“A spirit of strange meaning”: The Chinese Roots of Wordsworth’s Monism in The Ruined Cottage

ABSTRACT

In both his life and poetry, The Ruined Cottage marked a decisive breakthrough for Wordsworth, which resulted from his daring adoption and sustained use of a monistic idea. Though hitherto mostly dismissed or construed as a derivative of Platonism, Stoicism, Christian mysticism, and/or other conventional English and European concepts and usually seen as part of his supposedly quietist retreat from radical politics, the philosophy of One Life which Wordsworth promoted was in reality a recognizably unconventional conceptual innovation, which indeed made possible his poetic and political innovations in The Ruined Cottage and beyond. In the larger context of ideas that extends well beyond England and Europe and involves in particular the Chinese cosmological belief in tianren heyi or humanity’s unity with heaven, this essay explores Wordsworth’s innovative use of monism in The Ruined Cottage and argues for a significantly different understanding of Wordsworth and the related rise of English Romanticism.

KEYWORDS:

• Wordsworth
• The Ruined Cottage
• monism
• Spinoza
• Chinese philosophy
• tianren heyi
• Chinese and English garden design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), bk. 11, 4–7. Hereafter references to The Prelude are to the 1805 edition and are cited in the text.

2. Wordsworth, The Pedlar: Fragment, 218, in Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity; Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. B, 84–85.

3. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, 510; Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, xiii.

4. In Wordsworth and The Recluse, for instance, Kenneth Johnston representatively identifies the flourishing friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1797 as “a wedding of the Coleridgean ideal and the Wordsworthian real” so that “Wordsworth was to realize what Coleridge thought” (10). Countering this view in William Wordsworth, Stephen Gill goes out of his way to differentiate his biographical subject from Coleridge: “Unlike Coleridge,” as Gill says, “he [Wordsworth] was not a philosopher, nor did he feel the compulsion to eradicate uncertainties which drove Coleridge to a lifetime’s philosophical enquiry” (137). A similar view is expressed by Paul Sheats who characterizes Wordsworth’s poetry as “guided to its objects by feeling, and not by the methods of systematic exposition” (211). The same view can also be seen in Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge (62). Following Ernest de Selincourt and other scholars, on the other hand, M. J. Bruhn has recently drawn attention to Wordsworth’s revision of An Evening Walk in 1794 at Windy Brow and associates Wordsworth with Ralph Cudworth and other English and European rationalist thinkers in the tradition of Platonism and Neoplatonism.

5. Gill, Wordsworth, 60; Barker, Wordsworth, 71; Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 56–57.

6. An idea of what he already knew can be glimpsed from Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading.

7. Moorman, Wordsworth, 191; Gill, Wordsworth, 61.

8. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default,” 37.

9. Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, 792–95.

10. Ibid., 53 and 60–61.

11. Shelley, Laon and Cythna, lines 58 and 58–59.

12. In light of a conversation with Wordsworth which Thomas Carlyle recalled in his Reminiscences, written in 1867, it has long been speculated that Wordsworth made a third trip to France in late 1793 or at the beginning of the Reign of Terror. The evidence, however, is not conclusive.

13. Wordsworth, “Letter to William Mathews, June 8, 1794,” 124 and 124.

14. Wordsworth, Salisbury Plain, 255 and 321–22.

15. Ibid., 541 and 541–42.

16. Wordsworth, Salisbury Plain, 761.

17. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. B, 172–73.

18. Ibid., 203–5.

19. Butler, ”Introduction,” 6.

20. Wordsworth, An Evening Walk (1793), 244.

21. Ibid., 257–258, and 259–60.

22. Gill, “Introduction,” in The Salisbury Plain Poems, 5.

23. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. B, 250–56.

24. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. D, 508–11.

25. Butler, “Introduction,” 4; Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default,” 67; McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 90 and 84.

26. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 140; Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, 115.

27. Bate, Radical Wordsworth, 490; Radcliffe, “Saving Ideals,” 541.

28. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. B, 406–7.

29. Simpson, Romanticism, 152.

30. In Wordsworth’s Philosophical Poetry, for instance, John Hodgson writes that “by late 1798 Wordsworth was coming to regard his belief in the one life as simply inadequate to sustain and console him in the face of inevitable human loss” (49). Ulmer, “Wordsworth, the One Life, and 'The Ruined Cottage',” 329, 305, and 329.

31. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. B, 47, 74–75, and 77–79.

32. Ibid., 80–83.

33. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” 90–92.

34. Greenblatt, The Swerve, 5; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, 64.

35. Coleridge, “Letter to John Thelwall, May 13, 1796,” 1.216; Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage: MS. B Reading Text, 84–85.

36. Piper, The Active Universe, 4.

37. Coleridge, “Religious Musings,” 130–31.

38. Ulmer, “Wordsworth, the One Life, and “The Ruined Cottage,” 324 and 308.

39. Bewell, Natures in Translation, 234.

40. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 136.

41. Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1; Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century, 10.

42. Qian, World Situation and Chinese Culture, 383 (my translation).

43. Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 3.

44. For a recent discussion, see Liu, Harmonious Disagreement.

45. Longobardo, A Short Answer, I.214.

46. Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 208 and 167. Bayle discussed the Chinese monistic conviction in both the entry on Spinoza and the entry on Japan in his Dictionary Historical and Critical. Knowing the long and profound influence of China on Japanese philosophy and religion, Jesuit missionaries in Japan were the ones who initiated the Jesuit internal debate about the Chinese idea of tianren heyi in the early decades of the seventeenth century and who, by doing so, precipitated a chain of momentous events comprising the Chinese rites controversy and the westward movement of the Chinese monistic idea to England and Europe. For a recent discussion about that chain of events, see Liu, “Behind the Façade of the Rites Controversy.”

47. Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings, 250; Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius, 5.

48. Lai, “Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought,” 154. For a recent discussion, see Liu, “Deus sive Natura.”

49. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” 26. Thomas McFarland’s well-known characterization of Spinozistic pantheism in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition as atheistic for denying human freedom and responsibility is therefore misguided given its confinement to a narrow English and European or Eurocentric conceptual framework.

50. Farrar, Ancient Roman Gardens, 26; Vitruvius, On Architecture, I.25.

51. Hussey, “Introduction,” 15.

52. Temple, Works, vol. 3, 237.

53. Lovejoy, “Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” 3. For a recent discussion, see Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden.

54. For a recent discussion, see Liu, “The Contested Inspiration.”

55. Confucius, Analects, bk. 6, chap. 21. Note that in the Chinese language, the two monosyllabic words for mountain “shan” and river “shui” are usually used together as a phrase for the idea of landscape “shanshui.”

56. Ji Cheng, Yuanye Zhushi, 44.

57. Wyman, “Chinese Mysticism and Wordsworth,” 517 and 517.

58. Barker, Wordsworth, 99.

59. Barrow, Travels in China, 130.

60. Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 209.

61. Barrow, Travels in China, 130.

62. For a recent discussion on the subject, see Liu, “Changing Chinese Ideas.”

63. Wordsworth later moved from this new and revolutionary cosmology to religious orthodoxy, which proved to be the process in which he lost what was innovative not only politically and poetically but also conceptually. In his 1845 final revision of The Excursion, for instance, he ended Book I, which was recycled from The Ruined Cottage, by describing the wanderer as having his cheerfulness “repose / Upon the breast of Faith” (76, note). Among others, that Christianizing description marked the loss of the innovative and inspiring ethos behind the original poem.

64. Smith, The I Ching, 3.

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Notes on contributors

Yu Liu

Yu Liu (PhD) teaches at the English Department of Niagara County Community College, USA. The past recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and a Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study fellowship, he is the author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth (1999), Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (2008), and Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (2015).