T

WORDSWORTH

WO things stand out in the history of the criticism of Wordsworth-the high value set upon

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.

either to criticism or to contribution from without-such is the picture which men too commonly form to themselves of the life of Wordsworth; and they ask, as they well may, whether within such narrow and peaceful limits a poet can find the experience that may warrant him to describe himself as "a man speaking to men."

Such critics forget his youth and the French Revolution. There are times when a man of open sense and heart may crowd more experience into a decade or a single year than, in other periods, might be found in the most active life of eighty years. What is more serious, they forget that Wordsworth was a poet-"a creature of a fiery heart ”— open in quite an exceptional way to impulses, a spirit for whom everything that moved was significant, not merely in itself, but in the liberty it gave to imagination. He felt with an intensity that most men never know-and insight after all is a matter of intensity of feeling. He felt, and the ordinary limitations thinned away like a mist on his native mountains, and he saw and knew. To such men the barest hint of experience is more full of revelation than a lifetime of incident and habit to most human beings. Everything in them is keener, acuter, more susceptible. They live among common scenes and common men, and nothing is common; everything is wonder :

By our own spirits are we deified,

he says, in speaking of poets, and he is right. The poets have insight that is almost uncanny.

But, quite apart from this, Wordsworth, between 1790 and 1798, went through an experience that no generation has since known. New ideals pulsed in furious life within him. New conceptions of human grandeur rose before his eyes not merely as ideals but as realizations. And then the glorious vision was blotted out by what was worse than he could have dreamed, and he moved in thick darkness and despair. But he came through it, and won his way at last to peace and vision. For any man such a

story is one of high significance; for such a man the value of it transcends our standards. His experience, its intensity and its issue give him a power to be found in none of our poets, except Shakespeare and Milton.

If it is to be understood at all, we have to take his life as a progression, and to read his poems with definite attention to their order. In this way we have a new series of indices to what he calls "the fluxes and refluxes" of his mind. Matthew Arnold fixed on the year 1808, John Morley on Waterloo, as the term of his really creative energy, neither denying value to the later poems, though this value depends on the earlier life. This earlier life then gives us the key to all he does.

Wordsworth, at any rate, thought it of moment to record the growth of his own mind. He began his autobiographical poem in 1799, laid it aside, and, resuming it in 1804, completed it in the next year. It was addressed to Coleridge, who prophesied that it would be a sacred roll among the archives of mankind—

Dear shall it be to every human heart.

Every great poem is really more a new voyage of discovery than a record. The poet's aim in the Prelude is not so much self-revelation as self-discovery. His interest in himself is curiously impersonal. He has, says M. Legouis, penetrated "beneath the exterior of the individual, and has succeeded in reaching the essential feelings which make up the common heart of all mankind," and thus "his biography becomes almost an inward history of his generation." 2

Beside the Prelude, one might almost say that in one sense the Ode on Intimations of Immortality tells the same story. It is written from no conventional standpoint-the child, the boy, the youth of the poem are the poet himself.

1 Letter in Knight, Life, ii. 45.

2 Legouis, Early Life of Wordsworth (tr.), p. 253.

In old age he dictated to Miss Isabella Fenwick at her request a series of notes relative to his poems, their occasions and purposes-curious notes full of a strange medley of reminiscences,1 but precise and very accurate for matters removed by so wide a space of years.

In all this common minds may see vanity and want of humour. Wordsworth's vanity, Sir Henry Taylor said, was unlike that of ordinary men in being wholly undisguised. For the rest, much of his work was done by turning a strong, simple gaze on common things, on things and beings with which persons of a keener sense of humour would have been shy of associating themselves. It was his way to submit his mind, without the prepossessions of the quicker wits and "self-applauding intellects," to impulses from everything that is real-the "rudest men" and "the meanest flower that blows." He was an explorer, and such men are often the butts of humorists; half in and half out of the realm of normal vision, on the very confines of common sense, they have for the time a certain look of absurdity, but in the long run they enlarge the range of the human mind.3

A man's birth is perhaps a reasonable enough point from which to begin his story. Wordsworth, then, was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on 7 April 1770. His mother died when he was seven years old, his father when he was sixteen. Richard Wordsworth had been a solicitor and steward to Sir James Lowther, the first Earl of Lonsdale, who, for reasons of his own, quite other than those of poverty, insisted on borrowing the bulk of his steward's property, and refused to repay either him or his children. The second earl, about the year 1801, made

1

1 E.g., he discussed the effect of a heel galled by too tight a shoe, when he was composing The White Doe.

2 Knight, Life, iii. 204.

"I

It has often been suggested that Wordsworth lacked humour. think," wrote Lamb to him (19 September 1814), "I have a wider range in buffoonery than you." The hesitation implied in "I think," is most engaging. No positive statement could be quite so convincing-" there lives more faith in honest doubt."