3 IDEALISM

      ‘I am studying such a book!’ gushed Robert Southey, a nineteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate, in a letter to a former schoolmate on 22 November 1793.¹ He was reading William Godwin’s enormously influential An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, published in two volumes earlier in the year, which he had borrowed from the Bristol Library. Southey’s rapturous reaction typified that of thousands of English radicals. For Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, then a teenage articled clerk, Political Justice ‘made me feel more generously’, that the good of the community was his sole duty. Godwin, a former dissenting minister and self-taught philosopher, offered a solution to the problems of these troubling times. Humanity was perfectible, or at least susceptible to permanent improvement. Man was essentially a rational creature; since reason taught benevolence, it followed that men were capable of living in harmony without laws or institutions. In modern terms, Godwin was an anarchist. Society was nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. ‘Efforts for improvement of society must therefore be aimed at the improvement of each individual in it. Until each individual is made more rational, and therefore more moral, social institutions will not become more just.’ Vice resulted from injustice – but this injustice could be overcome only by changing individuals. Godwin rejected all forms of association, including organised political agitation for social reform.

      Southey was excited by this new philosophy, which seemed to overturn conventional wisdom. ‘We are born in sin and the children of wrath – says the catechism. It is absolutely false. Sin is artificial – it is the monstrous offspring of government and property. The origin of both was in injustice.’ In a rhetorical flourish, Southey asked any man of feeling to survey the lobby at the theatres or to look at the courtesans on the streets of London. Society was manifestly depraved, he wrote primly. It was innately unjust; by aggrandising the few it oppressed the many. ‘Would man thieve did not want tempt him? Poverty is the nurse of vice where she is dogged by disgrace.’ He did not ask much for himself. ‘Every day’s experience shews me how little Man wants, and every hours reflection now tends to fix my wishes on the grave’ (he was still very young). But ‘whilst Reason keeps the balance I dare live’.²

      He rejected the conventional title ‘esquire’. A man who deplored social distinctions could obviously have no truck with monarchy – thus Southey repeatedly declared himself to be a republican, even though to do so publicly might damage his prospects: ‘Perish every hope of life rather than that I should forfeit my integrity.’ He had been swept up in the first wave of enthusiasm for the Revolution; it appeared to him as if the human race was being washed clean. Like Wordsworth, he had fantasised about fighting on the frontier to defend the young Republic. Though subsequently alarmed by the September Massacres and repelled by the execution of the Queen, he remained a determined radical: ‘I can condemn the crimes of the French & yet be a Republican.’³

Even before he discovered Godwin, Southey had imagined an ideal community, an island populated by philosophers. There society could begin anew, without rules or gradations. His imagination was fired by reports of the tropical idyll that had lured the crew of the Bounty into mutiny;* Tahiti had many inducements, he insisted, ‘independant [sic] of its women’ – not only for the sailor, but for the philosopher too. Perhaps Southey was taken with the example of Fletcher Christian, a young rebel against tyrannical authority. Another of his utopian visions was of an ideal city, Southeyopolis. In a letter describing his grandiose scheme for Southeyopolis, Southey felt it necessary to protest that he had not been drinking.⁴

Increasingly, Southey began to talk of emigration to America.⁵ There, in a state of nature, he would find contentment. To the democratic mind there was something attractive in the idea of clearing one’s own land and living in a cottage one had built oneself. As the political outlook in Britain became bleaker, America began to look more attractive. The 1790s saw a new wave of emigrants to America,* many of them dissenters depressed by repeated failure to reform the laws that discriminated against them. Early in 1794 Joseph Priestley decided that he too had had enough of England and sailed across the Atlantic, where he settled in Pennsylvania, on the banks of Susquehanna River.

      ‘I have been doing nothing and still continue to be doing nothing,’ Wordsworth had admitted to his undergraduate friend William Mathews while he and Dorothy were staying with the Rawsons; ‘what is to become of me I know not.’ He could not face either of the two careers proposed to him, the law or the Church.⁶ It was now more than three years since he had left Cambridge, and he was still drifting from place to place. His only obvious achievement in all this time had been to publish two poems, and though he had another (inspired by his walk across Salisbury Plain) ready for the press, the ‘unmerited contempt’ with which those had been treated by some of the periodicals made him reluctant to publish anything further unless he could hope to ‘derive from it some pecuniary recompense’.⁷ With no income, he was living as modestly as possible, relying on the hospitality of relatives and friends and the occasional subvention from his elder brother, who controlled what meagre resources remained to the young family.

      When he confessed to doing nothing, Wordsworth did not mean that he was entirely idle; he was correcting and adding to the poems he had written, a process he continued throughout his career. For Wordsworth, a poem was never finished; as he changed, so he wanted the poem to change, to conform with the man he had become. He found it hard to let go of his work, and only reluctantly would he ever give it to the world. In revising these two poems it may be that he was responding to Dorothy’s criticisms; certainly his later judgement of them closely resembles comments she had made in a letter to Jane Pollard soon after they were published.⁸ New passages he added to ‘An Evening Walk’ anticipate ideas that Coleridge would later articulate to him more fully, and show that the two of them had been following the same tracks before they came into contact.⁹

      Mathews