University of Virginia Library

The Dating of the "1794" Version of Wordsworth's An Evening Walk
by
John O. Hayden

While we are used to identifying and tagging a philosophical concept like animism without giving it much thought, it is nevertheless an astounding belief. We can easily identify instances of animism in a number of William Wordsworth's poems from at least 1798 onwards, as in Lyrical Ballads [1]:

Animism, nonetheless, is so startling that when found in Wordsworth's poems it most often is taken as metaphorical or perhaps even whimsical. Wordsworth tends to help this attitude along by qualifying his published animistic statements, as he does above ("seems", "'tis my faith").

But in unpublished passages his animism is unqualified, in fact unrelenting, as it is in a fragment found in the Alfoxden Note-Book (written in early 1798):

Perhaps even more stark is a passage found in a revised version of An Evening Walk (lines 125-132):

This last passage, however, presents a problem, for, as Jonathan Wordsworth has observed, the revised version of An Evening Walk in which it is found has been dated 1794, and nothing even remotely like it appears in his work until the spring of 1798, when "a major change had taken place" (p. 188) in William Wordsworth's thinking. Yet, despite the isolation of the passage, Jonathan Wordsworth concludes, "All that safely can be said is that in April 1794 Wordsworth believed in animated matter" (p. 187).

James Averill prints the lines containing animism in his recent Cornell edition of An Evening Walk as part of "The Expanded Version of 1794," which is itself taken from two manuscript drafts in the Dove Cottage Library, DCMS 9 and DCMS 10.[4] Averill also prints transcriptions of both these manuscripts in full, and photos of the actual manuscripts appear on opposite pages to the transcriptions.

MS 9 is literally a scissors-and-glue affair with passages cut from the published version and pasted in among new and revised passages written on the pages in ink. It provides the full text for what Averill calls the "Expanded Version of 1794," which is about twice as long as An Evening Walk, published in 1793, and this MS 9 contains the only copy of the passage on animism given above. The version of An Evening Walk in MS 10, on the other hand, is a good deal shorter—barely a third of the lines of MS 9. The MS 10 revisions and additions to An Evening Walk are contained in the Windy Brow Notebook along with other material; consequently, unlike MS 9, it can be dated 1794 with some certainty.[5]

MS 9, which contains the animistic passage, has been given that same date a number of times; it is only the certainty that is missing. Ernest de Selincourt (I, 320) dates it 1794, and Mark Reed, having conceded that common readings between MSS 9 and 10 show MS 9 to be later, claimed that, since Wordsworth was not likely to have "resumed work on the poem once he had reached London in early 1795," late 1794 was the probable date.[6] No concrete evidence is offered in support of this supposition.

James Averill, the editor of the Cornell edition of the poem, follows de Selincourt in dating MS 9 as 1794 on textual grounds, that is, on its connections with MS 10 (pp. 13, 191). First of all, however, Averill admits that "for the most part, the work in DC MS. 9 is later than that in MS. 10: many revisions of MS. 10 appear as fair copy in MS. 9" (p. 13). But Averill then argues that in one seven-line passage MS 9 is earlier; and he makes the claim five times.[7]

The seven-line passage (lines 281-287 of the "Expanded Version of 1794") is not otherwise significant. Added to the description of the quarry (Evening Walk [1793], ll. 139-150), all it provides is a vignette of a maiden come at night to moan the death of her lover, who has died while working at the quarry, but it constitutes the only hard evidence for dating MS 9 as before

MS 10 and consequently as falling in 1794. Otherwise, MS 9 could have been written in 1798 or even later, perhaps even as late as 1820.

The 1794 dating of MS 9, in any event, depends solely on one seven-line passage as it appears in MS 9 and MS 10:

MS 9

• 281 To that sad spot her bosomed pain to tell
• lover
• 282 Where crushed by falling rocks her Henry fell When Love created thought wheree'er he stole Through her young veins till all her frame was soul passions passions thrilling fires
• 283 Fell while all warm with Joys delicious fires
• 284 She chid the slow moon "lingering her desires"
• 285 That very moon which ere she reached her wainne}[8] her
• 286 Led to these deep clefts to break the reign
• 287 Of Peace with anguish exquite as vain

MS 10

• 281 To that sad spot her bosomed pain to tell
• 282 Where crushed by falling rocks her lover fell
• 283 Fell while all warn with passions thrilling fires
• 284 She chid the slow moon "lingering her desires
• 285 That very moon which ere she reached her wain
• 286 Led to these deep clefts to break the reign
• 287 Of peace with anguish exquisite as vain.

A glance at the two versions supports Averill's contention (p. 140n.) that four changes made in MS 9 also affect MS 10: "lover" (line 282), "passion's thrilling fires" (line 283), the deletion of the added couplet (lines 282/283), and "wain" (line 285).

But several words that appear in MS 9 do not appear in MS 10 as they should if MS 10 is a copy of MS 9 by way of revision: "her" (added to line 286 of MS 9, but missing from MS 10) is treated by Averill as "a copyist's error" (p. 140n.) but he seems to have missed another word, "warn" in line 283 of MS 10, which would also be a mis-transcription (for "warm" in MS 9).

Averill includes in this list another word "wain" (line 285)—supposedly changed from "wane" in MS 9—but his reading of "wane" as the revision for "wain" in MS 9 is itself an error, no matter how much it might look that way on the accompanying photo. When the manuscript is examined, the reverse is clearly the case: "wane" has been changed to "wain". I suspect Averill did much of his transcription from photos, and perhaps this instance provides a good argument for the sole use of manuscripts. In any case, the probable motive for Wordsworth's revision will be provided shortly.

But the other two words that differ between the two manuscripts, "her" and "warm", could have been errors of transcription had Wordsworth been copying MS 9 into MS 10 at this point. Since, however, all other work in MS 9 is later than MS 10, and since so much hangs in the balance on this

one passage, Averill should have reconsidered his editorial assumptions and asked himself whether some other explanation of the revisions and "mis-transcriptions" was possible. Is it possible, he might have asked, for MS 9 to be a copy of MS 10 in this passage (as, he grants, it is everywhere else)?

Not only is an alternate scenario possible, it even seems to me a great deal more plausible. My basic assumption is that revisions can be, and often are, made during the process of transcription.[9] Both manuscripts are in Wordsworth's own hand, and thus another explanation for the differences between the two versions was 1) that the poet was revising MS 10 in the process of copying it into MS 9, and 2) that he made still further changes back to MS 10 readings later. The two colors of ink tend to support this hypothesis; the passage in MS 9 was written in brown ink and later revised in black-brown ink.

The passage in MS 9 (in brown ink) read as follows (before Wordsworth went back later and further revised in black-brown ink):

• 281 To that sad spot her bosomed pain to tell
• 282 Where crushed by falling rocks her Henry fell
• When Love created thought wheree'er he stole
• Through her young veins till all her frame was soul
• 283 Fell while all warm with Joys delicious fires
• 284 She chid the slow moon "lingering her desires"
• 285 That very moon which ere she reached her wainne}
• 286 Led to these deep clefts to break the reign
• 287 Of Peace with anguish exquisite as vain[10]

In my alternate scenario, Wordsworth made the following changes in brown ink while transcribing from MS 10:

• (282) He changed "lover" to "Henry", perhaps to make him more concrete, but then deleted "Henry" in the same brown ink. Perhaps Wordsworth was unhappy with the change; the maiden herself is unnamed. But he was apparently still unhappy with "lover", for he wrote nothing immediately in brown ink to replace "Henry".
• (282/283) He composed a new couplet apparently to expand on the relationship between the maiden and her lover. The couplet, however, was very poor, and he cancelled it in brown ink. That he returned at the beginning of the next line (283) to repeating the verb "fell" (as he had in MS 10) proves that this deletion was immediate.
• (283) He corrected "warn" to "warm".
• (283) He changed "passions thrilling fires" to "Joys delicious fires", apparently in an attempt to improve the phrasing, although neither, it could easily be argued, is very good.
• (284) He corrected the end of the line by adding quotation marks (omitted in MS 10) to enclose "lingering her desires", an adaptation of a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream (I,i,24): "This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires."
• (285) Possibly confused by the Shakespearean quotation, he changed "wain"

  ---

  269

  
  
  
  (MS 10) to "wane" but then must have realized that there was a choice about the antecedent of "her" and wane/wain at the end of the line. "Her" could refer either to the maiden or to the moon and on the solution to that confusion depends "wane" (moon) or "wain" (maiden). Although the maiden is not said to have a wain, there are "numerous wains" in the daytime scene above (line 266) and she could have ridden one to the quarry. In any event, without a change to the wording "her wain" (with "her" referring to the maiden), the "her" in the next line (286) would have the wrong antecedent ("moon"). Since the change from "wane" to "wain", moreover, involves a write-over, the color of the ink used is not as certain as elsewhere; it could be black-brown, in which case the change could be coupled with the later addition of "her" in the next line (286).

Thus, two of the changes made in brown ink during transcription are corrections made to MS 10 (the quotation marks and "warm"), three are attempts at improvements that failed and were corrected immediately ("Henry", the new couplet, and "wane"), and one was an attempt at improvement that was not changed ("Joys delicious fires").

Apparently, however, Wordsworth later went back over MS 9 with MS 10 at hand and made three other changes in black-brown ink: the addition of "lover", "passions thrilling fires", and "her" as superscriptions in their respective lines. The apparent procedure was as follows:

• (282) To fill the void left by the deletion of "Henry" (in brown ink), he returned to "lover" from MS 10.
• (283) He wrote "passions thrilling fires" (from MS 10) above the revision "Joys delicious fires", which had never been cancelled. The hesitancy noticeable in cancelling "passions" and then rewriting it suggests that he was not much happier with the wording reinstated from MS 10, and the absence of cancellation of "Joys delicious fires" suggests that he was not really satisfied with either reading—as well he might not have been—and wished to reconsider the wording.
• (286) He added "her" above the line to correct MS 10. He must have missed the need for "her" when he was initially transcribing from MS 10, but now he saw, as Averill put it (p. 140n.), that "Grammar, meter, and sense require 'led her.'" This explanation, I should add, is a good deal easier to accept than Averill's reverse argument that in copying from MS 9 to MS 10 Words-worth missed copying "her" even though it was written prominently above the line.

Thus, of the three later changes in black-brown ink, two were returns to MS 10 readings and one was a correction of MS 10.

My alternate scenario for the revision of lines 281-287 is supported, as my argument has indicated, by the colors of the inks used, colors which cannot be seen in the photos in Averill's edition but only by examining the manuscripts. Since both MS 9 and the revisions made to it are in Wordsworth's hand, it is easy to believe that he made corrections and revisions as

he was copying from MS 10 in the brown ink and that he went back later and made further revisions in black-brown ink, two of them back to previous readings of MS 10.

MS 10 was almost certainly an intermediate addition to An Evening Walk used by Wordsworth to produce the fuller version of MS 9, which in turn was incorporated into the version of An Evening Walk published in 1820.[11] As Averill's notes to MS 10 clearly show, MS 9 follows revisions made to MS 10 at least twenty-nine times. At several other points (lines 35, 724, and 728), Wordsworth could have been making the same sort of revisions-in-transcription from MS 10 to MS 9 that I argued above he could have made in the case of lines 281-287.

Since these latter seven lines constitute the one exception to the eight hundred lines of the "Expanded Version," it is only necessary to show the possibility of an alternate explanation in order to overturn Averill's argument that a part of MS 9 is earlier and his even less plausible explanation (p. 167n.) that "for a time at least, copying in the notebooks overlapped" and (p. 13) that "it seems likely . . . that the two notebooks were active at about the same time"—whatever these statements can possibly mean. MS 10, in other words, was probably written in spring or summer, 1794, while MS 9 was most likely written some time later, probably in 1798 but possibly even as late as 1819 to 1820, when, Averill argues (p. 129), many revisions took place.

Several other arguments support a later date as well. Bruce Graver, in a recent article in The Wordsworth Circle, argues that the principle of translation used to produce the Horatian ode "Blandusian Spring" (that occurs only in a note to MS 9) is very different from the kind of translation Wordsworth produced in 1788.[12]

The little other evidence provides no help. The paper on which MS 9 is written has a clear watermark, but it is of no use. The paper was produced by 1792,[13] and thus we only learn that MS 9 could have been written at least as early as that date, not when in fact it was written.

Then there is the passage on animism with which we began. It is highly unlikely that an idea as unconventional as animism would surface and then disappear even for so short a time as four years, although it is of course possible. And the survival of Wordsworth's animism well into the 1820's allows the dating of MS 9 to fall easily in the latter half of the second decade of the nineteenth century.

In his "address to Kilchurn Castle," composed between 1820 and 1827, there occurs a passage similar to earlier instances of animism in its apparently deliberate indistinctness:

And, as late as 1829, in a piece entitled "Humanity" we have a kind of covert animism:

But whether the animistic passage in MS 9 was written during the period of Wordsworth's most pervasive animism (1798-1804) or fifteen years later, it was almost certainly not written during 1794, nor was MS 9 in which it is found.

Notes