From the Elephant's Back (17 page)

Then it was

That the belovèd Woman in whose sight

Those days were pass'd, now speaking in a voice

Of sudden admonition, like a brook

That did but cross a lonely road, and now

Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn,

Companion never lost through many a league,

Maintained for me a saving intercourse

With my true self; for, though impair'd and chang'd

Much, as it seem'd, I was no further chang'd

Than as a clouded, not a waning moon:

She, in the midst of all, preserv'd me still

A Poet, made me seek beneath that name

My office upon earth, and nowhere else.
[12]

Looked at from this point of view the famous lines written above Tintern Abbey could be considered one of the great love-poems in the language.
[13]

The traditional portrait of the poet is drawn for the most part from the synoptic view of his life which tells us, for example, that the revolutionary young man spent 1791–92 in France, watched the first excesses of the revolution, fell in love with Annette Vallon who bore him a daughter, and then returned to England with his head hung low and his revolutionary heart broken by what he regarded not simply as an internal French disaster, but as a betrayal of the hopes for the whole human race. He was not the only one—a whole generation of young freethinkers and utopians all over Europe felt the same. A sick disgust, a heart-wrenching disappointment. Moreover this dark experience mingled with his despair about his French lover; he had every intention of marrying her and bringing her back to England—all this to the delight of Dorothy who at once established friendly and indeed loving contact with the girl. But a mixture of circumstances both personal and international intervened and separated them, not least among them the war with Napoleon, and gradually the marriage prospects faded out of the picture.

Nevertheless, so honest was Wordsworth, that when he fell in love with someone else he insisted on clearing the matter with Annette. In everything we have to deal with a highly collected man and a high-principled one. He was master of his own ship, however much his infantile poet-side quailed before life and drew strength from the women about him. War put the finishing touches to his French love affair, and he turned away towards his English destiny, with perhaps many regrets and certainly some unjustified self-reproach. It is from this point onward that his life seems to become staider, more orthodox, less colourful. He had been disappointed both in love and in his political visions of human justice. There remained his art. It is worth remembering that later on he married an old family friend, and that for a long time, while he lived with his sister, they took joint charge of a small child which belonged to a widower friend in London who could not meet his responsibilities towards the infant. In other words the household structure was a real one, a homelike one in the real sense of the word. It did not lack a domestic shape capable of engendering for the Wordsworths real human contact, warmth, and responsibility.

Moreover they were all happily devotees of country life, and adept at facing the rigours of climate and the boredom of long winters in the north. To them their native landscape was a Paradise, an Eden, and they never, like other Romantics, hankered for Italy or Greece. Switzerland represented something more real for Wordsworth, not only because it was scenically grandiose but also because it embodied the highest expression of democratic values. When Napoleon invaded it Wordsworth became his implacable enemy, and his sonnets were clarion-calls to rouse the English to their responsibilities towards the rights of man and the freedom of states—and the defeat of tyrants. As time went on Wordsworth may be represented as shifting his allegiances from republicanism to high toryism; was this the inevitable hardening of the arteries which comes after forty or was it based on a measured view of man and his capacities—his ability to deal rationally and sensibly with freedom? I like to presume the latter, though the evidence goes against me.
[14]
One wonders where he would stand today amidst so many conflicting issues? One is reminded of a jotting by the indefatigable Crabb Robinson:
[15]

Wordsworth spoke with great feeling of the present state of the country. He considers the combinations among journeymen, and even the Benefit Societies and all associations of men, apparently for the best purposes, as very alarming: he contemplates the renovation of all the horrors of a war between the poor and the rich, a conflict of property with no property. The memories of the French terror, and the reign of Robespierre, had left their mark.
[16]

Young De Quincey has noted somewhere the rate of growth of Wordsworth's reputation. “Up to 1820,” he writes, “the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant.”
[17]
There is something almost irresistible in the steady deliberate advance of the poet, not simply upon his public, but upon the sentiment of the whole nation. He gradually expanded into a grave public figure, a symbol of the vigour and maturity of English literature. Perhaps even a graven image to some, or a sacred cow. To continue the story, in 1839 Oxford honoured him with a DCL.
[18]
In 1842 he was accorded a civil list pension which enabled him to resign his sinecure as a Distributor of Stamps which he had held, discharging his duties aptly and faithfully, since 1813. He succeeded, finally, Southey
[19]
as Poet Laureate in 1843. In 1850, at the ripe age of eighty, Wordsworth died. He was the father of five children, and his wife lived on for another nine years after his death. His renown was nation-wide.

Side by side with his poetic life Wordsworth lived a fruitful and purposeful private life of a family man, passed for the most part in the most quiet and beautiful part of the one countryside which he loved above all others and to which he belonged. In many ways, if one adds up the debit and credit, he was almost supernaturally lucky. To live, first of all, exactly where he wished to; then to devote his whole time, his whole spirit, to his vocation. Poetry was both his life and his
business
. There were moments of hesitation when during his youth he was threatened with having to take a job—becoming a parson or a tutor—and then he felt his poetic independence threatened. But each time the clouds passed and the future allowed him to set his feet upon the path to selfhood, and with it to fame. Has there ever been a poet (without a private income) half as lucky as he? And then, Dorothy Wordsworth—what a gift from the Gods this sister turned out to be.
[20]
Her invincible devotion to him—and not only to him, but to his work—made a shelter in which his mind could take refuge. The little harem of copyists existed only to further his aims, to make life easy for him.

With such an ambience it would have been impossible not to make the best of one's art. No wonder Wordsworth did his work entirely without the use of drugs, or even the abuse of alcohol. He was perhaps the only poet of his age to manage to work thus. Of course so sensitive a man could not expect to be free from the strains and stresses of creative unhappiness—he would have been exceptional indeed had he never shown a sign of distress or anxiety. One remembers the pain in his side which often prevented him working, and which he outfaced; one remembers the eye-trouble; and also the periods of nervous stress which gave the attentive Dorothy so much cause for alarm and misgiving. But in the end it was Dorothy and not William who suffered a mental overthrow.

Yes, there were occasional money troubles too, and the need to secure himself a sinecure from the distribution of stamps arose in middle life. But this involved only local travelling. He was never forced to leave his own countryside. He always found admirers to let him rent or borrow congenial places to live with his family. Moreover his calculated frugality put him beyond the scope of those to whom he might have found himself indebted had he been a borrower or a spendthrift. If his luck was good, his credit was also, and in money matters he showed conspicuous good sense.

The existence of a definitive text of the poetry, and of more than one comprehensive biography of the poet, gives one the courage if not the right to pick about in the record of his long life in order to isolate if possible the high spots and the low, the miracles of good luck and the calamities which beset him—no poet can hope to side step Nemesis entirely; and Wordsworth the family man, the husband and father, had many sorrows to contend with on his line of march. They temper the rather austere after-image he has left us, and point to a man capable of deep passionate feeling underneath his proud reticence—and most of all where his children were concerned.

I am thinking most particularly of the year 1812 which was a particularly bitter one for the Wordsworth family, for two of the small children died during the course of it—little four year old Catherine first, and then Tom some six months later. Wordsworth's own grief transmuted itself into one of his loveliest poems for the child, though it was not published until much later.

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
[21]

But there were other bitternesses almost as hard to surmount, such as the unexpected loss of his adored brother John, the sea captain, who went down with the wreck of his ship. This cruel calamity cast a shadow over the hearts of William and Dorothy, for John had been closest to them, and was planning to come one day and share their lives.

Dorothy's own gradual collapse and the gradual foundering of her reason must also have weighed on him a great deal—she was so much his alter ego that it must have seemed like the loss of half of his own mind to watch her slowly descending the long slopes of unreason, to end up as a total mental wreck. All these tragedies he faced with fierce pride and responsibility. Perhaps there were others of which we know nothing, but if his later poetry is coloured by an ever deepening melancholy, a deep gathering pessimism, we might suspect that it was not only due to a gradual loss of faith in man's ability to restore to himself the shattered Paradise which had once seemed (to Wordsworth) within his reach; these private blows of fate must also have helped to charge his poetry with an autumnal sadness, a resignation, perhaps the vibration of his own approaching death. And then the death of his elder married daughter Dora was the final twist of the knife.

Two meetings of a professional kind might be accounted as of capital importance to Wordsworth's thinking. The most important is of course his encounter with the greatest thinker of the age, Coleridge—that unselfish, wayward, haphazard, and eccentric genius who rushed into Wordsworth's life like a whirlwind. Never could the poet have hoped for so profound an understanding of his work; but Coleridge brought even more than sympathetic appreciation. He approved the basic principles upon which Wordsworth had founded his poetic style. How moving is this great encounter; and how tragic that this literary friendship (which gave us the
Lyrical Ballads
) was clouded for so long by a silly misunderstanding which both men were big enough to have surmounted.
[22]
Never mind. Their association fecundated a whole period of our literature.

To this momentous friendship I would add another meeting, perhaps of less consequence in terms of friendship, but of great importance to the poet's intellectual make-up—the meeting with Hamilton, the Irish mathematical genius.
[23]
Through him Wordsworth learned all that was to be known about modern science—though of course he was getting on in years while Hamilton was still a young man. But he had always had an aptitude for, a fondness for, mathematics.

Another point is worth mentioning. In spite of the somewhat static picture his life gives, Wordsworth's mind was always open to Europe through its aptitudes. By education he was a classicist and humanist, but he also adventured in Italian and German as well as French. He also travelled in Europe increasingly after the wars subsided and the frontiers opened for travellers. His sympathies were generous and universal even if sometimes hidden under a dry and restrained exterior.

The reader should also bear in mind that this poet composed aloud, testing out his verses on the ear, not only on the eye. To do him justice he should be tested on the inner ear, or frankly, aloud. It will serve no purpose to hint at a certain metrical lack of variety in his work, and perhaps a touch of humourlessness. People of this calibre must be judged by their best qualities, and Wordsworth is no exception as he steers his verse around the rocks and shoals which lay in wait for it—over-meekness, sententiousness, too much austerity, too great a rectitude—towards the open sea of English poetry. He knew full well that the reality he sought lay beyond life, and that life was a very fragile and provisional matter.

The poem is an act of affirmation—one dares to make such a statement feeling that Wordsworth would have quietly agreed.

L'amour, Clef du Mystère?
[1]

I HOPE YOU ARE STILL PREPARED
to hear about Shakespeare. I ought to begin by confessing that centenaries and anniversaries, celebrations of national genius always seem to me to savour a little of corpse-eating. But it is true that we, writers, do live on the corpses of our ancestors in the strictly anthropological sense and we are so very much their children, their creations, both physical and intellectual, that it is perhaps poetic justice that we should be dug out from time to time to make a public confession of a debt to them, and to make a standard genuflection to any of the great images of our great ancestors. In the case of Shakespeare, what I found bizarre was the choice of a date like Friday the thirteenth which is considered a very unlucky day. It seemed to me that it was going to clash with my theme, because I wanted to present a portrait of an extremely lucky man. I don't mean by that a man who did not have personal private tragedy in his life, but from the point of view of his gifts, from his genius, it seems to me that the goddess luck was perpetually at his elbow. He had to invent absolutely nothing, the machinery was all lying ready, he simply had to manifest himself and be himself. To begin with, I think we often forget that he was saved from education by the fact that he got married far too early, at the age of eighteen, and already when he went to London to make a living, he had three small children. While he himself always felt somehow dishonoured by the fact that he was not a university man (his use of the word “gentleman” simply means university man), nevertheless when we compare his imagery, in his work, with that of all his contemporaries, we see to what a degree the rather bad form of university of that day, what a bad effect it had on their work. The best of them, Chapman,
[2]
and almost anybody else one could name of that period, who suffered from a university education, his verse had become encrusted with Latin and Greek allusions with the result that it is virtually unreadable now. In Shakespeare's case, I don't think it was really lack of education. He was just every bit as much of a gentleman as Marlowe who was also a cobbler's son. It was just the small difference of the university education, I think. It was not that he could not throw gods and goddesses into his work just as liberally as anyone else, but that his
métier
made him very much more sensitive to the people he was talking to. I think perhaps half his audience would not have understood a reference to Venus or Aphrodite thrown off like that, and consequently his choice of imagery was limited very strictly to an audience.