[In the following essay, Davis finds that Wordsworth's journals investigate some of the philosophical implications of the picturesque.]

Essentially an eighteenth-century aesthetic, the picturesque was eventually rejected by most Romantic poets. Relying heavily on the picturesque in the Alfoxden-Grasmere journals, Dorothy Wordsworth raised two important questions about its meaning. What does the picturesque say about man and nature, about the phenomenal world? And, why does it collide with Romantic sensibility? While praised for their descriptive power, her journals are regarded usually as embroidery with some small influence on William Wordsworth's poetry; whereas, as nature literature, the journals place man in nature, and in so doing show their own compositional integrity. It is, then, as literary texts in themselves that they probe the picturesque and reveal its structure.

For instance, in the first paragraph of the Alfoxden journal is a striking model of visual ordering in nature that will be repeated throughout both journals:

Alfoxden, 20th January 1798. The green paths down the hillsides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams. The garden, mimic of spring, is gay with flowers. The purple-starred hepatica spreads itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud; when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lengthening their slender stems. The slanting woods of an unvarying brown, showing the light through the thin net-work of their upper boughs. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.¹

One is carried rapidly into the midst of the natural scene by the swift movement from the detail of “wheat … streaked by silver lines” to “the clustering snow-drops … hanging their heads downwards,” and finally to the grand view of “the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks [;] the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.” One really cannot refer to Dorothy's descriptions without using the word “picture” to denote an approximation of full visual composition. The selection of details in the passage provides a pictorial center of wheat and flowers in the foreground. The suggestive shape of silhouetted trees on the horizon form the peripheral field, just as the generalized-and-vague landscape behind a subject in a picture provides the ground from which the figure emerges. Most importantly, the foreground-and-background organization establishes a fixed perspective and a principle; some things are out of focus and others in focus because the viewer has an unaltering position. The details of Dorothy's picture or any picture become a composition and an adequate representation of nature only if the limitations of the space created by the fixed perspective are familiar and otherwise acceptable to the viewer, the stationary position outside of the picture constituting the structural center through which details are pulled together into a composition and given meaning.

Not all the nature descriptions in the journals are arranged neatly in a movement from foreground to background, but most are. Compared to the first paragraph of the Alfoxden journal the following description may appear short and underdeveloped, but again it is organized by a foreground and a background:

Mary and I walked to the top of the hill and looked at Rydale. I was much affected when I stood upon the 2nd bar of Sara's Gate. The lake was perfectly still, the Sun shone on Hill and vale, the distant Birch trees looked like large golden Flowers. Nothing else in colour was distinct and separate but all the beautiful colours seemed to be melted into one another, and joined together in one mass so that there were no differences though an endless variety when one tried to find it out. The Fields were of one sober yellow brown.

(p. 162)

Shorter, less detailed and complex, this description is more impressionistic than the preceding one, but the appeal is still primarily visual. There is a background of “hill and vale,” and a foreground of “colours … melted into one another … in one mass.”

The imagery of Dorothy's journals imparts to nature a specialized shape, harmonizing the objects of the natural world into graphic compositional unity for a particular purpose: Dorothy uses landscape imagery to control nature through a highly rational method of comprehending the world. It was precisely this harmony and control that William Wordsworth rejected as “the cold rules” when he changed the name of a collection of poems from “Picturesque” to Descriptive Sketches. William's criticism of the picturesque aimed at the underlying realistic assumptions about light and shade attached to the nature that exists “out there” as a set of conventions. He rejected the picturesque as a poetic structure because it gave an “imperfect idea” of the emotional content he gathered when he “consulted nature and [his] feelings.”² J. R. Watson, in his incisive Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (1970), shows how William's rejection of picturesque techniques represents a crucial phase of his development as an artist, in a sense a severance from eighteenth-century aesthetics. Picturesque structure, by revealing in nature an aesthetic content that can be codified into rules and grasped rationally, brings meaning to experience. Watson judges the picturesque technique to be in fact very limited—“cold,” as William said—because it makes one “landscape … essentially something to be seen and then compared with others … the countryside in each is valued for its characteristics resembling an ideal form rather than for its local and individual uniqueness” (Watson, pp. 39-40). Watson demonstrates that rejection of the picturesque was for many Romantic poets a rite of passage into the nineteenth century.

Since many eighteenth-century theorists believed that the rational in art is the truth in nature, they could deny the often-made charge that the picturesque was a project for subduing nature. Recently, John R. Nabholtz persuasively argued against that charge by stating that the picturesque was simply one among other ways the Romantics looked at nature, still “another means of penetrating to the wondrous activities of nature, which were of such central importance to the Romantics.”³ Although Nabholtz is correct, as one looks behind the formal assumptions, as William Wordsworth did, picturesque innocence (like that of a spy glass held up to nature) is destroyed. Having a structure, the picturesque also has a structural intention, which, as Watson suggests, is found in formal repetition. By repeatedly imposing meaning, the picturesque is in a kind of battle with nature—the significance of which I will return to presently.

In the aesthetic model of the picturesque, the viewer's emotional involvement is in bondage to the principles of organization and harmony taken from landscape painting. The viewer stands in a fixed space outside of the natural scene and sorts the visual components into a graphic hierarchy of focused figures and unfocused background areas. With his back turned to the landscape, the viewer might raise an oval, tinted Claude glass, to see the view actually framed as a picture. Within such a model, techniques of shading and highlighting, blurring and sharpening, appear naturally. Experience can be subordinated so fully to picturesque description that landscape figures may appear and fade as they are needed for the composition, as in one hilltop description of the Alfoxden journal: “Went to the hill-top. Sat a considerable time overlooking the country towards the sea. The air blew pleasantly round us. The landscape mildly interesting. The Welsh hills capped by a huge range of tumultuous white clouds. The sea, spotted with white …” (p. 7). Who is “us”? Dorothy and Coleridge? Dorothy and William? Dorothy and the landscape? The question cannot be answered because experience in this passage is a response solely to the demands of landscape structure. In other words, people easily get lost in the foliage where human relationships are absent. Unable to form relationships, discrete human shadows move through Dorothy's landscape without meeting; accordingly, as Elizabeth Hardwick has noted, “there are no real people [in Dorothy's journals]—especially she and William are absent in the deepest sense.”⁴ Of course, this absence is interesting only because of what Dorothy does emphasize. It becomes clear that only in the nature descriptions does she engage herself fully as a writer, developing her subject complexly and at length, placing nature at the center of a canvas only minimally framed by the bothersome complexities of personal relationships.

Dorothy's journals, coming at the end of an eighteenth-century tradition of picturesque poetic and pictorial imagery, show a strain of a conventional time-and-eternity theme. In the foreground of a typical painting by, for example, Rosa or Lorrain,⁵ one may find a young girl drawing water, the ruin of a classical building, a decaying bridge, a young and vulnerable calf: figures that serve as a reminder of the passage of time. In the background is a timeless natural scene with mountains, billowy clouds, and immense verdure—the whole of the background often softened by the cover of a thick mist. Usually a great distance from the foreground, the background weighs heavily over the whole picture. When there is a ruin in the foreground it is commonly accompanied by a lustrous classical building in the background. As one focuses on the figures in the foreground, the background moves into one's field of vision, asserting its bulk and compositional dominance over the foreground figures. These figures in picturesque painting tell a story about the relationship of change and form somewhat as the icons of Botticelli's Allegory of Spring shape a narrative about the relationship of grace and secular love. The theme of the composite picturesque story is as follows: the life we see around us and the mutability that marks it are mere shadows of the enduring harmony and unity manifested in the picturesque form. The result is not a true reconciliation of time's lack and eternity's plenitude, but a willful yoking together of time and eternity into the confines of the picturesque gaze. While Dorothy's descriptions are not so stylized as to place a broken vase or a ruin in the foreground, they put specific natural objects like flowers or wheat stalks before vast natural panorama. As in the hillside description of the Alfoxden journal's first paragraph, the panorama serves as an emblem of a unity in nature as grand as individual flowers are vulnerable. Again, harmony is made to look as though it triumphs over time's destructiveness in the shackling together of time and eternity. Thus, the picturesque statement about man and nature is a response to the erosion of time.

In one passage it is especially evident that the need to maintain the objective validity of the natural world “out there” is the need to overcome a menacing awareness of death. Dorothy narrates at length her experience at a funeral (pp. 38-39), where, upon leaving John Dawson's house to accompany the coffin of an unnamed woman, she breaks into tears, then experiences an unexpected emotional reversal. After leaving the house she still weeps, but she weeps happily because the coffin is “going to a quiet spot.” What, we must wonder, comes between the first tearful experience of the funeral and the final joyful weeping? Why should it have such apparent significance that the coffin is “going to a quiet spot?” Let us go back.

The coffin emerging from the dark house, a poignant reminder of death, brings Dorothy to tears. After she comes out of the house and sees the landscape, she looks back to the churchyard and realizes that “the green fields [are] neighbors of the churchyard.” That is to say, the churchyard, which will receive the coffin, is part of the radiant landscape and thus also “allied to human life” (p. 38). Like the broken vase or ruin, reminders of time and mortality, the churchyard, and the coffin as it enters the churchyard, are touched by the enduring harmony of nature in the picturesque composition. Dorothy's awareness of the reality of death, subjective, dark, and threatening to her rational space, contains itself in diminished, displaced form by association with the “quiet spot” which has a proper place in the sunny landscape. Conversely, in such a scene most Romantic poets would allow a play of emotion beyond what is “realistic” in an attempt to open the gates of association and expression. The scene's curious narcissistic mixing of viewer (subject) and natural world (object) spatializes nature as a projection of feelings and renders its darker side, and the darker side of the “Dorothy” in the journals innocuous and manipulable. Spatialized nature in Dorothy's journals is not a movement into the world in time, but a frozen series of individual prospects, like slide projections in a darkened room. Throughout the Alfoxden-Grasmere journals, a model lights the screen and intrudes against the darkness a vision of nature in the image of picture-making rules. In this way, the picturesque passes over the subjective world in time to signify the world of “out there,” leaving emotions and death behind in the dark, like Dorothy's tears at the funeral.

Picturesque imagery in Dorothy's journals creates a kind of repetition that, in fusing emotions directly with an objectified landscape, excludes meaningful relationship between mind and nature in a denial of time. Quoting Coleridge, M. H. Abrams draws the conclusion that “absolute separation … is death-dealing—in Coleridge's words, it is ‘the philosophy of Death, and only of a dead nature can it hold good’—so that the separation of mind from nature leads inevitably to the conception of a dead world in which the estranged mind is doomed to lead a life-in-death.”⁶ Most Romantic writers attempted to relate subjective and objective experience according to an organic model, in what René Wellek calls “the great endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world.”⁷ Not in this sense a Romantic writer, Dorothy Wordsworth, as revealed through her nature imagery, backs away from the great endeavor to lose the self in a picture of nature.

The pictorial relation of subject and object is a statement of man's place in the phenomenal world, the articulation of which is the intention of the picturesque. Dorothy draws a trenchant emblem of picturesque intentionality when she tells of seeing in a landscape a “Stone man” (probably a man-shaped rock) who was looking out, it seemed, from his spot on the top of a hill (p. 62). Dorothy looks out upon the Stone man, the fixed perspective; the Stone man in turn looks out over the fixed form of picturesque nature. Dorothy concludes the passage as follows: “Every tooth and every edge of Rock was visible, and the Man stood like a Giant watching from the Roof of a lofty castle. The hill seemed perpendicular from the darkness below it. It was a sight that I could call to mind at any time it was so distinct.” The essence of the emblem is in the apparent, momentary mastery of a beauty which can be called up, repeated, whenever it is needed—at will. Against the darkness of time and oblivion, the picturesque rises like a lofty castle in a kind of triumph all the more poignant because it is fleeting and illusory. While the Romantic poets around her flee from the picturesque, Dorothy, the “exquisite sister” of William, hovers over her landscape like a ghost unable to abandon what was once safe.

Notes

1. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (1971), p. 1. Hereafter, all page citations in the text refer to this edition.

2. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (1940-58), I, 62n.

3. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Picturesque,” SiR [Studies in Romanticism], 3 (1964), 128.

4. Elizabeth Hardwick, “Amateurs: Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle,” New York Review of Books, 19 (November 30, 1972), 4.

5. In Kenneth Clark's Landscape Into Art (1949), see Lorrain's “Temple of Apollo” (pl. 61) and “Landscape with the Flight into Egypt” (pl. 63).

6. M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (1970), p. 218.

7. René Wellek, “Romanticism Re-Examined,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (1963), p. 132.