imperfectly and incorrectly; their circle is not a true circle, not
a circle all round; its radii would, many of them, be equal, but not
all; no one will dare therefore to keep it as the model and pattern. To
draw the figure which may truly stand as the model and the pattern, the
unmisleading, safe representative--this is the gift and the excellence
of style.
In Milton, the gems of pure poetry lie embedded in the rock of
scholastic pomp. And in Wordsworth, you must traverse waste acres of
dull verse, that had better far have been, if anything, plain prose, to
seek out the rich felicitous spots of fragrance and pure beauty. There
is no doubt, I think, that he wrote over much. Posterity, we must hope,
will have an instinct to cast away the dross and keep the good metal,
and judiciously to reduce his seven volumes to one. Setting himself
laboriously and painstakingly to work, and being by nature, moreover,
a little cumbrous and heavy, he sometimes measured his result, we
cannot doubt it, by quantity, and fell into the not unnatural mistake
of counting a great deal of silver to be worth a great deal more than
one quarter the quantity of gold. Where a man has himself at once to
produce and to judge of his production, it is certainly natural, it may
be even desirable, that the judgment should not be exact; it cannot,
perhaps, well be so without the accompanying evil of an excessive and
vitiating introspection and self-consideration.
Had Wordsworth been more capable of discerning his bad from his good,
there would, it is likely enough, have been far less of the bad; but
the good, perhaps, would have been very far less good. The consequence
is, however, that to prove him a true poet, you have to hunt down a
bit here and a bit there, a few lines in a book of the ‘Prelude on the
Excursion,’ one sonnet, perhaps, amongst eighty or ninety, one stanza
in a series of Memorials of Tours in Scotland, or on the Continent;
only very occasionally finding the reward of a complete poem, good
throughout, and good as a whole.
What is meant when people complain of him as mawkish is a different
matter. It is, I believe, that instead of looking directly at an
object, and considering it as a thing in itself, and allowing it to
operate upon him as a fact in itself, he takes the sentiment produced
by it in his own mind as the thing, as the important and really real
fact. The real things cease to be real; the world no longer exists;
all that exists is the feeling, somehow generated in the poet’s
sensibility. This sentimentalising over sentiment, this sensibility
about sensibility, has been carried, I grant, by the Wordsworthians
to a far more than Wordsworthian excess. But he has something of it
surely. He is apt to wind up his short pieces with reflections upon
the way in which, hereafter, he expects to reflect upon his present
reflections. Nevertheless, this is not by any means attributable to all
his writings.
Here then, even in this defect, is indicated one great praise
attaching to Wordsworth, alike as a poet and as a man. He set himself
manfully and courageously to his work, and through good report and
evil, especially the latter, patiently and perseveringly kept to it,
reminding one, with his hardy, unflinching, north-country spirit, of
the story told of the Lancashire workman, who, when the easy looker-on
took occasion to observe that he had a hard day’s work, simply rejoined
that he was paid for a hard day’s work. Paid, I dare say, however, not
very largely, any more than, till late in life, was Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, we have said, succeeded beyond the other poets of the time
in giving a perfect expression to his meaning, in making his verse
permanently true to his genius and his moral frame. Let us now proceed
to inquire the worth of that genius and moral frame, the sum of the
real significance of his character and view of life.
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man,
are words which he himself adopts from the Elizabethan poet Daniel,
translated by him from Seneca, and introduces into that part of ‘The
Excursion’ which gives us what I might call his creed, the statement
of those substantive enduring convictions upon which after a certain
amount of fluctuation and tossing about in the world he found himself
or got himself anchored.
A certain elevation and fixity characterise Wordsworth everywhere. You
will not find, as in Byron, an ebullient overflowing life, refusing all
existing restrictions, and seeking in vain to create any for itself,
to own in itself any permanent law or rule. To have attained a law, to
exercise a lordship by right divine over passions and desires--this is
Wordsworth’s pre-eminence.
Nor do we find, as in Scott, a free vigorous animal nature ready to
accept whatever things earth has to offer, eating and drinking and
enjoying heartily; like charity, hoping all things, believing all
things, and never failing; a certain withdrawal and separation, a
moral and almost religious selectiveness, a rigid refusal and a nice
picking and choosing, are essential to Wordsworth’s being. It has been
not inaptly said by a French critic that you may trace in him, as in
Addison, Richardson, Cowper, a spiritual descent from the Puritans.
Into what Byron might have remade himself in that new and more hopeful
era of his life upon which, when death cut him down at Missolonghi,
he appeared to be entering, it would be over bold to conjecture. But
assuredly (without passing judgment on a human soul simply according
to the errors of those thirty-six years which may claim perhaps the
name and palliation of an unusually protracted youth)--assuredly, to
be whirled away by the force of mere arbitrary will, whose only law
was its own wilfulness, to follow passion for passion’s sake, and be
capricious for the love of one’s own caprice--this is not the honour or
the excellence of a being breathing thoughtful breath, looking before
and after.
The profounder tones of Walter Scott’s soul were never truly sounded
until adversity and grief fell upon his latter days, and those old
enjoyments in which he seemed to live, and move, and have his being,
his natural and as it were predestined vocation, fell from him and
were no more. The constancy, courage, and clear manly sense which,
amid broken fortunes, severed ties, and failing health, spirits, and
intellect, the extracts from his journals given in Mr. Lockhart’s life
evince, constitute a picture, I think, far more affecting than any to
be found in ‘Kenilworth’ or the ‘Bride of Lammermoor.’ But the sports
and amusements of Abbotsford, the riding and coursing and fishing, and
feasting, and entertaining of guests, &c. &c., these, it appears to
me, a little disappoint, dissatisfy, displease us; and make us really
thankful, while we read, for the foreknowledge that so strong and
capable a soul was ere the end to have some nobler work allotted it, if
not in the way of action, at any rate in that of endurance.
More rational certainly, either than Byron’s hot career of wilfulness,
or Scott’s active but easy existence amidst animal spirits and
out-of-door enjoyments, more dignified, elevated, serious, significant,
and truly human, was Wordsworth’s homely and frugal life in the
cottage at Grasmere. While wandering with his dear waggoners round
his dearer lakes, talking with shepherds, watching hills and stars,
studying the poets, and fashioning verses, amidst all this there was
really something higher than either wildly crying out to have things
as one chose, or cheerfully taking the world’s good things as one
found them, working to gain the means and the relish for amusement.
He did not, it is true, sweep away with him the exulting hearts of
youth, ‘o’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea’; he did not win
the eager and attentive ear of high and low, at home and abroad, with
the entertainment of immortal Waverley novels; but to strive not
unsuccessfully to build the lofty rhyme, to lay slowly the ponderous
foundations of pillars to sustain man’s moral fabric, to fix a centre
around which the chaotic elements of human impulse and desire might
take solid form and move in their ordered ellipses, to originate a
spiritual vitality, this was perhaps greater than sweeping over glad
blue waters or inditing immortal novels.
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man.
Unless above himself, how poor a thing; yet, if beyond and outside
of his world, how useless and purposeless a thing. This also must be
remembered. And I cannot help thinking that there is in Wordsworth’s
poems something of a spirit of withdrawal and seclusion from, and even
evasion of, the actual world. In his own quiet rural sphere it is true
he did fairly enough look at things as they were; he did not belie his
own senses, nor pretend to recognise in outward things what really
was not in them. But his sphere was a small one; the objects he lived
among unimportant and petty. Retiring early from all conflict and
even contact with the busy world, he shut himself from the elements
which it was his business to encounter and to master. This gives to
his writings, compared with those of Scott and of Byron, an appearance
of sterility and unreality. He cannot, indeed, be said, like Cowper,
to be an indoors poet; but he is a poet rather of a country-house or a
picturesque tour, not of life and business, action and fact.
This also sadly lessens the value which we must put on that high moral
tone which we have been hitherto extolling. To live in a quiet village,
out of the road of all trouble and temptation, in a pure, elevated,
high moral sort of manner, is after all no such very great a feat. It
is something, indeed, anywhere. But I fear it cannot quite truly be
said of him, as he has himself finely said of Burns--
In busiest street and loneliest glen
Are felt the flashes of his pen;
He lives ’mid winter snows, and when
Bees fill their hives;
Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives.
People in busy streets are inclined, I fear, a little to contemn the
mild precepts of the rural moralist. They will tell you that he rather
reminds them of the achievements of that celebrated French sea-captain,
Who fled full soon
On the first of June,
But bade the rest keep fighting.
Perhaps it is only those that are themselves engaged in the thick of
the struggle and conflict that rightly can cheer on, or fitly can
admonish, their fellows, or to any good purpose assume the high moral
tone. Yet it must be confessed that even in a country village it still
is something.
Nor was Wordsworth in the earlier years of his life by any means of a
timid or valetudinarian virtue. A man who was in Paris in the heat of
the first Revolution was not without experiences. And the poems, it may
be observed, which follow closest upon this youthful period of living
experience, are of far higher value than the later ones, which ensued
upon his prolonged and unbroken retirement.
There may be, moreover, a further fault in Wordsworth’s high morality,
consequent on this same evil of premature seclusion, which I shall
characterise by the name of false or arbitrary positiveness. There
is such a thing in morals, as well as in science, as drawing your
conclusion before you have properly got your premises. It is desirable
to attain a fixed point; but it is essential that the fixed point be a
right one. We ought to hold fast by what is true; but because we hold
wilfully fast, it does not follow that what we hold fast to is true. If
you have got the truth, be as positive as you please; but because you
choose to be positive, do not therefore be sure you have the truth.
Another evil consequence is the triviality in many places of his
imagery, and the mawkishness, as people say, of his sentiment. I cannot
myself heartily sympathise with the ‘Ode to the Smaller Celandine,’ or
repeated poems to the daisy. I find myself a little recoil from the
statement that--
To me the meanest flower that blows doth give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
These phenomena of external nature, which in the old and great poets
come forward simply as analogies and similitudes of what is truly
great--namely, human nature, and as expressions of curious and
wonderful relations, are in Wordsworth themselves the truly great,
all-important, and pre-eminently wonderful things of the universe. Blue
sky and white clouds, larks and linnets, daisies and celandines--these
it appears are ‘the proper subject of mankind’; not, as we used to
think, the wrath of Achilles, the guilt and remorse of Macbeth, the
love and despair of Othello.
This tendency to exaggerate the importance of flowers and fields,
lakes, waterfalls, and scenery, I remember myself, when a boy of
eighteen, to have heard, not without a shock of mild surprise, the
venerable poet correct. People come to the lakes, he said, and are
charmed with a particular spot, and build a house, and find themselves
discontented, forgetting that these things are only the _sauce and
garnish_ of life. Nevertheless, we fear that the exclusive student
of Wordsworth may go away with the strange persuasion that it is his
business to walk about this world of life and action, and, avoiding
life and action, have his gentle thoughts excited by flowers and
running waters and shadows on mountain sides.
This we conceive is a grievous inherent error in Wordsworth. The poet
of Nature he may perhaps be; but this sort of writing does justice to
the proper worth and dignity neither of man _nor_ of Nature.
ON
THE FORMATION OF CLASSICAL ENGLISH:
AN EXTRACT FROM
A LECTURE ON DRYDEN.
Dryden, a true littérateur, simply reflects his epoch; the revolution
he was intent upon, and which we are especially bound to consider,
was that of English verse composition. While Newton was balancing
the earth, and Locke weighing the intellect, Dryden was measuring
syllables. While Penn and Locke were venturing experiments in
government, he was making them in prosody. Political movements
and agitations--the plot and the new plot--dissolutions and
elections--falls of ministries and impeachments and deaths were to him
chiefly of interest because he must mould the subject of his verse
accordingly. To please the King as laureate he is in duty bound; and to
serve his cause with rhyme to the purpose. Also prose.
Yet what side _should_ a littérateur of real excellence take if not
that of the King and the court? who certainly had the best taste, were
the most judicious critics as well as the most likely paymasters.
Settle and Shadwell might suit the Aldermen and the Exclusionists, who
knew no better. And nothing, I imagine, more completely suited Dryden,
more exactly met his feelings, and gave freer scope to his talents,
than the revolution in literature which the new King and court sought
to naturalise in England. To guide the process of that change and
to elevate a matter of mere passing court fashion into a permanent
reformation of English literature; to dignify a mere slipslop aversion
of pedantry by converting it into an appreciation of elegance and
propriety of writing--this was his vocation. He devoted himself to it
for forty years with infinite zeal and perseverance, laborious study,
and patient carefulness. And certainly with some considerable success.
During the whole of the next century I suppose it was considered that
our language first was written, so to speak, by him. For models of
composition no one was recommended anterior to him. In English poetry
he is for them the earliest name. Into Johnson’s collection Cowley
and Butler, and one or two others coëval with Dryden, are admitted,
but not Spenser. So too in prose it is only in our time that people
have begun to talk of Jeremy Taylor and Milton as legitimate standards
of English prose composition. Dryden was supposed to have commenced
in the two kinds of writing what Pope and Addison made perfect. For
style Shakespeare was dangerous and Hooker pernicious reading; Ben
Jonson’s wit was ponderous and the wisdom of Bacon pedantic; the mirth
of Fletcher was rude and vulgar, the elegance of Sidney formal and
factitious.
Maxims of this kind prevailed from the days of Dryden to those of Byron
and Scott. There are circles where they are still current, and there
are possibilities of their again finding a more general acceptation.
I incline to believe that there is a great deal of truth in them.
Our language before the Restoration certainly was for the most part
bookish, academical, and stiff. You perceive that our writers have
first learnt to compose in Latin; and you feel as if they were now
doing so in English. Their composition is not a harmonious development
of spoken words, but a copy of written words. We are set to study
ornate and learned periods; but we are not charmed by finding our
ordinary everyday speech rounded into grace and smoothed into polish,
chastened to simplicity and brevity without losing its expressiveness,
and raised into dignity and force without ceasing to be familiar;
saying once for all what we in our rambling talk try over and over in
vain to say; and saying it simply and fully, exactly and perfectly.
This scholastic and constrained manner of men who had read more than
they talked, and had (of necessity) read more Latin than English; of
men who passed from the study to the pulpit, and from the pulpit back
to the study--this elevated and elaborated diction of learned and
religious men was doomed at the Restoration. Its learning was pedantry,
and its elevation pretence. It was no way suited to the wants of
the court, nor the wishes of the people. It was not likely that the
courtiers would impede the free motions of their limbs with the folds
of the cumbrous theological vesture; and the nation in general was
rather weary of being preached to. The royalist party, crowding back
from French banishment, brought their French tastes and distastes.
James I. loved Latin and even Greek, but Charles II. liked French
better even than English. In one of Dryden’s plays is a famous scene,
in which he ridicules the fashionable jargon of the day, which seems to
have been a sort of slipshod English, continually helped out with the
newest French phrases.
Dryden then has the merit of converting this corruption and dissolution
of our old language into a new birth and renovation. And not only must
we thank him for making the best of the inevitable circumstances and
tendencies of the time, but also praise him absolutely for definitely
improving our language. It is true that he sacrificed a great deal of
the old beauty of English writing, but that sacrifice was inevitable;
he retained all that it was practicable to save, and he added at the
same time all the new excellence of which the time was capable.
You may call it, if you please, a democratic movement in the language.
It was easier henceforth both to write and to read. To understand
written English, it was not necessary first to understand Latin; and
yet written English was little less instructive than it had been, or if
it was less elevating, it was on the other hand more refining.
For the first time, you may say, people found themselves reading words
easy at once and graceful; fluent, yet dignified; familiar, yet full of
meaning. To have organised the dissolving and separating elements of
our tongue into a new and living instrument, perfectly adapted to the
requirements and more than meeting the desires and aspirations of the
age, this is our author’s praise. But it is not fully expressed until
you add that this same instrument was found, with no very material
modification, sufficient for the wants and purposes of the English
people for more than a century. The new diction conquered, which the
old one had never done, Scotland and Ireland, and called out American
England into articulation. Hume and Robertson learnt it; Allan Ramsay
and Burns studied it; Grattan spoke it; Franklin wrote it. You will
observe that our most popular works in prose belong to it. So do our
greatest orators. A new taste and a new feeling for the classics grew
up with it. It translated, to the satisfaction of its time, Homer and
Virgil.
Our present tongue, so far as it differs from this, cannot profess to
have done nearly so much. Homer and Virgil no longer content us in Pope
and Dryden, but we have not been able to get anything to content us.
The English diction of the nineteenth century has no Burke or Chatham
to boast of, nor any Hume or Johnson.
There may be some superiority in matter. We have had a good deal of new
experience, both in study and in action--new books and new events have
come before us. But we have not yet in England, I imagine, had any one
to give us a manner suitable to our new matter. There has been a kind
of dissolution of English, but no one writer has come to re-unite and
re-vivify the escaping components. We have something new to say, but do
not know how to say it. The language has been popularised, but has not
yet vindicated itself from being vulgarised. A democratic revolution is
effecting itself in it, without that aristocratic reconstruction which
pertains to every good democratic revolution. Everybody can write, and
nobody writes well. We can all speak, and none of us know how. We have
forgotten or rejected the old diction of our grandfathers, and shall
leave, it seems likely, no new diction for our grandchildren. With some
difficulty we make each other understand what we mean, but, unassisted
by personal explanations and comment, it is to be feared our mere words
will not go far. Our grandfathers read and wrote books: our fathers
reviews: and we newspapers; will our children and grandchildren read
our old newspapers? Have we any one who speaks for our day as justly
and appropriately as Dryden did for his? Have we anything that will
stand wear and tear, and will be as bright and un-obsolete a hundred
and fifty years hence, as ‘Alexander’s Feast’ is to-day?
LECTURE
ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
FROM CHAUCER TO WORDSWORTH.
(1852.)
The subject of my lecture is the Development of English Literature. It
were idle for me to attempt, and would be foolish in me to desire, to
say anything strikingly new upon it. Anything strikingly original could
be striking only because incorrect; and would in the end most likely be
found not even original.
Some novelty indeed there would be--the novelty of a rarely attained
success--could I, while passing in review the literature of our
country, treat of every part in proper place and due proportion,
without undervaluing, without overcolouring, without either omission or
exaggeration.
Something interesting too, if not striking, there might be, could I,
in following the development of English literature, indicate to you
truly its connection with the development of English character, point
out correctly why it was natural at particular epochs that particular
things should be said; how the times affected the writers, and the
writers express the times; and what sequence of changing words and
deeds has brought down the England of history to the modern England of
our own times in the East and in the West.