost any connection with formal Christianity" (Jonathan Wordsworth, Music of Humanity, p. 202). Losing his faith in the One Life by late 1798, the Wordsworth envisioned by Jonathan Wordsworth assumes a "purely humanist position" in the 1799 Prelude, and remains faithless until 1805, when the pain occasioned by John Wordsworth's drowning "made it necessary for him to accept the doctrine of an afterlife," and so prompted his related "acceptance of orthodox Christian thought."(9) With Jonathan Wordsworth, the poet's supposed secular and agnostic stance from late 1798 to 1805 even leads to comparisons with Thomas Hardy: like the nostalgic unbeliever of Hardy's "The Oxen," Wordsworth in the 1799 spots of time "is yearning for a certainty in which he cannot rationally believe," questioning the seemingly numinous aspects of childhood experience for a lost spiritual presence (Jonathan Wordsworth, "Two-Part Prelude," p. 577). Jonathan Wordsworth replaces Matlack's emphasis on natural supernaturalism with an emphasis on humanistic naturalism--but the dismissal of Christianity remains consistent.
Underlying this dismissal is the evidence about Wordsworth's religious views supposedly present in Coleridge's correspondence and, of course, the evidence present in the Pedlar manuscripts. The first pertinent Coleridge letter, addressed to John Prior Estlin, is dated 18 May 1798:
On one subject [Wordsworth and I] are habitually silent--we found our data
dissimilar, & never renewed the subject / It is his practice & almost his
nature to convey all the truth he knows without any attack on what he
supposes falsehood, if that falsehood be interwoven with virtues or
happiness--he loves & venerates Christ & Christianity--I wish, he did
more--but it were wrong indeed, if an incoincidence with one of our wishes
altered our respect & affection to a man, whom we are as it were instructed
by our great master to say that not being against us he is for us.
(LSTC, I, 410)
Matlack declares, on the evidence of this letter, that "Wordsworth considers Christianity a falsehood."(10) Yet, given Coleridge's express statement that Wordsworth "loves & venerates Christ & Christianity," the letter hardly denies Wordsworth's Christian beliefs forcefully. Proponents of an unChristian Wordsworth understand Coleridge's "falsehood" reference to mean "the Christian faith"; they understand his "I wish he did more" remark to mean "I wish Wordsworth believed in Christianity as well as admiring it." The letter admittedly permits this reading. I contend, however, that it permits another and more plausible reading, and that, due simply to the existence of discrepant interpretations, it remains inconclusive as evidence.
Coleridge's statements about Wordsworth must be assessed in the context of his intense Unitarian partisanship. Writing to the Reverend John Prior Estlin, Unitarian minister and close friend, Coleridge could presume upon a sympathetic response to distinctly Unitarian sentiments and judgments. Far from illustrating "the embarrassing awkwardness Coleridge felt in presenting Wordsworth to friends who shared...
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