British Havy Ships of the Line
The fantasy of sudden and violent victory at sea was something deeply shared in England. It reached what, at this distance, seems like the most unlikely of corners and was far more widely spread than merely among the jingo- istic, navy-admiring French-haters. William Wordsworth, for example, who in the 1790s had been agonisingly alert to the savagery and psychic destruction of war, nevertheless nurtured a half-guilty, voyeuristic vision of himself as a fighting sailor.
I cannot at this moment read a tale Of two brave Vessels matched in deadly fight And fighting to the death, but I am pleased More than a wise man ought to be; I wish, I burn, I struggle, and in soul am there.
It is, for Wordsworth, a moment of visionary apocalyptics, a shuddering, vicarious delight at the tales of battle and the need for courage, resolution and skill which they impose.
The received ideals of courteous politeness no longer satisfy.
Those, perhaps are what a wise man should delight in, but they are not enough. Deadly fighting and fighting to the death reaches deeper into the modern heart than politesse and the observance of rank and order. Wordsworths guilty confession acknowledges a new world bubbling up under the skin of the old. And to the general populace Nelson, more than any other man in the country, looked as if he had the secret of that new world in his hand. For Wordsworth, Nelsons genius consisted, more than anything else, in turbulence.
Fascinatingly, in the terms they use to describe what they do, Nelsons approach to battle mimics Wordsworths idea of what poetry needed to be. This is not to claim that battle is guided by aesthetic concerns, merely that Nelsons form of battle, so clearly drawing on the Hawke-Rodney-Howe inheritance, but given heightened intensity in the psychically dynamic and inventive years around Trafalgar, takes as its essential merits precisely those qualities which Wordsworth requires for the new poetry: immediacy; a dignity given to the common man; dispensing with the fripperies; a sense that the moment of crisis is engaged with the ultimate metaphysical realities; interested more in the essence of what is to be done than the niceties of form; quite unaffected in manner, scrambling into action; inspiring in a way those around both Wordsworth and Nelson cannot quite explain; richly, deeply and humanly sympathetic; ruthless in its pursuit of the ideal; prepared to engage with the broken, the anarchic and the chaotic in pursuit of the goal either of victory, which is a form of revelation, or revelation, which is also a form of victory.
In both of them there is a deep distrust of the affected world of 18th-century society. From the beginning, Words- worth proudly declared his crudeness, his lack of courtesy, his plain truth.
Those who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, he declared in the 1802 manifesto-preface to the Lyrical Ballads, if they persist in reading this book to its con- clusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look around for poetry and be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. This is battle without decorum, without the pretty and elegant evolutions on which poetry had previously relied.
Like Nelson, never loath to repeat his essential point, Wordsworths language, he says again and again, is the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, the very language of men addressing the essential passions of the heart in a plainer and more emphatic language. What is a Poet? he asked, as Nelson might have asked what a fighting man might be. He is a man speaking to men. He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In this light, it becomes clear that Wordsworths basic conception of the human condition is battle.
