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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
IN THE THIRD VOLUME OF A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, DAVID HUME argues that the mind is characterized by a "selfishness" or "limited" generosity that is reinforced by nature's having made scant provision for our wants.(1) Justice, as the predicate of this limitation of the subject's "interested affection," comes into being in order that society should make greater advances in "acquiring possessions" and avoid "running into the solitary and forlorn condition, which must follow upon violence and an universal licence" (492). According to Hume's hierarchical scale, affection begins with the self, descends logically to our relations and acquaintances, and culminates with "only the weakest [of our attention] reach[ing] to strangers and indifferent persons." Indeed, any contradiction in these degrees of partiality--by "enlargement or contraction of the affections"--Hume deems both "vicious and immoral" (488). It is thus possible for Hume to envision singular acts of private justice that would be contrary to the larger public construct of justice. To illustrate the ruinous potential of singular justice, Hume at one point offers a specific scenario in which an enlarged affection for the stranger violates justice: "When a man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and laudably, but the public is a real sufferer" (497). By labeling the recipient of generosity a "miser" or "seditious bigot," Hume disguises both the charitable act and the request which precedes it, making the motive for such singular justice as hard to envision as the circumstances in which a miser loses and begs for the restoration of his fortune.
Though it is at least possible to imagine particular cases in which the courts would be asked to rule with regard to seized properties of misers and bigots, Hume's scenario depends more plausibly on the socially familiar example of giving alms to beggars. This implicit analogy suspends the request that begets charity and reads it instead as a miserliness associated with political sedition, presumably because begging would suggest an inadequacy in the present social order. The configuration of miserliness and begging, though initially jarring in its apparent contradiction, more likely reflects a popular currency, namely, stories which circulated to refute almsgiving. Writing some twenty years on the other side of the Wordsworth poems here to be considered and sixty after Hume, Charles Lamb would defend the practice of almsgiving against just such suspicion: "Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies."(2) Inverting the implicit charge of miserliness by attributing the miserly intentions to the storytellers rather than their beggarly subjects, Lamb recounts a particular story, which appeared "in the public papers some time since," about a beggar who when he died left "all the amassings of his alms" to a regular benefactor. As Lamb partly recognizes, the moral of this story may cut both ways--polemicizing against the real need of beggars by the fantastic assertion of accumulated, unused wealth, while still encouraging "well-directed charity" by offering benefactors a fantastic return on generosity and by further allowing the amassed fortune to signify the beggar's "noble gratitude."
In a different register, one that yet preserves the anxiety behind such stories, Hume imagines the recipient of generosity not as one who begs from real need, but as one who is preternaturally undeserving.(3) What Hume recognizes, perhaps only as an unwitting insight of his anxiety, is that excessive need is unreasonable, for the additional charge of bigotry implies that the metaphorically concealed beggar is also an enemy of reason and justice. If Hume's anecdote is riddled by a distorting illogicality which perceives the recipient of generosity as a threat to social order, what is less apparent is why singular charity, which in Hume's time (as in our own) was often associated with more conservative political views of the poor, is deemed so threatening. The scandal of begging, it would seem, is that the beggar objectifies non-participation in social economy and becomes both a proof and a source of the responsible citizen's anxiety.(4) Hume's "miser" characterizes the violated spirit of exchange and stands for an abandonment of the social reciprocity that ought to govern all transactions between political subjects. When Hume ascribes the breach in reciprocal relationship to the recipient of generosity, "seditious" intent becomes not only the logical derivation of a beggar's non-integrated status, but a supposition about the beggar's aggressive dissent from social economy. This projected aggression suspends the possibilities of an identification that might call us into question, or out of our social positions and into the chaos of achieved sedition: "without justice, society must immediately dissolve, and every one must fall into that savage and solitary condition, which is infinitely worse than the worst situation that can possibly be suppos'd in society" (497). Although he never directly considers the case of the impoverished or vagrant poor in the Treatise, Hume so well incorporates them into the text's figurative language that they beget an anxiety about destitution that is dialectically opposed to the construct of justice. The beggar's liminal position promotes the responsible citizen's anxiety about the possibility of his or her own destitution, and the social evidence of injustice to which begging might testify is rendered instead in terms of an impractical (or impracticable) justice. Without directly refuting the restoration of the hypothetical fortune, Hume warns, "tis easily conceiv'd how a man may impoverish himself by a single instance of integrity." Hume's beggar cum miser is not just an object of charity, but a negative projection of the "beneficent" subject himself, as anxiety obtains a rhetorical function and encourages restricted attachment. The recipient's status as a miser excuses, rationalizes, or possibly constructs miserliness in the reader, who understands himself as a foil for the uncircumspect "beneficent disposition." Still, even as this rhetoric of anxiety would restrict responsibility, it simultaneously subverts that purpose by having raised the specter of nonrestrictive responsibility, that example offered by the "beneficent disposition."
This economy of justice, which in Hume restricts excessive charity through a taboo identification, also structures much of the Wordsworthian social conscience. The charting of the Wordsworthian social conscience has become a vexed and often divisive endeavor in recent criticism. Scholars such as Marjorie Levinson and James Chandler have weighed in heavily against the liberal Wordsworth who was for so long a commonplace of romantic studies, whereas others such as David Simpson and Gary Harrison, while acknowledging the retrograde and sometimes reactionary course of his politics over his career, have offered us a Wordsworth whose poetry nevertheless traces a critical engagement with the sources of economic oppression in his day.(5) More recently, David Bromwich has proposed a view of Wordsworth that would locate his emergent poetic voice in "The Old Cumberland Beggar" and that poem's exposition of a dynamics of "alienation" of which the beggar is himself an emblem. Wordsworth's transformation of a historical encounter with the beggar gives rise to a poetics of sympathy, wherein sympathy is not merely fellow feeling, but rather the processing of the claim of a person "newly recognized." If we contrast this Wordsworthian course of sympathy to Hume, one of the immediately apparent differences is the function Wordsworth attributes to alienation, which seems both an existential truth of humanity given expression by the old beggar's plight and a spur to the belonging that makes (again) possible our always potentially lost humanity. For Wordsworth recuperates the beggar, whose entire lack of economic agency might make him scandalous, by granting him a paradoxical agency, since it is the beggar who, in Bromwich's phrase, "sponsors the feeling of belonging to humanity."(6) Although from the picture Bromwich draws it is already possible to gain sight of the strategy of resolution Wordsworth will employ in his greatest encounter poem, "Resolution and Independence," I wish to argue that in later poems, such as" Beggars" and "Resolution and Independence" where Wordsworth seems more troubled by his encounters with vagrant poor, he revisits the scene of sympathy to investigate the poetic opportunism implicit in his earlier and direct advocation of almsgiving in "The Old Cumberland Beggar."
We should also note that inasmuch as "The Old Cumberland Beggar" admits the political occasion of Wordsworth's discourse into the poem itself, Wordsworth demands from his reader, rather as Martin Luther King, Jr. does in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," some accounting of the politics that have inspired his eloquence. As Wordsworth rhetorically opposes the "Statesmen" who want to "rid the world of nuisances"--presumably, by criminalizing and then institutionalizing vagrants--his defense of the poor takes up the very terms of social economy that Hume had presumed in figuratively exploiting his reader's anxieties about justice at the expense of those who cannot reciprocate our attentions or generosity.
But deem not this man useless.--Statesmen! ye Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye Who have a broom still ready in your hands To rid the world of nuisances....
(67-70)(7)
Protesting the idea that a man such as the beggar is "useless," Wordsworth withholds the direct referent of his vocative "Statesman" not only until the end of the line, but until after the period, so that along with the statesman it is also the reader who finds herself implicated in this ideological bias. Even Wordsworth cannot free himself of the bias, since he locates the beggar's value in the effect of goodness he occasions--that pleasurable commissioning of oneself to the idea of virtue arising, both as habit and spontaneity, in those who respond automatically to the beggar's need: "And thus the soul, / By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursu'd / Doth find itself insensibly dispos'd / To virtue and true goodness" (94-97). I think Bromwich is right to say, at least as an assessment of "The Old Cumberland Beggar," that the beggar "is defined ultimately by the feelings others can have regarding him" (19). Yet if Bromwich takes us quite far toward imagining a Wordsworthian poetics that conceives of "attention as an ethical act," and a course in which action follows from sympathetic response, Wordsworth seems either less able or less willing to answer to such a construct of sympathy in the encounter poems he wrote in the early part of the next decade.
The easiest conclusion to draw from this is that the Wordsworth of 1802 is already becoming the late Wordsworth, a poet who withdraws from the specter of his more liberal, even revolutionary politics of the 1790s. Most often, in our ideological assessments of Wordsworth, we attempt to perceive a horizon of action that devolves from his vision, but I want to argue that it is precisely in the poems where Wordsworth self-consciously contains the responsiveness of his poetic subject that he becomes most thoughtful about the relation between ethics and political action, confronting and forcing us to confront with him the limits we place upon our ethical responsibility for others. In the two poems on which I concentrate my attentions--"Beggars" and "Resolution and Independence"--Wordsworth studies the uses of identification in a restrictive economy of charity and reflects upon the limiting of otherness that inheres in identification. In so doing, he confronts not only the more explicit political debates about the fate of the vagrant poor in his time, but the central themes of Humean justice.(8) In "Beggars," for example, Wordsworth concentrates on the private act of almsgiving not simply in nostalgic avoidance of political solutions, but to draw our attention to the psychological economy of limited (or limiting) responsibility--that ethical core of political thought. Emmanuel Levinas has expressed this relation wherein ethics is not a denial of the political, but the very condition from which it must speak:
It is extremely important to know if society in the current sense of the term is the result of a limitation of the principle that men are predators of one another, or if to the contrary it results from the limitation of the principle that men are for one another. Politics must be able in fact always to be checked and criticized starting from the ethical. This second form of sociality would render justice to that secrecy which for each is his life, a secrecy which does not hold to a closure which would isolate some rigorously private domain of a closed interiority, but a secrecy which holds to the responsibility for the Other. This would be a responsibility which is inaccessible in its ethical advent, from which one does escape, and which, thus, is the principle of an absolute individuation.(9)
Levinas draws our attention to competing connotations of limitation, with the first sense denoting a restriction of predatory principles (a sense close to Hume's understanding of the relation between humanity and our environment), and the second, an evasion of the ethical structure of one for another which is the inescapable root of all language and social possibility.
Likewise, Wordsworth's "Beggars" offers us an encounter with the other which tends toward ethical evasion: the narrator, through his own sympathetic conjectures, dismisses a story of woe, with its...
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