Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth

by William Wordsworth

  Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

  Is sinking down in its tranquillity;

  The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:

  Listen! The mighty Being is awake,

  And doth with his eternal motion make

  A sound like thunder — everlastingly.

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

  “He expatiated much to me one day,” says Mr. Aubrey de Vere, “as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England’s modern poets — one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. ‘He took pains,’ Wordsworth said; ‘he went out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever struck him most — a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home and wove the whole together into a poetical description.’ After a pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and impassioned voice: ‘But Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and notebook at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated; that which remained — the picture surviving in his mind — would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in a large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them.’“

  How many a phrase of Wordsworth’s rises in the mind in illustration of this power! Phrases which embody in a single picture, or a single image, — it may be the vivid wildness of the flowery coppice, of —

  Flaunting summer, when he throws

  His soul into the briar-rose, —

  or the melancholy stillness of the declining year, —

  Where floats

  O’er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer;

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

  The broad open eye of the solitary sky —

  beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment they may.

  Or take those typical stanzas in Peter Bell, which so long were accounted among Wordsworth’s leading absurdities.

  In vain through, every changeful year

  Did Nature lead him as before;

  A primrose by the river’s brim

  A yellow primrose was to him,

  And it was nothing more.

  In vain, through water, earth, and air,

  The soul of happy sound was spread,

  When Peter, on some April morn,

  Beneath the broom or budding thorn.

  Made the warm earth his lazy bed.

  At noon, when by the forest’s edge

  He lay beneath the branches high,

  The soft blue sky did never melt

  Into his heart, — he never felt

  The witchery of the soft blue sky!

  On a fair prospect some have looked

  And felt, as I have heard them say,

  As if the moving time had been

  A thing as steadfast as the scene

  On which they gazed themselves away.

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

  They are of the sky,

  And from our earthly memory fade away.

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

  Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,

  Though clad In colours beautiful and pure,

  Find in the heart of man no natural home;

  The immortal Mind craves objects that endure:

  These cleave to it; from these it cannot roam,

  Nor they from it: their fellowship is secure.

  From this temper of Wordsworth’s mind, it follows that there will be many moods in which we shall not retain him as our companion. Moods which are rebellious, which beat at the bars of fate; moods of passion reckless in its vehemence, and assuming the primacy of all other emotions through the intensity of its delight or pain; moods of mere imaginative phantasy, when we would fain shape from the well-worn materials of our thought some fabric at once beautiful and new; from all such phases of our inward being Wordsworth stands aloof. His poem on the nightingale and the stockdove illustrates with half-conscious allegory the contrast between himself and certain other poets.

  O Nightingale! Thou surely art

  A creature of a fiery heart: —

  These notes of thine — they pierce and pierce;

  Tumultuous harmony and fierce!

  Thou sing’st as if the God of wine

  Had helped thee to a Valentine;

  A song in mockery and despite

  Of shades, and dews, and silent Night;

  And steady bliss, and all the loves

  Now sleeping in their peaceful groves.

  I heard a Stock-dove sing or say

  His homely tale, this very day;

  His voice was buried among trees,

  Yet to be come at by the breeze:

  He did not cease; but cooed — and cooed,

  And somewhat pensively he wooed.

  He sang of love with quiet blending,

  Slow to begin, and never ending;

  Of serious faith and inward glee;

  That was the Song — the Song for me!

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

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

  Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

  And sings a melancholy strain;

  O listen! For the Vale profound

  Is overflowing with the sound.

  Such — and with how subtle a difference! — is the Fragment in which a “Spirit of noonday” wears on his fa
ce the silent joy of Nature in her own recesses, undisturbed by beast, or bird, or man, —

  Nor ever was a cloudless sky

  So steady or so fair.

  And such are the poems — We are Seven, The Pet Lamb,

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

  Louisa, The Two April Mornings — in which the beauty of rustic children melts, as it were, into Nature herself, and the —

  Blooming girl whose hair was wet

  With points of morning dew

  becomes the impersonation of the season’s early joy. We may apply, indeed, to all these girls Wordsworth’s description of leverets playing on a lawn, and call them —

  Separate creatures in their several gifts

  Abounding, but so fashioned that in all

  That Nature prompts them to display, their looks,

  Their starts of motion and their fits of rest,

  An undistinguishable style appears

  And character of gladness, as if Spring

  Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit

  Of the rejoicing Morning were their own.

  My limits forbid me to dwell longer on these points. The passages which I have been citing have been for the most part selected as illustrating the novelty and subtlety of Wordsworth’s view of Nature. But it will now be sufficiently clear how continually a strain of human interest is interwoven with the delight derived from impersonal things.

  Long have I loved what I behold,

  The night that calms, the day that cheers:

  The common growth of mother earth

  Suffices me — her tears, her mirth,

  Her humblest mirth and tears.

  The poet of the Waggoner — who, himself a habitual water-drinker, has so glowingly described the glorification which the prospect of nature receives in a half-intoxicated brain — may justly claim that he can enter into all genuine pleasures, even of an order which he declines for himself. With anything that is false or artificial he cannot sympathize, nor with such faults as baseness, cruelty, rancour; which seem contrary to human nature itself; but in dealing with faults of mere weakness he is far less strait-laced than many less virtuous men.

  He had, in fact, a reverence for human beings as such which enabled him to face even their frailties without alienation; and there was something in his own happy exemption from such falls which touched him into regarding men less fortunate rather with pity than disdain.

  Because the unstained, the clear, the crystalline,

  Have ever in them something of benign.

  His comment on Barns’s Tam o’ Shanter will perhaps surprise some readers who are accustomed to think of him only in his didactic attitude.

  “It is the privilege of poetic genius, he says, to catch, under certain restrictions of which perhaps at the time of its being exerted it is but dimly conscious, a spirit of pleasure wherever it can be found, in the walks of nature, and in the business of men. The poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects of war, nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love though immoderate — from convivial pleasures though intemperate — nor from the presence of war, though savage, and recognized as the handmaid of desolation. Frequently and admirably has Burns given way to these impulses of nature, both with references to himself and in describing the condition of others. Who, but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art, ever read without delight the picture which he has drawn of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o’ Shanter? The poet fears not to tell the reader in the outset that his hero was a desperate and sottish drunkard, whose excesses were as frequent as his opportunities. This reprobate sits down to his cups while the storm is roaring, and heaven and earth are in confusion; the night is driven on by song and tumultuous noise, laughter and jest thicken as the beverage improves upon the palate — conjugal fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence — selfishness is not absent, but wearing the mask of social cordiality; and while these various elements of humanity are blended into one proud and happy composition of elated spirits, the anger of the tempest without doors only heightens and sets off the enjoyment within. I pity him who cannot perceive that in all this, though there was no moral purpose, there is a moral effect.”

  Kings may be blest, but Tarn was glorious,

  O’er a’ the ills of life victorious.

  “What a lesson do these words convey of charitable indulgence for the vicious habits of the principal actor in the scene, and of those who resemble him! Men who to the rigidly virtuous are objects almost of loathing, and whom therefore they cannot serve! The poet, penetrating the unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has unveiled with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling, that often bind these beings to practices productive of so much unhappiness to themselves, and to those whom it is their duty to cherish; and, as far as he puts the reader into possession of this intelligent sympathy, he qualifies him for exercising a salutary influence over the minds of those who are thus deplorably enslaved.”

  The reverence for man as man, the sympathy for him in his primary relations and his essential being, of which these comments on Tam o’ Shanter form so remarkable an example, is a habit of thought too ingrained in all Wordsworth’s works to call for specific illustration. The figures of Michael, of Matthew, of the Brothers, of the hero of the Excursion, and even of the Idiot Boy, suggest themselves at once in this connexion. But it should be noted in each case how free is the poet’s view from any idealization of the poorer classes as such, from the ascription of imaginary merits to an unknown populace which forms the staple of so much revolutionary eloquence. These poems, while they form the most convincing rebuke to the exclusive pride of the rich and great, are also a stern and strenuous incentive to the obscure and lowly. They are pictures of the poor man’s life as it is, — pictures as free as Crabbe’s from the illusion of sentiment, — but in which the delight of mere observation (which in Crabbe predominates) is subordinated to an intense sympathy with all such capacities of nobleness and tenderness as are called out by the stress and pressure of penury or woe. They form for the folk of northern England (as the works of Burns and Scott for the Scottish folk) a gallery of figures that are modelled, as it were, both from without and from within; by one with experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate, and yet with an insight which could draw from that simple life lessons to itself unknown. We may almost venture to generalize our statement further, and to assert that no writer since Shakespeare has left us so true a picture of the British nation. In Milton, indeed, we have the characteristic English spirit at a whiter glow; but it is the spirit of the scholar only, or of the ruler, not of the peasant, the woman, or the child, Wordsworth gives us that spirit as it is diffused among shepherds and husbandmen, — as it exists in obscurity and at peace. And they who know what makes the strength of nations need wish nothing better than that the temper which he saw and honoured among the Cumbrian dales should be the temper of all England, now and for ever.

  Our discussion of Wordsworth’s form of Natural Religion has led us back by no force
d transition to the simple life which he described and shared. I return to the story of his later years, — if that be called a story which derives no interest from incident or passion, and dwells only on the slow broodings of a meditative soul.

  CHAPTER XI. ITALIAN TOUR — ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS — POLITICAL VIEWS — LAUREATESHIP.

  Wordsworth was fond of travelling, and indulged this taste whenever he could afford it. Comparing himself and Southey, he says in 1843: “My lamented friend Southey used to say that had he been a Papist, the course of life which in all probability would have been his was that of a Benedictine monk, in a convent furnished with an inexhaustible library. Books were, in fact, his passion; and wandering, I can with truth affirm, was mine; but this propensity in me was happily counteracted by inability from want of fortune to fulfil my wishes.” We find him, however, frequently able to contrive a change of scene. His Swiss tour in 1790, his residence in France in 1791-2, his residence in Germany, 1798-9, have been already touched on. Then came a short visit to France in August 1802, which produced the sonnets on Westminster Bridge and Calais Beach. The tour in Scotland which was so fertile in poetry took place in 1803. A second tour in Scotland, in 1814, produced the Brownie’s Cell and a few other pieces. And in July, 1820, he set out with his wife and sister and two or three other friends for a tour through Switzerland and Italy.

  This tour produced a good deal of poetry; and here and there are touches which recall the old inspiration. Such is the comparison of the clouds about the Engelberg to hovering angels; and such the description of the eclipse falling upon the population of statues which throng the pinnacles of Milan Cathedral. But for the most part the poems relating to this tour have an artificial look; the sentiments in the vale of Chamouni seem to have been laboriously summoned for the occasion; and the poet’s admiration for the Italian maid and the Helvetian girl is a mere shadow of the old feeling for the Highland girl, to whom, in fact, he seems obliged to recur in order to give reality to his new emotion.

  To conclude the subject of Wordsworth’s travels, I will mention here that in 1823 he made a tour in Holland, and in 1824 in North Wales, where his sonnet to the torrent at the Devil’s Bridge recalls the Swiss scenery seen in his youth with vigour and dignity. In 1828 he made another excursion in Belgium with Coleridge, and in 1829 he visited Ireland with his friend Mr. Marshall. Neither of these tours was productive. In 1831 he paid a visit with his daughter to Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, before his departure to seek health in Italy. Scott received them cordially, and had strength to take them to the Yarrow. “Of that excursion,” says Wordsworth, “the verses Yarrow Revisited are a memorial. On our return in the afternoon we had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. A rich, but sad light, of rather a purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon hills at that moment; and, thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream (the Tweed), I was not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning, A trouble not of clouds nor weeping rain. At noon on Thursday we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation, tête-à-tête, when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, upon the whole, he had led. He had written in my daughter’s album, before he came into the breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her; and, while putting the book into her hand, in his own study, standing by his desk, he said to her, in my presence, ‘I should not have done anything of this kind but for your father’s sake; they are probably the last verses I shall ever write.’ They show how much his mind was impaired: not by the strain of thought, but by the execution, some of the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding rhymes. One letter, the initial S., had been omitted in the spelling of his own name.”