[39] SOME English critics at the beginning of the present century had a
great deal to say concerning a distinction, of much importance, as they
thought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the Fancy, and another
more powerful faculty--the Imagination. This metaphysical distinction,
borrowed originally from the writings of German philosophers, and
perhaps not always clearly apprehended by those who talked of it,
involved a far deeper and more vital distinction, with which indeed all
true criticism more or less directly has to do, the distinction,
namely, between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's
perception of his subject, and in his concentration of himself upon his
work. Of those who dwelt upon the metaphysical distinction between the
Fancy and the Imagination, it was Wordsworth who made the most of it,
assuming it as the basis for the final classification of his poetical
writings; and it is in these writings that the deeper and more vital
distinction, which, as I have said, underlies the metaphysical [40]
distinction, is most needed, and may best be illustrated.
For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own
poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of
almost no character at all. He has much conventional sentiment, and
some of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most serious
critical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political ideas,
consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him, at times, a mere
declaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes, to force
an unwilling pen, and write by rule. By making the most of these
blemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of his
work, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy and
independence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to
appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious
parochial virtues. And those who wish to understand his influence, and
experience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the presence of
an alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never coalesced with what
is really delightful in it, nor underwent his special power. Who that
values his writings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time to
time, of something tedious and prosaic? Of all poets equally great, he
would gain most by a skilfully made anthology. Such a selection would
show, in truth, not so much what he was, or to himself or others [41]
seemed to be, as what, by the more energetic and fertile quality in his
writings, he was ever tending to become. And the mixture in his work,
as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the
least promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be
lying hidden within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word
perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost
the whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all
creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient
mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure
was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and
he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work. And
this duality there--the fitfulness with which the higher qualities
manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power
not altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when
it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that old
fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine
possession, seems almost literally true of him.
This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher and
lower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to look
below the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of
training towards the things of art and poetry. It begets in those,
[42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a habit of
reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and
collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry, an
expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by means of a right
discipline of the temper as well as of the intellect. He meets us with
the promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us,
if we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret
of a special and privileged state of mind. And those who have
undergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like
people who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by
submitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art,
speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive,
from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.
But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for
oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar
influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of
it, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent, had
the writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect would
have been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how thin a
book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread
untwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small, lying apart
together.* What are the peculiarities of this residue? What special
sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy?
What are the subjects and the motives which in him excite the
imaginative faculty? What are the qualities in things and persons
which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to
others, in an extraordinary way?
An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which
weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by,
is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has been
remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It reveals
itself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in what is
strongest and most attractive in modern literature. It is exemplified,
almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and
Théophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history of the human
mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from
Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless some latent connexion
with those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul in
material things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modern
systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in [44] the graver writings
of historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modern
landscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic
and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense, the
writings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: he is
more simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, though
there are fine expressions of precisely the same thing in so different
a poet as Shelley. There was in his own character a certain
contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united
with a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence.
His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt
incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into
broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it most
resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish
painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions,
passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet,
systematic industry. This placid life matured a quite unusual
sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the
natural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and
its echo. The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of
such records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to Keats's
Saint Agnes' Eve. To [45] read one of his longer pastoral poems for
the first time, is like a day spent in a new country: the memory is
crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents--
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some grey rock;--
The single sheep and the one blasted tree
And the bleak music from that old stone wall;--
In the meadows and the lower ground
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears.
Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, in
the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even
moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something
actually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image.
He has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to the
consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary
impressions--silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the
whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression
of desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special day
or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a
spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]
insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's
history, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and he
has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit," which, as
he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.
It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon,
that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of The
Recluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world of
business, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the majority
of mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment.*
And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects,
which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth
the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every
natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual
life, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves
or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly,
by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing
space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,
for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was
like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of
letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive
condition, which some philosophers have traced in the general history
of human culture, wherein all outward objects [48] alike, including
even the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with
animation, and the world was "full of souls"--that mood in which the
old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange
aftergrowths.
In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry
often are, was but the result of a crude intelligence. But, in
Wordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in
inanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the
impressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of
sensuousness. At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally
susceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the expressiveness
of outward things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened
"a sort of thought in sense," is Shelley's just estimate of this
element in Wordsworth's poetry.
And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and
thought, that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human life,
indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental grace on
an expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of man as in
the presence and under the influence of these effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close connexion
of man with natural objects, the habitual association of his thoughts
and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to
[49] degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did but
reinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual lime
and clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end.
But for Wordsworth, these influences tended to the dignity of human
nature, because they tended to tranquillise it. By raising nature to
the level of human thought he gives it power and expression: he subdues
man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and
coolness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman
"stepping westward," are for him natural objects, almost in the same
sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath. In this
sense the leader of the "Lake School," in spite of an earnest
preoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of
nature. And of nature, after all, in its modesty. The English lake
country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of
Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of
apparently little or familiar things, would have found its true test
had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.
The glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little
about them, had too potent a material life of their own to serve
greatly his poetic purpose.
Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets of
the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]
perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has
always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach
themselves to actual scenes and places. Now what is true of it
everywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where one
generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it was
on this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.
Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local sanctities,
in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a particular spot of
earth with the great events of life, till the low walls, the green
mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of voices, and a sort
of natural oracles, the very religion of these people of the dales
appeared but as another link between them and the earth, and was
literally a religion of nature. It tranquillised them by bringing them
under the placid rule of traditional and narrowly localised
observances. "Grave livers," they seemed to him, under this aspect,
with stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners,
which underlies the highest courtesy.
And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in
proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
companionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion forming
new links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the low vaults
of his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made intense for him
now with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to appreciate passion
in the lowly. He chooses to depict people from humble life, because,
being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, than
other men: it is for this direct expression of passion, that he values
their humble words. In much that he said in exaltation of rural life,
he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect
fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise features of
the picture within, without which any profound poetry is impossible.
It was not for their tameness, but for this passionate sincerity, that
he chose incidents and situations from common life, "related in a
selection of language really used by men." He constantly endeavours to
bring his language near to the real language of men: to the real
language of men, however, not on the dead level of their ordinary
intercourse, but in select moments of vivid sensation, when this
language is winnowed and ennobled by excitement. There are poets who
have chosen rural life as their subject, for the sake of its
passionless repose, and times when Wordsworth himself extols the mere
calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of poetical
culture. But it was not for such passionless calm that he preferred
the scenes of pastoral life; and the meditative poet, sheltering [52]
himself, as it might seem, from the agitations of the outward world, is
in reality only clearing the scene for the great exhibitions of
emotion, and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
elementary feelings.
And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle
of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their
daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and giving
it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to Michael
by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble children
of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In this
respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in those
of her novels which depict country life. With a penetrative pathos,
which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of
pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the
traces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoral
world--the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling
about its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the
sorrows of the wild creatures, even--their home-sickness, their strange
yearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang [53] by a ruined
farm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false,
adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder
and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the
overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for
personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their pathetic
wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the
stormy seas"; the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her
betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of
the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all the
pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their
wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of
children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their
yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their
early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this
strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the
image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has
caught from him.
He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading deeply
in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed the
borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough, had he
cared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional beliefs,
which [54] were otherwise the object of his devout acceptance.
Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is
habitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of religious
sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered down to a
world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook, a world
protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas.
But he is at times also something very different from this, and
something much bolder. A chance expression is overheard and placed in
a new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing long past occurs to him,
a distant object is relieved for a while by a random gleam of
light--accidents turning up for a moment what lies below the surface of
our immediate experience--and he passes from the humble graves and
lowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a Westmoreland church,
on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point,
into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time to
time, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits.
He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences
and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind
us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of
connexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on these
endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge
to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also to
that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the fancy of
the Platonists--the old heresy of Origen. It was in this mood that he
conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when
the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a childhood, as it
seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in
the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over
again, in the passing away of actual youth. It is this ideal childhood
which he celebrates in his famous Ode on the Recollections of
Childhood, and some other poems which may be grouped around it, such as
the lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like what he describes was
actually truer of himself than he seems to have understood; for his own
most delightful poems were really the instinctive productions of
earlier life, and most surely for him, "the first diviner influence of
this world" passed away, more and more completely, in his contact with
experience.
Sometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, imaginative
power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and
expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant
mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself,
flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he
would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived--that old isolating
thought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and modern times.
[56] At other times, again, in those periods of intense susceptibility,
in which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient of
external influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit of
life in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of which
man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments--that old
dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, in
which some had desired to lose themselves, and others had become
indifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. It would come,
sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell: the
network of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common,
universal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, above
the green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogether
different in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was full
of the brooding power of one universal spirit.
And so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascination of
bold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon them to
conditions of poetical thought. He uses them, indeed, always with a
very fine apprehension of the limits within which alone philosophical
imaginings have any place in true poetry; and using them only for
poetical purposes, is not too careful even to make them consistent with
each other. To him, theories which for other men [57] bring a world of
technical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as in those two
lofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and the
restoration of Imagination and Taste. Skirting the borders of this
world of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first exciting
influence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great imaginative
theories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an understanding of
them; and it is not under the influence of these thoughts that his
poetry becomes tedious or loses its blitheness. He keeps them, too,
always within certain ethical bounds, so that no word of his could
offend the simplest of those simple souls which are always the largest
portion of mankind. But it is, nevertheless, the contact of these
thoughts, the speculative boldness in them, which constitutes, at least
for some minds, the secret attraction of much of his best poetry--the
sudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the majestic forms of
philosophical imagination, the play of these forms over a world so
different, enlarging so strangely the bounds of its humble churchyards,
and breaking such a wild light on the graves of christened children.
And these moods always brought with them faultless expression. In
regard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of the
higher and lower moods was absolute. It belonged to the higher, the
imaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the [58]
appropriate language with it. In him, when the really poetical motive
worked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and the idea;
each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the
other, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristic
of the highest poetical expression. His words are themselves thought
and feeling; not eloquent, or musical words merely, but that sort of
creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts,
directly, to the consciousness.
The music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar and
subtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry. With him, metre
is but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of words and
sounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the nobler prose no
less than in formal poetry. It is a sedative to that excitement, an
excitement sometimes almost painful, under which the language, alike of
poetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power, independent of metrical
combination, and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of the
elementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they
convey. Yet some of his pieces, pieces prompted by a sort of
half-playful mysticism, like the Daffodils and The Two April Mornings,
are distinguished by a certain quaint gaiety of metre, and rival by
their perfect execution, in this respect, similar pieces among our own
Elizabethan, or contemporary French poetry.
[59] And those who take up these poems after an interval of months, or
years perhaps, may be surprised at finding how well old favourites
wear, how their strange, inventive turns of diction or thought still
send through them the old feeling of surprise. Those who lived about
Wordsworth were all great lovers of the older English literature, and
oftentimes there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlier
poets. He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, a
clause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some other men's
most famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood had its
anticipator.* He drew something too from the unconscious mysticism of
the old English language itself, drawing out the inward significance of
its racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry of the language
used by the simplest people under strong excitement--language,
therefore, at its origin.
The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim
of Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of
pleasure. But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it, he
does actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the
things of practice. One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveys
more clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in the
conduct of life.
[60] Contemplation--impassioned contemplation--that, is with Wordsworth
the end-in-itself, the perfect end. We see the majority of mankind
going most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends, as their own
instincts may determine; but the end may never be attained, and the
means not be quite the right means, great ends and little ones alike
being, for the most part, distant, and the ways to them, in this dim
world, somewhat vague. Meantime, to higher or lower ends, they move
too often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble
gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety
to bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even
great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and
temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its
very sources. We understand this when it is a question of mean, or of
intensely selfish ends--of Grandet, or Javert. We think it bad
morality to say that the end justifies the means, and we know how false
to all higher conceptions of the religious life is the type of one who
is ready to do evil that good may come. We contrast with such dark,
mistaken eagerness, a type like that of Saint Catherine of Siena, who
made the means to her ends so attractive, that she has won for herself
an undying place in the House Beautiful, not by her rectitude of soul
only, but by its "fairness"--by those quite different qualities [61]
which commend themselves to the poet and the artist.
Yet, for most of us, the conception of means and ends covers the whole
of life, and is the exclusive type or figure under which we represent
our lives to ourselves. Such a figure, reducing all things to
machinery, though it has on its side the authority of that old Greek
moralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the outline of the
theory of right living, is too like a mere picture or description of
men's lives as we actually find them, to be the basis of the higher
ethics. It covers the meanness of men's daily lives, and much of the
dexterity with which they pursue what may seem to them the good of
themselves or of others; but not the intangible perfection of those
whose ideal is rather in being than in doing--not those manners which
are, in the deepest as in the simplest sense, morals, and without which
one cannot so much as offer a cup of water to a poor man without
offence--not the part of "antique Rachel," sitting in the company of
Beatrice; and even the moralist might well endeavour rather to withdraw
men from the too exclusive consideration of means and ends, in life.
Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth's
poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest. Justify
rather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever may become of
the fruit, make sure of [62] the flowers and the leaves. It was justly
said, therefore, by one who had meditated very profoundly on the true
relation of means to ends in life, and on the distinction between what
is desirable in itself and what is desirable only as machinery, that
when the battle which he and his friends were waging had been won, the
world would need more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth was
keeping alive and nourishing.*
That the end of life is not action but contemplation--being as distinct
from doing--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or
other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if
you enter into their true spirit at all; you touch this principle, in a
measure: these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for
the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art, is to
make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage
such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry.
Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more
recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned
contemplation. Their work is, not to teach lessons, or enforce rules,
or even to stimulate us to noble ends; but to withdraw the thoughts for
a little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix [63] them, with
appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man's
existence which no machinery affects, "on the great and universal
passions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations,
and the entire world of nature,"--on "the operations of the elements
and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, on
the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friends
and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, on
fear and sorrow." To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions
is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like
Wordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant. He sees nature full
of sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature,
passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connexion with the
grandeur and beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words,
"of man suffering, amid awful forms and powers."
Such is the figure of the more powerful and original poet, hidden away,
in part, under those weaker elements in Wordsworth's poetry, which for
some minds determine their entire character; a poet somewhat bolder and
more passionate than might at first sight be supposed, but not too bold
for true poetical taste; an unimpassioned writer, you might sometimes
fancy, yet thinking the chief aim, in life and art alike, to be a
certain deep emotion; seeking most often the great [64] elementary
passions in lowly places; having at least this condition of all
impassioned work, that he aims always at an absolute sincerity of
feeling and diction, so that he is the true forerunner of the deepest
and most passionate poetry of our own day; yet going back also, with
something of a protest against the conventional fervour of much of the
poetry popular in his own time, to those older English poets, whose
unconscious likeness often comes out in him.
1874.