The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1800.

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.