Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth

by William Wordsworth

  “Upon this I shall insist elsewhere; at present let me confine myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear friend, as easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present reception. Of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny? — To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us,) are mouldered in our graves.”

  Such words as these come with dignity from the mouth of a man like Wordsworth when he has been, as it were, driven to bay, — when he is consoling an intimate friend, distressed at the torrent of ridicule which, as she fears, must sweep his self-confidence and his purposes away. He may be permitted to assure her that “my ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings,” and to accompany his assurance with a reasoned statement of the grounds of his unshaken hopes.

  We feel, however, that such an expression of self-reliance on the part of a great man should be accompanied with some proof that no conceit or impatience is mixed with his steadfast calm. If he believes the public to be really unable to appreciate himself, he must show no surprise when they admire his inferiors; he must remember that the case would be far worse if they admired no one at all. Nor must he descend from his own unpopular merits on the plea that after catching the public attention by what is bad he will retain it for what is good. If he is so sure that he is in the right he can afford to wait and let the world come round to him. Wordsworth’s conduct satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed, curious to observe how much abuse this inoffensive recluse received, and how absolutely he avoided returning it, Byron, for instance, must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far more injurious to mankind than “a drowsy frowsy poem, called the Excursion,” could possibly appear. But, except in one or two private letters, Wordsworth has never alluded to Byron at all. Shelley’s lampoon — a singular instance of the random blows of a noble spirit, striking at what, if better understood, it would eagerly have revered — Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor did the violent attacks of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Reviews provoke him to any rejoinder. To “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” — leagued against him as their common prey — he opposed a dignified silence; and the only moral injury which he derived from their assaults lay in that sense of the absence of trustworthy external criticism which led him to treat everything which he had once written down as if it were a special revelation, and to insist with equal earnestness on his most trifling as on his most important pieces — on Goody Blake and The Idiot Boy as on The Cuckoo or The Daffodils. The sense of humour is apt to be the first grace which is lost under persecution; and much of Wordsworth’s heaviness and stiff exposition of commonplaces is to be traced to a feeling, which he could scarcely avoid, that “all day long he had lifted up his voice to a perverse and gainsaying generation.”

  To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by these adverse criticisms he was justly sensible. He was far from expecting, or even desiring, to be widely popular or to make a rapid fortune; but he felt that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that the devotion of years to literature should have been met with some moderate degree of the usual form of recognition which the world accords to those who work for it. In 1820 he speaks of “the whole of my returns from the writing trade not amounting to seven-score pounds,” and as late as 1843, when at the height of his fame, he was not ashamed of confessing the importance which he had always attached to this particular.

  “So sensible am I,” he says, “of the deficiencies in all that I write, and so far does everything that I attempt fall short of what I wish it to be, that even private publication, if such a term may be allowed, requires more resolution than I can command. I have written to give vent to my own mind, and not without hope that, some time or other, kindred minds might benefit by my labours; but I am inclined to believe I should never have ventured to send forth any verses of mine to the world, if it had not been done on the pressure of personal occasions. Had I been a rich man, my productions, like this Epistle, the Tragedy of the Borderers, &c., would most likely have been confined to manuscript.”

  An interesting passage from an unpublished letter of Miss Wordsworth’s, on the White Doe of Rylstone, confirms this statement: —

  “My brother was very much pleased with your frankness in telling us that you did not perfectly like his poem. He wishes to know what your feelings were — whether the tale itself did not interest you — or whether you could not enter into the conception of Emily’s character, or take delight in that visionary communion which is supposed to have existed between her and the Doe. Do not fear to give him pain. He is far too much accustomed to be abused to receive pain from it, (at least as far as he himself is concerned.) My reason for asking you these questions is, that some of our friends, who are equal admirers of the White Doe and of my brother’s published poems, think that this poem will sell on account of the story; that is, that the story will bear up those points which are above the level of the public taste; whereas the two last volumes — except by a few solitary individuals, who are passionately devoted to my brother’s works — are abused by wholesale.”

  “Now as his sole object in publishing this poem at present would be for the sake of the money, he would not publish it if he did not think, from the several judgments of his friends, that it would be likely to have a sale. He has no pleasure in publishing — he even detests it; and if it were not that he is not over wealthy, he would leave all his works to be published after his death. William himself is sure that the White Doe will not sell or be admired, except by a very few, at first; and only yields to Mary’s entreaties and mine. We are determined, however, if we are deceived this time, to let him have his own way in future.”

  These passages must be taken, no doubt, as representing one aspect only of the poet’s impulses in the matter. With his deep conviction of the world’s real, though unrecognized, need of a pure vein of poetry, we can hardly imagine him as permanently satisfied to defer his own contribution till after his death. Yet we may certainly believe that the need of money helped him to overcome much diffidence as to publication; and we may discern something dignified in his frank avowal of this when it is taken in connexion with his scrupulous abstinence from any attempt to win the suffrages of the multitude by means unworthy of his high vocation. He could never, indeed, have written poems which could have vied in immediate popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But the criticisms on the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads must have shown him that a slight alteration of method, — nay even the excision of a few pages in each volume, pages certain to be loudly objected to, — would have made a marked difference in the sale and its proceeds. From this point of view, even poems which we may now feel to have been needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a certain impressiveness, when we recognize that the theory which demanded their composition was one which their author was willing to uphold at the cost of some years of real physical privation, and of the postponement for a generation of his legitimate fame.

  CHAPTER IX. POETIC DICTION — ”DAODAMIA” — ”EVENING ODE.”

  The Excursion appeared in 1814, and in the course of the next year Wordsworth republished his minor poems, so arranged as to indicate the faculty of the mind which he considered to have been predominant in the composition of each. To most readers this disposition has always seemed somewhat arbitrary; and it was once suggested to Wordsworth that a chronological arrangement would be better. The manner in which Wordsworth met this proposal indicated the limit of his absorption in himself — his real desire only to dwell on his own feelings in such a way as might make them useful to others. For he rejected the plan as too egotistical — as emphasizing the succession of moods in the poet’s mind, rather than the lessons w
hich those moods could teach. His objection points, at any rate, to a real danger which any man’s simplicity of character incurs by dwelling too attentively on the changing phases of his own thought. But after the writer’s death the historical spirit will demand that poems, like other artistic products, should be disposed for the most part in the order of time.

  In a Preface to this edition of 1815, and a Supplementary Essay, he developed the theory on poetry already set forth in a well-known preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Much of the matter of these essays, received at the time with contemptuous aversion, is now accepted as truth; and few compositions of equal length contain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection. It is only when they generalize too confidently that they are in danger of misleading us; for all expositions of the art and practice of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts, is essentially a “mystery.” Its charm depends upon qualities which we can neither define accurately nor reduce to rule nor create again at pleasure. Mankind, however, are unwilling to admit this; and they endeavour from time to time to persuade themselves that they have discovered the rules which will enable them to produce the desired effect. And so much of the effect can thus be reproduced, that it is often possible to believe for a time that the problem has been solved. Pope, to take the instance which was prominent in Wordsworth’s mind, was, by general admission, a poet. But his success seemed to depend on imitable peculiarities; and Pope’s imitators were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this imitative school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A reaction succeeded, which asserted that poetry depends on emotion and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, (especially in his Sir Eustace Grey), had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at times themselves attempted to copy the very style which they were superseding.

  Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but only in the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry soon became to him the expression of his own deep and simple feelings; and then he rebelled against rhetoric and unreality and found for himself a director and truer voice, “I have proposed to myself to imitate and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men…. I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction as others ordinarily take to produce it.” And he erected this practice into a general principle in the following passage: —

  “I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between poetry and painting, and, accordingly, we call them sisters; but where shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify the affinity between metrical and prose composition? If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits, I answer that the language of such poetry as I am recommending is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we hare? Whence is it to come? And where is it to exist?”

  There is a definiteness and simplicity about this description of poetry which may well make us wonder why this precious thing (producible, apparently, as easily as Pope’s imitators supposed, although by means different from theirs) is not offered to us by more persons, and of better quality. And it will not be hard to show that a good poetical style must possess certain characteristics, which, although something like them must exist in a good prose style, are carried in poetry to a pitch so much higher as virtually to need a specific faculty for their successful production.

  To illustrate the inadequacy of Wordsworth’s theory to explain the merits of his own poetry, I select a stanza from one of his simplest and most characteristic poems — The Affliction of Margaret: —

  Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,

  Maimed, mangled by inhuman men,

  Or thou upon a Desert thrown

  Inheritest the lion’s Den;

  Or hast been summoned to the Deep,

  Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep

  An incommunicable sleep.

  These lines, supposed to be uttered by “a poor widow at Penrith,” afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls “the language really spoken by men,” with “metre superadded.” “What other distinction from prose,” he asks, “would we have?” We may answer that we would have what he has actually given us, viz., an appropriate and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and in the actual sound of the words used, — a music whose complexity may be indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in detail, at the risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe, then (a), that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. They contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long vowels, to suit the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six places only out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might be expected to be strong (in the second syllables, namely, of the Iambic foot), and in each of these cases the omission of a possible accent throws greater weight on the next succeeding accent — on the accents, that is to say, contained in the words inhuman, desert, lion, summoned, deep, and sleep, (b) The first four lines contain subtle alliterations of the letters d, h, m, and th. In this connexion it should be remembered that when consonants are thus repeated at the beginning of syllables, those syllables need not be at the beginning of words; and further, that repetitions scarcely more numerous than chance alone would have occasioned, may be so placed by the poet as to produce a strongly-felt effect. If any one doubts the effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let him read (1) “jungle” for “desert,” (2) “maybe” for “perhaps,” (3) “tortured” for “mangled,” (4) “blown” for “thrown,” and he will become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the existing consonants give one another. The three last lines contain one or two similar alliterations on which I need not dwell, (c) The words inheritest and summoned are by no means such as “a poor widow,” even at Penrith, would employ; they are used to intensify the imagined relation which connects the missing man with (1) the wild beasts who surround him, and (2) the invisible Power which leads; so that something mysterious and awful is added to his fate. (d) This impression is heightened by the use of the word incommunicable in an unusual sense, “incapable of being communicated with,” instead of “incapable of being communicated;” while (e) the expression “to keep an incommunicable sleep” for “to lie dead,” gives dignity to the occasion by carrying the mind back along a train of literary associations of which the well-known [Greek: atermona naegreton upnon] of Moschus may be taken as the type.

  We must not, of course, suppose that Wordsworth consciously sought these alliterations, arranged these accents, resolved to introduce an unusual word in the last line, or hunted for a classical allusion. But what the poet’s brain does not do consciously it does unconsciously; a selective action is going on in its recesses simultaneously with the overt train of thought, and on the degree of this unconscious suggestiveness the richness and melody of the poetry will depend.

  So rules can secure the attainment of these effects; and the very same artifices which are delightful when used by one man seem mechanical and offensive when used by another. Nor is it by any means alway
s the case that the man who can most delicately appreciate the melody of the poetry of others will be able to produce similar melody himself. Nay, even if he can produce it one year it by no means follows that he will be able to produce it the next. Of all qualifications for writing poetry this inventive music is the most arbitrarily distributed, and the most evanescent. But it is the more important to dwell on its necessity, inasmuch as both good and bad poets are tempted to ignore it. The good poet prefers to ascribe his success to higher qualities; to his imagination, elevation of thought, descriptive faculty. The bad poet can more easily urge that his thoughts are too advanced for mankind to appreciate than that his melody is too sweet for their ears to catch. And when the gift vanishes no poet is willing to confess that it is gone; so humiliating is it to lose power over mankind by the loss of something which seems quite independent of intellect or character. And yet so it is. For some twenty years at most (1798 — 1818), Wordsworth possessed this gift of melody. During those years he wrote works which profoundly influenced mankind. The gift then left him; he continued as wise and as earnest as ever, but his poems had no longer any potency, nor his existence much public importance.

  Humiliating as such reflections may seem, they are in accordance with actual experience in all branches of art. The fact is that the pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. We are always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral, and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be practically misleading. Among such incomplete explanations Wordsworth’s essays must certainly be ranked. It would not be safe for any man to believe that he had produced true poetry because he had fulfilled the conditions which Wordsworth lays down. But the essays effected what is perhaps as much as the writer on art can fairly hope to accomplish. They placed in a striking light that side of the subject which had been too long ignored; they aided in recalling an art which had become conventional and fantastic into the normal current of English thought and speech.