Wordsworth, Mill, and the Force of Habit

The crisis that finally arose, when Mill was twenty, grew from the growing conviction that, in Alan Ryan's words, "he had been manufactured" (Ryan, 33) rather than growing up as a person should; and the feeling of his being manufactured expressed itself in a sense of stifling restriction, as though the scope of human intelligence had been narrowed down to a fraction of its full richness and possibility: "For now I saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity ? that die habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has when no other mental habit of cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives" (Mill, Autobiography, 75). Wordsworth embraced a resistance to the force of custom and the habitual as a principal ambition in the Preface to Lyrical Battads: It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprizes the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded ... Stuck in London, in Book VII, stranded far away from die memos of his rural upbringing, Wordsworth was not forsaken, because the sorts of diought they bred had long been to him habitual: "By influence habitual to the mind / The mountain's oudine and its steady form / Gives a pure grandeur, and its presence shapes / The measure and the prospect of the soul / To majesty" (11.722-5) so that even in die thick of die city, Wordsworth can recall, "The spirit of Nature was upon me here, / The soul of beauty and enduring life / Was present as a habit, and diffused" (11.736-8). There is a knotty and keen section in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads which argues for the beneficial moral of influence certain "habits of mind" that constrain us, positively, to "obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits" (Literary Criticism, 72); and the same sort of wisdom lies behind the moralistic conclusion about charitable giving in "The Old Cumberland Beggar": "The mild necessity of use compels / To acts of love; and habit does die work / Of reason" (11.99-101).