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153 5 The Dissolution of Epic “We combated for victory in the empire of reason, for strongholds in the imagination” (PrW 1:261). So declares Wordsworth of the pamphlet war that brought forth his impassioned 1809 tract the Convention of Cintra. The full title of this work is Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, To Each Other, and to the Common Enemy, At This Crisis; And Specifically as Affected by the Convention of Cintra: The Whole Brought to the Test of Those Principles, by Which Alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered. As long-winded as its title suggests, the pamphlet was late to market, not appearing until after the controversy over an 1808 cease-fire allowing a French retreat by sea from Iberia had died down. The text is almost forgotten now.1 Yet it opens a window onto the geopolitical consciousness of a poet struggling with national military failure and personal poetic exhaustion, and in so doing it reveals much about the geopolitical unconscious of the idea of culture, an idea Wordsworth would develop in some measure as a consolatory fantasy. At one point, quoting Othello, Wordsworth describes “‘the sea-mark of [his] utmost sail’” in his tract to be “understanding the sources of strength and seats of weakness, both in the tyrant and in those who would save or rescue themselves from his grasp.” With such an understanding, he continues, “we may act as becomes men who would guard their own liberties, and would draw a good use from the desire which they feel, and the efforts which they are making, to benefit the less favoured part of the family of mankind” (PrW 1:237). This statement of ethico-political purpose also captures the contours of Wordsworth’s poetic inquiries into man, nature, and society, early and late. Yet it adduces a pomposity that belies the simplicity and the attunement to the everyday that had generally characterized Wordsworth’s poetic voice until the crisis of 1808, and that would no longer so characterize it afterward. The outward dilemma framed by Wordsworth’s tract is an international version of the problem of other minds: one might call it the problem of other states, or the problem of other islands, given the insular quality of the Iberian peninsula from which the Cintra Convention scandalously 154 Modes of Insular Empire permitted the surrendered French to sail away. Wordsworth’s subject in his essay, “healthy, matured, time-honoured liberty,” is for him in this work as elsewhere, “the growth and peculiar boast of Britain,” because “Nature herself, by encircling with the ocean the country which we inhabit , has proclaimed that this mighty Nation is for ever to be her own ruler” (PrW 1:280). Spain, fatally flawed by a land border with France (however mountainous), has not been so lucky. Celebrating the Spanish guerilla war against the French invaders, Wordsworth weighs whether Spain might not be proving itself a worthy member of the brotherhood of free nations that had until recently included Switzerland and the Venetian Republic. The populism inherent in this line of thought around this time enticed Henry Brougham, writing in the Edinburgh Review, to praise the Spanish mob—and, some thought, to incite its British counterpart—so fervently that he was branded a Jacobin. One of the most memorable of Brougham’s incendiarydeclarationsbearshighlightinginthepresentcontext.Decrying the exhaustion of British domestic political protest, Brougham declared that “the Spanish revolution comes most opportunely to turn the tide quite into the opposite channel; to awaken in this country all those feelings of liberty and patriotism which many had supposed were extinguished since the French revolution.”2 Such a turn was not Wordsworth’s idea of a propitious tide in the affairs of men, and he generally sided with the Tory backlash that, stoked by such scandalous statements and by the refusal of the Edinburgh Review to support intervention in Spain, brought about, among other events, the founding of the Quarterly Review as a counterweight to the Edinburgh. Nevertheless, in this context Wordsworth could and did fancy that his Cintra pamphlet would lead to him also being branded a Jacobin by the reading public. This pamphlet does find Wordsworth highly impatient with the British state. The scandal of the Convention has to his mind tainted the island people of Britain with the brush of continental servility. British officers had been complicit in a failure to prosecute the war with full ferociousness, a failure most humiliating...

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