Wordsworth Part 9

The naive earnestness of this pa.s.sage suggests to us how constantly recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the two trains of ideas which form the substance of the poem; the interaction, namely, (if so it may be termed,) of the moods of Nature with the moods of the human mind; and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with no complex background of social or political life, but set amid the primary affections and sorrows, and the wild aspects of the external world.

Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of the influence of Nature on human character, _Peter Bell_ may be taken as marking one end, and the poems on _Lucy_ the other end of the scale. Peter Bell lives in the face of Nature untouched alike by her terror and her charm; Lucy's whole being is moulded by Nature's self; she is responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to sound, and melts almost into an impersonation of a c.u.mbrian valley's peace. Between these two extremes how many are the possible shades of feeling! In _Ruth_, for instance, the point impressed upon us is that Nature's influence is only salutary so long as she is herself, so to say, in keeping with man; that when her operations reach that degree of habitual energy and splendour at which our love for her pa.s.ses into fascination and our admiration into bewilderment, then the fierce and irregular stimulus consorts no longer with the growth of a temperate virtue.

The wind, the tempest roaring high, The tumult of a tropic sky, Might well be dangerous food For him, a youth to whom was given So much of earth, so much of heaven, And such impetuous blood.

And a contrasting touch recalls the healing power of those gentle and familiar presences which came to Ruth in her stormy madness with visitations of momentary calm.

Yet sometimes milder hours she knew, Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew, Nor pastimes of the May; They all were with her in her cell; And a wild brook with cheerful knell Did o'er the pebbles play.

I will give one other instance of this subtle method of dealing with the contrasts in Nature. It is from the poem ent.i.tled "_Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the Sh.o.r.e, commanding a beautiful Prospect_."

This seat was once the haunt of a lonely, a disappointed, an embittered man.

Stranger! These gloomy boughs Had charms for him: and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene,--how lovely 'tis Thou seest,--and he would gaze till it became Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain The beauty, still more beauteous! Nor, that time, When Nature had subdued him to herself, Would he forget those beings, to whose minds, Warm from the labours of benevolence, The world, and human life, appeared a scene Of kindred loveliness; then he would sigh With mournful joy, to think that others felt What he must never feel; and so, lost Man!

On visionary views would fancy feed Till his eyes streamed with tears.

This is one of the pa.s.sages which the lover of Wordsworth, quotes, perhaps, with some apprehension; not knowing how far it carries into the hearts of others its affecting power; how vividly it calls up before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the whole vision of human love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. But, however this particular pa.s.sage may impress the reader, it is not hard to ill.u.s.trate by abundant references the potent originality of Wordsworth's outlook on the external world.

There was indeed no aspect of Nature, however often depicted, in which his seeing eye could not discern some unnoted quality; there was no mood to which nature gave birth in the mind of man from which his meditation could not disengage some element which threw light on our inner being. How often has the approach of evening been described!

And how mysterious is its solemnizing power! Yet it was reserved for Wordsworth in his sonnet "Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour," to draw out a characteristic of that grey waning light which half explains to us its sombre and pervading charm. "Day's mutable distinctions" pa.s.s away; all in the landscape that suggests our own age or our own handiwork is gone; we look on the sight seen by our remote ancestors, and the visible present is generalized into an immeasureable past.

The sonnet on the Duddon beginning "What aspect bore the Man who roved or fled First of his tribe to this dark dell," carries back the mind along the same track, with the added thought of Nature's permanent gentleness amid the "hideous usages" of primeval man,-- through all which the stream's voice was innocent, and its flow benign. "A weight of awe not easy to be borne" fell on the poet, also, as he looked on the earliest memorials which these remote ancestors have left us. The _Sonnet on a Stone Circle_ which opens with these words is conceived in a strain of emotion never more needed than now,-- when Abury itself owes its preservation to the munificence of a private individual,--when stone-circle or round-tower, camp or dolmen, are destroyed to save a few shillings, and occupation-roads are mended with the immemorial altars of an unknown G.o.d. "Speak, Giant-mother! Tell it to the Morn!"--how strongly does the heart re-echo the solemn invocation which calls on those abiding witnesses to speak once of what they knew long ago!

The mention of these ancient worships may lead us to ask in what manner Wordsworth was affected "by the Nature-deities of Greece and Rome"--impersonations which have preserved through so many ages so strange a charm. And s.p.a.ce must be found here for the characteristic sonnet in which the baseness and materialism of modern life drives him back on whatsoever of illumination and reality lay in that young ideal.

The world is too much with us; late and soon Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The Winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great G.o.d! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea: Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Wordsworth's own imagination idealized Nature in a different way.

The sonnet "Brook! Whose society the poet seeks" places him among the men whose Nature-deities have not yet become anthropomorphic-- men to whom "unknown modes of being" may seem more lovely as well as more awful than the life we know. He would not give to his idealized brook "human cheeks, channels for tears,--no Naiad shouldst thou be,"--

It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, And hath bestowed on thee a better good; Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.

And in the _Sonnet on Calais Beach_ the sea is regarded in the same way, with a sympathy (if I may so say) which needs no help from an imaginary impersonation, but strikes back to a sense of kinship which seems antecedent to the origin of man.

It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea: Listen! The mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder--everlastingly.

A comparison, made by Wordsworth himself, of his own method of observing Nature with Scott's expresses in less mystical language something of what I am endeavouring to say.

"He expatiated much to me one day," says Mr. Aubrey de Vere, "as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England's modern poets--one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. 'He took pains,'

Wordsworth said; 'he went out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever struck him most--a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home and wove the whole together into a poetical description.' After a pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and impa.s.sioned voice: 'But Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and notebook at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had pa.s.sed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated; that which remained--the picture surviving in his mind--would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in a large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them.'"

How many a phrase of Wordsworth's rises in the mind in ill.u.s.tration of this power! Phrases which embody in a single picture, or a single image,--it may be the vivid wildness of the flowery coppice, of--

Flaunting summer, when he throws His soul into the briar-rose,--

or the melancholy stillness of the declining year,--

Where floats O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer;

or--as in the words which to the sensitive Charles Lamb seemed too terrible for art--the irresponsive blankness of the universe--

The broad open eye of the solitary sky--

beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment they may.

Or take those typical stanzas in _Peter Bell_, which so long were accounted among Wordsworth's leading absurdities.

In vain through, every changeful year Did Nature lead him as before; A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.

In vain, through water, earth, and air, The soul of happy sound was spread, When Peter, on some April morn, Beneath the broom or budding thorn.

Made the warm earth his lazy bed.

At noon, when by the forest's edge He lay beneath the branches high, The soft blue sky did never melt Into his heart,--he never felt The witchery of the soft blue sky!

On a fair prospect some have looked And felt, as I have heard them say, As if the moving time had been A thing as steadfast as the scene On which they gazed themselves away.

In all these pa.s.sages, it will be observed, the emotion is educed from Nature rather than added to her; she is treated as a mystic text to be deciphered, rather than as a stimulus to roving imagination. This latter mood, indeed, Wordsworth feels occasionally, as in the sonnet where the woodland sights become to him "like a dream of the whole world;" but it is checked by the recurring sense that "it is our business to idealize the real, and not to realize the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic clouds of sunset, he feels for a moment ashamed to think that they are unrememberable--

They are of the sky, And from our earthly memory fade away.

But soon he disclaims this regret, and rea.s.serts the paramount interest of the things that we can grasp and love.

Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome, Though clad In colours beautiful and pure, Find in the heart of man no natural home; The immortal Mind craves objects that endure: These cleave to it; from these it cannot roam, Nor they from it: their fellowship is secure.

From this temper of Wordsworth's mind, it follows that there will be many moods in which we shall not retain him as our companion. Moods which are rebellious, which beat at the bars of fate; moods of pa.s.sion reckless in its vehemence, and a.s.suming the primacy of all other emotions through the intensity of its delight or pain; moods of mere imaginative phantasy, when we would fain shape from the well-worn materials of our thought some fabric at once beautiful and new; from all such phases of our inward being Wordsworth stands aloof.

His poem on the nightingale and the stockdove ill.u.s.trates with half-conscious allegory the contrast between himself and certain other poets.

O Nightingale! Thou surely art A creature of a fiery heart:-- These notes of thine--they pierce and pierce; Tumultuous harmony and fierce!

Thou sing'st as if the G.o.d of wine Had helped thee to a Valentine; A song in mockery and despite Of shades, and dews, and silent Night; And steady bliss, and all the loves Now sleeping in their peaceful groves.

I heard a Stock-dove sing or say His homely tale, this very day; His voice was buried among trees, Yet to be come at by the breeze: He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed, And somewhat pensively he wooed.

He sang of love with quiet blending, Slow to begin, and never ending; Of serious faith and inward glee; That was the Song--the Song for me!

"_His voice was buried among trees_," says Wordsworth; "a metaphor expressing the love of _seclusion_ by which this bird is marked; and characterizing its note as not partaking of the shrill and the piercing, and therefore more easily deadened by the intervening shade; yet a note so peculiar, and withal so pleasing, that the breeze, gifted with that love of the sound which the poet feels, penetrates the shade in which it is entombed, and conveys it to the ear of the listener."

Wordsworth's poetry on the emotional side (as distinguished from its mystical or its patriotic aspects) could hardly be more exactly described than in the above sentence. For while there are few poems of his which could be read to a mixed audience with the certainty of producing an immediate impression; yet on the other hand all the best ones gain in an unusual degree by repeated study; and this Is especially the case with those in which, some touch of tenderness is enshrined in a scene of beauty, which it seems to interpret while it is itself exalted by it. Such a poem is _Stepping Westward_, where the sense of sudden fellowship, and the quaint greeting beneath the glowing sky, seem to link man's momentary wanderings with the cosmic spectacles of heaven. Such are the lines where all the wild romance of Highland scenery, the forlornness of the solitary vales, pours itself through the lips of the maiden singing at her work, "as if her song could have no ending,"--

Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! For the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound.

Such--and with how subtle a difference!--is the _Fragment_ in which a "Spirit of noonday" wears on his face the silent joy of Nature in her own recesses, undisturbed by beast, or bird, or man,--

Nor ever was a cloudless sky So steady or so fair.

And such are the poems--_We are Seven, The Pet Lamb_, [6]

[Footnote 6: The _Pet Lamb_ is probably the only poem of Wordsworth's which can be charged with having done moral injury, and that to a single individual alone. "Barbara Lewthwaite," says Wordsworth, in 1843, "was not, in fact, the child whom I had seen and overheard as engaged in the poem. I chose the name for reasons implied in the above," (i.e. an account of her remarkable beauty), "and will here add a caution against the use of names of living persons. Within a few months after the publication of this poem I was much, surprised, and more hurt, to find it in a child's school-book, which, having been compiled by Lindley Murray, had come into use at Grasmere School, where Barbara was a pupil. And, alas, I had the mortification of hearing that she was very vain of being thus distinguished; and in after-life she used to say that she remembered the incident, and what I said to her upon the occasion."]

_Louisa, The Two April Mornings_--in which the beauty of rustic children melts, as it were, into Nature herself, and the--