you present helplessness, if all you have and all you can this year
expect is forfeit, ere it come to your hands, to the purveyors of
past indulgence, wherefore, I beseech you, go on in that same foolish
course? You need not, you ought not, you must not. Pay if you can: it
is the tradesman’s due; he too has his difficulties, he too has his
duties of charity: pay if you can; if you cannot retrench in any wise;
let no childish fear of alarming suspicions, of awakening unpleasant
importunities, withhold you; in the end it will surely be the best for
creditor alike and debtor. Let not duns or imagination of duns frighten
you into folly redoubled. Join, if you please, the Association: it
professes no more than retrenchment for the sake of the Irish: you
need not, in my judgment, pay one farthing to the box, you are serving
its purposes otherwise. And it may perhaps be some assistance to your
purposes of economy, it may give you a sort of vantage-ground of joint
recognition, to place your name, either in manuscript or print, among
its members. But about this I profess a most supreme incuriousness.
Only, for Ireland’s sake, and England’s, and your own--abstain, be
temperate, and save.
Will you tell me that the little we can do is too little to be worth
doing at all? Surely for our own satisfaction simply it should be done.
But further: do you not know that through increase of consumption in
the year before last, the returns of customs and duties were raised by
hundreds of thousands of pounds? I say, the mere customs and duties
upon the increase. What is true of increase in the one way, will I
think be admitted true of decrease in the other. If by the mere tax on
our increased eating and drinking the exchequer filled so fast, will
the total decrease amount to so very small a trifle?
Will you tell me finally that all this is the hot fume of a distempered
imagination? that I am rather letting my fancy rest on what one saw
in Oxford during last summer term, than looking steadily on what
is occurring in this? that I am haunted by the ghosts of forgotten
champagne bottles, the spectra of long-worn-out waistcoats, the
simulacra of the fruits and the ices of Whitsuntide ‘46?
The shopkeepers, I am told, profess to feel a difference. Surely they
did not count on exactly the same thing again! I trust indeed there
_is_ a difference. But then the weather has been so bad. Who wants
ices with the wind N.N.E.; who likes Nuneham or Godstowe in the rain?
When all the watering-pots of heaven are playing upon High Street,
there will hardly be a quorum for examining one’s toilet. I only wish
one could feel any sort of security that five or six fine warm suns
would not make a great difference the other way; would not provoke the
same exuberance of extravagant pleasure-hunting which shot up with such
rank vegetation in the heats of last June. With the roses and the May
will come out, I greatly fear, the champagne and the claret. For my own
part, if the corn could only ripen in it, I could wish for rain and
cold to the end of the chapter.
Or will you say this is all rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare
say, something too much in that kind. What with criticising style and
correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the
heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the
limbo of the factitious. Especially when the thing must be done at odd
times, in any case, and if at all, quickly. The term is half over;
while I write, the barometer rises; ere I correct the proof sheet, the
hot weather may be here. But if I have been obliged to write hurriedly,
believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily. And believe me
too, though I have desired to succeed in putting vividly and forcibly
that which vividly and forcibly I felt and saw, still the graces and
splendours of composition were thoughts far less present to my mind
than Irish poor men’s miseries, English poor men’s hardships, and your
unthinking indifference. Shocking enough the first and the second,
almost more shocking the third.
One word more. Nothing that is said here is intended to go against
enjoyment, as such. It is perhaps scarcely natural for young men to
feel strongly that which they do not see. It were absurd to affect
a gloom which does not exist. But it is not absurd to avoid in our
enjoyments that which a little reflection can show us to be wrong,
to be hurtful or unfitting: it is not absurd to lay down a few rules
beforehand which will keep up in our minds the general impression that
those unseen miseries are, though unseen, not unreal: it is not absurd
to do, with or without sensation and sentiment, those acts which tend
to their alleviation; to avoid, simply because it has been shown to be
the right course, expensive and ostentatious gratifications. And simple
enjoyments are, if not the most voluptuous and delicately refined,
assuredly the manliest and healthiest, the most honest and rational and
permanent.
I may as well end by copying a document which shows that an example
has been set for us in high places. It is an order issued by the Lord
Steward of the Queen’s household.
‘Board of Green Cloth, May 12, 1847.
‘Her Majesty, taking into consideration the present high and
increasing price of provisions, and especially of all kinds
of bread and flour, has been graciously pleased to command
that from the date of the order, no description of flour
except seconds shall be used for any purpose in her Majesty’s
household; and that the daily allowance of bread shall be
restricted to one pound per head for every person dieted in the
palace.
‘By her Majesty’s command, FORTESCUE.’
It may simplify the subject of ‘benefit of trade,’ to observe
the following distinctions. If I buy old books or pictures from
a friend, the money is merely transferred: the country suffers
no loss, and may indeed be the gainer, if my friend is more
economical and a better distributer than I. If I give a man a
shilling for holding my horse, the country suffers in case
the man could have been doing something else; for instance,
if I have called him off from mowing or reaping. Thirdly, if
I give a confectioner half a crown for sweetmeats, which I
could have done without, I have wasted the substance of the
country, certainly in one way, by consuming without requiring
it; perhaps in two, that is, if the confectioner’s work could
have been spent upon somebody who did require it. All that is
gone into my stomach is a pure waste, and the paltry percentage
which goes to the vendor as profit is very likely waste also.
He might have got the same for doing what was really wanted.
LECTURE
ON THE
POETRY OF WORDSWORTH.
William Wordsworth was born in April 1770, at Cockermouth, in
Cumberland; his father, of a family which came originally from
Yorkshire, was a solicitor in the town. Left an orphan early in
life, his recollections attach themselves less to his home than to
the neighbourhood in which he was placed at school. Hawkshead, an
antique village, the centre of one of the large straggling parishes
of the North country, possessing an ancient and once famous grammar
foundation, stands a little way from the west side of Windermere,
beside a small lake of its own. Here, lodged in a country cottage, he
spent most of his time from 1778 to 1787--nine years.
His reminiscences of this period and this locality form the most
beautiful part of his biographical poem, ‘The Prelude’; and a
considerable number of his most pleasing minor poems refer to the
same years and place. It was then and there, beyond a doubt, that the
substantive Wordsworth was formed; it was then and there that the tall
rock and sounding cataract became his passion and his appetite, and
his genius and whole being united and identified itself with external
nature.
From this provincial, primitive seclusion, he passed, in October 1787,
to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where his three years of academical
residence, not much improved by attention to the studies of the
place, were happily broken for him by visits to his own country, to
Hawkshead, amongst his mother’s relations, and more remarkably by a
bold pedestrian tour (almost wholly and literally pedestrian) through
France, Switzerland, and the districts of the Italian lakes--regions
which the revolutionary wars almost immediately afterwards closed to
all English, and which were before comparatively unknown. The account
of the journey is again one of the fine points of ‘The Prelude,’ and in
particular the description of the passage of the Simplon, and of night
on the shores of Lago Maggiore.
Taking his degree at Cambridge in January 1791, he again went over to
France, led, it would seem, by enthusiasm for the political changes
then at work there. He remained there, at Orleans and at Paris, about
fifteen months, during which he was a witness of the culmination of
the revolutionary tumult, and beheld the commencement of its period of
bloodshed and terror. It gives a feeling of strange contrast to the
after tranquillity of his life, to hear him speaking of the desire he
then felt to enter himself as an actor into that terrible arena, and
seriously seeming to consider it a thing, at the time, likely enough to
happen, and from which chance, rather than his own wish, diverted him.
Chance, however, carried him back to England. Sympathising strongly
with the original revolutionary movement, and continuing long, in
spite of its crimes and horrors, to cling to republican feelings, he
showed, to the mortification of his friends, no disposition to carry
out their views by taking orders in the Church. He loitered, living in
a desultory manner, partly alone in London, partly among his friends
in the country, and was, at one time, on the point of engaging in
the drudgery of writing for the newspapers. At last, in 1795, his
twenty-sixth year, he found himself made what he considered to be
independent, by a bequest of 900_l._, left him by a young friend in
the faith of his vocation to literary achievement. He now settled down
into domesticity with his sister in a country place in Somersetshire.
This sister was one of the two persons whose minds, he said, had been
most operative upon his. The other was Coleridge, whom he met for the
first time in June 1797.
Coleridge, youngest son of a clergyman and schoolmaster at Ottery St.
Mary, Devon, born two years after Wordsworth, bred up at Christ’s
Hospital and at Cambridge--which Wordsworth, when he came up, was just
quitting--had for the last three years been engaged with Southey, a
young Oxford student, in wild schemes for a Pantisocratic settlement on
the banks of the Susquehanna (a situation selected for the sweetness
of the sound); had been publishing poems, lecturing and neglecting to
lecture, preaching in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat, here and there
and everywhere, especially at Bristol. Finally he had run into the
most imprudent of marriages, and had settled himself at the village of
Nether Stowey. Here, during more than a year, Wordsworth had continual
intercourse with him, residing at a beautiful spot not far from
it--Allfoxden.
Some years before 1793 he had published verses, not particularly
promising, written in the established metre and manner--that of Pope
and Dryden. But if Hawkshead had made the inner Wordsworth, Allfoxden,
Coleridge, and his own sister gave us the expressed Wordsworth. The
effect of this time on Coleridge was remarkable: his high poetic period
is just this of his intercourse with Wordsworth; but to Wordsworth it
was more distinctly an epoch.
His first characteristic poems were published, together with
Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner,’ under the title of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ in
1798. They obtained considerable notice, and made his name well known;
but that notice was not favourable, and his name was known rather for
ridicule and censure than praise.
The following winter he spent in Germany, where Coleridge was
proceeding to lose himself in metaphysics; Wordsworth returned, and,
after some little wandering in Yorkshire, he and his sister finally
settled, with their petty income, in a cottage at Grasmere, in December
1799.
In 1800, a new volume of Lyrical Ballads, containing some of his best
poems, was published. Quite undaunted by their want of popularity
and the adverse judgment of the highest critics, relying on his own
feelings and perceptions, he worked in his mountain retirement steadily
on, devoting himself chiefly at this time to the biographical poem
which, with the name of ‘The Prelude,’ was published, for the first
time, after his death in July 1850.
So ends his story before he was thirty years old. After his settlement
at Grasmere we do not imagine that his mind or genius developed or grew
at all. It grew perhaps in bulk, we may say, but never altered its form
or character, attaining merely more and more what he himself calls
‘the monumental pomp of age.’ In 1803 he made a tour in Scotland, of
which a very pleasing record remains, not only in the occasional poems
suggested by its incidents, but in the journal of his companion--his
sister. Returning southward, they paid a visit, on September 17, to
Mr. and Mrs. Scott, at their cottage at Lasswade, near Edinburgh.
They received a promise that their host would join them again at
Melrose, and, stopping on their way thither at the inn of Clovenford,
were assured by the landlady that Mr. Scott was a very clever man. At
Melrose they met and spent the evening together. The landlady here,
says Miss Wordsworth, made some difficulty about beds, and refused to
settle anything till she ascertained from the sheriff himself, _i.e._
Scott, that he had no objection to sleeping in the same room with
William, _i.e._ Wordsworth.
Mr. Scott was already known in the literary world as a translator of
German, and an editor of Scottish ballad poetry. But he had published
nothing original; and it was not till two years after this, that (as
it stands recorded) nothing in the history of British poetry ever
equalled the demand for the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ the first four
cantos of which Wordsworth and his sister had heard their author read
during their visit at the cottage of Lasswade. In the same year, 1803,
Wordsworth married, without, however, any great internal or domestic
revolution. In 1832 Scott died. This is also the date of the collected
edition, in four volumes, of ‘Wordsworth’s Poems,’ including ‘The
Excursion,’ which, under general unpopularity, he had steadily gone on
writing and publishing.
In 1839, in the theatre at Oxford, he received an honorary degree with
unusual acclamation.
In 1840, on the death of Southey, he was, with a general feeling that
it was his due, made Poet Laureate: 1850 conveyed his body to the quiet
churchyard of Grasmere.
We have presented this bare biographical outline as preliminary to all
remark and criticism. But this meagre chronological table is not to be
dismissed without some attention. The array of mere names and figures,
dry as they may look, are really full of curious significance, and
pregnant with many thoughts and conjectures.
Let us consider, for example, upon what sort of reading the youthful
period of Wordworth’s life was cast. The English literature of the
then closing eighteenth century, as deficient, perhaps, in force and
fertility as it is remarkable for justness and propriety and elegance
of diction, was attaining its completion in Cowper, who, born in 1731,
and dying in 1800, published his one great poem, ‘The Task,’ in 1785.
As we now read Scott’s novels and poems, Byron, and Southey, and
Wordsworth, so they in Wordsworth’s boyhood read the series from Pope
to Johnson, read Fielding, and Richardson, and Sterne, and Gray, and
Collins, and Goldsmith.
What effect upon the minds of young men of this time had Burns--or, to
turn to foreign literature, the works of Rousseau?
To proceed lower down. The curious meeting of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Southey deserves special notice. In proximity to Wordsworth,
Coleridge blazed forth in a stream of poetic brilliancy, which
his after years never, in any sort or kind, repeated; in no after
moments did he ever create an ‘Ancient Mariner’ or a ‘Christabel.’
Wordsworth, also, was elevated and enkindled by the more vivid and
radiating genius of Coleridge. Notice again how completely anterior
and antecedent to Scott, and Moore, and Byron, are those Lake Poets,
whose nascent influence and popularity they so completely overpowered.
But without ‘Christabel’ the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ would never
have been written. Without Scott’s stories we should scarcely have
had Byron’s; without Wordsworth’s, and the reminiscences of Hawkshead
village-school, we should never have had the third and fourth cantos of
‘Childe Harold’; we should have lost, very probably, half the beauty of
Byron alike and Scott.
Like the runners in the torch race, they hand along the flame. Who
shall say, in these spiritual and subtle exchanges and interchanges,
This is mine, and that is thine? We cannot indeed, I think, assert that
Wordsworth derived anything directly from Byron, or even from Scott
(the ‘White Doe of Rylstone,’ so far as it follows Scott at all, so
far is a failure); but without that antagonism, and without the severe
lessons their popularity taught him, he probably would not either have
escaped his natural faults, nor exerted his natural strength.
Out of Wordsworth and Byron came forth Shelley; nor is Keats (there
is no such thing) an independent genius. We may remark also how, as
the brief career of Byron encloses within itself the yet briefer life
of Shelley, and Keats’s briefest of all, so is Byron himself included
in the larger arc of Scott, and the yet larger arc of Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, gradually working his way to reputation, was displaced by
the sudden glory of Scott. Scott, as a poet, presently has to resign
the field to Byron, and to compete against his Corsairs and Beppos with
the new phenomenon of the ‘Waverley’ novels. When Byron had died in
early manhood, and Scott in premature age; when the furor for the poet
had passed away, and the charm of the novelist had begun to decline,
Wordsworth first tasted the sweets of popular acceptance, and received
in his turn, at the end of his laborious and honourable life, the
reward which his rivals had almost outlived.
It is a curious and yet an undeniable fact that Wordsworth, who began
his poetical course with what was, at any rate, understood by most
readers to be a disclaimer and entire repudiation of the ornament of
style and poetic diction, really derives from his style and his diction
his chief and special charm. I shall not venture categorically to
assert that his practice is in positive opposition to the doctrine he
maintains in the prefaces, and supplementary remarks, which accompanied
his Lyrical Ballads, and which, calling down upon him and them the
hostility of reviews and the ridicule of satirists, made him notorious
as one
Who both by precept and example shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
Certain it is, however, that he did bestow infinite toil and labour
upon his poetic style; that in the nice and exquisite felicities of
poetic diction he specially surpassed his contemporaries; that his
scrupulous and painstaking spirit, in this particular, constitutes one
of his special virtues as a poet. The moving accident, as he says, was
not his trade; of event and of action his compositions are perfectly
destitute; a lyrical and didactic almost exclusively, scarcely ever in
any sense a dramatic writer, it is upon beauty of expression that by
the very necessity of his position he has to depend. Scott and Byron
are mere negligent schoolboys compared with him. The anecdote has
often been told that Wordsworth said to Mr. Landor, or Mr. Landor to
Wordsworth, that there was but one good line in all Scott. To which
assertion of the one the other at once assented, and said that there
was no doubt which it was:--
As the wind waved his garment, how oft did he start.
Wordsworth’s practice, in all probability, was far more just than
his theory. His theory, indeed, as directed not against style in
general, but against the then prevalent vices of style, was a very
tolerably justifiable and useful theory, but his practice was
extremely meritorious; his patience and conscientious labour deserve
all praise. He has not, indeed (Nature had not bestowed on him), the
vigour and heartiness of Scott, or the force and the sweep and the
fervour of Byron; but his poems do more perfectly and exquisitely and
unintermittedly express his real meaning and significance and character
than do the poems of either Scott or Byron. Lyrical verse is by its
nature more fugitive than drama and story; yet I incline to believe
that there are passages of Wordsworth which, from the mere perfection
of their language, will survive when the Marmions and the Laras are
deep in dust. As writers for their age, as orators, so to say, as
addressing themselves personally to their contemporaries, Byron and
Scott, one cannot hesitate to say, were far more influential men, _are_
far greater names. They had more, it may be, to say to their fellows;
they entered deeper, perhaps, into the feelings and life of their time;
they received a larger and livelier recognition, and a more immediate
and tangible reward of popular enthusiasm and praise. It may be, too,
that they had something not for their own generation only, but for all
ages, which quite as well deserved a permanent record as anything in
the mind of Wordsworth.
But that permanent beauty of expression, that harmony between thought
and word, which is the condition of ‘_immortal_ verse,’ they did not,
I think--and Wordsworth did--take pains to attain. There is hardly
anything in Byron and Scott which in another generation people will
not think they can say over again quite as well, and more agreeably
and familiarly for themselves; there is nothing which, it will be
plain, has, in Scott’s or Byron’s way of putting it, attained the one
form which of all others truly belongs to it; which any new attempt
will, at the very utmost, merely successfully repeat. For poetry, like
science, has its final precision; and there are expressions of poetic
knowledge which can no more be rewritten than could the elements of
geometry. There are pieces of poetic language which, try as men will,
they will simply have to recur to, and confess that it has been done
before them. I do not say that there is in Wordsworth anything like the
same quantity of this supreme result which you find in Shakspeare or
in Virgil; there is far less of the highest poetry than in Shakspeare,
there is far more admixture of the unpoetic than in Virgil. But
there is in him a good deal more truly complete and finished poetic
attainment than in his other English contemporaries.
And this is no light thing. People talk about style as if it were a
mere accessory, the unneeded but pleasing ornament, the mere put-on
dress of the substantial being, who without it is much the same as with
it. Yet is it not intelligible that by a change of intonation, accent,
or it may be mere accompanying gesture, the same words may be made to
bear most different meanings? What is the difference between good and
bad acting but style? and yet how different good acting is from bad. On
the contrary, it may really be affirmed that some of the highest truths
are only expressible to us by style, only appreciable as indicated by
manner.
That Raphael paints a Virgin and Child is not a very significant fact:
half a thousand other painters have painted the same; but painted _as_
Raphael--not one. It is as though you should suppose that to each
poetic thought some particular geometric figure, or curve, it might be,
specially appertained: just as to a particular definition the circle
appertains, and no figure but the circle.