Radical Wordsworth

(Slow-moving ark of all his hopes!) that veiled

The tender infant: and, at every inn,

And under every hospitable tree

At which the bearers halted or reposed,

Laid him with timid care upon his knees,

And looked, as mothers ne’er were known to look,

Upon the nursling which his arms embraced.[12]

This is a fantasy that imagines the impossible circumstance of him taking the baby with him when he left France. But then the poem ends in bereavement: ‘the precious child … by some mistake / Or indiscretion of the Father, died’. In penance, Vaudracour becomes a hermit and an elective mute. Not even ‘the voice of Freedom’ resounding through France can rouse him back into society. The most psychologically revealing line of the poem occurs just after the child dies: ‘Theirs be the blame who caused the woe, not mine!’[13] Given that he is allegedly narrating the story at second hand, there was no need for Wordsworth to introduce any mention of blame being attached to himself. Clearly, he did blame himself for the reality that from the point of view of his daughter, as she grew into consciousness of family and circumstance, her father might as well have been dead.

Between parting from the pregnant Annette and writing these lines, Wordsworth witnessed Coleridge’s paternal care of his son Hartley. And he read his friend’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, one of the most beautiful poems ever written about a father’s love for his baby: ‘at my side / My cradled infant slumbers peacefully … My babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart / With tender gladness thus to look at thee’.[14] Deprived of such moments, Wordsworth compensated by nurturing his imaginary children: his poems.

*

On a beautiful autumn day, he left the vineyards, orchards and meadows of the Loire for the ‘fierce metropolis’ of Paris.[15] Once again, he ranged through the city, judging the mood of the people, weighing the hope brought by the proclamation of the republic against the fear that followed from the slaughter of the palace guards and the September Massacres. He spoke to fellow English radicals who had witnessed these events. One of them, James Watt, wrote home to his father, the inventor of the steam engine:

I am filled with involuntary horror at the scenes which pass before me and wish they could have been avoided, but at the same time I allow the absolute necessity of them. In some instances the vengeance of the people has been savage and inhuman. They have dragged the dead naked body of the Princess de Lamballe through the streets and treated it with all sorts of indignities. Her head stuck upon a Pike was carried through Paris and shown to the King and Queen, who are in hourly expectation of the same fate.[16]

In The Prelude, Wordsworth elides the two bloody events of August and September as he remembers walking across the vast Place du Carrousel in front of the Tuileries Palace, where the bodies of the Swiss Guard and other victims had been piled up and burned:

I crossed – a blank and empty area then –

The Square of the Carousel, few weeks back

Heaped up with dead and dying, upon these

And other sights looking as doth a man

Upon a volume whose contents he knows

Are memorable but from him locked up,

Being written in a tongue he cannot read,

So that he questions the mute leaves with pain,

And half upbraids their silence.[17]

He was beginning to question his own complicity with the revolution, to upbraid himself. His own loyalties were by now divided: he had shared in Beaupuy’s revolutionary fervour, but at the same time he was in love with Annette, whose family were staunch royalists. What would happen to them if Robespierre and the other hardliners tightened their grip not just on Paris, but on the provinces? Was it a harbinger of things to come that, before he had left Orleans, more than fifty political prisoners had been transferred from that city to Versailles, where they were slaughtered in the street by the very same sans-culottes who were responsible for the massacres? That night, he lay awake in his lodgings, feeling ‘most deeply’ in what a world he now found himself:

My room was high and lonely, near the roof

Of a large mansion or hotel, a spot

That would have pleased me in more quiet times –

Nor was it wholly without pleasure then.

With unextinguished taper I kept watch,

Reading at intervals. The fear gone by

Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.

I thought of those September Massacres,

Divided from me by a little month,

And felt and touched them, a substantial dread.[18]

‘A fear to come’, so close to the ‘dark and shapeless fear of things to come’ in the ‘Vaudracour and Julia’ sequence, is a sign that his fears are not only for himself but also for Annette and his child.

Unable to sleep, he is haunted by a voice of remembrance and admonishment, conjured out of some combination of recent experience and ‘tragic fictions’. The language has a distinctly Shakespearean feel, signalled by an allusion to the voice that cries ‘sleep no more’ to Macbeth, murderer of an anointed king:

‘The horse is taught his manage and the wind

‘Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps,

‘Year follows year, the tide returns again,

‘Day follows day, all things have second birth;

‘The earthquake is not satisfied at once.’

And in such way I wrought upon myself

Until I seem’d to hear a voice that cried

To the whole City, ‘Sleep no more.’[19]

Wordsworth can only be comparing himself to Macbeth because he feels in some sense responsible for the blood that has just stained the Place du Carrousel, even for the execution of the French royal family that was soon to follow. Had he not welcomed the revolution? Having heralded the dawn, he was implicated in the consequences that were unfolding in the cold light of day. Blood will have blood, as Macbeth says. Wordsworth generalizes the thought into the old sense of the word revolution: ‘Course of any thing which returns to the point at which it began to move … Rotation; circular motion’.[20] Actions have consequences; once violence begins, a cycle of retribution will follow. Does that mean, Wordsworth wonders, that the pure ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity will never be realized throughout society and that the task of the writer may be to think about individual choice and liberty instead?

He was, of course, writing this passage a decade after the event, circling back in retrospect. And he would revise his account on several occasions in later years, moderating the language of books nine and ten of The Prelude in order to distance himself more and more from his youthful self, as the politics of his middle age and later years revolved to conservatism. We will never know whether he really heard an inner voice of admonition during that restless night. In the act of writing, it is his mature self in flight from the young idealist he once was.

During the month that he spent back in Paris, he furthered his acquaintance with the Girondin faction. It is possible that the very house in which he spent that sleepless night belonged to the man to whom Charlotte Smith had introduced him. An edition of Wordsworth’s poems published in Paris in 1828 includes an anonymously written introduction, which claimed that he ‘was acquainted with many of the leaders of the revolutionary party, and lodged in the same house with Brissot’.[21] Brissot lived in a tall four-storey town house in the Rue Grétry, a few blocks from the Palais Royal, to which Wordsworth remembered walking on the morning after his dark night of the soul, so both the structure and the location of the house make the identification plausible. The older Wordsworth denied that he actually lodged with Brissot: in his seventieth year he annotated a manuscript memoir by a writer called Barron Field, in which the claim from the 1828 Paris edition was repeated: ‘There is much mistake here which I should like to correct in person.’ He also crossed out the phrase about Brissot and wrote ‘a mistake’ above it in the manuscript.[22] This may, however, be an obfuscation on the part of the old Tory, eager to underplay the extent of his involvement with the revolution.

Whether or not the house was Brissot’s, there is no doubt that at this time Wordsworth supported the Girondins against the extremist Jacobins. The Palais Royal, just to the north of the Louvre, was the home of the king’s cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who had come out in favour of the revolution and even changed his name to the Duc d’Egalité. He had opened the palace grounds to the public and now it was a place where people thronged to hear the latest news. When Wordsworth walked round the corner from his lodgings into the ‘Palace Walk of Orleans’ on the morning after his sleepless night, he heard hawkers crying ‘Denunciation of the crimes / Of Maximilian Robespierre’. They were selling copies of a pamphlet in which the moderate Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a close associate of Brissot, accused Robespierre of seeking dictatorial power. The Prelude gives an account of the circumstances: Brissot had attacked Robespierre in the Convention and Robespierre had responded by challenging anyone accusing him of tyrannical ambition to confront him face to face. ‘Whereat’, writes Wordsworth, evoking a moment of vivid theatricality:

When a dead pause ensued and no one stirred,

In silence of all present, from his seat

Louvet walked singly through the avenue

And took his station in the Tribune, saying

‘I, Robespierre, accuse thee!’[23]

A pause, a silence, and then a moment of strong emotion: this is the Wordsworthian moment of suspension, as in ‘There was a Boy’, transposed to the seat of high politics.

Just how close Wordsworth was to the Girondin cause is apparent from the official memoir published by his nephew Christopher Wordsworth shortly after his death. The family of the recently deceased Victorian Laureate was eager to dismiss the young poet’s radical phase as a juvenile aberration, but the memoir nevertheless acknowledged that ‘If he had remained longer in the French capital, he would, in all probability, have fallen victim among the Brissotins, with whom he was intimately connected, and who were cut off by their rivals, the Jacobins, at the close of the following May.’[24]

In that same district of Paris, on the north bank of the Seine, close to the Palais Royal, there was a narrow street called the Passage des Petits-Pères. This is another possible location for Wordsworth’s lodging. It housed both the Hôtel des Etats-Unis and the Hôtel d’Angleterre, also known as White’s Hotel. These two lodgings provided the hub for the pro-revolutionary Americans and British who had descended upon Paris. On 18 November 1792, halfway through Wordsworth’s sojourn, about a hundred men and women met for a banquet at White’s, during which they formed themselves into ‘The Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man’, celebrating the creation of the republic and the values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Thomas Paine himself, author of The Rights of Man and one of the chief architects of both the American and French revolutions, was there. So were Helen Maria Williams; renegade Irish lord, Edward Fitzgerald; radical Welsh philosopher, David Williams; publisher of revolutionary pamphlets, John Hurford Stone; and freethinker John Oswald, who believed that rights should be extended not merely to all men, women and slaves, but even to animals and to nature itself. Fifty of them signed a petition addressed to the National Convention that advocated ‘a close union between the French republic and the English, Scotch, and Irish nations, a union which cannot fail to ensure entire Europe the enjoyment of the rights of man and establish on the firmest bases universal peace’.[25] Wordsworth may well have been among those who were present but did not sign.

Another acquaintance he made in Paris at this time was John Stewart, an eccentric figure known as ‘Walking Stewart’. His nickname came from the fact that he had walked halfway round the world, from Madras, through Persia, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa, and every country in Europe as far as Russia. He refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses. He came to believe that there was an impending ‘universal empire of revolutionary police terror’ that would ‘bestialize the human species and desolate the earth’. The police state would ban his books, so he urged readers to translate them into Latin (a precaution against the supposed decay of the English language) and bury them seven feet underground. Their locations would be passed down orally until the dawn of the age of the Stewartian man made their disinterment possible. Despite these bizarre beliefs, Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a wonderful essay about him, said that his political views ‘seemed to Mr Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher’.[26]

Stewart’s philosophy, expounded in books with titles such as The Apocalypse of Nature and The Revelation of Nature, was a theory of materialism, influenced by Spinoza and Holbach, combined with a distinctive belief in a single universal consciousness, an idea partly inspired by his travels in the East. Spinoza’s pantheism, the belief that there is no transcendent or personal deity, that God is to be found in nature, in things, was abhorrent to the church. It would fascinate Coleridge. As for Baron d’Holbach, his pseudonymously published anti-religious polemic The System of Nature, with its argument that there is ‘no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers to account for the formation of things’, underpinned the state-decreed atheism of the French Revolution.[27] The universe, Holbach argued, was nothing more than matter in motion.

Wordsworth learned of Spinoza from Coleridge, but probably never read him; he did not own a copy of Holbach’s System of Nature until 1805. His acquaintance with Walking Stewart in Paris meant that he didn’t need a first-hand knowledge of these influential radical thinkers. In The Apocalypse of Nature, Stewart praised Holbach for completing ‘the destruction of error’ and purging the human mind of prejudice. He made a series of claims that were profoundly formative of Wordsworth’s mind. Stewart began with matter and motion. ‘MOTION is the force or soul of matter, and cause of all action’: hence Wordsworth’s conception, expressed in ‘Tintern Abbey’, of a motion that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thought. ‘MAN. This machine is formed of particles of matter, organized so as to resemble a corded instrument of music of five strings which correspond with the five senses’: this idea chimed with Coleridge’s notion, which would soon also influence Wordsworth, of the human mind as an aeolian harp – a stringed instrument played by the wind – trembling into thought. For Stewart, as for Wordsworth, the self and nature are inextricably linked: ‘Self, as a part of all Nature, is immortal and universal … self pervades all Nature in its revolutions and operations, and self is as much concerned in the present or future health and happiness of all Nature, as the hand is concerned in that of the body.’[28] The further one reads into The Apocalypse of Nature, the more deeply one understands that the animated nature of Wordsworth’s poems, the insight into ‘the life of things’ that a few years later he would be articulating in ‘Tintern Abbey’, is deeply bound to the philosophies of pantheism and materialism that were at the ideological heart of the French Revolution.

Wordsworth asserted in The Prelude that in the early 1790s his love of nature gave way to a love of humankind. This was inspired by Beaupuy and the other radicals whom he met in France, and whose courage he saluted: ‘For great were the auxiliars which then stood / Upon our side, we who were strong in love’, he wrote in book ten. At the same time, he never renounced his primary love of nature. At the core of his system of belief there remained what Walking Stewart at the climax of his Apocalypse of Nature called ‘The RELIGION of NATURE’, its first tenet being ‘Nature is the great integer of being, or matter and motion, without beginning as without end.’[29] Nature would always offer Wordsworth a sense of wholeness and what he called in the same passage of The Prelude a ‘pleasant exercise of hope and joy’. Through that spring and summer in the Loire, inspired by river and valley, radicalized by Beaupuy, and in love with Annette, he breathed a vision of hope and joy for both nature and society. He believed for the while that ‘Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth, / The beauty wore of promise’. He was able to say

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.[30]