Wordworth's real point of departure, then, was the conviction that in
town life and its distractions men had forgotten nature, and that they
had been punished for it; constant social intercourse had dissipated
their energy and talents and impaired the susceptibility of their
hearts to simple and pure impressions. Amongst his hundreds of sonnets
there is one which is peculiarly eloquent of this fundamental idea. It
is the well-known:--
"The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--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 wreathèd horn."
These are remarkable words to have come from Wordsworth's
pen--remarkable, because they show what all sincere naturalism really
is, let it be decked with as many theistic trappings as it will. In its
inmost essence it is akin to the old Greek conception of nature, and
antagonistic to all the official creeds of modern days; it is vitally
impregnated with the pantheism which reappears in this century as the
dominating element in the feeling for nature in every literature. In
a preceding volume of this work (_The Romantic School in Germany_) we
made acquaintance with the pantheism which lay concealed under Tieck's
Romantic view of nature. Now we come upon it in the form of the human
being's self-forgetful and half unconscious amalgamation with nature,
as a single tone in the great harmony of the universe. This idea has
found expression in a curious little poem:--
"A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees."
If we transport ourselves into the mood which gave birth to such
a poem as this, we are conscious that it is the outcome of purely
pantheistic ideas; unconscious life is regarded as the basis and source
of conscious life, and every earthly being is conceived of as having
lain in nature's womb, an inseparable part of her until the moment when
consciousness began. One of the germs of the poetry of the new century
lies in this little poem; for here, in place of the cultivated human
being as developed and extolled by the eighteenth century, we have the
human being as seen by the new era in the circle of his kin--birds
and wild beasts, plants and stones. Christianity commanded men to
love their fellow-men; pantheism bade them love the meanest animal.
_Hart-Leap Well_, undoubtedly one of Wordsworth's finest poems, a
simple little romance in two parts, is a movingly eloquent plea for a
poor, ill-used animal, a hunted stag--that is to say, a creature in
whom the classical poets would have been interested only in the shape
of venison, and belonging to the species which the admirers of the age
of chivalry, including Scott himself, would have allowed their heroes
to kill by the hundred. Deeply affecting, in spite of the comparative
insignificance of its subject, grandly simple in its style, the little
poem is a noble evidence of the heartfelt _piety_ towards nature which
is Wordsworth's patent of nobility.
This piety in his case consists mainly in reverence for the childlike,
and for the child. And this same reverence for the human being who
in his unconsciousness is nearest to nature, is another of the
characteristic features of the new century. In a little poem with which
Wordsworth himself introduces all the rest, he writes:--
"My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man:
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."
Here we have reverence for the child developed to such an extent that
it supplants reverence for age. But this conferring of his natural
poetic rights on the child is, as the history of every country shows
us, only one of the many signs of the reaction against the eighteenth
century's worship of the enlightened, social human being, and its
banishment of the child to the nursery. Wordsworth carries the reaction
inaugurated by the nineteenth century to its logical conclusion. In
one of his sonnets he describes a walk which he takes on a beautiful
evening with a little girl. After describing the tranquil evening mood--
"The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration;"
he turns to the child beside him, and says:
"Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought
Thy nature is not therefore less _divine_;
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
And worship'st at the Temple's _inner shrine_,
God being with thee when we know it not."
The pious ending is inevitable with Wordsworth; but, as any intelligent
reader may see for himself, it is only tacked on to the main idea, that
of the child's own divine nature. In his famous _Ode on Intimations of
Immortality_ Wordsworth develops this idea with a fervour of enthusiasm
which carried him too great a length for even such a devotee of naïveté
as Coleridge. A child of six he apostrophises thus:--
"Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind.
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find."
These assertions are, doubtless, explained away in a
poetico-philosophical manner by the subsequent attribution of the
child's greatness to the fact that it stands nearer than we do to
the life before birth, and, consequently, to the "intimations of
immortality"; but even this is not to be taken as Wordsworth's literal
meaning, if we are to believe an assertion of Coleridge's which
remained uncontradicted by the author. The child is revered as earth's
"foster-child," and
"The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest."
In numerous poems Wordsworth refers to the strong impression made upon
him as a youth by the pageantry of nature. In one of them, to which,
according to his frequent custom, he gave a prolix title, _Influence
of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination
in Boyhood and Early Youth_, he thanks the Spirit of the Universe for
having from the first dawn of his childhood intertwined for him
"The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,--
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought
. . . . . . . . until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart."
Observe the vivid, delicate perception of nature in the following
description:--
"Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. In November days,
When vapours rolling down the valleys made
A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods
At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
When, by the margin of the trembling lake,
Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine:
Mine was it in the fields both day and night,
And by the waters, all the summer long;
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile,
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons:--happy time
It was indeed for all of us; for me
It was a time of rapture!--Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six--I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home.--All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures,--the resounding horn,
The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle: with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay,--or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star,
Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a summer sea."
This is a picture of nature which it would be difficult to match in
later English poetry.
In one of his most beautiful and profound poems, _Lines Composed a few
Miles above Tintern Abbey_, Wordsworth has described his own feeling
for nature in expressions which he declared that he recognised again in
the most famous and most poetical passages of Byron's _Childe Harold_,
and which, in any case, were indisputably epoch-making in English
poetical art. He writes:--
"For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."
Granted that it was very absurd of Wordsworth to talk (to Moore
in 1820) of Byron's plagiarisms from him, and to declare that the
whole Third Canto of _Childe Harold_ was founded on his style and
sentiments--and granted that Lord John Russell is right when he remarks
drily in this connection that if Wordsworth wrote the Third Canto of
_Childe Harold_, it is his best work--it is, nevertheless, easy to
understand that Wordsworth could not but feel as if, in the chief
passages in that canto, and the celebrated passages about solitude in
the earlier cantos, what was naturally expressed by him had been worked
by Byron into a laboured and antithetical sort of declamation.[1] It
is not difficult to discern, in these outbursts, the wounded vanity
of a narrow mind which felt itself eclipsed; but it cannot be denied
that it really was Wordsworth who first struck the chord which Byron
varied with such skill, nor that single striking and vivid lines of
Wordsworth's had impressed themselves on Byron's memory. Who can read,
for example, the following lines of _Childe Harold_ (Canto iii. 72):--
[1] See Thomas Moore: _Memoirs_, iii. 161.
"I live not in myself; but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling,"
without thinking of Wordsworth's verses just quoted? And who can deny
that Byron, as it were, adopted Wordsworth's idea, and added thoughts
of his own to it when he wrote (_Childe Harold_, iii. 75):--
"Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these?"
Wordsworth, in _Tintern Abbey_, describes his passion for nature as
something past, as something which only lasted for a moment during
an age of transition, and very soon turned into reflection and
questioning; but Byron's passion is a permanent feeling, the expression
of his nature. In his case the Ego in its relations with nature is not
forced into the strait-jacket of orthodox piety; no obstruction of
dogma is set up between nature and him; in his mystical worship of it
he feels himself one with it, and this without the help of any _deus ex
machine_.
Passion is not the special characteristic of Wordsworth's attitude to
nature. The distinguishing quality in his perception and reproduction
of natural impressions is of a more delicate and complex kind. The
impression, although it is received by healthy, vigorously perceptive
senses, is modified and subdued by pondering over it. It does not
directly attune the poet to song. If Wordsworth can say, with Goethe:
"I sing like the bird that sits on the bough," it is, at any rate, not
like the nightingale that he sings; his is not the love-song which
streams forth, rich and full, telling of the intoxication of the soul
and breaking and mocking at the silence of the night. He himself, after
describing the song of the nightingale in similar terms to these, adds
(_Poems of Imagination_, x.):--
"I heard a stock-dove sing or say
His homely tale this very day;
His voice was buried among trees,
Yet to be come at by the breeze;
He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed;
And somewhat pensively he wooed:
He sang of love with quiet blending,
Slow to begin, and never ending;
Of serious faith and inward glee;
That was the song--the song for me!"
It was himself that Wordsworth tried to paint in describing the
pensive, serious wooer. According to the custom of so many poets, he
attempted to formulate his methods into a theory and to prove that all
good poetry must possess the qualities of his own. All good poetry
is, he says, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But
poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any
variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than
usual organic sensibility, had also _thought long and deeply_." This
theory he supports by the argument that a "our continued influxes of
feeling are directed and modified by our thoughts, which are indeed the
representatives of all our past feelings"--a profound and striking,
if not scientifically satisfactory utterance, as well as an excellent
characterisation of his own poetic thought and deliberation.
His method consists, exactly defined, in storing up natural
impressions, in order to dwell on and thoroughly assimilate them. Later
they are brought forth from the soul's store-house and gazed on and
enjoyed again. To understand this peculiarity of Wordsworth's is to
have the key to his originality. In _Tintern Abbey_ he tells how the
direct, passionate joy in the beauties of nature which he felt in his
youth turned, in his riper years, into this quiet assimilation of the
human-like moods of nature:--
"That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
In this passage Wordsworth has delimited his territory, has poetically
yet plainly indicated his special province. What a contrast to Byron,
who seldom or never heard the human voice in nature, and certainly
never except in harsh and grating tones--the man who in _Childe Harold_
actually calls human life "a false nature--not in the harmony of
things!"
But we have not yet come to the most remarkable lines in _Tintern
Abbey_, namely those in which Wordsworth describes the silent influence
on the mind of the hoarded, carefully preserved impressions of nature.
He writes:--
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings, too,
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love."
And he asserts that he is indebted to the influence of nature for yet
another gift,
"Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened";
and his train of thought reaches its conclusion in the feeling of
assurance that this happiness produced in him by the sight of the
familiar places is not mere momentary pleasure, but _life and food for
future years_.
Again and again this last idea recurs in Wordsworth's poetry. We have
it very marked, for instance, in No. xv. of the _Poems of Imagination_,
in which he tells of the impression produced on him, during a lonely
walk, by the sudden sight of "a host of golden daffodils,"
"Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."
Nothing could be more unlike the lyric poet's usual habit of living in
the present, than this lyric poet's conscious saving of the present for
future use. He himself tells us that he is of a saving disposition;
he collects a winter store of bright summer moments; and there is in
this something genuinely human, which is too often overlooked. But
there is, above all, something national in it; it is not surprising
that _English_ Naturalism should begin by carefully and economically
providing itself with a store, a capital, of impressions of nature.
We are all familiar with the feelings that might lead to the attempt.
Many of us, gazing on the boundless blue ocean, sparkling in the
sunlight, have felt that to have this sight before our eyes every day
would widen the soul and cleanse it of all its little meannesses;
and we have turned away unwillingly and with the conscious desire to
preserve the impression so as to be able to renew its effect. Or with
beautiful landscapes before our eyes, especially those which we have
seen in the course of travel, with the certainty of not being able
to enjoy their beauty soon again, we have tried to be as passive as
possible, so as to allow the picture to impress itself firmly on our
memory. And we have often instinctively recalled the beautiful scene
to mind; for the soul involuntarily calls up bright memories to draw
strength and courage from them. But in us such impressions have been
almost effaced by stronger ones. We have not been able to preserve
them efficaciously for the future, or to ruminate over them again and
again. The preoccupations of society and of our own passions have made
it impossible for us to find our deepest and most inspiring joy in
memories of sunlight falling upon flowers, or of entwisted giant trees.
But the soul of the English poet, whose mission it was to re-awaken
the feeling for all these elementary moods and impressions, was of a
different stamp; unagitated by any practical activity, it vegetated
in these day-dreams of natural beauty. And it is undeniable that this
constant occupation of himself with the simplest natural impressions,
kept his soul pure and free to perceive and to feel beauty in its
simple, earthly manifestations, without fancifulness and without
excitement.
How rare is this capacity! how often wanting in the very greatest
and best minds! And how quickly was it lost again in English poetry!
It displays itself most exquisitely and completely in the few
lightly-sketched female figures of the short poems. The heroes and
heroines of the narrative poems, some of them portrayed with the design
of arousing sympathy with the rural population and the lowest classes,
others with the intention of edifying, are of distinctly inferior
quality. But these few delicately-drawn figures, seen with the same
tranquil and yet loving eyes with which Wordsworth looked at trees and
birds, are nature itself. They are the English feminine nature; and
never have the essential qualities of this nature been more exactly
expressed. Take as an example of what I mean, the following little
poem:--
"She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;
Like twilight's too, her dusky hair:
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
I saw her upon nearer view,
A spirit, yet a woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller between life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light."
This is a genuine, faithful portrait of the pattern English woman; and
to compare this sober, truthful description with the ideal women whom
the greatest English poets a few years later found satisfaction in
depicting, is to prepare an easy victory for Wordsworth. Take Shelley's
description, in _The Sensitive Plant_, of the ethereal protectress of
flowers and insects. The picture of the fairy-like beauty is charming,
as everything is that comes from Shelley's pen; her tenderness for the
plants and her touching compassion for all the small, ugly, despised
animals, "the poor banished insects, whose intent, although they did
ill, was innocent," are genuine human traits; and yet she is not a real
human being, any more than the Witch of Atlas is, or the dim heroine
of _Epipsychidion_. Shelley, like the lark he sang of, was a "scorner
of the ground." Or take the passionate Oriental heroines of Byron's
earliest poetic narratives--Medora, Gulnare, Kaled. They never attain
to the beautiful simplicity of this woman described by Wordsworth.
Their passionateness is the principal quality impressed upon us; their
love, their devotion, their determination know no bounds. They are
heroines invented for readers in whom the numbing life of crowded
London and the constant occupation with contemporary great historical
events, have induced a kind of nervous craving for the strongest
intellectual stimulants. But from the very beginning Wordsworth
regarded it as a pleasant and profitable task to show how profoundly
men's minds may be moved without the employment of coarse or violent
stimulants. He knew that those who were accustomed to striking effects
would be unlikely at first to appreciate works the distinguishing
feature of which was their soft and natural colouring; but he resolved
that he would turn the reader's expectations in the matter of the
agencies of a poem back into the natural track.