A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama Page A

You could cross the Channel to inhale some of that heady air of liberty, equality and – especially – fraternity, and work for the day when you might return in the vanguard of the forces of freedom. The French seemed to be treating British radicals as brothers and sisters. Tom Paine had been made an honorary citizen. To go to the fountainhead of freedom and to drink deeply would be more than a gesture of political tourism. It was the promise of a new life.
    Try as they might, however, not everyone could make the leap. At some point in the summer or autumn of 1792 John Thelwall took a little time off from lecturing on the cause of freedom and justice (to bigger and bigger crowds) to walk through Kent. In the guise of his literary
alter ego
, the Peripatetic Sylvanus Theophrastus, he arrives at the White Cliffs of Dover and looks out at the ‘foaming billows’ separating him from the land of liberty. The place for him is the essence of British sublimity, but there is so much to look at that he cannot decide whether the beach or the clifftop provides the more breathtaking view. He wants it all and scrambles up and down ‘above a dozen times’. But then he gets too ambitious and tries to climb a near perpendicular rock ‘with no better hold than a spray of elder, or a fragile tuft of thyme’. Three-quarters of the way there, the Peripatetic is well and truly stuck: no way up; no way down. Which describes allegorically, of course, Thelwall’s political predicament. The Cicero of the corresponding societies, arch-republican demagogue to the authorities, he has no way up, no way down. So he perches ‘though my heart beat an audible alarm … with all the calmness I was master of, beneath the hanging precipice, and contemplated the beautiful serenity of the spangled sea’. He turns ‘a longing eye towards the distant cliffs of France; and could not but regret the impossibility of exchanging my present situation for the more honourable … danger of defending with the sword of justice, the gallant struggles of that brave people in the cause of their new-born Liberty’.
    He can’t do it. Ultimately he knows he is, in his way, a British patriot. His feet have to be on its ground. So somehow ‘I contrived to let myself down, from precipice to precipice, till I arrived at last in safety on the beach, together with a fleck of chalk, and a sprig of thyme … Trophies purchased with more innocence … than all the sanguinary honours of the plunderers and destroyers of the world: the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Edwards and the Henrys, by whom the peace of mankind has been so repeatedly disturbed.’ Poor Thelwall – who would end up trying to be a farmer in the Black Mountains of Wales at Llyswen before turning to elocution teaching in London – would always be on the verge of happiness.

CHAPTER
2
FORCES OF NATURE:
THE ROAD HOME
    IN THE SPRING of 1792, and of his life, William Wordsworth had none of John Thelwall’s paralysing anxieties. Going to France was ‘pleasant exercise of hope and joy!’
    For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
    Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very Heaven!
    That, at any rate, was the way he remembered it 12 years later even when he was feeling a lot less charitable towards the French Revolution. The chronicle of his journey in and out of revolution forms part of
The Prelude
, the greatest autobiographical poem in English (or perhaps any other European language); the first section of which was written in 1798–9, exactly at the point when Wordsworth was undergoing a deep change of heart.
    The momentous theme of
The Prelude
is the struggle to hang on – through memory – to the instinctive life of childhood, even while being pulled inexorably towards an adult sense of individual self-consciousness. Immersion in nature is the great ally in this war against the inevitable erosion of innocence by time and social