English Literature
England, prevented his going headlong to the guillotine with the leaders of
his party. Two things rapidly cooled Wordsworth's revolutionary enthusiasm,
and ended the only dramatic interest of his placid life. One was the
excesses of the Revolution itself, and especially the execution of Louis
XVI; the other was the rise of Napoleon, and the slavish adulation accorded
by France to this most vulgar and dangerous of tyrants. His coolness soon
grew to disgust and opposition, as shown by his subsequent poems; and this
brought upon him the censure of Shelley, Byron, and other extremists,
though it gained the friendship of Scott, who from the first had no
sympathy with the Revolution or with the young English enthusiasts.
Of the decisive period of Wordsworth's life, when he was living with his
sister Dorothy and with Coleridge at Alfoxden, we have already spoken. The
importance of this decision to give himself to poetry is evident when we
remember that, at thirty years of age, he was without money or any definite
aim or occupation in life. He considered the law, but confessed he had no
sympathy for its contradictory precepts and practices; he considered the
ministry, but though strongly inclined to the Church, he felt himself not
good enough for the sacred office; once he had wanted to be a soldier and
serve his country, but had wavered at the prospect of dying of disease in a
foreign land and throwing away his life without glory or profit to anybody.
An apparent accident, which looks more to us like a special Providence,
determined his course. He had taken care of a young friend, Raisley
Calvert, who died of consumption and left Wordsworth heir to a few hundred
pounds, and to the request that he should give his life to poetry. It was
this unexpected gift which enabled Wordsworth to retire from the world and
follow his genius. All his life he was poor, and lived in an atmosphere of
plain living and high thinking. His poetry brought him almost nothing in
the way of money rewards, and it was only by a series of happy accidents
that he was enabled to continue his work. One of these accidents was that
he became a Tory, and soon accepted the office of a distributor of stamps,
and was later appointed poet laureate by the government,--which occasioned
Browning's famous but ill-considered poem of "The Lost Leader":
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.
The last half century of Wordsworth's life, in which he retired to his
beloved lake district and lived successively at Grasmere and Rydal Mount,
remind one strongly of Browning's long struggle for literary recognition.
It was marked by the same steadfast purpose, the same trusted ideal, the
same continuous work, and the same tardy recognition by the public. His
poetry was mercilessly ridiculed by nearly all the magazine critics, who
seized upon the worst of his work as a standard of judgment; and book after
book of poems appeared without meeting any success save the approval of a
few loyal friends. Without doubt or impatience he continued his work,
trusting to the future to recognize and approve it. His attitude here
reminds one strongly of the poor old soldier whom he met in the hills,[222]
who refused to beg or to mention his long service or the neglect of his
country, saying with noble simplicity,
My trust is in the God of Heaven
And in the eye of him who passes me.
Such work and patience are certain of their reward, and long before
Wordsworth's death he felt the warm sunshine of general approval. The wave
of popular enthusiasm for Scott and Byron passed by, as their limitations
were recognized; and Wordsworth was hailed by critics as the first living
poet, and one of the greatest that England had ever produced. On the death
of Southey (1843) he was made poet laureate, against his own inclination.
The late excessive praise left him quite as unmoved as the first excessive
neglect. The steady decline in the quality of his work is due not, as might
be expected, to self-satisfaction at success, but rather to his intense
conservatism, to his living too much alone and failing to test his work by
the standards and judgment of other literary men. He died tranquilly in
1850, at the age of eighty years, and was buried in the churchyard at
Grasmere.
Such is the brief outward record of the world's greatest interpreter of
nature's message; and only one who is acquainted with both nature and the
poet can realize how inadequate is any biography; for the best thing about
Wordsworth must always remain unsaid. It is a comfort to know that his
life, noble, sincere, "heroically happy," never contradicted his message.
Poetry was his life; his soul was in all his work; and only by reading what
he has written can we understand the man.
THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH. There is often a sense of disappointment when one
reads Wordsworth for the first time; and this leads us to speak first of
two difficulties which may easily prevent a just appreciation of the poet's
worth. The first difficulty is in the reader, who is often puzzled by
Wordsworth's absolute simplicity. We are so used to stage effects in
poetry, that beauty unadorned is apt to escape our notice,--like
Wordsworth's "Lucy":
A violet by a mossy stone,
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
Wordsworth set himself to the task of freeing poetry from all its
"conceits," of speaking the language of simple truth, and of portraying man
and nature as they are; and in this good work we are apt to miss the
beauty, the passion, the intensity, that hide themselves under his simplest
lines. The second difficulty is in the poet, not in the reader. It must be
confessed that Wordsworth is not always melodious; that he is seldom
graceful, and only occasionally inspired. When he is inspired, few poets
can be compared with him; at other times the bulk of his verse is so wooden
and prosy that we wonder how a poet could have written it. Moreover he is
absolutely without humor, and so he often fails to see the small step that
separates the sublime from the ridiculous. In no other way can we explain
"The Idiot Boy," or pardon the serious absurdity of "Peter Bell" and his
grieving jackass.
On account of these difficulties it is well to avoid at first the longer
works and begin with a good book of selections.[223] When we read these
exquisite shorter poems, with their noble lines that live forever in our
memory, we realize that Wordsworth is the greatest poet of nature that our
literature has produced. If we go further, and study the poems that impress
us, we shall find four remarkable characteristics: (1) Wordsworth is
sensitive as a barometer to every subtle change in the world about him. In
_The Prelude_ he compares himself to an æolian harp, which answers with
harmony to every touch of the wind; and the figure is strikingly accurate,
as well as interesting, for there is hardly a sight or a sound, from a
violet to a mountain and from a bird note to the thunder of the cataract,
that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth's poetry.
(2) Of all the poets who have written of nature there is none that compares
with him in the truthfulness of his representation. Burns, like Gray, is
apt to read his own emotions into natural objects, so that there is more of
the poet than of nature even in his mouse and mountain daisy; but
Wordsworth gives you the bird and the flower, the wind and the tree and the
river, just as they are, and is content to let them speak their own
message.
(3) No other poet ever found such abundant beauty in the common world. He
had not only sight, but insight, that is, he not only sees clearly and
describes accurately, but penetrates to the heart of things and always
finds some exquisite meaning that is not written on the surface. It is idle
to specify or to quote lines on flowers or stars, on snow or vapor. Nothing
is ugly or commonplace in his world; on the contrary, there is hardly one
natural phenomenon which he has not glorified by pointing out some beauty
that was hidden from our eyes.
(4) It is the _life_ of nature which is everywhere recognized; not mere
growth and cell changes, but sentient, personal life; and the recognition
of this personality in nature characterizes all the world's great poetry.
In his childhood Wordsworth regarded natural objects, the streams, the
hills, the flowers, even the winds, as his companions; and with his mature
belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, it was
inevitable that his poetry should thrill with the sense of a Spirit that
"rolls through all things." Cowper, Burns, Keats, Tennyson,--all these
poets give you the outward aspects of nature in varying degrees; but
Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the impression of some personal
living spirit that meets and accompanies the man who goes alone through the
woods and fields. We shall hardly find, even in the philosophy of Leibnitz,
or in the nature myths of our Indians, any such impression of living nature
as this poet awakens in us. And that suggests another delightful
characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, namely, that he seems to awaken
rather than create an impression; he stirs our memory deeply, so that in
reading him we live once more in the vague, beautiful wonderland of our own
childhood.
Such is the philosophy of Wordsworth's nature poetry. If we search now for
his philosophy of human life, we shall find four more doctrines, which rest
upon his basal conception that man is not apart from nature, but is the
very "life of her life." (1) In childhood man is sensitive as a wind harp
to all natural influences; he is an epitome of the gladness and beauty of
the world. Wordsworth explains this gladness and this sensitiveness to
nature by the doctrine that the child comes straight from the Creator of
nature:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
In this exquisite ode, which he calls "Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807), Wordsworth sums up his philosophy
of childhood; and he may possibly be indebted here to the poet Vaughan,
who, more than a century before, had proclaimed in "The Retreat" the same
doctrine. This kinship with nature and with God, which glorifies childhood,
ought to extend through a man's whole life and ennoble it. This is the
teaching of "Tintern Abbey," in which the best part of our life is shown to
be the result of natural influences. According to Wordsworth, society and
the crowded unnatural life of cities tend to weaken and pervert humanity;
and a return to natural and simple living is the only remedy for human
wretchedness.
(2) The natural instincts and pleasures of childhood are the true standards
of a man's happiness in this life. All artificial pleasures soon grow
tiresome. The natural pleasures, which a man so easily neglects in his
work, are the chief means by which we may expect permanent and increasing
joy. In "Tintern Abbey," "The Rainbow," "Ode to Duty," and "Intimations of
Immortality" we see this plain teaching; but we can hardly read one of
Wordsworth's pages without finding it slipped in unobtrusively, like the
fragrance of a wild flower.
(3) The _truth_ of humanity, that is, the common life which labors and loves
and shares the general heritage of smiles and tears, is the only subject of
permanent literary interest. Burns and the early poets of the Revival began