E.P. Thompson's The Romantics

...Here for the first time, walking on the public roads without a thought of livelihood, he saw into the depth of human souls, Souls that appear to have no depth at all To vulgar eyes...

...As his hero of the revolution, Wordsworth chose instead the leader of a lost cause, Toussaint L'Ouverture...

...DISSENT / Winter 1998 ation has forced this reading...

...THE ROMANTICS has a more clearly defined plot than most miscellaneous collections, and it is a plot that makes the 1790s sound a good deal like the years 19651975...

...But, having understood the symbolic meaning of social self-control, we must not expect the morality it enforces to be "nice" or "cosy": It is only as nice and as tolerant as the prejudices and norms of the folk allow...

...There is a rousing passage in one of Hazlitt's essays, where he speaks as the unrepentant Jacobin of English letters and says that the poets belong to us, so long as they are poets...

...Not only the essay "Disenchantment or Default?," reprinted here, but "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" in Customs in Common, and the chapters on the treason trials of 1794 and on the Luddite protests in The Making of the English Working Class, as much as the writings of any historian practically gave me the eyes with which I look at an entire period...

...Wordsworth's politics, it is now argued, stopped being radical at the very moment that his poetry turned ambitious...

...Though Thompson draws out Wordsworth's radical period to a full two decades, fundamentally he agrees with Hazlitt...

...It is also a piece of aestheticizing understatement, and Thompson's essay closes with an artful escape clause and a generalized qualification...

...130 DISSENT I Winter 1998 By "us" he meant the radical side in politics...

...Coleridge as a deserter from the cause he first espoused, unless one could tell what cause he ever heartily espoused, or what party he ever belonged to, in downright earnest...

...Thompson was conscious of the analogy...

...Godwin has always been inviting to ridicule, and satire against him launched some weighty reputations of the 1790s—that of Thomas Malthus, for example, who asked in apparent innocence how a society could be perfected if there were too many people...

...Fervid in his professions of revolutionary zeal, and as fulsome later in his defection to "legitimate" politics, he was a prototype of the literary apostate who would become a familiar figure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...on tour with a friend, he passed through the countryside of France on the way to the Alps: It was our lot To land at Calais on the very eve Of that great federal day...

...Liberty he felt he had experienced to its depth in childhood, though he was well versed in an earlier republican tradition, as the Sonnets on Liberty acknowledge...

...His final estimate comes close to repeating William Hazlitt's in the essay "On Consistency of Opinion": "I can hardly consider Mr...

...Thompson reminds us of the greatness of the discovery: not the souls of the dispossessed are vulgar, but the eyes that, meeting theirs, cannot imagine the depth they may hold...

...It is the work of a lonelier man, less certain that he can ever know the truth about the bonds between himself and others, yet sure that the good of life must be to search for them...

...That a crowd might have a tendency to commit wickedness, because each member is less answerable than each person would be separately: this was, to him, an abstract truth doubtless familiar from liberal theory, but an observation of no practical interest...

...but Thompson is largely concerned with the nineties, and the portrait that emerges is unexpectedly generous...

...But a prejudice in favor of the crowd is as remote from Wordsworth as any feeling could be...

...Thompson wrote there of his own suspicion of the idea of "commitment," in relation to literature above all, where DISSENT / Winter 1998 129 "the commitment is a disposition or concern in the poet, but what the poet is committed to lies ready-made, over there, outside the poet, awaiting appropriation...

...but did they work so perceptibly in concert...

...He needed to see a warm disposition here in the DISSENT / Winter 1998 131 writers or political actors he admired, and would often cite, as proof of frozen affections, the absence of crowd-sympathy in those he singled out as deplorable...

...In the present book, Godwin's belief that the disorder of popular assemblies is an impediment to reasoned discussion is said to exhibit the "arrogant vices" of his class...

...The sentence has a Swiftian accuracy: we can plainly see that the roughness was real and the music a blare of jeers and bruising assaults...

...But some way in the background, one can make out the force of a guiding maxim that revolutionary passion and poetic invention followed a single path...

...and where, looking among his friends and former allies, he seemed to see "utter loss of hope itself/ And things to hope for...

...It appears in The Prelude in close succession with the first, and both seem parts of a phantasmagoria of France in those heady months...

...The view has had some remarkable side effects...

...Rough music is a term of art with historians...

...Distaste for his utopian ideals, and contempt for the moderation with which he promoted them, seems to have lowered Thompson's opinion of anything Godwin set his hand to...

...It is an awkward moment but a prominent one, at the end of an essay that concludes an ambitious and scrupulous book...

...Wordsworth is praised again, in the essays that compose The Romantics, as an active reformer who migrated inward only in the sense that he became a revolutionist of feelings—a moral historian of people forced by neglect or ill fortune to the very edge of society, the people about whom he wrote poems like "The Idiot Boy" and "The Mad Mother" and "The Female Vagrant...

...Thompson seems to have settled on two...

...When he passed through Wisbech, a seaport town, "his lecture was attended by a 'rough music' led by a detachment of the military...

...When first broached in these terms, in 1968, Thompson's appreciation was unfashionable because it chose a political reason for admiring much of Wordsworth's poetry...

...Who would guess from that capsuleportrait the savagery of the Church-and-King mob that in a three-day frenzy burned down the house and laboratory of Joseph Priestley (a chemist and a radical pamphleteer), destroyed manuscripts and records of research covering half a lifetime, and, by the persistence of their threats, compelled Priestley to flee and resettle in London...

...The poetry with which Wordsworth is thus associated does not speak "Of joy in widest commonalty spread" or "Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower...

...He is able to see as acts of democratic imagination such works of the early 1800s as the Sonnets on Liberty and Wordsworth's tract on Spanish independence, The Convention of Cintra...

...and there we saw In a mean city, and among a few, How bright a face is worn when joy of one Is joy of tens of millions...

...He shared with the poet he celebrates a frank belief that the noble dead of every class need not be a lost cause forever...

...Some forms of rough music disappeared from history in shadowy complicity with bigotry, jingoism and worse...

...Of a scholarly edition of his political essays, Thompson says in the opening sentence of a damning review: "Coleridge earned some part of his bread, books, and drugs as essayist and leader-writer for the Morning Post and Courier...

...Yet Thompson surmises that the setting of the lines may actually be London, and that the scene of "each in his separate cell," like the terrorist plot of Wordsworth's tragedy The Borderers, has lurking behind it a domestic scandal, an abrupt disappointment with the rationalism of Godwin and his circle...

...What is under discussion is right and wrong and what is evaded is the judgment whether there is a standard of right and wrong outside the will of the people...

...Could he have become the poet he did become and yet have maintained the sense of lived solidarity as a ground note of his imaginings...

...Both Coleridge and Godwin, in spite of their faults when taken as the exhaustive moral arbiters they wanted to be, command a permanent interest that is allowed to remain hidden here...

...This confidence was unshakable and infectious, and it is alive in the last of his books...

...Thompson has moved the setting from France to England because he could more fully admire the lines if they looked like something other than a depiction of a revolutionary people bent on murderous collective action...

...These traits have no place in Thompson's sense of the period, which is rounded out, in the long essay that concludes the book, with a full-scale portrait of John Thelwall: a radical orator, poet, and essayist, whose consistency and self-sacrifice are made to point a moral against the preachers of gradual improvement or defensive conservatism...

...Citizen Samuel,' replied he, 'it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!' " Never has the posturing of a parlor radical been more delicately put down...

...Yet there was no didactic message in the poems, apart from a hatred of passive suffering...

...This is said with a respect born of deep knowledge, and not much colored by hero-worship— the tone that carried conviction in all of Thompson's historical writings...

...That was one kind of crowd...

...He looked back now, with a justified self-distrust, at his fantasies of quelling the Terror by prodigies of oratory or showing his good faith by service as a volunteer in the revolutionary army...

...To admire a writer as unregenerately individualist as Wordsworth goes against a prejudice of the dominant line of scholarship that is broadly called "historicist...

...The leader-writer's canonization as a wisdom-writer in the 1950s and 1960s was successful to an extent that had to be seen to be believed, and 'Thompson in his antiColeridge reviews was working with an unrivaled polemical gift to startle a pious consensus...

...Once, as Coleridge recalled, "we were sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him, 'Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!'—`Nay...

...His antipathy to leaders was as pronounced as his scorn for the led, and that may have been a reason why, unlike Southey and Coleridge and many other contemporaries, he never passed through a phase of idolatry of Robespierre...

...The choice has since become unfashionable for another reason...

...the cost, at this distance in time, is a certain suspension of charity...

...A second source of irritation is William Godwin, the visionary of a perfectible society governed on principles of individual judgment and sheer utility...

...Such actions of the folk are among the rituals of "social self-control," an admirable thing by comparison with discipline from above, and to that extent rough music is a practice to which "one may assent...

...Thompson makes a companion to the last book he completed, Witness against the Beast—a study of William Blake's poetry in the light of his possible ancestry among the radical Protestant sect of Muggletonians...

...He is exemplary as a radical who was hunted by the anti-Jacobin press, and by successive ministries, and who still went on resisting...

...It could not have a place in Wordsworth's career...

...It is a tricky business to criticize a working premise of a scholar one has greatly admired, in an area where he went far to shape one's own interests and perceptions, and I am in that position regarding Thompson...

...There is the start of an argument against Godwin in these pages, but only a start...

...Whatever Coleridge's attitude of the moment, a wish for acceptance drove him to advertise the pure-heartedness of his motives...

...and even Thompson can say of him: "Thelwall was utterly sorry for himself, and not afraid to show it...

...It might seem that his radical legacy, after the first decade of work in the 1790s, is far more equivocal than Blake's...

...It is an invigorating story of resistance, but enough of a story to require villains...

...His first years back in England, 1793 and 1794, appear to have brought him close to despair...

...The longest glimpse occurs in Book Six, in a recollection of the summer of 1790...

...The recognition that such barely articulate sentiments might be a subject for poetry did not come to Wordsworth early or easily...

...Wordsworth wrote them because he was thrown back on himself...

...At the end of this period he begins to write poems about persons as isolated as himself —beggars, drifters, madwomen, convicts— and with these portraits as if by accident comes the recognition of a purpose of his poetry...

...Persecution does nothing good for anyone...

...Why pretend that the expectation of substantial justice is a mere fastidious wish that manners be nice...

...And by what divination are just "some" of the victims imagined as likely to be sickened by the attacks of their tormentors...

...This argumentative rider, as Thompson calls it, has an effect of peculiar contortion...

...Both had a genuine imagination of evil, not unconnected with their fears of a violent revolution...

...He has not been inconsistent with himself at different times, but at all times...

...Thompson's is a more generous reading...

...His reluctance to place a crowd, or a people, or "the people" in an unflattering light, is not the same as refusal...

...0 NE MAY still wonder how far Wordsworth's poetic radicalism was coherent with his political radicalism...

...As it happens, Thelwall was treated once to the mercies of charivari, and Thompson's discussion of the episode is, in its directness of statement, greatly superior to the riders and parentheses quoted above...

...And so it goes on, exuberantly, for almost thirty lines...

...That place was his "home," England, where, listening in church to the prayers for victory against France, he felt himself the only voice unable to join...

...The two impulses need not be interpreted as contradictory...

...Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth's collaborator on Lyrical Ballads and the friend to whom he dedicated the work he called "the poem about the growth of a poet's mind" (The Prelude, as his editors unhappily named it), is treated here with 128 DISSENT / Winter 1998 a jaundiced skepticism that touches the other side of scorn...

...but Thompson, a historian as impressed by what people did as by what they said, finds that Coleridge did not think or act in politics to much effect...

...Its appearances in The Prelude are remarkable because they are fleeting...

...THE VICTIMS of the revolution, on the other hand, Wordsworth constantly imagines as persons in solitude...

...For some of its victims, the coming of a distanced (if alienated) Law and a bureaucratised police must have been felt as a liberation from the tyranny of one's own...

...once they have gone bitter, of course they will swing toward arbitrary power, but it does not matter: we have had the best of them...

...In Bavaria, the last manifestations of haberfeldtreiben were linked to mafia-like blackmail, anti-semitism and, in the final stage, to ascendant Nazism...

...How could he be so sure...

...That is not yet to say that the motive of the poetry is an idealism that harmonizes with the popular movements of the 1790s...

...The shock of the strangeness or sympathy that one can still feel in reading them did owe much to an intense experience of the revolution and the bafflement in which that experience trailed off...

...While he was in France, for thirteen months of 1791 and 1792, he wrote little but draft materials for An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches—poems in conventional eighteenth-century modes, which he published mainly to have something to show...

...Another kind is described in Book Ten of The Prelude, which deals with the Terror of 1793 and 1794: Domestic carnage now filled the whole year With feast-days...

...One cannot help feeling that Thompson approved of the choice—that it was part of what made him care for Wordsworth all along, even if he does not say so...

...John Thelwall, the nearest Thompson can come to a popular counterpart for Wordsworth, brings back the same question of sympathy with the crowd, since he was a poet but also a demagogue, in the mainly positive sense of an altruistic leader of people who have as yet no voice in government...

...The author was looked on as a primitive—a reputation he refused to disown, which would stay with him for another two decades...

...They found their joy, They made it, proudly eager as a child, (If light desires of innocent little ones May with such heinous appetites be compared), Pleased in some open field to exercise A toy that mimics with revolving wings The motion of a wind-mill...

...Consider the essay in Customs in Common on "Rough Music" or "charivari"— the folk custom of mocking or shaming, hounding or mobbing a chosen victim according to a picturesque protocol, with a real or fancied social grudge to back the action of the crowd...

...Thelwall's later life in Wales, pestering the government however he could, while writing articles on farming, a fragment of a novel, a book of "poems chiefly written in retirement," makes a symmetrical contrast with Wordsworth's gradual ascent to the laureateship...

...Wordsworth's most rooted intuitions went the other way...

...There was a great deal in that volume about the Muggletonian creed, and somewhat less about its disciple and allegorist, the author of the greatest English lyrics of imaginative liberty...

...He remains a figure of charm and dignity...

...Again, is there any distinction in experience between the ironically capitalized Law and what people ordinarily mean by the rule of law...

...though the air Do of itself blow fresh, and make the vanes Spin in his eyesight, that contents him not, But, with the plaything at arm's length, he sets His front against the blast, and runs amain, That it may whirl the faster...

...Of the ideals of the revolution, liberte, egalite, fraternity, his evocations of equality are the most stirring and unpredictable...

...The depth of the archival engagement drove out, or excluded as a matter of economy, a comparable range of critical inquisitiveness, and yet the result was to give Blake's thinking a credible environment in his age...

...The part of Wordsworth's career that is salvageable on both political and poetic grounds has been whittled down to three years of novice work ending in 1795...

...Much more is known about William Wordsworth, the hero of the present book: he was an inspired historian of his own thoughts and feelings...

...And the rider is further reduced to a parenthesis, in a curious sentence of The Romantics, where a possible extenuation is found for the avoidance of crowds by educated reformers of the 1790s: "(To be fair, they had good reason to be cautious of the crowd, as they looked back on the Priestley Riots in Birmingham and countless burnings of Tom Paine in effigy...

...I have always liked this passage for its nerve, but I have often wondered about it...

...It does not lead to a denial of realities so much as it leads to euphemism...

...His theory of rational reform, in Political Justice, converted many younger radicals from an evangelical belief in equality to a faith in the triumph of tolerance and persuasion, and so from a politics of protest to a final trust in "necessity" and "moral arithmetic" and projects of "sincerity" in personal life...

...the detachment of the military were anything but detached, and they were not there to attend the lecture...

...These subjects and his sense of their importance created the scandal of the Lyrical Ballads on its first appearance...

...They deploy the guillotine with the zest of children running into the wind to set a toy windmill going faster—as if the appetite of the mob were a habit that might be learned, and might come to seem natural over months and years...

...Such determined unshockability in the cause of the people involves a kind of juggling to which Thompson would never have consented on behalf of a person...

...there are scarcely another thirty such lines in all of Wordsworth...

...Somehow Wordsworth is spared the force of this criticism...

...Yet, on the question of solidarity and its manifestations in the action of a crowd, Thompson seems to me to have been liable to betray his own perceptions...

...The poem does not create the commitment, it simply endorses causes which are already known, and which have been disclosed without any poet's exercise...

...But Godwin, unlike Coleridge, was a political thinker of consistent emphasis with a ponderable impact...

...its sufferings do not immortalize the persecuted...

...The knockabout irony has a home in the career of Thelwall, who was in his element when he fought against such tactics...

...DAVID BROMWICH teaches English at Yale and is the author of Politics by Other Means...

...He goes so far as to wonder if Godwin's memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft—a vivid and affectionate book—may not have been "a blunder which exposed her to her enemies...

...even in his dreams, he cannot help identifying his fate with theirs—"Each in his separate cell, or penned in crowds/ For sacrifice, and struggling with forced mirth/ And levity in dungeons, where the dust was laid with tears...

...At that time, he recalls, so acute were his own feelings of guilt and impotence, he seemed to himself like one who "strove to plead/ Before unjust tribunals,—with a voice/ Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,/ Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt/ In the last place of refuge—my own soul...

...The impression of a passionate engagement never weakens...

...Thompson honors Wordsworth still more as an autobiographer—the author of a dramatic inquest into the motives for thoughts and feelings nobody knew were common until he discovered them, and an all-important witness to the energy given to every social idealism by the French Revolution...

...old men from the chimney-nook, The maiden from the bosom of her love, The mother from the cradle of her babe, The warrior from the field—all perished, all— Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks, Head after head, and never heads enough For those that bade them fall...

...Did they actually do so in Wordsworth's career...

...In a fine speculative essay published in Stand in 1979, unfortunately omitted from the book, he expanded on one aspect of the correspondence —the narrowing of radical politics, in both decades, from practical protest to a theoretically informed quietism punctuated by fantasies of terror...

...The second of these passages is quoted by Thompson, with an oddly forced interpretation...

...In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, he warned of "the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident...

...Wordsworth's later ambivalence toward the leveling democratic sentiments he once espoused is shown to be an imaginative response to a pressure of reaction that overtook English society in the years of war against Napoleon...

...whereas, with Thompson, it was a usual assumption that persons acting in a corps, an organized or spontaneous group with the stated or inferable aim of protesting an injustice, might of course do wrong, but so long as their ends were benevolent, complaints of their violence were more suspect than the violence itself...

...He speaks of an extended work of reflection in which Wordsworth's hopes, without giving way to disenchantment, were strongly qualified by self-questioning: It is exactly within this conflict—the moment when the received culture was challenged, all conventions were called into question, and the great humanist affirmations were abroad, but when sharp experience had shown that the florid periods of the platform Jacobin or the abstract periods of the Philosophes were inadequate—it is exactly within this conflict that the great romantic impulse came to maturity...

...They die as poets, such is the inference, before they die as radicals...

...Of fraternity, he was a most sparing witness...

...It belongs to a particular phase of his mid-twenties—after his return from France, where he had left behind his lover and their child—when he felt like a man stranded in a foreign place...

...It is a shocking passage because it explains the wildness of the Terror not as an effect of political machinations, or the distemper of a crowd gone wrong, but as an excited exertion of people getting together for a kind of pleasure...

...Godwin was a novelist of enthralling (if morbid) power and Coleridge a poet, in a few lyrics of the nineties, almost as striking and original as Wordsworth...

...Wordsworth had his own quarrel with Godwin—who had placed a theoretical ban on feelings as a motive for action—and he saw the possible abuses of such a philosophy in the hands of malevolent but "rational" persons...

...But Thelwall's political rhetoric has DISSENT / Winter 1998 133 dated as badly as Coleridge's...

...WORDSWORTH, I think, had as much feeling for individuals, and as much distrust of people in the aggregate, as it is possible to hold in a single mind...

...The Coleridge of the 1790s, a fellow-traveling Unitarian of a perfumed eloquence, enjoyed, within a small circle of associates, a formidable reputation as a political oracle...

...Sometimes in these essays, one has a sense that the author is striking while the iron is hot, and that it still is hot after two hundred years...

...Such a posture leaves "the poet free to choose causes like hats, whether from history's attic or from the radical boutiques of today" By contrast, the poems of Wordsworth and Blake themselves created a way of feeling...

...But this is the only image of its kind in The Prelude...

...But, pretty clearly, another consider132...