Byron's "The Giaour" (ll. 387-409)

Delacroix's famous image introduces one of Byron's most compelling poems. The passage below is a bit longer than most of the features here on Romanticism@UAB, but it's both accessible to readers and illustrative of a key and recurrent idea in Byron's poetry.

The Giaour is one of several oriental tales Byron wrote during his "years of fame"—that period from 1812 through 1815 when the poet was celebrated as the author of Childe Harold I & II and before the scandals of his private life caused him to go into (self)exile in 1816. The poem offers a fragmented narrative about a strangely powerful "Giaour" (i.e. a Christian) who, as is typical of the Byronic hero, is torn by remorse and anguish. As we piece together the various poetic fragments that make up the poem, it becomes evident that the Giaour has had a passionate relationship with Leila, a young woman from the Turk Hassan's harem. At the end of the poem, the beautiful Leila is dead, killed by Hassan in revenge for her unfaithfulness; Hassan is dead, killed by the Giaour in revenge for his killing of Leila; and the Giaour lives on, a shell of his former self, having spent his closing years as a vaguely frightening and mysterious brother in a nameless Abbey (a figure likely borrowed from the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe).

In the midst of this fragmented, discontinuous tale, the Boatman delivers these lines as an interpretation of or commentary on the narrative (lines 387-409):

As rising on its purple wing
The insect-queen of eastern spring,
O'er emerald meadows of Kashmeer
Invites the young pursuer near,
And leads him on from flower to flower
A weary chase and wasted hour,
Then leaves him, as it soars on high
With panting heart and tearful eye:
So beauty lures the full-grown child
With hue as bright, and wing as wild;
A chase of idle hopes and fears,
Begun in folly, closed in tears.
If won, to equal ills betrayed,
Woe waits the insect and the maid,
A life of pain, the loss of peace,
From infant's play, or man's caprice:
The lovely toy so fiercely sought
Has lost its charm by being caught,
For every touch that wooed its stay
Has brush'd the brightest hues away
Till charm, and hue, and beauty gone,
'Tis left to fly or fall alone.

The central figure here has to do with catching butterflies. The most fantastic and beautiful butterfly (the "insect-queen of eastern spring") entices the "young pursuer" into a chase which ultimately is unsuccessful, leaving the disappointed butterfly hunter "With panting heart and tearful eye." This, of course, is a figurative way of describing the attraction to beauty—like the young butterfly hunter, the "full-grown child" is enticed by the beauty of a "maid" into a chase that is "Begun in folly, closed in tears." What is especially interesting here is that, regardless of whether the pursuit of beauty is successful, the end is tragic for both pursuer and pursued: If the pursuit fails, then the pursuer is left with the "tearful eye" born of aroused but unsatisfied desire. If the pursuit succeeds, then the maid/butterfly sacrifices beauty to captivity (she has "lost [her] charm by being caught"), a point Byron illustrates by having the fragile pigment of the butterfly's wing brushed away by the pursuer's touch "Till charm, and hue, and beauty gone, / 'Tis left to fly or fall alone." Similarly for the pursuer, the "folly" of his pursuit is the dream of some fulfilled desire, some lasting pleasure which, of course, turns out to be illusory, leaving the pursuer in sorrow—at least until a new object of desire swims into his ken.

This is a recurrent structure in Byron's poetry (and perhaps in his life as well!), a structure that may help explain both the tragic sense of a work like Manfred and the comic narrative repetitions in Don Juan. For instance, Manfred explains a "fatal truth" in his opening monologue, that "Sorrow is Knowledge," or to put it otherwise, "The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life" (I.i.10-12). As readers of the Giaour's butterfly-hunting passage, we are in a position of "knowledge"; from our objective vantage point we can see the ultimate futility and disappointment that inevitably awaits the butterfly hunter whether or not he succeeds in catching his prize. From the hunter's point of view, however, he is alive only to his own desire for the butterfly, and he is fully engaged in his effort to satisfy that desire. The hunter does not consider such nice questions as whether the pursuit is worthwhile or whether it will lead to some final satisfaction—it is quite sufficient for him to feel and act upon his attraction to the prize. (Contrast this to Manfred, who feels the "curse to have no natural fear, / Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes, / Or lurking love of something on the earth" (I.i.25-27).) The hunter is fully caught up in his Life, conceived of as the goal-oriented pursuit of some object of desire; but we as readers are fully apprised of the Knowledge that such a life leads only to disappointment and sorrow: our Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

Toward the end of the poem, when the fearsome and mysterious title character is explaining himself to the friar, the Giaour claims that ordinary worldly accolades now mean nothing to him—"I smile at laurels won or lost" (1013). He then expresses his current condition in very Manfred-like terms: "But place again before my eyes / Aught that I deem a worthy prize;— / The maid I love — the man I hate — / And I will hunt the steps of fate, / (To save or slay — as these require) / Through rending steel, and rolling fire" (1016-20). Such is the condition of the Byronic hero: stricken with knowledge of the "fatal truth," living on as the mere shadow of a once indomitable power (that others now look upon in tantalized fear), and without any possibility of worthy or worthwhile action, whether driven by love or hate. If there is any possible exit from this intolerable position, it must be, as the Giaour suggests, his own death. But, I would argue, Byron eventually discovers an alternative in the comic, zeugmatic rhetoric of Don Juan.

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," Stanza 4.

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth--
And from the would itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

This is the fourth stanza of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," which was begun in April 1802 in response to Coleridge's hearing the opening stanzas of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Both poems focus on the speaker/poet's loss--loss of an ability to perceive "glory" in Nature, and thus to receive a dynamic, spiritual sustenance from the fusion of mind and nature. This was, of course, the great theme of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poems from the later 1790s, but now for both poets that capacity for a feeling, emotional, even visionary perception of natural beauty seems to be fading. As Coleridge explains in the first stanzas of "Dejection," he gazes with a "blank" eye upon the images of a beautiful sunset, and instead of being inspired by the beauty of nature, he merely registers these images as perceptions: "I see them all so excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!" Images that previously would have provided emotional and spiritual inspiration are now the mere stuff of mechanical perception.

The loss of the former mode of "glorious" perception raises implicit questions for Coleridge as it raised explicit questions for Wordsworth: Where did the glory come from? Where has it gone? Can it be rekindled? Wordsworth, of course, eventually resolved these questions by positing a supernatural and immortal soul which preexists our mortal selves and that will presumably continue even after we are no longer living our natural lives. Coleridge's response, written before Wordsworth's, is less optimistic: "I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within." For Coleridge, then, the failure of the heretofore sustaining "marriage" between mind and nature is attributable exclusively to the "soul" and not to any failing on the part of nature. Further, the marriage itself, as Coleridge suggests in Stanza 4, has been a very one-sided affair.

The stanza opens (after the "O Lady!" apostrophe, an echo of the poem's origins in an April 1802 letter to Sara Hutchinson) with the claim that "we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live: / Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!" In other words, whatever glory we once attributed to a creative fusion of mind and nature was really a projection of mind alone. Coleridge had, in effect, mistakenly posited a dynamic and reciprocal interchange between mind and nature, but it turns out that nature, itself passive, was really only reflecting back the projections of the speaker/poet--he receives but what he gives. Thus, if nature ever appeared to offer anything of "higher worth" than a mere "inanimate cold world," that "higher worth" was actually "A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud" that "issue[d] forth" from the soul. It is not (nor was it ever) the product of a fruitful interchange between mind and nature.

An analogy may help to clarify this argument. Suppose a person is sitting in a theatre, watching a film, and becoming emotionally engaged in and perhaps even inspired by the action and images presented on the screen. Initially one might conceive of this movie-goer's experience in holistic terms: the inspired, emotionally engaged condition is "caused" by a marriage of the viewer's emotional capacity to respond to the images presented on the screen, and the images themselves which are designed and organized by a filmmaker to foster just such a reaction on the viewer's part. Following through on this model, the filmmaker would be something akin to God, or, as Coleridge says in "Frost at Midnight," the "Great Universal Teacher." Hence, one might imagine a kind of visionary inspiration to derive from a "marriage" of perceiver and imagery, mind and nature, subject and object, and the viewer's inspired condition thus constitutes a feeling response to the divinity that flows in and through the perceived images. Such is the original, glorious mode of perception eulogized by Wordsworth's Ode and Coleridge's "Dejection."

But now imagine the same scene a few years later: this time the viewer does not respond emotionally to the images on the screen. The viewer still sees the images on the screen, but this is now just an indifferent and mechanical perception. The images are registered, but they are void of any particular meaning or emotional affect. They are no longer conceived as the inspired and inspiring work of some filmmaker/God figure--now they are just so much color and line with no particular significance attached. This second viewer can recall that at one time he was emotionally and spiritually engaged, but now the perceptual world is nothing but an empty show, and the viewer is left to grieve for his lost capacity to respond. (This is the "grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, / A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief" that the "Dejection" speaker expresses in the second stanza.) What is perhaps worst of all, from his current impassive and detached perspective, the speaker now sees that his former emotionally inspired condition, his assumption that he was intuiting the intentions of the filmmaker/God, was merely an illusion born of his own enthusiasm. Rather than sensing the willful purposes of a filmmaker/God in the images on the screen, he was actually "seeing" a reflection of his own enthusiasm. Now that the enthusiasm has faded, so too does the whole emotionally inspiring experience: there is finally no filmmaker/God, no "Great Universal Teacher," no "vast ... intellectual breeze."

Under the circumstances, one can certainly understand the gloominess of Coleridge's title. The poem calls into question the central philosophical, even theological position that had dominated Coleridge's poetry in the 1790s. By poem's end, the speaker has recovered somewhat--at least he hopes that Sara's experience will be happier than his own: "May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, / Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!" But for the numbed and grieving speaker of this poem, there is little hope of escape-- "afflictions bow me down to earth" and "each visitation / Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, / My shaping spirit of Imagination."

Joanna Baillie, from "A Winter's Day"

Strutting before, the cock leads forth his train,
And chuckling near the barn-door 'mid the straw,
Reminds the farmer of his morning's service.
His grateful master throws a liberal handful;
They flock about it, while the hungry sparrows,
Perched on the roof, look down with envious eye,
Then, aiming well, amidst the feeders light,
And seize upon the feast with greedy bill,
Till angry partlets peck them off the field.
But at a distance, on the leafless tree,
All woe-begone, the lonely blackbird sits;
The cold north wind ruffles his glossy feathers;
Full oft he looks, but dare not make approach,
Then turns his yellow beak to peck his side
And claps his wings close to' his sharpened breast.
The wandering fowler from behind the hedge,
Fastens his eye upon him, points his gun,
And firing wantonly, as at a mark,
Of life bereaves him in the cheerful spot
That oft hath echoed to his summer's song.

This brief passage comes from Joanna Baillie's poem "A Winter's Day," published in 1790. The poem fits neatly within the "loco-descriptive" genre, and it is reminiscent of the landscape paintings of artists like Constable who were flourishing at roughly the same time. As Baillie's title suggests, the poem as a whole is a diurnal sketch of rural life—it follows a farm family from the rooster's cry at first light until the farmer himself gives one last check on the weather before retiring for the night. As such, the poem is organized temporally—an obvious enough point, perhaps, though note that this contrasts with Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" or Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." These more famous and canonical Romantic poems, while still in one sense descriptive of specific natural scenes, are organized according to the poet's association of ideas rather than according to the temporal or spatial patterns of the objective world being described.

The body of Baillie's poem is made up of a series of scenes that usually seem "merely" descriptive, but that occasionally offer some sense of a figurative meaning that goes beyond the mere descriptive content. The passage presented here is one such instance. Much of the poem is devoted to the hard work of the laboring "hind," but also to the sustaining care with which he treats his family and his livestock and his broader community of neighbors. This is a world of harmonious interdependence, where the comical strut of the rooster is appreciated for what it is, and where the "grateful master" rewards the chickens (and the hungry but opportunistic sparrows) with a "liberal handful" of corn. It's an image of a joyful, ecological interdependence—the rooster and his brood depend on the farmer who is in turn "grateful" for their contribution to the life of the farm.

Nearby, however, we find a less fortunate bird—the "lonely blackbird" who is apparently too skittish to join in the farmyard feast. Instead, this wind-ruffled songbird sinks into himself, tightening his wings as though to better keep out the cold. The next figure, the "wandering fowler"—perhaps some passing sportsman with leisure time and resources enough to divert himself with hunting—apparently comes from outside this close-knit rural circle. Upon seeing the blackbird, he fires "wantonly, as at a mark," and kills him. It seems an act of senseless and impersonal violence: the blackbird provides no food or any other value for the "fowler." He is nothing more than a target and is killed without a thought. The poet, of course, recalls how the blackbird had contributed a song that made this place a "cheerful spot," but this positive engagement with the well-being of the place is lost on the hunter.

It is perhaps an easy and sentimental point, but clearly Baillie is drawing a contrast between the engaged, charitable, and ecologically sustaining lives of the laborer and his family as opposed to the wanton destruction wrought by the (presumably) leisure-class hunter. The social, cultural, and political implications of the observation are clear enough. This peasant laborer—like Wordsworth's Michael—represents a deeply grounded, ecologically engaged way of life that was quickly disappearing in the face of an increasingly cosmopolitan commercial and industrial England, and Baillie's poem is an elegy of sorts to this vanishing way of life.

P. B. Shelley's Alastor, (lines 192-205)

Roused by the shock he started from his trance—
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts.

This passage describes a psycho-spiritual condition that frequently recurs in Shelley's poetry and, indeed, that captures a familiar theme of romantic literature as a whole.

At this point in the poem, the Alastor Poet has been wandering through sites of ancient ruins while an "Arab maiden"—despite the Poet's neglect of her affections and even of her very presence—tends to his physical needs. Shortly thereafter, the Poet has an erotic, visionary dream in which he sees a "veiled maid" who seems to be his very soul-mate. In his dream, the maid—apparently a poet herself—sings about "Knowledge," "truth," "virtue," "lofty hopes," and "divine liberty," themes that mirror the most ardent thoughts and dreams of the Poet himself. Both the Poet and the dream maiden are enraptured, and eventually she gives in to the "irresistible joy" and "With frantic gesture and short breathless cry / Fold[s] his frame in her dissolving arms" (184-86). In a distinctly Shelleyan figure, visionary fulfillment is figured in baldly sexual terms. Such ecstasy does not last, and once the vision fades, the Poet is left with his solitary "vacant brain." The quotation above follows immediately on the heels of this visionary consummation. The Poet awakens with a start back in a cold physical reality which now seems inadequate—with "garish hills" and "vacant woods"—and he is left with nothing but questions: "Whither have fled / The hues of heaven that canopied his bower / Of yesternight?" Now he can only "Gaze on the empty scene."

This sense of extraordinary fulfillment followed by longing and emptiness suggests that Shelley has been reading his Wordsworth and his Coleridge. Wordsworth's Intimations Ode presents a similar pattern as his speaker is struck with a sense of loss and then wonders "Whither has fled the visionary gleam" (Ode, line 56), and Coleridge, in his "Dejection: An Ode" (written in direct response to the initial stanzas of Wordsworth's Ode), writes about a remarkably beautiful sunset: "And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!" (Dejection, line 30). Alastor would seem to be Shelley's contribution to this poetic conversation, and the differences in how each poet copes with his particular post-vision depression are instructive. Wordsworth, famously, posits a notion of pre-existence which, if it doesn't necessarily rekindle the same sort of joy he once knew, at least provides an assurance that soul itself is immortal and thus destined for a realm beyond the mutability of Nature. Coleridge is not so optimistic. His own "Joy" has been extinguished by "abstruse research" (89) among other things, and it will not return for him, though his poem concludes with a prayer that Joy and solace might visit his beloved friend.

Shelley takes a somewhat different approach. Certainly his Poet-protagonist feels acutely the pain of a lost visionary fulfillment, but his response to that loss is to ignore the actual world (as he was oblivious to the Arab maiden who loved him and tended to his needs), and to orient his quest toward another encounter with his dream-ideal. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley—at least in my reading—does not come to a decisive answer about the fleetingness of his encounter with this visionary moment of fulfillment. Instead, Shelley sees this interesting psychological/spiritual condition in the context of social ethics, and readers are left with a question: Are we supposed to admire the Alastor Poet's dedicated the pursuit of his ideal? Or are we supposed to question the value of such an other-worldly pursuit if it causes a real, mortal, natural world to seem inadequate by comparison?

Malthus, from the Essay on the Principle of Population

Thomas Robert Malthus was a "romantic" only by an accident of history; by temperament and thought he was anything but. Nonetheless, Malthus's ideas about population and economic distress were very much in play as writers from Charlotte Smith to William Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley considered the causes of the economic inequities that were themselves the causes of the political upheaval that was pervasive during the romantic period. Malthus was a fine writer and subtle thinker, but the idea for which he was most famous can be gleaned from these sentences from the opening chapter of his Essay on the Principle of Population... (1798, followed by several expansions and reprints).

1. The root cause of social and economic inequities "is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it."

2. "[P]opulation, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio."

3. "[C]onsidering the present average state of the earth, the means of subsistence, under circumstances the most favourable to human industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio."

The basic idea here is relatively simple from a 21st-century perspective already familiar with interpretations of culture and economics based on demographic and statistical data. This was news in the late 18th century:

If one thinks of economics in the broadest terms as the access to and distribution of the material means of survival (e.g. a species' access to food), then one of the driving forces of economic activity is captured in Malthus's tragic logic. The population of a species "increases in a geometrical ratio" (that is, populations increase exponentially) while the food supply increases in only "an arithmetical ratio." For example, suppose one husband and wife have four children, and, in twenty five years or so, each of these children has four children of their own who, in another twenty five years or so, have their own four children, &c. &c. Clearly this population will expand very rapidly. At the same time, however, the production of food can only increase comparatively slowly as new fields are opened, better agricultural methods are developed, and so forth. Even under "circumstances the most favourable to human industry," says Malthus, the food supply can only grow by an "arithmetical ratio"—that is, by adding a bit here and there, but not nearly so rapidly as the exponential growth in population. One might quibble about the exact numbers, but the simple fact, from Malthus's point of view, is that populations increase faster than food supplies, and, if unchecked, this leads inevitably to periodically repeated catastrophic starvation events which wipe out whole swaths of the population and thus restart the clock on the way to the next Malthusian catastrophe.

It's a simple, if tragic model for understanding the evolution and history of human societies.

But what does Malthusian theory have to do with romanticism? Well, a number of romantic writers were deeply concerned with revolutionary politics. The early Wordsworth was a great supporter of the French Revolution, William Godwin (and his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley) were both advocates of the "perfectibility" of human societies, and the overwhelming political and economic question of the day had to do with the increasingly strained relationship between a small number of people with resources, power, and money and a larger number—the "lower orders"—who lived in desperate poverty and were sometimes on the brink of starvation. The reformers of the period were motivated by an idealism that dared to imagine a more perfect society of freedom and, if not universal wealth, at least more equitably distributed resources. Such idealistic thinking is everywhere in the period—from Godwin's "perfectibilitarianism" to Shelley's social idealism. One might even cite the Preamble to the new American Constitution with its emphasis on forming "a more perfect Union" which will "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Malthusian theory is a warning to such heady idealism. If Malthus is right, then the kind of "perfect Union" the reformers are imagining is simply not possible—and not because of some corrupt, greedy, and self-serving political or ecclesiastical establishment. Instead, the very expression of human passion, which Malthus identifies (for reasons obvious enough) as the root cause of the "geometrical" growth of the population, will need to be regulated or "checked." The only alternative is to spin ever closer to the destruction and despair of the next Malthusian catastrophe.

Malthusian thinking was, to say the least, controversial during the period. Conservatives tended to embrace Malthus's population logic, seeing it as a tragic explanation for the poverty of the "lower orders." In the most cynical of such appropriations, extreme poverty was portrayed as an inevitable and necessary condition since it held the overall population growth in check and thus prevented an even greater Malthusian catastrophe. (The fact that such logic also allowed persons of authority to sidestep responsibility for the misery of the "lower orders" was also useful.) Other writers saw some genuine potential in Malthus's thesis—by refraining from having children, the poor could materially improve their lot without necessarily resorting to some political revolution. Still others, saw the implications of Malthus but also saw a kind of heartlessness in treating people as so many demographic statistics and then justifying systemic cruelty based on such findings. Among these latter writers was P. B. Shelley who, in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, says: "I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus."

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," lines 36-50

         Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

This is one of the most often quoted, most often remembered passages from Wordsworth's poetry. "Tintern Abbey"—for such the poem is almost always called, though the actual title is the ungainly "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey..."—offers an early formulation of Wordsworth's pantheistic philosophy. It may be the first full-blown expression of a Wordsworthian High-Romantic ideology (perhaps theology); much of the rest of Wordsworth's poetry is essentially an expansion on, clarification of, or reaction to the lyrically measured claims of "Tintern Abbey."

Prior to the quoted lines, Wordsworth describes the immediate "here and now" of the poem—a visit to the Wye Valley, ostensibly on 14 July 1798—and he then details the benign influences of his recollections of nature when, during the five years since his last visit, he was living "in lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities" (26-27). Thus, the chronology represented in the poem thus far has a visit to the Wye Valley (in 1793, presumably) followed by a five-year span in which the poet was in a lonely urban space, and now in 1798 he has returned to the natural scene. This recent history allows the poet both to admire the beauty of the natural scene before him and also to reflect on the value of his recollections of that scene even when he is removed from its immediate presence. This last reflection is the focus of the lines quoted above.

Initially, when the poet is lonely and stuck in the city, his recollections of natural beauty offer a kind of psychological solace and comfort: they provide "tranquil restoration" in "hours of weariness." But this is something more significant than a mere psychological palliative against urban alienation. The recollections have a moral element since they are involved with "acts / Of kindness and of love," and they lead ultimately to the moment of spiritual vision recorded above.

The central idea of the passage is that contemporary life is confused and often oppressive—it is a "heavy and ... weary weight" that makes up an "unintelligible world." But these recollections of natural beauty serve as a sort of catalyst producing a "serene and blessed mood" which Wordsworth describes in terms that seem almost mystical. The ordinary motions of the "corporeal frame" (respiration, circulation of the blood, etc.) are "almost suspended" while the mind (or "living soul") can suddenly "see into the life of things." Clearly this is a visionary moment, a momentary revelation of some "life" beyond the ephemeral appearances of "things" and beyond the confusion and alienation of ordinary urban life.

One aspect of such a passage that I find particularly intriguing is the context it provides for Wordsworthian nature ideology. It is clear everywhere in Wordsworth's writing that nature, or, more accurately, a feeling response to natural beauty, is the source of psychological comfort, moral judgment, and now even spiritual vision. What is sometimes overlooked, though, is the necessity of some non-natural space as well, some space like the "lonely rooms" described in "Tintern Abbey." One cannot fully appreciate nature unless one can recollect images of nature from a vantage point outside of nature. That non-natural vantage point is thus an essential element of the psycho-spiritual development expressed here in "Tintern Abbey" and elaborated throughout Wordsworth's life in The Prelude.

Following through on this observation, I would suggest that calling Wordsworth a "nature poet" is much too simple if one sees the term in a sort of binary system where nature is positive and non-nature (i.e. the city) is negative. It would be much more accurate to identify Wordsworth as a poet concerned with the movement back and forth between natural and non-natural environments, for in that movement Wordsworth can trace the development of his own poetic sensibilities. The fact that Wordsworth was writing at a time when England itself was being transformed from an agrarian/agricultural to an urban/industrial culture likely has some significant relationship to this central thematic concern of his poetry.

Austen's Pride and Prejudice, iii.14 (or chapter 56)

Here is a late-novel conversation between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet. Lady Catherine has the first lines:

   "I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended on the maternal side from the same noble line; and, on the father's, from respectable, honourable, and ancient, though untitled families. Their fortune on both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide them? The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be. If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere, in which you have been brought up."
   "In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal."
   "True. You are a gentleman's daughter. But who was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their condition."
   "Whatever my connections may be," said Elizabeth, "if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."

It was once unusual to see Jane Austen in a political context, but passages like this certainly support such a reading. "The Spirit of the Age"—as William Hazlitt and others described the late 18th and early 19th centuries—was in large measure a spirit of revolutionary change. An older aristocratic/monarchic system preserved money, power, and cultural authority in the hands of a few dominant, titled families, and those titles were handed down through the arcane rules of primogeniture from one generation to the next. This was not a system to inspire and reward individual merit—one's place in the social order was determined chiefly by the circumstances of one's birth. The emergent social order, however, tended to emphasize and reward individual merit and individual judgment. It was a more democratic (and capitalistic) social order that allowed for much greater mobility among social classes and that granted some power and cultural authority to persons who did not necessarily belong to established, "respectable" families. In one sense, the political debates of the 1790s that set conservative writers like Edmund Burke against radical/reformist writers like Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft offer a microcosm of this social, political, and economic sea change.

The passage above is imbued with this debate. For her part, Lady Catherine offers an almost cartoonishly extreme image of the aristocratic concern with family wealth and noble status. She begins with a bald assertion of her sense of cultural authority by issuing a direct command to Elizabeth: "Hear me in silence." She follows with a detailed account of the Darcy/de Bourgh lineage and the further assertion that the "fortune on both sides is splendid." These are powerful aristocratic credentials that are supposed to awe Elizabeth into submission, and, by extension, to assert her own "ancient" rights to power and to keep such bounders as she imagines Elizabeth to be in the "sphere, in which [they] were brought up." Note that there is no place in this system even to recognize any individual merit in a person like Elizabeth. From Lady Catherine's point of view, Elizabeth is of a class that is to be kept in its place. The fact that the marriage that Lady Catherine hopes to encourage between her daughter and her nephew is vaguely incestuous (at least from a twenty-first century vantage perspective) simply underscores the jealously guarded intra-familial relations of the aristocratic system.

Elizabeth, of course, will have none of Lady Catherine's pretensions, though she does adopt a version of the "family heritage" argument. Her first response is to assert the status of her own connections: "I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal," and even Lady Catherine must acknowledge the validity of Elizabeth's claim (though she continues to question the "connections" on Elizabeth's mother's side). Of greater importance, however, is Elizabeth's argument that it is the nephew's—Mr. Darcy's—views that count here, not Lady Catherine's: "Whatever my connections may be, if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."

Granted, one would not go so far as to claim Austen as a radical reformer, but there is a crucial difference here between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine that mirrors the logic of the political radicals. Lady Catherine's conception of the social order allows no place for individual judgment—everything depends on the historical and financial circumstances into which a person is born. But Elizabeth contends that such general claims of authority based on nothing more than social rank (e.g. Lady Catherine's initial command to Elizabeth) need to be subordinated to the concerns of the individuals involved. If what is at issue is a potential match between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, it is the prerogative of these individuals to decide their own best interests. The "ancient" aristocratic order is subverted by a new emphasis on individual judgment and individual merit.

The echoes of the socio-political debates of the period are obvious enough in a passage like this that pits the old-guard Lady Catherine against the plucky and self-reliant Elizabeth, and it is clear that the novel favors Elizabeth. This raises a broader question about Austen. Several posts here on Romanticism @ UAB have focused on the revolutionary moment of romanticism. Where exactly would Austen's novel fit into this debate? Does Elizabeth's individualism put her on the side of the radicals? Or do the portrayals of such well-tuned and tasteful estates as Pemberley put her on the side of the conservatives?