Radical Wordsworth

Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth was writing in the aftermath of his disillusionment with the turn to violence taken by the French Revolution. In the summer of 1790, like many young political radicals, he dared to hope that the New Jerusalem was about to dawn, that heaven could be brought to earth through social justice. Looking back, more than a decade later, he could not prevent his memories from being contaminated by subsequent events. The night after the crossing of the Alps, Wordsworth lodged in an ‘alpine house’ called the Spittal of Gondo. He could not sleep. In The Prelude he described the lodging as

A dreary mansion, large beyond all need,

With high and spacious rooms, deafened and stunned

By noise of waters, making innocent sleep

Lie melancholy among weary bones.[29]

Something very strange happened thirty years later, when Wordsworth and Dorothy went on a continental tour. They visited the Spittal of Gondo, but Dorothy could not persuade her brother to go inside. They moved on, forced to lodge elsewhere.[30] Wordsworth’s phobic reaction has never been explained, but there may be a hint in that phrase ‘innocent sleep’. The description of the mansion, with its high-ceilinged bedrooms, bears an uncanny resemblance to another hotel where Wordsworth spent a sleepless night in Paris two years later. And that, as will be seen, was the moment when his dream of the dawn of the New Jerusalem was shattered.

*

‘I am a perfect Enthusiast in my admiration of Nature in all her various forms’, Wordsworth wrote to Dorothy from a village beside Lake Constance.[31] The rest of the tour was more watery than mountainous: Lake Maggiore, the Lake of Lugano, Como (where Wordsworth was mildly smitten by the sight of dark-eyed peasant girls dancing on the shore), the Lake of Zurich, the Lake of Lucerne, the Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, the valley of Unterwalden, the mountains rising above Grindelwald, a boat bought in Basel and sailed along the Rhine to Cologne. There was the occasional adventure, for example a night in the woods when the two travellers were separated in a storm, but the landscapes of this second half of the tour conformed to the Burkean ‘beautiful’ as opposed to the ‘sublime’. Having sold the boat in Cologne, they continued on foot once again, past Aix-la-Chapelle and thence to the coast. They encountered some Belgian troops on the move, a military presence that cast the merest shadow of a cloud on the political horizon. They hurried their step, needing to get back to Cambridge to complete their degrees.

Wordsworth spent the week before his final exams reading Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa instead of revising. He sat the exams in the Cambridge Senate House in January 1791, duly scraping through his BA without distinction – he was classed among the hoi polloi.[32] He had no idea what to do next. Like many a graduand before and after, he drifted aimlessly to London. Book seven of The Prelude records his memories of being thrown into the vortex of the city: the crowds, the noise, ‘Stalls, barrows, porters, midway in the street / The scavenger that begs with hat in hand’, peep shows, street performers, hawkers shouting their wares, migrants from across the globe, the freak shows of Bartholomew Fair, a blind beggar propped motionless against a wall with a ‘written paper’ on his chest telling his story, ‘His fixed face and sightless eyes’ admonishing Wordsworth as if ‘from another world’.[33]

It was a lonely time. In May, however, he was reunited with Jones at his home Plas-yn-Llan, in the village of Llangynhafal in Denbighshire. A handsome redbrick house, long and with high windows, it rather resembled Wordsworth’s childhood home in Cockermouth. A letter of Dorothy’s suggests that her brother’s spirits were lifted by both the place and the company: ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clwyd and without a rival?’ she joked, explaining that ‘His friend Jones is a charming young man, and has five sisters, three of whom are at home at present, then there are mountains, rivers, woods and rocks, whose charms without any other inducement would be sufficient to tempt William to continue amongst them as long as possible.’[34] Wordsworth would not have been the first young man to enjoy a little flirtation with his best friend’s sisters. Sadly, one of them, Margaret, died soon after, aged just sixteen. Years later, Jones, writing with regret that they had been out of touch for so long, mentioned another of the girls, who was two years older than Margaret: ‘Mary you may perhaps remember something of.’[35]

The two young men spent the whole summer together. They went off on another walking tour, covering much of North Wales. They climbed the precipitous mountain of Cader Idris, which had been made famous in a painting by the landscape artist Richard Wilson; they wandered by the winding river Dee. In Powys, a little further south, they visited the shrine of a female saint called Melangell and Wordsworth got into an altercation regarding the powers of the Welsh language that led to him being threatened with a carving knife by a local priest who had drunk too much strong ale.

The most memorable of these summer excursions was a midnight ascent of Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales (higher, too, than any in England).[36] After taking supper in a rugged thatched cottage in a hamlet called Beddgelert, they proceeded to the foot of the mountain, where they roused a shepherd who supplemented his income by acting as a guide. It was a close warm night with a ‘dripping mist’ threatening a storm. They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’,

A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which

Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams

Innumerable, roaring with one voice.

‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.[37] This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.

Wordsworth then makes his habitual move from description to philosophizing:

A meditation rose in me that night

Upon the lonely Mountain when the scene

Had pass’d away, and it appear’d to me

The perfect image of a mighty Mind,

Of one that feeds upon infinity,

That is exalted by an underpresence,

The sense of God, or whatsoe’er is dim

Or vast in its own being.[38]

Here there is a measured uncertainty as to whether the ‘underpresence’ – the gleam or intimation that in book two of The Prelude he called ‘an obscure sense / Of possible sublimity’[39] – is an epiphany of the divine or a recognition of the profundity of human potential. Is the ‘mighty Mind’ God’s or our own?

As with the crossing of the Alps in the middle of The Prelude, the cognitive conclusion drawn from the ascent of Snowdon at the poem’s climax may belong to the act of memory, not the moment itself. We cannot be sure that the meditation really did arise in him that night rather than in the act of remembering and writing about the night. Equally, although there is no reason to doubt that he and Jones had the experience of standing above the sea of mist, the language in which the scene is described bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the standard guidebook which they had almost certainly consulted in planning their picturesque tour. During their perambulations, they actually visited the book’s author, Thomas Pennant. It was his A Tour in Wales that had given them the idea of an ascent of Snowdon timed so as to see the sun rise from the summit. There Wordsworth would have read of how

A vast mist enveloped the whole circuit of the mountain. The prospect down was horrible. It gave an idea of numbers of abysses, concealed by a thick smoke, furiously circulating around us. Very often a gust of wind formed an opening in the clouds, which gave a fine and distinct visto [sic] of lake and valley. Sometimes they opened only in one place; at others, in many at once, exhibiting a most strange and perplexing sight of water, fields, rocks, or chasms, in fifty different places.[40]

*

Though Wordsworth frequently wrote in Rousseauistic terms about nature providing a better education than books, he was always hungry for books and gladly acknowledged that the development of his writing was dependent on his reading. His first extended poem, ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, written during the summer holidays when he was just seventeen, borrows its language from James Beattie’s highly popular The Minstrel, while his first published poem, An Evening Walk, on which he worked during his long vacations from Cambridge, has the conventional vocabulary and perky rhyming couplets of a dozen other ‘loco-descriptive’ poems of the eighteenth century, not to mention classical sources and indeed guidebooks. Wordsworth acknowledged as much by adding footnotes along the lines of ‘from Thomson’ (that is to say, borrowed from Thomson’s The Seasons), ‘See Burns’ Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘See a description of an appearance of this kind in Clark’s Survey of the Lakes’, and ‘Much of this paragraph alludes to Horace’s beautiful ode to Bandusia of which the author has attempted a translation.’[41]

The now forgotten Beattie was one of the most important of these early influences. He anticipated Wordsworth in arguing for the power of places in summoning up memories:

The sight of a place in which we have been happy or unhappy renews the thoughts and feelings we formerly experienced there. With what rapture, after long absence, do we revisit the haunts of our childhood and early youth! A thousand ideas, which had been many years forgotten, now crowd upon the imagination, and revive within us the gay passions of that romantick period. And from these, and other associations of a like nature, arises in part the love of our country, our friends and fellow citizens, a fondness for the very fields and mountains, the vales, rocks and rivers which formed the scenery of our first amusements and adventures.[42]

Wordsworth’s early poems, notably his Evening Walk tracking his youthful perambulations around Derwent, Rydal, Grasmere, Esthwaite and Winander (Windermere), conform exactly to this model. And he did come to believe that love of country, friends and fellow citizens grew in part from love of nature.

But his most powerful memories – the windswept girl, the gibbet, the admonishing cliff rising over the stolen boat, the grip of the crag-fast boy, the thunderous sound of falling water in the Ravine of Gondo, the abyss below Snowdon – have a much darker and more mysterious tone than that suggested in Beattie’s evocation of the ‘gay passions’ of the ‘romantick period’ of childhood and early youth. Perhaps the first moment when Wordsworth found his own voice as a poet came in a passage of the ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, which he never published, when he dispensed with the flummery of Gothic fantasia stitched from his reading – the style that dominates the poem – and summoned up that memory of the December day when, aged thirteen, he was waiting for the horses to take him home for the Christmas holiday during which his father followed his mother to the grave:

One Evening when the wintry blast

Through the sharp Hawthorn whistling pass’d

And the poor flocks all pinch’d with cold

Sad drooping sought the mountain fold

Long Long upon yon steepy rock

Alone I bore the bitter shock

Long Long my swimming eyes did roam

For little Horse to bear me home

To bear me what avails my tear

To sorrow o’er a Father’s bier.[43]

John Wordsworth, working on Lowther business, had ridden out to a far corner of Cumberland and lost his way home on a pitch-dark December evening. He spent the freezing night on Cold Fell and never recovered from the exposure. William followed his father’s ‘bier’ to the grave in Cockermouth churchyard on a day of snow and wind. The death of his parents, and his consequent separation from his sister, shaped his whole life. He remained a poet of twilight and mourning, long after the fading of the glad morning of hope that he experienced with Jones on the road to Ardres in July 1790.

6

TWO REVOLUTIONARY WOMEN

The extended Wordsworth family was well embedded in the establishment of the Anglican Church. In September 1791, a cousin wrote to offer William a curacy in the south-east of England. Saying goodbye to Jones and his sisters, he travelled to London to explain that he was not of a legal age to enter Anglican holy orders. He was glad of the excuse. But he was still drifting. At the beginning of term, he went back to Cambridge. There was talk of him studying oriental languages, but he did not enrol. Instead, he returned to France. He intended to spend the winter in Orleans, perfecting his French. It was not quite clear how this would prepare him for the learning of biblical Hebrew that would be the next step in the event that the ecclesiastical plan should eventually come to fruition. Nevertheless, the family was willing to give him £40 to set him on his way.

By late November he was in Brighton, waiting four days for the wind to change so that he could embark for France. He took the opportunity to write to another college friend, William Mathews, complaining of his own lack of resolution with regard to a career: ‘I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life.’[1]

His host in the seaside town, sticking with him until the moment he left, was a fellow poet, Charlotte Smith, author of a volume of Elegiac Sonnets that he particularly admired. His connection came from the fact that her family lawyer, John Robinson, was a distant cousin of Wordsworth’s, who had worked as a clerk for Wordsworth’s grandfather and gained the patronage of Sir James Lowther. He had gone into politics while maintaining his legal career. He was not averse to the art of political advancement through the backhander – once, in the House of Commons, the supremely witty Whig politician and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan spoke out against bribery and there were cries to name the chief instigator, to which Sheridan replied ‘I could name him as soon as I could say Jack Robinson.’[2]

Charlotte Smith, born in 1749, was a generation older than Wordsworth. The eldest child of a Sussex landowner, she was, as she put it, ‘sold into marriage’ at the age of fifteen to a man named Benjamin Smith. Violent and dissolute, Smith came from a family that derived their wealth from West Indian slave plantations. Charlotte bore him twelve children while he wasted the family fortune. In 1783, she spent several months with him in debtors’ prison. This was when she set to work on her Elegiac Sonnets in the hope of making some money. A few years later, she separated from her husband and began supporting her children through her pen. This led her to turn to the novel, which had a bigger market than poetry. In the summer of 1789, she published Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake, a novel set in a Gothic house called Grasmere Abbey and containing many rhapsodic descriptions of Lake District scenery. The heroine Ethelinde wanders at dusk beside Grasmere lake, clutching her copy of the published letters of the poet Thomas Gray, ‘in which he with the clearest simplicity describes this small lake’: ‘she pursued her way, now over “eminences covered with turf, now among broken rock” till she reached the village which stands on a low promontory projecting far into the lake’.[3] This was the village that Wordsworth would one day call home, just as The Recluse was a title that he would one day seek (without success) to make his own. Late in life, he sometimes complained that tourists only wanted to see the site of Smith’s fictional ‘Grasmere Abbey’ – locals would tease them by directing them to a broken sheepfold on the hillside, perhaps the very one that inspired Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’.

The two poets would have talked not only of the Lakes in the north, but also of events across the English Channel. Everyone was talking politics, a national debate having been stirred by Edmund Burke’s admonitory Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine’s pro-revolutionary reply The Rights of Man. Smith had spent the year 1791 researching a new novel, Desmond, which marked her entry into the arena of political controversy. She explained in a preface when it was published the following year that ‘the political passages dispersed throughout the work’ were ‘drawn from conversations to which I have been a witness, in England, and France, during the last twelve months … I have given to my imaginary characters the arguments I have heard on both sides.’[4] The novel accordingly includes many quotations from, and debates about, Burke’s attack on the revolution and Paine’s defence of it. Smith nailed her colours firmly to the radical mast. Indeed, the following year when news came of the slaughter of the personal bodyguards of King Louis XVI, Charlotte scandalized a gentleman who was visiting her in Brighton. ‘I liked her well enough’, he wrote, save for ‘a democratic twist (which I think detestable in a woman)’ – until ‘she disgusted me completely on the account arriving of the Massacre of the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries by saying that they richly deserved it’.[5] From this time forward, she was a marked woman.

In the course of her research for Desmond, she had even visited Paris, where she met with one of the leading figures among the revolutionaries: Jacques-Pierre Brissot. He had cut his political teeth writing anti-monarchical pamphlets and forming an anti-slavery group known as the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. When Smith met him in Paris in 1791, he was making speeches in the Jacobin Club, editing the Patriote français and writing for a newspaper called Le Républicain that he had established, along with Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet. At the time of the storming of the Tuileries, he headed the Legislative Assembly. From this point on, cracks were beginning to appear within the revolutionary leadership. They all wanted a republic to be proclaimed, but they could not agree over the fate of King Louis, Queen Marie Antoinette and the rest of the royal family. Should they be kept alive, under house arrest, or would that run the risk of a revival of the monarchy in the event of foreign invasion or counter-revolutionary reaction? The Jacobins argued for a final solution, whereas Brissot emerged as the leader of a more moderate faction, who became known as the Girondins because many of them came from the region of the Gironde – though they were often called the Brissotins.

Charlotte Smith gave Wordsworth a letter of introduction to Brissot. She also gave him one addressed to a fellow poet who was residing in Paris: Helen Maria Williams. This was a woman whose work Wordsworth admired even more.

Born in 1761, Helen Maria, together with her sister and half-sister, was raised by her mother in Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border after her father died while she was an infant. She wrote poems from an early age. Brought to London in 1781, she was taken up by a Presbyterian minister called Dr Andrew Kippis. He wrote a preface praising her first published poem, Edwin and Eltruda, published when she was just twenty-one years old. Set in the time of the English civil war, it tells the story of lovers whose families fight on opposite sides, ending with their tragic deaths.

Doomed or thwarted lovers of this kind were a favourite theme in the literature of the late eighteenth century. Romeo and Juliet was one of the most frequently staged of Shakespeare’s plays, while the bestselling secular book of the age was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel La nouvelle Héloïse, which went through over seventy editions in print by 1800, besides being imitated in numerous other novels. It was so popular that publishers could not print enough copies to keep up with the demand, so they rented it out by the day or even the hour. Rousseau was overwhelmed with fan mail, telling him of the tears, swoons and ecstasies provoked in his readers. A modern reworking of the medieval story of Héloïse and Abelard, the novel tells the story of a passionate love affair that crosses the boundaries of class, religious piety and decorum. The full title was Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, though when first published in Amsterdam in 1761 it was called Lettres de deux amans – ‘letters of two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps’. The lover is Julie’s tutor, Saint-Preux. Under the ancien régime a posh girl cannot marry her tutor, especially if he is a holy man. But living in the sublime landscape of the Alps and rowing on a beautiful lake, they cannot resist their passions. Their affair must, however, come to an end when upper-class Julie dutifully marries a baron chosen for her by her father. Saint-Preux goes off on a world tour. Six years later he returns and is employed once more, this time as tutor to Julie’s children. They live happily and virtuously together, enjoying a simple country life, all passion duly restrained. But Julie has an epiphany when her child almost drowns: she has never stopped loving Saint-Preux, and soon she expires as if from pure emotional excess, an extreme of what was known as ‘sensibility’ (the temperament anatomized by Jane Austen in the character of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). For readers, the book demonstrated the power of passion over the demands of duty and the social order. The Catholic Church duly placed it on the index of prohibited books. But, however often priests and moralists inveighed from pulpit and pamphlet against the dangers of novel-reading, especially for women, the authorities could not prevent the spread of the cult of ‘sensibility’ – and there was no literary form more suited to the expression of extreme emotion than poetry.

Helen Maria Williams’ particular gift was the transposition of a Rousseauistic narrative of passion into verse and into an English setting. The character of Eltruda in her poem is a young woman of extreme sensibility, whose sympathetic imagination extends to every living thing:

For the bruis’d insect on the waste,

A sigh would heave her breast;

And oft her careful hand replac’d

The linnet’s falling nest.

The naming of a specific species of finch and the tender care for a bird’s nest: such details prefigure the delicate poetic brushwork of the most sensitive of all poets of nature, John Clare. One may also see the young Helen Maria Williams anticipating Wordsworth at his best. Eltruda is compared to a ‘lonely flower’ that ‘smiles in the desert vale’.[6] That is a conventional enough image, an echo of Thomas Gray’s famous lines in his ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air’. But in their rhythm of alternating tetrameters and trimeters (four- and three-stress lines), the following lines from Edwin and Eltruda feel very like a dry run for Wordsworth’s mysterious and mesmerizing ‘Lucy’ poems. Thus Williams:

So liv’d in solitude, unseen,

This lovely, peerless maid;

So grac’d the wild, sequester’d scene,

And blossom’d in the shade.[7]