To regard Wordsworth critically, impersonally, is for some of us a
rather difficult matter. With the disintegration of the solid
orthodoxies Wordsworth became for many intelligent, liberal-minded
families the Bible of that sort of pantheism, that dim faith in the
existence of a spiritual world, which filled, somewhat inadequately, the
place of the older dogmas. Brought up as children in the Wordsworthian
tradition, we were taught to believe that a Sunday walk among the hills
was somehow equivalent to church-going: the First Lesson was to be read
among the clouds, the Second in the primroses; the birds and the running
waters sang hymns, and the whole blue landscape preached a sermon “of
moral evil and of good.” From this dim religious education we brought
away a not very well-informed veneration for the name of Wordsworth, a
dutiful conviction about the spirituality of Nature in general, and an
extraordinary superstition about mountains in particular—a superstition
that it took at least three seasons of Alpine Sports to dissipate
entirely. Consequently, on reaching man’s estate, when we actually came
to read our Wordsworth, we found it extremely difficult to appraise his
greatness, so many veils of preconceived ideas had to be pushed aside,
so many inveterate deflections of vision allowed for. However, it became
possible at last to look at Wordsworth as a detached phenomenon in the
world of ideas and not as part of the family tradition of childhood.
Like many philosophers, and especially philosophers of a mystical tinge
of thought, Wordsworth based his philosophy on his emotions. The
conversion of emotions into intellectual terms is a process that has
been repeated a thousand times in the history of the human mind. We feel
a powerful emotion before a work of art, therefore it partakes of the
divine, is a reconstruction of the Idea of which the natural object is a
poor reflection. Love moves us deeply, therefore human love is a type of
divine love. Nature in her various aspects inspires us with fear, joy,
contentment, despair, therefore nature is a soul that expresses anger,
sympathy, love, and hatred. One could go on indefinitely multiplying
examples of the way in which man objectifies the kingdoms of heaven and
hell that are within him. The process is often a dangerous one. The
mystic who feels within himself the stirrings of inenarrable emotions is
not content with these emotions as they are in themselves. He feels it
necessary to invent a whole cosmogony that will account for them. To him
this philosophy will be true, in so far as it is an expression in
intellectual terms of these emotions. But to those who do not know these
emotions at first hand, it will be simply misleading. The mystical
emotions have what may be termed a conduct value; they enable the man
who feels them to live his life with a serenity and confidence unknown
to other men. But the philosophical terms in which these emotions are
expressed have not necessarily any truth value. This mystical philosophy
will be valuable only in so far as it revives, in the minds of its
students, those conduct-affecting emotions which originally gave it
birth. Accepted at its intellectual face value, such a philosophy may
not only have no worth; it may be actually harmful.
Into this beautifully printed volume Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has gathered
together most of the passages in Wordsworth’s poetry which possess the
power of reviving the emotions that inspired them. It is astonishing to
find that they fill the best part of two hundred and fifty pages, and
that there are still plenty of poems—“Peter Bell,” for example—that one
would like to see included. “The Prelude” and “Excursion” yield a rich
tribute of what our ancestors would have called “beauties.” There is
that astonishing passage in which the poet describes how, as a boy, he
rowed by moonlight across the lake:
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.