REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
The Hidden Wordsworth
By Kenneth R. Johnston
Pimlico, 2000
690 pp, $35.15 (pb)
"I am of that odious class of men called democrats". Could the person who uttered this statement and who supported the Great French Revolution (1789-93), be the same person who is best known for wandering "lonely as a cloud" in mystical communion with "hosts of golden daffodils" and who is reverentially upheld as the sublime example of the Great Poet?
Yes, argues Kenneth Johnston in his biography of William Wordsworth. There was the respectable and worthy poet that everyone knows and loves (or hates), and the "hidden Wordsworth", the political radical. That the latter has been so well hidden is due above all to Wordsworth himself, who spent his last fifty years concealing and falsifying the "juvenile errors" of his passionate youth.
Born in 1770 to a wealthy English middle-class family, Wordsworth's youthful receptivity to new ideas coincided with European society actively trying out these ideas. Kings and aristocrats, political dinosaurs ruling by the privilege of birth, were facing the beginning of their end. Like the dinosaur, there was a catastrophic event which sealed their doom. Revolution in France hit the political landscape with a force that made republicanism, reform and revolution blot out the legitimacy of government by the select.
Like many of his colleagues at Cambridge University, the 19-year old Wordsworth greeted the fall of the Bastille in 1789 with joy and he took off for a walking tour of France and Switzerland. Although he went mainly for the landscapes ("nature then was sovereign in my heart"), he revelled in the "public ecstasy" and joined in the "dances of liberty" in Paris, and he basked in the "golden hours" of France in revolution.
The British government's utter impermeability to democratic reform, sent a more politically charged Wordsworth back to France in 1792. He was equally besotted with "a cause so great" as with the woman he met and fathered a child with — Annette Vallon. Wordsworth returned to London to do something about both — to bring republicanism to Britain and to earn a living so that he could marry his lover.
Wordsworth celebrated in verse "Freedom's waves" travelling from France and breaking over "Conquest ... Avarice ... Pride ... Death ... Famine ... and dark Oppression" in England. In response to faint-hearted liberals fleeing from their commitment to the revolution after the execution of the French king, Wordsworth wrote one of the most radical pamphlets of the period supporting the regicide and exposing conservative opponents of the French Revolution as self-interested defenders of the property "rights" of the British ruling class.
Wordsworth had to be restrained from publishing his pamphlet as it would have guaranteed his arrest for sedition and resulted in prison, death or transportation to Botany Bay.
However, he was involved in (anonymously) writing for and producing the republican anti-war journal, The Philanthropist, in London. At this time, too, he also developed a profound empathy with the poor who were reduced to vagrancy and destitution by the economic costs of the British government's war against France.
In the hysterical political climate of government persecution of republicans, some of the anti-government dissident activity, particularly by middle-class liberals, could appear more radical than it actually was. This was true of Wordsworth. Although sincere, his views were wrapped in an ideology which cramped and, in the end, undid them.
Wordsworth himself eventually joined the stream of liberal middle-class defectors from radical democracy. As the French Revolution passed from its "respectable", bourgeois, beginnings to its more radical and democratic phase when revolutionary-democratic Jacobins backed by the working poor imposed the Terror to defeat the aristocratic counter-revolution, it offended Wordsworth's middle-class sensibilities and shocked his fundamentally reformist outlook.
Popular mobilisations by the poor masses (the "mob") alarmed Wordsworth who feared that "radical excesses" would damage his favoured course of "gradual and constant reform". "Inflammatory passion" could only lead to the guillotine and only the "unstoppable force of Truth", held by people of Wordsworth's class, could lead to the good society. "I recoil from the base idea of a revolution", he wrote in disillusion.
Wordsworth nevertheless maintained his concern with the lot of the poor and his radical past followed him as he left London for the safety of the provinces, as did the Home Office which sent one of its top agents to spy on him.
During this first phase of Wordsworth's disengagement from radicalism, conservative journals still detected the whiff of subversion in his "Lyrical Ballads" with their "implied criticism of the social system", an "excess of tenderness for convicts" and a "general stigma on the military".
Wordsworth responded by revising the troublesome bits in subsequent editions. Even Wordsworth's empathy for the poor was now marked by a quietist hand-wringing compared to what he now scorned as "Jacobinical pathos" in which sorrow for suffering humanity promotes hatred and action against the political cause.
Wordsworth's retreat was more torturous and agonising but it ended in the same camp of reaction that his fellow deserters had arrived at in a quick burst of political apostasy. He joined his local patriotic vigilante militia set up ostensibly to repel a rumoured French invasion but which were also used to police food riots by the poor. He accepted a government post as a tax collector, and he began moving in social circles with conservatives who were once the butt of his polemic and lampoons. He actively opposed the 1832 Reform Bill and supported the shackling of the radical press. His patriotic sonnets lauded England — "Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee". He ended his days as Poet Laureate, the royal stamp of approval.
Doubts about the loyalty of past radicals, however, could still threaten nouveau conservatives. Exposure of Wordsworth's "youthful errors" in the service of "false philosophy" could only fuel these doubts by the cultural witch-hunters. Wordsworth did not publish his famous autobiographical poem, "The Prelude", for 43 years because of this danger. Posthumous publication, and the continual process of denial, revision and alteration to his other works, guaranteed the solidity of his accommodation to the Establishment.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/but to be young was very Heaven", Wordsworth's famous lines about the French Revolution, expressed the truth not only about revolution but about Wordsworth's own youth when he stood trembling with rapture on the threshold of the paradise of liberty.
The hidden Wordsworth, patiently reconstructed by Johnson's mammoth biography, is the Wordsworth of heart leaping up to behold radical social change, the subversive companion to the approved Wordsworth of heart leaping up to behold rainbows in the sky.