This is a voice that speaks to us across a gulf of nearly fifty years.
A few months ago Wordsworth was taken from us at the ripe age of
fourscore, yet here we have him addressing the public, as for the
first time, with all the fervor, the unworn freshness, the hopeful
confidence of thirty. We are carried back to the period when
Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Rogers, and Moore were in their youthful
prime. We live again in the stirring days when the poets who divided
public attention and interest with the Fabian struggle in Portugal and
Spain, with the wild and terrible events of the Russian campaign, with
the uprising of the Teutonic nations and the overthrow of Napoleon,
were in a manner but commencing their cycle of songs. This is to
renew, to antedate, the youth of a majority of the living generation.
But only those whose memory still carries them so far back, can feel
within them any reflex of that eager excitement with which the news of
battles fought and won, or mailcoach copies of some new work of Scott,
or Byron, or the _Edinburgh Review_, were looked for and received in
those already old days.
[Footnote 3: The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an
Autobiographical Poem. By William Wordsworth. London, Moxon. [New
York, Appletons.]]
We need not remind the readers of the _Excursion_ that when Wordsworth
was enabled by the generous enthusiasm of Raisley Calvert to retire
with a slender independence to his native mountains, there to devote
himself exclusively to his art, his first step was to review and
record in verse the origin and progress of his own powers, as far
as he was acquainted with them. This was at once an exercise in
versification, and a test for the kind of poetry for which he was
by temperament fitted. The result was a determination to compose a
philosophical poem containing views of man, of nature, and of society.
This, ambitious conception has been doomed to share the fate of so
many other colossal undertakings. Of the three parts of his _Recluse_,
thus planned, only the second, (the _Excursion_, published in 1814,)
has been completed. Of the other two there exists only the first book
of the first, and the plan of the third. The _Recluse_ will remain in
fragmentary greatness, a poetical Cathedral of Cologne.
Matters standing thus, it has not been without a melancholy sense of
the uncertainty of human projects, and of the contrast between the
sanguine enterprise and its silent evaporation (so often the "history
of an individual mind"), that we have perused this _Prelude_ which no
completed strain was destined to follow. Yet in the poem itself there
is nothing to inspire depression. It is animated throughout with the
hopeful confidence in the poet's own powers, so natural to the time
of life at which it was composed; it evinces a power and soar of
imagination unsurpassed in any of his writings; and its images and
incidents have a freshness and distinctness which they not seldom
lost, when they came to be elaborated, as many of them were, in his
minor poems of a later date.
The _Prelude_, as the title-page indicates, is a poetical
autobiography, commencing with the earliest reminiscences of the
author, and continued to the time at which it was composed. We are
told that it was begun in 1799 and completed, in 1805. It consists
of fourteen books. Two are devoted to the infancy and school-time of
the poet; four to the period of his University life; two to a brief
residence in London immediately subsequent to his leaving Cambridge,
and a retrospect of the progress his mind had then made; and three
to a residence in France, chiefly in the Loire, but partly in Paris,
during the stormy period of Louis the Sixteenth's flight and capture,
and the fierce contest between the Girondins and Robespierre. Five
books are then occupied with an analysis of the internal struggle
occasioned by the contradictory influences of rural and secluded
nature in boyhood, and of society when the young man first mingles
with the world. The surcease of the strife is recorded in the
fourteenth book, entitled "Conclusion."
The poem is addressed to Coleridge; and apart from its poetical
merits, is interesting as at once a counterpart and a supplement to
that author's philosophical and beautiful criticism of the _Lyrical
Ballads_ in his _Biographia Literaria_. It completes the explanation,
there given, of the peculiar constitution of Wordsworth's mind, and of
his poetical theory. It confirms and justifies our opinion that that
theory was essentially partial and erroneous; but at the same time it
establishes the fact that Wordsworth was a true and a great poet in
despite of his theory.
The great defect of Wordsworth, in our judgment, was want of sympathy
with and knowledge of men. From his birth till his entry at college,
he lived in a region where he met with none whose minds might awaken
his sympathies, and where life was altogether uneventful. On the
other hand, that region abounded with the inert, striking, and most
impressive objects of natural scenery. The elementary grandeur
and beauty of external nature came thus to fill up his mind to
the exclusion of human interests. To such a result his individual
constitution powerfully contributed. The sensuous element was
singularly deficient in his nature. He never seems to have passed
through that erotic period out of which some poets have never emerged.
A soaring, speculative imagination, and an impetuous, resistless
self-will, were his distinguishing characteristics. From first to last
he concentrated himself within himself; brooding over his own fancies
and imaginations to the comparative disregard of the incidents and
impressions which suggested them; and was little susceptible of ideas
originating in other minds. We behold the result. He lives alone in a
world of mountains, streams, and atmospheric phenomena, dealing with
moral abstractions, and rarely encountered by even shadowy specters
of beings outwardly resembling himself. There is measureless grandeur
and power in his moral speculations. There is intense reality in
his pictures of external nature. But though his human characters are
presented with great skill of metaphysical analysis, they have rarely
life or animation. He is always the prominent, often the exclusive,
object of his own song.
Upon a mind so constituted, with its psychological peculiarities
so cherished and confirmed, the fortunes and fates of others, and
the stirring events of his time, made vivid but very transient
impressions. The conversation and writing of contemporaries trained
among books, and with the faculty of speech more fully developed than
that of thought, seemed colorless and empty to one with--whom natural
objects and grandeurs were always present in such overpowering force.
Excluded by his social position from taking an active part in the
public events of the day, and repelled by the emptiness of the then
fashionable literature, he turned to private and humble life as
possessing at least a reality. But he thus withheld himself from
the contemplation of those great mental excitements which only great
public struggles can awaken. He contracted a habit of exaggerating the
importance of every-day incidents and emotions. He accustomed himself
to see in men and in social relations only what he was predetermined
to see there, and to impute to them a value and importance derived
mainly from his own self-will. Even his natural good taste contributed
to confirm him in his error. The two prevailing schools of literature
in England, at that time, were the trashy and mouthing writers who
adopted the sounding language of Johnson and Darwin, unenlivened
by the vigorous thought of either; and the "dead-sea apes" of
that inflated, sentimental, revolutionary style which Diderot had
unconsciously originated, and Kotzebue carried beyond the verge of
caricature. The right feeling and manly thought of Wordsworth were
disgusted by these shallow word-mongers, and he flew to the other
extreme. Under the influences--repulsive and attractive--we have thus
attempted to indicate, he adopted the theory that as much of grandeur
and profound emotion was to be found in mere domestic incidents and
feelings, as on the more conspicuous stage of public life; and that
a bald and naked simplicity of language was the perfection of style.
Singularly enough, he was confirmed in these notions by the very
writer of the day whose own natural genius, more than any of his
contemporaries, impelled him to revel in great, wild, supernatural
conceptions; and to give utterance to them in gorgeous language.
Coleridge was perhaps the only contemporary from whom Wordsworth ever
took an opinion; and that he did so from him, is mainly attributable
to the fact that Coleridge did little more than reproduce to him
his own notions, sometimes rectified by a subtler logic, but always
rendered more attractive by new and dazzling illustrations.
Fortunately it is out of the power of the most perverse theory to
spoil the true poet. The poems of Wordsworth must continue to charm
and elevate mankind, in defiance of his crotchets, just as Luther,
Henri Quatre, and other living impersonations of poetry do, despite
all quaint peculiarities of the attire, the customs, or the opinions
of their respective ages, with which they were imbued. The spirit of
truth and poetry redeems, ennobles, hallows, every external form in
which it may be lodged. We may "pshaw" and "pooh" at Harry Gill and
the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment,
the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity,
which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody
of his lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the
mind. The very excesses into which his one-sided theory betrayed him,
acted as a useful counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste of his
time.
The Prelude may take a permanent place as one of the most perfect of
his compositions. It has much of the fearless felicity of youth; and
its imagery has the sharp and vivid outline of ideas fresh from the
brain. The subject--the development of his own great powers--raises
him above that willful dallying with trivialties which repels us in
some of his other works. And there is real vitality in the theme,
both from our anxiety to know the course of such a mind, and from
the effect of an absorbing interest in himself excluding that languor
which sometimes seized him in his efforts to impart or attribute
interest to themes possessing little or none in themselves. Its mere
narrative, though often very homely, and dealing in too many words,
is often characterized also by elevated imagination, and always by
eloquence. The bustle of London life, the prosaic uncouthness of its
exterior, the earnest heart that beats beneath it, the details even of
its commonest amusements, from Bartholomew Fair to Sadler's Wells, are
portrayed with simple force and delicate discrimination; and for the
most part skillfully contrasted with the rural life of the poet's
native home. There are some truthful and powerful sketches of French
character and life, in the early revolutionary era. But above all,
as might have been anticipated, Wordsworth's heart revels in the
elementary beauty and grandeur of his mountain theme; while his
own simple history is traced with minute fidelity, and is full of
unflagging interest.
We have already adverted to the fact that this Prelude was but
the overture to a grander song which the poet has left, in a great
measure, unsung. Reverting to this consideration an important
fact seems to force itself upon our notice. The creative power of
Wordsworth would appear to have been paralyzed after the publication
of his Excursion. All his most finished works precede that period. His
later writings generally lack the strength and freshness which we find
in those of an earlier date. Some may attribute this to his want of
the stimulus which the necessity of writing for a livelihood imparts,
and in part they may be right; but this is not the whole secret. That
his isolation from the stirring contact of competition, that his utter
disregard of contemporary events, allowed his mind, which for perfect
health's sake requires constantly-renewed impulses from without, to
subside into comparative hebetude, there can be no doubt whatever.
But the main secret of the freezing up of his fountain of poetical
inspiration, we really take to have been his change of politics.
Wordsworth's muse was essentially liberal--one may say, Jacobinical.
That he was unconscious of any sordid motive for his change, we
sincerely believe; but as certainly his conforming was the result less
of reasonable conviction than of willfulness. It was by a determined
effort of his will that he brought himself, to believe in the
Church-and-State notions which he latterly promulgated. Hence the want
of definite views, and of a living interest, which characterizes all
his writings subsequent to that change, when compared with those of
an earlier time. It was Wordsworth's wayward fate to be patronized and
puffed into notice by the champions of old abuses, by the advocates
of the pedantry of Oxford, and by the maintainers of the despotism not
even of Pitt but of Castlereagh. It is already felt, however, that the
poet whom these men were mainly instrumental in bringing into notice,
will live in men's memories by exactly those of his writings most
powerful to undermine and overthrow their dull and faded bigotries.
Despite his own efforts, Wordsworth (as has been said of Napoleon) is
the child and champion of Jacobinism. Though clothed in ecclesiastical
formulas, his religion is little more than the simple worship of
nature; his noblest moral flights are struggles to emancipate himself
from conventional usage; and the strong ground of his thoughts, as of
his style, is nature stripped of the gauds with which the pupils of
courts and circles would bedeck and be-ribbon it. Even in the ranks of
our opponents Wordsworth has been laboring in our behalf.
It is in the record of his extra-academic life that the poet soars his
freest flight, in passages where we have a very echo of the emotions
of an emancipated worshiper of nature flying back to his loved
resorts. Apart from its poetic value, the book is a graphical and
interesting portraiture of the struggles of an ingenuous and impetuous
mind to arrive at a clear insight into its own interior constitution
and external relations, and to secure the composure of self-knowledge
and of equally adjusted aspirations. As a poem it is likely to
lay fast and enduring hold on pure and aspiring intellects, and to
strengthen the claim of Wordsworth to endure with his land's language.
* * * * *