Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers

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Once more the poet brings home to us that sense of belonging at once
to two worlds, which gives to human life so much of mysterious
solemnity.

Wings at my shoulder seem to play;
But, rooted here, I stand and gaze
On those bright steps that heavenward raise
Their practicable way.

And the poem ends--with a deep personal pathos--in an allusion,
repeated from the _Ode on Immortality_, to the light which "lay
about him in his infancy,"--the light

Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;
Which at this moment, on my waking sight
Appears to shine, by miracle restored!
My soul, though yet confined to earth,
Rejoices in a second birth;
--'Tis past, the visionary splendour fades;
And night approaches with her shades.

For those to whom the mission of Wordsworth appears before all
things as a religious one there is something solemn in the spectacle
of the seer standing at the close of his own apocalypse, with the
consciousness that the stiffening brain would never permit him to
drink again that overflowing sense of glory and revelation; never,
till he should drink it new in the kingdom of God. He lived, in fact,
through another generation of men, but the vision came to him no more.

Or if some vestige of those gleams
Survived, 'twas only in his dreams.

We look on a man's life for the most part as forming in itself a
completed drama. We love to see the interest maintained to the close,
the pathos deepened at the departing hour. To die on the same day is
the prayer of lovers, to vanish at Trafalgar is the ideal of heroic
souls. And yet--so wide and various are the issues of life--there is
a solemnity as profound in a quite different lot. For if we are
moving among eternal emotions we should have time to bear witness
that they are eternal. Even Love left desolate may feel with a proud
triumph that it could never have rooted itself so immutably amid the
joys of a visible return as it can do through the constancies of
bereavement, and the lifelong memory which is a lifelong hope. And
Vision, Revelation, Ecstasy,--it is not only while these are
kindling our way that we should speak of them to men, but rather
when they have passed from us and left us only their record in our
souls, whose permanence confirms the fiery finger which wrote it
long ago. For as the Greeks would end the first drama of a trilogy
with a hush of concentration, and with declining notes of calm, so
to us the narrowing receptivity and persistent steadfastness of age
suggest not only decay but expectancy, and not death so much as sleep;
or seem, as it were, the beginning of operations which are not
measured by our hurrying time, nor tested by any achievement to be
accomplished here.

CHAPTER X.

NATURAL RELIGION.

It will have been obvious from the preceding pages, as well as from
the tone of other criticisms on Wordsworth, that his exponents are
not content to treat his poems on Nature simply as graceful
descriptive pieces, but speak of him in terms usually reserved for
the originators of some great religious movement. "The very image of
Wordsworth," says De Quincey, for instance, "as I prefigured it to
my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St.
Paul." How was it that poems so simple in outward form that the
reviewers of the day classed them with the _Song of Sixpence_, or at
best with the _Babes in the Wood_, could affect a critic like De
Quincey,--I do not say with admiration, but with this exceptional
sense of revelation and awe?

The explanation of this anomaly lies, as is well known, in something
new and individual in the way in which Wordsworth regarded Nature;
something more or less discernible in most of his works, and
redeeming even some of the slightest of them from insignificance,
while conferring on the more serious and sustained pieces an
importance of a different order from that which attaches to even the
most brilliant productions of his contemporaries. To define with
exactness, however, what was this new element imported by our poet
into man's view of Nature is far from easy, and requires some brief
consideration of the attitude in this respect of his predecessors.

There is so much in the external world which is terrible or
unfriendly to man, that the first impression made on him by Nature
as a whole, even in temperate climates, is usually that of awfulness;
his admiration being reserved for the fragments of her which he has
utilized for his own purposes, or adorned with his own handiwork.
When Homer tells us of a place

Where even a god might gaze, and stand apart,
And feel a wondering rapture at the heart,

it is of no prospect of sea or mountain that he is speaking, but of
a garden where everything is planted in rows, and there is a
never-ending succession of pears and figs. These gentler aspects of
Nature will have their minor deities to represent them; but the men,
of whatever race they be, whose minds are most absorbed in the
problems of man's position and destiny will tend for the most part
to some sterner and more overwhelming conception of the sum of things.
"Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?" is the cry of
Hebrew piety as well as of modern science; and the "majestas cognita
rerum,"--the recognized majesty of the universe--teaches Lucretius
only the indifference of gods and the misery of men.

But in a well-known passage, in which Lucretius is honoured as he
deserves, we find nevertheless a different view hinted, with an
impressiveness which it had hardly acquired till then. We find
Virgil implying that scientific knowledge of Nature may not be the
only way of arriving at the truth about her; that her loveliness is
also a revelation, and that the soul which is in unison with her is
justified by its own peace. This is the very substance of _The
Poet's Epitaph_ also; of the poem in which Wordsworth at the
beginning of his career describes himself as he continued till its
close,--the poet who "murmurs near the running brooks a music
sweeter than their own,"--who scorns the man of science "who would
peep and botanize upon his mother's grave."

The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,--
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

But he is weak, both man and boy,
Hath been an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.

Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the passage in
the second _Georgic_ to which I have referred is in its essence more
modern than the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Christianity involved a
divorce from the nature around us, as well as from the nature within.
With the rise of the modern spirit delight in the external world
returns; and from Chaucer downwards through the whole course of
English poetry are scattered indications of a mood which draws from
visible things an intuition of things not seen. When Wither, in
words which Wordsworth has fondly quoted, says of his muse,--

By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,--
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man,--

he felt already, as Wordsworth after him, that Nature is no mere
collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least approaches some
sense of her mysterious whole.

Passages like this, however, must not he too closely pressed. The
mystic element in English literature has run for the most part into
other channels; and when, after Pope's reign of artificiality and
convention, attention was redirected to the phenomena of Nature by
Collins, Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, it was
in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of an intimate
worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in Thomson, we have mere
picturesqueness,--a reproduction of Nature for the mere pleasure of
reproducing her,--a kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects. Or
sometimes, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which looks on
Nature with a side glance, and uses her as an accessory to the
expression of human love and woe. Cowper sometimes contemplated her
as a whole, but only as affording a proof of the wisdom and goodness
of a personal Creator.

To express what is characteristic in Wordsworth we must recur to a
more generalized conception of the relations between the natural and
the spiritual worlds. We must say with Plato--the lawgiver of all
subsequent idealists--that the unknown realities around us, which
the philosopher apprehends by the contemplation of abstract truth,
become in various ways obscurely perceptible to men under the
influence of a "divine madness,"--of an enthusiasm which is in fact
inspiration. And further, giving, as he so often does, a
half-fanciful expression to a substance of deep meaning,--Plato
distinguishes four kinds of this enthusiasm. There is the prophet's
glow of revelation; and the prevailing prayer which averts the wrath
of heaven; and that philosophy which enters, so to say, unawares
into the poet through his art, and into the lover through his love.
Each of these stimuli may so exalt the inward faculties as to make a
man [Greek: entheos kyi ekphron],--"bereft of reason but filled
with divinity,"--percipient of an intelligence other and larger than
his own. To this list Wordsworth has made an important addition. He
has shown by his example and writings that the contemplation of
Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these; may enable us
"to see into the life of things"--as far, perhaps, as beatific
vision or prophetic rapture can attain. Assertions so impalpable as
these must justify themselves by subjective evidence. He who claims
to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself received it;
and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves inexpressible,
he must convey to us in hints and figures the conviction which we
need. Prayer may bring the spiritual world near to us; but when the
eyes of the kneeling Dominic seem to say "To son venuto a questo,"
their look must persuade us that the life of worship has indeed
attained the reward of vision. Art, too, may be inspired; but the
artist, in whatever field he works, must have "such a mastery of his
mystery" that the fabric of his imagination stands visible in its
own light before our eyes,--

Seeing it is built
Of music; therefore never built at all,
And, therefore, built for ever.

Love may open heaven; but when the lover would invite us "thither,
where are the eyes of Beatrice," he must make us feel that his
individual passion is indeed part and parcel of that love "which
moves the sun and the other stars."

And so also with Wordsworth. Unless the words which describe the
intense and sympathetic gaze with which he contemplates Nature
convince us of the reality of "the light which never was on sea or
land,"--of the "Presence which disturbs him with the joy of elevated
thoughts,"--of the authentic vision of those hours

When the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world;--

unless his tone awakes a responsive conviction in ourselves, there
is no argument by which he can prove to us that he is offering a new
insight to mankind. Yet, on the other hand, it need not be
unreasonable to see in his message something more than a mere
individual fancy. It seems, at least, to be closely correlated with
those other messages of which we have spoken,--those other cases
where some original element of our nature is capable of being
regarded as an inlet of mystic truth. For in each of these complex
aspects of religion we see, perhaps, the modification of a primeval
instinct. There is a point of view from which Revelation seems to be
but transfigured Sorcery, and Love transfigured Appetite, and
Philosophy man's ordered Wonder, and Prayer his softening Fear. And
similarly in the natural religion of Wordsworth we may discern the
modified outcome of other human impulses hardly less universal--of
those instincts which led our forefathers to people earth and air
with deities, or to vivify the whole universe with a single soul. In
this view the achievement of Wordsworth was of a kind which most of
the moral leaders of the race have in some way or other performed.
It was that he turned a theology back again into a religion: that he
revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of
reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into
speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of
beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,--
of rites which had become unmeaning,--he substituted an admiration
for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a
sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable worship. Such
worship, I repeat, is not what we commonly imply either by paganism
or by pantheism. For in pagan countries, though the gods may have
originally represented natural forces, yet the conception of them
soon becomes anthropomorphic, and they are reverenced as
transcendent _men_; and, on the other hand, pantheism is generally
characterized by an indifference to things in the concrete, to
Nature in detail; so that the Whole, or Universe, with which the
Stoics (for instance) sought to be in harmony, was approached not by
contemplating external objects, but rather by ignoring them.

Yet here I would be understood to speak only in the most general
manner. So congruous in all ages are the aspirations and the hopes
of men that it would be rash indeed to attempt to assign the moment
when any spiritual truth rises for the first time on human
consciousness. But thus much, I think, may be fairly said, that the
maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered before
Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity
were uttered before Christ. To compare small things with great--or
rather, to compare great things with things vastly greater--the
essential spirit of the _Lines near Tintern Abbey_ was for practical
purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the _Sermon on
the Mount_. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their
fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which
connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that
Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men--indifferent, it may
be, to literary or poetical effects, as such--he has shown by the
subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature
can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer,--an opening, if
indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.

The prophet with such a message as this will, of course, appeal for
the most part to the experience of exceptional moments--those
moments when "we see into the life of things;" when the face of
Nature sends to us "gleams like the flashing of a shield;"--hours
such as those of the Solitary, who, gazing on the lovely distant
scene,

Would gaze till it became
Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain
The beauty, still more beauteous.

But the idealist, of whatever school, is seldom content to base his
appeal to us upon these scattered intuitions alone. There is a whole
epoch of our existence whose memories, differing, indeed, immensely
in vividness and importance in the minds of different men, are yet
sufficiently common to all men to form a favourite basis for
philosophical argument. "The child is father of the man;" and
through the recollection and observation of early childhood we may
hope to trace our ancestry--in heaven above or on the earth beneath--
in its most significant manifestation.

It is to the workings of the mind of the child that the philosopher
appeals who wishes to prove that knowledge is recollection, and that
our recognition of geometrical truths--so prompt as to appear
instinctive--depends on our having been actually familiar with them
in an earlier world. The Christian mystic invokes with equal
confidence his own memories of a state which seemed as yet to know
no sin:--

Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my angel infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back at that short space
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

And Wordsworth, whose recollections were exceptionally vivid, and
whose introspection was exceptionally penetrating, has drawn from
his own childish memories philosophical lessons which are hard to
disentangle in a logical statement, but which will roughly admit of
being classed under two heads. For firstly, he has shown an unusual
delicacy of analysis in eliciting the "firstborn affinities that fit
our new existence to existing things;"--in tracing the first impact
of impressions which are destined to give the mind its earliest ply,
or even, in unreflecting natures, to determine the permanent modes of
thought. And, secondly, from the halo of pure and vivid emotions
with which our childish years are surrounded, and the close
connexion of this emotion with external nature, which it glorifies
and transforms, he infers that the soul has enjoyed elsewhere an
existence superior to that of earth, but an existence of which
external nature retains for a time the power of reminding her.

The first of these lines of thought may be illustrated by a passage
in the _Prelude_, in which the boy's mind is represented as passing
through precisely the train of emotion which we may imagine to be at
the root of the theology of many barbarous peoples. He is rowing at
night alone on Esthwaite Lake, his eyes fixed upon a ridge of crags,
above which nothing is visible:--

I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And as I rose upon the stroke my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;--
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again;
And, growing still in stature, the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow-tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood. But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness--call it solitude,
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly thro' the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

In the controversy as to the origin of the worship of inanimate
objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage might fairly be
cited as an example of the manner in which those objects, or those
powers, can impress the mind with that awe which is the foundation
of savage creeds, while yet they are not identified with any human
intelligence, such as the spirits of ancestors or the like, nor even
supposed to operate according to any human, analogy.

Up to this point Wordsworth's reminiscences may seem simply to
illustrate the conclusions which science reaches by other roads. But
he is not content with merely recording and analyzing his childish
impressions; he implies, or even asserts, that these "fancies from
afar are brought"--that the child's view of the world reveals to him
truths which the man with difficulty retains or recovers. This is
not the usual teaching of science, yet it would be hard to assert
that it is absolutely impossible. The child's instincts may well be
supposed to partake in larger measure of the general instincts of
the race, in smaller measure of the special instincts of his own
country and century, than is the case with the man. Now the feelings
and beliefs of each successive century will probably be, on the whole,
superior to those of any previous century. But this is not
universally true; the teaching of each generation does not thus sum
up the results of the whole past. And thus the child, to whom in a
certain sense the past of humanity is present,--who is living
through the whole life of the race in little, before he lives the
life of his century in large,--may possibly dimly apprehend something
more of truth in certain directions than is visible to the adults
around him.

But, thus qualified, the intuitions of infancy might seem scarcely
worth insisting on. And Wordsworth, as is well known, has followed
Plato in advancing for the child a much bolder claim. The child's
soul, in this view, has existed before it entered the body--has
existed in a world superior to ours, but connected, by the immanence
of the same pervading Spirit, with the material universe before our
eyes. The child begins by feeling this material world strange to him.
But he sees in it, as it were, what he has been accustomed to see;
he discerns in it its kinship with the spiritual world which he
dimly remembers; it is to him "an unsubstantial fairy place"--a scene
at once brighter and more unreal than it will appear in his eyes
when he has become acclimatized to earth. And even when this
freshness of insight has passed away, it occasionally happens that
sights or sounds of unusual beauty or carrying deep associations--a
rainbow, a cuckoo's cry, a sunset of extraordinary splendour--will
renew for a while this sense of vision and nearness to the spiritual
world--a sense which never loses its reality, though with advancing
years its presence grows briefer and more rare.

Such, then, in prosaic statement is the most characteristic message
of Wordsworth. And it is to be noted that though Wordsworth at times
presents it as a coherent theory, yet it is not necessarily of the
nature of a theory, nor need be accepted or rejected as a whole; but
is rather an inlet of illumining emotion in which different minds
can share in the measure of their capacities or their need. There
are some to whom childhood brought no strange vision of brightness,
but who can feel their communion with the Divinity in Nature growing
with the growth of their souls. There are others who might be
unwilling to acknowledge any spiritual or transcendent source for
the elevating joy which the contemplation of Nature can give, but
who feel nevertheless that to that joy Wordsworth has been their
most effective guide. A striking illustration of this fact may be
drawn, from the passage in which John Stuart Mill, a philosopher of
a very different school, has recorded the influence exercised over
him by Wordsworth's poems; read in a season of dejection, when there
seemed to be no real and substantive joy in life, nothing but the
excitement of the struggle with the hardships and injustices of
human fates.

"What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of
mind," he says in his Autobiography, "was that they expressed,
not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought
coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They
seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was in
quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward
joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be
shared in by all human beings, which had no connexion
with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by
every improvement in the physical or social condition of
mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the
perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of
life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
and happier as I came under their influence."

Words like these, proceeding from a mind so different from the
poet's own, form perhaps as satisfactory a testimony to the value of
his work as any writer can obtain. For they imply that Wordsworth
has succeeded in giving his own impress to emotions which may become
common to all; that he has produced a body of thought which is felt
to be both distinctive and coherent, while yet it enlarges the
reader's capacities instead of making demands upon his credence.
Whether there be theories, they shall pass; whether there be systems,
they shall fail; the true epoch-maker in the history of the human
soul is the man who educes from this bewildering universe a new and
elevating joy.

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