718 Chapter XXX
Thomas Paine escape to France when he was indicted in 1792. It is argued that
Blake’s enigmatic style, both in his poems and in his engravings, was a defense
against threats to which men of his kind were exposed; that, in short, had he felt
more free, he would have expressed his republican sympathies more plainly. He is
remembered for his brooding dread of “these dark Satanic mills.” The phrase has
usually been understood to signify a poet’s fear of the degrading effects of long
hours of factory employment. It would seem, however, that Blake, an artisan in
London, had not yet heard that an Industrial Revolution was in progress, and re-
ally felt horror for the shops in which weapons to destroy the French Republic,
and human liberty, were being made.^15 Wordsworth perhaps felt the whole drama
most deeply. It is possible that his poetry, like Fichte’s metaphysics, was in some
sense the product of a profound feeling for liberty and equality. He himself, in his
theory of poetic diction, favored a forthright and easy simplicity which he liked to
believe was the language of the common people. Wordsworth grew away from his
first exaltation very slowly. The English poets, in fact, seem not to have turned
against France until the winter of 1797–1798.^16 It was not the Terror nor Thermi-
dor that made them change their minds, so much as Fructidor, Campo Formio,
and the transfer of Venice to Austria. Since they saw Italy, Switzerland, and Hol-
land in an unrealistic glow, with no knowledge of their contemporary political
problems, the setting up of new- style republics in these countries seemed to be no
more than the conquest and cheap collusion that conservative propaganda said it
was. Coleridge eventually turned into one of the more weighty philosophers of the
organic society, and Wordsworth into the poet of the church. Since their contacts
were with the gentle classes, they had never been “clubbists” even in their youth.
In a different category may be put true working- class bards, such as the Paisley
weaver, Alexander Wilson, and the Sheffield file- maker, Joseph Mather. Their
songs and ballads, at first printed ephemerally only in broadsides for their own
neighbors, were not published in book- form until a half- century later. Both sang
the merits of Paine and his Rights of Man. Both raged against the king and court.
According to Alexander Wilson:
For British boys are in a fiz,
Their heads like bees are humming,
And their rights and liberties,
They’re mad upon reforming
The court this day.Mather, whose style was more solemn, wrote on the war with France:
Facts are seditious things,
When they touch courts and kings,
Armies are raised.15 Erdman, Blake, VII and passim. For Wordsworth, F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet: a Study of
Wordsworth (London, 1957), is the most recent of many relevant works.
16 J. Voisine, Jean- Jacques Rousseau et I’Angleterre à l ’ époque romantique: les écrits autobiographiques
et la légende (Paris, 1956), 150–52.