1. De Man and Language

From Paul De Man, "Wordsworth and the Victorians," The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 89-92.

Consider for instance another key word in the corpus of The Prelude (1805), the word "face" as it appears in the opening section of Book V (entitled "Books"):

                                Hitherto
In progress through this Verse, my mind hath look'd
Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven
As her prime Teacher . . .
               (V.10-13)

"Face" is, first of all, a "speaking face," the locus of speech, the necessary condition for the existence of articulated language. The lines are not simply an anthropomorphism, a conceit by which human consciousness is projected or transferred into the natural world. They assume the recognition of an entity or agency that bridges the distinction between mind and world by allowing them to exist in the proximity, in the dialogue of this distinction. Hence that, unlike other moments in Wordsworth (such as the Essays upon Epitaphs), "face" does not appear here in the context of an apostrophic stance in which nature is addressed by man. The passage from which these lines are taken is indeed apostrophic, but the apostrophe, the voiced eloquence within which it is encased, is addressed, not by or to the "face of earth and heaven," but to man: "O Man, / Thou paramount Creature . . ." (ll. 3-4) or "Thou also, Man, hast wrought . . ." (l. 17). Man can address and face other men, within life or beyond the grave, because he has a face, but he has a face only because he partakes of a mode of discourse that is neither entirely natural nor entirely human. The encounter between mind and earth (or heaven) is therefore not itself a dialogue or even, as in an earlier section, a listening (as in II.327-28 for example), but a mute scene of looking, the mind gazing upon a speaking face. Compared to "speaking," "looking" may indeed appear as a loss or a deprivation. Yet, in this passage, it designates a prior encounter of which the other, later exchanges between men are derived. One can speak only because one can look upon a mode of speech which is not quite our own. A link is created between face and speech, but it remains obscure why this implies a seeing, an eye. The burden of the passage, which sets up a system that coordinates face, speech, man, and eye is to understand the connection between face and eye, two notions that are always copresent in the Prelude, also and perhaps most emphatically when one or the other of the two remains implicit.

The link between "face" and "eye" is clarified in the famous section in Book II beginning with the line "Bless'd be the infant Babe . . ." in which Wordsworth sets out "with my best conjectures" to ". . . trace / The progress of our being" (ll. 237-341). It can be considered Wordsworth's essay on the origins of language as poetic language, containing his most explicit description of the beginnings and workings of the "Poetic spirit of our human life" (l. 276). "Face" does not explicitly appear, yet the possibility and the status of its existence is at stake throughout the narration. "Eye," on the other hand, is prominent enough to displace "breast" where one would most naturally expect it:

                                the Babe,
Nurs'd in his Mother's arms, the Babe who sleeps
Upon his mother's breast, who, when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul
Doth gather passion from his Mother's eye!

What is later called a "mute dialogue with my Mother's heart" begins here in the exchange of a gaze, a meeting of "eyes." But this encounter is not a recognition, a shared awareness of common humanity. It occurs as an active verbal deed, a claim of "manifest kindred" which is not given in the nature of things. The power and the structure of this act are described in sufficient detail to give meaning to the by itself enigmatic phrase: to "gather passion." This "gathering" is a process of exchange by which the eye is "combin[d] / In one appearance . . ." with "all the elements / And parts of the same object, else detach'd / And loth to coalesce . . ." Without having to evoke the technical vocabulary of associationist psychology which is here used, it is clear that what is being described is the possibility of inscribing the eye, which is nothing by itself, into a larger, total entity, the "same object" which, in the internal logic of the text, can only be the face, the face as the combination of parts which the mind, working like a synecdochical trope, can lay claim to -- thus opening the way to a process of totalization which, in the span of a few lines, can grow to encompass everything, "All objects through all intercourse of sense." Language originates with the ability of the eye to establish the contour, the borderline, the surface which allows things to exist in the identity of the kinship of their distinction from other things.

"Face" then, in this passage, not unlike the earlier "hangs," designates the dependence of any perception or "eye" on the totalizing power of language. It heralds this dependency as "the first / Poetic spirit of our human life." The possibility of any contact between mind and nature depends on this spirit manifested by and in language. Just before this passage, Wordsworth has cautioned against the false distinctions which literal-minded psychologists (such as, presumably, Hartley) tend to make in their false claims to "analyse a soul" (II.232). He then offers his own theory of mind as the counterprocedure to the coarseness of what he calls the "outward shows" of science. Yet in a somewhat later passage, in Book III of the Prelude, this same face-making, totalizing power is shown at work in a process of endless differentiation correctly called perpetual "logic," of which it is said that it "Could find no surface where its power might sleep" (l. 164). The face, which is the power to surface from the sea of infinite distinctions in which we risk to drown, can find no surface: How are we to reconcile the meaning of face, with its promise of sense and of filial preservation, with its function as the relentless undoer of its own claims?

From Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 30-34.

Raymond Williams drew attention to the phrase 'the very culture of the feelings' in Mill's account of his reading of Wordsworth. He argued that here Mill removed 'culture' from 'society' by appropriating the term in the name of the private experience of art: 'These paragraphs [in his Autobiography] are now the classical point of reference for those who decide that the desire for social reform is ultimately inadequate, and that art, the "source of inward joy", is fortunately always there as an alternative.' But Mill did not propose the reading of Wordsworth as an 'alternative' to the desire for social reform. He claimed that Wordsworth taught him to commune with nature 'not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings'. Here one must consider the full implication of the structure of The Prelude's eighth book: love of nature leads to love of mankind. In a defensive moment, Wordsworth recognizes that, while a traditional, poeticizing pastoral will speak of a woodman languishing from the pangs of disappointed love, real woodmen die of disease 'From sleeping night by night among the woods / Within his sod-built cabin' (612-13). Such a critique of 'love' is built into all the best hard pastoral -- Rosalind in As You Like It claims that Leander in the Hellespont died of cramp not love, that 'Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love' (IV.i.99-101). Wordsworth replaces illusions of romantic love with the philanthropy explicit in the phrase 'love of mankind'. Such a move necessitates a critique of the traditional kind of history that is written from above: he will not accept those 'high-wrought modern narratives' which are 'Stript of their humanizing soul, the life / of manners and familiar incidents' (viii.774-6). He will write instead a history of working people and local communities. To aggrandize the common man, to write the shepherd into history in this way, is a radical move.

The love of nature leads Wordsworth to be able to love and to see love even in the city. At the end of book eight he returns to his memory of London. He sees a man sitting

                with a sickly babe
Upon his knee, whom he had thither brought
For sunshine, and to breathe the fresher air.
Of those who passed, and me who looked at him,
He took no note; but in his brawny arms
(The artificer was to the elbow bare,
And from his work this moment had been stolen)
He held the child, and, bending over it
As if he were afraid both of the sun
And of the air which he had come to seek,
He eyed it with unutterable love. (viii.849-59)

(In the final text of The Prelude Wordsworth transferred these lines to book seven, one of his major structural misjudgements.) This old man is the obverse, the redeemed image, of the blind beggar. That redemption has been achieved by means of the retrospective account of Grasmere shepherds; Wordsworth is now prepared to move on. Books seven to nine form a carefully structured triptych: seven concerns 'Residence in London', eight is the pivot, and nine concerns 'Residence in France'. The pivot is such that the three-book sequence should be read as a progression from alienation in the city through love of nature to the recognition of individual human love and tenderness in the city to the general love of humanity in the revolutionary spirit of book nine, seen at its most powerful in such moments as the one when Wordsworth's friend Beaupuy points to a hunger-bitten girl and says '" 'Tis against that / Which we are fighting" ' (ix.519-20). The principle of the 'love of mankind' to which the 'love of nature' leads is of a piece with the rhetoric of the revolutionary declaration of the universal rights of man. It is no coincidence that for the Romantics Rousseau was a prophet both of nature and of the French Revolution.

To return to Annabel Patterson's choice [in Pastoral and Ideology, 1988]: she ultimately comes down on the side of the view that Wordsworth's pastoral promotes a conservative ideology based on the premise that hardship should be countered by personal 'Resolution and Independence' rather than social meliorism. This conclusion ignores the cardinal fact that book eight is the prelude to book nine. It also ignores an important point about the function of the pastoral: the purpose of the Arden perspective in As You Like It is to bring about the melioration of the court, the overthrow of a corrupt regime. When Thomas Babington Macaulay read The Prelude on its publication in 1850, he recorded in his journal: 'The poem is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed Socialist. I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not choose to publish it in his life-time.' That 'last degree' is worth pondering, not least because Macaulay had total recall of everything he read and would therefore have held the whole poem in his mind. In summarizing The Prelude, he spoke not only of 'the story of the French Revolution, and of its influence on the character of a young enthusiast', but also of 'the old raptures about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind'. if the poem is to the last degree Jacobinical, then these latter features, characteristics of such books as the eighth, are part of its Jacobinism. The 'politics of home', of the small organic community based on frugality, hard work, and 'domestic affections' -- the phrase is from the letter to Charles James Fox of 14 January 1801 in which Wordsworth commended 'The Brothers' and 'Michael' to the attention of the leading opposition politician of the day -- would then be Jacobinical, indeed socialist, and by no means Burkean.

In one of the most famous passages of the Reflections, Burke argued that 'To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.' But the three links in Wordsworth's chain are not the same as those in Burke's: where the latter has local community, country, and mankind, Wordsworth has nature, local community, and mankind. Wordsworth goes straight from nature and Grasmere to mankind, and in particular to the aspirations for mankind that were given voice in the ideals of the French Revolution. The inclusion of nature and the exclusion of a Burkean sense of nation, of an established order under threat in England, are equally significant. The progression suggests that the 'socialism' of Wordsworth's republican pastoral is of a highly distinctive kind. Its vision of 'fullness and completeness of life', to use William Morris's fine phrase, is dependent on integration with, not subjugation of, nature. The politics of Grasmere Vale are ultimately based on a relationship to the environment, a marriage of humankind to the natural world -- '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' (Prel. x.725-7) -- and such a relationship transcends the politics of both Paine and Burke, both the French Revolution and the counter-revolution in England. To go back to nature is not to retreat from politics but to take politics into a new domain, the relationship between Love of Nature and Love of Mankind and, conversely, between the Rights of Man and the Rights of Nature. The language of The Prelude is fleetingly red but ever green.

In the spirit of John Stuart Mill's way of reading, let us ask what Wordsworth's pastoral may do for us. Poems do not send people out on to barricades, but they do have the capacity to alter mentalities. Wordsworth can help us to rethink the nature of politics. The thrust of Mill's reading is that the beauty, stability, and endurance of nature are necessary prerequisites for human social and psychological well- being. In Jerome McGann's terms, 'Ecological nature . . . contains for human beings, whose immediate lives are lived in the social and historical fields, the images of permanence which they need.' The criticism of the 1980s was vigorous and effective in its critique of Wordsworth's handling of the social and historical fields. But McGann's position, even though it was articulated a mere decade ago, now seems curiously outdated. Ecological nature no longer looks like an image of permanence. In the 1990s we will have to learn to live not just in the social and historical fields but also, perhaps pre-eminently, in the ecological field.

Document created March 22, 1997