Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 7

--that song which was never completed--yet, some ten years later, he still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic. Whether at any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it; and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to little and familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion that they are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of poetry was wanted at that time to counteract its special evils. There prevailed, he thought, a 'degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.' The violent excitement of public events, and 'the increasing acc.u.mulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,' had induced a torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and sensational effects--such effects as were produced by 'frantic novels,' of the Radcliffe or Monk Lewis type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles and terrifying spectres. He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from it as possible; to write a poetry even _more_ alien to it than Shakespeare's tragedies or Spenser's stories of knights and dragons; to show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved, even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal. In the same way, he grieved Coleridge by refusing to interest himself in the Somersets.h.i.+re fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest ways in England. And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd, but a born fighter who was easily provoked and could swing his crook with uncommon force, he a.s.serted his convictions defiantly and carried them out to extremes. And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrowed, when in the Seventh Book of the _Excursion_ he made the Pastor protest that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate the din of war, or to propagate the pangs and turbulence of pa.s.sionate love, he did this perhaps because the world which would not listen to him[6] was enraptured by _Marmion_ and the earlier poems of Byron.

How great Wordsworth's success might have been in fields which he deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he would have failed. With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of love-poetry, it would have been natural to him to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. But one may smile at his navete without disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it. The poems about Lucy are not poems of pa.s.sion, in the usual sense, but they surely are love-poems. The verses _'Tis said that some have died for love_, excluded from Arnold's selection but praised by Ruskin, are poignant enough. And the following lines from _Vaudracour and Julia_ make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:

Arabian fiction never filled the world With half the wonders that were wrought for him.

Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring; Life turned the meanest of her implements, Before his eyes, to price above all gold; The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine; Her chamber-window did surpa.s.s in glory The portals of the dawn; all paradise Could, by the simple opening of a door, Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks, Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank, Surcharged, within him, overblest to move Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world To its dull round of ordinary cares; A man too happy for mortality!

As a whole, _Vaudracour and Julia_ is a failure, but these lines haunt my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they profess to describe. This is not precisely 'pa.s.sion,' and, I admit, they do not prove Wordsworth's capacity to deal with pa.s.sion. The main reason for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt, he would have reached his highest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly feel--perhaps hardly felt at all--that the _pa.s.sion_ of love is a way into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth if it is to rouse all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had

dared to take Life's rule from pa.s.sion craved for pa.s.sion's sake;[7]

and he utterly repudiated that. 'The immortal mind craves objects that endure.'

Then there is that 'romance' which Wordsworth abjured. In using the word I am employing the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in a more special sense, romantic, and signalised, among other ways, by a love of the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of mythology.

It is a just and necessary distinction: the _Ancient Mariner_ and _Michael_ are very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the kind, it becomes misleading when it is roughly handled or pushed into an ant.i.thesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better the example of either, the more it shows its community with the other.

There is not a great deal of truth to nature in _Lalla Rookh_, but there is plenty in the _Ancient Mariner_: in certain poems of Crabbe there is little romance, but there is no want of it in _Sir Eustace Grey_ or in _Peter Grimes_. Taking the distinction, however, as we find it, and a.s.suming, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth's power to write an _Ancient Mariner_, or to tell us of

magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the _Prelude_) of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many pa.s.sages which show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in 'Arabian fiction.' The 'Arabian sands' (_Solitary Reaper_) had the same glamour for him as for others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (_Prelude_, v.) has a very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance _in excelsis_, like _Kubla Khan_. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,

Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;

the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual att.i.tude, in which he praises the Osmunda fern as

lovelier, in its own retired abode On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere Sole-sitting by the sh.o.r.es of old romance,[8]

--these, and a score of other pa.s.sages, all point the same way. He would not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron, nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his purpose, as in _Ruth_, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:

He told of the magnolia, spread High as a cloud, high overhead, The cypress and her spire; Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam Cover a hundred leagues, and seem To set the hills on fire.

He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he wrote of Greek religion in the _Excursion_ is full of imagination and brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth's pen:

Great G.o.d! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that elementary love of fighting which, together with much n.o.bler things, is gratified by some great poetry. And a.s.suredly he could not, even if he would, have rivalled the last canto of _Marmion_, nor even the best pa.s.sages in the _Siege of Corinth_. But he is not to be judged by his intentional failures. The martial parts of the _White Doe of Rylstone_ are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame. The former at least they were meant to be. The _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ was on every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem who missed its spiritual interest should be interested in anything else.

Probably he overshot his mark. For readers who could understand him the effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy. But, however that may be, he did what he meant to do. In the _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_, again, the war-like close of the Song was not written for its own sake. It was designed with a view to the transition to the longer metre, the thought of peace in communion with nature, and the wonderful stanza 'Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.' But, for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to put his heart into the martial close of the Song; and surely it has plenty of animation and glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the subject of war if he had wished to handle it _con amore_.

The poet whose portrait we drew when we began might have been the author of the _White Doe_, and perhaps of _Brougham Castle_, and possibly of the _Happy Warrior_. He could no more have composed the _Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty_ than the political sonnets of Milton. And yet Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than these Poems, which I am not going to praise, since Mr. Swinburne's praise of them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent. They are characteristic in many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series, which occupies the first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible.

The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets. And this too is characteristic. The entire success of the _Ode to Duty_ is exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poem is written in regular stanzas of a simple metrical scheme. The irregular Odes are never thus successful. Wordsworth could not command the tone of sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is irregular his ear is uncertain. The Immortality Ode, like _King Lear_, is its author's greatest product, but not his best piece of work. The Odes among the _Poems_ which we are now considering are declamatory, even violent, and yet they stir comparatively little emotion, and they do not sing. The sense of ma.s.sive pa.s.sion, concentrated, and repressing the utterance it permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse. And the Sonnet suited this.

The patriotism of these _Poems_ is equally characteristic. It ill.u.s.trates Wordsworth's total rejection of the G.o.dwinian ideas in which he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and sanct.i.ty of forms of a.s.sociation arising from natural kins.h.i.+p. It is composed, we may say, of two elements. The first is the simple love of country raised to a high pitch, the love of 'a lover or a child'; the love that makes it for some men a miserable doom to be forced to live in a foreign land, and that makes them feel their country's virtues and faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them.

We talk as if this love were common. It is very far from common; but Wordsworth felt it.[9] The other element in his patriotism I must call by the dreaded name of 'moral,' a name which Wordsworth did not dread, because it meant for him nothing stereotyped or narrow. His country is to him the representative of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,

the only light Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.

This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.[10]

But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in itself; and neither could be long maintained without that which gives value to both. This is the freedom of the soul, plain living and high thinking, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power, domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty. Wordsworth fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedom is not failing;[11] but he seldom fears for long. England, in the war against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth was to Milton,--an elect people, the chosen agent of G.o.d's purpose on the earth. His ideal of life, unlike Milton's in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast. His country is to him, as to Milton,

An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.[12]

And his own pride in it is, like Milton's, in the highest degree haughty. It would be calumnious to say that it recalls the description of the English given by the Irishman Goldsmith,

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pa.s.s by;

for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his countrymen the lords of human kind, nor is there anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there _is_ pride in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the character of his ideal and of this national pride, with him as with Milton, is connected with personal traits,--impatience of constraint, severity, a certain austere pa.s.sion, an inclination of imagination to the sublime.

3.

These personal traits, though quite compatible with the portrait on which I am commenting, are not visible in it. Nor are others, which belong especially, but not exclusively, to the younger Wordsworth. He had a spirit so vehement and affections so violent (it is his sister's word) as to inspire alarm for him. If he had been acquainted with that excuse for impotent idleness and selfishness, 'the artistic temperament,' he might have made out a good claim to it. He was from the beginning self-willed, and for a long time he appeared aimless. He would not work at the studies of his university: he preferred to imagine a university in which he _would_ work. He had a pa.s.sion for wandering which was restrained only by want of means, and which opened his heart to every pedlar or tramp whom he met. After leaving Cambridge he would not fix on a profession. He remained, to the displeasure of his relatives, an idler in the land or out of it; and as soon as he had 900 of capital left to him he determined _not_ to have a profession.

Sometimes he worked hard at his poetry, even heroically hard; but he did not work methodically, and often he wrote nothing for weeks, but loafed and walked and enjoyed himself. He was not blind like Milton, but the act of writing was physically disagreeable to him, and he made his woman-kind write to his dictation. He would not conform to rules, or attend to the dinner-bell, or go to church (he made up for this neglect later). 'He wrote his _Ode to Duty_,' said one of his friends, 'and then he had done with that matter.' He never 'tired' of his 'unchartered freedom.' In age, if he wanted to go out, whatever the hour and whatever the weather, he must have his way. 'In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked.' If the poetic fit was on him he could attend to nothing else. He was pa.s.sionately fond of his children, but, when the serious illness of one of them coincided with an onset of inspiration, it was impossible to rouse him to a sense of danger. At such times he was as completely possessed as any wild poet who ruins the happiness of everyone dependent on him. But he has himself described the tyranny of inspiration, and the reaction after it, in his _Stanzas written in Thomson's Castle of Indolence_. It is almost beyond doubt, I think, that the first portrait there is that of himself; and though it is idealised it is probably quite as accurate as the portrait in _A Poet's Epitaph_. In the _Prelude_ he tells us that, though he rarely at Cambridge betrayed by gestures or looks his feelings about nature, yet, when he did so, some of his companions said he was mad.

Hazlitt, describing his manner of reading his own poetry in much later years, says, 'It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.'

Wordsworth's lawlessness was of the innocuous kind, but it is a superst.i.tion to suppose that he was a disgustingly well-regulated person. It is scarcely less unjust to describe his poetic sympathies as narrow and his poetic morality as puritanical. The former, of course, had nothing like the range of minds like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Browning, or the great novelists. Wordsworth's want of humour would by itself have made that impossible; and, in addition, though by no means wanting in psychological curiosity, he was not much interested in complex natures. Simple souls, and especially simple souls that are also deep, were the natures that attracted him: and in the same way the pa.s.sions he loved to depict are not those that storm themselves out or rush to a catastrophe, but those that hold the soul in a vice for long years. But, these limitations admitted, it will not be found by anyone who reviews the characters in the smaller poems and the _Excursion_ (especially Book vii.), that Wordsworth's poetic sympathies are narrow.

They are wider than those of any imaginative writer of his time and country except Scott and perhaps Crabbe.

Nor is his morality narrow. It is serious, but it is human and kindly and not in the least ascetic. 'It is the privilege of poetic genius,' he says in his defence of Burns, 'to catch 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 pa.s.sion of love though immoderate--from convivial pleasure though intemperate--nor from the presence of war though savage and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. Who but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art ever read without delight the picture which Burns has drawn of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o' Shanter?'

There is no want of sympathy in Wordsworth's own picture of the 'convivial exaltation' of his Waggoner. It is true that he himself never describes a scene in which, to quote his astonis.h.i.+ng phrase, 'conjugal fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence,' and that his treatment of s.e.xual pa.s.sion is always grave and, in a true sense, moral; but it is plain and manly and perfectly free from timidity or monkishness. It would really be easier to make out against Wordsworth a charge of excessive tolerance than a charge of excessive rigidity. A beggar is the sort of person he likes. It is all very well for him to say that he likes the Old c.u.mberland Beggar because, by making people give, he keeps love alive in their hearts. It may be so--he says so, and I always believe him. But that was not his only reason; and it is clear to me that, when he met the tall gipsy-beggar, he gave her money because she was beautiful and queenly, and that he delighted in her two lying boys because of their gaiety and joy in life. Neither has he the least objection to a thief. The grandfather and grandson who go pilfering together, two infants separated by ninety years, meet with nothing but smiles from him. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale, after thirty years of careless hospitality, found himself ruined. He borrowed money, spent some of it in paying a few of his other debts, and absconded to London.

But this he did all in the _ease_ of his heart.

And for this reason, and because in London he keeps the ease of his heart and continues to love the country, Wordsworth dismisses him with a blessing. What he cannot bear is torpor. He pa.s.ses a knot of gipsies in the morning; and, pa.s.sing them again after his twelve hours of joyful rambling, he finds them just as they were, sunk in sloth; and he breaks out,

Oh, better wrong and strife, Better vain deeds and evil than such life.

He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it represents his original feeling, and he might have trusted that only an 'impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan' would misunderstand him.[13]

Wordsworth's morality is of one piece with his optimism and with his determination to seize and exhibit in everything the element of good.

But this is a subject far too large for treatment here, and I can refer to it only in the most summary way. What Arnold precisely meant when he said that Wordsworth 'put by' the cloud of human destiny I am not sure.

That Wordsworth saw this cloud and looked at it steadily is beyond all question. I am not building on such famous lines as

The still sad music of humanity,

or

the fierce confederate storm Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities;

or

Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills, The generations are prepared; the pangs, The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife Of poor humanity's afflicted will Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;

for, although such quotations could be multiplied, isolated expressions, even when not dramatic,[14] would prove little. But I repeat the remark already made, that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth's famous poems on human life,--the subjects, for example, of _The Thorn_, _The Sailor's Mother_, _Ruth_, _The Brothers_, _Michael_, _The Affliction of Margaret_, _The White Doe of Rylstone_, the story of Margaret in _Excursion_, i., half the stories told in _Excursion_, vi.

and vii.--we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence, torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which Wordsworth treated his subjects, and you will have to say that his world, so far as humanity is concerned, is a dark world,--at least as dark as that of Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud of human destiny, and he did not avert his eyes from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its darkness. The world was to him in the end 'this unintelligible world,'

and the only 'adequate support for the calamities of mortal life' was faith.[15] But he was profoundly impressed, through the experience of his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of despondency, and by the superficiality of the views which it engenders. It was for him (and here, as in other points, he shows his natural affinity to Spinoza) a condition in which the soul, concentrated on its own suffering, for that very reason loses hold both of its own being and of the reality of which it forms a part. His experience also made it impossible for him to doubt that what he grasped

At times when most existence with herself Is satisfied,

--and these are the times when existence is most united in love with other existence--was, in a special sense or degree, the truth, and therefore that the evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot really be what they seem to us when we merely suffer, deplore, or condemn them. He set himself to _see_ this, as far as he could, and to show it. He sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever in nature or humanity they a.s.sert their indisputable power; and turning to pain and wrong, and gazing at them steadfastly, and setting himself to present the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he yet endeavoured to show what he had seen, that sometimes pain and wrong are the conditions of a happiness and good which without them could not have been, that no limit can be set to the power of the soul to trans.m.u.te them into its own substance, and that, in suffering and even in misery, there may still be such a strength as fills us with awe or with glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he saw sufficed to solve the riddle of the painful earth. 'Our being rests' on 'dark foundations,' and 'our haughty life is crowned with darkness.' But still what he showed was what he _saw_, and he saw it in the cloud of human destiny. We are not here concerned with his faith in the sun behind that cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he 'fronted' it 'fearlessly.'