The revolution,therefore,meant to him the restoration of an idyllic state,in which the homely virtues of the independent peasant should no longer be crushed and deprived of reward by the instruments of selfish despotism.
The outbreak of war put his principles at issue with his patriotism.He suffered keenly when called upon to triumph over the calamities of his countrymen.But gradually he came to think that his sympathies were misplaced.
The revolution had not altered human nature.The atrocities disturbed him,but for a time he could regard them as a mere accident.As the war went on,he began to perceive that the new power could be as tyrannical and selfish as the old.Instead of reconstructing a simple social ideal,it was forming a military despotism.When the French armies put down the simple Swiss peasantry,to whom he had been drawn by his home-bred sympathies,he finally gave up the revolutionary cause.He had gone through a mental agony,and his distracted sympathies ultimately determined a change which corresponded to the adoption of a new philosophy.Wordsworth,indeed,had little taste for abstract logic.He had imbibed Godwin's doctrine,but when acceptance of Godwin's conclusions involved a conflict with his strongest affections --the sacrifice not only of his patriotism but of the sympathies which bound him to his fellows --he revolted,Godwin represents the extreme of 'individualism,'the absolute dissolution of all social and political bonds.Wordsworth escaped,not by discovering a logical defect in the argument,but by yielding to the protest of his emotions,the system,he thought,was fatal to all the affections which had made life dear to him;to the vague 'intimations'which,whatever else they might be,had yet power to give harmony to our existence.
By degrees he adopted a new diagnosis of the great political evils.On one side,he sympathised with Scott's sense of the fatal effects upon the whole social organism.Among his noblest poems are the 'Brothers'and 'Michael,'to which he specially called the attention of Fox.They were intended,he explained,to show the surpassing value of the domestic affections conspicuous among the shepherds and 'statesmen'of the northern dales.He had now come to hold that the principles of Godwin and his like were destructive to the most important elements of human welfare.The revolutionists were not simply breaking the fetters of the simple peasant,but destroying the most sacred ties to which the peasant owed whatever dignity or happiness he possessed.Revolution,in short,meant anarchy.It meant,therefore,the destruction of all that gives real value to life.It was,as he held,one product of the worship of the 'idol proudly named the "wealth of nations,"'24se1fishness and greed replacing the old motives to 'plain living and high thinking,'
Wordsworth,in short,saw the ugly side of the industrial revolution,the injury done to domestic life by the factory system,or the substitution of a proletariate for a peasantry,and the replacement of the lowest social order by a vast inorganic mob,The contemporary process,which was leading to pauperism and to the evils of the factory system,profoundly affected Wordsworth,as well as the impulsive Southey;and their frequent denunciations gave colour to the imputations that they were opposed to all progress,Certainly they were even morbidly alive to the evil aspects of the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo,which to them seemed to prescribe insensibility and indifference to most serious and rapidly accumulating evils.
Meanwhile,Wordsworth was also impressed by the underlying philosophical difficulties.The effect of the revolutionary principles was to destroy the religious sentiment,not simply by disproving this or that historical statement,but by making the whole world prosaic and matter-of-fact.His occasional outbursts against the man of science --the 'fingering slave'who would 'peep and botanise upon his mother's grave'--are one version of his feeling.The whole scientific method tended to materialism and atomism;to a breaking up of the world into disconnected atoms,and losing the life in dissecting the machinery.
His protest is embodied in the pantheism of the noble lines on Tintern Abbey,and his method of answering might be divined from the ode on the 'Intimations of Immortality.'Somehow or other the world represents a spiritual and rational unity,not a mere chaos of disconnected atoms and fragments.
We 'see into the heart of things'when we trust to our emotions and hold by the instincts,clearly manifested in childhood,but clouded and overwhelmed in our later struggles with the world.The essential thing is the cultivation of our 'moral being,'the careful preservation and assimilation of the stern sense of duty,which alone makes life bearable and gives a meaning to the universe.
