The Prose Works of William Wordsworth Part 137

'But who is innocent? By grace divine, Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine.'[272]

[272] 'Evening Voluntary.'

It was to Nature as first created, not to Nature as corrupted by 'disnatured' pa.s.sions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers. In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew--loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be. Utterly without Shakspeare's dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspeare. Wholly unlike Milton in character and in opinions, he abounds in pa.s.sages to be paralleled only by Milton in solemn and spiritual sublimity, and not even by Milton in pathos. It was plain to those who knew Wordsworth that he had kept his great gift pure, and used it honestly and thoroughly for that purpose for which it had been bestowed. He had ever written with a conscientious reverence for that gift; but he had also written spontaneously. He had composed with care--not the exaggerated solicitude which is prompted by vanity, and which frets itself to unite incompatible excellences; but the diligence which shrinks from no toil while eradicating blemishes that confuse a poem's meaning, and frustrate its purpose. He regarded poetry as an art; but he also regarded Art not as the compeer of Nature, much less her superior, but as her servant and interpreter. He wrote poetry likewise, no doubt, in a large measure, because self-utterance was an essential law of his nature. If he had a companion, he discoursed like one whose thoughts must needs run on in audible current; if he walked alone among his mountains, he murmured old songs. He was like a pine grove, vocal as well as visible. But to poetry he had dedicated himself as to the utterance of the highest truths brought within the range of his life's experience; and if his poetry has been accused of egotism, the charge has come from those who did not perceive that it was with a human, not a mere personal interest that he habitually watched the processes of his own mind. He drew from the fountain that was nearest at hand what he hoped might be a refreshment to those far off. He once said, speaking of a departed man of genius, who had lived an unhappy life and deplorably abused his powers, to the lasting calamity of his country, 'A great poet must be a great man; and a great man must be a good man; and a good man ought to be a happy man.' To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the expression of a healthily happy moral being.

AUBREY DE VERE.

Curragh Chase, March 31, 1875.

P.S. Wordsworth was by no means without humour. When the Queen on one occasion gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet, who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character of the father of English poetry, grave old Chaucer. 'What,' said Wordsworth, 'M. go as Chaucer! Then it only remains for me to go as M.!'

PART II.

SONNET--RYDAL WITH WORDSWORTH.

BY THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE.

'What we beheld scarce can I now recall In one connected picture; images Hurrying so swiftly their fresh witcheries O'er the mind's mirror, that the several Seems lost, or blended in the mighty all.

Lone lakes; rills gus.h.i.+ng through rock-rooted trees: Peaked mountains shadowing vales of peacefulness: Glens echoing to the flas.h.i.+ng waterfall.

Then that sweet twilight isle! with friends delayed Beside a ferny bank 'neath oaks and yews; The moon between two mountain peaks embayed; Heaven and the waters dyed with sunset hues: And he, the Poet of the age and land, Discoursing as we wandered hand in hand.'

The above-written sonnet is the record of a delightful day spent by my father in 1833 with Wordsworth at Rydal, to which he went from the still more beautiful sh.o.r.es of Ulswater, where he had been sojourning at Halsteads. He had been one of Wordsworth's warmest admirers, when their number was small, and in 1842 he dedicated a volume of poems to him.[273] He taught me when a boy of 18 years old to admire the great bard. I had been very enthusiastically praising Lord Byron's poetry. My father calmly replied, 'Wordsworth is the great poet of modern times.'

Much surprised, I asked, 'And what may his special merits be?' The answer was, 'They are very various, as for instance, depth, largeness, elevation, and, what is rare in modern poetry, an _entire_ purity. In his n.o.ble "Laodamia" they are chiefly majesty and pathos.' A few weeks afterwards I chanced to take from the library shelves a volume of Wordsworth, and it opened on 'Laodamia.' Some strong, calm hand seemed to have been laid on my head, and bound me to the spot, till I had come to the end. As I read, a new world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far away into serene infinitudes. The region was one to me unknown, but the harmony of the picture attested its reality. Above and around were indeed

[273] _A Song of Faith, Devout Exercises, and Sonnets_ (Pickering). The Dedication closed thus: 'I may at least hope to be named hereafter among the friends of Wordsworth.'

'An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams;'

and when I reached the line,

'Calm pleasures there abide--majestic pains,'

I felt that no tenants less stately could walk in so lordly a precinct.

I had been translated into another planet of song--one with larger movements and a longer year. A wider conception of poetry had become mine, and the Byronian enthusiasm fell from me like a bond that is broken by being outgrown. The incident ill.u.s.trates poetry in one of its many characters, that of 'the deliverer.' The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free. As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his 'Imaginary Conversation' between Southey and Porson, had p.r.o.nounced Wordsworth's 'Laodamia' to be 'a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes'--the Elysian Fields.

Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life. 'I should like,' he remarked to a young lady, 'to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.' He sometimes made a mistake in a.s.suming that others were equally philosophical. We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr. Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and wis.h.i.+ng to compliment him, said, 'Mr. Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet, when, in ill.u.s.tration of man's mortality, he says, "Linquenda est domus."' 'What is that you are saying?' replied Mr.

Rogers, whose years, between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing. 'I was remarking that your house,' replied Wordsworth, 'always reminds me of the Ode (more properly called an Elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be included among Horace's Odes) in which the Roman poet writes "Linquenda est domus;"

that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, _The house is_, or _has to be, left_; and again, "et placens uxor"--and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.' The Town Bard, on whom 'no angle smiled' more than the end of St. James's-place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains. His answer was what children call 'making a great face,' and the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, 'Don't talk Latin in, the society of ladies.' When I was going away he remarked, 'What a stimulus the mountain air has on the appet.i.te! I made a sign to Edmund to hand him the cutlets a second time. I was afraid he would stick his fork into that beautiful woman who sat next him.'

Wordsworth never resented a jest at his own expense. Once when we had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, I exclaimed, quoting his sonnet written on Westminster-bridge,

'Dear G.o.d, the very houses seem asleep.'

He laughed heartily, then smiled gravely, and lastly recounted the occasion, and described the early morning on which that sonnet was written. He did not recite more than a part of it, to the accompaniment of distant cab and carriage; and I thought that the door was opened too soon.

Wordsworth, despite his dislike to great cities, was attracted occasionally in his later years

'To the proud margin of the Thames, And Lambeth's venerable towers,'

where his society was courted by persons of the most different character. But he complained bitterly of the great city. It was next to impossible, he remarked, to tell the truth in it. 'Yesterday I was at S. House: the d.u.c.h.ess of S., showing me the pictures, observed, "This is the portrait of my brother" (naming him), "and it is considered very like." To this I a.s.sented, partly perhaps in absence of mind, but partly, I think, with an impression that her Grace's brother was probably a person whose face every one knew, or was expected to know; so that, as I had never met him, my answer was in fact a lie! It is too bad that, when more than seventy years old, I should be brought from the mountains to London in order to tell a lie!' He made his complaint wherever he went, laying the blame, however, not so much on himself, or on the d.u.c.h.ess, as on the corrupt city; and some of those who learned how the most truthful man in England had thus quickly been subverted by metropolitan snares came to the conclusion that within a few years more no virtue would be left extant in the land. He was likewise maltreated in lesser ways. 'This morning I was compelled by my engagements to eat three breakfasts--one with an aged and excellent gentleman, who may justly be esteemed an accomplished man of letters, although I cannot honestly concede to him the t.i.tle of a poet; one at a fas.h.i.+onable party; and one with an old friend whom no pressure would induce me to neglect--although for this, my first breakfast to-day, I was obliged to name the early hour of seven o'clock, as he lives in a remote part of London.'

But it was only among his own mountains that Wordsworth could be understood. He walked among them not so much to admire them as to converse with them. They exchanged thoughts with him, in suns.h.i.+ne or flying shadow, giving him their own and accepting his. Day and night, at all hours, and in all weather, he would face them. If it rained, he might fling his plaid over him, but would take no admonition. He must have his way. On such occasions, dutiful as he was in higher matters, he remained incurably wayward. In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer, or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked; and one of his dearest friends said to me, with a smile of the most affectionate humour, 'He wrote his "Ode to Duty," and then he had done with that matter.' This very innocent form of lawlessness, corresponding with the cla.s.sic expression, 'Indulge genio,' seemed to belong to his genius, not less than the sympathetic reverence with which he looked up to the higher and universal laws. Sometimes there was a battle between his reverence for Nature and his reverence for other things. The friend already alluded to was once remarking on his varying expressions of countenance. 'That rough old face is capable of high and real beauty; I have seen in it an expression quite of heavenly peace and contemplative delight, as the May breeze came over him from the woods while he was slowly walking out of church on a Sunday morning, and when he had half emerged from the shadow.' A flippant person present inquired, 'Did you ever chance, Miss F., to observe that heavenly expression on his countenance, as he was walking into church, on a fine May morning?' A laugh was the reply. The ways of Nature harmonised with his feelings in age as well as in youth.

He could understand no estrangement. Gathering a wreath of white thorn on one occasion, he murmured, as he slipped it into the ribbon which bound the golden tresses of his youthful companion,

'And what if I enwreathed my own?

'Twere no offence to reason; The sober hills thus deck their brows To meet the wintry season.'

(_k_) FROM 'RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAST DAYS OF Sh.e.l.lEY AND BYRON.'

BY E.J. TRELAWNY. 1858 (MOXON).

Some days after this conversation I walked to Lausanne, to breakfast at the hotel with an old friend, Captain Daniel Roberts, of the navy. He was out sketching, but presently came in accompanied by two English ladies, with whom he had made acquaintance whilst drawing, and whom he brought to our hotel. The husband of one of them soon followed. I saw by their utilitarian garb, as well as by the blisters and blotches on their cheeks, lips, and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists, fresh from the snow-covered mountains, the blazing sun and frosty air having acted on their unseasoned skins as boiling water does on the lobster by dyeing his dark coat scarlet. The man was evidently a denizen of the north, his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. The precision and quaintness of his language, as well as his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated my mind. Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer lat.i.tudes: broken loose from its anti-social system, mystic castes, coteries, sets, and sects, they lay aside their purse-proud, tuft-hunting, and toadying ways, and are very apt to run risk in the enjoyment of all their senses. Besides, we were compelled to talk in strange company, if not from good breeding, to prove our breed, as the gift of speech is often our princ.i.p.al, if not sole, distinction from the rest of the brute animals.

To return to our breakfast. The travellers, flushed with health, delighted with their excursion, and with appet.i.tes earned by bodily and mental activity, were in such high spirits that Roberts and I caught the infection of their mouth; we talked as loud and fast as if under the exhilarating influence of champagne, instead of such a sedative compound as _cafe au lait_. I can rescue nothing out of oblivion but a few last words. The stranger expressed his disgust at the introduction of carriages into the mountain districts of Switzerland, and at the old fogies who used them.

'As to the arbitrary, pitiless, G.o.dless wretches,' he exclaimed, 'who have removed Nature's landmarks by cutting roads through Alps and Apennines, until all things are reduced to the same dead level, they will he arraigned hereafter with the unjust: they have robbed the best specimens of what men should be of their freeholds in the mountains; the eagle, the black c.o.c.k, and the red deer they have tamed or exterminated.

The lover of Nature can nowhere find a solitary nook to contemplate her beauties. Yesterday,' he continued, 'at the break of day, I scaled the most rugged height within my reach; it looked inaccessible; this pleasant delusion was quickly dispelled; I was rudely startled out of a deep reverie by the accursed jarring, jingling, and rumbling of a caleche, and harsh voices that drowned the torrent's fall.'

The stranger, now hearing a commotion in the street, sprang on his feet, looked out of the window, and rang the bell violently.

'Waiter,' he said, 'is that our carriage? Why did you not tells us?

Come, la.s.ses, be stirring; the freshness of the day is gone. You may rejoice in not having to walk; there is a chance of saving the remnants of skin the sun has left on our chins and noses; to-day we shall he stewed instead of barbecued.'

On their leaving the room to get ready for their journey, my friend Roberts told me the strangers were the poet Wordsworth, his wife and sister.

Who could have divined this? I could see no trace, in the hard features and weather-stained brow of the outer man, of the divinity within him.

In a few minutes the travellers reappeared; we cordially shook hands, and agreed to meet again at Geneva. Now that I knew that I was talking to one of the veterans of the gentle craft, as there was no time to waste in idle ceremony, I asked him abruptly what he thought of Sh.e.l.ley as a poet.

'Nothing,' he replied as abruptly.

Seeing my surprise, he added, 'A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five we may conclude cannot and never will do so.'

'The "Cenci"!' I said eagerly.

'Won't do,' he replied, shaking his head, as he got into the carriage: a rough-coated Scotch terrier followed him.

'This hairy fellow is our flea-trap,' he shouted out as they started off.

When I recovered from the shock of having heard the harsh sentence pa.s.sed by an elder bard on a younger brother of the Muses, I exclaimed,