Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson Part 10

APPRECIATIONS

Coleridge, with rare insight, summarized Wordsworth's characteristic defects and merits as follows;

"The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity (at all events striking and original) to a style, not only unimpa.s.sioned but undistinguished.

"The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and newly-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a _matter-of-factness_ in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and there positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circ.u.mstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circ.u.mstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, when nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. . .

"Third; an undue predilection for the _dramatic_ form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. . .

"The fourth cla.s.s of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly antic.i.p.ated of men in general, even of the most cultivated cla.s.ses; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circ.u.mstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this cla.s.s, I comprise occasional prolixity, repet.i.tion, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. . .

"Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circ.u.mstance and occasion. . .

"To these defects, which . . . are only occasional, I may oppose . . .

the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies:

"First; an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. . .

"The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's works is--a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not from books, but from the poet's own meditative observations. They are fresh and have the dew upon them. . .

"Third; . . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent _curiosa felicitas_ of his diction. . .

"Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expressions to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and l.u.s.tre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its objects; but on the contrary, brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .

"Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to _him_ under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is; so he writes.

"Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own."

These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of Wordsworth.

Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of Wordsworth's poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted. "I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time." His essential greatness is to be found in his shorter pieces, despite the frequent intrusion of much that is very inferior. Still it is "by the great body of powerful and significant work which remains to him after every reduction and deduction has been made, that Wordsworth's superiority is proved."

Coleridge had not dwelt sufficiently, perhaps, upon the joyousness which results from Wordsworth's philosophy of human life and external nature. This Matthew Arnold considers to be the prime source of his greatness. "Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it." Goethe's poetry, as Wordsworth once said, is not inevitable enough, is too consciously moulded by the supreme will of the artist. "But Wordsworth's poetry," writes Arnold, "when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him." The set poetic style of _The Excursion_ is a failure, but there is something unique and unmatchable in the simple grace of his narrative poems and lyrics. "Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from two causes: from the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of _Resolution and Independence_; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur. . . Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is unique."

Professor Dowden has also laid stress upon the harmonious balance of Wordsworth's nature, his different faculties seeming to interpenetrate one another, and yield mutual support. He has likewise called attention to the austere naturalism of which Arnold speaks.

"Wordsworth was a great naturalist in literature, but he was also a great Idealist; and between the naturalist and the idealist in Wordsworth no opposition existed: each worked with the other, each served the other. While Scott, by allying romance with reality, saved romantic fiction from the extravagances and follies into which it had fallen, Wordsworth's special work was to open a higher way for naturalism in art by its union with ideal truth."

Criticism has long since ceased to ridicule his _Betty Foy_, and his _Harry Gill_, whose "teeth, they chatter, chatter still." Such malicious sport proved only too easy for Wordsworth's contemporaries, and still the essential value of his poetry was unimpaired.

The range of poetry is indeed inexhaustible, and even the greatest poets must suffer some subtraction from universal pre-eminence.

Therefore we may frankly admit the deficiencies of Wordsworth,--that he was lacking in dramatic force and in the power of characterization; that he was singularly deficient in humor, and therefore in the saving grace of self-criticism in the capacity to see himself occasionally in a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none of the narrative energy of Scott; that Sh.e.l.ley's lyrical flights leave him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural force makes his pa.s.sion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country, he must be named after Shakespeare and Milton. The intellectual value of his work will endure; for leaving aside much valuable doctrine, which from didactic excess fails as poetry, he has brought into the world a new philosophy of Nature and has emphasised in a manner distinctively his own the dignity of simple manhood.--_Pelham Edgar_.

REFERENCES ON WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND WORKS

_Wordsworth_ by F. W. H. Myers, in _English Men of Letters_ series.

Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Wordsworth_ by Walter Raleigh, London: Edward Arnold.

_Wordsworth_ by Rosaline Ma.s.son, in _The People's Books_ series.

London: T. C. & E. C. Jack,

_Wordsworthiana_ edited by William Knight. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Essays Chiefly on Poetry_ by Aubrey de Vere, 2 volumes. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Literary Essays_ by Richard Holt Hutton. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Studies in Literature_ by Edward Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

_Aspects of Poetry_ by J. S. C. Shairp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company.

_Lives of Great English Writers from Chaucer to Browning_ by Walter S.

Hinchman and Francis B. Gummere. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

_Great English Poets_ by Julian Hill. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co.

_The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_ by William Morton Payne. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

_The Religious Spirit in the Poets_ by W. Boyd Carpenter, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co,

_Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson_ by Francis T. Palgrave.

Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_A History of Nineteenth Century Literature_ by George Saintsbury.

Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Personal Traits of British Authors_ by E. T. Mason. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

_The English Poets_ edited by T. Humphrey Ward, Vol. iv. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Selections from Wordsworth_ edited by Matthew Arnold in _The Golden Treasury Series_. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Literary Studies_ by Walter Bagehot, Vol. ii. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

_A Study of English and American Poets_ by J. Scott Clark. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

_Prophets of the Century_ edited by Arthur Rickett. London: Ward Lock and Co., Limited.

_History of English Literature_ by A. S. Mackenzie. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_A Student's History of English Literature_ by William Edward Simonds.

Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

_Poems of William Wordsworth_ edited by Edward Dowden. Boston: Ginn & Company.

_Home Life of Great Authors_ by Hattie Tyng Griswold. Chicago: A. C.