[Footnote: Delivered extempore at Manchester.]
The history of the poetry of Wordsworth is a true reflex of the man
himself. The life of Wordsworth was not outwardly eventful, but his
inner life was full of conflict, discovery, and progress. His outward
life seems to have been so ordered by Providence as to favour the
development of the poetic life within. Educated in the country, and
spending most of his life in the society of nature, he was not subjected
to those violent external changes which have been the lot of some poets.
Perfectly fitted as he was to cope with the world, and to fight his way
to any desired position, he chose to retire from it, and in solitude to
work out what appeared to him to be the true destiny of his life.
The very element in which the mind of Wordsworth lived and moved was a
Christian pantheism. Allow me to explain the word. The poets of the Old
Testament speak of everything as being the work of God’s hand:--We are
the “work of his hand;” “The world was made by him.” But in the New
Testament there is a higher form used to express the relation in which
we stand to him--“We are his offspring;” not the work of his hand, but
the children that came forth from his heart. Our own poet Goldsmith,
with the high instinct of genius, speaks of God as having “loved us into
being.” Now I think this is not only true with regard to man, but true
likewise with regard to the world in which we live. This world is not
merely a thing which God hath made, subjecting it to laws; but it is an
expression of the thought, the feeling, the heart of God himself. And so
it must be; because, if man be the child of God, would he not feel to be
out of his element if he lived in a world which came, not from the heart
of God, but only from his hand? This Christian pantheism, this belief
that God is in everything, and showing himself in everything, has been
much brought to the light by the poets of the past generation, and has
its influence still, I hope, upon the poets of the present. We are not
satisfied that the world should be a proof and varying indication of the
intellect of God. That was how Paley viewed it. He taught us to believe
there is a God from the mechanism of the world. But, allowing all the
argument to be quite correct, what does it prove? A mechanical God, and
nothing more.
Let us go further; and, looking at beauty, believe that God is the first
of artists; that he has put beauty into nature, knowing how it will
affect us, and intending that it should so affect us; that he has
embodied his own grand thoughts thus that we might see them and be glad.
Then, let us go further still, and believe that whatever we feel in the
highest moments of truth shining through beauty, whatever comes to our
souls as a power of life, is meant to be seen and felt by us, and to be
regarded not as the work of his hand, but as the flowing forth of his
heart, the flowing forth of his love of us, making us blessed in the
union of his heart and ours.
Now, Wordsworth is the high priest of nature thus regarded. He saw God
present everywhere; not always immediately, in his own form, it is true;
but whether he looked upon the awful mountain-peak, sky-encompassed with
loveliness, or upon the face of a little child, which is as it were eyes
in the face of nature--in all things he felt the solemn presence of the
Divine Spirit. By Keats this presence was recognized only as the spirit
of beauty; to Wordsworth, God, as the Spirit of Truth, was manifested
through the forms of the external world.
I have said that the life of Wordsworth was so ordered as to bring this
out of him, in the forms of _his_ art, to the ears of men. In childhood
even his conscience was partly developed through the influences of
nature upon him. He thus retrospectively describes this special
influence of nature:--
One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat, tied to a willow tree,
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in,
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth,
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain echoes did my boat move on,
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent 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. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring place I left my bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
Here we see that a fresh impulse was given to his life even in boyhood,
by the influence of nature. If we have had any similar experience, we
shall be able to enter into this feeling of Wordsworth’s; if not, the
tale will be almost incredible.
One passage more I would refer to, as showing what Wordsworth felt with
regard to nature, in his youth; and the growth that took place in him in
consequence. Nature laid up in the storehouse of his mind and heart her
most beautiful and grand forms, whence they might be brought,
afterwards, to be put to the highest human service. I quote only a few
lines from that poem, deservedly a favourite with all the lovers of
Wordsworth, “Lines written above Tintern Abbey:”--
I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
In this little passage you see the growth of the influence of nature on
the mind of the poet. You observe, too, that nature passes into poetry;
that form is sublimed into speech. You see the result of the conjunction
of the mind of man, and the mind of God manifested in His works; spirit
coming to know the speech of spirit. The outflowing of spirit in nature
is received by the poet, and he utters again, in his form, what God has
already uttered in His. Wordsworth wished to give to man what he found
in nature. It was to him a power of good, a world of teaching, a
strength of life. He knew that nature was not his, and that his
enjoyment of nature was given to him that he might give it to man. It
was the birthright of man.
But what did Wordsworth find in nature? To begin with the lowest; he
found amusement in nature. Right amusement is a part of teaching; it is
the childish form of teaching, and if we can get this in nature, we get
something that lies near the root of good. In proof that Wordsworth
found this, I refer to a poem which you probably know well, “The Daisy.”
The poet sits playing with the flower, and listening to the suggestions
that come to him of odd resemblances that this flower bears to other
things. He likens the daisy to--
A little cyclops, with one eye
Staring to threaten and defy,
That thought comes next--and instantly
The freak is over,
The shape will vanish--and behold
A silver shield with boss of gold,
That spreads itself, some faëry bold
In fight to cover!
Look at the last stanza, too, and you will see how close amusement may
lie to deep and earnest thought:--
Bright _Flower_! for by that name at last
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast,
Sweet silent creature!
That breath’st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!
But Wordsworth found also joy in nature, which is a better thing than
amusement, and consequently easier to be found. We can often have joy
where we can have no amusement,--
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
* * * * *
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What Health the show to me had brought.
“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
This is the joy of the eye, as far as that can be separated from the joy
of the whole nature; for his whole nature rejoiced in the joy of the
eye; but it was simply joy; there was no further teaching, no attempt to
go through this beauty and find the truth below it. We are not always to
be in that hungry, restless condition, even after truth itself. If we
keep our minds quiet and ready to receive truth, and _sometimes_ are
hungry for it, that is enough.
Going a step higher, you will find that he sometimes _draws_ a lesson
from nature, seeming almost to force a meaning from her. I do not object
to this, if he does not make too much of it as _existing_ in nature. It
is rather finding a meaning in nature that he brought to it. The meaning
exists, if not _there_. For illustration I refer to another poem.
Observe that Wordsworth found the lesson because he looked for it, and
_would_ find it.
This Lawn, a carpet all alive
With shadows flung from leaves--to strive
In dance, amid a press
Of sunshine, an apt emblem yields
Of Worldlings revelling in the fields
Of strenuous idleness.
* * * * *
Yet, spite of all this eager strife,
This ceaseless play, the genuine life
That serves the steadfast hours,
Is in the grass beneath, that grows
Unheeded, and the mute repose
Of sweetly-breathing flowers.
Whether he forced this lesson from nature, or not, it is a good lesson,
teaching a great many things with regard to life and work.
Again, nature sometimes flashes a lesson on his mind; _gives_ it to
him--and when nature gives, we cannot but receive. As in this sonnet
composed during a storm,--
One who was suffering tumult in his soul
Yet failed to seek the sure relief of prayer,
Went forth; his course surrendering to the care
Of the fierce wind, while mid-day lightnings prowl
Insiduously, untimely thunders growl;
While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers tear
The lingering remnant of their yellow hair,
And shivering wolves, surprised with darkness, howl
As if the sun were not. He raised his eye
Soul-smitten; for, that instant, did appear
Large space (mid dreadful clouds) of purest sky,
An azure disc--shield of Tranquillity;
Invisible, unlooked-for, minister
Of providential goodness ever nigh!
Observe that he was not looking for this; he had not thought of praying;
he was in such distress that it had benumbed the out-goings of his
spirit towards the source whence alone sure comfort comes. He went out
into the storm; and the uproar in the outer world was in harmony with
the tumult within his soul. Suddenly a clear space in the sky makes him
feel--he has no time to think about it--that there is a shield of
tranquillity spread over him. For was it not as it were an opening up
into that region where there are no storms; the regions of peace,
because the regions of love, and truth, and purity,--the home of God
himself?
There is yet a higher and more sustained influence exercised by nature,
and that takes effect when she puts a man into that mood or condition in
which thoughts come of themselves. That is perhaps the best thing that
can be done for us, the best at least that nature can do. It is
certainly higher than mere intellectual teaching. That nature did this
for Wordsworth is very clear; and it is easily intelligible. If the
world proceeded from the imagination of God, and man proceeded from the
love of God, it is easy to believe that that which proceeded from the
imagination of God should rouse the best thoughts in the mind of a being
who proceeded from the love of God. This I think is the relation between
man and the world. As an instance of what I mean, I refer to one of
Wordsworth’s finest poems, which he classes under the head of “Evening
Voluntaries.” It was composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour
and beauty:--
“Had this effulgence disappeared
With flying haste, I might have sent,
Among the speechless clouds, a look
Of blank astonishment;
But ‘tis endued with power to stay,
And sanctify one closing day,
That frail Mortality may see--
What is?--ah no, but what _can_, be!
Time was when field and watery cove
With modulated echoes rang,
While choirs of fervent Angels sang
Their vespers in the grove;
Or, crowning, star-like, each some sovereign height,
Warbled, for heaven above and earth below,
Strains suitable to both. Such holy rite,
Methinks, if audibly repeated now
From hill or valley, could not move
Sublimer transport, purer love,
Than doth this silent spectacle--the gleam--
The shadow--and the peace supreme!
“No sound is uttered,--but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
* * * * *
“Wings at my shoulders seem to play;
But, rooted here, I stand and gaze
On those bright steps that heaven-ward raise
Their practicable way.
Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad,
And see to what fair countries ye are bound!
* * * * *
“Dread Power! whom peace and calmness serve
No less than Nature’s threatening voice,
From THEE, if I would swerve,
Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light
Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;
Which, at this moment, on my waking sight
Appears to shine, by miracle restored;
My soul, though yet confined to earth,
Rejoices in a second birth!”
Picture the scene for yourselves; and observe how it moves in him the
sense of responsibility, and the prayer, that if he has in any matter
wandered from the right road, if he has forgotten the simplicity of
childhood in the toil of life, he may, from this time, remember the vow
that he now records--from this time to press on towards the things that
are unseen, but which are manifested through the things that are seen. I
refer you likewise to the poem “Resolution and Independence,” commonly
called “The Leech Gatherer;” also to that grandest ode that has ever
been written, the “Ode on Immortality.” You will find there, whatever
you may think of his theory, in the latter, sufficient proof that nature
was to him a divine teaching power. Do not suppose that I mean that man
can do without more teaching than nature’s, or that a man with only
nature’s teaching would have seen these things in nature. No, the soul
must be tuned to such things. Wordsworth could not have found such
things, had he not known something that was more definite and helpful to
him; but this known, then nature was full of teaching. When we
understand the Word of God, then we understand the works of God; when we
know the nature of an artist, we know his pictures; when we have known
and talked with the poet, we understand his poetry far better. To the
man of God, all nature will be but changeful reflections of the face of
God.
Loving man as Wordsworth did, he was most anxious to give him this
teaching. How was he to do it? By poetry. Nature put into the crucible
of a loving heart becomes poetry. We cannot explain poetry
scientifically; because poetry is something beyond science. The poet may
be man of science, and the man of science may be a poet; but poetry
includes science, and the man who will advance science most, is the man
who, other qualifications being equal, has most of the poetic faculty in
him. Wordsworth defines poetry to be “the impassioned expression which
is on the face of science.” Science has to do with the construction of
things. The casting of the granite ribs of the mighty earth, and all the
thousand operations that result in the manifestations on its surface,
this is the domain of science. But when there come the grass-bearing
meadows, the heaven-reared hills, the great streams that go ever
downward, the bubbling fountains that ever arise, the wind that wanders
amongst the leaves, and the odours that are wafted upon its wings; when
we have colour, and shape, and sound, then we have the material with
which poetry has to do. Science has to do with the underwork. For what
does this great central world exist, with its hidden winds and waters,
its upheavings and its downsinkings, its strong frame of rock, and its
heart of fire? What do they all exist for? Not for themselves surely,
but for the sake of this out-spreading world of beauty, that floats up,
as it were, to the surface of the shapeless region of force. Science has
to do with the one, and poetry with the other: poetry is “the
impassioned expression that is on the face of science.” To illustrate it
still further. You are walking in the woods, and you find the first
primrose of the year. You feel almost as if you had found a child. You
know in yourself that you have found a new beauty and a new joy, though
you have seen it a thousand times before. It is a primrose. A little
flower that looks at me, thinks itself into my heart, and gives me a
pleasure distinct in itself, and which I feel as if I could not do
without. The impassioned expression on the face of this little outspread
flower is its childhood; it means trust, consciousness of protection,
faith, and hope. Science, in the person of the botanist, comes after
you, and pulls it to pieces to see its construction, and delights the
intellect; but the science itself is dead, and kills what it touches.
The flower exists not for it, but for the expression on its face, which
is its poetry,--that expression which you feel to mean a living thing;
that expression which makes you feel that this flower is, as it were,
just growing out of the heart of God. The intellect itself is but the
scaffolding for the uprearing of the spiritual nature.
It will make all this yet plainer, if you can suppose a human form to be
created without a soul in it. Divine science _has_ put it together, but
only for the sake of the outshining soul that shall cause it to live,
and move, and have a being of its own in God. When you see the face
lighted up with soul, when you recognize in it thought and feeling, joy
and love, then you know that here is the end for which it was made. Thus
you see the relation that poetry has to science; and you find that, to
speak in an apparent paradox, the surface is the deepest after all; for,
through the surface, for the sake of which all this building went on, we
have, as it were, a window into the depths of truth. There is not a form
that lives in the world, but is a window cloven through the blank
darkness of nothingness, to let us look into the heart, and feeling, and
nature of God. So the surface of things is the best and the deepest,
provided it is not mere surface, but the impassioned expression, for the
sake of which the science of God has thought and laboured.
Satisfied that this was the nature of poetry, and wanting to convey this
to the minds of his fellow-men, “What vehicle,” Wordsworth may be
supposed to have asked himself, “shall I use? How shall I decide what
form of words to employ? Where am I to find the right language for
speaking such great things to men?” He saw that the poetry of the
eighteenth century (he was born in 1770) was not like nature at all, but
was an artificial thing, with no more originality in it than there would
be in a picture a hundred times copied, the copyists never reverting to
the original. You cannot look into this eighteenth century poetry,
excepting, of course, a great proportion of the poetry of Cowper and
Thompson, without being struck with the sort of agreement that nothing
should be said naturally. A certain set form and mode was employed for
saying things that ought never to have been said twice in the same way.
Wordsworth resolved to go back to the root of the thing, to the natural
simplicity of speech; he would have none of these stereotyped forms of
expression. “Where shall I find,” said he, “the language that will be
simple and powerful?” And he came to the conclusion that the language of
the common people was the only language suitable for his purpose. Your
experience of the everyday language of the common people may be that it
is not poetical. True, but not even a poet can speak poetically in his
stupid moments. Wordsworth’s idea was to take the language of the common
people in their uncommon moods, in their high and, consequently, simple
moods, when their minds are influenced by grief, hope, reverence,
worship, love; for then he believed he could get just the language
suitable for the poet. As far as that language will go, I think he was
right, if I may venture to give an opinion in support of Wordsworth. Of
course, there will occur necessities to the poet which would not be
comprehended in the language of a man whose thoughts had never moved in
the same directions, but the kind of language will be the right thing,
and I have heard such amongst the common people myself--language which
they did not know to be poetic, but which fell upon my ear and heart as
profoundly poetic both in its feeling and its form.
In attempting to carry out this theory, I am not prepared to say that
Wordsworth never transgressed his own self-imposed laws. But he adhered
to his theory to the last. A friend of the poet’s told me that
Wordsworth had to him expressed his belief that he would be remembered
longest, not by his sonnets, as his friend thought, but by his lyrical
ballads, those for which he had been reviled and laughed at; the most by
critics who could not understand him, and who were unworthy to read what
he had written. As a proof of this let me read to you three verses,
composing a poem that was especially marked for derision:--
She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove;
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone.
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.
The last line was especially chosen as the object of ridicule; but I
think with most of us the feeling will be, that its very simplicity of
expression is overflowing in suggestion, it throws us back upon our own
experience; for, instead of trying to utter what he felt, he says in
those simple and common words, “You who have known anything of the kind,
will know what the difference to me is, and only you can know.” “My
intention and desire,” he says in one of his essays, “are that the
interest of the poem shall owe nothing to the circumstances; but that
the circumstances shall be made interesting by the thing itself.” In
most novels, for instance, the attempt is made to interest us in
worthless, commonplace people, whom, if we had our choice, we would far
rather not meet at all, by surrounding them with peculiar and
extraordinary circumstances; but this is a low source of interest.
Wordsworth was determined to owe nothing to such an adventitious cause.
For illustration allow me to read that well-known little ballad, “The
Reverie of Poor Susan,” and you will see how entirely it bears out what
he lays down as his theory. The scene is in London:--
At the corner of Wood-street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard,
In the silence of morning, the song of the Bird.
‘Tis a note of enchantment: what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
Is any of the interest here owing to the circumstances? Is it not a very
common incident? But has he not treated it so that it is not
_commonplace_ in the least? We recognize in this girl just the feelings
we discover in ourselves, and acknowledge almost with tears her
sisterhood to us all.
I have tried to make you feel something of what Wordsworth attempts to
do, but I have not given you the best of his poems. Allow me to finish
by reading the closing portion of the _Prelude_, the poem that was
published after his death. It is addressed to Coleridge:--
Oh! yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised;
Then, though (too weak to head the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace--knowing what we have learnt to know--
Rich in true happiness, if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day
Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, ‘mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.