Andrew Klavan: Romanticon: Wordsworth's corpus reflects the growth of a conservative's mind.
[Andrew Klavan is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of such best-selling novels as Don’t Say a Word and Empire of Lies. His latest book is The Last Thing I Remember.]
It’s something of a parlor game among the commentariat to compare one era with another. Every time America’s power ebbs, the pundits conjure the fall of the Roman Empire—and every time America’s power increases, they fear it’s the collapse of the Roman Republic. Each new war must be either Vietnam again or World War II. And if we had a dollar for every time a journalist compared the current economic downturn with the Great Depression, the current economic downturn would be over. That said, we can learn from history—we have to learn from it, or what’s the use of it? All these comparisons have some legitimacy, so long as you don’t stand too close or look too deep.
It is, then, with a diffident spirit that I suggest an only faintly outlandish comparison of my own. It seems to me that the last several decades in America have been a weird echo of the decades in Europe around the coming of the nineteenth century—and that no figure can serve as a better guide to both wisdom and error than William Wordsworth, one of the greatest of the British Romantic poets and, in many ways, the very model of a modern neoconservative, defending the West’s liberal tradition against radicalism.
My argument in brief is this. The French Revolution was the historical tragedy that recurred as farce in America’s 1960s. Cranky-cons like myself tend, when thinking of the Revolution, to skip right ahead to the bloody parts, like a 12-year-old watching Friday the 13th on DVD. But the French overthrow of what Wordsworth called “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute” provided young Europeans with the same sort of goose of utopian hope that the Age of Aquarius gave the young here. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth famously recalled in later years. “But to be young was very heaven!” What aging boomer boring his grandchildren with tales of Woodstock wouldn’t say much the same?
The young and blissful Wordsworth had a good view of the action. Had he been 20 in 1970, he’d have headed for Berkeley to commemorate People’s Park. As it was 1790, he set off instead for France and arrived in Calais on the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille—a day of celebration that was supposed to mark the successful end of the Revolution. As he tells it in his towering autobiographical poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth was little interested in politics at the time: “A stripling, scarcely of the household then / Of social life, I looked upon these things / As from a distance.” He seems to have been a lot more focused on a walking tour across the Alps than on the going radicalism.
A year later, however, now a semi-dropout from Cambridge trying to avoid settling down to a life in holy orders, Wordsworth returned. It was on this trip that he met Annette Vallon, who gave him French lessons—in every sense, apparently, as she was soon pregnant with their illegitimate child. Vallon was Catholic and probably a royalist, but when Wordsworth followed her from Orléans, where they met, to her hometown of Blois, he fell in with army captain Michel Beaupuy, a revolutionary nobleman who seems to have become his political mentor. The Prelude records how he and Beaupuy would walk and talk along the banks of the Loire and through the surrounding woods. Under Beaupuy’s tutelage, Wordsworth wrote, “hatred of absolute rule, where will of one / Is law for all . . . laid stronger hold / Daily upon me.” Like a peacenik turning a blind eye to the atrocities of Communism, Wordsworth signed on to the French Republican cause even as the September Massacres were staining the streets of Paris with the blood of Catholic clergy. He seemed not to notice that the Revolution’s ideals were already giving way to the “irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy” predicted by the less Aquarian skeptic Edmund Burke.
Lack of funds forced the budding poet to return to England, but he stopped in Paris on his way. There, he later recalled, he was “pretty hot in it,” apparently taking the side of the Girondist moderate-radicals in their increasingly tense political struggles against Robespierre’s Jacobin radical-radicals. Ultimately, however, he had to go home. He left his pregnant mistress behind, and though he seems to have intended to marry her, the intent dissipated as the wars between France and England kept them apart. He always treated their illegitimate daughter decently, but I suspect he knew that history had saved him from a disastrous union. He was preserved instead for one of the sweetest and most loving marriages in literary history...
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It’s something of a parlor game among the commentariat to compare one era with another. Every time America’s power ebbs, the pundits conjure the fall of the Roman Empire—and every time America’s power increases, they fear it’s the collapse of the Roman Republic. Each new war must be either Vietnam again or World War II. And if we had a dollar for every time a journalist compared the current economic downturn with the Great Depression, the current economic downturn would be over. That said, we can learn from history—we have to learn from it, or what’s the use of it? All these comparisons have some legitimacy, so long as you don’t stand too close or look too deep.
It is, then, with a diffident spirit that I suggest an only faintly outlandish comparison of my own. It seems to me that the last several decades in America have been a weird echo of the decades in Europe around the coming of the nineteenth century—and that no figure can serve as a better guide to both wisdom and error than William Wordsworth, one of the greatest of the British Romantic poets and, in many ways, the very model of a modern neoconservative, defending the West’s liberal tradition against radicalism.
My argument in brief is this. The French Revolution was the historical tragedy that recurred as farce in America’s 1960s. Cranky-cons like myself tend, when thinking of the Revolution, to skip right ahead to the bloody parts, like a 12-year-old watching Friday the 13th on DVD. But the French overthrow of what Wordsworth called “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute” provided young Europeans with the same sort of goose of utopian hope that the Age of Aquarius gave the young here. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth famously recalled in later years. “But to be young was very heaven!” What aging boomer boring his grandchildren with tales of Woodstock wouldn’t say much the same?
The young and blissful Wordsworth had a good view of the action. Had he been 20 in 1970, he’d have headed for Berkeley to commemorate People’s Park. As it was 1790, he set off instead for France and arrived in Calais on the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille—a day of celebration that was supposed to mark the successful end of the Revolution. As he tells it in his towering autobiographical poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth was little interested in politics at the time: “A stripling, scarcely of the household then / Of social life, I looked upon these things / As from a distance.” He seems to have been a lot more focused on a walking tour across the Alps than on the going radicalism.
A year later, however, now a semi-dropout from Cambridge trying to avoid settling down to a life in holy orders, Wordsworth returned. It was on this trip that he met Annette Vallon, who gave him French lessons—in every sense, apparently, as she was soon pregnant with their illegitimate child. Vallon was Catholic and probably a royalist, but when Wordsworth followed her from Orléans, where they met, to her hometown of Blois, he fell in with army captain Michel Beaupuy, a revolutionary nobleman who seems to have become his political mentor. The Prelude records how he and Beaupuy would walk and talk along the banks of the Loire and through the surrounding woods. Under Beaupuy’s tutelage, Wordsworth wrote, “hatred of absolute rule, where will of one / Is law for all . . . laid stronger hold / Daily upon me.” Like a peacenik turning a blind eye to the atrocities of Communism, Wordsworth signed on to the French Republican cause even as the September Massacres were staining the streets of Paris with the blood of Catholic clergy. He seemed not to notice that the Revolution’s ideals were already giving way to the “irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy” predicted by the less Aquarian skeptic Edmund Burke.
Lack of funds forced the budding poet to return to England, but he stopped in Paris on his way. There, he later recalled, he was “pretty hot in it,” apparently taking the side of the Girondist moderate-radicals in their increasingly tense political struggles against Robespierre’s Jacobin radical-radicals. Ultimately, however, he had to go home. He left his pregnant mistress behind, and though he seems to have intended to marry her, the intent dissipated as the wars between France and England kept them apart. He always treated their illegitimate daughter decently, but I suspect he knew that history had saved him from a disastrous union. He was preserved instead for one of the sweetest and most loving marriages in literary history...