Little Ambleside had the bustle of a metropolis. Lorries were noisily unloading their goods outside shops, there were placards everywhere advertising restaurants and hotels, and though it was still early, the tea shops were full. On racks outside newsagents' stalls, the papers reported on the latest development in a political scandal in London.
A few miles northwest of the town, in the Great Langdale Valley, the atmosphere was transformed. For the first time since arriving in the Lake District, we were in deep countryside, where nature was more in evidence than humans. On either side of the path stood a number of oak trees. Each one grew far from the shadow of its neighbour, in fields so appetising to sheep as to have been eaten down to a perfect lawn. The oaks were of noble bearing: they did not trail their branches on the ground as willows are wont to do, nor did their leaves have the dishevelled appearance common to certain poplars, which can look from close up as though they have been awoken in the middle of the night and not had time to fix their hair. Instead they gathered their lower branches tightly under themselves, while their upper branches grew in small, orderly steps. The result was a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle, like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.
The rain, which continued to fall confidently despite the promises of the landlord, gave us a sense of the mass of the oaks. From under their damp canopy, rain could be heard falling on forty thousand leaves, creating a harmonious pitter-patter that varied in pitch according to whether the water dripped onto a large or a small leaf, a high or a low one, one loaded with accumulated water or not. The trees themselves were an image of ordered complexity: the roots patiently drew nutrients from the soil, and the capillaries of the trunks sent water twenty-five metres upwards, each branch taking enough but not too much for the needs of its own leaves, each leaf in turn contributing to the maintenance of the whole. The trees were an image of patience, for they would sit out this rainy morning and the many that would follow it without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons, showing no ill temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey across to another valley—content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from those tallest leaves that held the rainwater in their palms.
Wordsworth enjoyed sitting beneath oaks, listening to the rain or watching sunbeams fracture across their leaves. What he saw as the patience and dignity of the trees seemed to him characteristic of nature's works, which were to be valued for holding up,
before the mind intoxicate
With present objects, and the busy dance
Of things that pass away, a temperate show
Of objects that endure.
Nature would, he proposed, dispose us to seek out in life and in one another ‘whate'er there is desirable and good'. An ‘image of right reason', nature would temper the crooked impulses of urban life.
If we are to accept (even in part) Wordsworth's argument, we may need to concede a prior principle holding that our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable, changing according to whom—and sometimes what—we are with. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy. Thus A's obsession with status and hierarchy may—almost imperceptibly—lead B to worry about his own significance, even as A's jokes quietly rouse his hitherto submerged sense of the ridiculous. But move B to another environment, and his concerns will subtly shift in response to a new interlocutor.
What, then, may be expected to happen to a person's identity in the company of a cataract or a mountain, an oak tree or a celandine, objects that after all have no conscious concerns and so, it would seem, can neither encourage nor censor particular behaviours? And yet an inanimate object may, to come to the linchpin of Wordsworth's claim for the beneficial effects of nature, still work an influence on those around it. Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us—oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm—and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue.
In a letter written to a young student in the summer of 1802, addressing the task of poetry, Wordsworth came close to specifying the values that he felt nature embodied: A great Poet… ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings… to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.'
In every natural landscape, Wordsworth found instances of such sanity, purity and permanence. Flowers, for example, were models of humility and meekness:
Sweet silent Creature!
That breath'st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!
Animals, for their part, were paragons of stoicism. Wordsworth at one point became quite attached to a bluetit that even in the worst weather sang in the orchard above Dove Cottage. During their first, freezing winter there, the poet and his sister were inspired by a pair of swans that were also new to the area, and that endured the cold with greater patience than the Wordsworths.
An hour up the Langdale Valley, the rain having abated, M. and I hear a faint tseep, rapidly repeated, alternating with a louder tissip. Three meadow pipits are flying out of a patch of rough grass. A black-eared wheatear is looking pensive on a conifer branch, warming its pale sandy-buff feathers in the late-summer sun. Stirred by something, it takes off and circles the valley, releasing a rapid and high-pitched schwer, schwee, schwee-oo. The sound has no effect on a caterpillar that was walking strenuously across a rock, nor on the many sheep dotted across the valley floor.
One of the sheep ambles towards the path and looks curiously at his visitors. Humans and sheep stare at each other in wonder. After a moment, the sheep sinks into a reclining pose and takes a lazy mouthful of grass, which he chews on one side of his mouth, as if it were gum. What makes me me and him him? Another sheep approaches and lies down next to his companion, wool to wool, and for a second they exchange what appears to be a knowing, mildly amused glance.
A few meters ahead, from inside a deep-green bush that runs down to a stream comes a noise like the sound of a lethargic old man clearing his throat after a heavy lunch. It is followed by an incongruously frantic rustle, as though someone was rifling through a bed of leaves in an irritated search for a valuable possession. But on noticing that it has company, the creature falls silent—the tense silence of a child holding his or her breath at the back of a clothes cupboard during a game of hide-and-seek. Back in Ambleside, people are buying newspapers and eating scones, while out here, buried in a bush, is a thing, probably with fur and perhaps a tail, interested in eating berries or flies, scurrying in the foliage and grunting—and yet still, for all its oddities, a contemporary, a fellow sleeping and breathing creature alive on this singular planet in a universe otherwise made up chiefly of rocks and vapours and silence.
One of Wordsworth's poetic ambitions was to induce us to see the many animals living alongside us that we typically ignore, registering them only out of the corner of our eyes and feeling no appreciation for what they are up to and want: shadowy, generic presences such as the bird up on the steeple and the rustling creature in the bush. He invited his readers to abandon their usual perspectives and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with. A few days before travelling to the Lake District, I had happened upon a nineteenth-century book that discussed Wordsworth's interest in birds and in its preface hinted at the benefits of the alternative perspective they offered: ‘I am sure it would give much pleasure to many of the public if the local, daily and weekly press throughout this country would always record, not only the arrivals and departures of Lords, Ladies, M.P's and the great people of this land, but also the arrivals and departures of birds.' If we are pained by the values of the age or of the elite, it may be a source of relief for us to come upon reminders of the diversity of life on our planet, to hold in mind that alongside the business of the great people of the land, there are also pipits tseeping in meadows.