Old and New Masters Part 3

The existence of a n.o.bility, he held, "has a necessary, tendency to dishonour labour." Had he published this pamphlet when it was written, in 1793, he might easily have found himself in prison, like many other sympathizers with the French.

Wordsworth gives us an idea in _The Prelude_--how one wishes one had the original and unamended version of the poem as it was finished in 1805!--of the extreme lengths to which his Republican idealism carried him. When war was declared against France, he tells us, he prayed for French victories, and--

Exulted in the triumph of my soul, When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown, Left without glory on the field, or driven, Brave hearts! to shameful flight.

Two years later we, find him at Racedown planning satires against the King, the Prince of Wales, and various public men, one of the couplets on the King and the Duke of Norfolk running:--

Heavens! who sees majesty in George's face?

Or looks at Norfolk, and can dream of grace?

But these lines, he declared, were given to him by Southey.

By 1797 a Government spy seems to have been looking after him and his friends: he was living at the time at Alfoxden, near Coleridge, who, in the previous year, had brought out _The Watchman_ to proclaim, as the prospectus said, "the state of the political atmosphere, and preserve Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and a.s.sa.s.sins."

Wordsworth at a later period did not like the story of the spy, but it is certain that about the time of the visit he got notice to quit Alfoxden, obviously for political reasons, from the lady who owned the estate.

Professor Harper's originality as a biographer, however, does not lie in his narration of facts like these, but in the patience with which he traces the continuance of French sympathies in Wordsworth on into the opening years of the nineteenth century. He has altered the proportions in the Wordsworth legend, and made the youth of the poet as long in the telling as his age. This was all the more necessary because various biographers have followed too closely the example of the official _Life_, the materials for which Wordsworth entrusted to his nephew, the Bishop, who naturally regarded Wordsworth, the pillar of Church and State, as a more eminent and laudable figure than Wordsworth, the young Revolutionary. Whether the Bishop deliberately hushed up the fact that, during his early travels in France, Wordsworth fell in love with an aristocratic French lady who bore him an illegitimate child, I do not know. Professor Harper, taking a more ruthless view of the duties of a biographer, now relates the story, though in a rather vague and mysterious way. One wishes that, having told us so much, he had told us a little more. Even with all we know about the early life of Wordsworth, we are still left guessing at his portrait rather than with a clear idea of it. He was a figure in his youth, a character in his old age. The character we know down to the roots of his hair. But the figure remains something of a secret.

As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats.

He brought into literature a fresh vision--a vision bathing the world and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light. He was the first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings. It would be absurd to suggest that there are no antic.i.p.ations of this democratic spirit in English literature from Chaucer down to Burns, but Wordsworth, more than any other English writer, deserves the credit of having emanc.i.p.ated the poor man into being a fit subject for n.o.ble poetry. How revolutionary a change this was it is difficult to realize at the present day, but Jeffrey's protest against it in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1802 enables one to realize to what a degree the poor man was regarded as an outcast from literature when Wordsworth was young. In the course of an attack on _Lyrical Ballads_ Jeffrey wrote:--

The love, or grief, or indignation, of an enlightened and refined character is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench. The things themselves are radically and obviously distinct.... The poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their _situation_; but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is peculiar to it.

When one takes sides with Wordsworth against Jeffrey on this matter it is not because one regards Wordsworth as a portrait-painter without faults. His portraits are marred in several cases by the intrusion of his own personality with its "My good man" and "My little man" air. His human beings have a way of becoming either lifeless or absurd when they talk. _The Leech-Gatherer_ and _The Idiot Boy_ are not the only poems of Wordsworth that are injured by the insertion of ba.n.a.l dialogue. It is as though there were, despite his pa.s.sion for liberty, equality, and fraternity, a certain gaucherie in his relations with other human beings, and he were at his happiest as a solitary. His nature, we may grant, was of mixed aspects, but, even as early as the 1807 _Poems in Two Volumes_ had he not expressed his impatience of human society in a sonnet?--

I am not one who much or oft delight To season my fireside with personal talk-- Of friends, who live within an easy walk, Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in _my_ sight: And, for my chance-acquaintance, ladies bright, Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk, These all wear out of me, like forms, with chalk Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast-night.

Better than such discourse doth silence long, Long, barren silence, square with my desire; To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, In the loved presence of my cottage fire, And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children. He noticed how light plays like a spirit upon all living things. He heard every field and valley echoing with new songs. He saw the daffodils dancing by the lake, the green linnet dancing among the hazel leaves, and the young lambs bounding, as he says in an unexpected line, "as to the tabor's sound," and his heart danced to the same music, like the heart of a mystic caught up in holy rapture. Here rather than in men did he discover the divine speech. His vision of men was always troubled by his consciousness of duties. Nature came to him as a liberator into spiritual existence. Not that he ceased to be a philosopher in his reveries. He was never the half-sensual kind of mystic. He was never a sensualist in anything, indeed. It is significant that he had little sense of smell--the most sensual of the senses. It is, perhaps, because of this that he is comparatively so roseless a poet.

But what an ear he had, what a harvesting eye! One cannot read _The Prelude_ or _The Ode_ or _Tintern Abbey_ without feeling that seldom can there have been a poet with a more exquisite capacity for the enjoyment of joyous things. In his profounder moments he reaches the very sources of joy as few poets have done. He attracts many readers like a prospect of cleansing and healing streams.

And he succeeds in being a great poet in two manners. He is a great poet in the grand tradition of English literature, and he is a great poet in his revolutionary simplicity. _The Idiot Boy_, for all its ba.n.a.lities, is as immortal as _The Ode_, and _The Solitary Reaper_ will live side by side with the great sonnets while the love of literature endures. While we read these poems we tell ourselves that it is almost irrelevant to mourn the fact that the man who wrote them gave up his faith in humanity for faith in Church and State. His genius survives in literature: it was only his courage as a politician that perished. At the same time, he wished to impress himself upon the world as a politician even more perhaps than as a poet. And, indeed, if he had died at the age at which Byron died, his record in politics would have been as n.o.ble as his record in poetry. Happily or unhappily, however, he lived on, a worse politician and a worse poet. His record as both has never before been set forth with the same comprehensiveness as in Professor Harper's important and, after one has ploughed through some heavy pages, fascinating volumes.

2. HIS POLITICS

"Just for a handful of silver he left us." Browning was asked if he really meant the figure in _The Lost Leader_ for Wordsworth, and he admitted that, though it was not a portrait, he had Wordsworth vaguely in his mind. We do not nowadays believe that Wordsworth changed his political opinions in order to be made distributor of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, or even (as he afterwards became in addition) for the county of c.u.mberland. Nor did Browning believe this. He did believe, however, that Wordsworth was a turncoat, a renegade--a poet who began as the champion of liberty and ended as its enemy. This is the general view, and it seems to me to be una.s.sailable.

Mr. A.V. Dicey, in a recent book, _The Statesmanship of Wordsworth_, attempts to portray Wordsworth as a sort of early Mazzini--one who "by many years antic.i.p.ated, thought out, and announced the doctrine of Nationalism, which during at least fifty years of the nineteenth century (1820-70) governed or told upon the foreign policy of every European country." I think he exaggerates, but it cannot be denied that Wordsworth said many wise things about nationality, and that he showed a true liberal instinct in the French wars, siding with the French in the early days while they were fighting for liberty, and afterwards siding against them when they were fighting for Napoleonic Imperialism.

Wordsworth had not yet abandoned his ardour for liberty when, in 1809, he published his _Tract on the Convention of Cintra._ Those who accuse him of apostasy have in mind not his "Tract" and his sonnets of war-time, but the later lapse of faith which resulted in his opposing Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation and the Reform Bill, and in his sitting down seriously to write sonnets in favour in capital punishment.

He began with an imagination which emphasized the natural goodness of man: he ended with an imagination which emphasized the natural evil of man. He began with faith in liberty; he ended with faith in restraint.

Mr. Dicey admits much of the case against the later Wordsworth, but his very defence of the poet is in itself an accusation. He contends, for instance, that "it was natural that a man, who had in his youth seen face to face the violence of the revolutionary struggle in France, should have felt the danger of the Reform Act becoming the commencement of anarchy and revolution in England." Natural it may have been, but none the less it was a right-about-turn of the spirit. Wordsworth had ceased to believe in liberty.

There is very little evidence, indeed, that in his later years Wordsworth remained interested in liberty at all. The most important evidence of the kind is that of Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, author of _The Purgatory of Suicides_, who visited him in 1846 after serving a term in prison on a charge of sedition. Wordsworth received him and said to him: "You Chartists are right: you have a right to votes, only you take the wrong way to obtain them. You must avoid physical violence."

Referring to the conversation, Mr. Dicey comments:--

At the age of seventy-six the spirit of the old revolutionist and of the friend of the Girondins was still alive. He might not think much of the Whigs, but within four years of his death Wordsworth was certainly no Tory.

There is no reason, however, why we should trouble our heads over the question whether at the age of seventy-six Wordsworth was a Tory or not.

It is only by the grace of G.o.d that any man escapes being a Tory long before that. What is of interest to us is his att.i.tude in the days of his vitality, not of his senility. In regard to this, I agree that it would be grossly unfair to accuse him of apostasy, simply because he at first hailed the French Revolution as the return of the Golden Age--

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

--and ten or fifteen years later was to be found gloomily prophesying against a premature peace with Napoleon. One cannot be sure that, if one had been living in those days oneself, one's faith in the Revolution would have survived the September ma.s.sacres and Napoleon undiminished.

Those who had at first believed that the reign of righteousness had suddenly come down from Heaven must have been shocked to find that human nature was still red in tooth and claw in the new era. Not that the ma.s.sacres immediately alienated Wordsworth. In the year following them he wrote in defence of the French Revolution, and incidentally apologized for the execution of King Louis. "If you had attended," he wrote in his unpublished _Apology for the French Revolution_ in 1793, "to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous situation which rendered him unaccountable before a human tribunal." In _The Prelude_, too (which, it will be remembered, though it was written early, Wordsworth left to be published after his death), we are given a perfect answer to those who would condemn the French Revolution, or any similar uprising, on account of its incidental horrors:--

When a taunt Was taken up by scoffers in their pride, Saying, "Behold the harvest that we reap From popular government and equality,"

I clearly saw that neither these nor aught Of wild belief engrafted on their views By false philosophy had caused the woe, But a terrific reservoir of guilt And ignorance filled up from age to age.

That would no longer hold its loathsome charge, But burst and spread in deluge through the land.

Mr. Dicey insists that Wordsworth's att.i.tude in regard to the horrors of September proves "the statesmanlike calmness and firmness of his judgment." Wordsworth was hardly calm, but he remained on the side of France with sufficiently firm enthusiasm to pray for the defeat of his own countrymen in the war of 1793. He describes, in _The Prelude_, how he felt at the time in an English country church:--

When, in the congregation bending all To their great Father, prayers were offered up, Or praises for our country's victories; And, 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance I only, like an uninvited guest Whom no one owned, sate silent, shall I add, Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come.

The faith that survived the ma.s.sacres, however, could not survive Napoleon. Henceforth Wordsworth began to write against France in the name of Nationalism and Liberty.

He now becomes a political thinker--a great political thinker, in the judgment of Mr. Dicey. He sets forth a political philosophy--the philosophy of Nationalism. He grasped the first principle of Nationalism firmly, which is, that nations should be self-governed, even if they are governed badly. He saw that the nation which is oppressed from within is in a far more hopeful condition than the nation which is oppressed from without. In his _Tract_ he wrote:--

The difference between inbred oppression and that which is from without [i.e. imposed by foreigners] is _essential_; inasmuch as the former does not exclude, from the minds of the people, the feeling of being self-governed; does not imply (as the latter does, when patiently submitted to) an abandonment of the first duty imposed by the faculty of reason.

And he went on:--

If a country have put on chains of its own forging; in the name of virtue, let it be conscious that to itself it is accountable: let it not have cause to look beyond its own limits for reproof: and--in the name of humanity--if it be self-depressed, let it have its pride and some hope within itself. The poorest peasant, in an unsubdued land, feels this pride. I do not appeal to the example of Britain or of Switzerland, for the one is free, and the other lately was free (and, I trust, will ere long be so again): but talk with the Swede; and you will see the joy he finds in these sensations. With him animal courage (the subst.i.tute for many and the friend of all the manly virtues) has s.p.a.ce to move in: and is at once elevated by his imagination, and softened by his affections: it is invigorated also; for the whole courage of his country is in his breast.

That is an admirable statement of the Liberal faith. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was putting the same truth in a sentence when he said that good government was no subst.i.tute for self-government. Wordsworth, however, was not an out-and-out Nationalist. He did not regard the principles of Nationalism as applicable to all nations alike, small and great. He believed in the "balance of power," in which "the smaller states must disappear, and merge in the large nations of widespread language." He desired national unity for Germany and for Italy (which was in accordance with the principles of Nationalism), but he also blessed the union of Ireland with Great Britain (which was a violation of the principles of Nationalism). He introduced "certain limitations,"

indeed, into the Nationalist creed, which enable even an Imperialist like Mr. Dicey to look like a kind of Nationalist.

At the same time, though he acquiesced in the dishonour of the Irish Union, his patriotism never became perverted into Jingoism. He regarded the war between England and France, not as a war between angel and devil, but as a war between one sinner doing his best and another sinner doing his worst. He was gloomy as a Hebrew prophet in his summoning of England to a change of heart in a sonnet written in 1803:--

England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean Thy heart from its emasculating food; The truth should now be better understood; Old things have been unsettled; we have seen Fair seed-time, better harvest might have been But for thy trespa.s.ses; and, at this day, If for Greece, Egypt, India, Africa, Aught good were destined, thou wouldst step between.

England! all nations in this charge agree: But worse, more ignorant in love and hate, Far, far more abject is thine Enemy: Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight Of thy offences be a heavy weight: Oh grief, that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee!

All this means merely that the older Wordsworth grew, the more he became concerned with the duties rather than the rights of man. The revolutionary creed seems at times to involve the belief that, if you give men their rights, they will perform their duties as a necessary consequence. The Conservative creed, on the other hand, appears to be based on the theory that men, as a whole, are scarcely fit for rights but must be kept to their duties with a strong hand. Neither belief is entirely true. As Mazzini saw, the French Revolution failed because it emphasized the rights so disproportionately in comparison with the duties of man. Conservatism fails, on the other hand, because its conception of duty inevitably ceases before long to be an ethical conception: duty in the mouth of reactionaries usually means simply obedience to one's "betters." The melancholy sort of moralist frequently hardens into a reactionary of this sort. Burke and Carlyle and Ruskin--all of them blasphemed the spirit of liberty in the name of duty. Mr. Dicey contends that Burke's and Wordsworth's political principles remained essentially consistent throughout. They a.s.suredly did nothing of the sort. Burke's principles during the American War and his principles at the time of the French Revolution were divided from each other like crabbed age and youth. Burke lost his beliefs as he did his youth. And so did Wordsworth. It seems to me rather a waste of time to insist at all costs on the consistency of great men. The great question is, not whether they were consistent, but when they were right.

Wordsworth was in the main right in his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and he was in the main right in his hatred of Napoleonism.

But, when once the Napoleonic Wars were over, he had no creed left for mankind. He lived on till 1850, but he ceased to be able to say anything that had the ancient inspiration. He was at his greatest an inspired child of the Revolution. He learned from France that love of liberty which afterwards led him to oppose France. Speaking of those who, like himself, had changed in their feelings towards France, he wrote:--

Though there was a shifting in temper of hostility in their minds as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to them under a different shape; and that enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition.

That is a just defence. But the undeniable fact is that, after that time, Wordsworth ceased to combat the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition as he once had done. There is no need to blame him: also there is no need to defend him. He was human; he was tired; he was growing old. The chief danger of a book like Mr. Dicey's is that, in accepting its defence of Wordsworth's maturity, we may come to disparage his splendid youth. Mr. Dicey's book, however, is exceedingly interesting in calling attention to the great part politics may play in the life of a poet. Wordsworth said, in 1833, that "although he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought to the condition and prospects of society, for one to poetry." He did not retire into a "wise pa.s.siveness" as regards the world's affairs until he had written some of the greatest political literature--and, in saying this, I am thinking of his sonnets rather than of his political prose--that has appeared in England since the death of Milton.

V.