LETTERS ON THE KENDAL AND WINDERMERE RAILWAY--CONCLUSION.
Wordsworth's appointment to the Laureateship was significant in more
ways than one. He was so much besides a poet, that his appointment
implied something of a national recognition, not only of his past
poetical achievements, but of the substantial truth of that body of
principles which through many years of neglect and ridicule he had
consistently supported. There was therefore nothing incongruous in
the fact that the only composition of any importance which
Wordsworth produced after he became Laureate was in prose--his two
letters on the projected Kendal and Windermere railway, 1844. No
topic, in fact, could have arisen on which the veteran poet could
more fitly speak with whatever authority his official spokesmanship
of the nation's higher life could give, for it was a topic with
every aspect of which he was familiar; and so far as the extension of
railways through the Lake country was defended on grounds of popular
benefit, (and not merely of commercial advantage), no one, certainly,
had shown himself more capable of estimating at their full value
such benefits as were here proposed.
The results which follow on a large incursion of visitors into the
Lake country may be considered under two heads, as affecting the
residents, or as affecting the visitors themselves. And first as to
the residents. Of the wealthier class of these I say nothing, as it
will perhaps be thought that their inconvenience is outweighed by
the possible profits which the railway may bring to speculators or
contractors. But the effect produced on the poorer residents,--on
the peasantry,--is a serious matter, and the danger which was
distantly foreseen by Wordsworth has since his day assumed grave
proportions. And lest the poet's estimate of the simple virtue which
is thus jeopardized should be suspected of partiality, it may be
allowable to corroborate it by the testimony of an eminent man, not
a native of the district, though a settler therein in later life,
and whose writings, perhaps, have done more than any man's since
Wordsworth to increase the sum of human enjoyment derived both from
Art and from Nature.
"The Border peasantry of Scotland and England," says Mr. Ruskin,[6]
"painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth,--(for
leading types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may name
Dandie Dinmont, and Michael,) are hitherto a scarcely injured race;
whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul
of England, before her days of mechanical decrepitude, and
commercial dishonour. There are men working in my own fields who
might have fought with Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, without being
discerned from among his knights; I can take my tradesmen's word for
a thousand pounds; my garden gate opens on the latch to the public
road, by day and night, without fear of any foot entering but my own;
and my girl-guests may wander by road or moorland, or through every
bosky dell of this wild wood, free as the heather-bees or squirrels.
What effect on the character of such a population will be produced
by the influx of that of the suburbs of our manufacturing towns
there is evidence enough, if the reader cares to ascertain the facts,
in every newspaper on his morning table."
[Footnote 6: _A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the
Lake District_,--Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1876.]
There remains the question of how the greatest benefit is to be
secured to visitors to the country, quite apart from the welfare of
its more permanent inhabitants. At first sight this question seems
to present a problem of a well-known order--to find the point of
maximum pleasure to mankind in a case where the intensity of the
pleasure varies inversely as its extension--where each fresh person
who shares it diminishes _pro tanto_ the pleasure of the rest. But,
as Wordsworth has pointed out, this is not in reality the question
here. To the great mass of cheap excursionists the characteristic
scenery of the Lakes is in itself hardly a pleasure at all. The
pleasure, indeed, which they derive from contact with Nature is
great and important, but it is one which could be offered to them,
not only as well but much better, near their own homes.
"It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies,
running streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and
all the ordinary varieties of rural nature should find an easy way
to the affections of all men. But a taste beyond this, however
desirable it may be that every one should possess it, is not to be
implanted at once; it must be gradually developed both in nations
and individuals. Rocks and mountains, torrents and wide-spread waters,
and all those features of nature which go to the composition of such
scenes as this part of England is distinguished for, cannot, in
their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even
very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or
opportunities of observation in some degree habitual. In the eye of
thousands, and tens of thousands, a rich meadow, with fat cattle
grazing upon it, or the sight of what they would call a heavy crop
of corn, is worth all that the Alps and Pyrenees in their utmost
grandeur and beauty could show to them; and it is noticeable what
trifling conventional prepossessions will, in common minds, not only
preclude pleasure from the sight of natural beauty, but will even
turn it into an object of disgust. In the midst of a small
pleasure-ground immediately below my house, rises a detached rock,
equally remarkable for the beauty of its form, the ancient oaks that
grow out of it, and the flowers and shrubs which adorn it. 'What a
nice place would this be,' said a Manchester tradesman, pointing to
the rock, 'if that ugly lump were but out of the way.' Men as little
advanced in the pleasure which such objects give to others, are so
far from being rare that they may be said fairly to represent a
large majority of mankind. This is the fact, and none but the
deceiver and the willingly deceived can be offended by its being
stated."
And, since this is so, the true means of raising the taste of the
masses consists, as Wordsworth proceeds to point out, in giving them,--
not a few hurried glimpses of what is above their comprehension,--
but permanent opportunities of learning at leisure the first great
lessons which Nature has to teach. Since he wrote thus our towns have
spread their blackness wider still, and the provision of parks for
the recreation of our urban population has become a pressing
national need. And here again the very word _recreation_ suggests
another unfitness in the Lake country for these purposes. Solitude
is as characteristic of that region as beauty, and what the mass of
mankind need for their refreshment--most naturally and justly--is
not solitude but society.
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
is to them merely a drawback, to be overcome by moving about in
large masses, and by congregating in chosen resorts with vehement
hilarity. It would be most unreasonable to wish to curtail to
curtail the social expansion of men whose lives are for the most
part passed in a monotonous round of toil. But is it kinder and wiser,--
from any point of view but the railway shareholder's,--to allure
them into excursion trains by the prestige of a scenery which is to
them (as it was to all classes a century or two ago) at best
indifferent, or to provide them near at hand with their needed space
for rest and play, not separated from their homes by hours of
clamour and crowding, nor broken up by barren precipices, nor
drenched with sweeping storm?
Unquestionably it is the masses whom we have first to consider.
Sooner than that the great mass of the dwellers in towns should be
debarred from the influences of Nature--sooner than that they
should continue for another century to be debarred as now they are--
it might be better that Cumbrian statesmen and shepherds should be
turned into innkeepers and touts, and that every poet, artist,
dreamer, in England should be driven to seek his solitude at the
North Pole. But it is the mere futility of sentiment to pretend that
there need be any real collision of interests here. There is space
enough in England yet for all to enjoy in their several manners, if
those who have the power would leave some unpolluted rivers, and
some unblighted fields, for the health and happiness of the
factory-hand, whose toil is for their fortunes, and whose
degradation is their shame.
Wordsworth, while indicating, with some such reasoning as this, the
true method of promoting the education of the mass of men in natural
joys, was assuredly not likely to forget that in every class, even
the poorest, are found exceptional spirits which some inbred power
has attuned already to the stillness and glory of the hills. In what
way the interests of such men may best be consulted, he has
discussed in the following passage.
"O nature a' thy shows an' forms
To feeling pensive hearts hae charms!"
"So exclaimed the Ayrshire ploughman, speaking of ordinary rural
nature under the varying influences of the seasons; and the
sentiment has found an echo in the bosoms of thousands in as humble
a condition as he himself was when he gave vent to it. But then they
_were_ feeling, pensive hearts--men who would be among the first
to lament the facility with which they had approached this region,
by a sacrifice of so much of its quiet and beauty as, from the
intrusion of a railway, would be inseparable. What can, in truth, be
more absurd than that either rich or poor should be spared the
trouble of travelling by the high roads over so short a space,
according to their respective means, if the unavoidable consequence
must be a great disturbance of the retirement, and, in many places,
a destruction of the beauty, of the country which the parties are
come in search of? Would not this be pretty much like the child's
cutting up his drum to learn where the sound came from?"
The truth of these words has become more conspicuous since
Wordsworth's day. The Lake country is now both engirdled and
intersected with railways. The point to which even the poorest of
genuine lovers of the mountains could desire that his facilities of
cheap locomotion should be carried has been not only reached but far
overpassed. If he is not content to dismount from his railway
carriage at Coniston, or Seascale, or Bowness,--at Penrith, or
Troutbeek, or Keswick,--and to move at eight miles an hour in a coach,
or at four miles an hour on foot, while he studies that small
intervening tract of country, of which every mile is a separate gem,--
when, we may ask, _is_ he to dismount? What _is_ he to study? Or is
nothing to be expected from Nature but a series of dissolving views?
It is impossible to feel sanguine as to the future of this
irreplaceable national possession. A real delight in scenery,--
apart from the excitements of sport or mountaineering, for which
Scotland and Switzerland are better suited than Cumberland,--is
still too rare a thing among the wealthier as among the poorer
classes to be able to compete with such a power as the Railway
Interest. And it is little likely now that the Government of England
should act with regard to this district as the Government of the
United States has acted with regard to the Yosemite and Yellowstone
valleys, and guard as a national possession the beauty which will
become rarer and more precious with every generation of men. But it
is in any case desirable that Wordsworth's unanswered train of
reasoning on the subject should be kept in view--that it should be
clearly understood that the one argument for making more railways
through the Lakes is that they may possibly pay; while it is certain
that each railway extension is injurious to the peasantry of the
district, and to all visitors who really care for its scenery, while
conferring no benefit on the crowds who are dragged many miles to
what they do not enjoy, instead of having what they really want
secured to them, as it ought to be, at their own doors.
It is probable that all this will continue to be said in vain.
Railways, and mines, and waterworks will have their way, till injury
has become destruction. The natural sanctuary of England, the nurse
of simple and noble natures, "the last region which Astræa touches
with flying feet," will be sacrificed--it is scarcely possible to
doubt it--to the greed of gain. We must seek our consolation in the
thought that no outrage on Nature is mortal; that the ever-springing
affections of men create for themselves continually some fresh abode,
and inspire some new landscape with a consecrating history, and as
it were with a silent soul. Yet it will be long ere round some other
lakes, upon some other hill, shall cluster memories as pure and high
as those which hover still around Rydal and Grasmere, and on
Helvellyn's windy summit, "and by Glenridding Screes and low
Gleneoign."
With, this last word of protest and warning,--uttered, as it may
seem to the reader, with, unexpected force and conviction from out
of the tranquillity of a serene old age,--Wordsworth's mission is
concluded. The prophecy of his boyhood is fulfilled, and the
"dear native regions" whence his dawning genius rose have been
gilded by the last ray of its declining fire. There remains but the
domestic chronicle of a few more years of mingled sadness and peace.
And I will first cite a characteristic passage from a letter to his
American correspondent, Mr. Reed, describing his presentation as
Laureate to the Queen:--
"The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was most gracious.
Mrs. Everett, the wife of your Minister, among many others, was a
witness to it, without knowing who I was. It moved her to the
shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I suppose, by
American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government.
To see a grey-haired man of seventy-five years of age, kneeling down
in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman, is a sight
for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a
spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon
which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in
strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is."
In the same letter the poet introduces an ominous allusion to the
state of his daughter's health. Dora, his only daughter who survived
childhood, was the darling of Wordsworth's age. In her wayward
gaiety and bright intelligence there was much to remind him of his
sister's youth; and his clinging nature wound itself round this new
Dora as tenderly as it had ever done round her who was now only the
object of loving compassion and care. In 1841 Dora Wordsworth
married Mr. Quillinan, an ex-officer of the Guards, and a man of
great literary taste and some original power. In 1821 he had settled
for a time in the vale of Rydal, mainly for the sake of Wordsworth's
society; and ever since then he had been an intimate and valued
friend. He had been married before, but his wife died in 1822,
leaving him two daughters, one of whom was named from the murmuring
Rotha, and was god-child of the poet. Shortly after marriage, Dora
Quillinan's health began to fail. In 1845 the Quillinans went to
Oporto in search of health, and returned in 1846, in the trust that
it was regained. But in July 1847 Dora Quillinan died at Rydal,
and left her father to mourn for his few remaining years his
"immeasurable loss."
The depth and duration of Wordsworth's grief in such bereavements as
fell to his lot, was such as to make his friends thankful that his
life had on the whole been guided through ways of so profound a peace.
Greatly, indeed, have they erred, who have imagined him as cold, or
even as by nature tranquil. "What strange workings," writes one from
Rydal Mount when the poet was in his sixty-ninth year,--"what strange
workings are there in his great mind! How fearfully strong are all
his feelings and affections! If his intellect had been less powerful
they must have destroyed him long ago." Such, in fact, was the
impression which he gave to those who knew him best throughout life.
The look of premature age, which De Quincey insists on; the furrowed
and rugged countenance, the brooding intensity of the eye, the
bursts of anger at the report of evil doings, the lonely and violent
roamings over the mountains,--all told of a strong absorption and a
smothered fire. His own description of himself (for such we must
probably hold it to be) in his _Imitation of the Castle of Indolence_,
unexpected as it is by the ordinary reader, carries for those who
knew him the stamp of truth.
Full many a time, upon a stormy night,
His voice came to us from the neighbouring height:
Oft did we see him driving full in view
At mid-day when the sun was shining bright;
What ill was on him, what he had to do,
A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew.
Ah! Piteous sight it was to see this Man
When he came back to us, a withered flower,--
Or like a sinful creature, pale and wan.
Down would he sit; and without strength or power
Look at the common grass from hour to hour:
And oftentimes, how long I fear to say,
Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower,
Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay;
And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away.
Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was
Whenever from our valley he withdrew;
For happier soul no living creature has
Than he had, being here the long day through.
Some thought he was a lover, and did woo:
Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong:
But Verse was what he had been wedded to;
And his own mind did like a tempest strong
Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along.
An excitement which vents itself in bodily exercise carries its own
sedative with it. And in comparing Wordsworth's nature with that of
other poets whose career has been less placid, we may say that he was
perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it was his constant
endeavour to avoid all excitement, save of the purely poetic kind;
and that the outward circumstances of his life,--his mediocrity of
fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence of striking personal
charm,--made it easy for him to adhere to a method of life which was,
in the truest sense of the term, _stoic_--stoic alike in its
practical abstinences and in its calm and grave ideal. Purely poetic
excitement, however, is hard to maintain at a high point; and the
description quoted above of the voice which came through the stormy
night should be followed by another--by the same candid and
self-picturing hand--which represents the same habits in a quieter
light.
"Nine-tenths of my verses," says the poet in 1843, "have been
murmured out in the open air. One day a stranger, having walked
round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked of one of the
female servants, who happened to be at the door, permission to see
her master's study. 'This,' said she, leading him forward, 'is my
master's library, where he keeps his books, but his study is out of
doors.' After a long absence from home, it has more than once
happened that some one of my cottage neighbours (not of the
double-coach-house cottages) has said, 'Well, there he is! We are
glad to hear him _booing_ about again.'"
Wordsworth's health, steady and robust for the most part, indicated
the same restrained excitability. While he was well able to resist
fatigue, exposure to weather, &c. there were, in fact, three things
which his peculiar constitution made it difficult for him to do, and
unfortunately those three things were reading, writing, and the
composition of poetry. A frequently recurring inflammation of the
eyes, caught originally from exposure to a cold wind when overheated
by exercise, but always much aggravated by mental excitement,
sometimes prevented his reading for months together. His symptoms
when he attempted to hold the pen are thus described, in a published
letter to Sir George Beaumont (1803):--
"I do not know from what cause it is, but during the last three
years I have never had a pen in my hand for five minutes before my
whole frame becomes a bundle of uneasiness; a perspiration starts
out all over me, and my chest is oppressed in a manner which I
cannot describe." While as to the labour of composition his sister
says (September 1800): "He writes with so much feeling and agitation
that it brings on a sense of pain and internal weakness about his
left side and stomach, which now often makes it impossible for him
to write when he is, in mind and feelings, in such a state that he
could do it without difficulty."
But turning to the brighter side of things--to the joys rather than
the pains of the sensitive body and spirit--we find, in Wordsworth's
later years much of happiness 011 which to dwell. The memories which
his name recalls are for the most part of thoughtful kindnesses, of
simple-hearted joy in feeling himself at last appreciated, of tender
sympathy with the young. Sometimes it is a recollection of some
London drawing-room, where youth and beauty surrounded the rugged
old man with an eager admiration which fell on no unwilling heart.
Sometimes it is a story of some assemblage of young and old, rich
and poor, from all the neighbouring houses and cottages, at Rydal
Mount, to keep the aged poet's birthday with a simple feast and
rustic play. Sometimes it is a report of some fireside gathering at
Lancrigg or Foxhow, where the old man grew eloquent as he talked of
Burns and Coleridge, of Homer and Virgil, of the true aim of poetry
and the true happiness of man. Or we are told of some last excursion
to well-loved scenes; of holly-trees planted by the poet's hands to
simulate nature's decoration on the craggy hill.
Such are the memories of those who best remember him. To those who
were young children while his last years went by he seemed a kind of
mystical embodiment of the lakes and mountains round him--a presence
without which they would not be what they were. And now he is gone,
and their untouched and early charm is going too.
Heu, tua nobis
Pæne simul tecum solatia rapta, Menalea!
Rydal Mount, of which he had at one time feared to be deprived, was
his to the end. He still paced the terrace-walks--but now the flat
terrace oftener than the sloping one--whence the eye travels to lake
and mountain across a tossing gulf of green. The doves that so long
had been wont to answer with murmurs of their own to his "half-formed
melodies" still hung in the trees above his pathway; and many who
saw him there must have thought of the lines in which, his favourite
poet congratulates himself that he has not been exiled from his home.
Calm as thy sacred streams thy years shall flow;
Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know;
Here, as of old, Hyblæan bees shall twine
Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine,--
Still from the hedge's willow-bloom shall come
Through summer silences a slumberous hum,--
Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong
The half-heard cadence of the woodman's song,--
While evermore the doves, thy love and care,
Fill the tall elms with sighing in the air.
Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of his last years,--
the sense of grave retrospection, of humble self-judgment, of
hopeful looking to the end. "It is indeed a deep satisfaction," he
writes near the close of life, "to hope and believe that my poetry
will be while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth,
especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little
moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his
little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely
signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the
shore."
And again, to an intimate friend, "Worldly-minded I am not; on the
contrary, my wish to benefit those within my humble sphere
strengthens seemingly in exact proportion to my inability to realize
those wishes. What I lament most is that the spirituality of my
nature does not expand and rise the nearer I approach the grave, as
yours does, and as it fares with my beloved partner."
The aged poet might feel the loss of some vividness of emotion, but
his thoughts dwelt more and more constantly on the unseen world. One
of the images which recurs oftenest to his friends is that of the
old man as he would stand against the window of the dining-room at
Rydal Mount and read the Psalms and Lessons for the day; of the tall
bowed figure and the silvery hair; of the deep voice which always
faltered when among the prayers he came to the words which give
thanks for those "who have departed this life in Thy faith and fear."
There is no need to prolong the narration. As healthy infancy is the
same for all, so the old age of all good men brings philosopher and
peasant once more together, to meet with the same thoughts the
inevitable hour. Whatever the well-fought fight may have been, rest
is the same for all.
Retirement then might hourly look
Upon a soothing scene;
Age steal to his allotted nook
Contented and serene;
With heart as calm as lakes that sleep,
In frosty moonlight glistening,
Or mountain torrents, where they creep
Along a channel smooth and deep,
To their own far-off murmurs listening.
What touch has given to these lines their impress of an unfathomable
peace? For there speaks from them a tranquillity which seems to
overcome our souls; which makes us feel in the midst of toil and
passion that we are disquieting ourselves in vain; that we are
travelling to a region where these things shall not be; that
"so shall immoderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall die."
Wordsworth's last days were absolutely tranquil. A cold caught on a
Sunday afternoon walk brought on a pleurisy. He lay for some weeks
in a state of passive weakness; and at last Mrs. Wordsworth said to
him, "William, you are going to Dora." "He made no reply at the time,
and the words seem to have passed unheeded; indeed, it was not
certain that they had been even heard. More than twenty-four hours
afterwards one of his nieces came into his room, and was drawing
aside the curtain of his chamber, and then, as if awakening from a
quiet sleep, he said, 'Is that Dora?'"
On Tuesday, April 23, 1850, as his favourite cuckoo-clock struck the
hour of noon, his spirit passed away. His body was buried, as he had
wished, in Grasmere churchyard. Around him the dalesmen of Grasmere
lie beneath the shade of sycamore and yew; and Rotha's murmur mourns
the pausing of that "music sweeter than her own." And surely of him,
if of any one, we may think as of a man who was so in accord with
Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no
Mansion of the Universe which shall not be to him a home, no
Governor who will not accept him among His servants, and satisfy him
with love and peace.