June 19, 2024

"Another acquaintance he made in Paris [in 1792] was John Stewart, an eccentric figure known as 'Walking Stewart.'"

"His nickname came from the fact that he had walked halfway round the world, from Madras, through Persia, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa, and every country in Europe as far as Russia. He refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses. He came to believe that there was an impending 'universal empire of revolutionary police terror' that would 'bestialize the human species and desolate the earth.' The police state would ban his books, so he urged readers to translate them into Latin (a precaution against the supposed decay of the English language) and bury them seven feet underground. Their locations would be passed down orally until the dawn of the age of the Stewartian man made their disinterment possible. Despite these bizarre beliefs, Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a wonderful essay about him, said that his political views ‘seemed to Mr Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher.'"


Here's De Quincey's "wonderful essay." Two sentences from it: "On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence--but rather exalted them. The old maxim, indeed, that 'Great wits to madness sure are near allied,' the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have heard disputed by Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, who maintain that mad people are the dullest and most wearisome of all people." 

9 comments:

Achilles said...

It would probably make him happy to know we can take his books out of the ground and load them into the metadata of a Non-Fungible Token and put them on the Cardano Blockchain in a completely immutable form and the people who owned his book would be completely pseudonymous and able to access it anywhere with an internet connection.

donald said...

Well there is that.

Quaestor said...

He came to believe that there was an impending 'universal empire of revolutionary police terror'...

Not impending from Wordsworth's perspective, but we're three and a half years into Walking Stewart's dystopia now. No point burying the Althouse blog. Maybe it can be encrypted, copied to a TB SSD, and then encased in concrete made from uranium slag.

Quaestor said...

I waken lonely as a cloud... Bliss it is this dawn to be awake.

Awake at this unaccustomed hour to interview
A new client over hearty quaffs of coffee at a distant diner
Banishing my meager, stale, forbidden brew.

Bullwinkle and Horace Rumpole,
To watch and listen was very heaven,
The rhymes of that stodgy hippie to invert.
The Moose and the Mouthpiece
Their plonk-pickled poems did pronounce.

PS
Rumpole and Althouse,
Surnames unadorned.
Vainglory eschewed,
I get it.

MadTownGuy said...

"He refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses."

The folks who want to ban cars would probably also prohibit the Amish and Mennonites from using horses.

"He came to believe that there was an impending 'universal empire of revolutionary police terror' that would 'bestialize the human species and desolate the earth.'"

He wasn't entirely wrong.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Thus illustrating the truth about being “a prophet in his own time,” but like Orwell, his vision was sharp and those tendencies keep reappearing in governments.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Wasn't DeQuincey a famous opium-eater? I believe heavy drug users have a tendency to think madness is close to wisdom. As a general rule, bullshit. Divine visions? Hard to disprove. The divine madness of Plato is a different thing; he was joking a fair bit of the time.

tim maguire said...

He came to believe that there was an impending 'universal empire of revolutionary police terror' that would 'bestialize the human species and desolate the earth.

Some things never change.

William said...

Every generation gets the John Stewart it deserves......Compared to the other Romantic poets, Wordsworth lacks sparkle and flash. He didn't even die young. I've never been tempted to read his bio or made much progress with the Preludes.....He's like Willie Mays. Mays was truly one of the greats, maybe even legendary, but he doesn't qualify for mythic status.....Willie Mays was probably a better center fielder than Mickey Mantle, but Mantle had a bum leg, a corrupted liver, and a fall from grace. There was a tragic dimension to Mantle's life and missed swings..... Wordsworth's life lacked excess. He was probably a better poet than Byron but there's more to poetry than the lines on the page.