Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy: Wordsworth, Kant, and the Making of the Post-Christian Imagination

5. Wordsworth and Political Redemption II: Paradise Lost

185 s Paradise Lost Words­ worth and Political Redemption II 5 Nameless Moral Shock Words­ worth speculates that had he not been obliged by lack of funds to return to England in late 1792 he might have perished in the Terror, fighting for the lost vision of those lines, “A poet only to myself” (10.199). Instead he lived and became a poet, but he became the poet he did become because of these lines and what they represented for him. The condescending, bookish liberal had become, briefly, an active participant in political creation. Nothing was ever the same for him again. But all this fell to pieces—for everybody, of course, but our concern is with the collapse of Words­ worth’s own personality. Why did that collapse take the form it did? Why did it lead to that kind of recovery? We are now in book 10. Words­ worth left Orléans in late October 1792 and remained in Paris for a month or so. The king was in prison, the republic was threatened by the armies of the Coalition, the September massacres had come and gone, and the hissing factions were disputing power. Robespierre’s star was rising. For now he is just a tiger; Words­ worth later likens him to Moloch. Paris “seemed a place of fear” (10.80). But so far all this merely provoked him to thoughts of action and service. He himself was “all unfit . . . for tumult and intrigue” (10.133), but as we have seen he was obsessed by the thought that “the virtue of one paramount mind” would have “cleared a passage for just 186 Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy s government . . . according to example given / By ancient lawgivers” (10.179–88). His liberal, aristocratic, and romance instincts were still undaunted, in other words. Virtue could have been imposed by a paramount mind informed by ancient laws. This, he insists, was a “Creed which ten shameful years have not annulled” (10.178). But Words­ worth himself has taught us to be wary of creeds of zeal. Truths about chivalrous service grasped in that joyous popular exercise of 1792 narrowed and hardened into something relatively illiberal and inegalitarian under the influence of what happened soon after, as he half-perceives, from the vantage point of 1804, in his very choice of the term “creed.” In any case, he was now hit by a double blow or shock. The first impact came not from events in France, from the Revolution itself, but from what he found on his sudden return home. This is the experience that in biographical or chronological terms, though not in the narrative , succeeds and counterbalances the “Bliss was it in that dawn” passage . We are now in spring and summer 1793. And now the strength of Britain was put forth In league with the confederated host; Not in my single self alone I found, But in the minds of all ingenuous youth, Change and subversion from this hour. No shock Given to my moral nature had I known Down to that very moment—neither lapse Nor turn of sentiment—that might be named A revolution, save at this one time: All else was progress on the self-same path On which with a diversity of pace I had been travelling: this, a stride at once Into another region . . . for I felt The ravage of this most unnatural strife In my own heart . . . I rejoiced, Yes, afterwards, truth painful to record, Exulted in the triumph of my soul When Englishmen by thousands were o’erthrown, Left without glory on the field, or driven, Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief— Grief call it not, ’twas any thing but that— s Wordsworth and Political Redemption II 187 A conflict of sensations without name, Of which he only who may love the sight Of a village steeple as I do can judge, 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! (10.229–74) For Britain to join the coalition of Continental powers against the French revolutionary republic was, Words­ worth says, a shock to “all ingenuous youth,” not just to him. The collective consciousness Words...