Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from thePrelude, ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension, and we are approaching the sublime:
One summer evening (led by her17) I foundA little boat tied to a willow treeWithin a rocky cave, its usual home.Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping inPushed from the shore. It was an act of stealthAnd troubled pleasure, nor without the voiceOf mountain-echoes did my boat move on;Leaving behind her still, on either side,Small circles glittering idly in the moon,Until they melted all into one trackOf sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen pointWith an unswerving line, I fixed my viewUpon the summit of a craggy ridge,The horizon’s utmost boundary; far aboveWas nothing but the stars and the grey sky.She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—And through the meadows homeward went, in graveAnd serious mood; but after I had seenThat spectacle, for many days, my brainWorked with a dim and undetermined senseOf unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughtsThere hung a darkness, call it solitudeOr blank desertion. No familiar shapesRemained, no pleasant images of trees,Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;But huge and mighty forms, that do not liveLike living men, moved slowly through the mindBy day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
One summer evening (led by her17) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet’s other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that famous passage in theOde, where the poet, looking back to his childhood, gives thanks for it,—not however for its careless delight and liberty,
But for those obstinate questioningsOf sense and outward things,Fallings from us, vanishings;Blank misgivings of a CreatureMoving about in worlds not realised,High instincts before which our mortal NatureDid tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
Whether, or how, these experiences afford ‘intimations of immortality’ is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.
The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases this manifest affinity to theOde, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still traceable. There is, for instance, inPrelude, xii., the description of the crag, from which, on awild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will remember
the wind and sleety rain,And all the business of the elements,The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,And the bleak music from that old stone wall,The noise of wood and water, and the mistThat on the line of each of those two roadsAdvanced in such indisputable shapes.
the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes.
Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary ‘reality.’ Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the ‘mortal nature’ stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from some presence
Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looksThat threaten the profane.
Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.
This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly, in the linesTo a Highland Girl, where the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem to the poet
Like something fashioned in a dream.
Like something fashioned in a dream.
It gives toThe Solitary Reaperits note of remoteness and wonder; and even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of the most famous stanza:
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without it such shorter narratives asHartleap WellandResolution and Independencewould lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple ‘moral.’
InHartleap Wellit is conveyed at first by slight touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.
Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes;The horse and horseman are a happy pair;But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,There is a doleful silence in the air.A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall,That as they galloped made the echoes roar;But horse and man are vanished, one and all;Such race, I think, was never seen before.
Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes;
The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
There is a doleful silence in the air.
A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall,
That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
Such race, I think, was never seen before.
At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the mountain fern.
Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?The bugles that so joyfully were blown?—This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.
Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
—This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.
Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd’s description of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer joy of himself and hisparamour. But now ‘the pleasure-house is dust,’ and the trees are grey, ‘with neither arms nor head’:
Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;The sun on drearier hollow never shone;So will it be, as I have often said,Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.
Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.
It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the solemnity of the stanza:
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,That is in the green leaves among the groves,Maintains a deep and reverential careFor the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
Hartleap Wellis a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as toResolution and Independence, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth’s poems, and the best test of ability to understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that ofSimon Lee. When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand,—for instance,
And, drawing to his side, to him did say,‘This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.’
And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
‘This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.’
or,
‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’
‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’
We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured. Yet with all this, and bydint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if we were in the presence of that ‘majestical’ Spirit inHamlet, come to ‘admonish’ from another world, though not this time by terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic ‘occupation’ he ‘pursues’:
The old man still stood talking by my side;But now his voice to me was like a streamScarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;And the whole body of the man did seemLike one whom I had met with in a dream;Or like a man from some far region sent,To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,The old man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me.
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me.
‘Trouble’ is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the soul’s infinity.
Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in thePrelude, iv., the passage (so strongly resemblingResolution and Independencethat I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit road, all alone:
No living thing appeared in earth or air;And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,Sound there was none ...... still his formKept the same awful steadiness—at his feetHis shadow lay, and moved not.
No living thing appeared in earth or air;
And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,
Sound there was none ...
... still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness—at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.
His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghostwas never ghostlier than he. And by him we may place the London beggar ofPrelude, vii.:
How oft, amid those overflowing streets,Have I gone forward with the crowd, and saidUnto myself, ‘The face of every oneThat passes by me is a mystery!’Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressedBy thoughts of what and whither, when and how,Until the shapes before my eyes becameA second-sight procession, such as glidesOver still mountains, or appears in dreams;And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyondThe reach of common indication, lostAmid the moving pageant, I was smittenAbruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chestWearing a written paper, to explainHis story, whence he came, and who he was.Caught by the spectacle my mind turned roundAs with the might of waters; an apt typeThis label seemed of the utmost we can know,Both of ourselves and of the universe;And, on the shape of that unmoving man,His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,As if admonished from another world.
How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, ‘The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!’
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world.
Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book of thePrelude, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones (‘Jones, as from Calais southward you and I’) set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without knowing it, they ‘had crossed the Alps.’ This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth’s, not mine. But the next words are these:
Imagination—here the Power so calledThrough sad incompetence of human speech,That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyssLike an unfathered vapour that enwraps,At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;Halted without an effort to break through;But to my conscious soul I now can say—‘I recognise thy glory’: in such strengthOf usurpation, when the light of senseGoes out, but with a flash that has revealedThe invisible world, doth greatness make abode,There harbours; whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,Is with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die,Effort, and expectation, and desire,And something evermore about to be.
Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
‘I recognise thy glory’: in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.
Downwards we hurried fast,And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and roadWere fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,And with them did we journey several hoursAt a slow pace. The immeasurable heightOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,The stationary blasts of waterfalls,And in the narrow rent at every turnWinds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-sideAs if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream,The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—Were all like workings of one mind, the featuresOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree;Characters of the great Apocalypse,The types and symbols of Eternity,Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.18
Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.18
I hardly think that ‘the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life’ could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that theirbirth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo inO blithe new-comer, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is
Like—but oh, how different!19
Like—but oh, how different!19
It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer,felthis faith. It was there that all things
Breathed immortality, revolving life,And greatness still revolving; infinite.There littleness was not; the least of thingsSeemed infinite; and there his spirit shapedHer prospects, nor did he believe,—hesaw.
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe,—hesaw.
And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.
Two voices are there; one is of the sea,One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.
Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.
And of the second of these we may say that ‘few or none hears it right’ now he is gone.
Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth’s greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life—to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only,but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.
The outward shows of sky and earth,Of hill and valley, he has viewed;And impulsesof deeper birthHave come to him in solitude.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulsesof deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary figures, they would not have awaked ‘the visionary power’; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his father’s ponies had had beside him any more than
Thesinglesheep and theoneblasted tree,
Thesinglesheep and theoneblasted tree,
the mist would not have advanced along the roads ‘in such indisputable shapes.’ With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself ‘wanders lonely as a cloud’: he seeks the ‘souls of lonely places’: he listens in awe to
One voice, the solitary raven ...An iron knell, with echoes from afar:
One voice, the solitary raven ...
An iron knell, with echoes from afar:
against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,
A solitary object and sublime,Above all height! like an aerial crossStationed alone upon a spiry rockOf the Chartreuse, for worship.
A solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.
But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two poems more. The editor of theGolden Treasury, a book never to be thought of without gratitude, changed the titleThe SolitaryReaperintoThe Highland Reaper. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the change was a mistake: the ‘solitary’ in Wordsworth’s title gave the keynote. The other poem isLucy Gray. ‘When I was little,’ a lover of Wordsworth once said, ‘I could hardly bear to readLucy Gray, it made me feel so lonely.’ Wordsworth called itLucy Gray, or Solitude, and this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear that for half his readers his ‘solitary child’ is generalised into a mere ‘little girl,’ and that they never receive the main impression he wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it fromAlice Fell:
Yet some maintain that to this dayShe is a living child;That you may see sweet Lucy GrayUpon the lonesome wild.O’er rough and smooth she trips along,And never looks behind;And sings a solitary songThat whistles in the wind.
Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it nothing ‘Byronic.’ He preached in theExcursionagainst the solitude of ‘self-indulging spleen.’ He was even aware that he himself, though free from that weakness, had felt
perhaps too muchThe self-sufficing power of Solitude.20
perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.20
No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his verse—a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I have been dwelling—is dedicated to the affections of home and neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links together allNature’s children, and ‘steals from earth to man, from man to earth.’ And this soul is for him as truly the presence of ‘the Being that is in the clouds and air’ and in the mind of man as are the power, the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They had not for him merely the ‘eeriness’ which they have at times for everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be ‘self-sufficing,’ to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and sympathy—a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of ‘the soul of all the worlds.’ Even when they were full of ‘sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,’ the solitude of the Reaper or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that austerer strain which led him to love ‘bare trees and mountains bare,’ and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that ‘unconquerable mind’ which through long years holds its solitary purpose, sustains its solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish. For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the ‘light of sense’ and the sweetness of life have faded or ‘gone out’; but in it ‘greatness makes abode,’ and it ‘retains its station proud,’ ‘by form or image unprofaned.’ Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself, solitariness ‘carried far into his heart’ the haunting sense of an ‘invisible world’; of some Life beyond this ‘transitory being’ and ‘unapproachable by death’;
Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;That hath been, is, and where it was and isThere shall endure,—existence unexposedTo the blind walk of mortal accident;From diminution safe and weakening age;While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;And countless generations of mankindDepart; and leave no vestige where they trod.
Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
That hath been, is, and where it was and is
There shall endure,—existence unexposed
To the blind walk of mortal accident;
From diminution safe and weakening age;
While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
And countless generations of mankind
Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.
For me, I confess, all this is far from being ‘mere poetry’—partly because I do not believe that any such thing as ‘mere poetry’ exists. But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry Wordsworth would be ‘shorn of his strength,’ and would no longer stand, as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century to Milton.
NOTE.I take this opportunity of airing a heresy aboutWe are Seven. Wordsworth’s friend, James Tobin, who saw theLyrical Balladswhile they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the ‘moral’ of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the ‘moral’ given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from which the poem arose.The ‘moral’ is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated opening stanza:————A simple child,That lightly draws its breath,And feels its life in every limb,What should it know of death?Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that the first line ran, ‘A simple child, dear brother Jim,’—this Jim, who rhymes with ‘limb,’ being the James Tobin who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in theLyrical Balladsas Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the words ‘dear brother Jim’ as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has afelicity of style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but, according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge’s authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having readWe are Sevenwithout feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, ‘This means more than the first stanza says.’ And, however improbable, it cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred him was the coincidence of the child’s feelings with some of those feelings of his own childhood which he described in the ImmortalityOde, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs, to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer to one or two passages. ‘At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust’ (remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth,Prose Works, ed. Grosart, iii. 464). Is not this the condition of the child inWe are Seven? ‘Nothing,’ he says to Miss Fenwick, ‘was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being’ (ib.iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza ofWe are Seven. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own case from the child’s, attributing the difficulty in her case to ‘animal vivacity.’ But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth’s direct testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead ‘proceeded obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and, secondly, to preserve their memory.’ But these desires, in his opinion, resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or fore-feeling of immortality, also described as ‘an intimation or assurance within us,that some part of our nature is imperishable.’ And he goes on thus: ‘If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without this assurance.... Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him!’ Now Coleridge’s stanza, and Wordsworth’s own distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to attributing the child’s inability to realise the fact of death to that very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this inability ought to have been traced to that ‘sense’ or ‘consciousness’ of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it wasthis, I suggest, that, unknown to himself, arrested him in the child’s persistent ignoring of the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the ImmortalityOde. The child is in possession of one of those ‘truths that wake to perish never,’ though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he saw them later (Tintern Abbey, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly significant that the child inWe are Sevenis not described as showing any particular ‘animal vivacity’: she strikes one as rather a quiet, though determined, little person.These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But many, I think, must feel them.
NOTE.
I take this opportunity of airing a heresy aboutWe are Seven. Wordsworth’s friend, James Tobin, who saw theLyrical Balladswhile they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the ‘moral’ of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the ‘moral’ given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from which the poem arose.
The ‘moral’ is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated opening stanza:
————A simple child,That lightly draws its breath,And feels its life in every limb,What should it know of death?
————A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that the first line ran, ‘A simple child, dear brother Jim,’—this Jim, who rhymes with ‘limb,’ being the James Tobin who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in theLyrical Balladsas Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the words ‘dear brother Jim’ as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.
Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has afelicity of style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but, according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge’s authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having readWe are Sevenwithout feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, ‘This means more than the first stanza says.’ And, however improbable, it cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred him was the coincidence of the child’s feelings with some of those feelings of his own childhood which he described in the ImmortalityOde, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs, to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer to one or two passages. ‘At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust’ (remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth,Prose Works, ed. Grosart, iii. 464). Is not this the condition of the child inWe are Seven? ‘Nothing,’ he says to Miss Fenwick, ‘was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being’ (ib.iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza ofWe are Seven. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own case from the child’s, attributing the difficulty in her case to ‘animal vivacity.’ But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth’s direct testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead ‘proceeded obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and, secondly, to preserve their memory.’ But these desires, in his opinion, resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or fore-feeling of immortality, also described as ‘an intimation or assurance within us,that some part of our nature is imperishable.’ And he goes on thus: ‘If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without this assurance.... Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him!’ Now Coleridge’s stanza, and Wordsworth’s own distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to attributing the child’s inability to realise the fact of death to that very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this inability ought to have been traced to that ‘sense’ or ‘consciousness’ of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it wasthis, I suggest, that, unknown to himself, arrested him in the child’s persistent ignoring of the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the ImmortalityOde. The child is in possession of one of those ‘truths that wake to perish never,’ though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he saw them later (Tintern Abbey, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly significant that the child inWe are Sevenis not described as showing any particular ‘animal vivacity’: she strikes one as rather a quiet, though determined, little person.
These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But many, I think, must feel them.
1The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April, 1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult Professor Herford’sThe Age of Wordsworth, a little book which is familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more admired the more they use it?2These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, inThe Tables Turned, where occurs that outrageous stanza about ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these statements, and many like them, are ‘poetic,’ they ought to remain startling. Two of them—that from the story of Margaret (Excursion, I.), and that from theOde, 1815—were made less so, to the injury of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.3Goody Blake, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge’sThree Graves. The question as to theAnecdote for Fathersis not precisely whether it makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is in the lines,And five times to the child I said,Why, Edward, tell me why?The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim, is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the effect so delightfully reproduced inThrough the Looking-glass(‘I’ll tell thee everything I can’).4Some remarks onWe are sevenare added in a note at the end of the lecture.5The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from Hazlitt and De Quincey.6The publication of theExcursionseems to have been postponed for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the world for thirteen years.7Evening Voluntaries, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.8Poems on the Naming of Places, iv. Keats need not have been ashamed to write the last line.9‘’Tis past, that melancholy dream,’—so he describes his sojourn in Germany.10Wordsworth’s Letter to Major-General Pasley (Prose Works, i.) contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of his hostility to mere militarism.11I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.12[This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (Comus, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]13In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude, cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in his poetry or in his life. ‘I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,’ the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was not so very unlike Wordsworth’s. And neither poet would have found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or ‘the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.’14The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (Excursion, vi.).15The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of theExcursion, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.16This is just the opposite of the ‘wise passiveness’ of imaginative but unreflective feeling.17Nature.18I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth’s mind who cares to return to them.The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth, ‘the visionary power’ arises from, and testifies to, the mind’s infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united with, a feeling or idea oftheinfinite or ‘one mind,’ and of union with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet’s experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about ‘immortality’ or ‘eternity.’ His sense or consciousness of ‘immortality,’ that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’ (cf. opening ofExcursion, ix.). Whatever we may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain entirely outside Wordsworth’s mind in passages like that just referred to, and in passages where he talks of ‘acts of immortality in Nature’s course,’ or says that to the Wanderer ‘all things among the mountains breathed immortality,’ or says that he has been unfolding ‘far-stretching views of immortality,’ though he may not appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth ‘transitory,’ but Nature always and everywherereveals‘immortality,’ and Man (in another sense) is ‘immortal.’ Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth, may mean by ‘man’ and ‘immortal,’ and to try to get intohismind.There is an illuminating passage on ‘the visionary power’ and the mind’s infinity or immortality, inPrelude, ii.:and hence, from the same source,Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,Under the quiet stars, and at that timeHave felt whate’er there is of power in soundTo breathe an elevated mood, by formOr image unprofaned; and I would stand,If the night blackened with a coming storm,Beneath some rock, listening to notes that areThe ghostly language of the ancient earth,Or make their dim abode in distant winds.Thence did I drink the visionary power;And deem not profitless those fleeting moodsOf shadowy exultation: not for this,That they are kindred to our purer mindAnd intellectual life; but that the soul,Remembering how she felt, but what she feltRemembering not, retains an obscure senseOf possible sublimity, wheretoWith growing faculties she doth aspire,With faculties still growing, feeling stillThat whatsoever point they gain, they yetHave something to pursue.An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth’s love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for instance,Prelude, xiii., ‘Who doth not love to follow with his eye The windings of a public way?’ And compare the enchantment of the question,What, are you stepping westward?’twas a soundOf something without place or bound.19Yes, it was the mountain echo, placed in Arnold’s selection, with his usual taste, next to the earlier poemTo the Cuckoo.20This was Coleridge’s opinion.
1The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April, 1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult Professor Herford’sThe Age of Wordsworth, a little book which is familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more admired the more they use it?
2These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, inThe Tables Turned, where occurs that outrageous stanza about ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these statements, and many like them, are ‘poetic,’ they ought to remain startling. Two of them—that from the story of Margaret (Excursion, I.), and that from theOde, 1815—were made less so, to the injury of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.
3Goody Blake, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge’sThree Graves. The question as to theAnecdote for Fathersis not precisely whether it makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is in the lines,
And five times to the child I said,Why, Edward, tell me why?
And five times to the child I said,
Why, Edward, tell me why?
The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim, is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the effect so delightfully reproduced inThrough the Looking-glass(‘I’ll tell thee everything I can’).
4Some remarks onWe are sevenare added in a note at the end of the lecture.
5The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from Hazlitt and De Quincey.
6The publication of theExcursionseems to have been postponed for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the world for thirteen years.
7Evening Voluntaries, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.
8Poems on the Naming of Places, iv. Keats need not have been ashamed to write the last line.
9‘’Tis past, that melancholy dream,’—so he describes his sojourn in Germany.
10Wordsworth’s Letter to Major-General Pasley (Prose Works, i.) contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of his hostility to mere militarism.
11I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.
12[This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (Comus, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]
13In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude, cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in his poetry or in his life. ‘I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,’ the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was not so very unlike Wordsworth’s. And neither poet would have found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or ‘the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.’
14The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (Excursion, vi.).
15The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of theExcursion, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.
16This is just the opposite of the ‘wise passiveness’ of imaginative but unreflective feeling.
17Nature.
18I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth’s mind who cares to return to them.
The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth, ‘the visionary power’ arises from, and testifies to, the mind’s infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united with, a feeling or idea oftheinfinite or ‘one mind,’ and of union with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet’s experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about ‘immortality’ or ‘eternity.’ His sense or consciousness of ‘immortality,’ that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’ (cf. opening ofExcursion, ix.). Whatever we may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain entirely outside Wordsworth’s mind in passages like that just referred to, and in passages where he talks of ‘acts of immortality in Nature’s course,’ or says that to the Wanderer ‘all things among the mountains breathed immortality,’ or says that he has been unfolding ‘far-stretching views of immortality,’ though he may not appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth ‘transitory,’ but Nature always and everywherereveals‘immortality,’ and Man (in another sense) is ‘immortal.’ Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth, may mean by ‘man’ and ‘immortal,’ and to try to get intohismind.
There is an illuminating passage on ‘the visionary power’ and the mind’s infinity or immortality, inPrelude, ii.:
and hence, from the same source,Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,Under the quiet stars, and at that timeHave felt whate’er there is of power in soundTo breathe an elevated mood, by formOr image unprofaned; and I would stand,If the night blackened with a coming storm,Beneath some rock, listening to notes that areThe ghostly language of the ancient earth,Or make their dim abode in distant winds.Thence did I drink the visionary power;And deem not profitless those fleeting moodsOf shadowy exultation: not for this,That they are kindred to our purer mindAnd intellectual life; but that the soul,Remembering how she felt, but what she feltRemembering not, retains an obscure senseOf possible sublimity, wheretoWith growing faculties she doth aspire,With faculties still growing, feeling stillThat whatsoever point they gain, they yetHave something to pursue.
and hence, from the same source,
Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
Under the quiet stars, and at that time
Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
If the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power;
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.
An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth’s love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for instance,Prelude, xiii., ‘Who doth not love to follow with his eye The windings of a public way?’ And compare the enchantment of the question,What, are you stepping westward?
’twas a soundOf something without place or bound.
’twas a sound
Of something without place or bound.
19Yes, it was the mountain echo, placed in Arnold’s selection, with his usual taste, next to the earlier poemTo the Cuckoo.
20This was Coleridge’s opinion.
SHELLEY’S VIEW OF POETRY
SHELLEY’S VIEW OF POETRY
Theideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been discussed and are familiar. Those of Shelley are much less so, and in his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet’s experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw light on some of the chief characteristics of Shelley’s own poetry.
His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is theDefence of Poetry. This essay was written in reply to an attack made on contemporary verse by Shelley’s friend Peacock,—not a favourable specimen of Peacock’s writing. TheDefence, we can see, was hurriedly composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical, it no doubt exaggerates such ofShelley’s views as collided with those of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth’s Prefaces or to Coleridge’sBiographia Literaria; but there are a few reminiscences of Sidney’sApology, which Shelley had read just before he wrote his ownDefence; and it shows, like much of his mature poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues of Plato.
1.
Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a ‘dim vast vale of tears,’ illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its partial manifestation. ‘All,’ I say: for the splendour of nature, the love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law, the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by superstitious religion,—all are equally operations or appearances of the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of Shelley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty of hisHymnis absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of hisOde, the ‘Great Spirit’ of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples, theOne which inAdonaïshe contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of Nature ofQueen Mab, and the Vision ofAlastorandEpipsychidion. The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it with the poet’s ear, would ‘repeal large codes of fraud and woe’; it is the same voice as the reformer’s and the martyr’s. And in the far-off day when the ‘plastic stress’ of this power has mastered the last resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free, will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation among many.
When we turn to theDefence of Poetrywe meet substantially the same view. There is indeed a certain change; for Shelley is now philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his; it represents ‘those forms which are common to universal nature and existence,’ and ‘a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.’ We notice, further, that the more voluntary and conscious work of invention and execution is regardedas quite subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions, to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with their evanescent hues, and so to ‘redeem from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.’
Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in which the ‘divinity’ or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed, throughout a large part of the essay, that ‘Poetry’ which Shelley is defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense. The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility. His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because, for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not feelwhat we know. The ‘Poetry’ which he defends, therefore, is the whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally, all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets. Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For all these things come from imagination.
Shelley’s exposition of this, which is probably the most original part of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The imagination—that is to say, the soul imagining—has before it, or feels within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own perfection—of itself become perfect—in one aspect or another. These aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul with soul (love), or of theperfect order of certain social relations or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while at the same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley’s thought) any such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.
I choose this particular title of the hidden power or divinity in order to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the imaginative idea is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is, for example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order, or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Shelley sometimes even speaks of their ‘rhythm.’ For example, he uses this word in reference to an action; and I quote the passage because, though it occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it illustrates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. ‘The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with Hannibal after the battle of Cannæ’—these he describes as ‘a rhythm and order in the shows of life,’ an order not arranged with a view to utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, ‘beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea.’
2.
If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls? Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry, but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest, because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see, therefore, what Shelley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially of poetic language.
First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination; whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations to other things in the material world, and this nature and these relations intervene between the artist’s conception and his expression of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium thatenable him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is also true of language.
But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound,isan order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning. For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language, Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient, popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action. But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence of poetry. ‘Hence,’ says Shelley, ‘the vanity of translation: it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.’ Strong words to come from the translator of theHymn to Mercuryand of Agathon’s speech in theSymposium!1And is not all that Shelley says of the difference between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language? Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a ‘convenience,’ which contributes nothing of any account to the influence of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley’s insistence on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it) is indispensable to the effect of poetry.
Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental. Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separateattention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen, he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No poem, he asserts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions. Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contempt of the fifty-six various readings of the first line of theOrlando Furioso. He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in theDefencehis foe is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the original conception as being obscure as well as intense;2from which it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the execution, while his manuscripts show plenty of various readings, if never so many as fifty-six in one line.
Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without pausing tocomplete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed, unlike Wordsworth’s or Byron’s, is, in his mature work, always that of a poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the hymnLife of Life: ‘He seems to go up into the air and burst.’ It is true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compareLife of Lifewith a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no other fire can reach.
In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats’s earlier poems faulty in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the following sentence from the Preface to theRevolt of Islam: ‘Nor have I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to my own ingenuity in contriving,—to disgust him according to the rulesof criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of language, produced by that familiarity.’3His own poetic style certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned and artful style, such as Virgil’s or Milton’s; but, like the best writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality, almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether the appropriate style is impassioned and highly figurative, or simple and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part ofJulian and Maddalohe has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And theCenciis an example of a success less complete only because the problem was even harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did—to idealise, without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in theCenciseems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.
3.
So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses ‘the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.’ But poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this kind. What is to be said, on Shelley’s theory, of his own melancholy lyrics, those ‘sweetest songs’ that ‘tell of saddest thought’? What of satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider poetry simply as a representation of fact?
To this last question I should answer No. Shelley’s theory, rightly understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He did not mean that theimmediatesubject of poetry must be perfection in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so long as hecanso colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus to take the instanceof Shelley’s melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an expressionofthe ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that, though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the ‘highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of the inferior,’ that ‘the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself,’ and that not sorrow only, but ‘terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.’ That, then, which appeals poetically to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in theDefenceregarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of conflict and wild passion. He had, it is true, another and an unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry; and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold ourselves, ‘under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.’ He writes of Milton’s Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the stage,Macbeth; and he was inclined to thinkKing Lear, which certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the world. Lastly, in the Preface to his ownCencihe truly says that, while the story is fearful and monstrous, ‘the poetry which exists in thesetempestuous sufferings and crimes,’ if duly brought out, ‘mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity’: so that he regards Count Cenci himself as apoeticcharacter, and therefore as insomesense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and passion of the soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Shelley’s theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.
Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression, not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some signs of this. He considered his ownCencias a poem inferior in kind to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public. With all his modesty he knew what to think of theneglectedPrometheusandAdonaïs, but there is no sign that he, any more than the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect. And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface toPrometheus Unboundthe strange notion that Prometheus is a more poetic character than Milton’s Satan because he is free from Satan’s imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in theDefencea similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer’s contemporaries regarded their vices (e.g.revengefulness and deceitfulness) as virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, ‘few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.’ Now, this idea, to say nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which was explained just now. It is an example of Shelley’s tendency to abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if thewhole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he says—
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of eternity;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity;