The characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, with the principles
from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their
proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his
theory only.
If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his
arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have
adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those
arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And
still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the
truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive
attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry
those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at
all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed
out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the
influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the
number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great
or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they
are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable.
The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high
time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics
of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they
are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or
wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the
least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of
his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.
In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment;
and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these
poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of
the poet’s mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The
poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part written in language,
as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the
following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same
poem.
“There sometimes doth a leaping fish
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven’s croak,
In symphony austere;
Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--
And mists that spread the flying shroud;
And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast.”
Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former
half.
“Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
On which the Traveller thus had died,
The Dog had watched about the spot,
Or by his Master’s side:
How nourish’d here through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime,--
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate!”
Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of
these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet’s
genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet
would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress
the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or
other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only
disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having
amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river’s
bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and
sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the
poet’s theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art,
generally acknowledged.
I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth’s
works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,
after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though,
to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand
previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed
myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that
might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore
commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto
published.
The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear
to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under
this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines
or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and
original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He
sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place
in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species;
first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only
proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have
been works, such as Cowley’s Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse
are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS
of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or
composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing
from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings
dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated
taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to
alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of
writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation
and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness
is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic
operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose
exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be
entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the
end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and
impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in
real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the
arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse,
with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which
convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and
particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward
state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of
his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that
in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of
the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the
excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp
and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of
literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business
of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual
splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints,
that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are
here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to
produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem,
the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint
them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are
alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.
I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose
from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion
instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:
“And one, the rarest, was a shell,
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.”
“Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and, led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred.”
Or page 172, vol. I.
“’Tis gone forgotten, let me do
My best. There was a smile or two--
I can remember them, I see
The smiles worth all the world to me.
Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
I cannot keep thee in my arms;
For they confound me: as it is,
I have forgot those smiles of his!”
Or page 269, vol. I.
“Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest
And though little troubled with sloth
Drunken lark! thou would’st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
_With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to th’ Almighty giver,_
Joy and jollity be with us both!
Hearing thee or else some other,
As merry a brother
I on the earth will go plodding on
By myself cheerfully till the day is done.”
The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the
two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II.
page 30.
“Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
He stood alone; a minute’s space I guess,
I watch’d him, he continuing motionless
To the Pool’s further margin then I drew;
He being all the while before me full in view.”
Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but
two.
“And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
Beside the little pond or moorish flood
Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth altogether, if it move at all.”
Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with
the first and the third.
“My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
But now, perplex’d by what the Old Man had said,
My question eagerly did I renew,
‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’
“He with a smile did then his words repeat;
And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide
He travell’d; stirring thus about his feet
The waters of the Ponds where they abide.
`Once I could meet with them on every side;
‘But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
‘Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.’
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.”
Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There
is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would
not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this
defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes
of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the
whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages.
In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by
the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden
superiority of some other passage forming the context.
The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should
say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may
be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the
poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,
in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is
taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where
the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this actidentality
I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle
pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most
intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the
reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage
from Davenant’s prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth.
“When I considered the actions which I meant to describe; (those
inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those
of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as
might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the
requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the
pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the
liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian.
For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune
by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere
historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were
in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs,
who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply,
that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship
a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive,
is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in
reason.”
For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in
THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking
instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong
motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the
intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in
a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with
incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil,
or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too
often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand
his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with
which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical
proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map
out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then
join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have
been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as
a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and
I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two
faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound
in the writings of Milton, for example:
“The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown’d,
“But such as at this day, to Indians known,
“In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
“Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
“The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
“About the mother tree, a pillar’d shade
“High over-arch’d and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;
“There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
“Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
“At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade.”
This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and
with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the
eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise
understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the
senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical
penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of
sound. Thus, “The echoing walks between,” may be almost said to reverse
the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.
Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of
imagination.
The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to
matter-of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to
probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this
head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my
best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr.
Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters.
I have already declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from
the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their
question, “Why did you choose such a character, or a character from
such a rank of life?”--the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why
with the conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean
or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your
own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable, that
such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose
guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that
state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those
things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the
high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense and the
feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The
feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation
rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have
us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the
excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he
might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise
of good men be his! In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination,
I honour a virtuous and wise man, without reference to the presence or
absence of artificial advantages. Whether in the person of an armed
baron, a laurelled bard, or of an old Pedlar, or still older
Leech-gatherer, the same qualities of head and heart must claim the
same reverence. And even in poetry I am not conscious, that I have ever
suffered my feelings to be disturbed or offended by any thoughts or
images, which the poet himself has not presented.
But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First,
because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral
philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in
my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral
essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main
fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even
between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth
for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time
shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so
united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will
remain the poet’s office to proceed upon that state of association,
which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make
it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here
is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. For the communication of
pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect
to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I were to admit, for a moment,
this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be
produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers
which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more
likely, to be found in it? The Poet, speaking in his own person, may
at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the
independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favours
of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of
Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his
fellow-slaves
------“and rejoice
In the plain presence of his dignity.”
Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth
himself exclaims,
“Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Nor having e’er, as life advanced, been led
By circumstance to take unto the height
The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings,
All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least.”
To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one’s
heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in the
truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to
be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to
introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans
on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how much
better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or Aeschylus,
could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country
where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how
restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find
even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for
the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure
familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns,
among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life
among those of English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that Poetic
Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant.
But be this as it may, the feelings with which,
“I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;
Of Burns, who walk’d in glory and in joy
Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side”--
are widely different from those with which I should read a poem,
where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a
philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a
chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject,
had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all
the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at
once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing, but biography, can justify
this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner
of De Foe’s, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of
Fielding’s: In THE LIFE OF MOLL FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM
JONES, or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately
introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest
individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of
Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of
the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent.
For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader’s
feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make
such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather
than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear,
and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only
knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet’s own, and his
own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless
endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to
forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when
the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in
THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND’S CALVARY; and not merely
suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,
contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply
permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either
denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is
rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts
of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic
belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as
the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines
full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing
fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in
this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree
brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the
balked attempts of the author to make him believe.
Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and
of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word,
for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic
of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without
the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and
beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of
learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the
rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the
knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary
this information renders the man’s language, feelings, sentiments,
and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes
of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a
genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects
the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of
fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the
friends of some obscure “ornament of society lately deceased” in some
obscure town,) as
“Among the hills of Athol he was born
There, on a small hereditary Farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little One--unconscious of their loss.
But ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction.”
“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer tended cattle on the Hills;
But, through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
To his Step-father’s School,”-etc.
For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with
trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far
greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;
and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a
sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.
Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and
then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented
as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.
The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former;
but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and
62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of
THE EXCURSION.
Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast,
as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the
bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the
awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.
It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and
leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too,
than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become
the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had
accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such
lines, as
“They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude!”
in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the
images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that
conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed “the bliss
of solitude?” Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say
burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--
“And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.” Vol. I. p. 328.
The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone
out for a day’s tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot
of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together
with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the
close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place.
“Twelve hours,” says he,
“Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
Have been a traveller under open sky,
Much witnessing of change and cheer,
Yet as I left I find them here!”
Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny
wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through
road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been
right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole
day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite
as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing
or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a
series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather
above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire
of China improgressive for thirty centuries:
“The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--
--Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
Outshining, like a visible God,
The glorious path in which he trod.
And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
And one night’s diminution of her power,
Behold the mighty Moon! this way
She looks, as if at them--but they
Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
The silent Heavens have goings on
The stars have tasks!--but these have none!”
The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already
cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of a child,
“a six years’ Darling of a pigmy size,” he thus addresses him:
“Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find!
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Present which is not to be put by!”
Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects
the epithets “deaf and silent,” with the apostrophized eye: or (if we
are to refer it to the preceding word, “Philosopher”), the faulty and
equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of
making a “Master brood o’er a Slave,” or “the Day” brood at all; we will
merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that
age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read “the eternal deep?” In
what sense is he declared to be “for ever haunted” by the Supreme Being?
or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a
blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or
by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings
indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to
the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his
inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of
themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has
produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us
that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting
themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should
float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda
and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into
some unknown abyss.
But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having
been the poet’s meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and
operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is
conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
of the child’s conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit
within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of
vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary
agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.
But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my
heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that
I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes!
Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and
among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI PAN,
who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God.
Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the
whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between
the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only
Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed
relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of
the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus,) in
which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance
to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility
of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting
at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his
regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their
wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest,
half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, “It is I, perhaps, that
am doing that,” i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, “or perhaps I;”
Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for
any explanation.
So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent
attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not
make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or
even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent
Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally
unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines,
immediately following, are to contain the explanation?
“To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;”--
Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
comment on the little poem, “We are Seven?”--that the whole meaning of
the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye
at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian
families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark,
cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the
frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death
and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief
possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all
Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the
former. But if the child’s belief be only, that “he is not dead, but
sleepeth:” wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother,
or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing’s
becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to
all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or
uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words
are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in
contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid
the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must
at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order
to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are
to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration.
Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems are so
few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the
reader’s attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the
more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly
detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized
by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand
the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those
passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able,
to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be
mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot
be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For
without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would
want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his
mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness!
To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional,
I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of
any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part
correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both
grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of
the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how
particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been
already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the
moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict
accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance
with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even
a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and
admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the
widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and
countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious
familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of
a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the
arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the
infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art,
which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in
which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and
deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that
ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of
a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same
language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I
include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but
likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed
to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and
intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is
practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations
and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not
promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with
the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the
poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as
the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous
distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the
honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,
and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food
of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food
and antidote.
In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style
wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,
from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator
to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment.
Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of
Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of
his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others. They might even
be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are
set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the
writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only
from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself
of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led
from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and
the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old
acquaintance under new names.
On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I
shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits
of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in
the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially
by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language
alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and
certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing
modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it
were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation
of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the
judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can
give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the
motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment
when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in
life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is
peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so
as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or
positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical
seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society,
of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same
unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those
by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer
the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and
practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation
are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet,
excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the
earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the
praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so
important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of
the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to
Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose
general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord
Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our
laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not
appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth.
Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be
left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this
eulogy so applied.
The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s work is: a
correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,
not from books; but--from the poet’s own meditative observation. They
are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her
strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,
Makes audible a linked lay of truth,
Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not
rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.
See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his
humblest compositions.
“O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing;”
and
“I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning;”
or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.
“Thus fares it still in our decay:
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.
The Blackbird in the summer trees,
The Lark upon the hill,
Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.
With Nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth, and their old age
Is beautiful and free!
But we are pressed by heavy laws;
And often glad no more,
We wear a face of joy, because
We have been glad of yore.
If there is one, who need bemoan
His kindred laid in earth,
The household hearts that were his own,
It is the man of mirth.
My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
My life has been approved,
And many love me; but by none
Am I enough beloved;”
or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a volume
would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the
poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312.
“To be a Prodigal’s Favorite--then, worse truth,
A Miser’s Pensioner--behold our lot!
O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth
Age might but take the things Youth needed not.”
Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth
strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our
golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel,
whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which
has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the
language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to
us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar
praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive
them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full
day-light of every reader’s comprehension; yet are they drawn up from
depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in
any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is
not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average
understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty
does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature
and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it
does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to
those for whom it is written, and
“Fit audience find, though few.”
To the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
early Childhood” the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante
addresses to one of his own Canzoni--
“Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi
Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,
Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto.”
“O lyric song, there will be few, I think,
Who may thy import understand aright:
Thou art for them so arduous and so high!”
But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed
to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times
into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest
in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time
and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed,
save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is
sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr.
Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary
interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever
meant or taught it.
Polla oi ut’ ankonos
okea belae
endon enti pharetras
phonanta synetoisin; es
de to pan hermaeneon
chatizei; sophos o polla
eidos phua;
mathontes de labroi
panglossia, korakes os,
akranta garueton
Dios pros ornicha theion.
Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength
and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa
felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens,
having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as
eminently characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry, his rudest assailants
have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire.
Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the
works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly
transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by
its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a
pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on
the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the
eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had
been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the
dusty high road of custom.
Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to 47,
especially to the lines
“So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle. with the din
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.”
Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more
accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?
“Upon yon tuft of hazel trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,
Yet seeming still to hover;
There! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
That cover him all over.
While thus before my eyes he gleams,
A Brother of the Leaves he seems;
When in a moment forth he teems
His little song in gushes
As if it pleased him to disdain
And mock the Form which he did feign
While he was dancing with the train
Of Leaves among the bushes.”
Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page
284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; or, lastly, though I might
multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so
completely Wordsworth’s, commencing
“Three years she grew in sun and shower”--
Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator, haud
particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank
conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or
toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The
superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to
him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or
cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in
each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this
mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer.
Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. I. page 134 to 136, or that most
affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 165
to 168, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no
parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the
former edition, entitled, THE MAD MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I
cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their
pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding
lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which,
from the increased sensibility, the sufferer’s attention is abruptly
drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by
the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing
power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been
so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.
“Suck, little babe, oh suck again!
It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They
Draw from my heart the pain away.
Oh! press me with thy little hand;
It loosens something at my chest
About that tight and deadly band
I feel thy little fingers prest.
The breeze I see is in the tree!
It comes to cool my babe and me.”
“Thy father cares not for my breast,
’Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;
’Tis all thine own!--and if its hue
Be changed, that was so fair to view,
’Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!
My beauty, little child, is flown,
But thou wilt live with me in love;
And what if my poor cheek be brown?
’Tis well for me, thou canst not see
How pale and wan it else would be.”
Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful,
and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or
demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature
of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed
his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But
in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to
Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and
his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an
illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects--
“------add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.”
I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this
faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis
of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to
the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet’s works without
recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this
faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I. page 303, 304.
“But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;
Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
Perennially--beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,
SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,
And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scattered o’er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glazamara’s inmost caves.”
The effect of the old man’s figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND
INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33.
“While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.”
Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of
miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland,
page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two
following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy;
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy!
The Youth who daily further from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”
And page 352 to 354 of the same ode.
“O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither,--
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”
And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though
highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the
subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number
of readers; I will add, from the poet’s last published work, a passage
equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative
power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling.
See White Doe, page 5.
“Fast the church-yard fills;--anon
Look again and they all are gone;
The cluster round the porch, and the folk
Who sate in the shade of the Prior’s Oak!
And scarcely have they disappeared
Ere the prelusive hymn is heard;--
With one consent the people rejoice,
Filling the church with a lofty voice!
They sing a service which they feel:
For ’tis the sun-rise now of zeal;
And faith and hope are in their prime
In great Eliza’s golden time.”
“A moment ends the fervent din,
And all is hushed, without and within;
For though the priest, more tranquilly,
Recites the holy liturgy,
The only voice which you can hear
Is the river murmuring near.
--When soft!--the dusky trees between,
And down the path through the open green,
Where is no living thing to be seen;
And through yon gateway, where is found,
Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
Free entrance to the church-yard ground--
And right across the verdant sod,
Towards the very house of God;
Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in serene and slow,
Soft and silent as a dream.
A solitary Doe!
White she is as lily of June,
And beauteous as the silver moon
When out of sight the clouds are driven
And she is left alone in heaven!
Or like a ship some gentle day
In sunshine sailing far away
A glittering ship that hath the plain
Of ocean for her own domain.”
* * * * * *
“What harmonious pensive changes
Wait upon her as she ranges
Round and through this Pile of state
Overthrown and desolate!
Now a step or two her way
Is through space of open day,
Where the enamoured sunny light
Brightens her that was so bright;
Now doth a delicate shadow fall,
Falls upon her like a breath,
From some lofty arch or wall,
As she passes underneath.”
The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic,
but in reading Bartram’s Travels I could not help transcribing the
following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor
of Wordsworth’s intellect and genius.--“The soil is a deep, rich, dark
mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of
rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above
the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black
oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus excelsior; platane; and a few
stately tulip trees.” What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me
to prophesy but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he
is capable of producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.
The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the
prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and ridicule
Mr. Wordsworth’s compositions.
Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may
perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far
within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as “too
petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with
him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action
is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the
many are greedy after vicious provocatives.”
So much for the detractors from Wordsworth’s merits. On the other hand,
much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not flatter
myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my opinions
concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more
or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be
satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet’s admirers and advocates.
More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be: deeper and more
sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion either for praise
or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel
me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced that such a criticism
was not only wanted; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it
must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. Wordsworth’s reputation.
His fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated nor
retarded. How small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties,
I have repeatedly declared; and that no one of them originates in
deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been more and greater, I should
still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age,
consider an analytic display of them as pure gain; if only it removed,
as surely to all reflecting minds even the foregoing analysis must have
removed, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded, yet so widely and
industriously propagated, of Mr. Wordsworth’s turn for simplicity! I
am not half as much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for
vulgarity of style, subject, and conception, as I am disgusted with the
gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers,
with whom he is, forsooth, a “sweet, simple poet!” and so natural, that
little master Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them,
that they play at “Goody Blake,” or at “Johnny and Betty Foy!”
Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical
sketches, important enough, (which I am not vain enough to believe,)
to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be done
unto.
For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled
SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been printed,
and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the tones,
which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, I
would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my
literary life:
When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem’d mine!
For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home
from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and at
the same time most pertinent to the title of this work.
SATYRANE’S LETTERS
LETTER I
On Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail from
Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native land
retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance--in all the kirks,
churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater number, I
hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will dare question
whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than
that which I then preferred for my country. “Now then,” (said I to a
gentleman who was standing near me,) “we are out of our country.” “Not
yet, not yet!” he replied, and pointed to the sea; “This, too, is a
Briton’s country.” This bon mot gave a fillip to my spirits, I rose and
looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all on the deck. We
were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen, an English lady,
a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and his servant, a
Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a German tailor and his
wife, (the smallest couple I ever beheld,) and a Jew. We were all on the
deck; but in a short time I observed marks of dismay. The lady retired
to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the faces round me assumed a
very doleful and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number
of those on deck was lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick,
and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of
appetite, which I attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of
the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations
from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied
passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have
discovered an easier way to see a man’s inside, than by placing a
window in his breast. He needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a
packet-boat.
I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a
stage-coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the
latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the
definitiveness of the period, at which the company will separate, makes
each individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those
with whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only
on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your
companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how
long you may be obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are
countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of
brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements
of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. I found that I
had interested the Danes in no common degree. I had crept into the boat
on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them, about
three o’clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been seeking
me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should join their
party and drink with them. He talked English with such fluency, as left
me wholly unable to account for the singular and even ludicrous
incorrectness with which he spoke it. I went, and found some excellent
wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. The Danes had
christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with
large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed
very well for a Methodist missionary. However I disclaimed my title.
What then may you be? A man of fortune? No!--A merchant? No!--A
merchant’s traveller? No!--A clerk? No!--Un Philosophe, perhaps? It was
at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and characters
I had the greatest disgust to that of “un Philosophe.” But I was weary
of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at best only the
abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a bow, even to the aspersion
implied in the word “un Philosophe.”--The Dane then informed me, that
all in the present party were Philosophers likewise. Certes we were not
of the Stoick school. For we drank and talked and sung, till we talked
and sung all together; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of
dances, which in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly
and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers, who lay in the cabin
below in all the agonies of sea-sickness, must have found our
bacchanalian merriment
------a tune
Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.
I thought so at the time; and, (by way, I suppose, of supporting my
newly assumed philosophical character,) I thought too, how closely the
greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and
how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger.
The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white
complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing
that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of
eminence I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much
shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face
slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old
remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been
rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I
had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated himself by my
side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in
the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity,
he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy
were modest in the comparison. His language and accentuation were so
exceedingly singular, that I determined for once in my life to take
notes of a conversation. Here it follows, somewhat abridged, indeed, but
in all other respects as accurately as my memory permitted.