The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Volume Iii Part 46

[Footnote B: Compare Emily Bronte's statement of the same, in the last verse she wrote:

'Though Earth and Man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death, Nor atom that His might could render void; Thou--THOU art Being and Breath, And what THOU art may never be destroyed.'

Ed.]

[Footnote C:

"Because she would then become farther and farther removed from the source of essential life and being, diffused instead of concentrated."

(William Davies).--Ed.]

[Footnote D: Mr. A. J. Duffield, the translator of Don Quixote, wrote me the following letter on Wordsworth and Cervantes, which I transcribe in full.

"So far as I can learn Wordsworth had not read any critical work on Don Quixote before he wrote the fifth book of 'The Prelude', [a] nor for that matter had any criticism of the master-piece of Cervantes then appeared. Yet Wordsworth,

'by patient exercise Of study and hard thought,'

has given us not only a most poetical insight into the real nature of the 'Ill.u.s.trious Hidalgo of La Mancha'; he has shown us that it was a nature compacted of the madman and the poet, and this in language so appropriate, that the consideration of it cannot fail to give pleasure to all who have found a reason for weighing Wordsworth's words.

"He demands

'Oh! why hath not the Mind Some element to stamp her image on?'

then falls asleep, 'his senses yielding to the sultry air,' and he sees before him

'stretched a boundless plain Of sandy wilderness, all black and void, And as I looked around, distress and fear Came creeping over me, when at my side, Close at my side, an uncouth shape appeared Upon a dromedary, mounted high.

He seemed an Arab ...'

Here we have the plains of Montiel, and the poet realising all that Don Quixote felt on that day of July, 'the hottest of the year,' when he first set out on his quest and met with nothing worth recording.

'The uncouth shape'

is of course the Don himself,

the 'dromedary'

is Rozinante, and

the 'Arab'

doubtless is Cid Hamete Benengeli.

"Taking such an one for the guide,

'who with unerring skill Would through the desert lead me,'

is a most sweet play of humour like to the lambent flame of his whose satire was as a summer breath, and who smiled all the time he wrote, although he wrote chiefly in a prison.

'The loud prophetic blast of harmony'

is doubtless a continuation of this humour, down to the lines

'Nor doubted once but that they both were books, Having a perfect faith in all that pa.s.sed.'

"Our poet now becomes positive,

'Lance in rest, He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now He, to my fancy, had become the knight Whose tale Cervantes tells; _yet not the knight But was an Arab of the desert too_, Of these was neither, and was both at once.'

This is absolutely true, and was one of the earliest complaints made a century and a half ago, when Spaniards began to criticise their one great book. They could not tell at times whether Don Quixote was speaking, or Cervantes, or Cid Hamete Benengeli.

'A bed of glittering light'

is a delightful description of the att.i.tude of Don Quixote's mind towards external nature while pa.s.sing through the desert.

'It is,' said he, 'the waters of the deep Gathering upon us.'

"It was, of course, only the mirage; but this he changed to suit his own purpose into the 'waters of the deep,' as he changed the row of Castilian wind-mills into giants, and the roar of the fulling mills into the din of war.

"Wordsworth is now awake from his dream, but turning all he saw in it into a reality, as only the poet can, he feels that

'Reverence was due to a being thus employed; And thought that, _in the blind and awful lair Of such a madness, reason did lie couched._'

Here again is a most profound description of the creation of Cervantes. Don Quixote was mad, but his was a madness that proceeded from that 'blind and awful lair,' a disordered stomach, rather than from an injured brain. Had Don Quixote not forsaken the exercise of the chase and early rising, if he had not taken to eating chestnuts at night, cold spiced meat, together with onions and 'ollas podridas', then proceeding to read exciting, unnatural tales of love and war, he would not have gone mad.

"But his reason only lay 'couched,' not overthrown. Only give him a dose of the balsam of Fierabras, his reason shall spring out of its lair, like a lion from out its hiding-place, as indeed it did; and you then have that wonderful piece of rhetoric, which describes the army of Alifanfaron in the eighteenth chapter, Part I.

"There are many other things worthy of note, such as

'crazed By love and feeling, and internal thought Protracted among endless solitudes,'

all of which are 'fit epithets blessed in the marriage of pure words,'

which the author of 'The Prelude', without any special learning, or personal knowledge of Spain, has given us, and are so striking as to compel us once again to go to Wordsworth and say, 'we do not all understand thee yet, not all that thou hast given us.'

Very truly yours, A. J. Duffield."

Ed.]

[Footnote E: Compare 'Paradise Lost', v. 1. 150:

'In prose or numerous verse.'

Ed.]