Radical Wordsworth

And Wordsworth:

She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love.

Women were cautious about exposing their identity in print. Like all the novels which Jane Austen would publish in her lifetime, Williams’ first book of poetry was anonymous. But in 1784 she boldly put her name on the title page of an epic poem called Peru. Two years later, she gathered her early works together with many new ones in a two-volume collection simply entitled Poems. It was published by the method of subscription, whereby purchasers paid up front to cover the cost of production. Over 1,500 people signed up, a remarkable number for a volume of poetry by a young woman.

In the spring of 1787, a London-based but cosmopolitan-inspired monthly journal called the European Magazine included in its poetry pages the first published work of a young man on the brink of his seventeenth birthday. It was entitled ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’. The octave reads as follows:

She wept. – Life’s purple tide began to flow

In languid streams through every thrilling vein;

Dim were my swimming eyes – my pulse beat slow,

And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain.

Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye;

A sigh recall’d the wanderer to my breast;

Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh

That call’d the wanderer home, and home to rest.

These few lines epitomize the Rousseauist sensibility. ‘She wept’, as did so many readers of Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, especially female ones. In connecting with a book – a tale of distress that might equally be a novel, a narrative poem or a true story – the reader also connects with the full tide of Life with a capital L. The heart reaches out in the spirit of fellow feeling with suffering humanity.

Extreme ‘sensibility’ of this kind was generally regarded as unmanly. Many readers of this sonnet in the European Magazine would have expected it to have been written by a woman. It was not. The poem was signed ‘Axiologus’, that classically inspired codename for Words-worth that Coleridge would use in his bitter poem about Sara Hutchinson. This was the teenage William’s first appearance in print. The sonnet is indeed a poem about the worth of words, the power of poetry. Wordsworth would go on, in company with Coleridge, to make unprecedented claims for that worth, for poetry as a form of salvation, a revolution of the self.

The sonnet’s key metaphor is that of a stream – a stream of consciousness, perhaps, that will eventually flow into the sea of the unconscious. The fluvial imagery is then internalized: the poet’s eyes swim with tears in sympathy with those of Miss Helen Maria Williams, as she in turn weeps in sympathy with the distress about which she is reading. Life flows along the bloodstream, ‘thrilling’ the veins. And then the pulse slows and the heart is swelled to ‘dear delicious pain’. Sympathy, or what we would now call empathy, brings, as a later and much greater Wordsworth poem would put it, ‘sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’. Sensations, the swelling heart, the excited flow of blood in the veins, the beating of the pulse, the idea that pain might have something delicious about it, above all that verb felt: these are going to be key words in poetry for the next forty years. One might almost say that the entire sensibility of another precocious poet, John Keats, is bound within the nutshell of this cluster of images. One thinks of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and its cry ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die’. At the core of ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ is the idea that a poem can offer a momentary ‘pause of life’. In momentarily suspending what a later sonnet would call the ‘getting and spending’ of daily routine in which we ‘lay waste our powers’, poetry can call the wanderer home, bring us ‘home to rest’. What we come home to is a bond, a sympathy for the still sad music of humanity.

He had not literally seen Miss Helen Maria Williams weeping at a tale of distress. He had read her poems and projected an image of her as the sympathetic poet. His sonnet was almost certainly inspired by a passage in Peru. Williams’ epic concerns the Spanish massacre of the Incas. It is a manifestation of her anti-imperial, pacifist sensibility. In a footnote, she expressed the hope, in anticipation of the coming revolutions such as that led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Caribbean, that ‘these injured nations may recover the liberty of which they have been so cruelly deprived’. ‘Liberty’ is another of the poetic watchwords of the age. At the climax of Peru, Williams introduced a personification of Sensibility, weeping for the Incas. A visionary figure descends from the clouds: ‘It lights on earth – mild vision! gentle form – / ’Tis Sensibility!’ Then, ‘Wet with the dew of tears’, the ‘ray of pity’ beaming from her eyes, she addresses

Ye to whose yielding hearts my power endears

The transport blended with delicious tears,

The bliss that swells to agony the breast,

The sympathy that robs the soul of rest.[8]

One can see the source of the language of Wordsworth’s sonnet. His clever device was to elide this figure with its creator: he makes Helen Maria Williams into the very embodiment of Sensibility. His reading is fully justified by the presence in her collection of a poem called ‘To Sensibility’, which argued – against the (nearly always male) critics who attacked what we might call the School of Sensibility – that strong emotion, weeping especially, is an essential part of what it is to be human because it answers to the moral imperative to feel for others and show benevolence towards them, or, as Wordsworth puts it in the closing line of his sonnet written in response to his reading of her, ‘To cheer the wand’ring wretch with hospitable light’.

In 1788, Williams published an anti-slavery poem, then early in 1790 her first novel appeared. Its very title, Julia, revealed the influence of Rousseau. In a digression in its second volume, Williams introduced a new poem of her own, under the pretence that it was written by a friend of the loser in the novel’s love triangle – written while he was in a terrible prison but dreaming prophetically of the destruction of that place. It was called ‘The Bastille, A Vision’.

Soon after her novel was published, Helen Maria Williams set off for France. She arrived in Paris on the very day that Wordsworth and Jones arrived in Calais on their student walking tour: the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. She had gone straight into the eye of the revolutionary storm. Later that year she published her Letters written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a friend in England; containing, various anecdotes relative to the French Revolution. ‘I arrived in Paris’, she began her first letter, ‘the day before the federation’ (the ‘Fête de la Fédération’ witnessed by those travellers whom Wordsworth and Jones met in the following weeks). She gave thanks for the good fortune of a speedy journey: ‘Had the packet which conveyed me from Brighton to Dieppe sailed a few hours later; had the wind been contrary; in short, had I not reached Paris at the moment I did reach it, I should have missed the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps, was ever represented on the theatre of this earth.’[9] Week by week, she reported from the front line, praising every aspect of the early days of the revolution:

It was the triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the noblest privileges of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world. For myself, I acknowledge that my heart caught with enthusiasm the general sympathy; my eyes filled with tears; and I shall never forget the sensations of that day.[10]

In the act of becoming one of her country’s few field correspondents at the scene of the epoch-making events, she moves her vocabulary of sensibility – heart, sympathy, tears, sensations – into the political arena.

Wordsworth, then, was on a mission, poetically, politically and in terms of his literal destination: his desire was to follow in the footsteps of Helen Maria Williams. He arrived in Paris by night, at the end of November, only to discover that she had moved to Orleans.

7

BUT TO BE YOUNG WAS VERY HEAVEN

Having missed Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth activated the second letter of introduction provided by Charlotte Smith: to her friend Jacques-Pierre Brissot. This took him into the heart of the French Revolution. Brissot arranged for him to visit the National Assembly, where the deputies were remaking the government of the realm. He also attended a clamorous debate at the Jacobin Club, where he saw ‘the revolutionary power / Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms’.[1] In the manner of a pilgrim, he visited the sites associated with the revolutionary events of the previous two and a half years: the Champ de Mars, where the Feast of the Federation had been held on his memorable first day in France back in 1790; the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the quarter near the Bastille that harboured many of the most radical of the sans-culottes; the Panthéon, where Rousseau and Voltaire had been reburied in honour of their literary work as harbingers of the revolution. He sat among the dust in the Place de la Bastille,

And from the rubbish gathered up a stone,

And pocketed the relick in the guise

Of an enthusiast.[2]

‘Enthusiast’, like the term ‘patriot’, which he also applied to himself, was code for a passionate supporter of the revolution.

After a few days, he headed south to Orleans. Once he got there, he discovered that he had again missed Helen Maria Williams. He found lodging with a hosier, at eighty francs a month. His host was virulent in anti-revolutionary feeling, as were his fellow lodgers, who were cavalry officers. He met an Englishman, Mr Foxlow, who owned a cotton factory in the city. Just before Christmas, he fell in with a family called Dufour, together with a friend of theirs, a notary’s clerk called Paul Vallon. He was moving among respectable burghers, nearly all of them royalists.

Vallon’s sister Marie-Anne – known as Annette and four years older than Wordsworth – was visiting from the city of Blois, some forty miles further along the river Loire. Since Wordsworth was short of cash, he decided not to enrol with a professional tutor, but to improve his French by means of conversation with the Dufours and the Vallons. And since Annette was the one who did not have a job to go to, she became his de facto tutor: in an age when everyone knew Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, the intimacy of the tutorial was all too likely to light the fuse of romance. Early in 1792, Annette returned to Blois. And Wordsworth went with her. They had fallen in love.

*

In The Prelude there is an especially vivid memory of a member of the garrison in either Orleans or Blois fuming over the daily news from Paris that was read out in public. His voice was ‘disarmed’ and his ‘yellow cheek’ fanned ‘Into a thousand colours’. He denounced the deputies of the Assembly, even the moderate Girondins such as Carra and Gorsas, as ‘locusts’ devouring the land. Wordsworth listened to these military ‘defenders of the crown’ with respect, but he resisted their attempts to win him over to their cause. Coming from ‘a poor district’, one of the places in England with the fewest number of aristocrats exercising power through ‘wealth or blood’, and having then been educated in the intellectual ‘republic’ of Cambridge, where every student stood ‘upon equal ground’ as ‘brothers / In honour, as of one community’, his natural sympathies leaned towards ‘the government of equal rights / And individual worth’.[3] Many officers were deserting and going to join the émigré army that was mustering on the French border, with support from Austria and Prussia. As he walked the public roads, exploring the Loire Valley, he encountered ‘patriot’ soldiers marching off to defend the revolution against the impending invasion. Tears came to his eyes as he saw the local women saying goodbye to their loved ones.

In contrast to Orleans, there were very few foreigners in Blois. There is accordingly a strong possibility that Wordsworth was one of the two Englishmen who, a surviving record informs us, were granted permission to sit in on the meetings of the city’s pro-revolutionary group, the Friends of the Constitution. What is certain is that he also made the acquaintance of a man whose politics were very different from those of the conservative burghers of Orleans, the well-to-do Vallons and the great majority of the officer class.

Captain Michel-Armand Beaupuy was from an ancient aristocratic family in the Bordeaux region; his mother was descended from the great sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne. Brought up in the spirit of the Enlightenment philosophes, he was an ardent democrat, deeply concerned about the plight of the poor. Wordsworth put his conversations with this remarkable man at the heart of his account in books nine and ten of The Prelude of ‘Residence in France and French Revolution’. Beaupuy gave him his political education:

oft in solitude

With him did I discourse about the end

Of civil government, and its wisest forms,

Of ancient prejudice, and charter’d rights,

Allegiance, faith, and laws by time matured,

Custom and habit, novelty and change.[4]

Wordsworth turned one of their roadside encounters into the most politically charged of his spots of time, in which Beaupuy gives him a lesson on the need to eradicate poverty and inequality:

And when we chanced

One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl

Who crept along, fitting her languid self

Unto a heifer’s motion – by a cord

Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

Of solitude – and at the sight my friend

In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

Which we are fighting,’ I with him believed

Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

At least like this, would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The industrious, and the lowly child of toil,

All institutes for ever blotted out

That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,

Whether by edict of the one or few –

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In making their own laws, whence better days

To all mankind.[5]

As she slowly walks, barefoot, knitting a garment to protect against the weather, the ill-fed girl seems the very embodiment of the inequality of society.

The word ‘agitation’, which Wordsworth chooses to evoke Beaupuy’s response, meant far more than it does today: it suggests a sensitivity in the nervous system, a strength of ‘sensibility’, an activation of the spirit of philosophic sympathy. Dr Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘agitation’ was ‘violent motion of the mind; perturbation; disturbance of the thoughts’, but Wordsworth was more influenced by the philosopher David Hartley, the man honoured in Coleridge’s naming of his first son, who proposed that sensation or feeling was the result of ‘vibration’ or ‘agitation’ in the particles of the nervous system. In this, Hartley was a pioneer of the idea that there is an integral relationship between psychic and physiological states, a key Wordsworthian tenet. Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s most influential expositor, argued that the degree of nervous ‘agitation’ determines the strength of a feeling and the force of a memory in the mind. The theory of nervous ‘agitation’ was accepted even by those who argued more generally against Hartley’s philosophy of ‘the association of ideas’. Thus Joseph Berington: ‘That many of our affections follow mechanically the nervous agitation, is not at all to be doubted. Such are, in the first place, all sensations.’[6] Wordsworth’s was indeed an age of sensation in every sense of the word.

At the same time, ‘agitation’ was suggestive of social unrest, revolutionary sentiment. Wordsworth’s language of sensation allied him to radical new ideas in both philosophy and politics. The act of feeling on behalf of the hunger-bitten girl was the first step towards an acknowledgment of her human rights and thence to a revolution in the social relations that constrained both France and Britain. In mingling the language of democratic politics with that of strong feeling, Wordsworth was channelling the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau via Michel Beaupuy, yoking the cult of sensibility embodied in La nouvelle Héloïse to the revolutionary clarion call of Rousseau’s Social Contract, with its idea that government should be based not on the inherited authority of the few but on the ‘general will’ of the people.

In the version of The Prelude completed in 1805, Wordsworth moved directly from the memory of the girl with the heifer to a story in the spirit of La nouvelle Héloïse that, he claimed, he had heard from Beaupuy ‘And others who had borne a part therein’.[7] It was a Romeo and Juliet tale of lovers called Vaudracour and Julia, facing parental resistance to their affair because the young man’s father was an aristocrat, the girl from the middle class. In the context of this social and familial gulf, the girl’s name would appear to be a nod to both Rousseau’s heroine and Shakespeare’s. But the distinctive thing about this story is that she bears Vaudracour an illegitimate child.

Wordsworth subsequently removed the story from The Prelude and published it as an independent poem. In the notes on the origins of his poems that he dictated to his friend Isabella Fenwick in his final decade, he said that it was ‘Faithfully narrated, though with the omission of many pathetic circumstances, from the mouth of a French Lady, who had been an eye and ear-witness of all that was done and said.’ He added that ‘Many long years after, I was told that Dupligne [the origin of Vaudracour] was then a monk in the Convent of La Trappe.’[8] All this was an attempt to remove any suspicion that the story might have had an autobiographical resonance. But it did. His relationship with Annette Vallon was so important to his life that he felt compelled to write about it in his poetic autobiography. He could not, however, openly admit to it in print. During the Victorian era, to have done so would have been ruinous to his reputation for probity and moral seriousness. More than half a century passed after his death before anyone outside the circle of his immediate family and friends would come to know that, during the year in the Loire when he was talking politics with Beaupuy, his relationship with Annette Vallon grew into a fully-fledged affair.

On 15 December 1792, a child, born that same day, was baptised in the cathedral church of Sainte-Croix in Orleans. Paul Vallon stood as godfather and Madame Dufour as godmother. The father was absent. Before leaving the city, he had given legal power to Monsieur Dufour to stand as his proxy. The clerk filled in the register: ‘Anne Caroline Wordswodsth [sic], daughter of Williams Wordswodsth, Anglois, and of Marie Anne Vallon.’[9] Just two weeks before the ninth anniversary of his father’s death, Wordsworth, now twenty-two, had become a father.

No love poem from William to Annette survives, but a passage that he inserted into ‘Vaudracour and Julia’ when developing it as an independent poem reflects the youthful bliss of their affair, heightened by a sense of illicit excitement but tinged with the sorrowful knowledge that Wordsworth’s poverty and his status as an itinerant foreigner meant that they could never marry:

The vacant city slept; the busy winds,

That keep no certain intervals of rest,

Moved not; meanwhile the galaxy displayed

Her fires, that like mysterious pulses beat

Aloft; – momentous but uneasy bliss!

To their full hearts the universe seemed hung

On that brief meeting’s slender filament.[10]

Wordsworth’s device of ending a line with the suspense of the word ‘hung’ creates a pause, as if the lover’s heart is missing a beat, while the notion of the entire universe resting on the single thread of a stolen nocturnal encounter brilliantly captures the sense one has when young and in love for the first time that nothing else in the world matters but this moment.

Wordsworth had left the Loire Valley at the end of October. Annette was heavily pregnant and there was no prospect of him getting work locally. Over the summer, word had come from Paris that the revolution was becoming more extreme. The three-year experiment of a constitutional monarchy came to an end with the deposition of the king in August. The Parisian sans-culottes stormed the Palace of the Tuileries and killed about 800 of the royal Swiss guards and domestic staff. Then in early September, after Verdun fell to the counter-revolutionary Prussian invaders, royalists and common prisoners were massacred after peremptory show trials. On 20 September, the revolutionary army effected a reverse, defeating the Prussians at Valmy. The next day a National Convention was opened in Paris and the day after that France was formally declared a republic. The prospect of war with Britain was becoming more likely by the day, with unknown consequences for a young Englishman far from home. The only sensible option was for him to return to England, commence a career and send such funds as he could for the support of his child.

Wordsworth had grown used to goodbyes by this time, what with his parents’ deaths, his long separation from Dorothy and the death of his beloved schoolmaster. Yet this would not have diminished the pain of parting from his lover and their unborn child. The impropriety of the liaison was such that he could not write about it directly, but he projected his feelings into the narrative of the separation of Vaudracour from Julia:

Once again

The persevering wedge of tyranny

Achieved their separation: and once more

Were they united, – to be yet again

Disparted, pitiable lot! But here

A portion of the tale may well be left

In silence, though my memory could add

Much how the Youth, in scanty space of time,

Was traversed from without; much, too, of thoughts

That occupied his days in solitude

Under privation and restraint; and what,

Through dark and shapeless fear of things to come,

And what, through strong compunction for the past,

He suffered – breaking down in heart and mind![11]

In the story, it is parental ‘tyranny’ that parts the lovers; in Wordsworth’s experience it was the prospect of national and international political tyranny. Poetically, the word ‘disparted’ is a fine example of his mastery of the negative prefix; biographically, it is a hint that the passage is informed by his own disappointment, indeed despair, over his parting from Annette and the knowledge that he might never see his first child. There is a revealing reticence as part of the story is left ‘in silence’, then a tell-tale introduction of the first-person voice (‘my memory could add / Much’). The ‘fear of things to come’, ‘strong compunction for the past’, the suffering and the breakdown of ‘heart and mind’ are his own.

He also found a way of processing his sorrow at not witnessing his daughter’s early years by having Vaudracour bear his infant child away and nurse it as a single father:

His eyes he scarcely took,

Throughout that journey, from the vehicle