If travelling, as the completion of a liberal education, were to be adopted on rational grounds, the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different countries. But, when visiting distant climes, a momentary social sympathy should not be allowed to influence the conclusions of the understanding; for hospitality too frequently leads travellers, especially those who travel in search of pleasure, to make a false estimate of the virtues of a nation; which, I am now convinced, bear an exact proportion to their scientific improvements.
Adieu.
1795 1796
2. Evade or distort. JOANNA BAILLIE 1762-1851
Joanna Baillie, who was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, but lived in London and Hampstead from her early twenties until her death at the age of eighty-eight, is known primarily as a dramatist. Her first volume of A Series of Plays: in Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind: Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy?now generally referred to as Plays on the Passions?appeared anonymously in 1798. It was an instant literary sensation, attracting as much speculation about its authorship as there was sixteen years later concerning Walter Scott's anonymous publication of Waverley. Two other volumes in the series followed in 1802 and 1812, winning acclaim for her as Britain's most distinguished woman playwright of the time?in some evaluations, the most distinguished regardless of gender. Scott compared her to Shakespeare. In a letter of 1817, Byron, just then completing his own play Manfred, recalled that the French author Voltaire had proposed that 'the
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A WINTER'S DAY / 21 3
composition of a tragedy require [d] testicles': 'If this be true,' Byron continued, 'Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does?I suppose she borrows them.' Baillie published, all told, twenty-eight plays and exerted considerable sway over the early-nineteenthcentury drama.
Her preface to the original Series of Plays, a seventy-page 'introductory discourse' advocating naturalness of language and subject matter, influenced both the Advertisement to Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which appeared six months later, and Wordsworth's longer and more famous Preface two years later. 'Those works,' she wrote, 'which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular'; the writer should forsake 'the enchanted regions of simile, metaphor, allegory, and description' in favor of 'the plain order of things in this every-day world.' Baillie's prolonged focus on both the writer's and the reader's 'sympathetick curiosity' in the essay probably also influenced William Hazlitt's concept of the sympathetic imagination and, through Hazlitt, Keats's notion of the self-effacing empathic 'poetical Character.'
In an 1812 preface Baillie acknowledged the gap between her theory as a dramatist and her practice, admitting that her effort to 'unveil' the workings of the mind was ill suited to the practical realities of the stage. In the major London theatres of her day, which were immense spaces designed principally to house spectacular scenery and light effects, only a third of the audience, she estimated, could hear the actors' lines or see their faces. (Charles Lamb had, to similar effect, argued in 1811 that readers who loved Shakespearean tragedy in the privacy of the study would have their illusions shattered when they saw it in one of these theaters.) Indeed, even when Baillie's plays were staged by stars such as Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean, theatergoers failed to respond as enthusiastically as reading audiences had. Today, in fact, the modern reader is more likely to agree not with Scott and Byron but with Hazlitt, who declared Baillie's plan to illustrate each passion separately a heresy in dramatic art: 'the passions are . . . not so in nature, or in Shakspeare.' But Baillie's interest in discovering an authentic language of feeling originated in her poetry, with a volume of 1790 titled Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners, and she remains of great interest as a poet. The modern reader, admiring the homely but graceful blank verse of her 'A Winter's Day,' can make connections with The Prelude (as in the descriptions of bird snaring, ice-skating, and the old discharged soldier), The Excursion (the character of the Wanderer), and 'Michael' (Michael's thrift, Isabel's industrious spinning wheel)?works that Words- worth wrote more than ten years after Baillie's poem. Baillie's 1823 'Address to a Steamvessel' likewise anticipates by a decade Wordsworth's 'Steamboats, Viaducts, and Bailways,' and it parallels, in its determination to make poetry accountable to new technology and in its mixed feelings about a modern tourist industry's marketing of picturesque nature, Wordsworth's ambivalent project in his 1810 guidebook to the Lake District. Baillie also excelled as a songwriter both in standard English (as in 'Up! quit thy bower') and, like her contemporary Robert Burns, in the Scottish dialect (as in 'Woo'd and married').
A Winter's Day
The cock, warm roosting 'mid his feather'd mates,
Now lifts his beak and snuffs the morning air,
Stretches his neck and claps his heavy wings,
Gives three hoarse crows and, glad his task is done,
Low chuckling turns himself upon the roost,
Then nestles down again into his place.
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21 4 / JOANNA BAILLIE
The laboring hind,1 who on his bed of straw Beneath his home-made coverings, coarse but warm, Lock'd in the kindly arms of her who spun them,
10 Dreams of the gain that next year's crop should bring; Or at some fair, disposing of his wool, Or by some lucky and unlook'd-for bargain, Fills his skin purse with store of tempting gold; Now wakes from sleep at the unwelcome call,
is And finds himself but just the same poor man As when he went to rest. He hears the blast against his window beat, And wishes to himself he were a laird,? landowner, lord That he might lie a-bed. It may not be:
20 He rubs his eyes and stretches out his arms; Heigh oh! heigh oh! he drawls with gaping mouth, Then most unwillingly creeps from his lair, And without looking-glass puts on his clothes.
With rueful face he blows the smother'd fire,
25 And lights his candle at the reddening coal; First sees that all be right among his cattle, Then hies? him
