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Wordsworth's Dim and Perilous Way
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Few critics have ever been very happy with the Excursion. Even those who support or justify Wordworth's turn to traditional attitudes have read it with no apparent enthusiasm or care. And for most modern readers who come to it after reading the Prelude, the Excursion can be no more than a painful anticlimax. It is hard for them not to suffer a sense of shock as they read its pious platitudes and realize that the poem was originally intended to embody and develop the fresh perceptions of the opening books of the Prelude. No wonder modern critics have been almost obsessed by the question: what happened to cause the narrowing and hardening of Wordsworth's attitudes? Why this timid compromise with orthodoxy rather than a bolder exploration of naturalism? And there have been nearly as many suggestions as critics. Perhaps because they have too readily accepted the Fenwick notes and taken the poem for granted as reflecting only the results of a change in the poet's attitudes, they have tended to neglect or to misinterpret the record in the poem itself of the state of mind which helped cause the change.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956
References
1 For all the complex and diverse elements in the tradition see H. N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York, 1939–49), 3 vols., esp. I, 535 fi. (Ch. xii), and ii, 365 ff. (Ch. xi).
2 For a detailed discussion of sources and analogues see Judson S. Lyon, The Excursion: A Study (New Haven, 1950), pp. 29–60.
3 Though Lorenzo never gets a chance to speak for himself, his skeptical arguments as paraphrased by Young are often similar to those of the Solitary. See esp. Nights VI and VII, “The Infidel Reclaimed.”
4 Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1940–49), v, 375. All citations to Wordsworth's poetry with the exception of the Prelude will be from this edition. For the facts of Fawcett's life, see M. Ray Adams, “Joseph Fawcett and Wordsworth's Solitary,” PMLA, XLVIII (1933), 505–528.
5 The Prelude, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1926), pp. 408, 410. All further citations to the Prelude will be from this edition.
6 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), ii, 109. Cf. Hazlitt's remark, “The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar are three persons in one poet,” in “Observations on the Excursion,” The Round Table (London, 1936), p. 113.
7 Two recent critics have assumed that Wordsworth was presenting a personal experience to be interpreted quite literally like those in the Prelude. Professor Abbie Potts, assuming that the original version of the vision is to be found in MS. x, which contains passages later to become part of Book vii of the Prelude, believes that the Solitary was first conceived of in the spirit of Bunyan's Pilgrim on the Delectable Mountains coming out of the valley of the shadow of death and looking toward the Celestial City (Wordsworth's Prelude, Cornell, 1953, pp. 11, 238). But the textual note in PW, v, 415, indicates that the vision passage was not part of MS. x. Furthermore, both the story of the old man and the vision are based upon an experience related to Wordsworth in November, 1805. See PW, v, 417–118.
John Jones sees the Solitary's experience as Wordsworth's own vision of Paradise “in an exact Christian and literary sense … We must believe that Wordsworth was in the spirit when he beheld this vision” (The Egotistical Sublime, London, 1954, pp. 170–172). But both Potts and Jones overlook the fact that, whatever the circumstances under which he first wrote the passage, Wordsworth has quite deliberately given it to one who wants to but cannot believe in such a vision.
8 For dates of composition for Book in, see PW, v, 418–419. The first draft was probably written in 1806.
9 12 March 1805. Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 460.
10 Ibid., p. 461. Night vi.205–206, 210–211.
11 Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (New York, 1854), p. 249.
12 Dissertations Moral and Critical: on Memory and Imagination (London 1783), p. 201.
13 To Beaumont, 20 Feb. 180S (Early Letters, pp. 449 ff. and 452); to James Losh, 16 March 1805 (pp. 463 ff.).
14 “The Tuft of Primroses” is printed in Appendix C in PW, v, 348–362. Lines 265–296 are identical with the Excursion iu.367—405.
16 iii.363–364. Not in “The Tuft of Primroses.”
18 iii.383–387; “Tuft,” ll. 276–280. Apparently originally intended for the Poet in Book v, further evidence that Wordsworth saw the Solitary's desires as his own. See PW, v, 153, 421.
17 See note, PW, v, 421, 418–419.
18 iii.695–701. The last 2 lines are an echo of ll. 1174–75 of the Borderers (PW, i, 198) in which Oswald describes his state of mind upon learning that the Captain he has marooned is innocent.
19 See PW, v, 385. The Ruined Cottage, MS. B (1797–98), 11. 238–256, becomes Prelude ii.416–434.
20 George MacLean Harper, William Wordsworth (London, 1929), p. 517.
21 For comments and letters from 1815 to 1845 on the unfinished Recluse, see PW, v, 367–368. The psychological implications of Wordsworth's comment in a letter to Landor on 20 April 1822 are obvious: “The Recluse has had a long sleep, save in my thoughts; my MSS. are so ill-penned and blurred that they are useless to all but myself; and at present I cannot face them.”
22 Part iv, Stanza xi, Shelley's Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford, 1935), p. 349.
23 Review of Excursion in Edinburgh Review, Nov. 1814; rptd. in Contemporary Reviews of Romantic Poetry, ed. John Wain (New York, 1953), pp. 71 ff.
24 In a note to Haydon, 10 Jan. 1818, Keats wrote that “there are three things to rejoice at in this Age—The Excursion Your Pictures and Hazlitt's depth of Taste” (The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, Oxford, 1935, p. 79). The passage to which Keats was especially attracted was that on the origins of Greek mythology, iv.718–762, 847–887. See PW, v, 427.
25 The Romantic Poets (London, 1953), p. 90. It is only fair to say that Hough sees the influence of the Excursion as entirely beneficial: “It is one of the great reassertions of traditional values against the unhistorical rationalist optimism of the enlightenment.”