Wordsworth Part 5

"Oppression, its own blind and predestined enemy, has poured this of blessedness upon Spain--that the enormity of the outrages of which she has been the victim has created an object of love and of hatred, of apprehensions and of wishes, adequate (if that be possible) to the utmost demands of the human spirit.

The heart that serves in this cause, if it languish, must languish from its own const.i.tutional weakness, and not through want of nourishment from without. But it is a belief propagated in books, and which pa.s.ses currently among talking men as part of their familiar wisdom, that the hearts of the many _are_ const.i.tutionally weak, that they _do_ languish, and are slow to answer to the requisitions of things. I entreat those who are in this delusion to look behind them and about them for the evidence of experience. Now this, rightly understood, not only gives no support to any such belief, but proves that the truth is in direct opposition to it. The history of all ages--tumults after tumults, wars foreign or civil, with short or with no breathing-places from generation to generation; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions, vanis.h.i.+ng, and reviving, and piercing each other like the Northern Lights; public commotions, and those in the breast of the individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject; the blast, like the blast of the desert, which sweeps perennially through a frightful solitude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening, but ever quickening, descent of appet.i.te down which the Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition ...

these demonstrate incontestably that the pa.s.sions of men, (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man), in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon them, do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true sorrow of humanity consists in this--not that the mind of man fails, but that the cause and demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires; and hence, that which is slow to languish is too easily turned aside and abused. But, with the remembrance of what has been done, and in the face of the interminable evils which are threatened, a Spaniard can never have cause to complain of this while a follower of the tyrant remains in arms upon the Peninsula."

It was pa.s.sages such as this, perhaps, which led Canning to declare that Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest piece of political eloquence which had appeared since Burke. And yet if we compare it with Burke, or with the great Greek exemplar of all those who would give speech the cogency of act,--we see at once the causes of its practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and principles are often as lofty as any patriot can express; but their loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but to add to their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven into the facts of the hour; action seemed to turn, on them as on its only possible pivot; it was as though Virtue and Freedom hung armed in heaven above the a.s.sembly, and in the visible likeness of immortal ancestors beckoned upon an urgent way. Wordsworth's mood of mind, on the other hand, as he has depicted it in two sonnets written at the same time as his tract, explains why it was that that appeal was rather a solemn protest than an effective exhortation. In the first sonnet he describes the surroundings of his task,--the dark wood and rocky cave, "the hollow vale which foaming torrents fill with omnipresent murmur:"--

Here mighty Nature! In this school sublime I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain; For her consult the auguries of time, And through the human heart explore my way, And look and listen, gathering whence I may Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.

And then he proceeds to conjecture what effect his tract will produce:--

I dropped my pen, and listened to the wind, That sang of trees uptorn and vessels tost; A midnight harmony, and wholly lost To the general sense of men, by chains confined Of business, care, or pleasure,--or resigned To timely sleep. Thought I, the impa.s.sioned strain Which without aid of numbers I sustain Like acceptation from the world will find.

This deliberate and lonely emotion was fitter to inspire grave poetry than a pamphlet appealing to an immediate crisis. And the sonnets dedicated _To Liberty_ (1802-16) are the outcome of many moods like these.

It is little to say of these sonnets that they are the most permanent record in our literature of the Napoleonic war. For that distinction they have few compet.i.tors. Two magnificent songs of Campbell's, an ode of Coleridge's, a few spirited stanzas of Byron's-- strangely enough there is little besides these that lives in the national memory, till we come to the ode which summed up the long contest a generation later, when its great captain pa.s.sed away. But these _Sonnets to Liberty_ are worthy of comparison with the n.o.blest pa.s.sages of patriotic verse or prose which all our history has inspired--the pa.s.sages where Shakespeare brings his rays to focus on "this earth, this realm, this England,"--or where the dread of national dishonour has kindled Chatham to an iron glow,--or where Milton rises from the polemic into the prophet, and Burke from the partisan into the philosopher. The armoury of Wordsworth, indeed, was not forged with the same fire as that of these "invincible knights of old." He had not swayed senates, nor directed policies, nor gathered into one ardent bosom all the spirit of a heroic age.

But he had deeply felt what it is that makes the greatness of nations; in that extremity no man was more staunch than he; no man more unwaveringly disdained unrighteous empire, or kept the might of moral forces more steadfastly in view. Not Stein could place a manlier reliance on "a few strong instincts and a few plain rules;"

not Fichte could invoke more convincingly the "great allies" which work with "Man's unconquerable mind."

Here and there, indeed, throughout these sonnets are scattered strokes of high poetic admiration or scorn which could hardly be overmatched in AEschylus. Such is the indignant correction--

Call not the royal Swede unfortunate, Who never did to Fortune bend the knee!

or the stern touch which closes a description of Flamininus'

proclamation at the Isthmian games, according liberty to Greece,--

A gift of that which is not to be given By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven!

s.p.a.ce forbids me to dwell in detail on these n.o.ble poems,--on the well-known sonnets to Venice, to Milton, &c.; on the generous tributes to the heroes of the contest,--Schill, Hoffer, Toussaint, Palafox; or on the series which contrast the instinctive greatness of the Spanish people at bay, with Napoleon's lying promises and inhuman pride. But if Napoleon's career afforded to Wordsworth a poetic example, impressive as that of Xerxes to the Greeks, of lawless and intoxicated power, there was need of some contrasted figure more notable than Hoffer or Palafox from which to draw the lessons which great contests can teach of unselfish valour. Was there then any man, by land or sea, who might serve as the poet's type of the ideal hero? To an Englishman, at least, this question carries its own reply. For by a singular destiny England, with a thousand years of n.o.ble history behind her, has chosen for her best-loved, for her national hero, not an Arminius from the age of legend, not a Henri Quatro from the age of chivalry, but a man whom men still living have seen and known. For indeed England and all the world as to this man were of one accord; and when in victory, on his s.h.i.+p _Victory_, Nelson pa.s.sed away, the thrill which shook mankind was of a nature such as perhaps was never felt at any other death,-- so unanimous was the feeling of friends and foes that earth had lost her crowning example of impa.s.sioned self-devotedness and of heroic honour.

And yet it might have seemed that between Nelson's nature and Wordsworth's there was little in common. The obvious limitations of the great Admiral's culture and character were likely to be strongly felt by the philosophic poet. And a serious crime, of which Nelson was commonly, though, as now appears, erroneously, [4] supposed to be guilty, was sure to be judged by Wordsworth with great severity.

[Footnote 4: The researches of Sir Nicholas Nicolas, (_Letters and Despatches of Lord Nelson_, vol. vii. Appendix), have placed Lord Nelson's connexion with Lady Hamilton in an unexpected light.]

Wordsworth was, in fact, hampered by some such feelings of disapproval. He even tells us, with that naive affectionateness which often makes us smile, that he has had recourse to the character of his own brother John for the qualities in which the great Admiral appeared to him to have been deficient. But on these hesitations it would be unjust to dwell. I mention them only to bring out the fact that between these two men, so different in outward fates,--between "the adored, the incomparable Nelson" and the homely poet, "retired as noontide dew,"--there was a moral likeness so profound that the ideal of the recluse was realized in the public life of the hero, and, on the other hand, the hero himself is only seen as completely heroic when his impetuous life stands out for us from the solemn background of the poet's calm. And surely these two natures taken together make the perfect Englishman. Nor is there any portrait fitter than that of _The Happy Warrior_ to go forth to all lands as representing the English character at its height--a figure not ill-matching with "Plutarch's men."

For indeed this short poem is in itself a manual of greatness; there is a Roman majesty in its simple and weighty speech. And what eulogy was ever n.o.bler than that pa.s.sage where, without definite allusion or quoted name, the poet depicts, as it were, the very summit of glory in the well-remembered aspect of the Admiral in his last and greatest hour?

Whose powers shed round him. In the common strife, Or mild concerns of ordinary life.

A constant influence, a peculiar grace: But who, if he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for human kind, _Is happy as a Lover, and attired With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired_.

Or again, where the hidden thought of Nelson's womanly tenderness, of his constant craving for the green earth and home affections in the midst of storm and war, melts the stern verses into a sudden change of tone:--

He who, though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence.

_Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes_; Sweet images! Which, wheresoe'er he be, Are at his heart; and such fidelity It is his darling pa.s.sion to approve;-- More brave for this, that he hath much to love.

Compare with this the end of the _Song at Brougham Castle_, where, at the words "alas! The fervent harper did not know--" the strain changes from the very spirit of chivalry to the gentleness of Nature's calm. Nothing can be more characteristic of Wordsworth than contrasts like this. They teach us to remember that his accustomed mildness is the fruit of no indolent or sentimental peace; and that, on the other hand, when his counsels are sternest, and "his voice is still for war," this is no voice of hardness or of vainglory, but the reluctant resolution of a heart which fain would yield itself to other energies, and have no message but of love.

There is one more point in which the character of Nelson has fallen in with one of the lessons which Wordsworth is never tired of enforcing, the lesson that virtue grows by the strenuousness of its exercise, that it gains strength as it wrestles with pain and difficulty, and converts the shocks of circ.u.mstance into an energy of its proper glow. The Happy Warrior is one,

Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!

Turns his necessity to glorious gain; In face of these doth exercise a power Which is our human nature's highest dower; Controls them and subdues, trans.m.u.tes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives; By objects which might force the soul to abate Her feeling, rendered more compa.s.sionate;--

and so further, in words which recall the womanly tenderness, the almost exaggerated feeling for others' pain, which showed itself memorably in face of the blazing _Orient_, and in the harbour at Teneriffe, and in the c.o.c.kpit at Trafalgar.

In such lessons as these,--such lessons as _The Happy Warrior_ or the Patriotic Sonnets teach,--there is, of course, little that is absolutely novel. We were already aware that the ideal hero should be as gentle as he is brave, that he should act always from the highest motives, nor greatly care for any reward save the consciousness of having done his duty. We were aware that the true strength of a nation is moral and not material; that dominion which rests on mere military force is destined quickly to decay, that the tyrant, however admired and prosperous, is in reality despicable, and miserable, and alone; that the true man should face death itself rather than parley with dishonour. These truths are _admitted_ in all ages; yet it is scarcely stretching language to say that they are _known_ to but few men. Or at least, though in a great nation there be many who will act on them instinctively, and approve them by a self-surrendering faith, there are few who can so put them forth in speech as to bring them home with a fresh conviction and an added glow; who can sum up, like AEschylus, the contrast between h.e.l.lenic freedom and barbarian despotism in "one trump's peal that set all Greeks aflame;" can thrill, like Virgil, a world-wide empire with the recital of the august simplicities of early Rome.

To those who would know these things with a vital knowledge--a conviction which would remain unshaken were the whole world in arms for wrong--it is before all things necessary to strengthen the inner monitions by the companions.h.i.+p of these n.o.ble souls. And If a poet, by strong concentration of thought, by striving in all things along the upward way, can leave us in a few pages as it were a summary of patriotism, a manual of national honour, he surely has his place among his country's benefactors not only by that kind of courtesy which the nation extends to men of letters of whom her ma.s.ses take little heed, but with a t.i.tle as a.s.sured as any warrior or statesman, and with no less direct a claim.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHILDREN--LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT--"THE EXCURSION."

It may be well at this point to return to the quiet chronicle of the poet's life at Grasmere; where his cottage was becoming too small for an increasing family. His eldest son, John, was born in 1803; his eldest daughter, Dorothy or Dora, in 1804. Then came Thomas, born 1806; and Catherine, born 1808; and the list is ended by William, born 1810, and now (1880) the only survivor. In the spring of 1808 Wordsworth left Townend for Allan Bank,--a more roomy, but an uncomfortable house, at the north end of Grasmere. From thence he removed for a time, in 1811, to the Parsonage at Grasmere.

Wordsworth was the most affectionate of fathers, and allusions to his children occur frequently in his poetry. Dora--who was the delight of his later years--has been described at length in _The Triad_. Shorter and simpler, but more completely successful, is the picture of Catherine in the little poem which begins "Loving she is, and tractable, though wild," with its homely simile for childhood-- its own existence sufficient to fill it with gladness:

As a f.a.ggot sparkles on the hearth Not less if unattended and alone Than when both young and old sit gathered round And take delight in its activity.

The next notice of this beloved child is in the sonnet, "Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind," written when she had already been removed from his side. She died in 1812, and was closely followed by her brother Thomas. Wordsworth's grief for these children was profound, violent, and lasting, to an extent which those who imagine him as not only calm but pa.s.sionless might have some difficulty in believing. "Referring once," says his friend Mr. Aubrey de Vere, "to two young children of his who had died about _forty years_ previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement, such as might have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few weeks before. The lapse of time seemed to have left the sorrow submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. Yet I afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his attention to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on him like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted, he could see nothing beyond."

This anecdote ill.u.s.trates the fact, which to those who knew Wordsworth well was sufficiently obvious, that the characteristic calm of his writings was the result of no coldness of temperament but of a deliberate philosophy. The pregnant force of his language in dealing with those dearest to him--his wife, his sister, his brother--is proof enough of this. The frequent allusions in his correspondence to the physical exhaustion brought on by the act of poetical composition indicate a frame which, though made robust by exercise and temperance, was by nature excitable rather than strong.

And even in the direction in which we should least have expected it, there is reason to believe that there were capacities of feeling in him which never broke from his control. "Had I been a writer of love-poetry," he is reported to have said, "it would have been natural to me to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader."

Wordsworth's paternal feelings, at any rate, were, as has been said, exceptionally strong; and the impossibility of remaining in a house filled with sorrowful memories rendered him doubly anxious to obtain a permanent home. "The house which I have for some time occupied," he writes to Lord Lonsdale, in January 1813, "is the Parsonage of Grasmere. It stands close by the churchyard, and I have found it absolutely necessary that we should quit a place which, by recalling to our minds at every moment the losses we have sustained in the course of the last year, would grievously r.e.t.a.r.d our progress towards that tranquillity which it is our duty to aim at." It happened that Rydal Mount became vacant at this moment, and in the spring of 1813 the Wordsworths migrated to this their favourite and last abode.

Rydal Mount has probably been oftener described than any other English poet's home since Shakespeare; and few homes, certainly, have been moulded into such close accordance with their inmates'

nature. The house, which has been altered since Wordsworth's day, stands looking southward, on the rocky side of Nab Scar, above Rydal Lake. The garden was described by Bishop Wordsworth immediately after his uncle's death, while every terrace-walk and flowering alley spoke of the poet's loving care. He tells of the "tall ash-tree, in which a thrush has sung, for hours together, during many years;"

of the "laburnum in which the osier cage of the doves was hung;" of the stone steps "in the interstices of which grow the yellow flowering poppy, and the wild geranium or Poor Robin,"--

Gay With his red stalks upon a sunny day.

And then of the terraces--one levelled for Miss Fenwick's use, and welcome to himself in aged years; and one ascending, and leading to the "far terrace" on the mountain's side, where the poet was wont to murmur his verses as they came. Within the house were disposed his simple treasures: the ancestral almery, on which the names of unknown Wordsworths may be deciphered still; Sir George Beaumont's pictures of "The White Doe of Rylstone" and "The Thorn," and the cuckoo clock which brought vernal thoughts to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and which sounded its noonday summons when his spirit fled.

Wordsworth's worldly fortunes, as if by some benignant guardians.h.i.+p of Providence, were at all times proportioned to his successive needs.

About the date of his removal to Rydal (in March 1813) he was appointed, through Lord Lonsdale's interest, to the distributors.h.i.+p of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, to which office the same post for c.u.mberland was afterwards added. He held this post till August 1842, when he resigned it without a retiring pension, and it was conferred on his second son. He was allowed to reside at Rydal, which was counted as a suburb of Ambleside: and as the duties of the place were light, and mainly performed by a most competent and devoted clerk, there was no drawback to the advantage of an increase of income which released him from anxiety as to the future. A more lucrative office--the collectors.h.i.+p of Whitehaven--was subsequently offered to him; but he declined it, "nor would exchange his Sabine valley for riches and a load of care."

Though Wordsworth's life at Rydal was a retired one, it was not that of a recluse. As years went on he became more and more recognized as a centre of spiritual strength and illumination, and was sought not only by those who were already his neighbours, but by some who became so mainly for his sake. Southey at Keswick was a valued friend, though Wordsworth did not greatly esteem him as a poet.

De Quincey, originally attracted to the district by admiration for Wordsworth, remained there for many years, and poured forth a criticism strangely compounded of the utterances of the hero-wors.h.i.+pper and the _valet-de-chambre_. Professor Wilson, of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, never showed, perhaps, to so much advantage as when he walked by the side of the master whose greatness he was one of the first to detect. Dr. Arnold of Rugby made the neighbouring home at Fox How a focus of warm affections and of intellectual life. And Hartley Coleridge, whose fairy childhood had inspired one of Wordsworth's happiest pieces, continued to lead among the dales of Westmoreland a life which showed how much of genius and goodness a single weakness can nullify.

Other friends there were, too, less known to fame, but of exceptional powers of appreciation and sympathy. The names of Mrs. Fletcher and her daughters, Lady Richardson and Mrs. Davy, should not be omitted in any record of the poet's life at Rydal. And many humbler neighbours may be recognized in the characters of the _Excursion_ and other poems. _The Wanderer_, indeed, is a picture of Wordsworth himself--"an idea," as he says, "of what I fancied my own character might have become in his circ.u.mstances." But the _Solitary_ was suggested by a broken man who took refuge in Grasmere from the world in which he had found no peace; and the characters described as lying in the churchyard among the mountains are almost all of them portraits. The clergyman and his family described in Book VII were among the poet's princ.i.p.al a.s.sociates in the vale of Grasmere. "There was much talent in the family," says Wordsworth in the memoranda dictated to Miss Fenwick; "and the eldest son was distinguished for poetical talent, of which a specimen is given in my Notes to the _Sonnets on the Duddon_. Once when, in our cottage at Townend, I was talking with him about poetry, in the course of our conversation I presumed to find fault with the versification of Pope, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer. He defended him with a warmth that indicated much irritation; nevertheless I could not abandon my point, and said, 'In compa.s.s and variety of sound your own versification surpa.s.ses his.' Never shall I forget the change in his countenance and tone of voice. The storm was laid in a moment; he no longer disputed my judgment; and I pa.s.sed immediately in his mind, no doubt, for as great a critic as ever lived."

It was with personages simple and unromantic as these that Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. Judged by ordinary standards the _Excursion_ appears an epic without action, and with two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose characters are identical. Its form is c.u.mbrous in the extreme, and large tracts of it have little claim to the name of poetry. Wordsworth compares the _Excursion_ to a temple of which his smaller poems form subsidiary shrines; but the reader will more often liken the small poems to gems, and the _Excursion_ to the rock from which they were extracted. The long poem contains, indeed, magnificent pa.s.sages, but as a whole it is a diffused description of scenery which the poet has elsewhere caught in brighter glimpses; a diffused statement of hopes and beliefs which have crystallized more exquisitely elsewhere round moments of inspiring emotion. The _Excursion_, in short, has the drawbacks of a didactic poem as compared with lyrical poems; but, judged as a didactic poem, it has the advantage of containing teaching of true and permanent value.

I shall not attempt to deduce a settled scheme of philosophy from these discourses among the mountains. I would urge only that as a guide to conduct Wordsworth's precepts are not in themselves either unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy--all systems which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of our faculties--are ill-suited for the ma.s.s of mankind. And on the other hand, if we are told to follow nature, to develope our original character, we are too often in doubt as to which of our conflicting instincts to follow, what part of our complex nature to accept as our regulating self. But Wordsworth, while impressing on us conformity to nature as the rule of life, suggests a test of such conformity which can be practically applied. "The child is father of the man,"--in the words which stand as introduction to his poetical works, and Wordsworth holds that the instincts and pleasures of a healthy childhood sufficiently indicate the lines on which our maturer character should be formed. The joy which began in the mere sense of existence should be maintained by hopeful faith; the simplicity which began in inexperience should be recovered by meditation; the love which originated in the family circle should expand itself over the race of men. And the calming and elevating influence of Nature--which to Wordsworth's memory seemed the inseparable concomitant of childish years--should be constantly invoked throughout life to keep the heart fresh and the eyes open to the mysteries discernible through her radiant veil. In a word, the family affections, if duly fostered, the influences of Nature, if duly sought, with some knowledge of the best books, are material enough to "build up our moral being" and to outweigh the less deep-seated impulses which prompt to wrong-doing.