“_All that is at enmity with joy._”
When autumn closes around him, and the season makes him conscious that
his leaf is sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims
“_Yet will I temperately rejoice_;
Wide is the range and free the choice
Of undiscordant themes;
Which haply kindred souls may prize
Not less than vernal ecstacies,
And passion’s feverish dreams.”
_Temperate rejoicing_,—that is the clearest note of Wordsworth’s poetry.
Not an unrestrained gladness, for he can never escape from that deep,
strange experience of his youth. Often, in thought, he
“Must hear Humanity in fields and groves
Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang
Brooding above the fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities.”
But even while he hears these sounds he will not be “downcast or
forlorn.” He will find a deeper music to conquer these clashing
discords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden joy, strong to survive amid
the sorrows of a world like this. He will not look for it in some far-off
unrealized Utopia,
“But in the very world which is the world
Of all of us,—_the place where in the end_
_We find our happiness, or not at all_!”
To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of joy, he dedicates his life.
“By words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
_To noble raptures_.”
And herein he becomes a prophet to his age,—a prophet of the secret of
joy, simple, universal, enduring,—the open secret.
The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of joy, as found in his poetry,
is threefold. First, he declares with exultation that he has seen in
Nature the evidence of a living spirit in vital correspondence with
the spirit of man. Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest feeling
of the inestimable value of the humblest human life,—a feeling which
through all its steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden gushes of
penetration and pathos. Third, he proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty
and greatness of man, consisting in obedience to law and fidelity to duty.
I am careful in choosing words to describe the manner of this threefold
prophesying, because I am anxious to distinguish it from didacticism.
Not that Wordsworth is never didactic; for he is very often entirely and
dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at his best; and it is in
these long uninspired intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater has
said, “With patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s
work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor
underwent his peculiar power.” Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not
always illuminate his industry as a writer. In the intervals he prosed
terribly. There is a good deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” in
some of his poems.
But the character of his best poems was strangely inspirational. They
came to him like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wondering at their
beauty. Through the protracted description of an excursion, or the
careful explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods on foot; but when
he comes to the mount of vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. In
the analysis of a character, in the narration of a simple story, he often
drones, and sometimes stammers; but when the flash of insight arrives, he
sings. This is the difference between the pedagogue and the prophet: the
pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, the prophet chants a truth
revealed by vision.