SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT--DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH.
The year 1803 saw the beginning of a friendship which formed a
valuable element in Wordsworth's life. Sir George Beaumont, of
Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, a descendant of the dramatist, and
representative of a family long distinguished for talent and culture,
was staying with Coleridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, when, hearing of
Coleridge's affection for Wordsworth, he was struck with the wish to
bring Wordsworth also to Keswick, and bought and presented to him a
beautiful piece of land at Applethwaite, under Skiddaw, in the hope
that he might be induced to settle there. Coleridge was soon
afterwards obliged to leave England in search of health, and the plan
fell through. A characteristic letter of Wordsworth's records his
feelings on the occasion. "Dear Sir George," he writes, "if any
person were to be informed of the particulars of your kindness to me,
if it were described to him in all its delicacy and nobleness, and
he should afterwards be told that I suffered eight weeks to elapse
without writing to you one word of thanks or acknowledgment, he
would deem it a thing absolutely _impossible_. It is nevertheless
true."
"Owing to a set of painful and uneasy sensations which I have, more
or less, at all times about my chest. I deferred writing to you,
being at first made still more uncomfortable by travelling, and
loathing to do violence to myself in what ought to be an act of pure
pleasure and enjoyment, viz., the expression of my deep sense of your
goodness. This feeling was indeed so strong in me, as to make me
look upon the act of writing to you as a thing not to be done but in
my best, my purest, and my happiest moments. Many of these I had,
but then I had not my pen, ink, and paper before me, my conveniences,
'my appliances and means to boot;' all which, the moment that I
thought of them, seemed to disturb and impair the sanctity of my
pleasure, I contented myself with thinking over my complacent
feelings, and breathing forth solitary gratulations and thanksgivings,
which I did in many a sweet and many a wild place, during my late
tour."
The friendship of which this act of delicate generosity was the
beginning was maintained till Sir George Beaumont's death in 1827,
and formed for many years Wordsworth's closest link with the world
of art and culture. Sir George was himself a painter as well as a
connoisseur, and his landscapes are not without indications of the
strong feeling for nature which he undoubtedly possessed. Wordsworth,
who had seen very few pictures, but was a penetrating critic of
those which he knew, discerned this vein of true feeling in his
friend's work, and has idealized a small landscape which Sir George
had given him, in a sonnet which reproduces the sense of happy pause
and voluntary fixation with which the mind throws itself into some
scene where Art has given
To one brief moment caught from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity.
There was another pursuit in which Sir George Beaumont was much
interested, and in which painter and poet were well fitted to unite.
The landscape-gardener, as Wordsworth says, should "work in the
spirit of Nature, with an invisible hand of art." And he shows how
any real success can only be achieved when the designer is willing
to incorporate himself with the scenery around him; to postpone to
its indications the promptings of his own pride or caprice; to
interpret Nature to herself by completing touches; to correct her
with deference, and as it were to caress her without importunity.
And rising to that aspect of the question which connects it with
human society, he is strenuous in condemnation of that taste, not so
much for solitude as for isolation, which can tolerate no
neighbourhood, and finds its only enjoyment in the sense of monopoly.
"Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a
liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting; its object
ought to be to move the affections under the control of good
sense; and surely the affections of those who have the deepest
perception of the beauty of Nature,--who have the most valuable
feelings, that is the most permanent, the most independent, the
most ennobling, connected with Nature and human life. No
liberal art aims merely at the gratification of an individual or a
class; the painter or poet is degraded in proportion as he does
so. The true servants of the arts pay homage to the human
kind as impersonated in unwarped and enlightened minds.
If this be so when we are merely putting together words or
colours, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when
we are in the midst of the realities of things; of the beauty
and harmony, of the joy and happiness, of loving creatures;
of men and children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams,
and trees and flowers; with the changes of night and day, evening
and morning, summer and winter; and all their unwearied
actions and energies, as benign in the spirit that animates them
as they are beautiful and grand in that form of clothing which
is given to them for the delight of our senses! What then
shall we say of many great mansions, with their unqualified
expulsion of human creatures from their neighbourhood,
happy or not; houses which do what is fabled of the upas
tree--breathe out death and desolation! For my part, strip
my neighbourhood of human beings, and I should think it
one of the greatest privations I could undergo. You have
all the poverty of solitude, nothing of its elevation."
This passage is from a letter of Wordsworth's to Sir George Beaumont,
who was engaged at the time in rebuilding and laying out Coleorton.
The poet himself planned and superintended some of these improvements,
and wrote for various points of interest in the grounds inscriptions
which form dignified examples of that kind of composition.
Nor was Sir George Beaumont the only friend whom the poet's
taste assisted in the choice of a site or the disposition of
pleasure-grounds. More than one seat in the Lake-country--among them
one home of preeminent beauty--have owed to Wordsworth no small part
of their ordered charm. In this way, too, the poet is with us still;
his presence has a strange reality as we look on some majestic
prospect of interwinding lake and mountain which his design has made
more beautifully visible to the children's children of those he loved;
as we stand, perhaps, in some shadowed garden-ground where his will
has had its way,--has framed Helvellyn's far-off summit in an arch
of tossing green, and embayed in towering forest-trees the long
lawns of a silent Valley,--fit haunt for lofty aspiration and for
brooding calm.
But of all woodland ways which Wordsworth's skill designed or his
feet frequented, not one was dearer to him, (if I may pass thus by a
gentle transition to another of the strong affections of his life),
than a narrow path through a firwood near his cottage, which
"was known to the poet's household by the name of John's Grove." For
in the year 1800 his brother, John Wordsworth, a few years younger
than himself, and captain of an East Indiaman, had spent eight
months in the poet's cottage at Grasmere. The two brothers had seen
little of each other since childhood, and the poet had now the
delight of discovering in the sailor a character congenial to his own,
and an appreciation of poetry--and of the _Lyrical Ballads_
especially--which was intense and delicate in an unusual degree. In
both brothers, too, there was the same love of nature; and after
John's departure, the poet pleased himself with imagining the
visions of Grasmere which beguiled the watches of many a night at sea,
or with tracing the pathway which the sailor's instinct had planned
and trodden amid trees so thickly planted as to baffle a less
practised skill. John Wordsworth, on the other hand, looked forward
to Grasmere as the final goal of his wanderings, and intended to use
his own savings to set the poet free from worldly cares.
Two more voyages the sailor made with such hopes as these, and amid
a frequent interchange of books and letters with his brother at home.
Then, in February 1805, he set sail from Portsmouth, in command of
the "Abergavenny" East Indiaman, bound for India and China. Through
the incompetence of the pilot who was taking her out of the Channel,
the ship struck on the Shambles off the Bill of Portland, on February
5, 1805. "She struck," says Wordsworth, "at 5 p.m. Guns were fired
immediately, and were continued to be fired. She was gotten off the
rock at half-past seven, but had taken in so much water, in spite of
constant pumping, as to be water-logged. They had, however, hope
that she might still be run upon Weymouth sands, and with this view
continued pumping and baling till eleven, when she went down.... A
few minutes before the ship went down my brother was seen talking to
the first mate, with apparent cheerfulness; and he was standing on
the hen-coop, which is the point from which he could overlook the
whole ship, the moment she went down--dying, as he had lived, in the
very place and point where his duty stationed him."
"For myself," he continues elsewhere, "I feel that there is
something cut out of my life which cannot be restored. I never
thought of him but with hope and delight. We looked forward to the
time, not distant, as we thought, when he would settle near us--when
the task of his life would be over, and he would have nothing to do
but reap his reward. By that time I hoped also that the chief part
of my labours would be executed, and that I should be able to show
him that he had not placed a false confidence in me. I never wrote a
line without a thought of giving him pleasure; my writings, printed
and manuscript, were his delight, and one of the chief solaces of
his long voyages. But let me stop. I will not be cast down: were it
only for his sake I will not be dejected. I have much yet to do, and
pray God to give me strength and power: his part of the agreement
between us is brought to an end, mine continues; and I hope when I
shall be able to think of him with a calmer mind, that the
remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the joy which
I had in him living."
In these and the following reflections there is nothing of novelty;
yet there is an interest in the spectacle of this strong and simple
mind confronted with the universal problems, and taking refuge in
the thoughts which have satisfied, or scarcely satisfied, so many
generations of mourning men.
"A thousand times have I asked myself, as your tender sympathy led
me to do, 'Why was he taken away?' and I have answered the question
as you have done. In fact there is no other answer which can satisfy,
and lay the mind at rest. Why have we a choice, and a will, and a
notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral agents? Why
have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting
pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the
Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other,
and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely
from what appears to be His notion and rule, _if every thing were to
end here_? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the
supposition of the thinking principle being _destroyed by death_,
however inferior we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of things we
have _more of love_ in our nature than He has? The thought is
monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition
of _another_ and a _better world_, I do not see."
From this calamity, as from all the lessons of life, Wordsworth drew
all the benefit which it was empowered to bring. "A deep distress
hath humanized my soul,"--what lover of poetry does not know the
pathetic lines in which he bears witness to the teaching of sorrow?
Other griefs, too, he had--the loss of two children in 1812; his
sister's chronic illness, beginning in 1832; his daughter's death in
1847. All these he felt to the full; and yet, until his daughter's
death, which was more than his failing energies could bear, these
bereavements were but the thinly-scattered clouds "in a great sea of
blue"--seasons of mourning here and there among years which never
lost their hold on peace; which knew no shame and no remorse, no
desolation and no fear; whose days were never long with weariness,
nor their nights broken at the touch of woe. Even when we speak of
his tribulations, it is his happiness which rises in our minds.
And inasmuch as this felicity is the great fact of Wordsworth's life--
since his history is for the most part but the history of a halycon
calm--we find ourselves forced upon the question whether such a life
is to be held desirable or no. Happiness with honour was the ideal
of Solon; is it also ours? To the modern spirit,--to the Christian,
in whose ears counsels of perfection have left "a presence that is
not to be put by," this question, at which a Greek would have smiled,
is of no such easy solution.
To us, perhaps, in computing the fortune of any one whom we hold dear,
it may seem more needful to inquire not whether he has had enough of
joy, but whether he has had enough of sorrow; whether the blows of
circumstance have wholly shaped his character from the rock; whether
his soul has taken lustre and purity in the refiner's fire. Nor is
it only (as some might say) for violent and faulty natures that
sorrow is the best. It is true that by sorrow only can the
headstrong and presumptuous spirit be shamed into gentleness and
solemnized into humility. But sorrow is used also by the Power above
as in cases where we men would have shrunk in horror from so rough a
touch. Natures that were already of a heroic unselfishness, of a
childlike purity, have been raised ere now by anguish upon anguish,
woe after woe, to a height of holiness which we may believe that they
could have reached by no other road. Why should it not be so I since
there is no limit to the soul's possible elevation, why should her
purifying trials have any assignable end? She is of a metal which
can grow for ever brighter in the fiercening flame. And if, then, we
would still pronounce the true Beatitudes not on the rejoicing, the
satisfied, the highly-honoured, but after an ancient and sterner
pattern, what account are we to give of Wordsworth's long years of
blissful calm?
In the first place, we may say that his happiness was as wholly free
from vulgar or transitory elements as a man's can be. It lay in a
life which most men would have found austere and blank indeed; a
life from which not Croesus only, but Solon would have turned in
scorn, a life of poverty and retirement, of long apparent failure,
and honour that came tardily at the close; it was a happiness
nourished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager appropriation of
the goods of earth, but springing from, a single eye and a loving
spirit, and wrought from those primary emotions which are the
innocent birthright of all. And if it be answered that however truly
philosophic, however sacredly pure, his happiness may have been, yet
its wisdom and its holiness were without an effort, and, that it is
effort which makes the philosopher and the saint: then we must use
in answer his own Platonic scheme of things, to express a thought
which we can but dimly apprehend; and we must say that though
progress be inevitably linked in our minds with struggle, yet
neither do we conceive of struggle as without a pause; there must be
prospect-places in the long ascent of souls; and the whole of this
earthly life--this one existence, standing we know not where among
the myriad that have been for us or shall be--may not be too much to
occupy with one of those outlooks of vision and of prophecy, when
In a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea,
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither.
And see the children sport upon the shore.
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.