Wordsworth
A Life
by Juliet Barker
Ecco, 576 pp., $29.95
LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, ESPECIALLY THE biography of a great poet, is one of the most demanding of forms, demanding at the same time the very different capabilities of the historian and of the literary critic. Juliet Barker possesses to an admirable degree the abilities of the historian, and brings before us Wordsworth in detail over his long life and important career, perhaps supplanting the very good 1989 biography by Stephen Gill.
She weaves into her narrative passages from Wordsworth's poetry, often "The Prelude," and most often from the earlier 1805 version. She makes good use of that great poem about the development of the poet's mind. Clearly she was drawn to Wordsworth because he was a poet, yet she does not get close enough to the poetry itself, to precisely why it matters--that is, to the justification for her large and, as biography, valuable enterprise.
She takes account, as she must, of the central event of his life, indeed of the life of Europe in his time: the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the revolution that followed. She recounts Wordsworth's two trips to Europe in 1791 and 1792, his love affair with Annette Vallon, resulting in a daughter, Caroline. Do not get the impression that Wordsworth was some version of Byron or D'Annunzio, or even Shelley. He dutifully contributed to the support of the child. His outward life was not marked by any sort of remarkable behavior.
Immensely important for his mind, however, was his
early humanitarian enthusiasm for the Revolution and the events he observed in France. "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive," he remembers in "The Prelude," "But to be young was very heaven." If that bliss and that dawn sound familiar as regards more recent revolutions, well they might. The French Revolution was the first modern revolution, driven intellectually by the Rights of Man, that is, by theory. In that it was new. But the dawn turned dark. Wordsworth was appalled by the increasing violence and fanaticism, the fear, the rivers of blood, and then the inevitable young military officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, taking charge to restore order. Wordsworth rejected the humanitarian abstractions that led to the guillotine and to the war that engulfed Europe. As Juliet Barker shows, this reaction led to an internal revolution in Wordsworth's mind, a major revolution, its reverberations still with us.
Hazlitt, an acquaintance of Wordsworth and Coleridge, was precisely wrong, misled by his own radical politics, in thinking Wordsworth's best poetry came from his revolutionary humanitarian sympathies. No. It came from his reaction against republican abstractions, a rejection that focused his mind on the individual and on the concrete particulars of experience. It was this shift in Wordsworth's mind that led ultimately to his famous praise of Burke in the 1850 "Prelude." Burke, wrote Wordsworth, "forewarns, denounces, launches forth, / Against all systems built on abstract rights," and who "the majesty proclaims / Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time." Both Burke, "alarmed into reflection," as he said, and Wordsworth saw that political abstractions (we would say ideologies) are lethal abbreviations of thought. Burke, reflecting deeply on an actual English society, arrived at an analytical understanding that institutions constitute the unconscious mind, that is, the habits, of society.
|
