THE FEAR THAT KILLS
One more, and we are done with the melancholy tale of the poets who ran
away from the French revolution.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble
earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have
accounted for some of the early rebellious emotions of the poet. He was
graduated from Cambridge at the age of twenty-one, and went to France at
the height of the revolutionary fervor. He has told us in his verse of
the stirrings which then possessed him; to be young at such a time “was
very heaven.”
But the poet, in telling us about his experiences in France, left out a
vital part thereof. The story had to wait a century and a quarter before
a professor of Princeton University dug it out. While Wordsworth was
abroad he carried on an affair with a young French girl of good family.
She bore him a daughter, but he did not marry her; instead, he came back
to England, and lived most piously with his sister, and became a
preacher of the proprieties. We can understand how, looking back on
France, it seemed to him a land of license, meriting stern rebuke from a
British moralist.
His first book of poems, “Lyrical Ballads,” was published in 1798. He
had by then become a reactionary in religion and politics, but in poetry
he was an innovator, because he dealt with the simple, every-day
feelings of his own heart, and with the peasant people of his
neighborhood. He was mercilessly ridiculed by the critics, and retired
into himself, to live a frugal life upon an income of a hundred pounds a
year, bequeathed to him by a well-to-do friend. In the course of time
the British ruling class realized that there was no real harm in this
nature-mystic, and at the age of forty-three he received a salary as a
distributor of stamps; nine years later an annuity was allowed him, and
a year after that he became poet laureate. He passionately opposed every
political reform, and composed a series of “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,”
dealing with the church rigmarole of England; also a pamphlet bitterly
attacking the proposition to run a railroad into the country of his
dreams. At the age of seventy-five we find him, white-haired and
venerable, kneeling, in the presence of a large assembly, to kiss the
hand of an extremely dull young girl by the name of Victoria.
Wordsworth was one of the teachers of my youth, and I do not want to be
unjust to him because he turned Tory before thirty. What we have to do
is to understand him, and to draw a moral from him. The worship of
Nature is like the worship of God; as a rule it is a reactionary
influence, cutting one off from real life; but here and there it may be
a source of inner energy, enabling a man to stand for his own
convictions against the world. To Wordsworth in his early days Nature
was that, and no poet has uttered in more noble and beautiful language
this sense of oneness with the great mother of all life. His writing at
its best is as beautiful, and also as sound, as anything in English.
But here is the point to get clear: practically all this poetry was
written in eight years; you might count on your ten fingers and ten toes
all the lines that Wordsworth wrote after the age of thirty-five which
are worth anyone’s while to read. In my youth, when I was studying
poetry, it was my habit to go through a poet, beginning with the first
page of volume one and ending with the last page of volume five, or ten,
or whatever it might be. In the case of Wordsworth, it was volume
twelve, and he was the one poet with whom I fell down. The
“Ecclesiastical Sonnets” finished me; I testify that of all the dreary
drivel in the world’s literature, this carries the prize.
There were two men in Wordsworth: the instinctive man, who experienced
overwhelming feelings, and the conscious man, who was terrified by those
feelings. This is no guess of mine, but something which Wordsworth
himself explained over and over again: “My apprehensions come in
crowds.... My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills.... Me this
unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires.” So the
Wordsworth who believed in the Tory party and the Thirty-nine Articles
put the screws on the poet, and not merely the emotions, but the brains
of a great genius withered before the age of forty.
The cases of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth suggest the inquiry: is
it possible for a great poet to be a conservative? In old times, yes;
for the conservatives then had something to say for themselves. But in
the last hundred years the meaning of the class struggle has become so
apparent, the consequences of class exploitation have become so obvious,
that a man who fails to see them must be deficient in intelligence, a
man who fails to care about them must be deficient in heart and
conscience; and these are things without which great poetry cannot be
made.