English Critical Essays Part 31

It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already begun that his first volume of _Descriptive Sketches_ (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression.

But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the eighteenth century. 'The first verses from which he remembered to have received great pleasure were Miss Carter's _Poem on Spring_, a poem in the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed much in,--for example, _Ruth_.' This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last warble died with Herrick; but Sh.e.l.ley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable, even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.

We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such verses as

Like an army defeated The snow hath retreated And now doth fare ill On the top of the bare hill,

with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.

_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone and judgement in selection which have made the _Traveller_ and the _Deserted Village_ perhaps the most truly cla.s.sical poems in the language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved wife and son:

Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze, Pa.s.sing his father's bones in future days, Start at the reliques of that very thigh On which so oft he prattled when a boy.

In these poems there is plenty of that 'poetic diction' against which Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.

To wet the peak's impracticable sides He opens of his feet the sanguine tides, Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.

Both of these pa.s.sages have disappeared from the revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.

Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, Those steadfast eyes that beating b.r.e.a.s.t.s inspire To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire; Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; Those shadowy b.r.e.a.s.t.s in love's soft light arrayed, And rising by the moon of pa.s.sion swayed.

The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he changes 'despotcourts' into 'tyranny'. One of the alterations is interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written

And bids her soldier come her wars to share Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar.

An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:

Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar.

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself done so in the _Evening Walk_, and corrects his epithets to suit his later judgement, putting 'gladsome' for 'boding', and replacing

The tremulous sob of the complaining owl

by

The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian pa.s.sage which already gives us a glimpse of that pa.s.sion with which he was the first to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with Turner.

'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour All day the floods a deepening murmur pour: The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight; Dark is the region as with coming night; But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turned that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun The West that burns like one dilated sun, Where in a mighty crucible expire The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.

Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the worse, by subst.i.tuting 'glorious' (which was already implied in 'glances' and 'fire-clad') for 'wheeling'. In later life he would have found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of poesy.

During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in favour of that ideal republic 'which never was on land or sea', but fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his own n.o.bler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which he found freedom enough in England as it was. Dr. Wordsworth admits that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of England where there is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of the c.u.mberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a New-Englander the a.s.sociations of fifty years ago, ere the change from New England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him.

The debt due to his father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbour. He at first proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called _The Philanthropist_, but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists, he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a private opinion on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion which const.i.tutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food from heaven; and while Wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare attorney that was lost in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a legacy of 900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his life, and made it honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led only to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years were pa.s.sed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had contrived to see something more in the _Descriptive Sketches_ than the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers. It was now that the tragedy of _The Borderers_ was for the most part written, and that plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_ suggested which gave Wordsworth a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the arrangement. In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile had married and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November _The Borderers_ was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so common to young authors.

The play has fine pa.s.sages, but is as unreal as _Jane Eyre_. It shares with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written to ill.u.s.trate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama, such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he published _The Borderers_ in 1842, and says in a note that it was 'at first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage'.

But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it accepted by some theatrical manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the _Lyrical Ballads_ for the press, and it was published toward the close of 1798. The book, which contained also _The Ancient Mariner_ of Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was reckoned at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons were not wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself infamous, for the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ undoubtedly raised him to the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parna.s.sus has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cl.u.s.ter; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper of society.

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The respectable old poet, who was pa.s.sing the evening of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius.

The record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth's mind. Among other things he said, 'that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs',--memorable words, the more memorable that a literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.

It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the _Lines composed at Tintern Abbey_ in July 1798. It is more likely to have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797. When Emerson visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of _Wilhelm Meister_, a part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His poem of the _Thorn_, though vastly more imaginative, may have been suggested by Burger's _Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain_. The little grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.

After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in Westmorland. In 1800, the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ being exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.

Longman paying 100 for the copyright of two editions. The book pa.s.sed to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805. Wordsworth sent a copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending to his attention the poems _Michael_ and _The Brothers_, as displaying the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under the influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil acknowledgement, saying that his favourites among the poems were _Harry Gill_, _We are Seven_, _The Mad Mother_, and _The Idiot_, but that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple subjects. Any political significance in the poems he was apparently unable to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral of English song the critical theses which he was to maintain against all comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing for an author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of poetry all that fervour and faith which had lost their political object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated that the true judgement of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false judgement, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were unsaleable. The strength of an argument for self-reliance drawn from the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.

An advertis.e.m.e.nt prefixed to the _Lyrical Ballads_, as originally published in one volume, warned the reader that 'they were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation in the middle and lower cla.s.ses_ of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure'. In his preface to the second edition, in two volumes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that 'it was published as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure and that quant.i.ty of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may _rationally endeavour_ to impart'. Here is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to the pa.s.sages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an a.s.siduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words 'rationally endeavour to impart'. In the preface of that year he says, 'The observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many years ago under the t.i.tle of _Lyrical Ballads_ have so little of special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an introduction to it.' It is a pity that he could not have become an earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that 'prose was words in their best order, and poetry the _best_ words in the best order'.

But idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Sh.e.l.ley and to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a manifest jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great mistake lay. For example, in _The Blind Highland Boy_ he had originally the following stanzas:

Strong is the current, but be mild, Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!

If ye in anger fret or chafe, A bee-hive would be ship as safe As that in which he sails.

But say, what was it? Thought of fear!

Well may ye tremble when ye hear!

--A household tub like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes, This carried the blind boy.

In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-sh.e.l.l, and thus robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest.

Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality.

But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of

I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision, still contains verses like these:

And he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry, Rests upon ankles swollen and thick; His legs are thin and dry;

Few months of life he has in store, As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell,--

which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on the ballad-style,--that their '_matter_ is contemptible'. The sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in unguarded moments. We are reminded of a pa.s.sage in _The Excursion_:

List! I heard From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_, _Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_.

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere, conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign sh.o.r.e, and that no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses.

Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the grat.i.tude of the purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.

On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the 14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion during a part of this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, then in ma.n.u.script. The travellers returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard for the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of 100, to defray the charges of a yearly journey.

In March 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the shipwreck of the _Abergavenny_ East-Indiaman, of which he was captain.

He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it.

The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may account for the great productiveness of this and the following year. He now completed _The Prelude_, wrote _The Waggoner_, and increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes, which were published in 1807.