This is not a study in influence or parallel lives, but parallel significance.
In his truly fascinating essay ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell distinguishes between two schools of literature, one with a political viewpoint and one with
a viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive—the viewpoint of a man who believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to control it.
The latter is that of ‘a willing Jonah’.1 On the face of it, the writers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Prelude embody these respectively and therefore could hardly be less alike. One could even argue that they were able to become great writers only having experienced opposite realisations. William Wordsworth believed in the French Revolution as part of the world-process, was disillusioned when it descended into the Terror, and responded with the literary internalisation we call Romanticism. Orwell, on the other hand, looking back through his work, wrote, ‘it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’2 However, I will argue that in several areas they are alike in their significance, including with regard to ‘the whale’.
They both dealt in their work with post-Christianity and crises of faith, involved themselves in idealistic revolutions abroad, later evolved deep and influential patriotisms when Britain was threatened with invasion, suffered apostasy from the left for this reason, but then generated, in death, extraordinarily influential cultural legacies. Dying in 1850 and 1950 respectively, they did more to define Englishness in the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than almost any other figures.
Orwell made very few references to Wordsworth, but those he did make are significant. In a 1944 column for Tribune, he includes a list of English institutions: ‘tea, cricket, Wordsworth, Charlie Chaplin, kindness to animals, Nelson, Cromwell and what-not.’3 (We would now include Orwell himself on this list.)
My subtitle is from Ruskin. He was talking about painters, but I think it applies to Wordsworth and Orwell:
All that the rest can do partially, they can do perfectly. They do it, not only perfectly, but nationally; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school.
The Englishest—and observe also, therefore the greatest: take that for an universal, exceptionless law;—the largest soul of any country is altogether its own.4
1. Inside the Whale: Of Wanderers and Clergymen
I am not going to focus on The Prelude or Nineteen Eighty-Four, but two of my subjects’ most maligned works, Wordsworth’s epic poem of 1814, The Excursion, which Harold Bloom labelled ‘an aesthetic disaster’, and Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), which the author himself later called ‘bollox’.5 Neither of these judgements is anywhere close to being fair.
Jeffrey Meyers argues that Orwell was thinking of A Clergyman’s Daughter when he wrote the passage quoted above about ‘lifeless books’, but it isn’t a lifeless book at all.6 The portrayal of twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Hare is touching, her experiences of parish life, hop-picking and teaching engage and inform, much as Orwell’s non-fiction does, and the Joycean experiment of Chapter 3, set in Trafalgar Square, was never going to be another Ulysses, but that doesn’t mean it has no merit. I suspect many of the negative assessments that A Clergyman’s Daughter has attracted exist partly because they were licensed by Orwell’s own.
The Excursion has been somewhat neglected since the end of the nineteenth century, but this makes its story of the Solitary and his despondency no less compelling. Moreover, it is widely thought to contain some of Wordsworth’s finest writing in blank verse, so to call it an aesthetic disaster is far too sweeping a statement. And even Bloom – that judgement notwithstanding – credits the poem with enormous influence:
[T]he Wordsworth who dominated nineteenth-century poetry from his own time onward was the author of The Excursion […] This Wordsworth, though he overtly preaches against the Solitary’s errors, nevertheless fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary.
For this reason, ‘Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry’, no less.7
It would be a valid criticism to say that neither The Excursion nor A Clergyman’s Daughter is exactly ‘well-made’, but that need not concern us.
In The Road to Miniluv: George Orwell, the State, and God (1975), Christopher Small says,
By the time he was writing A Clergyman’s Daughter [Orwell] had, on the evidence of his letters, abandoned any religious belief […] but, if only in memory, he was able through Dorothy to say with intense conviction what in one aspect at least it was like. In the same way and with the same conviction he could describe its loss.8
Of Orwell’s religious belief at this time, his biographer Bernard Crick wonders, ‘was he uncertain himself?’ Peter Davison, editor of The Complete Works, refers to Orwell’s ‘religionless Christianity’.9 And in another Tribune column from 1944, Orwell himself had this to say:
Western civilisation, unlike some Oriental civilisations, was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality. […] the modern cult of power-worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. […] the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilisation. […] I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. […] Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one’s belly is full. But the truth is the opposite: when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.10
Wordsworth sensed this early. With his famously perceptive hearing, he could discern the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the century to come. J. S. Mill said that in Wordsworth’s poetry he ‘seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.’ That is, when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation, but also (therefore?) from religion. Mill said he found Wordsworth’s poems ‘a medicine for [his] state of mind’, i.e. his ‘habitual depression’, which is what afflicts the partly autobiographical figure in The Excursion known as the Solitary.11
In his youth the Solitary showed promise. He became an army chaplain and married, but then it all went wrong, as Wordsworth’s summary of contents puts it:
His domestic felicity—afflictions—dejection—roused by the French Revolution—Disappointment and disgust—Voyage to America—disappointment and disgust pursue him—his return—His languor and depression of mind, from want of faith in the great truths of Religion, and want of confidence in the virtue of Mankind.12
After the deaths of his wife and children his
Soul Turned inward,—to examine of what stuff Time’s fetters are composed; and Life was put To inquisition, long and profitless! (III. 704–07)
In this state the French Revolution appeared as a cause and distraction into which he could throw himself with zeal: ‘To the wide world’s astonishment, appeared / The glorious opening, the unlooked-for dawn’ (II. 223–24):
Thus was I reconverted to the world;
Society became my glittering Bride,
And airy hopes my Children. (III. 742–44)
Another character, the Wanderer – a voice of ‘the great truths of Religion’ – describes the Solitary with a combination of sympathy and Burkean judgement: ‘he was sincere / As vanity and fondness for applause, / And new and shapeless wishes, would allow’ (II. 239–41). But with the Terror came a meaning crisis, and the Solitary eventually ‘sate down by very chance, / Among [the] rugged hills’ of the Lake District (II. 235–36). His ‘bare Dwelling’ (II. 359) can be identified with the real Bleatarn House, between the Langdales, and thinking about it now it reminds me of Barnhill, the isolated house on the Isle of Jura in which Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Returning to the period of A Clergyman’s Daughter, Christopher Small’s words could be applied to the Solitary:
[L]oneliness, from the beginning of her story, is Dorothy Hare’s lot; loneliness, it can be inferred, was [Orwell’s] continuing experience […] That this life was deliberately chosen makes no difference: the self-isolation of one who shuts himself away is not therefore less desolating.13
From Wordsworth’s classless Cumbria to Orwell’s class-ridden East Anglia:
It was just half past five, and coldish for an August morning. Dorothy (her name was Dorothy Hare, and she was the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk) put on her aged flannelette dressing-gown and felt her way downstairs. There was a chill morning smell of dust, damp plaster, and the fried dabs [fish] from yesterday’s supper, and from either side of the passage on the second floor she could hear the antiphonal snoring of her father and of Ellen, the maid of all work. With care—for the kitchen table had a nasty trick of reaching out of the darkness and banging you on the hip-bone—Dorothy felt her way into the kitchen, lighted the candle on the mantelpiece, and, still aching with fatigue, knelt down and raked the ashes out of the range.14
Chapter 1 describes Dorothy’s self-sacrificing life of holding the parish together and dealing with her selfish, unpastoral father:
Probably no one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as ten minutes would have denied that he was a ‘difficult’ kind of man. The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness. But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can’t do it on less than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic exasperation which it was only natural that he should work off on the person nearest to him—usually, that is, on Dorothy.15
Her Christian faith is genuine but punitive: ‘She made it a rule, whenever she caught herself not attending to her prayers, to prick her arm hard enough to make blood come.’16 What takes her, with the Solitary, to a ‘want of faith’, is simple if clunky. She experiences an attack of amnesia – a mental breakdown, we infer – and ‘wakes’ in London with no memory of how she got there and eight days unaccounted for. Her excursion takes her to the hop country of Kent, Trafalgar Square, ‘a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from London’,17 and finally back to Knype Hill. A longer essay than this one could compare her companion, the tramp Nobby, to Wordsworth’s Wanderer, and Chapter 4, in which she becomes a teacher at a ‘fourth-rate’ private school,18 to Book IX of The Excursion, since both function in effect as treatises on education. But I want to focus on the way in which, though her memory returns, her faith categorically does not, and her response to this. While working at the school, though ‘her faith had vanished’, she attends church and looks forward to it,
For she perceived that in all that happens in a church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed purpose may be, there is something—it is hard to define, but something of decency, of spiritual comeliness—that is not easily found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom.19
Aged thirty-six, in Grasmere, Wordsworth returned to being a regular churchgoer, and might have had some of the same thoughts as Dorothy – I don’t know. But she is much more black-or-white than any Wordsworthian figure, even the Solitary. After speaking to her atheist friend Warburton – to whom I will return in a moment – she reflects on her lack of belief. She is back to her selfless parish work, with ‘a big job on hand—costumes for a pageant that the schoolchildren were going to have on St George’s Day, in aid of the organ fund.’ Having put her glue pot on the stove, she considers
the deadly emptiness that she had discovered at the heart of things. […] There was, she saw clearly no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient to itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of ‘progress’ with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete. It is all or nothing. […] the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.20
There is a stoicism here, but aside from that it is hardly less bleak than the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a total departure from anything one finds in Wordsworth. In thinking about why, it is necessary to say a bit more about the kind of pin-pricking faith that Dorothy has lost. Back in her old life, in Chapter 1, bicycling home from her morning visits, she stops for a few moments’ respite in a meadow full of flowers:
Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognised, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of praise that the earth and all created things send up everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves, flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their joy. Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer, the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascending like the smoke of ever-burning altars. Therefore with Angels and Archangels! She began to pray, and for a moment she prayed ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the joy of her worship. Then, less than a minute later, she discovered that she was kissing the frond of the fennel that was still against her face.
She checked herself instantly, and drew back. What was she doing? Was it God that she was worshipping, or was it only the earth? The joy ebbed out of her heart, to be succeeded by the cold, uncomfortable feeling that she had been betrayed into a half-pagan ecstasy. She admonished herself. None of that, Dorothy! No Nature-worship, please! Her father had warned her against Nature-worship. […] Dorothy took a thorn of the wild rose, and pricked her arm three times, to remind herself of the Three Persons of the Trinity, before climbing over the gate and remounting her bicycle.21
The term ‘nature-worship’ was actually coined by Coleridge as a criticism of Wordsworth, and, while in theory Wordsworth would repudiate worshipping nature if doing so excluded God, in the practice of his poetry, it doesn’t. He discovers, and uncovers for us, no deadly emptiness at the heart of things, but ‘a bright and breathing World’ (III. 242) in which ‘the Virgilian magic of insects humming’22 is not a distraction from God but a sign of his benignity:
What other spirit can it be, that prompts
The gilded summer Flies to mix and weave
Their sports together in the solar beam,
Or in the gloom of twilight hum their joy? (IV. 447–50)
Nature worship goes with those other P-words of Dorothy’s – ‘pantheism’, ‘paganism’ – but there is an open, ecumenical compatibilism in Wordsworth that means such accusations can sit untroubled next to stoicism (which The Excursion also contains), what we would call Romantic humanism, as well as the soundest Anglicanism. This latter is embodied in the figure of the Pastor.
While Dorothy’s excursion takes her away from her father, an extraordinarily bad rector, the Solitary’s takes him to Grasmere Church, home of ‘a country clergyman of more than ordinary talents’.23 As the Wanderer introduces the Pastor,
No feudal pomp […] Nor feudal power is there; but there abides, In his allotted Home, a genuine Priest, The Shepherd of his Flock; or, as a King Is stiled, when most affectionately praised, The Father of his People. (V. 98–105)
A genuine priest, yet here is the Pastor a few hundred lines later, in full nature worship mode, describing the melting of April snow:
Go forward, and look back; On the same circuit of this church-yard ground Look, from the quarter whence the Lord of light, Of life, of love, and gladness, doth dispense His beams[.] (V. 540–44)
Unlike poor Dorothy, when the reader of Wordsworth sees that the lord of light is both God and the sun, she does not need to prick or even check herself.
The Solitary and Dorothy Hare are both semi-autobiographical figures who suffer life-crises and lose their Christian faith, but only the latter’s is presented as being irrecoverable. In the same year as A Clergyman’s Daughter was published Orwell wrote a little poem that begins,
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.24
He might have been the Pastor, in a sense, exactly as he says of the Reverend Charles Hare: ‘A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home.’25 Orwell would not even have had to be a rector to be happy, but merely a vicar! Either way, he seems sure that happy vicars and rectors are ‘anachronism[s]’, and there is no ‘genuine Priest’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter. ‘The novel insists’, says Michael Levenson, ‘on the obsolescence of both the Anglican faith and its social / institutional practice.’26 Specifically, Dorothy’s friend Warburton insists on this, and the first part of Chapter 5 is worth reading in full as a very entertaining tour de force from the point of view we would now identify as New Atheist. The wit is more Hitchens than Dawkins:
‘Surely I don’t take you to mean,’ said Mr Warburton, ‘that you actually regret losing your faith, as you call it? One might as well regret losing a goitre. Mind you, I’m speaking, as it were, without the book—as a man who never had very much faith to lose. The little I had passed away quite painlessly at the age of nine. But it’s hardly the kind of thing I should have thought anyone would regret losing. Used you not, if I remember rightly, to do horrible things like getting up at five in the morning to go to Holy Communion on an empty belly? Surely you’re not homesick for that kind of thing?’27
Perhaps, as Valerie Meyers writes, ‘Orwell was more interested in the social effects of dwindling Christian faith than the individual’s sense of loss’, whereas The Excursion is about exactly that.28 It concludes much more open-ended, with the Solitary taking his solitary way back towards Blea Tarn Valley, but not before signalling his willingness to continue his dialogue with the Wanderer:
“Another sun,” Said he, “shall shine upon us, ere we part,— Another sun, and peradventure more; If time, with free consent, be yours to give,— And season favours.” (IX. 778–82)
In A Clergyman’s Daughter and The Excursion we find two responses to the problems posed to – I won’t say Western civilisation, but Anglican civilisation, broadly understood – by the withdrawing of the sea of faith, and they map on to Meyers’s distinction between the individual and ‘social effects’. Warburton is intelligent and selfish, and his atheism comes naturally and works quite well for him, but it can be viewed as a ‘luxury belief’ if one considers the widespread anomie about which we now hear so much, under headings such as ‘the meaning crisis’. Hence Dorothy’s instinct that church retains ‘something of decency, of spiritual comeliness’.
The work of Wordsworth and Orwell continues to do what it does nationally – in Ruskin’s phrase – because it speaks to what still bedevils us. At its least attractive, the choice is between the insufficiencies of scientism – ‘Viewing all objects unremittingly / In disconnection dead and spiritless’ (IV. 957–58), as the Wanderer puts it – and a C of E-themed fudge. It is actually the compatibilist Wordsworth who feels more of the moment, with talk of a ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity, as well as related phenomena such as John Vervaeke’s Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, and Ted Gioia’s New Romanticism. Wordsworth is as good a guide as these, with, as Paul Fry says of the Wanderer, a ‘sense of his peripatetic vocation as an always-successful quest for significance.’29
But we have been too long ‘inside the whale’. The third of Dorothy’s P-words – after ‘pantheism’ and ‘paganism’ – was ‘progress’. When Wordsworth wrote The Excursion his revolutionary days were behind him, but Orwell wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter before his had even begun. As he explains in ‘Why I Write’, his experiences up to that point had
increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes […] but […] were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. […] By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.
Hence the ‘happy vicar’ poem, which he inserts at this point of the essay. But then, enter political purpose:
The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.30
2. Outside the Whale
Bliss Was It in That Dawn
A lot has been written about Wordsworth’s involvement in the French Revolution, so I will quote only my favourite prose account, the poet’s own and a short one: ‘I went over to Paris […] at the time of the revolution in 1792 or 1793, and so was pretty hot in it’.31 He was on ‘the left side’ – le côté gauche – in the original sense, supporting the revolution against the ancien régime. (Louis XVI was not affectionately praised or styled the father of his people at this time!) Wordsworth’s famous poetic description of this period comes not from The Excursion but The Prelude, and was also published under the title ‘The French Revolution, As it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’:
