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Genesis of The Borderers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Harrington Smith
John Harrington Smith*
Affiliation:
Washington University
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Extract

In a recently published article, Mr. J. R. MacGillivray has announced the necessity for redating Wordsworth's play. By closely checking allusions in Wordworth's letters, he is able to show that it could not have been begun before March 7, 1796, and that the letter in which the poet tells Wrangham that the first draft of it is nearly finished must have been written “some time between the beginning of December 1796 and the end of February 1797.” The play, MacGillivray feels, would have been begun not long before October 24, when Dorothy reported her brother “now ardent in the composition of a tragedy.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 1934 , pp. 922 - 930
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934

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Footnotes

∗

This paper appears in revised form, a large part of the original having been anticipated in J. R. MacGillivray, “The Date of Composition of ‘The Borderers,‘” MLN, xlix, 2 (Feb., 1934), 104–110. Ed.

References

1 Op. cit.

2 Memoirs of William Wordsworth (London, 1851), i, 96.

3 The Prelude, ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1926), 1805–6, x, 883 ff.

4 Letters, ed. Knight, i, 107.

5 The DNB and obituary notice in The Gentleman's Magazine, April, 1804, furnish fairly full, though not always trustworthy, accounts.

6 Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, no. 6, 246. “539. Gilpin's (Rev. W.) Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 2 vols.—1787.” Miss E. W. Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1925), p. 185, gives the date of the first edition as 1786. The catalogue date is possibly in error; at any rate, the book it lists is not likely to be the Highlands of Scotland, which was first published in 1789, and which has left no trace on The Borderers.

7 I have not had access to the first edition, but since the three which I have seen—a second edition (1788) and two “third editions” (1792, 1808)—are nearly identical as to text, and with regard to the passages which I quote, entirely so, it seems reasonable to suppose that Wordsworth's copy might be adequately representedby any one of these three. References here are to the edition of 1792. Italicization throughout is Gilpin's.

8 See, e.g., ii, 130, 131.

9 In the play “that cold voluptuary, the villain Clifford” has two castles—one habitable, the other the ruin to which Marmaduke and Oswald take Herbert. Apparently W. endeavored to use Brougham twice, but his imagination, with singular stiffness, tended to run the two versions together. Hence various absurdities in the play—e.g., the information that Clifford frequently uses the ruin for the holding of “infernal orgies,”

with the gloom,
And very superstition of the place,
Seasoning his wickedness (Cambridge ed., ii, 109–111)

and that Oswald, returning to the ruin from a brief expedition after water, can nevertheless claim to have passed so near the habitable castle of Clifford that he heard the villain's henchmen, detained “near the gateway of the castle,” discuss the fate of Idonea. (iii, 46 ff.)

10 See Anne Radcliffe's account of Brougham Castle in A Journey made in the summer of 1794, through Holland and the western frontier of Germany … to which are added, observations, during a tour to the lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland (Dublin, 1795), ii, 277 ff.

11 Two besides the main one according to the Radcliffe account; compare Marmaduke's

I think I see a second range of Towers;
This castle has another Area—come,
Let us examine it (ii, 181–318)

12 Prelude (Cambridge ed.) vi, 205 ff.

13 Marmaduke identifies it, v, 212.

14 ii, 106–107.

15 “Poems on the Naming of Places,” iii.

16 ii, 109–110.

17 The Borderers, ii, 238–239.

18 Ibid., ii, 185 ff.

19 Ibid., ii, 286.

20 Miss Manwaring's excellent study hardly needs to be cited.

21 iii, 47.

22 It is true that Wordsworth tell us in The Prelude of a phase of his career in which, succumbing to “a strong infection of the age,” he developed a tendency to apply to nature “the rules of mimic art” (presumably derived from Gilpin's and similar books) and to pamper his visual sense

with meagre novelties
Of color and proportion, to the moods
Of time and season, to the moral power
The affections, and the spirit of the place
Less sensible (1805–6, xi, 108 ff.)

—in other words, to subordinate truth of observation by all the senses and soul combined to a craving for the picturesque. But apparently the phase was not of much importance.

The question of its duration has recently been raised by Professor Charles Harold Gray (“Wordsworth's First Visit to Tintern Abbey,” PMLA, xlix, March 1934). I find it difficult to accept Professor Gray's conclusion that in Wordworth's account of the summer of 1793 visit in the Lines the poet means us to understand that he was at the time in the throes of this phase—“that the period in his life when he made the first visit was one of degradation.” The passage which Professor Gray especially singles out for analysis might be so interpreted. But elsewhere in the Lines the poet speaks of the experience in the highest terms. As I read the Lines, what Wordworth means is simply that he gave himself over to pure enjoyment of the natural beauties of the place, unmixed with anything else. This sort of experience is not, of course, the highest sort; nature has more to give man than this. Nevertheless, it has its place in the Wordsworth system. It is essentially what Wordsworth got from nature before he was “called forth from the retirement of his native hills”:

I lov'd whate'er I saw; nor lightly lov'd
But fervently, did never dream of aught
More grand, more fair, more exquisitely fram'd
Than those few nooks to which my happy feet
Were limited …
I felt, and nothing else. (1805–6, xi, 226 ff.)

Furthermore, his accounts in subsequent books of The Prelude of his experiences on Sarum plain (ibid., xii, 312 ff.) and during the climb of Snowdon (ibid., xiii, 1 ff.) show conclusively that during this summer he was conscious of no impairment of imagination. The two show, in fact, that the stage of development represented by the “first visit” (during which, according to the Lines, Wordsworth for the time being felt no visitation of the mystic mood) was one which the poet was outgrowing rapidly. The climb-of-Snowdon vision is especially in point; once again, as on the occasion of the poet's descent of the Simplon Pass three years before, nature spoke to him through the sublime, and this time in plainer accents; this was a “visiting of imaginative power” of the greatest importance in the development of Wordsworth's mystic “sense sublime

Of something for more deeply interfused …

And it follows almost immediately upon the “first visit.”

Finally, Wordsworth refers to his false appreciation of nature as a by-product of the period when, shorn of his confidence in the French Revolution, he endeavored to ground his faith on Godwin. This suggests a date much later than the summer of '93. Professor de Selincourt's conclusion (The Prelude, p. 585) that references in The Prelude suggest the spring of 1795 as a date for Wordsworth's swing to Godwin seems to me sound. It seems unlikely that (granting some sort of connection between Godwin and the failure in taste) it can have extended from 1795 as far back as 1793, for the poet refers to it in The Prelude as “transient” (1805–6, xi, 251)—as, in fact, must have been the period of the fuller Godwinism, however intense while it lasted.

The period, then, in which Wordsworth succumbed completely to the craving for the merely picturesque must have been short. It is interesting, however, to note that, although he had recovered by the date of The Borderers, his return to Gilpin's book in the composition of the play had a crippling effect upon his powers as a poet.