|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
MENTAL "TRANSITION," THE SURPRISING, DRAMATIC MOVEMENT OF mind in which one's moral and intellectual premises no longer bear the weight of external fact, mutate into quite other premises, and challenge what has been thought to be one's essential character, constitutes the "action" of Wordsworth's The Borderers. For Wordsworth it also described his mental crisis and, he believed, the crisis of other young Englishmen in the 1790s. Even if (or rather because) critics have not agreed on the quality or direction of transition (is it toward or away from solitariness, toward or away from nature, toward or away from self-consciousness, self-understanding, freedom), their conflict collects considerable textual evidence for the equivocal quality of "transition" and the incertitude and lack of finality that entails. (1) Until recently, the political dimension of this incertitude, always about to be recognized because of Wordsworth's own mention of the French Revolution in the 1842 and 1843 notes to the play, has been confined mainly to considerations of Wordsworth's relationship to William Godwin or to general references to the time Wordsworth spent in France and to the oppressive political atmosphere he experienced in England during the 1790s. In the past ten to fifteen years, however, historicist endeavors have developed the detail necessary to illuminate Wordsworth's own explicit connection between "what I had observed of transition in character & the reflections I had been led to make during the time I was a witness of the changes through which the French Revolution passed," (2) on the one hand, and his rhetorical and dramaturgical choices in the play, on the other hand. (3) In this essay I plan to show how Wordsworth rhetorically emplaces several notorious legal cases of the 1790s in his play, making specific crises of political justice carry the explanatory weight of mental crisis and engaging the epistemological implications and dramaturgical problems of representing this crisis.
Studying the play from this point of view raises again the question of Wordsworth's relation to and view of history. Early described as a poet of imagination and transcendence, in escape from history and the confines of mortality, then socialized and historicized and, in a sense, activated as a participant in history, Wordsworth still presents a site of contradiction and debate. In Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Wordsworth senses history as discontinuity and trauma, a "force" that "tears and breaks everyday being so that it must suddenly be `thought' in the first place" (57), but in James Chandler's earlier working out of Wordsworth's affinities with Edmund Burke, the poet evidences a friendly feeling toward habit as "second nature" and toward history as cultural continuity and epistemological assurance. (4) As a first move, and one that informs Liu's thesis, Chandler's position could make history in this sense a compensation for and solution to the experience of history as trauma. But it follows from a recent article by Anne-Lise Francois, connecting Wordsworth's valuation of "second nature" with Hume's epistemology of custom and habit, that this solution harbors a potential irony because of the equivocal qualities of custom and habit. (5) Francois observes that Hume escapes from skeptical doubts entailed in his epistemology by adopting the "natural" mode of thinking from "common life," valorizing the uncritical return to what has been impressed by "a slow process of familiarization," "the cumulative significance, acquired over time, of things that may initially appear of little moment" (142). While for Hume this process remains almost unconscious, is "so continuous that it is not felt as change" (153), and thus turns the assimilation of authority into a "gentle force," revolutionary romantics like Wordsworth felt nervous about the authority blindly admitted to power by this involuntary operation of memory, "the capacity for unwanted, unconscious forces to invade and become a part of the inner life" (159). Wordsworth's solution, according to Francois, is the imagination, an activity of mind, which while recognizing the power of deep-lying thoughts "to resist the reach of outward constructs" (159), also associates these thoughts with "nature" as "provid[ing] for a certain indeterminacy of meaning" (156). Yet in this formulation the threat of custom as authority disappears into habit as a personal and natural force, while act and interruption (history as revolution) become superfluous and slip out of sight. (6) As a result, "history" as custom does not really succeed in countering "history" as trauma, and nature's "indeterminacy," its openness, can turn back into vulnerability to external influence. The benign version of this equivocal feeling clearly informs The Prelude and other post-1798 poems; in The Borderers, however, where the force of custom and the force of personal memory are also implicated with each other, Mortimer's effort to extricate one from the other fails, and the very effort itself activates the meaning of "history" as event, interruption, trauma. In the play, the "indeterminacy" and openness of "nature" are felt as an instability and confusion of appearances, that subjects one to arbitrary authority.
In The Borderers Wordsworth's effort to emplace material from several trials of the 1790s shows him quite conscious of history in the double sense of custom and trauma. This same Janus-faced figure was evident in legal thinking of the late eighteenth-century, but with an epistemological and probatory complexion. On the one hand, law is pervasively characterized with emphasis on its aspect as tradition and continuity. Blackstone's account, with its attempt to stabilize the common-law character by importing a foundation of natural law theory, underlines the assurance of inherited procedure and the reliability of precedent. (7) "For it is an established rule to abide by former precedents ... as well to keep the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge's opinion; as also because the law in that case being solemnly declared and determined, what before was uncertain, and perhaps indifferent, is now become a permanent rule, which it is not in the breast of any subsequent judge to alter or vary from, according to his private sentiments...." (8) Moreover, it is within the legal institution that limits are placed upon indeterminacy. Geoffrey Gilbert's treatise on The Law of Evidence, like most such works of the eighteenth century which declare their empiricist premises, follows Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. It makes sensory intuition the most perfect kind of evidence, but admits that "most of the Business of CIVIL LIVE subsists on Actions of Men that are transient Things, and therefore often times are not capable of strict Demonstration." (9) Law, however, does not seek truth in this absolute sense, but only probability, through evidentiary procedure controlling the admission and interpretation of evidence to attain a degree of certainty that can count for truth. "... [T]here is that Faith and Credit to be given to the Honesty and Integrity of credible and disinterested Witnesses attesting any Fact, under the solemnities and obligations of Religion, and the Dangers and Perils of Perjury, that the Mind equally acquiesces therein as on a Knowledge by Demonstration ..." (Gilbert 3). With the authority of precedent and with the precedent of evidentiary procedure behind it, the legal system, it was believed, could confidently invoke the power and force of the state. Although criminal trial procedure in the latter half of the eighteenth century was still developing, according to J. M. Beattie, many of the elements of what we now recognize as a fair and impartial system had emerged: defendants were gaining the right to representation by counsel and already possessed it in the case of treason trials, rules for the admission of evidence in criminal trials were developed and lawyers widely educated in them, and the contention that the functions of declaring the law and finding fact were divided between judge and jury (an issue only in seditious libel by the late eighteenth century) was laid to rest by Fox's Libel Act in 1792. (10)
On the other hand, law could appear to the average Englishman in the 1790s more often in the aspect of sudden suspension of continuity, history as event and trauma rather than as traditional support. Not only was there the spectacle of the new and constantly self-violating legal system in Revolutionary France, but there were an alarming number of instances of legal violation closer to home: the 1793 Edinburgh trials of Muir and Palmer for sedition, the 1794 London trials of Hardy, Tooke, and others for treason, the frequent use of the threat of libel laws to control liberty of the press, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and the institution of the so-called "gagging laws." In such an environment, the following passage from Blackstone could be read as unbecomingly equivocal: "Yet this rule [of following precedent] admits of exception, where the former determination is most evidently contrary to reason.... But even in such cases the subsequent judges do not pretend to make a new law, but to vindicate the old one from misrepresentation. For if it be found that the former decision is manifestly absurd or unjust, it is declared, not that such a sentence was bad law, but that it was not law; that is, that it is not the established custom of the realm, as has been erroneously determined" (1: 70). Blackstone's effort to reconcile the history of the common law with a stable natural law foundation actually opens up jurisprudence to the conflicting authorities of history and reason, for although Blackstone speaks from the standpoint that legal decisions correct previous "absurd" judgments, that law gradually ameliorates itself, and that time renders the reason of law more and more evident, he makes available as well the opposite standpoint that law does not change, but judges and legislatures inflict injuries upon it which can only be cured by abrupt reversals; reason, not immanent in law, must then intervene through a second tradition-breaking act. The possibility of this alternative interpretation of legal precedent reveals its political implications, when this passage follows somewhat later: "Lastly, acts of parliament that are impossible to be performed are of no validity; and if there arise out of them collaterally any absurd consequences, manifestly contradictory to common reason, they are, with regard to those collateral consequences, void.... But if the parliament will positively enact a thing to be done which is unreasonable, I know of no power that can control it ..." (1: 91). (11) Experiences of violation, disturbing the legal procedure that has placed limits upon indeterminacy, could subject the spectator to conflicting interpretations of fact exacerbated by insecurity about the legal hermeneutic and open the door to a struggle for hermeneutic control. (12) Blackstone's effort to stabilize law inadvertently introduces an ambiguity which makes room for the exercise of arbitrary power by institutional authority, but simultaneously conjures up an exercise of revolutionary power. Here we have then the conditions for mutation in moral and intellectual premises: reason of custom (second nature) slides into reason of state (whether established or revolutionary). Before treating Wordsworth's dramatization of the role of law in the transition of character in The Borderers, I would like to consider his account of this period in The Prelude in order to introduce the likelihood that he thought of events in the judicial terms described above.
In Book 10 of the 1805 Prelude, vertiginous feelings of probatory and even epistemological uncertainty are repeatedly linked with instances of judicial and legislative subversions of trust. During the enormities of the French Terror, says Wordsworth,
... ghastly visions had I of despair, And tyranny, and implements of death, And long orations which in dread I pleaded Before unjust tribunals, with a voice Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense Of treachery and desertion in the place The holiest that I knew of--my own soul. (1805; 10.374-80) (13)
Wordsworth imagines himself, lawyer or legislator, with the desperate task of proof before him, undermined on the one hand by the tribunals deserting their principles of justice, on the other hand by his mind deserting its foundational processes and abilities; he imagines himself in a condition (in short) in which proof is impossible. (14) It is a nightmare of mental instability. Through the dog days of the Robespierrian purges, Wordsworth maintains mental law only by shifting to an apocalyptic and sublime order of things, in which broad and indiscriminate calamity can be read as the proper result of accumulated guilt; so that causal and moral relation can, in large letters, be discerned. After hearing of the fall of Robespierre, Wordsworth returns to a more pedestrian sense of the relation between motive and consequence, and with it a more quotidian trust in appearances: the preachers of violence fall victim to their own principles; "[t]heir madness is declared and visible" (1805; 10.550). Thus trust in his ability to interpret appearances (or in the ability of appearances to declare their meaning) depends, on the one hand, upon institutional instantiation of just decisions, and, on the other hand, upon security in the mental processes accredited with producing just decisions. In their absence, Wordsworth tries to locate a self-validating universal ground.
In the following passages, Wordsworth analyzes the fracture in his judgment by showing how he operated in spite of it. In the absence of the customary grounds for certainty, his hopes for the Revolution were undiminished because "[i]n the people was my trust, / And in the virtues which mine eyes had seen" (1805; 10.577-78). He had ocular proof, he asserts (though of invisible qualities), validating his belief in the people. Yet he confesses his trust in the people was an object of "passionate intuition," and "had effect / Not small in dazzling me" (586-88; my emphasis). His ability to "see" evidence, in other words, was a blindness created by uninvestigated feeling. His trust in the people, the item to be confirmed by the evidence, interpretively determined the evidence. The rational process that should have operated in...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
