This dissertation has been 61—5131 microfilmed exactly as received

WENZEL, Elizabeth Brown, 1927- THE PRELUDE AS SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1961 Language and Literature, general

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright by izab eth Brovm Wenzel 1962 THE PRELUDE AS SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School o f The Ohio S ta te U n iv ersity

By

Elizabeth Brown Wenzel, B. A., M. A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1961

Approved by

^ Adviser v Department of English CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

I "These Autobiographical times of ours" . 10

II "We see but darkly Even when we look • . behind us" 55

III "A linked lay of Truth" ...... 96

IV "Each man is a memory to himself". • • 128

V "Him s e lfe . . .a true Poem" .... 172

VI "Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poesie" 212

Bibliography ...... 2J0

Autobiography ...... 2^5

ii INTRODUCTION

11 The Prelude is not an autobiography," v/rites the most recent of Wordsworth's biographers, but one hundred and forty-one pages la t e r , th e same w riter d e cla r e s th a t in th e poem, "we fin d

[Wordsworth] writing what was in effect his spiritual autobiography."

Mrs. Mary Moorman's seeming contradiction reflects a confusion that exists in the use of the term "autobiography" both in Wordsworth criticism and in general. Scholars have used the term more and less generically as a category for The Prelude, from de Selincourt's in ju n c tio n th a t "The Prelude i s a great poem, but i t i s a lso the frank autobiography of a great man. . . .[Thus] it cannot be judged solely by poetic canons, any more than a letter can be judged by the same criteria as an essay: like a letter, it owes its peculiar charm to intimate revelation of the writer," to Havens' complaint that "most criticism of the truth of the poem has been based on the misconception of its purpose, on the assumption that it was intended to be autobiography."^ Such opposing statements need clarification.

Hlary Moorman, W illiam Wordsworth: The E arly Years 1770-1803 (Oxford, 1957), p. 277. 2 Ernest de Selincourt, ed., The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind (Oxford, 1926), p. 1..

^Raymond Dexter Havens, The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore, 194-1), p. 287.

1 Since Wordsworth1s time there has been an increasing volume of study and comment on autobiography as a distinct kind of writing which it is well for students of The Prelude to take into account. An exam­ ination of the tradition of autobiographical writing and of critical writing upon what is now considered a distinct genre would be of help in understanding Wordsworth’s achievement in his unique poetic example.

Wordsworth scholars have ignored the growing literature on autobiography as a genre; and, as a rule, students of autobiography have ignored The Prelude. The University Library of Auto biography reprints part of the poem, but the series includes little critical commentary. 4 E. Stuart Bates i Inside Out: An Introduction to Auto­ biography has a chapter entitled "Poetry as Autobiography," but it 5 merely mentions Wordsworth in a trite and superficial discussion.

Of Georg Misch's monumental history of the genre, only the volumes covering antiquity and the Middle Ages have been completed, although there are excellent general remakrs about the nineteenth century in the Introduction. Wayne Shumaker’s history and analysis of English autobiography excludes The Prelude because it is a poem, and verse lives are "a thing apart.A very recent book by Hoy Pascal differs

\ew York, 1918, XI, 98-162.

^New York, 1957.

^Geschichte der Autobiographie, Erster Band: Das Alterturn (Berlin, 1907); Zweiter Band: Das Mitt el alter (Frankfurt, 1955). The first volume, Das Alterturn, has been translated from the second edition by the author and E. W. Dickes, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols. (London, 19^8). ^E nglish Autobiography, I t s Emergence , M aterials and Form (Berkeley, 1954), p. 50• from these studies in that it discusses The Prelude at some length, although it gives no particular attention to it as a poem. Pascal notes that, while it is usually not considered in histories of autobiography, it is "a landmark as a history of a soul’s growth, „8 and as an exposition of the shaping of life by the soul."

Efforts to impose some pattern on the great variety of autobiographies frequently mislead. A national focus like Shumaker's in English Autobiography is fruitless with The Prelude: as Pascal has pointed out, The Prelude belongs with the continental autobiog­ raphies of Rousseau and Goethe. A focus on historical evolution is equally misleading, for, as Prank M. Towne has suggested, in style

The Prelude belongs with an autobiography far removed in time, The 9 C onfessions o f S t. A ugustine. The a lte r n a te way o f approaching a genre, the formal analysis, poses equal difficulties because of the uncommon variety and individuality inherent in autobiographies. The formal sections of Shumaker's study and the brief analytic remarks incidental to Miss Dorothy Sayers' thesis in The Mind of the Maker^ are instances of modal and logical oversimplifications; and the

^Design and Truth in Auto biography (London, I960), p.h6. Pascal's study appeared after I had completed the major portion of my work, but, since much of his material corroborates my own, I have frequently cited him in revising my text.

^"Wordsworth1s Spiritual Autobiography," Research Studies of the State College of Washington. XXV (1957)» 62.

*®(New York, 19^1)» PP» 89-95* Since Miss Sayers is using the analogy of writing autobiography to explain the theological doctrine of the Incarnation—"God wrote His own autobiography"—she posits the perfect autobiography. various essays in Formen der Selbstdarstel1ung**—admittedly a series of preliminary studies—dramatically illustrate the shapelessness of many attempts to bring order into what seems like chaos. Only a very general approach like that of Georges Gusdorf in the last-mentioned volume, which discusses the metaphysical presuppositions of autobiog­ raphy in the light of contemporary anthropological knowledge, seems to say something important concerning the genre without doing a gross 12 injustice to individual autobiographies. However, to point out the 15 limitations of these studies is not to deny their usefulness. I hope to avoid the obvious oversimplifications of both historical and formal methods—although I employ both—in the present study by focus­ ing on a single autobiography.

In its normal sense an autobiography implies two things, that the writer's own life is the principal theme and that the work is a fairly continuous unified history. Like St. Augustine's Con­ fessions. which it greatly resembles in tone, spirit, and scope, The

Prelude is much more than a simple recital of events, much more even than a narrative of inner experience; but, also like the Confessions.

*11 »• Gunter Reichenkron and Erich Haase, edd., Formen der Selbst- dars tell rang. Ahalekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbst- portraits. Festgabe fur Fritz Neubert (Berlin, 1956).

^"Conditions et lim ites de 11 autobiographic,11 Formen der Selbstdarstellung. pp. 105-28.

15of the many books and essays on autobiography, Misch's his­ tory and the items cited in this paragraph have been of most help in this study. A complete list of works consulted may be found in the Bibliography. 5 it is recognizably autobiographical at the most direct level, that of the writer speaking in his own person of his own extended experi­ ence in a basically chronological narrative. The span of life which the writer chooses to cover may vary. Some writers concentrate on the adult years, recording events and achievements; other emphasize childhood and development, an emphasis usually considered typical of the Romantics even though the fourth-century autobiography of

Augustine ignores the achievements of the Bishop of Hippo and con­ centrates, like Wordsworth, on formative years and experiences.

Yet, whether it is the formative or the achieving one, autobiog­ raphy must cover a significant span of time. This The Prelude certainly does. Thus I assume that—whatever more it is—Wordsworth's poem is an autobiography.

While many Wordsworth scholars have taken this fact for granted, they have not noticed that the writing of, and thinking about, autobiography had reached a significant stage in the age of the Romantics. The most recent writer on autobiography considers the period from 1782 to 1851—from Rousseau's Confessions to the last volume of Dichtung und Wahrheit—the "classical age of auto- biography,"tt decisive in the history of the genre. i 4 He is general­ izing from the autobiographies—including Wordsworth's—written in the period, but there are substantiating aspects of the intellectual milieu which have not been systematically presented. The word

^Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, pp. 6-b9, 5 50• "autobiography” itse lf was first used in 1809; contemporary auto­ biographies proliferated and earlier ones were issued, many for the first time; critical comments reflect the general interest; and three essays in particular discuss autobiographical writing in and for itself, as far as I know for the first time. The assumptions concerning autobiography im plicit and explicit in these essays throw significant light on the kind of autobiography we find in

The Prelude. Chapter I presents this historical material as a background for the analyses that follow.

Once I have shown how pervasive was the interest in auto­ biography during the years Wordsworth was at work writing and revis­ ing _The Prelude, and how strikingly the period's conception of autobiography is reflected in the type of autobiography the poem represents, I analyze direct and metaphorical statements in the 1805 version in an effort to determine just how conscious Wordsworth was of writing an autobiography. Scholars who heretofore have considered even peripherally Wordsworth's awareness of what he was doing have attempted to isolate the exact moment in the gradual conception of the poem at which he thought of the whole as an autobiographical narrative. I believe that internal evidence in the I8O5 text estab­ lishes beyond a doubt that Wordsworth was not only aware of the autobiographical nature of his work, but that he had thought search- ingly of the problems inherent in writing autobiography, in the main problems of motive, of memory, and of flux. Chapter II examines in detail that evidence. '7

In addition to the autobiographer1s problem of recalling and interpreting his experiences in his mind, there are the problems of his medium. The directness with which the artist attempts to present the raw material of his remembered experience in autobiog­ raphy tends to obscure the fact that autobiography is a work of art and confronted with the exigencies of any literary endeavor. The literary devices of apostrophe and direct address, of foreshadowing and recapitulation, and of dialectical progression are not peculiar to autobiography, but they function in heightened ways for the autobiographer. Chapter III examines their function in The Prelude.

One of the most characteristic points of the three Romantic commentators on autobiography analyzed in Chapter I is a distinction between an outer and an inner type of autobiography and an avowed concern with the latter. It is a distinction which was ignored by commentators later in the century but which has become a commonplace in tw en tieth -cen tu ry comment on autobiography. Shumaker speaks o f

"subjective autobiography" vs. "Life-and-Times" and Towne of res gestae vs. spiritual autobiography. Phrases like "life-and-times" and "res gestae" suggest the same identifiable type—one which may reveal the character and inner experience of the author indirectly but which concentrates on events and actions. "Subjective" or

"spiritual" autobiography is more difficult to characterize. Misch uses the term "spiritual autobiography" without formal distinction or attempt at definition, but he does suggest that self-scrutiny is its basis.^ The entry "spiritual autobiography" in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualite Ascetique et Mystique lim its the category to auto­ biographical accounts which tell of conversion.Tow ne says that the essence—and necessity—of spiritual autobiography is a kind of generalizing technique.^ St. Augustine1s is the prototype of spiritual autobiography for all these writers, and in Chapter IV

I make an extensive comparison of The Prelude with The Confessions in an attempt to show just how the poem may be considered spiritual autobiography. Since in Chapter II I concentrate on Wordsworth*s attitude toward the autobiographical task as it is expressed in the poem, and in Chapter I II on formal d ev ices, in Chapter IV I d iscu ss the material of autobiography; that is, in the comparison with

Augustine I study in detail the specific experiences the two men chose to r e la te and the u ses each makes o f them.

Chapter IV fo cu ses on Wordsworth and Augustine as men and thus as subjects of autobiography, on their differences in tempera­ ment, era, and metaphysical assumptions. But the technical differ­ ence between The Prelude and The Confessions, the distinction between poetry and prose, remains to be discussed. In Chapter V I return to the Romantic era and examine autobiographical elements in selected

-^History of Autobiography in Antiquity. II, 617•

Vernet, "Autobiographies Spirituelles," Dictionnaire de Spiritualite Ascetique et Mystique (Paris, 1957)* I» ll4 l-59•

■^His main purpose is to disclaim Wordsworth’s stylistic affinities with eighteenth-century generalized descriptions. poems of Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. In the concluding chapter I focus on autobiography as poetry, tracing the brief his­ tory of poetic autobiography and speculating why the one great

English autobiography of the Romantic era was written as a poem.

The study thus incorporates several themes and methods.

Chapters I, V, and VT are primarily concerned with the historic moment of The Prelude. The central chapters are devoted to analysis of the poem itself, but in IV my method is to compare it with The

Confessions of St. Augustine in order to define in what sense it may be called "spiritual autobiography." Throughout I apply the insights of students of autobiography as a genre to the poem. The generic studies do not treat autobiography as poetry even when they discuss The Prelude, however. In my concluding chapter I bring the historical and analytic points of the earlier chapters together in a discussion of autobiography as poetry. CHAPTER I

"These Autobiographical times of ours"

While The Prelude as an avowed autobiographical poem is unique, not only in the Romantic era but in all of English litera­ ture, it is not, as an autobiography, an isolated phenomenon.

Autobiographies of the modern type are rare in England before the 1 late Renaissance, but they became numerous during the Puritan era and the eighteenth century. There was a quickening interest in the genre, however, during th e period Wordsworth composed and revised

The Prelude. This Romantic interest is evidenced by the gradual distinction of autobiography from biography and Southey1s introduc­ tion of the word itself; by the publication, independently and in series, of many older and contemporary autobiographies; by critical considerations of the thus proliferating genre; and by the appearance of three essays—the first, as far as I am aware—exclusively devoted to the theory and practice of writing autobiographically.

Despite pioneering essays by Herder, Disraeli, and Foster in the analysis and theory of autobiography and Southey's apparent

James M. Osborn implies that the recently discovered manuscript by Thomas Whythorne i s th e f i r s t , "The Beginnings o f Autobiography in England," Clark Library Lecture (Los Angeles, 1959). See Chapter VI, pp. 214-15. 10 11

invention of the word "autobiography" in 1809, Romantic writers frequently ignored the distinction between autobiography and biog­ raphy. James Field Stanfield's book, An Essay on the Study and

Composition of Biography (1815), seems, in fact, to have been based on a study of autobiography rather than biography. On the second page Stanfield declares that "there can be no perfect biography but that which is written by a man's self." This undoubtedly re­ flects a favorite device of biographers of the time, to edit and arrange letters and other primary documents so that the subject was, in their words, his own biographer. And, while biographers thus ex­ ploited their materials, critics compounded the confusion. One re­ viewer felt that Boswell's Life of Johnson "may be regarded as a sort of autobiography" and judged Lockhart's Life of Scott so imbued with the spirit of the subject that even it "may almost be regarded as an

a autobiography." Stanfield devotes twelve pages early in his book

"to introduce a few observations on the [particular] subject of auto-biography," a treatment of self-biographers, the "first rank of biographers," which indicates a separate species; but, when he returns to the genus, biographer, he quotes for illustration almost exclusively from autobiography. His sources include the autobiograph­ ers known and commented on most frequently in his time* Thuanus,

Cardinal de Retz, Cardan, Montaigne, Rousseau, Lord Clarendon,

Colley Cibber, Lavater, Hume, Gibbon, A lfieri. Not only Stanfield,

2[Sir Archibald Alison], Blackwoods. LXI (1849), 295, 296. 12 but Lockhart in 1818, Sir Egerton Brydges in 1825, Carlyle in his famous 1852 essay on biography, and Wordsworth as late as 1845, use the word "biography" when they are obviously and specifically refer- x ring to autobiography.^

Stanfield uses both Southey's term, "auto-biography"— 4 hyphenated, as Southey had hyphenated it —and the term used by

Disraeli,^ "self-biography." He also speaks of "memoirs of dis­ tinguished persons. . .written by themselves." John Foster's phrase for autobiography in I8O5 had been "memoirs of oneself."^

The phrase would be considered redundant today; the plural form of

"memoir" has gradually usurped the more general meaning and as a rule is synonymous with autobiography.^ The suffusion of this meaning for

"memoirs" paralleled the growing interest in autobiography. The Ox­ ford English Dictionary credits the first use of the word in this sense to John Evelyn in the Diary, which, although written more than a century earlier, was not published until 1818.

5[Lockhart], Blackwoods. IV (1818), 212; Brydges, Suppression of Memoirs (Paris, 1825), p. 8; Carlyle, "Biography," Fraser's Magazine (April, 1852); Wordsworth is quoted in M. L. Peacock, Jr., The Criti­ cal Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore, 1950), P* 576. ■^In the Quarterly Review. I (I8O9), 586. See the OED for the citation of this as the first use of the word. 5l. Disraeli, "Some Observations on Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters," M iscellanies; or, Literary Recreations (London, 1796), pp. 95-HO. 6"0n a Man's Writing Memoirs of Himself" [18O5], Decision of Character and Other Essays (New York, 1882), pp. 16-81.

7Modern critics such as Pascal (Design and Truth in Autobiography London, I960, p. 5) frequently try to distinguish between memoirs and autobiography, but no standard differentiation exists. 15

Whether referred to as memoirs, auto-biography, s e lf ­ biography or merely biography, early autobiographical writings were

ferreted out and published for the first time in the first third of

the nineteenth century. Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of Colonel

Hutchinson and a fragment of autobiography appeared in 1806. Modern

students of the genre of autobiography rightly exclude diaries, but here we are documenting the autobiographical, and the first publica­

tion of Evelyn1s diary in 1818 and of an abbreviated version of Pepys

in 1825 seem symptomatic. Sir Kenelm Digby1s disguised autobiography,

"Loose Fantasies," was first published in 1827 under the title Pri­ vate Memoirs. Anne, Lady Fanshawe's Memoirs, written in 1676 as Q private instruction for her son, was first printed in 1829.

In addition to these first publications, well-known auto­ biographies were gathered into series and reissued, in France, Ger­ many and England. S u b scrip tio n s for a s e r ie s o f memoirs r e la t iv e to

the history of France were taken in 1785» but the project was sus­ pended in 1791 by the Revolution. Two divisions of fifty-two and o seventy-eight volumes did appear in 1819. In 1790 a German publisher began a series of spiritual autobiographies of which those by St.

D The dates and facts about these titles published for the first time in the early nineteenth century are taken from A Literary His­ tory of England, ed. Baugh (New York, 19^8), PP» 608, 781, 790-91.

^M. Petitot, Collection complete des Memoires Relatifs ti 1'histoire de France (Paris, 1819-29}. 14 10 Augustine, Petrarch, and Zinzendorf were issued. Horder was asked to provide the introduction for this series, and thus, as far as I know, wrote the first essay ever devoted exclusively to autobiography as a type.** In England between 1826 and 1852 the London publishers,

Whittaker, Treacher and Arnot, issued a special popular series which ran to thirty-four volumes. Most of the volumes had been published earlier in the century, and in many cases the old plates were used 12 and a special title page inserted. The series bore the heading

Autobiography, and the .subtitle, & Collection of the most instructive and amusing lives ever published, written by the parties themselves,

With brief introductions and compendious sequels, carrying on the narrative to the death of each writer. There was evidently no plan of selection. While most of the items had been written in the eightr-

eenth century, C ellini's Autobiography was a notable exception. The

contents were mostly factual memoirs, but some fiction, like Robert

JDrury1 s Journal (probably taken to be fa c tu a l), was included.

in •• •• Bekenntnisse merkwurdiger Manner von sich selbst, hrg. J. G. Muller (Berlin, 1791, rev* 1806).^ -A "pendant" series adding auto- biographies^by Thuanus and Andrea^appeared laters Selbstbiographieen beruhmter Manner, hrg. Seybold (Tubingen, 1797, 1799).

A A A **J. G. Herder, "Einleitende Briefe" to Bekenntnisse merkwurdiger Manner von sich selbst [l790j» Sammtliche Werke, hrg. Suphan (Berlin, 1885)", XVIII, 559-76.

■^Only the British Museum Catalogue lists the volumes as a series. In the English Catalogue nearly all the titles are listed with earlier publication dates than 1826-1855, although the final two titles in the series indicate publication dates falling within the time of the supposed series publication. The Library of Congress has an incomplete set of these voltimes with the separate title page, Autobiography. . ., inserted; Newberry Library has a complete set. 15

Continental items by Kotzebue, Vidocq, and others were used, but none of the spiritual autobiographies of the German series, and neither Rousseau nor Goethe, which would, of course, have been available in original editions.

A century earlier in Italy and in the 1780's in Germany contemporary autobiographies had been solicited for publication in series. Both of these proposed series had a specific educational purpose. In 1728 a Venetian quarterly proposed that intellectual autobiographies be written by "the Scholars of Italy" in order to edify the young and contribute to the reform of school curricula and methods. "Those who have published nothing but sonnets or the like slender poems, or legal books, or treatises on moral theology, or other things of that sort" were explicitly excluded in favor of

" creative writers.The proponents of the plan hoped to give sub­ stance to Leibnitz's suggestion in his discussion of Descartes: "it is good to study the discoveries of others in a way that discloses to us the course of the inventions and renders them in a sort our own. And I wish that authors would give us the history of their 14 discoveries and the steps by which they have arrived at them."

The only work thus precipitated and recorded is the now justly

■^Quoted by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, edd., The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, 19^), P* 5*

^Quoted by Fisch and Bergin, p. 5* 16 cherished Vita. . .da lui stesao deacritta of Giambattiata Vico.*^

Marshall McLuhan has linked Vico's autobiography with _The Prelude:

«A century separates [it] and Wordsworth's Prelude, but they are products of the same impulse,” and he continues, "another century, and Joyce’s Portrait carries the same enterprise a stage further. n 1 6

Vico's Autobiography documents the development of a discursive thinker, not a poet, but it cannot be denied that both he and Words­ worth show the development of a creative mind, rigorously excluding whatever is irrelevant in such a focus.^ With the exception of the

Vico the Italian series proved abortive, but in Germany late in the

1870's K. P. Moritz published a series of autobiographical documents

•^Vico wrote portions of his life in 1725 and 1728, and a con­ tinuation in 1751* I't is interesting that in the Romantic period it seemed important to bring autobiographies "up to date" to the time of death as was done in the popular English series; Vico's life history was continued and concluded by Villarosa in 1818. Although Vico's New Science was influential, the autobiography has seemingly been little known in English-speaking countries until recently. Coleridge read and praised it, however, in 1825, and Henry Nelson Coleridge included a translation of one section in the second edi­ tion of his Introduction to the Study of the Greek Poets. 1854.

^"The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry," English Institute Essays (1951)» 174-75*

■^The twentieth-century translator-editors of Vico's Autobiog­ raphy consider its unique interest to be the first application of the genetic method by an original thinker to his own writings. Like all generalizations which seek to pinpoint a historic "first," this one is suspect; according to Misch, Othloh of St. Enderan used a genetic presentation of his writings as early as the eleventh cen­ tury. See "Studien zur Geschichte der Autobiographic," Nachrichten der Akad. d. Wiss. G ottingen, p h ilo s . - h i s t . K lasse, 1954-, no. V. 125- 210. 17 in his Magazine for Experimental Psychology. His own contribution is an autobiography of childhood, differing from Vico's brief pre­ sentation of childhood because it attends "to the multiple experiences of the child and [isj aware of potentialities in their own right, not simply because they lead somewhere, to a career or a position."^®

In 179^ Wordsworth proposed a biographical series of his own. He is speaking to his friend William Mathews of the projected periodical which was destined to be frustrated before it began*

"Next should come essa y s p a r tly for in str u c tio n and p a r tly fo r amuse­ ment, such as biographical papers exhibiting the characters and opinions of eminent men, particularly those distinguished for their exertions in the cause of liberty. . . .It would perhaps be advisable that these should, as much as possible form a Series, exhibiting the advancement of the human mind in moral knowledge."^ His reporter's ear is sensitive to contemporary demands for "lives," and he sees the value of presenting a series in which individual lives gather to a cumulative force.

Both Wordsworth1s scheme and the subtitle of the Whittaker series rely on the centuries-old apology for all literary endeavor:

specific lives are both to instruct and to amuse. One may suspect

1A Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 95* I am in­ debted to Pascal for information concerning this series of solicited autobiographies.

~^Ba.rly Letters, June, 179^» 18 20 with Sir Walter Scott that the rage for personal and private his­ tory served primarily to amuse the growing mass reading audience, but serious claims were advanced throughout the Romantic era. The Eng­ lish translator of Lavater1 s Secret Journal of _a Self-Observer, for instance, prefaced his work in 1795 with the claim that "a faithful and circumstantial moral history of the most common and unromantic character is infinitely more important, and fitter for improving the 21 human heart, than the most extraordinary and interesting novel.

There is a general knowledge which a series of such works advances.

Wordsworth proposes to show "the advancement of the human mind in moral knowledge*" and Herder says th a t a lib r a r y o f authors upon themselves like that which he is introducing would form "an excellent 22 contribution to the history of mankind."

When it finally appeared in I85O, one reviewer of The

Prelude acknowl3dged the usefulness of such documents for the induc­ tive psychology of the period as well as the general historical march of mind: "The progress of mankind in self-knowledge, or, at least, in the habit of self-reflection and introspection, and the increase

20 He begins his own autobiographical fragment in 1808 by say­ ing that this current rage "may be well permitted to alarm one who has engaged in a certain degree the attention of the public." Quoted by John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott [1857-38], 10 vols. (Boston, 1901)» I» 1.

^Trans. from the German by Rev. Peter Will (London, 1795)» P refa ce.

22Herder, "Einleitende Briefe," p. 376. The translations from Herder are my own. with time of the mind's dispositon to direct its thoughts to the field of contemplation, rather than to that of action, is strikingly exemplified in the history of poetical literature." After speaking of Homer, the Greek tragedians, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and

Milton, and taking Wordsworth's measure by them, the writer discusses

The Prelude specificallyt "The complete history of the growth of any mind would be a work o f u n iversal and most in ten se in te r e s t, could i t ever be written; and the story of the growth of such a mind as Words­ worth's—however imperfectly, from the necessity of the case, it must be told, — cannot but be welcomed with delight and studied with ad­ vantage. . . .T his poem, in connection w ith the other works o f i t s , author, presents one of the best studies for the psychologist which literature anywhere affords, and is perhaps as complete and valuable an exposition of the mysterious development of a mighty intellect as will ever be given to the world.

As the century progressed, what the Romantics conceived as a d i f f i c u l t and id ea l d is c ip lin e came to be considered and p racticed as a perfunctory exercise. In reviewing Goethe's autobiography in

1818, J. G. Lockhart wrote: "Let us imagine with what delight we should our selves peruse an easy and copious biography of any of our own great departed worthies,—or, if the time were come, with what gratitude we should read a minute story of the mode in which the

2%orth American Review. LXXIII (1851), 475, 484-85. ojl spirit of Scott or Byron had been fashioned." Within ten years, however, the excess of popular and mediocre autobiographies led him to eloquent scorn! "England expects every driveller to do his

Memorabilia. Modern primer-makers must needs leave confessions be­ hind them, as if they were so many Rousseaus. Our weakest mob-orators think it is a hard case if they cannot spout to pop-* <= . . .and thanks to 'the march of in tellect,1 we are already rich in the auto­ biography of pickpockets. . . .The mania for this garbage of Confes­ sions, and Recollections, and Reminiscences, and Aniliana 'is indeed a v ile symptom. '"^5 Lockhart was n ot the only one to complain. The journals were full of criticism. In the review wherein the word

"auto-biography" appeared for the first time in ]809, Southey pre­ d icted a pernicious epidemic o f w riters "become thus querulous a fter fame (to which they have no pretensions)." In 1849 Sir Archibald

A lison blamed the French! "Every Frenchman thinks h is l i f e worth recording."^ In the middle years of the century reviewers insisted that autobiography should be written only by those "with some con­ siderable portion of talent, or at least by a person of some consider- «28 able celebrity or another, but by the end of the century Sir Leslie

oh Blackwoods. IV (1818), 212.

^"Autobiography," Quarterly Review. XXXV (1827), 164.

^Quarterly Review. I (1809), 586.

^"Autobiography—Chateaubriand's Memoirs," Blackwoods. LXI (1849), 299. ^"Autobiography," Quarterly Review (1827), 164. 21

Stephen was suggesting that the writing of an autobiography "should be considered as a duty by all eminent men; and, indeed, by men not «29 eminent." Wordsworth himself shortly before his death suggested a c o lle c t io n o f au tob iograp h ies by unknown men, men "of remarkable v ir ­ tues and talents though not universally nor generally known. The number o f th e se , i f sought fo r , would be found co n sid era b le, and I cannot but think they would tend more to excite imitation than accounts of men so preeminent in genius and so favoured by oppor- 30 tunity as rather to discourage than inspire emulation.

In the first part of the century, not only did Lockhart's

"drivellers" write their memorabilia, but writers of importance shaped their ideas in an autobiographical mold. While Coleridge's

Biographia Literaria is relatively impersonal in tone, no other critical document of proportionate significance in the history of

English literature has been cast as a "sketch of my literary life."

The intense inner preoccupations in the letters of Keats and Byron make them exceptionally revealing: a recent speaker on autobiography can include Keats' letters as documents which parallel The Prelude and the autobiography of Henry James,31 and the selected letters of

^^"Autobiography," Cornhill Magazine, XCIII (1881), 410.

5^He is discussing the memoirs of Benjamin Way in 1845. Quoted by Peacock, Critical Opinions, p. 376.

-^William Walsh, Autobiographical Literature and Educational Thought (Leeds, 1959). Byron have taken their place in the University Library of Autobiog­ raphy. In addition, Byron*s journals record his random and considered judgments for all posterity. The period saw a preponderance of per­ sonal essays—one thinks immediately of Lamb and pieces like "Christ's

Hospital." It has recently been claimed that in The Confessions of an Opium-Eater De Quineey*s "great discovery. . .was the happy thought of making from his own life the thread upon which to string his pre­ occupations with death, loneliness, neurotic pathos, and grandeur. .

. .The chief source of his distinction as a writer may, in the long n 32 run, . . .prove to have been this discovery of his proper subject."

A whole era was discovering and exploring its "proper subject," and

De Quincey recognised the tendency in himself and his age when he reorganised and rewrote the a r tic le s of th i r ty years for the 1853

Autobiographic Sketches. The adaptation of Hazlitt's frustrated love for Sarah Walker in Liber Amoris 53 a n tic ip a te s the c r is is w ith Blumine in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; but, while much speculation has gone into establishing the real life identity of Blumine, the significant autobiographical portions of Sartor concern Carlyle's intellectual and 3b spiritual development, not his romantic attachments. His revision

Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago, 1953), PP. 76-77.

55william Hazlitt, "Liber Amoris or The New Pygmalion," Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1932), IX, 95-162. 3b For a discussion of a part of this autobiography, see Carlisle Moore, "Sartor Resartus and the Problem of C a rly le 's 'C onversion'," PMLA, LXX (1955), 662-81. 25 of his philosophy "On Clothes" into the "biography" of his German persona, Herr Teufelsdro’ckh, accommodated his didacticism to the

A. autobiographical interest of the age. He writes of Herr Teufels- drockh in one place* "it ever remains doubtful whether he is laughing in his sleeve at these Autobiographical times of ours."^

The names o f great autobiographers are freq u en tly align ed with these works, both by the authors and by their reviewers. De

Quineey places The Confessions of an Opium-Eater and the Suspiria de

Profundis in the tradition of St. Augustine and Rousseau: admitting that to breathe a record of human passion "not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the saintly confessional" is perilously diffi­ cult, he accuses Augustine and Rousseau of failure to achieve the impassioned prose necessary for such an undertaking; thus they have left the field open to him, De Quinceyl^ In the earliest edition of the letters of Byron, a kind of editorial sop to the announcement th a t Byron's Memoirs had been destroyed, Thomas Moore compares Byron favorably to the great Italian poet who has been called the father of modern autobiography: "What has been said of Petrarch, that 'his correspondence and verses together afford the progressive interest of a narrative in which the poet is always identified with the man,1

55 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Her r Teuf elsdr o ckh. ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1957)» P« 9^.

A ^"General Preface, " The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quine ey. ed. David Masson (London, 1896;*I* 1^. will be found applicable, in a far greater degree, to Lord Byron, in whom the literary and the personal character were so closely interwoven, that to have left his works without the instructive commentary which his Life and Correspondence afford, would have been equally an injustice both to himself and to the world. *37 One reviewer, perhaps satirically, considers Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris in connection w ith Rousseau and Goethe."^58 The creator o f Werther was preparing his own intellectual autobiography in these years; Goethe, in fact, considered all that he had ever written fragments of one great co n fessio n . The Dichtung und Wahrheit was m erely an attem pt 59 he ventured upon to make that confession complete. Coleridge, whose usual indifference to Goethe is worthy of remark, uses a 40 quotation from him as the epigraph of the Biographia Literaria.

Had he known his Goethe better, he might have used any number of revealing statements concerning autobiography, for, while the one he did choose appears to refer specifically to the writer of auto­ biography, in its German context it refers to the writer in general.

57 Letters and Journals of Lord Byront with Notices of his Life, ed. Thomas Moore (Paris, 1850), from the Preface.

^The Examiner. May 11, 1825. Quoted by Le Gallienne in his edition of Liber Amoris (London, 1895)*

^Poetry and Truth, trans. R. 0. Moon (Washington, 19^9), p* 2 kb. 40 Samuel Taylor C oleridge, Biographia L ite r a r ia . ed. J. Shaw- cross (Oxford, 1907), 2 v o ls .

ill * »» - . It was taken from Goethe's Einleitung in die Propylaen (1798) 25

Those autobiographical documents and their allusions to previous writers of classic autobiography, as well as the details of the gradual differentiation between biography and autobiography, the publication of individual works and autobiographical series, and the testimony of reviewers, are important to an understanding of the immense interest of the age in autobiography; but the three early essays devoted to autobiography as an exclusive type of writing are of even greater importance to our understanding of The Prelude.

Herder in 1790, Isaac Disraeli in 1796, and John Foster in 1805 speak of the autobiographical task per se> Writers after

I8O5 continue to discuss autobiography, but they either lump it with biography—as Stanfield and Carlyle do—or they write long reviews with a group of specific contemporary autobiographies as their starting point. While the furor occasioned by the publication of

Rousseau's Confessions undoubtedly acted as a catalyst to the three essays—Rousseau is mentioned by all three—the Romantic commentators discuss autobiography proper, how it comes to be written, whether and when it should be published, its value to the reader but more espe­ cially to the writer, and the difficulties inherent in the task.

Victorian reviewers invariably discuss the objective value of autobiography to the reader, but these three Romantics, as might be expected, are much more interested in the value it has for the writer. Related to this perspective is their distinction between the recital of outer events and the more profound presentation of 'inner events. While Disraeli voices the usual justification from the reader's point of view—any faithful relation of humanity is of significance—and Herder looks for his proposed "little library of authors upon themselves" to inform his generation how it ought to direct itself, both realized that the autobiographer writes first of all for himself, and only then for a reader. Disraeli condemns the journals wherein only trivia are recorded; the human mind has become "the great object of our inquiry." "He who studies his own mind" will form a journal "peculiarly interesting" to himself, but

"probably, not undeserving the meditations of others." The emphasis is on the value to the writer. Herder has a positive attitude toward the objective type of memoir in which a father leaves a memento of his life for his children, a citizen for his compatriots, a scholar, a hero, or a statesman for those of his profession; but he obviously finds more interesting (and more worth while) the records of "rare beings" like St. Augustine and Petrarch who dis­ sect and fight with themselves, who concentrate on "self-communings and inner moral battles." Herder thus distinguishes between memoirs of outward events and contemplative or religious confessions, assum­ ing that they come from different men and for different purposes.

The latter are written for oneself, and there is a strong question whether or not they should be made public at all. Foster implies that any man can choose to write either, and he states the differ­ ence and his preference for the latter with explicit force*

You will have observed that I have said comparatively little of that which forms the exterior, and in general 27

account the main substance, of the history of a man's life—the train of his fortunes and actions. If an adventurer or a soldier writes memoirs of himself for the information or amusement of the public, he may do well to keep his narrative alive by a constant crowded course of facts; . . .he might occasionally feel it a convenience to be excused from disclosing, if he had investigated, the history and merits of his internal principles. . . .Let him go on with. . .where he has been, what he has witnessed, and the more reputable portion of what he has done. . .there is no obligation for him to turn either penitent or philosopher on our hands—But I am supposing a man to retrace himself through his past life, in order to acquire a deep self-knowledge, and to record the investigation for his own instruction. ^

All three essayists thus divide autobiographies into two basic types. Disraeli's distinction is between "trivial journals" and "studies of the mind"; Herder's between "memoirs" and "contem­ plative or religious confession"; and Foster's between "exterior history" and "deep self-knowledge." It is a distinction which is simply ignored in the long reviews during the rest of the century, but it has been revived in recent genre studies of autobiography.

Not only did Romantic commentators make the distinction; they ex­ pressed a definite preference for what I have called, following 43 Towne, " sp ir itu a l autobiography." I t i s no wonder th a t The Pre­ lude was comparatively bare of "special, social circumstance."^*

It was intended as something else. In the words of Foster, "the

^Foster, oj>. cit.. pp. 66-67*

43 See the Introduction, p. 7* 44 From the review in the British Quarterly Rgview. See Herbert Lindenberger, "The Reception of The Prelude," BNYPL, LXIV (I960), 196-208. 28 exterior life will hold but the second place in attention, as being the imperfect offspring of that internal state, which it is the 45 primary and more difficult object to review.”

From quite different evidence, that of standard autobiog­ raphies written between those of Rousseau and Goethe, Roy Pascal concludes that, beginning in this period, autobiography "serves a purpose all its own of self-discovery and reconciliation with self. 1146

Since this was the Romantic autobiographer *s primary purpose, the question of whether or not to publish looms large in the essays.

Herder praises the Delphic god for recommending self- knowledge above everything else, but doubts that he would have recommended men to make co n fe ssio n s o f them selves in fr o n t o f a ll the world. Rather they should hold dialogues with the "tutelary spirit of the soul" which gives them courage and spurs them on. He describes the result of such a private conversation in words which

Wordsworth himself might have used: "it reminds us of what we forgot, of vows, hopes, inklings of the inexperienced soul of our youth; and

thereby gives us courage and spurs us on."^ Wordsworth writes early in his poem that he will "fetch Invigorating thoughts from former years" which may fix the wavering balance of his mind and reproach

45 ^Foster, o£. cit., p. 67. 46 Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 51 •

47'Herder, op. cit., p. 570. 29 48 him; indeed th e ir "power May spur me on." Herder does n ot w ish that the examples of really rare beings like Augustine or Petrarch be multiplied or publicized without restraint. He vindicates the publication of the confessions of Augustine and Petrarch on public grounds: "Both of them produced such a repercussion in the world, in good as well as bad things, that it became almost a moral neces­ sity to inform themselves and others about the true state of their *49 sentiments, their heart and their character."

Early in his career Wordsworth must have had in mind just such a vindication for The Prelude. Near the end of his poem he makes this explicit statement: "Whether to me shall be allotted life, And with life power to accomplish aught of worth Sufficient to excuse me in men's sight For having given this Record of myself, Is all uncer­ tain" [XIII, 586-90]. His comments in 1804 as he worked on the poem show that Herder's is the only justification which he then felt to be adequate; "This poem will not be published these many years, and never during my lifetim e, till I have finished a larger and more important work to which it is tributary." Elsewhere, "it seems "av frightful deal to say about one's self; and, of course, will never be published (during my lifetim e, I mean) till another work has been written and published, of sufficient importance to justify me in

The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959)» I» 648-52. Book and line citations will hereafter be cited in the text. All references are to the 1805 version imless otherwise indicated.

^Herder, 0£. cit., p. 564. 50 giving my own history to the world. Disraeli says that to pub­ lish one’s own life has sometimes been a poor artifice to bring obscurity into notice, but "when a great man leaves some memorial of his days, his deathbed sanctions the truth, and the grave conse­ crates the m otive.It is a corresponding sense of propriety which made Wordsworth adamant about not publishing The Prelude during his lifetim e, although certainly during his and their life­ time lesser men published volume after volume of self-revelation.

Hume had published his own autobiographical sketch in 1777> but

Rousseau and Gibbon had left their autobiographies in the hands of lite r a r y execu tors. By 1859 Wordsworth was ob viously aware th a t he would never make the long hoped-for repercussion in the world with his complete poem "On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," but he had come to consider The Prelude worthy of publication for its own sake—for its own sake and for the sake of "such reputation as I have acquired,Its publication heretofore had been prevented

"merely by the personal character of the subject." By the time it did appear, delayed publication of autobiography was so exceptional that one reviewer felt constrained to posit a special reason why

"this autobiography has been so long suppressed."^

^°Early L e tte r s. March 6 , 1804; A pril 29, 1804. ^Disraeli, op. cit., p. 102. ^Letters. April 11, 1859.

^ Athenaeum (1850), 807. The "reason" was the supposed change o f mind and heart concerning the French R evolution. 51

Herder and Disraeli understand also the role of vanity in such an undertaking. While autobiography sometimes resuLts from

"the extravagance of vanity, and the delirium of egotism, 11 a great genius obliges posterity when he records "certain things which re­ late to ourselves, which no one can know b o well."^ Vanity is frequently assumed to be the prime motive for writing an autobiog­ raphy. Sidney Lee expressed the attitude near the end of the nine­ teenth century: the autobiographer "is self-centred; he is self- satisfied; he loves himself better than his neighbor."^ Realizing how inexorably and perhaps unintentionally the autobiographer reveals himself, a more sophisticated contemporary writer can suggest how misleading it is to talk of "self-love" in this context: "Most of us love ourselves too dearly to be autobiographer s. Disraeli knows there are other motives. Herder, while he admits that both

Augustine and Petrarch had a tinge of vanity, asserts that "they did not step out as vain fops to tell the world what nobody wanted to know; they rather approached the altar as humble penitents in order to make public confession."^ One is more likely to take

Wordsworth’s assertion that "it is not self-conceit. . .that has

y Disraeli, oj>. cit., p. 102.

^Introduction to his edition of The Autobiography of Edward. Lord Herbert of Oherbury, 1886.

^Pascal, oja. cit., p. 187.

•^7 Her der, 0£ . c i t . . p. 5^5 * 32 induced me to do this, but real humility""^ at its face value in such a context than in the context of a statement like Sidney Lee's.

In addition to the personal motive of knowing oneself,

Foster lists a second reason for writing autobiography. It is as a service to, an advance of, friendship* "With respect to any friend who greatly interests us, we have a curiosity to obtain an accurate account of the past train of his life and feelings* and whatever other reasons there may be for such a wish, it partly springs from a consciousness how much this retrospective knowledge would assist to complete our estimate of that friend."59 He quick­ ly reiterates the main use, "But our estimate of ourselves is of more serious consequence." Friendship is precisely the second motive Wordsworth gives at the beginning of his poem for writing of himself. It is for Coleridge "to know With better knowledge how the heart was fram'd Of him thou lovest" [i, 655”57]. In fact, this second motive is followed more consistently throughout the poem than the first, as I will show in Chapter III. As far as I know, Foster is the only writer on autobiography at any time to have listed friendship as an important impetus in the writing of autobiog­ raphy. Stendhal later affirms that a man "must write his memoirs like letters to an intimate friend,"^® but to address directly an

^Early Letters. May 1, 1805.

^Foster, cit., pp. 19-20.

^Quoted by Matthew Josephson in his edition of the Memoirs of Egotism (New York, 19^9), p. 19. Italics mine. 55 actual friend is more than to work for mere likeness. Stendhal himself may reach for the intimacy of such communication; he does not, in his various autobiographical writings, explicitly address a friend. I can, in fact, think of no other modern autobiographer of stature who does.

The letter form—whether the letter was addressed to a real or an assumed friend or to posterity—was one of the few formal elements in the continuity of autobiographical writing from anti­ quity to the Middle Ages.^ As a rule the autobiographical letters were short prefaces to other works, but Plato (Seventh Epistle),

Abelard (Historia Oalamitaturn) and Petrarch (Letter to Posterity) used the form as a basic structure. Two of the autobiographical prose works of the Romantics mentioned above made use of real letters. While Hazlitt wrote Part I of Liber Amoris as a dialogue between a man and a woman^—Petrarch's famous spiritual autobio­ graphy, the Secretum. had been written as a dialogue between Petrarch and his spiritual confessor—, Parts II and III are made up of real letters to two of Hazlitt's friends. It is typical of Coleridge to trail off, in the Biographia, into the "Letters of Satyrane," but it is equally typical of autobiographical writing to be written as a letter or series of letters. In a more integrated sense, The

^Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographic, II, 2, 415 ff. See also I, 545, 586.

^ nHen and "She"— presumably h im self and Miss Sarah Walker. See Richard le Gallienne's introduction to his edition (London, 1895). 54

Prelude can be considered Wordsworth's personal letter to Cole- 65 ridge. Rousseau attempts intimacy by addressing his reader, but it was Augustine who achieved an absolute of intimacy by using the convention of religious confession. And in intimacy of tone, The

Prelude comes closer to Augustine's Confessions than to any other autobiography.

In the light of the tradition of casting one's autobio­ graphical remarks in the form and with the tone of a letter, it is interesting to note that, although both Herder and Foster wrote their essays for publication, they used the form of private com­ munication. Foster's piece appeared in a volume entitled Essays in s. Series of Letters to a Friend, the friend being Miss Maria

Snooke o f Downend, who subsequently became Mrs. F oster.64 The letter form is a mere, and inconsistent, formality. Herder is less perfunctory. He wrote his introductory remarks in a letter to his close friend, J. G. Muller, the editor of the series he is intro­ ducing; he asks pardon for not assuming the solemn office of p refa ce-w riter and reasons th a t "what I have to say can be ex- 65 pressed much better in the familiar tone of the letter."

65 Helen Darbishire calls the I8O5 version "a glorified private letter to Coleridge" which in I85O Wordsworth has turned into "a poetic confession fit for the medium of cold print." The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford, 1950), p. 122.

^Identified by Samuel A. Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of E nglish L itera tu re and B r itis h and American Authors. "John Foster" (Philadelphia, 1859)7"

^Herder, 0£. cit.. p. 559. 55

The familiar tone with which Herder felt it was appro­ priate to write about autobiography was also considered appropriate fo r autobiography. Foster recommends th a t the s ty le used in memoirs be as simple as possible. The recent autobiographies of Gibbon and

Hume were considered English models of antithetical styles, and

Hume’s was preferred. Gibbon was charged with writing elaborately for the admiration of posterity, but "how different is the autobiog­ raphy o f Humel"®^ D is r a e li s in g le s out Hume's b r ie f, q u iet account for stylistic praise. He realizes that the writing of autobiography

"is a delicate operation; a stroke too much may destroy the effect of the whole. Such writing must be composed "with calmness, with

simplicity, and with sincerity." Indeed, he goes so far as to assert

that "this is the only production of a man of genius, which requires no grace of style or imagination."^®

Such a remark, combined with the realization that D israeli's

discussion of autobiography proper covers but three pages, might well

lead one to suspect that, in contrast to Herder and Foster, his is but an amateur's interest. But Disraeli had probably perused more of the "feelings and confessions" of men of genius than the other

two. His 1795 volume o f the "manners and genius o f the lite r a r y

Quoted by Allibone, op. c it. Wordsworth is quoted as having said that, in general, Gibbon could not write English; Peacock, op. c i t . , p. 258.

^ D is r a e li, op. c i t . , p. 101.

^Ibid., p. 105. character" attempted to characterize the attributes of genius from their own expressions about themselves; his illustrations range from

Cicero and the younger Pliny, through Petrarch and Erasmus, down to his contemporaries. 69 Although his subject is genius, his materials are e x c lu siv e ly au tobiograp h ical, and the "anatomy" has several peripheral interests for our study. For one thing, it was very popular—it had gone through five editions by 1859* (Foster's essay was in its thirteenth edition by 1859) Byron for one expressed great admiration for it in 1810 and 1811, and Wordsworth evidently owned a copy of the 1818 edition.^ Disraeli organizes his multifarious material under topics such as a genius's encounter with books and his youthful propensity toward the art of his maturity. Or he tests the popular notion that genius is untutored, beginning where learning ends, or that it is frequently dependent upon an unfavorable position in society. He can draw no conclusions concerning these topics and notions; sometimes the evidence he marshals substantiates one belief, sometimes its opposite. In discussing the book's

^ P u b lish ed in 1795 as An Essay on the Manners and Genius o f the Literary Character, it was revised in 1818 under the title The Literary Character. I have consulted the 1818 volume.

^Allibone mentions Byron's interest, and Disraeli quotes Byron in his Preface to the 1818 edition.

^Neither the Rydal Mount Catalogue nor Lienemann mentions the volume, but the Gertrude Lucile Robinson Collection in the English Department Library of The Ohio State University owns a copy of the 1818 edition supposed to have been Wordsworth's and said to be annotated by him. shortcomings, a reviewer of the 1818 volume issued a challenge which

Wordsworth, unknown to th e general p u b lic , had a lrea d y taken up:

"Unfortunately for our knowledge of the human soul, men of genius do not themselves attend philosophically to all the numberless causes that from childhood are constantly affecting, forming, and molding their characters.

Concerning the content of autobiography, the three com­ mentators have quite different things to say. Herder is the only one who worries about objectivity; he says we seldom deceive other men as we deceive ourselves since "strangers have their own eyes to look at us and to examine." However, "when we turn our sight to ourselves and into ourselves [we] have at once to become the seer, 75 the eye, and the seen object." This coincidence of the seer and the seen, one of the philosophical problems which troubled Augustine and which constitutes a recurrent theme in his Confessions, is gen­ erally taken to be one of the distinguishing marks of Romantic thought—one thinks of Coleridge’s coalescence of subject and object.

The coincidence of artist and model is, of course, the absolute pre­ supposition of autobiography as a genre, and it has its hazards:

Gusdorf reminds us that the appearance of a double, of a reflection in a mirror, is, in the majority of folklores and mythologies of

^[

^Herder, o£. cit., p. 369* 58 the world, a fatal sign.7^ But it is precisely the fact that the autobiographer tells us what only he can tell which makes autobiog­ raphy of unique value. Late in the nineteenth century Leslie

Stephen commented on the two q u a lific a tio n s o f supreme importance in all literary work which the autobiographer has ex officiot he is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority.Stephen, in fact, concludes that it may be a special felicity of autobiog­ raphy that, alone of all books, it is more valuable in proportion to the amount of misrepresentation it contains. A man does not understand himself as others think they understand him. The fact th a t Lord Herbert o f Cherbury emphasized h is so c ia l and diplom atic career rather than the intellectual achievement for which posterity values him tells us something very instructive about Lord Herbert.76

Herder pleads for a tempering of autobiography with more objective documents. He devotes a large portion of his remarks to the case of Rousseau, although Rousseau's Confessions is apparently not to be a part of the series he is introducing. Rousseau's work seems to illustrate his principle that we seldom deceive other men

7^Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions^et lim ites de 1'autobiograpHe, 11 Formen der Selbstdarstellung, ed. Gunter Reichenkron and Erich Haase (B erlin , 19% )t pp. 109-10.

^"Autobiography," Cprnhill Magazine, XLIII (1881), 410.

^See Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-century Autobiography (London, 1958), pp. 57-81. 59 as we deceive ourselves. Herder imagines Rousseau becoming himself undeceived and raising a piercing voice from his grave to shout,

"Therefore learn from me, 0 man, how different writing and imagin­ ing are from acting and being. 11 Herder concludes that the judgment of character from a man's confession is not valid by itself.

In the case of many eaily writers, of course, we do not have extrinsic evidence whereby to check fact with autobiographical record, and at any time we are forced to trust the writer concerning his ideas and feelings. Philosophers of history have come to see that the ideal of the positivists to reconstruct the past once and for all as it was is a senseless and impossible task. History is rewritten for each generation; and the historian as well as his time is reflected in his reconstruction of the epoch under discussion.

We must learn to make the same allowance for the autobiographer, and to consider the particular lim itation of autobiography, not as the revelation of a partial truth, but as the sharing of the rich­ n ess o f a very complex one. One may consid er th e memory e ith e r treacherous or noble; the way one considers it will tinge his appreciation of an autobiography. Pascal says that "memory can be trusted because autobiography is not just reconstruction of the past, but interpretation; the significant thing is what the man can

7 7 remember of his past. Similarly the reader can judge the inter­ pretation, the individual perception and organization of reality,

^Pascal, c>£. cit., p. 19. 40 by some hypothetical norm, or he may enter into it sympathetically and value it as an instance of human creativity and achievement.

Herder would certainly have recommended the latter. i Foster does not expect objectivity from the self-memoirists

"it were probably absurd to expect that any mind should itself be ..78 able, in its review, to detect all its own obliquities. While

Wordsworth did not, of course, see his own character inthe total­ ity and with the hindsight of the twentieth-century reader and scholar, he did, incontrast to Rousseau, have a remarkable insight into the process of memory and the problems inherent inthe autobio­ graphical task, as I will show in Chapter II.

Rather than analyzing the degree of objectivity with which an autobiographer can interpret his own experience, Foster emphasizes the actual topics to be covered. A memoir would include a man’s in­ struction, companionship, reading, and the diversified influences of the world, the chief interests of the Lockian-Hartleyan psycholo- 79 gists of the time. An earlier guide to writers of autobiography, the eighteenth-century proposal to Italian scholars which resulted 80 in the life of Vico, had suggested the inclusion of time and place of birth, parentage, remarkable or curious episodes of life "so far

•jo Foster, jO£. cit., p. 70.

~^Ibid., pp. 26-54.

^See above, pp. 15-16. 41 as they can without shame be published to the world and to posterity," and, more important, a detailed account and judgment of all studies, 81 of works published and in preparation. The Italian formula calls for the res gestae of the intellectual life. In contrast, Foster

(and Wordsworth) concentrate, not on the accomplished, but on the formative. Wordsworth's recital includes references to instruction, companionship, reading, and the diversified influences of the world.

However, his greatest theme, the influence of nature, Foster rele­ gates to a minor position since it "operates feebly" on the majority L of people. Foster's realization that nature could have "a powerful influence on opening minds, and transfuse into the internal economy of ideas and sentiment something of a character and a colour corres­ pondent to the beauty, vicissitude, and grandeur, which press on the senses" sounds like a paraphrase of Wordsworth, but his language is more guarded. "A creation infinitely rich with grand and beauti­ ful objects. * .can impart to a mind adapted and habituated to con­ verse with nature an exquisite sentiment, that seems to come as by Qp an emanation from a spirit dwelling in those objects." When Words­ worth wrote of grand and beautiful objects imparting an exquisite

sentiment to his childhood mind, he told of cliffs which themselves

strode after and wheeled by him.

ft! Quoted by Fisch and Bergin, oja. cit. . pp. 2-5.

®^Foster, oja. c i t . . pp. 51-52. k 2

Foster's source for his description of the influence of nature upon genius is Beattie's "Minstrel." Disraeli also refers to the "Minstrel" as if it were pertinent in discussions of auto­ biographical writing. They surely do not mean to imply any literal autobiographical significance in the poem. The minstrel represents to them, as to us, not its author, but the poet: "The contemplative race, even in their first steps towards nature, are receiving that secret instruction which no master can impart. The boy of genius flies to some favourite haunt to which his fancy has often given a name; he populates his solitude; he takes all shapes in it. .. .All nature opening to him, he sits brooding over his first dim images, in that train of thought we call reverie, with a restlessness of delight, for he is only the being of sensation, and has not yet ..83 learnt to think." These are, of course, qualities which the youthful Dorothy noticed in her brother in 1795—and which he corrob­ orates in the portrait of himself as a youth in The Prelude—when she discussed William with her friend, Jane Pollard: "'In truth he was a strange and wayward w ight fond o f each g e n tle e t c ., e t c .' That verse of Beattie's Minstrel always reminds me of him, and indeed the whole character of Edwin resembles much what William was when I f i r s t knew him—a fte r my leavin g H alifax— 'and o f t he traced the g2). uplands etc., etc. etc.'"

^D israeli, The Literary Character, pp. 22-23.

^Early Letters. July 10, 1795* The three essays between 1790 and 1805 which discuss auto­ biography qua autobiography distinguish, then, between accounts of outer and inner events and show preference for the latter. They posit as the main reason for writing autobiography, not to tell the world of oneself, but to know oneself. Stendhal was to express the extreme formulation of this motive later in the century when he said that he should write the story of his life in order to know what he had been.®-'* The three essayists also call for a simple style, show an awareness of the difficulty in achieving objectivity, and suggest topics to be covered. Two of them present their remarks in letter form. In addition, Foster, whose letters on the writing of self­ memoirs went through the first of many editions the year Wordsworth completed the first draft of The Prelude. has several images and reflections on the process and task of writing autobiographically in common with the poet. s. Three images are familiar to readerscf Wordsworth. Foster testifies that he personally "cannot be content without an accurate sketch of the windings thus far of a stream which is to bear me on for ever." Wordsworth's stream leads him to "the great thought By which we live, Infinity and God" [XIII, I85-8AJ. For the process of memory Foster uses the figure of strong gleams of light which

gc -''Quoted by Josephson, oja. c i t . , p. 17. 1 F o ster, oja. c i t . , p. 20. transiently fall upon a distant ridge of h ills. It reminds the reader of Wordsworth both of his famous "spots of time" and, more specifically, of the light which instantly "upon the turf Fell like a fla sh " in th e ep isod e upon Mt. Snowdon [X III, 5^“4 o ], Another image is that of the cavern. Foster writes, "After having explored many a cavern or dark ruinous avenue, [a person] may have left un­ d etected a darker r e c e ss w ith in where th ere would be much more

O *7 striking discoveries." Wordsworth uses the darkness of the "blind cavern" as a figure for the pre-conscious years which simply cannot be articulated [XIII, 174]. These images are so natural that

Shelley, in his fragment on the "Difficulty of Analyzing the Human

Mind," uses two of them! "Thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards; . . .The caverns of the mind are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their , || p ortal■, s . "88

Hot only do Foster and Wordsworth share the same images fo r th e mind and i t s p r o c e sse s, but th ey have many o f th e same re­ flections. After deploring the "extreme deficiency of. . .self­ observation," Foster continues, "in very early youth it is almost

0*7 Foster, oj>. cit., p. 21. OQ Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York, 1926), VII, 64. 45 inevitable for [the mind] to be thus lost to itself even amidst its own feeling, and the external objects of attention; but it seems a contemptible thing, and certainly is a criminal and dangerous thing, for a man in mature life to allow himself this thoughtless escape on from self-examination." Although Wordsworth*s emphasis was always on the richness of the youthful mind in its unself-consciousness, he would certainly have agreed. "Maturer seasons" called "collateral objects and appearances, Albeit lifeless then" forth "to impregnate and to elevate the mind" [i, 621-24]. Passages in which he contrasts his youthful and his mature seasons demonstrate the values he at­ tached to each;

already I began To love the sun, a Boy I lov'd the sun, Not as I since have lov'd him, as a pledge And surety of our earthly life, a light Which while we view we feel we are alive; But for this cause, that I had seen him lay His beauty on the morning h ills, had seen The western mountain touch his setting orb, In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess Of happiness, my blood appear'd to flow With its own pleasure, and I breath'd with joy. [il, 185-95]

Foster testifies prosaically that his mind "is becoming uncertain of the exact nature of many feelings of considerable interest, even of com paratively recent date; and th a t the remembrance o f what was f e l t in very early life has nearly faded away. Elsewhere he says that if the memoir be not drawn near the time, it can never be drawn with

^Foster, o£. cit., p. 22.

9°Ib id . . pp. 22- 25. h6 91 sufficient accuracy. Wordsworth1s testimony at thirty-five is th is : The days gone by Come back upon me from the dawn almost Of l i f e : the hiding-places of my power Seem open; I approach, and then they close; I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all, and I would give, While yet we may, as far as words can give, A substance and a life to what I feels I would enshrine the s p i r i t of the p ast For future restoration. [XI, 55^“^5]

Once the mature man recalls his life as a child, "The life we then Qp had, now seems almost as if it could not have been our own.11' The parallel in Wordsworth is equally explicit:

So wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being. [il, 28-55]

Foster marvels, 11 If the process [of assimilating influences] has been so complex, how comes the result to be apparently so simple?"9*

Wordsworth also marvels:

Ah me! th a t a ll The terrors, all the early miseries Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all The thoughts and feelings which have been infus'd Into my mind, should ever have made up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself! [i, 555-61! Foster believes that a man's character changes so much between seventeen and seventy that, should representations of the

^1 Foster, op. cit., p. 7 2 .

9 2Ib id ., p. 2 3 .

95_Ibid.> P* successive states of one man convene, they "would oppose and probably

despise one another, and soon separate, not caring if they were never

to meet again." He suggests that the self-observant person preserve

a mental likeness of himself in early life for the inspection of the

old man, and he i s rath er sev ere on th e old man. 94 Wordsworth

critics have tended to find great changes in him, to the extent of

speaking of "two Wordsworths." But his own prose "Autobiographical

Memoranda" dictated to his nephew just before his death concentrate

on the early years covered in The Prelude and reinforce the picture

of childhood there given. Whatever the changes in political and

religious thought frequently adduced from revisions of the text of

the poem itself between 1805 and 18J9, his memories and allegiance

to the childhood years remain firm. And in his case we have two

disparate "autobiographies," one from the young, the other from the

old man. Once the selected details of a person's life have been

fixed in the permanence of an art form, the artist-model may be

tempted to conform his life to the image in his art. But whether

the image of ourselves is objectified on paper or remains a kaleido­

scopic movement inside our heads, it is a reality with which we all must live, and we all do our best to conform to that image which we

94 Foster, oja. c it., p. 72. Goethe recommends a similar examina­ tion but without moralizing: "Nothing gives us a greater revelation of ourselves than when we see before us again that which has proceeded from us years before, so that we can now consider ourselves as an object of contemplation." He is thinking specifically of letters he has written as a younger man. Poetry and Truth, ed. cit.. p. 299. trust to be ourselves. Foster's prediction that an old man would despise his younger self is not necessarily true.

We must not conclude from incidental but striking simi­ larities of image, reflection, and sentiment that Foster was another

Wordsworth, even in his thinking. Foster differs radically from the poet in his conception of how influences work. To him man's mind is passive. He is denying, not the Kantian postulate of an active mind, but the rationalistic belief that reason discriminates and guides. He insists there is scarcely any such thing in the world 95 as simple conviction. Nor is there any reason to surmise a

direct contact between Foster and Wordsworth. It has been sug-

gested that Foster had read Wordsworth to advantage,-7 but the in­

fluence would have had to be through the early poems, since, despite

the fact that Foster first published his essay the year that Words­ worth completed his first version of The Prelude, the coincidence precludes any fruitful interchange. It is rather that attitudes

toward writing about oneself, like the interest in doing so, were

a part of the intellectual milieu at the turn of the century.

The evidence presented in this chapter shows that there

was a strong and growing interest in autobiographical writing from

the time of the conception and first writing of The Prelude through

95 ^Foster, o£. cit., p. 69•

^Keith Rinehart, "The Victorian Approach to Autobiography," Iff, LI (195^). 180. 18J9, the year of its final manuscript form. The word "autobiog­ raphy" itself was coined and gradually gained differentiation from

"biography." At the same tim e the plural "memoirs" grad u ally, for the most part, shifted from its general meaning to the more limited one synonymous with autobiography. Existing autobiographies were published individually, often for the first time, and were gathered into publishers1 series. Reviewers gave increasing attention to autobiographical writing and complained increasingly that trivial autobiography abounded. Important writers cast their thoughts and passions in autobiographical modes. Three essayists discussed autobiography as autobiography, and emphasized the value of records of inner experience over recitals of outer events. They also placed the value to the writer above the admitted value to the reader.

They showed an awareness of the difficulties inherent in the task of w ritin g a u to b io g ra p h ica lly , and one o f them used images and id eas concerning that task which Wordsworth also used.

In the light of such evidence it seems gratuitous to pro­ pose a specific and highly improbable catalyst for Wordsworth's autobiography. Mr. David V. Erdman has recently published for the first time a letter of July 1797, from Thomas Wedgwood to

William Godwin, in which, imbedded only incidentally in his scheme for educational experimentation, Wedgwood supposes himself to possess a "detailed statement of the first twenty years of the life „97 of some extraordinary genius." Wedgwood reasons that such an account, far from being of positive benefit and instruction, would only demonstrate a chaos of perceptions which his own rigid educa­ tional scheme is intended to correct. Foster, too, had proposed a series of autobiographies: "Make the supposition that any assort­ ment of persons, of sufficient number to comprise the most remark­ able distinctions of character, should write memoirs of themselves, so exactly and honestly telling the story, and exhibiting so clearly the most effective circumstances, as to explain, to your discernment at least, if not to their own consciousness, the main process by 98 which their minds have attained their present state." From this,

Foster, like Wedgwood, would draw a disheartening conclusion; he would see "into how many forms of intellectual and moral perversion the human mind readily yields itself to be modified." Neither of these "lessons" motivates or results from the one great autobiog­ raphy produced by their contemporary; one must grant Wordsworth at least the dignity of an honest attempt to interpret his own experienc

S ta rtin g from Wedgwood's remark, in i t s dubious con text,

Erdman suggests that there was no biographical psychology or psychological probing into the relation of perceptions and ideas in

^"Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Wedgwood Fund," Part I, "Tom Wedgwood's 'Master S trok e'," BNYPL, LX (1956), 425-45. QQ y Foster, o£. cit., p. 44. any of Wordsworth's writing before the autumn of 1797 when he just might have met Wedgwood personally and been infected by his enthu­

siasm: "Tom’s psychology and his simple tutorial plan pointed to

Nature's better plan and led the poet to see what sustaining pro­

cesses had actually been at work during those [his own] hours of meditation in solitary caves. . . .This fruition demonstrates not

only the catalytic effect of his new access of psychological theory.

It demonstrates also how burstingly stored his mind had become with

questions that needed such theory to find articulation. it 99 Now

Wedgwood's "simple tu to r ia l plan" would have been anathema to

Wordsworth. Mrs. Moorman points out the irony of Wordsworth's own

comments on education in Book V when she takes over Erdman's sugges­

tion and all but makes the phrase in the Wedgwood letter to Godwin

the prime motivation for the writing of The Prelude.'*'^

It seems to me that, given the interest of the period in

the psychology of genius and in autobiographical writing, the at­

tempt to pinpoint a source or specific impetus for Wordsworth's

poem is unnecessary. Disraeli had no psychological theory to pro­ mulgate in his anatomy of genius, but two years before the Wedgwood

letter to Godwin or the hypothetical meeting of Wedgwood with Words­

worth, he expressed in E nglish what Herder had alread y expressed in

•^"Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Wedgwood Fund," Part II, "Nursery of Genius or School of Nature? How Should Children Grow and What should Children Read?" BNYPL, LX (1956), 505-06. l^Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Early Years 1770-1805 (Oxford, 1957), PP. 555 ff. 52

German, th a t "every l i f e o f a man o f g en iu s, composed by h im se lf, presents us with the experimental philosophy of the mind."'*'0* It is in an effort to understand and not to reform that such attempts are praised.

Interest and appreciation of autobiography were thus a part of Wordsworth*s intellectual climate. What is more natural than that the poet who had distilled his personal experiences into some of the finest lyrics of the 90*s should transmute into poetry the genesis, the record, and the inspirations, of his poetic devel­ opment?

*°*The L itera ry C haracter, p. 15« CHAPTER II

"We see but darkly Even when we look behind us”

Although scholars have uncovered and studied closely manuscripts which give many clues to the composition of The Prelude and to Wordsworth1s intentions in writing it, they have neglected the testimony of the completed poem itself. Its conscious auto­ biographical intent is obscured by its gradual growth and its genesis as a preliminary portion of the Recluse. Miss Helen Darbi- shire concludes that, while Wordsworth wrote passages of Book I and others in Germany in 1798-99 as a record of the early preparation for his poetic calling, "we must suppose that in the summer months of 1799 at Sockburn Wordsworth conceived the idea of an autobio­ graphical poem dedicated to S. T. C. as preliminary to the great philosophical poem so eagerly expected by him."^

The completed 1805 version shows a mature and consistent conception of autobiography, elements of which scholars have been content to take for granted. It is full of hints and direct allusions to the problems of writing autobiographically, to the poet's motives,

"''The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959), xlvii. George Wilbur Meyer would put the autobiographical conception earlier: "By the spring of 1798 Wordsworth had determined to write his autobiography." "The Early History of The Prelude, 11 Tulane Studies in English, I (l9^9)> 119-56.

55 to his awareness of selecting and omitting and of the limitations of memory, to the history of the poem's composition as well as to the history of the poet's mind. There are more than ninety such r eferen ces, some o f them ex ten siv e and e x p lic it , some mere phrases, little more than transitional devices, some magnificently metaphori­ c a l. These d ir e c t and m etaphorical statem ents embedded in th e te x t argue overwhelmingly that Wordsworth knew what he was about, and that here, as elsewhere, he kept his eye on his object.

There are at least three distinguishable reasons stated within the poem itself why Wordsworth attempted the story of his life. The first is to acquire, in John Foster's contemporary terms,

"a deep self-knowledge,” to investigate his own past life for his own instruction. Word.rwor'ih states the reason thus:

My hope has been that I might fetch Invigorating thoughts from former years, Might fix the wavering balance of my mind, And haply meet reproaches, to o , whose power May spur me on, in manhood now mature, To honorable toil. [I, 64S-55J

The'second follows indirectly upon the first and also recalls a possible impetus to autobiography suggested by Foster, that of assisting friendship. Wordsworth is, of course, addressing Cole­ rid ge:

Yet should these hopes Be vain, and thus should neither I be taught To understand myself, nor thou to know With better knowledge how the heart was fram'd Of him thou lo v e s t . . . [ i , 655-57]

The third motive is introduced much later, and represents the more general impulse of the artist, to redeem from oblivion:

I would give While yet we may, as far as words can give, A substance and a life to what I feel: I would enshrine the spirit of the past For future restoration. [XI, 359-^3]

Therapy, friendship, artistic permanence—these are the reasons for

writing which Wordsworth expresses in the poem. He is not vindicat­

ing judgments and actions as Coleridge and Newman were to do in their

autobiographies. His mode will be personal and artistic, not argu­ m entative.

In the beginning the first motive is stated the most ex­

plicitly, and Wordsworth returns to it in his conclusion, but there

is little other reference to it in the poem. The therapy is complete

almost as soon as he announces it, and he becomes engrossed in the

third, the problem of giving a substance and a life to what he feels

and remembers. The second remains consistent throughout, partly,

one suspects, because the address of Coleridge is such a satisfac­

tory unifying device, but partly because of Wordsworth’s genuine and

strong impulse to communicate personal and poetic matters with his

fr ien d .

In the first book he has catalogued the themes which he has

thought of treating and his wavering sense of readiness to begin any

important work; he has also recalled choice instances of nature’s

bounty in his childhood, and, remembering the great promise im plicit

in her favor, has felt reproach. The word appears in the statement

of his first motive—in retrieving thoughts from former years he may 56

"haply meet reproaches"—and again when he recalls his initial im­ pulse in the concluding books

I said unto the life which I had lived, Where a r t thou? Hear I not a v o ic e from th ee Which 1 t i s reproach to hear? [XIII, 575-77]

His own beginnings reproach him, but the friend to whom he addresses his remembrances will not. Twice in Book II he addresses Coleridge,

"unapprehensive of reproof" and "of contempt" [il, 75i 4-70]• His tr u s t in C oleridge who knows him and w ill understand both h is m otives and what he may reveal i s important to him in g e ttin g under way, and i t remains c o n siste n t throughout the poem. In Book X III, for in ­ stance, he says that for Coleridge "the work shall justify itself"

[4l0]. Once he has recreated a few of his boyhood memories, however, he recovers the promise o f the p a st, and by the end o f the f i r s t book he has attained"one end at least"—his mind has been revived. "if this mood Desert me not, I will forthwith bring down. . .the story of my life," he says in concluding Book I, and again in XIII he re­ fers to this moodi "Call back to mind The mood in which this Poem was begun" [570-71]• The word "mood" does not r efer e x c lu siv e ly to an emotional state. Consider, for instance, the phrase, "in the steadiest mood of reason" [v, l]. In the catalogue of possible themes early in his first book, Wordsworth admits that

Sometimes it suits me better to shape out Some Tale from my own heart, more near skin To my own passions and habitual thoughts, Some variegated story, in the main Lofty, with interchange of gentler things, [i, 220-24] 57

He finally chooses autobiography ("the story of my life ”), hoping to dispel the sense of false stewardship so amply and touchingly set forth. He alludes to the complex first motive in concluding the whole poems

We have reach'd The time (which was our object from the first) When we may, not presumptuously, I hope, Suppose my powers so fax confirmed, and such My knowledge, as to make me capable Of building up a work that should endure. [XIII, 275-78]

The "distraction and intense desire" [XIII, 57^-] documented in the early part of Book I have been exorcised. The review of the "vast prospect of the world which I had been And was" [XIII, 579-80] has long since ceased to reproach. The therapy is complete; the poet believes in himself as he did intuitively in those high moments of boyhood and youth described so lovingly throughout the poem.

There is undoubtedly a certain amount of formal shaping involved in this return at the close to a restatement of initial purposes and mood. At the beginning o f Book XI, a fter tr e a tin g h is disappointm ent, confusion, and lo s s o f hope in London and France,

Wordsworth announces his return to an earlier confidences "Not with these began Our Song, and not with these our Song must end." [7-8]

He deliberately returns to the opening mood, and yet there has been a deepening of perception to justify the confident and exultant ending.

He has proceeded from a report of physical and mental experiences to their intellectual interpretative counterparts. A verbal illus­ tration of this exists in the contrast between his two uses of the word "balance” in Book I and the two uses o f i t in XII and X III.

It is balance for which Wordsworth consistently seeks, but in the beginning he is purely descriptive, not conceptual. In the opening scene of the poem he lay on the "genial pillow of the earth” and "the warm ground. . .balanced me.” Moving to description of his mental state, he speaks of "the wavering balance" of his mind, which the invigorating thoughts from other years are intended to "fix.11 By the end of the poem it is the "ennobling interchange Of action from within and from without" [XII, 576-77] which is the important

"balance," and the conception of "deep enthusiastic joy" balanced

"by a Reason which indeed Is reason” [XIII, 264-65] represents the equilibrium which, through reflection upon his experience and the writing of autobiography, he has achieved.

The d ir e c t comments on h is task between the opening and concluding stances show that, as he warmed to the prospect and grew in appreciation of the poem's significance, the undertaking per se took precedence over the therapeutic impulse of his beginning.

This undertaking i s , in co n tra st to the "ampler and more varied argument" [i, 67l] of the themes he has considered and for the time rejected, "a theme Single and of determined bounds" [i, 668-69].

Few autobiographers would find the story of their lives a single theme or o f determined bounds, but Wordsworth w ill focus on inner growth. In summarizing what he has done up to the present point in

Book III, he emphasizes, not isolated thoughts which may invigorate 59 him, but the continuity of his inner experience:

And here, 0 Friend! have I retrac'd my life Up to an eminence, and told a tale Of matters which, not falsely, I may call The glory of my youth. Of Genius, Power, Creation and Divinity itself I have been speaking, for my theme has been What pass'd within me. Not of outward things Done visibly for other minds, words, signs, Symbols or actions; but of my own heart Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind, [ill, I68-77J

He restates and refines this focus as he proceeds, always in lines addressed to Coleridge:

Thus, 0 Friend! Through times of honour, and through times of shame, Have I descended, tracing faithfully The workings of a youthful mind, beneath The breath of great events, its hopes no less Than universal, and its boundless love; A Story destined for thy ear. [X, 941-47]

Exalted conceptions are added, such as love,joy, imagination, and tru th :

This history, my Friend, hath chiefly told Of intellectual power, from stage to stage Advancing, hand in hand w ith lo v e and joy, And of imagination teaching truth. [XI, 42-45]

At each reiteration Wordsworth confirms an added discrimination which the reader must have anticipated but which he has nowhere found stated, as in this passage in the final book where the articulation of theme is fullest:

And now, 0 Friend! this history is brought To its appointed close: the discipline And consummation of the Poet's mind In everything that stood most prominent Have faithfully been pictured. [XIII, 269-75] 60

The new element here, that his history has contained "everything

that stood most prominent" is direct evidence that he has consciously focused, omitting and selecting for his purposes, never intending to

include all, or even representative instances of his geneial experi­

ence.

In the discussion of the French Revolution and the great

political and social upheaval of his time Wordsworth states his

"single theme" and its inherent exclusions:

These are things Of which I speak, only as they were storm Or sunshine to my individual mind, No further, [x, 10^-06]

One of the major criticism s of the biographical practice of the

Romantic era was that the ostensible subject, the individual, was 2 submerged in political and social history. Jeffrey, writing of

d ia r is t s and keepers o f jo u rn a ls, in clu d es th o se who, "without

having done anything memorable, have yet had the good luck to live

through long and interesting periods."''’ Wordsworth, it would seem,

conscientiously avoided the temptation to deviate from his inner re­

cital in order to document the great political upheaval. After he

has left the scene of the Revolution, he even admits omitting per­

sonal factual matter; it is information which his biographers would

^See Francis Russell Hart, "John Gibson Lockhart: The Romantic Biographer and his Art," unpub. doc. diss. (Harvard, 1959).

^Oontributions to the Edinburgh Review, III, 6^5* Cited by Hart, p. 65* 61 particularly welcome, but he justifies its exclusioni

Since I withdrew unwillingly from France, The S tory hath demanded l e s s regard To time and place} and where I liv e d , and how Hath been no longer scrupulously mark'd. [XIII, 55^-37]

Wordsworth's admission that selection has been consciously exercised has been hinted at throughout in phrases like "though leaving much Unvisited" [il, 1-2]; HI will here Single one out, then pass to other themes" [IV, 561-62]; "I glance but at a few conspicuous marks, Leaving ten thousand others" [VTI, 566-67]} flI have singled out Some moments, the earliest that I could" [VIII, 174-

75]* In Book V where he moves from a contrast of his own early free­ dom in the reading of books to the ironic references and cataloguing of the attempts of "mighty workmen of our later age," he writes eloquently of omissions:

That portion of my Story I shall leave There register'd: whatever else there be Of power or p lea su re, sown or fo s te r 'd thus, Peculiar to myself, let that remain Where it lies hidden in its endless home Among the depths of time. [v, 195-98]

At the end of the poem he again laments the necessity to omit many

influences of books (and of nature):

Much hath been omitted, as need was; Of Books how much! and even o f the other w ealth That is collected among woods and fields, Far more. [XIII, 279-82]

And while, in effect, he says it is appropriate to include this, he also says, it is appropriate to exclude that, as when, in his paean to Nature's thwarting of tyranny he writes, "But this is matter for another Song" [XI, I85]. 62

The standard crux in the matter of excluded experience is, of course, the episode with Annette Vallon. In the light of

Wordsworth1s focus and his frequent protestations of how much he has omitted, it becomes less crucial. It may be that in Wordsworth’s mind the French lia is o n had no s p e c ific bearing on the development of his poetic powers, but one suspects that his restraint is more personal than thematic. We are so accustomed to the '’honest11 memoir that "tells all" that we have all but lost sympathy with an earlier reticence. That such a reticence existed hardly needs proof, but we might, with our materials, point to the restriction of the

Italian proposal for autobiography which called for the recital of episodes "in so far as they can without shame be published to the world and to posterity."^ Or we can quote Foster on the reciter of outward events: "Let him go on w ith the more reputable portions o f what he has done."^ These quotations may cast a more puritanical shadow across Wordsworth’s feelings than is necessary, however.

There is another possible explanation. The writer of autobiography has his concern for others: at least one reviewer of Rousseau was willing to allow any revelation concerning Jean-Jacques, but ex­ coriated him for exposing the Countess of Warens as he did.^ We

^Quoted by Fisch and Bergin, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, 19^), p. 2.

^John F oster, "On a Man's Writing Memoirs o f Himself" [I8O5] , Decision of Character and other Essays (New York, 1882), p. 67.

^Monthly Review. LXVII (1782), 255. have no evidence that Wordsworth felt a sense of impropriety such as these quotations imply; we can only imagine that he might shrink from exposing both h im self and Annette in the d ir e c t manner o f

Rousseau. But why, having been willing in 1805 to include the episode in disguise, did he publish his story of Vaudracour and

Julia separately, thus removing it from the final version of his autobiography? The answer to this question is fairly obvious. An extended tale ostensibly of someone else's experience is simply out of place. Like the other tale told bLm by a friend, the story o f the shepherd and h is son in Book VIII [222-511j, Wordsworth cut it from the final version because such a long narrative complete in itself and justified only as a tale told him by an outsider dis­ rupted the flow and intimate telling of his own life. Such an explanation is consistent also with the shift he made in I85O of the person to whom the dream o f Shell and Stone in Book V occurred; in the early versions he attributed it to a friend, but in 1859 the dream became h is own, d esp ite the fa c t th at i t had o r ig in a lly been the dream of another and that a vestige of the earlier identifica­ tion remains as a result of Wordsworth1s nold persistent effort to record the truth.

Ju st as Wordsworth is aware o f having sele cted and om itted from his experience, so he is aware of the limitations of manory and

^Jane Worthington Smyser, ”Wordsworth1s Dream of Poetry and Science: The Prelude. V," PMLA, LXXI (1956), 269-75* the subtle changes the mind may throw over the material it recalls.

His fullest treatment of the difficulty inherent in reporting re­ membered experience is not made directly but in the metaphor of a

person gazing into the water from a boat [iV, 247-68], which is

discussed with other metaphors below. Of his boyhood he admits

that the vacancy between his adult self and those days appears so

wide that he seems to have two consciousnesses, of himself and of

some other being [lI, 28-55]. He is eloquent in condemning the

triviality of the Cambridge he experienced, hesitating not at all

to raise the ideal of a more serious university in a ”glorious

time" of old, but in typical humility he will not judge himself

the worse for what he missedJ nWe see but darkly, Even when we

look behind us" [ill, 492-95]* The statement is analogous to the

Biblical prophecy, 11 For now we see through a glass, darkly, but

then face to face" [i Cor. xiii, 12]; it is the past with which

Wordsworth is concerned, and he knows that one does not even under­

stand the past; it, too, is seen as through a glass. Of his Cam­

bridge experiences also he is frank to say that

Of these and other kindred notices I cannot say what portion is the truth The naked r e c o lle c t io n o f th a t tim e, And what may rather have been call‘a to life By after-meditation. [ill, 644-48]

While he is tempted to think of Coleridge joining Dorothy, Mary and

* himself during his Cambridge summers, he does not actually commit

the anachronism, but rather says,”l seem to plant Thee there” [VI,

248], Similarly, although Mary Hutchinson has properly no important 65 place in the growth of his mind up to the year 1798, he later de­ cided to p la ce Mary b esid e Dorothy and C oleridge in Book X III [XIV, 8 1850, 266-75], inserting a version of the final lines into MS A.

And he cannot help but remember that after he le ft Cambridge, Cole­ ridge succeeded him there, cannot help but speculate how, had they known each other, they would have encouraged each other through try­ ing times. He admits, in this context, what it is impossible that he has not done "in thought" throughout the poem:

I have play'd with times, (i speak of private business of the thought) And accidents as children do with cards, Or as a Man, who, when his house is built, A frame lo ck 'd up in wood and sto n e, doth s t i l l , In impotence of mind, by his fireside Rebuild i t to h is lik in g . [VT, 299-5^5]

Thus he not only looks backward with affection and charity to what was, and is no more, but to what might have been. It is Misch who reminds us of the admitted psychological fact that remembrance does not proceed as mechanical reproduction, but rather "tends to crea­ t io n ." 9

Far from keeping the narrative of his early years pure from intrusions of present moods and griefs, he makes a point of them, deliberately mixing what was and what is. His beloved Coleridge has been obliged to set out in search of health, and references to their

D See the note on the passage, The Prelude, p. 6$0.

9A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, I, 11. separation occur throughout the poem. And before he has finished his account, he has felt a "private grief Keen and enduring" [XIII,

416-17J, the untimely death of his brother John. Similarly, Words­ worth considers the progress in the composition of the poem itself fit material to weave into his account of the years it covers. In concluding Book V he refers flatly to changes in plan: "This work was taking in my thoughts Proportions that seem'd larger than had first Been meditated" [v, 655“55]* The history of the poem's composi­ tion to date is summarized at the beginning of Book VII, midway in the poem; and the "glad preamble" which opens the whole is matter of "present joy." A twentieth-century commentator quotes a reader who wishes writers of autobiographies would be more explicit about the circumstances in which they write. The past can only be pre­ sented in the present, and the present inevitably colors that past.

"Autobiography is. . .an interplay, a collusion, between past and present.11’*'0 Wordsworth may be no more explicit in his references to present joys and griefs than in his references to outer events w and places, but present emotions form an acknowledged strand in the texture of the poem.

The assum ptions Wordsworth makes about h is own e x p e r ie n c e s and the poem which records them differ profoundly from Rousseau's announcement of his own uniqueness and his uniqueness in writing

*°Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London, I960), p. 11. 67 of himself. There are enough incidental expressions of Wordsworth's sense of community with all men in the poem to indicate his con­ scious and consistent concern not to be thought unique. In pre­ senting the high "heroic argument," he insists "there's not a man

That lives who hath not had his godlike hours" [ill, 191-92]; in describing his vacation homecoming in Book IV he asks rhetorically,

"Why should I speak of what a thousand hearts Have felt, and every man alive can guess?" [lV, 55-34]; in Paying tribute to the power of the stories and tales encountered in childhood he is again rhetor­ ical* "Why call upon a few weak words to say What is already written in the hearts Of all that breathe?" [v, 185-87]; he suspects that his boyish, inexperienced glorification of London and his subsequent dis­ illusion is "the common mark of childhood" [VII, 93]> and by using an all-inclusive "we" in one place, he demonstrates his trust that all men are gladdened by the experience of lying "on our beds. . .

At night, in warmth, when rains are beating hard" [VTI, 486-87]; in introducing one of his vignettes of a shepherd with his dog, he parenthetically explains that "the spectacle Is common, but by me was then first seen" [VIII, 105-04]. Not just in isolated experiences, but in the processes of intellectual and moral growth, men are alike.

Having affirmed his interpretation of Nature leading to the love of man against those who "fed By the dead letter, miss the spirit of things," he adds, "And so we all of us in some degree Are led to knowledge, whencesoever led, And howsoever" [VIII, 4-41-45]; and in commenting on his own necessity to move from mere judgment between 68

good and evil to action, he parenthetically interposes, "but where­

fore speak of things Common to all?" [VIII, 665-66]. Thus, despite

the personal particularity with which autobiography is, of neces­

sity, filled , Wordsworth conscientiously widens his individual

experience to in clu d e a l l men.

He also expresses some reservations concerning the auto­ biographical task. Particularly in writing of the city and of the

Revolution, confidence in what he is telling falters. He had made

the decision that the poem must be extended to include these ex­ periences, yet his memory of them, powerful as all his memories were, affected him adversely. His uncertainty reinforces the claim that the London and French experiences had had a debilitating effect on his poetic growth:

More l o f t y Themes, Such as, at least, do wear a prouder face, Might here be spoken of; but when I think Of th ese, I f e e l the im aginative Power Languish within me. [VII, ^95-99]

As he discusses his involvement, or in the instance of the French

Revolution, his lack of it, he again apologizes:

I fear Now in connection with so great a Theme To speak (as I must be compell'd to do) Of one so unimportant. [iX, 110-15]

He is compelled to go on with his autobiography, trivial in contrast

to the greater theme of the Revolution; the latter has a historic

significance like many he had catalogued in Book I. He is also apologetic as he tells Coleridge how, against his nature, he grew 69 analytic in attempting to dissect society; he hesitates briefly in favor o f a form more dramatic than autobiography can be:

Time may come When some dramatic Story may afford Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my Friend, What then I learn*d, or think I learn'd, of truth, And the errors into which I was betray*d By present objects, and by reasoning false, [x, 879-34]

His qualification here of what he learned, or thought he learned, demonstrates also his awareness of possible gaps between one's ex­ perience and h is in ter p reta tio n o f i t .

These exten sive and frequent d ir e c t comments on focus and s e le c t iv it y , on memory and in ter p r eta tio n , on the lim ita tio n s and values of the task he has undertaken in writing autobiographically, are reinforced throughout the poem by briefer transitional phrases which serve to keep his autobiographical purpose before both himself and his reader. Phrases like "Nor is my aim neglected" [il, 99] and

"*Tis not my present purpose" [VI, 426]'*''*' are pedestrian, but they represent Wordsworth's conscious, consistent, and direct reminders of the great autobiographical theme.

■^Other phrases w ith a sim ilar function are: "Not u s e le s s ly employ'd" [i, 50l]; "Enough," [ill, 195] ; "can I leave untold?" [iV, 7l]; "We need not linger" [VI, 19]» "'Twould be a waste of labour to detail" [VT, llOj; "have been already told. . .as far as there is need" [VI, 556-57]; "My present Theme is. . ." [VIII, 586-87]; "Having touch'd this argument, I shall not, as my purpose was, take note Of other matters. . .but I will here instead. . ." [iX, 542-49J; "But from these bitter truths I must return To my own History" [X, 658-59]; "Having now Told what best merits mention, further pains Our present labour seems not to require, And I have other tasks" [XIII, 576-7 - 70

The metaphors which elucidate the autobiographical purpose are of movement—on water, on land, and in the air. Four metaphori­

cal passages utilizing water images speak directly to the purposes and problems of autobiography.'*’ Two lines in Book II [214-15] show

him humble before his task. In Book IV [247-68] and again at the

beginning of Book IX [l-9], by means of more extended epic sim iles,

he exploits the possibilities of hanging from "the side Of a slow- moving Boat, upon the breast Of a still water," and of a River who

"measure[s] back his course" to indicate his own perplexity at

parting "The shadow from the substance" and his awareness of "motions

retrograde." And finally in the last book, dropping the "like" and

"as" of sim ile, Wordsworth summarizes what his poem has attempted

with the image of a stream [XIII, 172-84].

In the difficult task of autobiography, Wordsworth avoids

presumption: "Who. . .shall. . .say, 'This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain?'" [il, 215-15]* He uses other images

for pre-conscious beginnings also. In his first book he refers to

days "disown'd by memory" by saying that before the birth of spring

he has planted his snowdrops among winter snows [i, 645-44], and in

•^Kenneth MacLean has analyzed a l l th e water im ages, "The Water Symbol in The Prelude (1805-1806)," UTQ. XVII (J u ly , 1948), 572-89. He divides his consideration into discussions of actual waters and symbolic ones, i.e ., the water and mind, water and poetry, water and music, concluding that images of water are much more appropriate to Wordsworth's purpose than, for instance, metaphors of light, Milton's basic image, would have been. his last book that he has traced the stream of his imaginative life from "the very place of birth In its blind cavern" [XIII, 172-7^]*

These two images are perhaps more felicitous than the river flowing from a fountain, for they imply no presumptuous attributions of beginnings; but Wordsworth*s disclaimer, who shall say? indicates the humility and clarity with which he approaches his autobiographic task. A twentieth-century autobiographer shows no such scruple in giving the date and hour and episode at which he first became aware of himself as a person. After citing a childhood experience which had made an uncommon impression upon him, Vladimir Nabokov inter­ prets: "I appear to my present self as jubilantly celebrating on «13 that twenty-first of July, 1902, the birth of sentient life.

Wordsworth is undoubtedly more profound when he bows to mystery and admits that no one can say a certain portion of the mind "came from yon fountain."

The famous epic sim ile of Book IV interrupts a general discussion of the significance of childhood recapitulations:

As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving Boat, upon the breast Of a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make, Beneath him, in the bottom of the deeps, Sees many beauteous sights, weeds, fishes, flowers, Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more; Yet often is perplex’d, and cannot.part

^Conclusive Evidence (New York, 1951)» P* 4* The Russian- American poet-novelist*s autobiography of childhood is reminiscent o f Wordsworth1s in many ways. 72

The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, from.that which is indeed The region, and the things which there abide In their true dwelling; now is cross'd by gleam Of his own image, by a sunbeam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence, Impediments th a t make h is task more sw eet; —Such pleasant office have we long pursued Incumbent o'er the surface of past time With like success? nor have we often look'd On more alluring shows (to me, at least, ) More soft, or leas ambiguously descried, Than those which now we have been passing by, And where we still are lingering. [iV, 247-68]

Down-bending from a boat, one can scarcely distinguish "the things which there abide In their true dwelling" (i.e ., weeds, fishes, flowers, grots, pebbles, roots of trees) from the reflections of rocks and clouds. Not only that, but the path of the eye "now is cross'd by gleam Of his own image, by a sunbeam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence." Such impediments "make his task more sweet." What more appropriate metaphor could Wordsworth have used to indicate the problems inherent in writing autobiography?

Row could he have made more explicit his awareness of the inevitable confusion of subsequent and present thoughts and experiences with those of the past which the autobiographer attempts to differentiate; of the inevitable interpretative shades which the autobiographer him­ self imposes upon the reality? And how could he have affirmed more completely the challenge inherent in his task than with the statement that such impediments "make his task more sweet"? He needs but seven lines to complete his simile—he had devoted more than twice as many to describing the ground of the figure, the "one. . . down-bending from. . .a slow-moving Boat." In the final seven lines he is affirmative but cautious. The "office [we have] long pursued

Incumbent o'er the surface of past time" has been a pleasant one and has ended with like success. The hanger-downward had solaced him­ self with discoveries of the eye, had seen many beauteous sights and fancied more, yet had often been perplex'd; whatever "success" he has had in parting shadow from substance is qualified. The larger part of his success is the pleasure and solace he receives, such beauty as his eye can give him, actual, fancied, and reflected. In his "like success" Wordsworth disclaims the intention, even the possibility, of achieving the goal of the positivistic reader who compares the autobiography with known biographical fact and judges the former inaccurate or incomplete. Reality is a combination of shadow and substance. Wordsworth continues to affirm: we have not often look'd on more alluring shows—and then comes his cautious parenthesis, "to me, at least"--more soft ones, or those seen less ambiguously, than the ones "which now we have been passing by, And where we still are lingering." His habit of literal transition, of summarizing and indicating what next with stubborn directness, is here more subtle: the phrase "we still are lingering" announces, not immediate movement forward, but a marking of time. There will be more such memories.

The second epic simile alluding to water at the opening of

Book IX refers not to the inherent process of memory, but to the 74 organization of remembered things into a discursive whole:

As oftentimes a River, it might seem, Yielding in part to old remembrances, Part sway’d by fear to tread an onward road That leads direct to the devouring sea Turns, and will measure back his course, far back, Towards the very regions which he cross’d In his first outset; so have we long time Made motions retrograde, in like pursuit Detain'd. [iX, 1-9]

Wordsworth gives two reasons why his anthropomorphic River, young, meandering stream that it is, goes not directly to the sea. nIn part,” it yields to "old remembrances,” but a new mood is intro­ duced which has been hinted at in many phrases previous to Book IX.

In part it is "sway’d by fear to tread an onward road That leads direct to the devouring sea." As he had progressed from the recapit­ ulations of his childhood experiences to his adult ones, there were many exp ression s of relu cta n ce, d erogation and u n certa in ty . He broke off his account of the youthful journey in the Alps: "I must break off, and quit at once, Though loth" [vi, 658-59]» It is a

"tamer argument. . .lies before us" at the beginning of Book VII and his residence in London, yet "needful to be told" [VII, 55~56]« The many self-conscious, almost apologetic transitions of Book VII, in contrast to the memory of the "glad preamble" of five years earlier which opened this book, indicate hesitation. Wordsworth knows only too well that the descriptive pageantry of this book is a break in his original method. "Shall I give way, Copying the impression of the memory. . .here describe, for pastime's sake?" [VII, 145-49] he

self-consciously asks. An associative device leads to a minor looping backs "These last words utter’d, to my argument I was returning, when. . ." [VII, and he is off on another digression.

"Those days are not My theme" [VII, 56^-64] he announces with new resolution, and then apologizes, "The matter that detains me now w ill seem, To many neither dignified enough Nor arduous" [VII, 488-90].

In one sense, the retrospective Book VTII itself indicates a kind of reluctance to move faward to the "devouring sea" of the experiences of the French Revolution, of moral questions given up in despair.

"[We have] long time made motions retrograde," he writes now in his 14 simile of organization, "in like pursuit Detain'd." One brief sentence is sufficient to make his comparison here; the phrase "in like pursuit" echoes and functions identically with the phrase "with like success" of the earlier simile. And Wordsworth is painfully aware of both reasons for his meandering: he enjoys reminiscences, and he is loath to be devoured, as he surely will be when his memories of the French Revolution are recollected into the force of poetry.

Nov/, he says, "we start afresh" but "Ohi how much unlike the past!"

[IX, 9, 14].

F in a lly , in concluding the whole poem, Wordsworth summa­ rizes his "long labour" in an extended water image, omitting now the

"as" and "ike" o f sim ile :

We have traced the stream From darkness, and the very place of birth In its blind cavern, whence is faintly heard

■^Italics in quotations used in this paragraph are, of course, my own. The sound of waters; follow*d it to light And open day, accompanied its course Among the ways of Nature, afterwards Lost sight of it, bewilder'd and engulph'd, Then given it greeting, as it rose once more With strength, reflecting in its solemn breast The works of man and face of human life , And lastly, from its progress have we drawn The feeling of life endless, the great thought By which we liv e , I n fin ity and God. [X III, 172-84]

Unlike the two earlier epic similes which analyzed inherent d iffi­ culties and structural irregularities, this extended metaphor sum­ marizes. It is not the stream of life, but of Imagination and in­ tellectual love that is followed—"they are each in each, and cannot stand Dividually" [187-88]—from its blind cavern to infinity. The metaphor includes the three dominant developments of Wordsworth*s life as they are shaped into the story of The Prelude. There is the pattern of loss and restoration of his native power: "follow'd. . . to light And open day. . .afterwards Lost sight. . .it rose once more

With strength." There is the conceptual emphasis of the crucial, interpretative, central Book VIII, the love of nature leading to love of mankind: in its first "open day" the Imagination "accompanied its course Among the ways of Nature," and "as i t rose once more" r e fle c ted

"The works of man and face of human life." And there is the third development, the affirm ation and sublime prophecy which Wordsworth was to draw from h is concrete h isto ry ; the metaphor says, "from i t s progress we have drawn The feeling of life endless, the great thought

By which we liv e , I n fin ity and God." Such m asterful handling o f epic simile and extended metaphor demonstrates an absolute consciousness of the ramifications of his autobiographical task. There in another cluster of metaphors which elucidates

the task of writing such a tale, a history, a story, a record, a

song— a ll words Wordsworth uses in referrin g to h is poem. They are

the journey by land, the pathway or road, images. Next to the river,

Wordsworth's favorite haunt and image is the road! "A favourite

pleasure hath it been with me. . .to walk alone Along the public

Way” [iY, 565-65] and "I love a public road" [XII, IA5] he says.

He uses images of the journey and the road as figures both for the

life he is recording and for the poem which records that life. Of

the proposed "story of my life" laid out in Book I, he says, "The

road lies plain before me" [668]. And having come some way, "The

way I tr a v e ll'd when I f i r s t began To lo v e the woods and fie ld s"

[II, 4-51 he says, "Yet is a path More difficult before me, and I

fear That in its broken windings we shall need The chamois' sinews,

and the eagl.e'.? wing" [I, i 237-90]. In Book III he claims having

"retrac'd my life Up to an eminence" [l68-69]» and in transition,

"now into a populous Plain We must descend.—A Traveller I am, And

all my Tale is of myself" [l95~97]« In Book V he mentions in passing

the life he has so far reconstructed, "While I was travelling back

among those days" [l7l], and much later he asserts, "I travel in

these dim uncertain ways. . .a Pilgrim gone In quest of highest

truth" [XI, 591-95].

Ultimately this tale of a traveller has epic overtones.

Wordsworth echoes several experiences of Miltonic heroes which were

laden with inner significance, although in his more objective 78 narratives Milton had not developed it; and allusions to important

Homeric and Virgilian themes give epic reinforcement to the general symbolism of the journey. Miss Abbie Findlay Potts is undoubtedly right in suggesting that Wordsworth conceived of his poem, or at least of the great work to which this portion was announced as preliminary, as a continuation of the epic of Mil t o n . The P relu d e b e g in s jLn medias res: the song of "present joy" [i, $6] gives way to the story of the poet's past and his hopes for the future. The lyric outburst which explains that joy repeats the panorama and im plicit feeling of the close of Paradise Lost: "The world was all before"

Adam and Eve, and the poet-hero of The Prelude sings out, "The earth is all before me." In the significantly pivotal Book VIII, Words­ worth again compares his response to his losing his innocent youthful rapport with Nature to Adam's situation at the moment he was turned out of the Garden. He has been telling of his experiences in London.

Despite guilt, vice, debasement of body and mind, and misery, through his power of imagination "everything that was indeed divine Retain'd its purity inviolate. . .seem'd brighter far For this deep shade in

^Wordsworth's Prelude: A Study of Its Literary Form (Ithaca, 1955)* P» 519. De Selincourt in the introduction to The Prelude (xxxix-xl), Moorman in her biography (p. 609), Lascelles Abercrombie in The Art o f Wordsworth (London, 195^> PP» 41-42, 55 )> and E liza b eth Sew ell in The Orphic V oice (New Haven, I960, pp. $02-09) also discuss the poem as epic; but, as in the case of critics who call the poem autobiographical» no one has adequately explored the possibilities of the poem as epic. A recent dissertation on traditional aspects of Romantic epic says that, while The Prelude has epic characteristics, it is not epic. Brian F. Wilkie, "The English Romantic Poets and the Epic," DA. XX, 1029-50. Miss Potts' discussion is the most extensive; but while she cites verbal echoes and parallels, she does not present the evidence in a convincing, consistent whole. 79 counterview" [VIII, 8 1 5 -1 6 ]. In simple comparison with Adam, he was "yet in Paradise, Though fallen from b liss” [8 1 8 -1 9 ]. However, the lines quoted from Paradise Lost at the end of the passage^ hardly allude to triumph. Milton's Adam received the glorious

Apparition with "doubt and carnal fear." The parallel in Words­ worth's experience cannot be the emotion with which Adam received the Archangel; it is rather the function of the Archangel's visit, for "to remove thee I am come, And send thee from the Garden" [PL,

XI, 260—613. Wordsworth is foreshadowing "how much unlike the past"

[iX, 14] what he has yet to tell will be. In addition to these crucially placed identifications of himself with Adam, in the re­ capitulation of the poem in his concluding book Wordsworth uses the epic vistas of Paradiae Regained to describe how he came to write the poem: "Anon I rose As if on wings, and saw beneath me stretch'd

Vast prospect of the world which I had been And was" [XIII, 577-80J.

A student of Puritan autobiography says that Milton's intense con­ cern with recording his own experience permeates much of his worlq and cites the episode of Abdiel, which dramatizes the part of the author in just the situation that Puritan autobiographers like Bunyan and

Baxter tended to dwell on, and the Christ of Paradise Regained who

^Darkness ere day's mid course, and morning light More orient in the western cloud, that drew "O'er the blue firmament a radiant white, Descending slow with something heavenly fraught." [VTII, 820-2j] Despite the quotation-marks around the last two lines, all four are taken, with slight changes, from Paradise Lost [XI, 204-07], 80

"speaks frequently in terms of his author's unacknowledged autobiog- 17 raphy." Both Wordsworth and Milton attempted to actualize Milton's idea that "he who would. . .hope to write well ought. . .him 3elfe to 1 A bee a tru e Poem," but i t was Wordsworth who wrote the epic of acknowledged autobiography.

Wordsworth refers by allusion and metaphor, not to Milton's epics alone, but to the whole tradition of epic. He internalizes the battle, the journey, the vocation, of Hector, Odysseus and

Aeneas, making them activities of the mind and soul. The allusions to non-Miltonic epic are economical but impressive. In the begin­ ning Wordsworth/Odysseus rejoices that he "May quit the tiresome sea and dwell on shore" [i, 55l» but much later a Wordsworth/Aeneas con­ ceives of the journey as a vocation, not as a search for haven: "My b usin ess was upon th e barren sea, My errand was to s a il to other coasts" [XI, 5 5 - 5 6 ] . The battle regalia of warlike epic becomes internalized and idealized: "I felt Gleams like the flashing of a

^L. D. Lerner, "Puritanism and the Spiritual Autobiography," Hibbert Journal. LV (1957), 582. X 8 "An Apology. . .against Smectymnuus," The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1951), HI, pb. 1, p. 5^5* Goethe felt that one's life was a greater work of art than one's poetry.

19The lines which immediately precede these combine elements of Odysseus' and Aeneas' experience with Circe's island: What a v a il'd , When Spells forbade the Voyager to land, The fragrance which did ever and anon Give notice of the Shore, from arbours breathed Of b lessed sentim ent and fe a r le s s love? [XI, 48-52] but those quoted in the text cannot but refer to Aeneas. 81

shield" [i, 615-14]; the heroic mind " b eneath such banners m ilitant

Thinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aught That may attest its prowess, blest in thoughts That are their own perfection and reward"

[vi, 545-46]. In a very different vein, and among many echoes of

Pope, is the thick-ribbed Army of the boyhood card game, with which

coincides the first instance in the poem of social commentary [i,

554-62]. Finally, Wordsworth contrasts his theme favorably to the acknowledged heroic themes: "Of Genius, Power, Creation and Divinity itself I have been speaking, for my theme has been What pass’d within me. . . .This is, in truth, heroic argument, And genuine prowess"

[ill, 171-74, 182-85].

Just as he internalized the battle, the journey, and the vocation, so Wordsworth transformed the formal device of epic simile into an instrument with which to probe the mind and feeling. The epic similes are few but striking. There are but four, and in the

I85O version one of them loses the shape of simile. We have already analyzed th e two which comment on th e autobiographical task [iV , 247-

68, IX, 1-9]- The ground of the remaining two comes, undoubtedly, from Wordsworth's travel reading. The first he cautiously develops to explain his psychological state at Cambridge:

And as I have read of one by shipwreck thrown With fellow Sufferers whom the waves had spar'd Upon a region uninhabited An island of the Deep, who having brought To land a s in g le Volume and no more, A treatise of Geometry, was used, Although of food and clothing destitute, And beyond common wretchedness depress'd, To part from company and take th is book, 82

Then first a self-taught pupil in those truths, To spots remote and corners of the Isle By the sea sid e, and draw his diagrams With a long stick upon the sand, and thus Did oft beguile his sorrow, and almost Forget his feeling; even so, if things Producing like effect, from outward cause So different, may rightly be compar'd, So was it with me then, and so will be With Poets ever. [vi, 160-78]

Having paused to wonder if things which produce a like effect, although caused by such different outward things, may rightly be compared, he continues to explain the mighty charm "Of those ab­ stra ctio n s to a mind b eset With images, and haunted by it s e lf ."

[179-80].

There is both a general and a specific likeness in the second travel jimilet

As when a Traveller hath from open day With torches pass'd into some Vault of Earth, The Grotto of Antiparos, or the Den Of Yordas among Craven's mountain tracts; He looks and sees the cavern spread and grow, Widening itself on all sides, sees, or thinks He sees, erelong, the roof above his head, Which instantly unsettles and recedes Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all Commingled, making up a Canopy Of Shapes and Forms and Tendencies to Shape That s h if t and vanish, change and interchange Like Spectres, ferment quiet and sublime; Which, after a short space, works less and less, Till every effort, every motion gone, The scene before him lies in perfect view, Exposed and l i f e l e s s , as a w ritten book. But let him pause awhile, and look again And a new quickening shall succeed, at first Beginning timidly, then creeping fast Through a ll which he beholds; the sen seless mass, In its projections, wrinkles, cavities, Through a ll i t s surface, with a ll colours streaming, Like a magician's airy pageant, parts, 85

U n ites, embodying everywhere some p ressu re Or image, recognis'd or new, some type Or picture of the world; forests and lakes, Ships, Rivers, Towers, the Warrior clad in Mail, The prancing Steed, the Pilgrim with his Staff, The mitred Bishop and the throned King, A Spectacle to which there is no end.

No otherwise had I at first been moved With such a swell of feeling, follow'd soon By a blank sense of greatness pass'd away And afterwards continu'd to be mov'd In presence of that vast Metropolis. [VTII, 711-48]

In its context it looks as if Wordsworth is claiming no more than that his response to London followed the pattern of change and move­ ment of a traveller exploring a cave, or that he is generalizing that any new experience fir st overwhelms, then seems commonplace, and finally becomes significant again. If we piece together his remarks about his responses to London elsewhere in this book and in Book VII, however, we see that his actual successive responses followed exactly th e p attern he has o u tlin e d , th a t he used many o f th e same words to describe his experience. The traveller entering the cave is moved a t f i r s t by th e s h if t in g "Canopy Of Shapes and Forms," and Wordsworth on entering London, on first "thridding the labyrinth," is impressed by the forms and shapes of things ("vulgar forms" and "mean shapes" to be sure) [VIII, 689-97]* The scene of the cave affects the traveller less and less; similarly the whole tenor of Book VII describ­ ing Wordsworth's residence in London substantiates this commentary!

For though I was most p a ssio n a te ly moved And yielded to the changes of the scene With most obsequious feeding, yet all this Pass'd not beyond the suburbs of the mind. [VII, 5^5-06] 84

But then to the traveller some "new quickening" comes, and the pro­ je c tio n s , w rin k les, c a v it ie s embody some type or p ic tu r e o f the w orld.

Wordsworth's f in a l word in "Retrospect" about London i s th a t "that great City. . .Affectingly set forth. . .the unity of man," individual emblems "Of courage, and integrity, and truth, And tenderness" [VIII,

825-27, 840-41]. The simile thus recapitulates in the cave-travelle^s experience the actual experience of Wordsworth in London, at the same time that it gives a general pattern for the response of a person's mind when it encounters any new and imposing and varied experience.

In these extended similes, the traditional device of epic,

Wordsworth has changed the function so that they elucidate interior process and psychological states; the two extremes which meet in the tertium comparationis are neither analogues or even objective correl­ atives, but approximations, descriptions "of things producing like effect, from outward cause so different." Not only do Wordsworth's internalized similes transform a traditional epic device. Northrop

Frye has remarked on the significance of the technical innovation w ith which shorter poems are absorbed in to The Prelude "in much the 20 way in which primitive lays stick together to form epics." Frye's generalization that the Romantic poet is interested in himself, not because of egotism, but because the basis of his poetic skill is in­ dividual, hence genetic and psychological, is not quite fair to

Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 60. Wordsworth* its corollary is that "in contrast to most of his

predecessors, [the Romantic poet] is apt to think of literary „21 tradition as a second-hand substitute for personal experience.

Wordsworth's traditional beginning in mediae res, his allusions to

Miltonic and classical epic, his internalizing of themes and of

similes—as well as direct statements affirming literary tradition

—demonstrate a much more positive role for that tradition. Per­

sonal experience gives an original dimension and carries the

tradition forward. This is the basis of Miss Elizabeth Sewell's

discussion of both the epic tradition and the Orphic tradition as

she traces its The Prelude is the basic modern document in both;

epic and Orphic coincide since the Orphic tradition approaches poetry

as an instrument in the voyage of self-discovery.22 Misch has said

that "it is not a rash conjecture to imagine an autobiography in

epic form."^ Wordsworth imagined and confidently wrote that auto­

biography.

There is an amazing consistency about the poet's juxta­

position of road and river images which shows a characteristic

habit of mind, of which Wordsworth was probably only imperfectly

21 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 60. 22 The Orphic Voice, pp. 3°2-09. 23 History of Autobiography in Antiquity, I, 69. Misch is discussing The Song of Roland and Beowulf. 86 aware. As with rivers and streams, there are many actual roads as well as symbolic ones: the "glad preamble" is the product of the open road; both specific incidents of Book IV, the semi-conscious dedication to poetry and the encounter with a soldier, occur as he walks alone along a road at night; Wordsworth’s sense of the gran­ deur of London, as well as his great experience in the Alps, occurs 24 in a moment along a roadway; he walks with Beaupuis along a path in France; two highways recall to his mind how on one occasion God

"corrected my desires"; it is on the mountain path on Snowdon that he finds his final emblem of the mind, the Soul and Imagination of the whole of Nature. The interesting thing about all these roads is, however, that in each instance the water is not far distant; some­ times it is the actual sea, sometimes a figurative one, frequently a complex blending of actual and figurative. In the setting of the opening lyric, for instance, alternate physical ways before the poet suggest the way of life: "whither shall I turn By road or pathway or through open field, Or shall a twig or any floating thing Upon the river, point me out ny course?" [i, 29- 52]. In lines immediately fol­ lowing, the sea refers to the restless life he has been living:

"Enough that I am free; for months to come May dedicate myself to chosen tasks; May quit the tiresome sea and dwell on shore" [i, 55“55J.

In Book IV, he telescopes the many times "when, in the public roads a t eventide I saunter’ d, lik e a riv er murmuring And ta lk in g to

24For a technical contrast of these two parallel incidents, see below, Chapter III, pp. 122-26. 87 itself" [II, 109-11] before moving to the two specific instances of one vacation summer.At th e great d ed ica tio n passage, in d escrib in g his physical surroundings, he says, "The Sea was laughing at a dis­ tance" [555], and in setting the scene for the second remembrance he says, "the road's watry surface, . . .glitter'd in the moon, And seem'd before my eyes another stream Creeping with silent lapse to jo in the brook That murmur'd in the v a lley" [571-75]* Even th e

Arab Knight in the dream in Book V i s pursued by "waters o f th e deep" [l50]> and the actual sea is before the dreaming poet [138].

The great experience on the road in the Alps is inextricable from a stream. The two friends' way lay "in the stony channel of the

Stream. . .a few steps" [l/T, 516-17], an,l I* Is ln his orientation to that stream that the information "that we had cross'd the Alps" reaches Wordsworth's consciousness. Immediately after his paean of praise to Imagination, he resumes his narrative with the fact that

"the brook and road We re fellow-travellers" [vi, 555-5^] • "Our journey we renew'd, Led by the Stream, ere noon-day magnified Into a lordly River" [58I-85]. As one of his "parting word[s]" [VT, 662] concerning this great Alpine trip, he concludes: "Whate'er I saw, or heard, or felt, was but a stream That flow'd into a kindred stream, a gale That help'd me forwards, did administer To grandeur and to tenderness, to the one Directly, but to tender thoughts by means Less often instantaneous in effect; Conducted me to these along a path Which in the main was more circuitous" [vi, 672-80], This mountain experience midway in his narrative prefigures the final 88 great insight of the Mt. Snowdon experience in Book XIII where a complex development of various waters seen from his pathway cul­ minates in a mighty emblem of man's mind. Here the natural scenes feed the stream of the personal mind; in the climax of the poem mountains and sea are emblems o f Mind i t s e l f .

As Wordsworth moves to the portion of his story devoted to the French Revolution, the portion he is loath to begin, the intro­ ductory simile of the personified River makes the river itself "tread an onward road" [iX, jJ* In the I85O version, after the nine-line simile of the river, Wordsworth expanded his idea with an alternate 25 simile, one of the land traveller. ^ Along the Loire, he and Beavt- puis took their frequent walk, "footing many a mile, In woven roots and moss smooth as the sea" [lX, 442-4^]^—again, as in Book IV, the roadway is compared in some aspect to an expanse of water. In Book

X Wordsworth speaks of Dorothy as "a brook That does but cross a lonely road" [911-12]. In Book XI he reports the Christmas vacation

^^Or as a traveller, who has gained the brow Of some a e r ia l Down, w h ile th ere he h a lts For breathing-time, is tempted to review The region left behind him; and, if aught Deserving notice have escaped regard, Or been regarded with too careless eye, Strives, from that height, with one and yet one more L a st lo o k , to make th e b e s t amends he mays So have we lingered. [185O, IX, 9-17] The addition of making "best amends" gives insight into Wordsworth's later conception of what he has done in his autobiography. See the discussion of the original simile, pp. 75-75 above. ^This is de Selincourt's reading in the first edition. In the second edition Miss Darbishire changes it and along with it the en­ tire meanings "inwoven roots and moss smooth as the sea." of his schooldays in which his father died. The reproach implicit in the story he tells of "trite reflections" and a subsequent cor­ rection of desires are forever linked to a scene, central in which are "two highways ascending" [XI, 552]. "Afterwards. . .the mist

Which on the line of each of those two Roads Advanced in such in­ disputable shapes" was a spectacle "to which I often would repair and thence would drink, As at a fountain" [XI, 576-85]. Rightly

Wordsworth says in Book XII that in his mind "something of the grandeur which invests The mariner who sails the roaring sea. . .

Surrounded, to o , th e Wanderers o f the Earth, Grandeur as much, and loveliness far more" [XII, 155~57]» He was probably quite uncon­ scious of his habit of uniting land and water, but the evidence is overwhelming. It is a touchstone of his style; and in autobiography, in an almost literal way, the style is the man.

The most elaborate interaction of path and sea, of literal sea and seeming sea and the sea of mind, occurs, of course, in the description of his experience on Snowdon. He has set out to see the sun r is e from Mt. Snowdon, but i t i s the abrupt appearance o f th e moon high in the heavens which introduces this climactic "spot of time" t

I looked about, and lo l The Moon stood naked in the Heavens, at height Immense above my head, and on th e shore I found myself of a huge sea of mist, Which, meek and silent, rested at my feet: A hundred h ills their dusky backs upheaved All over this still Ocean, and beyond, Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves, 90

In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes, Into the Sea, the real Sea, that seem'd To dwindle, and give up its majesty, Usurp'd upon as far as sight could reach. [XIII, 40-51]

The metaphorical sea is at first not an image for human life or the mind, but for a natural phenomenon; it is a huge sea of mist resting at his feet, and "A hundred h ills their dusky backs upheaved All over this still Ocean. The vapours of this seeming sea shoot themselves into "the real Sea”—Wordsworth differentiates between the figurative and literal with absolute clarity, although by 1850 he had removed the bald contrast "the real Sea" and identified it as the

Atlantic—and this real sea "seem'd To dwindle, and give up its majesty." This description of literal and figurative waters in turn becomes a symbol for the Mind of Man, but not without a further com­ plication of the image, a break in the misty sea which admits the roar of actual waters:

Meanwhile, the Moon look'd down upon this shew In single glory, and we stood, the mist Touching our very feet; and from the shore At distance not the third part of a mile Was a blue chasm; a fra ctu re in the vapour, A deep and gloomy breathing-place through which Mounted the roar o f w aters, to r r e n ts, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. [XIII, 52-59]

Whether Wordsworth has here broken the A tla n tic in to "waters, to r­ rents, streams innumerable" which have one voice, or whether these

27 „ This felicitous image is reversible: "The surface of the u n iv ersa l earth With triumph, and d e lig h t, and hope, and fear Work[s] like a sea" [I, 499-501]. 91 refer to various mountain waters, these waters are real, the roar actual. And in the blue chasm, in that breach, Nature has lodged

"the Soul, the Imagination of the Whole" [65].

Vague though this last is, the description is well-nigh perfect—Wordsworth claims it a perfect image for his purpose in line 69. His discourse on the meditation which rose in him that night unfolds inevitably out of the scene and is of necessity some­ what vague. The mighty Mind of which the scene seems so patently an emblem feeds upon infinity but is exalted by an under-presence.

The "one function" is a "glorious faculty" of higher minds which even grossest minds "cannot chuse but feel" [84], In MS W, printed for the first time in the second edition, Wordsworth tried to make more definite this "very spirit" by falling back on other concrete pictures. One might think that an analysis of the six further pic- 28 tures of the MS would help us to understand, but they only confuse the issue, and we can agree with Wordsworth's instinct not to com­ pound the incidents of such a "putting forth" with the "sundry other" less perfect, less impressive emblems of the manuscript version.

28 While the first two additional emblems, also taken from nature, clearly and obviously present a stationary quality in ttfe midst of tumult and movement (in th e Snowdon episode, a ll i s tum ult and movement, presumably even the breach itself), the four others, drawn from books, seem rather to catalogue affecting instances of vicarious emotion, perhaps fea r, courage, hope, unbearable suspense. D esp ite Wordsworth's verbal links in introducing each successive emblem—he begins "Such power. . ." "such o b ject," "Like sp e cta cle," and "kindred power"— one i s a t a lo s s to know p r e c is e ly what "power" th e s ix p ic tu r e s and the Snowdon scene have in common with the mind—beyond its general ability to find sermons in stones and good in everything. However, the discursive description of MS W which is modified in the text we know is perhaps the more explicit of the twos "These

[high er minds] from their native selves can deal about Like trans­ formation, to one life impart The functions of another, shift, create, Trafficking with immeasurable thoughts." That is, the one most godlike function of higher human minds is a kind of creative metamorphosizing, and the passage is a poetic exemplum of the principle. The I8O5 reading twice makes it clear that these higher minds may initiate or respond—they are equal to both. From this high function proceed highest bliss; religion, faith, and end­ less occupation for the soul; inner sovereignty, peace, cheerfulness, truth in moral judgments, unfailing delight in the external universe.

And "this alone is genuine Liberty." It is Wordsworth's greatest, his most inclusive, presentation of the great themes "My voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind. . .to the external

World Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too The external World is fitted to the Mind."^

In the light of Wordsworth's complex metaphor of the ex­ ternal world for the mind of man, it is interesting to follow a well-known juxtaposition of mind and mountain in two early auto­ biographers. In the Confessions St. Augustine complained that "Men go fo rth to wonder at the h eigh ts o f mountains, th e huge waves o f

2^Preface to the 1814 edition of The Excursion, Poetical Works, V, 11. 62-68. 95 the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the extent of the ocean, and ZQ the courses of the stars, and omit to wonder at themselves.1 The complaint is a recurrent one. In Wordsworth’s time both Isaac

D is r a e li and John Foster made i t ; they referred to man's preoccu­ pation, not with the grandeur of nature, but with the machines which measure the revolutions of seasons and the passage of time; and they are as astonished as Augustine that man's curiosity is so seldom directed toward his own mind.-^ In the Italian Renaissance Petrarch, who has been variously cited as the first essentially modern auto­ biographer and the first man to climb a mountain to look at the view, took his beloved Augustine's injunction literally to heart.

He says he remembered it precisely at the moment he had reached the peak of Mt. Ventoux, and his reaction, upon coming down from the mountain, war to write an inner autobiography in a letter to a counselor and friend: "You will see, my dearest father, that I wish nothing to be concealed from you, for I am careful to describe

v iii, 15. Trans. J. G. Pilkington, The Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers (New York, 1907), I.

^Disraeli writes, "I have often observed, with surprise, how some pass their days in noting the revolutions of the seasons, the rain and the sunshine; the more important occupation of becoming acquainted with their own mind, has never occurred to them, while they held the weather glass in their hand." "Some Observations on Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters," Miscellanies; or, Literary Recreations (London, 1796), pp. 97-98. Foster says, "Men carry their minds as for the most part they carry their watches, content to be ignorant of the constitution and action within." "On a Man's Writing Memoirs of Himself," o£. c it. , p. 21. to you not only my life in general but even my individual reflec­ tions."^ Petrarch was moved by the literal force of Augustine's admonishment: the mountain view reminded him of the prospect of his mind. Wordsworth's is a more poetic application: his poem is about his mind, and his experiences on mountains are the metaphors of his h igh est in sig h ts. Both Wordsworth and Augustine r e a liz e th a t even the commonest mind cannot help being impressed by natural wonders; both use the fact to stimulate their readers to a greater concern, to consider a far greater wonder, the mind o f man.

Wordsworth a lso uses in h is conclusion a sin g le sim ile of movement in the a ir which summarizes three aspects o f h is awareness of what he has undertaken. He refers to his Song,

which like a lark I have protracted, in the unwearied Heavens Singing, and often with more plaintive voice Attemper'd to the sorrows of the earth. [XIII, 58O-85]

The lines demonstrate once again his self-consciousness about ex­ tending—protracting—the work; but, more than that, they indicate clearly for the first time his awareness of two aspects of his auto­ biography, the ideal l i f e constructed by the mind and the prosaic recital of the events of life. He has sung, both in the unwearied

52iiiphe Ascent o f Mount Ventoux" i s tran slated by James H. Robin­ son and H. W. R olfe, P etrarch: The F ir st Modern Scholar and Man o f L e tte r s. 2nd ed. (New York, 1914-), PP» 507-20. A more recent scholar has shown from internal evidence that, far from composing the letter in 1556 when it is dated, Petrarch recollected the experience (if it was a real experience at all) in tranquillity at least sixteen years later. See Giuseppi Billanovich, Petr area letterato (Rome, 194-7), I, 195-98. 95

Heavens, and with a voice more plaintive (how accurate an adjec­ tive this isl)—concerning the sorrows of the earth.

These analyses of the direct references in the 1805 poem to the writing of autobiography and the metaphors which communicate

Wordsworth's reflections on the mind and on self-knowledge demon­

strate that he understood with greater clarity than most autobiog­ raphers the values and pitfalls inherent in the task he had set himself. The mind is its own epic. It charts its own voyage, follows its own mountain path—always in close proximity to waters— and makes its flight into the heavens, singing both to the Heavens and o f the earth. CHAPTER III

"A linked lay of Truth”

We have seen that the attitude of the times and Wordsworth's own attitude toward autobiography coincided in important ways. The technical problem is the same for the autobiographer in any period, however. Not only is his material, unlike that of a novelist or a dramatist, a body of "irreducible fact,"''' but the autobiography is a book like any other, and all the ordinary rules of composition apply to it: "It is unique because the author appears, personally and with­ out disguise, as a character in his own story; but it is still a story that he is writing, and he is obliged to handle his own charac- 2 ter as a character throughout the succession of events." This chapter explores characteristic ways in which Wordsworth joins his many strands of remembrance and reflection into the unity of a single autobiographic thread.

In the poem which he wrote after hearing The Prelude in

1806, Coleridge called Wordsworth's autobiography "a linked lay of

Truth." Whether i t i s the su ccessiv e elements o f a tru th or o f a

*Wayne Shumaker, E nglish Autobiography (Berkeley, 195^), P* 109*

^Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York, 19^1)» p. 90. 97 fiction which are being linked in a poem, the structural and transi­ tional devices are the same. Since the poet whose subject is himself must use the same medium as the poet whose subject is the founding of a c i t y or th e myth o f c r e a tio n , a n a ly ses o f a poem as poem, not necessarily as autobiography, will yield characteristic elements of style and structure, and there are many fine studies of Wordsworth which do this. The three devices of apostrophe and direct address, of foreshadowing and recapitulation, and of dialectical progression, analyzed in this chapter are, thus, techniques of poetry or of nar­ rative, and only incidentally of autobiography; they are not the only

significant or typical devices, but they are pertinent in a special way when th e n a rr a tiv e i s a u to b io g ra p h ica l.

How is The Prelude, with its vignettes of childhood, its passages of adult reflection, its remarks directed to Coleridge and

its apostrophes to Nature, its shifts from the years of boyhood to

the "now" of composition (itself progressing through time), put to­

gether? The poem has a general chronological order, to be sure, moving from the earliest remembered incidents of V/ordsworth1 s life

to the year 1798* but it is a very loose chronology and it certainly

does not account for transitions between small units or the many

interpolations into the chronology of the poem. It has been sug­

gested that "The Prelude is organized according to the associational

habits of Wordsworth’s mind,"^ but associational psychology i3 as

^Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., Wordsworth's Cambridge Education (Cambridge, Eng., 1957 )> P» 259- Schneider is explaining Wordsworth's juxtaposition of an account of the death of "the honour'd Teacher" 98 inadequate as chronology to explain Wordsworth's progressions throughout the poem.

Not only does Wordsworth's personal address to Coleridge reflect a deep friendship and thus give the poem a genuine intimacy appropriate to autobiography, but the device of direct address helps him to link his various materials in a natural sequence. The opening lines of Book I constitute a passage where shifts in time are all- important, where the address to Coleridge and to aspects of Nature facilitate those shifts. The present tense of the opening lyrical passage gives way to direct report to Coleridge: thus did I pour

With the next "my Friend," however, the poet shifts the nature of his report. He spares to speak of his "happiness entire" after settling down in his hermitage and moves to a description of inner wavering. His poetic ambition rose—his hopes to make permanent in art "phantoms of conceit"—only to be frustrated by mocking impedi­ ments. Here he shifts from report of a particular time past to present perfect tense and then to present. "I had hopes. . .but I

of his youth with the death of Robespierre [X, 467-539], but the suggestion is inaccurate. Here, as elsewhere, Wordsworth's juxta­ position grows out of his habit of setting a very circumstantial stage and time before recording important emotions. See the physi­ cal description of the day he left France which opens this book, the extensive preparation for the epiphany upon Snowdon at the open­ ing of XIII, or the scene as it is set in Book VIII, 695-700 and discussed below, p. 122. 99 have been discouraged." He manages to shift totally to the present by use of "often." The "gleams of light Flash often," then "disap­ pear And mock." Similarly, in the next verse paragraph the poet uses a "now"—now he would be content to give up his lofty hopes awhile for something humble. There follows a description, reminis­ cent in its two parts of A Midsummer Night* s Dr earn and Paradise Lost, of a poet's "unruly times," of the meditative mind's "goadings on."

And the "now" is reiterated: "With me is now such passion." Hav­ ing generalized the nature of poetic "fits" and unquiet "instincts," he blames the state, not for being now upon him, but only for last­ ing too long. Here description of his immediate psychic state ends, and the lines that follow, while they present again the wavering between ambition and frustration, have a very objective ring. "As becomes a man who would prepare For such a glorious work," he makes a "rigorous inquisition." He has slipped back to "the sweet promise of the past"; gone is the intervening contentment "for present gifts of humbler industry," although he is using present tense still. The

"rigorous inquisition" leads into his catalogue of projected themes,

Miltonic, Spenserian, historical (his heroes the upholders of free­ dom), some Tale from his own heart, the philosophic Song; but not without a reminder of the uncertainties he has already documented: he mistakes vainly, he fears, "Proud spring-tide swellings for a regular sea." The "awful burthen" of his highest ambition, the philosophic song, plunges him again into frustration. He "takes refuge" and "beguiles" himself; he has "no skill to part" a series 100 of opposite interpretations of his moods. Humility and modest awe betray him; they cloak a more subtle selfishness that now inhibits and now dupes with false activity.

The major shift from joy and confidence to uncertainty in these 251 lines occurred at line 116. Before that point he had sung his song and described the autobiographical situation in which it had come "spontaneously.* The pivotal point is his address to Coleridget in establishing the setting and explanation of the preamble, he had addressed his friend; in shifting to analysis rather than report, he repeats the address. Having persisted in presenting the wavering of his mind through several tones and modes up to line 251, the major shift at that point is abupt. An alternate, better way of spending one's time is proposed. It is a judgment, not a report, and the shift is indicated merely by a dash and an exclamation. The proposal of a

"neglect of all things" which would be better than his wavering ambition is stated but once, and Wordsworth is again articulating his wavering mood; and in case the reader should miss the reiterated in­ sistence, he states directly, "This is my lot." It is not until the end of the book that he speaks of the work being undertaken. While this autobiographic letter to Coleridge is a "present gift of humbler industry" [l45-44], it is also, after all, a fulfillment of his high hopes to give a "visible home" to "the many feelings that oppressed my heart" [l29, 1553-

Lines 252-271 end as they began—with a dash and an abrupt

shift, this time to a rhetorical question. "Was it for this," the 101 poet asks, that "the fairest of all Rivers, lov'd To blend his mur­ murs with my Nurse*s song"? What follows seems to have been the earliest written passage of the poem: it is at this point that MS

j J begins. The question is repeated, addressed directly to the

River Derwent, a second and a third time* "didst Thou, 0 Derwent,"

"didst thou, beauteous Stream, Make ceaseless music. . ." The relative clauses and participial constructions make this sentence of nine and one-half lines so complex that it is no wonder Words­ worth (or his editor) failed to punctuate the whole as the question it had started out to be. In the 1850 version the sentence is considerably simplified, but the question mark is still omitted.

I t i s by means o f th is p o etic apostrophe to the Derwent th at Y/ords- vorth moves into the first of the childhood scenes, presentation of and reflection upon which constitute the remainder of Book I.

He achieves his transition by shifting back to third person refer­ ence to the rivers "Having left his Mountains. . .that beauteous

River came. . ." So far everything in the poem has been Wordsworth's solitary experience; here the first person becomes plural for the first time, but only momentarily* the Derwent "was a Playmate whom we dearly lov'd." The first vignette is of himself alone, naked, a t the age o f f iv e , basking and plunging and basking again.

Thus the direct address to Coleridge and apostrophes to the river Derwent have a structural function; they act as highly intricate transitional devices for shifts in time and mode. Such direct address and apostrophe are, of course, everywhere, and it 102 is their ubiquity which gives the poem its consistent directness of tone. After presenting his usual summer wanderings during Cambridge vacations, as a transition to the more specific record of the Alpine siammer, for instance, he addresses a long passage to Coleridge [VT,

246-531]» and the even longer address to Coleridge which concludes

Book X [941-1039] functions as a transition between a documentation o f s ta te s o f mind concerning the French R evolution and th e theore'b- ical and recapitulatory Book XI on the Imagination. Similarly, after the high discussion of his analogy between Snowdon and the mind of man in Book XIII, he addresses "Ye Solitudes" [123] in order

to turn to autobiographical discourse again.

Wordsworth addresses not only C oleridge— and he addresses

him fifty-eight times in all, only eight of which instances were re­ moved in th e I 85O tex t— but h is school chums, the Dame, the maid o f

Buttermere, Dorothy, Milton, Theocritus, Man in the abstract, and

varied asp ects o f Nature, the Derwent, th e Rhone and Como, h is

darling Vale, and solitudes, as well as Books and paths, and the

past, Ye Golden times. In addition, he twice speaks directly to a

you, a potential reader who is not Coleridge. In both cases it is

to clarify and justify his vision; in both cases he attempts to pull

the reader to his height. In Book VIII he is on the defensive:

Call ye these appearances Which I beheld of Shepherds in my youth, This sanctity of Nature given to Man A shadow, a delusion, ye who are fed By the dead letter, not the spirit of things, Whose truth is not a motion or a shape 105

Instinct with vital functions, but a Block Or waxen Image which yourselves have made, And ye adore. [VIII, 428-56]

Similarly in Book XIII he exhorts his reader (it cannot be anyone else, certainly not Coleridge)*

Behold the fields In balmy spring-time, full of rising flowers And happy creatures; see that Pair, the Lamb And the Lamb's Mother, and their tender ways Shall touch thee to the heart; in some green bower Rest, and be not alone, but have thou there The One who is thy choice of all the world, There linger, lull'd and lost, and rapt away, Be happy to thy fill; thou call'st this love And so it is, but there is higher love Than this. [XIII, 152-62]

These two times are the only instances in the thirteen books when

Wordsworth does not address a third person or an aspect of Nature when he would speak directly. They slip so easily into the fabric of the poem that the reader scarcely notices. He is so accustomed to the form of direct address that when it is focused on himself he has not the impulse to protest, "But I, no more than Coleridge, need that distinction pointed out to me.”

The poem proceeds, then, with the transitional aid of direct address, whether to people (most often, of course, Coleridge) or to aspects of nature. Such address is highly appropriate to auto­ biographical writing where the tone of intimate revelation is neces­

sary to gain the reader's confidence.

The second device of recapitulation and foreshadowing is well illustrated in Book VIII, a transitional book both in position and in idea. Wordsworth ties the book to his whole poem with 104 allusions, some prosaic, some subtle, to what has and what is to come. Ostensibly the poet begins with a consideration of that stage of his life, his sojourn in London, where he had left off in Book

VII and w ill tak e up in Book IX by w ritin g , nI ranged a t la r g e , through the Metropolis Month after month." The last fourth is con­ cerned directly with his sojourn in the city, beginning with the apostrophe to London as "Preceptress stern" [678]. At the begin­ ning he refers to "that great City" in an apostrophe to Nature [63J> and the contrast between Nature and the City is his signal to intro­ duce the chronological development of his love for mankind, MS Y

has a much more explicit description of how the love of mankind grows out of the love of nature. Here, as in many places, the poem asserts

the relationship rather than explains it. The poet owes to Nature

the "high thoughts" which triumphed over the city experiences,

"loathsome sights Of wretchedness and vice," for she already had

"taught [me] to love My Fellow-beings." It was Nature's power that

raised a first complacency, which first inspired. The restraint

inherent in these cautious "firsts" becomes explicit in the middle

and at the end of the book in passages addressed to Coleridge. "Do

not deem, my Friend," Wordsworth cautions, "that it was really so" 4 [472, 475]» It is by "slow gradations" [862] that such shifts are

made, "My Fellow beings still were unto me Far less than [Nature]

^Wordsworth is always cautious in making statements about the stages and states of his mind. Of his life at Cambridge, for in­ stance, he says, "Imagination slept, And yet not utterly" [ill, 260- 6 1 ]. was,” and the balancing of the scale of love "with that in which

[Nature's] mighty objects lay” is accomplished by anticipating a maturity achieved during his residence in France.

At line 64l Wordsworth begins a direct recapitulation of

Books III and VII, the two previous books specifically concerned with encounters with mankind. To become "an Idler among academic

Bowers" he had been "transported. . .a s in a dream" [ v l l l , 649, 6 4 l] the figure is that of his first mention of Cambridge, "I was the

Dreamer, they the Dream" [ill, 28]. As a transition from the formal educational experience of Cambridge to the more casual but perhaps even more pertinent education described in Book VII, he personifies London as his "preceptress stern." In each case he includes a phrase indicating that he has already given the experi­ ence extended treatment: the new condition in which he found him­ self at Cambridge "at large Hath been set forth" [650-51]• As for

London, "I willingly return. Erewhile my Verse play'd only with the flowers Enwrought upon thy mantle" [679-81]. He realizes very clearly that the previous book had consisted mostly of pageantry; he had only "now and then" tried "to puzzle out Some inner meanings"

[685-85]. Here he will do the job. He begins by describing his first impression of the city. In contrast to the general tone and attitude of his descriptions in Book VII, his treatment of the city in this transitional book is affirmative. It develops a mere h in t a t the end o f Book VII:

But though the picture weary out the eye, By nature an unmanageable sight, It is not wholly so to him who looks In steadiness, who hath among least things An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. [VII, 707-12]

Still it is pathos rather than dignity or grandeur which stands out in his final city picture, that of the Old Man with the Child [844-5g].

Ke himself recognized that it was chiefly tenderness which moved him at this gradation of his love for his fellows.

Allusions to other sections of his autobiography are more numerous then direct recapitulations. The fine and accurate descrip­ tion of "gleams of sunshine on the eyelet spots And loop-holes of the hills" [88-89] seems an exact visual counterpart of the famous meta­ phor "spots of time" which appears in the similarly interpretative book near the end of the entire poem [XI, 258]. The retelling of a story told by his Household Dame reminds the reader of all the grati­ tude and affection for her expressed in Books II and IV. The image of an aerial cross on some spiry rock of the Chartreuse impresses a scene which Wordsworth o r ig in a lly reported in purely m a tte r -o f-fa c t terms in Book VI.

At the climax of his exploration of pastoral settings in

Book VIII there is a cluster of childhood episodes told originally for their own sakes, but now used to indicate the new dimension this book explores. He is about to introduce his visual childhood 107 impressions of the Shepherd, Man, and he gives alternate settings and tim es:

Seeking the raven's nest, and suddenly Surpriz'd with vapours, or_ on rainy days When I have angled up the lonely brooks Mine eyes have glanced upon him, few steps off, In size a giant, stalking through the fog, His Sheep like Greenland Bears; at other times When round some shady promontory turning, His Form hath flash'd upon me, glorified By the deep radiance of the setting sun: Or him have I descried in distant sky, A s o lita r y o b ject and sublim e, Above all heightI like an aerial Cross, As i t i s sta tio n ed on some sp ir y Rock Of the Chartreuse, for worship. [vill, 5°7-^10]

The original episode of the raven's nest indelibly placed in the rea d er's mind in Book I had been a sso cia ted w ith the b la s t and th e loud dry wind and not with vapours, but Wordsworth frequently enough mentions the feeling of surprise at sudden vapours; here he combines two settings. Angling had been mentioned twice before; the lines in

Book I, "the rod and lin e , True symbol o f th e fo o lis h n e ss o f hope"

[511-12], had, except for the editorializing on foolishness and hope, contributed purely to a descriptive passage; in Book V he mentions the rod and line again but only in order to demonstrate the desper­ ateness of his pursuit of books [v, 507 ]* In this passage the cluster of autobiographical scenes and sensations is used to magnify the importance of the giant Form; of themselves the raven's nest and angling have been important, but now Wordsworth's testimony is that

Man distracts him from them. The cluster of associations around the other two alternatives, "round some shady promontory" and "in distant 108 sky. . .above all height” are also recurrent and typical. Illumina­ tion characteristically occurs when he is alone, when he comes sud­ denly and unexpectedly upon a figure that is almost always a stark silhouette preferably stationed on some promontory or craggy rock, or when there is a flash—these are the elements of almost every concrete episode he reconstructs; that of the stolen boat, the morning walk when he meets the soldier, the heap of garments, the sight of Shepherd and Dog, the hunger-bitten girl and heifer, the gibbet, the reverie in which a single Briton strode across the

Wold, the ascent of Snowdon. These many incidents were specific remembrances; the Shepherd passage quoted above offers its series of alternatives to indicate, not a specific memory, but either a recurrent, or more likely, a generalized one. As he develops the alternatives, he alludes to almost every type of natural impression he has shared with his reader in the early books.

The web o f a l lu s i o n backward and forw ard g iv e s th e poem and, indeed, the life which is its subject, texture. Any good poem will have its foreshadowings and recapitulations. They give a life­ like dimension indispensable to autobiography: the reader's memory shares some of the intricacies of the poet’s memory. In presenting his political opinions Wordsworth twice adverts to the fact that the reader now knows him and his characteristic responses so well that explanations are unnecessary. In Book IX he alludes summarily to the formation of his thought and moral feeling to justify his ideal: 109

"It could not be But that one tutor'd thus, who had been form'd To thought and moral feeling in the way This story hath described, should look with awe Upon the faculties of Man, . . .and hail As best the government of equal rights And individual worth" [iX, 241-48].

And in te llin g of how his mind had been both "let loose and goaded" by the Revolution, he claims no explanation beyond that same train­ ing; again he calls upon his reader to furnish the explanation for himselfi "After what hath been Already said of patriotic love,

And hinted at in other sentiments We need not linger long upon this theme" [x, 864-67]•

The third device, that of dialectical progression, is the integrating structural device of Book VIII, however. Having aban­ doned the roughly chronological organization of the first seven books, Wordsworth now looks back and in his overview singles out a unifying theme, the "Love of Nature leading to Love of Mankind."

Havens says the book is not really about the love of nature leading 5 to love of mankind and that it is very badl3r organized, but he is reading the I85O text, and the omissions and changes from the I8O5 one make a significant difference. As is frequently the case in

Wordsworth, the poet makes no attempt to justify or explain the cause-effect relationship which he asserts. How the love of nature leads to the love of men is not explicitly analyzed. As for the

^Raymond Dexter Havens, The Mind o f a Poet (Baltimore, 1941), p. 452. 110 organization, of course one finds it weak if he summarizes, as

Havens does, the content of each division in a phrase, stating it baldly and then moving on and treating similarly the next. Like

Wordsworth's "gleams of sunshine," the inner form of the book is

"hidden by quiet process," and one must analyze this characteristic process to understand the book's integrity.

The book opens with an animated description which parallels the last scene of the preceding book, and proceeds by a series of contrasts. The fact that the opening lines describing

Helvellyn Fair "were an afterthought" in the order of composition^ need not detain us; they were in place by 1805, and, while many passages of Book V III are deleted and many added in the revised

I85O tex t, lin e s 1-61 are changed but s lig h tly . As for Havens' judgment that the contrast with Bartholomew Fair at the end of the preceding book was "probably not intended,"^ who is to say? It seems to me that the poet's awareness of the contrast of a city and a country fair is substantiated by the fact that each is viewed from a similar physical vantage point. The poet and reader had looked down on Bartholomew Fair exactly as Helvellyn and the reader look down cn ihe country festival. V/ordsworth contrived this point of view in the first instance by a rare appeal—"for once the Muse's

^De Selincourt, ed., The Prelude, p. 567*

^The Mind of a Poet, p. k'jb. Ill help will we implore"J that is, he asks for wings—and the differ­ ence between this mechanical approach and Wordsworth's more usual personification of a natural object, his method in order to over­ look Helvellyn fair, parallels his attitude toward the scenes below. In the one case there is "din," in the other, "music.11

There are more people at Bartholomew for one thing; the open space "is alive With heads," whereas "immense Is the Recess" which embraces Young and Old beneath Helvellyn. There are the natural differences in the constitutive elements of the two fairs: the chattering monkeys, the hurdy-gurdy grinder, albinos, ventriloquist, wild beasts—I mention a very few of those Wordsworth specifies— make up an inevitable contrast with the heifer, flocks of sheep, a lame man, a blind one, the aged female hawker, the showman, the sweet lass, the children and the generous old man—this is the full catalogue of the " lit t le Family of Men" v is ib le to Old Helvelfyn annually. The attitude infused into each description serves

Wordsworth's habitual antithesis of city and country. One can imagine Lamb, less prejudiced, or rather prejudiced in the other way, making something quite charming out of Wordsworth1s Parliament of Monsters. The give and take of "vomiting, receiving" in the "one vast M ill"—what a d ifferen t image from the "Recess, the circumam­ bient World Magnificent" which embraces, and in which country men move! Wishing to condemn, Wordsworth allows his description of itself to make the condemnation; wishing to praise, the poet does 112 so ex p lic itly : "How l i t t l e They. . .and yet how great!" he says of the country crowd, and brings the scene around to the Miltonic in­ versions of its close:

All things serve them; than the Morning light Loves as i t g liste n s on the s ile n t rocks, And them the s ile n t Rocks, which now from high Look down upon them; the reposing Clouds, The lurking Brooks from their in v isib le haunts, And Old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir, And the blue Sky that roofs their calm abode. [VIII, 55-61J

The abrupt shift in the next lines is all the more effective for the contrast between city and country fairs observed from two high vantage points; Nature and City come together and Wordsworth returns to autobiography. Now Nature is addressed, but the phrase "that great City" leaps back over the contrasting introductory description of the scene from Helvellyn and refers to Book VII and the pageantry of London.

The next fifty -sev en lin es t e s t if y that V/ordsworth's love of his fellow beings had been kindled before his city experiences, yet the testimony is made with restraint. The quality of his love for his fellows in his early apprenticeship to Nature he develops by two remembered vignettes of "A Shepherd and his Dog," the one a scene in open day, a static silhouette on a summit so engulfed by mists that the man and animal had seemed "inhabitants Of an aerial Island floating on," the other a description of humble action at evening

"in the bottom of a Vale," the Shepherd training his Dog to chase the flock . This pair of visual illu stra tio n s was dropped from the I85O version where V/ordsworth proceeded directly to a contrast in a very different poetic mode, his Miltonic description of an oriental

Paradise and the simpler "more exquisitely fair" paradise "where I was reared." Ostensibly his native paradise was one precisely be­ cause man was there: "Man free, man working for himself, with choice Of time, and place, and object" [l52~55]j then, in both texts, he recapitulates, as usual, bringing the first of the pair back into focus, explaining that the "resplendent Gardens" with

"elaborate ornaments" would be to a child "transport over-great"

[l60, 162J; instead, in the actual Paradise of his childhood world

"the common haunts of the green earth" and the "ordinary human in­ terests" (the two elements of the theme of this book as stated in the subtitle) are simply said to affect the youngster. As a child he had been unconscious of their "fastening on the heart," and in maturity he still knows not how or whence. In MS Y he had attempted to explain precisely how, but he was evidently wary of such presump­ tion, for the interesting passage printed by de Selincourt in his notes was not incorporated into the final text. But even in this explanation he proceeds by contrasting two feelin g s, grandeur and tenderness, or admiration and love, as he says in 1805, "two principles of joy" [175]. If one reads the I8O5 text without attention to the intervening lines of MS Y, these "two principles of joy" seem to refer to Nature and man, "the green earth" and "ordinary human in­ terests." Pairs of opposites or coordinates frequently ease 114 unnoticeably into one another in the poem: at one time the major contrast is between nature and books, again it is between nature and man, and again between books and the l i f e of men. Here, comment on two principles plummets us into the next series of shifting con­ trasts. The two small vignettes of shepherds with their dogs gather to a veritable army of shepherds as he presents and contrasts a variety of pastoral scenes from his experiences and his reading.

In th is series, ty p ica lly , one of the grounds of the con­ trast shifts: he contrasts the shepherds he knew in youth with those he read about in English verse, then the scene of Latin pastorals with a single vista he saw from Goslar once, which in turn becomes the basis for a contrast with the landscape and shepherd life of his own boyhood, which in turn is contrasted with the creatures met in books, the whole rounded o ff with a challenge to the reader to dispute the r e a lity of his interpretation. Although "Shepherds were the men who pleas’d me fir st” they were

Not such as in Arcadian Fastnesses Sequester'd, handed down among themselves, So ancient Poets sing, the golden Age; Nor such, a second Race, allied to these, As Shakespeare in the Wood of Arden plac'd Y/here Phoebe sigh'd for the fa ls e Ganymede, Or there where Florizel and Perdita Together danc'd, Queen of the Feast and King; Nor such as Spenser fabled. [VIII, l85-9l]

I t is true that Vfordsworth has heard of maids and their May-bush and admits that Spenser may have seen such traditions take place, but to him this "was but a dream." "Substantial needs," not 115

"lighter graces" were what he heard of and saw; tales were not wanting, but they were tales of actual neighborhood events.

The shifts and distinctions between actual pastoral and literary pastoral which now occupy an extensive section of the book are clear but complex. Having told the near tragedy of shepherd g and son "as recorded by my Household Dame" to contrast with the

Arcadian Fastnesses and the Wood of Arden, he shifts to the begin­ nings of literary pastoral in Latin literature, a more purely des­ criptive mode which had not yet gathered the sophisticated accre­ tions of allegorical and chivalric meaning, what Bruno Snell has

9 called a "spiritual landscape."' V/ordsworth* s plea is for a spiritual dimension in actual landscape, and to make it he must reject the conventional accretions and return to an actual land­ scape similar to the original literary one which he can personally attest to, the view from Goslar. "I myself. . .have seen a pastoral

Tract Like one of these Lthe banks of Galesus, Adria, Clitumnus]" he says, and he describes it. Only after twenty-three lines of description does he identify it, "A glimpse of such sweet life I saw when. . ." and having identified, he returns to the harsher scenes of his boyhood with praise: "Yet hail to You. . .Ye that

O See above, Chapter. II, p. 65» for a discussion of the omission of this tale in I85O.

9 "The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape," The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford, 1955)> PP« 28l-p09. 116 seize The heart with firmer graspI" The thirty-two lines of de­ scription which follow parallel the twenty-three lines describing the shepherd of the level expanse outside Goslar. They are more extensive because they include a winter scene (Wordsworth simply neglects to mention the colder season as he praises the idyllic life of the continental shepherd, even though the winter he and

( | ^ M l 0 V Dorothy had spent in Goslar had been perishingly cold ) and some explicit moralizing. (As in his contrast of city and country fairs, e x p lic it judgment comes in the discussion of the approved scene. )

The "unlaborious pleasure" of the German shepherds is contrasted with "hard labour interchang'd with. . .majestic indolence" of his boyhood shepherds. And again it is at the end of the description that identification is made: he had had the glimpse of an easier, more id y llic l i f e from Goslar "mature in manhood," and he f e l t the

"firmer grasp" as "a rambling Schoolboy." The th esis through a ll this description and contrast is then stated and the contrast re­ newed. This real shepherd was "spiritual almost As those of Books; but more exalted far, Far more of an imaginative form"; he was not a

Corin dancing with his Phillis, but "a Man With the most common."

And the series of pastoral permutations has come full round, the

Arcadian Fastnesses reenter.

^Autobjographical Memoir, ed. Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols.(London, 18^1)> I* 16. 117

Further contrasts and pairs of Book VIII include theses the quick and the dead, or genuine readers of spiritual things and mock ones; Man and Nature as male and females "a passion, she! . . . he. . .but a grace Occasional" [486-89]; Tillers of the soil, as distinct from Shepherds, the common man he had discussed at great length;^ the images of Fancy contrasted with reality, and briefly with a single image of the Imagination; his own boyhood experience of nature and Coleridge’s urban deprivation; the "time of greater T O dignity" prepared gradually which "now Rush’d in as if on wings"; what one might expect "the vulgar light Of present actual superficial life " at Cambridge and London to mean to him contrasted to the t e s t i­ mony that Nature's "dim Analogy" preserved his spiritual life; the

contrast between early reflection and the need for action which

came to him as he encountered the world of men; the contrast between what he had said and judged of London in the previous book and what the rest of this book will present; the epic simile of a traveler

in a cave or grotto, he a traveler in the den of the city;1 5 ^ a

series of pairs, one of which is always Nature, the other shifting,

H-In the I85O text the "little Family of Man" beneath Helvellyn is specified as "Shepherds and t il l e r s of the ground" [ l . 8], but the second group is omitted at lin e 565 where i t appears in I8O5 [498], 12 Earlier in the book the figure for th is phenomenon had been "several currents blended into one. . .gathering imperceptibly, Flow'd in by gushes" [176-78].

l^For a discussion of th is sim ile, see above, Chapter II, pp. 82-84. 118 as it does throughout the poem, at one time being Man or Mankind, at another the Mind of Man, again Books, sometimes tradition; the testimony that imagination played over the urban sights as i t had in one instance over a rural one, strengthening self-confidence; a contrast between the city's offering a sense of unity and then a sense of individuality.

From his childhood Wordsworth remembered a striking

"twofold image" which he finally used in The Excursion. IX, but which was originally, according to MS Y, a part of Book VIII. The description of the rams, real and reflected, taken from Y, would have made an apt emblem for the twin themes of love of Nature and love of Man:

Once coming to a bridge that overlook'd A mountain torrent, where i t was becalm'd By a f la t meadow, at a glance I saw A twofold image; on the grassy bank A snow-white ram, and in the peaceful flood Another and the same; most beautiful The breathing creature; nor less beautiful, Beneath him, was his shadowy counterpart; Each had his [glowing] mountains, each his sky, [And each seem'd centre of his own] fair w o rld .^

In Y Wordsworth uses this memory simply as a childhood episode.

In The Excursion he uses it to moralize on worldly transience.

There he metamorphosizes the simple autobiographical record that

"A stray temptation seiz'd me to dissolve The vision,—but I could not, and the stone, Snatch'd up for that intent, dropp'd from my hand" [MS y] into 111 Ah! what a pity were it to disperse, Or to

■*-^The Prelude, notes, p. 581. 119 disturb, so fair a spectacle, And yet a breath can do it i' "^ He restates his moral later:

Sometimes I fe e l, as now, That combinations so serene and bright Cannot be lastin g in a world lik e ours, Whose highest beauty, beautiful as it is, Like that reflected in yon quiet pool, Seems but a fle e tin g sunbeam.1 s g ift, whose peace The sufferance only of a breath of air I [467-75]

To demonstrate that the contrasts and pairs are not typical of Book VIII alone, let me mention how parts of Book I are put to­ gether Bind general contrasts throughout the poem. The passages of plundering from nature in Book I, of stealing from another's traps

[524-52] or from the mother bird [555“50J> &re paralleled by a

"severer" plundering, the stealing of the boat [572-427]. The general passage which intervenes discusses the principle, posits that Nature seeks him whom she would make a favored Being with

"gentlest visitation" [5^7] but also with "severer interventions"

[570]. The "1 ow breathings. . .among the solitary hills" when the boy V/ordsworth poached another's woodcocks and the "strange utterance

[of] the loud dry wind" as he climbed to the raven's nest had been gentlevisitations; the huge cliff which strode "like a living thing" is a "severer" one.^ By grouping his three experiences as a plun­ derer under "gentle" and "severe" he organizes episodes which would

•^The Excursion, IX, 452-54-* Poetical Works, V.

■^The huge form which strode after him may have seemed "like a liv in g thing," but the "mighty Forms" that moved in his mind both day and night as a result did not "love Like living men." 120 otherwise seem random; almost always the passages of comment hint, if they do not announce outright, h is thematic and structural ju stific a ­ tion for including the memories that he does. The summer scene upon the lake when the boy's sensitivity to the movement of the horizon led to such "grave And serious thoughts" [416-17] is paralleled

later by a winter scene on the lake when the astute boy, seeking the

same giddy yet inspiriting sensation, stopped short upon his skating

heels and watched as the "solitary C liffs Wheeled by," stretching

behind him "in solemn train Feebler and feebler" [464-88], The

"ministry More palpable" [570-71] of the passage explaining gentle

and severer interventions includes such episodes, for in the general

passage immediately following the skating incident, V/ordsworth speaks

directly to Nature concerning her employment of "such ministry" [494],

The "more" of "more palpable" thus refers to "severer" interventions

in contrast to gentle ones.

Thus analysis of Book VIII, the baldest of the books in this

respect, only substantiates an impression felt by the careful reader

concerning the early portions. In Book I the pairs are much more

subtly interwoven, but V/ordsworth's habit of progressing through his

experience by pairing off scenes and aspects is discernible as surely

in one place as in the other. Scenes altern ately occur by day and

night, in spring and autumn, outdoors and in, in solitary and group

amusement, in horse racing and boat racing. Similarly, but in larger

units, pairs of episodes or contrasting ideas and ideals occur in 121 nearly every book. In III the real school and the actual church

are contrasted with ideal ones. The two concrete incidents of Book

IV are early-morning and late-at-night occurrences along the road.

There are two contrasting elements in the famous dream at the begin­

ning of Book V, the Shell and the Stone; and the formal exposure

children of Wordsworth's mature years receive to books is contrasted

ironically with the less guided but much happier readings he had

perused. The boy he observed in the theatrical world of London in

Book VII in evitab ly has a p arallel in the more rustic babe born to

Mary of Buttermere. There are extended portraits of two individuals

who typify the Revolutionary conflict in Book IX: the unnamed

Royalist [l42-653 and the Republican Beaupuis [295“527]* Words­

worth's portrait of the latter shades off into a contrast of Beau­

puis with himself [556-46], and the summary of their talks [547-953

moves into a contrast with talks Wordsworth was later to have with

Coleridge [596] and a comparison with the 11 conversation under Attic

shades" [4l4] of Dion and Plato. In Book X the implicit contrast

of the cause of liberty in France and in the Sicily of old [955-64]

prepares for the long address to Coleridge who is sojourning in

S ic ily .

One c r itic has pointed out Wordsworth's habitual use of

"contrarieties," taking the key term from the passage in Book X

where Wordsworth admits that "wearied out with con trarieties, [he]

Yielded up moral questions in despair" [900-0l], but he is working

primarily with pairs of concepts— permanence and m utability, 122 harmony and discord, spirituality and physicality~in an effort to interpret The Excursion. ^ In the autobiographical Prelude the argument moves by means of contrasts. Wordsworth furnishes an even better motto for this process when he alludes to "that dis­ tinctness which a contrast gives Or opposition" [VII, 511-12], His great love is for the distinct, yet much of the material of his poem belongs to that vague inner world which at best he can only state and negate or state and qualify* "things which I had shap'd

And yet not shaped, had seen, and scarcely seen" [VII, 515-1^-]• By setting up his contrasts, he gains distinctness.

Yet the vague inner world of kaleidoscopic impressions which he is recording often eludes distinct discursive presentation.

Wordsworth's f ir s t impression of London is more d iscu rsively presented than many, but he is dealing with memories so inward that eventually he can only break off into exclamation. After claiming that he will never forget "The moment. . .when having thridded The Labyrinth of suburban V illages, At length I did unto myself f i r s t seem To enter the great City" [VIII, 690-95]> he is circumstantial concerning place and time, as he usually is [695~97]» until "the time When to myself it fairly might be said, The very moment that I seem'd to know The threshold now is overpass'd" [697-700]* He represents the in sigh t of that moment by an abrupt exclamation* "Great God! That

^ 0 . J. Smith, "The Contrarieties* Wordsworth's D ualistic Imagery," FMLA. LXIX (195^), 1181-1199. aught external to the living mind Should have such mighty sway!"

There follows a statement of general feeling [702-06] and then a h esitation which grows out of his memory o f the experience as con­ trasted with his attempt to record it—"alas! I feel That I am trifling: 'twas a moment’s pause.” Then comes reaffirmations

”A11 that took place within me, came and went As in a moment, and

I only now Remember that it was a thing divine” [708-10]. He has attempted to document the exact psychological moment of awareness, the very moment that he seem'd to know the threshold of the city was being crossed. An exclamation, with its key word "external” emphasized by italics, tells only indirectly what it was about the experience which impressed him. The moment impressed itself upon his mind, but only at the time of writing does his response seem a thing divine.

Using Wordsworth's characteristic technique of defining his point by presenting a contrast, let us compare this "spot of time" from Book VIII with a much more successfully presented and hence better-known act of significant awareness from Book VI. In the second instance he is reflecting on a similar moment of mental precision: in Book VIII i t was "I am now in London," here, "we have crossed the Alps." In this case, however, because of the situation he is aware of crossing the Alps only after the fact, not as he is crossing them. In the Alps passage he relates the circumstances

"even as they were" [VI, 494], building into his simple narration his growing scruple, anxiety, doubt, perplexed observation 507 [ , 124

509, 512, 51^J until "Hard of belief, we question'd him again, And all the answers which the Man return'd To our inquiries, in their sense and substance, Translated by the feelings which we had Ended in this; that we had cross'd the Alps" [520-24]. Only the prepara­ tion and the italics indicate some special feeling. The reportorial tone is interrupted by a brilliant passage on imagination, the in­

spiration for which occurred to him at the moment of writing about the experience, not at the moment of the experience itself.

Imagination', lif t in g up i t s e l f Before the eye and progress of my Song Like an unfather*d vapour; here that Power, In a ll the might of it s endowments, came Athwart me; I was lo s t as in a cloud, Halted, without a struggle to break through. And now recovering, to my Soul I say I recognise thy glory; in such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode. There harbours whether we be young or old. Our destiny, our nature, and our home Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope i t is , hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. The mind beneath such banners militant Thinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aught That may attest its prowess, blest in thoughts That are their own perfection and reward, Strong in itself, and in the access of joy Which hides it like the overflowing Nile. [VI, 525-43 J

When the narrative is resumed, the m atter-of-fact tone continues,

the "slackening that ensued. . .was soon dialog'd." Were it not

for these intervening lines which grow out of the inspiration of

remembering, the reader would have to imagine for himself the agitation the situation had produced. The thirteen lines which

specify where Imagination, Greatness, makes its abode describe a mental experience which parallels the visual experience of the Mt.

Snowdon episode. Imagination resides in a breach, in the misty

chasm on Snowdon; in this passage the breach in the narrative account

caused by memory attests to it. Even here Wordsworth uses the meta­

phor of mist; it rose "like an unfather’d vapour" and he was lost

"as in a cloud." In both cases it is the memory of the experience

which brings the heightened meaning, the philosophical profundity,

here as he attempts to recreate the scene for his reader, in the

Snowdon episode a few hours after the experience. In contrast, in

commenting on his entry into London he is reporting a feeling dis­

tinctly remembered as having happened at the time, and he is prosaic

and uncertain without the heightened emotion of inspired recollec­

tion: "Alas! I feel That I am trifling." But he recovers to assert

that the impression he remembers was "a thing divine." He is momen­

tarily lost in commenting on the Alps passage, too, but he is lost

in wonder, not in inadequacy: "now recovering, to my Soul I say I

recognise thy glory." In the passage extolling the imagination,

Wordsworth, as in the opening fifty-four lines of the poem, uses 18 a present insight as the matter of his Song.

1 P i This was first pointed out by W. G. Fraser, "The Prelude. Bk. VI 11. 592-616," TLS (April 4, 1929), 276. Only Stallknecht, of the major critics, takes cognizance of the fact, Strange Seas of Thought, p. 57• 126

These two passages which attempt to communicate the feeling of a particular moment of psychic insight demonstrate the difficulty of presenting such innerness. They show Wordsworth re­ creating what most autobiographers would be content to summarize.

While the "spontaneous" lyric outburst is more successful as a method than the abrupt exclamation, both demonstrate the quality of inwardness which makes The Prelude so revealing a document of spiritual states.

The foregoing analyses of some of the links in Wordsworth’s

"lay of Truth11 demonstrate some of his poetic habits: he character­ istically sets the stage for a significant inner response to his experience by a very circumstantial attention to space and time. He allows the less approved of a pair of opposites to condemn it s e lf while he explicitly praises the opposite. His experiences gain significance as he reca lls them: the mind adds its dimension to the natural impression. Wordsworth himself testifies to the early storing of his mind with the materials from which he v/as later to forge his poetry: "something to the memory sticks at la st Whence profit may be drawn in times to come" [ill, 667-68]. In the words of a later poet, he "had the experience but missed the meaning And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form. How specific and direct an application th is, his charac­ teristic poetic process, has to the writing of autobiography is

evident when we remember that only when one reflects on his experi­

ences does he endow them with pattern and with significance.

■^T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages, " ii. 127

The analyses also show the conventional poetic devices of direct address and apostrophe and of recapitulation and foreshadow­ ing at work in the service of autobiography. The argument by con­ trast is more specifically characteristic of Wordsworth. Not by simple chronology, not by the mere association of ideas, but by a kind of quiet shifting between the two elements of a contrast, and also frequently a shifting of one of the grounds of his contrast,

Wordsworth proceeds from point to point. He selects and orders, using, not the discursive logic of the syllogism, but the logic of dialectic. Our own contrast of hi3 art in presenting two remembered moments of powerful awareness (which, in his own manner, included a

subsidiary contrast of one of the passages with the Snowdon passage of the climactic book) uncovers two ways in which he attempted to communicate the power and the glory of the human mind at such moments of insight. The "insight" is a heightened feeling, an awareness of significance, and not a rational concept; but, to

Wordsworth, it is reason in its most exalted mood. CHAPTER IV 1 "Each man is a memory to himself"

We have discussed Wordsworth's awareness that his poem is autobiography, his deliberate exclusions and shaping which make it autobiography of a certain kind. We have discussed, too, some of

the techniques of poetry which serve the autobiographical material

p articu larly w ell, and certain m anifestations of Wordsworth’ s mind which formal poetic analysis reveals. But what of the content of

The Prelude? What materials does the spiritual autobiographer in­

clude? To sharpen my discussion of these matters, in this chapter

I intend to contrast Wordsworth with his greatest predecessor in 2 spiritual autobiography, St. Augustine of Hippo.

^The Prelude. I l l , 189* 2 Heretofore scholars have associated Wordsworth with St. Augustine only in passing. Havens quotes, in Latin, Augustine's famous "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are r e s tle s s till they find rest in Thee" and says that, being a religious man, Wordsworth felt deeply the truth of these words; he quotes "Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there." The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore, 19^1), p. 2. Abbie Findlay Potts interprets this remark of Havens to mean that "in its action of the restless soul seeking and finding rest" The Prelude has a kinship with the ideal action of the Confessionst Wordsworth*s Prelude (Ithaca, 1955)> P» John Jones is speaking of the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" when he refers to Augustine's Fields of Memory* The E g o tistica l Sublime (London, 195^0* P» 96. Newton

128 129

There is no evidence that Wordsworth laiew Augustine* s 5 Confessions, but the value of a careful comparison of the two as spiritual autobiographers obviously does not rest on the attribu­ tion of direct influence. The man who would write his own history needs only to look into himself; he does not need to study other autobiographers. There are parallels and differences in the pro­ cess of looking within; with men of stature and of a spiritual

P. Stallknecht is thinking of the "fatal disjunction" he finds in Wordsworth when he refers to Augustine’s formula, Ama et fac quod vis; Strange Seas of Thought, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, 1958), pp. 2^4- 55* E. D. Hirsch says Wordsworth chose Augustine’s solution of his dilemma of the relation between temporal and eternal (in the City of God) when his early temporal-eternal view of things collapsed; Words- worth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism, Yale Studies in English No. 145 (New Haven, 1960J, p. 81. Frank M. Towne refers specifically to the Confessions as the type of spiritual autobiography most akin to The Prelude; "Wordsworth's Spiritual Auto­ biography, " Research Studies of the State College of Washington, XXV (1957), 57-62. Years before Towne, Lane Cooper had implied the auto­ biographical inheritance of The Prelude by referring specifically to Augustine in order to justify the frequency of the "i-me-myself" pronouns in his Wordsworth concordance; "The First Person in Words­ worth and Shakespeare," N&Q , 11th ser. IV (1912), 65*

^Nothing by Augustine appears in the Rydal Mount Catalogue of Wordsworth's library (Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, No. 6), or in Kurt Lienemann's Die Belesenheit von William Wordsworth (Berlin, 1908). Nor does Peacock list Augustine in his useful handbook, The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore, 1950)» The fourth-century autobiography was not a text perused at school; Ben Ross Schneider, Wordsworth's Cambridge Education (Cambridge, Eng., 1957). Augustine is not mentioned in Jane Worthington [Smyser]'s Wordsworth* s Reading of Roman Prose. Yale Studies in English No. 102 (New Haven, 1 9 4 6 ).Abbie Findlay Potts refers twice to the City of God in her edition of Ecclesiastical Sonnets (New Haven, 1922), but with no indication whether Wordsworth knew it. The first ten books of the Confessions would have been available in an abridged English translation in 1796 when Joseph Milner included them in The History of the Church of Christ, v. 2. nature—though admittedly of widely diverse cultural milieus—as

Wordsworth and Augustine are, attention to these parallels and differences is instructive. In their intense preoccupation with the mind, and in the cosmic frame of reflection and philosophical meaning in which each imbeds his personal record, the reader w ill find their most striking similarities. In the objective clarity with which they view the materials outside the mind, as well as in their predominantly subjective orientation, the two are peers.

Both fight pettiness and material-mindedness. Both feel that they are members of a chosen group—Augustine, the community of sain ts,

Wordsworth, the "one great Society alone on earth. . .the great

Family [of] Sage, P atriot, Lover, Hero" [X, 968; XI, 6 l]. Both would, in all humility, open new vistas of qualitative mental ex­ perience for readers in years, even centuries, to come. There is also a similarity of tone, of intimacy, achieved through the formal prayers of the Confessions and the frequent poetic and personal apostrophes of The Pr elude.

The great shift in attitude toward life, from Christian and otherworldly to predominantly secular, predominantly humani­ tarian, and the march of intellect from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries, account for the stupendous differences: the child Augus­ tine is remembered as a creature of willfulness and sin, the child

Wordsworth as father to a comparatively self-sufficient man. Like the ancients, Augustine reserved full happiness to the sage; one of the great innovations of romantic thought is that the innocence of childhood is the happy state which man struggles, in vain, to maintain. Augustine had many friends and spoke of them often in his Confessions, but friendship is an attachment to this earth and his primary concern is the praise of God; Wordsworth's friendship with Coleridge was the inspiration of his best poetry, and he exalts their relationship, alternating his love and praise of

Nature with love and praise for his friend. Augustine responded to the fabulous and to the poetic indulgences of his childhood much as Wordsworth did, but the maturing ascetic of the fourth century felt compelled to lay them aside and even condemn. In both men’s experience of the available intellectual currents of their times, however, the process of arriving at truth through a rejection of falsehood, of ascertaining the truth for oneself, is the same. Each gropes toward a system which he then rejects, having come painfully to discern it as false; and the basis of the discernment in both is the Platonic notion of the inner light.

There are more superficial resemblances which may be noted.

Both The Prelude and the Confessions were written in the prime of life. Wordsworth completed the 1805 text at thirty-five, seven years after the span of life covered in it had closed. Augustine, writing in his forty-fourth or forty-fifth year, had allowed more than ten years to lapse since his conversion, the central event of the Confessions. Thus each autobiography spans the early formative years, twenty-eight in Wordsworth's case and thirty-tw o in Augus­ tine's. Both men lived to old age, more than twice the time covered 152 in their autobiographies; both reworked what they had written in later days, Wordsworth in his revisions, Augustine in the Retracta- tiones. Coincidentally, each wrote thirteen "books," the first four devoted to childhood and youth, with flashbacks to the childhood experiences throughout.

There is at least one resemblance, too, between the in­ tellectual milieus out of which the two works come. According to

Misch, in the century and a half after the year 5^0 more autobio­ graphical works were written than in all the preceding epochs of

Greek and Latin literature. Quite undistinguished minds, he writes, talked blithely of the recondita cordis, the things buried in the 4 heart. When one recalls both the distinguished and undistin­ guished minds which produced autobiographies at the turn of the eighteenth century and the general Romantic preoccupation with things buried in the heart, one sees not only that the two men had a sim ila rity of subjective temperament, but that their times were ripe for men of stature, genius and integrity, to produce models of autobiography.

Misch believes that Augustine, over a long period of time, forged his autobiographical tools. Having tried soliloquy and philosophic dialogue—both inadequate as vehicles of self-portrayal

—he only gradually and with much patient intellectual effort e- chieved a direct subjective utterance with full confidence in his

^History of Autobiography in Antiquity, II, 5^2, 5^9. 155 5 own action and judgment. In Yfordsworth's case, the autobiographical approach seems to have been waiting at his hand. The stuff of his own experience had been the raw material of his poetry from the beginning,*^ and the lyric tradition sanctioned the expression of personal emotion. He feels some self-consciousness in writing a long poem in which he speaks so much of himself, but the poem ii> self does not betray the feeling. Positivistic commentators on both have complained that the accounts are untrustworthy as docu­ mentaries? from Augustine's Soliloquies, written at the time of his conversion, the reader gets a different insight into many of his emotional responses. The unity of the Confessions, as opposed to the more immediate reactions of the Soliloquies, grew, partially at least, out of the Christian position Augustine adopted. Words­ worth's unity was the result of the transcendental philosophy which his mind evolved. In both autobiographies, unity there is— in tone, in goal, in the over-all narrative sweep. It is such unity which gives the shape of art to the raw materials of life, which distinguishes a truly great autobiography from a mediocre one, or autobiography proper from more diversely recorded diaries, journals, and 1etter s.

The purpose of this chapter, however, is to compare the material included in these two instances of spiritual autobiography

^Ibid., II, 627-55.

^Augustine's philosophic works are full of autobiographical references, of course. in order to evaluate Wordsworth's choice and use of his material.

Both The Prelude and the Confessions can be broken into three

segments, which in actuality, of course, overlap. First, there is the analysis of beginnings, the presentation of childhood and youth.

Second, there is the description of dawning awareness, of the con­ frontation of conflicting intellectual systems, and of the maturation which results from making a choice between them. Third, there is the commentary on man and society made from the chosen intellectual position. Events which have no bearing on the development, crucial

choice, and final point of view, although they may have some impor­ tance in themselves, are rigorously excluded. Most intellectual

autobiographies which focus on the training and development of the mind, from Vico's to John Stuart M ill's, do as much. It is in the

appeal to religious values and the cosmological inclusiveness of

the commentary that The Prelude and the Confessions may both be

called spiritual.

An extended treatment of childhood and youth does not of

itself bespeak spiritual autobiography, although the man who would

chronicle and interpret his inner development inevitably speculates

upon his beginnings. Amid the growing feeling for history and the

life of man, amid the growing genetic attitude toward the individual

life, writers after Rousseau attached a positive value to childhood

in and for itself. This does not mean that early autobiographers

neglected their childhoods. While Geraldus Cambrensis, Cellini,

and Colley Cibber typically concentrated on the rational and fully 155 conscious self, the motives and actions of the mature man— and thus produced, for the most part, recitals of outer events, res gestae— not only Augustine, but one of his immediate and important precur­ sors, Gregory of Nazianzus, devoted much space to childhood.^

"^At first glance it would appear that Wordsworth has more in common with Gregory than with Augustine. Gregory had a profound feeling for nature; in addition he was a poet who wrote his auto­ biography in verse. He emphasized the happiness of his childhood; he presented his youth as a time when aspirations were born and quietly developed. His student years in Athens were "filled with the Christian youth’s sense of what gives life true worth," and were heightened by a spiritual friendship with Basil. Gregory devotes eloquent passages to this friendship and to its eventual estrangement and his final denouncement, like Augustine's, of worldly attachments. One can imagine a later Wordsworth estranged from a sim ilarly close friend, Coleridge, reading the account of Gregory and Basil in Gibbon or in Newman. (Gibbon used Gregory's "Poem on his Own Life" as a principal source of his chapter on the ruin of Arianism in the East, Peeline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 27. He quotes there the verses on injured friendship. Cardinal Newman wrote on the friendship sometime before 1855> his essay "Basil and Gregory" is reprinted in Historical Sketches, v. 2, new ed. London, 1896.) In contrast to Augustine, Gregory was positive in his attitude toward literary learning. Cardinal Newman summarizes his character thus: "Gregory disliked the routine intercourse of society; he disliked ecclesiastical business, he disliked publicity, he disliked strife, he felt his own manifold imperfections, he feared to disgrace his profession, and to lose his hope; he loved the independence of solitude, the tranquillity of private life; leisure for meditation, reflection, self-government, study, and literature." "Rise and Fall of Gregory," Historical Sketches, II, 76. Much a s t h i s sk e tc h may remind us of Wordsworth, and much as Misch’s analysis of the auto­ biographic verses may remind us of The Prelude (History of Autobiog­ raphy in Antiquity, II, 600-24), Gregory's parallels with Wordsworth are far less significant than the parallels in Augustine. Gregory lacks both Augustine's rhetorical skill and his psychological depth. C h r is tin e Mohrmann and P. C o u r c e lle a g ree th a t a n a lo g ie s betw een Augustine and Gregory are themselves superficial: "Considerazioni sulle Confessioni di Sant'Agostino," Convivium, XXV (1957), 257-67, and "Antecedents autobiographiques^des Confessions de saint Augus­ tin," Revue de Philologie, de Litteratur e et d* Histcj-f e Anciennes, XXXI (1957), 25-51. Wordsworth's presentation of infancy and childhood differs from Augustine's in significant ways. Wordsworth is concerned to ex­ plain the processes of physical and mental growth, Augustine to praise God for guidance and life itself. In contrast to Words­ worth's How?, Augustine's question is Whence? Inevitably Wordsworth can only speculate on the'pre-conscious, pre-articulate years, and his speculations rest on a modified associational psychology. They are suggested, not defined. Augustine is the more circumstantial of the two and the more earthy, referring more often to the infant's purely physical dependence.

Wordsworth begins his story early, but Augustine goes back in time even further and contemplates his existence in the womb of g his mother. He is particularly curious concerning his pre-natal life because, while he has knowledge of his infancy, "no one can tell me these tilings, neither father nor mother, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory" [i, vi, 9]« He admits that more than once he takes his description of himself as a baby from his observa­ tion of other infants, since God has granted man "that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself" [i, vi, 10], Nowhere in his autobiography does Wordsworth rely directly on the testimony of others, admitting anecdotes, as more discursive autobiographers are wont to do, which others have related to him; either he remembers

^The Confessions of St. Augustin, J, vi, 9, trans. J. G. Pil- kington, Njcene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. I (New York, 1907). All references and quotations are from this translation and edition. Hereafter book, chapter, and division references will be given in brackets in the text. 157

and conjectures or he omits. In discussing infancy, however, he

has to admit implicitly the observation of others as a source of knowledge: he presents a detailed description of the infant babe

before referring, obliquely even then, to his own infantine ex­

perience. "Bless'd the infant Babe,11 he begins, adding parenthet­

ic a lly , "(For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress

of our being)” [il, 2y7~59]* Only when he introduces a transitional

summary of his autobiographical account forty lines later does he

use the personal pronoun:

From early days, Beginning not long after that first time In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch, I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart I have endeavour'd to display the means Whereby the infant sensibility, Great birthright of our Being, was in me Augmented and su stain 'd . [ i l , 280-87]

Augustine thanks God both for the comforts of woman's milk, "for neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts”

[i, vi, 7], and for the instinctive affection with which it was

willingly given. Wordsworth expresses his and his mother's faith

that Ke "Who fills the Mother's breasts with innocent milk, Doth

also for our nobler part provide, Under his great correction and

controul, As innocent instincts, and as innocent food" [v, 271-75]*

Augustine says, "At that time I knew how to suck, to be satisfied

when comfortable, and to cry when in pain—nothing beyond" [il, vi,

7.]. When Wordsworth speaks of the child at the breast, he speaks,

not of physical sustenance, but of the passion gathered from the mother's eye, of forms, of mute dialogues through touchj and he conceives of the process as the "first trial" of the mind's powers.

One may accuse the Romantics of reading a great deal into pre- conscious states, but modern studies of the thresholds of conscious­ ness both in man and in other forms of life—including what has heretofore been distinguished from the living as merely matter— show Augustine's observations to be lucid but highly simplified.

Wordsworth is much more complicated. Unable to rdy simply on the great mystery of God, he must probe the awakening consciousness and construct some theory of its unfolding. Augustine could say,

"Afterwards I began to laugh. . . .1 realized where I was." Wordsworth must analyze the "discipline of love," the "forms," "sensations," and the "virtue which irradiates and exalts All objects through all inter­ course of sense" [il, 259-60], and establish his modified theory of associational psychology in which the mind, even of the babe, both receives and creates. In the philosophical discourse of Book X,

Augustine scialyzes the sources of all knowledge in man's senses, only to arrive at the principle of memory or mind itself which makes its not insignificant contribution to all knowledge. Mind is the center of man, and it is the gift of God. Wordsworth is mindful of the great gift of life which precedes all association, and of the human mind as agent of the one great mind, but it is the How? rather than the Whence? which his analysis probes.

Wordsworth describes the games of boyhood lovin gly in a ll their variety. He treats them, along with the forms of nature, as bestowing beneficence, as discouraging self-consciousness, as

curbing pride. It is a social pride to which he refers—competition with others was overshadowed by natural pleasure in the sport [il,

65-78]— but in lig h t of his native tendency toward solitude which

is discussed below, one wonders i f his reaction was not less a matter of boyhood sports and nature than of personal temperament.

Augustine confesses to a fondness for play precisely because he

loved the honor of victory [ i, x, 16]. Far from considering the

sports and leisure activities of boys natural and worth while, he

considers them idle but understandable escapes from the discipline and beatings of school. Even as a boy, however, he astutely saw that his elders were equally idle, not in the name of play but in

the name of business; he comments wrily that they were not punished, yet he was [i, ix, 15]* Such an insight is foreign to Wordsworths

involved in experiencing and communing with himself in the solitude of nature, he had no inclination to observe others or to judge them.

Wordsworth wholeheartedly approved h is boyhood training and condemned his university. With Augustine it is the other way around. He would have joined Wordsworth theoretically in claiming

freedom and love as the ideal conditions of learning. He says, for

instance, "It is sufficiently clear that a free curiosity hath more

influence in our learning [Latin and Greek] than a n ecessity f u ll of

fear" [i, xiv, 25]. Yet he vitiates this appeal by admitting imme­

diately the necessity of restraining freedom for the love of God.

In c r itic iz in g his Cambridge days, Wordsworth says, "Youth should be lAo aw'd, possess'd, as with a sense Religious, of what holy joy there is in knowledge" [ i l l , 396-9 8], and contrasts extensively his ideal university with the one he knew. But he too later blunts his con­ demnations it could have been much worse; while he was not furthered in te lle c tu a lly , neither was he shaken morally or vocationally, and the republicanism of Cambridge society reinforced his early social feelings [ill, 50^-10; IX, 225- 35].

Both a personal temperamental difference and the intellec­ tual inheritance of centuries give Wordsworth a far more precocious sense of inner reality. Augustine states explicitly, and his accounts t e s t ify even more surely, that his great struggle toward God n ecessi­ tated breaking away from a characteristic literal-and material- 9 mindedness. V/ordsworth1 s childhood episodes imply, in contrast, that he possessed from the beginning a clear sense of the letter and the spirit and a preference for the latter. Even as a Christian bishop, Augustine opens his commentary on Genesis with a laborious explication of the phrase "the heaven of heavens," finally disengaging it totally in his mind from the heavens which cover the earth and resting satisfied that it is an intellectual place [XII, ii-ix].

As a boy Wordsworth sensed the distinction between the material and

^Typical expressions of this "gross-mindedness" [VII, i, l] occur in V, x, 20: "for I had no conception of the mind excepting as a subtle body, and that diffused in local spaces— and in VI, xvi, 26J "I could not discern that light of honour and beauty to be embraced for its own sake, which cannot be seen by the eye of the fle sh , i t being v isib le only to the inner man." 141 the mental, one would almost say—and he would say it—in his blood.

Hanging upon the c liff s , he encountered a sky which "seem'd not a sky

Of earth" [i, 3^9-50], His "heaven of heavens" is an experience, not an intellectual concept. It would seem, from his description of

sensuous experiences, that he actually did imbibe from Nature's fount what Augustine could only gain through patient, prolonged, logical analysis.

Augustine's mental life opened only through collision with

the thought of others, whether in books or in social exchange. Words­ worth's narrative of the growth of his mind unfolds quite independ­

ently of books although he did not neglect books and t e s t if ie s

directly to their great value in his imaginative development. He made, for instance, or had made for him, as he insists, his youthful

vow to be "a dedicated Spirit" on a walk home from a party [iV, 316-

but it was a culmination of what he had felt to be his vocation

from childhood. At approximately the same age Augustine read a book,

Cicero's Hortensius. which evidently gave him for the first time

in sigh t into what was then made the consuming passion of his l i f e ,

the pursuit of wisdom [ill, iv, 7]*

Similarly, the moment of Wordsworth's rededication to the

vows thus reported in Book IV occurs in a natural setting far from

the immediate influence of words and books. Since his epic begin­

ning is in the middle of things, the climax of his experience is

voiced in his opening song. The sweet breath of Heaven and the

corresponding vital breeze within him promise a "holy life" [of Ik2 music and of verse]. Wordsworth's poetry says what lite r a l dis­ course cannot: the breeze is both physical and mental, the Heaven both the heaven of earth and a higher "intellectual place." It is the natural scene, not the words of a book, which prompts th is return to the power of his childhood. In distinction, the climactic con­ version scene of the Confessions, while it occurs in a garden, is occasioned by a chain of words literally responded to. Augustine obeys the chanting of a child to "Take up and read." He remembers that Antony had been converted upon accidentally coming in while the Gospel was being read, and he says "I grasped, opened, and in silence read that paragraph on which my eyes first fell." The passage spoke to the specific and final weakness in his will, his bondage to the flesh, and the reader knows without Augustine's confirmation—

"No further would I read, nor did I need. . .all the gloom of doubt vanished away" [VIII, xii, 29]. The moment to which the narrative portion of the Confessions leads has come; and it is through the agency of a book, of random words taken at their most literal, that the divine worked in him.

Nor was Augustine alone either in the garden or in his pursuit of the Scriptural passage. His friend Alypius observed and shared his triumph. Misch has said that Augustine's entire develop- 10 ment proceeded in the midst of company. Wordsworth, of course, dedicated himself as a young man and returned to that dedication a

^History of Autobiography in Antiquity, II, 6^2. 145 slightly older, wiser man, in solitude. From the beginning his genius was solitary while Augustine's was social, communal.

Augustine had pondered his childish desire "to t e ll my wishes to those who might satisfy them" [i, vi, 8], Since he could not— "my wants were within me, while they were without, and could not by any faculty of theirs enter into my soul"—he feels a great need to learn to speak. The child Wordsworth seemingly had no such wishes; his life was a constant round of inarticulate fulfillment.

Even in adulthood as he attempts to articulate the feelings he had, it is to share understanding, not, like Augustine, to solicit action. Social communication is taken largely for granted when it does appear; it is much less important than self-communing, which is a matter of feeling rather than of discourse. When Wordsworth does discuss his relatively late awareness of other human beings, even then he does not speak of exchanges with them. The descriptions are of things within his own breasts his awe at seeing the majestic silh ou ette of a shepherd, at sensing the significance and grandeur of a drowned corpse or the tenderness of an old man bending over a child. In the transition from infancy to boyhood Wordsworth speaks briefly and vaguely of the loss of emotional props [II, 294], while the sole change Augustine records is that he learned to speak.

(His description of how is worthy of modern descriptive psychology.)

Thus he could exchange with those about him the "current signs of our wills" [i, viii, lj]* The acquisition of speech, and later of rhetoric, was thus to Augustine all-important. More important to 144

V/ordsworth was the maintenance of silence. In fact, the lack of eloquence, of any proper phrases, is the pivotal point in his argument championing the common man [XII, 250-77J. He opposes those adroit in speech to those whose silence is the "language of the heavens," and, much as he values the former, his insight into the hitherto unvalued inarticulate ones is his contribution to the growing truth of the a g es.^

Eloquence in speech was the sign of an educated man in the ancient world, and this undoubtedly explains why as a young student Augustine gave himself fully to the pursuit of formal rhetorical training which as a Christian he came to despise.

V/ordsworth sensed the emptiness of formal Cambridge studies when he was in the midst of them: "This obvious truth did not escape me then Unthinking as I was. . ." [ i l l , 452-55J* Only in retrospect did Augustine see the reversal of values in a system which condemned a man for faulty grammar, yet accepted his prevarications. V/ords­ worth was seemingly able to distinguish between the "excessive hopes" of college labors and his personal call [ill, 60-8l], and he delib­ erately withdrew from the former. This a b ility to judge seems to

•'■•'■The modern attitude of o rig in a lity shows up here. Wordsworth w ill not communicate anything until within himself he has brooded upon and sighted a new world " fit to be transmitted and made v isib le to other eyes" [XII, 370-753* Augustine is searching for eternal truth, and his path is strewn with words out of whose inadequate way he has laboriously stumbled, but he has no idea of creating a truth of his own or adding to the cumulative truth of ages. Truth has existed from the beginning in God. 145 have grown in him from early boyhood, while Augustine had to strug­ gle intellectually in his manhood to achieve a moral position.

That Wordsworth*s boyhood experiences of themselves taught him what Augustine learned only from conscious intellectual search is further demonstrated by a contrast of the two episodes of boyish theft which both of them, by coincidence, present. V/ordsworth* s theft, as one might expect, was a solitary venture: he went alone into the shepherd's boat [i, 575l» "an act of stealth And troubled pleasure.” He returned the boat as a natural response to the felt rebuke of the uprearing c l i f f which strode after him, and "grave and serious thoughts” were the immediate consequence. Unknown modes of being worked in his thoughts for many days and huge forms troubled his dreams. The significance of the incident is contained within it as it is told. The famous pear-stealing episode in the Confes­ sions is more the occasion for an analysis of the motives of sin than a documentary account of an event. Augustine discourses at length on those things which "when I remember them, cause me shame"

[ i l , v i i i , 16]. He does not, lik e Wordsworth, report what he f e lt at the time, but what he feels as a Christian contemplating his past action. The recorded details of the "crime" itself are those of the later Christian: he had had "a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled neither by hunger, nor poverty, but through a dis­ taste for well-doing, and a lustiness of iniquity" [iI, iv, 9].

Wordsworth's theft was a positive experience because the boy sensed that th eft was wrong and stood corrected and reproved. In manhood Augustine knows that his theft was wrong because it was theft; but seem ingly only when he had a moral system within which he could examine and to which he could refer h is exp loit, did he fe e l shame and the need for forgiveness. The episode looms large in the Con­ fessions because it is so appropriate a vehicle for much to which

Augustine would testify: the depravity of man, the forgiveness of

God, the analysis of the motives of crime and sin. It is a subject to inquire about, to discuss, and to reflect upon. Wordsworth does not leave his boat-stealing without comment: the description of the event is followed by a paean to the Wisdom and Spirit of the universe that thus purifies and disciplines. But even without the song of- praise, the reader understands from the episode itself that the boy Wordsworth felt, and felt keenly, a moral awakening. Augustine's 12 long discourse on his th e ft acts as a kind of metaphor of e v il.

In discussiig another remarkably parallel experience, their youthful taste for the theater, Y/ordsworth and Augustine fur­ ther illustrate their difference in character . V/ordsworth had an appreciation of the technical components of the theater which Augus­ tine was totally lacking. The poet speaks of how "living man, Music and shifting pantomimic scenes, Together join'd their multifarious aid To heighten the allurement" [VII, 281-84]. He enjoyed watching

12It includes a rhetorical discussion of beauty; a list of sins with commentary; a restatement of the question, "Why did I love the theft?" compounding the origin al perversity; a query to God, "What do I owe Thee?" and a final explanation of the theft in terms of another favorite theme, the worldliness of friendship. 147

the "laws and progress of belief" in "untaught minds" of the routine delusions of the stage, and was amused by the literal effect of the word "INVISIBLE" on Jack the Gian't-Kill er1 s coat of darkness [VII,

296-509J. Augustine is concerned solely with the matter, not the manner, of the stage; and its psychological effect upon the audience,

specifically himself, is not a matter for amused observation.

By chance Wordsworth saw a play based on the l i f e of a

g irl he and Coleridge had known, one with whom he had been "nursed

. . .on the same mountain"; his ready fancy suggests that they must

have gathered "on the self-same day. . .daffodils on Coker's stream"

[VII, 54-1-45]. Life and stage are connected in his mind, but in a

comparatively superficial way, as his digression comparing the

child of the actress with Mary of Buttermere's baby [VII, 567-411J

indicates. He does not really discuss drama and its deeper effect

as Augustine does. Psychological analysis pervades Augustine's

contrast of theatrical and real-life suffering. When one suffers

in his own person "it is the custom to style it 'misery;' but when

he compassionates others, then it is styled 'mercy.' But what kind

of mercy is it that arises from fictitious and scenic passions?"

[ill, ii, 2]. Of course, he condemns himself for his love of

theatrical grief. His literary naivete is related to his charac­

teristic literal-mindedness and the early Christian cultural dis­

position to underestimate the value of fictions. Yet his youthful

response to theatrical representations is recorded, analyzed and

contrasted with his mature compassions in a way that his contemporary 148

reaction to the pear-stealing was not: "I have not now ceased to

have compassion, but then in the theatres I sympathized with lovers

when they sinfully enjoyed one another, although this was done fic­

titiously in the play. And when they lost one another, I grieved

with them, as if pitying them, and yet had delight in both. But

now-a-days I feel much more pity for him that delighteth in his

wickedness, than for him who is counted as enduring hardships by

failing to obtain some pernicious pleasure, and the loss of some miserable felicity. This, surely, is the truer misery, but grief

hath no delight in it" [ill, ii, $]. Augustine thus records his

sympathy for the sinner. It is a mark of the general growth of the

humanitarian sentiment that, in a comment on first seeing a harlot

which is interposed in his discussion of the theater [VII, 412-54],

Yfordsworth mentions a similar pain, but for the victim of sin. He

capitulates to the proverbial experience that familiarity breeds

contempt when he admits that after his in itia l pain, a milder

sadness attended on such spectacles. Augustine's sense of Christian

responsibility deepens his compassion.

The juxtaposition and analysis of these passages describ­

ing a boyhood theft and a youthful response to theatrical presenta­

tions show how fully each autobiographer exploits his experiences

to communicate personal response and character. Augustine pursues

a relentless logic in coming to grips with the problem of vicarious

emotion. He shows himself the less sophisticated observer of

theater as theater, but his response to his fellow men and to his 149

own condition is the more profound. Elsewhere Wordsworth uses

subtle psychological analysis, but here he is content to describe.

He admits that London is not to his liking; his superficial treat­ ment of its components and his rather glib insertion that under­

neath the pageantry were "meditations holy and sublime" [VII, 477]

do not demonstrate his usual depth.

Wordsworth and Augustine were obviously totally differ­

ent persons, and their characteristic differences are inherent in

the ways they reacted as children and young men to similar ex­

periences. The beginning sustenance at the breast and the dawning

consciousness, the response to games and to school, the typical method of thinking of the material world and its meaning, responses

to books, nature, solitude, and others, the moment of dedication

and of final commitment, experiences of a boyish theft and of

attendance at the theater in young manhood—each utilizes such

experiences in telling of himself. Despite the obvious and tre­ mendous gulfs between them, such details in their respective accounts demonstrate how the spiritual autobiographer, whether he

is Romantic poet or fourth-century saint, can choose and put to- 4 gether a single aspect of his experience to reveal his character,

his inner states of torment or tranquility, his conception of

growth and development.

Readers of Wordsworth inevitably notice the profoundly

solitary nature of his experience, and contrast with Augustine on this point merely puts Wordsworthian solitude in a dramatic 150 perspective. The poet’s comparative passivity is similarly high­ lighted against the shrewd judgments and discursive struggle of

Augustine. Not only does the extended contrast corroborate what we have always known about Wordsworth; i t demonstrates how clear­ sighted he was about himself. His mature philosophy of quiet interrelationship with nature, of silence, solitude, and wise passiveness, was contained in his childhood responses and situa­ tion. What of the intermediate stage, when he struggled to find himself, or rather, to hold onto the self he had intuitively known even as a child? Again there are interesting parallels with the development of Augustine.

After Cambridge the young Wordsworth went to London and in his restlessness to France. When he returned to London, he was for a time, apparently, a Godwinian. Augustine went to Carthage and became a Manichean, and from there proceeded to Rome and to

Milan in search of truth and peace. Each spoke of his travels as occasioned by a desire to advance in his chosen profession. Words­ worth says his v is it to France was motivated "chiefly by a personal wish To speak the language more familiarly" [iX, 56-57]. Greater advantages and dignities were available to Augustine as a teacher of rhetoric in Rome; he says the principal reason for his removal there was that he had heard the students were quieter and more disciplined than in Carthage [v, v i i i , 14].

Wordsworth1s enthusiasm in France stems from his finding there in actu ality a force working for the good which he had always 151 believed in but never known. As a youth he had seen 11 that the best

Rul'd not,11 yet he had felt they ought to rule [iX, 215-16]. And in

France he was intoxicated with the discovery that men were willing to lose their lives that such government might be. While he is not

explicit about it, his delight in finding a man like Beaupuis seems to have opened a whole realm of action hitherto unknown to him.

Augustine talks openly of his astonishment at first hearing of a dedicated way of l i f e he had not been aware of, the monastic move­ ment in which men withdrew from the world in order to pursue their

Christian ideal. The revelation is accompanied by a tale of two

Romans who forsook their businesses and their affianced brides thus

to retire [VIII, vi, 15 ]J their situations are so similar to

his own, their action so attractive to him, that his subsequent

examination of conscience leads directly to his conversion. Both

Wordsworth and Augustine were tempted to join actively in the move­ ments which came thus surprisingly to their attention. Wordsworth

speculates that, had he not of outward n ecessity returned to England,

he might well have joined the ranks of fighting men and even use­

lessly have lost his life [X, 189-202], Augustine and several

friends had earlier conceived of forming a common household in order

to pursue wisdom [VI, xi, 18-20], but when he hears that Christians

do withdraw into special communities, it is the psychic dedication

he has been unable to achieve which haunts him, not the communal one.

In France Wordsworth's intellectual school is the world of

experience. He mingles with the Royalists, and, never at home in any 152 society before, is tolerated by them; he pleasantly analyzes the reasons. All Englishmen are considered madmen, he is youthful, his

French is only half-learned—he thus modestly explains his acceptr- ance. To be thus accepted must have been heady success indeed.

However, his hitherto inarticulate beliefs in republicanism pro­ vide strong counter-winds to the ideas of the Royalists [iX, 260-6lJ.

Whether he argued against the Royalists or whether his opposition

[line 259] was interior, he does not say; but when he encounters

Beaupuis, his tongue is loosened, and they discourse (in complete agreement) on sp ecific and general ideals, on ends and means.

Wordsworth says, sig n ifica n tly , ".in solitude With him did I dis­ course. "

Augustine's intellectual growth proceeded more polemically.

One of his editors says, "Perhaps no one. . .has been more indebted than was Augustine to controversies with heretics for the evolvement of truth."12 Like Wordsworth's encounters with the Royalists and

Revolutionaries, his experiences with the Manicheans are given in detail up to his disillusionment with the prophet Faustus. But while he mentions the more or le ss idle productions, books on the fair and the fit and on the liberal arts, which he wrote in Carthage, the later books against the Manicheans and the supposed skepticism of the Academics which are central in his movement toward Christi­ anity he scarcely alludes to.

^J. G. Pilkington, _ed. cit., n. 4, p. 115. 155

In this searching stage of their intellectual ripening, both men te ll the backgrounds of their associates, the subjects of their discussions, and the scenes and events along their paths.

Wordsworth gave his sympathies to few men and only to those with whom he agreed. He describes a typical Royalist whom he admired and pitied [iX, 142-65] and sets many scenes for sympathetic intercourse with Beaupuis. When he is forced to return to London, removing himself from the sanity and balance of Beaupuis' practical insight, he falls into error, and only Coleridge can restore his battened intellect to its true path. Augustine's general develop­ ment and search from Carthage to Milan is shared by at le a st two friends. He speaks at length of Alypius, giving the family back­ ground, te llin g several episodes in his frien d's moral experience, and comparing him to himself in the crucial matter of celibacy

[i/I, vii, 11-xii, 21-22]. But as the climaxes of their inner ex­ periences approach, both autobiographers focus on the intellectual problems that occupied them. Personalities and sources are scarcely mentioned or even alluded to.

Wordsworth refers vaguely to "false philosophers," but

Godwin is mentioned nowhere in the poem. Scholars generally agree that it was a Godwinian influence which Book X describes, just as medieval scholars attach great importance to the influence of

Plotinus on Augustine. But Augustine, no more than Wordsworth, men­ tions the mentor. He presents the great in tellectu a l problems which troubled him, unfolding his gradual acceptance of the Christian views on the spiritual and incorruptible nature of God and the source of evil in the perversion of will, but he only alludes to Platonic thought by dissecting one notion—that of the Logos—and comparing it with Christian teaching. Having conceived of God aright, he is moving to an acceptance of Christ, and this progress takes preced­ ence over any documentary account of the outward process. Similarly, having told of the events which led to the f ir s t great shock to his moral nature, Wordsworth becomes general and in tellectu a l. For ninety lines [X, 665-757] he recapitulates the history of his philosophic outlook, and then, admitting that such "sentiments Could through my understanding's natural growth No longer justify them­ selves through faith Of inward consciousness" [X, 785-38], tells how he elsewhere sought "evidence Safer, of universal application"

[X, 789-91].

He iro n ica lly describes that philosophy which promises

"to abstract the hopes of man Out of his feelings." [X, 8O8-O9].

In that philosophy passions have "the privilege to work, And never hear the sound of their own names" [x, 815-14-]. "What delight! How glorious!" Wordsworth mutters, to ignore the frailties of the world,

to adopt "magisterially" one guide, "the light of circumstances, flash'd Upon an independent in tellect." Wordsworth was tempted by the philosophic thought of his dayj it was his undoing, for he confesses to having succumbed to false reasonings until "I lost All feelin g of conviction" [X, 898-99]* It is the one "sin" that The

Prelude confesses to. Everything else in his experience has been, a positive contribution; much later in the poem he makes general claim that "howsoe'er misled, I never, in the quest of right and wrong, Did tamper with myself from private aims; Nor was in any of my hopes the dupe Of selfish passions; nor did wilfully Yield ever to mean cares and low pursuits" [XIII, 150-55.1 • The temptation to dissect "The living body of society Even to the heart" [X, 876-77] has been his great and only error. He returns to it reflectively in Book XI and distinguishes between a false and a true reason.

"The grand And simple Reason" [XI, 12^-24] he everywhere affirm s.

It is "that humbler power Which carries on it s no inglorious work

By logic and minute analysis" which tempted him in London, and he fell. He explains its attraction: "of all Idols" analytic reason is "that which pleases most The growing mind." He had used religiou s terms earlier when he called himself a "Bigot to a new Idolatry" and compared himself to a monk who, having forsworn the world, labors to cut himself o ff from his former l i f e , in Wordsworth’s case, "all the sources of. . .former strength" [XI, 75~78j. It is intuition, not this reason of the "meddling," "self-applauding in­ tellect" [XII, 5 l], which must rule, feelin g not judgment. He admits that his lapse came, not through suffering which would justi­ fy it, but through presumption [XI, 149-551• The "degradation" was, of course, "transient" [XI, 245-53-1 • Because he had felt forcibly and early something other— "Visitings of imaginative power"—this could not last. He is redeemed by vivifying spots of time; and as he discusses the general efficacy of Nature in Book XII, he 156 distinguishes again in one long antithesis false and true reason:

not in vain I had been taught to reverence a Power That is the very quality and shape And image of right reason, that matures Her processes by steadfast laws, gives birth To no impatient or fallacious hopes, No heat-of passion, or excessive zeal, No vain conceits, provokes to no quick turns Of self-applauding intellect, but lifts The Being into magnanimity; Holds up before the mind, intoxicate With present objects and the busy dance Of things that pass away, a temperate shew Of objects that endure, and by this course Disposes her, when over-fondly set On leaving her incumbrances behind To seek in Man, and in the frame of life, Social and individual, what there is Desireable, affecting, good or fair Of kindred permanence, the g ifts divine And universal, the porvading grace That hath been, is, and shall be. [XII, 25-44]

In addition to Nature and his renewed association with his sister, whose attitu d e toward nature had never wavered, Wordsworth owes his regained balance, particularly in formal philosophic thought, to

Coleridge. Coleridge is, in this, what Ambrose was to St. Augus­ tine. With Coleridge,

The rapture of the Hallelujah sent From all that breathes and is, was chasten'd, stemm'd And balanced by a Reason which indeed Is reason; duty and pathetic truth; And God and Man divided, as they ought, Between them the great system of the world Where Man is sphered, and which God animates. [XIII, 262-65]

Wordsworth's hope is in the sp ecific realm of p o litic a l thought, for i t is the c ity of th is world where "we find our happiness, or not at all" [X, 728] which exercises his mind. 157

We are here moving into the third category of materials

presented by our two autobiographers—the settled position, the

statement of achieved viewpoint. Me have seen in their two pre­

sentations of their climb toward that viewpoint that they moved

about restlessly in their search, that both were startled to dis­

cover men giving themselves to ta lly to causes in which they were

interested. In their narratives both document places, faces and

times as personal, particular bases for the drama which occurred within them; but as they come to crucial issues, they abandon auto­

biographical narrative for intellectual discourse. Wordsworth keeps

his much more personal than Augustine; he recapitulates his inner

development in order to contrast it with the state in which he

found himself in London; and he introduces fresh, specific inci­

dents to illustrate how Nature saved him from stultifying abstract

thought. Augustine, in contrast, in these sections, presents the

intellectual links in his gradual acceptance of a spiritual Father

and the human drama of Christ without personal references. In each

man there is implicit and conscious faith in the power of his own mind to sift and find the truth. Each experienced a series of

specific mental conflicts which led to truth. Augustine climbs

laboriously to an intellectual apprehension of that wisdom to

which he dedicated himself at nineteen, while Wordsworth struggles

to maintain, and when he cannot maintain, to reestablish, an imagi­

native (which in maturity includes an intellectual) apprehension

which he considers to have been his birthright. 158

What, then, of the truths which each, in his maturity, after the struggle, perceives and preserves for posterity in his autobiography? Each has a fully developed psychology and cosmol­ ogy, for both analyze the mind of man and the world in which mind finds itself.

It is in the mind that each centers man's d ivin ity, and

the realization provides each with his greatest message. Words­ worth's is an intuitive presentation, Augustine's a discursive. As

Wordsworth recognizes, the exalted quality of mind he is most con­

cerned to elaborate provides "endless occupation for the soul Whether

discursive or intuitive" [XIII, 112-15]. Ke states simply that such

a quality of mind comes "truly from the Deity" [XIII, 106]. Augus­

tine's approach to this central fact in Book X is a careful analysis

of the sources and processes of knowledge. In the analysis memory

becomes the key term. He w ill soar beyond mere bodily power through

which the horse and mule also discern and enter the fields and

roomy chambers of memory:

When I am in this storehouse, I demand that what I wish should be brought forth, and some things immediately appear; others require to be longer sought after, and are dragged, as it were, out of some hidden receptacle; others, again, hurry forth in crowds, and while another thing is sought and inquired for, they leap into view, as if to say, "Is i t not we, perchance?" These I drive away with the hand of my heart from before the face of my remem­ brance, until what I wish be discovered making it s appearance out of its secret cell. Other things sug­ gest themselves without effort, and in continuous order, just as they are called for,—those in front giving place to those that follow, and in giving place are treasured up again to be forthcoming whenI wish it. All of which takes place when I repeat a thing from memory, [x, v i i i , 12] 159

Wordsworth uses the word "memory" only fourteen times in the entire 14 poem, always in a general, non-technical way. His theoretical discussion of the memory in The Prelude is contained in his concept of the 11 spots of time” which somehow impress themselves more deeply than other things. They occur at moments when we have the deepest feelin g "that the mind Is lord and master" [XI, 258, 271-72]. He gives from his own storehouse of such memories two moments. While the description of each moment is extensive and circumstantial

(episodes of being lo st near a gibbet [XI, 279-516] and of v/aiting for a ride at the beginning of the Christmas vacation when his father died [545-64]), there is nothing in the occurrences them­ selves to warrant any exalted significance. As Wordsworth knows, the heightened awareness in the mind contributes the significance, and this he cannot recreate but only tell about. Indeed he would

"need Colours and words that are unknown to man" [XI, 509-10] to communicate it. He bases his point on a single special revisiting of the first scene [516-26]; to the second scene he often returned, and when it was impossible to return, single elements of the scene in wholly different settings brought "the workings of my spirit thence" [576-89]* Thus in his classic lyric expression of the proc­ ess, he says of the daffodils, "For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye

lhln Book I, 625, 645; III, 189, 504, 556 , 667; IV, 515; VII, 146, 540; IX, 275 , 740; X, 995; XI, 278 , 596. 160

Which is the bliss of solitude."^ Augustine records the fact that

"I discern the scent of lilies from that of violets while smelling nothing; and I prefer honey to grape-syrup, a smooth thing to a rough, though them I neither taste nor handle, but only remember” i_X, viii, ljJ, but his point remains strictly one of process analysis; it does not imply the whole aspect of individualization and personal depth with which Wordsworth enriches his similar testimony when he says, "And then my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils." Wordsworth admits that these are "dim, uncertain ways"

[XI, 391J to highest truth, but they are the experiential reality with which he intuitively works.

In his discussion of memory, Augustine continues, "There also do I meet with myself, and recall myself,--what, when, or where I did a thing, and how I was affected when I did it" [x, v i i i , l4j. And he constructs the past and the future, those two elements o f time which have no r e a lity except in the present [Book Xl], out of these memories. This memory "is a power of mine" [x, v i i i , 15]—

"power" is a Wordsworthian word—which also functions with perceptions outside the senses, with literature, mathematics, emotions.

All these things I retain in my memory, and how I learnt them I retain. I retain also many things which I have heard most falsely objected against them, which though they be fa lse , yet is i t not fa lse that I have remembered them; and I remember, too, that I have distinguished between those truths

15111 wandered lon ely as a cloud," Poetical Works, II, 217. 161

and these falsehoods uttered against them; and I now see that it is one thing to distinguish these things, another to remember that I often distinguished them, when I o f te n r e f l e c t e d upon them. I both remem­ ber, then, that I have often understood these things, and what I now distinguish and comprehend I store away in my memory, that hereafter I may remember that I understood it now. Therefore also I remember that I have remembered; so that if afterwards I shall call to mind that I have been able to remember these things, it will be through the power of memory that I shall call it to mind. [X, xiii, 20]

Ko more precise nor extensive statement can be made of the involu­ tions of memory in itself or as it affects the writing of auto­ biography. Wordsworth had expressed his similar awareness in the metaphor of the person peering into the depths of water from a boat."*"^ However, Augustine does not here apply his analysis to the task he is undertaking; it is rather a preliminary to his p roof and p r a is e o f God.

Augustine bases his argument for God's dwelling in the memory, not on the mystery of this function and power as Wordsworth does, but on an argument of opposites: the privation of memory is forgetfulness; no one seeks for something he cannot remember, yet men seek God. God has taken up Kis abode in the memory: "Thou dost dwell in it assuredly, since I have remembered Thee from the time I learned Thee, and I find Thee in it when I call Thee to mind" [x, xxv, 56].

There is little that is passive in Augustine's analysis, whereas Wordsworth makes a virtue of wise passiveness. The

■^See above, Chapter II, pp. 71-75* 162

Augustinian "i" is always expressed as conscious agent, even in the discussion of infancy. Every experience takes its place in memory and each is ultimately and equally available to recall. The less rational, more randomly determined, concept of a later time is im plicit in Wordsworth. In commenting on his Cambridge days, for instance, he describes how "carelessly” he gazed "as through a

C abinet Or w ide Museum" where

little can be seen Well understood, or naturally endear’d, Yet still does every step bring something forth That quickens, pleases, stings; and here and there A casual rarity is singled out, And has its brief perusal, then gives way To others, all supplanted in their turn.

• •*»«•••• Yet something to the memory sticks at last, Whence profit may be drawn in times to come, [ill, 652-68]

Analysis of sense impressions is formal and explicit in

Augustine, im plicit and scattered in Wordsworth. Having presented his chronological development, Augustine in Book X makes his formal confession in the present, first establishing, as I have summarized, the presence of God in the memory, and then cataloguing his own relative enthralment to each of the senses, or rather to three cate­ gories, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

He thus fu lfills his twofold formal confession, to confess God's praise and his own sins. He speaks of the lusts of eating and drinking, admits that "with the attractions of odours I am not much tr o u b le d ” [x, x x x i i, 48], discriminates between aesthetic and didac­ tic pleasures which the ear affords and the equally ambiguous 165 allurements of the eyes. As a "lust of the flesh, 11 the sense of sight is more dangerous than the others.

Wordsworth testifies that he, too, had to struggle against the tyranny of the eye, as he ca lls i t . Not only fa lse Reason but nanother cause. . .That almost seems inherent in the Creature" [XI,

166-68] provoked him. The world of the senses feeds andtrains the mind, to be sure, but "transport of the outward sense" must be sub­ dued in favor of the inner faculties. Wordsworth alludes to a state

"in which the eye was master of the heart," when sight, "the most despotic of our senses gain'd Such strength in me as often held my mind In absolute dominion" [XI, 171-76]. Augustine had told of an incident in the career of his friend Alypius in which physical sight had been the doorway to sin [vi, viii, 15]. It is presump­ tuous to rely on the force of one's own will, and therein lay

Alypius' sin. The occasion for Alypius' fall lay, however, in his sense impressions: the mighty noise in the amphitheatre entered his ears and unlocked his eyes; because he saw, he succumbed to the shows of the gladiators which he had originally detested. It is

God who saves from such presumption and tyranny of the sense, just as for Wordsworth it is Nature who thwarts the tyranny.

God is, by definition, capable of such action; explanations are unnecessary. An explanation in Wordsworth's case is necessary, and he realizes it; he says the means Nature employs is "matter for another Song" [XI, 151- 8 5]* We must not interpret this as stark evasion of a difficult if not impossible explanation, for the 164

explanation is inherent in Wordsworth1s references to the senses and

the invisible throughout the poem. In Book I he had distinguished between vulgar joys and joys of subtler origin [609, 575~76].

’’Fits of vulgar joy" seem to be those which "to the eye We re visible"

[609, 629-JO]; the 11 joys of subtler origin" seem to be invisible, yet the language used to suggest them is still that of sight. In

one episode he uses "spectacle,11 "sight, 11 "field of light," "mine

eyes. . .mov'd" [594-608], Even during the f i t s of vulgar joy the

child Wordsworth "felt Gleams.1' The senses which contributed to the

"not ignoble end" in the nest-plundering episode are sound and feel­

ings "On the perilous ridge 1 hung alone, With what strange utter­

ance did the loud dry wind Blow through my earsi the sky seem'd not

a sky Of earth, and with what motion mov'd the clouds" [i, 547-5°]*

One would think sky and clouds would have fed his visual sense, but

his physical position, like the relationship of his body to the

mountains in the skating episode, makes the sense impression one of

total bodily feeling. But it is when the light of sense goes out

[VI, 554-55] that we see into the life of things. And these moments,

"spots of time," become significant to the memory. "Recollected

hours [of childhood] have the charm of visionary things" [i, 659-

60], and Infancy itself seems "a visible scene." Clearly the senses

are linked to the higher life, refined through the processes of

Nature, by natural means, not supernatural.

For Augustine sense impressions are totally separated from

and valued less than God's indwelling in the mind. For Wordsworth the mind's creative and divine faculty and the world of sense im­ pressions coming d irectly from nature have equal ro les. As in other instances of our comparison, the difference is a matter of

a supernatural versus a natural orientation to experience and thought. Yet Wordsworth at every step approaches the supernatural through nature, and, like Augustine, his concern is with the power of perceptions and the highest quality of mind.

Given their tremendous concern with the mind, the anti- intellectualism of both men may seem inconsistent. In both cases the term "anti-intellectual” needs clarification, for the reasons behind both positions qualify its force tremendously. Beyond the

"lusts of the flesh" Augustine posits an analogous "lust of the eye"

— curiosity. "Seeing belongeth properly to the eyes; yet we apply this word to the other senses also, when we exercise them in the search after knowledge" [X, xxxv, 5^]* A similar linguistic use of the eye occurs in Wordsworth: consider his phrase, "the open eye of reason" [XI, 67]* In Wordsworth the outward sense must be subdued in favor of the inner faculties, but in Augustine this intellectual eye is more subtly sinful than the fleshly eye. "Hence do we proceed to search out the secret powers of nature (which is beside our end), which to know profits not" [x, xxxv, 55J. He con­ fesses to having subdued his earlier "vain solicitudes," but the

eye is subtle and the mind easily distracted, and who is to say he

is innocent of this form of intellectual pride? Augustine's anti­

intellectual attitude is a corollary of his theology and typical of 166

some Christian thought of his time. Wordsworth's anti-intellectual ism

(as it is sometimes called) is based on his mistrust of false reason,

the intellect which would parcel out by geometric rules [il, 209], which raised false temporal hopes at the time of the French Revolu­

tion; but, as we have seen, he everywhere affirms right reason, that

high faculty which merges imperceptibly in his concluding book with

Imagination, and finally with intellectual love.

Both Wordsworth and Augustine exalt an in te lle c tu a l love.

’Wordsworth begins, "From love. . .a ll grandeur comes, All tru th and

beauty, from pervading love, That gone, we are as dust" [XIII, 149-

52]. There are two kinds of love, and ty p ically , Wordsworth presents

the human love as much by means of a natural scene as by a domestic

one [l52-60], but "There is higher love Than this, a love that comes

into the heart With awe and a d iffu siv e sentiment; Thy love is human

merely; this proceeds More from the brooding Soul, and is divine"

[X III, 161-65]* Augustine does not discursively distinguish between

his two kinds of love in the Confessions as he does in _De doctrina

Christiana,~^but the spirit of his distinction pervades his autobiog­

raphy, and he is famous for his emphasis upon love in the C hristian

system.

*^He calls the two "charity" and "lust"t "I mean by charity that affection of the mind which aims at the enjoyment of God for His own sake. By lust I mean that affection of the mind which aims at the enjoyment of one's self and one's neighbour without reference to God." Quoted from Erich Przywara, An Augustine Synthesis (New York, 1958), P* 547. 167

Before we conclude that ITature is Wordsworth’s God, we must take account of the mention of God apart from Nature, even in the early text. Nov/here is Wordsworth concerned with how God works through Nature; the processes he describes are of how nature works

in the mind of man. He does state that Nature is an agency of God.

There is a "single sovereignty" which links God and Nature [iX,

237.1. In 1850 th is was clarified: "God’s mysterious power Made manifest in Nature’s sovereignty." Wordsworth must have meant

essentially the same in 1805 since in the early version he ad­

dressed God directly in a passage of similar import: "Great God!

Who send'st th yself into th is breathing world Through Nature and

through every kind of life, And mak’st Kan what he is, Creature

divine" [X, 586-89]* (in I 85O this passage is toned down, Nature

omitted, the language more theological—that is, the phrase "Thy

grace" is used.) Wordsworth and Beaupuis discoursed on "man and

his noble nature, as it is The gift of God and lies in his own

power" [iX, 361-62], The Augustinian conception of grace would

have man Tely wholly on "the g ift of God"—what- man in his own

power can do is but to seek and yield; and th is is not the meaning

behind Wordsworth's words. Presumably both ’Wordsworth’s "blind

desires" (anathema to Augustine) and his steady faculties capable

of clear truth [365-64] are parts of man's own power. And Words­

worth's discussion takes place in the context of political revolu­

tion, an area where Augustine would never think of centering man's

noble nature. Later, in his personal thanksgiving to Coleridge, Y/ordsworth im plies th a t his philosophic friend chastened h is thought on religious matters. He speaks more humbly of "thoughts. . .such as become a human creature" and of "God and Man divided, as they ought"

[XIII, 252-68]. Man is sphered within and God animates the "great system of the world." (in I 85O this is replaced by a rather senti­ mental reference to Providence and duty.) Nature has no part in this passage, but immediately thereafter Wordsworth speaks of "Nature's secondary grace" as if the theological term followed naturally. It is difficult to know from Wordsworth's compounding habits whether we are to consider word pairs such as "God and Nature" or "infinity and God" as single or separate concepts. Wordsworth considers "in­ finity and God" the "great thought [single?J By vrhich we live" [XIII,

185-84].

The religious tone of The Prelude is all-pervasive. It is exemplified less in these few direct references to God than in the narrative line of dedication and re-dedication and in the poet’s sense of prophetic mission and ardor. Mr. E. D. Hirsch has recently produced a philosophical framework within which the religious character of Y/ordsworth's early thought is justified. Taking Jaspers* term "Enthusiasm" as his key to a definition of romanticism (in par­ tic u la r, th a t kind of romanticism found in Y/ordsworth and Schelling),

Hirsch shows that Y/ordsworth's was a constant and sober way of con­ fronting reality, consistent, disciplined, and highly affirmative.

"Fundamentally a religious experience," Enthusiasm is based on mutual 169 inclusiveness, reciprocity, a cyclical view of time, and a cosmic 18 life and sympathy.

The scope of Wordsworth's cosmological speculations, uniting past and future in a great chain of minds, prophecying the great marriage of mind and nature, anticipating deluge and relapse, has its parallel in the Confessions. In his final books Augustine considers appropriate to his task a philosophical discourse on time and a formal exegesis of Biblical passages on the Creation.

As in the case of his final arguments for a spiritual God and the

Word made Flesh which precede the scene of h is conversion, Augus­ tine here omits personal narrative. Wordsworth is much more expert in integrating the personal with the cosmological. In his final lines he achieves this unity through his address to Coleridge. The passage gathers up his great themes—the transitoriness of human life, monuments of glory, mankind's relapse, knowledge, happiness, redemption, prophecy, sanctification "By reason and by truth," love, the mind of man, revolutions, beauty, divinity:

Oh! yet a few short years of useful life, And all will be complete, thy race be run, Thy monument o f g lory w ill be ra is e d . Then, though, too weak to t r e a t th e ways of tru th , This Age fall back to old idolatry, Though men re tu rn to serv itu d e as f a s t As th e tid e ebbs, to ignominy and shame

1 P Wordsworth and Schelling; A Typological Study of Romanti­ cism, Yale Studies in English No. 145 (New Haven, I960). 170

By Nations sink together, we shall still Find solace in the knowledge which we have, Bless*d with true happiness if we may be United helpers forward of a day Of firmer trust, joint-labourers in a work (Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe) Of their redemption, surely yet to come. Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason and by truth; what we have loved, Others will love; and we may teach them how; In s tru c t them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above th is Frame of things (Which, ‘mid a ll revolutions in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of substance and of fabric more divine. [XIII, 428-52]

Our two autobiographers could not have been personally more

different, nor could they have represented more different cultural milieus and metaphysical assumptions. Yet they experienced and

chose to tell a number of childhood episodes which are amazingly

parallel; their intellectual developments and their methods of pre­

sentation follow similar patterns; they share major preoccupations.

And their autobiographies recreate their inwardness with remarkable

success. In his basic inwardness Wordsworth is much closer to

Augustine than to his approximate contemporaries, Rousseau and

Goethe, or indeed to those two Victorian autobiographical giants

in England, Cardinal Newman and John Stuart Mill. Despite their

modern self-scrutiny, Rousseau and Goethe wrote primarily res gestae,

and in contrast to The Prelude their recitals are sprawling and form­

less. Newman and Mill have a narrower scope: Newman, of course, may

be called a “spiritual autobiographer" by virtue of his recording 171 the facts of his conversion; Mill, like Wordsworth, focusses pri­ marily on his intellectual development. However, neither of them achieves in his account the powerful subjectivity of ’Wordsworth.

Each discusses his inner states and discourses upon their outcomes, but they do not create in the reader, as Wordsworth does, the 19 sense that the experience is integral to the formulated philosophy.

Nor do they give the reader his own imaginative insight into the

states which are presented as Wordsworth does. Erich Auerbach has

claimed that a similar stylistic characteristic is present in

Augustine: "He feels and directly presents human life, and it 20 lives before our eyes."

Despite the radical differences in the reactions of the

two men to their experiences and in the philosophies which they

finally embraced, Wordsworth recalls Augustine both in the cosmic

scope of his autobiography and in the imaginative recreation of

his experience. Each was convinced—and was able to communicate

his conviction to the reader—that his childhood reactions were the

warp of his final philosophic fabric. And for both of them the mind

of man is u ltim a tely "Of substance and of fa b ric more divine" than

the earth on which man dwells.

^-9pagcal says of Newman's Apologia, for instance, "One fails to perceive and feel the driving forces in the man, the genetic sources of the personality, the numerous potentialities in him which ultimate­ ly led to this great decision,11 and of Mill's Autobiography, "What we miss is the adequate projection of the thematic idea into the form of experience." Design and Truth in Autobiography, pp. 100, 10J. 20 ■ Mimesis: The Representation of Reali t y in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1955), P* 70. CHAPTER V

"Him se lfe . . .a true Poem”

In Chapter IV I discussed Wordsworth's a ffin itie s as a spiritual autobiographer with St. Augustine. Wordsworth presented his autobiography as a poem, however; and in the poetry of his con­ temporaries there is an autobiographical tendency which is the subject of the present chapter.

All the major Romantic poets rely on their own experience for subject matter in a way and to an extent unknown in earlier poetry. Their poetic expressions of personal experiences and states of mind can be verified from the testimony of private letters and journals. In some instances this autobiographical material is pre­ sented directly through the personal "poetic I," as in the conversa­ tion poems of Coleridge, Keats' "Sleep and Poetry," and Shelley's

"Epipsychidion." In poems like Don Juan, The Fall of Hyperion, and

Alastor a persona intervenes between poet and autobiographical mate­ rial. In Juan and The Fall the poet is also present in his own person as narrator; and in "Julian and Maddalo" Shelley narrates the episode in first person, although in the course of the tale his friend Maddalo (Byron) addresses him as "Julian." A first-person account is usual but not necessary to autobiography proper—one

172 175 thinks of the third-person narrative in Vico, Henry Adams, and Sean

O'Casey^—so that the absence of an "I" precludes autobiography no more surely than its presence assures us of it. These poems are peripheral autobiography at best, however—they present either isolated episodes in their author's experience or they add fiction­ alized or idealized elements. Concerning these poems, no one would argue that the poet intended first of all to tell us of himself.

Still, the autobiographical impulse is strong in them, and an analysis of that aspect in our present context provides additional insight into the methods and possibilities of autobiographical poetry.

The Romantics tended to mix established genres, and the intrusion of the autobiographical into all types of poetry is an instance of the mixture. Misch has shown that the "autobiography" of antiquity consisted of brief autobiographical statements incor- 2 porated into nearly all the genres. In this period when autobiog­ raphy—a late-comer among the genres—reached its classic age, the autobiographical subtly pervades all genres, not in a section only, but throughout. The lyric is by definition both personal and sub­ jective, and the Romantic era is usually considered the lyrical era

^Other third-person autobiographers whom I have encountered: Giraldus Cambrensis, Thuanus, Lord Clarendon, K. P. Moritz, A. Gorz. Roy Pascal discusses the effect of the third-person narrator of autobiography: "The result is at times disturbing, for the author, positing an objective relationship to himself, misrepresents the true character of life as seen from inside." Design and Truth in Auto bio gr aphy, (London, I960), p. 165*

^History of Autobiography in Antiquity, I, 289, 5°°-04, 5°7» •par excellence. With the autobiographical elements of strictly lyrical poetry, however, I am not concerned. The period is rich

in longer personal narratives, most of which defy generic classifi­

cation; and it saw the virtual creation of a new kind—the conversa­

tion poem. Drama is by nature unlikely to lend itself to extended

self-revelation: Shakespeare was not Prince Hamlet; yet in obvious

and profound ways, Byron _is Cain and Manfred. Similarly, the tone

of satire is, in the main, opposed to that of autobiography, yet

Byron's great satiric poem, Don Juan, is highly autobiographical.

It is also a kind of epic. The Romantic attraction to epic resulted

in typical generic mutations. Certainly all four romantic poems

recently discussed as epic^ are relevant to a discussion of auto­

biographical poetry: The Prelude and Don Juan are cast in the first

person and tell of personal experience; Keats' fragmentary Hyperion

was recast, also fragmentarily, in the first person; and The Revolt

of Islam has been called Shelley's "spiritual autobiography" by his

biographer. ^

Given the Romantic mixture of genres, it seemed best to

discuss the ubiquity of the autobiographical in terms of specific,

selected poems. I have chosen Byron's Don Juan (particularly Canto

^Brian P. Wilkie, "The English Romantic Poets and the Epic," DA, XX, 1029-50.

^N. I. White calls The Revolt of Islam Shelley's "earlier spiritual autobiography" in contrast to his later one, "Epipsychi- dion," which I discuss below. Portrait of Shelley (New York, 19^5)> P. 596 . 175 i ) , C oleridge’s "conversation poems" and two versions o f "D ejection,"

Keats1 "Sleep and Poetry" and The Fall of Hyperion, and Shelley's

"Epipsychidion" for specific analysis. My method is to compare relevant aspects of the poem with The Prelude and with one another; and in the end, briefly, with the Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy of Dante, in an attempt to see the Romantic achievement in a broad perspective. The use of autobiographical material in Canto I of

Don Juan has been carefully studied and documented, and I merely adapt that material to my larger frame. Treatment of the other poems is more detailed because they have not been discussed exten­ sively from the point of view of this study; although I frequently rely on generalizations made by others, specific points must be documented and parallels drawn. Loosely speaking, the autobiographi­ cal elements and problems in the poetry of the Romantics are con­ sidered under four quite different modest the satiric (Don Juan), the conversational (Coleridge's poems), the mythological (The Fall of Hyperion), and the visionary ("Epipsychidion").

Like The Prelude. Byron's narrative has epic pretensions,^ b u t Don Juan is re a liz e d as comedy and s a tir e , a mode which on the surface appears antithetical to both epic and autobiography. "i want a Hero," Byron mocks in the beginning, and he settles, casually he would have it appear, on the infamous Don. The Prelude had begun in medias res, but Byron spoofs that epic convention and begins at the

For an excellent, recent discussion, see the chapter "My Poem's Epic" in George M. Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan. Yale Studies in English No. l44 (New Haven, I960). 176 beginning—in good biographical/autobiographical fashion—with Juan's parentage, childhood, and early education. Just as Wordsworth echoed the sentiment of Milton's exiled Adam and Eve at the outset of his autobiographical epic—"The world is all before me" [i, 1 5 ]— Byron had voiced the feeling in his own right as he set off for the Con­ tin e n t in 1809s "The world is a ll before me," he wrote to his mother.^ In the poem the persona of Don Juan essentially accumulates all Byron experienced in that world, yet the overall autobiographical correspondence is complicated by many partially autobiographical figures as well as the narrating "1,11 who speaks sometimes directly

as Byron, sometimes directly but ironically, sometimes for the exi­

gencies of the story. Byron claimed th a t Canto I was taken from

life; there are in that canto two characters other than Juan whose

experiences (Don Jose) or expressions (Julia) parallel Byron's own, while the major episode (the Juan-Julia one) only parallels in kind

the poet's own experience. Of the whole comedy, Byron's editors have

this to say! "Of all the people in the carnival, which is Byron?

Don Juan is a scabrous song of himself. It is an epic of re-creation

and reminiscence, an unquiet, lambent rhyme of his codes and a n ti­

pathies, of his own tensions and contradictions. He is not a detached

observer. . . .But with whom in this autobiographical epic can we

identify him? He is everyone in part and no one completely.11"^

^Byron? A Self-Portrait, ed. Peter Quennell, 2 vols. (London, 1950), I, 50. ^Truman Guy Stef fan and Willis W. Pratt, Byron's Don Juan (Austin, 1957), I, 284-85. 177

Byron*s acknowledged use of personal materials virtually creates an area of mock autobiography comparable to the traditional mock heroic upon which his poem is modelled. In mock heroic, however, both matter and style are parodied, and autobiography cannot allow a parody of its form. Even the more flexible autobiographical novel must respect its structure: the fictional, funny, yet autobiographi­ cal ’'I11 in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye comes closest to com­ bining form and matter in a humorous yet basically serious whole, but the novel does not parody its basic formal characteristic, the recital of Holden's life story. Byron's tone and attitude toward self­ scrutiny and the documentation of beginnings are reflected in a couplet from Canto VT, which may well be an allusion to the rumor th a t Wordsworth had w r itte n a lo n g poem on h im s e lf: "What _is so u l or mind, their birth or growth Is more than I know— the deuce take them both'." [xxii]. Such a tone allowed him to obscure his anguished involvement in the situations that he allowed Juan to encounter.

Indeed, humor allows him an esthetic distance of far greater impor­ tance than the mere intrusion of a persona.

An examination of Byron at work on Canto I shows that his was the "experience of a mind acutely responsive to many pressures 8 and functioning in ways peculiar to itself," but Byron's v/as hardly

the self-conscious mind examining itself as in the work of Wordsworth

Q Truman Guy S te ffa n , "Byron a t Work on Canto I o f Don Juan, " Iff, XLIV (1947), 164. or Augustine. Certainly the reader of Don Juan is made aware of tremendous inner conflict in the mind and heart of the poet, but the poem itself gives only an oblique testimony to the fact. Don Juan is, as it were, half way between a poem like Samson Ai?onistes, wherein

Milton's inner conflicts may be said to be objectively dramatized, and The Prelude, wherein Wordsworth uses personal conflict directly.

The events of The Pr elud e are recollected in tranquility, however, and Byron seems to have driven his experiences into a new frenzy in the years in which he wrote. His contemporaneous Venetian experi­ ences, both outward and inward, pervade Canto I, which, in its narrative, documents his English years. Yet "the muddy turbulence of the primary experiences and of their revival in the letters has been somehow distilled by the artist in verse that is without im­ petuous harshness or rhetorical inflation, but that has cleanness of ii 9 lin e and the rig h t economy of comic point. 7

For autobiography proper, seriousness of tone is necessary.

J. C. Powys has remarked in his autobiography that "a person's life- 10 illusion ought to be as sacred as his skin." It is not merely that the autobiographer must take himself seriously if he expects his reader to do so. Lacking a serious attitude toward himself and

^Truman Guy Steffan, "The Token-Web, the Sea-Sodom, and Canto I of Don Juan, " Texas University Studies in English, XXVT (194-7 )> 122.

^Quoted by Roy Pascal, 0£. cit., p. 71* 179 his life, who would attempt the difficult task of autobiography?

Laughter is largely a social affair, and the serious attempt to delineate one's innermost self is, of necessity, a very private undertaking. If a man laughs to himself it is because his mind contains more than one perspective and thus seizes upon incongruity.

But the task of autobiography is to communicate the singleness, or at least the continuum, of selfhood. To an outsider one's actions or words may appear inconsistent, but one can never for any continu­ ous purpose get outside himself. The reader of Ulysses may reflect how funny Bloom is, but Bloom himself cannot. A sense of humor

sharpens self-analysis, of course, but one does not consistently

- see his inner experience in a humorous perspective. The satirist takes his subject seriously, but in an indirect way. His under­ lying intent is serious, although on the surface he laughs and d e r id e s .

The satirist's attitude toward his subject is necessarily

different from the autobiographer's, but the conversational tone

becomes them both. Had classical antiquity produced sustained

autobiographies in the modern sense, the low style appropriate to

satire would clearly have been its medium. Coleridge recognized

the stylistic affinity his conversational poems shared with tradi­

tional satire when he adopted a phrase from Horace's fourth satire,

"sermoni propriora," as the motto of his "Reflections on Having Left 180 11 a Place of Retirement" in 1191 . In general, the adapting of a direct, matter-of-fact style to matter of high seriousness was an 12 achievement of the Romantics. Naturalness of expression has come to be pursued for its own sake, but Romantic poets sought to express profound truth thereby, and a certain perspective has been necessary to appreciate th eir profundity. The style of Wordsworth*s ballads, for instance, so disarmed their early critics that only in the mid­ twentieth century do commentators make a point of their high pur- 15 pose. Critics are beginning to be similarly aware of Coleridge’s conversation poems, sometimes toning down what they feel is their mere autobiographical quality. The argument reflects the poverty of our conception of autobiography. The assertion that "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" parallels in action Paradise

Lost''' ' need not place that poem beyond the designation "autobio­ graphical," especially when we have pointed out the ways in which

Horace's phrase is "sermoni propiora" [Satires, I, iv], trans­ lated sometimes as "better suited to talk," sometimes as "better suited to prose." That Coleridge though of it as the latter seems evident from his original subtitle, "a poem which affects not to be Poetry." Coleridge's misspelling has gone largely unnoticed. See the editor's footnote to William H. Marshall, "The Structure of Coleridge's 'Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement'," N&Q, CCIV (1959), 521.

■'■^R. H. Fogle speaks of the "Romantic effo rts to combine n atu ra l­ ness with dignity and significance"; "Coleridge's Conversation Poems," Tulane Studies in English, V ( l955 )> 106.

■^Cf. John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth (London, I960); Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice (New Haven, I960), p. 517* 14 . _ Max F. Schulz, "Coleridge, Milton and Lost Paradise," N&Q, CCIV (1959), 145-44. The parallel was suggested by Marshall, see n. 11 above. 181

Wordsworth' s autobiographical epic takes over from Milton; it does, perhaps, demand the qualification of an adjective such as "spiri­ tual ."

As similar patterned creations of certain "spots of time"

—immediate, not recollected--the conversation poems are personal, d ire c t, and intim ate. They form an unsustained record of deep spiritual insight more revealing of Coleridge the man, says G. M.

Harper, than all his philosophy, his literary autobiography, and 15 his better-known, more frequently admired poems. The short blarik- verse poem in which the poet muses in solitude, ranging over present, past and future in his mind, seems to have been Coleridge’s own dis­

covery. The only comparable poetry in English is to be found in certain passages of Cowper's Task. After looking closely at the two, Humphrey House concludes that Coleridge carries on where

Cowper left off. Where Cowper blends descriptive and autobiographi­

cal passages, in Coleridge "the autobiographical element is given

deeper psychological analysis, and the thought about it carries over

into what is properly metaphysical poetry. The informal method is kept, but everything has greater import; the language has the verbal

concentration on which great poetry always depends. Cowper’s

•^"Coleridge's Conversation Poems," Spirit of Delight (New York, 1928), pp. 5-27.

"^Humphrey House, Coleridge, The Clark Lectures, 1951-52 (Lon­ don, 1955)> P* 75* The further quotations in this paragraph are all from this excellent analysis, pp. 7 O-8 5. 182

poem, in fact, "has not high seriousness." Not only had no poet

before Coleridge and Wordsworth— for "Lines Written Above Tintern

Abbey" is of the type— quite hit upon such "avowedly autobiographi­

cal poems"; none had "found the internal need to devise" them.

The p h ra se " C o n v ersa tio n a l poem" was C o le r id g e 's own,

given as the subtitle to "The Nightingale" when it first appeared

in Lyrical Ballads. In this century eight poems are usually anthol­

ogized as conversation poems: "The Eolian Harp," "Reflections on

Having Left a Place of Retirement," "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,"

"Frost at Midnight," "Fears in Solitude," "The Nightingale," "Lines

written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the ’ -xrtz Forest," and "To

William ’Wordsworth." Some critics discuss only the better-known

ones, and they sometimes include "Dejection: An Ode" because in

its longer, earlier version it shares the basic characteristics of

the others. Coleridge wrote many more autobiographical poems, but

I concentrate here on this group. It is possible to consider it,

as a group, Coleridge's contribution to poetic and spiritual auto­

biography. In contrast to The Prelude, the individual poems are,

typically of Coleridge, fragmentary; but the individual poems are

self-contained. Not only do they resemble each other and The Pre­

lude in structure and in a specific private address, but they share

certain preoccupations which parallel The Prelude in scope and theme.

They are organised in a similar manner. Each begins with,

and returns, to a certain place or time: Coleridge's seat outside

his cottage, in the lime-tree bower, or beside his infant's cradle; his position in a small and silent dell or on a mountain top; the nighttime moment of an out-of-doors farewell to friends, or his midnight assessment of a friend's great poem and his own reaction to it. We have 3een that Wordsworth's characteristic technique in presenting his spots of significant time was to describe circum­ stantially their settings. Harper has analyzed the "fine parti­ cularity" of the "return" to the setting at the close of each of

Coleridge's poemsFogle notes that in this circular progress the 18 ending is not merely a return but also a synthesis. Thus the

shape of the poems reproduces in miniature the shape of The Prelude:

in the longer poem the childhood scenes are alluded to and inform the account of later years. Again, the structure of the Coleridge pieces, like that of The Prelude, has "some kind of completed action, with progression, gradation, and balance." While the effect is one of immediacy and sincerity of feeling, both Coleridge and Wordsworth

imitate naturalness and spontaneity without being spontaneous and natural. Variant texts of Coleridge's poems indicate careful and painstaking amplification, condensation, and continual recasting.

And just as Wordsworth's concrete spots of time frequently bring

together repeated experiences, and were reworked in various times

■^It is the major critical contribution of his excellent, early a r t i c l e . 18 "Coleridge's Conversation Poems," p. 110. The points follow­ ing in this paragraph concerning the Coleridge poems are Fogle's; the comparisons with The Pr elude are my own. and places, "The Eolian Harp" a t le a s t is a composite of d iffe re n t 19 experiences written on two separate occasions.

Like The Prelude, also, Coleridge's are poems of direct address. The apostrophes are to companions either present or ab­ sent, or to country, or to Cod. In "Lines Written in the Album a t

Elbingerode in the Kartz Forest" Coleridge lists man's important 20 allegiances, the recipients of his love. There he argues that the natural scene he has been describing is insignificant unless the heart holds the memory or anticipation of a personal relation­ ship—to friend, child, gentle maid, father, or country. It is his homesickness for England which prompts this poem, but there are men

"who can feel That God is everywhere" and this recognition of rela­ tionship to God is given the climactic position in this list of personal relationships which give meaning to the natural world.

In at least one poem in the group Coleridge addresses each of these loves (except his father), and references to others are inter- 21 woven in the various poems. Similarly, themes of friendship,

■^Henry J. W. Mil ley, "Some Notes on Coleridge's 'Eolian Harp', KP, XXXVI (1959), 559-75. 20 References to the poems are to the two-volume edition edited by E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912). 21 ~ He addresses his first-born son directly in "Frost at Mid­ night," but also refers to him in the poem addressed to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, "The Nightingale." William and Dorothy are not mentioned by name in "The Nightingale," but Coleridge identifies his friend in that other poem addressed to him, the one which speaks of the achievement of The Prelude, by calling it "To William Wordsworth Charles Lamb, the "gentle-hearted Charles," is of these friends singled out for address in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." While 185 infancy and boyhood, poetic theory, religion , and patriotism reoccur both centrally and allusively in the group. Coleridge incorporates prayer into "Fears in Solitude" and "Reflections," but he discusses his personal relationship to God problematically in the Hartz Forest lines and "The Eolian Harp." House believes that the ending of the latter poem involves a rejection of the vital personal experiences of lines 26-55 which were added only in lol7,o 22 but the antithesis of

Coleridge’s creative and speculative interpretation of the world of nature as "diversely fram'd. . .organic Harps" and Sara's "mild reproof" existed in the early version. Read autobiographically, the poem records a conflict in Coleridge's mind, a struggle to conceive of God aright not unlike the struggle suggested in the Harts Forest lines. "The Eolian Harp" is an instance of the inevitable problem of autobiography as poetic arts the honest autobiographical insight may not make a unified poem.

he addresses his young bride directly in "The Eolian Harp," Sara is included in the "we" in the same setting which opens "Reflections. . .", and he reports having addressed her in the wider time and space of that poem. The original version of "Dejection," is, of course, addressed to Sara Hutchinson, and there was another version addressed to Y/ordsworth. Finally, Coleridge frequently invokes his country and his countrymen; and he imbeds an impassioned prayer in "Fears in Solitude," and concludes the poem on his retirement with a one-line prayer.

22Coleridge. pp. 75"78. 186

Coleridge contrasts his memories of his own boyhood (the same memories recur in the original "Dejection") to the natural un­ folding in the midst of nature which he projects for his son in

"Frost at Midnight," and then restates this same vision for his son in a new contrast in "The Nightingale." In the latter poem the contrast is between poets who, echoing tradition, call the song of the nightingale melancholy, and those who, like William and Dorothy and himself, learn at nature's fount that it is joyous. Such themes and this shifting of the ground of a contrast to form the base of another contrast are themes and progressions in The Prelude too.

In The Prelude the progression by contrast, analyzed in Chapter III, forms consecutive discourse; here the contrasts and repeated themes in various poems act as cross-references to enrich one another.

The themes of mind and of nature and of their relationship, explicit in Wordsworth, pervade the conversation poems obliquely.

House's analysis of "Frost at Midnight" is a fin e statement of

Coleridge's implicit exploration of the movements of the minds "Not only do [the movements of the mindj give the poem its design and unity; but the poem as a whole leaves us with a quite extraordinary sense of the mind's very being, in suspense, above time and space; the mind with a ll it s powers of affection and memory, and it s power 23 of reading nature as the language of God."

2^Coleridge, p. 81. 187

The theme of nature pervades the poems in the settings and in the very development of the meditations; the symbol of the Eolian

Harp, central in different ways to "Dejection" and to the poem of that name, unites nature and mind. Nature is also a highly circum­ stantial mediator of man and man. In his lime-tree bower, Coleridge blessed the rook and watched its vanishing shape, "deeming?1 that Lamb 24 also "stood1 st gazing.11 Similarly in the original version of

"Dejection," the "Letter to Asra," he imagines that he and Sara, though separated by distance, are united by their actual and simul- taheous looking upon the heavens (11. 54-56)* Although it is a

"sweet thought," here it is an indication of his dejection, his distance from the ideal, since the common act stirs his heart but feebly. Later in the "Letter" he thinks again of this unitive act, his and Sara1s eyes united by looking at the heaven. He alludes to the "wild eyes" of Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey." In that poem, Words­ worth, callin g Dorothy f ir s t friend, then siste r , had said that he read his former pleasures—what he once was— in Dorothy's eyes, and continues with a prayer made for her. Calling Sara first sister, then beloved, Coleridge by this allusion and by context indicates

For an analysis of larger issues stemming from this incident in this poem, see R. A. Durr, "'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' and a Recurrent Action in Coleridge," ELH, XXVI (1959), 51 4-50.

^For the text of "A Letter to [Asra], " see the appendix, George Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (London, 1955)> PP* 155-64. 188 that he also beholds what once he was. He sees prayer in Sara's

eyes—prayer for him—and his reciprocal blessing, the movement from confession and dejection to praise and blessing, begins. The tran­

sition from self-concern and lack of joy to an outward-moving love and joy which climaxes "Dejection" is shown in this early version to have originated in Coleridge's deeply-felt personal relationship to Sara. In the earlier version Coleridge asks Sara to bless him

in return, but these autobiographical links are purged from "Dejec­ tion." The marvel of the composition of "Dejection" is, in fact,

that by a mere but ruthless cutting and slig h t rearrangement of an

intensely personal document, Coleridge was able to achieve an ode

"so fully realized that the 'I' at the centre. . .ceases to be the p/f historical Coleridge." For it is the grossly autobiographical which is omitted: the immediate impetus of the "Letter," a previous

letter of complaint (l. 115 ff» )» the specifically personal experience

of "a grief without a pang" of lines 21-24 and the direct self-analysis

of lines 151-54; the boyhood reminiscence (11. 5S“75)> "the extended

direct address to Sara (11. 74-185) which includes a specific "spot

of time" and allusions to other "remembrances that revive the heart,"

as well as his grief for his previous complaining letter and a re­

capitulation of his household and domestic situation with the tragic

admission of his infrequent but haunting half-wish that his "Angel

children. . .never had been born." The name "Sara" is, of course,

Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems, p. 127. 189 changed to "Lady," and references to the Wordsv/orth circ le and to

William (by his Christian name) as poet are removed. (Heeding a poetic lay to match the tenderer tale told by the wind, Coleridge refers to one by Otway in "Dejection.") What is le f t is equally autobiographical, but purged of its links to specific emotions, it rise s above i t s original time and place.

A d efin ite time and place, and themes of friendship, poetic tradition, early training and promise, nature and prayer, come together in the poem addressed to Wordsworth, a poem of special significance to this study since it discusses directly the composi­ tion and achievement of The Prelude. Coleridge recapitulates the argument of The Pr elud e in his praise of that poem, and records his own weaknesses and achievements.

The summary of Wordsworth1s prophetic Lay divides that poem into three sections which correspond to the sections we dis­ cussed in Chapter 17. Wordsworth had spoken of childhood and the

"milder hours of youth"; of "the Social Sense" and "dear Hopes af­ flicted" in which the main event is the visit to France; and ("last

strain") "Of Duty, chosen Lav/s controlling choice, Action and joy!"

Coleridge claims that his friend is the first to have sung aright

"Of the foundations and the building up Of a Human Spirit," to have

"dared to t e l l What may be told" and "what within the mind. . .o ft

quickens in the heart Thoughts a ll too deep for words." Thus Cole­ ridge credits Wordsworth with having communicated that inwardness 190 which Augustine recognised to be dependent upon the charity of the hearer: "How can they tell, when they hear from me of myself, whether I speak the truth, seeing that no man knoweth what is in man, 'save the spirit.of man which is in him'?" [X, iii, pJ*

C oleridge corroborates Wordsvorth1 s hope to number hint-

self among the heroes and the sages of all time. Before the chant­

ing Wordsworth1s nlast strain dying awed the air," his friend had

envisioned him "in the choir of ever-enduring men." ’With steadfast

eye he sees his friend's place on the sacred roll among the archives of mankind, but he hears too, for Wordsworth's work "Makes audible a

linked lay of Truth." And it is a truth "not learnt, but native"; the

phrase repeats the theme of "The Nightingale," where Coleridge coun­

ters the learned tradition of a melancholy bird with the native

knowledge that the nightingale is joyous. Once again in the clos­

ing lines Coleridge alludes to the choir of ever-enduring men: in

the silence after the reading he has "that happy vision of beloved

faces" round them both. It is the vision called up by Wordsworth1s

ovm close in The Prelude, that together he and Coleridge may be

worthy of that timeless "visible space" of the truly great because

"what we have loved Others will love; and we may teach them how."

As one confession and reflection excites another, so

Coleridge was led by Wordsworth's "song divine" to consider his

ovm life. He has done so with a heart forlorn: for all he had

received from nature, from study, and from his friendship with 191

Wordsworth are confessed to be ’’but flowers Strewed on my corse."

Ke interrupts this train of thought, however, as inappropriate to the occasion, and pleads with Wordsworth not to impair the finest memories of their intercourse with pity or grief for him. As in the case of the tumults large and small of which Wordsworth had told in his poem, this one of Coleridge’s "rose and ceased," and he contrasts it with the peace he also had felt in listening to his friend. In speaking of the tumult, he recapitulates his life with broad abstractions, Hope, Fear, past Youth, Manhood, Genius, Knowl­ edge; in speaking of the contrasting peace, he uses the conventional metaphor of the Halcyon. Then, referring to "moments for their own sake hailed" but more so for the sake of his friend's song, he con­ solidates the tumult and the peace in one complex nature image.

Beneath the stars he has been driven, while the "momentary stars"— the "constellated foam" of his own small vessel—have "darted off

Into the darkness"; again he has been "a tranquil sea Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon." His final image substantiates

Wordsworth's discursive claim that "From nature doth emotion come, and moods Of calmness equally are nature's gift" [XII, 1-2J. Words­ worth's poem is as natural as the stars and the sea, and Coleridge's image testifying to its twofold power to excite and to calm is worthy Wordsworth's own clim actic fusion of mountain mist and sea and moon in Book XIII of The Prelude.

The documentation of the specific time and place of this occasion and response is unfolded more subtly than in the other 192

Coleridge poems we have been considering. In the beginning Cole­ ridge is generals "into my heart have I received that Lay." Given this testimony, the reader might believe that he read the poem to himself months before and pondered it the while. But no, it has been an Orphic song; the high and passionate thoughts have been "To their own music chauntedl" At this mid-point of the poem we under­ stand that the situation was indeed immediate and oral, Wordsworth reading and Coleridge listening. The "return" specifies again the

situation between the two men: "Thy long sustained Song finally clo sed , . . .And when I rose, I found m yself in prayer." Like

A\igU3tine! s prayers in the Confessions, it was undoubtedly a prayer both of praise and of confession. Praise and confession are beauti­ fully balanced within the poem.

The tonal, structural and thematic sim ilarities between these poems and The Pr elud e undoubtedly stem largely from the in­ timate friendship and intellectual exchange between the two men during the period of their composition. A quite different poet who was not of their circle wrote an early autobiographical poem of

similar theme and scope, however. Keats' "Sleep and Poetry"

p a r a lle ls The Prelude in theme and resem bles th e C oleridge poems

structurally in that it achieves a wide scope within the framework

of one specific experience.

Like The Prelude, "Sleep and Poetry" tells of a dedication

to poetry. Although it records but a single experience of the poet,

it includes several of the personal, historical and cosmological 195

elements which we found in the full-length autobiographical poem.

Keats achieves his scope by the device o f waking reverie, a reverie which f ille d the hours of his sleeplessness on one sp ecific and

actual night. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, he documents the

circumstance and the physical setting of that one experience, only 27 he does so at the end of the poem. It is the youthful dedication,

parallel to that of Wordsworth in Book IV of The Prelude, which Keats

records; his is not only a specific report of the mood of one time

and place, but the time and place—the nighttime in Leigh Hunt's pO study after a pleasant d a y —have inspired him to put down his

poetic perspective and ambitions, just as setting and situation

prompted Coleridge to imaginative syntheses.

Many of the poetic and personal elements of Wordsworth's

story are also Keats'. He calls for ten years to "do the deed That

my own soul has to i t s e l f decreed" [96-973* He fe e ls none of the

waverings of confidence which Wordsworth records in his second

poetic dedication at the beginning of The Pr elud e as he settled

down once again to nature and to solitude, but Keats does admit the

possibility of his hopes' being interpreted as presumptions [270-74],

27 l ines 5^7-95* All references to Keats are to the edition of Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1905)* pQ The name of his friend is not mentioned, as i t would have been by Wordsworth; our assurance that the study was Hunt's comes from extraneous sources such as letters and accounts of friends, just as does most of the corroboration of autobiography in the poetry of Byron. and records a brief temptation to give in to the realization of the difficulty and immensity of the task before him [506-12]. His antic­ ipated stages of poetic development are Wordsworth1s retrospective ones; Robert Bridges has shown the parallel between Keats' prophetic insight into his future development, his later letter to Reynolds with its fuller self-consciousness, and the stages of "Tintern

k 29 / Abbey. Keats emphasizes fable and fantasy (set in natural sur­ roundings, to be sure) rather than Nature h erself in the early stage; he knows he must proceed to the real strife of human hearts, but he is wary of being tempted into nothingness by a sense of real things

[101-62]. After this survey of his personal future, he estimates the contemporary poetic scene and surveys the history of old Poets and Heroes, predicting a return to the "supreme of power" in his age, and concluding, "0 may these joys be ripe before I die" [l62-

269]. Like Coleridge, Keats alludes to the "choir of ever-enduring men," and like Coleridge, he feels that Wordsworth belongs to it, though, of course, he has no knowledge of The Prelude.

In the section of personal history which follow s, Keats recalls the "glad day" when f ir s t his Benses responded to tender airs

— "Thus I remember a ll the pleasant flow Of words at opening a port­ folio" [557-58]; Wordsworth specifies the time when he was thirteen or younger, when his ears began to open to the charm "Of words in

29See notes, Ernest de Selincourt, _ed. cit.. pp. 406-07. But see also J. Burke Severs, "Keats' 'Mansion of Many Apartments,' 'Sleep and Poetry' and 'Tintern Abbey1," MLQ. XX (1959), 128-52. 195 tuneful order" [v, 575-813• Keats conceives of such memories, in e ffe c t, as Wordsworthian "spots o f time" which are "ever harbingers

To trains of peaceful images": the swan’s neck, the linnet, and the butterfly nestling a rose are given, but such images he might indulge at large "in all my store Of luxuries" [559-4-7]• He links his liber­ ty with the use of imagination (see The Prelude, XIII, 120-25) in a passage which humbly states the personal balance of his poetic power.

He admits a lack of overall wisdom, that he has no sp e cific in sigh ts into the minds of men, that "no great minist'ring reason sorts Out the dark mysteries of human souls To clear conceiving"; yet "there ever rolls A vast idea before me, and I glean Therefrom my liberty; thence too I've seen The end and aim of Poesy" [284-953* Wordsworth had also made "rigorous inquisition" into his capabilities for "such an arduous work" [i, 157-60] and had specified what he lacked and did not lack [i, 160-763* As in Wordsworth, Keats' poetic ideal is only felt, but it is "clear As anything most true" [295-94]• If

Keats' one ideal for poets, simply to "tell the most heart-easing things" [268] seems to consort friv o lo u sly with Wordsworth's sterner conception of himself as a laborer in a work of man's redemption

[XIII, 459-41], his other statement that "the great end Of poesy

. . .should be a friend to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" [245-47] comes closer to Wordsworth's ambition to be a lasting inspiration, teaching man to love, and instructing him how exalted is the mind of man [XIII, 442-47]. 196

Keats also hints at the cosmological scheme for poetry when he, in two figures, speaks not of men but of the planet on which he dwells. One of the figures expresses his own ambitions "Then the events of this wide world I'd seize Like a strong giant, and my spirit teaze Till at its shoulders it should proudly see Wings to find out an immortality" [81-84], The other planetary image be­ speaks the achievement of poets of the Renaissance in England*

"Who could paragon The fervid choir that lifte d up a noise Of har­ mony, to where it aye will poise Its mighty self of convoluting sound, Huge as a planet, and lik e that ro ll round, Eternally around a dizzy void?"[172-77]• The sounds of the Renaissance poets are immortal. Wordsworth is not so sure that the "consecrated works of Bard and Sage" [v, 4lJ can last, although he aspires to their great fellowship.

Although it is, like the single conversation poem, limited to an isolated autobiographical experience, "Sleep and Poetry" thus includes many important elements of Wordsworth's fu ll-len g th auto­ biographical poem. Keats admired Wordsworth's published work, particularly The Excursion and "Tintern Abbey," as his letters show, and imbibed much of Wordsworth's s p ir it. He was also a poet of his times. His "poetic i" r e fle c ts the influence of both mentor and

Z eitgeist. Again at the end of his career he used the 111" represent­ ing himself as poet in a longer narrative, this time a mythological one. The fragmentary nature of his dual treatments of the Hyperion story has made criticism of the later Keats more than normally 197 speculative, but, as J. M. Murry has suggested, the influence of

Wordsworth on the revised version is all-important and pervasive, not only because The Fall of Hyperion is cast in the f i r s t person, 30 but because of central ideas and conflicts. His analysis adds a conceptual dimension to the critical commonplace that in presenting the Hyperion legend Keats was caught between a desire for Miltonic o b je c tiv ity and a compulsion toward Wordsworthian su b jectivity. A recent critic has said that the innovation in the second version is conceptual, not stylistic: "The Fall of Hyperion is less an epic than a personal statement. Indeed, i t is about the growth of a ,,3! poet's mind; only residually does it concern realmless deities.

In The Fall Keats combines epic mythology with personal

statement, just as Wordsworth interiorizes epic action and Byron fuses personal experience with comic epic. Unlike "Sleep and

Poetry," The Fall is not grounded in a circum stantial autobiographi­

cal experience; the entire action of the poem is a symbolic one. As

in Don Juan, the remarks of a narrating "i" frame the central story,

but the central dream or vision is also the experience of that "I." 32 In this it reminds one of Dante's Divine Comedy. The poet first

-^"Keats and Wordsworth," Keats, 4th ed. (New York, 1955)> PP* 269-91.

^John D. Rosenberg, "Keats and Milton: The Paradox of Rejec­ tion," Keats-Shelley Journal, VI (l957)» 91.

32 n ^ Rosenberg points out that "it is worth noting that Keats was studying Dante when he abandoned the f ir s t Hyperion, and that The Fall of Hyperion assumes the form o f a vision or dream"; ib id . , p. 91* 198 takes us into his mind and then exteriorizes the dream in which he is protagonist. In Christian dogma Dante found his justification for being personally present in the ideal action of his poem.33

Keats attempted to use Greek fable in a poem of epic proportions with the personal participation of Dante and of Wordsworth rather than the objectivity of Milton.

Like Keats, Coleridge wrote both personal and mythological poetry, but he created his own myths in "Christabel," "Kubla Khan,” and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." "The Rime" is, of course, a tale told by an "I," but it is objectively framed—"It is an ancient

Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three." At lea st one c r itic has read 34 it as a symbolic autobiography, but there is nothing circumstantial in the poem to justify such a reading. Whatever personal sources the poem may have had, we have no early version to prove just what they were, as we do in the case of "Dejection." Circumstantial autobiography was irrelevant even in Keats' earlier version of the

Hyperion story, but the sp ir it of the poet agonizing over his func­ tion is certainly autobiographical. The poet's growth as thinker and poet is the glorious preoccupation of his letters. His attempt

^Noting33 that repentance is the means by which the Christian can become a genuine personality, Leo Spitzer says, "From the beginning, Dante had been speaking with the 'poetic I'j but now that the princi­ ple of repentance is to be presented to him by Beatrice, now that he is to become a true Christian personality, he is addressed by his objective name—as if the supernal powers recognized, thereby, his entrance into this final stage." "Note on the Poetic and the Empiri­ cal 'I' in Medieval Authors," Traditio, IV (1946), 4l6.

5\enneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, 1941). 199 to mythologize the personal struggle to articulate his poetic task accurately, adapting the Greek sto ries he loved so w ell, shows how far Keats had progressed in his search for an objective poetry which would a t the same time be true to h is innermost being.

I have compared Keats' use of a double poetic "i"—the

"i" as narrator and also as participant—to The Divine Comedy. It is instructive to contrast the focus as well as the form to Dante.

While Dante's vocation as poet enters the Comedy—Virgil's guidance is Dante's most extensive and explicit allusion to his calling—he participates in the events of his dream as a Christian, not as a poet. This shift from Christian vocation to a poetic one—like the shift from Christian confession in Augustine to Wordsworth's personal confession to a fellow poet—indicates a special and important aspect of the Romantic preoccupation with self. The poet's subject is not merely himself, but poetry, himself as poet. Of the poems central to this study, The Prelude, "The Nightingale," "To William Words­ worth," "Sleep and Poetry," The Fall of Hyperion, and Alastor all r e fle c t th is preoccupation. Even Byron, in his le ss in trosp ective way, incorporates poetic theorizing and literary criticism in both dedication and text of Don Juan. The Romantics were men of profound

spiritual temperament, and as young men they could neither ignore nor reconcile the doubts of the preceding age of reason with the

agency of Christianity. The fact that V/ordsworth and Coleridge

eventually found a haven in the Christian church should not blind us 200 to their youthful similarity to ICeats and Shelley in this respect.

They all sought an objective expression for their inner spirit in nature; and the call to poetry—to make something of the given world of nature and of human hearts—was their religious calling. To understand this is to understand, in its most profound sense, the claim that the Romantics were what they wrote. ICeats1 poem is

spiritual autobiography in its most abstract sense.

Autobiographical elements in the la s t o f our major Romantic poets are also of an abstract, ideal kind. Such elements pervade the Shelley canon. While a good many o f the circumstances of

S h elley's l i f e enter the poems, they are almost always disguised.

Only the "Letter to Maria Gisborne" is d ir ec tly autobiographical,

resembling the Coleridge poems in its address, its fine particularity,

its revelation of personal interests and character. Allusions to many scenes and many people give a kaleidoscopic portrait of its

author that a Coleridge poem does not. We have spoken in passing

above of "Julian and Maddalo" and "The Revolt o f Islam."5 8 Two of

Shelley's major autobiographical poems, like Keats' "Sleep and

Poetry" and The Fall of Hyperion, span the poet's poetic career.

Alastor explores the formative experience of the poet in a dream­

like, symbolic way, without the poetic "I." The Emily of "Epi-

psychidion" is the vision of the youth in Alastor perfected in this

See above, pp. 172 and 17^* N. I. White's insistence that the madman as well as Julian in "Julian and Maddalo" is autobiographical pushes the search too far. See Portrait of Shelley, pp. 286-89* 201 world. The "I" of the later poem says so explicitly: "I never thought before my death to see Youth's vision thus made perfect."^

It is the "Epipsychidion" which will give a final dimension to our exploration of spiritual autobiography in poetry.57

In "Epipsychidion" the three major sections of approximately equal length—the invocation to Emily and the explanation of the meaning of the speaker's love for her [I-I8 9], the idealized history of his life and feelings with respect to love [190-587J* and the in­ vitation au voyage in which the speaker depicts himself and Emily united in the future on some Ionian isle [5 8 8 -5 9 1 —present

Shelley's present, past, and future in his personal quest for ideal

sympathy. Shelley alludes in his preface to the matter-of-fact his­ tory of circumstances to which the poem relates, and N. I. White has documented for us the "close sp iritu al kinship"of Shelley and Emilia

56 Lines 41-42. References to the poem are to the edition by Thomas Hutchinson, The Poetical Works of Shelley (Oxford, 1905).

57 For the autobiographical significance of Alastor see Raymond D. Havens, "Shelley's Alastor, 11 PMLA, XLV (l950)> 1098-1115* and Harold Leroy Hoffman, An Odyssey of the Soul: Shel1ey's A1astor (New York, 1955)* Earl Wasserman discusses "Mont Blanc" as a poem of the type of "Tintern Abbey" and the Coleridge poems in The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959)* It is clear that Carlos Baker is not thinking o f Coleridge or Wordsworth when he c a lls "Julian and Maddalo" and "Rosalind and Helen" conversation poems, as his use of the phrase "dialogue poem" for The Cenci in the same group ind icates. S h elley1s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton, 1948). 58 I take this summary from Milton Wilson, Shelley* s Later Poetry (New York, 1959)* p« 218. 202

Viviani which constitutes the personal foundation of the poem 39 4° Carlos Baker excepted, critics follow Shelley's own remark to John

Gisborne that the second section is an idealized history of his own 4l experience, and speculative identifications of the images are rampant and inevitably inconclusive. The problem in a consistent autobiographical reading, however, is the third section descriptive of the speaker's future life and his union with Emily on the Ionian 42 isle, and it is this section v/hich I discuss here.

The first reviewers of "Epipsychidion" read this section as radically autobiographical, scorning Shelley's Elysian paradise as impracticable and immoral. There is no reason not to consider it as autobiographical as the first two sections; the mistake is to mis­ understand its idealized nature. In his preface Shelley speaks of himself in the third person and as dead, ostensibly in an attempt to allay any personal identification, but it is a little ridiculous to think that Shelley believed such disguise would allay anything. He

^Portrait of Shelley, p. 591. 40 He says that to read the middle section as slightly allegorized autobiography is "too obvious, too literalistic, and too ridiculous." Shelley's Major Poetry, p. 251.

^ Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York, 1926)> X, 501.

42Given his identifications for the images in section two, N. I. White can only call section three "disproportionate." He goes so far as to suggest that Shelley perhaps once intended to end the poem with lines 583-87 which "complete the spiritual autobiography" and return to the opening lines. Portrait of Shelley, pp. 397-98. 205 knows quite well that the "certain class of readers" to whom the poem will be intelligible— in the words adopted from Dante, who

"fitly shall conceive" its reasoning—will be a small one, and his limited edition reflects that knowledge. Shelley is a master of complex and symbolic disguises, and his fiction that the writer of

"Epipsychidion" died preparing to make actual the vision described in the poem, rather than an attempt to confound critics, is a pro­ jection into a generalized future for himself. Life indeed should be a continuous attempt to establish the ideal, and death comes at

some point in the attempt. Shelley could have made no more inclu­

sive or perceptive autobiographical statement than the one which follows. This poet's "life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings." The romantic vicissitudes are alluded to in section two of the poem, but the

significant "ideal tinge" is incarnate in section three.

Neville Rogers has argued, on the basis of the Shelley ' y notebooks, that Shelley modelled his poem both in form and matter

on the first Canzone of Dante's Convivio, from which Shelley

adopted the envoi as his own epigraph. ^ Harold Bloom has said

that the personal allusions of Shelley's own envoi are instances of

^Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry (Oxford, 1956), pp. 255- 54. 204

■the poem's private character and as such constitute one of its de- 44 fe c ts. But these allu sion s to Marina, Vanna and Primus— Shelley's pet names for Mary, Jane Williams and Edward Williams—have their parallel in Dante too, not in the stanzas from the Convivio, but in the sonnet to Guido which Shelley had translated and published with 45 Alastor in 1816. In that sonnet Dante imagines the community and contentment that would prevail if an enchantment would allow the three poets, Guido, Lapo, and him self, to sa il wherever their thought might take them. In the sestet he imagines the further enrichment and freedom i f the same "bounteous wizard" would allow 46 the lady-love of each—Vanna and Lagia and Beatrice —to accompany them. The little shallop of the poet in Alastor may owe something to Dante's magic ship, but obviously the ship waiting in the har­ bor to take Shelley and his love to "an Isle under the Ionian skies" owes more. Fourteen lines speak of the voyage proper and move Emily

^Shelley's Mythmaking, Yale Studies in English, No. l4l (New Haven, 1959), P* 208.

^The translation is printed by Hutchinson, pp. 725-26.

^Shelley translates "Vanna and Bice and my gentle love." Like his references to the Oonvito, rather than the now established Con­ vivio, this undoubtedly depends on his text. See Bloom, Shelley* s Mythmaking, Appendix V. "Lagia" is given as the second name in Moore, Tutte le Opere di Dante Alighieri. 5rt* ed. (Oxford, 1904). For identification of Vanna and Lagia as the "lady-loves" of Guido (to whom the sonnet is addressed) and Lapo (who is also mentioned by name in the f i r s t lin e ), see P. J. Toynbee, Concise Dante Dic­ tionary. 205 and the poem’ s settin g from her prison to the Aegean isle s

Einily, A ship i s flo a tin g in the harbour now, A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow; There is a path on the sea's azure floor, Ho keel has ever ploughed that path before; The halcyons brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest Is a far Eden of the purple East; And we between her wings will sit, while Night, And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flig h t, Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, Treading each other's heels, unheededly. [407-21]

Dante addresses Guido to propose the voyage of true minds that he

desires. In Shelley's translation:

Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I, Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend A magic ship, whose charmed s a ils should f ly With winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend, So that no change, nor any ev il chance Should mar our joyous voyage.

Shelley uses his ship to transport himself and his love to the island

where physical and spiritual union become one. Dante had proposed

only to rove "where'er our thoughts might wend," and, once the ladies

have joined them, to grace their time with "passionate talk."

Shelley devotes the rest of his poem to descriptions of

the island to which the ship takes them [422-56]; to its symbolism

[457-82] and its soul which fits it as an abode for ideal lovers

[477-80, 538- 40]; to its chief marvel, a lone dwelling, his house

[485~5^0]j e^d to the p h ysical/sp iritu al consummation of th eir love

[540-91]. Like Dante's 1 overs, they will talk [560 ], but only until 206

"thought's melody. . .die in words" and their lips eclipse the soul

"with other eloquence than words." After their physical/spiritual

consummation in th is l i f e — "one hope within two w ills. . .one im­ m ortality, and one annihilation,"—when the years have heaped

"Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay"—Shelley proposes

that they will become "the living soul of this Elysian isle, Con­

scious, inseparable, one" [556_4 oJ. Dante was writing on a far

less symbolic level of comradeship and intellectual rapport, but

he too imagined ever greater closeness: "it might be That even

sa tiety should s t i l l enhance Between our hearts their s tr ic t com­

munity." Shelley has gone beyond Dante indeed; no keel has ever

ploughed the path to his island before.

In the midst of his description of the chambers he has

fitted for Bnily as "lady of the solitude," Shelley says quite

soberly, "I have sent books and music there, and a ll Those in stru ­

ments with which high Spirits call The future from its cradle, and

the past Out of its grave, and make the present last In thoughts

and joys which sleep, but cannot die, Folded within their own eter­

nity" [519-24]. Here are explicit references to future, past, and

present—prophecy, memory, and an eternity of the now. They are

implicit in books and in music, in poetry in the inclusive sense

of Shelley’s first definition in the "Defence." Our juxtaposition

of the Dante sonnet with it s personal allusions and it s imagined

voyage with the third section of "Epipsychidion" and the simple

suggestion that the three sections of the poem represent Shelley's idealized present, past, and future, suggest a consistent if general

autobiographical reading for the poem. The past and the future as

seen from the present—not just the personal past and future of any

autobiography, but the past of man1s heritage and the future of his

immortal l i f e —have been thematic aspects of the works we have

examined as spiritual autobiography. Yfordsworth is explicit about

the redemption of men and of his hoped-for position among the prophets of nature who labor jointly in that work. His immortality,

lik e his happiness, is found in th is world or not at a ll; i t is a

gradual growth in the minds of men which culminates in the marriage

of Mind and Nature. Augustine traces every item of his Confessions

against the background of Christian immortality; hi3 immortality is

both personal and communal, otherworldly yet traditional in this world, for it is the communion of the saints of both past and future

to which he aspires. Like Wordsworth, Shelley uses the metaphor of

marriage to approach the "one immortality" cf his imagined l i f e with

Emily on the Ionian island, but he also anticipates an interpenetra­

tion with the isle itself after their physical death. He "wishes

to have his cake and eat it too," as Milton Wilson puts it in the

different but relevant focus of his analogy between Emily and Dante's

Beatrice: "Dante's Beatrice is possible because Dante's Platonism

has been transformed by his Christianity. The timeless can enter

time for Dante and not simply be degraded by i t . Shelley's Platonic

frame of reference however, denies such interpenetration. . . .He

makes Rnily something more than the terms of his poem w ill allow. 208

Emily must be both a figure and more than a figure. In spite of himself Shelley touches the possibility that Eternity may be ful-

, . 4 7 f ille d in Time. Ke touches i t and moves back.

Wordsworth and Augustine drop the details of personal narrative and grapple with ideas and conflicts as they approach maturity; and Shelley, presenting a future apotheosis, leaves the here and now. But the ideal vision ha3 been his prime motive from the beginning. What details of personal experience he gives are generalised and obscured by symbols. So that, while it is possible to read 11 Epipsychidion" consistently as a kind of veiled and vision­ ary spiritual autobiography, the poem is at best only autobiographi­ cal. The poet is writing about himself in the first person, cover­ ing a sig n ifica n t span o f his experience in a framework of present, past, and future, to be sure. His focal point is his ascent on a modified Platonic scale, just as Augustine's is his movement toward

God, and Wordsworth1s his growth as a poet. The poem shares with

Augustine and Wordsworth a cosmological scope, but it neither particularizes nor dwells on the personal experiences which make the final vision a position whose gradual attainment we have shared and thus find substantiated as Shelley's personal philosophy. In autobiography we expect an evolution of the writer's "mode of vision b3 in terms of his successive engagement with the world." Shelley's

^Shelley's Later Poetry, p. 2^0.

^Pascal, cit., p. 155* 209 symbolism in section two truncates his successive engagement with the worldj his mode of vision lias not evolved but has sprung forth full-formed. Despite the personal involvements and the technical

111, 11 Shelley's preoccupation is not with himself, but with love.

Throughout his poetry, his concern is "with the moral status of the self and with the perfection of the will, rather than with the establishment of identity and with the growing pattern of conscious- ii 49 ness. Wilson has righ tly pointed out that in th is sense he seems 50 more medieval or even neo-classical than romantic. His own felt kinship with Dante is instructive here.

Shelley's references to Dante in the Preface are to the

Oonvivio and the spiritual autobiography which alternates poetry with prose, the Vita Nuova. Ke speaks of the Vjta Huova also in

"A Defence of Poetry," and in terms which strongly suggest his com­ ment on "Epipsychidion" and the content of his own poem: "it is the idealised history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love."^ But then imperceptibly he slips into a consideration of The Divine Oomedy, ca llin g "the most glorious imagination of modern poetry" Dante's "apotheosis of Beatrice in

Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne

49 Wilson, Shelley* s Later Poetry, p. 152.

5°Ibid., p. 151.

^ Complete Works, VII, 128. 210 *52 of the Supreme Cause. - In the poem itself, Shelley’s transitional

111 went forth . . .in to the wintry fo rest o f our life " [24<5-49] a l­ ludes to the Comedy.

The Divine Comedy has factual autobiographical elements to an extent unparalleled in the Middle Ages.^3 in addition, it utilizes the spiritual autobiography of the Vita Nuova. and employs a "poetic I" who, at the approach to^ Paradise is addressed as

"Dante." In his "Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ’I' in

Medieval Authors" Leo Spitzer comments thus: "For the story that

Dante had to tell, both aspects of his composite ’I1 were necessary: on the one hand, he must transcend the lim itation s of in d iv id u a lity in order to gain an experience of universal experience; on the other, an individual eye is necessary to perceive and to fix the matter of experience. For, unlike Milton, who was content to write of Heaven and Hell under the dictation of the Muse, Dante attempts to show us a human being actually experiencing the truths of the

Beyond.Generalizing from his wide experience of lite r a tu r e ,

Spitzer insists that "the medieval public saw in the ’poetic I' a representative of mankind." The device "enjoyed a freedom from biographic control unknown today." It was the Romantics who

-^Complete Works, VII, 128.

•^These are discussed by Edmund G. Gardner, "Autobiography in the Divina Commedia, " John Rylands Library Bulletin. VI (1921-22), 402-15. The claim that Dante used autobiographical elements to an extent unparalleled in the Middle Ages is made by Spitzer.

^Traditio, IV (1946), 4l6. 211 converted what Coleridge himself called the "I representative” to the poet in his proper person. Yet it is no coincidence that when

Keats and Shelley set about expressing their intense personal pre­ occupations with poetry and with love they found in Dante their model and ju stification .

It was the English Milton, however, whose ideal had been EC that the poet "ought him selfe to bee a true Poem." M. H. Abrams has pointed out that on the continent in the time we have been dis­ cussing the conversion of the representative "poetic i" to the personal proceeded largely in fictio n , but that "in England. . .the author usually chose to project himself in the medium of verse.

The mere fact that Wordsworth wrote his autobiography in verse, and the citation of modes of autobiographical poetry as diverse as our satiric, conversational, mythological, and visionary, document his observation. It remains, in our final chapter, to attempt some explanation.

5^See above, Chapter II, p. 80.

^The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1952)> P* 98. CHAPTER VI

"Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poesie"

The analysis of Romantic essays concerning autobiography in Chapter I showed a decided preference for what in th is study I have called "spiritual autobiography"; and the autobiography in the poetry of the period, both the direct and avowed autobiography of

Wordsworth analyzed in Chapters II, III, and IV, and the peripheral autobiography of other poets discussed in Chapter V, belongs to the preferred category. In this concluding chapter I focus on autobiog­ raphy as poetry, for as spiritual autobiography in verse The Prelude is unique in English literature.

Although a follower of Misch has found the beginnings of

English autobiography in poems as diverse as "Deor," Beowulf. and the

Hous of Fame.1 more balanced individual studies of "The Pearl,"

^Alois Brandi, "Anfange der Autobiographie in England," J3.-J3. der Preuss. Ak. der Wiss«t phil.-hist. Kl., (1908), pp. 724-55* p Nowhere is the nineteenth-century penchant for ferreting out the personal so exasperating as in early interpretations of "The Pearl." The excesses of the autobiographical interpretation are summarized and refuted by W. H. Schofield in two a r tic le s , "Nature and Fabric of the Pearl," FMLA, XIX (1904), 154-215, and "Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in the Pearl," PMLA, XXIV (1909), 585- 675* See also Charles Moorman, "The Role of the Narrator in Pearl." Iff, LIII (1955), 75-81.

212 215 5 4 Piers Plowman, and The Canterbury Taleg have, in the main, placed the "poetic I" of English medieval poetry in the tradition of Dante*s representative "I*1 mentioned above.^ Spenser's Colin Clout and the

" i" of Donne's satires come closer to the personal "I" of the

Romantics, but Renaissance poets did not produce autobiographical poetry with the consistency of the Romantics, There does seem, however, to have been an e ffo r t by the minor poets of the 1570 's to produce straightforward verse autobiography. After a survey of these and other attempts at direct poetic autobiography in England, in this chapter I speculate on the interrelatedness of autobiography and Romantic poetic theory in an effort to explain why the autobio­ graphical interest and insights of the period should have been so strikingly made manifest in poetry.

Early verse autobiographies in England were moralized res gestae. Around 1406 "one of the most autobiographical of English

^In "The poet of Piers Plowman and contemporary convention," (part 5 "Robert or William Longland," London Mediaeval Studies, 1959, I, 450-62) R. W, Chambers says that his analysis "does not mean that everything which the dreamer does, or says, is true of the author," although "to assume complete dramatic personation for that school of l4th century allegorical dreaming to which Piers Plowman belongs, is false analogy from types of literature and thought quite different. The poets of this allegorical school do not think of their dreamer as a person distinct from themselves"; pp. 442-45.

V Talbot Donaldson's "Chaucer the Pilgrim" (PMLA, LXIX, 1954, 928-56) tends to assume dramatic personation in The Canterbury Tales, as does Charles Moorman in his treatment of the Pearl poet.

^Chapter V, p. 210. poets" produced a direct verse confession: La Male Regie de T.

Hoccl eve covers the author's shortcomings over a twenty-year period.

Two minor poets of the 1570's also published verse autobiographies.

The second of Thomas Tusser's forty stanzas on "The Author's Life"

is a fair indication of that poem's form and substance:

By leave and love, of God above, I minde to shew, in verses few, How through the breers, my youthfull yeeres, have runne their race: And further say, why thus I stay, And minde to liv e , as Bee in hive, Full bent to spend my life to an end, in this same place.

In 1575 Thomas Churchyard seems to have laid pieces of "The First

Parte of Churchyardes Chippes" and "A Light Bondell of liv e ly dis­ courses called Churchyardes Charge" end to end as "A tragicall p discourse of the unhappy mans life." Far more in terestin g and pertinent is an autobiography from the same decade which, lik e

Dante's Vita Nuova, combines poetry with prose. Unfortunately,

the newly-discovered autobiography of the Elizabethan songwriter

Thomas Whythorne comes from the press too la te to be considered

in this study. Mr. James Osborn has reported that approximately

^The phrase is from Baugh's Literary History, p. 297 .

^Hoccleve's Works, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, No. LXI (London, 1892), 25-59.

^"The Author's Life" was added to the 1575 edition of Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie (London, I87 8 ), 205-15* 9 Reprinted in Illustrations of Early English Poetry, ed. J. Payne C ollier (London, 1870), II. See also "Advertisement," Bibliographical Miscellanies, ed. Philip Bliss (Oxford, I8I 5 ). one-quarter of the 90>000-word narrative is in verse, and in ter­ spersed in the narrative are Y/hythorne1 s more than 200 poems which total nearly 2,100 l i n e s . ^ The framework of the narrative combines the "ages of man" with a chronological commentary on how each of his songs and sonnets came to be written. The autobiography is addressed to an unnamed friend and has an introspective tendency unique for the time. Whythorne was apparently uninfluenced by any earlier autobiographer (he refers to St. Augustine, but Osborn be­ lieves his information comes from an intermediate source), and has, of course, not influenced later autobiographers, since his tattered manuscript "lay gathering dust for almost four centuries." While 11 there is much of the autobiographical in poets like Milton and

Cowper, 12 only the Latin hexameters of Thomas Kobbes 13 qualify as direct verse autobiography between the decade of Tusser, Churchyard, and Whythorne, and I8O5 . Wordsworth is, in this, then, manifestly original, and his Harper's reviewer noted the fact in I85O, calling

^'The Beginnings of Autobiography in England," Clark Library Lecture (Los Angeles, 1959).

"^For allusions to autobiography in Milton, see above, Chapter II, pp. 77-80, and Chapter V, p. 178. 12 For reference to Cowper*s Task as a forerunner of the Cole­ ridge conversation pieces, see above, Chapter V, pp. 181-82.

1^The " Vita Tho. Hobbes Malmesburiensis Scripta Anno MDCLXXIl" appears at the beginning of the Latin philosophical works, Opera Philosophica quae Latine Scripsit studio et labore Guilielmi Moles- worth (London, 1839)> iT lxxxv-xcix. 216

The Prelude the "first regular versified autobiography in our i .,lA language. ■'

One would assume that, once he had shown the way, other poets would follow; but a shift in attitude toward and trust in

* autobiography had come even by the time The Prelude was given to the world. Victorian commentators on autobiography ignored the

Romantic d istin ctio n between inner and outer and thus could express no preference for the former. They are, indeed, scarcely aware of 15 i t . In its review of the poem, the B ritish Quarterly Review attributes The Prelude*s bareness of "all special social circum­ stance" (in comparison with Dichtung und 17a hr he it ) partially to its metrical form; the reviewer would have preferred the "more anecdotic, in terestin g and communicative" p o s s ib ilitie s of prose.Neither

Tennyson, Browning, nor Arnold wrote prose autobiographies, nor would they authorise biographical accounts, but their poetic output is impressively autobiographical.'*'^ Browning1 s early "fragment of a

■^Quoted by Herbert Lindenberger, "The Reception of The Prelude, 11 3NYFL, LXIV (April, I960), 204. The italics are the reviewer’s.

■''-'’Keith Rinehart summarizes Foster in his review of "The Victorian Approach to Autobiography," MP, LI (l95^)» 177-86, but he does not mention Foster's distinction or preference. I have perused the items in his bibliography and found no distinction between inner and outer after Foster. The Victorians were in ter­ ested in autobiography, of course, but their concept becomes increasingly positivistic.

■^Quoted by Lindenberger, oj). cit. , p. 201,

■*"^See, for instance, E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Vic­ torian Poetry8 Sources of the Poetic Imagination in Tennyson, Brown­ ing, and Arnold (Princeton, 1952). 217

confession" is a first-person poem addressed sometimes to his

titu lar confidante, sometimes to Shelley, his youthful mentor; but

the poet withdrew "Pauline"—presumably because of its critica l

reception—and never again used the directness of f ir s t person narrative. While Browning perfected a dramatic technique for the 18 poetry of experience, the disguise is fatal to his late spiritual

autobiography. "Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in

Their Day" is such a classic instance of the oblique approach of writers who distrust a continuous narrative 1 ° ' that the literary

critic has had to unravel and explicate its autobiographical intent 20 and significance. Thus in Browning spiritual autobiography in

verse virtually went underground. A parallel, though slighter,

point can be made for Tennyson's insistence, through his son, that

"Merlin and the Gleam" tells his literary history, that brief poem

being "enough biography for those friends who urged him to write 21 about himself." In our own time John Betjeman's Summoned by

1 A -LOI take the phrase from Robert W. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, the Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tredition (London, 1957).

•^Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 6 5, dis­ cusses George Moore, Sean O'Casey, Gertrude Stein, Yeats, Gosse, and Havelock E llis, in this connection. Browning's poem is simply not known by the general student to be an autobiography. 20 W. C. DeVane, Browning* s Parleyings: The Autobiography of a Mind (New Haven, 1927)*

21 Hallam Lord Tennyson incorporates this explanation of the poem in the notes to the Ever siey edition of his father's Works, IV, 594-98 (New York, 1908), and repeats it in the preface to Alfred Lord Tenny­ son, A Memoir by his Son (London, 1897 )> I j xii-xv. 218 22 23 B ells inevitably reminds it s reviewers of The Prelude, but the contemporary verse autobiography has neither the cosmic scope nor the re-creation of powerful subjective states common to The Prelude and the Confessions of St. Augustine. The Prelude is s t i l l comparable

i ultimately only to great prose autobiography.

One is led to question, then, whether the technical d if­ ference between prose and poetry is important in the criticism of 2 4 autobiography. Is verse autobiography so much "a thing apart" that The Prelude should be excluded from discussions of English autobiography? The Romantics themselves would have said no. I trust that I will not violate the spirit of V/ordsworth1 s Preface to the Second Edition. . .of * Lyrical Ballads1 and Shelley's Defence of Poetry i f I apply whatever seems pertinent to a discussion of autobiography.

Both of the essays break down the usual distin ction between poets and prose writers. Shelley says that it is "a vulgar error

. . .inadmissabl e in accurate philosophy. "^5 y/ordsworth, arguing

22 I refer to the poem as printed in The New Yorker, August 27, I960, pp. yi-b2. Mr. James Osborn informs me that this version is identical with the first English edition. ^2See the review, NYT3R, Nov. 27, I960, p. 4. Betjeman himself is obviously aware of his parallel endeavor. His poem recalls The Prelude in many specific ways, but, while the central events of Bet j emn’s development are his choice of poetry as a career and his religious conversion, he has not the profound dedication of either Wordsworth or Augustine. oh Shumaker's argument. See above, Introduction, p. 2. 2^The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (London, 193^)» VII, 113-14. 219

that there is no "essential difference between the language of prose

and metrical composition [i.e., poetry]," sets up his stricter

antithesis of prose and metre. For Shelley the distinction between measured and unmeasured language is not necessarily a matter of

traditional metre; it is enough that "a certain uniform and harmoni­

ous recurrence of sound" be present [p. Il4], Yet metre is to be

preferred in "such composition as includes much form and action."

This would include any sustained autobiography. And, since, accord­

ing to Wordsworth, metre "tends to divest language., .of its reality,

and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial

existence over the whole composition" [p. 9^]> a composition which

otherwise directly presents the "pathetic situations and sentiments"

of one's own history, i.e., autobiography, actually needs metre to

temper the distressful portions, to give esthetic distance. It

follows from their poetic tenets that, for Wordsworth and Shelley,

autobiography would inevitably be written as poetry.

In his brief passage and it s accompanying footnote on the

popular antithesis of poetry and prose, Wordsworth argues by shifting

the ground of several contrasts, just as he proceeded in the eighth

book (and elsewhere) in his poem. For one moment his distinction is

betv/een prose and metrical composition; but that is not a strict

an tith esis, and he proposes a "far greater" one between selected and

The Prose Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1896), II, 86. 220 unselected, or vulgar, language. The selection of the language really spoken by men—the basic point in Wordsworth's argument— distinguishes the poetic composition from the vulgarity and meanness 27 of ordinary life, and is called distinction enough. In the foot­ note he suggests the much broader distinction between Poetry and

Matter-of-Fact, or Science. Kis intent is to refine distinctions in order to define poetry, but he also discourses extensively on similarities: on the affinities of poetry and prose, and on pleasure, which both poetry and science give. In his concluding apology that he has not been systematic, he hints that a chief cause of the pleasure afforded by metrical language is the principle that the mind derives pleasure from the perception of similitude in dis­ similitude. The brief prose passage we have been discussing, with its shifting of the ground of a contrast and its careful balance between similarities and dissim ilarities, constitutes an object lesson on this principle. In Chapter III I analyzed Wordsworth's habit of moving his poetic discourse by shifting from one pair of contrasts to another, one element in each contrast remaining the

same. The characteristic habit is here dramatically affirmed by

27 The poet's selection of language is a commonplace of which ’Wordsworth f e l t i t was necessary to remind h is readers. I t is analogous to the equally obvious fact that the autobiographer selects the details of his experience—he cannot do otherwise—and the full­ ness of his portrayal is, then, never the fullness of life (which the vulgar might suppose), but the fullness of art. the progress of his prose. Truly, "the bodies in which both [prose and poetry] are clothed may be said to be of the same substance" [p.

8 6 ],

Wordsworth discusses metaphor far le ss than measure.

Certain passe.ges of poetry "abound" with metaphors and figures, but they are frequently appropriate to prose as well, and it is the propriety which Wordsworth stresses [p. 8 7 ]. In the Preface he uses the sustaining metaphor of The Prelude for the a f f in it ie s be­ tween metrical and prose compositions: "They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of than are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree;

Poetry sheds no tears 'such as Angels weep,1 but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both" [p. 86]. In the poem the metaphor pQ unites nature and mind: both beat with the motion of the heart.

In Chapter II we discussed Wordsworth's sim iles which comment on the writing of autobiography itself. This is not as likely to occur in

Concerning nature: the breeze "beats against my cheek" [i, p] the sentiment of Being spreads "o'er all that. . .beats the gladsome air" [il, 426]; "all the storms of Heaven. . .beat" on the Window of his youthful imagination [VIII, 54o]. Concerning mind: "to bed we went. . .with a beating mind" (corrected to read "beating minds" in 1850) [II, 18]; "The inner pulse Of contemplation almost fail'd to beat" [ill, 557-58]. 222 a prose autobiography: for all his nature metaphors, Augustine speaks discursively when he speaks of his autobiographical task.

However, the poetic quality of the Confessions, in the broad sense discussed by Shelley, is a c r itic a l commonplace. Surely, had it occurred to him, Shelley could have included Augustine as easily as Bacon among the poets. The harmonies of sound integral to Augustine's rhetoric and the "vitally metaphorical11 language and conception of the Confessions, looking as it does backward to Plato and forward to Dante (Shelley ranks both as great poets), surely qualify it, in Shelley's view, as poetry of a high order. He had, after all, drawn from the Confessions for the epigraph to Alastor.

In the terms of Wordsworth* s "more philosophical11 d is­ tinction—that between poetry and science—autobiography again aligns itself with poetry. Even recitals of a predominantly res 29 gestae type—including those written by trained scientists"' — show the impossibility of a really matter-of-fact representation of one­ self. In autobiography rigorous precision corresponds to subtle dupery.All too frequently the literary critic who uses the term

^Pascal scrutinises the autobiographies of scientists who tend to be "scientific" in their self-analyses. He questions whether it is ever possible to eliminate personal factors, and emphasizes "how difficult it is for the scientist to incorporate into his autobiog­ raphy more than a narrow range of experience," adding that "his peculiar and intensive specialist preoccupation also tends to de­ partmentalise his experience itself and to hinder the cross-fertili­ zation of experience that makes for the full personality." Design and Truth in Autobiography, pp. 1 1 8 - 1 9 . -^Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions et limites de 11 autobiographie," Formen der Selbstdarstellung, ed. Reichenkron and Haase, p. 1 1 9 . 225

"autobiography11 or "autobiographical11 seems to posit absolutes of accurate memory and objective self-knowledge against which he judges the truth of the specimen. Such a p o sitiv istic approach denies the

i problematic base of autobiography, the psychological problem of the memory and the moral problem of the self*s impartiality to itself.

This paper has attempted to bring the most thoughtful generic studies concerning autobiography to bear on the pronouncements of

Wordsworth critics who all too frequently have not reflected on all that the writing of autobiography implies. The seeming contradic­ tion of the Moorman biography with which this paper opened, for in­ stance, implies that autobiography and spiritual autobiography are mutually exclusive. The same implication exists in a typical state­ ment concerning Augustine's masterpiece: it is "a sort of spiritual 51 autobiography rather than the story of his own life." Obviously, spiritual autobiography _is autobiography, though of a special kind.

A reader of the ]SpO Prelude around the turn of the century was less misleading: "The Prelude is. . .an autobiography and an autobiog­ raphy of a special kind. . .that delicate and dangerous, and yet in the best instances how interesting kind of autobiography which is termed 'spiritual autobiography'." Given the refinement of a

"special kind of autobiography" which I have assumed in th is study,

^Etienne Gilson, Preface to The Story of Abelard1 s Adversi­ tie s (Toronto, 195^0, P* !•

^James Potheringham, Wordsworth's "Prelude" as a. Study of Education (London, 1899)> P* 7* 224 one can deal with statements like that of Havens, also quoted in the

introduction. His insistence that to consider The Prelude as an autobiography is to misconceive its purpose must surely refer to an alternate kind of autobiography, the res gestae (Towne) or f,exterior

history" (Foster), the account of "social circumstance" (British

Quarterly Review), which, of course, it was not intended to be. It

is more important to acknowledge this distinction in intention and

subject than the technical one of poetry and prose.

Shelley makes a d is tin c tio n between sto ry and poem (not to

be understood as representing simply prose and poetry) which is

analogous to that between res gestae and spiritual autobiography:

"A story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond

of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the

other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms

of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is

itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies

only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of

events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and

contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives

or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature"

[p. ll.^J. These categories, for all their clarity here, are no more

mutually exclusive than those of "autobiography" and "spiritual auto­

biography." The problem of interpretation in literature exists

precisely in determining the proportion and interpenetration of

story and poem, of the particular and the universal. Good autobiography ?25 partakes of both, as any genre does. The unimaginative reader or even writer may think of autobiography as a life ’’story11 only, but its appeal is not only in its uniqueness. Wordsworth insisted that his experiences were not unique, and there is an amazing history of testimonials that he speaks of and to the hearts of men. In the terms of our working distinction we might call Shelley's ’’story” res g esta e, his "poem” sp iritu a l autobiography, remembering that as autobiography each is set in an actual place and tells a story in time.

Any autobiography tells of the past in light of the pre­ sent, but our spiritual autobiographers have been concerned with a further dimension in time.55 y In th is, too, Romantic criticism sug­ gests a parallel between autobiography and poetry. Wordsworth in­ sists that the poet "looks before and after" [p. 9l]» and Shelley that he "not only beholds intensely the present as it is. . .but he beholds the future in the present" [p. 112], A Dante scholar has misleadingly attributed a quality of autobiography itself to poetic autobiography by claiming that "as a poetic autobiography, the Vita

Nuova may permit itself foreshortenings or extensions of perspective 54 according to the poet's taste. ^ Foreshortenings and extensions of perspective are necessary to autobiography per se; they are no

^ S e e above, ChapterV, pp. 206-07.

^Etienne Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, trans. David Moore (New York, 1949), p. 91. 226 more than measure or metaphor the exclusive property of poetry.

Inevitably in an autobiography "perspectives telescope and inter­ penetrate. " ^

There are still other statements concerning poetry in the Freface and A Defence which strikingly suggest the most search­ ing things that have been said in th is century about autobiography.

Let us juxtapose, for instance, Shelley's "Poetry is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge" [p. 155] with Miss Sayers' reminder concerning autobiography that "to himself, the character partakes of the eternal wholeness of his own personal awareness, but to the other characters and the reader it is presented within the space-time-matter frame of the book itself." ^ Or Shelley's "[Poetry] creates for us a being within our being" [p. 157] with Shumaker's

"Autobiography must accept the resp on sib ility not only of reimagin- ing a life, but of discovering within the life something greater than the sum total of incidents and observations." 57 Again, Shelley's

"[Poetry] compels us to feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know" [p. 157] with Gusdorf's "Autobiography is a second reading of experience, truer than the first since it is the ?Q prize of consciousness." Or le t us turn to Wordsworth's object of

55 ' Gusdorf, ££. cit., p. 120.

^Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York, 19^1 ), p. 90. ^Wayne Shumaker, English Autobiography (Berkeley, 195^)» P» 107.

5®Gusdorf, ££. c i t . , p. 115* 227 poetry: "its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal11 [p. 89], and then to Pascal: ’’The value and truth of autobiography—and its value is always linked with its truth—are not dependent on the degree of conscious psychological penetration, on separate flashes of insight; they arise out of the monolithic impact of a personality that out of its own and the world's infinitude forms round itself, through com­ position and style, a homogeneous entity, both in the sense that it operates consistently on the world and in the sense that it creates a consistent series of mental images out of it s encounters with the world.

In the most philosophic sense of poetry in both Wordsworth1s

Preface and Shelley's Defence the equation of autobiography and poetry

implied by such juxtapositions is fair enough. In addition, we may

recall that a contemporaneous German poet and thinker called his

prose autobiography Dichtung und Vfahrheit—Poetry and Truth. Schol­

ars have applied the positivistic criteria of the late nineteenth

century in interpreting Goethe's title, but I doubt very much that

Goethe himself was thinking of the "falsification inherent in a

^Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 188. 228 n 40 s e lf-p o r tr a it when he named his book, or that he wished to d is­ tinguish between the actual facts of his youth anc’ the interprets- 41 tion of the old man writing. Ernest Renan seems closer to the spirit of the title when, in his own autobiography, he says that individual scenes in Goethe's account of himself represent, not poetry or_ truth, but both simultaneously: MCe qu'on dit de soi est toujours poesie. . . .On ecrit de telles choses pour transmettre + o aux autres la theorie de l'univers qu'on porte en soi.

Autobiography's essential subject is how a man's life appears to himself, and the reader who approaches an autobiography in order to test this image against the facts as he has learned them elsewhere is ignoring the basis and importance of autobiography as a genre. It is, of course, possible that Wordsworth deceived himself.

Sir Herbert Read has called the portrait of his childhood and youth an idealization, but Read is replacing Wordsworth's own interpreta­ tive transcendentalism with a twentieth-century Freudian touch- stone. 45 The sophisticated tools of poetic analysis have also been used to undermine Worasworth1s central statement in The Prelude that his love of nature led to a love for mankind. After an analysis of

^Shumaker, o j d . cit., p. 48. 41 Erich Trunz, in his notes to his edition of Goethe, vol. IX, (Hamburg, 1955)> quoted by Pascal, p. 9* 42 • From Souvenirs d1enfance et de jeunesse, quoted by Gusdorf, P. 115.

^Wordsworth (London, 1950). 229 images, Mr. David Perkins concludes th a t, no m atter what Wordsworth consciously thought he believed, in reality he felt a tragic gap hb between man and nature. And by a careful balancing of Wordsworth's

"sacramentalist11 and "mystical" attitudes toward nature and a reading of su b tle am biguities in the poems, Mr. David Perry concludes th a t

Wordsworth's "genius was his enmity to man, which he mistook for love." ‘ Probing another man's subconscious for what he really felt, however, is as difficult as probing one's own nature, and it is as possible for the critic to be wrong as for the autobiographer.

My plea is that Wordsworth's poetic autobiography can be fruitfully studied in contrast to the inner autobiographies of other men; and that, while the inward look is laden with dangers, in The Prelude it is taken with an amazing courage, awareness, and, in most in­ stances, clarity.

^The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p* 50*

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I, Elizabeth Brown Wenzel, was born in Marne, Iowa,

September 28, 1927. I received my secondary school education in the public schools of Griswold, Iowa, and my undergraduate training at Cornell College (Mt. Vernon, Iowa), which granted me the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948* During the academic year

1948-49 I was a Lydia Roberts Fellow at Columbia University, where I received the Master of Arts degree in 1951* Between

1949 and 1955 I taught in the public schools and the junior college in Monmouth and Webster City, Iowa. In the summers of

1951 and 1955 I attended summer sessions at Highlands University

(Las Vegas, New Mexico) and the University of Washington. In

1955 I began my doctoral study at The Ohio State University.

From 1955 to 1958 I was an assistan t in the Department of

English there, and in the academic year 1958-59 held a Univer­ sity Fellowship.

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