[1] The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a
short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April,
1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of
English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other
lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the
course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult
Professor Herford's _The Age of Wordsworth_, a little book which is
familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the
more admired the more they use it?
[2] These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen
partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much
the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in
_The Tables Turned_, where occurs that outrageous stanza about 'one
impulse from a vernal wood' which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When
all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these
statements, and many like them, are 'poetic,' they ought to remain
startling. Two of them--that from the story of Margaret (_Excursion_,
I.), and that from the _Ode_, 1815--were made less so, to the injury
of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten
what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.
[3] _Goody Blake_, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of
impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge's _Three Graves_. The
question as to the _Anecdote for Fathers_ is not precisely whether it
makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in
such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is
in the lines,
And five times to the child I said,
Why, Edward, tell me why?
The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim,
is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed
with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the
effect so delightfully reproduced in _Through the Looking-glass_
('I'll tell thee everything I can').
[4] Some remarks on _We are seven_ are added in a note at the end of
the lecture.
[5] The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from
Hazlitt and De Quincey.
[6] The publication of the _Excursion_ seems to have been postponed
for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the
world for thirteen years.
[7] _Evening Voluntaries_, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.
[8] _Poems on the Naming of Places_, iv. Keats need not have been
ashamed to write the last line.
[9] ''Tis past, that melancholy dream,'--so he describes his sojourn
in Germany.
[10] Wordsworth's Letter to Major-General Pasley (_Prose Works_, i.)
contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of
his hostility to mere militarism.
[11] I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost
courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased
to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.
[12] [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh
(_Comus_, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the
quotation.]
[13] In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of
course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude,
cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in
his poetry or in his life. 'I could kick such a man across England
with my naked foot,' the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base
action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was
not so very unlike Wordsworth's. And neither poet would have found it
difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or 'the
unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.'
[14] The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary
(_Excursion_, vi.).
[15] The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the
_Excursion_, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.
[16] This is just the opposite of the 'wise passiveness' of
imaginative but unreflective feeling.
[17] Nature.
[18] I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture,
but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth's mind who cares to
return to them.
The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth,
'the visionary power' arises from, and testifies to, the mind's
infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united
with, a feeling or idea of _the_ infinite or 'one mind,' and of union
with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague
alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet's
experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought
always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about
'immortality' or 'eternity.' His sense or consciousness of
'immortality,' that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in
some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness
that 'he' belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an 'active
principle' which is eternal, indivisible, and the 'soul of all the
worlds' (cf. opening of _Excursion_, ix.). Whatever we may make of
this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain
entirely outside Wordsworth's mind in passages like that just
referred to, and in passages where he talks of 'acts of immortality
in Nature's course,' or says that to the Wanderer 'all things among
the mountains breathed immortality,' or says that he has been
unfolding 'far-stretching views of immortality,' though he may not
appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and
Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth 'transitory,' but Nature always
and everywhere _reveals_ 'immortality,' and Man (in another sense) is
'immortal.' Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise
sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only
chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except
Wordsworth, may mean by 'man' and 'immortal,' and to try to get into
_his_ mind.
There is an illuminating passage on 'the visionary power' and the
mind's infinity or immortality, in _Prelude_, ii.:
and hence, from the same source,
Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
Under the quiet stars, and at that time
Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
If the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power;
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.
An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of
this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with
Wordsworth's love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for
instance, _Prelude_, xiii., 'Who doth not love to follow with his eye
The windings of a public way?' And compare the enchantment of the
question, _What, are you stepping westward_?
'twas a sound
Of something without place or bound.
[19] _Yes, it was the mountain echo_, placed in Arnold's selection,
with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem _To the Cuckoo_.
[20] This was Coleridge's opinion.