Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers
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F. W. H. Myers >> Wordsworth
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If, then, surrounding influences make so decisive a difference in
man's moral lot, what are we to say of those who never have the
chance of receiving those influences aright; who are reared, with
little parental supervision, in smoky cities, and spend their lives
in confined and monotonous labour? One of the most impressive
passages in the _Excursion_ is an indignant complaint of the
injustice thus done to the factory child. Wordsworth was no
fanatical opponent of manufacturing industry. He had intimate
friends among manufacturers; and in one of his letters he speaks of
promising himself much pleasure from witnessing the increased regard
for the welfare of factory hands of which one of these friends had
set the example. But he never lost sight of the fact that the life
of the mill-hand is an anomaly--is a life not in the order of nature,
and which requires to be justified by manifest necessity and by
continuous care. The question to what extent we may acquiesce in the
continuance of a low order of human beings, existing for our
enjoyment rather than for their own, may be answered with
plausibility in very different tones; from the Communist who cannot
rest content in the inferiority of any one man's position to any
other's, to the philosopher who holds that mankind has made the most
eminent progress when a few chosen individuals have been supported
in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs or slaves. Wordsworth's
answer to this question is at once conservative and philanthropic.
He holds to the distinction of classes, and thus admits a difference
in the fulness and value of human lots. But he will not consent to
any social arrangement which implies a necessary _moral_ inferiority
in any section of the body politic; and he esteems it the
statesman's first duty to provide that all citizens shall be placed
under conditions of life which, however humble, shall not be
unfavourable to virtue.
His views on national education, which at first sight appear so
inconsistent, depend on the same conception of national welfare.
Wordsworth was one of the earliest and most emphatic proclaimers of
the duty of the State in this respect. The lines in which he insists
that every child ought to be taught to read are, indeed, often quoted
as an example of the moralizing baldness of much of his blank verse.
But, on the other hand, when a great impulse was given to education
(1820-30) by Bell and Lancaster, by the introduction of what was
called the "Madras system" of tuition by pupil-teachers, and the
spread of infant schools, Wordsworth was found unexpectedly in the
opposite camp. Considering as he did all mental requirements as
entirely subsidiary to moral progress, and in themselves of very
little value, he objected to a system which, instead of confining
itself to reading--that indispensable channel of moral nutriment--
aimed at communicating knowledge as varied and advanced as time and
funds would allow. He objected to the dissociation of school and
home life--to that relegation of domestic interests and duties to
the background, which large and highly-organized schools, and
teachers much above the home level, must necessarily involve. And
yet more strongly, and, as it may still seem to many minds, with
convincing reason, he objected to an eleemosynary system, which
"precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature
can be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self-denial."
"The Spartan," he said, "and other ancient communities, might
disregard domestic ties, because they had the substitution of country,
which we cannot have. Our course is to supplant domestic attachments,
without the possibility of substituting others more capacious. What
can grow out of it but selfishness?" The half-century which has
elapsed since Wordsworth wrote these words has evidently altered the
state of the question. It has impressed on us the paramount necessity
of national education, for reasons political and social too well
known to repeat. But it may be feared that it has also shifted the
incidence of Wordsworth's arguments in a more sinister manner, by
vastly increasing the number of those homes where domestic influence
of the kind which the poet saw around him at Rydal is altogether
wanting and school is the best avenue even to moral well-being.
"Heaven and hell," he writes in 1808, "are scarcely more different
from each other than Sheffield and Manchester, &c., differ from the
plains and valleys of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or Westmoreland."
It is to be feared, indeed, that even "the plains and valleys of
Surrey and Essex" contain many cottages whose spiritual and sanitary
conditions fall far short of the poet's ideal. But it is of course
in the great and growing centres of population that the dangers
which he dreads have come upon us in their most aggravated form. And
so long as there are in England so many homes to which parental care
and the influences of Nature are alike unknown, no protest in favour
of the paramount importance of these primary agencies in the
formation of character can be regarded as altogether out of date.
With such severe and almost prosaic themes is the greater part of
the _Excursion_ occupied. Yet the poem is far from being composed
throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral made;" its
arguments and theories have lain long in Wordsworth's mind, and have
accreted to themselves a rich investiture of observation and feeling.
Some of its passages rank among the poet's highest flights. Such is
the passage in Book I describing the boy's rapture at sunrise; and
the picture of a sunset at the close of the same book. Such is the
opening of Book IV; and the passage describing the wild joy of
roaming through a mountain storm; and the metaphor in the same book
which compares the mind's power of transfiguring the obstacles which
beset her, with the glory into which the moon incorporates the
umbrage that would intercept her beams.
It would scarcely be possible at the present day that a work
containing such striking passages, and so much of substance and
elevation--however out of keeping it might be with the ruling taste
of the day--should appear without receiving careful study from many
quarters and warm appreciation in some recognized organs of opinion.
Criticism in Wordsworth's day was both less competent and less
conscientious, and the famous "This will never do" of Jeffrey in the
_Edinburgh Review_ was by no means an extreme specimen of the
general tone in which the work was received. The judgment of the
reviewers influenced popular taste; and the book was as decided a
pecuniary failure as Wordsworth's previous ventures had been.
And here, perhaps, is a fit occasion to speak of that strangely
violent detraction and abuse which formed so large an ingredient in
Wordsworth's life,--or rather, of that which is the only element of
permanent interest in such a matter,--his manner of receiving and
replying to it. No writer, probably, who has afterwards achieved a
reputation at all like Wordsworth's, has been so long represented by
reviewers as purely ridiculous. And in Wordsworth's manner of
acceptance of this fact we may discern all the strength, and
something of the stiffness, of his nature; we may recognize an almost,
but not quite, ideal attitude under the shafts of unmerited obloquy.
For he who thus is arrogantly censured should remember both the
dignity and the frailty of man; he should wholly forgive, and almost
wholly forget; but, nevertheless, should retain such serviceable
hints as almost any criticism, however harsh or reckless, can afford,
and go on his way with no bitter broodings, but yet (to use
Wordsworth's expression in another context) "with a melancholy in
the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought, a
steady remonstrance, and a high resolve."
How far his own self-assertion may becomingly be carried in reply,
is another and a delicate question. There is almost necessarily
something distasteful to us not only in self-praise but even in a
thorough self-appreciation. We desire of the ideal character that
his faculties of admiration should be, as it were, absorbed in an
eager perception of the merits of others,--that a kind of shrinking
delicacy should prevent him from appraising his own achievements
with a similar care. Often, indeed, there is something most winning
in a touch of humorous blindness: "Well, Miss Sophia, and how do
_you_ like the _Lady of the Lake_?" "Oh, I've not read it; papa
says there's nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry."
But there are circumstances under which this graceful absence of
self-consciousness can no longer be maintained. When a man believes
that he has a message to deliver that vitally concerns mankind, and
when that message is received with contempt and apathy, he is
necessarily driven back upon himself; he is forced to consider
whether what he has to say is after all so important, and whether
his mode of saying it be right and adequate. A necessity of this
kind was forced upon both Shelley and Wordsworth. Shelley--the very
type of self-forgetful enthusiasm--was driven at last by the world's
treatment of him into a series of moods sometimes bitter and
sometimes self-distrustful--into a sense of aloofness and detachment
from the mass of men, which the poet who would fain improve and
exalt them should do his utmost not to feel. On Wordsworth's more
stubborn nature the effect produced by many years of detraction was
of a different kind. Naturally introspective, he was driven by abuse
and ridicule into taking stock of himself more frequently and more
laboriously than ever. He formed an estimate of himself and his
writings which was, on the whole, (as will now be generally admitted,)
a just one; and this view he expressed when occasion offered--in
sober language, indeed, but with calm conviction, and with precisely
the same air of speaking from undoubted knowledge as when he
described the beauty of Cumbrian mountains or the virtue of Cumbrian
homes.
"It is impossible," he wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807,
"that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the
immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the public.
I do not here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and
all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any
merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute,
honest ignorance in which all worldlings, of every rank and situation,
must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and
images on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I
have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do
with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from
street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox,
Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the
borough of Honiton? In a word--for I cannot stop to make my way
through the harry of images that present themselves to me--what have
they to do with endless talking about things that nobody cares
anything for, except as far as their own vanity is concerned, and
this with persons they care nothing for, but as their vanity or
_selfishness_ is concerned? What have they to do (to say all at
once) with a life without love? In such a life there can be no
thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain), but as far
as we have love and admiration.
"It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be any genuine
enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons
who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world--among
those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of
consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one; because
to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is
to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.
"Upon this I shall insist elsewhere; at present let me confine
myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear friend, as
easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not
yourself upon their present reception. Of what moment is that
compared with what I trust is their destiny?--To console the
afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier;
to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think,
and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively and securely
virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully
perform, long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us,) are
mouldered in our graves."
Such words as these come with dignity from the mouth of a man like
Wordsworth when he has been, as it were, driven to bay,--when he is
consoling an intimate friend, distressed at the torrent of ridicule
which, as she fears, must sweep his self-confidence and his purposes
away. He may be permitted to assure her that "my ears are stone-dead
to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty
stings," and to accompany his assurance with a reasoned statement of
the grounds of his unshaken hopes.
We feel, however, that such an expression of self-reliance on the
part of a great man should be accompanied with some proof that no
conceit or impatience is mixed with his steadfast calm. If he
believes the public to be really unable to appreciate himself, he
must show no surprise when they admire his inferiors; he must
remember that the case would be far worse if they admired no one at
all. Nor must he descend from his own unpopular merits on the plea
that after catching the public attention by what is bad he will
retain it for what is good. If he is so sure that he is in the right
he can afford to wait and let the world come round to him.
Wordsworth's conduct satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed,
curious to observe how much abuse this inoffensive recluse received,
and how absolutely he avoided returning it, Byron, for instance,
must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far more injurious
to mankind than "a drowsy frowsy poem, called the _Excursion_,"
could possibly appear. But, except in one or two private letters,
Wordsworth has never alluded to Byron at all. Shelley's lampoon--a
singular instance of the random blows of a noble spirit, striking at
what, if better understood, it would eagerly have revered--
Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor did the violent attacks of
the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly Reviews_ provoke him to any
rejoinder. To "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"--leagued against
him as their common prey--he opposed a dignified silence; and the
only moral injury which he derived from their assaults lay in that
sense of the absence of trustworthy external criticism which led him
to treat everything which he had once written down as if it were a
special revelation, and to insist with equal earnestness on his most
trifling as on his most important pieces--on _Goody Blake_ and
_The Idiot Boy_ as on _The Cuckoo_ or _The Daffodils_. The sense
of humour is apt to be the first grace which is lost under
persecution; and much of Wordsworth's heaviness and stiff exposition
of commonplaces is to be traced to a feeling, which he could
scarcely avoid, that "all day long he had lifted up his voice to a
perverse and gainsaying generation."
To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by these adverse criticisms
he was justly sensible. He was far from expecting, or even desiring,
to be widely popular or to make a rapid fortune; but he felt that
the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that the devotion of years
to literature should have been met with some moderate degree of the
usual form of recognition which the world accords to those who work
for it. In 1820 he speaks of "the whole of my returns from the
writing trade not amounting to seven-score pounds," and as late as
1843, when at the height of his fame, he was not ashamed of
confessing the importance which he had always attached to this
particular.
"So sensible am I," he says, "of the deficiencies in all that I write,
and so far does everything that I attempt fall short of what I wish
it to be, that even private publication, if such a term may be
allowed, requires more resolution than I can command. I have written
to give vent to my own mind, and not without hope that, some time or
other, kindred minds might benefit by my labours; but I am inclined
to believe I should never have ventured to send forth any verses of
mine to the world, if it had not been done on the pressure of
personal occasions. Had I been a rich man, my productions, like this
_Epistle_, the _Tragedy of the Borderers_, &c., would most likely
have been confined to manuscript."
An interesting passage from an unpublished letter of Miss Wordsworth's,
on the _White Doe of Rylstone_, confirms this statement:--
"My brother was very much pleased with your frankness in
telling us that you did not perfectly like his poem. He wishes
to know what your feelings were--whether the tale itself did
not interest you--or whether you could not enter into the
conception of Emily's character, or take delight in that visionary
communion which is supposed to have existed between her and
the Doe. Do not fear to give him pain. He is far too much
accustomed to be abused to receive pain from it, (at least as far
as he himself is concerned.) My reason for asking you these
questions is, that some of our friends, who are equal admirers of
the _White Doe_ and of my brother's published poems, think
that _this_ poem will sell on account of the story; that is, that
the story will bear up those points which are above the level of the
public taste; whereas the two last volumes--except by a few
solitary individuals, who are passionately devoted to my
brother's works--are abused by wholesale."
"Now as his sole object in publishing this poem at present
would be for the sake of the money, he would not publish it if
he did not think, from the several judgments of his friends,
that it would be likely to have a sale. He has no pleasure in
publishing--he even detests it; and if it were not that he is
_not_ over wealthy, he would leave all his works to be
published after his death. William himself is sure that the
_White Doe_ will not sell or be admired, except by a very few,
at first; and only yields to Mary's entreaties and mine. We are
determined, however, if we are deceived this time, to let him
have his own way in future."
These passages must be taken, no doubt, as representing one aspect
only of the poet's impulses in the matter. With his deep conviction
of the world's real, though unrecognized, need of a pure vein of
poetry, we can hardly imagine him as permanently satisfied to defer
his own contribution till after his death. Yet we may certainly
believe that the need of money helped him to overcome much
diffidence as to publication; and we may discern something dignified
in his frank avowal of this when it is taken in connexion with his
scrupulous abstinence from any attempt to win the suffrages of the
multitude by means unworthy of his high vocation. He could never,
indeed, have written poems which could have vied in immediate
popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But the criticisms on the
first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ must have shown him that a
slight alteration of method,--nay even the excision of a few pages
in each volume, pages certain to be loudly objected to,--would have
made a marked difference in the sale and its proceeds. From this
point of view, even poems which we may now feel to have been
needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a certain impressiveness,
when we recognize that the theory which demanded their composition
was one which their author was willing to uphold at the cost of some
years of real physical privation, and of the postponement for a
generation of his legitimate fame.
CHAPTER IX.
POETIC DICTION--"DAODAMIA"--"EVENING ODE."
The _Excursion_ appeared in 1814, and in the course of the next year
Wordsworth republished his minor poems, so arranged as to indicate
the faculty of the mind which he considered to have been predominant
in the composition of each. To most readers this disposition has
always seemed somewhat arbitrary; and it was once suggested to
Wordsworth that a chronological arrangement would be better. The
manner in which Wordsworth met this proposal indicated the limit of
his absorption in himself--his real desire only to dwell on his own
feelings in such a way as might make them useful to others. For he
rejected the plan as too egotistical--as emphasizing the succession
of moods in the poet's mind, rather than the lessons which those
moods could teach. His objection points, at any rate, to a real
danger which any man's simplicity of character incurs by dwelling
too attentively on the changing phases of his own thought. But after
the writer's death the historical spirit will demand that poems,
like other artistic products, should be disposed for the most part
in the order of time.
In a Preface to this edition of 1815, and a Supplementary Essay, he
developed the theory on poetry already set forth in a well-known
preface to the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_. Much of the
matter of these essays, received at the time with contemptuous
aversion, is now accepted as truth; and few compositions of equal
length contain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection.
It is only when they generalize too confidently that they are in
danger of misleading us; for all expositions of the art and practice
of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts,
is essentially a "mystery." Its charm depends upon qualities which
we can neither define accurately nor reduce to rule nor create again
at pleasure. Mankind, however, are unwilling to admit this; and they
endeavour from time to time to persuade themselves that they have
discovered the rules which will enable them to produce the desired
effect. And so much of the effect _can_ thus be reproduced, that it
is often possible to believe for a time that the problem has been
solved. Pope, to take the instance which was prominent in
Wordsworth's mind, was, by general admission, a poet. But his
success seemed to depend on imitable peculiarities; and Pope's
imitators were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say
where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this imitative
school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they
wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A
reaction succeeded, which asserted that poetry depends on emotion
and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which
frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, (especially in his
_Sir Eustace Grey_), had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this
reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at
times themselves attempted to copy the very style which they were
superseding.
Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but only in
the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry soon became to
him the expression of his own deep and simple feelings; and then he
rebelled against rhetoric and unreality and found for himself a
director and truer voice, "I have proposed to myself to imitate and,
as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.... I have
taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction as
others ordinarily take to produce it." And he erected this practice
into a general principle in the following passage:--
"I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither is,
nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose
and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance
between poetry and painting, and, accordingly, we call them sisters;
but where shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to
typify the affinity between metrical and prose composition? If it be
affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves
constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on
the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and
paves the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind
voluntarily admits, I answer that the language of such poetry as I
am recommending is, as far as is possible, a selection of the
language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is
made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction
far greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely
separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary
life; and if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a
dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the
gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we
hare? Whence is it to come? And where is it to exist?"
There is a definiteness and simplicity about this description
of poetry which may well make us wonder why this precious thing
(producible, apparently, as easily as Pope's imitators supposed,
although by means different from theirs) is not offered to us by
more persons, and of better quality. And it will not be hard to show
that a good poetical style must possess certain characteristics,
which, although something like them must exist in a good prose style,
are carried in poetry to a pitch so much higher as virtually to need
a specific faculty for their successful production.
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