These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor Harper has collected a number of facts that make it appear likely that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.
Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious. Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism. They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth with the same horror with which a reader of the Morning Post would learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth may well have appeared to these orthodox parents a representative of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be looked on as invalid—as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary. Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had already gone so far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette. Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her relatives and yet desired to remain near her.
All we know of Wordsworth, and all the facts in Professor Harper’s story, make it impossible to believe that he would willingly have deserted Marie-Anne and his daughter. The baptism of the child was entered in the registry of baptisms in the parish of Sainte-Croix, “Williams Wordsodsth” in his absence being represented by a local official. She was baptised Anne Caroline, and it was as Anne Caroline Wordsworth, daughter of “Williams Wordsworth, landowner,” that she was married in Paris about twenty-four years later. Wordsworth appears to have kept constantly in touch with her and her mother in the meantime, and, when peace was in sight in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy determined to cross to France and see them. A meeting took place in Calais. It was the preliminary to a marriage, but not to marriage with Annette, who, indeed, never married, but went through life as Madame Vallon. Two months after the Calais meeting Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. That he had been deeply moved by the meeting with his child rather than with her mother is suggested by the mood of the sonnet he wrote at the time: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”
Professor Harper is of opinion that Wordsworth’s love for Marie-Anne Vallon was an event of supreme importance in his life. He holds that the facts he has discovered throw “light upon many of Wordsworth’s poems.” I do not think that on this point he has proved his case. In his two-volume life of Wordsworth, it may be remembered, he even goes so far as to assign the “Lucy” of so many beautiful poems to a French original. Lovers of a great poet are naturally led to speculate as to the experiences out of which his poems grew. There is nothing of the vice of Paul Pry in attempting thus to discover the sources of the experiences the poet communicates in his verse. The theme of every poet is the experiences that have moved his soul most profoundly. And many, or most, of those experiences spring from his relations with other human beings. At the same time, there is no evidence that Wordsworth in his work was ever influenced by Marie-Anne Vallon as Keats was influenced by Fanny Brawne. It is doubtful if any women every really took the place of his sister in his heart. “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,” could be said only of Dorothy. It was the fire of affection, not the fire of passion, that glowed in Wordsworth’s soul. “Oh, my dear, dear sister!” he cried in one of his letters, “with what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. So eager is my desire to see you that all other obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running, or rather flying, to my arms.” He was in life as in literature a devoted brother rather than a devoted lover. Even Professor Harper can give no other woman but Dorothy the position of presiding genius over his life and work. This does not necessarily involve our acceptance of the common theory that Dorothy was the original around whom the “Lucy” poems were written. But, had Lucy been a Frenchwoman, Wordsworth would hardly have written:
I travelled among unknown men
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England did I know till then
What love I bore to thee....
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;