And, more than all, a strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place. But wherefore be cast down?
Why should I grieve? I was a chosen Son.
4
France
1791–1792
WILLIAM made two trips to France within the space of about a year. The first one, during that last vacation from Cambridge, was fascinating in its own way. The second one, not long after he’d come down, was sensational. That’s the only word for it, considering the character of the young man we have got to know so far. It is still one of the least explicable events in his whole life.
The first trip can be explained in several ways. It was a defiance of Cambridge, an open slight to the system. Secondly, he had always loved travelling and wandering, right from the earliest days. And thirdly the whole civilized world was agog with the news and excitement of the Revolution. It never struck him for one moment as being dangerous, to venture across a foreign land at such a time. He never thought of personal danger anyway, even when lost all night on a Lakeland fell. In those first heady days, the Revolution seemed so welcoming, a breath of fresh air; the horrors came later. There’s a fourth, minor reason. Mrs Tyson had shut up shop. She had become too old to take in boarders any more. For the first time, William had nowhere else to go for his summer holidays. No-one else, after all, would have him.
All the same, it was a strange adventure, one which his relations thought was crazy, which was why he didn’t tell them beforehand. It was common enough in those days for young gentlemen to go on a Continental tour, though sensible ones waited till after university. Rich ones went in their own coaches. Less rich ones went in someone else’s coach, getting a job as a companion. William Wordsworth went on foot—a pedestrian tour right across Europe.
His companion was another student from St John’s, Robert Jones, a jolly, roly-poly Welshman. He made a good counterfoil to William, who, by his own confession, tended to be irritable when travelling, William was tall and spare and already looked older than his years, in manner and in his awkward gait. His face was long and his expression was usually rather serious. Most people found him reserved on first acquaintance, but there were strong feelings and passionate enthusiasms bubbling away just below the surface. The two young men had a common background: both were sons of country lawyers, both had gone to local country grammar schools and both had grown up in mountainous regions.
They must have made a funny-looking pair, as they set off from London to walk across Europe on the morning of 11 July 1790, each man’s belongings tied up in a pocket handkerchief. Between them, they only had £20 to keep them going for the three months ahead. Those friends at Cambridge, who knew about their plans, said they’d never make it. But a long letter to Dorothy, written after they’d been on the road for two months and had reached Switzerland, shows that William was obviously thrilled with himself:
Our appearance is singular and we have often observed that in passing thro a village, we have excited a general smile. Our coats which we had made light on purpose for our journey are of the same piece; and our manner of bearing our bundles which is upon our heads, with each an oak stick in our hands, contributes not a little to that general curiosity which we seemed to excite. I expect great pleasure on my return to Cambridge in exulting over those of my friends who threatened us with such an accumulation of difficulties as must undoubtedly render it impossible for us to perform the tour. Everything however has succeeded with us far beyond my most sanguined expectations.
They’d been greeted with affectionate amusement on their journey through France. Each village was in the throes of revolutionary celebrations and they were invited to join in the festivities, the dancing and the singing. As Englishmen, from the land of liberty, or so the French believed, they were welcomed as brothers. ‘During the time which was near a month which we were in France, we had not once to complain of the smallest incivility of any person, much less of any positive rudeness. But I must remind you that we crossed it at a time when the whole nation was mad with joy in consequence of the revolution.’
They had many adventures and encounters, several of which Wordsworth relates in The Prelude and in a long poem about the tour, Descriptive Sketches. None was particularly dramatic. They got lost a few times, slept out in the open when they couldn’t find an inn, met pedlars and horsemen. Crossing the Alps by themselves turned out to be an anti-climax. They lost their way going over the Simplon Pass only to find that when they thought the top was yet to come, they’d got over the summit of the pass and were now going downhill. The discovery at first made Wordsworth dejected and deflated, as if he’d been cheated.
Switzerland was a disappointment on the whole, which surprised William, as Switzerland was then a fashionable country for English travellers, who normally rhapsodized about its natural beauty, the sturdiness of its inhabitants, the idealism of its political system. Mont Blanc had just been climbed, in 1787, and Thomas Gray was one of the many English writers who had recently visited the country and written about it. Wordsworth had probably read some of the current travel books about Switzerland, as his school library had contained several. Perhaps he had expected too much.
Had we been able to speak the language, which is German, and had time to insinuate ourselves into their cottages, we should probably have had as much occasion to admire the simplicity of their lives as the beauty of their country. My partiality to Swisserland excited by its natural charms induces me to hope that the manners of its inhabitants are amiable, but at the same time I cannot help frequently contrasting them with those of the French and as far as I have had the opportunity to observe they lose by the comparison.
William gave Dorothy a blow-by-blow account of their route so far, boasting how they’d walked twenty miles a day, and how several times they had managed twice that, which seemed a slight exaggeration; but they were strong chaps, with very little to carry. On their way back, they were very enterprising and bought a little boat which they sailed down the Rhine, from Basel to Cologne. When they’d finished with it, they sold it. They came back through Belgium, where they ran into more stirring events, as the Belgians had risen against the Emperor Joseph II.
The scenery throughout had captivated William, and he spent a long time trying to describe it, and trying to describe the problems of trying to describe it—a difficulty which all travellers face:
Ten thousand times in the course of this tour have I regretted the inability of my memory to retain a more strong impression of the beautiful forms before me, and again and again in quitting a fortunate station have I returned to it with the most eager avidity, with the hope of bearing away a more lively picture. At this moment, when many of these landscapes are floating before my mind, I feel a high enjoyment in reflecting that perhaps scarce a day of my life will pass in which I shall not derive some happiness from these images
But it was the passions of the Revolution that had the most immediate effect on him. The natural rebel in him, the lover of freedom and liberty, rejoiced in what was happening, and for the next few years this dominated a great deal of his mind and energies. As with the natural beauty, he got an extra pleasure by realizing at the time that he was witnessing something momentous. So often in life, it is only when we look back that we realize what was happening, that we recognize later we were happy then. Wordsworth knew.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!
William returned to Cambridge, took his poor degree and then spent the next four months in London, bumming around. No details are known of how he lived or where he lived. Presumably he sponged off old Cambridge friends, perhaps those with some sort of job and some sort of accommodation. He idled the days away, watching the passing show, going to the law courts and watching the trials, which he described as ‘brawls’, and to churches, where he heard sermons which were ‘light follies’. It all sounds so contemporary, except that n
ow an unemployed graduate can at least claim social security. William, however, had no income, though it looked as if soon the Lowther case might come to court.
‘My times passed in a strange manner,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Sometimes whirled about by the vortex, and sometimes thrown by the eddy into a corner of the stream where I lay in almost motionless indolence. Think not, however, that I had not many pleasant hours; a man must be fortunate indeed who resides four months in Town without some of his time being disposed of in such a manner, as he would forget with reluctance.’
He managed to muster enough energy to move out of London when the weather got better and he spent the four summer months, from about May to September 1791, staying in North Wales with his pedestrian friend Robert Jones. They did some walking round Wales together, climbed Snowdon in the dark, and Wordsworth got into an argument with a Welsh priest who pulled a carving knife on him. (It’s not clear what the row was about: possibly William started on his anticlerical theories.)
But one of the big attractions of staying with Jones was the fact that three of Jones’s sisters were all at home. There’s a nice nudging reference in a letter from Dorothy to her friend Jane in Halifax. It’s the only reference I can find, in almost four thousand pages of published Wordsworth letters, in which William is teased about girls, though, as teases go, it’s a very harmless one.
‘William is now in Wales where I think he seems so happy that it is probable that he will remain there all summer,’ wrote Dorothy in June 1791. ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clewwyd without a rival? His friend Jones is a charming young man and has five sisters, three of whom are at home at present; then there are mountains, rivers, woods and rocks, whose charms without any other inducement would be sufficient to tempt William to continue amongst them as long as possible.’ Is there perhaps just a little hint of jealousy on Dorothy’s part… ?
During this summer, the big Lowther trial was at last heard at the Carlisle Assizes. The Wordsworth family had been trying for seven years, since the death of John Wordsworth, to get the Earl of Lonsdale to pay up the money owing. It was estimated to be about £5,000. Divided amongst five of them, it would give them £1,000 each and would solve all William’s problems. There had been endless litigation and stays of proceedings and other nonsense, while Lowther kept them at bay, but at last the case was tried before a full court. Lowther had engaged forty counsel, brought forward a hundred witnesses and produced a mass of evidence. The Wordsworths could only afford four counsel, the leading one being Mr Christian, the new Professor of Law at Cambridge. ‘We have got a very clever man on our side,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘but he is young and he will not have much authority. I hope that what he wants in experience will be made up in zeal for our interests.’
The Wordsworths won—but Lord Lonsdale refused to pay. The case went to an arbitrator in London. Proceedings dragged on all winter, with more witnesses being called, and the case eventually slid to a halt, the Wordsworths having to take out mortgages to get them started again.
It is not hard to see why William had such a violent hatred of the aristocracy. They had blighted his whole life, ruined his present and clouded his future. He hated their power and their corruption, their friends and their influence. It would be unfair to say that his passionate support for the French Revolution, and for the toppling of the French aristocracy, owed everything to his personal prejudice, but this certainly played a part.
During the summer he had idly contemplated becoming a tramp, taking to the road for the rest of his life. All he would need would be £100 a year, and he’d be a free man. But the Lowther disaster meant he had to think again, and when his distant cousin, an MP, said he was still holding a curacy in Harwich for him, William went to London to see him face to face, no doubt pushed into such courtesies by Uncle William and his guardians, who may have advised him at least to look a gift horse in the eye. William half promised that he would take the curacy, when he turned twenty-three and could be ordained. In the meantime, said his cousin, get some useful experience, instead of just wandering the countryside. So poor William trudged back to Cambridge, where he enrolled to attend a series of lectures on Hebrew and Oriental languages, a preparation for a clerical life.
In a letter to a friend, dated 23 November 1791, William privately ridiculed this plan, saying that he hardly knew any Latin and scarcely any Greek, so what was the point of him starting a new language, like Hebrew?
A pretty confession for a young gentleman whose whole life ought to have been devoted to study. And thus the world wags. I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life. I have read nothing this age, nor indeed did I ever. Yet, with all this I am tolerable happy. But away with this outrageous Egotism. Tell me what you are doing, and what you read. What authors are your favourites and what number of that venerable body you wish in the red sea? I shall be happy to hear from you. My address, Mon, Mons? W. Wordsworth, Les Trois Empereurs, Orleans.…
This rather sprightly letter was not written from Cambridge, as his uncles would have expected. The address was Brighton. After only a few weeks of Hebrew in Cambridge, William had thrown up his course, though he’d promised himself that he would do what his relations wanted, after he returned. In the meantime, he was bound once more for sunny France.
William’s reason for going to France again, so he told his long-suffering relations, was to improve his French so that he could get a job as a tutor. Then he would come back and, at twenty-three, get himself ordained, settle down and do the right thing for a change. He was now twenty-one, and, as far as they were concerned, he had loafed around for long enough. For the last four years, since he was seventeen and had first gone up to Cambridge, he had completely disobeyed them, ruining all his chances, making a mess of his life, letting down the family and himself. He did want to improve his French, but wanting to return to France was basically part of his wanderlust. He’d loved France best of all on his previous year’s pedestrian tour to the Alps and wanted to go back. He decided to do it in rather more style this time, so he got his brother Richard, the London solicitor, to extract £40 from his guardians to finance the trip. This was a large sum, when you consider that William and Jones had survived for three months on half as much. He did well to get it out of his guardians, as the Lowther money still seemed to be stuck. If and when his £1,000 or so did materialize, there would be £300 in Cambridge expenses to pay back, plus all the other bits he’d had over the years.
He was going alone this time, using coaches, and he made plans beforehand to get himself introduced into the local society at Orleans when he got there. It is not clear why he should have chosen to go to Orleans. Had he already met somebody from there he wanted to see again? For some years it had been a popular centre for English people abroad, so perhaps he had been told he would enjoy himself there.
In Brighton, while waiting four days for favourable winds, William went to see a local literary lady who gave him an introduction to a Miss Helen Maria Williams, a well-known writer of the day who was living in Orleans. William had for a long time been a fan of hers. While in his last year at school at Hawkshead, he’d written a sonnet about her (‘On seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep at a Tale of Distress’) which he’d had published anonymously in a London magazine in 1787—his first published work. She was a poet and journalist and had just published a book on France, which showed her in favour of the Revolution. It was probably this introduction to Miss Williams which made William finally decide on Orleans.
He spent only a few days in Paris on the way there, just enough time to visit the National Assembly, wander round the arcades and gape at the taverns, brothels and gaming houses, and go and look at the Bastille and pocket a piece of stone as a relic, just like any other rubbernecking tourist. In Paris he changed £20 into French money, receiving 643 livres in exchange. Then he headed straight for Orleans and found himself some lodgings there.
On 19 December 1791, two weeks after
he had reached Orleans, he wrote to his brother Richard in London, telling him he’d arrived safely but that he’d missed Miss Williams after all. She’d already left Orleans. However, he had found some nice lodgings which he was sharing with some cavalry officers. He didn’t know anybody else in Orleans so far, except a family nearby whom he found very agreeable and had spent several evenings with. He idled away the first few weeks in Orleans, living a ‘loose and disjointed’ life, so he says in The Prelude—a very tranquil existence, considering what was going on around him: ‘… careless as a flower / Glassed in a green-house, … When every bush and tree, the country through / Is shaking to the roots.’
William’s first enthusiasm for the Revolution had been a fairly adolescent response, an emotional reaction to a joyful uprising. He hadn’t so far been actively interested in politics. It was one of the cavalry officers who really made him appreciate intellectually what was going on. This officer, Captain Beaupuy, was from a noble family, but had left the army for a while and had been involved in Revolutionary politics. He’d then come back to his regiment, much to the disgust of his fellow-officers, who were mostly royalists and considered him a traitor. Beaupuy was fifteen years older than Wordsworth, a much experienced and well travelled man, something of a womanizer in his youth but now a great idealist with an interest in politics and philosophy. He became a firm friend of William’s, spending several months in his company, teaching and talking to him about France and about the world in general. According to William, he was the biggest single influence in his life up till that time. It was mainly thanks to Beaupuy that William, so he said, moved on from a love of nature to a love of man.
In The Prelude he recalls walking with Beaupuy in the country one day, when they came across a poor, half-starved girl with a cow, both bowed down and defeated-looking. ‘’Tis against that which we are fighting,’ declaims Beaupuy. William became passionately involved in the Revolution, fired by the ideals of equality, the need to abolish cruel laws and to make the people free. He felt himself suddenly to be a patriot—which was something of an exaggeration, considering he was an English tourist, but his heart was certainly in the right place.
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