"Just for a handful of silver he left us." Browning was asked if he
really meant the figure in _The Lost Leader_ for Wordsworth, and he
admitted that, though it was not a portrait, he had Wordsworth vaguely
in his mind. We do not nowadays believe that Wordsworth changed his
political opinions in order to be made distributor of stamps for the
county of Westmoreland, or even (as he afterwards became in addition)
for the county of Cumberland. Nor did Browning believe this. He did
believe, however, that Wordsworth was a turncoat, a renegade--a poet who
began as the champion of liberty and ended as its enemy. This is the
general view, and it seems to me to be unassailable.
Mr. A.V. Dicey, in a recent book, _The Statesmanship of Wordsworth_,
attempts to portray Wordsworth as a sort of early Mazzini--one who "by
many years anticipated, thought out, and announced the doctrine of
Nationalism, which during at least fifty years of the nineteenth century
(1820-70) governed or told upon the foreign policy of every European
country." I think he exaggerates, but it cannot be denied that
Wordsworth said many wise things about nationality, and that he showed a
true liberal instinct in the French wars, siding with the French in the
early days while they were fighting for liberty, and afterwards siding
against them when they were fighting for Napoleonic Imperialism.
Wordsworth had not yet abandoned his ardour for liberty when, in 1809,
he published his _Tract on the Convention of Cintra._ Those who accuse
him of apostasy have in mind not his "Tract" and his sonnets of
war-time, but the later lapse of faith which resulted in his opposing
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, and in his sitting down
seriously to write sonnets in favour in capital punishment.
He began with an imagination which emphasized the natural goodness of
man: he ended with an imagination which emphasized the natural evil of
man. He began with faith in liberty; he ended with faith in restraint.
Mr. Dicey admits much of the case against the later Wordsworth, but his
very defence of the poet is in itself an accusation. He contends, for
instance, that "it was natural that a man, who had in his youth seen
face to face the violence of the revolutionary struggle in France,
should have felt the danger of the Reform Act becoming the commencement
of anarchy and revolution in England." Natural it may have been, but
none the less it was a right-about-turn of the spirit. Wordsworth had
ceased to believe in liberty.
There is very little evidence, indeed, that in his later years
Wordsworth remained interested in liberty at all. The most important
evidence of the kind is that of Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, author of
_The Purgatory of Suicides_, who visited him in 1846 after serving a
term in prison on a charge of sedition. Wordsworth received him and said
to him: "You Chartists are right: you have a right to votes, only you
take the wrong way to obtain them. You must avoid physical violence."
Referring to the conversation, Mr. Dicey comments:--
At the age of seventy-six the spirit of the old revolutionist and
of the friend of the Girondins was still alive. He might not think
much of the Whigs, but within four years of his death Wordsworth
was certainly no Tory.
There is no reason, however, why we should trouble our heads over the
question whether at the age of seventy-six Wordsworth was a Tory or not.
It is only by the grace of God that any man escapes being a Tory long
before that. What is of interest to us is his attitude in the days of
his vitality, not of his senility. In regard to this, I agree that it
would be grossly unfair to accuse him of apostasy, simply because he at
first hailed the French Revolution as the return of the Golden Age--
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
--and ten or fifteen years later was to be found gloomily prophesying
against a premature peace with Napoleon. One cannot be sure that, if one
had been living in those days oneself, one's faith in the Revolution
would have survived the September massacres and Napoleon undiminished.
Those who had at first believed that the reign of righteousness had
suddenly come down from Heaven must have been shocked to find that human
nature was still red in tooth and claw in the new era. Not that the
massacres immediately alienated Wordsworth. In the year following them
he wrote in defence of the French Revolution, and incidentally
apologized for the execution of King Louis. "If you had attended," he
wrote in his unpublished _Apology for the French Revolution_ in 1793,
"to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importance
demands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather have
regretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human being
in that monstrous situation which rendered him unaccountable before a
human tribunal." In _The Prelude_, too (which, it will be remembered,
though it was written early, Wordsworth left to be published after his
death), we are given a perfect answer to those who would condemn the
French Revolution, or any similar uprising, on account of its incidental
horrors:--
When a taunt
Was taken up by scoffers in their pride,
Saying, "Behold the harvest that we reap
From popular government and equality,"
I clearly saw that neither these nor aught
Of wild belief engrafted on their views
By false philosophy had caused the woe,
But a terrific reservoir of guilt
And ignorance filled up from age to age.
That would no longer hold its loathsome charge,
But burst and spread in deluge through the land.
Mr. Dicey insists that Wordsworth's attitude in regard to the horrors
of September proves "the statesmanlike calmness and firmness of his
judgment." Wordsworth was hardly calm, but he remained on the side of
France with sufficiently firm enthusiasm to pray for the defeat of his
own countrymen in the war of 1793. He describes, in _The Prelude_, how
he felt at the time in an English country church:--
When, in the congregation bending all
To their great Father, prayers were offered up,
Or praises for our country's victories;
And, 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance
I only, like an uninvited guest
Whom no one owned, sate silent, shall I add,
Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come.
The faith that survived the massacres, however, could not survive
Napoleon. Henceforth Wordsworth began to write against France in the
name of Nationalism and Liberty.
He now becomes a political thinker--a great political thinker, in the
judgment of Mr. Dicey. He sets forth a political philosophy--the
philosophy of Nationalism. He grasped the first principle of Nationalism
firmly, which is, that nations should be self-governed, even if they are
governed badly. He saw that the nation which is oppressed from within is
in a far more hopeful condition than the nation which is oppressed from
without. In his _Tract_ he wrote:--
The difference between inbred oppression and that which is from
without [i.e. imposed by foreigners] is _essential_; inasmuch as
the former does not exclude, from the minds of the people, the
feeling of being self-governed; does not imply (as the latter does,
when patiently submitted to) an abandonment of the first duty
imposed by the faculty of reason.