Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 6

[8] The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word 'personality.' Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a personality; but it is not an interest in some bare form of self-consciousness, nor yet in a person in the legal sense, but in a personality full of matter. This matter is not an ethical or universal end, but it must in a sense be universal--human nature in a particular form--or it would not excite the horror, sympathy, and admiration it does excite. Nor, again, could it excite these feelings if it were not composed largely of qualities on which we set a high value.

[9] In relation to _both_ sides in the conflict (though it may not need to negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the catastrophe is emphatically not the finite power of one side. It is beyond both, and, at any rate in relation to them, boundless.

WORDSWORTH

WORDSWORTH[1]

'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings.' These sentences, from a letter written by Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common att.i.tude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really astonis.h.i.+ng number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.

I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book has practised what I am about to preach.

1.

There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original.

He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go.

Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled pa.s.sion, perhaps 'slow to begin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his 'criticism of life,' to be something deep, and therefore something that will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation.

It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser; nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their sorest need. And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to strike them as original, and something more. It is not like Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both, peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling, though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace, strength, exaltation, but a 'shock of mild surprise'; and his paradoxes, long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.

If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of occasional plat.i.tudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult; and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her ruined cottage had once so affected him

That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief The pa.s.sing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream, that could not live Where meditation was.

He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him breathed immortality. He said to 'Almighty G.o.d,'

But thy most dreaded instrument For working out a pure intent Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter; Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.

This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we a.s.sume that we are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we translate 'the soul of all my moral being' into 'somehow concordant with my moral feelings,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal that we behold,' or transform the Wanderer's reading of the silent faces of the clouds into an argument from 'design.' But this is the road round Wordsworth's mind, not into it.[2]

Again, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to miss the unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in Byron's lines, _On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year_, or in Sh.e.l.ley's _Stanzas written in dejection near Naples_, cannot escape discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a good deal that _is_ distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the lines (written by his wife),

They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude.

But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills.

It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines.

But with many readers it pa.s.ses unheeded, because it is strange and outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the effect of the poem.

This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain, as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our point is best ill.u.s.trated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of _The Idiot Boy_ and _The Thorn_, yet he calls them 'doleful examples of eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote _Goody Blake and Harry Gill_ and the _Anecdote for Fathers_, and yet I doubt if he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in a selection from which he excluded _The Sailor's Mother_.[3] Indeed, of all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And this is fatal.

I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. _Alice Fell_ was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poems; many still who admire _Lucy Gray_ see nothing to admire in _Alice Fell_; and you may still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me ill.u.s.trate this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and, having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise, and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or Poverty_) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was _this_ poverty and _this_ grief that Wordsworth described with his reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered cloak? It is the pa.s.sion that counts. Oth.e.l.lo must not agonise for a cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise for. Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poem about a child is right to the last line--next day the storm and the tragedy have vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.[4]

2.

I pa.s.s on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems; and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense, untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.

Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.

It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like most great poets, of war, or love, or tragic pa.s.sions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and familiar things,' alike in nature and in human life. His 'poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties.' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Sh.e.l.ley yawned between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a natural piety gradually a.s.suming a more distinctively religious tone.

Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from _A Poet's Epitaph_):

But who is he, with modest looks, And clad in homely russet brown?

He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter than their own.

He is retired as noontide dew, Or fountain in a noon-day grove; And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love.

The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie Some random truths he can impart, --The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

But he is weak; both man and boy, Hath been an idler in the land: Contented if he might enjoy The things which others understand.

And these are the words from Arnold's _Memorial Verses_:

He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen--on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round-- He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.

He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth; Smiles broke from us and we had ease.

The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sunlit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.

Our youth returned: for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furled, The freshness of the early world.

Ah, since dark days still bring to light Man's prudence and man's fiery might, Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel; Others will strengthen us to bear-- But who, ah who, will make us feel?

The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly-- But who, like him, will put it by?

Keep fresh the gra.s.s upon his grave, O Rotha! with thy living wave.

Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Those last words are enough to disarm dissent. No, that voice will never again be heard quite right now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the most part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture we have been looking at, though we may question the accuracy of this line or that, seems to me, I repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing missing?

Consider this picture, and refuse to go beyond it, and then ask if it accounts for all that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How did the man in the picture ever come to write the Immortality _Ode_, or _Yew-trees_, or why should he say,

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?

How, again, could he say that Carnage is G.o.d's daughter, or write the _Sonnets dedicated to National Liberty and Independence_, or the tract on the Convention of Cintra? Can it be true of him that many of his best-known poems of human life--perhaps the majority--deal with painful subjects, and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we expect him to make an 'idol' of Milton, or to show a 'strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo'? He might easily be 'reserved,'

but is it not surprising to find him described as haughty, prouder than Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant? Why should his forehead have been marked by the 'severe worn pressure of thought,' or his eyes have looked so 'supernatural ... like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns'? In all this there need be nothing inconsistent with the picture we have been looking at; but that picture fails to suggest it.

In that way the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose to emphasise some of the traits which it omits or marks too faintly.[5]

And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth's field. Certainly his field, as compared with that of some poets, is narrow; but to describe it as confined to external nature and peasant life, or to little and familiar things, would be absurdly untrue, as a mere glance at his Table of Contents suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not due to any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness of outlook. It was due, apart from limitation of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively soon, and on the other, especially in his best days, to deliberate choice; and we must not a.s.sume without question that he was inherently incapable of doing either what he would not do, or what, in his last five and thirty years, he could no longer do.

There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth undervalued or objected to the subjects of such poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing his part of the _Lyrical Ballads_, he returned from Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were not concerned with rural life or humble persons. Some old 'romantic' British theme, left unsung by Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments, war-like feats; vanquished Mithridates pa.s.sing north and becoming Odin; the fortunes of the followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues' journey of vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his exploits in the war for his country's independence,--these are the subjects he names first. And, though his 'last and favourite aspiration' was towards

Some philosophic song Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,