And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore,

And neither awful Voice be heard by thee!

And that is what makes the greatness of his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra. He saw, what so few of the statesmen saw, that this alliance with the peoples of Spain and Portugal had a hope in it, because it had a spiritual value in it, which the subsidizing treaties with Continental sovereigns could not have. In his view the Continental alliances might or might not be prudent expedients; the Spanish war was a thing of a higher order altogether, not an expedient but an act of principle; something into which faith and hope could throw themselves with a vision of new life. And the result proved that it was he and not the statesmen who were right. So soon as the Allies began to build on the principle of nationality, the end began to be in sight. What defeated Napoleon was not the resolve of the sovereigns to retain their property, but the resolve of England to be England, of Spain to be Spain, of Germany to be Germany, of Russia to be Russia. And it is scarcely too much to say, as Mr. Dicey has lately said in his interesting Introduction to a reprint of Wordsworth's Tract, that the policy of England has been markedly successful so far as it has coincided with the statesmanship of Wordsworth', whom he calls the first of English Nationalists', and not very successful so far as it has followed other lines.

To-day we are engaged in what we hope is the supreme phase of the old struggle against the efforts of a military tyranny to erect its single power upon the ruins of the separate nations of Europe. And for some of us it is not the least happy of our auguries of steadfast faith and ultimate victory that we are fighting under the guidance of a Foreign Minister who is known to be what Mr. Acland calls him, ́ a lifelong lover of Wordsworth'. We go back to Wordsworth because our position is so like his. And, if our position is so like, we must remember that so also are our duties. What did he insist upon through all those awful

years when England stood, often without an ally, against the greatest military genius the world has ever seen? First of all on perseverance. We ought not to make peace with France on any account', he wrote, 'till she is humiliated and her power brought within reasonable bounds.' That is strong language, but the man who called Carnage' God's daughter' was no mincer of phrases. He was a poet, and he need not be interpreted as if he were writing a scientific treatise. But he meant, and all that is wisest and strongest in England means to-day, that we ought not to think of resting till our work is finished, which will not be till the 'security' of Pitt's famous answer is again achieved and the liberties of Europe are no longer in danger.

The second thing on which he insisted was hope :

Hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays,

For its own honour, on man's suffering heart.

'I began with hope', he said in 1808, and hope has inwardly accompanied me to the end.' And so in the Tract on Cintra :

'There is a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead; the good, the brave and the wise of all ages. We would not be rejected from this community; and therefore do we hope. We look forward with erect mind, thinking and feeling; it is an obligation of duty; take away the sense of it, and the moral being would die within us

His is no cheap or easy optimism :

We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws
To which the triumph of all good is given,
High sacrifice and labour without pause,
Even to the death.

So his Happy Warrior is

doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed.

,

And the people of England, as he sees them, are ready, without fear or flinching, to be

left alone,

The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.

6

And indeed he and his England had a harder task to face in that duty of hope than we have. Then, even so late as 1813, people like Lord Holland were wishing for French victories; to-day not even our obscurest cranks wish success to the Germans. 'In Britain is one breath', said Wordsworth, seeing the ideal Britain and not the real. But what was not true then is true to-day. After a moment's hesitation the whole nation rallied to the great call; and one of the most distinguished of the Liberals, who had hesitated during the critical days of decision and publicly expressed his hesitation, could write to a friend a fortnight later, after the Belgian crime, and find Wordsworth's In Britain is one breath' the inevitable phrase in which to declare his recognition of the war as a war of justice, and the national cause as the cause of liberty and right. He and thousands of others would not have felt as they did and would not have thought of going to Wordsworth to utter what they felt, if they had not seen this war, as Wordsworth saw that of his day, as a struggle with the powers of darkness. Belgium opened their eyes. And the very blankness of her desolation, the utter and visible failure of all material means to avert her ruin, made them turn, like Wordsworth, to a deeper, a more inward consolation, at once a faith, a vision, and a call to arms; made them say to Belgium, and to all who had died or were to die for her and for the cause which she sanctified by her martyrdom :

Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and Man's unconquerable mind.

189

APPENDIX A: WORDSWORTH AND ANNETTE

SINCE this was written the subject of Wordsworth and Annette has been further discussed by Mr. Harper in a little book called Wordsworth's French Daughter, and more recently by M. Legouis whose articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes (April 1922) have now been reprinted and expanded into a volume entitled William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon. From the facts they set forth it is clear that Wordsworth throughout accepted his responsibilities as the father of Caroline. He had his name and place both at her baptism and at her marriage. At the first, one Dufour had a signed authority to represent him at the second his consent appears on the certificate. In one interesting point M. Legouis corrects Mr. Harper. Annette Vallon and her family became extreme Royalists soon after Wordsworth knew her, she herself was afterwards known as an active Chouan conspirator, and her name, as M. Legouis has discovered, was on a police list of 'suspects' in the year 1800. Mr. Harper knew enough of this attitude to lead him, not unnaturally, to think that they already held these views, and in particular strong views against the constitutional clergy, at the time when Wordsworth and Annette were together and that this might have been an obstacle to her marriage with a Protestant. But M. Legouis has discovered that there were two Vallons, Annette's uncles, who were Constitutional priests, and that her eldest brother had been baptized Jean Jacques; which does not suggest high Royalist or extreme Catholic opinions.

What then was the obstacle to the marriage? It is impossible now to say. Very likely the Vallon family were not very anxious that Annette should marry a foreign heretic of no profession and no fortune. And Wordsworth may have felt too poor to marry. After his return to England in December 1792 he certainly seriously considered marriage, and so, even more, did Annette who wrote pleading for it, for her child's sake, but generously adding only if there is not the slightest risk to be run'. But this was after the French declaration of war which took place on the 1st of February 1793, and made it very difficult, if not impossible, for Wordsworth to cross over to France. He related the whole story to Dorothy in his letters, and, at his wish, though Annette generously discouraged the plan, she confessed the secret to her uncle and aunt Cookson with whom she was then living, but naturally received no

encouragement of the idea of a marriage. A further discouragement of that idea may possibly be looked for in another direction suggested by M. Legouis. Wordsworth came at that time to be much influenced by the writings of Godwin who, as a pure rationalist, was anti-matrimonial, anti-sentimental, and even anti-emotional, and that influence may easily have disinclined Wordsworth to further attempts at carrying through a marriage against which reason had obviously a good deal to say. Difficulties and discouragements were increased as the war continued. There was some correspondence much limited by the postal authorities and the police-but there could be no meeting. For that they had to wait till 1802 when the Peace of Amiens reopened France to Englishmen. In August of that year Wordsworth and Dorothy spent some weeks with Annette and Caroline at Calais, going to them straight from Mary Hutchinson to whom he was now engaged. No doubt the visit was, as Mr. Harper says, undertaken for the purpose of 'making a settlement with and bidding farewell to her and her child'. Probably by that time it was clear to all parties that a marriage between a man so intensely English, Protestant and still Liberal as Wordsworth, and a fanatical French Catholic and Royalist who could not even read English, was very unlikely to make for any one's happiness: especially as all must have felt that the Peace was only a doubtful and temporary truce. And in fact, of course, war soon began again and they were again separated for many years. When they next met, in 1820, the daughter through whom Wordsworth has a number of French descendants had been four years married. Annette and Caroline had wished Dorothy to be present at her wedding, and she was trying to arrange to go when the return from Elba took place and upset all plans. Ultimately the marriage was celebrated in Dorothy's absence in February 1816. But Wordsworth may be said to have been present at it in two ways. The marriage certificate names him as the bride's father, describing him as 'Williams [sic] Wordsworth, propriétaire' and giving his address. He was also connected with it in a more important way. Her husband was the brother of an officer who had been a prisoner in England and had become a friend of the poet and his family. So Wordsworth may indirectly have provided a husband for his daughter. She only saw him once after her marriage, when he and Mary and Dorothy and Crabb Robinson visited Paris and the two mothers