Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers
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F. W. H. Myers >> Wordsworth
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I have alluded above to some of the passages, most of them familiar
enough, in which Wordsworth's sense of the mystic relation between
the world without us and the world within--the correspondence
between the seen and the unseen--is expressed in its most general
terms. But it is evident that such a conviction as this, if it
contain any truth, cannot be barren of consequences on any level of
thought. The communion with Nature which is capable of being at
times sublimed to an incommunicable ecstasy must be capable also of
explaining Nature to us so far as she can be explained; there must
be _axiomata media_ of natural religion; there must be something in
the nature of poetic truths, standing midway between mystic
intuition and delicate observation.
How rich Wordsworth is in these poetic truths--how illumining is the
gaze which he turns on the commonest phenomena--how subtly and
variously he shows us the soul's innate perceptions or inherited
memories as it were co-operating with Nature and "half creating" the
voice with which she speaks--all this can be learnt by attentive
study alone. Only a few scattered samples can be given here; and I
will begin with one on whose significance the poet has himself dwelt.
This is the poem called _The Leech-Gatherer_, afterwards more
formally named _Resolution and Independence_.
"I will explain to you," says Wordsworth, "in prose, my feelings in
writing that poem, I describe myself as having been exalted to the
highest pitch of delight by the joyousness and beauty of Nature; and
then as depressed, even in the midst of those beautiful objects, to
the lowest dejection and despair. A young poet in the midst of the
happiness of Nature is described as overwhelmed by the thoughts of
the miserable reverses which have befallen the happiest of all men,
viz. poets. I think of this till I am so deeply impressed with it,
that I consider the manner in which I am rescued from my dejection
and despair almost as an interposition of Providence. A person
reading the poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and
controlled, expecting something spiritual or supernatural. What is
brought forward? A lonely place, 'a pond, by which an old man
_was_, far from all house or home:' not _stood_, nor _sat_, but
_was_--the figure presented in the most naked simplicity possible.
The feeling of spirituality or supernaturalness is again referred to
as being strong in my mind in this passage. How came he here?
thought I, or what can he be doing? I then describe him, whether ill
or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence; but this I
_can_ confidently affirm, that though I believe God has given me a
strong imagination, I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than
that of an old man like this, the survivor of a wife and ten children,
travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying
with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust
state of society has laid upon him. You speak of his speech as
tedious. Everything is tedious when one does not read with the
feelings of the author. _The Thorn_ is tedious to hundreds; and so
is _The Idiot Boy_ to hundreds. It is in the character of the old
man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious.
But, good heavens! Such a figure, in such a place; a pious,
self-respecting, miserably infirm and pleased old man, telling such
a tale!"
The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us how constantly
recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the two trains of ideas which
form the substance of the poem; the interaction, namely, (if so it
may be termed,) of the moods of Nature with the moods of the human
mind; and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with no
complex background of social or political life, but set amid the
primary affections and sorrows, and the wild aspects of the external
world.
Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of the influence of
Nature on human character, _Peter Bell_ may be taken as marking one
end, and the poems on _Lucy_ the other end of the scale. Peter Bell
lives in the face of Nature untouched alike by her terror and her
charm; Lucy's whole being is moulded by Nature's self; she is
responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to sound, and melts
almost into an impersonation of a Cumbrian valley's peace. Between
these two extremes how many are the possible shades of feeling! In
_Ruth_, for instance, the point impressed upon us is that Nature's
influence is only salutary so long as she is herself, so to say, in
keeping with man; that when her operations reach that degree of
habitual energy and splendour at which our love for her passes into
fascination and our admiration into bewilderment, then the fierce
and irregular stimulus consorts no longer with the growth of a
temperate virtue.
The wind, the tempest roaring high,
The tumult of a tropic sky,
Might well be dangerous food
For him, a youth to whom was given
So much of earth, so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.
And a contrasting touch recalls the healing power of those gentle
and familiar presences which came to Ruth in her stormy madness with
visitations of momentary calm.
Yet sometimes milder hours she knew,
Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew,
Nor pastimes of the May;
They all were with her in her cell;
And a wild brook with cheerful knell
Did o'er the pebbles play.
I will give one other instance of this subtle method of dealing with
the contrasts in Nature. It is from the poem entitled "_Lines left
upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite,
on a desolate part of the Shore, commanding a beautiful Prospect_."
This seat was once the haunt of a lonely, a disappointed, an
embittered man.
Stranger! These gloomy boughs
Had charms for him: and here he loved to sit,
His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper;
And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath
And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er,
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here
An emblem of his own unfruitful life:
And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze
On the more distant scene,--how lovely 'tis
Thou seest,--and he would gaze till it became
Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain
The beauty, still more beauteous! Nor, that time,
When Nature had subdued him to herself,
Would he forget those beings, to whose minds,
Warm from the labours of benevolence,
The world, and human life, appeared a scene
Of kindred loveliness; then he would sigh
With mournful joy, to think that others felt
What he must never feel; and so, lost Man!
On visionary views would fancy feed
Till his eyes streamed with tears.
This is one of the passages which the lover of Wordsworth, quotes,
perhaps, with some apprehension; not knowing how far it carries into
the hearts of others its affecting power; how vividly it calls up
before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the whole vision
of human love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when
it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. But,
however this particular passage may impress the reader, it is not
hard to illustrate by abundant references the potent originality of
Wordsworth's outlook on the external world.
There was indeed no aspect of Nature, however often depicted, in
which his seeing eye could not discern some unnoted quality; there
was no mood to which nature gave birth in the mind of man from which
his meditation could not disengage some element which threw light on
our inner being. How often has the approach of evening been described!
And how mysterious is its solemnizing power! Yet it was reserved for
Wordsworth in his sonnet "Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful
hour," to draw out a characteristic of that grey waning light which
half explains to us its sombre and pervading charm. "Day's mutable
distinctions" pass away; all in the landscape that suggests our own
age or our own handiwork is gone; we look on the sight seen by our
remote ancestors, and the visible present is generalized into an
immeasureable past.
The sonnet on the Duddon beginning "What aspect bore the Man who
roved or fled First of his tribe to this dark dell," carries back
the mind along the same track, with the added thought of Nature's
permanent gentleness amid the "hideous usages" of primeval man,--
through all which the stream's voice was innocent, and its flow
benign. "A weight of awe not easy to be borne" fell on the poet, also,
as he looked on the earliest memorials which these remote ancestors
have left us. The _Sonnet on a Stone Circle_ which opens with these
words is conceived in a strain of emotion never more needed than now,--
when Abury itself owes its preservation to the munificence of a
private individual,--when stone-circle or round-tower, camp or dolmen,
are destroyed to save a few shillings, and occupation-roads are
mended with the immemorial altars of an unknown God. "Speak,
Giant-mother! Tell it to the Morn!"--how strongly does the heart
re-echo the solemn invocation which calls on those abiding witnesses
to speak once of what they knew long ago!
The mention of these ancient worships may lead us to ask in what
manner Wordsworth was affected "by the Nature-deities of Greece and
Rome"--impersonations which have preserved through so many ages so
strange a charm. And space must be found here for the characteristic
sonnet in which the baseness and materialism of modern life drives
him back on whatsoever of illumination and reality lay in that young
ideal.
The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea:
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Wordsworth's own imagination idealized Nature in a different way.
The sonnet "Brook! Whose society the poet seeks" places him among
the men whose Nature-deities have not yet become anthropomorphic--
men to whom "unknown modes of being" may seem more lovely as well as
more awful than the life we know. He would not give to his idealized
brook "human cheeks, channels for tears,--no Naiad shouldst thou be,"--
It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,
And hath bestowed on thee a better good;
Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.
And in the _Sonnet on Calais Beach_ the sea is regarded in the same
way, with a sympathy (if I may so say) which needs no help from an
imaginary impersonation, but strikes back to a sense of kinship
which seems antecedent to the origin of man.
It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
Listen! The mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly.
A comparison, made by Wordsworth himself, of his own method of
observing Nature with Scott's expresses in less mystical language
something of what I am endeavouring to say.
"He expatiated much to me one day," says Mr. Aubrey de
Vere, "as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the
mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most
justly popular of England's modern poets--one for whom he
preserved a high and affectionate respect. 'He took pains,'
Wordsworth said; 'he went out with his pencil and note-book,
and jotted down whatever struck him most--a river rippling
over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory,
and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home and
wove the whole together into a poetical description.' After a
pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and impassioned
voice: 'But Nature does not permit an inventory to be
made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and notebook
at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention
on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that
could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had
passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the
scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he
had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely
obliterated; that which remained--the picture surviving in his
mind--would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the
scene, and done so in a large part by discarding much which,
though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene
many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a true eye
for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on
them.'"
How many a phrase of Wordsworth's rises in the mind in illustration
of this power! Phrases which embody in a single picture, or a single
image,--it may be the vivid wildness of the flowery coppice, of--
Flaunting summer, when he throws
His soul into the briar-rose,--
or the melancholy stillness of the declining year,--
Where floats
O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer;
or--as in the words which to the sensitive Charles Lamb seemed too
terrible for art--the irresponsive blankness of the universe--
The broad open eye of the solitary sky--
beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment they may.
Or take those typical stanzas in _Peter Bell_, which so long were
accounted among Wordsworth's leading absurdities.
In vain through, every changeful year
Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
In vain, through water, earth, and air,
The soul of happy sound was spread,
When Peter, on some April morn,
Beneath the broom or budding thorn.
Made the warm earth his lazy bed.
At noon, when by the forest's edge
He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart,--he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!
On a fair prospect some have looked
And felt, as I have heard them say,
As if the moving time had been
A thing as steadfast as the scene
On which they gazed themselves away.
In all these passages, it will be observed, the emotion is educed
from Nature rather than added to her; she is treated as a mystic
text to be deciphered, rather than as a stimulus to roving
imagination. This latter mood, indeed, Wordsworth feels occasionally,
as in the sonnet where the woodland sights become to him "like a
dream of the whole world;" but it is checked by the recurring sense
that "it is our business to idealize the real, and not to realize
the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic clouds of sunset, he
feels for a moment ashamed to think that they are unrememberable--
They are of the sky,
And from our earthly memory fade away.
But soon he disclaims this regret, and reasserts the paramount
interest of the things that we can grasp and love.
Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,
Though clad In colours beautiful and pure,
Find in the heart of man no natural home;
The immortal Mind craves objects that endure:
These cleave to it; from these it cannot roam,
Nor they from it: their fellowship is secure.
From this temper of Wordsworth's mind, it follows that there will be
many moods in which we shall not retain him as our companion. Moods
which are rebellious, which beat at the bars of fate; moods of
passion reckless in its vehemence, and assuming the primacy of all
other emotions through the intensity of its delight or pain; moods
of mere imaginative phantasy, when we would fain shape from the
well-worn materials of our thought some fabric at once beautiful and
new; from all such phases of our inward being Wordsworth stands aloof.
His poem on the nightingale and the stockdove illustrates with
half-conscious allegory the contrast between himself and certain
other poets.
O Nightingale! Thou surely art
A creature of a fiery heart:--
These notes of thine--they pierce and pierce;
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
Had helped thee to a Valentine;
A song in mockery and despite
Of shades, and dews, and silent Night;
And steady bliss, and all the loves
Now sleeping in their peaceful groves.
I heard a Stock-dove sing or say
His homely tale, this very day;
His voice was buried among trees,
Yet to be come at by the breeze:
He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed,
And somewhat pensively he wooed.
He sang of love with quiet blending,
Slow to begin, and never ending;
Of serious faith and inward glee;
That was the Song--the Song for me!
"_His voice was buried among trees_," says Wordsworth; "a metaphor
expressing the love of _seclusion_ by which this bird is marked; and
characterizing its note as not partaking of the shrill and the
piercing, and therefore more easily deadened by the intervening shade;
yet a note so peculiar, and withal so pleasing, that the breeze,
gifted with that love of the sound which the poet feels, penetrates
the shade in which it is entombed, and conveys it to the ear of the
listener."
Wordsworth's poetry on the emotional side (as distinguished from its
mystical or its patriotic aspects) could hardly be more exactly
described than in the above sentence. For while there are few poems
of his which could be read to a mixed audience with the certainty of
producing an immediate impression; yet on the other hand all the
best ones gain in an unusual degree by repeated study; and this Is
especially the case with those in which, some touch of tenderness is
enshrined in a scene of beauty, which it seems to interpret while it
is itself exalted by it. Such a poem is _Stepping Westward_, where
the sense of sudden fellowship, and the quaint greeting beneath the
glowing sky, seem to link man's momentary wanderings with the cosmic
spectacles of heaven. Such are the lines where all the wild romance
of Highland scenery, the forlornness of the solitary vales, pours
itself through the lips of the maiden singing at her work, "as if
her song could have no ending,"--
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! For the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
Such--and with how subtle a difference!--is the _Fragment_ in which
a "Spirit of noonday" wears on his face the silent joy of Nature in
her own recesses, undisturbed by beast, or bird, or man,--
Nor ever was a cloudless sky
So steady or so fair.
And such are the poems--_We are Seven, The Pet Lamb_, [6]
[Footnote 6: The _Pet Lamb_ is probably the only poem of
Wordsworth's which can be charged with having done moral injury, and
that to a single individual alone. "Barbara Lewthwaite," says
Wordsworth, in 1843, "was not, in fact, the child whom I had seen and
overheard as engaged in the poem. I chose the name for reasons
implied in the above," (i.e. an account of her remarkable beauty),
"and will here add a caution against the use of names of living
persons. Within a few months after the publication of this poem I
was much, surprised, and more hurt, to find it in a child's
school-book, which, having been compiled by Lindley Murray, had come
into use at Grasmere School, where Barbara was a pupil. And, alas, I
had the mortification of hearing that she was very vain of being
thus distinguished; and in after-life she used to say that she
remembered the incident, and what I said to her upon the occasion."]
_Louisa, The Two April Mornings_--in which the beauty of rustic
children melts, as it were, into Nature herself, and the--
Blooming girl whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew
becomes the impersonation of the season's early joy. We may apply,
indeed, to all these girls Wordsworth's description of leverets
playing on a lawn, and call them--
Separate creatures in their several gifts
Abounding, but so fashioned that in all
That Nature prompts them to display, their looks,
Their starts of motion and their fits of rest,
An undistinguishable style appears
And character of gladness, as if Spring
Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit
Of the rejoicing Morning were their own.
My limits forbid me to dwell longer on these points. The passages
which I have been citing have been for the most part selected as
illustrating the novelty and subtlety of Wordsworth's view of Nature.
But it will now be sufficiently clear how continually a strain of
human interest is interwoven with the delight derived from impersonal
things.
Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers:
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.
The poet of the _Waggoner_--who, himself a habitual water-drinker,
has so glowingly described the glorification which the prospect of
nature receives in a half-intoxicated brain--may justly claim that
he can enter into all genuine pleasures, even of an order which he
declines for himself. With anything that is false or artificial he
cannot sympathize, nor with such faults as baseness, cruelty, rancour;
which seem contrary to human nature itself; but in dealing with
faults of mere _weakness_ he is far less strait-laced than many less
virtuous men.
He had, in fact, a reverence for human beings as such which enabled
him to face even their frailties without alienation; and there was
something in his own happy exemption from such falls which touched
him into regarding men less fortunate rather with pity than disdain.
Because the unstained, the clear, the crystalline,
Have ever in them something of benign.
His comment on Barns's _Tam o' Shanter_ will perhaps surprise some
readers who are accustomed to think of him only in his didactic
attitude.
"It is the privilege of poetic genius, he says, to catch, under
certain restrictions of which perhaps at the time of its being
exerted it is but dimly conscious, a spirit of pleasure wherever it
can be found, in the walks of nature, and in the business of men.
The poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the
felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes
the fairer aspects of war, nor does he shrink from the company of
the passion of love though immoderate--from convivial pleasures
though intemperate--nor from the presence of war, though savage, and
recognized as the handmaid of desolation. Frequently and admirably
has Burns given way to these impulses of nature, both with
references to himself and in describing the condition of others. Who,
but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art,
ever read without delight the picture which he has drawn of the
convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o' Shanter? The
poet fears not to tell the reader in the outset that his hero was a
desperate and sottish drunkard, whose excesses were as frequent as
his opportunities. This reprobate sits down to his cups while the
storm is roaring, and heaven and earth are in confusion; the night
is driven on by song and tumultuous noise, laughter and jest thicken
as the beverage improves upon the palate--conjugal fidelity archly
bends to the service of general benevolence--selfishness is not
absent, but wearing the mask of social cordiality; and while these
various elements of humanity are blended into one proud and happy
composition of elated spirits, the anger of the tempest without
doors only heightens and sets off the enjoyment within. I pity him
who cannot perceive that in all this, though there was no moral
purpose, there is a moral effect."
Kings may be blest, but Tarn was glorious,
O'er a' the ills of life victorious.
"What a lesson do these words convey of charitable indulgence for
the vicious habits of the principal actor in the scene, and of those
who resemble him! Men who to the rigidly virtuous are objects almost
of loathing, and whom therefore they cannot serve! The poet,
penetrating the unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has
unveiled with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and
feeling, that often bind these beings to practices productive of so
much unhappiness to themselves, and to those whom it is their duty
to cherish; and, as far as he puts the reader into possession of
this intelligent sympathy, he qualifies him for exercising a
salutary influence over the minds of those who are thus deplorably
enslaved."
The reverence for man as man, the sympathy for him in his primary
relations and his essential being, of which these comments on
_Tam o' Shanter_ form so remarkable an example, is a habit of
thought too ingrained in all Wordsworth's works to call for specific
illustration. The figures of _Michael_, of _Matthew_, of the
_Brothers_, of the hero of the _Excursion_, and even of the _Idiot Boy_,
suggest themselves at once in this connexion. But it should be noted
in each case how free is the poet's view from any idealization of
the poorer classes as such, from the ascription of imaginary merits
to an unknown populace which forms the staple of so much
revolutionary eloquence. These poems, while they form the most
convincing rebuke to the exclusive pride of the rich and great, are
also a stern and strenuous incentive to the obscure and lowly. They
are pictures of the poor man's life as it is,--pictures as free as
Crabbe's from the illusion of sentiment,--but in which the delight
of mere observation (which in Crabbe predominates) is subordinated
to an intense sympathy with all such capacities of nobleness and
tenderness as are called out by the stress and pressure of penury or
woe. They form for the folk of northern England (as the works of
Burns and Scott for the Scottish folk) a gallery of figures that are
modelled, as it were, both from without and from within; by one with
experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate,
and yet with an insight which could draw from that simple life
lessons to itself unknown. We may almost venture to generalize our
statement further, and to assert that no writer since Shakespeare
has left us so true a picture of the British nation. In Milton,
indeed, we have the characteristic English spirit at a whiter glow;
but it is the spirit of the scholar only, or of the ruler, not of the
peasant, the woman, or the child, Wordsworth gives us that spirit as
it is diffused among shepherds and husbandmen,--as it exists in
obscurity and at peace. And they who know what makes the strength of
nations need wish nothing better than that the temper which he saw
and honoured among the Cumbrian dales should be the temper of all
England, now and for ever.
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