Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  As it is, we are across them; we are benighted in our wandering and straitened for room. We glance back vainly to the lights of the later drama, and see Dryden, who had the heart to write rhymed plays after Shakspeare, and but little heart for anything else, – and Congreve, and Lillo, and Southerne, and Rowe, all gifted writers, and Otway, master of tears, who starved in our streets for his last tragedy – a poet most effective in broad touches; rather moving, as it appears to us, by scenes than by words.

  Returning to the general poets, we meet with bent faces toward hill-side Nature, Thomson and Dyer; in writing which names together, we do not depreciate Thomson’s, however we may a little exalt Dyer’s. We praise neither of these writers for being descriptive poets; but for that faithful transcript of their own impressions, which is a common subject of praise in both, – Dyer being more distinct, perhaps, in his images, and Thomson more impressive in his general effect. Both are faulty in their blank verse diction; the latter too florid and verbose, the former (although ‘Grongar Hill’ is simple almost to baldness) too pedantic and constructive – far too “saponaceous” and “pomaceous.” We offer pastoral salutation also to Shenstone and Hammond; pairing them like Polyphemus’s sheep; fain to be courteous if we could: and we could if we were ‘Phillida.’ Surely it is an accomplishment to utter a pretty thought so simply that the world is forced to remember it; and that gift was Shenstone’s, and he the most poetical of country gentlemen. May every shrub on the lawn of Leasowes be evergreen to his brow. And next, O most patient reader, – pressed to a conclusion and in a pairing humour, we come to Gray and Akenside together, yes, together! because if Gray had written a philosophic poem he would have written it like the ‘Pleasures of Imagination,’ and because Akenside would have written odes like Gray, if he could have commanded a rapture. Gray, studious and sitting in the cold, learnt the secret of a simulated and innocent fire (the Greek fire he might have called it), which burns beautifully to the eye, but never would have harmed M. Henault’s ruffles. Collins had twenty times the lyric genius of Gray; we feel his fire in our cheeks. But Gray, but Akenside – both with a volition towards enthusiasm – have an under-constitution of most scholastic coldness: “Si vis me flere,” you must weep; but they only take out their pocket-handkerchiefs. We confess humbly, before gods and men, that we never read to the end of Akenside’s ‘Pleasures,’ albeit we have read Plato: some pleasures, say the moralists, are more trying than pains. Let us turn for refreshment to Goldsmith – that amiable genius, upon whose diadem we feel our hands laid ever and anon in familiar love, – to Goldsmith, half emerged from “the system,” his forehead touched with the red ray of the morning; a cordial singer. Even Johnson, the ponderous critic of the system, who would hang a dog if he read Lycidas twice, who wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets, even he loved Goldsmith! and Johnson was Dryden’s critical bear, a rough bear, and with points of noble beardom. But while he growled the leaves of the greenwood fell; and oh, how sick to faintness grew the poetry of England! Anna Seward “by’r lady,” was the “muse” of those days, and Mr. Hayley “the bard,” and Hannah More wrote our dramas, and Helen Williams our odes, and Rosa Matilda our elegiacs, – and Blacklock, blind from his birth, our descriptive poems, and Mr. Whalley our domestic epics,” and Darwin our poetical philosophy, and Lady Miller encouraged literature at Bath, with red taffeta and ‘the vase.’ But the immortal are threatened vainly. It was the sickness of renewal rather then of death; St. Leon had his fainting hand on the elixir: the new era was alive in Cowper. We do not speak of him as the master of a transition, only as a hinge on which it slowly turned; only as an earnest tender writer, and true poet enough to be true to himself. Cowper sang in England, and Thomas Warton also, – of a weaker voice but in tune: and Beattie, for whom we have too much love to analyze it, seeing that we drew our childhood’s first poetic pleasure from his ‘Minstrel’! And Burns walked in glory on the Scotch mountain’s side: and everywhere Dr. Percy’s collected ballads were sowing the great hearts of some still living for praise, with impulses of greatness. It was the revival of poetry – the opening of the fifth era, – the putting down of the Dryden dynasty – the breaking of the serf bondage – the wrenching of the iron from the soul. And Nature and Poetry did embrace one another! and all men who were lovers of either and of our beloved England, were enabled to resume the pride of their consciousness, and looking round the world say gently, yet gladly, “OUR POETS.”

  Review of ‘Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, Including the Borderers, a Tragedy by William Wordsworth’

  First published in 1842 in The Athenaeum

  WHEN Mr. Wordsworth gave his first poems to the public, it was not well with poetry in England. The “system” rivetted upon the motions of poetry by Dryden and his dynasty had gradually added to the restraint of slavery, its weakness and emasculation. The change from poetry to rhetoric had issued in another change, to the commonplaces of rhetoric. We had no longer to complain of Pope’s antithetic glories – there was “a vile antithesis” for those also. The followers were not as the master; and the very facility with which the trick of acoustical mechanics was caught up by the former – admitting of “singing for the million,” with ten fingers each for natural endowment, and the ability to count them for acquirement, – made wider and more apparent the difference of dignity between the Popes and the Pope Joans. Little by little, by slow and desolate degrees, Thought had perished out of the way of the appointed and most beaten rhythm; and we had the beaten rhythm, without the living footstep – we had the monotony of the military movement, without the heroic impulse – the cross of the Legion of Honour, hung, as it once was, in a paroxysm of converted Bourbonism, at a horse’s tail; and the “fork”, which expelled nature, dropped feebly downward, blunted of its point. And oh! to see who sat then in England, in the seats of the elders! The Elizabethan men would have gnashed their teeth at such a sight; the Queen Anne’s men would have multiplied Dunciads. Of the third George’s men (‘Αχαιίδες ουκ ετ’ ‘Αχαιοι Hayley, too good a scholar to bear to be so bad a poet, was a chief hope, – and Darwin, mistaker of the optic nerve for the poetical sense, an inventive genius.

  But Cowper had a great name, and Burns a greater; and the reveillie of Dr. Percy’s ‘Reliques of English Poetry’ was echoed presently by the ‘Scottish Minstrelsy.’ There was a change – a revival – an awakening – a turning, at least upon the pillow, of some who slept on in mediocrity, as if they felt the daylight on their shut eyelids – there was even a group of noble hearts (Coleridge, the idealist, poet among poets, in their midst), foreseeing the sun. Nature, the long banished, re-dawned like the morning – Nature, the true mother, cried afar off to her children – “Children, I am here! – come to me.” It was a hard act to come, and involved the learning and the leaving of much. Conventionalities of phrase and rhythm, conventional dialects set apart for poets, conventional words, attitudes, and manners, consecrated by “wits,” – all such Nessian trappings were to be wrenched off, even to the cuticle into which they had urged their poison. But it was an act not too hard for the doing. There was a visible movement towards nature; the majority moving of course with reservation, but individuals with decision; some rending downward their garments of pestilent embroidery, and casting themselves at her feet. As the chief of the movement, the Xenophon of the return, we are bound to acknowledge this great Wordsworth, and to admire how, in a bravery bravest of all because born of love, in a passionate unreservedness sprung of genius, and to the actual scandal of the world which stared at the filial familiarity, he threw himself not at the feet of Nature, but straightway and right tenderly upon her bosom! And so, trustfully as child before mother, selfrenouncingly as child after sin, absorbed away from the consideration of publics and critics as child at play-hours, with a simplicity startling to the blase critical ear as inventiveness, with an innocent utterance felt by the competent thinker to be wisdom, and with a faithfulness to natural impressions acknowledged
since by all to be the highest art, – this William Wordsworth did sing his ‘Lyrical Ballads’ where the ‘Art of criticism’ had been sung before, and “the world would not let them die.”

  The voice of nature has a sweetness which few of us, when sufficiently tried, can gainsay; it penetrates our artificial “tastes,” and overcomes us; and our ignorance seldom proves strong, in proportion to our instincts. We recognize, like Ulysses’ dog, with feeble joyous gesture the master’s voice – and the sound is nearly always pleasant to us, however we may want strength to follow after it. But, while at the period we refer to, the recognition and gratulation were true and deep, the old conventionalities and prejudices hung heavily in bondage and repression. The great body of readers would recoil to the Drydenic rhythm, to the Queen Anne’s poetical cant, to anti-Saxonisms, whether in Latin or French; or exacted as a condition of a poet’s faithfulness to nature, such an effervescence of his emotions, as had rendered Pope natural in the Eloisa. “Let us all forsooth be Eloisa and so natural,” – the want was an excuse for loving nature; and the opinion went, that the daily heart-beat was more obnoxious in poetry than the incidental palpitation. Poor Byron (true miserable genius, soul-blind great poet!) ministered to this singular need, identifying poetry and passion. Poetry ought to be the revelation of the complete man – and Byron’s manhood having no completion nor entirety, consisting on the contrary of a one-sided passionateness, his poems discovered not a heart, but the wound of a heart; not humanity, but disease; not life, but a crisis. It was not so – it was not in the projection of a passionate emotion, that William Wordsworth committed himself to nature, but in full resolution and determinate purpose. He is scarcely, perhaps, of a passionate temperament, although still less is he cold; rather quiet in his love, as the stock-dove, and brooding over it as constantly, and with as soft an inward song lapsing outwardly – serene through deepness – saying himself of his thoughts, that they “do often lie too deep for tears;” which does not mean that their painfulness will not suffer them to be wept for, but that their closeness to the supreme Truth hallows them, like the cheek of an archangel, from tears. Call him the very opposite of Byron, who, with narrower sympathies for the crowd, yet stood nearer to the crowd, because everybody understands passion. Byron was a poet through pain. Wordsworth is a feeling man, because he is a thoughtful man; he knows grief itself by a reflex emotion; by sympathy, rather than by suffering. He is eminently and humanly expansive; and, spreading his infinite egotism over all the objects of his contemplation, reiterates the love, life, and poetry of his peculiar being in transcribing and chanting the material universe, and so sinks a broad gulf between his descriptive poetry and that of the Darwinian painter-poet school. Darwin was, as we have intimated, all optic nerve. Wordsworth’s eye is his soul. He does not see that which he does not intellectually discern, and he beholds his own cloud-capped Helvellyn under the same conditions with which he would contemplate a grand spiritual sbstraction. In his view of the exterior world – as in a human Spinosism, – mountains and men’s hearts share in a sublime unity of humanity; yet his Spinosism does in nowise affront God, for he is eminently a religious poet, if not, indeed, altogether as generous and capacious in his Christianity as in his poetry; and, being a true Christian poet, he is scarcely least so when he is not writing directly upon the subject of religion, – just as we learn sometimes without looking up, and, by the mere colour of the grass, that the sky is cloudless. But what is most remarkable in this great writer is, his poetical consistency. There is a wonderful unity in these multiform poems of one man; they are “bound each to each in natural piety,” even as his days are – and why? – because they are his days – all his days, work days and Sabbath days – his life, in fact, and not the unconnected works of his life, as vulgar men do opine of poetry and do rightly opine of vulgar poems, but the sign, seal, and representation of his life – nay, the actual audible breathing of his inward spirit’s life. When Milton said that a poet’s life should be a poem, he spoke a high moral truth; if he had added a reversion of the saying, that a poet’s poetry should be his life, – he would have spoken a critical truth, not low.

  “Foole, saide my muse to mee, looke in thine hearte and write.” – and not only, we must repeat, at feast times, fast times, or curfew times – not only at times of crisis and emotion, but at all hours of the clock; for that which God thought good enough to write, or permit the writing of on His book, the heart, is not too common, let us be sure, to write again in the best of our poems. William Wordsworth wrote these common things of nature, and by no means in a phraseology nor in a style. He was daring in his commonness as any of your Tamerlanes may be daring when far fetching an alien image from an outermost world; and, notwithstanding the ribald cry of that “vox populi” which has, in the criticism of poems, so little the character of divinity, and which loudly and mockingly, at his first utterance, denied the sanctity of his simplicities, – the Nature he was faithful to “betrayed not the heart which loved her,” but, finally, justifying herself and him, “ᴅɪᴅ” – without the Edinburgh Review.

  “Hero-worshippers,” as we are, and sitting for all the critical pretence – in right or wrong of which we speak at all – at the feet of Mr. Wordsworth, – recognizing him, as we do, as poet-hero of a movement essential to the better being of poetry, as poet-prophet of utterances greater than those who first listened could comprehend, and of influences most vital and expansive – we are yet honest to confess that certain things in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ which most provoked the ignorant innocent hootings of the mob, do not seem to us all heroic. Love, like ambition, may overvault itself; and Betty Foys of the Lake school (so called), may be as subject to conventionalities as Pope’s Lady Bettys. And, perhaps, our great poet might, through the very vehemence and nobleness of his hero and prophet-work for nature, confound, for some blind moment, and, by an association easily traced and excused, nature with rusticity, the simple with the bald; and even fall into a vulgar conventionality in the act of spurning a graceful one. If a trace of such confounding may occasionally be perceived in Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poetry, few critics are mad enough to-day, to catch at the loose straws of the full golden sheaf and deck out withal their own arrogant fronts, in the course of mouthing mocks at the poet. The veriest critic of straw knoweth well, at this hour of the day, that if Mr. Wordsworth was ever over-rustic, it was not through incapacity to be over-rustic, it was not through incapacity to be right royal; that of all poets, indeed, who have been kings in England, not one has swept the purple with more majesty than this poet, when it ath pleased him to be majestic. Vivat rex, – and here is a new volume of his reign. Let us rejoice, for the sake of literature and the age, in the popularity which is ready for it, and in the singular happiness of a great poet living long enough to rebound from the “fell swoop” of his poetical destiny, survive the ignorance of his public, and convict the prejudices of his reviewers. It is a literal “poetical justice,” and one rarest of all, that a great poet should stand in a permitted sovereignty, without doing so, like poor Inez de Castro, by right of death. It is almost wonderful that his country should clap her hands in praise of him, before he has ceased to hear: the applause resembles an anachronism. Is Mr. Wordsworth startled at receiving from his contemporaries what he expected only from posterity? – is he asking himself – “Have I done anything wrong?” – Probably not – it is at least with his usual air of calm and advised dignity that he addresses his new volume in its Envoy: –

  Go single, – yet aspiring to be joined

  With thy forerunners, that through many a year

  Have faithfully prepared each other’s way –

  Go forth upon a mission best fulfilled

  When and wherever, in this changeful world,

  Power hath been given to please for higher ends

  Than pleasure only; gladdening to prepare

  For wholesome sadness, troubling to refine,

  Calming to raise.

  – word
s of the poet, which form a nobler description of the character and uses of his poetry, than could be given in any words of a critic.

  We do not say that the finest of Mr. Wordsworth’s productions are to be found or should be looked for in the present volume; but the volume is worthy of its forerunners, consistent in noble earnestness and serene philosophy, true poet’s work, – the hand trembling not a jot for years or weariness, – the full face of the soul turned hopefully and stilly as ever towards the True, and catching across its ridge the idealized sunlight of the Beautiful. And yet if we were recording angel, instead of only recording reviewer, we should drop a tear . . . another . . . and end by weeping out that series of sonnets in favour of capital punishments, – moved that a hand which has traced life-warrants so long for the literature of England, should thus sign a misplaced ‘Benedicite’ over the hangman and his victim. We turn away from them to other sonnets – to forget aught in Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry we must turn to his poetry! – and however the greatest poets of our country, – the Shakspeares, Spensers, Miltons, – worked upon high sonnet ground; not one opened over it such broad and pouring sluices of various thought, imagery, and emphatic eloquence as he has done. This is a worthy counsel from one worthy to counsel: –