XIIIA WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY

A good many people were pleased—not without malice—when Professor Harper discovered a few years ago that Wordsworth had an illegitimate daughter. It was like hearing a piece of scandal about an archbishop. As a matter of fact, the story, as Professor Harper tells it, is not a scandal; it is merely a puzzle. The figures in the episode are names and shadows: we know almost nothing as regards their feelings for each other or what it was that prevented the lovers from marrying. Professor Harper believes that Wordsworth has left a disguised version of the story inVaudracour and Julia. Wordsworth himself says ofVaudracour and Juliathat “the facts are true,” and the main “facts” in the poem are that the lovers wish to marry, cannot gain their parent’s consent, and give way to passion, and that after this their parents, instead of softening in their attitude, insist more harshlythan ever on keeping them apart. Wordsworth is vehement in his contention that Vaudracour was no common seducer yielding to the lusts of the flesh, and the suggestion is fairly clear that the youth thought he was taking the only way to make marriage inevitable. Consider these lines, which impute honourable motives, if not honourable conduct, to the lover:

So passed the time, till whether through effectOf some unguarded moment that dissolvedVirtuous restraint—ah, speak it, think it, not!Deem rather that the fervent youth, who sawSo many bars between his present stateAnd the dear haven where he wished to beIn honourable wedlock with his love,Was in his judgment tempted to declineTo perilous weakness, and entrust his causeTo nature for a happy end of all;Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayedAnd bear with their transgression, when I addThat Julia, wanting yet the name of wife,Carried about her for a secret grief,The promise of a mother.

So passed the time, till whether through effect

Of some unguarded moment that dissolved

Virtuous restraint—ah, speak it, think it, not!

Deem rather that the fervent youth, who saw

So many bars between his present state

And the dear haven where he wished to be

In honourable wedlock with his love,

Was in his judgment tempted to decline

To perilous weakness, and entrust his cause

To nature for a happy end of all;

Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayed

And bear with their transgression, when I add

That Julia, wanting yet the name of wife,

Carried about her for a secret grief,

The promise of a mother.

These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor Harper has collected a number of factsthat make it appear likely that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.

Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious. Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism. They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth with the same horror with which a reader of theMorning Postwould learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth may well have appeared to these orthodox parentsa representative of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be looked on as invalid—as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary. Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had alreadygone so far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette. Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her relatives and yet desired to remain near her.

All we know of Wordsworth, and all the facts in Professor Harper’s story, make it impossible to believe that he would willingly have deserted Marie-Anne and his daughter. The baptism of the child was entered in the registry of baptisms in the parish of Sainte-Croix, “Williams Wordsodsth” in his absence being represented by a local official. She was baptised Anne Caroline, and it was as Anne Caroline Wordsworth, daughter of “Williams Wordsworth, landowner,” that she was married in Paris about twenty-four years later. Wordsworth appears to have kept constantly in touch with her and hermother in the meantime, and, when peace was in sight in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy determined to cross to France and see them. A meeting took place in Calais. It was the preliminary to a marriage, but not to marriage with Annette, who, indeed, never married, but went through life as Madame Vallon. Two months after the Calais meeting Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. That he had been deeply moved by the meeting with his child rather than with her mother is suggested by the mood of the sonnet he wrote at the time: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”

Professor Harper is of opinion that Wordsworth’s love for Marie-Anne Vallon was an event of supreme importance in his life. He holds that the facts he has discovered throw “light upon many of Wordsworth’s poems.” I do not think that on this point he has proved his case. In his two-volume life of Wordsworth, it may be remembered, he even goes so far as to assign the “Lucy” of so many beautiful poems to a French original. Lovers of a great poet are naturally led to speculate as to the experiences out of which his poems grew. There is nothing of the vice of Paul Pry in attempting thus to discover the sources of the experiences the poet communicates in his verse. The theme of every poetis the experiences that have moved his soul most profoundly. And many, or most, of those experiences spring from his relations with other human beings. At the same time, there is no evidence that Wordsworth in his work was ever influenced by Marie-Anne Vallon as Keats was influenced by Fanny Brawne. It is doubtful if any women every really took the place of his sister in his heart. “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,” could be said only of Dorothy. It was the fire of affection, not the fire of passion, that glowed in Wordsworth’s soul. “Oh, my dear, dear sister!” he cried in one of his letters, “with what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. So eager is my desire to see you that all other obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running, or rather flying, to my arms.” He was in life as in literature a devoted brother rather than a devoted lover. Even Professor Harper can give no other woman but Dorothy the position of presiding genius over his life and work. This does not necessarily involve our acceptance of the common theory that Dorothy was the original around whom the “Lucy” poems were written. But, had Lucy been a Frenchwoman, Wordsworth would hardly have written:

I travelled among unknown menIn lands beyond the sea;Nor England did I know till thenWhat love I bore to thee....Among thy mountains did I feelThe joy of my desire;And she I cherished turned her wheelBeside an English fire.

I travelled among unknown menIn lands beyond the sea;Nor England did I know till thenWhat love I bore to thee....

I travelled among unknown men

In lands beyond the sea;

Nor England did I know till then

What love I bore to thee....

Among thy mountains did I feelThe joy of my desire;And she I cherished turned her wheelBeside an English fire.

Among thy mountains did I feel

The joy of my desire;

And she I cherished turned her wheel

Beside an English fire.

To interpret this as a dramatisation of his early passion in France is to strain probability.1

1I understand that Professor Harper disclaims what seemed to me the obvious interpretation of a passage in his book.

Professor Harper, then, has discovered an interesting episode in Wordsworth’s life, but I do not think he has discovered what may be called a key episode. It may turn out to have had more influence on Wordsworth’s destiny than at present appears. But we do not yet know enough even about the circumstances to get any fresh light from it either on his work or on his character.

As regards Annette, we learn from a letter of Dorothy’s, written in 1815, that she shared, and continued to share, the Royalist convictions of her people. She often, Dorothy affirms, “risked her life in defence of adherents to that cause, andshe despised and detested Buonaparte.” In 1820, Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy visited Paris and lived on intimate terms with Annette, Caroline, and Caroline’s husband. They even went to lodge in the same street. Of Caroline it was reported earlier that “she resembles her father most strikingly.” For the rest, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, when writing his uncle’s biography, said nothing about the matter. He cannot be accused of having hidden anything of very great significance. The truth is now out, and we know little more about Wordsworth than we knew before.

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