The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [37]
Parodies of the poet's work soon began to circulate in the literary journals.
When I see a cloud,
I think out loud,
How lovely it is,
To see the sky like this ran one.
Was it a robin that I saw?
Was it a pigeon or a daw?
ran another.
Wordsworth was stoic. ‘Trouble not yourself upon the present reception of these poems,' he advised Lady Beaumont. ‘Of what moment is that when compared with what I trust is their destiny to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.'
He was wrong only about how long it would take. ‘Up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot,' explained De Quincey ‘From 1820 to 1830 it was militant; and from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant' Taste underwent a slow but radical transformation. The reading public gradually ceased guffawing and learnt to be charmed and even to recite by heart hymns to butterflies and sonnets on celandines. Wordsworth's poetry attracted tourists to the places that had inspired it. New hotels were opened in Windermere, Rydal and Grasmere. By 1845, it was estimated that there were more tourists in the Lake District than there were sheep. They prized glimpses of the cadeish creature in his garden in Rydal, and on hillsides and lakeshores sought out the sites whose power he had described in verse. On the death of Southey in 1843, Wordsworth was appointed England's poet laureate. Plans were drawn up by a group of well-wishers in London to have the Lake District renamed Wordsworthshire.
By the time of the poet's death at the age of eighty, in 1850 (by which year half of the population of England and Wales was urban), serious critical opinion seemed almost universally sympathetic to his suggestion that regular travel through nature was a necessary antidote to the evils of the city.
4.
Part of Wordsworth's complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not by themselves have eradicated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him.
The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall to what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which their happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder than it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,' wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other's names.'
Myself afflicted by a few of these ills, I had, one evening several months before my journey to the Lake District, emerged from a gathering held in the centre of London, that ‘turbulent world/of men and things' (The Prelude). Walking away from the venue, envious and worried about my position, I found myself deriving unexpected
relief from the sight of a vast object overhead, which, in spite of the darkness, I attempted to photograph with a pocket camera—and which served to