33 Wordsworth and Enlightenment Philosophy

In the summer of 1794, with Britain at war with France and the spectre of the Terror overshadowing the progressive ideals that drove the French Revolution, William Wordsworth exchanged a series of letters with his Cambridge friend William Mathews outlining plans for a monthly miscellany titled The Philanthropist, a title that he remarks ‘would be noticed’ because it ‘includes everything that can instruct and amuse mankind’ (EY, 121). He proposed that each issue should include ‘essays upon Morals, and Manners, and Institutions whether social or political’ alongside ‘essays partly for instruction and partly for amusement’ (122). The publication would combine a consideration of current political events with ‘essays of taste and criticism, and works of imagination and fiction’, with an emphasis on works ‘characterized by inculcating recommendations of benevolence and philanthropy’ that would ‘form a Series, exhibiting the advancement of the human mind in moral knowledge’ (122). Stephen Gill remarks that Wordsworth, during this period, strongly identified ‘the life of the mind with the cause of good’, and that his plans for The Philanthropist stemmed from a faith in ‘the irresistible progress of Truth’ (Gill, Life, 87).

Wordsworth’s vision of a publication that would unite thinking in multiple disciplinary forms in the service of human progress is aligned with the spirit and aims of the Enlightenment. In his 1751 Preliminary Discourse to the French Encylopédie, for example, Jean d’Alembert announces its major goals: ‘to set forth as well as possible the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge’, and ‘to contain the general principles that form the basis of each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, and the most essential facts that make up the body and substance of each’.¹ He further argues that the first necessary step to meeting them is to examine “the genealogy and filiation of the parts of our knowledge, the causes that brought the various branches of our knowledge into being, and the characteristics that distinguish them’ (5). Enlightenment thinking, despite the diversity of its specific positions and ideas, is characterized by efforts to observe, connect, order and articulate the general principles of human knowledge and the construction of genealogical accounts of its progressive becoming. Such accounts reveal the guiding mythos of the Enlightenment: it may be possible to discover the ultimate causes of natural and cultural progress and harness them to further human ends. In his subsequent efforts to ‘trace | The progress of our being’ (Prel-NCE, 1805, ii. 239–40), Wordsworth echoes d’Alembert’s summation of the Enlightenment project, ‘In short, we must go back to the origin of our ideas’ (5), with a question: ‘How shall I seek the origin?’ (Prel-NCE, 1850, ii. 346).

This question is indicative of the path that Wordsworth’s engagement with Enlightenment philosophy followed over the course of his career. In the letter to Mathews, he speaks of the ‘duty incumbent upon every enlightened friend of mankind’ to not only explain, but also enforce, the ‘general principles of the social order’, the knowledge of which ‘cannot but lead to good’ (EY, 120). He expresses an ardent desire for ‘freedom of inquiry’, claiming that while the ‘multitude walk in darkness’, he ‘would put in each man’s hand a lantern to guide him’ (EY, 121). However, as the evolving account of his engagement with political and philosophical ideas in The Prelude attests, the connection between progressive ideas and their concrete manifestation in personal and social life proves to be far more disordered than he assumes in his early vision. As the French Revolution fails to deliver on its promises, his faith in the intrinsic order and effectiveness of systemic knowledge falls apart:

Like others I had read, and eagerly

Sometimes, the master pamphlets of the day,

Nor wanted such half-insight as grew wild

Upon that meagre soil, helped out by talk

And public news; but having never chanced

To see a regular chronicle which might shew—

If any such indeed existed then—

Whence the main organs of the public power

Had sprung, their transmigrations, when and how

Accomplished (giving thus unto events

A form and body), all things were to me

Loose and disjointed, and the affections left

Without a vital interest.

(Prel-NCE, 1805, ix. 97–108)

Despairing of a ‘regular chronicle’ that would coordinate and embody the intellectual advances of the age in a manner similar to the encyclopaedic treatments of knowledge produced and celebrated by Enlightenment thinkers, Wordsworth turns to poetry as distinct form of knowledge that would, in the face of the illegibility of history, appeal with ‘vital interest’ to the ‘affections’ to make sense of events. As early as 1798, he began to look to poetry as the medium through which he would ‘convey most of the knowledge’ that he had gathered in his lifetime, proposing a work that would adequately represent ‘Nature, Man, and Society’ (EY, 188).

The methodological search for origins is fundamental to the Enlightenment myth of demystification. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer argues that reason ‘can never be known by its results but only by its function’, which ‘consists in its power to bind and to dissolve’. In order to challenge ‘revelation, tradition and authority’, reason ‘dissolve[s]‌ everything factual’, dividing everything into the ‘simplest component parts’ before beginning the ‘work of construction’. Cassirer’s account characterizes the Enlightenment as a ‘twofold intellectual movement’ in which reason should be viewed as a ‘concept of agency, not of being’.² Wordsworth’s poetry enacts this dialectical process, simultaneously employing and critiquing Enlightenment methods in ways that complicate Enlightenment assumptions and ideas. Scholars have offered illuminating accounts of this process as it emerges from an engagement with a diverse array of thinkers. In Wordsworth’s Second Nature, James Chandler focuses on Wordsworth’s ‘involvement…in the intellectual history of the French Revolution’. Without dismissing Wordsworth’s obvious debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chandler argues for tendencies in Wordsworth’s thought that follow Edmund Burke to demonstrate the complex role that opposing ‘ideologies of philosophy and power’ play in shaping his poetic project.³ H. W. Piper’s The Active Universe establishes Wordsworth’s engagement with the French materialists as crucial to his articulation of a dynamic vision of nature, the source of ‘a real and literal belief in the life of natural objects’.⁴ In British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, Alan Richardson contextualizes Wordsworth’s organicism as it develops in dialogue with multiple Enlightenment discourses, particularly ‘the new naturalistic and biological approach to mind then prominent in scientific and radical circles’.⁵ Alan Bewell’s Wordsworth and the Enlightenment treats Wordsworth’s plans for his great philosophical poem, The Recluse, as the ‘central event’ that ‘shaped his mature poetry’, which is characterized by his employment of the ‘experimental’ language of Enlightenment anthropology as a ‘vehicle of self-representation and self-understanding’.⁶ What all of these studies have in common is a focus on Wordsworth’s poetry as a distinct form of knowledge that articulates the sources, limits, and possibilities of human agency as it emerges through a network of relations to institutions, natural objects, and others.

Wordsworth’s prose and poetry of the early 1790s is marked not only by the influence of political radicals such as Richard Price, Thomas Paine, and William Godwin, but also by a complex engagement with one of the central assumptions of these Enlightenment thinkers: the intrinsic relationship between reason, freedom, and progress. For example, Price’s 1789 tract in support of the French Revolution, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, casts ‘freedom’ as a ‘light’ which, once released, will inevitably develop into a ‘blaze that lays despotism in ashes’, releasing the world from the ‘darkness’ of ‘slavish governments’ and ‘slavish hierarchies’.⁷ Likewise, Paine, with the publication of The Rights of Man in 1791, argues that ‘every age and generation must be…free to act for itself’, pitting the ‘rational contemplation of the rights of man’ against the ‘monstrous’ rule of the ‘dead’ to ‘dispose of, bind or control’ the ‘living’.⁸ Godwin’s 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice is also committed to rationalism; he insists on the ‘omnipotence of truth’, which he casts as an irresistible—and natural—power: ‘Truth is the pebble in the lake; and however slowly in the present case the circles succeed each other, they will infallibly go on till they overspread the surface’.⁹ In Godwin’s account, ‘truth’ will gradually dissolve ‘mischievous institutions’, working through ‘mankind’ to cause ‘oppression, injustice, monarchy and vice’ to ‘tumble into common ruin’ (453). Wordsworth’s plans for The Philanthropist proceed from a similar assumption of the necessary link between intellectual freedom and social progress. He claims that ‘truth must be victorious’ and advocates for the publication as a ‘lantern’ that would guide individuals on a steady path, providing a source of reasoned enquiry that would shield them from relying on the transitory ‘illumination’ of ‘inflammatory addresses to the passions of men’, which he likens to ‘abortive flashes of lightning, or the coruscations of transitory meteors’ (EY, 121).

The assumption that reasoned inquiry is an antidote to the ills and excesses to which political and religious institutions tend also underlies Wordsworth’s only explicit entry into radical discourse: the unpublished ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’. Composed in 1793, the tract responds to Richard Watson’s account of the execution of Louis XVI in France. With his defence of the British Constitution, Watson implicitly withdrew the liberal and republican stance that he had previously voiced in support of the American and French revolutions, provoking Wordsworth’s unequivocal admonition: ‘You have aimed an arrow at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race’ (PrW, i. 48). Scholars have cited the influence of several figures, particularly Paine and possibly Godwin on the letter; in any case, at the ‘ideological center’ of the Wordsworth’s ‘Letter’ lies a consideration of the relationship between ‘free intellectual inquiry and social progress’.¹⁰ The most explicit inspiration for the letter comes directly from the notorious French philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the ‘Letter’, Wordsworth cites Rousseau’s claim in the The Social Contract that ‘slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to be rid of them’, in the original French (PrW, i.36). From this provocative invocation, Wordsworth launches a series of arguments counter to Watson’s assertion that a republic, in which the people live under ‘the tyranny of their equals’, is the ‘most odious of all tyrannies’. In Wordsworth’s account, the ‘degraded state of the mass of mankind’ can only be brought into a healthier state through a process that begins by levelling the population, stripping away the corrupting influence of ‘arbitrary power’. He grants that ‘political virtues are developed at the expense of moral ones’, but refuses to accept appeals to a perceived lack of moral character in the masses as a ‘sufficient reason to reprobate a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things’. Following the ‘convulsion’, it is the ‘province of education to rectify the erroneous notions which a habit of oppression, and even of resistance, may have created’. He continues to cast enlightenment as a natural process that, once set in motion, tends towards self-moderation. He takes the position of ‘a philosopher’ to project that ‘having dried up the source from which flows the corruption of the public opinion…the stream will go on gradually refining itself’ (PrW, i. 38). In an even more suggestive metaphor, he remarks: ‘ the animal just released from its stall will exhaust the overflow of its spirits in a round of wanton vagaries, but it will soon return to itself and enjoy its freedom in moderate and regular delight’ (PrW, i. 34, 35, 36, 38). Social progress, then, emerges out of a return to an original state, in which, once free from the external constraints of institutions, an education based on reasoned principles has the potential to take root and gradually flourish.

Descriptive Sketches, first published in 1793 by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson shortly after the execution of Louis XVI in Paris, is the first of a series of works that can be read as a response to Rousseau’s injunction, in his second Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, to seek redemption by imagining the origins of primitive humanity: ‘Discontented with your present state, for reasons that herald even greater discontents for your unhappy Posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go backward’.¹¹ Wordsworth imagines a past state in which ‘Nature’ and ‘reason’ ruled man in place of institutionally determined laws:

Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,

Was bless’d as free—for he was Nature’s child.

He, all superior but his God disdain’d,

Walk’d none restraining, and by none restrain’d,

Confess’d no law but what his reason taught,

Did all he wish’d, and wish’d but what he ought.

(CDS, 520–5)

‘Nature’ appears in the poem as a benign and stable entity comprising familiar Enlightenment tropes, her garments made of ‘Love and Truth’, her ‘pulseless hand’, ‘fix’d unwearied gaze’, and ‘still beam’ keeping watch over ‘Unbreathing Justice’ (784–7). Like the ‘Letter,’ Descriptive Sketches concludes with an optimistic vision of the potential for ‘freedom of inquiry’ to overcome the moral and social degradation wrought by ‘arbitrary power’:

Oh give, great God, to Freedom’s waves to ride

Sublime o’er Conquest, Avarice and Pride,

To break, the vales where Death with famine scow’rs,

And dark Oppression builds her thick-ribb’d tow’rs;

Where Machination her fell soul resigns,

Fled panting to the centre of her mines;

Where Persecution decks with ghastly smiles

Her bed, his mountains mad Ambition piles;

Where Discord stalks dilating, every hour,

And crouching fearful at the feet of Pow’r.

(CDS, 792–804)

This passage is notable not only for its likening of ‘Freedom’ to an irresistible natural force, but also for its invocation of a mysterious ‘Pow’r’—often aligned but never equated with the personified female ‘Nature’—that unleashes and enables it. More than a mere youthful expression of radicalism, then, Descriptive Sketches introduces the key terms through which Wordsworth engages with Enlightenment thought throughout his career as he begins to think through the complex relationships between the natural world, human lives, human institutions, and historical events in order to discern the origins of power and track its operation through time.

In the 1793–4 Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth continues to investigate, revise, and complicate Rousseau’s assumption that a past state of nature is preferable to the present state of civil society. The opening stanzas of the poem introduce a ‘hungry savage’, who ‘lifts his head in fear’ at the threats posed by an untamed wilderness, as the ‘rushing rains’ put out his ‘watch-fire’, his only means of warding off prowling boars, growling bears, and howling wolves (SPP, 6–9). As the narrative voice quickly points out, however, ‘he is strong to suffer’ and confronts ‘all his evils unsubdued’ by the dulling influence of civilized pleasures:

Hence where Refinement’s genial influence calls

The soft affections from their wintry sleep

And the sweet tear of Love and Friendship falls

The willing heart in tender joy to steep

When men in various vessels roam the deep

Of social life, and turns of chance prevail

Various and sad, how many thousands weep

Beset with foes more fierce than e’er assail

The savage without home in winter’s keenest gale.

(SPP, 28–36)

Written in response to Great Britain’s official entry into conflict with France, Salisbury Plain goes on to describe a bleak landscape littered with ruins and suffering. The traveller’s journey across the plain is a record of the less recognized casualties of the war, featuring the tale of a female vagrant whose losses stand in for the ‘turns of chance’ that the ‘thousands’ who ‘weep’ suffer in exchange for the excesses of ‘Refinement’s genial influence’. Like Descriptive Sketches, the poem ends with a call for ‘Truth’ and ‘Reason’ to triumph over ‘Superstition’s reign’:

Heroes of Truth pursue your march, uptear

Th’Oppressor’s dungeon from its deepest base;

High o’er the towers of Pride undaunted rear

Resistless in your might the herculean mace

Of Reason; let foul Error’s monster race

Dragged from their dens start at the light with pain

And die; pursue your toils, till not a trace

Be left on earth of Superstition’s reign,

Save that eternal pile which frowns on Sarum’s plain.

(SPP, 541–9)

Wordsworth’s representation of social progress, however, has undergone a key shift; no longer content to portray ‘Truth’ and ‘Reason’ as steady, natural and ultimately peaceful forces, he employs martial metaphors, proposing a violent solution to the violence perpetuated by ‘social life’. As David Collings has argued, ‘the hyperbolic vision of the illegitimacy of culture modulates into a hyperbolic politics that seeks to surpass all known forms of culture and to create a new one based on Enlightenment ideals’.¹² The poem begins to demonstrate, then, the double-edged character of the ‘dazzling light of Enlightenment’; as ‘total critique’, the power of Enlightenment to reconstruct relies upon a destructive impulse that has the potential to wreak its own kind of violence.¹³

Wordsworth’s ambivalence towards the Enlightenment project surfaces in The Prelude as he looks back on this period of faith in systematic thinking:

This was the time when, all things tending fast

To depravation, the philosophy

That promised to abstract the hopes of man

Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth

For ever in a purer element,

Found ready welcome.

(Prel-NCE, 1805, x. 805–10)

Yet, despite Wordsworth’s desire that analytical systems akin to Godwin’s Political Justice, to which this passage refers, could succeed in abstracting ‘hopes’ out of ‘feelings’, such systems prove themselves to be frustratingly blunt instruments:

I took the knife in hand,

And, stopping not at parts less sensitive,

Endeavored with my best of skill to probe

The living body of society

Even to the heart. I pushed without remorse

My speculations forward, yea, set foot

On Nature’s holiest places.

(Prel-NCE, 1805, x. 872–8)

In addition to drawing attention to the violence inherent in the Enlightenment’s insistence on progress through the double-edged process of analysis and reconstruction, Wordsworth also begins to question its intrinsic coherence in a remark that takes aim at French thinkers in his 1808 prose tract, The Convention of Cintra. He dismisses the ‘meagre tactics’ of d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature and reduces Condillac’s system to ‘pellets of logic’ that he ‘tosses about at hap-hazard’. Likewise, he condemns the ‘paradoxical reveries of Rousseau’ and the ‘flippancies of Voltaire’ as unnatural methods of thought: ‘plants which will not naturalise’ (PrW, i. 177). The disappointing outcome of the French Revolution—and the failure of Enlightenment method to secure a better one—brings Wordsworth to a moment in which he ‘yielded up moral questions in despair’, leading him to seek alternative means for answering them (Prel-NCE, 1805, x. 900)

Wordsworth’s theory of poetry can be read simultaneously as the product of Enlightenment ideas and as a manifesto directed against Enlightenment methods. In a 1798–9 fragment, he attempts to explicitly set forth his critique of systemic moral thinking and explore alternatives ways of achieving its goals. He opens the manuscript draft ‘[Essay on Morals]’ by insisting that ‘publications in which we formally & systematically lay down rules for the actions of Men cannot be too long delayed’ (PrW, i. 103). He not only points to the ineffectiveness of moral philosophy, but also cites them as an active cause of harm. He claims that ‘such books as Mr. Godwyn’s, Mr. Paley’s, & those of the whole tribe authors of that class’ are ‘impotent to all their intended good purposes’ and continues to state that he wishes they were ‘equally impotent to all bad one[s]‌’ (103). Wordsworth’s counterproposal introduces one of the key preoccupations of his poetic career: ‘Our attention ought principally to be fixed upon that part of our conduct & actions which is the result of our habits’ (103). He locates the failure of moral philosophy in an ‘undue value set upon that faculty which we call reason’ and its tendency to rely upon ‘lifeless words and & abstract propositions’ that render it ‘impotent over our habits’ (103–4). Habits, rooted in the physical self, wield a power over human behaviour that ‘naked reasonings’ cannot access. ‘[N]o book or system of moral philosophy’ exists that possesses ‘sufficient power to melt into our affections, to incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds, & thence to have any influence worth our notice of those habits of which I am speaking’ (103). Bewell reads the essay as a rationalization for Wordsworth’s lifelong poetic project, through which he strives for a ‘language directed towards the body’, employing verse as the only written medium through which it is possible to ‘reshape how we habitually feel’ and, consequently, act.¹⁴ Wordsworth’s increased attention to the crucial role that embodied experience plays in shaping moral character develops alongside his exposure to anti-dualist ideas.

In The Active Universe, H. W. Piper demonstrates that Wordsworth’s organicism was deeply influenced by the systems of nature proposed by the philosophers and scientists of the French Enlightenment, which he likely encountered in various sources, including his acquaintance with John ‘Walking’ Stewart in Paris and his friendship with Michael Beaupuy, whose ‘family library was lined with the works of the Encyclopaedists’.¹⁵ The dynamic vision of nature that begins to appear in his poetry of the early 1790s resonates strongly with the materialisms of the Encyclopaedists, particularly d’Holbach, who argues in the Système de la Nature that the universe is animated by the activity of ‘a matter extremely subtle’.¹⁶ According to d’Holbach, ‘the essence of nature is to act; and if we consider attentively its parts, we shall see that there is not a particle that enjoys absolute repose’.¹⁷ In the 1794 version of An Evening Walk, Wordsworth links the intrinsic agency of nature to the formation of human ‘affection’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘sense’:

Harmonious thoughts, a soul by Truth refined,

Entire affection for all human kind;

A heart that vibrates evermore, awake

To feeling for all forms that Life can take,

That wider still its sympathy extends

And sees not any line where being ends;

Sees sense, through Nature’s rudest forms betrayed,

Tremble obscure in fountain, rock and shade

And while a secret power these forms endears

Their social accent never vainly hears.

(CEW, 123–32)

In Piper’s account, this passage, added to the poem during Wordsworth’s sojourn in France, is the point at which the word ‘forms’ in Wordsworth’s poetry begins to take on the meaning attributed to it by the philosophes—including Diderot, Robinet and Cabanis—referring not to an immaterial force, but to the ongoing activity of ‘organized bodies of sentient matter’.¹⁸ The link between matter’s subtle activity and human life is a key topic of another text that Wordsworth was exposed to in during this time and remained in his library until his death, Volney’s Les Ruines des Empires. Volney argues: ‘Man is governed, like the world of which he forms a part, by natural laws’.¹⁹ An understanding of the laws of nature leads to the understanding of human nature; the intrinsic agency of matter, ‘the secret power that animates the universe’, operates through natural objects and human lives alike, operating as ‘the rule of their individual action, the tie of their reciprocal connections, and the cause of the harmony of the whole’. One who learns to discern the patterns of its activity gains the knowledge of ‘the springs of his destiny, the causes of his evils, and the remedies to be applied’, acquiring a distinct kind of social insight—and transformative power.²⁰

Wordsworth also encountered theories of living matter as debates in the British scientific and medical communities that made their way into the broader discourse of radicalism, where the complicity of materialist ideas with French systems often led to the dismissal of such ideas as the product of Jacobinism and atheism. For example, Joseph Priestley’s Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit argues that ‘when the nature of matter is rightly understood’, there will no longer be ‘any reason to think that there is in man any substance essentially different from it’. ²¹ He further attributes to matter ‘a capacity for affections as subtle and complex as any thing that we can affirm concerning those that have hitherto been called mental affections’.²² John Thelwall, whose public lecture to the Physical Society at Guy’s Hospital, later published as An Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality, contributes to the debate with his declaration that ‘Life’ is a ‘state of action’.²³ Erasmus Darwin, whose medical treatise Zoonomia Wordsworth requested after meeting Coleridge, argued that the agency of matter was gradually generative of complex faculties: ‘With every new change, therefore, of organic form, or addition of organic parts, I suppose a new kind of irritability or sensibility to be produced…every one of which is furnished with an irritability, or a taste, or appetency, and a consequent mode of action peculiar to itself’. ²⁴ Darwin further equates this ‘power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations’ with both the ‘faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity’ and the obligation to deliver ‘down those improvements by generation to its posterity’, attributing a relative degree of moral responsibility for the future of life to all of the beings that inhabit the natural world.²⁵ The degree to which these positions call the ultimate foundations of power into question led to political backlash for their authors. The conservative publication The Anti-Jacobin called for the censure of Zoonomia on the grounds of its threat to social institutions, a riotous mob set fire to Priestley’s home during the 1791 Birmingham riots, and Thelwall was accused of treason in 1794, a charge that, as Nicholas Roe has argued, owed itself to his ‘scientific speculations…as much as his politics’.²⁶

Just as he never officially entered the fray of revolutionary politics, Wordsworth preferred to explore the implications of these materialisms in verse, continually representing the interdependence of mind and matter. The Pedlar in the early versions of The Ruined Cottage, for example, attributes a ‘capacity for affections’ and thus, ‘a mode of action’, to non-living as well as living objects:

To every natural form, rock, fruit and flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway,

He gave a moral life; he saw them feel

Or linked them to some feeling. In all shapes

He found a secret and mysterious soul,

A fragrance and a spirit of strange meaning.

(RCP MS.B, 80–5)

The Pedlar is one of many narrators that appear in Wordsworth’s corpus as conduits attuned to perceiving and communicating the ‘secret and mysterious soul’, working to transform an awareness of the ‘moral life’ of all things into ‘strange meaning’. Individuals gifted with the ability to perceive ‘natural form’, however, are equally subject to its influence. The ‘power’ that speaks ‘perpetual logic’ to the Pedlar’s ‘soul’, through ‘an unrelenting agency’, binds ‘his feelings even as in a chain’, linking his destiny to the ongoing activity of the rest of the material universe (RCP MS. B, 100–3). Richard Gravil points to the ways in which the poetry of Wordsworth’s middle years employs a series of terms—‘motions’, ‘impress’, active’, ‘presence’, ‘impulse’, ‘sense’—that convey his understanding of the complex—and reciprocal—relationship between human and natural agency, describing ‘the interaction of mind and nature in ways which leave one in some doubt as to whether matter is being spiritualized or mind materialized’.²⁷ Wordsworth continues to employ characters who articulate the ethical stakes of materialism in The Excursion, where the ‘venerable Sage’ speaks of an ‘active principle’, which ‘subsists | In all things’ and unites the inhabitants of the universe:

What’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; from link to link

It circulates, the Soul of all the Worlds.

(CExc, ix. 1–6).

The Sage identifies the ‘freedom of the Universe’ in the ongoing activity of living matter, which links the natural world to the ‘human Mind’ (ix. 16, 19). The individual with the ‘power to commune with the invisible world’, then, gains a knowledge of the ‘mighty stream of tendency’, that unites the ‘fret and labour’ of the ‘vast multitude’ of mankind to a higher purpose; in these passages, Wordsworth envisions the possibility of a teleological trajectory that binds the fates of Man to Nature and the individual to the community (ix. 87, 88, 93, 90).

Lyrical Ballads, the project that occupied the bulk of Wordsworth’s attention in the late 1790s and early 1800s, was conceived in conversation with Coleridge as one venue for ‘communicating good’ through poetic form. In the culminating poem of the 1798 edition, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, he declares himself a prophet of ‘all the mighty world | Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, | And what perceive’, who adopts the ‘language of the sense’ as the foundation of ‘moral being’ (LBOP, 106–12). As Richardson points out, Wordsworth was not only influenced by the philosophical register of Enlightenment materialism, but also actively responds to the ‘new, biological materialism’ promoted by Romantic-era physiologists such as Erasmus Darwin, Jean Cabanis, Charles Bell, and Franz Joseph Gall.²⁸ Wordsworth’s proposal of a distinct ‘language of the sense’ is indicative of his insistence, counter to a Lockean tradition that tends to ‘bracket off the body’, on the significance of embodiment to the origins and development of language.²⁹ The ‘language of the sense’, then, serves as the chief instrument of what are presented—anonymously—in the Advertisement as ‘experiments’ (PrW, i. 116). In the 1800 Preface, Wordsworth asserts that his poetic experiments have a ‘worthy purpose’; verse, which presents itself to the senses, has the power to represent—and reshape—‘habits of mind’ when directed towards an individual of sufficient ‘organic sensibility’. This power is derived from and dependent upon the reciprocal relationship between the physical senses and mental faculties: ‘For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed representatives of all our past feelings’ (PrW, i. 126). In accordance with Wordsworth’s embodied theory of language, ‘organic sensibility’ refers not to an abstract concept but to a collection of material organs, signifying a ‘mind shaped by and realized in bodily organs, though not entirely defined by them’.³⁰ It is on this basis that Wordsworth asserts that poetry, as the product of ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, through which it affects the rational faculties, is a possible medium for assessing and addressing the moral state of the nation. In later additions to the Preface, he prophesies that poetry will serve as intimate and necessary counterpart to science if human society is ever to reach a true state of enlightenment:

If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man (PrW, i. 141).

For Wordsworth, the ability of knowledge to transform human society is dependent on its materialization, its embodiment, its ability to ‘incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds’ (PrW, i. 103).

In the Preface, Wordsworth writes that the goal of Lyrical Ballads, the classification of public taste, as a sign of moral character, as ‘healthy or depraved’, depends upon ‘retracing the revolutions not of literature alone but likewise of society itself’ (PrW, i. 120). In order to accurately describe the present state of the cultural milieu that shapes individual minds, it is necessary to track its development back to the historical and philosophical origins of civilized life. To carry out this aspect of his ongoing poetic experiment, he began to imagine the structure of a comprehensive poem that would harness the knowledge of multiple disciplines. In a 1798 letter to James Tobin, he declares: ‘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’ (EY, 188). The Enlightenment offered ample prototypes; Wordsworth was surrounded by popular poems treating the progress of human life in relation to the advance of ethical and scientific inquiry that contributed to the rage for systematic philosophical poetry, including Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1792), and new translations of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. His friends were also engaged in similar projects. For example, Thelwall’s The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society (1793) provided a model of a multi-generic work that combines reflections on philosophy, observations on the relationship between the community and the landscape, and occasional poetry. In 1797, Coleridge also proposed an ‘Epic Poem’, in which he would link the knowledge of scientific disciplines with records of human history:

I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know

Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy,

Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the mind of

man—then the minds of men—in all Travels Voyages and Histories.

(LSTC, i. 320)

‘The Recluse’, however, took a form that departed from the Enlightenment models that inspired its conception. In the Preface to The Excursion, Wordsworth renounces any intention to ‘formally announce a system’, claiming that if ‘The Recluse’ succeeds ‘in conveying to the mind clear thoughts, lively images, and strong feelings, the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself’ (PrW, iii. 6). As The Excursion was the only ‘portion of the poem’ to be completed and published, out of its ‘natural order’, Wordsworth’s ‘determination to compose a philosophical poem’ might be deemed a failure as a synthetic, analytical, and comprehensive project.

Yet, it is also possible to read the plans for ‘The Recluse’ as a more complex product of—and response to—Enlightenment systems. Alan Bewell, in his ground-breaking Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, suggests viewing ‘The Recluse’ as a ‘governing intention’ that encompasses the shorter lyrics and narratives in an ‘evolving encyclopedic’ collection. Rather than adhering to a ‘preconceived structure’, he argues that ‘moral philosophy’ doesn’t function as a structural model for the work, but rather comprises a ‘silent, informing impulse of a poetry whose systematic preconditions could never be explicitly stated’.³¹Wordsworth takes his cues from Enlightenment texts that Bewell classifies as ‘anthropological’ in their shared interest in tracking the gradual and steady progress of civilization from its primitive beginnings; authors such as Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, and David Hume worked across multiple texts to explore the emergence of social and cultural institutions, often tracking them back to an origin that could never actually be witnessed. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau offers a particularly influential example of a narrative founded on imaginative origins: ‘Here is your history such as I believed I read it, not in the Books by your kind, who are liars, but in Nature, which never lies’. From this ‘remote’ perspective, he promises to describe ‘the life of [the] species’, beginning with an account of the barest human faculties, which ‘education and…habits could deprave, but which they could not destroy’.³² Wordsworth’s poetry participates in a similar mode of speculation. Wordsworth’s theory of poetry can be read simultaneously as the product of Enlightenment ideas and as a manifesto directed against Enlightenment methods a self-conscious ‘history of the imagination’, an evolving history conceived ‘in dialectical terms,’ a narrative that theorizes individual subjectivity as ‘linked to nature and to others through the power of the imagination to discipline itself’.³³ Bewell attributes the attention that Wordsworth pays to the ‘marginal figures’ that appear in his poetry—including idiots, wild children, savages, hermaphrodites, hysterical women, witches, fanatics, melancholics, the deaf, the mute, and the blind—to the tendency of empirical philosophy to use them as test cases for defining parameters of normal human faculties.³⁴

The Preface to The Excursion foregrounds the relationship between the mental faculties of the individual and the life of the species that comprises the central concern of ‘The Recluse’:

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted:—

(CExc, ‘Prospectus’, 63–6)

Through its interrelated narratives, The Excursion explores the degree to which the affective life of the individual emerges through interactions with both the natural world and fellow members of the human community. For example, the Wanderer’s encounters with ‘marginal figures’, such as the abandoned war widow in the narrative adapted from ‘The Ruined Cottage’, set up an exploration of the sources of human happiness. Book I begins the narrative by establishing the Wanderer’s ‘course of life’ and providing a detailed account of how he is ‘framed’ (CExc, i. 466):

His heart lay open; by Nature tuned

And constant disposition of his thoughts

To sympathy with Man, he was alive

To all that was enjoyed where’er he went,

And all that was endured; for, in himself

Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness,

He had no painful pressure from without

That made him turn aside from wretchedness

With coward fears. He could afford to suffer

With those whom he saw suffer.

(CExc, i. 391–400)

The solitary individual, free from the ‘painful pressure’ of social institutions and ‘tuned’ by Nature, gains a form of ‘quiet’ happiness that enables him to sympathize with the suffering of marginalized others. Rowan Boyson, in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure, argues that The Excursion ‘raises questions over man’s relationship to natural cheer, and the way in which contingency and material conditions underlie the potential for happiness’.³⁵ Through representations of ‘passive, unproductive pleasure, untied to larger narratives and ends’, Wordsworth theorizes the ‘communal and connecting’ potential of pleasure (183). Instead of employing the methods of systematic philosophy, he confronts on of the central questions of the Enlightenment—how an individual might lead a happy life—through a medium designed to reproduce, modify, and direct healthy habits of mind and communicate them to others. When the Wanderer finds a mouldy copy of Voltaire’s Candide (his ‘famous Optimist’) in an abandoned residence, he exclaims that the owner of the book could only be an ‘Unhappy Man!’ (CExc, ii. 467). He further dismisses it as the ‘relique’ of failed revolution, a ‘dull product of a Scoffer’s pen,’ which contains ‘Impure conceits discharging from a heart | Hardened by impious pride’ (ii.509–12). This episode serves as a subtle indictment of Enlightenment individualism, pointing to the isolation that necessarily accompanies visions of ultimate self-sufficiency.

The Prelude, which Wordsworth positions as the ‘preparatory Poem’ to ‘The Recluse’, ‘the Anti-Chapel…to the Body of a Gothic Church’, directly critiques the radical individualism that lies at the foundation of Enlightenment thinking. Looking back on his early devotion to abstract philosophical systems, Wordsworth recalls the allure of their claims:

the dream

Was flattering to the young ingenuous mind

Pleased with extremes, and not the least with that

Which makes the human reason’s naked self

The object of its fervour. What delight!

How glorious!—in self-knowledge and self-rule

To look through all the frailties of the world,

And, with a resolute mastery shaking off

The accidents of nature, time and place,

That make up the weak being of the past,

Build social freedom on its only basis:

The freedom of the individual mind

(Prelude 1805, x. 814–25).

The appeal of Enlightenment thinkers, with their promises of ultimate ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘self-rule’, lies in the prospect that the refinement of reason will eventually allow humanity to transcend the ‘accidents of nature, time and place’ and dictate its own destiny. Immanuel Kant mobilizes this ‘dream’ in his 1784 essay ‘What is Enlightenment’, in which he provides a concise definition of Enlightenment as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’, and ascribes to it a fitting motto: ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’³⁶ This focus on individual ‘mastery’ follows the epistemological revolution set in motion by Descartes, whose 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy casts ‘human reason’s naked self’ as the only reliable source of knowledge, and the original creator of reality. In his 1689 treatise, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke solidified the myth of Enlightenment individuality with his assertion that ‘we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain, in the consideration of things themselves; and made use rather of our own thoughts, than other men’s to find it’. With his assertion that ‘the floating of other men’s opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true’, Locke explicitly positions the individual as a self-determining entity.³⁷ In Locke’s account, ideas arise as the mind receives sense impressions from the outside world, but only become significant in light of the mind’s internal processes: ‘its own operations…are, as I have said, the original of all knowledge’.³⁸ For David Hume, progress in all branches of knowledge, including ‘Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Natural Religion’, depends upon the ‘science of MAN’. He remarks, ‘were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings,’ it would be ‘impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences’.³⁹

Through his recognition that the ‘mastery’ of knowledge is an unattainable and unpredictable ‘dream’, Wordsworth anticipates modern critiques of the legacy of Enlightenment thought. Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, from the perspective of the 20^th Century, begin the Dialectic of Enlightenment by exposing the myth of mastery that enraptured Wordsworth in France: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’.⁴⁰ That is, the Enlightenment impulse to define, categorize, and ultimately control the natural world produces its own forms of disciplinary power and social violence that replace the traditional ones it claims to shatter. In her study of the impact of Enlightenment theories of subject formation on Romantic-era texts, Nancy Yousef identifies the ‘fraught but powerful idea of autonomy’ as one of the ‘key inventions’ of the Enlightenment, alternatively a ‘celebrated innovation’ and a ‘damaging fiction’. She points to The Prelude as a work that begins to expose this fiction by drawing attention to the ‘artifice of its own tale of self-origination’.⁴¹ Early in The Prelude, in a passage addressed to Coleridge, Wordsworth points to the limits of the Enlightenment dictum to systematize everything down to the operations of the human mind: ‘But who shall parcel out | His intellect by geometric rules, | Split like a province into round and square?’ (Prelude 1805, ii. 208–10). He continues to explicitly knowledge the potential that such knowledge has to enslave those who would seek to be its masters:

Thou art no slave

Of that false secondary power by which

In weakness we create distinctions, then

Deem that our puny boundaries are things

Which we perceive, and not which we have made.

(Prelude 1805, ii. 220–4)

Instead of assuming the human self an original and self-sufficient power, Wordsworth states that difficulty of his own project stems from the impossibility of tracing the operations of the mind to their origins:

Hard task to analyse a soul, in which

Not only general habits and desires,

But each most obvious and particular thought—

Not in a mystical and idle sense,

But in the words of reason deeply weighed—

Hath no beginning.

(ii. 232–6)

Subjectivity, instead, appears as precisely that which lacks a definitive origin, as something that emerges through the complex and ongoing interactions of natural and cultural agents. Likewise, the significance of a human life can never be confidently charted or plotted in advance, but must instead be continually sought. Wordsworth proposes poetry as a fitting medium for such seeking. In the later books of The Prelude, Wordsworth embraces the contingency he had once believed could be conquered through the pursuit of system knowledge:

Whether to me shall be allotted life,

And, with life, power to accomplish aught of worth

That will be deemed no insufficient plea

For having given this record of myself,

Is all uncertain

(Prelude 1805, ii. 390–5).

In a final address to Coleridge, he asserts: ‘It will be known—by thee at least, my friend | Felt—that the history of a poet’s mind | Is labour not unworthy of regard’ (Prelude 1805, xiii. 406–419). Wordsworth’s poetic project anticipates modern critiques of the Enlightenment by refusing to adopt its methods and questioning its basic premises, abandoning the pursuit of ‘mastery’ in favor of an acceptance of the ‘uncertain’, recognizing the value of friendship over ‘self-rule’, and elevating the status of the ‘felt’ above the ‘known’.