William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April, 1770; he died on the
23d of April, 1850. His life was prolonged for ten years beyond the
space attributed to man by the inspired Psalmist. He lived in an age
unprecedented for its social and civil revolutions; for its discoveries
in science, and their practical application. He was fourteen years of
age when the new North American Republic was finally recognised as one
of the brotherhood of nations; he witnessed the French Revolution; the
subjection of every monarchy in Europe, except England and Russia, to
the absolute will of a French emperor; the instalment and evaporation of
the Holy Alliance; the European war of twenty years, and the European
peace of thirty-two years; one Pope carried into exile by a foreign
conqueror, another driven into exile by his own subjects: and at home,
the trials of Hardy and Thelwall; the Bank Restriction Act; the
origination of the Bell and Lancaster systems of Education; the visit of
the allied monarchs to London; the passing of Peel’s Bill; the
introduction of Palmer’s mail-coaches and M‘Adam’s roads; the invention
of steam navigation; the pausing of the Reform Bill; the development of
the Railway system, and the Electric telegraph. He was the contemporary
of Davey, Herschell, Bentham, Godwin, Malthus and Ricardo, Byron, Scott,
Wilkie, Chantrey, Fox, Pitt, Canning and Brougham.
Wordsworth’s age was one of stirring events and great changes. The
character of his poetry is in startling contrast to that age. It is
passionless, a record of the poet’s own mind; simple and austere,
emanating from his own independent thoughts and fancies; receiving
little of its form and colour from external events, or the feelings and
opinions of men. For eighty long years, Wordsworth would almost appear
to have lived ‘_among_ men, not _of_ them;’ sympathising as little with
the ephemeral pursuits of his contemporaries as the colossal Memnon does
with the Copts, Turks, and Arabs who now tenant the banks of the Nile.
William Wordsworth was born in the little county town of Cockermouth;
his father was an attorney—not a wealthy man, but in circumstances that
enabled him to give his family a fair education. One son entered the
merchant service, rose to command a vessel, and perished at sea. Another
has acquired a name as master of Harrow, and the author of a delightful
book on Greece, full of delicate beauty and fine classical feeling. The
allusions by William to his favourite sister are among the most touching
passages in his poems; and one or two little pieces of verse, and some
extracts from her journals, which he has published, show that she was
every way deserving of his love. The poetical dedication of the River
Duddon to Dr. Wordsworth, is full of delightful allusions to the boyhood
of the brothers, and conveys a pleasing impression of their family
relations.
Our poet received the rudiments of his education at the grammar school
of Hawkeshead, in Westmoreland, conducted in his time by a master of
more than ordinary attainments. In 1787, he matriculated at St. John’s
College, Cambridge. Even in his boyhood it was obvious that he possessed
superior abilities, but they were not of the showy and ambitious kind
which achieve school or college distinction. He was partial to solitary
rambles; fond of reading and reciting verses; a boy whom elder men
‘singled out for his grave looks,’ as he has said in the Excursion, and
liked to converse with.
It was intended that he should enter the Church, the family
circumstances rendering it necessary that he should adopt a profession.
But, independently of his wish to devote himself exclusively to literary
pursuits, he had caught the prevalent spirit of the time—the aversion to
conventional forms and opinions. A moderate income, settled upon him by
Raisley Calvert, the victim of a premature decline, enabled him to
follow his inclinations. This benefit the poet has gratefully
acknowledged:—
‘Calvert, it must not be unheard by them
Who may respect my name, that I to thee
Owed many years of early liberty.
This care was thine, when sickness did condemn
Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem;
That I, if frugal and severe, might stray
Where’er I liked; and finally array
My temples with the Muse’s diadem.’
After leaving College he made extensive tours on foot, in Scotland and
on the Continent with a youthful friend. In 1793 he for the first time
ventured into print. Two small volumes appeared in that year:
“Descriptive Sketches, in verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour among
the Alps;” and “An Evening Walk, an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a
young Lady from the Lakes in the North of England.” In these poems we
find no traces of the poetical theory which he subsequently adopted. But
they are characterised by the same, almost exclusive, preference for
lakes, cataracts and mountains, the elementary beauty of external
nature, human passions and incidents, and they contain many passages of
glaring imagination powerfully expressed.
In 1796 he took up his abode with his sister at Allfaxden, at the foot
of the Quantock Hills, in Somersetshire. This was an important era in
the development of his intellect and imagination. During his residence
at Allfaxden he was in constant and unreserved communication with
Coleridge. Totally dissimilar as the two men were in character, they had
many sympathies. Upon both, the classical tastes and ecclesiastical
opinions inculcated at English schools and colleges, had, without their
being aware of it, made a deep and indelible impression. Both had been
animated by the vague but ardent longings after an undefined liberty,
and perfection of human nature, then prevalent. They were isolated from
general sympathy without knowing it; from the revolutionary party by
their literary tastes and strong attachment to traditional English
morals; from the Church and State party by their freedom from sectarian
narrowness. The resolute independence of thought of the young poets is
worthy of all admiration; their frank and cordial communication of all
their thoughts, equally so. A pleasing though brief sketch of them at
that time has been given by Hazlitt, in an essay, entitled, ‘My first
Acquaintance with Poets;’ a more petulant and shallow account, which yet
contains some valuable information, by Cottle.
The result of this literary alliance was the first volume of the
“Lyrical Ballads.” The quiet but perfect melody of Wordsworth’s
versification and the depth of the human sentiment in his reflections,
the more swelling tone of Coleridge’s verse and his wild unearthly
imaginings, might have secured a more favourable reception for his work,
had it not been announced as the result of a new theory of poetry. That
theory was misapprehended by the critics of the day, and was indeed
inadequately expressed by its authors themselves. Coleridge subsequently
developed it in more precise and unexceptionable language in his
Biographia Literaria. The effect of its premature announcement was, that
the Lyrical Ballads were judged, not by their own intrinsic merits, but
by the theory upon which they were said to have been constructed.
The insurmountable indolence of Coleridge—always planning works too
great for human accomplishment, and resting satisfied with projects—left
Wordsworth to pursue his path alone. This he did with characteristic
pertinacity of purpose; if criticism had any influence on him at all, it
was only to confirm him in his foregone conclusions. After an excursion
to Germany, in which he was accompanied by his sister and Coleridge, he
returned to his native country, ‘with the hope,’ as he has told us in
his Preface to the Excursion, ‘of being enabled to construct a literary
work that might live.’
In 1803, Wordsworth married his cousin, Miss Mary Hutchinson, and
settled at Grasmere. He removed in a few years to Rydal Mount, where he
continued to reside till his death. Subsequently to this time his life
is utterly devoid of personal incident, and may be briefly recapitulated
before proceeding to chronicle his poetical productions, which are
indeed his life. By his wife, who survives him, he had one daughter, who
died before him, and two sons, one of whom holds a vicarage in
Cumberland, the other is a distributor of stamps. In 1814, Wordsworth,
by the patronage of the Earl of Lonsdale, was appointed distributor of
stamps for Cumberland and Westmoreland—a recognition of the claims of
genius to public support only second in eccentricity to the making of
Burns an exciseman. After holding this office for twenty-eight years, he
was allowed to relinquish it to his eldest son, and retire upon a
pension of 300_l._ a year. In 1843, he succeeded Southey in the limited
emoluments and questionable dignity of the Laureateship. His slender
inheritance, the beneficence of Raisley Calvert, his office under
Government, his retiring pension, and his emoluments as Laureate,
sufficed, with his simple tastes, to enable him to wait the slow
pecuniary returns of his literary labours.
While the critical storm awakened by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
was still raging, he composed his Peter Bell and his Waggoner, which
were not, however, published till many years later. They are full of
fine and deep-felt poetry. Their language is genuine racy English, and
their versification unsurpassed for sweetness. It cannot, however, be
denied that they are marked by a self-willed, exaggerated adherence to
the theory of poetry he had promulgated, the effect of something that is
very like a spirit of contradiction. In a playful adaptation of Milton’s
sonnet, Tetrachordon, Wordsworth defends his choice of subjects by the
admiration felt or professed for Tam o’ Shanter. He overlooks the utter
difference between the mode in which Burns conceived and executed that
poem, and himself his Benjamin the Waggoner. Burns was for the time the
hero himself. In Tam o’ Shanter, and still more in the Jolly Beggars, he
expresses the very passions of the characters he presents to us.
Wordsworth, constitutionally incapable of the emotions of a boon
companion, merely describes and moralises on the waywardness of his
Benjamin. We sympathise with the common humanity of Burns’s genial
reprobates; we feel the cold shadow of Wordsworth’s Benjamin to be a
hideous intruder among the fine poetical imagery and thought with which
he is mixed up.
In 1807, Wordsworth published two volumes, containing his own
contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, with many additional poems. Minute
detached criticism is not the object of this sketch. Suffice it to say
that many pieces in these volumes are unsurpassed in English poetry, or
in the poetry of any language. The Song at the feast of Brougham Castle
has a rich lyrical exuberance of feeling; the Laodamia is as severely
beautiful as a Greek statue; Hartleap Well is full of mellow humanity;
Rob Roy’s Grave, the Highland Girl, ‘She was a phantom of
delight,’—every piece, in short, is replete with delightful sentiment
and graphic pictures of rural nature. The objects of some of these poems
obviously originate in a mistaken apprehension of the scope and purpose
of poetry. Wordsworth was a curious observer of the workings of the
human mind, and he sometimes confounded the pleasure derived from such
metaphysical scrutiny with the pleasure derived from the presentation of
poetical imaginings. Hence, what is questionable in his Idiot Boy, his
Harry Gill, and some others.
The Excursion, the most ambitious, and, with all its defects, the
greatest of his works, was published in 1814. Here the poet was in his
true element. Wordsworth’s genius was essentially moralising and
reflective. Incidents and adventure had no charm for him. He arrived at
his knowledge of character by an inductive process, not like
Shakespeare, by the intuition of sympathy and imagination. He had no
power of perceiving those light and graceful peculiarities of men and
society, generally designated manners, vivid presentations of which
constitute the charm of so many poets; but he was tremulously alive to
the charms of inanimate nature.
‘——The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were there to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.’
His soul was full of lofty and imaginative conceptions of moral truths.
He, therefore, after severe examination of his own poems, resolved to
rest his claims to immortality on his composition of ‘a philosophical
poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society; and to be entitled
The Recluse, as having for its principal subject the sensations and
opinions of a poet living in retirement.’
How far this projected work has been advanced to completion, we have no
means of knowing. A preliminary work, descriptive of the growth of his
own powers, is, he has informed us, finished. The Recluse was to consist
of three parts, the first and third containing chiefly meditations in
the author’s own person; the intermediate introducing characters in a
semi-dramatic form. It is to be regretted that his second part has alone
been published, for Wordsworth’s genius was essentially undramatic. But
notwithstanding the disadvantages under which the poet laboured from the
selection of an uncongenial form, and his imperfect mastery of blank
verse (a measure of which, perhaps. Milton alone among our English poets
has developed the full measure, and varied power of modulation), the
Excursion is, undoubtedly, a poem in the highest and truest sense of the
word. The philosophical musings with which it abounds, are alike
profound and elevating. And nothing can surpass the deep pathos of the
episodes of Margaret and Ellen.
The subsequent publications of Wordsworth may be briefly enumerated.
Peter Bell and the Waggoner appeared within two years after the
Excursion; and the White Doe of Rylstone soon followed them. A
miscellaneous volume, of which the River Duddon was the most prominent,
was published in 1820, and Yarrow Revisited, in 1835. Of all these
works, it may suffice to say that they are highly characteristic of the
author, and contain many beauties.
Wordsworth’s poetry had long to contend against the conventional
prepossessions of the literary world. From the beginning, however, his
genius was felt by superior minds, and by a few young unprejudiced
enthusiasts. His first admirers were literally a sect, and their
admiration was, like the devotion of all sectarians, ardent and
indiscriminating. They have, however, served as interpreters between him
and the reading public, and thus his merits have come to be generally
acknowledged. His writings lent a tone to the works of some who, like
Shelley, dissented from his theory; and some who, like Byron,
systematically scoffed at them. The public taste was thus insensibly
approximated to them. Even yet, however, Wordsworth is probably more
praised than liked. But the process will go on, and in time what is
really valuable in his poems will take the place that is due to it in
the land’s literature.
Of the first writings of Wordsworth little need be said. Though they
contain valuable thoughts, they are lumbering and sufficiently
unreadable. The once furious controversy about his literary creed as
heresy, need not be resuscitated; there were great errors on both sides.
If his merits were individually depreciated, there was much in his
seemingly supercilious re-assertion, rather than defence and explanation
of his views, to extenuate the petulance with which he was often
treated. As for his wanderings in the fields of politics and polemics,
he is no exception to the general truth, that the warmest admirers of
poets must regret their deviations into such uncongenial by-ways.
The man was like his poetry; simple and therefore conservative in his
tastes: self-reliant and sometimes repulsive from his austerity, yet
with a rich fund of benevolence beneath the hard exterior. His frame was
strong and sinewy from his habits of exercise; his look heavy, and, at
first sight, unimpressive; but there was an inexpressible charm in his
smile. He was the antithesis of the materialist and practical activity
of the time. He did not understand, and therefore could not appreciate,
the ennobling tendencies of the social and scientific career on which
this age has entered—an age into which he had lingered, rather than to
which he belonged. He looked out upon the world from his egotistic
isolation rather as a critical spectator, than as a sympathiser. His
views of it were rusted over with the conservative prejudices of the
past. Railways he hated, and against them waged a sonneteering war.
Although they were rapidly increasing the commerce, comforts,
intercourse, affluence, and happiness of the whole community, they
invaded the selfish solitude of the one man; and single-handed he did
battle against the armies of invading tourists, who came to share with
him the heathful pleasures of the mountain and the lake, in which he
would have almost preserved a patent right for the few.
This anti-natural spirit, however, did not always lead him astray from
the right path. In the Excursion, were promulgated, for the first time,
these views respecting the embruting tendency of the unintermitting toil
of our factory labourers, the necessity of universal education by the
State, and the vocation of the English race to colonise the earth, which
have been so many zealous missionaries. We cannot better conclude these
desultory remarks,—an imperfect prelude to the lip of a truly good and
great man—than by quoting part of his weighty words in the Excursion,
respecting National Education:—
‘Oh! for the coming of that glorious time
When, prizing Knowledge as her noblest wealth
And best protection, this Imperial Realm,
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation, on her part, to _teach_
Them who are born to serve her and obey;
Binding herself by statute to secure
To all her children whom her soil maintains,
The rudiments of Letters, and to inform
The mind with moral and religious truth,
Both understood and practised—so that none,
However destitute, be left to droop
By timely culture unsustained; or run
Into a wild disorder; or be forced
To drudge through weary life without the aid
Of intellectual implements and tools;
A savage horde among the civilised,
A servile band among the lordly free!
· · · · ·
‘The discipline of slavery is unknown
Amongst us—hence the more do we require
The discipline of virtue; order else
Cannot subsist, nor confidence, nor peace.
Thus duties rising out of good possess’d,
And prudent caution, needful to avert
Impending evil, do alike require
That permanent provision should be made
For the whole people to be taught and trained.
So shall licentiousness and black resolve
Be rooted out, and virtuous habits take
Their place; and genuine piety descend,
Like an inheritance, from age to age.’
These are indeed worthy to become Household words.