Wordsworth’s route, on this occasion, lay at first through Austrian Flanders, then (1788, I think) on the fret for an insurrectionary war against the capricious innovations of the imperial coxcomb, Joseph II. He passed through the camps then forming, and thence ascended the Rhine to Switzerland; crossed the Great St. Bernard, visited the Lake of Como, and other interesting scenes in the north of Italy, where, by the way, the tourists were benighted in a forest — having, in some way or other, been misled by the Italian clocks and their peculiar fashion of striking round to twenty-four o’clock. On his return, Wordsworth published a quarto pamphlet of verses, describing, with very considerable effect and brilliancy, the grand scenery amongst which he had been moving. This poem, as well as another in the same quarto form, describing the English lake scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland, addressed by way of letter “to a young lady” (viz., Miss Wordsworth), are remarkable, in the first place, as the earliest effort of Wordsworth in verse, at least as his earliest publication; but, in the second place, and still more so, from their style of composition. “Pure description,” even where it cannot be said, sneeringly, “to hold the place of sense,” is so little attractive as the direct exclusive object of a poem, and in reality it exacts so powerful an effort on the part of the reader to realize visually, or make into an apprehensible unity, the scattered elements and circumstances of external landscapes painted only by words, that, inevitably, and reasonably, it can never hope to be a popular form of composition; else it is highly probable that these “Descriptive Sketches” of Wordsworth, though afterwards condemned as vicious in their principles of composition by his own maturer taste, would really have gained him a high momentary notoriety with the public, had they been fairly brought under its notice; whilst, on the other hand, his revolutionary principles of composition, and his purer taste, ended in obtaining for him nothing but scorn and ruffian insolence.
This seems marvellous; but, in fact, it is not so: it seems, I mean, primâ facie, marvellous that the inferior models should be fitted to gain a far higher reputation; but the secret lies here — that these were in a style of composition which, if sometimes false, had been long reconciled to the public feelings, and which, besides, have a specific charm for certain minds, even apart from all fashions of the day; whereas, his later poems had to struggle against sympathies long trained in an opposite direction, to which the recovery of a healthier tone (even where nature had made it possible) presupposed a difficult process of weaning, and an effort of discipline for re-organizing the whole internal economy of the sensibilities that is both painful and mortifying: for — and that is worthy of deep attention — the misgivings of any vicious or unhealthy state, the impulses and suspicious gleams of the truth struggling with cherished error, the instincts of light conflicting with darkness — these are the real causes of that hatred and intolerant scorn which is ever awakened by the first dawnings of new and important systems of truth. Therefore it is, that Christianity was so much more hated than any mere variety of error. Therefore are the first feeble struggles of nature towards a sounder state of health always harsh and painful; for the false system which this change for the better disturbs had, at least, this soothing advantage — that it was self-consistent. Therefore, also, was the Wordsworthian restoration of elementary power, and of a higher or transcendent truth of nature (or, as some people vaguely expressed the case, of simplicity), received at first with such malignant disgust. For there was a galvanic awakening in the shock of power, as it jarred against the ancient system of prejudices, which inevitably revealed so much of truth as made the mind jealous; enlightened it enough to descry its own wanderings, but not enough to recover the right road. The more energetic, the more spasmodically potent, are the throes of nature towards her own re-establishment in the cases of suspended animation — by drowning, strangling, &c. — the more keen is the anguish of revival. And, universally, a transition state is a state of suffering and disquiet. Meantime, the early poems of Wordsworth, that might have suited the public taste so much better than his more serious efforts, if the fashion of the hour, or the sanction of a leading review, or the prestige of a name, had happened to bring them under the public eye, did, in fact, drop unnoticed into the market. Nowhere have I seen them quoted — no, not even since the author’s victorious establishment in the public admiration. The reason may be, however, that not many copies were printed at first; no subsequent edition was ever called for; and yet, from growing interest in the author, every copy of the small impression had been studiously bought up. Indeed, I myself went to the publisher’s (Johnson’s) as early as 1805 or 1806, and bought up all the remaining copies (which were but six or seven of the Foreign Sketches, and two or three of the English), as presents, and as future curiosities in literature to literary friends whose interest in Wordsworth might assure one of a due value being put upon the poems. Were it not for this extreme scarcity, I am disposed to think that many lines or passages would long ere this have been made familiar to the public ear. Some are delicately, some forcibly picturesque; and the selection of circumstances is occasionally very original and felicitous. In particular, I remember this one, which presents an accident in rural life that must by thousands of repetitions have become intimately known to every dweller in the country, and yet had never before been consciously taken up for a poet’s use. After having described the domestic cock as “sweetly ferocious” — a prettiness of phraseology which he borrows from an Italian author — he notices those competitions or defiances which are so often carried on interchangeably between barn-door cocks from great distances: —
“Echoed by faintly answering farms remote.”
This is the beautiful line in which he has caught and preserved so ordinary an occurrence — one, in fact, of the commonplaces which lend animation and a moral interest to rural life.
After his return from this Swiss excursion, Wordsworth took up his parting residence at Cambridge, and prepared for a final adieu to academic pursuits and academic society.
It was about this period that the French Revolution broke out; and the reader who would understand its appalling effects — its convulsing, revolutionary effects upon Wordsworth’s heart and soul — should consult the history of the Solitary, as given by himself in “The Excursion”; for that picture is undoubtedly a leaf from the personal experience of Wordsworth: —
“From that dejection I was roused — but how?”
Mighty was the transformation which it wrought in the whole economy of his thoughts; miraculous almost was the expansion which it gave to his human sympathies; chiefly in this it showed its effects — in throwing the thoughts inwards into grand meditations upon man, his final destiny, his ultimate capacities of elevation; and, secondly, in giving to the whole system of the thoughts and feelings a firmer tone, and a sense of the awful realities which surround the mind; by comparison with which the previous literary tastes seemed (even where they were fine and elegant, as in Collins or Gray, unless where they had the self-sufficing reality of religion, as in Cowper) fanciful and trivial. In all lands this result was accomplished, and at the same time: Germany, above all, found her new literature the mere creation and rebound of this great moral tempest; and, in Germany or England alike, the poetry was so entirely regenerated, thrown into moulds of thought and of feeling so new, that the poets everywhere felt themselves to be putting away childish things, and now first, among those of their own century, entering upon the dignity and the sincere thinking of mature manhood.
Wordsworth, it is well known to all who know anything of his history, felt himself so fascinated by the gorgeous festival era of the Revolution — that era when the sleeping snakes which afterwards stung the national felicity were yet covered with flowers — that he went over to Paris, and spent about one entire year between that city, Orleans, and Blois. There, in fact, he continued to reside almost too long. He had been sufficiently connected with public men to have drawn upon himself some notice from those who afterwards composed the Committe
e of Public Safety. And, as an Englishman, when that partiality began to droop which at an earlier period had protected the English name, he became an object of gloomy suspicion with those even who would have grieved that he should fall a victim to undistinguishing popular violence. Already for England, and in her behalf, he was thought to be that spy which (as Coleridge tells us in his “Biographia Literaria”) afterwards he was accounted by Mr. Pitt’s emissaries, in the worst of services against her. I doubt, however (let me say it without impeachment of Coleridge’s veracity — for he was easily duped), this whole story about Mr. Pitt’s Somersetshire spies; and it has often struck me with astonishment that Coleridge should have suffered his personal pride to take so false a direction as to court the humble distinction of having been suspected as a conspirator, in those very years when poor empty tympanies of men, such as Thelwall, Holcroft, &c., were actually recognised as enemies of the state, and worthy of a state surveillance, by ministers so blind and grossly misinformed as, on this point, were Pitt and Dundas. Had I been Coleridge, instead of saving Mr. Pitt’s reputation with posterity, by ascribing to him a jealousy which he or his agents had not the discernment to cherish, I would have boldly planted myself upon the fact, the killing fact, that he had utterly ignored both myself (Coleridge, to wit) and Wordsworth. Even with Dogberry, I would have insisted upon that—”Set down, also, that I am an ass!” Clamorous should have been my exultation in this fact.
In France, however, Wordsworth had a chance, in good earnest, of passing for the traitor that, in England, no rational person ever thought him. He had chosen his friends carelessly; nor could any man, the most sagacious, have chosen them safely, in a time when the internal schisms of the very same general party brought with them worse hostilities and more personal perils than even, upon the broader divisions of party, could have attended the most ultra professions of anti-national politics, and when the rapid changes of position shifted the peril from month to month. One individual is especially recorded by Wordsworth, in the poem on his own life, as a man of the highest merit, and personal qualities the most brilliant, who ranked first upon the list of Wordsworth’s friends; and this man was so far a safe friend, at one moment, as he was a republican general — finally, indeed, a commander-in-chief. This was Beaupuis; and the description of his character and position is singularly interesting. There is, in fact, a special value and a use about the case; it opens one’s eyes feelingly to the fact that, even in this thoughtless people, so full of vanity and levity, nevertheless, the awful temper of the times, and the dread burden of human interests with which it was charged, had called to a consciousness of new duties, had summoned to an audit, as if at some great final tribunal, even the gay, radiant creatures that, under less solemn auspices, under the reign of a Francis I. or a Louis XIV, would have been the merest painted butterflies of the court sunshine. This Beaupuis was a man of superb person — beautiful in a degree which made him a painter’s model, both as to face and figure; and, accordingly, in a land where conquests of that nature were so easy, and the subjects of so trifling an effort, he had been distinguished, to his own as well as the public eyes, by a rapid succession of bonnes fortunes amongst women. Such, and so glorified by triumphs the most unquestionable and flattering, had the earthquake of the Revolution found him. From that moment he had no leisure, not a thought, to bestow upon his former selfish and frivolous pursuits. He was hurried, as one inspired by some high apostolic passion, into the service of the unhappy and desolate serfs amongst his own countrymen — such as are described, at an earlier date, by Madame de Sevigné, as the victims of feudal institutions; and one day, as he was walking with Wordsworth in the neighbourhood of Orleans, and they had turned into a little quiet lane, leading off from a heath, suddenly they came upon the following spectacle: — A girl, seventeen or eighteen years old, hunger-bitten, and wasted to a meagre shadow, was knitting, in a dejected, drooping way; whilst to her arm was attached, by a rope, the horse, equally famished, that earned the miserable support of her family. Beaupuis comprehended the scene in a moment; and, seizing Wordsworth by the arm, he said,—”Dear English friend! — brother from a nation of freemen! — that it is which is the curse of our people, in their widest section; and to cure this it is, as well as to maintain our work against the kings of the earth, that blood must be shed and tears must flow for many years to come!” At that time the Revolution had not fulfilled its tendencies; as yet, the king was on the throne; the fatal 10th of August 1792 had not dawned; and thus far there was safety for a subject of kings. The irresistible stream was hurrying forwards. The king fell; and (to pause for a moment) how divinely is the fact recorded by Wordsworth, in the MS. poem on his own life, placing the awful scenes past and passing in Paris under a pathetic relief from the description of the golden, autumnal day, sleeping in sunshine —
“When I Towards the fierce metropolis bent my steps, The homeward road to England. From his throne The king had fallen,” &c.
What a picture does he give of the fury which there 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 Tuileries, 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 portrayed with which they echoed back the feelings of their compatriots 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 his class. This man, duly as the hour arrived which 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 magnificently what he deals with, has ever been a real living spectator of parallel scenes. The French, indeed, it may be said, are far enough from being a people profound in feeling. True; but, of all people, they most exhibit their feeling on the surface; are the most demonstrative (to use a modern term), and most of all (except Italians) mark their feelings by outward expression of gesticulation: not to insist upon the obvious truth — that even a people of shallow feeling may be deeply moved by tempests which uproot the forest of a thousand years’ growth; by changes in the very organization of society, such as throw all things, for a time, into one vast anarchy; and by murderous passions, alternately the effect and the cause of that same chaotic anarchy. Now, it was in this autumn of 1792, as I have already said, that Wordsworth parted finally from his illustrious friend — for, all things considered, he may be justly so entitled — the gallant Beaupuis. This great season of public trial had searched men’s natures; revealed their real hearts; brought into light and action qualities oftentimes not suspected by their possessors; and had thrown men, as in elementary states of society, each upon his own native resources, un
aided by the old conventional forces 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 with the aristocracy. But of selfishness in any shape he had no vestiges; or, if he had, it showed 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 dedicated to the service of 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 had not been seen since the days of Bartholomew las Casas, who showed 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 thenceforwards a creature of the national will—”a son of France,” in a more eminent and loftier sense than according to the heraldry of Europe — had extinguished even his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour. “Injuries,” says Wordsworth —
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