AND ANOTHER THING
Lighting a Wordsworthian candle in a dim and philistine world
PAUL JOHNSON
Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Cul- ture, Media and Sport, said last week that the book he would take with him on a desert island is Wordsworth's Prelude. That would not be my choice, but it is an eminently defensible one, for no other poem encapsu- lates so many aspects of the English country- side, its weather, ways, moods and people, and the thoughts which contemplation of England gives rise to. There is an immense density of reflection in this great work which makes it ideal for exploration on long, lonely island days. Wordsworth had a genius for self-isolation, to intensify and heighten his senses, and recorded the results with eye- opening perception. Oddly enough, Smith's PhD thesis was on 'Wordsworth and Soli- tude', so he knows all about it.
My Wordsworth week began at Cocker- mouth Castle, where we were staying, surely the most delectable fortified residence in England, part romantic ruin, part cosy habi- tation. Turner was a frequent visitor — it was then owned by his most munificent patron, the 4th Earl of Egremont — and he painted it from every angle. I have done the same, using Turner's 'stations', which are always the most ingenious. Wordsworth was born in the still delightful town, in a fine, fair house (now open to the public) owned by his father, land agent to the 'Wicked' Earl of Lonsdale. The Earl owed the Wordsworths a good deal of money, and refused to pay it. But his successor, the 'Good' Earl, stumped up (plus interest). He also got the poet a use- ful job as a Collector of Stamps, which brought him a modest income and enabled him to travel about the Westmorland coun- tryside on horseback, the perfect occupation for a poet such as he. Thus Wordsworth was able to devote most of his life to writing, and we are the beneficiaries.
At the time the Liberals accused him of repudiating his earlier radical views and propagating Tory doctrine in return for a sinecure. The taunt was perpetuated in Browning's brilliant but grossly unjust poem `The Lost Leader' ('Never glad confi- dent morning again!'). But Wordsworth was incapable of voicing any but his own laboriously arrived-at and profoundly held convictions, springing directly from his only mentor, Nature itself. And the collector- ship was certainly no sinecure; rather a bur- den, at times. So the accusation was an unworthy smear. But it has stuck a little, as radical smears have a habit of doing, espe- cially in literary circles. I ast Friday we went over to Grasmere for a little ceremony. Wordsworth spent the last 50 years of his life in this enchanting vale, which retains its innocent freshness despite millions of summer visitors. Rydal Mount, which has a certain imposing elegance, was his eventual home there, but Dove Cottage, simple and tiny, will always be associated most closely with his work and family (though Thomas De Quincey actually lived there longer), and there the Wordsworth shrine is rightly found. Around the cottage he and his sister Dorothy created a natural garden, composed of mosses, wildflowers, fruit trees and heathers gathered from the entire vale. It was later formalised and ruined — it was nothing at all when I first saw the cottage, as a boy of 12, in 1941. But in recent years the wild garden has been patiently and faithfully recreated by George Kirkby, a gentle old herbaceous artist, who showed us round with pride.
Meanwhile, the study of Wordsworth, and indeed the whole of the Romantic Move- ment in England, has been transformed by the work of an energetic and resourceful scholar, Dr Robert Woof, gracefully assisted by his wife Pamela, another scholar of the period. They have turned the little Wordsworth Museum near the cottage into a citadel of exact learning and visual delight. The archive includes over 50,000 items, of which 30,000 are contemporary manuscripts, including Dorothy's Journals, De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater, and many other treasures. Not only can scholars come to work here on the originals of most of the great romantic poems, they can also receive professional training on archival preservation and the collection and arrangement of manuscripts. The museum itself is that rarity, the presentation of a poet's life, surround- ings, connections and influences with lumi- nous clarity and scholarly comprehensive- ness. It is also beautiful, for, with a tiny budget, Woof has contrived to acquire not only all the key manuscripts but most of the relevant portraits and landscape drawings with which those who love the period are already familiar — plus some stunning sur- prises. This is the kind of literary museum which one is occasionally fortunate to stum- ble across in France but is almost unknown in England. The fact that it is combined with a centre for training scholars to go out into the world and follow Dr Woofs methods of conservation and display makes it even more remarkable. Indeed it is unique, and a model which ought to be followed in commemorat- ing and interpreting our great writers all over the country.
Chris Smith's visit was a sign that govern- ment is at last taking note of the need to encourage such efforts. He was there to present awards to some of those who have created the Centre, and to open one of its many splendid special exhibitions, this one devoted to the efforts of artists to illustrate Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He told us that when the invitation reached his desk, an official minuted: 'Low priority', and that he had erased the 'low' and substi- tuted 'high'. He then delivered a little speech of singular felicity which was received with delight by a gathering of local worthies, scholars and writers.
I hope this indicates a change of direc- tion in government largesse. Writers have looked on with their accustomed resigna- tion while colossal sums of money have been lavished by the state on operas and orchestras, on modern art and galleries, on theatres and 'events', and even on emblem- atic monstrosities designed for unknown `cultural' purposes such as the projected Dome of Doom. Certainly, the visual and musical arts, in which Britain has rarely been particularly distinguished, have not lacked public cash. But our literature, our poetry — which are our chief claims to recognition as a creative people — are treated as Cinderellas, to be sent out bare- foot into a philistine world. I have a hunch that living writers are better off without such hand-outs. But the great and the dead need money to be presented worthily to the ignorant and often uncaring. The work of the Wordsworth Trust shows how much can be done on a pittance. How much more could be accomplished for our unrivalled heritage if those who control the fountains of largesse were to direct a modest rivulet in the direction of literature.
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