Politics, history, and Wordsworth’s poems
We know more about Wordsworth than before. The Cornell Wordsworth Series and new biographies – Gill, Johnston, Barker, Wu – have enhanced understanding of the poems and the life. And there have been startling discoveries. The National Library of Scotland yielded a manuscript of Wordsworth’s Imitation of Juvenal, a satire on government and aristocracy dating from 1795 which the poet had determined should be suppressed. The Public Record Office, London, disclosed correspondence between the Home Office and their agent James Walsh who in August 1797 was sent to spy on Coleridge and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth’s letters to Mary Hutchinson, found in 1977 among scrap paper at Carlisle, offered unprecedented insight into their marriage. So we do know more about Wordsworth, but not all about Wordsworth. Gaps and silences in The Prelude, and the conjectured career of the ‘hidden Wordsworth’, now seem as significant as the documented life. Emile Legouis’s pioneering Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798, first published in 1896, announced its source and subject as ‘A Study of The Prelude’. One hundred years later Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) set out to dispel the ‘Wordsworthian cover-up’ by revealing how what ‘seem to be metaphors’ in the poetry ‘often turn out to have a literal correspondence to the life’.
Wordsworth invites speculation and provokes questions, in that his innate reserve as a person was deepened by the politically reactionary mood of an age when ‘most people who wrote autobiographies drastically played down any involvement they might have had in the Jacobinism of the 1790s’.1 In his essay ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, E. P. Thompson remarked that there was ‘something secretive about Wordsworth through much of the 1790s, and secretive in more than the matter of Annette Vallon (which was so successfully hushed up)’.2 Wordsworth’s love affair with Annette Vallon was indirectly noticed in the passage in The Prelude, Book ix (published separately as Vaudracour and Julia in 1820) and – as Stephen Gill has observed – it was strongly hinted at in Christopher Wordsworth’s otherwise discreet Memoirs of William Wordsworth published in 1851:
Wordsworth’s condition in France was a very critical one: he was an orphan, young, inexperienced, impetuous, enthusiastic, with no friendly voice to guide him, in a foreign country, and that country in a state of revolution . . . The most licentious theories were propounded; all restraints were broken; libertinism was the law. He was encompassed with strong temptations; and although it is not the design of the present work to chronicle the events of his life except so far as they illustrate his writings, yet I could not pass over this period of it without noticing the dangers which surround those who in an ardent emotion of enthusiasm put themselves in a position of peril without due consideration of the circumstances which ought to regulate their practice.3
Given this ‘authorized’ account of Wordsworth in licentious, libertine France, ‘encompassed with strong temptations’ and ‘dangers’, it’s all the more surprising that Annette’s existence was indeed ‘hushed up’ until revealed in 1916 (as ‘an unfortunate attachment’) by the American scholar George McLean Harper.4 Wordsworth had arrived at Orléans in December 1791, and lodged in ‘a very handsome appartment’ on Rue Royale belonging to a milliner named Jean-Henri Gellet-Duvivier. In a letter to his brother Richard on the 19th he describes his life in Orléans as ‘comfortable’, says that he has ‘every prospect of liking this place extremely well’ and has already noted that ‘all the people of any opulen[ce are] aristocrates and all the others democrates’. ‘[T]wo or three officers of the Cavalry’ boarded in the house too, and Wordsworth joined their ‘routs’ and ‘card-tables’ at which, he remembered,
through punctilios of elegance
And deeper causes, all discourse, alike
Of good and evil in the time, was shunned
(Prel.1805 ix 119–21)
In this fashionable royalist society Wordsworth met a ‘very agreeable’ family, most likely Annette’s (WL i 70). When she returned to her home town Blois further down the Loire valley, Wordsworth followed and settled there for the spring and summer of 1792. In September they returned to Orléans, and Wordsworth went on to Paris where he lingered for two months before heading back across the Channel to England and London. Their daughter Caroline was baptized on 15 December at the cathedral of Sainte Croix, Orléans, with Annette’s brother Paul standing as godfather to the child.5 It’s likely that Wordsworth intended to return to France once he had raised money for their support, but the outbreak of war between England and France in February 1793 made the journey hazardous.6
Wordsworth’s memory in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of his first visit to the Wye, July 1793, evokes the yearning of ‘one / Who sought the thing he loved’, and the poem identifies ‘the thing loved’ as a most fortunate attachment: ‘nature then . . . / To me was all in all’ (73, 76). Yet in recalling more fully ‘what I was, when first / I came among these hills’ (67–8) loving quest is overlaid by a fearful reactive impulse,
more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
(71–3)
I argue in this essay that Wordsworth’s haunted intertwining of ‘dread’ and ‘love’ arose from tragic revolutionary events in which the Vallon family and others known to Wordsworth were ensnared. In relating ‘dread’ in the poetry to the revolution, the essay responds to recent studies which identify from The Borderers, ‘Tintern Abbey’, and The Prelude some kind of ‘crisis’ in Wordsworth during the 1790s. Rather than seeking literal correspondences between poetry and history, I want to suggest how recovery of personal and public contexts for the poetry may refresh readings of otherwise familiar passages. More specifically I want to argue that those contexts allow us to see how Wordsworth’s most transcendental claims reflect back upon the life out of which they emerged.
From reading The Prelude Book x, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson detected a ‘climactic crisis’ in Wordsworth’s early life ‘giving rise to a flight from its temptations and to a decade of arduous self-reflection’ (‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, 84). He located the crisis in 1795 when Wordsworth was captivated by the philosophic rationalism of William Godwin’s Political Justice. The violence of the French Terror (1793–4) had shown how revolutionary action betrayed otherwise humane motives; the attraction of Political Justice was its argument for social progress – and ultimately human perfectibility – through the power of reason alone. For a time, Wordsworth was won-over by ‘the philosophy / That promised to abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings’ (x 806–8). In London during summer 1795 he sought out William Godwin, and met reformers and radicals such as Thomas Holcroft, novelist and dramatist; William Frend, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, a unitarian and leader of the reformist London Corresponding Society; George Dyer, poet, scholar, and pamphleteer; and John Thelwall, poet, journalist, political lecturer, also a leader of the Corresponding Society.7 These were turbulent, unsettled, exciting times in Britain when the threat of revolution and a French invasion seemed likely to provoke the violent reaction of a ‘British Terror’. And Wordsworth was at the heart of it all, keeping company with the most controversial radical thinkers and ‘jacobin’ activists of the day. It would be fascinating to know all that he did at this moment but, apart from brief entries in Godwin’s Diary, material for recreating this period of the poet’s life is hard to come by. As a result, Wordsworth’s ‘Godwinian phase’ has been recounted in terms of his enthusiasm for and subsequent disappointment with Godwin’s ‘false philosophy’ rather than through his lived experience of the noisy, argumentative world of advanced radicalism.
It is possible to show, as Thompson does, that Political Justice encouraged quite outlandish behaviour in Wordsworth’s circle of friends and acquaintances. The artist Joseph Farington recorded a dinner at which Wordsworth’s friend Basil Montagu suddenly sprang to his feet and announced his ‘violent’ conversion to ‘the speculative principles of the new Philosophers’ (in other words, the ‘speculative principles’ of Political Justice). Montagu tried to persuade the party around the table
against the existence of Instinct . . . [saying] that Poets are made by education. – That a Parent should not love his Child better than the Child of another, but in proportion as the Child might possess better qualities and endowments.8
This anecdote agrees with the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson’s remark that Political Justice ‘produced a powerful effect on the youth of that generation’, and Robinson goes on to claim that by encouraging disinterestedness Godwin’s book made him ‘feel more generously’: ‘I had never before, nor, I am afraid, have I ever since felt so strongly the duty of not living to one’s self, but of having for one’s sole object the good of the community’.9 Wordsworth too recalled in The Prelude that Godwin’s appeal had been principally to young enthusiasts who were ‘[p]leased with extremes’ and ‘flattered’ in as much as the new philosophy enabled them to
look through all the frailties of the world,
And, with a resolute mastery shaking off
The accidents of nature, time, and place,
That make up the weak being of the past,
Build social freedom on its only basis:
The freedom of the individual mind,
Which, to the blind restraint of general laws
Superior, magisterially adopts
One guide, the light of circumstances, flashed
Upon an independent intellect.
(x 820–9)
Wordsworth’s poetry recreates the superficial command of Political Justice, its assertion of a Godwinian ‘mastery’ confidently abstracted from the realities of life. Two lines at the centre of the passage above encapsulate Godwin’s philosophy, which based social improvement on the seemingly boundless speculative freedom of the ‘individual mind’. But the lines are separated by a colon, marking the point from which Political Justice collapsed back into the world it seemed so compellingly to have ‘shaken off’. Rather than opening a thrilling prospect in which ‘social freedom’ meant ‘the good of the community’, the Godwinian enlightenment dwindled into a consideration of how ‘circumstances’ or ‘accidents of nature, time, and place’ appear to ‘independent intellect’. The superior vision of Political Justice disclosed only ‘things as they are’, a phrase Godwin incorporated in the title of his novel Caleb Williams (1794) to point to the oppressiveness of contemporary English society.
Given the extremity Political Justice encouraged it isn’t surprising that E. P. Thompson should have located Wordsworth’s crisis in the speculative terrain inhabited by the book’s admirers rather than in the world of actions and events. Thompson suggests that the crisis was precipitated by Wordsworth’s recognition of Godwin’s duplicity: ‘[Wordsworth] had found self-interest in the mask of reason’, Thompson writes, ‘and self-love masked as philanthropy. There was a sudden motion of recoil, which took him from London to Racedown, Stowey and Goslar, and . . . from the “Descriptive Sketches” to “Salisbury Plain” and The Borderers’ (‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, 93). The Prelude records Wordsworth’s ‘despair’ about Godwin (see especially x 878–900) although as the impulse for a prolonged ‘recoil’ it is unconvincing and especially so when read in relation to ‘Tintern Abbey’. Because philosopher Godwin proved as selfish as Basil Montagu did Wordsworth exile himself to the English west country (1795–8) and then to freezing Goslar in Germany (1798–9)? I doubt it. The Wordsworthian ‘recoil’ described by Thompson needs the compelling motives of ‘betrayal’ and ‘dread’ which surface in ‘Tintern Abbey’.
‘Tintern Abbey”s introspective and universalizing language invites and resists speculation about how the poem may or may not draw upon and reconfigure lived experiences. Throughout the poem a mournful undersong tells of ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’ (40–1) until a more uplifting claim supervenes,
And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her . . .
(122–4)
– a claim which folds the knowledge of betrayal into the heart of prayer, rather as the pursuit of nature as loving quest glanced back to acknowledge ‘something’ dreaded (71–3). There need be no exact biographical referents for ‘betray’ and ‘dread’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ but if Wordsworth’s ‘knowing’ was the growth of five years’ reflection (as the poem tells us) then any original experience, whether first-hand or otherwise, was a comparatively recent one – perhaps at some point during the poet’s residence in France in 1792, or following his return to England in December of that year. This possibility has gained on me in the course of writing this essay, and was reinforced by David Bromwich’s remark that he ‘became convinced (while thinking and writing) that [Wordsworth’s] Salisbury Plain mood of early 1794 holds a real panic under self-repression. The poem and the letters around it, the action and inaction, have to do with a feeling not only of things wrongly left undone but with things terribly and actually done.’10 If Bromwich is right, those terrible things, done and/or undone, must have dated from 1793 or a little earlier.
Wordsworth was an ‘inveterate coverer of traces’, David Bromwich says, ‘for prudential reasons, and in politics most of all’. So rather than attempting to identify ‘what Wordsworth may have done (or crucially failed to do)’, he attends to the evidence of the imagination arguing that by interpreting The Borderers, which he reads as a ‘personal allegory’, one can offer informed speculation about otherwise irretrievable history.11 The argument cannot be rehearsed step by step here, but Bromwich’s conclusions must be paused over, for they are extraordinary. Bromwich reads the play as ‘the outcome of Wordsworth’s hopes and fears reacting upon the impersonal principles of the philosophic radicalism of the 1790s’.12 Many commentators have found in The Borderers a disillusioned response to Political Justice, but Bromwich finds Godwin contributing to a more disturbing Wordsworthian insight about action and guilt. For him the story of Rivers and Mortimer, both of whom are persuaded or reasoned into committing murder, implies ‘the necessity of murder, exile, and self-reflection in the making of an individual mind’. In one of many brilliant juxtapositions, Bromwich relates Rivers’s central speech on what it feels like to have committed murder, ‘Action is transitory . . . Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark’ (iii v 60–5)13 to the situation and mood of Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’, suggesting the affinity between all that is ‘permanent, obscure and dark’ and ‘Tintern Abbey”s ‘burthen of the mystery’. ‘And if that is so’, Bromwich continues, ‘how different are the situations of Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”, with his “many recognitions dim and faint”, and Mortimer reflecting on his murderous crime in The Borderers? “Deep, deep and vast, vast beyond human thought, / Yet calm . . . In terror, / Remembered terror, there is peace and rest” ’ (Disowned by Memory 49–50). Mortimer’s ‘mighty burden’ of guilt (v iii 100), his knowledge that human nature is ‘decoyed, betrayed’ (v iii 59), casts a murderous implication across ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’.
The eerie similarities between The Borderers and ‘Tintern Abbey’ give imaginative shape to Bromwich’s ‘hunch that [Wordsworth] had once been in the thick of a conspiracy and seen someone badly hurt or killed on information from himself’ (Disowned by Memory 17). Rather than arising from the inadequacy of Godwin’s ‘false philosophy’, or its potential to release violence like Robespierre’s terror (1793–4),14 betrayal and dread in Wordsworth were apparently connected with events in France. When John Keats read ‘Tintern Abbey’ he came to something like the same conclusion. In his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Keats describes life as ‘a large Mansion of Many Apartments’ – an image for which one source was the large mansion at Enfield where Keats had attended school. In it the ‘infant or thoughtless Chamber’ opens, as consciousness awakens, into a second which Keats calls ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’. Here ‘light . . . atmosphere . . . [and] pleasant wonders’ are concentrated in an ‘intoxicating’ experience, the ‘effects’ of which according to Keats include
that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the [head: deleted] heart and nature of Man – of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heratbreak [sic], Pain, Sickness and oppression – whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages . . . To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’ and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages.15
At the darkling existential ‘point’ represented by ‘Tintern Abbey’ ‘[w]e see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist – We are now in that state – We feel the “burden of the Mystery” ’ (Keats Letters i 281). Keats says that Wordsworth’s genius is explorative of the ‘dark passages’ of life, and capable of ‘discoveries’; in this respect Wordsworth ‘is deeper than Milton’ (who for Keats as for Blake was ‘content’ with Reformation religion) and ‘proves there is really a grand march of intellect . . . proves that a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being, whether it be in human Knowledge or Religion’ (Keats Letters i 281–2). The sharpening, chastening power was associated in Wordsworth’s life experience with a period of the French Revolution Keats believed had put a ‘temporry stop’ to the ‘march of intellect’ and ‘the rapid progress of free sentiments’: the Terror (Keats Letters ii 193–4). Betrayal and dread in Wordsworth were associated with revolutionary events that have long been known about, and which draw together his residence in France, his love affair with Annette Vallon, the Terror, and the poetry. More than this, the career of one revolutionary involved in these events dramatized the ‘stop’ to enlightened progress noted by Keats – and in doing so offered a compelling pattern for The Borderers as well as the recovery signalled by ‘Tintern Abbey’.
In 1842, having revised The Borderers for publication, Wordsworth recalled what had prompted him to write the play:
The study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so are there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long residence in France, while the Revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme of wickedness, I had frequent opportunities of being an eye-witness of this process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory, that the Tragedy of ‘The Borderers’ was composed.
(Borderers 813)
This tantalizing recollection explains what went into the creation of the character Rivers, but the occasions of Wordsworth’s ‘eye-witness’ observations in France are seemingly left unspecified. Seemingly, that is, unless one understands a more-or-less distinct reference for the otherwise commonplace analogy ‘as in the trials to which life subjects us’. Trials. Wordsworth had concluded his earlier ‘Preface’ to the play (written c. 1797) with ‘one word more’ on ‘motives’ in law-suits, reflecting on how ‘utter ruin’ and ‘deadly feuds’ may proceed from ‘trifling and apparently inadequate sources’ (Borderers 68). The Wordsworth family’s quarrel with the Earl of Lonsdale was one such legal suit, and while the effort to recover John Wordsworth’s estate wasn’t an ‘inadequate source’ it doesn’t explain the extremity of Wordsworth’s remarks about ‘deadly feuds in families’. Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams dissected legal and psychological tyranny, and we know that Wordsworth read and was influenced by the book.16 Still, this does not account for experiences of ‘hardening of the heart’ and ‘perversion of the understanding’.
The legal ‘process’ to which I believe Wordsworth was a horrified spectator was notorious. It was reported in The Times on 4 September 1793 as an instance of the ‘despotism of [the] anarchic faction’ in control of the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris. And it was noticed prominently in the fivevolume Histoire Générale et Impartiale des Erreurs, des Fautes et des Crimes Commis Pendant le Révolution Française. The ‘contrast between the alleged deed and the punishment which followed’ was recalled in 1880 as ‘one of the most shocking proceedings’ of the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris. The case featured in Edmond Biré’s imaginary Diary of a Citizen of Paris During the Terror, where the verdict of the jury was described as having created a ‘tremendous sensation’ in the courtroom. In 1909 it was invoked as an example of the ‘implacable severity’ of the Revolutionary Tribunal; in 1965 it was described as ‘the outrageous Bourdon case’.17
Léonard Bourdon (1754–1807) was a native of Orléans, where he was educated at the College d’Orléans before going to Paris where he founded a successful school for boys. In the early years of the revolution he was a leading activist in the Cercle Social and the Paris Jacobin club, advocating international revolution and ‘an ideal community of all free peoples’. Bourdon was one of the organizers of ‘the glorious day’ of 10 August 1792 when Louis XVI was deposed, thus opening the way for the Republic, and he was elected to the National Convention by the Department of the Loiret.18 As David Erdman has shown, it was Léonard Bourdon who in 1791 crystallized the enlightened, universalist ideals of the Revolution in a ceremonial commerce des lumières between the French, British, and Americans – an image which Erdman says allowed a blend of meanings: ‘the meeting of luminaries, by mutual recognition of one another’s auras; exchanges of bright ideas, insight, wisdom; with a suggestion of aural – even mesmeric – contact’.19
Such lively exchanges did indeed take place between the Jacobin club at Paris and reformist associations like the London Revolution Society in Britain. One such occurred during the visit of Jérome Pétion to London, 30 October–8 November 1791. Pétion had been a member of the Constituent Assembly at Paris, and on 4 November he was guest of honour at the Revolution Society’s anniversary dinner in the London Tavern where he met Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine, and Thomas Walker, founder in 1790 of the Manchester Constitutional Society, one of the most important of the many such groups nationwide calling for political reform. There were some 350 guests at this dinner, and the event developed into a remarkable celebration of Anglo-French solidarity. Pétion’s diary noted that the royal toast was drunk ‘in gloomy silence’, and that support for France was demonstrated by tricoloured cockades, by display of the national flags intertwined, and in spirited singing of the revolutionary anthem Ça ira. Pétion responded proposing a toast to the unity of England and France; Paine upped the stakes by giving ‘The Revolution of the World’.20 Back again at Paris Pétion was elected mayor on 16 November; he addressed the Jacobin club two days later, describing the Revolution Society dinner and remarking on how the toast to the French Revolution and his own to Anglo-French union had been received ‘with transport’. Immediately after Pétion’s address Léonard Bourdon came to the tribune and evoked the spirit of universal patriotism as a ‘commerce des lumières’.
Another instance of electrifying commerce between London and Paris was the presence of ‘Citizen’ Charles Stanhope – ‘le Whig constitutionel’ – at the Jacobin Club, Paris, on Sunday 18 December 1791. Here Stanhope witnessed in a pageant suffused with light and atmosphere the ceremonial alliance of America, England, and France: ‘Vivent les trois nations! Vive la liberté!’21 On this occasion Léonard Bourdon spoke again, congratulating the Jacobins and the ‘incorruptible’ Pétion on having ‘brought about the ceremony which unites us today’ and moving that busts of Price and Franklin should be purchased by ‘voluntary subscription’ for display in the Jacobin Club (see Erdman, 146–7).
All that we know of his actions and sentiments shows that up until December 1791 Léonard Bourdon was one of the most prominent advocates of universal peace and liberty, embodying the ardent spirit in which revolutionaries at Paris reached out to Britain and America in a commerce des lumières. Bourdon was evidently well known to the many international visitors like ‘Citizen’ Stanhope who made their way to Paris, and he can scarcely have escaped Wordsworth’s attention. Wordsworth and Bourdon had mutual acquaintances among the English Jacobins at Paris and it’s no exaggeration to claim that, at the close of 1791, as Wordsworth followed ‘Citizen Stanhope’ across the Channel for a longer sojourn in France, Bourdon’s ideals represented everything Wordsworth hoped the revolution might achieve. But, as Wordsworth was soon to learn, ‘sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities’.
Léonard Bourdon arrived at his native city, Orléans, 16 March 1793, en route for the south.22 This was his second visit in recent months. Back in September 1792, when Wordsworth may well have been in Orléans, Bourdon as a Deputy of the Convention had assisted in the despatch of some fifty state prisoners to Paris where they were massacred. Now he attended and harangued a meeting of the jacobin ‘société populaire’, joined a patriotic banquet, and then prepared to continue on his journey. No doubt the patriots were excited; probably they were drunk. Meanwhile, resentment among royalists in the city was running high. Bourdon himself takes up the story in a letter to the National Convention:
More than thirty counter-revolutionaries with bayonets set upon me in front of the Town Hall. They flung me to the ground, battering me with kicks and blows; as soon as I went down all bayonets were readied – one of the bastards stabbed me in the belly, others in my arms and head. I managed to fend them off – only just, mind – and staggered and stumbled into the Town Hall where commandant Dulac separated us . . . I’m told that my wounds aren’t dangerous; my overcoat was some protection, and my hat so firmly stuck on my head that the bayonet only grazed skin-deep.
Bourdon goes on to notice several pistol shots aimed at him (they missed) and concludes his letter by mentioning to the Convention his ‘sense of exquisite satisfaction’ in being ‘a martyr for liberty’.23
But Léonard Bourdon wasn’t dead. Nor was he severely wounded in the brawl, since he was sufficiently recovered by 3 o’clock the following morning to write his letter to the National Convention. At Paris word about the attack on Bourdon arrived along with news of an uprising in the Vendée. Together these events appeared like a concerted insurrection, ‘links in a grand conspiracy forged by the enemies of liberty’; two Representatives of the Convention reported that ‘the assassination of our colleague Bourdon at Orléans, along with insults and provocations directed at several others, are all connected with the same plot’.24 The Convention acted immediately. At Orléans the mayor and civic officers were arrested, along with those guarding the Town Hall on 16 March (Aulard ii 390–1). Among the arrested was Jean-Henri Gellet-Duvivier, formerly Wordsworth’s landlord, who had been in the forefront of the scuffle with Bourdon. Legouis (Wordsworth and Annette Vallon 43) describes him grabbing Bourdon by the throat, knocking him down and striking him with his sword. Annette Vallon’s brother Paul was implicated too, although he seems to have tried to get away from the scene using ‘every means to tear himself out of the hands of the patriots who held him’ (Wordsworth and Annette Vallon 43). By 24 April when the warrant for his arrest was produced, Paul Vallon had gone into hiding. Unquestionably this saved his life, for he was listed among the twenty-six indicted for the ‘assassination’ of Bourdon, imprisoned in the Conciergerie at Paris, and committed to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal on a charge of murder.
What made the ensuing trial sensational, notorious, sickening was Léonard Bourdon’s presence at the Tribunal, ready to testify against the so-called assassins from his native city (see Loomis, Paris in the Terror, 122). No longer the prophet of a benign commerce des lumières, he now prowled the courtroom ‘dans l’attitude d’un tigre’ (Histoire v 201). The trial began on 28 June and finished on 12 July when nine of the defendants, including Gellet-Duvivier, were found guilty of a murder that never happened. As soon as the verdict was announced, ‘there was a tremendous uproar in court. Everyone was grief-stricken; the accused fell to their knees, raised their hands protesting their innocence to God, swearing they didn’t know and had never even seen Léonard Bourdon’ (Wallon i 184–5). When sentence of death was pronounced the whole court, except for Bourdon, was in tears. Next day the court reconvened, and was confronted with a petition from relatives of the condemned: ‘We appeal for our fathers, brothers, children . . . We trust to Léonard Bourdon’s humanity in helping us find some way, any way of proving the innocence of our unfortunate relatives’ (Wallon i 185). Duvivier’s eldest daughter pleaded for her father’s life: ‘just ten years old, her bravery and persistence sustained her over three long months of petitioning the judges and Deputies of the Convention; all to whom she spoke were moved to tears. She called on Léonard Bourdon at least twenty times, but a man with no humanity wasn’t to be moved to pity’ (Histoire v 200). Bourdon, one-time advocate of enlightened humanity, now sat silent, inexorable, ‘impassible’ (Wallon i 186). That afternoon the nine condemned men were dressed in red shirts to identify them as murderers, taken to the scaffold in the Place de la Révolution, and guillotined. The date was 13 July 1793.
Émile Legouis wrote about the Bourdon trial and executions in his book Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, but he did so as a tragic episode in the life of the Vallon family. Coming right up to the present Kenneth Johnston’s Hidden Wordsworth gives us Bourdon as the ‘petty dictator of Orléans’ and ‘mortal enemy’ of Paul Vallon, describing the trial but I think underestimating its impact on Wordsworth for contributing merely a ‘share of pathos’ to the ‘unjust tribunals’ passage in Prelude Book x (Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 290, 374). The change in Bourdon himself is sharply disturbing: formerly the advocate of revolutionary enlightenment and community, by 1793 Bourdon had become a kind of specimen example for Wordsworth’s claim that ‘there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding’. Sure, the Bourdon trial and its consequences were ‘important to Wordsworth privately’ (Johnston 373) – but we need to respond more adequately to the horror of what had happened to Bourdon and to individuals well known to, some of them intimately acquainted with, Wordsworth: Gellet-Duvivier and his daughter, the Vallons, perhaps others who were on trial too. Much research has been undertaken to identify persons Wordsworth may have known in revolutionary France, and to make a case for him revisiting France in 1793 when he might have witnessed the execution of his acquaintance the journalist Gorsas.25 But these studies have overlooked the traumatic effect of the Bourdon case on Wordsworth, who saw his attachments as a lover, a father, and as a partisan of the revolution betrayed by a lumière in the name of revolutionary ‘justice’ and ‘national honour’. The psychic fall-out from this shock emerged in nightmares:
Through months, through years, long after the last beat
Of those atrocities . . .
Such ghastly visions had I of despair
And tyranny, and implements of death,
And long orations which in dreams I pleaded
Before unjust tribunals, with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense
Of treachery and desertion . . .
(x 370–9)
This agonized passage from Prelude Book x is so placed in the narrative as to identify ‘those atrocities’, and the ‘beat’ of the blade on the scaffold, with July 1793.26 Of course the lines don’t have to apply to the Bourdon case: there were many other such ‘tribunals’ during the Terror, but none so grotesquely unjust as the capital charge for murder of a man present in court watching the proceedings. And no tribunal that highlighted so powerfully the dreadful miscarriage of the Revolution.
In July 1793 Wordsworth spent some weeks in the Isle of Wight (see Reed, 144) although what he was doing there remains one of the mysterious ‘gaps’ in his early life. Could he have crossed the Channel, made his way to Paris, and sat in the Tribunal as a helpless ‘eye-witness of the process’ – an eye-witness who for years afterwards would plead in his dreams on behalf of the accused? It hardly matters. This outrage, one of many reported in London newspapers, was (and is) so uniquely dismaying that we can understand how for anyone sympathetic to France news of it would have stirred feelings of ‘treachery and desertion’, as Wordsworth tells us of himself, ‘in the place / The holiest that I knew of, my own soul’ (x 379–80). Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to consider how Mortimer’s words to Matilda in The Borderers might stand for Wordsworth’s confounding discovery about human nature and about himself:
Now mark this world of ours:
A man may be a murderer and his hand
Shall tell no tales, nay, the first brook he meets
Shall wash it clean . . .
Thou must be wise as I am, thou must know
What human nature is, decoyed, betrayed –
I have the proofs.
(v iii 50–3; 58–60)
Mortimer’s confession follows some forty lines later, ‘I am the murderer of thy father’, followed by his (self-deluding) reflection: ‘Three words have such a power! This mighty burden / All off at once! ’Tis done . . .’ (v iii 100–1).
‘This mighty burden’: the knowledge of murderous guilt but also perhaps a transliteration and, wishfully, a riddance of ‘Bourdon’? The Oxford English Dictionary identifies ‘bourdon’ as a variant form of English ‘burden’ (in OED sense 2. a., meaning a ‘load of . . . blame, sin, sorrow’), and English ‘bourdon’, meaning a bass accompaniment or undersong, was adopted from the French ‘bourdon’.27 Maybe the burden / Bourdon pun is too slender a link from which to make the case that Mortimer’s ‘mighty burden’ may refer darkly to that damaged lumière, Léonard Bourdon. But Wordsworth liked quibbling28 and there may be a second, more uncanny recall of Bourdon in The Borderers too. Mortimer’s burden is not so readily ‘off at once’, for he is confronted by a weird hallucinatory barrier which seemingly projects his guilt and reminds us once again of ‘bourdon’. When Mortimer ‘hysterically’ sets out in quest of an ‘executioner’ to ‘do the business’ and purge his guilt, he finds himself baffled: ‘There is something / That must be cleared away – / . . . That staff / Which bars the road before me there. – ’Tis there, / ’Tis there breast-high and will not let me pass’ (v iii 197–200). Macbeth is in the background here, although the ‘staff’ that seemingly ‘bars the road’ bizarrely, but literally, invokes Léonard Bourdon through the sense of ‘bourdon’ as a ‘stout staff’.29
In the Bourdon tribunal and executions, which drew in the Duvivier and Vallon families, we can see how close Wordsworth was to the Terror and to the actuality of heart-hardening that he recreates in The Borderers. That proximity helps explain his distracted mood of 1793, and the obsession with guilt and treachery in poems like Salisbury Plain, The Borderers and, later still, The Prelude. You may think I’m going to suggest now that the ‘burden of the mystery’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, which so powerfully affected Keats, was a skewed literalism relating ‘decoyed’ perplexity at an ‘unintelligible world’ specifically to Léonard Bourdon. It does seem to me most likely that the five-year anniversary signalled by the poem’s date, ‘July 13, 1798’, and the opening of the poem, do indeed mark the executions at Paris on that day in 1793. But when Keats wrote ‘We are in a Mist . . . We feel the “burden of the Mystery” ’ (Keats Letters i 281) he was misquoting the poem, which says nothing about a ‘burden’. The lines run,
that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened . . .
(38–42)
Even supposing that there is indeed a punning acquaintance between ‘burden’ and ‘Bourdon’, the slippage from ‘burden’ (a word used only four times by Wordsworth) to ‘burthen’ would be an exemplary instance of ‘Tintern Abbey’ ’s universalizing – or canny obscuring – of historical reference.
No. The poem says nothing about Léonard Bourdon. Nothing about the events of 13 July 1793, nothing about poor Gellet-Duvivier and his daughter, nothing about Paul Vallon, nothing at all about Godwin or about Political Justice and its disappointments. But just as there are dark affinities between the poetry in The Borderers and ‘Tintern Abbey’, so too are there aspects of ‘Tintern Abbey’ which seem to hark back to the brighter temper of earlier years. Mortimer’s rash and self-deceiving assumption in The Borderers – ‘This mighty burden / All off at once!’ – ‘Tintern Abbey’ steadies into a slow-growing awareness that through human relationship and glimpses of universal greeting the ‘burthen of the mystery, / . . . Is lightened’. Wordsworth’s ‘lightening’ is a gradual clearing of ‘mist’, an easing of the spirit. ‘The setting sun will always set me to rights’, Keats said (Letters i 186), cheerily echoing the lines in ‘Tintern Abbey’ which report upon an omnipresence
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things . . .
(98–102)
The participation here ‘felt’ or ‘sensed’ is seemingly little akin to the ‘commerce des lumières’ between France, Britain, and America, or to the benevolent impulse that brought together citizens Wordsworth and Pétion, Paine, Stanhope and, yes, Léonard Bourdon. It took an instinctive lumière like John Keats to intuit that these famous lines about ‘the light of setting suns’ might indeed embrace a universal ‘setting to rights’, that Wordsworth’s most transcendental claim in ‘Tintern Abbey’ reflects back upon a world burdened by things that think and the mystery of ‘things as they are’.
NOTES
1 Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London, 1998), pp. 6–9.
2 See ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, London Review of Books (8 December 1988), rpt in E. P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thelwall (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1997), p. 77.
3 See Memoirs of William Wordsworth, Poet-Laureate, DCL (2 vols., London, 1851), i, p. 74, and Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), p. 35.
4 See George McLean Harper, William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Influence (2 vols., London, 1916), i, pp. 141–2, and for further comment Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, pp. 233–4.
5 See Émile Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (London and Toronto, 1922), p. 25. Caroline’s certificate of baptism is reproduced in George McLean Harper, Wordsworth’s French Daughter. The Story of her Birth, with the Certificates of her Baptism and Marriage (Princeton and Oxford, 1921), pp. 28–30.
6 Compare Wordsworth’s memory in Prelude x 190–1, that he had left France in December 1792, ‘Compelled by nothing less than absolute want / Of funds’.
7 For Wordsworth in London radical circles in 1795, see my Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), pp. 186–98.
8 The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre and Kathryn Cave (17 vols., New Haven and London, 1978–98), iii, pp. 700–1. Entry of 22 November 1796. One consequence of Basil Montagu’s philosophically independent attitude to parenthood was that from September 1795 the Wordsworths acted as guardians of his son – a role they maintained for some three years until August 1798.
9 See Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, ed. Thomas Sadler (3 vols., London, 1869), i, pp. 31–2.
10 Personal correspondence, 22 October 1999. I am grateful to David Bromwich for responding to my questions about the ‘terrible things’ which might lie behind Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s.
11 David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory. Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago, 1998), p. 46.
12 Disowned by Memory, p. 44.
13 Quoted from the 1797–9 text of The Borderers. David Bromwich quotes from the 1842 text of The Borderers in which, he argues, Wordsworth near the end of his life was able to recover ‘the heat and danger of the longest poem of his radical years’ (Disowned by Memory, p. 46). There are alterations in punctuation between 1797–9 and 1842, but the substance of the passage is the same.
14 For Godwin’s ‘abstract and unprincipled philosophy’ leading to ‘violence like that witnessed in France’, see Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, p. 219.
15 The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1958), i, pp. 280–1.
16 See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 66–7.
17 See The Times (4 September 1793); H. Wallon, Histoire du Tribunal Révolutionnaire de Paris (6 vols., Paris, 1880–2), i, p. 181; Edmond Biré, The Diary of a Citizen of Parts During ‘The Terror’, trans. John de Villiers (2 vols., London, 1896), ii, p. 188; G. Lenôtre, The Tribunal of the Terror. A Study of Paris in 1793–1795, tr. Frederic Lees (London, 1909), p. 69; Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror, June 1793–July 1794 (London, 1965), p. 122.
18 See H. Morse Stephens, The Principal Speeches of the Statesmen and Orators of the French Revolution, 1789–1795 (2 vols., Oxford 1892), ii, pp. 230–1 n, for details of Bourdon’s life. The Scottish radical John Oswald spoke at the Jacobin Club at Paris, 22 August 1792, on the need ‘to undeceive the British nation’ about the ‘glorious day of 10 August’; see David Erdman’s brilliant recovery of Oswald’s life and times in Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 (Columbia, Missouri, 1986), pp. 202–3.
19 See Erdman, 139, 143, and the epigraph to the whole book.
20 For a full account of the London Revolution Society dinner, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), pp. 187–8.
21 See ‘London Embraces Paris’ in Erdman, 143–7, and Erdman’s earlier account of Stanhope’s visit, ‘Citizen Stanhope and the French Revolution’ in The Wordsworth Circle, 15, 1 (Winter 1984): 8–15.
22 ‘Deuxième Voyage Sanguinaire à Orléans, le 15 Mars 1793, par Léonard Bourdon, Représentant du Peuple’, in Histoire Générale et Impartiale des Erreurs, des Fautes et des Crimes Commis Pendant le Révolution Française (5 vols., Paris, 1797), v, pp. 191–203, 192.
23 F. A. Aulard, Receuil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public (Paris, 1789–1964), ii, pp. 382–3.
24 See Aulard, Receuil, ii, p. 381 for this letter linking the Bourdon case with a wider counter-revolutionary conspiracy.
25 See for example my Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and some Contemporaries (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 143–58, and Johnston, 358–400.
26 Prelude x 290–306 recalls Wordsworth’s sojourn in the Isle of Wight, July 1793, and x 307–80 the beginning of the Terror in France, July 1793, and Wordsworth’s ‘melancholy at that time’ leading into the ‘unjust tribunals’ passage.
27 See The Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition (20 vols., Oxford, 1989), ‘burden’ form ß. 6 and sense iv 9; etymology of the English ‘bourdon’.
28 Wordsworth’s first published poem was ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep at a Tale of Distress’ in the European Magazine, 11 (March 1787), p. 202. It appeared over the signature ‘Axiologus’, a Graeco-Latin transliteration of ‘Wordsworth’.
29 See OED ‘bourdon’, sense 2.