In 1791 Wordsworth graduated, and left the University for London, where
he spent four months; and in May of the same year he visited his friend
Jones, in Wales, and made a tour through the northern parts of the
Principality. A moonlight night on Snowdon is thus finely described in
the “Prelude:--
“It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
Wan, dull, and glaring with a dripping fog,
Low hung, and thick, that covered all the sky;
But undiscouraged, we began to climb
The mountain side. The mist soon girt us round,
And after ordinary traveller’s talk
With our conductor, presently we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard that checked
Those musings, or diverted, save that once
The shepherd’s lurcher, who, among the grass,
Had to his joy unearthed a hedge-hog, teased
His coiled-up prey, with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed
In that wild place, and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts.
Thus might we wear a midnight hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chance, the foremost of the band.
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two, seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond
Far, far beyond the solid vapours stretched
In headlands, hills, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty
Usurped upon, far as the sight could reach.
Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none
Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light
In the clear presence of the full-orbed moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay
All meek and silent, save that thro’ a rift--
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place--
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heaven.”
This is poetry; and with the exception of the Arab and Dromedary
passage, is certainly the finest in the “Prelude.”
After the completion of this tour, Wordsworth was urged by his friends
to take holy orders; but he was not of age for ordination, nor was his
mind sufficiently imbued with love for the clerical functions at this
time, even had he been of age, to have induced him to have assumed them.
A Mr. Robinson offered him the curacy of Harwich, whilst he was in
Wales, and the curacy was the high way to the Living. But from the above
circumstances, and other motives of an active and political nature, the
offer was declined, and his non-age was the apology. The truth is, that
Wordsworth, like all the young, enthusiastic, and highly-gifted men of
that time, was filled with the grand idea of liberty, and the hope of
further enfranchisement from old forms of error and superstition, which
France had raised upon the theatre of her soil. And accordingly, in
November, 1791, he determined to cross the channel, and winter in
Orleans, that he might watch the progress of events. He had at this time
a very imperfect acquaintance with the French language, and set out on
his journey alone. In that same month, France was in the convulsions of
her first agony--her first birth-pangs of Revolution. “The National
Assembly met; the party of Madame Roland and the Brissotins were in the
ascendant; the war of La Vendee was raging; the army was in favour of a
constitutional monarchy; Dumourier was Minister of the Exterior; a
German army was hovering on the French frontier; popular sedition was
fomented by the Girondists, in order to intimidate the government, and
overawe the Crown. In the following year, 1792, the sanguinary epoch of
the Revolution commenced; committees of public safety struck terror
into the hearts of thousands; the king was thrown into the prison of the
Temple; the massacres of September, perpetrated by Danton and his
associates, to daunt the invading army and its adherents, deluged Paris
with blood; the Convention was constituted; monarchy was abolished; a
rupture ensued between the Gironde and the Montagne; Robespierre arose;
Deism was dominant; the influence of Brissot and of the Girondists was
on the decline; and in a short time they were about to fall victims to
the power which they themselves had created.”[F]
Such is a summary of the events which transpired whilst Wordsworth was
in France; and he has left us a record of the hopes, and wild
exultations with which he hailed the Revolution, when it first boomed
above the horizon of the morning.
“Before him shone a glorious world
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music suddenly;
He looked upon the hills and plains,
And seemed as if let loose from chains,
To live at liberty.”
But, alas! the counterpart of the picture came as suddenly, not attended
by the sweet breathings of a delicious music, but by the roar of mad and
fiery throats, and the pageantry of blood and death. Before these dread
events took place, and whilst hope was still high in the poet’s heart,
he made acquaintance with some of the most distinguished personages on
the republican side--and, amongst others, with General Beaupuis, whom he
characterises as a philosopher, patriot, and soldier, and one of the
noblest men in France. At length, he stands in the midst of the
Revolution; quits Orleans for Blois, and, in 1792, arrived in Paris,
only a month after the horrors and massacres of September. Republicanism
had prevailed--and what a republic it proved! All law and order
suspended, or dead--thousands of innocent and patriotic men condemned to
death on the faintest suspicions--the ghastly skeleton of Atheism seated
on the throne of God--and liberty strangled in her own cradle. “What a
picture,” says De Quincy, “does Wordsworth give of the fury which then
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 Tuilleries, 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
pourtrayed with which they echoed back the feelings 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 this class. This man, duly as the hour arrived
that 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 magnificent in what he deals
with, has ever been a living spectator of parallel scenes.”
The reaction of the atrocities and enormous crimes of the Revolution,
upon Wordsworth’s mind, was terrible. But a short time before the
Revolution commenced, we find him the espouser, the advocate of
democracy; the enemy of monarchial forms of government, and
consequently of _hereditary_ monarchy; the foe, likewise, of all class
distinctions and privileges; for he regarded these as enemies to human
progress and happiness.--After his return to England, he says, in one of
his unpublished letters to the Bishop of Llandaff, “In my ardour to
attain the goal, I do not forget the nature of the ground where the race
is to be run. The destruction of those institutions which I condemn,
appears to me _to be hastening on too rapidly. I abhor the very idea of
a revolution._ I am a determined enemy to every species of violence. I
see no connection, but what the obstinacy of pride and ignorance renders
necessary, between reason and bonds. I deplore the miserable condition
of the French, and think that we can only be guarded from the same
scourge by the undaunted efforts of good men. I severely condemn all
inflammatory addresses to the passions of men. I know that the multitude
walk in darkness. I would put into each man’s hand a lanthern to guide
him; not have him to set out on his journey depending for illumination
on abortive flashes of lightning, the corruscations of transitory
meteors.” These were the opinions of Wordsworth before, and at the
commencement of the Revolution. As I said, however, the crimes into
which the leaders of it subsequently plunged, and the mad passions which
influenced them, completely revolutionised the mind of Wordsworth, and
filled him with the darkest forebodings. He lost for a time, his
generous faith in men, his hope of human liberty, and his belief in the
perfection of human nature. He has given a fearful picture of his state
of mind at this period, in the _Solitary_ of the “Excursion,” which the
reader will do well to consult. The events of the Revolution, however,
brought with them much wisdom to Wordsworth. They turned his thoughts
inward, and compelled him to meditate upon man’s nature and
destiny,--upon what it is possible for man to become; whilst they gave
breadth, and depth, and expansion to his higher sympathies. From this
time Wordsworth’s mission as a priest may be dated. He was no longer a
mere dreamer, but was deeply impressed with the stern realities--with
the wants and necessities of his time; and he resolved to devote
himself to the service of humanity.
In De Quincy’s admirable “Lake Reminiscences,” in Tait’s Magazine,
already alluded to, it is stated that by his connection with public men,
Wordsworth had become an object of suspicion long before he left France,
and was looked upon as an English spy. How little did these persons know
of Wordsworth! At this very time his whole soul was in the cause for
which the patriots were struggling; and his own noble heart was rendered
still nobler, braver, and better, by his daily communings with the grand
and sublime nature of his friend Beaupuis. To this man De Quincy pays
the finest tribute of admiration and reverence which ever came from the
pen of the historian, or the mouth of the orator. “This great season,”
he says, of “public trial had searched men’s natures, revealed their
real hearts; brought into life and action qualities of writers not
suspected by their possessors; and had thrown man as in alternating
states of society, each upon his own native resources, unaided by the
old conventional forms 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 to the aristocracy. But of selfishness in any shape, he had no
vestiges; or if he had, it shewed 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 limited to the service of the 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
has not been seen since the days of Bartholomew Las Casas, who shewed
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
thenceforward a creature of the national will,--“a son of France,” in a
more eminent and lofty sense than according to the heraldry of
Europe--had extinguished his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour:
‘injuries,’ says Wordsworth--
----‘injuries
Made him more gracious.’
And so utterly had he submitted his own will, or separate interests, to
the transcendant voice of his country, which, in the main, he believed
to be now speaking authentically for the first time since the foundation
of Christendom, that, even against the motions of his own heart, he
adopted the hatreds of the young Republic, growing cruel in his purposes
towards the ancient oppressors, out of very excess of love for the
oppressed; and against the voice of his own order, as well as in stern
oblivion of every early friendship, he became the champion of democracy
in the struggle everywhere commencing with prejudice, or feudal
privileges. Nay, he went so far upon the line of this new crusade
against the evils of the world, that he even accepted--with a
conscientious defiance of his own inevitable homage to the erring spirit
of loyalty embarked upon that cause--a commission in the Republican
armies preparing to move against La Vendee; and finally in that cause,
as commander-in-chief, he laid down his life.”