The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [36]
3.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the small town of Cocker-mouth on the northern edge of the Lake District. He spent, in his words, ‘half his boyhood in running wild among the Mountains' and aside from interludes in London and Cambridge and travels around Europe, lived his whole life in the Lake District, first in a modest two-storeyed stone dwelling, Dove Cottage in the village of Gras-mere, and then, as his fame increased, in a more substantial home in nearby Rydal.
And almost every day he went on a long walk in the mountains or along the lakeshore. He was unbothered by the rain that, as he admitted, tended to fall in the Lake District ‘with a vigour and perseverance that may remind the disappointed traveller of those deluges of rain which fall among the Abyssinian mountains for the annual supply of the Nile'. His acquaintance Thomas De Quincey would estimate that Wordsworth had walked between 175,000 and 180,000 miles over his lifetime—a statistic that was all the more remarkable, added De Quincey, considering his physique: ‘For Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture upon the topic' Sadly, De Quincey continued, ‘the total effect of Wordsworth's person was always worst in a state of motion, for, according to the remark I have heard from many country people, “he walked like a cade”—a cade being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion.'
It was during his cadelike walks that Wordsworth derived the inspiration for many of his works, including ‘To a Butterfly', ‘To the Cuckoo', ‘To a Skylark', ‘To the Daisy' and ‘To the Small Celandine'—poems about natural phenomena that poets had hitherto looked at only casually or ritualistic ally, if at all, but that Wordsworth now declared to be the noblest subjects of his craft. On the sixteenth of March 1802—according to the journal of his sister, Dorothy, who kept a record of her sibling's movements around the Lake District—Wordsworth walked across a bridge at Brothers Water, a placid lake near Patterdale, and then sat down to write the following:
The cock is crowing
The stream is flowing
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter…
There's joy in the mountains;
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing
A few weeks afterwards, the poet found himself moved to write by the beauty of a sparrow's nest:
Look, five blue eggs are gleaming there!
Few visions have I seen more fair,
Nor many prospects of delight
More pleasing than that simple sight!
He experienced the same need to express joy a few summers later on hearing the sound of a nightingale:
O Nightingale! thou surely art
A Creature of a fiery heart—…
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
Had help'd thee to a Valentine.
These were not haphazard articulations of pleasure. Behind them lay a well-developed philosophy of nature, which—infusing all of Wordsworth's work—made an original and, in the history of Western thought, hugely influential claim about our requirements for happiness and the origins of our unhappiness. The poet proposed that nature—which he took to comprise, among other elements, birds, streams, daffodils and sheep—was an indispensable corrective to the psychological damage inflicted by life in the city.
The message met with vicious initial resistance. Lord Byron, reviewing Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes in 1807, was bewildered that a grown man could make such claims on behalf of flowers and animals: ‘What will any reader out of the nursery say to such namby-pamby… an imitation of such minstrelsy as soothed our cries in the cradle?' The editors of the Edinburgh Review concurred, declaring Wordsworth's poetry ‘a piece of babyish absurdity' and wondering whether it might not represent a deliberate attempt by the author to turn himself into a laughingstock: ‘It is possible that the sight of a garden spade or a sparrow's nest might