Romanticism & Ecology

"Sweet Influences": Human/Animal Difference and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794-1806

Kurt Fosso, Lewis & Clark College

Notes

* An earlier version of this essay appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, under the title "'Sweet Influences': Animals and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794-1800" (ISLE 6 [1999]: 1-20). It is reprinted here by permission.
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1  This is not to say that seventeenth-century painters, especially those on the continent, did not depict animals in their works. The Dutch artist Albert Cuyp (1620-91) is but one example. Yet, with the exception of some Flemish and Dutch paintings, such representations of foregrounded animals are few before the advent of the Romantic era—certainly in Britain's pictorial arts.
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2   According to William Galperin, "The Haywain" depicts "a world uncontrolled by human or authorial intervention" (87) and governed by what amounts to a different way of seeing (93). This other, animal's-eye vantage repeatedly attracts and blocks the human viewer's gaze, producing a "failure of absorption" in the aesthetic experience (95).
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3   As Tim Ingold explains, the question "What is an animal?" can be "construed in a number of ways, all of which are concerned with problems surrounding the definition of boundaries, whether between humans and non-human animals, animals and plants, or living and non-living" (1).
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4  Keith Thomas observes that Linnaeus's Systema naturae (1735) "unabashedly grouped Homo sapiens with other mammalian species and, more precisely, with other primates in the order Anthropomorpha. This may have encouraged the many students of that influential work to think more readily of man as an animal" and to view nature as a realm of evolving rather than static and fixed positions (7). Alex Potts adds that such new ideas about natural order were themselves tied to "changing conceptions of social order" (12)—in contrast to the medieval and Renaissance paradigms of the scala naturae, recently analyzed by Christopher Manes (20-21) and, in slightly different terms, by Henk Verhoog (208-10).
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5  Coleridge praised Erasmus Darwin early on as "the most inventive and philosophical of men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects except religion" (Collected Letters I.99). Zoonomia, although not as popular as Darwin's poetical treatise The Loves of the Plants, was nonetheless sought out upon its publication by Wordsworth, some of whose poems in Lyrical Ballads, such as "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," notably draw on Darwin. "Lines Written in Early Spring," with its "faith" in plants' and animals' pleasure, also likely draws upon Darwin's work (see Matlak 77-78).
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6  A measure of this general shift in sensibility can be gauged by Lord Erskine's speech on behalf of his 1809 bill for the prevention of "Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals." Although Erskine acknowledges that humans may "enjoy" animals for food, pleasure, and curiosity, he argues for our benevolent treatment of our fellow creatures, as "[a]lmost every sense bestowed upon Man is equally bestowed upon them—Seeing—Hearing—Feeling—Thinking—the sense of pain and pleasure—the passions of love and anger—sensibility to kindness, and pangs from unkindness and neglect, are inseparable characteristics of their natures as much as of our own" (4). His view is noticeably close to Darwin's own. Happily for Erskine's cause, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) had pronounced "[t]he wise and virtuous man" to be "at all times willing" to sacrifice his selfish interest "to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings" (346). Like Darwin's ideas about nature, Smith's sense of a greater "society" of "sensible . . . beings" offered conceptual opportunities to his contemporaries and successors for reimagining social relationships and identities.
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7  "I see nothing to loathe in nature," Byron ambivalently observes in Canto 3 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, "save to be / A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, / Class'd among creatures. . ." (684-86).
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8  The nineteenth-century term "ecology" is, as Bate notes, comprised of the Greek words logos and oikos: "system" and "dwelling." Coined in 1866 by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel to denote the "economy of nature" and "its friendly and inimical relations" of animals (cited Bate 36), ecology as a term succinctly captures the prior Romantic preoccupation with dwelling (ruins, bowers, cottages) and with whatever system makes such dwelling and social life possible.
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9  Turner argues that even those who welcomed the forces of progress in England felt "a twinge of uneasiness" and "a touch of longing for the familiar life fading away" (33)—as many of the works of the Romantic period attest. And, as Turner asks, "What was more 'natural' than beasts? Their paucity of reasoning power only enhanced their symbolic role as emblems of feeling. Moreover, since they exhibited many of the same emotions as people, they served as a very direct way of linking man with nature through the ties of feeling" (33).
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10   Thomas's Man and the Natural World provides an informative history of these and other cultural influences upon the period's changing attitudes about animals (see 92-191). In contrast to Thomas's arguably more linear view of this history, Harriet Ritvo sees the Romantic-Victorian period as one of paradoxical attitudes and actions towards animals, suggesting both "change in human-animal relations in Britain" as well as "stasis" ("Animals" 108). Indeed few even among those most concerned about animal welfare appear ever to have made a connection between the meat they consumed and the animal suffering they deplored. For the upper classes in England meat continued to be a desired staple (Black 5-7).
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11   John Berger argues that in fact animals have always (if less noticeably) been "central" to those cultural processes by which human beings "form an image of themselves" out of a system of differences (2)—and never more so, never more openly and even desperately so, I would add, than in the Romantic era in Britain. In "Eating Well" Jacques Derrida similarly describes human subjectivity as the product of a "schema" of animal speculation and sacrifice, exchange and consumption (113). By this accounting, Western culture can be said to be at its core a shifting economy of physical and symbolical animal exchange—again, at no time more so in Britain than at the turn of the century.
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12   All citations from Coleridge's poetry follow the texts of the poems in The Complete Poetical Works, excepting those poems by Coleridge, such as his earliest version of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, included in his and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads.
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13   For a helpful historical justification of Coleridge's and Southey's scheme, circa 1792-94, to escape to the banks of the Susquehanna, see Rosemary Ashton's Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 52.
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14   David Perkins agrees that "[t]he term 'brother' encoded the[se] Revolutionary ideal[s]" (929). His reading of the poem's "radical politics" as self-consciously exposing Coleridge's and others' democratic sentiments "to mockery" (941) is, however, quite different from my own. It is worth noting that the poem's emphasis on "fellowship" created by sorrow and on the hardening effects of poverty and slavery further connected the speaker's hail to contemporary reformist tenets and concerns, themselves tied to later anti-cruelty acts.
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15   According to James McKusick, Coleridge's "unique contribution" to his collaboration with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads was his "ecolinguistic" conception of language as "holistic" and organic—a view indebted to eighteenth-century natural history (392).
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16   Kroeber similarly argues that the poem "warns that one distorts the truths of natural being when one projects into external nature [one's] narcissistic feelings" (73).
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17   According to Elizabeth A. Lawrence, the phrase "jug jug" signifies the "harsh guttural sounds" produced in the nightingale's song (25). She describes that song "as a rich, extraordinarily vigorous virtuoso performance that includes mournful, almost sobbing notes" (22).
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18   Regarding the scene's relationship between father and son and its disruption of the poem's "associationist premises," see Anya Taylor's "'A Father's Tale': Coleridge Foretells the Life of Hartley," esp. 38-39. Timothy P. Enright offers a different reading of this turn to Hartley: as a means of self-authorization against poetic tradition and imitation (497-98).
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19   Drawing upon the work of the late Jean-François Lyotard, Andrew R. Smith states that "contemplation of communicability presupposes that the one contemplating is already a part of the sensus communis instantiated by the feeling" (342). In this respect my reading of Coleridge's poem is consonant with Regina Hewitt's own in The Possibilities of Society, although Hewitt sees the text's community of listeners as rejecting the conceit of melancholy largely "because it suggests discontinuity" and an absence of "harmony" (70). I find human and animal difference to be a greater source of social cohesion in the poem than is either similarity or harmony.
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20   On the intertextual connections between Coleridge's poem—specifically its description of the water-snakes—and Erasmus Darwin's "The Economy of Vegetation" in his Linnaean-influenced Botanic Garden, see Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature 154. Cf. Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature 11-13. Onno Dag Oerlemans's essay "'The Meanest Thing that Feels': Anthropomorphizing Animals in Romanticism" provides a different reading of Coleridge's representation of animals in the poem (see 17-20).
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21   The similarity is striking between the moral of Coleridge's poem and the sentiments of Goody Two-Shoes: "These are GOD Almighty's creatures as well as we. He made both them and us . . . so that they are our fellow Tenants of the Globe" (68). Perkins describes several other late-eighteenth-century instances of this popular notion "of loving sympathy with all creatures," including those proclaimed in Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786) and E. A. Kendall's Keeper's Travels in Search of His Master (1798). See Perkins (930-32).
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22   On a source in Schiller for this setting, see Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (322-23). Fruman also discerns Wordsworthian influences in much of the poem. Regarding the text's drive toward hermeneutic reconciliation, especially in its later, revised versions, see Tim Fulford, Coleridge's Figurative Language, 62-73. Enright reads both this ballad and "The Nightingale" as poems troubled by their derivative and inauthentic status (see, for example, 494-96).
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23   See Raimonda Modiano, esp. 482-501.
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24   Cf. Walter Reed. Reed's analysis of works by Kafka and by Blake reveals how animals often lurk behind and inform religious ritual.
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25   Wordsworth began Home at Grasmere in the spring of 1800, and, as the Cornell edition's editor Beth Darlington contends, a number of passages "clearly express events and feelings of March and April, 1800" (8). The two episodes I consider refer back to this time, and may well have been drafted in 1800, as Kenneth R. Johnston contends (85-91). In this regard, see also Jonathan Wordsworth (17-29). The text's earliest complete manuscript, "B," was not completed until after a long lull, in 1806; hence the poem's double dating here (1800, 1806) to designate its earliest and final dates of composition.
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26   Perkins cites the standard commentary on this reference to a "milder day": as referring to "a future time when . . . 'all mankind' (l. 256) will share the 'blessedness' (l. 254) that the poet and his sister now know in Grasmere" ("Wordsworth" 443). Perkins finds this reading problematical in its overly sympathetic view of humanity—a humanity shown in the poem to be prone to murderous hunting (444-45). In fact the "intimation" the Wordsworths receive is primarily one of blessings for their imminent dwelling in the vale; only secondarily, by virtue of their "trust" (l. 255), do they perceive this "love and knowledge" as having the power to bring "blessedness . . . hereafter" to humankind.
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27   Modiano interestingly interprets the episode of the missing swans in terms of its "active involvement in the elaboration of a non-violent framework of exchange, that of the gift, which secures momentary relief from violence"—although she also declares that the swans "must die to secure his and Dorothy's survival" (512, 483). Bruce Clarke comments on the strange manner in which at this textual midpoint a surmise of death "intrude[s]," and argues that the swans' disappearance in fact is owed to their symbolic displacement by this pair of new human arrivals (370-71). My interpretation of the episode owes a considerable debt to Clarke, to Modiano, and to readings of the scene by Johnston (89-92) and William A. Ulmer (70).
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28   One famous instance of a call unanswered is of course Wordsworth's previously mentioned poem "There was a Boy," from Lyrical Ballads, in which the Boy of Winander's owl-calls occasionally receive no response. His resulting "gentle shock of mild surprize" (l. 19) seems in the subsequent version of the text, incorporated in The Prelude, to be associated with his death, making him, in this case, the sacrifice to be mourned.
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29   Potts also argues that in this "important period of transition" the Enlightenment's and post-Enlightenment's "formalised conventions of [animal] picturing" came increasingly to be seen as either "irrelevant or detrimental to the cognitive content of a naturalistic visual depiction" (28). In short, both the order and ordering of things had changed. See also Ritvo, "New Presbyter or Old Priest?" 272-74.
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