A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH A CRITICAL ESSAY BY LAURIE MAGNUS, BA. Oxon. FORMERLY DEMY OF MAGDALEN METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. LONDON 1897 9s 3U/ TO heartedness" that had arisen on his wider horizon, in which, for instance, Dame Tyson was revealed in the grave, tender lights of her village evening.* For the sense of proportion, which is fine humour, was born ; it required only experience to perfect it. And among the men and maids of his native place, reading them clearly, as he says, yet finding their revelry not unwelcome, there came to him, out of the pageantry of a mountain sunrise, the first call to the service of mankind : " I made no vows, but vows were then made for me, . . . that I should be, else sinning greatly, a dedicat ed spj rjt" (iv. 334). The vacation of 1789 saw the beginning of that triple companionship which was to settle later in a single household. For r)nrothy Wordsworth, " now, after separation desolate, restored to me," joined her brother in his excursions into Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and with her came theirieIlow^pupn^ar~Penn^ School, Mary Hutchinson, grown to attractive girlhood. * Cp. Book iv., especially 191-255. BIOGRAPHY I I In July 1790, a longer journey was essayed, for Words- worth and Rober t Jone s, a College friend, started on a walking tour in Switzerland. The idea was as novel in the untravelled countryside of that day as the appear- ance of the travellers was strange. They went, in the words of the Memoranda ^ "staff in hand, without knapsacks, and carrying each his needments tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, with about twenty pounds apiece in our pockets." But the novelty of the experiment was equalled by the freshness of their impressions. The greater portion of the sixth book of The Prelude * is devoted to the record of this journey, and it is remarkable, not alone for many passages ever memorable in literature, but for the picture which it gives of a pair of young and unsoph isticated EnglishmeiL seeing ^Jjance and Switzerland on the eve of the French Republic f and before the era of Cook's tours. That William Wordsworth was one of the pair is only to say, that on that day a new focce,^ ^ born for En glish liberties and poetry, — " there we saw, In a mean city, and among a few, How bright a face is worn when joy of one Is joy for tens of millions " (vi. 346). To win this joy was Wordsworth's constant task. We have now to follow the poet through a troubled period. When he took his Bachelor's degree, in the January before his twenty-first birthday, he was quite undecided to what use to put his talents. His uncles, no doubt, on whom the burden of his educa- tion had fallen, were somewhat undecided as to the talents j * L. 322 to the end. I -j- «« w^e ^ ^ ^ landed at Calais on the eve of the day when the King was to swear fidelity to the new constitution." — Autobiog. Mem. 12 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH themselves. The se eds were slow to_ flow_er, and ripened out of sight. Articulation waited on maturity of thought. Until November 1791, he drifted aimlessly about, in London for the most part, or with Robert Jones in Den- bighshire, taking walks and attempting poems. Throughout these months the persistent problem of self prevented the self-forgetfulness which is in London's keeping, and Pre- lude vii., despite its conclusion, and despite its vindication in the " Retrospect " of viii., gives no exalted view of Wordsworth's " Residence in London." Winter found him in Fr ance, to learn the language fluently as the first step to a possible t utorsh ip. He learnt much more than the language ; he absorbed the s pirit and drank the in- tQja€atiflg..enJthusiasm of the French. At first, indeed, he had to train his emotions. He passed through Paris with more care, as he says, for " the painted Magdalen of Lebrun "; he sojourned in Orleans with more liking for " the formal haunts of men," p olished in society and arts, than for the noise and notions of the revolutionaries. This indifference was not without its apology. Not only was the first storm already overblown, but Wordsworth's interest in politics was in an academic rather than an active order. Moreover, as well from the traditions of the countryside as from the habit of undergraduate life, the revolution of power from king to commons struck on his sympathies with no sense of the extraordinary. But at Blois, in the spring of 1792, mingling with the flower of Gallic soldiery, seeing the roads crowded with the chivalry of France, above all, enjoying the companionship and confidence of the Republican General, Beaupuy,* the previous suspense gave way, * Michel Beaupuy (1755- 1796, when he perished at Elz on Oct. 19) was one of five brothers, three of whom, philosophers and warriors, BIOGRAPHY 13 " And I gradually withdrew Into a noisier world, and thus ere long Became a patriot ; and my heart was all Given to the people, and my love was theirs " (ix. I2i). Wordsworth's eulogy of Bfi^upjiy, in the ninth book of The Prelude^ is admitted on all sides to have been as just as it was discriminating. The Chartist of gentle blood, with the romance of arms about him, the poet's senior by fifteen years, his superior by a wealth of learning — for the descen- dants of Montaigne would not dishonour their ancestry — in w ^lks and talks innumerable, by brilliant argument or tren- chant silence, had _fired his youthful disciple with the con- tagion of his own ideals. When they parted, on July 27, 1792, never to meet again, in place of the aimless visionary and pamphlet politician, who had seen in the first great out- break " nothing out of nature's certain course," Beaupuy left in the young Englishman at Blois, on whom he had poured the passion and the magnanimity of his spirit, an ardent proselyte, ajoet with a re ligiorL-ajQila mission, burru ing to strike a blow in the cause of freedom and the people- His love was theirs, and the "joy for tens of millions " was presently interpreted according to the letter of revolutionary schemes. In the first week of September (1792) the "Mas- sacres " took place in Paris; on the 22nd their memory was readily wiped out (" Ephemeral monsters, to be seen but once ") in the proclamation of the Republic ; and, early in October, Wordsworth returned to the French capital. died in the cause of the Republic. Their father's family was noble ; through their mother they were descended from Montaigne. Michel Beaupuy's career is a stainless record of heroism, humanity and faith. Cp. Prel. ix., 287 to 430. But Wordsworth is mistaken in the date of his hero's death. Cp. too, Le General Michel Beaupuy, par G. Bussi^re et E. Legouis (Paris, 1891), 14 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Do not let us misjudge him. At this time he was a lad of two-and-twenty, consorting at that most impressionable age with the leading men in the g rande st drama that the stage^^f_Euro29 has seen. By every instinct~ of character and upbringing he was disposed to accept the cry of equality as the key to perfection. More than this, he was already convinced, by a degree of intimacy with nature and an in- sight into her spiritual unity granted to few, that some great work was awaiting his doing, and he had lacked, during the trying transition years, the wisdom of home influence to temper the egotism of youth. What wonder that, in this mood of fire, he had heard " a voice that cried to the whole city, * Sleep no more ' " ; he had prayed that the four corners of the earth might send their succours to France ; he had evoked the precedent of Harmodius and Aristogiton to prove " that tyrannic p ower is weak," and in their example would have thrownKTmselt mto the arms of the Girondists, and have followed their fate to the scaffold.* Hisuncles_took_alarm. To them he was only a somewhat uns atisfactqry charge, sent abroad to study French, and no doubt exceedmg his commands. In December, to the benefit of English literature, his supplies were stopped, and he was forced to return to London. More years of tribulation succeeded. Shortly after his home-coming, and to avert the displeasure of his relatives, he published, through Johnson, in St Paul's Churchyard, two slim quarto volumes of verse, An Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches. The former was addressed to his sister, and had been written at school and college. The latter was a memorial of his Swiss tour with Jones, was dedicated to him in his new style of Reverend, and had been composed during * ix. 4S-236. BIOGRAPHY 1 5 the pre vious year. Both were issued, as Wordsworth said in on^l^Jiis letters, "with great reluctance. . . . But as ^had aoi|£ nothing at the University, I thought these' little thing^might show that l^couM do some- thing." They showed little more than a liking for the imitators of Pope, and their author shared his sister's regret " that he did not submit the works to the inspec- tion of some friend before their pubHcation." But in truth, Wordsworth at this time was but little concerned for the success or failure of his poems. The Sketches closed with a clamorous i nvocation of France a s the bulwarkofMibfiity in Europe, and Wordsworth settled for awhile in London to follow the fortunes of that move- ment. It went ill. In January, Louis XVI. was killed, and the Reign of Terror presently began. The promise of liberty was fulfilled in the licence of crime. Nay, more. It issued, by the inexorable ironv__of events, in the very oppression of liberty, when, by the ambition of Napoleon Buonaparte, " Frenchmen had changed a war of self- defence for one of conquest" (xi. 207). This came later; but already, leading opinion in England, con- verted, in despite of violent opposition, by the eloquence of Edmund Burke, was co ^idemning th e excesses while it feared the example of the Revolution. And Words- worth, tigriiJ^etween his strength of principle on the side of Beaujguy, and his strength of sorrow for the Girondist victims, the women among whom were permitted that last and only privilege of freedom, held, too, by native loyalty to England, saw her join the coalition against France with feelings of deepest anguish. He even rejoiced, he tells us, when his countrymen were killed ; and he sate silent when the churches prayed for victory. He has 1 6 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH set on paper a passionate statement of his then convic tions, in the form of A Letter to the BisMp of Llandaff on the Extraordinary Avoival of his Qlitical Trincipks, contained in the Appendix to his late Sermon : by a Re- publican, — nowhere dated, and never voluntarily published, but belonging undoubtedly to 1793.* In this pamphlet, Wordsworth's new-born Rem iblicanisj n stands plainly con- fessed. He deprecates, as "an idle cry of modish lamentation," the horror of regicide which Louis' death provoked. He glozes over the t errible abus es of thejiame oflibertv, as the inevitable development of political virtues " at the expense of moral ones." He defends the forceful stripping of the clergy as "the right of the Nation over ecclesiastical wealth." Next, proceeding to principles, Wordsworth eloquently arrays for episcopal inspection the well-known a priori arguments against monarchy. And, in conclusion to this fiery piece of special pleading, he ad- dresses Bishop Watson in the following terms : "In some parts of England it is quaintly said, when a drunken man is seen reeling towards his home, that he has business on both sides of the road. Observing your Lordship's tortuous path, the spectators will be far from insinuating that you have partaken of Mr Burke's intoxicating bowl ; they will content themselves, shaking their heads as you stagger along, with remarking that you have business on both sides of the road." The Bishop, as we have seen, was never confronted with this " superannuated schoolboy's " manifesto ; and its chief interest for posterity, apart from its testimony to Wordsworth's ardour, lies in reconciling its principles with those of his later life. It is no great * It first appeared, from the author's MS., as '* An Apology for the French Revolution," in Wordsworth's Prose Works, edited by Grosart, Volume I. BIOGRAPHY 1 7 feat. The events in France in 1789 were the starting- point of two branching movements. The first was a reactionary revolution against the existing order of society. This cause Wordsworth espoused only to abandon it; for it drifted away from the promise of its origin to a reign of oppression in Sweden and Switzer- land, of blood-thirst and of Napoleon at home. The second was a movement towards a Tory democracy, based on the rights of man. For, though public sym- pathy was swiftly alienated from the methods of the French, the Revolution served its purpose in establishing beyond the possibility of doubt the great social change that had gradually taken place. Equality has always been a golden dream ; but it has never been nearer to per- manent realisation than in the Athenian democracy of Pericles. To that Greek summer of a hundred years belonged man's highest intellectual activity, his most secure liberty, his directest participation in the govern- ment of the State. But this success, as moral philoso- phers have pointed out, depended on artificial con- ditions. It depended on the jealous separateness of the Greek communities, on the traditional slavery of the so-called " masses." These barriers broken, the democracy of Pericles is revealed as a system of pro- tection and privilege. It was the supreme merit of the French Revolution to universalise the concep- tion of equality, and to establish, upon that basis, a genuine theory of freedom; to take u p the b u rden of the social problems from whi£E'tEfiZlGreiks_Jiad- secured exem^ion, and t^ sacrifice for awhile the special advantages in intellect and pleasure which that exemp- tion had permitted. From this moral and political level civilised Europe could never again go back, for the B A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH I conscience of the world has developed beyond the Greek.* I But that the requirements of a social discovery of these dimensions could instantly be met by violent legislative ; reform was the fatal error of 1789. Laws correspond to 1 national habits, and unless grounded on habit they are | fruitful only of lawlessness; and the peoples of Europe , were not yet trained to acc ept the burden and the boon of ' their inheritance. They had been disinherited for so long. The joy of political liberty, of philosophical con- solation, of poetic diction, had been reserved for the favoured few, and this triple bar of exclusiveness had reached its rigidest during the eighteenth century. It was Wordsworth's mission to attack it at all three points. From the common principle of life throughout creation he was led to infer the common right to freedom for all created things, — " when joy of one is joy for tens of milUons." From the primary passions and infuitions^^ the humblest ranks of society he constructed a more liberal and universal philosophy than the tainted materialism of eighteenth century schools. In the vernacular of dailyu^e he wrote more genuinepoetry than was ever dreamed of by the imitators of Pope. Before going further, I would call your attention to three aspects of this subject. In the first place^ I am not exag- gerating the force of the changes which Wordsworth intro- duced. In his access of democratic zeal, he enfranchised the very flowers that blow: "And 'tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes." In his philosophic re- acUdrr-iieTia3eTie~iIIirerate, the half-witted and the children more potent media of philosophic truth than all the princes of intellect \ while, in his democratisation of * Cp. with this section the late Professor Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, book iv. BIOGRAPHY 1 9 poetic diction, a conscious part of his democratic scheme, I need hardly remind you to what lengths he went. The ancient parody still serves to point the ridicule of his efforts : " My father's walls are made of brick, But not so tall, and not so thick As these ; and, goodness me ! My father's beams are made of wood, But never, never half so good As those that now I see." Secondly^ while it is easy for us, at this interval of a hundred years, to distinguish the good from the bad in the influence of the French Revolution, it would be idle to deny to Wordsworth the merit and the labour of his achievement. As he went through Paris in '91 he has recorded, " Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust Of the Bastile, I sate in the open sun, And from the rubbish gathered up a stone, And pocketed the relic " (ix, 67). Literally, then, and figuratively, he f ulfilled the vision of the prophet : "Go through, go through the gates, prepare ye the way of the people. Cast up, cast up the highway, gather out the stones : lift up a standard for the people." As Wordsworth had gathered out tEeTtone, so Tie~prepared the way — " My heart was all given to the People, and my love was theirs." I am not concerned to draw out at length the gradual process of restoration, the gradual rep air of his imagination a nd taste, shattered as they had been by his disillusion in France. Rudely awakened though Wordsworth was by England's mistrust and the misdeeds of the French, he sank only momentarily into bitterness and despair. Presently, the poet's sensibility to nature's healing powers, his observation of her equable 20 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH design, and the mental reaction from human weakness and mistakes, combined to correct that mood. This struggle for the right inductions in the maze of his ex- perience Wordsworth described in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Books of The Prelude. There they re- main for all time, the unique and stimulating record of a philosophic triumph won in the very midst of sensation. I would rather call attention to the grandeur of the victory ; for it was no small thing that a young man, dependent on uncongenial relations, whose intellect, more- over, was hardly awake to life, should have wrung these patient les sons fr pm th £^ turmoil ^w'^ rnnfngj^n n f a stu- per^douspol itical confl agration. Shelley, who died in 1822, counted Wordsworth's victory a desertion; and Browning, writing in youth, took Wordsworth for model in his poem The Lost Leader, But Shelley perished in- effective, and Browning lived to repent ; for time, in its dealings with the French Revolution, has made Words- worthians of us all. Thirdly^ I would remind you how Tegn yson c ontinued Wordsworth's message. It is not without symbolical significance that, in 1850, Alfred JTenny- son received " This laurel, greener from the brows of him that uttered nothing base," for, despite their objective differ- ences, Wordsworth and Tennyson wrote successively the poetry of the nineteenth century in England. Take the Ldylls of the King, for instance, which point, as Mr Stopford Brooke expresses it, " the complete breaking-down in practice of the theory of the heaven-born ruler " ; or take the symbol of the brand, Excalibur, the King's not the People's power, whether secular or sacred, returning whence •[ it came ; take Aybner's Field, and Lady Clara Vere de [ Vere, both directed at the abuse of privilege against which Wordsworth had lifted up his voice, — " Alas ! what differs BIOGRAPHY 2 1 more than man from man, and whence that difference, if not from himself ? " — take the many occasions when Tennyson followed Wordsworth to the lives and passions of the poor, in Dora^ The May-Queen^ Enoch Arden, The Brook^ The Promise of May, and others ; or take, sum- marily, if not finally, the poem of (Enone, where the democratic idea of the nineteenth century speaks in parables by the lips of Pallas, and the essential similarity will be apparent. It is outside the scope of our context to enforce the likeness further; but for the right under- standing of Wordsworth's life in these years, his pos- thumous influence must be taken into account. For the spark that burns and dies, is the brilliancy of intellect alone ; moral genius spreads. The summer of 1793 Wordsworth had spent in the Isle of Wight with his friend, William_jralyfirt^. as well as in a short jvalking_Jflur to Wales through Bath, Bristol and Tintern. He crossed Salisbury Plain on foot alone, a prey to melancholy thoughts which were the mspiration of The Vagranfs'T*d7e. Early in 1794 the poet had been with his sister, wandering in York- shire, and visiting the Speddings at Keswick. In the spring he had stayed with his uncle, Richard Wordsworth, at Whitehaven ; in June he had been busy with his prospectus of a new monthly miscellany, The Philanthropist. Its politics were to be republican, but not revolutionary, and Wordsworth was to have undertaken its landscape-gardening columns as well as other work. The scheme fell through ; but in the autumn of that year the poet was still talking of going to London as a journalist. His sense of relief at Robespierr g's- death- on July 28th marked the turning-point of his opinions. Nevertheless, the return to London was postponed through the illness of Raisley Calvert (William's 22 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH brother), whom Wordsworth stayed to nurse in Penrith. The invaUd died in the following January, 1795, and — with a romantic sense of the appropriate for which his memory will never die — left to his brother's friend the sum of ;^9oo. '' Hence," wrote Wordsworth, eleven years later, in a fine sonnet. To the Memory of Raisley Calvert : '* Hence, if in freedom I have loved the truth ; If there be ought of pure, or good, or great In my past verse ; or shall be, in the lays Of higher mood, which now I meditate ; — It gladdens me, O worthy, short-lived Youth ! To think how much of this will be thy praise." For, with qqij , a new, quiet era in the poet's life begins. He and Dorothy started housekeep ing to- d^° ^th g^t^^^j th^ gx:^2X joy of the " together " atoning for the deficiencies of the housekeeping. It was on a very frugal basis that the tiny household opened at Racedown, Dorsetshire, in the autumn.* To eke out their income they took two boarding-pupils — a little cousin, the daughter of Mr Tom Myers, and Basil, son of Basil Montagu, Q.C. To the September of this year, too, de- spite the doubt upon the subject, belongs in all probability the first meeting between Wo rdsworth and Coleridge ; they did not meet again until the following autumn, f At any rate, we have to reckon about this time with two new in- fluences in Wordsworth's life — his sister and his friend. Of Dorothy first. The story of this brother and sister friendship is a long familiar tale. How she was less_^xact- ing than a wife, and mo re co mpanionable than a secretary, yet combined some functions of both; how, in her Journals * They lived, probably rent free, in a cottage half way between Lyme and Crewkerne, in Somerset. t Most of the uncertainty arose from Cottle, the publisher's, habit of garbling his own and his clients' correspondence. BIOGRAPHY 23 and Diaries, is contained the nucleus of much of his poetry ; how, in a sense, hers was the more mascuHne mind, so that many of the adventures which he relates in his own name were really of her experience, even to the incident of a baker's assault in Hamburg in 1798; how she sank her personality in his, and he accepted the willing sacrifice ; all this is the commonplace of biography. It is rather to the reverse of the shield that attention is beginning to be attracted ; to the effect of these conditions upon Dorothy herself, to their possible effect upon AViliiam. To be mar- ried to a genius_has not always proved an enviable fate ; but to be his sister, housekeeper and friend is a position lacking the mutuality of marriage. There can be no doubt that Dorothy Wordsworth often fe]t the^strain. As early as i^^'she writes, under date 20th May, "The quietness and still seclusion of the valley affected me even to pro- ducing the de^gest melancholy. I forced myself from it." Two years later, in March 1802, we find her recording, *' I was tj red to dea th, and went to bed before him. He came down to me, and read the poem to me in bed." It was a moment in which the loveUest of his poems, nay, the " he " himself, must have been a trifle trying ; yet, doubtless, she raised herself on her pillow and s upplied the admira tion called for. Certainly, in 1835, her elasticity gave way; and from that year to 1856, when Dorothy Wordsworth died at the age of eighty-four, she was a confirmed mental invalid.^ Under different circumstances she might have been a poet herself ; she might have been a happy wife and mother ; and something of indirect responsibility for her early melancholia must be laid to Wordsworth's charge. And, looking at the situation in the light of the poet's life, some abatement must be made from its pleasingness. Pro- fessor Knight, in this context, speaks of his " self-involution," 24 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH and the term may stand to express the possible harm that was done by allowing Wordsworth's plau ^ble vanity a con- stant source of nourishm ent. But, all deductions admitted, still the facts remain. Dorothy chose, and found, and kept her vocation in life, and it does not bind one to optimistic fatalism to feel that it was for the best ; and her brother's splendid genius matured most readily on this prepared soil : it would be idle to point out its shortcomings. The fl attery ^f Colerid ge was yet more pronounced. In the fourth chapter of Biographia Literaria we read, " During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr Words- worth's first publication, entitled Descriptive Sketches^ and sel- dom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." Such critical discrimination is entirely to Coleridge's credit, but the remark of 1797, a propos of the tragedy. The Borderers^ " in Wordsworth there are no inequalities " ; or the letter to William Godwin, of March 25th, 1801, — "if I die, and the booksellers will give you anything for my life, be sure to say — 'Wordsworth descended on him like the Vr^&i asauTov from heaven ; by showing to him what true poetry was, he made himJ ^jiQw-"tfaatJLLeJij;3ftsdlwas no Poet,'" — these were the product of a more extravagant mood. I am constrained to admit that, all evidence weighed, the friendship was a little one-sid^^. Coleridge, Wordworth's junior by two years, was somewhat embarrass- ing in his intimacy. His intemperate habits and unkempt appearance became, after a while, a thorn in Dorothy's flesh, and we can watch the growing struggle between her first enthusiastic impressions, derived mainly, no doubt, from Coleridge's open appreciation of her brother, and her later reluctance to encourage his visits. Even in the BIOGRAPHY 25 German journey, to which we shall presently come, though the two set out together, Coleridge soon diverged. Nor was Wordswo rth ever quit e sq^ frankly loyal in the largess of praise as Coleridge had been to him. It is true that to Coleridge The Prelude was inscribed, and that his name was associated with the poem throughout. But this proof of friendship was a more formal affair than the warmth and heartiness on the other side. It rests on a different plane from the private professions and intimate confessions of which Coleridge disburdened himself. And here, perhaps, with this suggestion of formality, with the probable in- trusion of the feminine element, and with our sense of Wordworth's self - involved horizon, we may leave the matter. At least, in 1810, the estrangement came to a head. It was hastened by one of those untoward incidents from which there is no way out, which depend on a tone of voice, on a turn of a phrase, on a shade of ambiguity in m^eaning." Wordsworfh~~BSi(i something to Basil Montagu, perhaps in all kindness and goodwill, which Montagu indiscreetly repeated to Coleridge, and the latter resented as an unfriendly imputation of unsociable morals and manners. The quarrel lasted for two years, when it was patched up by Crabb Robinson's intervention, and the close comrades of olden days were outwardly reconciled, never to be the same again. The friendship was at its height in the last years of the century. Wordsworth had spent eighteen o^cden, j^^Qj^^-j^g ^t Racedown, occupied with his pupils and books. The composition of Tjie^ Borderer s belongs to this period, though its publication was very long delayed. In June 1797, Coleridge was the Wordsworths' guest. He had just written, in the new school of romantic drama, Osorio ; or, The Retnorse, and the two poets, who 26 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH were to share in common the fate of rejection for the stage, now read and admired one another's plays, in a spirit of mutual self-satisfaction. On July 2nd, hosts and guest exchanged their parts, and a fortnight later the Words- worths settled at Alfoxden, in the Quantocks, in order to be close to Coleridge's home at Nether Stowey. At either household various kindred souls were welcome. Coleridge, it is true, who depended for his living on journalism and lecturing, was at this time impecunious, and the burden of his B ohemian hospitalit y must have fallen heavily on his wife. One day, when they were to have lunched royally on bread and cheese and brandy, the cheese was stolen, and the brandy spilt, and the cupboard was bare of salt. But the salt of conversation supplied the pauses of the commissariat, and Thomas Poole, their wealthy neighbour in the castle, was always ready and at hand. A frequent visitor was Charles Lloyd, son of a Quaker banker in Birmingham, a youth of weak health and vapid enthusiasms, whom Coleridge had attracted in his pantisocratic days. William Hazlitt came there too, and found in the poems of the friends " something of the effect that arises from the turning-up of the fresh soil, or the first welcome breath of sprmg. * Henry Crabb Robinson came; and Charles Lamb, Coleridge's school-fellow, shortly after his domestic tragedy, repaired at Stowey the affliction of his spirits. His visit, and the seeds of future pleasure that it sowed, were a ray of sunshine in his darkened life. Southey, Mrs Coleridge's brother-in-law, and a comrade in the emigration day-dream, was a member of the circle ; De Quincey made acquain- tance with it ; and Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher, was drawn into it, to be persuaded into thinking that he would * See T/ie Liberal, vol. ii. p. 371, BIOGRAPHY 27 make his fortune by launching the young poets. Pqlitic%— tiiiged_vvith_j:g2ublicanism, and lite rature, wedd ed to i*e^' action, were the consta nt tO £ics ot talk. Its brilliancy was reinforced by th6 presence of John Thelwall, " Citizen Thelwall," Radical and Chartist, who bad retired from active propagandism to cultivate his acres and the domestic virtues. His visit, the unconventional habits of the households, and the suspicious chatter of inquisitive rustics, brought down a Government spy, with the result that at the end of their year's tenancy, the renewal of the Wordsworths' lease was refused, and in July 1798, the gathering in the Quantocks was broken up. It is unnecessary to protest the perfect innocence of " the conspirators." Indeed, the industry of Wordsworth, during his residence at Alfoxden, is the chief feature in their proceedings. In a letter of March nth, 1798, he wrote that he had begun " a poem which I hope to make of considerable utility. Its title will be ' The Recluse, or Views of Man, Nature and Society.' " A few weeks later, on April 20th, a start was made with Peter Bell) but the great work of the year was the first volume of Lyrical Ballads. '^ Since Wordsworth and Coleridge met almost every day, to discuss the theory and practice of poetics, it was natural that they should think of p ublishing^ a book in comrn gn. More- over, their rnmmnri pprivmnry n ecessit ies Served to recom- mend the scheme. On a November day, in 1797, Coleridge had been seized with the inspiration of the Ancien t Mar iner ; Wordsworth supplied some lines, and it formed accordingly the nucleus of the collection. Coleridge was to continue in a similar vein, giving "to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, ... a human interest and a semblance * Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems. J. Cottle, Bristol, and J. & A. Arch, London, 1798. 28 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH of truth " ; Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to reverse the process, and " to give a charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us" {Biog. Lit). By the following spring, Wordswor th's output was far in excess ofJ iis_colla:^ borator's, and when the anonymous volume was published by Cottle, in September 1798, it contained only four poems by Coleridge, — The Ancient Mariner^ The Foster- Mother's Tale, The Nightingale and The Dungeon. Words- worth's contributions included The Idiot Boy, We are Seven, The Thorn, Anecdote for Fathers, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, ^^ Her Eyes are Wild," Si7non Lee, Lines written in Early Spring, Expostulation and Reply, and others. Cole- ridge's Dungeon and A Character by Wordsworth were subsequently omitted. Meanwhile, in July, Wordsworth and his sister had left Alfoxden to walk to Tintern Abbey up the Wye. The poet had traversed the same country with William Calvert in 1793, and his present revised im- pressions were the occasion of his magnificent Lines, Com- posed a FewMiles_abo7^^ ('Five years have past,' — ) which were sent straight to Bristol, and were included in the Lyrical Ballads. With the proceeds of their various enterprises, Coleridge and the Wordsworths started to spend the 1798-9. . • wiaterjji,-.GerD[iany. They were received in audience by the poet Klopstock, by whom they were con- siderably overawed ; but Beyond him they seem to have seen hardly anyone. They arrived in October at Goslar, where Coleridge parted company with the sister and brother in order to have more time for study. The weather, Wordsworth complains, was bitterly cold ; he BIOGRAPHY 29 found his neighbours ungenial; and, thwarted, to some extent, in his social purposes, he gave most of his time to writing. Lucy Gray^ and Ruth^ and The Poefs Epitapji belong in composition to these months, as well as the verses to Lucy^ and the unspoken romance that inspired them. He was further engaged with elaborating his scheme for The Recluse \ and, while taking stock of his faculties in this regard, he began his auto-psychological poem, afterwards entitled The Prelude^ which was finished in 1805, but only posthumously published. At Gottingen, in February, the Wordsworths fell in with Coleridge again, and returned to England in the spring. For the rest of that year, 1799, they made Sockburn, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire, their head-quarters, where they stayed with Thomas Hutchinson and his sisters, Sarah and Mary. The record of the poet's life becomes more and more tranquil. It becomes, in W. M. Rossetti's Settlement phrase, more and more respectable.* On St \ In the Lake ^- ^ District Thomas' Day, December 21st, 1799, he settled with his sister in Dove Cottage . Town-end, Grasmere, a lovely retreat in that favourite Lake district to which he afterwards wrote a Guide, and to which he was faithful in preference till the end. During 1800 they entertained several visitors, John, their sailor brother, and Mary Hutchinson, and Coleridge among them. In July, the Coleridgestorik__Greta Hall, a house twelve miles from Dove Cottage, and the interGQur_se_again became- frequent. A second series of Lyrical Ballads was discussed ; but when in January i8oi,t Longman & Rees (London), who * The charge of "respectability" with its somewhat bourgeois im- plication was made by Rossetti in his Preface to one edition of Moxon's complete Wordsworth^ a Preface subsequently withdrawn at the earnest request of Wordsworth's surviving relatives. t The date on the title-page is 1800. 30 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH had bought out Cottle, pubHshed the Ballads in two volumes, Wordsworth's name appeared on the title-page, and Wordsworth's lengthy Preface explained and justified the purpose of the poems. Volume I. was a new edition of the 1798 publication, with Love by Coleridge added; volume 11. contained Wordsworth's Goslar pieces and others of yet more recent date, the chief of which were the two pastoral idylls, Michael and The Brothers-, The Oak and the B?'oom, ^^^Tis said that some have died of love^^ The Waterfall and the Eglantine, etc. ; as well as five poems On the Nafning of Places^ one of which was in- scribed to M(ary) H(utchinson). A piece of more material good fortune this year, was a windfall o j ;^8 5oo, paid, in complete liquidation — of capital and interest — of a sum of money borrowed by Lord Lonsdale from his agent, John Wordsworth, by Lord Lonsdale's successor to John Words- worth's children. It came at a most appropriate time, for the poet had been wearing himself out with work, and was thinking of taking seriously to the study of chemistry, with Calvert and Coleridge, as a relaxation from the strain of composition. By way of compromise, apparently, Words- worth got married ; for, in the whole biography of the poet, in nothing was he l ess like other men than in his a^poing^ and his wedding. It is said that D orothy had to write his love-letterST"cerlainly, after the ceremony, on October 4th, 1802, she accompanied the pair on their ji oneymoon . The account of that day m Dorothy's diary, is curious. The trio stayed for an hour or two at Kirby, in Yorkshire, where her brother and she entertained themselves with examining children's grave-stones ; later in the afternoon they caught sight of Rivaux Abbey, and Dorothy records, with a delicious touch of pity, '^ Dear Mary " — (for Mary Hutchinson, their old school-fellow, was the bride) — "had BIOGRAPHY 31 never seen a ruined abbey before — except Whitby." That they arrived at their destination very late at night, and left by six in the morning, was an appropriate ending to the day. Mary Wordsworth soon settled down to the long life a trois which centred about the poet. In the Auto- biographical Memoranda^ dictated at Rydal Mount in 1847, the events of the next forty years are very shortly sum- marised : " After our marriage -we dwelt, together with our sister, at Town-end, where three of puLxhiLdreu were born. In the spring of 1808, the increase of our family caused us to remove to a la rger h ouse, then just built, Allan Bank, in the same vale ; where our twxLJ^ounger children were born, and who died at the Rectory, the house we after- wards occupied for two years. They died in 181 2, and in 181 3 we came to Rydal Mount, where we have since lived with no further sorrow till £836j^when my sister became a confirmed_ jnvalid , and our sister Sarah Hutchinson died." It will not be disrespectful to this reticence to fill in a few more details of Wordsworth's private life. Tr£iV6ls Its seeming monotony was broken, in the first place, by occasional journeys abroad. In the summer after his marriage (1803), Wordsworth started with his sister and Coleridge on a Scotch__tQiir, upon which Dorothy wrote a small volume of Recollections ^ which have been published. Mrs Wordsworth was unable to accompany them on this occasion, for her eldest son, John, had been born on June 1 8th ; while of Coleridge, Wordsworth writes in a note to one of his own Me??iorials of the tour, " Poor C. was at that time in bad spirits, and somewhat too much in love with his own dejection, and he departed from us soon after we left Loch Lomond." The chief incident noted in Miss Wordsworth's Journal was the meeting with Walter 32 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH ' Scott at Melrose, in whose company they spent four days, from 19th to 23rd September. In a letter to Scolt , dated from Grasmere, nearly a month later, to announce their safe return, Wordsworth freely expressed his pleasure : " My sister and I often talk of the happy days we spent in your company. Such things do not occur often in life. If we live, we shall meet again ; that is my consolation when I think of these things. . . . Farewell ! . . . Your sincere friend, for such I will call myself, though slow to use a word of such solemn meaning to anyone." In October 1806, by the invitation and generosity of Sir George Beaumont, the Wordsworths and their family spent the winter aT^ farm-house in Coleorton, Leicester- shire, where the poet employed himself with laying oul grounds and planting a winter garden at the Hall for Lady Beaumont. A sonnet toheTlii^n the subject is among his Miscellaneous Sonnets, Goethe, oddly enough, was occupied at the same time in the same congenial manner at Weimar.* It was probably late in the following summer that Wordsworth paid his visit to the Craven district of Yorkshire, with the scenery of which his White Doe of Rylstone is associated. In 1814 came anothe^tour in Scotland, this time in the comm ny of Mr§^ Words witrth and Miss Hutchinson. It was chiefly remarkable for the poem Yarrow Visited^ which contrasted with the Yarrow Unvisited of nine years before. In 1 83 1, Yarrow Revisited was added to the collection, on the occasion of a third Scottish journey, the immediate reason for which recalled the circumstances of 1803. As 1 it was then that Wordsworth and Scott first met, so it was now that, in 1831, Wordsworth set off with his daughter to visit SirWalier. before he left for Italy. " How sadly * See Frau Gothein's Wordsworth^ i. 184. BIOGRAPHY 33 changgfi^ " runs the poet's note, " did I find him from the man I had see n so healthy, gay and h opeful. . . . On Tuesday mornmg, Sir Waiter Scott accompanied us, and most of the party, to Newark Castle, on the Yarrow. AVhen we alighted from the carriages, he walked pretty stoutly, and had great pleasure in revisiting these his favourite haunts. Of that excursion, the verses Yarrow Revisited are a memorial. Notwithstanding the romance that pervades Sir Walter's works, and attaches to many of his habits, there is too much pressure of fact for these verses to harmonise, as much as I could wish, with the two preceding poems. On our return in the afternoon, we had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. . . . A rich, but sad ligh t, of rather a purple than a golden hue, was spread ovei'— the^Eildon hills at that moment ; and thinking it probable that it rnigKTBfe the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream, I was not a Httle moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning, ' A trouble, not of clouds,' etc." Two days later, after " a serious conversation, tete-a-fete" Wordsworth and Scott parted; as is well known, the forebodings were fulfilled, and Sir Walt er- hurried bax:k from Italy to die in 1832. I give the sonnet referred to in this note at length : it was read by Scott before his departure : '• A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain, I Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height : Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain For kindred Power, departing from their sight ; While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain, Saddens his voice again, and yet again. Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners ! for the might Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes ; C 34 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Blessings and prayers, in nobler retinue Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows, Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true, Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea, Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope ! " Meanwhile, in 1820, Wordsworth had visited the Conti- nent with his wife and sister. Mr Monkhouse went with them to the Alps and to Milan, while Henry Crabb Robinson joined them at Lucerne. They finished up at Paris where they spent five weeks in the company of Mrs Monkhouse and a Miss Horrocks. In 1828 he was in Belgium with Coleridge, in 1829 in Ireland. In 1833, came a kind of supplementary journey to the Abbotsford pilgrimage of two years before, in order to visit StafFa and lona, which had then been necessarily omitted owing to the lateness of the season. Finally, in March 1837, a life-long wish of Wordsworth's was gratified by a tour among the cities of Italy. " I received," he records/^' trom Mr Moxon, the publisher of a large edition of my poems, a sum sufficient to enable me to gratify my wish without encroaching upon what I considered due to my family." Accordingly, he set off with H. C. Robinson, and the friends remained abroad until the following August. His poetic Memorials of this occasion Wordsworth considered in- adequate; he would have Uked to dwell on his enthusiasm for the Roman remains, as well as on the Petrarch associations, — " Between two and three hours did I run about, climbing the steep and rugged crags, from whose base the water of Vaucluse breaks forth. * Has Laura's lover,' often said I to myself, ' ever sat upon this stone ? Or has his foot ever pressed that turf?' Some, especially of the female sex, could have felt sure of it ; my answer was (impute it to my years), * I fear, not.' Is it not in fact obvious that many I BIOGRAPHY 35 of his love verses must have flowed, I do not say from a wish to display his own talent, but from a habit of exercising his intellect in that way, rather than from an impulse of his heart?" From this date the tranquil residence at ^RydalMount was practically ^nintemiptal. \ Incidentally, something has already been said of Words- worth's losses and gains by friendship during Friendships. ... ,., ... "^ ' ^ ^ \ ,^ his long life. We must revert to 1805 for almost the greatest sorrow which he suffered. On February nth in that year, the cottage at Town-end was turned into a house of r nourning by the news of the foundering__of the East Indiaman, Ear/ of Abergavenny, of which John Wordsworth, the youngest and the f avourite of the jmifchers, was Captain at the time. Evidence seemed to show that the loss of the ship was due to the pilot's mismanagement, while the heroism of the Captain's death was placed beyond a doubt. In this thought there was some consolation ; but in many poems and letters, both presently and in after years, Wordsworth's deep grief was evinced. John, he had always felt, was the most sympathetic of his brothers in temperament : " Of all human beings," he wrote in a kind of necrologe to Sir George Beaumont, " of all human beings whom I ever knew, he was the man of the most rational desires, the most sedate habits, and the most perfect self-command." His death added the discipline of sorrow to the poet's experience of life. The friendship with Sir George Beaumont, to whom Wordsworth had turned in his hour of bereaveme nt, dated from two years before. It had been brought about by the good offices of Coleridge, and it g rew in int imacy and mutual esteem until Beaumont's death in 1827. Sir George was a descendant of Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, and had inherited or acquired his ancestor's taste for culture. To 36 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH the men of talent of his times he acted the part of a Maecenas, with more of the connoisseur and less of the patron about him. Wilkie and Landseer, Coleridge and Scott, Southey, who called him the most fortunate of men, and Byron, who came to sneer, gathered at his house ; Hay- don and the veteran Sir Joshua were often to be met there. Beaumont was a painter himself, and Wordsworth's lines on his *' Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm " are among his most happily inspired. Another taste which they had in common was for landscape-ga rdeni ng, and the poet's opera- tions at Sir George's country house in Coleorton led to a long interchange of letters. He completed his task by composing suitable inscriptions for various points of in- terest in the grounds. Besides the acquaintances to whom Sir George Beau- mont introduced him, Wordsworth, when in London in 1820, at the height of his reputation, met many distin- guished men. One evening, of which Lamb records that he supped in Parnassus, there were assembled round Crabb Robinson's table in Gloucester Place five immortals, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Thomas Moore, and Samuel Rogers. He knew, too, and sustained in various degrees as associates or correspondents, Carlyle, Haydon, HazUtt, De Quincey, John Wilson, Thomas Arnold, Rowan Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, Aubrey de Vere, and Sir Humphrey Davy; but he was really not intimate with any. Scott died in 1832, Coleridge in 1834, and Southey in 1843. To the two former sufficient reference has per- haps been made ; death is always a great tranquilliser, and C ^ridge^ death came as a heavy \^]a\v to the surviving friend : their early sympathy stood out in more bold relief than the later differences which had divided them. But with increasing age, and after the loss of Beaumont, BIOGRAPHY 37 Wordsworth retired more and more into his own family circle. Dora, his daughter, took the place of the sister Dorothy of his youth, and Edj^ax^ jQuiUinan, her h usband, b ecame his friend a s well as his son-in-law. Dora^s deat h in 1847 was a grief from which he did not recover. And here, perhaps, with the last of his friends, is the most fitting place to take leave of the poet. He had never bee n a sociable man, though the list of his acquaintances is so long; he had nev er bee n a man of easy intercourse, as the Coleridge story may staiid7"among other testimony, to witness. But his could have been no ordinary attraction which basked in the devotion of a sister, wife and daughter ; nor is there any misprisal of love in his relations to John Wordsworth and George Beaumont. He liked best, as he has told us, to sit by his own hearth-fire, *' And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle whispering its faint under-song." At home then, amid the peace that this aspiration typifies, on April 23rd, 1850, the aged poet died. He is buried in Grasmere churchyard, within the sound of Rotha's waters. After the close of the Wanderjahre^ and the settlement in the Lake district, Wordsworth's biographer Publications. , ... . , , , , , . ° ^ , . has little concern with the domestic life of his subject. It remains for him to enumerate the works which Wordsworth published, and to follow the course of his growing appreciation as a poet. And this distinction is the more essential, because Wordsworth himself sharply divided off his private from his public career. "On the b ^sis of hi s human life he reared a poetic one," as he wrote of Robert Burns ; and this poetic structure was designed to be viewed as a whole. The very order of publication 38 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH corresponds to this design, and supersedes the order of composition. Wordsworth was writing nearly every day, — writing or revising — but his poetic life is most faithfully related by pursuing the history of his published works. I left this part of our subject with the appearance, in 1 800- 1, of the new volume of Lyrical Ballads and the famous Preface on the Principles of Poetry with which Wordsworth chose to introduce it. The contrast between the extreme triviality of certain of the Ballads and the seriousness of purpose to which the Preface laid claim, made the next experiment of the young poet an object of amused anticipation. In 1807, Messrs Longman issued " Poems, in two volumes, by William Wordsworth, author of the Lyrical Ballads." Their chief contents include some of the best of the poet's productions. They contained many of the sonnets subsequently " dedicated to National Independence and Liberty," — among them On the Extinc- tion of the Venetian Republic^ To Toussaint V Ouverture^ The King of Sweden, and the series written in August and September 1802, in a vein of passionate patriotism. They contained further some of the " Miscellaneous Sonnets," — Westminster Bridge, " It is a beauteous evening," and After a Journey across the Hamilton (Hambleton) Hills. They contained the three sets of stanzas, To the Daisy, the Elegiac Stanzas, suggested by a Picture of Peek Castle in a Storm, Pai?ited by Sir George Beaumont ; and the Character of the Happy Warrior. Had Wordsworth ceased writing in this year the verdict of posterity would still have crowned him poet for the wonderful achievement of these volumes. Nevertheless, they were made the occasion of the first of the Edinburgh Review attacks. In an article of October 1807, the Ode on hiti^fiations of Immortality, a poem which has since won almost extravagant admiration, was BIOGRAPHY 39 characterised in that periodical as " the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication " ; while the Reviewer concluded with the ungrateful hope, " that there is now an end of this folly." Happily, the poet was undeterred by the perversity of a blind generation. He measured his obstinacy with theirs, and followed up his two volumes of miscellaneous verse by an instalment of his projected magnum opus. In 1 814, there was published in a quarto volume, "The Excursion, being a portion of the Recluse, a Poem." In the scheme of the Recluse^ the present portion was the second of three divisions. It remains a fragment, — in nine thousand lines, for of the rest of the work only Book I. of Part First was ever completed. Its immediate success was of the most meagre. The Edinburgh^ finding its warning of seven years ago neglected, greeted the Ex- cur sio ft with the notorious review from Jeffrey's pen, beginning " This will never do." " The case of Mr Wordsworth," it continued, "is now manifestly hopeless." It is fair to add that chief exception was taken to the character of the Pedlar-Philosopher; some passages of beauty were quoted and admired, but contempt and derision were poured upon the underlying theory of all Wordsworth's work, — the existence of beauty in the common-place. The Quarterly^ in a more temperate article written by Lamb,* begged the poet, in his own interests, to abandon his excess of naivete ; while the Monthly Review was yet more guarded in praise. Even Coleridge was dissatisfied; he had looked for a more definite system of philosophy, a more tangible reply to * But edited by Gifford. Lamb complained that he did not re- cognise his article : in reading The Excursion he had spent a day in heaven. 40 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Locke, and Pope, and the elder Darwin. The Edifiburgh at this time carried enormous weight, and the greater is the merit due to Southey, who, in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, December 24th, 1814, wrote: "Jeffrey, I hear, has written what his admirers call a crushing review of The Excursion. He might as well seat himself upon Skiddaw, and fancy he had crushed the mountain." Wordsworth's popularity increased very slowly. The ap- pearance, in 1815, of his classified poems and the Appe?idix and Essay justifying their classification, was received with almost universal disapproval, although such pieces as Laodajnia 2ind the "Liberty" sonnets of 1810 were now added to the collection. The White Doe of Rylstone, published in the same year with an engraving after Sir George Beaumont by Bromley, was considered by the Edinburgh Review to be " the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume." Nevertheless, out of this very article, the severity of the attack defeats itself No unprejudiced reader of the seventh canto of that poem could acquiesce in the Edi7iburgh summary : " the poor lady runs about for some years in a very disconsolate way in a worsted gown and flannel night-cap ; but at last the old white doe finds her out, and takes again to following her." Such criticism is no criticism. The Quarterly was respectful and appreciative; and — more significant still — in the July and December numbers, 18 18, of Blackwood^s Magazine^ Wordsworth was for the first time treated as a Master as well as a Poet. But in the following year, the growing faith of the critics was somewhat rudely tried by the two thin volumes Peter Bell and The JVaggoner. The Monthly was un- measured in abuse : Wordsworth was an infatuated poetaster, the Prince of Poetical Burlesque. In a later BIOGRAPHY 41 chapter it will be shown how far Wordsworth deferred to public opinion in the corrections which he introduced into Peter Bell ; it is sufficient to mention here, that the first two editions of that poem — and those only — con- tained the famous stanza, — *' Is it a party in a parlour ? Crammed just as they on earth were cramm'd — Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all damn'd." Still, with or without these lines, Peter Bell was a practical illustration of the new mission of poetry for which not even the Excursion and the White Doe could be considered an adequate preparation. It was with a sense of relief that those who were most anxious for the poet's reputation welcomed the volume of 1820, " The River Duddon^ a series of sonnets, Vaudracour a?td Julia, and other poems. To which is annexed, a topographical description of the country of the Lakes, in the north of England." Verse and prose were both on a sufficiently high level to atone for the caprice of Peter Bell. The Monthly Review was converted ; or rather, it reverted to the tone of June 1799, when it had discovered much " genius and originality " in the author of Lyrical Ballads ; and from this date, the fame of Wordsworth, both at home and abroad, has been steadily progressive. Against the last attack of the Edinburgh Reviewer, who wrote in November 1822, "The Lake School of Poetry, we think, is now pretty well extinct," can be set the pronouncement of Blackwood's in the August before : " Wordsworth is indisputably the most original Poet of the Age." Both articles were a propos of the 42 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH i volume of poetry, " Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, ; 1820." By a curious fatality, the restitution of the critics came at a time when the creative energy of the poet had ceased, j During all the years that the reviewers had abused him, ; and the public had left him unread, Wordsworth had been putting forth the work which has made him immortal. His golden decade, according to Matthew Arnold, was from 1798 to i8o8j certainly the two volumes of 1807 con-' tained some of the finest of his poems ; and equally j certain is it, that after 1820, when the circle of his, readers first began to widen, when the reviewers began to follow Blackwood's lead, and wrote articles on the ' poet's teaching, when selections were first made from his poems " for the use of schools and young persons," the poetic fire was almost extinguished. To 1822, besides the " Memorials, etc.," just mentioned, belongs the volume of 102 "Ecclesiastical Sketches," subsequently enlarged to a sonnet sequence of 132. In the same year, the Guide to the Lakes was first issued as a separate publication, and it was still possible for the tourists who used it to ask the author if he had written anything else. , Nevertheless, uniform editions of the "Poetical Works" followed one another fast, taking in the new poems as they appeared. In 1834, "Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems " was given to the world. It contained the Memorials of Wordsworth's visit to Scotland in 1831,, in connection with Sir Walter Scott ; a series suggested i by the supplementary tour of 1833; three longish pieces, of indifferent value, called The Ar??ientan Lady's Love^ The Russian Fugitive^ and The Egyptian Maid ; and some miscellaneous sonnets and memorials, besides two or- three " Evening Voluntaries," the most notable of which, , BIOGRAPHY 43 Co7nposed iipo)i a?i Eve?iing of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty^ had already been published in the River Duddon volume. Finally, in 1842, as the seventh volume of his collected works, Wordsworth consented to the appearance of " Poems, chiefly of Early and Late Years ; including The Borderers^ a Tragedy." The tragedy dated from 1795"^; Guilt and Sorrow was a new and revised version of The Female Vagra?it of 1794, and the interest of the volume, on the whole, was biographical rather than literary. The course of this survey, and its conclusion in a pub- lication which was a kind of concession to Honours. .... . ... popularity, brmgs us imperceptibly to the point when Wordsworth had survived his early detractors, and the new generation that had grown up around the prophet, delighted to do him honour. The Jast decade of his public life was an ample compensation for its opening years. Outwardly, at least : for we cannot but remember that the sister, who had shared his toil, was practically unobservant of its reward ; that the brother, who had been most in sympathy, and the friends, who had been loyallest in help, were dead ; in a word, that, in outliving his dis- praise, Wordsworth had outlived his ambition. But the tokens of esteem came thickly. Money was never a materiaT^objecTlto the frugal poet, and in 1842, he was able to resign, in favour of his second son, the Distributor- ship of Stamps for Westmoreland and Cumberland, to which he had been appointed in 18 13. Lord Lonsdale's interest had procured him the post ; it was a curious instance of State-aid to art in the dawn of the socialist century. More direct was the interposition of the Civil Listj-sriew months after his resignation, with an annuity of ^300. But honours without emolument attached were 44 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH also forthcoming. In 1837, "The C omplete W orks of William Wordsworth " were published^in Philadelphia, under the auspices of Henry Reed, Professor of English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania. With his American editor, Wordsworth exchanged many letters ; in one, dated August 19th, 1837, he wrote: "I cannot conclude without assuring you that the acknowledgements which I receive from the vast continent_ofAmerica are among the most grateful that reach me. What a vast field is there open to the English mind, acting through our noble language ! " In this connection may be mentioned the visit paid to Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, in the summerot 1833, by the eminent transatlantic philosopher, Ralph Wal do Emerson.^ Emerson saw in him, " a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles. . . . He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favourite topic — that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion to its oeing restrained by moral culture. Schools do no good — tuition is not education. . . . He has even said, what seemed a paradox, that^^they needed a civil war in America to teach the n ecessity ofJnIiEng^._the social ties ItFonger." He did noFlive to see the war accompHshed. The conversation presently turned on books. Wordsworth recited three of his sonnets for his visitor's entertainment : "I told him how much the few printed extracts had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished poems. He replied, he never was in haste to publish ; partly, because he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously received after printing ; but what he had written would be printed whether he lived or died. . . . He preferred such of his poems as touched the affections to any others ; for, whatever is didactic, — what BIOGRAPHY 45 theories of society, and so on, — might perish quickly ; but whatever combined a truth with ari afjfecti nn wag KrrifJ^a h dsi, good to-day and^_gQod_. fox ever. . . . Wordsworth honoured himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very willing not to shine ; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought." * Six years afterwards, in August 1839, Wordsworth received more exceptional honour from a nearer source. Oxford conferred upon him her honorary degree, and the scene m the Sheldonian Theatre was only less enthusiastic than upon the occasions of the visits of the Duke of Wellington. To Keble, author of the Christiafi Year, and then Professor of Poetry, fell the task of introducing the new D.C.L., and he quitted it appropriately ; for the seal of a pious life was stamped upon poet and professor. Finally, upon Southey's death, in March 1843, it became obvious that the symbol of the laureateship must pass into Wordsworth's keeping. The circumstances have often been told but they bear repetition : for we have to re- member that exactly half a century had gone by, since Wordsworth's earliest publication. It was a long appren- ticeship to serve to the slow favour of the public taste : and the point of the service is this, that Wordsworth was never tempted to court popularity by following fashion ; he had educated his public before the public crowned him. Therefore, when the aged poet at first refused the office, pleading his advanced years and his aversion from fresh duties, the reply that he received was unanswerable, because it came as the consummation to his work. " The offer," \^TOte Sir Robert Peel, " was made to you by the Lord Chamberlain, with my entire concurrence, not for * English Traits and Representative Men, Macmillan's Emerson, vol. iv., chapter i. 46 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH the purpose of imposing on you any nervous or disagree- able duties, but in order to pay you that tribute of respect which is justly due to the first of living poets. The Queen entirely approved of the nomination, and there is one unanimous feeling on the part of all who have heard of the proposal (and it is pretty generally known) that there could not be a question about the selection. ... I will undertake that you shall have nothing required from you. But as the Queen can select for this honourable appoint- ment no one whose claims for respect and honour, on account of eminence as a poet, can be placed in competi- tion with yours, I trust you will not longer hesitate to accept it." In this spirit Wordsworth held the Laureate- ship for seven silent years. Little more remains to be told. In 1850, four months after the Laureate's death, his wido w pu blished, under the name of The Prelude, tht poetic autobiography of his youth, from which quotations have been made in this chapter. It became the eighth volume of his collected works. The public rec eived it^ ith decorous respect, but left it for the most part unread. Yet more and more a small band of admirers laboured to popularise the poet. Hardly any great critic arose, who did not write in his praise. I would single out, from a mass of such essays, Walter Pater's in 1874, not alone for the great insight and delicate dis- crimination which always marked his work, but because it pointed out how desirable a possession would be a treasury of Wordsworth's golden pieces. Five years afterwards, the desire was granted ; and Matthew Arnold, here and else- where, rendered willing service to the Master. The Go lden Treasury selectio ns from Wordsworth, with Arnold's Preface, have gone far to make knownjiis merits. Already, however, as early as 1861, F. T. Palgrave had surprised his BIOGRAPHY 47 readers by the extent to which he had laid Wordsworth under contribution in the eponymous Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. Further, on September 29th, 1880, a " Wordsworth Society " was constituted at Grasmere, with the Bishop of St Andrews for President, and for Secretary and moving spirit Professor William Knight, who has deserved so well of the poet. The Society held seven annual meetings, at which papers were read and discussion invited ; it also published its transactions, which include, among many valuable brochures, the first Wordsworth bibliography. The successive Presidents, 1882-6, were Lord Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, His Excellency Russell Lowell, Lord Houghton, and Lord Selborne. The Society dissolved when it had completed its work of organising the labours of Wordsworthians. Those labours are not yet done, for the world that is slow to appreciate is slow also to change ; and day by day, though a genera- tion has grown up since the centenary of Wordsworth's birth, the love and influence of the poet are widening. His name, it is felt, is written in the golden roll of the poets who are always young. J CHAPTER II THE LONGER POEMS Wordsworth's visits to France during the Revolution years were the consecration of his genius. The Borderers. . They touched a visionary of the fields and woods to sympathy with humankind. They moved to numbers the inarticulate music that was within him by pro- viding a subject adequate to his speculative powers, con- fined hitherto to a too narrow range of thought. But the earliest attempt which Wordsworth made to wed this newly- ' found experience with his poetic faculty was by no means harmonious in its result. He wrote in 1795-6 a tragedy called The Borderers^ an unique experiment in that form of composition with which he was never himself satisfied. Coleridge, indeed, to whom he read it at the time, praised it in extravagant terms, possibly through the bias of similar inspiration on his own part in The Re?norse ; for, historically speaking. The Borderers belongs to the beginning of the reaction of English drama from the formal and conventional to the sentimental and psychological school. Following his : own judgment, Wordsworth laid it by for nearly fifty years, and it appeared for the first time among the "Poems, chiefly of Early and Late Years," of 1842. It added nothing to his reputation, a fact for which the poet was quite prepared. He acknowledges him- self (1842) that its acting qualities had not been pre- sent to him during its production, " but," he adds, " not the slightest alteration has been made in the conduct of the THE LONGER POEMS 49 story or the composition of the characters ; above all, in the two leading persons of the drama, I felt no inducement to make any change. The study of human nature suggests this a^\ful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so there are no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long residence in France ... I had frequent opportunities of being an eye- witness of this process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory that the tragedy of The Borderers was composed." Even so, taking the piece upon its own claim to merit as a study in the genesis of sin and in the inequalities of justice, it is not altogether a success. Its characterisation is unclear, and its treatment is unconvinc- ing. With the most amenable disposition to the didactic purpose of the play, the reader is left perplexed. Words- worth was grappling with a great idea, but the form which he chose was neither suitable to it nor consistent with itself. - In admitting this failure, Wordsworth must be given the full credit of its long suspension from publica- Tlie Prelude. . & r r tion. He himself felt very deeply the need of testing his powers, of reviewing at leisure the effects of the severe and sudden discipline through which he had passed in France, and of deciding, in the light of this review, the proper scope for his muse. This careful determination of the form which the circumstances of his discipline would impose, a determination preliminary to the work of his life, and insuring for it an accurate proportion between endeavour , and achievement, a determination, it must be added, which in minor poets is mainly a matter of imitation, is embodied in the poem appropriately called The Prelude. It is char- 50 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH acteristic of Wordsworth, not only that his poetic conscience dictated this task, but also that he withheld it from the public until the larger work should have been given to the world. The larger work, designed as The Recluse^ in three parts, of which The Excursion is the second, was never completed, and it was not until 1850, the last year of Wordsworth's life, that he consented to publish The Pre- lude^ which should have been, but now never could be, the motive and justification, the " ante-chapel " of the " Gothic church." Critics, therefore, who have seen in The Borderers a premature trial of skill, display better judgment than those who have regarded The Prelude as uncalled-for or self- conceited. It is, on the contrary, a beautiful example of the diffidence of creative genius. It stands alone in poetry as an idealised employment of the conventional invocation, by which a formal means is commonly found of detaching the muse from the scribe, and claiming the privilege of inspiration. Wordsworth genuinely, almost painfully, realised the burthen of preparation which such detachment requires. He searched the sources of his message, that he might fit it to the most convincing form. But The Prelude is more than this, more than the record in verse of " the growth of a poet's mind," wherein to discover its limits and its powers. Its biographical interest passes into the experience of humanity. Its invocation is no more personal, but universal — the client not Words- worth, but mankind ; the gift not poetry, but conduct. This success was not a matter of accident, for a man does not happen upon the categorical - imperative mood by chance. It was by the closest and most painstaking self- examination, by an industrious abstraction of every element in his experience of accident or chance, that Wordsworth's THE LONGER POEMS 5 1 record became a universal law. The even course of The Prelude^ illuminated at intervals by passages of transcen- dent insight which make, as it were, their own music, be- comes the best way of Hfe — from the finality of youthful acquirement through the disillusion of worldly wisdom to the peace of the " years that bring the philosophic mind." The Fre/ude, which was inscribed to S. T. Coleridge, is written in blank verse, reminiscent of Milton, though usually less majestic, owing to a less fastidious vocabulary and to a more numerous flow of metre. It received the advantage of the author's corrections during the greater \ part of his life, the final revision being in 1832. It is divided into thirteen^ books, of which ix., x. and xi. have I the most historical interest, as covering the short period \ when Wordsworth moved in the midst of the movement of the world. The higher theme of the whole,- the theme that comes inevitably forward through reflection on the facts of experience, is the equal spirit of joy running through all creation. The first two books deal with the influence of natural objects upon boyhood, while nature is still " intervenient and secondary," not sought for her own sake. The winds and cataracts and mountains are per- ceived with a kind of sixth sense, which, " in the dawn of being, constitutes a bond of union between Hfe and joy." Wordsworth discovers an affinity between our sense-per- ception and the organic beauty of the world which is conceded as a favour of reconcilement or consolation to our instinctive demand for joy. '^^The joy comes later, with ' the reason of after-life ; but because the treatment in these books is retrospective,* a suggestion is made throughout I of the change in standard that is to be. Meanwhile, it may be noted that it is to the strength of this sense that * Cp. pp. 5 and 6, supra. 52 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Wordsworth's descriptions of scenery owe their charm. He makes no attempt, as happens so often in Tennyson, to paint the picture, onomatopoeically, on to his page. He does not translate the thing seen into the terms of the sense of hearing ; but over and over again he gives us the simplest sketches of nature, whose poetic quality lies in their record of the sensuous pleasure of distance or per- spective, curve or line, calm or motion, by which their appeal is made to us.* Book iii., the period of early man- hood, marks the beginning of the change. The transition from the domination of the senses to the affections of the [intellect expresses itself at first either by a half-morbid itrospection (iii. 109-124, 144-159), or else by a relapse [into purposeless sensationalism (iii. 210-216, 246-258). A little later, in Book iv., the glimmerings of the new dawn appear : " A freshness also found I at this time In human life, the daily life of those Whose occupations really I loved," but the interest is not yet strong enough to bring forgetful- ness of self, with which wisdom begins. Book v., therefore, shows the assistance which reading can render to the birth of reason. The things of sense lose their noisy insistence | * In this context, the following contrast is, perhaps, not unfair : '* vSweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet ; Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees." Tennyson, Princess. " A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, One after one ; the sound of rain, and bees Murmuring ; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky." "^^ Wordsworth, To Sleep, \ THE LONGER POEMS 53 in the sight of the " living Presence." The generalisations of "reason, undisturbed by space or time," lead through abstractions to God : ** Visionary power Attends the motions of the viewless winds, Embodied in the mystery of words." * With the sixth book we arrive at the final interpretation of nature in the principle of joy. It is a half-frightened triumph of reason over sense, which " Leaves far behind life's treacherous vanities, For penitential tears and trembling hopes Exchanged, — to equalise in God's pure sight Monarch and peasant." Here, for the first time, the grand note of Wordsworth's teaching is struck, and with it his language rises spontane- ously to sublimer heights. The style of sensuous description is abandoned for an imperious revelation of the invisible world, in which the soul of man is disclosed " blest in thoughts That are their own perfection and reward, Strong in herself, and in beatitude That hides her, like the mighty flood of Nile Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds To fertilise the whole Egyptian plain." In the earlier moments of prophecy it is hardly collected language ; certainly it is no practical counsel that the recog- nised glory of reason dictates. The painfully sought in- * Cp. The Exacrsion, iv. 73, where, in an Hegelian "bacchantic intoxication " of abstract thought, the power of this vision is explained : *' Immutably survive For our support, the measures and the forms Which an abstract intelligence supplies ; Whose kingdom is, where time and space are not," 54 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH spiration is as yet too wonderful a power for the poet to write his message calmly. Such a passage as the following is almost extravagant in its self-oblivion, its cosmic con- sciousness, its promise of the harmony to be wrought for humankind : — ** The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky. The rocks that muttered close upon our ears. Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream. The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light. Were all the workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree ; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end." — But we meet here the tnotif which runs through all his inspired work, of the unity in diversity, revealing God in the metaphysical and democracy in the social sphere. For at this point Wordsworth, the poet of the affections, is born, and from this point to the end of The Prelude his invoca- tion slowly gathers its response in a vision of true equality, in an ideal system of democracy, rising like a Phcenix from the" ashes of the Bastille, for the patient striving of a wiser generation. " What one is, why may not millions be ? " Wordsworth asks in the thirteenth book, and this theme has become "a lasting inspiration, sanctified by reason, blest by faith." To it accordingly he dedicates his life, for the prophetic fire has descended, and the poet is in- spired. THE LONGER POEMS 55 In speaking of Wordsworth as a democrat, a mental attitude is liable to be assumed which would The Recluse. ,. . ^ ^xr i i divert attention from Wordsworth as a poet. It was his own perpetual misfortune that he wore his con- science on his sleeve. We cannot but admire the spirit of scrupulous self-searching in which he built up his cathedral of verse ; but our appreciation of its beauties is hardly assisted by the structural details which the builder records. If we keep his own very happy metaphor of the ante-chapel and the Gothic church, we shall retain all that is required to understand his purpose. I am convinced that a part at least of the unfavourable criticism to which Wordsworth was exposed during his life-time was due to the pedantic curiosity of his own prefaces and notes. A great poet, like other great men, is to some extent taken at his own appraisal. Wordsworth seemed to make a deliberate attempt to pervert the estimation of his critics. He wrote lofty verse, and unwrote it in niggardly prose. To exemplify the former, the passage quoted just now from T/ie Prelude was hardly typical; the freshness of his passion was overmastering him. But in the following lines from The Recluse,^ the expression is more restrained and is characteristic of Wordsworth at his highest : " By words Which speak of nothing more than what we are, Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures ; . . . — Such grateful haunts foregoing, if I oft Must turn elsewhere, — to travel near the tribes And fellowships of men, and see ill sights Of madding passions mutually inflamed ; Must hear Humanity in fields and groves * The fragment (Book i. ) from the first part of the poem projected under that name, of which 7'he Excursion would have been the second part. 56 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Pipe solitary anguish ; or must hang Brooding above the fierce confederate storm Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities, — may these sounds Have their authentic comment ; that even these Hearing, I be not downcast or forlorn." If we contrast with this fine exordium a would-be illumin- ating passage from the preface ( 1 8 1 4) to The Excursioti, we shall see the injustice which Wordsworth did himself by drawing attention to the mental process of the poet, while neglecting the hterary quality of the poetry.* " He under- took," he says, " to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them. That work \The Prelude] . . . has been long finished ; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it was the determination to compose a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society ; and to be entitled ' T/ie Recluse ' ; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement. The preparatory poem . . . conducts the history of the Author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to him- self." It reads like a Blue-Book on the ordnance-survey of Parnassus, and to let Wordsworth speak to us in this way is to put a weapon in the hands of those who find The Ex- cursion tedious and unpoetical. * The contrast is the more instructive, because Wordsworth's repu- diation ("by words which speak of nothing more than what we are ") of poetic diction, as such, as a false idol of convention, may be seen from the lines quoted to have been considerably modified in practice. Note the obvious alliterations with s, v, tr, m, f ; the subtler changes rung on the sounds in brooding above . . . barricadoed j as well as the masterly variations between common and rare words. The passage would reward a more detailed study : cp. F. W. H. Myers' Wo'dsworth^ pp 107-8. I THE LONGER POEMS 57 The poem has no doubt a notable aspect as a system of politico-scientific thought. The scheme of 'democracy to which Wordsworth's disillusion had converted him was, in essentials and in many particulars, the practical democracy towards which the nineteenth century has tended. To us, reviewing this period at our leisure, the perspective of time reveals the precise place that Wordsworth challenges in the history of English thought. Professor Masson, writing in i860 on Recent British Philosophy^ remarked on the " loss and imbeciHty " of excluding Wordsworth from his preliminary survey ; and we, who inherit another generation's progress, must admit even more willingly the poet's right to the title of thinker too. His was no unbodied voice, like Shelley's, carrying our souls away in a riot of transubstantial being ; he was no longer anarchist nor atheist, forgetting God in Godwin. A recent French writer * has even discovered what for the poet's fame were as well forgotten, the polemical origin of certain verses, where he examined the very making of English thought, and tested it Hnk by Hnk. Constructively, then, his democracy was conservative. He retained existing divisions of society, and affected no disguise of their utility in stormy protests against their artificial character. The whole value of his French experience lay in his conviction, that no manner of hasty * Professor Emile Legouis. La Jeiiiiesse de W. Etude sur le Priliide. Paris, Masson, 1896. M. Legouis traces in considerable detail Wordsworth's revulsion in sentiment and conviction from Godwinian pessimism (in which The Borderers was composed) to the practical democratic ideal of The Excursion. Cp. op. cit., pp. 264 and foil., and pp. 310 and foil. " II serait aise de poursuivre cette etude et de montrer Wordsworth reconstruisant un a un, par I'observation des humbles, les sentiments dont Godwin avait depouille rhomme ideal " (p. 316). 58 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH legislation, hardly to be distinguished from revolution, could permanently influence the happiness of the race. True reform must be from within, — equalise the capacities of men, and they will adapt themselves to their opportunities. The false counsel of perfection had said, Equalise the opportunities, and let the capacities alone. In this way, Wordsworth was as far removed from the demagogue as from the visionary. His democratic note is that of the age, because it struck on character, not on works. He is primarily a moral, only secondarily a social reformer ; and, in this light, we are justified in passing by the balder strata of The Excursion. For the concrete expressions of reform, whatever their interest to the statesman or the politician, are only so many incidental illustrations of the spirit in which the whole is conceived. Wordsworth's supreme merit through it all lay in a consecration of the common- place. He showed the poetry in the life of the poor, in so far as the poetry of life is the capacity for noble being. He aimed, through the presentation of details, at realising the permanent idea which is their content ; and it was this, more than anything, that J. S. Mill meant when he wrote, " From them [Wordsworth's poems] I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence." In judging The Excursion^ therefore, we must beware of what Matthew Arnold would have called the Social Science Congress frame of mind. The Excursion is a poem of very leisurely progress, the interest of which lies partly in the moral purpose of the writer, but the beauty of which is mainly to be discovered on the bare grand table-lands of poetry that it attains, where alone the rapt peace and trans- THE LONGER POEMS 59 cendental imagination of the poet found perfect expression. Tennyson's bars of music ascending on his wreaths of smoke were not more wonderfully composed, — " wound and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought," * — than was Wordsworth's harmony of form and matter. He, too, was carried outside himself, and followed rather than guided his pen, when he dealt with the joy of ordered liberty radiating from the divine Creator to the meanest of His created works. While his muse lingered among the works, his style was simple and convincing, — ' ' From the bench I rose ; And, looking round me, now I first observed The corner stones, on either side the porch, With dull red stains discoloured, and stuck o'er With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep, That fed upon the Common, thither came Familiarly, and found a couching-place Even at her threshold." t — When it rose on that pillar of light, to use a Platonic meta- phor, which holds the universe together, and connects every phenomenon with God, his style rose with it to an appro- priate level, equally unforced. In neither case is anything artificial ; there is no conscious embellishment of the style, confusing the limitations of the material. It has, indeed, hardly been sufficiently remarked how spontaneously and comprehensively — with a margin to spare, as it were, — Wordsworth's language was equal to his subject. On planes of thought where metaphysicians labour obscurely, Words- worth moves with an assured and buoyant freedom. His effect is as natural as his effort was unconscious : * In Memoriam^ xcv. t The Excursion, i. 742. This is the Wordsworth of the " And never lifted up a single stone " type, — the line which Matthew Arnold gives as a touchstone of his style. 6o A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH " The sun is fixed, And the infinite magnificence of heaven Fixed, within reach of every human eye ; The sleepless ocean murmurs for all ears ; The vernal field infuses fresh delight Into all hearts .... Strange, should He deal herein with nice respects, And frustrate all the rest ! Believe it not : The primal duties shine aloft — like stars ; The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless, Are scattered at the feet of Man — like flowers .... .... He, whose soul Ponders this true equality, may walk The fields of earth with gratitude and hope ; Yet, in that meditation, will he find Motive to sadder grief, as we have found ; Lamenting ancient virtues overthrown, And for the injustice grieving, that hath made So wide a difference between man and man."* The poem moves mainly on the discursive level. Its lesson is faith, — faith working through love ; ** Life, I repeat, is energy of love Divine or human ; exercised in pain, In strife, in tribulation ; and ordained, If so approved and sanctified, to pass, Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy." f But its method is the historical, teaching by examples. What, then, are these examples ? Wordsworth's dramatic ; faculty was Sophoclean. His characters in The Excursion have no names ; they are types of being, not persons of drama. In the first of the nine books into which the epic is divided, the Poet — who narrates in the first person throughout — meets with the Wanderer, the heir of mediaeval | minstrelsy, a type since decayed from English countryside, * Excursion, ix. 210, 235, 247. t lb, V. 1012. These were favourite lines with the poet himself; cp. Knight's note in loc. in the Eversley edition. THE LONGER POEMS 6 1 who followed, at the time that Wordsworth wrote, an honour- able calling as the medium of communication between village and village. He gathered by the way a stock of experience and sympathy to guide him in his unique position of confidence and trust. The Wanderer of Words- worth's delineation is partly a portrait of a sometime genuine pedlar,* partly a sketch of the best way of rural life, to which the poet himself under different circumstances would have turned. Thus, in a sense, the Poet and the Wanderer are both local variations of Wordsworth's own nature. The first meeting of these kindred spirits on a Somersetshire common is made memorable by the story — drawn from the Wanderer's store — of Margaret, the last inhabitant of a deserted cottage on which " the calm, oblivious tendencies Of nature, 'mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers, And silent overgro wings, " had worked their will unchecked, yet left to a more in- timate vision so excelling a sense of final beauty and peace, " That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief That passing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream." In Book ii., where the poet is led " towards the hills," and the scenery changes with the walk to that of Langdale and Grasmere, we are introduced to the Solitary. The lessons of his experience occupy this and the two succeed- ing books, which cover in the main the same ground as ix., x. and xi. of The Prelude, for the Solitary, like Wordsworth, has passed in the course of the French Revolution through the slough of despair to the need of " Despondency Corrected" {Excursion, iv.). Thus this group of three * James Patrick, a distant connection of Mrs Wordsworth, 62 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH books repeats on a bigger scale the theme of the first, and the story of Margaret serves to introduce the story of the Solitary, by presenting in miniature the proposition there elaborated at large, that Nature, in her humblest and greatest issues alike, demands the same principles of human conduct. Opportunities may differ, but the capacity must be the same in kind. The Solitary, a " contamination," a la Latin drama, of several characters, among whom a Mr Fawcett, a dissenting minister and Revolution extremist, had been the chief, is supposed to have lost, by the sudden death of wife and children, the softening, reconciling interests of private life. He threw, as a lover, the whole force of his eloquence and passion into the public cause " of Christ and civil liberty As one, and moving to one glorious end." The glory turned to tinsel and wind.* Like a sheen or a breath, it vanished, and in Book iv. the Poet and the Wanderer combine to repair the shock of his disappoint- ment. Neither here nor elsewhere does Wordsworth indulge in the licence of aristocratic prejudice in which Tennyson condemned "the red fool-fury of the Seine." The horrors of the Revolution were too near and too real to him for any such inaccessible disdain. He had seen its misery, and had borne his part, and he, too, could ask quis talia fdndo . . . temperet. a lacrimis ? So these books of the Solitary, who had retired to " live and die forgotten " among the heathery table-lands of Cumberland, are com posed with breadth and depth. They have that so-called * *' Thus was I reconverted to the world ; Society became my glittering bride, And airy hopes my children." £xc. iii. 734. Solitary, loquitur. THE LONGER POEMS 63 inevitable note, which comes of a studied sanity in criticism. Wordsworth, speaking by his types of faith and order, Hfts the discussion out of the yea and nay of political partisan- ship. He converts the Solitary to the truth of that ampler vision with which 2 he Prelude had inspired him. " Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop, Than when we soar " (iii. 230), and stooping to gather herbs of healing and flowers of consolation along pedestrian ways, patiently, like Plato, taking the longer route, to err no more under false moons that fade, the venerable Wanderer restores the moral balance of his friend. *' — By thy grace The particle divine remained unquenched ; And, 'mid the wild weeds of a rugged soil, Thy bounty caused to flourish deathless flowers, From paradise tra.nsplanted : wintry age Impends ; the frost will gather round my heart ; If the flowers wither, I am worse than dead ! " (iv. 50). It is in this faith that the Pastor, who enters with Book v., and tempers the blunter edge of the discussion until the end of the epic, prevails to show that "love and im- mortality " conquer and transfigure the accidents of fate. Carlyle once said that the modern epic will begin, not Arms and the Man, but Tools and the Man The White Doe J ^ j^ ^^^ somewhat in this spirit that of Rylstone, 1807-10. Wordsworth conceived his unequally executed Excursion^ and in passing from it to The White Doe of Rylstone we pass from the region of modern epos to that of Spenserian romance. We learn from the Dedication (18 15) to Mrs Wordsworth that this poem was composed in the atmosphere of The Faery Queen^ where Wordsworth used to repair the ravages of materialism 64 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH during the years (1806-15) in which he was employed in interpreting providence to a sceptical generation.* The poem was equal to its burthen. Spenser's fancy and Spenser's tenderness seem to echo through its music, and the milk-white doe steals in and out among the chords like a piece of magic imagery, half-human, half- fawn, and therefore, wholly allegorical, winning for Emily, the maiden " consecrated " to the discipline of honour j; — that noblest renunciation to which man can rise — some- thing of the communion between created things by which ! the universe moves in rhythm. This victory of design, ', threading the inconsequence of seeming, is only hinted i at here, not elaborated in any system of thought ; for the | poem is narrative, as its second title. The Fate of the Norto?is, shows. It is an epic in miniature with super- human machinery ; an Idyll of the Queen, if the associa- tion of this phrase permit it, relating the rise of the \ Northern lords, in the twelfth year of Elizabeth's reign, - to marry Mary of Scotland to the Duke of Norfolk and ; restore the Catholic Church. Wordsworth's material lay s ready to hand in a contemporary ballad. The Earls of \ Northumberland and Westmoreland had taken to the field 5 at Wetherby, having summoned the representative of the - \ ancient Nortons, Richard Norton, Esquire, to bring and \ bear the standard of their host. Norton arrived with i eight sons in train, to whom ultimately, in York prison 5 and under sentence of death, comes Francis, the eldest i of the nine brothers, who had followed their destiny un- \ armed, in atonement for his brief interval of prudent \ hesitation. To Francis is entrusted the task of taking [ the banner home again, and laying it to rest in Bolton ( * Cp. Sonnets, Personal Talk, iii. (1806), with the Dedication in f question. ' THE LONGER POEMS 65 Abbey on St Mary's Shrine. But during his journey he is overtaken by the Earl of Sussex, by whom, in his dying sight, the standard of his family is borne away, — " But not before the warm life-blood Had tinged more deeply, as it flowed, The wounds the broidered Banner showed."* This was the fate of the Nortons, a tragic action with an epic dignity, a succession of incidents and a final catastrophe, such as Scott might have turned to heroic verse without straying beyond the confines of history. Wordsworth approached it from an " entirely different " standpoint. As he says in the prefatory lines borrowed from The Borderers^ "Action is transitory — a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle — this way or that — 'Tis done " ; or, as he repeats in his compendiously conscientious way, — " Everything that is attempted by the principal person- ages in The White Doe fails, so far as its object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual it succeeds. . . . [This is] its legitimate catastrophe, far too spiritual a one for instant or widely-spread sympathy, but not, therefore, the less fitted to make a deep and per- manent impression upon that class of minds who think and feel more independently, than the many do, of the surfaces of things and interests transitory, because belonging more to the outward and social forms of life than to its internal spirit." In other words, what he elsewhere calls the business parts of the story, the interest of the drama of personal prowess, are of less moment to him than the spiritual being which is thus translated into action. His aim, in The White Doe, is to take us behind the stage on * Canto vi. 132. £ 66 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH which Mary and Elizabeth, Percy and Neville, Norton and [ his sons play their parts, and to show us, if he can, the j purpose of it all in the vision of man's capacity for noble \ being raised even by the fraction of a degree. If man | works out his perfection through suffering, Wordsworth concerns himself with the stages of the perfection rather than the phases of the suffering. In all his semi-dramatic | undertakings, he is the poet of the fifth act. | On the present occasion, Wordsworth attains this aim, i first, by bringing to the fore the figure of Emily, daughter of . Richard Norton, and, eventually, the sole survivor of her ,' kin in Rylstone Hall ; secondly, by incorporating into his I narrative the legend of the doe, who, " say the aged people i of the neighbourhood, long continued to make a weekly pilgrimage from Rylstone over the fells of Bolton, and was constantly found in the Abbey churchyard during divine service, after the close of which she returned home as regularly as the rest of the congregation."* Like Una and her lamb, Emily and the doe seem to grow together by their likeness in purity, until at the end of the poem [ we arrive at the conception of an incarnate whiteness, in which the pains and perplexities of earth are washed away, and a beatific peace alone remains, like the motherhood ' on the face of the Madonna. The doe becomes a divine ' messenger, the symbol of enduring innocence, though the land is drenched in blood. Into the beauty of this holi- ness, sorrow-stricken, orphaned and desolate, Emily tran--' quilly steps, to exchange it only for death. It is a triumph i of thought, this x,vJa,p(ri; rojv rra^r^iLarm which Wordsworth i effects. Suffering is transformed by the faith that supports it; pity and fear are justified in the final purpose of an all-wise God, typified by the purest of his creatures. * History of the Deanay of Craven^ by Dr Whitaker. THE LONGER POEMS d"] Thirdly, Wordsworth introduced into his poem much of the scenery through which the "soft-paced doe" passed in her journeyings from Rylstone to Bolton. To-day, Bolton Abbey is a slender moss-grown ruin, and the valley of the Wharfe and its surrounding hills are largely pro- tected for tourists and sportsmen in their several require- ments. Nevertheless, the scenery of Craven, '• the shy recess Of Barden's lowly quietness," and the slopes of moorland from Barden Tower to Skipton, straggling down its hill, retain much of the beauty which Wordsworth has interpreted. The beauty, in the valley especially, is of the sunny order, to which the murmur of the Wharfe, and the changeful light of ancient woods contribute the chief share. It is, therefore, peculiarly the scenery which Wordsworth would have chosen as the medium of nature's healing process. Something in conclusion must be said of the form which the poem assumes. Whenever Emily or the doe appears — and Coleridge objected to the poem that they appear too seldom — the magic spell of a spiritual inspiration seems to govern the style. It takes on that note — not a technical one — of the highest poetry of the emotions, which thrills us with a sense of groping after a lost affection, after a receding power of sympathy, calling us, half-mockingly, to a loftier plane of sense-perception. This elusive voice, heard now and again through the ages, in a line of Virgil, or a stanza of Dante or Keats, has a mystic far-away cadence, the kind of enchantment which is implied by the conventional halo in painting. We meet it here, touched by a slow Spenserian melody, in the first and last of the seven cantos of The White Doe. Take, for 68 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH instance, her earliest appearance, and the sensuous thrill of wonder that is produced : *' Soft ! — the dusky trees between, And down the path through the open green, . . . Comes gliding in with lovely gleam, Comes gliding in serene and slow, Soft and silent as a dream, A solitary Doe ! White she is as lily of June, And beauteous as the silver moon. When out of sight the clouds are driven And she is left alone in heaven ; * Or like a ship, some gentle day, In sunshine sailing far away, A glittering ship that hath the plain Of ocean for her own domain, .... .... until at last, Beside the ridge of a grassy grave. In quietness she lays her down ; Gentle as a weary wave Sinks, when the summer breeze hath died, Against an anchored vessel's side." This is poetry at its height ; the restrained language of a poet who has seen glimpses of things set in more than mortal space and time, through " magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." Formally, again, the poem is the most polished that Wordsworth left. Though continuous in metre, it is saved to some degree by the restraint of rhyme from the un- conditioned freedom of composition which sometimes betrays The Prelude or The Excursion into long-winded- ness. It benefitted, too, more obviously than any other of Wordsworth's poems, by a thorough revision to which it was subjected in 1836. In editions since 1815 and * Cp. Intimations of Immortality, I3-I4' THE LONGER POEMS 69 previous to 1836 very few alterations had been made, but in the latter year the author devoted himself to its improve- ment with a full consciousness of its defects. He struck out redundancies, shortened periphrases, and cleared up obscurities of expression. He gave, too, considerable labour to working up those parts which he had somewhat scamped before, dealing with the matter less attractive to himself of historical action. Two examples will perhaps suffice. The first is a very simple but admirable cor- rection with a view to terseness. Four lines of 1815 — *' Such conflict long did he maintain Within himself, and found no rest ; Calm liberty he could not gain ; And yet the service was unblest" — are reduced to two in 1837, to their great gain in force and intelligibility : " Such conflict long did he maintain, Nor rest nor liberty could gain " (vi. 43-4). The second passage shows the difficulty which Wordsworth felt in constructive narration. Scott would have seized the swing of this scene at the first attempt ; Wordsworth hardly attains it in the second. In 1 8 1 5 the death of Francis Norton, under the circumstances related above, was described as follows : " lie from a Soldier's hand had snatched A spear, — and with his eyes he watched Their motions, turning round and round : — His weaker hand the banner held ; And straight by savage zeal impelled Forth rushed a. pikeman, as if he, Not without harsh indignity, Would seize the same : — instinctively — To smite the ofl"ender — with his lance Did P'rancis from the brake advance ; 70 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH But, from behind, a treacherous wound Unfeeling, brought him to the ground, A mortal stroke : — oh, grief to tell ! Thus, thus, the noble Francis fell : There did he He, of breath forsaken ; The banner from his grasp was taken, And borne exultingly away ; And the body was left on the ground where it lay." It is as bad as some of the most laboured fighting epi- sodes in the latter books of the yEneid; but, to the better fortune of his readers, Wordsworth, unlike Virgil, lived long enough to revise his work. In 1837, the passage was rewritten, with the rape of the banner centrally brought out and the feebleness of expression expunged. It then read : *' He from a Soldier's hand had snatched A spear, — and, so protected, watched The Assailants, turning round and round ; But from behind with treacherous wound A Spearman brought him to the ground. The guardian lance, as Francis fell. Dropped from him ; but his other hand The Banner clenched ; till, from out the Band, One, the most eager for the prize. Rushed in ; and — while, O grief to tell ! A glimmering sense still left, with eyes Unclosed the noble Francis lay — Seized it, as hunters seize their prey ; But not before the warm life-blood Had tinged with searching overflow, More deeply tinged the embroidered show Of His whose side was pierced upon the Rood ! " Finally, in 1845, thirty years after the first publication, the four concluding lines were realtered to the beautiful text that now stands : " But not before the warm life-blood Had tinged more deeply, as it flowed, The wounds the broidered Banner showed, Thy fatal work, O maiden, innocent as good " (vi. 1 19 135). THE LONGER POEMS 7 I Attention was thus recalled to Emily, who had worked the design of Christ upon the standard. Here is perhaps a fitting place to deal briefly with Wordsworth's habit of revision in general. For the recast of Tke White Doe is not only instructive as to what Virgil might have made of the ^neid, had his life been spared, but it is interesting as forming an exception to the poet's more common practice. His editors are always perplexed by the difficulty of selecting the " best " text. If they choose that which received the author's final sanction, they are scarcely less liable to give what is poetically inferior than if they invariably print the readings of each edttio pri?tceps\ on the other hand, out of an accumulated mass of alternatives, no critic of an almost contemporary writer can claim to finally establish the best reading, as in the case of a classic of antiquity. It is often said, in Words- worth's dispraise, that his instinct in revision was less sure than Tennyson's. To read the latter in successive editions is an education in art, and we can sometimes watch the " Tennysonian note " struggling upwards to complete expression. But this kind of censure, though its effect is true, is nevertheless not quite fair. The matter goes deeper than the judge's instinct for beauty to an initial divergence in the poets' point of view. Wordsworth's famous dictum as to the identity in language of poetry and prose was a canon of reaction, as much against the stilted and conventional school mainly of the imitators of Pope, as against his own early errors. Before his contact with reality through his experience in France, which touched him first to a destructive despair, as in The Borderers, and next, by invocation through The Prelude, to a slow and constructive faith, as in The Excursion, Wordsworth, too, had had his period of pre-Raphaelitism in poetic diction. 72 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH To this we shall return in the next chapter. It is relevant here to note how powerfully the sense of his mistake and the fear of a relapse affected, not so much his judgment, as his conception of the duties of a judge. The White Doe being excepted, he approached his task of correction from a different standpoint from Tennyson's. His pen in revision concerned itself mainly with the thought rather than the form. Form had misled his early genius into bizarreries and conceits of style ; in later life, therefore, the mere presence of style, superadded as such, conveyed occasionally to his morbid remorse a feeling of distrust and suspicion. Often enough he sacrificed linguistic beauty, spontaneously attained in the glow of creation, to the chilling quality of logical precision, and, puzzled, as it were, by his own excellence, exerted himself for a pedantic reconstruction of his musical thought. A single example from Elegiac Stanzas will illustrate this trait. In 1805 Wordsworth wrote : " and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land. The consecration and the poet's dream." In 1820 he rewrote these lines with a view to removing what he must have regarded as the meretricious adorn- ment of style, and until 1832, when wiser outside counsels restored the original reading, the text ran — " and add a gleam, The lustre, known to neither sea nor land, But borrowed from the youthful poet's dream." It was what he wanted to say. It was not the inevitable way of saying it. While this reaction to humble life as the exercise-ground of morals, was strong upon him in his tranquil Lakeland THE LONGER POEMS J^ home, Wordsworth wrote two pieces, published within a few days of one another, in 1819, but composed Peter Bell and ^ • . i r n ^ t> n • The Waggoner. ^^ ^" interval of seven years, Peter Bell m 1798, and The Waggoner in 1805. They were distinguished by Wordsworth from the bulk of his minor poems, not only by their greater length, but also by their titles being printed in capital letters in his table of con- tents.* Peter Bell was placed at the end of the Poems of the Imagination, as belonging to that category, rather than to any other, and The JVaggoner, after moving about between the Poems of the Fancy and those of the Affec- tions, finally received a place at the close of the former in independent type. Their contemporary appearance, the distinction thus paid to them, and a certain likeness in excess of naivete, admit of their being treated together. For Peter, the Potter, and Benjamin, the Waggoner, are both types taken from that class of society in which Wordsworth discovered the seeds of human perfection, the class which it has been the distinguishing mark of the nineteenth century to educate and elevate to their present and future responsibihties. Peter Bell is the more ambitious poem of the two. It tells in fustian the story of a conversion, or rather of an initiation of the humblest of acolytes into the service of nature, in whose temple Wordsworth was priest. It tells it — and this is the remarkable point, and the point at which it has been easiest to mock and to parody — not vaguely nor by abstract reflections, but by tracing con- . secutively and subjectively rendering the steps in the *^ process of transition. Peter Bell, when we first meet him, is a big, loutish fellow, for whom sunrise and sunset, the river flowing to the sea, the blossoms of spring upon its * See the stereotyped edition of 1845. 74 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH banks, the faith of dumb animals, the mirth of children, and the innocence of women, all the joy and order of the world, attuned for patient ears to perfect music, held no meaning nor message. He slouched heavily through life, deaf and blind to its fuller harmonies. When we leave him, he is a changed man. He has had that " call " to goodness, which used to play so prominent a part in the dispensary of a certain school of theologians, which, how- ever, is represented here as no verbal cant or recantation, but as the conclusion of a series of experience dependent on a strong emotion. In Wordsworth's mood of simple wonder, which marked his reaction from a foregone philosophy, nothing is described but everything related. Peter's insensibility, the selfish security of a man who has never voyaged far enough through the seas of thought, to reach even the shallows of doubt,* is admirably expressed : '* He trudged along through copse and brake, He trudged along o'er hill and dale ; Nor for the moon cared he a tittle, And for the stars he cared as little, And for the murmuring river Swale " (331-5). Presently, on his journey, he espies a promising short cut, and the detachment between himself and the beauties which it opens out serves to emphasize this indifference. Scales are hung upon his eyes, and his sight is literal, not interpretative : " Beneath the clear blue sky he saw A little field of meadow ground ; But field or meadow name it not ; Call it of earth a small green plot With rocks encompassed round " (366-70). * Cp. Wordsworth's phrase about Newton, "For ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." — Prelude. THE LONGER POEMS 75 Nevertheless, it is in this " scene of soft and lovely hue " that the emotion is to come to him which will render his succeeding experience in the terms of a novel sense. The instrument of revelation is the humblest, for in the dell is an apparently masterless ass, which Peter would appropriate for the purposes of his trade. To his con- fusion, the ass will not budge ; and though Peter, struggling against a sense of the uncanny, beats and harries the animal, it yet sinks uncomplainingly to the ground and turns its gaze upon the river. And now the strange double story begins, of nature's simple manifestations working on the man's fears in that lonely place like a superhuman being, and of Peter's indifference changed to defiance and his defiance changed to submission. He flogs the prostrate ass, and it brays, and at the sound his cruel humour rejoices, *' But in the echo of the rocks Was something Peter did not like " (469-70). He returns to his cowardly work, and the result is re- peated, — " What is there now in Peter's heart, Or whence the might of this strange sound ? The moon uneasy looked and dimmer, The broad, bhie heavens appeared to glimmer, And the rocks staggered all around" (481-5). At this moment he discovers the dead body of the ass's master lying on the bed of the stream, and the terror of the discovery in his overwrought mood completes his cure. Nature has played upon his cowardice, and con- quered the strength of his insensibility. The process is continued throughout the remainder of the story. Peter Bell obeys the expressed wish of the dumb beast, and suffers it to bear him to its home. He is convinced that 76 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH punishment will fall upon him for the wrong which he did to the dead man by abusing and maltreating his faithful attendant. A weird cry is in his ears, the cry of the drowned man's orphan. Voices rustle in the woods, call- ing vengeance on his cruelty ; " ' Where there is not a bush or tree, The very leaves they follow me — So huge hath been my wickedness ' " (708-10). The stones, gleaming mysteriously in the moonlight, or the dust, sleeping upon the lane, take suddenly the stain of blood for the wounds bleeding on the body of the ass which had bled for the dead man's sake. And when Peter tried to defend himself by protesting in his own mind that but for him the drowned man would never have had Christian burial, suddenly there came to him, God knows whence, the memory and visible ghost of a girl whom he had ruined, who had died calling her unborn baby Benoni, child of sorrow. Across this terror of the night hardly to be borne, broke the strong voice of a Methodist preacher, whose door he was passing by, crying aloud, "Repent." '* Repent, repent ! though ye have gone, Through paths of wickedness and woe, After the Babylonian harlot ; And, though your sins be red as scarlet, They shall be white as snow ! (950-54). By this, and by the gratitude of the widow, Peter Bell is finally healed. He " Forsook his crimes, renounced his folly, And, after ten months' melancholy, Became a good and honest man " (i 133-5). What is the value of this poem ? It was parodied THE LONGER POEMS "J "J almost before it was published. It has been ridiculed without being read. Five lines of description — " In vain, through every changeful year, Did Nature lead him as before ; A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more " (246-50). — have been detached as typical of Wordsworth's power, and in their jejune detachment have been made the butt of indiscriminate sneers and smiles. The world, the worldly world, so to speak, has never quite swallowed Peter Bell. A reserve of self-consciousness has stood in his way. The unheightened simplicity of his story touches the fringe of bathos. Poetry, it is felt, has not been dignified in him, but degraded. The mark of the tract is upon him, and the means of his conversion savour of the revivalist meet- ing. I cannot but think that such criticism convicts itself. There are indeed inadequacies of expression in the poem, less to-day than when it was first pubHshed, but they occur in its business portions, always so difficult to Wordsworth, in its technical setting in the middle of a conversation, and in the narrating of the bare events, as such. It is easy, for instance, to contrast to Wordsworth's disadvantage the opening (Part First) of Peter Bell with the beginning of Tennyson's Princess. Bess compares ill with Lilia, though the stanza of 1819 — " ' Good Sir ! ' — the Vicar's voice exclaimed, ' You rush at once into the middle ' ; And little Bess, with accent sweeter, Cried ' O dear Sir ! but who is Peter ? ' Said Stephen, ' 'Tis a downright riddle ! ' " — "was omitted in subsequent editions ; and Wordsworth's Squire, with his 78 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH " against the rules Of common sense you're surely sinning ; This leap is for us all too bold ; Who Peter was, let that be told, And start from the beginning," is less dramatically convincing, as the lord of broad lawns, than is Sir Walter Vivian. In 1819, again, such over- realistic touches occurred as, *' ' 'Tis come then to a pretty pass,' Said Peter to the groaning ass, ' But I will bang your bones ' " ; and though these particular lines were expunged, yet the subject chosen is none the less responsible for occasional expressions bordering on the ridiculous : " Only the Ass, with motion dull, Upon the pivot of his skull Turns round his long left ear." But these, after all, are minor matters. Tennyson's supreme happiness of style betrayed him into far worse mistakes than ever Wordsworth's lack of it. The rough edges of Peter Bell are much less offensive in art than the over-refinement 0/ Enoch Arden or the May-Queen, It is by his matter that Wordsworth must primarily be judged, and, fortunately, when it was not complicated by techni- calities in the telling, his style was always equal to it. The material of Peter Bell's story does not fall below the level of the best of Wordsworth's work. Its theme is true. As knowledge widens, it is recognised more and more that man is not divorced from the rest of nature. More than the so-called pathetic fallacy, — nature smiling with man's joy, or mourning with his grief; more than the mysterious thrill of spring, animating all creation ; more than analogies and anthropomorphic imaginings — all the vividness of paganism joined to the truth of childhood ; THE LONGER POEMS 79 — there is daily growing the conviction that our life, as individuals, can only be satisfactorily lived if it is set in rhythmic accordance with the movement of life as a whole. Science, specialised in her several departments, is always adding to our store of generalisations, of first principles beyond dispute, to which to refer the minutest detail of a day. Science is knowledge ; its application is the "wisdom" that "lingers." For in this regret Tennyson was continuing the democratic lesson which Wordsworth had taught to a previous generation, that progress, to be effectual, must be in measure of capacity as well as in multiplication of opportunities. " I would the great world grew like thee," wrote Tennyson of Arthur Hallam in Wordsworth's democratic spirit,* and Peter Bell was drawn from the great world to point, in his degree of opportunity, the one true means to equality of capacity. By visitations of nature, suited to the requirements of his case, t Peter learned to set his life to an ampler rhythm than his previous selfishness had attained. He corrected his standard to take in sympathy with man and beast and flower, so that, had circumstances summoned him to be premier instead of potter, the difference would have been in degree and not in kind. There may be something jejune in this story of the man and the ass and the primrose on the bank ; but an abstract truth is always more impressive than its concrete example. On the other hand, by the vividness of the examples the truth lives ; and Peter Bell, repeating on his humble scale the majestic theme of The Excursiofi^ could show more realisably the method of reform than all the rhetoric of the Wanderer. Wordsworth himself wrote very truly to Sir George Beaumont — " the people would love the poem of Peter Bell, but the * Cp. Prelude, xiii. ^S. t lb, 350-5. 8o A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH public (a very different thing) will never love it." To-day the difference is not so great; and since 1807, when Wordsworth said this, much of the faultiness which made the poem unpopular has been removed. Its merit remains as the process in working of a soul's awakening, — of clay transmuted to fine gold. The Waggoner need not delay us. It is a careful study of Cumberland scenery and rustic life, with some splendid descriptions of place and atmosphere (notably in the opening lines) and with a light allegro movement suited to the jangling of the horses' bells. But Peter Bell connects itself more naturally with a poem which Wordsworth singled out for especial honour, the Ode tions of Im- ^^^^^ ^^ cumbrous title On Intt77tattons of mortality, Immortality fro?n Recollections of Early 1803-6. Childhood. In every collected edition of his works, Wordsworth tabulated this ode in capital type at the end of his minor pieces. He distinguished it, there- fore, like the other poems (and those only) spoken of in the present chapter.* He intended further that its position should signify its purpose, to summarise in epitome the teaching of the minor poems, and to introduce in general terms the theme dramatised in The Excursion, He wrote it with particular care, hardly departing at all from the text arrived at after the three years' labour of composition. Finally, he prefaced it with a triplet of his own, " The Child is Father of the Man ; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety," t * The posthumous poems {Prelude, 1850, and Recluse, i., 1888) have naturally been tabulated in the same type. t From lines known as The Rainbow in Wordsworth's household (1804). THE LONGER POEMS 8 1 which conceal by their apparent simpHcity a long chain of reflection, carrying the mind back to a conception of duty at the root of Roman Law, and to a theory of origin, half- fanciful and half-scientific, at the root of Platonic specula- tion and the mysticism of neo-Platonists. Quite briefly, this Ode is the universahsation of the particulars of individual experience, of Wordsworth's in The Prelude^ of the Wanderer's in The Excursion^ of Peter Bell's in his eponymous poem, and of others in other pieces scattered up and down Wordsworth's works. The uni- versahsation, — but with a difference. It is to be noticed that the first four of the eleven paragraphs or strophes into . which the Ode falls, are divided from the rest by a period of nearly two years in composition. But in the first four paragraphs, the pronoun of narration is the personal " I," in the next five it is the impersonal " we," in the tenth the " I " recurs in a single reference to the beginning, and in the last (xi.) the conclusion is personal throughout. The significance of this should, perhaps, not be pressed ; but it may be noted at least as implying that Wordsworth"! began by justifying his own belief in immortality ; that in the course of two years' thought he tended to universalise his own recollections ; and that at the end again, he was warned by countless Peter Bells around him, to whom " a primrose on the river's brim a yellow primrose was, . . . and nothing more," that his personal experience could not be regarded as passing into a general law. " To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." "To me," — not necessarily to the "us" of the pre- ceding paragraphs. In other words, the feeling that has gradually grown up of recent years, that there is something 82 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH forced and rhetorical in the swing and argument of this famous Ode, can be proved out of its own mouth. The Continent takes it as our favourite poem. Frau Gothein, for instance, introducing Wordsworth to Germany, writes — "EngUshmen regard the Ode as the author's masterpiece";* but against Aubrey de Vere, Emerson, and Lord Houghton, whom she quotes, can be set the quaUfied admiration of those greater critics, Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold. Nor can it have been to the centre strophes of this poem i[ that J. S. Mill referred as a " medicine," and Ruskin as a i " war with pomp and pretence." For these middle para- graphs are not quite satisfactory. The eighth especially,* where the child is apostrophised as a deaf and silent eye, , fails somehow to convince. Childhood is exalted abovei;, its stature, despite the " soul's immensity " that is pre- dicated of it. Modern psychology, as the basis of modern i pedagogics, regards advancing life as opening out avenues 5 of knowledge, not closing them up ; as developing the reason and understanding, making them capable, as; physical strength increases, of further and further flights' into the region of the unknown, not constraining their r' freedom in the bondage of an "inevitable yoke." If there: is anything in Herbart's theory of the individual's life^ following the stages of the race's culture, then it is idle to) regret that the instincts of savagery cannot be throughout! protected. Modern science discovers the child "trailing"' quite other and more definite qualities than "clouds off glory" from arboreal quadrumanous ancestors, and itss psychological growth goes step by step with its biological. J This conviction seems to have forced itself upon Words- worth himself Granting even that he (and in his experi-.) ence, the world at large) had lost the light of initiation inl^ * Gothein, Leben u. Werke^ p. 225. THE LONGER POEMS 83 that of " common day " ; granting that for him there had " passed away a glory from the earth," yet the conclusion is at variance with the premises. The joy of manhood is greater than the joy of childhood, is the note that recurs almost in the poet's despite. '" I love the brooks that down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they ;" (xi.) and the visible presence of God in the child has resolved itself by then into " the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be," (x.) the anwia nmndi, or one mind throughout all creation, one being in all phenomena, one purpose threading all happen- ings, which was Wordsworth's constant care. The child and the philosopher meet, it is true, on the table-lands of divine goodness, but between the former, knowing not evil, and the latter, knowing evil and good, there is fixed the gulf of human life. Wordsworth's philosophic child is a paradox, for the child-like heart, which modern ethics set before human attainment, is in likeness of innocence, not of ignorance. Perfect knowledge is perfect innocence too. Plato regarded education as a process of recognition. A boy learns to know the things of earth by recognising their likeness to their heavenly prototypes, and this faculty : of recognition presupposes the ante-natal existence of the : soul. Wordsworth regarded earthly acquirements as de- structive to the soul's heavenly lore. A boy forgets his untaught knowledge by " endless imitation " of human action. Thus, whereas to Plato, the mere power of learn- ing was a proof of immortality, for learning is recollecting, to Wordsworth learning is forgetting, and the proof of immortality is found in the rationale of a child's earliest 84 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH imaginings and make-believe. For Plato, therefore, the more the mind is exercised by education, through the applied to the abstract sciences and finally to the science of sciences, the mystery of Being in itself, the nearer the , soul approaches to the region of prototypes or ideas ; for ! Wordsworth, on the contrary, at least in the middle para- graphs of his Ode, education is vanity. The more the ,mind is exercised with experience and with inductions from jit, the further it recedes from "that immortal sea which i 'brought us hither." According to these episodes, glimpses ' of that sea are to be obtained by no strenuous endeavours ' of human reason, but only by a recovery of childish ignor- ance and of the fugitive moments of second sight which in Wordsworth's own case marked that period. Thus the paragraphs, commonly said to be Platonic, have but a i superficial likeness to Plato's theory of reminiscence, for while Plato justified education, Wordsworth logically con- demned it. But, as was hinted just now, the Ode is 1 hardly consistent with itself Its true merit lies in its opening and conclusion, not in the ingrafted metaphysical speculations. The disparagement of earth's pleasures in the sixth strophe and onwards is practically abandoned towards the end for a restatement of the philosophy arrived at in the final books of The Prelude. There, it will be remembered, Wordsworth traced the restoration of his faith* shattered by his disappointment in France, |njiieditation_ Qn^ the changelessness of natu re a nd pn,_t.hfi__universaL efficacy of love as the motive of conduct, — in the realisa- tion of which human perfectibility lies. Life's accidents were transfigured for him in the purpose that transcended . them. Set in their due proportion, they are the means of ' humanising the soul and of assisting it to the fullest capacity of its sympathies. i THE LONGER POEMS 85 " Oh ! yet a few short years of useful life, And all will be complete, thy race be run, Thy monument of glory will be raised ; Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth) This age fall back to old idolatry, Though men return to servitude as fast As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame By nations sink together, we shall still Find solace — knowing what we have learnt to know, Rich in true happiness . . . Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith : what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how ; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which, 'mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine." * This was a nobler and more impassioned conception of the permanence of the priesthood of Nature, than that of the fifth paragraph of the Ode, *' The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended ; At length the Man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day." This was a more inspired conviction of its duties and its powers than that of the eighth paragraph, " Thou little Child, . . . Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife ? '' * Frelude, xiv. 340 to the end. S6 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH It contrasts with these middle strophes, but it compares with the tenth and the eleventh, '* We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, . . . In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. . . . The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, ; Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears. To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The Borderers^ relieving sin and suffering by their expression ; The Prelude, interpreting them by their discipline ; The Recluse {Excursion), curing them by a revolution of conduct in obedience to nature; The White Doe of Rylstone, merging them in a vision of perfect peace ; Peter Bell, atoning for them by a tardy awakening ; all the longer poems of Wordsworth are summarised in this statement of his philosophy ; that God's unifying purpose runs through all created things, surviving immutably the fall of nations, working out their redemption ; that the hand of a little child can lead men to wisdom, if they will but ; preserve their faith by seeking the meaning of the whole ; through and beyond their experience of a part. This | reasoned and intelligent faith more than compensates the j loss of the child's unquestioning joy. It takes up the \ burthen of life, and carries it still as a blessing. I CHAPTER III THE SHORTER POEMS Wordsworth's minor pieces were to '' be found by the attentive reader to have such connection with the main work as may give them claim to be Ukened to the Httle cells, oratories and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily in- cluded " in a Gothic church, to which — with The Prelude as ante-chapel — he had compared The Excursion. Further, to assist his reader's apprehension of his " purposes, both particular and general," Wordsworth divided these poems into subjective compartments of composition, cor- responding, as nearly as possible, to the sequence of moral moods uniformly attained in his longer works. In those there may be traced the architectonic design of a regular succession in mental history, from the sensuous pleasure of mere observation, through the energy of the affections in actual experience, to the reflection of the reason, touched by the poet's fancy or the seer's imagination. And this succession obviously corresponds to the course of human life. It formed, therefore, the basis of Words- worth's dramatic skill, which distinguished men, not by their acts, but by the stages of their moral development. Accordingly, by the order of moods an order in time * was also observed, "commencing with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death and Immortality." It has been objected, out of Wordsworth's own mouth, that the * i.e.^ an ideal order,— not in the egotistic chronology of composition. 87 88 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH classification is often arbitrary; but it is valuable, at any rate, as pursuing, without dogmatism on the critic's part, the high intention of the poet, to make all his works, the longer and shorter alike, contributory to the message which he had to give, — sections or sub-sections of " the law of faith working through love " {Excursio?i, ix. 672). The first division of Wordsworth's minor poems falls Poems ^^^^ ^"^^ parts, those written prior to his written in later residence in France, 1792-3, and those o^t^- written immediately afterwards, while the despair of the Revolution fiasco was strongly upon him. The first part includes An Evenmg Walk (composed 1787-9? published 1793) and Descriptive Sketches (com- posed 1 791-2, published 1793), both issued by way of self-justification, to show that there was " something in " the young man whose roving habit and refusal to settle down were so disquieting to his family ; the second part includes The Borderers and Guilt and Sorrow^ or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain. The Evening Walk and the Sketches have an occasional beauty in their record of natural observation, but the beauty is obscured by their artificialities of diction, and their main interest really lies in the psychological aspect of their subsequent revisions. The heroic couplet, in which they are written, is in itself peculiarly ill-adapted for a continuous descriptive style. Pope had brought it to a fulfilment of its powers in detached antithesis and epi- grammatic terseness ; and though Keats subsequently washed away its limitations in E?tdymion^s flood of melody, and Chaucer had previously broken its rigidity in the supple grace of The Canterbury Tales, yet the poets of the eighteenth century showed best the best use of which it was capable. Wordsworth, says Professor Legouis, " com THE SHORTER POEMS 89 menga a aimer les vers dans les annees les plus d^s- h^ritees de la po^sie anglaise," * and his love found ex- pression in an incompatible combination of sensuous nature-description with the heroic couplet style in its most degraded and least spontaneous form. It found in con- vention, allusion and imitation, in frigid conceits and stilted stylisticisms a sufficient substitute for originaUty. How profound was the change which overtook him, and how great his terror of a recurrence of the false unre- generate ideals, when living had become to him an interest and a reality, may be judged from the following sentences out of his famous Preface (1802) : " The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes ; and are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style and raise it above prose. . . . There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction ; as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it ; . . . Something must have been gained by this practice, but it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of poets. I have also thought it expedient to restrict myself still further, having abstained from the use of many expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower." The " bad poets " of the foolish repetition had included Wordsworth himself; and these pledges of abstinence are at once a token of atonement and a safeguard against future relapse. In their enunciation he could not but approach his Foems * La Jeunesse de IVordstuorth, p. 128. 90 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH r Written in Youth in a spirit of critical harshness, albeit J tempered by paternal indulgence. Take, for instance, as } typical, the following lines (13-18) from the 1793 edition { of An Evening Walk : " Fair scenes ! with other eyes, than once, I gaze The ever-varying charm your round displays, Than when, erewhile, I taught, a happy child. The echoes of your rocks my carols wild : Then did no ebb of cheerfulness demand Sad tides of joy from Melancholy's hand." This is the first appearance of the often recurring thought, that a child's sight sees the beauty in natural objects more keenly than a man's, though — and this is the compensation — less interpretatively. But the phraseology is essentially non-Wordsworthian. " I gaze the charms " is a conceit. " Ever- varying " is a convention. " Melancholy " is per- sonified, but obscurely, as holding an ebb and flow of water in her hand. " Sad tides of joy " is an unjustified paradox, and the whole requires reading twice over before its sense is understood. By 1836 the six lines had been amended to four : " Fair scenes, erewhile, I taught, a happy child, The echoes of your rocks my carols wild : The spirit sought not then, in cherished sadness, A cloudy substitute for faihng gladness." To glance through the poem is readily to multiply instances. Again, the Descriptive Sketches, " taken during a pedes- trian tour among the Alps," though Coleridge saw in them at once a novel simplicity of thought, yet required consider- able revision in style before Wordsworth passed them even as " Juvenile Pieces." The 813 fines of 1 793 were reduced to 670 in 1845. But the passages excised are less instructive than the passages rewritten. These clearly indicate the THE SHORTER POEMS 9 1 force of that personal revulsion in sentiment which was so largely responsible for Wordsworth's canons of poetry. For the spirit in which such atrocities — to select but a few casual examples — as "The viewless lingerer" (I. 92, 1793), " The red-breast Peace had buried it in wood " (1. 169), "And his red eyes the slinking water hides" (1. 236), *' On his pale horse shall fell Consumption go " (1. 791), had been committed, had to be exorcised by principle^ not by caprice. The principle of diction had been practically established when, in 1793-4, Wordsworth composed The Female Vag- rant* {Guilt and Sorrow). It was written, as has been said, during his Sturm und Drang period, the period that passed under nature's healing influence, and its subsequent revisions were mainly concerned with correcting, in the light of that inspiration, the unrelieved melancholy of the first recension. For the perspective of time revealed the French Revolution in less gloomy colours than it had appeared at near sight, and the true basis of practical democracy, which Wordsworth learned from nature, had consoled him for pre- vious failures in dreams of artificial equality, f We can trace, therefore, in Guilt and Sorrow, the pen of the old man toning down the pessimistic utterances of his youth. It tells, by the mouth of the wife and mother, now widowed and childless, the story of a soldier's family ruined by the American War. In the later version a sailor is introduced * It was under this title, and with only thirty stanzas, that Gidlt and Sorrow, now consisting of seventy-four stanzas, appeared in "Lyrical Ballads" in 1798, It underwent considerable intermediate changes, and first assumed its present form in the " Poems of Early and Late Years "of 1842. t Cp. Preltide, xiii. 88 ff., and p. 19 supra. ( 92 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH as audience, whose sorrows, dramatically enough, serve as a kind of pendent to the Vagrant's Tale. For his is the grief of a deed done by his own hand, and yet he wins forgive- ness on earth, and through that forgiveness peace. The suggestion is thus made that somewhere is stored up balm for the sorrows, not of her own making, which the soldier's widow has endured. Moreover, the sailor, in his capacity of listener, serves as a kind of Greek chorus. He points the pauses of her story with sage, consolatory reflections on the promise of dawn and the reconciling influence of time. But whether marred or improved by these additions of a less sombre mood and age, Giiilt and Sorroiv is more in- teresting from the side of style than of subject. The forced effects of the previous poems have almost disappeared, and we meet now the infinite promise of such lines as, ' ' In the calm sunshine slept the glittering main ; The very ocean hath its hour of rest " (st. xxxviii.). " Here will I weep in peace (so fancy wrought,) Roaming the illimitable waters round " (xli. ). ■ , Childhood, for Wordsworth, — to pass to the second group of his works, — was the time when in- Foems ... , . 1 , referring to stmct had spontaneously arrived at the same the Period of truths which reason should subsequently dis- Childhood. ^ •' cover by the patient process of interpreted experience. The joy of life, untroubled by life's prob- lems, is keener and wilder than that later tranquillity which has resolved the problems by faith. To the child the problems are unexistent, and in these Poems referring to the period of childhood, Wordsworth notes with almost naive curiosity the various aspects of childish habits of thought. The child turns instinctively to joy, like a flower to the sun. In the seventh poem of the series, for THE SHORTER POEMS 93 instance, The Mother's Return ^^ we have the expression of this : " She wars not with the mystery Of time and distance, night and day ; The bonds of our humanity. Her joy is like an instinct, joy Of kitten, bird, or summer fly ; She dances, runs, without an aim, She chatters in her ecstacy." The mystery of death is a matter of equal unconcern, and this is the theme of (x.) We are Seven. So, too, with the mystery of truth, not, as the pessimists had said, a natural instinct perverted by civilisation, but a usage of civilisation not discoverable in nature. This hopeful lesson is con- tained in (xii.) Anecdote for Fathers^ a set of verses which have been better ridiculed than understood. Alice Fell (viii.) is a tale of childish grief, — a familiarly bitter ex- perience before the sense of proportion is born. Lucy Gray (ix.) is, perhaps, the most successful of the group. A tenderness lingers over its mournful theme, and touches us like the white robes of the pall-bearers in a child's funeral in the Roman Catholic Church, xvi. and xvii. are studies of childhood from the plane of later life. The first, Influence of Natural Objects^ is now embodied in The Prelude (i. 401); the second. The Longest Day (181 7) is almost the most sententious of all Wordsworth's writings. He is comparing the course of the seasons to that of human life : — *' Yet we mark it not ; — fruits redden, Fresh flowers blow, as flowers have blown. And the heart is loth to deaden Hopes that she so long hath known. . , . * By Dorothy Wordsworth. 94 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Thus when thou with Time hast travelled Toward the mighty gulf of things, And the mazy stream unravelled With thy best imaginings ; Think, if thou on beauty leanest. Think how pitiful that stay. Did not virtue give the meanest Charms superior to decay." Wordsworth very seldom descends to this level ; but the metre in which the majority of these Poems are composed lends itself readily to such easy sing-song, and Wordsworth's parodists usually attacked him in its perilous measures. But the series must not be left without noting the first reference to Dorothy Wordsworth in (iii.) The Sparrow's Nest (1801) : — " The Blessing of my later years Was with me when a boy : She gave me eyes, she gave me ears ; And humble cares, and delicate fears ; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears ; And love, and thought, and joy." The next group of poems, thirty-eight in number, con- tains some of the finest of Wordsworth's com- Foems Founded on positions. The chief of all the affections is *^® love, and to the theme of love many of these Affections. 1 ^^r 1 r • poems are devoted. We have, for mstance, the Lucy sequence (vii., viii., ix.), of a young man's love, perhaps the casket of some fleeting romance in the poet's own life. The three sets of stanzas were written in 1799 ; the first is the lover's presentiment of impending misfor- tune; the second and third, his grief when facts have borne it out. For Lucy died, — " A violet by a mossy stone Half-hidden from the eye ! Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. " THE SHORTER POEMS 95 Possibly XV., To , where Mary, his wife's name, may have replaced the name left vacant in the dedication, and xvi., where the " Dear Maid " vanishes still further from reality, " That sometimes I in thee have loved My fancy's own creation," were also reminiscences of the unknown Lucy. But there are other fair ladies addressed in lines with a more imper- sonal cadence, sometimes anonymously, as in xi., xiv., xvii., xviii. and xix., sometimes by names, metrically suit- able, as the Louisa of vi., the Geraldine of x., and the Emma of xiii. A sad love-story is also the theme of xxx., Vaudracour and JuHa^ the one poem of Wordsworth which Matthew Arnold could never read. It belongs properly to the ninth book of The Prelude, from w^hich its proportions excluded it. It is referred to there * as having been related to the poet by his " Patriot friend " (General Beau- puy), to illustrate the sad events, "That prove to what low depth had struck the roots, How widely spread the boughs, of that old tree Which, as a deadly mischief, and a foul And black dishonour, France was weary of" (549-52). The tale was written in 1804, and published in 1820. Its gloom is relieved by no touch of human feeling in the actors, for neither Julia nor Vaudracour has any dramatic life, and the wooden lovers fail to arouse the reader to indignation w4th the wooden father who condemns one to a nunnery (like another • Juliet of tragic story) and the other to a lingering idiocy with his motherless child. Two poems (i. and xxxii.) of 1800 are on quite a differ- ent level. They belong to Wordsworth's reaction to rustic * Prelude, ix. 553 fif. 96 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH life, and deal in his discursive vein with elementary pas- sions. The Brothers is a story of the parish of Ennerdale. " They two Were brother-shepherds on their native hills " (74-5), but Leonard, the elder, had left his flocks in youth to seek his fortune on the sea. Years pass by, and the memory of his brother, and a constant tugging of .the hills at his heart, bring him back to his birth-place. Marking every change in the familiar landscape, an instinctive fear of other changes elsewhere turns his footsteps to the church- yard. There, by an unremembered grave in the spot where several of his family had been buried, he is accosted, tourist fashion, by the white-haired vicar. A dialogue ensues, in which, beginning with conventional greetings, Leonard elicits the history of the intervening years, as it concerned James and himself. The tragic irony — for it is like a " recognition scene " in a Greek play — is admirably sustained. The vicar insists on telling his story with almost garrulous consecution ; Leonard endeavours to anticipate its conclusion, without revealing his own iden- tity. But James is dead. Delicate from boyhood, a habit of somnambulism had grown upon him, till " one sweet May morning," he had fallen over the cliff in his sleep. The weary sense of difference, the vicar's unconscious alienation, and this final disappointment of his best hopes in returning home, send Leonard back unrevealed : " That night, he wrote a letter to the Priest, Reminding him of what had passed between them ; And adding, with a hope to be forgiven, That it was from the weakness of his heart He had not dared to tell him who he was. This done, he went on ship-board, and is now A seaman, a grey-headed mariner " (429-35). THE SHORTER POEMS 97 Leonard's character was drawn in part from Words- worth's own sailor brother, John, and the tenderness of that affection seems to brood over this chastened pastoral ; while its natural music rises at one point to a still finer height in the description of a calenture at sea (44-65). Michael (xxxii.) is infected with a similar pathos. It was composed with the same intention, to show that the primary passions are at once the strongest and the most universal, and form accordingly the most obvious psy- chological sanction for any scheme of equality. Michael is a shepherd freeholder, who lives in the Westmoreland hills with his wife and their only child, Luke. The scrip- tural names are in keeping with the sacred simplicity of the theme. For these latter-day idylls have the merest formal resemblance to the porcelain pastorals of Sicily : between Luke and Alexis there is the whole difference of Nature from Pan. The story of the father's care for his son is sympatheti- cally told ; and his care was its own reward, in that " from the Boy there came Feelings and emanations — things which were Light to the sun and music to the wind ; And that the old Man's heart seemed born again " (200-3). But financial troubles came upon him, and Michael, rather than sell his son's patrimony to meet them, decides with his wife on sending Luke away. A kinsman in the city should assist him to fortune, and the previous success of a neighbour's son confirms their resolution. It is again the world breaking in upon the repose of the hills, the problem of life in miniature, " new-old," as Tennyson wrote, " and shadowing Sense at war with Soul." Michael, meanwhile, had collected stones together in order to build a sheep-fold, and before the day of parting he makes Luke 98 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH "j lay the corner-stone, that the sheep-fold may be a covenant ! between them, to remind one of the other. This simple, | solemn act done, the boy went to London. At first, all was well. Luke prospered in his undertakings, and the 1 sheep-fold rose merrily up. But after a while the snares | of the city overcame the rustic lad, , " so that he was driven at last i To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas " (446-7). j This is the whole story, except that the sheep-fold, in- j augurated with such happy omen, was never completed : " 'tis believed by all That many and many a day he thither went, And never lifted up a single stone " (464-6). It is this touch of nature, the pathos of work unfinished which recurs all over the, world, that gives Michael, the humble shepherd, his share in the universal heart. " The great distinguishing passion," wrote Walter Pater, "came to Michael by the sheep-fold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding those humble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls" {Appreciations^ 51). Mother's love is the theme of xxi., xxii., xxiv., xxv. (by Dorothy Wordsworth), xxvi., xxvii., xxix., and xxxviii., in this group. The Affliction of Margaret (xxiv.) is de- servedly the best known among them. In it we listen to the beating of a mother's heart : My apprehensions come in crowds ; I dread the rustling of the grass ; The very shadows of the clouds Have power to shake me as they pass Beyond participation lie My troubles, and beyond relief : If any chance to heave a sigh, They pity me, and not my grief. I I THE SHORTER POEMS 99 Then come to me, my Son, or send Some tidings, that my woes may end ; I have no other earthly friend " (64 fif. )• The affection of sympathy with nature is the inspiration of iii., iv., V. and xxxvii. The second of these (iv.) is A Fareive/l {1Z02), where the poet takes j^rsonal leave for two months of a "happy Garden," which he hopes to find not overmuch altered on his return. Yet the thought of nature's indifference — her independence of the accidents of human fate — breaks upon his greeting : " And O most constant, yet most fickle Place, Thou hast thy wayward moods, as thou dost show To them who look not daily on thy face ; Who, being loved, in love no bounds dost know, And say'st, when we forsake thee, ' Let them go ! ' Thou easy-hearted thing, with thy wild race Of weeds and flowers, till we return be slow, And travel with the years at a soft pace " {41-8). Appended to the Foe?ns of the Affections are seven pieces on the Na??img of Places^ where some association of personal feeling has been superadded to the general affection of sympathy with nature. The silence and soli- tude of a fir-grove (vi. — " When to the attractions of the busy world" — 1805) remind Wordsworth of his lost sailor- brother. It is dedicated accordingly to his memory. In i. ("It was an April morning," 1800) the name of Emma recurs, "Our thoughts at least are ours ; and this wild nook, My Emma, I will dedicate to thee." "Fancy," wrote W'ordsworth in his Preface of 1815, " is given to quicken and to beguile the tem- the Fancy P°^^^ P^^^ ^^ ^^^ nature," and in the first poem of this series {A Morning Exercise, 1828) he wrote : lOO A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH " Fancy, who leads the pastimes of the glad, Full oft is pleased a wayward dart to throw ; Sending sad shadows after things not sad, ,, Peopling the harmless fields with signs of woe : Beneath her sway, a simple forest cry Becomes an echo of man's misery." In these thirty-two Poems of the Fancy, therefore, we are to find the record and observation of things that pass, half- recreated by the power of likely association. Take, for instance, the third stanza of vii., To the Daisy (1802) : " In shoals and bands, a morrice train, Thou greet'st the traveller in the lane ; Pleased at his greeting thee again ; Yet nothing daunted, Nor grieved if thou be set at nought : And oft alone in nooks remote We meet thee, like a pleasant thought, When such are wanted." The relation of truth to fancy in these Hnes — the " be- guiling," but not the betraying, of the former by the latter — is stated in the last words of (ii.) A Flower Garden (1824): ** . . . Fancy was Truth's willing Page ; And Truth would skim the flowery glade. The' entering but as Fancy's Shade." At the same time, through the operations of the fancy, the truth of mere sense-perception is " quickened." The poet returns from the region where fancy had beguiled him to the simplicity of his original perception ; but the percept \ now has been quickened to a livelier and more enlightened l| being. This appears from the last stanza of viii.. To the ; Same Flower {i.e., the daisy) : ^j '' Bright Flower ! for by that name at last. When all my reveries are past, I call thee, and to that cleave fast, Sweet silent creature. I THE SHORTER POEMS tO\ That breath'st with me in sun and air, Do thou, as thou art wont, repair My heart with gladness, and a share Of thy meek nature ! " It is curiously characteristic that Wordsworth, who taught his philosophy by examples taken from the field, Michael, Margaret, and their like, should have exercised his fancy upon the blossoms of the hedgerow. In contrast to Tennyson, whose idylls were of the king, and whose honey was won from roses,* Wordsworth went to humble life for his people and his flowers alike. He made beau- tiful the "unassuming Commonplace of Nature," and recurred again and again to the daisy, the primrose, the violet, and the common pilewort, as parallel types to his heroes of the plough. Two lovely poems in this series (xi. and xii.), are inscribed To the Small Celafidine, two — as has been seen — To the Daisys one (vi.) To a Sexton^ one (ix.) To the Green Linnet^ one (xv.) To the Redbreast chasing the Butterfly^ one (xxvii.) to A Wren's Nest^ and another (xxxi.) to The Kitten and Falling Leaves^ — themes, it will be admitted, sufficiently familiar, yet capable of a novel rendering by the fancy that sees, •* If the wind do but stir for his proper delight, Each leaf, that and this, his neighbour will kiss, Each wave, one and t'other, speeds after his brother ; They are happy, for that is their right ! " (xxiv. 33-6). To his fifty-one Poems of the Imagination Wordsworth looked for his chief tide to immortality. " I have given," he said, in the Preface of 181 5, "in these unfavourable times, evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its * Cp. Mr William Watson, Lachrynm Musarmn, " Seek him henceforward . . . ... In the rapture of the flaming rose." iQ2 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH M; worthiest objects, the external universe, the moral and ' religious sentiments of Man, his natural affections, and his f acquired passions ; which have the same ennobhng ten- i| dency as the productions of men, in this kind, worthy to be | holden in undying remembrance." Posterity, |: Imagination whose judgment was here anticipated with the |j modest pride of conscious worth, the pride fi that comes to the consolation of all true greatness, despite | the insults of " the ignorant, the incapable, and the pre- !] sumptuous " {ibid.), has not withheld its consent. The function of the imagination, as Wordsworth conceived it, ; was to "incite and support the eternal part of our nature" | {ibid.), and in these fifty-one poems, Wordsworth has J succeeded in interpreting the permanent element in life, in : language that can be understood by all. Imagination ; transfigures truth, without transgressing it. By insight and ; comparison, the things that seem are changed to images of j| things that are. j The central note is struck in (xxvi.) Lines, Composed a \ few 7?iiks above Tintern Abbey (1798), which is exceptional J among Wordsworth's poems as having been published \ almost as soon as it was written, and hardly at all sub- I sequently revised. Its 159 lines of blank verse have been ' more frequently quoted than almost any other work of , similar length. " These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur " (3, 4). '* These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild" (15-6). " . . . that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love " (33-5). THE SHORTER POEMS IO3 "... that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world. Is lightened" (37-41). "... more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved" (70-2). " The still, sad music of humanity" (91). "... a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused. Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man " (95-9). ** Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her " (122-3). ** . . . when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies " (139-42). — The extracts might pause only with the limits of the poem. For it sustains a majestic level, as well of diction as of thought, articulating the universe in design, and spiritualising man in execution. The Fri?nrose of the Rock (xliii.,-1831) is interesting, although it is composed in a less inspired mood, as giving in detail the percepts which Peter Bell missed in the " primrose on a river's brim." * W^ordsworth calls it *' A lasting link in Nature's chain From highest heaven let down" (11-12), for it obeys, in its own humble degree, the same lesson of faith, though in solitude, and love, though out of ken, as * Cp. p. 77 supra. I04 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH the greatest of God's creations. The application of the lesson is obvious : " Sin-blighted though we are, we too, The reasoning Sons of Men, From one oblivious winter called Shall rise, and breathe again j And in eternal summer lose Our threescore years and ten " (43-8). A similar fusion of the transient with the eternal, with its similar transfiguration of death and sorrow, is the theme — from different starting-points — of other pieces in this series. The " wandering Voice " which is the cuckoo (ii.) ; the "Spirit, yet a Woman, too," (viii. — to his wife — ) with but still ... all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn " (7, 8), A Creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food" (17-8) ; the two poems (x. and xi., — 1799) ^^ ^ ^^^er Lucy, whose soul, released from flesh, is gathered into the Spirit of Being,— " No motion has she now, no force ; She neither hears nor sees ; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees " (xi. 5-8) ; though, by participation in universal life, " She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs ; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. THE SHORTER POEMS IO5 The floating stars their state shall lend To her ; for her the willow bend ; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy. The stars of midnight shall be dear To her, and she shall lend her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face " (x, 13-30) ; the dance of "golden daffodils" flashed upon silent thought (xii.); the passion of Ruth (xxi., 1799); the faith of the old Leech-gatherer {Resolutmi and Indepeftdence, xxii., 1807), who solved by his simple faith many a vexed problem and "blind thought" of dejection; the skylark (xxx.) typifying the ideal of human endeavour, " true to the kindred points of Heaven and Home " ; Dion, the " swan- like " (xxxii,, 181 7), leaving "... this moral grafted on his fate : 'Him only pleasure leads and peace attends, Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends, Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends ' " ; Laodamia (xxxi., 1 8 1 4), whose earthly experience broadened into a vision of perfect love, casting out self ; — these, and other poems in the group, in diverse measures and with different degrees of successful imagination, repeat the theme of xxviii.,* that saving powers are within the reach of all, ■' French Revolution^ after^vards incorporated in The Prelude^ xi. 105-44. I06 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH "Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where ! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us, — the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all." Dion and Laodamta, it should be added, both belonged to Wordsworth's period of classical inspiration. The latter especially, with its noble echoes of the nobility of the sixth u^neid (Wordsworth had been reading Latin with his son) gives, in the mood of heroic tranquillity which attaches to classic themes, the apotheosis of domestic love, — "no longer as an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul." * But Protesilaus and Laodamia, on the classic Olympia which their names suggest, and Michael and Luke in their biblical fields, are alike essentially Wordsworthian. The series further includes (xxv.) the famous Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle (1807), where the music wonder- fully follows the thought, and marks by its abrupt technical transitions of metre, the subjective psychological moods. At the beginning of the Song there is an allegro movement in iambics ; e.g., " How glad | is Skip | ton at | this hoiir." This changes presently to a passionate trochaic swing with catalexis ; e.g., " 6r she | s^es her | infant | die." The tro- chees, in their final appearance, are wrought to their highest pitch by the device of alliteration in the initial syllables and a triple rhyme : '* Like a | re-ap | pearing | Star, Like a glory from afar, First shall head the flock of war." At this point it breaks off, and the plot — now in its fifth act, so to speak, of restored tranquillity — is resumed in leisurely decasyllabic stanzas : * Myers, Wordsworth, p. 115. THE SHORTER POEMS IO7 *' Love had he found in huts where poor men He ; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." The Reverie of Poor Susan (xiii.), Power of Music (xiv.), Beggars (xviii.), The Thorn (xxiii.), The Power of Sound (li.), and some slighter experiments hardly calling for special mention, are further contained in this group. The mood of sentiment and reflection takes up the burden of Wordsworth's message in a more Poems of didactic strain, and it must be conceded that Sentiment and . , ,. . . , Reflection. ^^^ poet, consciously moralismg, is less con- vincing and sometimes less melodious than the poet faithfully recording or prophetically interpreting his observations. The sententious habit, to which by his serious curiosity and earnest truth, Wordsworth was always liable, became peculiarly a snare in his purely contemplative hours. So it happens that it is to some accident of inspiration in the writer or his material that certain poems in the present series owe their poetic quality. The rest miss it none the less surely because criticism can only point out, not account for the defect. If any attempt at such discrimination is to be made, it might be said that Wordsworth occasionally presumes too far on his readers' power of sympathy. His mind works by processes so rapid and so familiar to himself, that, when he skips its operation and acquaints us only with its inductions, we are left in a somewhat reluctant state of lazy acquiescence or half-defiant reserve. The associative links are not yet clearly enough defined for the close collocation of trivial incident and weighty reflection which meets us again and again in these pages. Cosmos and the atom may be fused in the fire of imagination ; they I08 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH can not be poetically related by the normal habit of mind. Several poems in this group do not rise above the level of gnomic verse, — correctness without lustre. From the first half-dozen pieces examples can readily be taken : X " Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress ; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness " (i. 20-4) ; V' " One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can " (ii. 20-4) ; >N " Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths ; And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes" (iii. 9-12) ; ^ *' One moment now may give us more Than years of toiling reason : Our minds shall drink at every pore The spirit of the season " (v. 25-8) ; *' O Reader ! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader ! you would find A tale in everything " (vi. 65-8). The " sentiment " in each instance is unexceptionable, but the " gentle Reader " might justly retort that they fail on the side of poetry. To the ardent Wordsworthian, all the moods of his Master are inspired, but no greater obstacle has been put in the way of the poet, as such, than this spurious Wordsworth ciiltus. Verse, after all, — and AVordsworth chose that means of expression with no defective sense of its obligations, — is an emotional instrument ; but in such lines as the foregoing, Wordsworth has reverted to its worn-out mnemonic uses. THE SHORTER POEMS IO9 Though these reflections leave the reader unmoved, yet the missing stimulus is elsewhere supplied by associating them with the great commonplaces of universal moment and consent, — detaching them no longer in frigid sententue^ nor attaching them to inadequate incidents. The moral height of contemplation at which the Ode to Duty (xix., 1805) was composed; the indignation of genius against the children of the world which wrote the Poefs Epitaph (viii., 1799); 01* ttie individual interest which governs the sonnet sequence on Personal Talk (xiii., i-iv,, 1807) \ these are very different from the propriety of sentiment gushing directly at "the first mild day of March" (v., 1. i). For when a common system of thought is assumed, all reflec- tion is platitude; the sententious then differs from the sublime only in its degree of subjective passion. Wordsworth's Ode to Duty\ modelled as he said, on Gray's Ode to Adversity, reads like one of the sterner passages of Old Testament prophecy. He sees the universe obeying the law of order, and finding in that obedience true happiness and freedom, and turns, with the humility of proven weakness, to supplicate the same control : " Me ihis unchartered freedom tires ; I feel the weight of chance-desires : My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same" (37-40). It is like Israel, turning from following the desire of his eyes in which he was led astray; and like Israel's God, Duty, "stern Daughter of the Voice of God" (i), takes — for those who repent their transgression — the meed of her Father's grace : ** Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face ; no A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads ; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong " (43-8). A Foefs Epitaph is lofty in another vein. It exalts, on the poet's grave, where the final judgment overthrows all the pretences of convention, the child of light above the children of this world. The statesman, to whom mankind is as a chess-board ; the keen, hard lawyer ; the man of luxurious Uving ; the man of the sword ; the physician, the philosopher, and the moralist, are alike unworthy to approach. There is again something scriptural in the justice that turns aside from these intellectual claimants to welcome one whose merit is independent of sounding testimonials, and rests on his self-taught sympathy with the things that abide : " He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter than their own. . . . In common things that round us lie Some random truths he can impart, — The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart. But he is weak ; both Man and Boy, Hath been an idler in the land ; Contented if he might enjoy The things which others understand. — Come hither in thy hour of strength ; Come, weak as is a breaking wave ! . . . " It is the moral which Matthew Arnold repeated, as peculiarly applicable to the present age, — that we " never once possess our souls before we die," and whatever the practical utility of the warning, it is at least a reminder of the truer proportions of life. 1 THE SHORTER POEMS I I I In connection with these stanzas, something should be said of Wordsworth's attitude towards science. He treats it here with very scant respect, dismissing the philosopher as "... a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave" (18-20) ; while the moralist comes off even more hardly : " One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling Nor form, nor feeling, great or small ; A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all " (29-32). With this may be compared the similar statement in (ii.) The Tables Turned [i^jf^Z), " Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous orms of things : — We murder to dissect " (26-8). If we remember that denunciations such as these, penned in the last years of the eighteenth century, belong to the profound reaction against eighteenth century philosophy, we shall not only understand them the more readily, but we shall further see that they are but literary excursions in the field of metaphysics, echoes partly of Rousseau, and partly of Coleridge and Burke, on the side of common-sense against reason divorced from it. It was a reaction, writes G. H. Lewes, " less against a doctrine proved to be incom- petent than against a doctrine believed to be the source of profound immorality. The reaction was vigorous be- cause it was animated by the horror which agitated Europe at the excesses of the French Revolution. Associated in men's minds with the Saturnalia of the Terror, the philosophical opinions of Condillac, Diderot and Cabanis 112 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH were held responsible for the crimes of the Convention. 1 . . . Every opinion which had what was called a * taint of i| materialism' . . . was denounced as an opinion necessarily |i leading to the destruction of all Religion, Morality and i| Government." * The reaction, then, was primarily spiri- j tual. It issued in the science of comparative psychology ! which distinguishes the thought of the present century, but its earliest manifestation came from the side of politics and letters, and expressed itself in a kind of universal ; franchise, extending the sphere of philosophical enquiry ; to every spiritual being. Not only the illiterate, the women and the children, but " the numberless victims of the Cartesian proscription," in the brilliant phrase of a I French writer,! animals, and plants and so-called inanimate things, swell the crowd of witnesses to the new dominion of soul above reason. Wherefore, as Wordsworth wrote to Coleridge in The Prelude : "... Who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square ? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed ? Who that shall point as with a wand and say 'This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain ? ' Thou, my Friend, art one More deeply read in thy own thoughts ; to thee Science appears but what in truth she is, Nor as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity" (ii. 203-15). Science, neglecting the instincts and intuitions which throng the spiritual world, is science betraying the spirit. * His toy of Philosophy, ii. 642. t Legouis, La Jeunesse de Wordsworth, p. 412. THE SHORTER POEMS II3 Wordsworth's crusade against systems of sociology in favour of the study of society at the fount is only the expression of this conviction brought to more bitter utterance by the example of the French Revolution. To revert to the Poems of Sentiment and Reflection. The four sonnets on Personal Talk repeat the theme of A Poefs Epitaph, with the added reflection that Wordsworth himself could only hope to rank among the poets by keeping jealously aloof from "our daily World's true Worldlings " (ii. 8). He further tells us incidentally that in his world of books, Othello and the Fairy Queen were "pre-eminently dear" (iii. 13-4). The series cannot be left without referring to (xx.) Character of the Happy War?'ior (1806). In the Poefs Epitaph, the soldier received a welcome, albeit qualified, — " but lay thy sword aside, And lean upon a peasant's staff" (15-6). For the period of warfare in which Wordsworth's early man- hood was spent had, as he says, "naturally fixed one's attention upon the military character."* Accordingly, he endeavours, in this poem, to portray the ideal of such a character, drawing for the purpose partly from the public virtues of Admiral Lord Nelson and partly from the com- plementary qualities of his own sailor-brother. Captain John Wordsworth, who had died in the previous year. The result is a lofty and yet a human conception. The good that may come out of necessary evil — the consolation of all imperfection — is expressed as follows. He is the happy warrior, * Cp. Convention of Cintra. Grosart's Prose Works of Words- worth, i. 83. H I 14 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH \ " Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; In face of these doth exercise a power Which is our human nature's highest dower ; Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives : By objects, which might force the soul to abate Her feehng, rendered more compassionate ; . . . More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, As tempted more ; more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress ; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness" (12-26). The tragedy of Trafalgar — Nelson's death in the hour of his victory — wsls fresh in men's memory when this encomium was composed; but the classical scholar will further be reminded of the quality of ^neas, mistranslated piety,— " Whose powers shed round him in the common strife. Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; . . . Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; . . . Finds comfort in himself and in his cause " (45-8, 59-60, 81). The likeness between the Happy Warrior and pmis ^neas consecrated to his high purpose, is perhaps more than accidental. For Wordsworth and Virgil both admitted the military hero in concession, as it were, to the demands of their times, and in despite of their own more permanent ideals. Both represent him as a man of peace called necessarily to arms ; for both were affected by a similar reaction to rural life and pastoral virtues. The Maid of Naples, as Virgil was known to his less immaculate con- temporaries, laboured to reproduce in Imperial Rome, in the Rome of Greek vices and Augustan literature, the THE SHORTER POEMS II5 same " homely beauty of the good old cause " * which the simple recluse of Miss Wordsworth's diary was strenuously opposing to the politics and the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Both were reactionaries in order to reform ; both gathered up into their work any loyal and old tradition which made for the ancient virtues of their people ; and Wordsworth, like Virgil, returned to the elder classics of his country, to Chaucer and Spenser in especial, so that their spirit and the spirit of " our peace, our fearful innocence," t often breathes in his verses. It is not surprising, therefore, that the author of Laodamia, the poet who at one time thought of translating the yEneid, who echoes in single lines the majestic music of Virgil, should have fashioned his Happy Warrior in the likeness of Virgil's hero, — as different as possible from the instinctive fighters of the Iliad or the passionless tacticians of more recent warfare. There should be noticed in this poem the use of the heroic couplet in its contrast with that metre in the Poems composed in Youth. One technical point of distinction will be found in the five-fold recurrence (within 85 lines) of triplets in rhyme, thus breaking the antithetical monotony of the measure. But the greatest change is in diction. — There are no personifications, no inversions, no bizarreries; while the modulated sequence of ideas does away with that forced juxtaposition of detached epigrams which was so prominent a feature of his early verse. The three Matthew pieces (x., xi., and xii.) of 1799, called Matthew, Two April Mornings, and The Fountain respectively, are simple and sincere, but call for no special comment, xvii., composed in autumn (18 19), and trans- ferring the lesson of the seasons to the periods of the * Sonnet, To Milton. t lb. Il6 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH poet's own life, contains some fine lines, but is rhetorical rather than poetic. The Daisy of ix. (1803), "thy function apostolical in peace fulfilling," is less pleasing than the Daisy poems of the fancy. There are three poems about dogs, xvi., xvii., and xviii., all composed in 1805. The Tribute (xvii.) is perhaps a little over-strained: ** For love, that comes wherever life and sense Are given by God, in thee was most intense ; A chain of heart, a feeling of the mind, A tender sympathy, which did thee bind Not only to us Men, but to thy Kind : Yea, for thy fellow-brutes in thee we saw A soul of love, love's intellectual law : — " The draft is too big to be honoured. The dog of xviii. {Fidelity^ has watched, like the ass in Peter Be//, for three months by the dead body of a traveller, his master. The remaining poems in the group include (xxi.) T/ie Force of Prayer (1808), which belongs, with the WJiite Doe, to the Craven district of Yorkshire. There is a small collection of seventeen pieces, which Wordsworth placed in no definitive category. Poems '^^^ most notorious of these is (xii.) Goody BiaJze a?id Harry Gi//* (1798). Its second title, "A True Story," — for the incident happened in Warwick- shire at the end of last century — is perhaps its best justi- fication. Granted that a farmer, in a very cold winter, did actually lie in wait under his own hedge, to surprise an old woman who was robbing it of a few sticks, and that the venial thief, taking refuge in curses, did doom him to per- petual shivering, we have a subject quite susceptible of * " From 1 81 5 to 1843, this poem was classed among those of ' the Imagination.' In 1845 it was transferred to the list of ' Miscellaneous Poems.'" — Eversley Wordsworth, i. 254. I I THE SHORTER POEMS I I 7 poetical treatment. That Wordsworth, in the young ardour of his regenerate style, could accurately hit the mean between the simplicity which the persons of the drama required and the poetic " heightening " demanded by the eeriness of the action, is, however, not so certain ; and to this defect are due the lapses into the ridiculous with which the piece abounds : '* Of waistcoats Harry has no lack, Good duffle grey, and flannel fine ; He has a blanket on his back, And coats enough to smother nine " (5-8). " Sad case it was, as you may think, For very cold to go to bed ; And then for cold not sleep a wink " (46-8). *' That day he wore a riding-coat, But not a whit the warmer he ; Another was on Thursday brought. And ere the Sabbath he had three" (109-12). To defend this as realism is no sufficient apology. The reality of Harry Gill's affliction was not in the details of his wardrobe, and the pedestrian enumeration of the coats he wore neglects the one poetic quality of the story — the efficacy of the beldam's curse. In the same way, to keep the recital on the colloquial level of language is to detract from the weirdness of its inner meaning. Think for a moment how Coleridge dealt with the curse on the Ancient Mariner — a true example of realism in art — and the shortcomings of Goody Blake are clear. The Epistle (i., 181 1) to Sir George Beaumont sufifers from lack of tangible interest. It has no beginning and no end, and contains only a single notable line, — " A little, daring, would-be waterfall." The Gold and Silver Fishes in a Vase, with its sequel. Liberty (ii. and iii., — Il8 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH 1829), belong to Wordsworth's uncreative period. The tameness of excellent purpose pervades such lines as, " The beetle loves his unpretending track, The snail the house he carries on his back ; The far-fetched worm with pleasure would disown The bed we give him, though of softest down ; A noble instinct ; in all kinds the same, All ranks ! What sovereign . . . etc." (iii. 71-6) ; though an echo of more inspired moments may be heard in the second stanza of ii. — " Yet might your glassy prison seem A place where joy is known, Where golden flash and silver gleam Have meanings of their own." The remaining miscellaneous poems are of late origin and indifferent value. Of the fifteen poems, collectively known as Inscriptions, a little series of five (x. to xiv.), "supposed Inscriptions. , r j • j i • > n » to be found m and near a hermits cell, written in 181 8, are perhaps the best. The following, for instance, is quite in keeping with the origin suggested : '* Hast thou seen, with flash incessant, Bubbles gliding under ice, Bodied forth and evanescent, No one knows by what device ? Such are thoughts ! — A wind-swept meadow Mimicking a troubled sea, Such is life ; and death a shadow From the rock eternity ! " Omitting the Selections from Chaucer^ Modernised, which found a place here in the 1845 edition of Wordsworth's works, we pass — as he intended — to the final group dealing I I THE SHORTER POEMS IIQ with " Old Age, Death, and Immortahty." There are five '' poems referring to old age " and fifteen " epitaphs and elegiac pieces." The Old Cumberland inrto Old A^e. B^Sg<^^ (i 79^) is the first, the longest, and the Epitaphs. t)est of the series. It preserves the memory of an almost extinct institution — in itself no doubt a survival of feudalism — of pensioners, that is to say, attached to a district and personally supported by gifts in kind. Charity organisation and indoor relief have done away with this class of mendicant ; indeed, as the parochial horizon widens, they are naturally doomed, but there was a familiar picturesqueness in their state which could not but appeal to Wordsworth. This poem, too, is composed in Wordsworth's pastoral manner, in which, as Walter Pater wrote, " by raising nature to the level of human thought, he gives it power and expression : he subdues man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity." * It wins, therefore, from line to line by its idealising power, until we forget what is best forgotten, its origin as a polemic against the work-house. The stoop of old age is finely rendered : "... On the ground His eyes are turned, and, as he moves along, They move along the ground ; and, evermore, Instead of common and habitual sight Of fields with rural works, of hill and dale, And the blue sky, one little span of earth Is all his prospect " (45-51). But for all he seems an encumbrance, he is not sunken "so low as to be scorned without a sin" (83). He is a constant reminder to charitable action. Children learn in him the respect due to grey hairs ; students receive from ^ Appreciations, p. 47. I20 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH him " that first mild touch of sympathy and thought "(114) which moves their books to life : " . . . The easy man Who sits at his own door, — and, like the pear That overhangs his head from the green wall, Feeds in the sunshine ; the robust and young, The prosperous and unthinking, they who live Sheltered, and flourish in a little grove Of their own kindred ; — all behold in him A silent monitor" (116-22). Nay, more — and with admirable sense : '• . . . Man is dear to man ; the poorest poor Long for some moments in a weary life When they can know and feel that they have been Themselves, the fathers and the dealers-out Oi some small blessings, . . . ... for this single cause, That we have all of us one human heart " (147-53). The universal heart, — for the argument returns to this again and again throughout the poet's work, — the universal heart as the prime sanction of Hberty to all things that feel, building it up on no conventions or contracts of an artificial society, but securing it firmly on human nature itself, — even the old wayside beggar, whose use seems so circumscribed and small, can claim his share in this, — ** Then let him pass, ... * And let the chartered wind that sweeps the heath, Beat his grey locks against his withered face. . . . Let him be free of mountain solitudes ; And have around him, whether heard or not, The pleasant melodies of woodland birds. . . . As in the eye of Nature he has lived. So in the eye of Nature let him die ! " (171 ff.). The Small Cela?idtne, to which two poems of the fancy were inscribed, is the subject of the third in the present THE SHORTER POEMS 121 series. In its decay, when it has lost tlie power to close itself up against the wind and rain, it serves as a warning of the fate of men : — •• • It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold : This neither is its courage nor its choice, But its necessity in being old.' . . . To be a Prodigal's Favourite — then, worse truth, A Miser's Pensioner — behold our lot ! O Man, that from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things Youth needed not ! " (14, 21). Among the Epitaphs the most justly renowned is vi. (1805) Elegiac Stanzas suggested by the picture of Peek Castle i?i a storm, painted by Sir George Beaiwiont. * The poem falls naturally into three parts, — stanzas i to 8 being the poet's vision of the sea before the drowning of Captain Wordsworth in 1805 had revealed its crueller moods ; stanzas 9 to 1 3 being devoted to the grief of that loss, and the sympathy with nature's deeper emotions that it aroused, while stanzas 14 and 15 sum up the matter in the large spirit of humanity, — " not without hope we suffer and we mourn." The whole is composed in a very lofty strain, but one line stands out in especial, as epitomising the bulk of Wordsworth's teaching, — stanza 9, line 4, "A deep distress hath humanised my soul." The present distress was the death of his sailor brother, to whose memory vii. {To the Daisy) and viii. {Elegiac Verses) are also devoted, but its apphcation may be widened to include the humanising influence of Words- worth's disappointment in France. For in the course of our survey of these shorter poems from Childhood to Old Age, we have heard again and again the new strong note of * See pp. 36 and 72, stipra. 122 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH faith and love which succeeded the uncertain thought and imitative style of the poet's early manhood. We have seen this influence in its weakness and its strength, but its faults have always been the excess of its qualities, never their defect. From the level of conviction to which Wordsworth's experience had exalted him, his conscientious- ness could never decline. The table-lands to which he conducts us may at times be bald and bare, but their buoyancy never fails. The ample view remains, and the moral purpose of the guide. The last word, like the first, of any account of Wordsworth's shorter poems, must belong to psychology. Taking them more or less in detail, as has just been done, the reader is perplexed by a kind of sameness running through them, a something less than the whole of vision taming the poet's frenzy. Conduct, said Matthew Arnold, is three-fourths of life, and it is as though Wordsworth had held his life complete without the missing quarter. His love, so lightly grasped, so readily abandoned ; his sorrow, so serenely deep, so wholly healed ; his enthusiasm, so hedged about with bounds and limits ; his joy, so moderate and so sane withal ; these, it has been felt, are not the moods in which the fire of Prometheus is kindled before men. But it is in this aspect of philosophic calm that to read Wordsworth is an initiation. Rapt in a vision of harmonising purpose beyond the insistent succession of experience, securely interpreting the accidents of fortune by the revelation of faith, attaining in his course sometimes the sternness, sometimes the tenderness, invariably the inexorableness of prophecy, without haste and, above all, without prejudice, Wordsworth is the poet of a passionate love in a more than mortal sense. To have read Words- worth intelligently is not only to have condoned any THE SHORTER POEMS 123 artistic shortcoming, but it is to have acquired a new standard of excellence in life, a belief in beauty and perfec- tion, exacting, it may be, as an ideal of conscience, but infinitely merciful and of a large sympathy in criticism and understanding. Wordsworth is superhuman, an Olympian aloof from the world, only by excess of humanity. Every man has his own range of sympathy, his own philosophy and scheme of life, — selfish, parochial, patriotic or cosmo- politan. But the ungenial member of a small household in a narrow vale of an English county — if this be the picture of the poet which has impressed the world — wove into the texture of his verse the thoughts of all sentient beings and the feelings of all inanimate things, making the paradox a commonplace by the lonely labours of his mind. For Miss Wordsworth's Diary gives ample testimony to her brother's toil in composition, a toil which is shown by the history of his text to have been for the truthful expression of his hard-won inspiration. On these heights there must be peace, for their outlook is eternity. But it was only through the strength of his impassioned sensibility that Wordsworth's reason grew remote. Or if this claim of a Pisgah prospect from the least of Wordsworth's poems be accounted too presumptuous, and this talk of an initiation by their means into a mood of being at once more solemn and nearer to reality be held too serious for the poet's fame, we may approach them from another side. Wordsworth's gallery of Cumbrian portraits teaches, like Plutarch's Lives, moral philosophy by examples. He stands to the north-west of England as Dickens to the London that is passing away, and the fault is our own, not his, if the simple passions of elemental life are of less interest than the complex existence of the city. More than this ; the sensational school of English fiction 124 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH has now so long been accustomed to "exploit" special tracts of life for the purposes of its trade, introducing a conventional machinery of situations and effects in the place of truth and interpretative imagination, that the classics of England, Shakespeare and Milton, Scott and Wordsworth, in their several degrees, to whom a hot-house nature was false art, are in danger of being honoured unread. Words- worth's care for humanity was intense, and Wordsworth's men are to-day, as yesterday, the types of England's great- ness and her strength. Let us hold fast by this ; — the power of nations is built upon conduct as on a rock, not upon arms, not upon wealth; and in this final test, the humble " statesmen " of the Cumbrian hills shine out from their obscurity like stars. To help us to realise our capacity for perfection " commencing with Childhood, and terminating in Old Age, Death and Immortality," as a primrose is perfect in April, is the achievement of Words- worth's minor poems. CHAPTER IV MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS Horace's dictum about travellers {ccehini, ?ion animum^ mutant) applies with almost personal force to Wordsworth. For, after his first "humanising" transformation in France, the poet abroad was always much the same as the poet at home. He enlarged, of course, the limits of his local colour, but as the characters which he set in it were of similar type, so, too, the influence of the new scenery was rather conservative in its tendency than expanding. He returned home with a fresh affection for the country which he has made his own, and this habit of travel connects itself so closely with a characteristic of his style as to be well worth dwelling upon. He approached nature from within rather than from without, bringing to her the delicate homage of careful interpretation, as though she were a palimpsest written over with superficial characters, concealing an inner message, and not an open page to be categorically described. For the external forms that she assumed, except in so far as they served to train his observation, he can hardly be said to have cared. The simpler these were, and the more familiar they became to him by daily inter- course at home, the less liable he was to error in his reading of the message underneath. Their unfamiliarity, or their wilder and more engaging aspect, rather distracted and disturbed the correctness of that ulterior search. In this, as in so much else, despite their essential convergence in 126 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH teaching, Wordsworth stood in marked contrast with Tennyson. The later laureate had an unrivalled faculty of arresting in language the features of a landscape. He takes us to the Tropics, and we see their rich luxuriance of vegetation, and hear the long drowsiness of their insect- life. Roses blush visibly, waters audibly murmur, under the wonderful strokes of his pen. He uses his words like musical sounds, so that even in silent reading the disposition of his vowels and consonants forces an effect upon our primary senses. Thus, every fresh sight that Tennyson saw, every fresh description of a sight that he realised, provided new matter for his powers. He exercised his language upon it until that wonderful instrument had re- produced it, in actual sensible likeness, in its own domain of art. This is, more than the philosophy of In Meinoriam^ more than the sociology of the Princess^ the gift of Tenny- son to his generation, and to have brought our beautiful English language to its highest and least self-conscious expression, to have made it accord, like a musical instru- ment in the hand of a master, to every light and shadow on nature's face is by no means a slight achievement. But Wordsworth went quite otherwise to work. His words were not sounds but symbols, and his range of symbols was limited in the direction of natural phenomena. The Platonic quality of his mind, the search for unity in diversity, would in itself have prevented the multiple pictorial variety which is at once Tennyson's weakness and his charm. To Wordsworth, knowing every leaf of a certain circumscribed district, the rest of scenery was only the stage property of the same spirit ; it would have oppressed him to enumerate its particular shapes. The awe of Switzerland, the languor of Italy, the peace of the Rhine were not so many different realities to be crystallised in MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 27 undying language; but beneath their seeming differences they were to him manifestations of the same world-soul, whose outward forms he had penetrated at home. Here, as there, the procession of the seasons spoke to him of order in nature ; the wealth of form and colour bestowed so lavishly upon the face of the earth meant to him the sanction of beauty in being, rather than of utility in doing, as the plain principle of conduct ; the faith of dumb animals dictated to him the larger functions of higher gifts, and the elementary virtues of humble life were to him the prototypes of human endeavour. The libertine wind, the flowers that blossomed in joy, the creatures that watched with love, — what matter for the external face that nature wore when her universal heart was beating so near ? To Wordsworth, therefore, all scenery was equally solacious ; for he travelled through it, not as from acquaintance to acquaintance, seeking a new sensation at every stage, but as through the many rooms of a single mansion, presided over by a familiar friend. He has left the record, for instance, of two tours in Scotland, the interest of which lay for him not and 1804 ^" ^^^ characteristic differentia of Scotch lakes and moors, but in a few human affinities^ where the place is the accessory, and the sentiment the essence. There are three poems to the honour of Burns, to whose genius he owed so much and paid so sympathetic a tribute. There are the stanzas at Rob Roy's grave, which, entirely apart from the rhythm of their music, are attractive for their boldness of thought. " He came an age too late " is the poet's first apology for the outlaw bandit, and then, by a rapid transition, Wordsworth set Rob Roy in the midst of contemporary politics, and saw that he was born "an age too soon." His Napoleonic 128 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH qualities might have made him the Buonaparte of Great Britain. Finally, out of the grave, the nobler memory of the dead man prevails. Different circumstances would have developed him differently, and Rob Roy would surely have been found that day, battling for the right on the side of the poor, — for " thou did'st love the liberty of man." There is the wonderful little poem called Stepping West- ward, in which the chance greeting of a stranger by Loch Katrine, "What, are you stepping westward?" passed, in the poet's sensitive imagination, into the voice of the sunset hour, inviting him, as by right indefeasible, to enter without fear the region of endless light. It gave "a human sweetness " to the accents of that awful solitude which oppresses the most worldly of us at the last. It is in touches like these that Wordsworth's instinct was supreme; or, if supreme be objected to, as involving a superiority by comparison, then let us say, in these touches Wordsworth's genius was unique, for no other poet has struck a note so profound in language so transparent. The dim apperceptions that come to one or another of us now and again during life, across who knows what bounds of space and time, are brought here to a concrete expression. But let any of us try to arrest one of those fleeting shadows of the mind, cast, as in Plato's cave, by a light outside of our experience, and he will realise the better the achieve- ment of these six-and-twenty octosyllabic lines. I would connect with Stepping Westward^ two short pieces in this group. To a Highla7id Girl, and the Solitary Reaper, in both of which the eventual impression produced is of a permanence in the transient, — a permanence not only by the grace of memory but in the nature of things. The ships that speak one another in the night, or the islands that cry to one another across seas of misunderstanding, MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS I29 to use familiar metaphors of life, only seem to be sundered because of the incompleteness of our sensibility. The intelligence that would turn aside to pursue them is vain, for we cannot transgress its limitations ; but in so far as they afford us glimpses of the ultimate harmony of end, which proceeds from unity of design, so far they are valu- able in themselves, in their fleetingness, in their several and separate presentments. And Wordsworth who made the commonplace miraculous by the wealth of meaning which he extracted from it, who struck the stone, and the waters gushed forth, made, too, the miracle of sub-con- sciousness familiar, that he who runs may read. This Highland lass, who passed out of his material life, more completely than she had ever entered it, never lost her spiritual companionship, the breath of revelation from the time to come, when he, and she, and the song she sang, and the place of her singing, should all be gathered into the whole of beauty, — one and universal. For the poet was not as other men, to whom love and joy are passions of the flesh. Wordsworth's passion had ever something mystical about it, like the desire of the remote and conse- crated pilgrim, who holds his experience only as the pledge of perfect knowledge. Sixteen years later, an Helvetian and Italian girl were added to the record (in The Three Cottage tinent 1820 ^^^^•^)' I'ather because they recalled the Highland maiden than for any new beauty of their own. Indeed, this middle-aged tour through Belgium and along the Rhine to Switzerland, over the Gothard into northern Italy as far as Milan, and back by the Simplon Pass, did not produce any remarkable output of verse. On the contrary, we arrive with these years at Wordsworth's barren period, where the fault is not in 130 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH excess of originality, in a naivete carried to extremes, and exaggerated in defiance of unintelligent criticism, but is rather to be traced to a far sadder source in the gradual cessation of the poetic flame. Wordsworth laboured on without the light, sometimes plagiarising himself — the most sterile of all kinds of imitation, — sometimes writing ordinary verse like an ordinary man. It was on this level that the later Memorials of Tours were composed, the present series, for instance, of 1820, giving us nothing more than a few desultory descriptions and reflections, which, generally speaking, begin with an apostrophe and end wnth a prayer. The field of AVaterloo, the scene of " that world-earthquake " whose seismic history Wordsworth had followed with so close and vivid an interest, only suggests to him the buried horror of its carnage, and the most characteristic note is struck in the sonnet written At Dover (xxxvii.) on the poet's return. There was another visit to Scotland in the autumn of 1 83 1, to which Yarrow Revisited and Other Voluntaries ^^^^^^^ belong, — twenty-six in all, twenty-three of which are in sonnet form.* Appended to them is a little series of Evening Voluntaries (thirteen in number), written with two exceptions between 1832 and 1835, — viii., an impromptu, dating from 1804, and ix., Co?nposed upon an Evening of extra- ordinary Splendour and Beauty^ from 181 8. The latter may be taken first, as being almost the last instance in which Wordsworth discovered before his rayless years the magic of his former inspiration. It is an Ode in four stanzas, the last of which reverts to the conclusion of the Intimations of Immortality Ode ; but it is rather in the * This series had the special inspiration of Wordsworth's farewell visit to Sir Walter Scott, cp. pp. 32 and 33, supra. MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS I3I second of the four that the harp was taken down from the willows. I quote this stanza at length, and would dwell on it for a moment with the loving insistence that clings to a receding point of vision. " No sound is uttered, but a deep And solemn harmony pervades The hollow vale from steep to steep, And penetrates the glades. Far-distant images draw nigh, Called forth by wondrous potency Of beamy radiance, that imbues, Whate'er it strikes, with gem-like hues ! In vision exquisitely clear. Herds range along the mountain side, And glistening antlers are descried, And gilded flocks appear. Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve ! But long as god-like wish, or hope divine. Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe That this magnificence is wholly thine ! — From worlds not quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won ; An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread On ground which British shepherds tread." "From worlds not quickened by the sun a portion of the gift is won," — the lines take on a personal pathos as we follow the aging poet along the downward slope ; for that portion of the gift, and the grateful pride of priesthood that it evoked, were hardly to be won again. On the level tracts of middle life the music died distantly away. At home in Cumberland, where the rest of the Evening Voluntaries were also composed, failing the inspiration of that " evening of extraordinary splendour," there is no note like this. Wordsworth's vision has became objectified, and of his interpretative power its results only, not its methods, remain. Take, for instance, the two voluntaries To the 132 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Moo7i (xii. and xiii., — 1835). The first, written at the sea-side, pursues the categorical method. The Moon gladdens the mountains and their streams, pervades the wilderness and penetrates the forest, chequers the minster's gloom, and reaches the prisoner in his cell. The Moon has power for phrenzy and for peace; she tidally affects the sea, and is a guiding light to those whose business is upon it ; therefore she is especially the sailor's friend. The second, written at Rydal, touches an old superstition connected with lunar worship, and urges that, though its forms have disappeared, its spirit should be retained, — " May sage and simple, catching with one eye The moral intimations of the sky, Learn from thy course . . . To keep with faithful step the appointed way, Eclipsing or eclipsed, by night or day, And from example of thy monthly range Gently to brook decline and fatal change. ..." Such poetry, if it were not Wordsworth's, would be accounted high. It is melodious and thoughtful, and the " moral intimations " which it conveys, if not strikingly original, are at least lofty and convincing. But we feel at once that the light has disappeared which made Wordsworth's vision unique among poets. We feel it as we read the rest of these Evening Voluntaries^ with their common conclusion in direct prayer. We feel it again as we follow the poet in his travels, in 1833 to Scotland once more, and in 1837 to Italy. Of the eight-and-forty pieces in the former group all except three are sonnets. The most notable of the three is xxvii., Written in a Bla?ik Leaf of Macpher son's Ossian^ a work of attempted reconstruction which Wordsworth here and elsewhere condemns ; while of the sonnets, those inspired by lona (xxxii. to xxxv.), with its memorials and MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 33 its forgetfulness of Adamnan, and xxxvii., reverting to the daisy of Burns, " That, by the unwilling ploughshare, died to prove The tender charm of poetry and love," are, perhaps, most worthy of mention. The ItaUan tour, taken in companionship with Henry Crabb Robinson, " was shortened by report, too well founded, of the prevalence of cholera at Naples. To make some amends," Wordsworth continues, " for what was reluctantly left unseen in the South of Italy, we visited the Tuscan sanctuaries among the Apennines, and the principal Italian lakes among the Alps." Thus, to some extent, the steps of the friends retraced Wordsworth's earlier tour of 1820. The interest of this journey centres at the poet's visit to Rome. There is a long piece of preliminary Musi?tgs^ in which echoes from the history of the Everlasting City fleet before Wordsworth's mind, mingled with the thought of his own old age, spared for the sight of these splendours. And chiefly, through the memories of Cicero and Horace and Virgil, and " downward through that bright dream of commonwealths, each city a starlike seat of rival glory," * the story of the later Rome stands out, when the seven hills became the vicarage of the Christian Church. For the poet who had, as we shall shortly see, written a kind of ecclesiastical epos, was anxious, above all, to revive the historic sense, and, without any leanings to Romanism, to claim for the English Church her share in Roman antiquity. Poetry and piety he went to Rome to find, in that spirit of pilgrim's reverence which must touch the veriest tourist in her streets. These Musings^ therefore, near Aquapendente, * vii. 1 1- 1 3. 134 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH in the " dear neighbourhood " of a " flowering broom," that brought back memories of home and of " The Wizard of the North " who saw Italy, and died, end with a fine anticipation of dehght, — " Let us now Rise, and to-morrow greet magnificent Rome." The morrow brought disappointment, for the reality fell below the ideal. " Is this, ye gods, the Capitolian Hill ? " is, after all, the poet's greeting, and succeeding sonnets go on to plead for everything that tradition, everything that superstition can lend to preserve the memory of the city from the dry-as-dust disillusion of its ruins. "Assent is power, belief the soul of fact," is Wordsworth's reply to the destructive research spirit of Niebuhr and other modern Historians (iv.). But presently, this message of defiance is recalled. Let the majesty of truth prevail over the flatteries of fiction, let historians profane every consecrated romance (vi.), and still " the whole theme " of Rome will survive, a monument more enduring than brass (vii.). The apology in xi., the tenth sonnet of the sequence. From the A/ban Hills, looking towards Rome, came promptly and complete : '* Forgive, illustrious Country ! these deep sighs, . . . . . . Thy fortunes, twice exalted, might provoke Verse to glad notes prophetic of the hour When thou, uprisen, shalt break thy double yoke, And enter, with prompt aid from the Most High, On the third stage of thy great destiny " (i. 10-4). For Wordsworth in Italy is not moved, like Mommsen, to a 7ie plus ultra of Caesar- worship, nor touched, Hke Ruskin or Symonds, to re-create the morning of art ; but rather the spirit of all the ages seems to settle upon his thought, with MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 35 something of that penetrative optimism which delighted us in his earlier days. His vision of the Eternal City is a vision of faith, in which an excelling sense of the immortal quality of human greatness and endeavour unifies and transcends the several periods of her history. The human spectacle predominates, and Wordsworth, After leavmg Italy (xxv.), with the dreary sight of Lago Morto in his eyes, repeats the same strong note : *' Italia ! on the surface of thy spirit (Too aptly emblemed by that torpid lake) Shall a few partial breezes only creep ? — Be its depths quickened ; what thou dost inherit Of the world's hopes, dare to fulfil ; awake, Mother of Heroes, from thy death-like sleep ! " (8-14). And Wordsworth's whole attitude in travel is perhaps most succinctly given in a letter from Henry Crabb Robinson (his companion on this tour) to Mr Grosart, the editor of Wordsworth's Prose Works. The letter (Grosart, III. 433) is dated from 30 Russell Square, 1850, and speaking of the Musings ?iear Aquapende?ite, the writer remarks, — " As he himself repeatedly said of the journey, ' It is too late.' ' I have matter for volumes,' he said once, ' had I but youth to work it up.' It is remarkable how in this admirable poem meditation predominates over observation. ... It was a remark justly made on the Memorials of the Swiss journey of 1820, that Mr W. left unnoticed the great objects which have given rise to innumerable commonplace verses and huge piles of bad prose, and which everybody talks about, while he dwelt on impressions peculiar to himself. As a reproach, nothing can be more idle and un- meaning. I expected it would be so with these latter poems, and so I found it." Indeed, the first object at Rome which struck on Wordsworth's sensibility was a 136 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH solitary pine-tree on the Pincian hill, which the generosity and taste of Sir George Beaumont, his old friend, had pensioned from destruction by the axe. But if the " youth to work it up " and the magic of the youthful touch were wanting to Wordsworth on his travels, yet a great man's powers cannot decay without compensa- tion. More and more, as Wordsworth grew to distrust his capacity for a sustained effort of song, more and more, as the pathos of the " it is too late " kept his music in reserve, a certain stateliness of diction succeeded, which expressed itself chiefly in the sonnet. His model in this metre was Milton, and the record of this is so characteristic that the incident may be quoted in his own words : " In the cottage of Town-end, one afternoon in 1801, my sister read to me the sonnets of Milton. I had long been well acquainted with them, but I was particularly struck on that occasion with the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most of them — in character so totally different from the Italian, and still more so from Shakespeare's fine sonnets. I took fire, if I may be allowed to say so, and produced three sonnets the same afternoon — the first I ever wrote, except an irregular one at school." The qualities which are here distinguished were frequently reproduced by Wordsworth, but his sonnets, both in character and number, occupy a unique place in the history of that measure. Milton's own examples, only eighteen in all, seldom present the frugality of rhyme, the accurate division of sense between octave and sextad, or the summary conclusion of Italian and Shakespearian tradition, and Wordsworth, in his nearly five hundred sonnets, enlarged on his master's privileges. An elaborate analysis has shown that, though the earlier instances exhibit great technical correctness, yet, as this MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 37 measure became his chief instrument of expression, he considerably modified its artifices and rules.* And in the relaxed form which it assumed, by the " intense unity" of presentation which it secured, by its tutored dignity of sound, as well as by the negative excellence which Samuel Rogers pointed out of preventing the wordi- ness to which the poet was prone, Wordsworth's sonnet is the supreme creation of the autumn of his life, and reflects, as in a polished mirror, the hues of that period, glorious though in decay. For his later style, as it has been somewhat fallaciously called, was only the contrac- tion of his earlier energies. He became, not more re- ligious, but more distinctively Christian. His sister, for instance, revising in 1832 the Scotch tour of 1803, regrets that it began and ended on a Sunday. He became, too, not less democratic, but more distinctively conservative ; not a better patriot, but a more literal Englander ; and this added definitiveness in many departments of opinion brought with it a stiffening of numbers and a concentra- tion of vision. It brought with it, in a word, the Wordsworthian sonnet. The longest outcome of the later style was the series in three parts of 132 Ecclesiastical So?inets. It Ecclesiastical . i ^ j n i. ^ ^u Sonnets ^^ ^"^^ necessary here to dwell at any length on Wordsworth's historic sympathy with Church Establishment or his timid opposition to Catholic Emancipation.! Despite his essential religiousness, which kept him, even in the worst days of the reaction from the Terror, as far from Shelley's atheism as from Coleridge's metaphysical mists, despite even his increased respect for "" See a paper by the Rev. T. Hutchinson on The StmcUire of the Wordsworthia7i Somzet, Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, vol. 2. t Cp. Chapter v., p. 163, tJifra. 138 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH doctrine as the years went on, Wordsworth's Christianity was always, so to speak, vicarious. The moral and con- serving value of a church — and, a fortiori^ of the church traditionally established, — its value as a centre of spiritual influence, as a channel of ascetic aspiration, its value not least as a literal feature in the landscape, was always present to Wordsworth's mind. But the spirit and the ascesis, the renunciation and the practice, were less to his purpose than the outward body with which they were informed. Less to his purpose, — because Wordsworth's later mood was, above all, didactic. He had spent his manhood in a passionate endeavour to interpret the beauty of the world to a generation of Peter Bells. The realisa- tion of the vision was a question of conduct, and his old age was devoted to winning the social and political environ- ment best fitted for its display. His attitude, therefore, towards the Church was that of the politician and the social reformer, not that of the saint ; his interest in it was objective, based upon history rather than upon religion. In all this there is no ground for complaint. That Wordsworth was not George Herbert, that the epicist of the Church was not pre-eminently a Christian, nor the martyrologist himself a martyr, detracted indeed from the contagious quality of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets^ but cannot lessen their value as a historical plea for local religious observances. It cannot unmake that unique experiment to win the philosopher's assent to the worship of the people, and the share of the people in the tranquillity of the philosophers. It cannot reverse the complete success with which the country-side pastorage is sketched, like a tree with deep shadows, its branches embracing the land, it roots winding about antiquity, and its summit pointing to heaven. Nor can it unwrite the majestic sonnet Mutability (III. xxxiv.), MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS T39 nor the triad inspired by the Inside of King's College Chapel (III. xliii.-v.). The pity is, that the intensely conservative inspiration of the series answered to a strain of narrowness which sur- prises us in the aging poet. He has accustomed us so long to a universalisation of the individual, he has fused so successfully the limitations of life in the reconciling harmonies of eternity, an eternity unorthodox only in its approaches, for the God of Nature's temple is one with the God of the Church, — that, when it comes to a question of particular means, we had forgotten the narrowness which is logically required. Yet it is consistent enough, at least until the Platonic dream is realised, and our statesmen are philosophers, not in some circumscribed district alone, Protestant England or another, but in an ideal Republic whose bounds shall be co-extensive with the world. To have ideaUsed England, and to have hedged his idol about from every source of outside contamination, may have been unpractical on Wordsworth's part; but that is the statesmen's fault, not the philosophers'. It marks our distance from the ideal, but the ideal remains, clearly defined beyond the valley of the shadow : •' Look forth ! — that Stream behold, That Stream upon whose bosom we have passed, Floating at ease, while nations have effaced Nations, and Death has gathered to his fold Long lines of mighty Kings — look forth, my soul ! (Nor in this vision be thou slow to trust) The Uving waters, less and less by guilt Stained and polluted, brighten as they roll, Till they have reached the eternal City— built For the perfected Spirits of the just," * * Conclusion, E. S., III. xlvii. For the access of Conservatism here remarked upon, see the next chapter in connection with Wordsworth's political prose writings. I40 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH The Ecclesiastical Sonnets^ begun in 182 1, and worked at for many succeeding years, was not the Til 6 RiVfiT Duddon ^^^^ attempt which Wordsworth had made to present the different aspects of a single theme in the form of a sonnet sequence. In 1820, he dedicated to his brother, Dr Wordsworth, thirty-four sonnets to The River Diiddon, an unpretentious stream which, as is stated in the introductory note, rises '' on the confines of West- moreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire : and, having served as a boundary to the two last counties for the space of about twenty-five miles, enters the Irish Sea, between the Isle of Walney and the Lordship of Milium." It is a curious coincidence, just worthy of mention, that the scheme of the Ecclesiastical So?inets trespassed upon Southey's projected prose history of the Church in England, while that of the River Duddon trespassed upon Coleridge's intended poem " The Brook." This series is more attractive than the former. Though the sonnets were written at different times — the fourteenth, for instance, was the first composed — they exhibit at once more variety and more cohesion than those devoted to the Church. The succession of interest is not forced by copulative "buts" and "fors" and "ands"; it flows evenly, like the river itself Wordsworth, too, was happier in his subject. Duddon became to him a Uving companion, rich with sympathies and subtle suggestions in the lore of nature for the learning of man. Duddon's scenery, again, beautifully described in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and twentieth sonnets, and commemorated hardly less beauti- fully in the note to the seventeenth and eighteenth,* had been long famiUar to him, with the familiarity that induces * Begin at the words, ' ' After all, the traveller would be most gratified." A fine passage of prose succeeds. MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 14I understanding. Pious pilgrims in the poet's footsteps have identified every reference and cleared up every allusion in these poems ; but, whether studied geographi- cally or read poetically, the Duddon sonnets have always taken high rank among Wordsworth's productions. Since the potamic stage of civilisation, in the favourite phrase of a certain school of historians, a river has always held romance for the children of men. Its cloudy origin, its troubled youth, its tranquil manhood, flowing towards the sea, are typical of the course of human life. And it writes our history no less than our philosophy, for it is the high- way of intercourse and commerce in peace and war, con- trolling the destinies of the peoples on its banks. If Nile, or Tiber, or Rhine, or Neva is romantic in this wise, why not Duddon in its own degree? Those to whom the incantation of Wordsworth is a familiar message will see the truer appropriateness in his choice of a less-known theme, will look to him for a deeper meaning than their own sense could read, and will find — from the Dedication to the After-thought — W^ordsworth once more revealed in these poems as the priest of nature and the prophet of man. It is at least significant that The Mofithly Review^ which, in August, 1 8 1 9, spoke of the author of Peter Bell as "this infatuated poetaster," and in September, 18 19, spoke of the author of The Waggoner as "the Prince of Poetical Burlesque," was pleased in October, 1820, to notice the River Duddon volume in terms of respectful appreciation.* * Wordsworth's reputation passed through other vicissitudes in the hands of the Monthly reviewer. In 1799, "so much genius and originality " were discovered in the Lyrical Ballads^ that their author^ was encouraged to continue. In 181 5 (Feb. and Nov.), the Excursion^ the Poe?fis, and the White Doe were severely criticised and condemned. Finally, in June 1842, a propos of the Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, a retrospect was made, and a complete recantation effected. — See p. 41, supra. 142 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Nature abroad, the Church in history, a river as philo- sophy, these are all aspects of Wordsworth's Poems, etc., message. But the reader who has followed Dedicated to , ° ^ , , , , . . Liberty. ^^^ P^et so far, who has noted how inti- mately his " natural religion " was bound up with his national patriotism, who has discovered that what lay nearest to the poet's heart was not nature divorced from man but man re-created by nature, will have awaited some clearer strain, some direct cry to the England which he loved, some final utterance, not de- scriptive nor discursive, but of lyric intensity and lyric passion. It will have been possible to gather from what has been seen of Wordsworth's works his aspirations for his country, but the works would have seemed incomplete had he not put together for us the sum and substance of his desires. In the seventy-four Foems dedicated to National In- depe?ide7ice and Liberty^ and in the later fourteen Sonnets dedicated to Liberty and Order^ we have this transference effected in lyric guise, — nature's ordered joy and re- sponsible freedom transferred to the England of to-day. And this, the last great division of the master's poetry, must be viewed as a kind of consummation. Love comes to men in different ways, and Wordsworth's love was of diviner fabric than the passions of the flesh. It is hardly fanciful to say, that, in him, Nature was the Bride of humanity, and the fruit was social order. These poems to liberty become then, in a sense, the love-songs of Wordsworth. They exhibit the various phases of that consuming passion, its doubts, its longings, its gratitude, its despair, as clearly as in Catullus himself. And if it be objected, in the poet's dispraise, that his love was un- human and cold, Virgil's precedent recurs, who gave us, MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS T43 as hero, ^neas the Good, wedded to an equally remote ideal, but toiling as men toil, and suffering as men suffer for the passionless passion which he bore. It is granted to few to revive in their own heart the white flower of chivalry ; for to most men the love of country and the passion for humanity come tempered and turned to prose by the engines of political science. But to Wordsworth, purged in the fires of the Revolution, the passion and the love came lyrically free. He once compared a sonnet to a dew-drop, and these poems to Hberty bear out his simile. Some are shed by hope in the morning of her rising ; some glisten with the evening light ; some fall like the tears of the labouring noon. The first part contains twenty-six sonnets, a rhymed poem and an ode. The majority of the former belong to the years 1802-3, and breathe, in alternate strains of tender- ness and exhortation, the poet's love for England. The five, especially, numbered xiii. to xvii., written in London in the autumn of 1802, are alive for all time with genuine patriotism, xiii. laments the decay of simple virtue and the dress for show that modern life had assumed, xiv. is the magnificent invocation of the spirit of Milton, with his Puritan consecration of "life's common way." xv. is the exaltation of England at the expense of France, — " Great men have been among us," . . . but " France, 'tis strange, hath brought forth no such souls as we had then." xvi. pursues that source of encouragement ; a nation which has been so great can never utterly perish, — " we must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold which Milton held ; " and xvii., perhaps the most beautiful in the group, is the Poet's apology to England, his mistress, for his momentary distrust, — 144 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH ' ' For dearly must we prize thee ; we who find In thee a bulwark for the cause of men ; And I by my affection was beguiled : What wonder if a Poet now and then, Among the many movements of his mind, Felt for thee as a lover or a child ! " France's treatment of Switzerland and Sweden, and Napoleon's revealed meanness had made a terrible impres- sion upon AVordsworth, and several sonnets in the present collection are devoted to these themes. Those of 1803, for instance, xviii. to xxvi., are a stern indictment of the sinful country and her little great leader, "with mighty nations for his underlings," who had so shamefully declined from the ideal use of power, and were coming now, " Impatient to put out the only light Of Liberty that yet remains on earth." And England, Liberty's last stronghold, is again appealed to in stirring language not to be below her trust, xii., Thought of a Briton on the Subjection of Sivitzerland, and vi.. On the Extinction of the Venetia?i Republic, are too well known to require quotation here. In them, indeed, Wordsworth touched the highest point in the style which was avowedly fired by " Milton's dignified simplicity and majestic harmony." Both here and in the forty-two sonnets and four odes of Part II., Wordsworth's service to history and liberty is unique in kind. It is not possible to follow this second series in detail. It makes excursions into antiquity (i., ii., vi.), to Spain (vii., viii., xxvi.-xxxiii.), to the Tyrol (ix. and following), and to Russia (xxxiv.-xxxvi.), and concludes with the notorious Thanksgiving Ode of January 18, 1 8 1 6. Where the history of these years preceded, Wordsworth followed ; where liberty was contested, her lover went. He held up for our imitation a standard of public honour, equally un- MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 45 susceptible of compromise with the private honour of each man ; and the point where these poems are remarkable is in their relation to the democratic idea of our age. Words- worth, as we have seen more than once, founded the rule of the people upon a revolution of conduct. He had risen to the height of the lesson of 1789, freed of the mistakes of the Convention and purged of the Terror. He saw that its practical moral effect was the enfranchisement of the disinherited of all previous democratic ideals.* The basis of happiness was extended, and its local limits were enlarged. In other poems, as we have seen, Wordsworth set himself to illustrate this principle at work, in nature, in society, or in the individual, but here, and now, we get the assertion of the principle. The national honour is bound to uphold it ("Say, what is Honour ? — 'Tis the finest sense oi justice which the human mind can frame" xvii. 1-2).! Art and wealth and the industrial peace that promote them, aims of democracy to which Wordsworth fully subscribed, are to be postponed to this corner-stone of the democratic house, — liberty for one and all. This, very briefly, is the contribution which Wordsworth's present series of poems makes to the page of history. It interprets for succeeding generations the true lesson of the French Revolution, and crowns the conqueror of Napoleon as the guardian of this creed. The fourteen addi- tional sonnets of his old age. To Liberty and Order ^ are com- posed in the same spirit, and give the same call to conduct. No great value attaches to the series of fourteen sonnets, belonging to 1840, and designed as a defence The Funisli- r ^ • 1 -r. • 1 rr^i ment of Death Capital Punishment. They are interesting, however, from the point of view of Words- worth's opinions, for their tendency is directly in favour of * Cp. Chapter I., pp. 17-20, supra. t Cp. The Convention of Cintra. Grosait, Prose Works., i. 77. K 146 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH the theory of State Socialism ; Wordsworth justifies the extreme penalty of the law, not only on the ground of its greater humanity, as more merciful, and, in a sense, more religious than perpetual imprisonment ("leaving the final issue in His hands "), but also on the ground of the State, as a universal conception, transcending the limits of its individual parts. Social order cannot be attained unless this theory be practically asserted. In this particular issue, as in the wider principle itself, the liberty of Wordsworth's democratic idea was based on order, not on anarchy. There remain for mention the three series of unclassed ' sonnets, in which Wordsworth included some ! Sonnets ^^ ^^^ most polished gems. Perhaps, if selec- tion be invited, the one which bears most : directly on Wordsworth's art is the thirty-first of Part II., ^ " Brook ! whose society the Poet seeks." It might have ^ been put as preface to the Duddon series, giving, as it does, j. the peculiar attitude with which Wordsworth approached nature. In contrast especially to Keats, who revived the Hellenistic spirit in modern poetry, Wordsworth rejected the Greek point of view, which peopled the shows of nature with anthropomorphic imaginings. For him, the whole theogony of dryads in trees, and naiads in streams, 1 and echoes in mountains, was vicious and false, in that it deceived the unifying vision, and split up into a thousand attractive shapes the single informing spirit.* It was only in a moment of mental and spiritual exhaustion that Wordsworth relapsed into pantheistic Paganism. (Pt. I., * "The grand storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative imagina- tion, of poetical, as contra-distinguished from human and dramatic ;j imagination, are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton ; to which I cannot forbear to add those of fi Spenser. I select these writers in preference to those of ancient t; MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 47 xxxiii., — "The world is too much with us.") With this rejection is to be included the absence in Wordsworth's poetry of that modern development of Pagan anthropomor- phism, which Ruskin called " the pathetic fallacy." Wordsworth seldom or never read his private joys and sorrows reflected on the face of nature. Tennyson's Lotos- eaters may be taken as a locus classicus of this practice \ the human and the scenic elements are fused in a single mood. I would select, too, the third of the second series, To B. R. Haydon (" High is our calling. Friend ! — "), where the poet confesses to the painter the stress of emotion in which his work is composed. This sonnet and the following may be compared, in their conscious dignity and responsive meekness, to the eighth of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art. II. xxxvi., Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802 ("Earth has not anything to show more fair"), is justly famous for its beauty, and is interesting, too, from another point of view. Wordsworth's attitude towards London was never very deeply inspired. His residence there before the Revolution produced little more than a " country cousin's " sensations. After his return from Paris, at the end of 1792, he was more or less a stranger in the city, and its attraction to him was in its position as the centre of political affairs, rather than in any romance of its own. The Reverie of Poor Susan, in whose vision " Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside," Greece and Rome, because the anthropomorphitism of the Pagan religion subjected the minds of the greatest poets of those countries too much to the bondage of definite form ; from which the Hebrews were preserved by their abhorrence of idolatry. . . . Our great epic Poet . . v.as a Hebrew in soul." Preface to Poems, 181 5. 148 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH is the most inspired utterance provoked. It is character- istic, therefore, that the present fine sonnet should be of London at rest, not in its ceaseless motion. The three poems To Sleepy (I. xii.-xiv.), have already been mentioned in another connection ; * they breathe the spirit of repose. More directly bearing on the poet's work is I. xvii., "A poem came forth of late, called Peter Bell," modelled on Milton's sonnet on the Tetrachordon, and retorting the author's indifference to the ignorant censure of his critics. It is one of the very few instances where Wordsworth showed, not resentment so much as any notice at all of the revilings which had been showered upon him. His more common reply was a deference in the minutiae, and an indifference in the essentials of his art. Finally, we may select as an example of W^ordsworth's own critical faculty, united with perfect numbers, the first of Part II., in which the defence of the sonnet is attempted as it was employed by Shakespeare, Petrarch, Tasso, Camoens, Dante, Spenser, and Milton. To this noble roll, nobly commemorated, Wordsworth's name must be added. In the twenty-eighth poem of Part III. he has given the best description of his power. Comparing the splendid ecstasies and moments of poetry to the forms and hues of the western clouds at sun- set, he renounces the attendant pomp for the fear of the storms it implies : " Not loth to thank each moment for its boon Of pure delight, come vvhencesoe'er it may, ^ Peace let us seek, — to steadfast things attune ] Calm expectations, leaving to the gay | And volatile their love of transient bowers, \ The house that cannot pass away be ours." With this we may fitly leave the poetical works of * See p. 52, supya. MEMORIALS OF TOURS AND SONNETS 1 49 Wordsworth. Those to whom the peace of the permanent amid things passing makes ample atonement for the shifting pleasures it puts by, will rise to the height of this concluding aspiration. The house that has not passed away is his. CHAPTER V THE PROSE WORKS Wordsworth's prose writings supply a running commentary on his verse. I have already referred at some Politics length to the so-called Apology for the French Revolution (letter to the Bishop of Llandaff), which was written in London in 1793.* Apart from the interest of the circumstances of its composition, the pamphlet may delay us here a moment more to consider the merit of its argument. In the part of The Prelude touching that date, or a little earlier, Wordsworth exclaims, *' Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven ! — Oh ! times In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance ! " (xi. 108). The Letter in question was obviously written while the white heat of passionate life was strongly upon the poet. We can watch, if we read it carefully, the struggle between logic and enthusiasm, between Wordsworth's sense of glorious youth and his desire to be reasonably convincing, — in a word, between Beaupuy's proselyte and the Bishop's opponent. Accordingly, the process of argument is formal and precise ; the argument itself is indignant and dogmatic. Capitals and italics are not seldom used ; the eternal nature of man, in one or another form, is a constant subject of * See Chapter I., p. 16, supra. Grosart is responsible for the title; in italics. 150 THE PROSE WORKS I51 appeal ; and the compromise of interests, inevitable to all political systems, is persistently ignored. A similar " impossibility " has been held to characterise the Tractate on the Convention of Cintra. Judging it as an ephemeral production, the criticism is no doubt just. This document of 137 large octavo pages is condemned by its very title, "Concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal, ... the whole brought to the test of those Principles, by which alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered." As a serious contribution to the politics of 1808-9, such an essay was a farce. A Board of Inquiry was held on the share taken by Sir Arthur Wellesley and his colleagues in drawing up the agreement for the evacuation of Portugal by the French troops, and of the preliminary suspension of arms. The report of that Board had been a reserved judgment as to the fitness of the Convention itself, but a unanimous vote of confidence, on the other hand, in " the unquestionable zeal and firmness " displayed by the English Generals. There, in common fairness and patriotism, the matter should have rested. Not even poets should rush in where Boards of Inquiry fear to tread, — least of all, it might seem, a poet taking the pedestrian way of prose. It is typical of Wordsworth's earnestness that the objection never even struck him. Here was an obvious violation of the principles of conduct which it had been his poetic mission to construct ; it appeared to him his plain duty to drag the events before the bar of those principles. In other words, his vision of the ideal was so intense as to obscure its practical tactlessness. His idealism knew no expediency ; — •' I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more," Wordsworth said, in effect to his country, and, at 152 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH this distance of time, we may condone the tactical error for the chivalric virtue which provoked it. For, in this view, the memory of the poet is unassailed by censure. This treatise is, and was, a Hterary excursion into the field of politics. It is, to use a hackneyed term, an academic essay, remote, and of the schools. The events in Portugal and the men who directed them are used for purposes of experimentation, but, for the rest, it relates to an international policy, " wholly lost To the general sense of men, by chains confined Of business, care, or pleasure, or resigned To timely sleep."* Regarding the treatise, therefore, as an essay in con- structive justice, it is well worth reading. The stages of that revulsion of feeling, through which Wordsworth and many of his countrymen had passed since he apologised for the French Revolution, are clearly expressed, and give the clue to the mood in which, for instance, Guilt and Sorrow and The Borderers were composed : " There are promptings of wisdom from the penetralia of human nature, which a people can hear, though the wisest of their practical statesmen be deaf towards them. This authentic voice, the people of England had heard and obeyed : and, in opposition to French tyranny growing daily more insatiate and implacable, they ranged themselves zealously under their government ; though they neither forgot nor forgave its transgressions, in having first involved them in a war with a people then struggling for its own liberties under a twofold infliction — confounded by inbred faction, and be- leaguered by a cruel and imperious external foe. But these re- membrances did not vent themselves in reproaches, nor hinder us from being reconciled to our Rulers, when a change or rather a revolution in circumstances had imposed new duties ; and, in * See the Poems to National Independence and Liberty^ Part II., vii. and viii., where Wordsworth acknowledges that the present Tract was composed aloof from "the World's vain objects." THE PROSE WORKS 153 defiance of local and personal clamour, it may be safely said, that the nation united heart and hand with the Government in its resolve to meet the worst, rather than stoop its head to receive that which, it was felt, would not be the garland but the yoke of peace. Yet it was an afilicting alternative ; . . . Our condition savoured too much of a grinding constraint — too much of the vassalage of necessity. . . . We desponded, though we did not despair. In fact, a deliberate and preparatory fortitude — a sedate and stern melancholy, which had no sunshine and was exhilarated only by the lightnings of indignation— this was the highest and best state of moral feeling to which the most noble-minded among us could attain. But, from the moment of the rising of the people of the Pyrenean peninsula, there was a mighty change ; we were instantaneously animated ; and, from that moment, the contest assumed the dignity, which it is not in the power of anything but hope to bestow : and, if I may dare to transfer language, prompted by a revelation of the state of being that admits not of decay or change, to the concerns and interests of our transitory planet, from that moment 'this corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.' " It will not be denied that this fine passage of prose, and the following sentences which describe the glow of hope and brotherhood in which Spain and England joined forces, are an enlightened commentary on the successive emotions provoked by Pitt's declaration of war. In no estimate of those troubled times should Wordsworth's record be forgotten. Historically, too, considerable value attaches to the noble eulogy of the Spanish people, fired by a single desire for liberty. Their wrongs are eloquently stated ; "their consolation, their resolves, and their hopes" are yet more thrillingly confirmed. The romance of the land, and of the cities whose names are music, is pressed into the service of the writer. Against this grand array of justice, Wordsworth represents the Convention of Cintra as an act of treachery on England's part. I would refer 154 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH you, too, to the pages dealing with the quality of " in- tellectual courage," for lack of which " grievous errors were committed by Sir Hew Dalrymple and his colleagues." It is the quaUty of generalship which we have met before in the Character of the Happy Warrior ^^ who, as it is written here, " will have a firm mind in whatever embarrass- ment he may be placed ; will look steadily at the most undefined shapes of difficulty and danger, of possible mistake or mischance ; nor will they appear to him more formidable than they really are. For his attention is not distracted — he has'^but one business, and that is with the object before him. Neither in general conduct nor in particular emergencies, are his plans subservient to con- siderations of rewards, estate, or title ; these are not to have precedence in his thoughts, to govern his actions, but to follow in the train of his duty." And the British Generals, Wordsworth asserts, who had wanted this in- tellectual courage in regard to their means, were guilty of " worse blindness in regard to ends. . . . The evacua- tion of Portugal was not the prime object, but the manner in which that event was to be brought about. . . . We combated for victory in the empire of reason, for strong- holds in the imagination. Lisbon and Portugal, as city and soil, were chiefly prized by us as a language ; but our Generals mistook the counters of the game for the stake played at." The political indiscretion — for Lisbon and Portugal, it is true, were not made to speak the language of justice — is immaterial to-day ; the eloquence and the high purpose of the writer remain. The eloquence touches a still loftier level, when Words- worth shows how the action of England must have been received in Spain : — * See Chapter III., p. 114, supra. THE PROSE WORKS 155 " O Sorrow ! O misery for England, the land of liberty and courage and peace ; the land trustworthy and long approved ; the home of lofty example and benign precept ; the central orb to which, as to a fountain, the nations of the earth ' ought to repair, and in their golden urns draw light ' ; — O sorrow and shame for our country ; for the grass which is upon her fields, and the dust which is in her graves ; for her good men who now look upon the day ; and her long train of deliverers and defenders, her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton ; whose voice yet speaketh for our reproach ; and whose actions survive in memory to con- found us, or to redeem ! " For what hath been done ? look at it : we have looked at it : we have handled it : we have pondered it steadily : we have tried it by the principles of absolute and eternal justice ; by the sentiments of high-minded honour, both with reference to their general nature, and to their special exaltation under present circumstances ; by the rules of expedience ; by the maxims of prudence, civil and military : we have weighed it in the balance of all these, and found it wanting ; in that which is most excellent most wanting." It is for the historian to decide whether the occasion was adequate to such an outburst, and in his decision we must acquiesce. But for Wordsworth's critics it is enough to know that his prose was as eloquent as its informing spirit was sincere. The conclusion of the Tractate is of especial interest, because it states more clearly than elsewhere, Wordsworth's tutored conviction that the charters of a nation are as dust in the balance, if there be no freedom from within ; that "commerce, manufactures, agriculture, and all the peaceful arts, are of the nature of virtues or intellectual powers : they cannot be given ; they cannot be stuck in here and there ; they must spring up ; they must grow of themselves " ; that the moral quaUties upon which he lays such stress are not for exceptional use, but for habitual employment, in little things as well as in great : " The outermost and all-embracing circle of benevolence has 156 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH inward, concentric circles which, Hke those of the spider's web, are bound together by links, and rest upon each other ; making one frame, and capable of one tremor ; circles narrower and narrower, closer and closer, as they lie more near to the centre of self from which they proceeded, and which sustains the whole. . . . The higher mode of being does not exclude, but necessarily includes, the lower ; the intellectual does not exclude, but necessarily includes, the sentient ; the sentient, the animal ; and the animal, the vital — to its lowest degrees." * Finally, I select from this inspiring essay, a few of the great maxims which illuminate its pages, — general truths more valuable than the conclusions of contemporary politics, and the more forcible, perhaps, because detached from their context. The reader of the Tract will easily add to their number : "All knowledge of human nature leads ultimately to repose." " Still to be talking of bestowing and conferring, and to be happy in the sight of nothing but what he thinks he has bestowed or conferred, this, in a man to whom the weak- ness of his fellows has given great power, is a madness of pride more hideous than cruelty." "When the people speaks loudly, it is from being strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon ; and he, who cannot discover the true spirit from the false, hath no ear for profitable communion." " Riddance, mere riddance — safety, mere safety — are objects far too defined, too inert and passive in their own nature, to have ability either to rouze or to sustain. . . . All courage is a projection from ourselves ; however short- lived, it is a motion of hope." * See pp. 18 and 79, supra. THE PROSE WORKS 157 "Power of mind is wanting, where there is power of place." " Talk not of the perishable nature of enthusiasm ; and rise above a craving for perpetual manifestations of things. He is to be pitied whose eye can only be pierced by the light of a meridian sun, whose frame can only be warmed by the heat of midsummer." " The true sorrow of humanity consists in this ; — not that the mind of man fails ; but that the course and demands of action and of Ufe so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires." With the treatise on the Convention of Cintra, Words- worth's more direct interest in politics abroad Politics practically came to an end. He retained his historical sympathy with the traditions of great nations ; he retained, too, that ardent devotion to the cause of justice which made every moral inequality his special prey ; but — as we saw in the first chapter — towards the first few years of this century, the poet withdrew more and more to the solitude of his home among the hills. He was contented to see the universe in miniature ; or — to adopt his own metaphor — from a narrow and inner circle of benevolence, he watched the sympathetic tremors of out- ward and concentric circles. Accordingly, the next political utterance of any importance which Wordsworth gave to the world consists of two Addresses to the Freeholders of West- moreland (Kendal, 1818), portions of which originally appeared in the Ke?idal Chronicle and the Carlisle Patriot. In that year, Lord Brougham and Vaux, then known as Mr Henry Brougham, was for the first time contesting the representation of the county. He was unsuccessful then and twice afterwards, the third occasion being in 1826. It is not necessary here to enter into the various problems of 158 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH provincial politics at this date (18 18), in order to explain Wordsworth's disposition to Lord Brougham. There is more satisfaction in learning, from the Greville Memoirs, that the poet and the politician eventually came to appreciate one another aright. But beyond the personal and local reasons which led Wordsworth to support the nomination of both Members of Parliament for his district from the House of Lowther, these Addresses are at least of interest as a statement of the attitude of the Tory free-holders towards Reform before the date of the Reform Bills. The fight has been fought, and the ominous apprehensions of the timid are long since forgotten ; but to Wordsworth, as to many others in those years, it seemed more prudent to educate the electorate before enfranchising it, — " to walk — to wind — towards a thing that is coveted " rather than to leap upon it at once. In this spirit the Poet had already turned his attention to the ethical aspect of domestic politics. In 1809, Mathetes* had sent to the editor of The Friend — Cole- ridge's paper — a letter in which he set forth the paralysing danger to generous youth, on entering the world, of an education which has trained, in the noblest examples, the faculties of love and admiration. Such a youth, according to Mathetes, will transfer his eager affections, brought to active use in the school of nature and antiquity, to the readiest objects at hand. Natural curiosity will complete the work which inevitable self-delusion begins. Predis- posed to discover in his own age the answering object of his intellect and love, flattered by the promptness of its response, and dazzled by the glitter of its philosophy and art, such a youth will decHne upon the sensuous and the * Professor John Wilson, the " Christopher North " of Maga^ and of his own Nodes Ambrosiance. THE PROSE WORKS I 59 shallow, and will lose, in this declension, his power of moral discrimination. He will exaggerate the excellences of the present and base a belief in the perpetual progress of the race on a distrust of the wisdom and a lack of reverence for the greatness of "the mighty minds of old." Such was the indictment of the modern system of educa- tion ; it provoked the idealising powers of youth — and opened forthwith the doors of the world. Concluding his letter, Mathetes wrote : " If a teacher should stand up in their generation, conspicuous above the multitude in superior power, and still more in the assertion and pro- clamation of disregarded truth ; — to him, to his cheering or summoning voice, all those would turn, whose deep sensibihty has been oppressed by the indifference, or misled by the seduction, of the times. Of one such teacher, who has been given to our own age you [Cole- ridge] have described the power when you said, that in his annunciation of truths he seemed to speak in thunders. I believe that mighty voice has not been poured out in vain ; . . . and that even now there are many to whom the name of Wordsworth calls up the recollection of their weakness and the consciousness of their strength." Under these circumstances Coleridge entrusted to Words- worth the task of replying in The Friend. The subject was congenial, the occasion welcome, and the Poet's letter is a fine piece of English. More than this, it is essentially Wordsworthian, repeating the theme of the earlier books of The Prelude^ and generalising, for the benefit of mankind, his own experience of mental gro\^th. He begins by pointing out Mathetes' underlying assumption that our own age is inferior to the past. If this view is mistaken — and two errors contribute to it, the illusion of "forgetting, in the excellence of what remains, the large overbalance l6o A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH of worthlessness that has been swept away," and the illusion of contrasting with the shifting experience of the present, the accumulated wisdom of the past — then some- thing of Mathetes' contention disappears. But the main part of his argument having been grounded on " the con- stitution of things, . . . the nature of youth, and . . . the laws that govern the growth of the faculties," this error, even if it were estabUshed, would not be fundamental. Nevertheless, Wordsworth, as a student of history and a benefactor of his species, cannot leave this side of the question without expressing his belief, — " It is enough for complacency and hope, that scattered and solitary minds are always labouring somewhere in the service of truth and virtue ; and that by the sleep of the multitude the energy of the multitude may be prepared ; and that by the fury of the people the chains of the people may be broken." The ingenuous youth of Mathetes' abstraction, therefore, though he happens on a period of sleep or fury, may hold without harm his creed of ultimate perfection, if his enthusiasm be of the reason and not of the senses. Taking up at this point the parable of his correspondent, Wordsworth dw^ells on the advantages that youth possesses — its health, its nursery of noble deeds and words, its wealth of time — to predispose it to the higher good. " In the happy confidence of his feelings, and in the elasticity of his spirit, neither worldly ambition, nor the love of praise, nor dread of censure, nor the necessity of worldly maintenance, nor any of those causes which tempt or com- pel the mind habitually to look out of itself for support ; neither these, nor the passions of envy, fear, hate, despon- dency, and the rankling of disappointed hopes (all of which, in after life, give birth to, and regulate the efforts of men, and determine their opinions) have power to preside over THE PROSE WORKS l6l the choice of the young, if the disposition be not naturally bad." Yet when the moment of choice has arrived, the doubt is not as to the " preference, but the degree of pre- ference." How is the youth to be trained to choose, without hesitation, truth before the world ? Wordsworth's answer is characteristic, — let him be "remanded to nature." " We have been discoursing (by implication at least) of infancy, childhood, boyhood, and youth, of pleasures lying upon the un- folding intellect plenteously as morning dew-drops, — of knowledge inhaled insensibly like the fragrance, — of dispositions stealing into the spirit like music from unknown quarters, — of images uncalled- for and rising up like exhalations, — of hopes plucked like beauti- ful wild flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highway of antiquity, to make a garland for a living forehead ; — in a word, we have been treating of nature as a teacher of truth through joy and through gladness, and as a creatress of the faculties by a pro- cess of smoothness and delight .... We now apply for the succour which we need to a faculty that works after a different course ; that faculty is reason ; she gives more spontaneously, but she seeks for more ; she works by thought through feeling ; yet in thoughts she begins and ends." To those familiar with the teaching of The Prelude^ it is not necessary to pursue this argument further. How nature answers the appeal ; how the mind, " infusing by meditation into the objects with which it converses, an intellectual life," returns to nature the gifts which she has given, made creative by contemplation and active by knowledge ; how the rewards of the world are thus set in their place, as an " auxiliary motive to exertion, never the originating force ; " how, if " a false Gloriana in these days imposes worthless services," the seduction is itself a blessing, in that imagination turns more innocently to truth when it has proved the hollowness of falsehood ; how " the wisdom of patience waiting with pleasure " is at once the moral law and the active principle of life ; — L 1 62 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH t this is the trumpet-call of Wordsworth to his age, the j rationale of his own experience, the defence of hope i and the exhortation to conduct. j In an Appendix to the 1835 volume of his poetry ■ ( Yarrow Revisited^ etc.), Wordsworth recurred more im- ! mediately to the economic and social problems of the I day. The appendix is little more than a glorified note, | the first part of which — written in qualified support of the ' Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, — is a somewhat j hysterical cry in favour of State intervention for the relief j of the indigent, in preference to private benevolence. It , is hinted that the implicit compromise with individualism, ] which established a workhouse test for able-bodied paupers, ' was a retrograde movement on the part of the nation to | whom the aboHtion of the slave trade was due. The 1 second part carries more weight, as a plea, occasioned by the condition of Factory labour, for joint-stock companies, and the co-operative principle. Wordsworth would correct the democratic and republican tendency of such move- ments by encouraging the feudal spirit and widening the influence of the church. The last division of this excursus is devoted to the latter topic. " PluraUties " are defended, , as protecting the existence of curates, to whose inexperi- | ence a dependent position is an advantage, by whose youth, on the other hand, fresh vigour and enthusiasm are imported into the incumbency. The " tinge of secularity," ' which the inequalities of clergymen's incomes was said to » produce, is indicated as a temporal means to spiritual ends. . Impoverishment would degrade the social level of the;| class. The whole appendix is of the highest biographical interest, showing how Wordsworth's permanent principles and aspirations worked out, when they were applied to the J practical issues of his own times, i THE PROSE WORKS 1 63 On one other occasion only, had Wordsworth expressed himself upon home-politics in prose. In 1829, the year of the Catholic Relief Bill, he wrote a letter, addressed — though probably never sent — to the Bishop (Blomfield) of London, which for its terse periods and unqualified opinions is remarkable among his writings. It is easy to indicate, constructively, Wordsworth's attitude upon this subject. We know that, though by no means a strict Sabbatarian or church-goer, the poet looked to the Church as a moral engine of supreme force, in the training of the national character. The Pastor's speeches in The Excur- siofi^ the cumulative evidence of the Ecclesiastical So?inets^ as well as the definitely religious trend of the mass of his later poems, show how deeply Wordsworth was convinced that English Protestantism was the source of England's strength. This first : and next, the old man's growing unwiUingness to admit into the problem, which he had set himself to solve, new and disturbing factors ; his distrust of the easy humanity which cries, give way, give way, and neglects the ultimate goal. There was high- mindedness at least in the appeal : " It is, we trust, the intention of Providence that the Church of Rome should in due time disappear ; and come what may on the Church of England, we have the satisfaction of knowing that, in defending a Government resting on a Protestant basis, we are working for the welfare of humankind, and supporting whatever there is of dignity in our frail nature." For to us, living at a time when these questions are ancient history, the perspective of the years changes the features of the struggle. The prominent figures are no longer the Ayes and Noes, as such ; a personal interest supervenes, and there stand out, above the poUtics and polemics, above the cause and the winning or losing it, the earnestness 164 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH that was called forth, the depths that were moved, the heights that trembled on their cloudy summits. " Three great conflicts," wrote Wordsworth in this letter, surveying the battlefield, "three great conflicts are before the progressive nations, between Christianity and Infidelity, between Papacy and Protestantism, and between the spirit of the old feudal and monarchical governments and the representative and republican system, as established in America." We know how he had laboured to prevent a recurrence of the materialism of the eighteenth century, a 1 repetition of the terror of the French Revolution. The same devotion armed him now. He saw in the removal of: the civil disabilities of the Roman Catholics, the importa- tion of Papacy from Ireland, and " does not history prove," he asks, " that however other sects may have languished l' under the relaxing influence of good fortune. Papacy has 5! ever been most fiery and rampant, when most prosperous ? " ' Nay, more : considering the origin of the Irish vote, , "called into birth by short-sighted landlords, and by/, priests who, for lucre's sake, favour the increase of marri-^ ages," its political power, Wordsworth contends, should bet in inverse ratio to its numbers. And finally, " while it is^' obvious that the political agitators could not rouse the' people without the intervention of the priests, it is true that the priests could not excite the people without a hope, that from an exaltation of their Church, their social condition would be improved. What in Irish interpreta-i tion these words would mean, we may tremble to think of.''' — I am very far from defending the argument ; the causef is settled beyond defence or attack ; and with its settle-i; ment, and the settlement of similar causes of more recent date, the need for poHtical partisanship is past. We car admire the more the singleness of purpose which, ever THE PROSE WORKS 165 with the narrowing vision of old age, painfully sought the light. The Philippics of a poet are seldom of practical worth. The quality of eloquence may be his, — it belonged to Wordsworth in a marked degree, — but the Demosthenic quality of contagion, and the actuality of present service, will rarely be found in such works. And naturally so. For the genius of the poet is ex hypothesis an idealising force. His it is to interpret the past, or to prophesy for the future, to sound hope in depression and tenderness in victory ; but the more intently he fixes his gaze on the " far-off divine event," the less likely he is to read with clearness the signs of the passing hour. He deals with motives, not with facts, since the race advances by conduct ; law and state-craft deal with facts, since nations compete in activity. This gulf the political writings of Wordsworth did not and could not bridge : the poetic bias intervened, and the chief interest they ever possessed is as eloquence and biography. We pass into a different atmosphere when we come to his literary essays. Although in the eyes of Literary and , . . , , Critical contemporary reviewers, there seemed something ponderous and encyclopaedic in Wordsworth's habit of appending elaborate explanations in prose to his experiments in verse; although, as we have seen reason to believe,* the mere formulation of his principles involved him in theories less elastic than his practice ; and although our better understanding of the reactionary impulse that moved the poet f enables us to make certain abatements from his absolute views ; yet, all deductions and qualifications admitted, Wordsworth's * See Chapter II., pp. 55-6, supra. t See Chapter III., pp. 89-91, supra. 1 66 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH essays on his own art are valuable and instructive reading. In a little volume recently published at the Aldine House (Messrs Dent & Co.) under the title of The Prelude to Poetry^ a preface and an appendix by Wordsworth are justly included with Sir PhiHp Sidney's "Apologie for Poetry " and other selections from the poets on themselves. This is perhaps the first occasion that due honour has been paid to these writings. The tradition of homeliness has blocked the way : but they need only to be more widely read in order to win more general admiration. The Poetics of Wordsworth consist (i) of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads^ finally arranged and treated as an independent essay in the edition of 1802; (2) of an Appendix, in the form of a note to this Preface, on the words * poetic diction ' ; (3) of the Preface to the Poems in two volumes of 1815 — the first edition in which the classification by moods was adopted ; (4) of an Essay, supplementary to the Preface, and pubHshed at the same time; and (5) of the Preface to the Excursion (1815), in which the famous simile is employed of the Gothic church with its ante-chapel and oratories, to which refer- ence has already been made. It was to the consideration of (i) and (2) that Coleridge particularly applied himself in the latter part of his Biographia Literaria. Grosart, in his second volume of Wordworth's Prose Works has given these essays not inappropriate titles ; (3), for instance, appears there as " of Poetry as Observation and Description " ; and (4) as " Poetry as a Study." For purposes of clearness, it will be better to refer to them under the form and date of their original publication. The Preface (1802) sounded at once the note of re- action : " A multitude of causes," Wordsworth was con- strained to write, *' unknown to former times, are now THE PROSE WORKS 1 67 acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind. . . . The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid com- munication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this ten- dency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse." So far, and with the substitution of Norway for Germany, this diagnosis of a century ago would suit our own day ; nor has there been wanting the charge of intellectual apathy which Wordsworth then preferred. The difference is, that the physician of that date prescribed and dispensed a remedy, which has given ease and relief to thousands, besides having renewed for his successors a sounder principle in the theory of poetical composition. " When I think," Wordsworth continued, " upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these volumes to counteract it ; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible." With the latter part of this sentence should be compared the "remand to nature " which we found Wordsworth recommending, 1 68 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH as the solution of Mathetes' problem (p. i6i). Amid the fleeting impressions of the senses, and in the deterioration of the mental faculties they produce, nature's abiding processes and the natural laws inferred have a salutary influence, at once as method and as knowledge. Meanwhile, as to the form which the " feeble endeavour " assumed. In what respects did the principles enunciated in the Preface of 1798 (1802) involve a break with poetical tradition? Wordsworth claims as innovations, first, "that each of these poems has a worthy purpose " ; secondly, "that the feehng therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling " ; thirdly, " that there will be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction," and to this last topic, as already stated, the Appendix of the same date is devoted. It follows, from this threefold aspect of reform, that the first reformer went to humble and to rustic life for the exhibition of his art; for the purpose aimed at, which is, by applying the habit of discrimination to incidents and situations, to trace in them, " truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature," is best attained in those walks of Hfe where the passions to be contemplated work with greater simplicity and are less under restraint, while they speak in plainer and more emphatic language. To the present generation, which has walked with Burns by the furrow, or has followed Enoch Arden's funeral down the winding village by the sea, it is difficult to realise how grave and imperative a charge it seemed that Wordsworth laid upon himself. We are rather overdone than otherwise with this talk of passion and sentiment, discoverable in the homes of the poor. Yet consider for a moment the poetry of Scott, or Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, nay, of Coleridge himself, all THE PROSE WORKS 1 69 of whom were Wordsworth's contemporaries, and the democratic idea which Wordsworth formulated at the beginning of the century, and which Tennyson continued after his death, will be revealed in its daring novelty. Or consider, on the other hand, the preciosities of diction by which the Popian school had protected poetry for the few, and Wordsworth's revolt from its elaborate fetters has an equal claim on our gratitude. Life, in the eighteenth century, had been lived on the surface of passing sensa- tions : it was Wordsworth's endeavour to recall it to simplicity, to its elements. " For the human mind," I am still quoting from the preface (1802), "is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimu- lants ; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability." It is the same perception which derives a higher pleasure from the natural lines and curves of landscape than from the trim parterres, geometrically disposed, of a former fashion. But the double danger to be guarded against, in considering Wordsworth's reforms, is of depreciating their intention while exaggerating their extent. The innovation was radical : the poetry was genuine. " Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because not formal, but indirect ; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love ; further, it is an homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves." 170 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH To this condition of pleasure Wordsworth had so far deferred, that he chose metrical composition, rather than prose, for the vehicle of his thought. For, not Prose and Poetry, but Prose and Metre, Poetry and Matter of Fact, are Wordsworth's critical antitheses, whence it follows that the language of prose, with metre superadded, suffices for poetical style ; the vogue of conventions and conceits had been designed to disguise Matter of Fact in the dress of Imagination. The short appendix (1802) amplifies this view. " The earliest poets of all nations," it remarks, " generally wrote from passion excited by real events ; they wrote naturally, and as men : feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeed- ing times, poets, and men ambitious of the fame of poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation^ From this, two evils resulted : in the first place, the reading public, predisposed to suspend their ordinary judgment in the porches of the muse, were unable to distinguish the true from the false ; " the one served as a passport for the other ; " and, in the second place, the abuse of language was carried still further, and poetic diction receded yet another step from reality. "In process of time," according to the stately indictment of this Appendix, " metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed more or less THE PROSE WORKS 17I of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the false were inseparably interwoven until, the taste of men becoming gradually perverted, this language was received as a natural language : and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas." The convention of composition was protected by a convention of admiration. It flattered men's vanity and laid their judgment asleep, to think themselves admitted into arcana of style. Persius in Rome, the Euphuists in England, and — may we not add ? — George Meredith to-day have known how to utilise these weaknesses. Wordsworth's own examples are more dignified and no less emphatic. He contrasts with the original of Proverbs vi, " Go to the ant, thou sluggard," Dr Johnson's paraphrase, where the whole armoury of poetic diction was ransacked, ostensibly in the cause of poetry, until " How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers ? While artful chains thy downy couch enclose, And soft solicitation courts repose, Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, Year chases year with unremitted flight, Till want now following, fraudulent and slow, Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush'd foe," took the place of the preacher's words : " How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard ? When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep ? Yet a Httle sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty come as one 172 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man." The sacrifice was ready, and the victim bound : shall we quarrel with Wordsworth's conclusion, "that in works of imagination and sentiment^ in proportion as ideas and feel- ings are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or verse, they require and exact one and the same language. Metre is but adventitious to composition, and the phrase- ology for which that passport is necessary, even where it may be graceful at all, will be little valued by the judicious." (Appendix y?;^.) The Preface of 181 5 is of less general interest, in that the principles which it enunciated had Uttle further design "than to throw some light upon the present Volumes." So far, it has already been considered in the third chapter of this book. Wordsworth distinguishes the powers re- quisite for the production of poetry under six heads, — Observation and Description, SensibiUty, Reflection, Imagin- ation and Fancy, Invention, Judgment, the last, like Aristotle's . 1843. Select Pieces from the Poems of William Wordsworth, D.C.L., P.L. Dedicated to H.M. the Queen. London, J. Burns. 1844. Kendal and Windermere Railway. Two Letters, reprinted from The Morning Post. Kendal, R. Branthwaite & Son (N.D.). A New Spirit of the Age ; William Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt. Vol. L By R. H. Home. London, Smith, Elder & Co. 1845. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, D.C.L. , Poet Laure- ate, etc., etc. A New Edition. London, E. Moxon. Royal 8vo. (This single-volume, double-columned edition was based on Professor Reed's, Philadelphia, 1837. It was often reprinted, and included The Prelude after 1850.) Gallery of Literary Portraits. By George Gilfillan. Edinburgh, Blackwood. 1847. Ode, Performed in the Senate-house, Cambridge, July 6th, at the tirst Co7nmence7nent after the Installation of H.R.H. Prince Albert, Chancellor of the U?iiversity. Cambridge, University Press. July 10. This Ode was published in the Athencevm. July. Dorothy (Dora) Quillinan, the poet's daughter, died at Rydal Mount. 1849. Edward Moxon published a new edition of the Poetical Works. BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 1 7 This was the last issue during Wordsworth's life-time. There were six volumes, the sixth containing the Excursion. This volume was reprinted separately in 1851, 1853, and 1857. Notes from Books, in Four Essays. By Sir Henry Taylor. London. 1850. William Wordsworth, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, died at Rydal Mount, on April 23rd. April 27. Obituary notice in the Athenceum. Gallery of Literary Portraits. Second Series. By George Gilfillan. Edinburgh, Blackwood. The Prelude ; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind ; an autobiographical Poem. By William Wordsworth. London, Moxon. An Ameri- can edition, in duodecimo, was almost immediately published by D. Appleton, in New York. August 3. Reviews of the Prelude in the Atheticeum and Spectator. 1 85 1. E. Moxon published a second edition of The Prelude, to form volume viii. of his 1836 edition of the Poetical Works. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth^ P.-L. Edited by Professor Henry Reed. Revised. Philadelphia, Troutman and Hayes. Memoirs of William Wordstvorth. Including the Autobiographical Memoranda dictated to the Author at Rydal in Noveniber, 1847. By Christopher Wordsworth, Bp. of Lincoln. In two volumes. London, Moxon. Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the past Half-century. By David M. Moir. London, Blackwood. October. Article on The Life and Poetry of Wordsworth in North American Review. 1852. Memoirs of William Wordsworth. By January Searle. London. December, Article on Memoirs of Wordsworth in Quarterly Revieiv. 1853. The Genius oj Wordsworth harmonised with the Wisdom and Integrity of his Reviewers. By the late John Wright. London, Longman. An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth. Reprinted from the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine. Liverpool. 1854. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. With a Memoir (by J. R. Lowell). In seven volumes. Boston, Little, Brown & Co, i6mo. 1856. Essays and Reviews. By Edwin P. Whipple. In two volumes. Boston. William Wordsworth ; a Biography. By E. P. Hood, London. June. Article on Wordsworth s Poems in Dublin Review, (By Cardinal Wiseman?) 1857. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. A new edition. In six volumes. London, Moxon. The Fenwick Notes (dictated by the Poet to Miss Fenwick) are first printed here. The Earlier Poejns of William Wordsworth., corrected as in the Latest Editions. By W. Johnston. London, Moxon. 1858. The Pastoral Poems 0^ William Wordsworth, with engravings. London. Lectzires and Addresses on Literary and Social Topics. By F. W. Robertson. London, (See 1896.) 2l8 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH 1859. Lectures on English Poetry, By Henry Reed. (Wordsworth, No. XV.). London. Poems of William Wordsworth. Selected and edited by R. A. Willmott. Illustrated by Birket Foster, John Wolf, and J. Gilbert. London, Routledge. The Deserted Cottage. By William Wordsworth. Illustrated by Birket Foster, J. Wolf, and J. Gilbert. London, Routledge. (The last two volumes were also published in New York, 18 Beckman Street). The White Doe of Rylstone. By William Wordsworth. Illustrated by H. N. Humphreys, and Birket Foster. London, Longman. Passages from " the Excursion," by Wlliam Wordsworth. Illus- trated with Etchings on Steel, by Agnes Fraser. London, P. and D. Colnaghi, Publishers to Her Majesty. i860. Article on Wordsworth in Encyclopcedia Britannica, xxi., by R. Carruthers. 1862. Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, being volume II., and On Wordzvorth's Poetry, being part of volume V. of Thomas De _ Quincey's Collected Works. Edinburgh, A. and C. Black. Poets and Preachers of the Nifieteenth Century, Four Lectures ... by A. S. Patterson. Glasgow. 1863. Wordsworth s Poetns for the Young. Illustrated by J. MacWhirter and J. Pettie. London and Edinburgh. 1864. Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, as seen by William Wordsworth. Photographically illustrated by T. Ogle. London. November. Essay on Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Bro7vning, or Pure, Ornate a?id Grotesque Art in English Poetry, in National Reviexc. By W. Bagehot. (Reprinted in his Literacy Studies, volume II. Silver Library. Longman, 1895.) A Tauchnitz Selection from Wordsworth, in two volumes, for Con- tinental circulation, was published during this year at Leipzig. 1865. A Selection from the Works of William Wordsworth. By J. T. Palgrave. Moxons Miniature Poets. London, Moxon. A second edition appeared in 1869, and a Pocket edition was issued in 1885, and has been republished. April. Article on The Works of William Wordsworth, by A. H. Clough, in North American Review. 1866. Essays, Critical, etc. By John Wilson. London, Blackwood. 1867. Messrs Bell & Daldy, London, Fleet Street, published a reprint of the illustrated edition of The White Doe of Rylstone, Longman, 1859- 1868. Essays. By George Brimley. (Pp. 102-183). London, Macmillan. 1869. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence. By Henry Crabb Robinson. Selected, etc., by T. Sadler. In three volumes. London. (Third edition, in two volumes, 1872.) 1870. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. (A reprint of the six- volume edition of 1857.) Centenary Edition. London, E. Moxon. In this year, too, Mr Moxon published ' ' the only complete cheap edition " of the Poetical Works in a single volume (N.D.). It was edited, with a Critical Memoir, by W. M. Rossetti, but the Memoir BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 1 9 was subsequently withdrawn at the request of Wordsworth's surviving relatives. Among My Books. By J. R. Lowell. Boston, Mass. [871. September. Article on A Century of Great Poets, III. William Wordsworth in Blackwood's Magazine. [872, A Lecture on cheap and accessible Pleasures, with a Comparative Sketch of the Poetry of Burns and Wordsworth. By Lord Neaves, Edinburgh. 1873. A Comparative Estimate of Modern English Poets. By Joseph Devey. London, Moxon. Old Age in Bath. Recollections, . . . to which are added a fezv unpublished Remains of William Wordsworth. By Henry Julian Hunter. Bath, W. Lewis. 1874. Wordsworth. Edited by T. L. Ashland. The Poets of Lakeland. Selections from the Poetieal Works of William Wordsworth. By H. H, Turner. Stow's English School Classics. London. Recollections of a Tour in Scotland. By Dorothy Wordsworth. London. (See 1894.) Theology in the English Poets. By Rev. Stopford A. Brooke. London, Kegan Paul. 1875. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc. By David Masson. London, Macmillan, Leben und Gedichte Wordsworths. By Prof. Pels. Hamburg. October. Article on The Prose Works of WilliaTn Wordsworth. By Professor Edward Dowden in Fortnightly Review. [876. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. For the first time collected, with Additions from Unpublished MSS, Edited, with Preface, Notes and Illustrations, by Rev. Alexander B. Grosart. In three volumes. London, E. Moxon, Son, & Co. Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. By J. C. Shairp. Edinburgh, Edmonston and Douglas. January. Article on Wordsworth and Gray (Review of Grosart's Prose Works of Wordsworth) in Quarterly Reviezv. 1877. The Poetic Interpretation of Nature. By J. C, Shairp. Edinburgh, Douglas. Lectures on Poetry. Delivered at Oxford by Sir Francis Hastings Doyle. Second Series. London, Smith, Elder & Co. 1878. The English Lake District, as interpreted in the Poems of Words- worth. By W. Knight. Edinburgh, Douglas. Wordsworth. By F. W. H. Myers. English Men of Letters. London, Macmillan. (Often re-issued). Wordsworth. A biographic cssthetic study. By George Henry Calvert. Boston. November. Article on The Text of Wordsworth' s Poe?ns, by Pro- fessor E. Dowden, in Contemporary Review. 1879. Poems of Wordsworth. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. With a Preface. Golden Treasury Series. London, Macmillan. (Frequently re-issued). Hours in a Library. Third Series. By Leslie Stephen. London, Smith, Elder. Studies in Philosophy and Literature. By Prof. W. Knight. Lon- don, Kegan Paul. July. Essay on Wordsworth, by Matthew Arnold, in Macmillan s 2 20 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Magazine. (Subsequently the Prejace to Matthew Arnold's Selections). November. Essay on Matthew Arnolds Selections from Words- worth, by John Addington Symonds, in Fortnightly Review. (Reprinted as — Is Poetry at Bottom a Criticism of Life f in Symonds' Essays, Speculative and Suggestive. London, Chap- man and Hall, 1893). 1880. The English Poets. Edited by Humphrey Ward. Vol. IV., ! Wordsworth to Dobell. The Preface on Wordsworth by Dean Church, of St Paul's. London, Macmillan. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. With a Memoir, j By J. R. Lowell. British Poets. Riverside Edition. Seven volumes in three. Boston, Houghton, Osgood & Co. (See 1854). Poems. By William Wordsworth. Two volumes. (Selections). Miniature Libraiy of the Poets. London, W. Kent & Co. On September 29, the Wordsworth Society was constituted at Gras- mere. President, Bp. of St Andrews. Treasurer, George Wil- son. Secretary, William Knight. 1881. Aspects of Poetry. By J. C. Shairp. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Tivo Great Englishwomen, &'c. By Peter Bayne. London, Clarke & Co. William Wordsworth : a Biographical Sketch, By A. J. Syming- ton. In two volumes. London, Blackie. July 20. Second Annual Meeting of Wordsworth Society in Gras- mere. Lord Coleridge was elected President and an Executive Council was formed. 1882. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. And a Life. Edited, etc., by W. Knight. In eleven volumes. Edinburgh, Paterson, 1882-1889. On the Platonism of Wordsworth. By J. H. Shorthouse. Birming- ham, Cornish Bros. (N.D.) January. Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, volume I. Contents : Minutes, Bibliography. May 3. Third Annual Meeting of Wordsworth Society in Free- masons' Tavern. Matthew Arnold was elected President. Volume II. of Transactions contained Minutes of this Meeting ; Memorandum by Rev. H. D. Raw^nsley on Memorial Stone at Grisedale Tarn ; Letter from Prof. Bonamy Price on the Ode, Intimations of Immortality ; •^■a^-^^x On the Structure of the Words- ivorthian Sonnet, by Rev. T. Hutchinson ; notes On the Seeming Triviality of some of Wordworth's Stihjects and On Wordsworth' s View of Death, by Mrs Owen. Volumes III. and IV. of Transac- tions contained papers On Wordsworth s Selections from Chaucer, modernised, by E. Dowden ; and The Portraits of Wordsworth, with five examples, and Letter-press by W. Knight. 1883. English Traits. By R. W. Emerson. London, Macmillan. The Imagination and other Essays. By George Macdonald. Boston, U.S.A., D. Lothrop Co. Wifinowings from Wordsworth. By J. Robertson. Edinburgh, Nimmo. - Tintern Abbey, Odes, ^c. Chambers' English Classics. London, W. & R. Chambers. Selections from Wordsworth. Edited, with Memoir, by J. S. Fletcher. London, Gardner ; and Paisley. BIBLIOGRAPHY 221 Heroes of Literature: Eyielish Poets. By John Dennis. London, S.P.C.K. Ueber Wordsworth und Walt Whitman. Zwei Vortrage gehcalten von H. B. Cotterill und T. W. Rolleston. Dresden. May 2. Fourth Annual Meeting of Wordsworth Society in College Hall, Westminster. Russell Lowell was elected President. Volume V. of Transactions contained Minutes of this Meeting ; papers on Remarks on the Personal Character of Wordsworth' s Poetry, by Aubrey de Vere ; On Wordsworth' s Guide to the Lakes, by S. A. Brooke ; A Few Words on Wordsworth' s Position as an Ethical Teacher, by the Dean of Salisbury ; The Proposed Per- manent Lake District Defence Society, by H. D. Rawnsley ; Notes on the Localities of the Duddon Sonnets, by Herbert Rix ; Letter on Wordsworth's Influence in America, by F, O. Yarnall ; Biblio- graphy of Review and Magazine Articles in Criticism of Words- worth, by W. F. Poole, Chicago ; A Mountain Ramble, Extract from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, Letters from Sara Coleridge to Henry Reed, from R. W. Emerson to the same ; from Charles Lamb to Dorothy Wordsworth, etc. Studies in Wordsworth. By H. N. Hudson. Boston, U.S.A., Little, Brown & Co. The River Duddon. By William Wordsworth. With ten etchings by R. S. Chattock. A Folio of the Fine Art Society, Bond Street London. The Sonnets of Williajn Wordsworth. Collected in one volume (as in 1838), with an Essay on the History of the English Sonnet. By Archbishop Trench. London, Suttaby & Co. April. Article on Wordsworth and Browning, by A. C. Swinburne, in Nineteenth Century. May 10. Fifth Annual Meeting of Wordsworth Society in Lambeth Palace Library. Lord Houghton was elected President. Volume VL of Transactions contained Minutes of this Meeting ; with Russell Lowell's Address; Papers 0?i the Poetic Interpretation of Nature, by Hon. Roden Noel ; On Wordsworth's Treatment oj Sound, by Mr Heard ; On Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, by Canon A. Ainger ; O71 the Platonism of Wordsworth, by J. H. Shorthouse ; On Wordsworth' s Two Styles, by R. H. Hutton ; On the Yew Trees of Borrowdale, by Rev. H. D. Rawnsley ; Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Peasantry of Westmore- land, by the same ; Letters from Wordsworth to Charles Lamb and to J. Kenyon ; Catalogue of Rydal Mount Library. Wordsworth Birthday Book. Edited by J. R. Tutin. London, Adams & Co. The Wordsworth Birthday Book. Edited by Adelaide and Violet Wordsworth. London, Kegan Paul. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by A. J. Symington. The Canterbury Poets. London, W. Scott. (A i6mo volume of selections). Poe?ns of Wordsworth. Two volumes. London, Cassell. Ode on Immortality and Tintern Abbey. Illustrated. London, Cassell. July 6. Sixth Annual Meeting of Wordsworth Society, at Lord Houghton's house. Earl of Selborne was elected President, Volume Vn. of Transactions contained Minutes and Address ; papers 2 22 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH on A Comparison and Parallel between the Work of Wordsworth and Turner, by Mr Harry Godwin ; Wordsworth's Relation to Science, by Spence Watson ; List of Wordsworth's Poems in chronological order, by W. Knight, and a reprint of Bibliography. 1886. Essays on Poetry and Poets. By Hon. Roden Noel. London, Kegan Paul. Miscellanies. By A. C. Swinburne. London, Chatto & Windus. (See under 1884). July 7. Seventh and last Annual Meeting of Wordsworth Society, in Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster Abbey. Volume Vin. of Transactions contained Minutes and Address ; papers on The Theism of Wordsworth, by Professor Veitch ; Poets who helped to form Wordsworth's Style, by Canon Ainger ; The Humanity of Wordsworth, by Rev. H. D. Rawnsley ; Letters from Wordsworth, his wife, and sister, to Henry Crabb Robinson and others. 1887. Essays, chiefly on Poetry. By Aubrey de Vere. London, Macmillan. (Three essays relate to Wordsworth). Memorials of Coleorton. Edited, etc., by W. Knight. Edinburgh, Douglas. Through the Wordsworth Country. By Harry Godwin and W. Knight. London. Swan Sonnenschein. (Pictures by H. Godwin. Text by W. Knight). William Wordsworth : The Story of his Life, with critical remarks on his writings. By J. M. Sutherland. London, Elliot Stock. (Second edition, enlarged, 1892). A Greenockian s Visit to Wordsworth. From Journals of the late Dr Park, of St Andrews. Greenock, A. P. Paton. 1888. The Recluse. By William Wordsworth. London, Macmillan. (This was the Editio Princeps of Part I., Book First, of the Poem, of which The Excursion had been designed to form the second ot three parts). Selections from Wordsworth. By W. Knight and other members of the Wordsworth Society. London, Kegan Paul. Dante, and other Essays. By Dean Church. London, Mac- millan. Article on Wordsworth, by Prof. W. Minto, in Encyclopcedia Pritannica, xxiv. Edinburgh, A. & C. Black. 1889. Early Poems of Wordsworth. Selected by J. R. Tutin. London, Routledge. Selections from Wordsivorth. Edited by A. J. George. Boston, Mass., Heath & Co. Select Poems of Wordsworth. Edited by W. J. Rolfe. New York, Harper & Bros. Letters from the Lake Poets. (S. T. Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey to D. Stuart and others). Edited by Miss M. Stuart. Privately printed. The Poetical Works of William Wordsivorth. A New Edition. London, Moxon. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Eight volumes (in a case). Glasgow, Bryce & Son. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. One volume. Albion Edition. London, F. Warne, BIBLIOGRAPHY 223 1889. Wordsworthiana. Papers read to the Wordsworth Society. Edited by W. Knight. London, Macmillan. September. Article on IVordszvorth' s Great Failure, by Prof. W. Minto, in Nineteenth Century. 1890. Appreciations, By Walter Pater. Third Edition. London, Macmillan. (The essay on Wordsworth is dated 1874). Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's Home, 1800-1808. By Stopford A. Brooke. London, Macmillan. Holiday Studies of Wordsworth by Rivers, Woods, and Alps. By F. A. Malleson. London, Cassell. 1891. The Complete Poetical Works of Williavi Wordsworth. Introduction by John Morley. Bibliography by J. R. Tutin. In one volume. London, Macmillan. The Wordsrvorth Dictionary of Persons and Places. By J. R, Tutin. Hull, J, R. Tutin. (Limited to 600 copies). William Wordsworth. A Biography. By Elizabeth Wordsworth. London, Percival. De Quincey Memorials. Edited, etc., by Alex. Henry Japp. London, Heinemann. The White Doe of Rylstone. Edited by W. Knight. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Essays on English Literature. By Edmond Scherer. Translated by George Saintsbury. London, Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. (The paper, ix,. On Wordsworth and Modern Poetry in England, is from M. Scherer's Etudes stir la Littiratjire Contemporaine, volume vii. ), Nature in Books, Some Studies in Biography. By P. Anderson Graham. London, Methuen. Wordsworth. An Essay. Reprinted from The Churchman. By Edward H. Blakeney. London, Elliot Stock. Portraits of English Poets, from Drawings made by J. Cottle. Re- produced. Bristol, W. George's Sons. (Wordsworth and four others). Wordsworth for the Young. Selected, etc., by Cynthia M. St John. Boston, D. Lothrop Co. 1892. Wordsworth s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry ; ivith the Letter to Lady Beaumont. Edited by A. J. George. Boston, Mass., Heath & Co. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Professor Edward Dowden. In seven volumes. London, Aldine Edition, 1892-3. The Prose Writings oj Wordsworth. Selected and edited by W. Knight. The Scott Library. London, W. Scott, 1892, etc. Lyrics and Sonnets of Wordsrvorth. Edited by C. K. Shorter. London, D. Stott. An Index to the Animal and Vegetable Ki^igdoms of Wordstvorth. By J. R. Tutin. Hull, J. R. Tutin. The Birds of Wordsworth poetically, 7nythologically and compara- tively examined. By W. H. Wintringham. London, Hutchinson. Essays on Literature and Philosophy. In two volumes. By Edward Caird, LL.D. Glasgow, J. Maclehose. ( Wordsworth in volume I.). 1893. William Wordsworth, Sein Leben, seine Werke, seine Zeitgenosse?:, 224 A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH Von Marie Gothein. In two volumes. Halle, Max Niemeyer. (Vol. 11. consists of Translations). Poems. By William Watson. London, Macmillan. (This volume contains Wordsworih' s Grave, previously the chief contents of an eponymous publication). 1893. Wordsworth for the Young. Edited by J. C. Wright. London, Jarrold & Sons. 1894. The Poetical Works oj Williatn Wordsworth. Being No. 68 of Sir John Lubbock's Hundred Best Books. London, Routledge. Dorothy Wordsworth. By Edmund Lee. London, J. Clarke, Recollections of a Tour ?nade in Scotland, A.D. 1803. By Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by J. C. Shairp, LL.D. Third edition. Edinburgh, Douglas. Homes and Haunts of the British Poets. By William Howitt. London, Routledge. 1895. "^^^ Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by T. Hutchinson. In five volumes. Oxford Miniature Wordsworth. London, H. Frowde. Select Poems of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Longfellow. Edited, etc., by F. H. Sykes. Toronto, W. J. Gage Co. Some Wordsworth Finds ? Arranged and introduced by James Medborough. London, Unicorn Press. 1896. The Lyrical Poe?ns of William Wordsworth. Edited by Ernest Rhys. The Lyric Poets. London, J. M. Dent. Lectures and Addresses on Literary and Social Topics. By F. W. Robertson. Edited by S. A. Brooke. London, Kegan Paul. (See 1858). English Studies. By James Darmesteter. Translated by his widow London, T. Fisher Unwin. La feunesse de William Wordsworth, 1770-1798. Etude sur le "Prelude." Par Emile Legouis. Paris, G. Masson. June. Article on Wordsworth und Byron, by Alois Brandl, in Cosmopolis. July. Article on William Wordsworth, a propos dun livre ricent, by Joseph Texte, in Revue des Deux Mondes. Chosen English. Selections from Wordsworth, etc., ... for Schools. By Ad^le Ellis. London, Macmillan. Wordsworth. Complete (Eversley) edition. In sixteen volumes. Edited by W. Knight. London, Macmillan. (Vols. I. -VIII., Poems; Vols. IX. and X., Prose; Vols. XL and XII., fournals; Vols. XIII.-XV., Correspondence ; Vol. XVI., Life). In course of appearance. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Miiid. By William Words- worth. Temple Classics. Edited by I. GoUancz. London, Dent. 1897. February. Article on Wordworth's Youth, by Leslie Stephen, in National Review. The Age of Wordsworth. By Professor C. H. Herford. Hand- books of English Literal ui-e. London, Bell. INDEX Address to the Village School of—, 4- Addresses to the Free-holders of Westmoreland, 157-8. Affliction of Margaret, The, 98 f. Alice Fell, 93. Ancient Mariner, The, 27. Anecdote for Fathers, 93. Appendix to Preface {1802), 170-2. Arnold, Matthew, 42, 46, 47, 58, 82, 95, no, 122, 199, 202. Arnold, Thomas, 36. Aylmers Field, 20. Beaumont, Sir George, 32, 35-6, 37, 79- Beaupuy, Michel, 12, 13, 150. Betty Foy, 209. Biograp'hia Literaria, 24, 28, 166. Birkett, Dame, 2. Blackwood's Magazine, 40, 41, 177. Blomfield, Bishop, 163. Borderers, The, 24 f., 48-9, 86, 152. '' Break, break, break," 192. "Brook, whose society the Poet seeks," 147, 206. Brooke, Rev. S. A., 20. Brothers, The, 96-7, 196. Brougham and Vaux, Lord, 157. Browning, Robert, 20. Burke, Edmund, 15, in. Burns, Robert, 37, 127, 133, 168, 177 ff., 187. Byron, 36, 168. Calvert, Raisley, 21-2. Calvert, W. , 21. Cambridge, 7-10. Camoens, 149. Capital Punishment, 146. Carlyle, 36, 63, 174, 204. Catholic Relief, 163-5. Character of the Happy Warrior, 3, 38, 113-5, 154. Charge of the Heavy Brigade, 190. Chaucer, 88, 115, 188. Chiabrera, 182, Cockermouth, 2 f. Coleridge, Lord, 47. Coleridge, S. T., 22, 24 f. , 27, 34, 36, 51, III, 117, 140, 166, 168, 196. Convention ofCititra, T7'actate, ii^,* 146,* 151-7. Cookson, C, I. Cottle, J., 22, 26. Crackanthorpe, C, 3. Cuckoo, To the, 104, 202. f Daisy, To the, 100, 202. Dante, 149. Davy, Sir H., 36. Democracy, Athenian and modern contrasted, 17 ff., modern, 58, 145- Derwent, river, 2. Descriptive Sketches, 14, 24, 88, 90-1. Dickens, 123. Dion, 105 f. Ecclesiastical Sketches {Sonnets), 42, 137-9, 163. Edinburgh Review, 38, 40. Elegiac Stanzas, 38, 72, 121 f., 194, 201. Emerson, 44, 82, 190. Enoch Arden, 21, 78, 168, 198. Epitaphs, Essays, 179 ff. ; Poems, 119 ff. Essay, Supplementary to Preface (1815), 174-6. Evening Voluntaries, 130-2. Evenitig Walk, An, 14, 88-90. Excursion, The, 39, 57-63, 80, 163, 188 f. , 191, 202, 210. Fareiuell, A, 99, 202. Female Vagrant, The, 21, 91. Flower Gardeti, A, 100. French Revolution, 13 f., 17 ff. 226 INDEX Godwin, W,, 57. Goethe, 32. Goody Blake and Harry Gill, 116 f. Gothein, Frau, 32, 82. Grandmother, The, 198. Greville Memoirs, 158. Grosart, Rev. A. B., 135, 166. Guide through the District of the Lakes, A, 182-6. Guilt atid Sorrow, 43, gi f., 152. Hallam, Arthur, 79. Hart-leap Well, 207. Hawkshead Grammar-School, 3, 4-7- Hazlitt, W., 26, 177. Herbert, George, 138. Highland Girl, To a, 128-9, 202, Houghton, Lord, 47, 82. Hutchinson, Mary, 3, 10, 29, 30 ; Sarah, 29, 31 ; Thomas, 29 ; Rev. T., 137.* Idylls of the King, 20. ' Intitnations of Immortality, Ode, 80-6, 130, 192 f. , 201. In Me77ioria7jt, 188 f., 193, 195. Isola, Agostino, 7. Johnson, Dr, 171, 175. Jones, Robert, 11, 12, 14. Keats, 88, 147, 168. Keble, 45. Klopstock, 28. Knight, Professor W. , 7, 23, 47, 6o,t 116.* Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 20. Lamb, C, 26, 36, 39. Landseer, 36. Laodamia, 105 f. Legouis, Professor, 8, 57, 89, 112. Letter to the Bishop of Llandaf, 16, 150 ; to a Friend of Robert Burns, 177-9. Letters on the Kendal and IVinder- mere Railway, 186. Lewes, G. H., iii f. Liberty, 118. Lloyd, C. , 26. Locks ley Hall, 189, 190. London, Bishop of, 163. Longest Day, The, 93-4. Lonsdale, Lord, i, 30, 43. Lowell, Russell, 47. jMliTo, 94 f., 104.5. Lucy Gray, 2g, 93. ~ ' ' Lyrical Ballads, i. , 27, 41 ; ii. , 30. Masson, D., 57. Mathetes, 158 ff., 168. Matthew, Poems, 4, 115. Maud, 190. May-Queen, The, 78, 196. Mem,o)'anda, Autobiographical, 3, II, .31- Memoi'ials of a Tour on the Co7i- ti7ient, 1802, 42, 129 f. Michael, 97-8, 196 f. Mill, J. S., 58, 82, 196. Milton, 8, 136, 149, 188 ; So/i/iet to, 115. 143- Miscellaneous Sonnets, 8, 32, 146 f., 186. Montagu, B., 22, 25. Monthly Review, 39, 40, 41, 141.* Moore, Thomas, 36, Morning Exe7-cise, A, 100. Mothe7-s Return, The, 93. Musings 7iear Aquapcnde7ite, 133 f. Myers, F. W. H,, 56,* 106,* 173.* Myers, T. , 22. National Indepe7ide7ice a7id Liberty, Poe7?is to, 142 ff. Nelson, 113, 114. Newman, 200, 202.* Newton, 9, 74. Ode to Duty, 109 f., 192. CE7ione, 21. Old Cianberland Beggar, The, iigf. Oxford, 8, 45. Palgrave, F. T, , 46. Pater, W., 46, 82, 98, 119, 199. Peel, Sir R. , 45. Percy Reliques, 177. Perso7ial Talk, 64,* 113. Peter Bell, 27, 40-1, 73-80, 86, 202.f Petrarch, 34, 149. Plato, 83 f., 139, 196. Poet's Epitaph, A, 29, no f., 209. Poole, T. , 26. Pope, 88. Preface [1802), 89, 166-9; {^^^5)^ 101-2, 147,* 172-4. Prelude, The, i, 4, iif., 20, 25,29, 46, 50-4, 84, 86, 150, 159. I INDEX 227 Primrose of the Rock, The, 103-4, 191, 202.§ Princess, The, 77 f. Quarterly Review, 39 f. Quillinan, Edward, 37. Quincey, De, 36. Rainbo70, T/ie, 80. f Rechise, The, 27, 29, 50, 55-6, 86. Redbreast chasing the Butterfly, The, 199. Reed, Professor, 44. Resolution a?id hide^etidence, 105, 2o5! Reverie of Poor Susan, 148. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 36, 148, 183. Rivaux Abbey, 30. River Duddon, The, 41, 140 f. Rob Roy's Grave, 127-8. Robinson, H. C., 25, 26, 34, 36, 133. 135- Rogers, Samuel, 36, 137. Rome, 133 ff. Rossetti, W. M., 29.* Rousseau, in. Ruskin, 82, 134, 147, 185. Ruth, 29, 196, 202. Sandys, Archbishop, 4. Scott, Sir Walter, 32. 33-4, 36, 65. 134, 168. Selborne, Lord, 47. ' Seligkeit,' 198. Shakespeare, 136, 149, 188. Shelley, 20, 57, 168, 192, 202. Sidney, Sir Philip, 166. Sister, To my, 208. Skipton, 67. Sleep, To, 52,* 148. Small Celandine, The, 121, 202. Solitary Reater, The, 128 f., 202. Song at the Feast of Brougham ' Castle, 106-7, 207 f. Southey, R., 26, 36, 39, 140. SparroT.i) s Nest, The, 3, 94. Spenser, Edmund, 64, 115, 149. StetHng Westward^ 128, 202. Tables Turned, The, in. Tasso, 149. Taylor, W. , 4. Tennyson, 20 f. , 52, 59, 62, 71, 77 f. , loi, 126, 169, 188 ff. , 192 ff. Thelwall, John, 27. Thomson, 177. Three Cottage Girls, Ttie, 129. Tintern Abbey, 28 ; Lines, com- ' "posed a jekv miles above, 102 f. , 195, 207. Tribute, The, 116. Tyson, Anne, 4, 10. Vaudracour and Julia, 95. Vere, Aubrey de, 36, 82. Vernal Ode, 207. Virgil, 67, 70, 114 f., 143. Waggoner, The, 40, 73, 80. Watson, Bishop, 16. Watson, William, loi.* We are Seven, 93, 198. Wellesley, Sir Arthur, 151. West minster B ridge. Snnne4 ,i ^9. ^or^o ' White' Doe of Rylstone, The, 32, 40, 63-71, 86. Wilkie, 36. Wilkinson, Rev. J., 182. Wilson, John, 36, 158.* Wordsworth, Anne, i, 3 ; Chris- topher, 3 ; Dora, 37 ; Dorothy, 3, 10, 22-4,94, 98; John (i.), i; (ii.). 3. 29, 35, 37, 97, 113; (iii.), 31 ; Mary, 31, 61,* 95 ; Richard (i.), 3, 21; (ii.), 3; William, passim. Wordsworth Society, 47. Varro70 Revisited, 33, 42, 130, 162. PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS EDINBURGH A SELECTION OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY METHUEN AND CO. 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