A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the
family in the churchyard at Grasmere.[323] 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 ardors 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 judgment 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 judgment 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, nor 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,"[324] 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 flavor 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_.
* * * * *
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
Westmoreland. 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 endeavoring 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 northwest
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.[325] His life as a school-boy was
favorable 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 dropt 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.
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.[326] "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."[327]
The great event of Wordsworth's school days 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 judgment 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,[328]
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.
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 hath heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?"[329]
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
Eobinson, "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.[330]
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."[331] 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 honors 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 judgment 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.[332]
"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
"despot courts" 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."