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

experience. Nature is freedom; the business of the world a prison. The mature Wordsworth becomes a child of nature again through the act of intense recollection. What he describes is a Cumbrian childhood spent escaping from, fighting against, what we would now call ‘socialization’: against the rote-learning, fact-packed lessons at his school in Hawkshead. Instead, nature was his tutor and his playground:
    Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
    In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
    Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
    Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
    Alternate, all a summer’s day …
    or when rock and hill,
    The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
    Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
    Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
    On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut
    Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport
    A naked savage, in the thunder shower.
    At St John’s College, Cambridge, Wordsworth was in no hurry to oblige his father’s expectation that he enter the Church or the law. Nor was he particularly enthralled with learning:
    Of College labours, of the Lecturer’s room
    All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand
    … Let others that know more speak as they know.
    Such glory was but little sought by me.
    Restive, anxious, dimly aware that something big was waiting for him, in the summer of 1790 he decided to go with a friend, Robert Jones, on a walking tour of the Alps – in that generation very much a statement of moral and political temper. The two undergraduates landed in Calais – surely not by accident – on 13 July, the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and witnessed, first-hand, the ecstatic festival of flowers and freedom. On their journey south and east through France, they
    found benevolence and blessedness
    Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring
    Hath left no corner of the land untouched.
    At one point along their journey they found themselves swallowed up in a throng of celebrating villagers, ‘vapoured in the unruliness of joy’, who gave them supper and got them to dance in a circle:
    All hearts were open, every tongue was loud
    With amity and glee; we bore a name
    Honoured in France, the name of Englishmen,
    And hospitably did they give us hail,
    As their forerunners in a glorious course.
    Two years later, after his second journey to France, the dewy innocence might have gone, but not the political idealism. Still fending off family concern about his profession, Wordsworth had gone to London, where he met Joseph Johnson and the St Paul’s Churchyard circle during the height of the Burke–Paine furore. He saw Burke himself in the Commons:
    Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
    Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
    The younger brethren of the grove …
    Declares the vital power of social ties
    Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
    Exploding upstart Theory, insists
    Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
    But the retrospective eulogy of Burke as the personification of English nature – the gnarled and knotty oak defying the worst the revolutionary storm can hurl at him – is very much the recollection of the older Romantic conservative. Given the Paine-ite attacks on established authority that Wordsworth was still to write, it seems very unlikely that at this time he would have felt quite so warmly.
    Much later, too, Wordsworth insisted that his second journey to France, in 1791–2, had been just a study-trip to learn the language. But this is where memory turns disingenuous. At that very moment, France was facing a desperate war launched by the Emperor of Austria (Marie Antoinette’s brother) and the King of Prussia expressly to uphold the rights of monarchy and to liberate Louis XVI from the grip of those who had usurped it in the name of the people. It would have been rather like maintaining that a journey to Russia in 1920 was purely a matter of studying Pushkin. And