Then let us chearfu' acquiesce; Nor make our scanty Pleasure less And, even should Misfortunes come, They make us see the naked truth, Tho' losses, and crosses, Be lessons right severe, There's wit there, ye'll get there, "It was, I think," writes Gilbert Burns, " in the summer of 1784, when in the intervals of harder labour Robert and I were weeding in the garden, that he repeated to me the principal part of this Epistle." But, it may be said, this is very well; Burns so far is dealing mainly with one side of life, and there is little poetry to be found in crime and squalor such as Crabbe knew at Aldeburgh. A carousal in a low public-house is not a likely theme for true poetry. Yet Burns found poetry there, and in Tam o' Shanter and The Jolly Beggars he interpreted it. On this point Wordsworth's comment is very sound and illuminating. "The poet," he says, "trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine. nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love though immoderate -from convivial pleasure though intemperate. . . .-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 Tam was glorious O'er a' the ills of life victorious. 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." 1 The secret of this insight Wordsworth gives in his Lines above Tintern Abbey. With an eye made quiet by the power If Burns had only fitfully the power of harmony,—and perhaps no one has it always, not even Shakespeare— Crabbe obviously lacked "the deep power of joy." was only a happy man as he got away from what he describes. He He Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign, And cried, 'Ah! hapless they who still remain!' Wordsworth himself is also a poet of common life, Few poets have touched themes more humble than The Old Cumberland Beggar, The Two Thieves, Beggars, and The Leech-Gatherer. From early years his "favourite school had been "the fields, the roads and rural lanes," and his chosen teachers were lowly people, the pedlar, the old soldier on the lonely mountain road at night, little children—and the lesson he learnt was happiness. So hold the happier poets, made of sterner stuff; and their poetry takes us deeper into human nature and opens up to us new depths of faith and happiness. "A Scottish peasant's life," says Carlyle, who knew that life from actual 1 Some critics of Wordsworth might get a new idea of him if they would read his account of Tam o' Shanter in this Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns. experience," was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man's life, and therefore significant to men. . . . To the illstarred Burns was given the power of making man's life more venerable." Not altogether to Crabbe, for he is conscious chiefly of man's inadequacy; but he also touches truth on one side. We have to see it on both sides. We have to realize with Goldsmith, Burns and Wordsworth the potential beauty-yes! the actual beauty of human nature under the worst conditions, man's faculty of achieving greatness and happiness amid the worst environment of pain and sin; and then we have to realize with Crabbe the pressure of that environment,-to "expose ourselves to feel what wretches feel"; if we are to know what man indeed is. And if, as we read Crabbe, we remember that the squalor he knew in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago is intensified in the great cities of to-day, and that the inevitable development of industrialism, unaccompanied by quick social intelligence and the sense of social responsibility, has made the bad conditions of the past worse, because now on a larger scale and spread over wider areas, more depressing and more enslaving to human hearts and souls capable of all that Burns and Wordsworth have shown us,-will the contrast suggest anything to us of moment? WORDSWORTH WO things stand out in the history of the criticism of Wordsworth-the high value set upon T his poetry by the better minds of England, and the anticipation of the poet himself that it would inevitably be so. His poetry has been peculiarly associated with illumination and with happiness-and, again, this was anticipated by Wordsworth. Coleridge wrote to Godwin (25th March 1801): "Have you seen the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man's heart and intellect, precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems." "Why," wrote Lamb to Bernard Barton, "a line of Wordsworth's is a lever to lift the immortal spirit." 1 John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography of the healing effect which Wordsworth's poetry had once had upon him. "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. . . . 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 . . . 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. . . . I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil con 1 Lamb's letter of 15th May 1824; edn. of E. V. Lucas, No. 328. templation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. . . . I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it." 1 Mill's account of his experience in reading the poems agrees most curiously with the hope which Wordsworth expressed in a letter to Lady Beaumont after the issue of his volumes of 1807.2 "Trouble not yourself about 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." The fact stands then that Wordsworth's poetry has meant new happiness to men, and this not derivative. He has put them where they may find it themselves. For while his poetry is informed with a philosophy of life, it is still poetry-that glowing re-creation of the real, which is at once discovery and interpretation. Wordsworth foresaw, and in his strange open way he spoke of, the effect his work would have, for he had himself explored the way by which he would lead his followers from doubt and depression to a real happiness. A long, quiet, contemplative existence among the lakes, confined within a narrow circle, which tended to become one of admiration, never much ruffled by external criticism, and with time progressively less and less open 1 Mill, Autobiography, pp. 146-150; Knight, Life of Wordsworth, iii. 501. 2 Knight, Life, ii. 88 f. |