by Simon Schama
He can’t do it. Ultimately he knows he is, in his way, a British patriot. His feet have to be on its ground. So somehow ‘I contrived to let myself down, from precipice to precipice, till I arrived at last in safety on the beach, together with a fleck of chalk, and a sprig of thyme … Trophies purchased with more innocence … than all the sanguinary honours of the plunderers and destroyers of the world: the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Edwards and the Henrys, by whom the peace of mankind has been so repeatedly disturbed.’ Poor Thelwall – who would end up trying to be a farmer in the Black Mountains of Wales at Llyswen before turning to elocution teaching in London – would always be on the verge of happiness.
CHAPTER
2
FORCES OF NATURE:
THE ROAD HOME
IN THE SPRING of 1792, and of his life, William Wordsworth had none of John Thelwall’s paralysing anxieties. Going to France was ‘pleasant exercise of hope and joy!’
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!
That, at any rate, was the way he remembered it 12 years later even when he was feeling a lot less charitable towards the French Revolution. The chronicle of his journey in and out of revolution forms part of The Prelude, the greatest autobiographical poem in English (or perhaps any other European language); the first section of which was written in 1798–9, exactly at the point when Wordsworth was undergoing a deep change of heart.
The momentous theme of The Prelude is the struggle to hang on – through memory – to the instinctive life of childhood, even while being pulled inexorably towards an adult sense of individual self-consciousness. Immersion in nature is the great ally in this war against the inevitable erosion of innocence by time and social experience. Nature is freedom; the business of the world a prison. The mature Wordsworth becomes a child of nature again through the act of intense recollection. What he describes is a Cumbrian childhood spent escaping from, fighting against, what we would now call ‘socialization’: against the rote-learning, fact-packed lessons at his school in Hawkshead. Instead, nature was his tutor and his playground:
Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
Alternate, all a summer’s day …
or when rock and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport
A naked savage, in the thunder shower.
At St John’s College, Cambridge, Wordsworth was in no hurry to oblige his father’s expectation that he enter the Church or the law. Nor was he particularly enthralled with learning:
Of College labours, of the Lecturer’s room
All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand
… Let others that know more speak as they know.
Such glory was but little sought by me.
Restive, anxious, dimly aware that something big was waiting for him, in the summer of 1790 he decided to go with a friend, Robert Jones, on a walking tour of the Alps – in that generation very much a statement of moral and political temper. The two undergraduates landed in Calais – surely not by accident – on 13 July, the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and witnessed, first-hand, the ecstatic festival of flowers and freedom. On their journey south and east through France, they
found benevolence and blessedness
Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring
Hath left no corner of the land untouched.
At one point along their journey they found themselves swallowed up in a throng of celebrating villagers, ‘vapoured in the unruliness of joy’, who gave them supper and got them to dance in a circle:
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.
Two years later, after his second journey to France, the dewy innocence might have gone, but not the political idealism. Still fending off family concern about his profession, Wordsworth had gone to London, where he met Joseph Johnson and the St Paul’s Churchyard circle during the height of the Burke–Paine furore. He saw Burke himself in the Commons:
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove …
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
But the retrospective eulogy of Burke as the personification of English nature – the gnarled and knotty oak defying the worst the revolutionary storm can hurl at him – is very much the recollection of the older Romantic conservative. Given the Paine-ite attacks on established authority that Wordsworth was still to write, it seems very unlikely that at this time he would have felt quite so warmly.
Much later, too, Wordsworth insisted that his second journey to France, in 1791–2, had been just a study-trip to learn the language. But this is where memory turns disingenuous. At that very moment, France was facing a desperate war launched by the Emperor of Austria (Marie Antoinette’s brother) and the King of Prussia expressly to uphold the rights of monarchy and to liberate Louis XVI from the grip of those who had usurped it in the name of the people. It would have been rather like maintaining that a journey to Russia in 1920 was purely a matter of studying Pushkin. And Wordsworth did admit to a friend, albeit in rueful sorrow, that ‘I went over to Paris at the time of the Revolution – in 92 or 93 – and was pretty hot in it.’ Hot for revolution he certainly must have been, since all his contacts in France were fire-breathing expatriate militants like Robert Watt, Tom Wedgwood and the novelist and poet Helen Maria Williams, to whom, much smitten, Wordsworth had written a lyrically soppy poem on the spectacle of her in tears.
Which is not to say that he might not have had, from the beginning of his stay, some reservations. The beautiful account of his mixed feelings while roaming Paris:
I stared and listened, with a stranger’s ears,
To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild!
And hissing Factionists with ardent eyes,
In knots, or pairs, or single …
has the undoubted ring of truth.
Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust
Of the Bastille, I sate in the open sun,
And from the rubbish gathered up a stone,
And pocketed the relic, in the guise
Of an enthusiast; yet in honest truth,
I looked for something that I could not find,
Affecting more emotion than I felt.
Failing to find his friends in Orléans, as they had arranged, Wordsworth made his way down the Loire to Blois, now turned into a garrison town in the expectation that war, both foreign and civil, was not far away. But the war that broke out was in Wordsworth’s own heart and mind. Although he ‘became a patriot, and my heart was all/Given to the people’ in Blois, his allegiances were torn by the fiercest emotions he had yet experienced, of both love and friendship. His love affair was the purest Rousseau melodrama, forbidden passion between tutor and pupil, but this time with the sex roles of La Nouvelle Héloïse reversed. His teacher was Annette Vallon, daughter of a fervently Catholic family who took the lonely young English poet under their wing, gave him all the affection he craved and tried to convert him to their hatred of
the revolution. But the friendship that Wordsworth made with a young army officer from the Périgord, Michel Beaupuis, pulled him in precisely the opposite direction. Beaupuis struck Wordsworth as the model of selfless patriotism precisely because he had relinquished his aristocratic pedigree and rank to become a true citizen of the new France of equals, a soldier for liberty.
Beaupuis might also have struck Wordsworth as a kindred spirit because he too was moved, less by high-minded philosophical speculation than by the sight of physical distress. At home in the Lake District he had encountered woebegone old soldiers whose rags and tatters moved him inexpressibly, and, walking the streets of London Wordsworth had been moved by a blind beggar
who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
In Blois, too, right on cue, nature showed up to teach a lesson when Beaupuis and he chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl
Who crept along fitting her languid gait
Unto a heifer’s motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands
Was busy knitting …
‘’Tis against that which we are fighting,’ said Beaupuis, and Wordsworth agreed
That a benignant spirit was abroad
Which might not be withstood, that poverty
Abject as this would in a little time
Be found no more …
That legalised 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 framing their own laws, whence better days
To all mankind.
The dream of a harmonious marriage between liberty and equality turned out, of course, to be a lot harder than shouting the slogan. As the war sliced deeper into France, paranoia replaced euphoria and a republic replaced the monarchy, bloodily, on 10 August 1792, when Parisians stormed the Tuileries, butchered the Swiss guards and imprisoned the king. It was incumbent on anyone harbouring reservations about the Republic, or who had been born into privilege, to demonstrate that they were purer than the pure. Beaupuis predictably went off to die a citizen-soldier’s death, one of hundreds of thousands of young men who were to sacrifice themselves for ideals that were being violated daily on the streets of Paris. Wordsworth mourned his fallen republican friend, but in the meantime he had put himself in danger by fathering a baby royalist. Born in December, the girl was given the name of Caroline and registered in Paris as the daughter of a Citoyen Williame Wordwort. He now had a painful decision to make. With war between Britain and the Republic very much on the cards (it was declared in February 1793) he could either stay and care for his mistress and infant daughter, especially now that they were more, not less, likely to need protection from the prying eyes of suspicious authorities; or, like some of the British expatriates, including Watt, who were already beginning to feel the chill, have second thoughts and worry about being cut off from their home, he could take the packet for Dover. Wordsworth chose the latter course, still procrastinating, telling himself he was going to London to raise money for both of his divided allegiances – the British revolutionary cause and his counter-revolutionary lover and their child. But it would be 10 years before he would see Annette and Caroline again.
As he departed, other staunch Friends of Liberty, many of them fellow-diners from 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, were still arriving. The publication of the second, even more radical, part of Rights of Man in February 1792 had made Tom Paine public enemy number one in the charged atmosphere of bullish Britain. On 21 May he was summoned to answer a charge of seditious libel; but it seems likely that the government eventually became convinced that he would do less damage on the other side of the Channel than as a courtroom martyr, and gave him ample opportunities to escape. In the capital of what, since August, had become the French Republic, One and Indivisible, Paine was given a hero’s welcome, made an honorary citizen, elected deputy for Calais to the National Convention and, although he spoke virtually no French, a key member of its constitutional committee. A fraternal ‘British Club’ (or, more grandly, ‘The Association of the Friends of the Rights of Man Meeting in Paris’) gathered at White’s Hotel in the Passage des Petits-Pères, near the Palais-Royal, and its members, together with assorted American and Irish republicans, busied themselves drafting addresses to the Convention expressing the yearning of the People of Britain for their own liberation from the yoke of despotism and aristocracy. Among their number were the painter George Romney; the young businessman and essayist Thomas Christie; the Scottish poet and former soldier John Oswald, who drilled volunteers for the liberation of Britain; the democrat–aristocrat Lord Edward Fitzgerald, another former soldier, who was planning the same for Ireland; Helen Maria Williams and her lover, the wealthy businessman John Hurford Stone; and Tom Paine himself. Joining them, about a week after Wordsworth’s departure, was Mary Wollstonecraft.
Much had changed for her since her guerrilla attack on the pretensions of Edmund Burke. The surprising fierceness of her criticism had inevitably given her the reputation of an ‘amazon’ among both friends and enemies. Horace Walpole had been less appreciative, calling her a ‘hyena in petticoats’. Tom Paine and Joseph Johnson, however, saw that they had found a gifted and exceptionally tough polemicist; someone who was not going to run away from trouble, even in difficult and dangerous times. It may have been Paine, who was spending time in Paris even before his flight from the law, who suggested she write something on what women should ask of the dawning age of liberty and equality. Paine was close to the social and political philosopher the ex-Marquis de Condorcet, who was one of the very few writers in France to extend his progressive vision of social and political democracy to women.
Whatever or whoever spurred her to it, Mary leaped at the chance to air her own views on the subject. Six weeks of hell-for-leather writing produced A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Perhaps she should have taken six months. But, chaotically organized, digressive and repetitive though the book is, none of those faults obscures or compromises its trenchant bravery, nor the fundamental correctness of its historical analysis of the relations between the sexes. Many of its insights – the conditioning of girls to correspond to male stereotypes of the doll-playing, dress-loving miniature coquette; the surrender of independence of mind and body for the slavery of idolization; the assumption that their anatomy disqualified them from serious thought – have since become commonplaces of the feminist critique of a male-ordered world. But when Mary Wollstonecraft set them out they were still profoundly shocking, even to those who thought themselves on the side of Progress and Liberty.
What may have been especially disconcerting was her choice of arch-villains, namely the sainted Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mary believed (not without reason) had done most damage by restating the traditional canard of the unbridgeable, biologically determined difference between the sexes as a modern point of view. It was Rousseau, whose ‘ridiculous stories’ were ‘below contempt’ and obviously based on no first-hand knowledge whatsoever, who had perpetuated the fable that all girls were good for was cooking, primping, idle prattle, and who had insisted that their entire education should be shaped around their destiny as wives and mothers. It was Rousseau who had argued that, the more like men they were persuaded to become, the less power they would have over them. ‘This is the very point I aim at,’ she wrote. ‘I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.’ No wonder Rousseau had taken for his companion the ‘fool’ Thérèse, so ‘conveniently humble’. Not being able to raise her to the status of a rational being, he had been determined to lower the rest of the sex to her level. Instead of dooming women to the imprisoning
platitudes of their ‘delicacy’, Mary declared, they should be given identical educational opportunities; indeed, boys and girls should share the same schools right through their youth so that they could become easily familiar with each other’s common humanity and reasoning faculties, and not be segregated either from each other or from their parental home. (Mary detested the idea of boarding schools.)
Rousseau had also been at fault for fetishizing the transports of romantic love, which encouraged marriages to be made (when they were not mere property transactions) with expectations that were doomed to be disappointed since ‘Love, considered as an animal appetite, cannot long feed on itself without expiring.’ Hard on the heels of that inevitable disenchantment came betrayal, debauchery and bitterness. How much better to educate girls with enough strength of mind that they could become not just an adult doll but a true partner, a friend, and with that friendship withstand the inevitable decay of desire. Friendship was, after all, ‘the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time … Were women more rationally educated, could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives, and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship – into that tender intimacy, which is the best refuge from care.’
