In this one, for example, the boy has got lost in the gusty Cumberland hills, and as he begins to panic he clocks a beacon on a nearby hilltop and a moorland pond, and then suddenly bumps into a young woman engaged in the wholly humdrum activity of carrying home a pitcher of water.Ĭolours and words that are unknown to man ‘I cannot paint / What then I was’, says Wordsworth of his own boyhood in ‘Tintern Abbey’, which is not really a profession of his own inadequacy but rather of the inadequacy of painting, just as in the ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude, a series of vivid episodes recollected from his solitary childhood, it is part of the quality of the experience that you could never hope to capture it on a canvas. Wordsworth describes the picture assiduously enough, but the real thrill is unpictureable. When, years later, Wordsworth wrote another sonnet praising one of Haydon’s works, an imaginary portrait of Napoleon on St Helena, he began with the curious disclaimer that he wasn’t going to talk about anything to do with the picture as a picture at all – ‘Haydon! let worthier judges praise the skill / Here by thy pencil shown in truth of lines / And charm of colours’ – but rather dwell on the idea of the historical Napoleon contemplating his own downfall which the painting provoked: it is such ‘signs / Of thought, that give the true poetic thrill’, he says. He once wrote a kindly sonnet of fellow feeling to his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, a really heroic figure if a second-string painter, which began ‘High is our calling, Friend! – Creative Art / (Whether the instrument of words she use, / Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues)’ but you can feel the strain in the rather dutiful pomp (did you say ‘pregnant with ethereal hues’?). ‘Art’ is not normally a Good Thing in Wordsworth, who tended to prefer ‘Nature’ or ‘Imagination’ as objects of reverence, and there is frequently a slightly awkward note when he does feel obliged to invoke it honorifically. He said it traduced the Alps to apply the term ‘picturesque’ to them and so attempt to bring them under ‘the cold rules of painting’ and in his autobiography The Prelude, he self-reproachfully remembered a time when he had himself briefly fallen under the spell of William Gilpin and other connoisseurs of the picturesque mode, ‘even in pleasure pleas’d / Unworthily, disliking here, and there, / Liking, by rules of mimic art transferr’d / To things above all art’. When painting gets a bad press in Wordsworth it is usually because he associates it, not with portraiture, but with the conventions of picturesque landscape. Mary Wordsworth (n.d.), engraving after a portrait (drawing?) of 1839 by Margaret Gillies. By chance we know (because Wordsworth left it on record, saying they were the best thing in the poem) that those two lines were actually contributed by Mary, so the uxoriousness of the thing is double: not only does she evade the merely visual but she also possesses the innate genius to be able to name the imaginative power that so transcends it. All she possesses, as a painter, is the outward eye: ‘that inward eye’ is the poet’s hallmark, as of course Miss Gillies would have known from Wordsworth’s most famous poem, the one about the daffodils – ‘They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude’. The sonnet ends with Wordsworth telling the luckless Miss Gillies that she lacks ‘that inward eye’ which she would require to produce art which could ‘the visual powers of Nature satisfy’. An oddly misjudged piece of gallantry perhaps, and certainly not one of his greatest poems but Wordsworth felt strongly about it, telling his daughter that he had ‘never poured out anything more truly from the heart’, and his intensity was doubtless due not only to his feelings about his elderly wife (they were the same age) but also to his instinctive misgiving about pictures. He preferred to visualise Mary in her salad days: ‘’tis a fruitless task to paint for me, / Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, / By the habitual light of memory see / Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, / And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee / Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be’. When, in 1840 or so, a well-meaning houseguest called Margaret Gillies made a drawing of the 70-year old Mrs Wordsworth, everyone agreed that it was an excellent likeness but her kind act was rewarded with a testy and somewhat ungracious sonnet from the sitter’s husband. ‘We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,’ wrote William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in the famous ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), ‘and, accordingly, we call them Sisters.’ To speak of the ‘sister arts’ was indeed a critical platitude of the age, though as it happens Wordsworth’s attitude towards painting wasn’t normally very sisterly.
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