in his pantheistic language. The Divinity really reveals Himself in the
lonely mountains and the starry heavens. By contemplating them we are
able to rise into that 'blessed mood' in which for a time the burden of
the mystery is rolled off our souls, and we can 'see into the life of
things.' And here we must admit that Wordsworth is not entirely free
from the weakness which generally besets thinkers of this tendency. Like
Shaftesbury in the previous century, who speaks of the universal harmony
as emphatically though not as poetically as Wordsworth, he is tempted to
adopt a too facile optimism. He seems at times to have overlooked that
dark side of nature which is recognised in theological doctrines of
corruption, or in the scientific theories about the fierce struggle for
existence. Can we in fact say that these early instincts prove more than
the happy constitution of the individual who feels them? Is there not a
teaching of nature very apt to suggest horror and despair rather than a
complacent brooding over soothing thoughts? Do not the mountains which
Wordsworth loved so well, speak of decay and catastrophe in every line
of their slopes? Do they not suggest the helplessness and narrow
limitations of man, as forcibly as his possible exaltation? The awe
which they strike into our souls has its terrible as well as its amiable
side; and in moods of depression the darker aspect becomes more
conspicuous than the brighter. Nay, if we admit that we have instincts
which are the very substance of all that afterwards becomes ennobling,
have we not also instincts which suggest a close alliance with the
brutes? If the child amidst his newborn blisses suggests a heavenly
origin, does he not also show sensual and cruel instincts which imply at
least an admixture of baser elements? If man is responsive to all
natural influences, how is he to distinguish between the good and the
bad, and, in short, to frame a conscience out of the vague instincts
which contain the germs of all the possible developments of the future?
To say that Wordsworth has not given a complete answer to such
difficulties, is to say that he has not explained the origin of evil. It
may be admitted, however, that he does to a certain extent show a
narrowness of conception. The voice of nature, as he says, resembles an
echo; but we 'unthinking creatures' listen to 'voices of two different
natures.' We do not always distinguish between the echo of our lower
passions and the 'echoes from beyond the grave.' Wordsworth sometimes
fails to recognise the ambiguity of the oracle to which he appeals. The
'blessed mood' in which we get rid of the burden of the world, is too
easily confused with the mood in which we simply refuse to attend to it.
He finds lonely meditation so inspiring that he is too indifferent to
the troubles of less self-sufficing or clear-sighted human beings. The
ambiguity makes itself felt in the sphere of morality. The ethical
doctrine that virtue consists in conformity to nature becomes ambiguous
with him, as with all its advocates, when we ask for a precise
definition of nature. How are we to know which natural forces make for
us and which fight against us?
The doctrine of the love of nature, generally regarded as Wordsworth's
great lesson to mankind, means, as interpreted by himself and others, a
love of the wilder and grander objects of natural scenery; a passion for
the 'sounding cataract,' the rock, the mountain, and the forest; a
preference, therefore, of the country to the town, and of the simpler to
the more complex forms of social life. But what is the true value of
this sentiment? The unfortunate Solitary in the 'Excursion' is beset by
three Wordsworths; for the Wanderer and the Pastor are little more (as
Wordsworth indeed intimates) than reflections of himself, seen in
different mirrors. The Solitary represents the anti-social lessons to be
derived from communion with nature. He has become a misanthrope, and has
learnt from 'Candide' the lesson that we clearly do not live in the best
of all possible worlds. Instead of learning the true lesson from nature
by penetrating its deeper meanings, he manages to feed
Pity and scorn and melancholy pride
by accidental and fanciful analogies, and sees in rock pyramids or
obelisks a rude mockery of human toils. To confute this sentiment, to
upset 'Candide,'
This dull product of a scoffer's pen,
is the purpose of the lofty poetry and versified prose of the long
dialogues which ensue. That Wordsworth should call Voltaire dull is a
curious example of the proverbial blindness of controversialists; but
the moral may be equally good. It is given most pithily in the lines--
We live by admiration, hope, and love;
And even as these are well and wisely fused,
The dignity of being we ascend.
'But what is Error?' continues the preacher; and the Solitary replies by
saying, 'somewhat haughtily,' that love, admiration, and hope are 'mad
fancy's favourite vassals.' The distinction between fancy and
imagination is, in brief, that fancy deals with the superficial
resemblances, and imagination with the deeper truths which underlie
them. The purpose, then, of the 'Excursion,' and of Wordsworth's poetry
in general, is to show how the higher faculty reveals a harmony which we
overlook when, with the Solitary, we
Skim along the surfaces of things.
The rightly prepared mind can recognise the divine harmony which
underlies all apparent disorder. The universe is to its perceptions like
the shell whose murmur in a child's ear seems to express a mysterious
union with the sea. But the mind must be rightly prepared. Everything
depends upon the point of view. One man, as he says in an elaborate
figure, looking upon a series of ridges in spring from their northern
side, sees a waste of snow, and from the south a continuous expanse of
green. That view, we must take it, is the right one which is illuminated
by the 'ray divine.' But we must train our eyes to recognise its
splendour; and the final answer to the Solitary is therefore embodied
in a series of narratives, showing by example how our spiritual vision
may be purified or obscured. Our philosophy must be finally based, not
upon abstract speculation and metaphysical arguments, but on the
diffused consciousness of the healthy mind. As Butler sees the universe
by the light of conscience, Wordsworth sees it through the wider
emotions of awe, reverence, and love, produced in a sound nature.
The pantheistic conception, in short, leads to an unsatisfactory
optimism in the general view of nature, and to an equal tolerance of all
passions as equally 'natural.' To escape from this difficulty we must
establish some more discriminative mode of interpreting nature. Man is
the instrument played upon by all impulses, good or bad. The music which
results may be harmonious or discordant. When the instrument is in tune,
the music will be perfect; but when is it in tune, and how are we to
know that it is in tune? That problem once solved, we can tell which are
the authentic utterances and which are the accidental discords. And by
solving it, or by saying what is the right constitution of human beings,
we shall discover which is the true philosophy of the universe, and what
are the dictates of a sound moral sense. Wordsworth implicitly answers
the question by explaining, in his favourite phrase, how we are to build
up our moral being.
The voice of nature speaks at first in vague emotions, scarcely
distinguishable from mere animal buoyancy. The boy, hooting in mimicry
of the owls, receives in his heart the voice of mountain torrents and
the solemn imagery of rocks, and woods, and stars. The sportive girl is
unconsciously moulded into stateliness and grace by the floating clouds,
the bending willow, and even by silent sympathy with the motions of the
storm. Nobody has ever shown, with such exquisite power as Wordsworth,
how much of the charm of natural objects in later life is due to early
associations, thus formed in a mind not yet capable of contemplating its
own processes. As old Matthew says in the lines which, however familiar,
can never be read without emotion--
My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred;
For the same sound is in my ears
Which in those days I heard.
And the strangely beautiful address to the cuckoo might be made into a
text for a prolonged commentary by an æsthetic philosopher upon the
power of early association. It curiously illustrates, for example, the
reason of Wordsworth's delight in recalling sounds. The croak of the
distant raven, the bleat of the mountain lamb, the splash of the leaping
fish in the lonely tarn, are specially delightful to him, because the
hearing is the most spiritual of our senses; and these sounds, like the
cuckoo's cry, seem to convert the earth into an 'unsubstantial fairy
place.' The phrase 'association' indeed implies a certain arbitrariness
in the images suggested, which is not quite in accordance with
Wordsworth's feeling. Though the echo depends partly upon the hearer,
the mountain voices are specially adapted for certain moods. They have,
we may say, a spontaneous affinity for the nobler affections. If some
early passage in our childhood is associated with a particular spot, a
house or a street will bring back the petty and accidental details: a
mountain or a lake will revive the deeper and more permanent elements of
feeling. If you have made love in a palace, according to Mr. Disraeli's
prescription, the sight of it will recall the splendour of the object's
dress or jewellery; if, as Wordsworth would prefer, with a background of
mountains, it will appear in later days as if they had absorbed, and
were always ready again to radiate forth, the tender and hallowing
influences which then for the first time entered your life. The
elementary and deepest passions are most easily associated with the
sublime and beautiful in nature.
The primal duties shine aloft like stars;
The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless,
Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers.
And, therefore, if you have been happy enough to take delight in these
natural and universal objects in the early days, when the most permanent
associations are formed, the sight of them in later days will bring back
by pre-ordained and divine symbolism whatever was most ennobling in your
early feelings. The vulgarising associations will drop off of
themselves, and what was pure and lofty will remain.
From this natural law follows another of Wordsworth's favourite
precepts. The mountains are not with him a symbol of anti-social
feelings. On the contrary, they are in their proper place as the
background of the simple domestic affections. He loves his native hills,
not in the Byronic fashion, as a savage wilderness, but as the
appropriate framework in which a healthy social order can permanently
maintain itself. That, for example, is, as he tells us, the thought
which inspired the 'Brothers,' a poem which excels all modern idylls in
weight of meaning and depth of feeling, by virtue of the idea thus
embodied. The retired valley of Ennerdale, with its grand background of
hills, precipitous enough to be fairly called mountains, forces the two
lads into closer affection. Shut in by these 'enormous barriers,' and
undistracted by the ebb and flow of the outside world, the mutual love
becomes concentrated. A tie like that of family blood is involuntarily
imposed upon the little community of dalesmen. The image of sheep-tracks
and shepherds clad in country grey is stamped upon the elder brother's
mind, and comes back to him in tropical calms; he hears the tones of his
waterfalls in the piping shrouds; and when he returns, recognises every
fresh scar made by winter storms on the mountain sides, and knows by
sight every unmarked grave in the little churchyard. The fraternal
affection sanctifies the scenery, and the sight of the scenery brings
back the affection with overpowering force upon his return. This is
everywhere the sentiment inspired in Wordsworth by his beloved hills. It
is not so much the love of nature pure and simple, as of nature seen
through the deepest human feelings. The light glimmering in a lonely
cottage, the one rude house in the deep valley, with its 'small lot of
life-supporting fields and guardian rocks,' are necessary to point the
moral and to draw to a definite focus the various forces of sentiment.
The two veins of feeling are inseparably blended. The peasant noble, in
the 'Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,' learns equally from men and
nature:--
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and hills,
The silence that is in the starry skies,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
Without the love, the silence and the sleep would have had no spiritual
meaning. They are valuable as giving intensity and solemnity to the
positive emotion.
The same remark is to be made upon Wordsworth's favourite teaching of
the advantages of the contemplative life. He is fond of enforcing the
doctrine of the familiar lines, that we can feed our minds 'in a wise
passiveness,' and that
One impulse from the vernal wood
Can teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
And, according to some commentators, this would seem to express the
doctrine that the ultimate end of life is the cultivation of tender
emotions without reference to action. The doctrine, thus absolutely
stated, would be immoral and illogical. To recommend contemplation in
preference to action is like preferring sleeping to waking; or saying,
as a full expression of the truth, that silence is golden and speech
silvern. Like that familiar phrase, Wordsworth's teaching is not to be
interpreted literally. The essence of such maxims is to be one-sided.
They are paradoxical in order to be emphatic. To have seasons of
contemplation, of withdrawal from the world and from books, of calm
surrendering of ourselves to the influences of nature, is a practice
commended in one form or other by all moral teachers. It is a sanitary
rule, resting upon obvious principles. The mind which is always occupied
in a multiplicity of small observations, or the regulation of practical
details, loses the power of seeing general principles and of associating
all objects with the central emotions of 'admiration, hope, and love.'
The philosophic mind is that which habitually sees the general in the
particular, and finds food for the deepest thought in the simplest
objects. It requires, therefore, periods of repose, in which the
fragmentary and complex atoms of distracted feeling which make up the
incessant whirl of daily life may have time to crystallise round the
central thoughts. But it must feed in order to assimilate; and each
process implies the other as its correlative. A constant interest,
therefore, in the joys and sorrows of our neighbours is as essential as
quiet, self-centred rumination. It is when the eye 'has kept watch o'er
man's mortality,' and by virtue of the tender sympathies of 'the human
heart by which we live,' that to us
The meanest flower which blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
The solitude which implies severance from natural sympathies and
affections is poisonous. The happiness of the heart which lives alone,
Housed in a dream, an outcast from the kind,
* * * * *
Is to be pitied, for 'tis surely blind.
Wordsworth's meditations upon flowers or animal life are impressive
because they have been touched by this constant sympathy. The sermon is
always in his mind, and therefore every stone may serve for a text. His
contemplation enables him to see the pathetic side of the small pains
and pleasures which we are generally in too great a hurry to notice.
There are times, of course, when this moralising tendency leads him to
the regions of the namby-pamby or sheer prosaic platitude. On the other
hand, no one approaches him in the power of touching some rich chord of
feeling by help of the pettiest incident. The old man going to the
fox-hunt with a tear on his cheek, and saying to himself,
The key I must take, for my Helen is dead;
or the mother carrying home her dead sailor's bird; the village
schoolmaster, in whom a rift in the clouds revives the memory of his
little daughter; the old huntsman unable to cut through the stump of
rotten wood--touch our hearts at once and for ever. The secret is given
in the rather prosaic apology for not relating a tale about poor Simon
Lee:
O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in everything.
The value of silent thought is so to cultivate the primitive emotions
that they may flow spontaneously upon every common incident, and that
every familiar object becomes symbolic of them. It is a familiar remark
that a philosopher or man of science who has devoted himself to
meditation upon some principle or law of nature, is always finding new
illustrations in the most unexpected quarters. He cannot take up a novel
or walk across the street without hitting upon appropriate instances.
Wordsworth would apply the principle to the building up of our 'moral
being.' Admiration, hope, and love should be so constantly in our
thoughts, that innumerable sights and sounds which are meaningless to
the world should become to us a language incessantly suggestive of the
deepest topics of thought.
This explains his dislike to science, as he understood the word, and his
denunciations of the 'world.' The man of science is one who cuts up
nature into fragments, and not only neglects their possible significance
for our higher feelings, but refrains on principle from taking it into
account. The primrose suggests to him some new device in classification,
and he would be worried by the suggestion of any spiritual significance
as an annoying distraction. Viewing all objects 'in disconnection, dead
and spiritless,' we are thus really waging
An impious warfare with the very life
Of our own souls.
We are putting the letter in place of the spirit, and dealing with
nature as a mere grammarian deals with a poem. When we have learnt to
associate every object with some lesson
Of human suffering or of human joy;
when we have thus obtained the 'glorious habit,'
By which sense is made
Subservient still to moral purposes,
Auxiliar to divine;
the 'dull eye' of science will light up; for, in observing natural
processes, it will carry with it an incessant reference to the spiritual
processes to which they are allied. Science, in short, requires to be
brought into intimate connection with morality and religion. If we are
forced for our immediate purpose to pursue truth for itself, regardless
of consequences, we must remember all the more carefully that truth is a
whole, and that fragmentary bits of knowledge become valuable as they
are incorporated into a general system. The tendency of modern times to
specialism brings with it a characteristic danger. It requires to be
supplemented by a correlative process of integration. We must study
details to increase our knowledge; we must accustom ourselves to look at
the detail in the light of the general principles in order to make it
fruitful.
The influence of that world which 'is too much with us late and soon' is
of the same kind. The man of science loves barren facts for their own
sake. The man of the world becomes devoted to some petty pursuit without
reference to ultimate ends. He becomes a slave to money, or power, or
praise, without caring for their effect upon his moral character. As
social organisation becomes more complete, the social unit becomes a
mere fragment instead of being a complete whole in himself. Man becomes
The senseless member of a vast machine,
Serving as doth a spindle or a wheel.
The division of labour, celebrated with such enthusiasm by Adam
Smith,[27] tends to crush all real life out of its victims. The soul of
the political economist may rejoice when he sees a human being devoting
his whole faculties to the performance of one subsidiary operation in
the manufacture of a pin. The poet and the moralist must notice with
anxiety the contrast between the old-fashioned peasant who, if he
discharged each particular function clumsily, discharged at least many
functions, and found exercise for all the intellectual and moral
faculties of his nature, and the modern artisan doomed to the incessant
repetition of one petty set of muscular expansions and contractions, and
whose soul, if he has one, is therefore rather an encumbrance than
otherwise. This is the evil which is constantly before Wordsworth's
eyes, as it has certainly not become less prominent since his time. The
danger of crushing the individual is a serious one according to his
view; not because it implies the neglect of some abstract political
rights, but from the impoverishment of character which is implied in the
process. Give every man a vote, and abolish all interference with each
man's private tastes, and the danger may still be as great as ever. The
tendency to 'differentiation'--as we call it in modern phraseology--the
social pulverisation, the lowering and narrowing of the individual's
sphere of action and feeling to the pettiest details, depends upon
processes underlying all political changes. It cannot, therefore, be
cured by any nostrum of constitution-mongers, or by the negative remedy
of removing old barriers. It requires to be met by profounder moral and
religious teaching. Men must be taught what is the really valuable part
of their natures, and what is the purest happiness to be extracted from
life, as well as allowed to gratify fully their own tastes; for who can
say that men encouraged by all their surroundings and appeals to the
most obvious motives to turn themselves into machines, will not
deliberately choose to be machines? Many powerful thinkers have
illustrated Wordsworth's doctrine more elaborately, but nobody has gone
more decisively to the root of the matter.
One other side of Wordsworth's teaching is still more significant and
original. Our vague instincts are consolidated into reason by
meditation, sympathy with our fellows, communion with nature, and a
constant devotion to 'high endeavours.' If life run smoothly, the
transformation may be easy, and our primitive optimism turn
imperceptibly into general complacency. The trial comes when we make
personal acquaintance with sorrow, and our early buoyancy begins to
fail. We are tempted to become querulous or to lap ourselves in
indifference. Most poets are content to bewail our lot melodiously, and
admit that there is no remedy unless a remedy be found in 'the luxury of
grief.' Prosaic people become selfish, though not sentimental. They
laugh at their old illusions, and turn to the solid consolations of
comfort. Nothing is more melancholy than to study many biographies, and
note--not the failure of early promise, which may mean merely an aiming
above the mark--but the progressive deterioration of character which so
often follows grief and disappointment. If it be not true that most men
grow worse as they grow old, it is surely true that few men pass
through the world without being corrupted as much as purified.
Now Wordsworth's favourite lesson is the possibility of turning grief
and disappointment into account. He teaches in many forms the necessity
of 'transmuting' sorrow into strength. One of the great evils is a lack
of power,
An agonising sorrow to transmute.
The Happy Warrior is, above all, the man who in face of all human
miseries can
Exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower;
Controls them, and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives;