‘ . . . the fear that kills,’
and he thinks of Chatterton and his end.
During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria must
have been greatly encouraged. His hopes in the Revolution had begun to
fail, but the declaration of war against France made him wretched. He
wandered about from place to place, unable to conjecture what his future
would be. ‘I have been doing nothing,’ he tells Matthews, ‘and still
continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not.’ He
proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the
_Philanthropist_, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on
the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an
intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we
happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased
conviction the form which the disease assumes. The _Political Justice_
found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; it rooted and grew
rapidly.
‘So I fared,
Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,
Suspiciously, to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours; now believing,
Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground
Of obligation, what the rule and whence
The sanction; till, demanding formal _proof_,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
This was the crisis of that strong disease,
This the soul’s last and lowest ebb; I drooped,
Deeming our blessed reason of least use
Where wanted most: “The lordly attributes
Of will and choice,” I bitterly exclaimed,
“What are they but a mockery of a Being
Who hath in no concerns of his a test
Of good and evil; knows not what to fear
Or hope for, what to covet or to shun:
And who, if those could be discerned, would yet
Be little profited, would see, and ask,
Where is the obligation to enforce?”’
In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of Raisley
Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he immediately
set to work on the _Borderers_, which I take to be the beginning of
recovery. It was obviously written to exhibit the character of Oswald,
the villain. He is one of a band of outlaws, and is jealous of the
appointment of Marmaduke as chief. His revenge is a determination to
make Marmaduke as guilty as himself. Marmaduke is in love with Idonea,
and Oswald, partly by inventing lies about her blind father, Herbert, and
partly by dexterous sophistry derived from _Political Justice_,
endeavours to persuade Marmaduke to kill him. Marmaduke hesitates, but
is finally overpowered. Although he cannot himself murder Herbert, he
draws him to a desolate moor and leaves him to perish. Oswald then
recounts his own story. When he was on a voyage to Syria he had believed
on false evidence, that some wrong had been done to him by his captain,
and accordingly contrived that he should be left to die in agony on a
barren island. Oswald discovered that he had been deceived, but he
declares exultantly to Marmaduke that, after being somewhat stunned, he
found himself emancipated:—
‘Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way
Cleared for a monarch’s progress. Priests might spin
Their veil, but not for me—’twas in fit place
Among its kindred cobwebs.’
He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that the
impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his death was—
‘I would have made us equal once again.’
This is the commentary by Wordsworth on Godwin’s parable by which he
illustrates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul. ‘When a
ball upon a billiard-board is struck,’ etc. etc. ‘Exactly similar to
this . . . are the actions of the human mind’ (i. 306–7). Lacy, one of
the freebooters asks Wallace:—
‘But for the motive?’
and Wallace replies:—
‘Natures such as his
Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!’
The _Borderers_ is stuffed full with Godwinism. ‘Remorse,’ exclaims
Oswald,
‘It cannot live with thought; think on, think on,
And it will die. What! In this universe,
Where the least things control the greatest, where
The faintest breath that breathes can move a world;
What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed,
A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been
Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.’
So Godwin: ‘We shall, therefore, no more be disposed to repent of our own
faults than of the faults of others’ (i. 315). The noxious thing is now,
however, with Wordsworth no longer subject but object, and when a man can
cast loose the enemy and survey him, victory is three parts achieved.
There is no evidence that Wordsworth attempted any reasoned confutation
of _Political Justice_. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better
health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by the
friendship with Coleridge, although there was but little intimacy with
him till the summer of 1797, and the _Borderers_ was finished in 1796.
This, then, is the moral—to repeat what has been said before—that certain
beliefs, at any rate with men of Wordsworth’s stamp, are sickness, and
that with the restoration of vitality and the influx of joy they
disappear.
One other observation. Wordsworth never afterwards vexed himself with
free will, necessity, and the like. He knew such matters were not for
him. Many problems may appear to be of great consequence, but it is our
duty to avoid them if our protecting genius warns us away.