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WORDSWORTH, LAW, AND ECONOMICS: A POET'S LANGUAGES Volume I by Mark Lawrence Schoenfield A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) May 1990 UMI Number: DP23147 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP23147 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 This dissertation, written by Mark Lawrence Schoenfield under the direction of h.is. Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of Pfc.lX * 9 0 S365 v. | D O C TO R OF PHILO SO PHY Dean of Graduate Studies Date . . U f t Y . f m b . e j r . .22*.. 1 . 9 . 8 ? . DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson IX I say, if a man upon trial were stained with blood instead of ink,— if he were covered over with crimes of which human nature would start at the naming, the means against him would not be the less disgraceful . . . — Thomas Erskine, in defense of Thomas Paine, 1792 Dedicated to Steve Fisher, Jack Gifford, Maurice Natanson, and Harvey Goldstein, teachers all and always. Ill Acknowledgements In writing this ritual page, an author places friends at risk, and I concentrate that risk on a few people by name, rather than spreading it among the many who kept me going; in this gesture, I am comforted by another ritual in which acknowledgements are read as a safe, sentimental space or skipped entirely. I would like to thank the lawyers, especially Bart Selden and Charles Booth. I would like to thank the economists, especially Eileen Rabach. I would like to thank my students, especially Kara Adams, and my teachers, especially Peter Manning, Jerome McGann, and Max Schulz. I would like to thank my colleagues, Sandra Ross, Clare Simmons, Sylvia Sensiper, my friends, especially Harley Kornblum, and my several families, all especially. And I thank Sarah, who has had each of these roles, and many more she could not have anticipated. And Josh, still himself. i v Table of Contents Note on references vi Preface vii Chapter One.... 1 History, Discourse, Institution A. The Attorney's Son 1 B. Dworkin, Posner, and Interpretive Models 12 C. Outline 38 NOTES Chapter TWO...................... 58 The Word Made Real: Eighteenth-Century Professionals A. The Specter of the Spectator 60 B. David Hume: Changeless Alteration 67 C. William Blackstone 79 1. The Aesthetics of the Commentaries 79 2. Copying Property 88 NOTES Chapter Three................................................... 103 The Virtual Philanthropist NOTES Chapter Four............. 140 Goody Blake and the Reviewers NOTES Chapter Five.................................................... 165 The Contractual Basis for the Lyrical Ballads NOTES Chapter Six..................................................... 202 Evidentiary Poems A. Introduction and Reply: Wordsworth and Lamb 202 B. The Right to Name: "Hart-Leap Well" 213 C. The Economics of Interpretation: "The Brothers" 225 D. Criminal Law: "Andrew Jones" and "The Two Thieves" 244 E. Law, Economics, and Memory" "The Old Cumberland Beggar" and "Rural Architecture" 255 F. The Poet's Property: "A Poet's Epitaph" 276 G. Contract and Obligations: "Michael" 289 NOTES Chapter Seven................................................ A Look Forward: The Excursion A. Introduction: The Pedlar's Retirement 341 B. Francis Jeffrey and the Wanderer 357 C. Bentham and Wordsworth 407 D. Coming Full Circle: Property and Wandering NOTES Conclusion.............................................. 479 A. Wordsworth and Hume on Copyright 479 B. The Nature of Death 493 NOTES 340 448 Bibliography 504 v i Note on references: Complete bibliographic information appears in "Works Cited" (504-520). Wordsworth's poems are cited from the Oxford Edition edited by Hutchinson and revised by De Selincourt except for the Lvrical Ballads (cited from Brett and Jones), The Excursion (cited from De Selincourt and Darbishire), and the Ruined Cottage (cited from Butler), and The Prelude (cited from J. Wordsworth, Abrams, and Gill). Wordsworth's letters are cited by volume of the Oxford Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (for example, LEY for Earlv Years 1787-18056. LLY II for Later Years. Part II 1829-1834) . Mary Moorman's biographies, William Wordsworth. A Biography: The Earlv Years and William Wordsworth. A Biography: The Later Years are cited as Moorman I and Moorman II respectively. The reviews of poems are cited by the page numbers in the magazine, although all are reproduced in facsimile in Reiman's The Romantics Reviewed, except where otherwise stated. William Holdsworth's History of English Law is cited as Holdsworth with volume and page number. Preface Francis Bacon, expanding upon Deuteronomy, insisted that The mislayer of a mere-stone [property marker] is to blame. But it is the unjust judge that is the capital remover of landmarks, when he defineth amiss of land and property" ("Of Judicature" 222) Moving a property marker, that is, readjusting the symbols of distribution, may be a theft, but the failure to define "property" fairly constitutes a more grievous offense, because a judicial decision, protected by its legal status, enters into a mechanism of replication and precedent. By emphasizing the danger of a judicial error, Bacon indicates the extent of judicial power to operate as a symbolic system that can convert between mere stone and mere-stones.1 Jean Paul Sartre has argued that such relationships between possessions and legal enforcement arise in the failure of an ideology to transcend its historical limitations and to represent the total community through each of its members. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre comments specifically that Juridical power appears here as the creation of a community which realises that it neither is nor v i i i ever will be a totalised (and totalising) totality; it is therefore a new form of totalising intended to compensate for the impossibility of completing the totalisation, that is to say, of its appearing as a form, a Gestalt, a collective consciousness above all the members, and, therefore a guarantee of their permanent integration. (441) I Commonplaces asserting that for every wrong there is a remedy, for every right a corresponding duty are platitudinous expressions of a totalizing effort as if it i were complete, or could be completed. The legal process I does not begin with the court, but exists as a continual ) constraint or empowerment, and a particular legal act interprets not merely the law, but a particular action i | and a class of actions (at the same time, placing a particular act within that class). In other words, the kind of displacements (moving mere-stones across a diurnal course) that recent Romantic critics have \ attributed to much English poetry following the French i Revolution, with its failed utopian vision,2 finds its shadow in legal self-representation. Law and literature, like other social institutions, | create, store, embody, and replicate ideology. Emile Durkheim, in the first edition of The Division of Labor in Society (1893) argued that legal procedures such as marriage and contract began as the codification of voluntary rituals which reflected a social order i ! conditioned by purely material circumstances, but that i x the codification process itself produces a cultural reification and entails an alienation for subsequent generations. In modern law, consequently, the procedures i J are experienced by the individual as external judicial I iconstraints to which a person is compelled to respond. A i . . isimple example is that while two persons (defined as such by law) write and sign a contract, its meaning, by virtue of its being a contract, is determined by the courts ;either directly through adjudication or indirectly ;through the enforcement of standard practices: i What we cannot foresee individually is there [i.e., by law] provided for, what we cannot regulate is there regulated, and this regulation imposes itself upon us. (Division of Labor. 214) j The voluntary character of a contract— a condition of the 1 • • • • jvalidity of the document— is precisely what is I surrendered by entering into the contract. The presence of the contract, in turn, reflects the voluntary state of a market economy, and strengthens it to a point that one cannot reasonably avoid contract. In "Sociology and the Social Sciences" (1909) Durkheim contended that a specific law gains its authority because it incarnates the spirit of a society and "translates it into definite formulations" (80). Reconsidering contracts in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, Durkheim wrote that: [t]here is something in words that is real, natural and living and they can be endowed with a sacred force, thanks to which they compel and | bind those who pronounce them. (182) The repressive representation in Division of Labor has ! been replaced by the oath as a pre-condition for freedom; : Durkheim further asserted that the "juridical formulation is only a substitute for sacred formalities and rites" (Professional Ethics. 193) . Despite both the nostalgia of his first formulation iand the visionary tone of the second, the dialectic ibetween Durkheim's two positions allows an entry into i , | legal self-representation. Law is both a power and a representation, and the meeting ground of these poles is law's ability to interpret diverse human experience in ! its own terms and to make that interpretation compelling to future human action.4 Through their discourse— laws, , judgments, novels, poetry, judicial and periodical I reviews— and their material existence— courtrooms, wigs, j presses, bookbinding— both law and literature transmit to ! the society in which they function ideals and norms of I j social relations. i Ass though it may be, the law inscribes the social behavior of a woman by the legal category of "wife." , Furthermore, in representing that category as immemorial ! and crucial to other social goals, the law aids the i j internalization by both men and women of normative i x i marital (and non-marital) relations. Literature represents these normative relation in works as diverse i as William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Samuel I i Johnson's Rasselas (1759), Jane Austen's Pride and ! Prejudice (1813), Janet Hobhouse's Dancing in the Dark ! (1984), and television's on-going Divorce Court. As a condition of entering into the aesthetic pleasure of these works, one must accept, at least tentatively, that I "If marriage is best for mankind, it must be evidently i ! best for individuals" (Johnson, 111), that "a single man j in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," (Austen, 51), or that a wife can wonder if her husband "was genuinely happy[, or] rather if he was engaged enough by all of this to let her go on being happy" (Hobhouse, 5). Despite differences in the particular version of normality presented in these works, the ability to insinuate a norm as a condition of ] : understanding the text associates the functions of ! literature and law. ! The particular forms of ideological transmission ; chosen by institutions are partly determined by the i I necessity of preserving power within the duplicating i J structure itself (the courts or the publishing industry), 1 partly determined by the need to disguise this preserving function (by reference to, for example, constitutional x i i rights or a standard of taste), and partly determined by ; the material available to meet or assimilate threats to that power. The potential for internal critique in law, ; for example, is limited by educational and licencing j procedures; as Duncan Kennedy, a spokesman for the ! ; Critical Legal Studies movement, admits in explaining the i | modest limits of his "The Structure of Blackstone's ] Commentaries": I i Implicit loyalty oaths have always been a , condition of admission to the inner circles of I legality. The enterprise of merely understanding j the legal order is not likely to be taken up by a i person radically opposed to the status quo. ! Opposition to the status quo does not easily j survive the kind of identification with the legal system that seems to be a psychological precondition for really understanding it. (218) j External review is substantially prevented by an aura of : secrecy and difficulty, largely an artifact of the i professional language; Bentham, for example, believed I j that Blackstone's approach to law simultaneously equated I and distinguished "law as it is" and "law as it ought to i j be" and argued that the result was an insistence on blind ! obedience by non-lawyers disguised as moral behavior.5 i 1 This rhetorical defense is strengthened by the structure I | of political institutions which make the Supreme Court of ' the United States and the Law Lords of England the I i arbiters of their respective Constitutions. Xlll Because no institution operates unconditioned by , other social factors, however, the persuasiveness of literary and legal representations fluctuates through , history as they compete with other institutions, such as the church, the military, and medicine, as well as each ; other. Neither law nor literature have achieved a i i I hegemonic discourse for at least two reasons. First, t i I both require other discourses as the object of their interpretations, and, secondly, both contemporary legal ! and literary institutions developed from diverse and competing institutions whose traces endure in, for I { example, the divisions between law and equity and between , fiction and nonfiction (see Davis, Factual Fictions chs 3 I and 5). The distribution of language through what Jon I Klancher has termed the "social text," that is, the I I cultural frames through which individuals read their own I existence (Reading Audiences 49), both conditions and is | conditioned by the institutions which generate the : discourses available to writers and readers. As Bakhtin puts the point: Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated— overpopulated— with the intentions of others. ! Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (Dialogic Imagination. 294)6 | Language, it follows, is not merely the property of particular institutions, and the struggle to determine institutional powers and boundaries is necessarily part of the history and criticism of particular poetic works. The study of Wordsworth, then, is supplemented by a consideration of the law which surrounded him. In this i j argument, then, I intend to add another dimension to the efforts at restoring Wordsworth's work to its historical i circumstances by positioning his discourse against institutions largely responsible for both those circumstances and the way their history has been | transmitted to us, the law and the reviewing industry 1 dominated by lawyers such as Francis Jeffrey. XV NOTES 1. Bernard Jackson has suggested the extent to which Anglo-American law, at least as understood in the positivist tradition of Hart and Dworkin, should be regarded as a semiotic system: Despite claims that the specificity of law resides only at the pragmatic level, both syntactic and deep semantic features of legal discourse stand out as peculiar to it. Legal discourse claims to regulate its own creation, and to practice self-interpretation. Monosemicity and restricted connotations are characteristic claims of legal discourse. The capacity to create 'inferior' semiotic objects, the special claims of the legal acteur and the relation of 'recognition' to 'competence' also emerge from the Greimasian analysis as contributing to the specific appearance of law. (Semiotics and Legal Theory 283-84) 2. See especially Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology. Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems. and David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination, all of which will be discussed in later chapters. 3. Jeffrey Alexander, The Antinomies of Classical Thought, chs 5 and 8, considers the shift in Durkheim's theorizing about legal institutions in a wider political context. 4. In Haslem v. Lockwood (Connecticut, 1871), the substantial issue was who had the better right to eighteen heaps of manure, the plaintiff who had gathered the manure from the road, or the defendant, who had carted it off. The courts handled this messy business by determining what kind of property— real or personal— manure was. This case is discussed in eds. J.E. Cribbet et al, Property. ch 1. 5. Bentham, Fragment on Government (177 6). See also H.L.A. Hart, "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals," (1958) 51-2. 6. Both Klancher, who cites part of this quotation, and Bakhtin insist on historically situating even this point, by now so nearly self-evident that it seems a post-modern discovery regarding language itself. This "discovery" is untrue if "language" is taken to mean something xv i continuous over time or inherent in a human condition which transcends history. Klancher locates the heteroglossic moment at the rise of the great reviewing ' industry following the French Revolution: 1 The late eighteenth century ushered in a confusing, unsettled world of reading and writing. Ideas, signs, and styles had to cross new cultural and social boundaries[.] (Reading ! Public 3) I I Chapter One History, Discourse, Institution i A: The Attorney's Son This book explores the connection between William Wordsworth's sense of himself as a professional poet and his concerns with English law and jurisprudence. This exploration will involve historically situating Wordsworth within the rise of a juridical market economy (following the work of Carl Polanyi) and readings of both his poetry and his prose, most extensively the Lyrical Ballads and the Excursion. Many biographical facts justify such a study. In 1798, Richard requested from his brother the two volumes of Blackstone's Commentaries concerned with civil law (LEY 674). Whether he read Blackstone, Wordsworth, the child I and sibling of attorneys, had various avenues for learning about the law, including prominent trials reported in the papers (several involving writers) and the "master pamphlets" (Prelude IX 97) debating the status of the British Constitution as a question inseparable from the French revolution and domestic industrialization. His family was involved in several legal disputes, including a 2 complex litigation regarding a debt that "overshadowed the youth of the Wordsworths, giving to their lives an atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration" (Moorman I 169). I will argue, however, that his position is typical of the jpoet who represents himself as a professional during the English Romantic period, because that position is shaped by circumstances which include the rise of the professional lawyer, the shifts in contract law and the meaning of consideration, and the naturalization of the theory of rights. Further, the poetry of the period was not the passive victim of such forces, but actively engaged in polemics regarding property and justice. i. After reading the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Anne Taylor wrote Wordsworth, praising his poems and inquiring about the growth of the poet's mind. He responded in one paragraph which James Chandler has suggested might be labelled "a biocrraphia creocrraphia rather than an account of the events that shaped his opinions" (Second Nature 7). Wordsworth's choice to suppress his political dealings, or more precisely to translate them into a series of tours, which culminate by reclaiming his "native country," gives this paragraph a shape similar to "Tintern Abbey," which, like the prose biographic sketch, ends both with Dorothy's presence and strong reminders of 3 the tentativeness of their time together. Wordsworth apologizes to Taylor for providing "little which will throw any light on my writings" (LEY 327; 9 Apr. 1801), and as Chandler has shown,1 the omitted events would have been more revealing (at least for our contemporary scholarship which positions Wordsworth's thought within a historical context and to which this work intends a contribution2) . The last sentences of the paragraph, however, provide a starting point for an investigation into Wordsworth’s concern with legal and economic institutions: At present I am permanently fixed in my native country. I have taken a house in the Vale of Grasmere, (a very beautiful spot of which almost every body has heard,) and I live with my Sister, meaning, if my health will permit me, to devote my life to literature. It may be proper to add that my Father was by profession an Attorney, and that he and my Mother both died when I was a Boy. (LEY 327) Exactly as he consecrates himself to literature, having achieved an end of his wanderings by acquiring ("taking") Dove Cottage, he invokes the profession of his father. This point, its counterpoint of the father's death, and the propriety by which Wordsworth denotes the disclosure ("It may be proper to add . . ."), authorize the poet as a land holder occupying his patrimony (generalized as "native country," and already made public by virtue of its beauty3) and as a professional writer who will reinscribe the value of his possession in his work. 4 The capitalistic ideology adumbrating land-use through such mechanisms as enclosures and increased production jexpectations (both depended on considerable legal expenditure) in 1800 allowed for paradisal description of Grasmere through the mediation of tourism. Grasmere remains quaint, to mark the progress of other places and to provide a space of leisure which would not impede labor. Such was not Wordsworth's ideal. David Simpson contends that Wordsworth had a very sophisticated though often implicit conviction about the human imagination as best thriving in a subsistence, agrarian economy of owner-occupiers. This ideal— for that is what it was— is a fusion of poverty and possessiveness, and work and leisure. (Historical Imagination 47) The tentativeness of such subsistence existence (Wordsworth marks his status as an orphan and concerns for his own j ! health) finds its poetic correlative in the struggle for an audience within a competitive, and urban, marketplace. As with Grasmere, the problem regards not aesthetic beauty, but management. While this analysis allows reading in Wordsworth's bland biographical sketch a personal anxiety about both his audience and the presence of his absent, professional father, I propose to locate that anxiety within wider social context.4 The construction of a virtual tourist industry, rather than an actual one, by guide-book writers employing the picturesque, provides one element of that context5: 5 The possibility of an imagination of state rather than simply of estate lay in the fact that such special zones as the Lake District offered the opportunity symbolically to broaden and modernize ownership— to "free” property for exchange. The deep interest of the picturesque, we may say, was thus that it imagined a new property whose exchange depended not on hereditary succession but on industrial success, not on "place" but on the j displacement and reinvestment of capital. (Liu, Sense of History 91-2; italics mine) This analysis reveals the tension on which my study depends. One the one hand, Liu's use of "fact" suggests a historical given; on the other hand, his use of "free" in quotation marks positions what history has given as an interpretive (or linguistic) problem which cannot be answered by reference to history. Historical givenness emerges only after polemic debate, whose linguistic tools are not only words but semiotic systems such as legal discourse and consumption. Liu has prepared this tension (as both a product of, and precondition for, a poetic picturesque) in his analysis of history as a discursive field; [C]ontexts are themselves constituted as masses of difference— as collisions or discontinuities with other contexts or with aspects of themselves. (46) Thus, if we say that in deploying an odic form in "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth manages a denial of history, it is insufficient (besides impossible) to recover the denied facts. Instead, we must examine what system of 6 articulating (inventing, deploying, investing) those facts Wordsworth was denying, or more precisely, arguing against. English historiography developed within the intellectual and institutional debate over the status of English common law. J.G.A. Pocock proposes that t Renaissance historians were more or less consciously engaged in returning facts to their historical context and interpreting them there, and . . . this was bound to present complex problems for historical reflexion. With the lawyers this was particularly the case, because the data they were assigning to a past context were simultaneously the principles on which present society was endeavoring to govern itself. fAncient Constitution. 8). David Hume, who will figure largely in the next chapter as a nexus between professional law and professional writing, wrote his most lucrative work, The History of Great Britain, while the Keeper of the Advocate's Library for the Scottish Bar, a position which gave him access to documents as well as shape for his work. Although explicable in a variety of ways, the number of lawyers who produced historical works in the first half of the nineteenth century is suggestive. Sharon Turner, John Murray's lawyer, published the first volume of History of the Anglo- Saxons in 1799; Walter Scott published Original Memoirs Written during the Great Civil War (1806) the year after writing the first scraps of Waverlv; Francis Palgrave, called to the bar four years before the publication of History of Normandy and of England (1831), argued that the "Norman invasion preserved the most vital institutions of the ancient English state" (Simmons, Reversing the Conquest 113), a view critical to maintaining the English authority of common law.6 To put the matter paradoxically, like law, literature, economics, and religion, history as a discursive organization only comprises a component of the historical field, a field which, at other times or from other perspectives, might be more aptly identified as the religious, economic, legal, or literary field. During the Romantic period, the rise of the self took shape as a denial (or transcendence) of history; hence the importance of the lyric as delineated by Liu in Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Marjorie Levinson in Wordsworth1s Great Period Poems, and Clifford Siskin in The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. My point is that history itself, for the romantic age, had a more particular referent than uninterpreted "facts"; it was connected to the development of the English legal system with its procedures of precedent and constitution. Further, Wordsworth's concern (desire, worry) for property, arises within a continual debate with legal and critical discourses which were themselves engaged in defining property. Such definition 8 was simultaneously linguistic— what did the word denote— and material— what could be bought or sold. ii. Maturing in the English intellectual turmoil surrounding the French revolution, those poets commonly regarded as Romantic and the critiques that their ideological opponents voiced, again and again circled the concept of property. Byron expresses an aristocratic notion by his giving away the copyrights to his early poems and by his satires on the clutter of law in Don Juan; Dying intestate, Juan was sole heir, To a chancery suit and messuages and lands, Which with a long minority and care Promised to turn out well in proper hands. (I, 37, 1-4) Articulating a Godwinian radicalism, Shelley attacks paper currency as enslaving in the same poem that ridicules Lord Chancellor Eldon, The Mask of Anarchy: Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermine gown; His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to mill-stones as they fell . . . "Paper coin— that forgery Of the title deeds, which ye Hold to something of the worth Of the inheritance of Earth.["] (16-19, 180-3) In both poems, social relations— father, son; worker, master; man, earth— are inscribed through the legal status of property. That legal status, further, is situated within texts, the writs of a chancery suit and title deeds, 9 and within a visible economy. The satirical force of each passage relies on the recognition that the signifiers of property— the title deeds and chancery suit— have acquired reality and value equal to the land and labor they signify within the economy, just as Fraud/Eldon's tears become solid stone. This satiric reification mimics the expansion of property to include any item capable of being possessed, contracted, sold, or legally protected. "The Masque of Anarchy," written in response to the massacre in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, in 1819, implicitly suggested that human labor and lives were now regarded within that rubric. For Shelley, whose poetry circulated in readerships confined by both political and intellectual interests, the commodification of labor into a property capable of being sold held little professional interest; for other writers, such as Byron and Wordsworth, however, whose works were produced for circulation within a competitive marketplace, the ideology of such commodification was indispensable, even if it served as a characterization of opposing (and hence inferior) works and as precisely the historical condition of professional writing which their work purported to transcend. In his business dealings, Byron evoked the laws of property where necessary and avoided them in favor of a more noble morality when affordable. A letter to Jean 10 Antoine Galignani, who wished to publish his complete works in France, demonstrates these tendencies. Byron responded to the request with graciousness: I have no right to dispose of the property of Mr. Murray.— The copyright of the poems is his— and— although I might legally (it seems) sanction a re publication in France— I could not do so honestly, without his permission, (in manuscript) Byron does not own the poems— except legally. But honesty is a higher standard than legality, even if the terms of honesty are "copyright," "property," and "interest," all inescapable juridical echoes. Byron obsessively assures Galignani that he has no personal interest in the "business," and, "as far as mere feelings go," he would like Galignani to republish "because you seem to do so 'con amore.'" The strategy is to signal his favor and then disempower it. To demonstrate that he "is not actuated by any prejudice," he "haTsl signed the permissions & sent them to London addressed to Mr. Murray." Byron could easily predict his publisher's response to Galignani; Murray's refusal included the observation that "for the copyright of these works, which you print for nothing, I have given the author more than 10,000 pounds." The slippery nature of copyright— a property that was not a thing, but exists interstitially between the literal book and the literary idea— represents an intersection of law and literature inherent in the development of the 11 professional writer, exemplified in the eighteenth century by figures such as Addison's Spectator and David Hume. This development, as I shall argue in Chapter Two, allied aesthetic taste and legal regulation by constructing a i class of professionals whose labor— mere writing— entails professing that it is labor. This development shaped the literary marketplace in which Wordsworth and other post- French Revolution writers functioned. Consequently, Wordsworth employs notions and metaphors of property, contract, jurisdiction, and jurisprudence in order to establish his position both as a poet and as a political thinker, and to insist that the two positions necessarily coincide. Not unique in this gesture, he does provide an illuminating example of how poetic production occurs within a space of competitive institutions and audiences. This book is primarily about literature, and specifically about Wordsworth. It is also about the relationships between law and literature, social institutions which form both readers and writers. What does such an approach shows that reading the poems within a purely literary context will not? The full answer to that question rests in the readings of the poems in Chapters Four through Seven, but for now I wish to sketch a justification that suggests that the category "purely 12 literary context" is an illusion, and one important to contemporary legal theory. B. Dworkin. Posner. and interpretive models i i. Law and literature have been systematically connected throughout history. The word kritikos. in ancient Greek, meant at once critic and judge, and this etymological link underscores the Athenian social practice of selecting by lot from the same citizenry the critics who awarded the prizes at the dramatic festivals and the judges who issued the verdicts in the law courts. The criteria of probability, internal consistency, and rhetorical propriety applied both in the Theatre of Dionysus and the court of the Areopagus across the way. The regulation of the Athenian festivals— the law required wealthy patrons to support productions— reinforced the social structure that provided the ideologies of justice and democracy. While not enough Greek drama survives to speculate on its common themes, the plays preserved in school books consistently ask: what is justice? Antigone, written early in Sophocles' career, pits Creon's human legal decree prohibiting a burial against Antigone's obligations to a higher theological law. His later Oedipus the Kina, constructed as a series of interrogations entwine self- 13 identity and criminality, insists that society is both implicated in crimes and responsible for ferreting out the guilty, even in the absence of an aggrieved party.7 Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus, speculates on a law derived from a rational concept of justice independent of Zeus' divine caprice; the occasion for such speculation is the punishment of the Titan who provided human beings with fire, the arts, and sexual differentiation. The only surviving trilogy, Aeschylus' Oresteia. details a mythic transformation from a system of justice rooted in revenge to one built upon law. To the extent that the play concerns the rise of trial-by-jury in Athens, signified by the presence of the Areopagus across from the theater and the site of Orestes' "actual" (i.e., mythical) trial, the staging of the final action is telling. After Orestes' acquittal, the formal division between actors, chorus, and audience dissolves into the procession towards the Areopagus. A vision of communal unity enacted within the fiction of the play mirrors the experience of participation in the theater. The force of the Furies is controlled, but not dissolved. Athena's appearance with the crimson robes, which bedeck the Furies and give them legal rights, recalls the crimson rug that Agamemnon stepped on, confirming and, in the rhetoric of the scene, repeating sacrilege but now in a legal guise. The power ofj 14 the Furies becomes the horizon of civilized law, the force always available to empower the law or to topple it. For the moment, in the ecstasy of the play's climax, the chorus sings "Cry, cry, in triumph, carry the dancing on and on!" j(The Eumenides. 1057) This exultation mitigates, without i replacing, the earlier claims of the chorus that human beings must "suffer, suffer into truth" because it is Zeus' law (Agamemnon 179). In part, this mitigation is achieved by a historical displacement, since the contemporary legal event relevant to the audience/judges was not the formation of the Areopagus, but the Periclean reforms that reduced the Areopagus' vast judicial power to jurisdiction only for murder trials and sacred property. The play asserts the importance of these activities left to the Archons of the Areopagus while celebrating judicial progress.8 In this sense, the trilogy is not about the transformation of revenge justice into legal justice, but uses that mythic change to meliorate a current political struggle.9 The trilogy must end, the audience render its verdict, and the need to suffer returns, perhaps in the more civilized form of aesthetic catharsis but equally in the form of the . Periclean democracy in which the failure to participate in government was a criminal act. These Athenian plays achieved thematic depth within the context of a society 15 contemplating (and sanctioning itself to contemplate) its own legal institutions through its literary productions. ii In the 2 0th century, Anglo-American law and literature i find themselves much estranged by comparison with ancient Greece.10 Current jurisprudence, however, is witnessing a relatively new "law and literature movement" within its ranks. The introduction of alternative discourses into jurisprudence responds to a crisis in law regarding the legitimacy and necessity of interpretive procedures.1 1 Disturbing questions have been voiced regarding the extent of proper legal interpretation; among the issues at stake are whether interpretive acts can (or ought to) further social justice rather than reinforce the status quo, whether judicial recognition should be given to these possibilities whatsoever as opposed to "strictly" applying the law; and whether the law can safely rely on a doctrine of "plain meanings" of words.12 Given a question of how to understand a certain text— a will, an act of legislation, a common law precedent— it seems potentially fruitful to proponents of the "law and literature movement," such as Stanford Levinson in "Law and Literature," to examine literary criticism as a profession i constantly grappling with issues of interpretation. 16 Two related, partly overlapping approaches also use literary paradigms. The Critical Legal Studies movement, attempting a critique of legal theory and practice, has drawn explicitly on deconstruction.13 Ronald Dworkin, in his effort to assemble a rights-based notion of "Law's Empire," invokes a mythic judge, Hercules, who, possessing interpretive power "more reflective and self-conscious than i any real judge" needs, "shows us the hidden structure of [judicial] judgments and so lays these open to study and criticism" (Law's Empire 265). One objection to the "law and literature movement" begins with the observation that a judge reads a contract differently from a critic reading a novel. In particular, the outcome regarding the contract matters— who pays whom, what will be delivered, how will future contractors understand their enterprise.14 As such, legal interpreters must be consistent. Literary critics, by contrast, the argument runs, can interpret as they choose and many seem to revel in bizarre interpretations; in such cases, at worse, a few colleagues and a few more students suffer the occasional harangue. First, these objections ignore the historical situation of the two institutions: the constraints on critics are enforced by the disciplinary mechanisms of the academic community15 and, under such seemingly unified 17 doctrines as equity or states' rights, the law can interpret inconsistently with relative ease through the language of balancing competing claims. Secondly, the objections overlook a key social purpose of both academic jcriticism and law: the exertion of an ideological influence i over a population that must assent to the norms of contemporary culture in order for those norms to function. Most readings of the law are performed not by judges or lawyers, but by lay persons who read within a social text by obeying the law, forming contracts, exercising their rights, committing acts of civil disobedience, swearing oaths, taking out loans, bringing suits, or threatening to do so.16 These readings are performed under the auspices of the judiciary which may interpret the correctness of specific readings. In this institutional aspect, the court's texts are both interpretations and objects of interpretation. Similarly, literary works produce and duplicate aesthetic and cultural norms through which people read their own activities, and, under the signs of realism, these works are both interpretive and objects of interpretation. Ronald Dworkin, in proposing the model of a "chain novel" to explain the continuity of legal tradition, suggests a similar point: Judges, however, are authors as well as critics. A judge deciding McLouahlin or Brown adds to the 18 tradition he interprets; future judges confront a new tradition that includes what he has done . . . Each novelist [i.e. judge] aims to make a single novel of the material he has been given, what he adds to it, and (so far as he can control this) what his successors will want or be able to add. (Law's Empire. 229). Dworkin anticipates one objection to this model, that "the best theory of art [and works of art] require[] a single creator"; to this, he offers a few timid examples of serial production ("legend and jokes . . . the Old Testament, or, on some theories, the Iliad") and adds, "I am interested only in the fact that the assignment makes sense" (438nl). He could, I think, have responded more forcefully: Shakespeare's plays were conceived as collaborative effortsj and the collaboration in the space of the Globe Theater is duplicated in the temporal succession of productions on different stages with different copy-texts; only the t canonization (colonization?) of Shakespeare has trimmed his plays into solitary authorship. Boswell's Life of Johnson has multiple authors to the extent that the quotations of Johnson and others can be called accurate. The dominant narrative genres today— television and film— are necessarily collaborative and often serial as writers replace one another through successive drafts. Dworkin could not, however, have answered another objection, that his criteria of 'singleness' is an illusion of the reading procedures brought to bear on the genre of the novel, a 19 genre constructed by the collision of voices contending for control of the social text, including the ideological position to determine the content of a term like "integrity." M. M. Bakhtin, who, like Dworkin, chooses Dickens's work as his main example, formulates the terms of this heteroglossic collision: Almost every novel we mentioned above [a metonymic list of canonical authors of the comic novel, including Fielding and Dickens] as being a classic representative of this generic type is an encyclopedia of all strata and forms of literary language: depending on the subject being represented, the story-line parodically reproduces first the forms of parliamentary eloquence, then the eloquence of the court, or particular forms of parliamentary protocol or court protocol, or forms used by reporters in newspaper articles . . . or finally the way one or another concrete and socially determined personality, the subject of the story, happens to speak. (The Dialogic Imagination 301)17 Dworkin's resort to an aesthetic of the novel returns him to the history of the law and to the disjunctions in social interaction that were the material precursors of novelistic form. The notion of legal integrity on which Dworkin wishes to rest judicial authority has no counterpart in the novel, only its counterfeit. Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor exemplifies this counterfeiting by interrogating its own narrative integrity while (and partly by) referring to some aspect of law in every chapter.18 Initially, the story falls in the narrator's hands in disarray from his friend, a sign- 20 painter proscribed by law from putting words rather than emblems on his tavern signs: ["]Here are my notes of the tale," said poor Dick, handing a parcel of loose scraps, partly scratched over with his pencil . . . I proceeded, however, ! to decipher the substance of the manuscript as J well as I could, and wove it into the following Tale. (26)19 The narrator follows the interpretive procedure of integrity on which Dworkin's chain-novel metaphor relies, working "loose scraps" into a unified structure. A comic trajectory, the narrative begins with a funeral and culminates in a wedding, but it is nonetheless a tragedy. And as a tragedy, it is a meditation on the inadequacy of its integrative strategies in contrast to the legal and economic displacements emblematized by Ashton's acquisition of Ravenswood's property.20 The wedding between Lucy i Ashton and Ravenswood, which the cajoled reader desires and, which would resolve the legal dilemmas, is disrupted by the legal decree from Deuteronomy that a father may contradict a daughter's vows "in the day that he heareth" (312), and, more precisely, by an interpretation of this "text" that allows Lady Ashton's objection to the match to constitute the father's objection despite Lord Ashton's long knowledge of the vow.21 Lady Ashton's exclamation, "Let him hear the text" (312) commands integration just as the word of God brings the world into existence, but it depends on previous references and interpretation, specifically 21 scripture. It is also uttered by a character rendered despicable from her first appearance to the final sentence of the work: A splendid marble monument records her names, titles, and virtues, while her victims remain undistinguished by tomb or epitaph. (334) This modern marble replaces the marble fountain around which the action is structured, and text, cataloguing and listing ("names, titles, and virtues"), displaces the flow of legend and narrative. The moment in which the scriptural "text" is produced to disempower an oral vow, then, is paradigmatic in a work that begins focused on another text, Ravenswood's motto, "I bide my time" (38), a careful narrative balance between waiting and action. This text, in turn, is first "mutter[ed]" in perverted form by a constable trying to prevent the Scottish Episcopal funeral of Ravenswood's father: "You'll rue the day that clogs me with this answer" (33). Like the narrator ordering the sign-painter's loose scraps, the narration attempts to integrate competing j discourses. The method of textual integration is j interpretation. The narrator points out, Tradition, [is] always busy, at least in Scotland, to grace with a legendary tale a spot in itself interesting. (56) This is interpretation: the tale does not create the interest in the spot, but seeks to explain it. A 22 "generally received legend" regards the fountain where Ravenswood revives Lucy, but the narrator integrates the legend into his realistic mode by contextualizing it in three ways; first, it is received with rationales of its Jown origins, including a criminal analysis; second, it is located in an array of other legends; and third, Ravenswood tells an abbreviated version to Lucy who "love[s]" "legendary lore" (197). This narrative procedure, however, fails. At a crucial moment, Ravenswood, having left the ancient manor in a state of indecision, comes upon the fountain. This time, the integrative strategies of which the narrator has availed himself fail explicitly, and, invoking his own contract with the reader, previously hidden in the ease of the narrative integration, he reverts to an earlier, unintegrated form of story-telling: We are bound to tell the story as we have received it; and, considering the distance of the time, and propensity of those whose mouths it has passed to the marvelous, this could not be called a Scottish story, unless it manifested a tinge of Scottish superstition. (235) By shifting to the level of meta-narrative, the novel reveals not only its unintegrated situation, but the clash between its mode, realism, and its genre, Scottish tale. Psychology could explain Ravenswood's seeing a "female figure"; he is upset, in love, and aware of the legend of the fountain, and the narrator has previously used such 23 explanations in contemplating earlier stories. But, to accept the psychological reading is to reject the coherence of the Scottish tale as a Scottish tale. Such a procedure destabilizes the narrative "we," at once the royal singular ! jof the magisterial, immune, and necessarily anonymous author and a heteroglossic plural that recalls the fractured history of the story's transmission, with the deliminalizing moment of the manuscripts transformation from the sign-painter constrained by law within the oral tradition to the lawyer/narrator capable of manipulating such constraints. This novel is not amenable to integration, and contradicts the effort to read in the manner Dworkin believes novels ought to be read, that is by making the novel "the best it can be" through interpretation fLaw's Empire 229). Rather, taking into account narrative integration and legal strategies and interpretation, the story is willfully disappointing, a feeling for which Caleb, the faithful servant, is emblematic. Suddenly promoted by Ravenswood's final decree, "I make you my executor," he watches his master disappear, and ends his days in the rift between Scottish tradition and English improvements: If worldly profit could have consoled the old man, his age was better provided for than his earlier life had ever been . . . [but] He ate without refreshment, and slumbered without repose; and, 24 with a fidelity sometimes displayed by the canine race, but seldom by human beings, he pined and died within a year after the catastrophe which we have narrated. (333) ■ • * • • ?? jThis novel is characteristic not merely of Scott, but of |a genre conditioned by the collision of institutional languages (see McKeon, Origins 118). Not merely impractical (a harmless concession to his argument), Dworkin's project of a chain-novel is theoretically unsound and ahistorical. The objection that Dworkin's metaphor is merely a metaphor for the integrity that must originate in the law itself and not in its metaphors, does not evade the problem. The historical conditions that make the metaphor plausible are those which make the crisis of interpretation in legal thought visible, in this particular forms at this particular time. Dworkin tries to stabilize one set of j texts, the law, whose contemporary appearance of ! ! instability and distrust prompts such comprehensive works j I as Law's Empire, with a seemingly more stable set of texts, or textual procedures, the novel. But neither of these textual conglomerations is stable, nor independent of the ! other. By uncritically accepting the generic representation of the novel, Dworkin attaches transcendent values to historical phenomena. Ultimately, Dworkin's polemic that interpretation be the act which makes the body of law the best body of law it can be is congruent with the Blackstonean project of articulating the economic and 25 material concerns of law in aesthetic and totalizing forms.23 iii. Richard Posner, appellate court judge and leading I spokesman of the "law and economics" movement of legal analysis, suggests that the confusion regarding intentions and meanings is largely a generic one intensified by the cross-over between literary and legal disciplines (Law and Literature 14). He contends (not alone) that literary and legal texts are essentially different. The first, read for pleasure, should not be incumbered by problems of authorial intention but savored as an aesthetic experience. The second, read in the course of official business, should be governed by the intentions of the authors.24 Posner ! reserves the aristocratic standard of disinterested taste j for literature— it doesn't do anything to us, so let's enjoy it— and invokes the equally aristocratic standard of patrilineal command— what the framers said— for the courts. This solution is flawed for a reader who, rejecting claims of disinterest, views the ideology embedded in the institutions of law and literature as informing the collective and individual identities of a society. The pleasures of literature encountered uncritically reinforce social norms, and in that sense, exercise a juridical force of considerable consequence. Posner's position can be 26 identified as under the influence of Romantic ideology even as he seeks to disempower literature. As Jerome McGann has argued in his polemical The Romantic ideology. When critics perpetuate and maintain older ideas and attitudes in continuities and processive traditions they typically serve only the most reactionary purposes of their societies, though they may be unaware of this; for the cooptive powers of a vigorous culture like our own are very great. (2) The literature to which Posner refers can be set differentially against other sorts of writing, and a margin between law and literature constructed. Is a dictionary a work of literature, or law? One might, of course answer, neither, it belongs to some other category, reference book, and hence ideologically neutral. But it might be instructive to glance at how one dictionary-maker viewed his project. In 1789, Noah Webster published his Dissertations on the English Language; with Notes Historical and Critical, an attack on Johnson's Dictionary in explicitly legal terms.25 This same year, the United States elected its first president, formed the Supreme Court headed by Federalist author John Jay, and saw its first Congress compose twelve amendments to the Constitution popularly called the "Bill of Rights." Webster, writing in this heady, constitutionalist environment, portrayed the effects of professional arbitrators of language as devastating and undemocratic: 27 What a perverted taste, and what a singular ambition must those men possess, who, in the day light of civilization and science, and in the short period of the age, can go farther in demolishing the analogies of an elegant language, than their unlettered ancestors proceeded in centuries, amidst the accidents of savage life, and the shocks of numerous invasions. Webster is asserting a new power in the United States, shedding the language of colonization in favor of a language of sovereignty.26 He locates the voice of legitimate sovereignty in "an elegant language," as opposed to the contemporary "perverted taste" of the new "day light of civilization and science." The imputation of "singular ambition" prepares the contrast of usurpation and rebellion on which the rest of his analysis turns: The ipse dixit of a Johnson, a Garrick, or a Sheridan, has the force of law; and to contradict it, is rebellion. . . . [This] whole evil originates in a fallacy . . . that certain great men are infallible, or that their practice constitutes custom and the rule of propriety. (168) Johnson, Garrick, and Sheridan were all members of a literary club that included Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, so Webster graphs into their writings the collusive, monopolistic force of contemporary English letters. Rebellion— in its American context— seeks to restore natural and historical rights in response to the usurpation of the language by Johnson et al.27 What Posner delineates as literature, then, is a specific species of 28 writing which is given a distinctly non-performative (poetic) shape. Citing Gary Wills's Inventing America. Clifford Siskin remarks that "Literature, like America, is an invention that has obscured its own origins" (Historicity 85); I would add that literature alone was not responsible for obscuring those origins, but other discourses, in differentiating themselves from a Literature characterized by deep, imageless truth and common sensibilities and I therefore removed from the practical world of action, participate in this obscuring. Francis Jeffrey, reviewing a memoir of the French Revolution, distinguishes writing from action: "What is written may be corrected; but what is done cannot be recalled" ("Bailly's Memoirs" 1805, reprinted in Contributions 211). Both what is written and what is done, however, are textual entities: the former are works of the "philosophers" (clearly including Godwin) who are acquitted "in the crimes and miseries of the Revolution"; the latter are the guilty members of the i "Constituent Assembly of France" whose actions were a series of written laws. Within the full narrative of the review, Jeffrey reverses his dictum, because the Terror operates to recall "what is done" while the writing Jpersists in its translation into English reform. The historical accuracy of this description is less important 29 than a recognition of how Jeffrey uses implicit categories of literature and law (in the generalized forms of "writing" and "action") to construct a Whig history of progress and to position the critic as a legislator over Literature by virtue of his position in law. Posner's ruminations derive from the institution of Literature that occurred when the polemic character of romantic literary debate was lost.28 Posner's non-intentionalist view of literature leads him to write the following about excerpts from stanzas V and VIII of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood": This is magnificent poetry, although the surface meaning is absurd; six-year-olds do not have the knowledge that we spend our whole lives trying to recapture. (145). Posner's assertion as to what constitutes the "surface meaning" is already interpretive, exchanging Wordsworth's Platonic term "those truths" for the more empirical "knowledge"; this shift, from the Wordsworthian perspective, reiterates the profound forgetting that the "Ode" laments. In the same vein, Posner paraphrases "we are toiling our lives to find" as "spend our whole lives trying to recapture." Although I have reservations about the switch from Wordsworth's metaphor of labor ("toiling") to an economic metaphor of spending, Posner's work is not a bad interpretation, but it is an interpretation, not a "surface meaning." Posner acknowledges the "Ode" as "magnificent poetry," and strips it of moral power by dissociating its meaning from its magnificence.29 Posner and I agree generally that the "Ode" contemplates in the child a potential for a non- institutional existence that has already eluded us. We hear Anouilh's Antigone reminding Creon she has not said "yes" to all the banality. The surface meaning is not absurd; more precisely, poems do not have surfaces on which meaning reside, but are constituted as interpretive sites at which a variety of texts and contexts converge. James Chandler illuminates of the false dichotomy between nature and habit in the poem by regarding the Ode as "a kind of small-scale model for the Prelude" (Second Nature 79); such] i i a reading, disclosing the historically-layered intricacies of the work, suggests the limitations of a model of poetry dependent on a surface meaning. Posner's summary definition of Romanticism clarifies the dangers of his simplistic view: "Romanticism is the annihilation of the boundaries between individuals" (151). The assumption is that the boundaries, by which Posner means those boundaries of property and self maintained by law, are fundamentally untroubled. A critical reading of Romanticism, a formative period for the modern conception of the individual, however, repeatedly demonstrates the 31 dialectic between the terms Posner suggests Romanticism annihilates— boundaries and individuals.30 As Robert Langbaum has put it, the "romantic lyric . . . is both subjective and objective. The poet talks about himself by talking about an object; and he talks about an object by talking about himself" (Experience 53). For Wordsworth, this dialectic recurs in a specific sub-question: how are the boundaries between writer and reader, as interpreters of self and other, constructed? This question regards institutional power, philosophic scope, and ideological significance. Posner understands Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal" as a failed "hymn to pantheism," but suggests that if "we want to save it as an object of aesthetic value" our options include declaring that Wordsworth "intended to write a good poem rather than to spill his guts" (234). This sense of "saving" resembles an aesthetic safe deposit box that signifies value but shrouds the I valued object. His metaphor of "guts" is oddly chosen, since Wordsworth's sister Dorothy records his illnesses side by side with his efforts to write, almost as if the poetry were spilling from his guts.31 The goal, "to write a good poem," prepares for the reader who "as he lays down the book, will be able to cry out with a tranquil soul, 32 'All this is only literature'" (Sartre, What is Literature 28). Posner offers the following hypothetical situation: Imagine asking Wordsworth when he was alive whether he insisted that 150 years hence A Slumber Did Mv Spirit Seal be firmly understood as advocating pantheism, even if, as a result, people stopped reading the poem. I expect he would have answered that he was indifferent to the precise conditions for the survival of the poem for such an immensely long time. (235). This is difficult to respond to, first, because it glides from a reading that rejects Wordsworth's intended pantheism to a description of that reading as merely shifting "the precise conditions for the survival of the poem." A response is difficult, secondly, because Wordsworth did not intend "A slumber ..." as "advocating pantheism." The poem poses a difference between "earthly years" (4) and "earth's diurnal course" (7) and, as Jerome McGann points out, "These are a set of human thoughts which lie too deep for tears." At issue is not only a woman's death, but the slumber of the narrative voice and a continuity between consciousness and mystery (Romantic Ideology. 68),32 To respond in general to Posner's question, however, from Wordsworth's perspective, a poem not understood in the sense intended by the author was not the author's poem at all.33 Further, Posner posits the poet's authorizing a non-intentionalist reading, an authorization which can carry weight only from an intentionalist perspective; thus, encoded into his denial of intentionalism is a Romantic 33 assertion of the author as self-decomposing, as losing identity at the boundary of his text. This protracted response to what Posner couches as merely an example may seem to miss his point. Certainly there could be writers who prefer fame to meaning, and he might have chosen one. Perhaps Oscar Wilde.34 But the particularity of choices, for poets, judges, and critics matters. In law, the content of the formal method of stare decisis is the specific cases chosen to be on point.35 Posner selects not simply a romanticist, but one who, as Jonathan Arac writes, did more than anyone else to establish the vocation of literature in relation to which Coleridge's, and our own culture's, idea of the literary critic took shape. (Genealogies 3) For Posner, "Romanticism" is the normative critical label for literature; recognizing that the term has a specific use in literary criticism, he adds that nonetheless, the "Romantic" temperament is one of humankind's fundamental moods, reflecting the boundless egoism of early childhood and the sense of loss that accompanies growing up. (140-1) This generalization allows him to bring Homer's Odyssey. bk 14, Shakespeare's Macbeth (the character, I believe), Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Nietzsche's Failure of the Word, and Camus's The Stranger under the same rubric of works characterized by immaturity and nascent violence; "the affinity between some of Nietzsche's most strongly 34 asserted ideas and fascist ideology is unmistakable” (149)36; Camus's work ”turn[s] the moral order upside down” by "questioning the taboo against murder” (151).37 These examples stage a struggle between the potential oppression implicit in Romanticism and the "enabling" or "liberating” powers of law (152). Posner identifies a tension between romantic and legal writing, but, to valorize the latter, he avoids an accurate articulation of that tension. His choice, in Harold Bloom's terms, the misprision of a strong critic (although here strength is contiguous with judicial appointment), continues the argument between Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey, even while claiming to transcend such academic disputes into the real world of argument; or, alternatively, Posner transcends argument through the categorization of law and literature as essentially different. Similarly flawed, Posner's intentionalist reading of the Eighth Amendment leads him into a vicious circle. His investigation into the intentions of the framers reveals that: the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment was added to the Bill of Rights . . . to mollify people worried that the strong central government ordained by the Constitution might imitate the British practice of using criminal punishments to intimidate political opponents. (226) 35 Posner deduces that the courts are therefore constrained from interpreting the Eighth Amendment as prohibiting capital punishment. Such a prohibition, he maintains, would exert an unrestrained "power to regulate criminal « i punishments" (227) . Precisely what distinguishes an interpretation that would "particularize the prohibition if that became necessary" (Law and Literature 227) and judicial regulation of punishment is obscure. Stanley Fish, however, suggests that this problem is illusory, since any judge who confronts the Eighth Amendment will already be sufficiently conditioned by the institutional forces of judgeship to rule: [S]ince the operation of these forces is indeed principled, the fact that they determine (for a time) what will be thought of as "public values" is not something to be lamented, but simply a reflection of the even more basic fact that values derive from the political and social visions that are always competing with one another for control of the state's machinery. ("Fish v Fiss" 2 67) In this account, the difference between judicial regulation and interpretation is pre-determined for a judge by the institutional processes that create judges. Fish is right, in that within the legal institution, the range of debate as to what constitutes a proper legal argument is narrow and self-containing within the inertia of what Sartre has characterized as the "practico-inert.1,38 Fish's model does not imply stasis, since institutional norms do shift, so at various times both positions for and against capital 36 punishment can be derived from the Eighth Amendment. In any event, however, the argument regarding capital punishment always revolves within the re-assertion of the state's power over the body of the criminal; even in states that permit capital punishment, the number of executions are so limited as to be, from the perspective of most citizens, virtually symbolic (not a deterrent to crime, but a declaration of power39). Fish's assertion, however, that these forces operate in a principled manner depends on associating institutional procedures with principles— precisely the ideology of the legal institution which a critique of that institution must question. One approach to such a critique is to read institutions against one another, and to recognize that at stake is not only "control of the state's machinery," but the lives of those outside the institutions and subject to its force. Fish's position authorizes Posner's dismissal of Wordsworth's criticism of social institutions as "magnificent poetry." Posner's own analysis of the intent of the writers of the Eighth Amendment admits a range of intentions, none, however, supporting "a conclusion that capital punishment is unconstitutional" (224) . But if he is right that a purpose of the Eighth Amendment was to prevent the intimidation of "political opponents," then a court could find that the consistently discriminatory application of 37 the death penalty (and of incarceration) makes it unconstitutional because a racially (or economically) discriminatory application amounts to an inherently intimidating political differentiation. Thus, despite evidence that particular members of congress and state legislatures who voted for the Eighth Amendment specifically favored capital punishment, an intentionalist argument could fit either position because the chain of terms— cruel and unusual, political intimidation, racism, and intention— exceed the intentional frame because intentional beings do not constitute totalities.40 Constructional readings of documents are not solutions to legal problems, because the law, like literature, does not primarily read documents, but human beings. Every interpretation of a contract interprets the range in which human beings can agree to a concord; every interpretation of a segregation law interprets the meaning of an encounter in a school playground between a black student and a white student. W. Chambliss offers an example of a politician using the law, and specifically the category of the criminal, to group together— successfully for a time in the! public imagination— quite diverse social entities: When I talk about troublemakers, I'm talking about muggers and criminals in the streets, assassins of political leaders, draft evaders, and flag burners, campus militants, hecklers and demonstrators against candidates for public office and looters and burners of cities. 38 Not surprisingly, the writer, a lawyer, Spiro Agnew, omitted white collar crime from the list but included acts such as heckling protected by the Constitution.41 That the positioning of Romantic discourse should be I I |important to legal theorists ought to be surprising. It is not to dispel that shock that this book is devoted, but to suggest that recognizing the significance of Posner's and Dworkin's readings as acts of containment allows an understanding of the polemic dimension of Wordsworth's denial of history, not as denying facts but as always recognizing the limitations of the interpretive screens through which they were processed in becoming history. C. Outline The remainder of this introduction will outline the subsequent chapters. Antonio Gramsci has insisted that "every 'essential' social class emerging into history from a preceding economic structure" has found intellectual categories which were pre-existing and which, moreover, appeared as representatives of a historical continuity uninterrupted even by the most complicated and radical changes in social and political forms. (Selected Writings 251) In Chapter Two, The Word Made Real: Eighteenth Century Professionals. I demonstrate how several eighteenth-century works engage both law and aesthetic theory as a consequence of the conditions in which these texts were produced. 39 Joseph Addison uses the Spectator to create the persona of the professional writer as an observer, whose observation itself constitutes a critical participation in society. David Hume's essays reflect and exploit the market economy in which they circulate. William Blackstone's systematic Crvnrtnentaries on the Laws of England present the common law as a continuous force from before the Norman Invasion, and represent the social changes thereafter from the collapse of feudalism to the rise of the market economy as the emergence of the true meaning of the common law. I turn to Wordsworth in Chapter Three, Words into Goals. From his early letters contemplating the publication of a "monthly miscellany" with William Mathews through his management of the posthumous publication of the Prelude, Wordsworth demonstrated his awareness that the interaction of law and economy had serious implications forj I the career of a poet. The series of letters to Mathews (1794) clarifies Wordsworth's view of this interaction. In particular, Wordsworth imagines the poet's movement through the economic center of England, London, as a figurative movement which can be achieved without leaving the Lake District. In contemplating his potential audience, he translates geographic terms (such as "London") into political categories subject to the moral legislation of a journal. 40 Chapter Four, Goody Blake among the Reviewers, opens a three chapter sequence considering the Lyrical Ballads. Francis Jeffrey's campaign against Wordsworth's poetry began with the first issue of the Edinburgh Review (1802), but Jeffrey's position was largely reactive, picking up the terms of the Lvrical Ballads to devalue or appropriate them. Just as Jeffrey and other influential reviewers were lawyers, the terms of literary criticism were drawn from jurisprudence, not merely because they proved convenient metaphors, but because the interpretive practices of the courts and the reviewers had similar social goals, in terms of portraying a market economy subject to precise economic regulation. Even these techniques, however, reflect Wordsworth's devaluation of criticism in the "Advertisement" to the first edition of the Lvrical Ballads, and his effort to establish a fiction of a transparent exchange of labor between reader and writer independent of the critic. The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads exploits the concept of an unmediated exchange of labor between the writer and the reader as a mode of social commentary. Specifically, "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" and the responses of the reviewers of the volume demonstrate both the opposition and the exploitation. 41 Wordsworth's influential manifesto of poetic regulation is the subject of Chapter Five, The Contractual Basis of the Lyrical Ballads: The Preface. Kurt Heinzelman has observed in The Economics of the Imagination that the Preface of 1800 "was Wordsworth's first public declaration of poetry as his profession" (202) . In reading this declaration, I will demonstrate its dual structure as both a defense (in the legal sense) and as a contract (in the economic sense). In both aspects, however, Wordsworth carefully avoids the usual protection of the courts (figured as the reviewers), and relies on a doctrine of natural or poetic regulation. The ability to slide between terms of nature and terms of poetry reworks Blackstone's movement between terms of nature and terms of law, but also contributes to a process of linguistic differentiation | l ! which divides poetic and legal language. Chapter Six, Evidentiary Poems; The Second Edition, contains extended readings of many of the Lvrical Ballads to show how they employ legal and economic metaphors and structures. The variety of poems touch on many ancillary issues, such as Wordsworth's understanding of property, contract, labor, and feudalism. This range of issues demonstrates the investigatory scope of which Wordsworth presumed poetry capable. ! 42 In Chapter Seven, The Excursion. I explore the poem which Wordsworth, and his generation, considered his most important. I will examine how the poem engages in questions of system-making, and the nature of the constructed systems. Wordsworth's understanding of property as the intersection of an act of imagination and of material reality dominates his descriptions of landscapes, and the relation of the Wanderer, a retired peddler, and the young poet enacts the idealized evolution of the economic market. The poem and the reviewers' responses, taken as a dialogue within a poetic career, reveals Wordsworth's conception of poetic jurisprudence. 43 NOTES 1. Chandler offers the following catalogue of a period Wordsworth claimed was barren of events: his involvement with the French Royalists in Orleans, with Michel Beaupuy, and with the revolutionary societies in Paris; his complicated and painful affair with Annette Vallon in Blois and their natural daughter; . . . his plan to form a radical newspaper in London with William Mathews; his friendship with William Godwin, England's most important radical theorist of the mid-1790s; not to mention his friendships with Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Thelwall, and others equally well known by 1801. (8, note omitted) 2. For a sampling of "new historical" work, see many of the reviews (and the books reviewed) in The Wordsworth Circle 19:4 (1988), most centrally, Alan Liu's review of David Simpson's Wordsworth's Historical Imagination which includes a list of the most "obvious" critics associated with "Romantic New Historicism" (180). 3. Stephen Gill points out that Wilberforce had compared Grasmere to "Rasselas's happy Valley," and Gray had called it a "little unsuspected paradise" (William Wordsworth: A Life 179, note omitted); Wordsworth perhaps had on his mind the future fame the place would achieve from the first part of The Recluse. "Home at Grasmere." In 1790, the popular writer Charlotte Smith published Ethelinde. or the Recluse of the Lake which is set in the ruined and fictitious Grasmere Abbey; Kenneth Johnston suggests Wordsworth may have derived his title for The Recluse from this work (Wordsworth and The Recluse 13). 4. In this, I follow Liu's manifesto regarding the personal psyche and its relation to social institutions: [T]he family belongs at the head of the list of prior social institutions against which the self defines itself. . . .The common strategy of such critics of psychological subjectivity [Carl Schorske, William McGrath, Mark Poster] is their insistence that there is no "self" except as it is shaped by a collective history necessitating the experience and theory of subjectivity in the first place: not a timeless or mythical family romance, then, but culture-specific genres (romance or otherwise). (Sense of History 303) 44 I would add that collective history arises itself through mechanisms of collection— comraon-law institutes, archives, heirlooms— and does not exist as a timeless or mythic history but as class-specific genres. Jean Baudrillard, calling Historical materialism the "Euclidean Geometry" of Marxist theory, provides an example: Historical materialism emerges in a society ruled by the capitalist mode, a stage of actualization knotted by contradictions connected to the mode of ! production and to the final catastrophe of the class struggle. . . . It is only in the mirror of production and history, under the double principle of indefinite accumulation (production) and dialectical continuity (history), only by the arbitrariness of the code, that our Western culture can reflect itself in the universal as the privileged moment of truth (science) or of revolution (historical materialism). (Mirror of Production 111, 114) 5. Tobias Smollet's Travels through France and Italy (1766), Thomas Gray's Travel Journal (1775), and William Gilpin's illustrated guide books (one devoted to the Lake District appeared in 1786) are only among the most famous works of the genre. Wordsworth himself contributed his Guide to the Lakes in 1810, a work David Simpson places within the picturesque tradition as a "critique of the role of urban life in the national economy and psychology [that] takes the form of a celebration of the alternative: rural subsistence" (Historical Imagination 69). 6. For a discussion of the Whig interest in the Norman Conquest, see Simmons, Reversing the Conquest. 7. E.R. Dodds suggests the complexity with which an Athenian court would have understood Oedipus' crime; it would have "acquitted" him "of murdering his father" but found him guilty of "pollution" ("On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex" 71-2). 8. Aeschylus was uniquely and legally canonized by a decree granting a chorus (guaranteeing production) to anyone wishing to produce his work. 9. To use anachronistic terms, the play establishes the original intent of the founders of the Areopagus to have it preside over murder trials and sacred issues, and thus positions the Periclean reforms as a return to historical origins. For a sketch of the Oresteia from the perspective 45 of "Revenge as Legal Prototype and Literary Genre" see Richard Posner, Law and Literature 34-8. 10. As my description of the Oresteia suggests, religion was also closely tied to law in Greek culture. In Anglo- American law, as well, law absorbs and reflects many religious norms. The oaths for witnesses, jurors, and government officials recalls this origin as part of its prefatory procedure, a procedure which, as Derrida writes of the act of constituting (writing?) a preface, invokes the teleological: The pre of the preface makes the future present, represents it, draws it closer, breathes it in, and in going ahead of it puts it ahead. The pre reduces the future to the form of manifest presence. ("Outwork" Dissemination 7) Recent legal theorists have explored the relation between religious hermeneutics and legal interpretation. In "Comparative Normative Hermeneutics," Ronald Garet observes that: There is much less in common in what Catholicism and constitutionalism understand than in how they understand it. (134, italics mine) Robert Cover locates legal interpretation within a field of sets of narratives like the Bible that are "world- maintaining" : Stories relating the travail of siblings who are unambiguously eponymous suggest the war of neighbors. If Jacob is Israel and Esau is Edom, there is an implicit correspondence between private law norm of familial succession— rendered problematic by the divine hand of destiny (aided by human deceit)— and an "international" law regulating relations among those who have long been well settled and those who are self- proclaimed wanderers or newcomers. ("Nomos and Narrative," 22) From the Derridean perspective, the structure of this analysis lays out clearly pairs of complements in their dominant and supplemental forms (Israel and Edom, settled and wandering). To further Cover's narrative, the most important supplemental reversal would be precisely within the phrase in which he recognizes the mechanism of the "problematic": why not human deceit aided by the divine hand of destiny? See Derrida, "From/Of the Supplement of the Source: The Theory of Writing" Of Grammatoloav 269-316. 11. As with the French Revolution, it depends on one's institutional perspective whether the crisis is what the movement responds to, or is the movement itself. Roberto 46 Unger opens his manifesto The Critical Legal Studies Movement with a criticism of notions of property, contract, and constitutional law. On the last, he writes: The development of constitutional law and constitutional theory throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries tells a similar story [to that of contract and property] of the discovery of indeterminacy through generalization. This discovery was directly connected with its private law analogue. The doctrines of protected constitutional interests and of legitimate ends of state action were the chief devices for defining the intrinsic legal- institutional structure of the scheme of ordered liberty. They could not be made coherent in form and precise in implication without freezing into place, in a way that the real politics of the republic would never tolerate, a particular set of ideals between the national government and organized groups. Legitimate ends and protected interests exploded into too many contradictory implications; like contract and property theory, they provided in the end no more than retrospective glosses on decisions that had to be reached on quite different grounds. (7) Unger situates Critical Legal Studies (CLS) against two "ofi the most influential and symptomatic legal theories in j America today": [ The law and economics school has chiefly served the political right; the rights and principles school, the liberal center. (12) The language of this debate is vitriolic in proportion to the stakes each side feels at issue. Unger on law and economics: Such are the sophistries by which the law and economics school pretends to discover both the real basis for the overall evolution of the legal order and the relevant standard by which to criticize occasional departures of that order from its alleged vocation. (12-3) On law professors generally: Having failed to persuade themselves of all but the most equivocal versions of the inherited creed, they nevertheless clung to its implications and brazenly advertised their own failure as the triumph of worldly wisdom over intellectual and political enthusiasm . . . When we came, they were like a priesthood that has lost their faith and kept their jobs. They stood in tedious embarrassment before cold altars. But we turned 47 away from t h o s e a l t a r s , and fo u n d t h e m in d 's o p p o r t u n it y in t h e h e a r t ' s r e v e n g e . (1 1 9 ) This rhetoric is not difficult to attack within a profession in which mediation and moderation are the mechanisms of power and the marks of intellect. William lEwald responds, cleverly reappropriating the term I"Critical" in the title, "Unger's Philosophy: A Critical Legal Study" of his "resolutely non-political" "discussion" (673) : Of course, the ability to make breathtaking claims is not enough: You also have to support them. And here the details matter. It is the details, after all, that make the difference between the thrills of the astrologer and the more austere excitement of the astronomer, or between the claims of The National Enquirer and those of The Washington Post. (680). As an analysis of The National Enquirer and The Washington Post would show, it is not only the details that matter, but the details of what constitutes a detail. On Unger's contention that "Logic is the product of Liberal Society," Ewald states: Unger's argument in this passage has little to recommend it . . . he is marching into battle against a theory nobody ever held, a straw-person, and he is marching without the benefit of any knowledge of elementary logic. (690-1) On Unger's comments on war and revolution, especially as he imagines "third world" readers misconstruing it: His strident rhetoric is, to say the least, injudicious, and one wishes he had done more to temper the militant aspects of his theory. (752) These claims have serious institutional agendas; as Cornel West points out, Battles over decisions not to hire or give tenure to scholars associated with CLS have been front page news in the academic community. ("CLS and a Liberal Critic" 757) 12. Michael Moore proposes a "practical thesis about the right way of interpreting texts": [L]ook to the ordinary meanings of words, using a realist theory of meaning and not either of the two conventionalist theories of meaning; treat statutory definitions as having no more dignity than ordinary definitions are given on a realist theory of meaning. ("Natural Law Theory" 396-7) As an example of the deconstructive objection to this statement, in what sense can the "ordinary meaning[s]" of "look" and "dignity" be applied to this sentence without 48 already implying that law is open to inspection and worthy of veneration in advance of a critical analysis? Moore's use of "look" and "ordinary meaning" suggests a Wordsworthian ideal of a poet (who is, after all, essentially a man) who looks steadily, contemplates deeply, and then represents the 'real language of men.' But as Foucault has demonstrated (and I believe Wordsworth knew), the glance itself is never neutral, but disciplinary. 13. To make my own sympathies explicit, I would like to clear up a mis-reading of deconstruction that has been taken up partly by CLS and mostly by the opponents in an effort to stigmatize the movement, the charge of nihilism. D.C. Hoy offers this modest version: Deconstruction infers from the collapse of the ideal of absolute justification that no justification is possible. ("Interpreting the Law" 169) This description contradicts the Derridean position maintaining that the collapse of absolute justification makes justification itself possible, but that all justifications engage supplementation, marginalization, and other rhetorical and institutional procedures. Derrida has put this explicitly in Limited Inc (157), but this quotation is from the earlier Dissemination: One must then, in a single gesture, but doubled, read and write. And that person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this point (du coup! would feel himself authorized merely to add on; that is, to add any old thing. He would add nothing: the seam wouldn't hold. Reciprocally, he who through "methodological prudence," "norms of objectivity," or "safeguards of knowledge would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the "not serious" as in the "serious." ("Plato's Pharmacy" 64.) This engaged reading, the equivalent to the non-absolute justifications presumably rejected by deconstruction, is purely textual but not merely textual; that is, in its pure textuality, it is engaged utterly: This is the protocol indispensable to any reelaboration of the problem of "ideology," of the specific inscription of each text (this time in the narrowest regional sense of the term) within the fields commonly referred to as fields of "real" causality (history, economics, politics, sexuality, etc.) ("Outwork" 43) Hoy further argues against deconstruction that A theory of interpretation concluding that undecidability is inevitable is by reductio shown to be wrong. Since it could not decide the truth- values of its own claims, it could not exclude contradictory principles, and thus refutes itself. ("Interpreting the Law" 171) This statement would be true only if the theory of ;interpretation accepts reductio as a determining method jwhich operates somehow uncontaminated by the system in which it adjudicates, that it operates without supplementation. Reductio itself as a formal method depends on the ability of imagining, in some sense at least, not-P to demonstrate P. Further, whether any interpretive theory can exclude a priori contradictory principles or "decide the truth-values of its own claims" remains a matter of contention. 14. Posner extends this argument to quash the idea that judicial opinions might be read as literature: [T]he legal mind is insensitive to the imagery of language. This point is illustrated by the standard legal cliche for the abortion cases "Roe rv Wade) and its progeny."(Law and Literature 3 09) The implication of Posner's statement is that the right to have an abortion is antithetical to the production of progeny. He could as easily have shown that this "standard legal cliche" was a witty way of enforcing the point that the right of abortion, to the extent that it contributes to the empowerment of women, contributes to the formation of child-bearing families. 15. See Stanley Fish's "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Loathing in Literary Studies" in Doing What Comes Naturally and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature 248-52. 16. In "The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding," Paul Brest makes a similar point regarding American values: It has been said that the written Constitution lies at the core of the American "civil religion." Not only judges and other public officials, but the citizenry at large habitually invoke the Constitution to justify and criticize judicial decisions and government conduct. (94) 17. To prevent over-emphasizing Bakhtin's attention to legal and legislative voices, I quote the omitted section: . . . or the dry business language of the City, or the dealings of speculators, or the pedantic speech of scholars, or the high epic style, or 50 Biblical style, or the style of the hypocritical moral sermon . . . 18. Georg Lukacs credits Scott with the invention of the historical novel: Scott's historical novel is the direct continuation of the great realistic social novel of the eighteenth century . . . Yet his work, in comparison to theirs, signifies something entirely new . . . Scott, by disclosing the actual conditions of life, the actual growing crisis in people's lives, depicts all the popular life which lead up to the historical crisis he has represented. (The Historical Novel 31, 38) These remarks seem right, but need to be refracted through a more textual view of history itself, and the inventions of historicism in the nineteenth century, especially as influenced by the "historical novel" (on this, see Clare Simmons, Reversing the Conquest). If Scott's crises are historical, their solutions are contemporary and interpretable only through a reconciliation of the contemporary with the historical. In Ivanhoe. for example, that reconciliation is not integration, but replacement. The climax is the trial for the life of Rebecca which ends with a wage of battle that never really happens (especially in contrast to the earlier elaborate mock-battles in the tournaments). The psychically-torn Bois-Guilbert falls dead from his horse after the first harmless pass. Psychology replaces the divine intervention, or rather, becomes its homologous agency, and this replacement itself has its homology in the history of wage of battle, described in detail by Blackstone and long obsolete until invoked in 1817, two years before both its abolition and the appearance of Ivanhoe (Potter, 314). Scott's introduction of 1830 augments the historical displacement by revealing that the name Ivanhoe came from "A rhyme recording three names of the manors forfeited by the ancestor of the celebrated Hampden, for striking the Black Prince a blow with his racket, when they quarrelled at tennis" (537), thus providing a mock wage-of-battle as enabling precedent. 19. This fictional frame is complicated in the later edition by an authorial voice that reveals a variety of sources, both public and private, and ends on this disjunction: We have only to add, that the death of the unfortunate bridegroom by a fall from horseback, has been in the novel transferred to the no less unfortunate lover. (11) 51 Scott provides the means for reconstructing an "ur- narrative," but only through the interpretation of his fictionalized version. 20. The discussion between Ashton, the Lord Keeper, and his servant Norman (a typically resonant name for Scott) provides an aphorism for this conflict as one of textual ; meaning that extends to material circumstances. Early in the novel, it is in the comic mode: "I suppose," said the Keeper, smiling, "you would hardly guess what I mean were I to tell you of a condictio indebiti?" "Not I, on my saul— I guess it is some law phrase— but sue a beggar, and— your honor knows what follows— ..." (44). 21. The whole of Numbers 30, the source of the quotation, offers a countertext since, without qualification, the text states: If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth. (Num 30:2) Against this, Ravenswood breaks his vow of revenge, and both he and Lucy agree (in accord with Talmudic interpretations of the biblical passage despite what it "says") that it is right to break "a vow so fatal" (200) precisely at the moment the early vow is replaced by the betrothal; the juxtaposition prepares the problem as to what authority will interpret the vow, and already suggests that Numbers 30 is insufficient. Interestingly, Numbers 3 0 is explicit that a vow must be oral ("proceedeth out of his mouth") to be binding, and the description of the actual vow between Ravenswood and Lucy breaks from direct discourse to a narration which elides its utterance: "at length, instead of bidding her farewell, he gave his faith ; to her for ever, and received her troth in return" (198); ! only the interpretation of their words and circumstances gives the vow explicit verbalization ("by all I hold true and honorable ..." 200). 22. Ivanhoe and the Heart of Midlothian are both explicit that their endings are unsatisfactory, a result of the interpretive dilemma poised between romance and history, realism and romanticism, finally, for Scott, between the legal language of his daily life and the literary transcendence achieved only by reference to that daily language. For Scott's social context, see Graham McMaster, Scott and Society, esp. ch 3-5. For particular historico- legal references of The Bride of Lammermoor. see P.D. 52 Garside, "Union and The Bride of Lammermoor." For Scott's role in shaping (and typifying) the 19th-century novel within the economic phenomenon of the gentrification of Scotland, see Kathryn Sutherland, "Fictional Economies: Adam Smith, Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century Novel." 23. See below, chapter two, section C. 24. Posner explains: A legal intentionalist holds that what you are trying to do in reading a statute or the Constitution is to figure out from the words, the structure, the background, and any other available information how the legislators whose votes were necessary for enactment would probably have answered your question of statutory interpretation if it had occurred to them. (Law and Literature 218, footnote omitted) Why only the subgroup of legislators— "whose votes were necessary for enactment"— rather than the entire legislature is problematic, as are the issues of, first, what it means that the legislative body failed to, or chose not to, consider "your question" and what you should do if you decide that the legislature's having to answer the particular interpretive question would have caused the failure of the bill. Frederick Schauer, "An Essay on Constitutional Language," attacks the notion that "just as legal language is different in kind from ordinary language, constitutional! language may be different from other legal languages" ! (134). Schauer proposes that "Constitutional interpretations can change because the linguistic conventions and presuppositions change, even though the words remain the same" (153) . This point is supplemented with the observation that "Constitutional interpretations," because of the powerful institutional position held by the Supreme Court, alter linguistic conventions. 25. In 1807, Webster wrote a prolonged attack on Johnson's philology in a letter to David Ramsey, and followed it up in his introduction to his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). 26. Kernan has described located this sovereignty in "Print Logic": In time, simple usefulness acquired an aura of authority as, for example, permanent records began to be printed, accurate information conveyed in newspapers, and the society's privileged texts— legal, sacred, instructional— stabilized and 53 stored in print. Gradually this kind of authority grew into the authenticity that is probably the absolute mark of print culture, a generally accepted view that what is printed is true, or at least truer than any other type of record. (Printing Technology 48-9) Further, modern print is organized into a hierarchy of jauthority— large city newspapers are more reliable than ismall ones, hardcover books more serious than paperback. I 27. An interesting contrast to Webster's anti-colonialism can be found in the British Bee, a periodical journal founded in 1790, whose expansionist view of its audience mimicked Britain's increasing markets: Nor does the editor confine his views to Britain alone. The world at large he considers as the proper theatre for literary improvements...British traders are now to be found in all nations on the globe; and the English language begins to be studied as highly useful in every country. By means of the universal intercourse which that trade occasions, and the general utility of this language, he hopes to be able to establish a mutual exchange of knowledge, and to effect a friendly literary intercourse among all nations. (quoted in Klancher, Reading Audiences. 25) The egalitarian view of knowledge as mutual exchange is confined by the medium of that exchange— proper English. 28. Posner's own program describes the emergence of ideas into history as a function of economics: Ideas are a useful good produced in enormous quantity in a highly competitive market. The marketplace of ideas of which Holmes wrote is a fact, not merely a figure of speech. This marketplace determines the "truth" of ideas, other than purely deductive propositions such as the Pythagorean theorem. When we say that an idea (the earth revolves around the sun) is correct, we mean that all or most of the knowledgeable consumers have accepted ("bought") it. (Economic Analysis of Law 627) While declaring the factual existence of the marketplace, Posner discloses the thresholds of its maintenance qua I factual when he reifies "purely deductive propositions" and limits the market to the "knowledgeable," a term of class- allegiance that obscures the disciplinary procedures for achieving that classification. Factuality, like Literature, is a generic category, a feature of which is to obscure its origins in genre. Posner duplicates Jeffrey's 54 work in presenting a factual existence which, logically, can exist only as an idea within the very market which must continually adjudicate it. This contradiction is managed, however, through the legal discipline that regulates ideas. 29. In a corollary case, Posner distinguishes our expectations of poets from jurists: The difference between a poet, such as Blake, and a law professor, such as Robin West, is that we do not require the poet to show us how to get from where we are to where in his imaginative vision he wants us to be. (203) One can easily imagine Blake's response: his poetry does provide exactly that information, and the refusal of conservative power structures to read his work is symptomatic of the repressive social ills against which he wrote. See especially "The First Book of Urizen." 30. Thomas McFarland has articulated this dialectic in his study of "The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth," ch 1 Forms of Ruin. 31. Alan Liu demonstrates how Dorothy's letter describing Wordsworth's work on the "Ruined Cottage" (in the midst of transcribing the poem) corresponds to the poet's progress in the poem as he makes his difficult way until he reaches an easy plateau: William was very unwell last week, oppressed with languor, and weakness. He is better now. (quoted in Liu, Sense of History 332) For another example of the conscious understanding in which writing is an act of the body, consider the view De Quincey presents of himself in his Confessions. 32. McGann identifies "A slumber . . . " as a quintessentially romantic work, a miniature which illustrates that Amidst the tottering structures of early nineteenth-century Europe, poetry asserted the integrity of the biosphere and the inner, spiritual self, both of which were believed to transcend the age's troubling doctrinal conflicts and ideological shifts . . . Ecological Nature is the locus of what is stable and orderly, and it is related to Imagination as a set of vital hieroglyphs is related to an interpretive key. (67-8, 69) The debate on what Wordsworth's position vis a vis pantheism is exemplified by Cleanth Brooks's expression of "agonized shock . . . at the girl's falling back into the 55 clutter of things" and F.W. Bateson's delight in the poem's "pantheistic magnificence" (both quoted in Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Formalism: Chickens and Rocks" 221); Michaels converts this debate into a problem of intention: If we agree that [Wordsworth's saying] "I am a pantheist" meant that Wordsworth was indeed pantheistic, then our dispute over the meaning he attached to the word rock will be at an end. (223) This observation is correct provided we remain in the critical grooves ground out by Brooks and Bateson, rather than turning to the more salient questions such as, if Wordsworth was a pantheist and his skill at polemic poetry had been developed as early as the Salisbury Plain poems (1793), why does the poem not advocate pantheism in any way recognizable to an audience which Wordsworth knew was reluctant to understand pantheism, but instead use imagery making it harder? why "rocks and stones" instead of "rocks and birds"? By shifting to the level of ideology, a relation between the interpretive procedures of critics like Brooks and Bateson and Michaels and the poem they interpret begins to emerge. The depth of that critical groove is apparent from another perspective: why is "I am a pantheist" the relevant Wordsworthian statement; why not, "I am a geologist," or, to quote from the Lvrical Ballads, I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ("Tintern Abbey" 94-6)? 33. His effort to form his reading public, especially his posthumous one, is persuasively delineated by Jon Klancher, Reading Audiences 150. For Wordsworth's irritation at being misunderstood, see his response to Sara Hutchinson's understanding of "The Leech-gatherer" (LEY 366, 14 June 1802). 34. Imagining this possibility makes clear the importance of the specific choice. Leo Braudy observes that "Wilde's plunge toward a visible publicity inseparable from self- destruction foretells our century's preoccupation with the artist as self-styled (and actual) victim" (The Frenzy of Renown 581). To discuss Wilde is to discuss sodomy as well as "art for art's sake" as a creed in the late Victorian period. It is to confront an aesthetic, both serious and ironic, that says both in Wilde's voice and that of his character Vivian (who in "The Decay of Lying" is writing an article called "The Decay of Lying"): "Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of 56 facts. . . . All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals" (991-2). 35. See David Kairys, "Legal Reasoning" 12-13 for an explication of stare decisis in free-speech issues. 36. Arguing for the merits of Blackstone over Bentham, the latter's utilitarianism being a vigorous ideological competitor with romanticism (see Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age 2-25), Posner again invokes the specter of fascism: Bentham's assault on traditional language, and the traditional habits of thought encapsulated in it, prefigured the totalitarian assault on language by Newspeak, Hitler, and the Soviet press . . . [one 15-word sentence omitted] He toved with the idea of having everyone's name tattooed on his body to facilitate criminal law enforcement. ("Blackstone and Bentham" 599, italics mine) 37. Having written in 1942 that the "one truly philosophical problem" is "suicide" fMvth of Sisyphus 3), Camus, in 1951, offers this explanation of murder, an act he considers both horrifying and significant: [S]uicide was the problem then. Ideology today is concerned only with the denial of other human beings, who alone bear the responsibility for deceit. It is then that we kill. Each day at dawn, assassins in judges' robes slip into some cell: murder is the problem today. (The Rebel 4-5) 38. The embodiment of past praxis. the practico-inert is encountered when subjectivity "appears, in all its abstraction, as the verdict which compels us to carry out, freely and through ourselves, the sentence that a 'developing' society has pronounced upon us and which defines us a priori in our being" ^Dialectical Reason 71). 39. The commandment, "Thou shall not commit murder," (Exodus 20:13) functions similarly within the narrative of Exodus. God, not the Israelites, kills the Egyptians, and Moses' "smiting'3 of an Egyptian (Exodus 2:13-4) is taken as an act of judgment, albeit unauthorized from the Egyptian perspective. The "law" of the commandment is not prior to a social practice of not killing, but is part of the self reflexive way law legitimizes itself. The social practice of abstaining from killing is appropriated to the state, and melded into other practices that are new or contested. 57 40. Posner admits that no original intent, in the form of a consensus of the lawmakers, existed regarding the Eighth Amendment; instead, the ambiguity of the writing allows an illusion of consensus that the courts exploit (and invent). In literary terms, the intentionalist reading constructs an ahistorical implied author who "writes" a text suitable for the desired interpretation. Courts, as political entities, have profound reasons not to conclude that crime is a political activity and criminal enforcement therefore discriminatory, and I do not expect most readers, implicitly committed to a liberal agenda against violence by their very understanding of history, to find the argument convincing. My point is that it can be derived from an intentionalist perspective. 41. Quoted in W. Chambliss, "Toward a Radical Criminology" 232. Chambliss queries the extent to which this "law and order" ideology continues to inhabit American law, politics, and cultural attitudes. 58 Chapter Two The Word Made Real; Eiqhteenth-Centurv Professionals Although all periods of English Literature would reveal self-conscious authors who manipulated the institutions in which they operated, the form of self- consciousness itself is shaped within historical contexts. The eighteenth century, the focus of this chapter, saw the rise of the professional writer, a person whose livelihood came from publishing and who was committed to certain ideological positions by virtue of that dependence. Such a person could arise only in the context of semi-permeable discourses such as the law which, as it moved towards being a textual production, insisted on its transcendence of that status and its essential alignment with an oral tradition. As Pocock remarks, "the concept of English politics we find in Burke is directly connected with the fact that common-law records were assumed to be declarations of an immemorial ius non scriptum" ("Time, Institutions, and Actions" 255). This representation, in the context of increasing reliance on written negotiable instruments and contracts, I 59 required an ideological mechanism to mediate the contradictions, and it was this industry that the professional writer undertook. Although what follows will clarify and complicate a definition of the professional, two components need to be foregrounded. First, modern professions, Magali Sarfatti Larson contends, are a typical product of the "great transformation." They emerge, thus, as the age- old foundations of status are being destroyed by the twin processes of urbanization and industrialization . . . [T]he increasingly complex social division of labor opens new roles at the top of the ladder. (Professionalism 76) More precisely, the professions were both a "typical product" and a typical producer of the transformation. The career of the professional provided, as Larson notes, "a pattern of organization of the self" (229) , but this pattern was itself the work performed, and hence produced, by the professional. The self, considered as a product, required institutional mechanisms for maintaining itself distinct from the individual body; the materials necessary for textual circulation allowed the incorporation of writers into Authors and, on the consuming side, the transformation of people into a public hungry for pamphlets, legal reports, sermons, and other encoded professional selves. Secondly, professions were (and are) characterized by speech which is at once 60 the description of their labor and the labor itself. When an observer in 1680 noted that "It has now come to a | Civil War, not with the sword, but law" (quoted in ! Michael Landon, Triumph of the Lawyers 101), he was confirming, among other political realities, the power legal speech had acquired. This was the power the eighteenth-century professional writers sought to I replicate. A. Specters of the Spectator For Joseph Addison, the great popularizer of John Locke's philosophy, "the three great professions" were "Divinity, Law and Physic" (Spectator. March 1711). Silently, by the operation of the Spectator, he adds another, that of the writer. Throughout the Spectator, other professions provide both models and subject matter, but always subsumed into what might be called the meta profession of word production. The first episode concerning the Spectator is truncated in a Shandyesque way that anticipates his career: There runs a Story in the Family, that when my Mother was gone with Child of me about three Months, she dreamt that she was brought to Bed of a Judge: Whether this might proceed from a Law suit which was then depending [i.e., pending] in the Family, or my Father's being a Justice of the Peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged any Dignity that I should arrive at in my future Life, though that was the 61 Interpretation which the Neighborhood put upon it. (No. 1, Essays 141) The fairy-tale beginning, exploiting the slipperiness between story and history, wavers between a pseudo biography and a small myth. No claim for truth is made, j except the fact of the story's being told ("There runs a | story ..."), a claim validated by its appearance in The Spectator. The communal interpretation of the Spectator's birth awaits its fulfillment in his literary birth within the larger serial community of subscribers and readers. The doubling of the father as party to a I suit and Justice of the Peace locates him as object and j as interpreter of law, and points the Spectator towards a ! professional career (a mark of "Dignity"), likely in the law. The narrative, however, never reveals a career, but j paints a man capable of infinite circulation and observation. He is "frequently seen in most publick Places," although "not above half a dozen of my select Friends" know him (143). He is chameleon in aspect: "I have been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the Assembly of Stock-Jobbers at Jonathan's." Although an observer, he fits in, reproducing without disrupting the economic and social sites of human interaction. His fictitious circulation mimics the circulation of The Spectator and provides an ordering principle for 62 society duplicated in the subscription procedures to the magazine. The Spectator's silent absorption in his j surroundings constitutes the empirical gathering of information that results in the Spectator. yet the Spectator itself, as the vehicle of his speaking, is associated with the polite society of his club, the site where that data is interpreted and transformed into maxims: [W]here-ever I see a Cluster of People I always mix with them, though I never open my Lips but at my own Club. (143) As his public silence becomes the occasion for written communication (144), the club acquires indeterminate scope. The first issue ends: [T]ho' our club meets only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. we have appointed a Committee to sit every Night, for the Inspection of all such Papers as may contribute to the Advancement of the Public Weal. (145) "Spectator, No. 2" opens, "The first of our Society is a Gentleman of Worcestershire" (146). Letters are inspected for possible inclusion in the new magazine, but this aesthetic standard is equated with the "Advancement of the Public Weal"; the metaphor of "sitting" situates the Committee as judges taking writs under consideration. The potentially equal exchange between contributors and Spectator becomes a hierarchy of letters grafted onto a legalistic social structure. As the Club expands its 63 meeting times, the Spectator's shifts terms from "Club" to "Society." Like Chaucer opening his "General Prologue" with the Knight, Addison puts the Baronet, Sir Roger de Coverly first; but where Chaucer moves next to I the Knight's son, the Spectator places "a Member of the i Inner-Temple" as "The Gentleman next in Esteem and Authority among us" (147-8). This gesture does not replace family order with social rank, but recognizes that they no longer coincide. The right of inheritance has given place to the legal structure which authorizes inheritance. A "Merchant" having "natural unaffected Eloquence" and the doubly punning name of "Freeport" is next (148-9). This is not the Chaucerian hierarchy which orders and encompasses the entire world through a structure of resemblances; membership proper ends with an aristocrat, the gallant "Will. Honeycomb" (150), and adds "A Clergyman, a very Philosophic Man," who, since he seldom visits, cannot be certainly "account[ed]" "one of our Company" (151-2). Professions are located at both the center and margins of a society framed by aristocrats. In Spectator 10, the Spectator calculates his audience. According to his publisher, three thousand papers are distributed daily: [I]f I allow Twenty Readers to every paper, . . . I may reckon about Threescore thousand Disciples 64 in London and Westminster, who I hope will take care to distinguish themselves from the thoughtless Herd of their ignorant and unattentive Brethren. (158) Like the magazine itself, the individual papers circulate j and define its audience in "clubs and assemblies, at tea tables and in coffeehouses" (159). This vast audience remains able to distinguish itself from a mass audience by its intellect, the unspoken sign of which is the passing, hand to hand, of the Spectator. The written text retains the oral character of face-to-face transmission by virtue of the permeable status of one reader as both consumer and transmitter. The Spectator recognizes that the value of his journal is formed by its audience, and by the ability of that audience, taken as individuals, to read each other; hence, the intimate yet public sites of reading that recall the Spectator's own club.1 The term "Disciple" indicates both an educational purpose of the Spectator (separating it from partisan pamphlets which "naturally conduce to inflame Hatreds, and make Enmities irreconcileable") and a sense of hierarchical order which readership conceptually demands. The Spectator names several distinct audiences for which his work would be appropriate; "well-regulated Families" (159); "the Blanks of Society" who need news to relay in conversation (160); and "the Female World," the most "gentle" readers (160-1). Each of these audiences shares 65 some feature with the Spectator, such as the regulation of the family, the ability to convert information into conversation, or gentleness. The Spectator names another audience "whom I cannot but consider as my good Brothers and Allies," those who "have no other Business with the i rest of Mankind, but to look upon them" (159-60). Of the four named audiences, he delineates only this last with specificity: Under this class of men are comprehended all contemplative tradesmen, titular physicians, fellows of the Royal Society, Templars that are not given to be contentious, and statesmen that are out of business. (160) This list approximates the members of the club, with certain displacements. These descriptions mark out the modern professions— the tradesman who operates through contemplation rather than action, the lawyer who reads the Spectator in the Inner Temple rather than contending, the statesmen awaiting a turn in the government. Unlike the Spectator, these are not pure observers, but men positioned as observers who may return to the fray of their occupations. Their inactivity is, like the Spectator's, strategic and professional, but it is less perfect because its value is deferred rather than simultaneous to the inactivity. These "Brothers" are metaphorically related to the "Brethren" who do not read the Spectator? thus, Addison reinforces his hierarchy of 66 disciples by creating a familial arrangement that subsumes those who do not read his work. As such, the writer is placed first among the professions, and professions are privileged among the range of occupations. The Spectator's non-career is precisely the career of the 18th century man-of-letters, and the text insists on the literal aspect of a man composed of letters.2 The Spectator, still in the introductory number, comments that he has given the Reader just so much of my History and Character, as to let him see I am not altogether j unqualified for the Business I have undertaken. I (144) | He reserves "other Particulars" of his life to create a j coherence in the subsequent numbers, and he hopes finally j I "to Print my self out, if possible, before I die." This is the experiment, and on its results hangs the question of whether writing can adequately represent the society in which it functions. Coded letters indicating authorship for each issue emphasize the emblematic nature of the Spectator (including the anagrammatic possibilities in C-L-I-0 that point to Addison): under his sign, various identities gather and organize, yet within the secret codes of letters the individuals reveal themselves. To repose the Spectator's task, can he (without dying prematurely) 67 reveal himself powerfully enough to regulate the ideological and economic markets in which he circulates? 1 One device of replenishment of which the Spectator avails I | himself is the use of correspondence, occasionally genuine and often fictitious. In Spectator. No. 271. he observes I receive a double Advantage from the Letters of my Correspondents; first, as they shew me which of my Papers are most acceptable to them, and in the next place, as they furnish me with Materials for new Speculations. These advantages insist on a two-way exchange, but one directed by the overseeing Addison who decides what to print.3 — • - JttPftL- Changeless Aljterations | My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that law was a proper profession for me; but I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning. — David Hume, "My Own Life" xviii. The careers of David Hume and William Blackstone reiterate Jerome Christensen's description of the man-of- j i letters as a writer who "projects" his body of writing in a symbolic practice, a career, that exploited, facilitated, and epitomized the operations of the commercial society which it persuasively represented. (Practicing Enliahtenment 4) The economic dimensions of the careers of these writers were contingent on a continual engagement with concepts 68 of law. In this sense, Addison was a crucial precursor and William Wordsworth, publishing his Lyrical Ballads on the verge of the eighteenth century, an important follower. The next sections examine several of Hume's essays and the totalizing efforts of Blackstone's Commentaries. The contexts— historical, social, and literary— and the texts of these works are poised in a complex relation, as they strive to interpret a society that interprets them. i. Professions aim to represent to a society its own structure as acceptable, even desirable, and as dependent for stability on the profession which puts forward the representation.4 Gramsci viewed the role of the intellectual as hand-maiden to a social class: Every social class, coming into existence on the original basis of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates with itself, organically, one or more groups of intellectuals who give it homogeneity and consciousness of its function not only in the economic sphere but in the social and political field as well. ("Formation" 118) 5 This formulation accepts a necessary material priority of the empowered class over the intellectual, because, for G ra m sci, d i s c o u r s e su c h a s la w a lw a y s assum ed t h e r o l e o f legitimizing the discontinuities of power into a social continuum. But the "essential function" of a social class itself is an interpretive act. While professional 69 classes provided legitimacy through constructions such as property, mental illness, and aesthetics, they also provided the means for shifts in power by creating the very lacks which could be filled by new "essential functions.1 ,6 Certain eighteenth-century figures fill the ancillary ideological role for a rising property class by arguing for the value of a market economy per se. Adam Smith, an admirer of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, lectured on law and ethics as Chair of Logic at Glasgow University before producing The Wealth of Nations (1776), the fifth book of which makes an extended argument for the legislation and regulation of a laissez-faire marketplace.7 When ideologists such as Smith used a principle of self-interest to liberate the new property class from tradition, that same principle allowed their own works to circulate within the markets they were defining and to construct their own intellectual labor as an economic force. In this manner, individual professions accumulate capital not only within the market, but as the outlines of the market. Their class interests are poised between the property owner and the laborer. The development of the market depended on the development of lack as a constitutive element of the market, and thus demanded that individuals seek, rather 70 than adequate subsistence, unchecked gain. Hume grasped the literary possibilities of such a market; he realized that lack could be construed as the difference between the actual and the desired, and could be articulated as a presence within the human psyche and within society: As man of letters, it is Hume's office to create that lack in others and in himself. It is the singularity of the Enlightenment man of letters that his lack of anything in particular is the condition of his art of the general, of his ability to form by affiliation a class that could reasonably hope to dominate not by virtue of a God-given right or a historically sanctioned prerogative but by means of a refined and refining prose. (Christensen, Practicing Enlicrhtenment 4) This refined prose, however, had to be deployed through notions of right and prerogative, through an allegiance to the King who was the basis of copyright law, and through an expressed loyalty to the wealthy merchant class who could physically produce and circulate that prose. In essence, the exchange of prose for currency had to be articulated in the prose as an exchange of presences. When contrasted with the materiality of traditional barter exchange, the exchange of money and print switched one symbol for another, both denoting lack; money was the sign of materials sold, print the mark of an absent (most often anonymous author) whose speech was already said and often quieted (gallows confessions were among the most popular pamphlets). 71 Traditionally, money was invoked to exchange with a stranger (Polanyi, Great Transformation 58), so the prose had also to readjust the symbolism of money, to resituate its transparency as something at the heart of all human exchange, not only of those marginal exchanges in surplus markets. How to discuss lack, while concealing its I presence in the very discourse, was a problem Hume J devoted his career to solving.8 The "process” of Hume's career constituted his solution to this problem; "the man of letters' practice was 'maintained at at [sic] a continuous present by various devices of repetition'" (Christensen, Enliqhtenment 12 quoting Northrop Frye). The repetitions epitomized human behavior; the typical Hume essay presents a political point, demonstrates its truth, and then, not as a demonstration of truth but rather of continuity, provides historical examples of the same problem in previous cultures, most frequently the Roman and Athenian empires. In 1752, the year he was appointed Keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, Hume published a collection entitled Essays. Moral. Political, and Literary. Part Two as a supplement to a volume of the same title published in 1742. Despite the casual title, the fourteen essays of this volume (some previously published) form a sustained argument for the inevitable 72 stability of the market economy as mediated by the law. Entailed in the rhetorical stance of such an argument is, j paradoxically, the conclusion that there is no need to t \ i make it; that is, the constitution is self-reliant. Hume recognizes that this claim of self-reliance is fictitious, and he chooses the rhetorical stance of , indifference, reminiscent of the Spectator's remote objectivity, to suggest inevitability. The first nine essays concern the development of commerce, and address such topics as money,9 taxes,10 and the relation of the balance of trade to the balance of power in Europe. Hume constantly proposes equalities and correspondences: decrying public credit, he asks For why should the case be so different between the public and the individual, as to make us establish different maxims for both? (361) He interrupts these economic reflections with an essay entitled "Of some Remarkable Customs" which he introduces with a seemingly clear thesis: I shall observe three remarkable customs in three celebrated governments; and shall conclude from the whole, that all general maxims in politics ought to be established with great caution; and that irregular and extraordinary appearances are frequently discovered in the moral, as well as in the physical world. (374) The three historical examples are from Athens, Rome, and England. In the first two cases, a bizarre law is examined and in each instance of its application, the 73 result accords with the British Constitution. The essay demonstrates, rather than its stated thesis, the regularity despite "extraordinary appearances" by which the constitution is identifiable. The Athenian I j government had an "indictment of illegality" which, i according to Hume, provided that any one proposing a law could be held legally liable for consequences detrimental to the state if the law was enacted. To demonstrate that "nothing was more commonly practiced," Hume provides three examples. In each case, however, the proposer of the law is acquitted— by a speech. Thus, that which appeared to infringe free speech provides a public forum for speech, including one "sublime piece of eloquence [by Demosthenes defending Ctesiphon for a law bestowing honors on Demosthenes], that has ever since been the admiration of mankind" (375-6). The law, Hume concludes, was deemed necessary in the Athenian democracy because all citizens voted with impunity and it was necessary "at least, to check their demagogues and counsellours." Hume portrays the Athenian democracy as a competitive marketplace of speech, and the liability is equivalent to legal checks on the English free-market economy which ultimately strengthen the market. Hume's second example is "two equal wheels, which govern the same political machine, without any mutual 74 check, controul, or subordination” (377). In the Roman republic, both the comitia centuriati and comitia tributa had absolute legislative powers, including the capability of "totally annihilateing] its rival," yet there is "No instance of a quarrel between these two legislatures." The economics of power within the republic maintains the balance of power between them. The centuriati might prevail "by intrigue, by influence, by money, by combination, and by the respect paid to their character"; the tributa had the power of "numbers and force" (378). i The government "naturally" reflects its power base, and duplicates the balance in the English constitution without the juridical basis.1 1 The final test case for the workings of the Roman government is an orator. Cicero was banished by the tributa and recalled by the centuriati but the conflict was illusory: But his banishment, we may observe, never was considered as a legal deed, arising from the free choice and inclination of the people. It was always ascribed to the violence alone of Clodius, and to the disorders introduced by him into the | government. (379) Although the distinctions between the orator and the man- of-letters are critical,12 a degree of Hume's cultural empowerment comes from his associations with the oratory tradition (the knowledge of which "Remarkable Customs" exploits). The figure of Cicero in this example clarifies the relation of the houses of government, and I „ _ _ , I 75 determines the presence of a wider sphere of legality, since, even without juridical check, the tributa1s action could be "considered [not] a legal deed." As in the previous example, the stasis reflected in the British i constitution is achieved despite laws apparently to the contrary by the presence of a sufficient voice. This I j voice, translated into an economy dominated by print and monetary exchange, is the writing of the man-of-letters. Hume's third example is deliberately more difficult to interpret, breaking the pattern of beginning with a clear statement of the unusual custom. Instead, after noting that the final example from England is "not so important" as the first two, Hume proposes the following maxim as "undisputed and universal": [A] power, however great, when granted by law to an eminent magistrate, is not so dangerous to liberty, as an authority, however inconsiderable, which he acquires from violence and usurpation. For besides that the law always limits every power which it bestows, the very receiving it as a concession establishes the authority whence it is derived, and preserves the harmony of the constitution. (379-80) Law is conceived as a system independent of the individual laws which incorporate power. It is, consequently, self-regulating in the procedure of its empowerment: the king, empowered by the constitution, will not destroy that constitution. These sentences move from a general principle to a specific protection of the 76 British constitution as a harmonious structure that generates general principles. Hume cites Hampden's refusal to pay a minuscule tax that did not originate in parliament to demonstrate the "care of all English patriots to guard against the first encroachments of the crown." The violation of this maxim, the third remarkable custom, is "the pressing of seamen."13 The "exercise of an irregular power is here tacitly permitted in the crown" because parliament has discovered no "safe expedient" by which to make it legal. Its illegal status confines impressment to sailors, and prevents its being so regulated as to lose effectiveness. In a typically Humean paradox, the "irregularity of the practice, at present, prevents its abuses, by affording so easy a remedy against them." In this formulation, law is not the sole regulator of behavior, as extralegal activities are both possible and necessary, but it is the inevitable horizon which checks the abuses of such activities.14 A balance of power is maintained not legally, but ideologically through the prominence of the concept of liberty. Finally, legal justice itself is problematized, only partially recouped by the concept of a justice maintained by a competitive market of ideas; the essay ends ambiguously: The wild state of nature is renewed, in one of the most civilised societies of mankind: And a 77 great violence and disorder are committed with impunity; while the one party pleads obedience to the supreme magistrate, the other the sanction of fundamental laws. (381) Hume slides from a specific problem, limited enough in scope that "sailors . . . are alone affected by it" to the debate between Whigs and Tories as to the foundation of power. These examples have both shown the difficulty in establishing rules of political dogma and suggested the limited relevance of any particular rule in the face of the general tendency of a society. At the same time, they have established the writer's ability to investigate that general tendency by locating it within constitutional norms. As Christensen observes, Hume's ability to abstract particular arguments into general representations characterizes his productions. Boswell's Johnson would have agreed. Regarding Adam Smith, he observes that "a man who has never been engaged in trade may undoubtedly write well upon trade, and there is nothing that requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does" (Life 682-3). Johnson argues that traders in the market have too limited a perspective, where the philosopher may have "extensive views." In the same paragraph, Johnson comments that Blackstone "had not been much in practice when he published his Commentaries." The general point 78 is that the understanding of trade and law is derived from a vantage point that allows abstraction. For most professionals, word production was, arguably, secondary to the announced tasks of curing a patient or winning a law suit, although payment was rarely contingent on results. For the professional writer, however, the production of words was both the means and ends of his activity. The professional writer hovers between worker and owner, in that while he produced an object for sale like a worker, he simultaneously produced a property, a copyright, his possession of which was unaltered by sales of the written object. The distinctions between work and text, book and copyright, represent the critical and legal institutionalization of the peculiar status of the professional writer; the value of his ownership is not in the possession but the dispersion of his property. To put it in the terms of market economics, the subsistence production of a writer was simultaneously a surplus production because, since the labor of the writer was a commodity fictionalized by the writing, the writing, as a commodity, continued to duplicate the labor through its dispersement. Hume excelled in the management of such a career, and provided a model for the professional writers galvanized by the French Revolution. 79 C. William Blackstone My purpose in this section is not to explore Blackstone and his Commentaries from his position as a lawyer, nor to assess the accuracy or ideological underpinnings of his work.15 Blackstone and his legal enterprise, however, can be located within the context of the professional man-of-letters and the literary marketplace. To this end, I will explore two aspects of his Commentaries; in part 1, its deliberate use of aesthetics as part of its science, and, in part 2, the way in which its confrontation with copyright is self- referential and masks underlying contradictions regarding the status of property. 1. The Aesthetics of the Commentaries There in a winding, close retreat, Is Justice doomed to fix her seat; There, fenced by bulwarks of the law, She keeps the wondering world at awe; And there from vulgar sight retired, Like eastern queens is much admired Oh let me pierce the secret shade, Where dwells the venerable maidi . . . Observe how parts with parts unite In one harmonious rule of right; See countless wheels distinctly tend By various laws to one great end. So wrote William Blackstone in 1742, the year he left Oxford for the Middle Temple and a career in law and jurisprudence. Appropriately, he fixed in a poem of tight couplets and architectural metaphor that vision of order— an order both of a secreted aristocracy and of a L 80 complex, mechanical machinery— which his lectures would realize for the students of English common law until well into the reign of Queen Victoria.16 He had not, however, been successful in his legal practice during the seven years between being called to the bar in 1746 and retiring to Oxford. During his tenure as Vinerian lecturer, by contrast, he had the pleasures of refusing | the positions of serjeant-at-law in Chief Justice i Willes's court and chief justice of the Irish Court of Common Pleas; he did, however, accept the post of solicitor-general to the Queen, and announced that position on the title page of his Commentaries just beneath his title as Vinerian Professor of Law. He spent the ten years until his death in 1780 as a judge of the Common Pleas, while his Commentaries continued through j new reissues. In the sense that his personal and political strength derived from the deployment of his lectures, initially given privately and then institutionalized by the Vinerian bequest to Oxford, he is the legal profession's version of the Humean man-of-letters, and his literary legacy far outlasted him.17 Between his death and the publication of Serjeant Stephen's Commentaries on the Laws of England; Partly founded on Blackstone (actually an extensive rewriting of Blackstone) in 1849, fifteen 81 editions were printed, including one edited by John Taylor Coleridge who observed that the work appears "in the light of a national property" (Holdsworth XII 715). Mansfield, among other judges, praised it from the bench, I and Edward Gibbon reports having read it three times.18 I Blackstone's aesthetic approach to law— demonstrating its harmony, order, and beauty— can be viewed within the literary context of an aesthetic ideology which appropriates monarchical enthusiasm by a writer to an analogous enthusiasm for that writer. In demonstrating the nobility and order of law, Blackstone was defining for the lawyer a right to police that nobility and order, while indicating a loyalty to the aristocratic class that provided the empirical basis of nobility. Pope introduced his essay on criticism with the need for some regulation of the increasingly unmanageable literary marketplace, in which bad poets spawn bad critics who in turn commit the worse offense of "mis-lead[ing] our Sense" (4). His solution was a return to a kind of nature: Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd. Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd r Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd By the same Laws which first herself ordain'd. (88-91) The vision is of a self-regulating system of aesthetics which used nature as both its model and source.19 82 Blackstone had similarly invoked nature as the horizon for all law, but again, a nature methodized. Reiterating his opening comments, Blackstone begins volume III by reasserting that municipal law was 'a rule of civic conduct, prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right, and prohibiting what is wrong* From hence therefore it followed, that the primary objects of the law are the establishment of rights, and the prohibition of wrongs. (Ill 1) To command what is right and prohibit what is wrong depends upon pre-existing categories of right and wrong derived from nature; yet read with a different emphasis, the command and prohibitions bring the categories of right and wrong into being. This second characterization is, for Blackstone, simultaneously true and false with respect to God. Being omnipotent, God "was able unquestionably to have prescribed whatever laws he pleased to his creature, man, however unjust or severe." But having infinite wisdom, "he has laid down only such laws as were founded in those relations of justice, that existed in the nature of things antecedent to any positive precept" (I 40). In this formulation, justice seems to exist independently of God, but is, through his wisdom, incorporated into law— the strict definition of which, "a rule of action" (I 38), does not entail justice. 83 As God instantiates justice in natural law, custom instantiates justice in human law. Only the imperfections of humanity mar this perpetual symmetry, yet even regarding these, law— an incorporate being— can mitigate the injury by supplementing. As Duncan Kennedy has suggested, Blackstone's effort at a totalizing ! representation shapes the structure of the Commentaries. j but it also operates at local levels. For example, Blackstone lays out the "three great relations in private life" and adds a fourth in recognition of mortality: 1. That of master and servant: which is founded in convenience, whereby a man is directed to call in the assistance of others, where his own skill and labour will not be sufficient to answer the cares incumbent upon him. 2. That of husband and wife; which is founded in nature, but modified by civil society: the one directing man to continue and multiply his species, the other prescribing the manner in which that natural impulse must be confined and regulated. 3. That of parent and child, which is consequential to that of marriage, being it's principal end and design: and it is by virtue of this relation that infants are protected, maintained, and educated. But, since parents . . . may be snatched away by death or otherwise, before they have completed their duty, the law has therefore provided a fourth relation; 4. That of guardian and ward, which is a kind of artificial parentage, in order to supply the deficiency, whenever it happens, of the natural. Of all of these relations in their order [i.e., in successive chapters]. (I 410) Each relationship has two components, a substantial one encasing what is actually performed and a procedural one directing how that performance is to occur. The description of each relationship invests a hierarchical 84 power in one party and implies the ability of the relationship, as a legal entity, to check the abuse of that power. The net effect is to entwine nature and society by the correspondence of human interaction and i f j legal categories. In the first case, the relationship of i ] servant and master is freely chosen based purely on convenience, but the necessity of that convenience arises from the disparity between a man's "skill and labour" and the "cares incumbent upon him"; both the substantial and procedural components are socially derived, with nature as merely the horizon of society itself. Since the j source of incumbent cares are the relationships (social j obligations) into which the man has entered, society j regulates the relation of servant and master for the | I mutual benefit of all. Blackstone portrays the master as ! requiring the servant, and therefore obligated to enter j into a contractual relationship.20 The great advance of j English law over Roman law in this respect is the refusal to recognize slavery as a legitimate relationship (I 411) .21 The second relationship, between husband and wife, modifies a bond found in nature just as the phrase "continue and multiply" modifies "be fruitful and multiply." The balance is between a natural substantial component and a social procedural regulation. The 85 implications are that society checks the masculine impulses towards infidelity by securing the man’s power as master of the family. The third relationship begins with a natural procedure, while its substance— education and maintenance— is social. Further, this relation, as the end of marriage, regulates the previous one, and a structure which interrelates the relationships is thereby determined. For a matrix of substance and procedure to be complete, all that is needed is a relationship which is "natural" in both dimensions, but that would be— by definition— beyond the scope of human law and already present as its historical origin. What Blackstone substitutes is a purely social "artificial" relation, between guardian and ward, to supplement the deficiency "of the natural [parentage]" This purely social relation mediates the harm of a purely natural one— the relation of man to his master [God] as a structure of mortality— and consequently completes the range of possible "private oeconomical relations," a class which itself supplements and analogizes "the public relations of magistrate and people" (I 410). The completeness of this schema, and others presented through the Commentaries.22 operates to legitimate the national character of common law, despite the historical 86 reality that local customs often conflicted especially with regard to trading practices. Blackstone names his subject the "science of law," which was "committed to his charge to be cultivated, methodized and explained" (I 4). His initial definition of law presses the analogy between his work and Newton's: Law . . . signifies a rule of action . . . Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. (I 38) Blackstone does not mention Newton, but ascribes the laws of the Princioia to "the supreme being." The issue of whether a law is descriptive or prescriptive is carefully elided here, and the Humean resort to human nature provides the context for that elision. A rock cannot choose to disobey gravity, while a man can decide to export wool contrary to statute (I 43). But a human being cannot commit murder and remain human; rather, he becomes criminal and only through confession and penance (generally death) is his humanity restored. Since man is naturally a social creature, however, the implicit agreement to follow the laws that construct society compels obedience to the statute forbidding the export of wool. The distinction between murder and exporting wool is one of attitude: one may elect to export wool and take the punishment, without committing a wrong act; but, even 87 in accepting punishment, murder is not justified since the punishment only approximates divine retribution.23 Such distinctions have margins determined by social norms. Male homosexuality is a crime, "the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature," the capital punishment of which is derived from the destruction of Sodom (IV 215-6). With regard to rape, while common law is distinguished from civil law in that the former recognizes that "a concubine or a harlot" could be raped, the rules of evidence require that the chastity of the woman (her "good fame") determines the reliability of her evidence (when not otherwise supported, which was usually, in rape case). In civil law, the woman is deemed to have forfeited that which the rapist took from her and so no crime is possible; in the case of common law, the raped prostitute is deemed to have forfeited the trust of the community. At such margins, the apologetic aspect of Blackstone's work and the service to which his aesthetic principles are directed become apparent. He does not challenge the basic outlines of his society, but rather projects the law as the embodiment of those outlines. 88 2 . C o p y i n g P r o p e r t y i . John Locke, in his famous definition of property, lays the groundwork for the conjunction of conceptual right and material object by linking them through labor: Though the Earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This, no body has any Right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the Work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his own property. (Second Treatise on Government. "Of Property") Locke's language reconciles two moments in Genesis, God's grant of dominion over the earth and the punishment that "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" (3:19). Locke makes God's punishment the occasion for the individual's assertion of his rights over the earth. In such a system, negotiable instruments were merely a convenience, not a property; the distinction did not trouble Locke's presentation since he did not envision a debtor society.24 For Blackstone, this scheme was both adequate and inadequate. Property was itself a paradoxical notion in that it was the mediating term between the state, which expressed its power by its regulation of property, and 89 the people, which expressed its freedom by its control of property. The foundation of property, consequently, was both in nature and in the state.25 The state of property law when Blackstone wrote was confusing, in part because the state was creating new properties and in part because natural law theorists were unable to account for the alienability of property, the newly-foregrounded aspect that made commerce possible. Blackstone's own account suggests something of this confusion: Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title; . . . We think it enough that our title is derived by the grant of the former proprietor; . . . not caring to reflect that (accurately and strictly speaking) there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon a parchment should convey the dominion of land. (II 2)26 The role of writing in the structure of property is significant, and ultimately Blackstone grafts the paradoxical nature of property onto the relation between stable texts— such as the Bible and the laws of England, those documents with royal copyrights protected in perpetuity— and those transitory texts which circulate in the market under the protection of the copyright statute of 1709. This is not Blackstone's only strategy, but to consider professional writers, it is the most crucial.27 Blackstone's first citation to establish property rights is Genesis: 90 In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful creator gave to man "dominion over all the earth; and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." [note; "Gen. I. 28."] The actual King James text reads: "Be fruitful and i multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea," and so on as Blackstone quotes. His alteration locates the earth itself as subject to man's dominion, which is not strictly equivalent to the command to subdue it. By doing so, Blackstone increases the parallel structure of the passage, and asserts an equivalency between the various dominions. This move is important since land is the most important property, the foundation for many other properties, especially those socially derived such as rents and sureties. This one text "is the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things" but it does not explain the acquisition of specific property rights by individuals. These rights evolved as social roles became more specialized; without them, "Otherwise innumerable tumults must have arisen, and the good order of the world been continually broken and disturbed" (II 4). Blackstone cites both Isaac's interest in Abraham's well (Gen 26:15ff) and the division of Canaan and Jordan between Abraham and Lot by occupation as examples of 91 early rules of property regulation. The subsequent history of property rights develops through the increasing power of written instruments. What was to be done with new modes of property that derived obviously only from social structure, such as rents and sureties? Blackstone invoked the traditional division between corporeal and incorporeal properties, but insisted that in the case of an incorporeal hereditament, the actual value resided in the corporeal object from which it derived.28 For example, the rent- income derived from the value of the land, and more generally, the civil powers to create property derived from the natural ones. The concept of copyright, however, posed a problem to this formulation which can be viewed as a formalized distinction between work and text, between the book and the prose in it. The marketplace, both through selling practices and literary criticism, reversed the priority of corporeal and incorporeal. The law, as much as the printing press and the roads, allowed the (re)producibility of an author's labor, but the value of the work necessarily derived from the text.29 Blackstone had to use that priority, because the Bible itself— a text which necessarily preceded any particular work that inscribed it— was the foundation of property rights; in other 92 words, at the heart of the relation between corporeal and incorporeal is an inversion of the hierarchy.30 Furthermore, copyrights did not behave as property generally did. Ownership, as Locke had pointed out, is I j perpetual, and ends only on the transferring of the i property or the death of the owner. But for a work circulating in the literary market, this condition does not apply. The transferring of the individual book does not end, but reinforces, the ownership of the non- corporeal text; and the value of that text, then, is determined by these transfers. By creating statutory limits on copyright, the '"Act for the Encouragement of Learning" (8 Anne 19) attempted to stabilize the concept of text— a necessary procedure to prove the invasion of a copyright. The title of the act is suggestive: it is not for the benefit of the author but for that of the state that the statute is created. Blackstone, as a consequence, argues that at common law, copyright was perpetual even though there existed no specific means of enforcement beyond the limits of 8 Anne 19. This meant that while a literary property was perpetual, only those in fact held by the crown— laws and translations of the Bible— were protected perpetually. At the same time, the crown perpetually owned the basis of property law, the Bible. 93 One consequence of these tensions between temporal limitation and perpetuity, between natural and social origins, between statute and common law, between corporeal and non-corporeal was that the appearance of a text/work itself in the legally-composed free market was i J an ideological act with respect to the market. If the : rules of copyright insure a privileged position to legal reproduction as perpetually in copyright, they also entailed privileging linguistic reproduction itself as the safeguard of the market. The possibility of writing t I which represented itself as the market's primary i discourse was implicit in this paradox, and provided the j basis for the professional writers of the romantic j periodical industry. The conversion of a work of writing j i into a property positioned writing to protect property j I interests by the continual duplication of properties, in J the form of works, dependent upon the properties of I texts, just as property itself, as a corporeal object, I was the imaginative creation of the laws of England, j which were then subsumed into their own textuality in the publication of Blackstone's Commentaries. 94 NOTES 1. Just as the audience is expected to distinguish itself, the Spectator undertakes to distinguish itself: Sir Francis Bacon observes, that a well-written Book, compared with its Rivals and Antagonists, is like Moses1s Serpent, that immediately swallow'd up and devoured those of the Aegyptians. I shall not be so vain as to think, that where the Spectator appears, the other publick Prints will vanish . . . (159) 2. See Jerome Christensen, Coleridge1s Blessed Machine of | Language. (163) for the analysis of Coleridge as a man of letters that provides the suggestion that the metaphor can be taken and meant literally. 3. Jon Klancher, who quotes the above sentence in Reading Audiences. observes that as 18th-century journals multiplied, they registered the increasingly heterogeneous play of sociolects— the discourses of emerging professions, conflicting social spheres, men and women, the cultivated middle-class audience, and less sophisticated readerships. (20) For Addison's articulation of an explicit relation between the social audience of polite society and the legal institution of the Assize, see Spectator 122 (20 July 1710); for his desire for "Superintendents" of the English language equivalent to the "several Persons whose Business it is to watch over our Laws, our Liberties and Commerce," see Spectator 165 (8 September 1710). 4. "The American Bar Association in its Code of Professional Responsibility describes as a basic ethical duty of lawyers the promotion of 'respect for the law."' Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith 54. Levinson's work is an inquiry of the hegemonic iconography the Constitution has acquired in America, but finally, his critique reverts to an effort to sustain Constitutional faith. His metaphor of a secular religion reaches an anguished formulation in his conclusion: It would be essentially misleading to attribute to constitutional faith the longevity we associate with the great religious faiths that have provided the metaphors for this book, particularly Judaism and Christianity. We might think instead of the great Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religions that today stock museums with their treasures but are otherwise dead as 95 informing visions of how we the living might structure our own lives. (193-4) 5. The quotation continues with an example: "the capitalist entrepreneur creates with himself the industrial technician." While Gramsci is concerned primarily with a Marxist critique, his observation is ; relevant to 18th-century intellectuals. ! 6. Moreover, the "world of economic production" itself is an interpretive construct whose essential nature, if currently beyond question, is equally beyond demonstration. As Jean Baudrillard argues, the "monopolistic stage [of economic development] signifies less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code" (Mirror of Production. 194). Once codes are in social play, their mastery is a matter of struggle, and the determination of the "essential" is a spoil gained by the victors. 7. Laissez-faire. as a principle, required a mystification in which juridical and legislative intrusions were experienced as internal interpretations of pre-existing material facts, without origin other than in the myths of originary social construction (of which Hobbes' savage is the prototype). Smith describes as eternal laws of human nature that were developed in recent history and were not universal even within England: What are the common wages of labour, depends every where upon the contract usually made between two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. (Wealth 74) Presented as laws not only of the market place, but of human nature (workmen desire, are disposed), each of these sentences contains historical fallacies. First, wages were not constructed by contract, but Smith wanted to claim that since they were produced analogously (i.e., by some vague consent), they were in fact contracts and thus freely chosen and subject to legal scrutiny. Second, the notion of gain or surplus was hardly the workers' motivation; they were concerned with subsistence. The origins of workers in combination, the incorporated city and the guild, was only incidentally concerned with wages; the main impulses were security for 96 labor and limited competition. In part by preventing individual laborers entering into contracts, the corporation of the guild insured labor by preventing competition from independent workers. The mixture in Smith's passage of legal language and human nature suggests a continuum between laws human beings make (contract and contract law) and those to which they i discover themselves subject (desire and disposition). 8. Coleridge, writing to William Blackwood in 1819, suggests what might have been Wordsworth's solution of marking his lack as a presence greater than other writers' productions: I may adopt the words which Mr. Wordsworth once used to Longman: 'You pay others, Sir for what they write; but you must pay me likewise for what I do not write: for it is in this [i.e. the omissions, erasures, &c] that cost me most both Time & Toil. (quoted in Ericksen, "Egoism" 43, brackets his) 9. The "oil which renders the motions of the wheels of trade more smooth and easy," (309) money is unnecessary to subsistence, but indispensable to industrialization and to the security of the government. 10. Drawing on example from Athens, Genoa, Holland, and others, Hume demonstrates the proposition that "every new tax creates a new ability in the subject to bear it" (356) has truth because increased taxes correspond to increased industriousness. Taxes provide a way for the economy, through the government, to regulate its own productivity. 11. The situation in Rome had a nearly contemporary analogue for Hume: "The struggle between the civilians [lawyers trained in civil law] and the common lawyers is well known" (Cairns, "Blackstone" 331). In this contest, Coke's decision to publish his Institutes (1628) in English and legislation replacing law French with English in the courts tipped the balance in favor of the common lawyers and set the judicial stage for Blackstone's Commentaries. On the relation of these activities to the establishment of a national legal identity, see Cairns, 330-2 and 337-9. 12. Christensen has demonstrated Cicero1s importance to Hume as a model who must be exceeded. The "orator's centrality must be a literal fact" while 97 The modern man of letters is, on the contrary, situated in the midst of a people whose very dispersion makes the actual fact of a center only a metaphor. If he is central, it is not because he resides in a territorial, institutional, or political center but because of his symbolic role and symbolizing practice. (Enliqhtenment, 126) 13. In a much disputed practice, the king asserted the unconstitutional prerogative of impressing sailors. Smollett's description of the practice, in which Roderick is wounded, robbed, and dragged bodily aboard ship (Roderick Random 1st ed., 1748; 8th ed., 1750), indicates one popular view of the matter. Blackstone, in 1765, acknowledges that The power of impressing men for the sea service by the king's commission, has been a matter of some dispute, and submitted to with great reluctance; though it hath very clearly and learnedly been shewn, by sir Michael Foster, that the practice of impressing, and granting powers to the admiralty for that purpose, is of very antient date, . . . whence he concludes it to be part of the common law. The difficulty arises from hence, that no statute has expressly declared this power to the crown, though many of them very strongly imply it. (I 406; notes omitted) | 14. The point that a person actually impressed would not find the abuses checked reveals the domain of Hume's audience. 15. To set out some of the major work of the legal historians for whom such a task is appropriate: Daniel Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941) explores how the Commentaries employed the assumptions prevalent in its day about science, religion, philosophy, history, art, and reason, to give the legal system and the values embodied in it an appearance of rationality and acceptability" (vii). Boorstin has significantly directed my reading of Blackstone; he comments on about half the quotations I cite. Cairns, "Blackstone, An English Institutist" outlines the development of the institutional genre and Blackstone's position in that genre as contribution to English nationalism. Duncan Kennedy, "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries" concentrates on the apologetic aspects of the Commentaries. specifically how the work 98 mediates the "fundamental contradiction" of liberal thought that other human beings (including the state) are both necessary and inhibiting to personal freedom (213); in particular, he argues that Blackstone*s "right/wrong distinction functioned to legitimate the 18th century legal system" (222). A. Watson, "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries." angrily chides Kennedy I (correctly) for avoiding the historical and literary context of the Commentaries but concludes naively (especially in light of Boorstin) that since Blackstone "wished to set forth a systematic exposition of English law for teaching purposes" and since "No careful scholar can, I think, deny the combined influence on Blackstone's Commentaries of the structure of Justinian's Institutes. of the tabular explanation of that by Dionysius Gothofredus, and of the structure of Hale's Analysis," "it is difficult to imagine that there was also a particular and precise ideological motivation for the structure of the Commentaries on the Laws of England" (810-12). Watson's work presents many instances (claims of objectivity, precedent as transparent and ideologically neutral, a natural "need for structure" for social interaction as if that structure were value- neutral) that Kennedy identifies as characteristic of liberal modes of denying contradiction. Richard Posner, "Blackstone and Bentham," contends that Blackstone presented law not as a speculative abstraction or a collection of rules but as a functioning social system . . . [which demonstrated] how those laws operated to achieve the economic, political, and other goals of the society. (571-2) Posner portrays this analysis as distinct from Bentham's critique of the Commentaries. but they are similar. The key difference is that Posner equates the social classes served by Blackstone*s law with society as a whole, and Bentham sees them in complete opposition. The choice by the leading proponents of the Critical Legal Studies Movement (Kennedy) and of the Law and Economics Movement (Posner) to engage Blackstone's Commentaries, despite the irrelevance of most of the law to contemporary American society suggests the ideological significance of the work, and the sides they take seem to me equally revealing. 16. He circulated a manuscript on architecture at Pembroke. 99 17. Also similar to Hume, Blackstone constructed his work as a series of repetitions, editions of his Analysis of the Laws of England appearing both before the Commentaries as an aid to his students (1756), and then after, in a revised version, reflecting the ordering in the Commentaries. 18. For a more complete biography, from which this sketch (including the excerpt of the poem), is drawn, see Holdsworth XII 702-37). 19. Against this view, Pope pits both poetic anarchy and regulation by the critic: Moderns, beware! or if you must offend Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end; Let it be seldom, and compelled by need; And have at least their precedent to plead. The critic else proceeds without remorse, Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force. (I 163-8) Pope is not discounting the rules which critics invoke, but rather the authority by which the critics, as opposed to the poets, invoke those rules. The rules, initially descriptive, have in the critics hand, taken on a prescriptive force. 20. The four types of servants— "menial," "apprentices," "labourers," and a fourth species of servants, if they may be so I called, being rather in a superior, a I ministerial, capacity; such as stewards, factors, I and bailiffs: who however the law considers as servants pro tempore, with regard to such of their acts, as affect their master's or employer's property. Which leads me to consider, II The manner in which this relation, of service, affects either the master or servant . . . (I 415) In his desire to render the range of servants complete, Blackstone pushes the concept of "servant" to the margin, and there describes a certain kind of professional, who acts as a servant with regard to property, but as an independent agent with regard to his own rights. At such a moment Blackstone equates linguistic categorization ("if they may be so called") with legal categorization ("the law considers"). Blackstone avoids describing this troublesome class, which could call his entire model into question, and instead, makes their existence the prompt to consider the influence of the relationships on its 100 participants. Rhetorically, then, these partial servants, balanced between ownership and servitude, allow the discursive description of the meaning of all relationships. i 21. Blackstone explains that a slave or negro, the instant he lands in England, becomes a freeman; that is, the law will protect him in the enjoyment of his person, his liberty, and his property. Yet, with regard to any right which the master may have acquired, by contract or the like, to the perpetual service of John or Thomas, this will remain exactly in the same state as before. (I 412-3) Because enslavement is regarded as contractual, rather than based on war or heathen status, the conversion of the servant to Christianity— which would free him as a slave in some countries— does not alter the contractual bond of perpetual service. Blackstone, in renouncing slavery, provides the means of perpetuating it as obligation. 22. Blackstone, confronted with a confusing array of courts, transforms those competing structures (and they did compete for cases and for authority) into a unity reflected in the variety of human behavior: We are now to proceed to the cognizance of private wrongs; that is, to consider in which of the vast variety of courts, mentioned in the three preceding chapters, every possible injury that can be offered to a man's person or property is certain of meeting with redress. (Ill 866). Just as Hume had argued that the illegal impressment of sailors was better than legalizing press-gangs, Blackstone turned the disdain for law shown by 18th- century juries into an "institutional mercifulness" (Boorstin 147). 23. "[D]eliberate and wilful murder; a crime at which human nature starts, and which is I believe punished almost universally throughout the world with death" (IV 194). From the context, which sense of "starts" is meant, "shudders" or "begins," is unintentionally indeterminate, since with the enmity of Cain and Abel human nature does begin and Blackstone immediately quotes "the mosaical law" (IV 194). 24. This thin sketch does no justice to Locke's complex view, but it serves as a point of departure for the 101 subsequent debate carried through other slogans of property. 25. "Thus, to justify the whole institution of property as it existed in eighteenth-century England, it was necessary to assert that property had been created not only by nature but also by civil Society" (Boorstin, Mysterious Science 169). 26. The passage continues: These enquiries, it must be owned, would be useless and even troublesome in common life. It is well if the mass of mankind will obey the laws when made, without scrutinizing too nicely into the reasons of making them. But, when law is to be considered not only as a matter of practice, but also as a rational science, it cannot be improper or useless to examine more deeply the rudiments and grounds of these positive constitutions of society. (II 2) 27. For a general analysis of his treatment of property, see Boorstin, ch 9 and Kennedy, in passim. 28. Blackstone explains that: [An Incorporeal hereditament] is not the thing corporate itself, which may consist in lands, houses, jewels, or the like; but something collateral thereto, as a rent issuing out of those lands or houses, or an office relating to those jewels. In short, as the logicians speak, corporeal hereditaments are the substance, which may be always seen, always handled : incorporeal hereditaments are but a sort of accidents, which inhere in and are supported by that substance. (II, 20) The ability to rent land increased its corporeal value and revealed that the margin between corporeal and incorporeal was necessarily fluid in order for incorporeal properties to exist whatsoever. 29. In Southey v. Sherwood and Others (1817), Lord Eldon denied a motion on behalf of Southey to prevent the publication of "Wat Tyler," an embarrassingly radical work of the Poet Laureate's youth. Eldon reasons thus: If the publication is innocent, . . . [the author] has a right to an Injunction . . . If, on the other hand, this is not an innocent publication, . . . this court will not grant an Injunction . . . . It is to prevent the use of 102 that which is the exclusive property of another, that an Injunction is granted. (2 Mer 4 37). In other words, if a publication is offensive, it does not constitute a property. While Eldon seems to be finding against the interests of the state— granting the injunction would suppress the injurious work— at a broader level he acts consistently. His ruling aims at curtailing the production of such works and at assuring that the interest of the state and the interest of property will not conflict. 30. The inverted form itself— in which the corporeal derives from the incorporeal— can be viewed as a vestige of medieval law of corporation, in which the fictive (or in the case of the King, mystical) body secured the power of the real (in the case of the King, acting) body. 103 Chapter Three The Virtual Philanthropist i. An insistence on the professional status of the poet marks William Wordsworth's career. His notion of the professional balances the poet whose work can circulate in the market economy of London against the recluse living amid the common lands of the Lake District. His |letters reveal a man who recognizes the legal complexities of an annuity, yet who experiences one as a gift to be passed on through its transformation into poetry. Such an attitude shifts between the precapitalistic notions of gift-exchange and feudalism and the exploitation of the contemporary economic markets of London. Like David Hume before him, Wordsworth strives to represent the market economy to itself in a way to facilitate both the financial and ideological success of his writing. But the market economy Wordsworth encountered could no longer be viewed as free, as internally isolated by its own regulation in the way Adam Smith had suggested. Rather, it was marked by legal (and consequently moral and ideological) inscription; this condition was not new, but was visibly emerging during the reaction to the French Revolution and the nascent formation of the English working class. Consequently, issues of law and literature, particularly regarding property, permeate Wordsworth's letters and published prose as well as his poetry, and are reflected in the responses to his work by reviewers.1 Like Addison's Spectator, an emblem of the circulating writer and the polite professional, Wordsworth ruled out the professions of law and clergy before turning to writing: What is to become of me I know not; I cannot bow down my mind to take orders, and as for the law I have neither strength of mind or constitution, to engage in that pursuit. (LEY 112, 17 Feb 1794) In this letter to Mathews, Wordsworth's lament resembles one Mathews put forward in 1791-2, and Wordsworth's reply to Mathews then responds equally well to his own quandary: The field of Letters is very extensive, and it is astonishing if we cannot find some little corner which with a little tillage will produce us enough for the necessities, nay even the comforts, of life. (LEY 76, 19 May 1792) Wordsworth use of "Letters" implies a wide network of opportunity; he recognizes publishing, editing, journalism, and poetry as continuous.2 1 0 5 William Mathews and Wordsworth had met at Cambridge, where "presumably," they "joined . . . in welcoming the events of 1789" (Roe, Radical Years 20). After leaving Cambridge, Mathews had been a teacher and in 1794 he was a resident of the Middle Temple and an experienced parliamentary reporter (LEY 48). His connections to law and education made him a good sounding-board for Wordsworth. Their correspondence demonstrates Wordsworth's awareness of the institutional situation of writers. By "institutional situation," I mean both that writers in the 1790s recognized that they wrote within institutions and that they were committed to the shaping :and reshaping of institutions. ii. In the midst of the English reaction to the French Revolution, Wordsworth and William Mathews planned a magazine designed for moral instruction and entertainment. Contemplating a journal in 1794 was a political act, one about which Dorothy assured Richard that Wordsworth was "very cautious" and "well aware of the dangers of contrary conduct" (LEY 121, 28 May 1794). The dangers to which Dorothy refers reflect not mindless oppression by a ruling class, but the government's accurate assessment of the periodical industry as a competing producer of value. Magazines circulated in a 1 0 6 literary marketplace based on aristocratic values yet representing itself as a universalizing, and sometimes democratizing, force. Johnson's Rambler, like his Dictionary, mediated these conflicting impulses, and other eighteenth-century periodicals also confronted the contradiction. Using the Edinburgh Bee as a model, Jon Klancher has shown that the democratic "exchange" of reading and writing depends on a hierarchical notion of the public, implying an intricate social chain of "ranks," "gradations," and "degrees." The social text of periodical writing thus joins two dissonant orders: inside the text, a communal, democratic exchange; outside the text, a hierarchically ranked world. (Reading Audiences 23) In the 1790s, any periodical would necessarily reinterpret the confrontation between aristocratic and universalizing impulses. Since writers were now conceived of as professionals, periodicals could no longer imagine readers and writers as interchangeable. The effort to maintain an interchangeability, a vestige of the polite society of the Spectator, became a radical act, as E. P. Thompson's analysis of the London Corresponding Society shows. The first leading rule of the Society, which began in early 1792, was "That the number of our Members be unlimited," and the first task, assigned to Thomas Hardy, was the purchasing of paper "for the purpose of corresponding with like-minded groups in the country" (Working Class. 1 07 19). For the Corresponding Societies, correspondence authorized its potentially unlimited membership to represent itself in government. Within six months, 2000 "Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Mechanics" had joined; the required oath was an affirmative answer to this question: Are you thoroughly persuaded that the welfare of these kingdoms require that every adult person, in possession of his reason, and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament? (quoted in Working Class. 19) Even here, some power was reserved for the legal and medical institutions to disqualify persons from voting— but the law could act only on the basis of criminality. This was a radical reinterpretation of the social investment in law. For Hume, for Blackstone, as well as for his proponent Burke, criminality was possible only within a society governed by property relations, relations that universal suffrage potentially undercut.3 In 1792, the Corresponding Societies found a new task, the circulation of Paine's The Rights of Man. The utopia envisioned by Paine did not abolish property, but subsumed it into a social text at odds with Blackstone's Constitutionalism. The controlling metaphors shifted in significance. Where property established rights for Blackstone, rights establish property for Paine. Further, the rights of the state, which Blackstone and Burke considered so vital that they 1 0 8 overrode all other interests except those of property .itself, were derivative of the individual's rights. Paine draws implications for the nature of the judiciary: A man, by natural right, has a right to judge in his own cause, and so far as the right of mind is concerned he never surrenders it; but what avails it him to judge if he has not power to redress? He therefore deposits his right in the common stock of society and takes the arm of society, of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing. Every man is proprietor in society and draws on the capital as a matter of right. The right of judgment, in this model, is not reserved to the government, but attaches to any institution sufficiently transparent to express the will of t individuals. Continuing his attack against Burke in the Preface of Part Two, Paine positions competing interpretations as both a question of debate and of institutional power: •If,' says he [Burke], 'such writing [as Part I of Rights of Man) shall be thought to deserve any other refutation than that of criminal justice.' Pardoning the pun, it must be criminal justice indeed that should condemn a work as a substitute for not being able to refute it. (155) Paine's pun was not so easily pardoned; he was condemned for the publication of the work, and his trial is well regarded as a sustained, though hostile, interpretation of his work. It is at the threshold of political action that the extent of legal interpretive strategies become evident, precisely in their opposition to other 1 0 9 interpretive institutions. Included in such institutions were the radical journals and corresponding societies, but also the economic marketplace from which the notion of "common stock" derives. This point is particularly important in terms of Paine's understanding of economics: All the great laws of society are laws of nature. Those of trade and commerce, whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals, or of nations, are laws of mutual and reciprocal interest. They are followed and obeyed, because it is in the interest of the parties to do so, and not on account of any formal laws their government may impose or interpose. (165) Despite its similar diction, this position is radically opposed to Blackstone's concept that human law derives from natural law, and what is at stake in the difference is how natural law is to be made apparent. For Blackstone, the people consulted the constitution and the constitution's interpreters, the courts and government. For Paine, these were the institutions which prevented free exchange, and the obligation of awakening the people (and defining the economic marketplace) belonged to writers. Thompson lays out Paine's conception: "The Rights of Man and the Wealth of Nations should supplement and nourish each other" (Working Class 105)? attacking Burke's championship of chartered monopolies, Paine writes that if "Mr. Burke possessed similar talents to the author of 'On the Wealth of Nations', he would have 1 1 0 comprehended all the parts which enter into, and, by assemblage, form a constitution" (75). Despite the aid that the Corresponding Societies gave Paine's work, on this point, they were in a sharp, although nearly hidden disagreement. The Corresponding Societies had attempted to preserve the interchange of audience and author in the very act of correspondence. Paine's work, however, was directed at readers who would consume it, wrap children's sweetmeats in it, break its binding to carry it in their pockets. While the Corresponding Societies envisioned an unlimited membership, their growth was effectively curtailed both by legal actions and by the limits of the old style of reader/writer exchange. Paine's audience was an anonymous multitude that found its identity in The Rights of Man. Wordsworth, in contemplating a journal, had to think about questions of audience and content as inexorably linked, and further understood his own position as a professional, albeit unestablished, poet as tied into these questions. William Galperin, borrowing terms from Charles Rzepka's The Self as Mind, accepts that Wordsworth was "constitutionally in need of an Other" both as audience and as reflection of his self, but insists that in his "'professional' disposition" Ill Wordsworth "was able as a poet to satisfy that need immediately" in the imagining of his audience (Revision 67). This "immediacy," however, is an illusion of earlier modes of literary production in which the imaginative creation of the audience is sustained through the relatively unhampered dispersal of the text, as in the case of the Spectator. Writing in the double mode of being a potential poet and a potential radical in 1794, Wordsworth formulated a notion of audience against a complex background of the treason trials and suspension of habeas corpus. as well as a public debate regarding the true forms of justice and government. More generally, this notion was formulated by asking what historical audiences remained available to the writer after the Reign of Terror in France, the English government's crackdowns on the Corresponding Societies, and the eruption of competing pamphlets. The dominant positions of these pamphlets were staked out by Paine's Rights of Man and Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The activities both of writers and of the government radicalized positions. Thomas Erskine, in considering The Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France, locates the origin of the war as the "first Royal Proclamation against Seditious Writings on 21 May 1792": 1 1 2 The proclamation had unquestionably for its object to spread the alarm against French principles; and . . . all principles were considered French by his majesty's ministers which questioned the infallibility of their own government . . . The spirit which became prevalent about this time, which bore down everything before it, and prepared the nation for war, was an absolute horror of everything connected with France . . . It confounded the casual intemperance of an enlarged and warm zeal for the freedom and happiness of mankind with a tendency to universal anarchy. (quoted in Roe, Radical Years. 119) Erskine's position was a milder expression, and more historically situated version, of Godwin's arguments favoring open debate over libel laws; "From the collision ■of disagreeing accounts, justice and reason will be produced" (Political Justice. 598). Godwin reverses the juridical relation between the market of ideas and the courts. In the liberal formulation, the courts protect and judge the market; in Godwin's position, the disclosure of truth by the collision of ideas provides the standards of justice. The current "injurious interference of political institutions" reserves judgment for easily corrupted courts, forces the anonymous appearance of publications, which makes assessing them more difficult, and provides an institutional excuse for insincerity (Political Justice 599-600). Godwin's argument at the time and Erskine's retrospective analysis both suggest that the market of ideas thoroughly shaped the ideas which could circulate in it.4 1 1 3 i i i . Wordsworth's letter of 23 May 1794 (LEY 118-120) to Mathews is the first on the subject of starting a journal.5 He frames the letter by recognizing two difficulties of writing. It opens "I am sorry I did not receive your1s of the 11th till yesterday, as I certainly should have answered it sooner,"6 and it ends with the post-script "This pen and ink are so bad, I can scarce write with them at all." The implication is that Mathew's efforts to read the poor ink are matched by, and originate with, Wordsworth's problem of writing with it. The letter announces Wordsworth's confidence in overcoming both problems— circulation of the mails and the material impediments to producing words— not only in his personal correspondence, of which this letter itself is an example, but also in professional dealings, into which future writing could transform the letter. Finally, the structure of the letter makes the distinction between the personal and the professional murky. The first paragraph, an exordium of mutual admiration, begins this process. It ends thus: I assure you it would give me great pleasure to cultivate your friendship in person, but I really cannot on any account venture to London unless upon the certainty of a regular income. (LEY 118) Although this sentence is perhaps mere civility, its arrangement underscores a division which Wordsworth 1 1 4 intends to contain within his writing. The play of the country image of "cultivate," surrounded by humanizing words such as "pleasure" and "friendship" against the economic metaphor of "venture" enforced by "account" and "income" suggests the differences between the local economy of the Lake district and the national economy of London. The next paragraph, however, notes that while London is expensive, Whitehaven is not free and he "must do something to maintain" himself "even in this country." Economic necessity creates a continuum between London and Whitehaven which can then authorize other connections. Wordsworth uses this point as a transition into considering the "monthly miscellany from which some emolument might be drawn." What appeared personal takes on a professional edge, but one which guarantees the value of Wordsworth's personal contribution to the project in lieu of money. This discussion of money has a counterpart which ends the letter proper, creating a kind of inner and more elaborate frame than the one on the difficulties of writing. After a discussion of morality and audience, to which I will return shortly, Wordsworth discusses the publication of his poems, again both from a personal and a professional perspective mediated by money: I am at present nearly quite at leisure, so that with industry I think I can perform my share. I 1 1 5 say nearly at leisure, for I am not quite so as I am correcting and considerably adding to those poems which I published in your absence [An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches!. (LEY 120) In discussing the correction of his work, Wordsworth shows his skill at rhetorical precision; his repetitions of "nearly" and "quite" create a sentence suggesting a leisure devoid of slothfulness and characterized by the same industriousness needed for the success of the venture Mathews and Wordsworth are considering. Simultaneously, he places the poems in relation to his audience ("in your absence"), which allows him to make a typically Wordsworthian confession: It was with great reluctance I huddled up those two works and sent them into the world in so imperfect a state. But as I had done nothing by which to distinguish myself at the university, I thought these little things might show I could do something. This disclaimer anticipates both the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads calling the poems "experiments" and the Preface to The Excursion apologizing for publishing a fragmentary work. The need for public validation, expressed here in a sophomoric tone,7 is ambivalent partly because it has two distinct, and often contradictory, measures— the profit made through sales and the reviews. Wordsworth discounts the latter, and validates the former: They [the poems] have been treated with unmerited contempt by some of the periodical publications, 1 1 6 and others have spoken in higher terms of them than they deserve. I have another poem written last summer ready for the press, though I certainly should not publish it unless I hoped to derive from it some pecuniary recompence. The grammar of these sentences is interesting. The first, chiasmic in structure, suspends the reviews on either side of the poem's actual merit— something Wordsworth apparently knows but discloses only as the negation of the reviewers' opinions. The force of the "should" of the second sentence seems double, first, the conditional sense that only if he can anticipate a profit will he publish, but second, a moral obligation to publish only what will be profitable. This position, that the market ought not be burdened by unprofitable ventures which deplete its overall effectiveness, echoes Adam Smith, and justifies the increasing regulation of the market to keep it operating freely. The contradiction, for Wordsworth, as for Adam Smith, is only apparent; the market itself would, in due time, rid itself of unprofitable ventures, but such regulation (whether by law or, as Wordsworth here suggests, by personal morality) enhances that market operation. Paine's observation that the government itself was a profit-draining venture (Rights 236-39) would suggest the superiority of Wordsworth's method to legislative control. Wordsworth's attitude towards money here, both in refusing to publish except for "some pecuniary recompense" and in hoping that "some emolument might be drawn" from the proposed miscellany, hangs between two eighteenth-century attitudes towards writing for money. Hume wrote to Strahan a "general rule" that "no good book was ever wrote for money" (Letters of David Hume 285); Boswell's Johnson declared that "no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" (Life of Johnson. 731). Presumably neither Hume nor Boswell's Johnson would have defended their positions staunchly against the easily compiled counter-examples, but their comments reflect attitudes about the relationship between money and meaning that Wordsworth confronted throughout his career. Hume, who was rich from his writing when Strahan quoted his sentiments back to him and who had always driven hard bargains with his booksellers, clearly wrote for money, but he understood money— or wished to represent it— as the transparent sign of ideological sway in the marketplace; he received money because his works did their work in the market, not because he wrote for money. Boswell's Johnson, by contrast, did write for money, having, according to Strahan, written Rasselas so that "with the profits he might defray the expence of his mother's funeral, and pay some little debts which she had left" (Life of Johnson. 240); nonetheless, the theme of Rasselas. as Boswell distinguishes it from Candide in the next paragraph, was, "by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal" (Life of Johnson 242), a gloss which minimizes the meaning of the funeral and temporal debts. Boswell further deflects the meaning of Johnson's writing for money by the metaphor describing his own reading of Rasselas: The fund of thinking which this work contains is such, that almost every sentence of it may furnish a subject of long meditation. (Life of Johnson 242) The work is a depository of value, and the money Johnson received for it— immediately passed on in the fulfillment of filial duty— reflects a fraction of the value imparted to the reader. Like Hume, Boswell's Johnson writes for other things by writing for money, and their remarks reflect a difference in emphasis on the relation between money as representation and money as object, money as symbol of value and as a commodity possessing value (See Polanyi, Great Transformation, ch 16). Wordsworth inherits this tradition, declaring his intentions to make money by writing and simultaneously contextualizing that desire by insisting that the public good will accrue a value in proportion to his own profits. 1 19 In his discussion of his poetry in this letter, Wordsworth moderates between terms of labor and repose. His "leisure" allows for "industry," and his having "done nothing" inspires publication to "show I could do something." Wordsworth describes his poetic labor as stemming from both choice and necessity. Like the laborer, he must work; but, like the capitalist, he can choose his time to disburse his labor in the marketplace. Wordsworth ends this section of the letter by involving Mathews in his poetic concerns: As I am speaking on the subject, pray let me request you have the goodness to call on Johnson my publisher, and ask him if ever he sells any of those poems and what number he things [sic] are yet on his hands. This will be doing me a great favor. (LEY 120) The gesture of asking this favor expresses Wordsworth confidence in Mathews more substantially than the praises the letter offers, and consequently underwrites those praises by investing their object with responsibility. Wordsworth is not condescending to Mathew's project, but linking it with his own, the career of a poet. That the letter ends by invoking his poems indicates that they remain on the horizon of his discussion, and that Mathews is not to mistake Wordsworth's enthusiasm for their project as overshadowing his purpose as a poet. Having rhetorically evaded the stumbling blocks of competence and money, Wordsworth, in the core of the 1 2 0 letter, sets out the aspects of professionalism concerned with the poet's self-figuration. These aspects become primary in Wordsworth's career, partly because of his mediocre sales in comparison to Scott and Byron, and partly because of his isolation in the Lake Country which, as taken up by the reviews, becomes the sign under which his type of poetry is produced. Having recognized both his and Mathews's poverty, he suggests that "Perhaps however this might be got over if we could be sure of the patronage of the public" (LEY 118). One might anticipate that he would next consider how to insure such patronage, but he does not.8 To be a poet already implies such patronage, and he moves immediately to his next consideration, his location outside London: I do not see that my being in the country would have any tendency to diminish the number or deduct from the value of my communications. Put neutrally here, Wordsworth's attitude toward London was ambivalent throughout his life. When Wordsworth left France in 1792, he stayed in London for seven months, most of which was probably spent residing with Richard, by then an established lawyer (Moorman I 211). Book VII of the Prelude presents dire views of the city which both mask and express a fascination. For our purposes, however, "Residence in London" is important for the way 1 2 1 in which Wordsworth views London as a rival author.9 Describing the performers and exhibits of Bartholomew Fair, Wordsworth first delineates them with considerable specificity: "The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel," "The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes" (VII 703, 711). These stereotypes, to use Hazlitt's term, modulate into generalities: All out-o1-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats All jumbled up together, to compose A Parliament of Monsters. (VII 714-18) As this description evolves, the city, epitomized by the Fair, constitutes a rival artistic structure, one based on perversity but powerful nonetheless. Its semes are not language representing human beings, but human beings on which language is inscribed.10 "The Negro" and "The Bust," in the context of the Fair, become linguistic units. The perversion, in which the bodies are themselves compromised, is also a Wordsworthian vision of true presence, that which poetry can only represent and never fully achieve. The dislocation of "Parliament" from its political sense restores its sense of a speaking body which the Fair composes (writes), and so the individual bodies become an incorporate body, immortal as corporations are and monstrous as a linguistic substitute. At the same time, the unavoidable 1 22 association of the "Parliament of Monsters" with the English Parliament suggests the contagion of the Fair (the market) to the government. Like the successful professional writer, the Fair represents its audience to itself, and regulates it: Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end— [.] (VII 722-8) The Fair functions as a nexus at which the disparate— the "far-fetched" in its literal sense— intersect, and this intersection creates a market of radical exchangeability- -objects form an identity, and London's sons becomes a mass mirroring that identity. The language of London, as . an utter presence, finally fails, because, lacking law, meaning, and end, differences are impossible. The presence, paradoxically, becomes an absence (of law, meaning and end), and the trope by which the poet's absence, having a vantage of law and meaning, can become I a presence. This "unmanageable sight" is "not wholly so" to one who "sees the parts/As parts, but with a feeling of the whole" (VII 732-6), which is what Wordsworth has just done in his description.1 1 The distance which, in the letter to Mathews, will not be a hindrance becomes in the Prelude an advantage. 1 2 3 The two issues of audience and the poet's location, seemingly disparate, are inseparable both in the Prelude and in Wordsworth's letter to Mathews. He ends the paragraph with a question that clarifies their relationship: What class of readers ought we to aim at procuring; in what do we, each of us, suppose ourselves the most able either to entertain or instruct? (LEY 119) The problem of patronage has become one of aiming at a class of readers who exist not within a geography (London) so much as within a political category. In the next paragraph, Wordsworth asserts "I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall for ever continue." Consequently, the distance from London gives Wordsworth a perspective which the irony of "odious" shades as privileged.12 The poet's audience is forged out of political convictions: it will be impossible (and indeed it would render our publication worthless were we to attempt it,) not to inculcate principles of government and forms of social order of one kind or another . . . Beside essays on morals and politics I think I could communicate critical remarks upon poetry, &c, &c, . . . But I should principally wish our attention to be fixed upon life and manners, and to make our publication a vehicle of sound and exalted Morality. Aesthetics are not so much secondary as implicated in political questions.13 Wordsworth seizes this position, 1 2 4 a commonplace of the late eighteenth century, for his own by immediately contrasting his goal to the works: All the periodical miscellanies that I am acquainted with, except one or two of the reviews, appear to be written to maintain the existence of error and to disseminate error. (LEY 119) The notion of writing as a procedure of maintenance and dissemination is critical to Wordsworth's project; he insists that his product, even as it circulates, will not become error. In a subsequent letter to Mathews (LEY 123-29, 8 June 1794), Wordsworth provides a more specific context for his remarks concerning the role of institutions such as "the reviews" as meaning-producing. He tempers his opposition to monarchy and aristocracy by the Burkean concerns for the practical structures— the economy, the courts, and so on— that he identifies as "the nature of the grounds where the race [the modification of the British constitution] is to be run." Wordsworth recognizes two causes which appear to me to be accomplishing the subversion of this constitution; first, the infatuation profligacy and extravagance of men in power, and secondly, the changes of opinion respecting matters of Government which within these few years have rapidly taken place in the minds of speculative men. (LEY 124) The first clause is a packed series of three different problems all inhering in "men of power," while the second is a carefully laid-out sequence; this rhetorical difference reinforces Wordsworth's condemnation of "men in power" and support for "speculative men." The journal, then, would become an empowering agent of speculation and, in this way, Wordsworth hopes for, not revolution, but reform accomplished by a shift in ideology: There is a further duty incumbent upon every enlightened friend of mankind; . . . he should diffuse by every method a knowledge of those rules of political justice, from which the farther any government deviates the more effectually must it defeat the object for which government was ordained. (LEY 124) The allusion to Godwin insists that knowledge itself is power, while "men in power" are self-deceived, as much victims as those they injure. The image is a nation shrouded by its own inadequate constitution. How to lift the shroud? "Freedom of inquiry is all that I wish for; let nothing be deemed too sacred for investigation" (LEY 125). Wordsworth's journal will argue for precisely the liberty which it will assert; thus, his journal will not merely operate within the range determined by other journals, but will restructure the mechanisms of journalism by its own example. Wordsworth adds a caveat to free expression: "I severely condemn all inflammatory addresses to the passions of men . . . I know that the multitude walk in 1 2 6 darkness." Like Godwin, Wordsworth insists on reason, "a lantern" in "each man's hand" rather than passion, "abortive flashes of lightning, or the coruscations of transitory meteors" (LEY 125). Given Wordsworth's reputation as a poet of nature, this imagery which literalizes "enlightenment" requires a pause. The tamed light, the predictable, the manufactured, is finally enabling, while the unrestrained power of lightning frightens, provokes, and must be rejected. In part, the contrast anticipates the structure of "Resolution and Independence," in which the horrifying power of nature gives way to the smaller image of a man struggling for a living, murmuring his life-story. Both lantern and lightning are metaphors for powers of speech, and within the structure of the letter, segue into practical matters: what should the miscellany be called and what should it contain? Rejecting Mathew's proposed title, Wordsworth offers "The Philanthropist a monthly Miscellany.1,14 Next, he approvingly reiterates "what you [Mathews] have said upon that subject" of content, and provides more detail. Each issue will begin with "the topic of general politics" that "illustrate the tendency of particular doctrines of government"; move on to "essays upon morals and manners, and institutions whether social or political"; and then "essays partly for instruction and partly for amusement." These essays, such as "biographical papers" on men "distinguished for their exertions in the cause of liberty" are not to be randomly arranged, but "should, as much as possible form a series exhibiting the advancement of the human mind in moral knowledge." Like the miscellany, history has a particular structure, one of advancement, that can both be exploited by the arrangement of the miscellany and be furthered by its circulation. Reiterating of the "exertions" by thinkers such "as Turgot, as Milton, Sydney, Machiavel, Beccaria" constitutes progress, not mere repetition, because it establishes intellectual progress as a mode of history, and justifies the arrangement and the goal of the miscellany. An interior law, that of succession, to use Foucault's phrases, relates the subject of the miscellany to its own structure.15 The last sections will be essays of taste and criticism, reviews of publications (LEY 126). The dialogue between journals and other publications replaces the letters by correspondents to the Spectator. In choosing to engage other publications by critique, Wordsworth simultaneously suggests dialogue and superiority. This approach reworks the eighteenth- century journal's mediation of communal exchange and 1 2 8 hierarchical rank (to invoke again Klancher's phrases), but at the meta-level of the professional industry itself. The audience, outside the dialogue, partakes through economic consumption, not by letters from readers, real or fictitious. "Some poetry we should have." The inversion, the brevity of the sentence, the displacement of the moral imperative onto themselves as editors, all heighten the importance of the poetry, but not within the hierarchical structure of the miscellany itself. Wordsworth does not say where poetry should appear, leaving it free to infiltrate at all levels; it is at once politics and morality, instruction and amusement. Poetry moves : independently through the hierarchy, or to rephrase, it re-expresses the hierarchy to itself by containing that hierarchy within its own poetic discourse. If the structure of the miscellany does offer a parallel to historical structure, then poetry is a liberated moment, necessarily freed from the very constraints it will engage. It is not so much beyond law, as it is a law maker. Not so much beyond economy, but the representor of economics. Within the field of literature, poetry moves with impunity. 1 2 9 In the paragraph which outlines the structure of the work, Wordsworth considers audience more specifically than in the previous letter: As to our readers you think that we should endeavor to obtain as great a variety as possible, you cannot, however, be ignorant that amongst the partizans of this war, and of the suspension of the habeas corpus act amongst the mighty class of selfish alarmists we cannot obtain a single friend. We must then look for protection entirely amongst the dispassionate advocates of liberty and discussion[.] (LEY 126) Readers are friends, a word that echoes back to his earlier phrase, "enlightened friend of mankind," and they stand in a particular relation to "this war," the specifying pronoun which, having no antecedent, refers at once to the war against France and the more general struggle against liberty, the central symbol of which was the suspension of habeas corpus. Between his first and second letter to Mathews about the Philanthropist. Wordsworth had received a letter from Richard with this caution: I hope you will be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions. By the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Acts the ministers have great powers. (LEY 121, 23 May 1794) The majority of this letter details a series of complicated and linked civil actions, especially the "enormously expensive" "Cause with Lord Lonsdale," the description of which echoes the warning to William: I have always avoided writing and speaking upon this subject, because His Lordship has so many Spies in every part of the country. The suspension of habeas corpus and spies are dangerous in the same way to the expression of ideas, whether a poet's political notions or a lawyer's thoughts on a law suit against a wealthy opponent.16 Ideas can be seized and used against their owners and Richard, as a barrister, knew that the site of the danger was the law courts. After receiving secret reports about the Corresponding Society, both houses passed 34 George III c. 54, suspending the right to apply a writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum and, in essence, insisting on the rights of the state over the body of the citizen. The specific aim of the act was to arrest Hardy, Horne Tooke, Thelwall, and ten others who were never tried after the principals were acguitted (Holdsworth XIII 162). The charge was high treason for their roles as leading members of the Corresponding Society. Because the action was based on constructive treason, the trial turned on the question of whether, from the almost certainly seditious resolutions, treason could be constructed, or interpreted. The subordination of the body and the interpretation of a text had conjoined, not 1 3 1 coincidentally but through the specific mechanisms of state power. The juridical power of interpretation corresponded to the police power of arrest and, but for the interposition of the jury, to the penal powers of execution.17 Wordsworth, writing before the outcome of the trials (Hardy was acquitted on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5), understands this political problem as one of audience. To support the suspension of habeas corpus is to read the body, the body politic, and writing in a certain way. Against such readers, who constitute a "mighty class" through their individual self-interest, Wordsworth conceives of his audience as "advocates." In this metaphoric structure, the poet/publisher is on trial, and his readers protect him from those who would destroy liberty.18 Wordsworth's understanding of what it means to be a poet and what it means to produce a journal begins engaged in questions of liberty, justice, and jurisprudence. Furthermore, this engagement arises not solely as an act of personal judgment, but from the internal structures by which English society creates the marketplace in which journals flourish or fail. Wordsworth eventually decided against pursuing the publishing venture: The more nearly we approached the time fixed for action, the more strongly was I persuaded that we should decline the field. (LEY 134-6, 7 Nov. 1794) His "distance from town," he now claims, would "be a great obstacle," not, as he earlier wrote, a "circumstance [that] would not be of much consequence." He still cannot leave Whitehaven because of Raisley Calvert, but he alters the reason. Initially, Calvert's generosity required he stay: It would be using [Calvert] very ill to run the risque of destroying my usefulness by precipitating myself into distress and poverty at the time when he is so ready to support me. (LEY 127, 8 June, 1794) Now, Calvert "has every symptom of a confirmed consumption of the lungs, and I cannot think of quitting him in his present debilitated state" (LEY 134-35). Calvert died the following year, and Wordsworth represented the situation fairly. But rhetorically, in backing out of the project, Wordsworth refigures himself from professional to personal friend. He mentions his brother's prizes at Oxford (exaggerating a third prize into a second), and sets his discussion of his poetry filial terms: "my poetical bantlings," "children," "offspring" that are "christened." For Mathews's work, he deploys other images, those of labor: "service performed," "employment," "prospect." He had signed the June 8 letter "your fellow labourer and friend," and this 133 letter he concludes, "Believe {me,} dear Mathews, your very affectionate friend." He reinstates the divisions their Philanthropist was to overcome. Mathews was not deterred by Wordsworth's obj ections and formed the Telegraph, which started on December 30, 1794. Wordsworth wrote Mathews from Penrith: Your paper I have heard is out. I have learned nothing further of it than that it is democratical, and full of advertisements! . . . you would oblige me highly, very highly, by sending [a copy] down to me here, even if it were the day after its publication. I think also I might forward its circulation in this little place. (LEY 139, 7 Jan., 1795) Wordsworth positions himself as the outsider, the audience equally curious about democracy and advertisements, and yet not purely a consuming audience since in "this little place," perhaps he can aid the journal's circulation. The postscript to this letter revises Wordsworth's previously announced readiness to overcome material problems of writing. In the first letter broaching the Philanthropist. Wordsworth complained that the pen and ink were so bad he could "scarce write at all"; now he laments: I fear you will be unable to decypher this scrawl. I must learn to write a better hand, before I can earn my bread by my pen. Unprepared to write for a living, he must learn to manipulate the physical instruments of writing before he can make it his trade. This wry joke encourages Mathews 134 to proceed alone; Wordsworth is content to be part of an appreciative audience, a word already associated in their correspondence with "friend." His own public expression awaited the publication of the Lvrical Ballads.19 135 NOTES 1. Wordsworth's letters regarding his brother's death in 1805, shifting from expressions of grief to questions of legal liability, provide a dramatic example of his integration of these issues into personal life. See LEY 545-95, esp. the letters to George Beaumont and Richard Wordsworth. 2. For an extended discussion on the "ethos of Letters," see Chandler, Second Nature. 140-55. 3. This debate was not new, as Thompson's rehearsal of the dispute between the levellers and Cromwell's officers shows; what was new was the ability of the corresponding societies to grow rapidly, and provide the "ad hoc distribution" which helped put 200,000 copies of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in circulation by 1793 (Klancher, Reading Audiences. 27). This circulation was portrayed as a chaotic explosion by its opponents (Thompson, Working Class. 117-20); the attorney general prosecuting Paine observed that the book was "thrust into the hands of subjects of every description, even children's sweetmeats being wrapped in it" (Working Class 118). 4. One specific problem for Wordsworth, under the influence of Godwin's advocating resistance, not revolt, was how to express a moderate republican view without being co-opted by, or shoved into, the violence of one side or the other, a move accomplished through ideological and economic semes. While in France, Wordsworth had witnessed the moderate Girondins fall on those grounds; Robespierre and Saint-Just inevitably made more moderate speakers appear to be defending the monarchy, and in comparison the legal and constitutional concerns of the Girondins would certainly have appeared as 'indecision.' (Roe Radical Years 78) The Girondins fell from power in October, 1793 and twenty-one of them were brought to trial "not to discover whether the persons tried [were] guilty, but to justify their execution" (J.M. Thompson, French Revolution. 370). Despite the certainty of their conviction, the trial provided a last forum to be heard, but this opportunity was forestalled by a resolution of the Convention that "after three days' hearing, the President of the court might closure the trial, that is, ask for a verdict, if the jury had declared 'their conscience was sufficiently 1 36 enlightened'" (Thompson, Revolution 372). Like Thomas Paine's trial, halted by the foreman of the jury in mid argument (Gurney, Trial of Thomas Paine 472), the Girondins were silenced on the sixth day of the trial; three hours later, the conscience of the jury being "sufficiently enlightened," they were condemned. Their final symbolic speech act, a deliberate connection of their voices with the economy they had helped to forge, was throwing "assignats among the crowd, and cry[ing] A nous, nos amis"? the gesture was rejected as the crowd ripped up the notes and shouted "Vive la republioue" (Thompson, Revolution 272). The Girondins had lost their audience, and Robespierre's reign of Terror began. While Wordsworth would not have understood the French trial as a question only of audience, in the 1805 Prelude he recognized a continuity between speech and action, between commanding an audience and being driven to more desperate acts. Moreover, he locates this realization at the start of the Terror: [I] thought Of oppositions and remedies: An insignificant stranger and obscure, Mean as I was, and little graced with powers Of eloquence even in my native speech, And all unfit for the tumult and intrigue, Yet would I have willingly have taken up A service at this time for a cause so great, However dangerous. Inly I revolved How much the destiny of Man had still | Hung upon single persons^.] (1805, X 129-39) ' The modesty is not false, but an appraisal of a poet who has not found his voice and who has not established in his own mind whether a modern poet could be one of those "single persons" on whom the destiny of man might hang. The search for that voice could occur only within the established institutions of language: the law, the church, and the publishing industry. 5. For an analysis of the Godwinian influence evident in this correspondence, see Roe, Radical Years. 175-85. For a discussion of the educational ideas in the correspondence as evidence of Wordsworth's knowledge of French schemes for education, see Chandler, Second Nature. 104-7. 6. In Wordsworth's letters to Mathews, he generally opens with an apology for his slow response. His elaborate excuse in an early letter (17 June 1791) runs over 200 words, about a fifth of the letter. After confessing 137 that "it is totally impossible to find any apology," he offers a mock legal argument instead: Moralists inform us that whoever meditates any crime facti crimen habet. May not the observation be reversed, and may we not also say, that whoever thinks of and resolves to execute any good intention ought to have the merit of the actual performance of it. (LEY 48) j 7. Typically, when Wordsworth seems self-demeaning, a counter-text is possible: the world, not the poetry, is "in so imperfect a state." 8. The disjunction resembles one in "Tintern Abbey": If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— . . . How oft in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! (50-57) I Rather than pursuing consequences by completing the conditional, Wordsworth shifts to a personal recollection. 9. Quite likely, in 1794, Wordsworth would have been incapable of the articulation he manages in the Prelude, but his attitudes form, if not an identity, a continuity. 10. Shortly before the Bartholomew Fair scene, Wordsworth presents a nearly literal prototype of the inscribed man, "a sight not rare": [A] blind Beggar, who, with upright face Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain His story, whence he came, and who he was. (VII 639-42) The beggar offers his story as an extension of his body in exchange for money. Like the writer, he can offer the story continuously without exhausting it. He is not, however, a professional writer (and his story must literally have been written by someone else), but a beggar whose commonness signifies a troubled economy. He is subsumed, both by the city and by Wordsworth, as a linguistic mark; his individual character is destroyed. The poet, who maintains a distance between his story— which circulates without him— and his body, cannot, at least as Wordsworth represents him, be so subsumed. 11. By contrast, Paris is a city so rewritten that it can no longer be read: I crossed (a black and empty area then) 138 The square of the Carrousel, a few weeks back [the September massacre] Heaped up with dead and dying, upon these And other sights looking as doth a man Upon a volume whose contents he knows Are memorable but from him locked up, Being written in a tongue he cannot read, So that he questions the mute leaves with pain. (X 46-54) The "mute leaves" that do not answer contrasts sharply to the blind man who cannot help but speak. Eventually, Wordsworth, lying in near sleep, imagines Paris transformed not into a voice, but an audience: I seemed to hear a voice that cried To the whole city, 'Sleep no morel' (X 76-7) Like Wordsworth, Macbeth imagines hearing the cry "Sleep no more!/ Macbeth does murder sleep" (Macbeth. II ii 34- 5), and this results in the dissolution of identity that his positions as Thane and King ought to have established: Glamis hath murder'd sleep. and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more. (II ii 41-2) 12. A gesture such as this verifies Jeffrey's perception in labelling Wordsworth as part of a school of Lake Poets. The Lyrical Ballads constitutes an attempt to exploit this distance from London similar to Scott's situating primal struggles on the border of Scotland— not because they did not occur in cities, but because they were more expressible beyond urban civilization. 13. The competing journals of the 1790s confirm this view. See Klancher, "Cultural Conflict, Ideology, and the Reading Habit of the 1790s" (Reading Audiences ch 1). 14. "This title I think would be noticed; it includes everything that can instruct and amuse mankind" (LEY 125). Roe suggests that this title comes from Godwin: The revolutions of states, which a philanthropist would desire witness, or in which he would willingly cooperate, consist principally in a change of sentiments and dispositions of the members of those states. (in Roe, 184, italics mine) Wordsworth converts Godwin's disjunction of witness or cooperate into an identity: witnessing is cooperation. 139 15. "So that we see emerging [at the end of the eighteenth-century] as the organizing principles of this space of empiricities, Analogy and Succession; the link between one organic structure and another can no longer, in fact, be the identity of one or several elements, but must be the identity of the relation between the elements." (Order 218) 16. In the final paragraph, Richard suggests burning his letter as if it were potentially seditious; or rather, as if opposing Lord Lowther was sedition. 17. The acquittals, although greeted with enthusiasm, did not restore habeas corpus, and despite the outcome of the specific trial, the government continued to exercise a chilling effect; [I]n the next year the steady repression of reformers— or 'Jacobins'— was renewed. And by the end of the decade it seemed as if the entire agitation had been dispersed. The London Corresponding Society had been outlawed. Tom Paine's Rights of Man was banned. Meetings were prohibited. (Thompson Working Class 22) 18. This metaphor parallels Hardy's trial, since the ; verdict on constructive treason depended on the jury's reading of the London Corresponding Society. In 1792, Fox's Libel Act shifted the responsibility (or power, depending on one's perspective) of determining whether something published was a criminal libel from the judge to the jury. Previously, the jury would only determine the fact of publication (had the defendant willfully made a work available to at least one member of : the public?). The question of whether the writing ; constituted a libel was a matter of law for the judge. Wordsworth's implied metaphor of the readers— common people, the pool of jurors— reflects this shift in the law. 19. Roe suggests that Wordsworth might have contributed to Daniel Isaac Eaton's Philanthropist which appeared from March 1795 to January 1796 (Radical Years. 276-9). Kenneth Johnston argues for a Wordsworthian presence in Eaton's magazine ("Philanthropy or Treason"). 140 Chapter Four Goody Blake and the Reviewers i. The publishing information announced on the title page of the first issue of the Lvrical Ballads suggests the way in which the volume integrated a provincial i production into an urban economy: BRISTOL: Printed by Biggs and Cottle, For T. N. Longman, Paternoster-Row, London 1798 The usual meaning of this information would be that Biggs | and Cottle printed the edition and that Longman published it, that is, held the rights of occupation and distribution. Bristol labor is transformed into London profits. This usual meaning, however, does not correspond with the publication history. In 1799, Cottle "went out of business and sold all his copyrights [including the Lvrical Ballads' ) in a package to Longman" (Jordan, 46)1, so Longman did not own the rights in 1798. Why Longman appears on the title page is disputed, but, considered as part of a fictional frame of the first issue, the gesture 141 can be read as a manipulation of standard market practice. The local publisher borrows the London name as an entry into the market. Wordsworth's role in these machinations is murky and likely insubstantial. Jordan observes that a letter of introduction Wordsworth planned to take to London (on route to Germany) perhaps "betokens an agreement [with Cottle] to sound out Longman" about publishing the Lvrical Ballads (45); if so, it failed. Wordsworth wrote from Germany to a London correspondent that I do not yet know what is to become of my poems, that is, who is their publisher. It was undecided when I came off, which prevented my sending you a copy, but you will see them advertized and so learn where you may get them. (LEY 232). Wordsworth projects an equivalence between the fate of the poems and their having a publisher. In this case, the publishing is self-maintaining, with the advertisement substituting for the absent, and anonymous, author(s) by supplying the text. Once Wordsworth regained the copyright for the volume, he never surrendered it. He granted Longman only limited publication rights for the second edition. The irony of the publisher buying back from the poet a portion of what had been returned gratis suggests a specific way in which poetry operated as capital by gaining an audience. The decision to name himself 142 functions to exploit that capital by providing the means to invest it. Wordsworth wrote his brother, 8 June 1800, about Longman's offer to print a second edition: I am offered by Longman 80L. I think I shall accept the offer as if the books sell quickly I shall soon have the right of going to market with them again when their merit will be known, and if they do not sell tolerably, Longman will have given enough for them. (LEY 283) Wordsworth gets full value for the poems and still retains the poems, increased in value for their having been given away. The notion of redeploying materials, as we have seen, characterizes the man-of-letter's operation in the marketplace, and the publication history of the Lyrical Ballads confirms Wordsworth's abilities in such a procedure. Besides the two accretive editions with their expanding prefaces, he disperses the poems in other volumes. The 1815 edition of Wordsworth's poems, for example, is titled Poems bv WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, including Lvrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author, with Additional Poems, a new Preface and a Supplementary Essay. The Ballads are both integrated and, because of the title, maintained as distinctive.2 About half of the poems mentioned (and three of the four quoted) in the Augustan Review's favorable notice of this collection appeared first in the Lvrical Ballads.3 Nearly every review of Poems. in Two Volumes (1807), a 143 volume whose authorship is announced as "William Wordsworth, Author of the Lvrical Ballads.1 1 recalls the earlier work. Marilyn Butler has argued that "[Francis] Jeffrey's persistent campaign had unfortunately made the Ballads i , notorious, and far more salient than Wordsworth's greater and safer later work" (Romantics 63)? putting aside the value judgment, this contention has merit but must be weighed against Wordsworth's own efforts to keep the Lvrical Ballads before the public. Throughout ■ Wordsworth's career a struggle between critic and poet was fought over the Lyrical Ballads, with each side venturing incursions into the other's territory. Wordsworth struck the first blow in the Advertisement to the Ballads. The poems are glossed by a statement that deploys them within a field of other similar poems: It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves. (7) The claim relies not on a specific author, but on a class of men, poets, defined against other producers of words, critics. Poetry can be mapped onto the entire domain of human interest, and does so on the evidence of the poet. Wordsworth intimates that critics are parasitic, 144 precisely the charge Jeffrey will oppose in modeling his professional reviewer on the lawyer. The Advertisement prefigures a Lyrical Ballad, situating the poet as a common man (despised by ignorant : critics). The experiment is a challenge to the reader to value production rather than transformation as property. Heinzelman has observed that for Wordsworth "The labor of 1 the man of science (such as the economist) produces •facts,' but the poet's labor reproduces itself" (203). The reproduction of labor is, however, at once a production of fact and a reproduction of fact— as in the claim of truth for "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," the only l poem cited in every review of the first edition (probably because of this claim, rather than for aesthetic ; importance). Given the Advertisement's hostility towards the critics, the largely favorable reviews are at first peculiar. These reviewers, however, were not professionals, and they could read themselves as outside the "critics" Wordsworth ridicules. Butler has commented that If Wordsworth's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads had appeared a decade earlier . . . , they would hardly have attracted attention except for the merits. (Romantics 61) Similarly, the same volume, ten years later, would have faced a tougher professional critic, and would probably 145 have been universally panned like the Poems. in Two Volumes.4 The initial reviews invariably began with a consideration of the Advertisement, often quoting the majority of it.5 Only the two most favorable reviews, however, quote the opening paragraph, and only the British Critic’s writer, probably Wordsworth's friend Francis Wrangham, comments specifically on it: We fully agree with the author, that the true notion of poetry must be sought among the poets, rather than the critics; and we will add that, unless a critic is a poet also, he will generally make but indifferent work in judging of the effusions of Genius. (365) Wrangham's additions unravel the division upon which Wordsworth's "notion of poetry" depends, since if a critic can be a poet— not a practicing poet, but someone with has the sensibilities of a poet— then the Poet cannot dominate the literary marketplace. Wrangham himself was an amateur poet, an occasional critic, an interested translator, whose living came from the church (LEY 159, 317), and he seems inattentive to issues of the literary marketplace. While he attempts to bolster the poet, his own language turns against Wordsworth as Poet, and emphasizes the Critic's role. In his next sentence, he observes: In the collection of poems subjoined to this introduction, we do not find expressions that we esteem too familiar, or deficient in dignity; on the contrary, we think that in general the author has succeeded in attaining that judicious degree 146 of simplicity, which accommodates itself with ease even to the sublime. The use of "subjoined" ("To add at the end, to add afterwards"— Johnson) relegates the poems as secondary to the critical introduction. Secondly, while Wordsworth has described his effort as an experiment, implying a foray into new ground, Wrangham applauds him for rediscovering known territory, "that judicious degree of simplicity," the word "judicious" emphasizing that the correct "degree" has already been adjudicated. Wrangham does not consciously argue against Wordsworth's presuppositions, but rather, in the British Critic. Wrangham's text appropriates Wordsworth's words on behalf of the periodical industry. Charles Burney, in his review for the Monthly Review. is more aware of the implication of Wordsworth's position, and his review carefully reworks the material of the Advertisement: The author of these ingenious compositions presents the major part of them to the public as experiments; since they were written, as he informs us in the advertisement prefixed, •chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.' (202) His use of "presents" suggests that Wordsworth chooses a rhetorical stance to justify himself. Burney continues with qualified praise: "[although] we have been extremely entertained with the fancy, . . . of these pieces, we cannot regard them as poetry." He responds as Wordsworth had anticipated that "Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers" would; they would "be induced to wonder by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title [of Poetry]" ("Advertisement"). From Burney's perspective, however, the reader will encounter the review first, and Wordsworth will have to defend himself. The primacy of the critic is insured by his co-option of the poet's prose. "Inane phraseology" becomes Wordsworth's characterization of Pope and Dryden, not of their weak imitators, and Burney, secure in his eighteenth-century values, assumes that the readers will side with him. Both Burney and Wordsworth, in review and advertisement respectively, slide from the "language of conversation" to an appeal to precedent. Wordsworth contends that "the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, . . . the fewer complaints . . . will he have to make." Burney, by contrast, argues that poetry has been subject to progress: "Would it not be degrading poetry, as well as the English language, to go back to the barbarous and uncouth numbers of Chaucer?"6 He accepts the "polished measures" of Dryden, Pope, and Gray as improvements, and as new standards.7 He does not seem 148 to admit that much further improvement is possible, only refinement; this attitude, resembling Burkean aesthetics, can be placed into an array of attitudes consistent with the development of the sciences of economics and jurisprudence. Both Wordsworth and Burney eventually drop these arguments about "poetry" as mere semantic difference. Wordsworth presents his case thus: It is desireable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification. The issue of whether the works are poetry should be suppressed for the reader's sake. The attitude suggests that the term "poetry" has become at once too technical and too obscure. Burney reverses this position: We will not, however, dispute any longer about names; the author shall style his rustic delineations of low-life, poetry, if he pleases. The critic grants the poet the freedom to choose words; he can call it poetry, but only after Burney has identified its genus: "rustic delineations of low-life." Burney pursues this issue of word choice into the poems themselves: When we confess that our author has the art of pleasing and interesting . . . by his natural delineations of human passions, human characters, and human incidents, [italics mine] we must add that these effects were not produced by the poetry:— we have been as much affected by pictures of misery and unmerited distress, in prose. 149 Burney has silently quoted the three aspects of poetry which Wordsworth has made defining of the genre, and displaced them from the poet's domain to the realm of language more generally.8 Burney contends that Wordsworth has performed no necessary labor in bringing these views of misery before the public, but has merely converted them into verse for his own gain. Burney provides a hint of theft (plagiarism) since he has already encountered similarly affecting "pictures of misery" in prose. Wordsworth's position is, of course, the opposite: he has given voice to lives that lack voice, and so has cultivated agrarian language as a farmer cultivates a field. The struggle for primacy between the critic and the poet reflects questions of textual ownership, and hence of property. Because the issues of property were thoroughly inscribed in law— an exhaustive, although regressive definition of property is that something is property if and only if the court recognizes it as property— Wordsworth's poetry took up the themes of ownership in direct ways. The ballad, "Goody Blake and Harry Gill, A True Story" will provide an extended example. 150 i i . "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" was the most noted poem in the reviews of the Lvrical Ballads, and Wordsworth's own positioning of the poem indicates his sense of its importance. Of the poems composed after the conception of the Ballads. it appears first in the edition and leads the sequence of poems most fitted to the "experiment" described in the Advertisement. The Analytic Review reprinted it entirely as the conclusion to its favorable review. The less impressed reviewer of the N e w London Review quoted eight lines describing Goody Blake (29-32, 45-48), and observes that "If such passages . . . find admirers, the writer is fortunate; for they never cost him any labour in the composition." Such a charge strikes at the heart of Wordsworth's sense of self: if the poet is subject to fortune, he cannot regulate the marketplace; if he performs no labor, he accumulates no property. To recognize that this economic criticism is applied to a description of the laboring Goody Blake and not the owning Harry Gill opens an argumentative dimension of the review. Although "[n]othing is known about the editor or reviewers" (Reiman, A:792), the review seems politically conservative, and likely to accept both Burkean legal and aesthetic interpretive norms. 151 Southey mused upon whether "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" was likely to "promote the popular superstition of witchcraft." Southey may be mistaking Wordsworth's subjects for his audience, but more likely, he is deflecting the political overtones of the poem, overtones which Burney noted: Distress from poverty and want is admirably described, in the 'true story of Goodv Blake and Harrv Gill:1 but are we to imagine that Harry was bewitched by Goody Blake. The hardest heart must be softened into pity for the poor old woman; — and yet, if all the poor are to help themselves, ! and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbors, what imaginary wants and real anarchy would it not create? Goody Blake should have been relieved out of the two millions annually allowed by the state to the poor of this country, not by the plunder of an individual. Despite the ballad form and the history of , authentication, Burney insists on its contemporary referent. Wordsworth has prepared for as much by - shifting the story from the location in its source, Warwickshire, a rapidly industrializing area in the 1790s to the still rural Dorsetshire. Burney, however, does not pose the problem as one of industrialization. Instead, he articulates the struggle between the wealthy and the poor in the conventional terms of "anarchy" rampant in such uprisings as the French Revolution. To point to Burney's rhetorical method, so long as "poor" is an adjective adhering to mortal human beings, it is containable, but what happens when it becomes a noun, a 152 class of people who exist in perpetuity: "The poor always ye have with you" (John 12:8). The survey of reviews demonstrates that the poem was not read as an innocent ballad, but one which brought to the fore issues of property, labor, and relief which had immediate repercussions in British society. Wordsworth chooses to engage these questions within a displaced legal framework. The narrative is a crime, a trial, and a punishment, but rendered to criticize the legal ' structure that allows for such an occurrence (which ! actually happened, Wordsworth points out both in the ! Advertisement and in the title). More specifically, ; Wordsworth overlays features of medieval law onto modern j law to demonstrate the deficiency of the latter, and r ! structures the trial as between two theories of property, . the Burkean classical liberal theory to which Harry Gill , consciously clings, and a more abstract, naturalized theory whose roots are at once in Godwinian utilitarianism and the medieval common law that provided for common property. Goody Blake understands her defence as an appeal to God and could not articulate any theoretical ground. Rather, she feels it in her cold bones. The ballad form, as the reviewers noted, suggests a certain archaism, and so is suited for the effect of 153 opposing the two modes of legal thought. This opposition is inscribed in a series of other opposition, beginning with the two characters named in the title. Despite the frequency of names, both proper ("Simon Lee") and descriptive ("The Mad Mother") in the Lvrical Ballads. only two titles take the form of "X and Y," "Goody Blake, and Harry Gill" and "Expostulation and Reply," which takes the form of a debate both internally and in its relation to "The Tables Turned." Harry Gill is "young," even though the narrative perspective is some time after the incident at the hedge and the adjective is used twice more. First, "Young Harry was a lusty drover"; a drover drives sheep and ought to have a congenial relation to a spinner (just as the old and young ought to have a mutually beneficial relationship in Wordsworth's sociology9) , but the adjective "lusty" suggests something more perverted, and when he awaits Goody Blake, the scene takes on a voyeuristic quality: — He hears a noise - he's all awake. Again? - on tip-toe down the hill He softly creeps - 'Tis Goody Blake, She's at the hedge of Harry Gill. The stanza takes Harry Gill's perspective at first (echoing "a noise" with "awake" to enforce an association between his sensory and internal experience). But the last line undercuts this: he sees Goody Blake, and experiences the hedge not as his own, but as "of Harry 154 Gill." In his attitude towards Goody Blake, he is doubly alienated from his property and his self. Immediately after Goody Blake's prayer, Harry again is described as "young." He is restored to himself to endure his punishment. Goody Blake, in sharp contrast, is said to be old twice, and "auld" once10; her bones are twice referred to as old, and so is the hedge: "Could anything be more alluring/Than an old hedge to Goody Blake?" An affinity is suggested which gives Goody Blake a certain claim, especially since the hedge's oldness makes it precede Harry Gill's possession of it. The contrast of poor and rich is more fluid. Five times Goody Blake or her possessions are labeled poor, and Harry Gill's wealth is constructed by the contrast; he has a superfluity of property, including the hedge and his warm fire, and his punishment underscores this excess by making all his coats equally superfluous because they are useless. The final use of poor is Harry's own: "Poor Harry Gill is very cold," he mutters to himself. The allusion to Edgar's Poor Tom implies Harry's madness and his own responsibility for it, and, to a reader who recalls what drove Edgar to his disguise, links that madness to questions of inheritance.1 1 Despite these oppositions, and their alliance to either Goody Blake or Harry Gill, two terms, equally opposed, float between them, those of warmth and cold. Both Harry Gill and Goody Blake are susceptible to these sensations, but Goody Blake is dependent upon nature (the winds or "the long, warm, lightsome summer-day") while Harry Gill can produce his own heat and so does not recognize his dependence on it; in search of Goody Blake, "oft from his warm fire he'd go." The 'natural' terms of heat and cold, then, become the grounds for adjudication between the two litigants. The first stanza establishes Harry's ailment of chattering teeth which, given the context of speech acts (specifically prayer and poetry) suggests his worthlessness and plays it against his wealth, signified by his quantity of manufactured clothing. The inadequacy of this clothing, bought from afar, not locally, measures Harry's alienation from his community. He does not labor, but owns; Goody Blake, we learn later, is in the reverse circumstance; her constant labors of spinning cannot sustain her body temperature. The second stanza begins; In March, December, and in July, 'Tis all the same with Harry Gill The neighbors tell, and tell you truly, His teeth they chatter, chatter still. Harry does not experience nature's transitions, presented by their social names, the months. This punishment suits his cold inclinations and his lack of concern for those around him. The neighbors do not merely reinforce the truth of the story, but fulfill a community obligation of speaking the truth. In the medieval period, a jury would be chosen from a community which knew the defendant or litigants, and it was their duty to discover the facts, and to swear (Lt. iurare, to swear) to their truth (Potter, 234). In the modern period, a juror was disqualified for having any knowledge of a case, and the rules of evidence arose. It is under these modern rules that Harry Gill sets out to catch Goody Blake in the act. He waits "Till she had filled her apron full" to seize her. In sequence, he "took her," "held her," and "shook her" by the arm, verbs that condense a criminal proceeding of apprehension, detainment, and punishment. Two secondary meanings given in Johnson seem appropriate for the thrice repeated "arm" in the description of the arrest: first, the "bough of a tree," which again associates Goody Blake with the hedge and with nature, and secondly, "Power; might. In this sense is used the secular arm &c."12 This meaning shadows Harry Gill's violence with his injudicious use of power. His presence as a land-owner makes this moment constitute a parodic 157 trial since he might well have been empowered as a justice of the peace; to a reader of Caleb Williams he would have been immediately suspect. Goody Blake does not answer to him, but "pray'd/To God that is the judge of all." The word "pray," while primarily religious, has a secondary legal sense: one prays relief from the court. Goody Blake has invoked her natural right of trial before God. The image of the hedge, especially as a site of : contention between rich and poor, would have recalled to a reader in 1798 the on-going disputes about enclosures. A hedge was a usual, and cheap way of enclosing land and i securing a property interest. Enclosures "have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor" (Polanyi 35). If Polanyi's assessment has merit, then an alteration in the mechanisms of enclosure is of importance. The complaints against enclosures increased dramatically in the 18th century, but enclosures themselves had occurred in the middle ages. Much feudal land was acquired by enclosures that provided defense. In the 18th century, the methods of enclosure shifted from one in which enclosures represented the immediate action of power to one in which parliament and the courts granted the right of enclosure, and thus conveyed the power. Turner's survey of counties shows that legal fees constituted the largest cost of enclosure; in Warwickshire, "Enclosures provided almost continuous employment for solicitors" (Enclosures 61).13 Dorsetshire, where Wordsworth placed the story, was the location of the first act for enclosure in 1604 (Turner, Enclosures 16). The hedge, of neither defensive nor agricultural use, was a symbol of a legal determination made elsewhere. Consequently, Goody Blake's appeal to God becomes an act of civil disobedience, reminiscent of Antigone's burial of her brother though less deliberate. The specific benefit alleged by the proponents of Enclosure Acts is the development of laborers entirely dependent upon wages. Thrown into the market economy, workers would be both more industrious and more moral. J. Clark argued for enclosures in 1794 in order to "put it as much as possible out of their power to live idle" (quoted in Snell, 170). Similarly, the lack of external structure was assumed to cause a corresponding immorality; as one witness for the Select Committee on Enclosure (1844) reported: I generally find them (people living in the neighborhood of unenclosed land] demoralized, they are generally of dissolute habits; many of them commit depredations, being out of sight of any person of authority. (quoted in Snell, 171-2) Property bestows authority, and order is inflicted through watching. Wordsworth emphasizes Goody Blake's unseen hard work, despite her poverty; by contrast, Harry Gill's leisure allows him to exercise the authority of watching. The implication is that the wage structure resulting from enclosure does not preclude idleness, but makes it a profitable pastime for the land-owner, while the laborer's work does not avail to provide subsistence. The hedge is an emblem both of greed and of waste, and Goody Blake's action is unconscious political resistance. If the legal procedure of enclosure bestows one property right on Harry Gill, the poet's moral argument conferred a greater right on Goody Blake. In the fifth stanza, the narrator makes a first-person aside: "Two poor old dames, as I have known,/ Will often live in one small cottage" (34-5). This knowledge of the actual distribution of living space asserts the authority of watching, but locates it within the local community. The second first-person moment ends the poem: "Now think, ye farmers all, I pray,/ Of Goody Blake and Harry Gill" (127-8). "Farmers" used generally encompasses both owners and laborers, and reusing the verb "pray" suggests that in thinking about this story, the farmers are being asked to judge it, not from the view of legality, but of a higher natural law, one provided simultaneously in God's judgment of Harry Gill and the poet's rendering of the story into a plea. Southey's question of whether the poem promotes superstition can be re-expressed. An explanation of Harry Gill's chattering from Hartley's associationist psychology would not deflect it as a punishment from God, but express the mechanism of that punishment. In wage of battle, a knight fought on behalf of God and in his victory God's presence was understood. Wordsworth prepares such a scene in the description of nature's occasional benevolence: Oh joy for her! when e'er in winter The winds at night had made a rout, And scatter'd many a lusty splinter, And many a rotten bough about. The adjective "lusty" recalls Harry Gill, suggesting his own splintered circumstance, separated from his neighbors, and further associates him with the rotten bough. The wind (fulfilling Harry's feudal obligation as a land-owner to provide for surrounding peasants) provides warmth by driving otherwise useless wood and reinforces Goody Blake's claim to relief. The purpose of this analysis has not been to argue that the legal aspects of this poem overshadow other approaches to criticism, but to suggest that, for Wordsworth, a consideration of "the primary laws of our nature" ("Preface" 1800) involves an interaction between those laws of association which Hartley outlined and those laws of jurisprudence which Blackstone categorized. Blackstone had suggested both continuity and analogy between these two kinds of law, and these relationships became explicable through the science of jurisprudence. Wordsworth, by contrast, imbeds that explanatory power in poetry implicitly in "Goody Blake" and explicitly in the Preface of 1800, the subject of the next chapter. The initial project of the Lyrical Ballads was implicated in questions of social order, and Wordsworth found this consistent with the single motive of making money.14 He commented on Southey's review: He knew that I published those poems for money and money alone. He knew that money was of importance to me. If he could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it. (LEY 267-68) To make money and to make value are simultaneous projects in the marketplace. Done anonymously, however, they omit a component crucial to Wordsworth's poetics, the articulation of self through public discourse. The discovery of this necessity may well have been a considered response to the reviews, which interpreted the poems without invoking the authorial presence. Consequently, with the announcement of his name comes the announcement of his poetic theory, or, to use a word more in the thick of romantic aesthetics, his poetic system. 162 NOTES 1. In the documents of Longman & Co, the only available record of Lvrical Ballads . . . seems to occur . . . in a Copyright Book, where, under the heading 'Cottles Copies', appears inter alia. 'Lyrical Ballads', deleted. (Owen, "Costs" 93). 2. Eventually, the name William Wordsworth functions similarly, beginning with its announcement in the second edition of the Lvrical Ballads, and continuing as his career developed through a series of collected works. Longman, the publisher of Poems (1815), suggested that the title be Lvrical Ballads and other Poems, bv W. Wordsworth (20 May 1814, in Owen, "Letters"). Wordsworth's desire to feature his name more prominently and to subordinate the term Lvrical Ballads suggests his care in reworking material. Longman apparently continued to prefer its suggested title, as a later letter refers i to the edition as "Ballads." ! (5 Aug. 1814, in Owen, "Letters") 3. Only two other reviews appear in Reiman. One is the attack in the Monthly Review, which had already contained > an extensive, lukewarm review of the Lyrical Ballads. About a third of the poems it considers are from the Lvrical Ballads. The second is in the Quarterly, which criticizes Poems along with The White Doe of Rvlstone; from the Poems. it quotes only prose material, and most extensively from the Preface to the Lvrical Ballads. 4. Butler cites the Edinburgh's review of Edgeworth's Popular Tales, in which Jeffrey associates the "charitable endeavors of Messrs Wirdsworth [sic] & Co." with Thomas Paine. 5. Of the seven notices in Reiman, only the AntiJacobin Review (a notice ten lines long) does not quote from the first three paragraphs of the Advertisement. It does quote the last paragraph of the Advertisement. 6. In the Preface of 1800, Wordsworth answers this question in a footnote: "It is worth while here to observe that the affecting parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure and universally intelligible to this day" (Lvrical Ballads 246). 163 7. In his comments on specific poems, Burney indicates that this attitude towards the eighteenth-century rise of science extends beyond poetry into economics, politics, and psychology. For the last, consider his discussion of "Anecdote for Fathers": Of this the dialogue is ingenious and natural: but the object of the child's choice, and the inferences, are not quite obvious. It would be easy to say that Burney has misread the poem, but, more accurately, he opposes its premises. Similarly, his critique of "The Last of the Flock" indicates a respect for Blackstonean jurisprudence, probably as filtered through Burke: What but an Agrarian law can prevent poverty from visiting the door of the indolent, injudicious, extravagant, and, perhaps, vicious? and is it certain that rigid equality of property as well as of laws could remedy this evil? ; It is not the equitable distribution of property, but of law (which entails an uneven distribution of property) that secures the health of the state. Law functions as the infrastructure both for social and economic interactions, and the rules of law (jurisprudence) are open to discovery. 8. Wordsworth will answer this in the 1800 preface with his analysis of the powerful lines of Gray's sonnet: It is equally obvious that except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word "fruitless" for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose. fLvrical Ballads 253) 9. In "Simon Lee," Wordsworth gives us a perverted form, in which youth, trying to be helpful, overruns old age: "You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool," to him I said: . . . I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I sever'd. "We are seven" and "Anecdote for Fathers" come nearer to Wordsworth's ideal, but the extreme youth of the respondents begs the issue of two able generations contending for limited resources. 10. Changed to "old" in 1800. , 11. The phrase "Young Harry" may invoke its absent complement "Old Harry" and suggest, more than inheritance, usurpation. 164 12. The phrase "secular arm of the church" refers to the church's invocation of civil powers to punish offenders, as in the Inquisition. 13. See also Thompson, Working Class, esp. ch 7, "The Field Labourers: Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers. (237-8) 14. Wordsworth's cousin, Edward Ferguson, wrote on 8 Aug., 1798: Wm is about to Publish a Volume of Poems,— I believe he has got a good price from the Bookseller so will have no trouble or Anxiety about them, further than what an author must feel, for the fate of his productions. (LEY 226) 165 Chapter Five The Contractual Basis for the Lvrical Ballads i. In December, 1799, Wordsworth wrote Coleridge, "Take no pains to contradict the story that the L. B. are entirely yours" (LEY 281); he believed the rumor would aid sales since Coleridge was better known to the public. In the 1800 edition, by contrast, Wordsworth inserted a "Note to the Ancient Mariner," that distinguishes Wordsworth as the proprietor of the Lyrical Ballads from Coleridge, who is figured as a kind of apprentice in the shop.1 Much had occurred in the interim: their trip to Germany, possibly the draft of "Essay on Morals,"2 Cottle's gift of the copyright to the Lvrical Ballads. Wordsworth and Dorothy settlement in Dove Cottage. This last, providing Wordsworth the role of householder, corresponds to the increased responsibility he takes for his poetry. In a letter to Longman (18 Dec., 1800), Wordsworth implicitly makes this connection; after detailing the copyright agreement, Wordsworth explains his caution: I mention this because, by some unaccountable mistake, Mr. Cottle sold the Copy-right of the first volume when he had no more right so to do than to sell the house which I now inhabit. (LEY 310) Kurt Heinzelman has observed that the Preface of 1800 "was Wordsworth's first public declaration of poetry as his profession" (Economics 2 02). It was also the first time that he owned (or, in common legal terminology, "occupied") a copyright that had gone to London where Longman owned it and returned, via Cottle's gift, to the Lake District (although, as the above quotation suggests, Wordsworth asserted his continual possession of it). The Preface circulated in a discourse "increasingly inflected with terms of commerce and business, accumulation and exchange" (Economics 202). Heinzelman aptly describes both the growth of business discourse in England over the last century and Wordsworth's own growing investment in monetary matters. The letter to Longman cited above suggests this connection by Wordsworth's "particular request that no Books be advertised at the end of the volumes" (LEY 310), at once acknowledging the advertising base of market for his work and refusing to be a vehicle for the deployment of other works. Heinzelman particularly notes the language of contract the Preface uses. My reading of the Preface accepts the operations Heinzelman has demonstrated, and suggests that, in response to reviews of the first edition and anticipation of future critics, Wordsworth shapes the Preface as a legal argument. Its diction, invoking the domain of jurisprudence, underscores the systemization of Wordsworth's own ideas. Yet, because he is a professional poet, Wordsworth's contract in the literary marketplace eschews the usual protection by the court afforded an economic contract, and substitutes a kind of common law of poetry that permits the poem (or poet) to secure a contract with the reader at the moment of articulation. More plainly, the poetic contract and the legal contract are analogues and rivals within the economic sphere because both attempt to regulate that sphere internally. Wordsworth announces the rivalry wittily. Despite his claims to speak to the common man, he chooses an epigraph in Latin, the language of legal maxims. Brett and Jones translate it "Something not at all to your taste, Papinianus, "3 and explain it as a private joke against the lawyer James Mackintosh (LB 124). As such, it has both political and aesthetic dimensions. First, the political: Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae was a powerful defense of the French Revolution, but, in the summer of 1799, he had undertaken to refute it in thirty-nine lectures, "The Law of Nature and Nations." Both Godwin and Hazlitt heard these lectures with dismay, the latter writing "To be a hawker of worn-out paradoxes, and a pander to sophistry denotes indeed a desperate ambition" (quoted in Baker, Hazlitt. 100-1).4 In this context, the epigraph implies that the politics of the Lvrical Ballads remain true to ideals Mackintosh deserted, although the submersion of explicit political argument (and the obscurity of the epigraph) perhaps indicates Wordsworth's uneasiness with such a claim. Next, aesthetic: Mackintosh's erudite style and refined taste are not suited for a reader of the Lvrical Ballads. This private reference, however, remained unavailable to most readers, and those of sufficient learning could find another, more public gloss. The line comes from the legal historian and antiquarian, John Selden, in his forward to Michael Drayton's Polv-olbion. Aemilius Papinianus, a Roman Jurist (140-212 AD), wrote a Responsa. a 19-volume work that served as the basic curriculum of post-classical law schools; third-year students were consequently called Papinianistae. Wordsworth does not write for the hack lawyers being manufactured ever faster for the growing market demands. More subtly, the work defies the taste of especially those lawyers who saw themselves as the arbiters of taste: Papinianus' stature as a commentator was confirmed by an imperial decree that, should jurists disagree on a point, his view was authoritative. Robert Chambers, in his Lectures on the English Law (1767-1773), had identified Papinianus as "the greatest of Roman lawyers," and, as a defender of English jurisprudence, noted with pride that the jurist had "presided in Britain as prefect" (95). The epigraph establishes a distance between poetic production and legal tradition, a gesture preparing the claim for the propriety of poetic social regulation. Before turning to the contractual language that informs the Preface, I wish to lay out the work which the poet contracts to do. The opening of the Preface reworks the terms of the Advertisement's second paragraph. In 1798, Wordsworth had described his poems as an "experiment": They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. (7) The issue is whether specifically rustic speech can be adapted. The Preface widens both the stakes of the experiment and the range of the poet's interest: It [The first edition] was published, as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavor to impart. (241) The "selection" comes from the language of "low and rustic life," for historical and potentially transitory reasons, but now that choice occurs within the general exploration of the "real language of men." By "real," Wordsworth does not mean the words of actual speakers, since reshuffling those words into meter results in "triviality and meanness both of thought and language . . . more dishonorable to the Writer's own character than false refinement" (246). Instead, "real language" is associated with its Latin root, res. "thing." Johnson's three definitions are pertinent: "1. Relating to things not persons; not personal"; "2. Not fictitious; not imaginary; true; genuine"; and "3. In law, consisting of things immoveable, as land." 1. "Relating to things not persons; not personal": The real language of men speaks about things, land, cloth, natural objects and it comes from a communicating relationship with these things, rather than from an abstracted property interest in them. Wordsworth chooses the rustic as his source of real language "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects [things] from which the best part of language is originally derived" (LB 245). Wordsworthian poetry, then, attempts to re-invest language with its objective origins. Further, these origins do not only exist in the past, as in the legal doctrine of prior possession, but persist through constant renewal. "Anecdote for Fathers" shows not only how the art of lying is taught, but locates such an art as a perversion of objective language. When a demand for sophisticated language (i.e., the cross- examination of "Why? Edward, tell me why?") is inflicted on a more original emotion, the result must be untruth and its linguistic equivalent, unreal language. The answer of the boy, as he spots the weather-cock, demonstrates that his language works through the associations of objects but also that such a method risks perversion. Real language, deriving from objects, is not personal. It does not express the passion of an individual, but a passion accessible to, and exchangeable between, rustic, poet, and reader. The last stanza of "Anecdote" invokes this triad: Oh dearest, dearest boy! my heart For better lore would seldom yearn, Could I but teach the hundredth part Of what from thee I learn. (57-60) The poet's effect on the reader fulfills the father's desire because the poet, while keeping the incident intact, translates it into "better lore." Further, the father now addresses the boy silently, speaking from heart to heart without the intermediary language of disruption. In another sense, the father addresses the reader, who is the boy generalized in that the speaker fulfills his "yearn[ing]" to "teach " through the anecdote and who is, as the title announces, also a father and the universalized beneficiary of the boy's knowledge. The poem implicitly rejects the usual theory of property by prior possession (which, in Lockean terms, relies on an assumption that originary labor established a right of occupancy). The narrator's first assertion of possession, "I have a boy of five years old" (1), is reiterated without conscious recognition by his habit of holding the child by the arm (30, 34), recalling Goody Blake and, perhaps, the Ancient Mariner. Every reference to Edward in the first eleven stanzas is either explicitly possessive ("my boy" twice 17 and 45, "my little boy" 25), implicitly possessive by the use of the name with a diminutive adjective ("little Edward" 37), or both ("my little Edward" 38). At the moment of the lie, the references become impersonal ("The boy" 53), and in the final stanza, the child remains independent but increased in value ("Oh dearest, dearest boy"), while the father claims as his own that which is his only rightful possession ("my heart"). 2. "Not fictitious; not imaginary; true; genuine": Real language does not necessarily describe actual events. In the Advertisement, Wordsworth announces that except for "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," all the poems "are either the absolute inventions of the author, or facts which took place within his personal observation or that of his friends" (8). These three sources equally adapt real language to the extent that they successfully make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. The discourse of poetry and the lived experiences of the farmer both reflect primary laws, although the former is corrupted when it lacks social autonomy and grounds itself in affected (unreal, moveable, illegal) language, while the erosion of the latter concerns economic disruptions. The ruling classes, however, can only inflict these disruptions through control of language, a possibility depending on poetry surrendering its autonomy by choosing affected, rather than real, language as its medium. To be true, then, is to be lawful, and these laws are rooted in nature, but this nature itself gains existence in the poetic procedure of encountering and interpreting real language. The theory of natural law was a commonplace already used by two sides, Blackstone and Burke, Paine and Godwin, to justify opposed views of English Constitutionalism. From Wordsworth's perspective in the 174 late 1790s, however, these theorists either perverted nature by falsely asserting that the existing human laws in fact derived from nature (as Blackstone did, in his panegyric on the completeness of the British Constitution) or falsely believed that nature's laws i could be derived by an inspection of only the human soul (as Godwin's Platonism implied). In "Lines Written in i Early Spring," Wordsworth argued that the laws of association of thought corresponded to natural phenomena: To her fair works did nature link i The human soul that through me ran (5-6) f . As Wordsworth recalls these lines in the Fenwick Notes, they were "Actually composed while I was sitting by the side of a brook." Despite the many natural objects depicted— a grove, primrose-tufts, birds, breeze— the i poem never mentions a brook; the human soul, in the ■ fluidity expressed in line 6, replaces it.5 The human : soul and Nature's fair works are linked, but the soul is not identical with the individual. It is, rather, impersonal, that which compels the poet to thought, as in the last stanza: If I these thoughts [that twigs have pleasure, etc.] may not prevent If such be of my creed the plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man? (21-4) This lament is vague, referring as easily to the fall of the ancient regime as to the English response to the 175 French Revolution. In any case, man has constructed himself in his own image, rather than in that of nature. His language is no longer real, no longer part of the poet's creed. 3. "In law, consisting of things immoveable, as land": Language, for the poet, is a property. Beyond the actual protection of copyright, Wordsworth seeks a deeper claim, that language is a continual product of the poetic "occupation," a word that, with the senses of both work and occupancy, joins labor and property. To be occupied by language, or to occupy it, does not make language private, any more than the solitary work of the farmer remains secluded; both must be brought to market. Here, however, a difference between poetic labor and agrarian work becomes apparent. While language does literally circulate— volumes are bought, magazines are distributed, letters taught— the meaning remains fixed at a virtual origin, the Poet's sensibilities. The paradox here of motion and stability is not unique to Wordsworth's aesthetics, but emerges in most ideological attempts to represent the marketplace to itself, since the market is itself stable in order to authorize motion within it. Wordsworth, however, hermetically seals meaning, and therefore economic value, into the poet by his discussion ! of "purpose." 176 Wordsworth distinguishes his poems from those usually encountered in that "each one of them has a worthy purpose" arising from "the habit of meditation" (246). The name "Poet" and its instantiation "Wordsworth" secure this remark: "If in this opinion I am mistaken, I can have little right to the name of Poet." The re-issue of the Lvrical Ballads, combined with the unexpected success of the first edition (242), has established the right to the name and a communal duty towards it: "Several of my friends are anxious for the success of these Poems" (242) . Since the Preface and its simultaneous and necessary unmasking of the author establishes the right to the name, then existence of purpose is secure. This purpose, however, turns out to be its own expression. First, Wordsworth notes that "my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose" (246). The purpose appears to be ancillary to the feelings, or derived from their successful rendition, but in the next paragraph, Wordsworth collapses the distinction. The purpose "will be found principally to be: namely to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement" (247). The laws of association both validate the poetry and are validated by it. Wordsworth repeatedly articulates the 177 | same circle in which origin is at once manifested and j |veiled. The definition of poetry is a crucial example: ! i I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of , reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before j the subject of contemplation, is gradually j produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition J generally begins, and in a mood similar to this ; it is carried on; . . . (266) The passage begins as 'already said,1 so that the condition of spontaneity itself can be contextualized, revealed not as spontaneous but enmeshed within the poetic labor that it both overflows and fills by j 1 overflowing. The "origins" of Poetry arise in the midst of making poetry, in the habits of meditation: the I emotion which validates the labor both precedes and is I preceded by poetry, and it is, then, constructed by i i poetic intention. The space of tranquility is both occupied and consumed. The process of recollection presumes something previous made again to "actually exist," and this recreation becomes an original act that preserves "re[-]collected" emotions. The origins of poetry are not so much obscure as late; poetry begins | I already made. The second sentence of the quotation jlocates the definition of poetry ("Poetry is . . . ") as the "mood" in which poetry "generally begins." The | L referent to "this mood" is uncertain, or, to turn it around, by describing the shifts of poetic composition as a single mood, Wordsworth asserts a homogeneity in the transitions between emotion, tranquility, and emotion again. 1 The recreated emotion is "similar" (Johnson's first meaning: "homogeneous, having one part like another") to j some more originary feeling? and is capable of recreating | itself in the reader. This recreation allows the Poet to become analogous to Nature: Now if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed [the Poet], the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. By "preserving" the employed" poet in "a state of j enjoyment," Nature protects the labor of the Poet who ! repays the debt indirectly by providing an "overbalance ; of pleasure," to the reader. This pleasure contracts the ' reader into the labor of reading, on behalf of both ' writer and nature. The reader's necessary qualities of i soundness and vigor recall the "better soil" of the working rustic, but overlaid with the city's sense for profit. Wordsworth shifts between imagery of gifts and purchase. The Poet intends to profit from Nature and this accumulation overflows into the act of reading. I 179 I I Reading, then, like composition, begins already begun. The quoted sentence, however, can be emphasized in two I ways. The first centers the poet's obligation ("care") towards the Reader as a contract, with Nature replacing Law as the horizon of enforcement. The second way repositions the obligation of the reader. Since poetry arose with an overflow of emotion, the reader ought to feel pleasure, unless his mind is not "sound and vigorous." Wordsworth defends his poetry with this l appeal, despite his disclaimer that he does not intend a j systematic defence. Finally, the systemization which he apparently rejects is constantly present within the framework of that rejection. ii. After commenting on the success of the first edition and marginalizing Coleridge's poems, Wordsworth begins his defense by denying such an intention. His friends believe that if the views with which [these poems] were composed, were indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the multiplicity and in the quality of its moral relations; and on this account they have advised me to preface a systematic defence of the theory, upon which the poems were written. (242) The systematic defense would operate, at a meta-level of analysis, on a class of readers as the writing of a single poem at the level of emotional engagement does on 180 I I ; the reader. Or, to deploy Wordsworth's own mercantile imagery of production and interest, the underlying laws by which the poems were produced would sustain an entire class, that is, a "set . . . ranged in distribution, under some common denomination" (Johnson), of poetry. The poet produces both poetry and the laws of poetry, and this self-sustaining, double production "interest[s] mankind" in both the "multiplicity" and "quality" of its "moral relationships." The rules of poetic discourse structure moral relationships just as the legal system regulates society simultaneously to regulating itself through the science of jurisprudence. That Wordsworth refuses the task of this defense even as he presents it suggests the danger of the territory he invades, and Jeffrey's continual public attacks, despite private claims of enjoying Wordsworth's work, represent a predictable response. But why a preface at all? Wordsworth wishes to avoid the "impropriety of ' abruptly obtruding upon the Public . . . Poems so materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed" (243). As with "real," the full range of "materially" is called for. The poems are of a different fabric, a different weight. i This remark has a rhetorical dimension emphasizing I | Wordsworth's originality, but it also situates a new 181 contract between poet and reader, secured by a new property. In the next paragraph, Wordsworth presents the usual contract, the one sanctified by tradition: It is supposed that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association, that he not only apprizes the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. (243) . Supposed by whom? Or rather, where does the power to assert such suppositions lie? At one level, Wordsworth is appealing to the common practices of poetry, but such practices have gained regulative force because of their commonness. So, the supposition resides in the laws of association. Because he will later argue that poetry can regulate those laws, Wordsworth contradicts these rules of inclusion and exclusion in precisely the manner common law is challenged, by arguing that the rules have been inconstant and not in force from time immemorial: This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different areas of literature have excited very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus Terence and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian, and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. (243). Wordsworth articulates these ages by the poets who, he claims implicitly, typified them.6 They become the source of difference rather than continuity. At the same time, a continuity of difference is implicit in linking 182 the Latin writers with the English, since the Roman conquest of England is taken as a civilizing origin grounded in Roman Law introduced by prefects such as Papinianus. This consolidation prepares for Wordsworth's consideration of the current age and his relation to it: I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by the act of writing in verse an Author in the present day makes to his Reader; but I am certain it will appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. The certainty with which he interprets the response of "many people," implies that Wordsworth is capable of the determination that he declines. By refusing an analysis of the "promise" that the "act of writing in verse" de jure inflicts on an Author, Wordsworth opens a space to rewrite the contract himself while distinguishing "the Reader" (his reader) from the "many persons"7: I hope therefore the Reader will not censure me, if I attempt to state what I have proposed to myself to perform, and also (as far as the limits of a preface will permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined me in the choice of my purpose: . . . Wordsworth avails himself of the widening range of contract which the convertibility of the marketplace permitted. But in the usual terms of a contract, the voluntary entry into it is not sufficient to validate it; the court must also be willing to enforce it. Wordsworth makes the contract— the preface itself— self-validating I 183 j i land self-limiting, hence the parenthetical phrase. iWordsworth completes the quoted sentence by justifying ; this appropriation with a consideration balanced for both ! parties: ; that at least he [the Reader] may be spared any unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I j myself may be protected from the most dishonourable accusation which can be brought against an Author, namely, that of indolence which prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or, when his duty is ascertained prevents him from performing it. The contract of the Preface provides its own protection without recourse to its enforcement by an outside agent. Rather, a proper reading of the Preface (contract) J constitutes both the meeting of the minds and the consideration necessary for the contract to have force. But the terms of performance, for Wordsworth, are J i specifically those which release him from the usual practices. After clarifying his purpose of exploring the I associations of the mind by brief descriptions of several I poems, Wordsworth details "the general importance of the | i subject": ! to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capacity ["of excitement without the application of gross I and violent stimulants" in the reader] is one of 1 the best services in which, at any period, a j Writer can be engaged[.] (249) :The metaphors of productivity invoke an economic horizon, (but Wordsworth provides a critique of that horizon as having inadvertently created a need the poet can meet. The solution is not supplying the lacking "gross stimulants," which deepen the lack, but recalling the mind to its more delicate possibilities: [A] multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. Wordsworth recognizes that forces have "combined," have managed to accumulate into their own structure, and, as such, oppose the mind's delicate powers. The term "the mind," however, is problematic, because it silently develops its own accumulative force— it is not the particular minds of individuals at stake, but the objective mind to which real language speaks; at the same time, this general term preserves within it the individual as the person that the poet teaches, discloses, creates. Again, Wordsworth works a co-option of the marketplace by insisting on an accumulative power in the poet beyond the marketplace which, then, can revitalize the market itself. The oxymoron of "savage torpor" catches the frenzy of the economic marketplace madly creating the products (civilization) which sustain it by virtue of (and not despite) their inadequacy. Wordsworth outlines the causes of the savage torpor: the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in 185 the cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for the I extraordinary incident which the rapid ’ ! communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. i This market consolidation opposes the poet's craft. iWhere these forces accumulate men, the poet acts in . solitude to join men together in the disparate act of reading. Where the men are made uniform by occupation, the poet differentiates the "more subtle windings" (247) of the mind and insists on the individuation implicit in the unalienated labor. Where the economic structure of the city creates a craving (i.e., is experienced as a lack) the poet fulfills an obligation. Where the men of the city require "the extraordinary incident," the poet provides "the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature" (247). Where the structure of communication must be rapid to meet the craving, the poet's purpose arises from having "thought long and deeply" (246). And where the city creates and gratifies the needs of workers by molding them into a "uniformity," the poet offers a contract obligating the reader to use the mind's capacity for excitement as a mode of self knowledge. The charge against the great national events demands that writers take sides, and Wordsworth laments that: To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. (249) 186 This conformity is double, at the levels both of content and form? these works ("frantic novels," "deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse") provide the extraordinary incidents that are craved and constitute an accumulation of writers with a uniformity of occupation. This moment represents a radical challenge to the condition of literature, but Wordsworth retreats from it. I !For his poetry to succeed, it must act within a field of {language that it cannot, of itself, sustain. Writing about diction, he presents a less confrontational attitude: Not but that I believe that others who pursue a different track may interest [the reader] likewise: I do not interfere with their claim. I only wish to prefer a different claim of my own. (Italics mine; each italicized word appears in Black's Law Dictionary) The metaphor of interference and preference is from a bankruptcy action, a suitable image for the danger in which the Reader now discovers himself. Wordsworth does not interfere with other claims, that is, he does not inquire into the validity of the agreement between the Reader and other authors. Since these authors respond to the contingencies of the market, the Reader who constitutes the market has an interest in them. In preferring his claim, Wordsworth demands a priority on the capital (reading time, money, thoughtfulness) of the reader. The image doubles the responsibility of the 187 Reader, who is both the creditor (or party of the contract) and the judge who must enforce the claims. Only once the debt created by the Preface is discharged is the reader freed to answer the later claims. The claim of priority and the assertion that his poems disclose the fundamental laws of association form a single argument. From the laws of association, all other laws are derived, including those governing the market and the creation of verse. Wordsworth's poems, then, perform a critical function of providing the regulations by which human behavior can be understood and poetry j udged: I have taken as much pains to avoid [poetic diction] as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men . . . [my good sense] has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets. (251) The production of false language, as in refined eighteenth-century wit, creates a personal property interest which can be inherited. The image of the father passing on to the son cuts off poetry from the production of a real language continually recreated by labor, and so Wordsworth refuses his inheritance. Not that he refuses a property interest in his poetry, but that he wants one of greater durability. The old hereditary structure of 188 primogeniture, with its analogue of monarchy, remained a vital legal metaphor despite having been abolished in all cases except for intestacy in 1669.8 Godwin and Paine questioned the validity of such inheritance by demonstrating its conventional basis. Paine, to mock the absurdity of hereditary titles, imagined "the ridiculous insignificance into which literature . . . would sink, were [it] made hereditary" (Rights, 176); and Godwin, admiring the joke, expanded it specifically to the court- appointed office of Poet Laureate (Enquiry. 468). Wordsworth has omitted many "proper and beautiful" expressions because they have been foolishly repeated by bad Poets til such feelings of disgust are connected with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower. (251) As words are seized by bad Poets, they become inaccessible to good ones. This gives the Reader a stake in eliminating bad Poets, because it is his associations being abused. The turn of the Preface at this point is to move from a defensive posture to one of mutual compliance. The interests of Poet and Reader merge into a contractual agreement that excludes critics who merely apply laws of poetry. Wordsworth highlights this exclusion in the continued discussion of poetic style. Many critics, he says, find a line which, "though naturally arranged and according to 189 the strict laws of meter, does not differ from that of prose," and they "imagine they have made a notable discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own profession" (252). The sarcastic tone dampens the charge of ignorance of his profession, the sharpest one that could be levelled at Wordsworth. He rebuffs it by illustrating his competence not only in poetry, but in criticism. In reading the Gray poem, "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West," Wordsworth co-opts the point of the poem— that the solace of the overblown language ("reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire") pales before the grief packed into such simple lines as "My lonely anguish melts no hearts but mine"— in order to establish his own authority. He claims that only the prosaic lines are "of any value," as if the observation criticizes the poem, rather than subscribing to the poem's own values. Whether this co-option is deliberate, it is strategic. In portraying Gray as ignorant of his profession, Wordsworth establishes his own expertise. He reverses Wrangham's comment that a good critic must be a poet also; instead, as a professional, a poet has the self- consciousness that allows the best criticism. Wordsworth's attack on criticism does not become an appeal for poetic anarchy. He objects to rigid laws of 1 90 poetic diction because they arbitrarily place "the Reader utterly at the mercy of the Poet." What begins as self- justification protects the reader as well. The meter and rhyme, in contrast to diction, obey certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference is made by them with the passion but such as the concurring testimony of ages has shewn to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists with it. The willing submission to law presents law as a kind of contract, grounded in tradition, and opposes the idea that the law creates contract. David Hume had already demonstrated that the notion of an original contract was not well founded in history, law, or philosophy, and that people submitted to the regulations into which they were born because of a horizon of coercion; from his perspective, as a defender of the newly forming marketplace, this coercion was not malicious but a historical circumstance. Wordsworth has recognized this point in describing the usual marketplace for "idle and extravagant stories in verse," but here he suggests that poetry can introduce a new covenant that retains the forms (meter) of the old one, but enforces new content. In his prose, Wordsworth has reworked the mutual agreement sought by the narrator of "Simon Lee": 0 reader, had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle reader! you would find 191 A tale in everything. What more I have to say is short, I hope you'll kindly take it; It is no tale; but should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it. (73-80) Just as Wordsworth adds "to my stock of poetry" (LEY 215, 12 Apr 1798)9 in order to deploy them into books, the reader must call on his "stores" to recuperate the poems. The echo of "store" in the stanza above to an earlier description of Simon Lee ("Few months of life has he in store") suggests the seriousness of the matter; life itself must be stored in a way that labor remains inscribed on the store and can be reactivated. If the reader has lived in the proper way, he can make a tale that is the tale the poet has made. Although the narrator of "Simon Lee" does not recognize the implications of his incident— he cannot interpret Simon Lee's tears nor his own consequent "mourning"— the Reader presumably can, and must. The reviews of the first edition largely skipped "Simon Lee"; Burney, who commented on every poem, ignores the "Incident."10 Not until Wordsworth appears by name do the two narrative levels of the poem emerge, the first in which Simon Lee and the narrator engage in a misguided contract of misunderstood labor, and the second in which the Reader and Wordsworth mutually construct from that misunderstanding a genuine tale. 192 A serial relationship between the critic and reader is implicit in the structure of the reviews. One does not read alone, but in a matrix of readers who, in their readings, judge those of others. A consensus of judgment can be achieved, a verdict rendered through the jurisdiction of the reviewers. Wordsworth denies the validity of such a verdict and the claim of jurisdiction. In the closing argument of the Preface, Wordsworth requests: that in judging these Poems he [the Reader] would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others. (270) Wordsworth's appeal aims at individual reviewers, asking them to respond like "my Reader" and not in the "mode of criticism so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment" (270). Wordsworth rhetorically disrupts the reviewing institution by relocating its participants in a poetic, not critical, relation to the poet. In his concluding sentence, however, he structures a serial relationship back into the Reader/Poet exchange: From what has been said, and from a perusal of the Poems, the Reader will be able clearly to perceive the object which I have proposed to myself: he will determine how far I have attained this object; and, what is a much more important question, whether it be worth attaining; and upon the decision of these two questions will rest my claim to the approbation of the public. (272) 193 Wordsworth has presented his evidence, the poems, and his rationale, the Preface, and from these, the Reader can determine the result of two claims. First, has he fulfilled his contract which is articulated as existing between him and himself but parallels earlier expressions that located it between himself and the Reader? This move, of collapsing the entire relationship into himself, allows the reader to step out of the contract and rule on it. But, since the premise of the Preface has been that an accurate reading of the poems was simultaneously judgmental and contractual, no contradiction arises. Secondly, is the contract worthwhile, against the general debaucheries of poetry as already demonstrated? If the reader answers this second question in the negative, it amounts to his own failure to fulfill his obligation. In resting his defense, Wordsworth transforms the Reader (consistently an individual in contrast to the critics who have been a teeming mass throughout the Preface) into a "public," a poetic institution. The labor of the individual reader, like that of the poet, can accumulate, can form a marketplace, and, provided the critic does not manipulate that market, can do so without losing the individual character of reading. Wordsworth's contractual approach eschews the usual protections of a contract— lawyer and critic— and instead 194 insists on a mutuality between reader and writer; this very procedure, however, reveals a certain tension, if not contradiction, in his work. Individual readers can accumulate into a market, and indeed must to the extent that books are sold, discussed, reissued,, and so on, but they do so, in Wordsworthian terms, by denying the collective market character of their endeavors as readers and poets. The property Wordsworth creates is at once a poem and a way of reading which cannot be contained in the market yet can therefore claim to represent the market while being a perfectly transparent exchange product between reader and poet. iii. The second edition garnered few reviews, but its Preface became the object of critical execration for the next decade. In the first issue of the Edinburgh Review. Francis Jeffrey used the occasion of Southey's Thalaba to attack Wordsworth's aesthetics, "the perverted taste for simplicity," and its results, the commemoration of "the chattering of Harry Gill's teeth." Jeffrey's own agenda, his resistance to Wordsworth's system-making, depends on his situation as a Scottish lawyer dedicated to legitimizing the market economy in a way that positions the courts as the arbitrators of contracts, and, by corollary, the critics as the arbitrators of taste, 195 presumably "long established like the doctrines of religion." Jeffrey knew that religion had a long and bloody history of doctrinal disputes, but he represents the doctrines as transcending their own history; the true doctrines, like those of common law, persisted from time immemorial, despite moments of obscurity. Such a view, seemingly a middle-ground of political, aesthetic, and legal debate, unified a wide range of discourse. In essence, by controlling what constituted legitimate discourse, Jeffrey's reviewing procedures set the political standards and limits for the discourse of the reviewing industry. These limits were depicted as aesthetic judgments, but also represented the ideological supports and possibilities of the marketplace. They excluded discussions that radically questioned the marketplace; what they included allowed a range of disagreement but referred back to fundamental tenets. As a concrete example, two politically opposed journals, the Satirist and the Poetic Register, used the terms of Jeffrey's review against Wordsworth. Despite Wordsworth's claim that the Preface was not a systematic defense, critics insisted that he was a builder of systems. Reviewing Poems, in Two Volumes, the Satirist (November, 1807) recalled: This gentleman published two volumes of Lyric Ballads [sic] some years ago, which were composed 196 on a system of his own: as if poetry were a mechanical art, and performed its operations by certain regulated processes, and not an appeal to the hearts and feelings of mankind. (180) The impulse to dismiss this reading as stupid since Wordsworth emphasizes emotions misses the reviewer's rhetorical situation. The distinction between the mechanical and the emotional denies both the associationist psychology that invigorates much of Wordsworth's work and the role that the market's regulative processes take in developing poetry. This is the image of the romantic poet, inspired, effusive, unbusiness-like. Since the claim secures the domain of the analytic for the critic and the critic's analysis can adjudicate the presence of genuine emotion, the poet's role becomes subordinate. The review upends Wordsworth's Preface, and, true to its mandate, satirizes his "grand system of poetry" which separates him from other poets, and even from himself: The gossiping style of those productions, in which his practice corresponded to his theory, was the object of universal ridicule; but whenever he forgot his system and consulted his feelings, he displayed genuine talent. (189) Without denying, in fact praising, Wordsworth's poetic talents, the reviewer condemns Wordsworth's critical abilities, both in themselves and for their effects on his poetry. While not explicitly political, the review signals the ideological implications of Wordsworth's effort to center himself at the expense of the critic: If a certain ex-chancellor were to write a book of the same size, it could not contain a greater number of X's and me's. Almost a ludicrous contrast is produced between the swelling self- sufficiency of the writer, and the extreme insignificance of the object described. The chancellor (who did not remain out of office for long) was John Scott, Lord Eldon, who had aided the prosecutions of Thomas Paine as well as heading the prosecution against the members of the London Corresponding Society? he had declared his conservative values early and often. On the bench, his self- importance had manifested itself in the meticulous attention with which he approached cases, "however marginal or insignificant" (Underhill 166). By ridiculing both Wordsworth and Eldon, and suggesting that their mistakes are systematic rather than aberrant, the reviewer bolsters the current Lord Chancellor, Erskine, who had defended Hardy and Horne Tooke.1 1 The struggle against Wordsworth's false innovations intersects the effort for reform. Wordsworth's political position was not read universally as reactionary, and critiques from the other side also invoked Jeffrey's terms. The notice of Poems. in Two Volumes in the Poetical Register for 1806-07 198 (1811), produced by "the high-church publishers of the British Critic" (Reiman, 814) describes the volume as calculated to excite disgust and anger in a lover of poetry. The drivelling nonsense . . . is insufferable, and it is equally insufferable that such nonsense should have been written by a man capable, as he is, of writing well. (540) The insistence on calculation establishes a guilty intent, and this reviewer finds the same cause as the Satirist: But Mr. Wordsworth is a System maker . . . on the altar of that system he sacrifices melody, elegance, spirit, and even common sense. Whenever he deviates from his monstrous system he writes like a man of genius. (540-41) The metaphor of idolatry, signifying the effort to establish a religion and a ritual marking its inauguration, indicates that the central worry of the reviewer is not that Wordsworth lacks melody and common sense, but his effect on these qualities in society generally. In the notice following this one, the reviewer praises Mrs. Opie by implicitly contrasting her work with Wordsworth's: Still less . . . does she imitate those persons who present to us an idiot in rags, as a specimen of native grace and decorum. (541) The concern of the critics was not, then, only aesthetic, but involved questions of economic power, both literally in the promotion of poems and review vehicles, and 199 ideologically, in the manner in which critics and poets presented society to itself. 200 NOTES 1. The Preface itself steers a middle if inconsistent course. Coleridge's poems are included "For the sake of variety" and because they "in a great measure have the same tendency as" Wordsworth's poems. 2. "I think publications in which we formally & systematically lay down rules for the actions of Men cannot be too long delayed" (1:103) From the context, this first sentence of the fragment remains ambiguous, expressing either urgency or resistance to laying out systematic rules. The essay continues with an attack against Godwin's method, but the attack itself develops the outlines of an associationist system that grounds the Preface of 1800. The ambiguity, then, is not merely a matter of incompleteness, but perhaps suggests why the essay remained incomplete in favor of the revised Lyrical Ballads. 3. Wordsworth's interest in the motto is apparent from a post-script in a letter to Biggs and Cottle: "Be careful to print the motto accurately— Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuuml" (LEY 293) 4. By the Spirit of the Age (1825), Hazlitt's view had altered: The effect [of the Lectures] was more electrical and instantaneous, and this elicited a prouder display of intellectual riches, and a more animated mode of delivery . . . Dazzling others by the brilliancy of his acquirements, dazzled himself by the admiration they excited, he lost fear as well as prudence . . . the principles of Reform were scattered in all directions, like chaff before the keen northern blast. He laid about him like one inspired; nothing could withstand his envenomed tooth (214-5). The description of the lectures, their effects, and their inspiration of an interview with the dying Burke occupies half of the chapter on Mackintosh. Hazlitt's admiration of the sublime delivery is tempered by his horror of the effects. The structure of the Essay, beginning with the present, moving back to the Lecture, then to the Vindiciae Gallicae. and ending with the observation that Mackintosh currently is writing a history on the Stuart reign suggests the retrograde development that, for Hazlitt, characterizes Mackintosh's career. 201 5. Whether Wordsworth's description of the composition is accurate determines if his act of writing performed this transformation by suppressing the external brook or if his act of reading invented the brook to unify the poem further through interpretation. 6. The omission of Milton marks the anxiety of influence that Wordsworth suppresses, at this argumentative juncture, since Milton had already repudiated the convention of rhyme in an argument prefacing Paradise Lost. 7. Consider an Introduction written by one careful reader of Wordsworth: "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople— its no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike . . . " (E.E. Cummings, 4 61). 8. Wordsworth's argument reads a bit ironically; since he has already observed that in different ages, poetic language meant much differently, the inheritance is empty of content. 9. Presumed to be the earliest reference to the Lyrical Ballads. 10. "Simon Lee, the old Huntsman, is the portrait, admirably painted, of every huntsman who, by toil, age, and infirmities, is rendered unable to guide and govern his canine family." 11. For accounts of the rivalry between Eldon and Erskine, see anecdotes 53, 96, 173, and 174 in Eldon's Anecdote Book. 202 Chapter Six Evidentiary Poems j A. Introduction and Reply; Wordsworth and Lamb | The significance of the Preface was not primarily theoretical, but polemical, and the poems of the second edition were the test of its arguments. The presence of the Preface and the poet's name not only authorizes the thirty-five new poems, but alters the previously published ones. In a curious way, however, this alteration is elided by the publishing history of the poems. In 1800, Cottle and Biggs printed 750 copies of j the first volume and 1000 copies of the second volume I j (Owen, "Costs" 94); the economic rationale was that many i purchasers of the first edition would buy only the second volume. Wordsworth's decision, then, to place his critical polemic in the first volume where previous readers would not encounter it, rather than as an | appendix to the second volume, suggests its superfluousness for those readers of the First Edition I who were able to sustain enough pleasure from that volume to buy the Second in 1800. ! 203 | In re-ordering the first volume, Wordsworth announces a shift in emphasis, but one, he implies by both the content and placement of the Preface, that a sufficiently strong reader of the first edition could have deduced. I Such a revisionist illusion initiates Wordsworth's j technique of rewriting history through restructuring i poetry, a procedure at the problematic core of what i Clifford Siskin has identified as the "historicity of i l 'romantic discourse."1 That such a technique duplicates i i the revisionary aspects of common-law interpretation, by which, for example, copyright comes into existence in the eighteenth century as having existed from time j immemorial, is not accidental, but sheds light on the 1 historical terrain which romantic poetry and legal discourse disputed. The recent attention given to Wordsworth's career as a series of revisionary acts by ! such critics as Siskin, Kenneth Johnston (Wordsworth and i j The Recluse), and William Galperin (Authority and j Revision) helps position Wordsworth's career, and I Romanticism, within a wider historical framework which 1 was constructing itself through revisionary practices.2 i Reading the editions of the Lvrical Ballads as diachronic levels of a single text, however, can preserve ! the differences which Wordsworth's method elides, even j while suggesting the extent to which his poetic power is I 204 | marked by that successful elision. The first edition opens with an address to supernatural story-teller: It is an ancyent Marinere, And he stoppeth one of three "By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye I "Now wherefore stoppest me?["] (1-4) i ! In the second edition, this poem is buried, retitled and i positioned last in the volume. The change from "Rime of the Ancyent Mariner" to "The Ancient Mariner. A Poet's l ' Reverie" strips the Mariner of his role of poet by | emphasizing the modern poet's imagination. Lamb's ; objection to this shift, stated in a letter to Wordsworth (30 Jan., 1801), is that it reveals the poetic process which ought to be concealed in an encounter with the poem: I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere 'a poet's Reverie'— . . . What new idea is gained by this title, but one I subversive of all credit, which the tale should | force upon us, of its truth? (Lamb, 90) i j Lamb contends that the change in title does not alter the poem's meaning, but merely, and clumsily, intrudes the mechanism of that meaning on the reader in lieu of, or as ; a supplement to, its "truth." A proper understanding of the consistency, from Wordsworth's viewpoint, of the 1 change with the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads can I be seen in three other criticisms Lamb makes: first, "The Poet's Epitaph is disfigured, to my taste by the vulgar i satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning"; ! secondly, "the instructions conveyed in it ["The Old i I Cumberland Beggar"] are too direct and like a lecture: I ; they don't slide into the mind of the reader, while he is ; imagining no such matter"; and third, he "wished the ! Critical preface had appeared in a separate treatise." i These objections aim at minimizing the professional i profile of poetry, despite Lamb's awareness that I literature was a professional enterprise. Wishing to be seized like the unexpecting Wedding Guest, Lamb resists acknowledging (or more precisely, the Poet's i acknowledging) that the poem is always mediated by the poet, despite his realization that such mediation is the pre-condition of poetry.3 To judge from a letter by Lamb to Thomas Manning which summarizes a lost reply by Wordsworth, the poet was not pleased by his friend's I | response. In part, I would suggest, Wordsworth's peevishness ("four sweating pages," according to Lamb; i i LEY 316) arose because Lamb, in essence denying the success of the "experiment," echoed Wordsworth's own fear, that the literary marketplace could sustain the j professional poet only through his denial of professional status and his acquiescence to poetry's subordination ( within the economics of culture to legal and business i discourses.4 206 A difference in attitudes towards the professional tale-teller between Wordsworth and Lamb further clarifies Wordsworth's sense of professionalism. In his "Note to the Ancient Mariner" appended to the poem, Wordsworth notes that the poem's first defect is "that the principal person has no distinct character, . . . in his profession of Mariner" (LB 276-7). For Wordsworth, presumably, both the marks of travel and of story-telling particularize the professional.5 Lamb objects to this demand for particularity: I totally differ from your idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession. This is a Beauty in Gulliver's Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the Ancient Marinere undergoes such Trials, as overwhelm and bury all individuality. (Lamb, 90) For Wordsworth, trials would not bury the profession's individuality, but provide the means of its proof, because his productions were under constant trial in the marketplace. The tone of Wordsworth's response to Lamb, wishing that Lamb "should [have] receive[d] large influxes of happiness and Happy thoughts" (Lamb presumably loosely quoting Wordsworth, LEY 316) suggests Wordsworth's annoyance that Lamb had implicitly placed his poetry beside Swift's satire in the "placid state of little wonderments" (or at least Lamb's desire to understand Wordsworth that way).6 Lamb's letter, by 207 (preserving the First Edition's spelling of "Marinere," ; privileges Coleridge1s poem and its initial placement as the flag-bearer; Wordsworth's response was simultaneously | invested with personal dissatisfaction and professional !anxieties. | I turn now to a more detailed reading of ! ' "Expostulation and Reply" in the context of its supplanting "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere." The echo I | in "Expostulation" to the "Ancyent Marinere" in the first edition becomes an anticipation in the second edition. Both "William" and the "wedding guest" sit on a stone, and, after the change of title for the "Ancient Mariner," I 1 both are placed in the dreamy space of a poet's reverie (William "dream[s his] time away" 4). Responding to the I l charge that he is ignoring his books, William replies: I "The eye it cannot chuse but see, "We cannot bid the ear be still; . . . (17-8) The wedding guest, held in thrall by the Marinere's voice, "cannot chuse but hear." In both cases, the characters choose to hear, though they can make no other choice. But William has positioned himself to have only i , the one choice, while the wedding-guest confronts a violent interruption of his ordinary life. As Coleridge lays out the design of the Ballads, he j was to write poems in which "the incidents and agents i | were to be, in part at least, supernatural" while 208 iWordsworth was to write on "subjects chosen from ordinary !life" with characters and incidents that could be "found i i ' in every village and its vicinity" (Bioqraphia. II 6). 'while, as Coleridge presents it, the Ballads was i collaborative in the writing— he does not recall who |first proposed the scheme (Bioqraphia II 5-6)— in the I |reading, the poems were competitive. Would the reader's first encounter with an interpreter be William, whose discussion is with "[his] good friend Matthew" (15) and who can take words used against him in the first stanza and reuse them in his defense in the last; or would it be ; the wedding guest, held not so much against his will but I by the control of his will, and who ends "stunn'd" and i I silent? Is poetry a discourse of nature or an act of I violent intrusion? Determining that the first of these I | moods will dominate— without erasing— the second is j important to Wordsworth's project, set out in the Preface, of poetry as a mutual labor and contract between equals. When "Expostulation and Reply" opens the volume, the first line is an address to the named poet: "Why William, on that old grey stone ..." (1) In the eighteenth poem of the anonymous first edition, "William" carried no referential force; the reader had already encountered a host of commonly named characters. 209 Nothing indicates that "William" is a poet, rather than, say, an idle student. In the first poem of the second ; edition, with Wordsworth's name on the title-page, the i ! j reference is unavoidable, and the authority of the poet i sanctions a "reply" consistent with the Preface. The occasion for the poem laid out in the advertisement of | the First Edition was a "conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy"; such books, apparently championed by I iWilliam Hazlitt, relied on the generalizations the poem repudiates, and the trace of this line of argument remains. The absence of this gloss, however, augments the "books" at issue. "William" rejects "the light bequeath'd, . . . the spirit breath'd/From dead men to their kind" (5-8), now a poetic inheritance, in favor of "things for ever speaking" (26), a phrase recalling "real i language." The specificity of "Expostulation and Reply" ! ias a dialogue between two 'actual' individuals does not I ; allow 'reading nature' to be generalized. To read nature i requires a distinctive literacy gained in a rural youth, i ! and so a reader of the Lvrical Ballads, lacking that ! training, must accept nature as portrayed by Wordsworth. i This model relies on neither the appeal to reason as sufficient of itself nor a strict reliance on custom, to invoke reductive commonplaces of Godwinian and Burkean 210 epistemology in 1800; rather, the writers' minds l i j imprinted by nature feeds a communal mind: i j there are powers, Which of themselves our minds impress, j That we can feed this mind of ours, j In a wise passiveness. (21-4) i | ; This formulation, especially with its emphasis on an \ 1 \ engaged passivity, suggests to me the similarity between f the Spectator and William (Wordsworth) as professional writer, although the Spectator operated primarily in the i realms of finance and William in that of nature.7 As James Chandler has observed, William's reply to Matthew's challenge is oblique, even non-responsive (Second Nature 151): "Think you, mid all this mighty sum "Of things for ever speaking, ! "That nothing of itself will come, "But we must still be seeking? ["] (25-8)8 Had Wordsworth wished to offer a refutation of Matthew's ! I I , arguments, he would have. Instead, he locates himself at | a center point ("mid this mighty sum/Of things forever i speaking" he will remain "Conversing as I may" 30) which i j becomes a locus of distribution for his own works; his 1 continual transition of natural speech to poetic writing t j preserves a transcendent illusion that such writing is a | form of speech, and not, as "The Tables Turned" puts it, part of the "dull and endless strife" that books ' encapsulate. The debating form of the two poems does ; 211 i encapsulate a kind of strife, but in the mode of transcending it. The incompleteness of this 1 transcendence, however, is indicated by the duplication of the debate within the letters between Lamb and I i Wordsworth which centered on the status of Coleridge as a ! writer and contributor to the Lvrical Ballads. i , At the center of "Expostulation and Reply,"— the division between the two speakers— resides not knowledge, tbut mystery; this central stanza is the only one in the I narrator's voice: One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake, When Life was sweet I knew not why To me my good friend Matthew spake, And thus I made reply. (13-6) Aligning himself with Nature, William (Wordsworth) carves a position for himself that is subsumed neither by the Burkean nor Godwinian sides of the current literary strife. The poet does not investigate the sweetness of life, but transmits it as the enabling center of the debate it presumes to transcend; other authors, by l implication, "murder to dissect" ("The Tables Turned" 28). The mystery of sweetness may be contrasted to the gained wisdom of the Wedding Guest who is wiser by virtue j of being sadder for having confronted alienation from i i nature even in its midst, and having experienced that j alienation as one "stunn'd/And . . . of sense forlorn" i (655-6). 212 Geoffrey Hartman has commented that "it is striking that many [of the Lyrical Ballads1 are built around a 'spot,' whether in nature or in the psyche" (Wordsworth 141). "Expostulation and Reply," in this context, revolves around the stone from which William will not budge. It is equally striking how often the spots themselves are built around stories or what might be regarded as proto-poems. "Hart-Leap Well," to which I will now turn, revolves around the well built to commemorate the death of the Hart, but it becomes visible only through the story. As Wordsworth explained to Isabella Fenwick: Both the stones and the well are objects that may easily be missed; the tradition [i.e., the story] by this time may be extinct in the neighborhood: the man who related it to us was very old. (LB 298) As Hartman has suggested (14 2), Wordsworth encounters the tale upon his return to Grasmere and imbeds in the Hart's return to the well a powerful sense of return that mirrors his own attachment to the Lake District. Such a correspondence allows Wordsworth to preserve a tradition, even as it dies out locally with its teller, and inscribe the land with a presence of imagination. To the extent that Wordsworth relied on an intersection of land and imagination, then, his work was positioned against other ways of claiming land. 213 j B. The Right to Name: “Hart-Leap Well1 1 i i. t Wordsworth's exploitation of economic and legal i language situates the poet as both a stabilizer of the i I { local economy and the mediator between local and national I markets. For Wordsworth, the problem of property j occasioned a dramatic moment in which the relationship between an individual and nature could be located as a social reality, that is, if one could become part of his ! land, one became part of his society, even if it was a relation marked by solitude. Wordsworth's poetry | suggests that legal protection of property was I inadequate, not merely because nature would reclaim the land, but because the owner remained beholden to nature i and could forfeit (even inadvertently) his natural rights by exercising his legal ones. The "Poems on the Naming of Places" demonstrate the poet's ability to claim the | land by entering it in the record of his work; these poems contrast to legal discourse which, by regularizing property, obscures specific relations to land, i Francis Jeffrey recognized in such a position an appropriation of legal discourse, since a reader's | specific relation to land is mediated by Wordsworth. In j branding Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey a "certain brotherhood 1 1 who "have haunted for some years about the Lakes of Cumberland" (Edinburgh Review Oct., 1807, 214), I i he attempts to contain them, and meet head on I ■Wordsworth's claim that his poetry, while being local, i can negotiate within and represent the literary i ;marketplaces of London and Edinburgh. The adoption of I the term "Lake Poets" to join writers of disparate I I literary sensibilities and objectives indicates Jeffrey's I .qualified success. His action responds to Wordsworth's jown method of insisting on the significance of geographic names and naming. Jeffrey's label confines the poets j within geographic boundaries, an insistence directly jcontrary to Wordsworth's "Poems on the Naming of Places," 1 ! which argue the poet's power to create a community ! j interest in land by establishing a mutuality between I place and poem. Wordsworth recognized in the power of naming a claim over the land. To give a name worked a linguistic or !psychological enclosure, an improvement by virtue of | linking land to society, often by inscribing the history ; of the land in the culture of society. It also performs <the double functions commanded in Genesis: "replenish : the earth, and subdue it" and "whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof" (Gen, 1:28; 2:19). The association of naming and creating 215 imitates God's absolute speech acts of the Beginning ! , which end with rest. Improvement by naming, then, i i constituted the labor, at once exhausting and I | replenishing, by which a poet could exert a right of I ioccupation which received its validation in the reader's j encounter with the poem. The Advertisement for this series of poems reads: By Persons resident in the country and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown names, where little Incidents will have occurred, or feeling been I experienced, which will have given to such places ■ a private and peculiar interest. From a wish to j give some sort of record to such Incidents or renew the gratification of such Feelings, Names have been given to Places by the Author and some of his Friends, and the following Poems written in consequence. (217) In small, this announcement duplicates the technique of poetic creation detailed in the Preface. It begins with ^ "Persons" attached directly to "rural objects," but for i ! that attachment to be maintained and duplicated within the lives of the Poet and his Friends, names are needed which preserve the "Incidents" and the "Feelings." The renewal of the feelings result in the Poems which then recapitulate the triadic process of recounting the incident, creating the name, and invoking the feelings. The Poem acts as a quasi-legal record of the claims to the land. ; 216 The double move of constructing human habitats and decomposing them to nature is a consistent theme in Wordsworth which mirrors the double movement of developing a space of tranquility and dissolving that ispace in creative labor. This double movement typifies I (the "Poems on the Naming of Places," poems which contain i nature, yet acknowledge and celebrate its unrestrained character. "There is an Eminence," for example, brings a cliff high enough that "The meteors make of it a favorite !haunt" (9) under the name of the poet, but precisely by I troubling his own social relations as the purchase cost: • Tis in truth The loneliest place we have among the clouds. And She who dwells with me, whom I have lov'd With such communion, that no place on earth Can ever be a solitude to me, ! Hath said, this lonesome Peak shall bear my Name. (12-17) ^ The same relation by which the Poet evades solitude generates his association with the "loneliest place [they] have among the clouds," an image that at once asserts and evades possession. For a reader knowledgeable of Grasmere, the poem enacts this ambiguity by placing the cliff under the poet's constant gaze; Wordsworth and Dorothy "can behold it from our Orchard- seat" and "at evening" when they "pursue our walk/Along the public way" (3-5). The second image makes the Eminence available to all viewers on the public way, and : 217 the private possession is, as Wordsworth informed Fenwick, not true. Secondly, the claim is troubled by the cliff already having a name which is not, as the ! prefatory note suggests, "unknown." In overwriting |"Stone-Arthur" with the poet's name, Wordsworth both !makes a claim of possession and foregrounds the entailments which possession carries; these are not of a ,legal nature, but reside in the constant labor necessary •to negotiate private and public relations. i j The poems on the naming of places are given special ■ import by Wordsworth by their placement as conclusion to i the second volume. Strictly speaking, "Michael," the last poem, may not be part of the series, but a variant I in which the poet recounts the story by which he learned, i rather than invented, the name of a place. Within the context of the Lyrical Ballads, however, such learning, J transformed by the poetic labor of teaching, has I . . . . . . !identical claims as nominal invention, since names are a \ 'shorthand for Incident and Feelings inscribed on the ! land. The poems on naming end the second volume, but also frame it, since the first poem, "Heart-Leap Well," has an i introduction explaining that ) i [Hart-Leap Well's] name is derived from a remarkable chace, the memory of which is preserved by the monuments spoken of in the second Part of the following Poem, which 218 monuments do now exist as I have there described them. The "Naming" poems themselves constitute validating ! monuments which both alter (by disclosing origins) and i stabilize the names given to various locations, which t range from the public "Point Rash-Judgment" ("A narrow i | girdle . . . "86) to the private nook "we have named jfrom You" ("To M. H." 24). Unlike the final series, "Hart-Leap Well" is written in a balladic form of rhymed iambic quatrains and uses archaisms to provide a medieval cast appropriate to the construction of property implicit i in the poem. i I , , i I | "Hart-Leap Well" divides into two schematic parts, a l ! narrative and a dialogue. The first tells the story of j Sir Walter's victory over the hart, and the exultation he I . expresses by inscribing himself yet more upon nature by i I j decreeing his pleasure dome. The dialogue that follows | reveals how the poet came by the tale and the name of "Hart-Leap Well." By retelling the tale from the perspective of a present, in which a shepherd and the j poet read the remains of the pleasure-dome, and in this t | reading rewrite the story of the Hart from nature's I I perspective, Wordsworth forces the reader to re-evaluate ; the first part. By responding to the tension between the j first and second part, the reader performs a labor of 219 interpretation similar to the poet's labor of composition. The first lines of the poem invoke the Red Crosse Knight meandering in his sluggish quest for good: The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor With the slow motion of a summer's cloud. (1-2) Like Red Crosse, the Knight is on a pursuit, but, where Red Crosse seeks to free Una's lands from the dragon, Sir Walter roams his own dominions pursuing a Hart. Given the debates in the 1790s on the contribution of the poaching laws to the poverty of common people (Munsche, 123-5), the choice of a deer suggests a royal (or, more recently, a propertied) right of dominion. Read as a contemporary analogue, the abuses of Sir Walter are the abuses of a land-holding class wantonly limiting access to wild lands and exercising legal power without regard to local conditions. The hunt reinforces Sir Walter's grip on the lands and the people of those lands; when he changes horses, he exerts power at "a Vassal's door"(3): And "Bring another Horse!" he cried aloud. "Another Horse!" That shout the Vassal heard, And saddles his best steed. (4-6) By not naming him, the poem constructs the Vassal as a property like the horse, but this valuation is concealed by the vassal's immediate willingness to provide his best steed. The difference between what Sir Walter cries 220 j ("Bring another Horse!") and what the Vassal hears , ("Another Horse!") is telling; the Vassal does not need the verb to understand what he must do. The announcement i < i of an object amounts to the demand for it, and the demand l i to its acquisition. Where Red Cross falls three times in 1 |his battle, Sir Walter dismounts as often, always to rise j up stronger not through faith but through the depletion I !of his vassals. I The Knight's name, Walter, from "1waltan' to rule," suggests that the critique is levelled not against feudalism per se. but against the perversions of power 1 intrinsic in the over-accumulation of property. When | Burke had tried to rely on an appeal to the real days of ! chivalry to bolster his argument for the virtues of great ! accumulations of property, Wordsworth responded scornfully: Mr. Burke, in a philosophical lamentation over the extinction of Chivalry, told us that in those times vice lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness; infatuated moralist! Your Lordship excites compassion as labouring under the same delusion. ("Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff" Prose Works I 35-6) Wordsworth rejects Burke's chivalric code as one of aesthetic appearances ("grossness"),9 The pun on "infatuated" as a variety of grossness prepares the argument that "Slavery is a bitter and poisonous draught" ("Letter" I 36). As Wordsworth interprets Burke, vice lost its grossness by being institutionalized into despotism cloaked in justice. Wordsworth's signature as a "Republican" rejects this argument in advance, and he formally replaces Burke's vision with a new ironic chivalry which expresses its disdain as compassion for Watson, who, having over-imbibed, is figured as the victim of the despot Burke. "Hart-Leap Well" acknowledges the force of Burkean appearances in the guise of Sir Walter's endurance and strength, but forces them to yield— not, however, as in the "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff" to Godwinian rationalism— but to a critique by nature. Watson, like the vassal, is the enthusiastic victim. A first reading highlights the Vassal's loyalty, the Knight's fortitude— exactly the traits needed, at least in the historical myth, for the rise of the feudal state. A second reading, shadowed by the second part, recasts these lines. Where first attention settles on such happy phrases as "Joy sparkled in the prancing Courser's eyes/ The horse and horseman are a happy pair," a second reading weights the line closing that stanza: "There is a doleful silence in the air" (12). The word "doleful" anticipates the Poet's description of Hart-Leap Well: "More doleful place did never eye survey." The silence is inscribed by nature which mourns the Hart, despite Sir 2 2 2 Walter's elaborate and loud decree for his Pleasure- House . The race at first seems a celebration of the Knight's ability to outlast all his men, horses, and dogs until he reaches a kind of solemn communion with the Hart: A rout this morning left Sir Walter's Hall That as they gallop'd made the echoes roar . . . . . . breath and eye-sight fail, and, one by one, The dogs are stretch'd among the mountain fern. (13-14; 23-24) The primary meaning of "rout" is the archaic one, "a company of people or animals, especially of knights or wolves" (OED), but, from nature's perspective, the modern legal meaning of an unruly, unlawful assembly is to the point. As Sir Walter rides on, he strips himself of society and of nature. This secondary reading in which the Knight's company decomposes into unlawful assembly becomes evident from the perspective of Part Two. The hints laid in Part One are concealed by the conventions of the ballad and the medieval hero, and are unveiled when the new Poet meets the older Shepherd. Like Kent, the speaker of Part One can mar a curious tale in the telling: The poor Hart toils along the mountain side; I will not stop to tell how far he fled, Nor will I mention by what death he died; But now the Knight beholds him lying dead. (29-32) 223 Caught up in the race, the narrator has no time to narrate it. As a consequence, he conceals the climactic moment of man's victory over nature, and allows the reader to fill it, drawing his images from the Knight's exultation, "too happy for repose or rest" (45). But a trap has been laid, for the shepherd retells the moment of death by displacing a legend: Some say that here a murder has been done, And blood cries out for blood? but, for my part, I've guess'd, when I've been sitting in the sun, That it was all for that unhappy Hart. What thoughts must through the creature's brain have passed! (137-41) Against the narrative haste of the first version, we are given, first, the Shepherd's ability to say more than is known ("Some say . . . ") and next, his deliberate stillness as he guesses. In rejecting the charge of murder (homicide), he does not deny that "blood cries out for blood" or that a crime has been committed. His own thinking recreated the thoughts of the hart, precisely the labor by which the poet earns his reader and at which the Knight failed. Sir Walter experiences the "stone- dead" (77) Hart as a monument, lifeless as the stone he proudly commands to "receivfe] the living well" (82). From the perspective of the Shepherd's version of the tale, Walter is indifferent to the mysteriousness of the well. The hart is not running there to escape Walter, 224 but because that is where he chooses to die. The race, which, in the first part, nlook[ed] not like an earthly race" (27) is now, in the Shepherd's words, a desperate race; And in my simple mind we cannot tell What cause the Hart might have to love this place. And come and make his death-bed near the well. (145-8) In the First Part, the Knight's crime does not diminish his power, although after the shooting of the albatross in "The Ancyent Marinere" a reader might suspect the worst. Sir Walter chooses to build the pleasure-house because he has caused, "Such sight [as] was never seen by living eyes:/ Three leaps . . . /Down to the very fountain" (54-6).10 Sir Walter's palace is reclaimed by "Nature" which "in due course of time, once more/ Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom" (171) while Sir Walter "died in course of time./ And his bones lie in his paternal vale" (93-4, my italics). The course of time is nature, it is mortality, and it chastens pride. Sir Walter's decree, trying to hold his realm as a unity fully inscribed by human power, is anti-poetic. The damage he does must be recouped by the Shepherd and Poet together composing the Second Part as a dialogue. The poem ends by pointing the moral: One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught both by what she shews, and what conceals, I 225 Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. (177-80) !Here, the Poet accomplishes what Sir Walter cannot. The t |single lesson is divided, and then infinitely divided i |with each reader, but in each dividing, wholeness is i I reasserted. The poet's interest is eternal, the single . lesson continually duplicating because it is inscribed on i the poem by nature, and not the reverse. Similarly, both ; showing and concealing are modes of revelation, and this paradox authorizes the poet's selective presentation, jFinally, what nature teaches is the poet's occupation, !or, as becomes apparent in The Excursion. the poet is a spiritual feudal lord, bounded and bonded by nature into 1 the community he protects. In the figure of the poet himself, the power of the ruined well is recouped, quenching a different thirst. | C. The Economics of Interpretation: "The Brothers'* "The Brothers" is a measured account of both the ! powers and inadequacies of rural economy, expressed in the Priest's communal recollections and sketched in the cottage industry of his family. Like "Michael," with which Wordsworth paired it in a letter to Charles James Fox, its inner story concerns the effect of a family i member's absence on another person. Its pastoral plot of 226 a wanderer arriving home unrecognized to hear the story of his own life recalls Odysseus weeping at his own story in the Phaiakian's palace as well as his arrival in Ithaca where he is not recognized by Eumaeus. But more like Dante's Odysseus who must sail to the ends of the earth, or like Aeneas who sees the story of his Troy on the walls of Dido's Carthage but cannot make that city his home, Wordsworth's seafarer finds his home inadequate. The necessary condition for his return to "his Father's Land" was that he became "rich" (330-1), but his wealth, a foreign acquisition, makes him a "Stranger." Galperin places Leonard's alienation, occurring through the medium intended to bring reunion, within "contractions with respect to selfhood— specifically, that the authority of the individual is never more than an imitation of authority" (Revision and Authority 128). In terms closer to my own reading, the competing authorities in the poem— the priest, the mariner, the poet— all imitate the institutional authority which creates their selves, and those selves are consequently imitation of authority. The catharsis of story-telling cannot restore Leonard to the community as it regains Penelope and the kingdom for Odysseus (Odyssey 23), or earlier, as it gains for Odysseus new wealth from the Phaiakians. By contrast, 227 the tears that the story of James' death evoke offers no relief, but compels Leonard to leave. Then, in solitude, :he retells the story to himself by "review[ing]/All the |Priest had said" (434-5), and resolves to depart forever. Neither the Priest's story-telling, nor Leonard's own, is jempowering to regain the family lands. "The Brothers," I finally, is a double tragedy, about a brother's death and j the fragility of a way of life that seemed, and to the Priest continues to seem— like the codes of behavior it \ | generated— immemorial. The Priest, the local version of the professional moralist and record-keeper, cannot withstand the erosion of his community; he can barely see : it. He recognizes the cataclysmic changes, like the , lightning which destroyed one of two Springs; of a more lgradual change, a "dark cleft" that "does not seem to !wear the face/ Which then it had," he can only say, "for I ! aught I know,/ That chasm is much the same" (132-6). Wordsworth argues for the benefits of linking a moral | vision of the community with a record of its past— the i essential rationale for common law. Yet, in revealing the Priest's inability to synthesize unexpected alterations into the vision, he suggests that the poet, as a stronger interpreter of both the past and the land, can better integrate a community in the midst of economic ------------------------------------ 228 j diaspora. If Leonard is twice lost to the Vicar, he has j never left the eye of the poet. A footnote directs the reader's attention to the abruptness of the opening lines: This poem was intended to be the concluding poem of a series of pastorals, the scene of which was laid among the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland. I mention this to apologise for the abruptness with which the poem begins. (footnote to title). Instead of coming last, "The Brothers" is the first of the five poems called pastorals in a volume containing several others that resemble the pastoral form. Strictly, the intended location for the poem does not explain its abrupt opening (which is not abrupt anyway ■ I unless one reads it, or is prompted to read it, that j way). Wordsworth portrays the poem itself as dislocated, | shifted from its place, like Leonard. But like Leonard, who is eventually reconciled to his sea-faring life, the poem learns to operate— that is, the reader learns to read— in its new location through the context provided in the Lyrical Ballads.1 1 In a letter to Cottle, Dorothy indicates Wordsworth's desire that "The Brothers" "begin the volume" (LEY 290; 1 Aug 1800), but apparently the printing had already started and he had to be content with it appearing third. If it had begun the second volume, the sense of dislocation generated by the footnote would have been still increased, but the ultimate framing of the volume i i by "The Brothers" and "Michael" would centralize Wordsworth's view that "men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply" (LEY 315). The phrase is a metonymy for "small independent proprietors." but it can include a wider range of people within the social hierarchy these land-owners support. More exactly, it can include the ; many characters of the second volume dependent on a rural I economy, such as the neighbor who feeds the old Cumberland Beggar and the poet who rescues the lamb in "The Idle Shepherd-Boys." "The Brothers" opens with an ejaculation, a kind of mock prayer: These Tourists, Heaven preserve usI needs must live A profitable life:some glance along, Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air, And they were butterflies to wheel about Long as their summer lasted; some, as wise, Upon the forehead of a jutting crag Sit perched with book and pencil on their knee, And look and scribble, scribble on and look, Until a man might travel twelve stout miles, Or reap an acre of his neighbor's corn. (1-11) This view, one of local prejudice, is naive, but the naivety does not emerge until the poet disassociates himself from the narrative voice, by indicating the j Priest as the speaker, talking to his wife. In an , initial reading, the description seems to be of amateur ; writers flitting about to be self-consciously inspired by | I nature. When the speaker is identified, the lines shift 230 I | from being only by the poet, to being about him. It is i ! not an amateur writer, but a professional, being observed I by an inadequate observer. Wordsworth has already ! i announced himself as a tourist, in "Tintern Abbey," one who travelled "five summers" ago. For him, the Tour, which ended with the poem that concluded the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, constitutes successful work.12 The Priest's thoughts are somewhat I contradictory: in the first lines, walking is idleness, i ! while in the portrait of the scribbler, his idleness is compared with walking, constituted as a labor equivalent 1 to reaping. The poet can resolve this,* his activity is at once idleness and labor, because it is capitalizing, i i weaving sight into words, words into sight. The ! chiasmatic exchange of scribbling and looking is the distrustful version of the Preface's definition of the j j i poet as an observer of life, but the poem eventually ! ; I j validates writing as truth-revealing. The Priest does [ not recognize Leonard until his letter, and the poet, at first inside the scene, moves beyond it to the far future of the poem, when he can state, which prosaic clarity, that Leonard "is now/A Seaman, a grey headed Mariner" (448-9). | I The Priest's remarks on tourists have come from the associations inspired by the sight of Leonard: i 231 J i But, for that moping son of Idleness i Why can he tarry yonder? In our church-yard ; Is neither epitaph nor monument, Tomb-stone nor name, only the turf we tread, , And a few natural graves. (11-14) j i There is, for the stranger, nothing to read, nothing j interpretable, but at the same time, the Priest cannot i interpret the stranger. Labelling Leonard as the "son of 1 } Idleness" is particularly inept, since his Grandfather i worked himself to death while "buffeted with bond,/ j Interest and mortgages" (217-8). The limited view of ■ j "Only the turf we tread" foreshadows the fate of Walter's j cottage: j For five long generations had the heart j Of Walter's forefathers o'erflow'd the bounds Of their inheritance, that single cottage. (207-9) | The image is of the family thriving, spreading out beyond j the cottage into the community, and thereby strengthening | the claim on the cottage. But this free movement is j I checked by economic change barely noticeable: j 1 Each struggled, and each yielded as before ! A little - yet a little - and old Walter, ! They left to him the family heart, and land With other burdens than the crop it bore. (212-5) i The details of the failure are unclear, and the broken ! i syntax suggests that the its dynamics are beyond the : Priest. Stated generally, the expansive image of ; overflow constricts into incorporeal burdens; to have ! 'o'erflow'd the bounds' may now mean to have overspent. Leonard, as a trader and mariner, can negotiate within 232 the mercantile economy, and yet, in overcoming the poverty which drove him from his ancestral home, he contributes to the marketplace in which bonds, mortgages, and interest burden the uninitiated. Sailing ventures I j were often underwritten by corporate speculators, an activity which drove up both interest rates and taxes. Unlike Wordsworth's sea-going brother John, Leonard could not arrange for his earnings to support his sibling; John had the East India House pay Dorothy 2 0L a year from his pay (Moorman I 512), while James moved from one charitable home to another. The difference between Leonard, whose existence finally becomes reduced to his occupation, and John Wordsworth, whose generosity and encouragement enabled Wordsworth's poetry (LEY 563), is encapsulated in one of Wordsworth's epitaphs for his brother: "A Poet in everything but words" (Moorman I 471) . One slender line suggestively describes Leonard's fortune: it was "Acquir'd by traffic in the Indian Isles" (64). Leonard would thus have traded in the West Indies | sometime in the late 1700s. If, as Leonard's shyness I |suggests, Wordsworth had his own brother in mind as a i model (Moorman I 480), then Leonard's sailing West deserves scrutiny as a deliberate shift from biography, since John sailed for the East India Company.13 During 233 the period of the poem, the West Indies were major j exporters of sugar, and since the plantations "were i I cultivated mainly by slave labor they were important j < centres of slave trade" (Holdsworth XI 39). Wordsworth j does not say that Leonard trucked in the slave trade, but his location means that he operates in a slave-based ! economy.14 The rumor that the Priest has heard that Leonard was "in slavery among the Moors/Upon the Barbary Coast" (324-5) does not accord with the narrative facts, but is a likely enough transposition of details, in which i Barbados become Barbary and the enslaver becomes slave. ! In a "Lecture on the Slave-Trade," given at Bristol in 1795 (published the following year in revised form in | The Watchman). Coleridge's first argument describes the j j inequity of the slave trade, not for the slaves, but for i I the English laborers. The "Slave Trade & West India | Commerce," Coleridge contends, generates a market of J luxury items to be traded for domestic necessities.15 ; I Consequently, "the poor with unceasing toil first raise j l and then are deprived of the comforts which they absolutely want in order to procure Luxuries which they must never hope to enjoy" (Coleridge, Lectures. 2 37). ! This argument, and those that follow, are not unique, and j Wordsworth would have had ample opportunity to encounter j 234 them,16 not least through his friendship with Thomas I Clarkson, an avid abolitionist. I 9 ! The design of Coleridge's lecture enforces the i |connection between English liberty and the abolition of slavery. He notices that the same House of Commons which would not abolish the slave trade suspended the Habeas Corpus Act "with an ease and rapidity which might have I | iastonished the oldest Turnkey in NewgateI" (246). His I ;description of the free Africans corresponds to a nostalgic preindustrial England: The Africans . . . cultivate their fields in common and reap the crop as the common property of all. Each family like the peasants in some parts of Europe, spins weaves, sews, . . . [makes] the implements of agriculture, and this variety of employment gives an acuteness of intellect to the negro which the mechanic whom the division of Labour condemns to one simple operation is precluded from attaining. (240) The fluidity of occupation, idyllic in this vision, recurs in the description of the Priest's family: His wife sat near him, teasing matted wool, j While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, i He fed the spindle of his youngest child, I Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. (21-5) The family unit is emphasized as a single economic entity. The imagery of nourishment and openness recognizes the value of the labor not only in terms of monetary gain, but in terms of sustaining the family structure which, written small, is the community 235 I I I structure. The daughter may be "sent to service" just as ; j a "web is spun" (160): both events attach the family to ithe community, and substitute for calendars. From the j j Priest's view, the family regulates the wheel, around t iwhich the family work is organized. The poet, however, is aware of the reversibility of the situation and that E the demands of the external economy can drive a daughter ! [ to service with the same fury that the storm "send[s] : twenty score of sheep/To feed the ravens" (154-5). ' The level of detail demonstrates the poet's knowledge ' i ( of the operations of making wool; the Wordsworths were j fairly self-sufficient at Grasmere, although Wordsworth's writing was reckoned the most important industry. From a ; i psychological view, the extent to which Wordsworth identifies with Leonard contributes to the guilt which he l I both represses and expresses in "Tintern Abbey" in his ; ambiguous relation to "little, nameless, unremembered acts/Of kindness and of love" (35) that constitute "that ' i best portion of a good man's life" (34) but, tautologically, receive no credit.17 His own labor, like I Leonard's trafficking, is at least a potential betrayal j of the Lake District by its contribution to the national i economy. But Wordsworth compresses any consideration of | I jLeonard's occupation into one line, easily overlooked , I against the much more ambiguous abandonment of the Vale, ! 236 an act compelled rather than a crime chosen. Wordsworth, by contrast, returned to a household. The way in which Leonard redirects the Priest's discussion at exactly the moment he lays his wager that "if alive, [Leonard] has it [a particular Bible] yet" (289), suggests that he has lost it, perhaps in "perils manifold" (63) as Odysseus lost gifts given him, but nonetheless beyond restoration. This is not a loss of faith, but a loss of the social connection which allowed for faith. Without claiming that Leonard was a slave trader, I believe that the presentation of Leonard's business complicates a reading in which Leonard's rejection of the Vale stems from either his brother's death, or his guilt concerning that death. His guilt is also of a more general nature, a recognition that he has, in a certain way, killed his brother and betrayed his community (as represented by the Priest's exuberant trust) by his co option, however necessary, into the mercantile economy. Wordsworth did not scorn the money John proposed to make for his family, but a poem such as "The Brothers" suggests that such wealth would need to be purified into poetry in order not to become a betrayal. The professional status of the poet allows such a purification to operate simultaneously as investments 237 into the literary market, Grasmere, and the Wordsworth household; again, "Tintern Abbey" provides the paradigmatic union of these in situating Dorothy as reader of Wordsworth's "exhortations" despite the evidence of her journals often placing her as a co producer . The sight of the "Stranger" intrudes on the economy of the Priest's household, since he puts aside his task of "[feeding] the spindle of his youngest child" in order to "accost/The Stranger" (23, 35-6). Like the "abrupt" opening which needs reinterpretation, the third verse paragraph begins with a false recognition; 'Twas one well known to him in former days (37). Only after the poet has recounted the history of Leonard's sailing, does it become clear that even closer inspection has not revealed his identity to the Priest. Against the poet's knowledge of Leonard's inner life as rooted in his community even while "the regular wind . . . blew with the same breath through days and weeks,/ Lengthening invisibly its weary line" (46-9), Wordsworth places the Priest's inadequate reading of Leonard's body: 'Tis one of those who needs must leave the path Of the world's business, to go wild alone; The happy man will creep about the fields Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the setting sun Write Fool upon his forehead. (103-10) j 238 I It is not Leonard's fancy, but the Priest's, which generates this scene. In contrast, Leonard's imagination, during a fever, saw the forms of sheep that graz'd . . . And Shepherds clad in the same country grey Which he had worn. . . (59-62) Wordsworth appends a footnote pointing out that the description of the calenture is "sketched from an imperfect recollection of an admirable one in prose." The imagination, then, does not make up stories, but recalls the forms of reality: Leonard recalls his pastoral life, and the poet recalls an "admirable" description. The "imperfection" of the recollection is needed to empower the poet by allowing a difference that evades plagiarism. The sentimental vision that the Priest attributes to Leonard, in which tears and smiles are superficial effects of trivial adventures, opposes Leonard's association of inner sight to external stimuli. Leonard looks into the "broad green waves" (53) and sees the "verdant hills" (60). A cliche develops the continuity between this recollection in the tranquillity "Of tiresome indolence" (51) and the feelings derived from it: Leonard sees "in the bosom of the deep" (58). The heart and the sea, like the mind and brook of "Lines Written in Early Spring" are combined in the image. Just as the Priest has misunderstood Leonard's emotions, he has misconstrued his wealth. Leonard has I not left the "path of the world's business" but retraced it. With his money, he returns not in idleness, but in I i pursuit of "his paternal home" (65). Further, the | wealth, from a worldly perspective, is "small," but it overwhelms the Priest's view of Leonard. If the message in the poem to Fox is that small land-owners can feel deeply (LEY 315), the message to the local Vicar is that travellers may also feel deeply, and may not be the strangers they appear. Leonard's habit of staring— "[he would] gaze and gaze" (52)— until the sea changes into hills is repeated in a displaced way beside the graves: He had found Another grave, near which a full half hour He had remain'd, but, as he gaz'd, there grew Such a confusion in his memory, | That he began to doubt, and he had hopes I That he had seen this heap of turf before. (82-9) j Like the narrating poet in the poem previous, "There was ia boy," Leonard stands at the grave "A full half-hour I ! . . . /Mute" ("There was a Boy" 31-2), but, where that t encounter empowers the poet to confront the death of the boy of Winander, Leonard's vigil allows his imagination to invent doubt about what it knows to be true. Simultaneously knowing and not knowing about James's death, Leonard constructs two motives in approaching the 240 Priest, first, the enabling fiction of learning whether James is dead, and secondly, the need of a story to !assess (and abate?) his guilt in that death. I . . 1 j Although the Priest has left his work to "accost1 1 j • . 1 i (talk to) the Stranger, he forgets his purpose in his ; I j i fanciful contemplations: j i | till the stars appear'd The good man might have commun'd with himself But that the Stranger . . . /Approach'd. (111-4) j The "Stranger" recognizes the Priest immediately, and j uses the dialogue to manipulate him into telling the J story of his brother. The conversation is a negotiation between Leonard's impatience to hear about James' fate j and his desire to dwell on familiar facts. From the i i i Priest's perspective, they discuss an orderly sequence of | j nature, ancestors, the older brother, and then the younger; the progression is a kind of stasis, a single recollection of the community record. For Leonard, it becomes an unravelling of his own life. His opening speech is nostalgic, yet in it a reader can trace the finger of mortality: You live, Sir, in these dales, a quiet life: I Your years make up one peaceful family; | And who would grieve and fret, if, welcome come j And welcome gone, they are so like each other | j They cannot be remembered. j I |The rhetorical question, "who would grieve," is I j grammatically buried, unmarked by punctuation, and yet in the idyllic image of the peaceful family, an answer , emerges. James grieves for Leonard, and Leonard grieves for James; and in both these sorrows, they grieve for i lost time. The Priest can actually remember each year by the "accidents and changes" that punctuate rural life (147), and Leonard's nostalgia is that of a stranger. j The years remain particular, and the Priest knows that James died "One sweet May morning" "twelve years" earlier. - The poem continually uses paired images, the "two | i Springs which bubbled side by side" (141), the "two ; bells" which would ring if Leonard returned (320), the two brothers "like two young ravens on the crags" (283), ; and the "pair of diaries" (164). The "diaries" are, one, the ledgers of family bibles, particular to each family, and, two, the dramatic changes in the landscape available to all. Each pair, however, is disrupted. One spring j has been destroyed; the bells will "never sound" for I Leonard (322); one brother is dead, the other disguised, j and ravens are the ensigns of death.18 Lastly, Leonard i has taken away his Bible, its fate merely the speculation | l of the Priest's wager of "twenty pounds" (288), a bet | only possible in idle speculation. The Ewbanks' unmarked graves are so indistinguishable that Leonard cannot j i decide (or at least can refuse to decide) if one grave is ■ 242 new or forgotten, and yet, in the unmarked progression, a terrible mortality is evoked. The Priest ends with a highly suggestive image. James has died in a fall and ! midway in the cliff It [his staff] had been caught, and there for many years It hung— and moulder'd there. (417-9). Although to the Priest a mere fact, a natural oddity, this is an image of suspension. The temptation to interpret it is built up to be nearly irresistible: the lost or continuing leadership of the shepherd; the inability to speak since the staff, with rank and right, remains in sight of, but beyond the reach, of the local people; the lost support of a brother who, in carrying James "through the fords" (262) was as a staff to him; ! the suspended judgment on Leonard's responsibility for ! James' death, which, though repudiated by the Priest, remains as plausible as the conjecture about James' sleep-walking to his death; Leonard as caught between his past as a Shepherd and his future as a Mariner; these could be woven endlessly, but settling on any one, or ! combination, would be too facile. Wordsworth thus describes the origins of "The Brothers": The poem arose out of the fact mentioned to me, at Ennerdale, that a shepherd had fallen asleep upon the top of a rock called the 'pillar,' and perished as here described, his staff being left midway. (Prose. Ill, 22) 243 Whether this history is true or an invention based on the evolution Wordsworth wanted imputed to the poem does not matter here (I am inclined to accept Wordsworth on the point). Wordsworth began with a fact and constructed a story that transformed it into a metaphor without surrendering any of its factuality (and with the Fenwick note, integrated that factuality into the textual history of the poem). Around that image, the reader must construct his interpretation, just as the poet constructed the poem. Leonard's feeling of guilt towards his brother actually functions to mitigate his actual guilt and allow him to structure his continued flight as actually moving away from the past, rather than, as the Ancient Mariner recognizes is the case, recapitulating it. The Priest does not recognize in himself the progress of time; he constructs time as external, marked by nature and books and read by him, but not written within him. The ending of the poem, projecting to the old age of Leonard, hints at the Priest's death, and with that death, the end of his stories. The image of the staff, both fact and image, indicates the poetic labor as the essential psychic labor of mediating between the Priest and Leonard. 244 D. Criminal Law: "Andrew Jones1 1 and uThe Two Thieves1 1 i. i The juxtaposition of "Andrew Jones" and "The Two Thieves" comments on the relation between what is criminal and what is evil. The first poem is a narrator's explanation of his hatred for Andrew Jones by I describing that greedy man's encounter with a crippled beggar. The narrator is a common type in Wordsworth's poetry: he reacts instinctively against a situation but, because he has accepted the social framework which allowed the situation, he duplicates it in a displaced way. The poem is "hewn" from "Peter Bell," with added first and last framing stanzas (Moorman I 432). The peculiar rhyme scheme, abccb, repeats in all seven stanzas, and the unrhymed first lines are never end- I stopped except for the climactic penultimate stanza, in which every line ends with a pause. Each stanza, consequently, has an unbalanced feeling, as if the narrator is striving for an arbitrary regularity, a legal rather than organic unity. Attempting to be a moralist without being careful of his craft, the narrator calls down upon Jones the same arbitrary power by which Jones justifies keeping the cripple's penny. The climax of the poem is a legal interpretation: He stooped and took the penny up: 1 And when the Cripple nearer drew, 245 Quoth Andrew, "Under half-a-crown, What a man finds is all his own, And so, my friend, good day to you." (26-30) I i ,Jones cites a common-law principle regarding abandoned money to justify his keeping the penny. The rationale is in one sense superfluous since the beggar cannot prevent Jones' action, but it acts as a self-justification. i i i Since Jones is merely applying the law, and therefore j i giving the law its due, he can wish the beggar a good-day 1 and call him friend. The illusion that money has a j i stable value determined by law is replicated. Jones does j not consider that to the beggar the coins are worth more than to him, in direct proportion to the ease with which i Jones can scoop them up and the effort the beggar must j i expend merely to gather them together; for Jones, value is determined in relation to the legal threshold of I "half-a-crown." The narrator does not dispute the application of the I law; he asserts that applying the law is base. Jones's ; behavior is in contrast to the humane treatment Wordsworth applauded in of the Old Cumberland Beggar: The sauntering horseman-traveller does not throw With careless hand his alms upon the ground, But stops, that he may safely lodge the coin Within the old Man's hat. ("OCB" 27-9) ; 5 The benefactor in "Andrew Jones," "Some horseman passing by" (12) has followed an established custom. The concept I of throwing the money down was a mock-abandonment, so i j | 246 |that the beggar could claim it of his own volition, and [the alms-giving would be, in some sense, anonymous and of I greater credit to the benefactor.19 The "Horseman" does i jnot respond to the obvious needs of "this poor crawling I helpless wretch" ("AJ" 11), while the "horseman- traveller" ("OCB") breaks custom to preserve the proper circulation of the money. The horseman's action allows for Jones's legalistic interpretation of the situation, and indeed, they understand money in similar terms. Both the horseman and Jones conceive of the money in terms of their value— the Horseman throws down "A penny" (13) and Jones picks up "the penny" (25) ; the beggar, however, experiences the money in its material reality as "halfpennies" which must be gathered "together" (20). Jones has construed the law to his advantage (an action in keeping with his source, Peter Bell). By an alternative interpretation, Jones could claim the money only if it was not in possession of the beggar or had been manifestly abandoned; and since the beggar had "brought/the half-pennies together . . . at his feet" (19-20, 24), he could have been deemed by such an action |to have taken and retained possession. Jones' action, in [this model, would have been illegal. This reading, i 'however, is inadequate because the beggar's gathering is i |not recognized as labor by either Jones or the narrator. 247 Rather, the mock abandonment of the penny is taken as real, and Jones acquires possession before the beggar. The narrator's solution is neither to give the beggar money nor to befriend him, "A friendless Man" (10). The beggar becomes an occasion to justify the narrator's hatred for Andrew Jones, just as the law served as Jones' justification. The poem begins with the narrator's strident declaration: I hate that Andrew Jones: he'll breed His children up to waste and pillage. I wish the press-gang or the drum With its tantara sound would come, And sweep him from the village. (1-5)20 According to Thompson, "No institution was as much hated, in the eighteenth century, as the press-gang" (Working Class. 88). The constitutionality of this royal right had been debated for a century (see Hume's "Three Remarkable Customs," discussed in chapter two) but with the war against France, it was in force as a public necessity. In the poem, however, it is figured as a curse and a punishment, rather than an obligation towards the nation. The narrator is calling on the arbitrary power of the crown to inflict harm. In 1797, conditions in the navy were so appalling that sailors mutinied at Spithead, the place from which on November 17, 1795, another naval expedition had sailed towards disaster. Dorothy wrote: 248 [My] brother saw the West India fleet sailing in all its glory before the storm had made such dreadful ravages. (LEY 162) Seven of eight ships went down, and a dozen miles from I where the Wordsworths were living, the shore "had been strewn with hundreds of corpses’ 1 (LEY 162n) . What effect this event had on Wordsworth is unknown, but perhaps it helped form his view of the total desolation implied in the image of Jones’ being swept from the village as before a great wind. ii. Like "Andrew Jones," the poem that follows it in the Lvrical Ballads disturbs the question of criminality. Titled like a medieval exemplar, "The Two Thieves, or The Last Stage of Avarice" tells about an old man and his grandchild who steal their way through the town, ignorant that the old man's daughter (possibly the child's mother) i repays the value of the stolen goods. In the Preface, Wordsworth identifies "The Two Thieves" as an attempt to sketch characters under the influence of less impassioned feelings . . . characters of which the elements are simple, belonging rather to nature than to manners . . . and which from their constitution may be distinctly and profitably contemplated. (248) "The Two Thieves" opens with a peculiar introduction about story-telling, that complicates this schematic idescription: I ‘ Oh now that the genius of Bewick were mine 249 I And the skill which He learn1d on the Banks of the Tyne; When the Muses might deal with me just as they chose For I'd take my last leave both of verse and of prose. (1-4) The depth of allusion is difficult to reconstruct. The !combination of Bewick's inborn "genius" and learned "skill" seem to have natural origins; the genius he was born with, and the skill was learned on the Tyne. Muted is the seven-year apprenticeship in Newcastle learning the trade of engraving that made him famous.21 The first volume of his History of British Birds was published in 1797. The joke of Wordsworth's remark might be that the woodcuts of rural scenes carried the volume, so the text did not matter. In addition, Bewick had begun engraving bank notes for local institutions in the mid-1790s. Since his work i immediately became money, he had no need of muses. He had developed the ultimate self-sustaining art form for the market economy, in which his representation of | monetary circulation is the circulation itself. He ! engraved only for the local banks, and strongly supported 1 traditional agrarian economies that interacted with London as little as possible. When contacted by the Bank i of England in 1801, he responded, "though my plate would i [ |do well for country banks, it would not do for the great < number wanted for the Bank of England" (Memoirs, ch XIV); 250 | i while Wordsworth does not, of course, allude to this ; ianecdote in 1800, it is consistent with Bewick's public jpersona. In the next stanza, the reference becomes yet more convoluted: i / What feats would I work with my magical handI Book-learning and books should be banish'd the land And for hunger and thirst and such troublesome calls j Every ale-house should then have a feast on its walls ! (5-8) j j What is meant by banishing books? Perhaps the narrator ! I would use Bewick's talents to make prints for walls, like ; I Hogarth's, rather than the small illustrations Bewick i I preferred. Or is a validation of the visual over the written implied? This reading seems contrary to the I spirit of the Preface, and the peculiar grammar of the I i last three lines of the stanza leads me to another i interpretation. As the word does in "Rob Roy's Grave," "Books" could refer to acts of law,22 such as the poor laws designed to feed the impoverished by keeping them on j the Parish rolls (more books "for hunger and thirst and | such troublesome calls"), as well as to ideological and ! » legalistic works such as Burke's Reflections and Godwin's j |Enquiry.23 or more likely, to the prescriptive function j [of books which contests the distinction between books of ^ i law and other books. The narrator himself, in invoking banishment, attempts a judicial enforcement. He would t substitute for books something on the ale-house walls, ; 251 |presumably scenes of rural life like the tail pieces that j j adorn Birds. The third stanza, the last before the "tale" begins, adds another dimension: The Traveller would hang his wet clothes on a chair Let them smoke, let them burn, not a straw would he care, For the Prodigal Son, Joseph's Dream and his Sheaves, Oh what would they be to my tale of two Thieves! (9-12) i The grammatical structure of this stanza is confusing. | i The phrase "not a straw would he care" can refer either to his smoking and burning clothing or to "the Prodigal Son" and other Biblical stories; the punctuation argues j I I the former interpretation, while the use of "For" in line | i 11 suggests the latter. These alternatives cannot be j resolved until the final line, an exclamation structured j as an interrogatory, is parsed. Because of the ambiguity, the Traveller cares neither about his clothes nor about the Biblical stories, since both wane before i jthe pictorial "tale of Two Thieves." Christ's parable of j i the profligate child and Joseph's dream of his brother's sheaves bowing before him require several levels of i interpretation. The words spoken by the father of the Prodigal son must be interpreted by the older son, and then again by Jesus' audience, and finally by a reader of the Gospel; Joseph's dream must be read by himself, by his brothers and father, and then by a reader of Genesis. j 252 Both stories revolve around proper familial behavior as governed by the legal traditions of the Old Testament. I Joseph's brothers should not bow to him, because of primogeniture; and the prodigal son, having "wasted his i portion," should not be given more of his father's estate. In both cases, the moral is the inadequacy of the traditional law, and the consequence of a proper interpretation is a profit— the older son realizes that all his father has is his, and Joseph rules his brothers as a great people. The "tale of Two Thieves," in the context of the Biblical references, invokes the two thieves who died with Christ, an example of the inadequacy of law. Typically, however, Wordsworth's tale, a local one, concerns a toddler and an old man who "go a stealing together" (16). Throughout the seven stanzas describing their activity, the illusion is that the grandfather, in the last stages of avarice, is a consummate thief. His victims are laborers ("the Carpenter" 17) and people engaged in transactions ("Is a cart-load of peat at an old Woman's door?" 18) and, from the perspective of the free-market, he is a criminal. In reality, however, the j community sanctions his thefts, because his daughter !makes good the damages.24 So long as the economy is kept |in balance, all is well; the daughter would pay treble 253 damages (44) , actually the correct civil remedy (Holdsworth II 453) , but no one asks, as that, also, would disrupt the local economy. In terms of English law, the community's response is problematic. Thefts are I acts against the King's peace, and the community abets the crime. By interpretation, the community's action can be rendered correct if the restored damages are figuratively tripled and they are. First, the actual restoration; second, the old man's sense of self is retained, and finally, he has a communal function as exemplar: I love thee and love the sweet boy at thy side; Long yet may'st thou live, for a teacher we see That lifts up the veil of our nature in thee. (47-9) The treble restitution at once maintains the traditional law and allows the new one, through the poet's ability to construct the tale. Not the narrator's clumsy tale, but Wordsworth's story of telling that tale. The vision of these final lines seems typically Wordsworthian, including the slide between the narrator's loving as an individual ("I love") and learning as part of a community ("a teacher we see"). Often, in his work, a narrator encounters a beggar, a soldier, an old man ("Simon Lee") children ("Ode: Intimations of Immortality . . .") the sister of "Tintern Abbey," or some other marginalized figure, and learns from the experience. Without abating 254 their suffering in any substantial way, his own is lifted yet deepened. There is an extralegal exchange, economic in the widest sense of the word, but the exchange itself ibecomes productive in generating the poem that allows for I the further exchange between the poet and the reader. "The Two Thieves," like "Andrew Jones," has a narrator distinct from the persona of "Wordsworth" invoked in "The Old Cumberland Beggar" and the "Poems on the Naming of Places." In "The Two Thieves" Wordsworth deliberately mars the force of the tale with the peculiar introduction and the anticlimax of undercutting Dan's adroitness, yet the conclusion fits the matrix of encounter just outlined. The difference, however, is that Dan is only apparently marginalized; he is actually at the center of the community trying to maintain its local economic and legal standards against the encroachment of the national market. Unlike Simon Lee, Dan does not recognize the condescension in "Every face in the village . . . dimpled with smiles" (40). The narrator and the community of "The Two Thieves" has not accepted (noticed?) the governmental powers of the press- gang and of the determination of value which the narrator of "Andrew Jones" exploits in his curse. Like the scenes I depicted in Bewick's rural engravings (and those related by William Cobbett, a tavern-master's son, in Rural 255 Rides), the "Two Thieves" is less a moral exemplar than a tale of quiet desperation, but one from which Wordsworth quietly escapes in converting it to his own good. E. Law. Economics, and Memory: "The Old Cumberland Beggar" and "Rural Architecture" i. Although in his letter to Fox Wordsworth commends two other poems, "The Brothers" and "Michael," because of their concern with proprietors of small properties, his language more closely recalls "The Old Cumberland Beggar: A Description."25 Wordsworth praises Fox for his "sensibility of heart": Necessitated as you have been from your public situation to have much to do with men in bodies, and in classes, . . . you have not thereby been prevented from looking on them as individuals . . . This habit cannot but have made you dear to Poets[.] (LEY 313) i i jAs a poet, Wordsworth sets out a similar relationship between class and individual in the juxtaposition of the poem and preamble of "The Old Cumberland Beggar." The prose introduction declares: The class of Beggars to which the old man here described belongs will probably soon be extinct. It consisted of poor, and, mostly old and infirm persons, who confined themselves to a stated round in their neighborhood, and had certain fixed days, on which, at different houses, they regularly received charity; sometimes in money, but mostly in provisions. 256 Wordsworth elides the death of the individual by extinguishing the entire class in the shift from the present tense of the first sentence to the past tense of the second. The poem reverses this, and revitalizes the i (man as an individual. It opens in the past tense ("I saw I j. . .he was seated" 1-2) When the narrator thinks back ito his past, the present is recovered: Him from my childhood have I known, and then He was so old, he seems not older now (23-4) The beggar is an image of continuity, not seeming to age but someone by whom the poet can measure his own growth. After the argument for the beggar's beneficial effect on the community, the Statesman is asked to care for the future: Then let him pass, a blessing on his head! . . . So in the eye of Nature let him die. (155, 189)26 Despite the claim of being a "Description," the poem does little to particularize the beggar's appearance beyond the adjectives used in the preamble.27 Repeatedly, he is called "aged Beggar" and "old Man"; he has a "palsied hand" (16) and is "Bowbent" (52); the wind "Beat[s] his grey locks against his wither'd face" (169), signs of infirmity, age, and poverty. A reader could not distinguish him from any other male of his class. What then individualizes him, a quality crucial to both poet 257 and legislator? Not what he looks like, but who looks at him. In the broadest structure, the poem shifts from the ;narrative "I" looking on the beggar, to the beggar's !living and dying "in the eye of Nature" (188 and 189). Sight is transformed from an activity to a location, a property over which the beggar has a right of occupancy against the claims of the economy, the Statesman, and his statutory Poor laws. His right to nature's eye is established in a utilitarian way. Since, as Wordsworth tells Fox, "the most calamitous effect, which has followed the measures which have lately been pursued in this country, is a rapid decay in the domestic affections among the lower orders of society" (LEY 313), the Cumberland beggar's ability to sustain such affections by recalling the past establishes his right. I wish now to proceed with a more or less linear reading of the poem to expand and particularize this general structure (with the exception of lines 3-21, to which I will return by comparing them with the poem which follows in the Lyrical Ballads. "Rural Architecture"). This procedure will necessitate a certain level of disorder in my presentation, which I preserve to suggest that the poem's regularity is an artifact of reading the 258 Beggar's systematic progression onto it. The first lines ■locate the Beggar on public property: I I l I saw an aged Beggar in my walk I ! And he was seated by the highway side (1-2) j 1 |The momentary ambiguity of whether the walk is a path | belonging to the poet or a path the poet is using suggests the weakness of making such a distinction. The common land is available to whoever uses it well. After J the description of the beggar's efforts to eat, the poet i ! jnarrates the beggar's encounters with three other people j on the road, "The sauntering horseman-traveller" (26), | "She who tends/ the toll-gate" (32-3), and "The Post-boy" (37). This sequence is framed on either side by the line "He travels on, a solitary man" (24, 44). The three i disturb neither his travels nor his solitariness, but are j I l themselves slowed in their work. Taken as a group, they ! I represent the newly developed occupations of the improved roads, a component of the "spread of manufactory" about which Wordsworth complains to Fox (LEY 313). The ! traveller has surplus wealth, and so he gives money— not the usual "provisions"— to the beggar. The woman regulates the flow of traffic by operating the toll, and | i the post-boy uses the roads for the improved j !communication necessary for economic development. The j ! sight of the beggar "stops" the traveller. If the woman ' j"sees/the aged Beggar," she "quits her work" (34-5); and the Post-boy "Turns . . . to the roadside" (41). Implicit in this combination of a man, a woman, and a i child is a domestic unit, and I would stress the synonymous connection of "domestic" and "economic," both having "house" as a root. Wordsworth, in his letter to Fox, shifts from his description of economic evil, "the encreasing disproportion between the price of labour and that of the necessities of life, the bonds of domestic feelings among the poor" to a scene of domestic disruption: "the wife no longer prepares with her own hands a meal for her husband, the produce of his labour" (LEY 313-14) The beggar checks temporarily the economic expansion, recalling its agents to their domestic roots. From those who see the Beggar, Wordsworth moves to what the Beggar sees, and does not see: [His eyes] move along the ground; and evermore, Instead of common and habitual sight Of fields with rural works, of hills and dale, And the blue sky, one little span of earth Is all his prospect. (47-51) The common sights are the common lands, and the rural works are both the activities of workers (shepherding, building) and their artifacts, such as the "low structure of rude masonry" on which the poet first sees the Beggar. The insistence that objects retain the traces of their making is crucial to Wordsworth's aesthetic and moral vision. Without these sights, the world is not open to 260 interpretation. Consequently, just as these sights disappear for the beggar because of his infirmity, so also are they absorbed into the enclosures, until, like the beggar, the rural laborer has only, in Wordsworth's i dismal pun, a prospect of one little span of earth. The result must be domestic disaster. The deathlike quality of the "span of earth" is underscored by its unchanging status for the Beggar, even when it appears different: He plies his weary journey, seeing still, And never knowing that he sees, some straw, Some scatter'd leaf, or marks which, in one track, The nails of cart or chariot wheel have left Impressed on the white road, in the same line, At distance still the same. Poor Traveller! His staff trails with him, scarcely do his feet Disturb the summer dust[.j (53-60) The Beggar here is like a cursed figure, the image of * • • • * p o plying a journey perhaps recalling the Ancient Manner. To see without seeing is death-in-life, and these lines do not celebrate "irreducible natural man" who is "tenaciously alive" to use Harold Bloom's phrases (Company, 178-9). Rather, the Beggar is an object of the poet's sight, a poet who can interpret "marks" in the iroad, who has the perspective to compare the track of the jwheel both near and "At distance." In contrast, the Beggar is condemned to an utterly local vision. As such, the Beggar suffers for the community and for the poet, except that he is beyond suffering (or, to recall a line 261 from "Animal Tranquility and Decay," "All effort seems forgotten" 9; my italics). The juxtaposition of the wheel that makes an impression on the "white road" and the Beggar's feet which scarcely "Disturb the summer |dust" cuts in two directions. Taking Locke's property idea literally, in not mingling with the earth, the Beggar gains no property interest, while the cart-driver leaves his mark. The beggar has no claims other than to charity, and that has no legal status. But, as a consequence, the beggar does not damage the road but merely uses it. The Beggar is outmoded; his days of prophecy are done, as "His staff trails with him." He is passed even by the "slow-pac'd waggon" (66). But more importantly, though less obviously, he is passed by the poet, for in the next lines, the poet speaks to London: But deem not this man useless - Statesmen! ye Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye Who have a broom still ready in your hand To rid the world of nuisances . . . deem him not A burthen of the earth. (67-70, 72-3) "Nuisance," for the lawyer, was a specific term, for "something that incommodes the neighborhood" (Johnson),29 and his "broom," a deliberately domestic image, is no more effective than the Beggar's staff held in a "palsied hand." Like the Beggar, the statesmen lack perspective, but not power; the press-gangs can "sweep" Andrew Jones j 262 from the village ("AJ" 35). The Statesmen's eagerness for social engineering extends historically at least back to the rise of insane asylums, and the corresponding legislation in 1618 which authorized a five-pound fine I for the failure of a justice of the peace to provide ] housing for the indigent, (Commission . . . for Wards. Ideots. and Lunaticks) and forward to the utilitarian legislation of the 1830s, including the Reform Bill of {1832 and New Poor Law of 1834. In 1795, the justices of l Berkshire met in Speenhamland and handed down a recommendation that "subsidies in aid of wages should be granted in accordance with a scale dependent on the price of bread" (Polanyi, 78). Although never enacted by Parliament, "very soon [the Speenhamland scale] became the law of the land over most of the countryside" (Polanyi, 78). Joseph Townsend had already cautioned against such acts in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws; A wise legislator will endeavor to confirm the natural bonds of society, and give vigour to the first principles on which political union must depend . . . But our laws tend to weaken these bonds, and to destroy this subordination [of servant to master] . . . The wisest legislator will never be able to devise a more equitable, a more effectual, or in any respect a more suitable punishment, than hunger is for a disobedient servant. (26-7). The Beggar is not, strictly speaking, a servant, but his regular rounds are dictated by hunger, and, not being "useless," he does serve the community. In the opening stanza, he is trying to eat what he has gathered, "the dole of village dames" (9). The narrator does not impute jappetite to the Beggar, but describes his eating as a form of thriftiness. First, he "scann'd [his scraps and fragments] with a fix’d and serious look/Of idle computation" (10-1); and as he eats, he attempts "to prevent the waste" of spilling crumbs (17). It is as if he is reckoning for the community, just as Statesmen attempt to do. Against the plans of the Statesmen, the poet sets natural law: 'Tis Nature's law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good. (73-7) The narrator's view is not that the Beggar is good, but that nature has created a niche for him within the community, and that is good. He reasons from a Platonic, or Godwinian position, that "things" and "forms" always partake in good. Evil, then, amounts to misuse or misappropriation. For a Burkean perspective, human legislation should not, and ultimately cannot, violate jnatural law. Consequently, from either a conservative or i radical position, the Beggar's position has value. Speaking of the "small independent proprietors." Wordsworth tells Fox that their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand j instances when they would otherwise be forgotten I (LEY 314-5) In similar fashion, the Villagers view the Beggar: the Villagers in him Behold a record which together binds Past deeds and offices of charity Else unremembered, and so keeps alive The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years, And that half-wisdom half-experience gives Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign To selfishness and cold oblivious cares. (80-7) "Wordsworth" again stresses the Beggar's reified quality as something readable and available to inscription. As Bloom contends, this is not exactly "the vicious and mad doctrine that beggary is good because it makes acts of charity possible" I Company. 180), but neither is it far from it.30 Charity is good, but the Beggar's value is not in being an object of charity, but a record of it. Without such a record, half-experience would chill the heart. A world without poverty, in its full sense, would i jhave to be one without half-experience, and so beggars |would be unneeded. Thus, the argument is not for the necessity of charity but the necessity of communal records, one device of which is charity. As it stands, the Cumberland Beggar (like the Statesman) performs an administrative service, which Wordsworth figures as a curse when he repeats this argument: 265 let him bear about The good which the benignant law of heaven j Has hung around him, and, while life is his, ! Still let him prompt the unletter'd Villagers ! To tender offices and pensive thoughts. (159-63) jlhe good is like the Mariner's albatross, which "About [his] neck was hung" (38), symbolic of the life of the community. We now see why the Villagers must read the Beggar: they are "unletter'd"; they cannot read, for example, the Lvrical Ballads, a record of tender offices such as the misguided aid given "Simon Lee," the helpful poet of "The Idle Shepherd Boy," and the generous people of "The Old Cumberland Beggar." The Beggar's functions within the community are passive, regular rather than regulative: Where'er the aged Beggar takes his rounds, The mild necessity of use compels To acts of love; and habit does the work Of reason, yet prepares that after joy Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul . . . Doth find itself insensibly dispos'd To virtue and true goodness. (90-4) The social necessity for charity teaches the habit of goodness. Wordsworth again escapes the moral necessity for charity by offering two routes to the same joy, habit and reason. The Beggar's presence provides the method of habit, but one could reason out the need instead. Seemingly a continuation of the argument of lines 80-7, in these lines Wordsworth exalts half-experience in the guise of an insensible disposition. That habit was a 266 form of unexamined life was a commonplace Wordsworth would have encountered in Godwin's Enquiry (Bk 1 ch v). The mechanical reproduction of good achieved by the Beggar duplicates Bentham's contention that in the |panopticon, the guards who watch are as subject to social improvement as the prisoners watched. But where the guards are products of wage-labor, the Beggar's beneficiaries are equivalent to the community itself. In the context of an address to Statesmen, this argument | i suggests that the beggar has the same effect as the panopticon, but it is experienced more widely because it 1 is determined by his wide-ranging walks, and not the ! enclosure of the prison, or its analogues, the work- 1 houses. Later in the poem, Wordsworth connects these two ; institutions directly: i May never House, misnamed of Industry j Make him a captive; for that pent-up din, i Those life-consuming sounds that clog the air, Be his the natural silence of old age. (172-5) By breaking up the phrase House of Industry (and avoiding Bentham's formulation, "Industry-House,") Wordsworth ; creates a momentary ambiguity in which the Beggar should j i never have any house, but must, like the Mariner, j I continue on his rounds. Rather than the punishment of ■ the House, the "Struggle with frosty air and winter 1 I snows" (167) is atonement enough. Bentham's "Industry- 267 Houses," proposed in 1797 to displace Pitt's bill to I reform the Poor Law, were designed on the Panopticon plan— five storeys in twelve sectors— for the exploitation of the labor of the assisted poor . . . [and] were to be ruled by a central board set up in the capital and modeled on the Bank of England's Board, all members with shares worth five or ten pounds having a vote. (Polanyi, Transformation 107).31 In arguing against the House, Wordsworth simultaneously resists the reinforcement of a stock-market economy (Burke's metaphor for the distribution of human rights in the Reflections). By keeping the Beggar free, yet doomed to extinction, the poet anticipates a gap in the moral structure of the community which he can fill. The narrator also reminds the Statesmen that when other men see the Beggar, they recognize their own advantages. In particular, The easy man Who sits at his own door, and like the pear Which overhangs his head from the green wall, Feeds in the sunshine . . .all behold in him A silent monitor, which on their minds Must needs impress a transitory thought Of self-congratulation, to the heart Of each recalling his particular boons, His charters and exemptions. (108-11, 114-19) The language of this passage is a curious blend of the pastoral and the legal. The easy man beneath his pear tree evokes the tranquility of Micah's vision, "they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree" (iv:4) As in the Biblical passage, Wordsworth shifts from a collective plural "their minds" to i (individuals alone in contemplation "the heart/of each." i ; iMicah's utopia in which the law from out of Zion assures | i every man his property is displaced into the reality that I property is scarce. The man at ease recalls his boons, i charters, and exemptions; these are the terms of legal | entitlement.32 Not until these gains are described as transitory does Wordsworth explicitly invoke a religious l frame: and perchance, ! Though to no one give the fortitude And circumspection needful to preserve His present blessings, and to husband up The respite of the season, he, at least, And tis no vulgar service, makes them felt. (120-25) These lines combine the two dangers to the small property owner, threats from the economy and threats from the weather. The beggar's presence is no talisman against either, but only makes a man feel the value of what he ; has. This raises the question of who can provide j I "fortitude" and "circumspection." Not the Statesman, ■ | who, like the easy man, "contemplate[s]" a triad, in this ! case, his "talents, power, and wisdom" (72), that is j transitory. Perhaps the poet. Between the two social benefits of the beggar, the i habit of caring and the recognition of one1s own ! blessings, Wordsworth places another benefit, the development of the poet's mind:33 269 . . . To virtue and true goodness. Some there are, By their good works exalted, lofty minds And meditative, authors of delight And happiness, which to the end of time Will live, and spread, and kindle; . . . (97-101) The "good works" which exalt are not equivalent to alms giving, nor to the activities of the community, the "rural works" (49). They are achieved by conscious "authors of delight/And happiness," a role the statesman might like, but available only to the "meditative" as opposed to those "restless in [their] wisdom" (68). The antecedent of "which" (100) is ambiguous; is it the happiness which lives and spreads to the end of time, or the authors? To the extent an author inscribes himself in his works and becomes a permanent record of the community, this ambiguity never needs resolution.34 The expansion through spreading and kindling is mildly suggestive of revolution, but it is a revolution of traditional values moving beyond the local community into the national economy, of local customs gaining statutory force. This vision is not utopian, but historically specific; it is, in fact, only possible during the time of the Beggar's decline; minds like these, In childhood, from this solitary being, This helpless wanderer, have perchance receiv'd, (A thing more precious far than all that books Or the solicitudes of love can do!) That first mild touch of sympathy and thought In which they found their kindred with a world Where want and sorrow were. (101-7) The repetition of the specifier "this" locates the scene both temporally and geographically. Because the beggar is "helpless," he is doomed; interference by the Statesmen, the community, or the poet is useless. While i |the poet recoups him in the generalized sympathy with "a world/Where want and sorrow were," he cannot thereby produce others of equal sympathy through either books or love. But, he can warn the Statesmen of his lacks and insist on the inadequacy of laws, even "the Decalogue" (127), if not guided by moral sympathy. In his letter to Fox, Wordsworth describes a couple, "both upwards of eighty years of age." He is confined, and she recently lamed and unable to supply him with food. This couple can be read against "The Old Cumberland Beggar" in two ways. First, she recalls the narrator's neighbor who feeds the beggar every Friday, and then from her door Returning with exhilarated heart, Sits by her fire and builds her hope in heav'n. (152-4) Her heart is exhilarated by the movement between feeding the beggar and returning to her domestic situation. The woman in the letter represents this same situation gone awry. With her lameness, she fears being boarded out, that is, becoming utterly the object of sympathy, rather than one who, to a small extent, can afford to feel it. Losing a "house kept together so long," she is sure, "would burst her heart" (LEY 314); like the poor woman in the poem, she retains a "a sublime conviction of the blessings of independent domestic life" (LEY 314). | Since, as Wordsworth mentions parenthetically, she is supported by the parish, "independence" does not amount to ownership, but to the ability to walk. Her lameness will destroy her independence. In this guise, the couple can be figured as the Beggar, and the Parish as the woman in the poem. They support her independence so long as she can walk, just as he will survive "long as he can wander" (165). Wordsworth does not ask Fox for aid for this couple; they are an example of the "spirit" that the community bolsters. Rather, he directs Fox's attention to "The Brothers" and "Michael," poems about "small independent proprietors" (LEY 314). This "class of men is rapidly disappearing," but is not doomed to extinction; by commending them to the Statesmen, and depicting their ability to "feel deeply," the poet hopes to rescue them. Not so the beggar, who will die and whose class "will probably soon be extinct." ! Until his death, however, the narrator says, "let him, where and when he will, sit down/Beneath the trees" (185-6). A plea for a right of use, this "let," one of nine directed to the Statesmen, hovers between entreat 272 and command. The emphasis is determined by the implied reader. Despite the address to "Statesmen," this poem is directed to those who might exert pressure on Statesmen, not to the government itself. When Wordsworth actually addressed Fox, a statesman, his writing was not insulting, but done "With highest respect and admiration" (LEY 315) .35 The disenfranchised reader, accepting Wordsworth's characterization of the Statesmen, adopts both a derived sympathy for the Beggar and a respect for the poet's moral acumen. The propertied reader is pushed to accept the value of charity as directly linked to his right of property; as such, he is empowered by the poem and by the poet. The poem becomes the record of that community, and yet the poet is not absorbed into the role of the Beggar. Although he does not want the statesman to speed the process with social engineering, the poet is content to let the Beggar, and his class, die. In its own time, the agrarian society will blend into the national one. This is perhaps tragic, but it is a tragedy from which the poet, unlike the beggar, is safe: he can see the tracks down the road. ii. "Rural Architecture," an anapestic poem written in four stanzas of aabccb rhymes, follows "The Old 273 Cumberland Beggar." It names a rural work constructed by children, and is itself inelegantly assembled as if in imitation. Three boys build "Ralph Jones" out of stones, and after the wind blows "the Giant away" (16), they rebuild him. In contrast to their Frankenstein, the children are small, "the highest not more/Than the height of a Counsellor's bag" (2-3). This metaphor is peculiar. Perhaps the image recalls the bulk of a lawyer's briefcase, capable as it is, literally and figuratively, of swallowing children. Alternatively, it refers to a famous Counsellor's bag, the budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which contained the expenditures and revenues of the nation, and was held up to the waiting crowd once the national budget was determined, a symbol i of English stability. Wordsworth uses the word "bag" only twice in his poetry,36 once here, and once at the beginning of "The Old Cumberland Beggar," and the nearness invites comparison. from a bag All white with flour, the dole of village dames [The beggar] drew his scraps and fragments, one by i one, i And scann'd them with a fix'd and serious look Of idle computation. (OCB 8-12) Like the budget of the exchequer, the beggar's bag ! contains the revenues of the day, which are by necessity, I i and in sharp contrast to the government's budget, exactly ! ! equivalent to the day's expenditures. The scraps are 274 ) I mostly bread, since the bag is "all white with flour," and with the Speenhamland Act, the value of bread and of money were legally interconnected. The verse paragraph ends with the food slipping through the beggar's shaking hands to the waiting scavenging birds. In the context of "The Old Cumberland Beggar" alone, this image is sad, but recalls a cycle of life between human beings and nature which the Beggar mediates. But juxtaposed with the metaphor from "Rural Works," the scene becomes one of waste, perhaps shadowed by the huge national debt cause by the war waged against France, which left Britons to be the pickings of scavengers.37 It suggests the beggar's ultimate inadequacy to his community role, just as the children cannot build a man to withstand the ravages of the wind. Like the Hebrews working without straw, they build without "mortar or lime" (5) and need intervention to succeed. According to the Fenwick Note on the poem, These structures, as everyone knows, are common among our hills, being built by shepherds as conspicuous marks, occasionally by boys in sport. If we accept the historical accuracy of this remark, the children, twice called "School-boys" (2, 17), are being educated in the ways of the village. Their fortitude in rebuilding inspires the poet to join them, yet to outdo 275 them, or at least to educate them beyond the power of the village custom. The effect is similar to the inspiration the beggar provides for "authors of delight": — Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works In Paris and London, 'mong Christians or Turks, Spirits busy to do and undo: At remembrance whereof my blood sometimes will flag. — Then, light-hearted Boys, to the top of the Crag And I'll build up a Giant with you. They build, not rebuild, the Giant, because it will be a new Man, better than either the boys' earlier work or what has been achieved in the big cities. Pitting Paris against London, and then Christian against Turk, generalizes the "blind boisterous works" beyond architecture, and recalls the enmities of war. Whether the line reads in parallel, pairing Paris with the Christians, or as a chiasmus, linking the Revolutionaries with the infidels, depends on the reader's politics. In either case, the poet's empowerment constitutes the empowerment of the village amid the social changes inevitably arising from the conflicts between Paris and London, both actual and ideological. The poet's blood is restored by his return to the village, and in exchange, he helps the boys to build giants of themselves, and so outgrow the counsellor's bag. 276 F. The Poet's Property; "A Poet’s Epitaph” "A Poet's Epitaph1 1 combines two themes which occur frequently in the second volume of the Lvrical Ballads. First, a marker of death, most often a grave, is I associated with some story.38 Secondly, wandering provides a chance encounter with either a story of death, or death itself. "A Poet's Epitaph," however, is the only poem labeled an epitaph in the volume; in it, the wanderings of professional men towards the poet's grave is prohibited, while the approach of the "idler" is allowed. The various professional men appear before the grave as though before a judge, but their punishment is not that to which the "Statesman" would condemn the Old Cumberland Beggar, imprisonment. Rather, it is banishment. They are told to "come not near," reversing "the invitation, 'Pause, Traveller!1 so often found upon the monuments," as Wordsworth points out in his "Essay on Epitaphs," composed around 1810 and appended to The Excursion (p. 448) ,39 In that same essay, Wordsworth explicitly connects the dead as the implied author of his own epitaph with a judicial function: The departed Mortal is introduced telling you himself that his pains are gone; that a state of rest is come; and he conjures you to weep for him no longer. He admonishes with the voice of one experienced in the vanity of those affections which are confined to earthly objects, and gives Ill a verdict like a superior Being, performing the office of a judge, who has no temptations to mislead him, and whose decision cannot but be dispassionate. (454) The occasion of the poet's death, and more .specifically the site of the poet's grave, serve to i ;validate a particular social order against competing institutional structures. Replaying the tension between the narrative ballad and the epiphanal lyric from the volume's title, in this poem, wandering (as searching and, etymologically, as "erring") and death (as resolution) allow Wordsworth to stage a confrontation between the seemingly static poet, in retreat in the Lake District, and other professionals— statesmen, lawyers, etc.— characterized by wasted and harmful motion. Wordsworth appropriates to the poet, by his formal choices, what is most enabling to the other professions, in order to provide to the rustic— the final internal audience— a vantage point of repose, the poet's grave. Wordsworth achieves this appropriation by invoking the language of property, inheritance, and economics, and finally by reworking the image from "Ellen Irwin" in which "Without a groan on Ellen's grave/His [Bruce's] body he extended" (47-8) into the invitation to the idler to "stretch thy body at full length" ("Poet's Epitaph" 59) upon the poet's grave.40 „ . 1 278 i ! j The definition of the poet himself is achieved i through the modulation of wandering and death. The poet is gradually described by his social connections, but in the satirical outlook of the poem, those connections are constructed as absences and avoidances. Most literally, ! it is the poet's death which allows the poem. In a i psychological reading, Wordsworth's imagining his own ; death as a trope for his absence from the realm of i "public business" empowers the poem. But this absence is j also structurally based; it is developed through the ! ( poet's antagonistic relation to statesmen, lawyers, ! I moralists, and other writers of society. Few affirmative ! statements can be made of the poet; he shares "Some random truths" with the rustic, but on these he is silent. ! The title, "A Poet's Epitaph," is similarly cryptic. J Its article remains ambiguous: if the epitaph is suitable for any poet, then it defines poetic activity generally, i ! yet the individuation of death insists on a specific | poet. Like Hume's man of letters, Wordsworth's poet acts specifically on behalf of his general type. Or, to recall the Preface, the question of what is poetry is j isomorphic with the identity of the poet.41 The second enigma of the title is the location of the epitaph. Is it actual carved words over "Some mute inglorious Milton" 279 ("Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 59), or is it the poem itself?42 This ambiguity says much about Wordsworth's method; the poem itself is positioned both to be what it represents (it is the epitaph which beckons from outside itself), and, further, to duplicate within the poem the structures which make the poem possible. To recast this ambiguity, is the Epitaph composed about, or by, the dead poet? The fictional first-person of the epitaph, evident in the quotation above in which Wordsworth links the dead to a judge, provides the tradition in which the poem functions. The reviewer for the British Critic divided "A Poet's Epitaph" into two parts; "an effusion of good-humoured satire, is succeeded by this picture of an animated and engaging sensibility." He then quoted with approbation the last six stanzas (the "engaging sensibility") concerning the idler. On one level, the division between the characters who are not welcome at the poet's grave and the rustic who is called to the grave employs specific stereotypes; the lawyer's "sallow face" and "coward eye" could be out of Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode," while the unlettered idler might himself be that mute Milton. At another level, however, the poem explores the social structure which produces such characters as the Statesman in order to suggest an 280 alternative society characterized by the economy of a poetic, and not an industrial, marketplace. The poem's design is simple, four-line abab stanzas of iambic tetrameter. Given the wider context of the Lvrical Ballads, with its use of narrative personae, this formal construction suggests the presence of the dead, rustic poet. Later, in his Second "Essay upon Epitaphs," Wordsworth describes the homely characteristics of i "Country" Epitaphs: the strangeness of the illustrative images, the grotesque spelling, with the equivocal meaning often struck out by it, and the quaint jingle of the rhymes. These have often excited regret in serious minds, and provoked the unwilling to good-humoured laughter. (343) i Thus, Wordsworth's formal choices locate the epitaph ( within a rural economy, and associate the monument on which it is composed (if it is composed) with the rough stones of "Rural Architecture" and of the sheepfold in "Michael." The poem begins: Art thou a Statesman, in the van Of public business train'd and bred — First learn to love one living man; Then may'st thou think upon the dead. (1-4) Despite the seeming simplicity of these lines, they are open to an entire horizon of political activity, or "public business," which includes both legislation and economic management. The compound "statesman" itself combines the notions of leading a state (nation) and 281 owning an estate (property), and perhaps suggests that |the two activities are incompatible with justice, i precisely the opposite argument that Burke proposes in i his Reflections. The statesman is incapable of loving "one living man." The hierarchical nature of aristocracy necessarily divides men nto the positions of >subordination the poem satirically exploits. The | i statesman, then, neither deals with individuals nor i formulates a nation of humanity, the two valences of "one 1 living man." Rather, he is caught in the factionalism of I government. The poet, by contrast, achieves an i | understanding of the individual concurrently with a grasp | of the general type. Like the Ancient Mariner, the poet j I has the perspective of the dead, precisely the I ' perspective the Statesman cannot approach. i ! The last line of the first stanza is double-voiced. I J To "think upon the dead" is both to approach the poet's 1 grave, and, more politically, to invoke tradition, J ' precedent, and the laws of property, which, taking Burke I and a Whig tradition as a model, describes the methods of I i statesmanship. Wordsworth does not reject statesmanship, but appropriates it in order to criticize contemporary i statesmen and their temporal institutions. The poet, at once narrative and lyric, capable of joining disparate 282 ! individuals and humanity as a whole, is the better statesman. The connection to tradition creates a transition to the next stanza: A lawyer art thou? - draw not nigh; Go, carry to some other place The hardness of thy coward eye, The falsehood of thy sallow face. (5-8) , The interrogative form— "art thou"— which will be used I again with both the soldier and the physician serves to link these various professions. (For the lawyer and the philosopher, Wordsworth uses the inverted interrogative structure, perhaps because both these professions, more I than clergy and statesmen, are dependent on convoluted, that is, specialized, language since their products are i I more exclusively linguistic.) The interrogative form suggests that the professions are not quite i distinguishable, or rather, that they are joined by the • system in which they operate. While the lawyer's hardness and falsehood are written on his face, they do not originate there. They are figured as personal property to "carry." They are derived from the judicial system, or, within the hierarchy of the poem, they are given by the lawyer's position of subservience to the statesman. The traits of cowardice and sallowness, by contrast, are native to face and eye, and perhaps suggest the natural tendencies which make a person suitable to be i 283 called to the bar. Despite this satire, however, the ,poem employs a legalistic method of interrogation and sentencing; once again, the specific rejection is mediated by a structural appropriation. The next possibility is a cleric. Resembling iChaucer's monk, this man seeks comforts, and, since the ;sinecures of the church provide them, he is "plump" and "rosy." Like the lawyer, his social station is written 5 into his body. Next, a soldier: Art thou a man of gallant pride A Soldier, and no man of chaff? Welcome! - but lay thy sword aside And lean upon a Peasant's staff. As in "Michael," Wordsworth invokes the admonition to !beat swords into plowshares, and the metaphor of "chaff" i I calls up its counterpart of grain and indicates that the |Soldier is not doomed to soldiering. Unlike the earlier professions, this is one created by conscription ; rconscribere. to write together, enter into a list], or the economic necessity of enlisting (which is an implicit conscription). Once the soldier is brought into the poem, the military imagery of the Statesman's "in the van" can now be reread; it is the statesman who leads soldiers into war by controlling "public business," but he does so from the safety of London. While the biblical image generalizes the soldier, the more local reference to the contemporary war inscribes an opposition between 284 the soldier and the man who becomes a soldier. Put another way, Wordsworth rewrites, or unwrites, the conscripted soldier into a prototype of the idler. Denoting this man, the only character whose labors are in any sense tangible (albeit suppressed), as an idler points towards Wordsworth's notion of labor as effortless and the counterpart image of the poet's idle wanderings (in such poems as "The Brothers" and "A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags") as a mode of labor. J Readings similar to those for the lawyer and soldier ! could be constructed for the philosopher and for the moralist who is told not to "lose ten tickings of thy :watch,/ Near this unprofitable dust." Connecting morality both to time-keeping and profit-making reasserts the national economic horizon in which the poem is constructed, and provides a juxtaposition with the final stanzas that assert a local economy in the person of the idler. He is introduced thus: But who is He with modest looks, And clad in homely russet brown? While in earlier stanzas, the profession— Lawyer, Soldier— was capitalized, here the pronoun is. The adversarial question is not "art thou?" to which Christ has already given the conclusive reply at his trial, but "who is He?" By shifting into the third person, Wordsworth brings his reader into the poem as the person 285 addressed. We are asked to look on this man, and consider who he is. The rapid alteration of the professions gives way to sustained contemplation by both poet and reader. This triangle of poet, rustic, and reader constitutes a rival economy of symbolic exchange, an alternative mode of enquiry from that of the court, one grounded in correspondences with nature: He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter than their own. Through four more stanzas, the Poet compares the idler with the environment. In the penultimate stanza, he is "Contented if he might enjoy/ The things which others understand." The "others" include those professions shunted from the grave, who, with only 'understanding' and not enjoyment, understand nothing. Enjoyment is a prerequisite for genuine understanding, but it is not sufficient to achieve it. This distinction separates the rustic and the poet. The former is a potential victim of the system— the enclosure acts had already demonstrated as much— and his strength is itself a weakness in its inability to capitalize itself: — Come hither in thy hour of strength Come, weak as is a breaking wave! (57-8) While this exploits a traditional comment on the vanity of human strength generally, in the context of the poem, ! 286 it poses the specific problem of unprofessional labor which cannot sustain itself. The poet can, at least at an ideological level, protect the idler because his |facility with language (not the murmuring of running brooks) allows him to travel in both worlds. On one hand, he is like Walter Scott's Duke of Argyle who slips into Scots dialect and court language with equal agility in The Heart of Midlothian. More immediately, he is like the Wordsworth who sent a copy of the second edition of 'the Lvrical Ballads to Fox, with an admonition to attend to the hereditary property rights of small land owners. In addition to this letter, Wordsworth signed (authorized what Coleridge authored) letters to several other "persons of eminence" including William Wilberforce (LEY 312). The poet acts as advocate, and places the reader ■ in the role of judge. The letter to Fox, however, :demonstrates that Wordsworth's satirical position in this ,poem is mitigated by practical economic and institutional realities. The idler needs a spokesman in London, but one not contaminated by the city. Who better than the poet? In the final stanza of "A Poet's Epitaph," Wordsworth employs two different figures to register the support the poet can offer the rustic: Here stretch thy body at full length; : Or build thy house upon this grave. — (59-60) 287 In the first image, the rustic's temporal rest imitates I the poet's eternal sleep from which he receives rejuvenation. Against this metaphysical vision is one of I | property. The poet grants land to the idler who then, in building a house, enlarges and enriches the grave, protecting it from the encroachment of the new society. The poem has become a will, and the poet's death is worked into a cycle equally natural (or at least naturalized) and linguistic. It is required at common i # # law to exclude m a will by name anyone with an I apparently superior claim on property; thus, the poet's first nine stanzas, i The final line, granting property, plays against one ■ from the previous stanza: "[The rustic] Hath been an idler in the land" (54). The phrase echoes the Biblical phrase, "sojourner in the land." His status is temporary; moreover, he cannot inherit land, and, as a laborer, is always on the verge of enslavement from a landowner who "knew not Joseph." Within the system of the statesman and the lawyer, such was the historical reality: the peasants' lands were held in common, and thus any individual was as a sojourner, but the land was being rapidly sucked into larger estates. Furthermore, wages were in many places falling, but more to the point, were being wrenched from the traditional methods by which 288 they were set in favor of a supply-and-demand model, one consequence of which was a steep climb in unemployed agricultural labor. A more distant echo from one of Christ's parables reinforces the economic dimension of this line: "And [an householder] went about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace" (Matt, 20:3). Here, the landowner controls the price of labor and effects exactly the switch which, in Adam Smith's theory of political economy, the marketplace must be protected against: "So the last shall be first, and the first last" (Matt 20:16) In "A Poet's Epitaph," the poet offers this transformation by granting a property at once spiritual and material, the grave upon which a house can be built. To read the poem as a will, however, is to require common law, and, at first glance, to deconstruct the poem as reinstating the ideological scribes of the legal system. Alternatively, however, the deed of the grave emphasizes the "commonness" of tradition as something natural, and as inscribed directly on the land ("The outward shews of sky and earth") and not mediated by the courts. Instead, the buried poet, no longer distinct from the earth, is at once the mediator and the object of mediation. But all this is metaphoric: Wordsworth is alive, and building a house on a grave is, like building 289 a church on a rock, to produce another institution. Where, then, does the reader stand? Given that the reader, at least as represented by the circulation of a .book printed in London and reviewed by the London press, 1 iis a city-dweller who relies on lawyers and statesmen, what is his activity in reading the poem? What speech act does he experience the poem as performing? Such questions duplicate the problem produced by the poem— where do we locate the ownership of the poem's meaning, I i ,what kind of economy of exchange can be fabricated out of i i the exchange of poetry? In this context, the British ■Reviewer's remark, neatly dividing the poem into satire and sensibility, appears as a rhetorical move to disarm the poem's force. Even in raising these questions, our own consciousness, dictated by legal rationalism, pushes us from the grave, forces us to "struggle with feelings iof strangeness and awkwardness" (Advertisement). The parabolic enigma of the final stanza cannot be interpreted, only reread in an effort to approach a grave l |that awaits a name. i ! G. Contract and Obligations: "Michael" The final poem of the second volume, "Michael," presents an overlay of contractual obligations and promises: the explicitly legal contracts of the surety 290 Michael signs and of the mortgage he overcomes; the marriage of Isabel and Michael; the covenant between Michael and his son Luke for dividing their labor between shepherding and commercial trade; and the letter of agreement from their kinsman to take Luke into his business. Shadowing, or overshadowing these, are both t the covenant between God and Abraham forged by the sacrifice of Isaac. Similarly relevant is the contractual relationship between poet and reader ; established through the Preface and earlier poems, a j relationship which must mediate the losses and gains I entailed by the historical shifts from an older system of 1 unalienated labor and local monopolistic exchange to the : new economics of contract and negotiable instruments.43 I The Biblical parallel of displacement which informs the 1 poem is Christ's sacrifice meliorating the spiritual i | upheavals in the shift from Torah to a New Testament ■ perspective. Although the contractual arrangements in the poem can be organized in a chronological matrix, in 1800 the older i : forms of covenant were not obsolete nor were the newer, i "classical" forms of contract installed without opposition. The legal debates concerning the freedom of contract, that is, the proposition that men had the right to enter into any economic relationships they desired, 291 had a powerful ideological underpinning in the notion of the original contract which, in the myth of legitimized government, asserted the assent of the governed to the strictures of law. More concretely, every contract indicated the willingness of the contractors to submit 1 themselves to the courts, and thus to re-enact and verify an original meta-contract. The actual historical development of simple contracts was relatively recent, i contemporaneous with the development of a theory of ; natural law designed to promote commerce in the eighteenth century. Therefore, contracts ideologically argued for an original contract, and simultaneously ; disavowed any such origins in their own history. This ! contradiction duplicated itself within particular , contracts in which "freedom" was expressed only through binding oneself within the contract. I Blackstone, as late as 1766, allotted little space to contracts in his Commentaries. It formed a fraction of a 1 chapter, "Of Title by Gift, Grant, and Contract" in a series of chapters on entitlement.44 His definition of "contract" is deceptively succinct: ; "an agreement, upon sufficient consideration, to j do or not to do a particular thing." From which definition there arise three points to be contemplated in all contracts; 1. The agreement: 2. The consideration: and 3. The thing to be done or omitted, or the different species of contract. (II 442). 292 Blackstone devotes the majority of his discussion to the principle of consideration, the notion that for a contract to be enforceable, some fair value must have been given in addition to the agreement. In a society where traditional wages and prices prevail, the doctrine of consideration severely restricts the possibility of contract. If a servant is hired by a master and performs work, the existence of a contract does not require the master to pay; the work itself does. The contract functions, more or less, as a sign of a social obligation. Blackstone, in recognition of this position, dealt with the relation of master to servant as its own chapter under "The Rights of Persons." At the same time, the exchanges of merchants were economically regulated by the availability of negotiable instruments, usually regarded as specialty contracts or bills of exchange. This division of legal forms both mirrored and enforced the division of English economy into local and national markets. With the breakdown of local monopolies and the influx of foreign trade, the traditional view of contracts which Blackstone espoused became a hindrance to capitalization. Even as Blackstone wrote, the notion of "free" contract was undermining the principle of consideration, and his slight treatment of contracts is sly and 293 polemical on this point. Lord Mansfield, during his tenure as Chancellor, sought to "remove the doctrine of consideration from the law of contract or, at any rate, to reduce it to a shadowy and harmless fiction" (Holden, 133). He attempted to replace consideration, as the validating moment of the contract, with the fact of a written contract. A critical case in this development was Pillans v. Mierop (1765), the facts of which, curiously though coincidentally, reflect the surety that Michael gave for his nephew. Pillans, a Dutch merchant, promised White, an Irish merchant, to accept a bill for 800L on condition that White would provide a London creditor as guarantor. White provided Van Mierop, and Pillans honored White's draft and then wrote to Van Mierop asking them to accept bills amounting to 800L drawn against Van Mierop on the credit of White. Van Mierop agreed in writing to this proposal. Before the bills were drawn, however, White went bankrupt and Van Mierop instructed Pillans not to draw them as they would not be honored. Pillans, acting on the authority of the written agreement with Van Mierop, drew the bills which were dishonored by Van Mierop. Pillans brought suit, and the jury found for Van Mierop on the principle that Pillans had provided no adequate consideration for the contract. Pillans appealed and a panel of four judges, ; 294 led by Lord Mansfield, unanimously set aside the verdict. Mansfield presented two primary arguments, both undermining the doctrine of consideration. First, the ancient notion about the want of consideration was for the sake of evidence only: for when it is reduced into writing, as in covenants, specialties, bonds, etc., there was no i objection to the want of consideration. (Holden, ; 134) This argument, unsupported by any authority, is not historically accurate. It reverses the priority of the written instrument, the contract, and the physical :action, the consideration.45 Where Blackstone maintains i that the written agreement only clarifies what is 'implicit in the consideration, Mansfield argues that the consideration merely provided evidence that an agreement had been made, in the time before writing was common, and that the contract was sufficient evidence for its own enforcement. Mansfield emphasized that particularly in commercial cases the want of consideration did not matter. By invoking a false history, Mansfield disguises his role in making new law as a change in the emphasis of older law to suit new economic developments. This argument cuts in two directions, one moral and the other economic. Morally, a free man can bind himself by his t word and the courts, in enforcing the agreement, do nothing more than enforce his freedom. From an economic perspective, without the ability to make promises i 295 regardless of actual consideration, future promises, the spur of industry, would be impossible.46 In both readings, the performative power of professional legal speech becomes paradigmatic for economic exchange. Williamson v. Losh (1775) brings out the contradictory nature of contracts during this period. :John Losh had promised, in writing, his wife's niece, !Jane Tiffin, 100L and several pieces of furniture upon his death, "for the love and affection that I have for [her]" (Holden, 136). When Losh died, Jane Tiffin's ;husband, Williamson, sued for the money and property. The estate of Losh argued that the promise was not i 'enforceable since there was no consideration, but this i argument did not prevail since a written document I ■ existed. This case shows the depth to which the market economy had infiltrated other social relationships. The written note was clearly not a negotiable instrument because it referred to personal property (including "bedclothes and seven pudden-dishes"), and, given the language of familial affection, it was on the face not a commercial document; despite these points, the courts read the family commitments as if they were commercial in essence.47 Rann v . Hughes (1778) gave the contradictory nature of contracts within the free marketplace bald expression: 296 It is undoubtedly true that every man is by the law of nature bound to fulfil his engagements. It is equally true that the law of this country supplies no means, nor affords any remedy, to compel the performance of an agreement made without sufficient consideration. Lord Skinner, in this decision rendered by the House of Lords, explicitly denied the special status accorded to a written document by Mansfield.48 The reluctance of the House of Lords to permit a contract to be valid merely on the promise of the contractor retained the particular right of covenant for the aristocracy. Mansfield, by contrast, sought to establish the dominance of juridical review over all agreements. The historical compromise achieved between these views reflects the power of mediation which lawyers wielded. The rise of professional classes corresponded to developments of forms of discourse which were, figuratively, constantly under seal. The traditional obligation to perform the labor for which one was paid, transmuted for the professional lawyer, amounted to a kind of speech which was obligated to be empowering. Legal discourse, having value, was its own consideration. I have sketched this history, brief by any legal standard but perhaps lengthy as the introduction to a reading of a poem, because the various contradictory impulses regarding contractual obligations are central to the division between Michael's affection for his son and 297 for his land. Wordsworth may not have known many of these particular cases (although his brother would almost certainly have known Pillans and Rann), but he would have been aware of the issues regarding what made a promise good. In a letter to Poole, he claimed that in "Michael" he had attempted to give a picture of a man, . . . agitated by two of the most powerful affections of the human heart; the parental affection, and the love of property, landed property, including the feelings of inheritance, home, and personal and family independence. (LEY 3 22, 9 Apr. 1801) These impulses, in the myth of inheritance that both Wordsworth and Michael had received, were complementary and signified both the internal continuity of family and its larger analogue, the peaceful succession from generation to generation. The introduction of the various contracts in "Michael" disrupts the correspondence of the two feelings and recasts them in a sharp opposition Michael cannot reconcile in society or within himself. The poem opens with a direct address to a reader whom the speaker imagines as a visitor to the Lake District: If from the public way you turn your steps Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill, You will suppose that with an upright path Your feet must struggle. The reader is walking on a road improved by public funding and turns off onto a foot-path. But the contrast 298 between the "public way" and the "upright path," for a reader safely by a London fireside, has more figurative resonances. The public way is the road of business, and those familiar with its way suppose that an upright path, that is one governed by morality and tradition rather than business practice and law, is steep indeed. The upright path, however, is not as difficult as it appears, "for beside that boisterous Brook/ The mountains have all opened out themselves/ And made a hidden valley of their own" (6-7). The turn off the public way, the move for which the local Priest scorned the supposed stranger in "The Brothers" (105), and prohibited for the Statesman "in the van/ Of public business in "A Poet's Epitaph" (1- 2), is the site of poetic value, a value of mediation. Wordsworth has directed the reader's wandering to a "place [where] a story appertains" (18). To recall the precise meanings of "appertain," the story belongs to the place, either by "right" or "by nature of appointment" (Johnson). Wordsworth imagines that the reader might walk past the unfinished sheep fold, and to prevent this trespass, he offers the story that makes the sheep fold visible. Initially, the poem identifies the sheep fold as "a straggling heap of unhewn stones" (16) and not until the final couplet is this view merged entirely with the sheep fold which Michael builds. To an actual reader 299 who never goes up Green-head Gill, the story replaces the sheep fold, and the poem itself works the transformation of the stones into the Sheep-fold (the unfinished nature of which will concern us later). The second verse paragraph modulates between two justifications for the poem, the edification of the reader and the immortality of the poet, not in himself or even in his writing, but in other poets. The contract between writer and the imagined reader is guaranteed by the consideration of the sheep fold; for the actual reader, the guarantee is the written form of the poem. The story Is not unfit, I deem, for the fire-side, Or for the summer shade. It was the first, The earliest of those tales that spake to me Of shepherds (2 0-3). The poet does not invent the story, but repeats it, and suggests its repeatability by the reader who can retell it at the fire-place. The image of such story-telling recalls the priest’s vision of the diary of the community kept in the oral transmission of stories at the fireplace. But the poet, not the Vicar, determines the suitability of the story ("I deem"), and offers as evidence the effect it had on him when "yet a Boy": Careless of books, yet having felt the power Of Nature, by the gentle agency Of natural objects led me on to feel For passions that were not my own (28-31) j 300 These lines replay that "first mild touch of sympathy" which the Old Cumberland Beggar evokes, "A thing more precious . . . [than] books/ . . . can do" ("OCB" 106, 104-5). In "Michael," however, the source of sympathy is \ I more dispersed, or, from another perspective, more j | unifying, since it is the arrangement of the land, the shepherds, and the tale that makes the effect. None of these is originary and each enters the narrator's I consciousness in relation to the others: the shepherds I are loved "not verily/ For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills" (25-6); these lands exist as "occupation and abode," that is, already interpreted by rules of property (27). The poet's initiation into this life through the tale is a poetic version of a traditional contract; the tale constitutes an agreement I between the Shepherds and the poet with respect to the land which is nothing more than the expression of the natural relations already present.49 Unlike Robert Burns, Wordsworth was initiated into ' rural labor only virtually. Burns was born into the i family of a farmer, and was educated at the farm where he worked as a laborer; Wordsworth, the son of a lawyer, was educated at Cambridge. A hint of this tension becomes ■ apparent in juxtaposing the passage from "Michael" with the 1805 Prelude. The shepherds, so important in the ; 301 I frame of "Michael," occur only twice in the books of the 1805 Prelude on childhood, and in a curiously deflected way: The sands of Westmoreland, the creek and bays i Of Cumbria's rocky limits, they can tell 1 How, when the Sea threw off his evening shade, J And to the shepherd's huts beneath the crags Did send sweet notice of the rising moon, How I have stood to fancies such as these, Engrafted in the tenderness of thought, A stranger, linking with the spectacle No conscious memory of a kindred sight, . . . yet I have stood, Even while my eye has moved o 'er three long leagues Of shining water, gathering as it seemed Through every hair-breath of that field of light New pleasures like a bee among the flowers. (I 594-608) The appeal for confirmation is to the natural objects, | and the presence of human beings is compressed into their I ! habitats, the huts, which receive notice, rather than, I j like the Evening Star in "Michael," give it. As the sentence evolves, it becomes clear that Wordsworth is not looking at the huts at all, but rather, both the huts and the poet/"stranger" are gazing at the sea. The huts receive the regularity of the moon passively, a metonymy of continuity. Wordsworth, by contrast, transforms the "spectacle" into a journey of vision and transformation. The image of the bee among flowers is a commonplace for the good empiricist, who gathers nature but alters it by industrious labor. For Wordsworth, that labor is i J performed standing still, unlike the shepherds who must 302 abandon their huts for "Cumbria's rocky limits." Michael tells Luke that "in the open fields my life was pass'd/ And in the mountains" ("Michael" 360-1). The vision of the poetic transformation of nature under the sign of the shepherd's dwelling reworks a scene occurring earlier in the Prelude. the theft of the boat (I 372-451). The episode of the boat contains the other reference to a shepherd, again in the possessive case: One evening (surely I was lead by her [Nature]) I went alone into a shepherd's boat. The theft is figured as an invasion of a habitat, the skiff's "usual home" where Wordsworth "was a stranger." The light, as in the later passage, comes from the moon (361), and Wordsworth goes upon the water in an act of "troubled pleasure" (391). The outcome of the theft is the restoration of the boat to its proper place, and the disquieting of Wordsworth's thoughts because, while he appeared to be the active agent in rowing the boat, he was actually the passive observer of Nature who "surely" led him and unveiled her sublime aspect as chastisement. In the passage, in which Wordsworth stares at the water, he appears passive but is active. To realign the argument in legal terms, the theft of the boat is a crime, one for which Wordsworth is punished by his nightmares, while the journey of sight across the water is legitimate labor, a fair appropriation and sharing of 303 the shepherd's territory. These two passages combined rewrite the frame of "Michael," converting the shepherd's contributions to the poet's development from stories to objects, huts and a skiff. I am not concerned with which version is more biographically accurate, but rather with the point that the accounts intersect to favor poetic labor. The transformation of the Tale into a "Pastoral Poem" could either be like the boat theft or like the vision. Wordsworth overdetermines the similarity to the vision in the final lines of the second verse paragraph. Wordsworth has been led to think "On man": Therefore, although it be a history Homely and rude, I will relate the same For the delight of a few natural hearts, And with yet fonder feeling, for the sake Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills Will be my second self when I am gone. (34-9) Both "Therefore" and "For" indicate justifications, one of which slides into the other. First, the tale is told because of the effect it had on the poet; second it is told because of the effect it will have on "a few natural hearts," and on "youthful Poets." But these youthful poets become the narrator's second self, and so the two explanations become, if not identical, synchronic. The replacement of Dorothy as Wordsworth's second self in "the last poem of the first edition, Tintern Abbey" ("in thy voice I catch/The language of my former heart" 117- 8), by "youthful poets" corresponds to the more public 304 profile of the second edition. The perspective of the tale being transferred from shepherd to shepherd has modulated through the poet's own youth to the transfer from poet to poet. This shift is not entire— the "natural hearts" do matter— nor is it disingenuous; this is a moment where the anxiety of poetic influence is safely converted into less threatening, enabling precursors.50 The shift from shepherd to poet as the source of value replays the historical change from traditional contracts that reflected social values to written, empowered instruments that could determine those values. Several delicate balances are established in the opening of the poem; between theft and use, between inheritance and appropriation, between oral and written,51 between experienced and heard, between "history/ Homely and rude" and "Pastoral Poem." These tensions provide analogues to the arguments in law which mediated disputes of illegal and legal, of binding and voluntary, of consideration and promise, of writing as evidence and writing as performative. Wordsworth is not, at this point, deliberately drawing these comparisons, but the procedures of writing a poem confronting the collapse of a small land-owner's estate through the agency of a surety provokes them. 305 The story itself begins with a description of Michael. The lines on his understanding of the winds contains one of the three similes in the poem:52 he had learn'd the meaning of all winds, Of blasts of every tone, and oft-times When others heeded not, He heard the South Make subterraneous music, like the noise Of Bagpipers on distant Highland hills[.] (48-52) Michael can interpret the winds, can read in their sounds their effects. The winds resemble languages in which the blasts are the words with various intonations. Michael's ability, however, is jeopardized in the very metaphor which explains it. The interposition of nearly two complete lines between "all winds" and "South" serves to generalize "all winds" beyond the mythical four of the directions and makes the phrase "He heard the South" momentarily ambiguous. "South" is a metonymy for "South Wind," but, end-stopped, it seems like a direction indicating London and the industrial cities to the south. The comparison to Bagpipers, who are from the North, indicates the depth of Michael's skills; he can read one wind disguised as another. Yet, the simile indicates his limitations. Since "Michael" occurs in the decades after the '45, the bagpipes connote further disruption, specifically war. They are, it is true, metaphorical, but so is the war: the winds of economics undermine ("subterraneous") his land and Michael is inept at 306 interpreting. As a tale told by the shepherds in the poet's youth, the ominous level of this reading is not present, but in the conversion to a poem, this economic dimension emerges in the poet's greater capacity to interpret not real winds, but metaphoric ones. Hearing winds that portend a storm, Michael says to himself: The winds are now devising work for me! And truly at all times the storm, that drives The Traveller to a shelter, summon'd him Up to the mountains. (55-8) The contrast to the Traveller is a contrast to the reader, already figured as a visitor off the public way. At first glance, to such a reader/Traveller, Michael's exclamation may seem disgruntled, but the winds actually provide the means for him to be more himself, since his "Household" was "as a proverb in the vale/For endless industry" (97-8). The economics of wage-labor, in which work is directly proportional to pay, does not apply for Michael. His efforts respond to a nature which "summons," a term of obedience from legal discourse. Wordsworth anticipates a misreading of these lines and corrects it in the first sentence of the next verse paragraph: And grossly that man errs, who should suppose That the green Valleys, and the Streams and Rocks Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts. (62-4) 307 This view of shepherding resembles Victor Shklovsky's view of narrative. The work and the continuities are derived from the disruptions. In the continual mediation of nature as provider and nature as harm, the shepherd derives his value. Similarly, in narrative, from the mediation of the will to achieve closure, the story emerges. The conversion of a story "ungarnish'd with events" (19) into "Michael" is the poetic equivalent to Michael's shepherding. In the next lines, Wordsworth explicitly connects shepherding with narrative within an economic frame: ["Fields" and "hills"] which had impress'd So many incidents upon his mind Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear; Which like a book preserv'd the memory Of the dumb animals, whom he had sav'd, Had fed or shelter'd, linking to such acts, So grateful in themselves, the certainty Of honorable gains; these field, these hills Which were his living Being, even more Than his own Blood - what could they less? . . . (66-76) The grammatical antecedents to "like a book" are the fields and hills, but these natural objects also impress incidents on Michael's mind. A double composition, a meeting of Nature's mind with Michael's, occurs, and similarly, the value of the incidents is double— in themselves and as the procurer of "honorable gains," a term itself doubling into gains in honor and gains that are honorable. This doubleness is then seemingly fully 308 integrated into the merging of Michael's Being with the Hills. In the collapse of this being— through the intercession of the new contractual economy— the story of the Sheep-fold emerges. The pun on "his own Blood" is at this point submerged; apparently, he would give his own life to save his lands, but, as the sacrifice of Luke transpires, the gulf between Michael's Being, as a metaphysical object, and his physical blood becomes manifest. After the apparent unity of Michael and his land is established, the first "contract" is mentioned: He had not passed his days in singleness He had a Wife, a comely Matron . . . (80-1) The description of Michael's relation to Isabel seems hardly contractual, but, as it is not fully integrated into his own labor, the traces of an external imposition remain: The Shepherd, if he lov'd himself, must needs Have lov'd his Help-mate? but to Michael's heart The Son of his old age was yet more dear. (148-50) Levinson's account of the difference between Michael's love for Isabel and that for Luke is helpful: Isabel, Michael's partner rather than object, cannot elicit from the shepherd more love than that which he feels for himself, since he does not invest himself in her, doubling his ego, so to speak. (Great Period Poems. 62) Isabel and Michael live separately to the extent that their lives are consumed by, or (in keeping with their 309 self-representation) are continuous with, their labor. Isabel works constantly, first at a large wheel, next at a small one. From her perspective, these could represent her family, but the wheels cannot operate simultaneously. Similarly, at first, Luke is as much hindrance as help to Michael, but as he learns, both function simultaneously; the association of Isabel's two wheels with Luke and Michael dissolves as the boy grows. Male labor is reproductive in a way that female labor is only productive. The two intersect at two points in the poem; first, the creation of Luke which is, however largely co opted by Michael who "Had done [Luke] female service" and had "rock'd/His cradle with a woman's gentle hand (167- 8) .53 Further, to the extent that Luke is associated with Isaac, his mother's role is figured passively, since the creation and preservation of Isaac is through the intersection of two male figures, Abraham and God (Gen 21). Secondly, after dinner, in order to remain busy, Michael and Luke both betook themselves To such convenient work, as might employ Their hands by the fireside; perhaps to card Wool for the House-wife's spindle, or repair Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, Or other implement of house or field. (106-11) Isabel's labor is the occasion for Michael and Luke to justify their proverbial industry, and their work in carding is associated with repair, that is, moments when 310 productive labor breaks down. The marginalization of Isabel's work has a contemporary analogue in the collapse of the cottage economy, and, against the machine of the factory in which wheels turn other wheels, her work is deliberately disjointed: if one wheel had rest, It was because the other was at work. (86-7) The anthropomorphic metaphor of a wheel resting recalls that workers, contemporary ones rather than those "Of an unusual strength" (44) such as Michael who is legendary, need rest. The wheels get it only because it is structurally necessary, and in the factory, that structural necessity does not exist. As with the cottage scene in "The Brothers," the home inadvertently lays down the frame for the factory; Levinson points out that Michael's labor is unspecialized (73), but to this can be contrasted Isabel's specialized labor, bifurcated between the two wheels. Further, in keeping with the panoptic image of the factory, their cottage is the object of constant communal scrutiny. The light from their lamp was famous in its neighborhood, And was a public symbol of the life, The thrifty Pair had liv'd. For, as it chanc'd, Their Cottage on a plot of rising ground Stood single. (136-40) These remarks shift in several directions. As Levinson argues, 311 the narrator's emphasis on the locals' interpretation of Michael's lamp (they name the cottage "The Evening Star") suggests that the value inherent in the object produced or maintained for private use can become available to the community as well. (65) Compared with the light imagery of the letter to Mathews which favors the manufactured light of reason over the natural light of passion, Wordsworth restructures the relation of natural to manufactured. The manufactured light of the Lamp becomes valuable in its symbolic transformation into a natural light. The regularity of Michael’s family allows the community to rename his existence in naturalistic terms, as the "Evening Star." As with the poems on the naming of places, this power, here invested in the community, creates a communal bond. The accidental nature of their visibility ("as it chanc'd") does not discredit it, but rather preserves a natural, rather than economic, basis. Isabel's labor— she places the lamp— is not factory labor, but, in its representation in the poem, the ideological mediation between city production and country production is located in the relation between Michael and Isabel.54 After the description of Luke's childhood, the narrative introduces the second contract: While this good household were thus living on From day to day, to Michael's ear there came Distressful tidings. Long before the time Of which I speak, the Shepherd had been bound In surety for his Brother's Son, a man 312 Of an industrious life, and ample means, But unforeseen misfortunes suddenly Had press'd upon him, and old Michael now Was summon'd to discharge the forfeiture, A grievous penalty, but little less Than half his substance. (217-27) Like the belated introduction of Isabel, the surety is announced out of temporal sequence, a subterraneous eruption. The passage reverses the "good tidings of great joy" which the shepherds hear on the eve of the new law (Luke 2:10) into "distressful tidings." The slightly anachronistic phrases of the first sentence, in which Michael hears what would have been a written communication, indicates that he encounters the problem as he did earlier the winds. The winds, regardless of origins, ust eventually arrive to do harm; the contract operates from afar, via the public way. Where Wordsworth was explicit about the lamp, and explicit about that explicitness, he is vague about the surety, substituting instead details about Michael's nephew irrelevant to Michael's situation and allowing no assessment of the bond's legality. Would a "grievous penalty" be enforceable in the absence of great harm? Possibly; whether Michael was legally obligated to pay the forfeiture, even if he was bound to the surety, cannot be taken as a given for any informed reader encountering the text in 1800. The summons, if the term is used with precision, was not to 313 pay the penalty, but to show cause as to why he should not be obliged to pay. Wordsworth does not suppress these points so much as take them for granted: barring a costly defense, an order to show cause not to pay amounts to an order for payment. Further, for Michael, there is no question about executing the penalty. Michael understands his word as binding, but not in Mansfield's sense of "free1 1 contract. Rather, he is bound, as a passive agent, by his familial ties. Technically, of course, he bound himself, but such a binding occurred in a past during which the nephew was solvent and connected with Michael through shared industriousness.55 Such a connection, however, does not withstand the financial stress of the "unforeseen misfortunes." Speaking to Isabel, Michael disassociates his nephew from his family and distrust wells within him: I have liv'd to be a fool at last To my own family. An evil Man That was, and made an evil choice, if he Were false to us[.] (245-8) This disassociation, momentarily checked by Michael's forgiveness, quickly reappears: Twere better to be dumb than to talk thus. When I began, my purpose was to speak Of remedies and of a chearful hope. Our Luke shall leave us, Isabel. (2 51-4) Michael proposes to bind Luke to a kinsman who, like his brother's son was, is a "prosperous man,/Thriving in 314 trade" (259-60). The unavoidable analogy between the land and Luke, both given to Michael in his old age, indicates that he duplicates his error of binding the land by binding Luke in similar circumstances. His attempt to cure his ill replicates it. When Michael reveals his plan to Isabel, he inadvertently reveals the internal contradictions of his economic position: Our Luke shall leave us, Isabel; the land Shall not go from us, and it shall be free; He shall possess it, free as the wind That passes over it . . . (254-57) The emotional pitch of this reasoning is caught by the rapid confusions of Michael's thought, but these confusions are paradoxes the poem maintains. Land is free only when it is owned by its proper owner. Further, the freedom of the wind acts as a kind of entailment, a summons to the hills, a device for labor. Is it Luke or the land that is free as the wind? The dramatic answer is neither; Michael is mistaken. Wordsworth is not committed to a land free from improvement; the sheepfold is an improvement of enough importance that Wordsworth explains its design and function in an endnote, but it is an improvement within the traditions of the community, in contrast to, for example, the marble floor sent by Richard Bateman for a Chapel. 315 The parable of Richard Bateman is the best possible scenario of middle-class development once Luke is sent away. The movement out of the country was not reversible, at least in the myth of economic growth which Wordsworth presents in Isabel's mind: [Richard Bateman] was a parish-boy— at the church- door They made a gathering for him, shillings, pence, And halfpennies, wherewith the Neighbors bought A Basket, which they filled with Pedlar's wares, And with this basket on his arm, the Lad Went up to London, found a master there, Who out of many chose the trusty Boy To go and overlook his merchandise Beyond the seas, where he grew wond'rous rich, And left estates and monies to the poor, And at his birth-place built a Chapel, floor'd With Marble, which he sent from foreign lands. (2 6 9 -8 0 ) This story, rendered in one continuous sentence, is not a vision of wickedness, but an appraisal of the costs of economic changes which do perform some good. The basket filled with "Pedlar's wares" is the local version of the merchant, and the boy's transformation into a mercantilist is sanctioned by the community. The enumeration of the small coins which make up the "gathering," and the Neighbors' control over their expenditure demonstrate the power of the community. The neighbors convert the money into wares which are given to Bateman in trust, a parallel to the "Master" Bateman finds who chooses him to "overlook his merchandise." But in Bateman's transformation, as with the death of the 316 Cumberland Beggar, the power of the community, and with it, an element which drew the community together, disappears. The charitable "gathering" is an investment by the community against the expense of keeping Bateman on the parish rolls, and, in leaving "estates and monies to the poor," Bateman demonstrates the return on an investment of charity which would not be possible with only parish rates. The argument that charity, unlike state-sponsored aid, is economically beneficial is Burkean. Undercutting, or at least qualifying, the benefits, however, are two points, one hard economics, the other, hard poetry. First, while Bateman became rich, he was chosen as one "out of many," and if his industriousness was the cause, Michael's troubles show that such a quality is necessary, not sufficient. The fate of the many we know from Hogarth, Swift, and Smollett. Second, the image of the Marble floor. The Chapel is a modern version of the pleasure-house at Hart-Leap Well, built not by a Lord but a merchant. Bateman erects an alternative site to the church, the door of which was the locus of community charity. The trespass is of comic inappropriateness, a point emphasized by the contrast to the rough stones of the sheep-fold. The emphasis of the foreignness of the stones plays on the fashionable rage 317 in London for imports, but translates it, in the local community, into a kind of invasion. By placing this story in Isabel's mind, Wordsworth does not so much suppress the economic dynamics of Bateman's life, but suggests that such dynamics are experienced imperfectly in the mythologizing of community life.56 What Isabel thinks of Bateman's story cannot be claimed with certainty. Peter Manning maintains that "Isabel decides to give her consent to Michael's plan because of the memory of Richard Bateman" ("'Michael,' Luke, and Wordsworth" 203), but the text is somewhat ambiguous: These thoughts, and many others of like sort, Pass'd quickly thro' the mind of Isabel, And her face brightened. (281-3) Does her face brighten because of these thoughts, or in reaction to fortify Michael against them? Michael does not actually consult Isabel but presents the "scheme" as already decided. Her role is to "make ready Luke's best garments." Wordsworth creates an illusion of mutual consent between Michael and Isabel, an illusion aided by the ideology of consent which governs middle-class marriages, while still allowing Michael dictatorial expression. Once the decision to send Luke off is made, Michael's household becomes a torrent of preparation, which, 318 although strictly necessary, is strangely beside the point. The family awaits a letter, one which will give meaning to the frenetic activity. Even before Luke has left, the value of labor has shifted its locus, and, without yet feeling it, Michael is lost. Isabel recognizes this when she warns Luke that "if thou leave thy Father he will die," but, with Luke's "jocund" response, she is able to enter into the household delusion: they sit "like happy people" and "the house appear'd/As cheerful as a grove in Spring" (308-9, 313-6, my italics).57 The letter, when it arrives, is carefully drafted: The expected letter from their Kinsman came, With kind assurances that he would do His utmost for the welfare of the Boy, To which requests were added that forthwith He might be sent to him. (317-21) As in Wordsworth's own letters, the kinsman slides easily between the diction of familial affection and vocabulary of business. A split between these heteroglossic realms, however, is maintained by the grammar. The active voice of the assurance "he would do/His utmost" contrasts to the "requests," which "were added" as though by another hand, and which ask that Luke "might be sent," again submerging the agent, Michael, through the use of a passive voice. Through this structuring, Michael's original entreaty to the kinsman is converted into the 319 kinsman's request (or command) to Michael. This reciprocation can be read two ways: first, the kinsman is kindly recognizing the value Michael offers in sending Luke; secondly, the kinsman is an unconscious agent of "the dissolute city" (452) which, through Michael's economic reversals, commands Luke's sacrifice. Wordsworth does not provide a way to choose between these readings, and the argument between them reflects actual historical circumstances which awaited resolution. Was a contract the result of a mutual agreement or was it coercive and a replication of the same power structure which produced the forfeiture? The time frame insisted on by the term "forthwith" provides a glimpse of that power structure, since, in the contractual realm of offer-and-acceptance, it implies that the offer is of limited duration because at this point the kinsman can make profitable use of Luke. The kinsman is not doing Michael a favor, but the naivete with which even the skeptical Isabel receives the news— she "Went forth to shew [the letter] to the neighbors round"— obscures that point. Manning has pointed out that the "stark scene" of Michael at the unfinished sheepfold after Luke must flee England "draws its power from its wordlessness" (207). This effect is achieved partly because that location is 320 the site of the two most important covenants of the poem, that between reader and writer established early in the poem, and that between Michael and Luke figured more generally as between "old and young" (354). When Michael resolves to send Luke off, he does so with a capitalistic expectation of return. He has violated his own code, and attempts to mitigate the damages of that violation by overwriting his activity with a covenant between himself and his son. In attempting to establish a covenant of labor with his son, Michael tries to transform his physical strength into a transcendent strength, a power to bind. In the terms of the "Preface," he tries to alter the real language of his daily work into the slippery discourse of legal promises; his failure is foregone from the opening in which the poet, contracts to regain that real language in the midst of the public way. Two Oedipal conflicts occur in "Michael," that between Michael and Luke, whose ambivalence about going to the city resolves itself into pride, and that between shepherd and poet. Both come to a crisis in the covenant of the sheepfold. In keeping with the structure of the poem, in which past events, such as the marriage and the surety, erupt into the present, the sheepfold is introduced as a preexisting idea: Near the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill, In that deep Valley, Michael had design'd 321 To build a Sheep-fold, and, before he heard The tidings of his melancholy loss, For this same purpose he had gathered up A heap of stones[.] (332-7) The project is already in place, and Michael attempts to alter its significance by an agreement with Luke. The analogy to the poet altering the reader's encounter with the stones is underscored by the similarity of the opening line of this verse paragraph to both the second line of the poem and the final line.58 The crucial difference rests on the poet's success hewn from Michael's failure. Michael speaks, interrupted only by Luke's sobbing and silence, for nearly ninety lines. He attempts to construct a continuity between his past life and Luke's future, and this very project of continuity invokes the patriarchy of primogeniture, an increasingly antiquated doctrine as fewer landowners died intestate. His language clearly associates him with Abraham, upon whose covenant with God the great patriarchic nation of Israel rests: My Son, To-morrow thou wilt leave me; with full heart I look upon thee, for thou art the same That wert a promise to me ere thy birth, And all thy life has been my daily joy. (341-4) Luke's value to Michael is doubled, both in himself as a "daily joy," and in the fulfillment of and as "a promise." This promise exists without explanation, 322 another eruption of the past, but now, a mystical past to the extent the promise echoes the covenant God made with Abraham: And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly. (Gen 17:2) Abraham's offspring are both the promise itself and the object by which the promise is fulfilled. At this moment, when Michael solemnizes his breach with his patrimonial heritage in sending Luke away, that heritage is sanctified (sacrificed) by an allusion to a face-to- face encounter with God. This is not to say that Michael overlooks a superior option to sending away Luke; surrendering the land would do no better. Rather, Michael's language points to the necessary distortions he undergoes trying to preserve what cannot be preserved. The Jew within a Christian framework cannot preserve his covenant without acknowledging Christ as an intercessor. For Michael, no such intercessor appears and he tries to construct one through a modern covenant. He presents his position to Luke by first reviewing "our two histories" (347) and then the story of his relation to the land. The lands were "burden'd," that is legally mortgaged, but Michael insists on the equivalence between that meaning and the view of the lands as oppressed. Michael freed them through his labor which he understands 323 as exerting a certain mastery; he ends with this anthropomorphic image: — It looks as if it never could endure Another master. (389-90) The continuity of the "tumultuous brook" warns the reader that Michael is wrong about the land in one sense; finally, it has no master and is, as Michael says of Luke, but "a gift" eventually returned. As an object within human discourse (i.e., property), it does not endure its new owner. Having emphasized to Luke the importance of the past, Michael expresses the terms of their covenant: This was a work for us, and now, my Son, It is a work for me. But, lay one Stone— Here, lay it for me, Luke, with thine own hands. I for this purpose brought thee to this place (395-8) The insistence on Luke's using his own hands recalls Abraham taking "the fire in his hand" (Gen 22:6) and then "stretch[ing] forth his hand . . . to slay his son" (Gen 22:9). The promise between God and Michael is translated into a promise between Michael and Luke which amounts to a self-sacrifice by Luke and the exclusion of God. In the Biblical story, by contrast, the promise between God and Abraham is reaffirmed, translated into a promise between God and Isaac. The covenant between God and Abraham, already established before Isaac's birth, is doubled by the sacrifice: "In blessing I will bless thee 324 . . . And in thy seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed" (Gen 22:17-18).59 Michael's language for the rest of the speech twists with uncertainty, and ends with an inadvertent negation of the covenant: When thou return'st, thou in this place wilt see A work which is not here, a covenant Will be between us— (422-4) In this view, Luke's placing of the cornerstone does not create the covenant; rather, Luke's act is like the signature on a contract without consideration. Only the labor of the completed sheepfold constitutes the actual covenant and brings it fully into existence. At the denouement of his address, Michael falls upon the older form of contract in which only labor, and not its promise or sign, can construct a contract. Michael would not recognize the shift in his language: he intends "this Sheep-fold," marked only by its cornerstone, to be sufficient "anchor" and "shield" for Luke. Put another way, the silent Luke is incapable of a sufficiently powerful speech-act in the laying of the cornerstone and his fate is sealed by that failure, and Michael, finishing his speech, feels that doom: — but whatever fate Befall thee, I shall love thee to the last And bear thy memory with me to the grave. (424-6) 325 Luke's effort to obey his father and seal the covenant only crystallizes Michael's feelings; at the moment the cornerstone is laid: The Old Man's grief broke from him, to his heart He pressed his Son, he kissed him and wept. The line-break allows a momentary misreading in which the grief breaks Michael's heart. This private scene is developed slowly with its contradictions foregrounded. It is immediately contrasted with Luke's scene: when he had reach'd The public Way, he put on a bold face; And all the Neighbors as he pass'd their doors Came forth, with wishes and with farewell pray'rs That follow'd him 'till he was out of sight (335-9) The gifts are verbal, no longer the wares which sped Bateman on his way. In terms of the plot, this shift arises because Michael and Isabel could outfit him without help, but the contrast also suggests that within the community, a nascent capitalistic economy now located on the public way, discourse itself constitutes the act of giving. But the "pray'rs" can only follow him within sight of the speakers. The local words do not yet travel well; that strength awaits the poet. In sixteen lines, the good reports of Luke transform to his escape from "ignominy and shame" by "seek[ing] a hiding-place beyond the seas" (456). Wordsworth avoids portraying the degradation of the city, and Luke's offense is, like his words throughout the poem, rendered 326 vaguely. By focusing on Michael, Wordsworth centers the reader's sympathy there, and thus allows his usurpation of Luke's inheritance by asserting, as Hartman puts it, that "The poet is Michael's true heir" (Wordsworth's Poetry 266). Heinzelman concurs with this appraisal, but I would like to modify it slightly. Michael has no heir; his line is done. The Oak remains, an adequate reminder of Michael but already compromised as a symbol for the poet within the Lyrical Ballads by "The Oak and the Broom," which retells the familiar homily of the tree which will not bend and thus breaks in the storm while the broom, flexible and ironically sheltered by the Oak, survives. The pastoral tradition which created Michaels has given rise to a new pastoral tradition of the poet whose speech constitutes a covenant by virtue of its labor. Finally, Wordsworth reconciles the fissure in contracts by making his speech performative, and thus the contract and the consideration validating it become one act. Michael's inability to join his speech and his action ultimately exclude him from his community and his own labor. Where the winds devised work for him, Michael absorbs Luke's absence as lethargy. The son fails in the city, and his father, living through that failure, leaves the unfinished monument of the sheep-fold, and the estate 327 "went into a stranger's hand." The covenant of industriousness dissolves. Michael goes to the sheepfold and renders it complete in his melancholy— but it is incomplete— and that incompleteness is a violation of the covenant exactly reciprocal to Luke's: 'tis believed by all That many and many a day he thither went, And never lifted up a single stone. Michael's reality is absorbed entirely into the community's perception of him; this actually inverts the earlier view, in which Michael's household, by virtue of its regular light, guided the community. The devastation is not quite complete, the Clipping Tree remains, and the sheepfold, once again rendered unfinished, awaits the labor of the reader. The stranger is from afar, indifferent to the cottage which is destroyed; "the ploughshare has been through the ground/ On which it stood" (486-7). By extending Levinson's analysis of the Old Testament language, we can see how grossly distorted things have become. The ploughshare, that into which all swords were to be beaten, has itself become an instrument of violence against land, and against the community, as Wordsworth reminds the reader of the communal function of the cottage by recalling its name, "The Evening Star" (485) in the line previous to describing its destruction. 328 Yet, the stranger is already figured, first, in the estranged nephew and, secondly in the remade Richard Bateman. His marble floor inadvertently mocks the unhewn rocks, which, half a product of nature and half of man, stand as an ironic echo of an ideal relation between them. The disjunction between the right of property earned through work, and that of ownership by legal contract (the surety, a relatively new form of property, is the emblem), lies at the heart of this tragedy, and it is a tragedy to Michael, to his community, and to the reader to the extent that we have invested ourselves in the poem. And yet, it is also a victory of story telling, and of the reciprocal labor of reader and writer. In that same letter to Poole, Wordsworth writes This Poem has, I know, drawn tears from the eyes of more than one . . . ; and moreover, persons who have never wept, in reading verse, before. This is a favourable augury for me. (LEY 322) The victory is in the experience of the tragedy, and if, ultimately, the legalistic binds are what the final image of the poem overcomes in its sorrow, what is crucial as an augury for Wordsworth is that he has found a way to overcome those bonds by constructing new, more powerful ones. What is crucial to a critical reading of Wordsworth is that these new bonds are constructed by rewriting the discourse of the old ones. 329 NOTES 1. That modern critics, Siskin notes, have been held in thrall by the discursive power of English Romanticism "dramatizes how completely and invisibly the psychologized 'reality, of Romanticism has determined our understanding of ourselves and or our writing" especially as that reality requires such "artifacts" as "disciplinary boundaries (literary versus nonliterary), hierarchical differences (creative versus critical), aesthetic values (spontaneity and intensity), and natural truths (development and the unconscious)" and "also the distinction between the organic and the ironic/deconstructive that informs contemporary critical debate" (Historicity 3). 2. What Siskin says about "the extratextual manifestations" of romantic work applies equally well to the reconstruction of contract law: "This revisionary activity is intended to work not by altering what we read, but how we read it." (Ill) 3. In praising "The Old Cumberland Beggar," Lamb explicitly revels in the paradoxical nature of poetic mediation: . . .the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the Cumberland Beggar, that he may have about him the melody of Birds, altho' he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feelings for the Beggar's, and, in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. (Lamb, 89) 4. Lamb himself was aware of this paradox, and, during his entire carer as Elia, maintained his clerking job in the East India House— which situated his own writing as vocational. The creation of Elia, Lamb's persona for his essays in the London Magazine, Gerald Monsman observes, was itself an anagrammatic hoax ("a lie"), destined to rival in the literary sphere the scheme of the South-Sea Bubble whose centenary Lamb is here [in Elia's first appearance] wryly commemorating. The bubble was the result of a scheme to obtain a monopoly over trade in the South Seas in exchange for buying up the National Debt; the character of Elia is equally a bid to gain an undisputed claim— over a reading public— and equally doomed to failure. But it is a 330 failure Elia/Lamb cheerfully admits by recalling to his readers his real (i.e., daytime) profession at just the moment of describing his writing process in "Oxford in the Vacation" (London. October, 1820): The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation. It feels its promotion * * * * So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension. The necessity of an extra-literary profession is emphasized both by the metonomy of the quill that serves both occupations and by the ironic truth of the last sentence: It is not Elia, but Lamb, who might be "compromised in the condescension" since Lamb, not Elia, is the clerk who "sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill" (Lamb, 420). The final force of the apology is to belie its own claims— writing becomes something to be done at midnight, hidden. The shift to the third person is a rare intrusion by Lamb, to separate himself from Elia, whose dignity is not at all affected by Lamb's profession, but instead is constantly threatened by the public appearance of his articles. Although perhaps only an intriguing coincidence, on 29 March 1825, Lamb wrote Henry Crabbe Robinson this letter (quoted entirely): I have left the d d India House for Ever! Give me great Joy. C. Lamb (Lamb, 173) Within half a year, Elia appeared no more in the London. 5. Wordsworth also suggests that the Mariner, "long under controul of supernatural impressions" ought to "partake of something supernatural" (LB 277); Lamb responds that the Mariner "has acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase. eye, appearance, &c." Lamb's emphasis on phrasing recognizes that Wordsworth's objection regards an implicit relation between travelling and story-telling. 6. Like Lamb, although only by way of passing example, Simpson finds a continuity between Swift and Wordsworth: Edward Said has, for example, found in Swift many of the features of instability, incoherence and occasionality that I here discover (always of course set against the aspiration towards wholeness) in Wordsworth, [note omitted] . . . What they share, I suspect, is a common 331 sensitivity to the predicament of the bourgeois experience of authorship: radical uncertainties about readership, affiliation and determination. (Historical Imagination. 12) Jerome McGann has suggested that the method of "The Ancient Mariner" is to layer historically distinct linguistic registers (including "textual layers of the most primitive, even pre-Christian, sort" Beauties of Inflection 153) which a reader decodes not by grasping the meaning of the symbols but by locating historical differences. If this contention is right, then Wordsworth’s decision to substitute "Expostulation and Reply" is equally to substitute a different theory of reading and a different market in which that reading occurs (a move, in turn, creating a space for the revisions by which Coleridge deepened his methodology with the addition of the gloss in Sibvlline Leaves). 7. Both, when encountering that other realm, assimilate it into his primary discourse. For Wordsworth, the paradigmatic moment of such assimilation is "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 33, 1802" and the corresponding essays in The Spectator are those located on Sir Roger's country estate. 8. The verse turns on a philosophical tradition that regards the ontological status of nothing. See, for example, Persius: "Nothing can come out of nothing, nothing can go back to nothing" or II Corinthians 6:10 in the King James translation: "as having nothing, and yet possessing all things." William's assertion contemplates possession as an act of imagination in the midst of nature, and not as an act exercised over nature. 9. For more on the complex relation of Wordsworth to Burke in the unpublished "Letter," (a relation amenable to the double trope of consumption), see Chandler, Second Nature 15-25. 10. His find is comparable to, but paltry beside, the spot of the Khan's fountain in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. (3-5) Sir Walter attempts to impose his value, to measure out the "three leaps"; the Khan builds where nature's sacredness proceeds him, but in his pride attempts to gird it in. Their mistakes are reciprocal, and answered reciprocally. Kubla Khan hears "Ancestral voices prophesying war!" (30). 332 11. In later editions, Wordsworth drops the footnote and sets the initial lines with quotation marks. 12. The story that on finishing the poem, Wordsworth rushed it to his publisher, thus effectively ending the tour and the Lyrical Ballads simultaneously, emphasizes the poet's ability to convert idleness into labor. For a detailed discussion of the ramifications of tourism as a political act, see Alan Liu, "The Supervision of the Picturesque" (Sense of History 91-115) in which Liu argues the "importance for the picturesque of . . . actual as well as symbolic equivalence between scenery and property" that depended on a "peculiar" "distribution of property in the picturesque zones of Britian" (91-2). 13. In a letter to Jane Pollard, 8 May 1792, Dorothy mentions that John is sailing to either "the West Indies or America, and next spring he goes out again to the East." John's involvement in the West Indies is twice diluted in this sentence, and he is dissociated from the slave trade by the postscript: I hope you were an immediate abolitionist and are angry at the House of Commons for continuing to traffic in human flesh so long as 96 . . . (LEY 73, 75) 14. Suppressing the exact years of Leonard's voyages, Wordsworth does not allow a reader to locate his involvement in the West Indies against the political agitation for the abolition of the slave trade, a position supported by Wilberforce and Pitt in the 1790s (see Holdsworth XIII 157). 15. This exchange has an analogue in the transformation of the Lake District into a Tourist Industry which the Priest decries. Land, while serving for local subsistence, is expended— and cheapened by becoming more expensive— in become a tourist spot. See Simpson, Historical Imagination 75-7, for Wordsworth's resistance to a proposed railway through the Lake District in 1844 as a critique of the aesthetic of tourism. 16. See James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, ch 5, as well as the notes to Coleridge's Lecture. 17. Galperin has suggested that "The paradox of being obligated to the reader and opposed to the reader following that obligation, is reflected in the almost protean character of 'Leonard''s guilt" (Revision and Authority 131). This ambiguous attitude towards the 333 reader's obligation is expressed in the complicated position Dorothy occupies in "Tintern Abbey": If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me And these my exhortations! (144-47) 18. One roaring cataract— a sharp may storm Will come with loads of January snow, And in one night send twenty score of sheep To feed the ravens. (152-5) 19. Wordsworth's personal experience with Calvert's generosity was not, of course, anonymous, although De Quincey's gift to Coleridge in 1807 had such a veneer. 20. The final stanza restates all this in the past tense, starting with "And hence I said that Andrew's boys . . ." (31). 21. Also suppressed is the pollution of the Tyne because of the coal industry at Newcastle. 22. Said generous Rob, 'What need of books? Burn all the statutes and their shelves: They stir us up against our kind; And worse, against ourselves. 'We have a passion— make a law, Too false to guide us or control! And for the law itself we fight In bitterness of soul.['] (21-28) — "Rob Roy's Grave" (1807) 23. For a sampling of Bewick's vehement dislike of Pitt, see chs XV-XVI. Bewick earns his entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals less because of his radicalism than by contrast with the conservative climate during the wars against France. 24. "Lamb, writing to Wordsworth in 1815, spoke of that delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path which is so fine in the Old Thief and the boy by his side, and always brings water to my eyes" (Moorman I 48In). 25. The review in the British Critic groups these three poems as "of the highest order of Poems" in the volume. 334 26. Chandler has argued that the "eye of Nature" is "the eye of the villager whose perception is governed by the mild necessity of use" (Second Nature 89). This equation obscures the complexity of the various gazes through which the poem tracks the Beggar. I would suggest that the "eye of Nature" is a sight immune from the "mild necessity of use" which, in gazing on the Beggar, equally gazes on and admonishes the villagers. 27. The textual history suggests that Wordsworth began working on the poem as "only a description poem" (Reed 342) as early as 1796; it was not until 1798, however, when the "political economists were about that time beginning their war upon mendacity" (Fenwick note), that the poem discovered its intention. Put in the poems own language, the constant gaze (description) was given political shape by virtue of national changes. Wordsworth's choice, then, to retain the sub-title of "A Description" is indicative of the poem's mechanisms. 28. The Beggar's perpetual oldness (22-3) has a cursed element, and, in the context of poems like "Ruth" and "Ellen Irwin" (whose first name recurs in the poem immediately preceding "The Old Cumberland Beggar"), one line hints at the Beggar's past by negation; "His age has no companion" (45). Coleridge's poem haunts Wordsworth's work throughout the Lyrical Ballads. The famous division of labor proposed, according to Coleridge, was that his "endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic" while Wordsworth's object [was] to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand" (Bioaraphia. II 6-7). In this passage, taken as an interpretation of the volumes as they stand, Coleridge extends the grip of the Ancient Mariner over not only Wordsworth's characters, but his readers. The lethargy of custom is nowhere more apparent than in the protracted good-cheer of a wedding, which, as the Mariner's audience, the Wedding-Guest finally eschews. Wordsworth is placed as the Mariner, whom readers must hear, held in thrall by his glittering 335 eye that sees the natural, until the ordinary appears supernatural, or in any case, romantic. Implicitly, Wordsworth himself repents through the relentlessness of his story-telling. 29. A gloss from the OED is more suggestive: "Anything injurious or obnoxious to the community, or to the individual as a member of it (esp. as an owner of property), for which some legal remedy may be found." 30. Chandler suggests that Wordsworth may indeed be closer to that "mad doctrine," "closer, perhaps, than many of us would like to believe" (Second Nature 86). 31. Polanyi reports that 250 Industry Houses eventually held half-a-million inmates. 32. "Boon" is a general term, meaning "A gift, a grant; a benefaction; a present" (Johnson). Of the four quotations Johnson has, two are legalistic, e.g. "The blustering fool has satisfy'd his will;/ His boon is giv'n . . . Dryden's Fables." "1. A charter is a written evidence of things done between man and man. Charters are divided into charters of the king and charters of private persons . . . Cowel." All three additional quotations under this definition are explicitly legal, while both quotations under the second meaning, "Any writing bestowing privileges or rights," are doctrines of natural law, e.g., "God renewed this charter of man's sovereignty over the creatures. South." The two examples for the third definition , "privilege; immunity; exemption" are metaphors from Shakespeare, e.g., "I must have a liberty/ Withal as large a charter as the wind." Both examples of "exemptions" are from discourses on law, e.g., "The Roman laws gave particular exemptions to such as built ships, or traded in corn. Arbuthnot on Coins." 33. Although verbal echoes are insufficient to claim a deliberate allusion, this movement from the pedestrian formation of habit to the development of the poet occurs in Godwin's Enquiry (Bk 1 ch v). 34. And for Wordsworth criticism, the ascendancy of the Prelude further defers resolution. 35. Even to the extent that Fox is included in the audience, he is located outside the Pitt government; Wordsworth emphasizes his awareness of this at the end of 336 his letter: "Wishing earnestly that the time may come when the country may perceive what it has lost by neglecting your advice" (LEY 315). 36. He never uses the synonym "budget." 37. That thoughts of the war hover over "The Old Cumberland Beggar" is clear from its compositional history; it once contained lines from "Old Man Travelling," in which an old man goes to see his son, dying of a battle wound. 38. "Heart-Leap Well," "There was a boy," "The Brothers," "Ellen Irwin," 1,1 Tis said, that some have dies for love," "To a Sexton," Two April Mornings," "A Poet's Epitaph," "The Danish Boy," and "Michael" all have encounters with graves, and "Lines Written with a Slate- Pencil ..." opens with a "hillock of misshapen stones" that are of initial interest because they resemble a Cairn. Many other poems, which allude to death and graves, in the context of the volume, are implicated in this theme; "Emma's Dell," for example, concludes: Years after we are gone and in our graves, When they [shepherds] have cause to speak of this wild place, May call it by the name of EMMA'S DELL (45-7) Emma's Dell is a marker of deaths to come, even while it is the poet's "out-of-doors abode" (41), and in an earlier poem, "The Two April Mornings," an Emma is already dead. 39. The paragraph in which this observation occurs begins with the comment that Wordsworth "could here pause with pleasure, and invite the Reader to indulge with me in contemplation of the advantages that must have attended such a practise" as burying the dead "beyond the walls of towns and cities" (448). Wordsworth's rhetorical strategy is to coax his reader to pause, like a fellow traveller, to examine not an epitaph, but a procedure of eulogy. The homologousness of reading a work and reading the procedure of its composition provides another version of the argument from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. 40. Although "A Poet's Epitaph" may have been composed a few months earlier that "Ellen Irwin," the reader encounters "Ellen" first in the Lyrical Ballads. 337 41. In "The Essay on Epitaphs," Wordsworth suggests that it is enough "that the trunk and the main branches of the worth of the deceased by boldly and unaffectedly represented. Any further detail . . . must inevitably frustrate its own purpose [and become] unaffecting and profitless" (453). 42. In his note on "The Brothers," Wordsworth had indicated that most churchyards have few gravestones, and in that poem, the Priest articulates the same notion as a potential economic threat: The Stone-cutters, 'tis true, might beg their bread If every English churchyard were like ours ("Brothers" 177-8). 43. Gabel and Feinman point out that: Between the latter part of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, both the economic and political foundations of eighteenth-century contract law were, in Marx's phrase, 'burst asunder.' In this period the system of economic and social relations known as free-market capitalism achieved a full development begun several centuries earlier, and the political climate was explosively transformed in the service of those social and economic developments with the aid of violent revolutions in America and Western Europe. These changes dramatically transformed the life situations of people in Western society and brought about an equally dramatic transformation in contract law. (174) 44. By contrast, Broom devotes Book II, "Of Contracts," in his four book treatise, Commentaries on the Common Law (1846), to the law of contracts. 45. The three other judges, while concurring in the decision, reasoned differently. Two maintained that consideration had in fact been given because Pillans gave up the right to call upon White for the payment of the 800L. 46. Mansfield’s position, further, alters the domain in which truth is investigated from the external world to the written document; the contract, duly written, is its own guarantor. This position reflects an increased reliance on writing by aristocratic and mercantile institutions, and provides a legal frame to empower writing generally. 338 47. Of particular importance in this case was an argument that was not made, despite its availability for a hundred years. Williamson could have argued, with the precedent of Dutton v. Poole (1677), that "the warmth of natural affections and the recollection of paternal care sufficed to generate obligations [that is, "constituted consideration"] between the members of a family" (Fifoot, Lord Mansfield. 135). Williamson, therefore, could have maintained that the familial affection expressed in the document constituted consideration and that the writing should be construed as a simple contract which sought to actualize that affection. The choice not to use this reasoning suggests the success of Mansfield's court to subsume social relations under the legalistic ones of contract. See also Blackstone II 297. 48. Two years later, despite this setback, Mansfield was able to further insist on the negotiability of a signature in Russel v. Langstaffe. Langstaffe "had indorsed his name on five blank 'promissory notes'" which were then filled in by Galley who sold them to Russel. When the notes fell due, Galley dishonored them and Russel sued Langstaffe as the endorser. The trial court held that a signature on a blank note was a "mere nullity" and could not be transformed by subsequent writing. Mansfield overturned the ruling, arguing that the signature was not a nullity, but "a letter of credit for an indefinite sum" (Holden 143). 49. Such a reading is not available on first encountering these lines, but emerges with the more explicit contractual agreements later in the poem. 50. The "few natural hearts," combined with the earlier "not unfit,/I deem, for the fireside" carefully disperses Milton's "fit audience . . . though few." See Manning, 211. 51. The move from oral transmission to written poem does not seem to alter the story, but the opening lines of the verse paragraph force the reader to recognize that the great change is the presence of an audience that are neither the "natural hearts" nor the "youthful Poets," but the buyers of books, the tourists invading what is "in truth an utter solitude" (14). 52. The others are brief phrases in lines 70 and 96. 339 53. When Michael tells Luke that the boy "hast been my daily joy," he supplants Isabel, in the figure of Sarah who said "God hath made me to laugh." (Gen 21:6) 54. Wordsworth allows the textual history of this moment, partly encoded in the poem itself and partly the result of the Fenwick Note, to undercut the naturalness of the moment. Wordsworth justifies the minute details of the lamp because "there are no few/ Whose memories will bear witness to my tale" (135-6). The local audience, by bearing witness before the national audience, validates Wordsworth's story and its meaning. In the Fenwick note, Wordsworth informs his readers that the "Evening Star" was not Michael's cottage, but one nearby. Consequently, an actual local audience would not have discounted Wordsworth's story. It is his invention of a local audience which is self-validating. 55. Wordsworth is careful not to say that the nephew's "ample means" prompted Michael to sign the surety. 56. John Galt's Annals of the Parish (1821, written 1813) traces the transformation of a Scottish community through the importation of foreign goods and ideas, but his narrative strategy, which makes "placing" of the story teller/minister the first act of invasion, provides the church (and the periodical industry, to which he sends articles late in his career) as mediating structures by which the community can maintain itself with some success. The relation between Galt's work and Wordsworth's suggests the material basis for Wordsworth's concerns. 57. Wordsworth gives Isabel's words, memorable in their Biblical overtones, and merely reports the tone of Luke's response, so in a rereading of the poem, her words continue to have force that, on a first reading, Luke could disperse. 58. "Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill" (2) and "Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Gill" (491). 59. The simultaneity of God's promise to Isaac and to Abraham resembles a surety in which a single instrument binds both a principal and a guarantor. In this respect, a surety differs from a contract of guarantee in which two distinct instruments bind the principle and the guarantor, allowing each different defenses. WORDSWORTH, LAW, AND ECONOMICS: A POET'S LANGUAGES Volume II by Mark Lawrence Schoenfield A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) May 1990 UMI Number: DP23147 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP23147 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 3 4 0 Chapter Seven The Excursion Wordsworth desired that readers take The Excursion seriously by extracting a system from the poem. In this chapter, I attempt to follow this suggestion but to preserve a critical position by placing the system against other competing systems— not only to notice the gaps in Romantic systemization, but to restore its polemic character. In Section A. , I read The Excursion against both a younger Wordsworth and William Hazlitt, who portrayed himself as true to the younger Wordsworth’s ideals in a way the poet was not. Section B. situates Francis Jeffrey's review against both the poem and the periodical industry he aggressively shaped in the image of a legal system. In Section C., at the risk of rather lengthy digressions into both utilitarianism and science, I place Wordsworth beside Jeremy Bentham, the staunch critic of Blackstone as well as the character Hazlitt chose for the first essay of Spirit of the Age. While law and economics remain the primary focus, I widen the lens to locate in these discourses, as in The Excursion. 341 a totalizing drive which subsumes other voices. This approach will not avoid close analysis of the poem, but it limits it, and if I do not say enough about the institutional and pedagogic designs of the Wanderer's panegyrics, Kenneth Johnston's Wordsworth and The Recluse (especially Part Three) fills in many gaps better than I could have. A. Introduction: The Pedlar's Retirement. Gothic Structures i. In Wordsworth and The Recluse (10), Kenneth Johnston demonstrates that the "history of The Recluse is one of repeated beginnings": "The Ruined Cottage," the early Preludes. the sketches of "Home at Grasmere," the published Excursion with a Preface highlighting an otherwise imperceptible fragmentary status, subsequent editions and revisions seen through the press by Wordsworth, and the posthumous publication of the Prelude.1 This series deliberately structures works so that wholeness and priority becomes an interpretive question. New beginnings are fashioned not as a false starts, but as repetitions and purifications, the same real language represented yet again. At the same time, the poetic career, as an activity of publication and 342 self-reference, revises the poems into a continuum of self-interpretation. New beginnings, thus, are not only purifications, but rewriting and contaminations of earlier work. Wordsworth's composing procedures make this point clear: the 13 00 lines which "began" the Recluse in 1798 were dispersed into at least "The Old Cumberland Beggar," "Old Man Travelling" (described by Wordsworth as an "overflow" of the "Cumberland Beggar," although published two years before it), a section condensed into the Discharged Soldier episode concluding Book V of the 1805 Prelude (and not published until 1850), and a version of "The Ruined Cottage," that gradually evolved into the First Book of The Excursion (Johnston, Wordsworth 5-6). Dorothy, exasperated at the complicated state of the manuscripts, welcomed the publication of The Excursion as a hedge against Wordsworth's death, since she believed presenting them beyond anyone's ability but his; in such a moment as this, publication appears not as the end of a work, but as a resting place in the poet's development akin to the rock on which William sits in "Expostulation and Reply." The appropriate metaphor is once again the common law, consistently reinterpreting itself as a critique of its earlier versions in such a way as to erase them, or conform them to the contemporary, ahistorical and 343 transcendent version. And like the common law, the earlier versions remain not as overlooked, incidental traces, but as the antithetical foundations which structure the movement of the published text. Jonathan Wordsworth portrays Wordsworth's incorporation of "The Ruined Cottage" into The Excursion as a co-option that violates the aesthetic values of the earlier poem, as, in a word, a mistake.2 William Galperin accepts this violation, this taking, but values it as a critique. As an example, Galperin discusses the figure of the dreamer in both texts: In The Ruined Cottage, the differences separating the Poet and dreamer help unite the poet with the Reader . . . [In The Excursion.1 roughly the same experience actually accentuates the gap between self and community or between subject and object. (Revision 36-7)3 Consequently, the authority established by the poet at the opening of The Excursion becomes unstable and must be reinstated through the secondary (yet itself unstable) authority of the Wanderer. From "The Ruined Cottage" (in the earliest versions which probably contained the Pedlar's history) to The Excursion Wordsworth expands the Wanderer's failure as a school teacher; his resulting choice to become a peddler emphasizes that his value (and consequently authority) is dependent on his location within a vanishing economy.4 Wordsworth's rewriting, however, makes an ultimate critique of authority 344 impossible, because it exercises an exclusive property right over the previous poems and consequently reasserts his authority.5 The revisions of the Pedlar and the Narrator in "The Ruined Cottage" into the Wanderer and the Poet in The Excursion provide a microcosm of Wordsworth's struggle with poetic sovereignty. Comparable to the Leech- gatherer, the Pedlar of "The Ruined Cottage" is engaged in an occupation on the verge of extinction; his retirement, a change for The Excursion that looms as important as his work, provides the space of the poetic career. Since this retirement occurs within the textual history of the poem, in the gap between "The Ruined Cottage" and The Excursion, it can be seen as the manipulation of the supplanting poet. The general tenor of The Excursion is one of orderly inheritance— the Poet, educated by the Wanderer, will take up his tasks as educator, mediator, and judge. In the disjunction between "The Ruined Cottage" and The Excursion, however, usurpation— the professional revolution, bloodless but socially violent, intertwined with the Bill of Rights and the free market— is inscribed in the text. Here is the description in "The Ruined Cottage" of the narrator coming upon the Pedlar: He lay, his pack of rustic merchandize Pillowing his head. I guess he had no thought 345 Of his wandering-way life. His eyes were shut, The shadows of the breezy elms above Dappled his face. With thirsty heat oppressed At length I hailed him, glad to see his hat Bedewed with water-drops . . . (44-49) His pack is the means of his work and of his rest; at the end of the poem, "The old man [will rise] and hoistf] up his load" (534), the first movement reasserting a human presence among the noises of nature that "people[]" (533) the air. The narrator's guess that "he had no thought/Of his wandering-way life" is plausible because the Pedlar has no need to think about a life he always lives. This is still the old (mythic?) mode of labor; work is not carved out of life but integrated into it. In The Excursion. Wordsworth substantially changes this description: Supine the Wanderer lay, His eyes as if in drowsiness half shut, The shadows of the breezy elms above Dappling his face. He had not heard the sound Of my approaching steps, and in the shade Unnoticed did I stand some minutes' space. At length I hailed him, seeing that his hat Was moist with water-drops . . . (I 441-7) The pack is gone, and the narrator's guess, a tautology within the Pedlar's economy, becomes a privileged gaze: not the occupation of unalienated labor, but the silent transforming profession that capitalizes on observation. "[A]t length" initially delineated the struggle for the narrator to approach to hailing distance, but in the revised version, it indicates a period of gazing. The 346 Pedlar's eyes, in the first version merely "shut," become drowsy and half-closed in contrast to the narrator's alertness. The Poet's gaze cannot be sustained because of his thirst. The alteration to the participial "seeing" (from "glad to see") creates a causal effect: the poet hailed the Wanderer because he saw the opportunity to have his thirst quenched. The gladness, although inferable from the Poet’s admiration for the Wanderer, is muted, so that the scene seems dictated by necessity rather than choice. In "The Ruined Cottage," the fifteen lines between the narrator's spotting the pedlar and his going for water contain four expressions of emotion ("instantaneous joy" 36, "dear to me as the setting sun"6 39, "now/Delighted" 42-3, "glad" 49); in the later poem, all these are deleted and the poet's thirst is underscored by the opposition between his lips "parched with thirst" and the Wanderer's having "found relief" (I 454-5). In "The Ruined Cottage," the Pedlar points the way to water without prompting; in The Excursion, he does so "at the word" (I 454). In the difference between these two scenes, a certain resistance in the Poet emerges: he seeks to outdo the Wanderer, but cannot without the Wanderer's aid. The most significant difference in the scenes is that in The Excursion, the first-person actor 347 wishes to become a professional poet and needs tales, such as "Michael" and those implicit in "The Old Cumberland Beggar" which can be turned to profit. As the Wanderer/Pedlar puts it, in both versions, neither he nor the narrator are contented thence to draw A momentary pleasure, never marked By reason, barren of all future good .... [Margaret's story is] A tale of silent suffering, hardly clothed In bodily form. (I 634-44) Just as the Pedlar provides raiment by merchandising and Robert does by production, the poet clothes the story by wrapping it into first the Pedlar's history (bodily form) and then into the volume of The Excursion, and still again, into the collected editions of Wordsworth's work from 1820 onward. In one draft (1801-2) of "The Ruined Cottage," since the Pedlar had an open hand That never could refuse whoever ask'd Or needed . . . [he] was slow In gathering wealth. These lines do not survive into the published version. Economic reality, replaces, or at least coincides with, personal generosity, in the Wanderer's acquiescence. My reading cuts against most of The Excursion, which asserts a sympathy between the Wanderer and the Poet, but I suggest this sympathy derives from the perspective of the poet who, having subsumed the Wanderer, can now "afford 348 to suffer/With those whom he saw suffer” (I 72-3). He can preserve old modes of exchange within the new market, not least because that new market eliminated competitors such as peddlers who speak to customers and deliver real objects, rather than represent the "real language of men" to an anonymous audience. Wordsworth’s procedure in The Excursion is to elide this difference between "The Ruined Cottage" and The Excursion, by restoring to the relation of Poet and Wanderer the continuity which is disrupted by the differential between the two versions. By doing so, the Poet's authority is articulated in juridical, rather than sovereign form, to use terms Jerome Christensen invokes to discuss Byron.7 If the Prelude is a personal epic that struggles to establish a sovereignty over self, The Excursion is a juridical work which seeks to locate both self and other in a corporation under the "law/ of conscience" (IV 225-6) and its external manifestation, "The law of duty" (IV 103 6). But this effort requires the constant overcoming of the claims of other juridical interpreters, whether critics or judges; in effect, the usurpation of the pedlar is a trope for these other usurpations. ii. The space which Wordsworth opens up for the poet is simultaneously enclosed. The conversion of Dorothy's 349 mind into a "mansion for all lovely forms" and her memory into "a dwelling place" (141-42) in "Tintern Abbey," the invitation to build a house upon the poet's grave in "A Poet's Epitaph," and the psychic completion of the sheep- fold in "Michael" are all prototypes for the gothic cathedral which Wordsworth announces provides the shape of his poetic career. As such, William Hazlitt's response to the Excursion. which adopts the same metaphor, is telling. Hazlitt's review of The Excursion in the Examiner8 came out in three parts, crowded by commentary on the Irish Peasantry and tax law, and he opens it by deconstructing the imagery of unity. He insists on the fissure between Wordsworth's power over his materials and his skills in choosing materials suited to those powers. He concludes his opening paragraph thus: Whether, as it is, this is the most original and powerful performance may not rather remain like one of those stupendous and half-finished structures, which have been suffered to molder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel it would be presumptuous in us to determine. (541) When Wordsworth invokes the metaphor of the Gothic Church in his Preface to The Excursion, he describes the building as actively used, as if his current poem holds the same place in contemporary society that the gothic church held in ancient time. Never willing to obscure 350 the crush of history, Hazlitt reworks the metaphor to recall the decay to which such edifices have become subject, and thus leaves to the reader the problem of whether the effort in getting through the poem, necessarily commensurate with the author's labour of composition, will be adequately rewarded. At the same time, his architectural imagery recalls the fate of old cathedrals and the attendant medieval ideas which Hazlitt sees Wordsworth resurrecting in The Excursion. Committed to unravelling Wordsworth's contradictory structures, Hazlitt equates the poem with "the country in which the scene is laid"? both share "vastness and magnificence," "nakedness and confusion": Here are no dotted lines, no hedge-row beauties, no box-tree borders, no gravel walks, no square mechanical enclosures. All is left loose and irregular in the rude chaos of aboriginal nature . . . we doubt whether [Wordsworth] would not reject a druidical temple, or time-hallowed ruin, as too modern and artificial for his purposes. (541) Scenes like the church-yard or the Pastor's house contradict Hazlitt, but his next paragraph clarifies his position. Wordsworth's poem is not so much a description of natural objects, as of the feelings associated with them, not an account of the manners of rural life, but the result of the Poet's reflections on it. The occurrence of human-objects and natural objects are ancillary to the poet's use of them, and indeed, the 351 objects do not fully exist until the use is exerted. "An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing. . . . The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar, are three persons in one poet." Hazlitt's metaphoric trinity attacks the appearance of heteroglossia in the text which finally subsumes all variety into one system, the poet's imagination. From Wordsworth's point of view, however, t the poet's imagination is an origin of difference, and the poem enacts the dramatic conflict between two notions of difference. The first, the legalistic or Hobbesian one, is that difference is the state of nature, and the civilizing process is the institution of sameness. The second notion is that pre-human nature (an impossibility for Wordsworth) is sameness, and that the introduction of the human imagination brings difference, variety, and beauty into existence. Variety for its own sake is devalued as not a species of difference at all;9 rather, it resembles the gothic novels Wordsworth disparages in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. As Hazlitt remarks, Wordsworth refuses "the common vantage-grounds of popular story, of striking incident, or fatal catastrophe." To rephrase Hazlitt's remark, Wordsworth refuses to make his story interesting by evoking the cliches of interest and depends instead on the reader's labor to operate the shifts from sameness to difference. This model parallels 352 a version of the idealized market economy and the British Constitution, both of which are ways of duplicating human differences within the context of unchanging natural laws, whether of economics or rights. Hazlitt's genuine ambivalence, a strong component of which was admiration, to Wordsworth's project responds to Wordsworth's own terms.10 In his Preface to The Excursion. Wordsworth presents the interrelationships of his poems as firmly established; their unquestioned core is the incomplete Recluse, and the center of that is the volume in the reader's hand, The Excursion.1 1 Wordsworth uses the architectural metaphor of a church, a gothic cathedral whose building takes centuries, and whose social functions overspill its confines into the courts, the shops, the farms, the day-to-day life of the town. It is Tintern Abbey reinvested, its contemporary passive function as a hideaway for vagrants displaced by its medieval, socially vital mode: [T]he two works [the unpublished "biographical poem" posthumously produced as the Prelude and the never-completed Recluse1 have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the ante-chapel has to the body of a gothic church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor Pieces, which have long been before the Public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive Reader to have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to 353 the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices. (2) The metaphor is appropriate in that the development of such a church was subject to the shifts in labor supply, weather, materials, and aristocratic and papal support, and yet the final product presented itself as a harmonious whole, mirroring both the ordered heavens and the continuity of social life. A gothic architect was subordinate to the benefactor, usually anonymous, and often multiple. The conditional language of Wordsworth's metaphor is careful rhetoric; he insinuates that the value of his poetry compensates the money spent on him, whether directly by book buyers or indirectly by his supporters. Both "if he may so express himself" and "he may be permitted to add" at once ask permission and query the reader's subtlety in negotiating the metaphor. It repeats the stance of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that positions the reader as both confidant and judge, and then insists that the execution of the duty as judge depends on being a successful confidant. The metaphor of the gothic church was not original, and some of its resonance can be understood by examining Blackstone's use of another gothic edifice; Our system of remedial law resembles an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the 354 trophied halls are all magnificent and venerable, but useless and therefore neglected. The inferior apartments, now accommodated to daily use, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches may be winding and difficult. (Ill, 267-8) For both Wordsworth and Blackstone, the metaphor unites disparate pieces of writing (poems and laws), and accounts for their appearance as discrete, disunified, even contradictory objects. For Blackstone, new remedies did not indicate a new system, but adjusted a single constitution to the variations of history. The archaic aspects of the law, those associated with feudalism and discord ("moated," "embattled," "trophied") retain their sublime character and exert a unifying aesthetic pressure on the whole. Theresa Kelly has demonstrated Wordsworth's management of the sublime and the beautiful as tendencies towards inspiration and guardianship respectively (Revisionarv Aesthetics 44-45). Blackstone's position is similar: the "inferior apartments" that are "cheerful and commodious" are in "use," while the gothic structures are "magnificent" but "useless."12 The jurist turns to an aesthetic mode to confront historical disjunctions which both threaten the grounds of the common law and, in the myth of law as a civilizing influence, must reside at the pre-original moment of that law. The poet, Jeffrey would maintain, does not compete for the same stakes, but Wordsworth, as 355 a professional determined to sing "Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, . . . /Of joy in the widest commonality spread;/ . . . and the law supreme/Of that intelligence which governs all (Prospectus, 14,18,21-2) insists on those stakes and addresses exactly those disunities, as the imagery of ruins pervading The Excursion recalls. Like Hume and Blackstone, Wordsworth recognizes that the shaping of a public and the interpretive strategies it will use not only fulfills the personal economic ambition of a favorable reception, but affects the ideological supports of institutions. The movement of The Excursion from local questions to the establishment of a British Empire by means of education and promulgation (in the Wanderer's vision in Book IX) contextualizes the terms of the Prospectus. The temporal or dialogic character of Wordsworth's announced theme is apparent in the juxtapositions of its three terms. Man, Nature, and Society, in the empirical world, are neither equivalent nor distinct, neither wholly harmonious nor conflicting.13 Furthermore, the Prospectus reuses this triad, first apparently as a theme, but then, because of the grammar of the opening sentence, as the data on which the genuine theme can be constructed. The opening line echoes the epic tradition of announcing a theme; 356 On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life . . . But the sentence does not continue "I sing": On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of imagery before me rise, . . . And I am conscious of affecting thoughts And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes Or elevates the Mind, intent to weigh The good or evil of our mortal state. (1-7) What was the central theme in the prose introduction becomes, in poetry, a part of the chain of associations which eventually achieves the poetic product: the ability to weigh good and evil. The triad is evidentiary, not thematic, and the theme of The Excursion is given as "these emotions, whencesoe'er they come." The antecedent to "these emotions" is vague, because they are neither independent of the triad nor located in some exhaustible way within it. Memory, imagery, and solitude all mediate between the triad and the emotions, which are then defined morally in an extended passage which ultimately emerges as having the same structure as the opening of Paradise Lost: Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, . . . I sing:— 'fit audience let me find though few!' The mis-quotation of Milton (Paradise Lost VII 31) not only establishes a textual link, but articulates the connection as an matter of audience, of, in the historical circumstances of Wordsworth's day, the literary marketplace. The allusion to Book VII is apt 357 since the tales of The Excursion are mostly told by internal narrators, just as Book VII begins Raphael's narration to Adam. At the same time, Wordsworth's alteration in the line, the insertion of "let me," shifts the emphasis from the muse's finding the audience to the poet's doing so. B. Francis Jeffrey and the Wanderer i. The Review "This will never do." The line is familiar enough: Jeffrey's infamously acceptable response to The Excursion.14 A consideration of the review within the context of the poem's views on property and system will reveal what it was about the poem that struck Jeffrey as so threatening. What is it that will never do, and why? And do what? What speech act did Jeffrey, a lawyer who knew that powerful speech such as reviews and writs and sentences were performative, fear the poem might accomplish? Jeffrey objects to several claims about the ability of the poet to dictate the English intellectual economy, and consequently influence the monetary economy and the notions of property. Jeffrey recognized in Wordsworth's didactic poetry the effort to locate the poet in the 358 position that Jeffrey himself had placed the critic and the lawyer. This argument over intellectual economy amounted to an argument over the source of knowledge and power. To Jeffrey, a descendant of Hume, the social order constructed both knowledge and power. To Wordsworth, the social order manifested knowledge and power to the extent that it represented nature. Defining the "grand staple" of the work as "a kind of mystical morality," Jeffrey claims to open the book randomly to demonstrate "the chief characteristics of the style," that is, "it is prolix and very frequently unintelligible" (9-10) For his sample, he chooses thirty lines from Book IV, "Despondency Corrected" (72-87, 95- 100, 131-39) without indicating the omissions. The passage (asserting that "Duty exists" [74] and endures beyond "the storms of circumstance" [72]) is not straight-forward, although Jeffrey increases its difficulty by not situating it, by beginning mid sentence, and by making cuts that confuse reference. By pretending to exhibit this passage as "a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader with painful giddiness and terror," Jeffrey presents his judgment as necessarily 359 aesthetic; since he does not understand the passage, how could he comment on meaning? To view Jeffrey's judgment as solely aesthetic— and hence, merely either right or wrong, agreeable of disagreeable-— may be tempting. But a deviation from his usual method of presenting the relationship between critic and poet curbs this temptation. In his reviews of Thaiaba. Crabbe's Poems (1807), and Wordsworth's Poems. in Two Volumes (1807), Jeffrey positions the critic as either the judge or as the lawyer arguing before the bar of the public. In his review of The Excursion, he shifts the metaphor to another profession: The case of Mr Wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism. We cannot indeed altogether omit taking precautions now and then against the spreading of the malady; — but for himself, . . . we shall watch the progress of his symptoms as a matter of professional curiosity and instruction. (Edinburgh Review. Nov., 1814, 2) Figuring himself as a doctor (after the initially ambiguous phrase "The case of . . . "), Jeffrey obviates the need for argument, and even adopts, albeit sarcastically and obliquely, the Wordsworthian position that poetry, at least this particular poetry, is natural- -like decay; divorced from the social institutions on which Jeffrey believes communication depends, such nature is tantamount to disease and to abuse. The Lake Poets 360 constitute a threat to other poetry in that they live outside the system of literary distribution— neither in London nor Edinburgh— and yet they deploy their works through those systems and threaten contamination. This is a deliberate misreading of Wordsworth, who also insists on a relation between nature and society, but one with a different structure. Jeffrey has adopted the metaphor by which the Wanderer, the economic and moral center of the poem, understands the Solitary, who lives on the margins of the community. After telling the story of the Solitary, the Wanderer concludes by associating the Solitary's choice of occupation (i.e., where he lives) with illness: Tormented thus, after a wandering course Of discontent, and inwardly opprest With malady— in part, I fear, provoked By weariness of life— he fixed his home, Or, rather say, sate down by very chance Among these rugged hills. (II 304-9) The Wanderer considers the Solitary as sick, but, unlike Jeffrey's view of Wordsworth, curable. The cure entails restoring the solitary's intentional self, undoing the revision of "fixed his home" into "sate down by very chance." The Wanderer sees the Solitary's choice of habitation as a symptom of an inner malady; more precisely, his relation to the land has become one of mere possession, and no longer of property as an imaginative intersection of land and human intention. 361 Jeffrey reverses this view in considering Wordsworth, whose sickness proceeds from his association with the Lake District. Jeffrey claims that Wordsworth is dominated by the land, figured as a company of misguided poets striving to break "loose from the bondage of ancient authority" (Edinburgh Review Oct. 1802 64). As a consequence, Jeffrey maintains, Wordsworth loses the human dominion which, as Blackstone had asserted, is the foundation of property rights and hence human government itself. Both Jeffrey and Wordsworth (or the Wanderer) make appeals to the past, but for Jeffrey, such history is firmly rooted in the procedures of precedent; it provides not objects of interpretation, but interpretive templates. Wordsworth's history, like land, is always accompanied by the visibility of its own story-telling and retains the need for interpretation. In asserting Wordsworth's incurability, Jeffrey denies his ability to present a moral methodology by which the Solitary could be cured. In essence, Jeffrey denies to Wordsworth the labor which is the central action of the poem, curing the illness of despair which the recent history of England and France has inflicted on early enthusiasts of the French Revolution. Even in acknowledging Wordsworth's genius, a typical move in Jeffrey's reviews of the poet,15 Jeffrey seeks to 362 disempower it by limiting the scope of poetic investigation to truths derived from other institutions. The random "sample" adduced by Jeffrey central to the proposed cure in arguing that restoration may be found in adherence to "Duty/" but duty presented in an unfamiliar mode, equated with neither law nor custom, but discovered through intellectual labor. Duty amounts to the apprehension [of] those transcendent truths Of the pure intellect, that stand as laws (Submission constituting strength and power) Even to thy Being's infinite majesty! (IV 97-100) The referent to "thy Being" is "dread source,/Prime, self-existing cause and end of all" (80-1), and Wordsworth confronts his readers with a paradox of origins, since this Being is ruled. It is important to recognize what Jeffrey dislikes about this position. As a reviewer, Jeffrey maintained that Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers [critics or poets?], whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question. (Edinburgh Review October 1802, 63) His objection is not to the religious per se but Wordsworth's organization of institutions. For Jeffrey, religion occupies -those Gothic portions of the common law which provide, as Blackstone had said, magnificence and veneration, but its day-to-day practice occurs in history. The dominant institution of his opening salvo, in the Edinburgh's opening number, against the Lake Poets 363 is the law (used figuratively to regulate both religion and poetry). Such a figure situates law as a regulator of non-legal issues, and locates its authority in history. It is specifically a solution to the problem of origins which the Whig lawyers had depended upon in coming to power, and which Jeffrey, like Hume and Blackstone, continued to rely on.16 For Wordsworth, as the opening lines to the "Duty” passage (which Jeffrey omits) show, the uncertainty of history itself requires and authorizes the search for transcendent values, specifically those values which transcend institutions: "Possessions vanish, and opinions change" (IV 69). Jeffrey would not deny this mutability, but would depend upon the revisionary process of the law to contain such shifts so that, even when possessions change, property would not. As Philip Flynn points out, Jeffrey was "committed to the interests of 'property,' and he repeatedly described the dangers of violent social revolution"; in support, Flynn quotes a passage that might come as easily from Blackstone as Burke: The international law with regard to power, is . . . like the municipal law with regard to property. Its object is, not to establish a fantastic and irksome equality, like the Agrarian schemes of antiquity, but to protect and secure the irregularities to which fortune has given existence: to make wealth and poverty alike safe and independent. (Francis Jeffrey 116; quoting Edinburgh Review. 1803) This position is not far from the Wanderer's criticism of the French Revolution and its effect on the Solitary in Book II, nor from the Wanderer's equanimity in absorbing the destruction of Margaret's family for his own pedagogic purposes. The difference arises at the point of regulating difference. The claim that "Duty exists" positions duty beyond the institutions which enforce debt, and, in generalizing the critique of the French Revolution to one of history itself as a privileged (uninterpreted) discourse, Wordsworth sets those institutions at risk, not of revolution nor even reform, but of becoming unfamiliar to the people they govern. In surrendering Wordsworth as incurable, Jeffrey seeks to contain the malady, and to develop new poets free of disease. The relation between Jeffrey and young poets is that of the educator, the theorizer, a position not much different from the Wanderer's relation to the young poet in The Excursion. That Jeffrey resorted to this approach can be read two ways. First, it demonstrates Wordsworth's control over the mechanisms of poetic interpretation in a way which foreshadows the domination of the Prelude as the most influential piece of Wordsworthian criticism, whether historicist, psychoanalytic, or aesthetic. Secondly, it demonstrates 365 Jeffrey's ability to co-opt, incompletely but effectively, Wordsworth's methods for his own devices. That the second is Jeffrey's intent is clear in the patronizing reference to Wordsworth as "our patient" whom "we" offer "cordials and lenitives" rather than "harass" with "nauseous remedies." The paragraph of medical metaphor ends by Jeffrey defending himself to his audience, as if the objective case of Wordsworth was evident to all: In order to justify this desertion of our patient, however, it is proper to state why we despair of the success of a more active practice. (2) Neither of these readings, Wordsworth's domination and Jeffrey's co-option, can be accepted; they exist as part of a continual debate which moves within the fabric of poetic production, in the metaphors and invocations, the meters and tropes, and which weaves that fabric into the literary marketplace in book sales, critical commentaries, copyright legislation. Jeffrey's own answer to his rhetorical question recognizes this point, as he slides from a medical metaphor to an economic analysis: Inveterate habit must now have given a kind of sanctity to the errors of early taste; and the very powers of which we lament the perversion, have probably become incapable of any other application. The very quantity, too, he has written, and is at the moment working up for publication upon the old pattern, makes it almost 366 hopeless to look for any change of it. All this is so much capital already sunk in the concern[.] (2) After his opening witticism, Jeffrey continues: It fThe Excursion! bears no doubt the stamp of the author's heart and fancy: But unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system. His former poems were intended to recommend that system, and to bespeak favour for it by their individual merit; — but this, we suspect, must be recommended by the system— and can only expect to succeed where it has been previously established. (1) "System" was a common description of Wordsworth's method, and his propensity to deny it— as in his refusal of a "systematic defence" of the Lvrical Ballads— marked his willingness to engage the debate on those terms, much as Burke, who renounced French theorizing and abstract systems, constructed a system grounded in English tradition, a tradition formally institutionalized in common law and advertised as "custom." In his formulation of Wordsworth's "particular system," Jeffrey is objecting to Wordsworth's claim in the "Preface" that [i]t is not the Author's intention formally to announce a system: it was more animating to him to proceed in a different course; and if he shall succeed in conveying to the mind clear thoughts, lively images, and strong feelings, the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself. And in the meantime the following passage, taken from the conclusion of the first book of The Recluse, may be acceptable as a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole poem, (p 2) 367 This is the language of contract. The lines from the "first book" are offered as consideration for an agreement of conveyance, in which the Author agrees to convey "clear thoughts, lively images, and strong feelings." The nature of such consideration is slippery, when placed against the actual exchange in which a reader is brought into possession of a text. When a reader purchases a book, what he owns is not the text, but possesses a specific duplication of it. He has not bought the rights to reproduce it, nor has he acquired the ability to destroy it. What he gives up, money, is equally only a representation of a distant source, marked by the money's stamp. Wordsworth asserts that another contract, between Author and Reader, occurs in the Reader's activity of suiting himself to that title, that is, in his actual reading. The singularity of "Reader," reinforced by the reflexive pronoun "himself," casts the agreement between two individuals; in this way, Wordsworth makes a claim for the presence of the author within the particular readings by given individuals. The professional poet is entailed by his poetry, just as, in feudal law, the owner of a property is entailed by the property. This reading clarifies the economic shadings of the word "prospectus" which came into English usage during 368 the eighteenth century as "A description of account of the chief features of a forthcoming work or proposed enterprise, circulated for the purpose of obtaining support or subscriptions1 1 (OED) . The word marks the literary endeavor as a commercial one, aligning it with Pope's translations of Homer and Johnson's Dictionary. This professional arrangement between Author and Reader is not actual— the Prospectus does not commit Wordsworth to completing his work, nor provide a means for the reader monetarily to assist in that endeavor. Instead, it acts as a figured contract in which the reader will acquire from the writer the raw materials out of which to compose a system. Near the end of his review, after proving some illustrations of Wordsworth's poetic merit, Jeffrey comments on them and his procedure of producing them: When we look back to them, indeed, and to the other passages which we have now extracted, we feel half inclined to rescind the severe sentence which we passed on the work at the beginning: — But when we look into the work itself, we perceive that it cannot be rescinded. Nobody can be more disposed to do justice to the great powers of Mr. Wordsworth than we are . . . we have uniformly testified in their [Wordsworth's powers] favor . . . our high sense of their value is the chief ground of the bitterness with which we resented their perversion . . .and while we collect the fragments, it is impossible not to lament the ruins from which we are condemned to pick them. (29) 369 The metaphoric movement of this passage is to begin as judge, then witness, and finally as condemned man. By perverting Wordsworth's metaphor of a gothic church, this structure enacts the decay into a ruin of judgment itself as a consequence of Wordsworth's effort to usurp critical regulation. Rather than assembling a system, as Wordsworth asks of his readers, Jeffrey dismantles it in order to reveal poetic beauty. To take Jeffrey's critique as only aesthetic misses the immediacy with which a reader at that time would understand the Wanderer's role as double, at once the educator of the poet (who must, ultimately, supplant the peddler by creating a community characterized by distance, creating, in other words, a nation) and as the voice of a particular social structure— the cottage economy, the communal grazing lands of Cumberland— which depends upon a certain understanding of property. Although the word "Pedlar" never occurs in The Excursion. Jeffrey prefers it to "Wanderer," Wordsworth's common term. "It will be asked," Charles Lamb notes in his lauding review, which side-glances at Jeffrey's, "why put such eloquent discourse in the mouth of a pedlar?" After pointing to comparisons with Piers Plowman's Creed and Robert Burns, Lamb offers this advice in his concluding sentence: 370 After all, if there should be found readers willing to admire the poem, who yet feel scandalized at a name, we would advise them, wherever it occurs, to substitute silently the word Palmer or Pilgrim, or any less offensive designation, which shall connote the notion of sobriety in heart and manners with the experience and privileges which a wayfaring life confers.17 This witticism is not stupid, but shrewd and tactical. In a fashion typical of Lamb, rather than taking Jeffrey on, he disperses the challenge. By trying to obscure the role of the Pedlar as a peddler, Lamb softens the economic dimensions of the poem and assures the dominance of the religious; the cost to Wordsworth in this substitution is reinstituting the Spenserian boundaries of allegory over the terrain that Wordsworth tries to naturalize. The poem may seem amenable to such a reading; after all, the Pedlar is retired and after the first book, his profession is little discussed. But an insistence on the importance of the pedlar as the embodiment of a dispossessed economy— a mode of community and communication that is being destroyed— helps clarify the "system" which Jeffrey, as a reviewer, so fervently decried. That system was, among other things, a theory of property and of interpretation, two aspects of the same machinery, between which Wordsworth's concept of duty mediated. 371 i i . Book I To turn to the First Book of the poem, Margaret's ruin, in becoming a twice-told tale, becomes a unifying narrative that generates the actual three-day excursion from the smaller trip to the ruined cottage. From the unsuccessful wanderings of Margaret and Robert and the disruption of their marriage, emerges the emotional and intellectual union of the Wanderer and the Poet. The Poet's sympathy for Margaret allows him to commune with the Wanderer, who, consequently, can teach him how to "afford” to suffer. Before hearing the story, the poet's own wanderings are difficult, disrupted, poised between haze and clarity: Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high: Southward the landscape indistinctly glared Through a pale steam? but all the northern downs, In clearest air ascending, showed far off A surface dappled o'er with shadows flung From brooding clouds? . . . (I 1-6) The indistinct glare of the South is caused by a sun too bright, and the clarity of the north is endangered and engendered by "brooding clouds." Built into the very description is the possibility of alteration, since the sun is the precondition for clarity. Further, the Poet's position is determined by his relations to these directions, and, in the obverse, these directions arise from the Poet's particular location. If his position 372 suggests possibilities, however, he cannot recognize them in their midst: Across a bare wide Common I was toiling With languid steps that by the slippery turf Were baffled; nor could my weak arm disperse The host of insects gathering round my face, And ever with me as I paced along. (I 21-25) The insects, like the Socratic gadfly spurring the Platonic student, prove the poet's weakness to him. After uniting with the Wanderer, however, the return trip is virtually effortless, the insects replaced by melodies which "peopled the milder air": Together casting then a farewell look Upon those silent walls, we left the shade; And, ere the stars were visible, had reached A village-inn,— our evening resting-place. (I 967-70) The two men share a single glance at the silent walls, the archetype of ruin and disruption unified by the common story. This story works the transformation of the poet, which begins to turn him into the narrator capable of suspending his own tribulations to give the story of the Wanderer1s youth. In telling Margaret's story, the Wanderer describes her and then locates the tale in the Poet's past: Not twenty years ago, but you I think Can scarcely bear it now in mind, there came Two blighting seasons, when the fields were left With half a harvest. (I 535-38) The Wanderer is restoring the poet's history to him, making him bear it in mind, just as the Pedlar bears his 373 burdens. The implication is that the poet is incomplete without Margaret's story to vitalize his own past. The echo to the years of famine in Egypt is complicated by what follows: It pleased Heaven to add A worse affliction in the plague of war: This happy land was stricken to the heart! (I 538-40) The conjunction of the blighting seasons and the plague collapses the distinction between human and divine will, a point emphasized by the war being figured as a divine affliction, despite its clearly human causes.18 The famine and war do not create the disunities, but bring them into historical action from their dormant position in years of peace and prosperity; nothing fundamental in human nature has shifted. In economic terms, the underpinnings of prosperity are laid bare: A Wanderer then among the cottages, I, with my freight of winter raiment, saw The hardships of that season: many rich Sank down, as in a dream, among the poor; And of the poor did many cease to be, And their place knew them not. (I 535-6) The Wanderer's work continues, its form remaining the same, its content altering with local necessities. It becomes clear why he "could afford to suffer/with those whom he saw suffer"; his position is unaffected by individual shifts in the economic structure, provided 374 that the structure itself remains demarcated. Moreover, as the wanderer amid rooted people, he provides the economic stability which is the hope for recovery in such dire times. Thus, rich become poor (and, unmentioned, other even wealthier property-holders consolidated their lands by forfeitures and enclosures), and the poor die or are dislocated, severed from the land. The Wanderer speaks generally about the working population, and describes specifically the fate of one group, the artisans: shoals of artisans From ill-requited labour turned adrift Sought daily bread from public charity, They, and their wives and children— happier far Could they have lived as do the little birds That peck along the hedge-rows, or the kite That makes her dwelling on the mountain rocks. (I 559-65) While the use of "daily bread" is a metonymy for food generally, and connects with various Biblical echoes in the passage (such as the birds which neither toil nor spin as a sign to human beings that they will prevail), the Speenhamland acts which linked wages to the price of bread in 1795 (roughly when the story of Margaret occurred) introduce another reference. With the collapse in wages that resulted from the Speenhamland relief, artisans found no market for their work and were forced to rely upon the very instrument, public charity, which had collapsed wages initially (Polanyi, 78-8). While the 375 plight of Margaret and Robert is cast in personal terms, juxtapositions insist on the more general causes and consequences: A sad reverse it was for him who long Had filled with plenty, and possessed in peace, This lonely Cottage. At the door he stood, And whistled many a snatch of merry tunes That had no mirth in them; or with his knife Carved uncouth figures on the heads of sticks. (I 566-71) The parodic images of "uncouth figures" mimic both the landowner unable to sustain his property and the unskilled artisan carving without creating anything of value. When Robert can no longer fill the Cottage "with plenty," he fills it with nothing— carved sticks and snatches of tunes. The paragraph details Robert's manic idleness, and ends with Margaret's deeply moving commentary: "Every smile . . . /Made my heart bleed" (I 589-91) Margaret is responding to Robert's futile effort to hold things together within the Cottage against the ravages of the world beyond. The counterpoint to the Wanderer, she cannot afford to suffer. Jeffrey, who retells the story in one prose paragraph (7), emphasizes at once its "considerable pathos" (indicating Wordsworth's "knowledge of the human heart") and its "triteness" (emphasized by "mawkish sentiment, and details of preposterous minuteness"). At the root of this valuation is the implication that his audience, 376 without Wordsworth's aid, can already afford such suffering. Jeffrey resists translating Margaret's story, strictly one of economics, into a crisis of public imagination. Wordsworth, by contrast, interweaves these elements as the pedagogical method by which one acquires the intellectual capital to suffer sympathetically. Scarcity forces shifts in the distribution of labor which the return of good weather cannot rectify. Thus, although the Wanderer returns "in the warmth of midsummer, [when] the wheat/Was yellow" (I 707-8), for Margaret life is worse than ever. The harms of nature are prolonged by human institutions. Structurally, the Wanderer's narrative replicates Margaret's silent response by abruptly shifting to the present: At this still season of repose and peace, This hour when all things which are not at rest Are cheerful; while this multitude of flies With tuneful hum is filling the air . . . (I 594-7) The annoying insects have become musical. Repose and peace do not stop motion (wandering), but give it a particular character of cheerfulness. Given this, the Wanderer asks: Why should we thus, with an untoward mind, And in the weakness of humanity, From natural wisdom turn our hearts away; To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears; And feeding on disquiet, thus disturb The calm of nature with our restless thoughts? (I 599-604) 377 This question contains its own dissolution. Nature is figured as a non-human reality: natural wisdom resides outside "our hearts," only to be gazed; natural comfort is something observed, not felt; and the calm of nature is susceptible to the invasion of restless (wandering) thoughts. The Wanderer postulates the break between nature and humanity to overcome it. The status of the "we" of the question is the troublesome point. Human being is the precondition for the breach of the peace and for the peace itself. Not to shut one's eyes to natural comfort requires seeing the ruined cottage; to hear the humming of the insects is to feed disquiet. The Poet is beguiled by the question, and temporarily forgets Margaret's tale. But the forgetting shapes their conversation as "trivial." The poet's explanation is that the tale was "rehearsed" "with such familiar power, . . . that the things of which he spake/ Seemed present" (I 614-18). And they were present, inscribed and read from the cottage itself which redirects the Poet's attention: looking round Upon that tranquil Ruin, I returned, And begged of the old Man that, for my sake, He would resume his story. (I 622-5) A careful equality is established between the ruined cottage and Margaret's tale, each interpreting the other. No primacy of past or present, word or thing, nature or 378 humanity is possible. At this moment, this point is purely personal, the precondition for the poet's own education. As The Excursion evolves, social structures, as in the local tales told by the parson and in the diatribe about national education in Book Nine, become more prominent. In such passages, the personal is not forgotten, but resituated as the foreground of the social. Unlike Bentham's panoptic plans, which both the Wanderer and the Parson ridicule in their description of contemporary labor, the Wordsworthian gaze does not shape a human being by power, but calls forth an unalienated labor often figured as imagination. The Wanderer resumes his tale. When he returns to Margaret's cottage, Robert has enlisted and left money in his absence. In "The Ruined Cottage": Within her casement full in view she saw A purse of gold . . . ["]I knew it was his hand That placed it there.["] (263-6) By The Excursion, the lines are recast to bring out an implicit second meaning in "his hand," that of inscription: Within her chamber-casement she espied A folded paper, lying as if placed To meet her waking eyes. This tremblingly She opened— found no writing, but beheld Pieces of money carefully enclosed, Silver and gold . . . ["31 knew t was his hand That must have placed it there["]. (I 653-10) 379 The scene is more intimate, located explicitly in the bedroom, and the verbs "espied," "lying," and "placed" emphasizing agency, increase the pathos of Robert's absence. At first the paper seems to hold out a hope, the trembling hope of something written, the poetic trope of presence. Instead, it is only money, now not just gold but silver and gold. This change might be read to lessen the actual amount, but it also suggests a more varied economy in which differentials such as that between writing and money are duplicated within the figure of money itself. Robert's hand, incapable of labor, can not write but only use the implements of writing to enclose money. Enclosing money in paper replays in a literalizing parody the rise of the national debt through the issuing of bills. Robert leaves the money, and then "a stranger, from my husband sent" ("The Ruined Cottage" 267; in The Excursion, "stranger" is replaced by the pronoun/number "one" I 282) provides the detail that Robert enlisted. The wait of three days for news is not merely a mock resurrection, in which money substitutes for the sacrificed Robert, but allows Wordsworth to make a temporal connection between the appearance of the money and the arrival of the stranger. These are the elements of the new economy that have voice, and they silence the Wanderer: 380 I had little power To give her comfort, and was glad to take Such words of hope from her own mouth as served To cheer us both. But long we had not talked Ere we built up a pile of better thoughts[.] (I 690-4} This passage, for Alan Liu, marks the essential economic position of the Pedlar in "The Ruined Cottage" and his comment can be extended to The Excursion. In these lines there is the Pedlar's inability to contribute anything of value and, indeed, [he] need[s] to "take" textual value— "words of hope"— from Margaret herself; and finally, through strange dealings in absence, a "pile of better thoughts" (Sense of History 347). These better thoughts, in the wider context of The Excursion. are the arguments against despondency that the Wanderer makes in the later books. If, as Liu suggests (345-7), the Pedlar's activities form a capitalistic black market, then the poet subsumes that capital investment into his own within the legitimate market in which The Excursion is published. More precisely, it is not the Wanderer that converts the "purse" to "paper," but the poet. Within Margaret's narrative, there is no mode for their investment, no juridical structure to stabilize paper. When the Wanderer returns, Margaret's life has deteriorated. Robert has not returned, and Margaret has begun wandering in a futile search for information about him. 381 Encountering his absence in every stranger, she nearly loses her self, a self whose being is attached to the cottage: "sometimes— to my shame I speak— [I] have need/Of my best prayers to bring me back again" (I 755- 6). Robert has enlisted, and Margaret's wanderings mimic his behavior, an irony darkened by the reason he deserted her without warning: for he feared That I should follow with my babes and sink Beneath the misery of that wandering life (I 679-81; revised from "soldier's life" in "The Ruined Cottage" 273) The image of sinking recalls the actual weight under which the Pedlar used to travel, but here, of no economic use, the weight is a misery. The stability of Margaret's home is destroyed when Robert leaves, but he can only join the army because there is a war, a cause of the initial instability. Like Michael's futile effort to preserve his patrimony by temporarily sacrificing his son, Robert's effort to sustain his family by desertion is constructed as the result of both natural hardships and legislative interference which attempt to meliorate the harm. Thomas De Quincey responded to Robert's desertion with derision and a practical remedy. He suggests that the Wanderer might have done better than sympathizing with Margaret by "inquir[ing] for the station of 382 [Robert's] detachment [and] . . . [t]hat same night he might have written to the War-Office; and in a very few days an official answer, bearing the endorsement On H. M.1s Service, would have placed Margaret in communication with her truant" ("Wordsworth's Poetry" 306). He also invokes institutional aid in discussing the younger child's death: Had any one of us readers discharged the duties of coroner in her neighborhood, he would have found it his duty to hold an inquest . . . The Wanderer himself might have been called, as a witness for the crown. ("Wordsworth's Poetry" 3 07) De Quincey calls down the law upon Margaret in the same move as he calls down the critical, even novelistic standard of realism on Wordsworth. But, from the Pedlar's perspective, what value is the endorsement "On H. M.'s Service"? What precisely would a finding of Margaret's negligence mean, given her own neglected status? The fact-finding methods De Quincey invokes would uncover nothing more than— from the perspective of "The Ruined Cottage" as a tale within The Excursion— what the reader already learns from the poet. The Wanderer is already a witness, not for the Crown, but for a perspective which can query the origins of criminality, nature as disclosed by human reason. This is not to suggest that Wordsworth is an anarchist like Godwin, even though the initial drafts of "The Ruined Cottage" began 383 when Wordsworth was under Godwin's influence. Rather, as appropriated into The Excursion, an understanding of the story of Margaret, unmediated by the investigative powers of the state, is the precondition for the Poet to educate not his own affections alone, but also the state institutions which reify the structures by which such affections may be shown. Returning briefly to the "Prospectus," even in naming his theme, Wordsworth employs totalizing terms: "Truth" as a unity is balanced against "Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope/ And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith" as if these are defining aspects of the single truth. The last of the series, deliberately asymmetrical, introduces a disharmony only to regulate it, enacting the proposition that the Truth both is, and is law. The culmination of the sequence is a description of natural law, but organized as hierarchical, rather than, as Paine had suggested, equally distributed by the property rights all individual English persons had in England. For Wordsworth, the law supreme originates in an "Intelligence," and is therefore subject to intelligent replication, a point reinforced by the panegyric to the "State of England" (VI 6). Such constant adjustment is also at the heart of Wordsworth's career. His adjustments rely on constant 384 definition and redefinition of the poetic occupation and its location in wider social operations. But such a process also entailed defining those wider social operations. iii. Book II Wordsworth's textual strategy of new starts is engraved onto the text itself; as Johnston comments, Wordsworth's final and most extended period of work on it [the composition of the last books of The Excursion! . . . start all over again, with a new character, the Pastor, and a new cast to whom he gives voice, the rural folk buried in his church yard. (Wordsworth. 285) Similarly, Book II begins afresh a journey for which the day-trip of Book One was the prototype. These new beginnings reflect, as McFarland puts it, the "phenomenology of human awareness" as an experience of discontinuities (Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin 3); they equally engage and resist an argument about the totalizing efforts of law and economy, and the ability of any voice, within a poem or a society, to achieve hegemony. Like the forced metaphor of the "counsellor's bag" in "Rural Architecture," the fragmenting renewals of The Excursion have a polemical violence. Recalling the story of Margaret which dominates Book I, the invocation of Book II looks backwards, to journeys once permitted by a mythic social continuity but no longer possible; 385 In days of yore how fortunately fared The Minstrel1 wandering on from hall to hall, Baronial court or royal; cheered with gifts Munificent, and love, and ladies' praise; Now meeting on his road an armed knight, Now resting by a pilgrim by the side Of a clear brook; — beneath an abbey's roof One evening sumptuously lodged; the next Humbly in a religious hospital; Or with some merry outlaws of the wood; Or haply shrouded in a hermit's cell. (II 1-11) The minstrel's terrain is thoroughly humanized; social encounters are everywhere and each day begins a new excursion into a different stratum of life. The passage describes the Minstrel's wandering in the midst of medieval order, but with inversions that, even while expressing continuity, suggest fissures. The baronial halls and royal halls are interchangeable, recalling but mitigating the struggle between the ruling classes that resulted in the Magna Charta; the precise contents of the "love" and "ladies' praise" is a shade suspicious, given the chivalric tradition of adultery; the abbey, soon to be a ruin, is perhaps a touch too wealthy in contrast to the religious hospital; the outlaws are merry, recalling the tradition of Robin Hood and weakening the force of the royal corporation from which the passage derives its structure. Each encounter is with a figure of order, a baron who rules, a knight of sworn allegiance, the merry outlaws who defy King John in the name of Richard, the civil law of the abbey, and the religious stricture of 386 the hermit's cell; however, the figure of the Minstrel himself maintains the order by calling forth human nature in a manner that deflects force. He moves with impunity, protected from both outlaw and soldier: Him, sleeping or awake, the robber spared; He walked— protected from the sword of war By virtue of that sacred instrument His harp . . . [which opened] By melody, and by charm of verse. (II 12-18) This Godwinian formulation equates the robber and the knight who carries the sword of war in sworn allegiance to the King's peace. The minstrel's authority is emblematic, not derived from the violence which was the guarantee and mechanism of, but also the threat to, feudal order, nor yet from the rights espoused by classical liberal theory and rooted in the 1689 Bill of Rights. The sacredness of the harp displaces the four different religious incarnations (pilgrim, abbey, hospital, hermit) of the previous lines and empowers the Minstrel not with truth or law, but with charm. It remains for the Wanderer, and then the Poet, to transform such claims into something more stable, more marketable. The romantic vision of chivalry, as Byron noted in the addition to the Preface of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, is a fiction: "The vows of chivalry were no better kept than any other vows whatever; and the songs of the Troubadours were not more decent . . . than those 387 of Ovid.” Wordsworth's presentation of the myth is no more realistic than Byron's. Wordsworth's opening phrase, "days of yore" (altered from the MS X reading of "old," 1804), suggests not merely times long ago, but times that never existed. The shading of the word was well established: Johnson defines vore as referring to the past, but the four exemplars are from poems in which the past is fictional. But where Byron records the nightmare of a chivalric knight made real, Wordsworth validates the truth of the myth by proposing a contemporary exemplar, the Wanderer: Yet not the noblest of that honoured Race Drew happier, loftier, more empassioned thoughts From his long journeying and eventful life Than this obscure Itinerant had skill To gather, ranging through the tamer ground Of these our unimaginative days. (II 19-24) Nothing has suggested that the Minstrel's task was to collect "thoughts"; rather, he gained gifts, ladies' praise, and food. Along the way, given the inevitability of his encounters, he gained thoughts effortlessly and, with a similar naturalness, returned them in song. When, after the fall from this intellectual Eden and gift- exchange economy, "thoughts" need to be gathered in a terrain of scarcity, like the Leech-gatherer's leeches that "have dwindled long by slow decay" ("Resolution and Independence" 125), their values increase; more precisely, they come to have value as a commodity when 388 previously they were the by-product of other primary exchanges. The Wanderer has the necessary "skill," a word suggesting a contemporary economy in which "thoughts" can be gathered, produced, and exchanged in commodified interactions consistent with "haggl[ing] about tape, or brass sleeve buttons" and "selling [of] flannel and pocket handkerchiefs," as Jeffrey exasperatedly describes the Wanderer's profession (Edinburgh Review Oct. 1814, 30) . In part, Jeffrey was horrified that the Wanderer's intellectual skills would be viewed as consistent with selling wares, rather than as the specialized skills of the professional. His language, arbitrarily specifying objects where Wordsworth speaks only of "load[s]," "wants" "wares" (I 326, 333-34), asserts the distinction between linguistic and material exchanges; he contends that the Wanderer's "lofty diction" would "frighten away all his customers." Jeffrey's own task in making this observation, however, is to frighten away Wordsworth's customers and retain them for the Edinburgh Review. He suggests a privileged critical gaze, since after the customers are gone, there remain viewers who can take the Pedlar "for a madman, or for some learned and affected gentleman, who, in a frolic, had taken up a character which he was particularly ill qualified for supporting" 389 (30). Jeffrey's own language, exploiting the Wanderer's mythic predecessors, locates the Pedlar as a displaced Don Quixote. The economic and class adumbrations of Jeffrey's language insists on the particularity of linguistic value adhering in words, whereas, for Wordsworth, the simulacrum between language and objects provided a method of situating meaning in both, and so the Pedlar's double function of supplying wants and pleasing fancies (I 333-4).19 I would emphasize that Jeffrey's position and Wordsworth's are not far apart in proposing a linguistic management of objects; both are, after all, professional writers. Their division stems from where they locate the right and execution of such management. By positioning the Minstrel as the Wanderer's prototype, Wordsworth prepares the Poet as the Wanderer's heir. Neither the economic order of the minstrel/poet based on the gift nor that of the Wanderer (and his economic replacements, the monetary markets based on commodities) is original; they exist in mutual dependence, one myth building upon the previous even while providing the literary space in which to write that previous myth. Such a claim, which dominates the moral terrain of the entire poem, is reinforced by the judicial strength of the Wanderer, achieved not institutionally 390 but through the natural affections of those on whom he passes judgment. Despite his retirement, the Wanderer is greeted as though he still carries items of worth; Wordsworth articulates that worth not as platitudinous moralizing, as Jeffrey pretends, but something more threatening— the power of judgment. The second verse paragraph turns from the invented Minstrel to the real (within the poem) Wanderer, and it divides into two parts. The first describes the ability of the Wanderer to read the landscape; nearly every house "yield[s] a remembrance" and "call[s] forth" a tale, while his encounters with nature are silent, and allow the Poet to read: And in the silence of his face I read His overflowing spirit. Birds and beasts, And the mute fish that glances in the stream, . . . The fowl domestic, and the household dog— In his capacious mind he loved them all. (II 40-6) The hierarchy is neither the thoroughly humanized one of the Minstrel nor utterly natural, but one which joins humanity and nature. The double reading, the Wanderer's of nature and the poet's of the Wanderer, demonstrates the sympathy of the two travellers, but also establishes the neophyte position of the Poet. He cannot yet read directly (nor can he read the houses at all, except through the words of the Wanderer). Again, the prototypic position of the Wanderer's narration of the 391 Ruined Cottage is evident, but here expanded into present interactions with tenants of "many a cottage-hearth" (II 59). The poet is a stranger, but because of the affection by which the Wanderer is met, he "at once forg[ets]" that status. Such a forgetting is psychologically empowering, similar to the possession the Poet gains over the Ruined Cottage in receiving its tale, and the rights of citizenship granted correspond to the Wanderer's response to natural beings: Their rights acknowledging he felt for all. (II 47) This line entails a characteristic Wordsworthian displacement, since the rights of animals, as established in the laws of chattel, do not exist. The Wanderer tacitly recognizes as much by merely watching and sympathizing with a "poor brute's condition, forced to run/ Its course of suffering in the public road" (II 51- 2), but his own suffering introduces a human cost to the abuse, and thus begins a rewriting of the language of rights as inscribed in the eighteenth-century understanding of chattel. The position is similar to the narrator in "The Old Cumberland Beggar" who asks that the rights of the beggar be respected in allowing him to die in the open air. Recognizing rights at this moment does not entail any specific action, but an internal feeling. It remains to the poet to transform that feeling into 392 action by relocating it within readers in the political economy. The first half of the verse-paragraph has used a natural rights theory as its horizon and the second half shifts to another legal metaphor, that of adjudication. The results are more performative, not because of the specific exertion of power— as in a literal court— but because the Wanderer's adjudication concerns the individual divided against himself: — Nor was he loth to enter ragged huts, Huts where his charity was blest; his voice Heard as the voice of an experienced friend. And, sometimes— where the poor man held dispute With his own mind, unable to subdue Impatience through inaptness to perceive General distress in his particular lot; Or cherishing resentment, or in vain Struggling against it; with a soul perplexed, And finding in herself no steady power To draw the line of comfort that divides Calamity, the chastisement of Heaven From the injustice of our brother men— To him appeal was made as to a judge; Who, with an understanding heart, allayed The perturbation; listened to the plea; Resolved the dubious point; and sentence gave So grounded, so applied, that it was heard With softened spirit, even when it condemned. (II 62-80) The admonition the Wanderer offers is obscured by the emphasis on the genre of the advice, the judicial decision: "as to a judge." Since jurisprudence is constructed on the view that the law treats similar cases similarly, the form of the poor man's "crime" is an inability to recognize similarity or dissimilarity. He 393 cannot subdue his impatience because he does not perceive "General distress in his particular lot"; he cannot distinguish the "chastisement of Heaven" from the "injustice" of men. The adversaries in the case are the "poor man" and "his own mind"; thus, the divided self is an artifact of an isolated self, and the imposition of juridical order conjoins them in a sentence which is both punishment and absolution. Wordsworth's choice of this metaphor is itself polemical. He asserts the ability to judge the thoughts of men and to work alterations on their spirit. This assertion enters a complicated debate on the status of criminal intent. Bentham, following Beccaria, had argued that the courts lacked the capability to examine intention and that the doctrine of mens rea was an incoherent fiction since the guilty mind of the criminal was established only through the act he committed. Criminality, for Bentham, was determined by the harm of an act within society and not from the moral status of the act.20 Robert Chambers, by contrast, recognized in these same facts the invariable pressure that the law exerted on human intentions and the consequential ability to enforce judgment on that basis; The great strength of human laws arises from the constitution of things ordained by Providence, by which man is so formed and disposed that he can suffer more than he can enjoy . . . But such is 394 the frame of man, that the dread of evil will be always more powerful than the appetite of good. (Lectures on English Law I 309). In this model, the criminal law does not alter the basic drives of human beings, but adjusts the external world— by the imposition of penalty— to exploit the intentional structure of the human mind. To account for the obvious cases when the expected deterrence failed, Chambers followed Blackstone in describing passion as a mitigating circumstance, since in an impassioned state, the public individual was subsumed by the private. The criminal law itself, then, was divided on the relation between morality and legality and the mediation of the paradoxical impulses of regarding intention evolved into issues of the structure of the state itself. Bentham capitalizes on the division in proposing to exclude the fiction of intentionality from criminal law and introduce instead a system of panoptic surveillance. Blackstone, intent on unity, coopts the division as an element of a more general unifying principle, the balance of equity and law within a monarchy: one of the great advantages of monarchy in general, above any other form of government [is] that there is a magistrate [the king], who has in his power to extend mercy, wherever he thinks it is deserved: holding a court of equity in his own breast, to soften the rigour of the general law. (Commentaries IV, 389-90) 395 Monarchy legally places an individual above the law who can assure that the law maintains its just status. The king searches the heart; the court examines only the deed; between them, all human nature is under gaze. In Book II, Wordsworth's use of the adjudicative metaphor suggests another solution— that the initial division between intention and act is itself an artifact of criminality, disempowerment, breaks in human nature. The courts formalized disputes only between different litigants and, even for corporations (fictive individuals), denied the right to bring suit against one's self; Wordsworth, by contrast, insists on the continuity between disputes among parties and a dispute between a man and his mind. Communal obligation arises as a structure of the self, and precedes its institutionalization. One source of this attitude was the Wordsworths' long legal proceeding to recover a debt from James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale; while the Lord was ordered to pay, the amount was referred to arbitration and never resolved (Moorman, 196). When Lonsdale died in 1802, his distant cousin, Sir William Lowther, came into the estate, and William urged his brother Richard to "Try what an appeal to Lord Lowther's Honour and Conscientiousness may produce" (Moorman, 559).21 396 Another source was Wordsworth's struggles with the Godwinian critique of the legal institution. In the 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth depicts the confusions to which that critique led him: Thus I fared Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith Like culprits to the bar; suspiciously Calling the mind to establish in plain day Her titles and honours; . . . (X 888-92) Wordsworth is undergoing the same dilemma as the poor man in "dispute/With his own mind" in The Excursion II. His mind is turned against itself, and lacks the foundation for judgment. The metaphor of the bar, with the verb "calling" positioning the mind simultaneously as lawyer being admitted and witness summoned, forces judgment as if passions and faith could be arraigned, when they are, as Hume recognized, the basis of judgment. Wordsworth describes the consequent contortions of his mind: now believing, Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground Of moral obligation, what the rule And what the sanction; till demanding proof. And seeking it in every thing I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contraries, Yielded up moral questions in despair, . . . (X 892-900) Believing and disbelieving, the very terms of faith, cannot adjudicate faith. It seemed, at the time, that rules had to be derived independently of institutions, since the "advocates themselves/of ancient Institutions" 397 including "custom and written law," had brought "disgrace upon their very names" (X 850-3). The result, however, of the effort to transcend a historical reality by mind alone was groundlessness; the transcendence was an illusion as the necessity of resorting to legal metaphor demonstrates. In denying passions, conviction (and the pun works) was also lost. Wordsworth's first solution was a retreat to a realm in which pure reason worked, mathematics: And for my future studies, as the sole Employment of the inquiring faculty Turned towards mathematics, and their clear And solid evidence— Ahl then it was That thou, most precious Friend! about this time First known to me, didst lend a living help To regulate my Soul, and then it was . . . (X 889-908) The "clear and solid evidence" of mathematics is immediately contested by the appearance of Coleridge who offers another method to "regulate the Soul." James Chandler has observed that this crisis marks a shift from Godwinian reason to Burkean custom (Second Nature 55-56). Such a shift does not erase the former, but incorporates both within a synthetic discourse. Pure reason is enabling, but not sufficient, just as historical "facts" are material but, without poetic interpretation, unavailable and unstructured. Although Wordsworth does not specify what is meant by "a living help," if one puts any weight on the economic charge of "living," then the 398 movement is towards their collaboration in the Lyrical Ballads (an experiment in habit, terms neatly mediating between Burke and Godwin) which established Wordsworth as a poet within the literary market. In the Prelude, the regulation acts indirectly, by opening Wordsworth to Dorothy and consequently to himself as poet: and then it was That the beloved Woman in whose sight Those days were passed, now speaking in a voice Of sudden admonition— . . . Maintained for me a saving intercourse With my true self . . . She, in the midst of all, preserved me still A Poet, made me seek beneath that name My office upon earth, and nowhere else. (X 908-921) 22 The regulation of Wordsworth's soul empowers Dorothy to admonish him. His soul in order, it is available to the judgment of another which can then bring his mind into harmony with itself. This harmony, in turn, produces a Poet from the chaos, although the production is figured as a preservation— the true soul existed through the Godwinian critique and the recoil from it, but was hidden. Godwin's effort to lift a veil from the mystifications of legal institutions was inadequate because it shifted that veil over the very thing it sought to liberate, the individual's reason, which, without passion and moral foundation, could be nothing more than the historical reproduction of institutional ideologies. The Prelude was preparation for The 399 Excursion since, if it could establish Wordsworth as a poet to himself and thus locate him within a textual tradition (another term for a professional institution), he could offer a critique that did not end in the confusions of "demanding proof1 1 where none is to be had. That critique begins in Book II by replaying the appearance of Coleridge, but with the poet as the observer to the Wanderer's admonitions and judgments rendered at the "cottage-hearth." Viewed from this perspective, the silent Poet takes the role of Dorothy who watches to be empowered. The expression of the continuity between internal and external disputes is complicated since it is apparent only from the externalized perspective of the Wanderer and the poet who "witness[es]" (81) it. By presenting these encounters only through the metaphor of law, Wordsworth forces the reader to reserve judgment on the efficacy of the Wanderer's powers until the case of the Solitary is resolved. This case is at once medical and legal, his despondency being both an illness and a crime. The structure of The Excursion, then, can be viewed as one which poses the question of the relation of intention, act, and meaning, terms which operate necessarily in any profession seeking an ideological control over its society. 400 i v . Book II. continued A little more than a year after the completion of the most of The Excursion, and roughly the same period of time before its publication, Wordsworth accepted a job as the Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland. The post was secured by William Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, who had repaid his predecessor's debt to the Wordsworth family. It seems appropriate for a poet to have charge of stamps, the symbols of circulation and authority for written documents: The office of Distributor of Stamps was concerned with the collection of Inland Revenue duties. All legal documents, wills, licenses of all kinds, as well as pamphlets, books, papers, and insurance policies, came under its jurisdiction . . . The Distributor was expected to make quarterly rounds of his district, collecting the takings and forwarding them to the Board of Stamps in London. (Moorman II 244-5) As with the Spectator who himself circulates to empower the circulation of the Spectator. Wordsworth himself circulates through Westmoreland. When Wordsworth was given the chance to exchange this office for the Collectorship of Customs at Whitehaven, a considerably more lucrative post, he declined, being, according to his nephew Christopher Wordsworth, unwilling to surrender his retirement at Mount Rydal for a larger town (Moorman II 253). At Rydal, his writing and official position formed 401 a continuum, in which symbolic presence authorizes circulation. Wordsworth underscores the parallel between this occupation and that Excursion. in which a smaller circle is walked and stories are collected, exchanged, and interpreted, by his dedication to Lonsdale: Oft, through thy fair domains, illustrious Peer! In youth I roamed, on youthful pleasure bent; And mused in rocky cell or sylvan tent, Beside swift-flowing Lowther*s current clear. — Now, by thy care befriended, I appear Before thee, LONSDALE, and this Work present, A token (may it prove a monument!) Of high respect and gratitude sincere. (1-8) The roaming, echoing the early days described in "Michael," provides the opportunity for musing, and so prepares for the profession of poetry. Lonsdale's domains are neither completely natural nor civilized, but a careful balance between "rocky" and "cell," between "sylvan" and "tent." Condensed into these phrases is Wordsworth's notion of property as the intersection of civilization and nature, and as such the product of the human imagination. The debt, poetic or otherwise, to Lonsdale for use of the land is heavily mediated until the exchange between the lord and the poet takes on the aspect of mutual gifts. Not explicit about the latest demonstration of "care," Wordsworth casts his wandering into his past. He elides the point that he had roamed the domains not of this Lonsdale, but the previous, less 402 illustrious one. Wordsworth erases— leaving sharp erasure marks— the painful treatment to which the peer's family had subjected Wordsworth's by not paying John Wordsworth for his legal services. The dedication also elides the unsuccessful legal battle the Wordsworths waged to recover the debt and the eventual extralegal settlement. From William's perspective, his approach, not Richard's, succeeded (see below, note 20). The repayment was, from the perspective of law, a gift; but from the perspective of natural justice, the perspective Wordsworth championed, it was equity, and it would ultimately benefit all, including the heirs of Lonsdale in precise proportion to the public value accorded Wordsworth's poetry. Wordsworth figures the gift of the Distributorship as an advance against his own accomplishment, which begins as a "token" but, by circulating in the literary marketplace, might become a monument. Within The Excursion, issues of adjudication are accompanied by questions of jurisdiction; given a social or personal problem, who are the best spokesmen and the best judges? Such a question, posed politically, reshapes the aesthetic question raised in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads as to how and by whom poetry ought to be judged. In the broadest formulation, to the extent 403 that the Poet is the heir-apparent to the Wanderer and comes into his inheritance with the publication of The Excursion, the value of the Wanderer's world view corresponds to, without subsuming, the value of the poet's writing. Within the central trope of The Excursion, wandering, displaced from its position in Spenserian allegory onto the Lake District, must find value, against the centralizing, "at-home" impulses that provide a counter-text. Wandering and centrality intersect in the ability of the Wanderer, in his capacity as a peddler, to find his customers at home. This ability is tested with the decision to visit the Solitary. The movements of the Poet and Wanderer are initially determined arbitrarily: we roved, Now as his choice directed, now as mine; Or both, with equal readiness of will Our course submitting to the changeful breeze Of accident (II 81-85) The flexibility of direction corresponds to an inner fluidity of will, and the human relation between the two travellers mirrors the relation of human being to nature, in the ability of the wills to be expressed without conflict. Such a harmony arises from a flux of exertion and submission, and its final evolution is the Wanderer's announcement of a specific destination: My Fellow-traveller, with earnest voice, As if the thought were but a moment old, 404 Claimed absolute dominion for the day. (II 87-9) The "as if" clause suggests its contrary, that the Wanderer had long planned the destination, and that the initial wandering was preparation. The random roaming ultimately discloses its essentially patterned nature, just as Blackstone and Newton revealed the structures underlying the accumulated data of law and physics. Wordsworth locates this commonplace in the microscopic field of two friends encountering nature, and derives the institutions from that smaller moment; such a gesture, however, is unstable. Dominion is claimed only for the day. In larger terms, does the French Revolution create the Solitary, or the reverse? Do the laws of poetry, as Wordsworth has adumbrated them, precede the data of poetry, awaiting their empirical disclosure; or are they invented in the formulation of criticism as a field and profession? Wordsworth's answers to each of these questions, as we shall see, is both, and neither; more to the point, the Solitary cannot be yet described as fully created, nor can particular poetry be encircled by its laws. The emergence of a hierarchical structure in the decision to visit the Solitary is both unwavering ("absolute dominion") and yet checked by the equality of "Fellow-traveller." The relationship parallels an ideal 405 constitutional monarchy, where the rights and obligations of social status emerge from real social relations. Despite the claim of absolute dominion, the Wanderer tells the history of the Solitary which "serve[s] my Fellow-traveller to beguile/The way" (317-8). The word "beguile" connotes delusion, but a deceit which pleases or amuses. The story not only makes the walking easier, but entices the poet. The re-use of "Fellow-traveller" (the only other occurrence of the term in the poem) reasserts an equality, now a willful submission to the story-telling of the Wanderer. But the Wanderer's power, his ability with words, relies on his confidence of finding the Solitary at home. On hearing the funeral dirge, he rashly deduces his friend's death, and on finding a book, takes it as confirmation. Where before the funeral march, the ascent was "steep," the descent afterwards is "steep and difficult." The hierarchy is disrupted as the Poet moves ahead of the Wanderer and discovers the platform: Pleased with the sight, I could not choose but beckon to my Guide, Who, entering, round him threw a careless glance, Impatient to pass on. (II 428-31) If "care" earlier characterized the Wanderer, impatience now holds sway. Occurring early, this disruption is temporary, corrected easily on discovering that the Solitary is alive, but it marks the Wanderer's basic 406 anachronism— a traveller whose travels are legitimated by the stability of the community. He is entirely conscious of his predicament, and in educating the Poet, produces an heir in precisely the opposite position, a writer who can remain stable (if only fictively) while the community shifts. Wordsworth's execution of his duties as Distributor was performed in part symbolically. He made only one tour annually and had monthly receipts mailed to him, which he compiled into an account to forward to London. To assist in the accounting, he hired John Carter, whose employment included gardening at Mount Rydal and copying poems, including an 1817 fair copy of the Prelude. as well as business letters. Wordsworth's signature substituted for his presence as the Distributor of Stamps, and the careers of poet and of stamp distributor are overlapped. Derrida's concept of the legitimating power of absence and its unstable relationship to the very presence it empowers is not, for Wordsworth, an articulated theory but a historical and personal experience. We have already seen the shift of presences and absences in "The Brothers," but in The Excursion it 407 constitutes the system which, as Wordsworth says in its Preface, is not formally announced but can be extracted by the Reader. C. Wordsworth and Bentham i. Historicizinq Harmony Jerome McGann has argued that in both "Tintern Abbey" and "The Ruined Cottage," the "method is to replace an image and landscape of contradiction with one dominated by 'the power/Of harmony'" I Ideology. 86),23 In the preface to The Excursion, a similar method is at work in the harmonizing metaphor of the church that conceals the turmoil of literary production, especially the convolutions of writing and rewriting which the early fragments of The Excursion underwent until they finally emerged as part of an architectonic whole. In particular, crafting the relation between the Pedlar and the Ruined Cottage entailed establishing the status of the story-teller, a potential disruption necessarily outside the story being told, as an integral part of the system of stories. The final harmonization remains in the future, "when [the minor poems] are properly arranged," when the Recluse is complete. This means that the rearrangement of the poems is itself a poetic labor 408 of unveiling harmony, or, to resort to the language of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, revealing "the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement" (245) . The poems are themselves associated by primary laws, precisely those which invigorated religion before its collapse into rationalism. In the "Prospectus," Wordsworth anticipates the 1815 edition of his poems which will disperse the Lyrical Ballads across a variety of subtitles, such as "Poems of the Affections" and "Moods of my Own Mind." This arrangement, in turn, will yield to later collected editions. This continual effort at harmonizing, unifying, making whole must retain its trace of history not because men are doomed in some psychological way to recapitulate history, but because Wordsworth's specific project of being a professional poet entails the regulation of a specifically encountered society that must recognize itself as both subject and audience of the poems. The disharmonies internal to the poems have historical referents that allow Wordsworth to represent his own harmonizing efforts as a social labor, one which displaces other competing social harmonizers such as jurisprudence. As Christensen observes, The perfection of this inductive technique [of deriving general power from particular 409 encounters] became the business of a new intellectual class, the enterprising ideologists of political economy Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, et. al.), who understood power dynamically . . . Global dominion may be the end result of this passage [from the local to the global]; but power emerges in the particular, historical act of engineering the passage of the global. ("Theorizing Byron's Practice" 478) The Enclosure and Speenhamland acts were considered harmonizing, and harmony was an aesthetic as well as economic ideal of Blackstone and Adam Smith; the actual effects of these acts, however, seemed otherwise. Wordsworth proposes another harmony which unveils the disharmonies of the juridical system. But his poetic practice depends upon those disunities as the object of his harmonizing. The desire for harmony is itself a historical phenomena, differentiable from earlier visions of harmonies. Elements of the post-enlightenment harmony coalesce in jurisprudence, in associationist psychology, in Adam Smith's marketplace, in Godwin's Reason, and Bentham's panopticon. The list extends to a variety of projects in the decades surrounding the French Revolution, and, in part, the visibility at the time of the historical nature of the harmonizing project results in such self-conscious failures as the fragmentary poetry of Don Juan and "Christabel," as well as the fragmentary prose of the Elia essays and De Quincey's self- 410 perpetuating confessions. The latter two examples imply a willful disharmony by the authors against the harmonizing mechanization of the periodical industries. A perfectly devised harmony would eliminate the manufacturers of harmony. The courts were needed to regulate into harmony the system for which jurisprudence claimed a virtual harmony. The last thing they desired was to have at the core of their operation (the location of punishment) a system which did not require their efforts. Although punishment was historically the locus of the court's power, jurisprudence did not represent the legal system in that way. Rather, as public executions and spectacles were muted, interpretation displaced punishment as the core of legal self-representation.24 The courts became a meaning-making system, and punishment was a seme continuous with the reading of a contract and the awarding of monetary damages. William Wordsworth's concerns with law and laws, prevalent as they are, do not emerge, in The Excursion or elsewhere in his poetry, independent of his wider philosophical system of thought. The same can be said of his commentary on and use of economics, mathematics, and history.25 In this regard, Bentham represents an important parallel and contrast. Bentham's utilitarianism, rooted in empiricism, took for granted 411 the immediacy of external experience, while questioning constructions of the internal mind such as "intention" (Works 10, 141). He did not reject the existence of the private, but banished it from the public domain. His system rested on the observable and the quantifiable; the Panopticon was merely the institutional operation of his basic method of calculus. Wordsworth also based his system on the observable, but his observations evaded or qualified quantification precisely by calling upon the private within the public. The unpublished Prelude, glimpsed peripherally in The Excursion and the Bioaraphia Literaria. is a public document the force of which depends on its private status. Although rooted in empiricism, Wordsworth's system rejects unmediated experience and substitutes a series of mediations— literary allusion, personal memory, public associations— through which experience is constructed.26 In the Prelude, the earth stands all before Wordsworth, because Milton stands behind him; he feels "A correspondent breeze" (35) within, because the wind "blowing on my body" (34) is already mediated by not only that body, but by the poetical attitude and historical circumstances (such as the containment in school) that shaped that body— which becomes the subject of the early 412 books of the Prelude, and of the entire Prelude within the context of the Recluse. Bentham believed that he derived the principle of utility from unmediated experience which could then be invoked to judge experience with the rigor of a logical science. No contradiction of foundation arises for Bentham since the derivation of utility from experience is grounded in the necessity of logic. If this formulation seems paradoxical, it recasts what Duncan Kennedy has termed the fundamental contradiction of classical liberal theory: in order to assure private freedom, particularly of property, "the state stands outside civil society and is not implicated in the hierarchical outcomes of private interaction" (Structure. 215). The banishment of the private amounted to the banishment of the marginal; one interpretation of Bentham's tolerance of homosexuality (unpublished in his lifetime because of its seditious nature) is that the state's refusal to interfere with a strictly private act strengthens its dominion over public, economic acts.27 By contrast, Wordsworth's system rested on no essential term because it never emerged distinctly from its empirical base; rather, the system exists in the interstices between nature and reason, science and morality. In part, the necessity for mediation creates a 413 correspondence between poet and reader, since both of them experience the object of the poetry as mediated, although the medium of mediation is the poet's mind in the first case and the poem itself in the second. This difference, however, is one Wordsworth can invoke or elide for his own purposes, since he insists on the correspondence between experience (the breeze) and the poet's mind ("the correspondent breeze"). Bentham's enormous writing on law, beginning with his critique of Blackstone's commentaries and including plans for reformation of the rules of evidence, procedure, and interpretation, all recount his call for utilitarianism as the fundamental method of judgment on which any system, philosophic, political, aesthetic, must be built. Utility was a "moral thermometer," the scientific measurement derived from "the immovable basis of sensation and experience" (Theory of Legislation, 102). The metaphor characterizes Bentham's attitude; in 1742, Celsius had fixed the zero of the centigrade scale at the freezing point of water, an arbitrary but verifiable point, and the action historically corresponded to a greatly improved instrument for measuring temperature which was crucial to contemporary chemistry and physics. Hazlitt puts the case against Bentham in his opening essay of Spirit of the Age: 414 He has lived for the past forty years, . . . reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine . . . negligent of his person, his dress, and his manner, [he is] intent only on his grand theme of UTILITY. (5) Brougham, a former student of Bentham's, advocates the positive side: The age of Law Reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches of Reform, the leading and ruling department of human improvement. (In Keeton 17) The difference in these attitudes arises in part from Brougham's position as a lawyer and Hazlitt's as a professional writer, but in both appraisals, the connection between legal institutions and the human is explicit. Hazlitt rebukes Bentham for simultaneous and analogous simplifications of law, political conscience, and "the human mind," the individual conscience. Brougham applauds Bentham1s legal reforms because changes in the law, as the political conscience, govern human improvement. Wordsworth, also, integrates human experience with the laws which govern it, although where Bentham rarely used natural law— preferring statutory legislation and denouncing the common law as incoherent— Wordsworth follows Blackstone in positioning human law under the sovereignty of nature and in making laws the institutional equivalent to habit. Consequently, the 415 effort to develop or invent ideal human laws amounts to a usurpation of nature, and constitutes an effort beyond the bounds of human reason. Such, ultimately, was the French Revolution, and, as the Wanderer describes it, the mark of that overreach was the collapse of distinctions and the renunciation of habit: That righteous cause (such power hath freedom) bound For one hostility, in friendly league, Ethereal natures and the worst of slaves; (II 227-9) The lines are constructed as a series of three antitheses, all constraining liberty in the effort to express it: power's freedom binds; a hostility is the site of the friendly league; and "ethereal natures" (i.e., free spirits) join with the sign of their own failure, slaves. This final contrast has addition antithetical power, since "ethereal nature" is a metaphor from natural sciences for the human spirit which evades its social constraints by virtue of a higher (lighter) nature, while "slaves" is a economic metaphor denoting the artificial invention of restraints. Continuing the antithetical device, the Wanderer explicitly invokes a legal tribunal in order to suggest its extralegal and vain status: [The cause] Was served by rival advocates that came From regions opposite as heaven and hell .... A proud and most presumptuous confidence [arose] In the transcendent wisdom of the age, And her discernment; (II 2 3 0-237) 416 Wordsworth's phrase, "transcendent wisdom of the age" is neatly sarcastic, for the wisdom does transcend the age in destroying it, and at the same time, the age, in its wisdom, attempts to transcend its own historical situation. This argument is a version of Burke's objection against untested ideas. When Burke defends the English Restoration and Revolution, he asserts that, although the nation had lost the bond of union in the antient edifice; they did not however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient parts of the old constitution through those parts which were not impaired. (Reflections. 106) In particular, the whole English revolutionary struggle came down to a legal distinction between modes of inheritance, neither a critique of inheritance nor a manifesto for democracy. Burke's use of naturalizing metaphors in this passage differs from Wordsworth's. For Burke, the constitution is the living body and the task of human beings is its preservation; rights inhere in that body of law itself. David Hume consistently discovered the same moral (and morality) in the seemingly disparate acts in different cultures (see chapter two above); the result was the scientific distillation of human nature. This quantity could then be redeployed in his other works, and those of his followers. specifically, the history Edmund Burke 417 concocts for England in the Reflections elides the Norman Conquest, Revolution, and Restoration into moments which affirm the status of the constitution. The polemical effect is to gain the power to determine what counts as the history or story of England, and what constitutes mere accident. In a nation governed by common law, determining history amounts to determining law; not surprisingly, Burke makes this argument by using the medical metaphor of regeneration which Blackstone used to validate legal corporations: Our political system us placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts. (120) What appeared alterations were temporary aberrations, and were possible precisely because they were not institutional. Burke locates the emergence of human nature in the ability of the state to check the aberrations of individual psyches: Through the same plan of conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of inheritance. (121) Wordsworth does not accept the Constitution as a living body with its own rights, but as a mediation J between natural law and human experience. It is 418 necessarily opaque and the desire to transcend that opacity amounts to the usurpation of power, as when the discernment of the age attempts to meddle not alone in rights, And in origin and bounds of power Social and temporal; but in laws divine, Deduced by reason, or to faith revealed. (II 237-240) Wordsworth articulates the continuum of natural and human law analogous to Blackstone's introductory remarks, but creates a fissure in the continuum at precisely the moment when social and temporal laws— located in historical origins and bounds— move into the ahistorical laws divine. The result, like the affliction of war which rended Margaret's life, is that a "Plague from this union spread." Again, the structure is antithetical: disunion, spreading, contagion arise from the unholy union of heaven and hell, ethereal natures and slaves.28 The implicit question is how a mediation between the "laws divine" and human rights can be established, since deduction and revelation are imperfect methods, subject to the very contagion of exuberance: The strongest did not easily escape; And He, what wonder! took a mortal taint. (II 244-5) The capitalization of "He," and the juxtaposition of "wonder" and "mortal" in the context of sacrifice, establishes the Solitary as a Christ-like figure in need of rebirth. The question of whether the Solitary can be 419 reborn after the false rebirth of the French Revolution, corresponds to the question of the fissure between human and divine law, with both its aesthetic analogue in the disjunction between readerly meaning and poetic intention and its scientific formulation as the laws of nature and human reason as they intersect on the empirical plane of human experience. Unlike Bentham's philosophy, Wordsworth's system operated without a centralizing term. It is marked in his writing by a proclaimed absence: refusing to expound it in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, leaving the task of extracting it from The Excursion to the reader. More precisely, Wordsworth's wider system is not defined beyond the polemical constraints which it encounters in the acts of being produced, circulated, read, and contextualized by other readers and writers. ii. Harmonizing History These encounters find a ready trope at the intersection of nature as a text and reason as the imperfect interpreter of that text, and are thus incorporated (by reference) into the very system they constrain.29 Wordsworth's philosophical system, like his muse which Hazlitt complains "can hardly raise her wing from the ground" (Spirit. 189), never extends beyond its 420 poetic incarnation. For Hazlitt, the result of Wordsworth's work is a solipsistic universe; The Excursion "affects a system without having any intelligible clue to one" (Spirit. 198). Bentham used the doctrine of utility to claim an explicit command over the regulation of the marketplace, without any pretence to either naturalness or inevitability, but with an insistence on accountability in all its aspects. By contrast, the philosophical system which Coleridge wished Wordsworth to explicate becomes a function of the marketplace which Wordsworth epitomizes, a marketplace both of ideas and of properties. Abstractions become transferable commodities, like money, which must, at least in the fiction of the free market, originate in the concrete experience of production.30 Measurements themselves, the objectivity of which was the enabling fiction of Bentham's work, are functions of the interaction of subject and object in The Excursion. Book IV provides an extended example in which Wordsworth locates this interaction at the margins of economics, the moment of poverty which establishes the zero point of the marketplace. In Book IV, the Wanderer presents three mythic histories: the Biblical period when the hand of God was visible and man walked "Upon the breast of new- created earth" (IV 433), the time of the Chaldean 421 shepherds when the planetary heavens were a guide, and the development of philosophy and science in Greece from idolatry. Each stage is a cycle of simultaneous philosophical progress and reification, a move closer to science and away from God; the echoes both to the French Revolution and the Solitary's personal history are unmistakable. The cyclic pattern rejects linear models of history, either of degradation or progress and suggests a continual flux between imagination, natural observation, and reason.31 From this triad, the Wanderer infers three relational terms as the measures by which human beings live: 'We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love; And, even as these are well and wisely fixed, In dignity of being we ascend. But what is error?'— 'Answer he who can!' The Skeptic somewhat haughtily exclaimed: 'Love, Hope, and Admiration— are they not Mad Fancy's favourite vassals? Does not life Use them, full oft, as pioneers to ruin, Guides to destruction? Is it well to trust Imagination's light when reason's fails, The unguarded taper where the guarded faints? — Stoop from those heights and soberly declare What error is; and, of our errors, which Doth most debase the mind; the genuine seats Of power, where are they? Who shall regulate, With truth, the scale of intellectual rank? (IV 763-778) The criteria of admiration, hope, and love are not scientific as the Solitary underscores by describing them in a pre-scientific metaphor as "Mad fancy's favourite vassals." They are, however, positioned in the 422 scientific context of quantifying through the terms of fixation and error; furthermore, within The Excursion the medieval period, from which the Solitary draws his metaphor, is treated as a necessary precursor and presence for the modern period.32 The passive construction muting the agent by which these terms are fixed is deliberately ambiguous, and the Solitary connects that ambiguity to the possibility, and inevitability, of error. The Solitary rebukes the Wanderer with three rhetorical questions, and reposes the problem of error at an epistemological level with three more questions. The first three questions associate "Mad fancy" with "imagination's light," both "unguarded" and uncontrolled. He invokes the paradigm of rationality as the limit of knowledge, and recognizes its own insufficiency. The Solitary contests the meaning of imagination, choosing the metaphor of "unguarded flame"; but he contests against the Wanderer's version: "The imaginative faculty was lord/Of observation natural." The Wanderer does not resist the rise of reason, but he notes that the origins of science were in imagination, for the shepherds governed by imagination first "made reports of stars/in set rotation passing to and fro." This yielded to the recognition of correspondences "Between the orbs of our 423 apparent sphere/ And its invisible counterpart" (IV 711- 12). With a different signification, this correspondence was the assumption on which Newton based his theory of gravity: the heavens and the earth responded to the same universal laws. But the Chaldean history is a myth, and the Solitary rejects it in posing his question. At the division between the Solitary's two series of questions, he demands that the Wanderer shift planes, from the lofty to the concrete, or, given the Wanderer's actual stories, from the mythic to the observable. The Solitary's rhetorical gesture is astute, pushing the Wanderer to accept the position of imagination as supplemental to reason. Not until the shift is it apparent that the Solitary's question about Imagination and Reason is directed at the Wanderer's methodology, his ruminations which, to the Solitary and potentially to the reader (as with Jeffrey), seem no more grounded than the "gross fictions chanted in the streets/By wandering Rhapsodists" (732-3) in ancient Greece. This image of streets riotous with words invokes the chaos of the French Revolution, and since the fictions of the Rhapsodists (and the equally vocal Sophists with their "wrangling schools") did not obliterate a "SPIRIT," the Wanderer suggests continued hope: A gay or pensive tenderness prevailed, When piety more awful had relaxed. (IV 743-4) 424 The excesses of the Terror are over, Napoleon defeated, and now a pensive tenderness is perhaps possible. But the issue remains, how to prevent excesses again, how to regulate the scale of intellectual rank. The effort of the Encyclopedists to do so was implicated in the excesses of the Revolution. The Solitary's call to return from the lofty rhetorical heights echoes the shift in science from abstract reasoning to empirical investigation. The Solitary's questions both expand on the Wanderer's "what is error," and suggest that error is implicit not merely in the application of the standards, but in the effort to establish them. Finally, this comment regards scientific truth less than moral truth, but even this division requires an interpretive strategy subject to error. Intellect must be regulated to allow for the intellect that can regulate; this paradox is the paradox of the marketplace and the court, to the extent that they maintain their own existence. One explicit basis for the prohibition of blasphemy was that by attacking the religion which justified the court, the blasphemer was attacking the court (see Three Trials of William Hone 41- 4). Unlike the contradiction of classical liberal theory which operated by suppressing its own adumbrations, Wordsworth's paradox is foregrounded, calling into 425 question the grounds of authority even as a mode of achieving authority, but in such a way that the very authority achieved is questioned.33 The Wanderer's immediate solution to the problem is partial, not systematic but directed towards the Solitary himself. His metaphors again open the wider range which in the later books he will take up explicitly. He tells the Solitary that for this arduous office you possess Some rare advantages. Your early days A grateful recollection must supply Of much exalted good by Heaven vouchsafed To dignify the humblest state. Your voice Hath, in my hearing, often testified That poor men's children, they, and they alone, By their condition taught, can understand The wisdom of the prayer that daily asks For daily bread . . . (VI 780-89) The Wanderer's use of the Solitary's testimony is a complex admission against interest. Within the poetic grammar of the verse paragraph, it is foremost an analogy: just as the poor children understand the full force of daily bread because of their poverty, the Solitary understands the full force of spirituality— admiration, hope, and love— because he survives on the margins of the human relations which provide them, a margin maintained by his recollection of "early days."34 Although the primary meaning of the passage on poverty is metaphoric, a secondary meaning is crucial: Because the Solitary understands the relation between the private 426 prayer of thanks and the objective reality of poverty, he is capable of judging error. Not poverty, but understanding the reality that poverty confers constitutes the status of judgment. Moreover, the children confront their hunger not directly, but through the socially mediating power of the prayer. The Solitary understands the children's understanding of the prayer which interprets their hunger not as a mere literal fact but as a spiritual condition.35 Imagination, in these terms, is not mad fancy's kin, but its antithesis; not the weak supplement of reason, but its necessary precursor and companion. The revelation of imagination here, as with the story of the ruined cottage, is positioned at the economic margin of society. To be well fed is to make food such a reality that it is not subject to imaginative experience. Contrarily, to understand the meaning of the poor children's prayer of thanks is to reintroduce lack into whoever understands. This argument does not favor poverty, but recognizes that the system of economy within which poetry operates depends on the production of scarcity to develop value.36 Ultimately, such an argument places the problem of error into abeyance by accepting and reinforcing certain 'realities,' specifically, that the poor shall always be with us. 427 While the first metaphor, the hungry child, is empirical, the second is Platonic: The shepherd-lad, that in the sunshine carves, On the green turf, a dial— to divide The silent hours; and who to that report Can portion out his pleasures, and adapt, Throughout a long and lonely summer's day The round of his pastoral duties, is not left With less intelligence for moral things Of gravest import. Early he perceives Within himself, a measure and a rule, Which to the sun of truth he can apply, That shines for him, and shines for all mankind. (IV 800-10) The sun-dial allows the boy to recognize the correspondences between the cycle of the sun and his own "round of pastoral duties," but such observations do not use up intelligence, but rather organize it. Through such organization, he perceives in himself the rule by which the sun, now a metaphor of truth, can be applied, and this application is general as well as specific. iii. The Science of Sight Wordsworth's work shows a decided admiration for the scientific investigations of the day, and, in The Excursion, especially the advances of the Scottish Enlightenment, but this admiration is always checked by the remembrance of the pride of the French Encyclopedists and the collapse of their ideas in the Terror. In comparing "men for whom our age/Unbaffled powers of vision have prepared" with Greek shepherds, the Wanderer 428 insists that surely contemporary man can obtain more "From sense and reason." But the examples of their powers is cautionary: Ambitious spirits— Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh The planets in the hollow of their hand; And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains Have solved the elements, or analysed The thinking principle— shall they in fact Prove a degraded Race? (IV 94 6-54) This question is open. To regulate the moving spheres is the astronomer’s madness in Rasselas. except when it is understood that such regulation is actually internalizing and mediating nature's laws. Like the shepherd boy who divides the sun with a dial, the scientists regulate the planets only as a metonymy for self-awareness. One immediate consequence is the increasing problem of technology, which may materially determine the answer to the Wanderer's rhetorical question. The earth which has produced these scientists is now threatened by them, through her own generosity: * The earth has lent Her waters; Air her breezes; and the sail Of traffic glides with ceaseless intercourse. (VIII 111-13) The use of the economic imagery to describe the contributions of the elements to the development of economy recalls the ultimate dependence of any economic system on natural resources (such as the trees that the 429 woodchopper carelessly destroys), and the Wanderer fashions nature's retribution within the terms of justice: I grieve, when on the darker side Of this great change I look; and there behold Such outrage done to nature as compels The indignant power to justify herself; Yea, to avenge her violated rights, For England's bane. (VIII 151-56) The violation of nature's rights is articulated in a Promethean myth in which "soothing darkness" and "punctual stars"— the adjectives reminiscent of natural order— yield to an unceasing light which, like hell's darkness visible, appears to provide an alternative order but actually supplies only pandemonium: an unnatural light Prepared for never-resting Labour's eyes Breaks from a many-windowed fabric huge. (VIII 167-69) Rather than the stars, an artificial sound marks the time, and simultaneously recalls the Norman Conquest: And at the appointed hour a bell is heard, Of harsher import than the curfew-knoll That spake the Norman Conqueror's stern behest— A local summons to unceasing toil! (VIII 170-73) The curfew William imposed required the dousing of all lights and an enforced rest; in response to opposition, Henry I repealed the law in 1103. The new economy reverses the curfew: toil is unceasing, and the light unending. This vision is radically different from, for example, the tireless labor of Michael and Luke, for this 430 labor is organized externally by the contingencies of the factory itself: Disgorged are now the ministers of day; And, as they issue from the illumined pile, A fresh band meets them, at the crowded door— And in the courts— and where the rumbling stream That turns the multitude of dizzy wheels, Glares, like a troubled spirit, in its bed Among the rocks below. (VIII 174-79) The day shift and the night shift meet at the exchange point, and become one another. The moment of twilight in "Calm is all nature" is replaced by human demographics. Their social order, even their religion, is organized around the dizzy wheels: Men, maidens, youths, Mother and little children, boys and girls, Enter, and each the wonted task resumes Within this temple, where is offered up To Gain, the master idol of the realm, Perpetual sacrifice. (VIII 180-85) The relation of the unceasing work for this new idol and the unceasing meditation under older religion is fashioned not as a stark contrast, but rather as a continuum: Even thus of old Our ancestors, within the still domain Of vast cathedral or conventual church, Their vigils kept; where tapers day and night On the dim altar burned continually, In token that the House was evermore Watching to God. (VIII 185-91) The historical reality was that the political economists were creating a religious virtue out of labour, and enforcing it through a wage system and a general 431 ideological mobilization, into which Wordsworth's works could as easily be co-opted as positioned to resist.37 Wesley had already observed that religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches . . . [consequently] although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. (quoted in Thompson, 391). The Wanderer rejects the transformation of religious zeal into economic gain, but modulates into an alternative position, in which the powers of technology are viewed as liberating because they are guided by moral law. His authority for this is Archimedes: — Call Archimedes from his buried tomb Upon the grave of vanished Syracuse, And feelingly the Sage shall make report How insecure, how baseless in itself, Is the philosophy whose sway depends On mere material instruments;-how weak Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped By virtue. (VIII 220-27) Archimedes claimed "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth." He expresses the power of mechanical devices such as the lever. But the grounding, "place to stand," is, for Wordsworth, not merely an analogy for a moral grounding, but the same ground. Archimedes cannot literally have such a place to stand, but can only calculate it as an idea. In this respect, Wordsworth emerges as a Platonist, for whom the laws of existence are equivalent to the need for morality.38 432 The Wanderer's own scientific education helps establish his attitudes. He lingered in the rudiments Of science, and among her simplest laws, His triangles . . . Oft did he take delight To measure the altitude of some tall crag That is the eagle's birthplace, or some peak Familiar with forgotten years, that shows Inscribed upon its visionary sides, The history of many a winter storm, Or obscure records of the path of fire. (I 270-79) Nothing in the laws of geometry makes the crag worth notice; rather, its historical situation as the birthplace of the eagle inspires the Wanderer. Science cannot account for its own interests.39 The geometry which permits the measurement of the crag and peak does not end investigation, but opens new mysteries by disrupting the familiarity (natural habituation) of the sights. The very history written on the crag, the time told by the series of winter storms, accounts for the habituation, for the familiarity "of forgotten years." The word "visionary" does double work, recalling the visible sight and the projection of a story. In the terms of nature and reason, then, mathematics cannot be taken as a category of pure reason. In essence, this passage turns on the understanding of "natural history" as a mode of history. 433 The Wanderer's first attempts at motion are not literal, but figural; they are scientific investigations: he scanned the laws of light Amid the roar of torrents, where they send From hollow clefts up to the clearer air A cloud of mist, that smitten by the sun Varies its rainbow hues. But vainly thus, And vainly by all other means, he strove To mitigate the fever of his heart. (I 294-300) The laws of light are rendered visible in the refraction of light, at the site of a conversion of the four Aristotelian elements— fire ("sun"), water ("torrents" and "mist"), earth ("clefts") and air ("clearer air"). The laws of external light, however, are insufficient to account for his internal fever, a heat akin to light. Again, scientific law, taken as the intersection of man's reasoning ability and the regularity of nature (itself refracted in man's reasoning as the ability to derive laws from similar— not identical— circumstances) is both inspirational and inadequate. The sciences of the 18th-century experienced a qualitative alteration from what was conceived of as a quantitative shift, the increase in observation and data collection facilitated by the introduction of mathematics. In The Birth of the Clinic. Foucault has detailed how the empirical investigation of disease, the attempt to deploy the physician's glance with such clarity that the essential character of a disease emerged 434 in its relation to and difference from other diseases, radically altered medical practices along scientific and ideological lines. The effort to recognize disease in its purity constructed both the patient and the cure as impediments, introducing variations into the true course of disease, violating the laws of the disease in the imperfect expression of those laws.40 Yet, paradoxically, that interference restructured the medical experience in the institutional rise of the clinic where "the sovereignty of consciousness" could "transform the symptom [of an illness] into a sign" within a grammar of health. In terms of nature and reason, medical knowledge as a field tamed nature by restructuring its activities (illness, disease, death) into a system of signs accessible by the human reason which was the preeminent expression of health. The constant association in Rasselas. Humphrey Clinker. Amelia. and The Man of Feeling between clear reason and physical health reflects the ideological implications of this scientific inquiry. These texts equally reflect the limit of health as the inevitable submersion into nature, as disease ultimately reclaims the body in death and decay. From the early 18th century to the French Revolution, the mechanistic biology championed by Borelli and Keill, which found its rationale in Newtonian physics and which 435 repudiated any essential scientific difference between animate and inanimate objects, yielded to a new vitalism in which organisms were viewed systematically. Physiology turned from the description of the body's organs as levers, pulleys, pumps, and sieves to an investigation of those characteristics such as growth, nutrition, and regeneration that make living things . . . [appear] different from machines. (Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment 119-20) This shift was not a return a to Renaissance humanism that recognized an ineffable principle of life, but constituted the differentiation of biology from the physical sciences through empirical distinctions; for example, a crystal grew by accumulation on its surface while an organism enlarged through internal changes. Wordsworth's own expression of animism can be located both within and as a critique of this tradition. Beginning the final book, the Wanderer asserts: "To every Form of being is assigned, . . . An active Principle:-howe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things, in all natures["] (IX 1-5) This formulation is nearly Platonic, except that for Plato the form is coexistent with its active principle, but in this description, the Form is assigned an "active Principle" to which it is logically prior. In sharp opposition to the organic sciences, the active principle is taken to be, in principle, not observable because its 436 existence is subsistence; it is not subject to scientific containment, yet pervades as the precondition of scientific investigation. Finally, the active principle is a juridical presence. Taken seriously, the repetitive phrases, "In all things, in all natures’ * suggests that the active principle inheres at two distinct, hierarchical levels, the realm of things which human beings encounter, and the realm of natures which renders those encounters intelligible. Nature (here, "things”) and reason (here, "natures") are correlated, but in a manner which evades human investigation, but suggests that whatever the domain of investigation, its ultimate subject is mankind. The Wanderer, however, suggests the signs by which the "active principle" may be known: Whate'er exists hath properties that spread Beyond itself, communicating good, A simple blessing, or with evil mixed; Spirit that knows no insulated spot, No chasm, no solitude . . . (IX 10-14) This is at once a law of behavior and a metalaw governing the interpretation of reality as an act of imagination. The criteria for existence is the presence of "properties that spread" beyond the object and "spirit that knows no insulated spot." The properties correspond to the scientific concept of extension and duration, while the spirit corresponds to the religious concept of 437 transcendence; from the Wanderer's perspective extension and transcendence are equivalent, different expressions of the same phenomena. This reality has a juridical consequence; it constitutes "the freedom of the universe," as both "Unfolded still the more, more visible/ the more we know" and "reverenced least,/And least respected in the human mind." The freedom of the universe opens the universe to the human gaze, hence contributes to human knowledge, but that opening up constitutes a freedom from human domination by exposing the universe as an essential mystery. The data that makes the universe known— once constructed into the laws of optics, medicine, economics, jurisprudence— resists those sciences which function by insisting on the insulation which spirit, as an expression of being, rejects. The close investigation of the behavior of air revealed its hidden multiplicity, oxygen (the acid- maker), hydrogen (the water-generator), and nitrogen, and the Aristotelian substances vanished in a vapor. To mark the arrival of a new chemistry, Lavoisier proposed a new nomenclature: A well-composed language, adapted to the natural and successive order of ideas will bring in its train a necessary and immediate revolution in the method of teaching and will not allow teachers of chemistry to deviate from the course of Nature; either they must reject the nomenclature or they 438 must irresistibly follow the course marked out by it. The logic of the sciences is thus essentially dependent on their language. (Quoted in Hankins, 109) Language replicates a "natural" "order of ideas" and forces teachers to remain on the "course of nature." This order and this course, in their strict correlation, constitute the logic of science, and, when expanded into other domains, the reason of man which is not open to the whims of individuals but subject to the regulation of language as a collective human endeavor. Lavoisier himself insisted on the implications of classification and ordering for the regulation of weights and measures as simultaneously a scientific and economic measure, one entailing tax reform and natural rights. In 1794, Lavoisier died under the guillotine, a victim of what Wordsworth, by 1814, saw as the result of pushing man's reason until it challenged nature as the builders of Babel challenged the heavens. The mistake was the reification of reason capable of being abstracted from its empirical (and hence natural) origins. In The Excursion. Voltaire is the named symbol, his Candide propping up a miniature city built by children. Wordsworth marks the egotism of the work by two images; first, the book "open[s] of itself," as if utterly independent, and secondly, it is "swoln/With searching damp." Literally, the book has been ruined by moisture, 439 but at a metaphoric level, the book has absorbed more nature than its philosophic machinery can process. The swelling of this one book would easily recall the Encvclopedie. ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers, among whose contributors were Turgot who wrote the article on expansibilite. a neologism introduced to describe the infinite expandability of air, and who later penned a Discourse on the Successive Progress of the Human Spirit (1750). Wordsworth neatly works an antithetical structure into his verse: I found the work to be In the French tongue, a Novel of Voltaire His famous optimist. 'Unhappy Man!' Exclaimed my friend. (II 442-5) The lines enact a struggle between Voltaire's words, "famous optimist," and the Wanderer's "Unhappy Man," the referent of the second being several fold: the Solitary, Candide, Voltaire, and generalized man. Wordsworth did not deny the power of science to harness nature, but insisted that such a harnessing was temporary, and that if it constituted a transgression, the laws of nature would mete out just punishment. The sovereignty of man was his ability to name and to understand, not his power to use: Happy is he who lives to understand, Not human nature only, but explores All natures, — to the end that he may find 440 The law that governs each. (IV 332-35) The first line is ambiguous. The usual sense of "who lives to" is "who lives long enough to," but here another meaning is more central, "who lives with the intent to." A duration of life is replaced by an intent of life. The discovery of governing laws is an end in itself, a position validated by Blackstone's contention that courts discover, rather than create, law, but which seeks authorization in its own procedure. The passage which follows is laden with legal terminology combined with scientific jargon: and where begins The union, the partition where, that makes Kind and degree, among all visible Beings; The constitutions, powers, and faculties, Which they inherit,— cannot step beyond,— And cannot fall beneath; that do assign To every class its station and its office, Through all the mighty commonwealth of things; Up from the creeping plant to sovereign Man. (IV 335-43) This exploration of nature is part of the Wanderer's solution to despondency, because it reveals not merely a passive order, but an order perpetually renewed by the active power of nature's laws which "assign" (from siqnum. sign and signare, to mark) "station" and "office." The use of legalistic and bureaucratic terms in the passage implicitly draws a comparison between natural order and English government, and the position of man in nature's order resembles that of the king in 441 England's monarchy, specifically that he rules beneath, rather than above, the laws. Sovereignty is derived from position in the hierarchy, rather than the hierarchy being created by virtue (strength) of the sovereign. Further, since man's sovereignty exists within this hierarchy, human law is not merely an analogy to natural law, but a subset of it. For the Wanderer's argument, the existence of natural bounds, limits of both "beyond" and "beneath," helps explain the failures of human sovereignty. iv. The Poetics of Sight Thomas Moore records the following exchange in 1820 between Wordsworth and Humphrey Davy regarding the expensive publication of The White Doe (1815): 'Do you know the reason', Wordsworth asked suddenly, 'why I published The White Doe in quarto?' 'No, what was it?' 'To show the world my own opinion of it.' (quoted in Moorman, II 285) Wordsworth contends that through the market, he can "speak" to the world by inverting the usual relationship in which, as Burke says of the price of labor, "it rises and falls according to demand" (Scarcity"). By publishing an expensive edition, Wordsworth proclaims the worth of his work.41 The remark suggests both a certain hostility towards the purchasing public, a hostility delineated in the 1815 "Supplemental Essay,"42 and a 442 desire to communicate with that public. Wordsworth had not despaired of finding his audience, as the repeated reissues of his works demonstrate, but neither was he sure of finding it. If, in 1814, The Excursion came out in quarto to show what Wordsworth thought of it, in 182 0, it appeared in octavo so that readers could render their opinions. In consequence of Wordsworth1s particular commitment to the market, his poetry is shaped to deal with concrete experience, but the very work of poetry— for reader and writer— is how to render experience concretely. The Parson's wife's poses the problem when whispering to the Poet after one of the Wanderer's speeches: While he is speaking, I have the power to see Even as he sees; but when his voice hath ceased, Then, with a sigh, sometimes I feel, as now, That combinations so serene and bright Cannot be lasting in a world like ours. (IX 465-69) The task of the poet is to instill that "power to see," and the corresponding task of the reader is to not let the poet's voice die. The Wanderer's words ("combinations") are rendered as visual and a source of vision in the metaphor of brightness, while the Parson's wife's reception— sight— of those words is reintegrated not into words, but into a fading sound, a sigh. Only through continual speech can the combinations survive as a shared vision. This exchange of sight for sound is 443 played internally with each encounter with story-telling: the cottage and Margaret's story; the graveyard and the tales of the dead; the fragile vision of the ram poised above its mirrored image and the Parson's wife's lament quoted above. The actual act of reading The Excursion reworks the exchange, as readers translate words into sight which then authorizes the internal voices. A paradigmatic moment for this occurs early in the first book. The Wanderer is introduced as a realization of the Poet's own imagination. When the Poet is making his way over the terrain, he recognizes that To him most pleasant who on cool moss Extends his careless limbs along the front Of some huge cave, whose rocky ceiling casts A twilight of its own, an ample shade. Where the wren warbles, while the dreaming man, Half-conscious of the soothing melody, With side-long eye looks out upon the scene, By power of that covert, thrown To finer distance. Mine was at that hour Far other lot, yet with good hope Under a shade as grateful I should find Rest[.] (I 9-18) This long interpolation of an imagined person imagining prefigures the Wanderer who is discovered "Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep." The half-consciousness of the melody constitutes a tranquility which, like the muting effect of the shade, makes the scene vivid to the dreaming man. This imagined character hears not the insects, but the wren; later, the Wanderer will meld these images in describing the "tuneful hum" of "this 444 multitude of flies." The fictional moment is derived from the Poet's negation of himself, and more specifically, from the subtraction of his presence in the field and the substitution of an auditor/gazer. Such a move is then articulated as a projection of his own success in overcoming his circumstances and reaching a rest which corresponds to that of his imagined figure. The growth of the poet is, then, at once becoming his own imagination and become the Wanderer. The reader's corresponding task is becoming the poet, a task which does not displace the poet— that would amount to alienated labor— but which realizes the poet in the reader's imagination. Because Wordsworth has constructed the exchange between reader and writer to exclude the critic, he appropriates the critical function in the last book in a way that reveals much about his "system." The Parson's wife's commentary on the Wanderer's speech comes after all his major speeches, and reflects back to each of them, insuring their fragmentary and polemic character. Recalling the Wanderer's judicial abilities in Book II, do his opinions work any lasting change, or, in his absence, does the poor man find himself again divided from his soul? If the test case is the Solitary's despondency, then the question remains open. The object 445 of the critique, however, is equally the Wanderer's beguiling speech and "a world like ours." The world at stake is not the human world divorced from a stabilizing natural world, but the world which is constituted by the intersection of the human and natural world, an intersection metonymized by the Ram standing over his reflection, "his shadowy counterpart": Each had their glowing mountains, each his sky, And each seemed centre of his own fair world: Antipodes unconscious of each other, Yet, in partition, with their several spheres, Blended in perfect stillness, to our sight! (IX 447-51) The centered Ram and its possession of the mountains and sky (and wider universes alluded to by "several spheres") are not illusionary but neither are they real; rather, they are relational, arising within the mirror image. The metaphor of possession insists on the human overtones to the Ram, and simultaneously suggests the transitory duration of possession. In the gaze of the other, the human, the two worlds are blended, but that gaze does not have the power to maintain its own sight. Nonetheless, the character of the human gaze requires centering the subject from which the landscape can be demarcated; from the view of undifferentiated nature (a view utterly unWordsworthian except as an erasure), the two worlds are one, with or without the ram. Put abstractly, human beings construct nature out of the recalcitrant being 446 which is nature. As the Parson's wife observes, a breath (like her sigh) can disperse the sight. This observation leads her to her comments on the Wanderer's speech, a movement which suggests that the instability of the Wanderer's vision stems from the condition of human beings' relation to nature. The Poet himself deepens the dilemma in electing not to describe the landscape as their journey continues: — Ah! that such beauty, varying in the light Of living nature, cannot be portrayed By words, nor by the pencil's silent skill; But is the property of him alone Who hath beheld it, noted with care, And in his mind recorded with love! (IX 512-18) As with the description of the Ram, the imagery of possession has, for the Poet, explanatory value. But property here is radically unalienated, arising only to the extent of contact and not transferrable. What, then, is it that the poet can transfer? Not beauty, but the awareness of beauty, the desire for it. The poet creates, and markets, lack, but a lack which demands its own fulfillment. Although the concrete beauty of the Lake District is unavailable to the reader, the attitude of living towards beauty is. Concealed, or perhaps better, revealed in this aesthetic dialectic is a political dimension of empowerment. What are the moral justifications for property? These justifications arise, for Wordsworth, at the intersection of nature and human 447 reason as an imaginative act. Further, the political correlate is the construction of natural rights which are tempered by the limits of human knowledge. In the "Preface," Wordsworth announces that his intention for The Recluse is to "contain[] views of Man, Nature, and Society."43 He further explains that he published The Excursion, the middle part, because it "was designed to refer to more passing events, and to the existing state of things." The echo in the last phrase of Godwin1s Things As They Are, or. the Adventures of Caleb Williams suggests the complexity of that historical situation; things as they are, in Caleb Williams, are that way because reality (things as ideal) is obscured by human passions and human laws. Similarly, Wordsworth presents the "existing state of things" as concealing those things in the very act of presenting them, yet he recognizes that things will always exist in states, that they will never emerge in unmediated eminence. Again, the image of the Ram and its reflection seems paradigmatic. The issue of The Excursion is not how to encounter nature or reality unmediated, but rather, what forms of mediation transform nature into the most humanly accessible form. Put in the terms of a debate which raged in both law and the sciences, what constitutes adequate evidence for establishing an experience? 448 D. Coming Full Circle; Property and Wandering For Wordsworth, the problem of property occasioned a dramatic moment in which the relationship between an individual and nature could be located as a social reality: by becoming part of one's land, one joined society, even in solitude. Furthermore, property was the intersection of land and human imagination, a continual transformation worked upon the land in constituting it as natural. For Jeffrey, this was madness, or worse, mysticism, reversing the logical priorities in which social contract created property, and in which ownership was an appropriation of nature to human use. As a lawyer, Jeffrey knew that only that which the law protected as property was property. Byron's criticism of The Excursion in Don Juan presents a useful contrast: A drowsy frowzy poem called the Excursion. Writ in a manner which is my aversion. (Ill 94) Byron pretends that, like the musty smell invoked by "frowzy," the boredom he feels encountering The Excursion inheres somehow in the manner of the poem and not in himself, but it is not the manner alone to which Byron is averse but the implications which such verse has for poetry. A typically Byronic pun of joining the negating preface "a" to a version of "verse" balances the obsolete 449 form of the verb "to write." He condenses two common complaints against Wordsworth— that what he writes isn't Poetry and that he uses archaic language too often— into one sharp witticism that need not address, or even acknowledge, Wordsworth's rationale. Like Jeffrey, Byron sees a system at work, one which intends to give the professional poet an economic status, precisely the position which Byron's own literary career attempts to repudiate. In the stanza above the specific reference to The Excursion. Byron explains Wordsworth's early radical views (in between trashing Southey and Coleridge): Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then Seasoned his pedlar poems with democracy. (Ill 93) The unlicensed ("unexcised") Wordsworth has no use for the monarchist government which provides licenses, but once established, Wordsworth no longer uses the spice of democracy because he has an investment in the government and society. Byron, living in exile for a variety of reasons which summed to an overwhelming sense of the oppressiveness of English society, understands Wordsworth as having bought into the system precisely because he insists on the possibility of a professional poet. The poems are not so much poems about peddlers, but poems actively peddled in the marketplace, and hence subscribing to exactly those values that Byron as a public persona despises.44 450 The boredom Byron experiences in confronting The Excursion suggests an anxiety about his own position as a poet. The word "aversion" further suggests the combative position of the two long, potentially epic poems, The Excursion and Don Juan. Unlike Jeffrey, then, Byron can make his critique on aesthetic grounds from his position of exiled poet, but, for neither man is an aesthetic critique sufficient, because for both, a political agenda underscores Wordsworth's choices as a poet and, consequently, theirs as critics. In his larger poem, The Excursion. Wordsworth attempts to work out a solution to the problem of property dramatized in "Michael" by locating the concept of ownership as a duty, rather than as a right. "Duty," as a legal term, can be synonymous with debt, or can denote the precondition of bringing a tort action. For Blackstone, a duty would inhere only in a property interest; thus, a master has by contract a property interest in his servant, so has a cause against his harm, but not the reverse. Wordsworth, who would have been aware of the legal definitions as well as the religious dimensions of the word "duty," understood ownership as a duty towards the land, and a consistent theme in his poetry is that a violation of that duty leads to a harm which then entails an action, not before the court of 451 men, but before the laws of Nature. With the Parson’s stories, the verdict of Nature is accepted by the social ceremony of burial, a literal mixing of ashes and dust. Wordsworth's position on property opposed a recent, but over-determined and violently established tradition which understood property not only as a right, but as the surety of all other rights. In part, Wordsworth's opposition to the classical liberal theory arose from the failure of property to produce the social stability which its proponents argued was its natural consequence. With increasing capital, the distance between an owner and the item or land owned became arbitrary, and ownership itself became a method of making profits because a fundamental right of ownership was the right to transfer the property. Wordsworth's response is at once tinged with medievalism— the inscription of the owner on land, of the maker on personal property— and radicalism, the demand that the accumulation of property be checked by the utility of that accumulation. The classical liberal theory of property, which locates the right of property in the work performed by an individual and consequently opens out the possibility of ownership not only to, in theory, anyone, but also of anything, is given powerful expression by Locke and reaches its most comprehensive legal articulation in 452 William Blackstone's Commentaries. These Commentaries used the theory to offer an ideological justification for the economic structure of English society as it stood in the 1760s, and simultaneously to justify property law as being both a natural law and the highest evolution of social law. The self-regulation of the government was achieved through property structure; the two houses of parliament naturally drawing in two directions of opposite interest, [that is, landed and commercial interests] and the prerogative in another still different from them both, they mutually keep each other from exceeding their proper limits (I 154) . Furthermore, a stability of the English social terrain had been achieved by the creation of new alienable properties, such as a principal debt, And thus the legislature of England has universally promoted the grand ends of civil society, the peace and security of individuals, by steadily pursuing that wise and orderly maxim, of assigning to every thing capable of ownership a legal and determinate owner. This owner was usually the crown, or, as Bentham would insist, the king. It is worth pausing on Blackstone's sentence, which ends the first chapter of his second volume, The Rights of Things, to note the careful balance between words associated with natural law and those linked to legislation; grand ends pairs with civil society; peace with security; wise with orderly. 453 Wordsworth presents the interrelation of human and natural productions as something itself in need of interpretation. Wordsworth, like Blackstone, envisions a society in which the natural underwrites the contractual, but, where Blackstone believed such a society was discoverable in the English Constitution, Wordsworth thought that it was discernible only through a continual contact with nature, and the British Constitution was not an object of interpretation, but a method of interpreting nature. At the opening of Book III, the Wanderer, Solitary and Poet/narrator come upon "A mass of rock" which resembles "A stranded ship, with keel upturned." Is this the symbol of another journey gone astray, or one guided to safe shore by a divine will, like Noah’s ark? The description which follows at first suggests the latter; among other rocks, A pair were seen, That with united shoulders bore aloft A fragment, like an altar, flat and smooth. (Ill 58-60) And then, as with the story of Noah, transgression enters: A tall and shining holly . . . stood upright As if inserted by some human hand In mockery[.] (III 62-66) The poet's description prepares for the argument between the Wanderer and the Solitary. The Wanderer goes first: 454 "Behold a cabinet for sages built,/Which kings might envy!" His language asserts the reality of what is beheld— the rocks were built— and interlocks the natural and the human. The Solitary acknowledges the resemblance: Some shadowy intimations haunt me here That in these shows a chronicle survives Of purposes akin to Man, but goes on to explain it: The sport of Nature, aided by blind Chance Rudely to mock the works of toiling man. And hence, this upright shaft of unhewn stones . . . (Ill 88-90, 126-8) The echo of "Michael" recalls not the struggle between man and nature, but the struggle to grasp what that relation is. Are the works of man sanctified by nature, or only by the power bestowed by the king's laws? This argument does not resolve the question, but locates it in the poem's future, in the fate of the Solitary and the fate of England. To turn this dispute back towards the structure of poetry, the presence of these rocks calls into question the relation of intention, associated with an originary source, and meaning, derived from the empowered mechanisms of reading, metonymized as viewing. The structure of man, as a working being, is intentional, and his intentionality is present on and in his work to the extent that labor is unalienated. When the pedlar sells 455 a ware, with it is the story of its making and the reinstitution of relation between buyer and seller as user and maker. When nature produces such rocks effortlessly, man's intentional structure seems mocked, devalued. But poetry, in recouping the rocks within The Excursion itself, (re)creates the rocks as a poetic labor which then opens the way for meaning. Moreover, the Solitary's very expression creates meaning by endowing nature with intent. Man's intentional structure is the creation of the meaning of nature; the Solitary's "hence" constructs the causal relationship which invests nature with an intentional structure, a desire to mock. Blackstone had thought to settle the relationship of rights— the right to speak, act, be— with the rights of property once and for all. Any change in rights would constitute an attack on property, and hence on the fabric of English law, on security and peace, on order and wisdom. The French Revolution was, however, such an attack, and Burke, in repudiating it, turns to Blackstonean notions that locate natural order and rights within property interests: The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires on the ground. (138) 456 Air was one of the few things Blackstone considered incapable of ownership; against the air, Burke pits property: Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state that does not represent its ability, as well as its property . . . [But to be] safe from the invasions of ability . - . [property] must be represented in great masses of accumulation. (140) Burke, however, adds explicitly a relation between rights and property which was only implicit, and indeed disguised, in Blackstone. Burke lays out a variety of natural rights, which include the right to justice, to the means of profitable industry, to the acquisitions of their parents, the last of which Blackstone did not see as a natural right but as a convenience of state to secure peace. The list is itself formulated in terms of property, but then Burke's analogy shifts: In this partnership [society] all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to it, as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger portion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock. (150) The analogy points out the way a capitalistic trade has created a new domain for property, and a new urgency for the alienability of that property. The exchange of money for ownership can be done without regard to the product, the workers, or the location of the work. Buying stock profitably requires the ability to sell it quickly, and 457 selling is useful only if the money allows the acquisition of other property. The stability of property which Burke insists on, is actually undercut by his own understanding of the circulation of not only ownership, but of human rights. Wordsworth indicates the danger of obscuring the arbitrariness with which rights are located within property in his treatment of the Solitary. Here, the Solitary is relaying his domestic bliss by using a legal doctrine of occupancy: 'Seven years of occupation undisturbed Established seemingly a right to hold That happiness; and use and habit gave To what an alien spirit had acquired A patrimonial sanctity. (Ill, 622). But, "A claim" "shattered all." Death, it turns out, does not recognize property rights. Indeed, against this version of property, we can place Wordsworth's use of the word "tenant" in the poem. Book Four begins, "Here closed the Tenant of that lonely vale/ His mournful narrative." (Like a Homeric epithet, the phrase "Tenant of that lonely vale" recurs three times, each time in the same metrical position of closing a line.) Similarly, the Wanderer ends his story of Margaret, "and here she died;/ Last human tenant of these ruined walls." In both these cases, the word tenant is encased in painful imagery which recalls the power nature has to reclaim itself. Against this greater power, even an owner in fee 458 simple is but a tenant. But if Wordsworth rejected Burke's formulation, he found Godwin's response equally problematic. Godwin was quick to seize on Burke's inconsistencies, and sought to formulate a different view of property, one in which right proceeds property, and in which property is itself known through obligation. If property has been the foundation of English law, he argues both in An Enquiry Concerning Human Justice and in the novel Caleb Williams. it has equally been the source of English crimes. Certain instances, the enclosure and gaming laws, are obvious examples, but his argument seeks a more metaphysical foundation in seeing that one man's property is experienced as lack by another. Paine, like Godwin, attempts to reverse the relationship between property and rights that Burke has set out in the metaphor of a stock company. Paine claims that all Englishmen own England, and that the right of property, then, only inheres in the improvement upon the land which an owner undertakes; thus, any English citizen is entitled to a land rent from those who occupy the land. Presence is not required, and at a first glance, this might seem to accord well with the Wanderer's freedom. If, in at least the dominant readings of The Excursion, the moral center is a wanderer, almost all 459 wandering is bad. Indeed, as a central Romantic trope, wandering is fraught with dangers. Childe Harold's nihilistic journeys have replaced the meaning-making pilgrimage of the Red Crosse Knight. This particular example is shadowed by Byron's own wasted journeying, but his choice to overwrite this biographical information into Spenserian stanzas with allusions to Duessa and ruin and the loss of "One" (Una) illustrates a shift in the valuation of wandering. The Ancient Mariner's travels end in a condemnation to roam, and that roaming is experienced as arrest: He holds him with his glittering eye — The wedding guest stood still. The Mariner's intrusion threatens the ceremonies of civilization, the negative allusion being to Christ at Cana. Wordsworth was himself a great wanderer, but his travels were also fraught with ambiguity; the mixed emotions of "Tintern Abbey" resonate with his travels through France which ended in leaving Annette Vallon and their child— a story told in the mirror image of the Ruined Cottage. The vagrants and beggars and the "Old Man Travelling" who recalls Priam crossing Ilium to ransom the body of Hector define the terrain of the Lvrical Ballads. Poems which follow The Excursion are similarly marked, none more forcefully than Byron's Don 460 Juan, or Shelley's Alastor. whose journey invokes Wordsworth's poetic territory. The appearance of wandering in literature is not new to Romanticism; Henry Fielding's novels typically operate by the wanderings, more or less arbitrary, of individuals through recognizable social constructions, the inns of Joseph Andrews. the bailors prisons of Amelia. and as I have already suggested, the journeys of the Knights in The Fairie Oueene tantalize with the dangers to which the Romantic counterparts such as Childe Harold and Cain succumb. The change in the values of such journeys reflects the historical conditions of increased vagrancy, of inscription into the army, of improved road conditions which made travel easier but also increased the economic necessity of intra-national importing. Other displacements, of impoverished aristocracy and disowned farmers, contributed to this historical background. For Wordsworth, then, the issue is whether wandering could be made to hold social value within the historical disruptions of which wandering was a sign. These wanderings are different from the Pedlar's in that they are characterized by flight, by either the avoidance of duty or the inability to locate duty. The Pedlar himself, by finding a profession in wandering, is able to give his wandering a regularity. He is 461 associated with the sun throughout the poem. The opening verse paragraph, moreover, describes in detail how the sun structures the land: shadows that lay in spots, Determined and unmoved, with steady beams Of bright and pleasant sunshine interposed. (I 6-8) As the sun gives shape to the earth, the pedlar structures the economic environment of his community. The function is becoming obsolete: And there hard service, deemed debasing now Gained merited respect in simpler times; When squire, and priest, and they who round them dwelt In rustic sequestrations— all dependent Upon the PEDLAR'S toil-— supplied their wants Or pleased their fancies, with the wares he brought. (I 327-32) Through the pedlar, the community supplied its wants. The wording carefully maintains power in the community, and makes the Pedlar the means through which the community can express itself to itself. Where work is translated into money, then work becomes interchangeable and so do individuals. But with the Pedlar's 'steady' function, a myth of the specificity of work is preserved. He brings items, and with those items, he brings their origins. He is Walter Benjamin's story-teller. Wordsworth had once before used a peddler as the meeting point of a community, in "Michael": "wherewith the neighbors bought/ A basket, which they filled with 462 pedlar's wares." Richard Bateman, however, takes these wares "up to London," exchanges them for his master's merchandise, and grows "wondrous rich." He has outgrown the pedlar's limited market. In The Excursion, the threat is that the entire community has done so, and in doing so, lost itself, commodified itself. The Pedlar forestalls this outcome by retiring, and signifies at once the economic binding of the community, and the replacement of that binding with a poetic, or natural, binding. By natural, I mean— and believe that Wordsworth often meant— a binding that inheres in the structure of the land. The key to the pedlar's successes, as salesman, as minstrel, and as educator lies in his ability to find the community at home. (His educational designs on the poet/narrator need to be read against his having "essayed to teach/A village-school— but wandering thoughts were then/A misery to him" [I 312-14].) This requirement, then, entails a particular notion of property as obligation. The freedom of the individual to alienate his own property is a triple alienation, from society, from nature, and from self, since the self is seen in the concrete work, and not in the abstract return of work in the form of money. Further, it is an alienation disguised as freedom, and aligned to the failure of the French Revolution. By generalizing the 463 "home" of the reader into England itself (and, in Book IX, the empire), the mature Wordsworth can, in the myth of The Excursion, always find the reader at home, and thus continue the role of the peddler in an economy that has extinguished that role, and substituted instead lawyers, critics, and merchants. Goaded by the Solitary who "playfully draws a comparison between [the Wanderer's] itinerant profession and that of the Knight-errant" (VIII, "Argument), the Pedlar acknowledges the ruination of his profession, and the social order which permitted itself to be expressed through him: I have lived to mark A new and unforeseen creation rise From out the labours of a peaceful Land . . . With fruitless pains Might one like me now visit many a tract . . . Meanwhile, at social Industry's command, How quick, how vast an increase! From the germ Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced Here a huge town, continuous and compact, Hiding the face of the earth for leagues— and there, Where not a habitation stood before, Abodes of men irregularly massed Like trees in forests. (VIII 89-91, 95-6, 117-24) The images keep working out wider and wider and cannot hold. The purpose of property is not to obscure the face of the earth, but to show it; the function of habitation is that people may be grouped with regularity, not irregularly massed. The metaphor of the trees, playing off the image of "fruitless pains" is suggestive in 464 recalling the ruined cottage which has been overgrown— here, increase and ruin have merged. Wordsworth is writing a tragedy, which, in the full design of The Recluse, he intends to overcome, through the recovery of the Solitary and the triumph of the poet, and because of this intent, we read the equanimity of the Pedlar onto his maker. But Wordsworth never finished the work, and perhaps the contradictory goals set for the other parts precludes a conclusion. "The first and third parts of The Recluse," Wordsworth writes in his Preface, "will consist chiefly of meditations in the Author's own person." By contrast, the final lines of the poem promise more of the Solitary: How far [the Solitary's] erring notions were reformed And whether aught, of tendency as good And pure, from further intercourse ensued; This— if delightful hopes, as heretofore, Inspire the serious song, and gentle heart Cherish, and lofty Minds approve the past— My future labours may not leave untold. (IX 788-99) The poem's future, and the Solitary's fate, lies suspended between Wordsworth's inspiration and the poem's reception. Or to repose the issue, the reformation of the Solitary and the possibility of future good depends on the intercourse between poet and reader. In any event, the critical history of the poem does not mark its narrator's triumph. By and large, the continuity between The Excursion and the Prelude has been 465 rejected by a academic community which can accept the struggles of the latter, but not the critique of the former. Harold Bloom, for example, cites the following passage to "show clearly the decline of Wordsworth, the heavy frost that encrusted a spirit endowed by Nature with a vitality nearly the equal of Blake's" (Company 194-5): the care prospective of our wise Forefathers, who, to guard against the shocks, The fluctuations and decay of things, Embodied and established these high truths In solemn institutions:— men convinced That life is love and immortality . . . (V 1009-14; Bloom quotes to the end of the book, 1. 1028) The rejection of these lines, which in prose might well be a defense of the English Magna Charta or American Constitution— albeit one that raises to the surface difficult interpretive questions which those very institutions, losing sight of a relation between love and life, have buried— -brings us full circle to Richard Posner's remark that "we do not require the poet to show us how he wants us to get from where we are to where in his imaginative vision he wants us to be" (Law and Literature 203); we do not require it, nor do we, taking our cues from Francis Jeffrey, allow it— even though that was precisely Wordsworth's goal. For it remains true that today still, in the guises of objectivism, of law and economics, even of romantic ideology, we cling to 466 property as securing rights, even at the cost of denying those rights, sacrificing them, spending them in the acquisition of property and its tropes of independence and genius. We live as if to agree with Blackstone: So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the community. (I 140) But within the context of The Excursion, it becomes clear that what private property is cannot be an objective given, but arises as an interpretation, an act of textuality and of power. Wordsworth's Excursion, long as it is, needs to be felt as fragmentary, as voicing a vision of social structure at once antiquarian and revolutionary, but one which the legal/economic system, championed by Jeffrey, would not allow, because it might have done. 467 NOTES 1. For Johnston, this series, or one like it— rather than a completed poem— constitutes Wordsworth's promised Recluse. This approach recognizes, and perhaps at moments uncritically absorbs, Wordsworth's contention that the idea of a poem substantially constitutes the poem. Wordsworth's procedures of revision have subsequently characterized the industry of posthumous publication at such sites as the aesthetic debate between the various Preludes enacted through the productions of anthologies as well as the Cornell editions decision to produce the Two-Part Prelude as a distinct text. 2. Typical of Jonathan Wordsworth's aesthetic analysis are these comments on the description of Margaret spinning hemp and the description of Robert: [Sjcarcely less disastrous is the expansion of the Pedlar's fourth visit in order to get in a reference to Margaret's spinning of hemp . . . The process of revision goes on through MS.M. (1804) and MS.P.— responsible, for instance, for the deplorable lines on Robert. (Music 24-5). Jonathan Wordsworth rejects the economic additions— Margaret's spinning as an "employment hereabouts" and Robert's "humble worth" and "keen[] industrious[ness]." This move preserves the text as transcendent in its concerns; one consequence is the liberation of the editor to define the economic parameters of the poem independently of the poem's own economic specificity. The culmination of this process returns to the site of textual interpretation, on which Alan Liu comments: It is a sad testament to the power of the Cornell Wordsworth editions that every critic must now set an arbitrary "event horizon" beneath which he has not the human endurance to descend. (Sense, 609nl4). 3. Galperin's most expansive statement locates Wordsworth's rewriting as the beginning of the revisionist trend exemplified by Levinson and McGann: But where the revisionists increasingly use Wordsworth to disabuse the liberal, humanistic values seemingly encoded by the poems of the Great Decade (and on which Wordsworth's reputation rests), it is the purpose of this study to show that Wordsworth was necessarily the first to understand this revision. (1-2). ______ 468 4. In 1785, petitions were brought to ban peddlers in order to appease retail merchants who faced yet another new tax. As Alan Liu analyzes the debate, the lack of proper documentation is itself a clue to the deep truth of the controversy: peddlers were holdovers from a system of production and distribution that, in the transition to modern production and distribution by retail outlet, became objectionable precisely because it represented the undocumented, unaccountable, and unregulated. (Sense. 345) In essence, the peddlers were too free for the free market because they did not function within either the physical or textual limitations of the market. Just as the older mode of imagining a corresponding audience became a radical act (see ch 3 above) the old mode of selling became the marginal mode. In this context, Wordsworth replaces the peddler in two senses, first, as a poet, he preserves an unalienated exchange, but secondly, as a stamp collector, he stretches the reach of the market through its documentary mechanisms until the margins which the peddler requires are subsumed (for more on Wordsworth as stamp collector, see below in this chapter). 5. Wordsworth's rewriting was in no sense intended to permit other rewriting such as Jeffrey's attacks, Hogg's parodies, or Coleridge's Biocrraphia; that it may do so, however, is a reality of the market in which his works circulated. The market itself destabilized the identities of its authors, a move which, paradoxically, opened the possibility for the exploration of self- identity in works like Byron's Childe Harold and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. As a corollary, however, identities were subject to appropriation. As an example, in "Noctes Ambrosianae," John Wilson created not only his own literary persona, but personalities for other writers; his caricature of the Ettrick Shepherd continues to dominate the general impression of James Hogg. A literary persona is at risk in such an environment; it can be borrowed, altered, and- -to take one view of De Quincey's treatment of Coleridge's plagiarism— unmasked. 6. The equivalent line in the Excursion described ''a Man of reverend age" (I 33). 7. Christensen is borrowing from Foucault: The contrast between Humean force and Byronic strength corresponds to Michel Foucault's 469 distinction between a juridical notion in which "power is taken to be a right, which one is able to possess like a commodity, and which one can in consequence transfer or alienate" and a [sovereign] power that "is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised[."] ("Theorizing Byron's Practice" 478; quoting Foucault, Power/ Knowledge, note omitted) 8. Reproduced in Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed. Hereafter quoted in text by original page number in the Examiner. 21 August 1814; 28 August 1814; and 2 October 1814. 9. Cottom locates this in the eighteenth-century attitude towards taste, championed by Hume and Burke, which regards "uneducated perceptions" as "pseudo-events"; The assurance with which an individual may report an experience is of no consquence if that report does not defer to the social prescriptions for the senses. (Civilized Imagination 2, note omitted) 10. In Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt expresses his ambivalence through a commentary on the literary market he was instrumental in supporting; Mr. Wordsworth might plead, in mitigation of some peculiarities, that he is "the spoiled child of disappointment." We are convinced, if he had been early a popular poet, he would have borne his honours meekly. . . .But the sense of injustice and of undeserved ridicule sours the temper and narrows the views. To have produced works of genius, and to find them neglected or treated with scorn, is one of the heaviest trials of human patience. (249) He might almost be speaking of himself. 11. See also the "Preface to the Edition of 1815": My guiding wish was, that the small pieces of which these volumes consist, thus discriminated, might be regarded under a two-fold view; as composing an entire work within themselves, and as adjuncts to the philosophical Poem, 'The Recluse.' (753) A typically Wordsworthian stance, what is whole from one perspective is partial from another, and the reader must hold both perspectives simultaneously. 470 12. Rochard Posner's position (discussed in chapter one) that poetry is magnificent and law useful, augments Jeffrey's distinction to create a unified modern discourse within economics which can regard literature as gothic relics. 13. That Man and Society are not equivalent was recognized in the economic calculus which demonstrated that self-interest (greed) could result in social good, despite the apparent harm intrinsic in its mode of acquisition. Bentham comfortably argued the virtues of usury by deploying this distinction. Coleridge contemplating his own Recluse in 1797 distinguished between "the mind of man" and "the minds of men" as branches of "universal science," larger than, but of the same order as "Mechanics, Hydrostatics" and "Medicine." Both were necessary to write the great epic, but they were not the same. That Nature and Society are not distinct received one 18th-century articulation by jurists such as Blackstone who recognized a continuum between human law and natural order. That such a doctrine could transmogrify into the revolutionary declaration of natural rights was not anticipated by Blackstone, but for Wordsworth, that possibility was a historical reality in need of explanation. 14. Coleridge reproduces the remark in a hyperbolic version: "THIS WON'T DO!" (BL 2:115). In this cast, in the context of the Bioaraphia Literaria. the remark appears hysterical; and, more distorting still, it seems to be primarily an aesthetic judgment which might well be considered "largely dishonest" (Lyon 2), given Jeffrey's private remarks on Wordsworth's poetry. Coleridge wrote in 1825 that Jeffrey "told me that he was himself an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth's poetry, but it was necessary that a Review should have a character," while Scott had already written in 1810 that "Jeffrey is said in private to talk very highly but that is no rule for his public criticism for I['ve] seen him weep warm tears over Wordsworth's poetry & you know how he treats the poor Balladmaker when he is mounted into the Scorner's chair" (Lyon 2-3). Given Coleridge's deeply ambivalent feelings towards Wordsworth and the conflict between their poetic and critical productions of the mid 1810s, neither his analysis in the Bioaraphia nor his remark ten years later can be given any weight in terms of historical accuracy, and Scott's remark regards only Wordsworth's earlier poetry which lacks what have been taken for the chief "aesthetic" defects of the Excursion. 471 its length and its didactic presentation. Coleridge's public defense of Wordsworth, curiously, must be regarded as equally dishonest given his private remarks about being disappointed in the Excursion, but his purpose, at that point in the Bioaraphia. was not to praise Wordsworth but to attack Jeffrey, and more generally, to establish his own critical eminence against that of the reviewing industry. Matthew Arnold invoked Jeffrey's comment in regard to Wordsworth's poetic style: although Jeffrey completely failed to recognize Wordsworth's real greatness, he was yet not wrong in saying of the Excursion as a work of poetic style: 'This will never do." (Lyon 122; "Wordsworth" Essavs in Criticism. Ser II, 156) Edward Quillinan's estimation of the Excursion appears in Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers: "It will do, in spite of my Lord Jeffrey, and its occasional defects" (Lyon 140). The phrase "in spite" should be given its full weight; what the poem does sticks in Jeffrey's critical craw. Finally, Lyon brings all these comments to bear in his attempt to recover the Excursion from what he views as unwarranted critical neglect; he concludes his endearing fair effort by muting Quillinan's comment quoted above into a final statement of the aesthetic worth of the poem which, he rightly points out, Wordsworth considered his most important. I cite this wrangling over Jeffrey's comment not only as a reminder of how influential his reviewing was, but to show that it was co-opted and re-invested with a variety of meanings until we tend to read the remark through Arnold's eyes, as if it were a comment on poetic style. 15. "Wordsworth's Poems" 18 07, 215; "Wordsworth's White Doe" 1815, 355; and "Wordsworth's Tour" 1822, 450, as well as the review of The Excursion all mention Wordsworth's "genius." 16. For a detailed discussion of the reliance by lawyers on case law as developed in Coke's Reports as a precursor to the establishment of an empowered legal profession with in the seventeenth century, see Holdsworth V 339- VI 163. 17. I presume this is also a joke. A reader seeking to perform this replacement would wade through the entire poem without ever having the opportunity". 18. In chiding Richard Watson's defense of Burke's position on the French Revolution, Wordsworth had written, probably in 1793, that 472 we are necessarily led to conclude that you have no wish to dispel the infatuation which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor and consigning the rest to the more slow and more painful consumption of want.("Letter to Bishop Llandaff" 49). The oxymoronic pun on consumption, which Roy Porter has shown operative in 18th century medical discourse ("Consumption: The Disease of the Consumer Society?"), is reinforced by Wordsworth's repetition of the word in the next paragraph: Political convulsions have been said particularly to call forth concealed abilities; but it has been seldom observed how vast is their consumption of it. The concealed attack is against Burke, whose rejection of the French Revolution, given his support of the American Colonies in their rebellion, was termed a surprise by Paine and others. The correspondence between consumption in Parliament and among the poor is both parallel— the war uses up both the physical resources of the poor and the talents of the politicians— and chiasmatic— the consumption (eating) by the government corresponds to the consumption (disease or the negative eating of "want" as if it were a substance) of the poor. Between the two quoted passages is an example of the Bishop consuming; he "has partaken of Mr. Burke's intoxicating bowl." Burke himself is something consumed and consumptive, a typical Wordsworthian move in which the formal technique blurs into content, thus anticipating interpretive strategies. 19. Jeffrey denies what Jean Baudrillard would later distinguish as the "sign-value" of brass buttons, a supplement to their "use-value" and "exchange-value" (Political Economy of the sign 65). 20. Bentham's mathematical metaphor, suggesting a rigorous formulation, is typical: Legislation has the same centre with morals, but it has not the same circumference. (Quoted in Keeton, 26). This aphorism follows from sixteenth-century doctrines that the intention to commit a crime, though immoral, was not criminal, and that the commission of a killing during the course of a felony constituted murder and the presumption of intent. In the fourteenth century, by contrast, intent did constitute a criminal offence (see Holdsworth VIII 433). More recently, the paradoxical nature of any division between act and intent has been explored by H.L.A. Hart in "The House of Lords on 473 Attempting the Impossible.1 ' In Haughton v. Smith (1975) the House of Lords held that one who handles goods, mistakenly believing at the time of handling that they were at that time still stolen goods, cannot be convicted of an attempt to handle stolen goods. (369) To hold otherwise, according to Lord Morris of Borth-y- Gest, would be "to convict [the respondent] . . . not for what he did but simply because he had a guilty intention" (quoted in Hart, "Attempting the Impossible" 370nl2). But all unsuccessful crimes present this quandary: is firing an unloaded gun, believed to be loaded, attempted murder? A loaded gun that is broken and will not fire? A gun that fires but sends the bullet wide? I am not concerned with resolving this question, but would point out that such a resolution will function by locating a distinction between the guilty intention and the guilty act at an arbitrary point. Essentially, it is an interpretive act and requires (or invokes) an interpretive theory of justification. 21. The final resolution of that debt worked itself out as an intra-family struggle between two professionals, Richard the lawyer and William the poet. When James Lowther died and his heir printed "an advertisement in the Cumberland Paauet inviting all those with claims against the late earl to send in their statements" (Moorman, 559), a vigorous debate erupted between William and Richard regarding how to approach the delicate matter. William proposed to "draw up a memorial immediately," and that he intended to use his literary skills is clear from the post-script to the letter in which he adds "It would be proper to state the utter destitution of my Sister on account of the affair" (LEY 360, 10 June 1802). He clearly anticipated that Richard would favor a more legalistic approach, demanding payment of principal and interest and threatening legal action since the "statute of limitations d[id] not bar" the Wordsworths' claim (LEY, 372). William reminded Richard of their past failures: [W]ith what greater success could you carry on a suit against him, with his immense fortune, than against his predecessor? You will reply to this perhaps that Lord Lowther is a man of a fair character, and would have a suit conducted in a fair way. But will his agents Attornies and people about him be men of honour and principle? . . . What success was a poor man ever known to 474 have against a very rich one in a Law suit— especially of a complex kind? (LEY, 24 June 1802) Richard's response to this letter, and its attack on his profession, was apparently strident, since Wordsworth's next letter chides him for his tone: Many parts of [your letter] are totally deficient in that respect with which Man ought to deal with Man, and Brother with Brother. You seem to speak to me as if you were speaking to a Child. (LEY, 3 July 1802) Richard apparently rejected William's advice and planned to proceed on the basis of his own legal expertise, a course with which Wordsworth strongly disagreed: We see what Lawyers and Attornies have done already; and depend upon it if you proceed according to the letter in this track we are ruined. Though the affair must be bottomed no doubt upon a right in Law, that right will be lost to us, and we shall draw no advantage from it whatsoever, if we do not constantly bear in mind that our hopes of success (both in the conduct and in the final settlement) must depend entirely upon our combining with this right certain principles of natural justice, and considering the affair as an affair betwixt man and man. The repetition of the image of a man facing a man relates the intra-family struggle with the external effort to recover the debt. In both cases, natural justice— the sense of propriety in communication between brothers and the sense of honour between men— will be ultimately effective, and it cannot be achieved by lawyers, but rather by writers. Richard had counselled patience, and Wordsworth had termed that advice a sort of mechanic rule [hackney men of business] lay down, easy to adhere to? and thus they cheaply purchase to themselves the applause of being methodical, circumspect, and temperate men. Richard's response was conciliatory; he "promised to avoid litigation" and to proceed "as expeditiously as circumstances would permit" (Moorman I 561). By 1803, an agreement was reached for about L8000, roughly L2 000 less than the current value of the debt. 22. Wordsworth complicates these lines by echoing them in a retrospective passage which locates the victory of the French Revolution "Not in Utopia," But in the very world which is the world Of all of us, — the place in which, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all! (XI 724-28) 475 23. To the extent that enclosed land shadows the opening landscape of "Tintern Abbey," then the landscape itself operates within a largely symbolic discourse even in its unharmonized form. Approximately forty percent of the costs of enclosure were legal expenses. Which gesture— the legal documentation or the hedgerow which surrounded the enclosed property— was symbolic and which was the reality symbolized depended upon the position of the audience reading the acts. Therefore, the physical hedgerows in the first verse paragraph of "Tintern Abbey," like those in "Old Man Travelling," are already implicated in a legalistic economy. Consequently, the replacement of one landscape with another is not merely a shifting from a historical paradigm to an aesthetic one, but an effort to replace the horizon of legal discourse with that of poetic system. 24. See John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary 243-52. Not surprisingly, the issue of punishment interested both Boswell and Johnson: Dr. Johnson deplored the proposed move [of executions from Tyburn] to Newgate as a "new way" of hanging and preferred executions under the "old method" precisely because they drew crowds . . . [Boswell found that to] be present at but held at a distance from an intensely self- regarding spectacle seems to have provoked a profound moral self-consciousness . . . At Tyburn he experienced ungoverned terror; at Newgate the quite different emotion that Lessing describes as tragic fear" (Bender 24 6-7). 25. Recent scholarship which has emphasized Wordsworth's concern with his career helps suggest how his approach to poetry was accumulative, both in the repetition and revision of his work and the wide scope of categorical investigations. See, for example, Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse; Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: and Galperin, Authority and Revision in Wordsworth. 26. Klancher presents a similar interpretation: [For Wordsworth,] The historical transformation of the audience connects to a disturbing shift in the power of signs to merge the genuine into the counterfeit and the existential into the merely 'literary.' This position is hardly an empiricist one, as it is often described. Longing for the recovery of all the referentials, Wordsworth comes to a position unmistakably 'modern': a 476 belief in the power of signs to transform the real itself. (Reading Audiences. 138) 27. See Louis Crompton, Bvron and Greek Love 27-9. 28. For the established tradition of plague as a political trope and a bureaucratic experience, see Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, ch 2, "A Political Consciousness." 29. Alan Liu has argued that "Subversion contributes to the historical changes that condition us, when we look back from the changed world, to see subversion as part of the way things were Established" ("Wordsworth and Subversion" 88). Wordsworth seems to me highly aware of this dialectic in the deployment of his poetry. 30. Hazlitt echoes David Hume in describing The Excursion as having "fell still-born from the press" (Spirit. 198). 31. Galperin has pointed out that this attitude actually constitutes a nostalgia by the Wanderer, whose recourse to the "infancy of society" as an exemplary moment in history is an outward token of his inability to grow up. (Revision. 47). 32. Most blatantly, just as the Pedlar is the precursor for the Poet, the Minstrel and Knight-Errant are precursors for the Pedlar. See II 1-27 and VIII 44-116. 33. For a discussion of a similar moment, see Galperin, Revision. 38-9. 34. Within the context of the New Testament, a relation of poverty and spirituality was pervasive, as the comparison between the King James versions of Luke and Matthew on the opening of the beatitudes reveals: And he [Jesus] opened his mouth, and taught them [the multitudes], saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their's is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3). In Luke, the poor is taken literally, and simultaneously, the audience is shifted as Jesus looks to his disciples but uses the second person address: And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for your's is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20). 477 (There is a Biblical dispute as to what the phrase from which "daily bread" is translated literally means— the actual bread for the day, or the bread of tomorrow which is from the kingdom of God; on this, see Joachim Jeremias, The Pravers of Jesus 85-104.) Although Wordsworth read "daily bread" literally, he recognized that it was not far from spiritual nourishment. 35. This reading accords with Jon Klancher's reminder that "What will be represented in the Lyrical Ballads is not the 'real' but a 'real language' all but inaccessible to the middle-class mind" (Reading Public 139). 36. Hume had early given this point a homely formulation: "For what purpose make a partition of goods, where every one has already more than enough?" Without scarcity, there is neither property nor justice; Hume imagines in such a place "No tillage: No navigation. Music, poetry, and contemplation form his sole business" ("Of Justice" 179-80). In this imagining, the possibility of plentitude is rendered already impossible because these "businesses" enforce the lacks which they fulfill. 37. Thompson details the circumstances of the laborers in "Standards and Experiences," Working Class ch 10. 38. It is difficult to know how considered the reference to Archimedes was. For example, he died when Marcellus' army finally overran Syracuse and a soldier stabbed him as he drew a mathematical figure in the sand. Marcellus, who had given orders to spare Archimedes, commanded an honorable burial for him. Does this violence and expatiation enter into the allusion? Further, does the passage allude to Paine's "Introduction" to Part II of "the Rights of Man: WHAT Archimedes said of the mechanical powers, may be applied to Reason and Liberty: 'Had we.' said he, 'a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.* (159) 39. The Royal Society solved this quandary by claiming its interests encompassed all phenomena. Thomas Sprat, the first secretary of the society claimed that its first concern was "to make faithful Records, of all the Works of Nature, or Art." (quoted in Greenleaf, Order. Empiricism and Politics 214). The illusion, part of the ideology of disinterest central to eighteenth-century sciences, economics, law, and criticism, is that the procedure of recording could be politically neutral, when the method of recording— a mode of narrative— was never 478 neutral (see Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests in passim). Acts of exclusion in such a guise become nearly invisible. As Christopher Hill observes, "The Royal Society set the seal of its approval on the Interregnum development of prose by 'preferring the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits and scholars.'" (Century of Revolution 216). 40. Among the various sources Foucault cites, the clearest expression of this concept is Zimmerman (Traite de 1'experience. 1800): The author of nature has fixed the course of most diseases through the immutable laws that one soon discovers if the course of the disease is not interrupted or disturbed by the patient. (quoted in Birth. 14) 41. Jeffrey had already associated literary and economic value of the poem, and Wordsworth was perhaps stinging from the review's opening: This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. (Edinburgh Review Oct. 1815, 355) 42. See Jon Klancher, Reading Audiences 148-50 and Lee Erickson, "The Egoism of Authorship" 43-5. 43. The phrase survives from two letters written in 1789. To James Tobin, March 6: My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society. Indeed I know not any thing which will not come within the scope of my plan. (LEY, 212) To James Losh, five days later: I have written 13 00 lines of a poem which I hope to make of considerable utility; its title will be The Recluse or views of Nature. Man. and Society. (LEY, 214) . 44. In a letter to Moore in 1820, Byron wrote: Did you read [Hunt's] skimble-skamble about [Wordsworth] being at the head of his professional . . . He is the only one of us (but of us he is not) whose coronation I would oppose. Let them take Scott, Campbell, Crabbe, or you, or me, or any of the living, and throne him;— but not this new Jacob Behmen. (Letters VI 47) Conclusion A: Wordsworth and Hume on Copyright The eighteenth century established an alliance between publisher and writer, the producers, respectively, of the work and the text, contained by mercantile operations: The booksellers were the other, the more public, half of the book business, and during the eighteenth century they, and particularly a small influential group known as "the trade," dominated the book publishing business, controlling both printers and writers. (Kernan, Printing Technology 62) The structure of the audience did not, in practice, require the resolution of a conflict over ownership between publisher and author. The dissolution of a polite readership into a reading public which could absorb over thirteen-thousand copies of the monthly Edinburgh Review by 1818 called for a restructuring of the marketplace. In this restructuring, professional writers and booksellers found themselves habitually bargaining. The tension between these two mutually dependent industries becomes apparent in the way that they find themselves on the same side of the copyright 480 issue in 1777, and opposed in 18 38. Once again, the issue of the relation between a corporeal property and an incorporeal property was fought, not as once between ' sovereign and legal institution, nor even between book ! producers and 'pirates,' but now, within the marketplace of book production itself, between publishers and j I authors. Who was to govern? That question turned on j whether an authorial text dominated the physical work of I i the publisher, or whether, like an invention subsumed into the industrialization, a text was consumed in the manufacturing process of making books. Both Hume and Wordsworth represented their literary . I marketplaces as functions of literature (or, for Hume, | ! Letters), supplemented by economics and law. These other | ! institutional structures became objects of scrutiny for j both Hume's essays and Wordsworth's poetry, as well as ! conceptual metaphors which could be appropriated. This i i view is both reflected in the Excursion and serves as the j enabling fiction of it. For Hume, the potential reality | of such a view is reflected in his attitude towards copyright. For sixty years, the Statute of Anne limiting copyright to 28 years co-existed with a common law and I trade-practice understanding that a copyright, being a | 481 property, must be perpetual, and it was in general under the common law that injunctions were sought in Chancery.1 In February, 1774, this contradiction ended. The House of Lords ruled in Donaldson v . Beckett that Queen Anne's Act had abolished the common law protection, and provided the only available protection to booksellers.2 The Lords overturned the Court of Sessions decision by a 6-5 vote, with Mansfield (who would nearly certainly have sided with the minority, since it was his own ruling being overturned) absent for ethical reasons. The Annual Register offered this analysis: Near L200,000 worth of what was honestly purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property, is now reduced to nothing. (quoted in Letters of David Hume. 275). Hume, who as a writer, presumably stood to lose money since the value of a limited copyright was less than that of a perpetual one, was not particularly bothered. He was 63 years old and only in fair health, which might have aided his indifference, although, in 1839, Wordsworth indicated that his age ("approaching 70") was one reason he was so concerned about reforming the copyright act. Hardly matching Wordsworth's industry in writing letters to modify the copyright law, Hume wrote a letter that a lawyer for the booksellers introduced into the Commons in an effort to secure legislative relief from Donaldson. The lawyer described the letter as 482 | I "containing the wannest wishes to the petitioners, | i lamenting the late decision of the House of Peers as I { fatal to literature, and hoping that the booksellers j I might get speedy relief" (quoted in Letters of David Hume j 278). To Strahan, at whose request Hume probably wrote ; the public letter, he privately expressed a nearly j f i i indifferent opinion: , I have writ you an ostensible Letter on the Subject of literary Property, which contains my | real Sentiments so far as it goes. However, I j shall tell you the truth? I do not foresee any such bad Consequences as you mention from laying j the Property open. The Italians and French have more pompous [i.e., splendid] Editions of their Classics since the Expiration of the Privileges than any we have of ours: And at least, every Bookseller, who prints a Book, will endeavor to make it as compleat and correct as he can. (Letters of David Hume. 274-5, notes omitted). In part, Hume is expressing confidence in the book- i selling cartel to regulate its own marketplace. The I Edinburgh pirates cannot secure the best (i.e., most j I recent) editions, and their potential threat would prompt j the London publishers to produce superior, and reasonably j priced, editions.3 For Hume, the publishing cartel is j potent enough and unified enough that its own beliefs j will determine the shape of the literary marketplace. Further, his attitude, and the introduction of support of the bookseller's petition by literary figures, indicate that the mechanism of production was understood to be a i I combination of publisher and writer. Johnson's 483 Dictionary might be exemplary. His words were derived from the texts provided by his publishers, to whom he returned them through the agency of the printer, W. j Strahan. Strahan was also Hume's publisher and a long- ! t time correspondent, as well as the printer for Edward , Gibbon, Adam Smith, and Tobias Smollett. j Hume's assessment seems, for a time, to have been correct. The cartel of English booksellers assembled by 1777 and, pooling their copyrights, agreed to produce "an i elegant and uniform edition of The English Poets . . . ■ i with a concise account of the life of each authour, by \ Dr. Samuel Johnson" (E. Dilly to Boswell, Life of Johnson. 802).4 But, by degrees, the cartel dissolved , into individual concerns, and the interests of writers ' ■ r and publishers divided. Thus the striking contrast ! i between the battle over Donaldson and the debate over | Talfourd's bill (introduced in 1838) to extend copyright to sixty years: the booksellers and the authors were on opposite sides of the latter bill. I The Wordsworthian view of literary property as the sign of a connection between reader and writer positioned | the publisher as an agent of the writer. Wordsworth contracted with publishers on a profit-sharing basis, and ^ retained his copyrights. Wordsworth's view on copyright, j in which he invokes the law against the market practices, ! 484 can be seen as the third in a series of works which we j have examined which take a position on literary property. ! In the Lyrical Ballads, especially the Preface and "A Poet's Epitaph," the poet disdains the aid of the courts, and relies on a doctrine of natural law which finds its j instantiation not, as natural law lawyers insisted, in the courts, but in the poem itself, a document which is ; both contract and consideration for that contract, which is labor. In The Excursion. Wordsworth still insists on the natural law basis of literary property, but locates | it within a natural law basis of property generally. In j i appropriating the role of judgment to the Wanderer, but ! marking his insufficiency to the task in the new marketplace, Wordsworth re-establishes the courts not as the authorization of the literary property, but as the protectors of a value that inheres entirely within the i poem. By 1838, perhaps contemplating his own death, Wordsworth had lost still more faith in the ability of the poet to regulate the market, and, like Hume's calling j on the juridical powers by using his will to position "My j Own Life," Wordsworth called on the legislature to protect his family's interest in the Prelude. as well as j I his earlier works. This patrimony, like the encumbered j land Michael receives, is not a simple gift of monetary j value, but a property of responsibility. The publication 485 of the Prelude was a complicated enterprise, and marked the continuity of an industry of Wordsworthian family production. Wordsworth wrote letters to Members of Parliament (and their friends) calling for support on the Second Reading of Talfourd's Bill in 1838 (see LLY III 535-547). As he tells Francis Lloyd, a Birmingham banker, "the Booksellers and Printers, in their rapacity, threaten a very strong opposition" (2 Apr. 1838).5 In addition to private correspondence, he published two letters in newspapers, one anonymously and the other addressed to Talfourd. Wordsworth's recognition of his difficult position is apparent in his reluctance to present a petition although he eventually acquiesced to Talfourd's pleas; at first, he wrote a letter to Talfourd who published it in The Morning Post which both established Wordsworth's argument on copyright and explained his reluctance to petition. His approach is a rhetorical feint: I am loth to think so unfavorably of Parliament as to deem that it requires petitions from authors as a ground for granting them a privilege, the justice of which is so obvious. ("Law of Copyright" in Prose 313) The term justice, underscored by being "obvious," deflects the issue from a personal petition to Wordsworth's granting parliament the ability to perform its task, the distribution of justice. He further defers by claiming that the bill at issue does not rise to ; address the true nature of the argument, that literary property ought to be perpetual, as it was at common law.6 The letter, finally, serves as evidence so that Talfourd i will not be | treated as a volunteer intruding without wish or j sanction openly expressed by any one of the class ; whose rights and interests you have so much to your honour stepped forward to maintain. ("Copyright" 312) i i Wordsworth's rhetoric obscures his personal interest, and ! positions himself as outside the skirmish— since only perpetual copyright would truly address the transcendent value of poetry. His letter served as an introduction ! for Talfourd to prove he is not intruding, but acting in the interests of writers; in this regard, the letter is j fashioned as a favor to Talfourd. ' Given Wordsworth's care in continually revising his work, his anxiety rests not only on how much money his l family can make from the Prelude. but on whether his j ] family will be able to preserve the relationships of his j poems, governed by the Prelude, centered on the l Excursion, against the ability of the literary | i marketplace, now dominated by publishers, to dissolve his j canon and open up interpretive gaps which would not | merely allow misreading, but make the correspondence of 487 labor between reader and writer impossible. In "A Poet to his Grandchild: Sequel to 'Plea for Authors,"1 I Wordsworth uses the sonnet form explicitly to associate ! the economic and literary motives. In the octave, he imagines his grandchild in want, the consequence of which is that his further descendants will be "left unfit . . . l /even to feel or understand/My simplest Lay" (4-6). The » j sestet turns to the "Statutes of the Land," which, like Wordsworth's poetic work, need constant revision to approximate "Nature's claim/Or Reason's" (8, 10). From this broad vision, the sonnet closes on "hopes spun in i timid line" (11), a phrase which shifts to a vision of cottage economy while punning on the poetic "line." The ultimate effect is to render interdependent the fates of poetic and genetic progeny.7 j i Previous to the open letter to Talfourd, Wordsworth j published a letter anonymously in the Kendal Mercury. ; i The letter "To the Editor of the Kendal Mercury" responded within a week point-by-point to a "petition against Sergeant Talfourd's Copyright Bill from j compositors, pressmen, and others employed in the town of Kendal, to be presented to the House of Commons by the representative of that place" published in the Mercury j April 7, 1837 ("Copyright" 309). i I 488 Both Wordsworth and the employees of Kendal whom he j i I was opposing had a curious rhetorical task of balancing 1 arguments in favor of the public at large and in favor of their self-interest. To conceal the latter completely would be patently false and compromise integrity; to i over-rely on self-interest would smack of greed. The petitioners declare that altering the copyright laws would be "highly injurious to the interests of the ! community, the literature of the country, and more particularly to the interests of the petitioners" ("Copyright" 309). Wordsworth solves the rhetorical task by appropriating this quotation, which allows him to play I ! the role of answering objections. Further, he uses ! another quotation to center the focus of the issue on literature, and never addresses the question of the j I interests of the petitioners; The effect of the extension of copyright proposed in Sergeant Talfourd's bill would, according to the petitioners, be to render works having that privilege "a mere dead letter," or confine them to the hands of the wealthy, and could not be j productive of any real advantage. ("Copyright" 3 09) j The protection of copyright, the petitioners argue, would j prevent the republication necessary to keep a work vital. Against these dire consequences, Wordsworth suggests that j ! the issue concerns a limited number of works, which have i 489 relatively little economic impact on printers in comparison to the best sellers: [I]t will be found that a book for which there is : a great demand would be sure of being supplied to j the public under any circumstances; but a good | book for which there might be continued demand, though not a large one, would be much more sure j of not becoming a "dead letter," if the proposed j law were enacted than if it were not. ("Copyright" 309) These fewer works, good books with only limited demand, turn out to be the works central to English culture. Wordsworth points out that in America, where no copyright j for English works exists, no publisher can venture to J produce a decent edition, for fear it will be undersold by a "work incorrectly and meanly executed" ("Copyright" 309). The implicit argument is that without copyright, the economic currency, money, will overpower and debase cultural currency, literature. Wordsworth works in the self-interest of the writers and their heirs. Where the petitioners set their interest in defeating the bill as parallel to (and so, as Wordsworth excerpts them, independent of) the improvement of literature, Wordsworth argues that the self-interest j ( of the writer, and the consequent obligation of the 1 writer's heirs, actually guarantees the improvement of ! i literature: [W]ho can doubt that [author's children and descendants] would be particularly prompted to i extend the circulation of his works, not merely 490 for their own pecuniary advantage, but out of respect or reverence for his memory, and to fulfil what could not but be presumed to be his wish? ("Copyright" 310) This is a vision of familial obligation comparable to j I Michael's efforts to maintain his ancestral lands, but one which obscures the possibility of a Luke, not least j i because the moral education implicit in such works would help prevent such erring. This vision allows Wordsworth j to integrate the writer's monetary interest into the i I family industry which revolves around the author's work. j ! After pointing out that neither Coleridge nor Southey made much money writing, and only recently did "another author" (i.e., Wordsworth) make much, he declares: Not one of them but is too highminded to repine; i but the sense of justice is, I doubt not, sufficiently strong in them all to make them resent the denial to their posterity or their j heirs of that moderate compensation which a ; rational view of their interests would lead them to aim at, and which the public might be ready to bestow. ("Copyright" 310) The last phrase is telling; by securing copyright, the public's judgment is preserved by making the works available for that judgment. Without it, the chaos of an America of books prevents proper judgment, proper fulfillment of family duties, and finally, prevents writers from achieving their best work by making it j harder for them to imagine a future audience. After i I i addressing two more arguments by the petitioners, j 491 Wordsworth concludes with a summary that ends by observing that this issue is not merely one of interest, | but of obligation: I i And lastly, you violate a fundamental right, by leaving that species of property which has the highest claim to protection, with the least share of it; for as to the analogy, which has been ! elsewhere much dwelt upon, between literary property and mechanical inventions and chemical ! discoveries, it is, as might be shown in a few | words, altogether fallacious. ("Copyright" 312) ! Literature has the "highest claim to protection" because as an act of culture, it most effectively protects culture. At this point, it becomes clear why the best i sellers, ridiculed long ago in the Preface to the Lyrical i Ballads are excluded from the need for protection; they j do not acculturate, as literature does. By way of anticipatory example for this point, Wordsworth had pointed out that authors with copyright protection (his example is "Mr. Wordsworth") do not deny to educators the ability to extract their work and republish it in i convenient form for teaching. In fact, he suggests, that i the authors are more willing than the publishers, since, in another example, "the publisher of [Mr. Wordsworth's] ! works threatened [the editor of a sonnet collection that contained 57 pages out of 300 of Wordsworth's poetry] him ; i with an application to the Court of Chancery for an injunction," but "Mr Wordsworth's immediate reply" caused j the issue to be dropped. j 492 Wordsworth repeats the claim that no analogy exists i between patents and copyrights in his letter to Talfourd I and other letters to members of parliament. He explains 1 the dissimilarity by quoting Talfourd to Peel, who had suggested the analogy was reasonable. The defense rests on two points. First, inventions receive immediate 1 response and compensation as society puts them into use * immediately. Second, inventions are rarely unique, but part of an on-going communal project so that, had not one inventor come upon a certain discovery, another soon ; would have, "but who will suggest that if Shakespeare had , not written Lear, or Richardson Clarissa, other poets and j novelists would have invented them" (LLY III 572). I am not concerned with how convincing these arguments were, a difficult historical question since the bill was withdrawn in 1838 and a variant of it was passed j in 1842. Rather, I have tried to show that Wordsworth's I campaign solidified the transcendent vision of the poet, , i but paradoxically located that vision squarely within the j marketplace. This position revised the Wordsworthian j I view in the Lvrical Ballads, a revision that confronted \ the paradoxical requirement of transcendence itself, to have a specific historical space to transcend, and unless it could shape that space actively, other mechanisms, such as law, economics, and industry, would do so. I am 493 not suggesting, therefore, that Wordsworth's poetry fails, because its transcendence is a fiction, but rather that the fiction of that transcendence is precisely the I space that permits the labor of the reader, struggling to j rewrite the poem not merely against the critic but ! I against the author himself in whose name he labors. j f B. The Nature of Death ; A natural law theorist might attempt to illustrate our sense of death by Lear's observation near the end of j Shakespeare's Kina Lear: I I know when one is dead, and when one lives. (V iii 262) I Part of what is heartbreaking about this scene, however, is that the line— especially as performed on a stage in j \ which the body of Cordelia is literally alive and as qualified by Lear's decision to use a scientific test of whether Cordelia's "breath will mist" a looking glass (V iii 263)— is false. False not merely for Lear, but for the audience. » 1 Even the basic truth of death, under the right conditions, is an interpretive problem, and such | conditions will appertain at any moment language is summoned. Nature does not tell us of natural law, but, as Wordsworth's Excursion argues, our inventions of 494 natural law tell us about nature. Wordsworth, in the slow process of recovering from his daughter Dora's death j in 1847, ventured to visit his son Willy, and, describing Willy's wife, recurs to the final scene of Kino Lear; Her manners are quiet, gentle and mild, her voice sweet, which we have upon high authority is "an excellent thing in woman." < (quoted in Moorman II 602) j i The process of grieving the death of a daughter involves a rewriting over that death, complicating it by merging it with the sentiments for a daughter-in-law, that peculiar status of being within a family only by virtue of law. The sad, if not tragic, overtones of this letter are both distanced and enforced by Wordsworth's j , I misquotation, as Cordelia's voice was "soft," not I "sweet." Wordsworth, who had been treated as something | i as a national relic for the last decade, could not miss that in placing his daughter/daughter-in-law as Cordelia, he positioned himself as Lear near the end of the play.8 Death can not be rendered natural, or rather, death i is rendered unnatural by its human particularity. More j generally, The Excursion exploits the terms of the ' Recluse, "Man," "Nature," and "Human Life" not to j demonstrate the transparency of any of these terms, but i the reverse: to demonstrate that they only arise in the | i ( mediation of language, human interaction, and political ; struggle. At a more local level, the significance of the , 495 parishioners buried in the Church-yard resides in how they are talked about, how their lives are reconstructed into narrative. The deaths in this work— the solitary's wife, the parishioners, Margaret— are not deflected, but subsumed into larger narrations, and poetry itself becomes the term which mediates the naturalness of Death i and the unnaturalness of any particular deaths.9 Let me put the matter at its most paradoxical to generations of Wordsworth readers: Wordsworth is less the ; i poet of nature than Francis Jeffrey. In Wordsworth, j i I nature is a mediated term, one constructed within a j debate of institutional jurisdiction. Francis Jeffrey, by contrast, accepts the hegemonic position of law and j legal metaphors, out of which he constructs a human j I nature that is immune to history and becomes the measure of poetry. Stanley Fish, considering a contemporary nature law theorist, points out that all theories of nature move at some point to a grounding in a convention.10 In Wordsworth's "A spirit did my slumber seal . . . ," the significance of the rocks and stones is itself part of the mystery which law and science confronts; the decision to apply one mode a priori from Wordsworth's perspective is to surrender the mystery and complexity of experience. Poetry, by intensifying the i 496 real language of men, resists such an a priori categorization. As Fish would be quick to point out, however, Wordsworth himself achieves this perspective only by constituting another set of interpretive strategies for his community; as I hope I have I demonstrated in the previous chapters, these interpretive j I strategies are often appropriated from the very fields of j I discourse— law, science, history— which romantic poetry j I seeks to master. This appropriation, in turn, forced | Wordsworth's poetry to rely on the very structures it I attempts to transcend as the ground of its intelligibility. ii. William Wordsworth did, as Jon Klancher suggests (Reading Public 150), find his audience and not posthumously. In the late 1830s, Wordsworth's poetry earned him L1500 (Owen, "Costs"). While a certain portion of this must be accounted for by purchasers who placed Wordsworth's complete works on their shelves beside Milton and Shakespeare as artifacts of culture, Henry Taylor's review (Quarterly Review 1841) of "The Sonnets of William Wordsworth" (1838) shows that Wordsworth was being read, and on his own terms. Taylor, for example, reads the sonnets in relation to The j Excursion: ! 497 [T]aking the 8th Book of the 'Excursion' for a connecting commentary, the reader may be led by the Sonnets to trace the course of political liberty through some of its leading consequences in our own country. (Quarterly Review. [1841] 24) Taylor interprets "The world is too much with us " as a critique of the economics in which industry is balanced not by rest and repose, but by an "excitement of another kind— the excitement of spending," a word which balances the wasting of one's self with the acquisition of objects.1 1 The conclusion of Taylor's essay introduces the sonnet sequence "On the Punishment of Death" which Wordsworth would publish for the first time in 1842. These sonnets overtly enter a political debate which Taylor outlines.12 Taylor comments that Wordsworth offers his opinions "in poetry with as deep a solicitude as if they were delivered from the bench or the pulpit" (41). The first sonnet "Suggested by the View of Lancaster Castle (on the Road from the South)," opens with a description of the beauty of the view: This spot— at once unfolding sight so fair Of sea and land . . . (1-2) This is, in its diction, typically Wordsworthian, but the octave ends by asking a question which marks the incongruity between the sight and its effect on human I beings: 498 Why bears it the name of 'Weeping Hill'? (8) This move reverses the procedures of the "Poems on the Naming of Places" in which naming is used to make the "natural appearance" of a place evident. The sestet answers this question: Lancaster prison is the site of "lingering durance or quick death with shame" (11), and this spot represents the prisoners' first view of their future. It is a view that is, in a sense, not seen: Their first look— blinded as tears fell in showers Shed on their chains; and hence that doleful name. (13-4) Like the prisoners who are blinded, the reader also cannot see the castle, until Wordsworth makes it visible through the explanation of the name, just as he had with the private site of Michael's sheep-fold. The arguments which Wordsworth presents for capital punishment are by now, and likely by then, platitudinous, but from a critical viewpoint, the relation which these poems develop between the state, the people, and the poet represents the end of the professional trajectory traced in the previous chapters. The first two sonnets develop sympathy for the criminal, but equally suggest that it is the limits of that sympathy which can be most effective in ultimately eliminating capital punishment: Strike not from Law's firm hand that awful rod, But leave it thence to drop from lack of use ("Conclusion" 12-3) 499 The final poem, "Apology," (which follows "Conclusion") justifies the poet's turn to such a subject: The formal World relaxes her cold chain For One who speaks in numbers; ampler scope His utterance finds; . . . And, serving Truth, the heart more strongly beats Against all barriers which his labour meets (1-3, 6-8) The image is of the poet and indeed all human beings as prisoners of the "formal World" but by appropriating form, the poet gains a freedom which is simultaneously a responsibility. Wordsworth does not seek to free us from a world too much with us, but to make the character of that "too much"— a by-product of necessary social institutions such as law and economy— apparent as, paradoxically, the lack which only the poet can fill. i 500 NOTES 1. After the lapsing of the licencing act, Queen Anne's statute established a limited copyright which established the 28 year limit on copyright. The bill, although it established a specific property right, did not allow the assignees of that right to set any price on the sale of works; that is, the Act did not contemplate a free market in which competition would establish prices, partly because the Act reduced competition, and partly because in 1709, local marketplaces functioned on traditional prices. The Act provided a provision to insure that it would not be construed as altering that tradition in regard to literary property: "A Court of Arbitration was established in case 'any bookseller shall set a price upon any book as shall be conceived by any person to be too high and unreasonable'" (Letters of David Hume. 278, quoting Statutes at Large. xii, 84). This provision was repealed in 1738, suggesting that the literary marketplace offered sufficient constraints on prices by virtue of the difficulty in preventing piracies and the willingness of the public to purchase any specific work against a widening array of choices. An advertisement, written by Johnson for the "proprietors of the paper entitled The Idler." suggests much about the book industry and its reliance on the common law and traditional notions of justice and power. (Johnson himself was, in a way, a proprietor, since "he was supposed somehow to share in the profits of the new paper" [James Clifford, Dictionary Johnson 192]; he received about three hundred pounds for his Idler contributions, and an additional L84 when Newbury published the collected papers [Clifford, 192].) After forgiving previous trespasses since "The past is without remedy, and shall be without resentment," the advertisement announces that "the time of impunity is at an end": Whoever shall, without our leave, lay the hand of rapine upon our papers, is to expect that we shall vindicate our due, by the means which justice prescribes, and which is warranted by the immemorial prescriptions of honorable trade. We shall lay hold, in our turn, on their copies, degrade them from the pomp of wide margin [both profit and white space] and diffuse typography, contract them into a narrow space, and sell them for a humble price; yet not with a view of growing rich by confiscations, for we think not much better of money got by punishment than by crimes. We shall, therefore, when our losses are repaid, give what profit shall remain to the 501 Macrdalens: for we know not who can be more properly taxed for the support of penitent prostitutes, than prostitutes in whom there yet appears neither penitence nor shame. (Life of Johnson 244n2) 2. Boswell's Johnson summarizes the argument for perpetual copyright simultaneously with describing the profession of writing as an amalgam of publishers and writers: [Donaldson, who had printed Thompson's Seasons ] is a fellow who takes advantage of the law to injure his brethren; for, not withstanding that the statute secures only fourteen years of exclusive right, it has always been understood by the trade, that he, who buys the copy-right of a book from an author, obtains a perpetual property. (Life of Johnson. 310). Johnson was explicit that this right derived from trade practices, and not from the law. More precisely, the market of booksellers operates independently of the law, and is contained enough to express its own practices. 3. The letter ends by alluding to one of Hume's own essays, probably "On the Origin of Government" which first appears in the posthumous 1777 edition of his work: The Essay I mentioned is not so considerable as to [be] printed apart; yet any pyrated Edition would be reckond incompleat that did not contain it. (Letters of David Hume. 275, addition by editor) Hume attempts to demonstrate the truth of his argument by reference to his own work, and crucially, the audience of that demonstration is his own publisher. 4. In addition, committees were formed to engage the best engravers, to choose the idea paper, and, as a result, to establish the superiority of London publishing (Life of Johnson 803). 5. Forms of the word "rapacity" recur throughout the letters, in reference to the booksellers. Lloyd's written response, no doubt, pleased Wordsworth: Free Trade is all very plausible when reciprocity is its basis. If Booksellers cannot produce "Excursions" themselves they must pay a proportional duty. (547) 502 6. In The Sonnets of William Wordsworth. Wordsworth had published a sonnet, "A Plea for Authors, May 1838" which made this argument in a sarcastic tone: Failing impartial measure to dispense To every suitor, Equity is lame; And social Justice, stript of reverence For natural rights, a mockery and a shame; Law but a servile dupe of false pretence, If, guarding grossest things from common claim Now and for ever, She, to works that came From mind and spirit, grudge a short-lived fence. (1-8) 7. Wordsworth did not republish this poem, suggesting that he was not satisfied with its results, whether political or aesthetic. The argument that the poem fell into irrelevance after the 1842 Copyright Act is implausible since Wordsworth did republish "A Plea for Authors." Most likely, he found that the blatant economic motive, limited here to only his family rather than to the heirs of authors generally, as in the "Plea," served his opponents better than himself. 8. Moorman, as she assembles snatches of his last years in her final chapter, follows Wordsworth’s hint. In the paragraph previous to Wordsworth’s letter referring to Lear, she tells a story of Wordsworth breaking into tears during a conversation with the Kent-like gardener, James, the "one person humble and gentle enough to speak to the stricken man on his prolonged and excessive grief" (II 602). The other quotations in the paragraph that contains the Lear reference are, first, from Mary who "wisely" says, "we must not yield to his inclination to keep aloof from all contact" (II 603) , a contrast to Lear's comment to Cordelia, in refusing to see his other daughters, that "We two alone will sing like birds i'the'cage" (V iii 9); and second, Miss Martineau's denouncement of reports of in "some newspapers that [Wordsworth] was failing in mind" as "'utter nonsense'" (II 603) and her recognition of Wordsworth's "fixed despondency (uncorrected)" for which she "love[s] him best" (I 603n3), comments which play against the miseries and madness of Lear and Edgar, as well as against Wordsworth's aborted attempt to reform the Solitary. 9. In such a schema, the ability to talk about one's self, to narrate one's own life posthumously, is tantamount to self-authorization; this is the canonizing work which the Prelude performs, and it is a function 503 prepared by the publication of the Bioaraphia Literaria within a year of The Excursion in which Coleridge makes known to the general reading public the existence of the Prelude. 10. Michael Moore is considering the "legal" definition of "death," and suggests that interpreters (especially judges) attempting to establish whether someone is dead should be guided not by some set of conventions we have agreed upon as to when someone will be said to be dead; rather, we will seek to apply "dead" only to people who are really dead, which we determine by applying the best scientific theory we can muster about what death really is. ("Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory," Doing 381; quoting M. Moore, "A Natural Law Theory of Interpretation" 283). Fish's observation is, of course, that Moore merely shifts from one convention, the legal definition, to another, a scientific definition. 11. As Taylor locates the poem by "borrowing [it] from the Miscellaneous series" for his discussion on the sonnets concerning Liberty, "spending" functioning doubly as acquisition and waste. 12. In 1837, the punishment of death was removed from "about 200 offenses" and remained only to high treason, murder and attempts at murder— rape— arson with danger to life— and to piracies, burglaries, and robberies, when aggravated by cruelty and violence (39) Taylor points out that in many cases, the punishment of death merely deterred juries from convicting, and in other cases were never invoked and remains as only "the dead letter of the law" (39). In 1841, Mr. Kelly introduced legislation to abolish capital punishment entirely; the measure was defeated, although rape was made a non-capital offence. 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