William Wordsworth is the father of a new school of Poetry, and his name
marks an era in the literature of England, which is full of deep
interest to the philosophical inquirer. He began his career with
profound convictions respecting the nature and functions of poetry; its
dignity as an art, and the immense capabilities it afforded for the
utterance of sublime and ennobling truths, and for the furtherance of
human liberty and happiness. He saw, too, that the old Harp of the Bards
was profaned by the touch of uninspired, and even frivolous hands; and
he determined, if possible, to rescue it from their keeping, and restore
it once again to its divine uses, and ancient melody. To accomplish
this grand object, he devoted all his faculties and culture, and was so
deeply impressed with the idea that this was his especial mission upon
earth, that he retired amongst the mountains and lakes of
Westmoreland--a solemn and lonely man--holding converse with the
Invisible through the Visible forms of Nature, and thus fitting himself
for the priestly office to which he aspired. And in all the years of his
noviciate--through all the time when, by universal acclamation, he stood
crowned with the sacred laurels of the Bard--and his mission was
accredited by all men--he never for a moment flagged in his purpose, or
stooped to the garlands of fame,--but gathering his prophet’s mantle
around him, he pursued his undeviating course, alike regardless of
applause, condemnation, and persecution. He had looked well into his own
heart, before he set out on his perilous enterprise; had measured well
his own strength of purpose, and capability of performance; knew, in
short, what he had to do, and did it.
To appreciate fully, however, the historical position of William
Wordsworth, and the value of his labours, it will be necessary to take
a retrospective view of the literature which preceded him, or at least
to state its leading characteristics. The grand old era of Shakspeare
and his cotemporaries had long since passed away, and the noble music of
Milton’s song had ceased to thrill the hearts and souls of men. The
brilliant, half-inspired writers in the reign of Queen Anne, who came to
represent the national mind at the close of our Augustan epoch, had
formed a school of Poetry in England,--at once witty and sententious,
profound and hollow; without heart or genius; and with nothing but
talent and culture to recommend it. Pope, who may be considered the head
of this school, set the seal of his intellect upon the cotemporary and
subsequent literature of that era. He had rivals whom he stung to
silence, and covered with contempt by his satires, and imitators whom he
fondled and despised. Pope and his compeers were, however, kings and
priests of song, compared with the herd of twangsters who succeeded
them. The fancy and wit, the philosophy and refinement of Pope, were
sunk and lost in the barrel-grinding of these imitators of his style;
and Poetry was stripped of its subjective attributes, and lived only as
a mechanical form.--This at all events is true of the writers
professedly of the Pope school; and the few exceptions, for upwards of
fifty years after his death, owe what little fame they possess to their
own little originality.
In all the departments of literature, the same lifelessness and
uniformity were manifest. The deadest materialism prevailed both in
science and philosophy, and the national soul seemed paralyzed beneath
the weight of a dire, unknown, unseen incubus of death. In the
meanwhile, however, there were influences at work both in England and
Europe, which were silently preparing the way for a revolution in the
thoughts and opinions of men. The spiritual element awoke in Germany and
France, and like a mighty, but half-blind god, began to react upon the
materialism of the age. Then, for the first time since the close
of the Commonwealth, did the pulse of England begin, also, to beat
with the music of life and health. The importations of German
sentimentality--mawkish and imbecile as they often were--touched the
right chords in the English heart, and roused it to consciousness. Men
saw that there was new life struggling under this ghastly utterance, and
began to lose their faith in the dead formalism, which they had so long
hugged in their idolatry. Their minds were gradually turned to the old
grandees of Elizabeth’s reign: to Shakspeare and rare Ben Jonson, and to
Spenser, Beaumont and Fletcher, until, at last, the reactionary currents
had fairly set in, which were to cleanse the national mind of its
disease, and restore it to health. Add to this, that the higher minds of
England were already immersed in those metaphysical speculations which,
whilst they confirmed the increasing spiritual tendency, gave
earnestness to their aim and character. And when, at last, after Rouseau
and Voltaire--the two poles of the great revolutionary idea of
Europe--had flung their works into the cauldron of this vast, seething,
reactionary fermentation--the wonderous phenomenon, which we call the
French Revolution, burst upon the world--the reaction was complete, and
a new epoch dawned upon man--the epoch, viz., of progress and
humanity--which will never close until its mission is sealed with the
liberty and happiness of mankind.
Such, then, is a slight sketch of the characteristics of the age into
which Wordsworth was born. He came in time to catch the full surges of
its influence, and his spirit was one of the few destined to aid the
onward tide of events, and mould their flowing forms into a fixed and
plastic beauty. Not, however, by any active mingling with the affairs of
men, for this was clearly no part of his vocation, but by silent
watching and contemplative thought, and the faithful exercise of his
poetic faculties. The political arena was open to more daring, and less
costly men, who could do their temporary work and disappear without
farther loss to the nation: but the poet had a greater and more enduring
work to accomplish; he was to become the architect of a new literature
and the singer of a new gospel of life to the world. The growing
earnestness of his age demanded a voice to speak for it--many voices,
indeed, each in its proper province of feeling and of thought. And in no
province was this voice more loudly called for than in that of poetry,
for death reigned in all the courts of the poetic temple, and every
priest was a corpse which the muse had stuck about with flowers, that
she might conceal even from herself the sorrowful fact of her desertion
and utter misery.[A] Wordsworth came to tear away the mask, and spurn
the dead from her temple.
The great object of Wordsworth’s life was to win men back, by his poetic
example, to an admiration and love of the natural in all its aspects. To
him nature is not only divine and glorious as a whole, but equally so in
all her parts. In the meanest worm that crawls, in the tinyest flower
and the rankest weed; in the summer foliage, and in the brown skeleton
leaves of autumn; in the lonely mountain, and the silent stream--he
recognizes the spirit of beauty, and she passes through _his_ spirit
into song, and becomes at once a poem, and a grand moral gospel. All
things in heaven and earth are consecrated existences to him, no matter
how profanely and lowly they may rank with common observers.
And this view of Nature he carries into the presence of man. It is not
kings and the mighty ones in the dream-play of Life whom he thinks to
be the only worthy subjects for poetry. If these people come in his way,
he is Catholic enough to admit them through his imagination, into the
immortality which awaits his books. But he does not _seek_ them. He
thinks they have already had their full share of poetic honour, and
perhaps more than their due share; that so much dwelling upon such
people, with their unrealities and false glares of splendour, has
diseased the holy faculty of the poet, and turned his visions into
morbid night-mares. It seems in short to be his opinion, that the higher
we advance in the social scale, the further we are off from the sanities
and truths of human life. He consequently looks for these in ruder and
humbler ranks: in the dwellings of the poor, in the hearts of the
peasantry, and the intuitions of uncorrupted childhood. He delights to
sing of the commonest things, and is ever happy in his delineations of
the hopes and fears, the loves, inquietudes, and disappointments of
rustic existence. He has the minute anatomical power of Crabbe, combined
with a still higher physiological and creative faculty, by which he not
only lays bare the hidden meaning and laws of natural objects, but
transforms the objects themselves into new beauty and significance. The
grey light of morning breaking over the hill tops of his chosen
retreat--the hot sunshine burning in white molten silver upon the bosom
of his enchanted lakes--the lonely fisherman upon their shores--look
truer and more affecting objects, as we gaze upon them, through the
medium of his musical sorcery of words. His picture of the poor
wandering leech gatherer, over the deep black pools of the wild moor,
with the profound moral which he has attached to it, is an instance of
his skill as a painter, and of his divine insight as a man of genius.
“The Idiot Boy,” is another specimen of his consummate ability to render
the most inert and painful nature alive and glorious by the spiritual
appliances of his art. This boy, detached from the poet’s mind, is a
gloomy and sorrowful spectacle; but when _he_ enters the shattered
temple in which the Idiot dwells, and unites him, by the magic of his
presence, to the great universal temple of Nature, he is no longer a
gloomy insanity, but a poetically created existence. We see that this
Idiot also has a soul; a subject soul certainly, and bound to what we
might call hard conditions of capability and action, but a soul
nevertheless: vital with its own vagarious life, and rejoicing in it.
Wordsworth’s revelations of the inner workings of this Idiot’s mind--of
the dark moon glimmerings which break impulsively through the ruins of
his intellect, and make him wild with joy or ghastly with terror--are
unsurpassable achievements.
And yet Wordsworth is abused for his tameness and want of inspiration!
Dead asses and idiots, Peter Bells and Waggoners, it is said, are not
elevated facts enough for poetry! The foolish objectors do not
understand how all poetry is based upon facts, and how the most obscure
things become purified and poetic, when they are raised by imagination,
and placed in new connections of thought. It is the province of the Poet
to elevate the homely, and to beautify the mean. To him, indeed, nothing
is mean, nothing worthless. What God has made, he, the exponent of God,
shall love and honour.
It is our acknowledged want of sympathy with the common, which induced
Wordsworth to devote his life and attention to the awakening of it. He
knew that whatever is touched by genius is converted into gold, and
stamped thenceforth as sacred, by the impress of its image. The Betty
Foys of human existence, although they, too, are “encompassed by
eternity,” and destined to the same futurity as the Queens Elizabeth and
Mary, have never, before Wordsworth’s time, had a poetic priest high
enough to make them religious by his love and fidelity to them. It
required immense faith and majesty of mind to hazard the experiment; so
plebeian are all Betsies that wear red cloaks and black bonnets, instead
of ermines and crowns. Wordsworth, however, did not care for names and
orders, but saw and worshipped humanity alone. He has dared, therefore,
to say and to maintain, through a long and honourable life, that
Elizabeth Foy was as much of a man as Elizabeth Queen. He has linked
together the throne and the cottage through all their manifold
gradations. He has, of course, had his full share of abuse for this
heroic and triumphant effort; but the good old Skiddaw-granite-rock of a
man was not to be moved by abuse, but continued to sing and preach in
his solitude, with the solemnity and witchery of a Memnon statue.
It should be remembered, also, that Wordsworth purposely avoids the
florid style in the architecture of his verse. His ideal model is the
plain severity of the Saxon temple, in which the grand and the simple
were united.--He _aims_ at clear and unmistakeable utterance. His chaste
simplicity is the work of _an artist_, and by no means the necessity of
a limited intellect. If this fact were borne in mind by his detractors,
it is not unlikely that they would be less furious when they speak of
him. For an author should always be read, measured, and judged by his
own standard, and not by ours.--Nothing can be more absurd than the
subjection of a poet to any critical canon or authority. Knowing his
position as an expounder of the hidden truths of the universe--as an
oracle of the Infinite, and a revealer of the beauty and mystery of
nature and human life--he stands in our presence like the Hebrew
_law-giver_, covered with the golden glory and lightning of the Highest,
whom he has _seen_ upon the summits of Sinai. Henceforth we are to
accept his law, not he ours.
It is useless to question and criticise in our foolish manner the new
bard of God, whoever he may be, or under what circumstances soever he
may appear among us. _He_ does not live by questionings and logical
inductions, but by faith and inspiration. Entranced in the miracle of
his own existence, with all these vast orbs of immensity pressing upon
his brain, and the silent creatures of the fair earth stealing like
noiseless musical shadows into the temple of his soul, he has no time to
consult the critics whether this or that mode of reproducing them is the
orthodox one. He will speak in any way he can; and if the old grey-beard
world _will_ be startled or shocked at his speech, he has no other
answer for it but this: “My utterance is the birth-cry of my thoughts.”
Every new poet--every genius indeed that is divine--is a notification to
us that the world of things is about to be classified anew, and to
assume a deeper meaning. And certainly one would think that so great an
announcement might gladden the hearts of men, instead of making them
savage and ferocious at it. For of all men the poet is highest and
noblest. He is the awful Seer, who unveils the spirit of Nature and
looks with solemn and unscathed eyes upon her naked loveliness and
terror. The Beloved of God, he is admitted into the very presence of
the Invisible, and reports, in such wild and strange words as he can
find, the sights he has beheld there. He is the renovator of man and
Nature. He lifts the human soul upon his daring wings, and carries it
into light and immortality. In his words we behold the re-creation of
the universe. We see Orion, like the starry skeleton of a mighty giant,
go forth into the solitudes of unfathomable space; we witness the
planting of the solar stars, and hear the everlasting roar of the vast
sun, as it wheels, seething from God’s hands, upon its fiery axis; and
these unspeakable sights are heightened in their magnificence and
terrific grandeur by the poet, who holds us fast to their symbolical
meaning, and chains them to the being of God, as the expressions in
appearance of His thoughts and will.
By virtue, therefore, of his mission, the poet is Antinomian. He is
master of all law, and no critic can trammel him. Let him try that, and
the poet, like the war-horse who snuffs the far-off battle, will say to
the little man--“Ha! ha!”
It is necessary that we here make a few extracts from Wordsworth’s
defence, if we may call it so, of his manner of writing, in order that
the reader may be prepared for a right appreciation of his poetry. In
speaking of his poems as a whole, he says:--
“The principal object proposed was to choose incidents and situations
from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as
was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the
same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and
situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though not
ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly as far as
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.
Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition,
the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can
attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak in plainer
and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our
elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and,
consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly
communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from these
feelings, and from the necessary character of rural occupations, are
more easily comprehended and are more durable; and lastly, because in
that condition, the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful
and permanent forms of Nature. The language, too, of these men has been
adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from
all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust), because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is _originally_ derived; and, because, from their rank in
society, and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being
less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings
and notions in simple and unelaborated expression. Accordingly, such a
language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a
more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which
is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are
conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they
separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in
arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food
for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.”
It will be seen from this extract, that Wordsworth has no sympathy with
the inflammations of Literature. His mission is with the ordinary, the
beauty and philosophy of which he has devoted his life to expound. He
has flung a charm over existences which Nature did not seem before him
to love as her children; and we honour him for the great work which he
has accomplished.