Part 10

The discovery of humble life, of peasant character, of lowly, trivial scenes and incidents, as a field for poetry, was not original with Wordsworth. But he was the first English poet to explore this field thoroughly, sympathetically, with steady and deepening joy. Burns had been there before him; but the song of Burns though clear and passionate, was fitful. Cowper had been there before him; but Cowper was like a visitor from the polite world, never an inhabitant, never quite able to pierce gently, powerfully down to the realities of lowly life and abide in them. Crabbe had been there before him; but Crabbe was something of a pessimist; he felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste the sweet kernel.

Wordsworth, if I may draw a comparison from another art, was the Millet of English poetry. In his verse we find the same quality of perfect comprehension, of tender pathos, of absolute truth interfused with delicate beauty that makes Millet’s _Angelus_, and _The Gleaners_ and _The Sower_ and _The Sheepfold_, immortal visions of the lowly life. Place beside these pictures, if you will, Wordsworth’s _Solitary Reaper_, _The Old Cumberland Beggar_, _Margaret_ waiting in her ruined cottage for the husband who would never return, _Michael_, the old shepherd who stood, many and many a day, beside the unfinished sheepfold which he had begun to build with his lost boy,

“And never lifted up a single stone,”—

place these beside Millet’s pictures, and the poems will bear the comparison.

Coleridge called Wordsworth “a miner of the human heart.” But there is a striking peculiarity in his mining: he searched the most familiar places, by the most simple methods, to bring out the rarest and least suspected treasures. His discovery was that there is an element of poetry, like some metal of great value, diffused through the common clay of every-day life.

It is true that he did not always succeed in separating the precious metal from the surrounding dross. There were certain limitations in his mind which prevented him from distinguishing that which was familiar and precious, from that which was merely familiar.

One of these limitations was his lack of a sense of humour. At a dinner-party he announced that he was never witty but once in his life. When asked to narrate the instance, after some hesitation he said: “Well, I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question, ‘Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I said, ‘Why, my good friend, I didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife!’” The humour of this story is unintentional and lies otherwhere than Wordsworth thought. The fact that he was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts for the presence of many queer things in his poetry. For example; the lines in _Simon Lee_,

“Few months of life has he in store As he to you will tell, For still the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell:”

the stanza in _Peter Bell_, which Shelley was accused of having maliciously invented, but which was actually printed in the first edition of the poem,

“Is it a party in a parlour Cramming just as they on earth were crammed, Some sipping punch—some sipping tea But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all—damned?”

the couplet in the original version of _The Blind Highland Boy_ which describes him as embarking on his voyage in

“A household tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes.”

It is quite certain, I think, that Wordsworth’s insensibility to the humourous side of things made him incapable of perceiving one considerable source of comfort and solace in lowly life. Plain and poor people get a great deal of consolation, in their hard journey, out of the rude but keen fun that they take by the way. The sense of humour is a means of grace.

I doubt whether Wordsworth’s peasant-poetry has ever been widely popular among peasants themselves. There was an old farmer in the Lake Country who had often seen the poet and talked with him, and who remembered him well. Canon Rawnsley has made an interesting record of some of the old man’s reminiscences. When he was asked whether he had ever read any of Wordsworth’s poetry, or seen any of his books about in the farmhouses, he answered:

“Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry. There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wordsworth’s was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.”

But when we have admitted these limitations, it remains true that no other English poet has penetrated so deeply into the springs of poetry which rise by every cottage door, or sung so nobly of the treasures which are hidden in the humblest human heart, as Wordsworth has. This is his merit, his incomparable merit, that he has done so much, amid the hard conditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel necessities of life, to remind us how rich we are in being simply human.

Like Clifford, in the _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_,

“Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,”

and thenceforth his chosen task was to explore the beauty and to show the power of that common love.

“There is a comfort in the strength of love; ’Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain or break the heart.”

He found the best portion of a good man’s life in

“His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.”

In _The Old Cumberland Beggar_ he declared

“’Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably linked.”

And then he went on to trace, not always with full poetic inspiration, but still with many touches of beautiful insight, the good that the old beggar did and received in the world, by wakening among the peasants to whose doors he came from year to year, the memory of past deeds of charity, by giving them a sense of kinship with the world of want and sorrow, and by bestowing on them in their poverty the opportunity of showing mercy to one whose needs were even greater than their own; for,—the poet adds—with one of those penetrating flashes which are the surest mark of his genius,—

“Man is dear to man; the poorest poor Long for some moments in a weary life When they can know and feel that they have been, Themselves, the fathers and the dealers out Of some small blessings; have been kind to such As needed kindness, for this single cause That we have all of us one human heart.”

Nor did Wordsworth forget, in his estimate of the value of the simplest life, those pleasures which are shared by all men.

“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom High as the highest Peak of Furniss-fells, Will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells; In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is.”

He sees a Miller dancing with two girls on the platform of a boat moored in the river Thames, and breaks out into a song on the “stray pleasures” that are spread through the earth to be claimed by whoever shall find them. A little crowd of poor people gather around a wandering musician in a city street, and the poet cries,

“Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream; Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream; They are deaf to your murmurs—they care not for you, Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!”

He describes Coleridge and himself as lying together on the greensward in the orchard by the cottage at Grasmere, and says

“If but a bird, to keep them company, Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween, As pleased as if the same had been a maiden Queen.”

It was of such simple and unchartered blessings that he loved to sing. He did not think that the vain or the worldly would care to listen to his voice. Indeed he said in a memorable passage of gentle scorn that he did not expect his poetry to be fashionable. “It is an awful truth,” wrote he to Lady Beaumont, “that there neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who either 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.” He did not expect that his poetry would be popular in that world where men and women devote themselves to the business of pleasure, and where they care only for the things that minister to vanity or selfishness,—and it never was.

But there was another world where he expected to be welcome and of service. He wished his poetry to cheer the solitary, to uplift the downcast, to bid the despairing hope again, to teach the impoverished how much treasure was left to them. In short, he intended by the quiet ministry of his art to be one of those

“Poets who keep the world in heart,”

—and so he was.

It is impossible to exaggerate the value of such a service. Measured by any true and vital standard Wordsworth’s contribution to the welfare of mankind was greater, more enduring than that of the amazing Corsican, Bonaparte, who was born but a few months before him and blazed his way to glory. Wordsworth’s service was to life at its fountain-head. His remedy for the despair and paralysis of the soul was not the prescription of a definite philosophy as an antidote. It was a hygienic method, a simple, healthful, loving life in fellowship with man and nature, by which the native tranquillity and vigour of the soul would be restored. The tendency of his poetry is to enhance our interest in humanity, to promote the cultivation of the small but useful virtues, to brighten our joy in common things, and to deepen our trust in a wise, kind, over-ruling God. Wordsworth gives us not so much a new scheme of life as a new sense of its interior and inalienable wealth. His calm, noble, lofty poetry is needed to-day to counteract the belittling and distracting influence of great cities; to save us from that most modern form of insanity, publicomania, which sacrifices all the sanctities of life to the craze for advertising; and to make a little quiet space in the heart, where those who are still capable of thought, in this age of clattering machinery, shall be able to hear themselves think.

V

But there is one still deeper element in Wordsworth’s poetry. He tells us very clearly that the true liberty and grandeur of _mankind_ are to be found along the line of obedience to law and fidelity to duty. This is the truth which was revealed to him, slowly and serenely, as a consolation for the loss of his brief revolutionary dream. He learned to rejoice in it more and more deeply, and to proclaim it more and more clearly, as his manhood settled into firmness and strength.

Fixing his attention at first upon the humblest examples of the power of the human heart to resist unfriendly circumstances, as in _Resolution and Independence_, and to endure sufferings and trials, as in _Margaret_ and _Michael_, he grew into a new conception of the right nobility. He saw that it was not necessary to make a great overturning of society before the individual man could begin to fulfil his destiny. “What then remains?” he cries—

“To seek Those helps for his occasion ever near Who lacks not will to use them; vows, renewed On the first motion of a holy thought; Vigils of contemplation; praise; and prayer— A stream, which, from the fountain of the heart, Issuing however feebly, nowhere flows Without access of unexpected strength. But, above all, the victory is sure For him, who seeking faith by virtue, strives To yield entire submission to the law Of conscience—conscience reverenced and obeyed, As God’s most intimate presence in the soul, And his most perfect image in the world.”

If we would hear this message breathed in tones of lyric sweetness, as to the notes of a silver harp, we may turn to Wordsworth’s poems on the Skylark,—

“Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.”

If we would hear it proclaimed with grandeur, as by a solemn organ; or with martial ardour, as by a ringing trumpet, we may read the _Ode to Duty_ or _The Character of the Happy Warrior_, two of the noblest and most weighty poems that Wordsworth ever wrote. There is a certain distinction and elevation about his moral feelings which makes them in themselves poetic. In his poetry beauty is goodness and goodness is beauty.

But I think it is in the Sonnets that this element of Wordsworth’s poetry finds the broadest and most perfect expression. For here he sweeps upward from the thought of the freedom and greatness of the individual man to the vision of nations and races emancipated and ennobled by loyalty to the right. How pregnant and powerful are his phrases! “Plain living and high thinking.” “The homely beauty of the good old cause.” “A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.” “Man’s unconquerable mind.” “By the soul only, the Nations shall be great and free.” The whole series of _Sonnets addressed to Liberty_, published in 1807, is full of poetic and prophetic fire. But none among them burns with a clearer light, none is more characteristic of him at his best, than that which is entitled _London, 1802_.

“Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour; England hath need of thee; she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up; return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; Thou had’st a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay.”

This sonnet embraces within its “scanty plot of ground” the roots of Wordsworth’s strength. Here is his view of nature in the kinship between the lonely star and the solitary soul. Here is his recognition of life’s common way as the path of honour, and of the lowliest duties as the highest. Here is his message that manners and virtue must go before freedom and power. And here is the deep spring and motive of all his work, in the thought that _joy_, _inward happiness_, is the dower that has been lost and must be regained.

Here then I conclude this chapter on Wordsworth. There are other things that might well be said about him, indeed that would need to be said if this were intended for a complete estimate of his influence. I should wish to speak of the deep effect which his poetry has had upon the style of other poets, breaking the bondage of “poetic diction” and leading the way to a simpler and more natural utterance. I should need to touch upon his alleged betrayal of his early revolutionary principles in politics, and to show, (if a paradox may be pardoned), that he never had them and that he always kept them. He never forsook liberty; he only changed his conception of it. He saw that the reconstruction of society must be preceded by reconstruction of the individual. Browning’s stirring lyric, _The Lost Leader_,—

“Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat,”—

may have been written with Wordsworth in mind, but it was a singularly infelicitous suggestion of a remarkably good poem.

All of these additions would be necessary if this estimate were intended to be complete. But it is not, and so let it stand.

If we were to choose a motto for Wordsworth’s poetry it might be this: “Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice.” And if we looked farther for a watchword, we might take it from that other great poet, Isaiah, standing between the fierce radicals and sullen conservatives of Israel, and saying,

“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength, In rest and in returning ye shall be saved.”

“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT”

ROBERT BROWNING’S POETRY

There is a striking contrast between the poetry of Browning and the poetry of Wordsworth; and this comes naturally from the difference between the two men in genius, temperament and life. I want to trace carefully and perhaps more clearly some of the lines of that difference. I do not propose to ask which of them ranks higher as poet. That seems to me a futile question. The contrast in kind interests me more than the comparison of degree. And this contrast, I think, can best be felt and understood through a closer knowledge of the central theme of each of the two poets.

Wordsworth is a poet of recovered joy. He brings consolation and refreshment to the heart,—consolation which is passive strength, refreshment which is peaceful energy. His poetry is addressed not to crowds, but to men standing alone, and feeling their loneliness most deeply when the crowd presses most tumultuously about them. He speaks to us one by one, distracted by the very excess of life, separated from humanity by the multitude of men, dazzled by the shifting variety of hues into which the eternal light is broken by the prism of the world,—one by one he accosts us, and leads us gently back, if we will follow him, into a more tranquil region and a serener air. There we find the repose of “a heart at leisure from itself.” There we feel the unity of man and nature, and of both in God. There we catch sight of those eternal stars of truth whose shining, though sometimes hidden, is never dimmed by the cloud-confusions of morality. Such is the mission of Wordsworth to the age. Matthew Arnold has described it with profound beauty.

“He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round, He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease, The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o’er the sun-lit fields again: Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth returned; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furled, The freshness of the early world.”

But precious as such a service is and ever must be, it does not fill the whole need of man’s heart. There are times and moods in which it seems pale and ineffectual. The very contrast between its serenity, its assurance, its disembodied passion, its radiant asceticism, and the mixed lights, the broken music, the fluctuating faith, the confused conflict of actual life, seems like a discouragement. It calls us to go into a retreat, that we may find ourselves and renew our power to live. But there are natures which do not easily adapt themselves to a retreat,—natures which crave stimulus more than consolation, and look for a solution of life’s problem that can be worked out while they are in motion. They do not wish, perhaps they are not able, to withdraw themselves from active life even for the sake of seeing it more clearly.

Wordsworth’s world seems to them too bare, too still, too monotonous. The rugged and unpopulous mountains, the lonely lakes, the secluded vales, do not attract them as much as the fertile plain with its luxuriant vegetation, the whirling city, the crowded highways of trade and pleasure. Simplicity is strange to them; complexity is their native element. They want music, but they want it to go with them in the march, the parade, the festal procession. The poet for them must be in the world, though he need not be altogether of it. He must speak of the rich and varied life of man as one who knows its artificial as well as its natural elements,—palaces as well as cottages, courts as well as sheep-folds. Art and politics and literature and science and churchmanship and society,—all must be familiar to him, material to his art, significant to his interpretation. His message must be modern and militant. He must not disregard doubt and rebellion and discord, but take them into his poetry and transform them. He must front

“The cloud of mortal destiny,”

and make the most of the light that breaks through it. Such a poet is Robert Browning; and his poetry is the direct answer to at least one side of the modern _Zeitgeist_, restless, curious, self-conscious, energetic, the active, questioning spirit.

I

Browning’s poetic work-time covered a period of about fifty-six years, (1833-1889,) and during this time he published over thirty volumes of verse, containing more than two hundred and thirty poems, the longest, _The Ring and the Book_, extending to nearly twenty-one thousand lines. It was an immense output, greater I think, in mass, than that of almost any other English poet except Shakespeare. The mere fact of such productiveness is worth noting, because it is a proof of the activity of the poet’s mind, and also because it may throw some light upon certain peculiarities in the quality of his work.

Browning not only wrote much himself, he was also the cause of much writing in others. Commentaries, guide-books, handbooks, and expositions have grown up around his poetry so fast that the vines almost hide the trellis. The Browning Literature now demands not merely a shelf, but a whole case to itself in the library. It has come to such a pass that one must choose between reading the books that Browning wrote and the books that other people have written about Browning. Life is too short for both.

A reason, if not a justification, for this growth of a locksmith literature about his work is undoubtedly to be found in what Mr. Augustine Birrell calls “The Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning’s Poetry.” The adjective in this happy title indicates one of the points in the voluminous discussion. Does the difficulty in understanding Browning lie in him, or in his readers? Is it an accidental defect of his style, or a valuable element of his art, or an inherent profundity of his subject that makes him hard to read? Or does the trouble reside altogether in the imagination of certain readers, or perhaps in their lack of it? This question was debated so seriously as to become at times almost personal and threaten the unity of households if not the peace of nations. Browning himself was accustomed to tell the story of a young man who could not read his poetry, falling deeply in love with a young woman who would hardly read anything else. She made it a condition of her favour that her lover should learn to love her poet, and therefore set the marriage day at a point beyond the time when the bridegroom could present himself before her with convincing evidence that he had perused the works of Browning down to the last line. Such was the strength of love that the condition was triumphantly fulfilled. The poet used to tell with humourous satisfaction that he assisted in person at the wedding of these two lovers whose happiness he had unconsciously delayed and accomplished.

But an incident like this does not contribute much to the settlement of the controversy which it illustrates. Love is a notorious miracle-worker. The question of Browning’s obscurity is still debatable; and whatever may be said on one side or the other, one fact must be recognized: it is not yet quite clear whether his poetry is clear or not.