Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction

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Romantics and Renegades The Poetics of Political Reaction

Charles Mahoney

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Romantics and Renegades

10.1057/9780230597624 - Romantics and Renegades, Charles Mahoney



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Romantics and Renegades Charles Mahoney Associate Professor of English University of Connecticut



The Poetics of Political Reaction

© Charles Mahoney 2003

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–96849–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mahoney, Charles, 1964– Romantics and renegades: the poetics of political reaction / Charles Mahoney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–96849–2 1. English poetry – 19th century – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 2. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 3. France – History – Revolution,1789–1799 – Literature and the revolution. 4. Political poetry, English – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 5. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1772–1834 – Political and social views. 6. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Political and social views. 7. Southey, Robert, 1774–1843 – Political and social views. 8. Hazlitt, William, 1778–1830 – Knowledge– Literature. 9. Criticism – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 10. Romanticism – Great Britain. I. Title. PR585.H5 .M34 2002 821’.709358–dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne


2002025149


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Thomas and Ursula Mahoney

v


But say I could repent and could obtain By act of grace my former state; how soon Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay What feigned submission swore; ease would recant Vows made in pain, as violent and void. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.93–7

vi



The moral interest of the fable which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound

viii

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

x

Introduction: On the Discrimination of Apostasies

1

1

‘The Laureate Hearse Where Lyric Lies’: The Making of Romantic Apostasy

13

2

The Mausoleum of Independence

33

3

‘Lawless Sway,’ Pendulous Politics

80

4

Facing the Past: Spectral Apostasies

123

5

Upstaging the Fall: The Spectacle of Romantic Apostasy

143

Criticism on the Verge

167

6

Appendix: Overview of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt

198

Notes

201

Bibliography

247

Index

258

vii



Contents

This book had its beginnings in my preoccupation with one word, apostasy. Subsequently, as I found myself returning to and renegotiating my critical bearings via this word and the multitude of tropes it invariably seemed to set in motion, it evolved into a study of the most prominent critic of romantic apostasy, William Hazlitt. From there, it took up the subjects of Hazlitt’s criticisms under this heading: Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Philip Kemble’s Coriolanus. Throughout, I have returned time and again to the multifarious valences of a word which, although it denominates a standing-away (Gk.: apo-away; stasis-stand), repeatedly violates the conditions of its own etymology. In doing so, it delineates the political as well as rhetorical cadences of falling – or, as Hazlitt understood, of the ways in which the language of poetry can be seen to fall in with the language of power. What follows here is an attempt, if not to arrest, then at least to temporize that fall and to chart its implications for our understanding of the politics of romantic writing. It is a pleasure to acknowledge many obligations. My greatest single debt is to the generosity and sharp critical intelligence of Ross Hamilton; without his repeated and prescient interventions, this study would lack whatever critical finish it might now presume to claim. At Cornell University, where this study began, I am significantly indebted to the guidance and encouragement provided by Reeve Parker, as well as by Cynthia Chase, Neil Saccamano, and Gordon Teskey. At the University of Connecticut, I have relied on the support of John Abbott, Ross Miller, Richard Peterson, and Tom Riggio. James Chandler and Orrin Wang reviewed the manuscript with unusual generosity and insight. Indeed, I have received shrewd and critical advice from many, including Ian Balfour, Alan Bostick, Jeffrey Cox, William Galperin, Kenneth Johnston, Misha Kavka, Allen Kurzweil, Marc Redfield, Willard Spiegelman, Stephen Turner, Deborah Elise White, and Duncan Wu. These readers and others have prevented me from making many mistakes. Those that remain are my own – … il n’y avait plus rien à faire que s’excuser, sans se mettre hors de cause. The completion of the manuscript was made possible by a Chancellor’s Research Fellowship from the University of Connecticut. viii



Acknowledgements

An alternative version of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘“The Laureat Hearse Where Lyric Lies”: Hunt, Hazlitt, and the Making of Romantic Apostasy, 1813’ in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24.3 (2002). Sections of Chapters 2 and 6 appeared previously in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series as, respectively, ‘The Multeity of Coleridgean Apostasy’ (‘Irony and Clerisy,’ August 1999): and ‘Periodical Indigestion: Hazlitt’s Unpalatable Politics’ (‘Romanticism and Conspiracy,’ August 1997): . An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Upstaging the Fall: Coriolanus and the Spectacle of Romantic Apostasy’ in Studies in Romanticism 38.1 (1999): 29–50. I thank the editors of these print journals and of the Romantic Circles Website, , as well as Taylor & Francis Ltd. and the Trustees of Boston University, for their permission to reprint these materials here. Charles Mahoney Old Turnpike October, 2001



Acknowledgements ix

The following abbreviations are used throughout the text and notes. Full citations will be found in the Bibliography.

BL CL CP EOT CN WH LC LB P2V PrW SP

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell and Bate. Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs. Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. Keach. Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. Erdman. Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn. Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe. Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Southey. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green. Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis. Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser. Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham.

All citations from the Examiner are taken from the Pickering & Chatto facsimile edition; all citations from Milton’s poetry are taken from the Longman editions of Paradise Lost (ed. Fowler) and the Complete Shorter Poems (ed. Carey).

x



Abbreviations

For who in the Devil’s Name ever thought of reading Poetry for any political or practical purposes till these Devil’s Times that we live in? (Coleridge to Street, 22 March 1817) A great deal of critical energy has been expended on the early political passions of the Lake poets during the 1790s: Southey’s plans for a pantisocratic community on the banks of the Susquehanna; Coleridge’s Bristol lectures against the slave trade and the war with France; Wordsworth’s inflammatory defense of regicide. But the later lives of these same poets, while every bit as representative of the so-called ‘spirit of the age,’ have been subjected to far less scrutiny. By 1815, the year of Waterloo and Wordsworth’s collected Poems, the same poets whose republican idealism had once been ridiculed by the conservative editors of the Anti-Jacobin had renounced their youthful ideologies: Wordsworth had been named Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland in 1813 and was actively campaigning on behalf of local Tory politicians; Southey, appointed Poet Laureate the same year, was composing servile royal odes; and Coleridge, no longer lecturing ad populum, was writing for the ministerial papers and planning the Statesman’s Manual, his ad clerum address to ‘the higher classes of society.’ How to explain such blatant conversions? Perhaps the best way to analyze the poets’ startling about-face is to turn to the writings of their most outspoken contemporary, the man who, to denominate the wholly unpredictable intermingling of literature and politics in the decades following the French Revolution, coined the phrase ‘the spirit of the age’: the critic William Hazlitt. Hazlitt’s lexicon extends far beyond this phrase that has lapsed into cliché, to another, more 1



Introduction: On the Discrimination of Apostasies

obscure but equally volatile term which captures both the form and the movement of the poets’ shifting ideologies – namely, apostasy. This one word, with which Hazlitt relentlessly branded and castigated the Lake poets for their political betrayals, continues to hover in the margins of romantic studies as an abiding enigma, a critical riddle. And there is no one writer more aggrieved and vigilant in his delineation of romantic apostasy than Hazlitt. The full measure of his analysis of the literary-political culture of Romanticism offers profound insight into the conversions of the poets (ideological and otherwise), and can furthermore be applied to his own writings, however antirhetorical they may claim to be. Repeatedly taking its bearings from Hazlitt’s critical interventions in the 1810s, the present study analyzes the overdetermined relations between poetry and politics in terms provided by an explication of romantic apostasy which is as rhetorical as it is political. Apostasy historically names a desertion of one’s party or, in medieval times especially, of the Church. The most famous apostate in this regard was the emperor Julian – known thence as ‘Julian the Apostate’ – of whom Gibbon and Coleridge give such approving accounts. Julian attempted to reverse the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, to return the Empire to the worship of the ancient, pagan gods (purified, so to speak, by philosophy). Apostasy is a principled, lonely diversion from the mainstream, and can therefore be felt to be courageous and good. But it is also the desertion of a position, or of a loyalty formerly held, and can therefore be felt to be a betrayal, a renunciation – at the very least a manifestation of inconstancy in one’s character. Apostasy is thus a protean concept, being capable of radical alternation between extremes, depending on one’s point of view or, as we would say now, on one’s political position. Whereas Hazlitt and his targets attached pejorative connotations to apostasy – renunciation, ‘renegado-ism,’ tergiversation – a modern reading provides more ambiguous resonance. Although apostasy has its etymological roots in ‘standing-off’ or ‘standing-away’ (Gk apo ‘off, away’ and stasis ‘standing’), it repeatedly figures a standing so precarious as finally to be indistinguishable from a falling – and not an isolated fall at that, but an always-falling which can be seen to occur with reference not merely to political principle but, far more unpredictably, literary language. The unmanageability of the term is such that any definition of apostasy as simply a standing-off postulates a limit by which, in its rhetorical performance of falling, it cannot be constrained.1 That is to say: the critic cannot but fail in any attempt to arrest the fall of apostasy. To fail (to be wanting, to disappoint) and to



2 Romantics and Renegades

default (to be wanting, to fail) share a common etymology in the old French faillir (to be wanting) as well as in the modern French falloir (to be wanting, to be necessary), and the slippage between failing and falling can be succinctly read in the root of each infinitive (as well as in the seeming necessity of falling which lurks in falloir). Figuratively, to fail is to fall, just as to fail someone may be said to be a matter of having let that person fall. I dwell here on the obliquely impacted etymological resonances of apostasy as fall and failure for at least two reasons: first, to liberate it from its traditionally static deployment as an identifiable moment of withdrawal, in order to read it instead as the movement of a falling; second, to suggest both its uncontrollability (the seeming inevitability of indicting oneself in the exposure of another’s apostasy) and its uncontainability in romantic writing of the 1810s (the acceleration according to which the falling-away of apostasy becomes an alwaysfalling). Pressuring the term in this way underscores the necessity of reintroducing a notion of figure to the literary-critical analysis of politics and the political in romantic writing, at present a predominantly historical discourse from which figurative reading has been noticeably absent. For it is only when apostasy is understood figuratively that we can take the full measure of texts such as Shelley’s Preface to Prometheus Unbound, with its formulation of apostasy as a matter of the ‘unsaying’ of one’s ‘high language.’ The height from which high language is pronounced is obviously not literal but figurative (indeed, doubly so in Shelley’s allusion to the fall of Milton’s ‘apostate angel’ from Heaven into the political abyss of Pandemonium), and the falling-off that is here denominated ‘unsaying’ inflects romantic apostasy not merely as an historical phenomenon (the renunciation of revolutionary for reactionary politics) but also as a literary figure – in this case, irony. As a failure which is figured as a falling, then, apostasy ironically reveals itself in the interruption of any narrative of disenchantment or withdrawal (from revolution to reaction, say, however inflected) and, furthermore, of any critical gesture which would presume to arrest such a narrative. Such fallings-off constitute the irony of romantic apostasy. The figurative power of apostasy comes repeatedly to the fore when we understand it not so much as a standing- but as a falling-away. As telling as is the alignment of falling and unsaying in Shelley’s text (in the course of comparing Prometheus with Milton’s Satan), it is after all with Paradise Lost that apostasy begins to suggest a negative standing which seems, in turn, inevitably to yield to a falling. Created ‘sufficient



Introduction 3

to have stood, though free to fall,’ Adam is denied any intermediary position and finally cannot stand for falling, despite Raphael’s warning to ‘beware / Apostasy, by what befell in Heaven / To those apostates, lest the like befall / In Paradise’ (7.42–5; emphasis added). Inflected as a falling, romantic apostasy is decidedly Miltonic, and it is in precisely this precipitous Miltonic tension between standing firm and falling off that we can recognize the complexity of the relations – referential as well as rhetorical – that entangle romantic politics and romantic writing. (As was the case for Milton’s apostate angels, so too for Hazlitt’s reactionary renegades: ‘Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.’) For example: texts as otherwise disparate as Coleridge’s epigrammatic signature – ‘ΕΣΤΗΣΕ=S.T.C.,’ or ‘He hath stood’ – and Shelley’s Preface to Prometheus Unbound allow us to formulate romantic apostasy as, from the outset, a critically linguistic predicament. While Coleridge’s postrevolutionary motto denies its signatory’s own falls and fallings-off in order both to right and write his standing (all the while allusively conjuring the Miltonic dictum, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’), Shelley’s comparison of Prometheus and Satan highlights the risky alignment of the heights with high language (as when Satan ponders, ‘how soon / Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay / What feigned submission swore’ [4.94–6]) in analyzing recantation as a falling. What is it, then, about the poet’s diction and rhetoric that determine the ‘unsaying’ of his ‘high language’? These relations, and this question, are at the heart of my analysis of the rhetoric of romantic apostasy. Through detailed historical assessments of English literary and political culture from the revolutionary decade of the 1790s through the reactionary years of the Regency (1810–21), combined with close readings of the literary language of lyric poetry, drama, periodical criticism, and political prose, I examine the politics of Romanticism – which is almost to say the politics of revolution – in terms of its critical and rhetorical status as language, particularly as such language elucidates the forms and figures of apostasy. Central to this argument is an attempt to challenge the predominant understanding of ‘political’ as principally a matter of the historical topicality of a work and the ideologies attributed to its writer. To that end, I elucidate a set of recurrent critical claims and concerns articulated in romantic writing regarding the language of politics and the language of power, and, consequently, construe ‘politics’ in terms of the romantic text’s staging of its competing claims for critical control – a control not merely of a political crisis, but also and equally importantly of one in figuration. In pursuing this




argument, I repeatedly come up against the elusive status of romantic apostasy: in denominating the inability to stand by one’s position, apostasy succinctly names a particularly romantic anxiety concerning the precarious relation between literary language and ideology, and provides the readings that follow with an apt rubric under which to examine the various modalities of standing and falling repeatedly enacted by romantic writing. Hazlitt’s multivalent critique of romantic apostasy – especially when catalyzed by the poetical and political lives and after-lives of the Lake poets – regularly provides a powerful site for this comparison of the political construction of apostasy (as an ethical dereliction or betrayal) with its rhetorical status (as an uncontainable falling characteristic of figurative language), in order then to reveal the ideological conflation of a linguistic function with a physical reality (falling) that repeatedly and unpredictably occurs under the name of apostasy. The point of such a critique is not to expose the apostasies of the Lake poets (the extravagant inconsistency between their youthful Jacobinism and their middle-aged legitimacy) but to analyze the formal and rhetorical structures of their writings in terms of what I call, with regard to Coleridge’s odes, a ‘poetics of the verge,’ those features of their language which seemingly precipitate a falling in with power. For what is finally at stake in such a reconsideration of the politics of Romanticism is the possibility of formulating a political writing which is something other than merely a writing about politics. Politics has long been privileged as a prevailing category in what Frances Ferguson has termed the ‘literary taxonomy’ of Romanticism and romantic studies (107). Preoccupied as it has been with its own methodologies, much recent romantic criticism attempts to rewrite romantic allegories of literary history as political event, with the ultimate goal of reclaiming the French Revolution as more properly the genealogy of the romantic critic than, say, the Jacobin poet. In delineating the long entanglement of romantic criticism with the meanings of the French Revolution, Jon Klancher has noted that ‘Pressing the aesthetic, psychological, and ideological claims of romantic discourse has always entailed making a claim for what the French Revolution meant, and above all what it means now in the critic’s own historical moment,’ for ‘the political subtext of romantic criticism is the one that constellates the French Revolutionary’s political moment with the literary critic’s’ (‘English Criticism’ 463). Nowhere is this constellation more legible – indeed, obtrusive – than in Hazlitt’s writing. Hazlitt has of late become an unavoidable, if not in fact pivotal, site of appropriation by competing definitions of (political) Romanticism, given his



Introduction 5

insights into the political and cultural stakes of romantic writers’ selfrepresentations, most notably in terms of the apostasy involved in attempting to bury or efface an earlier self. Politics, Hazlitt, and apostasy, then: ever since the ‘reconsideration’ of Romanticism began in the early 1960s,2 these three terms have been repeatedly allied. Any attempt at defining ‘Romanticism’ has required determining what ‘politics’ means; ‘politics’ has been inflected by an appropriation of Hazlitt; and Hazlitt’s political tenets and writings have been represented as stating the argument for political consistency. Indeed, regardless of whether or not his writing is even considered, ‘Hazlitt’ has come to signify a particularly efficacious defense against apostasy. The reception and lasting influence of M.H. Abrams’s early ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’ (1963) reveal the degree to which configurations of the politics of romantic writing depend upon Hazlitt. Taking his title from what he terms Hazlitt’s ‘remarkable book of 1825, which set out to represent what we now call the climate of opinion among the leading men of his time,’ Abrams champions Hazlitt for giving currency to the dangerous phrase ‘the spirit of the age,’ which Abrams interprets as endorsing his own views ‘that the age had an identifying “spirit”’ and that ideas and national definitions of culture can (and do) act through individuals (‘Spirit’ 26–7). (It is of course Wordsworth of whom Hazlitt remarks, more equivocally than Abrams takes it up, that his ‘genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’ [WH 11.86].) Twenty years later in The Romantic Ideology (1983), Jerome McGann reads the variety and conflict of The Spirit of the Age as indicating just the reverse of Abrams’s claims for a poetic formalism which unifies romantic writing in the wake of the French Revolution. Hazlitt’s book is proof instead, according to McGann, that ‘not every artistic production in the Romantic period is a Romantic one … ; indeed, the greatest artists in any period often depart from their age’s dominant ideological commitments’ (19). Abrams and McGann share the assumption that a literary-historical period can in fact be construed in terms of a dominant ideology, and their claims succinctly represent the two main strategies of deploying Hazlitt along such lines: whereas Abrams can be seen to cite Hazlitt the literary critic who justifies the once-prevalent conviction of Wordsworth’s poetic representativeness, McGann emphasizes Hazlitt the cultural critic who reveals the routinely elided ideologies that are understood to determine more recent definitions of Romanticism. Abrams’s Hazlitt serves as the first critic to validate his emphasis on Wordsworth’s ‘high argument,’ while McGann’s Hazlitt serves as the prototypical ideology critic, exposing




the various ways in which history and politics are, as Klancher will put it, ‘sublimed into the romantic Imagination’ (‘English Criticism’ 464).3 In thus idealizing the legacy of the French Revolution in ‘English Romanticism’ (and later, in greater detail, in Natural Supernaturalism), Abrams implicitly accepts Wordsworth’s claim in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads for the correspondence between social and literary revolutions, and proceeds to argue that political tenets can be translated into poetical forms. Carl Woodring, on the other hand (and in response to Abrams’s claims) discounts the possibility of such a correspondence, noting at the outset of Politics in English Romantic Poetry (1970) that ‘I find it personally hard to assert that the French Revolution exerted pressure for a renovation in prosody’ (11).4 Repeatedly stressing that his subject ‘is politics in poetry, not poetry in politics’ (7), Woodring writes, ‘Whether or not poetry influences or accompanies political or intellectual change in a way to legislate for mankind is of little moment … , for ours is the opposite topic, politics in poetry’ (12). For Woodring, ‘politics’ simply denominates a variable yet recognizable set of ideas and references that can be contained in, although not produced by, language – from which it follows that ‘within the poems here studied … , much of the reference and connotation along the rise and fall can be accounted political’ (12). In restricting the political aspect of romantic poetry to the topicality of its reference, Woodring overlooks the consideration that the ‘politics’ at work in the language of the poetry he cites may not be simply a product of translating ‘reference and connotation’ back to their apparent empirical referents, but a function of the very nonconvergence of what he terms ‘the rise and fall’ of the poetry with the competing claims of ‘reference and connotation.’ In his now-classic analysis of romantic apostasy, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’ (1969), E.P. Thompson clarifies early on that romantic apostasy must be understood in terms of reference – more specifically, as a failure of reference. The apostasy of the Lake poets thus stems from an inability to locate their hopes in the ‘harsh and unregenerate reality’ around them. Hence, of Wordsworth’s ‘transposition of enthusiasm from overtly political to more lowly human locations,’ Thompson suggests that Wordsworth did not do so (as Abrams maintains) in order to effect a revolution in verse; rather, ‘because the objective political referents appeared unworthy,’ Wordsworth sought ‘to locate the aspirations of fraternité and égalité in more universal, less particular – and therefore less fragile – referents’ (151).5 Such activity occurs under the aegis of ‘disenchantment,’ Thompson’s term for the creative moment of a ‘Jacobinism-in-recoil or a Jacobinism-of-doubt’



Introduction 7


There is a tension between a boundless aspiration – for liberty, reason, egalité, perfectibility – and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also. There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art. But when aspiration is actively denied, we are at the edge of apostasy, and apostasy is a moral failure, and an imaginative failure… . It is an imaginative failure because it involves forgetting – or manipulating improperly – the authenticity of experience: a mutilation of the writer’s own previous existential being. (152–3) Apostasy emerges here as a default, the active denial of aspiration and a failure of the imagination. Thompson’s deployment of the term significantly expands the limited meaning of ‘apostasy’ as a repudiation of a political or religious principle (a repudiation which consists in standing away from the previously held position) through describing apostasy in terms of precipitousness and the threat of a fall: it is a matter of arresting oneself at ‘the edge of apostasy.’ Figured as a verge, the ‘edge of apostasy’ marks a faultline over which, in a moment of failure, the poet will default. When the fall named by apostasy is furthermore seen to be a falling back (‘Wordsworth fell back within the forms of paternalistic sensibility’ [175]), apostasy emerges as in fact a secondary fall, ‘a relapse into received patterns of thought’ (177), if not, finally, as an infinitely protracted economy of falling (in, out, away, back …). As we shall see, these are precisely the implications of Hazlitt’s forbidding aphorism, ‘Once an Apostate and always an Apostate’ (WH 7.135). One of Thompson’s primary goals in ‘Disenchantment or Default’ is to challenge those accounts of romantic apostasy that treat the politics of Romanticism too narrowly as merely a history of ideas (as if Godwinism ‘were the only set of republican ideas available’ and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s rejection of Hartleian mechanistic psychology as well as Godwinian rationalism immediately precipitated a thorough ‘rejection of republican ardor’ [150].6) The purpose of Thompson’s theorization of disenchantment is to open up what he calls the space of ‘actual lived historical experience’ (150),7 for only



antecedent to default or apostasy (152). Whereas disenchantment names a moment, however protracted, on a faultline between radical and traditional culture (a move away from the intelligentsia toward ‘the common people’ [150]), apostasy names its repudiation and thus marks a failure of the imagination:

there, he contends, can one ask questions such as ‘What happened? What made it happen?’ (155). Furthermore, how did disenchantment give way to apostasy? To these pressing queries regarding the agency of apostasy – ‘What made it happen?’ – Thompson finds this answer: it is ‘impossible for men to hold on to aspirations long after there appears to be no hope of inserting them into “the real world which is the world of all of us”’ (174), for ‘there must be some objective referent for social hope’ (177). These pronouncements are not entirely satisfying as conclusions to such an exemplary exercise in close historical reading. Having gone to some length to construe apostasy as an abiding crux of romantic criticism,8 Thompson himself succumbs to a degree of critical failure in relapsing into such stale patterns of explanation, thus reducing romantic apostasy to a matter of social alienation. To do justice to the complexity of the historical, political, and literary agendas outlined in ‘Disenchantment or Default,’ and to test their reach, sustained attention to Hazlitt’s writing is crucial. Thompson regularly cites Hazlitt’s pointed insights into the modalities of apostatic self-revision – indeed, his argument is predicated upon depicting Hazlitt as a proto-Thompsonian conscience for romantic criticism – but he never grants it the attention he gives to Wordsworth’s unpublished poetry of 1797–8 (‘The Ruined Cottage’) and certain of Coleridge’s private letters (the notorious defenses of his own conduct as written for his brother George [March, 1798] and Sir George Beaumont [October, 1803]), Thompson’s preferred forms of ‘actual lived historical experience.’ Nevertheless, it is Hazlitt’s published writings as well as his public life that provide Thompson with both a crucial trajectory for his essay and, ultimately, a counterexample to his own ‘defense’ of apostasy (the necessity of an objective referent for social hope if one is to maintain a revolutionary agenda). Defining apostasy as a moral as well as an imaginative failure, Thompson initially turns to Hazlitt’s argument in ‘On Consistency of Opinion’ (1821): while there need be no objection to a poet changing his opinions, ‘he need not … pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards; … he need not become one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire of himself’ (WH 17.25, cited 153).9 Yet in concluding, Thompson abruptly stands off from his previous reliance upon Hazlitt in order in fact to condescend to Hazlitt’s consistency. Thompson cites as representative Hazlitt’s eulogy for the millenial visions of the early 1790s (at the end of his second review of The Excursion [1814]), where Hazlitt recalls the ‘glad dawn of the day-star of liberty’ and laments, ‘To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously and wilfully



Introduction 9

blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less than what we owe – hatred and scorn as lasting’ (WH 19.18, cited 177–8). As though embarrassed by the affective excesses of Hazlitt’s grief, Thompson seeks to minimize its force, noting that ‘there is a curious arrest, a stasis, in this: the passage works by means of a tension between stale libertarian rhetoric (“glad dawn,” “day-star,” “golden era”) pressed to the point of self-mockery, nostalgic rhythms, and sudden, muscular polemic’ (178).10 The effect of such downplaying is to reduce the force of Hazlitt’s position as a possible rebuttal to his own conclusion regarding the impossibility of holding on to idealistic aspirations. While in Thompson’s account Hazlitt is by no means a political apostate, he nevertheless appears here to have fallen prey to an imaginative failure remarkably similar to that which beset Wordsworth and Coleridge. If this is the case, what Thompson’s reading reveals is that romantic apostasy is not in fact a matter of political betrayal so much as of a rhetorical falling away – a falling away the exigency of which is a matter of style or of the constraints toward style. In other words, apostasy is a product of an inclination toward falling which abides in the literary structures of Hazlitt’s (and others’) writing.11 There is no question but that Hazlitt has been consistent in his political opinions; it is the crowding of both ‘stale libertarian rhetoric’ and ‘self-mockery’ into Hazlitt’s literary position that would seem, for Thompson, to have ironized his stasis and precipitated him over the ‘edge of apostasy.’ As Thompson’s analysis makes clear, Hazlitt’s writings appear both to expose and to succumb to such a falling. This unseemly possibility – that rhetoric, or the force of language, might ‘press’ its writer over the verge – will be my explicit concern. More than anywhere else in romantic writing, it is in Hazlitt’s critique that we can read a strain between the categories of the ‘literary’ and the ‘political’ which resounds throughout romantic as well as recent consideration of the riddle of romantic apostasy. In defining politics less historically than critically, such issues as, say, Hazlitt’s preoccupation with Wordsworth’s ‘Jacobin poetics’ and his notorious contention that ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ (WH 5.347, apropos Kemble’s 1816 production of Coriolanus) are relevant not merely as an ideological critique of the political apostasy of the romantic poet but, more importantly, as a figurative analysis of the poet’s susceptibility to the effects of his own language. It is precisely this insistence on reading the inherence of the political in the literary that makes Hazlitt so compelling as a critic of Romanticism, and as a possible model for us now as to what it might look like to re-




read and re-define the politics of romantic writing. In order to do justice to Hazlitt’s insight, we must supplement that criticism which locates the politics of romantic writing in its referential topicality (the language of power, considered institutionally) through explicating its linguistic imperatives (the language of power, considered rhetorically), particularly as manifested in ‘the very idioms of language’ – the site, for Hazlitt, of the practice and perpetuation of tyranny (WH 7.12). For it is there, in the peculiarities of the English written not only by Hazlitt but also (in these pages) by Burke, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Hunt that we can read a political critique (and a critique of ideology) which works through such linguistic imperatives as the text’s referential functions and the laws of genre. What I denominate here as ‘politics’ or ‘political reading’ closely resembles what Carol Jacobs terms the text’s ‘critical performance,’ in which ‘the text’s forces of control – representation, authority (artistic, political, theological, legal), and criticism – [are] unbound precisely in the moment, or rather process, of their triumph, an unbinding that perpetually undoes the various gestures of teleological closure’ (Uncontainable Romanticism ix). To re-read romantic writing in light of Jacobs’s formulation of unbinding enables us to recognize ‘politics’ as a category of textual production rather than as a seemingly controlled reference, and to postulate it in terms of the romantic text’s staging of its competing claims for critical control – a control not merely of a political crisis, but also and equally importantly of one in figuration.12 What emerges is a writing in which ‘politics’ signifies the struggle for critical control over, for example, the laws of genre as enforceable principles of noncontamination, or over the linguistic determination of the Jacobin poet’s apostasy. Our constructions of the political in romantic writing need to be subjected to just such an unbinding if we are to read ‘politics’ not strictly in terms of gestures of thematic or referential control, but as the work performed by ‘the very idioms of language.’ Through explicating the terms and tropes that shape the complex relations between language and politics in romantic writing, Romantics and Renegades reveals romantic apostasy to name both a figuration of the political and a politicization of the figural. The movements and declensions of apostasy are functions of form and figure, as manifested here most explicitly in a preoccupation with the generic boundaries (which is to say, verges) of odes, sonnets, epitaphs, the drama, and – most pervasively – periodical criticism. While the literary character of romantic political discourse is legible throughout the texts and careers of the writers under consideration here, I begin with Southey’s appointment to the Laureateship in 1813



Introduction 11

(Chapter 1) because it is at this time that the term ‘apostasy’ enters public discourse. Subsequently, I turn back to the 1790s and recommence with Coleridge due to the labyrinthine complexity of his apostasy, however inflected (politically, metaphysically, poetically, religiously … ), as well as the complications it has posed for critics of Romanticism for 200 years. Furthermore, doing so will allow us to proceed with some semblance of chronology from Coleridge’s writings up until 1802 (Chapter 2), through Wordsworth’s sonnets between 1802 and 1816 (Chapter 3), to Southey’s response to the Wat Tyler crisis of 1816–17 (Chapter 4), before taking up Hazlitt’s interrogation that same winter of Kemble’s Coriolanus (Chapter 5) as well as, finally (Chapter 6), his analysis of the politics of both romantic prose and of that initiating apostate, Edmund Burke. Romantics and Renegades addresses the predicament and the pathos of romantic writing, arguing that its fall from revolutionary aspiration into reactionary disclaimer is less a political failure than an effect of literary language. In other words, it analyzes the dilemma of romantic apostasy as the poetics of a political reaction. For our understanding of the relations between poetry and politics to move beyond the referential impasse repeatedly arrived at by historicist criticism, we need to explicate apostasy as a rhetorical operation – that is to say, as a precipitous yet unavoidable function of a text’s literariness. Understood thus, as a trope, romantic apostasy designates less a postrevolutionary historical phenomenon than an abiding crisis in literary signification.




‘The Laureat Hearse Where Lyric Lies’: The Making of Romantic Apostasy

As detur digniori was the maxim upon which the thing was likely to be bestowed, they thought it would become me to accept it. (Southey to Wynn, 20 Sept. 1813) When the reigning Poet Laureate, Henry James Pye, died in August 1813, Leigh Hunt promptly addressed the matter on the front page of the Examiner, displaying it prominently as that week’s ‘Political Examiner.’ Rather than speculate, as might have been anticipated, as to who might be picked to succeed Pye, Hunt saw the vacancy as an opportunity to abolish an arcane office which he considered politically as well as poetically indecent – indeed, ‘noxious.’ Not opposed to the ornamental trappings of monarchy per se, Hunt singled out the Laureateship as not simply absurd but actually ‘contagious’ and finally degrading both to the Sovereign and to the Laureate. A pernicious office, ‘paid for annually flattering the Prince to his face in so many set terms, whatever may be his merits or demerits’ (‘Office’ 513), the Laureateship stigmatizes its occupant as the king’s officially sanctioned verse-maker (versificator regis) at the same time as it compromises the dignity of the ruler who would bestow a sinecure upon a rhyming flatterer. As a consequence, the office is all but impossible to fill satisfactorily: If you give it to a bad poet, he makes an involuntary burlesque of it and becomes doubly ridiculous; if to a good one, he is debased by its acceptance; and on the other hand, if the prince is a bad prince, he becomes doubly ridiculous by the praise; and if a good one, degrades himself by purchasing what he might win by deserving. (514) 13



1

This, then, is the paradox of the Laureateship: regardless of the virtues of either the poet or the ruler, it is an office which inevitably compromises what Hunt refers to time and again as a characteristically English spirit of independence. Its prostituted verses reflect poorly on both the Sovereign and the Laureate, demeaning the former through subjecting him to slavish adulation while, in the case of the latter, severing the poet from the patriot and turning him into a literary sycophant. Bound to be a panegyrist whether or not he admires the object of his encomium, the Poet Laureate loses his own independence – his ability to stand, as well as his own sovereignty in the realm of letters – in the course of bartering his verses for laurels, and subsequently kneeling before the Sovereign to receive them. Thus, invariably burlesquing either the head of state or the ‘head of the literary class’ of the day – if not both – the Laureateship does a disservice to both poetry and politics. If the Laureateship is as ridiculous and absurd as Hunt makes it out to be, however, and if it has just been occupied by as seemingly inconsequential a writer as Pye,1 why then does Hunt devote an entire editorial to it, one in which he vehemently calls for its abolition? Regardless of the poetical merits of any given laureate, the office provides the most visible link between English poetry and English politics – or, more comprehensively, between literature and power – in England’s evolving constitutional monarchy of the Regency. As such, the office galvanizes cultural discourse regarding the crossing of the taste-of-the-state with the state-of-taste for critics of the regime’s taste in either poetry or politics. And given the Examiner’s avowed purpose of ‘telling the truth to power,’ as well as its outspokenness in exposing ministerial corruption and excess, it comes as no surprise that Hunt should emphasize sovereignty of character and independence of judgment to the degree that he does throughout his campaign against the Laureateship in the summer of 1813. His argument accrues even greater force when we recall that, in August, 1813, Hunt was championing the independence of Englishmen and English poets from his cell in the Surrey Gaol, where he had been imprisoned since February, 1813 (and would remain until February, 1815, with his brother John serving a concurrent sentence in Coldbath Fields Prison), following his conviction in December, 1812, on charges of having libeled the Prince Regent – the same prince who would appoint the new Poet Laureate.2 Accordingly, the issue of the Laureateship provides Hunt with a timely forum for his persistent strictures on the political and moral shortcomings of the Regent, strictures which it would have been dangerous to articulate




any more directly. Beyond this critique, however, what is ultimately at stake in Hunt’s denunciation of the Laureateship is a trenchant analysis of the reciprocal contamination of poetry and politics by one another in shaping the critical ‘character’ – the persona as well as the spirit – of postrevolutionary English Regency writing. In what follows, I want to look briefly at Hunt’s 1812 trial, with its attention to the conflation of the political and the literary in the contemporary understanding of libel, as a prelude of sorts to the 1813 ‘debate’ over the Laureateship. One result of making such a ‘case’3 for the scrutiny of the Laureateship in 1813 is that we will be able to read a significant, overdetermined reconsideration of the politics proper to the ‘patriotic’ English poet,4 one responsible for fashioning a postrevolutionary poetics which will in turn inform the texts and careers of the Lake poets in the ensuing years. While a trial may at first appear a decidedly ‘political’ matter and a poetry competition a properly ‘literary’ concern,5 these two categories invariably cross (and cross-up) one another in Regency writing, as a result of which much ostensibly political writing from these years is distinctly literary while much writing advertised as literary is decidedly political. Nowhere is this more evident, more volatile, than in the writings of Hazlitt, whose career as a journalist dates from precisely this period. In examining the emergence of Hazlitt as a political writer apropos the office of the Laureateship in the fall of 1813, we can read in miniature the characteristic collusion of the literary and the political in romantic writing, as well as the vocabulary and strategies with which Hazlitt in particular will persevere in exposing the ‘little arts of sophistry’ with which ‘power’ veils and dissimulates itself. While our consideration of both the office of the Laureate and Robert Southey’s appointment to it in September, 1813, will most directly concern the writing of Hunt and Hazlitt, their criticisms are representative of the intense scrutiny the appointment received in the periodical press. Finally, it was in fact precisely at the time of Southey’s appointment that the term ‘apostasy’ entered public discourse as an explanatory epithet for the seeming virtuosity of certain poets in transforming themselves into versions of a laureate – that is, servile and self-serving flatterers of institutional power. I do not wish to suggest, however, that Southey ‘turned’ apostate when offered the Laureateship. My point here is not to isolate a particular moment (textual, personal, historical) at which Southey can be arrested and said to have turned away from the political and poetical Jacobinism that characterized his writing of the 1790s; rather, I want to situate romantic apostasy as a public phenomenon of the 1810s and to examine it within the larger context of



The Making of Romantic Apostasy 15

Regency literary and political discourse at this time, in order to illustrate the degree to which it galvanizes a multivalent vocabulary of standing and falling for Regency writing. Regardless of when Southey may have shifted his political allegiances, he was publicly branded as an apostate in September, 1813. The consequence was a cross-examination of the politics of contemporary poetry which resonated for years in the reading public’s evaluation of the Lake poets. And at the center of this interrogation is the volatile, circumlocutious figure of the apostate.

Albeit in a slightly different register, it was the aura of apostasy that provoked Hunt’s ire in the allegedly libelous editorials on the Prince Regent in March, 1812, where ‘politics’ emerges less as a matter of partisan accusation than as the staging of competing claims for critical control over the ‘character’ of the Regent.6 Bitterly disappointed following the Prince of Wales’s political about-face upon being invested as Regent (retaining a Tory cabinet despite his earlier identification with and endorsement of Whig policies, especially regarding ‘the Catholic question’ and the emancipation of the Irish), Hunt devoted a number of ‘Political Examiners’ in February and March, 1812, to the Prince’s political inconsistency,7 culminating in his lengthy commentary on the disdainful treatment of the Prince by the Benevolent Society of St. Patrick at their annual dinner. In both this climactic editorial and an earlier indictment of ‘regal flatterers,’ Hunt singled out for censure the pernicious influence of habitually speaking of the Regent in ‘terms of extravagant panegyric,’ not least because it betrayed ‘a want of consideration for the individual, and may be of eventual injury to the nation at large’ (‘Ministerial Movements’ 130) – precisely the indictment he would later level against laureate verses. It was actually not Hunt’s pronouncement on the public rebuke of the Regent that caught the attention of the Attorney General, but his critical commentary on a eulogy of the Regent which had run the same week in the Morning Post. Condemning this panegyric for its ‘sickening adulation’ (‘St. Patrick’s Day’ 179), Hunt castigated these ostensibly independent verses for their resemblance to ministerially commissioned poetry. In other words, it was his parodic ridicule of laureate-like verses that garnered the Examiner its fourth ex officio information. Hunt’s ‘fusion of literary taste into all subjects whatsoever’ (Autobiography 175) truly had not vitiated but in fact heightened the political profile of the Examiner: literary criticism had become liable to charges of seditious libel.




Ironically, in his first call for the abolition of the Laureateship, Hunt had contended that the writing produced by the Laureate was itself libelous. With the publication of Pye’s ‘New Year’s Ode’ for 1810 – a ‘complete specimen … of true Laureat flattery and fiction’ – Hunt had denounced the ‘gross farce’ of official poetry in no uncertain terms as nothing less than libels: Now … , – granting that Mr. Pye writes his Ode but as a matter of office, and that nobody expects to find it any other than what it is, – what are such compositions after all but libels on the good sense of the nation, libels on the dignity both of him that writes and him for whom they are written, and in fine, subjects of half-yearly disgust to all reasonable people? (‘On the New-Year’s Ode’ 34) In their susceptibility to sycophantic political truisms (‘the poet reminds us of the name of our country five times in six lines, and … of our never-dying gratitude to the King’ [34]) and thorough disregard for matters of diction (‘in the true court manner, by precedent … , the epithets and other poetical ornaments are like all former ornaments’ [34]), laureate verses are, following Hunt’s imputation, libelous: malicious defamations of any person which ‘provoke him to wrath, or expose him to public hatred, contempt, and ridicule’ (Blackstone 4.150). While odes such as Pye’s compromise the august dignity of the station and personage of the crown through their fawning misrepresentation of the state of England as well as of George III in 1810 – hailing the ‘halcyon days’ of an ailing monarch’s ‘lengthen’d reign’ (l. 12) – Pye exposes the office of the Laureate itself to contempt when he earnestly enjoins ‘the hallow’d rites of prayer and praise / To Heaven’s high throne their grateful incense raise.’ (ll. 27-8). What fundamentally incenses Hunt is the spectacle of any poet who stands to receive a raise for his praise. Here, both the matter and meter of pay inveigle themselves into several earlier, equally dubious couplets: Raptured I pour the verse again, To hail the British monarch’s lengthen’d reign, To celebrate the rising year, In which a king, to Britain dear, Bids every British breast with grateful lay Bless the tenth lustre of his lenient sway. For while I strike the votive lyre, The thrillings of the trembling lyre





While the avowed purpose of Pye’s commissioned lay may be to solicit a blessing for the King, perhaps what it really has to give thanks for is the lenience of a sway that tolerates lines such as these: hired praise may indeed pay, but it costs the Laureate the lenience of every British ear. Workmanlike as these verses are, they expose English poetry (as represented by the Laureate, or ‘prince of poets’) to contempt; however inadvertent, such ridiculous burlesques render the Poet Laureate less a patriot than a criminal. In 1813, however, the criminals – at least the imprisoned criminals – were the Hunts, who had been found guilty of libel in December, 1812, for Leigh Hunt’s ostensible defamation of the Regent in exposing the inconsistencies between the realities of the Prince’s political as well as private life and the Prince as portrayed in a decidedly laureate-like eulogy printed in the Morning Post: ‘You are the glory of the People – You are the Protector of the Arts – You are the Mecænus of the Age – Wherever you appear, you conquer all hearts, wipe away tears, excite desire and love, and win beauty towards you – You breathe eloquence – You inspire the Graces – You are an Adonis in loveliness’ (‘St. Patrick’s Day’ 179). Offended by such ‘wretched common-place lines,’ 8 Hunt appropriated and undermined their claims in exposing the Regent not only as a renegade from his previous political principles but, furthermore, as an eminently forgettable personage who in fact did not warrant any of the praises bestowed upon him: What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this Glory of the People was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches! That this Protector of the Arts had named a wretched Foreigner his Historical Painter in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen! That this Mecænus of the Age patronized not a single deserving writer! That this Breather of Eloquence could not say a few decent, extempore words, – if we are to judge at least from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portugal! That this Conqueror of Hearts was the disappointer of hopes! That this Exciter of Desire (bravo, Messieurs of the Post!) this Adonis in Loveliness, was a corpulent gentleman of fifty! In short, that this delightful, bliss-



Are lost amid the trembling notes of praise, Which with accordant voices a grateful people pays. (ll. 11–20)

ful, wise, pleasureable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal Prince, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity! (179) After this, the libelous passage, was read aloud in court, the clerk proceeded to Hunt’s next sentence – ‘These are hard truths; but are they not truths?’ – at which point Lord Ellenborough (the presiding judge) announced, ‘Stop there’ (‘Prince v. Examiner’ 789). 9 Unhappily, the ‘truth’ of Hunt’s depiction of the Prince Regent was, in the event, irrelevant: as Blackstone clarifies, whereas in a civil trial the libel must appear to be ‘false as well as scandalous,’ in a criminal prosecution ‘the tendency which all libels have to create animosities, and to disturb the public peace, is the sole consideration of the law’ (4.150). That is to say, the ‘truth’ was neither an editorial rationale nor a legal defense, since the counsel for the defense would not be allowed to introduce any evidence substantiating the truth of the alleged libel.10 Hunt’s point, as explained by his counsel, Henry Brougham, was not to expose the person of the Prince but ‘the miserable effects of courtly disguise, paltering, and profligacy’ – as perpetrated by grossly sycophantic doggerel – and his conclusion bears directly on his subsequent condemnation of the servility of the Laureateship: ‘Flattery in any shape is unworthy a man and a gentleman; but political flattery is almost a request to be made slaves. If we would have the Great to be what they ought, we must find some means or other to speak of them as they are’ (180). By extension, political flattery in the shape of poetry is unworthy of any writer who would presume to call himself a poet, corrupting as it does both the character of the poet and the taste of his readers. Throughout the trial, Brougham sought to exploit the indefinite nature of the law regarding libel in an attempt to deflect the charge from the Examiner to the Morning Post. My clients are accused of having published a libel on his Royal Highness, to the great scandal and disgrace of his Royal Highness. – Now, what I want to shew is, that my clients are not the authors of that scandal and disgrace, which are the words of the information, but that what they have published was an answer to, and an





In other words, the libelous writing was not Hunt’s parodic eulogy but the ‘fulsome panegyric’ in honor of the Prince printed in the Morning Post. To the degree that Hunt’s animadversion was derived from an already-published primary text, Brougham argued, it must be understood as but a ‘free and warm commentary on that to which it is an answer; and, as I said, an answer preserving the very words of the original … [and] unintelligible without that original’ (792). What is being tested here (as in libel trials generally, as Kevin Gilmartin has observed) is ‘the relationship between the printed word and the world’ (115): referring to the character and tendency of an ‘original’ text (that of the eulogy as it ran in the Morning Post), which in turn is to be understood as referring to its own ‘original’ (the character of the Regent), Brougham would inflect that relationship in terms of referential dependence. If there is any ‘tendency to create animosity,’ it must be located in the lines of laureate-like flattery that initiated the debate over the ‘character’ of the ‘original’ referent. Repeatedly castigating the commendatory verses as ‘doggerel,’ ‘fulsome panegyric,’ and, finally, indistinguishable from a ‘common lottery puff,’ Brougham attempted to displace the trial’s political overtones by insisting on the literary nature of Hunt’s response (not an assault on character but an indignant defense of standards of taste), all the while simultaneously dismissing these verses as somehow too illiterate to warrant notice. It was a defense predicated upon an understanding of both panegyric and parody as figures of speech – critically, upon a construction of Hunt’s response as not literal but figurative language (‘Prince v. Examiner’ 792, 794) – and it failed entirely to sway Lord Ellenborough. Convicted for having attempted to maintain the independence of his own judgment and that of the press, for having challenged the dignity as well as the efficacy of servile flattery and the writing of fulsome panegyrics in praise of mediocre princes (as much a matter of genre, it turns out, as of court etiquette), Hunt is uniquely positioned to insist on the necessary independence of literary from political power.12 Indeed, his analysis of the Laureateship serves in numerous ways as both an extension and a vindication of his libelous ‘attacks’ on the wayward moral and political character of the Regent in March, 1812. In pointing out the loss any Laureate suffers of his ‘sovereign character,’ Hunt is able, under the aegis of a commentary on poetical character, to chastise the Prince of Wales for his own loss of political



animadversion on, what had been said by others to such scandal and disgrace … . (‘Prince v. Examiner’ 792)11

character since becoming Regent early in 1811. And his avowed rationale for doing so is not to cater to a love of scandal nor to attempt to correct the vices of those in power, but to delineate the danger posed by political flattery (whether practiced by editors or laureates) to the integrity of government and, by extension, to the political freedom of its subjects. Political freedom is inextricably tied to literacy and literary taste for Hunt, and in addressing the ungovernable effects of flattery in verse, he exposes the disconcerting possibility that what is offered as an encomium may in fact be more appropriately read as a burlesque. Whether this is a result of the public political character of the Prince Regent or a function of the laws of genre governing epideictic poetry remains unclear. But what does emerge clearly here (as we shall see) is the distinct possibility that, in the 1810s, flattery may be every bit as libelous as parody, and that libel is perhaps most tellingly considered as a distillate of literary criticism.

Though nowhere mentioned in Hunt’s first editorial on the Laureateship (‘Office of Poet-Laureat,’ 15 Aug. 1813), the Regent is recognizably conjured throughout as that ‘bad prince’ who would inevitably undermine his own public standing in commissioning a laureate’s flattery: ‘he’ who ‘by degrading ornament into puerility shall make himself and his trappings ridiculous’; ‘he’ who would become ‘doubly ridiculous by the praise’ thus commandeered; ‘he’ who, ‘vulgar perhaps in person and imbecile in mind,’ may indeed ‘deserve a satire or a burlesque’ in lieu of a panegyric (513). The implication of the Laureate in such a dubious enterprise becomes all the more troubling when Hunt underscores a disconcerting analogy between the Regent and the ‘prince of poets’: A Poet-Laureat, or Poet crowned with laurel, is supposed to occupy the poetic throne of his time, or at least of his nation, and to be the legitimate successor of all the poets who have been crowned before him. Agreeably to this sovereign character, he has a regular stipend of money, and a real or supposed allowance of a portion of wine; and in return, pours forth a certain quantity of praise on those who support him. (513; emphasis added) Hunt is horrified that poetry might be in any way conceived of not simply as monarchical but as actually dependent on the monarchy –




which it necessarily will be as long as a laureate is appointed to take his position in a dubious line of Court Poets who have conflated poetry and politics in the name of subjecting themselves to an authority external to their proper state (Parnassian rather than British, watered not by the river Thames but the Pierian spring), and who have been crowned for their subservience. Accordingly, ‘to supply [Pye’s] place by a similar want of genius, would be keeping up a very ridiculous kind of dynasty; to put in it a real poet, would be distressing to all men of sense and independence’ (514). Real poets don’t write official panegyrics for £100 annually and a butt of sack: they have far too great a sense of the value of their in-dependence to de-pend upon the largesse of the state. Better far to stand alone than to stand in line for such a contaminated distinction. The romantic poet, after all, is not supposed to be a servile courtier but an outspoken advocate of liberty, one whose power does not depend upon his endorsement by the hirelings of a court, but upon his critical distance from the forms of institutional power. Hunt’s second editorial on the Laureateship (29 Aug. 1813) resounds with his earlier strictures against political flattery in any shape. Indeed, if it weren’t already clear to his readers that his dismissal of the Laureate was to be read as a further indictment of the Regent (‘by performing the part of a burlesque [the Laureateship] renders not only itself but its employers ridiculous’ [‘Laureatship’ 545]), Hunt immediately drives home his point in remarking that such observations must have ‘additional force in times like the present (for without breaking our resolution, in this stage of the business, of making no particular reflections on the Court, that point must be equally clear)’ (545). In this second editorial, Hunt is concerned less with the absurdity of the office generally than with his worries regarding the relative independence or subservience of English poets (and, by implication, English poetry), and he proceeds to demystify the most conspicuous of those ‘wretched sophistications’ to which a poet would need to submit before being ‘rendered supple and groveling enough to bend to this infliction of laurel’ (545). Chief amongst these is the problem of precedent, the contention that the Laureateship can be an honor ‘if not for itself, at least for having given titles to such men as Dryden and Jonson,’ to which Hunt responds that ‘since the times of those eminent men, things are quite altered with respect to the social respectability of literature, and to the spirit and independence of its higher professors’ (545). That is to say: poets are no longer bound to patrons and are now free to criticize the social institutions of both the aristocracy and the Court, as long as they preserve their ‘spirit of inde-




pendence.’ (If contemporary poetry is to vindicate revolutionary political heritage, then its practitioners must maintain a principled, Miltonic independence from established government.) As a means of hiring panegyric, the office of the Laureate doesn’t merely reinscribe the Laureate himself but, by implication, the entire ‘race of poets’ within the system of ‘subserviency and venality’ that is Court patronage; consequently, Hunt calls upon all possible candidates for the office to refuse the appointment in order to ‘do away this popular error’ (546). Hunt begins and ends his survey of the field with Scott (rumored to be the Regent’s first choice) who, even though ‘his notions of politics and the court give us more distaste than those of any poet alive’ (546), has enough ‘sterling poetry’ about him that, should he be offered the position, Hunt hopes he will decline. Campbell, Hunt imagines, would treat such an offer with contempt; Byron would bitterly dismiss it; and Moore would haughtily remind the messenger that he was Irish. Regarding the Lake poets, however, Hunt is less sanguine. While it is impossible to mention Wordsworth’s name without ‘feeling reverence for his real genius and indignation at his puerile abuse of it,’ Hunt implores him to recall his ‘noble sonnet to Milton’ (546). In a similar vein, he ‘hopes as much for a man of similar genius,’ Coleridge (546), for Hunt cannot, finally, imagine either of them betraying what they have previously written. Throughout his appraisal of not only Wordsworth and Coleridge but also, as we shall see, Southey, Hunt simultaneously reassures himself and chastens the Lake poets by reminding them of what they once wrote. Nowhere does he make his point as succinctly as in his allusion to Wordsworth’s ‘London, 1802.’ Hunt’s seemingly innocuous adjective here (Wordsworth’s ‘noble sonnet to Milton’) reminds us that for the iconoclastic Milton (as, indeed, for any romantic poet who would invoke his example), nobility was less a matter of blood-line than of tone and versification – a crucial point for Hunt at this time in his summoning of an English republican tradition to construct an English meritocracy of letters based on liberty rather than precedent at court. The urgency of Wordsworth’s invocation (‘Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee’ [ll. 1–2]) – itself Miltonic in its mode of addressing a national hero – allusively suggests that the present juncture is just such a moment of crisis, one in which what Hunt styles the ‘higher professors’ of English poetry are about to forfeit their ‘ancient English dower / Of inward happiness’ (ll. 5–6), of plain living and high thinking, should they barter their verses for laurels. Furthermore, with its thematic juxtaposition of a ‘then’ consisting in strong English Republicanism and a ‘now’ in which




the selfish English have neglected their ‘manners, virtue, freedom, power’ (l. 8), Wordsworth’s ‘London, 1802’ replicates Hunt’s own strategy here of goading his putative audience of poets by reminding them of the independence they stand to lose should any one of them accept the Laureateship.13 Such a reminder is nowhere more earnest than in the complicated case of Southey, whom Hunt had singled out in May as (with Moore and Campbell) ‘our best living poets’ and an accomplished writer of prose (‘Table-Talk’ 300), but a candidate whose politics are increasingly unpredictable: A slight sort of chill came over us when we heard that Mr. Southey was to make his appearance in town; but notwithstanding his ambiguous revilements of the Reformers, and his condescending to dedicate something to Mr. Croker, we brought to mind the fine turn of his genius and the native purity of his heart, and our chill was converted into a glow of good-will and security. (‘Laureatship’ 545–6) Discounting Southey’s political opinions in his recent prose (articles against Reform in the Edinburgh Annual Register as well as the Quarterly Review, and the Life of Nelson, dedicated to the Secretary of the Admiralty, John Wilson Croker), Hunt implicitly defers to the youthful ‘Jacobin’ poetry from the 1790s to substantiate his confidence that Southey would decline the position. Nevertheless, the language of ‘notwithstanding’ (not-standing-with), in league with the lurking ‘fine turn’ and ‘was converted,’ underscores an altogether different conversion, one that will implicate both political opinions and genre as the Jacobin poet turns into (or turns out to be) the Tory reviewer.

Southey was appointed Poet Laureate in September, 1813, and it is at precisely this moment that the term ‘apostate’ enters into the Examiner’s critique of the office and person of the Laureate. Reminding the Examiner’s readers of his compliment to Southey in August regarding ‘the native purity of his heart,’ Hunt was forced in September to acknowledge that ‘the same sweets that are honey to the fresh lips of youth and innocence, become gall in the mouth of an apostate’ (‘New Poet-Laureat’ 609). Always with reference to the disparity between ‘the tone of his former thinking’ (609) in his poetry and that of his current writing (principally in prose), the Examiner’s definitions of apostasy




take this inconsistency as its premiss and attempt to determine what it was that precipitated the poet’s abdication: ‘Formerly Mr. Southey was all ardent aspiration after principle and public virtue; now he is content to fall in with expedience and muster up arguments for apostasy’ (609; emphasis added). In the pages of the Examiner, apostasy immediately signifies the desertion of principle for expedience and is significantly figured in terms of a falling which lurks everywhere in Hunt’s account of apostasy (as it will, even more pervasively in Hazlitt’s) as that inconsistency which renders a poet dependent upon a court. While Hunt’s denunciation of Southey following his acceptance of the Laureateship reminds us of the rationale for his critique of the Regent, Hazlitt’s exposure of Southey in the pages of the Morning Chronicle clarifies what will be vitally at stake in his most vociferous attacks on the alignment of poetry with the Regency government in the winter of 1816–17: the freedom of literary from political power. For it is in the 1813 critique of Southey that ‘apostasy’ is not only first deployed with regard to the new Poet Laureate but, furthermore, first articulated as a particular liability for all contemporary poetry. As John Kinnaird has noted, … if we restore the charge of ‘apostasy’ to its original context in the columns of the Examiner, we learn soon enough that what seems violence done by partisan journalism to the cause of poetry is really motivated by a greater concern for the cause of literature itself, and especially by concern for the independence of genius from all ‘power’ but that of its own conscience. (101).14 Southey’s appointment prompted not merely an exposure of his own seeming inconsistency in accepting the office (as Hazlitt will remark, ‘Mr. Southey ought not to have received what would not have been offered to the author of “Joan of Arc”’ [WH 7.89]) but, much more comprehensively, a defense of poetry against the charges of servility and submission Hunt and Hazlitt levelled – and would continue to level – against all three Lake poets. In the Examiner’s critique, apostasy is pernicious not so much because of the individual weakness it reveals, but because of the example it sets for ‘public virtue’ and the ‘independent exercise of a sturdy common sense’ (as is the case with laureate-verses), as well as because of the vitriolic language unleashed by poetical apostates. Accordingly, ‘it is not upon the ground of a mere change of opinion that we quarrel with Mr. Southey,’ but




for his indecent violence of language respecting those who differ with him, after his running from one extreme to another … . Who would believe that the same man, who was formerly a violent advocate even of the senseless farce of equality, and who would hear of nothing in favour of kings and establishments, now ventures to confound in one mass of abuse all the advocates of Reform, and to doubt whether men who do not go half as far as he did can be decent and well-intentioned? (610) Running from one extreme to another, the apostate invariably falls – falls on the ‘ground’ of his shifting opinions and in with expedience, with its attendant ‘violence of language.’ The indecency lies not so much in the desertion of a previously held opinion as in the antics of the apostate’s futile attempt to distance himself as far as possible from them. The second reason that the Examiner quarrels with Southey is ‘for leaving his public principles behind with his opinions, and consenting to do homage to the follies and vices of the day’: But how can [Southey] vindicate himself from the second and main accusation, – that of a change of principle? How can he vindicate himself from the charge of having forfeited his proper sense of what is exemplary and free, and of sliding into the man of the world? He will answer perhaps that he has not done so, – that although the Prince Regent’s Poet he is still in love with good example, – although a pensioner twice pensioned he is as independent as ever, – and although fairly set forward in the pleasant path of preferment, he scorns to do anything worldly. (610) Sliding into a man of the world, Southey now ‘stands prominently forward’ as one who has ‘quitted [the] singleness of mind’ that characterizes the ‘honest and the consistent’ (610); now inconsistent, he can sophisticate to himself and others ‘that he at once cares for good example and countenance bad, – that with an unaltered contempt for dependence he is now dependent’ (609). Sliding back-and-forth between independence and dependence, the apostate cannot stand still in the maintenance of any opinion – indeed, un-countenanced, he can no longer even face his opinions, past or present. Hazlitt’s account of Southey’s appointment emphasizes the casuistry of court intrigue over the ostensible criterion of poetic merit. Within days of the appointment, he lamented in the Morning Chronicle on September 18 that




we should not have been disappointed if it had ended differently. Whatever may be the balance of poetical merit, Mr. Scott [the anticipated choice], we are quite sure, has always been a much better courtier than Mr. Southey; and we are of opinion that the honours of a Court can nowhere be so gracefully or deservedly bestowed as on its followers. (WH 7.24) Whereas Scott’s acceptance of ‘this mark of court favour’ would not ‘have broken in upon that uniformity of character, which we think no less beautiful and becoming in life than in a poem’ (WH 7.24), Southey’s accession to the post did indeed appear to break in upon the uniformity of political character that Hazlitt would chide him with, if no longer attribute to him: ‘to have been the poet of the people, may not render Mr. Southey less a court favorite; and one of his old Sonnets to Liberty must give a peculiar zest to his new Birth-day Odes. His flaming patriotism will easily subside into the gentle glow of grateful loyalty’ (WH 7.25). In being ‘elevated’ to the post of Laureate, Southeythe-poet is seen to have diverged from Southey-the-patriot in a movement which Hazlitt represents as in fact a descent – a subsiding or, in effect, a let-down. The Laureateship furthermore belongs properly to a courtier because ‘there is something in the air of a court, not favourable to the genius of poetry’ (WH 7.25). In the case of this appointment, that ‘something’ (according to Hazlitt) is the courtly economy of patronage, according to which John Wilson Croker (the Secretary of the Admiralty, to whom Southey had dedicated his Life of Nelson [1813], after the fashion of one of Hunt’s ‘regal flatterers’) reportedly interceded on Southey’s behalf with the Prince Regent – not out of admiration for Southey’s poetry, but on the grounds that ‘Mr. Southey’s [prose] efforts in the Spanish cause alone, rendered him highly worthy of the situation’ (WH 7.24). When the ministerial Courier took exception to Hazlitt’s suggestion that something other than poetical merit had been the deciding factor in short-listing Scott and Southey, insisting instead that ‘their distinguished literary characters have alone been their recommendation’ (cited, WH 19.115), Hazlitt shot back on September 20: We cordially allow Mr. Southey to be an honest man and an excellent Poet, but we do not (with deference to the authority of The Courier) think him a bit better qualified for the post of ‘Laureat’ on either of these accounts, and we sincerely hope that it will not prove ‘the trou de rat, the Ciudad Roderigo,’ of both – ‘the Laureat Hearse





Furthering his claim that the Laureateship has nothing to do with personal integrity or poetic genius, Hazlitt quickly proceeds here to articulate his main point, one that will guide his criticism of Southey for the years to come: there is an irksome, outrageous inconsistency in the fact that the poet who wrote the Botany Bay eclogues, an inscription in honor of the regicide Henry Marten, and such ‘Jacobin’ lyrics as ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ and ‘The Pauper’s Funeral,’ should exchange his principles for a pension. The poet who succumbs in this manner does not merely sell his voice but, in effect, silences it: the laureateship is a hearse, a decorative bier that marks the death of the lyric ‘I,’ swallowed up and entombed in the royal ‘we.’ Undertaking it upon himself to reveal the inconsistencies of romantic apostasy, Hazlitt styles himself here as an undertaker for romantic apostates, one who will both bury them and lament their loss – and, in the case of Southey, inter him in ‘the Laureat hearse where lyric lies’ the better to elegize him. In fact, Hazlitt’s substitution of ‘lyric’ for ‘Lycidas’ allows him to mourn the death of all three Lake poets in Southey’s accession to the tainted laurels, for his charged allusion to ‘Lycidas’ works (as so often in romantic appropriations of Milton, including Hunt’s own invocation in August) both to underscore the political significance of poetic form at this time and to remind the reading public – if not Southey – of the high calling of the poet.15 In turning courtier, however, Southey has opted to forgo fame’s fair guerdon in favor of infamy. Or, as Hazlitt puts it here with a smile, ‘we shall just say, that there does appear some slight disparity – a little falling off … between the splendour of his early projects for the liberties of mankind, and the utmost that he can now hope from the accomplishment of the freedom of Spain’ (WH 19.116; emphasis added). The language of inconsistency, disparity, and (most tellingly), ‘a little falling off’ can be consolidated in one charge – Southey is an apostate – and Hazlitt’s alignment of falling with apostasy succinctly returns our attention to apostasy as a scree slope along which a poet can run, slide, and fall, but cannot stand. Indeed, ‘apostate’ comes to signify not simply one who cannot stand by a previously held position, but one who is unable to stand in any position whatsoever.



where Lyric lies!’ To us who are plain, straightforward men, and not gifted with those profound resources of political casuistry with which others are blest, there appears to be a little inconsistency between some of Mr. Southey’s former writings and his becoming the hired panegyrist of the court. (WH 19.116)

It is in the representation of Southey’s turning, running, and sliding that we can most succinctly read the figurative slippage that pervades the language of romantic apostasy. In fact, the very language which might be used to ward it off – the language of independence and consistency – itself noticeably fails to control the problem. If to be consistent is to stand still or firm (L. consistere), then to be inconsistent is not to stand still but to move away or to give way – figuratively, to slide or run away. Considered in this light, inconsistency can be read as not merely changing an opinion, but actively running away from the former opinion. The difference between independence and dependence operates similarly, yet finally more precipitously. While independence names a state of freedom from reliance on another (thing, person) for support, or a state of exemption from any sort of contingent existence, dependence names not only the inverse, a negative state of reliance and/or contingency, but also and more tellingly, a state of suspension or hanging (F. dépendre, to hang down, and pendre, to hang; fr. L. de-pendere). To be dependent, therefore, is at the very least to sway (pendulaire), and that under the threat of hanging oneself (se pendre). Either way, the apostate’s dependence is an integral component of his fall. Inconsistent, he runs away; dependent, he suspends himself (as if he might thus arrest his decline) en route to falling. For both Hunt and Hazlitt, as we have seen, apostasy is crucially figured as a matter of falling – for Hunt, a ‘falling in’ with expedience which has everything to do with what Hazlitt will then term a ‘falling off’ of aspiration. And the regularity with which they both (and Hazlitt in particular) understand its operations in terms of falling indicates a precipitousness that makes the matter and modality of standing all the more precarious. As is suggested by the cadences of hanging and swaying that lurk in our explication of the relation between independent and dependent, apostasy thus names a seemingly neverending economy of falling according to which the apostate may abjure but cannot finally efface his past.

Hazlitt began to formulate his signature political writing, in his chosen persona as critic of romantic ideology, in the fall of 1813. Following his indictment of Southey’s political and poetical inconsistency in accepting the Laureateship, he wrote a disingenuous letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle in early October, in which he took aim at the editors of the ‘flippant, shallow’ Courier (presided over by T.G. Street and





But having for a long time witnessed the systematic deceits with respect to foreign events and relations, which are attempted to be practised upon the British Public by certain Journals, especially by those called Ministerial, if you think me worthy of a place in your columns, although I despair of reforming, yet I will occasionally undertake to expose, the inanity of their statements, and the perverse obliquity of their comments. (EOT 3.276) Hazlitt’s profession here provides us with a potent foretaste of his critical ideology at the outset of his career as a radical journalist, as it closely anticipates the statement of purpose with which he will open the Preface to his collected Political Essays in 1819: ‘I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as warmly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended’ (WH 7.7).16 If Hazlitt can ever be said to have formulated a systematic programme-statement, this is it.17 Central to Hazlitt’s lashing of the Lake poets from this time forward will be his relentless exposure of the ‘little inconsistencies’ between the language of their independent, radical youth and that of their dependent, legitimate maturity, accompanied by his levelling explication of the ‘perverse obliquity’ with which, unable to change their styles, they changed their principles. Throughout his writing on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, Hazlitt’s mode as well as his mood are decidedly elegiac. Hunt, on the other hand, is invariably parodic. When Southey’s first production as Laureate appeared in January, 1814 (‘Carmen Triumphale, for the Commencement of the Year 1814’), Hunt was quick to ridicule it as a ‘most mawkish entertainment’ (‘New Year’s Ode’ 41), and his procedure in condemning these ‘tame,’ ‘monotonous’ lines is precisely that which he exploited so dangerously in his animadversions on certain hackneyed doggerel verses in March, 1812. Here as there, the pejorative of choice is ‘common-place’ (‘We drag on from common-place to common-place, from town and tower to walls and bulwarks, and ask ourselves at the end, with a yawn, “What is there to recollect?”’ [41]), as Hunt prepares – again following the model of his 1812 ‘commentary’ – to parody Southey’s affected and fulsome panegyric. While the stakes may not be



Coleridge) for their pro-ministerial distortions of the news, and, in doing so, succinctly articulated what would be his governing critical credo as a political journalist in the years to come:

as high, the parallels are noteworthy: both the Regent and the Laureate are apostates, and Hunt’s resolve to redress the extravagant panegyric with which Southey eulogizes both the Prince and himself (‘Wake, lute and harp! My soul, take up the strain!’ for example, rendered by Hunt as ‘Come, pen and ink! My hand, take up the notes!’ [42]) amounts to a rearguard action against the miserable effects of regal flattery on heads of state, whether that state be denominated ‘England’ or ‘Letters.’ Though Hazlitt too notices the ungainly combination of artlessness and affectation in Southey’s new verses – ‘The Ode is in the ballad style, peculiar to Mr. Southey and his poetical friends. It has something of the rustic simplicity of a country virgin on her first introduction at Duke’s Place, or of Pamela on the day of her marriage with Mr. B.’ (WH 7.25) – his tone is more reserved, even melancholic. Speaking from his ‘respect for the talents and character of this eminent writer … , the last man whom we should expect to see graceful in fetters,’ Hazlitt laments the ode’s exhibition of ‘the irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain’ (WH 7.25), as if the ‘peculiar zest’ of Southey’s previously libertarian poetics were already suffocating in the airless hearse of the Laureateship.18 Unable to find even one ‘vigorous or striking passage,’ and impatient with simply juxtaposing them with Southey’s earlier, Jacobin writings, Hazlitt ultimately reveals his attitude toward ‘Mr. Southey’s poetical politics’ by allusion (WH 7.27): ‘As Mr. Southey’s Ode by no means satisfied the poetical appetite which it had excited in us, we turned, after reading it, to Spenser’s fine Canto on Mutability, and afterwards to some lines written by one who did not join the song of the avengers twice …’ (WH 7.369). Proceeding to cite St. Peter’s stern address in ‘Lycidas’ on the corruption of the clergy (beginning ‘How well could I have spared for thee, young swain’), Hazlitt is able simultaneously to mourn Southey’s ‘death’ and to announce his own emerging role in romantic writing as defender of the ‘faithful herdsman’s art’ of (English republican) poetry against those poetical apostates whose ‘lean and flashy songs / Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw’ as they ‘scramble at the shearer’s feast’ for any pensions or court favors which are to be had. It is a succinct, startling moment, as Hazlitt buries Southey (and, by extension, Coleridge and Wordsworth) in the ‘grave of liberty,’ presiding over their last rites in the dread voice of Miltonic republicanism, the same voice with which he will proceed to invigilate the high language of Romanticism’s ‘poetical politics.’




Beginning in 1813, then, the term ‘apostasy’ gains increasing currency as the name for the extravagant inconsistencies and obliquities of certain poets, and is most conspicuously figured as a fall from high calling to low supplication. Due in no small part to Hazlitt’s vigilance, the stigma of apostasy directs the public perception not only of Southey but also of Wordsworth and, above all, of Coleridge from this time forward.19 1813 was a pivotal year in the careers of all three of the Lake poets: before Southey’s appointment in September, Coleridge had finally succeeded in the public eye, with the astonishing reception of Remorse at Drury Lane in January, and Wordsworth had been appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland in April. With Wordsworth and Southey now holding posts under the administration (and writing dreadfully ‘legitimate’ poetry into the bargain: Wordsworth’s ‘November, 1813’ and Southey’s first lay as the Laureate, the ‘Carmen Triumphale,’ for example), and with Coleridge increasingly affiliated with the ultra-ministerial Courier, their apostasies from the Jacobin principles and antiministerial politics of their youth were now painfully, publicly apparent. 1813 marks the opening sequence in an interrogation of the relationship between poetry and power which would reach its climactic insight in Hazlitt’s 1816 formulation (apropos a contemporary production of Coriolanus) that ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ (WH 7.347) – a precipitous declension already legible in his earlier formulation of ‘perverse obliquity,’ itself a divergence or decline sufficiently awry to conclude in a fall. Although the Lake poets may not have turned apostate in 1813, this is the year they were turned out as apostates.




2

It were a folly to commit anything elaborately composed to the careless and interrupted listening of these tumultuous times. (Milton, The Reason of Church Government) Let him that stands take heed lest he fall – . (Coleridge to Sotheby, 10 Sept. 1802)

I: The riddle of romantic apostasy ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin,’ Coleridge maintained in 1802. And 1809. And 1818. In itself, the recurrence of this adage might appear to be nothing more than a piece of journalistic ephemera, a detail rightly relegated to the footnotes by various editors of the Collected Works. But the near-pathological obsession Coleridge’s writing belies regarding this curious formulation – repeating or alluding to it, claiming its originality while disclaiming its implications, not once or twice but on numerous occasions between its original appearance in the Morning Post in 1802 and its nth revivification in The Friend in 1818 – suggests that it is more than merely a successfully catchy slogan for (or is it against?) the revolutionary politics of the day.1 In league with its heretical relation, ‘apostate,’ ‘Jacobin’ emerges in Coleridge’s treatment as a word to watch with skepticism and vigilance. Indeed, the entire phrase, along with the implicit ideological indictment it contains, present us with a prism through which we can observe the numerous refractions not only of Coleridge’s personal politics of the 1790s but also, increasingly, of his transmogrifications of politics into metaphysics in the 1810s. With its converse insight into the modality of romantic apostasy, this volatile epigram is finally nothing less than the 33



The Mausoleum of Independence

fulcrum with which we can gain sufficient purchase to negotiate the critical conversions of Coleridgean recantation, from the odes of the 1790s through the desultory journalism of the 1800s and 1810s to the ‘Logosophia’ of 1817 and after. The temporal see-saw of these six words summarizes the tortuously circuitous ‘logic’ of Coleridge’s notoriously elusive ‘fixed and announced principles’ (BL 1.212).2 Indeed, as we shall see, it epitomizes in an altogether perverse fashion the ‘consistency’ of political principle that he regularly claimed for himself, as eloquently as (and far more succinctly than) such habitual sites of interrogation as the Bristol lectures of 1795, numerous articles written for the Morning Post between 1798 and 1802, and ‘that fine piece of fiction,’ Chapter 10 of the Biographia (1817; E.P. Thompson, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn’ 114). By examining the putative logic of (as well as the spell cast by) this enigmatic adage, we can obtain a far more nuanced understanding of the critical question pertaining to Coleridge’s politics: not was he (once) a Jacobin, but was he (always) an apostate? Concentrating on this adage can provide us with an answer which will be at once more discriminating and more comprehensive than would be possible through looking at either the revolutionary Coleridge of the “Conciones ad Populum” or the reactionary Coleridge of the Statesman’s Manual – or even (à la Hazlitt, Thelwall and others) through repeatedly juxtaposing the two personae with the intent to expose either their chaotic inconsistency or their fundamental consistency. For there may in fact be an unanticipated consistency to Coleridge’s political reasoning, albeit not what either his apologists or his detractors have claimed. If so, it is one better described as ‘hypostatic’ than as apostatic – that is, closer to an under-standing than to a standing-away. ‘To hypostasize’ is in fact a Coleridgean neologism, one concocted to denominate the recognition of a substance (or power or person) as self-existent;3 thus, to speak of a hypostatic Coleridge is to acknowledge the possibility of an abiding sub-stance between the ‘Jacobin’ of the 1790s and the ‘Tory’ of the 1810s. And to postulate a hypostatic union at the outset serves to underline the temporal dimensions of any inquiry into the question of Coleridgean recantation: what is the time of apostasy? ‘Once an Apostate and always an Apostate,’ Hazlitt pronounced in 1816, inverting Coleridge’s adage to hypostasize an altogether different sort of consistency which, nevertheless, relies on the same temporal syntax: Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin, is a maxim, which, notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge’s see-saw reasoning to the contrary, we hold




to be true, even of him to this day. Once an Apostate and always an Apostate, we hold to be equally true; and the reason why the last is true, is that the first is so. A person who is what is called a Jacobin (and we apply this term in its vulgarest sense to the persons here meant) that is, who has shaken off certain well known prejudices with respect to kings or priests, or nobles, cannot so easily resume them again, whenever his pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to attempt it. (WH 7.135) Of greater interest than Hazlitt’s wily ‘logic’ here (defining apostasy as a matter of shaking off inherent prejudice in order to claim that one must already be an apostate prior to becoming a Jacobin) is the essentially circular quality of this rejoinder: why is it that once an apostate always an apostate? Because once a Jacobin always a Jacobin. That is to say: if ‘once,’ then ‘always,’ regardless of the proposition. This is the ‘see-saw reasoning’ endemic to romantic apostasy, and nowhere does it prevail to a greater degree than in Coleridge’s attempts to reseat himself – facing his former self on the other side of a logical fulcrum invisible to all but himself – in his numerous narratives of his own anti-Jacobin self-consistency. To the degree that there is a logic to Coleridge’s politics, it is not one of principle so much as of figure, of apostasy considered as a trope according to which a standing converts or turns into a falling. This disruptive interruption is an operation of irony, of irony considered as the undoing of any narrative of apostasy (or, indeed, of any narrative of a stasis).4 To represent apostasy narratively entails an attempt to render the movement of standing away (the stepping from one stasis to the next) both consistent and stable, in order that the subject might be understood somehow to have maintained a coherence of self in the interim. When the discourse of romantic apostasy shifts to represent apostatic standing-away as something other than simply another stand – as something more akin to a turn, an unstable momentum which in turn raises the possibility of a fall – the register of apostasy must be reconfigured to accommodate this new, tropological attention to inconsistency and inversion.5 Irony, then, can be said to name the precipitous conversion of apostasy from a standing-away into a falling, a falling which is neither isolated nor terminal but vertiginous and neverending, as a ‘once’ turns out to be an ‘always.’ And it is this repetition (as it is articulated in the Coleridgean economy of ‘once/always’) that finally determines apo-stasis as a ‘state’ of always falling.6 Recognized in the tangle of Coleridgean politics, irony does not afford a final alternative to apostasy, a heading under which to explain Coleridge’s ‘virtual



The Mausoleum of Independence 35

consistency’ or his ‘habitual method of disunity’ (irony in lieu of apostasy). Instead, by dint of interrogating the very possibility of standing, irony interrupts romantic formulations of both his political consistency (Coleridge’s epigrammatic signature: ‘ΕΣΤΗΣΕ=S.T.C.,’ or ‘He hath stood,’ to which we will return) and inconsistency (Hazlitt’s articulation of Coleridge’s ‘own specific levity’ [WH 7.117]). The question thus becomes, how long does Coleridge have to have stood for falling to count as such? The evasive temporality of this most extravagant instance of romantic virtuosity is such that critics have had to construct their own see-saw of sorts – was he or wasn’t he? – and it is over this planking that they have run back-and-forth, to-and-fro, in their interrogation of the multeity of Coleridgean apostasy.7 The question of Coleridge’s apostasy continues to matter. Indeed, it constitutes an abiding, recalcitrant enigma for scholars of Romanticism.8 His writings in both prose and verse, particularly those dating from the period 1797–1803, epitomize what E.P. Thompson long ago recognized as ‘the intellectual complexity of [romantic] apostasy’ (‘Compendium of Cliché’ 149),9 the ‘riddle’ of which, as Alan Liu more recently affirmed, ‘has so haunted romantic studies’ (Sense of History 426).10 As Thomas McFarland states the matter, point-blank, ‘few topics that occupy the borderland between Romantic literary and political history are more problematic than the one posed by the political attitudes of Coleridge’ (78).11 And there is no shortage of possible solutions. In positions remarkably similar to those first articulated by Hazlitt and Coleridge, Thompson and McFarland have repeatedly maintained, respectively and unequivocally, that Coleridge ‘was, of course, an apostate’ (‘Compendium of Cliché’ 149), and, ‘that Coleridge was a committed Jacobin who then became an apostate Tory is, on the evidence, demonstrably not the case’ (80). Of these was neither and was both at once: as David Erdman has remarked (inflecting Coleridge’s political ‘consistency’ as strictly ‘virtual,’ as but his own desideratum), ‘we must smile at ourselves as well as at “S.T.C.” and conclude that he is in truth “ever the same” in the sense that he is never single-sided or single-minded but always both Jacobin and antiJacobin, Radical and Tory, poet and moralist, intermingled’ (EOT 1.lxiv, lxv; emphasis added). Or, in more recent pronouncements which depend upon and extend Erdman’s own: ‘there never was any treason, apostasy, or change of principle in the first place’ (Liu, Sense of History 423); ‘Coleridge was always slightly away from a political position; … he was always technically an apostate’ (Christensen, ‘Once an Apostate’ 464).




Arguably the most astute reader of the sinuousness of Coleridge’s apostasy, Jerome Christensen has further sophisticated his own formulation to underscore the temporality not only of any ‘Once/always’ formulation (which he adapts from Hazlitt) but also of the critical divide over Coleridgean apostasy as a matter of either ‘never’ or ‘always’: ‘“Once an apostate and always already an apostate” … At every point we examine him, even at the beginning, Coleridge is already falling away from every principled commitment’ (‘Guilty Thing’ 772). We will return to Christensen’s reading as it bears on Coleridge’s ‘metaphysics’ of apostasy in the 1810s, but for the moment we might simply note that, presented in immediate juxtaposition to one another, these two brief citations reveal a significant critical elision: what is the difference between the claim that Coleridge was ‘always slightly away’ and that he was ‘already falling away’? At the very least, as ‘always’ becomes ‘already’ and ‘slightly away’ resolves itself into ‘falling away,’ the categories of time and motion reveal themselves to be telling components of any critical account of Coleridgean apostasy.12 (And, as suggested above, irony can be said to name the conversion of a standing into a falling and thus to designate the disruption of any narrative of political consistency, however involuted.) In this light, Coleridge’s ‘political position’ is seen to be no stance at all but rather a falling, which we happen upon in medias res, as if he were in all ways already in motion – already falling, from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve – and thus always already just beyond our critical grasp. The critic who has done the most to put Coleridge’s apostasy within our grasp is Erdman. In his Introduction to the Bollingen edition of Essays on His Times,13 Erdman narrates the years of Coleridge’s affiliation with the Morning Post (1798–1803) as two conspicuously serpentine swings from ‘Yea’ to ‘Nay,’ in each of which Coleridge can be seen first to stand for Opposition and French republicanism, only then to recant his public positions in the act of taking a stand against Opposition and French republicanism.14 Regardless of the degree of inconsistency or independence we attribute to Coleridge’s political positions, our starting point remains the same: between January 1798, and January 1803, Coleridge twice stood – or rather, fell – away from Opposition.15 In the spring of 1798, Coleridge’s writings in the Morning Post reveal a pendulous movement away from an early endorsement of the Foxite Whigs and their platforms for domestic reform and peace with France through a repudiation of such a conciliatory stance, to a denunciation of France subsequent to the invasion of Switzerland in March 1798.16 Coleridge’s formal disavowal, ‘The Recantation: An Ode’




– an homostrophic five-stanza ode republished later that year and subsequently as ‘France: An Ode’ – ran on April 16, over a month after he and the Wordsworths had decided to leave England for Germany. It was not until after an hiatus of over eighteen months (nearly nine months in Germany, then his first walking tour of the Lakes with Wordsworth) that Coleridge resumed his contributions to the Morning Post in December 1799, beginning with a series of articles on Bonaparte’s Brumaire coup and the new French constitution. Once again, Coleridge swung from ‘Yea’ to ‘Nay’ with regard to the complicated alliance between ‘France’ and ‘Liberty,’ now concentrated on the question of how England ought to negotiate (or not) with Napoleon. After first championing Napoleon and condemning Pitt throughout the spring of 1800, Coleridge passed through an apathetic period of advocating peace and supporting the Addington ministry until the establishment of the Peace of Amiens (March 1802), soon after which he began to dismiss Bonaparte as a tyrant and, by September, 1802, called for the renewal of ‘Pitt’s war.’17 Then, on October 14, 1802, Coleridge dramatically reaffirmed his recantation of April, 1798, after reprinting a modified version of the ode on France alongside 68 lines from ‘Fears in Solitude’ (also dating from April 1798) to preface the extraordinary ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ of October 21, a ‘threshold-passing essay’ (ostensibly designed to unite anti-Jacobins of all colors to topple the Jacobin tyrant Napoleon [EOT 1.cix]), that, perhaps more so than any one other article by Coleridge during his affiliation with the Morning Post, reveals not only the intellectual complexity of his apostasy, but also its fundamental uncontrollability. Looking back to the recantation poems of 1798 under the auspices of a comprehensive formulation of Jacobinism that he will then reprint seven years later in The Friend, Coleridge’s 1802 essay, decisively prefaced as it is by the ode on France, will provide us at the conclusion of this chapter with a pivotal, climactic site for examining the uncontainable economy of Coleridgean apostasy. As Coleridge disingenuously queries at the outset of his essay – ‘What is a Jacobin?’ – so must we inquire of a no-less contaminated term in Coleridge’s lexicon, ‘What is an apostate?’ In both instances, the dangerous versatility of the term proves the undoing of the inquiry: as Coleridge remarks of ‘Jacobin’ even before commencing his investigation, it is a term that ‘has either no meaning, or a very vague one: for definite terms are unmanageable things’ (EOT 1.367). Apostasy is just such an unmanageable term – indeed, more so even than ‘Jacobin’ or ‘Jacobinism,’ for whenever put into play, ‘apostasy’ seems necessarily to frustrate any attempt to fix




the terms according to which it might be managed. (As we have seen already and will again, the unmanageability of the term is such that any definition of apostasy as merely a ‘standing off’ postulates a limit to which, in its inevitable performance of falling, it cannot be held.) From Coleridge’s claims for his ‘unaltered’ allegiance to Liberty in the poetry of 1798, through his 1802 avowal that ‘no man can ever become altogether an apostate to liberty’ (EOT 1.368), to the strident concluding assertion of 1802 (emphasized time and again in 1809 and 1818) that ‘I was never myself, at any period of my life, a Convert to the System’ of Jacobinism (Friend 2.146, 1.223; see also EOT 1.372), the ever-shifting modalities of Coleridge’s resolute unaccountability repeatedly indicate that apostasy is not a simple matter of standing off, but a swaying, hanging, and falling in which Coleridge’s ‘jacobinical leaven’ (as Hazlitt puts it) is always on the rise. Coleridge’s 1802 essay presents us with just such a ‘levititious’ fall, a self-consuming performance of apostasy in which the attempt to ‘stand off’ from Jacobinism pointedly fails to resolve itself into a stationary ‘standing against.’ While the ostensible point of the exercise for Coleridge is to enable him to demonstrate his credentials as an anti-Jacobin, his intimacy with the various facets of his subject immediately compromises the distance he would posit between himself and his former Jacobinism, finally precipitating a falling back at the very moment he would stand away. It is a moment of extreme unbalance, one in which Coleridge, arrested in a moment of weightless suspension, is finally neither Jacobin nor antiJacobin but is caught (in a succinct formulation of Liu’s) ‘performing the act of taking a stand’ (Sense of History 425). Querying of Coleridge’s vertiginous performance during his years with the Morning Post, ‘How to understand such a political mutability canto?’ (Sense of History 421), Liu’s contribution to a topic which has riddled the work of so many critics is to frame Coleridge’s protean politics in dialectical terms. ‘Here we need to step back from the chronological method of tracing Coleridge’s apostasy to a synchronic perspective,’ Liu contends, in order to recalibrate our sense of Coleridge’s apostasy as less a serpentine swing from ‘Yea’ to ‘Nay’ than a simultaneous equivocation articulated as ‘Yea’ but ‘Nay’: Coleridge habitually ‘swung’ from Yea to Nay, I suggest, because there really was no action of swinging involved at all. Rather, at every moment Coleridge faced in two directions such that the articulation of one view necessitated, as if structurally, the articulation of its opposite. Or to marry structural and diachronic views in a





Adopting Liu’s deployment of the logic of dialectic allows us to understand Coleridgean apostasy as less a ‘function of external circumstance’ (420) than as the ‘deep structure of his political thinking,’ articulated as ‘repeatability of change’ (420) or as Coleridge’s ‘habitual method of disunity’ (421). For Liu, this is in fact Coleridge’s genius: ‘It was not that Coleridge changed his mind from Yea to Nay, in sum, but that he consistently said Yea but Nay’ according to ‘a doubling or self-divisive tactics homologous to’ a practical dialectic (422). Following this line of argument, there ‘never was any treason, apostasy, or change of views in the first place,’ for, as Liu points out, the same ‘dialectical imagination that made Coleridge perpetually change his views mythologized itself as an apparently perpetual resistance to change’ (423). Somewhat paradoxically, however, such self-divisive tactics – repeated, no less, as integral to his thinking – seem to have left the Coleridgean self intact (a corrective method of disunity?) and resistant to any notion of change which would undo the essential coherence of this perpetually changing political subject gathered under the signature ‘Coleridge.’ While for Liu this deduction is nothing less than the ‘pièce de résistance of [Coleridge’s] propaganda for the Post’ (423), it is fundamentally the same point as that arrived at by Christensen in his own inverted formulation of Coleridge’s political continuity – namely, that ‘Coleridge was always slightly away from a political position; … he was always technically an apostate’ (‘Once an Apostate’ 464). Is there finally any difference between a claim for Coleridge never having been an apostate and one for Coleridge always having been an apostate? Both conclusions, it would seem, vitiate the terms of the inquiry to such a degree that we do not arrive at an understanding of Coleridge’s apostasy so much as at a stand-still.18 What is productive, however, is the explication in each instance of the structure – the ‘logic,’ as we shall come to recognize it – of rhetorical undecidability which inheres in both Coleridge’s writing and recent critical discourse on his apostasy. Noting that ‘Coleridge’s position was and always would be equivocal in relation to the political occasion,’ Christensen draws our attention to the divide between principles (positions) and their application (occasions) en route to concluding that any change in political application (which changes will in no way interfere with Coleridge’s later insistence on the continuity of his principles) ‘results from a logic of equivocation proper



single perspective … : Coleridge’s political journalism elaborates what is essentially a logic of dialectic, of an ever-moving structure of thesis and antithesis. (421)

to principles as principles’ (464). In a similar pronouncement on Coleridgean equivocation (in this case not apropos principles but their written application), Liu observes that ‘What we read in the texture of his essays is the fact that repetitive recantation is woven into his very style’ (420), woven into the articulation of ‘Yea-but-Nay’ which allows Liu to contend, in turn, that ‘at every moment Coleridge faced in two directions such that the articulation of one view necessitated, as if structurally, the articulation of its opposite’ (421; emphasis added). Such an articulation of one view with another underscores both Christensen’s ‘logic of equivocation’ and Liu’s ‘logic of dialectic’ as proper to the Janus-faced Coleridge who speaks time and again in the Morning Post essays. Indeed, as Liu points out in an observation applicable equally to his own argument and Christensen’s, ‘it is precisely the recantatory – and incantatory – alterity of his Yea-but-Nays that gives Coleridge’s prose in the Post its characteristic vitality’ (420). I have reprised both Liu’s and Christensen’s attention to the elusive ‘logic’ of Coleridge’s apostasy in order now to introduce yet a third logic. Liu’s particular vocabulary of singing and standing underlines the interactions of poetry (singing) with politics (standing) specific to Coleridge’s relations with the Morning Post, and prompts us to take up the abiding riddle of Coleridgean apostasy in terms of genre.19 Whereas Liu construes the structure of Coleridge’s desultory journalism according to the logic of an historically grounded Hegelian dialectic (427), I propose to explore a more immediately local history and a more formal logic which, given its highly refined yet ultimately irregular structure, provides a greater arc for the sway of Coleridge’s poetics of apostasy: that of the ode. For Coleridge, recantation can be seen to take the form of an ode. In brief, adapting the generic logic of the ode for our consideration of Coleridgean apostasy will allow us profitably to substitute personae for principles. It is a logic which can be represented persuasively as both equivocal (now inflected less in terms of political-philosophical casuistry than as a matter of giving equal voice to more than one position or persona) and dialectic (according to which the articulation of one position necessitates, ‘as if structurally,’ the articulation of its opposite). Furthermore, it will enable us to read Coleridge’s periodical writing – recantatory and incantatory, certainly, but also apostatic, apostrophic, and antistrophic – in terms of what I will call Coleridge’s poetics of the verge, a political poetics of apostasy according to which ‘standing off’ is finally indistinguishable from ‘falling down.’ Consequently, the ode on France (the common denominator shared by




his recantations in both April, 1798 and October, 1802) emerges as critical to any understanding of Coleridge’s apostasy – not so much because he initially entitled it ‘The Recantation,’ but because it was written as an ode and, as a result, reveals Coleridge at these precarious moments to be manipulating the elaborate requirements of this highly self-conscious, self-reflexive genre in the name of his political anxieties. While his odes can be seen to deploy a turn and counter-turn (strophe and antistrophe) along the lines of Pindar’s dramatic model, they never seem able to effect any sort of stand (epode), giving way instead to a falling or, at the very least, a vertiginously unbalanced stasis. How, then, are we to understand the political mutability canto that consists in Coleridge’s writing for the Morning Post? As an irregular Pindaric – ‘Intimations of Apostasy.’

In what follows, I will outline the significance of the ode for Coleridge from the outset of his poetic ‘career’ in order to read several of his more mature productions (notably, the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ and ‘France’), before examining the climactic, enigmatic ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ according to the drama of standing and turning – and falling – which underscores the formal logic of the ode. In conclusion, I will attend to Coleridge’s 1817 defense of Southey’s ‘renegado-ism,’ as well as his later, metaphysical writing on apostasy from the 1810s, in order to explicate his ‘conversion’ of a political dilemma into a metaphysical principle. Before elucidating the logic of the ode and Coleridge’s investment in this genre, however, it will behoove us to revert to March 1800 – a midpoint in the pendulous arc of his apostasies between 1798 and 1802 – for it is in and as a result of Coleridge’s writing during this winter that a vocabulary for romantic apostasy begins to emerge and coalesce around certain persistent figures in his discourse.

II: The Napoleonic fulcrum In the first of several profiles of Bonaparte for the Morning Post in March 1800, Coleridge sets forth three critical reasons why the French ought to support Bonaparte as Chief Consulate, ‘a new power under a new title,’ rather than clamor for either the restoration of the monarchy or the renewal of revolutionary chaos. While the first two reasons




are themselves sound enough (the office of Chief Consulate can be realized without any threat of a revolution in property and, two, it admits of a choice of occupant), Coleridge’s third point (that at the time of the Brumaire coup of November 1799, ‘a Chief Consulate was the only conceivable means of uniting the parties in France, or at least of suspending their struggles’ [EOT 1.208, 209]), introduces a verb – to suspend – which is of crucial importance both to the remainder of the analysis and, in a larger context, to his own situation as a political journalist at this time. Poised approximately halfway between his first and second recantations in the Morning Post, between the initial publication of ‘France: An Ode’ in April 1798, and its republication in October 1802, Coleridge’s endorsement of Bonaparte in the winter of 1800 can be seen as a fragile, stationary moment of suspension in the see-saw of apostasy he had set in motion two years earlier. It is an interregnum of sorts – or, in a particularly Coleridgean metaphor to which we shall soon return, a fulcrum – and as such can be profitably considered as a verge from which we can take our bearings, both retrospectively and prospectively, with regard to the ‘case’ of Coleridgean apostasy.20 Indeed, the case of Coleridge in 1800 reveals the casuistry as well as the suspense of romantic apostasy – will he stand, independent, or will he fall, de-pendent? – as he attempts to position himself on a fulcrum balancing revolutionary and reactionary ideologies. As becomes increasingly apparent in the essay’s ensuing maneuvers, though Coleridge’s renewed endorsement of the Revolution in France may have momentarily halted the arc of his apostasy, his continued use of ‘suspension’ positions the present as an entr’acte which is about to give way to an alternative state of affairs. Praising Bonaparte as a ‘commanding genius’ and a master of suspense for his virtuosity in persuading others of the ‘necessity of suspending the operation’ of those opinions at odds with existing circumstances, Coleridge goes on to observe that ‘as man is a placable being; as abstract notions give way to surrounding realities; as assumed opinions soon become real ones; [so] the suspension of a tenet is a fainting-fit, that precedes its death’ (EOT 1.210). So it was for Coleridge, who suspended his apostasy from revolutionary politics in 1800, before resuming it in 1802. Suspension, then, designates a period of intellectual abeyance, if not, in fact, of abrogation: ‘even in individuals,’ Coleridge suggestively remarks, ‘in every reform from vice there is a middle, a transient, and half-conscious state of hypocrisy’ (EOT 1.211). Put otherwise, suspension figures a pause, an intermission just before abstract notions (nostalgia for the English Jacobinism he espoused in 1795 and 1797–8,




perhaps; or levity, considered as the arbitrary weightlessness of being held in suspense between two possibilities) give way to surrounding realities (gravity, for example, and the grave implications of resuming a costly war with France). It is thus the last moment of tenuous support (sus-pendere) before the fall (de-pendere). In other words, it is the last balanced moment of apostasy as a standing-away which might prove manageable, before it gives way to a vertiginous falling down and out of control. The years of Coleridge’s affiliation with the Morning Post constitute a sustained yet precarious state of suspension amidst the shifting grounds of his putatively foundational political tenets; they thus represent a fainting-fit for the youthful Jacobinism that he would silence, suffocate, and bury in deference to a new ‘character’ (initially as ‘rigid and simple’ as that of the Consul [EOT 1.210]). Not surprisingly, the conclusion of Coleridge’s first portrait of Bonaparte’s ‘commanding genius’ sounds uncannily like a ventriloquized elegy for his own independence: ‘In his usurpation, Bonaparte stabbed his honesty in the vitals; it has perished – we admit it, that it has perished – but the mausoleum, where it lies interred, is among the wonders of the world’ (EOT 1.211). So too for Coleridge, who in his apostasy stabbed his independence in the vitals – we admit it and we shall demonstrate it: he was an apostate, an apostate according to every possible construction of the term – yet who was simultaneously enough of a virtuoso (truly a Napoleonic master of rhetorical expediency) to inter his independence, his ability to stand, in the mausoleum of his recantation poems of 1798 (both ‘France: An Ode’ and ‘Fears in Solitude’), those ‘stately songs’ in which he buried his political doubts. Then, after apparently disinterring his apostasy in 1800 (recanting his own recantation? dissatisfied with the burial service? intent on his own resurrection?), Coleridge staged an elaborate reburial of his Jacobinism in 1802 with the appearance of the notorious, and notoriously ambiguous, essay ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin,’ itself tellingly prefaced by the republication of the recantation poetry of 1798. Thus it is that we can read Coleridge’s apostasy as an interment of his in-dependence within the stately edifice of the ode, a poetic mausoleum which he can revisit and reopen as often as necessary, to commemorate the death of his jacobinical persona and thereby assure both himself and his readers that it is in fact steadfastly interred. Considered as a mausoleum, Coleridge’s writing between 1798 and 1802 does not bury so much as commemorate that for which he once stood. And in doing so, in erecting such a stately edifice in memory of the jacobin politics he would




entomb, Coleridge simultaneously betrays his reluctance altogether to silence that persona and reveals his virtuosity in reanimating it (in making himself over, and over again) as expeditiously as necessary. Fittingly, it is apropos Napoleon’s political malleability – a critical component of his ‘commanding genius’ – that Coleridge’s own rhetorical equivocation emerges in greatest relief. In early 1800, the immediate occasion was provided by the Brumaire coup and, consequently, Napoleon’s establishment as Consul as well as the drafting of a new French constitution. With Napoleon’s resurrection (returning from the ignominy of his Egyptian campaign to take control of Paris), Coleridge found his Gallican sympathies reanimated in the hopes that the ‘Saviour of the East’ would succeed in restarting an otherwise halted Revolution and thus suspend the disillusionment of English sympathizers such as himself.21 His insistently equivocal distinction between Bonaparte the usurper and Bonaparte the Chief Magistrate notwithstanding,22 Coleridge increasingly championed the ‘political sagacity and moderation’ of the ‘great General’ who was simultaneously negotiating peace abroad (despite the querulous response of Pitt’s alarmist ministry23) and overseeing the installation of a new constitution at home (EOT 1.124). Indeed, Bonaparte displayed his keen political instincts simply through his handling of the Consulate. Whereas the restoration of Louis XVIII to the throne would have left the minority irreconcilable, Bonaparte’s assumption of the Consulate successfully suspended factional strife due to the office’s combination of expediency and malleability; as opposed to a monarchy, Coleridge clarifies, the Chief Consulate exists ‘because it is suitable to existing circumstances; and when circumstances render it unnecessary, it is destructible without a convulsion’ (EOT 1.209). Thus, Republicans, Jacobins, and even Royalists could all contemplate Bonaparte’s ‘usurpation’ (as Coleridge repeatedly characterizes the Brumaire coup) as but a transient means to a permanent freedom, a ‘real political freedom’: How well this delusion is adapted to human nature, how quietly a suspension and re-suspension of our freedom is submitted to, where a formal repeal would be resisted with life and property… . In all innovations in human affairs, that change bids fairest to be permanent, which permits the discontented a hope of further change; still more so, when, as in the present case, it may be made [to] appear even as the means of that further change. (EOT 1.209–10) In March 1800, ‘the present case’ is not limited to Bonaparte (will his changes to the French revolutionary government prove to be permanent? will he be able successfully ‘to convert this armistice of factions




into a permanent peace’? [EOT 1.210]), for it also, and far more unpredictably, implicates Coleridge. To what degree is Coleridge deluding himself regarding this new direction of the Revolution? How permanent will his renewed revolutionary ardor prove to be? What principles has he suspended in recanting his recantation to champion Bonaparte’s ‘commanding genius’? For it will be only a little more than two years later, with the demise of the Peace of Amiens in the fall of 1802, that Coleridge will turn against Bonaparte and his military despotism to back Pitt’s call for a renewal of the war, thus publicly abjuring revolutionary politics for the second time. The ‘further change’ for which Bonaparte proved to be the means was, finally, the reification of Coleridgean apostasy as both a political and a rhetorical strategy. Napoleon’s pivotal role in Coleridge’s responses to French revolutionary politics was perspicaciously noted by Coleridge’s daughter Sara, who, in an attempt to establish the ‘virtual consistency’ of her father’s political writing, isolated Napoleon as ‘the plank or bridge, whereon Mr. Coleridge and the Morning Post crossed over from warm interest in the cause of the French nation to decided Anti-Gallicanism, from earnest demands for peace to a vigorous defence of renewed and continuous war.’24 More recently, Erdman has sophisticated Sara Coleridge’s metaphor in order to reconfigure our sense of Coleridge’s possible consistency: In the Morning Post essays we see Coleridge frequently on that plank or bridge, running back and forth or pausing uncertainly in the middle. It is valid to recognise an over-all consistency in Coleridge’s thinking – if we understand that the consistency is virtual or ideal, not actual; that it is his own desideratum, so that even while he speaks boldly on one side of a question he keeps a longing (or a roving) eye on the other sides of it… . It is the unity not of a straight line but of an S-curve. (EOT 1.lxiv) Whereas Sara Coleridge represents Coleridge as crossing back over Napoleon-as-plank from an endorsement of French liberté to a defense of English nationhood, Erdman locates Coleridge on that bridge, continually moving to-and-fro25 – and if pausing, doing so uncertainly, as if performing his own pronouncement on Napoleonic expediency, whereby ‘in every reform from vice there is a middle, a transient, and half-conscious state of hypocrisy’ (EOT 1.210; emphasis added). Oscillating according to the pattern of an S-curve on a plank, Coleridge




would appear less to be walking across a bridge than to be riding a seesaw – a plank arranged over a fulcrum in such a fashion as to move back-and-forth, up-and-down, in alternating movements. But if Bonaparte is the plank, then (to complicate this ‘virtual’ metaphor even further) who or what is the fulcrum: the English Channel or the cliffs of Dover? Coleridge’s much vaunted, rarely displayed ‘foundational political tenets’? The epode that balances strophe and antistrophe? Bonaparte himself, with Coleridge transmogrified into the motion of the swaying plank? Or perhaps Bonaparte’s seat of state, his throne? In a tantalizing notebook entry from May 1802 (soon after Napoleon’s term as Consul had been lengthened to ten years, and but three months before he was to elevate himself to Life Consul), Coleridge recalibrates Napoleon’s metaphoric value in the arresting formulation, ‘A Throne the ∆ος που στω of Archimedes – Poet Bonaparte – Layer out of a World-garden – ’ (CN 1.1166). As Kathleen Coburn notes, the Greek words traditionally assigned to Archimedes – ‘Give me a place to stand’ or ‘Give me a fulcrum (and I will move the world)’ – evidently here apply to Bonaparte’s ambitions (CN 1.1166n), and as Erdman observes in his own gloss on this memorandum, ‘the next part of the note develops the concept of the commanding genius as poet – with a striking empathic equivalence of Bonaparte to Coleridge’ (EOT 1.cv). According to such an explication of the terms of this entry, Coleridge has eliminated the need to run back-and-forth through identifying ‘Bonaparte’ with ‘Coleridge’ in the figure of the poet as commanding genius – ‘Poet Bonaparte.’ And he has appropriated Archimedes’ fulcrum to displace (by metaphoric as well as mechanical force) and relocate the power of such a commanding genius from the throne room to the garden, from Paris to the English lakes.26 Perhaps. But, as coherent as such a reading may at first appear, what if we were to displace our attention away from the identification of Coleridge not merely with Bonaparte but as Bonaparte (from the commanding genius-poet as Coleridge-Bonaparte)27 and back to the words which initiate this speculation – ‘A Throne the ∆ος που στω of Archimedes’ – in order to test the leverage of this fulcrum? For the terms here are not only wonderfully suggestive but also fundamentally unstable, and obliquely represent the difficulty of getting ‘Coleridge’ to stop moving and come to any sort of rest.28 A throne is not, after all, a place to stand but a place to sit. Indeed, considered as a royal or (more particularly) an ecclesiastical seat, it is synonymous with ‘see’ (L. sede-re, se-de-s). Going one step further, it comprises one half of a see-saw, one half of the Coleridgean S-curve




described by Erdman. And the other half? ‘Saw,’ of course: the indicative past of the verb, ‘to see,’ which teeters with a reciprocating motion into ‘was’; but also a command or decree (issued from a see), as well as a sententious saying – such as Coleridge’s own adage from this period, ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin.’ As ‘see’ gives way to ‘saw,’ then, present gives way to past as if in anticipation of Coleridge’s revisions of his own past (for example, ‘We were never at any period of our life converts to the system of French politics’ [EOT 1.372]), and reveals the vertiginous economy of Coleridgean apostasy. If there is any fulcrum to Coleridge’s oscillations, it is strictly ‘his own desideratum,’ as expressed most succinctly in the motto ‘’′Εστησ,’ or He hath stood, which he adopted during this critical period: ’′Εστησ signifies – He hath stood – which in these times of apostacy from the principles of Freedom, or of Religion in this country, & from both by the same persons in France, is no unmeaning Signature, if subscribed with humility, & in the remembrance of, Let him that stands take heed lest he fall – . However, it is in truth no more that S.T.C. written in Greek. Es tee see – . (CL 2.867)29 Whether or not derived from the Archimedean που στω (EOT 1.cv), Coleridge’s signature confronts us with a vocabulary of standing and falling which in turn requires some sort of critical fulcrum with which to support and arrest it, if only long enough for us to ask, as Liu does, ‘what did it mean for He hath stood to take his stand?’ (422). What it entails, I will argue, is the construction of a new fulcrum from the formal vocabulary of the Pindaric ode.

III: Odes as Palinodes Coleridge’s inability to stand by his signature redirects our attention to the dialectical movement – the turns, counter-turns, and stands – of his odes, the formal logic of which will help us to discriminate between the various modalities of standing, turning, and falling (the tropology of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, certainly, but also that of the closely related figures of apostrophe and apostasy) that sway the political essays as well as the odes. Indeed, designed as it is to regulate the oscillating back-and-forth movement of strophe and antistrophe on the stability of the epode, the formal vocabulary of the Pindaric ode provides us with a fulcrum on which to balance a reading of Coleridge’s pendulous performances of standing and falling.30 In




Coleridge’s odes, not surprisingly, no epode can finally be articulated that manages to stabilize – let alone arrest – the pendulous and often highly irregular movement between strophe and antistrophe.31 While the strophes of, say, ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ and ‘France: An Ode’ seemingly necessitate, ‘as if structurally,’ antistrophes as they first initiate and then exacerbate a series of turns (that is to say tropes, most notably apostrophes), this careening momentum defies arrest by a mere epode, an epode which finally reveals itself as not a stand so much as a postlude or ‘after-song’ (epo-dos: epi-upon, after; dos f. ode, aidein, to sing), a song after the fact, if not after all an elegy for the jacobinical persona Coleridge would silence. It is as if Coleridge’s failure to stand politically (at least, to stand still) were somehow rhetorically determined by his inability to find a place to stand in his odes, subject as they are to a decidedly vertiginous poetics, one comprised equally of fainting-fits and feinting-fyttes. Dramatic, self-reflexive, and dialectical in form as well as movement, the ode is a crucial genre for any consideration of Coleridge’s poetic personae. As Paul Fry has noted, ‘Coleridge took the idea of the ode as a test of vocation far more seriously than Wordsworth perhaps ever did,’ and even went so far at one point as to refer to all his juvenilia as odes, as if convinced that ‘if a poem was not an ode it was not a poem’ (178).32 By the time he prepared the second edition of Poems in 1797, however, and despite the prominent presentation there of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (the twentieth English poem he designated an ode [Curran 72]), Coleridge had already begun to privilege other modes and genres: ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ takes its epigraph from Horace’s Satires, ‘sermoni propriora;’ the ungainly ‘Destiny of Nations’ (unpublished until 1817, but dating from this period) is subtitled ‘A Vision’; and ‘Religious Musings,’ whatever its debts to Milton’s ode, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ is declared ‘A Desultory Poem.’ The cues provided by such prefatory subtitles highlight the fact that Coleridge had come to reserve the ode for public address on specific political occasions. The ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ was written at the invitation of the editors of the Cambridge Intelligencer in December 1796, and the ode on France was occasioned by the French invasion of Switzerland in March 1798. Coleridge’s mature odes, then, are conspicuously public, political poems. ‘The Ode on the Departing Year’ is a poem of opposition, written to preempt the Laureate’s official (and officially optimistic) ode for the coming year. Rife with hysterical prophecy and indignant grief over the state of England, it reveals Coleridge attempting to ‘confine his




[political] passions within the oscillatory form of a regular Pindaric ode’ (Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge 174–5).33 Though he conspicuously labels the first six of its nine stanzas (‘Strophe I,’ ‘Strophe II,’ ‘Epode I,’ ‘Antistrophe I,’ ‘Antistrophe II,’ and ‘Epode II’), the curious doubling of strophes before the first epode and of the antistrophes before the second epode, as well as the absence of any structural designation for the last three stanzas, attest to a significant deviation from Pindaric ‘logic’ at the same time as he would appear to acknowledge it.34 Put otherwise, the putative logic of the form fails to check the speaker’s ‘holy madness’ and the attendant impetuousness of his song (ll. 10, 12). After starting from his ‘silent sadness’ at the sight of the ‘skirts of the departing Year’ in the first strophe (ll. 9, 8), Coleridge’s frantic bard proceeds in the second to summon the ‘mixt tumultuous band’ of the passing year’s woes and joys to ‘Haste for one solemn hour; / And with a loud and yet a louder voice, / O’er Nature struggling in portentous birth, / Weep and rejoice!’ in the name of ‘divinest Liberty’ (ll. 26, 29–32). Far from stabilizing this ‘perplexèd dance,’ the first epode consists of a lengthy denunciation of Catherine the Great (who had died in November) as the bard calls upon the ‘Mighty Army of the Dead, / Dance, like Death-fires, round her Tomb!’ (ll. 60–1). It is only now, with the first antistrophe, that the momentum of the ode is momentarily checked as the bard slows to recall his chilling vision of the departing year, in which the ‘Spirit of the Earth’ arises to denounce the errors and excesses of the ‘bloody Island’ (warfare, torture, hunger, slavery) and call in turn at the close of the second antistrophe upon the God of Nature to avenge the ills of the departing year. With the departure of this phantom, the bard details (in the second epode) his dread and horror whenever ‘the dream of night / Renews the vision to my sight’ (ll. 103–4), and it is in this stanza that he takes on the role of prophetic seer. Unlabeled, the poem’s three remaining stanzas consist in a lengthy address to Albion, ‘my mother Isle,’ as the wild-eyed bard prophesies that it is ‘doom’d to fall, enslav’d and vile’ (ll. 120, 119): disclaimed of Heaven, guided by avarice, kindling with pride though cowering in the distance, Albion is to be eradicated by the ‘Fiend-hag’ Destruction (l. 145). Now, having revealed Albion’s ‘predestin’d ruins’ and ‘wail’d my country with a loud lament’ (ll. 144, 155), the bard retreats in the concluding stanza, ‘unpartaking of the evil thing’ as ‘I recenter my immortal mind / In the deep sabbath of blest self-content’ (ll. 152, 156–7). It is an astonishingly abrupt transition, one which leaves the reader at something of a loss as to the impassioned seer’s suddenly complacent tone, not to




mention the role of this seeming postlude in the scheme of the poem’s otherwise conspicuously Pindaric structure. Though he claims to have recentered himself, can Coleridge’s bard really be said to have found a place to stand? Reminding us that Coleridge’s major political odes are preoccupied both thematically and formally with the balance of power, Curran draws our attention to the dialectical motion of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ along what he terms ‘the axis of England’s own potentiality for good and evil’ (72). Given the predominance of evil practices, the eagerness with which the nations curse Albion, and the pronouncement of its predestined ruin, there is no satisfactory resolution of this dialectical tension; having made his prophecy, the bard does not linger to bear witness but retreats, as if there were no longer any place for him either on England’s previously quiet shores or on the ‘marge’ where serpentine Destruction lies in readiness.35 Denominated as a bard, Coleridge’s speaker here (and, to a lesser extent, in the ode on France) bears a significant resemblance to Gray’s poet-prophet in his rigorously Pindaric ode, ‘The Bard.’36 Coleridge himself underscored this identification in letters to Joseph Cottle (‘some people think [the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’] superior to the “Bard” of Gray’ [CL 1.309]) and Thomas Poole, to whom he dedicated the ode when publishing it as a pamphlet at the end of December. Reminding Poole that ‘among the Ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character,’ and that ‘although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings,’ Coleridge does not hesitate to enlist the poem within the tradition of the sublime ode (identified so closely with the obscurity of Gray and Collins) as he clarifies, ‘If it be found to possess that Impetuosity of Transition, and that Precipitation of Fancy and Feeling, which are the essential excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those, from whom alone praise could give me pleasure’ (CL 1.289). The regular triadic stanzas so carefully cultivated and deployed by Gray are, it would appear from this confession, merely one of the ‘less important’ aspects of the ode. As closely as the ‘character’ of Coleridge’s bard may resemble Gray’s in terms of their self-identification as prophets,37 this common denominator serves to highlight how significantly different they are in matters of voice and (more importantly) vocation. Of Gray’s bard it may be succinctly said that he stood, he sang, and he fell. Introduced in the second stanza, ‘On a rock, whose haughty brow / Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood, / Robed in the sable garb of woe, / With haggard eyes the poet stood’ (ll. 15–18), the bard proceeds to strike ‘the





‘Enough for me: with joy I see ‘The different doom our fates assign. ‘Be thine despair and sceptered care; ‘To triumph, and to die, are mine.’ He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night. (ll. 139–44) Having finished his song, this bard has run out of time, certainly, but also out of space, as if the rocky brow can no longer support the weight of his prophecy. The bard’s pronouncement of his own triumph, coupled with the act of passing sentence on himself, provide Gray’s ode with a decided epode. However negatively or turbulently it may be construed, it is undoubtedly a terminal resting place. Though Coleridge’s visionary bard similarly moves to conclude his song with a dire prediction, he neither hurls himself triumphantly to his death nor manages to stand firm. Indeed, the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ has no proper epode, even if we position the last stanza (in direct conflict with Coleridge’s earlier deployment of the term) as a postlude, or after-song. If anything, it is an apostrophic performance of apostasy, as the bard disclaims that which he has previously sung – a vocal ‘unpartaking’ – in the act of singing himself away: Away, my soul, away! In vain, in vain, the birds of warning sing – And hark! I hear the famish’d brood of prey Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind! Away, my soul, away! I unpartaking of the evil thing, With daily prayer, and daily toil Soliciting for food my scanty soil, Have wail’d my country with a loud lament. Now I recenter my immortal mind In the deep sabbath of blest self-content; Cleans’d from the fears and anguish that bedim God’s Image, Sister of the Seraphim. (ll. 147–59)



deep sorrows of his lyre’ with ‘a master’s hand and prophet’s fire’ (ll. 22, 21). Then, after having woven the ‘winding-sheet of Edward’s race’ for the better part of 130 lines (indeed ‘ample room and verge enough / The characters of hell to trace’ [ll. 50, 51–2]), he pronounces his own fate and the poem concludes in testimony to it.

With none of the conviction (poetic or prophetic) of Gray’s bard, Coleridge’s visionary turns away from Albion through his repeated apostrophes to his own soul (the immortal mind with which he is preoccupied in the closing lines) as well as through the awkward ‘unpartaking’ with which he shirks the ‘evil thing’ that seems to be both his country and his lamentation. While the image of the bard ‘soliciting’ his ‘scanty soil’ for food may seem bizarre, if not in fact bathetic, the combination of this solicitation with the preceding apostrophes underlines not so much the possibility of not having enough to eat (as the bard languishes, alienated, amidst Albion’s herds and cornfields [l. 135]) as that of perhaps having nowhere left to stand. Indeed, this bard’s predicament lurks in the ‘lank pennons’ he hears on the groaning wind – not because of the ominously famished ‘brood of prey,’ however, so much as because of the Miltonic register of those pennons. Used here as synonymous with wings, ‘pennons’ names Satan’s ineffective pinions when ‘all unawares / Flutt’ring his pennons vain plumb down he drops / Ten thousand fathom deep’ through Chaos (Paradise Lost 2.932–4). That is to say, pennons are the attribute of a fall; lank, they are flaccid, useless. As if in anticipation of such a chaotic fall, Coleridge’s increasingly timid bard would hasten his soul away – would disclaim or ‘un-call’ his strain – in the hopes of not falling prey to the Satanic inefficacy of those limp pennons. Scanning the soil for a place to stand, whether it be the previously quiet shore or the dragoninfested marge, Coleridge’s prophet has run out of space in which to recenter his mind, let alone realign his feet. In other words, he finds himself like Gray’s bard on a precipitous verge, but lacks the wherewithal to hurl himself headlong into the fathomless abyss.

Coleridge’s ‘stand’ at the end of ‘France: An Ode’ is just as precarious, if not more so, and reveals the degree to which the logic of the ode cannot arrest his fall other than arbitrarily. As Curran has pointed out, the ode on France ‘ultimately resorts to the same questionable ground as the earlier ode for its conclusion,’ as if there were in fact ‘no other ground for a “Stand”’ (72). Nor does there appear to be: the fear of falling which colors the conclusion of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ is made explicit in the fifth stanza of the ode on France, where Coleridge’s visionary bard (now isolated in a situation nearly identical to that of Gray’s) sways ‘on that sea-cliff’s verge,’ frustrated in his attempt to reconcile the dialectical tension between natural and political liberty which energizes the Pindaric




to-and-fro of the ode. And if there is no other ground for a stand, neither does there seem to be any possibility of hastening oneself ‘away,’ given the bard’s repeated acknowledgment, in both the initial and concluding stanzas, of the futility of any such endeavors. Originally published in the Morning Post on April 16, 1798, under the title, ‘The Recantation,’ Coleridge’s ode marks, as we noted earlier, the extreme ‘Nay’ in the arc of his first apostasy. In fact, it says ‘Nay’ both politically (turning against the French Revolution as it desynonymizes ‘France’ and ‘Liberty’) and formally, in the sense that it is a palinode (palin – again; oide – song), an ode in which the poet recants, in which he retracts something he has sung elsewhere (as Coleridge acknowledged when, in reprinting the better part of the fifth stanza in chapter 10 of the Biographia, he subtitled the ode ‘a Palinodia’ [BL 1.200]).38 Though the editor, Daniel Stuart, presented the poem as the work of a ‘zealous and steady advocate for Freedom’ (EOT 3.287–8),39 much as Coleridge would reprint it in 1802 to substantiate a differently inflected claim for his own steadiness,40 both the poem’s title and its oscillatory rhythms reveal a poet whose avowal is precariously predicated upon an apostrophic economy which has him turning and tottering far more than standing firm and without faltering. Despite this bard’s repeated claims to have remained ‘still’ and ‘unawed’ in his devoted songs, the ode is governed throughout by its restless, impassioned apostrophes, and is finally unable to resolve itself into any sort of stand – formal, political, or otherwise. With a resonant invocation of the unconstrained powers of the woods, the waves, and the clouds ‘whose pathless march no mortal may control’ (l. 2), the poet turns his back in the opening lines on the failed examples of human political and civil liberties he will delineate in the ensuing stanzas.41 Calling upon ‘every thing that is and will be free,’ the poet beseeches them, ‘Bear witness for me wheresoe’er you be, / With what deep worship I have still adored / The spirit of divinest Liberty’ (ll. 18, 19–21), both to establish his credibility as one who has still adored – as one who has stood still – and to present the poem’s first strophe (though the stanzas are nowhere labeled) as a song of the ‘wild unconquerable sound’ of natural liberty (l. 13). The poem’s central stanzas (two through four) then detail the oscillation of the poet’s hopes and fears over the course of the French Revolution up to the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798: despite his concerns when France first ‘Stamped her strong foot and said, she would be free,’ he voiced his ‘lofty gratulation’ as, ‘Unawed I sang amid a slavish band’ (ll. 24, 26, 27); despite his fears when Britain ‘joined the dire array’ of




monarchies allied against the Republic, ‘Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat / To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance’ (ll. 31, 36–7); and despite even the blasphemous rationalism of the new state and the bloody excesses of the Terror, he ‘reproached [his] fears that would not flee,’ so intent was he on substantiating his claim that ‘ne’er, O Liberty! with partial aim / I dimmed thy light or damped thy holy flame’ (ll. 58, 39–40). Whereas the ode’s strophe may be characterized as a wild song of natural liberty, the antistrophe is far more constrained, consisting as it does in a series of rationalizations and increasingly forlorn hopes (ll. 59-63) regarding the possible manifestation of liberty in human forms. With the subjugation of Switzerland, announced in the fourth stanza, the poet must distinguish ‘Liberty’ (no longer synonymous with France) from ‘Freedom,’ and it is here that the poem culminates in a recantatory plea to ‘Freedom’ to forgive the poet for having presumed that ‘Liberty’ might ever have allowed itself to be confined within the forms of human power. Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, From bleak Helvetia’s icy caverns sent – I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams! ….. … forgive me, that I cherished One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes! (ll. 64–7, 70–1) The ode’s most impetuous about-face occurs here, as the poet recants his former allegiance to the French revolutionary politics that suddenly appear far more licentious than libertarian. Turning abruptly to France, the poet shifts the register of his voice from lamentation to accusation as he demands: Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind? To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey; To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray? (ll. 80–4) The poet’s predicament at this point is two-fold. Having been himself first tempted then betrayed by France, he has been led astray from England but is unable simply or straightforwardly to return. (There is no indication that he has changed his early posture of hanging his




head and weeping at Britain’s name [l. 42].) And having now divorced ‘France’ from ‘Liberty,’ he is confronted with the daunting task of locating – envisioning? – another manifestation of human power in mortal terms and forms. Suspended in abeyance (between France and England, between natural and human liberties), it is a question, then, of where the poet is to stand – geographically, politically, poetically. At the end of the fourth stanza (punctuated as it is by that forbidding question mark) it is far from clear whether any stand will prove to be stable. At the outset of his climactic apostrophe to Liberty in the concluding stanza, the poet recapitulates his earlier testimony to its imperious independence from human control, as if simultaneously ceding the point and preparing to exceed it. ‘O Liberty!’ he exclaims, ‘with profitless endeavour / Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour; / But thou nor swell’st the victor’s strain, nor ever / Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power’ (ll. 89–92). This is strictly a negative insight, akin to the proclamation of the visionary bard at the end of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year,’ acknowledging that he has wailed his loud lament in vain. Given that this poet knew as much at the outset – namely, that Liberty’s ‘pathless march’ was not to be charted according to human forms but the natural forms of the winds and the waves – something further is required, ideally a resolution of the tension between eternal and social laws that has scarred and structured the poem. And, whether or not in deference to the synthetic ‘logic’ of the ode, this is precisely what Coleridge attempts in the poem’s jubilant last lines: And there I felt thee! – on that sea-cliff’s verge, Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there. (ll. 99–105) Taken at their most triumphant, these lines claim nothing short of a felicitous epiphany, a claim for the ‘one life within us and abroad’ in terms of an unanticipated, uncontrollable consonance between the human and the natural in which, as if in mutual affirmation of the cross-currents of Liberty, the pines ‘murmur’ and the poet shoots forth his ‘being’ like a traveling breeze.42 Claiming to have stood, to have possessed, and to have understood, the visionary poet presents this final tableau as a realized apostrophe – as if the much-solicited Liberty




has given him a song to sing, rewarding his moral freedom (now that he has recanted his allegiance to French revolutionary liberty) with political-cum-poetical freedom of song.43 But is such a reading in fact tenable? Does this poet have a place to stand while he does so? It would appear not. Positioning his experience of Liberty on the verge, the verge of a sea-cliff on which he now no longer stands – he stood, stood there, as in earlier and elsewhere – the poet betrays both its precariousness (the verge) and his own imminent apostasy, for he now stands elsewhere, stands off (or has he fallen off?) and away from the very place, however vertiginous, of Liberty. Despite the poet’s claims, then, there is in fact no epode, no resting place on which to stand and sing a newly understood song of liberty. The poet is every bit as perilously stranded here as he was at the end of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (and, by extension, as mortally so as was Gray’s bard) for, as was the case with the earlier ode, the concluding stanza here simply cannot resolve the tug-of-war over ‘Liberty’ except by appeal to a commanding, extrahuman authority for whom the poet testifies (Curran 73). Another way to articulate this dilemma is to read the ode on France as Liu has, as a ‘poem of pure marginality – of opposition mentality forced into a borderline stand neither here nor there in the social world’ (Sense of History 418).44 The sea-cliff’s verge at the end of ‘France’ is finally neither ample enough to accommodate the epode which the logic of the ode calls for, nor sturdy enough to support the poet who would recant from its perilous slope. The publication date of ‘France,’ April, 1798, is also that of the composition of ‘Fears in Solitude,’ a poem which, in both mode and mood, is not nearly as impassioned and impetuous as the ode on France (nor as quietly pensive and ‘conversational’ as, say, ‘Frost at Midnight,’ also from early 1798), yet which is nonetheless integral to our consideration of Coleridge’s two mature political odes. Coleridge himself remarked the unusual register of ‘Fears in Solitude’ when he annotated a copy of the volume in which it appeared, ‘N. B. The above is perhaps not Poetry, – but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory – sermoni propriora. –Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose’ (CP 522).45 Coleridge’s appropriation of the Horatian motto (from the Satires, which he also prefixed to ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ and at one point translated as ‘Properer for a Sermon’46) dignifies his otherwise awkward, self-effacing classification of it as ‘a sort of middle thing’ and, it seems to me, underlines its potential value (both tonally and structurally) as a ‘thing’ in the ‘middle’ – in other words, as an (Horatian) epode which mediates and ultimately balances the harsh




(Pindaric) strophe and antistrophe of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ and ‘France: An Ode.’ Neither of the odes, as we have seen, was able to resolve its dialectical tensions (between the potential for good or evil manifested in the prophetic vision of ‘Albion,’ between the natural and human inflections of ‘Liberty’). Neither ode was able to locate, let alone formulate, a compelling ‘ground’ on which the poet might stand in conclusion. ‘Fears in Solitude’ articulates precisely this ground, this otherwise absent epode to the ungovernable momentum both within each ode and, when considered in antistrophic relation to one another, between the two odes. And its success in doing so, I would argue, has everything to do with Coleridge’s curiously off-hand concession of its homiletic Horatian tone. In his codification of the literary history of the romantic ode, Curran draws our attention to a resolutely Horatian tenor in the otherwise formally Pindaric ode. His formulation of this inflection, in league with his overall attention to the urgent and far-ranging dialectical pressures of the ode for those who practiced it in the 1790s, illuminates the claim I want to advance here for the crucial structural role played by ‘Fears in Solitude’ as an epode – indeed, as a fulcrum – for Coleridge’s highly self-conscious poetics at this time. ‘The intrinsic paradox of the romantic ode,’ Curran writes, … is that, almost from the first, a Horatian voice was invested in a Pindaric form. To reduce that complex to its logical components, the Horatian meditative presence, its contemplations built through a sequential and associational logic, becomes a mediating presence standing above sequence, forced to impose, or to create within itself, a synthesizing order – an epode – upon the universal strophe and antistrophe of experience. (71) Compared with the earlier odes, ‘Fears in Solitude’ is remarkable for the degree to which it avoids the liabilities as well as excesses of Coleridge’s previous political poems. Its assured blank verse stands in stark juxtaposition to the oftentimes jarring couplets of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (tetrameter then trimeter, single rhymes alternating unevenly with double) and it refrains throughout from the abrupt transitions, overdetermined personifications, and oftentimes hysterical apostrophes which punctuate both of the earlier odes. As Woodring has noted, ‘Avoiding the portentous myths and proud flesh of earlier political eruptions, the argument of “Fears in Solitude” gains unobtrusive force through an antithetical, epigrammatic balance and thrust in the sentences’ (Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge 190). Indeed, crucial to




the poem’s success as an epode – as a ‘mediating presence standing above’ – is its balance (most audible to Woodring in the alternation of hypermetrical monosyllables with stately apostrophes [192]), evident in the poet’s ability to pause, at a stand-still, in the final verse paragraph, rather than turn away or teeter precariously on a perilous verge. Similar to the earlier odes, Coleridge has here prophesied ‘evil days’ for Britain, though in this case not in the garb of the isolated, righteous visionary but as one who not only identifies himself with his ‘brethren’ and his ‘Mother Isle’ but who has furthermore ‘told / Most bitter truth, but without bitterness’ (ll. 155–6). Consequently, when he speaks of vanity, it is not to upbraid his auditors for their indifference to his prophesy, but to supplicate, ‘May my fears, / My filial fears, be vain,’ and may the vaunts of the enemy ‘Pass like the gust, that roared and died away / In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard / In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass’ (ll. 197–8, 200–2). Such a transient gust and distant tree stand in dramatic juxtaposition to the lawless winds and woods of ‘France,’ while the dell – this low dell, in which the poet reposes free of vertigo – establishes a stabilizing alternative to the perilous verge of the sea-cliff. There seems to be no risk whatsoever of falling from this privileged vantage, and when the poet turns away from the dell in the concluding verse paragraph, it is not according to the dizzying dictates of yet another apostrophe, but in order to return home, to ‘beloved Stowey’ just over the hills, with a composure denied to the indignant bards of the odes. Now farewell, Farewell, awhile, O soft and silent spot! On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill, Homeward I wind my way; and lo! recalled From bodings that have well nigh wearied me, I find myself upon the brow, and pause Startled! And after lonely sojourning In such a quiet and surrounding nook, This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main, Dim tinted, there the mighty majesty Of that huge ampitheatre of rich And elmy fields, seems like society – Conversing with the mind, and giving it A livelier impulse and a dance of thought! And now, beloved Stowey! (ll. 207–21)




Of particular note here is the ‘pause’ (though enjambed), as the poet comes to a stand-still in order the better (both politically and poetically) to behold the scene before him: this is precisely the sort of stabilizing epode that the odes failed to establish. The poet finds himself – indeed, he has grounded his self – on the brow of the hill, and he manages to rest there free of any need to recenter his immortal mind elsewhere, let alone to shoot his being through the air. Unlike a verge, this brow provides him a ‘burst of prospect’ rather than of prophecy, as he regards the ocean (which separates him from France) ‘here’ and the English fields ‘there,’ without any of the deictic displacement that so unbalanced the concluding stanzas of the odes. But this will not suffice. Though Coleridge’s ‘Horatian’ composure at the end of ‘Fears in Solitude’ would seem to suggest that he has finally managed to resolve the dialectical tension that plagued the odes, his turn here – and it is a turn, an apostrophe to a spot, every bit as telling as those which precipitated the fallings-off of the odes – once again betrays the compulsively Pindaric mode in which he has repeatedly essayed to fashion an epode. Put otherwise, how is it that after nearly 200 lines of lamentation, satire, jeremiad, and imprecation, this brooding poet can simply and immediately summon himself back from his ‘lonely sojourning’?47 Such a maneuver is of a piece with Coleridge’s transparently arbitrary manipulations of the rhetoric of the ode in both ‘Departing Year’ and ‘France,’ and is made all the more jarring here by the fact that, unlike the two Pindaricks, ‘Fears in Solitude’ unfolds according to a much more deliberate, sequential structure, altogether at odds with such impetuosity of transition. Formally, there is no place for such an about-face, one that is all the more fraught given Coleridge’s diction here, in which the poet’s apotheosis is presented as a matter of recall: ‘and lo! recalled / From bodings that well nigh wearied me, / I find myself upon the brow, and pause / Startled.’ How are we to read the function here of ‘recalled’? Given the mind’s ‘livelier impulse’ and ‘dance of thought’ which follow, it would seem to be a revivifying summons: ceding agency to the beneficent influence of nature, the poet is brought back from (‘recalled / From’) his vatic isolation to ‘society,’ as figured by the ampitheatre of trees surrounding ‘beloved Stowey.’ Perhaps. Though the poem’s concluding prayer of thanks (to nature’s quietness, for having made him worthy to indulge love; ll. 228–32) augments such a construction of recall as return, there is no adequate clarification of precisely how nature manages to correct the poet’s ominous presentiments, and the close proximity here of




‘recall’ and ‘bodings’ should not reassure so much as alarm us, and startle us into skepticism. Considered retrospectively, ‘bodings’ may be said to take as its antecedent not merely the premonitions and forebodings given voice elsewhere in ‘Fears in Solitude,’ but also the ominous predictions of the earlier odes. Furthermore, construed performatively – as the act of announcing and proclaiming such prophecies – ‘bodings’ assumes a decidedly vocative register, one that is simultaneously underlined and undone by an inflection of the accompanying ‘recall’ as revocation. While the grammar of ‘recalled / From’ may point to the summoning back of the poet from his musings, the etymology of ‘recall’ (whether from revocare or recantare) inevitably and necessarily overrides such a limited context in its exposure of a renunciation – of a recantation. Though certainly not as precarious as the voids and verges figured at the end of the odes, this prospect does not finally afford sufficient balance to prevent yet another withdrawal: in his about-face on the brow of the hill, even Coleridge’s most Horatian persona cannot stand still long enough to stand by his words. To recapitulate: strophe – the visionary prophet turned against Albion to denounce its sins in the ‘Ode on the Departing Year,’ only to turn away in conclusion, fluttering his pennons in vain as he unpartook himself of the evil thing; antistrophe – the revolutionary bard turned against France in ‘France: An Ode,’ in the hopes of rescuing ‘divinest Liberty’ on his own terms, only to find himself stranded on a perilous verge, throwing his voice with profitless endeavor; epode – recalling himself from such incantations and recantations in ‘Fears in Solitude,’ the poet finally seems to have established a place to stand, a middle place on the brow of the Quantocks, neither here nor there but ostensibly at rest – only to lose his balance in the very attempt to recall his earlier voice and recant its dire predictions. If, despite such an unpropitious formal vocabulary, there is after all an epode to be articulated here, it would appear that it must be understood as nothing more or less than simply the latest place the poet would be thought to have taken a stand.

IV: Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin With the Peace of Amiens faltering and English support growing for a resumption of the war with France, Coleridge wrote a lengthy article in October 1802, for the Morning Post, ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin.’48 Though the essay’s announced purpose seems straightforward enough – to answer, once and for all, the question ‘What is a




Jacobin?’ – it is obscured from the outset by Coleridge’s complicated, specular relation to the adage which provides the title: Pitt’s claim in the Security Speech of February 1800 (as recorded and embellished at the time by Coleridge himself), that ‘the mind once tainted with Jacobinism can never be wholly free from the taint.’49 While Coleridge immediately takes credit for the adage’s ‘stately diction’ and its currency at the time, he just as clearly does not want to be bound by its implications, for he goes to great lengths in the essay to clarify that he is not, nor was he ever, a Jacobin. Consequently, the detailed substantiation he would provide of Pitt’s claim is complicated first by his favorable, often sentimental, representation of Jacobinism and, later, by his disdainful mockery of Pitt’s maxim as a presumptuous life-sentence passed ‘by those who would turn an error in speculative politics into a sort of sin against the Holy Ghost, which in some miraculous and inexplicable manner shuts out not only mercy but even repentance!’ (EOT 1.373). Though Coleridge reminds us at various moments that he never succumbed to the temptations of Jacobinism (and thus is ostensibly free of its indelible ‘taint’), both his passionate defense of a Jacobin as a sincere advocate of Liberty and his ridicule of the binding postulate ‘once/always’ suggest otherwise. It is, as Erdman has noted, a ‘threshold-passing essay’ in more ways than one;50 it repeatedly comes up against the difficulties – if not the impossibility – of crossing or recrossing any border marked ‘once/always,’ all the while Coleridge’s performance of crossing-over relentlessly erodes the stable ground of consistency he would claim for himself as an enlightened anti-Jacobin of long-standing. Coleridge further complicates our inflection of both the temporality and the politics of this threshold with the revision and republication, the preceding week, of ‘France’ and a lengthy excerpt from ‘Fears in Solitude.’ 51 While the lines from ‘Fears in Solitude’ (ll. 129–97 in CP) constitute an impressively Miltonic denunciation of ‘mad idolatry’ in order to ‘walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,’52 it is the republication of the ode on France that reverberates the following week, standing as it does as something of a double recantation – as if Coleridge were unsaying his own palinode of 1798. The reappearance of the second stanza in particular conspicuously betrays the degree to which Coleridge has perhaps been just such a ‘zealous and steady an advocate for Freedom’ as to be effectively incapable of the sort of recantation he seems to be announcing in such high style. Reminding us that ‘Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band,’ the poet exults,




Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, And shame too long delayed and vain retreat! For ne’er, O Liberty! with partial aim I dimmed thy light or damped thy holy flame; But blessed the paeans of delivered France, And hung my head and wept at Britain’s name. (ll. 36–42) In what relation are these lines to stand to the implosive performance of apostasy in the following week’s essay? Announcing in 1802 that his song is essentially ‘unaltered’ from that of 1798, Coleridge would presumably establish his consistency with his readers before they examine the temporality and rhetoric of ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin.’ In doing so, however, he has slightly yet tellingly altered his claim: whereas in 1798 the relevant line read ‘Yet still my voice unalter’d sang defeat’ (Fears in Solitude 15), two commas have been added in 1802 to render it ‘Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat.’ As minuscule as such an observation may seem, it draws our attention to an alteration in voice, for what had been an integral modifier has now become an apostrophic aside, inserted to underline a consistency the poet is actually in the process of violating. Read in this light, Coleridge’s alteration manages, preemptorily, to undermine the recantation that his editorial will simultaneously announce and refuse. Similar to such an inflection of the revised ode on France, ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ can be read as succumbing to the very inconsistency it would itself deny, due in this case to a revisionary clarification of Coleridge’s lingering commitment to revolutionary liberty which emerges out of the susceptibility of certain terms to the most untoward sort of alterations. ‘Definite terms,’ Coleridge declares at the outset, ‘are unmanageable things.’53 They have either no meaning or, at most, decisively vague ones, for the political passions of men adhere more readily and tenaciously to ‘floating and obscure generalities’ than to ‘clear, correct, and definite conceptions’ (EOT 1.367 370). Preoccupied at the time with controlling the valences of the decidedly recalcitrant term ‘Jacobin’ in order to delineate the timing and degree of his ongoing recantation, Coleridge’s provisos here – that ‘Jacobin’ is perhaps nothing more than ‘a term of abuse, the convenient watch-word of a faction’ – provide a rationale for his ensuing procedure of defining a Jacobin antagonistically (within a stringent nomenclature of English Anti-Jacobinism), not in terms of what a Jacobin himself might postulate so much as ‘what




the different sects of Anti-Jacobins have meant by the word’ (EOT 1.367). It’s a recognizably inverted Coleridgean maneuver (one in a series of doomed and disingenuous attempts to provide foundational ‘principles’ for a decidedly antigravitational politics) and one which allows him to legitimate his own vestigial Jacobin sympathies while hastening to map out his emerging Anti-Jacobinism. Furthermore, in the course of doing so he nearly micromanages the term ‘Jacobin’ sinuously enough to ‘prove’ the truth of what is in effect his own adage, all the while exculpating himself from its implications. At the same time as he confesses that ‘Jacobin is too often a word of vague abuse,’ for example, he nevertheless maintains that ‘there are certain definite ideas, hitherto not expressed in any single word, which may be attached to this word’ and to no other (EOT 1.368). (As he will archly address Fox later the same fall, ‘It is possible, Sir, that a very innocent meaning may be attached to these words [“The Rights of Man”], laxly used. If we allow a little laxity in terms, to what form of words may not an innocent meaning be attached?’ [EOT 1.383; emphasis added].) Coleridge, of course, assures us that he is just such a semantically conscientious anti-Jacobin, one who ‘uniformly’ uses the term accordingly and not otherwise than to denominate an uncompromising advocate of universal suffrage. Be that as it may, such a reductive, bloodless definition does not do justice to the complexity of the Jacobinism Coleridge would have us believe he is and has been repudiating (not that he has to, of course, never having been a Jacobin …). The assertion ‘once a Jacobin always a Jacobin’ will require, it turns out, not a counter-argument but merely a rejoinder – in this case, the blunt ‘we were never, at any period of our life, converts to the system of French politics’ (EOT 1.372) – for, as Coleridge reminds us, the adage is not an argument but merely an assertion, and therefore cannot be disproved but only rebutted in like form. Standing as he does in a decidedly specular relation to the modalities of Jacobinism he would classify, it would appear that Coleridge cannot otherwise exorcise or escape from his own residual Jacobinism, however obliquely or inversely it may be represented. A strictly formal redaction of the tri-partite structure of Coleridge’s ensuing animadversions bears a curious resemblance to the consolidating strophe, antistrophe, and epode of a Pindaric ode. Presented as a recantation (the terms of which are announced at the outset to be unmanageable), one which has already been prefaced by another, earlier recantation – or palinode – perhaps we may be excused for reading the essay as an ode if only to manage it for the moment. Attempting to come to a rest in the third and final definition of anti-




Jacobinism that he proffers, Coleridge does not merely stand away from the space he has cleared (as was the case in the epode of the ode on France), but in fact falls back into the very Jacobinism from which he professes to stand apart. Denouncing the first sort of anti-Jacobins as ministerial bigots who hate as a Jacobin anyone who opposed the war with France, Coleridge aligns himself instead with the more enlightened ‘third class of Anti-jacobins … , who use the word, Jacobin, as they use the word, Whig,’ and who define as a Jacobin anyone ‘who admits no form of government as either good or rightful, which does not flow directly and formally from the persons governed’ (EOT 1.368). Between these two somewhat predictable analyses, the former for its spleen and the latter for its idealism, is that of the ‘honest’ antiJacobins, and it is here that Coleridge most perilously and convincingly implicates himself. Not only is he not an anti-Jacobin of the third order as he claims, but he is in fact a Jacobin – still a Jacobin – according to his second formulation, as becomes clear in his rhapsody on Jacobin sensibilité, when he expostulates with no little ardor that … the word implies a man, whose affections have been warmly and deeply interested in the cause of general freedom, who has hoped all good and honourable things both of, and for, mankind. In this sense of the word, Jacobin, the adage would affirm, that no man can ever become altogether an apostate to Liberty, who has at any time been sincerely and fervently attached to it. His hopes will burn like the Greek fire, hard to be extinguished, and easily rekindling. Even when he despairs of the cause, he will yet wish, that it had been successful. And even when private interests warp his public character, his convictions will remain, and his wishes often rise up in rebellion against his outward actions and public avowals. Thus interpreted, the assertion, ‘Once a Jacobin, and always a Jacobin,’ is so favourable a representation of human nature, that we are willing, too willing perhaps, to admit it even without proof. (EOT 1.368) No man who has ever been a Jacobin can ever become an antiJacobin, for, if he has ever been ‘attached’ to Liberty (apparently a more adhesive term than Jacobin), then he can never entirely stand away or apostasize himself from his previous position: this seems to be the ‘logic’ implied in the adage ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin.’ (Although Coleridge doesn’t explicitly employ Hazlitt’s figure of ‘jacobinical leaven,’ its dual attributes of residue and levity are everywhere legible in this remarkable confession.) ‘Easily rekindled,’ the




ashes of (Coleridge’s) jacobin sentiments are never entirely extinguished.54 Eventually, these sentiments will ‘rise up in rebellion’ (the oldest Greek sense of apostasy, as an insurrection) against his perverted public character (his haphazard public performance of apostasy), and he will continue to wish, privately, for the political amelioration of mankind. As such, what we might call ‘Jacobin affect’ reveals what Hazlitt will later call Coleridge’s ‘own specific levity,’ according to which Coleridge’s strangely mutable definitions of Jacobinism ‘are floating and unfixed, … [seeking] to avoid all contact with [such] solid substances’ (WH 7.117) as definite terms. Indeed, Coleridge’s attachment to liberty is less a matter of adherence than of affect. As if he were attempting to give a greater weight to his renunciation through making himself out to have been a radically irrecuperable Jacobin, Coleridge brilliantly fails to take a stand here either as an Anti-Jacobin or as an apostate. While the apostate may draw off from a cause, it would appear that he can never definitively stand away and is finally consigned to be both always a Jacobin and always an apostate. Thus it is that we might denominate Coleridge a Jacobin manqué. It is as if in the very process of attempting to align himself with the most progressive sect of anti-Jacobins, Coleridge convinces himself that it is finally more ‘honourable’ to be cast as a Jacobin of the second order. If this is in fact such a favorable representation, then why is Coleridge so willing – ‘too willing perhaps’ – to endorse it without substantiation or proof of any kind? That is to say: having begun the article by chiding Pitt for having left his stately formula of 1800 as no more than a ‘blank assertion,’ how can Coleridge presume to revitalize it for contemporary political discourse without explicating the cryptic consistency at which it hints? The simplest answer is of course that to prove it would entail acknowledging his own youthful Jacobinism – an admission which, once avowed, would preclude him (according to his own ‘logic’ here) from establishing his credibility as an Anti-Jacobin (the motivating factor, after all, behind the article). Alternatively, we might note that there is in fact no need for Coleridge to prove it: he already has. It would be easy enough to demonstrate that, publicly and privately, Coleridge professed himself ‘sincerely and fervently attached’ to liberty throughout the 1790s: even earlier than the Morning Post essays we have mentioned (‘Lord Moira’s Letter,’ for example, and the profiles of Bonaparte), evidence abounds in the poetry from the mid 1790s, in the Bristol lectures of 1795, as well as in letters to Thelwall, Southey, and others.55




But there is not really any need to assemble so much documentary evidence external to Coleridge’s perplexing essay of October 1802; he has provided ‘proof’ enough in the passage cited above. Whether or not he is prepared to admit the truth of the adage ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin,’ he has enhanced its rhetorical power in his attempts here to provide a narrative, a temporal continuum, for apostasy. The reliance of apostasy upon a succession of states – the positing of an initial stasis from which the apostate can stand away or against which he can rise up, and which he can then finally repudiate – is challenged, if not in fact undone, by the collapse of past and future into a continuous present, that of the ‘Once/Always’ of the adage. And that collapse of time, or the failure to proceed definitively from one state (one attachment or set of opinions) to another, is revealed in Coleridge’s tenses here, as he careens indecisively between the present perfect and the present perfect progressive in his attempt to delineate and contain the time of apostasy in the past. What is at issue is the temporality of apostasy, of how long the apostate has to have stood for standing to count as such. Tellingly, there is no simple past here: the Jacobin, as represented by Coleridge, is one who ‘has hoped’ for the amelioration of mankind. This use of the present perfect clarifies that the action, to hope, is to be understood as completed. Nevertheless, such a man’s hopes, Coleridge quickly clarifies, will continue to ‘burn like the Greek fire, hard to be extinguished, and easily rekindling’ because apparently he isn’t through hoping after all. And why not? Because of the interference of the present perfect progressive: the Jacobin’s affections ‘have been … interested’ in the cause of freedom, and he ‘has been … attached’ to Liberty. The use of the progressive here alerts us to the continuance, in the present, of an action begun in the past – of a continuous action in this case, for his hopes will continue to burn, for ‘even when private interests warp his public character,’ he will ‘yet wish.’ The adage ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin’ holds true then, without circumstantial evidence, because it exists in the present perfect progressive, a grammar of temporal continuity as manifested in Coleridge’s declensions. In other words, Coleridge need not concern himself with providing ‘proof’ for the favorable representation of mankind in his adage. The time of apostasy? Not the simple past but the present perfect progressive, not merely a standing away, apparently, but a free-fall through time that no temporizing circumlocutions can arrest. The temporality of a political decision has been taken over and decisively reordered according to the temporality of the adage (the saw) he claims credit for both having





Between 1802 and 1818, Coleridge’s manipulations of his youthful political squib endowed it with a seemingly ungovernable afterlife, one which placed him (rhetorically as well as temporally) in a peculiarly specular relation to it. In numbers 10 and 11 of The Friend (Oct. 1809), for example, Coleridge reprinted a lengthy section from ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ (accompanied by yet another revised version of the ode on France) as part of a disquisition on the ‘Errors of Party Spirit.’ While he proudly signals this incorporation of earlier material by pointing out to the reader that it was he who in 1802 formulated ‘the first fair and philosophical statement and definition of Jacobinism and of Jacobin’ (Friend 2.144), Coleridge abjures the discriminating analysis of the varieties of English Jacobinism that would substantiate this claim, in favor of reprinting the essay’s attempt to demystify the adage that continues to haunt him. ‘Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin’ – O wherefore? … From what source are we to derive this strange Phaenomenon, that the Young and the Enthusiastic, who as our daily experience informs us, are deceived in their religious Antipathies, and grow wiser … ; should, if once deceived in a question of abstract Politics, cling to the Error for ever and ever? (2.145; compare EOT 1.372). Coleridge’s expostulations equating Jacobinism and heresy sound more hysterical than philosophical, and fail to address (let alone answer) the question of why one cannot shake it off, particularly when, in retrospect, the consequences of Jacobinism have proved to be such that ‘every good Man’s heart sickens and his head turns giddy at the retrospect’ (2.145). There is no reason per se, but simply the incommutable sentence passed by the adage. The use of ‘giddy’ at this juncture is telling: describing a confused sensation or mental dizziness and suggesting a susceptibility to falling, ‘giddy’ foreshadows the vertiginous valence that apostasy will acquire in the 1810s, and turns the ‘retrospect’ from a looking-back into a turning-back. Occurring as it does in the final sentence of the essay, ‘giddy’ furthermore describes both the verge from which to re-view Coleridge’s theory of Jacobinism and the



formulated (apropos Pitt’s February, 1800, speech) and for having reintroduced into public discourse. Once formulated, Coleridge’s definition of a Jacobin always belies the binding temporality of his own apostasy.

sensation attendant upon any attempt to unravel the temporal logic of the adage that he won’t allow his readers to forget. How is one to survey the past when it is repeatedly conflated with and rolled into the present, as happens in the disconcerting temporal vise of ‘once/always’? Coleridge’s formulation would seem to preclude the very retrospect that might free us from the snares of Jacobinism. Leaving this critical question unanswered at the end of the tenth number of The Friend, Coleridge abruptly begins the eleventh, ‘I was never, at any period of my life, a Convert to the System’ (2.146). We have heard this before (1802) and will hear it again (1817, in chapter 10 of the Biographia; and 1818, with the republication in three volumes of The Friend). Coleridge’s revivification at this time of both the adage for which he would claim parentage (‘once/always’) and the dubious antidote against it (‘I was never …’) is representative not only of his insistence on restaging his own past but also of his vulnerability regarding this past, at once the stability of his personal history and the operations of past tenses. Can the past (whether earlier political positions or antecedent conversions) be treated as such when organized under the heading ‘once/always’? The greater the lapse of time, the more susceptible Coleridge becomes to the curious, somehow binding temporality of his own adage. This sense of the progressive time of the past is complicated for us, as it was for his contemporary readers, by the knowledge of Coleridge’s susceptibility to charges of having been ‘once’ – and thus ‘always’ – a Jacobin. Southey, for example, Coleridge’s accomplice in the pantisocratic scheme of 1794–95 (which, predicated as it was upon the communality of property, bluntly violates Coleridge’s later, Burkean claims always to have endorsed the rights pertaining to individual property), was quick to vent his irritation with Coleridge’s insufferable ‘canting.’ Vexed with Coleridge’s manipulations of his own past in The Friend, Southey privately denounced these recantations as ‘worse than folly, for if he was not a Jacobine, in the common acceptation of the name, I wonder who the Devil was. I am sure I was, am still, and ever more shall be (New Letters 1.511).56 Eight years later, in chapter 10 of the Biographia (‘that fine piece of fiction’ in which he recounts his youthful political opinions [Thompson ‘Bliss Was It in that Dawn’ 114]), Coleridge repeatedly alludes to ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ in support of his claim that even during the production of The Watchman in 1796, ‘my principles were [opposite] to those of jacobinism or even of democracy’ (1.184). (Never hesitating to assume for himself the distinction of




having been the first to have ‘explicitly defined and analyzed the nature of Jacobinism,’ Coleridge goes so far here as to claim that ‘I both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against jacobinism, admitted or supported [its worst] principles’ [1.217]). It was periphrastic recollections such as this that prompted Thelwall (a far more visible and ‘radical’ Jacobin than Coleridge, who corresponded with Coleridge at the time before visiting him at Nether Stowey in 1798) to record his indignation in the margins of his copy of the Biographia. Conceding the difficulty of defining, let alone rescuing, such a term as Jacobin, Thelwall’s immediate response upon reading the Biographia suggests the degree to which Coleridge has compromised himself in his ongoing effort to evade the indelible ‘taint’ of youthful Jacobinism: What Jacobinism may mean I cannot tell: if the principles of the first leaders of the Jacobin club, what friend of liberty of human reason & human happiness would disown them? If the doctrines (or declamations, & the practices of the last, what friend of Man would not recoil from them with horror? If Jacobinism be antisocialism, I have never gone the lenghts [sic] in that way which the Pantisocratist went at any rate, nay I may say I never had the slightest tinge of that with which Mr C. was deep died: but that Mr C. was indeed far from Democracy, because he was far beyond it, I well remember – for he was a down right zealous leveller & indeed in one of the worst senses of the word he was a Jacobin, a man of blood. (Pollin 81)57 Whether or not it was ‘fair and philosophical’ as advertised, Coleridge’s 1802 analysis of the nomenclature of the term Jacobin repeatedly provides him with sufficient latitude in his oblique evasions of ever having been one. Consequently, what is ultimately at stake in the objections of Thelwall, Southey, and others to Coleridgean historicism is not so much the question of whether Coleridge was or was not a Jacobin according to the ‘common acceptation of the name,’ but whether, despite Coleridge’s self-congratulatory claims to the contrary, the term itself can be governed. Beyond the barbed j’accuse! of the contemporary responses to Coleridge’s performances of political versatility, the abiding significance of these repeated juxtapositions and conflations of the 1790s with the 1810s has more to do with the propriety and manageability of the terms themselves. Indeed, what is of note in Coleridge’s later, formulaic asser-




tions of political consistency – ‘I was never, at any period of my life, a Convert to the System’ – is the allegorical emphasis on French Jacobinism not as a ‘speculative error’ (a matter of belief, akin to an heretical opinion regarding the Holy Ghost) but as ‘the System’ (a formal set of rules, modulated according to its own logic) and, more importantly, for the explicit characterization of Jacobin politics in terms of conversion. Before one can attempt to turn away from Jacobinism, before one can turn apostate, one must turn away from an anterior ideology and toward Jacobinism (as clarified in Hazlitt’s revision, ‘Once an Apostate and always an Apostate’). Jacobinism is thus a product of an initial apostasy – indeed, of an initiating apostasy, once we consider, as Coleridge propels us to here, the taint of the ‘once/always’ as pertaining not so much to the -ism of Jacobinism as to the conversion to it: once a convert always a convert. (Put otherwise: once in motion, always in motion – much as language, understood figuratively, is seen to operate as a system of tropes which, ever in motion, turns without closure.) And it is this shift in emphasis, from the temporality of Jacobinism to that of conversion, of apostasy, that prefigures the ironization of apostasy which comes into play when Coleridge takes it upon himself to vindicate ‘heroic apostasy’ in the spring of 1817 (apropos the disinterment and pirated publication of Southey’s Jacobin drama of 1794, Wat Tyler) and forge a way out of the previously binding atemporality of his pet adage. The competing declarations remain locked in a strenuous tug-of-war over the fulcrum of Coleridgean apostasy, as ‘once/always’ is forced to balance itself against ‘never a convert,’ until the ‘turn’ and ‘conversion’ implicit in Jacobinism itself are articulated (by Hazlitt), after which the modality of the term ‘apostasy’ shifts from a standing-apart to a falling-away in such a fashion that Coleridge can then ‘convert’ politics into metaphysics.

V: The Multeity of Metaphysical Apostasy When revising The Friend in the spring of 1817, Coleridge introduced a footnote apropos his inclusion, yet again, of the extract from the selfconsuming article of 1802 designed to exculpate him from any charge of youthful Jacobinism. Reminding his readers that what followed was ‘the first philosophical appropriation of a precise import to the word Jacobin,’ Coleridge went on to note that ‘the whole Essay has a peculiar interest to myself at the present moment, (1 May 1817) from the recent notorious publication of Mr. Southey’s juvenile Drama, the Wat Tyler, and the consequent assault on his character by an M.P. in his senatorial capacity’ (Friend 1.221).58 Dating the present as precisely as




he does, Coleridge brings his own writing of the moment (the four-part ‘Mr. Southey and Wat Tyler’ of March–April 1817) into collision with the entirety of ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin.’ The ‘present moment’ designates not only the ‘now’ of discourse but, of greater consequence, the time that will interrupt the vise-like grip of ‘once/always’ on Coleridge’s thinking about consistency and selfhood. As such, it operates as yet another fulcrum – this time, the apex over which Coleridge lists as he begins to abjure the putative stasis of Jacobinism in formulating the apo-stasis and, finally, the falling of apostasy. The opportunity to defend Southey enabled Coleridge to shake off the binding decree of ‘once a Jacobin always a Jacobin’ and formulate an economy of conversion in such a way that it would no longer be necessary for him to maintain the illusion that he had never been a Jacobin.59 Indeed, Coleridge’s apologia ought to be considered not as a defense of but a eulogy on apostasy. Subsequent to his vindication of ‘heroic apostasy,’ Coleridge’s considerations of apostasy abjure the term’s contemporary political connotations in favor of more traditional theological implications, as appropriated and reinvigorated by Coleridge in order that he might deploy apostasy as a standing away from the divine – a standing of little or no stasis, however, designating as it repeatedly does the fall from God. Thus in a fragmentary essay from 1820, ‘On Love, the Holy ˘ names ˘ ‘the willing of a station Spirit, and the Divine Will,’ ‘apostasis’ ’′ πο του Θου [away, from God]) merely (στασις [stasis, standing]) from (α potentially’ (Shorter Works 868), and in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1824), it is the second class of Coleridge’s ‘System of Credenda’ (Shorter Works 1118). Following upon the first class, designated stasis (the transcendent cause, or ‘whatever verily is’), the spiritual chaos of the fall from God (apostasis) results in the third class, ‘metastasis’ (understood as a change of state), which is itself antecendent to the fourth class, ‘anastasis,’ or a rise in state (that is to say, Redemption) (1118–19). Given the multeity of significations overdetermining apostasis in Coleridge’s writing, it comes as no surprise that Coleridge and his critics should have increasing trouble reining it in. Indeed, though Coleridge may not ever have presumed to have managed the term apostasy to the degree that he claims to have purified Jacobinism, it becomes for him yet another unmanageable term when, in conjunction with his rereading of Schelling with T.H. Green in 1817–18 (crucial to much of his later thought, including the ‘System of Credenda’ above, and to which we will return in conclusion), he would subsume it within the metaphysical operation of his emerging




‘Logosophia’ as an initiating fall. Whether consequence or coincidence, it was in the immediate aftermath of the public spectacle of Southey’s apostasy that Coleridge began to convert a political liability into a metaphysical necessity. Hazlitt suggests something similar when, in castigating Coleridge for moving always ‘in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and falsehood,’ he notes the versatility with which Coleridge ‘slides out of a logical deduction with the help of metaphysics’ (WH 7.116). Here and elsewhere, Hazlitt repeatedly draws our attention to Coleridge’s sinuous logic in order to expose the ‘perverse obliquity’ (EOT 3.276) of his writing and its consequent inconsequentiality. Unaccountably oblique, Coleridge’s apostasy is not, Hazlitt intimates, finally reconcilable with any static model of apostasy which would attempt to arrest the ‘always’ that characterizes its falling away. Christensen, Hazlitt and Coleridge’s most sophisticated reader on this count, argues otherwise. Reading the ‘unaccountable diagonal’ of Coleridge’s thinking more recuperatively than Hazlitt, he argues that ‘Coleridge makes history by turning political vacillation into philosophical equivocation,’ then identifying as ‘Coleridgean’ the strategy ‘that equivocates politics and political philosophy and that imaginatively converts the former into the latter’ (‘Once an Apostate’ 463, 464). Christensen’s elaborate reading of Coleridgean sublimation would ground Coleridge through delineating apostasy as a principle, one with a concomitant ‘logic of equivocation proper to principles as principles’ (464), and thus arrest Coleridgean vacillation by insisting on the status of swaying as a principle. Such a strong reading of apostasy as a strategic susceptibility to double signification, while both erasing and remarking the stigma with which Thompson and others would brand the apostate, finally ‘turns apostasy into a kind of power’ (464) – namely the power of standing slightly away from both history and apostasy. Unequivocally an apostate, according to Christensen, ‘Coleridge was always slightly away from a political position; never a Jacobin revolutionary or a Burkean compromiser, he was always technically an apostate’ (464). Fixing apostasy as the principle of standing always away, Christensen arrests Coleridge’s fall from principle and ironically establishes the continuity of his career through empowering apostasy as a position resistant to power by virtue of being always away, always on the verge of falling out or in with power.60 Such a position is equivocal in the sense that it is susceptible of being assigned to either of the extremes between which it presumably wavers, an equivocation which, ‘proper to principles as principles’ (emphasis




added), insists on the apo- of apostasy as both ‘off’ and ‘against.’ By virtue of Christensen’s complicitous sublimation of politics into philosophy (and etymology), Coleridge can be said to be always off – off the mark and away from the principled positions where both his supporters and detractors would locate him. And this includes Christensen, who of course cannot always control the numerous conversions to which his own reading is liable: if always away, may not Coleridge be said to be in all ways away (now as ever)? As is the case with any significant consideration of Coleridgean apostasy, Christensen’s is both guided and haunted by Hazlitt, whose own reading qualifies the salutary continuity of equivocation which Christensen constructs through attending to the variety of ways that Coleridge has of being away. Hazlitt is valuable as a critic of romantic apostasy because, beyond the vigilance and severity of his critique, his own writing practice can be said to succumb to the very falling it so ruthlessly exposes. That is to say: what Christensen means by ‘Burke’ (the identification of politics with the forcefulness of tropes [464]) is what, for the purposes of explicating Coleridge’s apostasy, I mean by ‘Hazlitt’ (a chiasmus to which we will return in Chapter 6). Though Thompson invokes Hazlitt as somehow exemplary of a committedly (empirical) political critique of Coleridge’s apostasy, Hazlitt’s writing is in fact distinctive for its contamination of the political with the literary, and therefore for the reminder it provides that there can be no stable ground of judgement regarding such a self-violating word, such a mot glissant, as apostasy. The ground of Hazlitt’s critique repeatedly falls away under pressure from the ever-shifting modalities of Coleridge’s apostasy. Indeed, Hazlitt’s pointed deployment of Coleridge’s adage on Jacobinism against him provides a telling, climactic scenario of the complexity of an apostasy which can here be seen to contaminate Hazlitt as well as Coleridge. If, as Thompson puts it, apostasy is a matter of falling back in with the forms and sensibility of ‘traditional culture’ (‘Disenchantment’ 155; emphasis added), then, as we noted as early as Chapter 1, it is predicated upon a previous falling – a falling out with that culture prior to any subsequent falling back in. It is not surprising that Hazlitt should make this point apposite Coleridge’s own anti-jacobinical definitions of Jacobinism (which are themselves ‘not slightly infected with some of the worst symptoms of the madness against which they are raving’ [EOT 1.370]), as he does in the second of his ‘Illustrations of The Times Newspaper’ (‘On Modern Apostates’) in December 1816. Questioning the ‘liberal turn’ that has of late been





Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin, is a maxim, which, notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge’s see-saw reasoning to the contrary, we hold to be true, even of him to this day. Once an Apostate and always an Apostate, we hold to be equally true; and the reason why the last is true, is that the first is so. A person who is what is called a Jacobin (and we apply this term in its vulgarest sense to the persons here meant) that is, who has shaken off certain well known prejudices with respect to kings or priests, or nobles, cannot so easily resume them again, whenever his pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to attempt it. And it is because he cannot resume them again in good earnest, that he endeavours to make up for his want of sincerity by violence, either by canting till he makes your soul sicken, like the author of The Friend, or by raving like a Bedlamite, as does the Editor of The Times. (WH 7.135) According to Hazlitt’s appropriation of Coleridge, Jacobinism is itself an apostatic position, characterized here as a shaking off of accepted prejudices. Furthermore, while the attempted resumption of these same prejudices is equated with the preliminary apostasy as a shaking off, it is not as simple as a falling back. It is in fact the inability simply to fall back that prompts the violence of the apostate’s condemnation of the Jacobinism that he can now never entirely shake off – ‘He blusters and hectors, and makes a noise to hide his want of consistency … . He has … no feeling of any thing but of hatred to the cause he has deserted’ (WH 7.136). The residue of what Hazlitt figures as ‘old jacobinical leaven,’ however, renders such blustering completely ineffectual: ‘You see the Jacobinical leaven working in every line that he writes, and making strange havoc with his present professions … [as] the spectre of his former opinions glares perpetually near him, and provokes his frantic zeal’ (WH 7.136).61 Recalling that ‘old leaven’ is both that residue which remains behind, and that fermenting agent which enables a rising up, if the ‘logic’ of the maxim ‘Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin’ is predicated upon leaven-as-residue, then that of “Once an apostate and always an apostate” may be said to rely on leaven-as-levity: the levity of apostasy takes form as a falling up, especially as applied to the case of Coleridge’s ‘own specific levity’ (WH 7.117). In his own reading of Hazlitt’s diatribe (in a second examination of Coleridge’s apostasy), Christensen overlooks the havoc wreaked by



given to apostasy, Hazlitt clarifies the implications of Coleridge’s notorious formulation:


… if Hazlitt shows that Coleridge is constrained by a compulsive rhetoric of reversal, Hazlitt himself is not free of the Coleridgean figure. By equating Jacobin and apostate under the act of ‘shaking off,’ he curiously vitiates the moral force of his indictment; he formalizes change into a pattern of mechanical repetition that is more exigent than any ethical posture or political program. Hazlitt captures Coleridge within the restraints of his ironic equation only to open a trapdoor through which Coleridge escapes, leaving behind any responsibility, let alone culpability, for actions that are compulsive rather than wicked, paradigmatic rather than perverse. (‘Guilty Thing’ 772) According to Christensen, Hazlitt’s indictment loses its force when, in inscribing Jacobinism within apostasy as a formal pattern of repetition which is finally mechanical, it relieves Coleridge of any sort of responsibility for his actions and thereby sets him free. But perhaps that is exactly the ‘force’ of Hazlitt’s critique: if apostasy is unavoidable, a matter of mechanical repetition, then not only is Hazlitt subject to it himself (the real trapdoor here), but its never-ending economy (whether figured in terms of falling or of fermentation) gives it a far more radical agency that either Hazlitt or Christensen seems to realize. Although Coleridge may ‘leave behind’ any responsibility, he cannot, according to Hazlitt, so easily leave behind the jacobinical leaven that will (mechanically … ? organically … ?) continue to rise up and implicate him.62 While Coleridge may ‘escape’ via a slide from logic to metaphysics (the performance of the sublimation that Christensen previously read), it nevertheless does not follow that he will then be free from the ‘necessity of yielding to the slightest motive’ (WH 7.117). As a ‘pattern of mechanical repetition,’ operating without the exercise of thought or volition, apostasy can not be stopped by the application of critical will – which, as we will see, both Coleridge and Christensen (in a decidedly Coleridgean strategy) would bring to bear. As with his previous diagnosis of Coleridge’s apostasy, Christensen’s reading here is valuable for its liberation of the charge of apostasy from the ethical overtones that so often determine it; what it doesn’t do, however, is clarify or finally abide by the exigencies of repetitive falling it would articulate. Whereas Christensen previously constructed Coleridge’s apostasy in terms of the equivocation of his standing always slightly away, here,



residual Jacobinism in suggesting that Hazlitt unwittingly lets Coleridge off the hook:


Hazlitt’s assertion, ‘Once an Apostate and always an Apostate,’ is true but only if modified in a way that discharges it of its polemical force: ‘Once an apostate and always already an apostate’ is the better, not to mention more fashionable, motto. At every point we examine him, even at the beginning, Coleridge is already falling away from every principled commitment – commitments which are, indeed, endowed with significance solely by that lapse and the critical reflection it allows. (‘Guilty Thing’ 772) Apostasy here is not merely a ‘lapse,’ nor even an ‘already falling,’ but an ‘always already’ falling. The mechanics of this economy of falling seem to be already compromised, however, by Christensen’s valorization of apostasy in terms of an attendant critical reflection. Indeed, Christensen’s turn from the mechanical to the critical suggests that if Coleridge elides responsibility through escaping as he does out of a trapdoor, that exit is opened not by Hazlitt so much as by Christensen-as-Coleridge. And if the trapdoor turns out to be metaphysically rather than ironically hinged, then it can be seen to be held open by Christensen, who, in his apocryphal reading of Coleridge’s apostasy, turns to Coleridge’s notebooks to explicate what he terms a ‘metaphysics of apostasy’ (772). In an important 1818 entry on Schelling’s ‘two fundamental errors’ with regard to the ‘establishment of Polarity in the Absolute’ (in the Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie), Coleridge attempts, according to Christensen’s reading, to construct ‘apostasis as the crucial articulation of a cosmogonic paradigm that would take account of the law of polarity and yet preserve the determinant, singular unity of an absolute’ (773). In part, the entry reads as follows: … there must be the οδος κατω [way downwards] and the οδος ανω [way upwards] – but this is because there are two Spheres, το αγενετον, and η γενεσις [the uncreated and the coming into being] – or the Plenitude and Nature – the οδος κατω [way downwards] commencing with the Fall from God, η αποστασις [apostasy] – the µεθοδος [way, path of transit] with the Chaos and the descent of the Spirit – the οδος ανω [way upwards] with the genesis of Light. – Thus in my Logosophia I have four great Divisions, I. That which is neither ascent or descent, κανω or κατω, nor µθοδος – for instead of an οδος, it is that αφ' ου [from which], and ις ο’′ν, [to which], not a road at all, but at once the starting-post, and the Goal. – Call it then



standing gives way to falling, but a falling which in no way compromises the ‘power’ of Coleridge’s apostasy. As Christensen continues:

Στασις [Stasis]. II. αποστασις [Apostasy], or η οδος κατω [the way downwards]. III. Μεθοδος [way, path of transit]. IV. η οδος ανω [the way upwards]. Magis concinnè [More neatly] thus: I. Στασις [Stasis] II. Αποστασις [Apostasis] III. Μεταστασις [Metastasis, or changing of position] IV. Αναστασις [Anastasis, or standing up]. (CN 3.4449, CN 3.4449n)63 Repeating Coleridge’s immediate query, ‘Well but what is the use of all this?’ Christensen clarifies: The use, clear from our neo-Hazlittian perspective, lies in the transformation of ‘Once an Apostate and always an Apostate’ into a cosmogonic crux. Apostasy is the crucial, or rather, the critical stage of Coleridge’s paradigm because it is the first break in the stasis that precedes all paradigms, the standing away that precipitates the creation. (773; emphasis added) While this makes a great deal of sense as a distillation of such a resonant Coleridgean meditation, our neo-Hazlittian perspective suggests a somewhat different reading. Whereas he previously championed Hazlitt’s maxim for its insight into the Coleridgean modality of an always already falling, Christensen now withdraws from the implication of always falling in this climactic deployment of apostasy as a ‘standing away.’ As an always falling, apostasy doesn’t precipitate creation so much as chaos (according to the order of Coleridge’s Logosophia), and it remains for metastasis to check this fall. Indeed, as the medial position which arrests the movement downward and reorients its ‘path of transit,’ metastasis is far more crucial (that is to say, ‘critical’) to the coherence of the Logosophia. Rhetorically, as a rapid transition from one point to another, metastasis enables Coleridge and Christensen to escape the precipitous state of always falling that is proper to apostasy as apostasy. My point here is not, finally, to quibble with Christensen regarding an arcanely apposite entry in Coleridge’s notebooks but, rather – in pointing out the way in which Christensen’s reading falls away from its own most challenging insight (namely, the implications of thinking apostasy as a formalized ‘pattern of mechanical repetition’) – to focus on the unpredictable yet seemingly unavoidable exigencies of apostasy from which the critical discourse on apostasy is not immune. While the escape into metaphysics (Coleridge’s or Christensen’s) depends on the sleight of falling back upon a strict etymological denotation, such a construction is explicitly at odds with the usage of apostasy that is




everywhere apparent in Coleridge’s notebook as a falling and a lapse (in terms of ‘the Fall … the descent … [and] the way downwards’). Perhaps what is needed here is a different lexicon for apostasy, one more representative of the elusive operations of such a perverse mot glissant: slipping in this manner, apostasy revolts (in line with a second, Greek usage of stasis as faction and strife), and operates more in the manner of catapipty (cata-down; pipto-to fall), if not apopipty (to fall away; to fall and end up in a different place). Indeed, the word that the turn to (or is it against?) metaphysics really needs is apocatapipty (an apart-downward falling), a neologism so appropriate to the economy of Coleridgean apostasy that one would like to imagine his assent scribbled in the margins with a simple stet.




3

Amid the dark control of lawless sway Ambitions, rivalry, fanatic hate And various ills that shook the unsettled State, The dauntless Bard pursued his studious way. (Wordsworth, ‘[Sonnet on Milton]’1) In the Examiner of 11 June 1815, exactly one week before Waterloo, Hazlitt reviewed a recent production of Milton’s ‘Comus,’ noting in the final paragraph that he did not find the masque equal to either the youthful classicism of ‘Lycidas’ or the mature morality of ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Then, without any transition whatsoever, what appeared to have been a concluding survey of the trajectory of Milton’s career gives way to an indignant declamation: We have no less respect for the memory of Milton as a patriot than as a poet. Whether he was a true patriot, we shall not enquire: he was at least a consistent one. He did not retract his defence of the people of England; he did not say that his sonnets to Vane or Cromwell were meant ironically; he was not appointed Poet-Laureat to a Court which he had reviled and insulted; he accepted neither place nor pension; nor did he write paltry sonnets upon the ‘Royal fortitude’ of the House of Stuart, by which, however, they really lost something.* (WH 5.233)2 *In the last edition of the works of a modern Poet, there is a Sonnet to the King [‘November, 1813’], complimenting him on ‘his royal fortitude’ and (somewhat prematurely) on the triumphs resulting from it. The story of the Female Vagrant, which very beautifully and affectingly describes the miseries brought on the lower classes by war, in bearing which the said ‘royal fortitude’ is so nobly exercised, is very properly struck out of the collection.

80



‘Lawless Sway,’ Pendulous Politics

The modern poet in question is of course Wordsworth, encoded in the review’s final lines as a failed Milton, who stands in synecdochically for the tergiversations performed by all three Lake poets. Whereas Milton never retracted either of his Defences of the English People, Wordsworth, according to Hazlitt’s imputation, regularly and carelessly violates the social tenets of the Preface and the Lyrical Ballads in his later political sonnets and (in April 1816), the Thanksgiving Ode volume. Whereas Coleridge would ironize his relation to his 1790s ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ and write an ‘apologetic preface’ to his war eclogue, ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,’ Milton never qualified the tone of his own political sonnets. Whereas Southey and Wordsworth’s political shuffling enabled them to receive government sinecures, Milton’s consistent republicanism disqualified him from laureateships and stamp distributorships. And had Milton troubled to compose poetry for the Stuarts, it certainly would have surpassed Wordsworth’s obsequious tribute to George III in ‘November, 1813.’ Finally, whereas Hazlitt constructs Milton as the exception to the rule, the poet who was not an apostate, his arraignment here of Wordsworth suggests that he has no more respect for Wordsworth as a poet than as a patriot. As antagonistic as Hazlitt’s reading is, it accepts as its premiss Wordsworth’s own very public identification at this time with his selfproclaimed ‘great predecessor’ (Middle Years 2.146). Indeed, what is noteworthy about the diatribe is the seeming impossibility of considering Wordsworth and Milton other than in terms of one another. In the pages of the Examiner throughout the most intense period of Wordsworth’s self-canonization as the great heir to Milton – from the Excursion (August 1814) through the Thanksgiving Ode volume (April 1816) and, as we shall see, particularly in one week of June, 1815 – neither Hazlitt nor Leigh Hunt can mention Wordsworth without invoking Milton, or vice-versa, so inevitably does each poet’s vocational persona seem to inhere in the other’s (at least in the Examiner’s critical consciousness). When Wordsworth visited Hunt on the same afternoon that Hazlitt’s denunciation had run, Hunt reports that he ‘had the pleasure of showing [Wordsworth] his book on my shelves by the side of Milton’ (Autobiography 253), and when he published a retraction of Hazlitt’s comments in the next week’s Examiner, he attempted to do so by reconsolidating the Wordsworth-Milton axis so thoroughly disparaged by Hazlitt. Substituting ‘virtue and genius’ for Hazlitt’s patriotism and poetry, Hunt reattributes to Wordsworth the



‘Lawless Sway,’ Pendulous Politics 81

‘real spirit of liberty’ which Hazlitt reproves him for having turned his back on, and would thereby recover a Wordsworth who, ‘while he ranks himself in general with politicians of one description, he brings them the noblest of all assistance by refusing to give up his admiration for the great and good of another,’ namely Milton (‘Bonaparte’ 387). The prominent conflict here between Hunt’s credulousness and Hazlitt’s skepticism points out the pervasive Miltonic subtext to be read in Wordsworth’s career at this time (the metadiscursive performance of vocation, as distinct from the language of the poetry). It also clarifies that, as assiduously as Wordsworth cultivates this identification, he cannot control what ‘Milton’ will signify for the readership he would transform into his own ‘fit audience though few.’ Attending more to the figure of the poet and the ‘spirit’ of his writing than to the language of the poetry, Wordsworth, Hunt, and Hazlitt all read Milton as their particular cultural property. Whereas Milton names for Hazlitt the rare instance of a poet who did not trade in his principles for a pension, and for Hunt the exemplary instance of a poet who combined political virtue with literary genius, Milton signifies for Wordsworth the elite poet who not only (like himself in 1815) did not sell well during his own time, but who also, as the national poet, ‘Taught us how rightfully a nation shone / In splendor’ (‘“Great Men have been among us”’ ll. 7–8). Deploying a pointedly different ‘Milton’ than the one which emerges from Wordsworth’s appropriation, Hazlitt repeatedly demystifies Wordsworth’s self-canonization as the poet who will instruct England now as Milton did then. Beyond the premiss that (according to Crabb Robinson) Hazlitt at this time thought it ‘useful to expose people who would otherwise gain credit by canting and hypocrisy’ (Robinson 1.200–1), 3 Hazlitt’s strategy of criticizing Wordsworth by invoking (indeed, enforcing) Milton presents us not only with an intense scrutiny of the romantic poet’s mystification of his own vocation, but also with an account of how to resist Wordsworth’s critique of his readers’ pride and vanity 4 – for what is perhaps finally at stake in contemporary romantic preoccupations with Milton is not merely the question of the politics proper to the poet in a time of national turmoil, but the ideological status of poetry in such crises. In the contemporary assessment of Wordsworth’s politics and poetry – the nebulous intersection of political poetry and poetical politics – these questions are most conspicuously brought into focus under the heading of what Hazlitt denominates ‘Jacobin poetics.’ The ideology of




this poetics (a dangerous conflation of the ‘spirit’ and the ‘language’ of poetry) serves both to align Wordsworth with Milton and, ultimately, to contest that alignment, when ‘Jacobin’ emerges as signifying not politically radical Gallic egalitarianism so much as poetically reactionary radical Anglo-egotism. As Hazlitt pronounces (in a cryptic formulation to which we will return), ‘the secret of the Jacobin poetry and the anti-jacobin politics of this writer is the same’ (WH 7.144). In what follows, I will situate Hazlitt’s and Hunt’s constructions of Wordsworth’s Miltonism in two overlapping time-frames before eventually returning to the Examiners of 11 and 18 June 1815, to clarify the political stakes for romantic readers in reading Wordsworth vis-à-vis Milton. After looking briefly at Wordsworth’s own very public claims for his Miltonic inheritance between 1814 and 1816, I will examine the contradiction between the pretensions and effects of Wordsworth’s politics (under the heading of ‘Jacobin poetics’) as they emerge in an array of critical-political claims made for the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. We will then be in a position (part two) to concentrate on Wordsworth’s revisions and complications of his ‘revolutionary’ poetics throughout the 1802–16 trajectory of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,’ which repeatedly confront the reader with Wordsworth’s multivocal investment in Milton. In attending to the Miltonic valences of Wordsworth’s contemporary status as ‘cultural capital’ (both linguistically, as the revolutionary guardian of the language of English poetry, and symbolically, as the canonical poet of his day),5 we will be able to open up the context in which Hazlitt and Hunt read and resisted Wordsworth’s aggressive identification with his canonical role model. Having done so, we will be able (in the third and final section) to read the variously conflicted strategies according to which Hazlitt, Hunt, Wordsworth, and others all relentlessly crowd into the name ‘Milton’ their own accounts of the relation between politics and poetics proper to the English poet.6

I In the summer of 1815, Wordsworth was in the midst of a tripartite biblioblitz designed to clarify that he was, incontestably, the contemporary Milton. Having followed up the publication of The Excursion (August 1814) with his collected Poems (February 1815), Wordsworth would the following year publish the Thanksgiving Ode volume (April 1816), the final flourish of his self-aggrandizement as the definitive national poet of his time. The 1807 publication of Poems, in Two




Volumes marked the appearance of the first series of Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets, dedicated to Liberty’ (26 in total), which were then reprinted in the 1815 collected Poems, supplemented by 32 additional sonnets written between 1807 and 1813.7 Momentarily concluding in 1815 with the 1811 sonnet ‘“Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise”’ (‘Conclusion. 1811’), a reassertion of the purity of the poet’s song and his dedication to liberty, the series then has appended to it ‘November, 1813,’ Wordsworth’s sonnet on George III’s ‘regal fortitude’ (later singled out for derision by Hazlitt in the ‘Comus’ review). One year later, with its three sonnets on Waterloo, the Thanksgiving Ode volume presents itself as both a postscript to and post-Waterloo climax of the political poetry. Clarifying at the end of the Advertisement that ‘this Publication may be considered as a sequel to the Author’s “Sonnets, dedicated to Liberty;” it is therefore printed uniform with the two volumes of his Poems, in which these Sonnets are collected, to admit of their being conveniently bound-up together’ (Thanksgiving Ode x), Wordsworth tidily binds up the trajectory of his political poetry with his most ambitious publishing program.8 As Stephen Gill has observed of Wordsworth’s flurry of publications between 1814 and 1816, the contemporary reader didn’t actually need to read but merely to buy any of these volumes to see that Wordsworth thought of himself without hesitation or qualification as the direct heir to the line of Spenser and Milton (302). Nowhere is this identification more conspicuous than in Wordsworth’s allusions to Milton in the Preface to the Excursion (including the ‘Prospectus’ for the Recluse) and in the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ of 1815. In the former, Wordsworth relies on two particularly charged sites of Milton’s own vauntingly egocentric announcements of his vocation (the Preface to the second book of The Reason of Church-Government and the proem to book 7 of Paradise Lost) to reveal the extent to which he formulates his vocational ambitions as well as his anxieties in terms of Milton. Announcing in the Preface to the Excursion that he has ‘retired to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live’ (PrW 3.5; emphasis added), Wordsworth forthrightly alludes to Milton’s account, in The Reason of ChurchGovernment, of his intent to ‘leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die’ (Reason 810).9 Like Milton in 1642, Wordsworth here effectively announces to the ‘knowing reader, that for some few yeers yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted’ (Reason 820). Unlike Milton, of course, Wordsworth has in 1814 already written that work of his which




will live, and any suggestion to the contemporary reader of ‘trust’ or ‘payment’ will more likely connote the monetary benefits of apostasy, or at least the uneasy circumstances of Wordsworth’s recent appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland. Following the Miltonic rationale that with ‘his garland and his singing robes about him’ he might ‘without apology speak more of himself,’ Wordsworth discards the ‘cool element of prose’ in favor of the ‘high region of his fancies’ (Reason 808) to proclaim his high argument in the ‘Prospectus.’ In his supplication that he too may ‘fit audience find, though few,’ Wordsworth not only appropriates Milton’s Urania for his own ‘spousal verse,’ that ‘great consummation’ between the external world and the mind of man which is to constitute the central project of The Recluse, but suggests that Milton’s muse may not in fact be adequate to the task. These are no ordinary invocations. For Wordsworth as well as Milton, the stakes are particularly high, as both poets present themselves as having ‘fallen on evil days / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues’ (7.32–4).10 The proem to book 7 of Paradise Lost is the only one of the poem’s four invocations in which Urania is actually named, and it is under her aegis that both poets reveal what might be termed their Orphic anxieties. The Miltonic poet calls on Urania not merely to continue to direct his song as he returns to his native element but, perhaps more importantly, to ‘drive far off the barbarous dissonance / Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race / Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard’ in order that he will not be torn to pieces (7.32–4).11 Not vanquishing but vanquished by the rout, the poet here must confront the question, if Calliope could not save even Orpheus (‘nor could the Muse defend / Her son,’ 7.37–8), what can she do for me, a merely mortal poet? Although Wordsworth is not in hiding in 1814–15 (as Milton was after the Restoration), he too has fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Hounded by sluggish sales and such Thracian reviewers as Francis Jeffrey, Wordsworth again defers, in the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,’ to Urania’s protection in attempting now not merely to create his fit audience, but also to exorcize and repudiate the wild rout of Jeffrey and his revelers, ‘the Public.’ If ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ (PrW 3.80), then Milton is the exemplary instance afforded by the official genealogy in the ‘Essay, Supplementary.’ Contesting Johnson’s account of the paucity of readers for Paradise Lost (‘many more readers than were supplied at first the Nation did not afford’), Wordsworth maintains that ‘if Milton’s




work were not more read, it was not because readers did not exist at the time’ (PrW 3.71). Much as Milton repudiates the ‘empty dream’ of Calliope in favor of the ‘heavenly’ Urania in book seven, so does Wordsworth renounce the muse and turn for protection to Milton’s example in the ‘Essay, Supplementary.’ Though Wordsworth’s appropriation of Milton in the prefatory material of both the Excursion and the collected Poems is particularly invested in Milton’s epic stature as the poet of Paradise Lost, ‘Milton’ in fact provides romantic readers with a distinctly English model of political as well as poetic commitment – a model diverse enough to be championed and appropriated simultaneously by figures as politically opposed as Burke and Thelwall. As Lucy Newlyn has noted, Milton’s romantic readers tended to divide into two classes, treating him either as an historical figure actively engaged in politics (the republican hero firmly committed to libertarian politics) or as an oracular figure who served as a vehicle for timeless truths (the epic poet sublimely removed from earthly politics and capable of detaching himself from the views of his political prose) (Newlyn 37).12 If, according to Newlyn, most romantic readers opted first for the political reading in support of their youthful revolutionary politics, then turned later to a more spiritual reading under the impact of their disillusionment with the French Revolution, it comes as no surprise that no such shift can be read in Hazlitt.13 Indeed, no less surprisingly, he actively denies such a shift in Milton’s own position: ‘Whether he was a true patriot, we shall not enquire: he was at least a consistent one.’ Whether Milton was a Puritan or a Royalist is not as important to Hazlitt as whether or not he was consistent in his political position and that he did not profit from any tergiversation. In Hazlitt’s vocabulary, ‘consistency’ is a product of thinking, which is to be understood as fundamentally opposed to writing. At the same time as it is a keyword in his antirhetorical posturing, however, ‘consistency’ can nevertheless be read in the details of a particular writer’s style. As he writes in the Examiner later in the summer of 1815, ‘There is also a decided tone in his descriptions, an eloquent dogmatism, as if the poet spoke from thorough conviction, which Milton probably derived from his spirit of partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the natural firmness and vehemence of his mind’ (WH 4.37).14 That Milton should be seen to be dogmatic highlights not only his authoritative manner, but that he abides by principles based on reasoning alone. Although Hazlitt is finally unable to assign agency to either Milton’s ‘firmness and vehemence of mind’ or his ‘spirit of partisanship,’ their reciprocal relations




produce Milton’s eloquence and, in doing so, demonstrate the inseparablity of language and politics in Hazlitt’s account of the vocation proper not merely to Milton but to the English poet – particularly those poets who would style their Englishness and their language on Milton’s. At the same time as Hazlitt and Hunt almost instinctively read Wordsworth’s career in terms of Milton’s, the modalities of this identification are far from stable. The most pressing question for each is the relation between the literary and the political. While such a distinction is somewhat arbitrary with regard to a newspaper in which (as we noted in Chapter 1), one finds political criticism under the rubric ‘Theatrical Examiner’ and literary criticism presented under the heading ‘Political Examiner,’ it is nonetheless true that for both Hazlitt and Hunt, the challenge posed by Wordsworth’s claims for his Miltonic stature is how to reconcile his literary aspirations with his political apostasy. Hazlitt’s claim that Milton was a consistent patriot implies consistency not only within Milton’s politics, but also between his political and his literary writing, between the republican prose pamphlets written by Cromwell’s Secretary for Foreign Tongues and the epic poetry of the blind postrevolutionary sage. For Hazlitt, Milton’s poetry does not undo or otherwise qualify the politics of the prose (and vice-versa). The same cannot be said of Wordsworth. If what Hazlitt repeatedly valorizes under the name of Milton is some sort of continuity between partisanship and prosody which he would call consistency, then it is conversely the discontinuities endemic to Wordsworth’s own practice that capture his attention and that he denounces under the pejorative label of ‘Jacobin poetics.’ In Hazlitt’s lexicon, ‘Jacobin poetics’ denominates the licentious egotism that inaugurates the poetic levelling of all distinctions, a levelling which is motivated less by philanthropy than by jealousy. The Jacobin poet is one whose ‘levelling muse’ (as Wordsworth’s is described) ‘strives to reduce all things to the same standard’ (WH 11.87), not in order to demonstrate that all things are by nature fit subjects for poetry so much as to throw into conspicuous relief his own imaginative pretensions. In other words, ‘Jacobin poetics’ is not a revolutionary program committed to debunking the artificial manners of the day in order to elevate the abiding objects and passions of universal nature to a more noteworthy position, thereby realizing a ‘class of Poetry’ which will ‘interest mankind permanently … due to the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations’ (PrW 1.120). Rather, in Hazlitt’s skeptical account, it is an egotistical, hypocritical method of highlighting faux-naif poetic manners – of ‘exciting




attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world’; of reducing all things (the subjects, diction, and meter of poetry, ‘everything down to its spelling’) to an absolute level – ‘so that the only thing remarkable left in the world by this change, would be the persons who had produced it’ (WH 5.163). Drawing attention to the ideological as well as rhetorical slippages of the putative national poet, Hazlitt’s public examination of Wordsworth’s career repeatedly exposes the ‘extravagant versatility’ of such ‘Jacobin poetics.’ His invigilation of the fraught, unpredictable crossing of politics and poetics repeatedly produced by Wordsworth’s peculiar sublimation of French revolutionary ideals is nowhere more starkly legible than in his appraisal of Wordsworth’s role in the 1818 Westmoreland elections. Bluntly juxtaposing the poetical politics of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads with those of the ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’ and the ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland,’ Hazlitt tersely notes that whereas Wordsworth ‘at one time considered the rustic and the classical in language as the same thing,’ he has now (in the service of Lord Lowther) taken it upon himself ‘to find out and expose the bad grammar of his rustic and less classical opponents’ (WH 19.213).15 Reexamining Wordsworth’s convenient transformation from a reformer into a disciplinarian (if not a dictator) in the republic of letters, Hazlitt would later observe (in the important ‘Consistency of Opinion’): The tone … of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetical effusions requires a little revision to adapt it to the progressive improvement in his political sentiments: for, as far as I understand the Poems themselves or the Preface, his whole system turns upon this, that the thoughts, the feelings, the expressions of the common people in country places are the most refined of all others; at once the most pure, the most simple, and the most sublime: – yet with one stroke of his prosepen, he disfranchises the whole rustic population of Westmoreland and Cumberland from voting at elections, and says there is not a man among them that is not a knave in grain. In return, he lets them still retain the privilege of expressing their sentiments in select and natural language in the Lyrical Ballads. So much for poetical justice and political severity! An author’s political theories sit loose upon him, and may be changed like his clothes. His literary vanity, alas! sticks to him like his skin, and survives in its first gloss and sleekness, amidst ‘The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.’ (WH 17.25–6)16




Even while conceding Wordsworth’s versatility as an adept in both the old, revolutionary school and the new, legitimate school of English politics, Hazlitt protests that his ‘whole creed need not be turned topsy-turvy, from the top to the bottom, even in times like these’ (WH 17.25). Nonetheless, Wordsworth is seen here to have succumbed to precisely such a reversal, as if passing an act of attainder on his earlier, youthful opinions in order to ‘offer them at the shrine of matured servility’ (WH 17.25). ‘Would Milton or Marvell have done this?’ Hazlitt finally queries (WH 17.27).17 Unlike Milton, who did not remake himself politically with the restoration of the Stuarts, Wordsworth is here bluntly accused of having retracted his poetic defense of the English people (their language, their sentiments, their politics) with ‘one stroke of his prose-pen.’ What might it mean that Wordsworth’s ‘whole system turns upon’ the ostensible sublimity of natural rustic language? On the one hand, Hazlitt here merely rephrases (or, rather, anticipates) the critical commonplace that the Wordsworth of the Lyrical Ballads overturns the established hierarchy of genres in attributing to enfeebled huntsmen, idiot boys, and mad mothers a loftiness of sentiment and diction which they had previously been denied. This reading (long and conspicuously identified with M.H. Abrams) maintains that such a treatment is nothing less than a revolutionary ‘transvaluation,’ an ‘extension of the traditional sublime to new objects’ which enfranchises the rustic population as fit subjects for poetry (Natural Supernaturalism 393). But one might also read, in the ‘turning’ Hazlitt figures, an overturning of this ostensibly egalitarian poetics, a susceptibility to being turned ‘topsy-turvy’ which wrenches asunder the revolution Abrams and others would arrest in favor of the young Wordsworth. Consequently, Hazlitt’s attention to revolutionary topsyturviness – the ‘whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel’ (WH 17.25) – prompts us to reconsider the efficacy, if not in fact the very reliability of any such thing as a ‘revolutionary’ poetics. That Wordsworth’s ‘system’ should depend upon a sublimity whose effects repeatedly lie beyond his control suggests the imminent dangers of any aesthetic structured in terms of (re-)organizing our sympathy with a power which can just as easily be figured as institutional or as natural,18 and necessitates a closer examination of what Abrams and others have long valorized as Wordsworth’s ‘poetic revolution in the poetic sources of pathos and sublimity’ (Natural Supernaturalism 395). Although Abrams doesn’t ever devote a great deal of attention specifically to Hazlitt, his treatment is important due to the great




weight Hazlitt carries as the pivotal endorsement of the foundational claims Abrams repeatedly makes regarding Wordsworthian representativeness and literary revolution. Through his habitual citations from Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and The Spirit of the Age (1825), Abrams efficiently constructs the decidedly Wordsworthian Romanticism that is his signature reading. His appropriation of Hazlitt epitomizes the casual citational practice that so often impedes a critical reading of Hazlitt and, simultaneously, dramatizes the urgency of Hazlitt’s construction of the relation between romantic poetry and politics (Wordsworth’s in particular) as well as the wariness with which it should be engaged.19 In the influential ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’ (as throughout his writing on Romanticism and revolution),20 Abrams takes his bearings from an oft-cited moment in Hazlitt’s 1818 lecture, ‘On the Living Poets,’ in order to emphasize that … it is Hazlitt’s contention that the characteristic poetry of the age took its shape from the form and pressure of revolution and reaction. The whole ‘Lake school of poetry,’ he had said, ‘had its origin in the French revolution, or rather in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution’ [WH 5.161]. Hazlitt’s main exhibit is Wordsworth (the ‘head’ of the school), whose ‘genius,’ he declares, is a ‘pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’ [WH 11.86]. The poetry of Wordsworth in the period of Lyrical Ballads was ‘one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age; the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments’ [WH 11.87]. (26–7) As tidy and perfunctory an endorsement as this at first appears, Abrams must overlook Hazlitt’s qualified articulation of the relation between the poetics of the Lake school and the politics of the French Revolution – did the work of the Lake poets have its origins in a political revolution? or in those sentiments which, in turn, produced that revolution? – if he is to establish his equation for what he repeatedly calls the ‘translation’ of a political into a literary revolution. In fact, far more equivocally than Abrams lets on, Hazlitt merely states that, moribund as English poetry was toward the close of the eighteenth century, it simply ‘wanted something to stir it up, and found that something in the principles and events of the French revolution’ (WH 5.161). Whether this influence contributed more to the Lake school’s ‘revolutionary or renegado extravagances’ (WH 5.161), however, is not clear:




to ‘partake of’ a revolution is one thing, but to be ‘carried along’ is entirely another, and arguably far from salutary. Nonetheless, overlooking Hazlitt’s skepticism and equivocation, Abrams perseveres in presenting Hazlitt as Wordsworth’s ideal reader, one of the ‘fit audience though few’ for whom Wordsworth need not have been preoccupied with the ‘task of creating the taste by which he [was] to be enjoyed’ (PrW 3.80). Indeed, when he eventually goes so far as to claim that, in what is ‘one of his most remarkable achievements in literary criticism,’ Hazlitt interprets the originality of the Lyrical Ballads (in the passage cited above from The Spirit of the Age) ‘as the equivalent in literature to the French Revolution in politics’ (‘Keenest Critic’ 39; emphasis added), we are reminded that Hazlitt’s value for Abrams consists in his seeming endorsement of Abrams’s own idealizing reading.21 Accordingly, when Abrams climactically writes that what Hazlitt recognized was that Wordsworth ‘had translated the egalitarianism of French revolutionary politics into the egalitarianism of a revolutionary poetics’ (‘On Political Readings’ 372; emphasis added), Hazlitt’s ‘remarkable achievement’ would seem to consist simply in having formulated a critical paraphrase of Wordsworth’s intriguing yet ambivalent and wholly circumlocutious claim in the Preface to have generated a literary revolution in one country which, somehow, corresponds to a social revolution in another: For, to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and react on each other, and without tracing the revolutions not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself. (PrW 1.120) It is precisely this extraordinarily elliptical statement from 1800 that is repeatedly cited as Wordsworth’s ‘claim to base literary innovation upon social revolution.’ Demanding yet deferring a theoretical account of language, reading practices, and history, it is indeed ‘a breathtaking prospectus’ (Klancher, English Reading Audiences 139). Yet in a blithe, almost Coleridgean maneuver, Wordsworth abjures writing the ‘systematic defence of the theory, upon which the poems were written’ (PrW 1.120), in favor of a throw-away line which takes for granted the production of public taste by social revolution. Anxious whether he




might be ‘suspected of having been principally influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning [the reader] into approbation of these particular poems’ (PrW 1.120), Wordsworth forsakes – in the name of an excuse – anything which might be castigated as ‘clearness and coherence.’ Given the critical pressure that is applied to this prefatory excuse, it would seem essential to clarify its logic; such an examination, however, only serves to highlight the complexities of Wordsworth’s ambivalence in this ostensible declaration of political purpose. After the initial difficulty of determining the antecedent of ‘the subject’ (his ‘systematic defence’ of the theory of the Lyrical Ballads? or the inappropriateness of indulging in such cold reasoning in a preface to a volume of poetry preoccupied with the passions of men?), the reader is forced to clarify the relation between the four or five topics which Wordsworth is not pursuing here – namely, ‘the present state of [English] public taste,’ the relative health or depravity of this taste, the manner in which ‘language and the human mind act and react on one another,’ and the trajectory of literary as well as (‘likewise’) social revolutions. If this list details what Wordsworth is not pursuing in the Preface, then where exactly is his claim to formulate a poetics based on political revolution? Moving from public taste to the revolutions of society itself, Wordsworth seems poised to deliver the critique of contemporary readers that he finally represses until the ‘Essay, Supplementary’ of 1815, but here cuts himself off by immediately acknowledging that ‘I have therefore altogether declined to enter regularly upon this defence’ (PrW 1.120). Although Wordsworth concludes the trajectory of his nondefense in terms of the revolutions of literature and society, it is far from clear whether the ‘likewise’ which connects them refers to their similarity to one another, or to the individual relevance of each to the account of ‘the present state of public taste’ which is ostensibly his concern here. Finally, in what manner do ‘language and the human mind act and react on each other’? Much more than the questionable relation of literary and social revolution, this oddly Hazlittian formulation would seem to control the logic of Wordsworth’s excuse for not writing his defense,22 and in itself suggests a much more powerful elucidation of poetry’s thematization of the political than that which is traditionally extracted from the emphasis on revolution. Abrams necessarily overlooks the negative status of this moment from the “Preface” because the interdependence – indeed, in Abrams’s ‘necessitarian’ reading,23 the equivalence – of social and literary revolu-




tions is the central premiss of his claims for Wordsworth as the representative romantic poet and Jacobin poet extraordinaire, the ‘poetical Jacobin of his generation’ (Natural Supernaturalism 396). As a result, Hazlitt is valuable to Abrams precisely because his preoccupation with the politics of romantic poetics can be appropriated as substantiating Abrams’s strong reading of Wordsworth’s own querulous representation of his project. Nevertheless, despite Abrams’s profession that Hazlitt too regards Lyrical Ballads as the ‘inauguration of a new poetic era and the close poetic equivalent to the revolutionary politics of the age,’ and ‘shrewdly recognizes that Wordsworth’s criteria are as much social as literary’ (‘English Romanticism’ 61–2), it would appear that any shrewdness on Hazlitt’s part lies not so much in his endorsement as in his equivocation and, ultimately, in his exposure of Wordsworth’s motivations to practice such a poetics. For if Hazlitt really is as shrewd and insightful as Abrams makes him out to be, it is not because he complicitously subscribes to Wordsworth’s enigmatic alignment of social and literary revolution, but because he exposes Wordsworth’s perversion of the egalitarian impulses of Jacobin politics into a predominantly egotistic aesthetic when ‘translated’ into poetry. The complexity of Hazlitt’s account becomes immediately clear upon examining the pivotal moment from The Spirit of the Age: [Wordsworth’s poetry] is one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse (it cannot be denied, and without this we cannot explain its character at all) is a levelling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard. It is distinguished by a proud humility. It relies upon its own resources, and disdains external show and relief. It takes the commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature is always interesting from its inherent truth and beauty, without any of the ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances to set it off. Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads … . His popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings of verse, of all the high places of poetry … All the traditions of learning, all the superstitions of age, are obliterated and effaced. We begin de novo, on a tabula rasa of poetry. The purple pall, the nodding plume of tragedy, are exploded as mere pantomime and trick, to return to the simplicity of truth and nature. Kings, queens,





Traditionally, from Leigh Hunt and Francis Jeffrey to Abrams, the revolutionary nature of Wordsworth’s ‘poetical experiments’ has been read as his ostensibly egalitarian displacement and subversion of ‘all the high places of poetry.’ Overturning the hierarchy of genres, in which, as Abrams characterizes it, ‘the ruling principle of decorum had fitted the social status of the protagonists, and the social level of the poetic language, to the rank of the genre’ (‘Political Readings’ 372), Wordsworth’s poetry may indeed be said to have effected ‘a revolution in the poetic sources of pathos and sublimity’ (Natural Supernaturalism 395). The compass of such a revolution, however, is decidedly restricted, and represents what Klancher has delimited as the ‘Leigh Hunt position’: a modeling of the ‘romantic literary “revolution” upon the French Revolution as a liberalizing of a specifically literary history to which the critic has attributed such social or political values as the “hierarchy” of styles and genres, the “tyranny” of decorum, [and] the “privilege” of taste’ (‘Romantic Criticism’ 466).24 While Hazlitt can initially be seen to concur with this limited reading of Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetics, his concluding emphasis on poetic pride – ‘The author tramples on the pride of art with greater pride’ – underlines what is for him the paradoxical, distinguishing feature of Jacobin poetics: not egalitarianism but egotism. A distillate of the spirit of the age, the ‘spirit of [Wordsworth’s] rank egotism’ constitutes the ‘secret of [his] Jacobin poetry and anti-Jacobin politics’ (WH 7.144). ‘Jealous of all competition,’ Hazlitt observes as early as his 1814 reviews of The Excursion, Wordsworth’s ‘intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing’ and, consequently, suffocates the expression of moral sentiments and social affections in his writing (WH 19.11). It were as if Wordsworth simply refuses to be outmaneuvered by his subject matter: motivated neither politically nor aesthetically to practice any sort of egalitarian poetics whatsoever, he ‘tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him’ (WH 5.163). Hazlitt’s attention to the poet’s self-absorption (his indulgence of a decidedly private imagination in an ostensibly public poetics organized around ‘sheer humanity’) belies the solipsism of Jacobin poetics, distinguished as it is by a ‘proud humility’ which ‘disdains external show and relief.’ Consequently, the ‘levelling muse’ does not effect equality – politically



priests, nobles, the altar and the throne, the distinctions of rank, birth, wealth, power … are not to be found here. The author tramples on the pride of art with greater pride. (WH 11.87)

or poetically – so much as it affects concern for the downtrodden and the overlooked; it does not inspire the poet to elevate previously derogatory objects and terms of aesthetic discourse, so much as to lower anything that might be perceived as a threat to the fragile narcissism of the poet’s imagination. According to Hazlitt, then, Wordsworth is not motivated to ‘reduce all things to the same standard’ and to get rid of ‘all the high places of poetry’ out of a desire to effect political equality, but because he chooses ‘to have his subject a foil to his invention, to owe nothing but to himself’ (WH 11.88). The Jacobin poet favors mean and humble subjects neither in the name of a new aesthetics of the sublime nor in order to redress social injustices through the medium of a revolutionary poetics, but because such otherwise ‘unpromising’ subjects afford the poet ‘the greatest scope for the unbounded stores of thought and fancy in the [his] own mind’ (WH 5.162): ‘There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind … a repugnance to admit any thing that tells for itself without the interpretation of the poet, – a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect, – a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject’ (WH 19.13; emphasis added). Indeed, any pretense that levelling is undertaken in the name of elevating the mean is not merely levelled itself, but beaten down. Thus it is that Wordsworth ‘tramples on the pride of art with greater pride.’ In Hazlitt’s reading of the poetic transference of political principles, then, the only ‘translation’ that occurs is that systematic inversion (a turning inside-out) according to which ‘Jacobin poetics’ is seen to empower itself from anti-Jacobin politics.

II Whatever Wordsworth’s poetics finally ‘turns’ on systematically, from our vantage point in 1816, his career can be seen formally to resemble a sonnet, complete with the possibility of a (Miltonic) turn, if not indeed a conspicuous volte-face, after the octave. Contrasting the positions Wordsworth held in 1802 with those he espoused in 1816, Hazlitt formulates the oscillation – or, as we shall come to denominate it, the ‘sway’ – of Wordsworth’s career in precisely these terms, noting that ‘the keeping of the character at the end of fourteen years [would have been] as unique as the keeping of the thought to the end of the fourteen lines of a Sonnet’ (WH 17.27). Fittingly, the fourteen years between 1802 and 1816 are in fact those of Wordsworth’s ambitious cycles of sonnets dedicated to liberty,25 in which we can read the pronounced about-face from poetical justice to political severity that




Hazlitt later positions as the undoing of the sublimity of Lyrical Ballads by the sycophancy of the ‘Letters to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.’ Wordsworth’s Miltonic sense of his own vocation is legible in both the form and the themes of the work on national independence and liberty. From the Treaty of Amiens through Waterloo, the sonnets of this period carry the double weight of Wordsworth’s desire to be both the poet of his time and ‘for future times,’ the poet who would be remembered for having awakened England by Miltonic outbursts from its moral stupor.26 Historically, as Woodring long ago observed, Wordsworth aspires in the political sonnets ‘to goad all persons who were in any way capable of flagging in the contest against Napoleon’ (Politics in English Romantic Poetry 125) through summoning his English readers to emulate the republican virtues of such ‘great men’ as ‘the later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington’ and of course Milton.27 The sonnets of 1802 in particular, according to Woodring, ‘permitted the clear emergence of Wordsworth the patriot, and afford most readers the clearest view of his patriotism … . In his hand as in Milton’s, from 1802 on, “the Thing became a trumpet” for political commentary and sublimation’ (115).28 Indeed, of the approximately 23 ‘political’ sonnets that Wordsworth produced in 1802 and 1803, seven of them originally appeared as commentary in the pages of the Morning Post, on the same footing as the other editorial matter in the paper. Advertised in the Post as ‘little Political Essay[s],’ these sonnets effectively constitute, as Liu has noted, a desultory address to the English public in which (as in the Preface) Wordsworth undertakes to ‘carve out of the masses his ideal public’ (Sense of History 434): Addressed to the same newspaper audience that read Coleridge’s essays, and coordinated into a serial discourse on a par with the multiple-part essays that Coleridge sometimes wrote, the Morning Post sonnets (and by implication Wordsworth’s other political poems of the time) can thus be read with some assurance as works of public advocacy. (431)29 Considered as lyric works of public advocacy, Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnets are in fact indebted to Coleridge both discursively and generically. Not only did Wordsworth’s prosaic poetry stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Coleridge’s poetic prose in the pages of the Post (Sense of History 428), but his adoption of the sonnet as his form of public address was, according to Curran, indebted to the example of Coleridge’s ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters,’ which appeared in the




Morning Chronicle in the winter of 1794–5 (40).30 Other than Coleridge’s, the only tenable precedent for such public sonnets is of course Milton’s English sonnets from the Interregnum, and as Curran, Woodring, and others have noted, ‘it was to the patriotism of the Latin secretary of the Commonwealth, and to the sonnet as his vehicle for voicing this patriotism’ (Havens 530–1), that Wordsworth turned during the poetic and political crises of 1802. It is effectively impossible to take up these sonnets other than, to one degree or another, in terms of their relation to Milton’s, for at the same time as he would thus ‘prompt the age’ politically, Wordsworth undertakes the most significant formal rehabilitation of the sonnet since Milton.31 With their reliance on delayed turns, regular enjambment, medial caesurae, and their sonorous (if not, occasionally, stentorian) tone, Wordsworth’s sonnets repeatedly alert the reader to his deliberately Miltonic context and aspirations, publicly presented as they are in the service of the moral gravity and grandeur of the cause before the poet – namely, ‘National Independence and Liberty.’ Inspired as much by past as by present political crises, as Curran has pointed out (46), the heady and innovative sonnets of 1802 create ‘a complex interplay between a generic tradition and a modern sensibility conditioned by past history and past literature,’ one in which Wordsworth attempted not merely to ‘recapture the tone and ethos of the Miltonic sonnet’ but in fact to rival Milton’s own accomplishment in this arena (Curran 41). Indeed, we might even go so far as to say that Wordsworth’s sonnets are to his own oeuvre what Milton’s English sonnets and political pamphlets were to his, both an interregnum in the masterwork (Reason 804, 808) and a template of political and, more importantly, vocational aspirations according to which it is dangerously tempting – in the case of both poets – to read the later poetry.32 Not surprisingly, Wordsworth never hesitates to reinforce this Miltonic alignment. In the well-known letter to Landor of April 20, 1822, for example, Wordsworth concedes to Landor’s depreciation of the sonnet, recalling a period when he himself found it ‘egregiously absurd,’ but then quickly rehabilitates the form and, by implication, his own investment in it. Many years ago [1802] my sister happened to read to me the sonnets of Milton, which I could at that time repeat; but somehow or other I was singularly struck with the style of harmony, and the gravity, and republican austerity of those compositions. In the course of the same afternoon I produced 3 sonnets, and soon after





Wordsworth’s praise here for the harmony, gravity, and ‘republican austerity’ of Milton’s sonnets both reinforces numerous other such remarks33 and alerts us to the grandeur of tone and ethos with which he conceived and presented the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’; but what is of equal note, it seems, is the tension between sonnets and ‘anything of length’ – namely, the Recluse. Chastising himself for ‘want of resolution,’ Wordsworth restages the sense of purposelessness with which he was preoccupied early in 1802 at the moment when his (re)discovery of the sonnet consolidated his lyric experimentation of that year and freed him from the excessive liberties and increasing disorder of his own blank verse.34 Significantly, the notorious moment ‘many years ago’ when Dorothy reread Milton’s sonnets aloud for Wordsworth was May 1802,35 after which he reportedly dashed off three sonnets, including the decidedly Miltonic ‘“I griev’d for Buonaparte,”’ the first of nearly two dozen sonnets dating from 1802. Both written under the immediate inspiration of Milton’s and often patterned after them (Havens 530), these sonnets prompt the reader not merely to compare Wordsworth with Milton, or modern England with a ‘true,’ historic England, but to consider the politics appropriate to the English poet who would publicly present himself as Milton’s heir. Wordsworth clarifies as much publicly (the Miltonic forms and themes of the Morning Post sonnets) as well as privately, as in a letter of November 1802: Milton’s Sonnets … I think manly and dignified compositions, distinguished by simplicity and unity of object and aim, and undisfigured by false or vicious ornaments. They are in several places incorrect, and sometimes uncouth in language, and, perhaps, in some, inharmonious; yet, upon the whole, I think the music exceedingly well suited to its end, that is, it has an energetic and varied flow of sound crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of. (Early Years 378)36 The image of a ‘narrow room’ resounding with the crowded combination of rhyme and blank verse immediately conjures a representative



many others; and since that time, and from want of resolution to take up anything of length, I have filled up many a moment in writing Sonnets, which, if I had never fallen into the practice, might easily have been better employed. The Excursion is proud of your approbation. (Later Years 1.125–6)

sonnet from late 1802 – ‘“Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room”’ – which had pride of place in 1807 and after as the ‘Prefatory Sonnet.’ Although not often, if ever, considered in company with Wordsworth’s more overtly Miltonic sonnets, ‘“Nuns fret not”’ succinctly reveals a number of the formal strategies with which Wordsworth appropriated Milton at this time. Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room; And Hermits are contented with their Cells; And Students with their pensive Citadels: Maids at the Wheel, the Weaver at his Loom, Sit blithe and happy; Bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness Fells, Will murmur by the hour in Foxglove bells: In truth, the prison into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me, In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground: Pleas’d if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find short solace there, as I have found. (P2V 133) As is so often the case in Milton’s English sonnets, Wordsworth here overrides the division between octave and sestet, liberating us to determine whether the turn occurs prematurely, with the summary ‘In truth’ of our predicament in line seven, or tardily (and more compellingly), with the distillation of ‘we’ into ‘me’ in line nine. And it is here, with the enjambment of lines eight and nine (then again, immediately afterwards, in lines 10–11), that Wordsworth simultaneously breaks free of the controlled, end-stopped rhythms of the octave to crowd the more hectic momentum of blank verse into the scanty plot of the sonnet’s remaining ground. The strong medial caesurae of lines four, five, seven, eight, and nine, additionally contest any putative tyranny of form here, as Wordsworth recalibrates the poem’s pacing, overrides the grid of the rhyme scheme and, consequently, liberates himself from the oppression of poetic license (the philosophical blank verse of ‘The Pedlar’ as well as the amorphous ‘poem to Coleridge,’ both hopelessly stalled since late 1801) in favor of the formal liberties and binding pleasures of the Italianate sonnet.37 Recalling that ‘“Nuns fret not”’ prefaces both series of Wordsworth’s sonnets in the 1807 Poems, and reading it in the light of the poetic as




well as political crises of 1802, we can distill a complicated, multivalent politics of form in Wordsworth’s adoption (and adaptation) of the Miltonic sonnet. It is not merely a politics of allusion, according to which we might read the Prefatory Sonnet as prompting contemporary readers to approach Wordsworth as the age’s Milton (though Wordsworth will cultivate this identification, thematically as well as formally, throughout the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’). Rather, ‘“Nuns fret not”’ prompts us to consider the form of the sonnet as a narrow, scanty, finally unstable plot of ground – a verge – in which the poet can experiment with the degree to which it may or may not be possible to take a stand or in fact even to stand for any period of time (hence the difficulty of invigilating the turn). Thus inflected, the sonnet provides the poet with sufficient ground on which to stand (a narrow girdle through which to walk), though with ample freedom to fall – or, in the vocabulary of these sonnets, to ‘sway,’ as the in-dependent gives way to the de-pendent and finally the pendant. Under Wordsworth’s manipulation, that is to say, the sonnet emerges as the perfect form for the staging of apostasy. With its prescription for a volte-face somewhere after the close of the octave, the Miltonic sonnet does not simply allow for a turn but requires one. Thus a poetic form identified with a political partisan who did not renege on his republican politics turns out to be particularly conducive to the political wavering of his poetic heir. And while it might appear that such a turn is not, after all, apostrophic (nor, indeed, apo-static) but merely pro forma, the fact remains that it nevertheless divides the speaker’s persona in two – splits it against itself – in an always unbalanced fashion (as the octave tilts into the sestet) that, in turn, transforms what might have been merely a counter-stand into a precipitous swaying, if not finally a falling. Liu makes a similar point in his analysis of the political sonnets, though his schematic reading of romantic apostasy in dialectical terms (which we considered in Chapter 2) hinders him from appreciating the vertiginous nature of the formal as well as political sway in these sonnets. Noting that ‘the evidence of Wordsworth’s politics of the verge lies in a form of lyric especially suited to reifying turns of mind: the Miltonic (and Italianate) sonnet’ (Sense of History 428), Liu proceeds to observe of this type of sonnet that it ‘virtually demands thematic opposition between octet and sestet,’ that it is ‘a tyrannical form’ which, although ‘it solicits thematic reversal, it also encases reversal in a grid of rhyme so tight that even the partial liberation achieved through ploys of syntax (which may mask the fissure between octet




and sestet) rarely make the volta more than pro forma, more than a convention …’ (434–5). Closer attention to Wordsworth’s poetics in these sonnets reveals that they are in fact far too nuanced to admit of assimilation to Liu’s schematic imposition of an historically determined Hegelian dialectic. The shift from the octave to sestet, for example, would more often than not be better designated an inversion rather than an opposition, one whose results cannot always be anticipated. Regardless of nomenclature, however, the distinction between the two is ever unbalanced and inimical to representation as a balanced thesis-antithesis over the fulcrum of a volta which itself shifts its ground. Furthermore, Wordsworth’s rhyme schemes here are decidedly loose: he often uses three rhymes in the octave38 and, as we have already noticed, he effectively overrides the enforced rhythms of the grid with repeated enjambment and a constant refusal to abide by the prescribed pause after the sixth syllable of a given line. Such practices are not merely ‘ploys of syntax’: they represent a (Miltonic) resistance to the tyranny of form (noticeably absent from the later sonnets), one which reveals the poet to be at work fashioning not merely a politics but, more dynamically, a poetics of the verge. Liu’s analysis of form is more productive when he does not ‘freeze the antithetical moment into [the] glacial composure’ (435) of his dialectical schema, but reads the volta as but insecurely fixed – ‘like an Archimedean fulcrum’ (435) – a narrow ‘versus’ where we can read Wordsworth attempting to gain his footing. Indeed, the stand of Wordsworth’s double-minded ‘I’ bears such an astonishing resemblance to the see-saw stand of Coleridge’s He hath stood that (akin to the Coleridgean shufflings to which we attended in the preceding chapter) he too can be seen to stand ‘in the characteristic posture of early public advocacy: slipping and sliding.’ Consequently, as Liu proceeds to note of Wordsworth’s formal staging of ‘England versus France,’ what emerges is that Wordsworth ‘stood not so much on “England” as in the narrow channel of the “versus.” National politics became the medium for a politics of the verge that was neither fully subversive nor contained’ (428). Liu’s language of ‘verge’ and ‘versus’ will, in what follows here, facilitate a reading of Wordsworth’s politics and poetics in the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ according to what I will characterize in terms of an economy of swaying – an oftentimes ‘lawless sway’ – which I will attempt to regulate through attending to the operations of ‘sway’ as both the action of swinging (pendulously) and as dominion. Wordsworth can indeed be seen to slip and slide in these sonnets, much as we saw Coleridge doing in his own attempt to take a stand in




both the contemporaneous essays for the Morning Post and the ode on France. But ‘sway’ not only underscores a term which occurs with surprising regularity throughout the course of what Wordsworth eventually came to denominate as the ‘Poems, Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’; it also highlights the difficulty of standing, consistent and in-dependent, in lieu of swinging, de-pendent, over the course of either fourteen lines or fourteen years. If to be consistent is to stand still or firm (L. consistere), then to be inconsistent is not to stand still but to move away or to give way – figuratively, to slide away. The difference between independence and dependence operates similarly, but finally more precipitously (as we saw apropos the representation of Southey’s appointment to the Laureateship). While independence names a state of freedom from or reliance upon another (thing, person), dependence names not only the inverse (a negative state of reliance and/or contingency), but also and more dramatically, a state of suspension or hanging (L. dependere, to hang down [from]; from pendere, to hang, suspend). To be dependent, therefore, is at the very least to sway (Fr. pendulaire), if not more disturbingly to hang oneself (Fr. se pendre). Either way, the apostate’s dependence can be seen to precipitate his falling: inconsistent, he slides; dependent, he hangs himself just prior to falling. Thus configured, the volta does not operate as a fulcrum which balances octave and sestet, so much as it simply provides the last obstacle over which the apostate poet trips as he precipitates himself over the verge. Finally, as dominion, ‘sway’ simultaneously designates the field of action here (the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground) and underlines the contest for power that occurs within its boundaries, both poetically (Wordsworth as Milton) and politically (Napoleonic France versus Pitt’s England; ‘true’ republican England versus ‘false’ contemporary England). Given the volatility of this poetics, then, what will it mean to own the sway of these ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’?

Akin to the sublimation of revolutionary ardor into the romantic imagination which we are accustomed to read in Wordsworth’s other poetry of this period, the Wordsworth of the political sonnets enables us to read a sublimation of the national hero in the figure of the poet whose local sympathies increasingly give way to national priorities. ‘“I griev’d for Buonaparte”’ (long accepted as the ‘first’ of the 1802 sonnets) resonates with echoes from Milton’s republican sonnets (in particular




those to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane) and reveals just how closely Wordsworth modeled his early sonnets on Milton’s both formally (the relentless enjambment of Wordsworth’s opening quatrains) and thematically (political partisanship and civic virtue). Wordsworth’s preoccupation here with what he elsewhere terms the ‘ancient English dower’ of ‘manners, virtue, freedom, power’ (‘London, 1802,’ ll. 5, 8) resembles Milton’s formulation of the Romans’ heroic civic virtue ‘when gowns not arms repelled / The fierce Epirot and the African bold’ (‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger,’ ll. 3–4), for it is books rather than battles which will teach the Wordsworthian ‘Governor’ how ‘to act and comprehend’ (‘“Great Men,”’ l. 5). Indeed, it is as commentary on France’s failure to produce any ‘Great Men’ in the mold of the English Republicans Marvell, Harrington, Vane, and Milton that Wordsworth first juxtaposes ‘true Sway’ and ‘True Power’ with Napoleon’s military education: I griev’d for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! the vital blood Of that Man’s mind what can it be? What food Fed his first hopes? What knowledge could He gain? ‘Tis not in battles that from youth we train The Governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly and meek as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees: Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk Of the mind’s business: these are the degrees By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these. (P2V 157–8) As Cromwell was valorized by Milton for understanding that ‘Peace hath her victories / No less renowned than war’ (‘To the Lord General Cromwell,’ ll. 10–11), so Napoleon is chastised by Wordsworth for failing to temper military sternness with ‘Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.’39 Curiously similar to the pedagogy of Wordsworth’s Pedlar, this is nevertheless not the education of a young poet (as in The Ruined Cottage), but of the high Wordsworthian bard who will increasingly seek to articulate his vocation in terms of a ‘master-spirit’ (‘“Great Men,”’ l. 12). That the rights of dominion and power should be not merely legible in but authorized via ‘the talk /




Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk / Of the mind’s business’ gives a rather sinister edge to the (otherwise classically liberal) Wordsworthian pedagogy of the philosophical blank verse of 1798–1802, and immediately reveals the tension between the lowly quotidian ‘week-day man’ and the mighty imperial ‘great men’ that emerges in these sonnets. Consequently, the vaunting ‘sway’ of Wordsworth’s sonnets is not merely the dominion which the poet would check (Napoleon’s) or, later, celebrate (Wellington’s), but also the vacillation of the poet who, in educating power (clarifying the constitution of ‘true Sway’ for the imperial governor), falls under its sway.40 And it is this sense of precarious vacillation – not power but pendulousness – that will emerge as the ‘true Sway’ of Wordsworth’s apostasy in the political sonnets. When the political sonnets were published as a sequence in 1807, Wordsworth’s pedagogic speculations as to ‘true Sway’ in ‘“I griev’d”’ (number four) stood in stark opposition to Buonaparte’s merely ‘established sway,’ as condemned in the sonnet immediately following it, ‘Calais, August 15, 1802’:41 Festivals have I seen that were not names: This is young Buonaparte’s natal day; And his is henceforth an established sway, Consul for life. With worship France proclaims Her approbation, and with pomps and games. Heaven grant that other Cities may be gay! Calais is not: and I have bent my way To the Sea-coast, noting that each man frames His business as he likes. Another time That was, when I was here long years ago: The senselessness of joy was then sublime! Happy is he, who, caring not for Pope, Consul, or King, can sound himself to know The destiny of Man, and live in hope. (P2V 158–9) Though he has established his sway as Consul for life, Napoleon’s power cannot be measured according to the ‘stalk / True Power doth grow on,’ given his isolation from the ‘week-day man’ (who here can not ‘hold talk’ with the Consul but merely worship him and own his sway). As is so often the case in the 1802 sonnets, Wordsworth turns (with the shift from octave to sestet) from the present to the past, in this case to 1790, when he and Jones traveled south from Calais to Ardres not amidst




pompous state-sponsored celebrations for the ‘new-born Majesty’ (‘Calais, August, 1802,’ l. 7) but amidst ‘festivals of new-born Liberty’ with ‘songs, garlands, play, / Banners, and happy faces’ (‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais,’ ll. 4, 7–8).42 In the concluding tercet, both these divisions (between the Consul and the ‘week-day man,’ between the now of ‘Buonaparte’s natal day’ and the then of ‘Another time’) are bluntly reinforced through Wordsworth’s allusion to Milton’s condemnation of the abuse of established power in ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’: as Wordsworth hopes that there remains a ‘he’ who may ‘live in hope’ despite Napoleon’s triple sway (over Pope, Consul, and King), so Milton blesses the Italian fields, ‘where still doth sway / The triple Tyrant,’ that the blood of the martyred Piedmontese ‘may grow / A hundredfold’ (‘On the late Massacre,’ ll. 11–12) and they, too, may live in hope. Of particular note here is not only Wordsworth’s continued meditation in these sonnets on the modalities of (Napoleonic) ‘sway,’43 but also the sonnet’s clarification of the manner in which the poet sways between England and France (the manner in which, in Liu’s formulation, Wordsworth attempts to occupy the ‘versus’ between England and France [Sense of History 428]). Refusing to ‘bend the knee / In France, before the new-born Majesty’ (‘Calais, August, 1802,’ l. 6–7), Wordsworth has instead ‘bent [his] way / To the Sea-coast’ with the close of the octave, for it is from the vantage provided by the coast – by the verge provided by the coast – that he can best contemplate both ‘another time’ (1790) and another place (England). For the formulation of Wordsworth’s ‘critical patriotism,’ England is best considered from a distance – either temporally, summoning the virtues of seventeenthcentury English Republicans in 1802, or geographically, admiring the ‘Fair Star of Evening … / Star of my Country’ from across the Channel (‘Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais, August, 1802,’ ll. 1–2). Bending his way to the coast in the fifth of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,’ Wordsworth in effect doubles back to the first poem in the sequence, a sustained address to the ‘Fair Star of Evening’ by which he hopes to reify it, ‘Conspicuous to the Nations,’ as ‘my Country’s emblem’ (‘Composed by the Sea-Side,’ ll. 6, 7). At the same time, thus recapitulating ‘many a fear / For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs’ (‘Composed by the Sea-Side,’ ll. 12–13), Wordsworth anticipates the central, most heroic sonnets in the sequence (numbers 13–16), all positioned on the other side of the Channel in London, and all explicitly indebted to Milton. These four sonnets – ‘Written in London, September, 1802,’ ‘London, 1802,’ ‘“Great Men have been among us,”’ and ‘“It is not to be thought of that the Flood”’ – mark Wordsworth’s




attempt to arrest the vacillation of his allegiance through countering Napoleonic sway with Miltonic ‘Books and Men’ (‘“Great Men,”’ l. 14). That is to say, they reveal him attempting to displace political power by means of poetic liberty. In these sonnets, ‘Milton’ designates that set of ‘faith and morals’ according to which Britons ‘must be free or die’ (‘“It is not to be thought of … ,”’ ll. 12, 11), the greatest of the ‘Great Men’ whose hands penned and whose tongues uttered wisdom: These Moralists could act and comprehend: They knew how genuine glory was put on; Taught us how rightfully a nation shone In splendor: what strength was, that would not bend But in magnanimous meekness. (‘“Great Men,”’ ll. 5–9; P2V 166) Though France ‘hath brought forth no such souls as we had then’ (‘“Great Men,”’ l. 10), it is far from certain whether England has either – hence the need for a contemporary Milton. Lamenting to Coleridge that ‘Plain living and high thinking are no more: / The homely beauty of the good old cause / Is gone’ (‘Written in London … ,’ ll. 11–13), Wordsworth directly attempts to remedy this potentially national catastrophe in the subsequent sonnet, beginning with the declamatory invocation, ‘Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour’ (‘London, 1802,’ l. 1). This sonnet, centrally positioned in the 1807 sequence, arrests Wordsworth’s earlier worries (trapped in the ‘versus’ in those sonnets positioned on the seaside, admitting to Coleridge that ‘I know not which way I must look / For comfort’ [‘Written in London … ,’ ll. 1–2]) through providing the poet with a consistent, heroic example of English liberty. As Curran has succinctly pointed out, ‘The sonnet that marks [Wordsworth’s] despair remarks as well its antidote’ (47).44 Part of the antidote, however, may turn out to be the revelation (and subsequent cultivation) of Wordsworth’s own aspirations to poetic dominion, an ambition which may not prove conducive to the maintenance of a republican English poetics. In fact, while the octave of ‘London, 1802’ details those inestimable quotidian values which, if rejuvenated, are to preserve British freedom, the sestet draws our attention to the tensions driving Wordsworth’s voice away from its habitual room and hourly walk. After apostrophizing Milton in the opening line, Wordsworth establishes the thematic opposition between Miltonic and contemporary liberty in the remainder of the octave, before returning to Milton in a different register:




Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In chearful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on itself did lay. (P2V 165) Dwelling apart with a voice like the sea and the heavens, yet nevertheless still committed to the common way and the lowliest duties, the poet described here would seem more the apotheosis of Wordsworth than Milton: are not these the antitheses ostensibly reconciled by the leveling muse?45 In its conflation of the immense and infinite with the infinitesimal and insignificant, its reconciliation of the majestic and the common, the voice of Milton serves to diminish the risk of dwelling apart (the distance between the fens of the octave and the open sea of the sestet) through Wordsworth’s reinscription of this voice in the present historical circumstances, ‘at this hour.’ If England is not to forfeit its Englishness (the ‘manners, virtue, freedom, power’ of the Pedlar’s ‘lowly vocation’), it is imperative that a contemporary Milton assume the mantle of national poet in order to perform the Miltonic office of cultivating ‘in a great people the seeds of vertu and publick civility’ (Reason 816). And to the degree that the Miltonic poet of the sestet so closely resembles not only Wordsworth’s account of the poet’s vocation (in the Preface as well as in the ‘Pedlar’) but also contemporary appraisals of Wordsworth’s genius, ‘London, 1802’ demands to be read as a crowded yet controlled announcement of Wordsworth’s own national voice.46 Of the 64 sonnets eventually organized under the heading ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,’47 the approximately two dozen from 1802–3 are – in form, theme, and tone – by far the most Miltonic. Indeed, as early as 1807, Wordsworth’s sonnets ‘had become noticeably less sonorous and vigorous, had grown quieter, simpler, and more pedestrian, – in a word, less Miltonic and more Wordsworthian’ (Havens 531). The poetic and political crises of 1802 had been resolved, and as




Wordsworth first resumed work on the ‘poem to Coleridge’ (1804), then took up the long historical narrative The White Doe of Rylstone (1807–8), and finally published The Excursion (1814), the scope of the Italianate sonnet was no longer adequate to that of his ever-swelling national ambitions. After 1807, Wordsworth’s persona in the political sonnets is less and less that of an embattled Briton striving to spur his countrymen on to the defense of liberty with Miltonic outbursts, and increasingly that of an international delegate for political liberty on the continent. Taking it upon himself to ‘weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain’ (‘Composed While the Author Was Writing a Tract Occasioned by the Convention of Cintra,’ l. 10), to summon ‘Dear Liberty’ to ‘come forth from thy Tyrolean ground, / / Through the long chain of Alps from mound to mound’ (‘“Advance – come forth … ,”’ ll. 1, 4), and to champion the resolve of the French and Spanish guerillas who, with leaders ‘like those / Whom hardy Rome was fearful to oppose,’ ‘Shrink not, though far out-numbered by their Foes’ (‘Spanish Guerillas. 1811,’ ll. 6–7, 2), Wordsworth expands his focus from the historic English nation (his valorization of English soil and peculiarly English republican virtues in the first sequence) to the modern political state which would win liberty and representation from a foreign tyrant.48 Though nowhere more adamant in his representation of himself as the chosen bard of liberty than in the three Waterloo sonnets of 1816, Wordsworth clarifies his pretensions to be the foremost political poet of the day in what was originally intended as the final sonnet in the series, ‘Conclusion. 1811’: Here pause: the Poet claims at least this praise That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope Of his pure song, which did not shrink from hope In the worst moment of these evil days; From hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays, For its own honour, on man’s suffering heart. Never may from our souls one truth depart, That an accursed thing it is to gaze On prosperous Tyrants with a dazzled eye; Nor, touched with due abhorrence of their guilt For whose dire ends tears flow, and blood is spilt, And justice labours in extremity, Forget thy weakness, upon which is built, O wretched Man, the throne of Tyranny! (SP 74)




Pausing, the self-anointed ‘Poet’ of Liberty simultaneously recapitulates the tensions of the early, 1802 sonnets and anticipates those of the Waterloo sonnets. Reminding us, for example, what ‘an accursed thing it is to gaze / On prosperous Tyrants with a dazzled eye,’ Wordsworth alludes to the second of the original political sonnets, in which, querying ‘Is it a reed that’s shaken by the wind, / Or what is it that ye go forth to see?’ he chastised ‘Ye men of prostrate mind’ who hastened to Paris with something other than a ‘seemly reverence’ to behold Napoleon’s installation as Consul (‘Calais, August, 1802,’ ll. 1–2, 8, 9). Yet when this recollection of obeisance to power is aligned with his further reminder of the blood that has been spilt in the name of the ‘throne of Tyranny,’ Wordsworth bizarrely anticipates his own prostration before George III in the subsequent sonnet, ‘Added, November 1813’ (later ridiculed by Hazlitt for its celebration of ‘regal fortitude’), in which he implores God to ‘vouchsafe a ray divine / To his forlorn condition’ (ll. 9–10) in order that he might comprehend the victory over Napoleon at Leipzig – all while claiming that ‘virtuous Liberty hath been the scope [the sway?] / Of his pure song.’ Finally, Wordsworth’s emphasis here on heavenly admonitions (which he is privileged to interpret in his ‘pure song,’ the better to hector, ‘O wretched man,’ rather than converse as a man speaking to men) reveals the degree to which he has renounced English songs consecrate to truth and liberty in favor of heavenly lays. If any ‘Milton’ is to be heard in this sonnet, it is not the republican sonneteer but the religious prophet. By 1816, the austere republican ethos and the crowded momentum that energize the Miltonic persona of the 1802 sonnets have been all but abdicated to the righteous, shrill prophet of the Waterloo sonnets. Loftiness of imagination in league with humility of mind have been eclipsed in favor of a severity and righteousness of judgment which no longer prizes the poet’s ‘magnanimous meekness’ on ‘life’s common way.’ The haughty prophet of these sonnets has abjured ‘lowly duties’ in favor of an exclusive relationship with the heavenly host; consequently, the power and sway celebrated in the second Waterloo sonnet, ‘Occasioned by the Same Battle,’ bear little if any resemblance to the pastoral pedagogy of 1802: The Bard, whose soul is meek as dawning day, Yet trained to judgments righteously severe; Fervid, yet conversant with holy fear, As recognizing one Almighty sway:




He whose experienced eye can pierce the array Of past events, – to whom, in vision clear, The aspiring heads of future things appear, Like mountain-tops whence mists have rolled away: Assoiled from all incumbrance of our time, He only, if such breathe, in strains devout Shall comprehend the victory sublime; And worthily rehearse the hideous rout, Which the blest Angels, from their peaceful clime Beholding, welcomed with a choral shout. (SP 172) This sonnet marks the culmination of an astonishing about-face, from the ‘degrees by which true Sway doth mount’ in the 1802 sonnets to the ‘Almighty sway’ here. The ‘perfect freedom’ of books, leisure, and ‘the talk / Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk / Of the mind’s business’ has been thoroughly effaced in favor of a sway which depends upon the forfeiture of any such liberties in the name of a devotion to High Church righteousness, as nation gives way to state. The almightiness of the sway underlines the seeming inevitability of the poet’s apostasy, his giving over of himself to the bardic presumption of being one of the select – ‘He only,’ who sings a ‘pure song’ – and therefore no longer obliged either to speak with week-day men or to fashion a poetics based on the voice of a man speaking to men.49 The poet of the Waterloo sonnets – ‘He only’ – has similarly abstracted himself from the immediate ‘this hour’ of the 1802 sonnets, as he surveys past and future time, and in doing so has assoiled himself ‘from all incumbrance of our time.’ In a note published with the sonnet, Wordsworth acknowledges the Spenserian model for his gesture toward transcendence here: ‘From all this world’s encumbrance did himself assoil’ (SP 172n). That Wordsworth should turn at this time to Spenser rather than to Milton is itself intriguing (renouncing politics for romance?), but it is even more so when one examines the context of this line from the Faerie Queene (which Wordsworth does not clarify). When Prince Arthur arrives at a hermitage in book 6 with the ‘wyld man’ as well as the wounded Serena and Timias (courtesy of the Blatant Beast), Spenser assures the reader that the Hermite has earned his retreat from the world: And soothly it was sayd by common fame, So long as age enabled him thereto, That he had bene a man of mickle name,




Renowned much in arms and derring doe: But being aged now and weary to Of warres delight, and worlds contentious toyle, The name of knighthood he did disauow, And hanging up his armes and warlike spoyle, From all this world’s incombraunce did himself assoyle. (VI.v.37) As with ‘London, 1802,’ Wordsworth succinctly appropriates an illustrious poet in defense of his vocation, and in the course of doing so effortlessly conflates the two voices. For what is Spenser’s Hermite other than a brilliant apologia for Wordsworth’s numerous personae in the Excursion? Spenser’s Hermite has not only ‘retired to his native mountains’ but, more importantly, he is seen to be justified in doing so. And when that retreat is described as an ivy-clad bower (VI.v.35) where he heals diseased passions with wise counsel (VI.v.5–7), the identification between Spenser’s Hermite and the Wordsworthian poets and pastors of the Excursion is too determined to be overlooked. Finally, while ‘assoil’’s suggestion of absolution from sin complements the High Church tone of much of the sonnet, its additional connotation of release or acquittal aptly thematizes the way in which one line from Spenser might serve to deliver the poet from the clutches of the sonnet’s otherwise Miltonic tenor. It is almost as if the real battle here were not Waterloo, but one between Milton and Spenser for Wordsworth’s voice. Despite the gesture toward Spenser and the elaborate apologia it opens up, this second Waterloo sonnet is decidedly – indeed, uncontrollably – Miltonic. In his righteous severity, the bard here resembles Abdiel (in turn so tempting to identify with Milton) who opposes Satan’s blasphemy ‘in a flame of zeal severe’ (5.807), at the same time as the poet’s experienced eye recalls Satan, who ‘through the armed files / Darts his experienced eye’ (1.567–8). The collusion between righteousness and heresy nicely synopsizes the tension that drives the apostate to such extremes to rout his former self. Indeed, it is around the single word ‘rout’ that we can read Wordsworth’s investment in Milton. Both a conspicuous noun for Satan’s entourage (‘this rebellious rout’ [1.747], ‘that revolted rout’ [10.534]) and for their overthrow (‘ruin upon ruin, rout on rout’ [2.995]), ‘rout’ disorders the Spenserian tone which might otherwise assoil the sestet.50 (The poem of Wordsworth’s which most worthily rehearses a hideous rout is of course the accompanying ‘Thanksgiving Ode,’ in which he not only notoriously rhymes ‘daughter’ with ‘slaughter’ in declaiming that




carnage is the purest intent of God [ll. 278–82; SP 188], but would also displace Southey as national poet by writing the definitive ode on Waterloo.51) In his remarks on the Waterloo sonnets in the Examiner (18 February 1816, after they had appeared, appropriately enough, in the Champion on the 4th), Hunt resists Wordsworth’s claims for the temporal and worldly ‘assoilment’ of the Waterloo bard by systematically reinscribing the poems in the terms of contemporary political and poetical strife. Announcing at the outset, ‘we make no apology for introducing criticism on verses among our political articles,’ since ‘poetry has often been made the direct vehicle of politics’, Hunt immediately cites Milton’s sonnets and Paradise Lost as representative examples (‘Heaven Made a Party to Earthly Disputes’ 97).52 As suspicious, indeed snide, as are Hunt’s comments on Wordsworth’s invocation of Spenser (‘For our parts, we certainly do not pretend to be “meek as dawning day,” nor “assoiled from all the time’s encumbrance”; and so, it seems, we must not pretend to comprehend “this victory sublime”’ [98]), there is never any doubt as to the validity of comparing Wordsworth with Milton or of Wordsworth’s Miltonic presumptions. In both the general considerations of the relation between poetry and politics and in the specific observations upon the Waterloo sonnets, Hunt’s attention to the varying degrees to which Wordsworth’s sonnets can be said to be Miltonic provides yet another perspective from which to consider the ‘sway’ of these sonnets dedicated, ironically enough, to independence. And his criticisms also reveal, yet again, the degree to which it is nearly impossible not to read Wordsworth in terms of Milton at this time, given the implicit and pervasive specter of Milton monitoring any contemporary discussion of (Wordsworth’s) poetry and politics. Dismissing the first Waterloo sonnet (‘Inscription for a National Monument, in Commemoration of Waterloo’) as having ‘nothing particular in it as to poetry,’ and condemning the third (‘Siege of Vienna raised by John Sobieski’53) for having ‘sunk to the pitch of Mr. Southey,’ Hunt singles out the second sonnet, ‘Occasioned by the same Battle,’ as ‘a very noble strain of versification’ – that is to say, the most decidedly Miltonic of the three (98). At the same time, however, its enlistment of Heaven in earthly disputes exhibits the principal strategy which Hunt would expose here: the presumption of the Wordsworthian poet to claim, with every bit as summary a confidence as he did twenty years earlier, ‘that Heaven thinks precisely as he does’ (97) on all questions of contemporary politics. The righteousness




driving Wordsworth’s presumption in 1816 to justify the ways of God to men with regard to the ‘great moral triumph’ of Waterloo marks, for Hunt, the derailment of Wordsworth’s Miltonic aspirations.54 When the review concludes with Hunt’s hope that he will ‘see many more of Mr. Wordsworth’s sonnets, but shall be glad to find them, like his best ones, less Miltonic in one respect, and much more so in another,’ the nebulous status of ‘Milton’ is finally admitted but in no way resolved. What might it take for Wordsworth’s sonnets to be more or less Miltonic, or even more-or-less Miltonic? According to the general logic and trajectory of Hunt’s criticisms here, to be more Miltonic would require ‘insinuating some lessons to Kings,’ while to be less Miltonic would require refraining from appropriating Heaven as party to a particular political agenda (97). Significantly, Wordsworth’s best sonnets, according to Hunt, those which would qualify him as a ‘true poet’ even if he had written nothing else, are ‘London, 1802,’ ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge,’ and ‘“The world is too much with us,”’ all of which were written in 1802 at the beginning of his intensely Miltonic preoccupation with the genre, and all of which rely upon an involvement in the world and the ‘encumbrance of our time’ from which Wordsworth would dissociate himself in 1816. When Hunt rebuts Wordsworth in clarifying that he does not pretend to have similarly acquitted himself, he reinscribes Wordsworth’s sonnets not merely in the context of the Holy Alliance, but also in the temporal scheme of Wordsworth’s own sonnet sequence. Accordingly, to be more Miltonic would thus require the poet to abide by the Miltonic strictures of ‘London, 1802,’ with its lowly duties and common ways, rather than with the elect poet on the mountain-tops. But to be more-or-less Miltonic? This would require political partisanship – consistency – over the course not merely of fourteen lines but fourteen years (1802–16). And, susceptible as he is to both generic and political sway in the sonnets, Wordsworth is finally too dependent to stand, independent, at the side of Milton. Put another way, for Wordsworth to be more-or-less Miltonic in his political sonnets would require him to practice not a ‘Jacobin poetics’ so much as what we might denominate a partisan poetics – equally a matter of party spirit and the party line. For Wordsworth, the party line is invariably Miltonic (inexhaustibly so, as we have seen), from the tumultuous blank verse of the 1802 sonnets through to the oracular prosody of the Waterloo sonnets. The party spirit of these sonnets, however – or what Hazlitt terms the ‘spirit of partisanship’ – is not nearly so coherent. Though ‘high-sounding’ and “said to be sacred to liberty,’




Wordsworth’s sonnets may only ‘mouth it well’ (Hazlitt suggests in an article devoted to Milton’s sonnets) – which is to say, they are no better than Southey’s own high-laureate testimonials. They do not ‘breathe’ the ‘spirit of poetical patriotism’ that Milton’s do (WH 8.176).55 If to be patriotic is to be devoted to one’s country, then Wordsworth’s later sonnets do indeed sound hollow in this respect, concerned as they increasingly are with the poet’s claims to be bard of the elect, ‘assoiled from all incumbrance of our time’ and pledging allegiance to a heavenly order which takes precedence over a national heritage of ‘The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington, / Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend’ (‘“Great Men,”’ ll. 3–4): as we remarked earlier apropos Wordsworth’s ‘Jacobin poetics,’ the ‘spirit’ of these sonnets is ultimately far less egalitarian than egotistic. Indeed, according to the dictates of ‘poetical patriotism,’ Hunt’s own sonnets from the years immediately surrounding Waterloo may well prove to be more rigorously Miltonic than Wordsworth’s shrill later sonnets. In two sonnets to Shelley from 1818 and in three related sonnets from the same year (‘To -- -- , M.D. on his giving me a Lock of Milton’s Hair’), Hunt variously contrasts Milton’s consistency with Wordsworth’s apostasy and, in doing so, wrests away the mantle of Miltonic succession in the sonnet for himself and his circle. Admonishing Shelley to ‘Be still with thine own task in unison,’ Hunt distinguishes his ‘high-hearted friend’ from those who would … deny Wisdom’s divinest privilege, constancy; That which most proves him free from the alloy Of useless earth, – least prone to the decoy That clamours down weak pinions from the sky. (‘To the Same,’ ll. 14, 4–8; Poetical Works 242) Having deserted his ‘Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,’ Wordsworth has indeed fallen, clamoring, from the sky where he once dwelt, for Shelley as well as for Hunt, ‘as a lone star.’56 Inconstant, Wordsworth no longer stands alone but lies, doubly prone – prostrate, and thus vulnerable to those who would write more (and more-or-less) Miltonic sonnets in his wake. Similarly, in the first of the sonnets in celebration of having received a lock of Milton’s hair, Hunt begins allusively, ‘I felt my spirit leap,’ before discounting any supposed alignment of Wordsworth with Milton in the sestet:




I’ll wear it, not as my inherited due, (For there is one, whom had he kept his art For Freedom still, nor left her for the crew Of lucky slaves in his misgiving heart, I would have begged thy leave to give it to) Yet not without some claims, though far apart. (‘To -- --, M.D.,’ ll. 9–14; Poetical Works 246) Wordsworth’s own Miltonic presumptions have here been parenthetically restricted: as his sonnets have grown progressively less Miltonic, so has he lost his ‘art / For Freedom’ (‘To B B, M.D.,’ ll.10–11). Though Hunt may modestly forswear the lock of hair as not (yet) his ‘inherited due,’ he has nonetheless made the Miltonic sonnet his own in these lines. However wanting Hunt’s poetic talents may prove to be when weighed in the balance with Wordsworth’s, after Waterloo the laurels of the sonnet (as figured in the lock of Milton’s hair) would appear to belong to him. As Curran has aptly summarized the stakes of this contest, Hunt’s portrayal of Wordsworth in his chosen form of the Italianate sonnet is a profoundly ‘generic signal’: not only is Hunt claiming the honor of Miltonic succession here, but (as evidenced by the Hampstead sonnets) he can furthermore be seen to represent the ‘Wordsworthian vision with an accuracy and thoroughness never adumbrated by the older poet’ (51). The vision in question is that of the first 1802 sonnets, in which (long before national allegiances were displaced by holy and heavenly alliances) Wordsworthian ‘wisdom’ and ‘true Sway’ are distinctly quotidian achievements, matters of ‘Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk / Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk / Of the mind’s business’ (‘“I griev’d … ,”’ ll. 10–12). Take, for example, the first of the Hampstead sonnets (dated ‘Surrey Jail, August 27, 1813’), in which Hunt celebrates ‘that lightsome land’ for ‘Health, and the Joy that out of nature springs, / And Freedom’s air-blown locks,’ for ‘Friendship, frank entering with the cordial hand, / And honour, and the Muse with growing wings, / And Love Domestic, smiling equably’ (‘To Hampstead,’ ll. 9, 10–11, 12–14; Poetical Works 235).57 Such a representation of the ‘Vale of Health’ would seem to epitomize Wordsworthian wisdom, ‘with children round her knees’ (‘“I griev’d … ,”’ l. 9), regardless of how much Wordsworth himself may have renounced domestic life for military victories in the interim. Ironically – or appropriately – enough, it was in Hampstead that Hunt and Wordsworth were to collide with regard to Milton.





Returning to the events of June, 1815, it will now be possible to explicate the pervasive Miltonic valences of Hunt and Hazlitt’s constructions of Wordsworth at this pivotal moment. Although satirized by Hunt in the first edition of his Feast of the Poets (1811), Wordsworth had sent him an inscribed copy of the Poems in Februrary 1815, presumably in the hopes of a favorable notice by Hunt in the Examiner. Hazlitt had reviewed the Excursion for the Examiner the previous autumn (see WH 19.9–25), and Hunt (as we have seen) would prominently treat the Waterloo sonnets in February 1816, but the collected Poems received no notice other than Hazlitt’s scathing reference to Wordsworth’s preferential treatment of monarchs at the expense of vagrants. Visited at home by Wordsworth on the same day as Hazlitt’s ‘Comus’ review had run in the Examiner (11 June), Hunt privately disclaimed the article (as he would publicly in the paper’s next number) while at the same time saying that he ‘should consider his call as a higher honour’ if Wordsworth had in fact seen the article (Robinson 1.169). As he recounted the visit nearly 40 years later in his Autobiography, He came to thank me for the zeal I had shown in advocating the cause of his genius. I had the pleasure of showing him his book on my shelves by the side of Milton; a sight which must have been the more agreeable, inasmuch as the visit was unexpected … . He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the shelves (for his contemporaries were there also), he sat dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic judgements. (253–4) Standing by the side of Milton in the enemy’s house, Wordsworth bears a striking resemblance here not only to Napoleon’s characteristic attitude but also, oddly enough, to John Philip Kemble’s Coriolanus (whose postures and whose own sway we will examine in considerable detail in Chapter 5), who opens Act IV by taking up his position in Tullus Aufidius’ house next to the bust of Mars. ‘Dealing forth’ his opinions, it is almost as if Wordsworth were performing the prefatory matter to the collected Poems, creating the taste by which he was to be read through ‘establishing that dominion over the spirits of readers by which they are to be humbled and humanised, in order that they may be purified and exalted’ (PrW 3.80–1). In the case of the querulous



III

Hunt, at least, Wordsworth’s display of genius and egotism would appear to have been for nought: while the extensive notes to the second edition of The Feast of the Poets (1814) reveal Hunt finally to have read Wordsworth, he has not done so with any particular acuity, and any pleasure Wordsworth might have taken in Hunt’s account there of his ‘genius’ would have been compromised by Hunt’s alignment (in another divagation) of Wordsworth with Southey as a ‘servile place-hunter’ who had unequivocally tied up his independence (Feast 78).58 In the account of Wordsworth in the Autobiography, moreover, Hunt is principally concerned to distinguish his own levity from Wordsworth’s seriousness (and to determine the color of Wordsworth’s eyes) than he is to examine the shifting parameters of Wordsworth as more-or-less Milton. Oddly enough, Hunt’s facetious indulgence of his own adulation of Wordsworth serves to draw his account of the visit back both to the review by Hazlitt that he so promptly disavowed and to the pervasive Miltonic subtext of the Examiner in June, 1815. Remarking at the end of his recapitulation of the visit that ‘I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns’ (Autobiography 255), Hunt in effect has the last word in a disagreement with Byron which he had inserted earlier. Careening from anecdote to anecdote, Hunt interrupts his alignment of Wordsworth and Milton to announce that ‘Lord Byron, in resentment for my having called [Wordsworth] the “prince of the bards of his time,” would not allow him to be even the “one-eyed monarch of the blind.” He said he was the “blind monarch of the one-eyed”’ (253). In June 1815 the blind monarch is of course George III – the subject of the last of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ in the 1815 Poems (‘Added, November, 1813’). Byron’s pejorative alignment of Wordsworth with the king deftly undoes all the claims Wordsworth makes at this time for the ‘experienced eye’ of the poet, and implies that Wordsworth’s blindness is something other than Miltonic. Far from having his sight ‘overplied / In liberty’s defence’ (‘To Mr Cyriack Skinner Upon his Blindness,’ ll. 10–11), Wordsworth’s intercession for George III in ‘November, 1813’ is figured as having blinded him to liberty and having left him a victim of his own ‘dazzled eye’ before the ‘throne of tyranny’ (‘Conclusion. 1811,’ ll. 9, 14). Despite its cloying, gossipy air, Hunt’s captious account of Wordsworth’s visit nevertheless raises the difficult question of what it might mean to stand by the side of Milton. Hunt’s placing of




Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems is ‘agreeable’ because it coincides with Wordsworth’s own account of the Milton–Wordsworth axis in the prefatory matter to those very volumes. This literary alliance is complicated, however, by Hunt’s account of Wordsworth in the Examiner of 18 June 1815, exactly one week after their visit. In a ‘Political Examiner’ on the shifting modalities of Jacobinism (‘Bonaparte and the Independents’), Hunt digresses at length on Wordsworth, both in order to distinguish him from those of his contemporaries (namely Coleridge and Southey) who, ‘never perhaps having had much opinion or principle at all, were always ready to fall in with what was uppermost’ (386; emphasis added), and, having thereby attested to Wordsworth’s ‘lofty perception of right and wrong,’ to disclaim Hazlitt’s remarks of the preceding week. According to Hunt, Wordsworth’s ‘real spirit of liberty’ is such that while he thinks and ranks himself in general with politicians of one description, he brings them the noblest of all assistance by refusing to give up his admiration for the great and good of another, – for the MARVELLS, HARRINGTONS, and MILTONS, – men, with whom he feels relationship in virtue and genius, and from whom he differs with the music of an harmonious mind. (387) At the same time as Hunt instinctively places Wordsworth’s poetry at the side of Milton’s, he just as unhesitatingly opposes their politics. Standing side-by-side, Wordsworth and Milton do not face one another. But on whose side does Hunt finally stand? Proclaiming here that Wordsworth resembles Milton in virtue and genius, Hunt tidily reverses his own assessment of the previous summer, when he denounced Wordsworth for abusing his genius as Milton and Spenser never abused theirs (Feast 89). After merely one visit from Wordsworth, Hunt shows his own readiness to fall in with Wordsworth’s selfpromotion, as if he has as little literary ballast as he accuses apostates of having political principle.59 In a footnote to his equivocal alliance of Wordsworth with Milton, Hunt further betrays his own complicity with that class of (literary) Jacobins whose critical ‘violence has been moderated by experience’: The writer, who is at present supplying our Theatrical Department, closed some masterly observations on ‘Comus’ last week, with an attack on the tergiversations of some living poets, from which, as far as Mr. WORDSWORTH is concerned, we are anxious to express our dissent. If Mr. WORDSWORTH praises any body, whom upon the




whole neither the writer in question nor ourselves might think worthy of the panegyric, whatever may be our feelings toward him on other grounds, we are quite convinced, by the whole tenour of Mr. WORDSWORTH’s life and productions, that he does it in a perfectly right spirit; and as to the suppression of a certain part of his poems, it has been observed, and with great justice, that he could not have made the omission from any political view, as he has left other poems standing, which might be thought much more unpalatable to people in power, – such, for instance, as those that panegyrize the names above-mentioned. (387) According to Hunt’s querulous, obsequious criteria here, a sonnet such as ‘“Great Men,”’ with its juxtaposition of England’s ‘master spirit’ and France’s ‘perpetual emptiness,’ should be more ‘unpalatable to people in power’ than the ‘Female Vagrant,’ presumably because the spectre of an earlier model of English republicanism should be much more inflammatory than a narrative of ‘the miseries brought on the lower classes by war.’ In Hunt’s determined yet equivocal attempt to leave Wordsworth standing next to Milton, he defends the ‘standing’ in the 1815 volume of one of the three or so sonnets which mention Milton by name, and thereby further complicates the axis along which Wordsworth and Milton might stand next to one another. Whereas the body of Hunt’s article articulates a relationship between the two poets according to which Wordsworth resembles Milton in terms of his ‘genius’ but not his politics, the allusion in the note to ‘“Great Men”’ blurs the terms of that opposition by recuperating a Wordsworth who, because he left the sonnet standing, supposedly does resemble Milton politically after all. The more telling omission, however, is perhaps Hunt’s suppression of – or, rather, his about-face from – his own vexed account of Wordsworth in the revised edition of the Feast of the Poets, which Hunt had completed in prison the preceding summer. More immediately than Hazlitt’s rigorous and determined demystification of Wordsworth’s self-presentation, Hunt’s equivocal reading of Wordsworth’s poetry, as well as his public persona, remind us that many of the most potent political implications of romantic criticisms of Wordsworth are not confined to the topical positions assigned him (whether or not Wordsworth was, say, a ‘consistent’ Miltonic republican or, alternatively, a Jacobin according to Hunt’s criteria), but can be read in the conflicted constructions of Wordsworth as a cultural property. In his extensive notes to the




revised Feast of the Poets, Hunt identifies several of the valences of property which determine Wordsworth’s public persona at this time. Noting that Wordsworth, ‘though marked as government property, may walk about his fields uninjured’ (Feast 99), Hunt opens up the double-bind of Wordsworth’s self-canonization. Demarcating his property according to the classification of the 1815 edition, Wordsworth enables himself and his readers to walk uninjured about what he considers to be the vast unified fields of his poetic output over the past 20 years. In dedicating the volume to Sir George Beaumont and Beaumont’s own fields, however, Wordsworth marks himself as properly a tenant on another’s land: in addition to having given Wordsworth a small piece of land as a gift in 1803, Beaumont could claim an even more proprietorial relation to the 1815 Poems after Wordsworth’s dedication, in which he avows that ‘several of the best pieces were composed under the shade of your own groves, upon the classic ground of Coleorton,’ Beaumont’s house in Leicestershire (Poems [1815]). As Hunt continues, in remarks apropos Wordsworth’s restrictive poetics which have everything to do with Beaumont’s patronage, Wordsworth ‘narrows his dominion, and gives up the glory of a greater and more difficult sway; but still he rules us by a legitimate title, and is still a poet’ (101). The subordination of ‘sway’ to dominion again underlines the enclosure performed by Wordsworth’s enterprise of selfcanonization, while its confinement between dominion and rule can be said to limit its own sway, its turning from side to side in much the same fashion (as we have repeatedly seen) as the apostate can be said to careen from one extreme to another. Wordsworth’s sway here is not so much the swathe cut by his poetic property as it is his ability (as we noted of his visit to Hunt) to overpower and rule his reader. In qualifying this rule as legitimate, however, Hunt reopens the sway of Wordsworth’s vocational identity. Having constructed Wordsworth throughout the notes as the heir to Milton, Hunt’s use of ‘legitimate’ would seem at first glance to support this election, to suggest that Wordsworth has not merely assumed this title but been chosen for it: his claim is legitimate because he is the popular and elected heir to Milton. By 1814, however, ‘legitimate’ more immediately signifies (and nowhere more forcefully than in an Opposition newspaper such as the Examiner) the conservative ideology of restoring displaced European monarchs who have no more tenable a claim to represent the people than do their revolutionary usurpers. To call Wordsworth’s title legitimate, therefore, calls into question the titular power which Hunt




would recognize, if not also confer. Owning Wordsworth’s sway, as it were, Hunt cannot help but call into question its legitimacy. It is of course the fundamental illegitimacy of Wordsworth’s Miltonic pretensions that motivates Hazlitt’s critique in the ‘Comus’ review, where Wordsworth fails as both a poet and a patriot. Much of the force of Hazlitt’s denunciation of Wordsworth here lies in his stark opposition of the contrasting experiences of war borne by a monarch (‘November, 1813’) and an indigent widow (‘Female Vagrant’). If Wordsworth is going to compliment a king on his regal fortitude in time of war, Hazlitt contends, sadly enough it is only fitting that he should excise any work that so ‘beautifully and affectingly’ ennobles the sufferings of the poor under the same circumstances. In point of fact, however, the ‘Female Vagrant’ was not altogether absent from the 1815 volumes: cut from 270 lines in 1798 to 122 lines by 1815, the poem no longer begins with the pastoral childhood and education of a Pedlar-like woman, but at line 131 of the 1798 text, prefaced merely with the bland synopsis, ‘Having described her own situation with her Husband, serving in America during the War, she proceeds.’ If Hazlitt knew this (and presumably he did), then his remarks on its omission are not vitiated but actually made more severe, suggesting as they do that Wordsworth has effectively suppressed everything which gave the poem its power.60 Although singled out by readers such as Hunt as one of the poems which justify Wordsworth’s Miltonic pretensions (Feast 89), the ‘Female Vagrant’ did not coincide with Wordsworth’s own sense of his debt to his ‘great predecessor’ whilst canonically ordering his own work in 1815. Cut in half and consigned to the juvenilia, if the ‘Female Vagrant’ still succeeds as an artless ballad of vagrant suffering, it is in spite of the suppression of the poem’s determining social and political contexts. Beyond the predictable excision of the lines denouncing the military inscription of the rural poor and the squalid inhumanity of war (ll. 91–130; LB 53–4), more revealing is the absence of those lines detailing the expulsion of the narrator and her father from their land: The suns of twenty summers danced along, – Ah! little marked, how fast they rolled away: Then rose a mansion proud our woods among, And cottage after cottage owned its sway, No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray Through pastures not his own, the master took; My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay;





But, when he had refused the proffered gold, To cruel injuries he became a prey, Sore traversed in whate’er he bought and sold: His troubles grew upon him day by day, Till all his substance fell into decay. His little range of water was denied; All but the bed where his old body lay, All, all was seized, and weeping, side by side, We sought a home where we uninjured might abide. (ll. 37–54; LB 51–2) Whereas Hazlitt turns to the ‘Female Vagrant’ to illustrate Wordsworth’s betrayal of the rural poor in favor of the monarch (and thereby to imply that Wordsworth no longer abides by the poetics outlined, and just reprinted, in the Preface), the absence of these lines on property effectively draws our attention to Wordsworth’s own status as cultural property in 1815, and his reorganization of his poetic territory under the classifications adopted in the 1815 Poems. As we have noted, issues of ‘sway’ and dominion proliferate throughout Wordsworth’s sonnets, collected now in the ‘mansion’ that is the collected Poems. What then might it mean to own the sway of these volumes? On the one hand, it would entail acknowledging Wordsworth, as Hunt does, not only as the legitimate ‘prince of the bards of his time,’ but also perhaps as their principal proprietor. Wordsworth may now be able, as Hunt notes, to walk about his fields uninjured, but that is precisely what the female vagrant is doubly proscribed from doing, first by the local landowner and then by Wordsworth. This is precisely the sort of critical tramping (reading the 1798 ‘Female Vagrant’ on equal terms with ‘November 1813’) that Wordsworth would deny such politically unfit readers as Hazlitt, yet to which he will be increasingly subjected in the years to come. If it is fitting to excise the ‘Female Vagrant’’s descriptions of the miseries of war in deference to George III, it is even more incumbent upon Wordsworth to cut those lines which implicitly chastise the landowners with whom, as a proprietor of culture, he increasingly aligns himself.



He loved his old hereditary nook, And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook.

4

The spectre of the apostate’s former opinions glares perpetually near him, and provokes his frantic zeal. (Hazlitt, ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper,’ Dec. 1816) On 2 December 1816, an enormous, unruly crowd gathered at Spa Fields to hear Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt report on the Prince Regent’s refusal to receive the most recent petition for tax relief and political reform. This second Spa Fields meeting of 1816, the largest, most volatile Radical demonstration in London since 1795, effectively deteriorated when a cadre of ultra-jacobinical Spenceans (one Preston, as well as a Dr. Watson and his son, Watson Junior), having goaded part of the crowd into action, led them away to pillage several gunsmiths’ shops and march fully armed into the City with the intention of seizing the armory at the Tower.1 In its coverage of the disturbance, the ministerial Courier reported that the younger Watson, flourishing his tricolor cockade, spurred the crowd on by comparing their cause to that of Wat Tyler, a fourteenth-century blacksmith who led an abortive Peasants’ revolt against Richard II to protest similarly unjust taxation during yet another war with France.2 The Prince Regent, in his great generosity, has given you 5000l. out of funds which do not touch his own pocket. He robs you of millions, and then gives you part of the spoil. (Applause.) –My friend (Mr Prescott [sic], we suppose) has been described by the Treasury Journals as a second Wat Tyler – no bad title; for be it recollected, that Wat Tyler rose for the purpose of putting down an oppressive tax [emphasis added], and would have succeeded had he not been basely murdered by William Walworth, then Lord Mayor of 123



Facing the Past: Spectral Apostasies

London; but we have no basketwork Lord Mayors now; and if he was surrounded by thousands of his fellow-countrymen, as I am, he need fear no Lord Mayor whatever (Huzzas.) –It seems the determined resolution of Ministers to carry things in their own way… . That is to say, they will carry the business in defiance of the voice of the people. If they will not give us what we want, shall we not take it. (Yes, yes.) –Are you willing to take it? (Yes.) –Will you go and take it? (Yes.) –If I jump down among you, will you come and take it? (Yes, yes, from a thousand voices.) –Will you then follow me? (Yes, yes.) –The speaker then seized the largest of the tri-coloured flags, and flourishing his hat, jumped among the crowd, amidst the loudest shouts. –Dr. Watson and Mr. Hooper followed him, and these Heroes rushed forward, followed by some thousands, towards Clerkenwell.3 Whether as a result of or in spite of Watson’s invocation of Wat Tyler, the rioters were soon disarmed and captured. Nevertheless, the specter of the historic Wat Tyler rising up in concert with an armed mob of English Jacobins intent upon putting down the British monarchy proved to be the climactic moment in the ‘Spa Fields affair,’ and had several immediate consequences for postwar English Radicalism: the spectacle of an armed mob of English Jacobins brandishing liberty caps and tricolor flags (of the future British Republic) confirmed conservative fears that a revolution was at hand, frightened moderates away from the Radical movement, and provided Castlereagh’s ministry with the necessary pretext for suppressing the Reformers (Thompson, Working Class 636). When an attempt was made on the Regent’s life at the opening of Parliament in January, 1817 (again recalling 1795, when George III’s carriage was attacked on the same occasion),4 everything was in place for the establishment of the Committee on Secrecy, which duly reported the formation of a traitorous conspiracy to seize the Bank of England as well as the Tower, cause the Army to mutiny, and instigate an armed Jacobin revolution in London. Shortly thereafter, Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (4 March 1817) and the Seditious Meetings Act (25 March 1817), as well as bills to outlaw any incitement of troops to mutiny and to secure the personal safety of the Sovereign (Halévy, Liberal Awakening 22–3). It was, in short, a systematic reenactment of nearly all of the repressive legislation of the 1790s, when the British government was first at war with revolutionary France. It was in the midst of the debates over this flurry of repressive legislation in the winter of 1817, while the British Government seemed




intent on restaging, act-by-act, the counter-revolutionary terror of the 1790s, that Robert Southey’s previously unpublished Jacobin drama of 1794, Wat Tyler, suddenly and anonymously appeared in a pirated edition.5 Disinterred on 13 February with the taunting Shakespearean epigraph, ‘Thus ever did Rebellion find rebuke,’ Southey’s juvenile dramatization of Wat Tyler arrived in the same week as both his reactionary ‘Parliamentary Reform’ ran (also anonymously) in the ultraministerial Quarterly Review and, fittingly, the parliamentary report of the Committee on Secrecy was made public. The timing was perfect: on both a national and a personal level, this otherwise insignificant piece of juvenilia provided a final, melodramatic twist to the ongoing exhumation of the revolutionary politics of the 1790s. The publication of Wat Tyler provided Opposition critics with an irresistible opportunity not only to discredit a repressive ministry which was implementing extraordinarily harsh peacetime measures against the disaffected (Carnall 164), but also to spotlight the political apostasy of the Poet Laureate. At the height of his career as the Regent’s Poet Laureate and the Quarterly Review’s most splenetic, reactionary critic, Southey’s Jacobin youth (presumably long-buried) had suddenly returned to taunt him. If, as Marx quipped, all world-historical incidents of note occur as it were twice, then the ‘tragedy’ of Wat Tyler might be said to have returned as both a farce and, in this case, an epitaph – an unsought inscription for the youthful Jacobinism that, for whatever reason, had not perished but lingered to haunt Southey throughout the 1810s. Ever since his appointment to the Laureateship in 1813, Southey had been scrutinized and ridiculed in the periodical press for the seeming opportunism of having renounced his earlier Jacobinism for the wreath of pensioned laurels that accompanied the bane of composing dubious odes for the Prince Regent. In the summer of 1816, Hazlitt had dismissed Southey’s latest ‘Lay of the Laureate’ in no uncertain terms (‘The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism’ [WH 7.87]) while the Examiner had reprinted a number of Southey’s poems from the 1790s under the heading of an ‘acanthologia,’ or a gathering of thorns.6 Now, with the appearance of Wat Tyler, this established, if desultory, practice of embarrassing Southey by reminding the public of his earlier, superior ‘Jacobin’ poetry exploded into a wholesale critique of romantic apostasy, one in which Hazlitt and Hunt were joined in the periodical press by Radical journalists William Cobbett, William Hone, and T.J. Wooller, and on the floor of the House of Commons by Opposition members Henry Brougham (one of the founders of the Edinburgh



Facing the Past: Spectral Apostasies 125

Review, and the Hunts’ solicitor during both of their trials on charges of seditious libel in 1811 and 1812) and William Smith (an old personal friend of not only Southey but also of Wordsworth and Coleridge), both of whom denounced Southey for sedition within a month of the publication of Wat Tyler. Smith’s exposure and ridicule of Southey was in fact a pivotal moment, one when a parliamentary debate over the Seditious Meetings Bill turned into a public debate (in the very periodical press that Southey was intent on stifling) on both the structure of and rationale for postrevolutionary apostasy. Smith’s reported denunciation of Southey as a malignant ‘renegado’ piqued Southey to such a degree that he applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to restrain further sales of Wat Tyler. When this stratagem failed, on the grounds that (as Lord Eldon ruled) ‘a person cannot recover in damages for a work which is in its nature calculated to do an injury to the public,’ it was quickly and cheaply reprinted by Hone and others, with sales estimated at 60,000 copies – not a cent of which Southey could claim for himself (LC 4.251).7 It was at this point that Southey resolved to vindicate himself in print, first with a letter to the ministerial Courier (17 March 1817; see LC 4.252–5), then at greater length in A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P. (April 1817), in which (as we shall see), Southey invariably represents his own political consistency as a matter not of standing still but, curiously enough, of turning away. The effect of Southey’s defense, in league with Coleridge’s simultaneous series of articles for the Courier on ‘apostasy and renegadoism’ (March–April 1817; see EOT 2.449–60, 466–78),8 was simply to keep the controversy in the press – most conspicuously courtesy of Hunt and Hazlitt in the Examiner – far longer than would otherwise have been the case, and to expose all three Lake poets to more severe criticism of their political recantations than had previously (or would have otherwise) been the case. Rising up, spectrally, out of the grave in which Southey thought he had buried his Jacobin youth, this discarded drama effectively put him down, put him in his place as a pert, complacent courtier or ‘place-man’ and entombed him again, this time under the voluminous scorn heaped upon him by Hazlitt (among others9) as well as beneath the epitaph he presumed to write for himself at the end of his smug apologia.10 Aside from the gothic aura of the grave, the image of Wat Tyler rising up for the purposes of putting down (a king, a poet, an untenable rationale for political tergiversation) provides the entire scandal with a dangerously versatile vocabulary for the ever-shifting modalities of




romantic ‘renegadoism’ informing the conflagration of English poets in postrevolutionary politics in 1817.11 The deadly collision of natural and rhetorical falling (inscribed in both the gravity of the grave and in the action of being put down) is remarkably appropriate to contemporary romantic definitions of the apostate as one who has not so much stood as fallen away from previously held political principles. In repudiating (falling away from) his previous allegiance to the libertarian principles of the French Revolution, the romantic apostate in the winter of 1817 can be seen to fall – if not, after all, to leap, to fall with a purpose – into ‘the grave of liberty’ with the intent to bury and thus silence a previous Jacobin self.12 Many such implications can in fact be read in Wat Tyler’s rebellion against the power and prerogative of the King (as invoked by both the Jacobin poet of 1794, Southey, and the English Radical of 1816, Watson), drawing as it does on the oldest Greek sense of the stasis at the root of apostasis, as an insurrection or the rising up of a faction formed for seditious purposes – or in other words, as the taking of a stand against. Considered thus, we are poised to ironize Southey’s (indeed, any romantic apostate’s) later stand against or away from his own earlier Jacobinism as a double or second-degree apostasy. At the height of Southey’s career as a courtier-poet and the Quarterly Review’s high-Tory critic, the rising spectre of Wat Tyler (the name, now, of both an insurrectionist and a drama) can be said to have precipitated an apostasis so precarious as to have slipped from a presumably governable ‘standing away’ into a decidedly vertiginous falling away. The combination of Southey’s indignation at being branded a ‘renegado’ and Coleridge’s frustrated defense of the term reveals, as we shall see, the degree to which this climactic debate over revolutionary apostasy took shape as a struggle for control over several notoriously unmanageable terms – to wit, Jacobin, apostate, and now ‘renegado’ – as well as over the problem of consistency, political or otherwise. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Wat Tyler can ultimately be read as a critical referendum on the validity of Coleridge’s adage, ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin,’ and its ties to the modality of romantic apostasy.

During the debate in the House of Commons on 14 March 1817, regarding the possible reenactment of the Seditious Meetings Bills of 1795 and 1799, an Opposition member for Norwich, William Smith, rose to address the House. In one pocket he carried the latest number




of the conservative Quarterly Review, while in the other he had stowed a copy of the recently published Wat Tyler. Maintaining the pretence of anonymity under which each had appeared, and adverting to the possible implications of both for the grave matter now before the House (to suppress and prohibit all reform societies as unlawful combinations and confederacies), Smith requested the permission of the House to read aloud a passage from an article in the Quarterly, ‘Parliamentary Reform,’ that, so far as he could tell, expressly alluded to such recent, seditious disturbances as the Spa Fields riots of December 1816, and the attempt made on the Regent’s life at the opening of Parliament in January 1817.13 Lamenting the ‘present state of popular knowledge,’ the writer of the article takes the popular press to task for disseminating such sickly ‘half-knowledge,’ then proceeds to denounce it as suffering from ‘a sort of squint in the understanding which prevents it from seeing straightforward, and by which all objects are distorted’ (‘Parliamentary Reform’ 226). The article continues: When the man of free opinions commences professor of moral and political philosophy for the benefit of the public – the fables of old credulity are then verified – his very breath becomes venomous, and every page which he sends abroad carries with it poison to the unsuspicious reader. We have shown, on a former occasion [‘Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection], how men of this description are acting upon the public, and have explained in what manner a large part of the people have been prepared for the virus with which they innoculate them. The dangers arising from such a state of things are now fully apparent, and the designs of the incendiaries, which have for some years been proclaimed so plainly, that they ought, long ere this, to have been prevented, are now manifested by overt acts. (227; emphasis added) The ‘state of things,’ as depicted by the author of the article in question, is one in which ‘all true Britons’ are prevented from enjoying the peace which they have bravely won after 20 years of war by those ‘apostles of anarchy’ who would take advantage of a temporary and partial distress (stagnant manufacturing, two poor harvests, soaring postwar unemployment) in order to impose upon the ignorance of the multitude through flattering their errors, inflaming their passions, and finally exciting them to sedition and rebellion. Not yet two years removed from the ‘sublime victory’ of Waterloo, England found itself subjected




in the winter of 1816–17 to internal threats of revolution from such frustrated reformers as Spenceans (with their insistence on the redistribution of land to the community), to Luddites, Owenites, and the petitions of the Hampden Clubs, with their call for universal manhood suffrage. And all of these agendas were exacerbated, for those on the ‘ministers’ side of the question,’ by that perverse, formidable ‘engine of mischief’ and sedition, the radical press (273). According to the Quarterly reviewer, the only way to counter-act such overt acts of insurrection – whether in the form of mass meetings or the mass circulation of cheap journalism – was by enacting sufficiently stringent legislation. Having painted for the House this lurid picture of the venomous poison of sedition now circulating amidst the multitude, Smith then pulled out the copy of Wat Tyler, which had been published within days of the Quarterly Review in question. (Given Southey’s contempt at this time for the ‘Reading Public’ and the disaffected multitudes generally – the Jacobin Club, as Southey would try to explain a few months later, used to be far more selective – it seems a properly dramatic irony that the Spa Fields riot of the preceding December should have cued the reentrance of Wat Tyler onto the contemporary political stage.) Ingenuously supposing that it was to precisely this sort of writing that ‘the above writer alluded … as constituting a part of the virus with which the public mind had been infected’ (Madden 236–7), Smith read the following, representative extract, addressed by a criminal priest (John Ball) to an earlier group of downtrodden laborers: My brethren, these are truths and weighty ones: Ye are all equal; nature made ye so. Equality is your birthright; – when I gaze On the proud palace, and behold one man, In the blood-purpled robes of royalty, Feasting at ease, and lording over millions; Then turn me to the hut of poverty, And see the wretched labourer, worn with toil, Divide his scanty morsel with his infants, I sicken, and indignant at the sight, ‘Blush for the patience of humanity.’ (Act II; 31) Relying as it does on a decidedly Rousseau-istic sense of the fraternal ‘rights of man’ in declaring equality to be the natural birthright of wretched laborers, while denouncing royalty for its ‘blood-purpled robes’ of excess, this insurgent appeal to the passions of the oppressed




multitudes resonates only too clearly – alarmingly – in the aftermath of the Spa Fields riots. Clearly, Smith implies, this must be the sort of writing implicated by the Quarterly for infecting the masses with the ‘virus’ of political disaffection. Consequently, as Smith continues, Wat Tyler appeared to him to be ‘the most seditious book that was ever written; its author did not stop short of exhorting to general anarchy; he vilified kings, priests, and nobles, and was for universal suffrage and perfect equality’ (Madden 237). In comparison, the ultra-Jacobinical Spencean plan (so closely linked in public memory with the December riots) was but a ‘miserable and ridiculous performance’ (237; emphasis added), entirely lacking the play’s argument or appeal to the passions. Nor was the play difficult to obtain, for it was in fact available at nearly any bookseller’s stall in London. How was such a publication to be countenanced, so soon after the volatility of the mass meetings at Spa Field in December? ‘Why, then, had not those who thought it necessary to suspend the Habeas Corpus act taken notice of this poem? Why had not they discovered the author of that seditious publication, and visited him with the penalties of the law?’ And if both extracts had been written ‘by the same person, he should like to know from the hon. and learned gentleman opposite, why no proceedings had been instituted against the author?’ (237). Though a member for the Opposition, Smith’s seeming indignation at the incendiary tenets propagated by a regicidal drama momentarily aligns him with the ‘ministers’ side of the question,’ insofar as he calls for the repression of a seditious work and the punishment of its author. But, given the absurdity of doing so – of detaining the Poet Laureate, of all people, on charges of sedition, especially when it is the Laureate himself who has called (albeit extra-judiciously) for precisely such measures – Smith exploits the occasion to comment on this exemplary instance of the ‘tergiversation of principle’ so often witnessed in political careers. While he does not blame any man for a ‘fair change of opinion,’ he vehemently censures ‘those who, having changed their opinions, conceive that no severity of language is too strong to be made use of against those who still adhered to their former sentiments’ (Madden 239).14 For Smith, Southey is such a man, one who, in his censorious prescriptions in the Quarterly, has behaved with the ‘determined malignity of a renegado’ (236). Smith’s ‘performance’ in the House of Commons is less significant as an exposure of Southey’s apostasy (his barefaced political inconsistency) than as a textual reading, both as a staging (of sorts) of a dra-




matic script and as an interpretation of the play in light of Southey’s own later, more prescriptively critical strictures in the Quarterly. It sets up a resonant disjunction between the ‘late’ Jacobin youth who authored the play and the presently pensioned bard, one which effectively precludes anything other than a highly visible and politically damaging commentary on the apostasy of the Poet Laureate. Smith’s pedagogic moment furthermore underscores the fact that the public ‘debate’ on romantic apostasy in 1816–17 (whether in the House apropos of the Seditious Meetings Bill, or, more importantly for our purposes, in the periodical press apropos Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual, Kemble’s production of Coriolanus, or Southey’s Wat Tyler) is fundamentally a matter of reading and literary criticism – of interpreting the generic conventions according to which the romantic writer can narrate or stage his political autobiography. The question, in other words, is how does the author stand for his text? Anterior to Southey’s own claims (in the Letter to William Smith, when he eventually assumes responsibility for the play and attempts, albeit ‘posthumously,’ to preface the interpretive challenge it poses in terms of dramatic convention), Smith’s intervention thus serves to underscore the difficulty of invigilating any meaningful distinction between Southey the ‘man,’ Southey the ‘poet,’ and Southey the ‘renegade.’ Smith’s public staging of the play overdetermines its politics so thoroughly as to render ineffective any attempt to recuperate it other than figuratively. Southey’s putative ‘malignity’ is everywhere evident in his pointed attacks (in ‘Parliamentary Reform’) on the ‘flagitious incendiaries’ Hunt and Cobbett, charging them as he does with ‘seeking to irritate and inflame [the poor and discontent], by the most seditious language,’ with ‘sow[ing] the seeds of rebellion, insulting the government, and defying the laws of the country’ (275). And it is precisely these points that they will make in turn, in reprinting extracts from Wat Tyler in the Examiner and the Political Register, in order to demonstrate the ‘pertness’ and complacency with which the Laureate himself can be seen (in his own words, no less) ‘to palliate insurrection, treason, and murder’ (273). Summing up his diatribe against the likes of Cobbett and Hunt, Southey contends, We have laws to prevent the exposure of unwholesome meat in our markets, and the mixture of deleterious drugs in beer. – We have laws also against poisoning the minds of the people, by exciting dis-





Why indeed? If the author of Wat Tyler were not to be detained (under the auspices of the suspension of Habeas Corpus), arrested, and tried for sedition, was he not himself at least subject to the ‘law’ of the Quarterly, with its cursory strictures on incendiary writing? But what would it mean, in 1817, to detain the Poet Laureate – to render him accountable – for ‘poisoning the minds of the people’ with poetry? At the very least, it would mean acknowledging that Southey’s ‘official’ poetry was every bit as liable to excite discontent as was his juvenilia.15 Furthermore (and of greater resonance for our enquiry), it would entail examining what Southey utterly disclaimed, what Hazlitt termed (in a contemporaneous article in the Examiner) the ‘hypostatical union between the Quarterly Reviewer and the Dramatic Poet’ (WH 7.169; emphasis added). It is a marvelously Coleridgean indictment,16 one which prompts us to go beyond the blunt juxtapositioning of excerpts from Wat Tyler and ‘Parliamentary Reform’ in order to confront the substantial similarities between (or, in a properly Coleridgean inflection, the consubstantiality of) Southey’s dramatic and critical personae, and the ways in which his writing too may be governed by the binding temporality of Coleridge’s ‘once / always.’ In his 1816 review of Southey’s recent ‘Carmen Nuptiale,’ Hazlitt immediately noted that ‘If we had ever doubted the good old adage before, “Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin,” since reading “The Lay of the Laureate,” we are sure of it’ (WH 7.86). A Jacobin, in Hazlitt’s charge here, is ‘one who would have his single opinion govern the world, and overturn every thing in it,’ one whose every sentiment or thought is ‘nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion’ (WH 7.86; emphasis added).17 Of greater significance than the Jacobin’s sentiments or opinions is his penchant for simultaneously governing (making the law) and overturning (breaking the law), not least because the Jacobin’s own former positions, his standing places, are subject in turn to being overturned – not leveled but overturned. (Once a turnover always a turnover.) While, politically, the inherence of governing in overturning characterizes a radically oppositional agenda, rhetorically it is the equivalent of crossing the aisle, then turning around to denounce those who remain in your previous position (the apostrophic structure of tergiversation, as the apostate turns his back on former affiliations), all the while ignorant as to whether such an apostrophe will turn into a catastrophe. In 1817, the looming possibil-



content and disaffection; – why are not these laws rendered effectual and enforced as well as the former? (275)

ity of such a self-destructive overturn / turnover charges the fault-line between apostasy and ‘renegado-ism,’ a term which comes under acute scrutiny following Smith’s denunciation of Southey in the House of Commons, and which in many ways dictates the terms of this last act in the dramatization of romantic apostasy. Publicly silent on the resurrection of Wat Tyler in the weeks immediately following its appearance, Southey was moved to defend himself only after he had been denounced by Smith as a renegado.18 Having failed to obtain an injunction from the Court of Chancery against any further publication of the play (on the grounds that ‘a person cannot recover in damages for a work which is in its nature calculated to do an injury to the public’; Lord Eldon, cited LC 4.251n),19 Southey drafted a letter to the Courier, presented as his ‘last words’ on the topic, in which he essayed to ‘set [Smith’s] slander at defiance’ (LC 4.252, 254). Though conceding that he had ‘long outgrown’ the political opinions expressed in Wat Tyler, Southey nevertheless insisted that it had been ‘natural’ to do so and that, furthermore, casting them aside was in fact integral to the politically consistent and ‘straightforward course’ he had pursued since the 1790s (LC 4.253–4). In defending his change of opinions as, paradoxically, a straightforward matter, Southey fundamentally desired to vindicate himself as one who was equally correct in having been, first, a Jacobin in the 1790s and, second, an anti-Jacobin in the 1810s – a seemingly senseless self-sufficiency which Hazlitt would soon elaborate as ‘the new theory of political integrity,’ whereby ‘to be a steady, consistent, conscientious Whig or Tory, is nothing. It is the change of opinion that stamps the value on it’ (WH 7.179). What is at stake in this exchange in the periodical press (Southey and, soon thereafter, Coleridge in the Courier, countered by Hazlitt and Hunt in the Examiner) is the status of the vocabulary of apostasy. Hazlitt formulates the matter thus: First, if Mr. Southey is not an apostate, we should like to know who ever was? Secondly, whether the term, apostate, is a term of reproach? If it has ceased to be so, it is another among the triumphs of the present king’s reign, and a greater proof than any brought forward in the Quarterly Review, of the progress of public spirit and political independence among us of late years! (WH 7.180). Whether or not ‘apostate’ is any longer a derisory term in 1817, ‘renegado’ certainly is – as evidenced first by Southey’s umbrage when thus branded by Smith, then by Coleridge’s attempts in the Courier to rehabilitate it.




In common with both ‘apostasy’ and ‘tergiversation,’ but more akin to the latter, the term ‘renegado-ism’ denominates an act of desertion (of a religion or political party) or a going back on (turning one’s back on) a contract or promise. And simultaneous with pointing out such a conversion or turning, it captures the dramatic crux of ‘apostasy’ as an ‘unsaying.’ As one who has ‘renayed’ or ‘renegued’ (from the Latin, renegare, a renunciation, if not also a double denial of sorts [re-negare]) and who is thus defined as one who has unsaid that which one previously said (not stood for, but stated), the renegade is, figuratively, the romantic apostate par excellence. Southey is this and more, for the latinate ‘renegado’ (more graphically than the Anglicized ‘renegade’) specifically alludes to the desertion of Christianity for Islam, most conspicuously in Spain – a particularly ironic resonance for ‘Robert Southey, Esq., Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of History,’ who had reportedly been awarded the Laureateship in part as recognition for his work on behalf of the Spanish cause in the peninsular wars.20 In the spring of 1817, the term lacks any fixed bearings and, in the wake of Smith’s invigorating deployment of it, is subject to repeated speculation as to its valences. ‘How came he [Smith] then to use the word Renegado?’ Wordsworth inquires of Crabb Robinson after the affair had seemingly subsided: The practice to which he pretends his censure was confined [not a change of opinion but the virulence with which the renegade denounces those who still think as he once thought] is far from entering of necessity into the meaning of that word. The act of change is stigmatized by the word; which comes from a desertion of Christianity for Mohammedanism, which Christians cannot admit a possibility of, from other than a bad motive or a vitious impulse. (Middle Years 2.393) Distinguishing the initiating ‘act’ of change from any consequent acts of denunciation, Wordsworth would invigilate the separation of unsaying and saying, of unsaying a previous commitment (the renegade as renegator) and saying a present accusation (the renegade as judge). It is also a query – and a criticism – which needs to be made of Coleridge’s ‘defense’ of Southey’s tergiversations in a series of articles for the Courier written in the wake of Southey’s abortive letter.21 Taking exception to Smith’s aspersions regarding the virulence and fury of the renegade, Coleridge presumed to explain to the readers of the Courier in March 1817 that ‘it is natural and necessary for a renegade … to be more violent than another’:





In this account, the apostate seeks to recompense – if not in fact repair – his own fall (to effect its reversal) through halting others before they too fall ‘into similar courses.’ But what does it mean to fall ‘into’ a course, or a sequence of events, when the fall is to be understood, initially at least, as ‘from’ a previous state, as an interruption of or break in a sequence? Would it not make more sense, and provide greater stability, if the apostate were to prevent others from interrupting their own courses, to preserve a temporal continuity from the ‘lapse of time’? Coleridge’s taut placement here of ‘falling’ and ‘courses’ underlines the simultaneously unavoidable and unpredictable relation between allegory (that course of events in time, attendant upon any conversion) and irony (understood as interruption and figured here in terms of a fall) in any attempt to construct a narrative of romantic apostasy. It is in his capacity as defender of the faith (as a defense against the fall), then, that the apostate emerges from Coleridge’s account as a member of a new clerisy22 – those select few who know just enough about the dangers of Jacobinism (politically, religiously, physically) to warn others of the armed Jacobin revolution that seemed imminent in 1816–17. This is the crux of what we might call Coleridge’s construction of heroic apostasy, of apostasy in terms of clerisy, a position he maps out with even greater élan in the final article, where we are prompted to consider the apostate not as a political opportunist but, now that he has examined both sides of the question (both sides of the shield23) as ‘the Shield-Bearer of the Faith, the Crusher of Heresy’: Had no other fragments of the works of the heretic Faustus been preserved but those in which he calls St. Augustine, Apostate and Deserter, yet these would have been amply sufficient to make it certain that Faustus himself had remained a Manichean. The very hatred attached to the name Apostate is the clearest proof that the most puissant and formidable enemies, are those who have themselves held the same doctrines, who are familiar therefore with all the sophisms which had ensnared them … , and who above all are able and eager to detail the fatal consequences of the error, with an



He is ashamed of the errors he has committed, he regards those who delude others into such errors as the worst of men; and feeling the pangs of remorse, he seeks to make reparation for his sins, by preventing others from falling onto similar courses. He has been stung, knows the mischief of the poison, and cautions society. (EOT 2.451)


Apostates are the greatest defenders of the faith because they alone know the sophistical attractions of the error which they have renounced; they alone are qualified to prevent others from falling into the same trap. The apostate’s use of violent language establishes the authority of his voice in order that he may check others before they fall (as above). It also enables him to demonstrate that the course of his own conversion is complete, for the use ‘of qualified language respecting those who are deluding others into sin, as they deluded us, would prove the conversion to be insincere, or only half effected’ (EOT 2.451). Equivocal language would belie an incomplete or merely ‘half effected’ conversion, leaving the would-be apostate either suspended over the abyss into which he might again (and again and again) fall, or at the very least in danger of a relapse. Indeed, how can we be certain that the conversion is terminal? Though Coleridge represents conversion as a one-time affair for the apostate – once Southey was a Jacobin, now he is not, with the clear implication that neither will he be one in the future; he will never again hold the opinions he held then – as a singular conversion somehow guaranteed by the virulence of the apostate’s language, the language of apostasy repeatedly shows itself (as we have seen) to be critically unstable. To infamize another as a renegade or apostate is to confess oneself, Coleridge explains, as continuing to retain the principles ‘which the other had reneged and stood off from – in modern phraseology disowned and turned against’ (EOT 2.474). The shift which Coleridge concedes to contemporary usage – that apostasy is not a simple matter of ‘standing off’ but of ‘turning against’ – is significant: the introduction of turning destabilizes an operation which he otherwise inflects as static, as terminal and, furthermore, as completed in the past. If apostasy is not in fact a matter of standing but of turning, how are we to know if and when the turn has been completed? When will it, as it were, have run its course? The versatility of the apostasy (not merely a standing away from but a turning against) reminds us of the giddiness of the transition from one state to another and alerts us to the implicit dangers of a lapse – indeed, a relapse (as ‘the head turns giddy at the retrospect’), the falling back into and (ironic) repetition of a former mistake. It furthermore implies the possibility of a ‘once / always’ economy lurking in the ‘conversion’ constitutive of apostasy – both as a turning which cannot arrest itself and, more vertiginously, as the turning of a standing into a falling.



authorised voice of warning, and the strong, persuasive eloquence of personal sympathy. (EOT 2.475)

Unlike Coleridge, Southey is not hamstrung by the perceived ‘taint’ of Jacobinism that overdetermines the Coleridgean crux, ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin.’ Indeed, throughout the Letter to William Smith, he repeatedly emphasizes the paradoxically necessary relation between turning and self-consistency – a matter of conversion as consistency. He readily acknowledges the Jacobin sympathies of his youth in order then to clarify the degree to which he has shed them over the course of time (or, as Southey regularly formulates it, the lapse of time), the degree to which he has reoriented himself with regard to ‘feelings right in themselves, and wrong only in their direction’ (Letter 8). Southey’s text abounds in metaphors of temporality (political horologes, rising and setting suns, pole stars and navigational courses) which operate in the service of his attempt here both to delineate and to invigilate a narrative of politically consistent conversion according to which ‘the course of time and events [has] corrected me in what was wrong, and confirmed me in what was right’ (22–3). Structurally (though not thematically) similar to Coleridge’s own accounts of his political ‘consistency’ (as outlined in Chapter 2), Southey’s Letter is a highly ironic text, in the sense that his attempt here to assemble a temporally continuous narrative of his own apostasy (to be understood as a natural and principled change over the course or lapse of time) is constantly interrupted by the repeated oratorical gesture of ‘coming forward,’ as he hastens to speak in the present both for his past works and his future reputation. It is a rhetorical strategy which puts the temporality of his apologia entirely out of joint, and finally undoes its claims as a narrative of political consistency. In a climactic and bizarre attempt to repudiate Smith’s stigmatization of him as a renegado (and as further evidence that his intellect has not been stationary), Southey turns to and emphatically quotes his own words from 1809 in order to distinguish himself from other revolutionary sympathizers of the 1790s as one who has in fact abjured his former politics – a renegation which we are to understand as determined ethically rather than expeditiously. Though in the 1790s he, too, ‘fell into the political opinions which the French Revolution was then scattering throughout Europe’ (Letter 14), Southey insists that he … did not fall into the error of those who having been the friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was implicated




in her success, transferred their attachment from the Republic to the Military Tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency the progress of oppression because France was the Oppressor. ‘They had turned their faces toward the East in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking Eastward still, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there*.’ I, on the contrary, altered my position as the world went round. (27–8) *I quote my words, written in 1809.

According to the figurative ‘logic’ of this metaphor, Southey seems to claim consistency for himself on the basis that he effectively desynonimized ‘France’ and ‘Liberty,’ then adhered to the course of the latter through changing direction, through turning his back on France to look elsewhere.24 Standing off from those who stood still, Southey here boldly represents his apostasy in terms of altering his position – standing away, in the course of turning to face away, to face the sun (with the sun understood in turn as the face of liberty) – of reorienting his face in relation to the perpetual turning of the world.25 Apostasy may thus be said to emerge in Southey’s text not merely as a matter of changing the direction you face but as, figuratively, a matter of changing your face, of putting a new face to an old name. In the gesture of Southey’s return to his earlier writing (enhanced by the language of the text he cites), we can further observe the central importance of metaphors of temporality to any reading of the Letter to William Smith. In league with the publication of Wat Tyler, Smith’s denunciation of Southey forced him to confront his past, to turn around and face his past – to face his past as a text which bears his face and name, and thus to face his apostasy as a text. In other words, the Letter documents the rhetorical complexities of facing your own past. More comprehensively, it reveals Southey simultaneously attempting to realize three closely related goals: to restore and reface his past as a youthful Jacobin sympathizer; to maintain his present public persona as Poet Laureate; and, proleptically, to defend himself against the threat of future mutilation (here represented, as we shall see, in terms of slander-as-branding, as an ineffaceable mark on the forehead [28]). And the generic means by which he effects this restoration is the preface. In Southey’s case, it marks a belated attempt to reassign a face to the name borne by his writings – a retrospective ploy which, as Southey turns to face the future, eventually transforms a preface into a prefatory epitaph.




Rebuking Smith for having ‘deliberately stood up’ to calumniate him in the House (from which he was of course absent and consequently unable to defend himself), Southey declares early on that it is ‘proper that I should speak explicitly for myself’ (2). Noting further that ‘few authors have obtruded themselves upon the public in their individual characters less than I have done,’ and that ‘my books have been sent into the world with no other introduction than an explanatory preface as brief as possible, arrogating nothing, vindicating nothing; and then they have been left to their fate,’ Southey here rationalizes his decision to come forward from his habitual privacy as finally necessary if he is to defend his name and his works (10, 11). Southey’s acknowledgment of a threat to his name (borne by ‘wilful and deliberate mis-statement’ and those ‘unprovoked insults which have been levelled at me’ [10]) marks his text as highly autobiographical: it concedes a threat (that of defacement) and positions itself as a discourse of self-restoration.26 And, in light of the brevity of his previous introductions, Southey quickly and efficiently turns his rebuttal of Smith into an extended preface to his corpus. Though written over twenty years later than the works in question (Wat Tyler most conspicuously, but also Joan of Arc and miscellaneous lyrics of the 1790s), Southey’s ‘preface’ would anticipate the malignant misinterpretations – the cumulative defacement – to which they have been subject in the intervening years, and thus restore the face of their earlier persona. While acknowledging that it is a mischievous publication (the responsibility, ultimately, of the Dissenting minister Winterbottom, who brought it forward in January 1817), Southey denies that Wat Tyler is a seditious performance, through insisting upon the distance separating the dramatist from the personae: ‘for it places in the mouths of the personages who are introduced nothing more than a correct statement of their real principles’ (6). In other words, Wat Tyler is not seditious because it is dramatic, populated not by individuals but by characters, historical personages whose sentiments, Southey reassures us, are ‘correctly stated’ (15).27 ‘Were I now to dramatize the same story,’ Southey continues, ‘there would be much to add, but little to alter,’ and ‘I should not express the sentiments less strongly’ (15). Whether these sentiments and principles (the oppressive taxes in the name of a costly war, the treachery of the government, the injustices of the political system) are in fact the poet’s own cannot be determined, he maintains, without referring to other of his works:




It is a fair and legitimate inference, that no person would have selected this subject, and treated it in such a manner at such a time, unless he had in a certain degree partaken of the sentiments which are expressed in it: in what degree he partook them … can only be ascertained by comparing the piece with other works of the same author, written about the same time, or shortly afterwards, and under the influence of the same political opinions: by such a comparison it might be discerned what arose from his own feelings, and what from the nature of dramatic composition. But to select passages from a dramatic poem, and ascribe the whole force of the sentiments to the writer as if he himself held them, without the slightest qualification, is a mode of criticism manifestly absurd and unjust. (15–16) In arriving at this abbreviated delineation of the proper way to evaluate a writer’s work, Southey has made two critical moves: he has abruptly forsaken the first for the third person in referring to the author of Wat Tyler; and he has displaced the category of political principles and influences in favor of comparative literary formalism. What is arresting here is the impersonality of the defense, for Southey’s repeated reference to his younger self as ‘he’ (a strategy which he maintains here for several pages and, importantly, resumes at the conclusion of the Letter) must be read not simply as a distancing maneuver but as a prescriptive strategy for literary criticism. In the guise of a defense of himself, Southey is providing us here with an interpretive ‘mode of criticism’ – one according to which intention can only be assigned, however hazardously, via impartial consideration of the author’s contemporary oeuvre – a method which is, because of its very impersonality, understood to be applicable to all authors. That this shift from political autobiography to literary criticism takes place in an ostensibly political apologia is not coincidental, for, as we have repeatedly seen in previous chapters (and will highlight in Chapter 6), it is around the problem of apostasy that romantic criticism comes into its own as criticism, as a literary-political discourse of crisis.28 Southey’s sustained reference to himself in the third person presupposes a degree of posthumous recognition – not of his work any longer, but of himself as the signatory, ‘Robert Southey’ – and mediates between our consideration of the Letter as preface and of the Letter as epitaph. Figuratively as well as generically, it marks the transformation of Southey’s text from a preface to Wat Tyler into an epitaph for himself, as Southey pivots (not a little dizzily) from facing backward to




facing forward. As we noted earlier, the text is self-consciously autobiographical, to the degree that it is written in response to a perceived threat, in this case the disfiguration caused by Smith’s slandering of him as a renegado. The word ‘apostate’ is conspicuously absent from Smith’s denunciation and Southey’s rebuttal, but ‘renegado’ functions throughout not only to denominate a similarly unacceptable (rhetorical) expediency, but also permanently to brand and thus graphically mutilate anyone to whom it is applied. Southey admits as much when he links branding and epitaph as inscriptions: Mr. William Smith is said to have insulted me with the appellation of Renegade; and if it be indeed true that the foul aspersion past his lips, I brand him for it on the forehead with the name of SLANDERER. Salve the mark as you will, Sir, it is ineffaceable! You must bear it with you to your Grave, and the remembrance will outlast your Epitaph. (28) Not unlike Coriolanus’ infuriated riposte to the tribunes (‘Banish me? I banish you!’), Southey’s branding of Smith reverses the charge (‘Mark me? I mark you!’) in an attempt to disfigure – indeed, to deface – his assailant. His preoccupation here with the ineffaceable quality of such an inscription, and its ability to outlast the seemingly more permanent inscription of an epitaph (because implicitly engraved in stone), betrays the degree to which the Letter’s function as preface has itself become properly epitaphic. Whereas he initially sought here to preface his juvenilia, to assign a face to Wat Tyler, Southey now embarks upon a prefatory postscript, one less concerned with the status of his literary corpus than with the fate of his corpse and, consequently, the posthumous face of his name. Smith’s dramatization of Southey’s apostasy may be said to have prompted an interrogation of the romantic apostate’s relation to his previous textual self (Southey most conspicuously, but Coleridge as well), and the anxiety attendant upon the apostate’s recognition of the unstable relation between who he was then and who he is now (what he signed then and what he signs now) produces the desire to fix the mode in which his writings and his name will be read. The temporal shift of Southey’s about-face allows for the substitution of text and self that is figured in this new ‘mode of criticism,’ the epitaph. It is almost as if, having resigned himself to the interpretive slippage attendant upon any reading (as political opinion and literary form collide), Southey has sought to arrest this fall through inverting the temporal structure of his defense and inscribing (or prefixing) his preface as an epitaph – figuratively, as an inscription. Concluding the Letter with a





How far the writings of Mr. Southey may be found to deserve a favourable acceptance from after ages, time will decide; but a name, which whether worthily or not, has been conspicuous in the literary history of its age, will certainly not perish. Some account of his life will always be prefixed to his works, and transferred to literary histories, and to the biographical dictionaries, not only of this, but of other countries… . It will be said of him, that in an age of personality, he abstained from satire; and that during the course of his literary life, often as he was assailed, the only occasion on which he ever condescended to reply, was, when a certain Mr. William Smith insulted him in Parliament with the appellation of Renegade. (43–5; emphasis added) The substitution of text and self (a substitution implicit throughout Smith’s attack and developed in Southey’s critical strictures on reading earlier in the Letter) is here reworked not with regard to the past but to the future, as Southey quickly displaces ‘writings’ in favor of ‘name.’ Just as Southey’s Jacobin youth (presumably buried) was understood to speak through the resurrected Wat Tyler, so will his laurelled maturity speak (after his own death) through the epitaphic Letter to William Smith.29 Considered in this light, Southey’s epitaph for himself bestows a providential symmetry upon ‘the Wat Tyler affair’: having had his youth disinterred in such an untimely fashion, Southey responds by burying his future – by writing himself into the grave. The latent threat of such a prefatory epitaph is of course that of prematurely condemning yourself to the silence of the grave. And if, as de Man understood, ‘death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament’ (the threat of silence articulated by epitaphic prosopopoeia), then perhaps the irony of ‘apostasy’ may be said to be a displaced name for a temporal predicament, one in which the apostate cannot stand for falling – either back, into the repetition of a previous error, or ahead, into the grave of liberty.30



reminder that he has been silently contemptuous of his detractors long enough (similar to that manœuvre with which, at the outset, he rationalized prefacing his juvenilia after such a lapse of time), Southey reverts to the third person in a final, eerie act of ventriloquism, this time not for his past but future self:

Upstaging the Fall: The Spectacle of Romantic Apostasy

The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. (Hazlitt, ‘Coriolanus,’ Dec. 1816) Concluding her Preface to an 1808 reprint of John Philip Kemble’s Coriolanus, Elizabeth Inchbald pointedly reminds her reader of the play’s political volatility: This noble drama, in which Mr. Kemble reaches the utmost summit of the actor’s art, has been withdrawn from the theatre of late years, for some reasons of state. When the lower order of people are in good plight, they will bear contempt with cheerfulness, and even with mirth; but poverty puts them out of humour at the slightest disrespect. Certain sentences in this play are therefore of a dangerous tendency at certain times, though at other periods they are welcomed with loud applause. (5.5) Attending not to the character of Coriolanus but to ‘certain sentences,’ Inchbald immediately locates there a ‘tendency’ which endangers the legitimate taste and political equilibrium of the state: ‘certain sentences in this play are therefore of a dangerous tendency at certain times … .’ But what exactly does Inchbald mean here by ‘sentences?’1 On the one hand, there is the play’s judgement: as Hazlitt formulates it in an 1816 review of a later Kemble production, ‘the whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is, that those who have little shall have less, and those that have much shall take all that others have left’ (WH 5.349).2 Beyond such a comprehensive pronouncement, however, there are also Coriolanus’ sentences, both those published against him by the tri143



5

bunes (his banishment), and those which he authors himself at the expense of the Roman multitude and the Volscian military (the choleric taunts that prove his undoing). Furthermore, in what consists the ‘certainty’ of such sentences? Are ‘certain sentences’ sentences which are absolute, which can somehow guarantee the claims they set forth? (Who, finally, banishes whom when Coriolanus turns his back upon the people of Rome?) Or are they merely a particular collection of sentences, remarkable not so much for their settled reliability as for their precipitous inclinations, their ‘dangerous tendencies’? The troubling uncertainty of Inchbald’s own sentence – its pronouncement upon the play amidst its own grammatical aberration – confronts us with yet another dilemma, one that not only resounds throughout Coriolanus, but that repeatedly haunts any examination of the shifting modalities of romantic apostasy: is it in fact possible to stand by one’s sentences? In Regency England, this question is perhaps nowhere confronted so relentlessly as in and around the figure of Coriolanus. Indeed, for romantic writing (Hazlitt) as well as romantic acting (Kemble), the drama of Coriolanus’ shifting rhetorical postures regularly underlines the complications of what it means to stand. However considered – thematically, rhetorically, politically, or even dramaturgically – Coriolanus (specifically, Kemble’s productions of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron3) explicitly dramatizes the difficulties of distinguishing between variously unstable modalities of standing and falling (political as well as physical) on a scree slope that not only defines the parameters of the play but also impels the undoing of its hero. Whether encountered on the stage or in the closet, Coriolanus inevitably confronts romantic readers with the unavoidable yet insoluble question, what is the relationship between poetry and politics? As will become evident, no reader is more preoccupied with this question than Hazlitt, whose writing during this period (at no time more so than the winter of 1816–17) is riddled with his attempts to formulate its implications for contemporary poetry, to sentence the ‘Jacobin poetics’ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey following their conviction on charges of apostasy. It is in the collision of Coriolanus’ own sentences with the sentence of exile against him that the play’s dangerous tendencies are most conspicuously yet unpredictably at work. The play’s ‘tendency’ (that is, its leaning or inclination4) needs to be considered as, first and foremost, that of a standing which tends toward a falling, for it is Coriolanus’ failure to ‘stand’ properly for the consulship that catalyzes his momentous fall: unable to stand before the people and beg their voices,




Coriolanus is brought down by the tribunes, who not only stand in their turn for the voice of the people (which they both represent and solicit), but who furthermore successfully urge (‘beg’) the people to recall their equivocal endorsement of Coriolanus’ candidacy. Having first stood for Rome on the battlefield, then for the consulship in the streets of the city, Coriolanus will eventually take his stand against Rome when he allies himself with the Volscians. Coriolanus’ first and last stands are separated by a fall – not the physical fall from the Tarpeian rock with which he is threatened as an ostensible traitor to the people, but the rhetorical fall that consists in his failure to stand before the people and win their voice. Although he is never explicitly denominated as such, Coriolanus is of course an apostate. Whether abiding by a strict etymological definition of apostasy as a standing off or away, or by the more unpredictable romantic operation of apostasy as a falling, Coriolanus stands accused. When he refuses to recall his words to the citizens of Rome and finally turns his back on them with the rejoinder, ‘I banish you!’ Coriolanus effectively hurls himself headlong from the Tarpeian verge and into the abyss of an apostasy which needs to be read both politically (the renunciation of party allegiances) and rhetorically (the inability finally to stand by one’s words). Indeed, as we shall see, Coriolanus’ apostasy is far too vertiginous to be represented as merely a standing off, for as the play and his demise gain momentum, the posture of standing apart inclines irrevocably towards a falling down. Given such a precarious sense of stasis, what then does it mean to fall? To ask this question is to investigate the complicated inter-relations between act and actor (politically as well as theatrically) in a drama in which it is invariably difficult to assign agency to the operations of falling. Is falling an act of principle and will (to fall, to fall in with)? Or merely one of weakness and obeisance (to be fallen, to be fallen from)? Both on the stage and off, in the pit as well as the press and diffused across a broad range of romantic literary and political writing, Kemble’s Coriolanus serves as an always timely but never entirely predictable index of both the volatility of contemporary English political culture and the insolubility of these questions.5 Kemble’s Coriolanus (both his production and his representation of its hero) dramatizes the very real postrevolutionary difficulty of determining the difference between standing and falling; in the play’s vertiginous crossing of standing firm and falling off, moreover, we can recognize and reconsider the complexity of the abiding relations between romantic politics and romantic writing. Finally, in the season of 1816-17 (climaxing, as



Upstaging the Fall 145


When John Philip Kemble retired from the stage on 23 June 1817, he did so in the character of Coriolanus. Reporting on Kemble’s farewell for the Times with the zealous loyalty of the incorrigible fan, Hazlitt dismisses as ‘mere cant’ the allegations that ‘Mr. Kemble has quite fallen off of late.’ While he does concede that Kemble ‘may have fallen off in the opinion of some jealous admirers, because he is no longer in exclusive possession of the stage,’ Hazlitt insists that ‘in himself [Mr. Kemble] has not fallen off a jot’ (WH 5.375). Why is Hazlitt so sensitive to the implicit charge that Kemble has in some way or another fallen? In the immediate cultural context of the London stage between January 18146 and June 1817, Hazlitt’s partisan defense of Kemble reveals his continuing adherence to what he elsewhere calls the ‘religion of Kemble’ (WH 5.345); the recent ascendancy of Edmund Kean on the London stage, Hazlitt would aver, is not to be measured in terms of a corresponding falling off on Kemble’s part.7 Furthermore, Hazlitt’s attention to falling reveals a far more troubling and in many ways uncontrollable insight – that Coriolanus’ tragic flaw should be his inability to stand – into this most politically contemporary and potentially inflammatory of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. As the rest of Hazlitt’s tribute clarifies, for Kemble to be ‘like’ or ‘in’ himself requires that he appear as Coriolanus,8 both in his signature role and as a character who embodies the precipitous difficulties of standing ‘in’ or ‘within’ oneself, as well as ‘for’ others. So strongly does Hazlitt associate – indeed, identify – Kemble with Coriolanus that it is finally futile to attempt to distinguish in his eulogy between Kemble ‘himself’ and Kemble-as-Coriolanus (as troubled a distinction, it turns out, as that between the lofty hauteur of Kemble-as-Coriolanus and the strident consistency of Hazlitt-as-critic). Hazlitt’s reprisal of Kemble’s definitive portrayal is remarkable at first glance for the profound stasis it attributes to Kemble’s stage presence: … in Coriolanus, [Mr. Kemble] exhibited the ruling passion with the same unshaken firmness, he preserved the same haughty dignity of



we saw in Chapter 4, in the Wat Tyler scandal), the relevance of the difference between standing and falling has everything to do with the public spectacle of romantic apostasy, a spectacle in which Hazlitt can be seen to play the multiple roles of impresario, director, critic, and (however unwittingly) closeted Coriolanus.

demeanour, the same energy of will, and unbending sternness of temper throughout. He was swayed by a single impulse. His tenaciousness of purpose was only irritated by opposition; he turned neither to the right nor the left; the vehemence with which he moved forward increasing every instant, till it hurried him on to the catastrophe. (WH 5.376)9 The political implications of this review are remarkable, not least in requiring of us a far more rigorous attention to Hazlitt’s language than it usually receives. Turning ‘neither to the right nor to the left,’ this Coriolanus resists simple appropriation by either radical readers or what Hazlitt elsewhere terms ‘the minister’s side of the question’ (WH 9.33); it challenges us to read the play’s politics figuratively before topically, before we abdicate to the putatively ‘certain’ referentiality of certain of its sentences.10 Whether ‘the same’ as Coriolanus, or ‘the same’ as he has ever been, Kemble here appears to be so far from falling off in the representation that he does not even shake or bend. Kemble’s Coriolanus, it would appear, has banished the slightest tendency towards anything resembling either turning or falling in his production. Such ‘tenaciousness of purpose’ seems entirely appropriate to the depiction of as haughty, stern, and firm a character as Coriolanus, who, determined as he is to ‘play / Truly the man I am,’ would as soon slaughter Volscians as sneer at plebeians; cannot recall or otherwise retract the insolent words with which he rebukes the citizens of Rome when standing for the consulship; refuses to ‘bus the stones’ with his knees; and is expeditiously taunted by Tullus Aufidius as ‘still a Roman’ (50). Given such a remarkable tenacity of character, then, what might it mean to speak of Kemble’s Coriolanus as being ‘swayed by a single impulse’? In Hazlitt’s tribute, ‘sway’ most immediately denotes governance: 11 Coriolanus is governed by a single impulse, a personal interdiction against stepping out of character or being construed as in any way bending.12 Positioned as it is between the initial emphasis on Coriolanus’ firmness and the ominous final acknowledgement of his catastrophic end, Hazlitt’s formulation of the modality of Coriolanus’ ‘ruling passion’ provides the cardinal pivot from which his own account of the character sways. (Here also emerges the additional signification of ‘sway’ as hanging or suspension, a formal indeterminacy according to which, as we shall see later, Hazlitt’s reading of the entire play sways.13) Hazlitt’s attention to the sway to which Coriolanus is so tenaciously subject presents us with a crucial insight into the economy of Coriolanus’ demise, and ought to




temper our own sense of both the difference between standing and falling (whether physical or political) and, more generally, of what it means within the context of romantic political and literary culture simply to stand. The paradox of Coriolanus’ posture is such that his insistent sense of stasis is in fact what undoes him. Swayed by a single impulse, Coriolanus’ ‘unshaken firmness’ may prevent him from turning out of character (or, rather, from turning himself out as anyone but himself), but it cannot stave off his downfall, the ‘down-turn’ spelled out in the ‘catastrophe’ (cata-down; strophe-turn) of his multiple apostrophes, a series of turnings and fallings down and away against which no tenaciousness of swaying, however purposive, can preserve him. For, despite the singularity of his purpose and posture, Coriolanus does turn. He turns away from the plebeians in the streets of Rome only to return to them, to perform another turn with a more pronounced effect (‘I banish you!’). Then, having turned away from Rome, he turns toward Antium only, as it turns out, to return Rome to his mother with the intent to return to it himself and, in doing so – yes – to return to himself, ‘still a Roman.’ (‘Suspended’ in a Roman tragedy, Coriolanus’ political pirouettes are as refined as the pendulous sway between strophe and antistrophe of an irregular Pindaric ode, one which turns so often and abruptly as to render untenable the putative stasis of any epode at all – precisely Coleridge’s dilemma, as we noted in Chapter 2.) Coriolanus’ catastrophe is produced by his residual inability to accomodate another persona, by his failure to turn and address (to apostrophize), however fleetingly, the plebeians in ‘boulted language’ (36) – that is to say, by his inability to allow for any difference between political performance and ethical self. Refusing either to tend or to bend, Coriolanus finally breaks. He breaks up in falling – not over the precipitous Tarpeian rock (as the tribunes threaten), but over the verge of the cata-strophe catalyzed by his formal apo-strophe from the Romans who have finally banished him (‘thus I turn my back: / There is a world elsewhere’ [42]), and culminating in his succumbing to Volumnia’s performative challenge (as the ‘Roman Matron’) to his abiding apostrophe: ‘He turns away: / Down, ladies; let us shame him with our knees’ (58). With the pathetic apostrophe to his own falling body, ‘Sink, my knee, in th’earth’ (56), Coriolanus’ catastrophe is complete. The stunning paradox that informs both Coriolanus’ haughty character and Kemble’s classical posture resides here, in the curious necessity of somehow representing falling as a kind of standing (politically, physically, rhetorically … , vis-à-vis the ungovernable sway that finally fells




Coriolanus) – precisely the aspiration of both Kemble’s representation on the stage and of Hazlitt’s tribute in the Times. A pivotal word in both Shakespeare’s text and Kemble’s prompt book, ‘sway’ directly signifies ruling power, yet (as noted above) simultaneously figures a curious ‘state’ of suspension. The Roman senators bear sway in the capitol much as Martius does on the battlefield; later, Coriolanus effectually sways between citizenship and exile when deliberating as to whether to dissimulate and repent his insolent words to the plebeians, or ‘still / Be thus to them’ (37). As we have already noted (and will again, according to the momentum of Coriolanus’ free-fall), Coriolanus swings pendulously between standing (within his character, for himself – ‘play[ing] / Truly the man I am’ [36] – and for Rome), and falling (out of character – ‘false to my nature’ [36] and into league with the Volscians).14 Coriolanus’ single deployment of the word ‘sway’ both encapsulates the dramatic trajectory of the play and indites his own posture: no sooner has Volumnia remarked that she anticipates the senators have called Coriolanus before them in order that he might ‘stand’ for consul (at the end of the triumphal procession celebrating Coriolanus’ rout of the Volscians), than Coriolanus clarifies, ‘Know, good mother, / I had rather be their servant in my way, / Than sway with them in theirs’ (22). Juxtaposing his ‘way’ to the senators’ ‘sway,’ Coriolanus simultaneously articulates what Hazlitt terms the ‘sternness of his temper’ (the privilege he assigns to his ‘way’) and betrays his susceptibility to it, his inability not to be swayed by his own passion at the same time as he would sway others according to it. Kemble’s production assigns to Coriolanus’ pronouncement a telling prominence. Whereas in the Shakespearean text, this terse rejoinder occurs in the midst of the long opening scene of Act II, Kemble brings down the curtain on what is his own II.ii immediately after Coriolanus has staked his position. Kemble’s arbitrary scene-breaks both highlight the pageantry of the triumphal procession, and assign a finality to Coriolanus’ pronouncement which is absent in Shakespeare.15 In its mere 42 lines, furthermore, Kemble’s II.ii manages to represent the extreme physical attitudes between which Coriolanus can be seen to be sway. Immediately upon the appearance of his mother as the scene opens, Coriolanus kneels (that is to say, he would arrest his fall), only to be reproved by her and told to rise, to stand. Then, at the end of the same scene, Coriolanus draws attention to his reluctance to sway with the senators. Certainly, Coriolanus deploys sway here in the sense of ‘to govern,’ but, coming as it does at the end of a brief scene of spectacular pageantry




that invariably swayed the Covent Garden audience, ‘sway’ succinctly reconfigures the shifting physical posture of Coriolanus at the outset of the scene (and anticipates the second and final time he will kneel, in Act V). Swaying is both precisely what Coriolanus cannot do (he cannot bend), yet precisely what he aspires to do (to govern, or at least to rule), and moreover what he cannot help but do, swaying as he does throughout the play between standing and falling. Occurring as it does just before he stands for the consulship, Coriolanus’ dictum at the end of II.ii also anticipates the apostrophic aside in Act IV when, on the verge of taking his notorious stand in the entrance hall of Tullus Aufidius’ manse, he concludes his soliloquy, ‘I’ll enter: if he slay me, / He does fair justice; if he give me way, / I’ll do his country service’ (44). As in II.ii, Coriolanus’ sense of his ‘way’ resonates ominously with sway: if he is given his way – not merely a way to serve (as in II.ii), but the right-of-way in having ‘swerved’ from Rome to Antium – he will bear sway over the same Romans who denied him his way. According to his ‘way,’ Coriolanus can serve, slay, sway, even swerve … , but he can neither stay nor stand. If ‘to serve’ is to stand for another person, place, or ideology, then what does it mean to demand one’s way in doing so? Coriolanus would stand, but appears incapable of doing so without capitulating to the very sway he would abjure. Once again, we can discern the paradox that defines Coriolanus in the fragility of his stasis: despite taking stands that are notable for their firmness of purpose and command, Coriolanus is nevertheless unable decisively to counter a seemingly constitutional susceptibility to falling. In Antium as in Rome, for Coriolanus to take a stand merely seems to precipitate an imminent fall: ultimately unable to ‘serve in [his] way,’ Coriolanus will swerve, sway, and finally fall. Both Shakespeare’s play and Kemble’s prompt-book are punctuated with tableaux and text representing the various modalities of standing which first prop and then undo Coriolanus.16 For example: between the Tribunes’ threat in Act III to ‘pronounce the steep Tarpeian death’ (41) and throw him from the rock, and Tullus Aufidius’ vow at the close of Act IV to tempt Coriolanus ‘to the brink / Of this sure precipice’ (of Coriolanus’ residual allegiance to Rome; 51), and from there to ‘hurl him to perdition,’ Kemble-as-Coriolanus takes his most characteristic and notorious stand when, with the rise of the curtain for IV.iii, he is ‘discovered’ in the entrance hall of Tullus Aufidius, standing majestically and ‘in solemn silence’ next to the bust of Mars, ‘himself another Mars’ (WH 5.375).17 Stern, firm, and haughty, Kemble’s Coriolanus has ‘all the dignity of a still-life’ (WH 5.379) – all




the dignity and ‘high demeanour’ (45), that is to say, of the bust of Mars next to which he so tellingly stations himself. Remarking Kemble’s ‘statue-like appearance,’ Hazlitt further observes in his retirement tribute that ‘if Mr. Kemble were to remain in the same posture for half an hour, his figure would only excite admiration’ (WH 5.378).18 Kemble’s graceful consistency, his ability to stand firm for thirty minutes, has everything to do with his statuesque posture. Standing at the foot of a statue (L statua[stare]-stand), Kemble’s Coriolanus imitates the unmitigated consistency of its stasis. Physical composure, unhappily, cannot be so easily translated into political consistency. To stand in Tullus’ hall in Antium, Coriolanus must stand away or apart from Rome and his allegiances there. Between the stand he takes in the streets of Rome and that which he assumes in Tullus’ hall, Coriolanus has indeed taken something of a fall: unable to bend, to bus the stones with his knees, he falls. Politically, he falls out of favor with the citizens of Rome and into a dubious alliance with their avowed enemies; figuratively, in turning his back on Rome, he precipitates himself from the Tarpeian rock – precisely the penalty with which the tribunes taunted him, were he ever to return to Rome. Ironically enough, in turning against and banishing the citizens of Rome, forsaking them in favor of the Volscians, Coriolanus nonetheless remains somehow the same, for it is the same haughtiness of temper that finally hastens him to turn imperiously on Tullus with the reminder that ‘Like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioli; / Alone I did it’ (62). Nowhere is the precipitous nature of apo-stasis more powerfully dramatized than in the climactic Act V tableau between Coriolanus and Volumnia, where the combination of Coriolanus’ wary distrust of acting with his susceptibility to theatrical spectacle proves to be his undoing. Upon Volumnia’s entrance into the Volscian camp, Coriolanus no sooner vows ‘Let the Volscians / Plough Rome, and harrow Italy; / I’ll stand, / As if a man were author of himself’ (56), than he falls prey to the dangerously theatrical spectacle staged by his Olympian mother, capitulating with the apostrophe: ‘Sink, my knee, i’the earth’ (further admitting in the Shakespearean text that ‘Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part’).19 Coriolanus’ catastrophe culminates here, with an apostrophe to his own beleaguered body that will precipitate the final down-turn of his downfall.20 Vowing to stand firm and unshaken, Coriolanus nevertheless falls out of character and irretrievably subject to the catastrophic economy of romantic apostasy.




Given such precipitous reversals, how tenable (let alone desirable) is Coriolanus’ vaunted consistency? 21 What is the point of a putatively firm stand if you are going to fall in any event? The paradoxical virtuosity of Coriolanus’ confounded stasis (his formal as well as teleological purposiveness of pose) combined with the precipitous nature of his standing-for-his-sway go a long way toward accounting for the romantic fascination with Coriolanus’ ‘commanding genius.’ 22 (Nowhere is Coriolanus’ tenuous tenacity more clearly visible than in the arresting tableaux of the stands he assumes just prior to each of his most prominent falls: in Act III, before turning away from and banishing the Romans; in Act IV, before plighting himself to Tullus; and in Act V, on the verge of succumbing to his mother.) Indeed, the dangerous versatility of this stasis bears sway over Hazlitt’s divided response to the play in 1816–17: how is it possible to distinguish standing from falling in a play in which falling is repeatedly interpreted as standing – let alone in a political climate in which, as Hazlitt bitterly laments, such a ‘liberal turn has been given to the whole matter’ of apostasy (WH 7.131) that it is effectively impossible to distinguish standing from falling?

Hazlitt’s June 1817 tribute to Kemble’s greatness as Coriolanus constitutes something of retirement on his own part as well, coming as it does at the end of his most engaged and demanding season as a political critic for the Examiner. As William Galperin has noted, Kemble’s farewell performance (as reprised by Hazlitt) bears an uncanny resemblance to the critic’s own embattled position over the preceding winter, if only to the degree that it, too, ‘figures a lofty, oppositional stance that … Hazlitt always valued enough to protect’ (154). Indeed, Hazlitt’s writing at this time does not merely ‘protect’ his critical station so much as it enforces his increasingly strident defense against ‘Jacobin poetics.’23 ‘Swayed by a single impulse,’ Hazlitt’s own critical hauteur is itself ‘only irritated by opposition,’ as he relentlessly exposes ‘the little arts of sophistry’ by which the artifices of established power are defended. In the notorious review of Kemble’s 1816 production of Coriolanus, for example, Hazlitt interrogates the ideology of romantic poetry through a markedly political appropriation of Shakespeare, one which positions the play as an allegory of the insolent attractions of power in order to demystify the sophistry with which such power is defended by apostatic poets and ministerial critics.




It has often been remarked of Hazlitt that, as Jonathan Bate has put it, ‘no other critic has been so attuned at one and the same time to … the difficulty of being liberal-minded in politics yet committed to the power of art’ (Shakespearean Constitutions 7). 24 Valorizing Hazlitt as a common-sense materialist reader, 25 Bate argues that Hazlitt is ‘the exemplary English Shakespearean critic’ (7) because he would appear to have overcome the apparent difficulty of implementing a critical practice which combines political with literary reading: ‘Hazlitt lived and wrote not only by his political principles, but also by a passionate belief in the value of reading and the theatre’ (8). Yet Bate’s own self-consciously balanced reading of Hazlitt as the complete critic (a political reader with impeccable taste) effectively vitiates the power of his claim for the exemplarity of Hazlitt’s political reading, and ends up turning him into little more than a clone of the young Leigh Hunt (in this light, but a drama critic turned political commentator whose credo for the early Examiner was to effect ‘a fusion of literary taste into all subjects whatsoever’ [Autobiography 175]). Despite the vehemence of his initial claim, Bate’s reading quickly reveals itself to be merely the most recent reminder of Hazlitt’s great iconographic value for literary criticism: whatever the critical or political climate, ‘Hazlitt’ names the position of the erudite common-sense critic who is capable of infusing literary taste into politics, but who would never lower himself to practice strident, partisan, or virulent criticism. What if one were seriously to engage Bate’s most intriguing claim? What does it mean to be ‘committed to the power of art’? It is too disappointing that the ‘power of art’ becomes merely the ‘value of reading and the theatre,’ a gloss which is hardly satisfying given Hazlitt’s unpredictable, overdetermined deployment of the term ‘power’ as signifying at one time or another everything from gusto to tyranny, from idolatry to autocracy. Indeed, the power of ‘power’ is not least that it cannot be confined to any one register. Oddly enough, Bate is prompted to formulate his transient claim for Hazlitt’s commitment apropos an observation of Hazlitt’s which has less to do with the power of art than with the art of power – Hazlitt’s observation in the essay on Coriolanus that ‘a lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses, is a more poetical object than they’ because ‘the principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle’ (WH 5.348). If art does, as Bate paraphrases Hazlitt, ‘tend to have sympathy with power’ (Shakespearean Constitutions 7; emphasis added), then what does it mean to be committed to the power of art if that art’s power resides in its tendency




toward or sympathy with power? As Hazlitt will explain to William Gifford, the sympathy of art (specifically, poetry) with power does not ensure or canonize what Bate constructs as cultural value, but in fact results in a thorough abstraction of ‘sense of power … from the sense of good’ (WH 9.37). For Hazlitt, the ‘power of art’ is decidedly not its ‘value’ (in Bate’s aestheticized usage), but its ideology. ‘Power’ for Hazlitt is always at least the power of mystification, or what he terms (as he explains in the Letter to William Gifford) ‘the subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil, in order to guard against its approaches’ (WH 9.38). In Hazlitt’s reading not merely of Shakespeare but also of contemporary literature and politics, the ‘power of art’ relies upon such sophistry: mystifying the ‘claims of barefaced power’ (into the service of which, for example, the Lake poets have fallen), it is the ‘power of art’ that is repeatedly invoked by the apostate poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey to defend their sense of vocation and rationalize what Hazlitt denounces as the ‘shuffling on the side of principle, and tenaciousness on the side of power, [that] seems to be the peculiar privilege of the race of modern poets’ (WH 19.204). Hazlitt’s analysis of the power of art – nowhere more concentrated than in the Coriolanus essay and the ensuing exchange with Gifford – is not (as Bate and others would represent it) an attempt to combine political and literary criticism in the service of a more catholic critical sensibility. Rather, it is an attempt to account for the seemingly inevitable apostasies of contemporary poets in terms of the modalities according to which poetry inclines – or, rather, declines – toward power. Originally published in the Examiner on 15 December 1816, as a review of Kemble’s recent performance in the title role, Hazlitt’s essay appears in the same number of the Examiner as the second of his four ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper,’ in which he ruthlessly displays his gallery of contemporary sophists. It is in the winter of 1816–17 – from his reviews of Southey’s ‘Lay of the Laureate’ and Coleridge’s Lay Sermon in the autumn of 1816, through his lashing of Wordsworth in the third ‘Illustrations’ at the end of December, and culminating in his sustained ridicule of the responses of Southey and Coleridge to the Wat Tyler scandal in the early months of 1817 – that Hazlitt is motivated, as never before or after, to ‘neutralize the servile intellect of the country’ (WH 7.189) through a vigilant dissection of the ‘vices’ of ‘literary prostitution [and] political apostasy’ (WH 7.131). (Just as his reading of the Tempest will be mobilized by Coleridge’s 1818 lectures [see chapter 6], Hazlitt’s interrogation of Coriolanus can be seen to be




driven by the necessity to formulate a rejoinder to Wordsworth’s righteous poetic patriotism in the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ [1816] in which he proclaims, in light of the Allied victory at Waterloo, that ‘carnage’ is God’s ‘daughter.’) Firmly entrenched in the middle of his most sustained critique of the political liabilities of romantic poetry, the Coriolanus essay is essential to any reading of Hazlitt because it both reveals Hazlitt’s preoccupation with the untenability of Jacobin poetics and marks a major turning point in their theorization. The essay on Coriolanus insists on reading and writing literature and politics concomitantly. Accordingly, it needs to be read not merely for its attention to Shakespeare’s politics (the principal concern of the conservative bardolatry of Coleridge, William Gifford, and others), or those of Regency England, or as a lament for Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo,26 nor even (as it is often appropriated by those critics who would themselves abjure the intermingling of politics and literary criticism) as principally a radical rewriting of romantic theories of the imagination. The Coriolanus essay needs instead to be recognized as a crucial pivot in Hazlitt’s always overdetermined appraisal of the collusion of poetry and power in the English sublimation of the French Revolution, in which his acknowledgement of the play’s susceptibility to being appropriated as a credo for the ‘minister’s side of the question’ (WH 9.33) – the righteous defense of the status quo – can be read as an indictment of the disparity between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘language’ of poetry.27 The stakes are considerable: asking whether poets are without principle and thus effortlessly abjure their ‘high calling’ to turn courtiers, or whether it is in fact a principle of poetic language to succumb to power, Hazlitt’s essay attempts to account for the incompatability of the ‘spirit of Jacobinism’ with the ‘spirit of poetry’ (WH 7.144).28 It is here that Hazlitt begins to reformulate apostasy, the embracing figure for literary sycophancy, as less an ethical than a linguistic or rhetorical principle. The essay on Coriolanus is thus significant for its understanding of the alignment of poetry and power as a seemingly unavoidable function of the language of poetry: for Hazlitt, ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ (WH 5.347; emphasis added). The naturalness of this falling in of poetry with power firmly underlines the necessity of reading Hazlitt’s own political writing as his literary criticism, and vice versa. It furthermore indicates the centrality of apostasy to Hazlitt’s reading of romantic poetry, for it is in his attention to the seemingly unavoidable performance of ‘falling’ in romantic poetry that Hazlitt forces us to construe




the apostasy of the romantic poet as the condition constitutive of Jacobin poetics. Not surprisingly, the issues raised by Hazlitt’s essay regarding the relations between language and power cannot be contained or even satisfactorily addressed within its confines. As we shall see (through explicating some of the more cryptic claims of the Coriolanus essay with reference to Hazlitt’s explication of them in the Letter to William Gifford, Esq. [1819]), apostasy emerges as a falling off which is structured less as a function of personal ethics – a motivated betrayal of principle – than as a function of language. In Hazlitt’s writing, ‘apostasy’ names the inescapable fall into complicity with power that both constitutes and undoes Jacobin poetics. Indeed, it is a complicity which finally has disturbing implications for Hazlitt’s own writing practice (as intimated, as we shall see in Chapter 6, by his emulation of Burke’s precipitous prose style), in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish its force from its own performance of falling.

Treating Coriolanus equally as commentary upon the Revolution Debate of the 1790s and as a rationalization of contemporary domestic repression following Waterloo and the Corn Law of 1815, Hazlitt’s reading is, as Bate has remarked, ‘a performance designed to raise the political stakes in the discussion of Shakespeare at a time of high political tension’ (Shakespearean Constitutions 168). It is a trenchant analysis of the insolent logic of the poetic imagination which delights in power and willingly abstracts the sense of power from the sense of good: ‘wrong,’ Hazlitt repeatedly asserts, ‘dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance, has more attraction than abstract right’ (WH 5.348). In his opening remarks on the play, Hazlitt makes no attempt to link it with the other Roman plays,29 nor with his indictments of such popular histories as Henry V and Henry VIII as yet another of Shakespeare’s attempts to apologize for ‘the right divine of kings to govern wrong.’30 Instead, he immediately inscribes Coriolanus within the Revolution debate by aligning the play with both Burke and Paine: Coriolanus is a storehouse of political common-places. Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the Debates in both House of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own. The arguments for and against aristocracy, or democracy, on the privileges of the few and





Praising both Shakespeare’s poetic ‘spirit’ and his philosophic ‘acuteness,’ Hazlitt recasts the traditional attribution of disinterested sympathy to Shakespeare by unifying the division he would delineate in contemporary writing, where one is either a poet or a philosopher. While the ‘spirit of poetry’ may be said to be ‘favorable to liberty and humanity,’ as Hazlitt will emphasize to Gifford (WH 9.50), it lacks the resolve or staying power of what Hazlitt terms ‘philosophy,’ that ‘inveteracy of understanding’ which, he insists, ‘is alone a match for the prejudices of absolute power’ (WH 9.50). Hazlitt’s immediate qualification of his bardolatry, however, draws our attention to the inclination of Shakespeare’s own possibly dangerous tendencies: Shakespear himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question … ; and to have spared no occasion for baiting the rabble. What he says of them is very true: what he says of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it. The cause of the people is indeed but ill calculated as a subject for poetry. (WH 5.347; emphasis added) Hazlitt does not attend to Shakespeare’s ‘leaning’ to criticize his politics, however (as Gifford and others would later complain), but in order to establish the division between the ineluctably ‘aristocratic’ imagination and the ‘republican’ understanding: while the former ‘seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion,’ the latter ‘seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good by justice and proportion’ (WH 5.347). Although the spirit of poetry may be favorable to humanity, humanity itself is quickly seen to be a less than conducive subject for poetry: ‘it presents no immediate or distinct images to the mind, “no jutting frieze, buttress, or coigne of vantage” for poetry “to make its pendant bed and procreant cradle in”’ (WH 5.347, citing Macbeth I.6.7–8). According to the logic of Hazlitt’s poetics here, it is because there is ‘nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved’ (WH 5.348) that Martius’ imperious appropriation of the first scene so entirely captivates the imagination.31 What then is the proper subject for poetry? Not the ‘matter’ of hunger, nor even that of liberty, but power. So Hazlitt maintains in a



the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet, and the acuteness of a philosopher. (WH 5.347)


The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents an imposing appearance. It shews its head turretted, crowned, and crested. Its front is gilt and blood-stained. Before it, ‘it carries noise, and behind it, it leaves tears.’ It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers; tyrants and slaves its executioners – ‘Carnage is its daughter!’ Poetry is right royal. (WH 5.348) Quoting Wordsworth’s justification for martial service at the end of this construction of the tyrannical motivations of poetry, Hazlitt clarifies his inclination to read Coriolanus as an indictment of the political violence sanctioned by the Jacobin poet’s unabashed celebration of power.32 Hazlitt furthermore reveals here that what is finally at stake for him in reading Coriolanus as a play about the irresistible attractions of power for the imagination is an attempt to account for the apostasies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in other terms than merely the ‘change of political principle’ argument first espoused in Hunt’s 1813 Examiner articles on Southey’s appointment as Poet Laureate (see Chapter 1).33 Hazlitt would explain apostasy here not in terms of the malleability of political principles but, instead, in terms of the consistency of certain poetic principles. If the principle of poetry is an ‘anti-levelling principle,’ characterized by effect, contrast, and excess, then the ‘running from one extreme to another’ which characterizes the apostate is not due to the absence of what Hunt calls ‘solid reasoning’ but is, rather, ‘natural’ to the poet-as-apostate. ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ (WH 5.347). In perhaps the single most important sentence in the essay, Hazlitt addresses the troubling paradox that, while its ‘spirit’ may be ‘favourable to liberty and humanity,’ poetry should finally be seen to be ‘right royal.’ It is in the nature of the language of poetry – the language of poetry – to ‘fall in with’ power. It is as the language of poetry that literature falls in with power. Describing the inseparable alignment of poetry and power linguistically – in the most literal sense, as the ‘matter’ of its ‘language’ – this formulation exceeds any definition of apostasy as a betrayal of a political or ethical principle.



relentless series of images which culminates in a telling quotation from Wordsworth’s strident hymn to the ‘Tremendous God of Battles,’ the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ of 1816:

Apostasy names not a standing off from, but a falling in with: the necessary fall of language into complicity with power, as if the language of poetry were structured in terms of the affinity with power phenomenalized in the image of the ‘leaning’ poet. Foregrounding ‘power’ here as less ideological than critical, less thematic than rhetorical, Hazlitt’s preoccupation with Jacobin poetics is significant for its analysis of the poet’s sycophancy as determined by language in its characteristics as language, as a network of lexical, syntactical, and rhetorical constraints and resources. When, in the Letter to William Gifford, Hazlitt defends his claim that ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power,’ he backs off – or, rather, stands away – from its more radical implications, glossing poetry somewhat anti-rhetorically as ‘the imagination, generally speaking’ (WH 9.37). This seeming vitiation of his extraordinary earlier claim does not cancel the difficult question that it raises – what does it mean for the language of poetry that it should naturally fall in with the language of power? – so much as, in its own standing off, it draws our attention once again to the possible susceptibility of Hazlitt’s own writing to a similar sort of falling. Is it in fact possible to stand by such a precipitous formulation? It is in terms of such modalities of falling that we can now turn to the details of Hazlitt’s exchange with Gifford.

When the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays appeared in the spring of 1817, the essay on Coriolanus was repeatedly singled out by reviewers as a particularly lurid example of what would rapidly become identified as one of Hazlitt’s signature gestures: the contamination of belles lettres by political invective. While Francis Jeffrey casually notes in the Edinburgh Review that Hazlitt had certainly ‘intermixed’ ‘political reflections’ with his remarks on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus (‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare’ 481),34 the Quarterly Review’s Gifford violently takes exception to Hazlitt’s contention that Shakespeare ‘had a leaning toward the arbitrary side of the question,’ quickly accusing Hazlitt of thus having ‘libelled our great poet as a friend of arbitrary power’ (rev. of Characters 464), and going on to accuse Hazlitt of nothing less than sedition (in order, as we shall see, to banish him from the ‘State of Letters’ [466]). Hazlitt wrote the Letter to William Gifford early in 1819, in response to Gifford’s splenetic attacks not only on the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, but also on The Round Table (1817, with Leigh




Hunt), and the Lectures on the English Poets (1818).35 The point of the Letter is not merely to expose the political subserviency and arrogant ignorance behind Gifford’s putatively literary criticism, but to clarify what is principally at stake in an essay such as that on Coriolanus: not Shakespeare’s politics (Gifford’s point of contention), nor even the play’s topical relevance, but the sophistry by which such minds as Gifford’s rationalize their own love of power. Hazlitt is concerned here to follow up the claims he made in the original essay regarding the relationship between the language of poetry and that of power in order to remind Gifford and like-minded readers of the ‘obtrusive and unmanageable claims of literature and philosophy’ for both hyperministerial critics and sophistical Jacobin poets (WH 9.35). After the notorious opening diatribe in which he instructs Gifford, the ‘Ultra-Crepidarian critic,’ that ‘if you cease to be a tool, you cease to be anything’ (WH 9.15), Hazlitt proceeds to expose the hypocrisy and malignity of each of Gifford’s three reviews, not merely in order to contest and correct Gifford’s assessments – which have ‘nothing to do with the merits of a work, but with the party to which the writer belongs’ (WH 9.14) – but because, as a servile place-hunter and literarycritical spy, Gifford is a ‘nuisance, and should be abated’ (WH 9.17). When he arrives at the Characters, Hazlitt first clarifies for the servile Gifford that ‘it would appear by your own account that Shakespeare had a discreet leaning to the arbitrary side of the question’ (WH 9.36),36 then turns quickly to his own claims that ‘the cause of the people is indeed but ill calculated as a subject for poetry,’ and that ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’: I affirm, Sir, that poetry, that the imagination, generally speaking, delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right, whereas pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the true and good. I proceed to shew that this general love or tendency to immediate excitement or theatrical effect, no matter how produced, gives a bias to the imagination often inconsistent with the greatest good, that in poetry it triumphs over principle, and bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity. (WH 9.37) ‘Power’ here most prominently signifies ‘immediate excitement or theatrical effect,’ an effect of sublimity which is to be measured in terms of magnitude, contrast, and excess (it is the ‘logic of the imagination’ to ‘aggrandize what excites admiration’ [WH 5.349]), and is entirely inconsistent with the principles of ‘the true and the good.’ The plea-




sure taken in such displays of power is ‘in proportion to their strong and often tragical effect, and not in proportion to the good produced, or their desirableness from a moral point of view,’ and furthermore proceeds ‘from the sense of power abstracted from the sense of good’ (WH 9.37). The danger attendant upon the falling in of poetry with power is for Hazlitt precisely this abstraction of the sense of power from the sense of good, a separation which perpetuates ‘the subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil, in order to guard against its approaches’ (WH 9.38). In its emphasis on spectacle and theatrical effect, Hazlitt’s explication of why poetry abdicates to power would seem to back further and further away from the linguistic emphasis of his previous formulation, here in favor of an account of the logic and morality of the imagination. Nevertheless, while this account in no way clarifies what it might be about the language of poetry that precipitates its fall, it does remain possible here to examine the attraction exerted by the ‘language of power’: is the phrase ‘the language of power’ to be read as the language of power, the institutional expression of the dominant ideology? Or as the language of power, the sublimity of rhetoric as the force of language? Predictably yet uncontrollably, Hazlitt’s consideration of the language of power repeatedly transgresses any boundary which might reliably separate the institutional from the rhetorical (or alternatively, the political from the aesthetic) valences of power. Concentrating on their crossing and contamination of one another within this extreme verge – both that precipice over which literary language takes its putative fall and that space within the boundary simultaneously demarcated and mobilized by the phrase ‘the language of power’ – we can further explicate the double (duplicitous) jurisdiction of this language. In anticipation of two concerns which will emerge more forcefully in the following chapter – Hazlitt’s critique of romantic ideology (an exposure of the language of power) in league with his own practice of rhetorical tyranny (his susceptibility to the language of power) – I want here to further our examination of the former (in terms of the ideological invigilation performed by the office of the ‘literary police’) in order to prepare the way, in Chapter 6, for a more detailed examination of the force with which Hazlitt’s own examples interrupt and finally disfigure the (political) efficacy of his own writing. In the Letter to William Gifford, the phrase ‘the literary police’ denominates those hit-men hired by the institutions of contemporary literary power, and, consequently, carries the great weight of Hazlitt’s opprobrium. Denouncing Gifford as ‘the Government Critic … the invisible link, that connects literature and the police’ (WH 9.13), Hazlitt





… an opinion getting abroad that there was any knowledge of Shakespear or the English language except on the minister’s side of the question, would it not be the more absolutely incumbent on you, as the head of the literary police, to arrest such an opinion in the outset, to crush it before it gathered strength, and to produce the article in question as your warrant? (WH 9.33) While Gifford’s jurisdiction as the ‘head of the literary police’ may be at least putatively literary, his practice is anything but. It falls to the literary police to regulate the reading of Shakespeare not only according to the laws of what Hazlitt wearily calls the ‘State of Letters’ (WH 9.34), but also according to those of England, both of which are designed to foreclose on any alignment of Shakespeare with the ‘side of sedition’ (WH 9.33) in order to reestablish his proper place on the ‘minister’s side of the question.’ As ‘head of the literary police,’ Gifford simultaneously monitors the State of Letters with a scale ‘not of literary talent but of political subserviency’ (WH 9.15) and, should there be a difference of political opinion between himself and the writer, undertakes ‘not only to condemn that opinion, but to proscribe the writer’ (WH 9.32). The judicial force of language such as ‘arrest,’ ‘condemn,’ and ‘proscribe,’ in league with such figures as the ‘literary police,’ the ‘Government Critic,’ and the ‘State of Letters,’ uncontrollably blurs the boundaries between literature and the police in Regency England. (This bleeding of the metaphorical into the historical is not confined to Hazlitt’s language, but is at work across a range of voices in romantic criticism and, in its confusion of linguistic with natural reality, constitutes this criticism’s particular ideology.) Hence, it is effectively impossible to determine whether the laws which the literary police are to maintain are principally literary conventions such as, say, the laws of genre, or political bills such as the 1819 ‘Act for the more effectual Prevention and Punishment of blasphemous and seditious libels.’ Read in the context of Hazlitt’s feud with Gifford, the imperial jurisdiction of the literary police finally suggests that it is this critical police force itself that needs policing. Accordingly, Hazlitt’s project would seem to be readily assimilable to the work of ideology critique, a policing of romantic criticism motivated to expose the complicitous alliance between literature and the police. As we have already seen, however, a figure as volatile as that of the literary police cannot be so easily or so



exposes that connection, makes it visible, when he contends that if there were

confidently contained. Hazlitt’s preoccupation with the literary police should suggest at least one other immediate alternative: namely, that Hazlitt’s writing itself somehow stands in need of being policed. It is after all the peculiar force of his juridical constitution of the State of Letters that precipitates the mutual corruption of literature and politics by one another. (In the politically charged exchange between Hazlitt and Gifford, the operations of the ‘literary police’ fall into and slip between three registers: to enforce the English laws prohibiting seditious writing;37 to protect English readers from violations of taste and decorum; and to invigilate Hazlitt’s self-contaminating language.) Finally, if to call in the police is to call for control, then perhaps we should also read the figure of the ‘literary police’ as a condensation of the critical anxiety that Hazlitt’s contemporary readers feel about their own lack of control over the seemingly inevitable contamination of belles-lettres by political invective in Hazlitt’s writing (a principal point of consideration in the following chapter). Although inevitable, the effects produced by this crossing are in no way predictable. The arbitrary, finally aporetic nature of this alignment suggests that there is something out of control – indeed, uncontrollable – at work in romantic criticism generally, and in a particularly fraught fashion in Hazlitt’s own writing. For contemporary romantic discourse, as we have noted, it is the peculiar valence of ‘Shakespeare’ that most tellingly designates the romantic critic’s overlapping investment in the states of England and Letters. For a critic such as Gifford, therefore, Hazlitt most conspicuously breaks the laws against sedition when he dares to read Shakespeare as something other than the English national bard: ‘Shakespeare was a patriot in the old and genuine sense of the word; Mr. Hazlitt is one according to the new nomenclature, in which it signifies one who is not a friend to his country’ (rev. of Characters 464). Accordingly Gifford insists that, ‘had he lived in our time,’ under no circumstances would Shakespeare have been ‘an orator in Spa-fields, or the editor of a seditious Sunday newspaper; he knew what discord would follow if degree were taken away’ (465). The new nomenclature of Englishness, on the other hand, clearly is not that of English nationalism and Burkean common-sense, but of Jacobinism: the Englishman who is not a friend of his country must certainly be, like Brutus, a ‘friend of liberty.’ Thus rationalizing as an exercise in patriotism his splenetic attack on Hazlitt’s Characters (in particular the observations on Coriolanus, containing as they do ‘the concentrated venom of his malignity’ [464]),





one of the representatives of a class of men by whom literature is more than at any former period disgraced, who are labouring to effect their mischievous purposes non vi sed saepe cadendo [not by force but by falling frequently]; [I] therefore conceived that it might not be unprofitable to show how very small a portion of talent and literature was necessary for carrying on the trade of sedition. (466) Predictably enough, Gifford’s extraordinary condemnation exposes far more of his own critical ideology than Hazlitt’s, as he attempts to exploit Hazlitt’s politicization of the plays in order, single-handedly, to accuse, arrest, and convict Hazlitt for crimes against the state, and thus effectively to banish him from the ‘State of Letters’ (466). In this account, Hazlitt is neither a writer nor even a critic, but a tradesman, one who trades on sedition. As with the juridical language of Hazlitt’s account of Gifford as the head of the literary police, Gifford’s construction here of Hazlitt as a laborer who perpetrates social unrest is itself subject to the slippage between the metaphorical and the historical that characterizes so much romantic criticism. In this case, Gifford’s alignment of Hazlitt with a ‘class’ of seditious tradesmen implies that Hazlitt is in violation of the Seditious Meetings Act of 1817, and should therefore be detained immediately under the provision provided by the 1817 suspension of Habeas Corpus. Himself the son of a glazier and a shoemaker’s apprentice, Gifford is at great pains to classify Hazlitt as a tradesman in order to proscribe him from the State of Letters; such a banishment would enable Gifford to undermine Hazlitt’s increasingly celebrated status as a literary critic38 and, simultaneously, to reappropriate England as the land of Shakespeare rather than of shopkeepers. The metamorphosis of a Shakespearean critic into a tradesman purveying sedition reveals that, in Gifford’s realignment of Shakespeare with ‘the minister’s side of the question,’ ‘the question’ in question is not simply one of political sedition. The principles of taste and decorum are also under attack, as Gifford asserts in sneering that ‘Mr. Hazlitt’s knowledge of Shakespeare and the English language is exactly on a par with the purity of his morals and the depth of his understanding’ (466), and as Hazlitt himself makes clear in characterizing Gifford’s proper task as ‘to restore the taste of the public to its legitimate tone’ (WH 9.33). The emphasis here on restoration and legitimacy underlines Gifford’s reactionary politics clearly enough,



Gifford concludes his review by accusing Hazlitt not merely of libel but furthermore of sedition, denouncing him as

while an anagrammatic construction of ‘taste’ as ‘state’ reveals yet another mode in which the literary and the political infect one another in Hazlitt’s writing. Finally, what might it mean to characterize Hazlitt’s writing as operating non vi sed saepe cadendo – not by force but by falling frequently?39 Attended as it is with Gifford’s accusation of sedition and his attempt to banish Hazlitt, the juxtaposition here of force and falling recalls not only Hazlitt’s review of Coriolanus but also Coriolanus’ own plight. Indeed, what makes Hazlitt’s writing practice so troubling (for the romantic as well as the modern critic) is the difficulty of determining the relation between its force and its performance of falling. It is because of the way in which, as a language of power, the force of Hazlitt’s writing precipitates its fall (in with the language of power, perhaps; certainly awry of the various laws of the states of Letters and of England) that romantic criticism repeatedly calls in the literary police to contain and disarm his writing – much as the citizens of Rome relied upon the tribunes to control Coriolanus. Rather than simply juxtapose force with falling, we might instead attempt, in closing, to formulate yet another relation between force and falling which pertains not merely to Hazlitt’s writing, but more generally for the romantic imagination. To do so will require us to turn briefly to the example of the other romantic Coriolanus idolized by Hazlitt – Edmund Burke. While Hazlitt’s account of Kemble’s portrayal may be taken as representative of the all-firm Coriolanus who ‘keeps his state’ on the summit despite the sentence pronounced against him, his no-less heroic construction of Burke as Coriolanus calls our attention to the undeniably ‘dangerous tendency’ and precipitous inclination of a prose style that is notable for the vertigo it induces in Hazlitt and others (as we shall see in the following chapter). Hazlitt’s Kemble is in no way allowed to fall, although he may be said to stand off and then apart. Hazlitt’s Burke on the other hand, ‘that eloquent apostate’ (WH 19.271), comes much closer to the extreme verge: ‘It has always appeared to me that the most perfect prose-style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring, that which went the nearest to the verge of poetry, and yet never fell over, was Burke’s’ (WH 12.10; emphasis added). Here and elsewhere, the grandiose example of Coriolanus’ apostasy resounds throughout Hazlitt’s deployment of the term: striving to characterize the effect of such dazzling performances (in ‘On Reading Old Books’ [1821]), Hazlitt abjures his initial comparison of Burke with Milton’s Satan, that other eloquent apostate, in favor of one with Coriolanus, remarking of the Letter to a Noble Lord that it is




precisely there that ‘“[Burke], like an eagle in a dove-cot, fluttered his Volscians … in Corioli”’ (WH 12.228).40 So, too, might we observe of Hazlitt’s performance in the Letter to William Gifford that it is here that Hazlitt, ‘like an eagle in a dove-cot,’ fluttered his Volscians. And it is because of the way in which the force of Hazlitt’s writing might be said to make it fall – in with the language of power perhaps; certainly awry of the various laws of the states of letters and of England – that romantic criticism must repeatedly call in what Hazlitt derisively terms ‘the literary police,’ those tribunes at whom Hazlitt can be heard to sneer, ‘Banish me? I banish you!’ For Hazlitt (indeed, for the romantic imagination generally) Kemble’s unshaken Coriolanus and Burke’s precipitous Coriolanus present two extreme modalities of apostasy. For romantic writing as well as for romantic acting, then, the drama of Coriolanus’ shifting rhetorical postures underlines the complications of what it means to stand. If Kemble’s stage presence may be said to represent falling as standing, then Burke’s prose-style may be said to represent standing as falling. And what of Hazlitt’s own writing? A sustained spectacle of standing, Kemble-like, upon the summit of his inveterate political principles at the same time as, Burke-like, he flutters above the verge, blind to the precipitous inclination of his own rhetorical excesses.




6

Non vi sed saepe cadendo … The tension between thematic, historical, and rhetorical constructions of the politics of romantic writing is nowhere more legible than in Hazlitt’s criticism. Indeed, as we have already glimpsed, even the criticism of apostasy written by such a principled defender of consistency as Hazlitt is not immune to charges of critical apostasy, or what emerges more generically as the apostasy of criticism (arguably the most ineluctable ‘spirit’ of the age). If, as Hazlitt repeatedly claims, ‘literary’ language is susceptible to falling in with power, and if we acknowledge the ‘literariness’ of Hazlitt’s language, then how vulnerable, finally, is Hazlitt’s own discourse to the declensions of apostasy? Subject as it is to a perverse rhetorical determinism – setting itself up, as it were, for a fall – Hazlitt’s later writing betrays a latent rhetoric of falling apropos of the ‘force of language,’ a force which can neither be construed simply as constituting any sort of political dereliction, nor even be defended against by as seemingly vigilant and as avowedly anti-rhetorical a critic as Hazlitt. Having relied on Hazlitt’s criticism throughout the course of this book to develop arguments regarding the apostasies of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coriolanus, I propose now, in conclusion, to delineate the figure of the critic-as-apostate as it lurks most conspicuously in Hazlitt’s writing on three fronts: Shakespearean interrogations; periodical criticism itself; and the eloquent ‘apostate angel,’ Edmund Burke. In all three contexts, we can read the degree to which Hazlitt’s levelling accusations of apostasy are curiously and significantly linked both to his persona in the periodical press and to that array of rhetorical strategies denominated ‘Hazlitt’s style’ by so many uncomfortable readers. Throughout, the trou167



Criticism on the Verge

bling, unpredictable conflation and conflagration of the literary and the political that exemplifies this style can be seen to dictate contemporary response to it. Whereas recent criticism has sought to correct the critical neglect of much of Hazlitt’s political writing, 1 the partisan reviewing practices of the 1810s and 1820s effectively precluded any such divorce between literature and politics in determining Hazlitt’s contemporary reception. Indeed, the intersection of politics and literature in Hazlitt’s writing cannot be confined to that writing which presented itself as overtly ‘political’; although contemporary reviewers repeatedly criticized Hazlitt for the intrusion of political invective upon what was supposed to have been tasteful literary criticism, any attempt to distinguish political from literary writing in Hazlitt is bound to fail. The Political Essays (1819), for example, collect numerous essays on such putatively literary figures as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and the resulting violations of the conventions assembled as the ‘law of genre’ produce two general responses in reviews of Hazlitt: personal abuse based on party affiliation, and critical anxiety about the seeming unavoidability of the contamination of literary criticism by political opinion. (The first strategy is principally characterized by William Gifford – ‘literary toad-eater to greatness, and taster to the court,’ as Hazlitt castigates him [WH 9.34] – while the second strategy may be seen to inform the criticism of Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, and Thomas Noon Talfourd, Hazlitt’s literary executor.) In the three sections that follow here, what is constantly at issue (and never satisfactorily resolved) is the relation between these two categories, the literary and the political, in Hazlitt’s writings in the periodical press. And it is out of the impossibility of finally adjudicating (let alone diffusing) this tension that apostasy emerges in Hazlitt’s writing not as a matter of political opinion, but rhetorically, as a product of the irrepressible vehemence – that is to say, of the force – of language.

I: Policing the Bard Writing in the Monthly Review in November 1820, the anonymous reviewer of Hazlitt’s Political Essays deploys one of the trademarks of Hazlitt’s own style against him. Taking exception to Hazlitt’s indulgence of declamatory invective against the Lake poets in the Political Essays, the reviewer turns to Shakespeare for retribution:




Criticism on the Verge 169

—— ‘all the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on them’ [I.ii.341–2]; and they are ‘pinch’d as thick as honeycombs, each pinch more stinging than the bees that made them.’ If any of these gentlemen, therefore, should in their turn avail themselves of the opportunity which Mr. Hazlitt affords, by the present republication of his fugitive pieces, and ‘rack him with old cramps and fill all his bones with aches,’ he must bear the visitation with composure; for they may exclaim, ‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you For learning me your language’ [I.ii.365–7]. (Rev. of Political Essays, Monthly Review 251) This is an extraordinary quotation, both for the succinctness with which it covers the various modalities and topoi of Hazlitt’s style – quotation and cursing, Shakespeare and the Lake poets – as well as the seeming inevitability with which it succumbs to the discontinuity characteristic of that style. As often happens in Hazlitt’s own writing, the force of the quotations dissipates and finally subverts any sense of logic or consistency in the argument: no sooner is Hazlitt cast as Caliban cursing Prospero than this construction is reversed to cast Hazlitt as Prospero exposed to the cursing of the Lake poets as Caliban.2 The reviewer initially turns to The Tempest to castigate Hazlitt for the venom of his invective. But by attributing to him both the legitimacy of Caliban’s complaint (as the island’s displaced sovereign) and the authority of Prospero’s voice (as the tyrannical usurper), the reviewer inadvertently opens a double reading of Hazlitt’s implication in the play. It is easy enough to understand the (self-) identification of Hazlitt with Caliban. In both politics (resisting the machinations of tyranny) and language (cursing), Hazlitt can repeatedly be seen to cast himself as Caliban in contemporary discourse. In the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), Hazlitt singles out Caliban as one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, admiring the integration of his ‘natural coarseness’ into his otherwise ‘poetical character,’ before going on to note that ‘it is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it’ (WH



The curses of Caliban on Prospero are not more venomous or more various than Mr. Hazlitt’s denunciations against Southey, Coleridge, [and] Wordsworth … :

4.239). This Caliban is not a bitter, cursing monster, but a sensitive and eloquent literary critic who, after Ariel frightens them with his haunting music, reassures Stephano and Trinculo in loose iambic pentameter: ‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not’ (III.ii.133–5). A more political Caliban may be read in Hazlitt’s retort to Coleridge’s construction of Caliban as the ‘original and caricature of Jacobinism’ in his 1818 lectures on Shakespeare.3 In Coleridge’s account, Caliban figures ‘the springs of the vulgar in politics’ (Lectures 2.272), and gives the lie to the millenarial aspirations of 1790s English Jacobinism: ‘he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice’ (Lectures 2.270). As if it were not enough to denounce Caliban as the archetypal Jacobin, Coleridge here formulates Caliban’s amorality in such a way as to make him responsible for the Terror as well. Taking exception to Coleridge’s paranoid hyperboles in one of the few issues of the Yellow Dwarf (a radical Saturday newspaper published by Hazlitt and John Hunt in 1818), Hazlitt reappropriates The Tempest in order to expose the inconsistencies produced by Coleridge’s ministerial reading practices, according to which Shakespeare ‘never promulgates any party tenets’ yet nevertheless somehow manages to venerate ‘hereditary institutions’ and the ‘distinction of ranks’ in language that is ‘not drawn from any set fashion but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages’ (Lectures 2.272-3).4 Hazlitt writes in response: Caliban is so far from being a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that he is strictly the legitimate sovereign of the isle, and Prospero and the rest are usurpers, who have ousted him from his hereditary jurisdiction by superiority of talent and knowledge. ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother;’ and he complains bitterly of the artifices used by his new friends to cajole him out of it. He is the Louis XVIII of the enchanted island in The Tempest. (WH 19.207) After an extended and fanciful digression on the propriety of Caliban peopling the isle with little Calibans in order to maintain hereditary succession at the expense of ‘that upstart philosopher Prospero,’ Hazlitt finally calls it quits, announcing, ‘This is gross. Why does Mr. Coleridge provoke us to write as great nonsense as he talks?’ (WH 19.207). Despite this ironization of his own reading, it is




important to note that, with the point of entry provided by Coleridge’s investment in (and identification with) Shakespeare as a ‘philosophical aristocrat,’ Hazlitt can ridicule Coleridge’s retreat from his own youthful Jacobinism at the same time as he demonstrates that there is indeed a reading of Shakespeare other than on ‘the minister’s side of the question’ (WH 9.33). Given the pervasiveness of Hazlitt’s investment in Caliban, what then does it mean to figure Hazlitt as Prospero? In aligning Hazlitt’s language with Prospero’s, the Monthly’s reviewer disorients an otherwise pervasive identification of Hazlitt with Caliban and, as a result, aborts any facile characterization of Hazlitt’s project as the demystification of the sophistries by which power maintains its privileges. We are therefore prompted to consider the Prospero-like qualities (alchemy, magic, tyranny) of Hazlitt’s critical practice – that is to say, of his language, the explicit provocation and means of the curse: ‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’ (I.ii.365–6). When the Monthly’s reviewer concludes by observing that ‘The writer’s command of language is very great, and he is sometimes apt to exercise his imperial power like other potentates, uncontrouled by judgement or discretion’ (258), the alignment of Hazlitt with Prospero is complete. Commanding, imperial, and finally uncontrollable, the rhetorical tyranny attributed to Hazlitt’s language is violently at odds with the thematic identification of Hazlitt as the jacobinical friend of liberty. As positioned in the Monthly Review, the difference between Caliban and Prospero marks the tension between theme and rhetoric in Hazlitt’s discourse. When read in the context of Hazlitt’s own writing, however, this difference reveals its own instabilities: like Caliban, Prospero too is a displaced ruler; like Prospero, Caliban too commands language. Rhetoric, or the force of language, continually interferes with the thematic identification of the politics of any voice in the Hazlitt–Coleridge exchange over The Tempest. While Coleridge positions himself philosophically as Prospero, Hazlitt debunks the privilege of this position in the simple gesture of calling Coleridge’s reading ‘gross,’ the attribute most routinely applied to Caliban. At the same time, as we have seen, while Hazlitt implicitly identifies himself politically with the unjust oppression of Caliban, Caliban’s ‘poetical character’ and Hazlitt’s ‘imperial language’ complicate that alignment.5 What kind of writing is this, in which belles-lettres and political invective invariably contaminate one another? In its seeming conflation of the literary and the political, Hazlitt’s reading of The Tempest is a particularly good example of the inflammatory style that




put off so many of his contemporary readers. Many of the same reviewers who celebrate the literary Hazlitt of the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (the only volume of Hazlitt’s work that went into a second printing in his lifetime) for his ‘ardent and unstudied eloquence, the fertile fancy, the quick sensibility, and the discriminating genius’ (Monthly Review 251), are also quick to note that ‘we have nothing to do with Mr. Hazlitt’s political opinions.’ 6 Objecting not only to Hazlitt’s unremitting ‘vituperation of political characters’ (Monthly Review 252), in places such as the Political Essays, but particularly to the ‘intrusion of political virulence’ upon writing that announces itself as literary criticism (Talfourd rev. of Lectures 438), his contemporary readers repeatedly find themselves in the awkward position of feeling obliged to divorce themselves from the politics of an otherwise seductive and successful account of, for example, Shakespeare’s characters.7 While many of Hazlitt’s key discussions of politics occur, of course, in his essays on the Lake poets and Shakespeare, in the pages that follow, I will concentrate less on the topics and objects of Hazlitt’s criticism in the 1810s and more on its venue: the periodical press. For in considering Hazlitt’s examination of the ideology of the periodical press – indeed, more comprehensively, his criticism of contemporary periodical writing and reading habits, understood as a criticism of romantic criticism – we position ourselves to interrogate Hazlitt’s own style in relation to the apostatic modalities of romantic criticism.

II: Periodical Indigestion, Unpalatable Politics Reviewing Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual for The Edinburgh Review in 1816, Hazlitt singled out for attention Coleridge’s pointedly unMiltonic denunciation of ‘promiscuous’ reading: For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have now a READING PUBLIC … , whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of Literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what is the result? Does the inward man thrive on this regime? Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged by the articles of largest consumption; if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my Profaccia with a desponding sigh. (Lay Sermons 36–8; cited WH 16.105)




Is it possible, Hazlitt quickly asks, to be serious after such a ‘delicate morceau’? No, indeed not. But that need not preclude us from savoring just what makes Coleridge’s little morceau so delicious for our consideration of Hazlitt’s periodical criticism (and, furthermore, of reading as feeding). First there is Hazlitt’s own status as, arguably, the oddest bur, the relentless critic of the Lake poets’ apostasies, whose writings in the periodical press at precisely this time continue to create the taste according to which Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey are being and will be read. Then there is the question of the health of this taste. As Coleridge implies, the ordinary reader who diets at the prix-fixe banquet that is the periodical press cannot aspire to anything more than a delicate health, due to the consumptive ingredients with which those popular articles are concocted (by Hazlitt and others) for his ordinary palate. However piquante such a reading of Coleridge’s overcooked metaphor may be, it serves to draw our attention to an alimentary trope (the periodical press as an ‘ordinary,’ or table d’hôte, for unsophisticated palates) which in turn informs Hazlitt’s own dégustation of the state of public taste in an 1823 essay for the Edinburgh Review, ‘The Periodical Press’ (WH 16.211–39). Hazlitt is concerned here to rescue the reading public from such high-cultural scorn as Coleridge’s; yet, at the same time, he doesn’t hesitate to take issue with its distempered appetite, chiding it in turn for indulging the partisan excesses of the Ministerial Press. As so often in his criticism, Hazlitt’s political populism regularly collides here with his strikingly individual account of the power of language and of the literary imagination. In characteristic Hazlittian fashion, a levelling argument (in this case, in favor of universal critical suffrage) somehow manages both to celebrate and to deride the public it would defend: no sooner will Hazlitt assert the necessity of courting the reading public if critics are successfully to disseminate the principles of taste (WH 16.219) than he will concede that this same public’s taste is in fact so ‘ordinary’ – indeed, provincial – that ‘it is necessary to insert politics in a sort of sandwich of literature, in order to make them at all palatable’ (WH 16.220). Throughout Hazlitt’s consideration of the politics of periodical criticism, metaphors of taste operate both gastronomically and in terms of a decorum that is both literary and political – a crossing which can be read most succinctly in the anagrammatic construction of ‘taste’ as ‘state.’ Indeed, both Hazlitt’s account here and his routine practice of periodical criticism may be profitably considered as a continual negotiation between the state-of-taste and the taste-of-the-state. In dressing




politics in a ‘sandwich of literature’ to slip it past the ordinary tastes of the reading public, Hazlitt must simultaneously endeavour to evade the ‘literary police,’ those skulking government critics such as William Gifford who, in their critical capacity as tasters to the state, would restrict public taste to a strictly ‘legitimate’ diet. As figured, then, in the metaphorical border crossings performed by ‘taste’ in Hazlitt’s account of the periodical press, ‘politics’ denotes not merely an ideological critique of the abuses of power, but also (and more importantly) the maneuvers of smuggling ‘politics’ past the literary police and into an otherwise unassuming sandwich of literature – all in the name of creating a more ‘liberal taste.’8 For romantic criticism, it would appear, political writing has become a matter of undercover gourmandizing.

‘The Periodical Press’ consists in three parts: a defense of periodical criticism as necessary to the ‘critical’ spirit of the times if we are to taste, let alone savor, an otherwise ‘undigested heap’ of works of genius; a sampling of some of the more prominent daily, weekly, and monthly offerings of the press, presented throughout as a banquet whose dishes are to be estimated according to the relative liberality of their editors’ tastes; and a denunciation of the illiberal excesses of the Ministerial Press, that ‘corps of government-critics’ (WH 10.246)9 who exploit the most servile pretexts to withhold opposition delicacies, practicing political proscription under the heading of literary criticism (WH 8.221).10 Opening with the query, ‘Whether Periodical Criticism is … beneficial to the cause of literature’ (WH 16.211), Hazlitt quickly overrides the implied charge that it is not, that it instills fear in contemporary writers and thus inhibits the productions of genius, in order to announce his own truism on the subject – namely ‘That periodical criticism is favourable – to periodical criticism’ (WH 16.212). According to Hazlitt, such criticism not only suits the ‘spirit’ of the times but in fact actually advances it: We complain that this is a Critical age; and that no great works of Genius appear, because so much is said and written about them; while we ought to reverse the argument, and say, that it is because so many works of genius have appeared, that they have left us little or nothing to do, but to think and talk about them – that if we did not do that, we should do nothing so good. (WH 16.212)




‘Be it so,’ Hazlitt then announces with an Iago-like flourish, for ‘“We are nothing, if not critical”’ (WH 16.213). What, precisely, does Hazlitt mean here by ‘criticism’ and why is it so important? In the most straightforward sense (similar to contemporary arguments made at greater length by Thomas Love Peacock and others), ‘criticism’ denominates the work of any period subsequent to one of unusual productivity and thus names the study and diffusion of the productions of genius. For Hazlitt, it is this and more. ‘Criticism,’ specifically periodical criticism, is the definitive genre of romantic writing, for it is here more than anywhere else that we can read the volatile redefinition of such terms as ‘literature,’ ‘aesthetics,’ ‘politics,’ ‘taste,’ and, above all, ‘criticism,’ the abiding congery of which terms has in turn produced our valorization of this writing as ‘Romantic.’ The challenge for periodical criticism, as Hazlitt presents it, is to reconfigure their relations in a palatable mix, one which will ‘go down’ with the reading public and thus diffuse the ingredients of a liberal (as opposed to a ‘legitimate,’ and thereby illegitimate) taste. Having amassed a ‘superabundance of raw materials,’ Hazlitt continues, the ‘grand desideratum’ of the present is to refashion and redistribute them; since literature is no longer confined to the few, ‘the object therefore is, to make it accessible and attractive to the many’ (WH 16.219–20). The reading public is no longer to be treated with Coleridgean contempt but, rather, cultivated, flirted with, and seduced into taste. Essential to the success of this appeal is the critical refashioning of literature as a coquette. Literature may formerly have been ‘a sweet Heremitress, who fed on the pure breath of Fame, in silence and in solitude,’ but modern literature, that ‘delicious morceau’ is … a gay Coquette, fluttering, fickle, vain; … the subject of polite conversation; the darling of private parties; the go-between in politics; the directress of fashion; the polisher of manners … [whose] very variety and superficial polish show the extent and height to which knowledge has been acquired, and the general interest taken in letters. (WH 16.219) Similarly directing fashion, polishing manners, and interfering in politics, the operations of the periodical press are distinctly coquettish. Hazlitt even goes so far as to model the contemporary critic on the coquette, announcing that since ‘we exist in the bustle of the world, and cannot escape from the notice of our contemporaries … , [w]e must please to live, and therefore should live to please. We must look




to the public for support’ (WH 16.220). Impudent, witty, bold, and as vulnerable as coquettes, critics rely upon their extraordinary forwardness, their disregard of forms and decorum, to appeal to the vanity of their readers.11 The success of periodical criticism attends upon its ability to smile and be polite, under cover of which facetious attentions the truly radical critic can essay to smuggle in ‘politics’ past the coquetted gatekeepers. No sooner has Hazlitt concluded his impudent assessment of the practical versatility of the periodical press than he brings us up short with the ‘one fatal objection’ that is routinely made against periodical criticism – namely, ‘that it is too often made the engine of party-spirit and personal invective’ (WH 16.220). Criticism’s decidedly coquettish facility as a ‘go-between’ not only makes it invaluable for the dissemination of taste, but also, it now appears, renders it unusually vulnerable to seduction and appropriation. Though this is an abuse greatly to be lamented, Hazlitt immediately attempts to recuperate the value of the periodical press through contending that, in fact, its exploitation ‘only shows the extent and importance of this branch of literature, so that it has become the organ of everything else’ (WH 16.220). Acutely aware as he is of the Janus-faced versatility of criticism (its facility for seduction coupled with its susceptibility to exploitation), Hazlitt reformulates this dilemma again and again throughout his appraisal. And each time he does so, we can glimpse the constitutive versatility of Hazlitt’s own critical posture, that of a political leveller who is nevertheless a defiant cultural highbrow. Although Hazlitt appears to have taken upon himself the task of vindicating the reading public against Coleridge’s censorious ridicule, his defense of miscellaneous criticism often amounts to little more than a melancholic acknowledgment of its necessarily miscellaneous character: … by the progress of cultivation, different arts and exercises stretch out their arms to impede, not to assist one another. Politics blend with poetry, painting with literature; fashion and elegance must be combined with learning and study: and thus the mind gets a smattering of everything, and a mastery in none. The mixing of acquirements, like the mixing of liquors, is no doubt a bad thing, and muddles the brain; but in a certain stage of society, it is in some degree unavoidable. (WH 16.216) Similarly, the mixing of genres can be seen to muddle the taste. Through blending poetry and politics, for example, periodical criticism




may give the public a soupçon of both, but it risks neutralizing its taste for either, for the result (as Hazlitt complains of the London Magazine) is that ‘all is in a confused, unconcocted state, like the materials of a rich plum-pudding before it has been well boiled’ (WH 16.232).12 The public may indeed ‘like to taste works in the sample, before they swallow them whole’ (WH 16.231–2), but how is criticism to cultivate a liberal public taste when the public’s unsophisticated palate is catered to so indiscriminately? Hazlitt’s metaphors of muddled concoctions are noteworthy not only because they clarify the susceptibility of the public to the careless mixing of discreet tastes, but also because, in regulating the entire essay as they do, they comment succinctly on that aspect of Hazlitt’s style to which contemporary critics and readers alike take exception: the indiscriminate mixing of belles lettres and politics. Keeping in mind that unconcocted state of taste, we need first to explicate Hazlitt’s richest articulation of this double-standard, as he presents it in ‘The Periodical Press,’ in order that we may examine his reservations about periodical criticism in terms of what they reveal, in turn, about the vehement strictures passed by romantic criticism against Hazlitt’s own writing.

Having fashioned periodical criticism as a coquette capable of directing manners as well as mediating between (or interfering in) poetry and politics, Hazlitt returns to his alimentary trope in one last, sustained attempt to explain why it is ‘in some degree’ unavoidable that literature and politics are repeatedly to be found concocted (ripened, digested, endured) with one another in romantic criticism. The bias to miscellaneous criticism and discussion is so great, that it is necessary to insert politics in a sort of sandwich of literature, in order to make them at all palatable to the ordinary taste. The war of political pamphlets, of virulent pasquinades, has ceased, and the ghosts of Junius and Cato, of Gracchus and Cincinnatus, no longer ‘squeak and gibber’ in our modern streets, or torment the air with a hubbub of hoarse noises. A Whig or Tory tirade on a political question, the abuse of a public character, now stands side by side in a fashionable Review, with a disquisition on ancient coins, or is introduced right in the middle of an analysis of the principles of taste. This is a violation, no doubt, of the rules of decorum and order, and




might well be dispensed with: but … mere politics, mere personal altercation, will not go down without an infusion of the BellesLettres and the Fine Arts. This makes decidedly either for the refinement or the frivolity of our taste. It is found necessary to poison or to sour the public mind, by going to the well-head of polite literature and periodical criticism, – which shows plainly how many drink at that fountain, and will drink at no other. (WH 16.220–1) Integral to what makes this quotation so startling is that although Hazlitt ostensibly offers us the ‘sandwich of literature’ as a metaphor for the fatal objection against periodical criticism (its appropriation as an ‘engine of party-spirit and personal invective’ [WH 16.220]), it is after all such an apt figure for (if not, furthermore, a lampoon of) the operations of his own writing. Far from being merely guilty of such sleightof-hand, Hazlitt’s criticism stands and falls according to this criterion. When Hazlitt first deploys the word ‘taste,’ he does so gastronomically, with regard to the public’s palate. When he next does so, it figures decorum (the ‘principles of taste’) yet not without an aftertaste of its previous usage. What is a reader to do, Hazlitt implicitly asks, when he finds a political tirade ‘right in the middle of an analysis [a sandwich] of the principles of taste’? Such unpredictable interventions lend an unexpected degree of urgency to Hazlitt’s conclusion, when (having noted again that ‘mere politics … will not go down without an infusion of the Belles-Lettres’), he announces, ‘this makes decidedly either for the refinement or the frivolity of our taste.’ ‘This’ is what is finally at stake for Hazlitt in periodical criticism: will such sandwiches enhance the taste of the public, rendering it more liberal? Or will they corrupt and poison it, reducing it to an illiberal distemper? A preliminary answer may be read, once again, in Hazlitt’s figure of the critic-as-coquette, whose impudent versatility qualifies him to direct fashions, yet renders him vulnerable to appropriation and redirection by party politics. As Hazlitt proceeds to sample the offerings of the periodical press, the criterion that emerges is the correspondence between editorial taste and the ‘liberal taste’ which Hazlitt holds to be ‘the true characteristic of the age’ (WH 16.232): while the editor of the London Magazine occasionally fails to bring his pudding to a boil, leaving things in a ‘confused, unconcocted state,’ the editor of the New Monthly errs in the other direction, tampering until ‘the taste and spirit evaporate’ (WH 16.232). The failing of most periodicals, however, is not over-refinement but coarseness and profanity. ‘The illiberality of




the Periodical Press,’ Hazlitt clarifies, ‘is “the sin that most easily besets it,”’ though it is only ‘the worst part of the Ministerial Press that has had the temptation, the hardihood, or the cowardice to make literature the mere tool and creature of party-spirit’ (WH 16.232–3). With this turn to the Ministerial Press, Hazlitt devotes the remainder of the article to exposing and denouncing ‘the great opprobrium of our periodical literature’: that a malignant ‘gang of literary retainers’ in the service of the ‘literary police’ should defame as wickedly as they do all writers who do not ‘have the Government mark upon them,’ thereby polluting not merely the periodical press but also the taste of a reading public that relies upon it for its critical diet (WH 16.237, 238, 239). Scrutinizing in this way the illiberal excesses which compromise the otherwise miscellaneous character of the periodical press, Hazlitt vociferously exposes the ideological distortions according to which the Ministerial Press would disease the reading public with its ‘legitimate taste.’ In the same breath as he denounces these ‘government scribblers’ and ‘court critics,’ he also manages to remind us that ‘the continuance of this nuisance rests … with the public’ (WH 16.233), and is not likely to cease until ‘the excess leads to the remedy, and the distempered appetite of the public be surfeited, and so die’ (WH 16.239). While it is curiously reminiscent of Coleridge’s desponding profaccia, Hazlitt’s double-pronged disdain here (for both the press and the public) needs to be considered within the context of his own relations with the press, ministerial and otherwise, if we are to understand why contemporary critics found his own politics so unpalatable. How is it that, formulating as well as he does the necessity of smuggling politics into a sandwich of literature if they are to have any chance of going down with the reading public, his own writing sticks so uncomfortably in the throat of so many of his own readers and reviewers? Indeed, what might be the ‘legitimate tone’ of literary criticism? And what is it that so decisively marks Hazlitt’s own writing as illegitimate? According not just to William Gifford, but to romantic critics generally, Hazlitt’s writing is illegitimate because, in tainting belles lettres with political invective, it violates the law of genre that legislates the separation of literary from political writing in romantic criticism.13 Whether condemning the overtly political writing (most notably the Political Essays) as unremittingly strident invective, or attempting to overlook it in the name of Hazlitt’s insight as a literary critic (particularly in the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays and the Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth [1820]), contemporary romantic critics are invariably vexed by the intersection of politics and literature that marks Hazlitt’s writing.




While the Quarterly’s Gifford exploits the political vehemence of certain of Hazlitt’s readings to discredit his celebrated status as a literary critic, a reviewer as sympathetic as the Edinburgh Review’s Thomas Noon Talfourd attempts to marginalize the political tensions and implications of Hazlitt’s dramatic and literary criticism by insisting on its status as belles lettres. At either extreme, romantic criticism is repeatedly forced to confront the disturbing possibility that Hazlitt’s politics not only brand every aspect of his writing,14 but also empower its resistance to that law of genre which would attempt to enforce the noncontamination of literary criticism by politics. Reviews as divergent in their party affiliations as the Quarterly and the Edinburgh can therefore be seen to share a preoccupation with defending literature and literary criticism against Hazlitt’s political readings. While the Quarterly (as we saw in our consideration of Coriolanus) seizes upon the ‘senseless and wicked sophistry’ of the Characters under cover of the claim that ‘it might not be unprofitable to show how very small a portion of talent and literature [is] necessary for carrying on the trade of sedition’ (Gifford rev. of Characters 466),15 the Edinburgh postulates literary criticism to be, properly, the ‘reverent contemplation of genius,’ a vocation which should under no circumstances ‘“give up for party what was meant for mankind”’ (Talfourd rev. of Lectures 439).16 Such a rigid insistence on the decorous alignment of genre and audience makes it clear that, while Hazlitt’s ‘personal animosities’ may be excused in the implicitly lower genre of the political essay, they are not to transgress upon literary criticism. Contemporary romantic responses furthermore insist that not only does Hazlitt needlessly import and impose his political opinions upon his literary criticism, but that it is precisely the rhetoric of his declamatory invective that betrays his attempts to violate the law of genre.17 Talfourd is quick to point out as much in his lengthy review of the Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, where he chides Hazlitt for this discordance and goes on to note that, if Hazlitt has not met with critical justice, it is no doubt because, not surprisingly, ‘his love of startling paradox – and his intrusion of political virulence, at seasons when the mind is prepared only for the delicate investigations of taste, have naturally provoked a good deal of asperity, and prevented the due appreciation of his powers’ (rev. of Lectures 438).18 Take, for example, the ‘sandwich of literature’: as a critic, Hazlitt clearly understands the necessity of disguising politics in such a way as not to aggravate the reader’s taste; but when it is a matter of his own writing, he seems incapable of exercising such restraint. As




Talfourd implicitly recognizes but hesitates to accede to, the intersection of politics and literature in Hazlitt’s writing can in no way be confined to that writing which overtly presents itself as ‘political.’ Startling as well as virulent, Hazlitt’s writing offends the reader both politically (too vehement) and rhetorically (too paradoxical). Indeed, this ‘want of proportion, of arrangement, and of harmony’ (440) for which Talfourd indicts Hazlitt’s writing can be organized under two headings: excessive partisanship (his ‘want of respect for an audience, consisting of men of all parties, and men of no party’ [441]) and his rhetorical infelicity (‘the want of all continuity in his style’ [440]).

The anonymous review of Hazlitt’s Political Essays in the Monthly Review (with which we began this chapter) may be taken as representative of the critical ambivalence with which Hazlitt’s writing was received, as well as of the sharp discontinuity reviewers regularly remarked between his political and literary criticism. Qualifying his ‘extra-judicial’ attention to a volume which merely collects articles that have already appeared in the newspapers (primarily in the Examiner) the reviewer remarks that, if he is in fact tempted to read the Political Essays, to ‘stray from the turn-pike road of professional duty and wander with [Mr. Hazlitt] wheresoever he invites us,’ it is quite specifically due to the ‘ardent and unstudied eloquence, the fertile fancy, the quick sensibility, and the discriminating genius, which Mr. Hazlitt has displayed’ (251) in the Characters, the Lectures on the English Poets (1818), and the Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819). In moving from literary criticism to politics, however, and there confining himself ‘almost exclusively to the vituperation of political characters’ (252), the Hazlitt of the Political Essays receives no such approbation: An irrepressible vehemence pervades the language of Mr. Hazlitt, which, when applied to persons, even in their political capacity as statesmen, orators, or writers, is calculated to alienate and irritate. Reasoning and argument, thus uncourteously enforced, lose half their powers of conviction, by disdainfully rejecting all the adventitious aid of conciliation and persuasion … . His criticisms of our dramatic and poetic writers are delightful; evincing a perception and enjoyment of those minor beauties and almost latent graces of composition, which are lost on the dull organs of common observers. We had much rather,





In this account, it is difficult to distinguish the force of Hazlitt’s language from its susceptibility to falling – here, falling prey to its own intemperance. To the degree that it loses its balance (the critical equilibrium between his faculties of perception and reasoning, his temper, and his language), Hazlitt’s writing can be said to fall due to its forcefulness. The force of this language is both the vehemence which pervades it, and the way in which it is said to enforce Hazlitt’s opinions. In privileging Hazlitt’s ‘critical rather than his political lucubrations’ in Political Essays, the Monthly’s reviewer repeatedly attends not simply to the falling off of Hazlitt’s critical perception and reasoning but, conspicuously, to the efficacy and temper of Hazlitt’s language. At the same time as Hazlitt’s examination of Malthus, for example, stands out as ‘by far the closest piece of reasoning in the whole volume, and is therefore the best political article … , the reasoning would have lost nothing of its force, – nay perhaps it might have gained something of efficacy – had the author … refrained from that sin which so easily besets him, the indulgence of invective’ (258). Although Hazlitt comments critically on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in the Lectures on the English Poets, and regularly inflects his readings in the Characters in terms of contemporary politics, it is his ‘indulgence of invective’ that isolates the writing of the Political Essays from other less topical political writing. If literary criticism should be distinguished by its quick and responsive sensibility, then, for the Monthly Review’s critic, political writing should be marked by reasoning, rather than by the invective that not only obscures Hazlitt’s significant critical prowess, but further indicts him as a sort of rhetorical tyrant: We participate with him in all his hatred of tyranny and contempt for its tools, whatever station in life they occupy, and with whatever rank or title they are decorated and disgraced, but we have no relish for diffuse, personal, and declamatory invective, and of this we have too much in the volume before us. The writer’s command of language is very great, and he is sometimes apt to exercise his imperial power like other potentates, uncontrouled by judgement or discretion. (258) As sympathetic as this reviewer is to Hazlitt’s professed agenda in the Political Essays – ‘I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced



therefore, see him exercising his faculties on the belles lettres than on politics: – he has not temper enough for the latter. (255–6)

power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended’ (WH 7.7) – he is nonetheless quick to comment wryly on the degree to which Hazlitt’s rhetorical practice of vehement and splenetic invective is ultimately but a ‘tool’ of the tyranny to which he succumbs in his political writing, as his ardent, impatient political integrity turns into an unseemly linguistic despotism.19 Hazlitt, then, would seem to command language at the same time as, thanks to his intemperance, he loses his command over it – and it is precisely this undiscriminating contradiction that lessens the critic’s ‘relish,’ or taste, for Hazlitt’s writing. (Nowhere is this more striking than in the disruptive force of his own examples, as we shall see when we take up Hazlitt’s consideration and emulation of Burke’s style.) As attentive as he habitually is to the seemingly inevitable alignment of language, the imagination, and power (as in his repeated criticisms of apostates and apostasy for abstracting the sense of power from the sense of good, for example), Hazlitt himself can be seen, here and elsewhere, to fall prey to a similar overdetermination of language courtesy of his intemperate imagination. Or, worse still, Hazlitt can be said to abdicate his critical ‘command’ through catering to the reading public’s distempered ‘organs’ of taste: The taste of the public has, of late years, been accustomed to very high stimulants: no plain wholesome food will go down; and every thing must be hashed and stewed with some ‘sauce piquante,’ which however delicious to one palate, may be very offensive and disgusting to another. Mr. Hazlitt should not cater for such pampered appetites. (256) The intensely piquante collision of the political with the literary in Hazlitt’s own writing marks it as dangerously critical for a press which (most prominently between Waterloo and Peterloo) is singularly preoccupied with the relation between contemporary politics and periodical writing, a relation characterized by an aestheticization of politics which is as uncontrollable as it is unavoidable. While a reviewer as sympathetic as Talfourd marginalizes Hazlitt’s splenetic invective by insisting on the status of criticism as belles-lettres, Gifford condemns Hazlitt’s writing as seditious libel in order to discredit his increasingly celebrated status as a literary critic. Regardless of the partisan politics of the reviewer, however, Hazlitt’s intemperate writing inevitably provokes a display of the critical and ideological anxieties that characterize romantic criticism – including his own. Motivated at either extreme by




the seeming necessity of defending literature, literary criticism, and the periodical press against Hazlitt’s saucy reading practices, romantic criticism is repeatedly forced to confront the disturbing possibility that Hazlitt’s politics not only brand every aspect of his writing, but also empower its resistance to any and all principles of literary taste and decorum – including that law of genre according to which literary criticism is not to be contaminated by politics. Unless, of course, it is consumed in a ‘sandwich of literature.’20

III: Eloquent Apostasy: The Figure of Burke It is in Hazlitt’s incantatory assessment of the writing of Edmund Burke that we can most profitably examine the relation between the language of prose (in addition to that of poetry) and the language of power, for it is here that the language of power emerges as preeminently a function of the force of language. Hazlitt’s attempt to account for – yet not succumb to – the seductive sublimity of Burke’s writing reveals the language of power to be that force which, like Caius Martius against the Volscian army (and as Hazlitt characterizes Burke’s signature performance in the Letter to a Noble Lord), flutters its auditors ‘like an eagle in a dove-cote.’ With terms provided by Hazlitt’s desultory analysis of the elusive yet intractable force of Burke’s language (the best guide, in turn, to Hazlitt’s own style), we will be able to confront the volatile construction of the political in romantic writing. And, in doing so at the level of the sentence, we can then elucidate a model of romantic political writing that is not only a representation of the political but, in the final analysis, a politics of the figural. Whether characterizing the force of Burke’s writing as eloquent, fanciful, or sublime, Hazlitt repeatedly reveals his aspiration simultaneously to defend himself against and to appropriate its power, in order to forge a voice for the opposition as powerful as Burke’s espousal of a conservative ideology.21 What is at stake for both styles, finally, is the question of whether it is possible to deploy a language of power without complicitously falling in with it. That a significantly different relation should obtain between prose (rather than poetry) and power would seem to be the case when Hazlitt begins one of his periodic panegyrics on Burke’s style with the announcement that ‘it has always appeared to me that the most perfect prose style, the most powerful, the most daring, that which went nearest to the verge of poetry, and yet never fell over, was Burke’s’ (WH 12.10).22 Never falling over the




verge of poetry into its area of jurisdiction, Burke’s prose would seem proleptically to have avoided the subsequent fall attendant upon the language of poetry, its falling into step with the language of power. How then are we to understand the overt and repeated alignment of Burke’s writing with power – both its mastery over its reader and its status, repeatedly recognized by Hazlitt, as a ‘dangerous engine in the hands of power’ (WH 7.228)? And to what degree is Hazlitt suggesting that the best way to avoid the susceptibility of one’s own language to the language of power is to develop a powerful style oneself? The sophistry by which Hazlitt may be tolerating and pampering the evil he would otherwise abjure will become clearer upon examining both the effect and the affect of power in Burke’s writing, a writing which, in Hazlitt’s account, repeatedly comes up against the distinction between poetry and prose (tenuous at best, given its occasional resemblance to that other frail opposition, literature and politics) in terms of the resistance to and deployment of power. For what, if anything, finally saves prose from the vertiginous vulnerabilities that attend poetry? It is to this verge – between prose and poetry, politics and literature, gravity and levity – that we will return in conclusion. For Hazlitt, Burke’s style epitomizes that determination of the language of power as the force of language, as in the chiasmus, ‘the principle which guides [Burke’s] pen is truth, not beauty – not pleasure, but power’ (WH 12.10). The power of Burke’s language lies not in its institutional affiliation with the minister’s side of the question, but in the ways in which it overwhelms its auditor. Indeed, operating in a distinctly Longinian fashion, Burke’s writing can be seen not to persuade those who are exposed to it so much as to master them. As Hazlitt characterizes it at the end of a digression on Burke in the middle of a review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (it is typical of the power Burke exerts over Hazlitt that he simply appears, requisitioning essays ostensibly presenting themselves as on the prose style of poets, on reading old books, or as an indictment of the Holy alliance23): … he always aims at overpowering rather than at pleasing; and consequently sacrifices beauty and grandeur to force and vividness. He has invariably a task to perform, a positive purpose to execute, and effect to produce. His only object is therefore to strike hard, and in the right place; if he misses his mark, he repeats his blow; and does not care how ungraceful the action, or how clumsy the instrument, provided it brings down his antagonist. (WH 16.134; see also 7.229)




Striking hard, in order to overpower and eventually bring down his antagonist, Hazlitt’s account of Burke’s language thematizes power as quite literally the force of language. Decorum is sacrificed to pugnaciousness in a sublime which achieves its effects through bringing down the auditor, through making the (antagonistic) reader fall. As Hazlitt elsewhere puts it (‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’), ‘every word should be a blow: every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow’ (WH 12.11). The effects of Burke’s writing practice are thus understood to be achieved through the force of the contrasts, as every image – indeed, word – ‘grapples’ with another: ‘He did not produce a splendid effect by setting fire to the light vapours that float in the regions of fancy … , but by the eagerness of his blows struck fire from the flint, and melted the hardest substances in the furnace of his imagination’ (WH 7.310). At the same time as the distinction between the ethereal fancy and the substantial imagination reinforces the division of poetry from prose which Hazlitt is so intent on maintaining in his account of Burke’s writing, the image of the imagination as a furnace focuses our attention on the light as well as the heat of Burke’s decidedly Hephaestean labor. The obdurate force of Burke’s imagination in melting the hardest substances furthermore suggests a violent insatiability to be at work in such displays of power – fabrications which in turn clarify Hazlitt’s alignment of Burke with Milton’s Satan. In an 1822 account of the current ministry’s need of apologist of Burke’s rhetorical power (‘Arguing in a Circle’), Hazlitt characterizes Burke as ‘that eloquent apostate, that brilliant sophist, [who threw] his pen into the scale against truth and liberty. He varnished over a bad cause with smooth words, and had power to ‘make the worse appear [/] the better reason’ [2.113–14] – the devil’s boast!’ (WH 19.271).24 Here and elsewhere in Hazlitt’s alignments of Burke with Satan – that other ‘apostate angel’ (1.125) whose form ‘had not yet lost / All her original brightness; nor appear’d / Less than archangel ruin’d / And the excess of glory obscur’d’ (1.591–4) – the effect is a renewed sense of Burke’s radically Longinian ‘brightness.’ The power of both Satan and Burke is due to a fluent sophistry (‘making the worse appear / The better reason’) which relies upon a Longinian economy of excessive brilliance – brillance – to blind and captivate its readers. Indeed, in Hazlitt’s account, Burke’s most flamboyant language often succeeds precisely because it manages to obfuscate its status as figure.25 In a fashion just the reverse of Hazlitt’s alleged contamination of belles lettres by political invective, Burke’s writing can be said to treat




politics too fancifully. It is here, in the way in which politics becomes poetry in Burke’s writing, that the ‘language of power’ begins to shift ineluctably into the ‘language of power.’ The immediately efficacious attractions of such a poetics can be seen in Hazlitt’s remarks in the early (1807) ‘Character of Mr. Burke’: ‘Burke … gave a hold to his antagonists by mixing up sentiment and imagery with his reasoning; so that being unused to such a sight in the region of politics, they were deceived, and could not discern the fruit from the flowers’ (WH 7.309). The tension Hazlitt describes here in terms of imagery versus reasoning marks, once again, the rhetorical difference between poetry and prose. More importantly, it deceives Burke’s less-than-attentive readers, who cannot distinguish the one from the other. The power of Burke’s writing would therefore seem to lie not merely in the violence of its contrasts, but in their ability to confuse the reader – a necessary aspect of overmastering the reader, perhaps, but one that begins to draw our attention to the insidiousness of the Burkean sublime. In Hazlitt’s account, in remarks extraordinarily apposite to his own style, he condones the force, violence, and deception practiced by Burke’s writing as somehow called for by the recalcitrance of politics to Burke’s peculiar poeticizing. ‘There is a resistance in the matter to the illustration applied to it,’ according to Hazlitt, such that in Burke’s treatment of political questions, ‘… his fancy (or poetry, if you will) was ingrafted on these artificially, and as it might sometimes be thought, violently, instead of growing naturally out of them, as it would spring of its own accord from individual objects and feelings’ (WH 12.11). If politics weren’t so resistant to fancy, the violence of Burke’s writing wouldn’t make itself felt so forcefully. When it is imperative to work the most striking effects out of the most unpromising materials, however (again the Longinian economy gone awry), there ‘must be a weight, a precision, a conformity from association in the tropes and figures of animated prose to fit them to their place in the argument, and make them tell’ (WH 12.11). That is, the resistance of the matter to the illustration is to be overcome by the greater materiality of the illustration brought to bear on it. If the intent of Burke’s style is to overpower the auditor, then this can be seen to be accomplished at the level of the word, which operates here both as blow and ballast, weighing down that which would resist it. Whether figured as flint, furnace, or blows, the material violence of Burke’s writing exemplifies the way such a rhetorical practice works on its readers. It is in this unsettling prospect that we must finally consider any salutary claims (on Hazlitt’s part) for the ways in which Burke’s




writing might be said to resist the language of power. If, according to Hazlitt’s account, a powerful style is characterized by its ability to overmaster the reader, to overpower rather than to please (the accusation leveled against Hazlitt by the Monthly’s reviewer), then is there really any significant difference between this kind of power and the tyranny which Hazlitt elsewhere characterizes (in the Preface to Political Essays, for instance, the volume in which are collected both of Hazlitt’s essays on Burke’s character) as at work in the ‘very idioms of language,’ where it ‘overawes the imagination, and disarms the will to resist it, by the very enormity of the evil’ (WH 7.12)? The language of Burke’s prose may at first appear to have avoided falling in with the language of power as a result of having not precipitated itself over the verge of poetry, but, to the degree that it enacts the tyranny described above, it would seem to have fallen after all – to have performed its own apostasy. Although Hazlitt would divorce the writer from the consequences of the writings as instruments of political power (WH 7.308-9), in acknowledging that the furnace of the Burkean imagination becomes a ‘dangerous engine in the hands of power’ (WH 7.229), he would appear to counterfeit the otherwise unavoidable conclusion that the language of power is no longer distinguishable from the language of power.

When Hazlitt’s Literary Remains were published in 1836 (six years after his death), Talfourd, his literary executor, prefaced them with an acute analysis of the difficulties of following Hazlitt’s writing. When Talfourd then included his assessment of Hazlitt’s style in his edition of the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848), Thomas de Quincey was quick to pounce on Talfourd’s fundamentally sympathetic account in order to discredit Hazlitt as a prose stylist. Curiously, both Talfourd’s critical homage and de Quincey’s denigration conjure (however unwittingly) the ghost of Burke – a ‘Burke’ remarkably similar to the eloquent apostate first attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790 and later emulated by Hazlitt in the 1810s. The difficulties of following Hazlitt’s writing, it turns out, have everything to do with the challenge of reading his writing both in and against the terms of Hazlitt’s own assessment of the difficulties of following Burke. Dividing Hazlitt’s œuvre into three aspects – moral and political reasonings, observations on character and manners, and literary and art criticism – Talfourd immediately warns us that when reading the moral and political writing, Hazlitt ‘should be followed with caution’:




[Hazlitt’s] metaphysical and political essays contain rich treasures, sought with years of patient toil, and poured forth with careless prodigality, – materials for thinking, a small part of which wisely employed will enrich him who makes them his own, – but the choice is not wholly unattended with perplexity and danger. (‘Thoughts’ lxxxviii) With his emphasis on the essays as ‘materials for thinking,’ only a small part of which need be appropriated by the knowing reader, Talfourd’s warning seems at first glance merely to underline, for the ingenuous reader, the consistently dangerous reputation of Hazlitt’s notoriously vitriolic political opinions. In this light, Talfourd’s strictures simply repeat what we have already seen to be a characteristic nineteenthcentury assessment of Hazlitt’s stature as a critic: while sympathetic and antagonistic readers alike praise Hazlitt’s occasional writing on belleslettres for its taste and sensitivity, they are quick to clarify that they ‘want nothing to do with Mr. Hazlitt’s political opinions.’ Talfourd’s observations suddenly become remarkable, however, when we read in them a warning not against the danger of Hazlitt’s political opinions but, instead, against the perplexities produced by Hazlitt’s style. Rather than dismissing the excesses of Hazlitt’s political writing (as so many before him) as but the splenetic rage of an embittered old Jacobin, Talfourd goes on to argue that it is nothing other than Hazlitt’s overrefined aesthetic sensibility (precisely that quality his contemporaries so admired in his writing on belles lettres) that makes his political writing so bewildering. Hazlitt’s writing on politics must be ‘followed with caution,’ it turns out, because the force of the polemic is repeatedly broken and turned aside by Hazlitt’s seeming inability to resist an arresting image or an apposite quotation. It is the uncontrollable prodigality with which Hazlitt embosses his writing, according to Talfourd, that makes it so hard to follow: He had, indeed, as passionate a desire for truth as others have for wealth, or power, or fame… . But, besides that love of truth, that sincerity in pursuing it, and that boldness in telling it, he had earnest aspirations after the beautiful, a strong sense of pleasure, an intense consciousness of his own individual being, which broke the current of abstract speculation into dazzling eddies, and sometimes turned it astray. (lxxxix) While such a vivid sense of beauty may indeed abide ‘in the breast of the searcher after truth,’ Talfourd concedes, he must simultaneously be




able to deploy ‘the great mediatory and interfusing power of the Imagination’ if he is to render truth visible in the shapes of beauty (lxxxix). Unhappily for Hazlitt, ‘the interfusing faculty was wanting’ (xc). As a result, Hazlitt would often undo the very cogency of his reasoning and diminish its effect through an excess of illustration (a liability of both his moral and his political writing), troubled as he was with ‘“thick-coming fancies”’26: His force was diverted (unconsciously to himself) by figures and fantasies, by fine and quaint allusions, by quotations from his favorite authors, introduced with singular felicity as respects the direct link of association, but tending by their very beauty to unnerve the mind of the reader, and substitute the sense of luxury for that of hatred or anger. (ci) It is in order to circumnavigate those eddies in which Hazlitt himself is said to succumb, then, that we must follow Hazlitt’s writing with caution. Locating the ‘dazzling eddies’ of Hazlitt’s prose in those figures and fantasies, allusions and quotations which, far from irrelevant, are so unpredictably appropriate that they finally overwhelm the reader and carry him away from Hazlitt’s argument proper, Talfourd alerts us to an ideology of the aesthetic in Hazlitt’s writing which arbitrarily threatens to substitute indolent fancy for political principle.27 At the same time as he so presciently alerts us to the power of Hazlitt’s ‘figures and fantasies’ to unnerve the reader, Talfourd’s tantalizing figure of the ‘eddy’ can be seen to turn his own reading astray (or, perhaps more accurately, to suck it in to its abiding center) through inadvertently substituting the luxurious prose of Edmund Burke – that other ‘Eddie’ – for William Hazlitt’s. This substitution occurs precisely within the eddy of Eddie, within the whirlpool constituted by Talfourd’s figure and fantasy of William Hazlitt as Edmund Burke. Beyond Talfourd’s catachresis, in which a proper name becomes a vortex of rhetorical excess, Burke’s prose is conjured in this excerpt by the economy according to which a sense of luxury vitiates what should properly be righteous anger (a criticism of Burke since Wollstonecraft), as well as in the reaches of metaphor according to which ‘abstract speculation’ is a ‘current’ capable of being broken into ‘dazzling eddies.’ In one of Hazlitt’s numerous digressions on Burke’s style (as we have noted, it is characteristic of the whirl-power Burke exerts over Hazlitt that he breaks in upon and breaks up the current of numerous essays ostensibly given over to other topics), he asserts as




proof that, despite his unequivocal admiration for Burke’s style, he has never been infected by Burke’s principles because he has always understood ‘that an abstract proposition [is] one thing – a masterly transition, a brilliant metaphor, another’ (WH 12.228). In Talfourd’s reading of Hazlitt, he both reveals his own inability to maintain the difference between an abstract proposition and a metaphor, and allusively reminds us that, as with Hazlitt, Burke must be ‘followed with caution.’ Twelve years later, when Talfourd reprinted the bulk of his ‘Thoughts upon the Intellectual Character of the Late William Hazlitt’ in the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, de Quincey reviewed the volumes for the North British Review, and quickly took exception to Talfourd’s valorization of Hazlitt as both a metaphysician and as an eloquent writer. Hazlitt could not have been a ‘great thinker,’ de Quincey priggishly rebuts, because he ‘had read nothing’ (Collected Writings 5.231). And he ‘was not eloquent, because he was discontinuous. No man can be eloquent whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word from Coleridge) nonsequacious’ (5.231). For thought or writing to be sequacious (a term used far more often, incidentally, by de Quincey than by Coleridge), it must be perceived as persisting in a continuous direction. That is to say, its ‘current’ must not appear to be vulnerable to eddies of any kind, and it must lend itself to being followed without danger of digression – precisely that which is not the case, according to both Talfourd and de Quincey, with Hazlitt. As de Quincey quickly remarks, ‘Hazlitt’s thoughts were of the same fractured and discontinuous order as his illustrative images – seldom or never self-diffusive’ (5.232). Rather than diffusing their light upon the argument at hand, Hazlitt’s images, figured by de Quincey as fireworks, expire as quickly as they are set off: ‘A flash, a solitary flash, and all is gone’ (5.231).28 Similar to Talfourd, de Quincey seizes upon the figural excesses of Hazlitt’s political writing to explain its nonsequaciousness. Whereas Talfourd contends that it is the luxury of Hazlitt’s figurative language that turns his argument astray, de Quincey maintains that it is the fugitive isolation of this language that precipitates his discontinuity. As with Talfourd’s figure of the eddies in Hazlitt’s prose, de Quincey’s pyrotechnic metaphors for Hazlitt’s brilliance (‘all rhetoric is a mode of pyrotechny, and all pyrotechnics are by necessity fugitive’ [5.231]) again betray the figure and fantasy of Burke, that most incendiary of sophists. As we have already noted, Hazlitt repeatedly characterizes the power of Burke’s writing in terms of the inflammability of its figures, for it was ‘by the eagerness of his blows [that Burke] struck fire from




the flint, and melted the hardest substances in the furnace of his imagination … Burke most frequently produced an effect by the remoteness and novelty of his combinations, by the force of contrast … , [and] by bringing together those things which he knew would blaze out into glorious light by their collision’ (WH 7.310). While Burke’s striking manner, according to Hazlitt, is produced by the remoteness of his comparisons and the conflagration they produce, Hazlitt’s capriciously discontinuous style, according to de Quincey, results from the remoteness of his own illustrations and the solitary flash they produce. Much less generously than in Talfourd’s account, Hazlitt emerges from de Quincey’s dismissal as but Burke manqué.

Talfourd’s and de Quincey’s preoccupation with the difficulties of following Hazlitt has everything to do with the notorious danger of following Burke’s own prose style, a style which in its exercise of ingenuity to cover the most fatal designs ‘became a dangerous engine in the hands of power’ (WH 7.228). And no one is quicker than Hazlitt to point out that ‘the consequences of [Burke’s] writings as instruments of political power have been tremendous, fatal, such as no exertion of wit or knowledge or genius can ever counteract or atone for’ (WH 7.308–9). Before examining one of Hazlitt’s more dazzling Burkean eddies, however, let us turn briefly to a third account of the difficulties of following a writing that everywhere (as Talfourd remarks of Hazlitt’s) ‘trails after it a line of golden associations’ (‘Thoughts’ cii). In Wollstonecraft’s attack (in the Vindication of the Rights of Man [1790]) on the excesses of sensibility that make Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France such a cunning text, we can read an account of Burke’s own dazzling eddies of nonsequaciousness, one which crisply announces the problem Talfourd and de Quincey are still worrying fifty-odd years later: namely, what is this ‘strange chaos of levity and ferocity’ called ‘political writing’? Throughout the Vindication, Wollstonecraft draws our attention to what an arduous task it is ‘to follow the doublings of cunning, or the subterfuges of inconsistency,’ and repeatedly reminds us that she has neither leisure nor patience ‘to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game’ (Works 5.29, 5). Saucily juxtaposing Burke’s moving plea in the Reflections for Louis XVI with his ‘insensible and profane’ speeches to strip George III of his crown during the Regency Crisis of 1788 (5.26ff), Wollstonecraft




appropriates one of Burke’s more hysterical stagings of revolution – ‘Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity … , this monstruous tragi-comic scene’ (Reflections 92) – for her own evocation of the mental institutions Burke was said to have researched for statistics demonstrating that the king was too old to recover from his declared insanity. Her concluding surmise, regarding the ‘daring flight’ of the ‘uncontrouled imagination,’ not only stands forth as a disarmingly acute analysis of Burke’s maddening prose style, but also bears an uncanny resemblance to the posthumous analyses of Hazlitt’s style: ‘You might have heard the best turned conceits, flash following flash, and doubted whether the rhapsody was not eloquent, if it had not been delivered in an equivocal language, neither verse nor prose, if the sparkling periods had not stood alone, wanting force because they wanted concatenation’ (5.28). Similar to ‘that chaotic state of mind, called madness’ (as depicted here by Wollstonecraft; 5.28), Burke’s prose betrays a ‘teeming fancy’ whose lawlessness is marked by its equivocation and discontinuity. If its want of concatenation is due to the flights of fancy to which Burke is said routinely to succumb, its equivocation is due to what Wollstonecraft calls its ‘romantic spirit,’ those ‘false, or rather artificial, feelings’ necessarily at odds with simplicity and truth (5.29).29 In her denunciation of such a fabricated sensibilité – ‘the manie of the day’ (5.8) – Wollstonecraft once again comes up against the peculiar opacity of Burke’s writing: ‘This romantic spirit has extended to our prose, and scattered artificial flowers over the most barren heath; or a mixture of verse and prose producing the strangest incongruities. The turgid bombast of some of your periods fully proves these assertions’ (5.29). Neither verse nor prose but a volatile mixture of each, Burke’s writing cannot be contained by the conventions of principled political writing (which it abjures) any more than those of the pampered romantic literature of sensibility (which it exploits).30 While she notes at the outset of the Vindication that Burke is a man ‘whose literary abilities have raised him to notice in the state’ (5.7; emphasis added), Wollstonecraft cannot finally abide by, let alone follow, a prose style which in its literariness prefers flighty declamation to fixed principle. For Hazlitt, however, it is precisely this violent incongruity of fancy and severity (what Wollstonecraft would domesticate as merely equivocation) that makes Burke’s writing so brilliantly powerful: ‘Burke … gave a hold to his antagonists by mixing up sentiment and imagery with his reasoning; so that being unused to such a sight in the region of politics, they [Wollstonecraft et al.] were deceived, and could not





He gives for the most part loose reins to his imagination, and follows it as far as the language will carry him … . Yet, in the extremes of his mixed style, there is not much affectation … He is the most poetical of our prose writers, and at the same time his prose never degenerates into the mere effeminacy of poetry; for he always aims at overpowering rather than at pleasing; and consequently sacrifices beauty and delicacy to force and vividness… . His only object is therefore to strike hard, and in the right place; if he misses his mark, he repeats his blow; and does not care how ungraceful the action, or how clumsy the instrument, provided it brings down his antagonist. (WH 7.229; see also 16.134) A prose style that aims at overpowering rather than pleasing, in which ‘every word should be a blow’ (WH 12.11), does not ask to be followed logically but rhetorically, according to a Longinian economy of the sublime in which power flashes forth vividly as the force of language. Hazlitt’s preoccupation here with the effect of Burke’s style helps us to see one reason why Wollstonecraft, put off as she is by Burke’s affect, can not follow Burke to her satisfaction. Indeed, attentive as he is to the literary character of Burke’s political writing (‘Burke’s literary talents were, after all, his chief excellence’ [WH 7.229]), Hazlitt also provides us with a valuable purchase on his own style. If we are to follow Hazlitt, it turns out, we must follow Hazlitt following Burke and Burke’s own dazzlingly nonsequacious writing.

Turning in conclusion to a distinctly Burkean passage in Hazlitt’s own political writing (one singled out by Talfourd as a particularly regrettable eddy [‘Thoughts’ cii]), we can read there an attempt to appropriate Burke’s style for the opposition. In the second of his ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’ (December 1816), Hazlitt embarks upon a long and mocking account of the ‘more liberal turn’ that has been given to the question of apostasy with the sneer, ‘Men do indeed change sides, but then it is proper at present that they should’ (WH



discern the fruit from the flowers’ (WH 7.309). Mixing up sentiment and imagery with reasoning, Burke effectively mixes up what Wollstonecraft would understand as verse and prose. Far from finding this a liability of Burke’s writing, Hazlitt repeatedly isolates this extreme verge as a signature of Burke’s style and the secret of its power:

7.131). If the Lake poets have deserted the cause of liberty, they have only done so in as far as it deserted them; if they have gone over to the strong side of the question, they have only done so to preserve the integrity of their principles and the consistency of their characters. While, as Talfourd has argued, Hazlitt’s ‘personal bitterness towards Messrs Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey’ is noteworthy for its ability regularly to ‘disfigure’ his writing (rev. of Lectures 441), it is not simply (according to the etiquette of belles lettres) because there is no place for such animosities; more to the point, it occurs because such invectives regularly cancel themselves out due to the discontinuities attendant upon Hazlitt’s writing, given the degree to which he ‘cannot resist a powerful image, an exquisite quotation, or a pregnant remark, however it may dissipate or even subvert the general feeling which his theme should inspire’ (440). The light credulousness of Hazlitt’s derision reaches a crescendo in his disingenuous reassurance that ‘these political innocents’ ‘have not been made (not they) the overweening dupes of their own conceit and cunning’ (WH 7.132): Our maiden poets, patriots, and philanthropists, have not, it is to be hoped, like Miss Lucy Lockitt been bilked of their virtue, ‘bamboozled and bit.’ They have got into a house of ill fame in the neighborhood of Pall-Mall, like Miss Clarissa Harlowe, but they will defend their honour to the last gasp with their pens against that old bawd, Legitimacy, as she did hers against the old Lady in Duke’s place; or if the opiates and provocatives unfairly administered, and almost unavoidable when people get into such company and such situations, should for an instant rob them of what they hold most dear, their immaculate purity, they will, like Richardson’s heroine, die a lingering death of grief and shame for the trick that has been played upon their unsuspecting credulity! (WH 7.132–3) Hazlitt’s double emasculation of the Lake poets here – dressing down sophisticated courtiers and men of letters as cunningly ingenuous heroines of romance – immediately recalls Burke: the studied deployment of the literature of sensibility; the theatrical allusions; the mock horror in the face of such a ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’; and, most comprehensively, as a piece of writing which mixes up sentiment and imagery with its reasoning (here, on the ‘principles’ of apostasy) in concocting – yes – a ‘sandwich of literature.’ In the absence of a sufficient distinction between the intellectual and the imaginative faculties in Hazlitt’s writing, the allusion to Clarissa




overwhelms the text it was only to support. And the result is that ‘the reader’s whole current of feeling [is] diverted from all political disputes, by the remembrance thus awakened of one of the sublimest scenes of romance ever embodied by human power’ (rev. of Lectures 440; emphasis added).31 Talfourd draws our attention to Hazlitt’s inability to resist a striking quotation as evidence of the imbalance of his political writing and in substantiation of his own claims for the intuitive sympathy and evocation of Hazlitt’s finer moments. Infinitely more powerful than a political harangue or even an apposite simile, Talfourd implies, Clarissa’s flight in effect stages a sublime turn and appropriates the energy and direction that guided Hazlitt’s condemnation of the apostates. No longer a reading of contemporary politics but of canonical literature of sensibility, Hazlitt (in Talfourd’s reading) unwittingly vitiates the power of his critique of the apostates Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth through his uncanny choice of quotation, a choice which enables Talfourd to note the excessive, uncontrollable nature of Hazlitt’s political writing when caught up in an eddying ‘current of feeling.’ Felicitously placed 26 years after Wollstonecraft avowed her difficulty in following Burke, and 20 years before Talfourd would appraise Hazlitt in essentially similar terms, Hazlitt’s tableau marks the continuing and productive contamination of English political writing by what Wollstonecraft denounced as Burke’s equivocal and incongruous mixture of verse and prose. That its affect had an effect in this instance can be read in Talfourd’s own response to this passage: ‘Who,’ he entreats, ‘who, at the suggestion of the stupendous scene which the allusion directly revives, can think or care about the renegade of yesterday?’ (‘Thoughts’ cii). Who indeed: we couldn’t care less about Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in this regard, when the current of feeling carries back to that other towering ‘renegade of yesterday,’ Burke. What, then, are the implications for a writing practice such as Hazlitt’s, organized as it is around the resistance to and exposure of the machinations of power, that its practitioner ‘cannot resist a powerful image’? Talfourd’s formulation recalls Gifford’s dictum that Hazlitt’s writing operates not by force but by falling frequently: to the degree that Hazlitt is seen to fall in with power – here, uncontrollably, the ‘force’ of example (to which neither Burke nor Longinus is immune), as thematized in the ‘human power’ of the literature of sensibility) – his indictment of the Lake poets loses its force as moral indictment. Furthermore (once again according to Talfourd’s criteria), Hazlitt’s writing can be said to fall because of its discontinuity. In the absence of a ‘unifying imagination,’ Hazlitt’s writing repeatedly falls away from




its ‘leading principles’ because it ‘opens so many delicious prospects’ – so many verges – ‘by the way-side’ (rev. of Lectures 440). Formulated thus, the abandonment of principle which Talfourd reads in Hazlitt’s style sounds remarkably like the apostasy for which Hazlitt is so adept at exposing in contemporary poets and poetry. Rather than juxtapose force with falling, however, we might instead read the force of Hazlitt’s language in its falling. This force is to be seen not in the weightiness of the critique (nor in the writer’s despotic lack of courtesy for his audience) so much as in the effect with which it captures the reader’s attention – including Talfourd’s. If, as Hazlitt insists, ‘every word should be a blow,’ then Hazlitt’s ‘force’ is finally to be read in the capacity of his momentary effects to stun his reader. While Talfourd worries that the effect of Hazlitt’s untimely associations is to ‘divert’ the reader’s ‘whole current of feeling,’ it may well be that Hazlitt’s force resides in precisely this (Burkean) ability to divert and carry away, to overwhelm rather than to persuade the reader. Hazlitt’s preoccupation with such rhetorical assaults (not least, how to resist them) is legible throughout his examination of the force of Burke’s style. And it is here, in examining the relationship between eloquence and apostasy, that apostasy reveals itself yet again as a falling produced by the precipitous figurality of language. That such an insight should emerge apropos Burke, that most eloquent of apostates, seems entirely appropriate if we are to acknowledge the force of that ‘strange chaos of levity and ferocity’ that is Hazlitt’s political writing.




In his early ‘Character of Mr. Burke,’ Hazlitt remarks that ‘there is no single speech which can convey a satisfactory idea of his powers of mind: to do him justice, it would be necessary to quote all his works; the only specimen of Burke is, all that he wrote’ (WH 7.301; emphasis added). A similar specter of the mathematical sublime might be invoked in regard to Hazlitt’s own writing, spread as it is over seemingly innumerable articles across a variety of genres. Given the fragmentary nature of Hazlitt’s œuvre, and the frequency with which he draws on and partially reprints his own earlier work, I append the following index of his writing to provide a detailed overview of the place of his writings in this study. (For a complete listing of Hazlitt’s titles, see WH 21.xi–xxi.)

Volume 1: An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 1–91 (1805). Volume 4: The Round Table (1817): ‘On Milton’s “Lycidas,”’ 31–6. (Examiner 6 Aug. 1815) ‘On Milton’s Versification,’ 36–41. (Examiner 20 Aug. 1815) ‘On Gusto,’ 77–80. (Examiner 26 May 1816) ‘On Poetical Versatility,’ 151–3. (Examiner 22 Dec. 1816; ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’ [7.142–4]) ‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem The Excursion,’ 111–25. (Examiner 21, 28 Aug., 2 Oct. 1814; see also 19.9–24) Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817): Preface, 171–8. ‘Julius Caesar,’ 195–9. ‘Coriolanus,’ 214–21. (Examiner 15 Dec. 1816; see also 5.347–50) ‘The Tempest,’ 238–44. ‘Henry V,’ 285–91. Volume 5: Lectures on the English Poets (1818): ‘On Poetry in General,’ 1–18. ‘On Shakespeare and Milton,’ 44–68. ‘On the Living Poets,’ 143–68. A View of the English Stage (1818): ‘Mr. Kean’s Shylock,’ 179–80. (Morning Chronicle 27 Jan. 1814) ‘“Comus,”’ 230–3. (Examiner 11 June 1815) ‘Mr. Kemble’s King John,’ 345–7. (Examiner 8 Dec. 1816) 198



Appendix: Overview of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt

Appendix 199 ‘Coriolanus,’ 347–50. (Examiner 15 Dec. 1816; see also 4.214–21) ‘Mr. Kemble’s Retirement,’ 374–9. (Times 25 June 1817)

Volume 7: Political Essays (1819): Preface, 7–22. (Feb. 1819) ‘Mr. Southey, Poet Laureat,’ 24–5. (Morning Chronicle 18 Sept. 1813) ‘Mr. Southey’s New-Year’s Ode,’ 25–7. (Morning Chronicle 8 Jan. 1814) ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ 85–96. (Examiner 7 July 1816) ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermon,’ 114–18. (Examiner 8 Sept. 1816) ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual,’ 119–28. (Examiner 29 Dec. 1816) ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermon,’ 128–9. (Examiner 12 Jan. 1817) ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Apostates),’ 131–7. (Examiner 15 Dec. 1816) ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Lawyers and Poets),’ 137–45. (Examiner 22 Dec. 1816; see also 4.151–3) ‘The Times Newspaper (On the Connexion Between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants),’ 145–52. (Examiner 12 Jan. 1817) ‘Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review,’ 168–76. (Examiner 9 March 1817) ‘The Courier and Wat Tyler,’ 176–86. (Examiner 30 March 1817) ‘Mr. Southey’s Letter to William Smith, Esq.,’ 186–208. (Examiner 4, 11, 18 May 1817) ‘Character of Mr. Burke,’ 226–9. (‘Coleridge’s Literary Life,’ Edinburgh Review Aug. 1817 [16.115–38]; Champion 5 Oct. 1817) ‘Character of Mr. Burke, 1807,’ 301–13. (The Eloquence of the British Senate, 1807) Volume 8: Table-Talk (1821/22): ‘The Indian Jugglers,’ 77–89. ‘On Living to one’s-self,’ 90–101. ‘On Paradox and Common-Place,’ 146–56. ‘On Milton’s Sonnets,’ 174–81. (New Monthly Magazine March 1822) ‘On Criticism,’ 215–26. ‘On Effeminacy of Character,’ 248–55. Volume 9: ‘A Reply to Z,’ 1–10 (1818). A Letter to William Gifford, Esq., 12–59 (1819). Volume 10: Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy (1826): Chapter 20, ‘English and Foreign Manners,’ 241–52. (Examiner 1 May 1825)



Volume 6: Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 1–168. (1819) Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 169–364. (1820)

Volume 11: The Spirit of the Age (1825): ‘William Godwin,’ 16–28. ‘Mr. Coleridge,’ 28–38. ‘Mr. Southey,’ 78–86. ‘Mr. Wordsworth,’ 86–95. ‘Sir James Mackintosh,’ 95–103. ‘Mr. Gifford,’ 114–26. ‘Mr. Jeffrey,’ 126–34. Volume 12: The Plain Speaker (1826): ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets,’ 5–17. (Aug. 1822) ‘On Reading Old Books,’ 220–9. (London Magazine Feb. 1821) ‘On the Difference Between Writing and Speaking,’ 262–79. (London Magazine July 1820) Volume 16: Contributions to the Edinburgh Review: ‘Coleridge’s Lay Sermon,’ 99–114. (Dec. 1816) ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life,’ 115–38. (Aug. 1817) ‘The Periodical Press,’ 211–39. (May 1823) ‘Shelley’s Posthumous Poems,’ 265–84. (July 1824) Volume 17 (Uncollected Essays): ‘On Consistency of Opinion,’ 22–34. (London Magazine Nov. 1821) ‘The Fight,’ 72–86. (New Monthly Magazine Feb. 1822) ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ 106–22. (Liberal April 1823) Volume 18 (Art and Dramatic Criticism): ‘The Drama: No. II,’ 280–91. (London Magazine Feb. 1820) Volume 19 (Miscellaneous Literary and Political Criticism): ‘Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion,’ 9–25. (Examiner 21, 28 Aug., 2 Oct. 1814; see also 4.111–25) ‘The Laureat,’ 115–7. (Morning Chronicle 20 Sept. 1813) ‘The Times Newspaper,’ 177–82. (Examiner 1 Dec. 1816) ‘Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey,’ 196–8. (Examiner 6 April 1817) ‘The Press – Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Bentham,’ 202–6. (Yellow Dwarf 3 Jan. 1818) ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lectures,’ 206–10. (Yellow Dwarf 14 Feb. 1818) ‘Mr. Wordsworth and the Westmoreland Election,’ 213–14. (Examiner 5 July 1818) ‘Arguing in a Circle,’ 267–78. (Liberal July 1823) ‘Personal Politics,’ 329–34. (Aug. 1830) Volume 20 (Miscellaneous Writings): ‘Coquets,’ 218–20. (Atlas 22 March 1829)



200 Appendix

Introduction: On the Discrimination of Apostasies 1. In this regard, ‘apostasy’ operates according to the logic of what Bataille has termed a mot glissant, a word which is either so perverse or so poetic that it succeeds in positing itself as the only tenable gauge of its own dissolution. The most immediately recognizable examples (for example, Blanchot’s le néant) behave according to Bataille’s inflection of le silence: “Du mot il est déjà … l’abolition du bruit qu’est le mot; entre tous les mots c’est le plus pervers, ou le plus poétique: il est lui-même gauge de sa mort” (28). 2. I am thinking specifically of Romanticism Reconsidered (1963; ed. Northrop Frye), a collection of papers from the English Institute by Frye, Abrams, Trilling, and Wellek. In positioning the papers as both silencing the waning influence of the anti-Romantic criticism of Hulme, Eliot, and Pound, and examining the ‘degree of real content which the term Romanticism has,’ Frye stresses the inseparability of Romanticism and revolution, stating unequivocally that Romanticism ‘is not only a revolution but inherently revolutionary, and enables poets to articulate a revolutionary age’ (viii). 3. On a different plane (one with wide-ranging implications for our study here of the linguistic forms and structures of power), we might position Abrams’s own ‘high argument’ – his attempt to read ‘many seemingly apolitical poems of the later Romantic period’ as political poems (‘Spirit’ 55) – as an articulation of, as it were, a formal politics, or of politics conducted aesthetically. As Ferguson observes, ‘what has Abrams done other than to claim that the French Revolution has become so deeply implicated in Romantic structures of emotion that it must remain as implicit referent … ? And if Abrams’s point is that politics gets sustained by form, McGann’s point ought to be that politics can never be conducted by formal means (since, presumably, the formal version of politics continually tends toward the political masquerading as the apolitical)’ (105). Two of the critics who have usefully complicated our sense of Hazlitt’s abiding presence in such debates are Klancher and James Chandler. Analyzing the relations between romantic criticism and the political legacies of the French Revolution, Klancher succinctly identifies one of the primary obstacles to a critical reading of Hazlitt when he observes, apropos Abrams’s idealizing reading of Wordsworth, that ‘Hazlitt is usually cited as verifying Wordsworth’s claim to base literary innovation upon social revolution’ (as when Hazlitt writes, ‘the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His muse … is a levelling one’ [WH 11.86–7]). Klancher then quickly moves to demystify Abrams’s alignment, noting that ‘it only requires a little further reading of Hazlitt to see that he regarded the stance of “Jacobin poet” as a disturbingly ideological one’ (‘English Criticism’ 466; emphasis added). Klancher suggests that, in citing 201



Notes

Hazlitt’s judgement rather than reading it with more explicit attention to its textual, cultural, or political context (that of his portrait of Wordsworth in The Spirit of the Age), Abrams flattens Hazlitt into a critical spokesperson for Wordsworth in order to validate his own view that Wordsworth translates political principles into poetical forms, a translation which he values as the representative gesture of romantic writing. In Chandler’s remarks on The Spirit of the Age, he, like Klancher, similarly emphasizes the impossibility of citing any one formulation of Hazlitt’s as somehow ‘representative,’ particularly when the volume from which such pronouncements are excised itself ‘refuses either to capture “the spirit of the age” in a single portrait that could stand as its total representation or to select from among the “spirits of the age” one “proxy” … whose own “portrait” could be definitively representative’ (England in 1819 185). Unlike many of Hazlitt’s putative champions, Chandler reads in him an ‘irreducible multiplicity’ of representations which functions in fact to slough off the cultural authority Abrams and others would invest in his pronouncements. The result is a ‘Hazlitt’ whose power consists in the elusive ventriloquism of his own self-representations. (For a more detailed reading of Abrams’s use of The Spirit of the Age, see Chandler, ‘Representative Men’; for a fuller explication of what it might mean to ‘represent’ the ‘spirit of the age,’ see Chandler, England in 1819, 105–14 and 174–85.) 4. In Klancher’s constellation, Abrams occupies the ‘idealist’ liberal position (derived from Leigh Hunt’s sense of the romantic literary revolution as the ‘liberalizing of a specifically literary history’ [466]), whereas Woodring occupies that of the more ‘skeptical’ liberal (derived from Hazlitt [467]), who refuses the ‘displacement of French Revolutionary meanings into romantic poems’ (488). 5. Compare Abrams’s reading of the Wordsworth of the Prospectus to the Recluse: Wordsworth, it is evident, has salvaged his earlier millennial hope by a turn both from political revolution and from utopian social planning to a process which, in the phrase from the Prospectus, is available to ‘the individual Mind that keeps her own / Inviolate retirement.’ The recourse is from mass action to individual quietism, and from outer revolution to a revolutionary mode of imaginative perception which accomplishes nothing less than the ‘creation’ of a new world. (Natural Supernaturalism 338) While Thompson and Abrams share a conviction that Wordsworth (and the Lake poets) turned from public to private vision and reference, Abrams argues for the creative power (rather than the imaginative failure) of this recourse and recoil. 6. Thompson elaborates this claim in his review of the Bollingen edition of The Watchman, and proceeds to argue for the greater influence of William Frend on Coleridge’s radical years; see ‘Bliss Was it in that Dawn: The Matter of Coleridge’s Revolutionary Youth,’ esp. 119–24. 7. In delineating ‘actual lived historical experience,’ Thompson turns to the literary-biographical details of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s sojourn in the



202 Notes

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

West Country in 1797–8, which he makes public and politicizes by focusing on the presence of and correspondence with ‘the most notorious public Jacobin in England’ (157), John Thelwall. As Thompson writes elsewhere, ‘the question of [Coleridge’s] apostasy remains important, not because one wishes to nag at his biographers but because only this sense of covert self-betrayal explains the vehemence, the guilt-ridden and tortuous incoherence, of some of his later writings when he approached this sensitive area’ (‘Bliss Was It in that Dawn’ 129). Yes, Coleridge’s apostasy does remain important – not, however, because of Coleridge’s guilty, covert selfbetrayals so much as because such psychologizing explanations do not adequately account for the ‘tortuous incoherence’ of the later writings, an incoherence which ought not be written off as a matter of the psychology of apostasy but, rather, examined linguistically and rhetorically. Later, making his claims for the exemplarity of the annus mirabilis as a literary-political ‘spot of time,’ Thompson again turns for support to Hazlitt, to the elegiac ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’ (1823; WH 17.106–22), in order to validate his own claims; see ‘Compendium of Cliché’ 154–5. Thompson is not the only (politically minded) critic of Hazlitt to be embarrassed by Hazlitt’s rhetoric. In a study which takes its title from the passage in question, Tom Paulin condemns the Hazlitt of Liber Amoris for its ‘taut flaccidity’ and ‘recycled clichés,’ and, as a direct consequence of this style, for joining ‘the royalist enemy and adopting its kitsch language’ (The Day-Star of Liberty 45, 44). As is often the case with writing of Hazlitt’s dismissed as stale or cliché, the passage in question (along with numerous moments in the similarly inflected ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’) reveals Hazlitt to have exaggerated certain trademarks of his characteristic style for allusive, ironic, and, here, ultimately elegiac purposes. The matter of Hazlitt’s style has been most recently and forcefully addressed by Paulin in The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (1998). In Paulin’s analysis, ‘radical style’ denominates first-and-foremost the intellectual tradition of Rational Dissent and its prose style of ‘plain speaking’ (derived, according to Paulin, through Priestley from St. Paul’s ‘insistently plain-spoken epistolary form’ [53]). Positioned thus, Hazlitt’s ‘radical style’ manifests itself most explicitly in his imitation and appropriation of Miltonic ‘free writing and free speaking’ for the discourse of Rational Dissent (Areopagitica; cited in Day-Star 52). While Paulin’s reading of the influence of Unitarian culture on Hazlitt’s career as a journalist is compelling, I differ from him in emphasizing instead (as do, to differing degrees, David Bromwich and John Whale) Hazlitt’s precipitous emulation of Burkean prose, with its penchant for literary quotation and allusion, and its cultivation of oracular artifice. Considered in this light, Hazlitt’s ‘style’ consists less in its simplicity than in its dalliance with excess. (We will return to the matter of Hazlitt’s style in Chapter 6, ‘Criticism on the Verge.’) For an exemplary reading of ‘unbinding’ as a matter of ‘unsaying’ (and the consequent downfall of language and authority attendant upon such defiant speech-acts), see Jacobs’s analysis of Prometheus Unbound, ‘Unbinding Words’ (Uncontainable Romanticism 19–57).



Notes 203

204 Notes

1. Described by Byron as ‘eminently respectable in everything but his poetry,’ Pye succeeded Thomas Warton as Poet Laureate in 1790 and, as was the case with the majority of eighteenth-century laureates (for example, Tate, Eusden, Cibber, Whitehead), hastened the decline of the office’s reputation for literary merit. As one nineteenth-century chronicler of the laureates bluntly clarified regarding the office, ‘the odes were becoming more and more the butt of every humorous writer, and it was pretty evident their end was approaching. Pye’s mediocrity as a poet hastened their fate, and at the same time drew down ridicule upon the ancient office he held’ (Hamilton 209). 2. In its first five years (1808–12), the Examiner had been served with four ex officio informations for libel, which enabled the Attorney General to bring another party to trial without an indictment from a grand jury (Stout 6; for a detailed account of these charges, see Stout 5–21). Of these four informations, only the last two – regarding flogging in the military (September, 1810) and the Regent’s questionable moral and political character (March, 1812) – actually went to trial. In his successful defense of the Hunts against the 1810 charge of seditious libel, Henry Brougham foreshadowed the stakes for both parties in the government’s final, successful prosecution when he argued that what was really on trial was whether an Englishman must have the privilege of Parliament before he could discuss public measures, whether he shall have the privilege of free discussion; and, if discussion, of expression of his opinions against, as well as for, any political measure (“King v. Leigh and John Hunt” 127). 3. Here and throughout, I am adopting the idiom of ‘the case’ as it has been recently explicated by James Chandler: ‘The case might be initially defined as the genre in which we represent situations, and casuistry as the developed practice for making such representation, the discourse of the application of principle to circumstance’ (England in 1819, 39). Accordingly, making a case here for the discursive emergence of the term apostasy in 1813 will entail representing the Examiner’s interrogation of the office of the Laureate at this time as, critically, a representation of the liabilities of poetic apostasy. The word ‘case’ resounds all the more in an analysis of the rhetoric of apostasy given its derivation from the Latin cadere, to fall or befall, which Chandler indicates through citing Derrida and De Quincey. ‘As you know,’ Derrida writes in Mes Chances, ‘the words “chance” and “case” descend, as it were, according to the same Latin filiation, from cadere, which – to indicate the sense of the fall – still resounds in “cadence,” “fall” (choir), “to fall due” (échoir), “expiry date” (écheance), as well as “accident” and “incident”’ (‘My Chances/Mes Chances’ 5; cited 40n79). Chandler later cites De Quincey’s ‘On the Casuistry of Duelling’ to underscore his sense of ‘case’ in terms of a ‘befalling’: ‘Casuistry, the very word casuistry expresses the science which deals with such cases: for as a case, in the declension of a noun, means a falling away, or a deflection from the upright nominative (rectus), so a case in ethics implies some falling off, or deflection from the high road



Chapter 1: ‘The Laureat Hearse Where Lyric Lies’: The Making of Romantic Apostasy

or catholic morality’ (Uncollected Writings 2.71; cited 198). See also 194–202. 4. Here and throughout, I will follow Hunt’s use of the term ‘patriot’ in its earlier, more radical sense of one who privileges the democratically defined rights of the individual (the ‘rights of man’) over the claims of the nation and the state – that is, a patriotism anchored, as David Eastwood has noted, ‘not primarily in love of country but in fidelity to principle’ (268). It should be noted, however, that while the language of patriotism was ‘integral to the politics of opposition’ in the late eighteenth century, its political meanings shifted constantly during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars until, after the failure of the Treaty of Amiens, it increasingly came to signify ‘loyalty’ to England’s struggle against Napoleonic France (273). (In their reliance upon heroic English Republicanism of the seventeenth century to stir the political passions of nineteenth-century Englishman, Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets, Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’ are patriotic in both senses of the term.) Eastwood’s argument is of particular interest here, given his attention to the language of patriotism in the mature writings of Robert Southey, for it was Southey’s appointment as Poet Laureate in 1813 that prompted a recalibration, as we shall see, of the romantic signification of ‘apostasy.’ 5. When the Laureateship was vacant in 1785 (upon the death of William Whitehead), the ‘tradition’ of burlesquing laureates and laureate odes began with the competition for the laurels ‘staged’ in the influential Probationary Odes, which in fact included Warton’s own ode on the king’s birthday, in addition to a ‘Table of Instructions’ on ode-writing as proclaimed by the king’s chamberlain, ‘for the use of the said Thomas Warton, in his said poetical exercise and employment’ (127): 1st : catalogue of Regal Virtues, from which Laureat must be particularly careful not to omit his Chastity, Skill in Mechanics, and Royal Talent of Child-getting 2nd: Laureat should be liberally endowed with the gift of Prophecy, but careful not to predict any event but that which may be acceptable to your Sovereign (such as subjugation of America …) 3rd: always be provided with a due assortment of ‘true, good-looking, and legitimate words’ and that all necessary care is taken not to apply them but on their proper occasions (ie not for the sake of poetical conveniency, as several predecessors have done) 4th: as the Sovereign of the time being must always be the best, the greatest, and the wisest that ever existed … , so too must the year in question be so celebrated 5th: Music being a much higher and diviner Science than poetry, the ode must always be adapted to music and not vice-versa – the omission of a line or two of your poetry cannot be supposed to make any material difference either in the poetry or the sense 6th: don’t squander more than twenty lines in invoking the Muses (since these sort of invitations have of late years been considered by them as mere cards of compliment …, rarely accepted), nor repeat ‘Hail’ more than fifteen times. (128)



Notes 205

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

With the death of Pye in 1813, the conceit of a competition for the laurels was revived in two publications, Rejected Odes; or Poetical Hops, Steps, and Jumps of a dozen Popular Bards for the Obtainment of the Situation of Poet Laureat, edited by Humphrey Hedgehog (John Agg), and Leaves of Laurel; or New Probationary Odes, collected and edited by ‘Q.Q. and W.W.’ (John Hamilton Reynolds), both of which were more legibly ‘political’ than the Probationary Odes of 1785 in their explicit attention to the excesses of the Regent (as similarly ridiculed, though with greater personal consequence, by Hunt). While the former collection contains Southey’s own lines (on Wellington’s victories over Bonaparte in Spain), the latter dramatizes the confusion encountered by the judge in attempting to distinguish between the two candidates identified as ‘S–y’ and ‘S–y’ for the younger and the older Southey, ‘Who seem’d determin’d in his purse to put / The 100l., and quaff the malmsey butt; / Not caring if himself the but became, / And nobly trusting to his former fame’ (19). For a detailed account of the Examiner’s indictment of the Regent, the charge of libel, and the ensuing trial, see Stout, esp. 5–8 and 17–25, and Prince of Wales v. the Examiner. See, for example: ‘Letter of the Prince Regent,’ on ‘princely inconsistency’ (23 Feb. 1812), in which Hunt ingenuously enquires, ‘Surely it cannot be, that the Prince Regent, – the Whig Prince, the friend of Ireland – the friend of Fox, – the liberal, tolerant, large-minded Heir Apparent, can retain in power the very Men, against whose opinions he has repeatedly declared himself …’ (113); ‘Ministerial Movements and Regal Flatterers’ (1 March 1812); ‘Princely Qualities’ (8 March 1812), in which Hunt feigns an attempt to enquire into such attributes as generosity, patriotism, and magnanimity, only to find that no words will issue from his pen; ‘The Regent’s First Levee’ (15 March 1812); and, climactically, ‘The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day’ (22 March 1812). For the offending lines from the Morning Post, as read aloud in court, see ‘Prince v. the Examiner’ 792. In an open letter to Ellenborough on the eve of the trial, Hunt publicly chided him for the discrepancy between his ‘character’ and his judicial office, and his observations provide us with another opportunity to remark the close relation between Hunt’s objections to Regency politics and his contempt for the Laureateship. According to Hunt, Ellenborough is categorically unfit to discharge his professional responsibilities because in his capacity as a member of the Regent’s Privy Council, Ellenborough maintains a situation ‘incompatible with the nicer feelings of independence required in a Judge’ (‘To the Right Honourable Lord Ellenborough’ 769; emphasis added). Given the fundamental impossibility of maintaining judicial impartiality under such circumstances, Ellenborough ought to know better than to ‘unite two offices in one person, each of which prevents the proper discharge of the other and the just reputation of both’ (770). Hunt, in fact, seems to have been aware of this. As Crabb Robinson records of an evening at Charles Lamb’s at this time, Hunt remarked, ‘No one can accuse me of not writing a libel. Everything is a libel, as the law is now declared; and our security lies only in their shame’ (1.67). As Hunt later reflected in the Autobiography, ‘This article, no doubt, was very bitter and



206 Notes

contemptuous; therefore, in the legal sense of the term, very libellous; the more so, inasmuch as it was very true’ (232). 11. For the complete text of Brougham’s defense, see the Examiners of 13 and 20 December, 1812; for Hunt’s own argument that ‘the Lawyers themselves are not yet agreed upon the nature and definition of libel’ and that, consequently, ‘the word libeller has absolutely no meaning at all,’ see ‘Remarks’; for more detailed Whig and Tory commentaries on the law pertaining to libel in the 1810s, see, respectively, Brougham and Holt; for a more recent analysis of both the juridical definitions of libel and the role played by libel trials as a forum for radical assembly in the 1810s, see Gilmartin 114–21, where he observes apropos the trial of the Examiner that ‘the debates triggered by libel proceedings were intensely combative and dialectical, spilling from the courtroom to the press and back again, and spiralling outward until they seemed to pit “all that was well-constituted and amiable” against “the general wreck of the community”’ (115). 12. For the Examiner, ‘independence’ principally signifies the state of remaining free of party affiliation in order to criticize and to exercise ‘sturdy common sense,’ both of which characterize what the Hunts invoke as ‘English public spirit.’ At no time is this truer than 1813, when Leigh Hunt writes in the Postscript to the bound volume of that year’s Examiner, We took leave of our Readers last year, to go to prison; – we now address them in prison; and thank Heaven, that in every thing which fortune has left in our controul, we can still say that we are the same men. Independence was always one of our greatest enjoyments; the companionship of adversity has rendered it one of our dearest friends; and if to forfeit it then would have been foolish, to abandon it now would be insane. Hunt’s reputation soared with his conviction, after which he was celebrated by opposition writers as a martyr to the cause of freedom of the press. Amongst the many tributes written to Hunt at this time, a sonnet by Henry Robertson (a member of Hunt’s Hampstead circle and an occasional contributor of opera reviews to the Examiner [Cox 43]) succinctly figures the proper intersection of poetry and politics as transpiring not in the Prince’s court at Carlton House but in prison, as a result of decisions reached in a judicial – rather than a personal – court of law. Is this the muses’ haunt? Is this the bower Where Poetry delights to dwell and weave Her fairy fictions? Can she calmly leave The sunny nook, cool stream and simple flower; Pure nature’s charms; – the renovating power She draws from the free breath of morn or eve; The mind by study wearied, to relieve, And pass in silent cell the lonely hour? Yes. This for liberty of mind she seeks, Joined with pure thoughts and conscience ever clear. These found, she cares not where her dwelling lies. Through prison bars her fervent fancy speaks,



Notes 207

208 Notes

(‘Sonnet on the Poet’s Residence in the Surrey Jail,’ cited in Landré 1.75.) Abjuring natural for poetic liberty, Robertson’s sonnet not only re-stages the dynamic of Wordsworth’s ‘“Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room”’ but, in the context of our consideration of the debate over the Laureateship, furthermore constructs the ‘Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’ as a far more unfettered genre than the putatively ampler scope of the laureate ode. 13. Similar points could be made regarding a number of Wordsworth’s sonnets from 1802 (for example, ‘“Great Men have been among us,”’ ‘“It is not to be thought of that the Flood,”’ ‘“There is a bondage which is worse to bear,”’ and ‘Written in London, September, 1802’), with their repeated thematic and formal allusions to Milton, as well as their (Miltonic) urgency in charging Englishmen with an energetic pride in their native liberties – much as Hunt in 1813 will goad English poets into a proper estimation of the value of their own independence. For a more detailed consideration of the Miltonic poetics which inform the 1802 sonnets, see Chapter 3. 14. While Kinnaird is right to clarify that the principal issue for the Examiner was that of literary independence, he does not satisfactorily distinguish the modalities of literary and political power from one another; while the latter is institutional (an effect of court patronage), the former consists, according to the Examiner as well as Hazlitt, in its rejection of such offices and its critically Miltonic defense of ‘all that [is now] understood of freedom against the hirelings of a Court’ (‘Laureatship’ 547). Neither does Kinnaird sufficiently pressure his understanding of literary independence when he contends that, in 1813, the charge of apostasy implies ‘simply that the poet has surrendered the independence by which he formerly held and expressed his convictions; his allegiance as a poet can no longer be given purely and freely (102-3). There is in fact nothing simple about such a surrender of independence: not only can the poet no longer ‘give’ his allegiance (having sold it), he cannot even ‘hold’ his own opinions (now that he does not stand, in-dependent, but hangs, dependent). 15. Similarly, in Hazlitt’s most oft-anthologized essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), he can be seen to mourn the ‘death’ of the romantic poet in an elegiac lamentation over the apostate hearse where poetry lies. Hazlitt’s recollection here of his visit to Coleridge and Wordsworth in Nether Stowey at the end of the annus mirabilis in June, 1798, is a romantic topos of resounding significance and (as is the case with his ‘burial’ of Southey), an essay representative both of Hazlitt’s style (his ambiguous susceptibility to quotation, for example) and of the inseparability of poetry and politics at every level of his writing. With its lament for the absence of any ‘abundant recompense’ following upon the loss of Coleridge, Hazlitt’s ironic, allusive, and bitterly nostalgic essay draws together the most complicated example of romantic apostasy and its most insightful critic in an exhumation of both the intimations and implications of Coleridge’s apostasy, one that poisoned Hazlitt’s faith in the language of poetry as well as in Coleridge’s contaminated bequest, Hazlitt’s own language.



Roams o’er the absent scenes to mem’ry dear, And soars unfettered through cloudless skies.

16. For a consideration of the style of Hazlitt’s pronouncement here, see Paulin 51–3. 17. Tellingly, the essays collected in Political Essays commence with his writings for the Morning Chronicle in 1813 and reach their highest pitch with his relentless assault on (most notably) Coleridge and Southey in the winter of 1816–17. As William Hone remarked in a blurb for Political Essays (which he published), ‘No man has lashed political apostasy with more severity’ (cited in Kinnaird, 101). 18. Southey himself quickly came to feel the constraints of the office. Despite having been reassured by Croker that he would not have to ‘write odes as boys write exercises, at stated times and upon stated subjects’ (LC 4.40; see also Southey’s letter to John King of 17 September 1813, where he writes, ‘You will please to congratulate, and not condole with me, upon this appointment. I take it upon an understanding that no odes are to be expected from me …’ [New Letters 2.73]), or at the very least that he ‘might so execute [them] as to give [them] a new character’ (LC 4.41), Southey was in fact initially bound by the same conventions and restraints as his predecessors. ‘Doomed,’ as his son put it, ‘to feel the inconvenience of writing to meet the taste of those in power’ (LC 4.51), Southey lamented that the ‘Carmen Triumphale’ was hopelessly compromised by the necessity of cutting out all that related to Bonaparte. When he then attempted to reconcile his conscience to its mutilation by assembling the ‘maledictory stanzas’ into a separate ode and sending them – anonymously – to the Courier (LC 4.53), he conceded to Landor what Hunt had warned all prospective candidates of in August, namely that ‘I could not say all I wished or wanted to say, because a sort of official character attached to it’ (LC 4.60). (Southey later published these excisions in collected editions of his poetry as ‘Ode written during the Negotiations with Bonaparte in January 1814’ [see LC 4.54 and note].) However we construe the ‘character’ in question – whether as the persona of the Laureate or as the personage of the Regent or even as the public estimate of the morality of either – what is of note is the adherence of the attachment: Southey could not say what he wanted to say because he was no longer speaking in his own voice. Indeed, as the Regent’s pensioned versifier, he was not even speaking for himself. 19. A detailed construction of the historical experience of apostasy as a product of the 1810s might takes shape as a ‘hot chronology’ along the following lines: Wordsworth’s appointment as ‘Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland’ (April 1813); Southey’s appointment as Laureate (Sept. 1813) and his first ‘Lay of the Laureate’ (Jan. 1814); Wordsworth’s Excursion (Aug. 1814), his collected Poems, with the self-vindicating ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (Feb. 1815), and his Thanksgiving Ode volume (April, 1816); Coleridge’s ‘Lay Sermon’ (Dec. 1816); the pirated publication of Southey’s Wat Tyler (Jan. 1817); Southey’s self-defense in the Letter to William Smith, M.P. (Feb. 1817); Coleridge’s letters to the Courier on apostasy and ‘renegado-ism’ (March, 1817) and the Biographia Literaria (notably ch. 10); Wordsworth’s ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland’ (May, 1818); and ‘Peter Bell’ (April, 1819). James Chandler has recently demonstrated the usefulness (for romantic studies) of the phrase ‘hot chronology,’ or a period that because of its volatility requires a number of



Notes 209

210 Notes

Chapter 2: The Mausoleum of Independence 1. In fact, Coleridge first formulated the ‘logic’ behind this adage when reporting on Pitt’s ‘security speech’ of 18 February 1800 for the Morning Post. In Coleridge’s transcription, Pitt declared, ‘The mind once tainted with Jacobinism can never be wholly free from the taint; I know no means of purification; when it does not break out on the surface, it still lurks in the vitals; no antidote can approach the subtlety of the venom, no length of quarantine secure us against the obstinacy of the pestilence’ (EOT 1.186, 1.186n11). 2. In Chapter 10 of the Biographia, Coleridge writes that ‘Soon after my return from Germany, I was solicited to undertake the literary and political department in the Morning Post [Nov. 1799]; and I acceded to the proposal on the condition, that the paper should thenceforwards be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that I should be neither obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favor of any party or any event’ (BL 1.212). Erdman clarifies that, in fact, any such announcement on the part of the Morning Post only came after a crisis in the relations between Coleridge and the Post’s editor, Daniel Stuart, in January 1800, and, when it was printed (buried amidst details about type, paper, and circulation), it stressed the difficulty of abiding by any such ‘fixed, reasonable, and practical’ principles (EOT 1.xcii–xciii). 3. The two earliest examples cited by the OED are Coleridge’s: ‘for from the effect we may fairly deduce the inherence of a power producing it, but are not entitled to hypostasize this power (that is, to affirm it to be an individual substance) any more than the Steam in the Steam Engine, the power of Gravitation in the Watch, or the magnetic Influence in the Loadstone’ (Friend 2.75); ‘The admission of the Logos as hypostasized (i.e. neither a mere attribute or a personification) in no respect removed my doubts concerning the incarnation and the redemption by the cross’ (BL 1.204–5). 4. Irony, as Paul de Man repeatedly argues, ‘is precisely what makes it impossible ever to achieve a theory of narrative that would be consistent’ (‘Concept of Irony,’ Aesthetic Ideology 179). In the context of a consideration of romantic apostasy, irony names the threat of an imminent undoing of the apostate’s self-consistency, as constructed by a recuperative narrative of his standing-away as somehow stable. As will become increasingly apparent here, my consideration of irony closely follows the implications of de Man’s own, particularly as developed in ‘The Concept of Irony’ and ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality.’ For a reading of de Man’s theory of irony which is particularly attentive to the ways in which the category of time marks and delimits the subject’s sense of the impossibility of self-definition, see Jacobs, ‘The Metaphor of Temporality’ (Telling Time 142–58).



dates to record (as formulated by Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind); in the public discourse on romantic apostasy in the 1810s, 1813 and 1817 are the most incendiary years, due in no small part to the spotlight on Southey. See Chandler, England in 1819, 3–5, 67–9.

5. In this regard, the conversion of a standing into a falling resembles what F.W. Schlegel and, following him, de Man, have designated as a moment of parabasis, or ‘the interruption of a discourse by a shift in the rhetorical register’ (‘Concept of Irony,’ Aesthetic Ideology 178). Thus, the ‘always falling’ that emerges out of the economy of Coleridgean apostasy will be seen to resemble Schlegel and de Man’s structure of ‘permanent parabasis.’ 6. De Man most explicitly considers the relation between irony and falling in the early ‘Allegory and Irony in Baudelaire,’ where he observes (apropos ‘De l’essence du rire’) that for the subject to come ‘face to face with its own fallen condition’ is for it to recognize the attendant ‘threat of a persistent falling’ (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism 111), which falling has been initiated by ‘a passing from a mere extension of the self to an altogether different kind of self that results from a radical change of the level of consciousness,’ which one can in turn think of ‘as a vertical movement of climbing and falling’ (110). (See ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ [Blindness and Insight], especially 211–16.) For a detailed consideration of de Man’s articulation not merely of irony but in fact of theory with falling, see Caruth. 7. The OED defines ‘multeity’ as ‘the quality or condition of being many’ and attributes it to Coleridge in both ‘The Principles of Genial Criticism’ and the Biographia, where, in justifying his use of scholastic formulations, he prefers ‘multeity’ to ‘multitude’ for its greater precision in expressing ‘the kind with the abstraction of degree’ (1.287). Cf. CN 4352 (on the laxity of philosophical language in English), 4449 (to which we will turn at the end of Chapter 4), and 4450. For my purposes here, multeity denominates (in a succinctly Coleridgean fashion) the unmanageability of the term apostasy as deployed both by and regarding Coleridge. 8. Nor is this strictly a recent concern: whether or not denominated as ‘apostasy,’ the question of Coleridge’s political (in)consistency has troubled his readers at least since his wife Sara wrote Thomas Poole in April, 1799, ‘It is very unpleasant for me to be often asked if Coleridge has changed his political sentiments, for I know not properly how to reply. Pray furnish me’ (cited in Sandford 160). Routinely acknowledged by Coleridge’s earliest editors and biographers (amongst them Joseph Cottle, his daughter Sara Coleridge, H.D. Traill, and James Dykes Campbell), the question of apostasy takes on an anxious, critical edge only in the 1920s, when critics of Romanticism begin to diverge into two camps: those who overlook or deny the matter, and those who confront it while conceding that they are unable to resolve it. In Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (1929), Cobban simply refuses to consider the issue at anything other than face-value, remarking that we need not ‘suspect [Coleridge] of disingenuousness when he declares in a letter of 1798 [the notorious, self-incriminating apologia to his brother George (CL 1.395)] that his opinions were never tainted in any degree by the French system’ (165), and that if he was ‘eclectic’ in his political allegiances, it was ‘not because of mere innate perversity of temperament’ but, rather, ‘by force of circumstance’ (158–9) – that is to say expedience, an integral and temporizing element of political apostasy. Nearly contemporaneous with Cobban is Brinton’s account of Coleridge’s political ideas in The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1926), in which he plaintively acknowl-



Notes 211

edges that it is ‘most unfortunate’ that we are unable to separate Coleridge’s ideas from the intricacies of his personality, for ‘much is gained in the way of simplicity – and Truth is surely simpler than psychologists will have it – if a man’s ideas can be granted a degree of objectivity, a certain independence of the petty twistings and turnings of his inner self’ (65). Attempting to distinguish Coleridge’s ‘ideas’ from his ‘self,’ Brinton uncannily (however unwittingly) anticipates the ironic undoing of the self we have sketched above: positing a ‘degree of objectivity’ which validates itself as an interruption of the twists and turns of the self’s tortured narrative of self-consistency, ‘independence’ can here be seen to name a standing-away from the self – an ironic standing, as it were, predicated upon the continued threat of a further, systematic undoing (through twists and turns) of any understanding of the self’s standing-away as in any way stable. Brinton’s formulation is all the more provocative given his proviso that he has ‘no interest in affirming or denying Coleridge’s claim to personal consistency’ (67). 9. For an additional consideration of Thompson’s analysis of Coleridge’s apostasy, see the Introduction 7–10. 10. In his Introduction to a forum on Coleridge’s ‘politics of the imagination,’ Carl Woodring positions the dilemma as one of ‘critical indeterminacy’: ‘Did Coleridge begin as a Jacobin and end as a Tory? Did he begin and end as either a radical or a conservative? Did he begin or end, or begin and end, in eccentric independence? Did he become an equivocator? Did he begin and remain an equivocator?’ (447). Such a litany underlines the degree to which romantic criticism is indeed riddled by questions pertaining to the matter of Coleridge’s apostasy. Receiving particular attention in the discussion which follows here will be the various modalities of in-dependence available to the apostate, as well as both the logic and figures of equivocation in Coleridge’s discourse. 11. McFarland poses the problem thus: ‘Did Coleridge’s attitudes over the course of his adult life represent a coherent development from primary assumptions, or, on the contrary, did they represent an incoherent line of thought characterized by opportunism and outright apostasy?’ (78). Taking as his premiss that Coleridge ‘was temperamentally on all sides of a question at once’ (82), and underlining this habit as ‘the idiosyncracy and defining merit of his mental activity’ (83), McFarland argues for the fundamental coherence and tenacity of Coleridge’s political thought, which he then represents via Hazlitt’s anecdote of Coleridge (in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’) as ‘shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other’ as if ‘unable to keep on in a strait line’ (WH 17.113; cited 83–4). (In a similar figuration of the curious mode of Coleridge’s intellectual movement, Thompson repeatedly speaks of his ‘crablike political evolutions’ [‘Compendium of Cliché’ 145].) McFarland’s ensuing claim – that ‘Coleridge’s political progress was precisely an intellectual version of the idiosyncratic fact that … [he] did keep moving on the path; the shifting, however peculiar to his mode of progression, was not an opportunistic abandonment of one faith and adhesion to another’ (84) – is dubious at best. (Given Coleridge’s penchant for returning to and worrying the same texts, of his own devising, it is hard to detect any real ‘progression’ in



212 Notes

Coleridge’s thought on such matters as, say, Jacobinism after 1798.) And McFarland’s method of resorting to Coleridge’s notebooks and journalism from the 1810s to rationalize his own writings from the 1790s is entirely untenable. Coleridgean repetition, as I argue below, can be seen to be less a matter of shifting than turning – as in turning one’s back on, or turning with an about-face. 12. In a detailed notebook entry of 1801, seemingly occasioned by James Mackintosh’s abrupt political about-face from his pro-French position in Vindicæ Gallicæ (made pæublic in his lectures ‘On the Law of Nature and Nations’ [1799]), Coleridge figures romantic apostasy in terms of two modalities of movement, the wavering of a compass needle and the motions of hands on a watch: A flash of Lightning has turned at once the polarity of the Compass Needle – & so perhaps now & then, but as rarely, a violent motive may revolutionize a man’s professions – but more frequently his honesty dies away from evening into twilight & from twilight to night – he turns hypocrite so gradually & by such tiny atoms, that by the time he has arrived at a given <point> he forgets his own hypocrisy in his conversion. The difference between such a man, & a bolder Liar, is merely that between the Hour Hand, & the Hand that tells seconds, on a Watch. Of the one you can see only the Motion, of the other both the motion & the moving. (CN 947) Which type of ‘Liar,’ then, better represents Coleridge’s own conversion? Though implicit in the image of the compass is the presumption that (as if in accordance with the economy of ‘once/always’) the needle will always reorient itself as it once was, Coleridge’s ‘see-saw’ reasoning on the matter of Jacobinism and apostasy, in league with his incremental adjustments to his own rationalizations (as we shall see), ultimately suggest the delusions of the hour hand. (The figure of the compass recurs on several occasions in assessments of Coleridge’s political mutability: while Erdman reminds us apropos Coleridge’s journalism, ‘we are observing a weathervane, not a magnetic needle’ [EOT 1.lxxxi], Thompson remarks of the same body of work that, at the spectre of Jacobinism, ‘Coleridge swung instantly to the most bitter attacks’ [‘Compendium of Cliché’ 149].) 13. See the Introduction to Essays on His Times, esp. 1.lxiv–lxv, lxxiv–lxxxiii, and lxxxvi–cxiii. For another reprisal of Erdman’s narrative, see Liu, Sense of History 417–20. 14. As Erdman notes, ‘“Recantation” is a term Coleridge uses for himself, more than once, but it is less accurate than “oscillation,” a term he prefers to use for others’ (EOT 1.lxv). In Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, Coleridge speaks in terms of ‘Yea, and Nay, but as an attempt to delineate an arc of oscillation’ in his state of mind (cited by Erdman, EOT 1.lxxv note 3). 15. Or, as Liu formulates Coleridge’s expedient manipulation of political apostasy and the ‘journalism of impartiality’ (Sense of History 416), ‘In two cycles of opportunistic apostasy punctuated by his famous recantations, Coleridge led the Post away from Opposition to its popular contrary: a cryptoMinisterial stand little short of outright Pittism’ (417).



Notes 213

16. Following Erdman: ‘Lord Moira’s Letter’ (20 January 1798; EOT 1.13–17) represents the ‘extreme “Yea” in [Coleridge’s] “arc of oscillation”’ (EOT 1.lxxv); ‘Insensibility of the Public Temper’ (Feb. 24, 1798; EOT 1.20–3) publicizes ‘the ambivalent centre of indifference between the Yea and Nay of Coleridge’s arc’ (EOT 1.lxxvi); and the self-justifying letter to his brother George in which Coleridge claims to be of no party – ‘I am no Whig, no Reformist, no Republican’ – and to have ‘snapped [his] squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition’ (ca. 10 March 1798; CL 1.394–8) marks, albeit privately, ‘the extreme Nay of [his] oscillation’ (EOT 1.lxxx). While the fourth stanza of the ode on France clearly implies that it was the French invasion of Switzerland that prompted the poet to repudiate his support of the French Republic (now no longer synonymous with Liberty), Erdman suggests that just as influential (if not more so) were the arrests of members of the London Corresponding Society and the United Irishmen earlier in the month, for the Post’s coverage of these arrests earned the editor, Daniel Stuart, an interview with the Privy Council (EOT lxxvii–lxxix). From this time forward, Erdman observes, we can see the Post ‘preparing the ground for recantation’ as, in their different ways, both Stuart and Coleridge ‘recanted while saying they did not, and oscillated more than they recanted’ (EOT 1.lxxx, lxxxi). 17. In this second, more extended oscillation, the extreme ‘Yea’ of Coleridge’s arc can be read in his three celebratory essays on Bonaparte (March 11, 13, 15, 1800; EOT 1.207–16); the indifferent center in his essential withdrawal from journalism between March 1800 and September 1802 (with the notable exceptions of three essays between December 1801 and March 1802, on the negotiations leading to the Peace of Amiens [EOT 1.c, ciii]); and the extreme ‘Nay’ in his critical comparison of Bonaparte and the Caesars of the late Roman Republic (Sept. 21, 25, 29; Oct. 2; EOT 1.311–39). 18. Both Christensen and Liu attempt, in other words, to reify their own methods for arresting and controlling Coleridgean apostasy. In writing of Coleridge’s ‘habitual method of disunity,’ Liu subordinates Coleridgean disunity to his own habit (here, a ‘practical’ dialectic) in order to exculpate him from the charge, while in describing Coleridge as ‘always already’ an apostate, Christensen would seem to conflate ‘always’ with ‘all ways’ in order to appear to have anticipated future apostasies. Read more ironically, ‘disunity’ insistently undoes the claims of ‘method,’ and ‘always’ names a constant deferral or interruption of any narrative of the self. In each case, the radical irony of apostasy is such that it represents apostasy itself as a matter of falling back into and repeating a previous mistake – for Coleridge, the attempt to stand away and incorporate his disunity, rather than fall down in succumbing to it. 19. I am indebted on this score to Liu’s reading of Books 9–13 of The Prelude in terms of a contest of genres. See Sense of History 359–87, esp. 360–1 and Liu’s appropriation of Lacan’s ‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever’ as it applies to lyric selfconsciousness and the control of generic boundaries. 20. With regard to the idiom of ‘the case,’ see Chapter 1, note 3, and Chandler, England in 1819 39–40 and 194–202. 21. See Coleridge’s letter to Southey of October 15, 1799: ‘and what say you of the Resurrection & Glorification of the Saviour of the East after his Tryals in



214 Notes

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

the Wilderness? – I am afraid that this is a piece of Blasphemy – but it was in simple verity such an Infusion of animal Spirits into me – Buonaparte! Buonaparte! dear dear DEAR Buonaparte!’ (CL 1.539). As Liu notes (reading Coleridge’s representations of Napoleon within the oscillating arc from Yea to Nay), ‘even as he excoriated Napoleon’s desertion of republican principles and branded him usurper… , he said Yea to his genius,’ and did so to such a degree, finally, that his ‘extreme denunciation of Napoleon is balanced in the body of the essay [‘Bonaparte I’] by a romance of Commanding Genius no less extreme’ (Sense of History 419, 421). See Coleridge’s series, ‘On Peace,’ of Jan. 2, 3, 4, 6, 1800 (EOT 1.64–79), as well as the ‘Paper War’ articles later in the month, especially Jan. 21, 22, 23, 25, and 28 (EOT 1.108–17, 121–30, 135–8). Essays on His Own Times, ed. Sara Coleridge, 1.xxviii; cited by Erdman, EOT 1.lxiv. In ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets,’ Hazlitt characterizes Coleridge’s gait in a remarkably similar fashion, and does not hesitate to read in it an allegory of political inconsistency. Recalling his walk with Coleridge in January 1798, Hazlitt writes that ‘I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a strait line’ (WH 17.113). Erdman and, following him, Liu proceed to gloss the ramifications of world gardening with a further citation from Coleridge’s 1802 notebooks while walking in the Lakes: ‘O for wealth to wood these Tarns… . Bear witness for me, what thoughts I wandered about with – if ever I imagined myself a conqueror, it was always to bring peace – but mostly turned away from these thoughts to more humane & peaceable Dreams’ (CN 1.1214; EOT 1.cv; Liu Sense of History 423). See Liu Sense of History 422–3 for a reading of this entry (furthering Erdman’s own) as a moment in which ‘Coleridge became as Napoleon’; see also Bainbridge 25. Though our consideration of Coleridge’s writing for the Morning Post will close with a reading of the dynamics of ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ (October 1802), see Coleridge’s last essay for the paper at this time, ‘Our Future Prospects’ (January 1803), for further evidence of his preoccupation with the metaphoric operation of the figure of the fulcrum, in this case of the poise and counterpoise of wartime European politics (EOT 1.cxi–cxii, 419–22). As Griggs notes: ’′Εστησ signifies ‘He hath placed’ not ‘He hath stood.’ The word should have been Εστηκε, but then the play on Coleridge’s initials would have lost. Elsewhere he called it ‘Punic Greek.’ Subsequently Coleridge wrote in a copy of his Conciones ad populum: ‘Qualis ab initio, εστησε ΕΣΤΗΣΕ=S.T.C. July, 1820.’ The echo from Ars Poetica, 127 (‘Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet’ [have it kept to the end even as it came forth at the first, and have it self-consistent]), suggests that he found in Horace’s ‘sibi constet’ a confirmation of his forced interpretation. (CL 2.867n)



Notes 215

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

Additionally, for the ‘remembrance’ of Coleridge’s ‘Let him that stands take heed lest he fall,’ see 1 Corinthians 10.12, ‘Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.’ See also the late poem ‘A Character’ (ostensibly written in response to Hazlitt’s portrait of Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age), for a depiction of ‘our Bard’ as ‘Contented if he could subscribe / In fullest sense his name ’′Εστησ (Poems 1.453 and note). Finally, see Hazlitt’s 1821 essay, ‘On Consistency of Opinion,’ for its use of the same lines from Horace as epigraph (WH 17.22). Jonson’s ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’ (1629) is, as Stuart Curran has noted, the first truly Pindaric ode in English, and the first in which the structural terms are anglicized in such a way as also to suggest their choral role in Athenian drama (64). In this view, widely exploited though not uniformly endorsed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the chorus was understood to have been moving ‘to the left during the first strophe, to the right during the antistrophe, and standing still in the epode’ (69). Whether or not this was in fact the case on the Athenian stage, such a progressive alternation of the movements of the ode serves to underline its dramatic as well as its dialectical structure for romantic writers, and distinguishes the formal symmetries of the ‘true Pindaric’ from the ‘irregular Pindaric’ (or Pindarick) introduced by Cowley. While it may be objected that no significant ode in English can be cited as abiding by the controlled structure of regular stanzaic triads, my point is simply that the rhetoric of this schema is imaginatively available to any English poet undertaking the composition of a Pindaric ode. See Curran, who notes that ‘All in all, the ode represented a daunting field for youthful poets to test their originality in,’ and proceeds to cite a 1791 composition by Coleridge originally entitled ‘Prospectus and Specimen of a Translation of Euclid in a series of Pindaric Odes’ in order to demonstrate the illusory ‘balance of power’ promised by the Pindaric ode (71, 72). Equating ‘the exactness of Mathematical disquisition [with] the boldness of Pindaric daring,’ Coleridge describes an equilateral triangle in such a fashion that ‘Not Peter Pindar carp, nor Zoilus can wrangle’ – ‘The unanimous three / C. A. and B. C. and A. B. / All are equal, each to his brother, / Preserving the balance of power so true’ (ll. 31, 51–4; CP 27, 28) – a balance not to be found in the later, political odes. When it first appeared in the ‘Cambridge Intelligencer,’ the title read ‘Ode for the Last Day of the Year’ (to clarify its oppositional relation to the Laureate’s forthcoming ‘Ode for the New Year’); since the 1834 edition of the Poetical Works it has been titled ‘Ode to the Departing Year.’ I follow Woodring in referring to it as the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ (as it was listed in all published versions between 1797 and 1834) in order to stress Coleridge’s presentation of it as ‘an elevated poem on a certain serious subject of public concern’ (Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge 176; emphasis added). Hence its classification by Shuster (247n12) and others as not Pindaric but Pindarick. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ are from Poems (1797). When published in a quarto pamphlet in December, 1796, the line describing Destruction as lying ‘By livid fount, or roar of blazing stream’ (142 in



216 Notes

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

Poems) read ‘Stretched on the marge of some fire-flashing fount’ (see CP 489, note to line 144). See Woodring (Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge 177–8) and Curran (73) for additional appraisals of this connection. The prophetic character of this bard is underlined at the outset, in Coleridge’s epigraph from a speech of Cassandra’s in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: ‘Ha, ha! Oh, oh the agony! Once more the dreadful throes of true prophecy whirl and distract me with their ill-boding onset… . What is to come, will come. Soon thou, present here thyself, shalt of thy pity pronounce me all too true a prophetess’ (ll. 1173–5, 1199–2000; Loeb Classical Library translation, as cited CP 485). Coleridge also refers thus to ‘France’ in the margins of a copy of Sibylline Leaves, where, at the end of the ‘Ode on the Departing Year,’ he writes of ‘the Ode that follows,’ that on France, as ‘a kind of Palinodia’ (Johnson, as cited CP 485). Approximately halfway between the initial publication in the Morning Post of ‘The Recantation’ (April 1798) and its reappearance there as ‘France: An Ode’ (Oct. 1802), Coleridge glossed ‘Palinodia’ (in a March 1800 review of Arthur Young’s pamphlet, The Example of France a Warning to Britain) as a work of recantation ‘almost lyrically unconnected, and set to a more boisterous music than would have suited any [other] species of the Lyric’ (EOT 1.233). As Erdman has noted, Coleridge’s description here of the palinode pertains far less to Young’s avowals in prose than to his own recantations in verse (EOT 1.233n3). As Woodring notes, Stuart’s editorial preface ‘praised Coleridge not for thinking the conduct of France atrocious, which everybody did, but for publicly denouncing what he had formerly praised and for avowing his past misjudgement, which few lovers of Freedom had yet shown the courage to do’ (180; emphasis added) – that is, for recanting. As Liu comments, ‘Recantation, quite simply, sold newspapers’ (Sense of History 420). As is often the case in Coleridge’s later writings and remarks, ‘steadiness’ varies in value according to the context. James Dykes Campbell cites an anecdote from Coleridge’s Table Talk relevant to our discussion of ‘France’: ‘No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution; it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw, and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery of the whole affair’ (Table Talk, July 23, 1832; Campbell’s emphasis). Campbell then comments, ‘The editor of T. T. quotes stanzas iv. and v. of ‘France’ in support of Coleridge’s imperfect recollection. It would have been more useful had he quoted stanzas ii. and iii. in correction of it’ (85n2). All citations from ‘France’ will be taken from CP. For the text of the poem most closely resembling that of its initial appearance in the Morning Post, see either the 1798 quarto Fears in Solitude or Complete Poetical Works, ed. E.H. Coleridge, 243–7 and appar. crit. (which prints the remnants of a truncated stanza which originally appeared between stanzas iv and v); for the text of the ‘Argument’ prefixed to the ode when Coleridge reprinted it in 1802, see EOT 3.295–6, CP 518, or Complete Poetical Works 243–4. See Fry, who formulates a similar reading thus: ‘The energies of nature, high and distant as in “Dejection,” cannot be controlled by the individual will, but only by a consonance … between eternal laws and social laws’ (187).



Notes 217

43. Coleridge suggests something similar in annotations to the Fears in Solitude quarto (presumably made in 1807 or 1808 at Coleorton), where he writes at the end of ‘France’: ‘Southey in a review made some (me judice) unfounded objections to this last stanza – as if I had confounded moral with political Freedom – but surely the Object of the Stanza is to show that true political Freedom can only arise out of moral Freedom – what indeed is it but a Dilation of those golden Lines of Milton: – “License they mean, when they cry Liberty! / For who loves that must first be wise & good.” S. T. C.’ (Evans 255). 44. I cannot agree with Liu, however, regarding the geographical prospect to be had from this verge. Liu maintains that ‘The sea-verge at the time, after all, looked eastward not with intensest love but with hate toward the expected French invasion’ (Sense of History 418). But from the Quantock Hills above Nether Stowey (where Coleridge was living in the spring of 1798 and where he quite specifically located the two other poems published with this ode in the 1798 quarto volume, ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Fears in Solitude,’ the latter written ‘during the Alarm of an Invasion’) one faces west (more precisely, northwest) over the Bristol Channel. And it was from the west that a small French landing force had in fact arrived in February 1797, and was then expected in the winters of both 1798 and 1811. See Lean 2–11. 45. See Evans for the context and history of this and other annotations in the Fears in Solitude volume of 1798. 46. ‘… there are moods of mind, & such as a Poet will often have, & sometimes express; but they are not his highest, & most appropriate moods. They are “Sermoni propiora” which I once translated – “Properer for a Sermon”’ (CL 2.864). As Woodring notes, ‘The motto from Horace was always printed inaccurately as “Sermoni propriora,”’ rather than sermoni propiora, and the ‘absence of the r translates something like “talk more individual” into something like “on the verge of conversation”’ (Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge 255n16). In the context of our consideration of Coleridge’s ‘poetics of the verge,’ however, the inaccurate ‘propriora’ is far more succinct. 47. See Roe Radical Years 267–8 for a similar reading of the contraction and reversal of the poet’s stance in the concluding verse paragraph. 48. In the larger context of Coleridge’s contributions to the Morning Post in the fall of 1802 (the extreme ‘Nay’ in his second arc of apostasy; see n. 17), the essay functions simultaneously as an afterword to Coleridge’s four-part comparison in September of the French and Roman republics (in which Napoleon is represented as having metamorphosed from an Augustus into a Julius Caesar) and as an announcement of the line of argument he will take up in his two public letters of November to Fox, whom he denounces for his continuing commitment to peace. 49. See EOT 1.186 and n. 1 above. 50. In Erdman’s reading, Coleridge’s purpose was manifold: to rouse English Anti-Jacobins into uniting in order to topple Napoleon; to convince lingering English Jacobins that now was the time to recant; and to distance himself from his own earlier support for Napoleon in the winter of 1799–1800 (EOT 1.cix). 51. See CP 517–19 and 522–3 (or Complete Poetical Works 1.243–7, 256–63, and appar. crit.) for changes made to these poems between 1798 and 1802.



218 Notes

52. Particularly Miltonic moments in this extract include Coleridge’s denunciation of the French as ‘still promising / Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free’ (ll. 142–3) and his avowal of the necessity of telling bitter truth (ll. 154–6), much as Milton defends such a necessity in the second book of the Reason of Church Government (a tactic and a text which Coleridge will more thoroughly appropriate in The Statesman’s Manual). Coleridge’s argument here, that the freedom of a nation depends upon the virtue of its people, finds similar expression in Wordsworth’s early sonnets from 1802, as we shall see in the following chapter. 53. For an invaluable gloss on Coleridge’s wariness regarding definite terms, see a notebook entry from November 1801: ‘Whether or no the too great definiteness of Terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital & idea-creating force in distinct, clear, full made Images & so prevent originality – original thought as distinguished from positive thought – Germans in general – ’ (CN 1016). 54. In the same letter to Southey as that in which he had celebrated ‘dear dear DEAR Bonaparte’ as the ‘Saviour of the East’ just after the Brumaire coup, Coleridge goes on to write of Poole’s reaction, ‘in consequence of the News he burns, like the Greek Fire, under all the Wets and Waters of this healthand-harvest-destroying Weather. – He flames while his Barley smokes – see! he says – how it grows out again, ruining the prospects of those, who had cut it down! – You are harvest man enough, I suppose, to understand the metaphor’ (CL 1.539; see also EOT 2.454–5 and 2.455n4). 55. For detailed considerations of Coleridge’s ‘Jacobin youth,’ see Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default?’ (esp. 150–4); ‘Bliss Was it in that Dawn: The Matter of Coleridge’s Revolutionary Youth,’ (esp. 108–20, 124–32); and ‘A Compendium of Cliché: The Poet as Essayist.’ See also Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall.’ For a less than persuasive rebuttal of Thompson, see McFarland 75–139. 56. Southey’s accusation comes amidst a longer tirade: ‘Coleridge has vexed me by his Friend – the affectation of humility even to downright canting, is to me insufferable, and the folly of talking as he does about his former principles is still worse… . There is a baseness in talking about himself as he has done for which even all his power of intellect cannot atone’ (New Letters 1.511). 57. Of Coleridge’s reminiscences later in Chapter 10 regarding his ‘retirement’ to Nether Stowey, Thelwall intervened, ‘Where I visitted him and found him a decided Leveller – abusing the Democrats for their hypocritical moderatism, in pretending to be willing to give the people equallity of privileges & rank, while at the same time, they would refuse them all that the others could be valuable for – equality and property – or rather abolition of all property’ (Pollin 82). For a critique of the ‘defensive, evasive, non-committal’ stance of the editors of the Bollingen Biographia (143) in failing to address this and other contemporary challenges to Coleridge’s veracity here, see Fruman 152–4. 58. See Chapter 4 for an examination of the ‘Wat Tyler scandal.’ 59. Maintaining the division of the extract from ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’ that he had used in 1809 (such that the subsequent essay begins, ‘I was never, at any period of my life, a convert to the system), Coleridge prefaced it in 1818 with this couplet (attributed to Coleridge by E.H. Coleridge,



Notes 219

60.

61.

62.

63.

Poetical Works 2.1008): ‘Truth I pursued, as Fancy sketch’d the way, / And wiser men than I went worse astray’ (Friend 1.223). For Liu, such a position closely resembles the stance of Opposition politics, as epitomized by Burke: ‘… apostasy was endemic to the basic negational structure of opposition. Referenced on a pure relation, Opposition was in the final analysis a will to oppose independent of settled object’ (Sense of History 411; see also 407–13). Compare Hazlitt’s formulation in the later essay, ‘On Consistency of Opinion’ (1821): ‘It seems that they [apostates] are afraid to look their old opinions in the face, lest they should be fascinated by them once more. They banish all doubts of their own sincerity by inveighing against the motives of their antagonists. There is no salvation out of the pale of their strange inconsistency’ (WH 17.24). See also ‘Arguing in a Circle’: ‘Their zeal, their eagerness to distinguish themselves in their new career, makes them rash and extravagant’ (WH 19.276). Indeed, Coleridge would appear to avow as much himself in ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin,’ where he concedes (as we have earlier noted), ‘In this sense of the word, Jacobin, the adage would affirm, that no man can ever become altogether an apostate to Liberty, who has at any time been sincerely and fervently attached to it. His hopes will burn like the Greek fire, hard to be extinguished, and easily rekindling’ (EOT 1.368). For a more detailed account of this lengthy entry, see the notes of the editor of the Notebooks, Kathleen Coburn (whose translations of Coleridge’s Greek have been inserted here), as well as ‘Guilty Thing’ 772–4. Closely related to Coleridge’s reading here of Schelling are his letter of September 30, 1818 to T.H. Green (CL 4.873–6), the fragment ‘On the Error of Schelling’s Philosophy’ (Shorter Works 786–7), and Coleridge’s marginalia concerning the Naturphilosophie, where he asserts the superiority of his own conception of ‘multeity’ over Schelling’s positing of ‘original productivities’ (Marginalia 4.381).

Chapter 3: ‘Lawless Sway,’ Pendulous Politics 1. For the text of Wordsworth’s (incomplete) sonnet on Milton, see SP 46. Throughout this chapter, citations from Wordsworth’s poetry will be taken from the earliest available texts, habitually as (re-)printed in the Cornell Wordsworth editions of Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800 (LB), Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807 (P2V), and Shorter Poems, 1807–1820 (SP). Exceptions to this procedure will be noted parenthetically. 2. When reprinted in A View of the English Stage (1817; [WH 5.230–3]), the clause ‘and (somewhat prematurely) on the triumphs resulting from it’ was omitted. 3. Also cited in Howe 195. Hazlitt clarified his position in response to Crabb Robinson, who had taken exception to Hazlitt’s concluding diatribe against Wordsworth in the Examiner of 22 December 1816, the third of his ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Lawyers and Poets)’ as a violation of decorum. Characteristically denigrating poets for their unprincipled want of fortitude, Hazlitt furthered his denunciation of the ‘rank egotism’ of Wordsworth’s ‘Jacobin poetry’ with the timely reminder that ‘Milton was however a poet, and an honest man; he was Cromwell’s secretary’ (WH 7.144).



220 Notes

Notes 221

divesting the reader of the pride that induces him to dwell upon those points wherein men differ from each other … ; and in making him ashamed of the vanity that renders him insensible of the appropriate excellence which civil arrangements, less unjust than might appear, and Nature illimitable in her bounty, have conferred on men who may stand below him in the scale of society’ (PrW 3.80).

5.

6.

7. 8.

While Wordsworth’s attention here to the necessity of educating his reader is not new, I cite this particular instance given the date of its composition in the midst of Wordsworth’s most publicly Miltonic phase (1814–16). (See also the Preface of 1802, with its emphasis throughout on moral sensations [PrW 1.126–8]; Wordsworth’s letter to John Wilson of June 7, 1802, where he assumes responsibility for rectifying men’s feelings [Early Years 355]; and his letter to Beaumont of February 1808, where he insists, ‘Every great Poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing’ [Middle Years 1.195].) With regard to the vanity that renders readers insensible to the excellence of English civic law, see the Advertisement to the Thanksgiving Ode volume (April 1816), where Wordsworth chides his (disenchanted) readers for the ‘morbid satisfaction’ they presume to take in the ‘present distresses’ of post-Waterloo Britain (Thanksgiving Ode iii–iv; SP 178). The terms are of course John Guillory’s: linguistic capital names the ‘means by which one attains to a socially credentialed and therefore valued speech’ (in Wordsworth’s case, the language of a man speaking to real men …); while symbolic capital designates a ‘kind of knowledge-capital whose possession can be displayed upon request and which thereby entitles its possessor to the cultural and material rewards of the well-educated person’ (the ability of Wordsworth’s contemporaries both to recognize and contest his identification with Milton) (Guillory ix). Coleridge’s 1817 letter to Street (as cited in the epigraph to the Introduction) articulates a relevant and tantalizing reading which will not, alas, be pursued here: the unavoidable question of the degree to which we can or should read Milton ‘in the Devil’s Name.’ That is to say, how ironically does the Satan of Paradise Lost stand in relation to the politics of Milton’s prose? In relation to Abdiel in the epic? If the 1810s are as devilish a time as Coleridge would have it, then we might be well served to reread book 5 of Paradise Lost as an index of the range of possible appropriations of the political Milton. For an in-depth consideration of Romantic attitudes toward Milton, see Newlyn; see also nn. 12 and 13 below. For the ordering of Wordsworth’s sonnets in Poems, in Two Volumes, see P2V 60–1; for their ordering in the two-volume Poems of 1815, see SP 618–19. As James Chandler has pointed out, the presentation of the Thanksgiving Ode volume was modeled quite specifically on the editions of both 1807 and 1815, and the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ itself was to be read as complementing the enormously successful ode, ‘“There was a time,”’ that closed the



4. See the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), where, regarding the ‘real difficulty of creating that taste by which a truly original poet is to be relished,’ Wordsworth maintains that it consists in

second volume of 1807: ‘Even the architectonic arrangement of poems in the 1816 volume recalls the publication of 1807, for the sequence of sonnets dedicated to liberty followed by the elevated and extended “Thanksgiving Ode” closely approximates the order of the second 1807 volume’ (‘“Wordsworth” after Waterloo’ 98–9). 9. Owen and Smyser note this allusion (PrW 3.10) and support it with a letter from Wordsworth to Thomas Poole (previously cited) from the spring of 1814: ‘I have at last resolved to send to the Press a portion of a Poem which, if I live to finish it, I hope future times will “not willingly let die.” These you know are the words of my great Predecessor, and the depth of my feelings upon some subjects seems to justify me in the act of applying them to myself… .’ (Middle Years 2.146). See also Wordsworth’s dedicatory sonnet to Lonsdale, in which, disparaging his incomplete poem as but a ‘token’ of his gratitude, he hastens to correct himself: ‘(may it prove a monument!)’ (Poetical Works 5.1). 10. The figural economy of falling proliferates throughout the proem to book 7. Ironically, Urania is named here (‘Descend from heaven Urania’) not to lead the poet any further ‘into the heaven of heavens,’ but to return him to his native element before he should ‘fall’ from an un-reined Pegasus: ‘Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, / More safe I sing with mortal voice’ (7.23–4; emphasis added). 11. Compare ‘Lycidas,’ ll. 58–63: What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself, for her inchanting son Whom universal Nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the shore was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? 12. As Newlyn proceeds to explain, ‘It was as political allegory that the Romantics read Paradise Lost, at least in the first instance, because to do so lent support to their own radical positions; but … they tended increasingly to turn to Milton as a way of exploring the moral issues that politics raised, rather than simply appropriating Milton as a champion of their cause’ (38). 13. Paulin presents the consistency of Hazlitt’s political reading of Milton as integral to his Unitarianism: ‘because Milton is one of the central cultural pillars of Unitarianism[,] to cite his poetry or prose is implicitly to affirm that faith and perpetuate it in the present’ (217). For the Unitarian reader, furthermore, there was no discernible shift from the republican prose writer to the epic poet; for Hazlitt in particular, Paulin claims, ‘the Allied victory over Napoleon [was] the equivalent of Milton’s tragic disappointment at the restoration of the Stuarts’ (217). 14. Hazlitt’s remarks here on Milton’s style occur in the second of two Examiner pieces on Milton in August, 1815. The reading of ‘Lycidas’ in the previous number (Aug. 6, 1815; WH 4.31–6) is likely his first piece for the Examiner since Waterloo (the week following his review of ‘Comus’), a notice which it is tempting to construct as his elegy for Napoleon.



222 Notes

15. To denigrate the grammar of one’s opponent is a decidedly conservative tactic (often practiced against Hazlitt by William Gifford and the reviewers of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine), one which Hazlitt here turns against Wordsworth when he quotes from the ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’: ‘Whom did the poet intend should be thought of as copying that grave over which, after modestly setting forth the moral discernment and warm affections of its “poor inhabitant,” it is supposed to be inscribed that “Thoughtless follies laid him low, / And stained his name?” Who but himself – himself anticipating the too probable termination of his own course?’ Hazlitt then retorts, ‘Who but Mr. Wordsworth, a person triumphing over the slips of the pen in an electioneering placard, would have put to the press such a sentence as this? We leave it to his friend Mr. Coleridge to extricate him from this grammatical scrape … and translate the above passage into legitimate English’ (WH 19.213). 16. The quotation is from Addison’s Cato, which, appropriately enough, had been written expressly to contest the ‘ridiculous Doctrine in Modern Criticism’ that rewards and punishments should be distributed justly. 17. Hazlitt’s rhetorical question here serves to remind his readers that ‘true’ English republicans are not high church Trinitarians but Unitarians, the intellectual and political descendants of Milton, Marvell, Harrington, and Algernon Sidney – precisely the ‘Great Men’ whom Wordsworth claimed for his own cause in his 1802 sonnet. For an account of the ‘revolutionary consciousness which runs through Unitarian writing,’ including Hazlitt’s, see Paulin, esp. 3–4, 6–11. 18. Among other examples, I am thinking of the imperative moral force to which the Pedlar is subservient in such critical lines (dating from 1798) as ‘“Not useless do I deem … ,”’ in which one ‘needs must feel’ the (putatively natural) power that not only moves us ‘from strict necessity,’ but which disturbingly ‘knows no bound.’ Alternatively, see Wordsworth’s avowal in book 10 of The Prelude (similarly preoccupied as it is with Godwin) that during his residence in France, ‘amid the awe / Of unintelligible chastisement / I felt a kind of sympathy with power’ (1805; 10.414–16). While one might argue that such constructions of power must themselves be recuperated under the heading of ‘the excursive power / Of Intellect and thought’ (‘“Not useless do I deem …”’) to which various Wordsworthian personae yield, these passages nonetheless resound uneasily with the voice that aspires in both the ‘Essay, Supplementary’ and the Advertisement to the Thanksgiving Ode volume to establish dominion and to communicate power. (For ‘“Not useless do I deem … ,”’ see Gill 495–7 and The Ruined Cottage 261–71.) 19. As J. Hillis Miller observes in his review of Natural Supernaturalism, ‘Abrams perhaps takes his writers a little too much at face value, summarizes them a little too flatly, fails to search them for their ambiguities or contradictions in their thought, does not “explicate” in the sense of unfold, unravel, or unweave’ (11). Abrams would not necessarily disagree, noting in the Preface to Natural Supernaturalism that ‘authors, so far as feasible, should be allowed to speak for themselves’ (15). See the Introduction, n3, for a consideration of the impediments such a citational practice poses to a critical reading of Hazlitt.



Notes 223

20. From ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’ (1963), through Natural Supernaturalism (1971) and his review of David Bromwich’s Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (1984), to the Foreword to the exhibition catalogue, William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism (1987), and, most recently, in ‘On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads’ (1989), Abrams consistently exploits the same pronouncement from ‘On the Living Poets,’ in league with the same two paragraphs from the portrait of Wordsworth in The Spirit of the Age. Even his review of Bromwich often reads as but another opportunity to remind us (this time more self-consciously attentive to Hazlitt’s ‘doubleness of assertion and attitude’) that Hazlitt was right: Wordsworth was the exemplary romantic poet. 21. Repeatedly arguing that ‘Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and his other early poems were a revolution in poetry equivalent to the French Revolution in politics, in that they transferred to their stance and subject-matter the political principles of human equality and fraternity’ (Foreword viii; emphasis added), Abrams distinguishes three interrelated projects in Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetics: an overturning of the decorum and hierarchy of genre; the translation of scriptural transvaluations into literature; and the reformation of his readers’ sensibilities. Furthermore, for Abrams, this last constitutes Wordsworth’s own critique of romantic ideology ‘On Political Readings’ 371–2). 22. Compare Hazlitt’s account, in the Letter to William Gifford, of the ‘subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil, in order to guard against its approaches’ (WH 9.38). 23. Although Abrams denounces the ‘radically political criticism’ of McGann and Marjorie Levinson as a ‘“must-be,” or necessitarian theory: it brings to the reading of any literary work a predetermination of the kind of meaning … that the act of reading will necessarily discover’ (‘On Political Readings’ 367), his irritation at such totalizing strategies does not exempt him from succumbing to a similar degree of ‘critical authoritarianism’ when it comes to his own ‘reading’ of Hazlitt, insisting as he repeatedly does on Hazlitt’s recognition of a clear alignment of political and poetical revolutions which (at least in Hazlitt’s writing) is far too complicated, not to mention tenuous, to be so simply distilled. For an analysis of Abrams’s essay as a ‘massive misreading’ of the methodology of the New Historicism, see Liu, ‘The Power of Formalism’ 770n92; for an appraisal of the exchange between Abrams and the New Historicism, see Ferguson. 24. Klancher cites Hunt from the Examiner (29 April 1821, review of Byron’s Letter to **** ***** on the Rev. W.L. Bowles’ Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope), as reprinted in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism 640. (See Introduction 6–7.) For an alternative account of Wordsworth’s contributions to literary ‘revolution’ which illustrates the complexity of Hunt’s reading of Wordsworth, see Feast of the Poets 87–109. 25. In the 1807 Poems, the section on sonnets is divided into 20 ‘Miscellaneous Sonnets’ and 26 ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty.’ In the 1815 Poems, the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ are further divided into two parts, those which appeared in 1807 and a second series of 32 sonnets, from 1807 to 1813. With Miscellaneous Poems (1820), the second series of ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ is augmented by six additional sonnets from the



224 Notes

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Thanksgiving Ode volume (1816) and the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ itself. For the arrangement of the political sonnets in 1807, see P2V 60–1; for 1815, see SP 618–19; and for 1820, see SP 627–8. See Wordsworth’s letter to Lady Beaumont of May 21, 1807, where, although Milton is not mentioned by name, the ‘simplicity’ and ‘grandeur’ in terms of which Wordsworth characterizes the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ inflects them as decidedly Miltonic: ‘… I would boldly say at once, that these Sonnets, while they each fix the attention upon some important sentiment separately considered, do at the same time collectively make a Poem on the subject of civil Liberty and national independence, which, either for simplicity of style or grandeur of moral sentiment, is, alas! likely to have few parallels in the Poetry of the present day’ (Middle Years 1.147). Woodring characterizes the ‘goading sonnets’ in terms of their ‘mixture of rhetorical passion, topical immediacy, lucid political and psychological propositions, apostrophes to leaders who had fallen in a just cause and to whole peoples in the pulse-quickening news, with bookish appeals to historic analogues’ (Politics in English Romantic Poetry 125). For a detailed account of Wordsworth’s sense of historic indebtedness to the ‘great men’ of English Republicanism, see Fink. For a dialectical explication of Wordsworth’s ‘critical patriotism’ in these sonnets (treated as Wordsworth’s first fully political discourse since the 1793 ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’), see Liu, Sense of History 432–5. In the Morning Post of January 29, 1803, Daniel Stuart (the proprietor of the paper) ran the following announcement: ‘We have been favoured with a dozen Sonnets of a Political nature, which are not only written by one of the first Poets of the age, but are among his best productions. Each forms a little Political Essay, on some recent proceeding’ (cited in Sense of History 431; see also EOT 3.297). In the end, Wordsworth contributed a total of seven sonnets to the Morning Post in 1803: ‘“I griev’d for Buonaparte”’ (Jan. 29), ‘Calais, August, 1802’ (‘Is it a Reed that’s shaken by the wind’; Jan. 29); ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (Feb. 2); ‘September 1st, 1802’ (‘We had a Fellow-Passenger’; Feb. 11); ‘Calais, August 15 th, 1802’ (‘Festivals have I seen’; Feb. 26); ‘“It is not to be thought of that the flood”’ (April 16); and ‘“When I have borne in memory what has tamed”’ (Sept. 17). All seven sonnets appeared with the signature W.L.D., initials which, according to several of Wordsworth’s editors, stood for Wordsworthius Libertati dedicavit (cited by de Selincourt, Poetical Works 3.453). As Stuart Curran has noted, ‘Whatever their lapses in an ultimate scale of value, the “Sonnets on Eminent Characters” stand out from the thousands of sonnets published in the closing decade of the eighteenth century for their creation of a sustained public posture and unified cultural vision’ (39–40). Curran goes on to argue that Wordsworth’s address to Coleridge in the thirteenth of the political sonnets (‘Written in London, September, 1802,’ which begins ‘O Friend! I know not which way I must look / For comfort …’) is not merely a gesture of friendship but in fact ‘an implicit acknowledgment of obligation to [Coleridge’s] example’ (40). For an account of the deterioration of the English sonnet between Milton and Wordsworth, see Havens 488–528 and Curran 29–39.



Notes 225

32. As Curran observes, ‘Wordsworth creates the greatest of neo-Miltonic sonnet sequences through the profound imagining of what Milton would have required of the poet who would emulate him’ (48). 33. See, for example, Wordsworth’s letter to Alexander Dyce (April 1833), in which he remarks of Milton’s tendency to override any clear distinction between the octave and the sestet by delaying the turn, ‘Now it has struck me, that this is not done merely to gratify the ear by variety and freedom of sound, but also to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense Unity in which the excellence of the Sonnet has seemed to me mainly to consist’ (Later Years 2.604–5). See also Wordsworth’s remark in the Fenwick note on the 1802 sonnets regarding the ‘dignified simplicity and majestic harmony’ that runs through most of Milton’s sonnets (cited by de Selincourt, Poetical Works 3.417). 34. Todd articulates the sonnet’s appeal for Wordsworth particularly well, noting that ‘In the regularity of the sonnet form he found an artistic counterpart to the personal discipline for which he was beginning to yearn; and the appeal of the ordered verse form was the precursor of those imperious demands which the principle of duty was later to make on him’ (115). While Todd inflects ‘duty’ in terms of poetic standards of order (culminating in the ‘Ode to Duty’), Wordsworth’s preoccupation in 1802 with the tension between freedom and order is of course every bit as political as it is poetical. 35. See Dorothy’s journal entry for May 21, 1802 (Grasmere Journals 101). 36. The letter (to Lamb?) continues, ‘The Sonnets of Milton which I like best are that to “Cyriack Skinner;” on his “Blindness;” “Captain or Colonel;” “Massacre of Piedmont;” “Cromwell” except two last lines; “Fairfax,” &c’ (Early Years 379). 37. In poetry, as John Hollander has observed apropos this sonnet, ‘freedom paradoxically manifests itself in the imagination’s unbridled propensity to design new bridles for itself’ (90). 38. See Havens 531–2 for an account of Wordsworth’s handling of the technical challenges of the sonnet. According to Havens, ‘in the first six years of [Wordsworth’s] sonnet activity, during which his best work was produced, thirty-seven of his octaves are legitimate, twenty-three have the three-rimed form, a b b a a c c a, and only one is irregular’ (531). See also McNulty. 39. Compare the sestet of Milton’s sonnet to Vane: … besides to know Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done. The bounds of either sword to thee we owe; Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son. 40. For a reading of ‘“I griev’d”’ which is sympathetic to Wordsworth’s appropriation of a Napoleonic ‘true Sway,’ see Bainbridge 86–8. 41. In 1803 in the Morning Post, ‘“I griev’d”’ appeared as Wordsworth’s first sonnet and ‘Calais, August 15, 1802’ ran nearly a month later, the fifth of seven. See above, note 29.



226 Notes

42. Compare Prelude (1805) 6.352–70, where Wordsworth writes of ‘How bright a face is worn when joy of one / Is joy of tens of millions,’ and of towns ‘gaudy with reliques’ of the Fête de la Fédération (14 July 1790). 43. Beyond ‘“I griev’d”’ and ‘Calais, August 15, 1802,’ Wordsworth elsewhere addresses ‘sway’ (in this first series of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’) as an imperial corruption of revolutionary French liberté in ‘October, 1803,’ where he denounces Napoleon as ‘one man, of men the meanest too! / Raised up to sway the world…’ (ll. 2–3). See also the ‘Lines on the Expected Invasion. 1803’ (P2V 598–9), where the memory of the heroes of the Commonwealth is invoked to spur Englishmen on to ‘take your stand’ and ‘display / Banners at enmity with regal sway’ (ll. 2, 5–6). 44. Curran continues: ‘The second half of the sonnet sequence recovers motive force through the incorporation of Milton as abiding genius within it. The sequence does not simply pay tribute to Milton: it regains its sense of purpose and integrity, both cultural perspective and inner assurance, through incorporating Milton’s voice and vision’ (47). 45. Apropos lines 13–14 of ‘London, 1802,’ de Selincourt and Darbishire cite Wordsworth’s letter to J.K. Miller (Dec. 17, 1831): ‘It is the habit of my mind inseparably to connect loftiness of imagination with that humility which is best taught in Scripture’ (Poetical Works 3.455; Later Years 2.465). Interestingly, Wordsworth is concerned in this letter (written during the debates on the Reform Bill) to clarify his opposition to any ‘revolutionary’ English spirit; the republican ‘Milton’ whom he summons in 1802 would have been entirely unacceptable to him in 1831, given his interest in defending the political institutions of ‘this empire’ (Later Years 2.464; emphasis added). 46. That it was read in this light can be seen in the regularity with which even such an ambivalent Wordsworthian as Leigh Hunt cites this poem as a barometer of Wordsworth’s ‘greatness’; consider, for example, Hunt’s important allusion to it during the 1813 debate over the Laureateship, as discussed in Chapter 1, and, below, his reliance upon it in the notes to the Feast of the Poets (1814) as well as in his response to the Waterloo sonnets (1816). 47. See SP 627–8 for their arrangement in Miscellaneous Poems (1820), which appends six sonnets from the Thanksgiving Ode volume (1816) to the second sequence on liberty in the collected Poems (1815). 48. See Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry, 122–6, for further commentary on Wordsworth’s later, ‘international’ political sonnets. 49. Stephen Gill’s remarks on Wordsworth’s 1816 odes are equally applicable to the falling-off that can be read in the later political sonnets, in which, ‘in attempting a generalizing utterance Wordsworth forsook the very ground of the success of most of his poems, which is that they are realized in and through the matter-of-fact, the everyday, the human. “Michael” and “The Brothers” depict belonging, rootedness, loyalty, but not as abstractions, rather as forces expressed in daily living in a particularized place. The 1816 odes are empty of human beings, unanchored in specific place or event’ (319–20). Similarly, although the 1816 sonnets are topically catalyzed by Waterloo, they too are devoid of the anxious quotidian reflections that energize the 1802 sonnets.



Notes 227

50. For further commentary on the Miltonic echoes in the Waterloo sonnets, see Bainbridge 233n48. 51. As Bainbridge notes, ‘the three sonnets on Waterloo … fail to transcend their status as pseudo-laureate celebrations of the British victory’ (169); consequently, ‘it was by abandoning the sonnet and returning to the sublime lyric mode of the irregular or Pindaric ode that Wordworth found a form in which he could “worthily rehearse” the “hideous rout” of Waterloo’ (170). (Ketcham, the editor of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode,’ makes a similar claim; SP 12.) For a detailed reading of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode,’ see Bainbridge 170–6. 52. Hunt announces his reading of Wordsworth’s sonnets as a party: ‘Heaven Made a Party to Earthly Disputes – Mr. Wordsworth’s Sonnets on Waterloo’ (97). Not a celebratory event so much as a conspiracy, this party’s guest list (far more restrictive than that of Hunt’s own, earlier Feast of the Poets) is restricted to God, the Holy Alliance, and Wordsworth. Neither Hunt nor the readers of the Examiner, as quickly becomes apparent, have been invited. And though Milton’s company seems to have been solicited – who better to represent God’s Party and represent its ways to Englishmen? – it remains uncertain on whose side he will be seated. 53. Hunt’s critique here (that ‘Wordsworth has got into an awkward business here altogether,’ rekindling Catholic superstition and praising an elected monarch [98]) is exemplary of his reading strategies, the habitual ways in which he resists Wordsworth’s moves toward transcendence. 54. See, for example, the Advertisement to the Thanksgiving Ode volume. 55. Though it might be argued that Wordsworth’s politics in the sonnets are consistent to the degree that he is always anti-Napoleonic, Hazlitt’s critique reveals the degree to which Wordsworth’s public presentation of his Miltonic aspirations in 1814–16 inflected the manner in which he was read from that point on. Relying critically on two overdetermined citations from the Excursion, Hazlitt insists that because of Wordsworth’s recantation of revolutionary politics in that poem, he can not be considered as more than ‘half the man or half the poet Milton was’: [Mr. Wordsworth’s sonnets] mouth it well, and are said to be sacred to Liberty. Brutus’s exclamation, ‘Oh Virtue, I thought thee a substance, but I find thee a shadow’ [cited in Excursion 3.775–7], was not considered as a compliment, but as a bitter sarcasm. The beauty of Milton’s Sonnets is their sincerity, the spirit of poetical patriotism which they breathe. Either Milton’s or the living bard’s are defective in this respect. There is no Sonnet of Milton’s on the Restoration of Charles II. There is no Sonnet of Mr. Wordsworth’s, corresponding to that of ‘the poet blind and bold,’ ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont.’ It would be no niggard praise to Mr. Wordsworth to grant that he was either half the man or half the poet that Milton was. He has not his high and various imagination, nor his deep and fixed principle. Milton did not worship the rising sun, nor turn his back on a losing and fallen cause. ‘Such recantation had no charms for him!’ [Excursion 3.778] (WH 8.176) 56. The language is Shelley’s, from the 1816 sonnet, ‘To Wordsworth’ (Poetry and Prose 92), with which Hunt clearly seems to be not only in agreement



228 Notes

57.

58.

59.

60.

but in fact in dialogue. Note, for example, the representation in each of Wordsworth as a heavenly beacon – in Shelley’s case, presumably an allusion to ‘London, 1802,’ where Wordsworth addresses Milton, ‘Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart.’ See Cox, who remarks of the Hunt Circle’s acutely social sense of poetry that ‘The occasional nature of so much of even the group’s best verse is a sign of how deeply embedded their poetry was in day-to-day life, whether personal, social, cultural, or political’ (65). Concerned as he is in the long note on Wordsworth to compensate for his previous neglect, Hunt’s more insightful remarks on Wordsworth are actually to be found in the note on Southey, where he characterizes the apostasy of the Lake poets as a product of their literary language: ‘the maudlin German cant which first infected their muse at last corrupted their manners, and being a jargon adapted to every sort of extreme, enabled them to change their free opinions for slavish ones, without altering the cast of their language’ (Feast 77). Benjamin Haydon, who arranged the visit between Wordsworth and Hunt, later remarked in a letter to Wordsworth (April 1817), ‘Leigh Hunt’s weathercock estimation I cannot account for … . He first attacks you when he had never read you, then a friend (Mr. Baines) brought him your Excursion, pointed out your sonnets and he began to find that he should have looked through a Poet’s works before he came to a conclusion on the genius displayed in them – he then recanted … . [Hunt] never holds one opinion one month he does not sophisticate himself out of before the next is over’ (cited in Moorman 2.279). Mary Moorman’s remark on Hazlitt’s footnote – ‘as Wordsworth had included the whole of the Vagrant’s story after her return from America, it seems a strange and careless criticism’ (2.280) – overlooks the fact that the descriptions of war (to which Hazlitt alludes) all precede her return, and that the narrative’s decisive events (her father’s eviction and her husband’s enlistment) are also absent from the 1815 version, collected in the collected Poems as ‘Juvenile Pieces.’

Chapter 4: Facing the Past: Spectral Apostasies 1. For detailed accounts of the political agitation during the winter of 1816–17 – specifically, the significance of the three Spa Fields meetings of December 1816 and their aftermath – see Halévy, Liberal Awakening 15–25 and Thompson, Working Class 631–41. 2. For a history of the man as well as the uprising, see Wat Tyler xvii–xxiii, which reprints the relevant pages from Hume’s History of England. 3. As cited in the Examiner, Dec. 8, 1816 (779). 4. After delivering the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the 1817 parliamentary session (Jan. 28), the Regent was returning to Carlton House when a projectile (a bullet? a pebble?) passed through his carriage, piercing two windows. Though the Regent was unhurt, this unexpected attempt on his life (if it was that) immediately recalled the attack on George III’s carriage at the opening of Parliament in 1795, and threw Sidmouth’s cabinet into a counter-revolutionary fervor. See Halévy, Liberal Awakening 22–3.



Notes 229

5. In 1794, Southey had left the manuscript with the radical publisher Ridgway, who was at that time in Newgate. Southey never bothered to recover the manuscript, which came to be owned by a friend of Ridgway’s, a dissenting minister named Winterbotham, who arranged for its publication after the history of Wat Tyler began to circulate again in December 1816. See Carnall 161–5; see also Storey 253–7 and passim; for Southey’s own account, see New Letters 2.150–1, 153 and LC 4.234–9; for a detailed account of the entire controversy, see Hoadley. 6. ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ (Feb. 4); ‘Inscription for the Apartment in Chepstow Castle, where Henry Marten the Regicide was Imprisoned Thirty Years’ (Aug. 18); ‘Inscription for a Monument at Old Sarum’ (Aug. 25); ‘Inscription for a Monument in the New Forest’ (Sept. 1); ‘To Horror’ (Sept. 15). In a later edition of Wat Tyler (April 1817), William Hone reprinted the poems on Henry Marten and the battle of Blenheim, as well as ‘On Bad Rulers’ and an extract from ‘Sapphics.’ For contemporary texts of Southey’s poems from the 1790s, see Poems. 7. The astonishing sales figures for Wat Tyler would prove to be Southey’s highest ever, a significant increase over the successes of The Curse of Kehama (1810) and Roderick, The Last of the Goths (1814), and far more than the later The Vision of Judgement (1821); see Storey 200–5, 218, 225, 230–2, 285–9. 8. See Chapter 2 for a consideration of Coleridge’s 1817 articles for the Courier. 9. See Hunt, ‘Death and Burial of the Late Mr. Southey’ and ‘Extraordinary Case of the Late Mr. Southey.’ 10. As Carnall observes, ‘The spectacle of the Laureate’s jacobin past rising in judgement against him was too diverting to be reasoned away; nor was the unconciliatory tone of the Letter itself calculated to impress the ordinary reader favourably’ (164). 11. In the Preface, ‘Suitable to Recent Circumstances,’ to his April 1817 edition of the play, Hone underscores the gothic qualities of Wat Tyler’s sudden appearance: ‘Had Mr. Robert Southey made up his mind to revel only in the “sweet sin of poesy,” at his retreat in Cumberland, perhaps no ghost had risen from the grave, and all might have been well … .’ Having decided to write conservative polemics in the ministerial press, however, ‘during a paroxysm, in the Quarterly, [he] had scarcely put down his pen, when, as in retribution, up jumped WAT TYLER’ (Wat Tyler vi, vii). 12. The phrase is William Godwin’s, from a melancholy pronouncement of 1801: ‘I have fallen (if I have fallen) in one common grave with the cause and the love of liberty; and in this sense have been more honoured and illustrated in my decline from general favour, than I ever was in the highest tide of my success’ (‘Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon,’ Uncollected Writings 284). Though acknowledging that he himself may have fallen from favor and into the ‘grave’ of liberty, Godwin is more immediately concerned with attempting to account for the political apostasies – the fallings-off – of so many of his contemporaries, including Samuel Parr. What is of note in Godwin’s representation of himself as having fallen into a grave is his clarification that he has not been silenced by such a fall but (and it is this implication to which we shall return) that he is speaking to us from – if not beyond – the grave.



230 Notes

13. For extracts from Smith’s speech, as well as the reply by Charles Wynn, see Madden 236–9. For a more complete account, see Hoadley, who writes, ‘Smith is reported to have entered the House of Commons on the morning of Friday, 14 March with a copy of Wat Tyler in one coat pocket and the current issue of the Quarterly in the other. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates [vol. 35 1090–4] and sundry newspaper accounts record that during the debate on the Seditious Meetings Bill he read a characteristic extract from each, declared Wat Tyler to be seditious and its author (whom he did not mention by name) worthy of prosecution, and predicted that the author would go free because the Ministry would not proceed against a Quarterly writer’ (83). 14. Smith’s position is representative of contemporary attitudes toward Southey: at issue was not the fact that he had changed sides, but that he so thoroughly denounced those who continued to maintain those positions which he had once espoused. Compare Hazlitt, from a contemporaneous comparison of Wat Tyler and ‘Parliamentary Reform’: ‘Those who have undergone a total change of sentiment on important questions, ought certainly to learn modesty in themselves, and moderation towards others; on the contrary, they are generally the most violent in their own opinions, and the most intolerant towards others’ (WH 7.170). 15. See, for example, Hazlitt’s review of Southey’s 1816 ‘Lay of the Laureate,’ in which he undermines the Laureate’s patriotism in terms of his recent productions: ‘It was understood to be for his exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty that [Southey] was made Poet-Laureate. It is then high time for him to resign … Has he discovered that the air of a Court does not very well agree with remonstrances against acts of oppression and tyranny, when exercised by those who are born for no other purpose? Is his patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House convenience? His silence on this subject is not equivocal’ (WH 7.95). See also Hunt’s earlier characterization of laureate poetry as libelous in ‘On the New-Year’s Ode’ (as cited above, Chapter 1). 16. See Chapter 2 n. 3 for a gloss of ‘hypostasis.’ 17. See Chapter 3 for a consideration of the charge of literary Jacobinism as it applies to Wordsworth. 18. See Hoadley: ‘As soon as Southey heard of Smith’s remarks, his attitude toward the whole Wat Tyler affair changed. No longer did he see the poem as dangerous only in stirring up riots; it personally menaced its author’ (84). See also Carnall 163. 19. For the full text of Lord Eldon’s opinion, see LC 4.251; on Southey’s desire to see the publishers charged with sedition, see LC 4.239, 242. 20. The curious applicability of ‘renegade’ and ‘renegado’ to Southey’s career is further illustrated by the OED, which cites his Roderick, The Last of the Goths (1814) to illustrate both terms: ‘How best they might evade The Moor, and renegade’s more watchful eye’ (Roderick VIII); ‘Might I meet that renegado, sword to scymitar, in open field’ (Roderick IX). 21. See Hazlitt, ‘The Courier and “The Wat Tyler”’ (WH 7.176–86), where he observes, ‘Instead of applying for an injunction against Wat Tyler, Mr. Southey would do well to apply for an injunction against Mr. Coleridge, who has undertaken his defence in The Courier. If he can escape from the ominous patronage of that man’s pen, he has nothing to fear from



Notes 231

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

his own… . [Wat Tyler] only proves that he was once a wild enthusiast: of the two characters, for which Mr. Southey is a candidate with the public, this is the most creditable for him to appear in … . A strong dose of the Jacobin spirit of Wat Tyler may be of use to get the sickly taste of the Poetlaureate and the Quarterly Reviewer out of our mouths’ (WH 7.176–7). Southey strikes this pose repeatedly throughout the Letter to William Smith, even going so far at one point as to characterize the English Jacobins of the 1790s as a uniquely enlightened class: ‘[Wat Tyler] was written when republicanism was confined to a very small number of the educated classes; when those who were known to entertain such opinions were exposed to personal danger from the populace; and when a spirit of Anti-jacobinism was predominant, which I cannot characterize more truly than by saying, that it was as unjust and intolerant … as the Jacobinism of the present day’ (7). See Hazlitt, ‘Consistency of Opinion’ (WH 17.22–34), where he alludes to ‘a story somewhere in Don Quixote, of two champions coming to a shield hung up against a tree with an inscription written on each side of it,’ in order then to represent apostasy in terms of the combatants changing sides during the heat of battle and subsequently denying ‘that there were any such words on the opposite side as they had before been bent on sacrificing their lives to prove were the only ones it contained.’ As unaccountable as such a scenario may seem, Hazlitt continues, it is nonetheless the very situation of some modern apostates: ‘It seems they are afraid to look their old opinions in the face, lest they should be fascinated by them once more. They banish all doubts of their own sincerity by inveighing against the motives of their antagonists. There is no salvation out of the pale of their strange inconsistency’ (WH 7.24). Below, we will take up the apostate’s dilemma when attempting to face his old opinions as it arises in Southey’s Letter to William Smith. See Hazlitt’s three-part dissection of the Letter (WH 7.186–208), where he caustically observes, ‘It is not always that a simile runs on all-fours; but this does. The sun, indeed, passes from the East to the West, but it rises in the East again: yet Mr. Southey is still looking in the West – for his pension’ (WH 7.203–4). Southey follows up his figure of the apostate as (political) weathervane when, several pages later, he writes: ‘The changes which have taken place render other changes inevitable; forward we must go, for it is not possible to retrace our steps; the hand of the political horologe cannot go back, like the shadow on Hezekiah’s dial [2 Kings 20.9–11]; … when the hour comes, it must strike’ (Letter 30). Within the context provided by the ‘political horologe,’ Southey’s defense of change as inevitable and irreversible underlines the structure of apostasy not as a terminal conversion but as an initiating turn which is not to be arrested. Both the formulation and the premiss are de Man’s; see ‘Autobiography as De-facement,’ where he characterizes autobiographical discourse as ‘a discourse of self-restoration,’ developed and deployed in response to a perceived threat of deprivation to or mutilation of the self (Rhetoric of Romanticism 74). Compare Coleridge, who in the second of his articles on Southey and Wat Tyler similarly maintains that William Smith cannot really be ignorant that ‘the Wat Tyler is a Poem, and a dramatic Poem, and that it is both unfair and



232 Notes

absurd to attribute to the Poet, as a man all the sentiments he puts in the mouth of his character’ (EOT 2.457). 28. It is not simply that political apostasy and literary criticism are inevitably linked in the 1810s; the problem of romantic apostasy continues to illuminate the interpretive dilemma posed by the attribution of agency, not least because – as the very rhetoric of Southey’s dramatization of himself suggests – such agency can never be reliably adduced. 29. As in fact it may be said to have done; in the Life and Correspondence, Charles Cuthbert Southey conspicuously appends it to volume 4, noting that he thinks it right to place it there as, ‘from my father’s reprinting it in his Essays, it appears plainly that he intended it should be preserved, and as the history of Wat Tyler is incomplete without it’ (LC 4.256). 30. Read in its proper context (the concluding paragraph of ‘Autobiography as De-facement’), de Man’s formulation bears even further resonance for our reading of the Letter to William Smith: ‘Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopoeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause’ (Rhetoric of Romanticism 81). Southey’s prosopopoeiae in the Letter – the displacements of persona from the first to the third person in regard to both the past and the future (allowing him to speak, proleptically, from beyond the grave) – disfigure as well as restore in the sense that, speaking for Robert Southey but not as Robert Southey, he re-faces (pre-faces) himself only then ultimately to deface himself in conclusion through silencing himself.

Chapter 5: Upstaging the Fall: The Spectacle of Romantic Apostasy 1. Inchbald’s isolation of the danger of the play at the level of the sentence draws our attention particularly to the tendency of many of the play’s notable rhetorical flourishes, such as Martius’ dismissal of the plebeians in the first scene, ‘Go get you home, you fragments!’ Reserving the sentence as the unit for aristocratic expression, Martius’ grammatical elitism here reveals yet another fashion in which we can read what romantic criticism repeatedly terms Shakespeare’s ‘leaning’ toward the arbitrary side of the question in Coriolanus. In the subsequent and final paragraph, Inchbald more prominently inflects the ability to stage the play as a barometer of public discontent: ‘As Coriolanus is now once more brought upon the stage, and the voice of the public has hailed its return; this circumstance may be received as a joyful evidence – that the multitude at present are content in their various stations; and can therefore, in this little dramatic history, amuse themselves with beholding, free from anger and resentment, that vainglory, which presumes to despise them.’ The pleasure Inchbald takes in the renewed possibility of staging the play (a possibility which rests with the public’s ability to amuse itself at its own expense) compromises our sense of her ideological savvy as a critic, as she reinscribes her earlier attention to the play’s dangerous tendencies within the larger framework of an humiliating public stasis.



Notes 233

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

For a similar portrayal of the audience of a full theatre as a ‘national convention,’ upon whom the passions of the play will work to conciliate and harmonize, ‘to make the various ranks pleased with themselves and with each other,’ see Walter Scott’s review of James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 200–1. For a far more vitiated appraisal of the play’s politics, see Coleridge’s notes on Coriolanus, in which he cites the play as exemplary of the ‘wonderful philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare’s politics’ and as little more than a ‘good-humoured laugh at mobs’ (Shakespearean Criticism 1.79). All citations from Hazlitt’s review of Kemble’s 1816 production of Coriolanus are taken from the text reproduced in A View of the English Stage (1818; WH 5.347–50), which follows the original Examiner review (15 Dec 1816; 792–4) more closely than that reprinted in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817; WH 4.214–21). John Philip Kemble, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron (London: Longman, 1806). Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Coriolanus are taken from this edition, and will be cited parenthetically by page. (For a facsimile of an earlier Kemble edition, see Kemble, Coriolanus [1789], ed. IngaStina Ewbank.) For an account of the textual history of Kemble’s Coriolanus, see Ewbank; for an account of the contemporary reception of Kemble’s Coriolanus, see Rostron, ‘Examination of the Prompt Copies.’ See Hazlitt, ‘Coriolanus’: after remarking how ‘ably handled’ are the play’s ‘arguments for and against aristocracy, or democracy, or the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it,’ he nonetheless concludes that ‘Shakespear himself seems to have had a leaning toward the arbitrary side of the question’ (WH 5.347; emphasis added). See Rostron, ‘Contemporary Political Comment in Four of J.P. Kemble’s Shakespearean Productions.’ After an absence of two years, Kemble returned triumphantly to Covent Garden on 15 January 1814, in the role of Coriolanus. His success was soon to be compromised, however; on 27 January 1814, Edmund Kean made his debut at Drury Lane, in the role of Shylock. According to one account, ‘within a month [Kean] had taken the town by storm and the public, fickle as a Roman crowd, had turned from their old idol to the new’ (Kelly 192). See also Baker 324–5. For Hazlitt’s account of Kean’s debut, see ‘Mr. Kean’s Shylock’ (WH 5.179–80), prominently collected as the first review in A View of the English Stage (1818). See Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Kemble’s King John’ (WH 5.345–7). See also Hazlitt on Kean’s Coriolanus (WH 18.290–1). Whereas, for Hazlitt, Kemble remains fixed and immoveable, ‘Kean’s acting is not of the patrician order; he is one of the people and what might be called a radical performer.’ Unable to ‘keep his state,’ and consequently descending ‘into the common arena of man,’ Kean betrays that the ‘intolerable airs and aristocratical pretensions of which [Coriolanus] is the slave, and to which he falls a victim, [do] not seem legitimate in him, but upstart, turbulent, and vulgar’ (WH 18.290). For a shrewd account of the tension in Hazlitt’s criticism between his adulation of Kemble and his respect for Kean, see Galperin, 140–55. See also Donohue, Dramatic Character, 323–43. Donohue’s response (elsewhere) to



234 Notes

8.

9.

10.

11.

Hazlitt’s criticism of Kean’s ‘failure as Macbeth’ further underlines Hazlitt’s peculiar preoccupation with falling: ‘Although he may not have done full justice to Kean, it is Hazlitt’s sense of failure that makes his criticism extremely significant’ (Donohue Theatre in the Age of Kean 149). In his review of Boaden’s Memoirs, Scott generalizes Hazlitt’s observation to include all of Kemble’s Roman characters (Cato, Brutus, Coriolanus), who were, according to Scott, ‘peculiarly suited to [Kemble’s] noble and classical form, his dignified and stately gesture, his regulated yet commanding eloquence … To his peculiar art of acting, also, the Roman character in its various shades afforded great facilities. There was almost always connected with it an assumed character, which qualified, if it did not master, that which nature had assigned to the individual’ (222–3). Scott’s attention to the tension provided by each character’s ‘assumed character’ succinctly underlines Coriolanus’ fatal inability to act his part. Hazlitt additionally notes that Kemble ‘gave the same prominence to the very same passages, that he used to do’ (WH 5.375): humbling himself before Volumnia during the triumphal procession in Act II; waiting for Tullus next to the statue of Mars with the opening of the curtain for Act IV; prostrating himself before Volumnia in Act V; and taunting Aufidius in the final scene, ‘Like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioli; Alone I did it …’ (62). While Jonathan Bate is certainly right to note the ‘conjunction between the dispute about the availability of grain in the first scene of Coriolanus and the principal cause of public discontent in the years immediately after the Napoleonic wars: the 1815 Corn Law,’ it nevertheless does not follow that, in his reviews of the play, it is ‘quite clear that Hazlitt is thinking as much about the condition of the people in England in 1816 and 1817 as he is about the interpretation of Coriolanus’ (Shakespearean Constitutions 166). Hazlitt’s nuanced attention to Coriolanus’ physical as well as his rhetorical posturing suggests, instead, that the play is far too fraught to be reduced so quickly to a merely topical interpretation. So too in Joanna Baillie’s Introductory Discourse, in which she explicates at length the ‘dominion’ of strong and fixed passions (1.9, 29–30, 37–42). Baillie’s contention that the ‘chief object [of tragedy] should be to delineate the progress of the higher passions in the human breast’ resonates in Hazlitt’s praise for Kemble’s genius as shining most particularly in the representation of those characters who are governed by ‘one solitary sentiment or exclusive passion’ (WH 5.376). Indeed, Hazlitt’s final eulogy for Kemble illustrates the sense of ‘passion’ that preoccupies Baillie: ‘In short, we think the distinguishing excellence of his acting may be summed up in one word – intensity; in the seizing upon some one feeling or idea, in insisting upon it, in never letting it go, and in working it up, with a certain graceful consistency, and conscious grandeur of conception, to a very high degree of pathos or sublimity’ (WH 5.379). Despite such a striking similarity between Baillie’s delineation of the passions and Hazlitt’s praise for Kemble (who not only staged Baillie’s De Monfort [1798] but also appeared with his sister in the title roles), Hazlitt casually dismisses both Baillie’s writing and her sensibilities in the



Notes 235

Lectures on the English Poets (1818): ‘Her tragedies and comedies … are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible: they are not so in nature, or in Shakespeare’ (WH 5.147). Hazlitt’s objection here to the republican nature of Baillie’s account of the passions reminds us of one of the abiding paradoxes of his criticism: that despite his ‘Jacobin’ politics, Hazlitt can be every bit the critical aristocrat in his own state of letters; as he freely concedes in reviewing Coriolanus, ‘The cause of the people is indeed but ill calculated as a subject for poetry’ (WH 5.347). 12. Witness Coriolanus’ revulsion at the prospect of bending his ‘arm’d knees, / … like his / That hath receiv’d an alms!’ (39). Obsessed as he is to ‘stand, / As if a man were author of himself’ (56), Coriolanus is fundamentally unable to sway beyond the confines of his dramaturgical definition of ‘self’ – as against (political or military) actor. 13. For an alternative account of the modalities of swaying in romantic drama, see Christensen’s reading of Sardanapalus (Lord Byron’s Strength 275–99). 14. Coriolanus’ exchange here with his mother (III.ii in Kemble) repeatedly reveals the pendulous nature of Coriolanus’ dilemma, and his double inability either to dress or act the part: Cor. I muse, my mother Does not approve me further. Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me False to my nature? Rather say, I play Truly the man I am. Vol. O, sir, sir, sir, I would have had you put your power well on, Before you had worn it out. Cor. Why, let it go. Vol. You might have been enough the man you are, With striving less to be so: Lesser had been The thwartings of your dispositions, if You had not show’d them how you were dispos’d, Ere they lack’d power to cross you. Cor. Let them hang. (36–7) Ironically, of course, it is Coriolanus who not only hangs now, divided as he is being acting and being, but who will also hang between the Volscians and Volumnia in Act V, and thus precipitate his final fall. 15. Kemble’s text divides Shakespeare’s II.i into three distinct scenes, with the curtain rising for II.ii on the scene of a triumphal procession streaming through an arch accompanied by music and a public ovation, then coming down on ‘A grand March’ (22) immediately after Coriolanus’ pronouncement. In noting of his farewell performance that Kemble ‘gave the same prominence to the very same passages, that he used to do’ (WH 5.375), Hazlitt directs our attention to precisely this scene. For accounts of Kemble’s gift for and exploitation of pageantry, see Rostron ‘Examination of the Prompt Copies’ 27, and Kelly 72–3.



236 Notes

16. Consider, for example, Menenius’ equivocal remark when releasing Coriolanus from his formal duty to stand for the consulship through begging the voices of the people, ‘You’ve stood your limitation’ (29), and the equally curious assertion by the tribunes in the act of recalling the voice of the people, ‘Let us stand to our authority’ (34). 17. While Coriolanus was Kemble’s most famous role, there were no more iconographically significant representations of him as Coriolanus than those depicting him in precisely this pose. Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Kemble represents him standing, statue-like, in ‘mean apparel’ yet of ‘exalted port,’ while the frontispiece to the British Theatre edition of Coriolanus (1808; ed. Inchbald) shows Coriolanus unveiling himself, between Tullus Aufidius on one side and a statue of Mars on the other, with the inscription, ‘Knowest thou me yet?’ So powerful was Kemble’s impression upon the audience in this posture that, even as late as 1838, Macready attempted to distance himself from Kemble’s iconicity by entering against a backdrop of only a starlit Antium foregrounding a distant seascape (Brockbank, Introduction to Coriolanus 81). 18. Throughout his eulogy on Kemble’s talents, Hazlitt repeatedly stresses Kemble’s ability to stand firm: Kemble failed as Hamlet ‘from a want of flexibility,’ for ‘he played it like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose’ (WH 5.377); his Macbeth ‘stood as it were at bay with fortune, and maintained his ground too steadily’ against the passions that assailed him (WH 5.378). 19. Ironically, the overt theatricality that constituted much of the appeal of Kemble’s production can here be seen to undo its own hero for, like an extravagantly sensible theater-goer, Coriolanus has been too much moved by the theatricality of his own imagination. Mary Jacobus’s decidedly Hazlittian observations on Macbeth are strikingly apposite our own concerns with Coriolanus: ‘What we witness in Romantic responses to Macbeth is not so much anti-theatrical prejudice in yet another of its historical manifestations, as the difficulty of confronting the inherent theatricality of the imagination itself’ (‘“That Great Stage Where Senators Perform”: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre’; Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference 37). See also Carlson, 1–4, 14–21. 20. Scott’s account of Coriolanus’ death, as represented by Kemble, emphasizes its prominence as a decisive coup de théâtre: ‘There was no precaution, no support; in the midst of the exclamation against Tullus Aufidius, he dropped as dead and as flat on the stage as if the swords had really met within his body. We have repeatedly heard screams from the female part of the audience when he presented this scene, which had the most striking resemblance to actual and instant death we ever witnessed … ‘ (224). Having himself succumbed to one spectacle (that of Volumnia shaming him with her knees), Kemble’s Coriolanus subjects his own audience to another. 21. The status of Coriolanus’ ‘consistency’ is particularly dependant upon the political liberties staged by each appropriation. For adaptations prior to Thomson’s, see Nahum Tate, The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth: Or, the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus (1682), and John Dennis, The Invader of His Country; Or, the Fatal Resentment (1720).



Notes 237

22. The phrase is of course Coleridge’s, dating from his ‘portraits’ of Bonaparte for The Morning Post in March, 1800 (see Chapter 2). In an earlier article, an obituary for General Washington, Coleridge characterizes ‘commanding genius’ as ‘that character which all men are compelled to feel, though few are capable of analysing’ (EOT 1.132) – precisely Hazlitt’s dilemma, as we shall see, in his repeated attempts to come to terms with the ‘aristocracy’ of the imagination that identifies itself not with the plight of the citizens but with the imperious hauteur of Coriolanus. For a more detailed account of ‘commanding genius’ and its importance for our understanding of romantic theatre, see Carlson 21–6. 23. By ‘Jacobin poetics’ (as examined in greater detail in Chapter 3), I do not mean the traditionally valorized reading of Wordsworth’s poetics in terms of a ‘levelling muse’ that reduces all things to the same standard in order to confer dignity and sublimity upon previously marginalized poetic subjects and genres. Rather, ‘Jacobin poetics’ names what Hazlitt condemns in Wordsworth’s poetry as the ‘spirit of rank egotism’ – specifically (as he clarifies at this time in a diatribe against the Lake poets), that which motivates Wordsworth to deride the idea ‘of any thing greater, or thought greater than himself,’ to tolerate ‘nothing but what he himself creates,’ and to sympathize ‘only with what can enter into no competition with him’ (WH 7.144). 24. For additional considerations of Hazlitt’s seemingly contradictory commitments to aesthetic power and Reform politics, see Kinnaird (esp. 101–13) and Trilling, ‘The Princess Cassamassima’ (The Liberal Imagination 81–2; cited in Kinnaird 112 and Shakespearean Constitutions 166.) 25. As opposed to what Bate denigrates as ‘today’s more strident “materialist” readers,’ Hazlitt is ‘too catholic in his interests … to imply that there is nothing but politics’ (8). 26. Presenting the essay on Coriolanus as Hazlitt’s ‘most famous expression of radical doubt’ regarding the limitations of romantic republicanism, Tom Paulin has recently read in it ‘an almost tragic gaiety’ – indeed, ‘an almost Nietzschean exhilaration’ – as Hazlitt ‘rages against [Napoleon’s] defeat by following the logic of the imagination’ with an exultant relish in its aggrandizement of power (the Allied victory at Waterloo) at the expense of the more republican understanding (Day-Star of Liberty 39, 40). This is excessive, and skews the Hazlittian formulation upon which it depends – namely, that ‘the principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle’ (WH 5.348). Paulin’s glib dramatizations (the essay is no more ‘about’ Napoleon than it is ‘about’ Nietzsche) further compromise their tenability when we consider how hastily Paulin succumbs to careless historical references as well as to an inverted version of the republicanism he would puncture. Yes, as Paulin repeatedly points out, Hazlitt did publish his review of Kemble’s Coriolanus in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat and in the same year as Wordsworth’s celebration of the occasion (see below, n. 29), but it was 18 months after Waterloo and 11 months after the publication of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode.’ (For a more allusively textured lament on Napoleon’s defeat, see Hazlitt’s two Round Table contributions of August 1815 on Milton, later collected as ‘On Milton’s “Lycidas”’ [WH 4.31–6] and ‘On Milton’s Versification’ [WH 4.36–41]). The complicated significance of



238 Notes

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

Napoleon for both Hazlitt’s and the romantic imagination generally is lost in Paulin’s reductive psychological readings of the ‘radical style’ of ‘Hazlitt Agonistes’ (46). I disagree, in this regard, with Galperin’s assessment of the Coriolanus review as characterized by ‘precious little overdetermination’ and amongst Hazlitt’s ‘most searing and unambiguous works of criticism’ (151). ‘Searing,’ indeed, but it is precisely the uncontrollable ambiguity and, furthermore, overdetermination of such prevalent terms as ‘poetry’ and ‘power’ that necessitate Hazlitt’s repeated reappraisal of the crucial issues raised here – how best to characterize the relation between the language of poetry and the forms of power? how to understand the theatricality of the romantic imagination? – in the fourth of the ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspapers’ (‘On the Connexion Between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants’), ‘Mr. Kemble’s Retirement,’ and, most importantly, the Letter to William Gifford, Esq. Hazlitt’s analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Jacobin poetics’ (cited here) ran in the Examiner exactly one week after his review of Coriolanus and is, in its invective against Jacobin poetics as an ideology whereby a poetics based on the love of power passes itself off as a poetics founded on sheer humanity (WH 7.144), significantly indebted to the examination of power in the Coriolanus review. See, for example, Hazlitt’s treatment of Julius Caesar, in which he observes of Brutus’ vulnerability as a ‘friend of liberty’ that the design to ‘liberate their country fails from the generous temper and overweening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their case and the assistance of others’ (WH 4.198). Pope, Dunciad, 4.188; cited by Hazlitt as an apposite commentary on Henry V (WH 4.285). Sneering at the citizens in the salutation, ‘What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues?’ before dispatching them as ‘fragments,’ then condemning their exhausted proverbs as ‘shreds,’ Martius tramples without hesitation on the spirit of humanity which the citizens ‘vent’ and ‘sigh forth’ in their supplication. In a stanza in which he would establish the endorsement of martial service by God, Wordsworth apostrophizes the ‘God of peace and love’ thus: ‘But thy most dreaded instrument, / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, – / Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!’ (SP 188). As Paulin notes, ‘By alluding to this passage, Hazlitt is recognizing just how completely Wordsworth has rejected his earlier commitment to the people’s cause. The poet has followed the “logic” of the imagination and the passions, which seek to “aggrandize what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery”’ (Day-Star of Liberty 40). Hazlitt regularly deploys Wordsworth’s unfortunate couplet (dropped after 1832) at the expense of both the Lake poets and their defenders. See, for example, his disingenuous inquiry at this time into the political consistency of ‘the fictions and the forms of poetry,’ where he notes that ‘“Carnage”’ was every bit as much the ‘“daughter of Humanity”’ under Robespierre as under Wellington: ‘It is true, these men have changed sides, but not parted with their principles, that is, with their presumption and egotism’ (WH 7.142). As we saw earlier, it is habitually with reference to the disparity between ‘the tone of his former thinking’ in his poetry and that of his current language that ‘Mr. Examiner’ Hunt defines Southey’s apostasy in terms of a



Notes 239

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

rhetorical inconsistency which results in not simply an expedient desertion but a fall into dependence: ‘Formerly Mr. Southey was all ardent aspiration after principle and public virtue; now he is content to fall in with expedience and muster up arguments for apostacy’ (‘New Poet–Laureat’ 609; emphasis added). See also Hunt’s notice of the Characters in the Examiner, in which he remarks ‘the very striking susceptibility with which [Hazlitt] changes his own humour and manner according to the nature of the play he comes upon; like a spectator in a theatre, who accompanies the turns of the actor’s face with his own’ (rev. of Characters 682). Far from ‘obtruding’ his political sentiments on the plays, Hazlitt’s critical sympathy is represented here as such that he writes in response to the manner and nature of the play in question. While all three reviews appeared anonymously, I base these attributions not only on Hazlitt’s suppositions but also on the evidence compiled by Shine in The Quarterly Review Under Gifford. As Hazlitt himself observes in the Letter to Gifford, not only have both of them appropriated Coriolanus as an allegory of arbitrary power, but that is what Gifford, after all, would want to read in Shakespeare (WH 9.36). Laws which can be seen to be not merely those of England but also, in a decidedly proprietorial fashion, those of the Quarterly: see Southey, ‘Parliamentary Reform’ and ‘Rise and Progess of Popular Disaffection.’ The Characters was the only book of Hazlitt’s that ever sold well. It quickly went into a second printing, was reviewed favorably by Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review, and was, according to Hazlitt, headed for a third printing before Gifford’s article killed its sales (WH 9.33; 8.99n). Likely from the seventh sermon of Latimer (1549, before Edward IV), ‘gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed saepe cadendo.’ For Latimer’s possible sources, see Ovid, ‘gutta cavat lapidem, consumitur annulus usu’ (Ex Ponto IV.x.5) and Lucretius, ‘nonne vides etiam guttas in saxa cadentis’ (De Rerum Natura IV.1286). (With thanks to Nicholas Halmi.) Aside from those occasions on which he cites this explosive line from Coriolanus apposite Kemble, Hazlitt reserves it as a sign of his abiding fascination with two men: Burke and Coleridge. See ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ where he describes Coleridge’s homiletic power in Shrewsbury as a matter of ‘“fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dove-cote”’ (WH 17.107).

Chapter 6: Criticism on the Verge 1. See, for example, Cook, ‘Hazlitt: Criticism and Ideology,’ and his Introduction to William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, where, in selecting such habitually overlooked Hazlitt texts as ‘Illustrations of The Times Newspaper,’ and excerpting the Letter to William Gifford, Esq. as well as the biography of Napoleon, Cook attempts to correct the ‘strangely lop-sided view of Hazlitt’ that emerges from those anthologies (nearly all) which omit the political writing. 2. In The Tempest (I.ii), Caliban addresses his rebuke – ‘You taught me language …’ – to Miranda. In the context of the citation as it appears in the



240 Notes

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

Monthly Review, however, it is clearly constructed as a rejoinder to Hazlittas-Prospero: the Lake poets will ‘in their turn … rack him [Hazlitt] with old cramps and fill all his bones with aches.’ Coleridge lectured on the Tempest on both February 6, 1818 and December 17, 1818. In his response to Coleridge’s February lecture (‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lectures’ [WH 19.206–10]), Hazlitt draws on the report of the lecture in the Courier (Feb. 9, 1818), which, as R.A. Foakes notes, reflects the degree to which Coleridge had superseded his own notes (Lectures 2.124n). Given the fragmentary nature of the notes for the February lecture (Lectures 2.108–24), I draw primarily on the notes for and accounts of the December lecture (Lectures 2.260–80) in compiling a composite account here of Coleridge’s reading of the play. Coleridge’s comments here are worth citing at length, given their resonance with his pronouncements elsewhere on Shakespeare’s ‘good-humoured laugh at mobs’ in Coriolanus: ‘If [Shakespeare] must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face …’ (Lectures 2.272–3). In a similar vein, see Coleridge’s earlier clarification, that ‘Least of all poets colored in any particulars by the spirit or custom of his Age … [Shakespeare had] the spirit of all that it had pronounced intrinsically and permanently good … concentrated and perfected … in his mind. Thus … in an age of religious and political Heats nothing sectarian in religion or Politics’ (Lectures 2.114). It is characteristic of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism to careen precipitously between the topical and the atemporal. As Jonathan Bate notes, ‘Coleridge was especially adept at claiming, on the one hand, that Shakespeare had no politics but, on the other, that he was right-thinking in his politics’ (Romantics on Shakespeare 19). A further complication of the engagement between Hazlitt’s Caliban and Coleridge’s Prospero may be found in a later essay of Hazlitt’s, ‘On Effeminacy of Character’ (collected in Table-Talk, 1821), where, in remarkably similar terms, Hazlitt does not curse Coleridge but would summon him with his own incantatory address, ‘oh thou! who didst lend me speech when I was dumb … start up in thy promised likeness and shake the pillared rottenness of the world!’ (WH 8.251). See also ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ for a similarly fond construction of Coleridge as Prospero to Hazlitt’s Caliban: ‘… but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge’ (WH 17.107). Rev. of Hazlitt, Table Talk in the Literary Museum (13 July 1822) 177; cited in Hayden 206. It should be noted that, especially in the Characters, much of the political force of Hazlitt’s criticism lies not in the topical relevance he would adumbrate, but in the critical sympathy around which he organizes his revolutionary character analysis (for example, Caliban). In the Letter to William



Notes 241

8.

9.

10.

11.

Gifford, Esq. (1819), it is significant that, having clarified for Gifford that ‘Jacobin sentiments sprout from the commonest sympathy, and are even unavoidable in a government critic, when the common claims of humanity touch his pity or his self-love’ (WH 9:24n), he should then conclude his rebuttal of Gifford’s critical rationale with a lengthy and impassioned exegesis of his own Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805). As Bate notes, ‘It was as much the implied politics of Hazlitt’s principle of sympathy as any overt political statement that led the British Critic reviewer to fulminate that Characters was “stuffed with dull common place, Jacobin declamation … tirades of democratic trash”’ (British Critic 9 [1818]: 15–22; cited in Romantics on Shakespeare 24). See Hazlitt’s Letter to William Gifford (WH 9.11–59; see above, Chapter 5), for Hazlitt’s most sustained denunciation of Gifford, the ‘Government Critic … the invisible link that connects literature and the police’ (WH 9.13), whose servile role as editor of the Quarterly Review is to counteract any knowledge of the English language and its literature ‘except on the minister’s side of the question,’ in order to ‘restore the taste of the public to its legitimate tone’ (WH 9.33). Hazlitt’s formulation here occurs in a chapter from Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy (1826) originally conceived of as a separate essay entitled ‘English and Foreign Manners.’ In it, Hazlitt reprises an exchange between himself and an old acquaintance, ‘Dr. E——,’ regarding the state of the periodical press in England: ‘He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public press – at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment, of a Quarterly Reviewer, the reckless blackguardism of Mr. Blackwood, and the obtuse drivelling profligacy of the John Bull’ (WH 10.246–7). In ‘On Criticism’ (included in the 1821 edition of Table-Talk), Hazlitt clarifies that the basis of what he derides as ‘political criticism’ is first-andforemost the ‘virulence of party spirit,’ for ‘the basis of this style of writing is a caput mortuum of impotent spite and dulness, till it is varnished over with the slime of servility, and thrown into a state of unnatural activity by the venom of the most rancorous bigotry’ (WH 8.220). Hazlitt continues, in a voice reminiscent of his contemptuous denunciation of Gifford two years earlier, ‘It is not a question of literary discussion, but of political proscription. It is a mark of loyalty and patriotism to extend no quarter to those of the opposite party. Instead of replying to your arguments, they call you names, put words and opinions into your mouth which you have never uttered, and consider it a species of misprision of treason to admit that a Whig author knows any thing of common sense or English’ (WH 8.221). Intriguingly, although Hazlitt feminizes criticism as a ‘coquette,’ in Liber Amoris (which he had submitted for publication the same year he undertook to write ‘The Periodical Press’), he insistently characterizes Sarah Walker as a ‘coquet,’ an ostensibly obsolete masculine usage which testifies



242 Notes

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

to her abilities to un-man him. See also ‘Coquets’ (WH 20.218–20), where Hazlitt identifies as the ‘secret’ of coquetry the ‘dictate of extreme vanity or extreme boldness’ whereby the coquette disarms her object with the suddenness of her transition from modesty to impudence (WH 20.218). Compare Burke’s assessment of Richard Price’s ‘Discourse on the Love of Our Country’ (1789) as ‘a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections’ (Reflections 93; emphasis added). Antagonism toward the political Hazlitt is particularly acute in contemporary romantic assessments of his writing, where if the political Hazlitt is tolerated at all, it is in a tone of weary irritation with his excessive and embarrassing vehemence, and strictly out of deference to that other Hazlitt – either the ‘sprightly, debonair, essentially worldly’ Hazlitt (as David Bromwich characterizes the restrained, urbane Hazlitt of such occasional essays as ‘On Gusto,’ ‘The Indian Jugglers,’ ‘The Fight’ [3]), or, more often, the deeply sympathetic and reverent Hazlitt of the literary criticism. The formulation is Michael Foot’s, in ‘The Shakespearean Prose Writer,’ his tribute to Hazlitt (Debts of Honour 93). Justifying his splenetic bardolatry as a necessary exposition of the libelous and ‘concentrated venom’ of Hazlitt’s ‘malignity,’ Gifford would convict Hazlitt according to the ‘law’ of the Quarterly (espoused by Southey in such articles as ‘Parliamentary Reform’ and ‘Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection’; see Chapter 4), according to which seditious libel is to be made punishable by transportation. Talfourd here quotes from Goldsmith’s ‘epigraph’ for Burke in ‘Retaliation’: ‘Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, / We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; / Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, / And to party gave up what was meant for mankind’ (ll.29–32). The disparagement of the political Hazlitt continues along similar lines in recent criticism as well. Following the anxiety of contemporary reviewers about both the violence and intrusiveness of Hazlitt’s politics, but with none of their admiration of Hazlitt’s critical acumen, John Hayden complains that Hazlitt ‘was constantly obtruding his political opinions into his works. In the Political Essays, such opinions would naturally hold a prominent place, but Hazlitt brought them into his otherwise nonpolitical essays and into his literary criticism, as in his treatment of Henry VIII and Coriolanus, where monarchy and nobility are attacked in gross generalizations (206; emphasis added). This blunt insistence that Hazlitt’s political writing belongs in a certain place (preferably in one volume, prominently titled, so as to warn potentially ingenuous, impressionable readers) is merely the most straightforward of a number of defenses against Hazlitt which continue to impede a serious consideration of his writing. Anxious to separate the properly literary from the political, Hayden would maintain that not only did Hazlitt gratuitously import and impose his political opinions upon his literary criticism, but that such gestures always reveal themselves due to their obtrusiveness, their clear violation of the laws of genre. Talfourd also voices a common misgiving when he inflects Hazlitt’s political opinions as not merely virulent but (the real assault on decorum) intru-



Notes 243

sive when they appear in writing where the reader thinks he will be spared such polemics. Literary criticism is precisely such a venue, an inquiry which, in Talfourd’s opinion, ‘should be sacred from all discordant emotions’ (rev. of Lectures 441) in order for the reader better to appreciate ‘those talents and feelings which [Hazlitt] has here brought to the contemplation of such beauty and grandeur, [which] none of the low passions of this “ignorant present time” should ever be permitted to overcloud’ (438–9). Compared with the majority of contemporary reviewers however, Talfourd is unusually generous in his suggestion that such political virulence doesn’t completely incapacitate Hazlitt’s appeal as a writer but merely precludes either the generous or thoughtfully critical reading which Talfourd argues is his due. 19. To the degree that Hazlitt’s rhetorical tyranny not only compromises his otherwise rigorously libertarian politics, but also renders him susceptible to appropriation by his Tory foes, the Hazlitt here indicted by the Monthly Review’s critic uncomfortably resembles the Shelley whom Hazlitt will indict in ‘On Paradox and Common-Place’ (WH 8.146–52) and ‘Shelley’s Posthumous Poems’ (WH 16.265–84) for the political dangers of his own rhetorical excesses. 20. Hazlitt’s ‘resistance’ remains legible in recent romantic criticism. In attempting to explain why he has not accorded Hazlitt a more prominent position in his consideration of the periodical press in the 1810s, Kevin Gilmartin underscores Hazlitt’s disconcerting sublimation of the political in the literary for the critic who would construct a ‘radical’ Hazlitt. (What finally makes Hazlitt’s writing ‘political’? The array of rhetorical functions and figures with which it resists – and unbinds – critical appropriation.) Noting that while the ‘tensions and contradictions’ of radical opposition were everywhere apparent in Hazlitt’s prose, they were nevertheless ‘almost entirely translated to the printed page’ and that this ‘shift from circulation and organization to language involved a corresponding shift … from politics to literature’ (228), Gilmartin implicitly denigrates Hazlitt’s critique as insufficiently materialist, when compared with that of such figures as John Wade, T.J. Wooler, or William Cobbett. Contrary to Gilmartin’s claims, however – that ‘Hazlitt avoided appealing directly to a popular reading audience, never edited or published a periodical, was not directly involved in radical organization, and neither courted nor experienced political prosecution for what he wrote’ (228) – Hazlitt did appeal to a radical reading audience (publishing the Political Essays under Hone’s imprint); did in fact both edit and publish a periodical (the Yellow Dwarf, with John Hunt in 1818); and did court political prosecution (continuing to write for the Examiner and other weekly newspapers throughout 1817, well after Cobbett’s hasty emigration to America). Finally, we should note that the sublimations and translations to which Gilmartin draws our attention are in fact precisely what make Hazlitt’s writing such a ‘radical critique of radical opposition’ (232). 21. As Jon Cook notes, ‘for Hazlitt a satisfactory refutation of Burke and the conservative ideology he represented was importantly a matter of discovering a style as powerful as his opponent’s’ (‘Hazlitt: Criticism and Ideology’ 144); see also Whale. For a fine consideration of Burke’s significance for Hazlitt as a figure of power, see Bromwich 288–313.



244 Notes

22. Hazlitt’s remarks come from ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’ (WH 12.5–17), one of three essays in The Plain Speaker in which he reflects on the dangerous attractions of Burke’s prose style; see also ‘On Reading Old Books’ (WH 12.220–9) and ‘On the Differences Between Writing and Speaking’ (WH 12.262–79). Two other important sites of interrogation are the ‘Character of Mr. Burke’ (WH 7.226–9) and the ‘Character of Mr. Burke, 1807’ (WH 7.301–12), the 1807 portrait having been written ‘in a fit of extravagant candour, at a time when I thought I could do justice, or more than justice, to an enemy, without betraying a cause’ (WH 7.301n). 23. As David Bromwich observes, ‘in all these places [“Coleridge’s Literary Life,” “On the Prose-Style of Poets,” “On Reading Old Books,” “Arguing in a Circle”], Hazlitt leaves no doubt that for him, Burke’s is the style of power, the whole figure of his prose darting out always abruptly, in its sudden flexions, and alternately towering above the reader’ (289). 24. See Hazlitt’s lecture on Shakespeare and Milton, where he characterizes Satan as the principle not of ‘the abstract love of evil – but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified’ (WH 5.64). 25. See Longinus: ‘For in much the same way as dim lights vanish in the radiance of the sun, so does the all-pervading effluence of grandeur utterly obscure the artifices of rhetoric’ (127). A similar point might profitably be made apropos Hazlitt’s often disorienting appropriation and deployment of literary quotation, given the cumulative effect of radiance (and momentary blindness) to which the reader is subjected. For a consideration of Longinus’ rhetoric of the sublime (notably, its own artifice of interwoven quotation) which affords startling insight into Hazlitt’s use of Burke, see Hertz, ‘A Reading of Longinus’ (The End of the Line 1–20). 26. Talfourd attributes Hazlitt’s deficiencies as a logically coherent writer both to his training as a painter and to the fact that he failed in this pursuit: A painter may acquire a fine insight into the nice distinctions of character, – he may copy manners in words as he does in colours, – but it may be apprehended that his course as a severe reasoner will be somewhat “troubled with thick-coming fancies.” And if the successful pursuit of art may thus disturb the process of abstract contemplation, how much more may an unsatisfied passion ruffle it, bid the dark threads of thought glitter with radiant fancies unrealized, and clothe its diagrams with the fragments of picture which the hand refused to execute! (xcii). Formulating Hazlitt’s liability as a reasoner in terms of a susceptibility to ‘“thick-coming fancies,”’ Talfourd deploys against Hazlitt precisely the same quotation from Macbeth (5.3.38) which Hazlitt uses in castigating Coleridge’s habit of mistaking hallucinations for truths in the Lay Sermon: ‘Plain sense, and plain speaking would put an end to those “thick-coming fancies,” that lull him to repose’ (WH 16.101). 27. For detailed considerations of Hazlitt’s use of quotation, see Bromwich 275–87 and Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions 185–201. 28. Even de Quincey, however, concedes a certain degree of Longinian brillance to Hazlitt’s pyrotechnics when he writes, ‘Hazlitt’s brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image which throw upon the eye a



Notes 245

vitreous scintillation for a moment, but spread no deep suffusions of colour, and distribute no masses of mighty shadow. A flash, a solitary flash, and all is gone’ (5.231). 29. For a detailed examination of Burke’s exploitation and arousal of artificial feeling in the Reflections (specifically as a development of the pathos of eighteenth-century domestic tragedy), see Reid. 30. And the result is that the principle of liberty loses out (in the Reflections) to the ornaments of feeling: ‘Sensibility is the manie of the day, and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain’ (Works 5.8). 31. In a similar vein, see Talfourd’s formulation in the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: ‘Although Mr. Hazlitt was thus staunch in his attachment to principles which he reverenced as true, he was by no means rigid in his mode of maintaining and illustrating them; but, on the contrary, frequently diminished the immediate effect of his reasonings by the prodigality and richness of the allusions with which he embossed them’ (2.157).



246 Notes

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258



Index

‘France: An Ode’, 37–8, 41–4, 49, 53–8, 60–3 The Friend, 38, 68, 69, 71 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 57 Hazlitt on, 30, 31, 36, 66, 144, 158, 208n15, 209n17, 240n40 Biographia Literaria, 185 ‘A Character’, 216n30 gait, 215n25 ‘jacobinical leaven’, 39, 65, 75 Lay Sermon, 154 periodical criticism, 172–3, 176, 179, 182 Political Essays, 168 ‘power of art’, 154 romantic apostasy, 36, 37, 75, 212n11 Shakespeare, 170–1 style of Hazlitt, 195, 196 Hunt on, 118 influence on Wordsworth, 96–7, 101–2 influences on Frend, 202–3nn6–7 Milton, 49, 62 Laureateship, 23 letters to Cottle, 51 to Fox, 64, 218n48 to Poole, 51 to Southey, 66, 214–15n21, 219n54 to Street, 1, 221n6 to Thelwall, 66 on Milton, 218n43 Morning Post, 37–8, 41, 42, 96, 102 ‘France: An Ode’, 54 Liu on, 39 Napoleonic fulcrum, 42–3, 44, 46 ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’, 61 on Pitt, 210n1 Napoleonic fulcrum, 42–8, 238n22 ‘Ode on the Departing Year’, 49–53, 56, 58, 60–1, 217n38 odes as palinodes, 48–61, 148 ode as test of vocation, 49 ‘On Love, the Holy Spirit, and the Divine Will’, 72

‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’, 33–4, 38, 44, 61–71, 72, 132, 220n62 public debate on romantic apostasy, 131 public perception, 32 ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’, 49 ‘Religious Musings’, 49 Remorse, 32 ‘sequacious’, use of, 191 signature, 4, 36, 48 Smith, William, 126 ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’, 81, 96–7 on Southey, 218n43 Southey on, 69, 70, 218n43 Southey’s Wat Tyler, 127, 133, 134–7, 231n21, 232–3n27 Statesman’s Manual, 1, 131 ‘System of Credenda’, 72 Thompson on, 8, 9, 36, 202–3nn7–8, 212n11 compass image, 213n12 multeity of metaphysical apostasy, 74 Wordsworth influence of Coleridge, 96–7, 101–2 ‘poem to Coleridge’, 99, 108 ‘Written in London’, 106 Coleridge, Sara (daughter), 46, 211n8 Coleridge, Sara (wife), 211n8 Collins, William, 51 Committee on Secrecy, 124, 125 Cook, Jon, 240n1, 244n21 Corn Law (1815), 156 Cottle, Joseph, 211n8 Courier Coleridge, 30, 32, 126 Hazlitt’s attacks on, 27, 29–30 Southey, 27, 126, 133, 209n18 Spa Fields meetings, 123 Cowley, Abraham, 216n30 Cox, Jeffrey, 229n57 Croker, John Wilson, 24, 27, 209n18 Cromwell, Oliver, 87, 103



Index 259

Curran, Stuart on Coleridge, 51, 53, 216n30, 216n32 ‘Fears in Solitude’, 58 influence on Wordsworth, 96 on Wordsworth, 96–7, 106, 115, 226n32 de Man, Paul autobiographical discourse, 142, 232n26 irony, 210n4, 210nn5–6 de Quincey, Thomas, 188, 191–2, 204–5n3 Derrida, Jacques, 204n3 Donohue, Joseph, 234–5n7 Dryden, John, 22 Eastwood, David, 205n4 Edinburgh Review Brougham, 125–6 Hazlitt, 173 Talfourd, 180 Eldon, Lord, 126, 133 Ellenborough, Lord, 19, 20 Erdman, David, on Coleridge, 36, 37 compass image, 213n12 Morning Post, 37, 210n2 Napoleonic fulcrum, 46, 47, 48, 215n26 ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’, 62 palinode, 217n38 Eusden, Laurence, 204n1 Examiner Hazlitt, 152, 154, 181, 244n20 Laureateship, 13, 14 Southey, 24–6, 125, 126 libel, 16, 19, 204n2, 207–12 Milton, 86 Wordsworth, 81, 116, 117–18, 120 Ferguson, Frances, 5, 201n3 Foakes, R.A., 241n3 Foot, Michael, 243n14 Fox, Charles James, 64, 206n7, 218n48 Frend, William, 202n6 Friend, The, 38, 68, 69, 71 Fry, Paul, 49, 217n42 Frye, Northop, 201n2

Galperin, William, 152, 239n27 George III, 17, 18, 122 attack on carriage, 124 Burke’s speeches, 192 Wordsworth’s ‘November, 1813’, 81, 84, 109, 117 George IV, earlier Prince Regent attempted murder of, 124, 128 Examiner, 204n2 Hunt, 13, 14–15, 16, 18–21, 31 Southey, 27, 125 Spa Fields meetings, 123 Gibbon, Edward, 2 Gifford, William, 154–65, 168, 174, 179–80, 183, 196, 223n15, 242n7, 242n10 Gill, Stephen, 84, 227n47 Gilmartin, Kevin, 20, 207n11, 244n20 Godwin, William, 230n12 Goldsmith, Oliver, 243n16 Gray, Thomas, ‘The Bard’, 51–2, 53, 57 Green, T.H., 72, 220n63 Griggs, 215n29 Guillory, John, 221n5 Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (1817), 124, 164 Hamilton, Walter, 204n1 Harrington, James, 105 Hazlitt on, 223n17 Hunt on, 118 Woodring on, 96 Havens, Raymond Dexter, 107, 226n38 Hayden, John, 243n17 Haydon, Benjamin, 229n59 Hazlitt, William 1–2, 5–6, 10–11, 32 Abrams on, 6, 201–2n3 apostasy of, 167–8 Burke, 184–97 periodical criticism, 172–84 Shakespearean interrogations, 168–72 on apostasy in general, 123, 232n23 ‘Arguing in a Circle’, 165, 186 ‘Character of Mr. Burke’, 185, 188, 192, 194 ‘Character of Mr. Burke, 1807’, 186, 187–8, 191–2, 193–4



260 Index

‘Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion’, 94, 95, 116 Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 159, 163–4, 169–70, 172, 179–82 ‘Coriolanus’ 32, 143, 153, 154–8, 159, 160, 163–4, 165 ‘The Tempest’, 169–72 on Coleridge, 30, 31, 36, 66, 144, 158, 208n15, 209n17, 240n40 Biographia Literaria, 185 ‘A Character’, 216n29 gait, 215n25 ‘jacobinical leaven’, 39, 65, 75 Lay Sermon, 154 multeity of metaphysical apostasy, 73, 74–7, 78 periodical criticism, 172–3, 176, 179, 182 Political Essays, 168 ‘power of art’, 154 romantic apostasy, 36, 37, 212n11 Shakespeare, 170–1 style of Hazlitt, 195, 196 ‘Coleridge’s Lay Sermon’, 172–3 ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’, 185 ‘“Comus”’, 80–1, 84, 116, 121 ‘Coriolanus’, 32, 143, 153, 154–8, 159, 160, 163–4, 165 critical ideology, 29–30 ‘English and Foreign Manners’, 174 ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Apostates)’ 8, 34–5, 71, 74–5, 123, 152, 154, 194–5 ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Lawyers and Poets)’ 83, 154, 155, 238n23, 239n28 ‘jacobinical leaven’, 39, 65, 75 on Kemble’s ‘Coriolanus’, 143–4, 146–66 Laureateship, 15 Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 179, 180 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 181 Lectures on the English Poets, 90, 160, 181, 182

‘On the Living Poets’, 88, 90, 94, 95 Letter to William Gifford, Esq., A, 147, 154–7, 159–64, 166, 168 on Milton, 80–1, 86–7, 89, 114, 165 ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermon’, 36, 66, 73, 75–6, 154 ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lectures’, 170 ‘Mr. Kemble’s King John’, 146 ‘Mr. Kemble’s Retirement’, 146–7, 149, 150–1, 152 ‘Mr. Southey, Poet Laureate’, 25, 26–7 ‘Mr. Southey’s Letter to William Smith, Esq.’, 154, 232n24 ‘Mr. Southey’s New-Year’s Ode’, 31 ‘Mr. Wordsworth and the Westmoreland Election’, 88 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, 208n15, 212n11, 215n25, 240n40 Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy, ‘English and Foreign Manners’, 174 ‘Once an Apostate and always an Apostate’, 8, 34–5, 71 ‘On Consistency of Opinion’, 9, 88–9, 95, 232n23 ‘On Criticism’, 174 ‘On Milton’s Sonnets’, 114 ‘On Milton’s Versification’, 86–7 on political power, 208n14 ‘On Reading Old Books’, 165–6, 191 ‘On the Living Poets’ 88, 90, 94, 95 ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’, 165, 184, 185, 186, 187, 194 Plain Speaker, The ‘On Reading Old Books’, 165–6, 191 ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’, 165, 184, 185, 186, 187, 194 Political Essays, 168–9, 179, 181–3, 209n17 ‘Character of Mr. Burke’, 185, 188, 192, 194 ‘Character of Mr. Burke, 1807’, 186, 187–8, 191–2, 193–4 ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Apostates)’ 8, 34–5, 71, 74–5, 123, 152, 154, 194–5



Index 261

‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper (On Modern Lawyers and Poets)’ 83, 154, 155, 238n23, 239n28 ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermon’, 36, 66, 73, 75–6, 154 ‘Mr. Southey, Poet Laureate’, 25, 26–7 ‘Mr. Southey’s Letter to William Smith, Esq.’, 154, 232n24 ‘Mr. Southey’s New-Year’s Ode’, 31 Preface 11, 30, 188 ‘The Courier and Wat Tyler’, 133, 154, 231–2n21 ‘The Lay of the Laureate’, 25, 132, 154, 231n15 ‘Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review, 132, 154, 231n14 Round Table, The, 86–7, 159–60 skeptical liberalist position, 202n4 on Southey, 25, 26–8, 31, 114, 125, 144, 158, 209n17 ‘Lay of the Laureate’, 132, 154, 231n15 periodical criticism, 173, 182 Political Essays, 168 ‘power of art’, 154 style of Hazlitt, 195, 196 Wat Tyler, 126, 132, 133, 231n14, 231–2n21, 232n24 Spirit of the Age, The, 6, 90 ‘Mr. Coleridge’, 216n29 ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, 87, 90, 91, 93–4, 95, 201–2n3 standing- and falling-away, 4 Table-Talk ‘On Criticism’, 174 ‘On Milton’s Sonnets’, 114 Tempest, The, 169–72 ‘The Courier and Wat Tyler’, 133, 154, 231–2n21 ‘The Laureat’, 27–8 ‘The Lay of the Laureate’, 25, 132, 154, 231n15 ‘The Periodical Press’, 173–9 ‘The Press – coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Bentham’, 154 Thompson on, 9–10 View of the English Stage, A

‘“Comus”’, 80–1, 84, 116, 121 ‘Coriolanus’ 32, 143, 153, 154–8, 159, 160, 163–4, 165 ‘Mr. Kemble’s King John’, 146 ‘Mr. Kemble’s Retirement’, 146–7, 149, 150–1, 152 ‘Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review, 132, 154, 231n14 on Wordsworth, 1–2, 30, 31, 81–4, 116–19, 154, 158, 201–2n3, 208n15 Abrams’s reading of, 89–90, 92–3, 224n20 Jacobin poetics, 82–3, 87–90, 94–6, 144, 238n23, 239n28 Miltonic aspirations, 114, 121–2 ‘November, 1813’, 84, 109 periodical criticism, 173, 182 Political Essays, 168 ‘power of art’, 154 ‘spirit of the age’, 6, 93–4 style of Hazlitt, 195, 196 Waterloo sonnets, 113–14 Hegehog, Humphrey (John Agg), 206n5 Hoadley, Frank T., 231n13, 231n18 Hollander, John, 226n37 Hone, William, 125, 126, 209n17, 230n6, 230n11, 244n20 Horace, 49, 57–8, 60, 61, 216n29 Hunt, Henry ‘Orator’, 123 Hunt, John, 14, 18, 170, 207n12, 244n20 Hunt, Leigh, 29 Autobiography, 16, 81, 116, 117, 206n10 on Coleridge, 118 Feast of the Poets, 116–21, 224n24, 227n46, 228n52, 229n58 and Hazlitt, comparisons between, 153 on Hazlitt, 159–60, 240n34 idealist liberal position, 202n4 on Laureateship, 13–15, 17, 19, 20–4, 209n18, 231n15 Southey, 24–7, 30–1, 112, 117–18, 125–33, 158 libel trial, 16, 18–21 on Milton, 112, 113, 114, 119



262 Index

Index 263

Inchbald, Elizabeth, 143, 144 Jacobs, Carol, 11 Jacobus, Mary, 237n19 Jeffrey, Francis on Hazlitt, 159, 168, 240n38 on Wordsworth, 85, 94 Jonson, Ben Laureateship, 22 ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’, 216n30 Julian the Apostate, 2 Kean, Edmund, 146, 234n6 Kemble, John Philip Coriolanus, 10, 131, 143–52, 154, 165–6, 240n40 posture, 116 Kinnaird, John, 25 Klancher, Jon, 5, 7, 91, 94, 202n4 Lacan, Jacques, 214n19 Lamb, Charles, 206n10 Landor, William Savage, 97, 209n18 Latimer, Hugh, 240n39 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 237n17 Leaves of Laurel (ed. ‘Q.Q. and W.W.’ [John Hamilton Reynolds]), 206n5 Levinson, Marjorie, 224n23 Liu, Alan on Coleridge ‘France: An Ode’, 57, 217n39 metaphysical apostasy, multeity of, 220n60 Napoleonic fulcrum, 48, 215n22, 215n26 romantic apostasy, riddle of, 36, 39–40, 41, 213n15, 214nn18–19 on Wordsworth, 96, 100–1, 105

London Magazine, 177, 178 Longinus, 196, 245n25 Louis XVIII, 45 Lowther, Lord, 88 Mackintosh, James, 213n12 Macready, William Charles, 237n17 Madden, Lionel, 129, 130 Malthus, Thomas, 182 Marten, Henry, 28 Marvell, Andrew, 103 Hazlitt on, 89 Hunt on, 118 Woodring on, 96 Marx, Karl, 125 McFarland, Thomas, 36 McGann, Jerome, 6, 201n3 Miller, J. Hillis, 223n19 Milton, John Coleridge on, 218n43 ‘Comus’, 80 Hazlitt on, 80–1, 86–7, 89, 114, 165 Hunt on, 112, 113, 114, 119 independence, 23 influence on Coleridge, 49, 62 on Hazlitt 203n11 on Wordsworth, 81–7, 96–103, 105–7, 109–13, 115–21, 208n13 ‘Lycidas’, 222nn11, 14 ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’, 105 ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, 49 Paradise Lost, 3–4, 85, 86, 221n6 The Reason of Church Government, 33, 84, 85, 97, 107 romantic appropriations of, 28 Shelley on, 3 ‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger’, 103, 226n39 Wordsworth’s ‘London, 1802’, 23 Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnet on Milton’, 80 Monthly Review, on Hazlitt, 168–9, 171, 181–2, 188 Moore, Thomas, 23, 24 Moorman, Mary, 229n60 Morning Chronicle



Southey’s attack on, 131 ‘Surrey Jail, August 27, 1813’, 115 ‘To —, M.D.’, 114, 115 ‘To Hampstead’, 115 ‘To the Same’, 114 on Wordsworth, 81–3, 87, 94, 112–22, 227n46

264 Index

Napoleon Bonaparte, 155 Coleridge on, 38, 42–8 Hazlitt’s elegy, 222n14 posture, 116 Southey’s poetry, 209n17 Wordsworth on, 103, 104–6, 109 New Monthly, 178 Newlyn, Lucy, 86 North British Review, 191 Paine, Thomas, 156 Parr, Samuel, 230n12 Paul, St., 203n11 Paulin, Tom, 203nn10–11, 222n13, 238–9n26, 239n32 Peacock, Thomas Love, 175 Pindar, 42, 48–9 Pitt, William (‘the Younger’), 45 Coleridge on, 38, 46, 62, 66, 68, 210n1 Poet Laureateship, 13–15, 17–24 Pye, Henry James, 13, 14, 17–18, 22, 206n5 Southey, 24–9 Poole, Thomas, 51, 211n8, 219n54 Pope, Alexander, 239n30 Price, Richard, 243n12 Priestley, J.B., 203n11 Probationary Odes, 205–6n5 Pye, Henry James, 13, 14, 22, 206n5 ‘New Year’s Ode’, 17–18

Quarterly Review Gifford, 159, 180, 242n8 on Hazlitt, 180, 223n15 Southey, 125, 127 ‘Parliamentary Reform’, 125, 128–32 Rejected Odes (ed. Humphrey Hedgehog [John Agg]), 206n5 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 206n5 Richard II, 123 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa Harlowe, 195–6 Ridgway (publisher), 230n5 Robertson, Henry, ‘Sonnet on the Poet’s Residence in the Surrey Jail’, 207–8n12 Robespierre, Maximilien, 239n32 Robinson, Crabb, 82, 206n10 Wat Tyler affair, 134 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 72, 77 Schlegel, F.W., 211n5 Scott, Sir Walter, 23, 27, 234n1, 235n8, 237n20 Seditious Meetings Act (1817), 124, 126, 127, 131, 164 Shakespeare, William, 153–4, 159, 162, 163–4 Coriolanus, 10, 143–48, 159–60, 165–6 Hazlitt’s apostasy, 167, 168–72 Macbeth, 237n19 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Hazlitt on, 244n19 Prometheus Unbound, Preface, 3, 4 Wordsworth’s sonnets to, 114 Shuster, George N., 216n34 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Viscount, 38, 229n4 Sidney, Algernon, 96, 223n17 Smith, William, 126–34, 137–42 Southey, Charles Cuthbert, 233n29 Southey, Robert, 1–2 ‘Carmen Nuptiale’, 132 ‘Carmen Triumphale, for the Commencement of the Year 1814’, 30, 32, 209n18



Coleridge’s ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’, 97 Hazlitt’s attacks on the Courier, 29–30 Hazlitt’s exposure of Southey, 25, 26–7 Morning Post Coleridge, 37–8, 41, 42, 96, 102 ‘France: An Ode’, 54 Liu on, 39 Napoleonic fulcrum, 42–3, 44, 46 ‘Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin’, 61 on Pitt, 210n1 eulogy of the Regent, 16, 18, 19–20 Wordsworth, 96, 98, 226n41

Coleridge on, 218n43 on Coleridge, 69, 70, 218n43 Hazlitt on, 25, 26–8, 31, 114, 125, 144, 158, 209n17 ‘Lay of the Laureate’, 132, 154, 231n15 periodical criticism, 173, 182 Political Essays, 168 ‘power of art’, 154 style of Hazlitt, 195, 196 Wat Tyler, 126, 132, 133, 231n14, 231–2n21, 232n24 Hunt on, 24–7, 30–1, 112, 117–18, 125–6, 133, 158 Laureateship, 15–16, 24–9, 81, 102 ‘law’ of the Quarterly Review, 243n15 Letter to William Smith, 126, 131, 137–42, 230n10, 232nn23–5 letters from Coleridge, 66, 214–15n21, 219n54 to King, 209n17 to Wynn, 13 patriotism, 205n4 public perception, 32 Rejected Odes (ed. Humphrey Hedgehog), 206n5 Wat Tyler, 71–2, 125–33, 138–42 Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, 112 Spa Fields meetings, 123–4, 128, 129–30 Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene, 110–11 Hazlitt on, 31 Hunt on, 118 influence on Wordsworth, 84, 110–11 Street, T.G., 29–30 Stuart, Daniel and Coleridge, relationship between, 210n2 Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’, 54 Privy Council interview, 214n16 Wordsworth’s sonnets, 225n29 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 168, 180–1, 183, 188–92, 194–7

Tate, Nahum, 204n1 Thelwall, John, 70, 86 Thompson, E.P., 7–9, 73 on Coleridge, 8, 9, 34, 36, 69, 73, 74, 202–3nn7–8, 212nn9,11, 213n12, 219n55 compass image, 213n12 on Hazlitt, 9–10 on Wordsworth, 7, 8, 9, 202–3n7 Todd, F.M., 226n34 Traill, H.D., 211n8 Tyler, Wat, 123, 124, 126–7, 129 see also Southey, Robert, Wat Tyler Vane, Henry, 103 Wade, John, 244n20 Walker, Sarah, 242–3n11 Walworth, William, 123–4 Warton, Thomas, 204n1, 205n5 Washington, George, 238n22 Watson, Dr and Junior (Spa Fields meeting), 123–4, 127 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 104, 239n32 Whale, John, 203n11 Whitehead, William, 204n1, 205n5 Winterbotham, William, 139, 230n5 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 188, 190, 192–4, 196 Woodring, Carl, 7 on Coleridge, 50, 212–10, 217n39, 218n46 ‘Fears in Solitude’, 58, 59 skeptical liberal position, 202n4 on Wordsworth, 96, 97, 227n48 Wooller, T.J., 125, 244n20 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 98 Wordsworth, William, 1–2, 83–4 Abrams on, 6–7, 89–94, 201n2, 202n5 ‘“Advance – come forth”’, 108 ‘Calais, August 15, 1802’, 104–5, 109 Coleridge’s walking tour of the Lakes with, 38 ‘Composed by the Sea-Side’, 105 ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, 113



Index 265

‘Composed While the Author Was Writing a Tract Occasioned by the Convention of Cintra’, 108 ‘Conclusion. 1811’, 84, 108–9, 117 ‘Consistency of Opinion’, 88 The Excursion, 83, 84, 94, 108, 111, 116, 228n55 ‘Female Vagrant’, 119, 121–2 Germany, move to, 38 ‘“Great Men”’, 82, 103, 105–6, 114, 119 Hazlitt on, 1–2, 30, 31, 81–4, 116–19, 154, 158, 201–2n3, 208n15 Abrams’s reading of, 89–90, 92–3, 224n20 Jacobin poetics, 82–3, 87–90, 94–6, 144, 238n23, 239n28 Miltonic aspirations, 114, 121–2 ‘November, 1813’, 84, 109 periodical criticism, 173, 182 Political Essays, 168 ‘power of art’, 154 ‘spirit of the age’, 6, 93–4 style of Hazlitt, 195, 196 Waterloo sonnets, 113–14 Hunt on, 81–3, 87, 94, 112–22, 227n46 ‘“I griev’d for Buonaparte”’, 98, 102, 103–4, 115 influences on Coleridge, 96–7, 101–2 Milton, 81–7, 96–103, 105–7, 109–13, 115–21, 208n13 Spenser, 84, 110–11 ‘Inscription for a National Monument, in Commemoration of Waterloo’, 112 ‘“It is not to be thought of that the Flood”’, 105–6 Laureateship, 23 ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’, 88, 223n15 letters to Beaumont, 221n4, 225n26

to Dyce, 226n33 to Lamb, 226n36 to Landor, 97–8 to Miller, 227n45 to Poole, 222n9 to Wilson, 221n4 ‘Lines on the Expected Invasion. 1803’, 227n43 ‘London, 1802’, 23–4, 103, 105–7, 111, 113, 225n30, 229n56 Lyrical Ballads, 7, 81, 88, 89–93 ‘November, 1813’, 32, 81, 84, 109, 117, 121, 122 ‘“Nuns fret not”’, 99–100 ‘Occasioned by the Same Battle’, 109–10, 112–13 ‘poem to Coleridge’, 99, 108 Poems, 83–4, 116–18 Prelude, 227n42 public perception, 32 The Recluse, 85, 98 ‘Siege of Vienna raised by John Sobieski’, 112 Smith, William, 126 ‘Sonnet on Milton’, 80 ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’, 84, 95–115, 117, 205n4 Southey’s Wat Tyler, 134 ‘Spanish Guerillas. 1811’, 108 Thanksgiving Ode, 83–4 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, 111–12, 155, 158 ‘The Pedlar’, 99 The Ruined Cottage, 103 ‘“The world is too much with us”’, 113 Thompson on, 7, 8, 9, 202–3n7 ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais’, 105 ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland’, 88 The White Doe of Rylstone, 108 Yellow Dwarf, 170, 244n20 Young, Arthur, 217n38



266 Index

Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction

Dante and the Romantics

The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics

Written Reaction: Poetics Politics Polemics (1979-1995)

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

Renegades of the Futu

The renegades of Pern

The Renegades Of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

Plato and the English Romantics

Ramage and the Renegades

The Renegades of Pern

The renegades of Pern

Renegades of the Future

The Renegades

The Renegades

The Renegades

The Renegades

Renegades Of Pern - 04 - The Renegades Of Pern

Renegades of Gor

Renegades of Time

Renegades Of Gor

The Poetics of Golf

The Poetics of Golf

The Poetics of Space

The Last of the Great Romantics

The Last of the Great Romantics

Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction

Dante and the Romantics

The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics

Written Reaction: Poetics Politics Polemics (1979-1995)

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

Renegades of the Futu

The renegades of Pern

The Renegades Of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

The Renegades of Pern

Plato and the English Romantics

Ramage and the Renegades

The Renegades of Pern

The renegades of Pern

Renegades of the Future

The Renegades

The Renegades

The Renegades

The Renegades

Renegades Of Pern - 04 - The Renegades Of Pern

Renegades of Gor

Renegades of Time

Renegades Of Gor

The Poetics of Golf

The Poetics of Golf

The Poetics of Space

The Last of the Great Romantics

The Last of the Great Romantics

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