Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The

learned member of the legislature at Westminster or at Washington,

speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now

invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,

the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or

conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,

and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of

their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so

Locke and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains

all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew;

friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which,

if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with

authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The

appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his

breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing,

whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely

on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit,

would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the

ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to

that most private reality with which he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the

world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labour, when a

thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible

is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English

language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but

centuries and churches brought it to perfection; There never was a

time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,

admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of

ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the

Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the

prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer, all over the

world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer,

that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use,

in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the

grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive

forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the

legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted,

strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws

govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being

translation on translation. There never was a time when there was

none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all

others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the

same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these

books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Æsop's

Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish

Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such

works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter,

the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book

supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every

trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is

not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of

all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his

own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare

Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the

Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final

detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from

_Ferrex and Porrex_, and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, down to the

possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered,

remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued

by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall

unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow

accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to

discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held

horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in

his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age

mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are

turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen

Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and

Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder

of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be

remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the

inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people

of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to

receive this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected

he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as

faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and

frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human

understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,

though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no

suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was

attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him

generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet

of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's

time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born

four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him;

and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following

persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of

Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,

Izaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,

John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,

Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having

communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he

saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts,

Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men

who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any

such society; yet their genius failed them to find out the best head

in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the

mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until

two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we

think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the

history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German

literature: it was on the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by

Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel,

that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately

connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative

genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could

find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought

are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present,

we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge

and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions

with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a

silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like

Christianity, qualifies the period.

The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised

the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead

to proof; and with what result? Beside some important illustration of

the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have

gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to

property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned a

larger share in the Blackfriars Theatre: its wardrobe and other

appurtenances were his; that he bought an estate in his native

village, with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived

in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbours with

their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that

he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing

_Macbeth_, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford,

for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at

different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with

no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort

of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking

manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the

importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have

been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these

researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite

invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We

are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of

parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of

money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we

have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears

between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at

random into the _Modern Plutarch_ and read any other life there, it

would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to

spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to

abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and

Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden,

Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton,

Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to this

genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows

them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal

from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with

invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to

see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage;

and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was

that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to

the ghost:

What may this mean,

That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel

Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's

dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces

the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his

magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography

shed light on the localities into which the _Midsummer Night's Dream_

admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,

sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate

creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the

moonlight of Portia's villa, 'the antres vast and desarts idle' of

Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the

chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one

word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all

great works of art,--in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India;

in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;

the Ballads of Spain and Scotland;--the Genius draws up the ladder

after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a

new age, which sees the works, and asks in vain for a history.

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can

tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most

apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,

and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents

extricated, analysed, and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;

and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to

have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man

within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they

match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or which

gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet with Shakespeare

for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the

information which is material, that which describes character and

fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with

him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on

those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and

death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the

ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the

influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those

mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet

interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who

ever read the volume of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had

there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the

lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the

most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?

What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can

discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what

forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in

large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let

Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from

Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all

modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of

economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life,

has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge

of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not

remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught

Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What

lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What

gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare

valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is

falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these

critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a

full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,

which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,

we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good

a dramatist he was, and he is the best in the world. But it turns out,

that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some

attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is

to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs

and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which

gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer,

or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of

its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of

life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of

modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and

Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man, and

described the day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men

and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the

wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices

slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from

the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine

demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression

which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the

terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the

landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life

sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a

question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he

is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,

conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,

and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of

doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No

man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety

compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and

only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of

life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He

clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if

they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have

left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in

language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him

into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent

humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story

to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain

observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence,

and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves

that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his

fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no

importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities:

no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no

discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,

subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,

as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without

effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and

likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of

power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so

incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other

readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of

things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has

added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into

natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing

new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without

loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with

compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any

distortion or favour. He carried his powerful execution into minute

details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as

he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the

scrutiny of the solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of

production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the

power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch

its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch

a million. There are always objects; but there was never

representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let

the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given

for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the

translation of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though

their excellence is lost in the splendour of the dramas, are as

inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit

of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so

is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now

as a whole poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty

which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the

sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers

and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as

admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps

himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is

not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off

with him in some distant direction: he always rides.

The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered a

transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain

a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read,

through their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with

parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The

sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not

yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite over into

the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This

generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and

closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet

there is not a trace of egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his

cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his

aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he

delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that

sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds

over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that

a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true

bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies

in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, 'It was

rumoured abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with

repentance?' Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and

cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and

emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company

of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing

that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.

* * * * *

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor,

when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,

we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can

teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare

also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of

humanity.

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that

plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than

for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the

earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and

finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and

conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on

human life. Shakespeare employed them as colours to compose his

picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which

seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which

resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--What is that which

they themselves say? He converted the elements, which waited on his

command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind.

Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science,

the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and

should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal

fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, 'very

superior pyrotechny this evening!' Are the agents of nature, and the

power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the

breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the

Koran,--'The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them,

think ye we have created them in jest?' As long as the question is of

talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.

But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its

auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a

Twelfth Night, or Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale:

what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of

the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor

and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable

men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but

this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the

common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes,

we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this

man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger

subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity

some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should not be wise for

himself,--it must even go into the world's history, that the best poet

led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public

amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede,

beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was

contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they

read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a

sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,

joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with

doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays

and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer

and the heart of the listener sank in them.

It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world

still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with

Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the

mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration.

For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than

private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

1819-1891

WORDSWORTH (1875)

A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the

family in the churchyard at Grasmere. Perhaps it is hardly yet time to

take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. To do this

is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last

shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics

which began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and which

came to a pause rather than end when they flung up their caps with the

rest at his final coronation. Something of the intensity of the _odium

theologicum_ (if indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the

more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians

were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of

the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses

of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant

of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded

criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters, they were

songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardours of

conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their

own. As we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of

them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock

of disenchantment. It is something like the difference between the

_Marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or

by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the

closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Thérèse. It was

natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly

on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some sort

the measure of a man's right to judge of poetry at all. But now we

must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less

essential elements in forming a sound judgement as to whether the seer

and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in

by himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the

few great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and

safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while

insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of

judgement by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice

adjustment of means to ends. In none of our poets has the constant

propulsion of an unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive,

if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the

original endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly does

the biography throw so much light on the works, or enter so largely

into their composition as an element whether of power or of weakness.

Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished to see, beyond the

limits of his own consciousness and experience. He early conceived

himself to be, and through life was confirmed by circumstances in the

faith that he was, a 'dedicated spirit',[41] a state of mind likely

to further an intense but at the same time one-sided development of

the intellectual powers. The solitude in which the greater part of his

mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the

passionate intensity of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may

be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any

standard of proportion outside himself by which to test the

comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more

incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by

commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone

without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the

distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call

originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything

odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most

points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of

our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations

and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings,

and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.

The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the

wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid

the throng of men, and lifting their common aspirations and

sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of

his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we

would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other

page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The

world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar _is_ of

precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian chalice or

from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The

Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone

with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the

flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget the

deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben dà lui_.

[41] In the _Prelude_ he attributes this consecration to a

sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked

homeward from some village festival where he had danced all

night:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.

A dedicated Spirit.--Book IV.

* * * * *

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of

April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John

Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther,

afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the

daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been

settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather

had emigrated to Westmorland. His mother, a woman of piety and wisdom,

died in March 1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father,

who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death,

survived her but five years, dying in December 1783, when William was

not quite fourteen years old.

The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and

partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher

appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's

Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them

chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to cultivate their reasoning

faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from

natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates

here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife.

In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of

York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a

small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile

north-west of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a

people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity.

His earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of

his native district, and the associations with which his mind was

stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. The

boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a

freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but

beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that

hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit

and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth's ordinary

amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long

walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper

on horseback.[42] His life as a schoolboy was favourable also to his

poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among

whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there are small

diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with

less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal

human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold, and to

which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying

drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race

who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more

picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing

fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human

sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its

own resources, and individuality of character. Where everybody knew

everybody, and everybody's father had known everybody's father, the

interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold

hearsay and distant report. When death knocked at any door in the

hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropped

its white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the

churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree

untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth

learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to

his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep

trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to

the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed early to the

difficult art of being himself.

[42] _Prelude_, Book II.

At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,

and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any

peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in

his fourteenth year to become a poet.[43] 'It is recorded', says his

biographer vaguely, 'that the poet's father set him very early to

learn portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early

age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and

Spenser.'

[43]

I to the muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong indentures.

_Idiot Boy_ (1798).]

The great event of Wordsworth's schooldays was the death of his

father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting

chiefly of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of

which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived

in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October 1787

he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we

are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in

mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were _Don

Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Gulliver's Travels_, and the _Tale of a Tub_;

but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some

English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had

learned many by heart. What is more to the purpose, he had become,

without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same

mental necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest

in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also studious of

the movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and

dependence of the external and internal universe.

Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming

a character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to

itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly

and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has

become a truism, that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but

perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have made themselves

distinguished by their industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of

faculties in themselves of only an average quality. It is rather to be

noted how little is known of the parentage of men of the first

magnitude, how often they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early

an apparently adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to

encounter and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences.

Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is

characteristic. He himself tells us that he was 'stiff, moody, and of

violent temper'. His mother said of him that he was the only one of

her children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that

he would be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resentment at some

fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart failed him.

I suspect that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these

momentary suggestions of despairing helplessness. 'On another

occasion,' he says, 'while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith,

along with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together

in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down on

particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family pictures,

and I said to my brother, "Dare you strike your whip through that old

lady's petticoat?" He replied, "No, I won't." "Then," said I, "here

goes," and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which,

no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But,

possibly from some want of judgement in punishments inflicted, I had

become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather

proud of it than otherwise.' This last anecdote is as happily typical

as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of

heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him

afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of

the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the

punishment of the Reviewers.

Of his college life the chief record is to be found in _The Prelude_.

He did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any

incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in

biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life.

He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at

Cambridge,[44] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest

published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his

native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion

of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly

of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and

tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who called forth the shyer

sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and

austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the

rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first

public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative

temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude

of original minds with messages from the future. Through the greater

part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to

him.

[44] _Prelude_, Book III.

Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon

the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he took his degree of B.A., and

left Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and,

after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was

not of age for ordination, went over to France in November, and

remained during the winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with

the republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he

ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and

returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted in October for

Paris. He remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the

close of the year went back to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the

fate which soon after overtook his friends the Brissotins.

As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not

less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period

of his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely

and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime

forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative

faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds

and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside

histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage.

In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was

a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the

Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and

he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of

a national emotion. He sympathized with the hopes of France and of

mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his

faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he

only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his

reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and

above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been

recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable

that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always

compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary

leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever

was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in

religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who

does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the

grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and

virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal

liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make men better

by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make

them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that

these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can

permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics

were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes

and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events.

The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was

complete soon after his return from France, and was perhaps due in

part to the influence of Burke.

While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,

Against all systems built on abstract rights,

Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims

Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;

Declares the vital power of social ties

Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,

Exploding upstart theory, insists

Upon the allegiance to which men are born.

... Could a youth, and one

In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved

Under the weight of classic eloquence,

Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?[45]

[45] _Prelude_, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring

to a still earlier date.

He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up

whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of

tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly

to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce

artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main

safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory

through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a

certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that

in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, 'Wordsworth may

perhaps walk in; if he do, I caution you both against his terrific

democratic notions'; and it must have been many years later that

Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, 'I have no respect whatever

for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me'. In 1802,

during his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on the other

days of the week. He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer.

'Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said

he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh

raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not

when he had been in a church in his own country. "All our ministers

are so vile," said he. The mischief of allowing the clergy to depend

on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all

the evils of an establishment.'

In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the

following year published _Descriptive Sketches_ and the _Evening

Walk_. He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that,

although he had gained no honours at the University, he _could_ do

something. They met with no great success, and he afterward corrected

them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions,

without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. In

commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these

poems,--

And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines

Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,--

he says: 'This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect

distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was

important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness

of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been

unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was

acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to supply in some degree

the deficiency.'

It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here,

misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which

leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without

break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more

distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in

retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been

acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his

dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of

Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable

in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps,

some slight indication of its having already begun that his first

volume of _Descriptive Sketches_ (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who

was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is

seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression.

But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that

his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the

eighteenth century. 'The first verses from which he remembered to have

received great pleasure were Miss Carter's _Poem on Spring_, a poem in

the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed

much in,--for example, _Ruth_.' This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's

lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always

narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his

lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost

ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern

poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching

cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last

warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have

shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable,

even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.

We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such

verses as

Like an army defeated

The snow hath retreated

And now doth fare ill

On the top of the bare hill,

with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the

lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop

lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.

_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the

prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the

mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone

and judgement in selection which have made the _Traveller_ and the

_Deserted Village_ perhaps the most truly classical poems in the

language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of

the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in

the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from

which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may

suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter

killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved

wife and son:

Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,

Passing his father's bones in future days,

Start at the reliques of that very thigh

On which so oft he prattled when a boy.

In these poems there is plenty of that 'poetic diction' against which

Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.

To wet the peak's impracticable sides

He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,

Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes

Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.

Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as

well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron

made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of

fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.

Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade

Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,

Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire

To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire;

Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go

Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;

Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,

And rising by the moon of passion swayed.

The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he

changes 'despotcourts' into 'tyranny'. One of the alterations is

interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written

And bids her soldier come her wars to share

Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar.

An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:

Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar.

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful

bird. He had himself done so in the _Evening Walk_, and corrects his

epithets to suit his later judgement, putting 'gladsome' for 'boding',

and replacing

The tremulous sob of the complaining owl

by

The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the

revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading

anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which

already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first

to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with

Turner.

'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour

All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:

The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;

Dark is the region as with coming night;

But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,

Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;

Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine

The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;

Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,

At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;

Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun

The West that burns like one dilated sun,

Where in a mighty crucible expire

The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.

Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the

worse, by substituting 'glorious' (which was already implied in

'glances' and 'fire-clad') for 'wheeling'. In later life he would have

found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline

over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these

poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true

poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the

incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of

poesy.

During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political

tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the

hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had

without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in

favour of that ideal republic 'which never was on land or sea', but

fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his

own nobler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which

he found freedom enough in England as it was. Dr. Wordsworth admits

that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect

that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He

had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great

landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of England where there

is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of

the Cumberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a

New-Englander the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from

New England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes

no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him.

The debt due to his father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth

was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a

friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbour. He at first

proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called _The

Philanthropist_, but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts

from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the

same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct

republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no

appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists,

he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also

it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be

merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a private opinion

on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion

which constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in

the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food

from heaven; and while Wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient

at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had

gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare

attorney that was lost in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of

Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a

legacy of £900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help

came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his life, and made it

honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of

theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led

only to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at

Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years

were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some

extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political

dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is

consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had

contrived to see something more in the _Descriptive Sketches_ than

the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The

sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied

him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of

popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers. It was

now that the tragedy of _The Borderers_ was for the most part written,

and that plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_ suggested which gave Wordsworth

a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was

entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that

Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune

uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the

arrangement. In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in

Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile

had married and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November _The

Borderers_ was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his

sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again

interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went

back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so

common to young authors.

The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as _Jane Eyre_. It shares

with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written

to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis

is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama,

such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables

them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he

published _The Borderers_ in 1842, and says in a note that it was 'at

first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage'.

But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to

Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it

accepted by some theatrical manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the

_Lyrical Ballads_ for the press, and it was published toward the close

of 1798. The book, which contained also _The Ancient Mariner_ of

Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part

contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his

copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was reckoned

at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons

were not wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new

day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to

extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself

famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made

with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would

have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer,

Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself infamous,

for the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ undoubtedly raised him to

the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus

has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other

where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes

from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke

of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and

after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth

had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the

man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the

reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence

behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical

Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time

when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who

were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from

those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by

side, in the great pin-paper of society.

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after

dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The

respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the

chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems

to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius.

The record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into

Wordsworth's mind. Among other things he said, 'that it was the

province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to

descend to theirs',--memorable words, the more memorable that a

literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.

It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's studies during

his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It

may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the

German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to

confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The

Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly

not due to any German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the

_Lines composed at Tintern Abbey_ in July 1798. It is more likely to

have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797. When Emerson

visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of _Wilhelm Meister_, a

part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There

was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read

Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of

Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very

small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and

sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His

poem of the _Thorn_, though vastly more imaginative, may have been

suggested by Bürger's _Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain_. The little

grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly

recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.

After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister

returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in

Westmorland. In 1800, the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ being

exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.

Longman paying £100 for the copyright of two editions. The book passed

to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805. Wordsworth sent a

copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending

to his attention the poems _Michael_ and _The Brothers_, as displaying

the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of

those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under

the influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil

acknowledgement, saying that his favourites among the poems were

_Harry Gill_, _We are Seven_, _The Mad Mother_, and _The Idiot_, but

that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple

subjects. Any political significance in the poems he was apparently

unable to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an

argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral

of English song the critical theses which he was to maintain against

all comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing for an

author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic

and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of

poetry all that fervour and faith which had lost their political

object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his

mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that

he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater

number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated that the

true judgement of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false

judgement, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a

well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward

added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for

philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has

been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to

set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were

unsaleable. The strength of an argument for self-reliance drawn from

the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who

uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they

serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only

suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.

An advertisement prefixed to the _Lyrical Ballads_, as originally

published in one volume, warned the reader that 'they were written

chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation

in the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes

of poetic pleasure'. In his preface to the second edition, in two

volumes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a

little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of

Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that 'it was published

as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how

far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real

language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure

and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may

_rationally endeavour_ to impart'. Here is evidence of a retreat

towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have remained

unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to

the passages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed

him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an

assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic

method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough

scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to

the understanding which is implied by the words 'rationally endeavour

to impart'. In the preface of that year he says, 'The observations

prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many

years ago under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_ have so little of

special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and

diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an

introduction to it.' It is a pity that he could not have become an

earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that 'prose was words

in their best order, and poetry the _best_ words in the best order'.

But idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn

painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley

and to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too

frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a

manifest jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great

mistake lay. For example, in _The Blind Highland Boy_ he had

originally the following stanzas:

Strong is the current, but be mild,

Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!

If ye in anger fret or chafe,

A bee-hive would be ship as safe

As that in which he sails.

But say, what was it? Thought of fear!

Well may ye tremble when ye hear!

--A household tub like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes,

This carried the blind boy.

In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the

last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus

robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest.

Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality.

But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which

suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her

nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never

quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He

yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave

up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of

I've measured it from side to side,

'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he

could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which

renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and

sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision,

still contains verses like these:

And he is lean and he is sick;

His body, dwindled and awry,

Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;

His legs are thin and dry;

* * * * *

Few months of life he has in store,

As he to you will tell,

For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell,--

which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the

same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody

on the ballad-style,--that their '_matter_ is contemptible'. The

sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives

utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has

a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in

unguarded moments. We are reminded of a passage in _The Excursion_:

List! I heard

From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_,

_Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_.

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was

thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,

conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of

finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius

taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that

no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses.

Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the

purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he

made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and

soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on

the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this

marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his

poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.

On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the

14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot

journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion during a part of

this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In

Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part

of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, then in manuscript. The travellers

returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this

year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George

Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable

merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in

making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus

contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency

of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont,

dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard for the poet, but contrived to

hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of £100, to

defray the charges of a yearly journey.

In March 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the

shipwreck of the _Abergavenny_ East-Indiaman, of which he was captain.

He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to

his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible

to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such

grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of,

though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it.

The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion

may account for the great productiveness of this and the following

year. He now completed _The Prelude_, wrote _The Waggoner_, and

increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes,

which were published in 1807.

This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his

shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable _Odes_ to Duty and

on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The

reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they

scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth

showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back of some

buccaneering plunderer of an abbey. There was a general combination to

put him down, but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his

favour, consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in

good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such occasions,

kept up the spirits of his friends.

Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George

Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere

having become too small for his increased family. On his return to the

Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived

three years. During this period he appears to have written very little

poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the

smokiness of the Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the

failure of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly

in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon

the Convention of Cintra, which was published too late to attract much

attention, though Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that

which one of Milton's tracts might have had upon a contemporary. It

was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated _The Friend_, and Wordsworth

contributed to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes

(Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in the

Notes to _The Excursion_. Here also he wrote his _Description of the

Scenery of the Lakes_. Perhaps a truer explanation of the comparative

silence of Wordsworth's Muse during these years is to be found in the

intense interest which he took in current events, whose variety,

picturesqueness, and historical significance were enough to absorb all

the energies of his imagination.

In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage at Grasmere.

Here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate

experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and

Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.

Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither,

changed his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of

this year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of

Westmorland, an office whose receipts rendered him independent, and

whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample

leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an

instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon Wordsworth

through his whole life. In our view it is only another illustration of

that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good

luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and

conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to

the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone

as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who

respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the

originality of the poet. The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more

lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and declined.

He had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. Still later,

on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of that

district was annexed to Westmorland, and Wordsworth's income was

raised to something more than £1,000 a year.

In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in

company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year _The Excursion_

was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied

the demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies

was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 _The White

Doe of Rylstone_ appeared, and in 1816 _A Letter to a Friend of

Burns_, in which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be

observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable

suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to

which he was constitutionally indifferent. Nearly the same date may be

ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the

_Aeneid_, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge

_Philological Museum_ (1832). In 1819 _Peter Bell_, written twenty

years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the

ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his

previous volumes. _The Waggoner_, printed in the same year, was less

successful. His next publication was the volume of _Sonnets on the

river Duddon_, with some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the

Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection,

published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the volume of

_Ecclesiastical Sketches_. His subsequent publications were _Yarrow

Revisited_, 1835, and the tragedy of _The Borderers_, 1842.

During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily,

and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of

friends which his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them

deserved. Public honours followed private appreciation. In 1838 the

University of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839

Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his

seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he

resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the

honour of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of £300. In

1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it

was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be

self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the

installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of

Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should

seem, that he might receive that honour which he had truly conquered

for himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a

century, unparalleled for the scorn with which its labours were

received, and the victorious acknowledgement which at last crowned

them. Surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man

had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous

renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its

durability. He died on the 23rd of April, 1850, the anniversary of the

death of Shakespeare.

We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life

uneventful even for a man of letters; a life like that of an oak, of

quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side

whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in

proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The

life and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are

to be looked for, even more than is the case with most poets, in his

works, for he deliberately recorded them there.

Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was somewhat

above the middle height, but, according to De Quincey, of indifferent

figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature

was the eye, which was grey and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt

says: 'I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural.

They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of

acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have

had such eyes.' Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and

Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De

Quincey's judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to

Richardson's notes on _Paradise Lost_. He was active in his habits,

composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. His

daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified

and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is

remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgement of

contemporaries.

The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to

be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of

judgement uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the

doors.

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when

the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority

of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost

inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgement was a

rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan.

Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of

William Wordsworth as its representative. Right in general principle,

he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that

greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own

instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to

a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his

natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own

temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell

sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a

poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely

peculiar.

Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew

older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[46]

but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the

growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles

through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public

insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were

consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He

forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of

conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of

something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented

repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living

creature; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and

did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether

creations which really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius,

and were alive with nature's life of life, were not contrivances of

wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect has lost

the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in Cornelius

Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion

than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction

in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a

tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory and with

no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the

Imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds

that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its

shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have

drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. The

Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth

seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by

laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at

the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable

emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be

caught.

[46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose

influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he

had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The

advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his

_Thanksgiving Ode_ which, if one met with it by itself, he

would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:

While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.

And in _The Italian Itinerant_ and _The Swiss Goatherd_ we

find a thermometer or barometer called

The well-wrought scale

Whose sentient tube instructs to time

A purpose to a fickle clime.

Still worse in the _Eclipse of the Sun_, 1821:

High on her speculative tower

Stood Science, waiting for the hour

When Sol was destined to endure

That darkening.

So in _The Excursion_,

The cold March wind raised in her tender throat

Viewless obstructions.

But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had

another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and

permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not

only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet,

and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question

whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the

history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to

furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more

than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics,

divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is

more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts

unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while

they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of

philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which _The

Excursion_ possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the

episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted

by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth

had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his

Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest

it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect

poems in their kind, and without example in the language.

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic

of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he

made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of

leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. It may be

doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing

but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively

as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the

imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his youth:

In fine,

I was a better judge of thoughts than words,

Misled in estimating words, not only

By common inexperience of youth,

But by the trade in classic niceties,

The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase

From languages that want the living voice

To carry meaning to the natural heart;

To tell us what is passion, what is truth,

What reason, what simplicity and sense.[47]

[47] _Prelude_, Book VI.

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of

him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear

its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he

did not earlier give himself to 'the trade of classic niceties'. It

was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe

dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the

tune of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed,

Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always

essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love of

outward nature and of simple things. The main difference between them

is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the lifelong

familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the

poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and

commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the

great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded. He wrote too much

to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but

a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He

set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to

make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout _The

Prelude_ and _The Excursion_ he seems striving to bind the wizard

Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have

forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere.

There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress

wearisome. Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we

rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching

heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting

harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying baritone

of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert

wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our

names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness

and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other

poet!

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow,

and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humour,

no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless

quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a

letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most

successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of

natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression

of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own

mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn

took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages are always

monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of

his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative

importance given to trivial matters. He was the historian of

Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a

power as generalization) is what gives such vigour and greatness to

single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a

single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the

sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his

fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying

enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative

temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was

permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but

fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common

fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels

in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy.

In _The Excursion_ we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict

of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and

elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered

to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter;

some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent

thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their

destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of

canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse.

It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable

equally of the trumpet's ardours or the slim delicacy of the flute,

and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as

if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If

Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it

aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral

reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which

Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,--that which

Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,--the same in

which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her

dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or

sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone,

thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

Wordsworth's absolute want of humour, while it no doubt confirmed his

self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical

incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory

concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule

called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain

dullness of perception in other directions.[48] We cannot help

feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which,

in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which,

whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained

obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many poets would seem to

approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind could be raised

only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And in proportion

to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the

very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the productions

of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting

our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our

youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of

diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of

fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable

grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very

ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of

mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of

prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below

himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in

imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help

having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of

these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and

elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. In

other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring

from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to

have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his

rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around

it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material

whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem

it encumbers.[49] During the most happily productive period of his

life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical

portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to have

been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted

on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected

his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he

certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was

always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his

best poem in these respects is the _Laodamia_, and it is not

uninstructive to learn from his own lips that 'it cost him more

trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written'. His

longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union

than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. Of

character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all

the personages of _The Excursion_ that are not Wordsworth are the

merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature

was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men

and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of

individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts

of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the

_callida junctura_. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by

times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_);

we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is

hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do

we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of

unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in

Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets

than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in

mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to call

it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows

those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian

with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we

feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half

conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an

enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly

comic but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William

Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William

Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize

two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and

his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the

amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some

anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman,

and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses

on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These

marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have

been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by

dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.

Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one

divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power.

Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute

abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong

to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own

than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift

of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and

accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to

the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the

pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not

grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One

of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is

the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly

idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of

Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to

resemble his former self. They would never, as Sir John Harington says

of poetry, 'keep a child from play and an old man from the

chimney-corner'.[51]

[48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic

self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite

the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be

matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage

sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.

Compare:

Curst be the heart that thought the thought,

And curst the hand that fired the shot,

When in my arms burd Helen dropt,

That died to succour me!

O, think ye not my heart was sair

When my love dropt down and spake na mair?

Compare this with,--

Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts

That through his brain are travelling,

And, starting up, to Bruce's heart

He launched a deadly javelin:

Fair Ellen saw it when it came,

And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,

Did with her body cover

The Youth, her chosen lover.

* * * * *

And Bruce (_as soon as he had slain_

_The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,

And fought with rage incessant

Against the Moorish Crescent.

These are surely the versos of an attorney's clerk 'penning a

stanza when he should engross'. It will be noticed that

Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the

language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as

less modern and familiar. Had he written

And Gordon never gave a hint,

But, having somewhat picked his flint,

Let fly the fatal bullet

That killed that lovely pullet,

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.

He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the _Ancient

Mariner_ in the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_: 'The

poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the

principal person has no distinct character, either in his

profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been

long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be

supposed himself to partake of something supernatural;

secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted

upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary

connexion, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the

imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.' Here is an

indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the

attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange

charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this

very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.

[49]

A hundred times when, roving high and low,

I have been harassed with the toil of verse,

Much pains and little progress, and at once

Some lovely Image in the song rose up,

Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.

_Prelude_, Book IV.

[50] His best poetry was written when he was under the

immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have

felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes

when he speaks of 'those who have been so well pleased that I

should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills

into _their_ main stream' (_Letters, Conversations, and

Recollections of S. T. C._, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth

found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of

the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:

The singing masons building roofs of gold.

This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have

written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the

repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the

singers' (Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_). Wordsworth writes to

Crabb Robinson in 1837, 'My ear is susceptible to the

clashing of sounds almost to disease.' One cannot help

thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by

Coleridge.

[51] In the Preface to his translation of the _Orlando

Furioso_.

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who

was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by

saying, 'Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court

of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know.'

Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points

till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat

underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and

once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not

when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of

keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions

sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three

stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of _Peter Bell_,

where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all

happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of

comicality:

Is it a fiend that to a stake

Of fire his desperate self is tethering?

Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,

In solitary ward or cell,

Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?

The same want of humour which made him insensible to incongruity may

perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion

which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther

on in _Peter Bell_ we find:

_Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark

That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,

And in a moment to the verge

Is lifted of a foaming surge--

Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!

And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the

sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are

somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[52]

[52] In _Resolution and Independence_.

The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood too

meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and

reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests

of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the

subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. _The Waggoner_ involuntarily

suggests a comparison with _Tam O'Shanter_, infinitely to its own

disadvantage. _Peter Bell_, full though it be of profound touches and

subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to

confess that he did not like it. _The White Doe_, the most

Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also

only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in

Wordsworth and will charm for ever is the

Happy tone

Of meditation slipping in between

The beauty coming and the beauty gone.

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of

our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner,

indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us

without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They

rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his

own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for

life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to

us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a

reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of

character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean

Jacques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The

Solitary of _The Excursion_, who has not been cured of his scepticism

by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,

equally proof against the lectures of Pedlar and Parson. Wordsworth

apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his

way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea

or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence,

exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the

Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less

vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and

cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients

and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become

fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight

in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this

world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of

another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand

it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and

would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the

spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the

Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in

the tussle for existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those

qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may

not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to

justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the

unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out

unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily

thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a

revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set

our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our

maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher

to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating

perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary

apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious

instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of

experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite

sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer

sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but

which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth

shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or

two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but he

was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is

always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that

stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark

passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall

that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared

with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind

which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular,

almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather

brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very

limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the

impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If

we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves

changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If

we read our favourite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly

great. And even as regards _The Excursion_ we should remember how few

long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but

one,--the _Odyssey_.

None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of

the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions

which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that

shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,

rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and

otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and

clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases

become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more

epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of

having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those

faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle

ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely

ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure

immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at

their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and

by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest

heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and

abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us

to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own

instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid

Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh

To rare Beaumont, and learned Beaumont lie

A little nearer Spenser;

for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he

is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets.