"Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar."[333]
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 judgment, 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 favor
of that ideal republic "which never was on laud 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.[334] 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 neighbor. 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,[335] 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 clew 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 mean while 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.[336]
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 in-famous, 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 Spinosism 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.[337] 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
Westmoreland. 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.[338] 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
acknowledgment, saying that his favorites 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 fervor 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 judgment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false
judgment, 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 unsalable.
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 endeavor_ to impart."[339]
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
endeavor 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 endeavoring 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,
'T is 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.[340] "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 forego 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 Wagoner," 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.[341]
There was a general combination to put him down, but on the other hand
there was a powerful party in his favor, 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.[342]
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.[343] 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[344] (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.[345]
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 Westmoreland, 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.[346] 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 Westmoreland, 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.[347] 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 Wagoner," 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
honors 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 honor 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 honor 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 labors were received, and the
victorious acknowledgment 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 23d 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 gray 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 judgment, 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 judgment 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 judgment
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 judgment 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;[348] 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.
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.[349] 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."[350]
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 life-long 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.[351] 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
splendors 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 barytone 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 humor, 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 vigor 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 tradewind, 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 ardors 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 humor, 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 dulness of perception in other
directions.[352] 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 forever 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 endeavoring 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.[353] 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[354] 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.[355] 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 Harrington says of poetry, "keep a child
from play and an old man from the chimney-corner."[356]
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 humor 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.[357]
The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood to 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 Wagoner" 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 forever 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 Jaques 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 Pedler 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 favorite 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 Beaumond, and learned Beaumond 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.
Footnotes:
[323] "I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at
Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Crabb
Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine pathos, thirteen
years after his master's death. Wordsworth was always considerate and
kind with his servants, Robinson tells us.
[324] In the Prelude he attributes this consecreation 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."--B. IV.
[325] Prelude, Book II.
[326]
"I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures."
_Idiot Boy_ (1798).
[327] I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the
influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith
was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Evening
Walk. I speak of them as originally printed.
[328] Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge, his
teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It
may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic
study of English poetry was due to the copy of Andersen's British
Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on setting out for
his last voyage in 1805.
[329] Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a
still earlier date. "Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat
under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." (Southey to
Miss Barker, May, 1806.)
[330] This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss
Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for
publication as early as 1805.
[331] Crabb Robinson, I. 250, Am. Ed.
[332] Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to
prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr.
Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian
Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group of
Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The dev-ils!"
[333] The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The
original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately
Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor C. E.
Norton.
[334] Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so
far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and
Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them
shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with
Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer.
There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but
apparently written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that
Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy.
"Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_ that he
has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden
estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired."
Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's insulation of character and
habitual want of sympathy with anything but the moods of his own mind
that rendered him incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He
appears to have regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly
loved as much as it was possible for him to love anything but his own
poems) as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a
mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.
[335] Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, "that, after
he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what
his future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough
for the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined
for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience
and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from
the Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for
the higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history
with great interest, and the strategy of war, and he always fancied
that he had talents for command, and he at one time thought of a
military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if
he were ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him
from the yellow fever, and he gave that up." (Memoirs, II. 466.) It
is curious to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness
between him and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each
other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in
a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character
somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety
in Woidsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point
of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make
Wellington a great commander.
[336] Cottle says, "The sale was so slow and the severity of most of
the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be
certain." But the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then
the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, especially to
Wordsworth's share in the volume. The Monthly says, "So much genius
and originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to
see another from the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in
the whole range of English, poetry we scarcely recollect anything
superior to a passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey," sums up
thus: "Yet every piece discovers genius; and ill as the author has
frequently employed his talents, they certainly rank him with the
best of living poets." Such treatment cannot surely be called
discouraging.
[337] A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia
Literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion
of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant
references to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show
how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in accordance with
the usage of the last generation in New England.
[338] Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a
hearing in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, a
Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient _list of
subscribers_ to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The
second English edition, however, having been published before he had
wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially followed in the
first American, which was published in 1802.
[339] Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is now
printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815.
[340] "On my alluding to the line,
"'Three feet long and two feet wide,'
"and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said,
'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His
ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to
appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity
to judge of poetry at all.
[341] Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these
volumes not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as
saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack
on Hours of Idleness. "The young man will do something if he goes
on," he said.
[342] The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle
with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only
matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's "History of the Protectorate House
of Cromwell." It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into
the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are
among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the
clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of
Wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be
read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the
principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a
letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself
upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with
what I trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add
sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young
and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and
therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is
their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after
we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves....
To conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile
criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings
and; after what I have said, I am sure yours will be the same I doubt
not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my
writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the
benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and
that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser,
better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary
relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers;
it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith
from his own inexhaustible cistern.
[343] "Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general
effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend
De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure
by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July,
1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.
[344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.
[345] Wordsworth's children were,--
John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman.
Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847.
Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812.
William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as
Stamp-Distributor.
[346] Good luck (in the sense of _Chance_) seems properly to be the
occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows
how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's
Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound
common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to
fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man
could not have been found in Westmoreland.
[347]
"I am not one who much or oft delight
In personal talk."
[348] 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."