Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers
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F. W. H. Myers >> Wordsworth
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Our discussion of Wordsworth's form of Natural Religion has led us
back by no forced transition to the simple life which he described
and shared. I return to the story of his later years,--if that be
called a story which derives no interest from incident or passion,
and dwells only on the slow broodings of a meditative soul.
CHAPTER XI
ITALIAN TOUR--ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS--POLITICAL VIEWS--LAUREATESHIP.
Wordsworth was fond of travelling, and indulged this taste whenever
he could afford it. Comparing himself and Southey, he says in 1843:
"My lamented friend Southey used to say that had he been a Papist,
the course of life which in all probability would have been his
was that of a Benedictine monk, in a convent furnished with
an inexhaustible library. _Books_ were, in fact, his passion;
and _wandering_, I can with truth affirm, was mine; but this
propensity in me was happily counteracted by inability from want of
fortune to fulfil my wishes." We find him, however, frequently able
to contrive a change of scene. His Swiss tour in 1790, his residence
in France in 1791-2, his residence in Germany, 1798-9, have been
already touched on. Then came a short visit to France in August 1802,
which produced the sonnets on Westminster Bridge and Calais Beach.
The tour in Scotland which was so fertile in poetry took place in
1803. A second tour in Scotland, in 1814, produced the _Brownie's
Cell_ and a few other pieces. And in July, 1820, he set out with his
wife and sister and two or three other friends for a tour through
Switzerland and Italy.
This tour produced a good deal of poetry; and here and there are
touches which recall the old inspiration. Such is the comparison of
the clouds about the Engelberg to hovering angels; and such the
description of the eclipse falling upon the population of statues
which throng the pinnacles of Milan Cathedral. But for the most part
the poems relating to this tour have an artificial look; the
sentiments in the vale of Chamouni seem to have been laboriously
summoned for the occasion; and the poet's admiration for the Italian
maid and the Helvetian girl is a mere shadow of the old feeling for
the Highland girl, to whom, in fact, he seems obliged to recur in
order to give reality to his new emotion.
To conclude the subject of Wordsworth's travels, I will mention here
that in 1823 he made a tour in Holland, and in 1824 in North Wales,
where his sonnet to the torrent at the Devil's Bridge recalls the
Swiss scenery seen in his youth with vigour and dignity. In 1828 he
made another excursion in Belgium with Coleridge, and in 1829 he
visited Ireland with his friend Mr. Marshall. Neither of these tours
was productive. In 1831 he paid a visit with his daughter to Sir
Walter Scott at Abbotsford, before his departure to seek health in
Italy. Scott received them cordially, and had strength to take them
to the Yarrow. "Of that excursion," says Wordsworth, "the verses
_Yarrow Revisited_ are a memorial. On our return in the afternoon
we had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. A rich, but
sad light, of rather a purple than a golden hue, was spread over the
Eildon hills at that moment; and, thinking it probable that it might
be the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream (the Tweed), I was
not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet
beginning, _A trouble not of clouds nor weeping rain_. At noon on
Thursday we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day Sir
Walter and I had a serious conversation, _tete-a-tete_, when he
spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, upon the whole, he had
led. He had written in my daughter's album, before he came into the
breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her; and,
while putting the book into her hand, in his own study, standing by
his desk, he said to her, in my presence, 'I should not have done
anything of this kind but for your father's sake; they are probably
the last verses I shall ever write.' They show how much his mind was
impaired: not by the strain of thought, but by the execution, some
of the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding
rhymes. One letter, the initial S., had been omitted in the spelling
of his own name."
There was another tour in Scotland in 1833, which produced _Memorials_
of little poetic value. And in 1837 he made a long tour in Italy
with Mr. Crabb Robinson. But the poems which record this tour
indicate a mind scarcely any longer susceptible to any vivid stimulus
except from accustomed objects and ideas. The _Musings near
Aquapendente_ are musings on Scott and Helvellyn; the _Pine Tree of
Monte Mario_ is interesting because--Sir George Beaumont has saved
it from destruction; the _Cuckoo at Laverna_ brings all childhood
back into his heart. "I remember perfectly well," says Crabb Robinson,
"that I heard the cuckoo at Laverna twice before he heard it; and
that it absolutely fretted him that my ear was first favoured; and
that he exclaimed with delight, 'I hear it! I hear it!'" This was
his last foreign tour; nor, indeed, are these tours very noticeable
except as showing that he was not blindly wedded to his own lake
scenery; that his admiration could face comparisons, and keep the
same vividness when he was fresh from other orders of beauty.
The productions of these later years took for the most part a
didactic rather than a descriptive form. In the volume entitled
_Poems chiefly of Early and Later Years_, published in 1842, were
many hortatory or ecclesiastical pieces of inferior merit, and among
them various additions to the _Ecclesiastical Sketches_, a series of
sonnets begun in 1821, but which he continued to enlarge, spending
on them much of the energies of his later years. And although it is
only in a few instances--as in the description of King's College,
Cambridge--that these sonnets possess force or charm enough to rank
them high as poetry, yet they assume a certain value when we consider
not so much their own adequacy as the greater inadequacy of all
rival attempts in the same direction.
The Episcopalian Churchman, in this country or in the United States,
will certainly nowhere find presented to him in poetical form so
dignified and comprehensive a record of the struggles and the glories,
of the vicissitudes and the edification, of the great body to which
he belongs. Next to the Anglican liturgy--though next at an immense
interval--these sonnets may take rank as the authentic exposition of
her historic being--an exposition delivered with something of her
own unadorned dignity, and in her moderate and tranquil tone.
I would not, however, seem to claim too much. The religion which
these later poems of Wordsworth's embody is rather the stately
tradition of a great Church than the pangs and aspirations of a holy
soul. There is little in them--whether for good or evil--of the
stuff of which a Paul, a Francis, a Dominic are made. That fervent
emotion--akin to the passion of love rather than to intellectual or
moral conviction--finds voice through singers of a very different
tone. It is fed by an inward anguish, and felicity which, to those
who have not felt them, seem as causeless as a lover's moods; by
wrestlings not with flesh and blood; by nights of despairing
self-abasement; by ecstasies of an incommunicable peace. How great
the gulf between Wordsworth and George Herbert!--Herbert "offering
at heaven, growing and groaning thither,"--and Wordsworth, for whom
the gentle regret of the lines,--
Me this unchartered freedom tires,
I feel the weight of chance desires,--
forms his most characteristic expression of the self-judgment of the
solitary soul.
Wordsworth accomplished one reconciliation of great importance to
mankind. He showed, as plainly in his way as Socrates had shown it
long ago, with what readiness a profoundly original conception of
the scheme of things will shape itself into the mould of an
established and venerable faith. He united the religion of the
philosopher with the religion of the churchman; one rarer thing he
could not do; he could not unite the religion of the philosopher
with the religion of the saint. It is, indeed, evident that the most
inspiring feeling which breathes through Wordsworth's ecclesiastical
pieces is not of a doctrinal, not even of a spiritual kind. The
ecclesiastical as well as the political sentiments of his later
years are prompted mainly by the admiring love with which he
regarded the structure of English society--seen as that society was
by him in its simplest and most poetic aspect. This concrete
attachment to the scenes about him had always formed an important
element in his character. Ideal politics, whether in Church or State,
had never occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its
informing principles embodied in the England of his own day. The
sonnet _On a Parsonage in Oxfordshire_ well illustrates the loving
minuteness with which he draws out the beauty and fitness of the
established scheme of things,--the power of English country life to
satisfy so many moods of feeling.
The country-seat of the English squire or nobleman has become--may
we not say?--one of the world's chosen types of a happy and a
stately home. And Wordsworth, especially in his poems which deal
with Coleorton, has shown how deeply he felt the sway of such a
home's hereditary majesty, its secure and tranquillizing charm. Yet
there are moods when the heart which deeply feels the inequality of
human lots turns towards a humbler ideal. There are moments when the
broad park, the halls and towers, seem no longer the fitting frame
of human greatness, but rather an isolating solitude, an unfeeling
triumph over the poor.
In such a mood of mind it will not always satisfy us to dwell, as
Wordsworth has so often done, on the virtue and happiness that
gather round a cottage hearth,--which we must, after all, judge by a
somewhat less exacting standard. We turn rather to the "refined
rusticity" of an English Parsonage home.
Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends,
Is marked by no distinguishable line;
The turf unites, the pathways intertwine,--
and the clergyman's abode has but so much of dignity as befits the
minister of the Church which is the hamlet's centre; enough to
suggest the old Athenian boast of beauty without extravagance, and
study without effeminacy; enough to show that dwellings where not
this life but another is the prevailing thought and care, yet need
not lack the graces of culture, nor the loves of home.
The sonnet on _Seathwaite Chapel_, and the life of Robert Walker,
the incumbent of Seathwaite, which is given at length in the notes
to the sonnets on the Duddon, afford a still more characteristic
instance of the clerical ideal towards which Wordsworth naturally
turned. In Robert Walker he had a Cumbrian statesman turned into a
practical saint; and he describes him with a gusto in which his
laboured sonnets on _Laud_ or on _Dissensions_ are wholly deficient.
It was in social and political matters that the consequences of this
idealizing view of the facts around him in Cumberland were most
apparent. Take education, for example. Wordsworth, as has been
already stated, was one of the earliest and most impressive
assertors of the national duty of teaching every English child to
read. He insists on this with a prosaic earnestness which places
several pages of the _Excursion_ among what may be called the
standing bugbears which his poems offer to the inexperienced reader.
And yet as soon as, through the exertions of Bell and Lancaster,
there seems to be some chance of really educating the poor, Dr. Bell,
whom Coleridge fondly imagines as surrounded in heaven by multitudes
of grateful angels, is to Wordsworth a name of horror. The
mistresses trained on his system are called "Dr. Bell's sour-looking
teachers in petticoats." And the instruction received in these
new-fangled schools is compared to "the training that fits a boxer
for victory in the ring." The reason of this apparent inconsistency
is not far to seek. Wordsworth's eyes were fixed on the village life
around him. Observation of that life impressed on him the imperative
necessity of instruction in reading. But it was from a moral, rather
than an intellectual point of view that he regarded it as needful,
and, this opening into the world of ideas once secured, he held that
the cultivation of the home affections and home duties was all that
was needed beyond. And thus the Westmoreland dame, "in her summer
seat in the garden, and in winter by the fireside," was elevated
into the unexpected position of the ideal instructress of youth.
Conservatism of this kind could provoke nothing but a sympathetic
smile. The case was different when the same conservative--even
retrograde--tendency showed itself on subjects on which
party-feeling ran high. A great part of the meditative energy of
Wordsworth's later years was absorbed by questions towards whose
solution he contributed no new element, and which filled him with
disproportionate fears. And some injustice has been done to his
memory by those who have not fully realized the predisposing causes
which were at work,--the timidity of age, and the deep-rooted
attachment to the England which he knew.
I speak of age, perhaps, somewhat prematurely, as the poet's
gradually growing conservatism culminated in his opposition to the
Catholic Relief Bill, before he was sixty years old. But there is
nothing to wonder at in the fact that the mind of a man of brooding
and solitary habits should show traces of advancing age earlier than
is the case with statesmen or men of the world, who are obliged to
keep themselves constantly alive to the ideas of the generation that
is rising around them. A deadness to new impressions, an
unwillingness to make intellectual efforts in fresh directions, a
tendency to travel the same mental pathways over and over again, and
to wear the ruts of prejudice deeper at every step; such traces of
age as these undoubtedly manifested themselves in the way in which
the poet confronted the great series of changes--Catholic
Emancipation, Reform Bill, New Poor Law, on which England entered
about the year 1829. "My sixty-second year," Wordsworth writes, in
1832, "will soon be completed; and though I have been favoured thus
far in health and strength beyond most men of my age, yet I feel its
effects upon my spirits; they sink under a pressure of apprehension
to which, at an earlier period of my life, they would probably have
been superior." To this it must be added, that the increasing
weakness of the poet's eyes seriously limited his means of
information. He had never read much contemporary literature, and he
read less than ever now. He had no fresh or comprehensive knowledge
of the general condition of the country, and he really believed in
the prognostication which was uttered by many also who did _not_
believe in it, that with the Reform Bill the England which he knew
and loved would practically disappear. But there was nothing in him
of the angry polemic, nothing of the calumnious partisan. One of the
houses where Mr. Wordsworth was most intimate and most welcome was
that of a reforming member of parliament, who was also a manufacturer,
thus belonging to the two classes for which the poet had the
greatest abhorrence. But the intimacy was never for a moment shaken,
and indeed in that house Mr. Wordsworth expounded the ruinous
tendency of Reform and manufactures with even unusual copiousness,
on account of the admiring affection with which he felt himself
surrounded. The tone in which he spoke was never such as could give
pain or excite antagonism; and--if I may be pardoned for descending
to a detail which well illustrates my position--the only rejoinder
which these diatribes provoked was that the poet on his arrival was
sometimes decoyed into uttering them to the younger members of the
family, whose time was of less value, so as to set his mind free to
return to those topics of more permanent interest where his
conversation kept to the last all that tenderness, nobility, wisdom,
which in that family, as in many others familiar with the celebrated
persons of that day, won for him a regard and a reverence such as
was accorded to no other man.
To those, indeed, who realized how deeply he felt these changes,--
how profoundly his notion of national happiness was bound up with a
lovely and vanishing ideal,--the prominent reflection was that the
hopes and principles which maintained through all an underlying hope
and trust in the future must have been potent indeed. It was no easy
optimism which prompted the lines written in 1837--one of his latest
utterances--in which he speaks to himself with strong self-judgment
and resolute hope. On reading them one shrinks from dwelling longer
upon an old man's weakness and a brave man's fears.
If this great world of joy and pain
Revolve in one sure track;
If Freedom, set, revive again,
And Virtue, flown, come back,--
Woe to the purblind crew who fill
The heart with each day's care,
Nor learn, from past and future, skill
To bear and to forbear.
The poet had also during these years more of private sorrow than his
tranquil life had for a long time experienced. In 1832 his sister
had a most serious illness, which kept her for many months in a
state of great prostration, and left her, when the physical symptoms
abated, with her intellect painfully impaired, and her bright nature
permanently overclouded. Coleridge, too, was nearing his end.
"He and my beloved sister," writes Wordsworth, in 1832, "are the two
beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, and they are now
proceeding, as it were, _pari passu_, along the path of sickness, I
will not say towards the grave, but I trust towards a blessed
immortality."
In July, 1834, "every mortal power of Coleridge was frozen at its
marvellous source," And although the early intimacy had scarcely
been maintained,--though the "comfortless and hidden well" had, for
a time at least, replaced the "living murmuring fount of love" which
used to spring beside Wordsworth's door,--yet the loss was one which
the surviving poet deeply felt. Coleridge was the only contemporary
man of letters with whom Wordsworth's connexion had been really close;
and when Wordsworth is spoken of as one of a group of poets
exemplifying in various ways the influence of the Revolution, it is
not always remembered how very little he had to do with the other
famous men of his time. Scott and Southey were valued friends, but
he thought little of Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Byron
and Shelley he seems scarcely to have read; and he failed altogether
to appreciate Keats. But to Coleridge his mind constantly reverted;
he called him "the most wonderful man he had ever known," and he
kept him as the ideal auditor of his own poems, long after Coleridge
had listened to the _Prelude_,--
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.
In 1836, moreover, died one for whom Coleridge, as well as Wordsworth,
had felt a very high respect and regard--Sarah Hutchinson, Mrs.
Wordsworth's sister, and long the inmate of Wordsworth's household.
This most valued friend had been another instance of the singular
good fortune which attended Wordsworth in his domestic connexions;
and when she was laid in Grasmere churchyard, the stone above her
tomb expressed the wish of the poet and his wife that, even as her
remains were laid beside their dead children's, so their own bodies
also might be laid by hers.
And now, while the inner circle of friends and relations began, to
pass away, the outer circle of admirers was rapidly spreading.
Between the years 1830 and 1840 Wordsworth passed from the apostle
of a clique into the most illustrious man of letters in England. The
rapidity of this change was not due to any remarkable accident, nor
to the appearance of any new work of genius. It was merely an
extreme instance of what must always occur where an author, running
counter to the fashion of his age, has to create his own public in
defiance of the established critical powers. The disciples whom he
draws round him are for the most part young; the established
authorities are for the most part old; so that by the time that the
original poet is about sixty years old, most of his admirers will be
about forty, and most of his critics will be dead. His admirers now
become his accredited critics; his works are widely introduced to the
public; and if they are really good his reputation is secure. In
Wordsworth's case the detractors had been unusually persistent, and
the reaction, when it came, was therefore unusually violent; it was
even somewhat factitious in its extent; and the poems were forced by
enthusiasts upon a public which was only half ripe for them. After
the poet's death a temporary counter-reaction succeeded, and his
fame is only now finding its permanent level.
Among the indications of growing popularity was the publication of
an American edition of Wordsworth's poems in 1837, by Professor Reed
of Philadelphia, with whom the poet interchanged many letters of
interest. "The acknowledgments," he says in one of these, "which I
receive from the vast continent of America are among the most
grateful that reach me. What a vast field is there open to the
English mind, acting through our noble language! Let us hope that
our authors of true genius will not be unconscious of that thought,
or inattentive to the duty which it imposes upon them, of doing their
utmost to instruct, to purify, and to elevate their readers."
But of all the manifestations of the growing honour in which
Wordsworth was held, none was more marked or welcome than the
honorary degree of D.C.L. conferred on him by the University of
Oxford in the summer of 1839. Keble, as Professor of Poetry,
introduced him in words of admiring reverence, and the enthusiasm of
the audience was such as had never been evoked in that place before,
"except upon the occasions of the visits of the Duke of Wellington."
The collocation was an interesting one. The special claim advanced
for Wordsworth by Keble in his Latin oration was "that he had shed a
celestial light upon the affections, the occupations, the piety of
the poor." And to many men besides the author of the _Christian Year_
it seemed that this striking scene was, as it were, another visible
triumph of the temper of mind which is of the essence of Christianity;
a recognition that one spirit more had become as a little child, and
had entered into the kingdom of heaven.
In October, 1842, another token of public respect was bestowed on
him in the shape of an annuity of 300L a year from the Civil List
for distinguished literary merit. "I need scarcely add," says Sir
Robert Peel, in making the offer, "that the acceptance by you of
this mark of favour from the Crown, considering the grounds on which
it is proposed, will impose no restraint upon your perfect
independence, and involve no obligation of a personal nature." In
March, 1843, came the death of Southey, and in a few days Wordsworth
received a letter from Earl De la Warr, the Lord Chamberlain,
offering him, in the most courteous terms, the office of Poet
Laureate, which, however, he respectfully declined as imposing duties,
"which, far advanced in life as I am, I cannot venture to undertake."
This letter brought a reply from the Lord Chamberlain, pressing the
office on him again, and a letter from Sir Robert Peel which gave
dignified expression to the national feeling in the matter.
"The offer," he says, "was made to you by the Lord Chamberlain, with
my entire concurrence, not for the purpose of imposing on you any
onerous or disagreeable duties, but in order to pay you that tribute
of respect which is justly due to the first of living poets. The
Queen entirely approved of the nomination, and there is one
unanimous feeling on the part of all who have heard of the proposal
(and it is pretty generally known) that there could not be a question
about the selection. Do not be deterred by the fear of any
obligations which the appointment may be supposed to imply. I will
undertake that you shall have nothing _required_ from you. But as
the Queen can select for this honourable appointment no one whose
claims for respect and honour, on account of eminence as a poet, can
be placed in competition with, yours, I trust you will not longer
hesitate to accept it."
This letter overcame the aged poet's scruples; and he filled with
silent dignity the post of Laureate till after seven years' space a
worthy successor received
This laurel greener from the brows
Of him that uttered nothing base.
CHAPTER XII.
LETTERS ON THE KENDAL AND WINDERMERE RAILWAY--CONCLUSION.
Wordsworth's appointment to the Laureateship was significant in more
ways than one. He was so much besides a poet, that his appointment
implied something of a national recognition, not only of his past
poetical achievements, but of the substantial truth of that body of
principles which through many years of neglect and ridicule he had
consistently supported. There was therefore nothing incongruous in
the fact that the only composition of any importance which
Wordsworth produced after he became Laureate was in prose--his two
letters on the projected Kendal and Windermere railway, 1844. No
topic, in fact, could have arisen on which the veteran poet could
more fitly speak with whatever authority his official spokesmanship
of the nation's higher life could give, for it was a topic with
every aspect of which he was familiar; and so far as the extension of
railways through the Lake country was defended on grounds of popular
benefit, (and not merely of commercial advantage), no one, certainly,
had shown himself more capable of estimating at their full value
such benefits as were here proposed.
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