LECTURE XIWORDSWORTH

LECTURE XIWORDSWORTH(Tuesday Evening, February 13, 1855)XI

(Tuesday Evening, February 13, 1855)

A few remarks upon two of the more distinguished poets of the eighteenth century will be a fitting introduction to Wordsworth, and, indeed, a kind of commentary on his poetry. Of two of these poets we find very evident traces in him—Thomson and Cowper—of the one in an indiscriminating love of nature, of the other in a kind of domestic purity, and of both in the habit of treating subjects essentially prosaic, in verse; whence a somewhat swelling wordiness is inevitable.

Thomson had the good luck to be born in Scotland, and to be brought up by parents remarkable for simplicity and piety of life. Living in the country till he was nearly twenty, he learned to love natural beauty, and must have been an attentive student of scenery. That he had true instincts in poetry is proved by his making Milton and Spenser his models. He was a man of force andoriginality, and English poetry owes him a large debt as the first who stood out both in precept and practice against the vicious artificial style which then reigned, and led the way back to purer tastes and deeper principles. He was a man perfectly pure in life; the associate of eminent and titled personages, without being ashamed of the little milliner’s shop of his sisters in Edinburgh; a lover of freedom, and a poet who never lost a friend, nor ever wrote a line of which he could repent. The licentiousness of the age could not stain him. His poem of “Winter” was published a year before the appearance of the “Dunciad.”

Thomson’s style is not equal to his conceptions. It is generally lumbering and diffuse, and rather stilted than lofty. It is very likely that his Scotch birth had something to do with this, and that he could not write English with that unconsciousness without which elegance is out of the question—for there can be no true elegance without freedom. Burns’s English letters and poems are examples of this.

But there are passages in Thomson’s poems full of the truest feelings for nature, and gleams of pure imagination.

Mr. Lowell here read a passage from “Summer,” which, he said, illustrated better than almost anyother his excellences and defects. It is a description of a storm, beginning:

At first heard solemn o’er the verge of HeavenThe tempest growls.

At first heard solemn o’er the verge of Heaven

The tempest growls.

This is fustian patched with cloth of gold. The picture, fine as it is in parts, is too much frittered with particulars. The poet’s imagination does not seem powerful enough to control the language. There is no autocratic energy, but the sentences are like unruly barons, each doing what he likes in his own province. Many of them are prosaic and thoroughlyunpicturesque, and come under the fatal condemnation of beingflat. Yet throughout the passage,

The unconquerable genius struggles through

half-suffocated in a cloud of words.

But the metre is hitchy and broken, and seems to have no law but that of five feet to the verse. There is no Pegasean soar, but the unwieldy gallop of an ox. The imagination, which Thomson undoubtedly had, contrasted oddly with the lumbering vehicle of his diction. He takes a bushel-basket to bring home an egg in. In him poetry and prose entered into partnership, and poetry wasthe sleeping partner who comes down now and then to see how the business is getting on. But he had thesoulof a poet, and that is the main thing.

Of Gray and Collins there is no occasion to speak at length in this place. Both of them showed true poetic imagination. In Gray it was thwarted by an intellectual timidity that looked round continually for precedent; and Collins did not live long enough to discharge his mind thoroughly of classic pedantry; but both of them broke away from the reigning style of decorous frigidity. Collins’s “Ode to Evening” is enough to show that he had a sincere love of nature—but generally the scenery of both is borrowed from books.

In Cowper we find the same over-minuteness in describing which makes Thomson wearisome, but relieved by a constant vivacity of fancy which in Thomson was entirely wanting. But Cowper more distinctly preluded Wordsworth in his delight in simple things, in finding themes for his song in the little incidents of his own fireside life, or his daily walks, and especially in his desire to make poetry a means of conveying moral truth. The influence of Cowper may be traced clearly in some of Wordsworth’s minor poems of pure fancy, and there is one poem of his—that on “Yardly Oak”—which is almost perfectly Wordsworthian. But Cowperrarely rises above the region of fancy, and he often applied verse to themes that would not sing. His poetry is never more than agreeable, and never reaches down to the deeper sources of delight. Cowper was one of those men who, wanting a vigorous understanding to steady the emotional part of his nature, may be called peculiar rather than original. Great poetry can never be made out of a morbid temperament, and great wits are commonly the farthest removed from madness. But Cowper had at least the power of believing that his own thoughts and pleasures were as good, and as fit for poetry, as those of any man, no matter how long he had enjoyed the merit of being dead.

The closing years of the eighteenth century have something in common with those of the sixteenth. The air was sparkling with moral and intellectual stimulus. The tremble of the French Revolution ran through all Europe, and probably England, since the time of the great Puritan revolt, had never felt such a thrill of national and indigenous sentiment as during the Napoleonic wars. It was a time fitted to give birth to something original in literature. If from the collision of minds sparks of wit and fancy fly out, the shock and jostle of great events, of world-shaping ideas, and of nations who do their work without knowing it, strike forth afire that kindles heart and brain and tongue to more inspired conceptions and utterances.

It was fortunate for Wordsworth that he had his breeding in the country, and not only so, but among the grandest scenery of England. His earliest associates were the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native district, and the scenery with which his mind was stored during its most impressionable period was noble and pure. The people, also, among whom he grew up were a simple and hardy race, who kept alive the traditions and many of the habits of a more picturesque time. There was also a general equality of condition which kept life from becoming conventional and trite, and which cherished friendly human sympathies. When death knocked at any door of the hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside; and a wedding dropped an orange blossom at every door. There was not a grave in the little churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree without its legend. The occupations of the people, who were mostly small farmers and shepherds, were such as fostered independence and originality of character. And where everybody knew everybody, and everybody’s father had known everybody’s father, and so on immemorially, the interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distantreport. It was here that Wordsworth learned not only to love the simplicity of nature, but likewise that homely and earnest manliness which gives such depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, intercourse with society, scholarly culture, nothing could cover up or obliterate those early impressions. They widened with the range of his knowledge and added to his power of expression, but they never blunted that fine instinct in him which enables him always to speak directly to men and to gentleman, or scholar, or citizen. It was this that enabled his poetry afterwards to conquer all the reviews of England. The great art of being a man, the sublime mystery of beingyourself, is something to which one must be apprenticed early.

Mr. Lowell here gave an outline of Wordsworth’s personal history and character.

As a man we fancy him just in the least degree uninteresting—if the horrid word must come out—why, a little bit of a bore. One must regard him as a prophet in order to have the right kind of feeling toward him; and prophets are excellent for certain moods of mind, but perhaps are creatures

Too bright and goodFor human nature’s daily food.

Too bright and good

For human nature’s daily food.

I fancy from what I have heard from those who knew him that he had a tremendous prose-power, and that, with his singing-robes off, he was dry and stiff as a figure-head. He had a purity of mind approaching almost to prudery, and a pupil of Dr. Arnold told me he had heard him say once at dinner that he thought the first line of Keats’s ode to a “Grecian Urn” indecorous. The boys considered him ratherslow. There was something rocky and unyielding in his mind; something that, if we found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and respect, we should call hard. Even his fancy sometimes is glittering and stiff, like crystallizations in granite. But at other times how tender and delicate and dewy from very contrast, like harebells growing in a crag-cleft!

There seem to have been two distinct natures in him—Wordsworth the poet, and Wordsworth the man who used to talk about Wordsworth the poet. One played a kind of Baruch to the other’s Jeremiah, and thought a great deal of his master the prophet. Baruch was terrificallyuninspired, and was in the habit of repeating Jeremiah’s poems at rather more length than was desired, selecting commonly the parts which pleased him, Baruch, the best. Baruch Wordsworth used to praise Jeremiah Wordsworth, and used to tell entertaining anecdotes of him,—howhe one day saw an old woman and the next didnot, and so came home and dictated some verses on this remarkable phenomenon; and how another day he saw a cow.

But in reading Wordsworth we must skip all the Baruch interpolations, and cleave wholly to Jeremiah, who is truly inspired and noble—more so than any modern. We are too near him, perhaps, to be able wholly to separate the personal from the poetical. I acknowledge that I reverence the noble old man both for his grand life and his poems, that are worthy expressions of it. But a lecturer is under bonds to speak what he believes to be the truth. While I think that Wordsworth’s poetry is a thing by itself, both in its heights and depths, something sacred and apart, I cannot but acknowledge that his prosing is sometimes a gift as peculiar to himself. Like old Ben Jonson, he apparently wished that a great deal of what he wrote should be called “works.” Especially is this true of his larger poems, like the “Excursion” and the “Prelude.” However small, however commonplace the thought, the ponderous machine of his verse runs on like a railway train that must start at a certain hour though the only passenger be the boy that cries lozenges. He seems to have thought that inspiration was something that could be turned onlike steam. Walter Savage Landor told me that he once said to Wordsworth: “Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix as much poetry with prose as he likes, and it will make it the better; but the moment he mixes a bit of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole.” Wordsworth, he added, never forgave him.

There was a great deal in Wordsworth’s character that reminds us of Milton; the same self-reliance, the same purity and loftiness of purpose, and, I suspect, the same personal dryness of temperament and seclusion of self. He seems to have had a profounder imagination than Milton, but infinitely less music, less poetical faculty. I am not entirely satisfied of the truth of the modern philosophy which, if a man knocks another on the head, transfers all the guilt to some peccant bump on his own occiput or sinciput; but if we measure Wordsworth in this way, I feel as if he had plenty of forehead, but that he wanted hind-head, and would have been more entirely satisfactory if he had had one of the philo-something-or-other.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the poetical mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the Understanding (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imaginationare embedded. He wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. He sets tasks to the divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove’s eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout the “Prelude” and the “Excursion,” he seems striving to bind the wizard imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particulars adhere. There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome; yet with what splendors of mountain-sunsets are we not rewarded! What golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward, with angels ascending and descending! What haunting melodies hover around us, deep and eternal, like the undying barytone of the sea! And if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert wilderness, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we might wait for in vain in any other poet.

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humor, nodramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless quality that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own mind. His finest passages are always monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue importance given to trivial matter. He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or word. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton’s which, like the trade-winds, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some, deep with silks and spicery, come brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of theircommon epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet’s ardors, or the slim delicacy of the flute; and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo breathed through tending the flocks of Admetus, that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe, the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual nature, so that ever and anon, amid notes of human joy and sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

Of no other poet, except Shakspeare, have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentler ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to beconscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to trust ourselves to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to

Bid Beaumont lieA little farther off to make him room,

Bid Beaumont lie

A little farther off to make him room,

for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is now enrolled as the fifth in the succession of the great English poets.

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