Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production 9781503616394

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Wordsworth's Profession

Wordsworth's Profession

Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production

Thomas Pfau

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book

Acknowledgments

For their perceptive and supportive responses to earlier drafts of this book, or parts of it, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to a number of people. Jerrold Hogle's extraordinary support of this manuscript has provided me with an awesome example of considerate and enabling mentorship. Ian Balfour, Tilottama Rajan, Carol Jacobs, Nicholas Roe, and Steven Goldsmith provided invaluable critical input. Here at Duke, I benefitted immensely from comments and suggestions offered by some colleagues whose friendship, collegiality, and intellectual integrity have truly distinguished them; among these are Robert F. Cleckner, Frank Lentricchia, David Aers, Thomas J. Ferraro, and Michael Valdez Moses. My appreciation also extends to the highly engaged and talented Duke undergraduate and graduate students who made my Romanticism seminars a spirited and rigorous testing-ground for this book's thesis and the local readings undertaken in its support. Among the many whose lucid questions, observations, and suggestions helped clarify and strengthen my argument, I especially wish to acknowledge John Waters, Ghislaine McDayter, Nigel Alderman, Damien Gilbert, and Helen Thompson. Most of all, I have looked forward to expressing my profound gratitude to my wife, Olga L. Valbuena, and our daughters, Natalie and Elisa, from whose loving and creative sympathies I have drawn strength for many years. I dedicate this book to them, in full admiration of their expressive talents, which have always kept me mindful of the fine line separating intellectual passion from professional self-absorption. Earlier versions of sections of "Instruction" and "Vocation" appeared in Romanticism (1996) and South Atlantic Quarterly (1996). A portion of "Instruction" was published in New Literary History 24 (1993) and is reprinted here by kind permission of the editor. T.P.

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

XI

r

Description: Picturesque Aesthetics and the Production of the English Middle Class, 1730-I798 I7 Professing Class: Aesthetic Form as Social Capital, 19. The Politics of Locodescriptive Form: Aesthetic Locale and National Interest, 37· Cultural Experience as Technique: On the Pragmatics of Picturesque Form, 6r. Aesthetics and the Social Unconscious: Judgment and Disinterestedness in Kant, 82. Virtual Reality: Labor and Professionalization in Wordsworth's Early Poetry, 92. Lyric Transport: Beholding Affect and Intelligence in "Tintern Abbey," 114.

Instruction: Romantic Theories of Elemental and Cultural Literacy and the Lyrical Ballads qr "Spreading the areas of allegiance": The Pragmatics of Romantic Writing, I43· Surveillance as Pleasure: Literacy and Ascendancy in Bell and Coleridge, 151. "Searching Their Hearts": Moral and Aesthetic Pedagogy in Wollstonecraft, r63. "Silent Monitors": The Hermeneutic Mobility of the Reader in Lyrical Ballads, 179. Genial Inquisition: Dialogue as Social Practice in Wordsworth and Godwin, 193. Bringing About the Past: Recollection and Transmission in the Ballad Genre, 208. Moving the Subject: Bildung as Cultural Theory in Hegel and Wordsworth, 227. "Substitute Excellencies": Figuration and Authenticity in Wordsworth's Preface, 246.

Contents

Vlll

Vocation: Automimesis and the Political Economy of Spirit and Body 26r in The Prelude Self-Interest Professed: Autobiography and the Simulation of Authority, 263. Self-Interest Contained: Figuring the Polity in Reynolds, Burke, and Hume, 275. Self-Interest Legitimated: The Composition of Affect in The Prelude, 302. "Emboss'd with terms of art": Imitation of Life in Book 5 of The Prelude, 32r. "Disturbing the Feast": The Crisis of Political Economy in Malrhus's Essay, 34r. "Debasement of the Body or the Mind": Urban Inferno in The Prelude, 362. "Rosy

Cheeks" I "False Lustres": Sexual and Aesthetic Heterodoxy in Book 7 of The Prelude, 370.

Notes

385

Bibliography Index

449

429

Figures

r. Claude Lorrain, Landscape with a Rustic Dance (1640-41) 45 2. Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Apollo and the Muses (1652) 46 3· Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion (1648) 52 4· Salvatore Rosa, Landscape with Banditti (1656) 53 5· Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. john Gravenor and Their Daughters, Elizabeth and Ann (1752) 59 6. Thomas Gainsborough, The Watering Place (1777) 6o 7· Joseph Priestley, figures appended to his Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective (1770) 68 8. William Gilpin, Scene Without Picturesque Adornment (c. 1792) 73 9· William Gilpin, Scene with Picturesque Adornment (c. 1792) 74 10. William Craig, exempla from his Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape (1793) So rr. Thomas Hearne, frontispiece to Richard P. Knight, The Landscape (1795) 85 12. Thomas Hearne, frontispiece to Richard P. Knight, The Landscape (1795) 86 13. Thomas Gainsborough, Wooded Landscape with Cattle by a Pool (1782) 95 14. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Transept ofTintern Abbey (c. 1794) 127 r 5. Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819-20) 133

x

Figures

16. Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise at Sea (1821) 134 17. William Blake, frontispiece to Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories (1791) 167 18. William Blake, "Nurse's Song," from his Songs of Experience (1794) 168

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used throughout the text and notes. Full information on the sources below and other sources cited in the text and notes is provided in the bibliography. In quotations, italics are in the original unless specified as mine. B BL Cr] D E EPP 1798 EPP r8o3 EW LB LG LL LS LWEY

OS

William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. W. J. Bate and James Engel!, 2 vols. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Pat Rogers William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Philip Appleman Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Donald Winch William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, I797I8oo, ed. James Butler and Karen Green Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logic, ed. J. R. de Jackson Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures I8o8-I8I9: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White The Letters ofWilliam and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, I787-I805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester Shaver Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life

Xll

p !799

P r8os P r8so PG PrW PS PW RC

RF RR

Abbreviations William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798-1799, ed. Stephen Parrish William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book "Prelude," ed. Mark Reed, 2 vols. William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book "Prelude," ed. W. J. B. Owen G. E W. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser, 3 vols. G. F. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 5 vols. William Wordsworth, "The Ruined Cottage" and "The Pedlar," ed. James Butler Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. C. C. O'Brien Donald Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, 2 vols.

Wordsworth's Profession

Introduction

As I try to indicate the motivation for this book, I find an image persisting in my mind, compelling for both its formal concision and its historical force. The year is 194 5, the scene is Berlin: there, before a backdrop of ruins rising skyward from the faltering twilight of an early summer evening, is the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sergiu Celibidache, giving one of its first performances since the end of the war.1 The scene seems almost without parallel: a city reduced to rubble, a nation soon to confront its gruesome history of this century, rising intuitions of an abysmal collective guilt, and the encroaching recognition that this time Germany has obliterated all its moral and historical capital. In short, this is an audience about to become conscious of a world irreversibly altered by the bloodshot fantasy of Germany's racial and geopolitical hegemony; and in this setting the symphony goers, synecdochic of the German populace, struggle to imagine a reality beyond the totalitarian, violently homogenized order of the Third Reich. With the bunker of the Reich beneath, the rubble of turnof-the-century Wilhelminian architecture all around, and an "uncertain heaven" above, these listeners witnessing Celibidache and the philharmonic supremely embody a community desperately searching for untainted symbolic resources that will help it recover some measure of moral and affective integrity. In fact, the symbolic order indispensable for this project of ideological reconstruction already fills the air: free of the terror of historical memory, the strains of Beethoven's Egmont overture ascend into the dusk; tears descend from empty eyes, finding their way on the furrowed, gray, often catatonic faces. One might want to conclude that these tears signal an awakening from the nightmare of saturation bombings and street combat, and perhaps also a first awakening to the ghastly efficiency of Gestapo terror and Nazi propaganda conceived and implemented by the German people themselves. More likely (if less optimisti-

2

Introduction

cally), however, these tears symptomize collective relief at having rediscovered (and at having begun to reappropriate) Kultur as a plausible strategy of "unknowing" a relentless and potentially insurmountable consciousness of historical guilt. The mediations of a more distant, settled, and notably Romantic tradition; the virtual, formal integrity of Germany's aesthetic heritage; the dream of a noncontradictory, transhistorical, "pure" cultural capital: all of these are here mobilized to stave off Germany's impending awakening to the full measure of its collective historical guilt. Some twenty years later, Schumann's and Brahms's orchestrations of a cohesive, quasi-symphonic bourgeois affect-along with the corresponding literary dream of reading as Einfuhlung so suggestively imaged in the smooth, Bicdermeyer prose-textures ofEichendorff, Stifter, Fontane, and the early, "nonpolitical" Thomas Mann-once again established themselves as the dominant cultural dispensation. Gone by this time were most of the ruins of 1945, replaced by functional concert halls, wellstocked public libraries, and generously funded museums. To be raised on this diet of nineteenth-century cultural production, as I was, meant being initiated into the communal dream of a noncontradictory "cultural heritage" (kulturelles Erbe) of such formal coherence as to induce the forgetting (before one has ever fully known) the ideological tensions and historical guilt that have been the price of that national community. A classic instance of Nietzsche's conception of the aesthetic as "redemption by illusion" (Birth of Tragedy, 25), the project of bourgeois cultivation (Bildung) entailed being "trained up" (as Bentham and Coleridge had put it long before) into a state of mind where a formal-aesthetic competence furnished a truly indispensable moral capital. For the post-World War II generation, that is, the work of culture helped maintain an "illusion that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it ... are required to see as empirical reality" (Birth of Tragedy, 25). Such a passionate, if also (by Nietzsche's own later admission) "impossibly Romantic," critical analysis of the Apolline world of "rational" illusion provides the following readings with a provocative hypothesis. For I shall argue that it was at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century that the emergent urban and provincial middle-class communities in England began to display a cultural productivity unprecedented in its complexity, scope, and intensity. A unique psychological constellation emerges, an amalgam of metaphysical and formalist esprit that will enable its subjects to stave off the impending consciousness of their historicity and their historical guilt by pledging themselves to the open-ended pursuit and refinement of strictly aesthetic or "inward" experiences. As Nietzsche saw all too clearly, it was precisely by

Introduction

3

means of their abiding commitment to "deep" and "scholarly" forms of productivity that the nineteenth-century European middle classes sought to defend themselves against the impinging consciousness of their complicity in that century's checkered history of nationalism and imperialism. The same set of cultural practices also enabled this demographic community to compensate for its own irremediable economic and spiritual contingency, something succinctly captured by Georg Lukacs's now well-worn expression of the "transcendental homelessness" of the protagonist in the nineteenth-century novel. This sketch from postwar Germany has suggestive connections with the modes of cultural production in early English Romanticism analyzed in the following chapters. There is, as Linda Colley has recently shown, the significant historical fact that the genesis of Romantic culture evolved in a country almost uninterruptedly at war and thus substantially uncertain of its cultural mission and spiritual identity save through continual projections of a hostile Other. To be sure, not even the darkest moments of Pittite repression can be said to resemble the diabolical legacy of material and spiritual terror in German politics between 1933 and 1945. Still, the vignette of the Berlin Philharmonic's first postwar performances throw into relief the unconscious efficacy of cultural production in the Romantic and post-Romantic age of flourishing capitalism. After all, in its strenuous elaboration of affective experiences and collective patterns of judgment, as well as in the persistent formal-institutional policing and curricular transmission of aesthetic traditions, the demographic historical subject now so casually identified as the European "middle class" appears to have been born precisely of a desire to forestall the recognition of its historically contingent or imaginary constitution. It does so by reproducing its conflicted, often deeply antagonistic historical situation in the inverse (aesthetic) order of highly refined symbolic and exegetical forms and practices. As a sphere of virtual expertise, that is, the aesthetic does not merely defend its practitioners against the "problem" of their historical genesis and present disposition; it effectively converts this problem into a solution by imaging or narrativizing it in rhetorical forms or genres that appear wholly separate from the history they now represent in condensed form. It is precisely this capacity of the aesthetic to encrypt its own contingent historical situation that this study intends to analyze. For only at a concrete rhetorical (and usually textual) level can we expect to gain insight into the aesthetic (and especially the "literary") simulation of history as the understated (always "subtle") drama of its subjects' psychological mobility. Unexpectedly, then, writing this book helped me clarify what it means

4

Introduction

to have been raised and formally initiated into the cultural capital of a nation seeking to contain the spiritual and material debts of its history by reconstituting that history in the shrewdly decontextualized form of a cultural heritage. The typical 196os middle-class literary curriculum thus extended from the polite conflicts of Lessing's Enlightenment through the psychological excess of Schiller's Sturm und Drang to the gritty eloquence of Hauptmann's and Brecht's realism. Its biographical lineage is paralleled by that of the great composers, extending from the effortlessly concise Mozart to the supremely self-sufficient Beethoven and on to Brahms, himself at times virtually incapacitated by the weight of a tradition to which he could not imagine any alternative. Analogously, the operatic canon took the dedicated listener from the Mozart's and Cirnarosa's opera buffa through the bel-canto tales of nationalist struggle in Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi to the alternately nostalgic or ironic last Rornanticisrns of Puccini and Richard Strauss.2 To be inducted into the formal mysteries of 196os middlebrow culture by being sat down (at age eight if I remember correctly) to a performance of The Magic Flute now strikes me as uncannily similar to Tarnino's initiation into the enigmatic symbolism of eighteenthcentury Freemasonry in that opera. Caught up in the Romantics' highly successful conception of middlebrow reading and listening as practices of complex identification, I made the sympathetic acquaintance of protagonists usually overwhelmed by their historical moment, ranging from Goethe's Werther to Mann's Hans Castorp and from Florestan to Tristan. Thus I carne to experience first at an intuitive level that profound dialectic between the contingencies of historical experience and the simulated permanence of the aesthetic, a dialectic that this book now intends to analyze in more explicit form. Undeniably, many of my intellectual interests were thus sown long ago, in the simultaneously public and private spaces of the library, the concert hall, and the museum, where "leisure" was dedicated to the semiprofessional pursuit of cultivating and (to take the long view) redeeming oneself and one's community through the "mastery" of a complex cultural heritage. Yet if this book rests on vestigial identifications and recollections, such biographical ephemera will ultimately prove meaningful only if they coalesce with the analysis of much larger and complex aesthetic, economic, and spiritual traditions and practices. Thus, in reflecting the personal "situatedness" of this project, I do not purport to tap some incontrovertible moral or professional capital, nor do I mean to stylize what Christopher Lasch has identified as the "pseudo-self-awareness" of the postrnodern intellectual into some unassailable critical vantage point. On the contrary,

Introduction

5

reflecting on the "personal" motivation of a given critical argument should deepen one's sense of responsibility to the discursive and methodological framework of a discipline; for it sharpens one's awareness of the affective depth and historical scope of the "reading as identification" paradigm. As remains to be seen in the context of Wordsworth's Prelude, any attempt to engage self-interest rhetorically begins (but should not end) with reconstructing the affective substance in a sequence of reflection that must subsequently be reinscribed within a public and discursive framework: selfinterest always comes at the price of accountability; or, in Hegel's words, all self-expression (Ausserung) produces self-alienation (Entausserung). In a similar vein, Hume, Wordsworth, and even Coleridge variously argued and exemplified in their writings how self-interest not only demands but indeed logically presupposes a significant measure of social (self-)discipline. Proceeding on that premise, this book remains quite firmly within its critical discipline, even though it conceives the curricular and critical agenda of that discipline to be a remote effect of Romanticism's invention of "literature" as the medium best suited for professionalizing and governing a largely uncolonized middle-class interiority. Hence, even as this study incubates and responds to an inescapable quantum of personal motivation, it primarily aims at configuring that affect with more complex historical and professional imperatives; for the purpose of critical self-awareness is to understand, not indulge, the motives underlying and shaping our interpretive practice.3 One way to achieve such understanding is to study the genesis of the Wordsworthian self-in its double sense as the author/producer and the actual or ideal reader-since either self is located precisely at the intersection of diverse and often interfering political, economic, and aesthetic languages. Analyzed as reflexes of a complex historical and cultural logic, the vagaries of personal biography-however spontaneous, unique, and "deep" they may seem to the critic writing-should gradually merge with larger, more anonymous patterns of historical experience and cultural productivity. To the extent that the Romantic aesthetic constructs (and authenticates) affect and intuition as "expressive" matter-thereby constructing the individual as the embodiment of ultimately communal values, purposes, and beliefs-we would obviously commit the imitative fallacy if we subsequently collapsed the historical analysis of that aesthetic into a confessional narrative of how it (supposedly) produced "us." Such a bargaining away of discursive accountability may reflect an increasingly widespread "emotional and rhetorical difficulty of remaining in a state of constant suspension, [which] is the discipline that much of the strictest

6

Introduction

contemporary theory seems to demand"; it may also be the symptom of a more pervasive decline of theory throughout the humanities, with practitioners proving unable or unwilling to "offer the grand theory, the master narrative, the outline of the socio-historical totality" (Simpson, Academic Postmodern, 26, 28). Alternatively, however, the flagging commitment to sustained forms of critical analysis may simply reflect the ennui among midcareer suburban professionals now looking to ventriloquize such languor in critical confessions as a legitimate "weariness with professionalism itself" (ibid., 76). The consequence, as David Simpson, Barbara Johnson, Alan Liu, and Frans:ois Lyotard among others have argued, has been a barrage of "little narratives" that "produce dissensus rather than consensus" by predicating critical insight on the deceptive authenticity of the critic's "self-enthusiasm and self-projection."4 Either way, it should be stressed that in reconsidering the deceptively familiar story of the historical genesis of bourgeois Romanticism, this book for the most part does not take exception to the antiurban, antiprofessional, critical cum confessional spirit of contemporary critical writing. Rather, it traces it back to the aesthetic dispensation of the Wordsworthian "egotistical sublime," an aesthetic ideal that Keats shrewdly analyzed as "writ[ing] in one of the most comfortable Moods of his Life ... a kind of sketchy intellectual Landscape-not a search after Truth." Arguably, Keats had a point when he remarked that Wordsworth, steeped in material security and an affluence of spirit, should "have thought a little deeper" before writing "Gypsies," in which case most likely he "would not have written the poem at all" (Letters, r: 387, 174). At the same time, Keats's observation does not foreclose the possibility that the inscrutable selfinvolvement of Wordsworth's poetic personae may also deceive us (and perhaps is meant to do so) into searching no further for social and ideological motives potentially realized in these figurations of his "blessed" interiority. In fact, Romantic historicism has taught us much about how this period progressively fashioned imaginary subjects-ranging from the nucleus of the individual self to the demographic subjects of class, region, and nation-out of highly intricate (albeit deceptively "natural") forms of aesthetic production and interpretation. Rethinking this basic plot, I focus on the inherently problematic idea of "class" (specifically the idea of a "middle class") by analyzing how in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century cultural behavior shifts from a paradigm of leisure and consumption to an increasingly formalized, canonical, and "deep" interpretive investment in literature and the arts. Anticipating similar developments in post-Napoleonic France and Germany, England between 1750

Introduction

7

and r 8oo witnesses the ascent of what we now take to be the historical "fact" of an English middle class, a development characterized by the gradual production and refinement of the symbolic conditions that expedited the growing self-awareness of that class. In his recent study of the transformation of political discourse during this period, Dror Wahrman offers a much-needed critique of the "persistent image haunting the historiography of modern Britain, that of an emergent 'middle class,' which like the rising sun ... becomes inexorably ever more conspicuous and transforms our vision of the world." Focusing on cultural practices rather than political debate, my own study also seeks to examine what Wahrman calls "assumptions about the correspondence between social being and social consciousness" and about "the degree of freedom which in fact exists in the space between social reality and its representation." 5 Crucial for any analysis of the English middle class is the fact that, for an extraordinarily long time, it remained unhappily caught between the consciousness of its political and spiritual disenfranchisement (an issue only partially resolved by the r832 Reform Bill) and the vivid experience of its economic and cultural ascendancy, already evident in Hume's economic writings of 1754 and fully confirmed by the 1776 publication of Smith's Wealth of Nations, the foundational text for the discipline of political economy.6 Precisely the antagonistic structure of its evolution-the delayed and uneven development of the middle class into the moral and cultural exemplar of the national community-set in motion the demographic expansion and postclassicist democratization of cultural practices during the later eighteenth century. Thus this era appears significantly influenced by the emergence of "an essentially 'bourgeois' aesthetic and norm of conduct" that could negotiate between the dominant cosmopolitan and classicist models of European high culture and the envisioned national, regional, even local forms of aesthetic production and consumption serviceable for the emergent middling classes: "the solution was to adapt essentially neo-classical ideas in such a way as to permit the incorporation of fundamentally Protestant attitudes" (Campbell, Romantic Ethic, rso). Eager to distance themselves from the hedonistic and consumptive materialism of the landed gentry and the upper aristocracy, the middling classes devised new symbolic forms and inward experiences that would reinforce their social and spiritual legitimacy. While still destined for consumption, the aesthetic object had to be first experienced in an essentially productive manner, that is, as an intricate commodity demanding sustained interpretive care and thus generating a superior, because productive, form of subjectivity.

8

Introduction

What distinguishes the bourgeois technique of deriving "pleasure from self-constructed, imaginative experience"-what Colin Campbell calls "modern hedonism"-is that a "process of day-dreaming intervenes between the formulation of a desire and its consummation" (ibid., 85). It is striking that Campbell's thesis, which synthesizes discrete features of eighteenth-century economic behavior into an ethic of modern consumerism, should connect so readily with the operational structure of Romantic aesthetics. What follows is an attempt to trace the operation of "modern hedonism" in the self-constructed imaginative experiences facilitated by the poetic commodities of the period, with a special emphasis on how that poetry reconceives consumption as a form of unself-conscious productivity. To the extent that it continually stimulates "mind" to further, more ambitious displays of imaginative mobility, Wordsworth's poetry in particular may be viewed as an encryption of its demographic unconscious: the cultural Romance of the middle-class psyche as the story of an unlimited development realized (and objectified for us) in Wordsworth's approach to discrete aesthetic forms and genres and succinctly captured in his phrase of "something evermore about to be." What follows loosely conforms to Clifford Siskin's idea of a "generic history," a mode of critical writing that "use[ s] genre to construct history rather than the other way around" (Historicity, ro). Thus, in exploring the role of specific poetic genres and of Poetry as a professional venture, I seek to elucidate Wordsworth's ongoing aesthetic class/ification of a plausible demographic community and worthy audience. Though by no means the only protagonist in this study, Wordsworth proved especially persistent in his experimentation with descriptive, didactic, narrative-autobiographical, and lyric forms and so allows us greater access than perhaps other writers do to the social pragmatics of Romantic literary production. In examining his sustained attempts to cultivate the inherited cultural practices and ideals of "description," "instruction," and "vocation," we find Wordsworth gradually enfranchising himself and his audience as a novel, imagined community. It is a community distinguished not only by the intensity of its commitment to aesthetic and interpretive pursuits but also by the participation of its members in an unconscious pattern of reciprocal legitimation. Thus Wordsworth credits his "true" readers (the "people" as opposed to the "public") as uniquely responsive to his poetry, and he credentials himself as the most genuine of writers by determining that he alone can satisfy their superior taste. Shaping his career in shrewdly intuitive ways, Wordsworth between 1793 and r8o5 gradually refined both a capacious agenda for literature in general and the specific rhetorical techniques necessary

Introduction

9

for its implementation. At the same time, he kept his audience in a delicate state of aesthetic receivership, always anxious to fall short of the imaginative expectations mapped out by a given poem. Over time, such an alternately censorious or approving relationship between the Wordsworthian poet and his prospective audience was to fashion a once amorphous and mostly random "public" into a cohesive middle-class community that believed it had distinguished itself through its seemingly unlimited imaginative mobility. As I condense the standard macrohistorical narrative about the rise of the middle class into an argument about the professionalization of aesthetic production and consumption, the poetic texts themselves will constitute my evidence; for it is only at the local, textual level that we can materially account for "the patterning of pleasures and the processes of aesthetic discernment" (Campbell, Romantic Ethic, 94) that circumscribed Romanticism's distinctive middle-class psychology. Its larger historical concerns notwithstanding, then, this book thus unfolds as a sequence of local interpretations. Indeed, its relationship to more familiar historicist accounts of Romanticism is quite cautious, for though I continue to "understand art as social," I certainly do not hold that "the social ... allows an unmediated access." Nor, for that matter, does the following argument mean to indulge in the "utopian pieties" (Cole, "Evading Politics," 34, 35) that have occasionally made Romantic historicism seem to pursue the implausible ideal of a retroactive liberation. Rather, by exploring Romanticism's crucial investment in literature, writing, authorship, and genre and so incrementally mapping the period's logic of cultural production, this study gathers its evidence from specific interpretive forays into Wordsworth's poetry and into contiguous literary and theoretical writings by some of his contemporaries. To the extent that this book seeks to conceptualize Romanticism as a historically distinctive type of symbolic behavior, it will not suffice simply to reconstitute the historical contexts and material conditions presumed to have determined that behavior. For what ultimately precipitates and shapes poetry is less any subject's (supposedly axiomatic) unconscious debt to his or her historical moment than the assimilation and subsequent conversion of that debt into functional (if also displaced) sociocultural representations. Such a symbolic practice, meanwhile, can unfold with "conviction" or "sincerity" only if it successfully construes its historical moment as open and indeterminate; as Wordsworth remarks about books in general, "These mighty workmen of our later age I . .. with a broad high-way ave over bridged I The forward chaos of futurity" (P r8o5, bk. 5, ll. 370-72). As inevitably belated, critical

IO

Introduction

readers of Romanticism, we can reach only an encrypted form of that period's complex and often antagonistic ideological motivation-its political and cultural unconscious-namely, the form stylistically objectified by received languages, genres, and discursive traditions. The extraordinarily elusive and flexible cultural agency also known as Wordsworth thus appears driven more by a prospect than by a debt. It involves a professional poet continually developing new hermeneutic scenarios to help his envisioned audience reconfigure its political, economic, and cultural anxieties and hopes. Vis-a-vis such an irreducibly contingent future, Wordsworth's poetry offers itself as a figural solution by retelling the story of the poet's vocational commitment to the imaginative recovery of an otherwise unattainable, precapitalist past. While arguing throughout how Wordsworth's poetry is connected with the (deceptively simple) narrative of a rising middle class, I emphasize that the coherence and eventual self-awareness of this demographic formation is the effect, not the cause, of Romanticism's cultural productivity. Growing aesthetically more self-conscious and demographically more coherent, Wordsworth's intended audience is constituted by the cultural work of writing, reading, printing, publishing, and reviewing-very much in the spirit of his well-known r8 I 5 remark about the poet creating the taste by which his poetry is to be appreciated. Social reflexivity-the construction and self-representation of individuals as members of an imagined middleclass community-is thus understood as a result gradually wrought by displays of authorial productivity and a corresponding interpretive proficiency. Throughout this study, I advocate reading the multiple aesthetic practices and symbolic forms of Wordsworth's and his contemporaries' Romanticism as the simultaneous realization and encryption of collective desires rather than as simple "expressions" of an autonomous, selfconscious individuality. As John Guillory notes, any attention to the "social order" of this period will only further underscore "the immense social significance of polite letters as a transformative cultural force" (Cultural Capital, n8). The first part of the book explores the middle-class "professionalization of leisure" by analyzing a number of formal practices frequently conjoined under the category of the "Picturesque." Conceiving form as the effect of a recurrent practice, rather than as a transhistorical and autonomous aesthetic object, I approach the Picturesque as a representative case of the macrohistorical role of aesthetic production in late-eighteenth-century England. Almost by definition anticlassicist in its commitments, the Picturesque elaborates a visual grammar that appears paradoxically ca-

Introduction

II

sual and generic, intricate and inconspicuous at the same time. Such elaboration, we find, typically subordinates the material and topical specifics of a given landscape to the aesthetic rewards of its "composition." After an opening discussion of the relation between class-consciousness and classrepresentation in eighteenth-century Britain, I explore the practical implementation and subsequent, theoretical justifications of the Picturesque in poems by John Denham, John Dyer, and James Thomson, as well as in the Picturesque's discursive regulation of "proper" aesthetic experience in the areas of tourism, sketching, and casual writing during the I?70S and I78os. Emerging from this configuration of vernacular aesthetic practices, Wordsworth began his slow and increasingly methodical process of poetic professionalization in his An Evening Walk (I793), The Ruined Cottage (I797/r799), and poems like "Tintern Abbey" (I798). On the basis of poems like these, I argue, Wordsworth and his still-indistinct audience engage in a process of mutual projection and transference that furnishes them, almost imperceptibly, with more distinctive cultural and political identities, albeit identities as provisional and malleable as the poetic forms and hermeneutic process that gave rise to them. What in Romanticism's idealist aesthetic is ordinarily referred to as "spirit" can thus be understood as a modular subjectivity distinguished by its specific aesthetic idioms, interpretive proficiency, and quest to stabilize itself in an aesthetic community that, it now appears, rests on a type of representative affect or "sensibility" rather than on a set of explicit propositions. This sustained dialectical process of ideological positioning and reciprocal identification not only stabilizes the social personae of the author/producer and reader but also accumulates the "interest" (on the basis of aesthetic practices that are consciously experienced as "disinterested") of Literature as a comprehensive system, a canon, or (in the recent phrase) "cultural capital." The book's next part traces the evolution of middle-class pedagogy from the late I790s into the first decade of the new century, and it explores how the languages of pedagogical theory, didactic fiction, and the Wordsworthian ballad seek to inculcate elemental, moral, and aesthetic literacy in their respective constituencies by relying on a deep-structural logic of self-surveillance. As formulated in the "monitorial" systems of elemental instruction (developed by Andrew Bell and popularized and elaborated by Joseph Lancaster, Thomas Bernard, and Jeremy Bentham), Romantic pedagogy seeks to convert the individual's self-consciousness into its own disciplinary authority. By devising an intricate calculus of rewards, incentives, and prospects for promotion that comparatively outweighs the threat of punishment and demotion, it furthermore virtually ensures that

I2

Introduction

the individual will internalize and cultivate the paradigm of a "selfwatching, subtilizing mind" (Coleridge, Poetical Works, 241) "spontaneously" and even come to experience his or her own cultivation of this monitorial logic with "pleasure" rather than anxiety. The ultimate goal is to overcome the eighteenth-century opposition between public and private education not merely by reproducing a highly efficient and ceaselessly attentive monitorial system within the mind of its disciples but also by conceiving of such a system as a blueprint encompassing all conscious existence. What prompts the individual to emulate at an affective and "private" level the state's pedagogical dispensation is precisely the fact that in the monitorial system cognitive mobility is inevitably experienced as a form of social ascendancy. As defined by both Anglican and Dissenting middle-class professionals, the educational systems of early Romanticism conceived of learning and cultivation (Bildung) as means of shaping highly adaptive forms of intelligence rather than as expedients for communicating a finite body of knowledge. This formation of highly mobile and adaptive intelligences, also analyzed by Coleridge in his Logic under the Latin concept of educare, ultimately construes intelligence as a social commodity and thus identifies sociocultural ascendancy as the now axiomatic, historical form of desire. Readings in Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life (r79I) and of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (r798lr8oo) further explore how the interiority of the middle-class subject pivots on the ability to represent that interiority as spiritual capital and identify a mobile intelligence as an emergent middle-class paradigm of power. In an ongoing effort to strengthen his or her tenuous sociocultural status, the individual must assimilate a wide-ranging aesthetic curriculum comprising countless formal discriminations and symbolic nuances, a cultural project supremely exemplified in the Bildungsroman of German Romanticism. Discussing the protagonist's theatrical self-creation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Jiirgen Habermas comments on Wilhelm's ambition to "become a public person": "Since he is no nobleman and as a bourgeois also does not want to make the vain effort merely to appear to be one, he seeks out the stage as a substitute, so to speak, for publicity ... It may well be that it was the secret equivocation of the cultured personality ('the necessity I feel to cultivate my mental faculty and tastes') ... that permitted the equation of the theatrical performance with public representation" (Structural Transformation, 14). Meanwhile, in England the idioms charged with the cultivation and display of such aesthetic connoisseurship and poetic competence largely coincided with the field of middlebrow "literature," which during

Introduction

I3

this period was largely defined by the genre of poetry, with prose fiction deemed to have been corrupted by Gothic spectacles and sentimental romance. My readings of Wordsworth's ballads thus place particular emphasis on the self-privileging and sharply discriminating logic of middle-class "taste" as it informs both the writing and reading of poetry. The book's final part explores Wordsworth's most ambitious poetic effort, The Prelude, by focusing on the conversion of a self-interested reflexive subject into a distinctive narrative idiom that, in turn, is to demonstrate the poet's ethos of vocational sincerity and his exemplary social function. To demonstrate this vocational fiction and ensure the poem's overall success, Wordsworth must continually renegotiate the fundamental antagonism between his grounding hypothesis of a unique yet representative self and the inherited aesthetic and political languages required for confirming that hypothesis. To that end, The Prelude occasionally draws on residues of a civic humanist discourse that, in writers like Reynolds and Burke, has mutated into a mostly antitheoretical aesthetic advocacy of social custom and durable affect. Wordsworth's autobiography also displays features of the more recent and pragmatic Humean style, an idiom unfailingly intelligent and inconclusive as it ponders the potential, though never actually demonstrable, social and cultural value of reflexive selfinterest. Yet what in Hume's later writings involves the uneasy truce between a permissive political and a more cautious moral economy is being reconceived by The Prelude as a conflict between two radically different models of literary practice. Lest his ideal of an authentic, original self should be traced back to inherited poetic techniques and his own authorial ambition, Wordsworth draws a sharp line between genuine spiritual procreation in true poetry and a derivative, illicit model of aesthetic reproduction. In focusing on these fears, I argue that the structural antagonism between the autobiography's aesthetic and thematic levels essentially reproduces the political and economic anxieties and contradictions against which Wordsworth works to establish his vocational ethos and poetic beliefs, a dilemma structurally reflected in the poem's virtually unending history of textual revision. The same antagonism is also reflected thematically in the ongoing attempt of The Prelude to homogenize the incompatible identifications and interests of its envisioned reading audiences. It is by means of the revisionary, which is to say self-legitimating, form of autobiography-itself the genre that most directly embodies the potential scandal of self-interest-that Wordsworth seeks to fashion his unique professional identity. To that end, the narrative is itself conceived as the objective transcript of sustained self-interest and as the evidence of a greater

Introduction social good realized by such self-representations. The project's overall success, meanwhile, hinges on the poem's ability to condense (and temporarily obfuscate) the contradiction between its own inward particularity and the complex political, economic, and psychosexual anxieties of an amorphous, dis/ concerted reading public. Like H ume's Enquiries, Wordsworth's Prelude thus legitimates its vocational fictions (i.e., durable poetry, sincere poets, and capable readers) by means of a language that is deliberately provisional and vague, though never abstract. Such autobiographical eloquence, we are led to expect, will yet vindicate its own constitutive selfinterest as the incubator of more capacious, if never fully realized, social values. Against the background of Reynolds's and Burke's reconceptualization of custom into the interior, psychologizing rhetoric of "habits" and affect, I explore Wordsworth's representations of metropolitan London, of populousness, and of the social, gendered, and sexual determinants that tend to nullify the mimetic contract of his poetic autobiography. My readings in book 7 of The Prelude thus connect the antagonisms of mimetic structure, vocational ethos, and social anxiety that undergird Wordsworth's autobiography with the spirited debates about populousness and public morality in late-eighteenth-century England. Seen in this context, Wordsworth's autobiography appears less a confession than an attempt to simulate poetic answers to questions lingering in the national unconscious, questions ultimately too vast and threatening in their scope to bear conscious asking. Like Donne's "jolly statesmen," Wordsworth's imaginary twins of a "blessed" youth and an authoritative poet approach London's spiritual and semiotic inferno with a complex redemptive agenda. Eager "to tie I The sinews of a city's mystic body" (Donne, "Satire !"), Wordsworth's autobiography unfolds as the poet's first down-payment on The Recluse, a project repeatedly envisioned as a quasi-sacramental offering of the writer's life and work to the nation's imperiled body politic. Premised on this formal conceit of the self-as-poem and the poem as providential confession, the project of The Recluse can be understood as the development of a new form of secular, blank-verse scripture designed to perform aesthetic therapy on a social unconscious beleaguered by profound transformations and antagonisms within England's political and cultural economy. What Wordsworth pursued, then, was a model of representation that would imply rather than argue a general consensus among its readers concerning the proper nature, purpose, and thematic range of aesthetic representation. Ideally, it seemed, his readers would endorse his claims for the profession of letters a priori rather than be reasoned into accepting them.

Introduction

15

This opposition between an analytic and an apodictic model of poetic authority is particularly evident in the more sharply circumscribed, formal varieties of the lyric. In contrast with the philological and thematic meanderings of The Prelude, his volumes of lyric poetry (1807, 1815, 1817) set forth an all but axiomatic, unified sensibility in the form of a comprehensive and internally differentiated lyric curriculum, a conception reflected in the idiosyncratic division of these volumes (i.e., "Poems of the Imagination," "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection," "Poems on the Naming of Places," etc.). This study can only occasionally point to the many ways in which Wordsworth's lyrics after Lyrical Ballads attempt to complete his edifice of an authoritative career and an exemplary aesthetic community. Even more than The Prelude, lyrics like the great "Ode" are distinguished by their "presentation" as official transcripts of an idealized middle-class sensibility, and it is precisely the confessional and testimonial "aura" undergirding Wordsworth's "high Romantic" mode that cautions us against simply embracing these lyrics as authentic "expressions" of such a sensibility. In other words, the central Wordsworthian hypothesis of an unimpeachably authentic and durable interiority is secured by the social efficacy (or semiosis) of the lyric's distinctive formal-symbolic aura, that is, by the ability of its specific forms (hymn, ode, elegy, and epitaph) to present themselves as the private supplement to Scripture itself. Wordsworth's careful presentation of the lyric as the ultimate aesthetic "anticommodity" may also help explain why, particularly during theRegency and after Waterloo, middle-class patterns of dignified poetic reading tend to blur into an unself-conscious lyric consumerism. Both The Prelude and the lyric volumes of 1807 and 1815 can thus be understood as an ambitious update on the ideal of an interpretive cum spiritual bathos so authoritatively established in Robert Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753, English translation 1787) and complemented by the philological recovery and curricular stabilization of a distinctly English national literature in the scholarship of John Newbery, Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy, Thomas Warton, and Joseph Ritson, among others? In urging his audiences to devote their imaginative potential to the open-ended pursuit of their own cultural literacy, Wordsworth's poetry ensured the "return" of an increased affective coherence among its readership, something quite consistent with Benedict Anderson's idea of the nation as an "imagined community" that rests on "the deep horizontal comradeship" of otherwise anonymous individuals. This symbolic and spiritual "aura" of Wordsworth's confessional narrative and lyric testimonials also distracts from the rhetorical skill and professional interests that remained

r6

Introduction

integral aspects of a poetry whose commodity status became a consuming issue for Wordsworth, the only major writer of his generation to petition Parliament to rewrite English copyright law.8 Yet even in that context, Wordsworth consistently represented his poetry as an inalienable spiritual progeny and would insist at all times on its categorical immunity from all laws of commerce. In fact, he maintained, genuine poetry could only be properly appreciated as the supreme anticommodity. Whatever its content or motifs, poetry had to be, in Wordsworth's effective and often persuasive conception, a strategy of defense against professionalization, specialization, and the psychological vacuum resulting from a seemingly interminable ascendancy, all of which had emerged both as the historical foundation of his middle-class audiences and as the structural threat to their psychological integrity.

Description "Comfort by prouder mansions unbestowed": Picturesque Aesthetics and the Production of the English Middle Class, I730-I798

Rocks and mountains, torrents and widespread waters ... cannot, in their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even very imperfectly perceived, without processes of culture or opportunities of observation in some degree habitual. -William Wordsworth, Guide Through the District of the Lakes Any object or problem situated on the terrain and within the horizon, i.e., in the definite structured field ... is thus no longer the act of an individual subject, endowed with the faculty of "vision" which he exercises either attentively or distractedly; the sighting is the act of its structural conditions, it is the relation between the field of the problematic and its objects and its problems. Vision then loses the religious privileges of divine reading: it is no more than a reflection of the immanent necessity that ties an object or problem to its conditions of existence, which lie in the conditions of its production. -Louis Althusser, "From Capital to Marx's Philosophy" The wind is in the trees But they are silent; still they roll along Immeasurably distant, and the vault Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, Still deepens its interminable depth. At length the vision closes, and the mind Not undisturbed by the deep joy it feels, Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, Is left to muse upon the solemn scene. -William Wordsworth, "A Fragment" (1798), later ''A Night-Piece" (18r5)

l5l

Professing Class

~

Aesthetic Form as Social Capital What follows is anchored in three propositions, two historical and a third more theoretically descriptive. I begin by calling up the overarching consensus (however diverse its critical expressions) that with the flourishing of urban commerce; the development of the disciplines of legal theory, political economy, and aesthetics; and the gradual secularization and the unleashing of the Dissenters' enormous industrious potential, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of something eventually called "class" and "class-consciousness." 1 I shall defer for the moment further consideration of the period's virtual identification of legality with commercial and property law; nor is this the occasion to inquire further into the mid-eighteenth-century system of political representation, its foundation on the "permanence" of aristocratic privilege and landed wealth, arrangements supported by widespread gerrymandering, "buying off" elections, and increasingly restrictive electoral legislation. Instead, I shall turn to a second hypothesis: that a rising urban and provincial middling class-defined primarily by its economic mobility yet eager to anchor its economic ascendancy in distinctive cultural values and practices-became preoccupied with devising a vernacular, mostly descriptive, aesthetic paradigm for literature and the fine arts during the second half of the century. Brought to formal and conceptual discipline under the rubrics of "landscape art" and the Picturesque by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, this polymorphous movement and its precursor genres have traditionally been analyzed from within the very discipline of aesthetics whose formal notions and cultural purposes the Picturesque consolidated. From Christopher Hussey's landmark I927 study on the subject to Nigel Everett's recent discussion in The Tory View of Landscape, there is ample evidence of a collusion between object and inquiry, symptom and analyst, between critical ways of accounting for an aesthetics of the "estate" and a precritical faith in the formal and disciplinary integrity of aesthetics as an autonomous "estate" or way of knowing. As a result, many discussions of the eighteenth century's preoccupation with an aesthetics of description offer similar accounts of how the period's innovative representational techniques in poetry and painting produce a distinctive kind of "pleasure." Taken to their logical conclusions, such analyses result in the critic's acceptance of the organic fit between an iterable, though alleg-

20

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edly spontaneous, "feeling" and the period's "natural" beliefs regarding genuine, exemplary, and authoritative aesthetic expertise. Once the transfiguration of a contingent "affect" into the social capital of "sensibility" has been completed, the aesthetician's critical review of the period's cultural accounts comes to an end. Thus eighteenth-century aesthetic connoisseurship and its contemporary disciplines (e.g., art history and historical poetics) direct their expert aesthetic knowledge toward a shared, however unconscious, "interest": the transmission of culture as a noncontingent universal. A different and more rewarding kind of hypothesis emerges, however, if we temporarily suspend the operating (and the correlated moral) privileges accorded to the aesthetic while retaining the method of close reading and patient analysis of forms. At its most concise, the poetic and painterly rhetoric of description begins to crystallize as a specific historical practice yielding an increasingly distinctive psychological effect: a shared "sensibility." If, furthermore, we approach sensibility as a virtual commodity, an ideal, its value appears to be determined by its susceptibility to circulation or, as Kant puts it, by its communicability. Hence, in tracing the evolving cultural logic of description in the later eighteenth century, we might appropriately begin by inverting the traditional, aesthetic approach to the Picturesque, not by turning it "upside down" but by putting it finally on its feet. Our working hypothesis then reads something like this: aesthetic pleasure becomes "distinctive" precisely as the stylistic enactment of an inward affective experience posited retroactively. To the extent that the representation of affect compels often intricate formal discriminations, which in turn set bounds to its social circulation, the representation of aesthetic "pleasure" produces what today are known as interpretive communities in the very process of delineating their distinctive cultural capital. Elaborating such a capital in an insistently formal and disciplinary manner, such communities delimit, refine, and police their boundaries, at first as a strictly aesthetic "movement" centered around a number of representational media, objects, and practices and, eventually, in the reflexive form of a social "class." Thus, what has traditionally been thought as an originary and unimpeachably authentic affect-that core sensibility or "feeling" posited as the very center of eighteenth-century aesthetic "experience" and Picturesque contemplation-has in fact been produced by historically specific and often curiously elaborate modes of formal-aesthetic practices. A summation is offered by Blake, who, at one point in his marginalia, remarks with characteristic bluntness and concision on his time's widespread tendency to mediate almost all aesthetic sensibility and judg-

Professing Class

2I

ment as a generic, locodescriptive practice: "Perhaps," he muses, "Picturesque is somewhat synonymous to the word Taste" (Complete Poetry and Prose, 718). Indeed, the intensely elaborate, focused, and technical "grammar" of Picturesque experience-be it in practical manuals for the dilettante artist of landscape sketches, the tourist, or the "improver" of landscapes or in theoretical accounts linking the "pleasure" of spatial representations to determinate causes-cumulatively conditions and delimits a distinctive type of cultured experience. Ever curious about the formal conditions that guarantee the "communicability" of its distinctive and spontaneous "pleasure"-the period's master trope for assimilating contingent social practices to a determinate psychological outcome-the Picturesque proves less the cause than the effect of highly connected aesthetic preferences. Our critical focus will thus be on the proper technique and formal proficiency identified by the practitioners of the Picturesque as the material condition for the representation of cultivated pleasure. In so analyzing the movement's intensive yet casual (in other words, "pseudovernacular") formalisms, we may be able to understand how the oblique rigor of Picturesque practices mediates the historical and demographic energy of an emerging, still unself-conscious middle class in representations of aesthetic pleasure. My third, more directly theoretical concern involves the pragmatic or largely unconscious "motives" that undergird the oblique semiosis of natural or Picturesque experience, as well as the "relaxed" representational technique that characterizes the liberal and productive imagination of the Picturesque. How, we may ask, must an aesthetic technique be constituted if it is to portray a given individual's spontaneous "feeling" of economic affiuence and psychological confidence as representative for an entire cultural community. Attempting just such a synecdochic conversion of material, spatial, and objective "aspects" into a general-purpose cultural capital, the representations associated with the Picturesque movement also reflect an economic shift elsewhere identified by J. G. A. Pocock as a "major key to eighteenth-century social thought." As Pocock notes, it was specifically the "debate between 'landed interests' and 'monied interests' which was revitalized by the financial revolution" (Virtue, rrs, ro9). I intend to show a systematic relationship between the emergence of the Picturesque-to be grasped in the widest sense as an economy of explicit, topographical fixations and correspondingly oblique visual/rhetorical forms-and the gradual emergence of "class" as the conscious reflection of a social identity that has been produced rather than inherited.2 Its aes-

22

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thetic investment in the image as a kind of "portable property"-itself generative of (rather than derived from) an affect-based community-as well as its transfiguration of material "aspects" into virtual "prospects," points to the Picturesque as an early-capitalist mode of cultural production. Its deceptively static, "landed" interests in the garden, the estate, the irregular play of distances, lines, proportions, and shapes may all be understood as reflexes of an unconscious capitalist epistemology in which the self-conscious subject is no longer the origin but the telos of productivity. The late-eighteenth-century development of a productionist aesthetic of description thus appears part of the period's larger investment in a dynamic, prospecting logic of production. At issue, then, is a new, essentially psychological paradigm of economic activity and self-experience characterized, in the following passage by Pocock, as the volatile interaction between debt and imagination brought about by the establishment and gradual assimilation of public credit since the r69os: Government stock is a promise to repay at a future date; from the inception and development of the National Debt, it is known that this date will in reality never be reached, but the tokens of repayment are exchangeable at a market price in the present. The price they command is determined by the present state of public confidence in the stability of government, and in its capacity to make repayment in the theoretical future. Government is therefore maintained by the investor's imagination concerning a moment which will never exist in reality. The ability of merchant and landowner to raise the loans and mortgages they need is similarly dependent upon the investor's imagination. Property-the material foundation of both personality and government-has ceased to be real and has become not merely mobile but imaginary. Specialized, acquisitive and post-civic man has ceased to be virtuous, not only in the formal sense that he has become the creature of his own hopes and fears; he does not even live in the present, except as constituted by his fantasies concerning a future.3

Transposed into the context of aesthetic production, Pocock's argument would suggest that the yield of an investment in descriptive representations ought to be reflected in its formal organization. The Picturesque's widely noticed generic or formalist tendencies, in other words, will instance in the domain of "style" the very logic of their production and, in so doing, allow us to articulate the relationship between a particular aesthetic practice and its corresponding political economy. Insofar as it is possible to establish a functional relation between the discrete image and its historical motivation (be it as creativity or as conformity)-that is, between inspiration and ambition as alternative appearances of a productive historical unconscious-we also find this dynamic

Professing Class

23

becoming more self-conscious as the century wears on. It is, in any event, my hypothesis that precisely by devising formally distinctive representations of its economic and cultural capital, a demographic subject emerged that was to be retroactively identified as "class" by political economists of the nineteenth century, or as "sensibility" by aestheticians today. With the individual's economic and social identity increasingly subject to the "investor's imagination," the culturally literate and productive middleclass subject is best conceived as an unself-conscious agency dominated by the fantasy of its ongoing ascendancy into a middle-class community. As Pocock insists, this community remained to some extent always imaginary and was never definitively realized. Still, this is not to say (and Pocock does not suggest it) that its provisional and virtual constitution deprives it of historical relevance. On the contrary, national and aesthetically circumscribed communities in the eighteenth century possess historical "actuality" precisely on the basis of their distinctive modes of economic and aesthetic self-representation. If understood as an imaginary category instanced by its material and cultural productivity, "class," specifically the concept of a middle class, remains a viable critical category, provided we can establish structural connections between its material practices and its formal self-representations.4 It is no accident that questions of "representation" above all posed the principal obstacle to the emergence of a "middle class" or (to hazard an overtly Marxist concept) "class-consciousness" in the England of George III, a time of stark (though never entirely predictable) conflict between the Whigs' progressive vision of expanding commerce, mobile capital, and monied interests and the Tories' defensive and exclusionary attachment to landed interests and feudal privilege. The Tories' distrust of all direct representation and their anticapitalist ethos of public virtues appear strained by the rise of an economic liberalism whose speculative possibilities appeal to an aristocracy increasingly strapped for cash. And yet, even as "a deep cultural rift between those oriented towards an aristocratic London-centered culture, and those resisting it with assertive localism" (Wahrman, Imagining, 4 n. 6) intensifies during the rnos and r78os, the claims of a middling local or regional sensibility are often advanced in aesthetic forms derived from "high" aristocratic culture. The idea of a conspicuously positioned "estate," for example, frequently dominates the cultural imagination of a middling class eager to solidify its virtual, monied gains with the acquisition of land and more direct access to parliamentary representation.5 A determinate link thus crystallizes between the ongoing, intensifying struggle over objective electoral arrangements and re-

DESCRIPTION

forms, on the one hand, and the comparatively understated elaboration of a distinctively middle-class "sensibility" by means of a vernacular aesthetic of description, on the other. As we will find, the latter symbolic practice appears dominated by a rapidly growing, predominantly urban middle class conspicuously attached to representations of rural scenery that gradually mutate from the explicit leisure of the pastoral to the industrious ethos of the georgic-and correspondingly from the dissipations of a cosmopolitan tourism to images rehearsing regional and, eventually, national allegiances. Before we delve into the technical and aesthetic evolution of this evolving cultural practice, here cumulatively referred to as the Picturesque, some additional remarks on the structure of social and political representation and on the idea of "class" in eighteenth-century England are needed. The same factors that contribute to the emergence of a concept of "class"-in explicit antithesis to "rank," "station," and "order"-within the equally novel disciplines of sociology and political economy account more generally for an "expanding vocabulary, experimentation in usage, and fluidity of style and expression" during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.6 Commonly known as "virtual representation," a polite fiction indeed, the dominant model of political representation was largely a metaphoric one. As provided for by the 1710 and 1716 acts that restricted the electoral privilege to those possessing £6oo and extended the sessions of parliament from three to seven years, parliamentary representation by the landed peers and grandees remained a largely hereditary prerogative. Like a textbook trope, aristocratic property and electoral privilege alone had the power to represent "virtually" and enter into circulation the otherwise absent "spirit" of regional constituencies? Yet with the accelerating conversion of the very paradigm of property from the rural estate into a mobile and increasingly urban capital, the true heterogeneity of the body politic, and eventually something known as "class," became ever more obvious and produced alternative modes of representation outside the political establishment: in the press, "itself a kind of middle-class presence," as E. P. Thompson notes, and particularly in the "licence of the crowd," which was the "price which aristocracy paid for a limited monarchy and a weak state" ("Eighteenth-Century English Society," 144, 145). The increasingly mobile concept of property, the spread of affluence to regional and urban centers of manufacture and trade, the investment of England's (and Scotland's) political and monied interests in the East India Company, and the speculative idea of Empire in general: all these factors pointed to the need for a fundamental redefinition of those values said to

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25

determine social identity. Identity, one's place in the steadily transforming social configuration, depended on one's ability to accommodate changing economic situations and to manipulate effectively (rather than resist) the vagaries of capital: "Power was resynthesized into active terms, of acquisition, production, and display, rather than of inheritance, formal title, and ancient lineage" (Cornfield, "Class," 99-roo). At the same time, the perceived need to account more effectively for the sweeping socioeconomic transformations generated several new disciplines or languages concerned with shaping a new, conspicuously abstract or "virtual" kind of knowledge and a correspondingly changed kind of epistemic agency. Among them we find the seemingly unrelated projects of formal aesthetics and political economy. Indeed, it is the latter discipline's apparent emphasis on "production" vis-a-vis terms like "estate" and "property" that fundamentally "undermined older notions of where one stood in society" (Wallech, "Class Versus Rank," 409). Crucial for our discussion is to determine the point where the volatile question of middleclass representation converged with the young discipline of political economy and its entirely new, far more pragmatic mode of accounting for a given individual's moral and economic status within an increasingly permeable social fabric. That point can be named in one word: "professionalization," still a comparatively neglected phenomenon in today's contextualist and cultural critiques of Romanticism's literary output and productionist aesthetics. Professionalization will be of concern throughout this book, not merely in relation to Wordsworth's individual career as a poet but in the larger sense as "an attempt to translate one order of scarce resources-special knowledge and skills-into another-social and economic rewards." 8 The following readings in the evolution of the eighteenth-century Picturesque thus situate that cultural development within a larger historical narrative, a story we might sum up as the professionalization of leisure, which is closely affiliated with the "commercialization of leisure" discussed by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Birth, 2). Assuming here the historically objective form of aesthetic practice, professionalism appears distinguished less by what its practitioners do and more by their representation of themselves in doing whatever specialized work they happen to profess as their (spontaneous) "calling." Above all, professionalization involves the elaboration of a distinctive ethos, a new symbolism designed less to display wealth, affluence, and material possession than to signal the proficiency of its practitionersand, in so doing, to facilitate their mutual affirmation as legitimate members in an identifiable community.

DESCRIPTION

A significant epiphenomenon of Karl Polanyi's "great transformation," professionalization pivots on the emergence of an entirely new aesthetics of social appearance, one that identifies some individuals as professionals and, by the same token, confers on them the social credit of a dedicated professional community. Magali Larson observes, "Their product, is only formally alienable and is inextricably bound to the person and the personality of the producer. It follows, therefore, that the producers themselves have to be produced if their products or commodities are to be given a distinctive form" (Rise, 14; italics mine). In slight qualification of Larson's analysis, however, I shall refrain from drawing a rigid distinction between the "producer as product" and some other, conspicuously unnamed "product or commodity." For insofar as professionalism is distinguished by the need (itself "virtual" rather than "material") to "produce the producer," its ideological mission can be realized only within the formal appearance, or "aura," of the product. In other words, it is precisely through the distinctive symbolic constitution of the product that the producer becomes conscious of his affiliation with a community of practitioners engaged in the same professional practice. As the objective embodiment of material skills and cognitive discriminations, the "work" or "product" facilitates the emergence of a professional self-consciousness. Originating in the (unself-conscious) expertise of its producers and replicated at the moment of its material consumption and/or interpretive reception, the product not only reflects the technical skill, proficiency, and expertise of its professional producer but also becomes the material correlate for an emergent psychology of "confidence" and "independence." Its "aura" mediates the essentially unconscious productivity of its "agents" with their conscious, socioeconomic identity as historical "subjects." Larson's opening thesis that "in the larger perspective of the occupational and class structures ... the model of profession passes from a predominantly economic function ... to a predominantly ideological one" thus warrants some modification. Indeed, an alternative view may properly be introduced by recalling a passage from The Wealth of Nations (r776) in which Adam Smith specifies the necessary homology of economic and ideological functions in a fully professionalized mode of production: Two different causes contribute to recommend the [professions]. First, the desire of the reputation which attends upon superior excellence in any of them; and, secondly, the natural confidence which every man has more or less, not only in his own abilities, but in his own good fortune. To excel in any profession, in which but few arrive at mediocrity, is the most decisive mark of what is called genius or

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superior talents. The public admiration which attends upon such distinguished abilities, makes always a part of their reward. It makes a considerable part of that reward in the profession of physic; a still greater perhaps in that of law; in poetry and philosophy it makes almost the whole?

Grasping professionalism as a demonstrable proficiency and mastery of formal-technical discriminations, Smith points to the ultimate ideological effect of this new mode of production, namely, to reshape the older theodicy of "fortune" into the modern idea of "confidence." As Jerome Christensen succinctly puts it in the context of Hume's idea of the "man of letters," the professionalized subject has "convinced himself that being metaphorical was sufficient, that he could capitalize himself by representation alone." 10 The self-referential, indeed self-privileging, logic of professionalism in which the producer is the product returns us to the proposed macro-argument about the correlation between an emergent, middle-class consciousness and significant transformations in the theories of political and aesthetic representation. As Steven Wallech puts it, it was Adam Smith who, by "convert[ing] the entire structure of status into a system dependent on economic circumstances[,]laid the foundation for the modern language of 'class'" ("Class Versus Rank," 425). Clearly, the consciousness of that group eventually known as the "middle class" was dominated, during the second half of the century, by a generally antagonistic relationship between an economic infrastructure conducive to productive selfidentification and a superannuated, exclusionary, and static system of political representation resistant to such demographic developments. 11 Itself the catalyst for the crystallization of "class" and the (necessarily belated) emergence of "class consciousness," this tension also has significant implications for the evolving representational function of the Picturesque as I shall develop it in the following pages. For the Picturesque as a complex, flexible symbolic practice yields, prima facie, the "appearance" of a distinctive communal sensibility and hardens it into a historical "fact" by elaborating, policing, and distributing its formal-aesthetic opportunities to the point that its practitioners could become "sensible" or conscious of their cultural coherence as "middle class." At issue, then, is a social transformation wrought by the emergence of a vernacular aesthetic of cultural and economic appearance that (like any discourse consumed by its formal-technical exigencies) is mostly unconscious of its underlying historical mission. Thus the Picturesque's representational investment in a distinctively "English" landscape and its unique elaboration of the "proper," natural, and spontaneous response to the remarkable "vistas" and "prospects"-these tropes being the most common ones to simulate

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spatial experience-instance not simply a certain model of proper aesthetic and cultural behavior but facilitate the "expression" of a larger historical transformation of which its practitioners were for the most part not conscious. By tracing the pragmatics or motives in their symbolic objectification as stylistic practice and aesthetic theory, we may avoid succumbing to the sometimes mannered proceduralism of contextualist and historicist critique and to its implicit Enlightenment fantasy of "liberating" the text from its involuntary aesthetic mystification. Instead, I opt for a series of close readings of poetic and discursive arguments that embody the sociocultural motivation of Picturesque representation in the later eighteenth century. Approached as the embodiment of a historically specific type of cultural labor, the Picturesque's deceptively casual and generic representations also account for this movement's proven resistance to theoretical and historical analysis. In retracing what purports to be a strictly aesthetic phenomenon-itself, I maintain, an impossibility-we encounter practices of such studiously humble formal demeanor as to confound the conceptual inventory of a philosophical aesthetics and exhaust the formal inventory available to art history and literary criticism. Indeed, it appears an inevitable, if deleterious, consequence of the Picturesque's meticulously "disciplined" self-presentation that it should have mostly engaged the formal imagination of aestheticians, art historians, and literary critics rather than aroused the (less "initiated" and admittedly less complicit) dialectical interest of political and economic historians.U Much like its elusive conceptual neighbor, "Romanticism," the term "Picturesque" certainly does not designate an easily identifiable historical or aesthetic concept or "truth." On the contrary, its yield for dilettante practitioners who invest their leisure time in acquiring the visual and descriptive competence demanded by the Picturesque must be sought in the "virtual" domain of what Pierre Bourdieu and John Guillory have called "cultural capital." It is precisely the quest for such capital and its eventual conversion into representations of a distinctive, middle-class subjectivity that shape the symbolic practices usually associated with Picturesque form: its transfiguration of spatial vistas into cultural and communal prospects. For these reasons, the Picturesque may be best characterized as a distinctive historical mode of cultural production, or (to offset the Marxist and totalizing overtones) as a specific symbolic moment in the narrative of Western Europe's evolving cultural unconscious. Specifically during the last three decades of the eighteenth century, and particularly for the growing commumties of tradesmen, shopkeepers, manufacturers, lawyers, economists, men of letters, and other professionals, that moment is

Professing Class marked by a deep antagonism between this consciousness of their economic ascendancy and the established political and electoral order forestalling the public representation of such a consciousness. Still, to speak of "historical process" and the operations of a "cultural or historical unconscious" is ultimately to describe but one, albeit necessarily elusive, phenomenon. Hence, in order to grasp its cultural motives, we must situate the Picturesque in diacritical relation to several competing, at times anti-aesthetic representational strategies. Which is to say that we must at first suspend, and eventually question, the fundamental axiom of this allegedly emergent, bourgeois aesthetics: its self-privileging claims of formal and disciplinary autonomy. And yet, even as we remain vigilant against the potential encroachments of a traditional aesthetics on our argument, ideas of aesthetic autonomy and intrinsic formal value-as exemplified, for example, by Kant's third Critique-are not to be dismissed from consideration. On the contrary, such ideas warrant even closer examination. Their rigorous formal constitution hints, in the precise and recurrent gesture of disavowal, at an equally precise functional or motivational "interest" in the practice of the philosophical aesthetician. In a recent study that locates the rise of "pure" aesthetic theory in the socioeconomic context of ongoing debates over authorship and literary property, Martha Woodmansee argues convincingly, "the momentous shift from the instrumentalist theory of art to the modern theory of art as an autonomous object that is to be contemplated disinterestedly ... is rooted in the far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (Author, 32). For the time being, it may suffice to reaffirm the Picturesque's resistance to being subsumed under any one aesthetic and its tendency to branch out into contiguous cultural practices, genres, and techniques-at first into topographical and locodescriptive poetic genres of a traditionally allegorical variety (Denham, Dyer), and eventually mediating didactic interests in overtly vernacular or "casual" designs (e.g., Lancelot "Capability" Brown versus Richard Payne Knight).B Likewise, the genre of landscape painting asserts its legitimacy over against the historical classicism of Sir Joshua Reynolds: landscape graduates from its traditional function as generic background for biblical and historical motifs to an autonomous and complex "scene"; 14 formal landscape painting (Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Salvatore Rosa, Jacob Ruisdael, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Constable) delimits and progressively distills the socioeconomic and cultural transformations of mideighteenth-century estates through the holistic drama of "perspective";

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and at the level of Picturesque travel, the practice of perspective and detached, aesthetic discrimination in the context of the so-called "grand tour" of Italy by the educated upper-class becomes a principal instance of reaffirming one's social position by rehearsing one's aesthetic competence.15 Pivoting on questions of technique involved in the art of proper "stationing" or casual landscape sketching, the rehearsal of cultured experience in "walks" through England's North offers further proof of the comprehensive filiation of the Picturesque's formal and seemingly apolitical practices with socioeconomic changes reflected by the rise of domestic tourism and the accelerating enclosure and "improvement" of previously common land.16 An examination of this polymorphous, often compulsive involvement with the aesthetic appearance of land suggests that "form" is ultimately the displaced effect of recurrent and distinctive practices. Form converts, a priori as it were, the impending knowledge of land's ideological determinacy into the pleasure of its appearance as an aesthetic artifact and as aesthetic competenceP Above all, then, the Picturesque is characterized by its quietly democratic stress on technique as something that warrants professional cultivation and by the added premise that its practitioners are endowed with a "sensibility" distinct both from the vulgarity of those below and from the sensual dissipations of the aristocracy above. Such a diacritical logic of cultural production is reflected in the embrace of the dedicated amateurism of the sketch or "wash" as opposed to commissioned highbrow genres of the conversation piece or neoclassical history painting, and of a humble locodescriptive poetry as opposed to the cosmopolitan authority of Horatian or Virgilian mythemes.18 Overall, then, the Picturesque dramatizes how ideological motives are encrypted by the play of aesthetic practices and representational forms and, in retrospect, can be reconstructed from the formal and symbolic tensions exhibited by specific art forms. In the present instance, ideological motivation manifests itself in an inverse temporal sequence that permeates virtually all Picturesque representation: a preponderantly middle-class community simulates its own, simpler prehistory by means of its present, unreflected-that is, "spontaneous" and "natural"-symbolic practices. Cumulatively and over time, such practices generate the effect (or yield the "interest") of a collective sensibility, an intuitive or "disinterested" ethos of communal experience. On the presumptive strength of its "simplicity," "spontaneity," and "immediacy," the Picturesque thus furnishes the middle class with pseudo-memories and pseudo-knowledge of its historical genesis. From our belated critical perspective, meanwhile, such knowledge

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presents itself as the simulation of an "authentic" and "legitimate" origin. The figural character of the Picturesque image thus emerges in terms such as "nature" and "spontaneity," themselves empirical and psychological ellipses for the generic spatiality and sentimentality of its representations. What needs to be analyzed, then, is "the peculiar force of banalities expressed in a specific linguistic form" (Guillory, Cultural Capital, 91). Our task will thus be to articulate a functional continuum connecting (r) the increasingly self-conscious tradition of topographical poetry (Denham, Dyer, Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth); (2) the debate over economic and aesthetic "improvement" and the alleged capacity of an English national landscape to offer moral salvation to a hybrid body politic; (3) the theoretical construction of "nature" (discourse on gardens, forests, picturesque tours) by a first and second generation of professional aestheticians (Capability Brown, Knight, Humphrey Repton, William Hutchinson, William Gilpin, and again Wordsworth); (4) the debate concerning the reception and transformation of neoclassical landscape painting (Poussin, Claude, Ruisdael, Caspar David Friedrich) and its progressive popularization in England (e.g., Gainsborough, George Morland, Constable); and (5) the lowbrow adaptation of this neoclassical tradition in manuals about proper viewing and sketching habits (e.g., Gilpin, William Craig), as well as the emergent enterprise of regional and national tourism, which, to cite the plausible hypothesis of one recent critic, "self-consciously functioned as the continuation of [a] process of cultural self-definition" (Andrews, In Search, 4). What accounts for the Picturesque's paradigmatically proto-Romantic status within eighteenth-century English culture, and what makes it as well such a compelling field for contemporary critique, is its extraordinarily wide dissemination of cognate aesthetic practices and genres over a vast range of cultural production-its aggressive aestheticization of political consciousness. In reconfiguring the material and symbolic realms during the period that witnessed the radical economic transformation of old England into a capitalist Britain, the Picturesque reacts to many of the economic, spiritual, and political antagonisms between landed and monied interests; regional and nationalist conceptions of administration; a gradually fading, oligarchic, Anglican, and traditionalist paradigm of civic virtue; and an emergent, significantly nonconformist and protocapitalist paradigm of possessive individualism. Specifically, though, it addresses the acute conflict between a Whiggish conception of landscape as the material focus for liberal and expansionist fantasies of economic "im-

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provement" and a Tory conception of land as a primarily symbolic estate "whose resources are used to stimulate morality" and whose exemplary owner "is attached to a particular place and values its customs, institutions, and traditional landmarks [and] eschews many fashionable activities, including forms of architecture and gardening, which seem devoted to private opulence, luxury, and narrow ideas of possession" (Everett, Tory View, 21). By the 1790s, this delicate balance of ideological antagonisms seemed to have become not so much the disturbance of an otherwise settled social arrangement as the only available dispensation, "a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic" (:Zizek, Sublime Object, 21). What distinguishes Wordsworth's engagement of the Picturesque's distinctive techniques and practices in several of his early works-specifically in his two early publications, Descriptive Sketches (1793) and An Evening Walk (1793), yet also in The Ruined Cottage (1797/r799)-is the mobilization and transformation of an inherited, Tory-leaning aesthetic as a strategy for attenuating and "un-knowing" the social, economic, and political antagonisms consciously expressed in the protest poetry and reformoriented pamphlets generated en masse by reform-oriented Whigs and various corresponding societies. Wordsworth's reconfiguration of the Picturesque marks the emergence of an essentially new, complex, neoconservative cultural practice. His early poetic depictions of economic destitution wrought by England's frivolous campaign against France (yet also a result of the rapid displacement of cottage industries by centralized manufacture in provincial towns and cities) are no longer shaped by an outright nostalgic voice arguably descended from Toryism's traditional anticapitalist, antiurban, and antispeculative sensibility. Rather, the Pedlar's and the Poet's affective stylistics conceive of aesthetic proficiency as a way to derealize the very landscape wherein such material destitution has been encountered. Stripped of its empirical trappings as garden, estate, and formal "landskip," Wordsworth's "soil" and "spots" transfigure an empirical site into a strictly "virtual" or figural domain whose potential intelligibility demands interpretive "interest" rather than political protest, formal discrimination rather than material dissatisfaction-in short, Romantic "intensity" rather than social speech. Wordsworth's metamorphoses of a political into an aesthetic landscape and of an empirical into a figural one challenges the beholder/reader to discover a new eye and-to quote the exemplary Pedlar, himself studiously unself-conscious in his striving for exemplarity-to attain

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An active power to fasten images Upon his brain; and on their pictur'd lines Intensely brooded, even till they acquir'd The liveliness of dreams. (RC, MS E, The Pedlar, 11. 142~46)

Clearly not reducible to the false consciousness and evasion of history occasionally ascribed to Wordsworth, the intensity of beholding and describing the scene of social misery, the stylistic micromanagement of material suffering by the Pedlar's and the Poet's aesthetic efforts, reveal how the Picturesque no longer reacts against but, on the contrary, reproduces at the level of the symbolic the very same paradigm of productivity, investment, and maximized returns that has left Margaret and her fellow sufferers (or criminals) marooned in an economic wasteland of no speculative value to the national economy. "Self-taught" like "a dreamer in the woods" (RC, MS E, ll. 356-s7), the Pedlar's reveries furnish the ultimate simile for his conscious, everyday practice of organized industry and incidental charity. Indeed, in his intuitive, dreamlike ability to see, distill, and reconfigure aspects of material suffering into spiritual prospects, the Pedlar-and following him countless other ventriloquists of the Wordsworthian imagination-throws into relief the paradox of pervasive material destitution (begging Whiggish "sympathy" in the 1790s) wrought by the unrelenting "improvement" of England's empirical landscape (itself the result of Whiggish "industry"). Converted and derealized as a strictly virtual and mobile form of capital, land thus mediates the fantasy of economic libertarianism in the same way, as "spot" and "dwelling," that it facilitates the growth of Wordsworth's poetic spirits. To extend our preview of Wordsworth's strategic investments in the Picturesque, the Pedlar-arguably the most significant personification of Wordsworth's emerging literary career-"exhibits" this historical antagonism for us only in an indirect manner, namely, by reproducing it as an unconscious synthesis that converts material deprivation into the virtual plenitude of local detail, and in so doing, generates the speculative "interest" of a communal sensibility: 19 "He could afford to suffer I With them whom he saw suffer. Hence it was I That in our best experience he was rich" (RC, MS E, !!. 328-30; italics mine). The Picturesque of the later eighteenth century establishes a fundamentally pragmatic and functional (and not simply escapist) culture of representation that is defined by its espousal of appearance over substance, of the cultural capital of "sensibility" over the nonproductive wealth of

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classical knowledge. Both in its applied forms and as theory, the Picturesque derives its appeal from its cultural enfranchisement of a sizable number of "middle-class" practitioners who, having acquired a highly succinct and iterable aggregate of "relaxed" representational practices, are now in a position to reproduce cognate aesthetic effects. In what might be seen as its partial democratization, "vision" is promoted from a privilege of classically educated "inspiration" to a medium of cultural cognition, a language whose comparatively malleable textures ref1ect its functional, adaptive, practical purposes. Hence, like all practice, the Picturesque realizes a communal and preponderantly unconscious, social "interest." We can discern this expansionist interest in the conversion of spatial "aspects" into speculative "prospects," as well as in a fixation on horizons, distant sources of light, a maze of hues, mezzotints, and remote figures caught in transition from labor to meditation. Preoccupied with configuring its formal components to the overarching interest in its social "communicability" or iterability as a practice, the Picturesque specifically opposes a classicist paradigm of representation grounded in the notion of an immutable, divine, and ultimately irreproducible original. Instead, it conceives of aesthetic production and reception as experiences authenticated by a generic quality of affect ordinarily captioned as "spontaneity," "individuality," and "immediacy." In thus challenging the Augustan and neoclassical axioms of the universality, cosmopolitanism, and transparency of aesthetic "value," the Picturesque also draws a sharp line of demarcation between the "scene" of aesthetic experience, as such a "virtual" landscape, and the space where representations of such experience serve specific ideological purposes, as for example in the culturally literate communities of the urban and provincial "middle class." 20 Whereas the rural scene gives rise to the aesthetic proposition that the content of the Picturesque coincides with its form, the highly discriminating idiom in which such experience will subsequently be represented reverses the terms, revealing Picturesque discourse itself (the representation of representation) as the superinduced "restrictive economy" of a style whose larger cultural and ideological mission we must understand as the gradual inauguration and rehearsal for a new paradigm of social community. Richard Rorty's succinct formulation, "liberal culture needs an improved self-description rather than a set of foundations," is corroborated by the widely attested, liberal politics among a number of theoreticians and practitioners of the Picturesque (Gilpin, Knight, Price, Gains borough, Morland) _21 An unconscious agency seeking to develop terms for the public

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acknowledgment of its social and cultural authority will necessarily realize itself in tropes, conventions, and genres and in a correspondingly simulated psychology of nostalgic memories, casual reminiscence, and liberalist fantasies of a fallen culture or nation about to be redeemed. Forever oscillating between the contingencies of empirical sight and the distant plausibilities of aesthetic "vision," the representational culture of the Picturesque continually redraws the boundaries between resource and motive, that is, between the closure of individual "experience" and the larger ideological interests realized in representations of such experience. If the aesthetic practices here at issue initially point to a determinate self at the center of "authentic" experience, they soon proceed to synecdochize that self as a subsidiary of a larger "sensibility" that is to solicit the reflexive identification of a demographic subject, a "class." In this manner, the Picturesque was to condition the individual agency overseeing its material realization and, in so doing, to prepare the ground for the historical myth of a determinate and self-conscious English "middle-class." Rather than mystify the Picturesque movement as leading "from the aesthetic to the moral or metaphysical" (M. Price, "Picturesque Moment," 287), we approach it as a socioeconomically determined practice of form, an artfully casual style generative of what was then called "sensibility" and what I propose to rename as the period's own demographic unconscious. The various historical practices here convened under the umbrella concept of the Picturesque are all aimed at producing a distinctive yet iterable formal effect characterized above all by its topically evacuated quality as generic "pleasure" or "feeling." The project of an economically and aesthetically achieved consciousness of class thus constitutes itself as a complex historical effect or, in Althusser's words, reflects "the effectivity of a structure on its elements." 22 As a fundamentally unconscious mode of (aesthetic) production, the Picturesque cannot yet resolve its formal/material tensions, such as that between the objective spatial topos and the studiously detached or removed stationing of the beholder, between the economic complexity and material concreteness of the spatial terrain surveyed and the evacuation of that terrain by a Picturesque gaze fixated on formal matters of "proportion," "depth-of-field," and transparency of the "scene" for the eyeP For it is this very preoccupation with visual authenticity that reproduces itself as a quasi-ethical concern with the formal propriety of visual representation per se. Engaged in the humble dramaturgy of spontaneous contemplation, the seemingly individual agency of the Picturesque traces for us the eco-

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nomic, ethical, and aesthetic values that simultaneously condition and motivate this representational practice. In conceiving of the project of a naturalized, anti-ideological, ostensibly aesthetic community as the driving motive of Picturesque practice-a cultural practice so totalizing in its formal fixations as to "forget" its mediated economic and pragmatic status as "technique" (in the Nietzschean sense of an originary and culturally enabling "forgetting")-I want to focus primarily on the relation between the topology of Picturesque space and the teleology of Picturesque discourse, between aspect and prospect.24 To do so is to acknowledge the necessity, as well as the methodological consequences, of grasping aesthetic forms and their stylistic precepts as attempts to resolve in the realm of the "symbolic" specific historical contradictions. As Fredric Jameson has argued, the "interpretive mission of a properly structural causality will find its privileged content in rifts and discontinuities within the work, and ultimately in a conception of the former 'work of art' as a heterogeneous and (to use the most dramatic recent slogan) schizophrenic text .... The appropriate object of study emerges only when the appearance of formal unification is unmasked as a failure or ideological mirage." Subsequent to such an analysis, however, it is also imperative that the shattered strategies of symbolization "be reunified, if not at the level of the work itself, then at the level of its process of production, which is not random but can be described as a coherent functional operation in its own right" (Political Unconscious, 56). Style, Jameson has argued, not only instances a specific aesthetic idea but, as a discrete parole, reflects the "great and collective class discourses" (langue) and, in so doing, constitutes itself as one distinctive structural effect of a macrohistorical paradigm of cultural production. Specifically in this last sense, "style" also attempts, albeit at an unconscious and symbolic level, to resolve that mode's intrinsic structural contradictions. Consequently, a given work of art, or even a genre, will reconstitute these contradictions as stylistic and formal symptoms.ZS To the extent that the Picturesque can be shown to have produced, cumulatively and over time, a community identified by its shared formal-aesthetic predilections, "community" is grounded in a set of distinctive cultural practices and, indirectly, in the specific beliefs sustained by these practices. Consequently, it cannot be understood as a selfconscious subjectivity or as an aggregate of explicit political and moral propositions. The Picturesque, in other words, is not our ultimate object but merely one mode of dramatizing the historical emergence of that object: the Romantic bourgeoisie. "Sight" and "vision," the putative essence of bourgeois immediacy, thus become thinkable only as formal-

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aesthetic or cultured practices of proto-canonical rigidity. Not entirely to our surprise, this apparent and central paradox drew the attention of Romanticism's ultimate connoisseur of theoretical imponderables, Coleridge. ~

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Aesthetic Locale and National Interest Though generally indifferent to painting and, to judge by his Notebooks, a practitioner of a radically different kind of Picturesque "writing," Coleridge offers a concise definition of the oscillation of the picture, the prospect, or the "scene" between an originary, empirical cause and a superinduced, teleological cause for aesthetic vision. Remarking on Christian Garve's essay "Uber einige Schonheiten der Gebirgsgegenden" ("On some Beauties of Mountainous Regions"), he notes: What justice is there in Carve's Idea, that a mountain delights us from its position as a painting lying flat, what is it? The painter comes, & puts it on the Easel[;] now what is a mountain but a great flat picture-, Trees, Houses, Crags, Beasts &c that on a flat would hide each other, but now stand, like Spectators in a Theatre-it delights us therefore durch Annaherung und Emporhebung [by means of approximation and elevation]. It fills the mind with distinct images without any painful Effort to acquire them & joins therefore all the requisites of pleasure, Ease, Sufficiency, & Vividness-.... The view of an extensive Plain, all cultivated, from a high mountain, would be merely an amusing object-a curiosity-a map-a picture-()were it not for the imposingness of the situation from which we view it-the feelings, possibly worked on by the air &c .... Now there certainly is an intellectual movement connected with looking forward[,] a feeling of Hope, a stirring & inquietude of Fancy-. To look down upon, to comprehend, to be above, to look forward to, are all metaphors that shew in the original feeling a resemblance to the moral meaning christened thereafter.26

With his customary micrological attention to verbal detail, Coleridge offers a concise theoretical assessment of the relation between empirical vision and verbal, aesthetic (and eventually moral) structures. The latter, he notes, remain by definition "invisible" or devoid of consciousness of "any painful effort." Vision, moreover, is understood as a "practice," one primarily concerned with positioning the beholding subject. As regards the eventual discursive yield of such "vision"-the oddly indirect "pleasure" derived from an absent consciousness of labor-it coincides with the "imposingness of the situation from which we view." Spatial vision, in other

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words, is but a metaphoric or generally symbolic encryption of the moral vision that constitutes the implicit telos or "interest" of this ostensibly disinterested practice. Echoing Richard Payne Knight's blunt characterization of Picturesque vision as proceeding with "art clandestine and conceal'd design ... With secret skill, and counterfeit neglect" (The Landscape, II. 4-6), Coleridge's passage articulates a paradigm of Romantic vision as a structured, quasirhetorical process. Because Picturesque technique tends to disavow (or simply distract from) its underlying moral interest, the assimilation of an older, empiricist model juxtaposing a unified self and an objective landscape into the aesthetic play of "virtual" representation goes almost unnoticed. In fact, the epistemic status of the Picturesque as the simulation of empirical experience can only be inferred by analyzing the interconnected formal steps that assimilate the hypothesis of an original instance of empirical perception to an unapparent idiom of description that, in turn, condensed vision into a holistic moral metaphor. In Coleridge's analysis, the Picturesque reveals complexities that reach far beyond its ostensibly disinterested, "purely aesthetic" technique; when subjected to theoretical (which for Coleridge always means verbal) scrutiny, technique reveals the "pleasure" in beholding not simply to be an organic effect of such beholding but to result from the displacement of the structured labor that was always involved in composing the "natural scene" from an ideal point of viewP In short, "Ease, Sufficiency, & Vividness" are the "requisites of pleasure." They are not, Coleridge understood, to be confused with that pleasure itself. As any casual survey of English literary history between r64o and r8r5 will show, the troping of a moral vantage point by means of an elaborate description of "literal," spatial elevation is the most commonplace feature of several generations of topographical poetry, beginning with Denham and Marvell and extending through Pope, Dyer, Thomson, Cowper, Akenside, Bowles, and Gray to Wordsworth and the early Byron.28 If, therefore, a certain "way of looking became so refined, and so important to those who employed it, that it became almost their only way of knowing the landscapes" (Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 59), such a general thesis warrants qualification, for its significance rests not with our discernment of an intrinsic formal coherence but with articulating the socioeconomic impact of this historically specific cultural practice of description. Denham's "Cooper's Hill" (1642) anticipates a standard and abiding motif in the eighteenth-century Picturesque, one frequently elided by the seemingly "natural" design of Gainsborough's or Constable's land-

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scapes, in Benjamin West's picturesque sketches, or Thomson's micrological imaging of natural processes. For in each case, the conflation of a topographical rhetoric with a (hypostatized) empirical perception distractsindeed must distract if it is to realize its unconscious historical "motivation"-from the plain fact that, as representation, "vision" implements a preestablished set of psychological values and aesthetic practices. The literary motif that docs the work of displacement, meanwhile, is commonly known as a temporalized or allegorized landscape, a paysage moralise: if (advantag'd in my flight, By taking wing from thy auspicious height) Through untrac't ways, and aery paths I fly, More boundless in my Fancy than my eie: My eye, which swift as thought contracts the space That lies between, ... Under his proud survey the City lies, And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise; Whose state and wealth the business and the crowd, Seems at this distance but a darker cloud: And is to him who rightly things esteems, No other in effect than what it seems: Where, with like hast, though several ways, thy run Some to undo, and some to be undone; While luxury, and wealth, like war and peace, Are each the others ruine, and increase. (Poetical Works, II. 9-14, 25-34; italics mine)

The rhetorical dissociation of "eye" and "thought" prepares for the antithesis between a morally indifferent city (characterized by metaphors of indistinctness and opacity as well as a false splendor) on the one hand and the speaker's "proud survey" on other hand. The latter is a strictly figurative type of vision associated with thought rather than empirical sight. As a moral trope, "vision" thus metaphorizes a set of axiomatic beliefs so that only he "who rightly things esteems" is deemed capable of grasping the ephemeral temporality ("with like hast") and visual equivalence ("each the others ruine"), which in Denham's poem refers all material and finite processes back to the general topic of urban political and spiritual corruption.29 This perhaps most elemental motif of all Picturesque representation, eventually reinvoked in the topical structure of the second verse paragraph of "Tintern Abbey," can be traced in a sequence

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of topographical poems-from Pope's "Windsor Forest" (1713) to Dyer's "Grongar Hill" (1726) to Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (1747)-and most prominently in Thomson's The Seasons (172630). Thus an ideological motif over time produced the aesthetic and eventually canonical coherence that to this day dominates the curricular agenda of literature departments and provides the rationale for cultural institutions such as poetry anthologies and reading lists. At the same time, Denham's poem intones yet another seminal feature of the late-eighteenth-century cultural logic of perspective: its premise of a forward-looking "eye" eager to balance the speaker's consciousness of a tenuous present against the distant, near-utopian horizon of "civic virtue." Denham's juxtaposition of empirical "eye" and transcendent "thought"-similar to textual features in Marvell's "Upon Appleton House"-temporalizes the ethical distance between the present's deficient "aspect" and the remote "prospect" of a tolerationist community where "variety" would be understood "as a vision of 'moderation'" (Liu, Wordsworth, 104). This gap, moreover, appears in the form of a moral antithesis between the speaker's authentic, inward, and morally "fixed" vision and the indiscriminate, morally vacuous "undoings" of the "crowd." Needless to say, such a portrayal mandates the absence of all signs of urban and commercial culture from the locus amoenus, that proto-Picturesque spot sheltering the solitary "eye" from the distant city's rumblings of political and material commerce and, most urgently, from incipient civil war. Notwithstanding its more introspective temperament, Coleridge's 1795 "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" essentially follows Denham in encrypting a deeply problematic political moment as a symbolic space oscillating between shelter and idleness. Here, too, for the reader to respond as sympathetically to Coleridge's evocation of his "Valley of Seclusion"-as does the "wealthy son of Commerce" whose exchange of meaningful glances with the higher-placed poet makes "him muse I With wiser feelings" (religious and/or homoerotic)-requires sustaining the fantasy that the aesthetic skill that has shaped the description is untainted by urban "thirst of idle gold." The requirement holds even if the poet be thereby removed from all "honorable toil" and "bloodless fight I Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ": Here the bleak mount, The bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep; Grey clouds, that shadowing spot the sunny fields; And river, now with bushy rocks o'er-brow'd; Now winding bright and full, with naked banks;

The Politics of Locodescriptive Form And seats, and lawns, the Abbey and the wood, And cots, and hamlets, and faint city-spire; The Channel there, the Islands and white sails, Dim coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless OceanIt seem'd like Omnipresence! God, methought, Had built him there a Temple: the whole World Seem'd imag'd in its vast circumference: No wish profan'd my overwhelmed heart. Blest hour! It was a luxury,-to be. (Poetical Works, ro7, II. 29-42; italics mine)

Coleridge's extended descriptive parataxis suspends all consciousness, absorbs all social and economic motivations into the virtual sanctuary of the poetic image ("the whole World I Seem'd imag'd"). Naming his objects in the generic plural and syntactically arranging empirical perception from the center outward ("Here the bleak mount ... there, the Islands and white sails"), Coleridge achieves a simulated, quasi-stoic plenitude in the referential para-practice of the poetic catalogue, which is to say, through the displacement rather than fulfillment of desire ("No wish profan'd my overwhelmed heart"). Already closer to Coleridge's displacement of the politics of sensibility into the unapparent conventions of locodescriptive poetry, Dyer's "Grongar Hill" forgoes Denham's allegorized landscape and its emblematic, consciously encoded representations of time as strictly extrinsic, historical mutability. Surveying, with a "curious eye" borrowed from the "silent nymph," a landscape from the sheltered repose of "the evening still" and Grongar's synaesthetic "silent shade," the speaker devotes the first 30-some lines to positioning this "eye" in a space-time continuum. It is an "eye" endowed with considerable visual competence, an expertise supposedly distilled through recurrent acts of contemplation much like Wordsworth's insistent repetitions at the opening of "Tintern Abbey" that facilitate the superimposition of spiritual on empirical "truths." About his chequered sides I wind, And leave his brooks and meads behind, And groves and grottoes where I lay, And vistoes shooting beams of day, Wide and wider spreads the vale, As circles on a smooth canal. Still the prospect wider spreads, Adds a thousand woods and meads, Still it widens, widens still,

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And sinks the newly-risen hill. Now I gain the mountain's brow, What a landscape lies below! (II. 2 7-42, in Lonsdale, New Oxford Book, r67-70)

A carefully detailed act of visual apprehension generates the particulars of the landscape, effectively centering the overall representation on the question of "perspective," the form that commands and encloses a spatial "prospect." While the act of visual beholding has not yet become reflexive, its representation certainly ponders in general terms the relation between visual and rhetorical practice, specifically as it affects perspective, detail, and the dialectic between fixed and moving images. A rich miniature, Dyer's landscape dramatizes how a dynamic cultural conception may be naturalized as a spatiotemporal perception. Similar to Claude's paintings, the details of the scene that "spreads around beneath the sight" function primarily as markers organizing the representation's depth of field and thereby authenticate the aesthetic and representational competence of the beholder. The casual overtone of a "scene" that "spreads around" its details like a visual miscellany is matched by the persistent usc of active verbs for describing the emergence of these details: "Old castles on the cliffs arise," while "Rushing from the woods, the spires seem from hence ascending fires" (11. 48-52). Dynamic predication-" below me trees unnumbered rise" (1. 57) and "streaks of meadow cross the eye" (1. n8)-thus displaces the structured practice of formal description into the incidental dramaturgy of perception. Social labor is transmuted into private sensibility. To say that Dyer's empirical landscape is constructed, and hence effected, by an "invisible" rhetorical "point of view" is to describe the contradictory, indeed symptomatic status of the Picturesque as a historically specific cultural practice. With its recurrent syntactic patterns and referential fixations on generic "brooks," "groves," "woods and meads," Dyer's poem establishes itself as the simulacrum of precisely that perceptual experience in which it claims to have originated. Its syntactic and referential organization poses as the rhetorical equivalent of a grid of geometric coordinates whose lines converge on an imaginary horizon while authenticating the intermediate empirical space and spiritual time with a monotonous catalogue of natural objects: The gloomy pine, the poplar blue, The yellow beech, the sable yew, The slender fir that taper grows. (II. 59-6r)

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To facilitate imaginative traffic through its empirical and cultural space, and thus "to instruct our wand'ring thought" (l. roo), Dyer's "prospect" imbues its spatiotemporal descriptions with more mediated, psychological motives: as the speaker puts it, "my passions tamed, my wishes laid" (1. 132). He thus anticipates for the reader the distant benefits of this re-created vision, namely, a coalescence of authorial and readerly sensibilities in an all-encompassing subjectivity of sound moral and aesthetic judgment and liberal economic outlook. To participate in this communal process of visual-aesthetic representation is itself tantamount to achieving a desirable temporal continuity, moral stability, and, ultimately, social identity: "Ever charming, ever new, I When will the landscape tire the view!" (IJ. I03-4) .30

First published as a subscription quarto in 1730 and reprinted in another so editions before the end of the century, Thomson's The Seasons exemplifies the liberal idiom of a preponderantly secular quest for transcendence already at work in Dyer. Encircling the new space of political imagination called "nation" (and at times, though less comfortably, that of "Empire"), Thomson's trajectory of locodescription depends on a stable axis of eye and sun that seems to link the incidental nature of empirical sight with the providential import of visual/visionary perspective:31 in the western sky, the downward Sun Looks out, effulgent, from amid the Flush Of broken Clouds, gay-shifting to his Beam. The rapid Radiance instantaneous strikes Th' illumin'd Mountain, thro' the Forest streams, Shakes on the Floods, and in a yellow Mist, Far smoaking o'er th' interminable Plain, In twinkling Myriads lights the dewy Gems. Moist, bright, and green, the Landskip laughs around. Full swell the Woods' their every Musick wakes, Mix'd in wild Concert with the warbling Brooks Increas'd, the distant Bleating of the Hills, The hollow Lows responsive from the Vales, Whence blending all the sweeten'd Zephyr springs. Here, awful NEWTON, the dissolving Clouds Form, fronting on the Sun, thy showery Prism; And to the sage-instructed Eye unfold

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The various Twine of Light, by thee disclos'd From the white mingling Maze. Not so the Swain. ("Spring," II. r86-2r2)

Much like the seductive luminosity of Claude's distant horizons (see Figs. rand 2), the overdetermined specular image of a "rapid Radiance instantaneous" celebrates the "Landskip" less because of its topical specifics than because of its complex texture. As the consistent use of the plural reveals, the material specificity of the objects in this landscape has been subordinated to their function within the rhetorical drama of a complex production of perspective. Subscribing to the differential employment of objects that functions in Claude's landscapes to demarcate planes of color, Thomson's verse exhibits an extended para tactic structure that assimilates the spatial extension of the "interminable Plain" into the prospect of an infinite visual discovery of new effects.32 More precisely, the Newtonian "sage-instructed Eye" discovers-and, before long, controls in the practice of perspectival form-the virtuous and providential import of its own competence, something the nameless "Swain" at the end of this passage does not yet know. What is providential about Thomson's nature, then, is its ability to activate the dormant sensibility of a cultured eye, itself the synecdoche of a pervasive sensibility "bestriding Earth" and capable of extracting "from the white mingling Maze ... every Hue ... in fair Proportion" ("Spring," 11. 205-12). Contingent on a perspectival, empirical technique, such a transcendent sensibility capable of "catch[ing) the Landskip, gliding swift I Athwart Imagination's vivid Eye" ("Spring," II. 458-59) is reproduced in a syntax designed to convert the material and topical distinctness of the "Landskip" back into a form of transcendent, communal appeal. The rhetoric of The Seasons suggests "not just that Thomson's way of looking at landscape is imitated by his syntax; it is imitated apparently by a fixed pattern of syntax, which suggests that his way of looking, too, is as far as possible fixed and invariable, and whatever sense he wants to communicate, about the individual content of the place he is describing, is not to be allowed to impose itself more than is consistent with its revealing the design of the landscape" (Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 29). To be sure, Thomson's poetry amounts to a naturalization of the gaze visited upon his fallen subjects by Milton's God "from his prospect high, I Wherein past, present, future he beholds." 33 And yet its ostensibly greater emphasis on the spatial logic of cultured experience must not blind us to the ultimate ideological and teleological motives of The Seasons. For what is "naturalized," so to speak, is not only the idea of Milton's theodicy but, more

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Figure I. Claude Lorrain (r6oo- r682), Landscape with a Rustic Dance (r640-41). By kind permission of the Marquess of Tavistock and the Trustees of the Bedford Estate.

significantly, the idea of progress and its symbolic exigencies. If Milton's charting of the "ways of God to man" allowed for virtually unlimited rhetorical experimentation and defined the consciousness of that rhetoric as necessarily belated and "fallen," the cultural and rhetorical climate of Thomson's England is substantially altered by comparison. The indirect, even unconscious filiation of an aesthetic classicism with a state of metaphysical dependency, characteristic of Catholicism and to be ultimately rejected, surfaces in fully developed, argumentative form in The Wealth of Nations. Discussing the education of youth with regards to religious instruction and tours of the continent, Adam Smith rejects the remote and implausible expectations of a scheme "inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life," a philosophy according to which "happiness was to be earned only by penance and mortification" and which con-

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Figure 2. Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Apollo and the Muses (1652). By kind permission of the National Galleries of Scotland.

sistently subordinates the expedients of "moral philosophy" to the remote speculations of outright "theology" (2: 29). What is missing, in short, is a pragmatic, "this-worldly" paradigm of "morality," a genuinely teachable set of beliefs, and a correspondingly professionalized practice of moral self-cultivation that stresses practice over expectation, confidence over submission, and conscious productivity over passive faith. It is under the same dispensation that Smith also expresses his misgivings about the longstanding institution of the continental tour. According to established belief, having traveled the continent for three or four years, a young man is said to have "acquired some knowledge of one or two languages: a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with sufficient propriety. In other respects, he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home" (2: 295). Smith's prudent redistricting of metaphysical and geographical prospects rejects anything too far-flung, too "speculative" (just as he and,

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even more so, Hume reject the reckless speculations of "stock-jobbers"). What accounts for his misgivings about placing the youth at too great "a distance from the inspection and controul" (2: 295-96) of parental authority is thus not some simplistic endorsement of generational oppression but the perceived need to activate and develop any individual's capacity for self-definition and social productivity within a determinate-and that means, domestic-ideological context. At the same time, the preponderantly domestic focus of The Seasons also intimates the search, begun early in the eighteenth century, for new symbolic strategies designed to respond to a sense of contradiction basic to the British ruling class and growing in it by midcentury, a sense of being alien in its own land. In her recent study of "Britishness" in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Linda Colley remarks on the relative want of cultural capital on the part of the landed, patrician ruling class, whose "cultural practices ... were in some respects ostentatiously unBritish" (Britons, r6 5). This deficiency led to a vigorous search for symbolic means by which to authenticate, legitimate, in short, "naturalize" the alliances of convenience between Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and English aristocrats as a genuine national elite, "packaged and presented so as to seem beneficent rather than burdensome, a national asset rather than an alien growth" (ibid., r64-65). The consummate aesthetic form that seeks to resolve this constitutive contradiction of the eighteenth-century British ruling class is surely the Conversation Piece, an art form that, as Ann Bermingham observes, "collapsed the opposition between nature and the cultural (social, aesthetic) processes that appropriate it" and that was related in complex ways to the eventual genre of the Picturesque tour and to increasingly popular representations of Tory estates as forms of art.34 Above all, the midcentury preoccupation with a symbolic enclosure of England's countryside and the corresponding distillation of an authentically British sensibility required the "naturalization" of the rhetorical forms mobilized for such ends. By most accounts, this collective effort-itself coincident with the Picturesque in the widest sense-was successful, however much we may hasten to deplore its political consequences. Among these one would have to list the extraordinary temporal gap separating the middle class's relatively early, productive self-constitution and its dramatically belated, and even then only partial, political coming-of-age with the r832 Reform Bill. Speaking of how the aesthetic and cultural practice of the Picturesque was able to dissemble a determinate historical contradiction, Colley notes: "Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the

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people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolutions." 35 Returning to Thomson's passage, we are now in a better position to see how much The Seasons revises Milton's theodicy and its implicit conception of rhetoric as a symptom of our universal metaphysical predicament. More a justification of the "ways of man to God" than vice versa, The Seasons is conceived as a natural theodicy, a progressive reclamation of "nature" from the ideological constraints and corruptions visited upon her by an alien Hanoverian monarchy. The aim is to overcome an increasing rift between the detached cosmopolitan aristocracy and the often unbridled commerce and "stock-jobbing" of the middling classes, between the remote, classicist authority of European high culture and an as yet amorphous national culture oscillating between the local and regional identifications of "Englishness" and the apparent displacement of that older paradigm by the emerging imperialist vision of a British Nation. Precisely its differential relationship to discrete and increasingly distinctive sociocultural constituencies accounts for the wide, almost universal appeal of The Seasons throughout the century. Though initially patronized by the queen, ro dukes, and 31 earls and countesses, not to mention a sizable portion of the lower peerage, the poem's accessibility in dozens of moderately priced editions nevertheless underscores its aesthetic appeal to, indeed its defining power for, what by the end of the century emerges as preponderantly middle-class fascination with locodescriptive and georgic poetry, landscape painting, sketching, and Picturesque tourism. A clear anticipation of Wordsworth's earlier descriptive poetry, such a theodicy hinges on the aesthetic cultivation of the "travelling" eye of the beholder/ speaker. Initially "Snatch'd thro' the verdant Maze, the hurried Eye" becomes gradually attuned to the intricacy and richness of local detail, inconspicuous "raw" material to be gradually refined by the perspectival discriminations of the "charm'd Eye" ("Spring," ll. 518, 543) into the virtual symbolic order of what today we call cultural capital. As The Seasons progresses, its specular and rhetorical techniques are increasingly mobilized on behalf of a comprehensive, albeit unfailingly understated, political vision. If "in British landscape poetry of the early eighteenth century, we can trace the adaptation of inherited descriptive models to new cultural and aesthetic enterprises" (Andrews, In Search, 23), Thomson's poetry in particular reveals this practice as coincident with the macrohistorical

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development of an emergent middle class searching for techniques and genres adequate to the task of self-representation. The poetry in question thus furnishes the conditions for that class's eventual reflexivity as a political force. It does so by consciously resisting the intractable, corrupt, and in any event exclusionary logic of "virtual representation" imposed on the nation by peers and grandees. For the emerging notion of a distinct, middle-class culture functions diacritically, that is, by resisting the lure of a detached cosmopolitanism and the sensual dissipations of those above as well as the uneducated preferences of the uneducated "swain" below. Thus, this class can constitute itself only through a self-legitimating narrative, an account of its originary, uncorrupted, and wholly interior moral, economic, and aesthetic values.36 By adopting lyric and narrative models once associated with religious and republican radicalism-forms of Dissent that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had yielded to an assimilationist spirit of liberal education and modern professionalism-social and moral distinction are now realized through the salvation of a "fallen" nature in aesthetic form, and through the rational theodicy of "mind" by the emergent theories of sympathy (e.g., Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments) and the rising disciplines of psychology and moral philosophy. The salvation of the modern (often Dissent-based) entrepreneurial subject unfolds under the generic auspices of a balanced "sensibility," which, in turn, is the product of one's demonstrated capacity "quick[ly] to recognise I The moral properties and scope of things" (RC, MS E, ll. 162-63). Precisely insofar as at all times "to every purer Eye /Th' informing Author in his Works appears" ("Spring," Il. 8596o), the inquisitive yet unpretentious psyche of the middling classes stakes out its claim to become the authentic spiritual heart of the nation, a community defined by its cultural-aesthetic capital. Not surprisingly, Thomson's best-selling poem also set a new standard for the economic potential of middlebrow literature as a commodity; though it must be conceded that a mostly secular and postclassical poetry of this nature was vulnerable to the very charge of moral indeterminacy against which the emergent middling classes appeared to react when criticizing the landed feudal and aristocratic high classes as indifferent to the deeper moral and economic mission of Britain as Nation. As a set of tropes capable of wielding considerable social and political power, morality is increasingly mediated through the aesthetic. Precisely because the aesthetic product no longer functions as a subsidiary of "the Church's and court's publicity of representation," its consequent loss of the "aura of extraordinariness" transforms this product into a mere commodity "profaned" inasmuch as its consumers

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"had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational communication with one another) .... The issues discussed became 'general' not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate" (Habermas, Structural Transformation, 37). Reading Gray's "Elegy," John Guillory tells essentially the same story of the aesthetic object's depotentiation from the scriptural to the merely citational: "[Gray's] style is produced by the systematic linguistic normalization of quotation." Consequently, "the pleasure elicited" by these echoes and quotations "is not the pleasure of an individual's recognition of his or her individuality; rather it takes the form of identification with a social body expressed or embodied in the common possession of writer and reader, a common language" (Cultural Capital, 91-93). As Samuel Johnson had put the matter, even when encountering presumably original phrases in Gray, the reader invariably "persuades himself that he has always felt them" (quoted ibid., 91). If not a community in material circumstance, the "middling classes" to whom The Seasons came to represent a new standard text of their cultural literacy certainly emerge from that poem as a community defined by its shared imaginary: the fantasy of collective mobility, implicitly supported by Thomson's tendency to "conceal the gap between producer and consumer, by describing the influence of Industry on one single, undifferentiated, representative 'Man'" (Barrell, Dark Side, so). Adverting regularly and with common hyperbole to the distance that separates the serene and confident Britons of the present from the "ancient barbarous Times, I When disunited Britain ever bled," The Seasons reconstitutes the potentially unsolvable moral and economic contradictions at the heart of the emergent project of Britain as a geopolitical empire as evidence of an entirely modern and successful way of nation- and community-building; the nation's success is the result of its practical cultivation of the labor and professional skills of its present population and of the comparative lack of emphasis placed on the conflicted political, religious, and cultural inheritance of Britain before the Act of Union: yet she grew To this deep-laid indissoluble State, Where Wealth and Commerce lift the golden Head; And, o'er our Labours, Liberty and Law, Impartial, watch, the Wonder of a World. ("Spring," 11. 842-48)

The moral emptiness of past historical time contrasts with the commercial plenitude of this "indissoluble state" basking in the radiance of com-

The Politics of Locodescriptive Form merce's "golden Head." At once material practice, collective faith, and poetic trope, "Commerce" aligns Picturesque prospect and economic fantasy, taking for its vanishing point a transcontinental, commercial "Empire" and a domestic community grounded in Blackstonian "constitutional liberty," sound economics, and humble aesthetic preferences. To be sure, the identity of the middle-class individual remained tenuous, its identifications being no longer anchored in a pattern of inheritance but productively determined by its performance in a world of manufacture and commerce shaped by the vagaries of domestic and colonial markets and, of course, the fluctuations of public credit. Thomson's verse counters the necessary contingency of the middle class's economic and social position (no longer a "rank" or "station") by naturalizing its place in a self-effacing idiom displacing its descriptive artifice into the organic spontaneity of the beholder's "eye." In contrast to Denham's and Marvell's allegoric encoding of an ultimately unsuccessful quest for "civic virtue," the naturalized gaze of The Seasons succeeds precisely by absorbing the explicit, political and conceptual antagonisms into its organic descriptions. The Real thus vanishes into its own aesthetic solution; a consciousness afflicted by impinging social and economic antagonisms is redeemed, indeed transfigured, by the virtual sphere of aesthetic practice. Secluded in a symbolic and seemingly nonideological/ocus amoenus that it itself helped create, Thomson's "eye" fashions for its audience a preconscious solution to the complex historical antagonism that is the middle class, a formation dimly aware of the adverse logic connecting its political disenfranchisement, its spiritual heterogeneity, and its speculative economic and cultural interestsF As The Seasons progresses, a narrative plot emerges according to which this tenuous "class" of readers is gradually introduced to its new spiritual "home," a site whose protective enclosure and symbolic autonomy already anticipates programs of a fully autonomous, immanent (in short, a Romantic) aesthetic. Hence, Thomson's descriptions not only evade the static and overly generic classical mythemes of the Stoic Poussin (Fig. 3) but abandon Claude's expansive Mediterranean vistas in favor of more faithful descriptions of local and regional spaces of the kind often associated with Gainsborough's art. Absent here are the expansive horizons of Claude with their oblique correspondence between small-scale biblical motifs (e.g., Hagar and the angel, Joseph's flight into Egypt) and the beholder's implication in a metaphysical destiny encoded in Claude's luminous, if distant, horizons. At the same time, the landscape is also utterly devoid of the picaresque or sublime contrivances, the Gypsies and banditti commonly found in Rosa's adventure-filled landscapes (Fig. 4). Attesting to the increasingly apparent national function of the Pictur-

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Figure 3· Nicolas Poussin (1594-r66s), Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion (1648). By kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) .

esque, Thomson's pastoral retreats to a "Dale I With Woods o'er-hung, and shag'd with mossy Rocks, I Whence ... You silent steal; or sit beneath the Shade I Of solemn Oaks" intimate a changed cultural function for the aesthetic practice of topographical description.38 Spatial configurations no longer answer to a model of empirical perception but instead simulate a (pseudo-empirical) landscape whose aesthetic organization is said to reflect the affective drama of its producer. Thomson's "liberal" or " impartial" ("Summer," I. 848) rhetoric is thus shaped by its conscious efforts to evade and displace a still-dominant Latinate and classicist poetic rhetoric-hence his understated, blank-verse parataxis, his predicating an oblique metaphysical structure on the sheer cohesion of its topographical symbolization, and above all his persistent obfuscation of his own rhetorical artifice through the master trope of a humble and reclusive "eye" whose ambitions are betrayed by its axial alignment with the sun. Following the "rage" of the sun's gaze, which bleaches all distinctions from the " torrid zone" of Africa's plains-thereby momentarily confusing the descriptive

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idiom of The Seasons, as John Barrell has shown (Idea of Landscape, 4042)-the ideal moment for the assimilation of visual to visionary, of empirical to transcendent, and of natural causes to ideological effects is found at sunset. In setting up a delicate calculus of " natural" differences between the temperate northern climate and the "torrid zone," in which all variety and all possibility of aesthetic discrimination seems to have been lost (i.e., Summer, II. 629-52,690-758, 860-97), Thomson advances the Whiggish geopolitical dispensation of a British Empire whose commercial, scientific, and aesthetic temper will dominate the globe with an inevitability adumbrated by the metaphor of "climate." For in Africa's " torrid" world, nature itself appears "fallen" and inscrutably hostile to man (II. ro26-no2). Its uncultivated space, unproductive population, and moral indeterminacy are drawn out by the poem's implacable spirit of aesthetic discrimination,

Figure 4· Salvatore Rosa (r6r5-73), Landscape with Banditti (1656). By kind permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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which portrays the African landscape sun-bleached and marred by its excessive luminosity and transparency to the eye. Time itself appears to have been banished from this "torrid zone," for the passage of time during a given day, a basic device organizing the narrative of "Summer" (at least within an authentically "English" landscape), cannot be ascertained in this climate. Precisely the gradations of light correlating to the passage of time, however, are indispensable for the discriminations of color, shade, and perspective and, ultimately, for the metaphoric sublation of empirical perception into the beholder's moral and spiritual acuity. Only on that basis can the poem achieve closure with a hymn to the invisible, absolute, and eternal "dream of waking Fancy." Roaming "o'er the vary'd Landskip, restless, ... I Fervent with Life of every fairer Kind: I A Land of Wonders! which the Sun still eyes I With Ray direct" ("Summer," II. 779-82), the beholder's eye (analogous to the sun's "vital Lustre") may thus airbrush out of the picture all empirical form. What emerges in its stead is the subtlety and mobility of (British) "mind," the ultimate signified of this natural drama: The Sun has lost his Rage: his downward Orb Shoots nothing now but animating Warmth, And vital Lustre; that, with various Ray, Lights up the Clouds, those beauteous Robes of Heaven, Incessant roll'd into romantic Shapes, The dream of waking Fancy! Now the soft Hour Of Walking comes: for him who lonely loves To seek the distant Hills, and there converse With Nature; there to harmonize his Heart, And in pathetic Song to breathe around The Harmony to others. Social Friends, Attun'd to happy Unison of Soul; To whose exalting Eye a fairer World, Of which the Vulgar never had a Glimpse, Displays its Charms; whose Minds are richly fraught With Philosophic Stores, superior Light. ("Summer," II. I37I-89)

The perimeter traversed in the "equal wide survey" by the beholder's "raptur'd Eye" ("Summer," II. 1617, 1409) gradually subordinates the empirical "goodly I Prospect ... Of Hills, and Dales, and Woods, and Lawns, and Spires,/ And Glittering Towns, and gilded Streams, till all I The stretching Landskip into Smoke decays" ("Summer," II. 1438-41). While

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the "scene" fades into the twilight, the formal structure of a perspectival syntax remains intact, though now it serves to intone a "fairer World" of an otherwise unspecified cultural capital ("Philosophic Stores") accessible only to the "exalting Eye" of an aesthetic community ("Social Friends I Attun'd to happy Unison of Soul"). The metamorphosis of visual into visionary power, the gradual substitution of the discriminating, middleclass sensibility of "eye"/I ("Unison of Soul") for the remote luminosity of the noon sun, is finally completed now that the gaze governing the descriptive syntax depends no longer on a "raging noon" above but rises from the "waking Fancy" of the "pregnant Earth." Toward the close of "Summer," this self-definition of a collective sensibility through Thomson's seemingly non-ornamental syntax culminates in the image of a "straining Eye" absolving itself from all empirical miscellany; "imperfect Surfaces of Things" are exposed and swiftly vanish as "Sudden to Heaven I Thence weary Vision turns" ("Summer," II. r68894). Rather than view this moment as one of hubris or sacrilege, however, we have reason to understand this transfiguration of the "eye" into a "Unison of Soul" as the secular equivalent of a theodicy, a narrative legitimating the seemingly contingent historical fact of a rising middle class as a matter of cultural and national destiny. So as not to be misconstrued as an outright, retroactive "excuse," such legitimation must unfold, as much as possible, in unconscious and mainly symbolic form; this would help explain why The Seasons relies so extensively on a symbolism of perspective and on a corresponding rhetoric of extended parataxis rather than realizing its larger motives in propositional form. Thomson's poem reflects an efficient yet fundamentally unconscious collective practice, and its vernacular, formal-aesthetic discriminations absorb the cognitive potential of its subjects (poet and audience) by the very practice that defines them as a community, thereby forestalling the recognition of those deeper ideological "motives" that had conspired to produce specifically this style of poetic representation. In a significant reversal of the traditional cause/ effect sequence that links simple and unmediated natural forms to complex cultural experiences, Thomson's verse reveals the "Immediacy" of a responsive sensibility to be itself an effect of formally intricate visual and rhetorical representations. The collective, preconscious agency caught up in uniquely cultivated experiences is now allegorically identified as Philosophy, who, with inward View Thence on th' ideal Kingdom swift ... turns Her Eye; and instant, at her powerful Glance,

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Th' obedient Phantoms vanish or appear, Compound, divide, and into Order shift, Each to his Rank, from plain Perception up To the fair Forms of Fancy's fleeting Train. ("Summer," II. 1788-94)

Under Thomson's poetic administration, philosophy's allegorical anticipation of an "ideal Kingdom" in which all faculties and subjects have been properly stationed, "Each to his Rank," pivots on the operation of the omniscient, all-pervading "powerful Glance" of the ideal eye. Thomson's "Eye" not only furnishes representations of empirical matter-be it a colonial or domestic landscape or some more particular aspect-but imposes an inherently figural (nonmimetic) depth structure of valuations, a submerged grid of half-conscious functions by means of which empirical matter can coalesce into a coherent system in the first place. Anticipating Kant's conception of the transcendental "conditions of possibility" for experience, Thomson's "Eye" tropes the inscrutable exigencies that regulate the commerce between the empirical eye and its space. Only insofar as the transcendental faculty of a cultural unconscious makes "Th' obedient Phantoms vanish or appear, I Compound, divide, and into Order shift" does contact with the empirical world yield up aesthetic and, by extension, cultural "interest." Though Thomson furnished a powerful poetic and visual grammar to the later eighteenth century, his model of a comprehensive, descriptive integration of empirical and transcendent horizons, of the economic "confidence" of the individual subject and the cultural destiny of Britannia, was substantially attenuated and altered by economic and cultural developments during the mid--eighteenth century. In its unapparent, spiritual theodicy of Nation, the movement of the Picturesque gradually shifts from its initially overt advocacy of the middle-class ideology of credit-driven manufacture, trade, and professionalism to one of defense. Increasingly such works strive to immunize this core middle-class constituency against the encroaching consciousness of its own constitutive instability, its irreducibly provisional sense of self. Enclosure, for example, no longer targets the material space of merry old England's countryside but instead functions figurally, as an improvement of the "virtual" estate of the mind. Thus the works of Gainsborough's London period, the contemporaneous elegiac poetry of Oliver Goldsmith (e.g., The Traveller and The Deserted Village), and the programmatic writings of William Gilpin all reveal how the genesis of the Picturesque as explicit theory and as self-conscious descrip-

The Politics of Locodescriptive Form

57

tion coincides with a growing antiurban, anticommercial, and antiprofessional rhetoric. No longer does the coherence of the Picturesque center on the stability of a transcendent perspective facilitating the integration of commercial and natural prospects. Rather, the practices of description assert an ostensibly disinterested aesthetic. As a figural enclosure of the imaginary estate of "sensibility," the Picturesque is now legitimated as the superior "perspective" of a cultural movement ostensibly opposed to the material resources that, needless to say, continue to provide the very economic foundation for its middle-class practitioners. The elaboration of a Picturesque sensibility thus identifies the aesthetic as a branch of ideology in general, as supporting the very structural antagonism that is the "Real" for its subjects. As we have seen, the antagonism is that between, on the one hand, an expansionist, speculative, and profit-oriented capitalist "imaginary" constituting the material condition of possibility for the middle class and, on the other hand, the resistance, by the conscious individuals of that very class, to the capitalist epiphenomena of urbanization, professionalization, and public credit, all of which are repudiated as causes of a dissociated, dissipated, and fundamentally self-interested sensibility. A classic instance of the logical nexus between capitalism and schizophrenia first established by Deleuze and Guattari some time ago, this tension does not, of course, pose a conscious problem for the subjects. In fact, precisely to the extent that their historical and affective identity is produced and circumscribed by that antagonism, the subjects in question remain also constitutively barred from becoming fully conscious of that antagonism. Instead, they proceed to displace it as the rising economic middling classes of the eighteenth century typically approached all their problems: in acts of cultural production and in the aesthetic commodities thus produced. The result of this transformation, not merely within the particular evolution of the eighteenth-century Picturesque but within the larger ideological functioning of the aesthetic, is generally known as sentimentalism. In the context of Picturesque descriptive practices, it is best represented by Goldsmith and Gains borough. Consciously departing from Poussin's stoic coulisses and Claude's classically flanked, panoramic vistas, Gainsborough's Eastern Suffolk landscapes shrewdly capitalize on that region's relatively long-standing texture. As Ann Bermingham has noted, the ancient and modestly apportioned instances of enclosure passed by Parliament for that region (known as the center of the wool industry since Tudor times) created a landscape seemingly unscarred by the rampant, large-scale enclosure of land in most other regions of England throughout the later eigh-

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teenth century. Consequently, Gainsborough's Suffolk retains a seemingly "natural" quality without appearing outright primitivist and unproductive: Given that "only ten acts of enclosure were passed for Suffolk between 1727 and r8or ... its socially determined design could stand for naturalness relatively free of social determination" (Landscape and Ideology, 39). The semitransparent perspectives of Gainsborough's landscapes, with a screen of trees partially sheltering the eye from the semantically elusive, forever-expanding horizons of Claude and Thomson, draw attention to the far more simple, rustic life of cottagers and farmers and away from his earlier conversation pieces in which the portraiture of the confident estatesman and his carefully groomed landed property appear to form an uneasy, static, and excessively posed ratio of foreground to background (Fig. 5). Significantly, the aesthetic and ideological compromise represented by these early conversation pieces was abandoned in favor of a bifurcated artistic career, with Gainsborough grudgingly earning his living as a portrait painter in fashionable Bath and London while avoiding history painting altogether and dedicating whatever leisure his occupation as a professional portrait painter would buy him to the painting of landscapes. Joking about his "cunning way of avoiding great subjects in painting & concealing my ignorance by a flash in the pan ... while I pick pockets in the portrait way two or three years longer," Gains borough effectively concedes our point, namely, that the art of landscape is circumscribed by the alienation of modern commercial society, in which the professional's skills, including those of the commissioned portrait painter, are his social credit.39 Because it was an evasion of the referential constraints of history painting and a corresponding classicist aesthetic mostly associated with the dominating figure of Joshua Reynolds, landscape painting offered Gainsborough "formally and ideologically ... a refuge-from the demands of the present, of an urban culture and its society, and of portraiture" (Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 44). Indeed, to the extent that Gainsborough's landscapes-in their perspectival configuration (and occasional elision) of particular motifs and figures-inadvertently delineate the economic conditions that affected their producer, they not only afforded him refuge from a society steeped in an urban, commercialized, and professionalized mode of production but also offered the members of that society a refuge from the knowledge of their utterly indeterminate socioeconomic future. Even so, "refuge" remains a potentially misleading term. For insofar as Gainsborough's increasingly primordial landscapes evade the modernity of agrarian enclosures and the credit-based, expansionist psychology of commerce (for

The Politics of Locodescriptive Form

59

Figure 5· Thomas Gainsborough (1727- 88), Mr. and Mrs. fohn Gravenor and Their Daughters, Elizabeth and Ann (1752). By kind permission of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

which enclosure is a fit synecdoche), they offer themselves as the symbolic support of the very antagonism that is the "Real," both to Gainsborough and to a growing audience identifying with his landscapes in the I79os and early r8oos (Fig. 6).4° Considering that it appears in the form of an aesthetic product, " refuge" constitutes not the straightforward evasion of an unbearable knowledge but a highly constructive symbolic strategy of "un-knowing" embodied in the anticommodity of painting itself. What may be understood as a certain evasion of "history"-an issue that will

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Figure 6. Thomas Gainsborough, The Watering Place (1777). By kind permission of The National Gallery of England.

resurface repeatedly in this book-thus does not amount to an outright absence or negation of authentic (and supposedly available) representations of such history but rather marks the beginning of a new, functionalist paradigm of "literature" as the supplement of a deeply antagonistic "Real." Landscape painting and poetry thus enact at a deceptively relaxed or vernacular level concise and steadily evolving formal-aesthetic discriminations, such as will demand of the Picturesque's bourgeois practitioners an abiding commitment to the competent reception of such art and to its curricular transmission and interpretation as a uniquely British cultural capital. To exemplify once more: Goldsmith's insistent dichotomy between rich and poor, between the "long pomp, the midnight masquerade I With all the freaks of wanton wealth arrayed" and the "simple blessings of the

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Cultural Experience as Technique

lowly train" (The Deserted Village, ll. 252-60), proves to be something of a conceptual red herring. As a figural economy needed to sustain the sentimental account of the "imparkation" of "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain," the rich/poor opposition, rather than specifying an objective hierarchy of class, provides a basic grid of coordinates on which to locate proper appearances and aesthetic competence. The rich/poor opposition thus generates its own dialectical contrary: the ideal of a community whose moral authority grows directly out of its economic ascendancy and cultural capital, its prudence, confidence, and sensibility, virtues grounded in domestic custom rather than public speculation. As Guillory remarks in his discussion of the contiguous literary example of Gray's "Elegy": The distinction between the rich and the poor does not signify immediately a historically specific class structure ... hut rather a problem of social mobility, which is in turn specific to a certain historical class structure. It is only in the context of problematizing the possibility of movement between classes that ... strategies of ironizing wealth or power under the shadow of death, or granting to poverty a noble pathos, become intelligible. (Cultural Capital, 93)

Likewise, Gainsborough's and Goldsmith's Picturesque, their unselfconscious visual and verbal evocation of a precapitalist state of spiritual and material self-sufficiency ("When every rood of ground maintained its man; ... Just gave what life required, but gave no more," The Deserted Village, II. s8-6o), cannot be reduced to an outright indictment or sentimental evasion of a Whiggish ideology of improvement and commercial speculation. No case of mere pamphleteering, the efforts of Thomson, Gray, Goldsmith, and Gainsborough (to name but a few) to develop an aesthetic topography also seek to remedy a significant quantum of selfdoubt, even self-loathing on the part of their enterprising and professionalized middle-class audiences.

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Cultural Experience as Technique

~

On the Pragmatics of Picturesque Form The diverse aesthetic practices that inform topographical poetry and landscape painting began to be formally condensed in a number of theories aiming to conceive the Picturesque as "a vernacular curriculum" that would significantly redefine the late-eighteenth-century "category of literature itself." 41 Particularly significant in this context is the dissociation of the Picturesque from the midcentury discourse on material and economic

62

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"improvement." Instead the Picturesque emphasizes the capacity of its allegedly unpremeditated representations to bring about a figural or virtual improvement of its constituency's "sensibility." Rather than attempt to formulate another "theory" of the Picturesque, however, we shall reconstruct the theoretical formalization of its aesthetic techniques, genres, and practices as a distinctive stage in the evolution of an early bourgeois society. Far from providing us with a reliable conceptual resource for our own critical reflection on the historical forms and practices at issue, that is, the theorizing on such matters proved a characteristic feature of the unfolding professionalization, leisure, and productive self-representation on the part of the emergent British bourgeoisie. Aesthetic "theory" thus functions on a continuum with the poetic and painterly grammars of a cultivated topographical vision already examined. Indeed, the Picturesque's insistence on predetermining "spontaneous" experience in the abstract, not to say generic, idiom of theory offers further evidence of its underlying historical motivation: to develop a system of aesthetic knowledge and practical competence whose perspectival intricacy and complex logic of formal "distinction" warrants continuous refinement in order to ensure its ethos of authenticity and its demographic exclusivity as a middle-class practice. The early-eighteenth-century social ritual of a cultural apprenticeship in upper Italy, an almost obligatory "tour" for young gentlemen of the lower and higher aristocracy, was not so much the cause of a sudden eruption of visual discrimination as a further effect of the pervasive usurpation of "sight" by a socioeconomically specific grammar of aesthetic competence. Indeed, "for the most part, the tourists seem either to have made the tour anxious to be converted, and so half-converted already, or else to have survived the experience without any particular interest in natural beauty growing within them; though that is not to say that, on their return from Italy, they did not feel obliged to give evidence of a taste which ... was becoming part of the fashionable equipment of the age." 42 If the topographical specifics of such continental tourism were designed "to encourage the landscape to reveal itself at its most correctly composed, and [for the tourists] to have sufficient taste to recognize when it was so" (Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 3-5), the rise of theories of the Picturesque after 1770 involves a substantial deepening and intensifying of perspectival technique, modes of visual apprehension, and especially of self-effacingrhetorical strategies for representing the "experience" of leisure as generating transcendent spiritual effects. Thomson's exceptional sense of syntactic and specular technique provided the dominant poetic paradigm for a post-

Cultural Experience as Technique classicist, comparatively humble and self-effacing mode of cultural (self-) production and consumption, something amply confirmed by the progressively more affordable and widely distributed editions of The Seasons (totaling more than 50 before 18oo). What is striking about the emergence of Picturesque theories during the last three decades of the century is not only their "rejection ... of selfconscious design and system and their recommendation instead of irregularity, variation, decay and wildness in 'natural' appearance as sources of aesthetic pleasure" (Copley and Garside, Politics, 3), but the fact that such studious aesthetic self-effacement parallels significant advances in the economic mode of producing Picturesque effects. Among these might be listed the emergence and widespread printing of travel accounts and fold-out maps, the proliferation of inns in scenic areas throughout England, and also the dissemination of cheaper, octavo editions of locodescriptive poetry, which by 1793 prompts Thomas Holcroft to lament, upon reviewing Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches, "More descriptive poetry! ... Have we not yet enough? Must eternal changes be rung on uplands and lowlands, and nodding forests, and brooding clouds, and cells, and dells, and dingles?" 43 The rage for locodescriptive poetry is paralleled by a frenzy of amateur landscape painting and sketching to which, also in 1793, William Craig responds with An Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape, a pamphlet that purports to cure the "disease of the pencil" and restore "the true principles of the art, which the prevailing tide of fashion has nearly overwhelmed" (s-6, 9). William Gilpin's sketches, to whose identification of painterly skill with generic vistas and schematic objects Craig particularly takes exception, owed much of their popularity to such technological advances as the development of aquatints, which, as Stephen Copley and Peter Garside note, allowed for the commercial reproduction of sketches. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction to be recovered from the otherwise often confused and contradictory claims of the practitioners and theoreticians of the Picturesque is that between the empirical, material "object" and its aesthetic configuration into a "scene" (Gilpin), between "sight" and "composition" or, in Richard Payne Knight's reinstatement of Locke's distinction, between "perception" and "sensation."44 A fairly representative instance might be taken from Thomas West's Guide to the Lakes (3rd edition, 1784). Though mostly concerned with local assistance to the inexperienced and untrained eye of the urban tourist, West occasionally lapses into more general commentary on the material constraints of the eye as an actively shaping, representational agency. Having once

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again acknowledged that "it would be mere vanity to attempt to describe a scene which beggars all description," he continues instead with a detailing of the beholder's "station": The point on which you stand is the side of a large ridge of hills that form the eastern boundary of the lake, and the situation high enough to look down upon all the objects: A circumstance of great importance, which painting cannot imitate. In [painted] landscapes you are either on a level with the objects, or look up to them; the painter cannot give the declivity at your feet, which lessens the object as much in the perpendicular line, as in the horizontal one. (67).

Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether painting can or cannot achieve the effect of spatial depth or "declivity," we note the extent to which spatial relations preoccupy West's guide, often to the exclusion of the objects and material entities found within a given perspectival field. Undeniably, West draws on conventions from seventeenth-century topographical poetry and painting wherein "the prospect from a high place was well established as an image of political foresight and inquiry" (Turner, Politics of Landscape, 5). And yet, similar to the chiasmic transition from a literal setting sun to the beholder's ascending "inward view" in Thomson's "Summer," the total enclosure of the tourist's eye within the Picturesque "prospect" identifies a change of rhetorical paradigm. An older allegorical idiom of public virtue and active citizenship is supplanted by a regional, even local and "private" (not to say unconscious) mode of cultural production, one legitimated on the "grounds" of the very sensibility it has "insensibly" produced. Characterizing the Picturesque as "in sum, the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century idea of bureaucracy as 'natural,'" Alan Liu rightly notes the contiguity between the construction of cultural authority through a complex aesthetics of visual surveys and the Benthamite fantasy of political and pedagogical surveillance.45 At issue, then, is the contingency of the Picturesque's imaginary enclosure of a landscape on an unapparent though highly sophisticated and culturally literate ideal viewpoint, itself the ratio of "elevation" and "distance," of "real" and "visible" sizes of objects in a landscape of "sensation" and "perception" (Knight, The Landscape, ll. 69-70n). At once a rationally scientific principle and a determinate, if unself-conscious, stage in the production of sensibility (and thus the "ground" for its demographic supplements: "community" and "class"), "perspective" dominates not only the "stationing" of the Picturesque tourist but also the representations of aesthetic "experiences" that it itself has engineered. Insofar as a formal-symbolic preoccupation with poetic and painterly perspective serves to attenuate the cultural and socioeconomic antagonisms of an

Cultural Experience as Technique emergent middle class's unconscious, the meanings of aesthetic experience can be represented only in pre-reflexive forms: as the oxymoronic expression of the producer's/beholder's "spontaneous interest" in a given prospect and as an effort to legitimate such interest with supplemental theorizing about the formal conditions determining the "communicability" of aesthetic pleasure in general. A celebrated instance of the Picturesque as the representation of experience and the meta theory arguing its larger demographic relevance can be found in Capability Brown's "Letter Describing the Vale and Lake of Keswick": At Keswick, you will on one side of the lake, see a rich and beautiful landscape of cultivated fields, rising to the eye, in fine inequalities, with noble groves of oak, happily dispersed, and climbing the adjacent hills, shade above shade, in the most various and picturesque forms. On the opposite shore you will find rocks and cliffs of stupendous height, hanging broken over the lake in horrible grandeur, some of them a thousand feet high, the woods climbing up their steep and shaggy sides, where mortal foot never yet approached. On these dreadful heights the eagles build their nests; a variety of water-falls are seen pouring from their summits, and tumbling in vast sheets from rock to rock in rude and terrible magnificence; while on all sides of this immense amphitheatre the lofty mountains rise round, piercing the clouds in shapes as spiry and fantastic, as the very rocks of Dovedale . ... I should tell you that the beauty of Keswick, consists of three circumstances, beauty, horror, and immensity united.46 Predictably, Brown's overdetermined and self-privileging account soon moves past these "permanent beauties" to detailing the "varying" appeal of the landscape-that is, "the perpetual change of prospect," vistas "assuming new romantic shapes." There is more talk of "the contrast of light and shade," though the message remains substantially the same. Maintaining a symmetry of natural properties and their inherent energy-cliffs "hanging" and forests "climbing"; eagles "soaring" and water "falling" in "sheets"; groves "happily dispersed" and climbing the rocks in "the most various and picturesque forms"-Brown's rhetoric effectively presupposes a fundamental consensus among its audience as to what they "seek" in this landscape without actually desiring to "know" it. For his generation to peruse Brown's account of Keswick Vale, we may surmise, was to delight in the disestablishment of nature's materiality and its gradual coalescence into a prospect, with shapes progressively "retiring and lessening on the eye, and insensibly losing themselves." In short, the yield produced by the beholder's and writer's unselfconscious aesthetic interest can only ever become operative as "spontaneity." "Spontaneity," in turn, is defined precisely as the absence of all self-

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consciousness from the subject's productive manipulation of those aesthetic techniques and formal discriminations required for any representation whatsoever. Hence "spontaneity" is said to have produced, albeit only a posteriori and a forteriori, a generic feeling of disinterested "pleasure" that connects the individual to a larger community of taste. While subject to continual improvement, taste is accessible and teachable to all those members of a middle-class community who share and continue to cultivate the same formal-aesthetic grammar. The preoccupation with perspectival technique as the precondition for predictable and iterable aesthetic effects is particularly evident in Knight's r8o5 programmatic poem The Landscape, where "the difference between real and visible perspective or, rather, the difference of perspective in objects as they appear to the eye only and as they appear to the eye corrected by the understanding" stimulates a characteristic scientific innovation: This difference may at any time be discovered and ascertained, hy tracing a figure, with projecting parts, through a plate of glass, or other transparent substance. In such a traced drawing, rhe lineal perspective must necessarily he correct; but nevertheless, the projections will become much larger in it, than they appear to the eye in the object from which it was taken; because the mind, knowing their real size from the evidence of another sense, corrects the sight in a manner so habitually instantaneous, as to be quite imperceptible.47

Ever concerned with new areas that might benefit from scientific enlightenment, Joseph Priestley had already suggested, in his 1770 lectures to the Royal Academy of Painting, A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective, that "of all the imitative arts, this of perspective is capable of being brought ... the nearest to perfection" (p. iv). "Perspective," his opening definition informs his audience, "is the art of delineating objects as they would appear upon an upright plane, interposed between them and the eye; for instance, as they would appear upon a pane of glass when they are seen through a window" (7). What these otherwise obvious remarks-characterized by Priestley himself as "familiar"-suggest, minimally, is the homology of perspective as a mastery of the empirical ("the art of delineating objects") and representation as control over the space of private affect (as "seen through a window").48 A sign system, whether comprising graphic lines or verbal-rhetorical means, constitutes the indispensable medium for all visual representation. Strictly contingent on something "interposed between [objects) and the eye," perspective is by definition bound up with technique and, as a form of mediation, locates its subject in a particular stylistic and social context with its own logic

Cultural Experience as Technique of distinction. And yet, as Priestley's "scientific" instructional diagrams evince (see Fig. 7), the mediating function of such technique-designed "to make the practice of this agreeable art the more intelligible," which is to say, to render it reproducible or iterable-remains simultaneously hidden, much like the interrupted, "invisible" lines that intimate the virtual objectivity of perspectival vision (Familiar Introduction, 8). Priestley's scientific idiom thus proves strikingly cognate with what we have by now identified as a preponderant feature in Picturesque practice and theory: while acknowledging that vision, qua technique, constitutes a mediated, socially and ideologically particular practice, Priestley disarticulates the contingency of any vision on any particular representational style or technique, claiming instead to have brought it under the auspices of a rational and universal science. To purloin Carl von Clausewitz's well-worn phrase, the conjugation of Picturesque effects with scientific objectivity is the continuation of sensibility by other means. Or if "liberal culture needs an improved self-description rather than a set of foundations ... it was natural for liberal political thought in the eighteenth century to try to associate itself with the most promising cultural development of the time, the natural sciences" (Rorty, Contingency, 52). The initial appeal of the Picturesque as a sophisticated, quasi-scientific technique for producing distinctive and iterable cultural experiences is also consistent with Dror Wahrman's thesis that "invocations of 'middle-class' language before r8r5 did not draw attention to 'common economic interests'" but instead "focused first and foremost on the special role of the middle classes in society as a strategic and 'progressive' group" (Imagining, 59). The most elaborate arguments regarding the stationing of the subject in the theories of the Picturesque are undoubtedly those advanced by William Gilpin and Uvedale Price. Beginning with Gilpin, Picturesque "theory" quickly gains notoriety for its incessant production of distinctions and supplemental discriminations, such as Price's tri-partitioning of the aesthetic into the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque, and his finer distinctions between a pastoral, georgic, and an outright idealizing, poetic and painterly outlook on landscape (e.g., in Poussin, Claude, and Thomson). The latter, in turn, contrasts with more exotic and sublime or with quietly local representations of a Picturesque sensibility in the work of Rosa and Gains borough, respectively. Gains borough in particular inspired and increasingly dominated the development of a distinctly "British" visual sensibility by lesser known and politically diverse painters, such as George Lambert, Thomas Rowlandson, George Morland, and Francis Wheat!ey.49 The last three decades of the eighteenth century also produce

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Figure 7· Joseph Priestley (173 3-I8o4), figures appended to his Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective (1770).

Cultural Experience as Technique widely discussed and indeed vehement reactions against Capability Brown's and Humphrey Repton's excessively designed, geometrical landscapes, critiqued as "vain parade" in Knight's The Landscape (1. r74). Though they would quite conceivably have opposed Priestley's "straight lines" with the same righteous indignation that characterizes their invectives against Repton, ultimately Brown, Gilpin, and Price cannot but replicate Priestley's logic. Their stated preference for the "liberal artist" vis-avis "the mechanic" (The Landscape, I. q8n) is by definition a contingent one and thus constrains them to embrace whatever representational style promises-in a specific context, relative to a specific audience, and at a specific point in time-to be the most "effective" one; which is to say, the preferences of the Picturesque theorists for a "natural" and unadorned presentation are only accommodated by a rhetoric whose mediations appear least conspicuous or, ideally, are altogether invisible. It is imperative to understand the larger, ideological function of the debate on the Picturesque, to grasp the sociocultural significance of its fetishization of perspective, coloration, description, rough lines, generic objects, and the like. These features simulate perception metaleptically; that is, they produce an empirical space in the unapparent domain of tropes, thereby ensuring the "authentic" material experience of that space as culturally and spiritually meaningful and, consequently, as affirming the basic integrity of the middle class, whose individual members continually seek such experiences. Ultimately, Picturesque theory reaffirms the historical premise of a contiguity between phenomenal universals (an objective standard of perception) and the local scene where such cultivated perception occurs. Only so will it be possible to consolidate the underlying purpose of the entire Picturesque project, the configuration of an otherwise unrepresented class of productive and culturally literate individuals into an imagined (or virtual) community or class. Seeking to convert, spontaneously, an empirical and heterogeneous landscape into a holistic symbolic effect, the Picturesque builds up a cultural capital of visual and rhetorical discriminations which it immediately reinvests in the project of its practitioners' ongoing quest for aesthetic proficiency and social ascendancy. Perhaps the most concise of his many statements on the Picturesque as the aesthetic, effortless production of natural experience, William Gilpin's work Three Essays (r794) sums up this practice as well as the cultural values underwriting it.50 Of overriding importance for Gilpin is the distinction between the Picturesque and the Beautiful, specifically the Pictur-

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esque's characteristic "roughness" (which it shares with midcentury theories of the sublime), for the latter enables Picturesque representations to make us effectively forget, a priori as it were, their constitutive and highly sophisticated formal infrastructure and "technique." 51 To be sure, the theorist of the Picturesque knows that all "sighting is the act of its structural conditions" (see the epigraph by Althusser). He knows, furthermore, that if the beholder were to become conscious of the multiple determinants of his aesthetic vision, the putative integrity, immediacy, and efficacy of his representation would instantly crumble, as would the implicit notion that the cultivated representations produced by any individual affiliate him or her with an entire communal "sensibility." Hence most theoreticians of the Picturesque insist that "the picturesque eye abhors art" and that "the province of the picturesque eye is to survey nature; not to anatomize matter" (Three Essays, 26), an assurance that would before long assume the monotony of a rhetorical topos in its own right. Likewise, Knight urges the efficiency of Picturesque practice for realizing the middle class's desire for cultural self-definition, insisting that "nature, ... irregular and free, I Acts not by lines, but general sympathy" (The Landscape, II. 143-44). According to Gilpin, too, "the picturesque ... must depend solely on some peculiar construction of the object" (Three Essays, 4). The design of experience, the admission or elision of detail or "richness," and preference for certain motifs-among which the Gothic ruin reigns supreme (see Three Essays, 46)-thus take their cues from what Gilpin calls "effect," that is, from the end point of the structured representation rather than from a hypostatized order of authentic material referents. Objects become motifs, schemata, or mere outlines configured to the formal rigors of the Picturesque operation itself, namely, the demarcation of an ideal subjectivity, an exemplary vision: "It is enough if you express general shapes; and the relations which the several intersections of a country bear to one another," Gilpin recommends to the sketching traveler (Three Essays, 64), while Knight suggests that the Picturesque tourist "in plain undecorated lines, I Just hint the subject of his vast designs" (The Landscape, II. 207-8). The "effect" of a scene is thus collapsed into the mode of its (re)production, or into the technology of its "composition." Comprising a myriad of structural discriminations, such an approach cumulatively aspires to the generalized cultural competence synecdochized by Gilpin as the "picturesque eye." In explaining how an aesthetically proficient "eye" is to position itself for an ideal topographical survey, Gilpin also clarifies his under-

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7I

standing of the holistic sense of pleasure derived by the subject (e.g., a sketch-artist, dilettante painter or poet, or tourist) from a successful aesthetic performance and, thus, from the experience of its cultural ascendancy: we must ever recollect that nature is most defective in composition; and must be a little assisted. Liberties, however with truth must be taken with caution: tho at the same time a distinction may be made between an object and a scene ... in a scene, the whole view becomes the portrait .... No beauty, no light, colouring, or execution can atone for want of composition. It is the foundation of all picturesque beauty. (Three Essays, 67-70) The referent around which Picturesque vision and representation ought to be configured is itself "the whole view," that is, the affective drama of "delight" and "pleasure" within the beholder himself.52 The abovementioned dissociation of "object" from "scene," the insistence on "composition" as the sole cause for picturesque "effect," and the corresponding structural rather than referential logic of such "effect" are characteristic of Gilpin, who, even more than Gains borough, would sketch almost exclusively imaginary or "fictitious" landscape. Contrary to historical paintings, "where the principal subject occupies the foreground; & the distance is the appendage," Gilpin's definition of picturesque "composition" significantly anticipates Saussure's paradigm of a structure constituted solely by functional differences yet devoid of positive terms; 53 what counts is the "richness" and the proper ratio of tenderness and force, light and darkness, and roughness and distinctness of form. Not surprisingly, then, Gilpin locates the ultimate perfection of the "picturesque eye" within the domain of the "imagination," a term rather loosely conflated with "fancy." Proverbially vague, Gilpin's overall argument proves nonetheless strikingly "modern" in that he unequivocally collapses the representation of Picturesque vision with a desire to construct an aesthetic community around a shared aesthetic value or "effect." His long letter to William Lock of December 24, 1787, is worth quoting at some length here: Observe, that I am so far from summoning the mechanical agents of vision to a council on the pleasures of the imagination, that I receive their report at the door & dismiss them .... [I) maintain that the Picture in my fancy is the same whether I have derived it from Nature or from art. If it is Landscape, it consists of a certain combination of hills & plains, woods & water: if well composed it gives me pleasure, & ought to do so without fastidious inquiry whence it came .... The mind deliberates on an image as offered by the sense of sight, without considering whether it was brought before her by transmission thro' a pane of glass, or by

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reflection from the surface of a canvas. By whatever means she is put in possession of her ideas, they become her own. The question is not, whether the image she now beholds independent of the giver, he the tribute of Nature or of Art, but whether it he worth the entcrtaining.54

What seems remarkable about this forthright statement is the complete absence of any "gold standard" of empirical or referential authenticity. Indifferent to any mimetic constraints or axioms from earlier theories of painting, Gilpin shows no interest in reflecting on the relationship between the topographical surfaces of perception, those of the canvas, and some further, metaphysical depth of meaning ordinarily established as the principal concern for art in general. In contrast to Claude's and even Gains borough's landscapes, Gilpin's sketches offer not so much an "evacuated liturgy" (to borrow Liu's phrase for the eclipse of biblical narrative in eighteenth-century landscape painting) as conspicuously schematic and two-dimensional surfaces, almost dreamlike in their redaction of phenomenal properties to general shapes (Figs. 8 and 9). Rejecting the commonplace opposition of art and nature as obsessive, a "fastidious inquiry" or misguided quest for an imponderable and quite possibly nonexistent originary referent, Gilpin instead grasps the "image" as motivated by the telos of "pleasure," by the contingent logic of "effect," and by the prospect of a community composed of "an inspired writer, & of an intelligent reader." His colloquial, self-confident style also suggests that artistic technique can only be assessed within a teleological paradigm, namely by grasping social communities from an officially disinterested, aesthetic perspective whose social motivation is occluded by its natural, spontaneous, and seemingly "innocent" mode of production. Still, to argue for a structural homology between the multifaceted rhetoric of Picturesque effects on the one hand, and the teleology or "prospect" of a class-specific, collective sensibility instanced by what Knight calls the "middle style" (Analytical Inquiry, rsr) on the other, is to find that the Picturesque's elaborate discriminations are unconsciously aimed at concealing its intrinsically constructed and mediated status from the subject, whose social and cultural ascendancy, in turn, depends on the seamless continuum of this aesthetic practice. In general, then, "the Picturesque stands at the hinge between 'estate culture' and 'bourgeois culture,'" trying to "reconcile, at least momentarily, a passing world based on nontemporal, static classification that emphasized transformation ... and required a level of abstraction and placelessness that the specifics of the land could no longer support" (Robinson, Inquiry, 143). The cultural practices

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Figure 8. William Gilpin (1724-1804), Scene Without Picturesque Adornment (c. 1792). subsumed under the name of the Picturesque will thus produce a new "subjectivity"-one whose consciousness is circumscribed by its "spontaneous" pleasure or, in Nietzschean terms, by its constitutive forgetting of those very techniques by means of which this now conscious subjectivity has unconsciously produced itself, namely, as a formal and psychological artifact captured in Romanticism's aesthetic homology of "work" and "pleasure." Meanwhile, the 1790s witnessed the proliferation of arguments attacking the Picturesque. Such an assault, it seems, was the fate of any aesthetic theory based on utterly contingent "effects." But the critiques also reflected the negative impact of the French Revolution on all overtly theoretical pursuits in England. Specifically, the Jacobins' decision to reallocate the land, to reorganize its administration, and to reeducate local subjects into cosmopolitan citizens seemed too close to the meliorist, liberal vision of the "improvers" and at the same time seemed to echo the Picturesque movement's critique of aristocratic indifference to local property

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Figure 9· William Gilpin, Scene with Picturesque Adornment (c. 1792).

relations, of wasteful mansions, estates, large-scale gardens, and so on. Denounced as "the Jacobinism of Taste," the theories of Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and William Gilpin find themselves on the defensive in a climate in which anti-Jacobinism appears increasingly to merge with antimodernism, anticosmopolitanism.55 The aggressive liberal and early utilitarian models of political economy-the harsh approach to the problem of rural poverty, the unqualified embrace of manufacture and commerce-was rapidly being reevaluated. No longer portrayed as a social menace and political threat, as it had been branded by Gilpin, Knight, Price and many others opposed to the Whiggish aesthetics of Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown during the Walpole years of "old corruption," commercial enterprise and industry were rapidly being appropriated as English, and often enough Tory, virtues. Not surprisingly, the rapid realignment of English domestic politics in the wake of the French Revolution caused the stock of Gilpin's Picturesque theory to plummet, although, it must be stressed, it did not lead to a complete demise of the Picturesque. In fact, the Picturesque's resilience and capacity to adapt itself to a rapidly

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changing political climate prove themselves in the arguments of those opposed to Gilpin's generic landscapes and objects and unsettled by the apparent absence of any metaphysical and moral concern from Knight's aesthetics.

A case in point involves William Craig's small Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape (1793), a pamphlet committed to reinstating the institution of an absolute signified as the sole authority on all matters of aesthetic, social, and moral propriety. Craig's argument closely follows Burke's project in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to defend "antient constitutions" against "a present sense of convenience ... [and] the bent of a present inclination" RF, no). For Burke, it is specifically the idea of a polity comprising equal and independent political and economic interests that is the most threatening aspect of Jacobinism. Speaking against a fragmentary and particularist model of political representation, he insists: "Government is the point of reference of the several members and districts of our representation. This is the center of our unity. This government of reference is a trustee for the whole, and not for the parts" (RF, 303). In the same spirit, Craig maintains that any challenge to the authority and integrity of a natural referent will precipitate a potentially disastrous crisis in representation, in both the political and the aesthetic sense of the word. Following Burke's cues, Craig thus takes issue with the Picturesque's implicit conception of a "general nature," and even more so with the possibility of its "general representation," notions unacceptable because in the wake of Jacobin upheaval "general" has come to mean little more than random, abstract, and indiscriminate. Such talk of a "general nature" remains suspect because it conceives nature as a derivative, cumulative "assembly" of heterogeneous and supposedly equal individualities. To be sure, Craig insists, nature is necessarily a "collection of individualities," but it is so in the primordial sense that these individualities relate to one nature in a strictly subsidiary and epiphenomenal manner: For who, that is at all acquainted with the practice of the art of which we treat, or even who that has, for a moment, reflected upon it, would think of sitting down to paint a flower or a tree so, that the tree shall possess every thing that trees have in common with each other, without oak, ash, beech, elm, or walnut .... Whoever truly loves the art must hear, with regret and indignation, what is unfortunately too true, that, amongst many practitioners in drawing, a certain set of signs has been employed, as by agreement, to represent, or signify, certain objects in nature,

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to which they have intrinsically little or no resemblance. This is, doubtless, the general imitation so much talked of, and general it certainly is; for, as we shall see in the conclusion, these signs are as much like one thing as another. (Essay, 8-9)

Palpably indebted to Burke's Reflections, and thus experiencing the same logical contradictions that haunt that text, Craig repudiates the political implications of an aesthetic in which the validity and authority of representation is exclusively determined by its differential relationship to other representations. Gilpin, the "well known writer of Picturesque Tours" referred to by Craig, is particularly cited for the proliferation of "this manner of drawing by signs," which signs, insofar as they maintain no referential allegiance to any governing "natural" body, will (in Craig's words) tend to "[blunt] the nice edge of judgment" (Essay, IO). At issue is a political theory of painting in which signs no longer function as metonymic subsidiaries to the autonomous authority of a natural referent but instead institute a (Jacobin) theory of metaphoric equivalences according to which any sign or particular may represent any other-"these signs are as much like one thing as another," Craig complains. Such theorizing is viewed as an attempt to invalidate the mimetic contract of the classicist ancien regime and to promote in its stead the ascendancy of communities and classes thus far excluded from the domain of representation. Usurping the dominant theory of the sign whose mimetic techniques "cannot be acquired without much labor," the social and aesthetic upstart, Gilpin's amateur artist, suddenly wishes to be admitted, by the same authority, to greater liberties, and [to be] allowed to add altitude to mountains, to manufacture trees and foregrounds, where necessary, and even to turn the course of rivers at pleasure. Thus the picturesque hand acquires a power, before unknown, and we may hope soon to sec a Skiddow or Helvellyn represented as rising from the fertile plains of Berkshire; or the Thames, and its numerous sails, gliding through the deep valleys of Cumberland. (Craig, Essay, 11-12)

Here, then, we seem to have come full circle, with Gilpin's encouragement of a liberal mode of representation appearing all but indistinguishable from the ruthless practice of "improvement" that his theories had so insistently opposed. Craig's specter of a sublime social and aesthetic conflagration that may permanently disfigure England's distinctive topography overtly baits us to make the connection with Burke's incendiary rhetoric directed against the Ja co bin redistricting of France into provinces, departments, and cantons. If the French revolutionaries' resolve to "dissever [their land] in this barbarous manner" and "to confound all sorts of citi-

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zens, as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass" had reduced land and people alike to "loose counters merely for the sake of simple telling" (RF, 297, 300), it is to be expected that an aesthetic populism, a schematic and indiscriminate "painting by signs" (Gilpin's Picturesque), will in the long run constitute an equally severe political threat.56 And yet, as Craig begins to conceive of remedies to this outbreak of aesthetic Jacobinism, his language inadvertently reproduces the very specter of equivalent signs and contingent standards of aesthetic judgment against which he has been campaigning thus far. This odd reversal once again dovetails with the paradox of Burke's anticlassicist rhetoric in Reflections, that "revolutionary book against the Revolution," as Novalis so shrewdly called itP Having surveyed the history of the mimetic doctrine in the visual arts from antiquity to the present, all in five pages, Craig suddenly falters as he restates his hardly original doctrine: "that the object of the pencil is to imitate Nature." For, as he now recognizes with a perplexity that quickly begins to muddle his syntax, the satisfaction we feel in contemplating the sketches of a great master ... is occasioned by finding the end in view so far obtained by a degree of labour apparently inadequate. This admitted, it follows consequently, that as the end of painting is to imitate Nature, any subject imitated in proportion to the extent of the means employed for that purpose, will give pleasure in the subsequent contemplation. It should, however, be understood that any subject, more pleasing than another, in Nature, will have the same effect in painting. (Essay, 15-16; italics mine).

Craig's argument inexorably drifts toward the contradiction between the presumption of representational immediacy in which any notion of aesthetic imitatio grounds its claims to authority and the inevitable contingency of imitation upon technique ("means employed"). Whatever gratification may be derived from imitations of "Nature" is not, in and of itself, a "natural" event but an effect produced "in proportion to the extent of the means employed for that purpose," as Craig puts it. The authenticity and "essential" integrity axiomatically ascribed to "Nature," it now appears, had to be produced by a type of (aesthetic) labor whose most distinctive feature is its incommensurability with its referent, a "labour apparently inadequate," Craig says, to the ends it has so insensibly produced. Since "labor" here refers to a specific mode of acquiring and displaying technical proficiency in the arts, the initially "laboured manner" of any detail-oriented aesthetic, here promoted by Craig, will realize its goal only insofar as it gradually disappears into "habit" and "facility" (Essay, 19; italics mine). To the extent that Nature is a generalized (and retroactive)

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umbrella concept for a series of discrete representational effects-a claim that implicitly undermines its ontological status as the only material foundation for faith and truth-it can logically stand only in a pragmatic, not an essential, relation to particular aesthetic techniques. As a result, what Craig would understand as "absolute" Nature attains meaning only by virtue of its affiliation with a historically specific calculus of genres, modes, tones, shades, in short, techniques whose lack of hierarchy Craig continues to deplore. Serenely inattentive to the massive contradiction opened up by his argument, Craig thus remarks, "any subject, more pleasing than another, in Nature, will have the same effect in painting." Any "natural" effects of mimesis prove strictly contingent upon the degree to which a given representation's constitutive "technique" disappears into the infrastructure of our cultural unconscious, indeed becomes that infrastructure through its appropriation and refinement as "practice": The practice of copying accurately, impresses objects so forcibly upon the mind, that whenever we have occasion to employ the materials thus collected, euen differently combined from what they were when first presented to us, we can give them the same energy and truth of character, as if derived immediately from Nature .... The practice of drawing, at once, the precise line that is proposed to remain, makes the eye correct; and, further, as, to do this, each little particular must be impressed upon his mind by attentive observation, the student will insensibly form an intimacy with the various characters which Nature ever exhibits. (Essay, 17; italics mine).

If, in his assault on Gilpin, Craig seems to retain a more conservative, classicist doctrine of authentic imitation, this doctrine surely does not constitute a different mode of representation but rather provides the Tory viewer and sketch artist with a new, more exacting vocabulary of aesthetic discriminations. Illustrating the increasingly widespread reliance of anti] a co bin thought on a classicist (and "classist") rhetoric, the complex formal discriminations and elaborate detailism of Craig's aesthetic draw an implicit line of division between legitimate aesthetic competence and the simulated connoisseurship of Gilpin's middle-class dilettante artist. And yet, even as Craig targets the ascendancy of the latter and inveighs against a "J acobinism of taste" supposedly about to level all the cherished timeless aesthetic virtues of Georgian England, we find that his ideal aesthetic subject does not stand above the contingent and equivocal status of the aesthetic sign but, on the contrary, has merely failed to recognize its own implication in that fact. In other words, Craig's faith in the absolute priority of "energy and truth of character" stands only in deceptive opposition

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to Gilpin's virtually unqualified reliance on aesthetic "effect." For, like Gilpin, he can produce this "truth" or presumptive gold-standard of Nature only a posteriori. As such, "Nature" is endowed with a strictly regulatory function, a convenient standard by which to evaluate the representational proficiency of disciples whose aesthetic practice succeeds not by their conscious proximity toN ature but by their assimilation of contingent artistic techniques into their cultural unconscious. Not surprisingly, then, Craig objects no more than Gilpin to representations of Nature "differently combined" but wishes to counteract the unsettling contingency of the idea of an aesthetic object upon the fundamentally equivalent representational techniques that have produced that object. This he does by maintaining his belief in the possibility of immediate access to Nature ("when first presented to us"), an axiomatic or self-privileging claim that, not surprisingly, produces a supplemental conceptual machinery designed to adjudicate any potential disputes regarding "proper" aesthetic technique. The remainder of Craig's Essay thus consists of a predictable relapse into precisely those generic rules and examples (e.g., Fig. ro) for which he has been reprimanding Gilpin all along: "Whatever memorandums are made for the shadows of objects, let them be made diagonally, from the right hand to the left." Or, the "parallel tendency of the lines in the shadows produces a degree of unity, or harmony, in the appearance of a drawing, so managed, that is highly pleasing," and so on (Essay, 22-23). To its agents or practitioners, the ideas of a technique (e.g., for improving landscapes) and of Picturesque nature or "scenery" never collide, since the practice of the Picturesque (in travel, sketching, painting, travel accounts, stationing, occasional poetry) already implicates its agents in a certain matrix of understanding nature: that is, practically and productively. In its reluctant configuration into a body of moderately coherent ideas-which, in any event, we must understand as an effect of our own, belated critical intervention rather than as its actual and reflexive historical purpose-the Picturesque's authentic historical mission consists in the unself-conscious construction of a practice, not the formulation of a critical theory. In its recurrent elaboration of that practice as a matter of representational technique and the bearing of such technique on the refinement of a generalized structure of consciousness-the "insensible" production of "Sensibility"-the Picturesque may, indeed, reproduce itself in theoretical form, though never as a "critical" or reflexive theory. On the contrary, the deregulation of classicism's exclusionary aesthetic practices and their corresponding "classist" demographics pivots on the popularization of vi-

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Figure ro. William Craig (r788-r828), exempla from his Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape (1793) .

sua! and descriptive techniques among a complex and evolving audience. Consequently, the Picturesque constitutes an infrastructure sufficiently malleable to enable the emergent "middle class" to distinguish itself as a liberal body-politic choreographed around an aesthetic (i.e., seemingly anti-ideological) practice. Like any other " practice," the Picturesque thus relies on a (largely unconscious) infrastructure of more or less settled formal and structural discriminations. And to the extent that its technique

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remains unstated or, at least, substantially understated (for which reason we speak of "infrastructure" rather than "system" or "theory"), we may assume that the membership in this aesthetic, "middle-class" community was elective rather than competitive, and consequently also not usually contested by other social classes. In what also seems an apt characterization of the intrinsically conservative, middle-class focus largely shared by the Picturesque practices, E. P. Thompson characterizes the cultural logic of the late-eighteenth-century middle-class ascendancy as the phenomenon of "a rebellious conservative culture," one best described by "decoding [its] symbolic behaviour" ("Eighteenth-Century," 154). Extending this conclusion, Thompson also notes that "class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process," and furthermore that "class eventuates as men and women live their productive relations" (1 55, 149). Fittingly, then, the Picturesque, if approached as cultural practice (both as the "practice" of perspective and as the "practice" of theory), approximated a form of cultural and intellectual selfdefinition well before the carefully preserved logic of "virtual" political representation was reorganized by the 1832 Reform Bill. "Perhaps," Thompson muses, "it was necessary that class should become possible within cognition before it could find institutional expression" (157). Knight articulates this fundamental homology between the aesthetic and the social stratifications of representation in his 1805 Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, observing, "the productions of [the] arts are never thoroughly enjoyed but by persons, whose minds are enriched by a variety of kindred and corresponding imagery." And if class and social position constitute themselves in part as a sensibility mediated through cultural production, it follows that such a sensibility is both produced and reaffirmed by specific aesthetic practices: Nor arc the gratifications, which such persons receive from these arts limited to their mere productions, but extended to every object in nature or circumstance in society, that is at all connected with them .... Of this description are the objects and circumstances called picturesque: for ... they afford no pleasure, but to persons conversant with the art of painting, and sufficiently skilled in it to really distinguish, and be delighted with its real excellences. To all others, how acute soever may be their discernment, or how exquisite soever their sensibility, it is utterly imperceptible. (Analytical Inquiry, 142-43)

A discourse preoccupied with the definition of an ideal, communal standard of aesthetic perception, Knight's critique of "Taste," much like that of Immanuel Kant in the Critique of judgment, is grounded in a tech-

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nique necessarily oblique to its very agents. In fact, it is precisely because of (and in proportion to) its unapparent vernacular quality that the Picturesque presents us with two incompatible theories of aesthetic perception, experience, and representation, which now warrant direct and close scrutiny. ~

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judgment and Disinterestedness in Kant At the level of the material and empirical landscape, we have now identified the structural relation between an assumed, perception-based, objective field and the desired, aesthetically configured "scene" itself. While usually absorbed into, and dissembled by, the aesthetic "composition" of the Picturesque's intricately structured representational techniques and forms (the wash, the pencil sketch, the Claude glass, the convex glass, the telescope, artificial echo, etc.), the material field remains logically distinct from the formal rhetorical and perspectival resources and exigencies of the Picturesque. However efficient the aesthetic may be in simulating a continuity between these two realms, a certain asymmetry is bound to remain, a cognitive dissonance that will sooner or later reappear within the aesthetic form itself. It may, for example, manifest itself as a tension between the generic "relief" produced by Picturesque representation and a local scene of material destitution. The narrative exploration of this tension in Wordsworth's Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795), for example, leaves the sympathetic listener to the widow's tale with "excess of grief oppress'd" and longing for a spiritual "gain" that mirrors the very improvement which had displaced the widow's family years ago.58 Elsewhere, at various points in The Prelude and throughout "Tintern Abbey," the structural gap separating the "objective" landscape from its representational manifestation as a "composition" or "scene" is displaced into a temporalized progression, a narrative tracing the beholder's evolving interior psyche. Cultural production thus unfolds as the aesthetic structuring of an ideal vantage point, a perspective facilitating a speaker's or beholder's ostensibly personal investment in the proton pseudos or simulacrum of "nature." What appears to be a disinterested contemplation of such a "nature" is soon superseded by the spontaneous or "expressive" transfiguration of a prospect into formal representation. To retain the commercial metaphor a moment longer, the representation itself constitutes a productive and often professional investment of a writer's aesthetic competence,

Aesthetics and the Social Unconscious and it is returned not only in the commodity form of the poem but with a genuine prospect of "interest," namely, the interest that such poetry may command among its prospective audience, whose return, once again, will consist in the experience of a certain disinterested "pleasure" or "delight" (as Gilpin puts it). What Knight calls the "middle style," in other words, begins with the hypothetical representation of an individual "eye" /"I" for the purpose of its gradual expansion into, and projection as, an exemplary sensibility. Specifically in Wordsworth, whose earlier poetry borrows from Thomson's Seasons, the representation of visual experience-concrete in its formal-aesthetic appearance yet speculative in its underlying demographic motives-gradually reconstitutes the beholder as simultaneously spontaneous and receptive. To follow the narrative and pictorial trajectory of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and the landscapes of George Lambert, George Morland, and the late Gains borough is to witness the slow, almost imperceptible transposition of an empirical aspect into a "scene," a "composition." By aspiring to formal coherence and maintaining a faithful relationship to the intricate details of their (imaginary) locale, these representations offer their beholder and consumer a sanctuary from their consciousness of a "Real" racked by tensions between the material sphere of labor, poverty, and starvation and the psychological sphere of leisure, sympathy, and speculative wealth. In unconscious evasion of the unfathomable and incongruous features of the Real, the Picturesque furloughs its expert practitioners into a virtual, noncontradictory textual or painterly reverie in which such antagonisms no longer impinge on the subject. To interact with such representations, as beholder or reader, is to produce one's identity as a public figure, a discriminating professional consumer of cultural commodities capable of making pronouncements on coloration, mezzotints, hues, sources of light, patterns of shadow, motifs, coulisses: in short, discriminations that stand in synecdochic relation to the aesthetic itself. As a quest for a holistic and functional grasp of minute representational features, the practice of aesthetic judgment indirectly assembles a repertoire of affective responses that in turn lay the groundwork for a paradigm of the individual as potentially representative of a community. Even as the movement from "scene" to "pleasure," from "vision" to "affect," is conceived as a linear, causal narrative, we can yet perceive how the ostensibly coherent formal textures of the Picturesque are imbued with a quest for a transcendent and authoritative social perspective. In the Picturesque, "motive" and "telos" are collapsed into one and the same structured practice. As the objective embodiment of a fixed and thus recurrent symbolic

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practice, Picturesque form is focused on the vanishing point of an inherently social future, one where perception is colloquialized as a "spontaneous" yet discriminating vision that sanctions an exclusive middle-class cultural community as a "natural" outcome. In anticipation of the antirhetorical rhetoric that was to dominate Wordsworth's Preface (r8oo), the Picturesque's ideological efficacy depends on the disappearance or, rather, on the preemptive "forgetting" of those rhetorical and painterly techniques, genres, and traditions that made a given representation distinct and exemplary.59 The conclusion to be drawn from the Picturesque theorists' micromanaging approach to cultural production and consumption is twofold. First, as regards the often vehement rejection of the Whiggish ideal of improvement-exemplified particularly well by Thomas Hearne's antithetical frontispieces to Knight's The Landscape (Figs. I I and I2)-the advocates of the Picturesque offer less a competing argument than a claim that they pursue an essentially different project; for their cultivation is aimed torestructure the very value of natural experience by emphasizing the fundamental need of processing such (allegedly spontaneous) experiences with due aesthetic discrimination and discursive expertise. To see is less to behold than to "gather," in the complex sense of legein as unconscious, holistic mediation. The (obviously self-privileging) concept of "natural experience" thus provides merely the point of departure, the pseudo-material "motif" for the ultimate telos or "motive" of such cultural practice: the representation of sight as exemplifying the beholder's mastery of a grammar comprising modest and subtle formal discriminations. Put differently, if "seeing" is the empirical condition (causa materia/is) for the virtual, symbolic representation of the "scene" in question, it is only through the subsequent "labor" of poetic or visual representation that the beholder's aesthetic proficiency will be fully ensured, itself the prerequisite (causa finalis) of his social ascendancy and the confirmation of his membership in a bourgeois cultural community. A second aspect involves the "epistemic self-privileging" tendencies of late-eighteenth-century descriptive technique.60 In conceiving landscape as an aggregate of "effects," such self-privileging takes the form of projecting (in moments of unself-conscious, "spontaneous" perception) potentially significant motifs into a landscape. Subsequently, these motifs will be recovered by means of consciously supplemental representations (sketches, poems, diary entries, etc.) whose formal-aesthetic sophistication will have to be continuously refined in order to restrict access to the middle-class

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Figure II . Thomas Hearne (1774- I8 I 7), frontispiece to Richard P. Knight, The Landscape (1795).

communities that, at least in part, have come to define themselves through this kind of cultural practice. Picturesque practice is thus necessarily and irreducibly speculative and unconscious, even at its most principled and theorized level- for example, as the liberal ideology of improvement; as the bourgeois subject's aesthetic definition of its own cultural estate as private contemplation; or as the anti-Jacobin project of salvaging "nature" from its various material or symbolic "improvers" and restoring it to objective and unimpeachable authority under the auspices of Aristotelian imitatio. Cutting through the Gordian knot of seemingly opposed aesthetic, liberal, or conservative aesthetic beliefs, William Hutchinson thus characterizes the subject of the Picturesque as a " speculative traveller" who is perfectly happy with the simulation of political power afforded him by the leisure-based practice of Picturesque travel: "On parties of pleasure time should never be limited .... The speculative traveller is never con-

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Figure 12. Thomas Hearne, frontispiece to Richard P. Knight, The Landscape (1795).

fined to roads, times, or seasons; but as the circumstances exciting his curiosity lay either to the right or left, he pursues the objects of his attention, without regard to hours or rules."61 What is being enclosed and administrated by the Picturesque, then, is the virtual sphere of "sensibility" rather than a material space, the mediating agency of aesthetic " judgment" rather than direct political power and representation. The cultural unconscious thus operates by discovering new imaginary potential within the malleable and highly adaptable inheritance of a descriptive poetics, and it cultivates these resources as the foundations for a social community of strictly imagined coherence. Not only is the cultural and nationalist ideal of the authentic English landscape an effect of these imaginary operations, but, because of their recurrent and iterable symbolic character, the practices subsumed under the Picturesque incrementally reify their practitioners into self-conscious subjects. The " pleasure" of the Picturesque thus

Aesthetics and the Social Unconscious dovetails with the Kantian inquiry into the aesthetic as the practice of "judgment in general" and, thereby, as the a priori condition of possibility for "community."

Indeed, no other text of the late eighteenth century expounds the claims just made with the same precision and lucidity as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, provided we approach his theory with a certain curiosity as to its implicit political agenda and not merely as an aggregate of formal propositions. Taken "functionally," the pivotal concepts set forth in the Critique of ]udgment-"judgment" and "pleasure"-reflect a historical pragmatics strikingly similar to that of the Picturesque. Notwithstanding the fact that Kant's text did, in fact, contribute in pivotal ways to the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics, the Critique of judgment also proves highly revealing of a deeper functional, even performative, dimension inherent in aesthetic practice generally speaking. For Kant's argument offers the outline for an activity that, precisely because of its restriction to "formal" distinctions, also ensures its "disciplined" coherence and its autonomy relative to social, economic, and political life. In defining "judgment" as the recurrent demonstration of a given subject's aesthetic competence, Kant implicitly conceives "community" as the distinctive effect of a discursive or "virtual" practice transacted by subjects in mutual acknowledgment and collective elaboration of the rules governing that discipline (i.e., aesthetics). As the faculty that connects our finite understanding (Verstand) with the transcendent faculty of reason (Vernunft), judgment is presented in Kant's Critique as a strictly formal or "transcendental" capacity: "Judgment must assume ... that what in the particular (empirical) laws of nature is from the human point of view contingent, yet contains a unity of law in the combination of its manifold into an experience possible in itself" (Crj, 20). For Kant, then, judgment in its most general sense identifies the moment of conscious recognition of the possibility of representation in general, irrespective of the specific material content of such representation. This possibility, insofar as it comes to mind, involves an onrush of "pleasure," though "if pleasure is bound up with the mere apprehension (apprehensio) of the form of an object of intuition, ... then the representation is thereby not referred to the object, but simply to the subject, and the pleasure can express nothing else than its harmony with the cognitive faculties which come into play in the reflective judgment" (Crj, 26). Form

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thus no longer constitutes an objective and extrinsic property but, on the contrary, designates the (pleasurable) recognition of a "purposive" (zweckmassig) interplay of our faculties of representation, intuition, and understanding. What renders the experience of form qua "purposiveness" generative of "pleasure" (Lust) is the fact that the self's fundamental capacity of "representation" (Vorstellung) has been recognized as formally suited for communication: "this pleasure," Kant goes on, "is judged as bound up with the representation necessarily, and, consequently, not only for the subject which apprehends this form, but for every judging being in general" (Cr], 27). Or, in Kant's concluding, almost terse redaction of his ideas, "only in society is it interesting to have taste" (Cr], 39n). What concerns us in both Kant and the Picturesque is precisely the social and cultural "interest" of purely formal "disinterestedness," the unapparent ideological "yield" of an equally unapparent "investment" (of "natural" or purely "formal," seemingly spontaneous contemplation).62 Thus Kant considers the material object of aesthetic experience a mere simulacrum whose putative materiality is all but obliterated by the formal monotony of aesthetic predication (x, y, or z is "beautiful" or, as the case may be, "picturesque"). As a result, we are now in a position to glimpse the faint outlines of an altogether different object-or, more properly, objective. This objective, which Kant calls "idea," is none other than the instantiation of a cultural or aesthetic community as such, alternatively referred to as "a universal voice" (allgemeine Stimme) or simply as aesthetic (though not conceptual) "common sense" (sensus communis): "We may see now that in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated but such a universal voice, in respect of the satisfaction without the intervention of concepts .... The judgment itself does not postulate the agreement of everyone (for that can only be done by a logically universal judgment because it can adduce reasons); it only imputes this agreement to everyone" (Cr], so-sr). Kant all but informs us that an aesthetic judgment constitutes a performative act, for by means of its apodictic form it instances a community and, at least by implication, also outlines an evaluative idiom by means of which a community may raise its contingent intuitions to the level of intersubjective, discursive speech. Kant's axioms concerning the philosophical place and function of judgment "in general" amount to a self-privileging operation, an a priori act that lays claim to the implicitly social business of philosophy. To be sure, it is a claim established by what might superficially appear to be nonreferential, "merely" technical, and conspicuously abstract propositions about the structural relation (or "form") among "our" mental faculties during the process of judgment. In

Aesthetics and the Social Unconscious short, Kant "constructs theoretical entities that serve his purpose. There is no empirical confirmation of Kant's hypothesis, however, since what counts as experience, and also as confirmation, is created by our acceptance of the hypothesis" (S. Rosen, Hermeneutics, 25). For the present context, Stanley Rosen's lucid characterization of Kant's self-privileging logic strongly suggests that the aesthetic is to be understood as the most general construction (in the sense of an unself-conscious practice) of a determinate social formation or community. Such a general formulation, however, proves meaningful only if we bear in mind that the "universality" of the voice or discourse in question cannot be endorsed as transhistorically valid but, on the contrary, is imbued with a historical "purposiveness" of its own. Etymologically linked to the idea of community, Kant's "voice" (Stimme) presupposes "agreement" (Uhereinstimmung). Even so, for the time being it would still seem possible to attribute the remarkable social efficacy of Kant's aesthetic judgment (its capacity to secure the grounds for any eventual cultural and communal selfconsciousness) to an "essentially" inward and private moment of "pleasure." The crucial and thus far unresolved question is this: is "pleasure" the underlying cause of the (ultimately derivative) propositional and communicative practice of aesthetic judgment, or, conversely, is pleasure the effect of the practice of aesthetic judgment itself (though, perhaps, an effect in the sense not of something temporally subsequent but of something "coinstantaneous" with)? "The solution of this question," Kant notes in momentous diction, "is the key to the critique of taste, and so is worthy of all attention" (Cr], 131). To argue that "pleasure in the given object precedes (judgment]," he notes, would be tantamount to identifying pleasure with "mere pleasantness in the sensation, and so in accordance with its nature [it] could have only private validity" (Cr], 51). Alternatively, then, "it is the universal capability of communication [Mitteilungsfiihigkeit] of the mental state in the given representation which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must be fundamental and must have the pleasure in the object as its consequent" (Cr ], 51).63 What is communicated in the act of aesthetic predication is the "pleasure" resulting from the conscious experience of the "power of judgment" (Urteilskraft) itself and of the presumed existence of an aesthetic "common sense" and community with which this "power of judgment" bears a relationship of reciprocal affirmation. Kant elaborates: The subJective universal communicability [Mitteilbarkeit] of the mode of representation in a judgment of taste ... can refer to nothing else than the state of mind

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in the free play of the imagination and the understanding (so far as they agree with each other, as is requisite for cognition in general). We are conscious that this subjective relation, suitable for cognition in general [Erkenntnis iiberhaupt], must be valid for everyone, and thus must be universally communicable, just as if it were a definite cognition, resting always on that relation as its subjective condition. This merely subjective (aesthetical) judging of the object, or of the representation by which it is given, precedes the pleasure in the same and is the ground of this pleasure in the harmony of the cognitive faculties. (Cr], 52)

Neither a merely contingent inward "experience" nor a discursive universal "concept," the "pleasure" instanced by the aesthetic judgment constitutes a determinate and collective unconscious, an operational affect identified by Kant as our "communal sensibility" (Gemeinsinn). The latter, he cautions, is not to be confused with the logical propositionalism of "common sense" but instead hinges on "obscurely represented principles" (Cr], 75). What characterizes Kant's. definition of aesthetic judgment (and to that extent has considerable bearing on eighteenth-century aesthetic practices, such as the Picturesque) is the extent to which a political conception of culture constitutes at once the foundation and the telos of the practice of judgment. Or, as he notes, a communal sensibility is simultaneously the prospective "ideal" and the indispensable "precondition" (Voraussetzung) of judgment. Hence, notwithstanding the ostensibly "disinterested" and "autonomous" function of the aesthetic as evidence of the free play of "pure" transcendental thought, Kant's theory remains by default anchored in the historical totality of his vernacular and specialized discursive culture. Its particular mode of displacing its historical situation by transcending it in the form of rational discipline, however, also reflects Kant's pivotal role in larger eighteenth-century "transformation of philosophy into hermeneutics" (S. Rosen, Hermeneutics, 26). Situated between a unique moment of "pleasure" as its putative point of origin and a collective "sensibility" as its projected destination, aesthetic judgment is understood by Kant no less than by theorists of the Picturesque to instance a moment of "spontaneity" (Unmittelbarkeit). What he and his aesthetically apprenticed subjects "experience" as spontaneity and immediacyconsciously colloquialized as "judgment" or a "refined sensibility"amounts to a mode of symbolic and epistemic productivity whose motivations remain necessarily extrinsic and inaccessible to its practitioners. The mastery of formal discriminations, the professionalism and skill at once intrinsic to and reinforced by "judgment," produces and authorizes its practitioners as legitimate historical subjects and communities. Each instance of aesthetic practice-whether creative or appreciative in a con-

Aesthetics and the Social Unconscious scious sense-thus unfolds already within a specific model of community, one that to some extent the practice will reaffirm or redefine. The representation of judgment is, once again, not the representation of objects but the "communication" (Mitteilung) of aesthetic competence per se. To construct the question of "taste" as one of "successful" (in the performative sense) symbolic practice is to participate in recognizable ways in that community and thus to be engaged in what Kant persistently refers to as "knowledge in general." Precisely this circular nature of hermeneutic practice-at once disciplinary and social, the demonstration of a kind of competence and the implicit enactment, thereby, of a historically (class-) specific structure of desire-is recaptured with exemplary clarity in Kant's most programmatic characterization of "communal sensibility": "Since the universal communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense, we have grounds for assuming this latter. And this common sense is assumed without relying on psychological observations, but simply as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and in every principle of knowledge that is not skeptical" (Cr], 76; italics mine). Communicability conditions community. If the point sounds trivial, it does so because it has to be trivial, common, colloquial, and strictly implicit to the social formations whose cohesion it states in such axiomatic form. In support of Kant's intricate theoretical demonstration of the "disinterested" construction of evaluative communities, what better proof could there be than a casual, Picturesque, epistolary account of the social interest so inextricably woven into the fabric of private and disinterested pleasure? Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth, William explicates the spiritual import of his sojourns at the Swiss-Italian border in a letter of September 1790: "At the lake of Como my mind ran thro a thousand passing dreams of happiness which might be enjoyed upon its banks, if heightened by conversation and the exercise of the social affections .... I have thought of you perpetually and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it" (L WEY, 35). The oblique intensity so characteristic of the siblings' correspondence also reinforces the unconscious logic of "transport," the Kantian "imputation" (Ansinnung) of assent, which conceives of aesthetic evaluation as forever building toward a family romance (to purloin Freud's term). Passion, pleasure, and "transport" circumscribe not merely a private and inward form of immediacy but also a "wish" for community ("conversation and the exercise of the social affections"). In distinguishing between the "happi-

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ness" derived from the empirical aspect and the "happiness which might be enjoyed" in the virtual domain of a "scene" or "composition," Wordsworth demonstrates the convergence between the deceptively casual yet formally discriminating descriptive aesthetics of the Picturesque and the unconscious macrodynamics of "judgment" as cultured, implicitly professionalized practice. All indications are that his next letter will be a poem. ~

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Labor and Professionalization in Wordsworth's Early Poetry It is by now widely accepted that understanding Wordsworth's fitful attempts at launching his literary "career" requires more than the scholarly pointillism of another biography, one that recites his desultory academic forays into theology, interrupted by the political drama of the 1790 tour with Robert Jones through France and two further journeys in that country during a period of rapidly deteriorating revolutionary and counterrevolutionary sentiments. Taking for granted the much-told tale of familial loss, delayed inheritance, professional irresponsibility, and unacknowledged paternity-an olio that has sent generations of scholars down the slippery slope of developing biographical causes for seemingly inextricable textual effects-! propose that we approach Wordsworth's life between 1790 and 1797 as the expression of a more pervasive antagonism. For it is precisely the fitful, searching, and often delayed progression of Wordsworth's early "life" that compels our reading of this life as inadvertently reproducing a specific antagonism (not a Marxian "determinate contradiction") of socioeconomic, aesthetic, and political imperatives. The tension lay between the prospect of an inherited socioeconomic identity-the opportunity denied or at least forestalled for the Wordsworth siblings as a result of Sir James Lowther's calculated delay in paying a debt of some £4,625 to John Wordsworth's estate-and the uncertainty about what might be involved in constructing a supplemental identity for oneself through a profession.64 In contrast to the presumptive literalism in the idea of familial and communal "inheritance" (what Burke calls "our natural entrails"), an identity contingent on one's felicitous performance as a career poet can only be understood as metaphoric, acquired, and simulated. This tension-which is Wordsworth's biography and which, not coincidentally, he shared with Godwin, Coleridge, and Robert Southey, among others-could only be resolved by means of producing his "self" performatively, by constructing for himself the supplemental identity of a career,

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trade, or profession. Such a reorganization of one's subjective and social identity points to an aesthetic dimension in any enterprise of self-making, though it is virtually certain that the creation of a distinctive professional identity and public appearance will reproduce the very conflicts from which such a performance seeks to absolve its agent. In that most inauspicious of years, 1793, Wordsworth launched his career with the publication of his descriptive accounts of the Lake District and his continental tour, an attempt to display gentlemanly mastery of benevolent locodescription in An Evening Walk and genteel tourism in Descriptive Sketches. This was the year that saw the demise of France's monarch on the guillotine, followed by the blundering campaign of England and its allies against the revolutionary army and by the repressive maneuvers of Pitt's government aimed at discrediting the incendiary rhetoric of the corresponding societies and millenarian radicals. Few projects seem as untimely as Wordsworth's attempt to launch his career as a writer of locodescriptive verse. How are we to articulate a plausible relation between these poems' subtle perspectivalism and descriptive chiaroscuro and the profound political and economic antagonisms relative to which these poems appear such implausible resolutions? Is Wordsworth's Picturesque at its very limit still but political allegory? Are these descriptive offerings to the public but an instance of bad faith, not to say false consciousness, on the part of the author who has just written (though notably not published) his "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff"? An answer may begin to emerge if we inquire into the stylistic cum political economy of Wordsworth's first poetic tour of duty, one that promoted him from the anonymity of an aspiring writer to that of a published poet. For only in the stylistic organization of the poetry can we hope to discern the basic elements of Wordsworth's unfolding professionalization as a man of letters. Virtually any long passage from An Evening Walk will serve our purposes; here is a first, arguably representative descriptive set piece: How pleasant, as the yellowing sun declines, And with long rays and shades the landscape shines; To mark the birches' stems all golden light, That lit the dark slant woods with silvery white! The willows, weeping trees, that twinkling hoar, Glanc'd oft upturn'd along the breezy shore, Low bending o'er the colour'd water, fold Their moveless boughs and leaves like threads of gold; The skiffs with naked masts at anchor laid, Before the boat-house peeping through the shade;

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Th' unwearied glance of woodman's echo'd stroke; And curling from the trees the cottage smoke. Their pannier'd train a groupe of potters goad, Winding from side to side up the steep road; The peasant from yon cliff of fearful edge Shot, down the headlong pathway darts his sledge; Bright beams the lonely mountain horse illume, Feeding mid' purple heath, "green rings," and broom; While the sharp slope the slacken'd team confounds, Downward the pond'rous timber-wain resounds; Beside their sheltering cross of wall, the flock Feeds on in light, nor thinks of winter's shock; In foamy breaks the rill, with merry song, Dash'd down the rough rock, lightly leaps along, From lonesome chapel at the mountain's feet, Three humble bells their rustic chime repeat; Sounds from the water-side the hammer'd boat; And blasted quarry thunders heard remote. (EW, II. 97-124 [1793 text]; italics mine)

Significantly expanded in I794 and further revised for the poem's r836 edition, the passage presents us with a discriminating, pervasive detail ism and a masterful display of subjective "receptivity" reconstituted as textual "composition." Consistent with Gilpin's Picturesque distinction between "object and scene," the landscape's material surfaces are refracted by a high-resolution descriptive idiom whose status as textual artifice is displaced by the temporal progression of dusk. The organic device of nightfall imbues the material landscape with a spirit of revelation, such means as by dwelling on an effulgent horizon reminiscent of Claude and the later Gainsborough (Figs. r, 2, and r3). Analogous to the sun's transcendent eye at the very vanishing point of representation, the eye of the beholder encloses and transubstantiates material objects, people, and labor into the virtual sphere of the "image." Correspondingly, the manipulations of "composition" are absorbed by the power of their aesthetic effect, specifically by their ability to dramatize the subject's affective powers. Unconscious practice translates as "natural" appearance.65 A line such as "Th' unwearied glance of woodman's echo'd stroke" renders the woodman's labor and indeed the woodman himself all but invisible; at the same time the axe's "unwearied glance" and "echo'd stroke" emerge as ephemeral reflexes of the Picturesque traveler's dedicated eye and ear and thus affirm his independent aesthetic receptivity and productivity. At the level of

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Figure 13. Thomas Gainsborough, Wooded Landscape with Cattle by a Pool (1782). By kind permission of Gainsborough's House, Sudbury, Suffolk.

imagery, such ideological transference eventuates as an organic, axial correspondence between the traveler's studious eye and the horizontal sun, which structures the entire passage and indeed much of the poem. What facilitates the visual "arrest" of the Picturesque motif, so ably discussed by Liu, is ultimately the traveler's providential conversion of an intrinsically indifferent natural cycle into visual, aesthetic capital, the salvation of mere "being" ("dark slant woods") into the forever expansive luminosity of "appearance" ("lit ... with silvery white"). In this most "Thomsonian" poem of Wordsworth's, "composition" is the secular echo of "salvation," the vindication of leisure as unself-conscious productivity. Neither indigenous labor nor laborer is merely displaced, even though they function only figuratively. A less artificial way of gauging the depth

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of landscape than the "swivel cannons" fired for the tourists in Hutchinson's Lake District, the sounds of the "hammer'd boat; I And blasted quarry thunders heard remote" constitute, in their remote materiality as evidence of labor, a moral foundation for the highly mediated, professional productivity of the Picturesque traveler-poet. His aesthetic "labor" superinduces culture upon labor; or again, it earns ideological "interest" from the raw empirical matter of "hammer'd" sounds, "blasted quarry thunders," the "woodman's echoed stroke," and the "pond'rous timber-wain." The descriptive image, in other words, is not merely the "other" of actual labor. Rather, to the extent that indigenous labor is being structured, given design, and thus sublated into and as the professional and virtual discriminations known as poetry and as the aesthetic in particular, such labor yields a different "interest" and generates a distinctive "cultural capital" for the reading audience. Indeed, contingent on that audience's approval, such capital will eventually once again revert to the professional poet, who authorizes and produces himself in proportion to the public display of his descriptive skill. Far from being anxious about the potential interference between the visible and audible labor in the landscape and the submerged cultural productivity of this landscape as representation-what I have called the "professionalization of leisure"-Wordsworth's poem betrays a consistent fascination with the hidden productivity of the Lake District: Bright'ning the cliffs between, where sombrous pine And yew-trees o'er the silver rocks recline, I love to mark the quarry's moving trains, Dwarf pannicr'd steeds, and men, and numerous wains: How busy the enormous hive within, While Echo dallies with the various din! Some, hardly heard their chissel's clinking sound, Toil, small as pigmies, in the gulf profound; Some, dim between th' aereal cliffs descry'd, O'erwalk the viewless plank from side to side; These by the pale-blue rocks that ceaseless ring Glad from their airy baskets hang and sing. Hung o'er a cloud, above the steep that rears It's edge all flame, the broad'ning sun appears; A long blue bar it's aegis orb divides, And breaks the spreading of it's golden tides And now it touches on the purple steep That flings his shadow on the pictur'd deep Cross the calm lake's blue shades the cliffs aspire, With tow'rs and woods a "prospect all on fire;"

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The coves and secret hollows thro' a ray Of fainter gold a purple gleam betray; The gilded turf arrays in richer green Each speck of lawn the broken rocks between. (EW, ll. 139-62 [1793 text]; italics mine)

Contrasted with Thomson's Seasons, the earlier part of this passage appears uncharacteristically concerned with labor, with detailing the subterranean productivity of the almost invisible, inaudible, and nameless "Some" beneath the landscape's "aereal cliffs" and "silver rocks." The displacement of labor below the surface and beyond the horizon of cultured vision, however, is itself the object of the verse. As in Gains borough's late landscapes (Fig. r 3), the "deserving poor" (as Barrell calls them) remain marginally visible and indeed did not go unnoticed when Gainsborough's landscape was being exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782: " ... a woodman and his dog in the gloomy part of the scene, returning from labour; the whole heightened by a water and sky, that would have. done honor to the most brilliant Claude Lorrain." 66 Rather than standing in outright contradiction to the aesthetic, laborer and labor function as the material gold-standard for the "interest" earned by their poetic description. They supply the "substance" for the poem's speculative surfeit, that is, they credential the writer's professionalism and the audience's aesthetic proficiency. However qualified their remarks on technical or prosodic aspects of An Evening Walk, reviewers certainly followed Wordsworth's cues, endorsing and inadvertently reproducing his Picturesque conjunction of empirical motif and transcendent motive, material labor and professional display. As the reviewer for Gentleman's Magazine confirms, to superinduce speculative aesthetic "prospects" upon the topographical referent of indigenous, subsistence-oriented, repetitive labor yields precisely the "interest" we have been exploring for some time. Thus he finds himself "much pleased with it, not only as a poem in the abstract, but more particularly as a companion of the traveller who knows how to feel and estimate the real beauties of nature, and, at the same time, is not averse to the children of the Muse; I know not how I can better repay to these delightful vales the large debt of pleasure I owe them, than by attempting farther to extend the prevalence of their charms, by recommending this poem to the attention of their several visitants." 67 Wordsworth's descriptive compositions, then, tend to shade off into social compositions much as Kant's nearly contemporaneous Critique of Judgment provides a theoretical blueprint for an aesthetic community where social cohesion results from formal discriminations ("judgment")

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and their discursive conditioning ("communicability"). In similar fashion, the reviewer of Gainsborough's 1782 landscape (Fig. 13) quickly passes beyond the incidental figure of "the gloomy part of the scene" to an affirmation of the composition's luminous perspectival coherence, which he predictably links with Claude Lorrain, the most highly appraised representative of the cultural commodity of "landskip" painting. In the passage quoted above, Wordsworth's verse performs precisely that characteristic turn from "object" to "scene" by sublating, at the beginning of the new verse paragraph, the indigenous and contingent signs of materiallabor"How busy the enormous hive within"-into an aesthetically selfreferential "composition." As the "broad'ning sun" overwhelms the traveler's empirical gaze, adjectives of coloration and affluence begin to proliferate; "the purple steep," the "calm lake's blue shades," the "ray I Of fainter gold," and the "gilded turf" all coalesce into one fully selfsupporting textual aggregate to be measured and evaluated, on the grounds not of its referential veracity but of its formal-perspectival cohesion. Ultimately, the Picturesque drives toward a dissolution of precisely the mimetic and referential contract on which it had predicated its ethos of authenticity. While the Romantic deregulation of the sign-rejected with such lucid anxiety by Burke and William Craig as the overthrow of the ancien regime of original reference in favor of a democracy of direct and fully equivalent representation-has been taken as evidence of Romanticism's general anticipation of a modernist aesthetic, the same movement can and perhaps should be considered in a less utopian light. What has been called a "pull toward extra-descriptive truth" thus shows an ingrained structural tendency within the Romantic sign to move beyond the inherited correspondence-model of mimesis toward an articulation of the underlying and complex motivation or interestedness of aesthetic signification as such. In so shifting from a customary allegiance (i.e., referentiality) toward an idiom of "expressive" self-creation, the Romantic sign also reveals its affinity with a late-eighteenth-century model of speculative economics. To move closer to justifying what might seem an extreme inflection of the interdependency between the late eighteenth century's political and aesthetic economies, we once more press for answers in Wordsworth's early poetry and in the incidental, prosaic justifications that surround his Picturesque compositions. Given its paradoxical reliance on a mimetic logic of description and its simultaneous desire to cultivate the disinterested speculative capital of an aesthetic "sensibility" (a logic of judgment)

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within a given a material scene, An Evening Walk is constrained to introduce a supplemental rhetoric of justification, one overwhelmingly antimimetic and antipictorial. Indeed, much locodescriptive poetry and painting displays contradictory allegiances to a mimetic model of representation and to a metadiscourse heralding the transcendent and universalizing purposes of descriptive art. Characteristically, a review of Wordsworth's poem in Gentleman's Magazine assures us that "no description of particular spots is here aimed at; such an attempt in poetry could have been productive of little but vague, uninteresting, description, and tiresome repetition; they will find, however, the general imagery of the country enumerated and described with a spirit and elegance which prove that the author has viewed nature with the attentive and warm regard of a true poet." 68 As late as r843, Wordsworth's note on An Evening Walk once again illustrates the same antagonism, opening with the assurance that "there is not an image in it which I have not observed" yet closing with a hymnal to the independent integrity of the "poetic spirit" vis-a-vis the squalor of empirical reference: "I will conclude my notice of this poem by observing that the plan of it has not been confined to a particular walk or an individual place; a proof (of which I was unconscious at the time) of my unwillingness to submit the poetic spirit to the chains of fact & real circumstance" (EW, 300-301 [1793 text]).69 Rendered more explicit in Wordsworth than anywhere else, this general tension between the Picturesque's descriptive faithfulness on the one hand and its underlying rhetorical enactment of economic, professional, and cultural motives on the other occurs in an intriguing lengthy footnote to Descriptive Sketches. Justifying what might be taken as a strained simile ("mountains glowing hot, like coals of fire"), Wordsworth's long footnote offers a telling blend of antipictorialism and submerged aesthetic notions characteristic of Claude, Gains borough, and the early Turner: I had once given to these sketches the title of Picturesque; but the Alps are insulted in applying to them that term. Whoever, in attempting to describe their sublime features, should confine himself to the cold rules of painting would give his reader but a very imperfect idea of those emotions which they have the irresistible power of communicating to the most impassive imaginations. The fact is, that controuling influence, which distinguishes the Alps from all other scenery, is derived from images which disdain the pencil. Had I wished to make a picture of this scene I had thrown much less light into it. But T consulted nature and my feelings. The ideas excited by the stormy sunset I am here describing owed their sublimity to that deluge of light, or rather of fire, in which nature had wrapped the immense forms around me; any intrusion of shade, by destroy-

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ing the unity of the impression, had necessarily diminished its grandeur. (Descriptive Sketches, 72 [1793 text]; italics mine)

Faintly echoing Protestantism's critique of iconolatry, such emphatic antipictorialism in the midst of the Picturesque marks the reappearance of the very tension within the aesthetic that, in the form of a historical unconscious, constitutes the core motivation for the emergence of this aesthetic in the first place. In short, the image must do political work-unconsciously-and precisely for that reason and to that extent it reacts vehemently against its referential demotion as mere image. Wordsworth mobilizes an established anticlassical rhetoric-like the eventual critique of Pope in the Preface a pragmatic and self-privileging conceptual move-in order to shift attention away from the referential constraints policed by "cold rules of painting" and toward a generalized theory of compositional effects, a sublime, self-referential "deluge of light" whose effect is psychological, not referential. Though first encountered as a discrete empirical "picture," the poetic representation must reconstitute the "scene" or structure of desire-what James Averill has analyzed as the "objectless sympathy" of sentimentalism-which the empirical landscape activates in the beholder; as James Averill repeatedly notes, "the content of the emotion is irrelevant" (Wordsworth, 49). In striking anticipation of Turner's Swiss watercolors of r8or and r8o2, Wordsworth's elaboration of the motive and projected effect of description ("the unity of the impression") reaffirms the Picturesque's "urge toward extra-descriptive truth" (Liu, Wordsworth, 123), its constitutive antagonism between empirical matter and speculative interest, material "picture" and aesthetic "scene," pencil and pen?0 The ultimate vanishing point of the Picturesque, indeed of most lateeighteenth-century aesthetic practice, involves the release and reaffirmation of a speculative, expansionist social energy intrinsic to discursive practice itself, that "irresistible power of communication," as Wordsworth calls it, or, in Kant's phrase, the "universal communicability of a feeling." "Power" and "energy" were precisely the terms on which the political representation, economic mobility, and aesthetic interest converge, not as mutually canceling vectors or classically Marxist "contradictions" but rather as a partially conflicted, motivational complex that undergirds all representational practice.71 Nowhere does the antagonism between "picture" and "scene," material suffering and aesthetic sympathy, referential and aesthetic "interest" seem more acute than in the "vagrant mother" passage of An Evening Walk (ll. 241-300). Here the sociomaterial content of the image dominat-

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ing the traveler's prospect is no longer the archetypal and redemptive labor of the "deserving poor" but the impending, unredeemed starvation of a terminally displaced group of subjects, the beggar woman and her children whom no political philosophy of organized relief or incidental charity will recuperate for the national community's social and economic "composition." Wordsworth's rather voyeuristic, extended depiction of utter destitution appears carefully "framed" by the preceding account of a mother swan that, "unweary'd watching every side," bestows every conceivable care on her young "with affection sweet" (EW, 11. 214-15 [1793 text]). The explicit, calculated antithesis between the organic charity of the natural world and the systemic indifference of a complex, human economy initially perplexes the reader. It appears that the elaborate contrast between a natural and an artificial economy of affect is meant to anticipate an explicit, almost Foxite critique of the havoc wrought on the domestic economy by Pitt's continental warmongering and by the ongoing retrenchment of organized poor-relief, issues often raised in descriptive poetry of the early 1790s, such as Charlotte Turner Smith's "The Emigrants" (1793) or Robert Southey's "The Soldier's Wife" and "The Widow" of the same year. Yet the depiction of the beggar woman ultimately throws into relief but one of countless deleterious social effects that can partially be accounted for by the middling classes' embrace of a speculative, mobile, and imaginary paradigm of affluence that increasingly wrought havoc with daily wages and the price of (formerly) "real" commodities such as food and shelter. Given the structural homology between economic speculation and aesthetic interest explored throughout this section, Wordsworth's depiction of vagrancy and destitution in An Evening Walk might conceivably operate as a relatively straightforward indictment of a political economy undergirding the very middling classes that Wordsworth was hoping to configure into a plausible and sympathetic audience. To read the passage in question, however, is to discover that such a critical reaction forms within neither the poet's consciousness nor, to judge by the contemporary reviews, the readers'. Material suffering in An Evening Walk, as in other Romantic representation (as we shall see), can only be traced in its obfuscation, its sublation into expressivity. As Mary Jacobus notes, "stock figures of grief and destitution, with the landscape of distress-ruins and inclement weather-reappear in Wordsworth's early poetry as he pays lip-service to contemporary sensibility or exploits suffering for the purposes of humanitarian protest" (Tradition, 134). The question, then, is not why the beggar proved a nonstory to the poem's

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readers but why a nonstory, an icon of supertragic sentiment, is introduced into the poem at all. Again, the stylistic and structural design of the passage will provide the cues. Thus the beggar woman appears twice, first as itinerant sufferer and subsequently as a steady yet abstract focal point for a Picturesque vision that has turned increasingly reflexive: Fair swan! by all a mother's joys caress'd, Haply some wretch has ey'd, and call'd thee bless'd; Who faint, and beat by summer's breathless ray, Hath dragg'd her babes along this weary way; While arrowy fire extorting feverish groans Shot stinging through her stark o'erlabour'd bones. -With backward gaze, lock'd joints, and step of pain, Her seat scarce left, she strives, alas!, in vain, To teach their limbs along the burning road A few short steps to totter with their load, Shakes her numb arm that slumbers with its weight, And eyes through tears the mountain's shadeless height; And bids her soldier come her woes to share, Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar; For hope's deserted well why wistful look? Chok'd is the pathway, and the pitcher broke. I see her now, deny'd to lay her head, On cold blue nights, in hut or straw-built shed; Turn to a silent smile their sleepy cry, By pointing to a shooting star on high: I hear, while in the forest depth he sees, The Moon's fix'd gaze between the opening trees, In broken sounds her elder grief demand, And skyward lift, like one that prays, his hand, If, in that country, where he dwells afar, His father views that good, that kindly star; -Ah me! all light is mute amid the gloom, The interlunar cavern of the tomb. Sweet are the sounds that mingle from afar, Heard by calm lakes, as peeps the folding star, Where the duck dabbles mid the rustling sedge, And feeding pike starts from the water's edge, Or the swan stirs the reeds, his neck and bill Wetting, that drip upon the water still; And heron, as resounds the trodden shore, Shoots upward, darting his long neck before.

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While, by the scene compos'd, the breast subsides, Nought wakens or disturbs it's tranquil tides; Nought but the char that for the may-fly leaps, And breaks the mirror of the circling deeps. (EW, II. 241-312 [1793 text); italics mine)

Quite perversely, any explicit critique of policies pertaining to the poor, or of the political economy that circumscribes the terms of such debates during the 1790s, pivots on the dissolution of the beggar woman's empirical aspect into a Picturesque prospect, a "scene" of suffering. In order to motivate its critique of the domestic economy, descriptive poetry almost inevitably has to transfigure the sufferer from an economic into an aesthetic casualty. Suggesting more generally, perhaps, that a liberal social critique may demand an intensely figurative, even melodramatic rhetoric, An Evening Walk thus cannot but represent the beggar woman and her children as synecdoche, which is to say, as the local effect of a structural causality. Wordsworth's elegiac verse transfigures material suffering and death into an aesthetics of sympathy by shifting its focus increasingly to the poet's perspective, technique, and overall aesthetic proficiency. Victimized by the transcendent eye of the sun ("beat by summer's breathless ray"), the beggar woman "eyes through tears the mountain's shadeless height" only to be reconstituted soon thereafter as a haunted, nocturnal being quietly bestowing affection on her suffering children "by pointing to a shooting star on high." Her melodramatic focus on the tenuous shelter of a moonlit sky implicitly sanctions the poet's meliorating vision, whose oblique voyeurism ("I see her now") operates on the same visual axis as the "Moon's fix'd gaze between the opening trees." Substituting himself for the absent father-soldier "Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar"-quite possibly also a brilliant transferential move on Wordsworth's part, himself the revolutionary period's latest "deadbeat" father-the speaker cultivates a conditional and strictly virtual, aesthetic "interest" where material relief seems impossible: "If, in that country, where he dwells afar, I His father views that good, that kindly star." Predicated on a sophisticated visual and perspectival technique, "sympathy" here proves to be a highly mediated type of passion, a transparently "literary" product designed to simulate "sensation." The passage's conclusion (11. 301-12) thus amounts neither to an ideological about-face nor to an aesthetic tour de force but merely continues the poetry's persistent transpositions of sociomaterial reference into the virtual domain of literary affect. Repeatedly sliding from the object of sight into the practice of seeing, An Evening Walk reconstitutes the raw, narrative matter of a history of suffering into the synecdochic

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aggregation of descriptive detail. Toward the end of this passage, Wordsworth's poetic descriptive miscognition of the Real verges on outright reflexivity with its last, as it were pre-Pre-Raphaelite image of "the char that for the may-fly leaps, I And breaks the mirror of the circling deeps." Composed with what Geoffrey Hartman calls a "Hopkinsian density," Wordsworth's late scene of material suffering in An Evening Walk produces aesthetic interest in the form of generic affect: "the breast subsides, I Nought wakens or disturbs it's tranquil tides." 72 These anesthetic powers of Wordsworth's descriptions will numb the countless material abrasions that were the Real for millions of the English poor. Remarking on the peculiar invasions of the Picturesque gaze in the context of Gainsborough's The Market Cart (1786), Ann Bermingham identifies voyeurism as "the theme of the late subject pictures" and "as a way of being simultaneously present and detached, suggest[ing] alienated involvement" (Landscape and Ideology, 46). Bermingham's phrase suggests just how close our critical examination of the Picturesque and of Wordsworth's poem has brought us to the moment of critical "judgment." Is not this descriptive "surface" of sympathy after all the very symptom of social guilt, and does it not invite moral censure of the kind passed on Wordsworth's Ruined Cottage by Thomas De Quincey and on his "Gipsies" by Keats?73 Indeed, the case against Wordsworth's Picturesque practices seems strong, with the crime ("failure to assist") compounded by the misdemeanor of "peeping" at a beggar woman "dogg'd by death; I Death, as she turns her neck the kiss to seek" (EW, II. 286-87 [1793 text]). Yet we may be well advised not to seize upon Bermingham's formulation of "alienated involvement"-an admirably concise definition of the Picturesque-as proof of the scandalous moral indifference of the Picturesque. Reasonable doubts remain, for no matter how righteous the belated critic may feel in indicting Wordsworth's descriptive aesthetics, there appear to be only a few, merely virtual casualties (figures in a poem), and if a crime has been committed we know neither by whom nor with what motive. In short, however bewildered our response to Wordsworth's voyeuristic interest in depicting, rather than relieving, a scene of human suffering, no amount of righteousness will grant today's readers more authoritative access to the poem's ethical meaning than was enjoyed by Wordsworth himself. Thus again we ask what caused the later-eighteenth-century middling classes to predicate their own distinctive "sensibility" upon the disappearance of an empirical landscape encompassing material labor, disenfranchised poverty, and even outright destitution? What is the greater social good or "interest" allegedly produced by the poet's and painter's

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"alienated involvement" and replicated by the sensibilities of those consuming their "works"? As our readings have overwhelmingly suggested, the motives that inform the period's socioeconomic and aesthetic productivity operate predominantly at the level of an unconscious. That alone might at least partially indemnify the aesthetic practices in question from the indictments of contemporary historicist and cultural critiques. Probing for some overriding "interest" that might exonerate the idealized representations of the Picturesque's Other-such as Wordsworth's female figures suffering without relief, Francis Wheatley's well-dressed peasants, or Gainsborough's tranquilized laborers at sunset in front of their cottage-let us turn to two revealing comments on An Evening Walk offered by its earliest readers: Mr. Wordsworth's paintings, however, do not want force or effect and read on the spot, we are convinced, would receive additional advantages from the minuteness and accuracy of his pencil. His description of the fate of the Beggar and her children is very pathetically delineated, and other parts of the poem are intitled to pra1se. The beggar, whose babes arc starved to death with cold, is affecting, though it has not equal strength with the soldier's wife in Langhorne's Country Justice, which seems in some measure to have suggested the idea?4

As these reviewers make clear, the beggar in An Evening Walk is axiomatically grasped as a literary sign and aesthetic figure. For contemporary readers implicitly to sign the Picturesque genre's aesthetic contract, though, does not evince some naive sense of moral obligation to do so but, I would argue, hints at a more general "interest" they take in or, more accurately, hope to derive from reading the poem. In other words, it is precisely through their endorsement of the aesthetic as a sphere of expertise that late-eighteenth-century expert consumers of a poetic and painterly visual grammar can realize their unconscious socioeconomic aim of obtaining greater self-awareness and structural integrity as individual and collective subjectivities. To put it differently, the social "payoff" of one's cultural and specifically "literary" expertise cannot be realized unless all parties agree to abide by the professional rules by which the market operates, in particular to accept mediation as constitutive of all literature, and hence not to object to the dissimulation of empirical and social reference by the aesthetic. This contract, like any other, is obviously exclusionary; indeed, it will sometimes produce bad social grammar, such as the substituting of a neuter pronoun for the beggar woman. Nonetheless, the construction of a middle-class sensibility-itself the condition of possibility

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for the reflexive awareness of this class mediated by the distinctive representations of its sensibility-hinges on the implied consent to the image's fundamentally speculative, not referential, mission. Were it not for this speculative commitment to the aesthetic as technique and dissimulation, the Romantic professionalization of literature would hardly have proven feasible. For "creating professional markets required, as in every other case, establishing social credit or, to paraphrase Durkheim, creating noncontractual bases of contract" (Larson, Rise, rs}. In short, it is precisely the aesthetic, extrareferential dimension of the sign cultivated in and as the emergent profession of poetry-as one reviewer of An Evening Walk approvingly comments, "that merit which a poetical taste most values, new and picturesque imagery"-which provides this "natural" or "noncontractual" base for the social contract that had led, as we recognize in retrospect, to the incorporation of the English middle class. How, then, are we to pass beyond the opposed critical accounts of Wordsworth's Picturesque as either a disguised political critique (which frames the poetry in question within an intentionalist paradigm) or the unconscious disclosure of his growing conservatism (a historicist framing of that poetry as an involuntary espousal of aesthetic defenses against the "Real"). Again, I suggest that we read the poems of 1793-95 as expressions of a much larger, macrohistorical narrative, a story about developing aesthetic practices, forms of virtual self-representation, emergent theories of an autonomous "aesthetic" sphere and of "literature" as a unique cultural capital, all of which-even as they are being unconsciously produced by the productionist ascendancy of the middle class-determine its rise as an increasingly self-conscious demographic subjectivity. While still reading within the paradigm of an autonomous "literary" aesthetic, Hartman already notes with characteristic astuteness that beneath Wordsworth's "unduly sympathetic" depiction of the vagrant, his "melodies of evening have a more covert eloquence of intent. Their diminuendos build up into a crescendo of secretly continuing life." Hartman's scrutiny of the intricate descriptive calculus of An Evening Walk, "a night-piece which intimates the persistence of vital powers" (Wordsworth's Poetry, 97-98), intuitively points to the metadescriptive and metareferential motivation of the Picturesque, in short, to the unconscious social "interest" of aesthetic "disinterestedness." To the extent that the production of cultural value hinges on the mobilization of a distinctive set of representational techniques, the published poem thus produced also establishes the social identity of its producer. Hence, rather than assuming that Wordsworth consciously seeks to integrate, or unconsciously seeks to evade, the political

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and economic antagonisms that surround him between 1791 and 1794, it ought to be considered that a "William Wordsworth" never existed outside these antagonisms. For Wordsworth to write and publish, and thereby to stake out his professional claims in the imaginary estate of the Picturesque, meant to configure the imponderables of his life with the ambivalent referential and aesthetic imperatives of that genre. By extension, it would be overly restrictive to focus solely on certain events of 179 3 without considering them in conjunction with the more deep-seated transformations in England's sociocultural and economic profile?5 These tensions or antagonisms not only produce a distinctive mode of writing but, in just as rigorous a sense, predetermine the range of self-awareness of the individual striving to clarify his political, economic, and spiritual identity in the profession of letters. Romantic writing, "literary" or otherwise, reproduces to a large extent the very historical mode of its production, even when it is motivated by and legitimated as a critical response to certain "preestablished codes of decision" (LB, 739). Wordsworth's entry into poetry, which coincides with his apprenticeship in the poetic mode of the Picturesque, is marked by a similar survey of the economic domain accessible to a young man of copious talents but limited means. In a letter to his Cambridge friend William Mathews of May r9, 1792, Wordsworth dwells on the question of professional selfmaking, and his choice of tropes underscores the larger connection between the form of aesthetic proficiency aimed at by the Picturesque and a larger paradigm of cultural and economic productivity, between the rhetorical production of aesthetic repose and the prospective psychology of a career: You certainly are furnished with talents and acquirements which if properly made use of will enable you to get your bread unshackled by the necessity of professing a particular system of opinions. You have still the hope that we may be connected in some method of obtaining an Independence. I assure you l wish it as much as yourself. Nothing but resolution is necessary. The field of Letters is very extensive, and it is astonishing if we cannot find some little corner, which with a little tillage will produce us enough for the necessities, nay even the comforts of life .... Tho' I may not be resident in London, I need not therefore be prevented from engaging in any literary plan, which may have the appearance of producing a decent harvest. I assure you again and again that nothing but confidence and resolution is necessary. (L WEY, 76; italics mine)

Of palpable concern to Wordsworth is the fear of being shackled to "a particular system of opinions," especially given his resistance to being ordained as a clergyman and his lackluster performance as a theology stu-

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dent. At the same time, he voices his dread of narrow professionalization in an intriguing agrarian metaphor ("a little tillage" yielding "a decent harvest") that obfuscates the obvious geographical and conceptual distance separating any professional endeavor from agrarian life. Notwithstanding its casual tone, Wordsworth's projection of extensive husbandry in the "field of Letters" warrants our attention precisely on account of the literal treatment it accords its agrarian tropes; metaphorized as good husbandry, the project of professional self-making is speculative and thus distinctly incompatible with notions of literal agrarian productivity thought to unfold and yield produce in some specific region of the country. Hence, even as he envisions the benefits of his meta- or antiprofessional career as a general man of letters, Wordsworth shifts back and forth between "necessities" and "comforts," between the material resources needed to sustain life at the most rudimentary level and those figural, exchangeable commodities that reflect a deeper professional motivation. Designed to anticipate the future trajectory of Wordsworth's career as a writer-a professional identity so mediated as to defy all literal representation-the agrarian figure ultimately collapses under its speculative weight. For it seeks to map the future of Wordsworth's venturepenmanship itself, what Liu has aptly termed the "vocational imagination," a domain where notions of a natural, material harvest no longer apply. What ultimately counts, as Wordsworth puts it so tellingly, is not an actual harvest but "the appearance of producing a decent harvest." Wordsworth here anticipates Marx's analysis of the self-privileging appearance of "value" and its usurpation and displacement of the idea of a "subject." Thus Wordsworth completes his professional self-analysis by reemphasizing the interdependency of "appearance" and what he calls "confidence and resolution," terms that proved already seminal to Adam Smith's understanding of professionalism in The Wealth of Nations. Even as the letters to Mathews verge on the idiom of proscribed Painite radicalism-" I am of that odious class of men called democrats," Wordsworth writes to his friend in May 1794 (L WEY, rr9)-they amount less to a statement of political dissent than to a self-dedication to the profession of letters in its most general sense?6 Reflecting Wordsworth's fear of being "shackled" by "a particular system of opinions," his ambitious outline of a "monthly miscellany," The Philanthropist, offers no coherent Jacobin or reformist program but instead shows a producer venturing into the volatile marketplace of sociocultural ideas. Wordsworth's ethos of nonspecialization and antiprofessionalism accentuates the distance between literary and nonliterary professionalism; "for while in other disci-

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plines anti-professionalism requires a conscious effort to detach the commodity from the social and cultural contexts in which it seems inextricably embedded, in literary [pursuits] ... the commodity is defined by its independence of those same contexts, and anti-professionalism is the very content of the profession itself" (Fish, Doing, 232). Viewing the field of letters as the testing ground for cognitive investments, for the vocational and professional ethos of enlightened man, Wordsworth observes: "There is a further duty incumbent upon every enlightened friend of mankind; he should let slip no opportunity of explaining and enforcing those general principles of the social order which are applicable to all times and to all places" (L WEY, 124). Ultimately, Wordsworth's letters outline a general ideal of professionalization rather than a specific political philosophy. We should understand Wordsworth's often circuitous and usually vague talk of "those general principles of the social order" as a dress rehearsal for his budding vocational faith, notwithstanding the fact that the 1793-94 letters, Salisbury Plain (1793), and its revision into Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795) all evolve within the intellectual aura of William Godwin's Political justice. What Wordsworth so sonorously expounds as the writer's "duty" to let "slip no opportunity" for discursive intervention and social improvement proves to be a more intellectualized continuation of his earlier, more clearly bourgeois admonitions to Mathews. For in the 1792letter mentioned before-the first item in a correspondence that shows Wordsworth sketching out his vocational prospects in his characteristic ventriloquist mode-he exhorts his friend to abandon indecision in favor of the self-fuelling psychology of resolve and to "be making daily inroads upon your happiness .... You have the happiness of being born in a free country, where every road is open, where talents and industry are more liberally rewarded than amongst any other nation of the universe" (L WEY, 77)?? Both here and in An Evening Walk, "walking seems an appropriate activity for a subject who .... can only claim a metaphorical social space, or estate: 'Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge'" (Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 21). By May 1794, of course, Wordsworth's first poetic attempts at enclosing a Picturesque spot for himself on the generally unbounded map of professional self-making had already been published, and the first reviews of Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk were beginning to appear. The overall skeptical tenor of these reviews, as well as the poems' insignificant sales, prompted Wordsworth to revise them and to delay the publication of Salisbury Plain-from which he longed "to derive ... some pecuniary recompense" (L WEY, uo)-pending further revision. Referring to the

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two published poems in a letter to Jane Pollard, Dorothy Wordsworth depicts her brother's evolving professionalization by elaborating on the closing Picturesque imagery of An Evening Walk: "At the conclusion of the [E]vening Walk, I think you would be pleased with those lines, 'Thus hope first pouring from her blessed Horn, &c. &c.' You would espy the little gilded Cottage in the Horizon, but perhaps your less gloomy Imagination and your anxiety to see your Friend placed in that happy Habitation might make you overlook the dark and broad Gulph in between" (L WEY, 8889). Remarking on the distance that separates William's earliest poetic venture from the public recognition and acclaim that he may yet secure, Dorothy's alignment of a professional and a Picturesque perspectivalism recalls the rural cottage scenes of Gainsborough's London landscapes (1774-88). Most significantly, the image of a "little gilded Cottage" oscillates between the outright projection of a transcendent "hope" and the practical objective of empirical "confidence." "You know in what vivid Colours I can pourtray Scenes of future felicity" (LWEY, 93), she adds in her next letter, and subsequent remarks amplify her tendency to mobilize the visual and rhetorical infrastructure of the Picturesque in order to resolve the contradiction between the affective ties within the family or its community of friends and the series of dislocations attendant on William's literary career?8 The cottage is arguably an emblem uniquely suited to containing the professional's anxiety concerning his forever provisional social and economic identity. It aestheticizes and thereby anesthetizes the restless unconscious of the career man of letters in the era of capitalist selfmaking as supposedly having already "arrived," albeit only in an imaginary sphere of local "simplicity" where all labor has already been completed, an icon supremely instanced by Gainsborough's last landscape, the 1788 canvas entitled Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door. As David Simpson puts it, the cottage constitutes the veritable "signature of localism" while paradoxically connecting a professed "commitment to the local" with the rhetorical "habits of a cosmopolitan." Precisely this advocacy of the rustic, anticapitalist, and local aura of the poetic image throws into relief a pseudo-local or simulated quality in Romantic writing from Wordsworth to Cobbett that identifies these writers as prefigurations of a "thoroughly post-modern personality." 79 This much said, it remains imperative not to succumb to a static, bourgeois (and hence potentially "academic") antithesis between, on the one hand, the sphere of aesthetic and critical professionalism and its notions or tropes of pleasure and, on the other hand, the literal rough-and-tumble

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world of political and economic interests. What renders that opposition inadequate and potentially misleading is not merely its apparent refusal to conceive the aesthetic itself as a mode of productive, often professionalized behavior but its preemptive and erroneous exclusion of the aesthetic from the logic of capital. For if, as I have been arguing thus far, aesthetic appearance is to be situated within a macro-logic of value that underwent a profound transformation in the course of the eighteenth century, it follows that the representation of economic value rests by definition on an (implicit) aesthetics of appearance. That is, in an era in which economic behavior was significantly shaped by notions of confidence, resolution, and complex speculative "prospects," commodities had not only become imaginary or fictional, as J. G. A. Pocock has repeatedly argued, but as such presupposed a distinctive aesthetic matrix for their public "visibility" or "appearance." The tension between "labor, land, and money" as commodities and their apparent resistance to such commodification ("none of them is produced for sale") superinduced the idea of "fictional" commodities, as Karl Polanyi has observed: It is with the help of this fiction that the actual markets for labor, land, and money are organized .... The commodity fiction, therefore, supplies a vital organizing principle in regard to the whole of society affecting almost all its institutions in the most varied way, namely, the principle according to which no arrangement or behavior should be allowed to exist that might prevent the actual functioning of the market mechanism on the lines of the commodity fiction. (Great Transformation, 72-73)

Both the economic and the cultural prosperity of the nation thus pivots on the symbolic administration, the descriptions, that it accords its substantially fictional entities of land and labor, and it is precisely this convergence of symbolic and economic representation as a formally highly evolved, nation-building practice that we have been tracing. The phenomenon is further elucidated in Marx's memorable characterization of capital, in the Grundrisse, as "permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces" (Selected Writings, 364). What renders capital such a consummate force-all but indistinguishable here from the inexorably progressive Hegelian "spirit," which Marx's analyses purport to overcome-is its ability to mutate into virtually any appearance, to appear logically and indeed constitutively as "its own Other." To the extent that "property-the material foundation of both personality and gov-

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ernment ... [has become] not merely mobile but imaginary" (Pocock, Virtue, II2), the formation of the individual economic and cultural agent in the era of public credit unfolds as the figurative projection of future cultural and spiritual identities. No longer bound up with some material and cultural inheritance, notions such as subjectivity, identity, and personality appear as vicarious social effects of a mostly rhetorical practice centered around terms such as "confidence," "imagination," "prospect," and {to borrow one of Wordsworth's titles) "resolution and independence." No longer compatible with the nonproductive splendor of the ancien regime and its aristocratic order, Romanticism's proto-modernist conception of subjectivity is bound up with the appearance of value: "value" has become the coefficient of its own confident, imaginative, and seemingly "spontaneous" representation, an effect of its distinctive-we might say "performative"-mode of appearance.80 Homologous with the economic and spiritual "confidence" of late-eighteenth-century middle-class subjects, "value" has become truly "creative," a self-begetting and selfconfirming, in short, "aesthetic" category. It lives in representations whose formal-rhetorical coherence is designed to close the present desires of a subject and the future subject of that desire; in this fully professionalized world, affluence is as much a cultural and psychological as a material category. It is precisely this simulation of stability-the metaphoric conquest of future economic and spiritual horizons through an intrinsically performative rhetoric of confidence, stability, and interest-that cumulatively produces the surplus "interest" ordinarily referred to as the subject. As Marx puts it: Value becomes here the subject of a process, as which, all the while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus value, is its own movement; its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.81

This aestheticization of value as "appearance" not only constitutes the logical capstone to Marx's Capital but also offers a highly suggestive formulation of the historical mode of production of subjectivity as a selfprivileging, performative, and self-confirming mode of aesthetic (and specifically rhetorical) appearance. The rapid evolution of eighteenth-century England into a capitalist order wherein, according to Burke's ominously

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totalizing pronouncement, the "laws of commerce ... are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God," caused predictable unease by collapsing the previously distinct and supreme authority of religion and its empirical subsidiary, the idea of "natural law," into a fiercely pragmatic, contingent, and speculative mode of socioeconomic cognitionP As Pocock observes, "specialized, acquisitive and post-civic man ... has become the creature of his own hopes and fears [and] does not even live in the present, except as constituted by his fantasies concerning a future" (Virtue, 112). Understood as a trajectory of investments and reinvestments in pursuit of essentially imaginary prospects-which is to say, as the progressive reification of a fantasy into a product-"career" and "professionalization" emerge as distinctive historical modes of autoproduction. Yet the most salient characteristic of these forms of self-representation may well be their eagerness to deflect any potential reflexive awareness of their intrinsic pragmatism into the local-empirical "aura" of description and into the formal-aesthetic proficiency with which such Picturesque representation credentials its authors and audiences. For, as Stanley Fish notes, any "professional must find a way to operate in the context of purposes, motivations, and possibilities that precede and even define him and yet maintain the conviction that he is 'essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities.' The way he finds is anti-professionalism, ... the strongest representation within the professional community of the ideals which give that community its ideological form.'' 83 Correspondingly, Marx suggests, the operative logic of the commodity must thus be that of a proton pseudos, for it is the commodity itself-including, as I have argued, that of professional expertise and specialized skills-that controls, indeed produces, its "subjects" as producers, distributors, and consumers. Possessing consciousness only under the aegis of a historically determinate mode of production and, in the present instance, as a consciousness-ofcommodities, Marx's subjects unconsciously produce a historically contingent and mediated commodity yet become conscious of it only under the deceptively empirical guise of discrete, private subjects interacting with authentic, material objects. Itself the product of an all-encompassing and all-absorbing "mode of production"-Marx's anticipation of the "unconscious"-the commodity presents itself to the conscious subjects as the "real thing" (to put it colloquially), albeit a Real that overshadows "its" subjects' identities with its aura as universal appearance or aesthetic form. The most determinate cultural form to embody the end(s) of all Picturesque description is thus one foregoing all further narrative justification: lyric poetry.

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Beholding Affect and Intelligence in ''Tintern Abbey" It is in the poetry of 1797 and in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 that the production of a conscious and exemplary subjectivity begins to emerge in the lyric intimations of its larger cultural potential, its capacity for reconstituting the objects of contingent empirical sight in the form of a distinctive "style." A transformation is under way whereby the scene, the landscape, and the distant echoes and glimpses of empirical labor fade altogether and are replaced by the rhetorical drama of a self-focused, poetic "composition." As in several of Gainsborough's last paintings, where "landscape per se no longer exists ... [but where] figures absorb andreveal its values and meanings" (Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 52), the focus of descriptive practice shifts from an objective landscape to the affective transformation wrought in the subject caught up in its contemplation. This reflexive and speculative completion of the Picturesque points up a deeper implication within Marx's argument that value, when understood as a trajectory of formally distinctive appearances, "becomes ... the subject ofa process" and "expands spontaneously" (Selected Writings, 450). A first consequence of reorienting natural description toward an archaeology of subjective affect is the emergence of temporality as a significant condition in the production of lyric meaning. As we will soon explore, by repetitioning the formerly naive sight of his "boyhood years," Wordsworth's articulate self-personification in "Tintern Abbey" predicates the possibility of the lyric's significance for others upon the growth in affective depth, stylistic expertise, and cultural "interest" displayed by an articulate subjectivity. In configuring the repetition of subjective diction with a correspondingly anaphoric diction, the poem aligns its intrinsic formal features and its propositional social character around the continuum of time. Reinforced by its curricular transmission and anthologized circulation as a canon of "strong" poetic voices-Goldsmith, Gray, Cowper, and Bowles, to name but a few-the historical (and as yet unfinished) project of a "middle class" is fueled and mediated by the formal-aesthetic refinement of its cultural capital. Under the respectable aesthetic stewardship of the poet, descriptive poetry introduces "scene" and "prospect" primarily as the empirical repositories for its production of a bathic sensibility; conceived as the concise transcript of that sensibility, the cultural commodity of descriptive verse establishes a more widely marketable hour-

Lyric Transport geois "truth" known as lyric intensity. The increasingly reflexive character of Wordsworth's poetry after 1797 also reveals that the previously unconscious motivation of the Picturesque is becoming more articulate and selfconscious. Beyond the mediations of "object"/"scene" ratios and the generic affect that we observed in An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth's poetry now begins to reenact its origination in the writer's affective psyche. The professional, quintessentially "modern" autonomy of the lyric emerges in the speaker's insistence on sublating all empirical matter from an aspect into the domain of aesthetic interest. Wordsworth's poetry after 1797 thus operates with an implicit Hegelian model avant Ia lettre, as it turns out, though to say that is to leave unanswered the question concerning the historical significance of this turn toward bourgeois inwardness. For even a poem like "Tintern Abbey" can only raise to greater reflexive awareness, but never actually solve, the antagonism between its descriptive obligations toward an utterly contingent social world and the unconscious motivations underlying locodescriptive form to begin with. Wordsworth's "is a poetry that has become aware of the incessant conflict that opposes a self, still engaged in the daylight world of reality; ... [its imagery] represents objects in nature but is actually taken from purely literary sources" (de Man, Blindness and Insight, 171). The manuscripts surrounding The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar provide copious evidence of the extent to which the lyric paradigm of expressive inwardness correlates with Adam Smith's conception of a ceaselessly enterprising unconscious shaping a new class of productive and professionalized Britons. The motive that produces the artifact of poetic description, in other words, is not an essential sympathy but a deep-seated, often compulsive cultural productivity. Thus Liu has read The Ruined Cottage ("not a poem about humanity ... [but] a capitalization upon inhumanity," Wordsworth, 325) as revising the genial detachment that had prevailed throughout An Euening Walk. In its place we find a narrative detailing the slow yet steady evolution of communal sympathy and converting the earlier premise of an "objective" landscape (always a cultural fiction) into "an image of landscape projected upon an 'impending' screen of vegetation" (314). Liu emphasizes the poem's reliance on images of organic, vegetative, and wholly unapparent productivity, such as that "image of tranquillity" of the spear-grass toward the end of The Ruined Cottage. The associative powers of such a delicately wrought symbolism respond to the insight "that any legitimate commerce between culture and poetry requires some medium of exchange, some pricing mechanism based on a

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demonstrable, earnable, and commonly held 'cash' of human value allowing cultural and poetic premiums to be weighed alike" (323). Liu's reading of the Wordsworthian image and general paradigm of lyric productivity as the encoding of complex historical, fundamentally economic exigencies and purposes seems compelling because The Ruined Cottage appears close to understanding its relationship,as an aesthetic product, to the macroeconomy of representation in which it is embedded. The poem itself cannot, however, afford a fully self-conscious relationship to its deeply antagonistic macrohistorical moment, one characterized by an extreme disparity between bourgeois productivity and foreclosed political representation. What prevents the poem from specifying the conditions of its emergence is the fact that, as a cultural artifact, it is precisely aimed at granting its audience an imaginative furlough from that disparity. For just like the New Criticism's bourgeois ideal of immanent "textual" values, the self-contained, "organic" aura of Wordsworthian poetry-a kind of secular scripture-aims to objectify and thereby resolve the antagonisms that circumscribe the psyche of its readers. Meanwhile, the long passage I am about to quote suggests that in the revisions of The Ruined Cottage, manuscript B, Wordsworth moves toward a programmatic articulation of the sociocultural motives informing aesthetic production in general. He focuses on an aesthetic grammar that undergirds all "sight" ("the habit by which sense is made") and on the larger "interest" that connects aesthetic productivity with the inscrutable evolution of historically distinctive communities ("a chain of benefits I Shall link us to our kind"). Much of Wordsworth's poetry between 1797 and 1799 appears to vacillate between a pragmatic implementation of the lyric image and a self-conscious meditation on the programmatic, social interestedness of such poetry. Time and again, Wordsworth shifts between entrusting professional success as a published poet to the unconscious efficacy of the lyric still-life and an explicit theoretical definition of its purposes, elsewhere referred to as the "history or science of feelings" (LB, 351). This characteristic professional indecision also reverberates in the poetry itself, and it produces an especially complex manuscript history in the case of The Ruined Cottage. There Wordsworth's first attempts (in MS B) to offer a detailed accounting of the Pedlar's exemplary cultural productivity extend to the 1802 manuscripts E and M entitled The Pedlar and from here on became a kind of portable aesthetic program variously apportioned to The Prelude, Poems r815, and The Excursion.84 The following lines, transcribed into manuscript D by Dorothy Wordsworth from an addendum to manuscript B of The Ruined Cottage, thus constitute the

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blueprint for the cultural project guiding Wordsworth's authorial practice: to determine the relationship between "things" and their "inarticulate language" as objects of subjective apperception, and to scrutinize their capacity for stimulating the mind into speculative engagements. Specifically the latter purpose assists us in understanding Wordsworth's concept of an ideal social community, something here reflected by his quasiHegelian use of "we" and "us": Not useless do I deem These quiet sympathies with things that hold An inarticulate language for the man Once taught to love such objects by contemplating these forms In the relations which they bear to man We shall discover what a power is theirs To stimulate our minds, and multiply The spiritual presences of absent things Then weariness will cease- We shall acquire The habit by which sense is made Subservient still to moral purposes A vital essence and a saving power Nor shall we meet an object but may read Some sweet and tender lesson to our minds Of human suffering or of human joy All things shall speak of man and we shall read Our duties in all forms, and general laws And local accidents shall tend alike To quicken and to rouze, and give the will benefits

And power which by a Shall/ink us to our kind.

chain of geed

While with a patient interest [Science] shall watch The processes of things, and serve the cause Of order and distinctness, not for this Shall it forget that its most noble end Its most illustrious province must be found In ministering to the excursive power Of Intellect and thought. So build we up The being that we are. Thus disciplined All things shall live in us, and we shall live

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In all things that surround us. This I deem Our tendency & shall thus every day {

ower

Enlarge our sphere of pleasure & of p a in For thus the senses and the intellect Shall each to each supply a mutual aid Invigorate and sharpen and refine low and high to comprehend

Each other with a

~hat

force

knows no boand

Minute & vast with ever growing[? sway] sway

And forms & feelings acting thus, & thus Reacting they shall each acquire A living spirit & a character Till then unfelt, & each be multiplied With a variety that knows no end. (RC, MS D pp. 373-75, 67v-69'; italics mine)

As distinctively "Wordsworthian" a piece of verse as any, this passage commands respect for its skillful blending of doctrine and analysis, its forthright propositions of poetic faith and their cautious, reflexive elaboration. Negotiating his way between the hubris of a purely individual creed ("Not useless do I deem ... ";"This I deem our tendency ... ")and the a posteriori justification of that creed as the transindividual, transhistorical foundation for a spiritual community, Wordsworth here focuses on the speculative social interest served by his proper mode of descriptive cognition. What counts are not "objects" but their capacity to affirm the cognitive distinction of the subject: "contemplating these forms I In the relations which they bear to man I We shall discover what a power is theirs I To stimulate our minds." Significantly, what might otherwise seem abstract, micromanaging epistemology is here being filtered through the mellifluous cadences of a richly descriptive blank verse. That epistemology consists really of two claims: that the composition of object-knowledge and of social communities is structurally cognate, and that the coherence of either composition pivots on its nontransparency to the very producers whose compatibility or sympathy with their Other it affirms. Consequently, it is through the "quiet sympathies" and "inarticulate language" that mindboth as individual affect and as collective "sensibility"-conceives of itself as the reflex of a causality that, once "mind" becomes conscious of it, is found to have "always already" circumscribed it. Wordsworth's analysis of "the habit by which sense is made" exhibits the self-confirming character of description in general and is perhaps best exemplified by the "patient interest" of a Science, provided its purposes are nobler than the analytic evisceration of the empirical world. At their best, scientific descriptions of

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"the processes of things" throw into relief the spontaneous and infinitely adaptive nature of intelligence itself. According to Wordsworth, cognition and "interest" are complex manifestations of an indivisible and unselfconscious mode of productivity.85 His postulate "All things shall speak of man" thus aligns general epistemic with local psychological concerns, and it asserts a deep-structural reciprocity between any individual subject and the architectonics of a collective humanity: "So build we up I The being that we are." In its almost baroque conceptual and syntactic involutions, strongly reminiscent of Kant's epistemological architecture, Wordsworth's early Romantic conception of knowledge constitutes, somewhat perversely it would appear, a theory of "un-knowing." The ornate, often inscrutable affective and material requirements of such epistemic activity prevent its agents from becoming conscious of the sociocultural purposes served by their "excursive power I Of Intellect and thought." Indeed, the passage suggests again why it is imperative to set the Wordsworthian version of Romanticism as a growth-of-mind narrative side by side with accounts of growth proffered by Romantic nationalism and commercialism. Thus, Wordsworth's metaphoric alignment of the body politic's economic and cultural destiny reveals the continuity of his verse with the productionist imperatives of the later eighteenth century: "the senses and the intellect I Shall each to each supply a mutual aid I Invigorate and sharpen and refine I Each other with a power that knows no bound." Such an integration of "low and high," epistemic and social productivity does not function as an allegorical tribute to the Jacobin ideals of egalite et fraternite but instead emphasizes the structural coherence between the prospective and expansionist interests of a middle-class sensibility and the period's macroeconomic theories of exchange- and interest-based value. In short, the lyric tells no story. Rather, it reinforces its audience's allegiance (what Hartman calls "the binding of the imagination") to a set of narratives already in place and operating "Minute & vast with ever growing sway." The logic of description, in other words, is that of implicit affirmation; and its rhetorical core is imagistic, not propositional, because its transfiguration of the empirical seeks less to secure some determinate knowledge than to "invigorate and sharpen and refine" the process of judgment that, in Kant's phrase, determines "cognition in general" and so conditions all community. In moving through the contiguous stages of empirical object, perceptual scene, cognitive form, and affective ref1ex, the discrete and progressively more "intensive" (lyric or scientific) figurations of the "object" of description gradually emerge as the actual "value" of the practice of

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description. "Value," as Marx notes in his analysis of the functional mutations of capital, "becomes the subject of a process"; or as Wordsworth here puts it: "forms & feelings acting thus, & thus I Reacting they shall each acquire I A living spirit & a character I Till then unfelt, & each be multiplied I With a variety that knows no end." The poetry's repeated slippage from the first-person singular into the first-person plural ("This I deem I Our tendency") and its hortatory syntax ("We shall live I In all things"; "For thus the senses and the intellect I Shall each to each supply a mutual aid") only reaffirm the extent to which its rhetorical and formalaesthetic organization partakes of the very logic whose comprehensive social benefits it seeks to articulate.

In concluding this segment with a reading of the poem known by convenient (if suspect) shorthand as "Tintern Abbey," I intend to throw into relief Wordsworth's remarkable skill for fusing the epistemic and stylistic, the cognitive and rhetorical dimension of representation, something so programmatically explored in the passage related to The Ruined Cottage but as yet not studied in its concrete implementation as lyric poetry. Arguably the most "lyrical" of all the Lyrical Ballads (1798), the collection's closing piece has unsettled generations of readers with its peculiar rhetorical involutions, fitful transitions, illogical leaps of argument, unexamined premises, and especially its transferential projection of an idiosyncratic faith on a rather enigmatic audience. Not surprisingly, then, the poem's promotion to a degree of canonical authority-which often parallels that of Gray's "Elegy" according to John Guillory's recent discussion of literary canon formation-seems to result from its tendency to keep the reader in a state of anxious receivership. When reading "Tintern Abbey," one is repeatedly assigned the position of a belated, often confused commentator whose sympathy with the poet's meditative psyche is all but obligatory and turns one into an unwitting collaborator with what may well be Romanticism's most famous instance of literary self-invention.86 Even a casual acquaintance with the impact of New Historicist and cultural critique on literary studies, and on Romantic studies in particular, however, will make abundantly clear that for some time now readers have been intent on moving beyond the formal-stylistic, Arnoldian paradigm of dedicated exegesis. It seems no longer sufficient to explicate how the poem establishes a quasi-scriptural covenant between an inspired finite consciousness and its larger professed mission. Marjorie Levinson has sharply contested this axiomatic spiritualization of bourgeois practice by

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arguing, "ideology is exactly that outside or social, which is invisible as such (that is to say, which is experienced as Nature or the order of things) precisely because it has so perfectly framed what is inside: psyche." Accordingly, she has offered a strident historicist conception of "Tintern Abbey" as the stylistically engineered vanishing act of all social and material reference. "The primary poetic action is the suppression of the social," she notes; "the success or failure of the visionary poem turns on its ability to hide its omission of the historical" or "to intentionalize matter" to the point where the topographical poem becomes "a sort of psychic allegory spatially disposed." 87 I will only briefly pay attention to the methodological premises and material claims that undergird the historicist critiques of Wordsworth's meditative idiom and will focus instead primarily on the poem's stylistic organization-not as something exacting sympathetic endorsements but as a highly self-conscious, rhetorical elaboration of a deepseated and fundamentally social desire. Notwithstanding its apparently self-involved and self-referential character, "Tintern Abbey" ultimately focuses on a semantic vanishing point where the speaker's authorial and vocational projections will merge with the sensibility of his audience. The lyric's form, that is, can neither be reduced to some autonomous aesthetic quality nor be pared down to the unconscious cunning of a given poem's referential evasions. Rather, form encrypts complex and historically specific sociocultural motives and at the same time embodies in its distinctive "design" the cultural labor expended on their realization. Shifting from a historicist to a more pragmatic understanding ofWordsworthian productivity, I will argue that the poem realizes its producer's interest in the virtual sphere of social psychology more than it seeks to elide the material sphere of historical reference. Form may thus be understood as mediating social desire, as constructing an imagined, sympathetic community no less "real" than the domain of material reference allegedly compromised by the lyric's systematic obfuscation. Prima facie, aesthetic form imagineswith all the dissembling, unconfessed preferences and sometimes outrageous projections that such activity inevitably entails. By the same token, however, the aesthetic cannot be reduced to an unself-conscious desire for concealment of social and material reference; for however much such dissimulation of the "Real" may be part of the lyric, it remains but a subsidiary aspect of the lyric's inherently pragmatic, constructive motivation. In his brief note on "Tintern Abbey" (appended to the r8oo text of Lyrical Ballads and to all subsequent editions), Wordsworth outlines precisely such a functional relation between a specific aesthetic form or "style" and those imaginary communities brought to greater self-

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awareness as a result of their representation in that style: "I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification, would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition" (LB, 357). The poem's style is said to embody its cultural motive, and insofar as the structure has not yet yielded the meanings that Wordsworth associates with the ode, the language of "Tintern Abbey" harbors the residual tension between the poem being written and that ultimate poetic form or "sense sublime" toward which the poem "was written with a hope." With the sublimations of elegiac retrospection, which searches the landscape's "prospects" for materials useful for composing an authoritative and seemingly unmediated sensibility, "Tintern Abbey" raises the lyric paradigm to the higher pitch of a confessional, rhapsodic, and transferential mode of speech. As the poem evolves into a reflexive awareness of its rhetorical form, it exposes its functional composition, its combination of specular and meditative, topographical and confessional devices, toward an ultimately social end. Like any social ambition, of course, the purposes implemented by Wordsworth's rhapsodic style do, to some extent, function "as a barricade to resist the violence of historical change and contradiction" (Levinson, Great-Period Poems, 53). Still, what contemporary cultural and materialist critique frequently refers to as the aesthetic's resistance or blindness to history in the end amounts to the refusal of one interpretive paradigm of history. More accurately, what shapes the lyric's articulate energy is a desire to displace one paradigm of historical understanding with another. Self-knowledge brought about by the cadences of the lyric does not amount to an utter evasion of History; rather, it persuades an imagined community of readers into a transferential identification with a deceptively "timeless" condensation of their historical moment. The fallacy to which "Tintern Abbey" may have given rise concerns more likely the romance of Enlightenment retold in vestigial form by contemporary historicism. Thus, in Levinson's words, a "self-consciously belated criticism ... sees in its necessary ignorance-its expulsion from the heaven of Romantic sympathy-a critical advantage: the capacity to know a work as neither it, nor its original readers, nor its author could know it." 88 It is precisely the utopian epistemological stance of a "selfconsciously belated" historicism that tends to forget its own transferential (almost axiomatically Whiggish) politics and its historically contingent disposition. Thus it seems precipitate, to say the least, for the New Historicism to construe our "expulsion from the heaven of Romantic sympathy"

Lyric Transport as a Fall into an objective form of historical knowing and, therefore, to consider the Present exempt from what are in fact merely different sociocultural transferences. In the end, Historicism's romance of liberating a modern reader from the "mind forg'd manacles" of Romantic signification merely reiterates the transferentiallogic of Wordsworth's ballads in which, as we shall see, the aesthetic itself is advertised to its prospective audience as the sole refuge from the antagonistic quality of their consciousness. "Tintern Abbey" thus tells the standard Historicist story about the providential conversion of lost affective identifications into the gain of some more abiding knowledge. Similar to the contemporary "liberation-theology" of Romanticism's social signifieds, allegedly "overwritten" and misappropriated by the lyric's unconscious cunning ("what we witness in this poem is a conversion of public to private property"; Levinson, Great-Period Poems, 37), the poem's belated effort to recuperate "its" lyric self meets with only partial success. Contrary to historicist and materialist critiques, "success" here depends on the transferential construction of a sympathetic community of readers rather than on the utopia of an abiding "critical" knowledge. Ultimately, any statement, no matter how aggressively naturalizing its symbolic or lyric construction, eventuates by definition within and as a historical practice: its intelligibility rests on the social recognition and acceptance of the distinctive rhetorical form in which that statement is cast. Precisely because the rhetorical, aesthetic, and spiritual conditions that define "communicability"and by extension "community" in general-are intrinsically and irreducibly social and iterable, it makes little sense to impute to some forms but not to others {say, to poetry but not to criticism) the evasion of "History" as a constitutive motive. It is this double bind between the poem's hymn to a spontaneous and spiritualized form of subjective, bathic knowledge and its inescapable dependency on inherited lyric, religious, and locodescriptive rhetorical patterns that causes "Tintern Abbey" to develop as a consummately reflexive statement, an act of faith constituted in the rhetorical form of a meditative lyric and projected onto a particular historicocultural scene. At one level, reflexivity throws into relief the social conditions that constrain any practice of subjective self-declaration-what Coleridge calls "a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself" (BL, r: 273)-even as it is in progress. Beholding a landscape and negotiating what Hartman has identified as the poem's delicate balancing of object-consciousness and self-consciousness presupposes a complex, transindividual, aesthetic grammar that determines, as we have seen, not

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only the practice of topographical vision (a.k.a. "experience of nature") but also its supplemental conversion into, and circulation as, a socially valid or "interesting" statement (a.k.a. "expressive poetry"). To be sure, the poem is replete with statements of a humanistic faith. Yet even these affirmations-for example, "Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold I Is full of blessings" (ll. 133-34) or "Therefore am I still I A lover of the meadows and the woods" (II. ro3-4)-sound forced and generic. Ultimately, the poem's subtle melancholy, a "faith" born of rhetorical mediation rather than accepted as an essential "belief," shows Wordsworth grappling with the recognition that a spontaneous consciousness is logically impossible. Thus the poem's overall message is compromised from the outset by its admission that any active construction of a self rests on conditions that predate that act's performance and, consequently, are irrecoverable for the interiority thus produced. Wordsworth does not present us with meditative parole that stands to the sociocultural langue of a Picturesque sensibility (and of topographical poetry more particularly) like a spontaneous, autonomous, and private cause to a mediated, contingent, and social effect. Rather, "Tintern Abbey" opens with a melancholic admission by the lyric "voice" that its desire for originality, spontaneity, and expressivity has already been thwarted by repetition, by a recursive temporality according to which things always change yet, perversely, always seem to stay the same. The poem's enigmatic spirit of selfassurance and resilience rests not on an unshakable faith but on a prolonged transferential rhetoric aimed at converting the lyric's initial confession of spiritual and epistemological "loss" into the "gain" of melancholy as an iterable and socially approved form of bourgeois interiority. Indeed, this general scheme of confessional transferences intensifies as the poem unfolds and seems particularly prominent in the closing apostrophe to Dorothy. Her silence, ventriloquized so eloquently by William's transferential effusions, confirms the lurking fear that an intact self can never be constructed from the raw matter of inward reflection alone. Clearly not a matter of simply transcribing the memories ofa putatively authentic self, confession displaces and projects the lyric subject's recognition of its impossible closure and coherence as a self onto an audience. Cued by the "organic" bond between the siblings, Wordsworth's audience is to cultivate (figurally) just such a kinship with the poem and, in so doing, reexperience at an interpretive level the same ratio of sameness/difference, of "recognitions dim and faint" I "sad perplexity," which had occasioned the poet's confession to begin with. In the poem's closing scene of "autoscopy"-a motif of abiding interest to our reading-William suddenly reveals how he, looking, continues to be himself the object (as well as

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the subject) of Dorothy's isomorphous lyric intensity ("in thy voice I catch I The language of my former heart and read I My former pleasures" II. n6-r8). From the outset, then, "Tintern Abbey" is dominated by the syntactic figure of repetition (anaphora) and by the corresponding cultural and epistemological motif of "autoscopy." The latter, as Joseph Leo Koerner has shown, defines that anxious moment when specularity (seeing, gazing, beholding) yields to a potentially interminable reflexivity as the seeing subject abruptly becomes conscious of itself as the objectified and alienated focal point of a disembodied gaze. The poem's opening 23lines offer eloquent testimony of the extent to which repetition-both in the temporal and cultural senses of a "recurrent perception"-has intensified the genteel detachment of the tourist's view in An Evening Walk; for the image in "Tintern Abbey" is not simply concerned with keeping at safe distance some empirical Other but, more urgently, responds to its lack of cultural and epistemic authority, that is, to its utter indeterminacy as "voice." Very much in the spirit of the poem's beginning, then, let us recall the beginning of the poem: Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.-Oncc again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. (LB, rr6-I?, II. r-23)

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To begin with, the locale of the Wye Valley (including Tintern) arguably predetermines the outcome of the poetic "experience" of it in that it firmly holds the traveler to the terms of its implicit cultural contract. For to visit the most celebrated tourist site in southern Wales around 1794 was undeniably to immerse oneself in a fixed set of cultural practices and expectations.89 Though Wordsworth obviously does not cast the matter in such explicit form, the tension between the "hour I Of thoughtless youth" (II. 90-91) spent among the haunting presences of nature and the experience of alienation articulated with such wistful emphasis by the poet tells us essentially the same story. Starting with the poem's anaphoric opening, the entire verse paragraph is constructed around modular instances of repetition. The syntactic patterns of these opening verses-their repeated incomplete comparatives, redoubling syntax, and enigmatic conjunctions, or, generally speaking, their "intensification of quantitative values" (Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 26)-quickly make us wonder what might have prompted this lyric to begin with an emphatic notation of its belatedness. The scene of temporal difference, it appears, remains virtually indistinguishable from the "scene of writing, where memories are cathected with intentions, and impulses with the characteristic amplitudes and dispensations of utterance" (Foster, "Scene of Writing," 87).90 With its unique stress on syntactic rather than referential markers, this description of a supposedly visual experience quickly transforms the scene into a touchstone for a profoundly alienated subjectivity. The "sense sublime" associated with the specter of an irremediably alienated self, and the desire for its temporal continuity-axiomatic, if also ineffable, in a poem of such pronounced confessional and elegiac tone-is thus enacted in a meditative syntax dominated by anaphora and parallelism, that is, by formal repetitions that produce the impression of a recurrent perception. In a striking resemblance to Turner's early watercolors (see Fig. 14), "Tintern Abbey" seems preoccupied by recurrent visual motifs and as a result will bring the act of visual perception into reflexive focus; Turner's early watercolors of Tin tern Abbey, for example, are centered on "the repetition of a linear module and a graphic scheme (the ogive or pointed arch), that the artist could redouble and multiply, thereby assuring the overall morphological unity of his work" (Clay, Romanticism, 140). The hypothesis of a self-identical landscape, the isomorphous arches and ornaments of the abbey {whose presence here is, in any event, only conjectural), and the abstract memory of the visit to the Wye being itself a repetition of an earlier one: all these notations are subtly being appropriated as evidence for the temporal continuity of the self. The speaker's professed approach to the

Figure 14. Joseph Mallard William Turner (I775-185I), Transept o(Tintern Abbey (c. 1794). Courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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site of Tintern Abbey as epistemologically and culturally self-same, then and now, oscillates between the hypothesis of empirical identity (repetition) and the recognition of the desire that produced that hypothesis (re/ petition). The lyric's opening references to the supposedly indifferent, value-free passage of time ("five years ... five summers with the length I Of five long winters") deny, of course, the very doubt that occasions lyric productivity and its transferential quest for an audience to begin with. Not surprisingly, every syntactic repetition and anaphoric figure asserting the continuity of the speaker's subjectivity against the backdrop of a consummately iterable, cultural objet d'art-"and again I hear ... Once again I do I behold ... when I again repose"-only tends to widen the temporal gap between a putatively original scene of natural instruction and the consciousness revisiting that "scene" to learn the content of that instruction. Palpably "haunted by the gap between epiphany and the text of reminiscence" (Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 218), the lyric voice seems to offer not so much a transcription of Picturesque "sight" as a critical expose of the epistemological conditions and cultural motives that determine Wordsworth's cultivated "sight" and "vision" as a distinctive representational practice.91 Among the epistemological issues that loom so conspicuously throughout the poem, none seems more intractable and disturbing than that of temporality. For it is on account of his intrinsically temporal constitution that the poet confronts his subjectivity (i.e., becomes self-conscious) as anxious, incomplete, and inadequately identified. "Tintern Abbey" adumbrates the question of time in its tripartite division, opening in the meditative present, proceeding to the rem em oration of past resources of meaning, and ending with the speaker's subtly rhapsodic transference of the epistemological problem of closure onto his present witness and future replicant: Dorothy. More significant, however, are the poem's persistent efforts at displacing the phenomenon of temporality-which as Heraclitean "flux" or as Hegel's "absolute unrest" (absolute Unruhe) proves resistant to all abstract and absolute comprehension-into the meliorist, positional contiguity of the poem's language. It is what Thomas McFarland has called the poem's "streaming infrastructure," an idiom of intensely metonymic, anaphoric, and parallelist organization, which comes to absorb the shock of an epistemological and existential sublime: time as absolute discontinuity (absolute Selbstzerissenheit), even as Death. "Time," Hegel tells us, "appears as the destiny and necessity of the Spirit that is not yet complete within itself" (PS, 487/PG, 558). As the synopsis of all cultural productivity, "spirit" deflects the threat of temporal discontinu-

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ity-that is, the "death" of the autonomous, conscious individual-into discrete and articulate representations that no longer purport to locate the self in an immediate and fully determined relationship to its natural, empirical surroundings. Instead, Hegel's speculative idiom parallels the development of the Romantic lyric, which represents "the knowledge of Nature as the untrue existence of the Spirit." Here "death loses this natural meaning ... [and] becomes transfigured from its immediate meaning, viz. the non-being of this particular individual, into the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected" (PS, 475 I PG, 544-45). "Spirit" thus coincides with the recognition of language and representation as its authentic (because virtual) destiny; for as the predicative movement and grammatical infrastructure charting the emergence of all "truth," language alone proves also consubstantial with it. Both Hegel's narrative and Wordsworth's lyrics draw on the same paradigm of language as productive "transference" (between siblings, between poet and reader, or between a "natural consciousness" and the philosophical "we"). Language thus emerges as the quintessential epistemological function, and whatever the individual speaker's local and personal affect or intended "meanings," it is in language alone that he will encounter some encryption of "community" as the deep-seated, social purpose of his own expressive acts. "Spirit," in Hegel's summation of his chapter "Revealed Religion," from which I have been quoting, "is its community" (PS, 473/PG, 543). Hegel's overall argument thus views the gradual ascendancy of lateeighteenth-century middle-class communities as closely intertwined with the evolution of distinctively "bourgeois" languages (political, aesthetic, and scientific). Inasmuch as Hegel regards any dialectic of language and intelligence as the progressive crystallization of "pure" rationality, he will contend that, over the course of time, these historically specific forms of a political and aesthetic (post-Latinate) vernacular inevitably acquire greater formal coherence. According to Hegel, this development reaches a point where "form" doubles back on itself, thereby becoming self-aware and, as such, being "sublated" (aufgehoben) into a new paradigm of intelligence. In the present context, this conversion of a highly coherent form into a reflexive intelligence means that seemingly discrete, individual (or "crypto-bourgeois") speakers recognize one another as members of the same linguistic community who have been sharing political, economic', and aesthetic beliefs and practices for some time and, as a result, now tend to represent these practices and beliefs to one another in notably similar ways. The passage of time thus produces "truth" in the distinctive histori-

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cal form of bourgeois self-awareness, which is to say as the merging of the individual with the overarching vernacular culture of the Nation, one rooted in the formal "skills" (Geschick) of its professionalized members and retroactively explained by them as their logical "destiny" (Schicksal). In a compelling analogy to the logic of commercial speculation by means of which this new demographic subjectivity produces itself, "time" is no longer accepted as a metaphysical death sentence vitiating all selfidentification. On the contrary, by the fiat of a rhetorical and speculative imagination, time is commuted into the psychological category of "temporality," all but consubstantial with subjective consciousness. More accurately, as "temporality," the formerly metaphysical threat of time has been appropriated as the very medium of conscious inwardness, and thus it is expected to bring about the closure of the alienated, conscious individual under the auspices of what Hegel calls "communal sensibility" (Gemeinsinn) or "religious consciousness." With often uncanny rhetorical consistency, "Tintern Abbey" anticipates not only Hegel's philosophical conceptions avant La lettre but also those of Freud, at least to the extent that the speaker's voice, in "reconstituting its past in the urgency of the present" (Weiskel, 142), anticipates the logical tension between phenomenological time as duree and an inversion of the traditional, temporalized paradigm of cause and effect, referred to by Freud as "deferred action" (Nachtriiglichkeit). In Wordsworth's searching, lyrical patterns of speech, the logical and abstract conception of time so seemingly disruptive of the material and intellectual world is reconstituted as the speaker's ever-present consciousness of death: "I cannot paint I What then I was," a very "undead" Wordsworth tells us, as he figurally drains his "former heart" (I. rr8) for all its poetic and vocational worth. The subtle cadences of the lyric thus commute the sublime, unrepresentable "death" of the individual subject into the "life sentence" of a poetic vocation and professional career preoccupied with what Wordsworth calls "tranquil restoration" (1. 31). Such "restoration" can also be read as a political trope, that is, as substituting the Tory ideal of "virtual" representation for the radical and evidently unattainable ideal of"direct" representation. Seen in the context of Wordsworth's fading political radicalism, the substitution of a figural "soul" of community for an ineffable, empirical self in "Tintern Abbey" throws into relief the lyric and figural ways in which "the burthen of the mystery, I Of all this heavy and unintelligible world I Is lighten'd" and displaced by -that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,

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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. (LB, II?, II. 41-49)

Here again, we note Wordsworth's characteristic replacement of the firstperson singular with the first-person plural-evoking the stability and visceral presence that resonates in "our human blood," "living soul," and "the life of things"-in response to the crisis and impending demise of individual consciousness?2 Hegel's Protestant affirmation of a "Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected" reappears in "Tintern Abbey" as the transposition of an empirical and visual acuity into an examination of subtle shifts in the temporalized interiors of the speaker's consciousness. Subtle figural shifts, together with currents intrinsic to Wordsworth's lyric style, produce the effect of temporal continuity and spiritual mobility ("the affections gently lead us on"). Throughout "Tintern Abbey" such e/motion encompasses loss and gain, despair and hope; and in so cathecting particular affective qualities, it clears the space for the familiar, "deep" Wordsworthian persona selfconsciously perched between a melancholic, skeletal self ("this corporeal frame") and the "spirit" of a holistic community ("a mansion for all lovely forms"). Such rhetorical mediation shelters the individual from recognizing the necessarily illusory nature of its claims to immediate self-presence and substantive identity. In its stead, the positional power of the lyric image offers itself as a supplemental defense by transfiguring that very loss of authenticity into the cultural capital of lyric scripture. "Tintern Abbey" thus seems at once occasioned by and expressive of an irremediable melancholy, with the speaker initially straining for self-affirmation and re/petitioning his former self, only to discover that such a self is recoverable only in the guise of an as-yet-unrealized prospect, a fiction alternately displaced into the past and projected onto the future so as to mitigate the aura of "loss" that defines the lyric present. Yet how, we may wonder, can such ruminations ever compel the "interest" of an audience and achieve the "distinction" requisite for all cultural capital? The answer to this question, I believe, lies in the poem's commerce with the Picturesque. The reflexive artistry of "Tintern Abbey" revolves around the speculative (vestigially religious) motif known among art historians by its German name of Riickenfigur. In his recent discussion of

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the work of Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph Leo Koerner has drawn our attention to Friedrich's habit of placing figures in his landscapes, their faces typically averted and their (to us) invisible gaze radiating outward toward often misty and partially obscured horizons. As in the opening of "Tintern Abbey," in Friedrich there is "repetition at work (we seeing the Ruckenfigur seeing, or, alternatively, we see the artist's vision of himself seeing)." Koerner also notes, however, that "something has been elided, for what repeats our looking, the turned traveller, hides with his body the very thing repeated: the gaze of the subject." The affective and cultural value in the traveler's representations of natural experience, in other words, remains inscrutable, and the averted gaze consequently "testifies to a powerful dimension of loss, of absence, of incompletion within the subject." In several of Friedrich's paintings (see Figs. r 5 and r6) this incompletion is absorbed by the community of affect that seems to organize pairs and groups of figures almost wholly "frozen in contemplation, their stillness a mark of an immense interiority." 93 Two Men Contemplating the Moon (r8r9) and Moonrise at Sea (r82r) show the proximity of the men sublating an utterly self-contained natural prospect into their convergent aesthetic sensibility, something compounded, in the first of these paintings, by the men's defiant wearing of the Altdeutsche Tracht that signals their community of political dissent. According to Koerner, the "incompleti0n within the subject" operates in the twofold temporal sense of a "not yet" and "always already": That Friedrich's paintings seem like landscapes already seen, even if we behold them for the first time, suggests the mysterious phenomenon of the deja vu. In the deja vu, I feel as if what I am experiencing has already happened, and I have been thrown back into a past moment of my life. While the illusion lingers, I experience a sense of expectancy, as if I know for sure what will happen next. What I anticipate in this immediate future is that I will recall the original experience that I now feel myself repeating. I await a recognition that will turn the deja vu into a memory, one which will recapture some lost past. What is perplexing in this failure is that the anticipated moment a little further on contains the illusion of a past origin of experience. The deja vu excites us with an anticipated return, yet leaves us in a state of exile; anticipation becomes finally nostalgia for a place I have never visited .... From another perspective, the Ruckenfigur as an emblem of subjective experience, or even as painted object, is a trace of the past. It gazes not into its future, but into a now concealed past anterior to its being: the unseen wood, the unpainted surface of the canvas. We, the community of viewers who pass behind, are its future. (Friedrich, 2 34)

Koerner's lucid analyses of the deja vu logic intrinsic to the motif of the Ruckenfigur resituates our earlier discussion, in the context of Hegel's

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Figure 15. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-r84o), Two M en Contemplating the Moon (r819- 20). By kind permission of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Phenomenology, of the overcoming of Death by the subject's bearing witness to its own dissolution as an autonomous individual and sublating that "experience" (qua lyric poetry) into the domain of the "spirit" as the center of an aesthetic "community." Koerner's analyses can be extended into a more complex critique of the aesthetic subjectivity at issue throughout "Tintern Abbey." Wordsworth's lyric ruminations ultimately compel us to recognize the dissolution of the self's presumptive integrity, an event that manifests itself as the onrush of a terrifying and quite postmodern suspicion: that the self (Wordsworth's lyric "I") may turn out to have been all along but a product of aesthetic "representations" of subjective experience, representations at once so ubiquitous and so well executed as to be unconsciously credited as authentic by a rather generic middle-class subject whose consciousness of its own cultural and visionary "distinction" the representation helped constitute in the first place. To be sure, it may seem outrageous (and it is irreverent) to second-guess in this manner the

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Figure 16. Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise at Sea (1821). By kind permission of Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

bathic strains of "Tintern Abbey." Could we possibly liken the speaker, on grounds of his repeated tonal hesitations and concessions of doubt (e.g., "other gifts I Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, I Abundant recompense," 11. 86-88) with, say, the Replicants of Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner, characters plagued by the paranoid suspicion that they "might" be mere copies of an authentic human being whose identity they can only ever attain in the form of a wish: to acquire proof of their "having been" human all along. Even worse, Dick's plot suggests that eventually such paranoia will begin to infect all subjects, Replicants and humans, since engineering has so perfected the art of reduplicating the mode of appearing "human" as to instill the same reflexive instability in any individual being whatsoever. What seems unnerving, both to Friedrich's Ruckenfiguren and to Wordsworth's speaker in "Tintern Abbey," in other words, is the sense that the temporal discontinuity we so much fear, as presumptively authentic "human" subjects, may in the end mean nothing. What

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meaning, after all, can we possibly assign to "feelings, too, I Of unremembered pleasure" (11. 31-32)? And what distinguishes the obliquities of the present meditation from the generic "unremembered acts I Of kindness and of love" (ll. 35-36) and from a past only remembered as mortgaging the present voice with its ineffability: "I cannot paint I What then I was" (11. 76-77)? Other than the mere wish to be "more deep," "more sublime," "more profound," and "far more deeply interfused," what underwrites the exemplary "human" integrity of the lyric voice? To affirm with regard to his "boyish days" how "that time is past" and how he is now "Changed, no doubt, from what I was" (ll. 84, 67), and thereby to establish a calculus between a subsidiary and incomplete (confessed) past and the (professed) plenitude of the present, is to hold out for contingent success at best?4 For even as the lyric voice posits itself as the subject born of (and yet asserting control over) a temporal continuum between past and present, the central suspicion to be displaced by the lyric's affirmations returns: the fear that the lyric voice itself might be but a displacement of epistemic and cultural ennui, a recognition of the qualitative indifference between the unselfconscious "coarser pleasures of my boyish days" and the likewise mechanical and repetitive "fretful stir I Unprofitable" and "dreary intercourse of daily life" which define the city dweller's observable present (ll. 7 4, 5354, 132). This deja vu unnerves the poet and reader with the uncanny familiarity of the present as mere repetition, as a phony revelation that turns out, upon closer inspection, to have been insidiously "scripted" and predetermined by the very past whose enigmatic nature it purports to overcome. Yet the "anticipated return" of the present, that is, its outright recognition as the instant replay of a past that appears to beg that recognition (or bait our meconnaissance), never quite materializes. Instead, present and past continue to destabilize one another and, by further consequence, to corrode the very idea of a temporal continuum that might be expected to realign inward reminiscence with its social representations, the remembering subject and the subject remembered. In so "rediscovering" themselves for the first time, Wordsworth's and Friedrich's subjects enter the scene already in "a state of exile." Koerner's remarks on the non-event of our recognizing the present as a repetition of some vaguely familiar past, and of our resulting feeling of "nostalgia for a place I have never visited," warrant further attention. For this logical conundrum also throws into relief a desire more generally at work in Romanticism's lyric and painterly representations, namely, the desire to produce the subject in such a way as to spare it from becoming aware of its status as the product of a palpably

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social practice of representation. To be unique and, at the same time, socially meaningful requires that the technologies of representation be absorbed into the object of their productivity. For a self to feel unique-to display what Hegel calls "Spirit" and what Wordsworth calls "Soul"-its self-awareness must eventuate "spontaneously" and yet as the (ontologically "false") recognition that it has always already been there. As Wordsworth puts it in "Tintern Abbey": And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills. (LB, n8, 11. 59~68; italics mine)

"Tintern Abbey" evolves as a prolonged attempt to reconcile a hypostatized natural, unself-conscious, autonomous sensibility-only "remembered" as irretrievably past-and an urban, professionalized, dissociated subjectivity incapable of determining the epistemological relationship that it maintains with the former (is it recollection or projection?). In his Philosophy of Art (I8os), Schelling had thematized this difference when distinguishing between two types of figures commonly placed in landscape paintings: "People in a landscape either must be portrayed as indigenous, as autochthonous, or they must be portrayed as strangers or wanderers recognizable as such by their general disposition, appearance, or even clothing, all of which is alien in relationship to the landscape itself" (14546). The voice of "Tin tern Abbey" alternately inclines to the autochthonic youth and the alienated traveler, with the former embodying Romanticism's belief in, or wish for, authentic natural "experience" (reminiscent of the unconscious pleasures of the Picturesque poor in Gainsborough's earlier landscapes) and the latter strongly intimating the illusory nature of that wish. Having recognized how "feeling" and "memory" are mediated by an intrinsically social (and aesthetic) grammar, Wordsworth's lyric voice gradually relinquishes its delusive faith in grounding a self in unremembered, unrepresentable, utterly generic types of affect ("feeling," "memory," and the idea of spontaneous "recognition" itself). In response, "Tintern Abbey" stages its truth in a series of verbal repetitions and psy-

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chological transferences that appear to aim, cumulatively, at authenticating some exemplary self, one not verifiable as an individual with a distinctive past but merely identified as sincere by its repeated admissions of "forgetting." Taking up Heinrich von Kleist's discussion of Friedrich's remarkable Monk by the Sea (1809-10), Koerner draws attention to Kleist's observation that the presence of the Monk in the picture, a beholder whose gaze is notably directed toward the horizon of the picture itself, "motivates everyone to articulate what many have already said in exuberant, universal familiarity." The fictional dialogues among various beholders of Friedrich's paintings, constructed by Kleist and integrated into his review of the painting for the Berliner Abendblatter, show Kleist at his ironic best as he offers a pastiche of middle-class "talk" about art consisting of confused literalisms, delusive expertise, and inane formalisms. As Koerner notes, in Kleist's review "the Ruckenfigur is thus made into an initiator of discourses, somehow inspiring his viewers with unbounded exegetical confidence. The views he elicits, while radically heterogeneous in content, all reflect the same false faith within their speakers that they know whereof they speak." Rather than palliating readers of Wordsworth's meditative lyric and beholders of Friedrich's enigmatic scene of contemplation with images of an organic correspondence between the "experience" of nature and the representation of such experience, the work of art serves precisely to remind us of the a priori discontinuity between these realms. The painting, Koerner argues, "will not evoke longing and loss by allowing us entrance into its spectacle, any more than the real sea [in Friedrich's painting] allowed us passage from the shore. It will instead simply repeat the experience of exclusion, keeping us out of the landscape." Kleist thus "does not explain or mediate the picture's meaning, but only repeats the picture's essential deferment of meaning" (Friedrich, 212-14). In fact, Kleist's irony may extend even farther than Koerner realizes. A more postmodern reading of Kleist reconnects the larger motif of the Riickenfigur to Wordsworth's poem while reconstituting the social and cultural significance of Wordsworth's and Friedrich's figures, who seem so irremediably isolated in their respective landscapes. For if Kleist's fictional dialogues caricature the "unbounded exegetical confidence" and "universal familiarity" that the viewers of Friedrich's canvas display and impute to one another-thus revealing notions of aesthetic expertise and middleclass "taste" to be unfounded, what Koerner calls "Romanticism's caricature of Romanticism"-such ironic exposure of the shallow terms founding social understanding and aesthetic community does not, however, ren-

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der this conversation a mere nothing. A community founded on the illusion of aesthetic expertise, trite notions of cultural value, and unexamined, not to say unconscious (i.e., canonical) notions of "taste" is still, for better or worse, a community and, more often than not, peculiarly strengthened and unified by its commonplace (and quite possibly contradictory) "aesthetic predicates." Koerner's otherwise astute analyses of the integration of producer and consumer in the Riickenfiguren of Friedrich's paintings and in the cognate effect of deja vu in several of Wordsworth's poems should not lead us to conclude, then, that the cultural reflexivity instanced by these motifs will somehow slow down or even reverse the larger movement toward a self-conscious, robust, and authoritative culture of middleclass representation. On the contrary, the cumulative "effect" of "Tintern Abbey" pivots not only on the producer's vocational imagination but, just as crucially, on the supplemental expertise of its implied readers. For in repeating, at the level of reading, the lyric's dramatization of a conscious interiority, the alienated and still incomplete identity of an urban, educated, "middle-class" audience is invited to ground its generic monied interests in a distinctive cultural capital. As the summa of the eighteenthcentury Picturesque, "Tintern Abbey" condenses the bourgeois subject's epistemological and economic instability into the deceptively local and spontaneous representations of an inward pathos. Posited as the center of an exceedingly self-conscious suffering, the lyric subject is thus reauthenticated as fully, indeed exemplarily "human" precisely insofar as the confession of its incompletion and alienation is tendered in the currency of a locodescriptive lyric wrought from the established aesthetic protocol of the Picturesque tradition. Melancholy thus begins to reveal, in a modern (Freudian) sense, a structural condition that reaches beyond the incidentals of subjective loss. What has vanished is not merely the integrity of the genteel individual achieving "virtual" self-representation by fashioning an empirical landscape into a highly discriminating, if iterable, Picturesque "scene." Also lost is the premise of the subject's and the landscape's authenticity. At the same time, however, the Picturesque's increasingly expansive "literary" mediations offer themselves not only as the cause of but also as the (necessarily artificial) remedy to and de-realization of the empirical, substantive, and temporal stability of self and other. Hence this loss of land, of individual selfhood, and of the possibility of their authentic representation is transposed into "literature" and the aesthetic more generally. Overtaken by the uncanny and mutually canceling senses of "once again," Wordsworth's" halted" speaker synthesizes this recognition ofloss into poetic transferences of melancholy and projections of hope as he "on

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a wild secluded scene impress[es] /Thoughts of more deep seclusion" (11. 6-7). In this manner, the formalized practice of description fulfills its historically unconscious mission in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," that is, in the tenuous identity of the professionalized poet whose status as an exemplary subject will depend on the continued accreditation of his future lyric productions.

Instruction "The man, whose eye I Is ever on himself": Romantic Theories of Elemental and Cultural Literacy and the Lyrical Ballads

Every individual man, it may be said, carries in disposition and determination a pure ideal man within himself, with whose unalterable unity it is the great task of his existence, throughout all his vicissitudes, to harmonize. This pure human being, who may be recognized more or less distinctly in every person, is represented by the State, the objective and, so to say, canonical form in which the diversity of persons endeavors to unite itself. But two different ways can be thought of, in which Man in time can be made to coincide with Man in idea, and consequently as many in which the State can affirm itself in individuals: either by the pure man suppressing the empirical-the State abrogating the individual-or by the individual becoming State-temporal Man being raised to the dignity of ideal Man. -Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Insofar as a writer is really a propagandist, not merely writing work that will be applauded by his allies, convincing the already convinced, but actually moving forward like a pioneer into outlying areas of the public and bringing them the first favorable impressions of his doctrine, the nature of his trade may give rise to special symbolic requirements. Accordingly, it is the propaganda aspect of the symbol that I shall center uponconsidering the symbol particularly as a device for spreading the areas of allegiance .... For each new class ... is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form. -Kenneth Burke, "Revolutionary Symbolism in America"

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The Pragmatics of Romantic Writing If any audience would have been gratified by the unexpected juxtaposition of Kenneth Burke and Friedrich Schiller-the Sturm und Drang poetphilosopher advocating the convergence of individual and ideology in the "ideal state" and the enfant terrible of twentieth-century American Marxism reconceiving of classical dialectical materialism as a rhetorical and distinctly symbolic practice in search of "ideal form"-it would have been Burke's listeners at the 1935 American Writer's Congress.1 As their vehement response made all too clear, to consider rhetorical and symbolic form as anything but an incidental tool in a class struggle whose ontology was material, not representational, smacked of the very ideological "other" that had unwittingly produced the contradiction (and by extension the revolutionary consciousness of that contradiction) between an inequitable material mode of production and a seemingly autonomous sphere of aesthetic and symbolic indulgences typically associated with the ruling classes. While anathema to his listeners (for whom the message had been misconstrued by his respondents), Burke's conception of "social action ... [as l preeminently a literary act" and of ideology as something that "in a broad but fundamental sense is revealed to us textually and therefore must be grasped (read) and attacked (reread, rewritten) in that dimension" seems reassuringly familiar to most intellectuals today (Lentricchia, Criticism, 26, 24). Indeed, we see now that his arguments anticipated, by nearly a half century, many of the essentials of social and historical critique now firmly established in the humanities under such seemingly disparate names as nco-Marxism, neopragmatism, cultural studies, and (to some extent) Lacanian psychoanalysis. Still, Burke's simpler (though also more courageous) propositions relate suggestively to Schiller's (in his time equally courageous) argument for an ideal community of "diverse" individuals bound together by aesthetic and symbolic practice. Both the enfant terrible of the fledgling American Marxist movement and the dramatist of psychological excess, of Sturm und Drang, understood that consciousness, far from being any individual's "property," is primarily the effect of a symbolic and narrative emulation of the "other," of a community (or a "State") of cognate spirits whose interests the writer will seek to represent in "ideal" or universal form. The cultural endowment underwriting the rise of the British middle class at the beginning of the nineteenth century is neither spontaneous

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nor premeditated with full self-consciousness. Rather, it emerges out of complex and prolonged symbolic practices, of which the emergent system of Romantic "literature" constitutes one subsidiary. Such symbolization centers around the ideal of a genuinely democratic and spiritual community, which we are to distinguish differentially, especially in juxtaposition to the depraved cultural valuations of competing demographic formations (the peers and grandees, the gentry, the "vulgar" classes of day laborers and artisans) supposed to have usurped and corrupted precisely that ideal. Just as Schiller regards such symbolic practices as occurring in a "canonical form" that fuses the individual and the state in an idiom of mutual affirmation, Kenneth Burke also views community and classconsciousness as effects of a multifaceted rhetorical (and intrinsically dialectical) movement, with the writer availing himself of whatever symbolic forms are necessary to "[spread] the areas of allegiance." Fundamentally, then, the following examination of the interplay of pedagogical motivation and textual form in Lyrical Ballads aims at elucidating how one of the most influential and paradigmatic formations of Romanticism-the vision or "sensibility" of the middle class, a seemingly all-representative authentic community-is produced by the hermeneutic practice encoded in "poetic diction," in "poetry," and indeed by the very "idea of literature" as it is embodied in that collection of poems. Consistent with Burke's Marxist cum pragmatist analysis of how motives are encoded in rhetorical forms, the following inquiry will move beyond the figure of the "writer" to the question of how the genre of the ballad attained its remarkable sociocultural efficacy. To extend Burke's analysis of the "agency" of the writer (not a "subject") to the recipient of the symbolic message is to recognize this "recipient" as an integral product of a given poem's and of an entire collection's pedagogical performance. The historical and cultural specificity of Wordsworth's reading audience emerges diacritically through the interplay between the ballads' competing depictions of a responsive (albeit inadequately so) figure in the poem and an as yet merely "implied" reader whose superior responsiveness to the enigma of Wordsworthian incident is to supplant the ballad's thematic substance altogether. Insofar as the reader's consciousness is to be considered an effect, indeed the product, of the balladeer's intricate narrative calculus, we may understand Burke's "symbolic requirements" as the manifestation of a political and cultural (though not necessarily fully conscious) "wish" or "desire." In giving a "voice," a text, and generally a "design" to this wish, the writer's symbolic productivity implicitly establishes the terms on which his reading audience may become self-aware. Arguing that Schiller's aesthetic

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pedagogy of Bildung and Burke's conception of the writer as "propagandist" differ only in their degree of political explicitness, I reaffirm my strategic concern and abiding critical objective: to assess Romantic symbolization as well as the symbolic overcoming of the alleged distance between "temporal man" and "real man"; or, to cite Burke's corollary distinction, to examine the rhetorical strategies by means of which "each new class" pragmatically dissimulates its "interest" as that "of all members of society." This distance itself is at once brought to the reader's attention and resolved in a historically determinate rhetorical form. Its cognitive formulation thus depends on the particular historical mode of reading, be it as unself-conscious literary "consumption" or as hyperreflexive textual exegesis. In other words, the very hermeneutic progression envisioned by Schiller when he speaks of "the individual becoming State" occurs within a wholly symbolic (and therefore interpretive) infrastructure whose aesthetic design playfully shores up communal support (Burke's "areas of allegiance") precisely on the basis of its formally recurrent and thus discernible aesthetic constitution. Somewhat against the grain of Schiller's argument on behalf of redeeming a divided, specialized, and alienated culture by the unconscious "play" of the aesthetic, I have been arguing that the formal and stylistic codification of authentic cultural practices in the medium of poetry was paralleled by the genesis of a "middle class" during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Notably, though, the formation of the middle class is bound up with the rediscovery, reconstruction, and reorientation of education as a new symbolic practice, one subsidiary to the macrohistorical development of nation-building. The latter, needless to say, unfolded not as an intentional, self-conscious project but as a gradual movement toward reflexivity on the part of a bourgeoisie that came to conceive of itself increasingly as the socioeconomic and cultural heart of Britain. The point, articulated so powerfully in Wordsworth's poetic practice and theory around r8oo, is that the moral authority and cultural legitimacy of the middle class hinge on its symbolic self-enactment as a "universal" community supposedly untainted by the excessive "interestedness" that resonates in the term "class." Moreover, while the word "class" appears haunted by presumptions of utter transparency and historical selfawareness, the idea of the Nation as a community is more readily understood (as it should be) as a contingent formation of subjects largely unaware that their coherence and historical fixity have been achieved through the policing and reformulation of the rhetorical and symbolic forms that articulated their beliefs, hopes, and anxieties.

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Indeed, the widespread sense of moral and cultural authority as the hallmark of an enlightened, liberal middle-class consciousness for the past two hundred years has endured precisely insofar as its social and cultural "content" is symbolized as a complex of universally accepted, quasinatural beliefs. To risk a fully conscious, propositional representation of such beliefs might suddenly corrode the community's "moral" fabric altogether, since it would necessarily lead to the exposure of its "beliefs" as historically contingent and interest-specific. Aligning, in customary fashion, the "Rights of Women" with the larger, ongoing project of middleclass political and religious emancipation, Anna Laetitia Barbauld appeals thus to her female audience: Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost; Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame, Shunning discussion, are revered the most. 2

Likewise, to cite another, contemporary instance, this paradox continues to reverberate in the ongoing debate about the First Amendment: generic statements in support of "free speech" are all but an article of liberal middle-class civic faith, and any explicit attempt to "define" or "delimit" the range of protected speech meets with vehement objections (from all kinds of groups) for supposedly having reduced the statute to a merely group- or content-specific, that is, contingent, proposition.3 As Dror Wahrman observes, "the language of 'middle class' was inherently vague. Few of its proponents ever chose to define it or to specify its referents." In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, that is, such "vagueness ... was not merely some unthinking oversight or a consequence of incomplete development: the elasticity which it permitted was integral to the political function and efficacy of this language at this particular historical juncture" (Imagining, 55-56). Generally speaking, then, the linguistic "maintenance of communities" tends to unfold as a predominantly indirect finetuning of those rhetorical forms that underwrite and sustain middle-class beliefs as just that, "beliefs." In engaging in the formal-aesthetic policing of diverse languages charged with its representation (and ranging from the genres of art to the discourses of the sciences and those of the professions, notably political economy and the law), middle-class communities seek to immunize their core beliefs against the squalor of outright historical accountability. Preserving its "unconscious" with what Hegel calls "the cunning of reason" (and what I see as the "pragmatics" intrinsic to symbolic and rhetorical practice), community eventuates as a "continuous

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flow of diurnally enacted genial relationships which constitute unaffected moral association" (Oakeshott, Conduct, 68}; it results from an overwhelmingly unself-conscious symbolic practice whose efficacy depends on its ability to absorb its participants' cognitive potential in the stylistic nuances thought to sustain the spiritual integrity of that community's propositional and interpretive forms-all of which prevents the distinctive "affect" or "style" of middle-class conduct from ever becoming fully conscious of its contingent historical situation or mode of production. It is an abiding paradox in Wordsworth's poetry, and indeed in much theoretical and poetic discourse among his contemporaries, that any notion of immediacy can enter into the political and cultural sphere only as something irreducibly mediated and instrumental. A cultural community whose moral and civic integrity is allegedly grounded in its immediacy of "feeling," in its "sensibility," still requires mechanisms of policing and transmitting the (aesthetic) integrity of the symbolic and often poetic idioms, the "natural," "organic," and "spontaneous" modes of signification by which that community sustains its awareness as a morally authentic and durable social formation. Paradoxically, that is, all immediacy appears to require mediation, albeit in unself-conscious form, and new paradigms of instruction bound up with that process seem all but inevitable. A focused analysis of Romanticism's paradigms for the production of elementary, moral, and cultural (poetic) literacy will show how the paradox of "mediated immediacy" resolves itself once we see that it is an integral function of "forms" of immediacy to drop out of our analytic horizon precisely insofar as they circumscribe and constitute that horizon. In short, what Wordsworth's poetry ultimately produces, even as it promises us a quasiprovidential "truth breathed by chearfulness," is neither a discrete individual belief nor an external communal revelation. For to the extent that its fetish of immediacy rests on the positively unapparent work of rhetoricthat is, its active elision of its own instrumental and mediated work as representation-a Romantic aesthetic enables "its" individual or communal subjects to "forget" the contingent or (to borrow a postmodern critical expression) "constructed" quality of their own bourgeois ascendancy and spiritual transcendence. To hazard a broad hypothesis, Romanticism's varieties of socioeconomic mobility, aesthetic "pleasure," and spiritual transcendence are the effects of a distinctive rhetorical practice whose continuously evolving technical and interpretive demands on poet and reader obscure its role in conditioning the emergence and self-awareness of a middle-class community. Adverting to "that accord of sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the remote past and a prophetic annuncia-

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tion of the remotest future," Wordsworth insists in his "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" (1815) that while "most naturally and most fitly conceived in solitude," "grand thoughts ... can[not] be brought forth in the midst of plaudits, without some violation of their sanctity" (PrW, 3: 83). Wordsworth's routine association of such "sanctity" and "solitude" with inspiration, "grand thoughts," and the integrity of poetic "knowledge" in general once again affirms how "pleasure" defines his mode of producing cultural knowledge not only as unconscious but indeed as anti-self-conscious. In other words, "pleasure" constitutes a "style" of communal knowing that appears as "natural" experience and thus eludes simultaneously the hubris of overtly transcendent "beliefs" and the equally explicit constraints attendant on formal, disciplinary "cognition." At the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, economically sophisticated and culturally literate individuals increasingly constructed their socioeconomic identities in a speculative, vigilant, and "disciplined" manner, qualities also reflected by the growing "professionalization" of teaching and learning across the entire sociocultural and disciplinary spectrum. Representative of these developments are Romanticism's theoretical and practical dissemination of literacy among the lower classes, the alternately catechistic and didactic constitution of an affectbased (i.e., not a decisionist) paradigm of bourgeois morality, and, of course, the rapidly increasing production and consumption of a wide range of poetry. This precarious transition of the first-generation Romantics from the radical protest of the early 1790s to their inception of Literature as a symbolic encryption of their former radical politics coincided with the emergence of a new paradigm of civic and cultural agency defined for the most part by its professional ambition and aesthetic vocation. Following the defeat of the reform movement, the accelerated disestablishment of the corresponding societies, and the waning of radical Dissent and ultra-Jacobin rationalism, a sizable portion of English society consists of weary middle-class communities, oscillating between melancholy and anxiety as William Pitt, Edmund Burke, Bishop Watson, and George Canning of the Anti-Jacobin Review confounded the political promises once associated with J acobinism and the pleas for reform by artisans, intellectuals, and Dissenting ministers in London and most provincial cities.4 Beginning with Coleridge's failed project The Watchman (1796) and its supersession by the paradoxical lyric dedication of a 21-year-old intellectual to pastoral "retirement" in Poems on Various Occasions (1796) and Poems (1797), and continuing with the collaborative effort of Lyrical Ballads over the next eighteen months, the representation of the subject's sociocultural

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competence mostly unfolds in poetic accounts of its gradual, often unconscious acquisition.5 Thus, as hopes for a national consensus between the government and its demographic constituencies grew dim as a result of the revolutionary excesses of Jacobin France, representations of a moderate sociocultural agency in England increasingly depended on its psychological balance (William Paley's "contentment," Thomas Paine's "rights"), on the "virtual" and formal proficiency of its judgment, rather than on the actual content of its opinions-in short, on its symbolic and affective coherence rather than on its material and ideological situation. It is the larger purpose of the following pages to explore this conception of "agency" and, more specifically, to reconstruct its origins in a mode of cultural production that, in the early years of Romanticism, was formulated in the contiguous practices of elemental, moral, and cultural literacy. Once again, the modernity of Romanticism's production of middle-class models of sociocultural "agency" appears conspicuously Hegelian inasmuch as the term designates a mobile, transitional, and fundamentally unself-conscious subjectivity characterized, above all, by a cognitive "restlessness" that is its intelligence. Thus understood in its modern bourgeois sense as a type of "virtual" capital, the concept of intelligence-itself the product of rapidly evolving models of education during the Romantic period-manifests itself in a given subject's incessant monitoring of its own sociocultural proficiency. Building on a variety of cultural strategies and modulating several discursive and usually "literary" genres, agency thus displaces its inherent lack of foundation into an aesthetic productivity whose diverse literary and painterly genres simulate a correspondingly varied array of imagined communities. Specifically, however, "it was indeed the middle classes that were most responsible for advancing the new educational theories and methods which eventually transformed schooling into something like its present form ... as both disciplinary and progressive" (Richardson, Literature, 47). Romanticism's instructional project can thus be viewed as "a new consensus on education," one that stresses not traditional skills, "accomplishments," and factual knowledge but rather, intellectual preparedness and the ability to quickly assimilate new information and learn new tasks, more responsive (as Rousseau argues in Emile) to increasing social "mobility" and generational change. With its emphasis on "habit," "association," and internalized discipline, this new mode of thinking (perhaps one should say, this new set of conditions for educational thought) reflects a shift in educational practice from the instilling of formal precepts to the imposition of "living rules,"

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making part of a more general cultural shift which saw social power take less coercive and more consensual, individualistic forms. (Richardson, Literature, 6o)

This valuable contextualization of Romanticism's diverse and often competing programs of literacy and education rightly stresses the unapparent, associationist, "internalized discipline" they shared. Precisely for that reason, however, it is also imperative that we move beyond the descriptive model of cultural historiography at work in Alan Richardson's study, one too confined by the "period" in question. To the extent that it reflects the efficacy of the social and cultural unconscious sedimented in rhetorical forms, specifically in the "virtual" currency of poetry, Romantic instruction can be grasped analytically only through close reading. Hence I shall avoid the associative peripatetics of a contextualizing Historicism. With numerous such studies already in place (of which Richardson's is arguably the most comprehensive and refined), I instead want to focus on the homology between the movements of affect and text, that is, between the subject's cognitive proficiency and the instructional languages activating that subject.6 From Andrew Bell to Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, G. W. F. Hegel, and William Wordsworth, the Romantic scene of instruction consistently revolves around a productive tension between the performative "agency" of the text and the interpretive "intelligence" activated by that text. The rhetorical performance of didactic fictions and lyrical ballads-namely, to construct a paradigm of intelligence through the mediations of symbolic and interpretive play-shapes the reader as a cultural agent defined, above all, by his growing reflexivity and interpretive competence. Still one of the most insightful readings of Wordsworth, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (r8r7) produces the first version of this argument. By insisting every step of the way on the conceptually explicit and closely textual character of the reading process, Coleridge appears to contradict the submerged "consensus" of Romantic education mapped out by Richardson above. Speaking of his as yet unrealized project of a Logic, Coleridge promises to demonstrate on some future occasion, ... the close connection between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision ... which masters .the feelings more especially by indistinct watchwords; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. (BL, 2 : I43-44)

Surveillance as Pleasure Such a concept of pedagogy-"of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse" (BL, 2: 144)-proves literary and rhetorical at its very core. Indeed, the point needs sharpening: Romanticism's formulation of a distinctly "literary" and poetic education-Coleridge, for example, refers to the "excellence" and "perfection" of Wordsworth's poetry-is predicated precisely on its nonthematic status, on the "imperceptible" and "unremembered" efficacy of the text's rhetorical structures. In what follows, I take up first the monitorial structure of Romantic "intelligence," namely, the "mutual tutor" system developed by Andrew Bell and, not so surprisingly, vigorously supported by Coleridge. It succinctly embodies the logical core of Romantic pedagogy: to instruct its subject under the ever-looming specter of self-consciousness, here understood as social "embarrassment." That is, self-consciousness may emerge as the scene and instrument of Romantic discipline and punishment, as the moment when the individual becomes abruptly conscious of its inability or unwillingness to configure its inner (affective and intentional) life with socially valid modes of representation. As we have already seen in "Tintern Abbey," the lesson of Romanticism consists precisely in inducing its subjects not to reject and despair over its noncoincidence with the Social and the Real, but rather to embrace and to cultivate such embarrassment as the speculative, metaphoric capital for further work on the project of an emergent, socially and culturally "literate" community. Thus the self is taught to transmute the extrinsic shock of discontinuity into the pleasure of an inward "experience" that encompasses prospects of social ascendancy, aesthetic proficiency, and spiritual transcendence? ~

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~

Literacy and Ascendancy in Bell and Coleridge In 1797, Reverend Andrew Bell published an initially little-noticed treatise, An Experiment in Education Made at the Male Asylum of Madras, the first of Bell's many publications expounding how "a school or family may teach itself under the Superintendance of the Master or Parent." Charged by the trustees of the East India Company with the superintendence of "half-caste children" whose mixed racial and orphaned status rendered them the kind of economic liability that preoccupied Robert

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Malthus back in England, Bell began to ponder the most efficient, economical way of "forming them to habits of diligence, industry, veracity, and honesty" (Bell, Experiment, 6-7). Constrained by minimal support from the East India Company and stimulated by his own frugality and love of money, Bell soon decided to divide the classes into pairs of students, the more talented one acting as tutor and the other as disciple.x Although he initially limited the educational goals to literacy and the most basic mathematical skills, Bell focused principally on the form of instruction and on the logic or "civil economy" (Bell, Sketch, r) of a pedagogical process in which each student was to teach himself under the "scrutinizing eye" of his tutor (Experiment, 26). Developing John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which had suggested the importance of visual surveillance of the pupil by an adult, Bell essentially collapses the technologies of instruction into those of surveillance.9 To learn thus means to "emulate" and, as much as possible, to internalize the very form of surveillance brought to bear on the individual disciple; to cite Coleridge's genial paraphrase, "emulation" involves "the substitution of positive infamy for negative shame" (LL, r: 588). Since the tutor is, in turn, working under a similarly scrupulous surveillance by the master teacher, and the master teacher under that of the headmaster, any lapse of supervisory attention is bound to compromise one's interests in this zero-sum game-at the heart of which lies the idea of ascendancy, more than knowledge.10 The constant fear of demotion on the finely graduated scale of civic and intra-institutional authority ought to preempt personal failure. But further, it can seem to punish even the failure to report another subject's deficient performance, which would be construed as a quasi-moral failure to monitor both one's own and everyone else's performance. As Bell puts it, "the Scholar is continually stimulated to obtain pre-eminence in his Class, and even to rise above it, and be promoted to a superior; and especially not to sink below it, and be degraded to an inferior Class," and "if the Assistance be guilty of misbehaviour, the Teacher who witnessed, and did not report it, is made responsible, and so on" (Analysis, 4, r2) .11 Throughout his writings, Bell insists on the politically sound character of his system and, in contrast to his nonconformist popularizer Joseph Lancaster, repeatedly heads off potential criticisms of his reform as bound to destabilize the economy of class-relations or the spiritual identity of the lower class: "It is not proposed that the children of the poor be educated in an expensive manner, or even taught to write and to cypher. Utopian schemes, for the universal diffusion of general knowledge, would soon realize the fable of the belly and the other members of the body, and con-

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found that distinction of ranks and classes of society, on which the general welfare hinges" (Analysis, 9o).U The rapid rise of Bell's system during the first and second decade of the new century and its widespread support among the Anglican establishment-the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor had introduced the system into 230 schools by r8r3 and claimed its adoption by over 550 institutions two years lateralready suggests that its stated goals of spreading rudimentary education among the poor was not being perceived as a threat to the political order. 13 Bell's proposed educational infrastructure bears out his reassurances, first in its subordination of the content of instruction to the student's formal proficiency in tutorial and monitorial discipline and then in the seeming empowerment of each disciple as the agent of his own, as well as everyone else's, disciplinary surveillance. The principal objective of such educational reform is, as Bell proudly notes, the development of a "system, consisting of a series of consecutive rules, linked together in the closest union, and depending on a common principle" (Analysis, 2 5). What distinguishes this "system" is its seemingly invisible and organic efficacy, not merely in the mind but, in a totalizing sense, as that mind itself. Again, Coleridge captures the point succinctly: "the lesson to be inculcated should be, let the Child [be good] and know it not" (LL, r: ro8). What ultimately ensures the efficiency of this principle of self-education and self-surveillance is its being virtually coextensive with the total play of mental functions. In Bell's words: The system, with its concatenation of Occasional Usher and Sub-Usher, its Teachers, and Assistance, Tutors and Pupils, Registers of daily Tasks, Black-book, and Jury of Peers-being a series of consecutive regulations, linked together in the closest union, and forming a digested theory, composed of laws derived from observation, confirmed by experience, and founded on acknowledged principles of humanity, I regard as completed in all its parts, and requiring no addition. In framing the Scheme, it was studied that no interstices should be left to be filled up, no deficiency to be discovered in its apparatus. (Analysis, 44-45; italics mine)

A system reaches a state of maximum return when its infrastructure of civic form has been assimilated as an unconscious logic underlying and structuring all conscious practice. In the words of Foucault's familiar account of new disciplinary structures emerging at the beginning of the nineteenth century, punishment becomes "discipline," in that it "measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the 'nature' of individuals .... The perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions com-

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pares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes" (Discipline and Punish, 182-83). In just that sense of quotidian practice-what Coleridge calls "emulation without envy" (LL, 1: 581)Bell relishes the unadulterated play of surfaces (i.e., the material disciplinary mechanics of his system). Indeed, it is precisely the pedagogical system's organic incorporation as mind ("digested theory") that guarantees that system's nontransparency to the very subjects it produces. This structural feature is what Bentham, but even more so Coleridge and Wordsworth, came to grasp as the quintessentially linguistic and rhetorical dimension of all educational practice, in Coleridge's words "to make Images the symbol of Things, instead of resting on mere Words" (LL, 1: 582). With characteristic enthusiasm, Bell thus extols his monitorial system as "a digested theory." Elsewhere he claims "that a discovery of a new Organ of mind has been made, and measures ingrafted on it for converting those affections and passions which are implanted in the human breast, into instruments ... which we must never cease to implore, for preventing, checking, and correcting (as far as may be), the evil propensities of our fallen nature" (Wrongs of Children, 9-10). No longer an external imposition, "discipline" is being promoted as the organic, affective sustenance of its very subjects and consequently remains beyond the threshold of analytic, conscious reflection. Among individual disciples no less than among their various supervisors-and indeed among entire schools-the goal of education is now to achieve proficiency in disciplinary form. The agent and object of disciplinary self-cultivation are ultimately one and the same empirical subject, albeit in its discrete potentiations as the cultural and linguistic Unconscious ("agent") and as a socialized and seemingly autonomous selfconsciousness ("subject"). Yet it also turns out that the empirical subject as such is never simply at one with itself; for its vision of self-improvement hinges on its potentially omnipresent surveillance by an imaginary Other-the "scrutinising eye [that] must pervade the whole system" (Bell, Experiment, 26)-an Other to whom the subject remains bound in an agonistic vision of cultural and social ascendancy.14 What distinguishes Bell's pedagogical system of sociocultural mobility-one's "career of pleasure, ambition, or interest" (Bell, Sketch, 3)-is the extent to which it manipulates its disciples' political and cultural unconscious by continually "exciting emulation" (Experiment, 25) of each other and the logic of the entire system. If, in Coleridge's paraphrase, "education ... consists in educing the faculties, and forming the habits," then that "vast moral steamengine" of Bell's monitorial system (LS, 40-41) engineers conscious sub-

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jects in the shadow of a dislocated unconscious, a psyche determined by the latent knowledge that in this zero-sum game of promotions and demotions there will never be a stable social, economic, or cultural "estate" to fall back on.15 And yet, even as the consciousness of Bell's monitorial subjects is being colonized by a system of formal imperatives that exact the price of continual self-alienation, such alienation is now being experienced, materially and psychologically, as productivity and as a steady movement toward greater civic legitimacy and moral authority. Consequently, the movement ore/motion of Romantic Bildung yields an affective "interest" or formal-aesthetic "pleasure" that derives from its successful execution. Both as a subject's disciplinary compulsion into elementary literacy and as the pleasurable assimilation of middlebrow aesthetic proficiency, Bildung becomes conscious .or reproduces itself "subjectively" as a distinctive "sensibility." Bell's pedagogical innovations thus appear to hinge on the pleasurable assimilation of an unapparent disciplinary "style" or "aesthetic" that transfigures a contingent individual into an exemplary sensibility whose spontaneity has now become the unconscious agent of the nation's economic and cultural interests. Such an argument, however, invites some weighty, if familiar, historical objections.16 To promote a comprehensive vision of national education, especially during the volatile 1790S, would seem tantamount to furnishing the lower classes with literacy and rhetorical skills and thus to instill in them a desire for change that would almost certainly threaten the "established order" of England as defined by Edmund Burke, Sir John Scott, Arthur Young, or Bishop Watson, to name only a few. Yet precisely this rigid traditional opposition between pedagogy as a subsidiary of the state and the state as an effect of pedagogy is now producing its dialectical counterargument or "contrary" in the form of emergent Romantic theories of education. To begin with, we should consider that, as David Vincent argues, "the pattern of learning which took place in childhood, the acquisition of skills, knowledge, imaginative powers and moral values, constituted what is loosely called 'socialization': the induction of a new generation into the ways of thinking and behaving established by its predecessors. In a sense it was a conservative process" (Literacy, 66). Extending that argument, we can observe how, in the context of Andrew Bell, Sarah Trimmer, and Jeremy Bentham, the national effort on behalf of a large-scale dissemination of elemental, moral, and cultural literacy produces conformity in the form of an interiorized, selffocused "unrest." Romantic Bildung conceives of e/motion as unrest, that is as a virtual cognitive force projected by the self upon itself. To that ex-

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tent, then, the entire process of social acculturation evolves as a "virtual" quest for a definitive experience and for an exemplary mode of representation of that experience. As the ceaseless reinvestment of the self's cognitive and imaginative resources in its own perpetual reorganization, "unrest" (the Unruhe identified by Hegel in the Phenomenology as the mode of appearance of the spirit's temporality) has at once become pervasive, systematic, and totalizing. At the same time, it is increasingly experienced within and as the sacrosanct affective interiority of middle-class privacy. The political potential of unrest is channeled preemptively-prior to irrupting into consciousness per se-into the various aesthetic forms that a given historical situation deems authentically expressive of private "pleasure." The same argument can also be couched in terms of the increasingly specific differentiation among classes and demographic subjectivities. The schemes for the dissemination of literacy among the poor were, in virtually all cases, conceived, promoted, and funded by middle-class individuals and organizations that recognized that the paradigm of a national community was being shaped by secular and political rather than religious institutions. Almost without fail they designed their educational theories with a view to reproducing the socioeconomic logic by which they had established themselves as distinctly middle class. What Richardson describes as the accelerating "bourgeoisification" of formerly religious institutions of learning and of grammar schools toward the end of the eighteenth century thus amounts to a changing and substantially broadening ideological investment in education, which, in the case of the middling classes, entails the growing interest in instrumental and more mediated, "cultural" kinds of knowledge (Literature, 77-91, 8r)P If the monitorial system sought both to reshape the unconscious of the lower-class subject as an agency spontaneously and perpetually re-creating a hierarchy of affect within itself and to "exalt [the subject) in his own eyes, and [give) him a character to support" (Bell, Analysis, 6), the function of middle-class Romantic pedagogy is ultimately cognate with, though far more mediated than, Bell's system. For Coleridge, the "middling" classes were to produce their distinctive consciousness or sensibility through an essentially rhetorical and "literary" education. Pondering Bell's theory, Coleridge wonders, in sketches for his r8r3lecture on education, how it can "be transferred, & what part of it to other/& higher classes" (LL, r: 58r). Notwithstanding his High-Church Anglicanism, Coleridge's notation that "in the simplicity of [Bell's) principle, there was a world of richness" places him right alongside the secularist Bentham, who, in his Chrestomathia (r8r7), took great

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interest in this mode of production of a cultural and economic agency "under the impulse of emulation" or "place-capturing principle" (44, 102) precisely because it appeared to provide a blueprint for a highly efficient and structurally homologous administration of cultural, civic, and economic life. Thus it was only natural for Bentham to use his earlier Panopticon scheme as a heuristic metaphor for the process of self-surveillance and monitorial self-production initially outlined by Bell. Bentham's architectural vision whereby "every human object in the whole building is kept throughout within the reach of the Head-Master's eye" (Chrestomathia, 104) and its speculative extension into what has been identified as "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures ... that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201) are cognate moments in the production of economic, civic, and cultural self-consciousness.18 As Lawrence Stone notes, "all three-the acquisition of professional expertise, the confirmation or acquisition of status, and the internalization of social controlsare aspects of a single process of acculturation" ("Literacy and Education," 97). Opening his Lay Sermon (1817), Coleridge likewise discriminates between cultivation as an ancient privilege and as a present-day social obligation: "Erudition is, doubtless, an ornament, that especially beseems a high station: but it is professional rank only that renders its attainment a duty" (LS, 121). If Foucault's reading of Bentham's Panopticon stresses how "the productive increase of power can be assured only if ... it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way" (208), the aspect more relevant to our concern with the role of didactic literature and the more refined genres of poetry in the nation's paradigm shift (i.e., from a material commonwealth inherited to an imaginary community produced) requires some modulation of Foucault's approach. For if the prison is a metaphor for modernity's mode of producing civic subjects, Bell already suggests that-well beyond the penitentiary and its criminalization of poverty in late-eighteenth-century England-the efficacy of instruction and learning pivots on the dynamics between the social theater of culture and the stylistic and symbolic practices that implement, sustain, and refine that culture's unconscious motivations. Above all, Bell regards education as the induction of subjects into an overarching paradigm of productivity. Hence, to grasp the comprehensive ideological function of his educational system as "the grand desideratum in the political, moral, and religious world," we must concede that any pedagogical scheme remains "imperfect, if it do not embrace industry"

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(Sketch, 5, 10). Bell's satisfied conjecture that the same "intellectual machinery" has already begun to operate "in prison-houses, work-houses, and in manufactories, as well as in school-rooms" (Wrongs of Children, 13) complements Sarah Trimmer's appeals for educational reformers to pay "vigilant attention towards the rising generatiOf! since no less than the safety of the nation probably depends on the education of those children ... whose parents are not only incapable of giving them proper instruction but are likely, it is to be feared, to lead them astray by their own bad example."19 At its core, Coleridge's etymology for the word "education" as derived from the Latin educere-"that is, 'draw forth,' 'bring out'" (LG, 9)-not only adverts to the drawing out of hidden intellectual potential but, indeed, to the actual removal of the subject from its historical and material sphere. To transcend the contingent demographic and economic influences of one's local and regional provenance-in short, to embrace self-alienation as the necessary condition for one's sociocultural ascendancy-proves the differentia specifica for the fitness and proficiency of educated subjects. Their "home" is now delineated by the prospects of the imaginary community of the modern nation-state, whose stress on "productivity" the individual embodies to the extent that it derives the consciousness of its social legitimacy from its own restless unconscious.

No other text, with the possible exception of Hegel's Phenomenology and his later writings, articulates the rhetorical, infrastructural operations of Romantic pedagogy as clearly as Coleridge's Logic, and rarely does an argument prove Hegel's overall point about Romantic culture with greater force than Coleridge's account of "education": that Romanticism seems perched on the threshold between the implementation of the Moderncapitalism, nationalism, the "state apparatuses" of education, high culture, and so on-and a reaction against the establishment of that ideology. Repeatedly linking education to the acquisition of language, to the correct referential usage of words-"deiktikos, that is, demonstrando"-Coleridge sees all education break down into "two parts, the process of educing, and that of training" (LG, IO-n). The cultivation of mind thus entails not simply its acquisition of mechanical skills, a point Coleridge repeatedly makes, but the art of "a gentle compulsion [which] solicits the mind to make for itself from the like effects of different objects on its sensibility the links which it then seems to find, unconscious that both the form, and the light by which it is beheld, are of its own eradiation and but reflected

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from external nature" (LG, n). Such a Kantian, transcendental conception not only views pedagogy as a shrewd manipulation of a mind and identity already in place but in effect grasps mind itself as an unselfconscious (and, in that sense, "spontaneous") product of teaching. Once the blank slate of the child's consciousness has been imprinted with the usages of social language, or in Coleridge's metaphor of engraving, once "the tracing is finished, ... she but goes on to refresh and deepen the etching" (LG, 12).20 The "support" of the child's mind as it acquires language is, in fact, always "training" and unapparent "gentle compulsion," since any subsequent spontaneous act of consciousness will necessarily evolve within the social aura of an unconsciously acquired mode of production that the child-unawares-is destined to perpetuate. Long before Bourdieu's and Althusser's theories of subjectivity as a product of social practice and of schooling as "cultural reproduction," Coleridge offers an arguably more analytic and idiomatically sensitive account of what might easily be misconstrued as a postmodern overcoming of the Romantic ideology. In at least two distinct senses, then, the following passage from the Logic diagrams the very heart of Romantic education, both articulating its efficacy as an unself-conscious symbolic practice and offering itself as a transcendental critique of that practice: Here then the process of artificial education, that is, relative to the intellectual powers (and in this relation only it is here spoken of), may be said to commence: so far at least, that at this point the agency of man, the scheme of human schooling, may be singly and severally contemplated. What it should be, and what in the main it is and ever has been, among the cultivated portions of mankind, may be easily known from its aim and object: which can be no other than to render the mind of the scholar a fit organ for the continued reception and reproduction, for the elaboration, and finally for the application, of these notices supplied by sensation and perception, gradually superinducing those which the mind obtains, or may be taught and occasioned to obtain, by reflection on its own acts, and which, when formed and matured into distinct thoughts, constitute (and in distinction from the former may be called) the mind's "notions." ... If then we have rightly stated the aim of human education, in its main divisions; and if the latter and that which is more especially the end or final aim, be the formation of right notions, or the mind's knowledge of its own constitution and constituent faculties as far as it is obtained by reflection; it is obvious that in order to its realisation the several faculties of the mind should be specially disciplined. (LG, 12-13)

Even as it is instanced by the self's "reflecti[ng] on its own acts" and thereby converting the extrinsic "notices" of sensation and perception into the mental property of "notions," the epistemological mobility of the sub-

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ject is circumscribed by an "artificial" social process masquerading as the individual's spontaneous intelligence. The subjectivity of the individual functions by mediating an irreducibly social and cultural process; or, as we might say, the Real affords itself temporary refuge (a Nietzschean "forgetting") from its heterogeneous constitution by mesmerizing its subject with the metaphysical sideshow of the "growth of the individual mind." In truth but an "organ" for the "reception and reproduction" of an intractable and (given its lack of "essence") social infrastructure, "mind" betrays its subsidiary, indeed strictly figural relationship to "human education" in its peculiar fixations on "right notions" and "disciplined" appearance. True to the Kantian spirit of transcendental and self-confirming philosophical argumentation, Coleridge thus goes on to conclude that the "subject matter" on which mind lavishes its disciplined attention is the "work" and "reflection of these faculties, such as owe their own existence to the functions of the human intelligence, and to the laws by which the exercise and application of these functions are governed and determined. But a subject perfectly answering this character is provided for us in the privilege and high instinct of language" (LG, 13)_2! More absorbed by the speculative potential of Bell's theory than by its pragmatic application as a blueprint for social policing (which was to preoccupy Bentham), Coleridge grasps language as the unconscious inscription of the social within the individual; for him, all parole-the distinctive stylistics of speech and text-instances the production or "creation" of a deceptively "spontaneous" individuality (an articulate effect) by the unself-conscious agency (or absent cause) of language itself. Not surprisingly, Coleridge conceives of language as the "subject" that will "perfectly answer" to the abstract quest for reflective self-awareness. Only through the gradual acquisition of a referential and selfreferential-a specifically predicative and generally linguistic-proficiency is the subject educated, cultivated, and thus configured to the dominant exigencies of social and political life. As the condition for any individual's social competence, language-the unconscious grammar of what Kant calls "cognition in general" (Erkenntnis iiberhaupt)-effectively produces that subject and all but precludes its objectification except in the opaque expression of a "high instinct." Such a philosophical position is arguably best realized by a poetry that aims to transcribe faithfully each minute shift in the speaker's psychological disposition into a reflexive utterance. "Frost at Midnight" (1798) offers a compelling example of Coleridge's poetics as the verbal facsimile of the "self-watching subtilizing

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mind." Mind itself here emerges as a holistic effect of its own unrelenting monitorial or reflexive productivity, in which any given natural entity or psychological state is but a metaphoric token soon to be exchanged for another one. For it now appears to be the overriding purpose of poetry to grasp the fluctuations and metamorphoses of mind as they are brought into focus by the writer's constantly evolving self-awareness. Such transcribing of the subject's cognitive mobility and of its often unpredictable (e)motions of "mind," Coleridge suggests, will find its most appropriate (because wholly metaphoric) medium in poetry itself: the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks its motion in this hush of nature Gives its dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. (Poetical Works, 240-41, II. 13-23)"2

Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" offers perhaps the supreme lyric synthesis for this (ant)agonistic historical paradigm of the monitorial "mind" as it elaborates the acculturation of this subjectivity, here personified as the child "trailing clouds of glory" and "fad[ing] into the light of common day" (Poems, pp. 271-77). It is a child transferentially associated with a past ravaged by forgetfulness ("0 joy! that in our embers I Is something that doth live, I That nature yet remembers," 11. 132-34) and recovered in images of reflexive imprisonment ("A creature I Moving about in worlds not realiz'd, I High instincts, before which our mortal Nature/ Did tremble like a guilty Thing surpriz'd," 11. 147-50). Wordsworth's lyric re-creation of capitalist and modernist Weltschmerz-a structural melancholia-thus mobilizes the cultural credit increasingly commanded by the genre of the lyric to support the concept of a bourgeois inwardness. Only occasionally, and then rather vicariously, will the lyric misspeak and disclose the political unconscious that is the historical foundation of its subjects, such as in Wordsworth's stylistic slippage from quasi-Miltonic, highbrow images of a Metaphysical Fall into the bland contemporary tropes of self-imprisonment: "Heaven lies about

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us in our infancy! I Shades of the prison-house begin to close I Upon the growing Boy" (ll. 66-68). However deplorable, the acculturation of the unself-conscious child into Earth's "Foster-Child, her Inmate Man" (I. 82) appears all but inevitable. For, as this lyric balm is applied to the psychological abrasions of the modern, bourgeois individual, the very social and economic antagonisms resulting from increased specialization and professionalization are displaced by the virtual industry of visionary poets and expressive lyrics, institutions now capable of transfiguring the subject's material and affective instability into a cultured acquirement. What to make of the subject's imprisonment has become a matter of representation, of rhetorical form. For in contrast with the prominence of the modern penitentiary as an embodiment of the "mildness-production-profit" ratio (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 219), the cultivation of a bourgeois sensibility hinges on the "forgetting" or "transcending" of the "constructed" quality of this process. As the canonization of Wordsworth's "Ode" suggests, the accumulation of formal-aesthetic proficiency and, along with it, of civic and cultural authority is based on the elaboration of an "authentically" spiritual and poetic realm. This realm's superior "power" will confront the subject not in the terrifying shapes of an overwhelmingly complex, alien, and bluntly material national economy but in the form of a rarefied "pleasure" produced by the gradual transfiguration of a once local and incidental individuality into a formally distinctive type or sensibility. Synecdochic of the work of Romantic "culture" (Bildung) at large, education unfolds as the subject's incorporation of formerly extrinsic modes of surveillance. As the correlate of an inward desire (rather than of an objective force), "discipline" emerges as the unconscious core of the middle-class subject's affective and cognitive experiences. Hence the subject's "imagination" surrenders all analytic, reflexive awareness of the mode of production undergirding the "pleasure" it derives from socioeconomic ascendancy and from its acquisition of cultural literacy within a liberal, educated, and distinctive middle-class community. Coleridge's micrological analyses and Wordsworth's lyric figuration of education as unapparent "training" and nostalgic reflection have moved us closer to articulating the connections between Romanticism's new educational paradigm and its simultaneous preoccupation with a general critique of language. It is in precisely this sense of a structural unconscious delineating all possible experience and cognition of the individual that language embodies Bell's, Bentham's, and Coleridge's concept of pedagogical agency and explains the necessary invisibility and inscrutability of that agency.

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Moral and Aesthetic Pedagogy in Wollstonecraft Still, following Coleridge's cues to the point of seeing language as the infrastructural agency of Romanticism's educational project does not give us a conclusive purchase in and of itself on Romanticism's remarkably unstable and antagonistic historical profile. To "comprehend" that profile ultimately means to afford it what Clifford Geertz calls "thick description," which is an attempt to reconstruct the period's motivational currents insofar as they assume a distinctive rhetorical practice and objectify themselves in once again distinctive fictional strategies, genres, and styles. Indeed, it is only by tracing a historical process in its readable sedimentations that we can hope to access the specific identifications (e.g., national! regional, affective/reflexive, dominant/emergent/residual, etc.) of Romantic communities. Insofar as community, "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in [it], ... is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7), it is perhaps best described as the material effect of an imaginary practice: a formation instantiated by rhetorical and often literary and aesthetic modes of productivity, which set the conditions for the eventual reflexive awareness of such a community as Culture, Class, Nation, and Empire. Within the particular context of an emergent British nation and its industrious middle class, arguably the most widespread genre connecting "ideas" of general pedagogy with the social value of rhetorical and aesthetic competence is didactic fiction. The work of Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Taylor, to name but a few very productive voices (significantly all female), testifies to the rapid mobilization of fictional strategies on behalf of Romanticism's most complex and significant cultural issue: directing the middle class's productive unconscious toward a state of self-awareness as the socially legitimate, nationally representative, and morally authoritative "heart" of the nationP In focusing on but one of the countless works of didactic fiction published at the time, Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life, my primary concern lies not so much with the empirical "impact" of Wollstonecraft's didactic writings but, rather, with tracing the dialectic between her narrative's stated pedagogical objectives and the deeper historical motivation that shapes the book's rhetorical organization and formal development. Wollstonecraft's objective of detailing in narrative form the production of an utterly rationalist and trans par-

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ent model of subjectivity informs her style as progressively more "literary," to the point where her writing's thematic agenda, the surveillance of youth's moral propriety, effectively merges with the governess's exemplification of aesthetic proficiency. First published in 1788 and reissued in 1791, Original Stories from Real Life illustrates particularly well the pleasure/unrest interplay that defines the interiority of the subject of Romantic Bildung. As her subtitle also makes clear, Wollstonecraft's prose remains intensely committed to the didactic conceptions of a post-Rousseauvean Enlightenment: Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. Indeed, the work explores the incidental stylistics of vernacular dialogue as particularly conducive to moral and cultural improvement. Implementing the conceptual figure of a "monitorial" and wholly unself-conscious system of "mutual tutoring" which Bell, Bentham, and Coleridge would bring into greater focus, Wollstonecraft notes that "good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason" (OS, iii; italics mine). Insofar as the implementation of a vision of rationality pivots on the elision of Reason as an object for the very self whose cognitive reach it delimits, rationality can fulfill its didactic mission only by assuming a determinate symbolic form. In Original Stories, rational pedagogy thus objectifies itself as fiction sui generis. By constraining rationality to suspend its claim to universality at least temporarily, the genre of didactic fiction invariably assumes a dialectic form. It stages rationality as an episodic movement from immature affect and local habits to a model of personality that recognizes these features as mere "semblance" (Schein) and so repudiates them as "inessential." What occurs at the level of character, however, must ultimately also transform the very idea of fiction itself. In the end, that is, a didactic narrative can legitimate its temporary "appearance" (Erscheinung) only by expressly renouncing its earlier formal status as "mere" fiction. Both its formal particularity as storytelling and the local or affective limitations of its characters can only be redeemed inasmuch as they embrace rationality as their destiny; and, at least in Wollstonecraft's stories, they will do so, albeit only under an all-pervading aura of melancholia. At its outset, Wollstonecraft's Original Stories limits the symbolic play of narrative form to a strictly subsidiary function, a mere dialogic working out of the putative universality of moral and civic competence between the two girls, Mary and Caroline, and their governess, Mrs. Mason. Yet as her charges attain greater sophistication, Mrs. Mason's increasingly mediated and complex stories disclose a far more profound potential of

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fiction. No longer a mere "device" or "design" of a rational core-message that the narrative initially credits with autonomous existence, the rhetorical and aesthetic play of fictional narration and lyric imagery comprehends, usurps, indeed becomes the work of rational pedagogy. Having reached the latter half of Original Stories, we have not only read a didactic narrative of the girls' comprehensive moral education but also endorsed, at least implicitly, the mediation, indeed the socialization of rationality as "literary" practice. What is of interest, then, is precisely this collapsing into each other of ideological motive and cultural practice, the synthesis of a presumptively universal bourgeois rationality with particular middleclass cultural practices and figural idioms (e.g., the lyric, the confessional, the memorial). By gradually conceding that "notions" of morality and rationality possess operative value and actual being only as rhetorical genres-that is, as reproducible cultural forms-Wollstonecraft's Original Stories (and indeed much didactic fiction and poetry in early English Romanticism) substantially confirms Benedict Anderson's suggestion that "communities are to he distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (Imagined Communities, 6). Quite the embodiment of the solid moral constitution that resonates in her name, Mrs. Mason at the opening of the tale proposes "a walk before breakfast, a custom she wished to teach imperceptibly, by rendering it amusing": The sun had scarcely dispelled the dew that hung on every blade of grass, and filled the half-shut flowers; every prospect smiled, and the freshness of the air conveyed the most pleasing sensations to Mrs. Mason's mind; but the children were regardless of the surrounding beauties, and ran eagerly after some insects to destroy them. Mrs. Mason silently observed their cruel sports, without appearing to do it. (OS, 1-2; italics mine)

Clearly, it is Mrs. Mason's interest here to transfer her mind's rational reflexivity onto the children in her care. In unmistakable analogy to the sun's smiling down on "the half-shut flowers," Mrs. Mason's pedagogical function is to re-create her own mode of vigilant self-awareness within her protegees and to make them incubate her own relentless perspicacity. Anticipating the strategic concerns of Wollstonecraft's narrative as a whole, such self-awareness soon coalesces with the all-encompassing infrastructure of the children's unconscious: their "sensibility." Wollstonecraft's deceptively simple account thus extends to its (adult) readers the fantasy of a consciousness whose political and cultural self-monitoring would emulate the organic and unconscious axial relationship between

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the sun and the blades of grass and "half-shut flowers." In his Logic Coleridge makes an etymological case for "education"-a "derivative[,] Educare ab educere: 'educate' from 'educe,' that is, 'draw forth,' 'bring out' "-by remarking how in its "primary sense it is applied to plants, and expresses the process by which man imitates, carries on, and adapts to a determined human purpose, the work of education (evolution, development) performed by nature" (LG, 9). Alluding to Catullus's Poems, herebuilds the familiar analogy of educare as a word "applied to the householder man in relation to the young of his own species, and made to express the collective process in which the educator is himself (instead of) the dews and showers, the sun and the breeze, to the congenerous plant" (LG, ro). Most certainly, however, Coleridge's reliance on organic imagery here does not mean that he conceives of education as an essentially organic or "natural" process; on the contrary, he knows all too well what a world of difference separates the spontaneous and nonreflexive concept of organic maturation from the irreducibly mediated world of "determined human purpose[s]." Precisely because of that distance, authority can be achieved only as a rhetorical and figural vanishing act, as an instance of dis/appearance into an ontologically separate sphere, such as organic nature, and as the subsequent reiappearance and reconstitution of that sphere in the rhetorical image or simulacrum of the flower. As Paul de Man put it long ago, "the obviously desirable sensory aspects of the flower express the ambivalent aspiration toward a forgotten presence that gave rise to the image, for it is in experiencing the material presence of the particular flower that the desire arises to be reborn in the manner of a natural creation" (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 6). In just that sense, the organic imagery of Original Stories "aestheticizes" an instance of intense civic scrutiny as a moment of Romantic (if slightly elegiac) "pleasure." To close the momentous gap between the child's and the adult's sensibility is to engage in a transferential process that circumscribes the role played by a distinctively "literary" rhetoric, the unapparent infrastructure for the production of civic and moral agency. An obvious textual cognate of the interpretive vigilance that defines Bell's system of mutual tutoring, literary dialogism dramatizes the social efficacy of rhetorical form by asking us to focus on the pauses, delays, evasions, blushes, tonal intensities, downcast or defiant glances, on the irreducibly contingent social semiosis that creates the quality of its agents' conscious interiority. If the scenario seems familiar, uncannily "literary," this is also theresult of Blake's involvement as the illustrator of Wollstonecraft's text, pub-

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Figure 17. William Blake (I?5?- I82?), fronti spiece to Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories (r79I).

Figure 18. William Blake, "Nurse's Song," from his Songs of Experience (1794). By kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King's College, Cambridge.

"Searching Their Hearts" lished by Joseph Johnson. Blake's frontispiece to Original Stories (Fig. 17) recalls his design for "Nurse's Song" in Songs of Experience (Fig. r8), a poem itself connected with the issues here under discussion. For it is in the two "contrary" versions of the "Nurse's Song" (among other poems) that Blake undertakes a shrewd critique of pedagogical practice and its manipulation of the verbal and visual icons of organic "care" and "support." In Songs of Innocence, the song's design shows the governess reading under a barren tree, isolated from the children's merry-go-round. Satisfied with knowing that time is on her side, she grants the pleading children an extension of their self-forgetful pleasure: "Well go & play till the light fades away" (B, 15). What initially appears as a kind accommodation of the children's straightforward empirical "joy" turns out, upon rereading, to be suffused with the darker symbolic significance of all children's inescapably temporal and mortal predicament ("till the light fades away"). Indeed, the noxious "literary" sophistication that undergirds the nurse's adult pedagogical authority becomes far more apparent in the companion poem in Songs of Experience, whose excessively "framed" and contrived design shows the nurse's body leaning toward the child in what can only be viewed as a reflexive emulation of the iconic motif of "care": an intensely mediated, ornate posture embodying precisely what, in his Logic, Coleridge will analyze as the duplicitous nature of pedagogical "support." The scene of instruction is rendered yet more ominous by an abject apparition lingering in the doorway, an apparition wholly incompatible with the empirical instruction and "care" simulated in the foreground. Is that figure the alter ego of the Nurse, an abject embodiment of her nihilism-"Your spring & your day, are wasted in play I And your winter and night in disguise" (B, 2 3)? Or might it be a temporal projection of the adult consciousness currently being molded, literally and figuratively, by the nurse whose hand extends seamlessly into a large comb? The concluding two lines of the poem certainly constrain us to reevaluate our potentially "innocent" first reading of the scene of instruction in either version of "Nurse's Song." 24 In aligning their verbal and visual symbolism of night/day, winter/spring with the abject and barren consciousness of the adult instructor, Blake's poems point up the deeper ambivalence of the literary itself as a potential disguise for the void, the absence, and the possible confrontation with an entropy against which notions of adult rationality, maturity, wisdom, and pedagogical support establish themselves. To cite but one of Mrs. Mason's countless revealing admonitions to her charges, "remember that idleness must always be intolerable, because it is only an irksome con-

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sciousness of existence" (OS, ro9). Originating as the displacement of idleness, the "virtual" forms of middle-class cultural productivity are embodied both by the practical dedication of Blake's bibliophile and solitary governess in Songs of Innocence and by Coleridge's discernment of the "high instinct" of language as the most genial "subject" through which to realize the interests of pedagogy-" every new branch of taste that we cultivate, affords us a refuge from idleness ... [and] the highest branch of solitary amusement is reading," Mrs. Mason sermonizes (OS, no). The first quatrain of Blake's "Nurse's Song" from Songs of Experience makes the same point in more concrete form: When the voices of children, are heard on the green And whisprings are in the dale: The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green and pale. (B, 23)

Playing on the notorious instability of the color green, "Nurse's Song" does throw into relief the corrosive affect being masked by the governess's iconic posture of care and support for the child. But even more importantly, it exposes the degree to which the agonistic tensions of the Real (the empirical world into which adult consciousness has fallen) are bearable only if displaced in "literary" form, such as the Nurse's concise figure of imaginative reminiscence ("The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind"). Where Wollstonecraft's Original Stories implements literature toward practical ends, of which we shall see more, Blake's designs bring the social efficacy of the literary into focus as "a fantasy construction which serves as support for our 'reality' itself." Precisely the maintenance of that fantasy in the virtual domain of the literary-objectified as one generation's investment in reproducing elemental literacy in the nextenables us to function within an inherently "insupportable reality." 25 Elsewhere in Wollstonecraft's Stories, we witness the function of delayed pedagogy, and of a correspondingly deferred narration, in an incident that shows Mrs. Mason correcting her disciples' proclivities toward mendacity and vanity: It was one of Mrs. Mason's rules, when they offended her, that is, behaved improperly, to treat them civilly; bur to avoid giving them those marks of affection which they were particularly delighted to receive. Yesterday, said she to them, I only mentioned to you one fault, though I observed two. You very readily guess I mean the lie that you both told. Nay, look up, for l wish to see you blush; and the confusion which I perceive in your faces gives me pleasure; because it convinces me that it is

"Searching Their Hearts" not a confirmed habit .... When I speak of falsehood, I mean every kind; whatever tends to deceive, though not said in direct terms. Tones of voice, motions of the hand or head, if they make another believe what they ought not to believe, are lies; ... but, if you consider a moment, you must recollect, that the Searcher of hearts reads your very thoughts; that nothing is hid from him. (OS, 37-38; italics mine)

Mrs. Mason's and, by extension, Mary Wollstonecraft's solid moral dramaturgy shrewdly capitalizes on the temporal delay between the perceived transgression and the pedagogical intervention. By withholding the expected tokens of affection, Mrs. Mason ensures that this temporal gap will not go unnoticed by her protegees. In sharp contrast to the manipulative and probably inauthentic inventory of "tones of voice, motions of the hand or head," the girls' "blush" (much to the "pleasure" of Mrs. Mason) signals the advent of a deeper self-consciousness, as yet devoid of any particular content or abiding "truth" and provisionally characterized as a state of "confusion." Such confusion points up the girls' emergent awareness of the ceaseless productivity of the monitorial principle, an agency at once invisible and implacable. Hence, for Mrs. Mason's disciples or any subject whatever to develop a reliable and effective understanding of their civic and moral value, they must internalize or "sublate" (aufheben) the monitorial function so aptly and ultimately troped by the narrative as "the Searcher of hearts." Resembling the omniscient and inexorable "supreme Being" of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's "Searcher of hearts" constitutes the most fitting trope for her ultra-rational mode of producing civic and moral legitimacy. Indeed, Mrs. Mason subsequently invokes that revolutionary trope, noting that "the supreme Being has every thing in himself; we proceed from Him, and our knowledge and affections must return to Him for employment suited to them" (OS, nr). To accentuate the theoretical implications of Wollstonecraft's text but slightly, God is the power of "negativity"-what Hegel refers to as the "absolute unrest" of intelligencean incessant revolution of the subject's interiority that elsewhere is characterized by Hegel as "difference left to itself, unresting and unhalting Time." 26 In the educational projects of Andrew Bell and Mary Wollstonecraft, God thus no longer consists in an absolute "essence" but instead is understood as a totalized "imperative" or "function." In a quasi-Gothic personification as "the Searcher of hearts," God tropes for the empirical, middle-class subjects of moral and cultural pedagogy precisely that temporal difference that condemns every individual to the awareness of its

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nonidentity, to the ghastly recognition of its suspension between a "nolonger" and a "not-yet."27 As Mrs. Mason continually affirms, the subject's consciousness of its provisional state, or of its residual illegitimacy, can only be displaced productively, namely into the supplemental ideologeme of a vocational ethos and its symbolic acts of transmogrifying the incidentals of "life" into the cultural capital of a literary "work." The ultimate embodiment of such cultured vocational work is, of course, the subject as a fully self-supporting and transparent function, as mind or intelligence: "Music, drawing, works of usefulness and fancy, all amuse and refine the mind, sharpen the ingenuity; and form, insensibly, the dawning judgment.-As the judgment gains, so do the passions also" (OS, no). In other words, "God" tropes the imperative of ceaseless rational and moral self-production. This process involves the subject's reawakening continually to the distances between private vices and public approval, between contingent affect and rational accountability. The result is a compromise between thee/motion of interiorized self-surveillance and the pro/motion of social ascendancy perpetually negotiated by Romanticism's interconnected discourses of mutual tutoring, didactic fiction, literary expertise, and aesthetic theory. Elsewhere, after obtruding (albeit once again unself-consciously) on some visitors a vain display of physical attractiveness and a correspondingly uncensored gaze at the visitors' unfortunate deformities, Caroline and Mary once again receive but a token "kiss of peace" and thus discover "that they had done wrong." Uncannily devoid of all personal affect"She was never in a passion," the narrator assures us-Mrs. Mason's "quiet steady displeasure made them feel so little in their own eyes, they wished her to smile that they might be something; for all their consequence seemed to arise from her approbation" (OS, 52; italics mine). Deprived of any account of Mrs. Mason's "displeasure," Mary and Caroline subsequently begin to retrace their entire social performance on that day, thereby effectively reproducing the same vigilant and distanced "searching eye" whose dispassionate and ceaseless moral scrutiny continues to outpace the girls' social and moral performance. "I declare I cannot go to sleep, said Mary, I am afraid of Mrs. Mason's eyes" (OS, 53). An ominous anticipation of William's comparatively (if deceptively) innocent natural philosophy in Wordsworth's "Expostulation and Reply"-"the eye it cannot chuse but see"-Mary's remark illustrates the growing conformity between the subject and the system of pedagogical discipline. Consistent with Bell's "principle," Wollstonecraft's didactic fiction appears driven by a vision of utter homology between the system of instruction and the psy-

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chology of its agents. If their identity is being produced by their unselfconscious reproduction of the logic of a system of monitorial pedagogy within and as the self, the system's overarching imperative that all time be employed in the monitoring of one's own civic and moral performance also ensures that this mode of self-production remains definitively unconscious and nontranscendable. To the extent that Mrs. Mason's protegees experience learning as the unrelenting progression toward self-alienation, shot through with intimations of social and moral ascendancy and emblematized and internalized as the monitorial eye's oscillation between terror and benevolence, they can never "know" themselves as the actual products of this performance. As the educational and seasonal calendar wears on, "harvest time" not only finds the children "continually out to view the reapers" (OS, r12) but also enables Mrs. Mason to bring her material and pedagogical acts of improvement into full alignment by launching into a lengthy account of how, some time ago, she relieved the distress of a Welsh harp-player. A victim of oppression by a feudal system, the "settled hatred" of the local justice, yet also of his own defiant spirit of yeomanly (very much Welsh) independence, the harpist functions as the moral core of the country.28 As an honest, hard-working individual, his material destitution stands in inverse relation to his moral capital. The landlord, whose request for help with the harvest he had once refused, displays the obverse imbalance between material wealth and moral and spiritual depravity. Now reduced to maintaining his family "by playing on the harp" at the local inn and picking up "a few pence, just enough to keep life and soul together," the harpist and his instrument embody precisely the early Romantic ideology of mutual "resonance" between moral, aesthetic, and social improvement. Having met him first while stranded in the Welsh countryside as the result of an overturned carriage, Mrs. Mason comes to think "the accident providential" (OS, rr9) almost as soon as the landscape, the harpist's tunes, and her own mood coalesce in a symbolic reverie: It was almost dark, and the lights began to twinkle in the scattered cottages. The scene pleased me, continued Mrs. Mason, I thought of various customs which the lapse of time unfolds; and dwelt on the state of the Welsh, when this castle, now so desolate, was the hospitable abode of the chief of a noble family. These reflections entirely engrossed my mind, when the sound of a harp reached my ears. Never was any thing more opportune, the national music seemed to give reality to the pictures which my imagination had been drawing. I listened awhile, and then trying to trace the pleasing sound, discovered, after a short search, a little hut, rudely built. (OS, n3)

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Upon encountering the old man whose "national music" has "give[n] reality to the pictures" of Mrs. Mason's imagination, the governess learns that the displacement of his family is not simply another instance of careless aristocratic power but in effect an example of aristocracy consuming itself. For "the old man then informed me that the castle in which he now was sheltered formerly belonged to his family-such are the changes and chances of this mortal life" (OS, rr9). The disruptive and transformative powers of regional political dissent, aristocratic dissipation, and class antagonisms coexist uneasily in Mrs. Mason, who, even before learning the fate of the hard-working old man, has already dwelt on the general moral and material decline of the aristocracy and on the abject regional status of Wales. What renders the encounter with the harpist so "providential" is precisely the an/aesthetization of her historical consciousness by his "national music" and "pleasing sound." For his immunizing her against the encroaching consciousness of historical discontinuity, she repays him by securing for his family the tenancy of "a small farm" on the estate of a friend nearby and by giving him the money to buy stock for it (OS, rr920). The work of "providence" has here objectified itself in the aesthetic sensibility or receptivity of Mrs. Mason to the harpist's tunes, and it is her cultural and moral capital-receptive to beauty and committed to justice-that accredits her as the narrative's social and ethical mediator. The logic of mediation here is complex, however, for it involves more than Mrs. Mason's counterbalancing the effects of hereditary aristocratic privilege by securing for the harpist's family the capital needed to resume their productive lives. Well beyond furnishing such material assistance, her most significant act is the mobilization of the aesthetic, the lyric image, on behalf of a far more complex agenda of social and ideological mediation. Endowed with the moral capital and evidence of significant economic connections-her friend, we are told, is a "man of consequence in the neighbourhood"-her quintessentially middle-class position identifies her as the historical heir to a feudal structure whose decline she traces through the narrative conduit of the harpist. Her vintage middle-class function as governess also confers upon her the kind of moral accreditation required for mediating the positive and negative dimensions of aristocracy as such. This she does by recovering, preserving, and sublating the ideal of aristocratic virtue in the figure of the harpist, that once productive and aesthetically refined freeholder whom her narrative and material interventions sharply distinguish from the empirical order of a landed gentry, here represented by the harpist's implacable landlord whose sensual dissipations and indiscriminate use of power have corrupted that very

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ideal. In Wollstonecraft's Original Stories, such speculative salvaging of an ideal image from the material textures of feudal history-a consummately rhetorical (and ultimately utopian) effort at separating virtue from power, "tradition" from history-ultimately benefits the middle-class subject whose aesthetic productivity commutes a history of social conflict into a didactic narrative designed to reproduce its message both in and as the sensibility of its listeners. Indeed, the harpist's "unbounded" gratitude assumes the quasiinstitutional expression of his annual pilgrimage to Mrs. Mason at harvest time, an occasion, as the governess informs her charges, about to be celebrated again. And though the celebration features the material pleasures of music and dance, "it was not the light toe, that fashion taught to move, but honest heart-felt mirth, and the loud laugh, if it spoke the vacant head, said audibly that the heart was guileless" (OS, 120). Always inclined to oppose material pleasure and physical joy to some elusive domain of genuine affect ("honest heart-felt mirth" and a "guileless" heart), Wollstonecraft now introduces its most elaborate aesthetic set piece: the nocturnal serenade by the harpist, with an exegetic voice-over by Mrs. Mason for the greater pedagogical good of her children. With an explicit purpose and rhetorical precision rarely found in the didactic fictions ofWollstonecraft's contemporaries, the following passage performs the crucial transition from pedagogy as elemental socialization to a comprehensive induction into cultural and aesthetic literacy. As the harpist played some of Mrs. Mason's favorite airs, the moon rose in cloudless majesty, and a number of stars twinkled near her. The softened landscape inspired tranquillity, while the strain of rustic melody gave a pleasing melancholy to the whole-and made the tear start, whose source could scarcely be traced. The pleasure the sight of harmless mirth gave rise to in Mrs. Mason's bosom, roused every tender feeling-set in motion her spirits.-She laughed with the poor whom she had made happy and wept when she recollected her own sorrows; the illusions of youth-the gay expectations that had formerly clipped the wings of time.-She turned to the girls-I have been very unfortunate, my young friends; but my griefs are now of a placid kind .... My state of mind rather resembles the scene before you, it is quiet-I am weaned from the world, but not disgusted-for I can still do good-and in futurity a sun will rise to cheer my heart.-Beyond the night of death, I heal the dawn of an eternal day! I mention my state of mind to you, that I may tell you what supports me. (OS, 122-23)

This deeply ambivalent passage not only recalls the almost nihilistic inwardness of Blake's Nurse but also echoes the structural critique of pedagogy instanced by Songs of Innocence and of Experience. While it initially

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appears as but another lyric canvas filled with the overly precious pastels of sentimentalism, Wollstonecraft's governess soon qualifies the distant kinship between didactic and sentimental fiction by supplementing the lyric image with an exegesis that serves as a lesson to the children. In so doing, however, Mrs. Mason, and indeed the overall text of Original Stories, unwittingly excavates a far deeper, unconscious logic of melancholy of which the generic sentimentalism of the passage is but a symptom. What appears as a sentimental image cannot simply be explained as the effect of empirical atmospherics: the moonlit night, harped airs, distant twinkling stars, and a "softened landscape." To be sure, the opening description amounts to a conspicuously schematic cultural acquirement that is almost mannerist in its evocation (or citation) of lyric sentimentalism. Yet unless we are to settle for the reductive explanation that such generic imagery is an immediate, authentic expression of a "deep" sensibility, we can only grasp it as a symptom, a displacement and effect, of a far more alarming recognition, unspeakable as such yet pressing enough for Mrs. Mason to follow her description with a highly reflexive commentary. As that commentary makes clear, what renders the preceding sentimental images stylistically so apposite here is precisely their hollowness, for they forestall Mrs. Mason's unbearable recognition that in fact she has no being independent of her social function: "I am weaned from the world, but not disgusted," she protests, "for I can still do good." Her pedagogical function as mediator, the very icon or gold-standard of middle-class virtue, the governess has no history, no authentic expression, and no valid application for her subjective memories to which, quite tellingly, she repeatedly alludes yet whose content she never divulges. Traced in its stylistic objectification as a dissociated and vaguely mannered sentiment, melancholy can thus be understood as the aesthetic expression of the loss of history that has produced the middle class, a demographic segment defined by its ability to differentiate itself rhetorically and aesthetically from the sensual corruption associated with the landed and nonproductive wealth of the aristocracy and from the material and spiritual deprivations of the poor. Yet such moral cum aesthetic authority, it now appears, has been purchased at the steep price of no longer being able to symbolize any subjective, personal value. As the governess's gendered and sociological status (unmarried and lower middle-class) makes particularly clear, her authority wholly depends on her subjective disembodiment, taking that term in its physical, affective, and representational senses. Her authority is vested solely in carrying out a professional function: to teach and to be

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compensated for reproducing an impersonal idiom of social conformity. And what Mary Wollstonecraft elsewhere calls "the natural death of love" constitutes either literally (as widowhood succeeding marriage) or figurally (as the renunciation of all personal attachment before the fact) an enabling social fiction under necessarily damaged (and damaging) circumstances.29 Stylistically the lyric moment under discussion appears strained, almost incapable of supporting the structural antagonisms that circumscribe the governess's social identity. Thus the refuge afforded by a substantially acquired sentimental style (it "roused every tender feeling-set in motion her spirits," she claims) is eventually replaced by the straightforwardly metaphysical or utopian motif of the "immortality of the soul." Wollstonecraft's Original Stories offers a compelling articulation of Romanticism's mode of producing and transmitting civic competence through the "work" form of cultural capital, as a symbolically mediated ("literary") practice facilitating the ascendancy of England's intensely productive middling classes. What allows us to formulate the contiguity between early Romanticism's concern with the elementary education of the poor and the middle-class quest for cultural literacy-aside from the fact that both projects were conceived and advanced by members of the middle class-is these projects' incorporation and disciplinary construction of the unconscious as the "organic system" or "high instinct" of language itself. Wollstonecraft's text marks Romanticism's emergent conceptualization of language as the ultimate structural paradigm of agency. Precisely this structurality also identifies it as the reflex of (and response to) an inscrutable, permanently operative causality "experienced" only belatedly as the ratio of pleasure and pain associated with upward or downward social mobility, itself generative of consciousness in its specific historical forms of subjectivity. Instruction has been refigured as a differential calculus that allows the subject to produce itself in a series of moral dislocations and, at the same time, to derive "pleasure" throughout this very process from the representational proficiency with which it integrates these dislocations into a narrative form. Contingent in both its transcendental and empirical senses upon its monitorial reflexivity and on its cultural productivity, Romantic subjectivity presents itself as the agent, scene, and telos of Bildung. In its holistic and self-confirming operations, Romanticism's idea of the "literary" thus displaces the objective, historical alienation of its bourgeois subjects into the virtual spheres of affective self-discovery and cultural ascendancy. Quite possibly modernity's supreme instance of self-disavowal or "unknowing," the twin progeny of Romantic peda-

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gogy-that is, the fiction of an affective, private "interiority" and that of literature as its corresponding, virtual capital-offers itself as the spontaneous (or "immediate") answer to the period's historical antagonisms well before the subjects produced and constrained by these antagonisms could ever begin to grasp them in conscious form. Wollstonecraft's narrative thus symptomizes in its very conceptual and stylistic organization the ideological motivation shared by the period's seemingly incompatible intellectual, spiritual, and economic movements (the cosmopolitan rationalism of Godwin, the Protestant revivalism in provincial towns, the institution of periodicals and reviews surveying and judging "literature" in the broadest sense, the institution of secular literature, didactic fiction, poetry as a subject worthy of public attention and promulgation, and so on). As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall note in their recent study of the rising English middle class, "by the early nineteenth century, this peculiar blend of evangelical religion and rationalism was joined by ideas and images now often labelled romantic." It was, they remark, precisely this "commitment to an imperative moral code and the reworking of their domestic world into a proper setting for its practice" that lent cohesion to the seemingly divergent strands of "urban and rural, nonconformist and Anglican, Whig, Tory and Radical, manufacturer, farmer, and professional, wealthy and modest" (Family Fortunes, 27, 25). The need for information and guidance in the increasingly complex everyday world encouraged advice manuals covering all aspects of business and private life. In short, any claim to participate in the "polite world" depended in part on a capacity to read, think and speak correctly.... Such writers [Hannah More, Felicia Hemans, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Taylor] and such publications were at the heart of middle-class culture, for there was both a national and local "cultural market-place." Popular writers formed the subject of conversation and letters between people, the imaginative food for thought of individuals. Their works and ideas were discussed, their lives a source of fascination, their homes and gardens places to visit and revere. Such authors answered existing needs from an expanding literate public seeking not only diversion but instruction. They were instrumental in constructing an audience, and in their responses to the changing world they themselves inhabited were defining what came to be understood as specifically middle-class beliefs and practices. (Family Fortunes, r6o, r62)

With the exception of the conservative Hannah More, most of the woman writers considered by Hall and Davidoff appeared to have a distinctly regional impact. Still, as a group, their influence on the cultural unconscious-the delineation of the symbolic and interpretive infrastructure of "specifically middle-class beliefs and practices"-proved seminal on ana-

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tional scale for the genesis of a distinctive middle-class consciousness. It now remains to be seen how oppositions of past/present, regionalism/nationalism, wealth/capital, and station/class are negotiated in the essentially nondidactic representations of Wordsworth's poetry. ~

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The Hermeneutic Mobility of the Reader in Lyrical Ballads What sets the several editions of Lyrical Ballads (1798-rSos) somewhat apart from the regional/national opposition is Wordsworth's shrewd authentication of all poetic and social cognition as necessarily "local" (and typically "rural") even as the individual ballads derive their narrative interest from a perspective dissociated from such local knowledge. As Wordsworth was to put it in the Preface (r8o2), poetry's "object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative" (PrW, r: 139). By dramatizing an often unreliable urban or cosmopolitan perspective on England's putatively authentic (albeit disappearing) provincial and local culture, Lyrical Ballads reflects an ultimately national interest: to devise for the emergent middle class a vigilant and adaptive sensibility, one whose cultured reflexivity is its sociocultural capital, one that has emancipated itself from the superstitions of a fading rural culture without, however, surrendering to the dissolute pursuits of the higher classes. Yet the most unusual feature of this newly won "mobility" of mind is that the particular "sensibility" in question functions synchronously with the industrious, money-based imagination of the ascending middling classes yet secures these groups morally against the corruptions of urban capital. In short, the psychology of the emergent (and not yet fully self-conscious) middle class is fundamentally differential and relative and is objectified, at least for the first generation of Romantics, not only in its still tenuous material disposition but also in discursive and aesthetic forms conceived to fortify the bourgeois unconscious against the encroaching awareness of its contingent economic and cultural identity. This rough outline of the unconscious dynamic shaping Wordsworth's poetic career between 1798 and 1805 (the period spanned by the various editions, revisions, and expansions of Lyrical Ballads) can be traced, more specifically, in Wordsworth's rejection of child labor and his objection to the usurpation of regional economic identities by increasingly uniform, capitalist modes of manufacture and trade. It also emerges in his anxious vision of the squandering of England's supposed moral capital by Lon-

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don's vulgar spectacles, lotteries, and fairs and his regret of the literal and figural prostitution of authentic aesthetic distinctions by the derivative forms of melodrama, Gothic fiction, and sensational ballads. Long before Coleridge's formal inauguration of a "clerisy," Wordsworth thus conceives of the project of Lyrical Ballads as cultural salvation: "it cannot have remained unnoticed with what alarming rapidity our written language has been receding from the real language of life and that from the encreasing circulation of books this practice must act powerfully towards adulterating our moral feelings and of necessity the language of real life itself, this poisoning our future literature in its best and most sacred source." 30 Rather than speculate about Wordsworth's "beliefs," however, let us trace their emergence from the affective stylistics and prevailing mode of literary production in Lyrical Ballads. For it is this poetry, taken as a cultural commodity and instrument, that contributed significantly to the production of an articulate middle-class agency by grafting onto the psyche of its prospective audience an intensely self-focused pattern of interpretive proficiency. Having already noticed the extent to which this anxious reflexivity had begun to dominate the conception of "intelligence" among the educated middle class, we shall now approach it from a less overtly coercive and ostensibly more leisurely perspective. In reading Lyrical Ballads, that is, the emphasis of the monitorial principle shifts from the public idea of expedient disciplinary forms to a more elusive cluster of affective and cognitive values traditionally referred to as "sensibility." Wholly unapparent in design and seamless in texture, the ideal readerly sensibility postulated and engineered by Lyrical Ballads appears to put the reader in charge of his or her literary experience. Yet the scenario of an enlightened, spontaneous, middle-class intelligence proceeding confidently and judiciously through the diverse lyric experiences in Wordsworth's and Coleridge's collections comes with grave responsibilities attached. For any failure of communication between the poetry and its audience will be ascribed by the readers to their inadequate cognitive resources. As we shall see, then, the totalizing character of Bell's model of self-surveillance also governs Lyrical Ballads and etches into the individual psyche an unimpeachable code of formalaesthetic "judgment" and "propriety" that is embraced to this day as the spiritual capital and expressive signature of the English Romantic movement. For only by subscribing, however unconsciously, to the lyric as a secular yet "deep" scripture would culturally literate and mobile individuals begin to choreograph the motion of their minds according to the cues of the poem and, consequently, coalesce into and represent themselves-

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with an ideological necessity eventually explained as a sign of providence-as a cohesive British middle class. In the course of his early and middle career, Wordsworth was to become involved with some of the pedagogical projects mentioned above, for instance by his outspoken support for a system of national and universal education after r8o8. In r8rr Wordsworth actually received Andrew Bell at Grasmere, having read Bell's An Experiment in Education a few years earlier, and he also began to teach regularly at the Grasmere elementary schools during the autumn of that year.31 Yet rather than tracing Wordsworth's attachment to Bell's system and his advocacy of national education in book 9 of The Excursion, I intend to focus on the logic of Romantic pedagogy as it is mediated in Lyrical Ballads. At issue here is the deepstructural affinity between diverse rhetorical forms, their stylistic inflection in specific poems, and the formally intricate processes of aesthetic response elicited by the collection of lyrics as a whole. To pursue this study is to deepen our understanding of the hermeneutic proficiency that Wordsworth's poetry sought to inculcate in its hypostatized middle-class reading audience, an audience that, insofar as his indirect approach succeeded, he indeed helped produce. In targeting the mechanisms of interpretive response in this "virtual" audience, as well as its propensity for a transferential reading (from text to self), Wordsworth produces the conditions that will enable a community characterized by its cognate modes of aesthetic response to recognize and articulate its sociocultural coherence as "class" in the private and spontaneous play of a shared poetic sensibility. A clear departure from the stationary and largely unconscious play of Picturesque description in An Evening Walk, Lyrical Ballads (1798/rSoo) probes the limits of poetry and our "pre-established codes of decision." An instance of cultural critique avant la lettre, we might say, the collection compels its readers to develop an analytic awareness of antagonisms between the economic, aesthetic, and specifically linguistic coordinates of that hybrid formation otherwise referred to as "our national culture." 32 While retaining their focus on the increasingly "imaginary" space of rural England for the moral and aesthetic edification of a predominantly urban class of readers, these poems, which "arc to be considered experiments" (LB, 738), reflect a different dynamic of consciousness, in both their production and their reception. With its complex array of stylistic paradigms, its shifting models of narrative authority, and its oscillation between an internal psychological and an external scenic focus for description, Lyrical Ballads partially suspends the Picturesque's dream of an integrated class-

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based sensibility, of a community or class-consciousness steeped in and produced by its unconscious semiotic engineering of spontaneity. Rather than constructing an affective community through a predetermined semiotics of perspectival vision and a rigorous descriptive form, Lyrical Ballads presents poems so discontinuous with one another as to be taken, each in its own right, as a dramatization of the very process of literary and social understanding at several levels. Dramatizing the process of social and aesthetic understanding in individual lyrics, as well as at the level of a reading experience that is being subtly directed by Wordsworth's sequencing of poems, Lyrical Ballads offers a new paradigm of literary experience. The lyric functions no longer as an objective "sign" but as a contingent "proposition" (to borrow Stephen Land's useful distinction).33 Both in the context of a given poem and in that of the entire collection, to interpret no longer means to ascribe distinctive meanings to discrete lyric statements but to continually project, elaborate, and revise the general hermeneutic framework within which any given utterance (the speech of characters as well as the idiom of a specific poem) would appear to operate. Reconstituting the implausible quest of Wordsworth's protagonists for local ecstasy in a historically discontinuous and usually inhospitable landscape, Lyrical Ballads quickly immerses its reading audiences in an environment of massive textual and epistemic contingency. From Simon Lee to the nameless youth and the "stranger" who struggle for understanding of the lines in "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree"; from the forsaken Indian Woman, Martha Ray, and the convict, to the persona of Wordsworth himself; none of the characters in this collection any longer properly "dwell" in the place where the poems happen to catch up with them. Protagonists and readers thus find themselves constrained to legitimate their initial, passive sense of hermeneutic confidence. To have authority now means to find oneself under the continual obligation of revising previous, even recent aesthetic preferences and hermeneutic intuitions. As the effects of their own unconscious productivity, Bell's and Wollstonecraft's self-suspecting minors and Wordsworth's emergent middle-class reading audiences reveal how membership in the national economy and culture of the middle class is defined not by one's wealth or "substance" but by one's felicitous performance in the ongoing project of effective self-representation, by one's capacity to find the proper ratio of cognitive and affective investment, reserve, and display. No longer subscribing to the hermeneutic premise of a shared field of sociocultural reference-a presumption already exposed by Wordsworth's explicit dissociation of his poetics from the static classicism of the Augus-

"Silent Monitors" tans and the frantic effects of Gothic and sentimental spectacles-the poems in Lyrical Ballads are designed to stimulate their prospective class of readers to a degree of hermeneutic vigilance almost unprecedented in English literature, with the possible exception of Milton and Blake. Consistent with this study's overarching conception of "style" as the textual sedimentation (or infrastructure) of various unconscious and complex antagonisms between the material and ideational determinants of what we call "culture," the following readings in Lyrical Ballads focus in particular on the relation between the poetry's stylistic dynamics and its cognitive efficiency. The collection invests in a critique of rhetorical forms associated with pedagogy and, by extension, moves the variously inadequate consciousnesses of its characters and hypostatized readers from a largely passive, often complacent sensibility to a highly productive and self-conscious hermeneutic agency. Whether readers prefer the lesson of "Expostulation and Reply" or of "The Tables Turned," in either case their interpretive response results from the poem's having issued an implicit challenge to their presumptive state of exegetical confidence. Interpretive "insight," in other words, takes the form of "work" and yields a "product," a construction of complex (often hard-won) meanings that remain after the reader has subjected his preferences, values, and paradigms of "pleasure" to the counterintuitive scrutiny of the text. Such a paradigm of reading produces a consciousness whose primary authority resides no longer in its simply having an aesthetic mode of response but in finding itself under the continued obligation of configuring its formerly intuitive preferences and sympathies with the historically contingent notions of utility and industriousness. While reference to this product as a "consciousness" is meaningful only in the context of detailed readings that remain to be undertaken, the countless interpretive contingencies burdening the readerly "consciousness" in Lyrical Ballads suggest why that term no longer designates a substantive identity but instead an operative critical function. To be sure, there is still debate about whether "reader" refers strictly to cumulative, formal-psychological mechanisms of response elicited by a given text or instead denotes a historical category, substantially independent of (and possibly preceding) the text's aesthetic performance.34 As regards that ongoing quarrel between formalists and materialists, the preceding discussion of Andrew Bell and Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that "historical" subjects are the material and psychological (though never fully selfconscious) effects of diverse symbolic and significantly predetermined practices. Any reflexive awareness of its own historical situation on the part of an individual or a community, that is, unfolds only in terms already

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established in large measure by languages variously experienced as disciplinary and ranging from the most elemental to the most evolved modes of literacy. We might thus say that self-consciousness is, alternatively, the subject's most alarming or most gratifying way of experiencing the historical displacement that is its "nature": either as the terrifying, fleeting recognition of its ephemeral status, or as the delusive if expedient embrace of its identity in the form of "knowledge" and "objective" selfrepresentation. In speaking of the reader's subjectivity in Lyrical Ballads, I thus refer not to some nostalgic consciousness of lost innocence, nor to a visionary self projecting its unconfessed authorial ambitions into spiritual testimonials. Rather, the term charts the usurpation of an initially posited autonomous subjectivity by the peculiar authority of the poetic text. The text itself thus emerges as a versatile pedagogical agency whose construction of its thematic and readerly subjects reveals self-cultivation and selfalienation as the fundamental coordinates of aesthetic productivity. Wordsworth's innovative poetic collection compels its readers to adapt to this new paradigm of conscious subjectivity by submitting to each poem's counterintuitive exposure of its audiences' inherited conceptions of what literary experience would ordinarily "feel like." That the experience of Lyrical Ballads evolves as the gradual revision of the hermeneutic operations of the lyric and of literature in general is also ensured by the performance of the collection's dominant paradigm of subjectivity, that of an alternately misguided, obtuse, and overly confident questioner and/or commentator. Beginning with "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree" (LB, 48-50), which opens the 1798 collection, the ballads' narrative accounts and descriptive fixations are regularly interrupted by quasi-authorial interventions enjoining readers to refine their interpretive skills and to submit to the inexorable and open-ended dialectic of self-surveillance and self-improvement. Essentially a prolonged mediation between a familiar yet dead individual and a living though nameless audience, the epitaphic form of the poem opening Lyrical Ballads (1798) implements such mediation in the form of reminiscence, inward speech, even meditation: -Nay, Traveller! rest. This lonely yew-tree stands Far from all human dwelling: what if here No sparkling rivulet spread the verdant herb; What if these barren boughs the bee not loves; Yet, if the wind breathe soft, the curling waves That break against the shore, shall lull thy mind By one soft impulse saved from vacancy. (LB, 48, II. I-7)

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Challenging the "traveller" with its moral capital and local identity as epitaph and inscription, the poem-as-text has an artifactual status that is obfuscated by the poem's simulation of its own occurrence as speech. Indeed, speech here assumes the self-privileging tonality of a speaker's spiritual disclosure or elegiac confession.35 Part memorial and part exhortation, the poem vests its social and spiritual authority in the speaker, who, "warm from the labours of benevolence," regulates affective commerce between a nearly exemplary life that failed by squandering its spiritual endowment and an anonymous addressee who cannot afford to ignore the lesson of that life. Deposited anonymously as mere lines on a seat in a yew tree-no more than spiritual litter in modernity's cultural marketplace of profit-oriented publishing, amorphous tastes in reading, and partisan standards of literary reviewing-the poem's blend of meditative and hortatory speech negotiates its fortunes as published poetry by colonizing the dead subjectivity of the individual whose fate the poem reconstitutes as a matter of moral and rhetorical urgency for the living. In remembering the attributes of the individual-that he possessed distinction ("no common soul"), talent, and integrity ("by genius nurs'd ... pure in his heart")-the poem establishes itself both as the executor of that individual's moral estate and as the agency capable of redeeming him from his one, albeit fatal, flaw, namely, to have been "against all enemies prepared, I All but neglect." For while it may have been possible for his fellow citizens to ignore the noble resolutions of the nameless subject in their midst, the appeal of the poem appears irrefutable because the work is advanced not as a contingent cultural artifact but as a memento mori, as an unimpeachable and implacable spiritual appeal issuing from the dead to the living. For the audience to embrace the poem's self-confirming rhetorical presentation as an objective inscription of spiritualized memory is also, at least implicitly, to endow a contingent cultural form (poetry) with transhistorical and transcultural authority (spirit) and, by extension, to endorse the new cultural paradigm of poetry as communal salvation rather than discrete utterance. To be sure, in this lyric such a paradigm is not so much justified as axiomatic: a contingent cultural practice and professional pursuit, poetry, is being established in self-privileging and self-authenticating rhetorical form. By capitalizing on the malleability of the ballad genre, Wordsworth furthermore, and almost instantaneously, reverses the hierarchy between reader and text. Rather than the reader evaluating the poem, the poem, as an instance of conspicuous (as it were, posthumous) exhortation, now monitors the performance of its reader. The speaker,

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transferring his almost existential sense of urgency onto the reader-"the curling waves I That break against the shore, shall lull thy mind I By one soft impulse saved from vacancy"-holds the audience to a standard of productive insight in comparison with which the remembered subject evidently fell short. The contrast between that subject's unproductive selfpity (''A morbid pleasure nourished") and a model of spiritual and social productivity undeterred by potential rejection or failure ("Stranger! henceforth be warned") already resonates in the symbolic overdetermination of the poem's title: "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree Which Stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect." To read the poem "the right way" is to forge a passage from a "desolate" spot remembered to a present "beautiful prospect," the cultivation of which coincides with the practice of reading itself. Reading, in other words, is an act of speculative selfimprovement, with the poem sternly monitoring the readers' progress toward a model of moral and aesthetic proficiency. Unfolding as the scrupulous archaeological production of a (Geertzian) "local" knowledge, reading is to excavate the empirical debris of "stones" piled, "barren boughs," and "an aged tree ... bend[ing] its arms in circling shade" and to reassemble the narrative of a failed life. It is the very ethos of such patient involvement on the part of the reader which will redeem that life, namely, by reconstituting an enigmatic locale as the determinate expression of a universal message. Both as an interpretive act and as the formal embodiment of that act, poetry thus sublates the local into a scene of national recognition by reconstructing the incidental "scene" as a determinate, though highly mediated, effect of the inscrutable and corrosive structural forces of modernity itself ("dissolute tongues, ... jealousy, and hate, I And scorn," 11. r6-r7). Opening on a conditional note, the last verse paragraph articulates with Hegelian overtones how, if "mind" is to neutralize modernity's dissolution of its dream of an organic sensibility (i.e., "mind" dreaming itself as "spontaneity"), it will have to carry out a preemptive strike of alienation upon itself; or, in Wordsworth's parallel construction, it must "in the silent hour of inward thought, I . .. suspect, and still revere" itself: If thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know, that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt

"Silent Monitors" For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used; that thought with him Is in its infancy. The man, whose eye Is ever on himself, doth look on one, The least of nature's works, one who might move The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds Unlawful, ever: 0, be wise thou! Instructed that true knowledge leads to love, True dignity abides with him alone Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, Can still suspect, and still revere himself, In lowliness of heart. (LB, 49-50, ll. 44-60; italics mine)

To immunize oneself against the remembered individual's devastation, to pay one's respects to his "life" and, at least by implication, to the redemptive powers of the present lyric, is to inculcate the same degree of vigilant scrutiny with which the speaker has scanned the "desolate" scene near Esthwaite and, in the guise of the poem, continues to monitor the performance of its readers. The pedagogical agency here-the poem as an utterly disembodied, disinterested, and strictly "functional" voice-is meant to reproduce itself in the consciousness of its readers, a strategy that appears to have succeeded, at least according to one "critic." The reviewer of the Monthly Mirror, effectively surrendering his critical voice altogether, submits one short phrase of commonplace approval ("The author ... has produced sentiments of feeling and sensibility, expressed without affectation, and in the language of nature") and proceeds to quote "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree" in its entirety (RR, Pt. A, 2: 685-86).36 In collapsing the object and the voice of critique into each other, this reviewer implicitly endorses the poetry's constitutive premise. To read it with any sense of exegetical purpose is to endorse its idiom of moral and social cognition as axiomatically true and to assimilate it into and as one's re/ formed self. Rather than being asked to surrender themselves to the contingent interests of the empirical present, readers are enjoined to conceive their future selves as products of a beneficent, if unrelenting, selfsurveillance. The educational project of elemental literacy, its empirical administration of "discipline," and the vigilant interpretive culture activated by Wordsworth's aesthetic dispensation in Lyrical Ballads can thus be understood as different components of one "civil economy" (to recall Andrew Bell's phrase). Elsewhere, speaking of the deceptively ephemeral appearance of the

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Old Cumberland Beggar, the ballad of that title salutes that figure's superior, indeed unimpeachable communal wisdom: All behold in him A silent monitor, which on their minds Must needs impress a transitory thought Of self-congratulation, to the heart Of each recalling his peculiar boons, His charters and exemptions. (LB, 232; italics mine)

"They"-that is, rural subjects no less than urban readers-do or at least "ought" to "behold" this beggar and pay philosophical tribute to him because he is already "watching" them. Not to "mind" this seemingly abject figure is to risk appearing devoid of psychological depth; and not to "behold" him is to forfeit the moral capital so sorely needed by Wordsworth's quintessentially modern readers, for whom morality amounts to a calculus of loss and gain, of "boons," "charters," and "exemptions." Like the Pedlar, that is, the Old Cumberland Beggar stands in an almost explicit metonymic relationship to poetry itself, and to fail him is to have failed the implicit test of sensibility and integrity that the monitorial agency of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is forever administering to its readers. In passages such as the one just cited, the steady metaphoric relationship between aesthetic competence and economic prosperity shows both types of proficiency to be located on the same ideological axis of "productivity." Empirical vision, poetic expressivity, and economic man's ability to discern and convert seemingly indifferent perceptual matter into moral and aesthetic capital all rotate around the same idea of speculative intelligence. As the shared condition for the cultural and economic prosperity of modern communities and nations-themselves, as Benedict Anderson has remarked, "cultural artifacts of a particular kind"-"intelligence" is defined by the individual's professional grasp of highly adaptable modes of cognition and representation. Among the Romantics, it was, of course, also known under its more delicate nom de plume: imagination. In any event, either concept refers to the capacity of speakers and writers to mobilize formally distinctive representations in order to access and redirect the psyche of an Other or "Stranger!", to recall Wordsworth's urgent mode of address. Only on the basis of such rhetorical activity, then, can an idea of civitas be realized, for all community is fundamentally something "imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,

''Silent Monitors" yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6). As Wordsworth puts the matter in "A Poet's Epitaph," a poem that opens with an emphatic critique of specialized professionalism (Statesman, Lawyer, Doctor, Soldier, Physician, Moralist) only to recombine these discrete skills in the figure of the poet: In common things that round us lie Some random truths he can impart, The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart. (LB, 237)

There is, then, cause for a more thorough investigation of the connections between the subject matter, the rhetorical presentation, and the cultural logic of the ballad as genre in the context of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, on the one hand, and the monitorial logic of elementary literacy, its catechistic style, and its underlying ideological interestedness, on the other. Striving for a distinctive model of cultural literacy, the speaker of "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree" reconfirms that the traditional model of knowledge as a static aggregate of practical skills and propositional contents has been superseded by a paradigm of knowledge as an open-ended, speculative investment in the cultivation of the self. Knowledge, that is, has become a practice rather than a state. It refers to the yield of increasingly professionalized, institutionalized, disciplined forms of pedagogy. As the site of highly complex, if unapparent, hermeneutic activity, Lyrical Ballads reproduces chronologically and structurally the very logic of pedagogical and monitored self-cultivation that distinguishes Andrew Bell's, Joseph Lancaster's, and Jeremy Bentham's conceptions of educational reform. As we already saw, their theories are fundamentally aimed at replacing an old-fashioned, "content-based," strictly remedial type of education with a method whereby the subjects "learn" by emulating unconsciously the very form or design of instruction. No less than the emergent systems of elemental pedagogy, Wordsworth's implementation of a superior kind of cultural literacy also depends on a readerly "discipline" whose axiomatic truth, like those a priori truths scattered throughout Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's didactic prose, seems only to emerge from interpretive failure. Cultural proficiency and readerly discipline delineate the pedagogical project of mastering textual form. Virtually all of Wordsworth's ballads dramatize or recall a scene of interpretation and instruction, a "moment" constituted by the dialogic or narrative skill of its participating agents, a veritable synecdoche of prevailing affective habits

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and cognitive practices. "Culture," in other words, speaks to us in the freeze-frame technique of the lyric image or in the ghostly language of isolated narrative incidents miraculously salvaged from the debris of history and, like Shelley's "fading coal," displaying the momentary effulgence of a deeper and unsuspected political, sexual, or economic significance. Particularly in the earlier dialogic poems, we thus witness an uneasy complicity between Wordsworth's theories of moral, aesthetic, and rhetorical (self-) cultivation and Bell's reflexive and self-monitoring formal technique, which is designed, as discussed above, to realize a program of lowerclass literacy and middle-class sensibility by dramatizing a model of selfconsciousness born of a habitual self-production and self-alienation. Many poems in Lyrical Ballads thus probe to what extent the moral and pedagogical problem at the center of a given tale can be illuminated by the interpretive technique available to a given poetic character. In this manner, the audience witnesses the alternately enabling and debilitating "preestablished codes of decision" by means of which alone any subject (fictional or empirical) frames its reality. The social issues (poverty, vagrancy, illegitimacy, idiocy, melancholia, crime, economic change, etc.), often viewed as the historical and moral core of Lyrical Ballads, thus enter the scene only as subsidiary motifs, that is, as heuristic fictions designed to activate interpretive paradigms and, where necessary, confront the reader with the consciousness of their inadequacy. Consequently, the historical import of Lyrical Ballads emerges only if we ask whether a given poem's dramatization of and attempts to resolve a conflict of understanding remain caught up in the same material and hermeneutic constraints that produced this conflict or have instead actually developed the quasi-Blakean "contrary" to these constraints. The poems examined below all involve either a direct collision or an oblique interference between two paradigms of knowledge. Such a collision, for example, quickly erodes the fantasized or remembered community between the reflective consciousness ascribed to adults and an affect-based sensibility supposed to characterize the minds of children. Likewise, it vitiates any reconciliation between the poet-traveler's elegiac expertise and the oblivious local nostalgia of Simon Lee. Meanwhile, in "Hart-Leap Well," the tension proves barely noticeable for a shepherd unaware of the appeal of his rustic and unaffected reminiscence for an inquisitive, urban poet, one driven to distraction by the distance between the enigmatic "spot" and the professional potential of the "tale" that he fails to reclaim from that spot. Notwithstanding their extensive ideological filiations,

"Silent Monitors" Wordsworth's representations of "community" tend to revolve around conventional oppositions of the naive and the sentimental, an antithesis variously reconstituted in Lyrical Ballads as that of rural/urban, uneducated/professional, superstitious/rationalist, impoverished/affluent, and local/national, to name but the most prominent. Building on the individual reader's unconscious internalization of a "monitorial" mode of producing its civic and cultural competence, the r8oo edition of Lyrical Ballads complements the earlier collection's more eccentric dramas of instruction with narratives whose pedagogical tension involves not two empirical speakers but an individual and a historical past. This past, even as it maintains an affective and economic hold on the individual, has faded enough to leave him without adequate interpretive resources to comprehend it. Analogous to the often random migration of Wordsworth's characters through inscrutable material landscapes, the reader's movement through Lyrical Ballads requires charting a nearly entropic topography peopled by "dwellers" whose sensibilities-ranging from firmness of mind to outright superstition, from authentic sympathy to urban arrogance, from transparent nostalgia to unregenerate speculation-mirror a likewise complex scale of sociocultural cognition in Wordsworth's audience. Recognitions of the ephemeral status of community and scenes of misunderstanding and misprision abound in these poems, and each poem's dramatization of a scene of understanding, however inadequate, instances a particular unconscious "logic of practice" that sustains at least one paradigm of community in the face of threats to it. Consequently, the "motives" or "pragmatics" shaping a given character's and reader's interpretive practice-and by extension generating a distinctive sensus communis-must not be construed as the immanent, immediate, or essential "content" of their subjectivity. In fact, not even the reader's likely discernment of the formal contradictions between the languages of father and son in "Anecdote for Fathers," or between Leonard and the Priest in "The Brothers," will ever grant him access to the deeper historical causality that has produced his hermeneutic and aesthetic expertise. Hence, a "critical" (as well as "close") reading of Lyrical Ballads ought to trace the political, cultural, and economic motives that determine the audience's reflexive movement through individual poems and through the collection as a whole. The formal-stylistic contradictions within these discrete and discontinuous ballads, the tensions within tone, voice, imagery, character, narrative form, drawn out with such expertise by the readerly culture of the New Criticism and nco-Aristotelian formalists, should now be seen as symp-

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toms of Romanticism's central antagonisms between theory and practice, private incident and cultural norm, details exemplary in theory and facts incumbent on lived existence.J? Rcf1ecting a changed literary strategy (personification rather than allegory) and instancing an equally novel mode of cultural production (the "virtual representation" of anti classical writing masquerading as vernacular speech), the enigmatic fixations of Wordsworth's interrogative lyric voices and personae reconstruct aesthetic experience as hermeneutic "work," as a practice requiring significant social and cultural literacy as well as an essentially professional approach to the practice of reading. To be sure, much depends now on how these alleged transformations in the domain of subjective consciousness and in the cultural practices mediating that consciousness can be shown to operate in a considerable variety of poems and how the stylistic organization of a given ballad encompasses a distinctive model of sociocultural cognition. For the time being, however, the lead hypothesis shall remain: at the level of character, of narrative control, and indeed also of reading, the construction of subjectivity in Lyrical Ballads pivots on the progressive destabilization of a conventional notion of consciousness as the quasi-substantive interior of a given individual. With some of the poems disestablishing that paradigm before our eyes, what we find emerging in its stead is a consciousness whose claim to legitimacy resides in its reflexive anticipation of ever-new challenges to its current sociocultural beliefs. Specifically in the 1798 text of Lyrical Ballads, we can trace the thematic and stylistic groundwork that prepares for the capacious (and deceptively authoritative) voices dominating later ballads, such as "Hart-Leap Well," "The Brothers," and "Michael." Let us start with the dialogical model, identified by Don Bialostosky as the most significant ideological and stylistic feature of the 1798 ballads and, indeed, a subgenre particularly conducive to an analysis of overall ideological motivation of Wordsworth's first Lyrical Ballads.38 In ballads such as "Expostulation and Reply," "The Tables Turned," "Anecdote for Fathers," and "Simon Lee," it is still comparatively easy to show how the scene of instruction dramatized in these poems reproduces itself as a hermeneutic crisis of reading for the reader. Sooner or later, the reader cannot but pick up on formal and stylistic tensions that begin to corrode the paradigm of authority introduced by a given ballad and progressively disestablished by the developments that make up the bulk of the narrative. Precisely insofar as the articulation of such tensions mandates the reader's disengagement from the representational paradigm of a given poem, thus yielding up a more sophisticated paradigm of hermeneutic in-

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telligence, the deceptively incidental and seemingly "private" events recounted in these ballads gradually open up more capacious ideological questions. Even as the collection shifts back and forth between, on one hand, such palpably inadequate scenes of instruction as those of "Anecdote for Fathers," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee" and, on the other hand, models of a maturer, quasi-stoic wisdom intoned by "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree," "Hart-Leap Well," and "Michael," significant tensions remain between a deceptively timeless, settled rhetoric of "natural" wisdom and each narrative's reconstruction of a world whose economic and social contingency outpace the cognitive reach of any one language of interpretation. As an intrinsically twofold hermeneutic object, a sequence of lyrics and a "whole" book, Lyrical Ballads cumulatively restructures its audience's cognitive purchase on an ever-changing social, economic, and cultural environment and, as a further consequence, confronts its readers with the contingent nature of their hermeneutic practice overall.

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Dialogue as Social Practice in Wordsworth and Godwin The Lyrical Ballads of r8oo opens with "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned," poems whose pedagogical deliberations are identified not so much by any explicit propositional content as by each character's implicit practice of a certain "form" of learning and cultivation. Hence the provocative and palpably intrusive "why?"-and not a content-oriented "what"-constrains the respondent to legitimate himself, to confront the mode of production of his very own consciousness: "Why, William, on that old grey stone, "Thus for the length of half a day, "Why, William, sit you thus alone, "And dream your time away? "Where are your books? That light bequeath'd "To beings else forlorn and blind! "Up! Up! and drink the spirit brcath'd "From dead men to their kind. "You look round on your mother earth, "As if she for no purpose bore you; "As if you were her first-born birth, "And none had lived before you!" (LB, I0?-8, ll.

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For William's self-cultivation to appear and be publicly recognized as productive and purposive, he will have to monitor the relation between himself as the subjective agent and himself as objective product of the labor of cultivation. It is just this kind of monitorial self-consciousness that the questioner demands of William and from which, once the question has been put to him, the respondent can never fully recover. More an exhortation than a question, Matthew's challenge sends somewhat different signals to the character in and the reader of the poem. For the latter, the rhetorical excesses and the unexamined imperatives on which Matthew's authority is predicated appear palpable enough. Eager to liberate William from his inert hermetic state and to recover "half a day" of lost productivity for an otherwise unspecified communal "purpose," Matthew's questions strike us as peremptory and self-congratulatory. Indeed, straddling the contiguous fields of moral and political economy, Matthew's claim to authority falters at the level of style, as in his catachrestic expression of "drink[ing] the spirit breath'd from dead men to their kind." To prescribe such a liquid diet of books not only confounds stylistic norms but, more seriously, calls up a controversial Burkean paradigm of learning as the transfusion of an oppressive inheritance into the body politic of the present. In basing his critique of William's stoic propensities on an unexamined standard of economic productivity and cultural traditionalism, Matthew's rhetoric already hints at the eventual rejection of his paradigm of agency as beholden to the fetishes of mechanical industry and a merely scriptural historical consciousness. Moreover, a reading audience already put on notice by the "Advertisement" 's invective against "that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision" (LB, 739) is likely to react with caution, even skepticism, to Matthew's reliance on strictly implicit economic and cultural imperatives. Significantly enough, though, William does not counter Matthew's identification of productivity with assimilating the traditionalist "spirit breath'd I From dead men to their kind" by turning to a Painite, theoretically explicit and radically principled conception of social agency. Indeed, neither in this poem nor elsewhere in Lyrical Ballads do we find positions recalling Thomas Paine's "conten(tion) for the rights of the living, and against ... the manuscript assumed authority of the dead" (Paine, Rights of Man, 42). Rather than objecting to the questioner's obviously antiquated, bibliophile traditionalism, William's response ventriloquizes in seemingly "natural" terms a more contemporary sense of learning, specifically of reading, a sense that seems much closer to Godwin than to

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Paine. Far from seeking education from books, his answer replaces the book as a static repository of propositional knowledge with a dynamic paradigm of reading as the holistic incorporation of infinitely diverse material and psychological phenomena. From his perspective, nature is not opposed to books but in fact functions very much like them. It, too, is part of the larger infrastructure of complex signs and meanings that stimulate its "readers" to evolve to a higher level of cognition. Salvaged from the contingency of their historical production, books-as well as any number of less conspicuous natural phenomena-facilitate the production of a desired contemporary model of flexible, vigilant, and rational middleclass agency. Less on account of their explicit and potentially mistaken content than their capacity for shaping the unconscious, they produce this agency in an utterly "open" present, perched between an opaque past and a contingent future. In his 1797 essay "Of an Early Taste for Reading," William Godwin remarks that books are "the depositary of every thing that is most honorable to man. Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. He that loves reading, has every thing within his reach. He has but to desire; and he may possess himself of every species of wisdom to judge, and power to perform" (E, 31). Godwin's essay subsequently performs two interlocking moves that can be seen as the very signature of a Romantic ideology of education, as well as the period's dominant mode of cultural production. First he argues that a habit of early intense reading transfigures one's local subjective endowments into a veritable allegory of "mankind" or, as Schiller would say, of "humanity." Such a reader "passes through a thousand imaginary scenes ... and thus becomes gradually prepared to meet almost any of the many-coloured events of human life." This speculative transubstantiation of the single individual into a universal spirit corresponds to the assimilation of empirical knowledge to a sphere of pure rationality, a domain for which books, language, and writing serve as the master trope. "If he observe the scenes that occur, it is with the eye of a connoisseur or an artist. Every object is capable of suggesting to him a volume of reflections" (E, 32; italics mine). In the final analysis, Godwin's distinction between a desultory belated reading on the one hand and an early pervasive reading on the other hand must (and does) lead to a conception of self-cultivation whose end point would be the disappearance of any distinction between a consciousness cultivated by reading and the infrastructure of texts and publications delimiting that consciousness. As

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Godwin puts it, "this mode of reading, on which we depend for the consummation of our improvement, can scarcely be acquired, unless we begin to read with pleasure at a period too early for memory to record" (E, 34; italics mine). Once again, Romantic self-cultivation pivots on the experience of rationality as "pleasure," on the transposition of a contingent individuality into a textual trope or emblem of community, of humanity.39 For precisely these reasons, Matthew's otherwise overbearing interrogation of William in "Expostulation and Reply" ultimately achieves, albeit in a more radical sense, what it set out to do: by focusing on William's stoic form of self-cultivation, on the unexplicit mode of production of William's consciousness (a "wise passiveness" bordering on outright indolence), Matthew still succeeds in that he compels William to devise some strategy of self-legitimation. As a result, William will necessarily begin to internalize the very monitorial scrutiny that he just encountered in the figure of his "good friend Matthew." A rather unsettled, selfconscious William now faces the impossible task of explicating an immediate form of experience. As becomes apparent, such a justification of "immediacy" can only take the form of a circular logic or repetition; that is, the original unconscious act of transference (of self onto nature) that had enabled William to "dream [his] time away" in presumptive harmony with nature must be repeated on a larger scale. Not surprisingly, then, William's defense of his stoic ideal (or idyll)-which, by now, is lost to William as an individual-reconceives of that ideal as a legitimate, indeed compelling paradigm of communal sensibility on the order of Schiller's "humanity" (Menschheit), a paradigm, needless to say, far superior to the high-handed, obliquely capitalist idol of productivity internalized by Matthew: "The eye it cannot chuse but see "We cannot bid the ear be still; "Our bodies feel, where'er they be, "Against, or with our will. "Nor less I deem that there are powers, "Which of themselves our minds impress, "That we can feed this mind of ours, "In a wise passiveness. "Think you, mid all this mighty sum "Of things forever speaking, "That nothing of itself will come, "But we must still be seeking?

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"Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, "Conversing, as I may, "I sit upon this old grey stone, "And dream my time away." (LB, ro8, ll. 17-52)

Sensing that any strategy of self-justification for his "wise passiveness" will reproduce the social and economic mediations against which his belief had seemed to immunize him, William's response performs a subtle transposition of dominant authority and counterintuitive example. Converting the charge of indolence into evidence of Matthew's deficient sensibility, William peremptorily redescribes his "wise passiveness" as an axiomatically superior (because spiritual) model of life. As suggested by the abrupt shift to the plural ("our minds"), this counterintuitive standard of inward cultivation (Bildung) appears authorized less by its propositional cogency than by its affective potential as a future revelation. As Wordsworth puts it in the closely related ballad "Lines, Written at a Small Distance from My House," a "universal birth, I From heart to heart is stealing, I . .. It is the hour of feeling" (LB, 63-64, II. 21-24). Matthew's implicit endorsement of civic practice as exclusively answerable to utilitarian standards of productivity now merely demonstrates his failure to respond to the superior belief system that has already revealed itself to William and his kind.40 They think of community no longer as the simple aggregation of individual proprietary, productive interests but as the result of a ,determinate, albeit unconscious, logic of affect. Thus their hypostatized language"this mighty sum I Of things forever speaking"-figures nature as a holistic economy and as an agency of instruction, thereby immunizing it against any future analytic incursions by Matthew or any "meddling intellect" of the sort that Wordsworth, in the Preface (18oo), repeatedly invokes and rejects under the title of "the Man of Science." "The Tables Turned: An Evening Scene, on the Same Subject" (LB, roS-9) further complicates an already precariously abstract lesson that the reading audience of Lyrical Ballads might have drawn from the opening poem of the 18oo text. This companion piece to "Expostulation and Reply," in abandoning the dialogic setting of the first poem, appears to be Wordsworth's first programmatic statement of an affect-based, natural religion, which the previous poem had only tenuously articulated as "this sum of things forever speaking." Oddly enough, however, the philosophy in question is once again expounded in the same obtrusive and overdetermined tone, indeed with a quotation of the preceding ballad's imperious exhortation:

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Up! Up! my friend, and clear your looks, Why all this toil and trouble? Up! Up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you'll grow double. The sun, above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife, Come, hear the woodland linnet, Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to blessSpontaneous wisdom breathed by health Truth breathed by chearfulness. (LB, I08-9, II.

I-20)

What perplexes about this poem is its outright reversal of the professed doctrinal content even as it retains the former ballad's self-assured and excoriating tone. By opening the r8oo collection with two ostensibly programmatic ballads whose almost identical rhetorical forms appear to support diametrically opposed popular philosophies, Wordsworth shatters whatever hermeneutic confidence a reading audience may have brought to these poems. These short poems all but compel their readers to reorganize their conscious sensibility around an unrelenting, shiftless, formal imperative: to anticipate the poems' disconfirming, contingent propositions by cultivating a perpetual aesthetic vigilance and thereby to dismantle the terms of any received cultural and interpretive authority, albeit only within the realm of the conscious interior and not in the sphere of public discourse. Hence, to read the opening poems of the r8oo collection is not only to witness the mutual interference and joint erosion of two seemingly timeless popular tropes for culture-the naive and the sentimental-but also to realize that there will very likely never be a "knowledge" of culture any more abiding than the rhetorical and social situation in which it has been produced. This ultimately applies also to the elaboration of a "spontaneous" and immediate sensibility, "Truth breathed by chearfulness," in the present lyric. In its strictly formal advocacy of nature as the scene and agent of instruction, the anonymous voice of "The Tables Turned" assists its disaffected urban readers in forgetting the extent to which the projection of an immediate, abiding communal affect constitutes a defensive reaction against the deeper knowledge of their irremediable alienation.

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Their disposition is shaped by the inexorable demands of the self's anxiously reflexive cultural "interest" and by the unrelenting capitalist displacements and reinvestments of that "self." The irruption of a formal-reflexive energy into the seemingly settled practice of a meditative, bibliophile self-cultivation in these lyrics is reinforced by the apparent erosion of any perspective from which this energy might be said to originate. What appear to be straightforward questions descending on a rather unprepared William vex their respondent with their obliquely encoded rhetorical charge of a moral reprimand. Even as they purport to solicit an explication of his creed, the questions appear suffused with the charge of belatedness: that William's meditative condition is inherently unjustifiable because it is merely a "natural" effect (intrinsically unself-conscious) of his failure to monitor his own performance relative to a transindividual standard of civic and cultural productivity. Likewise, William's reappropriation in "The Tables Turned" of a similar mode of peremptory challenge is aimed less at the bibliophile Matthew, with his Enlightenment sensibility, than at the friend, who has not yet internalized a belief system of self-evident superiority ("one impulse from the vernal wood I May teach you more of man; of moral evil and of good, I Than all the sages can," LB, 109). Though this system's superiority would seem to inhere in its "immediate," largely affect-driven quality, it is also a system whose seemingly immediate "truth" can benefit only the already disaffected "meddling intellect" of an amorphous urban and commercial society. The poem thus throws into relief a constitutive paradox of the ballad as genre: even as "the ballad is a machine for re-creating context, ... the only true ballad tragedy is the constant failure or breakdown of that machinery, its impossible relation to authenticity" (Stewart, Crimes, 122). Reflecting a tension within the genre to which I will return, what is here called "Truth breathed by chearfulness" does not designate a cult whose purported immediacy we can endorse as an originary episteme or virtue. Rather-and this explains why the speaker at the end of "Expostulation and Reply" and throughout "TheTables Turned" once again modulates interrogation into reprimand-the failure of meddling intellects lies in their refusal to turn their analytic prisms upon themselves and to discover the spontaneity of human affect as the authentic object of productive cultivation.

Like its companion piece, "We Are Seven," Wordsworth's "Anecdote for Fathers" warrants extensive quotation, for it is at the micropoetic level of dialogic speech that the question of pedagogical authority is being

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worked out. As in Wollstonecraft's tales, this narrative centers on the sudden obtrusion of self-consciousness on a hapless disciple, though the performance now appears destitute of any salutary effects. In fact, in reading the poem for the first time, one inevitably begins to pick up on an underlying dialectic relationship between the misguided pedagogic "designs" of its principal speaker and the pedagogy of the text's own poetic performance. In confronting the reader with a self-absorbed and insensitive "shew" of adult rationality, "Anecdote for Fathers" constrains its audience to maintain an anxious, vigilant awareness similar to the state of mind belatedly understood by the son to be an asset crucial to his continued well-being. Overall, the poem's idiom encourages the reader to assemble a holistic interpretation and, in so doing, to approach the very experience of "reading" with a mind sufficiently reflexive not to repeat the very excesses from which the poem has derived its "tale." Or, to put the matter in the form of a question: how does the performance of the poem-as a text constructing the consciousness of its reception-avoid reproducing in its own verbal style the adult questioner's excessive rationality? Here, then, is the first part of Wordsworth's scene of instruction: I have a boy of five years old, His face is fair and fresh to see; His limbs are cast in beauty's mould, And dearly he loves me. One morn we stroll'd on our dry walk, Our quiet house all full in view, And held such intermitted talk As we are wont to do. My thoughts on former pleasures ran; I thought of Kilve's delightful shore, My pleasant home, when spring began, A long, long year before. A day it was when I could bear To think, and think, and think again; With so much happiness to spare, I could not feel a pain. My boy was by my side, so slim And graceful in his rustic dress! And oftentimes I talked to him, In very idleness. The young lambs ran a pretty race; The morning sun shone bright and warm;

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"Kilve," said I, "was a pleasant place, "And so is Liswyn farm. "My little boy, which like you more," I said and took him by the arm"Our home by Kilve's delightful shore, "Or here at Liswyn farm?" "And tell me, had you rather be," I said and held him by the arm"At Kilve's smooth shore by the green sea, "Or here at Liswyn farm?" In careless mood he looked at me, While still I held him by the arm, And said, "At Kilve I'd rather be "Than here at Liswyn farm." (LB, ?I-72, II. T-)6)

The poem's challenge to many generations of readers has been its demand for a critical and self-reflexive interpretive relation to the voice of the father. It is the elder's voice that resonates with an almost unbearable aesthetic complacency and moral high-mindedness. With each unexpected shift of emphasis, and with his repeated evasion of personal accountability, the figure of the father-the self-styled embodiment of rational thoughtappears paradoxically beyond all rational scrutiny himself. Recalling Thomas Paine's unflattering portrayal of monarchy as burlesque-a staged, "silly, contemptible thing ... kept behind a curtain about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss" (Rights of Man, r82)-the father's affect here is also shrouded by mystery, inclined to capricious and inscrutable reversals. At the same time, the opening characterization of the father's ineluctable preference for "Kilve's smooth shore" and his mannered sculpting of the son ("cast in beauty's mould") render him precious and self-absorbed. His "dry walk" and "intermitted talk" with his son set us on edge on account of both their covert sensuality and their studious indifference to all communication.41 For all of 22 lines, the reader witnesses the father projecting his self-absorbed elegiac inwardness on the aestheticized body of his son. Thus the father's generic lament ("former pleasures," a "pleasant home," and the season of spring from "a long, long year before") shades into a self-conscious nostalgia of almost masturbatory intensity, an activity at once redundant, contentless, and, precisely for those reasons, bound to be projected into the sphere of social and discursive relations. Claiming for himself the very excess of fulfillment that masks a consciousness oppressed by the demand for the renewal of such pleasure

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(''A day it was when I could bear I To think, and think, and think again I With so much happiness to spare"), the shiftless and ultimately phony "depth" of the father's sensibility will seek to replicate itself in some social consensus, to "ground" itself in a binding sensus communis. Indeed, an alert reading audience might even have associated the opening aesthetic framing of the son with the sensualist aesthetic of the ancien regime and with the cultural elitism and ennui of English peers and grandees. The poem's exploration of the domestic politics of instruction, the verifiability of a moral "core" of sincerity in the son, and the poem's concern with its own vernacular "style" of analysis also constitute Wordsworth's attempt to respond to radical Enlightenment theory, specifically the pedagogical writings of William Godwin. Godwin's "Of Deception and Frankness," included in the Enquirer (1797), is a locus classicus of a fantasized, utterly rational, transparent, and homogeneous community of speakers and listeners.42 Suspending his customary reverence for the work of Rousseau, Godwin rejects Rousseau's "whole system of education [as] a series of tricks, a puppet-show exhibition, of which the master holds the wires, and the scholar is never to suspect in what manner they are moved" (E, ro6). His own, decidedly less theatrical model of pedagogy rejects both the antiquated, overtly authoritarian model (already denounced by the citizen of Geneva) and Rousseau's performative notion of instruction as a process requiring the teacher to dissimulate his authority. Such a model Godwin characterizes as misguided and even malignant in ways strikingly parallel to the events in Wordsworth's ''Anecdote for Fathers": The usual mode of treating young persons, will often be found to suggest to children of ardent fancy and inquisitive remark, a question, a sort of floating and undefined reverie, as to whether the whole scene of things played before them be not a delusion, and whether, in spite of contrary appearances, they are not a species of prisoners, upon whom their keepers have formed some malignant design, which has never yet been properly brought to light. The line which is ordinarily drawn between men and children is so forcible, that they seem to themselves more like birds kept in a cage, or sheep in a pen, than like beings of the same nature. (E, ros-6)

Recalling the inscrutable motivation of Rousseau's pedagogue, the father in Wordsworth's poem seizes Edward by the arm and exacts an explanation for his son's preference of one locale over another, even though it had been the father to begin with who had gratuitously raised the question and had done so, moreover, in a manner that rhetorically predetermined the "choice" for which he now holds his son responsible. What disturbs Godwin about the dissimulation of authority, however, is not so much the

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prospect of an unpredictable, "forcible" discharge of adult authority upon the child-prisoner, which ultimately remains incidental, but the disintegration of his own proto-liberal fantasy of a rational community and its corresponding (indeed Habermasian) "ideal speech situation." In other words, what warrants the kind of correction of which Godwin's own text avails itself is the very opposition of innocence/corruption and child/adult. For Godwin, it is not enough to shelter youthful affect from the elegiac and duplicitous mediations of the adult world. Rather, he insists, a legitimate form of pedagogy must cultivate a distinctive "style" of rational and explicit communication in which both child and adult participate with equal frankness, a style of authentic "manliness" that coincides with the abstract, rational logic of which it is the consummate manifestation. In outlining his ideal of pedagogy as the coincidence of conviction and speech, rationality and style, Godwin takes recourse to a heuristic fiction-arguably the only kind of fiction ever encountered in the Enquirerthat anticipates Wordsworth's opening of "Anecdote for Fathers" almost verbatim. The following passage outlines the "fiction" in question: The child that any reasonable person would wish to call his own or choose for the object of his attachment, is a child whose countenance is open and erect. Upon his front sit fearless confidence and unbroken hilarity. There are no wrinkles in his visage and no untimely cares. His limbs, free and unfettered, move as his heart prompts him, and with a grace and agility infinitely more winning than those of the most skilful dancer.... There is something in the sound of his voice, full, firm, mellow, fraught with life and sensibility; at the hearing of which my bosom rises, and my eyes are lighted up. He sympathises with sickness and sorrow, not in a jargon purposively contrived to cajole the sufferer, but in a vein of unaffected tenderness. When he addresses me, it is not with infantinc airs and in an undecided style, but in a manner that shows him fearless and collected, full of good sense, of prompt judgment, and appropriate phraseology. All his actions have a meaning; he combines the guilelessness of undesigning innocence with the manliness of maturer years. (E, ro8-9)

Godwin's "heart leaps up" when he beholds this child, for it is the (fictional) embodiment of his own dearest rationalist fantasy. The child in question is to be understood neither as a child nor as an adult in any empirical sense but, rather, as an unself-conscious symbolization of Godwin's dominant intellectual vision. As such, the child's physical integrity gives metaphoric "substance" to Godwin's projection of adult rationality, a projection that is never realized in the actual world of any parent. Hence, what causes the parental "bosom [to] rise" is the belated projection of an unattainable state of emotive and cognitive alignment in which "all ...

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actions have a meaning" and in which our consciousness remains free of "cares" and our brows of their physical counterpart, "wrinkles." Raising his prose to sonorous and alliterative pitch, Godwin takes pains to identify this superior state with the uncorrupted and wise cadences of a "voice, full, firm, mellow." Ultimately, Godwin's central fiction of a "state" of pure rationality (in the double sense of an affective disposition and an administration of community) generates the epistemological fiction of absolute self-presence and the corresponding aesthetic fantasy of a transparent voice, tropes designed to qualify representations as spontaneous and natural. Posited as the substantive counterpart of Godwin's notion of rationality, "voice" appears to derive its purity from an oblique affiliation with some putative masculine "essence." To that extent, "voice" is brought into the argument in contradistinction to the feminine attributes of sensual contrivance ("infantine airs"), moral fickleness ("undecided style"), and excessive receptivity to social determinants ("a jargon purposively contrived"). Like Andrew Bell's theory, Godwin's philosophical project is undergirded by the fantasy of a cultural "state" in which desire and rationality exist in complete alignment. Like Schiller's celebrated definition of "freedom as the spontaneous recognition of necessity," Godwin's conception of pedagogy depends on the personification (or "persona-fiction") of an unqualified adult rationality paradoxically associated with the "unbroken hilarity" of a child's consciousness. What results is the allegorical fiction of a state of adult/child homology wherein the individual's cultivation of pleasure will simultaneously generate the "gold-standard" of communal rationality. As Godwin notes earlier in the essay, "morality is nothing but a calculation of pleasures" (E, ro4). Consequently, as he puts it elsewhere in the Enquirer, "the only possible method in which I can excite a sensitive being to the performance of a voluntary action, is by the exhibition of a motive" (E, 76). For Godwin, it is only in the distinctive cadences of a given vernacular "style" that we can realize (as speakers) and discern (as listeners) the unconscious mode of producing "pleasure" and the emergence of a corresponding unconscious "desire" that will eventually be reconstituted as a rational motive. Whether in the exchanges between two individuals or in a text simulating such dialogue and ventriloquizing its readers' interpretive response, pedagogy for Bell, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the early Wordsworth hinges on monitorial surveillance of the aesthetic contours that lurk beneath the deceptively innocuous surfaces of empirical speech. Even so, if Godwin's proto-liberal fantasy of a state of pure rationality appears predicated on the recovery of an aesthetics of authentic, "plain"

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speech (an ultimately conservative ideal, which he shares with Paine), Wordsworth, a careful reader of Godwin at the time, subtly shifts the dramatic emphasis. He stresses instead the aesthetic potential of "voice" as something far too complex to be consigned to its strictly supplemental role in Godwin's precarious, self-confirming argumentation.43 Depicting father and son encircling their "quiet house all full in view" and engaged in otherwise unspecified "intermitted talk I As we arc wont to do," the opening of "Anecdote for Fathers" briefly calls up the delicate (and deceptively casual) equilibrium of family- and property-relations in the mideighteenth-century conversation piece. At the same time, the poem dramatizes the extensive fragmentation of the logical and spatial axis on which that genre had aligned the functions of family portraiture and landscape painting, the reciprocal legitimation of kinship and "landed interest," foreground and background (see Fig. 5). Thus Wordsworth's mention of a "dry walk" reveals the elegiac sensibility of the father as alienated from "my pleasant home," a phrase no longer connected to an authentic estate but instead reminiscent of an imaginary and unattainable condition. Meanwhile the son appears uncomfortable in his growing awareness of being "framed," of having been not only "cast in beauty's mould" ("so slim I And graceful in his rustic dress") but also "cast" in a script, a generic situation whose formal logic and social purpose are utterly unknown to him. There is, in other words, a world of difference between the formal, generic authority invoked with such studious understatement in the father's casual opening of the conversation ("I talked to him I In very idleness") and the son's lack of a properly monitorial consciousness ("In careless mood he looked at me"). What specifically accounts for the disturbing, almost bizarre quality of the ensuing dialogue is the fact that the father's "idleness" proves merely a simulation of the traditional estatesman's aesthetic and political confidence.44 In fact, as the reader has by now had ample opportunity to notice, the casual authority of the father's vernacular shrouds the sense of alienation and affective disequilibrium of the narrator's internal monologue. As the poem proceeds to detail the son's forcible initiation into the social, rhetorical, and aesthetic determinants of his father's consciousness, both the reader and the five-year-old boy are subjected to a tour de force in elementary education on what, only moments before, had seemed a bright spring morning when "the young lambs ran a pretty race." The father's initial remark proves virtually identical with his previous meditation and as such appears to require no particular response whatsoever: "'Kilve,' said I, 'was a pleasant place, I 'And so is Liswyn farm.'" Somewhat strained in its attempted equation of the

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present "dry walk" (at Liswyn) with "former pleasures" (at Kilve), the father's vernacular transcribes with seismographic accuracy the collision between the subterranean planes of authority and desire. To the attentive reader, the initial statement's transformation into a question directed at the son can no longer be discounted as a mere symptom of the "idleness" that had characterized the "intermitted" conversation between father and son. Indeed, with the father regularly seizing young Edward by the arm (11. 26, 30, 34), the very power structure that had heretofore tacitly underwritten the regime of paternal sensibility suddenly erupts to the surface of verbal and paralinguistic "style." The urgency of the physical gesture is reproduced by the imbalanced syntax of the question that the gesture underscores: as the father dwells on the remembrance of things past ("Kilve's delightful shore/ .. . I At Kilve's smooth shore by the green sea"), the monotonous repetition of the present alternative ("Or here at Liswyn farm?") is made to absorb the uncertainty of the questioning syntax.45 Ultimately, Wordsworth's poem produces a critique of Godwin, though it is shrouded by a tale superficially mimicking Godwin's own critique of Rousseau. In vacillating on his preference of places, in insisting that the son sanction one or the other choice, and in demanding a reason for that choice from a small child who had never contemplated the issue, the father reveals that his own rationality-and, consequently, his own claim to pedagogical authority-is just as "groundless" as the restless energy with which he now forces the conversation toward its wholly inconclusive end. Neither father nor son has ever worked from a model of rational first causes and transparent psychological effects, nor will they ever be able to recover such a logic; rather, as the poem's ending suggests, the conversation is determined by contingent reactions of its participants to the rhetorical qualities that provide the dialogue with its distinctive performative texture.46 Thus the concluding lines, while familiarizing Edward with the inscrutable cathections of the adult psyche, also show his own answer to be just as contingent as the father's overbearing interrogation: His head he raised-there was in sight, It caught his eye, he saw it plainUpon the house-top, glittering bright, A broad and gilded vane. Then did the boy his tongue unlock, And thus to me he made reply; "At Kilve there was no weather-cock, ''And that's the reason why."

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0 dearest, dearest boy! my heart For better lore would seldom yearn, Could I but teach the hundredth part Of what from thee I learn. (LB, 73. II. 49-6o)

Few ballads risk ending with such a blatant conundrum. As the review for the Monthly Review put it laconically, "the object of the child's choice, and the inferences, are not quite obvious." 47 Responding to his son's seemingly "irrational" (or idiosyncratic) and palpably contingent answer, the father's apostrophic conclusion appears conspicuously stylized and, in its strained fusion of elusive content and affirmative tone, unreliable and obtuse.48 The subjunctive ("would seldom yearn I Could I but teach") not only shows that the father's affective economy is still as imbalanced as before but also suggests that, whereas the father's question remains unanswered, his son, having asked none, has in fact learned an important lesson. At the center of that lesson stands the word "lore," which (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) may designate either "the act of teaching" or "that which is taught." Approaching the poem with the same kind of monitorial scrutiny and weariness that eventually characterize Edward's responses and circumscribe the lesson he has learned, the reader progressively assembles an analogously formal and indirect lesson. To read "Anecdote for Fathers" with any comprehension at all is to anticipate an unresolved contradiction between the father's compulsive imposition of a pseudo-rational standard on his son and the poem's seemingly analogous pedagogical designs on the reader. Readers are thus constrained to devise more flexible and self-conscious responses to a narrative poetry whose stylistic implementation of pedagogical motifs and themes comes close to mirroring (and thus confounding) the avowed social and aesthetic authority of such poetry, both as a historical genre and as a performance in the present. Promoting his audience through Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth thus reshapes the reader's psyche into a more sophisticated and resourceful agency. Even as it is "objectively" or "consciously" centered on the textual drama of the poem, the vigilant or "self-watching subtilizing mind" (to recall Coleridge's phrase) continually absorbs the criteria that will allow it to discriminate between authentic and deceptive forms of cognition and representation. By tracing the numerous faultlines between speech and narrative, between parental and poetic instruction, between the deceptive innocence of vernacular speech and a middlebrow culture ventriloquizing

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its affective and social conflicts in the anonymous genre of the ballad, the reader generates a new paradigm of hermeneutic competence and, consequently, a change in the paradigm of social consciousness itself.49 Lectio, we may provisionally conclude, produces not the substantive "wealth" of some positive knowledge or "lore" but instead the strictly virtual "capital" of a consciousness raised to greater (skeptical and reflexive) proficiency in its interaction with cultural and rhetorical forms. Hence the "lesson" that seems to resonate in the disparate, elusive, and ill-conceived affirmations of the father's concluding lines imparts, in fact, no particular insight. Indeed, whatever "lore" the poem divulges will admit only of an allegorical formulation, achievable by subordinating the poem's thematic focus on considerate questions and truthful answers to the reader's pragmatic monitoring of the dialogic form and the ballad genre, which profess to convey such a wholesome message. For it is through his scrutiny of the poem's dramatization of pedagogical form that the reader comes to discern the contingent, ultimately inscrutable affect that has displaced itself into and as the father's question. And it is precisely the "symptomatic" status of the father's conversational "idleness" as contingent displacement which is captured in Edward's choice of the "weather-cock," an emblematically random image. In sharp contrast to the perilous "depth" of parental affect, the son's abrupt realization of the pragmatic potential of selfawareness is announced by a corresponding reversal of the father's meandering elegiac style to the verbal staccato of blunt, specular images ("in sight" I "caught his eye" I "saw it plain" I "glittering bright" I "broad and gilded"). Rather than yielding a specific interpretive proposition or conclusion for the reader, "Anecdote for Fathers" thus ends with a moment of filial recognition whose complex relevance to the reader's continuing engagement with Lyrical Ballads can only be grasped indirectly, by our reading against the grain of the father's obtusely affirmative and conditional appropriation of his son's "lore."

1!5

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Recollection and Transmission in the Ballad Genre It is now time to expand our focus beyond individual ballads that commuted reading from a consumptive into a productive activity. We also need to move beyond the earlier hypothesis that viewed the shift in the paradigm of reading as symptomatic of larger shifts in the demographic unconscious of early Romanticism, namely, the hypothesis that the new manner of read-

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ing served to promote and materially assist the proto-bourgeois individual in his or her quest for economic and cultural ascendancy. For beyond the intriguing stylistic manifestation of history as an absent structural cause lies the question, why have these ideological developments so emphatically and overwhelmingly played themselves out in poetry? More specifically, why should they have objectified themselves in the genre of the ballad, a genre that for some time has been viewed as having become not only internally conflicted but "distressed" and deeply "schizophrenic" by the end of the eighteenth century?50 To attempt an answer to such questions, it is not enough to recall more familiar "facts" about the emergence of the ballad as a "primitive" literary form (the "broadside" ballads), its rise to respectability (as "credal" poetry), and the growing ability of this hybrid form to stimulate antiquarian impulses among its late-eighteenth-century audiences. Indeed, compiling a genealogy of the ballad as a cultural form is very much a middle-class project, assigning one's less accomplished cultural forbears their "proper" place on the ascending family tree of literary history, complete with dates and professional acquirements. Needless to say, such dignified historical research will inevitably become mired in the same unstable relation between a form of historical knowledge and the comprehension of that form's history which had rendered the ballad such enigmatic "kin" to begin with. In other words, if the study of literary history has produced a reliable sense of the ballad's genesis and its evolution into valid "literature," such genealogical, usually antiquarian erudition may turn out to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. For the ballad's (culturally unconscious) mission was precisely to assist in the formation of a national literature, to contribute to what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have called the "invention of tradition," and to formulate the idea of a nation's "cultural heritage" as an ongoing interpretive social project, education in the broadest sense. As a collateral effect of the larger movement of British nationalism, this "scholarly revolution"-which also produced the new bourgeois subjectivities of the "collector" and amateur historian (see Newman, Rise, I09-19)-would find its logical completion in the canonization of certain genres as authentically "literary," as well as in their subsequent canonical study and curricular reproduction. As a reflex of changing patterns in late-eighteenth-century cultural production, the ballad thus significantly contributed to the formation of a middle-class academic model of literary education and to the conscientious and explicit techniques of reading associated with the rising discipline of historical philology. These institutions, in turn, produced and legitimated the ballad as an objective literary form and as authentic cultural heritage. In other

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words, the ballad produced a mode of historical comprehension which yielded an authoritative, functional concept of "literature" that (usually) included the ballad and even saw itself as "rooted" in that form. To the extent that such literary education has accomplished its mission, most readers will likely agree on a few relatively broad features as seminal characteristics of the ballad genre: its written simulations of a mode of speech whose presence both hints at and elides its particular sociohistorical context; its ventriloquizing of voices taken as echoes of its purported origins in oral folk-culture; its anonymous and authorless mode of appearance; and, finally, its formal condensation of tragic social incident in the nearly testamental concision of its narrative form.51 Beyond these features, any description of the genre becomes quickly muddied. To cite but one case in point, Robert Mayo notes, "it is customary to consider the 'lyrical ballad' as a kind of literary hybrid, invented by the poets for a somewhat special purpose, which modified significantly the traditional features of the ballad species" ("Contemporaneity," 509). Needless to say, Mayo's implicitly biological and cultural paradigms of "purity" do not line up very well, for to tell the story of the genre's cultural evolution into a more sophisticated literary form-of which nearly all critics are wholly persuaded, Mayo included-is to concede the dilution of the ballad's primitive, organic constitution by essentially modern, group-specific interests (what Mayo refers to as "a somewhat special purpose"). Not too surprisingly, Mayo thus is forced to concede that "by 1798 almost anything might be called a 'ballad' and often was. The word, of course, suggested traditional balladry-the folk ballad, the poetry of the non-literary classes, the celebrated verses of Bishop Percy's Reliques. But it suggested also the broadside ballad-i.e., any verses of several stanzas which might be sung to a popular tune or be sold in the streets" (507). To resolve the confusion, which he has not so much produced as inherited from the Romantics, one must jettison a purely immanent, literary model of study and consider the possibility that Mayo's "somewhat special purpose" may involve a larger historical mission. Indeed if the biological paradigm of hereditary traits and genealogical improvement cannot account for the persistent resurfacing of supposedly inferior and recessive traits-"primitivism," the proverbial "simplicity" and "artlessness" that appear in so many poems of Lyrical Ballads, much to Coleridge's dismay and Francis Jeffrey's glee-it may be worthwhile to rethink its temporal logic as retroactive rather than progressive. To do so is to understand the ballad as a genre continually retelling the story of its (and its characters') exodus from the paradisiacal, rustic,

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and essentially oral culture of the broadside and its emergence as a contemporary, albeit conflicted and amorphous, "literary" mode. Such a narrative grants literature the unique capacity for maintaining both allegiances to the past and legitimacy in the present. To recover from its "exile," the modern ballad in form and incident constantly establishes reference to a hypostatized prehistory of authentic feeling and communal simplicity. It cannot, however, actually remember that history itself. Instead, it only remembers "forgetting" it (with an ambivalent stress on "forgetting" as either the result of the sheer passage of time or of betrayal), for it is a history of primitive forbears constructed mostly in reaction against the antagonisms of the present.SZ Thus Susan Stewart has recently pointed to the ballad's aggressive restriction of a context for its voices, an action that renders the genre itself "symptomatic": it now appears but as a fragment of a larger whole, not only of other versions but of the entire aura of the oral world-such "a world's imagined presence, immediacy, organicism, and authenticity" (Crimes, 104). Yet if such "writing of oral genres always results in a residue of lost context and lost presence," this putative loss of history is actively being converted into a "sense of nostalgia and even regret," and precisely to that extent, that loss facilitates what Stewart describes as "the artifactualization of the ballad [that] is coterminous with the commodification of literature" (ros). For her, "the Scandal of the ballad is in its very revival: the production of a ghost, freed of a history that scholarship will take on as its duty to supply.... Imitation arises as a scandal, forgery as a style of genius, and scholarship as a cure"(ro8).53 Constructing a threshold between history and literature, between "primitive" social and "evolved" cultural forms, the aesthetic authority of the ballad is vested in its power of "salvation," of transfiguring the allegedly unself-conscious life forms of a hypostatized, "simple" past into the cohesive symbolism of written poetry, its institutional fixation in a "canon" and its traditions of production and reception. Thus motivated, the genre of the ballad throws into relief the larger, highly complex ideological motivations that fuel and define various forms of historical comprehension. Even as History is being produced by the ballad's rhetorical organization-which ostensibly "salvages" history in the decontextualized, narrative form of succinct reminiscences yielding psychological "interest"-it is just this symbolic practice of reconstituting, preserving, and condensing history that underwrites the integrity and legitimacy of a cultural community in the present. The ballad produces "'tradition' [as] something amorphous, indicating survival but not in any classical sense,

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because what is transmitted through the generations is partly hearsay, superstition, legend." 54 Hence to commit the methodological resources (and the corresponding ideological fervor) of historicist and materialist critique to the project of a full recontextualization of the ballad-to pursue, in other words, the liberation of sociomaterial signifieds from that genre's studiously enigmatic commerce with history-is in fact to take the ideological bait thrown out by that very genre's aesthetic. For the ultimate test of the reader's commitment to the aesthetic involves the "completion" of literature and poetry by the project and the institutions of "critique" (Kritik), what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, redescribing Schlegel's theory of "Criticism," call the reiconstruction "of the spiritual intuition of the object." 55 Thus the ballad narratively reconstitutes history as the correlate of defective transmission and incomplete remembrance, as an opaque residue of a simpler past destined to fade from memory on account of its oral rather than written discursive status. It thereby stimulates within its readers the devotional ethos of antiquarian exegesis and philological recovery that over time was to reproduce itself as a literary canon and in institutions charged with that canon's material preservation and pedagogical reproduction. Discussing the exemplary case of Thomas Chatterton, Marjorie Levinson puts the matter thus: the "canon at once created the taste, which it represented as already venerable and prestigious, and offered itself as the only artifact capable of satisfying it." In other words, "the literariness of ... [such] poetry was strictly a function of its documentary, antiquarian presentation" (Keats's Life, ro). True to the genre's concern with aesthetic economy, the poems in Lyrical Ballads throw the ballad's complex cultural logic into relief by recovering the present's troubled hermeneutic relation to a fading agrarian mode of social organization. This they do by dramatizing the discursive and tonal constraints and expectations that bear down on the poet searching for adequate representations of that past. The character of the poet in "Simon Lee" confronts a past that exposes his rhetorical overconfidence, indeed his obliviousness as a speaker to the symbolic import of what he narrates. In "Hart-Leap Well," meanwhile, the poet's intuitive grasp of the significant narrative matter associated with an enigmatic, desolate "spot" places him in a state of hermeneutic receivership relative to the shepherd who details significant local history. The poet and the shepherd form but the most tenuous of communities, however, for while the latter's ability to remember the low-key drama of rural life makes him the poet's conduit to the past, it is only the rhetorical and professionalized poet who can identify the shepherd as a suitable conduit to what is a nearly forgotten

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past, and who can articulate that past's ideological interest for the present. Particularly in the r8oo edition of Lyrical Ballads, from the opening "Hart-Leap Well" to the remarkable closing statement of "Michael," the Romantic concern with pedagogy reappears as a quest for the rhetorical and aesthetic forms best suited to the overarching purposes and "interests" of culture so as to ensure its own transmission and reproduction in future communities. Pedagogy thus operates simultaneously at the levels of synchrony and diachrony. The former is instanced by the microculture of Bell's and Lancaster's monitorial systems and, specifically, by how these systems are adapted to inculcating moral and aesthetic literacy among Wollstonecraft's and Wordsworth's middle-class characters and reading audiences. Meanwhile, the diachronic nature of pedagogy can be traced in the macro-cultural drama of historical transmission instanced by the very genre of the ballad and by the supplemental exegetical institutions (e.g., ballad scholarship)-charged with regulating the ideological commerce of a present culture with its (invented) traditions. If "Anecdote for Fathers" challenges the reader to construct a counterintuitive narrative to correct the specious affirmations of the poem's final lines, such encouragement of interpretive dissent from the narrator's rhetorical authority echoes the slightly less obvious instability of the closing lines in "Simon Lee," which precedes ''Anecdote for Fathers." 56 Whereas the latter poem constrains the reading audience to dissociate itself from the paternal regime's alternately complacent and duplicitous rhetoricthereby suggesting that a hermeneutics of dissent is a precondition for any meaningful reading, however inflected-"Simon Lee" appears to guide the reader's reaction to the story (or, rather, non-story) of the ballad by a more explicit though still unreliable authorial intervention. Indeed, as the more loquacious, histrionic digression in "The Idiot Boy" will make clear, such an interruption results from personal and professional motives: I to the muses have been bound, These fourteen years, by strong indentures; Oh gentle muses! let me tell But half of what to him befel. (LB, IOI, ll. 347-50)

Once confessed, such motives never quite fade from the reader's mind but in fact tend to complicate one's relationship to the ballad's story and to the history allegedly preserved by it. In "Simon Lee," meanwhile, following a lavish 68-line portrayal of the old huntsman's decaying physical, domestic, and economic constitution, the detailed and sincere descriptive idiom is

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suddenly interrupted by an authorial intervention whose unsuspected scrutiny (and preemptive critique) of the reader's "pre-established codes of decision" bears an uncanny resemblance to Bell's and Bentham's monitorial system of pedagogy. My gentle reader, I perceive How patiently you've waited, And I'm afraid that you expect Some tale will be related. 0 reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, 0 gentle reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, I hope you'll kindly take it; It is no tale; but should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it. (LB, 67, II. 69-80)

At the very least, the narrator's intervention intensifies the reader's selfconsciousness by hinting at a disparity between the poem's authorial "design" and the reader's lesser interpretive resources. For to disclose, without any warning, that "I perceive I How patiently you've waited" is to reveal that the entire preceding description-quite apart from its intricate historical references-was meant to generate a hermeneutic plot between the author/narrator and the projected reading audience as much as it was to "relate" a talcF To be sure, this carefully timed disclosure that the deferred telling of a non-story has enabled the author/narrator to monitor the reader's interpretive circumspection and self-reflexivity is not aimed at maintaining the reader in a state of hermeneutic receivership; on the contrary, to disclose that the narrator's surveillance ("I perceive") of the reader's performance has lasted as long and "patiently" as the latter was craving for some incident or "tale" is to invite the reader to emulate the author/narrator's superior state of formal, reflexive self-cultivation. Hence the verse advocates a paradigmatic reversal according to which the "tale" becomes a function or effect of the "silent" productivity of thought. In other words, for any tale to have more than "incidental" value, it must be generated by an inward, reflective dynamic that will, in due time, yield the virtual capital ("such stores as silent thought can bring") of a cultivated inward sensibility. Thus forewarned, the reader of the "no tale" that follows is now expected to demonstrate his formal-interpretive skill and au-

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thority by transforming a materially contingent "scene" into a "tale" offering instruction in formal ethics. Admittedly, such a reading seems to reflect a strong (and today almost anachronistic) formalist tendency. Throughout "Simon Lee," the trauma of pervasive historical change and its corresponding material antagonisms is being encrypted within the local and plain symbolic order of the poem itself; the speaker's formal-aesthetic emphasis of descriptive "close-ups" continually displaces the impending drama of social analysis. Indeed, the poem's overriding strategy of assimilating or (as Hegel might put it) "interiorizing" (erinnern) an empirical scene as the reflexive appearance of a more ideal form of knowledge identifies one of the dominant representational strategies of the entire collection of Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 18oo). It is precisely in the text's and the collection's overriding formal-rhetorical interest, its symbolic strategy, that we can trace the historical "content," the ideological pragmatics of such formal experimentation: to forge a "virtual" and forever provisional community of cognate interpretive sensibilities through the ever-shifting hermeneutic drama of the reader's aesthetic response. In other words, to read "Simon Lee" as another instance of Romanticism's dominant mode of cultural production-namely, the mode of subordinating the putative facticity of historicomaterial reference to the formal-virtual drama of its textual (re)construction-is not simply to reinstate the familiar, righteous charge against Wordsworth as continually "evading" History. Rather, this dissolution of the historical and material setting of Simon Lee, the huntsman, constitutes itself as a distinctive historical practice in its own right, something akin to what, in a different context, Renata Rosaldo has characterized as "imperialist nostalgia." In evading the consciousness of their very own historicity, the poetic figurations of "Simon Lee" disclose nonetheless distinctive historical energy. They do so to the extent that Wordsworth's projected reading audiencecomprising mostly the growing, if predominantly unself-conscious, middle class in provincial towns and London-is itself an effect of the same historical transformations that have left Simon Lee marooned with only the vestiges ("a long blue livery-coat") of feudalism's vanished political economy. What better way to affirm the historical success of a professional middle class than the nostalgic passage in which the speaker mourns a feudal system whose demise facilitated the ascendancy of a British middle class: His master's dead, and no one now Dwells in the hall of lvor;

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Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead; He is the sole survivor.

Such "nostalgia of the distressed genre is ... a nostalgia for context, for the heroic past, for moral order, for childhood and the collective experiences of preindustrial life" (Stewart, Crimes, 91). This historical tension, formally acknowledged by a conspicuous double rhyme ("I vorl survivor"), is intensified by the setting of the encounter in Wales, according to David Simpson a bastion against "the subtle modern corruptions of commerce and luxury ... [and] the locus of a picturesque feudalism." 58 "Simon Lee" reconfigures this field of conflicting historicomaterial forces as an attenuated, intrinsically moral encounter. It thus responds in an unconscious though symbolically concise form to the very historical causality to which a strong narrator and a decrepit huntsman are correlated, if unwitting, as effects. But the ballad's unease with its own symbolic condensations resurfaces once again in its central event, however trivialized by the narrator: the poet's severing, with a gesture of noticeable impatience, both Simon Lee's roots in an irretrievably lost order and the narrative's ambivalent attachments to that past. The poem's central act of "relief" effectively cuts short the very narrative it purports to furnish with a sense of closure. As a result, the poem's conflicted ending cautions the reader against eclipsing a specific historical situation by imposing a rigid and violent severing of his roots in such a past. To the very end, in other words, the reading audience appears confounded by the narrator's agonistic cultural unconscious, for which his speech and the narrative's oddly truncated plot are the "symptoms." It is an unconscious shot through with the conflicting forces of historical change and disturbed by the inadequacy of its own attempts at resolving this conflict (of which it itself is the product) through a material act of charity and the sociopsychological romance of an apparently liberal humanism. Still, to return yet once more to the poem's beginning, we note that the narrator's placement of Simon Lee in the spot where he is eventually encountered by the narrator/protagonist proceeds in very literal yet transparently symbolic ways. Indeed, a second or third reading of the poem alerts readers to the overwrought and oddly fixated description that seems to reveal as much about the urban preconceptions that the narrator brings along into the enigmatic feudal landscape of the "sweet shire of Cardigan" as about the old huntsman. Depicted as "an old man ... , a little man I I've heard he once was tall," and suffering with "his little body ... half

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awry, I His andes they are swoln and thick; I His legs are thin and dry" (ll. 2-3, 34-36), Simon Lee resembles the "stump of rotten wood" and the "tangled root" (ll. 84, 94) whose pointless tenacity in the landscape the narrator addresses in word and deed. Progressively disembodied by the narrator's descriptive micromanagement, the huntsman is transfigured into an unwitting allegory of the historical transformations he has evidently failed to grasp. Corresponding to the account of Simon's physical deterioration, the introduction offers a digression of almost Homeric proportions: we are told-mostly on the authority of hearsay-of the onceyouthful huntsman's spectacular feats ("No man like him the horn could sound, I And no man was so full of glee; I To say the least, four counties round I Had heard of Simon Lee," ll. 17-20). The discrepancy between Simon's once robust constitution as "a running huntsman merry" and the now ravaged "limbs those [former] feats have left" thus stands in synecdochic relation to the temporal hiatus separating the seemingly timeless feudal order of rural England from the elusive transformations wrought by sharply accelerated urbanization and a forward-looking urban psychology shaped by the advent of capital. By extension, the physical transformation of Simon Lee also stands in a loosely metaphoric relationship to the distance between the putative authenticity of the ballad's oral origins and its transfiguration into a middlebrow textual genre pursued by the poetas-author whom we now encounter as a "performing subject within an imaginary feudalism" (Stewart, Crimes, rr3). Clearly an exponent of this latter perspective, the narrator appears less than sympathetic to the careless, self-indulgent material pleasures of the feudal order. Such impatience will eventually become a full-fledged critique of the aristocracy whereby the historical contradiction between the mobility of capital and the privileged statics of "landed interest" is grasped symbolically as a violation of nature (as, for example, in "HartLeap Well"). Already in 1798, in a stanza that captures Simon's excessive identification with the aristocratic fetish of the hunt, we witness the narrator's impatience with Simon's attachment to feudal "landed" interest on whose displacement urban and provincial middle-class poets and readers have staked their vocational opportunities and their economic future: 59 He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often ere the race was done, He reeled and was stone-blind. And still there's something in the world

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At which his heart rejoices; For when the chiming hounds are out He dearly loves their voices. One summer-day I chanced to see This old man doing all he could About the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock totter'd in his hand; So vain was his endeavour That at the root of the old tree He might have worked forever. "You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool" to him I said; And at the word right gladly he Received my proffer'd aid. I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I sever'd, At which the poor old man so long And vainly had endeavour'd. The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. -I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning. Alas! the gratitude of men Has oftener left me mourning. (LB, 66-67, II. 41-48, 81-104)

Simon Lee's uncanny absorption by the thrill of feudalism's ultimate ritual ("ere the race was done I He reeled and was stone-blind") hints at a mind momentarily overcome by a deeper intuition of its physical excesses and historical immobility; connecting with the fact of his present partial blindness, the figure of Simon's being momentarily "stone-blind" functions as a precognition of his historical identity that he will be able to grasp with full consciousness only in the present. Back in the unspecified past, meanwhile, such blindness hints at the discrepancy between his athletic prowess and his social immobility. His failure, then, consisted in not recognizing historical changes already under way, and failing to reorganize his physical and mental endowments accordingly. Perversely, that failure is the result of Simon's unconditional identification with a landed class for whom, in

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fact, he only ever held instrumental value. The stanza's second half thus depicts Simon's erroneous (albeit involuntary or unconscious) identification with a superannuated ritual ("And still there's something in the world I At which his heart rejoices; I For when the chiming hounds are out I He dearly loves their voices"). Here the symbolic, formal-aesthetic appeal of the hunt engulfs his consciousness and overtaxes his cognitive resources. Mercilessly exposing Simon's physical incapacity to uproot an old "stump," and indeed the pointlessness of that "endeavour" in the first place, the narrator proffers his aid with a somewhat unfeeling reference to Simon Lee's physical decrepitude. Following his earlier, almost wishful intimations of old Simon's imminent demise ("Few months of life has he in store," 1. 65), the narrator thus cuts impatiently and patronizingly through the Gordian knot of Simon's intricate affective and historicomaterial filiations with a feudal past ("the tangled root I sever'd"). In the context of late-eighteenth-century debates on poverty, such an incidental "single blow" would arguably qualify as an act of spontaneous "charity" and, as such, would stand well apart from the competing theory of organized, state-funded poor-relie£.60 Indeed, the swift, peremptory quality of this "blow"-a leisurely display of casual, quasi-aristocratic confidence by the detached urban poet-tourist-could hardly fail to call up in the reader the complex debates concerning the causes and remedies of rural poverty waged around 1797 by political economists and moral philosophers alike. The specious self-assurance with which the narrator insists on the benevolence of his physical intervention and the presumed "gratitude" of its reception by Simon Lee is exposed by instances of overdetermined and equivocal predication, expressions that rattle oddly within the poem's otherwise smooth vernacular idiom. The presumption that Simon Lee "right gladly ... Received my proffer'd aid" and the ambivalent notation of how "thanks and praises seemed to run I So fast out of his heart" display a narrator unwilling to concede or unable to grasp the historical suffering (as opposed to the speaker's putatively timeless virtue) now condensed in Simon Lee's inscrutable tears. Far beyond assisting the huntsman in his material labor, the poet-tourist's "charitable" intervention propels Simon Lee into irremediable knowledge of the historical contradiction from which his symbolic (indeed materially pointless) labor and his nostalgic illusions had thus far sheltered him. The contradiction is one between, on the one hand, an all-but-faded hierarchical order of feudal administration that had once enveloped the huntsman in the dream state of symbolic and affective permanence-with the contentment flowing from his "station" as a huntsman preempting any thought of social mobil-

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ity-and, on the other hand, the quintessentially modern recognition that his earlier, however illusory, identification with that past is no longer operational or even available. The narrator's unease with finding himself the subject of Simon Lee's repeated "thanks and praises," and indeed his sense of "mourning" at this intense display of gratitude, give rise to interpretive suspicions about the "true" motivations of the modern urban poet-tourist upon confronting a static and recalcitrant past from which he, too, has emerged. As this "act of contingent condescension" is explained by Simpson, "the poet is able to come to the old man's aid, but his discomfort at so doing is a function of his own sense of displacement as well as of his guilt or embarrassment at being in better health or fortune." 61 It is an ambivalence ultimately to be entertained more by the reader than by the narrator. For the latter, dosure is achieved in a simple moral syllogism: an act of charity warrants gratitude, which in turn reaffirms the social and affective bonds that (supposedly) produced the act of charity. Yet to the reader such a moral calculus rests on an ultimately unacceptable elision of the competing historical imperatives, knowledge, and assumptions that set apart the poet-tourist's prospecting and the huntsman's elegiac psychology. In its complex reconfiguration of the character in the poem, the narrator and the reader of the poem, and the poem's textual performance relative to other ballads in the 1798 collection, "Simon Lee" thus dramatizes that any relation to history is necessarily conditioned by an intrinsically unknowable symbolic and interpretive infrastructure, and that to develop new perspectives on one's place in history requires a complex, often prolonged dismantling of the ballad's narrative and textual infrastructure on which such knowledge had been predicated thus far. Consequently, any reading of the poem must proceed from the understanding that both narrator and reader can only ever take a highly mediated, symbolic, and virtual "interest" in the figure of Simon Lee. This irony is demonstrated at once by the obtrusive urban strength and economic confidence with which the author/narrator cuts short the futile and superannuated "toil" of Simon Lee, and by the reader's initially unwitting acceptance of a narrator whose specious affirmations compromise all prospects for an abiding interpretive community between the poet-narrator and his audience. If the balladeer's narrative mandate seems insufficiently supported in "Simon Lee," the narrator of the thematically contiguous "Hart-Leap Well" seems to wear his fascination with the sensational design of feudal life on his sleeve. Leaping into the middle of that most emblematic of aris-

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tocratic practices, the hunt, the narrator joins the Knight's quest and, in so doing, causes the first part of the poem to reenact, at the level of narrative tone, imagery, and subject matter, modernity's craving for "moving accident." Needless to say, such a presentation at least implicitly creates a sense of complicity between the material self-absorption, even dissipation of a past feudal order and the contemporary reading public's craving for more narrative simulacra of such bygone spectacles. History thus enters the narrative in its "lowest" denomination, as a pageant of images, as decor, and as the oblivious materialism of feudal leisure. And yet, beginning with the second line's simile, which construes a tenuous and soon faltering relationship between the Knight and what the collection's next lyric refers to as "that uncertain heaven" (LB, 140), the images repeatedly hint at a darker, more elegiac, and profoundly estranged symbolic undercurrent, thereby suggesting that the narrative interest in this enigmatic "race" may be one of critique rather than consumption: The Knight had ridden do"':n from Wensley Moor With the slow motion of a summer's cloud; He turn'd aside towards a Vassal's door, And, "Bring another Horse," he cried aloud. "Another Horse."-That shout the Vassal heard, And saddled his best steed, a comely Grey; Sir Walter mounted him; he was the third Which he had mounted on that glorious day. Joy sparkled in the prancing Courser's eyes; The horse and horseman are a happy pair; But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies, There is a doleful silence in the air. A rout this mourning left Sir Walter's Hall, That as they gallop'd made the echoes roar; But horse and man are vanish'd, one and all, Such race, I think, was never seen before. Sir Walter, restless as a veering wind, Calls to the few tired dogs that yet remain: Brach, Swift and Music, noblest of their kind, Follow, and up the weary mountain strain. The Knight halloo'd, he chid and cheer'd them on With suppliant gestures and upbraidings stern; But breath and eyesight fail, and, one by one, The dogs are stretch'd among the mountain fern.

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Where is the throng, the tumult of the chace? The bugles that so joyfully were blown? -This race it looks not like an earthly race; Sir Walter and the Hart arc left alone. (LB, 133-34, ll. I-28)

The Knight's aristocratic caprice ("restless as a veering wind," I. 17) appears self-consuming here. He seems to ravage his own resources, ruining the dogs (the "noblest of their kind") and soon poisoning the water and land. Thus, in one of the poem's most succinct symbolic moments, the Hart's "nose, half-touched a spring beneath a hill,/ And with the last deep groan his breath had fetched I The waters of the spring were trembling still" (11. 42-44). Such overwrought symbolism ("a doleful silence in the air," "This race it looks not like an earthly race") and elegiac reminiscence ("Such race ... was never seen before," "the bugles that so joyfully were blown") recurs throughout the ballad, and the function of such rhetorical excess may ultimately be to affirm the poem's critical ethos and interpretive mandate over a history whose material excesses have furnished the ballad's subject matter. "History" thus operates in these ballads in a twofold sense. It first appears as the material trace of an enigmatic past that triggers an often bewildered affective response to the disproportion between that past's material surfeit and its deficient interpretive yield. Yet gradually "History" also emerges as the focus of a reconstructive poetics, becoming the product of a narrative agency and the subsidiary effect of a modern communal ethos of interpretation eager to recalibrate its distance and proximity to the past's lingering "aura" of thoughtlessness and outright violence. The bifocal perspective that the ballad opens upon its subject is neatly condensed in the repeated, if oblique, pun of "race," that word referring not only to Sir Walter's chase but also to a gentry whose illusory confidence and mastery over nature the Knight embodies ("horse and man are vanish'd, one and all, I Such race, I think, was never seen before"). Whether it addresses the empirical chase or the presumptive integrity of the feudal order, the line not only questions the material excess of the chase but simultaneously construes the violence incidental to such feudal practice as an emblem of the past's fundamentally unreal, illusory, antagonistic constitution. Incapable of transmitting its specious acquirements ("a pleasure-house," "a small arbour") to the next generation, the feudal race begets only the virtual, subtly rebellious offspring of the ballad. A quiet revolution has taken place. The excess that is the feudal order-the sensualism of the chase and the accompanying locutions of aris-

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tocratic strength ("Till the foundations of the mountains fail/ My mansion with its arbour shall endure," II. 73-74)-is already known to have been defeated, absorbed now into its heir-unapparent, an ascending middle-class culture whose moral integrity and economic thrift are here objectified in the concision of its lyric imagery. Never wasteful, the ballad's economy of narrative incident and symbolic motif has displaced the nonproductive capital of feudalism's sumptuous decor. Physically erased from its spot, the "pleasure-house" is now being recovered as the material debris of history ("I saw standing in a dell I Three as pins at three corners of a square,/ And one, not four yards distant, near a well"-11. ro2-4), an archaeological enigma spurring poetic and interpretive industry by the poet and by his prospective audience. The nonproductive wealth of feudal history-its formalism of time as mere lineage or succession-yields to a present continually refining its future viability by reconstituting the demise of that feudal order in the "virtual" representations of a poetic genreand by nurturing the speculative "interest" of that genre's cultural capital in the exegetical industry of ballad scholarship, antiquarian research, poetic anthologies, and literary reviewing. Critics have repeatedly noted a tendency in Romantic poems depicting ruins to potentiate "the erosion of the building [into] a total evanescence of the past. The temporal location of pastness is abstract and general ... reduced to a blank space, and history, in turn, is generalized into a set of chivalric/romantic commonplaces in which a self-identical event continually re-enacts itself" (Janowitz, England's Ruins, 89). This cultural logic is thrown into thematic relief by "Hart-Leap Well" when, in a moment of utter triumph and hubris, Sir Walter "gaz'd and gaz'd upon that darling place" (1. 48). The present-day poet appears no less mesmerized by the peculiar evacuation of life from the spot that refuses to yield up its history: It seem'd as if the spring-time came not here, And Nature here were willing to decay. I stood in various thoughts and fancies lost. (II. ns-ry)

-The symbolic function of Wordsworth's enigmatic descriptions is to sublate a local history comprising social violence and material excess-an infraction of unstated, unwritten, "naturallaw"-into the bourgeois Idea of History as a metaphysical crime to be atoned for by a "serious" devotion to literature and by the ancillary industry of interpretive and historical scholarship. The ballad thus functions as an act of enclosure, not of actual landed property or "pleasure house[s]" to be sure, but of a past whose

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frivolous ethos and material excesses may yield "interest" for a national culture eager to fend off an increasingly stratified demographic reality with its vernacular dreams of universal affect and an undivided, transhistorical "humanity." The second part of "Hart-Leap Well" capitalizes on the ballad genre's twofold structure-as the tale of a faded, ambivalent past and as the belated explication of that tale's speculative commerce with the enigmas of history-for it is here that the reader is abruptly expelled from the account of a sensational chase. Again, it appears, the text has been monitoring the audience's aesthetic competence, and for readers to have positively relished the poem's sumptuous detailing of Sir Walter's gruesome exploits in the dell is, it now turns out, to have "enjoyed" themselves too much. As the sudden fade-out of narrative immediacy makes clear ("But there is matter for a second rhyme, I And I to this would add another tale," ll. 94-95), the middle-class ethos of reading is closer to "work," a type of semireflcxive devotion or, in Mary Wollstonecraft's cunning phrase, "practical prayer" (OS, I28). Thus it is now disclosed that the entire preceding account of the chase was actually furnished by a shepherd (or more accurately, by "one who was in Shepherd's garb attir'd," I. uS), and that the poet himself has merely "rehears'd" (I. 122) an account that the audience receives only in doubly mediated form as the textual echo of an imitation ballad. "Hart-Leap Well," in other words, confronts its audience with the interpretive complications attendant on all historical transmission by situating the poet's voice between a past he cannot comprehend and a superstitious accounting for that past by a voice he cannot trust. While one might wish to confine this problem to the poet, it soon becomes apparent that the "poet" and the "voice" of "Hart-Leap Well" are themselves also the derivatives of an imported aesthetic, the subsidiary fictions of a prevailing sensationalist practice of telling and its often predatory dissemination of "ludicrous and faulty" spectacles among a gullible audience.62 For as many readers would have known in the wake of countless translations of Gottfried August Burger's ballads, the enigmatic "spot" that hosts the quizzical poet/narrator of "Hart-Leap Well" is not a residue of some authentic feudal past but, on the contrary, the simulacrum of a historical frame of reference (that is, the "dell" in the shepherd's vivid localism). The fictive quality of this local history is, in fact, subtly flaunted by Wordsworth's substantial and relatively undisguised borrowings from Burger's famous ballad "Der wilde Jager" (translated as "The Chase" by Walter Scott and published in 1796 and 1797). Moreover, "Hart-Leap Well" nota-

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bly lacks any of the regional or local markers spotlighted by the titles or narrators in various other poems of Lyrical Ballads. Indeed, at one point the shepherd all but discloses the poem's invention of the very historicity on whose grounds it claims quasi-moral superiority over the material interestedness and sensual absorption of Sir Walter and over the corresponding spectacles and "moving accidents" of the contemporary ballad industry: "But as to the great Lodge, you might as well I Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream" (ll. 131-32). Still, in displacing his voice onto the shepherd from the very outsetif only to reclaim the meaning diacritically from the shepherd by exposing the latter's superstitious mannerisms of telling-the poet consigns a history impossible to know or recall to the deceptive simplicity of its vernacular retelling. This disinterested, purely iterative practice gradually sponsors the communal fantasy of "remembering," which in turn underwrites the Wordsworthian ideal (that is, the "anticommodity") of "genuine" poetry. The poem thus dramatizes a national community's evolution into cultural literacy, leading from the presumptive innocence of a fading oral culture with its multigenerational penchant for local recall all the way to the contemporary need for a critical exegesis of that vernacular culture by the reputable national institution of the ballad-as-text. The pedagogical authority and integrity of Wordsworth's poem is bound up with the repeated displacement of its "voice," displacement achieved by constructing poetic authority as a diacritical effect of incompatible narrative versions rather than investing it in any one of these. Embodied in the motif of a poet concerned with reconstructing a feudal order from its archaeological debris, the ballad's humble and dedicated historicizing of a local spot rests on a form whose "literariness" is kept purposively oblique, less something to be relished than an instrument by means of which Wordsworth hopes to delimit his audience's cultural unconscious. "Mind" itself is thus enclosed as a distinctly middle-class "estate," a figural soil cultivated so that it may yield the virtual "harvest" of sustained, pleasurable, and disinterested contemplation: "'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, I To pipe a simple song to thinking hearts" (ll. 99-roo). Offering itself as a corrective gloss to the melodramatic, superstitious, and Gothic excesses of the r79os ballad-with the shepherd's and Burger's accounts presented as all but interchangeable-the poem enables its audience to develop more "valid" literary meanings provided it is willing to surrender the inherited and still-dominant paradigm of poetic "sensation." In its "internal structure," Geoffrey Hartman notes, "the poem reflects a historical principle

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of canon formation . . . [for] the essential structure remains that of the reflective encirclement and progressive purification of symbols from Romance" (Unremarkable Wordsworth, 57). Regardless of whether the estate in question is material or virtual-a "spot" in the landscape or the very "mind" of the reader-acts of enclosure in Lyrical Ballads rarely succeed, and the sententious, aggressively moralizing affirmations of the narrator's closing statement are no exception. Determined to extract a lesson from the shepherd's account, and hinting at the paradigmatic tension between the latter's art of telling and the strategic purposes of transcribing such tales into the literary artifact of the ballad form, the speaker offers up five stanzas replete with "supplementary platitude" and "instructive homilies" (Wolfson, 1986, 8o-8r). "Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well; Small difference lies between thy creed and mine; This beast not unobserv'd by Nature fell, His death was mourn'd by sympathy divine. The Being, that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For them the quiet creatures whom he loves The Pleasure-house is dust:-behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom; But Nature, in due course of time, once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. She leaves these objects to a slow decay That what we are, and have been, may be known; But at the coming of a milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown. One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught both by what she shews, and what conceals, Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." (LB, I38-39, II. I6I-80)

Clumsy, paternalistic, and almost unbearably self-satisfied in his moral pronouncements, the narrator serves up a specious humanist "cocktail" of pantheism, universal benevolence, and sentimentalism. What should caution the reader not to swallow the new dispensation whole, however, is the conclusion's resemblance to the similarly garrulous and obtuse affirmations at the close of "Simon Lee," as well as its disarticulation by the

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remarkable lyric "immediacy" of the collection's next poem, "The Boy of Winander." For the epitaphic, minimalist, and profoundly symbolic style of that lyric all but demolishes the present speaker's complacent faith in some nebulous "sympathy divine" and "deep and reverential care": it strongly suggests that the only relation that human beings can ever maintain with "their" world is a strictly transferential one, a relation whose ephemeral and random nature is time and again confirmed by the intrusion of death. In the imagistic concision of "The Boy of Winander," death at the age of ten disarticulates the preceding narrative's laborious rhetoric of continuity, of "slow decay" and the "due course of time." Indeed, the very fact that the lyric lacks all exegetical closure retroactively exposes the affirmations of spiritual continuity at the end of "Hart-Leap Well" to have been gratuitous. In the "Boy of Winander," death disrupts all expressive commerce between the boy and nature and, in doing so, calls into question any metaphysical nexus between the constructed world of human affairs (history) and what is now perceived as "that uncertain heaven." The strenuous affirmations of the narrator's catechistic pedagogy in "Hart-Leap Well" are collapsed into the negative theology of the elegy, a reversal thrown into thematic relief in "The Boy ofWinander" by the sudden "deep silence" that mocks the boy's "mimic hootings," his innocuous yet doomed attempt at eliciting a "natural" standard of responsiveness and at cultivating an organic model for instruction. To insist that we ought "never to blend our pleasure or our pride I With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels" is to conceive by implication the very ideology of a natural sensibility that subsequent poems will dismantle, albeit from such diverse points of view as those in "Nutting," "Michael," or the Lucy poems. The collection's basic framework of prolific, multilateral, and irremediable misunderstandings is here objectified as an elegiac apostrophe to the inextricable mislfit between representations of a figure in an alien landscape and that subject's alienated and uncomprehending relationship to the landscape's historical and temporal mutations.63 ~

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Bildung as Cultural Theory in Hegel and Wordsworth

If Andrew Bell's mechanisms for disciplining the poor encourage social and cultural ascendancy strictly at an imaginary level-mainly as simulations within a strictly inward economy of mental functions-Lyrical Ballads affords its readers a fantasy of aesthetic and cognitive pro/motion,

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usually to be experienced as the inspirational exchange between urban and provincial middle-class readers and the putatively precapitalist English rural poor. To regard this contact as simulated rather than authentic is to recognize that all consciousness of historicomaterial difference is produced, controlled, and (to some extent at least) obfuscated by a logic of fantasy that was soon to become the defining characteristic of Romanticism's involvement with the "Literary." Much of the enigma of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, as well as the hazards that the lyrics pose to historicist interpretation, inheres in the fact that the contact between, on the one hand, poet, traveler, tourist, or retiree and, on the other hand, the despondent woman, the displaced yeoman, or the would-be freeholder turns out to be simulated from the very outset, a strictly symbolic, textual, and thus "literary" event. Solicitous of local and regional poverty as a matter of intense dramatic potential and spiritual "interest" to an emergent national reading culture, Wordsworth's balladic encounters between the "virtual" estate of the British middling classes and the fictive historicity of an English precapitalist "rustic" sphere generate an interpretive paradox. If we conceive of the agrarian realm of "Simon Lee," "Hart-Leap Well," "The Brothers," or" Michael" as a dreamlike projection of a fading English past, Lyrical Ballads qualifies the "survival" of that past, either by exposing its ideological colonization by arrogant, obtuse, or bewildered narrators or by confronting the reader with the sudden, inexplicable, and unredeemed "death" of that past. Wordsworth's collection thus compels its audience to become more aware of the dissolution of rural simplicity and to grasp the erosion of the rustic's ideological claim to affective immediacy and historical authenticity. To understand why Leonard's native landscape in "The Brothers" is no longer a plausible "dwelling" for him, to articulate the illusory conception of property that vitiates Michael's dream of "possession," and to concede the heteronomous nature of the "spot" that defies the poet's interpretive skill in "Hart-Leap Well"-in short, to read Lyrical Ballads-is to witness the urban poet-traveler as the reader's next-of-kin, gradually recognizing the rural as a fictive history, a mode of lucid dreaming not fully aware of its anachronism. As such, reading is destined to reproduce the very antagonisms of its contemporary mode of production whose hegemonic power these ballads acknowledge in the elegiac structure of "Inscriptions," conflicted tales, and wistful memorials. Wordsworth's figurations of the rural thus instance what Slavoj Zizek has described as "the so-called 'Kafka's universe,' ... not a 'fantasy-image of social reality' but, on the contrary, the mise en scene of the fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality itself" (Sublime Object, 36). Many of the poems in

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the r8oo collection transform a potentially revolutionary consciousness of social antagonisms-and of the corresponding epistemological tensions within their characters and narrators-into the tableau vivant of the ballad or the still life of the lyric. This aesthetic form thus embodies an inherently defensive ideological consensus, or in Zizek's words, it functions as a "metaphoric condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the everyday consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular question without solving them all-that is, without solving the fundamental question which embodies the antagonistic character of the social totality" (3). The question of the rural or "rustic" thus returns us to the larger issue of the writer's pedagogical mission, here instanced by Wordsworth's cultivation of symbolic strategies conducive to his overall professional enterprise and ideological mission of producing a middle-class aesthetic community. If the textual performance of Lyrical Ballads is any indication, such a community will be characterized by its self-conscious mode of producing knowledge, by its formally discriminating paradigm of cultural capital, and by the cautious, interpretive ways in which it constructs "its" history. In their complex responses to Wordsworth's pseudo-historical figurations of the rural and local, and in their dedicated, if elegiac, readerly furlough from the professional and political antagonisms of modernity, readers of Lyrical Ballads confront an entirely new paradigm of poetry: the old and seemingly familiar representational surfaces of the dialogic, the elegiac, the inscription, as well as their Gothic, sentimental, and superstitious tonal spectrum, yield an unexpected, often perilous interpretive depth. Consequently, the history ostensibly "preserved" in these forms turns out to have been essentially produced by the specific rhetorical perspective that a given ballad opens on its subject matter. On the basis of that unsuspected insight, readers must now consider in what ways and to what extent their historical identities stem from continually evolving and nontranscendable rhetorical situations and genres. Precisely insofar as it succeeds in mobilizing flexible interpretive responses, then, the middle-class audience of Lyrical Ballads becomes a historically distinct formation in its own right. Or, as Hegel puts the matter, the holistic agency of "spirit" is mediated through its interpretive activity, and by reflecting itself in the history of earlier and partially inadequate representations, it comes to be for itself To imply, as Bell, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth all do, that the sheer flexibility of interpretive and cognitive skills constitutes the most significant sociocultural capital of modern subjectivity is also to affirm Hegel's overall philosophical paradigm: that it is the mobility of its cognitive and representational forms that circumscribes the "intelligence" of the Romantic bourgeois subject.64

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Having relied on German Romantic and idealist accounts of Bildung throughout this section, let me address that debt to Hegel's logic of culture and cultivation (Bildung) directly. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit proposes to reconstruct from a critical vantage point the evolution of modern culture as a progressive appropriation, partial negation, and reflexive overcoming of historically determinate forms of representation. In so doing, the Phenomenology unfolds in striking analogy to Wordsworth's argument for a new paradigm of poetry and changed logic of its reception in his Preface (r8oo). It is not in the realm of beliefs, ideas, or ambitions but only in the genres, the tonal shades, and the stylistic peculiarities of poetic, "virtual" representations that Wordsworth can conceive of a cultural identity for an as-yet-amorphous and pre-reflexive British middle class. The theoretical premise for that argument-namely, that the work of culture, of formation, and of pedagogy in the widest sense inheres in the necessarily indirect structure of all representation-is first articulated by Hegel and his philosophical contemporary, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Hegel's Phenomenology defines the movement of self-cultivation through the figure of recurrent self-alienation, a double reversal initially threatening, yet eventually liberating, for the empirical subject, the "natural consciousness" (natiirliches Bewu{?tsein). The latter's monitoring of its epistemic fitness continually generates superior, more representative subject-positions, a subjectivity that is gradually configured with basic Romantic concepts such as "sympathy," "community," and "morality" and destined to merge with Hegel's philosophical ideal of the political: the Nation-State. Often anticipating Foucault's analyses of modernity as vested in the "discourses" of disciplinarity (prison, the military, schooling, psychiatry, etc.)-though Hegel's uncannily hermetic and ominously dispassionate idiom contrasts starkly with Foucault's impassioned and allusive style-Hegel conceives of language as the infrastructure and seismographic index of all cultural transformation. As we have already observed in Bell, Bentham, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth, the early Romantic conception of "culture" (Bildung) pivots on a structural principle of "unrest" activated in discursive form within the individual's consciousness. At once the agent and the object of its surveillance, or "the agent of its own instability" (de Man, Blindness and Insight, 19), the subjects of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and the "natural consciousness" in Hegel's Phenomenology appear to be incrementally less "themselves" precisely because they progressively "experience" (erfahren) their continuity with the larger demographic process of bourgeois, economic and cultural ascendancy.65

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Arguably such a "Western" conception of pedagogy proves ambivalent in its political implications: it exposes an oddly dialectical relationship between the individual's surfeit of epistemic lucidity (the "growth-of-themind" story of Romanticism) and the corrosion of that individual's affective identity by a self-imposed askesis or "discipline" without which, it is now claimed, there can be no lucid or socially valid representation. As we saw, such askesis involves, for example, the denial of reading for "pleasure" by "consuming" rather than interpreting ballads. Indeed, to the extent that the Romantic subject's formal-reflexive competence produces a sense of civic and cultural authority with "interest"-by thus transforming the very quality of that subject as sophisticated in its manipulation of cognitive and aesthetic forms-it also ensures the gradual disappearance (a Nietzschean "forgetting" or Freudian structural incapacity for "remembering") of the political content and ideological function that motivates Romantic culture (Bildung). As critics have increasingly come to argue, the ideological signature of Romanticism appears to be that its principal exponents were unconscious reactionaries; or as Nietzsche says in his acerbic commentary on the German idealists (Hegel, Schelling, Holderlin) who had been trained at the Protestant seminary in Tubingen: "only the Svabians can lie innocently." It is in Romanticism's rapid specialization and professionalization of authorship, literary reviewing, and "disciplined" theories of middle-class reading that we can locate the institutional symptoms of the productive restlessness that Hegel identified as the essence of all "spirit." In this transition into a postclassical and fully capitalist world, to be self-conscious is to get a purchase on the distant promises of Bildung by submitting to what Wordsworth's "Michael" calls "endless industry" (LB, 255, I. 97). The almost pleasurable self-surveillance and the elaborate representational forms that are the fruit of that surveillance thus are the very substance of the "self-alienated" subject that, in Hegel's theory of Bildung, constitutes the philosophical core of modernity as such: The existence of this world, as also the actuality of self-consciousness, rests on the process in which the latter divests itself of its personality, thereby creating its world. This world it looks on as something alien, a world, therefore, of which it must now take possession .... We may say that self-consciousness is merely a "something," it has actuality only in so far as it alienates itself from itself; by so doing, it gives itself the character of a universal, and this its universality is its authentication and actuality. This equality with everyone is, therefore, not the equality of the sphere of legal right, not that immediate recognition and validity of self-consciousness simply because it is; on the contrary, to be valid it must have

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conformed itself to the universal by the mediating process of alienation [durch die entfremdende Vermittlung]. (PS, 297 I PC, 350-51)

This process of alienation, this dialectical movement between an evolving self-consciousness and the progressive recovery of its universal destiny in the "concept" (Begriff) or, more precisely, the conception (begreifen) of its own proper universality, exemplifies Hegel's holistic understanding of culture as a process. A resumption of Schiller's dialectic of individual man and the aesthetic state (see the epigraph from his Letters above), Hegel's outline of the dialectical unfolding of the subject in its cultural forms in the Phenomenology centers on transforming the very opposition between a "natural consciousness" and the "universal concept": "The process in which the individuality moulds itself by culture is, therefore, at the same time the development of it as the universal, objective essence, i.e., the development of the actual world" (PS, 299 I PG, 352). As the gradual mediation and comprehension of the "true" import of the individual/universal opposition, all cultural process thus unfolds as a steady metamorphosis of its own constitutive terms: it begins with the simple dichotomy between self and other, evolves into the dichotomy between good and evil, and eventually becomes the dichotomy between private "wealth" and collective "state power." If the notion of "wealth" initially seems to affirm individuality (in the sense of "being in possession of oneself"), however besieged by the laws and obligations obtruded by state power, the "natural consciousness" of that self inevitably produces the reflexive supersession (Aufhebung) of that notion. With the rise of possessive individualism, a consciousness dominated by the paradigm of property as substance or "wealth" experiences a crisis of legitimacy and begets its own Other in an attempt at selfjustification: the idea of the modern nation-state or commonwealth as an abstract and imagined community. Yet because Hegel's hypostatized agency of "spirit" has not fully internalized the new dispensation but has only introduced it to justify its continuing attachment to an older conception of "wealth" (and to the corresponding paradigm of the "self" as a form of "property"), spirit initially conceives the national community only as an "idea." That is, it establishes the idea of a national culture, and in order for that paradigm to become socially effective, it simultaneously posits the notion of "culture" as a separate realm of pure representation. For Hegel, it is precisely in this simultaneous emergence of the "idea" of culture and the proto-bourgeois "cult" of the idea itself that we first make contact with the as-yet-unconsummated philosophical and historical "truth" of bourgeois nationalism. Soon thereafter the materiality of indi-

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vidual wealth is exposed as a false universal: while it may purchase "universal enjoyment," it can nevertheless do so only for a "transitory consciousness ... qua single and independent individual" (PS, 303-4 I PG, 357-58). In Hegel's characteristically Protestant thinking, the renunciation of "wealth" as an ideal announces the emergence of a fundamentally new civic ethos of "virtual" rather than material affluence. Corresponding to this ethos is a new paradigm of subjectivity, "the noble consciousness" acknowledging state power in such a way that the latter is, indeed, not yet a self, but only the universal substance; it is, however, conscious of being the essence of that substance, its end and absolute content .... This consciousness is the heroism of service, the virtue which sacrifices the single individual to the universal, thereby bringing this into existence .... The state power, however, which was at first only the universal in thought, the in-itself, becomes through this very process the universal in existence, actual power. (PS, 306 I PG, 360) For Hegel, then, the process of culture is one more figure or exemplar of the very logic that shapes the Phenomenology throughout; but it is a particularly compelling account because it explicitly connects the supersession of a precapitalist paradigm of wealth with a correspondingly restrictive, first conception of the state as a strictly defensive "force" or "evil." As these pre-Romantic notions begin to collapse under their own restrictive and mostly negative weight, there emerges the still abstract idea of a "noble" civic ethos characterized by the mutual (albeit still unequal) acknowledgment between the individual and the state. Such a subjectivity "serves the state power [but] has not as yet renounced its own pure self and made it the active principle of the state power" (PS, 307 I PC, 360). In twentieth-century intellectual historiography, the dispensation is better known as the resurgence of a Protestant civic humanism and its ideal of "public virtue" in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England.66 To the extent that the relation of the self to the state is still that of "the haughty vassal who is active on behalf of the state power," the idea of the state has not yet reached its destiny as a holistic and consensual democracy; in other words, it is "not yet in truth actual state power" or "government." For while the process of civic and spiritual cultivation is advanced by discrete agents, Hegel contends, we are still dealing with the "separated Spirit of the various 'classes' and 'estates,' and this, in spite of its chatter about the general good, reserves to itself what suits its own best interest, and is inclined to make this chatter about the general good a substitute for action" (PS, 307 I PC, 361). Hegel's synopsis of the prehistory of the modern state thus evolves as

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the explication of a dialectic between political ideas and the forms of their representation (that is, as the dual aspect of all culture as will and reflection, as "in-itself" and "for-itself"). In his view, this dialectical progression leads inexorably toward a final "renunciation of existence" on the part of the individual consciousness. Such a renunciation, "when it is complete, as it is in death, is simply a renunciation; it does not return into consciousness; consciousness does not survive the renunciation .... The separated inner Spirit, the self as such, having come forward and renounced itself, the state power is at the same time raised to the position of having a self of its own" (PS, 308 I PG, 362). Here, then, the individual's "natural" consciousness has been wholly absorbed into the bureaucratic mechanisms of the state. What Hegel here describes is, in fact, a seamless and totalizing configuration of individual desires and intentions with the state's abstract, structural interests. Better known as ideology, this Hegelian ideal is defined by a convergence between individuals spontaneously assimilating abstract mechanisms of discipline and the idea of a nationstate increasingly spiritualized under the umbrella concepts of "culture," "community," and "empire." Hegel's paradigm of a Romantic/modern society requires, above all, that all forms of self-knowledge and selfrepresentation reflect this dialectical reconciliation of individual desire and institutional "force." Modernity itself is thus understood as the nearly irreversible closure within the fabric of consciousness, the moment when "culture" (Bildung) is promoted from its earlier mode of appearance as an objective, groupspecific "norm"-a "duty" and "virtue" prescribed by a collective to the individual-to the very condition of possibility of all consciousness. Having relinquished its earlier proprietary notion of the self as a psychophysiological entity, modernity's professionalized bourgeois subject has been virtually collapsed into the discursive technologies that furnish the terms of its "appearance" (Erscheinen). Challenged by the formal intricacy of its discursive and disciplinary resources-the languages of political economy, comprehensive theories of law, professional journalism, theories of "aesthetics," and speculative psychology, to name but a few-Hegel's "modern" subject is absorbed by the unending task of self-cultivation, that is, by learning to assimilate new disciplines and languages as the indispensable resources for its ongoing project of self-representation and selfjustification. As both the agent and the object of such compulsive and selffocused scrutiny, Romanticism's speculative, bourgeois self is no longer defined by any inalienable affective or cultural endowment but instead must forever develop new psychological interests and secure further social

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and cultural capital, a mode of existence identified by Wordsworth's Prelude as coterminous with imaginative practice: "something ever more about to be" (P r8o5, bk. 6, I. 542).6? In Hegel's Phenomenology, the emergence of Romantic "culture" occurs decitledly no longer as a conscious and deliberate proposition. Rather, he insists, it is the signature of this historical transition that from here on "culture" circumscribes the structural conditions of all possible (present and future) representation as such. Discipline coincides with the very infrastructure of consciousness itself, and it has permeated the entire sphere of public and private experiences by colonizing all techniques and genres on which the self could possibly call in order to represent "experience." At just this point in his argument, then, Hegel suspends his macrohistorical description of "culture" in favor of a micrological analysis of language itself, for it is now evident that the large-scale evolution of the modern national community has resulted from changes in the rhetorical mediation of consciousness itself. Language itself is now discovered to have sustained the entire speculative movement of Bildung and in its last phase was able to resolve the earlier antagonism of individual consciousness and state power. Speaking of the final "alienation" and "renunciation" of the self and the corresponding spiritualization of the concept of the state, Hegel now comments as follows: But this alienation takes place solely in language, which here appears in its characteristic significance. In the actual world of ethical order, in law and command, ... language has the essence for its content and is the form of that content; but here it has for its content the form itself, the form which language itself is, and is authoritative as language. It is the power of speech, as that which performs what has to be performed. For it is the real existence of the pure self as self; in speech, selfconsciousness, qua independent separate individuality, comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others. Otherwise, the "1," this pure "I," is non-existent, is not there. (PS, 308 I PG, 362)

In virtually the same way that Coleridge's Logic assesses education as a fundamentally linguistic formation of the individual's social mode of appearance, Hegel views culture as the self-alienation of the individual into socially circulating forms of representation. Because it encompasses not so much the "idea" of community as the discursive implementation and policing of some such idea or hypothesis, society occurs strictly speaking only as a Saussurean differential calculus of idioms and norms ret1ecting (and usually superimposing on one another) emphases of class, region, locale, religion, gender, or professional discipline, to name but a few obvious coordinates. Whereas previously culture had inhered only in its own

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abstract "idea," it now coincides with the performative realization of communities in spoken and written discourse. The bourgeois self, Hegel contends, is characterized by its voluntary subscription to the Nation as the transindividual end point of the subject's historical evolution, and that point is reached when the subject consciously "grasps" (begreifen) its history as a "process of mediation, the simple existence of which as middle term is language" (PS, 310/ PG, 364). A self that has become conscious of its own historicity, namely as something utterly bound up with a performative conception of language, has thereby also established a radically changed relationship to time. As Alexander Kojeve puts it, "time in the full sense of the term ... [is] a Future that will never become either Present or Past .... Now, this Future, for Man, is his death, that Future of his which will never become his Present; ... Logos becomes flesh, becomes Man, only on the condition of being willing to die" (Introduction, 14748). Hegel's claim that language "is the real existence of the pure self as self ... so that it exists for others" and that for an individual figure to speak, insofar as "it is perceived and heard, means that its real existence dies away" (PS, 309 I PG, 363) institutes a thoroughly performative conception of all social life. Community no longer can be "explained," or again, is no longer an abstract "content," a symbolically mediated "idea," or a syllogistically supported "proposition." Rather, Hegel tells us, it inheres in the ideational, propositional, and referential implications of language as social performance. Romanticism, it may be argued, is shaped by the rapidly spreading recognition that language is in a holistic sense political, and that it is the key to the ethical destiny of all community. As Olivia Smith and James Epstein have argued, this recognition took hold of the English public in the wake of the French Revolution, an event that to a perhaps unprecedented degree identified political and spiritual conceptions through metalinguistic and metadiscursive debates. Instances range from the arguments about plain versus ornate rhetoric waged by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Paine to the debate pitting self-confirming legal narratives against more cautious criteria of legal inference waged by attorney general Sir John Scott and defense counsel Sir Thomas Erskine, during the 1794 treason trials of Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, and others.68 In the critique extending from Hegel to Foucault and beyond, the end point of the dialectic ordinarily referred to as Bildung is reached once the affective quality and the conscious techno/logic of this mode of production-which progressively sublates an empirical self into a contingent community and eventually a collective totality-have become fully interiorized and have

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so utterly permeated the consciousness of the mode's agents as to become the nontranscendable (or "unconscious") condition of their civic and cultural proficiency. Indeed, where Hegel's speculative construction of cultural process most differs from the constructions of his modern heirs (notably Foucault's in Discipline and Punish) is in the dispassionate rhetoric with which he traces the historical stages of the "cunning of reason" (die List der Vernunft). As that well-worn phrase suggests, Hegel's philosophical narrative essentially concedes Foucault's misgivings regarding the disciplinary oppressiveness of bourgeois modernity, albeit without any of the activist pathos characteristic of intellectual debates in Paris, Berlin, or Prague around 1968. I deliberately emphasize this rhetorical and tonal discrepancy between Hegel's and Foucault's otherwise cognate approaches to macro historical argumentation because it is basically the same tension ·that emerges in Wordsworth's evolving professionalization as the selfappointed aesthetic custodian of a supposedly dissociated British middleclass sensibility. From the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, The Excursion, and The Recluse, his poetry abounds with the eloquent pathos of modern political critique, at times righteous, then again studiously modest, yet always passionate in its expression of analytic despair over historical processes bent on closing off all imaginative, affective, and intellectual complexity. At the same time, however, the very opus featuring the lyric, narrative, and epigrammatic tokens of such pervasive disillusionment reflects a vocational ambition and systematic scope scarcely less totalizing than Hegel's logic of culture. It is in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads above all that we find Wordsworth attempting to reconcile his avowed antimodernist and anti professional ethos as a poet with his shrewd professionalization and vocational ambition as public author.

Few texts of the Romantic period are more firmly anchored in the curricular and pedagogical agenda of the period, and indeed of current Romantic studies, than Wordsworth's Preface (r8oo). This circumstance is puzzling given what criticism has found to say about that text for the past half century. For notwithstanding its high-profile investment in a pedagogy designed to reshape the sensibility underlying both the production and the reception of poetry, Wordsworth's text has almost universally been regarded as marked by internal tensions, inconsistencies, discontinuous argument, and a confused sense of purpose.69 Many of the obstacles to recovering a "unified" argument in the Preface are rooted in Coleridge's criticisms of Wordsworth's "theory." The impact of that critique, however

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pertinent or misguided it may be, lies in its roundabout placement of the Preface within a tradition of "poetic theory" and hence within what Coleridge considered his very "proper" domain. Also prescribed by Coleridge is a second function of the Preface: to introduce the actual poems of the r8oo edition of Lyrical Ballads?0 Thus even though critics, most cogently Don Bialostosky, argue that Coleridge consistently misstates the terms and, indeed, misconstrues the very purpose of the Preface, that argument does not free us from Coleridge's paradigmatic reading of the text as an intrinsically contradictory poetic theory that also proves extrinsically incompatible with the poems it purports (in Coleridge's view) to explain to an audience.71 A less cumbersome strategy for reading this text, which has always been made to bear the burden of someone else's "Romanticism," would be an "aggressively" (not regressively) close reading that refuses to invest the poetic topology of the Preface (style, figurative diction, meter, prose vs. poetry, etc.) with the immanence and aesthetic autonomy first implied by Coleridge's critique and prolonged by much critical concern with the "coherence" of Wordsworth's text. Such a reading, directing its "close" focus at the "interest" (a term repeatedly deployed by Wordsworth) rather than the "unity" of the Preface's argument, will find these two notions to overlap dramatically. An extraordinarily consistent argument emerges if only we acknowledge that it is not the argument insinuated by the aesthetic topology of Wordsworth's operative terms. Such a "pragmatist" reading receives unexpected encouragement from another "close" reader. Even though formalist preoccupations eventually obscure her highly suggestive thesis, Josephine Miles, refreshingly unconcerned with any Coleridgean ambition of making the Preface "mean" some particular brand of "Romanticism," notes how the "problems of diction, problems of figure, problems of order, all are subordinated, the usual critic of Wordsworth's diction to the contrary, to problems of what Wordsworth called reality: the literal, sympathetic connection between man and nature, between image, feeling, and thought" (Primary Language, 363). Indeed, Wordsworth himself, at the threshold of a new century and eager to propose a Romantic vision of modernity, appears fully aware that "reality" itself is not a correlate of perception but an effect of definition. To define "reality" for him is to configure, with the necessary rhetorical and interpretive competence, the diverse interpretive, evaluative stances under a visibly coherent paradigm of community, which Wordsworth locates in the "affective." As the theoretical paradigm and communal "rallying point" (Wordsworth's phrase in his r8or letter to Charles J. Fox) in which the Preface will anchor

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its definition of the Real, the affective becomes the focal point of Wordsworth's metaphoric blending of "essential" and "general" features, a practice that serves to align those concepts specifically remarked by Miles: "feeling," "figurative language," and "the rustic." Their paradigmatic force throughout the Preface inheres in their simultaneous capacity to signify a collective meaning and to appear as the very essence or intuition that "grounds" such meaning, a circumstance that may help explain why the "affective" (from Wordsworth to post-Freudian psychoanalysis) defies critical intelligence. Thus, what from Miles's formalist perspective may appear to be "literal" can be seen from a pragmatist point of view as a type of rhetorical practice that, while ostensibly "denoting" or "signifying" a certain "object," effectively assumes the communal interpretive stance (and its values) on which the objectivity of such "literal" essences is predicated. My principal contention, then, is this: that in according centrality to notions of "feeling," figuration, and the "rustic," Wordsworth's Preface performs the ideation of a sweeping cultural theory while masking the utility, the situational specificity or "pragmatics," that inform his practice as a theorist. Such an argument, however, were it to be carried out without further qualification, would in all likelihood replace the often stubborn, misplaced criticisms of Wordsworth's Preface with a new but still hardnosed set of terms. Indeed, in what follows I clearly do not wish to rely on the broad strokes and often generic procedures of a "critique" purporting to recover a certain "ideology" in the text insofar as it has been "displaced" by the text, notably by the conspicuous centrality of aesthetic notions such as "poetic diction," "metre," "rustic life," and "feeling." A more productive alternative approach is to scrutinize Wordsworth's persistent efforts at revaluating precisely these concepts. For it is in this Preface, if not for the first time then at least to an unprecedented degree, that an intrinsically political theory of culture is advanced as a theory of discourse that is itself bounded by the yet tighter formal constraints of the discipline of poetics and formal stylistics.72 Indeed, it is precisely this unique tension between the expansive cultural ambitions and the restrictive disciplinary economy of "poetics" which enables the Preface to invest poetry with paradigmatic value and thereby to shape its argument about the fundamental continuity between discursive, poetic, and cultural transactions. Toward the end of the Preface, Wordsworth remarks on the implicit commerce between poetic technique (or style) and cultural theory: "having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing in verse, and why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring my language

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near to the real language of men, if I have been too minute in pleading my cause, I have at the same time been treating a subject of general interest" (PrW, I: 151). To develop a more specific understanding of this "general interest," which is the overriding concern of the following remarks, is to understand the Preface as a speculative treatise on the structure and pragmatics of the poetic sign, with "pragmatics" denoting the motivational logic of the Preface as an instance of cultural theory avant la lettre. In focusing on the tenuous configuration of discrete, seemingly disjointed technical arguments that constitute the Preface-rather than speaking of its "subtext" or its "historicity"-the following pragmatist reading consciously refrains from imputing conspiratorial or unconscious motives (e.g., a displacement of history or an elision of economic, psychological, or cultural "desire") to Wordsworth's text and thus from burdening it with the incongruous, retroactive wisdom of post-modern theories of the subject73 In fact, Wordsworth's argument aims to develop a generalized and unified theory of value-albeit a theory persistently troped, and thus "naturalized," as a "recovery." In focusing on discursive as well as poetic practice, Wordsworth's theory visibly aligns its "interest" in restoring "consistency" and "sincerity" to rhetorical practice with a larger, eschatological hope of restoring "homogeneity" to an entire culture. From behind the formally "disciplined" discourse of poetics there gradually emerges the larger, pragmatic-cultural dimension of the Preface, as Wordsworth goes on to demarcate his theory of value from contingent historical transformations characteristic of the present, rather than from a long-standing tradition in poetics and criticism. As he insists time and again, values grounded in and promoted by the kind of stylistic practice that merits the title of "good poetry" must categorically transcend history. In a rhetorical manner quite familiar to Wordsworth's readers, however, his cultural interest in restoring the "human" to an order of authenticity now besieged by historical contingency is advanced through the rhetorical convention of humilitas. While it may be difficult to decide how much the conspicuously humble rhetoric of the Preface "evades" prevailing historical and political constraints or is pragmatically "manipulative" of a skeptical audience, Wordsworth's Preface affirms its sincerity by insisting on its strictly local, "technical" application and by disavowing any disruption of the boundaries circumscribing the discipline of "poetics": 74 To treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which

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A fully developed theory of poetry, Wordsworth notes, would mandate an inquiry into the extent to which the poetic sign is determined by the intellectual resources of the writer and by the hermeneutic frame of reception espoused by its specific audience. Rhetorically grounded in a trope of disease ("healthy or depraved")-itself a master trope of contingencyWordsworth's proposed inquiry into the pathology of "public taste" teems with ideological interest. Hence, notwithstanding its syntax of disavowal, the passage affirms the theoretical link between the primary "subject" (poetics), a secondary sociology of "taste," and the capstone of a totalizing, "transcendental" inquiry ("pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other"). Wordsworth's ostensibly humble, formal-technical investment in poetic technique visibly understates the political as well as metaphysical efficiency of (any) discursive technique; it professes to bring into focus merely the contingent empirical matter of a "poetic diction" that, the Preface contends, has come to erode the criteria for aesthetic value, the poet's spiritual authority, and poetry's cultural efficiency. Characterizing the passage as "a breathtaking prospectus," Jon Klancher justly notes how, because of the Preface, "it has now become impossible to write the smallest, humblest poem of worth without framing it with an ambitious theory of social transformation, individual and collective psychology, literature and the interpretation of signs" (Making, 139). Indeed, as Wordsworth's general allusion to events between 1789 and 1793 also makes clear, contingency involves not just the variegated spectrum of discursive "taste" but much vaster historical transformations, the "revolutions ... of society itself." With its unpredictable, ultimately intractable shifts, reconfigurations, and "motions" in the fields of class, economics, demographics, politics, religion, and aesthetics, history continually threatens the specificity-the normative or "objective" referential value-which Wordsworth is eager to restore to the poetic sign. Thus the Preface's conflation of "history" with contingency per se amounts to recharacterizing the indeterminacy that is said to vitiate the referential field deemed "natural" or "proper" to poetic language. In fact, Wordsworth cannot ascribe the "fickle[ ness)" of taste or the poetic sign to the instability of the referential field unless the "subject" can be identified in some palpable way independent of historical, empirical contingency. In order to point up the extent and the purported causes of its cor-

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ruption, Wordsworth must trope the field of reference by means of a figure whose relevance to history and community "goes without saying," so to speak: what is ravaged by the forces of history is the "human mind" itself. Notwithstanding Wordsworth's repeated, conspicuous characterization of his poetics as aimed at recovering "the primary laws of our nature" (PrW, 1: 122), it will not suffice to point to the generalizations throughout the Preface as evidence for the text's purported cultural and ideological "interest," since it is just that conceptual generality that complicates our search for specific evidence to that end7 5 Rather than merely asserting that Wordsworth proposes general notions, however, we should consider how his consistently generalizing rhetoric achieves the identification of stylistic and poetic values with social and communal ones. Thus, what the 1798 Advertisement had disqualified as an oppressively aesthetic practice, the "gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers" (PrW, 1: n6), now reappears writ large as the very specter of a society marked in every imaginable way by contingent historical change: A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of the occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies .... Reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it. (PrW, I: I2 9 -

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In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (PrW, I: I4I)

This assertion of great distress at the loss of a stable, meaningful field of reference coincides with Wordsworth's general description of the sociopolitical transformations of English society during the 1790s. David Simpson appropriately stresses Wordsworth's concerns with "the negative effects of urbanization and the debasing of 'popular' culture" (Historical Imagination, 64). As Wordsworth's letter to Charles James Fox suggests, however, the focus of the poetic enterprise of Lyrical Ballads and of the Preface is simultaneously the programmatic redescription of the actual, present

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culture of urban life in terms of dissimilar, rustic metaphors. The rustic thus serves "as the rallying point" for "domestic feelings" that prove recuperable only a posteriori. Hence the poetic epitaphs commemorating their disappearance draw their motive for inscription not from these feelings' "essence"-which proves but an abiding metaphysical assumption-but from their pragmatic social thrust or "force." In short, Wordsworth invests the notion of "poetic feeling" with "interest" and "purpose" precisely by ascribing to them a regenerative potential vis-a-vis the economic antagonisms and consequent affective instability of the provincial and urban (culturally literate) middling classes. Thus, his epistolary and prefatory rhetoric converts "affections" into "profitable sympathy" (LWEY, 259-62). Wordsworth's isolation of "certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind" does not, therefore, constitute an imaginative faith in the autonomy of human subjectivity. On the contrary, growing syntactically and logically out of the antecedent notations of an entropic disorder, the paradigm of a human, masculine self-consciousness enters the argument precisely because (and only to the extent that) the erosion of a specific field of reference for poetic production is experienced at the site of self-consciousness. Historical change not only "blunt[s] the discriminating powers of mind" but may eventually compromise the ability of consciousness to reflect on this erosion of its own, 'essentially' human specificity. Indeed, Wordsworth's Burkean invocation of "our natural and unalienable inheritance" (PrW, r: qr) and his professed faith in the "human" as a noncontingent (transhistorical and transcultural) "essence" appears rhetorically and syntactically contingent upon the presence of vast forces of negation. Hence, with its anaphoric string of adverbial phrases ("In spite of ... "), each of which challenges the idea of a human essence preexisting the historicity that permits its definition, the last passage reveals Wordsworth's eagerness to designate an ideal referent or poetic signified unconstrained by the shifting economies of time and place. The imbalanced economy between an "essentialist" cultural vocabulary and a syntax relentlessly impelled by a desire to disavow the "differences" threatening that very vocabulary (and thereby again exposing the contingent nature of "essentialist" talk) involves yet another troubling complication. For the same passage, besides eroding the permanence of poetry's desired signified (e.g., those "primary laws of our nature"), also intimates that historical contingency accounts for the correspondingly

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fragile, varied, and discontinuous nature of the "poetic" signifier ("in spite of difference ... of language"); indeed it is discourse itself that accounts for the contingency and velocity of historical change. In short, the formal conception of a world knowable through stable semiotic correspondences is threatened at both ends, with Wordsworth now recognizing discourse of any form as contingent upon interpretation in both a subjective and an objective sense. Indeed, this bilateral instability of the sign-palpably evidenced by shifting techniques and "tastes" in signifying practice and by the transformation of the world thus signified-also accounts for Wordsworth's persistent interfacing of a technical (poetic) and a cultural agenda. Both converge in the "subject" of poetry itself, which Wordsworth perceives to be human consciousness (at once the signifying agency and the "ideal" referent of all signification) and which marks the site of an ongoing struggle between self-identity and difference, authenticity and distortion, the inwardness of "feeling" and the alienating forces of "rapid communication.'' If, in the words of the Preface, "the subject is indeed important," and if "my subject" or "the Poet's subject [must] be judiciously chosen" (PrW, 1: 129, 133, 137), the conspicuous generality of Wordsworth's use of "subject" is somewhat checked by its consistently gendered representation, "Man." Indeed, it is no surprise that the recurrent depiction of the threat posed by historical contingency-to erode and render indiscriminate both the cultural and economic identity ("savage torpor" and "uniformity of the occupations") of the "subject" ("humanity" as "community")-will be opposed by a figure of poetic redemption whose essence is grounded in its gendered sclf-identity76 Hence Wordsworth's recovery of authentic poetic speech evolves as an exclusively masculine and unmediated transaction, as revealed by his persistent emphasis on self-presence of the poet's essence qua "voice" and "speech": the poet "is a man speaking to men ... a man essentially pleased with his own passions and volitions"; "the Poet writes ... as a Man"; "he considers man and the objects that surround him"; "he considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other" (PrW, 1: 138, 139, qo; italics mine). The minimal and noncontingent "essence" of the human (the "primary laws of human nature" or "certain indestructible qualities") is generally embodied in the concept of the affective, also referred to as "feeling," "passion," or, at the beginning of the Preface, a "state of vivid sensation." Here, then, are some of the pivotal statements in which the affective is being promoted to the status of an a priori, paradigmatic cultural value:

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Humble and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language .... Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it .... Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who ... had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed hy our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; ... feeling therein [in the hall ads] developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling. (PrW, r: 125-27)

If the cultural pragmatics of Wordsworth's text hinge on the social adaptability of the affective, the question now becomes how "feeling" relates to "community." Once again, the rhetorical conduct of Wordsworth's argument reveals at least part of the answer: the "essential passions of the heart" become, within the space of a few lines, "elementary feelings," an already more general turn of phrase, and such verbal transference serves to prevent the affective from sliding back into the spectrum of contingent meanings that extends from the historicocultural down to the idiosyncratic-since it is precisely against these latter meanings that the affective is meant to demarcate the "human" as the essence of community. Presumably for the same reasons, Wordsworth rejects the prevailing diverse inventory of poetic subjects ("poems to which any value can be attached were never written on any variety of subjects"), thereby strengthening the argument that poetic value should be restricted to the affective as the most "durable" aspect of consciousness. It is the self-identity and purportedly inalienable essentialism of those "great and simple affections of our nature" that account for those affections' pragmatic value in the argument at hand, for they reconfigure an unnaturally dispersed economy of discourse into a community characterized by a "healthful state of association" (PrW, r: 126), one whose affective center of gravity will necessarily be found "outside" of history?? In order to shelter such a center from repeated invasion by the contingent forces of historical and cultural change, the Preface conceives of conscious reflection as being at all times already the effect of the antecedent dynamics of "feeling": "thoughts ... are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings." Poetry itself, then, is not principally interested in the local, contextual specificity of the affective but, on the contrary, seeks to establish this notion as a human essence. Wordsworth's long note to "The Thorn" makes this aim particularly clear: "a Poet's words ... ought to be

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weighed in the balance of feeling" since "poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings; now every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language" (LB, 351). The function of poetry in relation to the affective is to redeem "every man" from the consciousness of alienation or decenteredness, a goal likely to resonate among an urban middle-class reading audience whose affective and socioeconomic identities no longer coincide. Prima facie, then, the principal, pragmatic interest of the Preface is to reinstate the affective as a general, noncontingent ontology, since the intervention of the poet on behalf of his community is strictly predicated on a pervasive crisis of affect. The figure of the poet, which now enters the argument, seeks to reconstruct a community by "convey[ing] passion to Readers who are not accustomed to sympathize with men (!] feeling in that manner or using such language." Such a general purpose ("community"), redefined in the context of an equally general notion ("feeling"), will require a skillfully calibrated, mediating form of discourse: "It seemed to me that this might be done by calling in the assistance of lyrical and rapid metre" (LB, 351; italics mine). ~

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Figuration and Authenticity in Wordsworth's Preface The supplemental function here ascribed to the lyric opens another stage of the argument. In keeping with his well-known distrust of abstract notions ("lifeless words, & abstract propositions" merely placate "the spirit of self-accusation," PrW, r: 104), Wordsworth appears well aware that no determination of "feeling" can amount to a compelling argument at a purely conceptual level. As the purportedly "founding" criterion of the human, "feeling" will have to be situated within an ostensibly historical frame of reference that will support the definition of its adequate (or "natural") discursive form. Hence, having initially dehistoricized and dissociated the affective from the seemingly boundless spectrum of social, political, and cultural transformations of the urban present, Wordsworth now recontextualizes it within an agrarian, "rustic" past that ever since Coleridge's probing examination of this idea has been the principal evidence for the alleged obscurity and contradictoriness of the Preface and its incompatibility with the lyrical ballads. The avowed proposition, already stated in the Advertisement, of "a natural delineation of human passions,

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human characters, and human incidents" (PrW, r: rr6) is projected onto a largely nostalgic, if not outright imaginary, setting of "common life." The highly questionable historical authenticity of such "incidents and situations from common life" (PrW, r: 123) as are said to constitute the general setting of "humble and rustic life" (PrW, r: 125) is itself rhetorically hidden from sight by Wordsworth's repeated, conspicuously inflected claim that Lyrical Ballads violates certain inherited, mannered, formalaesthetic conventions of poetic language. His confession of an aesthetic transgression (once again, his humilitas) effectively masks the assumption that the "rural" constitutes a distinct historical reality. Anchored in his conscientious observance of a faithful empirical correspondence or community between subject and object, between his own sensibility and the "rustic" field of vision ("I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject," PrW, r: 133), the poet's ethics thus legitimate the "interest" or motive of such an avowed stylistic transgression.78 Once again pivoting on the convention of humilitas ("I may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects," PrW, r: 153), Wordsworth's rhetoric continues to obfuscate the possibility that such "subjects" might not exist in the first place, at least not in such schematic form. It is this combined rhetorical thrust of a humbly understated field of reference and an equally self-effacing, literal model of representation ("plain style") that recasts the issue of the historical authenticity of the referent ("rustic life") as a question of stylistic propriety. Admittedly, to question the rustic's authenticity on the grounds of its conspicuously rhetorical emergence in the Preface may seem a perverse contradiction of current critical consensus. New Historicists in particular might contend-and some have-that Wordsworth's absorbing concern with stylistic propriety serves precisely to obfuscate the local and material "truth" of the "rustic" behind dignified, elaborate, and aggressively ideational poetic discriminations. This issue harbors much potential confusion, both theoretical and critical, and so it may be helpful to distinguish more explicitly between historicist approaches, themselves quite varied in the kinds of erudition and inflection they bring to bear on Wordsworth's texts, and my own assessment of Wordsworth's prefatory strategy. As an example, consider the following account of Wordsworth's theory of "rural life" offered by one of Wordsworth's most committed historicist critics. Having illustrated, in a number of examples as selective as they seem poignant, Wordsworth's "need to preserve an agrarian alternative to the incipient urbanization of British culture and the British economy," Simpson goes on to comment:

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Wordsworth ... provides what may well be a uniquely sophisticated account (or representation) of how urban and rural environments can determine the perceptual faculties of the human mind. So different are these worlds, that they produce two social systems, two cultures, and thus two literatures to sustain and delight them. The predicament of the "rural" poet, for Wordsworth as for Goldsmith before, is not only in crisis because his audience is increasingly smaller and less influential; it is also an audience that has little or no need for poetry. The poet is thus displaced from the very social units that he celebrates as a healthful paradigm of communal life. Being a man of two worlds, he is properly of neither. (Historical Imagination, y6-77)

Simpson, whose entire argument centers around the displacement of history by the representational structures of Wordsworth's poetry and prose, historicizes the "rural" largely by pointing to the considerable awareness of economic and cultural dynamics that emerges in Wordsworth's letters. But by correlating the rural with the dwindling population of England's agrarian North, Simpson accords a reality to both of these two "social units" and specifically invests the rural with the very presence that renders it so "literally" efficient for Wordsworth's cultural-poetic "interests." As long as it is being conceived as an authentic reality rather than as a master trope in a piece of sociocultural argumentation, the "rural" continues to function as an epistemological gold-standard, a touchstone allowing Wordsworth's alienated urban reading audiences no less than his belated, historicist critics to discover that their respective visions of authentic selfhood and social truth have been marred by historical contingency, or "by differences, I That have no law, no meaning, and no end" (P r8o5, bk. 7, 11. 704-5). Arguably, then, the New Historicism's model of critique more than most others stands in a markedly complementary relationship to the Wordsworthian project of recovering a community beset by contingent historical difference, for it repeats and completes the Wordsworthian desire to escape history, backing up figural displacements with the literal and material "reality" whose authentication Historicism reclaims at the very moment of (and in inverse proportion to) its aesthetic obfuscation. The trope of the rural, the affective point of origin for the progressive alienation that allows Wordsworth to characterize present urban culture as in need of redemptive meanings, is now being reaffirmed by historicist practice as a vanishing point of factual knowledge rather than as the object of a nostalgia? 9 As Alan Liu has persuasively argued, Wordsworth's poetic dispensation of a "transcendental everydayness" where "Mind was the visionary medium that coded the world as otherworldly" has received its

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"pseudo-analytic" counterpart in an "increasingly generic contextualism" ("Local Transcendence," 76, 8r, 77). Liu shrewdly exposes the questionable tendency toward "antiknowing," a theoretically sophisticated skepticism whose "anti-epistemological imperatives" inhabit the contemporary languages of cultural criticism, neopragmatism, neoMarxism, and New Historicism. As Liu argues, these critical models all appear to rejoice in the fragmentation of knowledge into historical microstructures-particulars at once indivisible, incommensurable, and, given their total isolation from one another, irrefutable. Indeed, I have been arguing that Wordsworth's prefatory and lyric writings-seen as distinctive rhetorical forms and, once published, as social practice-were meant to counter the dissolution of the "public" into regionally, demographically, and spiritually incompatible smaller communities. Consistent with our general focus on the underlying pragmatics of Wordsworth's career and on the sociocultural motives encrypted in his writing, we are able to understand the notion of the "rural" as functioning, throughout the r8oo Preface, in ways uncannily analogous to the "local detail" of contemporary cultural and historicist critique, "our new concrete universal: the cultural rather than verbal icon," as Liu aptly calls it. Seen as a reflex of its historical moment, "when the rhetoric of empiricism confronted the early regime of the fragment: an emergent romantic rhetoric" ("Local Transcendence," 87), the "rural" or "rustic" of Wordsworth's Preface functions as the controlling or "founding" allegory (the "other") of a specific historical consciousness and hence is synecdochized as "feeling." It cannot be accorded autonomous material existence, however, since such facticity depends necessarily on its being "represented" for some urban readership. Instead, Wordsworth argues that the "rural" is to be excavated from the entanglements that, in the view of the Preface, characterize the constitutively alienated middle-class urban consciousness whose economic and social ambition Wordsworth time and again manages to enlist for what he presents as a journey of affective self-recovery. More recently, Simpson has offered a more flexible and rather concise portrait of this middle-class psychology as it operates among Wordsworth's projected reading audience. Showing that by the mid-r790s "the business of a specifically literary criticism would become, more and more, the delineation and celebration of the ordinary," Simpson elaborates as follows: The discursive space that ... opens up for the specification of the "literary" is inevitably unstable, not the least since the category of the ordinary is hopelessly imprecise as soon as one moves beyond criteria of self-evidence. As the ideological

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signature of a bourgeois identity, moreover, the category of the literary had to reflect the same instabilities that went into the social experience from which it emanated and which it sought, in some sense, to stabilize. The experience of being "middle class" has never taken on the fixity that it may appear to have in some versions of sociological theory; one could in fact propose that the experience is one of constant insecurity and anxious vigilance, so that apparent stability may be best described as the result of two mutually cancelling vectors, fear of falling and efforts at rising.80

This literary "celebration of the ordinary," so shrewdly connected by Simpson to the oscillations of a middle-class sensibility, must be understood as a rhetorical, figural project energized by its pragmatics or motives. That is, the authentic idiom of the "literary," poetry, aims to counteract the "historical restlessness [and] perpetual self-displacement" of the middle class by configuring it through its literary practice as a reading audience "hung[ry] for permanent reinterpretation" (Klancher, Making, 75) into a more cohesive (aesthetic) community. Relative to this project, an avowed concern with referential veracity and authentic diction must be viewed as incidental, or rather as a necessary manipulation of the "reality effect" on which, perhaps, all literature must rely to some extent. Consequently, Wordsworth's pragmatist poetics should be understood as claiming the referential veracity of the "rural" only by way of an accompanying deictic notation of that realm's erosion and imminent disappearance. Thus motivated by the project of reconfiguring an increasingly heterogeneous spectrum of middle-class readers, mostly urban and endowed with complex, seemingly incompatible economic, affective, and cultural "interests," the Preface engages the question of the facticity of the "rural" only vicariously, namely, by assuming it when pondering its appropriate stylistic form. Despite exposing the concept of "rustic life" as a historical and stylistic au tapas, Coleridge still followed the fiction far enough to be drawn into the more technical debate over the extent to which the imagined language of such life would admit of imitation.81 In and of itself, however, the rural clearly proves a "critical fiction," one that may help us understand why Wordsworth persists in linking its affective qualities to figural language. I recall here a familiar formulation of Wordsworth's ostensibly agrarian poetics: "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language" (PrW, r: 125). Notwithstanding its programmatic transparency, the statement brings into focus several rhetorical

"Substitute Excellencies" difficulties that continue to preoccupy the Preface as it gropes for an appropriate ratio between "feeling" and "style," between the "immediacy" of the affective as origin and its "communicability" as social value. Thus the delicate balance between a communal language "really used by men" and its poetic transformation by a "certain colouring of the imagination" begins to crumble as Wordsworth inadvertently deploys the very concept of "rustic life" as a metaphor for "passion," which it is otherwise said to embody. The argument's unexpected sliding toward an overt troping of its basic concepts-here, the "rustic"-points up the Preface's next concern, also conspicuously understated, namely to recover the affective as a communal "primary law" of a humanity beset by infinite and contingent difference. Such a project mandates a form of expression that can be unfailingly distinguished from both the erratic discursivity associated with "rapid" historical transformation and the mechanized application of figural language by a literary culture frantically trying to outpace change with sensational innovation. The latter practice, Wordsworth insists, lacks any substantive and "more durable" poetic subject (PrW, r: 125). Hence, in an effort to preempt the ballads' contamination by a promiscuously reproductive "poetic diction," Wordsworth notes, "as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it" (PrW, r: 131).~ 2 And yet, to react so vehemently against the hold of his contemporary culture on the poetic sign invariably reinstates the very artificiality ("as much pains has been taken") that it critiques, while compromising the latitude of poetic expression: "it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets" (PrW, r: 133).

If cultural and social responsibility involves counteracting the apparent corruption of the signifying medium by "bad Poets" through expressions of "feeling" that have been "judiciously chosen," the required "principle of selection" appears strangely elusive. Wordsworth himself seems increasingly aware that his ideation of a language of authentic feeling is already at a remove from the "rustic" sphere of authentic reference from which it derives its cultural authority: one is to "imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men," to make "this selection ... with true taste and feeling" (PrW, r: IJI, 137), to "describe," "imitate," or" conjure up" passion.83 Up to this point in the Preface, having advocated a categorical break with the stale tradition of Augustan poetry, Wordsworth now begins to sense how much the forces of history-literary and

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cultural alike-may invade the very poetry that seeks to keep them in check under the auspices of the affective.84 Although he "imitates and describes the passions," the poet's "employment" is now conceded to be "in some degree mechanical." The principal challenge to the desired universal homogeneity of the affective ("the primary laws of human nature") is mounted neither by the historical shifts of poetry's social field of reference nor by the calcified "phraseology" of "poetic diction"; rather, it is the inevitably supplementary status of the poetic sign, always in an arbitrary and asymmetrical relation to "feeling" ("in some degree mechanical"), which constitutes the most tenacious impediment to Wordsworth's theoretical vision of a socially and culturally efficient poetic technique. Between derivative practice ("poetic diction" as an imitation of reference) and the theorized ideal (figuration as homologous to "universal passion") there opens up a far more unsettling prospect of rhetoric as simulacrum. Not surprisingly, then, the resistance of "feeling" to communicability reveals itself throughout the Preface in subtle, though inconclusive, terminological substitutions. The affective shifts from "essential passions" to "elementary feelings" to "regular feelings" to "moral feelings" to "general sympathy" to "general passions and thoughts and feelings" and, finally, to "the great and universal passions of men" (PrW, I: 125, I37, I38, I42, 145). The progressive totalization of the affective-its essentialization under the auspices of a "rustic life," which immunizes it against contingent historical difference-impels the Preface toward committing poetry and the lyric to a paradigmatic ("expressive") and thereby universalized theory of style. Shifting from "the subjects and aim of these Poems ... to their style," Wordsworth again reaffirms his faith in the authenticity of "the very language of men" (PrW, I: I3I) which poetry is to "imitate" or "adopt." Constructed as the historical concretion of the affective, the superior cultural authority of the "rustic" proves to result from its purported discursive immediacy: "The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style .... Assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such" (PrW, I: I3I). According to Wordsworth, the intrinsically mediating, because substitutive, event of figuration must itself be, at all times, an "immediate" effect of "passion." 85 Given the foundational status of the affective throughout the Preface (serving as the ontology supporting the poet's recovery of a community), it must never reveal itself as subject to contingent historical shifts in taste and rhetorical prac-

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tice. Wordsworth's rhetorical argument thus employs the trope of personification in a synecdochic or paradigmatic manner in order to illustrate the general susceptibility of figurative diction to use and abuse. Such a choice is far from accidental, given his overall concern with recovering an authentic paradigm of subjectivity: "if the subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead [the Poet] to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures" (PrW, I: 137).86 It is here that Wordsworth's strategic identification of poetic technique and cultural practice encounters its most severe problems. As so often in his prefatory writings, here they manifest themselves in the form of parenthetical concessions that ostensibly pose no significant threat to the overall argument. Speaking of the subject, the poet, Wordsworth notes that in addition to other qualities the poet is characterized by a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves. (PrW, I: 138)

The undeniably supplementary relation of the poetic sign to the affective culture of "rustic life" and its corresponding "real language" poses a theoretical dilemma from which Wordsworth seeks to extricate himself by suggesting that the poet is capable of figuring forth "absent things" and "conjuring up in himself passions" that are not his own. Such an inward appropriation of what is to be ultimately a social and cultural value (contributing to the "general sympathy" or meant to "excite rational sympathy," PrW, I: 143) requires figurative diction as its corresponding rhetorical form: "As it is impossible for the Poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider himself in the situation of a translator, who does not scruple to substitute excellencies of another kind for those unattainable by him" (PrW, I: IJ9). The image of the translator defines the mediation of the affective with a secondary language, which is itself but the "imitation" designed to "conjure up" the originary idiom that proves "unattainable" even for the poet. As "translator," the poet thus is charged with the unenviable, indeed paradoxical task of mediating an unattainable referent (the "passion" of the "rustic") and an unattainable language (that elusive "real language") for the benefit of an urban

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audience incapable of discriminating between authoritative, figurative translations of "passion" and cognate sensations effected by counterfeit rhetoric. In short, the causality between passion and figuration (between essence and telos, inward "feeling" and communal "sympathy") is inherently undecidable. If the poet is merely "affected by absent things," how are we to know that "metaphors and figures" are indeed "prompted by passion"? To insist that they are, as Wordsworth does, invariably inculcates a competing, far more unsettling theoretical prospect, according to which "feeling" denotes only an interest, not an essence, in that it can only appear in figural form, alienated from its putative origin. The essential quality of the affective, steadily affirmed by Wordsworth's continued technical concern with its faithful "translation," distracts from its function throughout the Preface: to deduce from the essential self-identity and homogeneity of "feeling" the social exigency of a homogenous (noncontingent and transhistorical) value of "sympathy" and community itself.B? Alluding to the force of convention, Wordsworth notes: "I may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether protect himself" (PrW, I: I 53). The poet's authority thus appears to be simultaneously predicated on and destabilized by the equivalence between "feeling" and "figures." On the positive side, such "equivalence" implies the poet's "originality" or "inevitability" (which Wordsworth missed in Goethe's poetry), whereas, when the poet is understood as a translator, his effort at constructing a communal culture depends on "metaphors and figures" whose value and authority are irremediably alienated from the affective interiority or essence that legitimizes the poet's social "interest" to begin with.HH Meanwhile, if the theoretical exposure of such undecidability appears oppressively familiar in its "deconstructionist" bent, Wordsworth's subsequent remarks skillfully avoid any conclusions that might leave the overall argument stranded amidst the conceptual debris of some generalized existential crisis. Quite to the contrary, the Preface appears no less enabled than threatened by this "equivalence" between figuration and passion, between the mediating structure and the affective immediacy which together circumscribe the origin ("feeling") and the telos ("community") of poetic practice. Indeed, his argument about cultural and social values requires Wordsworth to balance a negative causality (figures "conjuring up" the effect of "passion") that illustrates a pervasive cultural deterioration (e.g., Augustan "poetic diction") with a positive causality ("figures of speech

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prompted by passion") charged with realigning and homogenizing the currently inflated economy of cognitive, emotive, and material values. The r 8o2 Appendix to the Preface recharacterizes the theoretical predicament of an undecidable causality between "feeling" and figuration as the result of a historical deterioration of both reading taste and poetic practice. It deplores the absence of a reliable standard for the employment of figurative diction by characterizing the currently prevailing economies of "feeling" and figuration as the end point of a historical trajectory that has all but eroded reliable standards of signification and interpretation. But the Preface simultaneously "naturalizes" its own cognitive procedure by adopting the organic, authoritative form of historical genealogy: The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation. (PrW, r: r6o)

What the narrative's genealogical structure masks, however, is the affinity between a repeatedly criticized "poetic diction" and the (good) poet's unavoidably belated, substitutive figuration of "passion." For "while he describes and imitates passions," we now recall, any poet's activity will prove "in some degree mechanical," and he stakes his cultural efficiency on his "ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events" (PrW, r: 138). In causing the theoretical tensions within the Preface and thus continually disrupting Wordsworth's ideation of a homogenized cultural value, historical contingency is about to be refocused or "displaced" once more. The previously lamented contingent difference or, as the Preface prefers to see it, the historical deterioration of objective standards of value now manifests itself as a crisis of reading. It is precisely this theoretical tension between the supplemental figuration of "whatever passions [the poet] communicates to his reader" (PrW, r: rsr) and the avowed essentialism of such affective foundations of culture that now accounts for the erratic transformations of aesthetic response offered by varied audiences. The Preface's overarching assertion that there is an essential, identifiable, and representable core-"the primary laws of our nature" linking the individ-

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ual with "humanity"-proves shaky as long as the bond of signifier/signified and figure/affect remains at the mercy of reading as historically and socially conditioned. Though it has been conceived as the very signature of the authenticity and durability of "true" culture, poetry remains susceptible of alienation into a contingent otherness by the infelicitous historical collaboration of derivative poets and gullible readers. The poems as well as the r8oo Preface "compose the textual countermove against that vast social transformation that since Wordsworth's birth has been turning one (full) culture into another (empty) culture .... Thus the increasingly bleak strategy of a writer who casts the act of reading against ineluctable historical development itself" (Klancher, Making, 144). Referring to the language that was "insensibly produced" by the misappropriation of "poetic diction," Wordsworth thus resumes his historical narrative: The Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also: in both cases he was willing that his common judgment and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the one served as the passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar causes. Besides, the poet spake to him in the character of a man to be looked up to, a man of genius and authority. (PrW, r: r6o)

If the immigration of private "human" essence into social and cultural relations requires the personifying "passport" of figurative rhetoric, to display that passport is to be at the mercy of an audience (itself to be reformed) whose ability to discriminate between authentic essences and pragmatic effects, between "true" affect and "false" sensation, is at all times historically contingent. Any "instinctive and infallible perception of the true" simply cannot exist, since the reader too is but a historically determined category. While Wordsworth may insist on the Poet's unique spiritual endowment-capable of contemplating "ordinary life ... with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge" (PrW, 1: qo)-both the sensationalist and the authentic forms of "passion" appear to have been "produced by the same, or similar causes." The complexity and significance of Wordsworth's Preface at the threshold of a new century rests primarily with its unexpected recognition of a fundamental hiatus between ideational desires and their discursive realization. A conflict intrudes into an argument whose "interest" lies with a definition of culture and its founding value (the affective), yet whose re-

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sources derive from the domain of rhetorical and poetic theory. Wordsworth's management of this tension between his cultural pragmatics and a corresponding imagined poetic infrastructure, between value and form, at times appears to verge on conservatism. Ultimately, though, the Preface opts for an idiom of rhetorical persuasion rather than dogmatic propositions, thereby suggesting that the motive subtending Wordsworth's entire theory-that is, the ideation of a community founded on a homogeneous, human, and specifically affective essence-has been neither fully realized nor brought down by total failure. To be sure, its realization has been forestalled by a seemingly irresolvable tension between "essence" and "discourse," a tension that merely reappears in the supplemental concept of figuration invoked to resolve it. Notwithstanding foundationalist claims ("the poet ... is the rock of defence for human nature," PrW, r: 141) and the complacent, even Philistine tonality of his canonical, middle-class paradigm of humanism, Wordsworth ultimately seeks neither to collapse the affective into a metaphysical absolute nor to personify it as the divine. Rather, he continues exploring the resistance of language and the tensions of poetry as rhetorical form and cultural practice, insofar as these concerns bear on his overall project of aesthetically configuring, or at least reconfiguring, a national culture. In spite of an often overwhelming desire to transfigure societas into universitas, Wordsworth will seek-at least in his 1798 and r8oo Lyrical Ballads-to achieve community poetically, namely, as the effect of interpretive participation elicited by a complex array of rhetorical forms rather than as an abstract entity postulated and defined conceptually. For the time being the troubled hypothesis of a "real language of men" and its purportedly authentic, if fading, "rustic" community remains at the center of interpretive rather than definitional practice. The social and ultimately moral "interests" or pragmatics of the Preface are thus realized by way of recharacterizing the vernacular, henceforth to be regarded as "a practice in terms of which to think, to choose, to act, and to utter." 89 Michael Oakeshott's portrayal of moral and social conduct as inherently discursive seems applicable to the Preface's consistent blending of affective and discursive values. Its openness and flexibility may not always be what Wordsworth's r8oo text fully endorses, but it is a model that Wordsworth the relatively unknown writer of the year r8oo-so troubled by the conflict between his democratic convictions and his professional ambition-is not yet prepared to surrender on behalf of Wordsworth the public author. Thus the r8oo Preface implicates both Romanticism and modernism in the tension between a language that by definition is alienated into otherness and a desire for a "more durable" paradigm of

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cultural value that threatens to unravel at the very moment of its rhetorical implementation. Lyrical Ballads thus "produces" its reading audiences by staging a seemingly bilateral symbolic or inspirational exchange between the increasingly numerous and diverse communities of readers in London and the provincial towns and the fictitious (or figural) historicity of an allegedly disappearing class of rural poor. Fascinated with the characters of the poor, with the economic determinacy of poverty, and with the tears in the fabric of social psychology made by the experience of poverty, Wordsworth's collection transcends the earlier genre of Jacobin protest-poetry by developing a middle-class readership in "speculative" fashion, through an often contradictory, interpretive, and textually constituted mode of producing cultural knowledge. It thus dramatizes Schiller's (and following him, Hans-Georg Gadamer's) conception of the aesthetic as "play" (Spiel), "serious play," that is, according to which "the 'subject' of the [aesthetic] experience ... is not the subject of the person who experiences it, but the work itself." 90 Both economically and culturally-both realms springing from the same causality-the emergence of an English "middleclass" does not constitute a simple, sociohistorical occurrence but instead depends on the unconscious production of essentially linguistic, interpretive technologies for self-description and self-refcognition. The project of Lyrical Ballads thus stands in synecdochic relation to the period's ideological superstructure of Romantic Bildung, so astutely (if inadvertently) implemented as pedagogical practice by Andrew Bell, as didactic fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, and as aesthetic and linguistic theory by Schiller, Coleridge, and Hegel. In these cases, the "work" of pedagogy reconstitutes the collective, unconscious responses to cultural and economic transformations in discrete, intricate textual or institutional effects. On the face of it simple texts to be read, Wordsworth's ballads institute the idea of Literature, of superior cultural practice, and delineate the appropriate rhetorical and conceptual modes for the reception of this artifact. Among these we might subsume the affiliated discourses or disciplines of continental speculative philosophy, Scottish political economy, English political and legal theory, and didactic literature, as well as institutions such as the British Museum (founded in 1753), the rise of comprehensive exhibitions of British art in London, the National Encyclopedia, and the rapid increase and widespread distribution of annual, monthly, and weekly almanacs, magazines, and journals concerned with reviewing literature, fiction, and poetry. In short, textual forms and the institutional forums for their "critical" administration all operate on an ideological continuum-

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2 59

or to put it differently, they constitute symptoms of the virtual, speculative, or "invisible workmanship" of capital. What defines authentic membership in the domestic and national economy of the middle class, then, is not one's wealth or "substance" but one's felicitous performance in the never-ending task of self-description and self-representation and, requisite to that practice, one's capacity to find the proper ratio of cognitive and affective investment, reserve, and display. As Wordsworth was to recognize with full force around the turn of the century, everything depends on converting the "touching compulsion" of history into a choice, into individual and social "destiny"-or, more modestly put, to turn it into the matter and means of "Vocation."

Vocation "Beyond the Suburbs of the Mind": Automimesis and the Political Economy of Spirit and Body in The Prelude

This is, in truth, heroic argument, And genuine prowess; which I wish'd to touch With hand however weak; but in the main It lies far hidden from the reach of words. Points have we all of us within our souls, Where all stand single; -William Wordsworth, The Prelude He disposes the world in categories, thus: The peopled and the unpeopled. In both, he is Alone. But in the peopled world, there is, Besides the people, his knowledge of them. In The unpcoplcd, there is his knowledge of himself Which is more desperate in the moments when The will demands that what he thinks be true? -Wallace Stevens, "Esthetiquc du Mal" The formulation of a problem is merely the theoretical expression of the conditions which allow a solution already produced outside the process of knowledge because imposed by extra-theoretical instances and exigencies (by religious, ethical, political, or other "interests") to recognize itself in an artificial problem manufactured to serve it both as a theoretical mirror and as a practical justification. -Louis Althusser, Reading "Capital"

If$

Self-Interest Professed

C&

Autobiography and the Simulation of Authority The purpose of this section is to situate Wordsworth's Prelude within the larger and increasingly fragmented sphere of mid- and late-eighteenthcentury political and moral languages. In exploring how Wordsworth's autobiographical narrative frames supposedly essential, personal experiences in a shrewd amalgam of diverse and by no means always compatible rhetorical traditions-in a language that ranges from sublime personal epiphanies to abstract blank-verse meditations on philosophical, socioeconomic, and aesthetic issues-we come face-to-face, so to speak, with his social motivation, here encrypted as "deeply" personal in substance. In general, Wordsworth's abiding and professed interest appears to be the salvaging of an allegedly fallen "public" and its reconstruction as a spiritually authentic and aesthetically proficient national community: "the people." While remaining close to a set of concerns and questions ordinarily associated with historicism, my readings wish, once again, to specify the ideological place of The Prelude by attending to its formal-textual presentation first, and by pressing the analysis of a concern with its formalaesthetic coherence, apparent throughout the poem, to the point that it begins to disclose (by default, as it were) the presence and disposition of specific ideological motives and non-aesthetic concerns. The "sense" of The Prelude's historicity is thus to be traced in its figural and philological movement-as a multilayered process of composition, expansion, and revision, yet also as the sheer movement (a tropism) underlying any one of its "passages" and episodes. As Wordsworth came to understand with increasing depth, the poetic production of socially relevant knowledge ultimately coincides with recognizing and analyzing the full extent of one's (often unconscious) debt to those languages previously charged with the representation of that knowledge, such as the frayed discourse of civic humanism and its designated heir, the aesthetic and political rhetoric of "custom" associated with the writings of Johnson, Reynolds, and Burke. At the same time, however, the economic and philosophical writings of the Scottish Enlightenment (especially Hume and Smith) strongly hinted that the perceived fragmentation of the social body was connected to the growing role of political economy in the definition of the public and its rapidly changing conception of value. In its double sense as poetic argument and professional enter-

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prise, Wordsworth's Prelude was predicated on the identification of a conflict pervading all of these languages, a scandal whose solution could not be entrusted to the competing humanist and economic languages that had produced it to begin with. In its formal inception as autobiography, that most precarious of all literary genres, The Prelude identified and confronted this problem as the question of self-interest. The question as to how to represent self-interest without indulging in it appeared to be a problem that early conceptions of civic humanism had largely ignored and had tended, when confronting it on rare occasion, to repudiate without qualification as moral and political corruption. However, with the dramatic rise of political economy as a powerful material fact-and, before long, as an effective discipline claiming to explain and justify that fact in all its ramifications-"self-interest" began to be perceived not merely as a dominant but as quite possibly the only relevant paradigm of agency in the public discourse on moral and political issues. By r8oo, an increasingly professionalized Wordsworth felt constrained not only to address the problem of self-interest but to exemplify through his work that its solution required a fundamentally new aesthetics of subjective appearance. What was required was not more rational propositions but an entirely changed paradigm of self-representation. From its very outset, The Prelude thus declines to furnish yet another logical proposition or to rely on "some British theme, some old I Romantic tale" (P r8os, bk. r, ll. r8o-8r) and so to compete with discourses and disciplines that, in Wordsworth's latently antimodern view, had more often than not magnified the moral scandal of self-interest. Instead, The Prelude attempts a strictly formalaesthetic solution objectified in its unique idiom of confessional autobiography. Wordsworth's narrative thus promotes its distinctive rhetorical design as the only viable (dialectical) response to the question of self-interest by charting the poet's progression through and beyond his variously narcissistic, sentimental, and rationalist-Ja co bin phases. Such an archaeology reconstructs the poet's seemingly contingent affective memories as actually representative in kind. Designed as an unfolding narrative transcript of subjective reminiscence, that is, The Prelude emulates the psychology of a similarly positioned middle-class reading audience hoping to legitimate its present socioeconomic disposition by rewriting (or re/remembering) the history of its "mobility." To legitimate the present individualthat is, the product of a career of self-interested professionalization-is to redescribe the present as the end point in a narrative of cultural destiny. Thus it would be more accurate to speak of Wordsworth's Prelude as a metaprofessional narrative. For his highly professionalized autobiogra-

Self-Interest Professed phy-Clifford Siskin calls it "the most famous resume in English literary history"-typically identifies itself as antiprofessional, knowing that its audience "yearn[ s] ... for what professionalism has supposedly disguised: an individual whose deep human feelings have somehow survived the chill" ("Prescriptions," 3rr, 308). Proceeding on the metaphysical premise of the poet's "vocation" or "calling," The Prelude indemnifies its subject against the charge of excessive self-interest by dramatizing in its rhetorical form how spontaneous recollection inevitably merges with the aesthetic and discursive capital of its demographic end point: the Nation. Such a strategy necessarily results in a highly reflexive poetic idiom, one heavily invested in the evolution of several, often competing languages and disciplines that had previously sought to offer plausible representations of the relation between self and community, private interests and public obligations, passions and virtues. Wordsworth's solution to the public/private conflict-a conflict as intractable as it seemed monotonous-was to historicize the problem of self-interest by transcribing (from memory, so to speak) the account of its dialectical evolution. By design, then, The Prelude hopes to transubstantiate self-interest from the vagaries of first memories and their subsequent cathection as "first poetic spirits" into an exemplary, ideally unimpeachable public language. To approach The Prelude in this manner is to remain sensitive to the project of historicism, though it is to imply, also, that a genuine and comprehensive historicization of the autobiographical text (and hence of Wordsworth's vocational ambition) requires more than the reconstruction of local detail that a generation of astute readers have so often found encrypted in the subtly allusive, elliptic, and symbolic rhetoric. While historicism has significantly expanded our grasp of Wordsworth's "fit" within his historical moment, it has arguably done so by reinforcing (if also redirecting) earlier, more overtly idealizing conceptions of his poetry as a unique type of expressive behavior. Thus, M. H. Abrams's "expressivist" conception of Romantic poetry and Geoffrey Hartman's reading of Wordsworth's verse as staging a unique dialectic of nature and self-consciousness continue to resonate in the New Historicist quest, in Alan Liu's words, "for the subject, any subject able to tell us what it is (authority, author, identity, ideology, consciousness, humanity)." The deeper purpose of such an approach is thus to "connect the plural to the dominant, historical context to literary text, and so [to] create a single movement of culture, a single motivated artifact" ("Power of Formalism," 732). Historicism is thus understood as a redaction of the New Critical paradigm of the literary text as a system of purely immanent justifications, into an equally

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monolithic conception of history and culture of which, it is said, Romantic poetry is an especially articulate evasion. In construing that text as the unconscious displacement of larger cultural and economic antagonisms (and hence as the obfuscation of referentiality as such), historicism produces "its" unified subject of history by inverting the symbolic concision and aesthetic unity of the literary artifact. · At this point, first parallels between Romanticism's poetic and historicism's analytic practice begin to crystallize. The conceptual structure and cognitive ambition of historicism, for example, recall Hegel's conception of philosophical critique (Kritik) as the destiny and salvation of aesthetic form. According to the self-confirming, retroactive logic of speculative philosophy, the concise stylistic character of the aesthetic "object" came to be understood as anticipating that object's eventual analytic redemption by the universal concept (Begriff) of a historicist method of philosophy. Romanticism's aesthetic of the beautiful-which Hegel was to historicize as essentially textual in appearance-is thus understood, retroactively, to have been destined for cognitive redemption by a philosophical criticism (System) all along. Such axiomatic, self-privileging philosophical confidence continues to resonate in contemporary historicism's self-characterization as a "self-consciously belated criticism" (Levinson, Great-Period Poems, 12), as "hav[ing) a higher self-conscious grasp of ... received intellectual traditions" (McGann, Beauty, 7), and as deploying "our consciousness to cure the past of its objectivity: in effect, its pastness" (Levinson, Rethinking Historicism, 28). To quote Jerome McGann's founding (and eminently Schlegelian) apotheosis: historicism is "the completed form of criticism" (Beauty, 56). McGann's unshakable confidence in the retroactive powers of the New Historicism-a confidence subtly ironized by Marjorie Levinson's hint that our present is merely "edified but not changed by its scholarly operations" (Rethinking Historicism, 29)-recalls Walter Benjamin's conception of historicism as caught in a phantasmagorical interplay of danger and redemption. In the sixth of his "Theses on the Concept of History," Benjamin remarks: "To articulate the past ... means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.... [That] danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it" (Illuminations, 25 5). And yet, insofar as the historicist's "image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption," his-

Self-Interest Professed toricism's moment of analytic mastery proves necessarily unstable. For precisely that past, Benjamin now argues, had already "carrie[d within itself the] temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim" (Illuminations, 254). Indeed, a reading of Wordsworth's Prelude may ultimately help us grasp the liberal utopias undergirding the New Historicism as the (academic) expression of a postmodern, "messianic" longing. Quite possibly, an ethos of redemption lives on not only in the blank-verse vernacular of The Prelude but also in the discourses of materialism and historicism that aspire to liberate the unconscious ideology of the Wordsworthian idiom from its (alleged) referential autism. As remains to be seen, then, the retroactive conceptualization of Romanticism's overall aesthetic bequest shows how Romantic idealism continues to mortgage the intellectual estates of contemporary critique, a scenario neatly thrown into relief by Wordsworth's Prelude, a poem profoundly consumed by the desire to control the terms of its posthumous reception. Both at the level of textual revision and in its overarching theme of the poet's "growth," Wordsworth's autobiographical verse claims to have incubated the conditions for its own recognition: the poet's style "professes" (indeed prognosticates) its eventual social effects. Not only are the vagaries of poetic confession to be redeemed by a larger communal purpose, but the poetic act simultaneously claims to salvage the (allegedly compromised) integrity of a social community. Far from reveling in its formal-stylistic idiosyncrasies, then, such a poetics claims an instrumental relation to a philosophical, civic community (Hegel's "spirit") by positing poetic "style" as the encryption of an ultimately social knowledge. Whatever its local and temporal objectives (or, in Hegel's terminology, its "meaning"), the aesthetic matters strictly because it contains within itself the speculative seeds of its own public intelligibility. Hegel's speculative theory thus conceives of the aesthetic as the embryonic anticipation of, and an involuntary reaching for, total historical knowledge; it is the Wordsworthian child whose stylistic intuitions father the subject of reflective, disciplined man. And yet, as Liu has forcefully argued, to embrace style as an unimpeachable cue for the historicist's reconstruction of a more truthful, though no less unified, "subject" of history is to mistake an instance of blind transference for one of insight: "The New Historicist interpreter," Liu writes, is

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a subject looking into the past for some other subject able to define what he himself, or she herself, is; but all the search shows in its uncanny historical mirror is the same subject he/she already knows: a simulacrum of the poststructuralist self insecure in its identity.... Whereas before the action of the Hero discovered historical plurality to be literary unity, the 'expressive' action of the new hero, modern subjectivity, discovered just the reverse. History was now the dominating unity that had to be expressed as literary plurality.1

Indeed, another half decade of profuse critical (at times "experimental critical") writing not only has confirmed Liu's thesis of "the New Historicism [as] in effect a profoundly narcissistic method" ("Power of Formalism," 746) but has also, with sometimes breathtaking naivete, potentiated historicism's unwitting transferentiallogic by collapsing the critical and analytic challenge posed by representations of class, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on, into the delusive capital of subjective, empirical reminiscence. Masquerading as the last bastion of authentic cognition and political relevance, the resulting self-styled critical cum confessional narratives, frequently vacillating between the lurid and the banal, have further eroded a paradigm of analytic and scholarly discipline already compromised, in Liu's view, by the New Historicism's monolithic understanding of subjectivity, ideology, context, and so on. In construing the task of critical writing as one of sheer advocacy, autobiographical literary criticism arrogates the cognitive and social scope (though clearly not the responsibilities) of a previously historicist discipline whose problems are deemed (perhaps rightly so) unsolvable, yet which now are being repudiated (with palpable illogic) as an oppressive disciplinary burden.2 In recasting the production of knowledge as a function of "bearing witness"-and so bypassing the logistic inconveniences of historical research, as well as its analytic entailments (e.g., questions of evidence and of verification and falsification in historical or even psychoanalytic argumentation)-the recent flourishing of anecdotal, confessional, and biographical criticism appears to have revived the quintessential American myth of rugged self-creation and its Puritan origins. For its basic outline is that of an intellectual antinomianism, an ostentatiously brave new rejection of the discursive rules and practices (nomos) that have conditioned academic disciplines up to this point. What renders this otherwise ephemeral development relevant for our purposes, however, is not its potentiation of historicism's comparatively subdued cognitive transferences with now-defiant personal identifications intrinsic to most forms of advocacy. Rather, this transformation of the disciplinary languages of critical discovery into a rhetoric of stridently

Self-Interest Professed

subjective self-discovery seems to bear, at first glance, an uncanny resemblance to the Wordsworthian paradigm of poetic meditation and confession as submerged spiritual aggression. Both today's "experimental critical" and Wordsworth's autobiographical ruminations reflect the larger social purposes served by tapping the presumptive integrity of one's interior life and converting it into a public rhetorical performance. Writing takes the "spectacular" form of a theater of the passions, a gradual merging and strengthening of personal, authorial, and professional confidence. Like the righteous testimonials furnished in contemporary autobiographical criticism, the confessional metonymies that constitute Wordsworth's Prelude graph the evolution of a professionally sophisticated (albeit socially detached) individual from early bouts of juvenile delinquency through episodes of pre-professional anguish to the eventual confident authorization of the poet as a "sensitive and creative soul" (P r8o5, bk. rr, 1. 257). Seen in this light, Wordsworth's ambitious autobiographical project bears pointedly on disciplinary problems that continue to occupy literary and historical interpretation today. For "discipline," specifically the disciplining of that most generic of passions, self-interest, emerges as a crucial motive for public writing in the later eighteenth century and continues to be a pivotal issue throughout The Prelude. It would be a serious error, however, to construe Wordsworth's stated objective, the quest for an effective symbolic discipline of self-interest (or "love of self"), as an instance of outright repression or, for that matter, as anything "personal" at all. On the contrary, the representation of subjective "growth" and selfdisciplining throughout, and indeed as, The Prelude is by definition a very conspicuous, public, and hence in large measure trans personal act. Indeed, "to confess, to periodically relinquish privacy, to renounce solitude as an end in itself," Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, is always a public event, "a rehearsal for friendship; a discipline for community" (Edge of Night, 53). Generally speaking, self-representation always mobilizes (though always differently so) the personal only to discover its aesthetic and political complexity, its intrinsic Otherness. Discussing the conventional antithesis between subjective experience and professionalized work, Siskin similarly concludes that such an opposition "misses a major historical point: for the past two centuries professionals have talked about little else. Their apparent detachment from their own private lives while working on others' has been but a blind to the productive power of such talk: far from preceding and being increasingly blinded by professionalism, private life was and is a product of the same (Romantic) discourse" ("Prescriptions," 309).

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Hence, what distinguishes the few successful and lasting autobiographical writings from the rest is precisely their insight that, beyond mobilizing the personal, the inscription of self-interest must also assimilate and reconceive a complex aesthetic tradition. For if we take seriously the transferential element within historicism, then "this interest of ours in a certain use [of the past] might also be an effect of the past which we study, and ... our mode of critical production could be related to that past as to the absent cause which our practice instantiates" (Rethinking Historicism, 21). What sets The Prelude apart from so much autobiographical literature is that Wordsworth appears so intensely conscious of his poem's transferential character, even as he purports to subordinate self-interest to self-discipline, "love of Nature" to "love of mankind." Far from reducing his subject's sociopolitical significance to a function of prosaic selfassertion, Wordsworth locates self-consciousness-and its ultimate "interest" in securing a distinctive audience-at the intersection of highly complex and frequently incommensurate economic, political, and aesthetic languages. Ranging from the cosmopolitan to the national, regional, and local, these variously professionalized, vernacular, or outright nostalgic idioms render history intelligible as something that has surreptitiously filtered through the self and has incrementally circumscribed its unconscious. Hence, to negotiate the autobiographical subject as an authoritative "vision" for his prospective audience, Wordsworth must show the consciousness of that self (never really "his" self) to be imbued with the same aesthetic and poetic tradition that has textured the minds of his audience. As he notes, "I through myself I Make rigorous inquisition," and doing so often entails salvaging old "stores from decay .. . I By timely interference" (P r8o5, bk. 1, II. 159-60, II27-28). Re-membering a subject nearly dismembered and dispersed into that tradition-particularly the Gothic and sentimental fictions that so irritate Wordsworth-thus merely anticipates a recognition within the projected readership of his poem. For that purpose, and especially so as to salvage both his and his audience's subjectivities from being engulfed in a literary tradition deemed questionable in its moral and formal-aesthetic authority, Wordsworth's Prelude realizes selfinterest as an often highly allusive and culturally self-conscious style. Selfinterest, in other words, cannot be reduced to an enunciation of languid sentiments and righteous opinions, nor are the autobiographer's views authenticated-morally or analytically-by any assumption that some inner struggle must have preceded the public act of confession. Such pseudoauthentication of confessional writing Wordsworth rejects when commenting on

Self-Interest Professed How Books mislead us, looking for their fame To judgments of the wealthy Few, who see By artificial lights; flattering thus our self-conceit With pictures that ambitiously set forth The differences, the outside marks by which Society has parted man from man, Neglectful of the universal heart. (P r8o5, bk.

IZ,

II. 2o6-r9)

As it turns out, however, the poetic fiction of such a "universal heart," arguably the dominant trope throughout Wordsworth's career, is not bestowed upon him through a revelation, nor is it anything simple or monolithic to begin with. On the contrary, this "heart" is accessible to Wordsworth and his audience only via a prolonged dialectical migration of their subjectivity through (and transformation of it by) two centuries of frequently competing aesthetic and political languages struggling to establish compelling definitions of the public sphere. Far from conceiving of his poem as a reflex of divine intervention or unfailing inspiration on the part of the poet, Wordsworth conceives of the genre of autobiography as a cultural palimpsest of powerful aesthetic and economic imperatives and languages. For his readers to trace this inheritance throughout The Prelude is to hazard the sublime recognition of their subjectivities as unwitting effects of that history. The result-the poem as critical, historical artifact-thus amounts to a distinctive symbolic intervention, an aesthetic parole aimed at redefining its projected readership. As Wordsworth shrewdly intuited, such an audience preferred to be manipulated at the level of desire rather than to be subjected to didactic verse. Hence, to enable its prospective readers to coalesce into a class of like-minded subjects, an "imagined community," Wordsworth's Prelude encourages a highly collaborative, quasi-voyeuristic mode of serendipitously "overhearing" (in Matthew Arnold's lucid phrase) the allegedly spontaneous selfcreation of the author's exemplary "poetic spirit" in the form of a sustained confessional narrative. Precisely insofar as the writer is but another "discursant ... performing acts whose context is that of the discourse itself," it is incumbent upon us to conceive a poem's parole or "style" as an intervention within a field of languages designed to reorganize the public's perception of unsuspected possibilities opened up (or, alternatively, of desired possibilities needlessly foreclosed) by the present configuration of that field.3 If, as

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]. G. A. Pocock (whom I have been quoting here) has argued, "a language must be, as a style need not, a game recognised as open to more than one player" ("Concept of a Language," 26, 28), it is also the case that any style or personalized idiom is aimed-both as a matter of avowed poetic design and as a pragmatic reflex of the author's career-at becoming an inclusive mode of self-representation and self-experience, in short, a language. If this observation seems obvious, not to say a truism, its entailments for the historicization of literary and, more generally, cultural symbolic production prove more complicated. For poetry, especially autobiographical verse, typically seeks to absorb its audience's analytic powers in the thematic, symbolic, and even syntactic intricacy of its textual form. With its inscrutable subject matter and expansive metaphoric range, Wordsworth's autobiographical meditation appears to preempt its audience's discerning its own historicity in the poem. For "the more we are dealing with individual styles of utterance, the creation of identifiable individuals in identifiable situations, the greater becomes the danger of confusing parole with langue, and interpretation with identification" (Pocock, "Concept of a Language," 26). Reading toward The Prelude, then, we will have to analyze closely the moral, economic, and philosophical (and hence "public") dilemma of self-interest by paying special attention to the period's recurrent efforts to mobilize the aesthetic as a means of reconfiguring the individual with the concept of a "public sphere." I say "reconfigure" also because the consensus-building potential of the aesthetic-taken in its most generic sense as Reynolds's "central form" (D, 107), as Hume's dominant "string to which all mankind have an accord and symphony" (Enquiries, 272), or as the "pleasing illusions" and "decent drapery" associated by Burke with an "age of chivalry" (RF, 170-71)-inheres precisely in its figural character. To borrow the apposite political terminology of lateeighteenth-century England, the aesthetic constitutes an instance of "virtual representation," that is, the simulation of social consensus in nonpropositional, affect-based form: "a dark I Invisible workmanship that reconciles I Discordant elements, and makes them move I In one society" (P r8os, bk. r, II. 353-56). A distant heir of the Florentine political theory of "civic humanism," the eighteenth-century concept of "virtual representation" has been widely analyzed as a unique amalgam of unspoken economic and electoral interests ("old corruption") and a complementary classicist aesthetic of emphatically "public" character.4 The Florentine ideal of an "individual who knew himself to be rational and virtuous ... and knew how to play his role and take decisions within the politeia" (Pocock, Machiavellian

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Moment, 466) had for its premise a republican ideal that, in earlyeighteenth-century England, held far more ambivalent, potentially Levelling meaning. In an effort to indemnify the republican ideal against renewed charges of regicide, Levelling, and tolerationism, civic humanism was subjected to intense scrutiny by the rationalist theories of the late seventeenth century, specifically Locke's and Shaftsbury's conceptions of a government pledged to the "Publick Weal," "Common Interest" and the "Universal Good," notions grounded in the "natural Affections" and ascetic ethos best exemplified by the landed aristocracy. Such efforts notwithstanding, the civic-humanist ideal came increasingly to be perceived as incommensurate with "a nation where the division of labour had so occluded the perspectives of its members that none of them, or almost none, could grasp the 'idea' of the public" (Barrell, Political Theory, 2). The task of maintaining an implausible consensus of individual interests, at least in symbolic form, thus devolved upon the sphere of aesthetic production. In its various painterly and poetic incarnations (Barrell's preferred examples derive from the genre of history painting), aesthetic production alone seemed "capable of representing a ground of social affiliation which could substitute for that lost public space." 5 As we saw in the above discussion of Thomson and the genesis of the Picturesque as cultural theory and practice, the Picturesque disarticulates its own historical moment by focusing on a "sensibility" of communal, "natural" experience seemingly impervious to the very historical shifts (i.e., urbanization, professionalization, new systems of finance, new technologies of production and distribution, and a rapid nationwide acceleration in elemental and cultural literacy) that define that moment. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the ideal of a unified civic ethos seemed compromised by the heterogeneous interests and identifications of individuals, by the uneven development of local and regional communities, and above all by the growing perception "that the real world of economy and polity rested on a myriad fantasy worlds maintained by private egos" that were not so much "greedy and selfish ... [as] they were unreal" (Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 465-66). The increasingly speculative and fantasy-based economic and psychological organization of early British society naturally led to the formation of new discursive systems and disciplines charged with offering plausible and acceptable descriptions of evidently transformed economic, political, and cultural practices and identifications. A first one sought to modify the compromised rhetoric of civic humanism by abandoning that theory's reliance on a rationalist and propositional form of political argumentation in favor of a more indirect,

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symbolically mediated practice of representation. This conception, articulated most prominently by Reynolds and Burke, identified the aestheticand by example also the figural qualities of language-as the only viable form of representing the idea of a "public," a term now bound up with the retroactive memory-construct of "custom" and "tradition." An aesthetic education, Reynolds argued, was the means to ensure "the natural operation of [the individual's) faculties." For only through the virtual competence and discipline associated with aesthetic expertise can the individual subject be induced to overcome "singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy" and thus be resocialized into "a general union of minds, ... a general combination of all mankind" (Reynolds, Discourses, 192). Before pursuing further Reynolds's curiously abstract (almost postmodern) conception of a classicist aesthetic, let us recall the other disciplinary language that, toward the end of the eighteenth century, was to define the social meanings of self-interest within the rapidly diversifying socioeconomic and cultural British nation. The closely linked discourses of moral philosophy and political economy associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, and with Hume and Smith above all, seemed to offer a progressive and analytic approach to historical transformations that the aesthetic and rhetorical strictures of Reynolds, Johnson, and Burke had not so much solved as displaced into the figural domain of the aesthetic. Hume's and, eventually, William Hazlitt's response to the apparent connection between economic self-interest and a nation too demographically amorphous for any one representation, and hence problematic to govern, was to redescribe self-interest not only as axiomatically "human" but as the modern equivalent of Milton's "fortunate Fall," a psychological and economical lapse yet capable of producing-via the extensive detour of capitalism itselfa prosperous national community. One prominent characteristic above all connects these seemingly independent disciplines of neoclassical aesthetics and political economy. They share a remarkably strained, often heavily involuted syntax. Whether it is Reynolds explaining the ultimate compatibility of all individuals or Hume assuring us of the social destiny of individual self-interest, their extraordinarily complex, often tortured syntax provides the perhaps most formal evidence of the historicity of political and aesthetic thought in the era of public disintegration. And yet, far from proving an outright debility or impasse, the growing awareness among these writers-supremely developed in Wordsworth's Prelude-of an inescapable link between cognitive and rhetorical discomfort allowed them to invert this relationship and market their formal-rhetorical proficiency as a cultural and professional

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capital (or as public credit). Hume's vernacular eloquence, Burke's distinctive blend of highbrow and lowbrow figures, and Wordsworth's long, meticulously calibrated blank-verse periods all rest on an increasingly selfconscious premise: that the inauguration and maintenance of a specific social consensus rested on the refinement of subtly connected disciplinary languages, each one controlling public access by complicating the criteria for its formal-symbolic mastery.6 It is in The Prelude above all that we can witness the contingency of public authority upon the self's capacity to acquire and display specific kinds of discursive competence.

lfi>

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~

Figuring the Polity in Reynolds, Burke, and Hume Spanning some twenty-one years, Reynolds's Discourses on Art (176990) opens on a confident, programmatic note by assuring the audience that the recently founded Royal Academy would finally furnish "a great, a learned, a polite, and a commercial nation" (D, 8o) with what had been so long overdue: an institution and method pledged to establish formally coherent and universally valid criteria of aesthetic production. From its beginning in January 1769, the direction of the Discourses seems clear, if more practical than theoretical. To grasp the value of aesthetic representation as public practice, students were to be "directed to their proper objects," itself but a first step in a gradual aesthetic socialization whose overarching goal it was to instill in the students "an implicit obedience to the Rules of Art" (D, 82). Significantly, Reynolds's aesthetic program is prescriptive, though not theoretically reflexive. Thus "obedience" prevails over a more discursive style of argumentation whose propositions and syllogisms would likely inspire counterarguments, particularly in an atmosphere as contentious as that surrounding the foundation of the Royal Academy? For Reynolds, "proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature" (D, 83), and the development of artistic proficiency thus coincides with the subordination of individual preferences and inclinations to the essentially public purposes of visual representation. These purposes are no longer to be realized through the "fallacious mastery" of the Renaissance painterly ideal known as trompe l'oeil ("deceivingthe superficial sense of the spectator," D, 103) but instead require a syncretistic gathering of "those perfections which lie scattered among various masters, [and] are now united in one general idea" (D, 89). The same logic also underlies Reynolds's rejection of any referential conception of art as the "drudgery

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of copying," little more than a "mechanical practice" (D, 92) far too local and ephemeral to have significant public merit. Curiously enough, Reynolds's alchemic quest for a formula of what might be termed the instant classic makes his Discourses read like an early manifesto for abstract art. For his ultimate aesthetic objective is to induce a holistic state of mind in the beholder, a determinate ideological outcome referred to as "the most complete effect of art" (D, ro5) and attained by means of simulation rather than imitation. If the benefits of painted representation are to extend, prima facie, to an inherently contingent "public," there can be no gold standard for representational authenticity, for the relationship of aesthetic production to the body politic is pragmatic, not dogmatic. The formal propriety of painting is wholly bound up with its projected impact on the public sphere and, consequently, is not subject to the regulatory authority of humanist imitatio and its faith in an original referent. "Nature herself is not to be too closely copied ... for the works of nature are full of disproportion, and fall very short of the true standard of beauty" (D, 102-3). By the same logic, portrait painting-though commercially more viable than the supposedly worthier genre of history painting-is compromised by Reynolds's unrelenting insistence on "general figures" and by his aesthetic premise of "the abstract idea of ... forms more perfect than any one original" (D, ro6).8 What is promulgated by Reynolds as the "grand style" representing "general ideas" thus demands not only the dissolution of all referential constraints but also, correspondingly, the artist's and beholder's conscious surrender of all purely subjective identifications in favor of an axiomatically public mode of aesthetic production. In a deceptively bland, generic humanist idiom that anticipates similar statements in Wordsworth's Preface (r8oo), Reynolds thus declares, rather peremptorily, that the "History-painter paints man in general; a Portrait-painter, a particular man" (D, IJI).9 Reynolds's aesthetic betrays an undecidable causal relationship, perhaps endemic to all classicist (axiological) argumentation, between its presupposition of a stable, universal psychology and an inventory of public forms (painterly and rhetorical) alternately charged with representing this presupposition as a fact or realizing it as a goal.10 Hence Reynolds must choose between a potentially interminable analysis of psychological differences and begging the question of "a general uniformity and agreement in the minds of men" (D, 190), which is to say, between deferring his aesthetic project until the psychological inquiry has been concluded, if it ever is, and begging the question of "a general similitude that goes through the whole race of mankind" (D, 191) on a grand scale, in which case its aes-

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thetic representation will appear curiously redundant. For Reynolds is well aware that "taste ... is addressed to the mind, and depends on its original frame or ... [on] the organization of the soul" (D, 190). Seeking to counteract the tendency of all representation to particularize and localize-and thus to betray the economic and cultural determinacy of its producers and addressees-Reynolds's "Seventh Discourse" mobilizes a variety of rhetorical and conceptual resources captured in the following paragraph: The internal fabrick of our minds, as well as the external form of our bodies, being nearly uniform; it seems then to follow of course, that as the imagination is incapable of producing any thing originally of itself, and can only vary and combine those ideas with which it is furnished by means of the senses, there will be necessarily an agreement in the imaginations, as in the senses of men. Thcre'being this agreement, it follows, that in all cases, in our lightest amusements, as well as in our most serious actions and engagements of life, we must regulate our affections of every kind by that of others. The well-disciplined mind acknowledges this authority, and submits its own opinion to the pub lick voice. It is from knowing what arc the general feelings and passions of mankind, that we acquire a true idea of what imagination is; though it appears as if we had nothing to do but to consult our own particular sensations, and these were sufficient to ensure us from all error and mistake. (D, 191; italics mine) 11

The strained, involuted syntax of the first two sentences introduces in rapid sequence various conditions and qualifications, only to reposition them, in subsequent clauses and sentences, as established facts and solid foundations legitimating the introduction of further conditions. By popular association, the supposition of "nearly uniform" bodies sanctions the crucial psychological notion of an axiomatically social (and increasingly socialized) "imagination." According to the logic of this passage, "agreement" constitutes at once the hidden logical premise and the avowed social effect of aesthetic practice. Indeed, as "discipline" the aesthetic is itself but another term for the acknowledgment of that premise, and any "well-disciplined" mind therefore "submits ... to the publick voice." If imagination should initially appear capricious, the intelligibility of its "own particular sensations" requires not only that the individual mind be disciplined as "publick voice" but also that a subject thus resocialized grasp (retroactively) its imagination as a priori circumscribed by the "general feelings and passions of mankind." The formal and material aspects of aesthetic practice thus are to induce, in any given individual, a consciousness of all signification as "regulat[ing] our affections of every kind by that of others."

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Aesthetic representation thus is redefined as a para-practice designed to incubate within the consciousness of the individual citizen the lost, indeed generic (i.e., contentless, nonrepresentational) memory according to which all self-awareness and self-interest ("imagination," "particular sensation," and "passion") had always been social to begin with. By contrast, it is but "error and mistake" to think individuality as an originary, autonomous, and unalienated mode of being. Notwithstanding the ostensibly conservative logic of Reynolds's civic-humanist vision, such an argument effectively concedes that neither the subjective agency of imagination nor the "publick voice" were ever authentic. The containment of self-interest by a "well-disciplined" aesthetic of legitimate public representation unfolds as the individual subject's resocialization into a grammar of "custom," which, though always anterior to the contingent acts of an imagination, remains "incapable of producing any thing originally of itself" and thus is nothing primordial. A theory of custom is not so much a foundationalism as a simulation of it. If Reynolds's Discourses constitutes a classicist argument, the book's reliance on supposedly transhistorical, aesthetic values and principles seems increasingly qualified and frequently leaves such principles looking vestigial. To be sure, the specific formal criteria that render some rhetorical and painterly forms legitimate and public may seem anchored in transhistorical values-what Reynolds calls its "undoubtedly ... intrinsic excellence, and immoveable principles." Such formal and psychological axioms, however, are neither verifiable nor falsifiable but instead merely simulate the permanence of what Reynolds calls the "presiding feeling of mankind" (D, 196), a type of national affect wholly contingent in substance and appearance. Indeed, a foundationalist attempt to discriminate once and for all between "fluctuating" and "fixed" principles of representation merely begs the question as its analytic findings turn out to be at once self-confirming, irrefutable, and thus wholly pointless. Regardless of the specific empirical object or appearance seized by such analysis, the transhistorical "immoveable principles" yielded by the inquiry will invariably remain lifeless abstractions: We may apply this to every custom and habit of life. Thus the general principles of urbanity, politeness, or civility, have been the same in all nations; but the mode in which they are dressed is continually varying. The general idea of showing respect is by making yourself less; but the manner, whether by bowing the body, kneeling, prostration, pulling off the upper part of our dress, or taking away the lower, is a matter of custom. (D, 194)

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Unlike purely logical analysis, which yields irrefutable but, by the same token, irrelevant insight into "the nature of things," aesthetic practice is driven by a macrohistorical purpose. Geared toward the "reformation" of "a national taste" (D, 194, 201), it deploys universals and principles only for tactical purposes, which is to say as simulacra. Increasingly, then, Reynolds's Discourses redefines its initial civic-humanist project of containing self-interest by arguing for the alignment of subjective interests with the simulated universality of "custom." In Reynolds's aesthetic republic, custom identifies the pragmatic representation of contingent practices and identifications as truth. Insofar as custom identifies and legitimates "prejudices" of a particularly durable and expedient nature, it is not so much something to be overcome as something to be incorporated in the form of enlightened, that is, conscious aesthetic practice: "We are creatures of prejudice; we neither can nor ought to eradicate it; we must only regulate it by reason; which kind of regulation is indeed little more than obliging the lesser, the local and temporary prejudices, to give way to those which are more durable and lasting" (D, 200). By this logic, the work of portraiture "shall correspond to those ideas and that imagination which [the painter] knows will regulate the judgment of others." Mobilized on behalf of a strategic project of community, the aesthetic ensures that representations will "correspond with those prejudices which we have in favor of what we continually see." The larger ideological dispensation undergirding Reynolds's pleas for a "more learned and scientific prejudice" (D, 200) can readily be identified as that of nationalism. To quote John Barrell, "art should create ... a customary community of taste, [and] develop in a people a sense of its nationhood, of belonging to one nation rather than another." 12 To produce and subsequently anchor a national community of taste in the "justifiable prejudice" (Barrell, Political Theory, 136) of custom is to endow a seemingly individual or local quality of affect with the authority of social and historical crypto-memory. Rather than expelling "prejudice" categorically as irrational and unjustifiable, its redescription here as cultural inheritance, as "custom," allows Reynolds to reposition otherwise contingent instances of subjective "feeling" or affect as the most (perhaps the only) authentic tokens of national wisdom. Filtered through the discourse of custom, which is no longer sanctioned by any abstract rational principles (though it will always claim anteriority to any particular representation), expressions of local or individual affect can be reinterpreted as unwitting anticipations of their ideological destiny: the Nation. What legitimates the representation of subjective affect is the rec-

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ognition that, at the very moment of its formal inscription, all affect will disclose its social significance; for to the extent that affect is communicable, capable of representation in polyphonous and heteronomous genres and forms, it is recognized as providential, a "pre-cognition" of communal, national meanings. Salvaged from the obliquities of pure memory and restored to the only legitimate sphere, that of representation, "feeling" emerges as the simulacrum of national memory: "sensibility." The same premise, that "language is the instrument, conviction is the work" (D, 124), also underwrites the cognitive commerce between Wordsworth's autobiographical narrative and its projected community of readers, namely as the articulate transfiguration of discrete, spontaneous, and often ineffable recollections into the diachronic authority of "custom."

In Burke's Reflections, self-interest holds an essentially equivalent, and just as precarious, position as the Dissenters' vexing claim that "members of a community ... all have an equal right" (R. Price, "Love of Our Country," r84) to personal liberty and public representation. What had been so programmatically asserted by Richard Price, and what Burke was to denounce so vehemently, were primarily liberal-democratic arguments in favor of amending "the defects ... in our established codes of faith and worship" and "the inequality of our representation" ("Love of Our Country," r83, 191-92). Still, Burke's repudiation of Price ("this spiritual doctor of politics," RF, 97) soon enlarged its scope beyond the questions of fully equal religious and political representation to an indirect analysis of the deeper historical and economic motives underlying the political program of the Dissenters. In characterizing Burke's analysis of Price's and the French Jacobins' political agenda as "indirect," we move away from the overwhelming perception of the Reflections-first established by readers like Paine, Wollstonecraft, Thelwall, Mackintosh-as a text utterly devoid of analytic interest.13 Notwithstanding its metaphoric theater and frenzied repetitions, Burke's prose offered an involuntary analysis, not so much of the French Revolution and its English Jacobin sympathizers as of the condition of modernity as an all-encompassing challenge to what Burke had embraced under the title of "natural society." 14 To him, demands by secular and millenarian radicals, as well as the more restrained (though equally insistent) petitions of urban middle-class communities, for political representation and religious equality merely symptomized economic and ideological transformation too overwhelming to admit of

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direct analytic representation. It is specifically a profound indeterminacy of the late-eighteenth-century capitalist economy that accounts for Burke's almost delirious oratory, which continually displaces the sublime sense of a society premised on incompatible modes of political, cultural, and economic (self-)representation. Burke's intemperate prose thus conceives an imagistic and imaginary past as a defense against the present's ideological antagonisms. Fundamentally, these antagonisms result from the economic enfranchisement and cultural ascendancy of large sectors of the British population, themselves the result of the system of public credit and the consequently transforming political and cultural economy, which Burke himself had apparently embraced. The concept of "political economy," as John Pocock has argued, was itself curiously indeterminate throughout much of the century, ranging from "the policy of administering the public revenue ... to establishing the moral political, cultural, and economic conditions of life in advancing commercial societies: a commercial humanism" (Virtue, 194). In the wake of the French Revolution, however, Burke came to regard the introduction of paper currency and the numerous speculative schemes involving bonds (which converted government debt into an imaginary token of affluence) as "destroying the value and even the meaning of property, the foundation alike of virtue, manners and the natural relations of society" (Virtue, 196). If the traditional Whigs had embraced the rise of commerce as the foundation of a stable, affluent, and cohesive nation, the central assumption underwriting that vision was one of quasi-ontological continuity between economic, political, and religious interests. Only on the basis of this mythic ideal, according to which "the laws of commerce ... are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God" (Burke, Writings and Speeches, 137), had Burke been able to endorse the Whig theory of a commercially enterprising, "mobile" people and its philosophical justification by the rising discipline of political economy, specifically inHume's cautious theoretical account of it. By the 1790s it had become apparent, however, that the "assumed convergence of interests between a managerial landed aristocracy and a system of public credit" was no longer tenable (Pocock, Virtues, 195). Thus, throughout the Reflections, Burke employs a "mixed style" reminiscent of Swift's satiric indictment of monied interests, stock-jobbing, and imaginary commodities as undermining the landed, stoic identity of Queen Anne Toryism.15 Pocock's astute positioning of Burke's Reflections within the context of late-eighteenth-century debates over the legitimacy or polyvalence of

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the term "political economy" is helpful in understanding Burke's rejection of the self-interest of the professionally and commercially enterprising classes as narcissistic and hence as pernicious to the social fabric. As regards the professions in particular, Burke notes: Their very excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from a qualification for others. It cannot escape observation, that when men are too much confined to professional and faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state. (RF, 133)1 6 Central to Burke's political philosophy, and constitutive of his increasingly paranoid mode of argumentation, is his axiom of the incompatibility of professional and national interests. Yet it had become apparent to Burke that the affluence of the nation depended substantially on the professional expertise of its middling classes. Notwithstanding occasional relapses into the superannuated rhetoric of a Toryism that deplores the influence of monied interests and stock-jobbers, Burke generally elects a different strategy for combating the "selfish and mischievous ambition" and "the lust of selfish will" (RF, 135, r9r) fostered by a fully commercialized society. Against the allegedly impending, sublime spectacle of a society wholly based on "the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or ... from his own private interests" (RF, r7r), Burke conceives a comprehensive symbolic regimen: "Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection" (RF, rsr)P A seminal influence on Wordsworth's legitimation of self-interest in his autobiographical speculations some fifteen years later, Reflections is Burke's response to his own intuitions of a deeply conflicted moral and political economy. Such an economy now appears to rest on extensive and inscrutable, virtual allegiances among previously disenfranchised subjects whose social, cultural, and spiritual identity is increasingly vested in a variety of self-interested and professionalized techniques of manipulating correspondingly unreal or imaginary forms of capital. As Burke knew only too well, it is precisely the virtual or imagined (psycho- )logic of this evolving political economy that would, before long, produce the "real" material effect of social mobility and incompatible political and religious interests. Wordsworth's r8so Prelude

Self-Interest Contained seconds Burke's suspicion of the correlative threats of social mobility and sophisticated specialization by endorsing his denunciation of "upstart Theory" and "all systems built on abstract rights" (P r8 50, bk. 7, II. 529, 524) .18 To these quintessentially modern hazards, Reflections responds with two distinct though interactive narratives. First, in a narrative form customary during the republican struggles waged on both sides of the Atlantic during the last quarter of the century, Burke converts his intuitive and sublime perceptions of impending social upheaval, which threatens prima facie his own axiomatic beliefs, into a semiofficial narrative of various plots, conspiracies, and assaults on these beliefs.19 In a classic instance of what Freud was to psychoanalyze as the mechanism of "projection," Burke converts anxiety into self-confirming representations of a world deceptively innocuous yet disclosing (at least to the initiated) unmistakable signs of impending social apocalypse. In this manner, Burke's empirical account indicts the mischief supposedly lurking behind the meliorist Enlightenment vision of cultural and economic ascendancy and political inclusion and, simultaneously, fends off personal responsibility for that analysis. "Projection," we may say, affords the writer the pleasure of analysis while sheltering him from recognizing himself as a subject substantially implicated in the knowledge thus produced. Time and again, Burke's rhetoric masks its own status as agency behind self-privileging, often parenthetical assertions of universal assent and references to shared perceptions: "I hear on all hands that a cabal, calling itself philosophic receives the glory of many of the late proceedings" (RF, r85; italics mine). The sublime intuition that pervasive social and political change has already taken place, then, can only be represented as a conspiracy conceived and implemented by the usual Burkean suspects: atheists, infidels, heretics, and philosophers. "A literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal ... [and] a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree." The discursive polyphony of contemporary political and cultural interests is thus displaced into a subterranean cacophony, "a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused movement ... that threatens a general earthquake in the political world" (RF, 2n, 265). Building on the self-privileging (and inherently rhetorical) mechanisms of transference and projection, Reflections contains its author's prophetic intuitions concerning the transformation of the public sphere by reconceiving such change as the remote effect of clandestine and diabolically efficient individual and sectarian agencies.

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The second strategy, meanwhile, involves the cure prescribed for the French malady: the pseudo-historical account reviving England's "antient constitution" (RF, 117) and the idea of a society based on custom, instinctual memory, and traditions grafted onto the psyche of all trueborn Englishmen. Here, too, Burke's text seeks to disavow its status as argument, that is, as a historically contingent (and hence contestable) proposition. Consequently, Reflections strains to conceive reflection itself as a matter of sheer instinct, or (in Burke's pungent phrase), as a knowledge consubstantial with "our natural entrails" (RF, 182). Much of Burke's rhetorical skill is thus invested in naturalizing the book's content as little more than a passionate transcription of involuntary and universally valid perceptions, a point driven home early on in the passages on England's own troubled monarchical and constitutional history.20 Not surprisingly, Burke's Reflections mobilizes Reynolds's idea of a society based on custom-that is, expedient public prejudice-though the nationalist, antirationalist, and antirepublican thrust of the term has now been vastly strengthened. In Burke's text, tradition and custom constitute both the intuitive premise for the ensuing argument and its official gold-standard of immanent justification. Here, too, custom and tradition-mocked by Paine as "a sort of political Adam" (Rights of Man, 44)-serve to counteract the potentially uncontainable cultural and economic "energy" of the middling classes. And yet, if it is to succeed in choreographing the subtle and irrepressible movements of self-interest, custom can no longer be limited to an elitist, mostly academic syncretism of classical, formal-aesthetic precepts. Rather, as Burke makes clear, it must be discerned in the distinctive (though never sumptuous) rhetorical cadences and visual forms of an English vernacular, postclassical yet discriminating, flexible yet exclusive. This oblation of the state itself ... should be performed as all publick solemn acts are performed, in buildings, in musick, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons, according to the customs of mankind, taught by their nature; that is, with modest splendour, with unassuming state, with mild majesty and sober pomp.... It is the public ornament. It is the publick consolation. It nourishes the publick hope. (RF, 196-97)

Ultimately, it is the "unassuming state" and "modest splendour" of a self-consciously traditionalist prose-and, as remains to be seen, of Wordsworthian blank verse-which Burke's Reflections mobilizes as the only effective remedy against the dissipations of aristocratic display and against the detached cosmopolitan self-interest of an emerging, postcivic bourgeoisie. Even so, the passage continues to draw on an established

Self-Interest Contained civic-republican ideal of modest and virtuous representation, and as such it reveals Burke's affinity with the ascendant bourgeois, economically and professionally self-interested citizens whose alleged Jacobin leanings are officially targeted by Reflections. Burke's plea for an intrinsically aesthetic mode of self-representation ("public ornament") seems forward-looking rather than reactionary. Thus, in contrast to the standard apology for Anglican and aristocratic power, Reflections emphasizes something called "public hope," a notion hardly consistent with the palliative of "contentment" prescribed by Paley to the lower and middling classes. Likewise, Burke's cautious embrace of custom as "publick consolation" is not to be confused with the complacent advocacy of a political status quo (Paley's "contentment"); thus Burke's wistful "consolation" implicitly acknowledges the injustices built into the established order. Not surprisingly, then, even as he recommends this "unassuming" model of self-representation to a bourgeoisie whose historical potency and scope he understood all too well, Burke never allows this dispensation to constrain his own political oratory. In fact, at an imaginary level, the rhetoric of Reflections proves just as "mobile" and speculative as the middling classes whose political and religious loyalties Burke so insistently questions. An instance of daring rhetorical self-creation as a professional politician, Burke's Reflections, in which, Paine alleged, "facts are manufactured for the sake of show" (Rights of Man, 49), is virtually impossible to locate on the period's official maps of political and aesthetic valuation. Its elusiveness symptomizes the antagonisms of Burke's own biography, his Irish, plebeian, cryptoCatholic background, which time and again thwarted his ambitions and caused him, when he did prevail, to be maligned for "kiss[ing] the aristocratic hand that hath purloined him from himself." 21 With generous metaphoric license and occasionally outrageous breach of stylistic decorum, Reflections capitalizes on the "freedom of epistolary intercourse" (RF, 92) to stake out a large nationalist claim for English as the most authentic (because wholly vernacular) representation of custom. Vestigially Latinate, yet cued by the exigencies of the present, English exemplifies an aesthetic ideal: the possibility of individual self-representation as consubstantial with the nation's collective memory and custom. Burke's rhetoric may thus be understood as social practice par excellence, an instinctual assimilation of his own familial and professional interests to a social grammar known as custom and tradition and said to be embodied by the nation's vernacular, which Burke appropriately characterizes as the very "oblation of the State itself." 22 Against a society (or, rather, against the conscious acceptance of such a society) in which all relations are mediated through the

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circulation of money in various denominations-hence a society whose paradigms of value, allegiance, and inheritance are utterly contingent upon the vagaries of commerce-Burke sets not the outmoded Tory ideology of a stoic aristocratic ethos and feudal property relations but the figure of a body politic anchored in a generic and unself-conscious paradigm of history (i.e., custom as instinctual memory) and in a grammar of social and aesthetic discriminations which, likewise, is not so much processed consciously as it is mechanically received as a people's "inheritance." Much of Reflections can thus be read as another apotheosis of the aesthetic state, here predicated on a vernacular imbued with aesthetic and social discriminations and therefore capable of absorbing threatening historical developments into a holistic and self-privileging set of beliefs identified as custom. In his notorious melodramatic account of the events that supposedly occurred at Versailles on October 6, 1789, Burke notably focuses on the ways in which these events compromise his political aesthetic. Lamenting the passing of "the age of chivalry," he fixates on how all the "decent drapery of life" and the "wardrobe of the moral imagination" have been stripped away; thus what he laments is not the extinction of some truth but the erosion of "all the pleasing illusions" (RF, I70-7r) that he deems crucial for maintaining a public sphere. In fact, Burke readily concedes that "public affections," manners, and custom in general function as "supplements" rather than as transhistorical origins or principles (RF, 172). Like Reynolds, Burke thus conceives of aesthetics as virtually consubstantial with social grammar: it is what we might call constructive prejudice. Against the French upheaval, a "revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions," Burke mobilizes the idea of a society utterly identified with its vernacular aesthetic, a society so seamlessly robed in the "coat of prejudice" (RF, 175, r83) as to shelter its subjects from consciously experiencing the antagonism between their jointly inherited historical identifications and their privately conceived economic interests: We are generally men of untaught feelings; [and] instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. (RF, 183; italics mine)

In developing his case for a society based on conscious and collective prejudice through tropes of monied speculation, Burke confirms the changes

Self-Interest Contained wrought by modern capitalism even as he deplores its deleterious speculative tendencies. Hence, to build on the "capital of nations, and of ages" is to derive metaphoric solutions from the past to combat the perception of the present as replete with unrepresentable, sublime contingency. In this closed circuit of imaginary perils and pseudo-solutions, memory is the only legitimate concept of agency. Rather than functioning as conscious remembering, however, memory constitutes a "powerful instinct" that allows England's subjects to condense historical knowledge into generic icons simulating historical content. To remember is thus to be "always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers," to entertain "the idea of a liberal descent," and to conceive of "a noble freedom" authenticated by "a pedigree and illustrating ancestors," by "bearings and ... ensigns armorial." With "its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles," Burke's ideological fantasy of tradition aestheticizes, indeed anesthetizes, the range of historical consciousness (RF, 12r; italics mine). What Burke repeatedly hails as the "simplicity of our national character," "native plainness," and "our instincts" (RF, r86-87), tropes chosen with shrewd humility, thus identifies the gradual enclosure of self-conscious and self-interested subjects by aesthetic icons and their simulated traditions. Burke's oratory might even be seen as an attempt to turn the pervasive middle-class psychology of economic selfinterest against itself by pandering to the bourgeoisie's even more intense craving for a quasi-aristocratic stability and legitimacy. To hypnotize an otherwise rational and calculating consciousness of the middle-class tradesman, manufacturer, or professional with records, titles, and ensigns armorial is to prey on unconfessed desires to reconceive the bland facts associated with the economic genesis of that class as a pseudo-historical romance of cultural ascendancy. Terms such as "instinct," "plainness," and (in Wordsworth's Prelude) "spontaneity" all point to the ongoing supersession of the Enlightenment's paradigm of historiography as rational discipline by invented traditions and simulations of custom. Such notions, then, appear designed to legitimate self-interest by objectifying it as an instinctual or spontaneous memory unifying the members of an imagined English national community. Indeed, it is precisely the idea of Nation that emerges as the focal point of some of Burke's most insistently organicist and antirationalist tropes. As he puts it in a well-known passage of Reflections, the English nation is a "mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged,

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or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression." 23 Nation, for Burke, is a community built around a political and cultural unconscious and hence is to be thought as "inheritance." Its conscious awareness is one of family-romance, of "inheritance," and its "image [is that] of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars" (RF, 120). Conceived as the antidote to the antagonisms of political and class interests in the era of capitalist and credit-based speculation-a system to which part of Burke was intensely committed-his rhetoric of custom casts aesthetic and rhetorical discriminations as the salvation of the civic ideal of the politeia. Political legitimacy thus rests on the preservation of an (invented) tradition whose authenticity (being unprovable) warrants preservation, if not worship. Political discourse thus unfolds as an extensive practice of simulation, purporting to remember and salvage a cultural and representational "inheritance" (e.g., Burke's "age of chivalry," Reynolds's "central form") allegedly imperiled by present social transformations. Custom and form thus cannot, indeed must not, be approached in conscious, propositional terms, in part because the idea of a politically authoritative social and moral philosophy has vanished along with the civic-humanist ideal of a unified "public sphere." If the demographic profile of the British body politic appears disunited, an incorporation of incompatible economic and cultural identifications and interests, it is increasingly the function of aesthetic practice to reconstitute the ideal of a public by targeting a demographic unconscious. It performs this function primarily at the level of the "passions," that is, by soliciting on a wide scale "disinterested" interest in carefully crafted, pseudo-individual representations of which, as remains to be seen, Wordsworth's Prelude may well be the most monumental instance.

If others also had their doubts concerning the motives underlying Burke's advocacy of the passions and his rejection of self-interested social ascendancy, few expressed these misgivings as succinctly as Coleridge. In the third of four essays titled "On the Principles of Political Philosophy," published in The Friend (r8o9-ro), Coleridge points out a contradiction central to most of Burke's writings, one that not only went unresolved but in fact continued to be exploited with much cunning by Burke himself:

Self-Interest Contained The inconsistency to which I allude ... is the want of congruity in the principles appealed to in different parts of the same Work, it is an apparent versatility of the principle with the occasion. If his opponents are Theorists, then every thing is to be founded on Prudence, on mere calculations of Expediency: and every man is represented as acting according to the state of his own immediate self-interest. Are his opponents calculators? Then calculation itself is represented as a sort of crime. God has given us Feelings, and we are to obey them! and the most absurd prejudices become venerable, to which these Feelings have given consecration. (The Friend, r: r88)

The passage is an accurate description of tensions and logical contradictions that abound in the later Burke, though it also shows the analysis to be substantially the default-value of Coleridge's own philosophical axioms and biases, the first among these being that "Truth" must be noncontradictory and communicable in one unchanging idiom; "Never can I believe, but that the straight line must needs be the nearest," he insists, pressing on with his quest for "the whole truth [as] the best antidote to falsehoods." Burke's alleged trespass against truth and reason, the "apparent versatility of [his] principle with the occasion," ultimately only confirms how far his own rhetorical practice reproduced precisely that "world of discordant appetites and imagined self-interests" (The Friend, r: 18990) against which it was ostensibly directed. Needless to say, the fragmentation of the people into a heterogeneous and intractable "public" was a proven political and demographic fact, and was perfectly well understood as such by Burke, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their contemporaries. Where they differ, then, is not in their basic intuition of their surroundings but in the rhetorical and intellectual conceptions with which they variously seek to oppose or deflect that intuition. Precisely this perceived need to address (if never fully heal) the dis/concerted and dis/membered polity through a new, preeminently rhetorical form of behavior first emerged in Hume, the quintessential man of letters whose writings "systematically unfold a discourse that is always intelligible, if never definitive" (Christensen, Practicing, 68). Hume's conception of the rhetorical process as a social practice or, in Bourdieu's words, as an "officializing strategy" establishes the writer's task as that of intervening in a discordant Real. While this approach is unlikely to "eliminate inconsistencies[,] it redistributes them, exploiting equivocal references as opportunities for further elaboration" (Christensen, Practicing, 68) and, we should stress, as the opportunity for professional self-making of the kind that was to dominate Wordsworth's "great decade." Much of Hume's career may be read as a meditation on the hypothesis-forever unconfirmed though always beckoning-that the discordant

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current of human "passion" might yet be found to be governed by a deeper, internally consistent logic. Indeed, the current of "passion" cannot be attached to any axiomatic self or "I" because its enactment alone creates the conditions for the (necessarily public) recognition of such a self. Gone are Burke's "natural entrails," for in the rhetorical theater of Burne's writings ("a text defecated of any substantive 'I,'" Christensen, Practicing, 8o) there is only the endless performance of the passions. Their most determinate, observable, and representable instance is the passion of economic desire or self-interest, for "every thing in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labour." 24 In a series of essays on economic subjects, all written in 1754, Hume comments repeatedly on the consubstantiality of passion with interest, and of interest with economic (that is, public) behavior, thereby ensuring that a probably hostile psychological feature may, however inadvertently, function as the catalyst of most social good. Here is a typical passage, taken from "Of Interest": There is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment; and this desire seems the foundation of most of our passions and pursuits .... If the profit be attached to every particular exertion of industry, he has gain so often in his eye, that he acquires, by degrees, a passion for it, and knows no such pleasure as that of seeing the daily increase of his fortune. (Hume, Political Essays, 130)

In a commercialized society, desire has evolved from an "idle show and magnificence," characteristic of aristocratic and feudal wealth, into the psychological axiom corresponding to the idea of social mobility. It not only transports the mind and person to ever new pleasures and future desires but also ensures the interconnectedness of the polity. For "commerce encreases industry, by conveying it readily from one member of the state to another, and allowing none of it to perish or become useless." Indeed, so totalizing is this logic of "the arts of gain" that they will "soon prevail over the love of pleasure." "Interest," by now virtually coterminous with self-interest, marks the transfiguration of a secular passion into a providential good. As "the barometer of the state," moreover, it "proves the encrease of industry, and its prompt circulation through the whole state, little inferior to a demonstration" (Political Essays, 130-32). Interest, in short, furnishes the most concise metaphor for a polity in which individual impulses and social destiny have become fully aligned. Or have they? To be sure, the psychological and social mobility produced by the conversion of wealth into capital and of land into real-estate has strengthened communication among a vast, anonymous national community of producers and consumers. And yet, while ostensibly offer-

Self-Interest Contained ing little more than a description of his society as it already functions, Hume has been "taking responsibility for saying what goes without saying and doing so as he draws, in order to draw the line between the field of opinions and doxa, diminishing the former ... and expanding the latter to include the whole range of human behavior" (Christensen, Practicing, 86). It appears a further consequence of such self-promotion, however, that if complications were to emerge in the political and economic sphere, the public would almost by default petition Hume for a supplemental, and hopefully remedial, accounting for any such inconsistencies in its lived existence. Let us briefly address one, perhaps the most crucial, of those contradictions inadvertently generated by the axiomatic conflation of all passion with economic self/interest. In his essay "Of Public Credit," Hume expresses alarm at how "public securities are with us become a kind of money, and pass as readily at the current price as gold or silver," and he quickly sketches out a noticeably ambivalent series of conclusions from that simple fact: Our national debts furnish merchants with a specie of money, that is continually multiplying in their hands, and produces sure gain, besides the profits of their commerce. This must enable them to trade upon less profit. The small profit of the merchant renders the commodity cheaper, causes a great consumption, quickens the labour of the common people, and helps to spread arts and industry throughout the whole society. (Political Essays, r68)

The passage betrays an underlying anxiety about the extent to which tokens of national debt, to be repaid in the distant future, have in the meantime become exchangeable commodities in the present-that is, tokens of a purely imaginary affluence. To be sure, this development was hardly surprising to Hume, nor does it seem entirely unwelcome when we recall his impressive demonstration, in the contemporaneous essay "On Money," of how gold and silver are unessential to manufacture and trade.25 Yet by advocating the economic and psychological status quo of mobile, self-interested, speculative individuals bound only by their commercial passions, the professional author, Hume, has also assumed responsibility for delivering any future explanations and justifications that this disconcerting scenario may require. For a polity consigned to the vagaries of selfinterested, commercial passions appears very much on its way to becoming the bizarre Burkean congregation of "artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews ... [who ]load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground" (RF, 138). Thus Hume now speaks of "this unnatural state of society" in which "men, who have no connexions in the state, ... can

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enjoy their revenue in any part of the globe in which they chuse to reside." And if they do not succumb to the outright "lethargy of a stupid and pampered luxury," it is in any event obvious that "stocks can be transferred in an instant, and being in such a fluctuating state, will seldom be transmitted during three generations from father to son" (Political Essays, 172). A polity grounded in an imaginary and mobile capital owes its stability strictly to the convergent psychology of its individual members, and that convergence remains necessarily beyond the reach of any one individual, group, or institution. All authority thus has been diffused into the structural and quasi-instinctuallogic of a process of laissez-faire capitalism; and if, consequently, it is strictly the commercial "freedom [that] naturally begets public spirit" (Political Essays, 97), the resulting nation is not only vested exclusively in the imaginary of its discrete members but also strikingly devoid of any moral and cultural identity. The capitalist status quo has become an all but self-fulfilling prophecy. To the concerned eye of the man of letters, this dispensation is likely to beget a spirit of complacency that may render the population unprepared for, or indifferent to, national emergencies. Alternatively, it may over time produce a state of pervasive bourgeois ennui, a feeling of the individual's spiritual irrelevance that Wordsworth would address in "Tintern Abbey" and the great "Ode." Discussing the politically volatile question of the Protestant accession Hume launches into the kind of generalizing apotheosis to the health and fortitude of the nation and commerce that has been the oratorical trademark of politicians from Horace Walpole to Margaret Thatcher: During these last sixty years, when a parliamentary establishment has taken place; whatever factions may have prevailed either among the people or in public assemblies, the whole force of our constitution has always fallen to one side, and an uninterrupted harmony has been preserved between our princes and our parliaments. Public liberty, with internal peace and order, has flourished almost without interruption: Trade and manufactures, and agriculture, have encreased: The arts, and sciences, and philosophy, have been cultivated. Even religious parties have been necessitated to lay aside their mutual rancour: And the glory of the nation has spread itself all over Europe; derived equally from our progress in the arts of peace, and from valour and success in war. So long and glorious a period no nation almost can boast of: Nor is there another instance in the whole history of mankind, that so many millions of people have, during such a space of time, been held together, in a manner so free, so rational, and so suitable to the dignity of human nature. (Hume, Political Essays, 217)

Though all the leading indicators seem to be pointing in the right direction, "almost" turns out to be the crucial word, for as Hume now proceeds

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to argue, this vision of national cohesion, economic growth, and cultural hegemony is suspended on the slender thread of chance. Citing the recent insurgence of the Scottish Jacobites in 1715 and 17 4 5, Hume again stresses the need for dispassionate philosophical analysis: "there are some circumstances to be thrown into the other scale; and it is dangerous to regulate our judgment by one event or example." The stability of the nation, in short, is a function of popular perception and social psychology, modes of experience and judgment inevitably flawed to the extent that they tend to conflate the individual's confidence in his present affluence and future economic interests with a presumption of collective stability. In fact, this faith in the success of the Hanoverian accession to the throne, and in the commonwealth overall, has been procured in exchange for an enormous national debt, which in turn has led to precariously speculative behavior in matters of national finance. Predicated on the shared commercial and fiscal confidence of an enterprising people, political stability must ultimately be perceived as no less imaginary than the financial speculations by which it has been underwritten all along: Notwithstanding our riches and renown, what a critical escape did we make, by the late peace, from dangers, which were owing not so much to bad conduct and ill success in war, as to the pernicious practice of mortgaging our finances, and the still more pernicious maxim of never paying off our incumbrances? Such fatal measure would not probably have been embraced, had it not been to secure a precarious establishment. (Political Essays, 218) Given the interdependency of commercial and political confidence, then, it would be an obvious error to predicate hopes for one on the presumptive stability of the other. Indeed, the competing political interests in thwarting or accommodating the claims of the Stuarts and of Catholicism, even if they were to be resolved in a militant or revolutionary way, are relatively transparent and low-cost propositions compared with the heavy mortgaging of the very idea of the English polity by risky financial policies: "No revolution made by national forces, will ever be able, without some other great necessity, to abolish our debts and incumbrances, in which the interest of so many persons is concerned" (Political Essays, 220). Needless to say, Hume has no definitive answer to this dilemma, for it will have been a dilemma only after the fact, at which point no philosophical insight alone can possibly remedy the situation. In the meantime, however, it is suggested that only something like the eloquent and balanced philosophical account of Hume is capable of keeping up with the rapid changes of a commercial society so taxed by its day-to-day activities as to be unable to devise a vocabulary sufficiently capacious for the analysis of

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its practices. Thus there arises the need for a supplemental, metacommerciallanguage, something akin to the generalized rhetorical discipline of a moral philosophy, "A power" that Brings with it vernal promises, the hope Of active days, of dignity and thought, Of prowess in an honorable field Pure passions, virtue, knowledge, and delight. (P 18os, bk. 1, II. 47-53)

Anticipating Wordsworth's self-defined office as the (ostensibly antiprofessional) curator of a supposedly imperiled national psyche, Hume rises to the occasion by fashioning for himself the role of a general practitioner in all affairs cultural, economic, and moral. It is Hume's uneasy advocacy of self-interest that concerns us here because, in seeking to contain selfinterest within the symbolic order of philosophical argument, he produced not a new solid morality but the public institution of a master rhetorician offering his services of articulate therapy to a people repeatedly depicted as on the cusp of disintegration. Early on in his programmatic essay "Of Commerce," Hume takes account of the general intellectual responsibilities of the man of letters and, by exemplifying the rhetorical conduct required by that office, ensures that he will be perceived as singularly qualified to hold it: General reasonings seem intricate, merely because they are general; nor is it easy for the bulk of mankind to distinguish, in a great number of particulars, that common circumstance in which they all agree, or to extract it, pure and unmixed, from the other superfluous circumstances. Every judgment or conclusion, with them, is particular. They cannot enlarge their view to those universal propositions, which comprehend under them an infinite number of individuals, and include a whole science in a single theorem. Their eye is confounded with such an extensive prospect; and the conclusions derived from it, even though clearly expressed, seem intricate and obscure. But however intricate they may seem, it is certain, that general principles, if just and sound, must always prevail in the general course of things, though they may fail in particular cases; and it is the chief business of philosophers to regard the general course of things. (Political Essays, 94)

Hume's "general course of things," like Wordsworth's enigma of "the life of things" in "Tintern Abbey," suggests that his "business" as a general philosopher stands in a relationship of almost self-conscious supplementarity to the "great number of particulars" and the "infinite number of individuals" whose economic and social identity prevent them from transcending their "superfluous circumstances." While the cultivation of such an "extensive prospect" requires positioning oneself outside the spe-

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cialized and professionalized pursuits that identify the "bulk of mankind," the older Tory dispensation of a landed life of stoic virtue is no longer an option for Hume. For the above passage already implies that the complexity of an enterprising and evolving society itself is the only business of the philosopher. His metaprofessional ambition of comprising "a whole science in a single theorem" thus complements the mostly unselfconscious practices of society at large.26 Not surprisingly, then, Hume's economic writings are paralleled by his ongoing efforts at refurbishing his first and most wide-ranging philosophical work, the Treatise of Human Nature, completed by 1736 and published in 1739 and 1740. This work, by Hume's own famous admission, had initially fallen "dead-born .from the press." Indeed, the public vindication of his magnum opus became a matter of stylistic and professional importance to him. Where the Treatise seemed "ill-proportioned, incoherent, ill-expressed" (Enquiries, viii), its second issue under the title of Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (published in two parts in 1748 and 1751) substantially ensured Hume's reputation as a first-rate writer. It is specifically the second treatise on morals, rated by Hume himself as "of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best" (Enquiries, ix), in which public discourse and eloquence assume a crucial role in remedying the moral and cultural malaise that appears an inevitable feature of a society comprising little more than individuals driven by economic self-interest. Hume's public relevance as a man of letters coincides with the persuasiveness of his general style, one that continually refines the perception of problems while rarely delving into the arcane and overly specialized world of philosophical controversy. Logically, the continuing relevance of a career thus defined requires that Hume specify the operation of eloquence itself as indispensable to the public's spiritual well-being. Particular stress is to be placed on eloquence as an "operation," for it is to be understood not as a virtue that anyone might attain but as a "talent" to be demonstrated or performed repeatedly for the public by Hume himself. Noting that "there has been a controversy started of late ... concerning the general foundation of morals," Hume quickly establishes a conflict between two schools of thought, one wishing to ground morality in reason, the other seeing it as grounded in sentiment. What follows is, without doubt, one of Hume's vintage performances as a writer, in which he establishes, in an unfailingly accessible, cogent, and noncontroversial tone, that the question concerning morality is unanswerable on either ground. His arguments to that effect furthermore suggest that the public success of his au-

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thorial performances depends time and again on forestalling the expectation of theoretical or affective closure in the discourses to which he responds. Hume the philosophical generalist appears, curiously enough, also the most antitheoretical of all writers, and it is no exaggeration to say that the substantive business of his second Enquiry has already been concluded at the end of its first section. Here, then, are some of the relevant passages from the last three pages of the chapter opening the second Enquiry: These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced), are so plausible, that I am apt to suspect, they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions. The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praise-worthy or blameable; that which stamps on them the mark of honour or infamy, approbation or censure; that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species. For what else can have an influence of this nature? But in order to pave the way for such a sentiment, and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained .... It is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment.... The very nature of language guides us almost infallibly in forming a judgement of this nature; and as every tongue possesses one set of words which are taken in a good sense, and another in the opposite, the least acquaintance with the idiom suffices, without any reasoning, to direct us in collecting and arranging the estimable or blameable qualities of men. The only object of reasoning is to discover the circumstances on both sides, which are common to these qualities. (Enquiries, 172-74)

Unlike Reynolds, who always conceives of the "central form" as indeed the end point of aesthetic theory and practice, Hume argues with sly understatement that there will never actually be any "final sentence." If Reynolds's syntax struggled to establish an equilibrium between all possible exceptions and contingencies, Hume's Enquiry relishes the extended period as the most polite way of attesting to the impossibility of theoretical closure. Thus, after offering a veritable shopping list of concepts claiming such finality though, when laid side by side, appearing to be mere metaphors of one another ("amiable ... praise-worthy ... honor ... approbation," etc.), Hume resumes his main clause, almost drowned out by the sumptuous inventory of abstract philosophical argument. And what we now learn is that any "final sentence depends" on some otherwise unspec-

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ified, indeed inscrutable "internal sense or feeling," which is to say, of course, that no "sentence" is ever final. Still the most likely term to furnish such closure would appear to be that of "nature," yet Hume makes sure to displace its meaning almost as soon as he has introduced it. Thus, appearing to have just conceded that such "internal ... feeling" has been established as "universal in the whole species" by "nature," he quickly redeploys the term, with shrewd indifference, in a pat phrase at the end of a rhetorical question: "For what else can have an influence of this nature?" The answer, of course, is "more discourse," for the persuasiveness (or "truth") of any moral proposition can only be ensured by the discursive forms and talents mobilized on its behalf. Whatever moral convictions an individual may "feel" or have syllogistically produced, their justification invariably requires eloquence and then again more eloquence, it being certain that sentiments will continue to shift and further contingencies will arise. Under the Humean dispensation of the Enlightenment as an infinite conversation, "nature," "feeling," and indeed "reason" all appear subject to the rhetorical process of "reasoning" in which "the least acquaintance with the idiom suffices" to determine, not a moral "truth," but the "circumstances" that produced the conviction of that truth. Morality thus coincides with socialization, the weaning of the individual from the self-interest or self-absorption that generally produces indifference toward the polity. In construing morality as a process of rhetorical mediation, Hume suggests that all "virtue" will remain contingent upon the eloquence and receptivity that are marshalled on its behalf; it is, in other words, linguistically induced or constructed: "The social virtues must, therefore, be allowed to have a natural beauty and amiableness, which, at first, antecedent to all precept or education, recommends them to the esteem of uninstructed mankind, and engages their affections." To the extent that he understands morality to be socialized by a rhetorical practice that targets affect-which, in turn, may involve "considerations of self-interest, or ... more generous motives and regards" (Enquiries, 214-15)-Hume ultimately reconfirms self-interest as the only form of desire or passion, notwithstanding the fact that this position had repeatedly troubled him in his economic writings. Self-interest is thus understood as the exclusive point of contact between the imperatives and preferences of the individual and those of the polity. Consequently, it is precisely in "the intercourse of sentiments, in society and conversation," that individuals begin "to form some general unalterable [moral] standard," because in the practice of "conversation" the individual is "familiarized to these general preferences and distinctions, without which our conversation and dis-

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course could scarcely be rendered intelligible to each other" (228-29). All discursive practice and eloquent behavior, including the otherwise abstract syllogisms of moral and economic theory, ultimately amounts to a para-practice, a transactional model of socialization whose rhetorical forms-while never essential to the issues at hand-must be distinctive and formally rigorous to facilitate those deceptively objective judgments that lead to the inclusion of some individuals as morally "fit" (and to the exclusion of others as "unfit") for membership in a given community. Ultimately, most of the concepts introduced by Hume in the course of the Enquiry ("self-interest," "virtue," "affect," etc) resolve themselves into considerations of "circumstance" and "utility" (Hume's preferred terms for what we may now call "contingency"). All "interest," that is, requires a "feeling" or conscious "sense" of proximity and shared circumstance; which is not to say that individual members of a given community must actually share the same local or regional space, but they must share a medium that will instill in them the illusion of such proximity. That is the purpose of language, for it simulates "connexion" among anonymous participants. Whereas "virtue placed at ... a distance, is like a fixed star, which, though to the eye of reason it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed as to affect the senses, neither with light nor heat," Hume suggests that proximity and eloquence are virtually coterminous with a "sympathy" that is also self-interested: "Bring this virtue nearer, by our acquaintance or connexion with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; our hearts are immediately caught, our sympathy enlivened" (Enquiries, 230). Morality thus inheres in the constant negotiating and the occasional "gentle compulsion" (to recall Coleridge's phrase) that circumscribe an ongoing conversation in the course of which confirmed and prospective participants are either reconfirmed as masters of or "familiarized" with an ostensibly settled rhetorical practice. The end of such constant fine-tuning and rehearsing of rhetorical conventions-supposed to be imbued with a genuinely "moral" fiber and durability-is to ensure the continued functioning of that practice itself, for without its characteristic "preferences and distinctions ... our conversation and discourse could scarcely be rendered intelligible to each other." 27 Hume's defense of self-interest takes two oddly complementary forms. He first shows that the economic benefits of self-interest are extraordinary and have, in any event, utterly changed the social and psychological constitution of Britons. However, inasmuch as some moral barrier should appear desirable to defend this new polity against future repercussions such as might result from excessive speculation and debt, it now appears that

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moral argumentation must, paradoxically, build on the same interests whose deleterious consequences it wishes to curtail. The configuration of competitive, anonymous, self-interested individuals into a social body thus requires a medium as accessible and capable of generating "interest" as the modern conception of capital itself: language. For the Humean man of letters, social philosophy thus involves a continual interweaving of two seemingly distinct analytic strands, those of a rhetorical formalism and of a general psychology. It is characteristic of Wordsworth, and a measure of his intellectual distance from Coleridge, that his prose should retail this distinctive Humean blend of psychological and linguistic analysis. In the Preface (r8o2), Wordsworth thus stresses how the efficacy of all rhetorical and moral practice is bound up with the grand elementary principle of pleasure .... We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathise with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure and exists in us by pleasure alone. (PrW, r: 140)

More than Hume, Wordsworth thus psychologizes the official ideal of "custom" as one of "habit," and more than any of the writers before him, Wordsworth particularizes habit to the point that only one idioQl, his own, is capable of recovering within experiences of an intensely personal and contingent nature the social significances which alone legitimate the practice of telling. As he puts it in his early "Essay on Morals," "I know no book or system of moral philosophy written with 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." Rationalist approaches to moral philosophy "present no image to the mind," and "describe nothing" (PrW, r: ro3). And, as we have already observed, this blend of image and pleasure also enables individuals and entire communities to forget that their propositions, demands, fears, hopes, and so forth are articulated from a contingent perspective and that, consequently, the language giving rise to a specific moral "feeling" is itself delimited by considerations of "utility or circumstances" (Hume, Enquiries, 231) that lie outside the conscious reach of its speakers at that time. The linguistic response to the problem of self-interest, first proposed by Hume and subsequently cultivated by Wordsworth, thus unfolds as a continual rhetorical overdetermination of the "interest" and "pleasure" at hand. The cure to self-interest lies in its rhetorical mediation, a project best accomplished by the simultaneously professionalized and antiprofes-

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sional, interested and disinterested, vernacular or poetic idiom cultivated by the man of letters. For he alone is capable of understanding the social mission of his practice to be general, while recognizing that his analytic material will be irreducibly particular. Like Hume's prose, Wordsworth's blank-verse idiom displays its mastery over the myriad of contradictions that are the "Real" of his audience, not by drawing abstract and definitive "conclusions" but by displaying an eloquent "familiarity" with them. The "depth" of feeling justifies the infinite deferral of any propositional knowledge, since it is a depth achieved precisely by showing the stability and universality of such knowledge to be illusory and insufficiently "mindful" of the local, circumstantial, and hence contingent status of all insight, moral or otherwise. Hume's "articulated practice of remedial indirection" (Christensen, Practicing, 66) amounts thus to a public, transactional, and necessarily provisional mode of rhetorical production. Both Hume's distinctive idiom in his Essays and Enquiries and Wordsworth's unmistakable blank verse solicit the reader's participation provided he or she is willing to abandon less sophisticated and articulate conceptions of the world. For to retain those is to remain enslaved to ephemeral, subjective interests and, consequently, to compromise the prosperity and "durability" of the polity at large. The choice as it is to be perceived by their audiences (Hume's as well as Wordsworth's) must never .be one between opposing arguments or styles but, rather, that between a "deep" and a superficial practice of writing and reading, as well as between authentic cognition and feelings on the one hand, and mere opinion or sensation on the other. In opting, as any self-respecting individual naturally will, for the product of a "genuine poetry, in its nature well adapted to interest mankind permanently" (PrW, I: I 58), the reader stakes his or her social and moral identity on the author's promise to continue delivering textual products of the greatest circumspection and professional sophistication. Furthermore, he or she must renounce any competing interests in favor of a brand-name intellectual commodity that is at once distinctive, "deep," and forever provisional: "In order entirely to enjoy the Poetry which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed" (PrW, I: I57).28

The continuities with Burke and Hume exhibited by Wordsworth's Prelude are many, and particularly in the case of Burke have received a fair amount of attention. Overall, Burke and Hume share a tendency to psychologize the inherited ideologeme of "custom" under the more technical, and more individualized, concept of "habit." They also bequeathed Wordsworth a strong model of antitheoretical, vernacular eloquence,

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though here it ought to be stressed that unlike Hume, who always maintains a measure of ironic reserve toward his own and anyone else's arguments, the later Burke fervently believed in the existence of a distinctive English temperament and indeed elevated it to a psychopolitical axiom crucial for his anti-Jacobin and antireformist jeremiads in Reflections and his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796). Yet what most connects Reynolds, Burke, and Hume with Wordsworth is their shared perception that a new and capacious "public" aesthetic and an affect-based general rhetoric is needed to counterbalance a political economy predicated on the indifference of economically productive, competitive, and self-interested individuals toward the older civic ideal of the polis. This late-Enlightenment conception of language as "counter-spirit" is now to be explored in The Prelude, and in order to be able to speak with some accuracy to the discursive "fit" of The Prelude within its historical spectrum of political and economic langues, we must first secure a dearer understanding of the poem's distinctive rhetorical parole, both as a unique narrative style and as the determinate form of the genre of autobiography itself. For, in searching for some equilibrium between the selfcinterested individuality of its subject and its readers and the seemingly opposed demands of a national culture, The Prelude fashions an idiom of generalized, blank-verse eloquence sufficiently distinctive to create the impression of having addressed with due specificity the conceptual and affective tensions that permeate the polity. In other words, such an idiom must appear to have addressed the antagonisms among economic, political, spiritual, and sexual interests and norms in ways designed to satisfy Wordsworth's audience that these issues have been adequately treated for the time being, it being nearly understood that they will in all likelihood never be answered conclusively. Wordsworth would almost certainly have identified with Hume's view that "the end of all moral speculation is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits" (Enquiries, 172; italics mine). Along with William Hazlitt's 1805 Essay on the Principles of Human Action, which offers a standard psychological apologia of self-interest and thus launched Hazlitt's competing career as a man of letters, Wordsworth's Prelude (first finished in 1805) may thus be said to have completed the genesis of Romanticism as a specifically aesthetic movement.29 As remains to be shown in further detail, it does so by legitimating its poetic subject, as well as the author's professional self-interests, in the form of a hypertrophic promissory note assuring the reader that, no matter how tangential and selfabsorbed the autobiographical narrative may initially appear, it is "work"

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in the most authentic, civic-minded, and interminable sense of the word and must be read as a prolegomenon to larger greater public efforts yet to come.

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The Composition of Affect in The Prelude The Prelude constitutes the great experiment in Wordsworth's career, a formidable investment of his poetic skill in a project that seemed as urgent at its inception as it proved interminable during the next 40 years. It is the product of an unprecedented commitment of all personal and professional resources-poetic technique, personal recollection, literary competence and mastery of epic precursors-to construct an exemplary, articulate, and authoritative individual for a nation in which the selfinterestedness of the professions had seemingly displaced the ethical integrity of vocation. Preparatory to the "moral and Philosophical Poem," his eventual, "more important" task, as he calls The Recluse in a letter to Thomas de Quincey (L WEY, 454), The Prelude furnishes us with the most extensive analysis of the relation between aesthetic form and social authority in Romanticism's early phase.3° Crucial to the narrative is the subordination of its fixation on a self to an agenda of larger civic and cultural relevancy. At "9000 lines, not hundred but thousand lines," The Prelude amounts to "a thing unprecedented in Literary History" to be sure, yet its organization clearly aims at the appearance of "real humility ... not selfconceit" (LWEY, 586). Overcoming the risk of such "self-conceit" not only dominates Wordsworth's reflections on his vaunted poetic project but also furnishes The Prelude itself with a traditional motif, roughly akin to that of Christian conversion narratives. As Wordsworth notes: my selfishness Was mellow'd down and thus the pride of strength And the vain-glory of superior skill Were interfused with objects which sudued [sic] And tempered them & gradually produce'd A quiet independancc of the heart[.] And to my Friend who knows me I may add Unapprehensive of reproof, that hence A modesty and diffidence ensued And I was taught to feel perhaps too much The self-sufficing power of solitude. (P 1799, MS R V,

2') 31

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Not surprisingly, Wordsworth's letters alert their recipients to the "larger and more important work" (L WEY, 454). A "Poetical Work ... only introductory to" that project (L WEY, 456), The Prelude throws into relief the precarious moral nature of this enterprise of prolonged aesthetic selfreference. By April r8o4, the poem has already grown "far longer than I ever dreamt of: it seems a frightful deal to say about one's self." And yet the tonal ambiguity of the following, typical disclaimer cannot escape notice: "of course [it] will never be published (during my lifetime I mean) till another work has been written and published, of sufficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world" (L WEY, 470). TheRecluse, that magnum opus on "whatever I find most interesting, in Nature Man Society" (L WEY, 454), now figures as the justification of The Prelude, whereas the autobiographical poem itself had been conceived as merely "a sort of portico to the Recluse" (L WEY, 594). Sketched in the letters as something akin to the fictional resume of what Jerome Christensen in another context has called the "posthumous 'I'" (Practicing Enlightenment, 46), The Prelude constitutes and legitimates itself by integrating two distinct accounts: first, a genealogical account of subjective, literal selfreference; and second, a retroactive, community-oriented narrative of figural self-creation on behalf of a yet unrealized community of appropriately sensitive readers. The commerce of legitimation is bilateral here, in that the personal materials authenticate the project of a socially redemptive autobiography in the first place; at the same time, only on the basis of these larger social and spiritual promises extended by the poem as a whole are its discrete recollections morally defensible rather than scandalously self-interested. This closed circuit of empirical and psychological justifications does not, however, constitute the abstract principle on which Wordsworth's autobiographical enterprise rests. Rather, it manifests itself in the specific textual form that the enterprise actually takes, that of a narrative vacillating rhapsodically between discrete narrative incidents of material recollection increasingly interrupted, legitimated, and eventually dominated by strokes of lyric affirmation. As Wordsworth understood from the outset, the vagaries of personal recollection and the contingent (at best synecdochic) individual psychological profile that results from it can only be redeemed if they are shaped into a plausible, purposive, and authoritative form. Thus "The Recluse made Wordsworth the poet he is, even though he could not make The Recluse"; hence the tendency in The Recluse "to turn at every critical point into The Prelude" (Johnston, Wordsworth, xxii, r8). To recover its social motivation, then, we will first have to scrutinize

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the formal contours of the 1799 Prelude-including some of its revision in later versions-to the point where its stylistic and philological structures point up the larger cultural efficacy of the "blessed" individual remembered in this narrative. Begun within a few weeks after the publication of Lyrical Ballads and written "in self-defence" (L WEY, 236) during William and Dorothy's wintry isolation in Goslar, the earliest texts associated with The Prelude initiated at a textual level the same quest for "the Poet" that was dramatized in manuscript B of The Ruined Cottage, continued in The Pedlar and "Tintern Abbey," and taken to full conceptual articulation in the Preface (r8oo). The early Prelude should thus be understood as the beginning of a "turn" in Wordsworth's development that shows him taking control over his poetic future. The idea that shapes the topography of personal recollection, of providential "blessedness"-as well as the textual labor of a narrative preoccupied with authenticating these topoi-is that of the author, whose vocational ethos allows him to transcend considerations of professional advancement and thus realize a capacious and representative civic ideal. The fusion of personal history and the text of autobiography is thus paralleled by the fusion of the life of the author and the divinely inspired (and sanctioned) "work" or oeuvre. Wordsworth no sooner voices his unanticipated feelings of dejection upon completing The Prelude (r8o5) in a letter to George Beaumont (June 3, r8o5) than he turns back to the redemptive project of the Recluse, remarking, "if I am permitted to bring it to a conclusion, and to write, further, a narrative Poem of the Epic kind, I shall consider the task of my life as over" (L WEY, 594-95). The "task" of the authorial life (something to be constructed) coincides with the completion of a philosophical epic, The Recluse, itself the capstone of an oeuvre inaugurated by a genealogical narrative recounting the historical particulars of that "life" (something to be remembered). As David Simpson comments, "Wordsworth offers his most detailed representations of himself as, respectively, a mobile subject and a person in habitual contact with others in a dear perpetual place. [Thus] the topic The Prelude announces itself as singular and individual, while Home at Grasmere attempts to place that self within a community." 32 As we shall see, this circular logic of aesthetic production correlates with an equally selfconfirming poetic figuration of the self. What renders Wordsworth's vocational project and vision inherently conservative, and also quite effective, is precisely the contiguity between the constructed literary and the recollected personal life, the kind of relationship that defuses the scandal of protracted self-reference by subordinating such potential "self-conceit" to

Self-Interest Legitimated a larger poetic "task," an act of prolonged, all-absorbing "humility" and self-dedication to the continuity of one's national culture.33 In transubstantiating his material life-as text, book, and eventually oeuvre-into the nation's figural body-politic, Wordsworth significantly redefines the understanding of self-representation traditionally implied by autobiographical writing. Rather than locating the individual in a field of abstract determinants ("origins," "principles," and "rights" as conceived in Paine's writings), Wordsworth's earliest version of The Prelude reveals significant affinities with Burke's subordination of transitory, passionate, individual bodies to permanent, historical interests of the national body as a whole. And though he would have been hard-pressed, in 1799 or even 1805, to endorse Burke's peculiar traditionalist understanding of civitas or his intemperate and heterodox rhetorical habits, Wordsworth shares Burke's anxieties about historical contingency and change. He also identifies with Burke's metaphysical constitutionalism-"the disposition of a stupendous wisdom" (RF, 120)-though again The Prelude redirects traditionalism toward the more inclusive and demographically more specific ideal of a vernacular, middle-class aesthetic. In conceiving of his poetic and vocational project as more the "exercise and produce of a toil/Than analytic industry to me I More pleasing, and whose character, I deem, I More poetic"(P 1799, bk. 2, II. 427-30), Wordsworth intensifies the aesthetic quality already implicit in Burke's conception of traditions and customs embodied in "pleasing illusions" and "decent drapery." The latter's ideal of an English society held together not by the knowledge of history but by the elliptical, even simulated agency of an intuitive national memory ("sensibility") reappears in Wordsworth as the shaping force of the poet's adolescence: "the great social principle of life I Coercing all things into sympathy" (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 438-39). As he cultivates the vocational motif of poetic individuation in deliberately confessional form, Wordsworth's "faculty of imagination is profoundly conservative. It strives to retain." 34 It is in his drafts preliminary to The Pedlar and, especially, his Two-Part Prelude, that we find the first substantial evidence for deeper connection between Wordsworth's emergent conservatism and his growing professionalization of poetry. In 1799, the war against revolutionary France, now in its sixth year, continued as inconclusively as ever; the domestic economy was in shambles; the Pittite government vacillated between bouts of self-doubt and spasms of political repression; and all the representatives of an alternative political rhetoric were either dead, exiled, or ineffectual. Joseph Gerrald

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died; the London Corresponding Society had ceased to operate; and John Thelwall, Joseph Priestley, and Charles James Fox had retired, left for America, or become victims of their own notoriety.35 Arguably, "the Wordsworthian first person emerges out of [this] interplay between ... the rhetoric of the French Revolution, eighteenth-century ideas about the profession of authorship, and Wordsworth's pronounced need to create an identity whose apparent center is at once poetical (in Wordsworth's sense) and philosophical (in Coleridge's sense)" (Nichols, "Revolutionary 'I,'" 66). To characterize this new discourse as an aesthetic philosophy is to understand the pragmatic, not to say performative logic of Wordsworth's undertaking. His need "to dramatize a version of himself in order to help solidify a new form of personal authority" (67) gives his poetic enterprise the character of a palimpsest of languages and disciplines that, taken independently, are deemed inadequate for the holistic task at hand: to articulate the spiritual foundations of the "British" nation as coincident with the vocational ethos and professional legitimacy of Wordsworth the poet.36 Still, Wordsworth's regeneration of national culture, soon to be proposed in the Preface (18oo), requires that he identify a domain where authenticity and credibility were not dependent on the specious institutions and the discursive rigors of partisan politics.J? Hence, even though the 1799 Prelude and its vastly expanded and revised r8o5 version reenact the logic of Burke's political theory, the topical dimension of politics has been blotted out. Instead, Burke's "stupendous wisdom" has become the "mysterious soul" of the proto-Wordsworthian speaker, as first encountered in manuscript B of The Ruined Cottage: Though he was untaught, In the dead lore of schools undisciplined, Why should he grieve? He was a chosen son: To him was given an ear which deeply felt The voice of Nature in the obscure wind, The sounding mountain and the running stream. 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. Though poor in outward shew, he was most rich; He had a world about him-'twas his own, He made it-for it only lived to him

Self-Interest Legitimated And to the God who looked into his mind. Such sympathies would often bear him far In outward gesture, and in visible look, Beyond the common seeming of mankind. Some called it madness-such it might have been, But that he had an eye which evermore Looked deep into the shades of difference As they lie hid in all exterior forms, Which from a stone, a tree, a withered leaf, To the broad ocean and azure heavens Spangled with kindred multitude of stars, Could find no surface where its power might sleep, Which spake perpetual logic to his soul, And by an unrelenting agency Did bind his feelings even as in a chain. So he was framed. (RC, MS B, II. 74-104)

By 180) the Pedlar has become fused with the autobiographical dramatization of an exemplary sensibility, a "chosen son" fathered by the historical Wordsworth's recollective imagination and dramatized in and as the text of a "vocational imagination" (to borrow Alan Liu's apt expression). The 1799 Prelude persistently counteracts the potential misconstrual of its recollective fixations as private "self-conceit" by figuring all imaginative acts as instances of "humility," responses to a divine, providential interposition or inspiration.38 The immediacy of the Pedlar's "feeling" thus comes to be both "madness" to the unregenerate "common seeming of mankind" and "perpetual logic" to the blessed subject's own soul.39 What weighs more, the Pedlar's unique intuitive competence-eventually transcribed into the autobiographical idiom of The Prelude-is devoid of determinate origin, incommunicable, and thus altogether beyond the reach of ordinary instruction, to say nothing of the futile speculations and "dead lore of schools undisciplined." Wordsworth echoes Burke's distaste for "geometric politics" and theoretical abstractions early on in the 1799

Prelude: But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square. Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed; Who that shall point as with a wand and say,

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This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain; 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. (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 242-67)

Here Wordsworth appears to recall (perhaps involuntarily) Burke's polemic against the recent division of revolutionary France into "square republics" whose "geometric properties" are but the disfigured progeny of "metaphysical and alchemistical legislators" (RF, 314-15, 300). What Burke had repudiated as the misguided attempt at reconceiving the body politic "by a sudden jerk of authority" (RF, 315) Wordsworth here rejects as the implausible project of speculative theory: to arrive at a universal, principled, and noncontingent conception of the human individual. He thus clearly parts ways with Paine's and Godwin's rationalist axiom of a humanity grounded in "rights," intrinsically "perfectible," and consequently destined for the collective goal of utterly transparent and rational agreement.40 As an alternative to a mainstream liberalism predicated on the epistemological fantasies of transparent consciousnesses and convergent interests, Wordsworth offers not a skeptical truth but smaller-scale (and demographically more specific) fantasies of his own. His preferred model of social and historical explanation, like Burke's (though far less paranoid), operates at a far more local level and emphasizes the contingency of The Prelude's material, psychological, and rhetorical dimensions upon its symbolic coherence. The source of the poem's coherence, however, remains inscrutable because "in the words of reason deeply weighed [thoughts have] no beginning." Supposedly inaccessible to any causal explanation, autobiographical narrative rejects a rational and analytic paradigm of cognition in favor of a hermeneutics based on mostly unconscious transferences: "understanding" of The Prelude is to unfold as the poet's and audience's unconscious dialectical refinement of their comprehensive ideological kinship. While still retained in abstract terms, the model of direct causation is no longer considered adequate to the professed "task" of recovering the individual subject from the maelstrom of time and restoring it to self-presence through the supplemental operation of its rhetorical, textual reproduction. As an "interminable building reared I By observa-

Self-Interest Legitimated tion of affinities" (P 1799, bk. 2, 11. 431-32), the (re)construction of an authoritative individuality must forgo the schematic representational grammar of syllogistic proof in favor of more flexible, efficient models of self-description. In the words of his German contemporary Novalis, "all accidents of our Life are materials from which we may fashion whatever we wish. Whoever is rich in spirit will do plenty with their life. For the truly spirited individual, each acquaintance or incident could thus become the first element in an infinite sequence, the beginning of an infinite novel."41 For Novalis and Wordsworth, the hermeneutic place of causation has been demoted to the virtuality of a promise, one that "promises itself as a beginning, a beginning which will be recognized as such [only] retrospectively, from the future" (Caruth, "Unknown Causes," 8o). It is precisely this "general rhetoric of hypothesis" (Simpson, Historical Imagination, rr3) which identifies The Prelude as an exemplary instance of the changed hermeneutic logic of the Romantic text, described by Tilottama Rajan as follows: The absence of actualized meaning also results from a disjunction between signifier and signified in the text of the social and human psyche, a feeling that the meaning of events in the world is not given, and thus that literary discourse can no longer codify the meaning of events but can only be a heuristic stimulus to its production. In its initial stages romantic hermeneutics both initiates and masks this crucial change in the status of discourse. Because it sees literature as a productivity rather than a product, it inevitably sees literary meaning as implicated in larger processes such as communication and history. But at the same time traditional romantic hermeneutics neutralizes this recognition by making reading a process hut positing as the goal of this process a product, a fixed center behind the text called the "work." (Supplement of Reading, 28)

To the extent that the French Revolution had exposed the contingent and extraordinarily manipulable nature of that supposedly axiomatic "passion" of social sympathy-a passion whose course appeared to have been altered by the dissemination of pamphlets, treatises, speeches, caricatures, journals and so on-Rajan's recharacterization of literature as "productivity rather than ... product" constitutes as much a political as an aesthetic insight. Yet as Rajan also notes, what finally distinguishes the hermeneutic practices evolving during the last three decades of the eighteenth century and culminating in European Romanticism-brilliantly embodied in Hume's Enquiries and Wordsworth's Prelude-is that period's realignment of inscrutable passions responsible for momentous historical change with the oblique metonymical patterns of philosophical or autobiographical narrative. Such patterns not only create the expectation of a

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correspondingly associative mode of reading but also postulate a congenial relationship between a particular text and the larger oeuvre and career of which that text is but an anticipation or a first installment.42 This attenuation of complex material and theoretical energy by the play of Wordsworth's Prelude-that is, the realignment of an affective with an authoritative conception of history-assumes simultaneously a determinate philological form. For The Prelude is a labyrinth of persistent, not to say compulsive, textual revision. Wordsworth's project of recovering the postulated arche of "feeling" for the poet's and reader's selfconscious understanding, and thus of potentiating affect into authority, rests altogether on the symbolic texture of an imaginary world. As Ashton Nichols puts it, "an unreal textual world comes to replace a real physical world as a way of transforming forgotten moments of silence into images preserved in marks on paper. But the image of the past self thus created is no more the real self than the dream in the mind is the real world .... The identity forged on paper is a creation out of emotional memory, not a literal remembering of a past self" ("Revolutionary 'I,'" 75). Similarly, Clifford Siskin observes that Wordsworth's conception of development has achieved such dominance and "has been so thoroughly naturalized into truth ... that its historical and formal relationship to the labor of revision has been obscured" (Historicity, ro3). Extending this view, we ought to understand the phrase "emotional memory" as defining an instance of what Rajan calls hermeneutic productivity. From a critical perspective, that is, what Wordsworth repeatedly and axiomatically refers to as "passion" and "feeling" coincides with his poetry's rhetorical effectiveness, which in turn depends on its formal-symbolic coherence. Rather than soliciting his audience's analytic potential, Wordsworth's revisionary verse seeks to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of reading in terms of the same language of experience whose reconstruction is being attempted by the poem itself. By narrativizing the self as a matter of development and result, as a "tale of healthy growth and of deviations from it," Wordsworth makes his audiences "want to feel." Framed by the genetic logic of confessional autobiography, "feeling" naturalizes the author's cultural and historical production, just as interpretation is assimilated to the self-privileging idea of spontaneous "growth" and sympathetic reading. In a poetic universe in which self-discipline has been transfigured into generic (aesthetic) desire, "feeling must seem to have no strings attached" (Siskin, Historicity, 93). If this approach seems close to Foucault's definition of ideology as an unapparent disciplinary practice, an equally analytic account of ideology

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3II

as the enclosure of the subject's entire affective and cognitive potential can be found in the later Coleridge. His Stateman's Manual opens with a critique of those who categorically reject any historicist reading of Scripture. Scrutinizing their premises, Coleridge observes that to argue the Bible's "immediate derivation from God ... is conceivable only under a compleat system of delusion, which from the cradle to the death-bed ceases not to overawe the will by obscure fears, while it preoccupies the senses by vivid imagery and ritual pantomime" (LS, 5). And yet, while ostensibly opposing any attempt to strip the individual reader of his or her cognitive mandate, Coleridge's text soon begins to advance an anti-Enlightenment program of its own. For as it turns out, Coleridge not only magnifies the historical significance of his professional ideals-a microanalytic and hyperreflexive practice of reading-but also seeks to indemnify his method against public scrutiny and counterargument. His test case involves the "riddle of the French Revolution," specifically whether this most public of recent events might be traced back to "the corruptions of moral and political philosophy." Answering in the affirmative, Coleridge argues for a paradigm of theory so "pure" as to resist all co-option and contaminations by the rough-and-tumble world of social history. Pleading for an understanding of pure theory as "the true proximate cause" of social transformation-yet unaffected by such transformation-his sermon dramatizes the change in his political (and theoretical) conceptions since his 1795 Bristol lectures. More importantly, his response also shows him trying to solve the larger problem of how theory ought to respond to the operative ideology of the state whose constitution it investigates. Coleridge here confronts the undecided ethical place of theory: should it oppose the logical constitution of its objects, or must theory align itself with that constitution on the premise that its analytic methods ought to be fully commensurate with the operative logic of its object? The question is also a deeply personal one, since it implicates Coleridge's uneven career as onetime radical theorist and self-appointed advocate of an intellectual "clerisy" advocating a thoroughly stratified Anglican society. As so often, Coleridge's response is hypothetical: It would not be difficult, by an unbroken chain of historic facts, to demonstrate that the most important changes in the commercial relations of the world had their origin in the closets or lonely walks of uninterested theorists;-that the mighty epochs of commerce, that have changed the face of empires; nay, the most important of those discoveries and improvements in the mechanic arts, which have numerically increased our population ... had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen, or in the practical insight of men of business, but in the closets of unin-

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terested theorists, in the visions of reclusive theorists .... So few are the minds that really govern the machine of society, and so incomparably more numerous and more important are the indirect consequences of things than their foreseen and direct effects. (LS, q-rs) 43

The passage transfigures Coleridge's earlier conception of theory as political practice into a highly abstract, if still powerful, network of remote causes and proximate effects. Though its import continues to be magnified (it has "changed the face of empires"), theory now is understood as the strictly "virtual" origin of all social and economic transformation. Precisely the visceral and abrasive character of material historical change is thus taken by Coleridge as evidence of the moral corruption and derivative, belated, even fallen status of all empirical history. If the transcendental forms of cognition associated with theory continue to dominate the material social process, their authority now appears to have been purchased (like the power of God) at the expense of their almost complete inscrutability. Entrusted to the care of the nameless few, a deceptively nonpolitical and disinterested paradigm of theory ultimately lends ideological support to the currently prevailing cultural and political arrangements. It does so by posing as the cause of all social and economic transformation, a cause at once evident to the initiated, "uninterested theorists" yet incommunicable to the "numerically increased" population, which theory merely acknowledges as one more subsidiary effect of its own inscrutable productivity. Relocated within a professionally and socially arriviste model of aesthetic and philosophical production, theory (analogous to Wordsworth's concepts of "feeling" and "passion") "has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita" (LS, 14). Obvious rhetorical and idiomatic differences notwithstanding, Wordsworth and Coleridge share this tendency to solve specific ideological and historical problems by begging their question on a grand scale. Rather than taking up questions of analysis-including the question concerning the ideological place of theoretical analysis itself-in propositional form, and thus risking the emergence of powerful counterarguments, both continue to build their careers on the premise that the social authority of the individual writer depends fundamentally not on the verifiability (or falsifiability) of answers but on the mystification of these answers as having originated in unimpeachable subjective intuitions. Whereas the displacement of analytic obligations by a self-privileging rhetoric frequently takes the form of a scholarly, metaphysical, even religious arrogance in the case of Coleridge, Wordsworth makes his case by adopting his customary tone of indirect and understated assertion. As early as the 1798 Lyrical Ballads

Self-Interest Legitimated and the 1799 Prelude, he thus collapses the question concerning the validity of social analysis into that concerning his audience's aesthetic proficiency. The issue at hand, in other words, involves never really the content of a given narrative but the reader's fitness for deriving from the text at hand the expected spiritual gain. Such gain, it now turns out, requires not a greater application but, on the contrary, the almost complete suspension of all analytic initiative: Oft in those moments such a holy calm Did overspread my soul that I forgot The agency of sight, and what I saw Appeared like something in myself-a dream, A prospect in my mind. (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 397-40T) In collapsing the ideal of a spiritual or poetic authority into holistic affective response to one's historical inheritance, Wordsworth indirectly allies himself with Burke's hostility to explicit and theoretically selfconscious forms of political and cultural argumentation. Anticipating Coleridge's ideal of the "reclusive genius," Wordsworth predicates the efficacy of his narrative on its ability to foreclose any analytic responsibility for the self producing that narrative. In so potentiating personal recollection into communal Scripture, Wordsworth substantially expands the poet's spiritual mandate precisely by declaring it permanently beyond the reach of all public and enlightened discourse ("Who knows the individual hour?"). Not only is the poet's history said to have initiated and shaped the current of all "feeling" in ways too subtle and pervasive ("even as a seed") to be knowable, but the writer's "unrelenting agency" perpetuates the structural enigma of his subject (his "self") by "bind[ing] his feelings even as in a chain." This allegedly "even" character of all genuine "feeling" runs from the most idiosyncratic moments of experience to the most universal, from "each most obvious and particular thought" to our "general habits and desires." What remains supposedly undemonstrable at the level of public discourse is thus said to become intuitively, indeed empirically apparent as an exemplary psychological equilibrium such as the sensibility of the Pedlar. The only answer to Wordsworth's question "How shall I trace the history, where seek I The origin of what I then have felt?" (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 395-96) has to be that it is the wrong question, impossible to answer and dangerous to ask. The function of Wordsworth's Prelude corresponds to that of good government in Burke. If asking the question concerning the difference between vain self-interest and legitimate self-representation

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has yielded a prolonged autobiographical account, the individual who emerges from that narrative-knowing officially nothing of these larger social stakes of The Prelude-cannot but repeat that very question with full innocence: "Was it for this ... ?"Simpson rejects an ironic reading of this passage, noting instead its "reluctant negation of the public dimension of writing." Wordsworth, he remarks, "is enduringly anxious about designating The Prelude as any kind of worthwhile task, something that might make amends for a fallen condition rather than being itself just one more outgrowth of it" (Historical Imagination, rr6-r7). Consequently, thenarrative's formal-symbolic coherence-its textual simulation of an affective, quasi-organic allegiance between the individual writer and his projected interpretive community-will constitute the only acceptable compensation for having raised the question concerning the origins of spiritual authority and the legitimacy of such authority. In the political languor of British politics, the hysteria over the French revolutionary terror having yielded to the slow economic strangulation of the campaign against the post-Robespierrean directoriat, authority revolves around the management of public passions. Correspondingly, Wordsworth understands authority to involve the cultivation of an (intensely figural) poetic idiom that can convincingly claim to uncover the affective foundations of all public selves.44

At the beginning of the 1799 Prelude, the emergence of its poetic subject is announced by "severer interventions" and a "ministry more palpable" (P 1799, bk. r, II. 79-80), that is, by the emergence of consciousnessof-guilt for which the narrative declines to furnish any causal explanation. Instead, the poetry turns away-with the formal concision of lyric apostrophe-from the personal, political, and epistemological dilemma of authentic self-representation, precisely the analytic note on which the poem had opened. For The Prelude to succeed, then, it is imperative that Wordsworth contain the analytic curiosity that produced the autobiographical impulse; volatile passions of a youthful, imaginative self-interest must be curbed, voices of personal and political terror smoothed into the organic cadences of lyric apostrophe, and the narrative's unbalanced and heterogeneous episodes configured into the formal "unity I Of this my argument" (P 1799, bk. r, II. 253-54). Until then Wordsworth's vocational ambition remains hamstrung by the volatile and potentially revolutionary nature of its recollected materials. The Prelude thus continues to be haunted by the professionally disastrous conflict between an experience of au then-

Self-Interest Legitimated tic yet incommunicable subjectivity and inherited languages that will facilitate the intelligibility of a self, though only at the expense of its sincerity. As a prolonged mnemonic (and metonymic) performance, Wordsworth's autobiographical poem dramatizes the early Burke's conception of the sublime as the experience of an irremediable ineffability; such writing takes "the form of an infinite regress, in which the representation of sensation produces representation as always something additional to be responded to" (Ferguson, Solitude, viii). Given the poem's susceptibility to charges of vanity, as well as the tenuous quality of affective memories said to have produced the autobiographical impulse, it cannot surprise us that "the primary drama of The Prelude is the fixing and unfixing of its narrative frame" (Wolfson, Questioning Presence, r65). At an epistemological level, Wordsworth's autobiography attempts to maintain two incompatible systems of cognition; and to a significant degree it is the ongoing negotiation between the two that shapes the style of Wordsworth's narrative, thereby disclosing deep-structural ambivalences intrinsic to Romanticism's mode of cultural production. At a first level, The Prelude contends with the psychotemporal distance between the subject of and the subject to rec'ollection. Taken in its most basic quantitative or chronological sense, this distance results in a lasting tension between the allegedly spontaneous and unself-conscious experiences of Wordsworth's youth and the self-conscious professionalism and cultural literacy of his mature years. Time and again, "Wordsworth often seems to be reading the past as if it were the future and the future as if it were the past" (Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 144); or, as The Prelude describes this hermeneutic conundrum: so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my heart That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses-conscious of myself, And of some other being. (P r799, bk. r, II. 26-3r) 45

As Susan Wolfson remarks, in this passage "the poet, like the autobiographer of The Prelude, stands somewhat outside, thinking of the difference with a sense and syntax that alternates uncertainly between heartfelt presence and the apprehension of a vacancy so wide that those days seem totally 'other,' not even of the self at all" (Questioning Presence, 49). The passage discloses the consciousness of a profound qualitative difference

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between the pronominal subject recollected ("me and those days") and the rather tenuous agency of the writer. By claiming to be "conscious of myself, I And of some other being," the writer suggests that his reflexive literary productivity seeks to compensate for the sharp divide between the seemingly literal evolution of his subjective consciousness and the symbolically overdetermined consciousness of his current autobiographical performance. Consciously suspending the autobiographical self between its hypostatized affective origins and the knowledge that the undemonstrability or ineffability of the self is the certain price of that hypothesis, Wordsworth conceives the bourgeois subject as a deeply divided psyche.46 Yet precisely because that claim of a divided self issues from just the kind of subject it describes, Wordsworth's knowledge remains necessarily provisional. His characteristically tenuous self-reference (e.g., "I seem I Two consciousnesses") furthermore suggests that memory, too, can only produce knowledge of the self as something irrecuperable. For given its status as strictly "interior," all memory continues to presuppose the integrity of the subject that it purports to affirm. In Wordsworth's autobiographical narrative, any self is but "my former self."47 Wordsworth responds to this fundamental temporal discontinuity of the subject by reconstructing, in the Freudian sense of memory as the transferential creation of a past, the self's history as that of an aesthetically "blessed" individual. Focusing on "spontaneous" and, by implication, "authentic" memories, The Prelude posits the affective origins of the poet's subjectivity as immune to infection by the heteronomous social and aesthetic conventions underlying the representation of these origins for Wordsworth's present-day audience. It responds to this ultimately insoluble theoretical contradiction by conceiving and elaborating the supplemental distinction between a legitimate and a derivative aesthetic. For strategic purposes, we may also describe that difference between a procreative and a reproductive model of (self-)representation. Drawing on Reynolds's critique of an originally Aristotelian concept of mimesis as overly mechanical, particular, and morally contingent, Wordsworth's Prelude repeatedly pathologizes any type of self-interest and self-representation that can be captured in explicit propositional form. Unlike Reynolds, however, Wordsworth prefers a model of a procreative aesthetic that does not so much repudiate the local and material particularity of self-reference as it insists that poetry ought to cultivate the writer's humble origins in a series of transferences: from youth to poet, from poet to author, and from author to audience. The writer remembers, and thereby authenticates, his self as

Self-Interest Legitimated

317

the organic progeny of a politically, economically, and demographically specific "spot" or "dwelling." Anticipating The Recluse, Wordsworth thus insists, "A plastic power I Abode within me .... A local spirit of its own, at war I With general tendency" (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 4II-r5). Only a procreative model of poetry can convincingly identify its paternity, whereas the aesthetic paradigm of imitatio (or reproduction) yields never an authentic self but only more writing. Consistent with Burke's ideal of Englishness as the product of a local and instinctual wisdom, Wordsworth's autobiographical voice is premised on the recovery of allegedly inalienable personal and local experiences claimed to have produced the poet's subjectivity. In order to make its risky epistemological and rhetorical calculations pay off, then, The Prelude emphasizes local particulars and psychological detail, hoping that it may eventually give authoritative expression to the supposed foundations of its own voice. "I conversed I With things that really are," Wordsworth claims, and now at length From Nature and her overflowing soul I had received so much that all my thoughts Were steeped in feeling; I was only then Contented when with bliss ineffable I felt the sentiment of being spread O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still, O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought And human knowledge, to the human eye Invisible, yet liveth to the heart. (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 442-54) 48

Wordsworth's conception of affect proves at once indisputable and perplexing. As was the case in the Preface (rSoo), in The Prelude affect is inherently contingent and indeterminate, alternately active and spontaneous or reactive and dormant.49 Furthermore, in characterizing the poet's affective origins as "bliss ineffable" and as a "sentiment of being ... lost beyond the reach of thought" Wordsworth all but collapses the youth's spiritual endowment into the material specifics of the local history said to have procreatively shaped that endowment. In this manner, The Prelude surreptitiously authenticates the poetic self and its wholly experiential "sense" of history. The function of affect is essentially the same as that of a hypothesis in formal logic, albeit one characterized by The Prelude as a spontaneous and unimpeachable intuition, one of "Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense I Which seem in their simplicity to own I An in-

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tellectual charm" (P I799, bk. I, 11. 383-85). In this manner, Wordsworth's autobiography proceeds to establish a type of double indemnity between affect and history, between the contingent origins of self-interest and the disinterested significance of that self for its eventual community of readers.

History in The Prelude is constituted as a series of metonymies or pseudo-repetitions of that ineffable yet procreative moment that produced the poet's "first-born affinities" (P 1799, bk. I, I. 387). Occasionally, Wordsworth will identify that origin as "custom," though usually it is, of course, called "nature."50 Paradoxically, it is precisely by vesting his poetic and social authority in contingent and inscrutable personal experiences that Wordsworth immunizes his narrative against the contingent insight of a reading public. In his epistemology, all affect compels, not conscious interpretation, but its transferential repetition in the form of commensurate representations and modes of reading; relative to an inscrutable dynamic of "feeling," writing and reading constitute a "species of reaction" (PrW, I: q8). Similar to Freud in his metapsychological writings of I9III 5, Wordsworth conceives of affect as an inextinguishable impulse or "(e)motion" in the zero-sum game of psyche. Thus The Prelude's humble confessional design implements a complex transferential agenda as subjective impulses are cathected in the symbolic domains of poetic reflection, authorial production, and eventually public reading: "I felt the sentiment being spread," Wordsworth claims, even as he minimizes his own authorial agency by suggesting that what is being remembered at such moments is not a distinctive affective content but merely the generic fact that the youth's "sensations" have been forgotten. Recollection in The Prelude ultimately focuses on its own generic operational logic rather than on the local and personal quality of past experience. Not only does the myth of memory authenticate the poet's vocational integrity, but the transferential logic of a confessional narrative simultaneously constrains its audience to formulate responses that will legitimate the poem as socially purposeful rather than frivolous. The dialectical model discussed thus far is so prevalent and insistent throughout The Prelude as to warrant some speculation about the deeper significance of the "frustration" experienced and projected by the writing subject onto its eventual audience. Exploring just this kind of epistemological cum rhetorical "frustration," and appropriately enough capturing it in a protracted series of rhetorical questions, Jacques La can puts the matter thus:

Self-Interest Legitimated Does the subject not become engaged in an ever-growing dispossession of that being of his, concerning which-by dint of sincere portraits which leave its idea no less incoherent, of rectifications which do not succeed in freeing its essence, of stays and defenses which do not prevent his statue from tottering, of narcissistic embraces which become like a puff of air in animating it-he ends up by recognizing that this being has never been anything more than his construct in the Imaginary and that this construct disappoints all his certitudes? For in this labor which he undertakes to reconstruct this construct for another, he finds again the fundamental alienation which made him construct it like another one, and which has always destined it to be stripped from him by another. This ego ... is frustration in its essence. (Speech and Language, n)

If, in the process of self-interest and self-representation, there is a significant shift from a desire for self-possession to an awareness of the hermeneutic contingency of any self upon an irreducibly alien medium, it must be expected that the writer, out of a consciousness of his own intrinsic frustration, will become his own agent, so to speak. The very language that betrayed his most subjective desire for self-possession must be mobilized against its potential for revealing its inherent otherness, that is, its extrinsic, sociocultural determinacy.51 To contain the consciousness of "frustration," which threatens forever to overwhelm the consciousness of a self, it is imperative that language itself be contained by means of a comprehensive rhetorical form and aesthetic design. Language itself must be rescued from the status of a merely indifferent supplement or even resistant medium by becoming effectively consubstantial with the subject it purports to represent. In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge anticipates Lacan's argumentation when he observes, "a subject ... becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject." Subjectivity thus is an inherently frustrating process of "perpetual selfduplication" (BL, r: 273). The relevance of Lacan's and Coleridge's remarks for our overarching concern with the social pragmatics of Wordsworth's autobiographical narrative is, perhaps, best formulated as a gene era! hypothesis: The confessional, blank-verse narrative idiom of The Prelude symptomizes at a formal-aesthetic level an open-ended, transferential dialectic of a "self" seeking to stave off the consciousness of its own instability by staging-in and as poetic "work"-the ideal of a continuum linking a past recovered (or, rather, simulated) as a "felt" origin with the writer's present. Precisely because it is neither a direct effect nor an authentic inscription of some a priori interiority, the subject of The Prelude is best

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thought as a result of "indirect," aesthetic productivity; it objectifies itself in a distinctive poetic form precisely because, as "subject," it must respond to the ever-impending knowledge of its constitutive logical and historical self-alienation.52 A seemingly inscrutable feeling thus initiates a synecdochic movement of growing complexity that expands early memories into an articulate poetic authority and eventually sponsors the conclusion that all subjective intuition, however local and incidental, is but the encryption of a profound, indeed normative "sensibility": -And if the vulgar joy by its own weight Wearied itself out of the memory, The scenes which were a witness of that joy Remained, in their substantial lineaments Depicted on the brain, and to the eye Were visible, a daily sight: and thus By the impressive agency of fear, By pleasure and repeated happiness, So frequently repeated, and by force Of obscure feelings representative Of joys that were forgotten, these same scenes So beauteous and majestic in themselves, Though yet the day was distant, did at length Become habitually dear, and all Their hues and forms were by invisible links, Allied to the affections. (P 1799, bk. r, II. 427-42)

The phrasing here should give us pause. It qualifies the status of the affective further, speaking of "obscure feelings representative I Of joys that were forgotten" (P 1799, bk. r, II. 436-37). The diction reveals the supplemental, ultimately metaphoric relationship between the topical status of "feeling" in the poem and an entirely inaccessible past of sensations ("joys")-an argument familiar from "Tintern Abbey" and the Preface and of pivotal importance to the contemporaneous theories of the subject in Fichte and Schleiermacher. It thus appears possible that the metaphoric relationship between the "feelings" basic to The Prelude and those inaccessible "forgotten joys" constitutes but a (rhetorical) wish, an imaginative projection of a past that has been invented only retroactively and that was never "present" in any empirical, experiential sense.53

1!5

"Emboss'd with terms of art"

~

Imitation of Life in Book 5 of The Prelude At a formal level, the success of Wordsworth's autobiographical narrative depends above all on the demonstration of an essential continuity between affect, language, and textual form. The form must purge the youthful poet's "vulgar joy" of its moral indeterminacy and self-absorption; it must excavate from the debris of affective memories more "substantial lineaments, ... hues and forms." Only by responding to the recollection of first sounds, breathings, and mutterings-embryos of the text's own articulate character-will The Prelude establish a causal relationship between the transgressive exploits of Wordsworth's youth (robbing traps and birds' nests; stealing someone's boat) and his proclaimed authorial stature in the present. In 1799, Wordsworth's autobiography adumbrates its thematic scope and epistemological complexity via a prolonged opening question. The river Derwent's "murmurs" blend with "my Nurse's song," thereby occupying a social function with a natural agency and metaphorizing a human covenant as an organic, articulate, and unconscious "voice /That flowed along my dreams": Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song, And from his alder shades, and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou 0 Derwent, travelling over the green plains Ncar my "sweet birth-place," didst though beauteous Stream Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence tempering Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts To more than infant softness. (P 1799, bk. I, 11. r-!2)

Throughout its first part, the 1799 Prelude attempts to assimilate the ineffable memories of "sounds" and "breathings" to its own organic and articulate textual profile. Uncontainable by any causal narrative, feeling is repeatedly reified in lyric apostrophe as what, in a draft, is called "the vital spirit of a perfect form" (P 1799, DC MS 33, 49v).54 The tension between affect and text is metaphorized as one between transgression and atonement, between the boy's incidental acts of theft and the emergence of a

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haunting, providential voice. Infringing on the human world of property, the boy robs a trap and, figurally speaking, becomes trapped himself. For although "the bird I Which was the captive of another's toils I Became my prey," retribution followed swiftly and, appropriately enough, took the ominous form of an allusion to Macbeth (r, vii, r-2): and when the deed was done I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings come after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (P 1799, bk.

I,

II. 45-49)

Likewise, when disturbing the nest of a raven (itself a predator), the youth suddenly experiences the enigma of his mortality as he clings to "half-inch fissures in the slipp'ry rock, I But ill sustained." Again, the distant memory yields a crypto-poetic interest: oh at that time, While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears. (P 1799, bk.

T,

II. 62-65; italics mine)

And in the boating episode, perhaps the best known of these scenes, the boy's initially linear movement within a picturesque landscape ("I fixed a steady view I Upon the top of that same craggy ridge, I The bound of the horizon") disintegrates abruptly as a "huge cliff" rises skyward. Here again, the youth's transparently phallic exploits, acts of "stealth and troubled pleasure," are accompanied from the very beginning by audible premonitions: "not without the voice of mountain-echoes" (P 1799, bk. r, II. 91-92). And in the skating episode, the young Wordsworth "heeded not the summons" but, "Proud and exulting like an untired horse I That cares not for its home," ventured out on the fragile ice. The dialectic of transgression and retribution persists as the youths skate across lake Windermere. Prefiguring the eventual discovery of the drowned schoolmaster at Hawkshead, the skaters' exuberant halloos meet with subdued echoes of faintly Gothic import: not a voice was idle: with the din, Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud, The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills

"Emboss'd with terms of art" Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy not unnoticed. (P 1799, bk. r, ll. 162-67)

In its turn, such "alien sound of melancholy" attenuates the youths' overconfident and "idle" pleasures, and it prefigures the "long I And frequent yellings" of ice breaking on the frozen lake, overheard indoors by Wordsworth and his friends. The boys are restaging the French Revolution in mock-epic style as a game of cards: to the combat-Lu or Whist-led on A thick-ribbed army, not as in the world Discarded and ungratefully thrown by Even for the very service they had wrought, But husbanded through many a long campaign. Oh with what echoes on the board they fellIronic diamonds, hearts of sable hue, Queens gleaming through their splendour's last decay, Knaves wrapt in one assimilating gloom, And King's indignant at the shame incurr'd By royal visages. Meanwhile the frost Raged bitterly with keen and silent tooth, And interrupting the impassioned game Oft from the neighbouring lake the splitting ice While it sank down towards the water sent Among the meadows and the hills its long And frequent yellings, imitative some Of wolves that howl along the Bothnic main. (P 1799, bk.

I,

ll. 2r5-33)

As part of its larger quest for a causal model supportive of its professed spiritual authority, The Prelude seeks to assimilate these breathings, yellings, and oblique utterances-"The elements of feeling and of thought" and "the passions that build up our human soul" (P I799, bk. r, 11. 134, 138)-to a readable and respectable rhetorical form. All the incidents have to be declassified, so to speak. As the components of an autobiographical narrative of "single and determined bounds" (P r8o5, bk. I, 1. 669), they must all "[melt] into one track" by disclosing a deep-structural, indeed providential, metaphoric consistency as memories all "haply aiming at the self-same end" (P I799, bk. I, 11. 95, 78).55 Each episode in the poem thus provides further evidence of the conceptual hypothesis underlying The Prelude as a whole, namely, that the subject's experience of contingency is but a tacit affirmation of the (Burkean) conception of the individual as

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the involuntary and organic product of its local, sociocultural history. An early apostrophe in the 1799 version thus affirms how "The mind of man is fashioned and built up I Even as a strain of music" (P 1799, bk. 1, 11. 6768). Two other passages elaborate on this "declassification" of the narrative's raw material in explicit and complementary terms: I seemed to learn ind1v1dual

of

& forms

That what we see of forms and images Which float along our minds & what we feel Of active or recognizable thought Prospectiveness or intellect or will Not only is not worthy to be deemed Our being, to be prized as what we are But is the very littleness of life Such consciousness I deem but accidents Relapses from that one interior life far beyond

That lives in all things sacred from the touch Of that false secondary power by which In weakness we create distinctions, then all

Believe that our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive and not which we have made. (P 1799, DC MS 33, so') It were a song Venial, and such as if I rightly judge I might protract unblamed; but I perceive That much is overlooked, and we should ill Attain our object if from delicate fears Of breaking in upon the unity Of this my argument I should omit To speak of such effects as cannot here Be regularly classed, yet tend no less To the same point, the growth of mental power And love of Nature's works. (P 1799, bk.

1,

11. 2 48-58) 56

Recalling the pantheism of Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp" and of his own "Tintern Abbey" ("The one life within us and abroad"), the first passage shows Wordsworth insisting that any particular percept and intellectual concept proves inherently contingent and, as a result, metaphorically exchangeable with any other "accident." What renders such effects distinctive is an ultimately "false, secondary power" whose abstract and analytic

"Emboss'd with terms of art" fixations divide the ephemeral world of experience with "puny boundaries." Such a world remains deficient in both an epistemological and a moral sense. Meanwhile, the second passage specifies the reciprocal legitimation of the poet's incidental recollections and the spiritual community of a writer and his audience in which all are said to profit from the narrative's irregular yet ultimately cohesive account. Negotiating a surplus stock of memories ("I perceive I That much is overlooked") and the communal interests ("our object") realized by the poet's dedicated reminiscence, The Prelude repeatedly concedes the uniqueness of "effects as cannot here I Be regularly classed," at the same time affirming the teleological coherence of a narrative in which everything "tend[s] no less /To the same point, the growth of mental power I And love of Nature's works." To configure the poem's material resources with its social interest, the "effects" told with the "point" of telling, requires that the incidental "I" here subject to recall merge with a comprehensive ideal of the nation as a predestined sociocultural community. Only so can the poet realize his vocational, authorial ambition and find such ambition complemented by his audience's craving for spiritual stability.57

The reconfiguration of a narrative project bordering on self-conceit into an undertaking benefiting the self recollected and the recollecting poet, the poet in and the author of that poem, that author and his audience-all this is repeatedly figured in economic terms in The Prelude: How Nature by collateral interest And hy extrinsic passion peopled first My mind with forms. (P I799· bk. I, II. 376-?8}

The mind thus populated with "extrinsic passion" will connect uneasily with the uncontainable reproductive instincts of the urban body politic explored in book 7 of The Prelude. Likewise, the narrative insists, albeit with characteristically circuitous diction, that memorable things are not in vain Nor profitless if haply ... impressed Collateral objects and appearances, Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep Until maturer seasons called them forth To impregnate and to elevate the mind. (P 1799, bk.

I,

II. 420-26) 58

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Again, the trope of reproduction supports the underlying premise of a long-term economic investment in "collateral objects and appearances" expected to yield interest (or progeny) in the form of a poetic "spirit." The latter is to legitimate the unprecedented narrative attention lavished on the self, and indeed the (inherently figural) life of that self. The recit of past incidents and the type of affect allegedly salvaged from the past and inscribed in the poem are thus supposed to be equivalent. Only the writer's mastery of his medium can immunize the autobiographical narrative against the contingent significance (or potential irrelevance) of its material recollections. Alluding to the generic eloquence of Othello, the poem thus prefaces its own most famously generic episode, the Spots of Time, with a casual notation of the seemingly inexhaustible stock of equivalent expenences: I might advert To numerous accidents in flood or field Quarry or moor, or 'mid the winter snows, Distresses and Disasters, tragic facts Of rural history that impressed my mind With images, to which in following years Far other feelings were attached, with forms That yet exist with independent life And like their archetypes, know no decay. (P 1799. bk. I, II. 279-87)

Notwithstanding the avowed genetic or merely contiguous logic that tethers "accidents," "Distresses and Disasters, [and] tragic facts" first to "images" and then to "forms," the authentic experience reproduced in this series of metonymies struggles with its ephemeral constitution.59 What has to originate in its place is a quasi-metaphoric correspondence of mutual affirmation and of timeless, "essential" durability, between affective "forms I That yet exist with independent life" and "know no decay" and those archetypes to which these forms are literally "like[ened]." 6°Correlative with the aberrant or "wayward" analytic spirit of cognition, Wordsworth's narrative continually cautions against an imminent deterioration of the rhetorical, textual medium that might confuse the "littleness of life" with the "one interior life" of which any given moment of consciousness constitutes but an ephemeral "Relapse." More crucially yet, Wordsworth can intone his oblique humanist creed ("far other feelings") only as an explicit countermove to the ineffable specifics of his life, those "tragic facts I Of rural history" said to have shaped his poetry between Salisbury Plain (1793) and the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. While it would be both a theoret-

"Emboss'd with terms of art" ical and a historical error to disqualify the affective as mere subterfuge or false consciousness, the above passage nevertheless suggests an understanding of Wordsworthian affect as the romance of permanent values, as the abiding wish for an outside to historical contingency. The point warrants further qualification, however, since it has become increasingly common practice to construe the purpose of "feeling" in The Prelude solely as a desire to "escape" or otherwise obfuscate history. Such a model of historicism as ideological critique, evidently not without presuppositions of its own, continues to need reevaluation. First, we must remind ourselves that such an alleged desire for a noncontingent, transhistorical foundation of the self inheres solely in the rhetoric of The Prelude itself; such a "desire," in other words, is accessible only in the form of a hermeneutic process, a specific technique of reading that may conceivably, and to a greater or lesser extent, have been shaped by the rhetorical cues provided by the poem itself. Posited as the embryonic anticipation of the present writer's aesthetic authority, "feeling" is by definition a contingent interpretive result whose social effect depends on the poem's ability to create a unified readerly response to its narrative epiphanies through their subsequent lyric condensation. This remains true even as Wordsworth persists in construing "feeling" as an autonomous, wholly ineffable spiritual content.61 Making ever-growing demands on its audience's forbearance and interest, The Prelude capitalizes on its openly provisional status; for it was "not the incompleteness of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's philosophy that left The Recluse incomplete, but its indemonstrability, both as system and as story" (Johnston, Wordsworth, r8}. There is a second caveat: for Wordsworth's narrative poetics to recycle the basic ideological dispensation of the later Burke-yet to do so in the very spirit of professionalism and authorial self-fashioning that Burke had set out to discredit in his vituperative Reflections-is for that poetics to reveal that the supposedly ahistorical or aesthetic (dis)interestedness of The Prelude is itself historically conditioned. Thus, Wordsworthian desire, specifically the motive, so persistently ascribed to him, to "escape" history turns out to be historical both in its content and in its mode of enactment. The "evasions," "absences," and "displacements" so effectively uncovered by recent historicist and materialist critique amounts in the end simply to an attempted evasion of a specific set of historical beliefs, imperatives, or constraints. It is but one more (historically and culturally determined) form of putting up rhetorical defenses against a cacophony of political, economic, and personal demands and identifications.62 In outlining a new poetic theory and vocational ethos, Wordsworth mobilizes his

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aesthetic productivity in order to mediate two conceptions of history, that is, to reconcile incompatible constraints, exigencies, and hoped-for outcomes within the evolving public sphere he occupied. One such development, strenuously rejected by Wordsworth, involved what he perceived to be the exploitation of an unstable middle-class psychology by derivative and wholly imitative forms of representation (the Gothic novel, sentimentalizing ballads, and theatrical spectacles). Ceaselessly reproducing themselves by means of translation, pirating, or the brazen imitation of one hack writer by another, these genres had begun, in his view, to colonize the already delicate affective texture of his middle-class audience. To this obviously "constructed" (not to say fantasized) historical analysis, Wordsworth now responds with his own aesthetic dispensation, a circular economy of memory and inscription that simultaneously coordinates The Prelude's narrative form and legitimates it as a professional enterprise. Rather than "evading" history or failing to meet a belatedly introduced standard of historical self-awareness-a duty that perhaps no text or subject can ever hope to discharge at the "proper" time- The Prelude constitutes a distinctive intervention in the particular "sense" of history jointly conceived by Wordsworth's professional, political, and aesthetic imaginary. Historicity thus inheres in what Kenneth Burke calls "motive" or, as I have sought to describe it, in the "pragmatics" of a complex demographic unconscious. For Kenneth Burke, historical awareness is always the reflex of a specific "ratio of scene and agent." Throughout The Prelude, we thus witness the gradual construction of an imaginary "subject," a synthesis of two hypostatized identities: those of the youth "confessed" and the poet "professed." It is a synthesis effected by the writer's as yet unfulfilled quest for professional, public authority, a quest morally defensible only as the writer's response to a "calling" said to issue from his past and narrativized as the passage from his first "vocation" (the "invocation" of his "first poetic spirits") to the social and professional authority of a poet legitimated by his oeuvre. Wordsworth's Prelude thus condenses its own historical moment into a dialectical progression from one instance of transference and countertransference to the next. This poem negotiates history as an aesthetic covenant, grounded in "sincerity" and authentic memory and forged between the simulated identities of the poet and an audience that in turn is but the epiphenomenon of the poem's definitional authority over a middle-class readership supposedly groping for an understanding of its political disenfranchisement and moral indeterminacy: "Abject, depress'd, forlorn, disconsolate" (P r8os, bk. 5, I. 27). Underlying the entire project of The Prelude is thus a hope that the reader's sympa-

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thetic identifications shall assist the writer in his endeavor to sublate his empirical "life" into a socially compelling, figural narrative authenticated by that biographical history. To the extent that the speculative investment of a "self" in the autobiographical venture tends toward a dialectic of sympathy between the individual reader and the literary product-a prolonged, complex, and reciprocal movement of imaginary transferencesboth the author and his audience appear destined for substantially altered representations of their respective selves. In reconceiving the "self" as an intrinsically social, speculative, and imaginary figure, The Prelude implicitly establishes a new paradigm of a middle-class community predicated on its preeminently aesthetic mode of retelling the story of iu; cultural and economic "mobility."63

As the first of several troubled epiphanies throughout his autobiography, Wordsworth's discovery of the drowned man in book 5 throws into relief the fundamental tension in Wordsworth's autobiographical and professional venture: that between the hypostatized "invisible workmanship" of the poem as a vocational act and the impending recognition that the product will remain determined by its cultural Other: books. Against the knowledge of its own heteronomous determinacy as artifact, The Prelude mounts an entire system of philological and rhetorical defenses. Vexed by the apparent indistinguishability of "legitimate" forms of literary selfcreation from "illegitimate" modes of rhetorical reproduction, the poem identifies the aesthetic paradigm of mimesis as the root cause of a pervasive social and spiritual crisis. It is thus repeatedly charged with an illicit and uncontrolled reproduction of "feeling" as "sensation" through allegedly derivative rhetorical practices and literary genres, in particular the translations, forgeries, or pirated plots of Gothic novels, sensational ballads, and the "sickly and stupid German tragedies" (PrW, I: 128) already targeted in the 18oo Preface. Throughout The Prelude anxiety runs deep about uncontainable aesthetic and material reproduction, that is, about a national literature replicating foreign tastes, and about an English population reproducing without regard for its economic and spiritual welfare (at least as conceived of by Malthus and Wordsworth).64 Formally, then, the 1799 Prelude is characterized by a dialectical movement between narrative episodes detailing volatile experiences and urgent reaffirmations of a transhistorical spirit in the (deceptively timeless) rhetorical form of lyric apostrophe. Philologically, the same dialectic plays itself out as a sequence of philqlogical and internal revisions, with "internal" revision here referring

330

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to the paradox of episodes officially declared to be each other's (metaphoric) equivalent, though furtively attempting to contain the unintended, and probably counterproductive, implications of earlier narrative segments. An instance of the latter would be the second boating episode (P I799, bk. 2, II. I40-214). The gathering of youths at the lake of Coniston unfolds "beneath the trees ... in our small boat I And in the covert," a setting starkly contrasting with the earlier boating episode's "rocky steep, till then I The bound of the horizon" (P I799, bk. I, ll. I07-8). With Wordsworth and his friends eating their "delicate meal I Upon the calm smooth lake," the inward terror of the earlier episode is distanced, indeed absorbed into the sheltering geometry of the setting: It was a joy Worthy of the heart of one who is full grown To rest beneath those horizontal boughs And mark the radiance of the setting sun Himself unseen, reposing on the top Of the high eastern hills. (P 1799, bk. z, II. 154-6o)

The account yields an entirely changed, positive spiritual balance: instead of "blank desertion" and the absence of all "familiar shapes I Of hourly objects, images of trees/Of sea or sky" (P I799, bk. I, ll. I24-26), the second episode adumbrates an emergent meditative consciousness of deep-seated metaphoric links between an empirical world furnishing incidental tales and a vocational ethos that shall govern all telling. It is in this manner that Wordsworth begins "in my thoughts to mark I That sense of dim similitude which links I Our moral feelings with external forms" (P I799, bk. 2, ll. I63-65). What we witness here is the parthenogenesis of the poet himself as a "blessed" and exemplary individual embodied in the organic cadences of his "voice." Foreclosing all analysis of its implicit authorial and professional interestedness, "voice" in The Prelude is presented as the offspring of two psychological functions allegedly vested in one and the same mind: the function of recollecting (and atoning for) earlier "ignoble" though still visionary transgressions, and the function of transcribing such incidents as prefigurations of Wordsworth's own authorial destiny. It would be an obvious critical fallacy, however, to endorse that professed genetic subjectivity since it has not only been hypostatized in the poem but, at the same time, used to underwrite the social and aesthetic authority of the poem itself. For an audience likely to have internalized the monitorial logic of

"Emboss'd with terms of art"

}}I

Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, such "double indemnity" between the formal and cultural logic of The Prelude means that to ensure "productive" reading, questions of external verification or falsification of a poem's claims must be suspended in support of the quintessential Wordsworthian axiom: that all cultural productivity shall facilitate the "growth of my own mind" (L WEY, 5r8). The problem already emerged in the general circularity of autobiography: (r) at the level of epistemology, acts of subjective reminiscence authenticate and, by extension, legitimate the projected philosophical "work," even as they burden the latter with the "selfconceit" of its self-referential fixations; (2) at the level of poetic production, The Prelude purports to recapture, with authoritative mastery over its figurative medium, those troubled epiphanies whose retributive echoes it has posited as the authentic prefigurations of the narrative's present exemplariness; and (3) at the level of rhetoric (i.e., the "pragmatics" of poetic speech), the autobiography's premise of self-interest is attenuated by successive confessions of a highly volatile interior life, confessions whose dramatic potential facilitates the transformation of a poem presented initially as but a supplement to "forgotten joys" into a legitimate, because public, for(u)m of subjective existence. To confirm its hypothesis of the poet's affective life as the site of an authentic and privileged truth, and to continue its quest for representational strategies commensurate with the premise of such an exemplary "sensibility," The Prelude confronts head-on the question of how to distinguish between proper and improper, legitimate and derivative forms of representation. Predicated on the axiom of an inalienable affective interior ("life")-both as an authentic content to be recovered and as the ground legitimating its own poetic representations- The Prelude must fight not only the generic charge against autobiography in general (i.e., excessive self-intcrestedncss) but also the secondary allegation that its defense against "vanity and self-conceit" is itself predicated on an analogously self-privileging aesthetic theory. Ultimately, autobiography can legitimate its subject's "voice" only by demonstrating that all consciousness, the poet's and his audience's, was always imbued with the language put to such articulate use by the autobiographical project. To postulate the integrity of the poet's interior spirit is to presuppose the integrity of the language in which that postulate is embodied. Thus, "the Self configured by the desire for ongoing revision ... is self-disciplinary: by requiring and expecting unlimited development, it always opens deeper depths to surveillance and invites more and more specialized intervention" (Siskin, Histo-

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ricity, r 3). Referring to Freud's distinction between the theoretical impossibility of memories "from our childhood" and more plausible "memories relating to our childhood," Thomas Weiskel had to admit that "the other Being or consciousness implied by Wordsworth's speech remains inaccessible except through the highly mediated languages of memory and desire. The whole series of representations-images, thoughts, ideas, wordsfunction as the signifiers in this dialogue, and they cannot be shortcircuited in an unmediated intuition because the Other is defined, as locus or possibility, only by these signifiers" (Romantic Sublime, ryo). In order to relocate this Other in its historical and ideological sphere, we may conceive of it as the prospectus for an aesthetic community circulated under the title of "sensibility." Self-inspection, Wordsworth habitually insists, can only be sanctioned by the locomotion of a "soul" in the direction of a community: I look'd for universal things; perused The common countenance of earth and heaven: And, turning the mind in upon itself, Pored, watch'd, expected, listen'd; spread my thoughts, And spread them with a wider creeping; felt Incumbences more awful, visitings Of the Upholder, of the tranquil Soul, Which underneath all passion lives secure, A steadfast life. But peace! it is enough To notice that I was ascending now To such community with highest truth. (P r8o5, bk. 3, II. no-20)

And yet, even as The Prelude "proceed[s]less by the authority of the writing poet and more by authority of the Poet writing," which is to say "by authority of 'we'-the Poet and his expectant audience" (Galperin, Revision, r82), the fact that Wordsworth would never publish his autobiographical poem during his lifetime appears to render all speculation regarding its impact on a prospective audience futile. For the belated critical reader of today, the construct of a poet and an audience caught up in a dialectic of reciprocal determination and obligation reflects a delicate if ultimately implausible epistemology. At both a conceptual and a professional level, psyche derives its potential social relevance solely from the performative effect of autobiography's rhetorical form. This recognition, however, The Prelude cannot afford, and Wordsworth repeatedly insists that, however much he "wish'd to touch I With hand however weak" the "genuine prowess" of his argument, it remains inaccessible:

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333

but in the main It lies far hidden from the reach of words. Caverns there were within my mind, which sun Could never penetrate. (P r8o5, bk. 3, II. 183-85, 246-47)

The humble confession that the poem's core axiom-"my own heart"is by definition something ineffable thus weakens the poet's authority insofar as that authority depends on protecting the anonymity of his affective sources. Another I 50 years of phenomenological and psychoanalytic research have reinforced (often against the grain of their own interests) the suspicion that the conscious reconstruction of a subject's affective interiority amounts to an unconscious construction of the contents that it claims to have discovered. What Reynolds and Burke had elaborated as the proper aesthetic management of an originally self-interested passion now reappears, in The Prelude, as the legitimation of a hypostatized (and allegedly "incommunicable") affective interiority by the autobiographical narrative and vice versa. Faced with the possibility that the audience might catch on to the poem's calculus of reciprocal justification, The Prelude increasingly shifts emphasis from its primary autobiographical account to a metanarrative concerned with elaborating a comprehensive aesthetic theory of legitimate self-representation. The account, in the I799 Prelude, of the death of the Hawkshead schoolmaster curiously suspends all causal explanation in favor of a compact, matter-of-fact style. Here one readily suspects a more significant narrative lurking beneath the terse, factual account, particularly some connection between the boy's conspicuous audiovisual fixation on the lake, the heap of garments, and the retrieval of the drowned schoolmaster on the following day. One psychological plot might have the young Wordsworth project onto the teacher the sudden death of his mother, in consequence of which he had been "transplanted to thy vale,/ Beloved Hawkshead" (P I799, bk. I, ll. 26o-6I). In such a reading, the boy's prolonged gaze would constitute the displacement of an inarticulate, even wishful preoccupation with death, a fixation about to be confirmed by the ghastly spectacle of the recovery of the schoolmaster from the lake on the following day. Indeed, the poem repeatedly arouses suspicions that its empirical surfaces and psychological depths-much like the deceptive stillness of "the calm lake" and its premonitory disruption by "leaping fish" and, soon thereafter, the dead schoolmaster-are yoked together by a series of oblique projections. In surveying, with scrupulous audial attention, "those open fields

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which, shaped like ears, I Make green peninsulas on Esthwaite's lake" (P I799, bk. I, ll. 264-66), Wordsworth metaphorizes the landscape in terms of the acute senses that surveil it.65 Likewise, the young poet's uncannily sharp eyes locate "distinctly on the opposite shore I Beneath a tree and dose by the lake side I A heap of garments" (P I799, bk. I, ll. 267-69), thereby prefiguring (if not projecting) the audiovisual scrutiny with which, on the following day, a "company ... in the boat I Sounded [the lake] with iron hooks and with long poles." In a personalized apostrophe (revised in later versions), Wordsworth fully merges the functions of empirical perception and imaginary projection: "Thy paths, thy shores I And brooks were like a dream of novelty" (P I799, bk. I, ll. 26I-62). A close, formalist reading of this kind responds so directly to Wordsworth's enigmatic tone precisely because of its strictly textual paradigm of evidence. Yet we have reason to believe that grounding his poem in the reciprocal legitimation of its psychological and rhetorical premises caused Wordsworth increasing misgivings. Thus we notice how The Prelude begins to move away from the inaugural paradigm of a narrative claiming to have achieved conscious knowledge of an ineffable psychological state on which it has staked its legitimacy as a rhetorical and cultural act all along. Although the poem never definitively abandons its idealist conception, the relocation and revision of the drowned-man episode in the I 8os and I 850 texts illustrate Wordsworth's extraordinary ability to transform a conceptual and rhetorical impasse at the level of poetic production into a momentous moral-cultural crisis for his projected audience. The textual revisions that bound Wordsworth for several decades to his autobiographical endeavor significantly complicate the scenario, however, for they fully expose the inherent "undecidability" or (to borrow Schleiermacher's term) the "oscillation" of the affective within the complex rhetorical calculus of the poem. For revision may "mean that the earlier attempt was not successful in objectifying the self, or it may also mean that it was a successful objectification of a self which, when it confronted us clearly, we disowned and repudiated in favor of another" (Wimsatt, Verbal Icon, 9). Paul de Man recasts the issue as that of the indeterminacy between the referential (intentional) domain of interiority and the figural, generic resources of the medium on which the reproduction of such a putatively anterior consciousness depends: "Can we not suggest ... that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life, and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium" (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 69). In light of the epistemolog-

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ical instability between subject and text explored by a critical tradition extending from Schleiermacher to Lacan, it appears sensible indeed to "regard textual variants and the dynamics of revision as significant events in the shape of a career" (Wolfson, "Illusion," 918) and to establish a functional relationship between the formal-rhetorical organization of The Prelude and Wordsworth's professionalization as a poet. Thus, "revision's function is no longer additive but interpretative" (Siskin, Historicity, 108). In its unique trajectory of revisions, the drowned-man episode traces at the level of textual production the very tenuous logic of affective, authentic individuation, itself the embryonic anticipation of the poet's authoritative sensibility and the anchor of the genealogical model claimed for The Prelude. For here the contingent genealogy of the "blessed" youth conflicts with the social character and cultural motives-the literary grammar, genres, and careers-all of which make up the "language" with which Wordsworth now seeks to reproduce the ineffable consciousness of his past as a meaningful cultural concept. Thus the psychological drama of the youth encountering the drowned man's "ghastly face" is suspended as but a type of affect invoked principally for the purpose of exposing the countless strata of meaning that constitute the topography of Wordsworth's modernist consciousness.66 Increasingly, then, the narrative struggles to immunize the putative integrity of its affective fabric against the corrosive influence of mimetic technologies (the Gothic, the Sentimental, the Pastoral) that seem otherwise indispensable for the representation of any consciousness whatsoever. The Hawkshead episode in the 1799 Prelude, we recall, ends rather abruptly as the "dead man 'mid that beauteous scene I Of trees, and hills, and water, bolt upright I Rose with his ghastly face" (P 1799, bk. I, 11. 277-79). But in a series of revisions Wordsworth then explores the larger potential of this incident. We join in at twilight, with the young boy still gazing on the lake: meanwhile the calm lake Grew dark with all the shadows on its breast And now and then a fish upleaping snappd

The stillness ·.vith -a sta-rtl-ffig sound. Next day The breathless stillness. OOf>n--a-s--l--reac.fted home

_,. I to [?]little household of this sight Made casual mention. The succeeding day Th[ose] unclaimed garments telling a plain tale Went there a Company & in their Boat Sounded with grappling Irons & long poles

VOCATION

At length the dead man mid that beauteous scene Of trees & hills & water bolt upright Rose with his ghastly face; a spectre shape Of terror even, & yet no vulgar fear Young as I was a Child of eight years old

Possess'd me for my inner eye had seen Such sights before, among the shining streams Of Fayeryland & forests of romance Th[ ence) came a spirit hallowing what I saw YeHAg as I .. as a Chile ef eight )ears ela

With decoration & ideal grace A dignity a smoothness, like the works Of Grecian art & purest Poesy. (P r8o5, MS W [DC MS 38), 3rv-32')

The actual discovery of the drowned man undergoes further revision in the base texts for the r8o5 and r8so Prelude: The succeeding day, garments telling a plain Tale) Went there a company. (~imed

(P r8o5, MS A [DC MS 52], ro8')

The succeeding day, Dravm from all quarters to tile fatal spot (Tnose unclai!HOO garments telling a plain Tale) A Company assembled (P r8o5, MS A [DC MS 52], ro8')

The succeeding day, Those unclaimed garments, telling a plain tale, some

Drew to the spot an anxious Crowd; tliese looked In passive expectation from the shore, others

deep

While Others from a boat hung oer the flood, Sounding with grappling irons & long poles. (P r8so, MS D, bk. 5, p. 27)

Here the account has become far more mediated; most notably, the surfacing of the drowned man evokes in the young boy only dubious, if unmistakably literary, sensations. At the same time, the drafts reinforce the sense of a hidden causal relationship between the boy's anticipatory gaze and the eventual confirmation of mortal terror lurking beneath the lake's "smooth surface." In this manner, otherwise contingent events are assimilated to a youth's consciousness now recognized as inherently "literary" and steeped in books. Just as the consciousness-of-death is mediated as

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the consciousness-of-representations-of-death, the contingencies of the overall narrative are increasingly absorbed into the closure of books, generically fixed systems of representation ("the shining streams I Of Fayeryland & forests of romance"), and their predictable, semiotically induced effects. Assuaged by the specious literary predilections of the adolescent boy-the library at Hawkshead, we are told, was "unusually well stocked in contemporary literature" (Gill, Wordsworth, 29)-the shock of death appears to be muted, its hortatory, spiritual potential lost in the dense texture of derivative languages infused by the consciousness of the boy with an array of counterfeit representations. Meanwhile, the actual discovery of the drowned man as a social, communal event is detailed rather indifferently, almost as an afterthought. The narrator appears far more preoccupied with exploring the intersection between history and its absorption by an adolescent psyche, and the semiotic, cultural, and literary infrastructure mediating the traffic between the two. Throughout book 5, books reflect in emblematic form a fundamental crisis (in the original sense of krinein: division, sundering) that has befallen the epistemological and cultural authority of the poet. Books resocialize the adolescent Wordsworth into a society of aesthetic preferences and discriminations, that is, into the "virtual" or simulated reality of "taste," which has superseded the earlier, unmediated idea of nature's "common range of visible things" (P r8o5, bk. 2, 1. r82). Such a maturation comes at a significant expense, however, for it now appears that Wordsworth's reflexive awareness as a youth-including his ability to access his childhood memories with full consciousness-was conditioned by his growing interaction with books; thus only "among the shining streams I Of Fairy Land, the Forests of Romance" can he locate the reference point that now enables him to construct his life as a (supposedly organic) passage from preconscious "feelings" to the authoritative sensibility of the poet. Cultural literacy may indeed absorb the sublime shock of death here encountered by the youth, yet in mitigating "vulgar" (r8so: "souldebasing") fears it exhibits the supposedly primordial realm of Wordsworthian affect as something knowable only in alienated form. Mediated by the sheltering, virtual reality of fairy tales and romance, affect appears increasingly but a retroactive projection, a pseudo-origin rendered distinct only by socially constructed aesthetic forms and genres that in turn appear less suited to the representation of subjective feeling than imitative of one another. The narrative reconstruction of the poet in the 1799 Prelude, a strictly psychological dialectic of preconscious desires and reflexive notions, has been superseded by a sociocultural dialectic whose protagonists

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are not competing levels of conscious awareness but competing mimetic techniques, genres, and fictions. Immediately following the drowned-man episode, Wordsworth thus recalls his enthrallment with a "yellow canvasscover'd Book,/ A slender abstract of the Arabian Tales": but a block Hewn from a mighty quarry; in a word, That there were four large Volumes, laden all With kindred matter. (P r8o5, bk. 5, II. 483-90)

What seemed "a promise scarcely earthly" is doubly insidious, for in proving imitative of itself such generic fiction, "kindred matter" in four volumes of romance, also threatens to erode the hypostatized affective origins of the youthful poet's "blessed" mind. Such had certainly been the fate of the child prodigy featured earlier in book 5· The figural death of his consciousness as the result of unrelenting mechanical learning corresponds, in turn, to the literal death of the Boy of Winander, himself, it seems, a casualty of his wholly imitative enslavement to nature. As the latter continues to reproduce the owl's "mimic hootings" across the lake, we are left wondering whether he is imitating the owls or vice versa."? Matters stand differently with the child prodigy whose ceaseless memorization of facts reproduces him in the image of the institutions that supervise his education. "Fenced round" by his prodigious learning as "each little drop of wisdom ... falls I Into the dimpling cistern of his heart" and treading a path "chok'd with grammars," the prodigy offers a classic instance of a social order reproducing itself by compelling individuals to assimilate a canon of official knowledge.6 s Though shrewd yet innocent himself withal And can read lectures upon innocence, He is fenced round, nay arm'd, for aught we know In panoply complete, and fear itself, Natural or supernatural alike, Unless it leap upon him in a dream Touches him not: briefly, the moral part Is perfect, and in learning and in books He is a prodigy. His discourse moves slow, Massy and ponderous as a Prison door, Tremendously emboss'd with terms of art; Rank growth of propositions overruns The Stripling's brain.

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Nay, if a thought of purer birth should rise To carry him towards a better clime, Some busy helper still is on the watch To drive him back and pound him like a Stray Within the pinfold of his own conceit. (P r8o5, bk. 5, II. 312-62)

A critique of the traditional, catechistic, grammar-school paradigm of education, one whose unimaginative and often abusive procedures mimic the repressive logic of Pitt's administration (especially after 1793), this passage offers a passionate critique of cultural policies that subordinate individuals' moral responsibility, both to themselves and to their society, to the impersonal interests of commerce and nation. A mere aggregate of bodies of knowledge imitative and reduplicative of each other-propositions, grammars, lectures, strings of names-education has become an instance of ideological servitude, an unrelenting reproduction of books and informational patterns at once static and invariant in kind and replicating each other. Devoid of all spontaneity and subjective passion, the prodigy's indiscriminately acquisitive memory deflates the value of knowledge itself in much the same way that, in Burke's view, paper currency tended to corrode the very paradigm of economic value. Though the prodigy can read The inside of the earth, and spell the stars; He knows the policies of foreign Lands; Can string you names of districts, cities, towns, The whole world over (P r8o5, bk. 5, II. 332-36),

his learning reflects a detached cosmopolitanism that contrasts sharply with the local and rural identifications of Wordsworth's autobiographical project. The passage also initiates a tendency in The Prelude to construe the urban as a contaminant, an agency of pervasive, nefarious reproduction, in both the literal/material and the figurative/intellectual sense. While severe in its strictures on a "life of lies" imposed by coercive educational practices, book 5 of The Prelude ultimately endorses a correspondingly self-referential, imitative, and seductive world of fictions, fairy tales, and romances as a necessary stage for the poet to pass through in his quest for cultural authority. The narrative thus analyzes these adventures endless By the dismantled Warrior in old age,

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Out of the bowels of those very thoughts In which his youth did first extravagate (P r8o5, bk. 5, II. 524-27)

as the generic offspring of the poet's contemporary culture, which incessantly reproduces the sensationalist illusions that prey on an audience's "dumb yearnings [and] hidden appetites." A life lived under the auspices of romance thus appears as a life not lived at all. As the very antithesis of Wordsworth's poetic persona, the warrior of romance has squandered his youth on pseudo-experiences and is now constrained to recognize that genre as encompassing the sum total of his biography: "These [thoughts] spread like day, and something in the shape I Of these, will live till man shall be no more" (P r8o5, bk. 5, 11. 524-29). Recalling the youth in his natural bower on the banks of the river Derwent as having "read, devouring as I read,/ Defrauding the day's glory" (P r8os, bk. 5, 11. srorr), The Prelude establishes a palpable connection between the poet's own incomplete education and a larger culture of reading that appears similarly deficient and immature. The memory of his onetime infatuation with the prose of "Dreamers, ... Forgers of lawless tales, ... Impostors, drivellers, dotards" (P r8os, bk. 5, 11. 447-49) thus functions both as an instance of confessional literal self-reference and as a new figure of interpretation in The Prelude's ongoing project of social critique and aesthetic therapy. With his characteristic blend of elegiac reminiscence and cultural elation, Wordsworth thus notes: I sometimes could be sad To think of, to read over, many a page, Poems withal of name, which at that time Did never fail to entrance me, and are now Dead in my eyes as is a theatre Fresh emptied of spectators. (P r8o5, bk. 5, II. 570-75)

Introducing the theater as the fit emblem for a culture absorbed by the imitative play of spectacular yet hollow representations, The Prelude further develops its concern with mimetic spectacles commonly associated with romance, Gothic, and sentimental fiction. Increasingly, that is, The Prelude's opening thematic premise of autobiographical self-interest has been superseded by the macrocultural and (as remains to be seen) macroeconomic specter of reproduction, that is, by the ceaseless replication of sights, sounds, words, books, meanings, and bodies, to the point where it has become impossible to tell reality from appearance, the "true from the

"Disturbing the Feast" false" (PrW, r: r6o). More and more it seems as though "authentic" interiority hypostatized by the genre of autobiography had become indistinguishable from the affect of crowds mesmerized by the theatrical fabrications of Drury Lane or by the vulgar sideshows of St. Bartholomew's Fair. Theater and city thus emerge as the decisive stage of a spiritual crisis whose resolution will determine the success or failure of Wordsworth's endeavor of an autobiographical cum cultural critique. Before joining Wordsworth on his forays into the bustling streets and genteel retreats of London in book 7 of The Prelude, however, we need to refine the complex, as it were holographic map of political and aesthetic languages by means of which Wordsworth hopes to plot a course for his self and text through the metropolis. In further pursuit of a discursive blueprint for The Prelude, we shall explore connections between the Malthusian discourse on population and reproduction, a discourse dominated by "Wordsworthian" issues, such as the psychology of poverty, the shifting cost of labor and poor relief, and the zero-sum calculus of luxury and provisions. Given Malthus's abiding concern not only with analyzing the root causes of poverty but also with developing an aesthetics to regulate the proper appearance of economic and class differences, his political economy intersects at multiple levels with Wordsworth's autobiographical endeavor: to reconstruct within his audience the psychological conditions on which his notions concerning the proper representational forms and purposes of poetry may take hold. In London more than anywhere else, Wordsworth-spiritual tourist of the city and self-declared representative of The Prelude's projected middle-class audience-appears profoundly alienated and anxious to transcend often inscrutable economic and social constraints by entrusting them to the imaginary plausibilities of The Prelude and, ultimately, The Recluse.

lf5

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&&

The Crisis of Political Economy in Mal thus's Essay To make the transition from the rhetorical and ideational dimensions of Wordsworth's narrative sublime to its social dimension is to understand the rhetorical, and specifically textual, expressivity of the sublime as the effect of a larger, more deep-seated historical causality. Thus we can now interrogate the sublime's affect, its axiomatic and self-privileging mode of appearance as a symptom in its own right, that is, as the reflex or effect of a historical necessity. What accounts discursively for Wordsworth's poetic

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fixation on social and aesthetic apocalypse in the later books of The Prelude, and why is it that the discursive and conceptual tensions thus inflected in the form of blank verse and in the vocational script of the modern epic do, indeed, assume that particular expressive form? While building on the critical reception of the sublime, specifically by psychoanalytic and historicist models of inquiry, I intend to explore the specific ideological motivations encrypted in Romanticism's aesthetic fascination with apocalyptic or sublime modes of self-experience. Overall, the period's representations of the sublime as symbolic effect of a more expansive historical causality-like the unconscious inscrutable except in its consistent operations of displacement-indicate a functional, dynamic relation between Romantic representations of an inward consciousness-of-self and the larger sociocultural structures whose antagonisms circumscribe that self. Crystallizing the experience of modernity as that of countless antagonisms intrinsic to the logic of an emergent bourgeois culture, the sublime's appearance (and ideological efficacy) inheres in its symbolic encryption of economic, aesthetic, and sexual anxiety in a blank-verse narrative of markedly imagistic and often epiphanic quality. "Seduced" by the seemingly archetypal appeal of a poetic and painterly symbolic and (in our century) exhorted by the New Criticism's axiomatic belief in the autonomy of the aesthetic, generations of readers have come to embrace the dreamlike lucidity and formal concision of "high" Romantic poetry as the very essence of "literariness," even as paradigmatic of cultural value in general. At the same time that the instability of bourgeois affect was being transposed into the sublime reflexivity of a figural, "poetic" self, such as we encounter in Wordsworth's Prelude, it was also assuming the disciplinary character of bourgeois professionalism, such as in the institutions of political economy and the law. Works of such disparate rhetorical and disciplinary character as Malthus's Essay on the Principle ofPopulation and Wordsworth's Prelude, therefore, process their shared perception of the Real in similarly defensive and conflicted ways. In fact, a homology or a functional continuum connects the figural psyche outlined in Wordsworth's narrative poetry and the deceptively literal preoccupation with the health of the nation's body politic that characterizes the rising discipline of political economy. Each of these idioms promises to offer a compelling redefinition not only of the individual's economic and cultural status but, at a macrohistoricallevel, of England's economic and cultural prosperity. Both in Malthus's Essay and in The Prelude, a largely preconscious, self-focused economic and cultural anxiety is displaced into an "objective" and properly "disci-

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plined" concern with the perceived erosion and imminent apocalypse of national strength. Subsequently, and precisely because as it can now be thought and symbolized as a rational-humanist concern for the middleclass community as Nation, such anxiety was once again reconceived as a threat posed by the individual body's reproductive potential, itself perceived as threatening the nation's economic and cultural health. The political economy of the body and of Romanticism's contiguous imagings of material and spiritual apocalypse thus converged in an unconscious motivational current at the historical moment of "high" Romanticism, a moment mediated by the idioms of political economy and aesthetics under the auspices of an alternately sentimental and apocalyptic "feeling." Romantic sentimentalism and apocalypticism can thus be understood as inherently social effects of the period's (unconscious) mode of cultural production. Characterized, above all, by its strong allegiance to disciplinary and formalized standards of representation, this mode of production sought to shelter its productive subjects from the impending yet unbearable "knowledge" of their contingent, not to say antagonistic, historical situation. Both Malthus and Wordsworth found solutions to their constructions of political, economic, and aesthetic conflict in imaginative and elegiac writing that was also intensely antiurban and gynophobic. As it turns out, then, a significant motive behind Romanticism's preoccupation with its own spiritual and poetic fecundity is to contain the quasi-revolutionary specter of rampant literal reproduction and figural mimesis. Both Mal thus's moralistic response to the economic perils of precipitate and illicit reproduction and Wordsworth's ideal of a parthenogenesis of his authentic poetic spirits into authentic future poets and their legitimate middle-class reading audiences are fundamentally aimed at solidifying the still-tenuous economic and cultural constitution of the English middle class by affording its members new disciplinary idioms for describing their purportedly noncontradictory "sensibility."69 Around the last decade of the eighteenth century, when populousness began to be perceived as a threat to national fortunes rather than as their premise, sexual reproduction began to be perceived as the cause of a potential social conflagration: the sublime specter of urban class-conflict. The discourses excoriating uncontrolled reproduction and the corresponding spread of economic misery and moral depravity ought to be read as parallel to the intensifying disciplinary stringencies of late-eighteenth-century aesthetics, with their strictures against popular "fictions," the "feminization" of literature, and the indiscriminate sensationalism of theatrical mimesis. Updating what had been since the days of Hogarth, Wilkes, and

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Lord Gordon the quintessentially British fear of the "mob," the French Revolution compounded these simultaneously material and cultural anxieties. Fueled by the extraordinary events that had taken place in France since 1789, these apprehensions blossomed, often overnight, into outright paranoia during the next half-dozen years. Suspicions proliferated regarding the "true" objectives of constitutional "theorists" and the corresponding societies and Illuminati widely believed to plot the political and religious enfranchisement of the nonpropertied classes and Dissenters?0 There were also growing fears that "ministerial treason" was about to deprive freeborn Britons of their freedoms, and that the government was compromising the nation's economic fortunes by attempting to compensate for rapidly growing national debt through its reckless speculation with bonds, its suspension of specie conversion, and the introduction of paper currency. Many of these changes were also widely regarded as hastening the decline of older, mostly local economies and replacing them with an insidiously mobile and abstract paradigm of capital and property as forever migrating through interdependent markets and mutating in both denomination and value. What we here confront is Romanticism's fear of its own intrinsic "modernity," a unique psychopolitical blend of the phobias and self-loathing endemic to the middling classes, which were trapped between the stable but recalcitrant political and cultural order of the past and a future mortgaged by the fluctuations of economic, political, and cultural values. Restless and "mobile," this group more than any other proved vigilant against any vulgarization and dispersal of the conditions of its economic and cultural prosperity. As we have seen, the capacity of this demographically amorphous (or polymorphous) middle class for producing itself in economic terms continued to outpace its capacity for "knowing" or "representing" itself. Hence, by the late 1790s, it appeared to crave a conservative or, rather, "defensive" aesthetics of self-representation to counteract the displacement of its economic identity into the future by urban, moneybased speculation.71 Thus in the wake of the Two Bills of December 1795 (redefining sedition and restricting the right to assembly), the more radical societies of metropolitan intellectuals and artisans and even some of the more moderate associations pleading the cause of social reform were portrayed, with increasing approval of the middling classes, as inundating an unsuspecting nation with atheistic speculation, seditious pamphlets, and vulgar literature.72 Within the maturing, if still uneasily conservative, political unconscious of what would eventually become the British middle class, the dialectical Other of radicalism (alternatively secular and millenarian

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in its accent) thus became the protagonist in a drama of political, moral, and sexual terror whose climactic scene staged British self-consciousness as the horrified recognition of its own vulgarized national "culture." Much of the ''defensive" thrust of an antiurban, antifeminine, and antitheatrical aesthetics that underwrites the creed of "High Romantic Argument" converges in the "object-construct" of reproductivity, the focus of my subsequent remarks. This issue aligns the early Romantic discourses on populousness and on mimesis, the latter here to be taken in its larger sense as semiotic reproduction. In scrutinizing these three issues jointly, we gain access to the cultural unconscious of an emergent middle class that habitually displaces economic terms in aesthetic categories and vice versa, thereby ensuring that the very operation of such a displacement will never irrupt into consciousness. Like that class, the unconscious "rep~ resents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 109). To hazard a Hegelian figure of thought, we could say that, like any "object" of psychosomatic anxiety, the specter of unrestricted reproductivity must have been unconsciously constructed for it to be empirically "discovered" and, in time, brought to disciplinary "knowledge." The contradictions-obviously long in the making-intrinsic to the evolution of modern capitalism reached a certain dramatic pitch toward the end of the eighteenth century, precipitating the emergence of the disciplines of political economy and of modern aesthetics, and along with these a new langue or discourse of moral and aesthetic policing of which Malthus's Essay and Wordsworth's Prelude constitute particularly distinctive paroles. The Romantic fascination with social and aesthetic dissolution may thus be integrated within a larger historical analysis of ideology, a project necessarily focused on the socioeconomic dimension of psychological and aesthetic symbolization (and of its disciplinary policing), by means of which a culture seeks to achieve an ultimately impossible coherence. Taken in this "fundamental dimension," Slavoj Zizek notes, ideology "is not simply a 'false consciousness' ... [but] a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence" (Sublime Object, 25). Hence, to gain access to this ideology, we must locate within the economic and aesthetic discourses of the late eighteenth century a pattern of contradictions that entitles us to reconstruct their purported "object" of knowledge and practice as a "symptom." The historical passage from the plausible to the symptomatic involves our recognizing that (unbeknownst to their stated disciplinary objectives) the economic and aesthetic discourses of early Romanticism constitute effectively "the only

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point that gives consistency to the subject" and, consequently, "the only way we-the subjects-'avoid madness'" (Sublime Object, 25, 75). Consequently, an inquiry into that unique psycho-aesthetic phenomenon of the Romantic representation of apocalypse must seek to elucidate the larger (also extra-aesthetic) cultural or ideological "content" of such symbolizations; and such an undertaking, in turn, cannot once again be "disciplined" in the sense of simply administering the formal rites of textual and strictly "literary" exegesis. In a necessarily provisional way, I thus propose that we locate this ideological "symptom"-that is, the "object" that fixated and motivated the cognate discursive productivity of the economic and the moral-aesthetic unconscious at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuryin the figure of feminine reproductivity. The apocalyptic volatility of this object mirrors its intrinsically metaphoric, displaced status over against the anxious psyche of precisely those subjects concerned with coming to "know" it. "The production process of knowledge, and hence that of its 'object,' as distinct from the real object of knowledge which it is its precise aim to appropriate in the 'mode' of knowledge has a determinate reality," Althusser notes. "This determinate reality is what defines the roles and functions of the 'thought' of particular individuals, who can only think the 'problems' already actually or potentially posed" (Reading "Capital," 41-42). In Malthus and Wordsworth, this "object" is thought and imaged as a nefariously proliferating body politic and body of writing begotten by and begetting the most depraved literary, moral, and economic fantasies. In stark contrast to Wordsworth's postulate of referential and spiritual stability as the prerequisites for genuine poetry, such writing hints at the presence of a mass audience whose presumption of aesthetic and political empowerment coincides with the erosion, potentially even the destruction, of "Britishness" itself. Subjective symbolization, in both Malthus and Wordsworth, thus evolves in the "distinct but interlocking figures of the dissociated sensibility and the divided or alienated society" (Hunter, "Aesthetics,'' 3 51).

First published anonymously in 1798, and reissued in vastly expanded and heavily revised form in 1803 (and published again, with further revisions, in 18o6), Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population proved so startling to its first readers because of its seemingly irrefutable syllogistic rigor, based on two postulates: (r) "that food is necessary to the existence

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of man" and (2) "that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state" (EPP 1798, 19). Malthus concludes: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio" (EPP 1798, 20). In short, too many individual bodies reproduce, thereby deflating the value of labor, inflating the price of provisions, and, as the ultimate consequence, eroding the differential stability and viability of the social organism with its various economic classes.73 Overpopulation, in Malthus's schematic view, is thus confronted by "positive checks," which result in "misery," the catalogue of which might well have served as an alternative topical arrangement of Wordsworth's 1798 Lyrical Ballads: starvation, sickness, infanticide, infant mortality, economic decline, abandonment of women, war, and so on. To avoid such multifaceted "misery," society is likely to insist on so-called "preventive checks," which for Malthus involve, especially, delayed marriages and the urging of celibacy on groups and individuals beyond the clergy. By thus "insisting that healthy bodies will eventually generate a feeble social organism, Mal thus departed from nearly all his contemporaries."74 In acknowledging that the return on labor was bound up with the cost and maintenance of laboring bodies and that these factors were determined by the semi-independent logic of the market, Malthus reversed in uncompromising terms one of the central premises according-to which national strength was to be equated with populousness. It is an axiom found, for example, inHume's 1765 essay "On the Populousness of Ancient Nations." Hume there endorses the common equation of national progress with populousness primarily in order to dislodge another commonplace, namely, "the humour of blaming the present and admiring the past." Drawing on Plutarch, he urges his readers "not [to] form a notion of the ancient populousness of mankind from the present emptiness and depopulation which is spread over the world" (Essays, 443). Similarly, Richard Price, in his 1780 Essay on the Population of England, links concerns about the protracted war with the American colonies to a widespread "increase of luxury" and concludes that London's population has diminished "by half": "in eighteen years near 2oo,ooo of our common people have been lost" (4, 29). Notwithstanding Price's highly mediated and consequently highly inaccurate computation-he infers the number of inhabitants of England and Wales from the number of houses, the latter figure derived from county tabulations of taxes assessed for each window

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in a given house-his essay represents the widely perceived correlation between national strength and the economic inducements for the lower classes to reproduce (or not to do so). Concluding that "the number of inhabitants in England and Wales must be short of Five Millions," Price conjures up a baleful image of a nation wasting away as a result of depopulation, prolonged warfare, increased debt, and declining productivity: "we are sinking under new incumbrances and difficulties. The most valuable of our dependencies are lost. Another foreign war is begun. Trade is declining; our strength is wasting; and at the same time, that load of debts which has pressed so heavily on our population, is increasing faster than ever" (Essay, q, 31). Not everyone felt so despondent over the issue, to be sure, and among those who contested Price's claims some even rebuked him for publishing his (mistaken) figures at all. "Surely, at no time whatsoever," comments the mathematician William Wales (1734-98) in 1781, "could publications, which tend to depress the spirit of the nation, be more improperly introduced than now, when we are surrounded by numerous and powerful enemies, through whom we must fight our way, or sink into the most humiliating state of insignificancy" (Inquiry, 2). Though he would eventually grow despondent over popular resistance to any census, Wales initially viewed the issue at hand as quite straightforward. For the greater good of the "state" one has to "promote population," which is tantamount to "encouraging marriage amongst all ranks of people, but especially among the lower, and middling ones." By the same token, any adverse demographic proclivities, such as "marriages between persons of disproportionate ages ... ought absolutely to be prohibited" (74, 76). Reaffirming that "our national consequence must be ever in exact proportion to the number of our people," the statistician and minor economist John Howlett (173r-18o4) opens his highly critical examination of Price's essay also on a decidedly positive note, though casting a weary glance at Price's aspersions. "Every one who is really attached to the welfare of his country," Howlett insists, will be gratified by the strongest presumption that an increasing population must have been gradually taking place. Our commerce, during this period, has been extending itself into every quarter of the globe; our manufacturers have been multiplying and improving to an astonishing degree; our agriculture has been daily receiving additional extent and additional perfection; dreary marshes and barren wastes have been gradually transformed into rich pastures, meadows, and cornfields; small hamlets have grown into considerable villages, and villages have swelled into large and populous towns. (Examination, x)

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Rising to almost rhapsodic eloquence, Howlett here throws into relief the full complexity of the premise about to be challenged by Malthus, namely, that increased reproduction is forever desirable and indeed indispensable for national strength. Quite inexorably, the debate concerning population prompts one to consider far more complex questions of the body's reproductive power, thus revealing the extent to which the languages of economic, military, and moral governance prove intertwined. It is thus sensible to approach Malthusianism "as an intervention into a complex field of discussion and debate, in which economic, moral theological, governmental, and practical themes, arguments, and concepts cross and intermingle with diverse effects" and where poverty is redefined "as a definite condition of individuals and groups as opposed to a conception of 'the Poor.' " 75 The arguably surprising proto-Marxist character of Malthus's analyses has to do with his recognition that the psychology of poverty is conditioned by the market, whose fluctuating assessment of the value of labor and the cost of provisions has been, in turn, determined by the quantity of bodies either capable of labor or in need of maintenance by the state?6 Indeed, as both Malthus and Wordsworth were to realize, the very body initially thought as synecdoche for the providential organization of Nature is never quite one's own property. Rather, once embodied consciousness turns reflexive, it will recognize its body not as a personal asset but as a debt to society. What once seemed the most literal, inalienable, and "natural" locus of subjective self-awareness, the body, turns out to obey neither its literal parents nor its figural owner, the mind, but instead the paternalistic strictures of political economy, itself the most influential progeny of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. At the intersection of diverse though inseparable functions-labor, reproduction, and the potentiality of a consciousness-of-culture (and of pleasure)-the body is the pivotal figure in a cultural and economic order, as well as the emergent cause of that culture's continued instability and potential apocalypse. Malthus's Essay, then, dismantled the traditional postulate of an eternal alliance between the reproductive drive of the individual and the economic prosperity of the nation. With it collapsed the overarching premise of a "natural" or providential alliance of economic and moral imagination, as well as the once-axiomatic belief in the individual's ability to govern the body's reproductive instincts. "Politicians, observing that states which were powerful and prosperous were almost invariably populous," Malthus notes, "have mistaken an effect for a cause, and concluded that their population was the cause of their prosperity, instead of their prosper-

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ity being the cause of their population" (EPP r8o3, 197)?? Disturbed by widespread food shortages in 1795/96 and r8oo, Malthus thus confounds the traditional equation of national strength with prosperity by offering a bleak portrayal of a nation where "perpetual anxiety about corporeal support" has severely strained the resources of the bourgeois psyche, specifically its potential to "expatiate in the field of thought": This beautiful fabric of the imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth. The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished reappear. The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist. The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions; and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in support of a mother with a large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence, yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire and lords it triumphant over the world. (EPP r8o3, 61)

A significant aspect of the emergent discourse of political economy, Malthus argues, is to take up the question of whether to remedy poverty through acts of state maintenance (e.g., Poor Laws) or, alternatively, to leave the regulation of poverty to the vagaries of the market. Inasmuch as the latter determines the cost of labor, provisions, and, ultimately, the tax revenues for annuities or so-called "reversionary payments" to the nonproductive elderly (this being the issue that had first alerted Richard Price to the question of population), it could be argued that capitalism's dialectic of supply and demand invariably provides any individual with strong cues regarding whether or not to reproduce. The gloom that pervades the above passage, however, suggests that the material implications of population and reproduction bear vitally upon an implicit, secondary, and preponderantly moral order. It is precisely this increasingly unstable and contradictory relation between the syllogistic literalisms of Malthus's political economy and the hortatory figurations of his moral philosophy that allows us to read his r8o3 Essay as anticipating Wordsworth's similarly hyperbolic and elegiac depiction of London. For as the logical contradictions exposed by Malthus's socioeconomic analysis begin to outpace and confound his moral/aesthetic construction of the Real, a "literary" mode of representation is activated. Concise antitheses-"rosy flush of health" versus "pallid cheek," "faint struggles" of benevolence versus "self-love," and so on-seek to counteract the irremediable contradictions produced

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by Malthus's syllogistic argumentation. The passage shows Malthus not merely refuting "the Romance, the Utopia" (Bentham, "Situation andRelief," 396-97) of poor-relief with his "literal" calculus totaling up to the "Crisis of Population." For in tracing all affect to a contingent material base that withers at the barest contact with the inscrutable movements of capital, his "literary" rhetoric also reveals all economic knowledge to be just as unreal as those naive schemes for relief by means of which society seeks to stave off capital's pernicious effects. Hence the same ideology that shapes Malthus's and Wordsworth's rhetoric of social description also drives the policing of descriptive form by the institutions of political economy and aesthetics. It follows that the aesthetic functions not simply as one more "ideology" among diverse others, nor as a calculated evasion of a historical problematic that we may yet expect to bring to an objective, critical formulation. More sensibly, we may conceive the aesthetic as "a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our 'reality' itself: an 'illusion' which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel. ... The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel" (:Zizek, Sublime Object, 45). As with any other syllogism, the ideological dimension of Malthus's argument inheres in its premises rather than in his conclusion; among these premises figures prominently his equation of nature with instinct and his identification of sexual instincts as law. Thus he speaks of "the constant tendency of all animated life to increase" and of "the dictate of nature" as quasi-Newtonian principles: It accords with the most liberal spirit of philosophy to believe that no stone can fall, or plant rise, without the immediate agency of divine power. But we know from experience that these operations of what we call nature have been conducted almost according to fixed laws. And since the world began, the causes of population and depopulation have been probably as constant as any of the laws of nature with which we are acquainted. (EPP r8o3, 14, r6, 40)78

Contrary to Condorcet and Godwin, who hold that social and economic distress stem from institutional failure or abuse and that our natural spontaneity (the "master-spring of benevolence") will eventually remedy all material suffering, Malthus views society as altogether determined by a fundamentally arational instinct: "violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice and every form of distress, ... seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the

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nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human regulations." This biological determinism is compounded by a historical one, since we not only enter the world as bodies determined by an inexorable, instinctual agency but also find that world to be historically prepossessed by the "two fundamental laws of society, the security of property and the institution of marriage .... Those who were born after the division of property would come into a world already possessed. If their parents, from having too large a family, were unable to give them sufficient for their support, what could they do in a world where everything was appropriated?" (EPP r8o3, 62, 6 5-66). What the sexual and/or reproductive instincts of the body threaten, therefore, is not so much starvation as poverty, and hence Malthus turns out to be ultimately far less concerned with the analysis of a problem than with the justification of a solution that demanded the (retroactive) construction of such a problem. True to form, William Cobbett offered a lucid, if polemical, assessment of Malthus: No assemblage of words can give an appropriate designation of you; and, therefore, as being the single word which best suits the character of such a man, I call you Parson, which, amongst other meanings, includes that of Boroughmonger tool. It must be very clear to every attentive reader of your book on Population that it was written for the sole purpose of preparing beforehand a justification for ... deeds of injustice and cruelty? 9

In other words, the body docs not so much imperil the totality of the nation as it threatens the prevailing cultural order, the disposition of which accords with the hierarchy of economic classes or ranks. The apocalypse conjured up by Malthus's vision of unchecked reproduction involves the specter of redistributing the nation's wealth (e.g., taxation for the Poor Laws), rather than that of global starvation: "Poverty, and not absolute famine, is the specific effect of the principle of population." With characteristic hyperbole, Malthus thus paints the picture of a body politic consumed with the task of relieving a forever-swelling number of paupers; insofar as these measures erode the spirit of industry and self-preservation, they reveal the body politic itself as diseased, "our laws [being] in opposition to the laws of nature." The rapid increase of the poor thus "presents us ... with the prospect of a monstrous deformity in society," a steadily worsening condition that reveals how "society itself, its body politic is the unnatural character, for framing laws that thus counteract the laws of nature" (EPP r8o3, 70, 265, 259). The individual reproductive body thus functions as catalyst in an economic conception that Malthus, his rudi-

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mentary grasp of the market-driven logic of supply and demand notwithstanding, still regards as a zero-sum game of material commodities, while maintaining a conspicuous reserve toward all urban financial speculation and any commodification of capital (stock) and debt (bonds).8° Contrasting the "neatness, cleanliness, and comfort" of rural laborers with the "filth, rags and poverty" of workers in urban manufacture, Malthus identifies himself with the antiurban stance that pervades Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads and large portions of The Prelude.81 In Malthus's zero-sum game of material resources, at least "while the present proportion between population and food continues, a part of society must necessarily find it difficult to support a family, and this difficulty will naturally fall on the least fortunate members" (EPP 1803, 90).82 Proceeding alternately by implication and by peremptory declaration, Malthus's Essay consigns the poor to a state of inevitable "misery." In fact, Malthus is predominantly concerned here with the middle class, that steadily growing and productive segment of the population which responds with particular alarm (then as now) to any increase in taxation, even if it is aimed at relieving the poor. Such resistance is justified in hyperbolic images of a bourgeois economic martyrdom; Malthus also invokes the more traditional iconography of poverty-induced rioting and mob rule by the lower classes, precisely the kind of unrest that may provoke the state to suspend those civil liberties on which the middle class understands its own prosperity to depend. Once again invoking the specter of scarcity, Malthus thus remarks, "the greatest sufferers ... were undoubtedly the classes immediately above the poor; and these were in the most marked manner depressed by the excessive bounties given to those below them." Elsewhere, he elaborates this image of a middle-class melancholy born of economic adversity for which the body politic's unhealthy inclination toward poor-relief is ultimately to blame: In the higher and middle classes of society it is a melancholy and distressing sight to observe, not unfrequently, a man of noble and ingenious disposition, once feelingly alive to a sense of honour and integrity, gradually sinking under the pressure of circumstances, making his excuses at first with a blush of conscious shame, afraid of seeing the faces of his friends from whom he may have borrowed money, reduced to the meanest tricks and subterfuges to delay or avoid the payment of his just debts; till ultimately grown familiar with falsehood, and at enmity with the world, he loses all the grace and dignity of man. (EPP r8o3, 92, 233) 83

Initially, Malthus's rhetoric here portrays economic decline as the slow corrosion of a distinctly middle-class aesthetics of conduct. Thus, at the

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beginning of his decline, the man of "honour and integrity" can still produce "a blush of conscious shame" that momentarily overcomes the pallor of melancholy; as his condition deteriorates, however, his once-authentic sensibility yields to dissimulation and a pathetic fear of detection. Woven into this familiar time-lapse image of economic and aesthetic decline is a slightly more oblique trajectory of progressive emasculation. Virtuous, economically productive, and legitimately procreative man has become a "nothing," the negative sum of his losses. We can now only encounter him in the alienated form of rhetorical dissimulation; in short, as the bearer of generic "fictions" and the agent of theatrical make-believe who will shun no device to convince us of the veracity of his spectacular disasters. Like the blind beggar in book 7 of The Prelude, who, with upright face, Stood propp'd against a Wall; upon his Chest Wearing a paper, to explain The story of the Man, and who he was (P !805, bk. 7, II. 6I2-I5),

this Malthusian figure unsettles the middle-class beholder less with his professed (and possibly true) narrative of economic decline than with his infringement of all aesthetic and social propriety. Malthus's oblique aesthetic strictures thus serve his overall project of policing economic conduct by scrutinizing cultural appearances whose potential infraction lays bare a largely unconscious nexus of economic, aesthetic, and sexual dysfunction that haunts the once middle-class, masculine subject. Malthus's argument, in which economic, moral, and aesthetic judgment and decorum reinforce each other, reaches its climax in what was soon regarded as a particularly notorious passage in the r8o3 Essay; in fact, Malthus omitted the paragraph from all subsequent editions. To appreciate its ideological force and rhetorical intensity, let us examine the passage in full: A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the

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spectacle of misery and dependency in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those who are justly enraged at not finding the provisions which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her guests should have plenty, and knowing she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full. (EPP r8o3, 249)

In sharp contrast to his earlier, literal conception of nature as a (sexual) instinct and as the inexorable cause for the excessive reproduction of the poor, Malthus here allegorizes nature as an upper-class hostess possessed of good judgment and a firm hand. Approvingly, the Essay thus offers the synecdoche of a "polite" social gathering for the whole of England and that of a "feast" for the general need for provisions. As the policing of class, rank, or "station" begins to be compromised by an excess of the unproductive poor, a rhetoric of antitheses contrasts a (mildly pathogenic) spirit of "compassion" with the dull instinctual laws governing the body of the poor, an aesthetics of "order and harmony" against the brute "spectacle of misery and dependence," and a social identity informed by "just" expectations with those whose proliferating bodies that crowd and violate the economic domain and physical estates of the "middling" and upper classes.84 Describing how rumor "fills the hall with numerous claimants," Malthus's rhetoric seems to distantly echo Burke's Reflections, specifically the latter's notorious depiction of a mob of vile, dissolute women clamoring for bread and violating "the sanctuary" of Marie Antoinette's bedroom. Lest England undergo the same course of events that France has suffered since 1789, it is crucial, according to Malthus, to educate the poor to recognize the desperate need for proper surveillance of their bodies and instincts. Itself "the growth of a redundant population goaded by resentment," the mob, according to Malthus, proves "totally ignorant of the quarter from which [its sufferings] originate." Convinced of the need to rein in the bodies of the poor rather than indulge in wild-eyed theories of political reform, Malthus lambastes (very much in the spirit of the day) the "dissatisfied man of talents" and the "turbulent and disoriented men in the middle classes of society" for inciting civic unrest among the poor who, if left to themselves, "are by no means inclined to be visionary" (Essay, r8o3, 244, 250). To counteract the dismal consequences that appeared to follow from the reasoning with which he had opened his 1798 Essay, Malthus decided to elaborate his conception of "moral restraint" in the vastly expanded r803 edition. As a strategy to head off the "positive checks" (i.e., starvation

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and disease) to which, once they intervene, "we must submit ... as an inevitable law of nature," Malthus outlines a delicate calculus that posits the "desire of marriage" as a stimulus for industriousness, even as he insists that "it is clearly the duty of each individual not to marry till he has a prospect of supporting his children." The exhortation to exercise "moral restraint" and defer biological reproduction is legitimated by economic considerations; or, as Malthus puts it, "our obligation to practise [moral restraint] will evidently rest exactly upon the same foundation as our obligation to practise any of the other virtues, the foundation of utility" (Essay, 1803,207, 215).85 While his 1806 edition conveys even stronger utilitarian overtones, it is there that Malthus also encounters a fundamental contradiction between his number-based syllogistic thesis and the notion of "moral restraint" designed to head off the apocalyptic results of that calculus. Speaking of "vice"-that is, alternative (heterodox) channels for accommodating the sexual instinct-Malthus finds himself suddenly overtaken by an apparent redundancy in his terminology: As the general consequence of vice is misery, and as this consequence is the precise reason why an action is termed vicious, it may appear that the term misery alone would be here sufficient, and that it is superfluous to use both. But the rejection of the term vice would introduce a considerable confusion into our language and ideas. We want it particularly to distinguish that class of actions, the general tendency of which is to produce misery, but which, in their immediate or individual

effects, may produce perhaps exactly the contrary.86

Malthus's perplexity intrigues, and it merits closer scrutiny; how, we must ask, could moral "vice" produce "perhaps exactly the opposite" of the social misery that, ordinarily, it is believed to cause? Quite inadvertently, it turns out, Malthus has happened upon the central contradiction of the entire Essay. That is, by colliding with his second axiom ("the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state")-indispensable for Malthus's syllogistic prediction of an impending crisis of population-such "preventive checks" are firmly asserted to result in "vice." Consistently, then, "the vindication of sexual passion is made within the assumption that any practice severing sexual pleasure from reproduction would be classed as vice" (Gallagher, "Body Versus Social Body," 88). Even so, Malthus cannot but acknowledge that his proposed (moral) solution of temporary celibacy may be rivaled, as regards its efficiency or "utility," by the (material) solution of heterodox, nonreproductive sexual intercourse. Such rivalry appears inevitable once we begin to argue, as Malthus just has, that the ideal of deferred marriage

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is grounded in social utility and that (at best) it may produce moral effects without, however, being intrinsically "moral" itself. Thus his axioms (food is necessary; sexual desire is a constant) and their syllogistic extension (too many bodies reproduce too rapidly), which together set the parameters for the crisis of population, prove fundamentally incompatible with the moral idiom designed to head off that crisis. What seems "virtuous" in a mathematical sense appears the very embodiment of "vice" in Malthus's moral universe.87 Such subtle classifications and distinctions notwithstanding, Robert Southey saw the entire book as mired in contradictions: "Either chastity is possible, or it is not; in the one case his argument has been shown to be groundless, in the other inapplicable .... The latter part of his book therefore palpably confutes the former, and he perishes by a stupid suicide, like the scorpion who strikes his tail into his own head." Continuing with sardonic humor, Southey seeks to cement the effectiveness of his review by mocking Malthus's argument as an Oriental threat to the masculinity of the (very English) reading audience of this and similar treatises in political economy. Alluding to yet another remedy (castration), Southey only half-jokingly envisions England succumbing to the magnificence of Oriental manners, and ... the wise invention of Semiramis for counteracting the principle of population. The advantages are obvious: the people would be happier, because poverty would be annihilated; the fine arts would be improved, inasmuch as we should rear our own opera-singers, and reform our church-music according to Italian taste; and the proceedings of government would be wonderfully facilitated, for John Bull has been at times a refractory animal, hut John Ox would certainly be tractable.88

Under the crass humor, Southey has correctly identified Malthus's fundamentally pretheoretical solution (see the Althusser epigraph above) aimed at maintaining a highly stratified and gendered political and cultural economy. In his continued struggle to realign the mathematical and moral implications, Malthus expanded considerably on his definition of "vice" from the original 1798 Essay. Whereas "vice" there had principally Stood for prostitution, the term gradually is extended to the whole range of heterodox sexual techniques, "child-exposure" (i.e., infanticide), birth control, and sodomy.89 After defining "moral restraint" (in a footnote to the 1806 version) as "restraint from marriage from prudential motives, with a conduct strictly moral during the period of restraint," Malthus admits that the sexual instinct is not easily curbed:

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A promiscuous intercourse to such a degree as to prevent the birth of children, seems to lower in the most marked manner the dignity of human nature. It cannot be without its effect on men, and nothing can be more obvious than its tendency to degrade the female character, and to destroy all its most amiable and distinguishing characteristics. Add to which ... those unfortunate females with which all great towns abound .... Promiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed, and improper arts to conceal the consequences of irregular connexions, clearly come under the head of vice. (EPP r8o3, 23-24)

As Malthus fills his canvas with broad strokes, imaging the social body as languishing under the onslaught of compromised female delicacy and imperiled male virility, he once again raises the specter that haunts Wordsworth throughout book 7 of The Prelude. That is, the reproduction of (literal) bodies is found to imperil the aesthetics of (figural) reproduction, of proper representation, by eroding the inherited and morally sanctioned separate roles of men and women, of genuine poetry and derivative spectacles, of authentic "spirit" and fallen consciousness. While the effects of the principle of population might extend only to the province of political economy, that discipline could not chart the full impact of the body's nefarious potential without recourse to a set of figural conceptions associated particularly with sentimental literature. Given its origination in competing and contradictory moral and economic reasoning, the concept of "vice" in the Essay and The Prelude must resolve its logical tensions within a formal-aesthetic realm. To reconcile economic self-interest, which appears to produce unpredictable and often deleterious social effects, and the moral precepts marshalled to counteract such outcomes, Mal thus resorts to increasingly complex symbolic conceptions. In so recasting all unregulated reproduction as aesthetic transgression, Malthus offers a vintage illustration of what Fredric Jameson has called "the ideology of form ... a symbolic act, whereby real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm" (Political Unconscious, 77, 79). Insofar as it is generated by the "law" of the body's sexual instinct, which Mal thus interprets as seeking to reproduce an invariant type of pleasure and incidentally to reproduce impoverished, unproductive bodies, "vice" not only threatens the economic imagination of the middle class but simultaneously reproduces this volatility within the aesthetic or symbolic itself. That is, both Malthus and Wordsworth could think and symbolically represent the fundamental contradiction within the economic paradigm of early capitalism (i.e., the apparent absorption of moral categories such as "vice" into the economic calculus of "misery" and "prosperity") only by recasting it as

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the specter of the lower classes' enslavement to "pleasure" and "sensation," or as that of the masculine, procreative and productive consciousness being consumed by an instinctual and potentially all-devouring feminine reproductivity. Underlying Malthus's ostensibly empirical concerns with sexuality and with the fluctuation of provisions and capital, we discern an (unconscious) figural logic of cultural production. That is, the political economy of the body and its "law" of sexual instinct-the basis for Malthus's deduction of hazards encroaching on the "security of property," though also the cause of the unexpected and fundamental contradiction between economic and moral propriety-must be recuperated for the disciplined logical coherence on which the Essay stakes its discursive authority and political efficacy. In short, the logical contradiction must be reconstituted as a "natural" and "essential" opposition, as the master trope of the unconscious according to which the compatibility of the material and the social body, the propriety of one's economic and one's cultural imagination, and the legitimacy of one's reproductivity and productivity have always already been defined antithetically. Insofar as it serves to displace the contradictions of theoretical cognition into the domain of natural appearance, the trope in question proves, predictably enough, to be that of gender difference. It is the figure that, for both Malthus and Wordsworth, defines the legitimacy or illegitimacy of sexuality as a spectrum of practices relative to the ongoing search for a paradigm of authentic value in a complex capitalist system. Gender difference, that is, simultaneously establishes the notion of a sexual instinct as "law" and transmutes its economic impact into an aesthetic of social appearance. In other words, it compels an argument from its premise regarding the material equivalence of the body (viz., the body's needs for food, housing, clothing, etc., are equal) to its syllogistic conclusion regarding the nature and necessity of moral precepts and aesthetic discriminations. Having originated as an inquiry into the causes of material suffering among the lower classes, Malthus's argument evolves into a sustained meditation on the delicate balance of middle-class psychology. What began as an analysis of the reproductive pleasures of the poor has now developed into an apotheosis to the unmediated, virtuous aesthetic of the bourgeoisie. This discursive development is paralleled by a shift in emphasis from the material threat of female reproductive excess to the psychological specter of imperiled masculine procreation and productivity. The following two passages illustrate how, throughout the Essay, Malthus has relied on a gendered matrix in order to accomplish his seemingly

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impartial objective: to inquire into "those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs and render turbid the whole stream of human life" (EPP 1798, 66). Contrasting with his scenario of unrestricted feminine reproduction in the first passage, a later passage from the Essay sketches in highly sentimental pastels an exemplary masculine spirit dwelling languidly and with "fondest regret" (a strikingly Wordsworthian turn of phrase) on the fading memory of its onetime "virtuous love": The irremediableness of marriage, as it is at present constituted, undoubtedly deters many from entering into this state. An unshackled intercourse, on the contrary, would be a most powerful incitement to early attachments: and as we are supposing no anxiety about the future support of children to exist, I do not conceive that there would be one woman in a hundred, of twenty-three years of age, without a family. (EPP r8o3, 59) Virtuous love, exalted by friendship, seems to be that sort of mixture of sensual and intellectual enjoyment, particularly suited to the nature of man, and most powerfully calculated to awaken the sympathies of the soul, and produce the most exquisite gratifications. Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, who does not look back to that period, as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves most to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regret, and which he would most wish to live over again. (EPP r8o3, 2u)

In addition to sheltering Malthus from the charge of harboring radical Jacobin sympathies-a charge frequently leveled against speculative, abstract, or "visionary" writers-the trope of gender functions as a metonymy for the "raw" empirical fact of biological/sexual difference. Indeed, Malthus repeatedly seeks to extend the "natural" and inevitable character of such difference to the axioms and syllogistic results that his text gradually unfolds and justifies. And yet precisely this trope of gender ultimately operates in highly speculative ways throughout the Essay owing to the work's continual presupposition of two distinct ("gendered") types of relation between body and consciousness?0 In the case of woman, this opposition is posited as its own (nontranscendable) totality; the relationship between body and consciousness is determinate, with the sexual instincts of the body said to circumscribe the range of feminine consciousness. In the case of man, by contrast, this finite and determinate relationship becomes itself the object of knowledge for the superior reflexivity of a "masculine" subjectivity. The latter, as Malthus puts it, is characterized by a "spirit of independence" of which most middle- and upper-class En-

"Disturbing the Feast" glishmen "are still possessed" and which appears to reconcile the stoic interiority of a Rousseauvian St. Preux and the dynamic intelligence of Hegel's Geist?' The body/consciousness opposition does not delimit the reach of masculine "spirit," then, but rather is transcended by the virtuous male agent who alone is capable of bringing his sexual, economic, and cultural role into alignment with the larger demands of the national English body politic. Gender, in Malthus's account, thus naturalizes the ideological premise of two different classes of consciousness, one dominated by the body and its (reproductive) instincts, the other capable of transcending that opposition between physical instincts and social responsibility?2 Woman counts only numerically in the body politic; her apparent inability to reflect on her gendered consciousness leaves her body to be ruled by "instincts" as inexorable as Malthus's overall thesis. The second passage above, however, which is consistent with Malthus's assertion elsewhere of the "superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures" (EPP 1798, 76), figures woman allegorically, that is, as mediating the present-day, disillusioned masculine consciousness and a purportedly noncontradictory and precapitalist originary state in which the demands of the individual and the social body were still integrated. Malthus's numerous and vivid antitheses largely follow from this fundamental distinction between feminine reproductive compulsions and the unique masculine "mixture of sensual and intellectual enjoyment." In a series of analogies, the Essay constructs an elaborate opposition between feminine instincts that threaten the social body with apocalyptic overpopulation and intermasculine {latently homosocial) "sympathies of the soul." What allows such "friendship" to function as the condensed trope for a noncontradictory national community is just that it has contained man's problematic heterosexual drives in the abstraction (at once utopian and elegiac) known as "virtuous love." This capacity for "virtuous love" ascribed to men merits further scrutiny, for it hinges on an opposition between, on the one hand, the "irremediableness of marriage" and its implicit paradigm of reproductionoriente_d heterosexuality and, on the other hand, the sublimated attachments that dominate the erotic imagination of socially responsible man. For "friendship" and its cognate "sympathies of the soul," so often invoked by Malthus, can presumably eventuate only between men whose consciousness-increasingly dominated by the contradictions between their faltering economic and their discordant sexual and moral imagination-now seeks to recover its identity through representations of nostal-

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gic "spiritual delight." Malthus's ideal of such an alternative aesthetic community comprising subjects with a comparable nostalgic sensibility and symbolic competence (e.g., speakers, writers, and consumers of a specific aesthetic idiom) resembles the Wordsworthian "recollection in tranquillity," whose self-focused intensity almost immediately supplants its professed object ("the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"). Such a poetics authorizes itself retroactively by deriving its "authentic" spiritual power from the poetic drama of recollection itself, thereby obscuring the logical heteronomy (subject/object) and the temporal anachrony (present/former self) that consistently vitiate theories of reflection. In what amounts to an implicit endorsement of the homosocial sensibility undergirding the Wordsworth's poetic theory of "a man speaking to men," Malthus likewise stresses that to "bask" one's imagination with "fondest regret" in reminiscence will produce its own distinctive "intellectual enjoyment" and "exquisite gratifications."

I&J

"Debasement of the Body or the Mind"

~

Urban Inferno in The Prelude To study the sexual politics that underlie the melancholia of an emergent, masculine, middle-class poetics is to plunge into a historically specific idiom of cultural anxiety. In the present instance, that anxiety was brought to conscious "discipline" as the syllogistic idiom of the political economist intent on tracing a perilous chain of causes and effects from the material body to the social body-politic. It was also, as we are about to see, deployed in a poetic discourse that capitalized on the specter of economic and sexual apocalypse for reasons of its own. In any case, however, cultural anxiety can be thought and represented only as some individual's or community's conscious fear; in other words, as Malthus's Essay reveals, anxiety can be represented consciously only by means of displacement and thus is figural from the very moment that it achieves the disciplined coherence of rational "thought." To maintain that coherence thus depended on not recognizing the logical condensations and repetitions of that anxiety now represented as economic "knowledge." Consequently, the disciplinary construction of a population crisis not only displaced the self-focused anxieties of the middle class but had to totalize them in the figure of hyperbole. That is, the "theoretical problem" of reproduction had to expand its "proper" disciplinary home from political economy to an aesthetics concerned with figural reproduction or mimesis. In seeking to explicate

"Debasement of the Body or the Mind" the nightmare of a capitalist system destined for apocalypse because its economic and moral imagination contradict each other, Malthus's argument commutes the "Real"-a concatenation of conflicting bodily, affective, and intellectual experiences-into the preconscious dream of a homogeneous and latently homosocial aesthetic community. In its quintessentially middle-class form, this community has forsworn the contingent pleasures of heterosexual reproductivity and of an exchange-based economic agency, pledging its loyalty instead to the virtual reality of a "chaste," self-focused "virtuous love" and its implied noncontingent state of economic and cultural affluence. If we conceive of the Romantic cult of detailism and descriptive poetry as a continuation of the "dream" of a noncontradictory Real with other, more distinctly symbolic means, then Wordsworth's Prelude offers a rhetorical and conceptual scenario remarkably similar to Malthus's Essay. As we have seen, Malthus constructs middle-class economic anxiety, in a series of displacements, as a theoretical problem for which the discipline of political economy offers institutional solutions. It does so primarily because the middle class cannot countenance the sublime knowledge that its political, economic, and cultural identities will remain forever conflicted. Likewise, then, Wordsworth's Prelude can only process the epistemological and moral antagonisms of its exemplary poetic spirit in deflected, figural form, namely, by developing its own idiom in sustained antithesis to the frivolous, spectacular, and imitative aesthetics of a ceaselessly reproductive, urban body politic.93 Itself a distant echo of Hogarthian technique and motifs, Wordsworth's autobiographical depiction of London street life acquires formal coherence and aesthetic autonomy by indicting popular culture for its vacuous theatrical spectacles, profuse and imitative oratory, vulgar signs, miscellaneous advertisements, and purely profit-oriented publishing ventures such as London's "commissioned spirits" are said to dream up almost daily. As we saw earlier, Wordsworth ambivalently endorsed sensationalist fictions and spectacles in book 5 of the r8o5 Prelude as a stage through which mind must pass and by which it is to be purified in its progress toward an authentic and exemplary mode of self-representation. His narrative thus depicts the poet's youth as a phase in which "mind" is temporarily immersed in inferior aesthetic forms, if only for the purpose of refining the poem's overriding program of spiritual sincerity, vocational urgency, and authentic taste. Even as Wordsworth thus concedes some ephemeral value to fictional and theatrical forms blatantly imitative of each other, he stresses that their value is merely incidental to the evolution of a morally

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and aesthetically superior subjectivity-the cultural community of the Wordsworthian "Poet" and his congenial reading audience-destined to move beyond such parasitical forms of culture. This depraved contemporary literary taste is assimilated to the larger narrative scheme of The Prelude as an object of confession, a "wilfulness of fancy and conceit" that marks a youthful transgression on the part of the poet and, by extension, on the part of the national culture: But when that first poetic Faculty Of plain imagination and severe, to the works of art, The notions and the images of books Did knowingly conform itself, by these Enflamed, and proud of that her new delight, There came among those shapes of human life A wilfulness of fancy and conceit Which gave them new importance to the mind, And Nature and her objects beautified These fictions, as in some sort in their turn They burnish'd her. From the touch of this power Nothing was safe; the Elder Tree that grew Beside the well-known Charnel-house had then A dismal look; the Yew-tree had its Ghost That took its station there for ornament: Then common death was none, common mishap, But matter for this humour everywhere, The tragic super-tragic, else left short. (P r8o5, bk. 8, ll. pr-32)

The "new power" of Gothic fictions and their "tragic super-tragic" effects has displaced everything that Wordsworth cherishes as the "Real": a landscape administered like a family, centered around a regional economy, and distinguished by monuments (epitaphs), supposedly organically grown, that ensure the spiritual durability of the landscape. According to The Prelude, the transformation thus wrought within the youth's consciousness proves simultaneously aesthetic and sexual; the specious luster of a formerly innocent Nature now "burnish'd" by "notions and ... images of books" is figured as an instance of erotic adolescence, the youth's consciousness "enflamed" and reveling in its "new delight." The intrusion of this ambivalent cultural capital, exceedingly mobile and ceaselessly transforming, into the domain of the "common" and "well-known" corresponds to Wordsworth's (in part Burkean) antimodern concern with the

"Debasement of the Body or the Mind" usurpation of old, landed interests by urban, monied interests and speculators whose acquisitiveness distorts the use-value of the land, displaces rural identities, and erodes the subsistence of the lower classes. The nefarious consequences of modernity's aesthetic and economic marketplace, however, have not been imposed upon the public; on the contrary, they reflect that public's overwhelming absorption in the cognate fantasies of possessive individualism and sociocultural ascendancy. Thus The Prelude images the aesthetic depravation of the Gothic, the sentimental, "sickly and stupid German tragedies," and cheap sensationalist ballads as the reflex of the public's unself-conscious cravings or instincts: "Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours,/ And they must have their food" (P r8o5, bk. 5, II. 530-31). As the phrase's sexual undertow suggests, there is a contiguity between, on the one hand, the ideational order of a "taste" (however depraved) feeding on spectacles and fictions that are proliferating at an exponential rate-imitating one another, reproducing the same plot in an infinite variety of settings-and, on the other hand, the "yearnings" and "appetites" that cause literal bodies to reproduce. Wordsworth's implicit aesthetics essentially dramatizes a theory of cultural consumption staked out, some ten years earlier, in Arthur Young's Travels in France (1792). Scrutinizing Young's theory of proper and improper literary distribution, of "circulation" and "dissemination," Jon Klancher has pointed out that political stability at least indirectly depends on the stringencies of aesthetic and cultural practices: Circulating seems to involve both the way writing is distributed within an intricate, systematic social network and the way it is produced by the writer. By such special acts of circulating-repeated acts of certain kinds of writing and readinga public is shaped to read discourses in deliberate, directed ways .... For if readers are not thus made, Young will insist, they can be spontaneously called forth by "visionaries," purveyors of "theoretic" systems, and others who stand outside the circulatory system and threaten its unifying order. (Making, 33) Klancher's own metaphors, moreover, confirm our sense that the policing of aesthetic boundaries, at the level both of writing and of reading, is constitutively interwoven with figures of sexual anxiety. Thus, while exploring the "economic and physiological senses" of cultural circulation, Klancher reelaborates Young's basic distinction through the "infinitely adaptable metaphor" of the "cardiovascular system of the social body." "To circulate," he remarks, is to follow a path, however circuitous or labyrinthine its windings, along an ordered itinerary.... But to disseminate is to flood through the interstices of the

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social network, into the social cracks of the ancien regime. Dissemination takes place where there is no circulation, where there are no preformed patterns to guide the flow of language or ideas. What is disseminated "propagates" or reproduces itself without the orderly expansion of circulation. (Making, 32, 34)

Such an account of "dissemination" largely echoes late-eighteenth-century critiques of the illicit (Whiggish) fantasy of unbridled and unregulated "commerce." Fears of a wholly unbounded, cosmopolitan, and hedonistic economy tend to be mediated, and given added poignancy, as indictments of illicit sexual and bodily commerce.94 In the same spirit, Wordsworth's Prelude repeatedly discriminates between authentic and parasitical forms of reproduction (or mimesis)forms of knowledge, of literature, of spiritual and material affluence and poverty, and so on-by juxtaposing "our high-wrought modern narratives I Stript of their humanizing soul" with the allegedly more integral and abiding character of his own autobiographical enterprise. As he insists, his recollections, though indebted to "extrinsic transitory accidents," are capable of passing "the test of thought" and reveal an "enduring majesty" on account of his unrivaled recombinatory powers: And not seldom Even individual remembrances, By working on the shapes before my eyes, Became like vital functions of the soul; And out of what had been, what was, the place Was thronged with impregnations, like those wilds In which my early feelings had been nursed, And naked valleys full of caverns, rocks, And audible seclusions, dashing lakes, Echoes and waterfalls, and pointed crags That into music touch the passing wind. Thus here imagination also found An element that pleased her, tried her strength Among new objects, simplified, arranged, Impregnated my knowledge, made it liveAnd the result was elevating thoughts Of human nature. Neither guilt nor vice, Debasement of the body or the mind Nor all the misery forced upon my sight, Which was not lightly passed, but often scanned Most feelingly, could overthrow my trust In what we may become. (P r8o5, hk. 8, II. 786-8o7)

"Debasement of the Body or the Mind" Reared in "naked valleys," a phrase whose suggestiveness is borne out by the subsequent enumeration of the antithetical, gendered properties of landscape (caverns/rocks; echoes/waterfalls; audible seclusions I pointed crags), Wordsworth images his poetic sensibility as a body of endless fertility and procreative powers. Its generational roots (fabricating its imaginative offspring "out of what had been") and its generative power ("thronged with impregnations" and "simplified, arranged I Impregnated my knowledge") draw on the same language of sexual reproduction as the critical accounts of the contemporary literary scene offered in Young's Travels in France and in Wordsworth's own Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Yet this passage from The Prelude also introduces a markedly different feature, designed to distinguish the responsible, generative productivity of the Wordsworthian imagination (in its form as pure, lyric speech) from the indulgent and random dissemination of the hedonistic pleasure frequently cited as the prime defect of Gothic fictions and of the "feminine" genre of sentimental romance?' In assimilating past landscapes to future prospects ("my trust I In what we may become") and in linking a recollected, highly individuated bodily "sense" to the promise of a collective sensibility, The Prelude figures Wordsworth's imagination as self-fertilizing: "Thronged with impregnations," the "vital functions" ascribed to his psyche figure his consciousness as the autoreproductive, organic simulacrum of Nature herself. In the full Emersonian sense, this self-reliant Wordsworthian imagination is presented "with more than Roman confidence" (P 1799, bk. 2, I. 489) as the progeny of a "pure," quasi-immaculate conception or "inspiration." To recall our earlier notion of The Prelude as a thoroughly self-confirming and self-privileging text, the trope of impregnation so persistently at work in the poem "begets" (and thus implicitly confirms) the genealogical trajectory of the narrative itself. In reproducing physical "shapes" as cultural "forms," Wordsworth discloses the larger cultural ethos that sustains and fuels The Prelude's twofold poetic reproduction of life: "life" as the autobiographical mimesis of the poet's biography and as its prospective re-creation, by the poem itself, in the superior sensibility of Wordsworth's envisioned reading audience. Not surprisingly, however, the body metaphor will not easily admit of being treated as just another figure. The material endowment of the body, its drives, instincts, "hidden appetites," and "dumb yearnings" previously invoked by Wordsworth himself, persists at a literal level in this complex passage, albeit only as something to be denied or repudiated: the disturbing sights of London, that overly populous, morally unstable metropolis, though "scanned I Most feelingly," are expressly said not to have impreg-

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nated the poet's body or to have deformed his mind; the autonomy of the poet admits of "Neither guilt nor vice, I Debasement of the body or the mind." It thus stands in stark contrast to the prevailing, debased literary taste that constantly craves new effects and thus has precipitated an endless mimicry of forms and genres, itself but another reflex of the Malthusian social apocalypse brought on by the dissemination of a sexuality that reproduces individual bodies while compromising the prosperity of the body politic. Book 7 of The Prelude all but reverses these imaginary polarities by contrasting its own poetic procreativity with the moral instability of sexual reproduction.96 Much like Malthus's ratio of a fluctuating population to the price of provisions and labor, the body as a material, individual entity and as a trope for cultural communities appears in constant "oscillation." It seems given over to constant transformation, reproduction, and dissimulation, and consequently it remains indeterminate with regard to both its moral and its economic value. For Wordsworth, nothing embodies these properties more succinct! y than London, that "mighty heart" pulsating and circulating (or disseminating) moral, economic, and cultural nourishment (or poison) to the body of the entire nation. "Having thridded the labyrinth of suburban Villages" (P r8os, bk. 8, II. 690-91), the poet appears to enter the city with a momentarily restored faith in the spiritual individuality and autonomy of his consciousness: At length I did unto myself first seem To enter the great city. On the Roof Of an itinerant Vehicle I sate With vulgar men about me, vulgar forms Of houses, pavement, streets, of men and things, Mean shapes on every side. But at the time When to myself it fairly might be said, The very moment that I seem'd to know, The threshold now is overpass'd-Great God! That aught external to the living mind Should have such mighty sway! yet so it wasA weight of Ages did at once descend Upon my heart. (P r8o5, bk. 8, II. 692-704)

In returning to the very prison the release from which had enabled the beginning of The Prelude-"coming from a house I of bondage, from yon city's walls set free" (P r 8os, bk. r, II. 6-7)-Wordsworth resurrects the classical figuration of the metropolis as a semiotic, aesthetic, and moral netherworld. The urban sublime confronts the poet with forms, shapes, "men and

"Debasement of the Body or the Mind" things" in ceaseless movement, driven by a structural principle we can trace only in the ubiquitous proliferation of bodies, signs, languages, and the literal and figural economies governing their production and interpretation. Not surprisingly, Wordsworth seeks to capture the cognitive and aesthetic challenge presented by London in what is arguably one of the greatest similes in the entire poem. While the stationary aesthetics of his Westminster Sonnet remain a guiding ideal, the simile of the Cave of Yordas reveals that the imposition of any durable semiotic conception on the metropolitan space is an error. Upon second sight, the "still heart" that was the finishing touch on the lyric canvas of Wordsworth's r8o2 sonnet never actually ceases to beat; instead, any configuration of urban shapes and forms soon disintegrates, yielding to further transformation. Rather than offering a tranquil imitatio, the city thus imaged offers a dynamic holograph of seemingly inexhaustible capacity to reproduce and reorganize itself: As when a traveller hath from open day With torches pass'd into some Vault of Earth, The Grotto of Antiparos, or the Den Of Yordas among Craven's mountain tracts; He looks and sees the Cavern spread and grow, Widening itself on all sides, sees, or thinks He sees, erelong, the roof above his head, Which instantly unsettles and recedes Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all Commingled, making up a Canopy Of Shapes and Forms, and Tendencies to Shape, That shift and vanish, change and interchange Like spectres, ferment quiet, and sublime; Which, after a short space, works less and less Till every effort, every motion gone, The scene before him lies in perfect view, Exposed and lifeless as a written book. But let him pause a while, and look again And a new quickening shall succeed, at first Beginning timidly, then creeping fast Through all which he beholds: the senseless mass In its projections, wrinkles, cavities, Through all its surface, with all colours streaming, Like a magician's airy pageant, parts unite, Embodying every where some pressure Or image, recognis'd or new, some type Or picture of the world; forests and lakes,

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Ships, rivers, towers, the Warrior clad in Mail, The prancing Steed, the Pilgrim with his Staff, The mitred Bishop and the throned King, A Spectacle to which there is no end. (P r8o5, bk. 8, II. 7H-4r)

Few passages in The Prelude are as insistently self-referential as this extended simile, whose preoccupation with perceptual forms ("Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all I Commingled, making up a Canopy I Of Shapes and Forms") evolves into a preoccupation with rhetorical forms. The intermediate moment of rest, with the beholder of this geological spectacle contemplating "the scene before him ... in perfect view, I Exposed and lifeless as a written book," gives way to a "new quickening," a renewed play of representations saturated with social and literary references. The organic "canopy" of the cave is transformed into a dreamlike procession of seductive cultural fictions and emblematic representations of social life. With "colours streaming I Like a magician's airy pageant" and with images, types, and pictures evoking commerce, war, chivalric and religious devotion, kingship, and state religion, the simile of the cave gradually reattaches itself to that ambivalent heart of civilization, London, whose semiotic and perceptual entropy it was meant to counterbalance. Like Prospera's marvelous eloquence celebrating the end of "this insubstantial pageant" ("our revels are now ended"), Wordsworth's selfconscious rhetoric here resumes one of his favorite themes: the limits of rhetoric and fiction as the point of origin for a more responsible cultural consciousness?7 With characteristically mercurial overtones, Wordsworth thus envisions the metropolitan stage, "that great Emporium," as both the origin and tendency, the "fountain" and "destiny," of the Nation itself. A "Chronicle at once I And Burial-place of passions" (P r8os, bk. 8, II. 74650), London comprises all the "senses" of crisis-economic, spiritual, cultural, literary-to the resolution of which The Prelude, as precursor to The Recluse, has dedicated what it calls elsewhere Wordsworth's "sensitive and creative soul" (P r8os, bk. rr, I. 257). ~

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Sexual and Aesthetic Heterodoxy in Book 7 ofThe Prelude Book 7 may well prove the most conflicted section in Wordsworth's overall narrative enterprise, potentially imperiling the larger designs of The Prelude (as well as of The Recluse) by confronting an ideal of rural

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life-the declared referential focus and spiritual resource of Wordsworth's poetics-with a ceaselessly enterprising and reproductive metropolitan populace and semiotics. The conflict is all the more poignant in that it is precisely the economically contingent and politically disenfranchised sensibility of an urban middle-class community of shopkeepers, manufacturers, tradesmen, and professionals that the overall project of The Recluse targets for aesthetic redemption. Yet insofar as book 7 of The Prelude reflects a profound anxiety about unrestricted economies of reproduction, Wordsworth's autobiographical narrative cannot be said to be concerned simply with the middle class in any straightforward topical sense. On the contrary, it throws the anxiety of that group into relief precisely by scanning the urban landscape-with a panoptic eye, a discriminating ear, and a generally censorious aesthetics-for the countless threats it poses to the economic and aesthetic identity of that class. Hence, to read book 7 is to be cognizant of the "object" of middle-class anxiety-the phenomenon of reproductivity-in two senses: (r) as potentially rampant biological reproduction, such as is bound to compromise all political and material value (essentially Malthus's argument); and (2) as illicit reproduction (mimesis) of discourse-in vernacular languages, vulgar sights, commercial signs, Gothic spectacles, and lowbrow romance. As Wordsworth suggests time and again, it is the mimicry of an invariant, eroticized "pleasure" and its concomitant "dissemination" in cheap printings, low-cost vaudeville productions, and free-of-charge entertainment (e.g., St. Bartholomew's Fair) that threatens the gold standard on which all middle-class cultural values appear to rest: a fully integrated theory of poetic expression andreception?8 Having just "quitted hall and bower I And every comfort of that privileged ground" and being "yet undetermined to what plan of life I I should adhere" (P r85o, bk. 7, ll. 54, 64), the post-academic and pre-professional Wordsworth embarks upon urban middle-class self-making only to discover that the psychological vacuum intrinsic to that very process presents an occasion for a certain kind of aesthetic therapy, thus disclosing to him new professional prospects for an old vocation: poetry. Wordsworth's descriptions of populous London instance not merely a social but an aesthetic disillusionment too, which, in turn, is contiguous with the sexual and moral vagaries of urban reproductivity and "vice" explored in Malthus's Essay. Recalling how his youthful imagination of the metropolis even outpaced "whatsoever is feigned I Of aery palaces and gardens built I By genii of romance .... Of golden cities ten months' journey deep I Among Tartarean wilds" (P r8o5, bk. 7, ll. Sr-87), he connects the public's

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sensual and aesthetic endorsements to a poetic interiority that appears both anxious and censorious. Such a change of venue dovetails with the young Wordsworth's oblique perplexity ("not wholly free I From disappointment," II. wo-wr) with a one-time friend, already maimed in body ("a Cripple from the birth," I. 95), who had returned from the metropolis not only physically unimproved but now also displaying the early symptoms of a deteriorating aesthetic constitution: every word he uttered, on my ears Fell flatter than a caged parrot's note, That answers unexpectedly awry, And mocks the prompter's listening. (P 18os, bk. 7, ll. 105-8)

Entering "the Babel din, I The endless stream of men and moving things" (P r8o5, bk. 7, II. I 57-58), the poet's former disquiet escalates into a marked fear of being morally and aesthetically maimed, of losing his distinctive poetic endowment among the mimicry and reproduction of an urban idiom. To the true poet, this idiom seems driven, by an allencompassing structural causality or addiction of individual consciousness, to the unrelenting pursuit of more commercial and sensual gratification. Haunted by the bustling urban commerce, Wordsworth "at length, I Escaped as from an enemy," turns into "some sequestered nook, I Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud" (ll. 184-87}. The refuge yields up a "raree-show" entertaining some of London's ubiquitous offspring ("children gathered round"), to whom a somewhat redundant notation contrasts another figure: "single & alone I Some English Ballad singer sv+'eet of voice." 99 Arguably book 7's most persistent specter, the usurpation of the aesthetic by commerce defines the antithesis to the ballad singer. Having escaped from the "throng" into the "straggling breezes of suburban air," the speaker is once more assailed by the blight of the city: files of ballads dangle from dead walls; Advertisements of giant size, from high Press forward in all colours on the sightThese, bold in conscious merit-lower down, That, fronted with a most imposing word, Is peradventure one in masquerade. (P 18os, bk. 7, ll. 205-14)

Writing and commerce seem interchangeable, victimizing the beholder with the disturbing sense that writing has been colonized by the omnipresent circulation of capital. Thus assimilated to commerce, representation

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seems forever on the verge of infringing Wordsworth's implicit norms of aesthetic integrity. Provoked by the perceptual entropy "of differences I That have no law, no meaning, and no end," this crisis also begins to affect the overall autobiographical quest for authentic self-representation and self-reference, itself the indispensable condition for refurbishing the contingent affective consciousness of the adolescent Wordsworth as the nowauthentic and exemplary sensibility of the poet: "Shall I give way, I Copying the impression of the memory, I (Though things remembered idly do half seem /The work of Fancy)" (P 1805, bk. 7, II. 704-5, 145-48). Authentic spiritual meanings have become permanently inaccessible to any traditional model of direct poetic naming, since what is seen, read, and heard is only the symptom of a totalizing economic structure devoid of any definitive center, a capitalist and aesthetic mode of production reproducing forever the invariant "sensation" of profit and pleasure. As in Malthus's rhetoric, the conception of an incipient socioeconomic crisis is bound up with the illicit reproduction and dissemination of sexual and sensual pleasure, issues encompassed by the antithetical figures of fallen feminine consciousness and transcendent masculine spirituality, as well as by those of derivative, theatrical mimesis and an original, authentic poetics. Indeed, the figure of antithesis structures most of book 7 and consistently indexes the phenomenal world of London with the opposing valuations of an overt, commercialized, and unrestricted sexual economy and of a decorous, chaste, and carefully regulated sympathy. Examples of either extreme abound; consider, for example, Wordsworth's vignette of "some female vendor's scream-belike I The very shrillest of all London cries," whose frantic commercialism and aggressive physical presence contrast with "the dame I That field-ward takes her walk in decency," though also with "the feeble salutation from the voice I Of some unhappy woman now and then" (P 1805, bk. 7, ll. 198-99, 225-26, 639-40). Likewise, Wordsworth's first encounter with London prostitutesfor the first time in my life did [I] hear The voice of Woman utter blasphemy; Saw Woman as she is to open shame Abandoned and the pride of public vice (P r8os, bk. 7, II. 418-21)

-confounds his sensibility by transgressing less a moral principle than one of aesthetic propriety: "but the pain was almost lost, I Absorbed and buried, in the immensity I Of the effect" (ll. 421-2 3). The following complex passage will throw into sharper relief The Prelude's anxious conflation of prostitution and female sexuality with the

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theatrical reproduction {"those mimic sights") of the then-popular panoramic and dioramic contrivances "expressing, as in mirror, sea and land,/ And what earth is, and what she hath to shew" (P r8o5, bk. 7, 11. 248-5 r) .100 Having just recounted the story of a woman, Mary of Buttermere, tricked into bigamy by the impostor John Hatfield-the subject of a recent play at Sadler's Wells, though "too holy theme for such a place!" (1. 318)-Wordsworth now recalls the first of two antithetical figures: One A rosy Babe, who, for a twelvemonth's space Perhaps, had been of age to deal about Articulate prattle, Child as beautiful As ever sate upon a Mother's knee! The other was the Parent of that Babe; But on the Mother's cheek the tints were false, A painted bloom. 'Twas at a Theatre That I beheld this Pair; the Boy had been The pride and pleasure of all lookers-on In whatsoever place; but seem'd in this A sort of Alien scatter'd from the clouds, Of lusty vigour, more than infantine, He was in limbs; in face, a Cottage rose Just three parts blown; a Cottage Child, but ne'er Saw I, by Cottage or elsewhere, a Babe By Nature's gifts so honor'd. Upon a Board, Whence the attendant of the Theatre Serv'd out refreshments, had this child been placed And there he sate, environ'd with a Ring Of chance Spectators, chiefly dissolute men And shameless women; treated and caress'd, Ate, drank, and with fruit and glasses play'd, While oaths, indecent speech, and ribaldry Were rife about him as are songs of birds In spring-time after showers. The Mother, too, Was present! but of her I know no more Than hath been said, and scarcely at this time Do I remember her. But I behold The lovely boy as I beheld him then, Among the wretched and the falsely gay, Like one of those who walk'd with hair unsinged Amid the fiery furnace. He hath since Appeared to me oft-times as if embalm'd By Nature.

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A series of chiasmic reversals illustrates the sharp moral and aesthetic divide between Mary of Buttermere and the prostitute-mother in this passage. While the latter dies figuratively in the speaker's memory ("scarcely at this time I Do I remember her"), Mary is textually resurrected ("thy image rose again"). Correspondingly, the literal death of Mary's illegitimate offspring, who "beside the mountain Chapel sleeps in earth I . .. fearless as a lamb" (P r8o5, bk. 7, ll. 350-56), stands over against the strictly figural death ("as if embalm'd I By Nature") that shelters the prostitute's "rosy Babe" from the moral inferno of the theatrical and "false" sociability of the adult world. Likewise, the posthumous notoriety of the bigamous impostor, John Hatfield, alerts us to the conspicuous absence and anonymity of the father of the prostitute's child. The otherworldly, obliquely Christ-like innocence of that child (''A sort of Alien scatter'd from the clouds"), and the self-sufficient and authentic expressivity of his "articulate prattle" not only redeems the premature silence of Mary's "new-born Infant" but simultaneously shelters him from the "oaths, indecent speech, and ribaldry" of the adult, urban, and commercial world. As the allusion to 3 Daniel affirms, the urban furnace of unrestricted sexual commerce and aesthetic transgression-of feminine reproductive and theatrical-mimetic excess-also tests the spiritual viability of Wordsworth's autobiographical project, specifically its capacity to establish a standard of bourgeois cultivation motivated by concerns markedly different from the needs and pleasures of the body. Insofar as the survival of culture is thought to hinge on its association with the superior language and calling of its chosen prophets, The Prelude's most persistent antithesis, in book 7, proves to be that between a properly indirect, authentic poetic vocation and the crass, seductive accents of the popular lowbrow theater. Contrasting Mary's just opinions, female modesty, Her patience, and retiredness of mind, Unsoil'd by commendation, and the excess Of public notice (P 18os, bk. 7, II. 337-40)

with the idiom of "dissolute men I And shameless women," the speaker thus aligns his claim for an unmediated, affect-based poetics with the locally grown, rural sensibility of the Maid of Buttermere, who lives "Upon the spot where she was born and rear'd I Without contamination." The (almost) compromised chastity and virtue of Mary-seduced by the make-believe of her impostor husband, John Hatfield (executed in r8o3 for the cognate transgression of forgery)-is assimilated to the consistently

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defensive consciousness of the poem's autobiographical subject. Thus Wordsworth recalls how he had been absorbed by the specious illusions of the "Country Play-house" where he blended in with "the many-headed mass I Of the Spectators" (P r8o5, bk. 7, II. 387-88, 3 52-53, 467-68, 482). What ultimately saves him from the theater's simulations-a cathartic reversal akin to the annulment of Mary's marriage to a bigamist and impostor-and thus ensures his aesthetic chastity is a providential crack in the theater's fa\=ade. Were it not for that "fractured wall," Wordsworth's poetic spirit would likely have been colonized by the theater's psychosexual sensations. In subjecting the phenomenon of the spectacle to vehement critique, book 7 forecasts contemporary theories of the postmodern as a network of hypersimulations whose inescapable "reality effects" almost completely elide their economic determinants: Pleasure that had been handed down from times When, at a Country Play-house, having caught, In summer, through the fractured wall, a glimpse Of day-light, at the thought of where I was I gladden'd more than if I had beheld Before me some bright Cavern of Romance. [W]rought upon by tragic sufferings, The heart was full; amid my sobs and tears It slept, even in the season of my youth: For though I was most passionately moved, And yielded to the changes of the scene With most obsequious feeling, yet all this Pass'd not beyond the suburbs of the mind. (P r8o5, 7, II. 48r-so7)

The "many-headed mass" of spectators and its semiotic counterpart, the proliferating "changes of the scene," are thus checked by a censorious and defensive aesthetics. Such "pathologizing" of competing aesthetic and moral valuations is an inevitable requirement in the unconscious process of self-constitution of a distinctive, middle-class cultural sensibility. In support of his quest for a spontaneous and original self, Wordsworth's antiurban, antifeminine, and anti theatrical aesthetic creates a detailed map of his own cultural unconscious ("the suburbs of the mind"). He had affirmed the topography of the self to be all but inscrutable earlier in The Prelude, when charging epistemological speculation with the same indifference to history that the French Ja co bin revolutionaries had shown in their abstract political cartography: "But who shall parcel out I His intellect, by geomet-

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ric rules, I Split, like a province, into round and square?" (P r8o5, bk. 2, ll. 208-ro). At the level of aesthetic production, Wordsworth's sociocultural poetics thus grounds its "organic," affective, and imagistic style in a network of "natural" and primarily defensive valuations that, with the vicarious benefit of critical hindsight, can be seen to coalesce into a remarkably accurate map of Romanticism's political and cultural unconscious.

Indeed, it is no accident that book 7 should revolve around the same cluster of sexual, aesthetic, and economic fears that shaped Malthus's r8o3 Essay. For at the beginning of the nineteenth century the ancient "association of writing with femaleness and prostitution in particular" becomes especially virulent, primarily on account of "the increase in literacy" (Gallagher, "George Eliot," 40) .102 If Aristotle had opposed "poetic making as a method of natural reproduction" to "the written word as an arbitrary and conventional sign multiplying unnaturally in the mere process of exchange," the resulting antithesis of "literary paternity" and " [female ]literary usury" is extended by Wordsworth's complex juxtaposition of feminine, sexual, and theatrical reproductivity with masculine, authentic, and poetic procreativity (40) .."Even as it conceives of exchange as the ever-present condition of production," Catherine Gallagher notes, nineteenth-century thought restricts "the process of exchange [to] an epiphenomenal status" while identifying "the sphere of production ... as the source of value" (42). In the domain of post-r8oo aesthetic criticism, this repudiation of mechanisms of exchange took the form of intense strictures against female writers of romance and more general attacks on a "feminized" culture allegedly seduced by a derivative and mawkish sentimentalism, by a prurient Gothic imaginary, and by the constant threat that "authentic" literature might be usurped by a commercialized massculture, as reflected in the popular theater and the annual St. Bartholomew's Fair.l 03 Taken cumulatively, these phenomena point to the rising middle class's defensiveness against the potential deflowering of its fetishized "chaste" originality, a hypostatized poetic and spiritual endowment captured in the emblematic figure of the prostitute's son: a "Cottage rose I Just three parts blown." The figural and spiritual integrity of this ideal, then, was to be sheltered from all fluctuations of moral and economic value, now recognized to be an inevitable consequence of any market-driven system of exchange. In fact, it was just such a general logic of exchange that circumscribed the economic imagination of emergent capitalism and its most significant demographic progeny: the middling

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classes. Not surprisingly, the insistent pathologizing of that logic by a conceptually oblique yet, in its metaphoric thrust, vigilant aesthetic throughout Wordsworth's poem also shows how the historical construction of that class via its seemingly boundless economic prospects ("something evermore about to be") should have resulted in a profound individual selfloathing and collective alienation. It is in part this ambivalence that prompts Peter Stallybrass and Allon White to note how "the grotesque body of carnival was being re-territorialized, it was being appropriated, sublimated and individualized to code refined identity, to give the eighteenth-century ... bourgeoisie masks and symbols to think with at the very moment when they were repudiating the social realm from which those masks and symbols came" (Transgression, 104). This historically specific economic, moral, and sexual anxiety climaxes in Wordsworth's notorious description of St. Bartholomew's Fair. Strongly reminiscent of Dante and Milton, it is a passage of almost unparalleled intensity in its portrayal of semiotic, cultural, and sexual entropy: what a hell For eyes and ears! what anarchy and din Barbarian and infernal! 'tis a dream Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound. (P r8o5, bk. 7, II. 659-62)

The semiotic welter of the Real is dominated by the at once excessive and indifferent reproduction of signs and of people, and it throws into "blank confusion" Wordsworth's quest for authentic and durable tokens of poetic sensibility. For the carnivalesque logic of the fair collapses, or suspends at least temporarily, all ethnic, aesthetic, and socioeconomic distinctions. Maneuvering his way through "all out-o' th'-way, far fetch'd, perverted things, I All freaks of Nature, ... jumbled up together, to make up I This parliament of Monsters," the bourgeois Wordsworthian pilgrim betrays-in a deeply phobic and correspondingly overdetermined poetic idiom-how the profession known as "High Romantic argument" has been circumscribed by a specter now objectified in the poet's sublime depiction of (literal and figural) reproductive excess. Such a rhetoric "of simplicity and power," of "steady form" and "pure grandeur," and of "the measure and the prospect of the soul I To majesty" does more than react to the specter of a ceaselessly reproductive urban culture, that "vast Mill, I . .. vomiting, receiving, on all sides, I Men, Women, three years Children, Babes in arms" (P r8o5, bk. 7, 11.688-95, 721-26). In fact, it is within this seemingly transparent rationality of the "principle of population" that

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Wordsworth's spiritual affirmations-such as his assurance of having recovered in London's "vast receptacle ... The spirit of Nature"-find their dialectical Other: the idea of reproductivity as the unspeakable (apocalyptic) "object" of middle-class anxiety. Yet to trace this "object" back to what we now refer to as the political and cultural unconscious of the Romantic bourgeoisie is not without risks of its own. For even as we salvage the larger ideological dispensation of · the Romantic middle class from its encryption as a confessional autobiography, we must not reduce this "defensive" aspect of Wordsworth to a mere debility. For only by articulating and revising the often conflicting metaphoric relationships among its aesthetic, economic, and sexual intuitions were Malthus and Wordsworth able to distill the problems, themes, and motifs required by a middle-class audience to balance its tenuous identity. To the extent that the genre of autobiography, both in theme and idiom, posits and stabilizes a correspondingly determinate social response, Wordsworth's poem functions both as a prelude to and as a means for a middle-class unconscious continually in search of more permanent and cohesive forms of self-representation. What Book 7 dramatizes and explores-ingeniously aligning sociopolitical reference, formal-aesthetic theory, and intricate psychosexual rhetoric-is less Wordsworth's professed distaste for the city than a constitutively modern syndrome of bourgeois self-loathing and antiurban nostalgia. At once effective and symptomatic, Wordsworth's poetics allowed the demographic subjects of an emergent English middle class to define themselves both consciously and defensively. Thus The Prelude conceives this sublime spectacle of a society (and the psyche of its members) about to disintegrate as a result of its commercial, aesthetic, and reproductive excesses in a strictly imaginary and figural mode. Imaginative writing constitutes the most effective representational strategy for Romanticism's anxious bourgeois intelligence precisely because it develops its social and spiritual issues not as factual, empirical matter but as plausible, simulated "motifs." Whereas a strictly mimetic approach would likely entangle Wordsworth's autobiographical project in the multiple antagonisms of its historical moment, the poem's conception of social anxiety as an imaginative plausibility-not an inescapable fact-allows for a seamless transition from the analysis of pseudoproblems to the discovery of pseudo-solutions. Writer and audience simulate historical experience in the communitarian ritual of writing and responding to narratives at once confessional and redemptive. In affording its participants prospects (however imaginary) of increased psychological stability and political legitimacy, such symbolic practice instances a com-

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munity similar to Schiller's ideal of a "humanity" (Menschheit) configured by the continual practice and mutual affirmation of its aesthetic preferences and practices. Anticipating the postmodern simulation of political action that has recently seized the humanities in the United States, The Prelude offers a first instance of what David Simpson has so acutely examined as the "professionalized bohemianism" and "professional anti professionalism" of contemporary critics (Academic Postmodern, So). Once aesthetic virtue and commerce were no longer allies, the genres of the former attempted to remedy, albeit only figuratively, the lesion of discontinuity inflicted on the middle-class unconscious by its own economic productivity and prosperity. Overall, then, my reading of The Prelude has aimed at deepening a longstanding interpretive approach to Wordsworthian Romanticism, one that locates the significance of his poetry in the modulations of its voice or, better, text. Ultimately, the motifs and narrative concerns of his poetry remain subordinate to a figural, highly mediated dramaturgy of "expression." Yet what we must suspend within this traditional hermeneutic paradigm of poetic "expressivity" is its axiom of a stable subjectivity-customarily deployed as "poet," "speaker," "consciousness," or "imagination." In its stead, we find the cultural and economic agency of writer/author ventriloquizing, in a style of symbolic hypersimulation, a psychological interiority or subjectivity whose ability to become self-conscious seems restricted to pondering the "mysteries" of its origin and its allegedly providential, spiritual exemplarity. In the speculative sense of Hegel's definition of language as "self-consciousness existing for others" (PS, 395 I PC, 458), the motive for the aesthetic labor of The Prelude is to emulate, autobiographically, the culturally and economically cognate psychology of that Other, and only in a conditional sense to disclose a self. However insistently professed as the "main region" of Wordsworth's song, the goal of self-discovery remains primarily a consequence of the aesthetic contract between the poet and his audience as it is instanced by the very genre of autobiography. Like any contract, it is a means to an end. Wordsworth's studious rhetorical balancing of motifs of humility and confession and their effective "timing" throughout the narrative underwrite his authorial pledge with the securities of poetic dedication, sincerity, and the distant prospect of aesthetic redemption: his pledge, namely, to deliver authentic and durable cultural meanings to an audience made uncertain of its cultural identity by its constitutive investments in a capitalist mode of production. To view Wordsworth's poetic enterprise as supplementing the macrohistorical self-constitution and self-identification of a British (national)

"Rosy Cheeks"I" False Lustres" middle class-and to explore why this overarching ideological motivation should take the specific "textual" design of a humbly autobiographical blank-verse narrative-is to appreciate the deeper confessional logic of Wordsworth's seemingly autonomous figural idiom. As the traumatic encounter with St. Bartholomew's Fair shows, Wordsworth's is a "poetsubject repulsed by social practices [that are] destined to become the very content of the bourgeois unconscious" (Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 124). Irresistibly and repeatedly, then, the representations of cultural and moral dissolution in book 7 of The Prelude identify for us Romanticism's aesthetics of the sublime as an attempt to keep at bay an unspeakable though forever impending recognition on the part of its bourgeoisie: the recognition of the antagonism between its laws of economic "rationality" and its axioms concerning our sexual "instinct." The seemingly disparate institutions of political economy and confessional poetry are thus both designed to redeem an apocalyptic, postlapsarian psyche on the verge of recognizing itself as the effect of an interference between sexual desire and the (pseudo-)rationality of a bourgeois, reproductive economy.104 Wordsworth's archaeology of his poetic self and his reflexive figuring of origins, affective memories, and epiphanic experiences thus constitutes a determinate and functionally "poetic" practice motivated by factors outside the seemingly "pure" symbolic order of Romantic autobiography. That practice developed within a specific historical field of social psychology relative to which Wordsworth continues to position and reinvent his authorial selves. It is only in this sense that the "literary" discloses its distinctive ideological efficacy: not as the dreaming Other of History or the Real, but as a daydream, whose suspension of the empirical allows specific individuals and communities to approach and condense the inherently contradictory and irreal quality of that lived History itself.105 For Wordsworth, to secure the "authentic" appearance of his poetry through a complex syntax of confession rather than through some (unavailable) nomenclature of evidence and referentiality is to compose a unique style fundamentally aimed at generating exemplary aesthetic responses that also define the reading process. Thus, book 7 of The Prelude emulates its audience's anxious psyche by depicting a "poet" roaming the metropolis with an exemplary, panoptic eye and rhetorical acumen. Its sequence of highly interactive representations offers itself as the very simulacrum of its projected readers' consciousness. As Zizek remarks, any symptom is "already formed with an eye to its interpretation .... There is no symptom without its addressee" (Sublime Object, 73). That readeraddressee is thus brought into focus in a deliberately unapparent and inci-

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dental manner, that is, as a subjectivity largely determined by a "cultural unconscious"-a configuration of economic, cultural, and sexual anxieties-that remains mute because it suspects all channels of articulation, expression, and production of already being colonized by the very "object" (that unspeakable Other) of its anxiety. It is precisely the quasi-sacred integrity, purity, and intangibility of that (Lacanian) nonempirical "object"-its immunity to touch and thought-that guarantees the "organic" and "harmonious" vision of Wordsworth's poem. Consequently, a truly inquisitive reading of The Prelude will always be complicated by the fact that the inaccessibility of this object of poetic and vocational concern (the sexuality of the body as the moment of collision between Romanticism's political, moral, and aesthetic economies) is inversely proportional to the conceptual and stylistic cohesiveness of The Prelude itself. The more "organic" and "naturalized" is the (gendered) design of Wordsworth's poem, the better the poem delineates the poet's allegedly "immediate" experiences of metropolitan reproductivity and sets the stage for the righteous adjudication of such social evil-and the more difficult it becomes for us to disentangle a historically specific, middle-class cultural unconscious from that displaced, self-confirming confessional "design." That very anxiety, far from being a mere impediment to the "main point" of Wordsworthian narrative, is itself constitutive of it and resolves itself in what Tilottama Rajan, in a variety of Romantic contexts, has recently analyzed as the supplement of reading (Supplement of Reading, rs-35). Wordsworth's at once eloquent and deceptively "natural" idiom of cultural and economic discriminations thus reshapes an initially unselfconscious and amorphous middle-class reading audience into an increasingly cohesive community that defines and recognizes itself through its participation in an alternately sympathetic and defensive idiom of selfdescription; its "bad habits are a sign of developmental failure that invites the literary cure" (Siskin, Historicity, rrr). In other words, the ideological core of the bourgeois middle class, "feeling," has been transmogrified into the self-interpreting text of private development, a strategy enabling the middle class to experience itself aesthetically. In so doing, the Wordsworthian imaginative community eschews theoretical inquiry and its contingent bodies of knowledge in favor of a confessional narrative punctuated by moments of lyric epiphany: in short, a literary reverie allowing its bourgeois subjects to dream their post-apocalyptic, elegiac answers to questions that bear no conscious asking.

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction r. The first postwar concert of the Berlin Philarmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Leo Borchard, had already taken place on May 26, 1945, a mere seventeen days after the official capitulation of the German armed forces. Following Borchard's death (the result of an accidental shooting at a U.S. army checkpoint in late August 1945), and with Wilhelm Furtwangler barred from all public performances pending further investigation of his political role between 1933 and 1945, the young Romanian Sergiu Celibidache was appointed in October 1945 as the orchestra's new principal conductor. It was under his baton that the performances to which I am referring here took place in the ruins of the orchestra's prewar auditorium known as the Alte Philharmonic. The only photographic documentation that exists of these performances is contained in a 1954 documentary film about the Berlin Philarmonic Orchestra, Botschafter der Musik (alternatively titled Das klingende Herz). For more extensive documentation of the fast-paced reconstruction of musical and theater culture in postwar Berlin, see Chamberlin, Kultur auf Triimmern, a compilation of reports (translated into German) filed by U.S. military attaches. 2. For some accounts of the changing role of composition and performance in Romantic music, see Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era; Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music and Nineteenth-Century Music; and Rosen, Romantic Generation. 3· As David Simpson puts it, critical self-awareness should not yield to outright "professionalized bohemianism" (Academic Postmodern, So), there being already, as Jameson has noted, an abundance of "delirious non-stop monologue" and "in-group narratives" (Postmodernism, 368) in contemporary academia. 4· For the quote from Lyotard, see Simpson, Academic Postmodern, 26. See also B. Johnson, Wake of Deconstruction, and, in the context of Romantic studies, Liu, "Local Transcendence," and, most recently, Steven Cole's very incisive critique of Romantic historicism, "Evading Politics." 5· Wahrman, Imagining, 1, 6. Wahrman quotes Gareth Stedman Jones, who

Notes to Pages 7-23 notes, "consciousness cannot be related to experience except through the interposition of a particular language which organizes the understanding of experience, and it is important to stress that more than one language is capable of articulating the same set of experiences" (ibid., 7 n. 12). 6. I take up the role of Smith and Hume below; see especially 26 and 289. Clifford Siskin particularly stresses the delay between the material emergence of the British middle class on the one hand and its political recognition and reflexive awareness on the other, arguing that only "the 183os marked the moment at which the constructs and strategies of Romantic texts became 'normal' within and for the very culture that had produced them" ("Prescriptions," 305). 7· For an introduction to the formal classification of English poetry between 1760 and 1810, see Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 56-59, 128-3 3· 8. See Swartz, "Wordsworth, Copyright, and the Commodities of Genius," an extension of his earlier "Patrimony and the Figuration of Authorship," and Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech, 192-212. On the law of copyright and its implicit model of literary property in eighteenth-century England, see also Rose, "Author in Court"; Ross, "Authority and Authenticity"; and my own "Pragmatics of Genre."

Description r. Though by 1770 Dissenting Protestants (Quakers, Presbyterians, Independents, Congregationalists) constituted only 7 percent of the population, some studies suggest that they may have contributed more than 40 percent of all entrepreneurs in England. See Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, 44-5!. 2. As Pocock notes, the institution of a system of public credit, with the foundation of the Bank of England in 1695, resulted in the "sudden and traumatic discovery of historical transformation as something brought about by the advent of public credit" (Virtue, ro8). 3· Pocock, Virtue, II2. See also Haber mas, Structural Transformation, 57-67. 4· Sec Williams, Marxism and Literature, 121-27. Williams's categories are only of limited use, however, since the ultimate justification of what qualifies a representational practice as "emergent" rather than "dominant" presupposes an authoritative interpretation of the relation between a specific style or genre, an aesthetic movement, and a historical period's mode of production. 5· The issue of whether the electorate actually decreased or increased in the second half of the century is rather contested. For an argument against the thesis of Whig historiography-viz., that the electoral process deteriorates as the century wears on-see O'Gorman, "Unreformed Electorate"; O'Gorman's statistics largely ignore the court's manipulation of parliamentary majorities and the parliament's own electoral gerrymandering. Even during the 1790s, "257 supposed Representatives of the People, making a Majority of the House of Commons, are re-

Notes to Pages 24-28 turned by a Number of Voters not exceeding the thousandth part of the Nation." "Address of the London Corresponding Society to the Nation at Large" (May 2.4, 1792.), in Thale, Selections. 6. Cornfield, "Class," 102.; also Briggs, "Language of 'Class.'" 7· See Porter, English Society, 98-12.8; Osborne, "Politics of Resentment"; Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society"; and Pocock, Virtue, 103-2.3. 8. Larson, Rise of Professionalism, xvii. Larson's book addresses primarily the rise of legal, economic, and medical professionalism in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both in England and America. More recently, David Lieberman has offered an excellent study of the growing professionalization and disciplinary ethos of the law in eighteenth-century England; see his Province of Legislation Determined. 9· Smith, Wealth of Nations, n9; italics mine. The passage substantially restates the argument of Smith's 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments concerning the grounds of distinction available to "the man of inferior rank .... He must acquire superior knowledge in his profession, and superior industry in the exercise of it. He must be patient in labour, resolute in danger, and firm in distress. These talents he must bring into public view, by the difficulty, importance, and, at the same time, good judgment of his undertakings" (54-55). 10. Christensen, Practicing, 19. Similarly, Siskin draws the critical distinction between "asking how professionalization altered literary activity" and "how literary activity constructed the professional" ("Prescriptions," 309). It is the latter issue with which this book will be concerned throughout. II. For early usages of "class," see the essays by Briggs and Cornfield and, of course, the exemplary analysis offered by Wahrman's recent Imagining the Middle Class. For an early example of the rise of sociological writing and, corresponding to it, the policing of "class," see Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes (1795). Specifically with reference to the 1790s, Wahrman discusses how the emergent middle class of the 1790s came to challenge the earlier, polite fiction of the Parliament as an organ of "virtual representation" (in direct contradistinction to the French assembly as a body of delegates): "As far as the public in Britain was concerned, there was no single image of parliament available to and shared by everyone. Instead the public was confronted with a plurality of representations, in which diverging political languages were employed to address differently formulated concerns" ("Virtual Representation," 85). In placing the terms "class" and "middle class" in quotation marks, I mean to acknowledge their heuristic status in this argument, which, in viewing these categories as the outcome of an unconscious process, suspends the factual stability that historians (though not Wahrman) so frequently accord them. 12.. This may even hold true for John Barrell, whose contention that by exploring "how a correct taste, here especially for landscape and landscape art, was used in this period as a means of legitimating political authority" seems close to my own argument (Birth, 41). Yet for Barrell, the preoccupation with landscape art

Notes to Pages 29-30 constitutes a fundamentally nostalgic phenomenon that is primarily invested in the ownership of "fixed property" and thus is driven by the old Machiavellian (and Harringtonian) ideal of "civic humanism." However, his claim that the citizen's "ability to generalise, a correct taste in landscape, and the claim to be capable of exercising political authority [constitute) an instantiation of his ability to abstract the true interests of humanity" (52) ignores the fact, central in my view, that the representation of political and property ("monied") interests was increasingly driven by the virtual and future-based logic of the market, of communal selfdefinition, and not by the allure of landed, substantive power. Diffusing that historical tension into the aesthetic distinction between "panoramic" and "accidental" (42) landscapes, Barrell relies on the (inescapably contingent) opposition between "public interest" and a "private sphere" (57). By contrast, my own argument seeks to grasp the Picturesque as instancing an emergent, middle-class political economy in an aesthetic practice, a functional aggregation of "purely" formal discriminations that surreptitiously generates a community of "taste." Naturalized as "sensibility," the Picturesque can be seen to herald a new social formation groping toward adequate representations of its economic and political identity and thereby producing the formal-aesthetic infrastructure that, by the start of the nineteenth century, will facilitate its self-recognition as "middle-class." 13. On gardening, see Hussey, Picturesque, 128-85, and Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 9-32. Brown's and Repton's Picturesque architectonics of landscape were, of course, severely strictured by Uvedale Price's 1795 essay On the Picturesque and Richard Payne Knight's work published in the same year, The Landscape, which is discussed below. 14· See Liu's Wordsworth, where he argues for an understanding of the Picturesque as "evacuated liturgy" (87), as well as the more wide-ranging discussions of developments in the visual arts during the later eighteenth century by Morris Eaves and Nigel Everett. 15. On the "grand tour,~' see Hussey, Picturesque, 83ff., and Barrell, Dark Side, 3-6. The most recent empirical examination of Picturesque tourism in England is that offered by Andrews, In Search, 83-240. 16. On the Picturesque as visual enclosure, see Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 11-14, and Liu, Wordsworth, 91-115, where he subsumes this idea under his larger argument for the Picturesque as structurally cognate with political institutions. By contrast, Barrell's work has accorded historical centrality to the material practice of enclosure itself, though he, too, regards it as a displacement, naturalization, or obfuscation of the political and economic status of British landscape in the later eighteenth century. Thus, with varying stress and orientation, Liu, Bermingham, and Andrews-all of whom acknowledge a profound debt to Barrell-have offered political readings of Picturesque form as "unapparent interpretation" and as a "historically knowable cultural formalism: institution" (Liu, Wordsworth, 76, 85). While Liu's argument, far more complex and evocative than Bermingham's and Andrews's readings, continues to inform my subsequent read-

Notes to Pages 30-34 ings, it should already be stressed that my own focus will be primarily on the

efficiency of Picturesque practices, that is, on Picturesque cultural pragmatics, which I understand as the instantiation of a sensibility as an authoritative cultural value (if also an elaborately naturalized value, which accounts for Liu 's correct and perceptive characterization of form as "unapparent interpretation"). On statistics and general information about the development of enclosure in the later eighteenth century, see Porter, English Society, 2o8-r3. r7. Elsewhere, I have elaborated the theoretical question concerning the social and cultural efficiency of aesthetic forms, i.e., their place within a performative conception of praxis; see my "Immediacy and Dissolution." r8. I fundamentally concur with Liu's characterization of the Picturesque as "the basic Protestant method of rehearsing culture" (Wordsworth, 104) and, already in its incipience in the late seventeenth century, as "a garden of liberalism" (Nikolaus Pevsner, quoted ibid.). On the asymmetrical relation of Picturesque practice to the statics of Palladian architecture and explicitly cultivated gardens (in the mode of Capability Brown and Repton), see Martin Price, "Picturesque Moment," and Andrews, In Search, where he notes, "the beginnings of Picturesque tourism in Britain ... coincided with strong challenges to the cultural authority of Greek and Roman literature, and with attempts to give an English vernacular flavor to classical genres of poetry" (4; see also 40-41, 59). 19. Though these issues will be developed in greater detail below, I should acknowledge here my intellectual debt to Alan Liu's brilliant analysis of The Ruined Cottage (Wordsworth, 3II-58). 20. In using a concept as troublesome as "ideology," I take for my point of departure Williams's notation, in Marxism and Literature, of a paradoxical tension between two competing usages of the word: "Ideology then hovers between 'a system of beliefs characteristic of a certain class' and 'a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge.' This uncertainty was never really resolved" (66). This question, dovetailed with that regarding the interpretive relationship between a historical field and its necessarily belated ideological critique, cannot be answered categorically. Suffice it to remark that the aesthetic practices subsumed under the Picturesque prove so complex, malleable, and continually evolving as to vitiate any one critical category. As Williams has already suggested in The Country and the City, the dialectic of rural and urban England furnishes an exemplary case for the intersection of political and aesthetic representation in the later eighteenth century (12o-8r). In the context of urban life, it should be remembered, the artisans, shop keepers, tradesmen (especially the dissenters among them), and manufacturers were for the most part excluded from all political representation. By 1793, electoral reform had effectively superseded the French Revolution as the dominant topic of political debate. Widespread concern with the current electoral arrangements also galvanized London's increasingly diverse political subculture during the 1790s, with the

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Notes to Pages 34-38

Friends of the People, the Society for Constitutional Information, and the London Corresponding Society variously stating the grievances of their respective groups. See Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 26-r8 5, and, on the earlier backlash against cosmopolitanism and French high culture in rnos England, Newman, Rise, 35-39. 2 r. Rorty, Contingency, 52; italics mine. On the interrelation between theories of value, the justification of aesthetic value judgment, and the discursive constitution of cultural communities, see Herrnstein-Smith, Contingencies of Value, 30-53· 22. In Althusser and Balibar, Reading "Capital," 17, 29. I here follow Jameson's critical assessment of Althusser in Political Unconscious, 74-89. In speaking of a homology of political, economic, and aesthetic factors in the context of the Picturesque, I wish to draw out Martin Price's hint that the "aesthetic interest [of the Picturesque]lies in the emergence of formal interest ... or in the internal conflict between the centrifugal forces of dissolution and the centripetal pull of form" ("Picturesque Moment," 277). 23. Andrews points out some of these contradictions at the very beginning of his book, though he seems less inclined to consider these contradictions themselves as part of the historical and critical significance of the Picturesque; see In Search, 3-4· 24. In stressing the iterability of the Picturesque as a set of historically determinate practices, I shift emphasis away from Liu's deeply insightful reading. The interest of this argument is on the ideological efficacy of the Picturesque rather than on its historicomaterial debts and constraints. Needless to say, such a shift also qualifies the otherwise powerful influence of Marxist accounts of "determinism" on contemporary cultural studies. On this issue, see Jameson, Political Unconscious, 39-45, and Williams, Marxism and Literature, 83-107. 25. To qualify the often facile application of a Marxian notion of "contradiction," we should recall the eighteenth century's unique capacity for turning apparent contradictions into stimuli for further psychological and rhetorical investments. Speaking of Hume's ambivalent philosophical prose, Christensen thus remarks on his ability to cultivate "rhetoric [as) both the sign of logical contradiction or inconsistency and the device for putting inconsistency to work," or, simply, to "reinscribe the disturbing within the ordinary." Practicing, 14-15. 26. Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. r, entry no. r675. On Garve, see also K. Coburn's note to this entry. Coleridge's copy of Carve's collected writings (Vermischte Aufsiitze [Breslau, r8or )) and possible marginal notes of his have not been preserved, however. On landscape in Coleridge's Notebooks, see Baker, "Landscape as Textual Practice." 27. Occasionally, this "absenting" of labor poses empirical difficulties, as in Thomas West's account of "Station III" near Derwent Water in his Guide to the Lakes. There West remarks on "one impediment [that] attends his descriptions, which will in part prevent their permanency, and that is, the annual fall of timber

Notes to Pages 38-47

391

and coppice-wood, and the frequent removal of picturesque trees" (88-89n). The sound of the "woodman's echo'd stroke" along with other images of lateafternoon, completed labor recurs also in Wordsworth's An Evening Walk (EW, II. 107-24 [1793 text]). Bermingham's argument that "the landscape garden's aesthetic effect depended on a completely nonfunctional, nonproductive usc of land" and that "as the real landscape began to look increasingly artificial, like a garden, the garden began to look increasingly natural, like the preenclosed landscape" (Landscape and Ideology, 13-14) has been recently been contested persuasively by Daniels and Watkins, "Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management," and by Copley, "William Gilpin and the Black-Lead Mine," in Copley and Garside, Politics of the Picturesque. 28. On seventeenth-century topographical accounts, James Turner remarks, "landscape art was a dominant unifying influence, not so much in its pictorial effect as in offering structural principles which could convert topography into a dazzling artifact ... sustained by a coherent ideology of Nature and Place, which had long been given the privileged status of a natural philosophy." Politics of Landscape, 5· 29. "Time is landscaped as well as space. History becomes typology; past and present make one 'certaine image'-a perpetual and beneficent status quo opposed to the perennial forces of evil, the future being accordingly dismal or glorious"; Turner, Politics of Landscape, 44· On Denham's poem, including its multiple revisions, which correspond to political and military developments of the Civil War, see also 49-6r. 30. For complementary observations on Dyer's poem, see Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 34-35. Earlier in the book, Barrell also offers an astute description of the beholder's eye "travelling" through Claude's paintings, themselves usually set "on rising ground" (n). 3r. All quotations of Thomson are taken from The Seasons, cd. James Sambrook, henceforth cited parenthetically. On the emergence of "nation" and "empire" see Colley's Britons, especially IOI-45· 32. The most elaborate comparison of Claude and Thomson is by Barrell; see Idea of Landscape, 6-27. His argument that "a descriptive poem ... , through the energy and disposition of its verbs especially, can imitate the way in which the poet has perceived the relationships between the objects he describes, and between those objects and himself" (17) has been questioned by Andrews, who maintains, perhaps not entirely to the point, that Flemish landscape painting far exceeded in influence the impact of Claude in England and that, in any event, Thomson was most likely not at all acquainted with Claude; In Search, 22-23. See also Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, and, for a critique of her study, Michasiw, "Nine Revisionist Theses." 33· Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3, II. 77-78. On Milton's use of topographical description and perspectival technique, see Turner, Politics of Landscape, 22-35. 34· Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 14. For two opposed general dis-

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Notes to Pages 48-6r

cussions of these issues, see Bermingham's chapter "The Picturesque Decade" (Landscape and Ideology, 57-86) and Everett's Tory View, especially his chapters "A Noble Estate" and "A Sort of National Property." 35. Colley, Britons, I77· Although noting that it is "the taste of the aristocracy here that stands most in need of explanation," Barrell also points out "the increasing interest on the part of the aristocracy in the efficient management of their estates, if less often in the details of husbandry itself; of the increasing exploitation of the mineral resources on their lands; of the increasing opportunities for them to engage in manufacturing projects, in short of all the activities by which the landed aristocracy maintained its political hegemony through the eighteenth century, as the economic basis of power shifted from agriculture to industry and commerce." Idea of Landscape, 8. 36. This logic of production has been superbly articulated by Guillory. Speaking of Gray's "Elegy," he describes that poem's style as "the systematic linguistic normalization of quotation, a compositional method of translation, decontextualization, and grammatical revision." Gray's idiom reflects a "linguistic ambivalence" among "the 'middling' and commercial classes ... toward the classical languages as useless knowledge, and envy of the social distinctions they represent."

Cultural Capital, 92, 97· 37· "Though the official ideology [of Thomson and his contemporaries], as it appears in their statements of the unity of Happy Britannia, is fraught with contradiction whenever we try to apply it to the specific classes in rural society, this is not to be thought of as an unintentional lapse, an embarrassing discord in the swelling hymn to England. It's essential to the success of that hymn that it should make these contradictory statements-it matters only that the contradiction should be as far as possible concealed." Barrell, Dark Side, 40. 38. See Pugh, Reading Landscape, especially Pugh's Introduction and the essay by D. Solkin. For a discussion of Gainsborough's "anti-urban" landscapes, usually "devoid of topographical landmarks" and thus, in a new generic sense, "countryside," see Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 33-54. 39· Gains borough, Letters, 4 3· On Gains borough's artistic career, see Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 33-54, and, focusing on the changing representation of the rural poor in his paintings, Barrell, Dark Side, 35-88. For a superb, comprehensive discussion of Gainsborough, see Hayes, Landscape Paintings. 40. As Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau note, "antagonism" is not simply "contradiction," a "lamentable confusion" of Marxists. Instead, they suggest, "antagonism" ought to be redescribed as the" 'experience' of the limit of all objectivity" in its discursive form. It is what forestalls "closure," and what as "the presence of the 'Other' prevents me from being totally myself. The relation arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution." In that sense, again, antagonism is being defined as "the 'experience' of the limit of the social." Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 12 5. 41. Guillory, Cultural Capital, xi. Guillory offers a long-overdue theoretical

Notes to Pages 6z-66

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formulation for what James Heffernan had described as the late-eighteenth-century "difficult[ y) for any educated traveller even to see scenery without thinking of pictures, much less describe it without doing so." Re-creation of Landscape, 15. See also Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision, and Paulson, Literary Landscape. 42. Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 3-4. On the "grand tour," see Newman, Rise, 42-44· 43· Holcroft, review of Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches, in Monthly Review (Oct. 1793), reprinted in RR, Pt. A, 2:704-5. 44- See Knight, Analytical Inquiry, nn, 19n. As Barrell notes, "the importance of [the] separation of the poet from the landscape ... is reflected in the poetic vocabulary of the eighteenth century, and particularly in those words which were more or less interchangeable with the word 'landscape' itself-'view,' 'prospect,' 'scene'" (Idea of Landscape, 23); sec also his remarks earlier in the same book on the generally elevated vantage point of the beholding subject (21). 45· Sec Liu, Wordsworth, 100, and, more generally, 91-II5. See also Andrews's discussion of changes in the practice of "stationing" the beholder (In Search, 60-64). The formal distinctions emphasized by Andrews are given a more political reading in Barrell's recent "The Public Prospect and the Private View," in his Birth of Pandora. 46. Brown, in West, Guide to the Lakes, 192-93. Brown's letter was included as an addendum to the third edition of West's book. 47· Knight, The Landscape, I. 69n. Among the various paraphernalia designed to enhance and reconfigure an empirical field into a psychological "effect" are the telescope, the so-called Claude glass, "a landscape mirror [which], where the objects are great and near, ... removes them to a due distance, and shews them in the soft colours of nature, and in the most regular perspective the eye can perceive, or science demonstrate" (West, Guide to the Lakes, 12). Another device to dramatize spatial relationships in such locales as the vale of Ullswater, often described as an "amphitheatre," was a boat outfitted to produce echoes. As Thomas Hutchinson reports in his Excursion to the Lakes, "a vessel was provided with six brass canon, mounted on swivels; on discharging one of these pieces, the report was echoed from the opposite rocks .... At intervals we were relieved from this entertainment, which consisted of a kind of wond'rous tumult and grandeur of confusion, by the music of two French horns, whose harmony was repeated from every recess which echo haunted, on the borders of the lake .... All this vast theatre was possessed by innumerable aerial beings, who breathed celestial harmony" (68-70). For further empirical information, see Bicknell, "Picturesque Scenery." 48. As Peter deBolla has exhaustively documented, publications on the representational technique of perspective were abundant; see his Discourse of the Sublime, 186-222. Arguing, often laboriously, for the individual body as the center of the cultural spectacle of beholding, deBolla ignores altogether the economic and political motivation that also shapes such cultural practices. Picturesque prac-

394

Notes to Pages 67-77

tice is centered not on the individual subject of experience but on its social communicability in a set of formal-aesthetic languages that require both the material leisure and discursive proficiency characteristic of the middle class. For a fine discussion of Priestley's unique combination of scientific, millenarian, and economic interests into a "scientific liberalism," see Kramnick, Republicanism, 71-98. 49· See especially Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 38-42; so-s8. Also instructive on this point are Barbier, William Gilpin; Andrews, In Search, 39-66; and Barrell's recent "Private Comedy of Thomas Rowlandson," in his Birth of Pandora. 50. For a general introduction to Gilpin's career, see Barbier, William Gilpin, 98-q7, and Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 63-85. sr. Discussions of "roughness" as a principal requirement in Picturesque representation are abundant in all the major texts on the Picturesque, ranging from the study by Hussey to the works of Martin Price, Ann Bermingham, Alan Liu, and Malcolm Andrews. A sustained discussion of the term in Picturesque theory outside of Gilpin's works can be found in Knight's Analytical Inquiry, 66-79. 52. The masculine pronoun intones the abiding association of Picturesque "roughness" with the sublime and, by implication, with a generic cultural figuration of masculinity. It ought to be stressed, however, that Picturesque travel was almost equally popular with middle-class women, albeit always in "appropriate" company. Indeed, the liberal practice of Picturesque travel and sketching was far more accessible to women than was the predominantly masculine institution of the earlier "grand tour." A caustic remark by Coleridge furthermore hints that the eventual dismissal of the Picturesque as contrived and overused would be projected back onto woman as the ever-available master trope of a culture grown parasitical, unoriginal, bookish, and mindlessly reproductive: "Ladies reading Gilpin's &c while passing by the very places instead of looking at the places" (Notebooks, vol. r, no. 760). 53· William Gilpin, letter to William Lock, Feb. 24, 1790, quoted in Barbier, William Gilpin, r23-24. 54· Ibid., 142. 55. Tbe well-known phrase "the Jacobinism of Taste" is Anna Seward's, quoted in Everett, Tory View, rr6. The most famous defense against this charge, not surprisingly, is also found in Knight's notorious, hypertrophic footnote, which attempts to recover from the unexpectedly radical light in which his middle-class, aesthetic nonconformism appears to place him in 1793. For a helpful discussion of the often confusing politics of the Picturesque in the context of the French Revolution controversy, see Everett, 91-122. On Whig connections between Charles James Fox, Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and other theoreticians of the Picturesque, see Robinson's Inquiry into the Picturesque, 14-16, 73-89. 56. Burke's passage continues its complex metaphoric elaboration of the recently established table of chemical elements, one of his many ambivalent reactions to modern science. For a more extended discussion of Burke, see especially Furniss, Burke's Aesthetic Ideology, 220-65.

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57· The remark derives from Novalis's collection of aphorisms, dated from 1797/98 and entitled Bluthenstaub (Pollen). It reads, in toto: "Many antirevolutionary books have been written on behalf of the [French] Revolution. Yet Burke wrote a revolutionary book against the Revolution" (Werke, 2: 278; translation mine). For helpful discussions of Burke's rhetoric in Reflections, see Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language; Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 35-67; and Furniss, 89-n2. I return to Reflections below, 280. 58. Wordsworth, Salisbury Plain Poems, II. 397,298-324. Barrell has explored instances of this contradiction in eighteenth-century landscape paintings, such as in the perplexing coexistence of laborers laboring in the landscape virtually side by side with gentlemen beholding, reading, and sketching that landscape, as for example in George Lambert's Hilly Landscape with a Cornfield, reproduced and discussed by Barrell in Dark Side, 43-45. 59· I will take up the issue of Wordsworth's pragmatic management of difference, both in a social and historical sense, in "Instruction," below, 179. 6o. See Herrnstein-Smith, Contingencies of Value, 54-84, and her "Belief and Resistance." 61. Hutchinson, quoted by Stephen Copley, in Copley and Garside, Politics

of the Picturesque, so-sr. 62. For a social analysis of the rise of aesthetic theory and practice in eighteenth-century Germany, see Woodmansee, Author. 63. In sections 39-40 of the third Critique, Kant further explores the issue of "communicability" and "sensus communis"; see Cr], 133-38. 64. A bill for this amount was first drawn and delivered to the Earl of Lonsdale in August 1786; legal proceedings began by January 1788, and the injunction for Lowther to pay £4,000 was tried at the assizes in Carlisle during the summer of 1791. Reminiscent of the legal case in Bleak House, the proceedings filled some 1,830 folios with documentation and were resolved in favor of the Wordsworth siblings, though the subsequent arbitration of the amount was not concluded until the death of Lord Lonsdale in r8o2. At that point, an agreement between his heir and Wordsworth was reached and some £8,ooo were disbursed. See Moorman, William Wordsworth, I: 167-69, 558. 65. For a similar discussion of the logic of "composition" in Humc, sec Christensen, Practicing, 24-26. 66. Rev. Henry Bate, quoted in Cormack, Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, 140. 67. Gentleman's Magazine (Mar. 1794), reprinted in RR, Pt. A, 2: 554-55; italics mine. 68. Gentleman's Magazine (Mar. 1794), reprinted in RR, Pt. A, 2: 554-55; italics mine. 69. On the cultural logic of Wordsworth's perambulatory poetics, see Jeffrey Robinson, The Walk; Harrison, Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse; and Langan, Romantic Vagrancy.

Notes to Pages roo-ro9 70. See especially Turner's The Devil's Bridge, Pass of St. Gotthard (r8o2) and his monumentalr8o3 canvas entitled St Huges Denouncing the Vengeance on the Shepherd of Cormayer, in the Valley of d'Aoust. See Wilton, Turner in His Time, 48, 54; also Geoffrey Hartman's praise for the 1794 revisions of An Evening Walk as "less aggressively mimetic, less under the oppression of sight and rich externals." Hartman expands: "As the literal shapes deepen, a prophetic despair arises. We glimpse here the real, if submerged drama: his mind faces the coming of a night in which that variegated nature is no more." Yet Hartman hastens to reassure us (or himself), "Wordsworth's hold on phenomena proves strong enough to reveal the life that persists in darkness." Wordsworth's Poetry, 93n, 94· 71. See Underwood's recent work "Productivism and the Vogue for 'Energy' " and Liu's historicization of Wordsworth's notion of "power" in Wordsworth, 46068. Also see Pocock's remarks on Burke's attempt to conceptualize a bourgeois class by drawing on images of alchemical "combination" and "energetick" entrepreneurship and by speaking, usually with great distrust, of an "electrick communication" prevailing among them. Virtue, 204-ro. 72. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 92. As Celeste Langan has argued, similar strategies of containing and sublating figures of economic abjection can be found throughout Wordsworth's corpus. See her reading of The Ruined Cottage in Romantic Vagrancy, 238-71. 73· Regarding Keats's criticism of Wordsworth's "Gipsies," see his letter to Benjamin Bailey, Oct. 29, r8r7, in Letters of john Keats, r: 173-74. On Margaret in The Ruined Cottage, see de Quincey, quoted in Liu, Wordsworth, 322. 74· European Magazine (Sept. 1793), reprinted in RR, Pt. A, 2: sor; and Critical Review (July 1793), in RR, Pt. A, r: 298. 75· Though generally in agreement with Liu's discussion of the unstable "figure-ground relations" in An Evening Walk-a "pastiche of calm ... supremely edgy with remembered terror"-! here part with his lucid critique of the descriptive ideology undergirding that poem (Wordsworth, 122-25). I do so out of a conviction that it is imperative for any reading of the poem to articulate the ideological "function" or "motivation" underlying the persistent conflict between muteness and expressivity, as well as its overt descriptive and covert narrative interests. Even at its most mimetic and referential, Wordsworth's "romance of description" (Liu, Wordsworth, 127) activates an early-capitalist, cryptoprofessional motivation. It is this figural logic of self-making that prompted Hartman to remark long ago of An Evening Walk that behind its "gallery of discrete pictures" there lurks "the greater theme ... [of] the growth of the poet's mind" (Wordsworth's Poetry, 93). 76. On the logic of cultural production instantiated by the eighteenth-century "man of letters," see Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 69-93, and Christensen's particularly cogent study of Hume, Practicing, r2o-2oo. 77· In the context of The Philanthropist, Wordsworth aims to strike the optimal balance between risking an investment and yielding profits to a publisher:

Notes to Pages no-IZ

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"You ... may be better able to judge how far our publisher may be induced to circulate the work with additional spirit if he himself participates in the profits. For my part I should wish that if possible it were printed entirely at our own risk and for our own emolument." LWEY, r27. 78. Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, July 10 and 12, 1793: "I hear you point out a spot where, if we could erect a little cottage and call it our own we should be the happiest of human beings" (L WEY, 97, original emphasis). See also her April21, 1794, letter to Jane Pollard, in which Dorothy, now relishing the presence of William at Keswick, devises an elaborate description of the perspective on scenery from "the window of the room where I write" (LWEY, 114-15). Gains borough, reflecting on the gradually improving reputation of landscape art and the correlative ascendancy of his painterly and professional reputation, anticipates Dorothy's anxious reflection on the prospects of her brother's literary ventures. Writing to his close friend, the composer William Jackson, Gainsborough concedes his friend's "comparison betwixt our different professions to be just provided you remember that in mine a Man may do great things and starve in a Garret if he does not conquer his Passions and conform to the Common Eye in chusing that branch in which they will encourage & pay for.... If Music will not satisfye you without a Certainty (which by the by is nonsense, begging your pardon, for there is no such thing in any profession), then I say be a Painter-You have more of the painter than half those that get money by it, that I will swear, if you desire it, upon a Church Bible. You want a little drawing and the use of pencil and colours which I could put in your hand in one month, without meddling with your head .... There is a branch of Painting next in profit to Portrait and quite in your power without any more drawing than I'll answer for your having, which is Drapery & Landskip backgrounds" (Gainsborough, Letters, 118-19). 79· Simpson, Academic Postmodern, 138, 141. Simpson notes further, "to embrace localism, whether in the image of the owner-occupier or of the organically integrated Tory squire, ... was to gesture against the new wealth, and against a subculture that liked to speak French, to travel, and to imagine itself as belonging to a worldwide citizenry" (142). The careful rhetorical and visual construction of the persona of the "owner-occupier" and his estate by the theoreticians of the Picturesque assisted these representatives of the "new wealth" in "unknowing" their own complicity in a speculative capitalist order whose contingent and virtual paradigm of afr1uence they resented. Simpson also emphasizes the inherently transferential character of a "fantasized localism" when remarking of the bourgeoisie, "the very modernization against which localism was in reaction was itself the condition of their emergence" (142). So. On this economic shift, see Christensen, "Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy." 81. Marx, Selected Writings, 450. I have modified McLellan's translation slightly and restored Marx's italics from Das Kapital. The German reads: "In der Tat aber wird der Wert hier das Subjekt eines Prozesses, worin er unter dem bestan-

Notes to Pages IIJ-26 digen Wechsel der Formen von Geld und Ware seine Groge selbst verandert, sich als Mehrwert von sich selbst als ursprtinglichem Wert absrofSt, sich selbst verwertet. Denn die Bewegung, worin er Mehrwert zusetzt, ist seine eigene Bewegung, seine Verwertung also Selbstverwertung. Er hat die okkulte Qualitat erhalten, Wert zu setzen, wei! er Wert ist. Er wirft lebendige Junge oder legt wenigstens goldene Eier." Okonomische Schriften, 149. 82. Burke, "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity" (1795), in Writings and Speeches, 9: 137. 83. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, 244- As Marx puts it in Kapital, what accounts for "the enigmatical character of the product of labor, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities" is a direct result of "this [commodity] form itself" (Selected Writings, 436). ("Woher entspringt also der ratselhafte Charakter des Arbeitsproduktes, sobald es Warenform annimmt? Offenbar aus dieser Form selbst." Okonomische Schriften, 47.) 84. See "Transcriptions of Additions to MS. D" of The Ruined Cottage, in RC, 371-75. 8 5. Wordsworth's analysis of poetic cognition in this passage seems remarkably close to Schelling's 1797 Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge. Sec my translation of the latter text in my Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, especially 76-104. 86. For strong examples of this "sympathetic" reenactment of the poem's professed faith in a rigorously philosophical idiom-it being all the while understood that the "faith" pledged in the poem and the "rigor" professed by its readers function on the same ideological axis-sec Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime, and Foster, "Scene of Writing." 87. Levinson, Great-Period Poems, rr, 37, 39, 50, 51. Even now, the seductive appeal of Romantic belief has its advocates, as the vehement repudiation of the New Historicist project by M. H. Abrams and Thomas McFarland suggests. Betraying their axiomatically religious relationship to Romanticism, Abrams and McFarland in particular have chosen the textual site of "Tintern Abbcy"-allegedly ruined by the secular industry of Marjorie Levinson's, Kenneth Johnston's, and Jerome McGann's Marxist and contextualist critiques-as the New Jerusalem for their crusade on behalf of a spiritually activist criticism that seeks to shelter the poetic word from the taint of historical reference. See McFarland, "Dessication of William Wordsworth," in his William Wordsworth; Abrams, "On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads"; and Bromwich's "French Revolution and 'Tintern Abbey,'" a lucid critique of Levinson's interpretation of the poem. 88. Levinson, Great-Period Poems, 12. See also Levinson's "The New Historicism: Back to the Future," in Rethinking Historicism. 89. See Sneyd Davies, ''A Voyage to Tintern Abbey" (1742; published 1745); Edmund Gardner, "Sonnet Written in Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire" (1796); and a number of other lyrics listed by Mayo in his "Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,'' 492-93 n. 8. Also see Turner's Transept ofTintern Abbey, Monmouth-

Notes to Pages I26-46

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shire, a watercolor and pencil sketch dating to c. 1794 (figure 14). On the genesis of Picturesque tourism specifically in the Wye Valley, see Andrews, In Search, 83-107. 90. In his particularly searching and astute reading of "Tin tern Abbey," Mark Foster often comes close to my own pragmatist reading of Wordsworth. He states: "Poetry ... is for Wordsworth the means of finding or constituting himself in the world, where both self and world did not, in any precise sense, exist before .... Because certainty is suspended in the immediate and unfolding poetic project, Wordsworth is simultaneously driven to create a justification for his enterprise ... because [his] self is unattainable and incomprehensible except through the power of an emergent discourse whose fate is open to question" ("Scene of Writing," 8990). For a more traditional reading that situates "Tintern Abbey" carefully within more familiar literary boundaries, see Jacobus, Tradition, ros-30. 91. Mary Jacobus, for whom "nature becomes a catalyst for the continuities of memory," is more inclined to give Wordsworth's rhetorical organization of inwardness the benefit of doubt (bearing in mind, however, that inwardness in "Tintern Abbey" only eventuates as a doubting, radically Cartesian agency). Notwithstanding her expansive recovery of the poem's extensive rhetorical filiations with previous poetry, Jacobus does not appear to register any tension between the poem's rhetoric of inwardness and her own, axiomatic conception of such inwardness as authentically "expressive." See Tradition, 123. 92. Wordsworth's habit of projecting, by means of contiguities subtly derived from his descriptive and meditative figures, an "unsteady private conviction" onto a universal, transpersonal "we" has also been noted by Wolfson, Questioning Presence, 62, and by Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime, 34-40. 93· Koerner, Friedrich, r82, r66. On Friedrich's temporalized landscapes, Alice Kuzniar remarks that "landscape painting uses empirical nature as a covering or veil which it then removes to reveal the invisible world. On the other hand, this revelation is self-cancelling, for all intuition of the idea depends on the subject. Thus not only is all depiction/interpretation of landscape subjective, but moreover landscape painting exemplarily expresses the notion of romantic subjectivity. It paradoxically denies the existence of the natural world it seems to portray." "Temporality of Landscape" (74). 94· Throughout the poem, "the effect of the statement is to display what it disclaims"; "what [Wordsworth] excludes emerges with fuller descriptive power than what he owns" (Wolfson, Questioning Presence, 64-65). Instruction I. The Kenneth Burke epigraph is from his "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," in American Writers' Congress, ed. Henry Hart, but is quoted here from Lentricchia, Criticism, 26, 28. 2. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, "The Rights of Women" (c. 1792), reprinted in Ashfield, Romantic Women Poets, 17-18.

400

Notes to Pages r46-52

3· In support of this position, see Fish, There's No Such Thing, especially the title essay and "Jerry Falwell's Mother, or, What's the Harm?" 4· Dissent, both political and religious, and radical politics continued, of course. Their constituencies, however, were now less the radical or reformist middle-class intellectuals of the 1790s discussed by Kramnick (Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism), Epstein (Radical Expression), and Goodwin (Friends of Liberty), than they were the artisans, shopkeepers, and day laborers of the city whose influence has been discussed by Thompson (Making ofthe English Working Class) and McCalmain (Radical Underworld), and the rural laborers so untiringly represented by William Cobbett and recently reexamined by Dyck (Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture). 5. On the question of the industrious middle class and its fixation on the idea of genteel, rural, independently affluent "retirement," see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 225-33. 6. See the works by Brian Simon, Lawrence Stone, David Vincent, and Harold Silver listed below in the bibliography. Also of interest are Laqueur, "Toward a Cultural Ecology of Literacy"; Richardson, Literature, 1-108; and Robert Altick, English Common Reader. Richardson is particularly helpful when the historicist pointillism of his study yields to critical synthesis; thus he sums up the muchdiscussed Bell-Lancaster controversy by noting that "writers on both sides of the debate were most often on ideological common ground" and that the same "set of discursive conventions is operative in the treatises of both Lancaster and Bell, and marks the monitorial writings of Mill, Bentham, and Brougham no less than those of Trimmer, Southey, and Coleridge" (103). 7· For a first, tentative exploration of the literary ramifications of Romantic "unconsciousness" or "anti-self-consciousness," see Hartman's essay "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness." In the context of the later Romantics, Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment offers a lucid discussion of issues central to this essay at a tonal, stylistic level. 8. While leaving England in 1787 with a mere £128, Bell negotiated and invested his salaries shrewdly; nine years later, he returned to England with a staggering £25,000. See the entry for Andrew Bell in the Dictionary of National Biography. 9· For a discussion of Locke's and Rousseau's impact on Romantic theories of catechistic instruction, see Richardson, Literature, 48-51. 10. In the words of the Manual of the System of Primary Instruction Pursued in the Model Schools of the British and Foreign Schools Society, "the first great and leading principle of the British system is that it is the teacher's duty to pay more regard to the formation of the character of his scholars than to the success in any, or all of the branches of learning professedly taught" (8). 11. The revised and vastly expanded Analysis of the Experiment in Education-being the third edition of Bell's 1797 treatise-offers the most explicit account of Bell's scheme and has since become the basis for most critical assessments

Notes to Pages 153-55

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of his monitorial system, including that offered by Jeremy Bentham in his Chrestomathia. r2. Joseph Lancaster's system, as presented for example in his 1810 publication The British System of Education, differs from Bell's system on several counts, including Lancaster's notorious preference for corporal punishment and his massmarketing of his educational system, which took him to Simon Bolivar's newly founded country and subsequently to New York. For general accounts of the rise of literacy, reading, and the displacement of oral culture between 1750 and the early twentieth century, see Vincent, Literacy; Stone, "Literacy and Education"; and Richardson, Literature, 91-103. On middle-class education, sec Simon, Studies, 102-25. For a discussion of the gradually fading objections to systems of public (including lower-class) literacy in early-nineteenth-century England, see Silver, English Education, 17-35. r3. For information on the adoption of Bell's system across England, see Foakes's excellent introduction to Coleridge's lecture on education of 18o8 in LL, r: 97-98. Foakes offers a more extended discussion with reference to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's considerable interest in Bell's system between r8o8 and 1812 in "Thriving Prisoners." The partisanship on behalf of Bell also involved Southey, whose Origin, Nature, and Object ofthe New System ofEducation was followed by the exceedingly tedious and belated three-volume Life ofthe Rev. Andrew Bell (only the first volume was written by Robert Southey, edited posthumously, by his wife; the remaining volumes were written by his son, Charles Cuthbert Southey). At some point, Andrew Bell had actually proposed Southey and Wordsworth as executors of his "literary" estate, though that wish was omitted from the final version of the will. Bell, the Bishop ofDurham, and Thomas Bernard, all vigorous advocates ofthe New School, were also subscribers to Coleridge's The Friend. On Bell and the followers of his monitorial system, see also Silver, English Education, 42-52. r 4· See also Blake's perhaps self-consciously melodramatic depiction of the youth going "to school in a summer morn I 0! it drives all joy away; I Under a cruel eye outworn." "The School Boy" (B, 31). 15. I concur with Lawrence Stone's caveat that "because of the wide variety of the objectives which men have had in mind when they sponsored or embarked on education, it is impossible to justify the use of distinctions like functional and non-functional." Stone regards the deceptively "non-functional status [of education] as serving a status-conferring or disciplinary function," as also stressed by Bell and Bentham. "Literacy and Education," 97· 16. The matter recurs throughout Stone's "Literacy and Education"; for an example, see 84-87. While a strong conjunction between Stone's empirical argument and more speculative theories of the 1790s seems plausible, this is not the place to explore the cause-effect relationship between, for instance, Kant's concept of aesthetic "disinterested pleasure" (uninteressiertes Wohlgefallen), a state of general though determinate affect said to precede its "interested" reflexive conceptualization by the conscious individual.

402

Notes to Pages I56-7I

17. Such "bourgeoisification" also illustrates the displacement of the Enlightenment's axiomatic faith in a universal rational standard for subjects of all classes effected by Bell's system of pedagogy. To contrast Bell's and Lancaster's approach with the vintage Enlightenment educational writings of Catharine Macaulayfor example her soo-pagc treatise of 1790 titled Letters on Education-is to notice the disestablishment of the content by the form of instruction and, by implication, the displacement of the Enlightenment's belief in the universality of reason and in the educability of individuals of all classes by a system in which pedagogy has become a tool for explicitly class-based social policing. 18. As Foucault remarks earlier, "discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise .... it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy" (Discipline and Punish, 170). His entire conception of discipline as the systematic "perfection of power [that] should tend to render ... its actual exercise unnecessary" proves homologous with the subject's reflexive policing of its cultural proficiency in the rhetorical and interpretive middle-class reading practices. On Bentham's chrestomathic system, sec Simon, Studies, 79-84. 19. Sarah Trimmer, The Oeconomy of Charity (r8o1), quoted in Vincent, Literacy, 73· Vincent also notes that Bell's and Lancaster's "artificial and complex structure" of monitorial instruction tended, by dint of its overly elaborate hierarchy and abundant technical discriminations, to exclude "parents and amateur teachers in private day schools" (77). 20. Morris Eaves's recent study of Boydell's ambitious, if ultimately unsuccessful, project of a "national" edition of Shakespeare "engraved by our best artisans" suggests how intertwined Coleridge's images of pedagogical "etching" is with the material practice of creating engraved, costly, and thus seemingly timeless cultural commodities; sec Eaves, Counter-Arts Conspiracy, 3 3-62. 21. For discussions of Coleridge's linguistic philosophy, see McKusick, Coleridge's Philosophy of Language, and Christensen, Coleridge's Blessed Machine. Critical of McKusick is Cole, "Coleridge, Language, and the Production of Agency"; see especially n9-25. 22. In a later version (r828) Coleridge continues as follows: "Ah me! amus'd by no such curious toys I Of the self-watching subtilizing mind, I How often in my early school-boy days I With most believing superstitious wish." Poetical Works, 24I. 2 3· On didactic fiction, the novel, and female reading audiences, see Richardson, Literature, 109-66. 2.4. For a concise and lucid discussion of the hermeneutics of reading Blake's Songs, see Rajan, Sufiplement of Reading, 222-34. 25. Zizek, Sublime Object, 45· For close readings of Blake's two songs, see Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 20-23. 26. PS, 489/ PG, 560. As Hegel elaborates, "time is the Notion [Begriff] itself

Notes to Pages

172-81

that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped [erfapt] its pure Notion, i.e. has not annulled Time [die Zeit tilgt]. It is the outer, intuited pure Self which is not grasped by the Self, the merely intuited Notion; when this latter grasps itself it set aside its Time-form, comprehends this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuiting. Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself." PS, 487 I PG, 558. See my discussion of Hegel (and of Alexander Kojeve's discussion of Hegel) below, 230. 2 7. As Alan Richardson notes, "the school is beginning to displace the church and other traditional communal institutions as the principal site for regulating social relations of power and domination" (Literature, 39). In detailing that transformation, his subsequent chapter, "School Time" (44-108) recaptures much of the valuable research on changes in literacy; the interdependency of changing socioeconomic demographics; transformations in the fiscal and curricular policies of Sunday schools, grammar schools, Dissenting academies, and the so called "public" or "great" schools (Eton, Winchester, Harrow, etc.); and the formulation of particular instructional methods, among them the catechistic model developed by Bell, Lancaster, and Bernard. 28. Wollstonecraft's narrative here exhibits some of the formal features of the ballad, as the construction of a past by a text purporting to ensure that past's survival; as such, the narrative's focus on Welsh musical culture is not insignificant either. As Prys Morgan has shown in an intriguing study, figures such as Edward Jones (1752.-r824), harpist to George IV and author of The Bardic Museum, "turned Welsh culture from being one of decaying but unselfconscious survival into self-aware revival, and the result, though often bogus, was never dull." "Hunt for the Welsh Past," 44· 2.9. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women, I 39· The text soon continues as follows: "Raised to heroism by misfortunes, [the widow] represses the first faint dawning of a natural inclination, before it ripens into love, and in the bloom of life forgets her sex-forgets the pleasure of an awakening passion, which might again have been inspired and returned. She no longer thinks of pleasing, and conscious dignity prevents her from priding herself on account of the praise which her conduct demands. Her children have her love, and her brightest hopes are beyond the grave, where her imagination often strays" (qo). As Cora Kaplan notes, Vindication "offers the reader a puritan sexual ethic with such passionate conviction that self-denial seems a libidinized activity." Sea Changes, 36. 30. William Wordsworth, letter to an unknown correspondent, Grasmere, Jan. 14, r8or, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: A Supplement, 3· Wordsworth's poetic simulation of a sublime cultural crisis is taken up below, 362.. 31. See Moorman, William Wordsworth, 2.: 176-8r. I shall not elaborate on Wordsworth's extensive conception of a national institution of education in book 9 of The Excursion, something also discussed by Moorman. As mentioned before,

Notes to Pages r8r-92 Bell had specified Wordsworth, along with Robert Southey, as executor of his literary estate. See note 13 above. 32. For general background information on the composition, literary contexts, publication, and reception of Lyrical Ballads, sec the Introduction to Lyrical Ballads, by James Butler and Karen Green, LB, 3-33; Moorman, William Wordsworth, 1: 359-407; Jordan, Why the "Lyrical Ballads"?, 9-52; and Parrish, Art of "Lyrical Ballads." On Wordsworth's role in the contemporary revival of the ballad form, see Jacobus, Tradition, 209-32; Mayo, "Contemporaneity," and Rajan, Supplement of Reading, 136-66. 33· The distinction follows Land's discussion of the evolution of eighteenthcentury linguistic theory in From Signs to Propositions. For another lucid discussion of paradigmatic shifts in linguistic theory between the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, see Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, r: 73163. The implications of these shifts for Romanticism's literary production and reception are explored with particular incisiveness by Raj an, Supplement of Reading, 15-35 and passim. See also Simpson's discussion of how, "in many of Wordsworth's poems, the 'first sight' produces either confusion or misreading, and must be corrected by a second look." Wordsworth, xvii. 34· "Though reader-response theory is often accused of approaching the reader in an insufficiently materialist way, literalizing the notion of audience by identifying it with a specific historical group is equally essentialist and has value more as a corrective than as truth. There are advantages to defining 'audience' as a blank that can be refilled in more than one way, while defining the audienceoriented text as an unstable compound of voices that can never quite be fixed." Raj an, Supplement of Reading, r66. 3 5. "That strangely intense response, never directly explained within the poem, is part of the frame or donnee of a situation now identified as an accessa new birth-of self-consciousness" (Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 13). On Wordsworth's lyric inflection of a generic middle-class and postrevolutionary melancholia, see Jacobus, Tradition, rs-37· 36. Reviews were themselves a means for extending the circulation of poetry; thus between 1798 and r8oo, "ten of the twenty-three poems in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads were reprinted in full in eight different magazines-some poems more than once" (Mayo, "Contemporaneity," 519). Considering the various reprintings of several ballads in anthologies of poetry, such duplication yielded "an audience of very considerable proportions which dwarfs by many thousands the r,250 to r,500 purchasers of the first two editions" (ibid., 520 n. 40). 37· As Sheats observes, "unassuming form of the ballad conceals an architectonic skill that recalls the lapidary art of Jonson or Horace." Consequently, "these poems ... argue a trust in the capacities of the reader that is itself an act of charity" (Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 203-4). Likewise, Glen focuses primarily on the countless "awkwardnesses, embarrassments and the uncertainties" and on how "the reader, expecting, and failing, to find some mediating comment, some autho-

Notes to Pages I92-zo6 rial direction, is forced into a recognition of the intransigent otherness of one of those whom even compassionate description, even enlightened protest, tended to sec as mere objects of polite moral consciousness" (Vision and Disenchantment, 260, 227). 38. Bialostosky, Making Tales, 104-59. See also Wolfson's discussion of the characteristic inversion of pedagogical authority in the 1798 ballads, where an adult frequently is the questioner and a child the respondent; Questioning Presence, 42-70. 39· In speaking of the individual as the "emblem" of a collective sensibility, I purposely avoid the term "allegory," since the success of this rhetorical transubstantiation depends on its agents' "not-knowing" of its deeper political significance and ideological efficacy. At issue here is the role of a contingent affect as a social norm, that is, as something capable of producing a self-conscious "community" through its moral-aesthetic example. Insofar as a community can never fully access the mode of production to which it owes its conscious existence, it would obviously be erroneous to conceive the role of individual affect as emblematic or symbolic, concepts that presuppose a rhetorical and aesthetic self-awareness. 40. "Like Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, William rejects the very premises of the kind of debate his philosophical opponent wants to have .... From William's point of view, this exchange has been not so much a debate as the successful evasion of one." Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature, I 53· 41. With reference to Burke's eulogy of the French monarchical system, Paine notes: "The whole of it is a scene of perpetual court cabal and intrigue .... What is called monarchy, always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter" (Rights of Man, 182). Echoing Paine's satiric critique, Cynthia Chase remarks, "the speaker of 'Anecdote' ... encounters ... surprise and bafflement at the impossibility of grasping the origin of articulate desire." As a result, she goes on to note, "desire arises without a motive, prior to the motive that is thereafter posited as its cause" ("Anecdote for Fathers," 187, 189). 42. On Wordsworth's interest in Godwin in the context of Lyrical Ballads, see Jacobus, Tradition, I s-24. 43· On the strikingly conservative philosophy of language underwriting the agenda of Godwin and Paine, see Furniss, "Rhetoric in Revolution," as well as his study Burke's Aesthetic Ideology; see also Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 35-67. 44· On the ideology of the estate, see Everett, Tory View, I p-82, and Bermingham, Landscafle and Ideology, 9-54. 45· See Simpson's "Public Virtues, Private Vices," r68, where he offers a similar reading of the duplicitous phrasing that prevails throughout the father's deceptively equivalent questionings. Also attentive to the peculiar disparities between

Notes to Pages zo6-8 the father as character and as narrative agent is Bialostosky, who notes, "the limitation of the narrators' understandings is the price of the extension of the readers.'" Hence, Bialostosky remarks shortly afterwards, to read Wordsworth's dialogical ballads "is to take a kind of pleasure in seeing through their maker's failure or the failure of their narrators to see the 'real' truth of their situations and our own. This is a genuine pleasure, but it isolates the one who characteristically takes it from the subjects he examines and exposes him to the unmasking which he habitually performs on others, for it presumes an idea of reality which can easily be shown to be only 'a certain quantity of immediate knowledge,' just another ideology." Making Tales, 118, 120. 46. As Chase puts it, "the child's 'lie' tells truly what impels and empowers him to speak: not a wish or a reason, but a signifier." Chase, ''Anecdote for Fathers,'' 201. 47· Charles Burney, review of Lyrical Ballads for the Monthly Review of June 1799, reprinted in RR, Pt. A, 2:207. 48. Assessments of the concluding lines to a given poem in Lyrical Ballads differ wildly. Sheats's passing glance at ''Anecdote for Fathers" is unflinchingly redemptive: "Perceiving what he has done, the speaker then recovers his humility before the landscape and his own son" (Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 196). More persuasive is Glen, who remarks on the conclusion's "curious mixture of humility and unctuousness" and finds in the ending "an inconclusiveness most unlike the neat summing up appropriate to the 'anecdotal genre'" (Vision and Disenchantment, 244, 241). 49· Such an argument must eventually part company with the more traditional Marxist premises of Simpson's interpretation of this poem (and others). Although he appears well aware of the poem's involvement in "the contemporary debate about education,'' about its "analogues in the writings of Godwin and Rousseau,'' Simpson soon thereafter retreats into the material details of Wordsworth's psycho-biographical dynamics ("Public Virtues, Private Vices,'' r68, 170). To argue that the poem constitutes "a more private drama that has less to do with educational debates than with personal anxieties about home and shelter, about money, and about public images and political identities" is not only to compromise even the most rudimentary Marxist explanation of the dialectic relationship between the public and the private sphere but also to reinstate a traditional "expressivist" paradigm of the Romantic text, updated only with the interjection of token and at times rather contrived "political" context. For an instance of the latter kind, see Simpson's reading of the image of the "weather-vane" and his argument for "Liswyn" as the coded name for Alfoxden in the poem (174). I agree with Roc (Politics o{Nature, 148-so) that the range of political reference is preemptively restricted here; indeed Simpson, for the remainder of his essay, struggles to reclaim the far more sophisticated thesis with which he had opened: that "there is no truly 'private' dimension to this poem" and that if "the social whole is composed of the relations between [classes and groups] ... Wordsworth either reproduces ideology

Notes to Pages 209-r4 in a critical manner (including various levels of self-critique) or reproduces an incoherent ideology" ("Public Virtues, Private Vices," 177, 183, r84). 50. The argument for the ballad as a "distressed genre" has been made by Stewart, Crimes, 86-131. Similarly, Jordan notes that Lyrical Ballads appeared in a "critical climate that was neatly balanced or markedly schizophrenic, depending on one's point of view" (Why the "Lyrical Ballads"?, 53). Others have also remarked on the period's "great confusion with respect to literary taste-a period witnessing widespread dislocations in literary taste, and a corresponding shift in opinion concerning the nature of true poetry and of poetic excellence" (Mayo, "Contemporaneity," so6). Mayo's view is seconded by Albert Friedman, Ballad Revival, 292-326. 51· On the ballad genre, see Stewart, Crimes, 124-25; Rajan, Supplement of Reading, 137-44; Mayo, "Contemporaneity," 506-22; Jacobus, Tradition, 20932; and Albert Friedman, Ballad Reuival, 259-9r. 52. "Wordsworth does not so much remember as remember that he has forgotten something, at which point memory becomes intimation" (Foster, "Scene of Writing," 88). Foster's observation proves relevant in a paradigmatic sense for the overall genre of the ballad, the form in which poetic writing objectifies itself as cultural practice. 53· In this notion of scholarship as "cure" lies, I think, the bait with which Romantic aesthetics feeds the liberation fantasies of contemporary historicist and materialist critique; see my discussion of Wordsworth's concept of rustic language and primitive history in the context of the Preface (18oo) below, 237. 54· Raj an, Supplement of Reading, 138. Seen in the context of Scott's stubborn antiquarianism, "the literary community sought an idea of folklore more than the actuality of folkloric materials" (Stewart, Crimes, 106). 55. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 105; for general discussion, see roi-27. Romanticism's bilateral self-launching as the rhetorical cult of "immediacy," "simplicity," "organicity," etc., and as the reflexive mission of articulating the transcendent purposes and ends of that "literary" productivity in the conceptual idiom of Kritik, constitutes arguably the core-insight of Schlegel's and Novalis's critical writings. See also Navalis's collection of aphorisms, Bluthenstaub (Werke, vol. 2), and, for a recent critical discussion of his theory, W. Arctander O'Brien, Navalis, 147-52. 56. I will forgo speculations on Wordsworth's substantial rearrangement of the 1798 ballads in the first volume of Lyrical Ballads (18oo); there the order of "Anecdote for Fathers" and "We Are Seven" is reversed, and both poems are preceded by "The Thorn," whereas "Simon Lee" appears relatively late in the collection, following Coleridge's "The Dungeon" and preceding "Lines Written in Early Spring." For discussions of the arrangement of Lyrical Ballads, see Freistat, "'Field' of Lyrical Ballads." 57· "The cool scrutiny of 'I perceive' is sharpened by the fact that the reader has by no means waited 'patiently' for the tale he expects. It also exposes the read-

Notes to Pages zr6-29 er's blindness to the 'tale' already told by Simon's ankles, a tale that concerns him more than he knows." Sheats, Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 191. s8. Simpson, Historical Imagination, ISI. On the political significance of Wales for Wordsworth during his transition from "the subversiveness of radicalist discourse" to "subversion [as] Patriotism," see Liu's "Wordsworth and Subversion," especially 7r-8r (quote from 86). The double rhyme ("Ivorlsurvivor") is also noted by Jacobus, Tradition, 206. 59· On the historical significance of Simon's function as "huntsman," see Simpson, Historical Imagination, I s6-S7· 6o. For a discussion of these issues, see Dean, Constitution of Poverty, and Jarvis, "Wordsworth and the Uses of Charity." 61. Simpson, Historical Imagination, rs 3· Readings of the poem's concluding lines differ wildly, with the perhaps most naive affirmation of the narrator's conclusions offered by Sheats: "This 'single blow' ... is a powerful and liberating release of protective energy, a gesture of defense, and even revenge, on behalf of a humanity caught in the inexorable process of natural law.... [The reader] is thus invited to compare what he was with what he has become during his experience of the poem, and to join the speaker and Simon Lee in an act of charity that springs from shared understanding of what it is to be a man" (Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 192-93). Rightly critical of Sheats is Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 2 34-39, which also offers a lucid commentary on the narrator's ambivalent authority, mostly predicated on hearsay. The most perceptive close readings of the poem are arguably those by Griffin, "Wordsworth and the Problem," and Bialostosky, Making Tales, 74-82. 62. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: A Supplement, 3· 63. In Lyrical Ballads (r8oo), several of those poems eventually classed as "Inscriptions" and as "Poems on the Naming of Places" in the r8r5 edition offer competing responses to the shepherd's account in "Hart-Leap Well." See, for example, the heavily revised poem entitled "INSCRIPTION, For the Spot Where the HERMITAGE Stood on St. Herbert's Island, Derwent-Water" (LB, 179-8r), or "LINES, Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone, the Largest of a Heap Lying near a Deserted Quarry upon One of the Islands at Rydale" (LB, 209-ro), which is directly linked to the story of Sir Walter. For a reading of the latter poem, see Chase, "Monument and Inscription." More generally on the epitaphic inscriptions, see Hartman, "Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry," in Unremarkable Wordsworth, 31-46. 64. To speak of modern subjectivity's "essence" requires that we take the term in a nonsubstantial sense. That subjectivity's cognitive force and potential, in fact, hinge on its surrendering of the nostalgic or orthodox sense of the self's substantiality, as well as on the dissolution of various rhetorical and historical myths of the self's immediacy. The self's cognitive power, its (negative) essence-what Schelling calls Ungrund in his essay "On the Essence of Human Freedom"-inheres in

Notes to Pages 230-38 its continual awareness of having no substance, no definitive content, and no a priori spiritual or metaphysical endowments. What Heidegger refers to as the subject's constitutive "discursivity" (Umwegigkeit), as such manifest in the irreducibly pragmatic nature of "intelligence," already emerges in Hegel's theory of culture, to which I now turn. See also Rorty, Contingency, 23-43, and Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, 3-40. 65. This principle of "unrest" closely resembles Hogle's brilliant description of the language of "transference" in Shelley's poetry; see Shelley's Process, 3-27. 66. See my discussion of these issues below, 2 72; also see the work by Pocock, Kramnick, and others cited there. 67. Hegel's conception is effectively reiterated (though not really acknowledged) by Foucault under the notion of "discipline," a force that" 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power, ... [but] a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy." For Foucault, this economy is "neither too concentrated at certain privileged points, nor too divided between opposing authorities; so that it should be distributed in homogeneous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body." Discipline and Punish, 170, So. 68. On the question of language in England, see Aarsleff, Study of Language; Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, especially 35-109; Epstein, Radical Expression; and Furniss, "Rhetoric in Revolution." On the treason trials, see Barrell, "Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law," in Birth of Pandora; and my own "Paranoia Historicized." For more comprehensive accounts of Hegel's theory of language, see Gasche, Tain of the Mirror, 35-59; and Derrida, "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology," in Margins of Philosophy. 69. Sec Heffernan's repeated objections to "crude formulations" that expose the Preface's "disunity" and "dissonance," in Transforming Imagination, 47, 92. Similar arguments inform Owen's reading in Wordsworth as Critic. 70. While skillfully balancing Coleridge's complex and often misleading reading of the Preface, Bialostosky appears to endorse Wordsworth's notions of "feeling," the "rustic," and "speech" as inherently, indeed axiomatically valid. As components of the Romantic and post-Romantic Western European fetishization of "immediacy" and organic "presence," these notions undeniably aim to posit a self-evident, transparent, and autonomous model of human agency, which can then be expanded to sanction equally "natural" paradigms of authentic community. Again, the challenge to the reader of Wordsworth here is not to succumb to this reification (as supposedly "self-evident" and "actual") of the very effects produced by the self-privileging statements found in the Preface. For a discussion of Coleridge's response to the Preface in the Biographia, see Bialostosky, "Coleridge's Interpretation." 71. For a renewal of the Coleridgean reading of the Preface as "defensive,"

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Notes to Pages 239-44

seeking to redefine the relation (distorted by reviewers) between audience and Lyrical Ballads, see Dingwaney and Needham, "(Un)Creating Taste," and Scroggins, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." 72. The political context of the Preface has been explored in considerable detail by Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 202-27, and throughout Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge. For Smith, "the two figures of the rustic and the artificial poet embody the Preface's redefinition of vulgar and refined language. The personification of the rustic makes the Preface's argument more palatable by his nostalgic value as a representative of the pastoral tradition" (216}. However, here as well as when arguing that "by 'correcting' the Preface, by refuting its democratic theory of the mind and language, Coleridge intended to depoliticize the text and to reduce it to merely an aesthetic argument" (222), Smith treats linguistic theory and political ideology as materially and analytically separate spheres, much to the detriment of her otherwise suggestive thesis. 73· As should he apparent, in my "pragmatist" approach to reading, I neither take for granted the often-cited advantage of the critic's reflexive belatedness nor share in the eschatological confidence that sustains current historicist and materialist ideological critique, an inherently utopian tendency lucidly criticized by Rorty, Contingency, 56-69. A more balanced and constructive conception of the kind of practice instanced in Wordsworth's Preface can he found in the work of Oakeshott: "An action [soon to be called 'practice'], then, is an identity in which substantive performance and procedural consideration may be distinguished but are inseparably joined, and in which the character of agent and that of practitioner are merged in a single self-recognition. The so-called 'practical' is not a certain kind of performance; it is conduct in respect of its acknowledgement of a practice." Conduct, 57; italics mine. 7 4· "Many of the evasions of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads can be accounted for by the frightened temper of r8oo." Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 208. 75· Eventually, Wordsworth was to mute and deemphasize his social theory, as is already apparent in his r8o2letter to John Wilson: "People in our rank in life are perpetually falling into one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that human nature and the persons they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we generally associate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, professional men, ladies, persons who can afford to buy or can easily procure books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed, and printed upon super-fine paper. The persons are, it is true, a part of human nature, but we err lamentably if we suppose them to be fair representatives of the vast mass of human existence" (LWEY, 355). Thus, by the time of the 1815 Preface, "the whole sociology of literature ... was to prove abortive" (Klancher, Making, 139). 76. On Wordsworth's concept of "humanity" in The Ruined Cottage, see Liu, Wordsworth, where he provides context for the traditional "misty-eyed" idea that "humanity can be a timeless personality spanning without difference from Romanticism to our own century." In fact, Liu subsequently notes, "only relations,

Notes to Pages 245-SI affiliations, or-conceived semiotically-communications of care can be humanity" (}12, 319). 77· Writing to John Wilson, Wordsworth states, "a great poet ought to ... rectify men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of things." L WEY, 355· 78. In regarding the word "interest" as encoding the pragmatic thrust of Wordsworth's prefatory writings, we recall the note to "The Thorn," where Wordsworth argues for the capacity of the poetic word to stave off the impact of socioeconomic contingency by simulating the homogeneity of "rural life" and the affective interior of miscellaneous local characters such as Martha Ray. Of "repetition and tautology," he notes that they produce an evidently desirable confusion of rhetoric and the material world: "among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient." LB, 351. 79· For a somewhat differently inflected critique of historicist and materialist readings, sec Liu's "Power of Formalism" and "Local Transcendence." 8o. Simpson, Romanticism, 124. As a Unitarian minister put it in 1835, "in the middle classes we note an almost universal unfixedness of position. Every man is rising or falling, or hoping that he shall rise, or fearing that he shall sink." Quoted in Hobsbawm, "Example of the English Middle Class," 131. 8r. Notwithstanding his lucid redefinition, in chapter 17 of the Biographia Literaria, of a "real language" as intrinsically contingent on the interests of a local, regional, or national community ("for real therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis"), Coleridge continues to subscribe to the concept of the "rustic" as a regulative norm, rather than as the pragmatic fiction. Coleridge thus assists Wordsworth in promoting the dispersed middling classes' "interest" in selfawareness and self-representation as a demographic force (BL, 2: 56). 82. On the interaction between images of reproduction-both literal (of people) and figural (of books, discourse, poeticisms, ete.)-and Wordsworth's repeated association of derivative representations with prostitution, see Jacobus, Romanticism, 206-36, and Ferguson, "Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth and the Spirit of Solitude" (in Solitude, n4-28), where Ferguson hints suggestively, if still tentatively, at conceptual affinities between Wordsworth's texts and Mal thus's Essay on the Principle of Population. See my discussion of these issues below, 341. 83. "[Wordsworth] assert[s] that such a language exists ontologically apart from the language of the urban middle class, and that the very framework of representation-where one language 'imitates' another-will at last reveal yet a third language. Neither peasant nor middle-class, this language is the very 'music of humanity.' Here the ambitious, profoundly moral act of writing produces an audience that may escape its unacknowledged prisonhouse of language, its own classlimited cultural position, and gaze into the freer realm of a humanity that 'suffers' rather than 'craves.'" Klanchcr, Making, 140.

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Notes to Pages 252-68

84. Herrnstein-Smith has argued that "the pathologizing of the other remains the key move and defining objective" for the establishing of an aesthetic hierarchy or "axiology." Contingencies of Value, 38. 85. See Land's discussion of figuration, particularly metaphor, in eighteenthcentury rhetorical theory. A locus classicus within eighteenth-century poetic and rhetorical theory, and an anticipation of Wordsworth's conjunction of metaphor with social affect, is Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, originally published in Latin in 1753 yet only translated in 1787. Of more immediate currency, though far less complex and innovative in this context, is Blair's 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. 86. Wordsworth's defensive response to increasingly disparate attitudes and uses of figurative expression in poetry echoes Jeremy Bentham's misgivings about tropes and figures. In Bentham's logical universe, rhetoric commonly misrepresents assumptions as facts and thus "tends to propagate, as it were by contagion, the passion by which it was suggested." Quoted in Kenneth Burke, "Rhetorical Analysis in Bentham," 90-ror. 87. What can from a pragmatist perspective be understood as the Preface's multiple theoretical antagonisms has also been persuasively characterized as a historical ambivalence: "These urban and rural cultures were not simply notional opposites yoked together by the ingenuity of his own Preface; one had been, for the past generation, becoming the other." Klancher, Making, 143-44. 88. Wordsworth's comment on Goethe's poetry as not being "inevitable enough" is recalled by Matthew Arnold, "Wordsworth," in Selected Prose, 381. 89. Oakeshott, Conduct, 78-79; see also 6o-8r. Oakeshott's conception of moral conduct as rhetorical practice suggests the possibility of a political reading (rather than mere ideological critique) of aesthetic, and specifically literary, form. Below, I address the "iterable" or generic character of lyric utterance, which might be understood as instancing precisely the moral and social authority that Wordsworth hoped to secure for himself as public author in the 1807 and r8r5 collections of his poems. 90. Gada mer, Truth and Method, 92. On the concept of "play" as a metaphor for the performative and trans formative agency of the aesthetic, see Schiller, Letters, 74-80, and Gadamer, Truth and Method, 91-97, 446.

Vocation r. Liu, "Power of Formalism," 73 3, 737· Levinson offers a similar understanding of the transferential character of historicist practice (Rethinking Historicism, 12-rs), as does Simpson in his discussion of storytelling, anecdotes, and conversation in current academic criticism (Academic Postmodern, 64-71). For a fine critique of Levinson's argument, see Cole, "Evading Politics," especially 37-41. 2. Levinson offers some searching, if contradictory, reflections on the transferentia! and self-staging risks intrinsic to historicism as an academic practice. Of

Notes to Pages 27r-77 Wordsworth she remarks that "apologetics for or against [him] are always apologetics for us." Likewise, "our habit of collapsing text into context and literature into politics is a way of reducing past and present to a single, homogeneous and historically innocent temporality. This is a sure way to empty the past of its reality and the present of its responsibility." Rethinking Historicism, so; see also Simpson, Academic Postmodern, r-21. A collection of recent experimental critical writings and arguments critical of its emergence has been edited by Veeser under the title Confessions of the Critics. 3· As Pocock puts it, "the language he employs is already in use; it has been used and is being used to utter intentions other than his. At this point an author is himself both the expropriator, taking language from others and using it to his purposes, and the innovator, acting upon language so as to induce momentary or lasting change in the ways in which it will be used." Hence, he argues, to historicize an author's thought or intention as invariably anchored in a possibly antagonistic discursive field (langue) is to shift "the focus of attention ... from the concept of intention toward that of performance." "Concept of a Language," 6, 5· 4· See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Barrell, Political Theory, r-39; and Wahrman, "Virtual Representation." 5. Barrell, Political Theory, 3; italics mine. For a thoughtful and critical discussion of Barrell's Political Theory, see Hemingway's review of the book. 6. On Burke's rhetoric in Reflections, and on Thomas Paine's direct challenge to Burke's syntax as the fit embodiment of his unfit political views in The Rights of Man, see Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 35-57. 7· See Pat Rogers's introduction to the Discourses, especially 4-13. 8. "The mind does not enter into the minute particulars of the dress, furniture, or scene of action .... The historical painter never enters into the detail of colours, [nor] docs he debase his conception with minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery." D, n7, 122. 9· Wordsworth was well acquainted with Reynolds's writings, having received a copy of Edmund Malone's edition of The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds in three volumes (3rd ed., r8or) from Sir George Beaumont. For his appreCiative and concurring response to Reynolds, see L WEY, 490-91,499-500, sr6-r8; the last letter, to George Beaumont (Dec. 25, r8o4) is also significant for its programmatic account of The Prelude. ro. See Herrnstein-Smith, Contingencies of Value, 37-42. Guillory, who also offers a superb critique of Herrnstein-Smith's ahistorical method (Cultural Capital, 271-309), hints at a similarly circular procedure in E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, noting, "we need not linger here over the peculiarity of an argument which offers as information prerequisite to reading the same information one ordinarily acquires as a consequence of reading." Cultural Capital, 35· rr. Undoubtedly, Reynolds's argument was indebted to his close friend, Samuel Johnson, especially the Preface to the Dictionary (1755). In it Johnson's initial confidence that he will be able to remedy the "improprieties and absurdities" of

Notes to Pages 279-82 his native language soon is checked by the perception of countless empirical obstacles, an abundance of "perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice ... to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection" (104). As empirical phenomena converge into the recognition of a deeper structural impasse, Johnson's frustrated quest for "a settled test of purity" in matters of lexical definition yields to an indictment of current linguistic practice as misshapen and slovenly. Johnson now complains of "mutilated interpretations," "uncertainty of terms," "commixture of ideas," and a general "exuberance of signification" (104, ns-r6), at least in part because the lexicographer can never be certain whether the imprecision of terms is an effect of linguistic convention or of undefined thought. 12. Barrell, Political Theory, 140; on the emergence of custom in Reynolds, see , 136-58. At least since the publication of Gadamer's Truth and Method in 1960, the question of "prejudice" has remained prominent in hermeneutic and post-structuralist theory. While the inevitability of "prejudice" (Vorurteil) is usually conceded on both sides of the Atlantic, the theoretical and methodological consequences of Hcidegger's hermeneutic circle have proven very disparate indeed. Very much like Reynolds, Gadamer thus advocates a model of interpretation in which, rather than seeking to discredit "prejudice," the subject "earns" (erwerben) cognitive authority over its prejudices by assimilating them in the form of a historical "tradition"; see Truth and Method, 235-74. For a contrasting, pragmatic rather than historicist position, see Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 13. Besides Paine's The Rights of Man, pt. r, significant published reactions included James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae (1791); Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790); and, a particularly trenchant reading of Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord, John Thelwall, Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord (1796), reprinted in Thelwall's Politics of English ]acobinism, 330-87. On responses to Burke, including William Frend's unsuccessful (and personally disastrous) attempt at mediation in Peace and Union, see also Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 84117.

14· Burke's first publication, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), reprinted in Edmund Burke, Prerevolutionary Writings. 15. Hume, of course, was also caught up in a commercial society based on the availability and imaginative, speculative development of public credit. Unlike Burke, however, Hume "reinscribe[ s] the disturbing within the customary" (Christensen, Practicing, 14) and thus fashions the correspondingly speculative career of the philosophical man of letters. 16. Statecraft as a nexus of "circumstances" is an abiding motif in the early sections of Burke's Reflections: "Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect." Hence, Burke suggests, the logic of political representation is by definition sublime or unrepresentable, and the Jacobins' "metaphysic

Notes to Pages 282-90 rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate" (RF, 152). On Burke's use of metaphor, see Furniss, Burkes Aesthetic Ideology, 197-219. 17. Arguments against self-interest and in favor of restraining the passions figure just as prominently in the writings of radical intellectuals of the time. Thus Richard Price rests his plea for a rational "love of our country" by arguing that this passion, "like all other passions, ... requires regulation and direction" ("Love of Our Country," 178). Likewise, Coleridge concludes his 1795 lectures at Bristol by appealing to his audience to "exert over our own hearts a virtuous despotism, and lead our own Passions in triumph, and then we shall want neither Monarch nor General" (Lectures 1795, 229). r8. For a comprehensive discussion of Burke's role in The Prelude and of the "Genius of Burke" passage in book 7 of the 1850 text in particular, see Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature, especially 26-6r. 19. For more comprehensive accounts of the conspirational tendency in legal, political, and fictional narrative of the 1790s, see G. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style," and my own "Paranoia Historicized." 20. "Burke said clearly of his doctrine of traditionalism that it was the way of thinking which existed in the England of his time and had existed for so long that it was itself traditional. ... Burke is talking history; he is discussing both a traditional interpretation of English history and the part which that interpretation had itself played in shaping English history; and the historical facts to which he alludes are such as we may ourselves discern and describe in terms not unlike his own." Pocock, Politics, 2os, 207-8. 21. Paine, Rights of Man, 51. On Burke's deeply ambivalent politics see Kramnick, Rage ofFdmund Burke, especially 143-68, and Conor Cruise O'Brien, Great Melody, 50-71. The indistinct rhetorical character of Reflections is brought out by an analogy of Paine's: " ... a place in America, called Point-no-Point; because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr. Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all." Rights of Man, 49· 22. "Grammar, virtue, and class were so interconnected that rules were justified or explained not in terms of how language was used but in terms of reflecting a desired type of behaviour." Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 9· 23. On this passage, see Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language, 16-17, and Pocock, Politics, 2n-q. 24. Hume, Political Essays, 99· As Hirschman has argued, the fictions of predictable individual interests and national expansion have supplanted the Hobbesian universe of random passions and an adversarial, zero-sum paradigm of trade.

Notes to Pages

29I-JOI

Sec his The Passions and the Interests, especially the section on "interest" as a mechanism of social regulation, 31-48. 25. "If the coin be locked up in chests, it is the same things with regard to prices, as if it were annihilated .... As the money and commodities ... never meet, they cannot affect each other." Were he to be faced with the choice between a (supposedly) earlier, uncultivated state ("ere fancy has confounded her wants with those of nature") and a "refined" method of living, Hume would prefer "without much scruple, the latter.... [For] it is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silver to few hands, and preventing its universal diffusion and circulation." Political Essays, 122, 124. 26. Commenting on Hume's famous metaphor of the "mind as indeed a kind of theatre," Christensen remarks: "Obviously, someone or something must stand outside of the mirroring apparatus in order to describe its operation; ... someone offstage has to take responsibility for imposing new metaphors, new compositions that will remedy the inevitable wearing away of the persuasiveness of any particular performance." Practicing, 78-79. 27. The enduring appeal of Hume's pragmatic approach to moral theory as a matter of ordinary-language philosophy can be gauged by the significant impact of Michael Oakeshott's work in our time. Consider, as an example, the following passage from Oakeshott's On Human Conduct: "Moral conduct is agents related to one another in the acknowledgment of the authority of a practice composed of conditions which because of their generality attracts to itself the generic name, 'practice': morality, mos. A morality is the ars artium of conduct, the practice of all practices; the practice of agency without further specification .... Morality is like an art in having to be learned, in being learned better by some than by others, in allowing for almost endless opportunity for individual style, and in which virtuosity and mastery are distinguishable; and it is like a language in being an instrument of understanding and a medium of intercourse, in having a vocabulary and syntax of its own, and in being spoken well or ill" (6o-62). On the relation between Hegel's concept of morality and the pragmatist approach to morality as a matter of performativity, see my "Immediacy and Dissolution." 28. Like Wordsworth, Hume allows readers to substitute their understanding for the intelligence delivered by the writer or, rather, the text. Yet readers can take credit only by first foregoing all claims to an independent rhetorical practice, so that their claims of intellectual self-sufficiency reproduce the idiom and, substantially, the conclusions of the writer. "Hume is the writer who trusts to everyone's experience-an investment which returns to him an increase in the authority of his own experience as justly representative" (Christensen, Practicing, 67). 29. Operating in a comparatively narrow model of psychological analysis, Hazlitt argues that the "principle of general self-interest has been supposed inseparable from individuality, because a feeling of immediate consciousness does essentially belong to certain individual impressions, and this feeling of consciousness, of intimate sympathy, or of absolute self-interest has been transferred by

Notes to Pages 302-6 custom and fancy together to the abstract idea of self." In fact, Hazlitt insists, the concept of self is irreducibly temporal, and "personal identity neither does, nor can imply any positive communication between a man's future, and present self." To the extent that all action implies volition and that "by the very act of being willed, ra thing] is supposed not to exist," it follows that "the motives by which I am impelled to the pursuit of my own welfare can no more be the result of a direct impression of the thing which is the object of desire ... than the motives by which I am interested in the welfare of others can be so." Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 47-48, 20, 22. On the speculative logic of the Romantic movement, see also Christensen, "Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy." 30. For accounts of the textual and philological genesis of The Prelude, which I will not address here, see the excellent introductions by Stephen Parrish, Mark Reed, and W. J. B. Owen to their respective editions of the 1799, 1805, and 18 50 Prelude. For the projected interim text of The Prelude in five books, see Jonathan Wordsworth, "Five-Book Prelude of Early Spring 1804." On the overall dialectic between The Prelude and The Recluse, see Johnston's Wordsworth. 31. The passage is slightly revised in the final version of the Two-Part Prelude, with the first-person singular yielding to the first-person plural: "Thus our selfishness was mellowed down ..." (P 1799, bk. 2, II. 67-68). 32. Simpson, Historical Imagination, ro8-9. To qualify Simpson's notion of community, we should recall that the connotations of "the word recluse . .. in the late eighteenth century were generally positive, signifying a desire to escape from evil urban influences." Johnston, Wordsworth, 13. 3 3· "The Prelude is constantly defining itself within the vocabulary of labour, fulfilled and unfulfilled" (Simpson, Historical Imagination, II}); "no matter how large the work, there is always a 'connection' to a larger one" (Siskin, Historicity, II3). 34· Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 215. The hermeneutic suspicion of Wordsworth's conservative aesthetics, whose beginnings I would date to 1799, has underwritten most of the influential historicist and materialist accounts of Romantic poetry over the last decade or so. Of obvious relevance in this regard are Butler's Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, Simpson's Historical Imagination, Levinson's Great-Period Poems, Liu's Wordsworth, and, their critical source text, McGann's Romantic Ideology. 35· See Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 145-98, and Simpson, Historical Imagination, 108-39. On the political context, see Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 77-185, and Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 307-412. 36. Nichols continues, "for Wordsworth, the act of writing his own identity as a text becomes a means of regenerating himself and providing a model for regenerating others" ("Revolutionary 'I,'" 67). On the evolving conception of Britishness, see Colley, Britons, and Newman, Rise. 37· On Wordsworth's return, following his earlier involvement with radical and reformist "theorists," to the "microsocial" ideal of rural and regional life,

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Notes to Pages 307-r6

succinctly outlined in The Prelude (P r8o5, bk. 8, II. 152-58), see Simpson, Historical Imagination, 124-27. 38. This dimension of the poem's argument is, of course, significantly amplified in the later versions of The Prelude; see especially the dedicatory verses in Book 4 (1' r8o5, hk. 4, II. 340-45): -Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walk'd In blessedness which even yet remains.

On the relation between the figuration of the Pedlar in MSS Band E of The Ruined Cottage and on Wordsworth's identification with that portrait in The Prelude of r8o5, see Johnston, Wordsworth, r9-27. 39· For the transposition of these lines into the first-person narrative of The Prelude (18os), see book 3, lines I4I-67. 40. Simpson has explored with admirable clarity and thoroughness the symbiosis between, on the one hand, the popular antitheoretical and anti philosophical stance exemplified in the early I790s by Burke and, on the other hand, the ideology of nationalism. See Simpson, Romanticism, especially chaps. 2-4; he refers specifically to Burke's concern with "geometric politics" later on in this work (r38). 4I. "Aile Zufalle unsers Lebens sind Materialien, a us denen wir mach en konnen, was wir wollen. Wer vie] Geist hat, macht vie! aus seinem Leben. Jede Bekanntschaft, jeder Vorfall, ware fur den durchaus Geistigen erstes Glied in einer unendlichen Reihe, Anfang eines unendlichen Romans." The passage appears in Navalis's collection of aphorisms, Bliithenstaub, in his Werke, 2:253. 42. The aesthetic tension between "productivity" and a formal "product," a substantial "Work," correlates rather effectively with the tension-persistently rehearsed by Burke's Reflections-between the volatile "monied interests" of commerce and public credit and "landed interests." Sec Pocock's lucid account in "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution," in Virtue. 43· For readings concerning the widespread reliance on models of remote causality and conspirational argumentation, see my "Paranoia Historicized" andespecially G. Wood's "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style." 44· See Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature, 3I-6I. On Wordsworth's relation to Burke and Paine, see Simpson, Historical Imagination, I28-29. 4 5. MS RV, printed in the Cornell edition of the I798-99 Prelude and incorporated without substantial changes into MS V, which serves as the fair copy of the Two-Part Prelude. 46. My occasional use of the generic Greek term psyche seeks to circumscribe the general problematic of Romanticism's investment in the construction of an essentialist and autonomous mode of subjective experience. Among the various

Notes to Pages p6-r7 concepts charged with its representation is that of an "intellectual intuition," of central function in the work of Navalis, Fichte, and Schelling. Similarly, Holderlin was to emphasize the role of "fantasy" or what he also calls the "natural state of the imagination [Naturzustand der Einbildungskraft]" (Sdmtliche Werke, vo!. 4, pt. i, p. 211). Though each of these intellectuals initially relied on some notion of "immediacy," they all eventually had to acknowledge the paradox of semiological preconditions rendering such "immediate subjectivity" representable. Consequently, I use the concept of psyche to designate the site of a conflict between motivation and constraint, that is, between the philosophical wish for an originary, authentic, yet also unmediated form of subjectivity and the recognitionas such a byproduct of the attempted inscription of that subjectivity-that all selfpresence rests on a socially and aesthetically foreign-determined system of representation: symbols, signs, styles, genres, conventions, and the history of their interpretive effects. For a brief account of the epistemological crisis of the Romantic subject in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, see the introduction to my Idealism and the Endgame. For other discussions of the relation between German Idealism and English Romanticism, see Kipperman, Beyond Enchantment, and Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling. 47· Weiskel's argument relative to this passage from The Prelude appears strangely divided. Noting that "the vacancy stretches between two known points and thus becomes an extensive attribute of the implicit identity that subsumes both states and whose medium is time," Weiskel insists that "Wordsworth's great solution[,] the myth (or plot) of memory is not a problem but an answer." Qualifying his seemingly axiomatic faith in the possibilities of a strictly psychological reading, Weiskel concedes that "identity seems to imply a discourse, and a succession of identities deployed in time constitutes a 'perpetual logic' of knowable terms" (Romantic Sublime, 143). For Weiskel, however, all semiotic activity remains driven by an intractable and ineffable affective interiority (what he refers to as "desire"; see especially 151-52). By contrast, I understand the concept of interiority as the simulation of an origin-a comprehensive projection whose motivations remain "literally" unknowable to the "figure" of the poet/author and thus are being persistently troped within the text itself as questions of memory and confession. Were it not for the self-confirming terms of a "vernacular psychology" (what we now refer to as "pop psychology"), Wordsworth could never have staked out his vocational and professional claims within the field of literature as he was to do for almost half a century (see also Ferguson, Wordsworth, 144-45, 149). 48. The passage, once again, derives from an earlier manuscript associated with The Pedlar; seeP 1799, DC MS 16, 63Y and 64r. 49· See Miall's recent argument on the elusive epistemic and rhetorical nature of feeling in The Prelude; his argument offers a classic instance of how Wordsworth's own theoretical asides, scattered throughout The Prelude, will colonize and, to some degree, preempt a genuinely critical reading of that poem. Feeling

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Notes to Pages JI8-2I

and language are thus fully incompatible, and "the textual issue is governed by the fundamental psychological problem ... of providing a context in which the prospective role of feeling can find a correspondence in the movement of poetry" ("Wordsworth and The Prelude," 247). To take that view is to repeat a gesture of epistemological self-privileging which Wordsworth himself frequently pushes to the point of undermining his larger objectives: "Yet wherefore should I speak, I Why call upon a few weak words to say I What is already written in the hearts I Of all that breathe!" (P I8os, bk. 5, II. 184-87). Miall does not, however, probe this theoretical proposition as potentially motivated by a cultural constellation that would result from its endorsement by Wordsworth's readers (contemporary or "critical"). By means of this and similar statements, the order of affect against the supposed distortions of a socially and aesthetically predetermined rhetoric, Wordsworth seeks to secure for his poem a genealogical paradigm of reading in which recollection is peremptorily authenticated as confession. Like Hume's concept of the passions, "feeling" is thus conceived as epistemologically unassailable long before the perception of its alleged distortion by an inescapably "public" system of representation constrains the poet to expend an epic poem on its recovery. 50. "Nature is thus the guarantor of the dialogue, at once the principle assumed to cover and redeem its discontinuities and a kind of screen on which "the multiplicity of representations is projected." Weiskcl, Romantic Sublime, 172. 51. Elsewhere Lacan notes, "metaphor occurs at the precise point at which sense emerges from non-sense, that is, at the frontier which, as Freud discovered, when crossed the other way produces the word ... that is simply the signifier 'esprit'" CEcrits, 158). For Lacan, the production of a noncontradictory subject constitutes the principal and abiding motive for all signification. 52. The theoretical questions at issue were, perhaps, most thoroughly addressed in the work of Schleiermacher, specifically in his Hermeneutics and Dialectics. For Schleiermacher, all subjectivity depends on the rhetorical and interpretive simulation of its own "ground." For a more detailed discussion of these texts, see my "Immediacy and the Text." 53· To say so, once again, is to contravene the genetic paradigm according to which "The Prelude as a whole is an attempt to negotiate the strait leading from remembered images, and from the power of mind to which these images continue to testify, to capable speech." Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 172. 54· "In keeping the referent of his own this obscure, Wordsworth ... delays answering by expanding the syntax of 'was it for this?' from its first rather than its second pronoun, from the past rather than from the present. This dilation not only deflects present distress, but calls for an unfolding of the providential information of the past." Wolfson, Questioning Presence, 148. On The Prelude's recurrent shifts from narrative to lyric, see Jacobus, Romanticism, r 59-83, and Kelley, Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics, 91-130. The latter reads the 1805 version of The Prelude largely as an attempt to "unwrite" the volatile episodes or "spots" of time that dominate in the 1799 Prelude.

Notes to Pages 323-27

421

55. Arac has drawn attention to the convergence between the images in the boating episode and the overall design of The Prelude; see his "Bounding Lines." Likewise, Wolfson observes: "plot is everywhere in evidence, elaborated by a series of interrelated metaphors; the life is the growth and nurture of a plant, the traveler's journey on the road, the voyage on a stream" (Questioning Presence, 132). 56. The passage resurfaces, with some significant revisions, in MS R V, rov. Here Wordsworth speaks of empirical accidents as "Relapses from the one interior life I Which is in all things from that unity I In which all beings live with god." Significantly, the hypothesis of the divine "unity" undergirding the poet's "one interior life" resurfaces in The Prelude as a concern with the "unity I Of this my argument." For a fine discussion of subtle theological overtones in the second passage, see Wolfson, "Illusion," 92 5. 57· "By the time he returned from Goslar, Wordsworth had begun to connect his poetics as social practice with a specific view of his profession as a calling." Nichols, "Revolutionary '1,'" 76. 58. For another instance of "collateral" attachments between material scenes and qualities of consciousness, see P 1799, bk. 2, ll. 50-52. 59· For readings of this passage and its allusive logic, see Manning, Reading Romantics, 87-n4, and Wolfson, "Illusion,'' 927-28. 6o. See de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, r-r7, especially 4-5. 6r. Simpson views Wordsworth's poetics as a literal return to a "rural economy,'' which Wordsworth is said to have conceived as "real" in a literal and material sense. Relative to a faith thus imputed, Simpson now offers the following critical commentary: "the complex retractions that Wordsworth inscribes into his own personal history are themselves symptoms of its general implausibility as a wider social ideal. When the culturally privileged poet is always liable to deviate into error, requiring nature's severer interventions to correct him, then not much hope can be held out for those who have not shared the special circumstances of his upbringing" (Historical Imagination, 123). On this occasion, Simpson might be projecting his own error onto Wordsworth; for he does not conceive (as I have been arguing that we ought to) Wordsworth's "rural economy" as an imaginary, self-confirming, and highly condensed symbolic economy. As such, Wordsworth's texts can be understood as assisting their audience in overcoming a supposedly unhealthy attachment to sensational modes of writing. Book 7 of The Prelude charges the Gothic and the sentimental with instigating confusion between "authentic" representations of (self-)experiencc and the dissemination of sensational writings in which such affect is retailed in simulated textual forms to a "public" lacking the necessary interpretive resources for discriminating between the two orders. On the general problematic of localism and detailism, both in Romanticism and in contemporary criticism, see Liu, "Power of Formalism" and "Local Transcendence." For another critique of the various antifoundationalisms, see Simpson's Academic Postmodern. 62. As Lacan puts it: "History is already producing itself on the stage where

Notes to Pages 329-35

it will be played out once it has been written down, both within the subject and outside him .... What we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history-that is to say, we help him to perfect the contemporary historization of the facts which have already determined (in a 'primary historization'] a certain number of the historical 'turning points' in his existence" (Speech and Language, 23). Lac an is right to insist that the interpretive bringing-to-consciousness of that primary process necessarily leads to a "secondary historization," which we should not misconstrue as a closure. Regrettably, though, his caveat that "maintaining this dialectic is in direct opposition to any objectifying orientation of analysis" (65) frequently goes unheeded in efforts to "apply" Lacanian concepts for the purposes of a determinate interpretive outcome. 63. Klancher draws the long-overdue distinction between the critical fiction of a professionalized and aesthetically competent "reader" and a historically and materially disposed reading-audience; see Making, 4-17. See also Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's "Prelude," 5. 64. Precisely because it emerges in the philological revisions and formal episodic structure of the narrative itself, this sociocultural argument may be understood to have been already at work in Hartman's reading of The Prelude. His discussion of the poem's tendency to attenuate an impending sublime affect (apocalypse) through a supplemental covenant (akedah) between the poet and the imagination, as well as between the poem and its audience, makes essentially an analogous argument for The Prelude as an exemplary narrative aesthetic experiment conceived for the purpose of staving off a catastrophic recognition (selfconsciousness). Further developed by McConnell, Lindenberger, and Onorato, Hartman's reading remained largely unconcerned with the historical parameters of what he calls apocalyptic self-consciousness. Sec his Wordsworth's Poetry, 20859; on Hartman's reading, see my "Rhetoric and the Existential," especially 498-503. 6 5. A similar reading is offered by Hartman, who, in the context of the second "spot" of Time, sees the young Wordsworth's waiting with the "anxiety of hope" as subliminally hastening the passage of time and thus accelerating the death of Wordsworth's father (Unremarkable Wordsworth, 168-72). In his earlier study, Hartman also notes the conspicuously audiovisual determinants of the boy's consciousness in this episode (Wordsworth's Poetry, 232-33). 66. Wolfson remarks," 'Books,' signals a new interpretive paradigm, one that allows rwordsworth], in effect, to translate the literal corpse into a literary figure" ("Illusion,'' 921). Similarly, Chase notes how "Wordsworth identifies as fairy tales and romances, or allegories, the works that enabled him to see the disfigured face as figure. Allegory is the activity that orders literal language into a sequent of prominent figures" ("Accidents of Disfiguration,'' 556). True to her critical moment, Chase ignores the historical significance of this fact by replacing the distinctive literary genres of fairy tales and romances with de Man's abstract vocabulary of "allegory,'' "figures," and "literal" writing. Doing so arguably vitiates any re-

Notes to Pages 338-49 covery of the poem's historical and cultural efficiency vis-a-vis a reading audience whose very existence, as a middle-class community, was utterly hound up with the ongoing debates regarding the value of specific aesthetic forms and practices. 67. See Kneale, Monumental Writing, r2. 68. "The boy prodigy's learning includes the very instruments-telescopes, nautical quadrants, maps-symbolic of Britain's mercantile success during the eighteenth century." Jacobus, Romanticism, 76-77. 69. On conceptions of the middle class at the turn of the century, see my discussion above, 22-27, and the works by Wahrman, Cornfield, Briggs, Wallech, Porter, Osborne, and Thompson listed in the bibliography. 70. On the representational, legal, and aesthetic aspects of I790s radicalism and on the political history and its often paranoid structures of argumentation, see Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class; Olivia Smith, Politics of Language; Simpson, Romanticism; Epstein, Radical Expression; Paulson, Representations of Revolution; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture; Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style"; Emslcy, Crime and Society in England; and my "Paranoia Historicized." 71. See Pocock, Virtue, n2. The archetypal history of the displacement of "old Corruption" by an urban and bourgeois mode of production and circulation of "durable commodities" and virtual assents (e.g., stocks, bonds, credit) is, of course, Adam Smith's. See especially "How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country," in Wealth ofNations, 432-45. See also Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, roo-r3, and Colley, Britons, 85-roo. 72. "To the extent that an orderly structure of ranks no longer defines the function of being middle class, the latter must find another social force against which its own activity assumes definitive shape." Klanchcr, Making, 36. 73· Malthus "figures reproduction as a mathematical process, the inevitable and essentially unvarying production of numbers from ratios of other numbers" (Ferguson, Solitude, n8); thus reproduction is a narrative always already written and in its necessitarian thrust seemingly incompatible with any moral "interest" and change. Some of the reviewers strongly criticized the palpably apocalyptic tone of Malthus. 74· Gallagher, "Body Versus Social Body," 83. Gallagher continues: "Malthus can argue that it is precisely the bodies of laborers, their collective biological needs, that the labor theory of value allows one to discount or overlook" (92). 75· Dean, Constitution of Poverty, 87, 68. Gallagher discusses Malthus's shift from a labor-theory account of the value of the individual body to an exchangetheory account: "Reproduction remains automatic; indeed, it is so automatic that it altogether disappears as a discrete event. However, it docs not appear to he automatically out of proportion to the increase in food production. Here the oppositions earlier seen to be inherent in biological drives are reconceived in economic categories (productive labor versus unproductive labor or production versus ex-

Notes to Pages 349-53 change)" ("Body Versus Social Body," 93). Even Edmund Burke, however vigorous a defender of the old Whig order of landed interest, recognizes the implication of labor in a system of market exchange; see his 1795 "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity" (Writings and Speeches, 119-45). Arguably the crudest utilitarian conception of the poor as nothing but an embodiment of the commodity of labor is offered by Jeremy Bentham. See his discussion of the reproductive threat posed by the "two-legged livestock" of the rural poor in his 1797 "Situation and Relief of the Poor." 76. In advocating the gradual phasing out of the English Poor Laws altogether, Malthus revived an argument first advanced by Joseph Townsend in his 17S6 Dissertation on the Poor Laws. On Townsend and Mal thus, see also Dean, Constitution of Poverty, 6S-S6. 77· For further interesting documentation of the position revaluated by Malthus, see Dean, Constitution of Pouerty, 27-2S, 43· 7S. See also EPP rSo3, 51, where the equation of nature with instinct and instinct with law is figurally reinforced by a comparison to the steady movement of the planets. 79· Cobbett, Cobbett's England, S6. The essay dates from February 6, 1S19. See also the epigraph by Althusser, above. So. As Malthus notes elsewhere, "the national object is the increase of supply." And, shortly afterwards, "the object of the nation was not to increase the profits of ship-owners and sailors, but the quantity of shipping and seamen; ... the object of a nation in the establishment of a bounty is, not to increase the profits of the farmers or the rents of the landlords, but to determine a greater quantity of the national capital to the land, and consequently to increase supply." EPP 1So3, I59· Sr. This antiurban stance, it must be stressed, also shelters Malthus, an "old" Whig after all, from the popular charge of indulging in "visionary" and "speculative" theory, in short, the charge of Jacobinism, which came to be identified as the monstrous progeny of the cosmopolitan sensibility of the French philosophes. Various reviewers of Malthus's Essay were gratified by what they perceived to be its inherently conservative, antitheoretical stance. "We are glad to see a refutation of the new philosophy, if it indeed, merit the name of philosophy" (Analytical Reuiew [Aug. 1798 ], 119); the 1803 Essay is praised for "stand[ing] very much disentangled from the visionary philosophy which it was its primary object to expose" (Monthly Review [Dec. r8o3], 337). "The facts collected by Mr. Malthus, and the just reasoning deduced from them, completely refuted all the visionary theories of Godwin" (British Critic [Jan. 1804], 6o). For a lucid account of the multilayered identifications (often but a rhetoric of political slander) shaping the debate over theory in the 1790s, see Simpson, Romanticism, 40-83. 82. As Malthus remarks elsewhere, "it may be distinctly stated to be an absolute impossibility that all the different classes of society should be both well paid and fully employed, if the supply of labour on the whole exceed the demand" (EPP

Notes to Pages 353-57 1803, n9). See also his r8oo pamphlet "An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions," a transitional piece of analysis between the first and the second edition of the Essay. For a strenuous recent critique of Malthus's concern with overpopulation as compromising the current allocation of wealth and resources, see Greer's Sex and Destiny, and, for a discussion of Greer in the context of Malthus, Ferguson, Solitude, n4-r6. 83. The 1798 Essay opens with Malthus admitting, "the view ... given of human life has a melancholy hue" (EPP 1798, r6). As Patricia James notes in her detailed biography, Malthus, at the time of the first Essay and at 32 years of age, remained unmarried and, with an annual income of barely £10o, was by his own standards not economically secure enough to contemplate marriage any time soon. See James, Population Malthus, 67-68; see also EPP 1798,23-24. As Wahrman notes, the question of the middle class becomes suddenly very prominent in Malthus's revised and expanded Essay of r8o3 (Imagining, 241). 84. Malthus's conclusions are clearly indebted to Joseph Townsend, who had argued some eleven years earlier, "a constant provision for the poor ... increases their improvidence, but does not promote their chearful compliance with those demands, which the community is obliged to make on the most indigent of its members." Townsend continues with a phrase that preludes Malthus's diction, observing that poor relief "tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of the system which God and nature have established in the world" (Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 36). Reviewing the Essay for Arthur Aikin's Annual Review, Robert Southey seized on this notorious passage as irrefutable evidence for Malthus's "real" issue, that of preserving the distinctions of the British class system. "It is easy to see what, upon Mr. Malthus's view of society, would become the perfect system of policy.... The first step would be to commute the miseries of poverty for the comforts of servitude, ... and the poor might be brought to it, as they are to be brought to celibacy,-by starving.... [Mr. Malthus] writes advice to the poor for the rich to read." Annual Review2 (r8o4): 301. 85. Possibly embarrassed by the crude Benthamite overtones of moral utilitarianism or radical pragmatism, Malthus deleted the last phrase in the 1817 edition. 86. EPP r8o3, 24n; italics mine. The passage quoted is derived from the slightly revised 1806 version and reprinted as a footnote in Quentin Skinner's edition of the r8o3 text. Malthus continues: "The gratification of all our passions in its immediate effects is happiness, not misery; and in individual instances even the remote consequences (at least in this life) come under the same denomination." Again, as in the preceding instance, Malthus amended the footnote after being rebuked by conservative members of the Anglican clergy. See the editor's comment on Malthus's footnote, on the same page, and also James on Malthus's disputes with other clergy, in Population Malthus, 119-20. 87. This contradiction did not go unnoticed by the contemporary reviewers; thus, while granting Malthus the right to present a view "of human life [that] is not the most flattering," the anonymous reviewer of the 1798 Essay was startled

Notes to Pages 357-6r to find that "the author, in this essay, has furnished the best apology for prostitution, that has ever been written" (Analytical Review, Aug. 1798: 124). Savaging the r8o3 Essay, Southey charges, "if we believed with Mr. Mal thus's warmest partizans, that men never will in general be capable of regulating the sexual appetite by the law of reason ... nothing would be more easy than to demonstrate that abortion, or the exposure of children, or artificial sterility on the part of the male, would become virtues: a thought from which we turn with loathing" (Annual Review 2 [I 804]: 296). Relying frequently on the verbatim text of Coleridge's marginal notes to the r8o3 Essay, Southey rejects Malthus's axioms outright, though he does so once again only because he cannot countenance their consequences: "The whole proceeds upon the assumption that lust and hunger are alike passions of physical necessity, and the one equally with the other independent of the reason and the will. If this were true, chastity could not exist; fornication would be as indispensable as food, every single man must be a brotheller, every single woman a strumpet" (ibid.). For Coleridge's notes on Malthus, which he made available to Southey for the purpose of the review essay, see his Marginalia, 3: 8os-ro; see also Coleridge's remarks on Godwin's "Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon," Marginalia, 2: 848-49. 88. Annual Review 2 (r8o4): 298-99, 30r. 89. While Malthus disqualifies all contraception as "vice," "it was left to Francis Place in his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (r822) to recommend that married persons 'avail themselves of such precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception'" (Dean, Constitution of Poverty, 8o-8r). In fact, an earlier, highly circumlocutory positive recommendation surfaces in Jeremy Bentham's 1797 essay "Situation and Relief of the Poor." There Bentham writes, in whimsical and circuitous ways, of "a remedy, not ... a dead letter but ... living body: a body which, to stay the plague, would, like Phineas, throw itself into the gap." He elaborates on such a device as "a spunge [that] goes ... into the fire, the instant you can shew me that a single particle of necessity is deprived by it of relief" (423). An alternative to so forestalling the conception of children and poverty (and to subsequent pleas for relief) was, of course, the "exposure" of children. Liu also offers insightful remarks on child-killing; see his Wordsworth, 258 ff. 90. Sec Laqueur's argument on the socialization of the body and the increased stress placed on the chastity of a consciousness, now inherently gendered, at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century; Making Sex, 193-96. 91. The gendered dimension of Malthus's writing-which reappears in book 7 of The Prelude-also has a distinctly nationalist component; thus Malthus is quite capable of viewing entire nations as feminized, such as "Ireland and Spain, and many of the Southern countries," where the population t:xhibits "so dt:graded a state as to propagate their spt:cies like brutes, totally rt:gardless of consequences." EPP r8o3, 270. 92. Gender, in the Essay, thus serves to initialize the body as destined for an

Notes to Pages 363-74 instinctual/feminine or speculative/masculine quality of consciousness. This, I believe, accounts for the often-noted exclusively masculine (moral and economic) conception of agency in Malthus. See Dean, Constitution of Poverty, 77-81, and Siskin, Historicity, 169, where he notes, "women are, in a biological sense, centered, in that they are the immediate agents of population growth; but they are centered only as the problem to be resolved by the actions of men." 93· I will not explore the obvious bearing of the Malthusian concern with unrestrained and economically illegitimate reproduction on Wordsworth's biography, that is, Wordsworth's illegitimate child with Annette Vall on, conceived during his second visit to France. While the matter has received plentiful critical attention, the empirical nature of this incident in Wordsworth's biography-however much it may be compensated for by the suggestive powers of certain critical terminologies-frequently obscures the wider cultural relevance of and rhetorical filiation between the seemingly literal discourses on literal reproduction and the ideational and self-consciously figural idiom that governs the aesthetic and poetic reproduction (mimesis) of a life. On the question of sexuality in Wordsworth's Prelude, sec especially Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude," and Jacobus, "'Splitting the Race of Man in Twain': Prostitution and Personification, and The Prelude," in her Romanticism, 206-36. 94· For a characteristic fusion of anticapitalist, antimodern, and gynophobic anxieties, to be redeemed by the local-descriptive, quietist, and sentimental imagination of the poet, see Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, ll. 275-302. 9 5. On the Gothic as a subject of Romantic critique and post-Romantic development, see Hogle, "Gothic and the 'Othcrings,'" and Sedgwick, Coherence of

Gothic Conventions. 96. See Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude." Also see Klancher, Making, where he argues, "only the middle class would need to determine consciously the nature of its tastes, and the act of writing for a middle-class public in the eighteenth century could be the perpetual making of a consensual taste only as long as that public remained middle class" (36). 97· The Tempest, iv, T, qS-58. 98. On early- and mid-nineteenth-century portrayals of London as a cultural and moral inferno, sec Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 125-48. 99· Dove Cottage MS X (Dove Cottage MS 47), ur, printed in P r8o5, 2: 322. wo. On such displays, see Altick, Shows of London; Galperin, Return of the Visible, 34-127; and King, "Wordsworth, Panoramas, and the Prospect of London." See also McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb's Birth, especially the chapter "The Commercialization of Fashion," 34-99. 101. Some of the antithetical images in this passage receive further intensification in the r8 50 version. Thus the point of the babe's initiation into language and its portent of social corruption has been moved back from "twelvemonth's" length to that of "six months' space, I Not more." Also, the contiguity between the prostitute's "false tints" and the false arts of the theater is intensified, as these

Notes to Pages 377-SI tints "too well accorded with the glare I From Play-house lustres thrown without reserve I On every Object near" (P 1850, bk. 7, II. 337-38, 345-47). On the historical context of Mary of Buttermere, see Reiman, "Beauty of Buttermere." For readings of the Mary-of-Buttermere and prostitute-mother episodes in book 7, see also Jacobus, "Splitting the Race of Man in Twain" (in Romanticism), and Kramer, "Gender and Sexuality in The Prelude." To argue that the antithetical figuration of woman in book 7 "externalizes-and idealizes-the place of gendered sexuality in [Wordsworth's] own character" (Kramer, 620), or to suggest that "far from being emblems of sexual difference, [Romantic women] function precisely as defence against it" and that as "an emblem of representation" the allegorical female figures (e.g., Mary) "allow Wordsworth to depict himself as ultimately uncontaminated by the fall into writing or representation which London symbolizes" (Jacobus, Romanticism, 208, 214, 2n) is ultimately to reproduce Wordsworth's own autobiographical program: namely, to conceive of social phenomena as figural emanations of the autobiographical subject's troubled interiority. Thus Jacobus concludes, "casting out woman as prostitute ... protects Wordsworth himself from division by projecting the split as sexually differentiated" (223). 102. Speaking of a masculine and a feminine metaphor for authorship, Gallagher clarifies, "both are associated with forms of multiplication, of proliferation, and yet they cannot be made parallel ... for the gender distinction in literary theory is not between male fathers who can multiply and female eunuchs who cannot, not between male language and female silence, but between the natural production of new things in the world and the 'unnatural' reproduction of mere signs." "George Eliot," 40-42. 103. On the feminization of culture and of poetry in particular, see Simpson, Romanticism, 123-25. The sense of cultural discontent and ennui accounts for the complex tensions between cultural conservatism and progressive politics in the case of William Hazlitt; see his "Characteristics of 'The Times' Newspaper," "Our National Theatres," "On Modern Comedy," "On Tragedy," "Why the Arts Are Not Progressive," and "Whether the Fine Arts are Promoted by Academies," all in Selected Writings, and his "Standard Novels and Romances" in Complete Works, vol. 16. ro4. My argument here is indebted to Althusser's "From Capital to Marx's Philosophy," in Althusser and Balibar, Reading "Capital," 13-69; and to Jameson's critical development of Althusser's structuralist Marxism, in Political Un-

conscious, 17-102. 105. "The only point at which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves 'it was just a dream,' thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but the consciousness of this dream. It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy-framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself." Zizek, Sublime Object, 47·

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Index

In this index an "f" after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an "ff" indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., "57-59." Passim is used for a duster of references in dose but not consecutive sequence. Abrams, Meyer H., 265 Aesthetics: and Picturesque theory, 3I, 6I83; relative to labor and value, 42, 84, 92-97, IIO-I3, II9f, 390n27; branch of ideology, 57, I43-48, I70-79, 24of, 258; Reynolds and Burke on, 272-80, 284f; simulating a "public sphere," 273-79, 284-87 passim; and social apocalypse, 34I-46, 377-82. See also Class and class-consciousness; Form; Kant Akenside, Mark, 38 Althusser, Louis, 35, I 59, 346 Anderson, Benedict, I5, I65, I88f Anti-Jacobinism, 73-79, 85, I 52 Arnold, Matthew, 27I Averill, James, IOO Autobiography: and self-interest, 263-72 passim; as "labor" and commodity, 302-8; inscrutable and anti-theoretical, 309-I4, 327, 332f; forms of adolescence in, 32I-25, 329-37; relation to books and theater, 337-4I, 363-67, 372-77 passim. See also Selfconsciousness; Self-interest; Wordsworth, Prelude

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 4 Bell, Andrew, II, I50-66, I7If, I8I-87 passim, 204, 2I3f, 227, 230,258 Bellini, Vincenzo, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 266f Bentham, Jeremy, II, I 50, I54-6o passim, I64, I89,2I4,230 Bermingham, Ann, 47, 57, I04 Bernard, Thomas, II Bialostosky, Don, 238 Blake, William, 20; "Nurse's Song," I6670, I75 Bourdieu, Pierre, 28, I 59, 289 Bowles, William Lislie, 38, II4 Brahms, Johannes, 2 Brecht, Berthold, 4 Brewer, John, 25 Brown, Lancelot ("Capability"), 29, 3I, 6 5,68,74 Burger, Gottfried August, 224f Burke, Edmund, I3f, 98, q8, I 55,236, 263, 272-75 passim, 305-8 passim, 333; Reflections, 75£f, 280-89, 327, 355 Burke, Kenneth, I43-45, 328 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 38

Ballad genre, ISo-84, 208-I3; imaginary feudalism in, 2I5-26 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, I46 Barrell, John, 53, 97

Campbell, Colin, Sf Canning, George, I47 Celibidache, Sergiu, I Chatterton, Thomas, 2I2

450

Index

Christensen, Jerome, 27 Cimarosa, Domenico, 4 Civic humanism, 233, 264,272-74. See also Community; Nationalism and nation-building Class and class-consciousness, 6, 21-27 passim, 35, 387mr; and demographic unconscious, 8, 22f, 86f, I 57, 378ff. See also Middle class Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellee), 29, 42, 44, )I, 57f, 67, 72, 94-99 passim Cobbett, William, 352 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5, I2, 92, 123, I48-64 passim, 180; Notebooks on the Picturesque, 37f; "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," 4of; Logic, IS8-6o, r66, I69; "Frost at Midnight," I6of; on Lyrical Ballads, 210, 237£, 246, 250; on Burke, 288f; Statesman's Manual, }II-I}; Biographia Literaria, v9f; "Aeolian Harp," 324 Colley, Linda, 3, 47 Communicability and aesthetic pleasure, 20,87-92,191 Community, 36, 55, 87-92 passim, 138, 146£, 191, 232; as rhetorical "wish," 89-92, 143ff, 2orf, 225£; in "Tintern Abbey," 121-33 passim; in the "Preface" (r8oo), 257ff; in The Prelude, 271-75. See also Middle class Composition, and Picturesque theory, 7072, 94-97. See also Form; Syntax Confidence, and professionalization, 26f, I07ff Conspiracy, 283, 343ff Constable, John, 29, 38 Conversation piece, 47, s8, 205 Copley, Stephen, 63 Cowper, William, 31, 38, II4 Craig, Willliam, 31, 63, 75-79, 98 Culture (Bildung), 2, 12, 154-62; as "grand tour," 46£, 62; Coleridge on, I5of, r58-6r, 235; as ratio affect and surveillance, 152-58, 170-73; in didactic fiction, 163-79: Hegel's theory of, 229-37. See also Pedagogy Custom, theory of, 14, 274, 278-8o, 28488

Davidoff, Leonore, 178 Debt, as related to imagination and interest, 22f, 291 ff Deleuze, Gilles, 57 De Man, Paul, r66, 334 Denham, John, II, 29, }I, 38-40, SI, DeQuincey, Thomas, ro4, 302 Dick, Philip K., 134 Discipline and disciplinarity, 25, rsr-62 passim, 235, 342f Donizetti, Gaetano, 4 Donne, John, 14 Dyer, John, n, 29, 31, 38; Grongar Hill, 40-43 Edgeworth, Maria, r63 Eichendorff, Joseph, 2 Enclosure and estate: mind as virtual estate, 56, 64, 225; in Gainsborough and Goldsmith, 57-61 passim Epstein, James, 2 36 Erskine, Sir Thomas, 2 36 Essentialism, n8ff, 242-56 passim, 278 Everett, Nigel, I9 "Experimental" critical writing, 4-6, 268f Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 320 Fish, Stanley, I I 3 Fontane, Theodor, 2 Form: as encryption of social motives, 28ff, 40, 121, 129, I44ff, 157-62 passim, 266f; and style, r83, 378-82. See also Aesthetics Foucault, Jv1ichel, '53· '57, 230, 236f, 310 Free-speech debate, 146 Freud, Sigmund, 130, 283, 318, 332 Friedrich, Caspar David, 31, 132-38 passim Gainsborough, Thomas, i9ff, 34, 38, s66r, 7rf, 83, 94-99 passim, ro4f, no, II4, I}7 Gallagher, Catherine, 377 Garside, Peter, 63 Gerrald, Joseph, 305 Gilpin, William, }I, }4, s6, 6}, 67, 76-79 passim, 94; Three Essays, 69-75 Godwin, William, 92, 109, 150, r78, 189, 308, 3 5r; "Of an Early Taste for Read-

Index ing," 194-96; "Of Deception and Frankness," 202-6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 12 Goldsmith, Oliver, s6f, 6of, TT4 Gray, Thomas, 38, 40, so, rr4, r2o Guattari, Felix, 57 Guillory, John, ro, 28, so, 120 Habermas, Jiirgen, 12 Hall, Catherine, q8 Hardy, Thomas, 236 Hartman, Geoffrey, 104, ro6, n9, 123, 22Sf, 26S Hauptmann, Gerhard, 4 Hays, Mary, r63 Hazlitt, William, 274, 301, 416n29 Hearne, Thomas, 84 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, I36, rso, 1S6ff, 21), 267; on temporality, 128-31 passim, 171; on culture and nationalism, 229-37, 380 Hemans, Felicia, r63 Historicism, see Romantic historicism I New Historicism History: and aesthetic "unknowing," rff, ssf, 2o8-r6; absorbed by Picturesque technique, 69-7s; as feudal decor, 2r8, 221ff; opposed to "feeling," 240-49, 2 ss. See also Romantic historicism I New Historicism Hobsbawm, Eric, 209 Holcroft, Thomas, 63 Holderlin, Friedrich, 2 3 r Howlett, John, 348f Hume, David, 5, 7, qf, 27, 47, 263, 272ff; on economics, 290-95; and moral theory, 295-300; on populousness, 347 Hurd, Richard, r 5 Hussey, Christopher, 19 Hutchinson, William, 31, 8sf Immediacy: psychological effect of aesthetic technique, Ssf, 69ff, 147f; theorized as "spontaneity" and "pleasure," 62-66 Intelligence, as cognitive and social mobility, 12, II9, I49-51, 159ff, 171,180-88 passim, 229 Interest, I I, 34, 87f, 116; literature as

45I national interest, 48-s6 passim, 179f. See also Self-interest

Jacobus, Mary, ror Jameson, Fredric, 36, 358 Jeffrey, Francis, 210 Johnson, Barbara, 6 Johnson, Joseph, 169 Johnson, Samuel, so, 263,274 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 29, s6, 8r, roo, I I 9, 16o; Critique of judgment, 87-92, 97 Keats, John, 6, 104 Klancher, Jon, 241, 36sf Kleist, Heinrich von, 137 Knight, Richard Payne, 29, 31, 34, 38, 63, 66, 70-84 passim Koerner, Joseph Leo, 125, I_ll-38 passim Kojeve, Alexander, 2.36 Labor, relative to aesthetic production, 3742 passim, 84, 92-97, rro-r3, rr9ff, 390n27 Lacan, Jacques, 3r8f, 33S Lambert, George, 67, 83 Lancaster, Joseph, II, rs2, 189, 213 Land, Stephen, r82 Language: necessarily vague and antipropositional, ss, 14s-48, 380-82; in Hegel, 128f, 234-37; as infrastructure of culture, rs8-6r, 230, 299f; in theories of diction, 238£, 243-56 passim; multiplicity of languages in The Prelude, 270-75, 306, 330f Larson, Magali, 26 Lasch, Christopher, 4 Levinson, Marjorie, 120-2 3 passim, 212 Literacy: elemental, 11£, 149-62; cultural, ISOf, 173-79, 202-S Liu, Alan, 6, 64, ro8, nsf, 248, 26s-68 passim, 307 Localism, no, 179£, 317f; as "rustic" order in Wordsworth, 229,239, 246-sr, 409n7o; opposed by Reynolds, 276£, 397n79 Locke, John, 152,273 Lowth, Robert, 15 Lukacs, Georg, 3 Lyotard, Fran