The "Dial's Moral Round": Charting Wordsworth's Evening Walk

I.

There is little dispute that Wordsworth's early poem An Evening Walk draws heavily on eighteenth-century descriptive traditions. Alan Liu has outlined in some detail the poem's reliance on picturesque and locodescriptive norms, and Wordsworth himself makes explicit connections to James Thomson, Thomas Gray, and others through notes and textual allusions.¹ Wordsworth's relationship to these precursors has dominated critical reaction to the poem, but in a specific, one might say limited, manner, focusing on Wordsworth's ability to break free from his influences. Because the mainstream of twentieth-century criticism represented Romanticism as a salutary revolt against the sedate norms of eighteenth-century culture, the fortunes of the poem have waxed or waned according to how solid a case could be made for placing it on the far side of the romantic divide. Sympathetic criticism usually seeks to tease out of the poem glimmers of the greater poetry to come in the wake of the French Revolution.² Other critics simply dismiss An Evening Walk as juvenilia. Paul D. Sheats, for example, emphasizes its "striking contrast to [Wordsworth's] later work" and suggests that the mature poet "and most of his critics would regard this poem as an egregious capitulation to conventional stylistic vices."³

But the assumption that Romanticism in fact represents a revolt against the eighteenth century is now the subject of renewed critical debate. These days we are just as likely to place romantic literature within an extended eighteenth century, stressing its participation in common patterns of thought and representation. There are practical reasons behind this change, as job opportunities for those who specialize in forty or so years of literary history (and, until recently, the work of six poets) continue to shrink in the face of economic pressures.⁴ But it also answers the demands of dominant theoretical perspectives: the contemporary urge to remove Romanticism from a narrative of rebellion and to resituate it within an eighteenth-century episteme responds to a mistrust of narrative ordering fostered by both deconstruction and new historicism. One could refer here to Paul de Man's well-known critique of romantic temporal aspirations—specifically the romantic subject's tendency to appropriate "the temporal stability it lacks from nature." And it is precisely the tendency of romantic values to extend over time that motivated Jerome McGann's influential demand that criticism historicize its object as a matter of academic hygiene.⁵ The result is a contemporary predisposition to think of culture in terms of spatial matrices—the Foucauldian episteme as a map of an era's cultural possibilities. While transitions were once the primary focus of literary history—the (revolutionary) shift from sensibility to Romanticism, for instance, or the charting of Wordsworth's development as a poet—texts are now more often than not read against a set of possibilities determined by the period, the genre, the historical moment. Deconstructionist criticism has now largely faded from the mainstream, but historicism is still widely embraced, and this criticism either explicitly or implicitly understands history in opposition to time. In the case of An Evening Walk, for example, Liu's historicist reading exemplifies current critical values by focusing not on the story of Wordsworth's career but on "the disciplinary matrix at the heart of the picturesque" (W, 102).

An Evening Walk holds a peculiar advantage to our age, I would suggest, because it reflects on the very distinction between time and history that underwrites contemporary criticism. Like historicist criticism, the picturesque tradition that informs the poem endorses the discrete moment of vision at the expense of narrative development. The picturesque, as Liu puts it, "arrests" temporal experience; it accommodates diversity through the construction of a spatial order that requires renouncing, if only momentarily, the movement of time. As a picturesque poem An Evening Walk indeed presents a series of landscape views that recall a "picture gallery"; its scenes repeatedly stage diversity within the matrices of specific historical moments—discrete moments of viewing (W, 84, 117).⁶ Such practices seem designed to appeal to a historicism with little patience for developmental narratives and...