HONORABLE TOIL? COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH IN RETIREMENT

Abstract

7 7 R H O N O R A B L E T O I L ? C O L E R I D G E A N D W O R D S W O R T H I N R E T I R E M E N T P A U L H . F R Y Part 1 of Wordsworth’s two-part Prelude of 1799 has almost reached its conclusion when – as in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ – the poet abruptly and unexpectedly addresses his ‘‘friend,’’ in this case Coleridge. He implies that he has not been getting any work done lately and expresses the hope that reproaches from his own former years (‘‘Was it for this?’’ is the abrupt note on which the poem had begun) will spur him on to ‘‘honourable toil.’’ In 1798 or 1799, this is actually a little surprising. The past two years had not been at all a fallow period for Wordsworth. At a time when he was freezing through a winter of record cold in the pastoral though provincial backwater of Goslar, Germany, but writing steadily and well, it is di≈cult to say why Wordsworth felt that he had anything in particular to reproach himself with, unless it be, indeed, that at twenty-nine he still did not have a job. In the eighteenth century there were relatively few professions for the educated classes: what counted as intellectual labor were the professions of medicine and law; scholarship, natural science, and dilletantism for those with inherited wealth; Grub Street journalism for the less fortunate like Dr. Johnson; and before all else the modest but genteel life of a clergyman. The arts other 7 8 F R Y Y than poetry occupied the border between the artisanal and the gentlemanly, depending on how and in what mode they were practiced. A history painter in oils was a gentleman, for example, but a topographer in watercolor was an atelier craftsman who made painting a shared and inherited family trade. Poetry may have been a divine gift, still worth patronizing through the sorts of small annuities and legacies from which both Wordsworth and Coleridge were to benefit, but unlike engraving, for example, poetry was not a job. More than a decade earlier Wordsworth had gone up to Cambridge , satisfying his uncle and his older brothers that he was intent on preparing for holy orders. But alas, he had since left school to climb the Alps, to fall into the dubious company of the London Dissenting Societies and other radicals, clerical or otherwise , to bond eventually with his sister to a degree that may well have made everyone uncomfortable, and by 1796 to have formed close ties with the Unitarian radical Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the convicted seditionist John Thelwall. Yes, the first edition of Lyrical Ballads had appeared in 1798, but in the eyes of those he had disappointed that scarcely betokened a job. And besides, hadn’t all those poems, with their idiot boys, garrulous old sea captains, and mad peasant women, become a magnet for public mockery and derision? Worse yet, the volume was selling poorly. Against this backdrop, then, as scholars like Thomas Pfau, Cli√ord Siskin, and Mark Schoenfield have argued, cogently but in my opinion too often with the smugness of sociopolitical hindsight, Wordsworth was a pioneer in the e√ort to make poetic labor a profession: not just toil but honorable toil calling forth respect; and the very impulse to undertake The Prelude, the long poem on ‘‘the growth of the poet’s mind,’’ is part of that e√ort. When he reconstructed the materials of the 1799 part 1 for book 1 of the 1805 ‘‘Poem to Coleridge,’’ as The Prelude was most often called in the Wordsworth circle, Wordsworth could more plausibly reproach himself for the relatively fallow period that did in fact ensue in the year or two following his 1800 arrival in Grasmere, his permanent home from then on; and that is what he does here, regretting that after a misleadingly ‘‘glad preamble,’’ as he calls it (‘‘There is a blessing in this gentle breeze’’ and all the spontaneous utterance that the breeze inspires...