'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that
every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or
original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished;
he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are
stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to
these petty stings.' These sentences, from a letter written by
Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common
attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best
poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English
poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of
criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more
reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that
sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet
himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and
if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really
astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold,
Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to
this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter
Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for
some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been
expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.
I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or
even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I
think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions
of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate
emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And
I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and
also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I
will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to
omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book
has practised what I am about to preach.
1.
There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original.
He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would
have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if
his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had
been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would
not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in
whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to
love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go.
Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled
passion, perhaps 'slow to begin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around
the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of
seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his
'criticism of life,' to be something deep, and therefore something that
will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation.
It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser;
nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their
sorest need. And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to
strike them as original, and something more. It is not like
Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both,
peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a
cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what
made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling,
though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace,
strength, exaltation, but a 'shock of mild surprise'; and his paradoxes,
long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.
If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his
strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that
they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of
occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult;
and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or
strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's
centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot
get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt
the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his
statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a
philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or
symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the
meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too
deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the
soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that
nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is
full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale
of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her
ruined cottage had once so affected him
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was.
He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the
clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him
breathed immortality. He said to 'Almighty God,'
But thy most dreaded instrument
For working out a pure intent
Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.
This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit
more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we
are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we
translate 'the soul of all my moral being' into 'somehow concordant with
my moral feelings,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal
that we behold,' or transform the Wanderer's reading of the silent faces
of the clouds into an argument from 'design.' But this is the road round
Wordsworth's mind, not into it.[2]
Again, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to miss the
unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true
poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of
our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to
appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in
Byron's lines, _On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year_, or in
Shelley's _Stanzas written in dejection near Naples_, cannot escape
discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood
expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is
constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most
popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is
popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who
convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is
comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a
good deal that _is_ distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the
sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and
the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the
lines (written by his wife),
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.
It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines.
But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and
outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the
effect of the poem.
This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain,
as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our
point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most
earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some
incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on
his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through
the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and
yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here
therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne
sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of _The Idiot
Boy_ and _The Thorn_, yet he calls them 'doleful examples of
eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he
criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture
into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote _Goody
Blake and Harry Gill_ and the _Anecdote for Fathers_, and yet I doubt if
he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected
the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in
a selection from which he excluded _The Sailor's Mother_.[3] Indeed, of
all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has
not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by
men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And
this is fatal.
I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. _Alice
Fell_ was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles
Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in
policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poems; many still who
admire _Lucy Gray_ see nothing to admire in _Alice Fell_; and you may
still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for
the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking
his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking
questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject
of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate
this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her
cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and
who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes
of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through
a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and,
having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise,
and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and
motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or
Poverty_) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she
does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent
heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side
and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob
after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself
for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost
her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was
_this_ poverty and _this_ grief that Wordsworth described with his
reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was
more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from
which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What
does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered
cloak? It is the passion that counts. Othello must not agonise for a
cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise
for. Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poem about a child is
right to the last line--next day the storm and the tragedy have
vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak
as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.[4]
2.
I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In
spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually
been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and
misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to
several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of
Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his
later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of
literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems;
and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably
Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly
just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other
aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true
and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense,
untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of
Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but
not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.
Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not
attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.
It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like most great poets, of war,
or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His
peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and familiar
things,' alike in nature and in human life. His 'poetry is great because
of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in
nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and
duties.' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient
in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended
also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very
optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned
between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the
ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and
which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor
rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences
as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also
that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a
communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect
devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a
natural piety gradually assuming a more distinctively religious tone.
Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew
Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from _A
Poet's Epitaph_):
But who is he, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,
--The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
But he is weak; both man and boy,
Hath been an idler in the land:
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.
And these are the words from Arnold's _Memorial Verses_:
He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen--on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round--
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth;
Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
Our youth returned: for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.
Ah, since dark days still bring to light
Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear--
But who, ah who, will make us feel?
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly--
But who, like him, will put it by?
Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
O Rotha! with thy living wave.
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.
Those last words are enough to disarm dissent. No, that voice will never
again be heard quite right now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the
most part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture we have been
looking at, though we may question the accuracy of this line or that,
seems to me, I repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing missing?
Consider this picture, and refuse to go beyond it, and then ask if it
accounts for all that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How did the
man in the picture ever come to write the Immortality _Ode_, or
_Yew-trees_, or why should he say,
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?
How, again, could he say that Carnage is God's daughter, or write the
_Sonnets dedicated to National Liberty and Independence_, or the tract
on the Convention of Cintra? Can it be true of him that many of his
best-known poems of human life--perhaps the majority--deal with painful
subjects, and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we expect him to
make an 'idol' of Milton, or to show a 'strong predilection for such
geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo'? He might easily be 'reserved,'
but is it not surprising to find him described as haughty, prouder than
Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant? Why should his forehead have been marked by
the 'severe worn pressure of thought,' or his eyes have looked so
'supernatural ... like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a
sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two
caverns'? In all this there need be nothing inconsistent with the
picture we have been looking at; but that picture fails to suggest it.
In that way the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose to
emphasise some of the traits which it omits or marks too faintly.[5]
And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth's field. Certainly his
field, as compared with that of some poets, is narrow; but to describe
it as confined to external nature and peasant life, or to little and
familiar things, would be absurdly untrue, as a mere glance at his Table
of Contents suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not due to
any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness of outlook. It was due,
apart from limitation of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution
of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively soon, and on
the other, especially in his best days, to deliberate choice; and we
must not assume without question that he was inherently incapable of
doing either what he would not do, or what, in his last five and thirty
years, he could no longer do.
There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth undervalued or objected to
the subjects of such poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser,
Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing his part of the _Lyrical
Ballads_, he returned from Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the
subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were not concerned with
rural life or humble persons. Some old 'romantic' British theme, left
unsung by Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments, war-like
feats; vanquished Mithridates passing north and becoming Odin; the
fortunes of the followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues' journey of
vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his exploits in the war for
his country's independence,--these are the subjects he names first. And,
though his 'last and favourite aspiration' was towards
Some philosophic song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,
--that song which was never completed--yet, some ten years later, he
still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic. Whether at
any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it;
and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to
little and familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion that they
are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural
predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of
poetry was wanted at that time to counteract its special evils. There
prevailed, he thought, a 'degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation.' The violent excitement of public events, and 'the
increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,' had induced a
torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and sensational effects--such
effects as were produced by 'frantic novels,' of the Radcliffe or Monk
Lewis type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles and terrifying
spectres. He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from
it as possible; to write a poetry even _more_ alien to it than
Shakespeare's tragedies or Spenser's stories of knights and dragons; to
show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved,
even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal. In the same way, he
grieved Coleridge by refusing to interest himself in the Somersetshire
fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the
earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest
ways in England. And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd, but a
born fighter who was easily provoked and could swing his crook with
uncommon force, he asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them
out to extremes. And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrowed,
when in the Seventh Book of the _Excursion_ he made the Pastor protest
that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate the din of war, or
to propagate the pangs and turbulence of passionate love, he did this
perhaps because the world which would not listen to him[6] was
enraptured by _Marmion_ and the earlier poems of Byron.
How great Wordsworth's success might have been in fields which he
deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose
it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he
would have failed. With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read
without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of
love-poetry, it would have been natural to him to write it with a degree
of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and
which might have been undesirable for the reader. But one may smile at
his naivete without disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth
neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it. The
poems about Lucy are not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they
surely are love-poems. The verses _'Tis said that some have died for
love_, excluded from Arnold's selection but praised by Ruskin, are
poignant enough. And the following lines from _Vaudracour and Julia_
make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of
Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:
Arabian fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;
Life turned the meanest of her implements,
Before his eyes, to price above all gold;
The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;
Her chamber-window did surpass in glory
The portals of the dawn; all paradise
Could, by the simple opening of a door,
Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks,
Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,
Surcharged, within him, overblest to move
Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world
To its dull round of ordinary cares;
A man too happy for mortality!
As a whole, _Vaudracour and Julia_ is a failure, but these lines haunt
my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they
profess to describe. This is not precisely 'passion,' and, I admit, they
do not prove Wordsworth's capacity to deal with passion. The main reason
for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt, he would have reached
his highest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly
feel--perhaps hardly felt at all--that the _passion_ of love is a way
into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth
if it is to rouse all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had
dared to take
Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;[7]
and he utterly repudiated that. 'The immortal mind craves objects that
endure.'
Then there is that 'romance' which Wordsworth abjured. In using the word
I am employing the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the
Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in a more
special sense, romantic, and signalised, among other ways, by a love of
the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of mythology.
It is a just and necessary distinction: the _Ancient Mariner_ and
_Michael_ are very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the kind,
it becomes misleading when it is roughly handled or pushed into an
antithesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies
exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better
the example of either, the more it shows its community with the other.
There is not a great deal of truth to nature in _Lalla Rookh_, but there
is plenty in the _Ancient Mariner_: in certain poems of Crabbe there is
little romance, but there is no want of it in _Sir Eustace Grey_ or in
_Peter Grimes_. Taking the distinction, however, as we find it, and
assuming, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth's power to write an
_Ancient Mariner_, or to tell us of
magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in
romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The
indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar
dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the _Prelude_)
of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many passages which
show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the
supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in 'Arabian fiction.' The
'Arabian sands' (_Solitary Reaper_) had the same glamour for him as for
others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (_Prelude_, v.) has a
very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance _in excelsis_,
like _Kubla Khan_. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,
Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;
the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he
praises the Osmunda fern as
lovelier, in its own retired abode
On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,[8]
--these, and a score of other passages, all point the same way. He would
not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron,
nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his
purpose, as in _Ruth_, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:
He told of the magnolia, spread
High as a cloud, high overhead,
The cypress and her spire;
Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
To set the hills on fire.
He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was
determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he
wrote of Greek religion in the _Excursion_ is full of imagination and
brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English
of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in
much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth's pen:
Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that
elementary love of fighting which, together with much nobler things, is
gratified by some great poetry. And assuredly he could not, even if he
would, have rivalled the last canto of _Marmion_, nor even the best
passages in the _Siege of Corinth_. But he is not to be judged by his
intentional failures. The martial parts of the _White Doe of Rylstone_
are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame. The
former at least they were meant to be. The _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
was on every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as
ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem
who missed its spiritual interest should be interested in anything else.
Probably he overshot his mark. For readers who could understand him the
effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an
outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy. But, however that
may be, he did what he meant to do. In the _Song at the Feast of
Brougham Castle_, again, the war-like close of the Song was not written
for its own sake. It was designed with a view to the transition to the
longer metre, the thought of peace in communion with nature, and the
wonderful stanza 'Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.' But,
for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to
put his heart into the martial close of the Song; and surely it has
plenty of animation and glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the
subject of war if he had wished to handle it _con amore_.
The poet whose portrait we drew when we began might have been the author
of the _White Doe_, and perhaps of _Brougham Castle_, and possibly of
the _Happy Warrior_. He could no more have composed the _Poems dedicated
to National Independence and Liberty_ than the political sonnets of
Milton. And yet Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than these
Poems, which I am not going to praise, since Mr. Swinburne's praise of
them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent. They are
characteristic in many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly
inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series, which occupies the
first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth's poetic
power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible.
The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets. And
this too is characteristic. The entire success of the _Ode to Duty_ is
exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poem is written
in regular stanzas of a simple metrical scheme. The irregular Odes are
never thus successful. Wordsworth could not command the tone of
sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is irregular his ear is
uncertain. The Immortality Ode, like _King Lear_, is its author's
greatest product, but not his best piece of work. The Odes among the
_Poems_ which we are now considering are declamatory, even violent, and
yet they stir comparatively little emotion, and they do not sing. The
sense of massive passion, concentrated, and repressing the utterance it
permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse. And
the Sonnet suited this.
The patriotism of these _Poems_ is equally characteristic. It
illustrates Wordsworth's total rejection of the Godwinian ideas in which
he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and
sanctity of forms of association arising from natural kinship. It is
composed, we may say, of two elements. The first is the simple love of
country raised to a high pitch, the love of 'a lover or a child'; the
love that makes it for some men a miserable doom to be forced to live in
a foreign land, and that makes them feel their country's virtues and
faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them.
We talk as if this love were common. It is very far from common; but
Wordsworth felt it.[9] The other element in his patriotism I must call
by the dreaded name of 'moral,' a name which Wordsworth did not dread,
because it meant for him nothing stereotyped or narrow. His country is
to him the representative of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,
the only light
Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.
This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires
military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.[10]
But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in
itself; and neither could be long maintained without that which gives
value to both. This is the freedom of the soul, plain living and high
thinking, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power,
domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty. Wordsworth
fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedom is
not failing;[11] but he seldom fears for long. England, in the war
against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long
Parliament and the Commonwealth was to Milton,--an elect people, the
chosen agent of God's purpose on the earth. His ideal of life, unlike
Milton's in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the
influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast. His country
is to him, as to Milton,