Читать книгу The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge - Adam Sisman - Страница 10

In the summer of 1790, William Wordsworth, then twenty years old and a commoner at St John’s College, Cambridge, together with Robert Jones, another Cambridge undergraduate, made a vacation walking tour across Europe. They set out from Calais on 14 July, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. This was the climax of the week-long Fête de la Fédération, culminating in a tremendous spectacle in the capital, attended by 400,000 delegates from all over the country, and celebrated throughout France. The two undergraduates walked through towns and villages decorated with triumphal arcs and window-garlands; the whole nation seemed ‘mad with joy’.¹ Wordsworth was a self-confessedly stiff young man, proud and prickly, but even he found it hard to resist the intoxicating mood:

…’twas a time when Europe was rejoiced,

France standing on the top of golden hours,

And human nature seeming born again.²

The thoroughfares of France were crowded with fédérés returning home from the festivities in Paris. Wordsworth and his companion fell in with a ‘merry crowd’ of these; after supper on a riverbank they danced around the table, hand in hand with the celebrants:

All hearts were open, every tongue was loud

With amity and glee. We bore a name

Honoured in France, the name of Englishmen,

And hospitably did they give us hail

As their forerunners in a glorious course;

And round and round the Board they danced again.³

At such a moment it was easy to assume that the Revolution had run its course, that a healthy France had purged itself, that monarch and people were united in a delightful new equilibrium. Had not the King sworn to uphold the decrees of the Assembly in front of a vast crowd at the Champ de Mars? Had he and his family not decamped from the magnificent Palace of Versailles to the Tuileries, in the very heart of Paris (albeit under duress)? Had he not appeared in public to greet the Mayor at the Hôtel de Ville, his hat adorned with the Revolutionary red-and-blue cockade?

‘It was a most interesting period to be in France,’ Wordsworth wrote to his sister from the shores of Lake Constance.⁴ But not that interesting: he and his friend Jones bypassed Paris, even though their route took them close to the capital, where all the most interesting events were happening. The Revolution was not their affair; they were headed for the Alps, then a sacred destination in the cult of the sublime. The young Englishmen joined in the Revolutionary festivities as guests, rather than participants. In his great autobiographical poem The Prelude, most of which was written a decade or more after the events described, Wordsworth admitted that

… I looked upon these things

As from a distance – heard, and saw, and felt,

Was touched, but with no intimate concern –⁵

(At this point a cautionary note is appropriate. On the one hand, The Prelude dramatises what Wordsworth called ‘spots in time’ – moments of special significance from his inner life. It is the principal source for the biography of his youth, particularly some obscure years of his young manhood for which the poem provides almost the only illumination. On the other hand, it cannot be wholly relied upon, and in at least some aspects is misleading. The emotional and psychological aspects of the poem may be more trustworthy than the merely factual and chronological – though perhaps not entirely so. In The Prelude, Wordsworth plots the growth of a poet’s mind’, from his infancy until he came into contact with Coleridge in his late twenties. But Wordsworth was writing in retrospect, trying to make sense of his past from the perspective of his mid-thirties. He had become a different man from the youth he was writing about. Not only was his memory fallible; there was a tendency in him, as in all of us, to manipulate the past in order to explain the present. Wordsworth’s biographers cannot avoid using The Prelude, but they need to do so cautiously, and to seek for confirmatory evidence elsewhere.)

The two undergraduates returned home in October for their final term at Cambridge, after trudging more than a thousand miles* through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Belgium in just under three months (Wordsworth’s admiring sister Dorothy traced his path on the map). This was a poor man’s Grand Tour, directed towards natural rather than cultural wonders, and undertaken on foot rather than by coach. Walking holidays were then coming into vogue, particularly for undergraduates and young clergymen – though few undertook a journey as ambitious as this one. Many of Wordsworth’s Cambridge friends had thought the scheme mad and impractical, with so many difficulties as to render it impossible. Nevertheless, such tours were not completely unknown: two years before, William Frend and his old schoolmate Richard Tylden had trodden a similar route. Frend was a Cambridge Fellow, and it is possible that his example inspired Wordsworth. The poet William Lisle Bowles was another who had made a recent walking tour of the Continent. Wordsworth’s school friend Joshua Wilkinson would undertake two walking tours in Europe in the following three years, and in 1798 would publish The Wanderer, a book based on his experiences. But walking tours were still something new; indeed the Oxford English Dictionary credits Wordsworth, in speaking of this tour, as the first to use the word ‘pedestrian’ in its literal rather than its metaphorical sense. A few years later an anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Magazine noted approvingly the ‘increasing frequency of these pedestrian tours’. By 1815 the editor of the Bristol Journal could refer to ‘this age of Pedestrianism’.⁶

Most of these new walkers did not venture abroad. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published in 1785, had helped to popularise the notion of internal tourism, exploring the wild and remote corners of the British Isles, until then generally assumed to be not worth going to see. Even before this, back in 1769, Thomas Gray had made a tour of the Lake District, and by the end of the century the Lakes had begun to attract tourists.* A succession of guidebooks to the regions of Britain appeared. Young men clad in sturdy boots and heavy coats strode up hills and along valleys, admiring landscapes previously unconsidered. Walking provided access to picturesque vistas otherwise inaccessible. Moreover, it was a form of escapism, disapproved of by the respectable. There was something intrinsically egalitarian – almost democratic – about this new habit. While the Grand Tour was available only to the very wealthy, walking tours, especially tours in Britain, could be made by anyone with the necessary leisure and modest funds to cover essential expenses. Such tours brought the middle-class walker into contact with the common people who shared the roads, while the rich rattled past in their coaches.† Dressed like tramps, the new walkers endured the same hardships and privations.

There was camaraderie on the road, as Wordsworth and Jones had discovered. Towards the end of their journey they passed through another country in revolt; the Belgians, inspired by their French neighbours, had risen against their ruler, the Austrian Emperor.

… a glorious time,

A happy time that was. Triumphant looks

Were then the common language of all eyes:

As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed

Their great expectancy; the fife of war

Was then a spirit-stirring sound indeed,

A blackbird’s whistle in a vernal grove.⁷

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in print within weeks of Wordsworth’s return to England. (This was a response to Richard Price’s address to the London Revolution Society, now published as a pamphlet.) Burke was then in his sixtieth year; his Reflections were delivered with the authority of an elder statesman, the most intellectual of the Whigs, an exponent of principle in politics, a champion of liberty, and a philosopher of the sublime. Assessing what had happened in France, he argued that nothing good could come from a complete break with the past: on the contrary, such an upheaval must inevitably lead to bloodshed, war and tyranny. He did not oppose change of any kind; but he believed it must be gradual rather than sudden, and rooted in the traditions of the people. His book became a bestseller, and his ideas were much discussed, but by no means generally accepted; the Prince of Wales, for example, then a young radical, scorned it as a jeremiad, ‘a farrago of nonsense’. In the House of Commons, the Prince’s mentor Fox could not resist describing the new government of France as ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country’. Fox and Burke had long been political allies, and when an indignant Burke voiced his opposition to ‘all systems built on abstract rights’ in the debate, Fox whispered his hope that though they disagreed, they might still remain friends. Burke spurned his appeal, declaring aloud that their friendship was at an end. Fox rose to reply, but was so hurt that he could not speak for some minutes, while tears trickled down his cheeks.

Burke’s Reflections infuriated radicals, all the more so because Burke had been such an eloquent critic of the British government at the time of the American Revolution, fifteen years earlier. It provoked any number of hostile responses – including an essay written by Robert Southey, then a Westminster schoolboy – the most famous being Tom Paine’s colossally successful Rights of Man. These in turn inspired further ripostes, one delivered by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who had initially lauded the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary rule, but who had come, like Burke, to deplore the results when the passions of human nature were ‘not regulated by religion, or controlled by law’.

Meanwhile Wordsworth had left Cambridge with a mere pass degree, a disappointment to his relatives who had hoped that he might have done well enough to be elected to the Fellowship reserved for men from Cumberland, succeeding his uncle William Cookson. They castigated him for having undertaken such an arduous walking tour in his final long vacation, when he should have been studying. Wordsworth’s future was not a matter for him alone; a successful career would bring influence that could be used for the benefit of the whole family. But he was stubborn. The more his seniors tried to guide him, the more he resisted. An orphan from the age of thirteen, he had since been dependent on his grandfather and two uncles who acted as guardians; with no home of their own, he and his siblings had suffered slights from tactless relatives and insolent servants. Pride and restraint were at war within him. Open rebellion was not an option for Wordsworth; he could not afford to defy his uncles while he remained reliant on them. The most that he could do was to thwart their plans for him.

After quitting Cambridge, Wordsworth spent some months in London, where ‘Free as a colt at pasture on the hills/I ranged at large’.⁸ He feasted greedily on the spectacle offered by what was then the greatest city in the world: the bustle, the theatres, the shops, the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the prostitutes and the fashionable ladies, the destitute and the wealthy, the extraordinary variety of sights and sounds and smells, all the more extraordinary to one who had grown up in the remote Lakes. As a spectator he attended the law courts, and watched the debates in Parliament, where he marvelled at Pitt’s sustained oratory and was inspired by Burke’s evergreen eloquence.⁹ His reactions suggest that on the great issues of the moment he was not yet parti pris, even though he was mixing with radicals sympathetic to the French revolutionaries. On Sundays he would often dine with Samuel Nicholson, a Unitarian and a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, afterwards going on with him to hear the popular sermons preached by the minister Joseph Fawcett at the dissenters’ meeting house in Old Jewry. It was probably at this time too that he met another radical dissenter, the bookseller-publisher Joseph Johnson, who lived above his shop in St Paul’s Churchyard.¹⁰ Johnson, who would be Wordsworth’s first publisher, combined business acumen with good taste; among the eminent writers he published were Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Malthus, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth. He was also publisher of the liberal monthly the Analytical Review, and was then in the process of publishing the first part of Paine’s Rights of Man.

In the late spring of 1791 Wordsworth left London for Wales, to stay with his walking companion Robert Jones and his sisters. ‘He seems so happy that it is probable he will remain there all the summer,’ observed his sister Dorothy. ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clewyd [sic] and without a rival?’¹¹ Despite these attractions, Wordsworth was able to tear himself away; he and Jones went on a walking tour of north Wales, and made a memorable night ascent of Snowdon to see the sunrise from the summit.*

To his friends at this time, Wordsworth affected a devil-may-care nonchalance. ‘I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life,’ he boasted to another Cambridge friend, William Mathews, after a year in which he cheerfully admitted to doing very little. His family was now trying to steer him towards the Church, but Wordsworth did not relish the prospect of ‘vegetating on a paltry curacy’. Fortunately he was still, at the age of twenty-one, too young to take holy orders; he could afford to look about him a while yet. He appeared to be thinking as much of his own prospects when he urged Mathews to find ‘some method of obtaining an Independence’, which would ‘enable you to get your bread unshackled by the necessity of professing a particular system of opinions… The field of Letters is very extensive, and it is astonishing if we cannot find some little corner, which with a little tillage will produce us enough for the necessities, nay even the comforts, of life.’¹²

Wordsworth counted himself a ‘philosopher’, in the original sense of a lover of wisdom, one devoted to the search for fundamental truth. In the parlance of the time, the term might equally be applied to a scientist or a naturalist as to a student of political or moral philosophy, or metaphysics. At this stage Wordsworth was far from certain what kind of life lay ahead of him. While at Cambridge he had become increasingly aware of his poetic gifts. The ‘instinctive humbleness’ he felt at the very thought of publication began to ‘melt away’; his ‘dread awe of mighty names’ softened; increasingly he felt a ‘fellowship’ with the authors he revered, and he was filled with ‘a thousand hopes’, ‘a thousand tender dreams’, as ‘a morning gladness’ settled on his mind. He had already completed one long poem, ‘An Evening Walk’; this achievement encouraged the ‘daring thought’ that he

… might leave

Some monument behind me which pure hearts

Should reverence … ¹³

Yet his feeling of fellowship with the great poets of the past was accompanied by a sense of alienation in the present. At Cambridge he had often been melancholy, conscious that he did not belong. There was ‘a strangeness in my mind’, a solitariness, an impression that he was different. Sometimes he would leave his university friends and walk out into the surrounding country, ‘turning the mind in upon itself’. Then again he would feel

The strength and consolation which were mine.

The swelling appreciation of the powers latent within him strengthened his conviction that he was ‘a chosen son’ of Nature.¹⁴

Towards the end of the year Wordsworth returned to France, to pass the year in Orléans, which until the Revolution had been a fashionable destination for young Englishmen, but where now (as he would discover) only a handful remained. It seems that he had no particular plan beyond that of improving his French, in the vague hope that this would qualify him for the post of travelling companion to some young gentleman. His uncles would have preferred him to return to Cambridge, to study oriental literature. ‘William has a great attachment to poetry,’ remarked his sister Dorothy to her friend Jane Pollard, ‘which is not the most likely thing to produce his advancement in the world.’¹⁵

The country to which he returned in November 1791 was very different from the one he had left the year before. France was in a state of turbulence; the apparent equilibrium had proved illusory. The National Assembly was supplanted by a Legislative Assembly, which would be replaced while Wordsworth was still in France by a National Convention. Each new body proved more susceptible than its predecessor to Revolutionary rhetoric, and each member tried to outdo his peers in crowd-pleasing Revolutionary zeal. The debate was increasingly histrionic. Publications such as Jean-Paul Marat’s L’Ami du peuple set a tone of vituperative abuse. Factions began to form: the most radical grouping found a permanent place on the left side – the ‘left wing’ – of the Manège (the converted riding school where the Assembly met), the most conservative on the right. The King had displayed his commitment to constitutional monarchy by attempting to flee the country, only to be escorted back from Varennes (not far from the border) under restraint; National Guardsmen had opened fire on their fellow citizens in suppressing a demonstration at the Champ de Mars. Frenchman had fired on Frenchman; brother had killed brother. It became clear that the Revolution was not yet complete.

This time Wordsworth travelled through France by coach rather than on foot. His route to Orléans took him through Paris, where he spent a few days exploring, hastening to the Champ de Mars to sniff the grapeshot, listening to the debates in the Jacobin Club* and the Assembly, pocketing a stone as a relic from the ruins of the Bastille. There he sat in the sunshine, ‘affecting more emotion than I felt’. He admitted to being more moved by a painting, the baroque Magdalene de Le Brun, displayed in a Carmelite convent while religious music played in the background for the benefit of visitors – now almost forgotten, but then one of the must-see sights of Paris.¹⁶

At this moment the young Wordsworth appears to have had no more than a vague sympathy for the Revolution. By the time he left France a year later he was ready to take up service for the cause, however dangerous – even, if necessary, to sacrifice his life.¹⁷ Such a change could not have occurred overnight; it seems more plausible that Wordsworth’s loyalties were won gradually during his stay in France. As he became more familiar with the language, so he was better able to comprehend what was being said and written all around him. And as a result he was better able to form his own judgements about the behaviour and character of those he encountered. It was natural that the longer he stayed in France, the more he should identify with French concerns. At first he felt as if he had arrived at a theatre when the play was already far advanced. By the end of his stay he felt ready to act a part himself.

The Revolution reached its crisis while Wordsworth was in France. Since his flight to Varennes the King was no longer trusted; there were persistent rumours that he was conspiring with émigrés and foreign powers to usurp the new constitution. In April the nation declared war on ‘the King of Bohemia and Hungary’ (the Austrian Emperor Leopold, brother of the hated Marie Antoinette); by the summer the French were at war with the Emperor’s allies, the Prussians, as well. Shouting demonstrators burst into the Tuileries, forcing Louis to don a red bonnet and drink a glass of wine with them, which he did with courage and good humour. The Prussians issued a manifesto calling on the French to rise up against their Revolutionary ‘oppressors’, and threatening an ‘exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance’ against the capital in the event of further outrages against the royal family. Morale in the old royal army was as low as could be; two-thirds of the officer corps had abandoned their commands, many to avoid a compulsory oath of allegiance to the new constitution, others in despair of disciplining the new patriot’ recruits.* Generals and their staffs defected en masse to the enemy. The Prussian army marched towards the border, crossing into France in mid-July. The Assembly formally decreed a state of emergency, ‘La Patrie en Danger’, and appealed for volunteers. These flocked to Paris from the provinces, aflame with Revolutionary ardour. A further decree allowed all citizens to enrol in the National Guard, creating ‘a nation in arms’. Excitement crackled in the streets, and on the morning of 10 August an angry crowd gathered in front of the Tuileries. The King’s Swiss Guards retreated inside the palace. The royal family fled to the Assembly, where the King appealed for shelter. After a flurry of shots, Louis sent an order to his Guards to stand down. The crowd stormed the palace, pursuing the Guards and courtiers out into the streets, where they were hunted down and slaughtered.

Now that his authority had collapsed, Louis XVI was no longer relevant; the monarchy was suspended, and soon abolished. The royal family was imprisoned in the Temple, the gloomy medieval home of the Knights Templar. The Assembly accepted Robespierre’s proposal to summon a National Convention, elected by universal (male) suffrage, for the purpose of framing a new constitution. Meanwhile the Prussians advanced steadily. First one fortress, then another fell to them. The mood in Paris became jittery. More than a thousand suspected counter-revolutionaries’ were taken into custody. A guillotine was erected outside the Tuileries.

It was difficult for Wordsworth to follow the changing situation in Paris and the fighting on the borders. In a letter home he confessed that, ‘in London you have perhaps a better opportunity of being informed of the general concerns of France, than in a petty provincial town in the heart of the kingdom itself’.¹⁸ Nevertheless, it was impossible for any resident of France not to be aware of the upsurge in patriotic feeling at this time. Every town saw parades and ceremonies, introduced by speeches of lofty rhetoric; Revolutionary clubs like the ubiquitous Jacobins began to usurp the powers of local government:

… ‘Twas in truth an hour Of

universal ferment; mildest men

Were agitated; and commotions, strife

Of passion and opinion, filled the walls

Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.¹⁹

This was a cultural revolution. The young men in its vanguard aimed to introduce a sterner moral code into public life, in place of the lax cynicism of the ancien régime. These zealots were steeped in the classics, whose authors presented an ideal of civic virtue, of loyalty to the Republic triumphing over selfish attachments. Their values were those of self-sacrifice, purity, duty, integrity, patriotism, stoicism and austerity; their model the Roman Republic; their heroes unimpeachable citizens like Cato or Cicero, whose oratory echoed down the centuries. Indeed, the revolutionaries identified themselves with the Roman Republic to what now seems a ludicrous extent. Had they not cast off a line of tyrannical kings, as the Romans had done? Had they not established a Senate? Had they not sworn solemn oaths, like the Horatii? Had they not defeated conspiracy after conspiracy to undermine the Republic?

The changes taking place extended into every area of life. A severe neoclassicism became the predominant style in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in fashion. The artificiality of the eighteenth century was replaced by an emphasis on naturalness. Wigs began to disappear. Men wore their own hair, often short and straight, perhaps brushed forward in the Roman style, without powder or curls. (While at Cambridge Wordsworth had powdered his hair, but now he too cut it short.) Women wore loose, flowing, high-waisted dresses, in contrast to the ornate and cumbersome constructions favoured by fashionable ladies in pre-Revolutionary France. It became de rigueur to address everyone as ‘tu’, no matter how distant the relationship; while the titles ‘monsieur’ and ‘madame’ made way for the more democratic ‘citoyen’ and ‘citoyenne’.²⁰ These usages, though offensive or embarrassing to many, were enforced by the new authorities. Even the calendar would be replaced while Wordsworth was in France: Sunday was abolished and a ten-day week introduced. Year 1 began with the founding of the Republic, on 22 September 1792.

In Orléans Wordsworth lodged above a shop in the rue Royale owned by M. Gellet-Duvivier, a vociferous opponent of the Revolution. The other lodgers, three Cavalry officers and ‘a gentleman from Paris’, were of like mind. After a fortnight in Orleans, an apparently surprised Wordsworth reported that he had not met a single person ‘of wealth and circumstance’ favourable to the Revolution. ‘All the people of any opulence are aristocrates* [sic] and all the others democrats,’ he informed his brother Richard.²¹ His fellow lodgers introduced Wordsworth to the society of other officers stationed in the city. All were well-born, all ‘were bent upon undoing what was done’, and some spoke openly to this young foreigner of leaving to join the émigrés mustering with the enemy armies on the borders.

If the officers assumed that the Englishman (being an Englishman) would share their contempt for the lower orders, they were mistaken. Wordsworth was not one for whom rank and wealth commanded automatic respect, having grown up in the Lake District,

… which yet

Retaineth more of ancient homeliness,

Manners erect, and frank simplicity,

Than any other nook of English land.²²

Moreover, he and his siblings had a long-standing grievance against one of the ‘great’: the notoriously mean Earl of Lonsdale, the most powerful landowner in the north-west of England, who used his enormous wealth to exert absolute control over nine seats in Parliament, † enough in the chaotic politics of the eighteenth century to give him considerable political leverage. As an attorney, Wordsworth’s father John, a widower, had been Lonsdale’s* man of business, and in this capacity he had freely disbursed his own money on his employer’s behalf. After John Wordsworth’s sudden death in 1783 Lonsdale had refused to honour the outstanding sum, amounting to several thousand pounds. The Wordsworth orphans were left impoverished, dependent on relatives. Having been raised with certain expectations, they had been disappointed; a sense of injustice coloured their lives. Wordsworth had therefore the strongest personal reasons for resenting the power and the privileges of the wealthy, and his formative experience of the ruling class was of an especially odious specimen. This was an upbringing that might have been devised for the raising of a revolutionary. Many of the leading deputies in the Assembly were young men like Wordsworth: from the middle ranks of society, alienated from their families, well educated but carrying some form of grievance.

Cambridge had encouraged Wordsworth’s democratic inclinations, being ‘something …

Of a Republic, where all stood thus far

Upon equal ground, that they were brothers all

In honour, as in one community –

Scholars and Gentlemen – where, furthermore,

Distinction lay open to all that came,

And wealth and titles were in less esteem

Than talents and successful industry.²³

Nothing in Wordsworth’s background led him to share the officers’ assumptions about the innate superiority of the landowning classes. On the contrary, their disdain for the uncouth masses rankled with him.²⁴

But anyway, Wordsworth felt that it would be impossible to ‘undo what was done’, whatever the outcome of the war. The Revolutionary reforms were belated and inevitable. As he wrote to Mathews:

… suppose that the German army is at the gates of Paris, what will be the consequence? It will be impossible to make any material alteration in the constitution, impossible to reinstate the clergy in its ancient guilty splendor, impossible to give an existence to the noblesse similar to that it before enjoyed, impossible to add much to the authority of the King: Yet there are in France some [?millions – this word is indecipherable] – I speak without exaggeration – who expect that this will take place.²⁵

It seems likely that he was thinking of the officers when he wrote these words.

Wordsworth could not refrain from contrasting such disillusioned and resentful reactionaries with the gallant volunteers for the citizen army. Once again, as in 1790, he saw the roads of France crowded, this time not with fédérés returning from Paris, but with ‘the bravest Youth of France’ flocking to the frontier, in response to urgent appeals to defend the motherland from invasion. He witnessed many poignant scenes of farewell, the memory of which would move him to tears more than a decade afterwards. News from the front that summer was of disaster after disaster: the patriot army seemed unable to match the superior discipline of their opponents, all professional soldiers. To Wordsworth, the volunteers appeared as martyrs, going willingly to their certain doom.

… they seem’d

Like arguments from Heaven that ’twas a cause

Good, and which no one could stand up against

Who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud,

Mean, miserable, wilfully depraved,

Hater perverse of equity and truth.²⁶

Such idealism could scarcely fail to move an open-hearted young man. The fine principles for which the volunteers fought, dressed in heady rhetoric, were universal. The French were fighting to defend their country, but they were fighting in the name of all Mankind. The fire had been kindled in France, but it seemed possible, indeed likely, that the blaze would spread across Europe, perhaps even to England. In such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Wordsworth should have come to see himself as ‘a Patriot’:

… my heart was all

Given to the People, and my love was theirs.²⁷

Wordsworth was then a child of Rousseau; he was inclined to believe that men are naturally good, that the existing institutions of society are artificial, tending to perpetuate idleness, luxury and flattery: a rotten carapace that could be peeled back to reveal the healthy flesh underneath. The violence that accompanied the Revolution was not characteristic; it was simply necessary to correct the unnatural abuses of the past. A new social contract would be founded on Justice, Equality and Reason. Government would be by the ‘general will’, for the common good, and by consent of the citizenry. In making a new constitution, free from any encumbrances of the past, the Convention would be making a new kind of Man. For the young Wordsworth, the Revolution promised heaven on earth:

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For great were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! O times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute took at once

The attraction of a country in romance –

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights

When most intent of making of herself

A prime enchanter to assist the work

Which then was going forwards in her name.

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise … ²⁸

In Orléans Wordsworth became involved with a woman at least four years his senior, Annette Vallon, and it was probably on her account that he moved early in 1792 to her home town of Blois, some thirty miles down the Loire. It seems likely that he was one of the two Englishmen admitted on 3 February to the Revolutionary club in Blois, Les Amis de la Constitution.²⁹ Its President was Henri Grégoire, a radical cleric closely identified with the iconography of the Revolution: his image appears at the centre of Jacques-Louis David’s famous composition The Tennis-Court Oath.* As ‘Constitutional Bishop’ of Blois he had served as a member of the Constituent Assembly until its dissolution in September 1791. Former members of the Constituent Assembly were debarred from sitting in the new Legislative Assembly, so after its dissolution Grégoire had returned to Blois. On 14 July 1792, Federation Day, he delivered a fiery speech to Les Amis de la Constitution in which he prophesied that the Revolution would spread across the world. He hailed the patriot armies fighting for ‘la liberté de l’univers’:

The present augurs well for the future. Soon we shall witness the liberation of all humankind. Everything confirms that the coming revolution will set all of Europe free, and prove a consolation for the whole human race. Liberty has been fettered to thrones for far too long! She will burst those irons and chains and as she extends her influence beyond our horizons, will inaugurate the federation of all mankind!³⁰

Whether Wordsworth was present while this speech was being delivered is unknown. If not, he may well have read the transcript when it was published soon afterwards. In any case, Grégoire’s rhetoric gives a sense of the millenarian atmosphere in Revolutionary Blois at the time. Wordsworth was certainly aware of Grégoire; he later referred to him admiringly and quoted his words with approval.

In Blois, Wordsworth again lodged in a house with army officers, but here he met one different from the rest (and ostracised as a result): Michel Beaupuy, a captain who, though an aristocrat by birth, embraced the changes brought by the Revolution wholeheartedly. Beaupuy was thirty-seven, fifteen years older than Wordsworth, and he became a mentor to the younger man. Together they walked many a mile along the banks of the Loire, or in the forests that grew along the valley, engaged in earnest dialogues’, putting the world to rights:

Why should I not confess that earth was then

To me what an inheritance new-fallen

Seems, when the first time visited, to one

Who thither comes to find in it his home?

He walks about and looks upon the place

With cordial transport – moulds it and remoulds –

And is half pleased with things that are amiss,

T’will be such joy to see them disappear.³¹

In this spirit of comradely idealism, Wordsworth may even have fantasised about joining Beaupuy in an armed crusade to liberate Britain from monarchy and aristocracy. There is a passage in The Prelude that seems to hint at such a possibility, when he writes of a ‘philosophic war/Led by philosophers’.³² And why not? However unrealistic, Wordsworth’s dream of revolution in Britain was consistent with the rhetoric used by men like Grégoire.

Among Beaupuy’s qualities that impressed Wordsworth was his compassion for the poor, ‘a courtesy which had no air/Of condescension’. On one of their walks they chanced on a ‘hunger-bitten girl’, leading a heifer by a cord.

… 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 … ³³

Such sympathies would linger in Wordsworth’s heart long after he had abandoned hope of revolutionary change.

On 2 September 1792, the fortress of Verdun fell to the Prussians. The French army prepared to make a last stand; if this failed, the road to Paris lay open before the invaders. Panic seized the capital; rumour spread that as the enemy arrived at the gates a ‘fifth column’ of aristocrats and priests would emerge from prison to murder the defenceless families of citizens away fighting. Marat fed the paranoia, urging the people to eliminate this threat from within. Mobs stormed prisons across the city, dragging out the inmates and slaughtering them in the street: old and young, men and women alike. The often mutilated corpses were stripped of their clothing, then loaded onto wagons and carted away for disposal. The newly severed head of one of Marie Antoinette’s closest friends, her former lady-in-waiting the Princesse de Lamballe, was impaled on a pike and waved jeeringly outside the Queen’s window. About half of all those imprisoned in Paris were massacred, among them more than two hundred priests. Three years before, the Revolution had begun with the joyous release of prisoners from their dark cells; now prisoners were hauled out into the light to be butchered.

The September Massacres, as they became known, shocked even the by-now hardened French public. More than a thousand people were murdered before the frenzy faded. Among the dead were fifty or so prisoners being transferred from Orléans, ambushed by a band of armed Parisians at Versailles. Blood was shed in Orléans itself in early September: a mob protesting against the high price of bread went on the rampage, burning and looting houses. The city authorities imposed a curfew and declared martial law, but by the time the National Guard had restored order, thirteen people had been killed in the riots. Wordsworth returned to Orléans from Blois some time in September; it is not known whether he was in time to witness the violence. He was then putting the finishing touches to his poem ‘Descriptive Sketches’; its conclusion welcomed the proclamation of the Republic by the Convention on 21 September:

Lo! From th’innocuous flames, a lovely birth!

It seems probable that these lines were written even as bloodstains were being scrubbed from the pavements of Paris.

Wordsworth was preparing to return to England. By this time it must have been obvious that Annette Vallon was pregnant; she would give birth to a daughter on 15 December. So why did Wordsworth leave France, just as he was about to become a father? He was certainly short of money. He may have believed that the time was ripe to publish his poems. Maybe he felt that he must return home to secure his future, to establish himself in the Church or some other profession, so that he would be able to provide for Annette and his child. Possibly he intended to marry her once he was established; Annette’s subsequent letters suggest that she expected him to do so. But she may have been deluding herself. It would have been difficult for him to make a career in the Church, with a foreign, Catholic wife and a child born out of wedlock. Perhaps he made promises to Annette that he did not mean to keep. The frustrating truth is that there is not enough evidence on which to base anything more than guesses at Wordsworth’s intentions.

The very day before the proclamation of the Republic, the French repelled the Prussians at Valmy, about a hundred miles east of Paris. This was the turn of the tide; the crisis had passed. Goethe, who was accompanying his patron, a general in the defeated army, immediately recognised the significance of the Revolutionary victory. That same evening, sitting in a circle of demoralised Prussian soldiers around a damp campfire, he attempted to lift the prevalent gloom by telling them: ‘From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’³⁴

In the House of Commons, Fox did not hide his delight at the French victory. For him, the ‘conspiracy’ of the reactionary powers (Prussia and Austria) threatened ‘not merely the ruin of liberty in France, but the ruin of liberty in England; the ruin of the liberty of man’. Like Fox, Wordsworth had come to see the fate of mankind as being bound up with that of the Revolution; he ‘laid this faith to heart’,

That if France prospered good men would not long

Pay fruitless worship to humanity.³⁵

In late October Wordsworth, ‘enflam’d with hope’, arrived in Paris on his way back to England. It was a moment of high political tension. The majority in the new Convention was attempting to assert its authority over those extra-parliamentary forces that had so recently wrought havoc in the capital. One of the most prominent of those trying to re-establish the rule of law was the leader of the loosely organised ‘Girondin’ group of deputies, Jacques Pierre Brissot. In this he was resisted by Maximilien Robespierre, who by a process of manipulation and intimidation dominated the Jacobin clubs and the Commune. Robespierre’s supporters were known as ‘the Mountain’, after the position they took in the new chamber in the Tuileries, on the benches high up against the wall. The majority of uncommitted deputies sat lower down, close to the debating floor, and thus became known as ‘the Plain’. Brissot and his allies had already made one attempt to rein in Robespierre, which failed when Marat brandished a pistol in the Convention chamber and melodramatically threatened to blow out his own brains.

On his first morning in the capital, after a disturbed night dreaming of the massacres, Wordsworth emerged onto the street to find hawkers selling copies of a speech denouncing Robespierre. In the Convention, Robespierre dared his opponents to identify themselves – and, after a silence, the Girondin journalist Louvet stepped forward to the tribune to accuse him, amongst other crimes, of encouraging the creation of a personality cult, and aspiring to a dictatorship.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth chose to dramatise this as a decisive scene in the Revolution, the moment when its future would be decided, for good or ill. He may have overestimated its significance – historians disagree on the subject – but there seems little reason to doubt his sincerity. It was clearly an important moment for him.* He bemoaned the fact that ‘Louvet was left alone without support/Of his irresolute friends’. Though ‘an insignificant stranger’, Wordsworth contemplated taking sides in this struggle:

Mean as I was, and little graced with powers

Of eloquence even in my native speech,

And all unfit for tumult and intrigue,

Yet would I willingly have taken up

A service at this time for cause so great,

However dangerous.³⁶

It was not unprecedented for an Englishman to engage in French politics. Tom Paine, for example, had been elected to the Convention after receiving a letter from the President of the Assembly announcing that ‘France calls you to its bosom,’ as well as invitations from no fewer than three different départements to stand as one of their deputies. In August the Assembly had conferred on Paine the title of ‘French citizen’.* It is possible that Wordsworth had already met Paine in 1791 through his publisher Joseph Johnson, the original publisher of Rights of Man; possible too that Wordsworth attended the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel in Paris on 18 November, at which Paine was toasted and diners offered their ‘fraternal homage’ to the new Republic. Ten days later, a delegation from the Society for Constitutional Information in London presented a congratulatory address to the Convention. In response, Grégoire evoked the memory of the English revolutionaries of the 1640s. ‘The moment is at hand,’ he declared, ‘when the French Nation will send its own congratulations to the National Convention of Great Britain.’³⁷

Nearly fifty years afterwards, an elderly Wordsworth chucklingly confessed that he had been ‘pretty hot in it’ while in Paris, but what he meant by this is unclear. In a letter to his brother Richard written soon after his first visit to the French capital, he had referred to an unnamed member who had introduced him to the Assembly, ‘of whose acquaintance I shall profit on my return to Paris’.³⁸ This was probably Brissot. Thomas De Quincey, who first met Wordsworth in 1807 and whose source was likely to have been Wordsworth himself, recorded that Wordsworth ‘had been sufficiently connected with public men to have drawn upon himself some notice from those who afterwards composed the Committee of Public Safety’, i.e. Robespierre and his associates. He implied that Wordsworth had been prominent enough to be in danger had he remained longer in France.³⁹ In The Prelude Wordsworth would later suggest that had he stayed in Paris he ‘doubtless should have made a common cause/with some who perished’ – and maybe would have perished himself.⁴⁰

As well as Brissot, Wordsworth knew at least one other prominent Girondin deputy, the journalist Jean-Antoine Gorsas. Moreover, he was familiar with and may have known Grégoire, who in September had returned to Paris from Blois to sit in the Convention as deputy for Loir-et-Cher. It was Grégoire who had proposed the motion to abolish the monarchy, initiating the Republic. On 16 November he would be elected President of the Convention.

Robespierre replied to the charges against him in a speech to the Convention a week later. It was delivered in his usual style: self-dramatising, paranoid, brimming with righteous indignation. Far from seeking power for himself, he claimed to be no more than a repository of Historical Truth. He defended the recent violence, and dismissed the charges of illegality, pointing out that the Revolution was from its outset ‘illegal’. To judge the Revolution by standards of conventional morality was to rob the people’s uprising of its natural legitimacy. He concluded with a rhetorical flourish: ‘Do you want a Revolution without a revolution?’⁴¹

The speech carried the Convention; his accusers melted under the heat of Robespierre’s high-minded rhetoric. He now turned his attention to the fate of the King, demanding that he should face trial. Robespierre’s protégé, the young fanatic Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, went further: he asserted that a trial was unnecessary, because Louis was by definition guilty: ‘one cannot reign innocently’. There was only one possible solution: the surgical removal of this excrescence from the body of the nation.

Another prominent deputy, the Minister of the Interior Jean Marie Roland, announced the discovery amongst the King’s belongings of an iron chest filled with papers, apparently incriminating not just the King himself, but also some of the more moderate deputies. Those trying to defend the King were now on the defensive, fearful that they might in turn come under attack. A number chose to abandon Louis in order to protect themselves.

Early in December the Convention ended its discussion on the principle of trying the King and ordered an indictment to be prepared. On the eleventh Louis was brought before the Convention to answer the charge of fomenting counter-revolution. His replies, though dignified, were unconvincing.

Wordsworth had planned to be back in London during the month of October.⁴² He had two poems ready for publication, and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who needed his support. But he lingered a month or more in Paris, no doubt fascinated to be on hand while the future of the world was being decided. It seems that he may have attended some of the debates in the Convention as a spectator. Two years earlier he had been unwilling to make a small detour to come to Paris; now he was unable to drag himself away. At last, he returned reluctantly to England,

Compelled by nothing less than absolute want

Of funds for my support.⁴³

* This is a low estimate. They travelled about two thousand miles in all, but some of the journey was by boat.

* The term came into usage around 1800.

† Coach travel cost 2d or 3d per mile, a prohibitive expense for all but the wealthy.

* It seems likely to have been on this trip that Wordsworth visited the celebrated travel writer Thomas Pennant, whose Tour in Scotland had stimulated Johnson and Boswell to make their journey to the Western Isles.

* Generally known as such after the place where members of the club met in the rue St Jacques. Their official name was the Society of the Friends of the Revolution.

* Until the Revolution, commissions in the army had been reserved for scions of families whose aristocratic lineage went back at least four generations.

* Confusion is caused by the term ‘aristocrat’. The French noblesse was not the same as the English aristocracy: even allowing for the difference in population size, they were far more numerous – perhaps a quarter of a million people, compared to the 10,000 or so in Britain. By no means all ‘aristocrats’ were wealthy, despite occupying a privileged position under the ancien régime. It was not unknown for a French ‘aristocrat’ to push his own plough. In Britain, the term ‘aristocrat’ had a political as well as a social meaning; it was used as shorthand to denote anyone opposed to reform; while a ‘democrat’ was defined as one who demanded radical changes to the constitution, together with an immediate peace with France and recognition of the French Republic.

† His MPs were known as ‘Lonsdale’s ninepins’

* Lonsdale was Sir James Lowther until ennobled in 1784.

* Commissioned by the Jacobin Club but never completed (in part because of the need for constant changes; some of those who had been present became personae non gratae, and thus had to be excluded, while others, who had not, now wished to be included): existing only in the form of David’s preliminary (but detailed) sketches, some of which portray the assembled oath-swearers as classically severe nudes.

* It may be significant that Louvet had been elected to the Convention to represent the Loiret, the département in which Wordsworth had been living; perhaps this fact contributed to Wordsworths interest in him

* Joseph Priestley was made a citizen of France in September. He too was elected to the Convention, but declined the election.