Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth

Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1933.

“It is important to emphasize that he resumed the practice of Christianity while his theological convictions were still unsettled—before, for example, having arrived at a steady belief in the immortality of the soul. As late as 1805 he still seems to have been struggling towards a confident assurance of an afterlife” (Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation; Religious politics in English literature, 1789-1824. p. 98)

“A fair specimen of the average conscientious High Church parish priest is the Rev. William Cole, as we know him from his diaries. All the materials for the Tractarian Revival are there: the strong historical sense, passing into antiquarianism, the sense of duty towards the spiritual needs of his parishioners, the sense of the Church, he sacramental sense leading to a strong sympathy with Roman Catholicism on the sides of religious devotion and ceremonial” (Batho 240)

“It is clear from everything he wrote that, bred an Anglican, he was not bred either a Low Churchman or an Evangelical” “High Churchmen with the characteristic regret for the destruction at the Reformation of so much that was noble, there characteristic wish to revive it, the characteristic respect for the religious devotion of Roman Catholics, and the characteristic dislike for the Roman Church” (240-241)

“why, Hale White wondered, should Wordsworth in The Ecclesiastical Sonnets, after a series of sonnets celebrating the liturgy, write one on Mutability? ‘Is mutability, then, so characteristic of things ecclesiastical that when the thoughts are turned to them it naturally presents itself?’ Hale White was not a Churchman, or he would have knows that the answer was ‘Yes’. There are at least three places in the Prayer Books which consider that precise point of the mutability of rites and ceremonies” (243)

The High Church might at the times, with more or less justice, be accused of dryness and formality, but that very insistence on external forms and obligations would have the effect of impressing upon a man brought up in it the possible existence of truths which were not at every moment emotionally felt or believed, or received with complete and overpowering intellectual conviction. Even a strong intellectual disagreement, or an emotional desolation, would not make such a man feel that he must exclude himself from the Church; and the Church would not exclude him. (264)

1824. O dearer far. “a poem which means nothing at all if it does not mean that he envied not only her unhesitating belief in a matter which might be looked upon as an open question—the belief that we shall recognize in the next life those whom we have loved—but her who religious attitude” (277)

The Ecclesiastical Sonnets are ecclesiastical, therefore, necessarily narrow, bigoted, and not to seriously considered for their poetry. Actually, beside the Mutability sonnet and those on King’s College Chapel, they contain much good poetry…and they are marked by a lofty absence of partisanship which is sufficiently indicated by the fact that, while Crabb Robinson was touched by their fairness to Nonconformists, Hale White and others have been equally struck by their Catholic tone” (292-293)

not seeing W as mystical depends “partly on a general misconception of the mystical attitude, a belief that implies a vague, blurred and sentimental habit of mind, which is obviously far removed from Wordsworth’s definite and unsentimental thought; partly on a failure to understand the successive states of the mystical life” (306-307) no more mystical experiences doesn’t mean you stop being a mystic: “the ecstasies, the intuitions, the ‘consolations’, to use a technical religious term, come at the beginning and may never be repeated” (307) “from about 1795 onwards for several years, a longer period than seems to be usual, the mystical experience was frequently repeated, with deepening significance” (309)