Later, before she
has seen the white doe, she must already have found springs of
comfort, for she is strangely said to be “sustained by memory of
the past.
has seen the white doe, she must already have found springs of
comfort, for she is strangely said to be “sustained by memory of
the past.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
Though he follows
in the train of a succession of descriptive poets, he outdoes them
all in abundance of precise touches.
But his practice of descriptive poetry was interrupted for
several years, at the very time when he was giving the finishing
touch to these poems. The influence of the French revolution
on this part of his life cannot be overrated. Characteristically, he
was rather late in becoming an adept. He uttered no paean on the
fall of the Bastille. To move him, it was necessary that his senses
should be aroused. Now, the revolution turned her most enticing
smile towards him. It so happened that he had first landed at
Calais on the eve of the federation of 1790; so, the unparalleled
mirth of that time seemed a festivity prepared for his welcome.
The glee and hopefulness of the season turned into a charming
benevolence, which he tasted with all the relish of a student on
a holiday trip. Then came his prolonged stay in France, chiefly
at Orleans and at Blois, from November 1791 to December 1792, in
times already darkened by civil mistrust and violence. But, chance
would have it that he should be eyewitness to heartstirring
scenes, such as the enlisting of volunteers and the proclamation
of the republic. Above all, he had the good fortune to make
friends with one of the true heroes of the day, captain Michel
7
E. L XI.
CH, V.
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
98
[CH.
William Wordsworth
Beaupuy, whose chivalric nature and generous enthusiasm for the
new order warmed the young Englishman. Exquisite is the
portrait drawn of Beaupuy in The Prelude. The fine traits of
his character are all confirmed by what has since become
known of his career, with this reservation that, through an
irresistible tendency to idealise, Wordsworth may have toned
down some of the features. Beaupuy was the revolutionary
apostle described by the poet, but there was less of the philosopher
and more of the soldier in his composition. It is clear from his
letters and diaries that he was an ingenuous and soldier-like
reasoner, and, also, that he could utter an oath or two when in a
passion. Anyhow, he found Wordsworth a bewildered foreigner
and left him a determined revolutionist, one might almost say a
French republican. A spirit of revolt and indignation against all
social iniquities pervaded Wordsworth for years, together with a
sympathy, which never left him, for the poorer and humbler
members of the community. When he came back to England,
he drew near the Jacobins without becoming one of them; but
he was a decided reformer. Alienated from his own country when
she went to war with France, he heartily hated king, regent and
ministry. His letter to the bishop of Llandaff and his poem Guilt
and Sorrow (or Incidents on Salisbury Plain) are the best
testimonies of his feelings. Society appeared to him responsible
for the wretchedness, and even the crimes, of individuals—his
pity went to vagrants and murderers. His abhorrence of war
was shown in insistent and gruesome pictures of war scenes.
When the French revolution passed into the Terror, and
especially when the republic changed a defensive into an aggressive
war, Wordsworth lost his trust in immediate social reform. He
turned more and more to abstract meditation on man and
society, chiefly under the guidance of William Godwin-a period
of dry intellectualism that went against the grain. He suffered
from the suppression of his feelings, from being momentarily
deaf to the language of the sense. ' Besides, his analysis
of men's motives soon convinced him that the evils he fought
against were not so much the results of social forms as of some-
thing inherent in man's nature. A man of commanding intellect
may be wantonly cruel and vicious ; he may use all the powers
of logic for his detestable ends ; reason is non-moral; the wicked
'spin motives out of their own bowels. Hence, a wellnigh
absolute, though transient, pessimism, which vented itself in
his play The Borderers. If the traditional bonds of morality are
6
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
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Dorothy Wordsworth
99
relaxed, the fixed rules of our actions or the intuitive guidance
of the feelings repudiated, then full scope is given to bold, in-
telligent, bad men; then are the wellmeaning blinded and
betrayed to abominable deeds. Then is the Terror possible.
Scarcely any hope of betterment is left. The kindhearted Girondin
Marmaduke will be an easy prey to the villainous Montagnard
Oswald.
When he wrote this tragedy, Wordsworth had already put an
end to his solitary, wandering life and settled at Racedown in
Dorsetshire with his sister Dorothy (autumn of 1795). There, they
both lived a frugal life, on the meagre income from a legacy of
£900 left to the poet by a dying friend. This settlement was the
crowning of a longcherished scheme. Brother and sister were
passionately attached to each other. Dorothy's letters make their
mutual love known to us and let us into depths of Wordsworth's
nature, scarcely revealed by his poems. She speaks of 'a vehe-
mence of affection' in him that his readers might not suspect, so
careful he usually was, in Hazlitt's words, 'to calm the throbbing
pulses of his own heart by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face
of nature. ' By this discipline, did he, in those years, slowly conquer
his besetting thoughts of despondency. Wordsworth and Dorothy
were equally fond of natural scenery. Their delight in each other
and their daily rambles were the first agents in the young dis-
illusionised republican's recovery. Dorothy made him turn his
eyes again to the landscape and take an interest in the peasants
near their home. But the poet's mind remained gloomy for a
time, as is shown by his pastoral The Ruined Cottage (or The
Story of Margaret), which afterwards found its place in the first
book of The Excursion. A heartrending narrative, if read without
the comforting comments of the pedlar afterwards added to it, a
perfect poem, too, such as Wordsworth never surpassed, it points
out both the exceeding tenderness often met with in the hearts
of the poor and the cruelty of fate aggravated by the existing social
order. No doctrine, poetic or philosophical, is perceptible in this
poem of simple, chastened beauty. It does not give any token of
the message with which Wordsworth was soon to think himself en-
trusted. His sense of a message only became clear to him after he
had, in the summer of 1797, removed from Racedown to Alfoxden, so
as to live in daily converse with Coleridge, who was then dwelling
at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Till then, the two poets
had only exchanged a few visits, after the end of 1795, the first
results of which had merely been to encourage Wordsworth to
7-2
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
Іоо
William Wordsworth
[CH.
6
poetical composition. He had felt raised and exhilarated by
Coleridge's entire, almost extravagant, admiration for his Salis-
bury Plain and Borderers. But, when they had become close
neighbours and intimate friends, Coleridge's innate transcen-
dentalism began to affect Wordsworth. It is impossible to define
exactly the share of each in the elaboration of those poetical and
moral tenets which they seemed, for a time, to hold in common,
unconscious of the deep differences between them. Yet, on the
whole, one may say that Wordsworth's share consisted in his
more precise observations of nature and common life. Coleridge,
with the capacious soul,' influenced his friend by his metaphysical
gifts, 'the power he possessed of throwing out in profusion grand,
central truths from which might be evolved the most comprehen-
sive systems. An omnivorous reader, with an inclination towards
mystic doctrines, Coleridge talked eloquently to Wordsworth on
Plato and the neo-Platonists, Berkeley's idealism, the pantheistic
system and serene necessitarianism of Spinoza, the intuitional
religion of the theosophists—a new world to one who had not yet
gone beyond the rationalism of the eighteenth century and who
always found his most congenial food in the associationism of
Hartley. Now, Wordsworth, without binding himself to any one
master, was to take hints from all in building up his own doctrine.
But he was not an intellectual dilettante; all he absorbed from
without had to be reconciled to his personal experience and
turned to a practical aim. He would show men the way to wisdom
and happiness. He would, from his country retreat, give out his
views of nature, man and society. He justified this lofty ambition
to himself because he was conscious, personally, of having issued
out of error into truth, out of despondency into hopefulness. He
thought he knew the reasons why most men in his generation had
fallen into pessimism and misanthropy. He now believed in the
restorative power of nature, in the essential goodness of a man's
heart when unadulterated by the pride of intellect, in the greatness
of the senses which could drink in infinite joys and profound lessons
of wisdom. Thus did he plan his Recluse, as early as March 1798,
'the first great philosophical poem in existence,' as Coleridge
anticipated, which was to employ his highest energies for seventeen
years. Though never completed, the monument exists in frag-
ments of imposing magnitude the first book of The Recluse,
properly so called, written in 1800; The Prelude, written between
1798 and 1805, an autobiography meant as the ante-chapel to
the huge gothic cathedral; and The Excursion, which, though it
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
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Lyrical Ballads
IOI
includes passages composed as early as 1797, was not finished
before 1814. Such intervals of time account better than any
other reason for the incompleteness of the edifice, for the poet's
ideas changed so much while he was engaged upon his work that no
systematic presentation of doctrine, as was first intended, could
possibly be achieved. Only the initial impulse remained—the poet's
sense of a duty put on him from on high, his earnest wish to benefit
his fellow men morally and to make them happier. The reasons for
his optimism might and did vary; but the optimistic attitude was pre-
served to the end, securing the unity of the poet's career.
But, during his stay with Coleridge in Somersetshire, Words-
worth did not only lay the foundations of his Recluse. The same
intercourse gave birth to less ambitious and more immediate
verse, to the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798, a small volume of
short poems by Coleridge and himself. It is well known how,
after some fruitless attempts at collaboration, the two friends
agreed to divide the field of poetry. To the share of Coleridge
fell such subjects as were supernatural, or, at any rate, romantic,
which he was to inform with a human interest and a semblance
of truth. Wordsworth's part was to be the events of everyday
life, by preference in its humblest form ; the characters and
incidents of his poems were to be such as will be found in every
village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling
mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present
themselves. ' Thus did Coleridge sing The Ancient Mariner, while
Wordsworth told the tales Goody Blake and Simon Lee. Nothing
can better show Wordsworth's minute realism, how necessary it
was to him to hold a little of his mother earth within his fingers.
His homely ballads are so many humble practical illustrations of the
philosophy he was at this very time promulgating in lofty blank
verse, for instance, in his lyrical hymn of thanks to nature, Tintern
Abbey. The ballads have 'a something corporeal, a matter-of-
factness, which Coleridge could not help lamenting. They are
not only clad in humble garb, but, to a certain extent, are
more scientific than poetic in their aim. There survived so much
of Wordsworth's former rationalism that he almost gave the pre-
cedence to psychology over poetry in these experiments. The
preface of the 1800 edition of the Ballads really looks like the
programme of a man of science. He is inspired by a wish to
know more, and make more known, of the human heart. He goes
so far as to call poetry 'the history and science of the feelings. '
Perfect unity is not characteristic of this period so much as
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
102
[CH.
William Wordsworth
11
a gladsome energy exerted in several directions. “He never wrote
with such glee. His new reading of nature and of man fills
him with delight-together with the life he now leads between
the most wonderful of friends and the most devoted of inspired
sisters. He had such superfluous joy that he could afford to
suffer with those he saw suffer,' that he was 'bold to look on
painful things. He believed in the deep power of joy,' by
means of which 'we see into the life of things. ' He made joy
the chief attribute of poetry, proclaimed poets 'the happiest of
men. ' He rejoiced in his own boldness, found vent for his sur-
viving republicanism in a sweeping, democratic reform of poetical
style-putting down the time-honoured hierarchy of words,
abolishing the traditional distinction between high and low, in
subjects and diction.
These trustful feelings, this spontaneous optimism, expressive
of his unimpaired vitality, sustained him throughout the years
from 1798 to 1805, during which period his best and most original
poetry was written, whether at Alfoxden, or in Germany, where
he stayed with his sister from September 1798 to April 1799, or
in the glorious humility of Dove cottage, at Grasmere, in the lake
country, where he settled with Dorothy in the last days of the
century and where Coleridge was again his frequent visitant, or in
his wanderings over Scotland, with both Coleridge and Dorothy,
from August to October 1803. A period of plain living and high
thinking,' made famous by great verse.
One may fix on 1805 as the year in, or about, which this
period of Wordsworth's poetical life closes. He had now, if not
published, at least written, nearly all that is supreme in his
works-his only book of The Recluse, all The Prelude, the best
parts of The Excursion, besides many of the best and boldest
of his short poems, ballads and sonnets. His great Odeon
Immortality was all but finished. Had he died then, in his
thirty-sixth year, having lived as long as Byron and much longer
than Shelley or Keats, he would have left a fame almost as high
as he was to attain, though of a different character. His freshness
of thought and style being taken together, his works would have
stamped him as one of the most daring among the poets of his
day. The sedate and sometimes conventional moralising which
has been associated with his name comes into existence in his
later productions. But it should be added that, for ten years,
he was to achieve, in a new direction, some verse that 'one would
not willingly let die. '
## p. 103 (#125) ############################################
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His Marriage
103
Outward events and the circumstances of his own life had some-
thing to do with the change that took place in him about 1805.
Politically, it was caused by the beginning of the French empire,
the crowning of Napoleon by the pope, 'a sad reverse for all
mankind'; hence, the final overthrow of Wordsworth's sympathies
for the revolution, the decisive proof (so he thought) that his
former ideal was false and treacherous. This led him to suspect
more and more all that, in his ideas, still savoured of revolt ; it
caused him to rally more closely round the principles of order
and repent his former wishes of social change. The gray tints
of mistrust slowly overlaid the glowing enthusiasms of yore. It
is true that Wordsworth's feelings were roused, chiefly by the
Spanish war, to a patriotic fervour that found expression in many
a vigorous sonnet and even turned him into a pamphleteer. His
eloquent and ponderous Convention of Cintra (1809) shows the
fighting spirit that was in him. But it had the inconvenience of
leading him from verse to prose, from poetry to dialectics, and
thus generated an oratorical habit that was to infect many parts
of his Excursion.
Then, in his very home, there happened changes that, whether
fortunate or sad, impressed on his soul new habits and tendencies.
As early as 1802, he bad married a Westmorland girl, Mary
Hutchinson, in whom he found one of the greatest blessings of his
life. The quieting influence of this meek Mary, by degrees, though
not at once, was added to, or even took the place of, the more
impulsive and exciting companionship of Dorothy. Mrs Words-
worth's nature told for submission and repose. Besides, the mere
fact of his being married checked gradually, though it did not
suppress altogether, what might be called the guiltless Bohemianism
of his youth. The duties and cares of the father of a large family
grew upon him. Five children were born to the pair between 1803
and 1810, two of whom were to die almost simultaneously in 1812.
As early as 1806, the increase of his family had led to a temporary,
then to a definitive, abandonment of the narrow Dove cottage, to
which clung many of his most poetical memories.
Before robbing him of two of his children, death had already
struck Wordsworth a blow that went near his heart, one that ever
after saddened his life—the loss of his brother John, a sailor ship-
wrecked in February 1805. How deeply he was affected by it is
known, not only by his poems, but from the letters of the Grasmere
household and the journal of Dorothy. There was another cause
of grievous sorrow in the state of the brother of his soul,
## p. 104 (#126) ############################################
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William Wordsworth
[CH.
Coleridge, now a prey to opium and drink, whose growing distress
of body and mind was, for years, a depressing, heartrending sight
for his friend, and whose endless idle laments haunted Wordsworth's
sleep as well as his waking thoughts. Whether absent or present,
Coleridge had become an increasing source of anxiety to Words-
worth. Wordsworth's infinite patience and forbearance, in these
circumstances, cannot be too highly praised. But nothing availed.
The friends had to part in 1810, Coleridge betaking himself to
London. More painful than all the rest, Coleridge, in one of his
irresponsible moods, turned in anger against Wordsworth. An
estrangement followed which was never wholly healed, and which
left a lifelong scar in Wordsworth's heart.
Yet, the change in Wordsworth's poetry had still deeper causes
than all these. Though he had little of Coleridge's self-abandon-
ment, he could not help feeling a decay of his strictly poetical
powers—of that imagination and joy on which, till then, he had
erected the structure of his verse. When Coleridge had written
his ode Dejection in 1802, Wordsworth could immediately re-
tort with his optimistic Leech-Gatherer. But, now, he, also, felt
the wane of his 'shaping spirit of imagination. ' The earth no
longer offered him the splendour it had for him in his youth. A
glory had departed from the earth. He had, very early, felt the
fading of that glory, but had long checked the onset of the un-
imaginative years to come by fondly dwelling on the memories of his
childhood. In 1805, he had so copiously drawn from the treasure-
house for his Prelude that the store was becoming exhausted. He
understood the meaning of the depression of his vital spirits : he
was travelling further away from the springs of energy, drawing
nearer to old age and death. This is a sad thought to all
men-it was doubly so to him who had rested all his faith
on the freshness of the senses and feelings, and on their glad-
some guidance.
In want of comfort, he turned to duty. Wordsworth’s Ode to
Duty (1805), produced at the turning-point of his career, is full of
import and significance. It throws a light both on the years that
went before and on those that were to follow. It also reveals an
aspect of the poet's nature not usually apparent. It is common to
speak of him as one of the teachers of duty, and to refer to this
ode (or to its title) as a proof. Now, he distinctly resigns himself
to the control of duty because, at his time of life, a man can do
no better. He abjures with regret the faith that, till then, had
been his and in which duty had no place, the dear belief that joy
## p. 105 (#127) ############################################
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Ode to Duty
105
6
6
and love can guide man to all good—or, rather, he does not
renounce it, but still mutters a hope that better days may come
when, joy and love reigning supreme, duty can be dispensed with.
As for himself, he would still cling to the same creed if he preserved
spirit enough to bear the shocks of change and enjoy his ‘un-
chartered freedom. ' He retires into the arms of duty as a weary
warrior of old might end bis days in the quiet shelter of a
monastery He still feels an uncertain convert: Thee I now
would serve more strictly, if I may. The 'stern lawgiver,' at first
sight, inspires him with more fear than love. He only reconciles
himself with the awful Power' when he has realised that duty
wears a smile on her face, that she is beautiful, that, after all, she
may be identical with love and joy:
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
And the most ancient Heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
a noble stanza, the loftiest of a poem signalised by the almost
plaintive appeal that is heard throughout and by the longing,
lingering look cast behind.
The Ode to Duty seems to have been written just before the
death of his brother John. He expressly says that he is still
'untried,' and moved by 'no disturbance of soul. ' When the trial
came that darkened the world for him, Wordsworth made it his
chief task to struggle against grief. He resolutely bade farewell
to the heart that lives alone, housed in a dream. ' He welcomed
'fortitude and patient cheer. He called his former creed an
illusion. His themes now, more exclusively than before, will be
the sorrows and tragedies of life. But he must find 'blessed con-
solations in distress. ' He must tell of 'melancholy Fear subdued by
Faith. ' The consequence is that his exploration of human woes
will, henceforth, be guarded and cautious. He now lacks the bold
spirit of youth that can haunt the worst infected places without
giving a thought to the danger of contagion. He is the depressed
visitor of the sick, who must needs beware, and be provided with
preservatives. He could no longer offer such harrowing pictures
of misery as those to be found in his Ruined Cottage or even (in spite
of the abrupt conclusion) in his admirable Michael (1800). His
diminished vitality makes it necessary for him to ward off dejection.
Argument is the process used at wearisome length in The
Excursion. This noble poem may be described as a long sermon
against pessimism, scarcely disguised by a story. Though different
## p. 106 (#128) ############################################
106
[CH.
William Wordsworth
speakers are introduced, their speeches are mere ventriloquism.
Wordsworth, as the optimistic Pedlar, or Wanderer, assails Words-
worth as the Solitary, or the late enthusiast of the French revolution,
now dispirited. He uses all his eloquence to raise this other self to
his own serene mood. The Excursion too often reminds us of the
debates between God and Satan at one time set forth in churches
for the edification of the people, the rule being that Satan should
have the worst of the controversy. It is the same with Wordsworth's
Solitary, who is presented to us in unfavourable colours ; his
morals are not of the best. And, when he vents his misanthropy,
he does not seem to be quite so fearless. cogent and impressive an
exponent of his own views as he might have been. We cannot
help thinking that, if the author of Cain had been entrusted
with the part, he would have made it many times more telling.
The worthy pedlar's triumph would not have been so easily
achieved.
The other manner in which Wordsworth now fought against
grief is illustrated by his White Doe of Rylstone (1807). In this
poem, he renounced argument and called imagination to his
aid. He found his subject in the romantic past, in an old tale of
war and bloodshed, the tragedy of a catholic rebel killed with all
his sons in a revolt against queen Elizabeth. Only one daughter
survived, Emily, who, many years after pillage and ruin had passed
over the paternal estate, drew comfort from the visitings of a
white doe bred by her in her happy days. The doe is a symbol of
the past, the lovely phantom of buried memories. Her first
apparition gives the lady 'one frail shock of pain’; but the pain
soon passes into a holy, mild and grateful melancholy,
Not sunless gloom or unenlightened,
But by tender fancies brightened.
The awful tragedy has thus been transformed by length of time
and strength of habit into something both beautiful and sweet.
This is as it should be with the deepest of human woes.
This graceful symbol makes the end of the poem one of the
most lovely passages in Wordsworth's poetry. Yet the poem, as a
whole, is languid, and even the moral impression is felt to be less
convincing than it might have been. The reason is that the poet
never dares courageously to cope with despair. He can paint
with free energy neither the fate of the rebels, the clang of arms
and shocks of death, nor even the pangs and sorrows of Emily.
During the battle which is to end in the death of her father
and brothers, she, represented as a protestant in a catholic
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Laodamia
107
6
family, is seen awaiting the issue without even daring to express
a wish for either side. When an old man offers to secure a hiding-
place for her kindred if vanquished, she declines the offer and
declares herself with her condition satisfied.
Later, before she
has seen the white doe, she must already have found springs of
comfort, for she is strangely said to be “sustained by memory of
the past. Such reticence in the picture of desolation much
enfeebles the effect of the poem.
How much more striking it
would have been if it had begun with dark, valiant scenes of tragic
fate; if Emily's despair had been made so evident that we should
feel for her the want of supernatural comfort, the necessity of the
coming in of the white doe!
Wordsworth, in this period, often defeats his own object by
refusing to describe the power of evil or woe to the full. He stirs
a protest in the reader's mind, incites him to complete the half-
drawn picture of misery. Or else, the strain of his muscles in the
fight against grief, his repeated assaults and his tricks to elude the
grasp of the great adversary, often leave the reader more distressed
than he would be by open pessimistic outpourings. Indeed, the
greatness of Wordsworth, in these years, lies in his stubborn refusal
to confess himself overcome. There is pathos in his optimism, as
in the sight of a strong man that will not weep though timely tears
might do him good. His stoic poem Laodamia (1814) is a proof of
this. The Olympian serenity advocated in it makes us feel-and
painfully feel—the distance between the summit where gods dwell
and the lower ground inhabited by men. Well for the gods to
disprove “the tumult of the soul! ' Well for the Elysian fields to
be a place where there are
No fears to beat away-no strife to heal-
The past unsighed for, and the future sure !
>
But poor Laodamia is merely human and lives on this earth of
ours. She cannot ‘meekly mourn' for her lost hero. She dies of
a broken heart, and it seems hard that she should be punished for
it as for meditated suicide.
Is this the conclusion of optimism ? How hard, inhuman and,
one might add, despairing! The poem is great and pathetic,
because Wordsworth, all the time, sympathises with Laodamia,
feels for her tender weakness, is at heart more like her than like
the heroic, dishumanised Protesilaus. But it can scarcely be called
a comforting poem. The same might be said of the other verse
of this period in which Wordsworth insists on proclaiming both
## p. 108 (#130) ############################################
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[CH.
William Wordsworth
the grandeur and difficulty of hopefulness, when, for instance,
he calls hope
The paramount duty that Heaven lays
For its own honour on man's suffering heart.
We perceive how lofty is the peak—and, also, how hard the climbing.
>
The rest of Wordsworth's career (1814—50) adds compara-
tively little to his best verse. No works of magnitude are to be
found in it, the most considerable being collected memorials of
one or other of the many tours he made either in the British Isles
or on the continent, or series of sonnets, like The River Duddon
(1820) and Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822). Though several of these
sonnets or short pieces are as exquisite as any in the former
volumes, these gems are now far between, and no new departure
is perceptible. The days of original thought and spontaneous
creation are over. Perhaps the most lyrical burst of the period is
the poem entitled Composed upon an Evening of extraordinary
splendour and beauty, in 1818, which breathes his former enthusiasm
for the aspects of nature; yet it is to be noticed that an “ex-
traordinary' magnificence is now needed to revive youthful
ecstasies that used to feed on what was common in the beauty
of things. The character of his later verse is other than this.
Scandalised by the fame of Byron and the success of the new
cynical and pessimistic poetry, Wordsworth exaggerates his own
sermonising tendencies. There is now a fixed and rigid attitude,
a sort of optimistic trick, in the poems which extol the minute
joys of life and endeavour to tone down its sorrows. He does
his best to convert himself to Anglicanism, which, however, he
celebrates with more copiousness than real warmth. His Eccle-
siastical Sonnets are the Anglican counterpart, on a much narrower
basis, of Châteaubriand's Génie du Christianisme. In politics,
his evolution has become complete to the point of appearing a
recantation. He pursues against liberalism the campaign upon
which, for liberal reasons, he had entered against Napoleon.
He seems to find everything for the best in Europe after the
French emperor's overthrow. He approves and upholds the Holy
Alliance and opposes, with might and main, every attempt at
reform in his own country. He protests against the too advanced
instruction which the liberals desire to impart to girls in the lake
district, against the spread of mechanics' institutes, against the
emancipation of Irish catholics, against the abolition of slavery
by parliament, against the abolition of capital punishment, against
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His Later Years
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parliamentary reform, and so forth. The one change he supports
is the extension of copyright, which affects his own interests as a
writer. That he was sincere in all his opinions, and that he had
strong arguments for his absolute conservatism, cannot be doubted.
No apostasy is to be laid to his charge. The evolution of his ideas,
which made his old age diametrically opposed to his youth, can be
traced, step by step, accounted for by outward circumstances and
earnest meditations. Yet we cannot help feeling that, all the
same, it is a progress from poetry to prose, from bold imaginings
to timorousness, from hope to mistrust, from life to death.
In the meantime, his worldly prosperity and his public reputa-
tion were steadily increasing. From the gladsome frugality of the
Grasmere days he passed into ease and comfort, thanks to his
appointment, in 1813, as stamp distributor for Westmorland, which
enabled him to remove to Rydal Mount in 1814. There, he was to
live till his death, courted by members of the nobility and higher
clergy, visited by a growing number of pilgrims, sincere admirers
and mere tourists. His fame, which was at a low ebb at the
beginning of that period, partly on account of the ridicule thrown
on his poems by reviewers, partly because the public turned in
preference to Scott and Byron, gradually rose after 1820, till it
culminated in a triumphant reception at Oxford in 1839, a state
pension bestowed on him in 1842 and the laureateship in 1843.
Before the close of his life in 1850, Wordsworth could feel assured
that he had become one of the great poetical influences of the age.
It is inevitable that, when retracing Wordsworth's career, one
should insist on the main streams of thought which flowed through
his mind. The temptation to look upon him as a prophet is great,
and, thus, in any estimate of him, to give chief prominence to the
more or less systematic philosophy woven by him out of experience.
True, few poets blended philosophy and poetry more intimately
together. Yet, the two remain distinct; they are things of a
different order. They were in conflict more than once; so, our
estimate of Wordsworth's poetical genius should not be reduced to
an appreciation of his moral code.
He was a great poet when, in 1797, he wrote The Ruined
Cottage—he never outdid that pastoral and, indeed, only once
or twice again reached such perfection. Yet (if we set aside
the words of comfort and resignation wherein, years after, it was
wrapt up), in itself, the tale is most distressing and desolate.
Wordsworth's usual optimism is not to be found in it. It implies
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a protest against the iniquity of society and the harshness of fate.
It is one of Wordsworth's masterpieces, but, in a moral sense,
can scarcely be called Wordsworthian.
The last of the Lucy poems—though written in 1799—is in
even more striking contrast to Wordsworth's known teaching.
It is one of the most desperate sobs that ever escaped from the
heart of a forlorn lover. No glimpse of hope pierces through his
vision of the tomb :
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Surely, Wordsworth would have condemned such a fit of blank
despair in any other poetry than his own. Yet, he never wrote
with more essential strength, and many of his admirers must needs
regard this quatrain as, perhaps, the most condensed example of
his poetical greatness.
What has been said of his moral doctrine applies, also, to his
theory of poetical style. It is now agreed that Wordsworth
wrote some of his most beautiful poems in entire opposition to his
principles of diction. He had laid it down as a rule that the poet
should use the simple language of peasants, merely freed from its
errors. Yet, even when he interpreted the feelings of cottagers
and made them speak in their own names, he often broke this rule
in the most glaring manner. The example pointed out by Myers
.
is so conclusive that it would be idle to look for another one. It
is taken from The Affliction of Margaret, a pathetic monologue
in which a poor widow, who used to keep a shop, laments over the
disappearance of her son, and pictures to herself the dangers and
sufferings to which he may have been exposed. Not a single phrase
in the beautiful stanza 'Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan’
but is raised to the highest pitch of lyrical force and subtlety.
Without recurring to such extreme cases, in which we have the
poet at war with the systematic thinker, we must admit that, in
many of his finest poems, the characteristics of his thought and
doctrine are least evident—whether he gives way to a disturbing
melancholy, which he usually condemns, as in The two April
Mornings or The Fountain, or where he imparts to us an im-
pression of nature on which he hangs no moral, as in The Green
Linnet or Yew-trees. The four yew-trees of Borrowdale, joined in
one solemn and capacious grove' constitute one of his most im-
pressive pictures. But no philosophy is tagged to the description,
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His Poetry of Nature
III
which is self-sufficient. There, you have Wordsworth's power laid
bare, founded on his imaginative vision of natural aspects, yet not
passing from this to a moral lesson. If this dark, powerful piece
of painting had been handed down to us without the author's
name, it is not certain that anyone would have ascribed it to
Wordsworth ; or, if so, it would have been on account of the
Westmorland names found in it; for, the bold allegories, the
strange sonorous mythology, would have made many a critic
hesitate.
These instances tend to prove that his poetry is not identical
with his habitual teaching, that it sometimes revolts against it,
that it may here and there go beyond it. Of this conclusion, we
ought not to lose sight, even when we pass on to the examination
of such verses as are both beautiful in themselves and stamped
as Wordsworth's manifest creations, to which no exact parallels
can be found in any other poet.
His chief originality is, of course, to be sought in his poetry
of nature. But it is not the mere fact of his being a poet of
nature that makes him unique. There had been many poets of
nature before, more were to come after, him. It is not even the
minute, precise, loving observation of her aspects that gives him his
preeminence. Certainly, he was one of the most truthful describers
when his task was to describe ; though, for accuracy or subtlety of
outward detail, he may have been equalled, nay, surpassed, by other
poets who, at the same time, were botanists or naturalists, writers
as different from each other as were Crabbe and Tennyson. Of
flowers, insects and birds, the latter two knew, perhaps, more
than Wordsworth. His undisputed sovereignty is not there. It
lies in his extraordinary faculty of giving utterance to some of
the most elementary, and, at the same time, obscure, sensations of
man confronted by natural phenomena. Poetical psychology is his
triumph. Apart from the philosophical or moral structure which
he endeavours to raise on data furnished him by his sensations,
these sensations are, in themselves, beautiful and new. By new,
we mean that he was the first to find words for them, for they
must have been as old as mankind.
There was a Boy is one of the most striking instances of this.
The 'gentle shock of mild surprise' felt by the lad who did not
catch in due time the answer of the owls to his own hootings, the
sudden revelation to him of the fair landscape while he hung
listening, his thrill of delight at seeing the uncertain heaven
received into the bosom of the steady lake'—these were additions
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6
to man's knowledge and enjoyment of his common sensations.
The absolute truth of the analysis impresses one simultaneously
with its beauty. The emotion is, surely, subtle, but, at the same
time universal, and we have it here expressed once and for ever.
No psychologist can expect to go further than this, no poet to hit
on words more apposite and more harmoniously combined so as to
make this little mystery of the soul palpable. When Coleridge read
the poem in a letter from his friend, he said that, if he had met
with these lines in a desert of Africa, he would have cried out
Wordsworth' at once. Here, we have, without doubt, one of the
‘
essentials of Wordsworth's poetry.
The same character is to be found in Nutting, where we are
told of 'the intruding sky,' that struck with remorse the boyish
nut-gatherer after he had torn the boughs of a virgin bower; or,
again, in Skating-scene, where the poet describes the strange
appearance of the surrounding hills, which, to the skater who has
just stopped short after gliding at full speed, still seem to wheel
by 'as if the earth had rolled with visible motion her diurnal
round. Here we have a mere illusion of the senses, but one of
the existence of which, as of its weirdness and beauty, no doubt
can be entertained.
One English poet only can be compared with Wordsworth here :
Shelley, whose senses were endowed with an unusual, almost
a superhuman, gift of insight. He, too, was to enrich our
knowledge of sensation by his verse. His sensitiveness goes into
things even deeper than Wordsworth’s. He can see further
through the screen, even spy ‘the warm light of life. ' But few, if
any, can follow him to the end, or remember having themselves ex-
perienced his wonderful ecstasies. He is alone. On the contrary,
Wordsworth has no abnormal and hypertrophied sensitiveness.
It was the common healthy sensibility of mankind which he found
himself sharing. He merely reveals to us what everyone has felt,
or may feel any day.
There may be a poetry of nature less obvious than that
founded on a multitudinous notation of her detailed aspects, less
subtle than the analysis of exquisite sensations, but, perhaps, of
more breadth and grandeur. Hazlitt has said that one could infer
that Wordsworth's poetry was written in a mountainous country,
from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth. ' It is
not, indeed, by description that the characters of nature are most
deeply caught and expressed ; it is by incorporation, so to say,
when the image of the outward world, instead of being directly
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Michael
I13
presented, is reflected in the feelings and shines through the most
indifferent words ; thus deeply had the scenery among which he
spent his days penetrated into Wordsworth's mind and soul. If
we had to praise him as the poet of mountains, we might, of
course, choose the noble descriptive pages that abound in his
volumes ; but, rather than to these, rather than to the famous
mountain scenes in his Excursion—which are too conscious—we
should turn to a poem like Michael, where scenery, characters
and style form a perfect harmony of lines and tints that could
not have existed without a secret process of assimilation. Lofty
and bare, indeed, is this pastoral ; few flowers grow on the
heights where old Michael meant to build his sheepfold. The
land is unadorned. It has no other features than the sheer linea-
ments of its sweeps and pastures or its steep rocks, over which
are spread by turns the naked sky and the winter mists. All this,
together with the bracing air, you feel from the first to the last
line, not less when the poet gives you the speech of his ancient
'statesman' or a glimpse of his stern mind, than when he paints
the landscape itself. Even as the scenery is composed of essentials,
so is the old man's character, and so his language. In such
passages there is not one word of description, and yet the 'pastoral
mountains' are constantly conjured up with their raw atmosphere,
behind the discoursing shepherd. Every syllable he utters is their
emanation.
Another summit is reached by the poet when he freely allows
his creed of the refining agency of the senses to pass into a sort
of waking dream, instead of asserting itself by argument as in
The Prelude, or even, as in Tintern Abbey, by lyrical proclama-
tion. Few will deny one of the very first ranks in his verse to
the fourth of the Lucy poems, where he tells us how his beloved
had been cared for by nature since her tenderest years, how nature
had vowed to make her a Lady of her own,' imparting to her 'the
silence and the calm of mute insensate things,' either bidding the
storm ‘mould the maiden's form by silent sympathy, or causing
'beauty born of murmuring sound to pass into her face. Here,
Wordsworth joins company with the most aerial of poets. He
drops to the earth, for once, all that matter-of-factness of which
Coleridge complained. He sets common observation at defiance
and simply ignores the objections of common sense, with which he
is elsewhere only too prone to argue. Though most thoroughly
himself when shaping Lucy's natural education, he gives wings,
not feet, to his most cherished belief. We have, in this lyric, “the
E. L. XI.
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[CH.
William Wordsworth
fine excess' of poetry. Whatever may be said of these country
maids who, though brought up under the clouds and stars, and by
the side of dancing rivulets, failed to be informed with grace and
beauty, Wordsworth has used his privilege as a poet of embodying
a vision made, after all, of mysterious possibilities, perhaps of
truths in the making.
But nature never engrossed all his thoughts. Many were
given to man, chiefly to the feelings of man. He shows the same
mastery in his delineation of the hidden germs of feeling as of
those of sensation. He, again, excels when describing the moral
emotions in the blending of the subtle and the simple, of the
strange and the essential. But the beauty of his verse seems, in
this case, to come less from intuitive discovery than from long
brooding. Fullness and compactness of meaning now characterise
his greatest utterances. All readers catch their pathos at once ;
few, immediately, if ever, their entire signification. A noticeable
instance is the finale of the plain prosaic story Simon Lee, a short
stanza full to overflowing of his prolonged meditations on the
present iniquity and harshness of society. Poets and moralists
have vied in easy railings at man's ingratitude. Shakespeare,
among others, is full of such denunciations. Alas! the greater
cause for grief is the existence of gratitude, chiefly of excessive
gratitude, which implies that there is a scarcity of fellow-feeling,
a dearth of benevolence, a lack of mutual neighbourly assistance
in this world. That exaggerated thanks should be offered for
the merest trifle, for a deed of easy and imperative kindness,
betrays daily uncharitableness and opens vistas of the insensibility
of existing society ; it shows 'what man has made of man':
I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Hath oftener left me mourning.
This is one of his many reflections which are more pregnant and
sink deeper into the mind and heart than those of almost any
other poet.
From such deep sources do many of his sonnets, chiefly of his
political sonnets, draw their rare intensity of moral feeling. It is
enough to remind the reader of a few familiar passages : his
melancholy on hearing of the extinction of the republic of Venice;
his energy of tone when he comforts poor Toussaint Louverture,
the liberator of San Domingo, now thrown into a prison ; the bitter
P
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His Sonnets
115
restrained irony of his ‘high-minded Spaniard,' who resents, more
than the devastation of his country, Napoleon's so-called benefits,
and so forth. In his more strictly English sonnets, the greatness
is not due to novelty of thought. It so happens that almost every
idea and emotion expressed by Wordsworth in 1802 and the years
following had been more than foreshadowed by Coleridge as
early as 1798 in his Ode to France or Fears in Solitude. But
the truly Wordsworthian power of the sonnets is owing to the
protracted sojourn of these feelings in his breast before he gave
utterance to them, to his long reluctance against their admission,
to his repeated inward debates. Hence, instead of Coleridge's
extemporised effusions, which have been aptly compared, by
Angellier, to the sea-scud which is thrown off by a storm, here we
have the distilled elixir. Nearly ten years of vexed thoughts
went to the making, in 1803, of the final line of the sonnet to
England, where, after enumerating and condemning what he calls
her many political crimes, he sighs (with a unique mixture of
reproof and tenderness, of grief and repressed pride) at the
thought that she, nevertheless, is the least unworthy champion
of liberty left in the world :
O grief that Earth's best hopes rest all in thee!
It would be hard to match these ten monosyllables for compactness
of historical allusion and complex feeling. Such condensed moral
utterances are among the glories of Wordsworth’s verse.
Other characteristics ought to be added, regarding bis more
purely artistic gifts-gifts of verse-writing and style, gifts of com-
position. But this would land us in endless discussions ; for, in
these respects, Wordsworth’s mastery is surely relative and inter-
mittent. He reaches, at times, so high a degree of excellence that
the mere verbal felicity of some of his simplest lines baffles the
imitation of the most refined artists:
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago. . . .
But he frequently mixes the highest poetry with the flatness of
unimpassioned, uninspired prose. He also shows himself, in many
a period or stanza, devoid of ease, elegance and pliancy. He is
more than once awkwardly naïve, clumsily familiar, or, on the
contrary, more solemn and pompous than needs be. The talent
for construction, niggardly bestowed on the romantic poets of all
countries, is particularly weak in him. He could never frame and
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[CH. V
William Wordsworth
fashion a considerable poem with due equilibrium of substance
and form, of thought and story. In this respect, The Excursion
is a memorable failure. As to The Prelude, it owes its permanent
interest partly to its admirable passages of poetry, partly to its
philosophical or to its autobiographical value, which we feel, as we
read, to be merits not strictly poetic. Only in compositions of
moderate length, like The Ruined Cottage, Michael, Laodamia
did he achieve perfect harmony, and in many of his lyrics and
sonnets.
That he often tries to lift us and himself to the poetic mood
rather than takes this mood for granted, cannot be denied. Poetry
often seems to be his object rather than his possession. He made
the training of man to poetry his chief office here below.
leads us warily from the inlands of prose to the shore, marking out
the way with unprecedented care; but he is sometimes content
with gazing on the element and leaves it to others boldly to sail
upon it or plunge into it. The main body of his poems is educative
and preparatory. Yet he has left sufficient of absolute verse,
heart-searching and beautiful, enough for a Wordsworthian an-
thology that will remain among the most enduring treasures of
romanticism.
He
1
1
1
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CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
COLERIDGE survives for us as poet: a poet unique in inspiration,
unique, also, if sadly fitful, in achievement. But he was also philo-
sopher, critic, theologian, moralist, talker-above all, a talker.
And, with the strongest will in the world, it would have been hard
for one so variously endowed not to dissipate his genius. Given a
will exceptionally infirm, the wonder is that he should have left so
much, rather than so little, as a monument of what he was.
The strange complexity of his nature, reflected, as it is, in the
whole tenor of his life, is a challenge to all who love to follow the
mysterious windings of the soul. His character is an enthralling,
as well as a deeply pathetic, study in itself. And it may even be
that we shall find it throw some light upon his genius, as a poet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in October 1772; two years
after Wordsworth, one year after Walter Scott. He was crossing
the threshold into manhood at the time when the French revolution
was rousing the more active minds to revolt against the traditions
of the past: a revolt which, in his case as in others, extended to
things literary no less than to those social and political. He reached
middle life with the reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon.
He died (1834) in the period immediately succeeding the arrest of
that reaction: some dozen years later than Keats and Shelley; ten
years after Byron; two years after Walter Scott. And, of all the
movements connected with those names and events, there was not
one, unless we except the creations of Keats and Shelley, which did
not, whether by way of action or reaction, leave some trace upon
his soul.
From his father he inherited a reverence for verbal niceties
which went with him throughout life; a curious strain of pedantry,
which crops up in the most unlikely places; above all, a dreamy
nature, which always made him a stranger and pilgrim among the
bustling figures and harsh incidents of daily life.
in the train of a succession of descriptive poets, he outdoes them
all in abundance of precise touches.
But his practice of descriptive poetry was interrupted for
several years, at the very time when he was giving the finishing
touch to these poems. The influence of the French revolution
on this part of his life cannot be overrated. Characteristically, he
was rather late in becoming an adept. He uttered no paean on the
fall of the Bastille. To move him, it was necessary that his senses
should be aroused. Now, the revolution turned her most enticing
smile towards him. It so happened that he had first landed at
Calais on the eve of the federation of 1790; so, the unparalleled
mirth of that time seemed a festivity prepared for his welcome.
The glee and hopefulness of the season turned into a charming
benevolence, which he tasted with all the relish of a student on
a holiday trip. Then came his prolonged stay in France, chiefly
at Orleans and at Blois, from November 1791 to December 1792, in
times already darkened by civil mistrust and violence. But, chance
would have it that he should be eyewitness to heartstirring
scenes, such as the enlisting of volunteers and the proclamation
of the republic. Above all, he had the good fortune to make
friends with one of the true heroes of the day, captain Michel
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[CH.
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Beaupuy, whose chivalric nature and generous enthusiasm for the
new order warmed the young Englishman. Exquisite is the
portrait drawn of Beaupuy in The Prelude. The fine traits of
his character are all confirmed by what has since become
known of his career, with this reservation that, through an
irresistible tendency to idealise, Wordsworth may have toned
down some of the features. Beaupuy was the revolutionary
apostle described by the poet, but there was less of the philosopher
and more of the soldier in his composition. It is clear from his
letters and diaries that he was an ingenuous and soldier-like
reasoner, and, also, that he could utter an oath or two when in a
passion. Anyhow, he found Wordsworth a bewildered foreigner
and left him a determined revolutionist, one might almost say a
French republican. A spirit of revolt and indignation against all
social iniquities pervaded Wordsworth for years, together with a
sympathy, which never left him, for the poorer and humbler
members of the community. When he came back to England,
he drew near the Jacobins without becoming one of them; but
he was a decided reformer. Alienated from his own country when
she went to war with France, he heartily hated king, regent and
ministry. His letter to the bishop of Llandaff and his poem Guilt
and Sorrow (or Incidents on Salisbury Plain) are the best
testimonies of his feelings. Society appeared to him responsible
for the wretchedness, and even the crimes, of individuals—his
pity went to vagrants and murderers. His abhorrence of war
was shown in insistent and gruesome pictures of war scenes.
When the French revolution passed into the Terror, and
especially when the republic changed a defensive into an aggressive
war, Wordsworth lost his trust in immediate social reform. He
turned more and more to abstract meditation on man and
society, chiefly under the guidance of William Godwin-a period
of dry intellectualism that went against the grain. He suffered
from the suppression of his feelings, from being momentarily
deaf to the language of the sense. ' Besides, his analysis
of men's motives soon convinced him that the evils he fought
against were not so much the results of social forms as of some-
thing inherent in man's nature. A man of commanding intellect
may be wantonly cruel and vicious ; he may use all the powers
of logic for his detestable ends ; reason is non-moral; the wicked
'spin motives out of their own bowels. Hence, a wellnigh
absolute, though transient, pessimism, which vented itself in
his play The Borderers. If the traditional bonds of morality are
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Dorothy Wordsworth
99
relaxed, the fixed rules of our actions or the intuitive guidance
of the feelings repudiated, then full scope is given to bold, in-
telligent, bad men; then are the wellmeaning blinded and
betrayed to abominable deeds. Then is the Terror possible.
Scarcely any hope of betterment is left. The kindhearted Girondin
Marmaduke will be an easy prey to the villainous Montagnard
Oswald.
When he wrote this tragedy, Wordsworth had already put an
end to his solitary, wandering life and settled at Racedown in
Dorsetshire with his sister Dorothy (autumn of 1795). There, they
both lived a frugal life, on the meagre income from a legacy of
£900 left to the poet by a dying friend. This settlement was the
crowning of a longcherished scheme. Brother and sister were
passionately attached to each other. Dorothy's letters make their
mutual love known to us and let us into depths of Wordsworth's
nature, scarcely revealed by his poems. She speaks of 'a vehe-
mence of affection' in him that his readers might not suspect, so
careful he usually was, in Hazlitt's words, 'to calm the throbbing
pulses of his own heart by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face
of nature. ' By this discipline, did he, in those years, slowly conquer
his besetting thoughts of despondency. Wordsworth and Dorothy
were equally fond of natural scenery. Their delight in each other
and their daily rambles were the first agents in the young dis-
illusionised republican's recovery. Dorothy made him turn his
eyes again to the landscape and take an interest in the peasants
near their home. But the poet's mind remained gloomy for a
time, as is shown by his pastoral The Ruined Cottage (or The
Story of Margaret), which afterwards found its place in the first
book of The Excursion. A heartrending narrative, if read without
the comforting comments of the pedlar afterwards added to it, a
perfect poem, too, such as Wordsworth never surpassed, it points
out both the exceeding tenderness often met with in the hearts
of the poor and the cruelty of fate aggravated by the existing social
order. No doctrine, poetic or philosophical, is perceptible in this
poem of simple, chastened beauty. It does not give any token of
the message with which Wordsworth was soon to think himself en-
trusted. His sense of a message only became clear to him after he
had, in the summer of 1797, removed from Racedown to Alfoxden, so
as to live in daily converse with Coleridge, who was then dwelling
at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Till then, the two poets
had only exchanged a few visits, after the end of 1795, the first
results of which had merely been to encourage Wordsworth to
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William Wordsworth
[CH.
6
poetical composition. He had felt raised and exhilarated by
Coleridge's entire, almost extravagant, admiration for his Salis-
bury Plain and Borderers. But, when they had become close
neighbours and intimate friends, Coleridge's innate transcen-
dentalism began to affect Wordsworth. It is impossible to define
exactly the share of each in the elaboration of those poetical and
moral tenets which they seemed, for a time, to hold in common,
unconscious of the deep differences between them. Yet, on the
whole, one may say that Wordsworth's share consisted in his
more precise observations of nature and common life. Coleridge,
with the capacious soul,' influenced his friend by his metaphysical
gifts, 'the power he possessed of throwing out in profusion grand,
central truths from which might be evolved the most comprehen-
sive systems. An omnivorous reader, with an inclination towards
mystic doctrines, Coleridge talked eloquently to Wordsworth on
Plato and the neo-Platonists, Berkeley's idealism, the pantheistic
system and serene necessitarianism of Spinoza, the intuitional
religion of the theosophists—a new world to one who had not yet
gone beyond the rationalism of the eighteenth century and who
always found his most congenial food in the associationism of
Hartley. Now, Wordsworth, without binding himself to any one
master, was to take hints from all in building up his own doctrine.
But he was not an intellectual dilettante; all he absorbed from
without had to be reconciled to his personal experience and
turned to a practical aim. He would show men the way to wisdom
and happiness. He would, from his country retreat, give out his
views of nature, man and society. He justified this lofty ambition
to himself because he was conscious, personally, of having issued
out of error into truth, out of despondency into hopefulness. He
thought he knew the reasons why most men in his generation had
fallen into pessimism and misanthropy. He now believed in the
restorative power of nature, in the essential goodness of a man's
heart when unadulterated by the pride of intellect, in the greatness
of the senses which could drink in infinite joys and profound lessons
of wisdom. Thus did he plan his Recluse, as early as March 1798,
'the first great philosophical poem in existence,' as Coleridge
anticipated, which was to employ his highest energies for seventeen
years. Though never completed, the monument exists in frag-
ments of imposing magnitude the first book of The Recluse,
properly so called, written in 1800; The Prelude, written between
1798 and 1805, an autobiography meant as the ante-chapel to
the huge gothic cathedral; and The Excursion, which, though it
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Lyrical Ballads
IOI
includes passages composed as early as 1797, was not finished
before 1814. Such intervals of time account better than any
other reason for the incompleteness of the edifice, for the poet's
ideas changed so much while he was engaged upon his work that no
systematic presentation of doctrine, as was first intended, could
possibly be achieved. Only the initial impulse remained—the poet's
sense of a duty put on him from on high, his earnest wish to benefit
his fellow men morally and to make them happier. The reasons for
his optimism might and did vary; but the optimistic attitude was pre-
served to the end, securing the unity of the poet's career.
But, during his stay with Coleridge in Somersetshire, Words-
worth did not only lay the foundations of his Recluse. The same
intercourse gave birth to less ambitious and more immediate
verse, to the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798, a small volume of
short poems by Coleridge and himself. It is well known how,
after some fruitless attempts at collaboration, the two friends
agreed to divide the field of poetry. To the share of Coleridge
fell such subjects as were supernatural, or, at any rate, romantic,
which he was to inform with a human interest and a semblance
of truth. Wordsworth's part was to be the events of everyday
life, by preference in its humblest form ; the characters and
incidents of his poems were to be such as will be found in every
village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling
mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present
themselves. ' Thus did Coleridge sing The Ancient Mariner, while
Wordsworth told the tales Goody Blake and Simon Lee. Nothing
can better show Wordsworth's minute realism, how necessary it
was to him to hold a little of his mother earth within his fingers.
His homely ballads are so many humble practical illustrations of the
philosophy he was at this very time promulgating in lofty blank
verse, for instance, in his lyrical hymn of thanks to nature, Tintern
Abbey. The ballads have 'a something corporeal, a matter-of-
factness, which Coleridge could not help lamenting. They are
not only clad in humble garb, but, to a certain extent, are
more scientific than poetic in their aim. There survived so much
of Wordsworth's former rationalism that he almost gave the pre-
cedence to psychology over poetry in these experiments. The
preface of the 1800 edition of the Ballads really looks like the
programme of a man of science. He is inspired by a wish to
know more, and make more known, of the human heart. He goes
so far as to call poetry 'the history and science of the feelings. '
Perfect unity is not characteristic of this period so much as
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William Wordsworth
11
a gladsome energy exerted in several directions. “He never wrote
with such glee. His new reading of nature and of man fills
him with delight-together with the life he now leads between
the most wonderful of friends and the most devoted of inspired
sisters. He had such superfluous joy that he could afford to
suffer with those he saw suffer,' that he was 'bold to look on
painful things. He believed in the deep power of joy,' by
means of which 'we see into the life of things. ' He made joy
the chief attribute of poetry, proclaimed poets 'the happiest of
men. ' He rejoiced in his own boldness, found vent for his sur-
viving republicanism in a sweeping, democratic reform of poetical
style-putting down the time-honoured hierarchy of words,
abolishing the traditional distinction between high and low, in
subjects and diction.
These trustful feelings, this spontaneous optimism, expressive
of his unimpaired vitality, sustained him throughout the years
from 1798 to 1805, during which period his best and most original
poetry was written, whether at Alfoxden, or in Germany, where
he stayed with his sister from September 1798 to April 1799, or
in the glorious humility of Dove cottage, at Grasmere, in the lake
country, where he settled with Dorothy in the last days of the
century and where Coleridge was again his frequent visitant, or in
his wanderings over Scotland, with both Coleridge and Dorothy,
from August to October 1803. A period of plain living and high
thinking,' made famous by great verse.
One may fix on 1805 as the year in, or about, which this
period of Wordsworth's poetical life closes. He had now, if not
published, at least written, nearly all that is supreme in his
works-his only book of The Recluse, all The Prelude, the best
parts of The Excursion, besides many of the best and boldest
of his short poems, ballads and sonnets. His great Odeon
Immortality was all but finished. Had he died then, in his
thirty-sixth year, having lived as long as Byron and much longer
than Shelley or Keats, he would have left a fame almost as high
as he was to attain, though of a different character. His freshness
of thought and style being taken together, his works would have
stamped him as one of the most daring among the poets of his
day. The sedate and sometimes conventional moralising which
has been associated with his name comes into existence in his
later productions. But it should be added that, for ten years,
he was to achieve, in a new direction, some verse that 'one would
not willingly let die. '
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His Marriage
103
Outward events and the circumstances of his own life had some-
thing to do with the change that took place in him about 1805.
Politically, it was caused by the beginning of the French empire,
the crowning of Napoleon by the pope, 'a sad reverse for all
mankind'; hence, the final overthrow of Wordsworth's sympathies
for the revolution, the decisive proof (so he thought) that his
former ideal was false and treacherous. This led him to suspect
more and more all that, in his ideas, still savoured of revolt ; it
caused him to rally more closely round the principles of order
and repent his former wishes of social change. The gray tints
of mistrust slowly overlaid the glowing enthusiasms of yore. It
is true that Wordsworth's feelings were roused, chiefly by the
Spanish war, to a patriotic fervour that found expression in many
a vigorous sonnet and even turned him into a pamphleteer. His
eloquent and ponderous Convention of Cintra (1809) shows the
fighting spirit that was in him. But it had the inconvenience of
leading him from verse to prose, from poetry to dialectics, and
thus generated an oratorical habit that was to infect many parts
of his Excursion.
Then, in his very home, there happened changes that, whether
fortunate or sad, impressed on his soul new habits and tendencies.
As early as 1802, he bad married a Westmorland girl, Mary
Hutchinson, in whom he found one of the greatest blessings of his
life. The quieting influence of this meek Mary, by degrees, though
not at once, was added to, or even took the place of, the more
impulsive and exciting companionship of Dorothy. Mrs Words-
worth's nature told for submission and repose. Besides, the mere
fact of his being married checked gradually, though it did not
suppress altogether, what might be called the guiltless Bohemianism
of his youth. The duties and cares of the father of a large family
grew upon him. Five children were born to the pair between 1803
and 1810, two of whom were to die almost simultaneously in 1812.
As early as 1806, the increase of his family had led to a temporary,
then to a definitive, abandonment of the narrow Dove cottage, to
which clung many of his most poetical memories.
Before robbing him of two of his children, death had already
struck Wordsworth a blow that went near his heart, one that ever
after saddened his life—the loss of his brother John, a sailor ship-
wrecked in February 1805. How deeply he was affected by it is
known, not only by his poems, but from the letters of the Grasmere
household and the journal of Dorothy. There was another cause
of grievous sorrow in the state of the brother of his soul,
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William Wordsworth
[CH.
Coleridge, now a prey to opium and drink, whose growing distress
of body and mind was, for years, a depressing, heartrending sight
for his friend, and whose endless idle laments haunted Wordsworth's
sleep as well as his waking thoughts. Whether absent or present,
Coleridge had become an increasing source of anxiety to Words-
worth. Wordsworth's infinite patience and forbearance, in these
circumstances, cannot be too highly praised. But nothing availed.
The friends had to part in 1810, Coleridge betaking himself to
London. More painful than all the rest, Coleridge, in one of his
irresponsible moods, turned in anger against Wordsworth. An
estrangement followed which was never wholly healed, and which
left a lifelong scar in Wordsworth's heart.
Yet, the change in Wordsworth's poetry had still deeper causes
than all these. Though he had little of Coleridge's self-abandon-
ment, he could not help feeling a decay of his strictly poetical
powers—of that imagination and joy on which, till then, he had
erected the structure of his verse. When Coleridge had written
his ode Dejection in 1802, Wordsworth could immediately re-
tort with his optimistic Leech-Gatherer. But, now, he, also, felt
the wane of his 'shaping spirit of imagination. ' The earth no
longer offered him the splendour it had for him in his youth. A
glory had departed from the earth. He had, very early, felt the
fading of that glory, but had long checked the onset of the un-
imaginative years to come by fondly dwelling on the memories of his
childhood. In 1805, he had so copiously drawn from the treasure-
house for his Prelude that the store was becoming exhausted. He
understood the meaning of the depression of his vital spirits : he
was travelling further away from the springs of energy, drawing
nearer to old age and death. This is a sad thought to all
men-it was doubly so to him who had rested all his faith
on the freshness of the senses and feelings, and on their glad-
some guidance.
In want of comfort, he turned to duty. Wordsworth’s Ode to
Duty (1805), produced at the turning-point of his career, is full of
import and significance. It throws a light both on the years that
went before and on those that were to follow. It also reveals an
aspect of the poet's nature not usually apparent. It is common to
speak of him as one of the teachers of duty, and to refer to this
ode (or to its title) as a proof. Now, he distinctly resigns himself
to the control of duty because, at his time of life, a man can do
no better. He abjures with regret the faith that, till then, had
been his and in which duty had no place, the dear belief that joy
## p. 105 (#127) ############################################
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Ode to Duty
105
6
6
and love can guide man to all good—or, rather, he does not
renounce it, but still mutters a hope that better days may come
when, joy and love reigning supreme, duty can be dispensed with.
As for himself, he would still cling to the same creed if he preserved
spirit enough to bear the shocks of change and enjoy his ‘un-
chartered freedom. ' He retires into the arms of duty as a weary
warrior of old might end bis days in the quiet shelter of a
monastery He still feels an uncertain convert: Thee I now
would serve more strictly, if I may. The 'stern lawgiver,' at first
sight, inspires him with more fear than love. He only reconciles
himself with the awful Power' when he has realised that duty
wears a smile on her face, that she is beautiful, that, after all, she
may be identical with love and joy:
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
And the most ancient Heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
a noble stanza, the loftiest of a poem signalised by the almost
plaintive appeal that is heard throughout and by the longing,
lingering look cast behind.
The Ode to Duty seems to have been written just before the
death of his brother John. He expressly says that he is still
'untried,' and moved by 'no disturbance of soul. ' When the trial
came that darkened the world for him, Wordsworth made it his
chief task to struggle against grief. He resolutely bade farewell
to the heart that lives alone, housed in a dream. ' He welcomed
'fortitude and patient cheer. He called his former creed an
illusion. His themes now, more exclusively than before, will be
the sorrows and tragedies of life. But he must find 'blessed con-
solations in distress. ' He must tell of 'melancholy Fear subdued by
Faith. ' The consequence is that his exploration of human woes
will, henceforth, be guarded and cautious. He now lacks the bold
spirit of youth that can haunt the worst infected places without
giving a thought to the danger of contagion. He is the depressed
visitor of the sick, who must needs beware, and be provided with
preservatives. He could no longer offer such harrowing pictures
of misery as those to be found in his Ruined Cottage or even (in spite
of the abrupt conclusion) in his admirable Michael (1800). His
diminished vitality makes it necessary for him to ward off dejection.
Argument is the process used at wearisome length in The
Excursion. This noble poem may be described as a long sermon
against pessimism, scarcely disguised by a story. Though different
## p. 106 (#128) ############################################
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William Wordsworth
speakers are introduced, their speeches are mere ventriloquism.
Wordsworth, as the optimistic Pedlar, or Wanderer, assails Words-
worth as the Solitary, or the late enthusiast of the French revolution,
now dispirited. He uses all his eloquence to raise this other self to
his own serene mood. The Excursion too often reminds us of the
debates between God and Satan at one time set forth in churches
for the edification of the people, the rule being that Satan should
have the worst of the controversy. It is the same with Wordsworth's
Solitary, who is presented to us in unfavourable colours ; his
morals are not of the best. And, when he vents his misanthropy,
he does not seem to be quite so fearless. cogent and impressive an
exponent of his own views as he might have been. We cannot
help thinking that, if the author of Cain had been entrusted
with the part, he would have made it many times more telling.
The worthy pedlar's triumph would not have been so easily
achieved.
The other manner in which Wordsworth now fought against
grief is illustrated by his White Doe of Rylstone (1807). In this
poem, he renounced argument and called imagination to his
aid. He found his subject in the romantic past, in an old tale of
war and bloodshed, the tragedy of a catholic rebel killed with all
his sons in a revolt against queen Elizabeth. Only one daughter
survived, Emily, who, many years after pillage and ruin had passed
over the paternal estate, drew comfort from the visitings of a
white doe bred by her in her happy days. The doe is a symbol of
the past, the lovely phantom of buried memories. Her first
apparition gives the lady 'one frail shock of pain’; but the pain
soon passes into a holy, mild and grateful melancholy,
Not sunless gloom or unenlightened,
But by tender fancies brightened.
The awful tragedy has thus been transformed by length of time
and strength of habit into something both beautiful and sweet.
This is as it should be with the deepest of human woes.
This graceful symbol makes the end of the poem one of the
most lovely passages in Wordsworth's poetry. Yet the poem, as a
whole, is languid, and even the moral impression is felt to be less
convincing than it might have been. The reason is that the poet
never dares courageously to cope with despair. He can paint
with free energy neither the fate of the rebels, the clang of arms
and shocks of death, nor even the pangs and sorrows of Emily.
During the battle which is to end in the death of her father
and brothers, she, represented as a protestant in a catholic
## p. 107 (#129) ############################################
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Laodamia
107
6
family, is seen awaiting the issue without even daring to express
a wish for either side. When an old man offers to secure a hiding-
place for her kindred if vanquished, she declines the offer and
declares herself with her condition satisfied.
Later, before she
has seen the white doe, she must already have found springs of
comfort, for she is strangely said to be “sustained by memory of
the past. Such reticence in the picture of desolation much
enfeebles the effect of the poem.
How much more striking it
would have been if it had begun with dark, valiant scenes of tragic
fate; if Emily's despair had been made so evident that we should
feel for her the want of supernatural comfort, the necessity of the
coming in of the white doe!
Wordsworth, in this period, often defeats his own object by
refusing to describe the power of evil or woe to the full. He stirs
a protest in the reader's mind, incites him to complete the half-
drawn picture of misery. Or else, the strain of his muscles in the
fight against grief, his repeated assaults and his tricks to elude the
grasp of the great adversary, often leave the reader more distressed
than he would be by open pessimistic outpourings. Indeed, the
greatness of Wordsworth, in these years, lies in his stubborn refusal
to confess himself overcome. There is pathos in his optimism, as
in the sight of a strong man that will not weep though timely tears
might do him good. His stoic poem Laodamia (1814) is a proof of
this. The Olympian serenity advocated in it makes us feel-and
painfully feel—the distance between the summit where gods dwell
and the lower ground inhabited by men. Well for the gods to
disprove “the tumult of the soul! ' Well for the Elysian fields to
be a place where there are
No fears to beat away-no strife to heal-
The past unsighed for, and the future sure !
>
But poor Laodamia is merely human and lives on this earth of
ours. She cannot ‘meekly mourn' for her lost hero. She dies of
a broken heart, and it seems hard that she should be punished for
it as for meditated suicide.
Is this the conclusion of optimism ? How hard, inhuman and,
one might add, despairing! The poem is great and pathetic,
because Wordsworth, all the time, sympathises with Laodamia,
feels for her tender weakness, is at heart more like her than like
the heroic, dishumanised Protesilaus. But it can scarcely be called
a comforting poem. The same might be said of the other verse
of this period in which Wordsworth insists on proclaiming both
## p. 108 (#130) ############################################
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William Wordsworth
the grandeur and difficulty of hopefulness, when, for instance,
he calls hope
The paramount duty that Heaven lays
For its own honour on man's suffering heart.
We perceive how lofty is the peak—and, also, how hard the climbing.
>
The rest of Wordsworth's career (1814—50) adds compara-
tively little to his best verse. No works of magnitude are to be
found in it, the most considerable being collected memorials of
one or other of the many tours he made either in the British Isles
or on the continent, or series of sonnets, like The River Duddon
(1820) and Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822). Though several of these
sonnets or short pieces are as exquisite as any in the former
volumes, these gems are now far between, and no new departure
is perceptible. The days of original thought and spontaneous
creation are over. Perhaps the most lyrical burst of the period is
the poem entitled Composed upon an Evening of extraordinary
splendour and beauty, in 1818, which breathes his former enthusiasm
for the aspects of nature; yet it is to be noticed that an “ex-
traordinary' magnificence is now needed to revive youthful
ecstasies that used to feed on what was common in the beauty
of things. The character of his later verse is other than this.
Scandalised by the fame of Byron and the success of the new
cynical and pessimistic poetry, Wordsworth exaggerates his own
sermonising tendencies. There is now a fixed and rigid attitude,
a sort of optimistic trick, in the poems which extol the minute
joys of life and endeavour to tone down its sorrows. He does
his best to convert himself to Anglicanism, which, however, he
celebrates with more copiousness than real warmth. His Eccle-
siastical Sonnets are the Anglican counterpart, on a much narrower
basis, of Châteaubriand's Génie du Christianisme. In politics,
his evolution has become complete to the point of appearing a
recantation. He pursues against liberalism the campaign upon
which, for liberal reasons, he had entered against Napoleon.
He seems to find everything for the best in Europe after the
French emperor's overthrow. He approves and upholds the Holy
Alliance and opposes, with might and main, every attempt at
reform in his own country. He protests against the too advanced
instruction which the liberals desire to impart to girls in the lake
district, against the spread of mechanics' institutes, against the
emancipation of Irish catholics, against the abolition of slavery
by parliament, against the abolition of capital punishment, against
## p. 109 (#131) ############################################
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His Later Years
109
parliamentary reform, and so forth. The one change he supports
is the extension of copyright, which affects his own interests as a
writer. That he was sincere in all his opinions, and that he had
strong arguments for his absolute conservatism, cannot be doubted.
No apostasy is to be laid to his charge. The evolution of his ideas,
which made his old age diametrically opposed to his youth, can be
traced, step by step, accounted for by outward circumstances and
earnest meditations. Yet we cannot help feeling that, all the
same, it is a progress from poetry to prose, from bold imaginings
to timorousness, from hope to mistrust, from life to death.
In the meantime, his worldly prosperity and his public reputa-
tion were steadily increasing. From the gladsome frugality of the
Grasmere days he passed into ease and comfort, thanks to his
appointment, in 1813, as stamp distributor for Westmorland, which
enabled him to remove to Rydal Mount in 1814. There, he was to
live till his death, courted by members of the nobility and higher
clergy, visited by a growing number of pilgrims, sincere admirers
and mere tourists. His fame, which was at a low ebb at the
beginning of that period, partly on account of the ridicule thrown
on his poems by reviewers, partly because the public turned in
preference to Scott and Byron, gradually rose after 1820, till it
culminated in a triumphant reception at Oxford in 1839, a state
pension bestowed on him in 1842 and the laureateship in 1843.
Before the close of his life in 1850, Wordsworth could feel assured
that he had become one of the great poetical influences of the age.
It is inevitable that, when retracing Wordsworth's career, one
should insist on the main streams of thought which flowed through
his mind. The temptation to look upon him as a prophet is great,
and, thus, in any estimate of him, to give chief prominence to the
more or less systematic philosophy woven by him out of experience.
True, few poets blended philosophy and poetry more intimately
together. Yet, the two remain distinct; they are things of a
different order. They were in conflict more than once; so, our
estimate of Wordsworth's poetical genius should not be reduced to
an appreciation of his moral code.
He was a great poet when, in 1797, he wrote The Ruined
Cottage—he never outdid that pastoral and, indeed, only once
or twice again reached such perfection. Yet (if we set aside
the words of comfort and resignation wherein, years after, it was
wrapt up), in itself, the tale is most distressing and desolate.
Wordsworth's usual optimism is not to be found in it. It implies
## p. 110 (#132) ############################################
IIO
[CH.
William Wordsworth
a protest against the iniquity of society and the harshness of fate.
It is one of Wordsworth's masterpieces, but, in a moral sense,
can scarcely be called Wordsworthian.
The last of the Lucy poems—though written in 1799—is in
even more striking contrast to Wordsworth's known teaching.
It is one of the most desperate sobs that ever escaped from the
heart of a forlorn lover. No glimpse of hope pierces through his
vision of the tomb :
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Surely, Wordsworth would have condemned such a fit of blank
despair in any other poetry than his own. Yet, he never wrote
with more essential strength, and many of his admirers must needs
regard this quatrain as, perhaps, the most condensed example of
his poetical greatness.
What has been said of his moral doctrine applies, also, to his
theory of poetical style. It is now agreed that Wordsworth
wrote some of his most beautiful poems in entire opposition to his
principles of diction. He had laid it down as a rule that the poet
should use the simple language of peasants, merely freed from its
errors. Yet, even when he interpreted the feelings of cottagers
and made them speak in their own names, he often broke this rule
in the most glaring manner. The example pointed out by Myers
.
is so conclusive that it would be idle to look for another one. It
is taken from The Affliction of Margaret, a pathetic monologue
in which a poor widow, who used to keep a shop, laments over the
disappearance of her son, and pictures to herself the dangers and
sufferings to which he may have been exposed. Not a single phrase
in the beautiful stanza 'Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan’
but is raised to the highest pitch of lyrical force and subtlety.
Without recurring to such extreme cases, in which we have the
poet at war with the systematic thinker, we must admit that, in
many of his finest poems, the characteristics of his thought and
doctrine are least evident—whether he gives way to a disturbing
melancholy, which he usually condemns, as in The two April
Mornings or The Fountain, or where he imparts to us an im-
pression of nature on which he hangs no moral, as in The Green
Linnet or Yew-trees. The four yew-trees of Borrowdale, joined in
one solemn and capacious grove' constitute one of his most im-
pressive pictures. But no philosophy is tagged to the description,
6
## p. 111 (#133) ############################################
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His Poetry of Nature
III
which is self-sufficient. There, you have Wordsworth's power laid
bare, founded on his imaginative vision of natural aspects, yet not
passing from this to a moral lesson. If this dark, powerful piece
of painting had been handed down to us without the author's
name, it is not certain that anyone would have ascribed it to
Wordsworth ; or, if so, it would have been on account of the
Westmorland names found in it; for, the bold allegories, the
strange sonorous mythology, would have made many a critic
hesitate.
These instances tend to prove that his poetry is not identical
with his habitual teaching, that it sometimes revolts against it,
that it may here and there go beyond it. Of this conclusion, we
ought not to lose sight, even when we pass on to the examination
of such verses as are both beautiful in themselves and stamped
as Wordsworth's manifest creations, to which no exact parallels
can be found in any other poet.
His chief originality is, of course, to be sought in his poetry
of nature. But it is not the mere fact of his being a poet of
nature that makes him unique. There had been many poets of
nature before, more were to come after, him. It is not even the
minute, precise, loving observation of her aspects that gives him his
preeminence. Certainly, he was one of the most truthful describers
when his task was to describe ; though, for accuracy or subtlety of
outward detail, he may have been equalled, nay, surpassed, by other
poets who, at the same time, were botanists or naturalists, writers
as different from each other as were Crabbe and Tennyson. Of
flowers, insects and birds, the latter two knew, perhaps, more
than Wordsworth. His undisputed sovereignty is not there. It
lies in his extraordinary faculty of giving utterance to some of
the most elementary, and, at the same time, obscure, sensations of
man confronted by natural phenomena. Poetical psychology is his
triumph. Apart from the philosophical or moral structure which
he endeavours to raise on data furnished him by his sensations,
these sensations are, in themselves, beautiful and new. By new,
we mean that he was the first to find words for them, for they
must have been as old as mankind.
There was a Boy is one of the most striking instances of this.
The 'gentle shock of mild surprise' felt by the lad who did not
catch in due time the answer of the owls to his own hootings, the
sudden revelation to him of the fair landscape while he hung
listening, his thrill of delight at seeing the uncertain heaven
received into the bosom of the steady lake'—these were additions
## p. 112 (#134) ############################################
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William Wordsworth
6
to man's knowledge and enjoyment of his common sensations.
The absolute truth of the analysis impresses one simultaneously
with its beauty. The emotion is, surely, subtle, but, at the same
time universal, and we have it here expressed once and for ever.
No psychologist can expect to go further than this, no poet to hit
on words more apposite and more harmoniously combined so as to
make this little mystery of the soul palpable. When Coleridge read
the poem in a letter from his friend, he said that, if he had met
with these lines in a desert of Africa, he would have cried out
Wordsworth' at once. Here, we have, without doubt, one of the
‘
essentials of Wordsworth's poetry.
The same character is to be found in Nutting, where we are
told of 'the intruding sky,' that struck with remorse the boyish
nut-gatherer after he had torn the boughs of a virgin bower; or,
again, in Skating-scene, where the poet describes the strange
appearance of the surrounding hills, which, to the skater who has
just stopped short after gliding at full speed, still seem to wheel
by 'as if the earth had rolled with visible motion her diurnal
round. Here we have a mere illusion of the senses, but one of
the existence of which, as of its weirdness and beauty, no doubt
can be entertained.
One English poet only can be compared with Wordsworth here :
Shelley, whose senses were endowed with an unusual, almost
a superhuman, gift of insight. He, too, was to enrich our
knowledge of sensation by his verse. His sensitiveness goes into
things even deeper than Wordsworth’s. He can see further
through the screen, even spy ‘the warm light of life. ' But few, if
any, can follow him to the end, or remember having themselves ex-
perienced his wonderful ecstasies. He is alone. On the contrary,
Wordsworth has no abnormal and hypertrophied sensitiveness.
It was the common healthy sensibility of mankind which he found
himself sharing. He merely reveals to us what everyone has felt,
or may feel any day.
There may be a poetry of nature less obvious than that
founded on a multitudinous notation of her detailed aspects, less
subtle than the analysis of exquisite sensations, but, perhaps, of
more breadth and grandeur. Hazlitt has said that one could infer
that Wordsworth's poetry was written in a mountainous country,
from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth. ' It is
not, indeed, by description that the characters of nature are most
deeply caught and expressed ; it is by incorporation, so to say,
when the image of the outward world, instead of being directly
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Michael
I13
presented, is reflected in the feelings and shines through the most
indifferent words ; thus deeply had the scenery among which he
spent his days penetrated into Wordsworth's mind and soul. If
we had to praise him as the poet of mountains, we might, of
course, choose the noble descriptive pages that abound in his
volumes ; but, rather than to these, rather than to the famous
mountain scenes in his Excursion—which are too conscious—we
should turn to a poem like Michael, where scenery, characters
and style form a perfect harmony of lines and tints that could
not have existed without a secret process of assimilation. Lofty
and bare, indeed, is this pastoral ; few flowers grow on the
heights where old Michael meant to build his sheepfold. The
land is unadorned. It has no other features than the sheer linea-
ments of its sweeps and pastures or its steep rocks, over which
are spread by turns the naked sky and the winter mists. All this,
together with the bracing air, you feel from the first to the last
line, not less when the poet gives you the speech of his ancient
'statesman' or a glimpse of his stern mind, than when he paints
the landscape itself. Even as the scenery is composed of essentials,
so is the old man's character, and so his language. In such
passages there is not one word of description, and yet the 'pastoral
mountains' are constantly conjured up with their raw atmosphere,
behind the discoursing shepherd. Every syllable he utters is their
emanation.
Another summit is reached by the poet when he freely allows
his creed of the refining agency of the senses to pass into a sort
of waking dream, instead of asserting itself by argument as in
The Prelude, or even, as in Tintern Abbey, by lyrical proclama-
tion. Few will deny one of the very first ranks in his verse to
the fourth of the Lucy poems, where he tells us how his beloved
had been cared for by nature since her tenderest years, how nature
had vowed to make her a Lady of her own,' imparting to her 'the
silence and the calm of mute insensate things,' either bidding the
storm ‘mould the maiden's form by silent sympathy, or causing
'beauty born of murmuring sound to pass into her face. Here,
Wordsworth joins company with the most aerial of poets. He
drops to the earth, for once, all that matter-of-factness of which
Coleridge complained. He sets common observation at defiance
and simply ignores the objections of common sense, with which he
is elsewhere only too prone to argue. Though most thoroughly
himself when shaping Lucy's natural education, he gives wings,
not feet, to his most cherished belief. We have, in this lyric, “the
E. L. XI.
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[CH.
William Wordsworth
fine excess' of poetry. Whatever may be said of these country
maids who, though brought up under the clouds and stars, and by
the side of dancing rivulets, failed to be informed with grace and
beauty, Wordsworth has used his privilege as a poet of embodying
a vision made, after all, of mysterious possibilities, perhaps of
truths in the making.
But nature never engrossed all his thoughts. Many were
given to man, chiefly to the feelings of man. He shows the same
mastery in his delineation of the hidden germs of feeling as of
those of sensation. He, again, excels when describing the moral
emotions in the blending of the subtle and the simple, of the
strange and the essential. But the beauty of his verse seems, in
this case, to come less from intuitive discovery than from long
brooding. Fullness and compactness of meaning now characterise
his greatest utterances. All readers catch their pathos at once ;
few, immediately, if ever, their entire signification. A noticeable
instance is the finale of the plain prosaic story Simon Lee, a short
stanza full to overflowing of his prolonged meditations on the
present iniquity and harshness of society. Poets and moralists
have vied in easy railings at man's ingratitude. Shakespeare,
among others, is full of such denunciations. Alas! the greater
cause for grief is the existence of gratitude, chiefly of excessive
gratitude, which implies that there is a scarcity of fellow-feeling,
a dearth of benevolence, a lack of mutual neighbourly assistance
in this world. That exaggerated thanks should be offered for
the merest trifle, for a deed of easy and imperative kindness,
betrays daily uncharitableness and opens vistas of the insensibility
of existing society ; it shows 'what man has made of man':
I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Hath oftener left me mourning.
This is one of his many reflections which are more pregnant and
sink deeper into the mind and heart than those of almost any
other poet.
From such deep sources do many of his sonnets, chiefly of his
political sonnets, draw their rare intensity of moral feeling. It is
enough to remind the reader of a few familiar passages : his
melancholy on hearing of the extinction of the republic of Venice;
his energy of tone when he comforts poor Toussaint Louverture,
the liberator of San Domingo, now thrown into a prison ; the bitter
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His Sonnets
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restrained irony of his ‘high-minded Spaniard,' who resents, more
than the devastation of his country, Napoleon's so-called benefits,
and so forth. In his more strictly English sonnets, the greatness
is not due to novelty of thought. It so happens that almost every
idea and emotion expressed by Wordsworth in 1802 and the years
following had been more than foreshadowed by Coleridge as
early as 1798 in his Ode to France or Fears in Solitude. But
the truly Wordsworthian power of the sonnets is owing to the
protracted sojourn of these feelings in his breast before he gave
utterance to them, to his long reluctance against their admission,
to his repeated inward debates. Hence, instead of Coleridge's
extemporised effusions, which have been aptly compared, by
Angellier, to the sea-scud which is thrown off by a storm, here we
have the distilled elixir. Nearly ten years of vexed thoughts
went to the making, in 1803, of the final line of the sonnet to
England, where, after enumerating and condemning what he calls
her many political crimes, he sighs (with a unique mixture of
reproof and tenderness, of grief and repressed pride) at the
thought that she, nevertheless, is the least unworthy champion
of liberty left in the world :
O grief that Earth's best hopes rest all in thee!
It would be hard to match these ten monosyllables for compactness
of historical allusion and complex feeling. Such condensed moral
utterances are among the glories of Wordsworth’s verse.
Other characteristics ought to be added, regarding bis more
purely artistic gifts-gifts of verse-writing and style, gifts of com-
position. But this would land us in endless discussions ; for, in
these respects, Wordsworth’s mastery is surely relative and inter-
mittent. He reaches, at times, so high a degree of excellence that
the mere verbal felicity of some of his simplest lines baffles the
imitation of the most refined artists:
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago. . . .
But he frequently mixes the highest poetry with the flatness of
unimpassioned, uninspired prose. He also shows himself, in many
a period or stanza, devoid of ease, elegance and pliancy. He is
more than once awkwardly naïve, clumsily familiar, or, on the
contrary, more solemn and pompous than needs be. The talent
for construction, niggardly bestowed on the romantic poets of all
countries, is particularly weak in him. He could never frame and
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[CH. V
William Wordsworth
fashion a considerable poem with due equilibrium of substance
and form, of thought and story. In this respect, The Excursion
is a memorable failure. As to The Prelude, it owes its permanent
interest partly to its admirable passages of poetry, partly to its
philosophical or to its autobiographical value, which we feel, as we
read, to be merits not strictly poetic. Only in compositions of
moderate length, like The Ruined Cottage, Michael, Laodamia
did he achieve perfect harmony, and in many of his lyrics and
sonnets.
That he often tries to lift us and himself to the poetic mood
rather than takes this mood for granted, cannot be denied. Poetry
often seems to be his object rather than his possession. He made
the training of man to poetry his chief office here below.
leads us warily from the inlands of prose to the shore, marking out
the way with unprecedented care; but he is sometimes content
with gazing on the element and leaves it to others boldly to sail
upon it or plunge into it. The main body of his poems is educative
and preparatory. Yet he has left sufficient of absolute verse,
heart-searching and beautiful, enough for a Wordsworthian an-
thology that will remain among the most enduring treasures of
romanticism.
He
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CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
COLERIDGE survives for us as poet: a poet unique in inspiration,
unique, also, if sadly fitful, in achievement. But he was also philo-
sopher, critic, theologian, moralist, talker-above all, a talker.
And, with the strongest will in the world, it would have been hard
for one so variously endowed not to dissipate his genius. Given a
will exceptionally infirm, the wonder is that he should have left so
much, rather than so little, as a monument of what he was.
The strange complexity of his nature, reflected, as it is, in the
whole tenor of his life, is a challenge to all who love to follow the
mysterious windings of the soul. His character is an enthralling,
as well as a deeply pathetic, study in itself. And it may even be
that we shall find it throw some light upon his genius, as a poet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in October 1772; two years
after Wordsworth, one year after Walter Scott. He was crossing
the threshold into manhood at the time when the French revolution
was rousing the more active minds to revolt against the traditions
of the past: a revolt which, in his case as in others, extended to
things literary no less than to those social and political. He reached
middle life with the reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon.
He died (1834) in the period immediately succeeding the arrest of
that reaction: some dozen years later than Keats and Shelley; ten
years after Byron; two years after Walter Scott. And, of all the
movements connected with those names and events, there was not
one, unless we except the creations of Keats and Shelley, which did
not, whether by way of action or reaction, leave some trace upon
his soul.
From his father he inherited a reverence for verbal niceties
which went with him throughout life; a curious strain of pedantry,
which crops up in the most unlikely places; above all, a dreamy
nature, which always made him a stranger and pilgrim among the
bustling figures and harsh incidents of daily life.
