Among My Books Volume Ii Part 24

[340] "On my alluding to the line,

"'Three feet long and two feet wide,'

"and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said, 'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to appreciate the pa.s.sage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity to judge of poetry at all.

[341] Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these volumes not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack on Hours of Idleness. "The young man will do something if he goes on," he said.

[342] The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has enc.u.mbered the memory of his uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only matched by the Rev. Mark n.o.ble's "History of the Protectorate House of Cromwell." It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of Wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves....

To conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings and; after what I have said, I am sure yours will be the same I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaustible cistern.

[343] "Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July, 1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.

[344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

[345] Wordsworth's children were,-- John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman.

Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847.

Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.

Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812.

William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as Stamp-Distributor.

[346] Good luck (in the sense of _Chance_) seems properly to be the occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man could not have been found in Westmoreland.

[347]

"I am not one who much or oft delight In personal talk."

[348] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:--

"While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."

And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a thermometer or barometer called

"The well-wrought scale Whose sentient tube instructs to time A purpose to a fickle clime."

Still worse in the "Eclipse of the Sun," 1821:--

"High on her speculative tower Stood Science, waiting for the hour When Sol was destined to endure That darkening."

So in "The Excursion,"

"The cold March wind raised in her tender throat Viewless obstructions."

[349] According to Landor, he p.r.o.nounced all Scott's poetry to be "not worth five shillings."

[350] Prelude, Book VI.

[351] This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's conversation: "Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with which he dwells on trifles; at other times he flows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read "Resolution" and "Independence" to a lady who was affected by it even to tears, and then said, "I have not heard anything for years that so much delighted me; but, _after all, it is not poetry_."

[352] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. Compare

"Curst be the heart that thought the thought, And curst the hand that fired the shot, When in my arms burd Helen dropt, That died to succor me!

O, think ye not my heart was sair When my love dropt down and spake na mair?"

compare this with,--

"Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts That through his brain are travelling, And, starting up, to Bruce's heart He launched a deadly javelin: Fair Ellen saw it when it came, And, _stepping forth to meet the same_, Did with her body cover The Youth, her chosen lover.

"And Bruce (_as soon, as he had slain The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain, And fought with rage incessant Against the Moorish Crescent."

These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a stanza when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by subst.i.tuting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had he written,--

"And Gordon never gave a hint, But, having somewhat picked his flint, Let fly the fatal bullet That killed that lovely pullet,"

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: "The poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the princ.i.p.al person has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat laboriously acc.u.mulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this very emanc.i.p.ation from the laws of cause and effect.

[353]

"A hundred times when, roving high and low, I have been hara.s.sed with the toil of verse, Much pains and little progress, and at once Some lovely Image in the song rose up, Full formed, like Venus rising from the sea."

_Prelude_, Book IV.

[354] Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, "These quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed me; it seemed almost as if he were _awed by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with which he had been endowed_." (The italics are mine.)

[355] His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream." (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S.T.C., Vol. I. pp. 5-6.) "Wordsworth found fault with the repet.i.tion of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:

"'The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

"This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repet.i.tion was in harmony with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, "My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.

[356] In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

[357] In "Resolution" and "Independence".