Memoirs of William Wordsworth

by George S. Phillips

“It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
Wan, dull, and glaring with a dripping fog,
Low hung, and thick, that covered all the sky;
But undiscouraged, we began to climb
The mountain side. The mist soon girt us round,
And after ordinary traveller’s talk
With our conductor, presently we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard that checked
Those musings, or diverted, save that once
The shepherd’s lurcher, who, among the grass,
Had to his joy unearthed a hedge-hog, teased
His coiled-up prey, with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed
In that wild place, and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts.
Thus might we wear a midnight hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chance, the foremost of the band.
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two, seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond
Far, far beyond the solid vapours stretched
In headlands, hills, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty
Usurped upon, far as the sight could reach.
Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none
Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light
In the clear presence of the full-orbed moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay
All meek and silent, save that thro’ a rift—
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place—
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heaven.”

This is poetry; and with the exception of the Arab and Dromedary passage, is certainly the finest in the “Prelude.”

After the completion of this tour, Wordsworth was urged by his friends to take holy orders; but he was not of age for ordination, nor was his mind sufficiently imbued with love for the clerical functions at this time, even had he been of age, to have induced him to have assumed them. A Mr. Robinson offered him the curacy of Harwich, whilst he was in Wales, and the curacy was the high way to the Living. But from the above circumstances, and other motives of an active and political nature, the offer was declined, and his non-age was the apology. The truth is, that Wordsworth, like all the young, enthusiastic, and highly-gifted men of that time, was filled with the grand idea of liberty, and the hope of further enfranchisement from old forms of error and superstition, which France had raised upon the theatre of her soil. And accordingly, in November, 1791, he determined to cross the channel, and winter in Orleans, that he might watch the progress of events. He had at this time a very imperfect acquaintance with the French language, and set out on his journey alone. In that same month, France was in the convulsions of her first agony—her first birth-pangs of Revolution. “The National Assembly met; the party of Madame Roland and the Brissotins were in the ascendant; the war of La Vendee was raging; the army was in favour of a constitutional monarchy; Dumourier was Minister of the Exterior; a German army was hovering on the French frontier; popular sedition was fomented by the Girondists, in order to intimidate the government, and overawe the Crown. In the following year, 1792, the sanguinary epoch of the Revolution commenced; committees of public safety struck terror into the hearts of thousands; the king was thrown into the prison of the Temple; the massacres of September, perpetrated by Danton and his associates, to daunt the invading army and its adherents, deluged Paris with blood; the Convention was constituted; monarchy was abolished; a rupture ensued between the Gironde and the Montagne; Robespierre arose; Deism was dominant; the influence of Brissot and of the Girondists was on the decline; and in a short time they were about to fall victims to the power which they themselves had created.”[F]

Such is a summary of the events which transpired whilst Wordsworth was in France; and he has left us a record of the hopes, and wild exultations with which he hailed the Revolution, when it first boomed above the horizon of the morning.

“Before him shone a glorious world
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music suddenly;
He looked upon the hills and plains,
And seemed as if let loose from chains,
To live at liberty.”

But, alas! the counterpart of the picture came as suddenly, not attended by the sweet breathings of a delicious music, but by the roar of mad and fiery throats, and the pageantry of blood and death. Before these dread events took place, and whilst hope was still high in the poet’s heart, he made acquaintance with some of the most distinguished personages on the republican side—and, amongst others, with General Beaupuis, whom he characterises as a philosopher, patriot, and soldier, and one of the noblest men in France. At length, he stands in the midst of the Revolution; quits Orleans for Blois, and, in 1792, arrived in Paris, only a month after the horrors and massacres of September. Republicanism had prevailed—and what a republic it proved! All law and order suspended, or dead—thousands of innocent and patriotic men condemned to death on the faintest suspicions—the ghastly skeleton of Atheism seated on the throne of God—and liberty strangled in her own cradle. “What a picture,” says De Quincy, “does Wordsworth give of the fury which then possessed the public mind; of the frenzy which shone in every eye, and through every gesture; of the stormy groups assembled at the Palais Royal, or the Tuilleries, with ‘hissing factionists,’ for ever in their centre? ‘hissing,’ from the self-baffling of their own madness, and incapable, from wrath, of speaking clearly; of fear already creeping over the manners of multitudes; of stealthy movements through back streets; plotting and counter-plotting in every family; feuds to extermination—dividing children of the same house for ever; scenes, such as those of the Chapel Royal (now silenced on that public stage), repeating themselves daily amongst private friends; and to show the universality of this maniacal possession—that it was no narrow storm discharging its fury, by local concentration, upon a single city, but that it overspread the whole realm of France—a picture is given, wearing the same features of what passed daily at Orleans, Blois, and other towns. The citizens are described in the attitudes they assumed at the daily coming in of the post from Paris; the fierce sympathy is pourtrayed with which they echoed back the feelings in the capital; men of all parties had been there up to this time—aristocrats as well as democrats, and one, in particular, of the former class, is put forward as a representative of this class. This man, duly as the hour arrived that brought the Parisian newspapers, read, restlessly, of the tumults and insults amongst which the Royal Family now passed their days; of the decrees by which his own order were threatened or assailed; of the self-expatriation, now continually swelling in amount, as a measure of despair on the part of myriads, as well priests as gentry,—all this, and worse, he read in public; and still as he read—

‘his hand
Haunted his sword, like an uneasy spot
In his own body.’

“In short, as there never has been so strong a national convulsion diffused so widely, with equal truth, it may be asserted that no describer, so powerful, or idealizing, so magnificent in what he deals with, has ever been a living spectator of parallel scenes.”

The reaction of the atrocities and enormous crimes of the Revolution, upon Wordsworth’s mind, was terrible. But a short time before the Revolution commenced, we find him the espouser, the advocate of democracy; the enemy of monarchial forms of government, and consequently of hereditary monarchy; the foe, likewise, of all class distinctions and privileges; for he regarded these as enemies to human progress and happiness.—After his return to England, he says, in one of his unpublished letters to the Bishop of Llandaff, “In my ardour to attain the goal, I do not forget the nature of the ground where the race is to be run. The destruction of those institutions which I condemn, appears to me to be hastening on too rapidly. I abhor the very idea of a revolution. I am a determined enemy to every species of violence. I see no connection, but what the obstinacy of pride and ignorance renders necessary, between reason and bonds. I deplore the miserable condition of the French, and think that we can only be guarded from the same scourge by the undaunted efforts of good men. I severely condemn all inflammatory addresses to the passions of men. I know that the multitude walk in darkness. I would put into each man’s hand a lanthern to guide him; not have him to set out on his journey depending for illumination on abortive flashes of lightning, the corruscations of transitory meteors.” These were the opinions of Wordsworth before, and at the commencement of the Revolution. As I said, however, the crimes into which the leaders of it subsequently plunged, and the mad passions which influenced them, completely revolutionised the mind of Wordsworth, and filled him with the darkest forebodings. He lost for a time, his generous faith in men, his hope of human liberty, and his belief in the perfection of human nature. He has given a fearful picture of his state of mind at this period, in the Solitary of the “Excursion,” which the reader will do well to consult. The events of the Revolution, however, brought with them much wisdom to Wordsworth. They turned his thoughts inward, and compelled him to meditate upon man’s nature and destiny,—upon what it is possible for man to become; whilst they gave breadth, and depth, and expansion to his higher sympathies. From this time Wordsworth’s mission as a priest may be dated. He was no longer a mere dreamer, but was deeply impressed with the stern realities—with the wants and necessities of his time; and he resolved to devote himself to the service of humanity.

In De Quincy’s admirable “Lake Reminiscences,” in Tait’s Magazine, already alluded to, it is stated that by his connection with public men, Wordsworth had become an object of suspicion long before he left France, and was looked upon as an English spy. How little did these persons know of Wordsworth! At this very time his whole soul was in the cause for which the patriots were struggling; and his own noble heart was rendered still nobler, braver, and better, by his daily communings with the grand and sublime nature of his friend Beaupuis. To this man De Quincy pays the finest tribute of admiration and reverence which ever came from the pen of the historian, or the mouth of the orator. “This great season,” he says, of “public trial had searched men’s natures, revealed their real hearts; brought into life and action qualities of writers not suspected by their possessors; and had thrown man as in alternating states of society, each upon his own native resources, unaided by the old conventional forms of rank and birth. Beaupuis had shone to unusual advantage under this general trial. He had discovered, even to the philosophic eye of Wordsworth, a depth of benignity very unusual in a Frenchman; and not of local, contracted benignity, but of large, illimitable, apostolic devotion to the service of the poor and the oppressed;—a fact the more remarkable, as he had all the pretensions, in his own person, of high birth, and high rank; and, so far as he had any personal interest embarked in the struggle, should have allied himself to the aristocracy. But of selfishness in any shape, he had no vestiges; or if he had, it shewed itself in a slight tinge of vanity; yet no—it was not vanity, but a radiant quickness of sympathy with the eye which expressed admiring love—sole relic of the chivalrous devotion once limited to the service of the ladies. Now again he put on the garb of chivalry; it was a chivalry the noblest in the world, which opened his ear to the Pariah and the oppressed all over his misorganized country. A more apostolic fervour of holy zealotry in this great cause has not been seen since the days of Bartholomew Las Casas, who shewed the same excess of feeling in another direction. This sublime dedication of his being to a cause which, in his conception of it, extinguished all petty considerations for himself, and made him thenceforward a creature of the national will,—“a son of France,” in a more eminent and lofty sense than according to the heraldry of Europe—had extinguished his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour: ‘injuries,’ says Wordsworth—