The Prose Works of William Wordsworth Part 133

[256] _Ibid._ iv. 455.

[257] If I remember right, it is in the third line,

'Ludisque dicatae, jocisque;'

a strange blunder, for Buchanan must have read Horace's,

'Quid dedicatum poscit Apolliuem,'

a hundred times.

When I began to give myself up to the profession of a poet for life, I was impressed with a conviction, that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me as examples--Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I must study, and equal _if I could_; and I need not think of the rest[258].

[258] This paragraph was communicated by Mr. H.C. Robinson.

I have been charged by some with disparaging Pope and Dryden. This is not so. I have committed much of both to memory. As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope.

I cannot account for Shakspeare's low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the superhumanity, of his genius. They were infinitely below his conception of what they might have been, and ought to have been.

The mind often does not think, when it thinks that it is thinking. If we were to give our whole soul to anything, as the bee does to the flower, I conceive there would be little difficulty in any intellectual employment. Hence there is no excuse for obscurity in writing.

'Macbeth,' is the best conducted of Shakspeare's plays. The fault of 'Julius Caesar,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Lear,' is, that the interest is not, and by the nature of the case could not be, sustained to their conclusion.

The death of Julius Caesar is too _overwhelming_ an incident for _any_ stage of the drama but the _last_. It is an incident to which the mind clings, and from which it will not be torn away to share in other sorrows. The same may be said of the madness of Lear. Again, the opening of 'Hamlet' is full of exhausting interest. There is more mind in 'Hamlet' than in any other play, more knowledge of human nature. The first act is incomparable.... There is too much of an every-day sick room in the death-bed scene of Catherine, in 'Henry the Eighth'--too much of leeches and apothecaries' vials.... 'Zanga' is a bad imitation of 'Oth.e.l.lo.' Garrick never ventured on Oth.e.l.lo: he could not submit to a blacked face. He rehea.r.s.ed the part once. During the rehearsal Quin entered, and, having listened for some time with attention, exclaimed, 'Well done, David! but where's the teakettle?' alluding to the print of Hogarth, where a black boy follows his mistress with a teakettle in his hand.... In stature Garrick was short.... A fact which conveys a high notion of his powers is, that he was able to _act out_ the absurd stage-costume of those days. He represented Coriola.n.u.s in the attire of Cheapside. I remember hearing from Sir G. Beaumont, that while he was venting, as Lear, the violent paroxysms of his rage in the awful tempest scene, his wig happened to fall off. The accident did not produce the slightest effect on the gravity of the house, so strongly had he impregnated every breast with his own emotions.

Some of my friends (H.C. for instance) doubt whether poetry on contemporary persons and events can be good. But I instance Spenser's 'Marriage,' and Milton's 'Lycidas.' True, the 'Persae' is one of the worst of Aeschylus's plays; at least, in my opinion.

Milton is falsely represented by some as a democrat. He was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word. See the quotation from him in my 'Convention of Cintra.'[259] Indeed, he spoke in very proud and contemptuous terms, of the populace. 'Comus' is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in 'Samson Agonistes.' When he wrote that, his mind was Hebraized. Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets. This arose, in some degree, from the temper of the times; the Puritan lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New.

The works of the old English dramatists are the gardens of our language.

One of the n.o.blest things in Milton is the description of that sweet, quiet morning in the 'Paradise Regained,' after that terrible night of howling wind and storm. The contrast is divine.[260]

[259] Page 174 (vol. i.), where Milton speaks of the evils suffered by a nation,' unless men more than vulgar, bred up in the knowledge of ancient and ill.u.s.trious deeds, conduct its affairs.'

[260] _Paradise Regained_, iv. 431.

What a virulent democrat ---- is! A man ill at ease with his own conscience is sure to quarrel with all government, order, and law.

The influence of Locke's Essay was not due to its own merits, which are considerable; but to external circ.u.mstances. It came forth at a happy opportunity, and coincided with the prevalent opinions of the time. The Jesuit doctrines concerning the papal power in deposing kings, and absolving subjects from their allegiance, had driven some Protestant theologians to take refuge in the theory of the divine right of kings.

This theory was unpalatable to the world at large, and others invented the more popular doctrine of a social contract, in its place; a doctrine which history refutes. But Locke did what he could to accommodate this principle to his own system.

The only basis on which property can rest is right derived from prescription.

The best of Locke's works, as it seems to me, is that in which he attempts the least--his _Conduct of the Understanding_.

In the Summer of 1827, speaking of some of his contemporaries, Wordsworth said, T. Moore has great natural genius; but he is too lavish of brilliant ornament. His poems smell of the perfumer's and milliner's shops. He is not content with a ring and a bracelet, but he must have rings in the ears, rings on the nose--rings everywhere.

Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He allows himself many liberties, which betray a want of respect for his reader. For instance, he is too fond of inversions; _i.e._ he often places the verb before the substantive, and the accusative before the verb. W. Scott quoted, as from me,

'The swan on _sweet_ St. Mary's lake Floats double, swan and shadow,'

instead of _still_; thus obscuring my idea, and betraying his own uncritical principles of composition.

Byron seems to me deficient in _feeling_. Professor Wilson, I think, used to say that 'Beppo' was his best poem; because all his faults were there brought to a height. I never read the 'English Bards' through. His critical prognostications have, for the most part, proved erroneous.

Sir James Mackintosh said of me to M. de Stael, Wordsworth is not a great poet, but he is the greatest man among poets.' Madame de Stael complained of my style.

Now whatever may be the result of my experiment in the subjects which I have chosen for poetical composition--be they vulgar or be they not,--I can say without vanity, that I have bestowed great pains on my _style_, full as much as any of my contemporaries have done on theirs. I yield to none in _love for my art_. I, therefore, labour at it with reverence, affection, and industry. My main endeavour as to style has been that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English. Lord Byron has spoken severely of my compositions. However faulty they may be, I do not think that I ever could have prevailed upon myself to print such lines as he has done; for instance,

'I stood at Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand.'

Some person ought to write a critical review, a.n.a.lysing Lord Byron's language, in order to guard others against imitating him in these respects.

Sh.e.l.ley is one of the best _artists_ of us all: I mean in workmans.h.i.+p of style.

At Calgarth, dining with Mrs. and the Miss Watsons ... a very fine portrait of the late Bishop in the dining-room.... Mr. Wordsworth there: a very agreeable party. Walked home with him in the evening to Rydal. It rained all the way. We met a poor woman in the road. She sobbed as she pa.s.sed us. Mr. Wordsworth was much affected with her condition: she was swollen with dropsy, and slowly hobbling along with a stick, having been driven from one lodging to another. It was a dark stormy night. Mr.

Wordsworth brought her back to the Lowwood Inn, where, by the landlord's leave, she was housed in one of his barns.

One day I met Mr. M.T. Sadler at the late Archbishop's. Sadler did not know me; and before dinner he began to launch forth in a critical dissertation on contemporary English Poetry. 'Among living poets, your Grace may know there is one called Wordsworth, whose writings the world calls childish and puerile, but I think some of them wonderfully pathetic.' 'Now, Mr. Sadler,' said the Archbishop, 'what a sc.r.a.pe you are in! here is Mr. Wordsworth: but go down with him to dinner, and you will find that, though a great poet, he does not belong to the "genus irritabile."' This was very happy.

After returning one day from church at Addington, I took the liberty of saying a few words on the sermon we had heard. It was a very homely performance. 'I am rather surprised, my Lord Archbishop, that when your Grace can have the choice of so many preachers in England, you do not provide better for yourself.' 'Oh!' said he, 'I think I can bear bad preaching better than most people, and I therefore keep it to myself.'

This seemed to me a very pleasing trait in the gentle and loveable character of that admirable man.

Patriarchal usages have not quite deserted us of these valleys. This morning (new year's day) you were awakened early by the minstrels playing under the eaves, 'Honour to Mr. Wordsworth!' 'Honour to Mrs.

Wordsworth!' and so to each member of the household by name, servants included, each at his own window. These customs bind us together as a family, and are as beneficial as they are delightful. May they never disappear!

In my Ode on the 'Intimations of Immortality in Childhood,' I do not profess to give a literal representation of the state of the affections and of the moral being in childhood. I record my own feelings at that time--my absolute spirituality, my 'all-soulness,' if I may so speak. At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust.

Many of my poems have been influenced by my own circ.u.mstances when I was writing them. 'The Warning' was composed on horseback, while I was riding from Moresby in a snow-storm. Hence the simile in that poem,

'While thoughts press on and feelings overflow, And quick words round him fall like _flakes of snow_.'

In the 'Ecclesiastical Sonnets,' the lines concerning the Monk (Sonnet xxi.),

'Within his cell.

Round the decaying trunk of human pride.

At morn, and eve, and midnight's silent hour, Do penitential cogitations cling: Like ivy round some ancient elm they twine In grisly folds and strictures serpentine; Yet while they strangle, a fair growth they bring For recompence--their own perennial bower;'--

were suggested to me by a beautiful tree clad as thus described, which you may remember in Lady Fleming's park at Rydal, near the path to the upper waterfall.

S----, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds _imagery_ and _imagination_. Sensible objects really existing, and felt to exist, are _imagery_; and they may form the materials of a descriptive poem, where objects are delineated as they are. Imagination is a subjective term: it deals with objects not as they are, but as they appear to the mind of the poet.

The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified both in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of dramatic _tableaux_, by which the persons of the play are invested with new drapery, or placed in new att.i.tudes; or it is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together into one harmonious and h.o.m.ogeneous whole.

A beautiful instance of the modifying and _investive_ power of imagination may be seen in that n.o.ble pa.s.sage of Dyer's 'Ruins of Rome,'[261] where the poet hears the voice of Time; and in Thomson's description of the streets of Cairo, expecting the arrival of the caravan which had perished in the storm,[262]

Read all Cowley; he is very valuable to a collector of English sound sense.... Burns's 'Scots wha hae' is poor as a lyric composition.