Radical Wordsworth

RADICAL WORDSWORTH

The Poet Who Changed the World

Jonathan Bate

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Jonathan Bate 2020

Cover: Wordsworth portrait: Getty Images; Trees: Flickr Creative Commons.

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Jonathan Bate asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008167424

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008167431

Version: 2020-03-11

Dedication

for Mark Lussier

In one of those excursions (may they ne’er

Fade from remembrance!) through the Northern tracts

Of Cambria, ranging with a youthful friend,

I left Bethgelert’s huts at couching-time,

And westward took my way, to see the sun

Rise from the top of Snowdon …

and Christopher Ridgway

beloved Friend,

When, looking back, thou seest in clearer view

Than any sweetest sight of yesterday

That summer when on Quantock’s grassy hills

Far ranging, and among the sylvan coombs

Thou in delicious words with happy heart

Didst speak …

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

List of Illustrations

Preface

PRELUDE

1. The Epoch

PART ONE

1770–1806: BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE

2. A Voice that Flowed Along my Dreams

3. Fostered

4. There was a Boy

5. Walking into Revolution

6. Two Revolutionary Women

7. But to be Young was Very Heaven

8. Stepping Westward

9. A New Spirit in Poetry

10. The Banks of the Wye

11. The Experiment

12. Lucy in the Harz with Dorothy

13. By W. Wordsworth

14. Home at Grasmere

15. The Child is Father of the Man

EXCURSION

16. From New School to Lake School

PART TWO

1807–1850: WORDSWORTH’S HEALING POWER

17. Surprised by Grief

18. This will never do

19. Among the Cockneys

20. The Lost Leader

21. A Medicine for my State of Mind

RETROSPECT

22. A Sort of National Property

23. Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind

Picture Section

Chronology

Suggestions for Further Reading

Footnote

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jonathan Bate

About the Publisher

MAP

WORDSWORTH’S LAKE DISTRICT

ILLUSTRATIONS

FRONTISPIECE

Early twentieth-century map of ‘Wordsworthshire’ (author’s collection)

PORTRAITS

Wordsworth in 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads, portrait by William Shuter (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)

Wordsworth around the time of the completion of The Prelude, pencil drawing by Henry Edridge (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Wordsworth in 1817, portrait by Richard Carruthers (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Wordsworth in Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, beside Newton and Voltaire, with Keats behind (photograph from the author’s collection)

Wordsworth on Helvellyn, painted by Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1842 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Max Beerbohm, Wordsworth in the Lake District, at Cross-purposes (author’s collection)

PLACES

Birthplace: the family home in Cockermouth as it is today (author’s collection)

Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, Storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792: Wordsworth witnessed the aftermath (public domain)

Alfoxden as it is today (author’s collection)

Dove Cottage as it was when Wordsworth lived there (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Rydal Mount in Wordsworth’s time (photograph from the author’s collection)

PEOPLE

Annette, presumed miniature portrait (photograph from the author’s collection)

Dorothy as a young woman, miniature portrait (photograph © Bonhams)

Dorothy in old age, portrait by Samuel Crosthwaite, photographed in the early twentieth century by Christopher Wordsworth (courtesy of the Wordsworth family, Rydal Mount)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, portrait after James Northcote (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

The New School: detail from James Gillray’s caricature New Morality (author’s collection)

The wedding ring and Dorothy’s journal entry for her brother’s wedding day (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

The lost children: presumed drawing of Thomas and Catharine (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

William and Mary in old age (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

POEMS AND THEIR INSPIRATION

Title page of Lyrical Ballads, 1798 (public domain)

The Quantocks today, with thorn tree, lonesome road and view towards the Bristol Channel, from where it was feared that the French might invade (author’s collection)

Symonds Yat today, a few miles above Tintern Abbey, with woods, sylvan river, steep and lofty cliffs (author’s collection)

Wordsworth’s skates (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

‘Perfect Contentment, Unity entire’: the vale of Grasmere (© Kevin Eames / Dreamstime.com)

Sir George Beaumont’s painting of Piel Castle (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Original Goslar manuscript of ‘There was a Boy’ (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere; photograph by the author)

Title page of first American edition of The Prelude, 1850 (author’s collection)

PREFACE

Rádical. adj. [radical, Fr. from radix, Latin.]

1. Primitive; original.

2. Implanted by nature.

3. Serving to origination.

(Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)

I first went to the Lake District for a family holiday in 1969, when I was eleven. My favourite photograph in the family album is a faded Kodak snapshot in which I am grinning beside my brother and my father (sprightly, happy and youthful-looking, though nearly sixty) on top of Helvellyn, the third-highest mountain in England, with the precipitous Striding Edge snaking below us. The next day we visited Dove Cottage, a few miles down the road in Grasmere. That was my introduction to William Wordsworth. I was amazed that anyone could live and write in rooms so small and dark. A few years later, at school, where I was privileged to have great teachers, we studied the ‘Lucy’ poems and ‘Tintern Abbey’. I worked my way through my father’s blue hardback Oxford edition of the complete poems, purchased in 1939, not long before he went from schoolmastering to soldiering. It had tiny print in double columns and a curious arrangement in categories such as ‘Poems referring to the Period of Childhood’, ‘Poems founded on the Affections’, ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, ‘Poems of the Fancy’ and ‘Poems of the Imagination’.

I discovered that Wordsworth had written a vast number of poems. Every now and then I would find a sequence or a single image that made my heart leap up. But there were great swathes of pomposity and turgidity. I asked myself how a poet who could be so good could also be so bad. Later, I would discover and relish a sonnet by Virginia Woolf’s cousin J. K. Stephen, an underrated poet who suffered, like her, from what we now call bipolar disorder. Parodying a grandiloquent sonnet by the man himself which begins ‘Two voices are there; one is of the Sea, / One of the Mountains; each a mighty Voice’,[1] Stephen identified a distinctly bipolar quality in Wordsworth’s imagination:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;

It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,

Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,

Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:

And one is of an old half-witted sheep

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:

And, Wordsworth, both are thine.[2]

‘Articulate monotony’ is a brilliant phrase. Start with the wrong Wordsworth poems and he will indeed seem ponderous, pedantic, verbose. You will never want to read him again. Do not on any account begin with ‘To the Spade of a Friend’ or the Ecclesiastical Sonnet on American Episcopacy.

Meanwhile, I puzzled over some of those categories: what was the difference between the Fancy and the Imagination? My teacher told me that the answer to that question was to be found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and soon the figures of Wordsworth and Coleridge became inseparable in my fancy, as they have been in the imagination of generations of readers. Then at university, when I reread Wordsworth’s poems in chronological order, I began to see that the tangled history of his relationship with Coleridge might provide a large part of the answer to my question of how someone who was so good could be so bad.

During the 1980s, I wrote a doctoral thesis about Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their successors Keats and Hazlitt, as readers of Shakespeare. I also had the good fortune to be a tutor on the Wordsworth Summer Conference, the brainchild of Richard Wordsworth, an actor best known for his role in the cult 1950s science fiction horror film The Quatermass Xperiment. He was the poet’s great-great-grandson. This was a conference unlike any other: it lasted for two weeks and, while the mornings and early evenings were devoted to suitably academic lectures, seminars and learned papers, the afternoons were spent hiking the fells. As a tutor, one had to be as adept with a compass and an Ordnance Survey map as with an edition of Wordsworth and the latest literary theoretical jargon. Every morning at 7.30 there was a brisk three-mile walk around Grasmere lake, led by Richard, as fleet of foot in his seventies as my father had been in his sixties and as Wordsworth himself must have been when he ascended Helvellyn at the age of seventy.

I had one frustration as a tutor then, and I still have it today: the desire to give to students – and indeed to anybody who raises an eyebrow when the poet’s name is mentioned and the only word that comes to mind is ‘daffodils’ – a not overlong and not overspecialized book that would make them excited about Wordsworth. He has always lacked the glamour of Coleridge, De Quincey and Byron: he was neither opium addict nor ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’.[3] He lacked, too, the pathos of Keats, Shelley and John Clare: he failed to make the romantic career move of dying young or going mad. If you try to read a comprehensive account of his entire fourscore years, the chances are that you will lose the will to live somewhere around the halfway mark. Two of the more recent biographies of him, published in 1998 and 2000, are each 1,000 pages long – and one of them covers only the first half of his life.[4] For all their scholarship and their sympathy, they reproduce one of Wordsworth’s faults, namely the prolixity that was mocked by Lord Byron:

And Wordsworth, in a rather long ‘Excursion’

(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),

Has given a sample from the vasty version

Of his new system to perplex the sages.[5]

The book I wanted to share was one that was not 1,000 pages long and that explained several things at once, without getting bogged down in too much detail: how the first half of Wordsworth’s life was such an extraordinary adventure and the second half so dull; why the poetry of the first half is so memorable, that of the second so forgettable; why William Hazlitt called his genius ‘a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’; why he provoked both excoriation and adulation in the next generation; why the Victorians had no hesitation in regarding him as the only modern poet to stand in the company of Shakespeare and Milton. A book, above all, about how Wordsworth made a difference.

After all these years I have still not found a book that not only outlines the story of the man and examines the best of his work, but also places him in the context of his revolutionary age and traces the vicissitudes of his reputation. So I have attempted it myself, in the belief that a selective account of the journey from the visions and experiences that made him a poet to the rays of influence that made him a force in cultural history will reveal why his words are still worth reading two and a half centuries after his birth.

The role of literary as opposed to historical biography should be to discern and seek to explain the distinctive qualities of the subject’s imaginative power. Why else should one bother to write, or read, the life of a poet? Wordsworth’s best early readers, most notably Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria; or, My Literary Life and Opinions and William Hazlitt in his essays, recognized this and accordingly mingled biographical recollection with literary critical analysis, supported by ample quotation. Some of Hazlitt’s essays and reviews give more space to the words of his subject than to his own opinions. I have followed the example of these two in quoting amply from Wordsworth, not only because they wrote as eyewitnesses but also because they are my touchstones of literary insight. I therefore have, to adopt a phrase that Wordsworth used in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ‘one request I must make of my reader’. Sometimes when we encounter blocks of indented quotation as we read a biography or historical work, we skate past them or half-consciously speed the reading eye. When you come in this book to a passage of Wordsworth’s poetry or his sister Dorothy’s prose, or of Coleridge or Hazlitt, please do the opposite: slow down and savour their words. Better still, read them aloud. And, as Wordsworth asked, in ‘judging these Poems’, decide by your ‘own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others’.[6]

*

He was always a mountaineer, so perhaps the conquest of some vast peak is the best metaphor for his life story. Imagine it as thirty-six years of arduous but exhilarating ascent to the summit that was reached with the completion and reading aloud of the epic work that he called his ‘Poem to Coleridge’ and that his family would publish as The Prelude. After a moment of rest, there would be forty-four years of crawling descent. Any fell-walker will tell you that the joy of the downward journey comes from its speed – as a young man I used to run down the scree slopes, footpaths and sheep-mown grass of Wordsworth’s native hills. There is nothing more boring than a gradual decline. So it is that the long life of Wordsworth tails off into monotony.

This book accordingly offers only a lightning sketch of the second half of Wordsworth’s life. In the spirit of The Prelude, it concentrates on the formative years of youth. For this reason, my title is Radical Wordsworth. The word ‘radical’ is derived from Latin radix, a root. In Wordsworth’s time, it denoted the essential nature of a thing: this book is a quest for the roots, the fundamentals, of Wordsworth’s genius. An organic metaphor is fitting for the man who was more rooted in the natural world than any previous poet. Also fittingly, the word ‘radical’ began to take on a new meaning in the early nineteenth century: it became a synonym for ‘Jacobinical’, used (pejoratively) to denote an English supporter of the French Revolution.

There are other biographies – I especially recommend those of Mary Moorman and Stephen Gill[7] – that walk through his whole story in a straight line from womb to tomb in a steady tread reminiscent of the way in which, according to William Hazlitt’s account, he composed his verse: ‘Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.’[8] The gravel-walk suited the steady beat of Wordsworth’s blank-verse iambic pentameter, but he did not think that human life progresses in a straight line. One of his controlling metaphors in the poem to Coleridge and elsewhere is that of the river or stream, flowing onwards but sometimes looping back on itself, sometimes meandering while at other times rushing in a torrent. A Wordsworthian biography of Wordsworth will be more like a stream of consciousness than a march from cradle to grave.

It will also acknowledge that his life – any life – is shaped more by key moments than quotidian routine. As he explained in The Prelude,

There are in our existence spots of time

Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed

By trivial occupations and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

(Especially the imaginative power)

Are nourished, and invisibly repaired.[9]

Too often, biographies of Wordsworth have been depressed by trivial occupations and the round of ordinary intercourse. Those are not the things that inspire great poetry. This biography, by contrast, focuses on the spots of time which with distinct pre-eminence fructified, nourished and repaired his imaginative power. It is deliberately fragmentary, momentary, selective. It seeks to open what in book eleven of the poem to Coleridge, which concerns ‘Imagination, how impaired and restored’, he called ‘the hiding-places of my power’.[10]

PRELUDE

A sort of experience like the effect of lightning …

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, late December 1806)

1

THE EPOCH

Christmas 1806. Coleorton, Leicestershire.

He was a long way from the rivers, lakes and mountains of his northern boyhood. A long way, too, from the rolling green hills of the West Country Quantocks where he and his new friend had planned the collection of poems that would come to mark a turning point in literary history. The eastern Midlands of England, all coalfields and low-lying farmland, was not his natural domain. He was there with his family – wife Mary, sister Dorothy, sister-in-law Sara, son Johnny, daughter Dora and new baby Tommy – at a place called Hall Farm. A generous patron, Sir George Beaumont, had given him a sanctuary for the winter of his thirty-seventh year.

Just before Christmas, the friend arrived. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: overweight, addicted to opium and alcohol, he had recently returned from a long stint in a warmer climate where he had sought to repair his health. He was in the midst of a marital crisis. After weeks of characteristic procrastination, he had left his wife Sara and two young children at the home in the Lake District that they shared with fellow poet Robert Southey and his family (Southey’s wife Edith was Sara Coleridge’s sister). Coleridge was magnetically drawn to the Wordsworth household not only because of the friendship that had led to the co-written poetry collection Lyrical Ballads, but also because he was irredeemably and unrequitedly in love with Sara Hutchinson, William’s sister-in-law.

Now he was here at Hall Farm, bringing along his eldest child, ten-year-old Hartley, named after the philosopher David Hartley. There was room enough. The house had three bedrooms on the first floor, and more on the second. The five adults and four children shared a spiced pudding on Christmas Day, Dorothy’s birthday.

Wordsworth had a treat for Coleridge and the three women, all of whom loved him in different ways. On the twelve days of Christmas, and for one day beyond, the family gathered around the fireplace in the drawing room to the right of the front door and listened to him reading a blank-verse composition in thirteen books, dedicated to his newly returned friend.[1] It was unlike anything heard before in the history of poetry.

The oldest and most revered form of Western poetry is epic. This is where Western culture began: the stories of the demigods in Gilgamesh, of the heroes in The Iliad and The Odyssey. This was the great tradition in which students were drilled through the centuries: the origins of ancient Rome in the Aeneid of Virgil, the myths of antiquity in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Fall of Man in the Paradise Lost of John Milton. In what may well have been the boldest act of chutzpah in literary history, Wordsworth wrote his epic poem not about heroes and gods, not about his nation, not about the spiritual story of humankind from Genesis to Revelation, but about himself. The most ancient of poetic forms was made new and made personal, turned inward to address the growth of the poet’s own self.